Crowdbooster (YC S10) in "How to Measure Your Brand's Online Influence" - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/guides/201102/how-to-measure-brand-influence-online.html

<comment><USER2> Here is the thing I don't get about Crowdbooster.

Lots of chartsengrafs. Some of them are even interesting. I'll click over every once in awhile, see if my Twitter messages are driving followers away. But the site is not very sticky.

But buried on one of those graph pages --- I can never remember which one --- is a button for "schedule a Tweet", where Crowdbooster has _figured out for me_ when my Tweets should get published.

Why - oh - why - oh - why isn't the primary interface to this whole app just a big Tweet dialog box with "tweet now" or "tweet at best possible time"? I would use that EVERY DAY.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been using Crowdbooster since last November (no serious reason, just felt like betatesting another YC startup) and until like two days ago when they improved their graphs a bit I honestly thought they are dead. In the last four months the website pretty much did not change at all.

Here is a suggestion. Maybe you can work on improving communication with your users so they know what is being changed and added to the site. I just checked out the blog for the first time like a minute ago and only once is a new feature mentioned (the #FF feature from 19 days ago). All the other entries seem to be focused on 'we are mentioned here! and we are mentioned there!'. Since I do not even read the blog, I even missed the #ff feature.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback. Since our launch three months ago, we have been occupied with:

(a) working one-on-one with some of our larger users on some premium features that we will be opening up soon.

(b) supporting our userbase; we got a significantly larger number of signups than expected from our initial beta launch and have been seeing double-digit monthly growth since then. As a result we've had to delay some feature work to fix lots of bugs and scaling issues in order to effectively track millions of tweets our beta users.

For the latest product updates, follow our blog or @crowdbooster on Twitter. We're also looking at other ways of getting the word out to our users about major new features when they are released. Thanks for sticking with us!

<comment><USER3> Thank you for information. Yeah, I was considering that you might be working hard on scaling these days. The site seems to work mostly well, so you seem to be doing a good job there.

Thank you very much for the email you sent me too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great article. If I'm starting a new ice cream sandwich delivery service for example, it would be great to know how much influence my facebook and twitter accounts have over my revenue. On the other end, hopefully influence ratings will help services suggest places online to market new brands based on similar industry case studies.

</comment><comment><USER6> I find this ironic since one of the top articles today is "The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All (Sockpuppet Management Software)" Can you easily measure crowd interest if it's becoming easy to fake online users.

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome article!!!</comment>


The Evolution of a Software Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@webseanhickey/the-evolution-of-a-software-engineer-db854689243 <comment><USER2> No spring, no ORM. Their enterprise example is worthless.

On a more serious note - in the career of a software developer the moments in which his power, resources and responsibilities are balanced are rare. Which leads to over engineered hello worlds if he is bored and have extra time. Or hacked together mission critical in a crunch time. Often both simultaneously.</comment>


But what about blockchain apps? - <AUTHOR> https://www.heropunch.io/xj9/2018/but-what-about-blockchain-apps <comment><USER2> Blockchain apps aren't going to happen, just how BitTorrent apps never happened. There's a bunch of reasons, but most of them come down to the fact that decentralization isn't _really_ a boon. Consider a new social network I want to build. Making a simple prototype and hosting it on AWS is easy. Getting people to use it is hard. Getting people to use it _and_ make them self-host some kind of "node" in this decentralized universe -- that's exponentially harder. Diaspora clearly showed that no one wants to set up and host their own nodes. And then you have to solve all kinds of really hard problems: double spending, consensus, 51%+ attacks, and so on. Some of these problems are simply unsolvable and we have to compromise. SSBT, for example, has no consensus, so everything is subjective[1] (which makes it almost impossible to do anything useful with).

The people still fighting this war of decentralization remind me of the Japanese soldiers[2] who didn't realize WW2 was over. You lost. No one cares about decentralization. Google won. Amazon won. Facebook won. The great majority of people invest in BTC and ETH because they think it'll make them wealthy, not because of some noble desire to fight "the man." Besides, BTC isn't really decentralized anyway, the million-dollar-VC-backed miners basically control that ecosystem.

[1] [https://github.com/ssbc/secure- scuttlebutt/issues/86](https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt/issues/86)

[2] [http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/17/world/asia/japan- philippines-w...](http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/17/world/asia/japan-philippines- ww2-soldier-dies/index.html)

<comment><USER3> Email is decentralized and is probably the most used and most compatible system there is.

<comment><USER4> And yet what percentage of email lives on the servers of a handful of giant corporations?

<comment><USER5> But you _can_ host your own emails. You can't host your own Facebook page.

<comment><USER6> >But you can host your own emails.

Sure, as long as you don't actually want to email someone else. AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, anywhere you might want to host your email server, they're likely already blocked by all the spam filters so you're never going to get through.

>You can't host your own Facebook page.

You can't host your own Gmail either, but you can host something awfully similar to Facebook while not being exactly Facebook.

<comment><USER5> I've been hosting my own emails for 8 years and haven't had any problems.

If you host something "awfully similar to Facebook" you can't communicate with Facebook users. If you host your own emails, you can still communicate with Gmail users. Surely you weren't intending that retort as a serious argument?

<comment><USER6> The second argument follows the first. If the first isn't true, then the second also isn't true and it seems you've been fortunate in that regard. But if the first is true (that spam lists block addresses from shared hosting providers), then you can email but not to Gmail. Sort of like hosting Facebook without communicating to Facebook users.

<comment><USER3> Seems like a solveable problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am seeing this:

 _Surge protection

Warning:
You triggered the wiki's surge protection by doing too many requests in a short time.

Please make a short break reading the stuff you already got.

When you restart doing requests AFTER that, slow down or you might get locked out for a longer time!
_

Google cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qGQvzK...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qGQvzKU5kBEJ:https://www.heropunch.io/xj9/2018/but- what-about-blockchain-apps+)

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm being hugged to death! maybe i should add come caching to my nginx config

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> AFAICT, with current blockchain technology, in order to process PayPal level volumes, every single participant in the network would need to process PayPay level volumes... 1,000 transactions per second is not a problem for a single payments company; it seems like a giant problem for each of the 100,000 nodes on the network also to process 1,000 transactions per second.

Certainly I am missing something obvious?

<comment><USER9> This is one of the biggest problems with Blockchains right now. If it cannot be solved then their utility is extremely limited. There are two main approaches that seem likely to work:

\- "Layer 2" networks: Most transaction volume happens off-chain. POW blockchain remains as a settlement layer. Quite a few proposed protocols. Lightning network [1] is the most well known. First mainnet lightning transactions were sent in December [2]

\- Sharding: Split the blockchain into lots of different blockchains with a subset of miners validating transactions on each sub-chain. Miners are randomly assigned a new sub-chain on a regular basis to stop collusion. Each sub-chain has it's own address space. Sub-chains can communicate using asynchronus message passing. Ethereum has a draft specification [3][4] and is starting to implement some test clients [5].

[1] [https://lightning.network/](https://lightning.network/)

[2] [https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/946175898029395968](https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/946175898029395968)

[3] [https://github.com/ethereum/sharding/blob/develop/docs/doc.m...](https://github.com/ethereum/sharding/blob/develop/docs/doc.md)

[4] [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding- FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ)

[5] [https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability- re...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability-research- development-subsidy-programs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a real hard time reading this post without being disoriented by the lack of capitalization.

<comment><USER6> Yes, this is a stylistic choice some bloggers are using these days and it's pretty annoying. I'm all in favor of learning how to break the rules but in this case it just makes it harder to read without adding any benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I agree with some of the authors points. One item that is missing is the incentive structure.

Let's take mesh networks for example (as mentioned in the article). Substratum pays users in coins to share their network, which creates an incentive to grow the network (as long as the coins are worth something). If the coins are worthless, the model doesn't work.

It would take a lot of money to create the incentives without the coins.

</comment><comment><USER12> DAG (Directed acyclic graph) based currencies don't need a blockchain; Byteball/Dagcoin, IOTA, Rayblocks (Nano) and others.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not sure I entirely understand where this post is going. What does centralization versus decentralization have to do with a blockchain? Just because Bitcoin and others are using it as a centralized data store for a decentralized currency doesn't mean the blockchain has to be tied to any of that.

I feel like people keep getting really far away from what a blockchain really is (a fancy linked list that can ensure integrity from start to end) and are confusing it for how Bitcoin uses it.

<comment><USER14> I read it as:

Blockchains(PoW/PoS/etc) are not the solution for decentralized applications because blockchains are a global state and most decentralized application don't _need_ a global state. (Specially non-fintech ones that don't have a double-spend problem like social/websites/photos/etc)

It briefly mentions Secure Scuttlebutt, a gossip protocol that works over meshnets without global internet access as an example of a decentralized technology without a global state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Surge protection warning</comment>


Remotely dump memory with no interaction on iPhone 11 Pro (fixed in iOS 13.3.1) - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=1982 <comment><USER2> > The physical memory dumping is abusing the fact that on iOS the physmap > region, which provides direct virtual mappings of large parts of device > physical memory is larger than the random ASLR shift which is applied to it. > It's almost 4GB in size, but its virtual address only varies by around 1GB, > leading to kernel virtual addresses which are always mapped and which > provide a window in to device physical memory.

Not the first time Apple has messed up ASLR because the thing that they're sliding has gotten too large…

</comment><comment><USER3> This also affected MacBooks and was fixed in MacOS 10.15.3

iOS: [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210918](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT210918) MacOS: [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT210919](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210919)

</comment><comment><USER4> Does this work if AirDrop is disabled but Bluetooth is on?

How about if just AirDrop is off?

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it would be good to change the title to say `(fixed in iOS 13.3.1)` instead of `(iOS 13.3)`, to make it clear that this is not a zero day.

<comment><AUTHOR> HN title character limit didn't allow me to.

<comment><USER6> I've squeezed it in there now at the cost of a little ungrammaticalness.

(Submitted title was "PoC remotely dump memory with no user interaction on iPhone 11 Pro (iOS 13.3)".)

<comment><USER7> I still see only 13.3, not 13.3.1... could do this:

> Remotely dump memory w/o user interaction on iPhone 11 Pro (fixed iOS > 13.3.1)

<comment><USER6> Thanks, I missed that. I've moved things around a bit.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Help the Internet Archive save 500px CC licensed photos TONIGHT - <AUTHOR> 500px is getting rid of support for its CC licensed photos... like now. Jump on and help!<p>https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=500px <comment><USER2> Clickable link: [https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=500px](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=500px)</comment>


Under the Hood with the SpaceX Merlin Engine - <AUTHOR> http://tuts.pinehead.tv/2013/01/14/under-the-hood-with-the-spacex-merlin-engine/

<comment><USER2> The livescribe link in the article is well worth watching. Fascinating, rocket science is!

[http://www.livescribe.com/cgi- bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/ML...](http://www.livescribe.com/cgi- bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=n7SMWV6PdG7r)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's interesting that the engine is so small, are all engines of that caliber that size or is this one special?

<comment><USER4> It's not really mentioned in the article but as a starting point they received all the work done for Fastrac [1], a NASA program to build small, cheap, expendable rockets - something like the Falcon 1. That got cancelled as NASA projects are wont to do but it made sense to use that design as a baseline. A clean sheet engine design is very complicated indeed - it's a very high dimensional, highly coupled optimisation problem, so a known good starting point is a very valuable thing to have.

Indeed the turbopump, which is one of the hardest bits of a rocket engine, is made by Barber Nichols, who made the turbopump for Fastrac and who make the turbopumps for the Merlin engines [2]. I've heard rocket engineers describe rocket engines as turbopumps with some extra plumbing. Perhaps a slight exaggeration but not far off, especially since their design is so tightly coupled and dependent upon overall engine parameters. The degree of coupling depends on the topology of the plumbing, or the 'cycle' of the engine, which I'll try and explain:

There are three kinds of rocket engine cycle (well, there are maybe more but these are the three that have been flown historically). The Expander Cycle, the Staged Combustion Cycle, and the Gas Generator cycle. I'll mention the last two.

Merlin, as the article mentions, is an example of a Gas Generator cycle [3]. In this cycle, you take off a little bit of fuel and oxidiser to burn outside the main combustion chamber, to generate some hot energetic gases that you can exhaust over a turbine. This spins the turbine up, which is connected to a shaft with a compressor on the other end. The compressor increases the pressure of the propellents so that they can be injected into the main combustion chamber. This assembly (turbine, shaft, compressor) is called the turbopump. It's necessary because the engines require very high flow rates to get the thrust they need, and that has to be at a high pressure - higher than the pressure of the combusting gases inside the combustion chamber, else you wouldn't be able to inject it!

Back to the bleed-off to drive the turbine. You usually don't want a perfect stoichiometric mix of fuel and oxidiser for this, or even close, because it generates extraordinary hot gases that no turbine would last long in (The turbines are spinning at many tens of thousands of RPM usually so would be subject to much higher forces than the actively cooled walls of the main combustion chamber). For this reason you usually have a large imbalance of one propellent to the other to keep the temperature down. Usually you run with excess fuel, or 'fuel-rich', as the opposite - oxidiser rich - means you have hot oxidising gases which are harder on the metallurgy. I do know of some russian exceptions to this, though, where fuel rich would have left sooty deposits in the plumbing (The materials science employed in the turbines was apparently so witchcraft that when the US got intelligence of oxidiser-rich turbine precombustors, they thought is was deliberate counterintelligence from the russians to get them to waste billions researching the impossible). The gas generator cycle, as the article mentions, dumps this turbine exhaust overboard separately. The problem with this is that there's a load of uncombusted fuel in this exhaust, which you're just wasting, and this hits your rocket performance - the Specific Impulse ( I_{sp} ), as you're not getting as much bang out of a given mass of fuel as you could.

The answer to this is the Staged Combustion Cycle [4], where you also inject the exhaust of the turbine into the combustion chamber to finish off combustion. The performance of these engines is higher but the thermodynamic balance to design a working system is a greater challenge, and some of the engineering is a bit harder too. Staged Combustion engines are mostly russian, although the Space Shuttle Main Engines are a US-design example of Staged combustion.

SpaceX have been gradually and incrementally improving the Merlin's away from their simpler beginnings, and it's been pleasing to watch as an interested outsider. To bring it back to the OP question, "are all engines of that caliber that size or is this one special?", Merlin didn't particularly stand out in terms of power density in the early days, although it's been improving and improving. Now there is the Merlin 1D [5], which claims to have the highest thrust to weight of any rocket engine every made. One should take these claims with a pinch of salt as what counts as 'engine' and what counts as 'plumbing' and what counts as fuel tank is sort of open to debate and you can do some creative accounting to make your numbers look better. However, it's an impressive achievement regardless.

The metric that doesn't lie, from a performance point of view, is the mass fraction of the rocket - that is the fraction of the all-up, fuelled-up mass of the rocket on the pad that makes it into orbit. The higher the better - i.e. you can take bigger payloads for a given size rocket. Note this is just from a performance point of view, not an economics point of view.

However, increasing mass fraction will be important to SpaceXs staged aim of re-usable rockets. That's because as well as the payload, each rocket stage as to also carry the fuel it needs to land. I believe Falcon 9 can launch about 2% of its pad mass into orbit (i.e. the payload can be 2% of the total mass), and Musk reckons if that could be increased to about 4 or 5%, there's be enough margin to carry enough landing fuel and extra landing hardware like legs.

So my bet, just for fun (I'm not connected with SpaceX, this is just sideline speculation for the sake of interest) is that you might start to see development of a Staged combustion engine instead of gas generator, and a switch to methane fuel which, with LOX, has a slightly higher specific impulse than Lox/Kerosene which they currently use. Maybe 20 seconds extra (seconds being the unit of specific impulse), which is maybe 5-7% more than they might be seeing now, which is worth having. Methane is nice because it has a similar density to kerosene. Lox/LH2 has almost 50% better performance than LOX/Kerosene in theory but LH2 is of a very much lower density, so the tanks must be much bigger (the illustrates my earlier point about the slipperyness of engine-only thrust to weight as a metric - how much bigger and heavier are the tanks?).

[Edit: of course instead of building a higher performance engine you could just built a much bigger rocket with the same mass fraction and have the cargo be a smaller percentage of launch mass. probably cheaper than developing a staged combustion engine. I suspect the rocket science equivalent of more servers vs a rewrite in C]

This post has ended up being a bit longer than I thought it would. Hopefully of some interest if you're new to the subject.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastrac_(engine)> [2] [http://www.barber- nichols.com/products/rocket-engine-turbopu...](http://www.barber- nichols.com/products/rocket-engine-turbopumps) [3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-generator_cycle_(rocket)> [4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_combustion_cycle_(rocket...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_combustion_cycle_\(rocket\)) [5] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#M...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_\(rocket_engine_family\)#Merlin_1D)

<comment><USER5> Thanks a lot. Very interesting!

> For this reason you usually have a large imbalance of one propellent to the > other to keep the temperature down.

So how large is that imbalance usually, or in the case of the Merlin 1C?

> although the Space Shuttle Main Engines are a US-design example of Staged > combustion.

Is this, why their exhaust is so clean? How much more efficient is this engine compared to the Merlin?

PS: I'm excited, this engine will be used again in the new super heavy lift [1] that NASA is developing, though obviously, I can't tell if its a good idea.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Core_stage>

<comment><USER6> > _Is this, why their exhaust is so clean?_

The Space Shuttle Main Engines used LOX and LH2, which creates water when burned.

> _How much more efficient is this engine compared to the Merlin?_

The specific impulse is the metric to look at, and ballooney already talked about it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Root Certificate Authority role separation – On Windows and beyond - <AUTHOR> https://wsx.io/certificate-authority-scope-separation-on-windows-and-beyond-4f62ec001167 <comment><USER2> @wsx:

I'm not sure exactly where you think the problem lies.

If you install a root CA certificate, yes, whomever has the private key can potentially intercept traffic.

If you install a root CA certificate, yes, your machine will trust any certificates that it signs.

 _That is the whole point._

If you don't trust it, don't install it!

This is all _BY DESIGN_ , so I'm not surprised that Microsoft was so dismissive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe you didn't understood the whole concept. Read the first mail better. Maybe the with the android case of VPN is more easy to understand.

If you just install the key of your VPN service, to avoid spoofing of that VPN, you also expose yourself to another problem, the risk of a stolen private key. That can be used to sniff you everywhere, VPN, HTTPS, etc...

In the case of Linux, if someone stole my private key of the VPN, my only problem is the VPN, not the whole architecture. because the attacker can only use that private key to spoof my VPN service.

About the sentence "If you install a root CA certificate, yes, your machine will trust any certificates that it signs. ". Not on Linux.</comment></comment>


Compiler Explorer - <AUTHOR> https://godbolt.org/ <comment><USER2> Matt Godbolt is a great speaker as well. I loved this talk that included a bit about the architecture behind his Compiler Explorer. The rest of his talk is super cool as well. E.g. closed form solutions from O(n) code? Compilers are awesome. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bSkpMdDe4g4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bSkpMdDe4g4)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is this thing that works similarly but for emacs: [https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/rmsbolt](https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/rmsbolt) It seems pretty gosh darn spicy

<comment><USER4> Wow, this is amazing. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is amazing for all computer science degree courses. I wish I had this when I was learning this stuff. Sadly, I think the truth is that most profs or students won't know this platform exists.

<comment><USER6> Compilers have had the ability do dump Assembly since the early days, and many IDEs do support an interleaved Assembly view, so the missing teaching opportunity has been there for quite a long time.

<comment><USER7> Even then, I think the great UI in the compiler explorer still puts it apart from the others.

<comment><USER6> Sure, compiler explorer is a great idea, just saying that unfortunately plenty of people aren't aware of such workflows, even when the tooling has been available for so long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice to see this continues to get exposure. It remains awesome and every time I return to it Matt's added some new nifty feature. More please Matt!

</comment><comment><USER9> See also a command line tool[1] for this, written in Rust.

[1] [https://github.com/ethanhs/cce](https://github.com/ethanhs/cce)

<comment><USER10> Neat. But once you're using command line tools why not just use the constituent tools used by Compiler Explorer? `objdump`, etc?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really nice work by Matt. Haven't seen a project before that makes some of that stuff quite so quick and simple.

Tangentially, anyone have a transpiler recommendation?

Started to look at Babel but it seems most inclined to targeting Javascript. Looking to go bidirectional between Python and a proprietary DSL.

Would have to reverse engineer the DSL grammmar I assume but it doesn't seem very complex, so hearing of any good tooling would be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER12> Legit 10/10 for their displayed privacy policy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Or, in one line of shell:

      echo 'int square(int num) { return num*num; }' | gcc -S -x c - -o -

How about this: open an editor on "test.c". Then in another terminal window, run this script:

      #!/bin/sh

      rm -f test_copy.c

      while true ; do
        if [ test.c -nt test_copy.c ] ; then
          cp test.c test_copy.c
          clear
          gcc -S test_copy.c -o -
        fi
        sleep 0.3
      done

Every time you save test.c, the compiler output updates in the other shell window (within a fraction of a second).

<comment><USER14> Godbolt has many more features than this. It can show you mappings from your code to the outputted asm, it can show help text on what instructions mean, you can compare multiple compilers against the same source file easily...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This would be really useful if it can be run offline. Much easier to use than writing code, compiling it with -S to produce assembly, then trawling through the assembly to look for the code you're interested in.

<comment><USER16> It's open source, so you can just clone the source code and run the server locally on your computer. I've been running it like this for a long time :-)

<comment><USER7> How hard was it to set up for you? Is it a small standalone thing or a beast with complex dependencies? Did you configure it to run everything locally or is it still requesting a web service to compile the programs?

<comment><USER17> i got it up and running within 30min or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there a way to set this up to have two windows? One window to type code into and the other to run my program? I have been fiddling with the UI for a while, but can't quite figure it out.

<comment><USER18> My bad. For some reason I thought I could actually run programs, but looks like that isn't the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It a very nice project.

I really like how it grew to encompass any language with AOT/JIT compilers, as long as anyone is willing to support the language related tooling.

</comment><comment><USER19> #incluide "/etc/passwd" ?

<comment><USER20> Doesn't look like it works any more.

In any case, Matt Godbolt has spoken a bit about the architecture of Compiler Explorer. Seems like he's given some thought to security.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSkpMdDe4g4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSkpMdDe4g4)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAbCKa0FzjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAbCKa0FzjQ)

<comment><USER10> IIRC the main sandboxing comes from a wrapper around libc that restricts pathnames used in open() and friends. It seems reasonably well designed for its intent but probably not super difficult to escape. Certainly if the C library adds another entry point, it won't be obvious that there's a new way around.

What the Compiler Explorer has going for it in this regard is that there's very little treasure to be found once you escape. No user accounts, no passwords, no security questions, no financial transactions, etc.

Compiler Explorer doesn't execute the programs it builds, so the risk is limited to what you can convince the compiler/assembler to do on your behalf.

<comment><USER21> > limited to what you can convince the compiler/assembler to do on your behalf

C++ is a not a language where i would have a lot of confidence in that limitation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Godbolt is very impressive for learning assembly, I also post this 5 days ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635399)

</comment><comment><USER23> No perl?!?!?!?

<comment><USER24> In a tool to study assembly output of compilers?

<comment><USER25>
        $ perl -MO=Concise -e 'my $v = 1234; $v *= 9876'
        a  <@> leave[1 ref] vKP/REFC ->(end)
        1     <0> enter ->2
        2     <;> nextstate(main 1 -e:1) v:{ ->3
        5     <2> sassign vKS/2 ->6
        3        <$> const[IV 1234] s ->4
        4        <0> padsv[$v:1,2] sRM*/LVINTRO ->5
        6     <;> nextstate(main 2 -e:1) v:{ ->7
        9     <2> multiply[t2] vKS/2 ->a
        7        <0> padsv[$v:1,2] sRM ->8
        8        <$> const[IV 9876] s ->9
        -e syntax OK

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> that's such a wonderful tool, for which I have 0 usage</comment>


How did MySpace do such a bad UI/UX job? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/How-did-MySpace-with-a-smart-team-of-people-do-such-a-BAD-UI-UX-job-with-the-new-design/answer/Andrew-Chen

<comment><USER3> Chen is specifically talking about a new redesign here, not the overall ability for MySpace users to customize everything.

What's so totally annoying about this is the UX people get overridden by the concerns of the 'business' people. Many companies I've worked with still have rather arbitrary distinctions which divide people and create antagonistic tendencies between teams. Really, truly, everyone is working on the same 'business' problems, just from different angles.

Treating UX people as not understanding 'business' is insulting. Not saying it's been done here explicitly, but as someone who's done a lot of development, I've been talked down to enough by people who think I don't understand 'business' or company X's particular 'business'. The only time I don't understand an aspect of the business needs is when those aspects are specifically withheld during meetings ("for strategic purposes", of course).

I think the UX people probably understand the 'business' of getting users to quit leaving myspace and start using it again - for the long term - <USER2> than any of the 'business' guys who can only measure success on daily or weekly ad sales charts. Not saying money and ad sales are bad, but this is a classic death spiral - increase page views (and possibly ad sizes) to squeeze a few extra bucks out of the remaining users before they leave two.

The same network effect of people using MySpace because all their friends did is going to be working in reverse as people quit using it because their friends quit using it too. The absolute first priority should be to keep those friends using MySpace, then devising strategies to get them to get their friends back.

All this assumes the true goal of the 'business' side of things is to have a growing profitable MySpace 5 years from now. I really suspect it's not.

<comment><USER4> That's because the incentives are completely screwed up (to put it in the nicest terms): more page views (no matter how these come about) = more ad revenue. So what do you expect many to do?

It's a sad state of affairs because the "business" folks are now resorting to more controversial and in-your-face material that is complete garbage much like cable news and other ratings whores on television. Think about the AOL memo that was allegedly leaked. That's what the internet is turning into all at the expense of high-quality content.

This wouldn't be a problem if everyone else didn't do it, but when you can't easily monetize online, now you even have the likes of the New York Times with huge display ads that scroll down to cover up most of your screen when you visit their home page. Disgusting. Someone needs to change this. I'm looking into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> MySpace allowing CSS etc. in their profiles was initially a bug. Their code was just bad, not escaping user input.

They were on such a growth trajectory, and users loved being able to customize their pages, that they made it into an official feature.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've heard anecdotally that Plenty of Fish intentionally does something similar on their search results. The user thumbnails are generally low quality and/or squashed into the wrong aspect ratio. What I heard from someone who talked to him about it is they tried fixing it (cropping instead of resizing, higher image quality, etc), but it resulted in fewer click-throughs (and fewer ad impressions) so they changed it back.

</comment><comment><USER7> MySpace intentionally delegated a good chunk of the UI/UX to the individual users. This was a mistake.

<comment><USER8> Even twitter does that! Yet we are yet to see horrendous profile pages on Twitter. Reasons:

1) Twitter crowd is "relatively sober" (no data to prove this).

2) Twitter does not go all out on the options. The tools are limited to a huge extent with a majority of page still covered by tweets esp in the new design. Hence less chance of the user to play their part.

<comment><USER9> I could be wrong, but Twitter doesn't allow custom CSS, cursor changes, scroll tags, and it doesn't let you blast horrible horrible music in the faces of their readers. That, to me, is a plus.

It's a little weird since I prefer to give the users as much control as allowable when I write applications for them... but this has shown me that sometimes great power is not always treated with great responsibility :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> On a somewhat related note, I 'got' how/why people were so attracted to MySpace in the first place with the 'personal customization' aspect - my own background, colors, etc. But I have to say it would have been even better with one or both of the following options:

1\. A toggle to disable a person's styles to a default.

2\. An option of defining my own style for viewing others' pages.

I just went to a friend's page (after having not been on myspace in > 2years) and it was 100% unreadable. Doing a 'select all' on the entire page made some of the text readable, barely. Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER10> Dont forget MySpace was THE site out there when doing these things was considered the best business plan. Hence why Ning and a few other sites like it were also popular. However that was a LONG time go and things have changed alot since then.

</comment><comment><USER11> Designing for the best user experience is the same as designing for revenue.

</comment><comment><USER12> For most users I suspect it's better than Quora's, actually.

<comment><USER13> I had to chuckle when I saw the domain this story was submitted from. On one hand, the technical aspects of Quora are quite nifty. But the interaction process is one big 'wtf'. Adding new topics to your feed is baffling. In fact for a while I didn't even realize there _was_ a personalizd feed, I thought the majority of questions were just about Steve Jobs (must have been cause ceoSteveJobs is on my Twitter account, which I used to sign in). Other details, like wanting to post a question in anonymous mode, have inobvious answers. It's a shambles (although I suppose it's still early days, and really the content is the important thing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a good example of how A/B testing the wrong things can kill your product.</comment>


Empowering Your Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/01/empowering-your-team.html

<comment><USER2> Why not post the link to the interview itself: <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/31corner.html>

The guidelines say:

      > Please submit the original source. If a blog
      > post reports on something they found on another
      > site, submit the latter.

( from <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> )</comment>


Medical student + dev = new start-up, feedback? / Stay up-to-date on your health - <AUTHOR> http://www.meddik.com

<comment><USER2> Ok, how is it different to mailing list with nice looking subscription page?

Looking at your (minimalistic) page, I can't see a reason why should I give you my email and click "sign up". Some more info about service, guest preview of what is offered might make me interesting, but one page with one image and subscribe button will not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, realized I never answered your question.

The difference: We scrape medical forums, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc (all the social media avenues) and add a layer of intelligent semantic analysis to bring you the best information relevant to what you have (or just the hottest news if you don't have anything).

If there isn't anything new that meets our threshold, we won't send you anything.

<comment><USER3> Scraping sites for this content has vary basic copyright issues. How do you get around that?

<comment><AUTHOR> From our research about these laws, as long as we cite back to the original site (i.e. we're not displaying their information on our own sites, only linking to them) and respect the no-scrape robots.txt files, we're in the clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Think this is a fantastic idea and very useful to a lot of people. I used to work with the hemophiliac community and this (like many other communities) is exactly what they need. I'll also be looking forward to using it for myself. Signed up, best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the encouragement! There's just too much information out there; we just want to distill it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good idea. I've been part of a development team working on a similar space. Instead of medical conditions and topics, it was research progress in specific areas - feeds on most recent articles, cutting edge results, methods and procedures that have seen results. I think we are going to be seeing a lot more this in the near future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This idea came out of the fact that we built an enterprise Radian6-like platform specifically for the health vertical and realized this would be a useful tool for consumers as well.

That and people send so much time searching for this stuff anyways, we might as well help them out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You really need a privacy policy linked from the front page. I hope it goes without saying that if someone wants to follow news about medical_condition_x, people are going to be sensitive about who has access to the data linking their email (and, by proxy, identity) to that condition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Working with our lawyers on this as fast as we can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This would be a great way for me to keep up with the latest info related to Type 1 diabetes (which I have).

Signed up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's the idea. There are so many new apps and treatments coming out it's hard to keep up with them all individually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great. I see this being very useful if you have a specific medical condition. Your favicon is missing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, if you don't have a specific medical condition but just wanted to stay up-to-date with something in health (new startups, health technology, health policy, etc), It serves the same function.

Thanks for alerting us about the favicon!

<comment><USER9> Another minor issue... why is there an asterix next to "Email," but no accompanying disclaimer or privacy policy?

Your main headline in 3 lines (rather) than 2 on OSX (Lion) in Firefox 10. Look is like the div width issue. Everything else looks good. Keep up the good work. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! +1 for the HackerNews community :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When are you hoping to launch?

Have you begun building this, or are you just gauging interest?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've built this for enterprise; it's just a matter of adding a consumer facing aspect to it. And yes, we're gauging interest to see if it is even worth it to have a consumer web aspect.

Hoping to launch at the end of Techstar's Affiliate startup accelerator Blueprint Health (mid-March). Thanks!

<comment><USER10> My grandmother recently asked if I could research Barret's Esophagus, which she suffers from. She wanted to know if there'd been any new / experimental procedures that didn't exist 5 years ago. If Meddick would help with that, I'd sign up (and my grandmother would probably pay monthly for it)

<comment><AUTHOR> Meddik would help with that. Especially with rarer disorders like Barrett's esophagus (or less diagnoses, rather), you'll hear about new treatments as soon as our engine surfaces them. Thanks for the support!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone working in the same space, I am going to give you honest feedback that might seem harsh.

1\. There are other sites doing this better and they have far more than just a landing page.

2\. Are you holding user data? If so what about hippa compliance?

3\. Your differentiating factor: "We scrape medical forums, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc (all the social media avenues) and add a layer of intelligent semantic analysis to bring you the best information relevant to what you have (or just the hottest news if you don't have anything)."

Simply put, I dont believe that you have one single bit of this.

4\. Why would I use this and not patients like me or crohnology.com where I can find out about new things and also have them vetted by my friends that have similar conditions.

5\. I dont think your newsletter could ever be better than condition specific newsletters like the ones from the CCFA or ADA? How will you deal with that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the honest feedback!

1\. Who else is in this space of content organization? Plus, in the spirit of start-ups, it's never about how many competitors you have; it's about who can ultimately provide the most value :)

2\. Holding user data, but we're deidentified enough to be HIPAA-compliant (or at least our lawyers say so.)

3\. Haha, you don't have to believe us. You'll see it in action when it's live.

4\. We know both of those teams and they're both fantastic! Our goal isn't to replace them, just increase their awareness. Patientslikeme works fantastically for chronic diseases; Crohnology is a great start-up for Crohn's disease. But the percentage of Crohn's users who actually know about Crohnology and product updates is low. Our goal is to get the newest and best information to those who need it most.

5\. Perhaps not, but there are a couple distinguishing factors here. First, the more common chronic diseases have resources like that, but many of the ones in between have little support. Second, the topics we cover are a bit different. They're focused on generating their own content and might miss out on some of the thousands of new apps being generated in this health boom. Ultimately, we'd love to provide more awareness to newsletters like that if they're really the most helpful tool.

Patients first.

<comment><USER11> I am a patient. Being a patient is why I am so passionate about products in this space. So the thought of someone scraping the web to find information that I might apply to managing my medical condition is scary. I have worked at CPA companies that ran things like Molocure scams, Cure diabetes now sites etc... Perhaps your technology is so advanced that it can tell the difference between valid news and scams and perhaps you will manually review everything and verify the source of the information; but im not willing to bet my health on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel ya. Having worked in healthcare for years and as a medical student myself / recently gone through rounds, I know exactly where you're coming from. In addition, I am a patient myself in the hospital once a week.

Moreover, having grown up in this era of cyberchondria, I know that the danger of self-treatment is ever present and real, but that's not the problem we're set out to solve.

Physicians know quite a bit, yes. They can tell you what medicines to take, anecdotally what they've seen, and what the latest research tells them. However, they're far removed from what the patient actually goes through in terms of daily struggles, and what is out there to help them with that.

We built our technology with the mindset to surface useful information and bury scams. We actually built a medical search engine that did just that, but it didn't take.

We interpret "apply to managing my medical condition" as directing you to the right resources (e.g. Crohnology for Crohns, WeSprout for parents) that you might not have otherwise heard of. And we definitely have safeguards against spam.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MI6 chief questions China's role in UK tech sector - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-46431810 <comment><USER2> I think the West is finally waking up to the rampant IP theft that China perpetrates, and how their growth is fueled by this.

Regardless of what you say about Brexit or Trump, the part of the populism movement that resonates across the spectrum is that there have been a few state actors that have been taking advantage of the Washington-consensus world order.

Democrats and Republicans alike, and Labour and Tories alike, are more or less in their dismay toward China and Russia.

People across the west and the spectrum are waking up to the reality of how China grows.

<comment><USER3> I run a business at risk of IP theft and this worries me. But sometimes I also wonder if in reality IP is a fairly weak premise for a business (I know...sleepless nights this issue gives me), precisely because (1) it's so easily stealable, and (2) a lot of cultures don't really seem to view IP as property, which is a western-centric point of view. And then I think we've been mad in the West to construct economies on IP creation rather than manufacturing, just because, well, who will we sue?

<comment><USER4> IP theft is usually (but not always) a needless worry - at least it comes way behind proving a product:market fit. Being the best (aligned to your customer) source of a solution normally trumps being the only source. That said, some investors or specific highly competitive marketplaces may favour an IP- protected solution.

<comment><USER3> I think that's the conclusion I've reached. Thanks for your response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No word on social media and Brexit. People are still living in a dream state about what the real threat is .

China and Russia sure can cause hurt here and there but in a hyperconnected economic order sooner or later they suffer too.

Look at the yellow jacket movement in France. Nobody has any idea how to control that. That's the danger. To wake up one morning and find your house or business burnt done cause some group or the other has been triggered on social media.

<comment><USER2> I find it interesting that if you look at the top articles on HN mentioning China in a negative light, more often than in other articles, you'll get comments talking about:

\- How another country (the US usually) is even worse in many ways.

\- A change of topic from the article being mentioned.

This is not an an ad-hom against the OP, for all I know he's a normal guy sitting right in my state. But just a pattern if you search other HN articles on China.

Also, I don't get your middle sentence

> Eventually China and Russia will hurt too.

If China steals UK IP, how will China "eventually hurt", other than using the most roundabout logic?

<comment><USER6> China is notably not implicated in messing with the democracies on things like brexit or Trump. Which isn't to say they're saints -- they're just playing a longer game.

As far as people who dare to defend China against being THE WORST... I mean, 1.4 billion people, some of them move to America and speak English. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy.

EDIT: More downvotes, please. Express your patriotism.

<comment><USER2> Right, but if there was a post about how the US is still polluting with a lot of coal, how often is the top post "But China..." Similarly, India has even more US immigrants, but look at the top critical articles on India.

There's plenty of new evidence showing that China does engage in so-call "Sharp power"

[https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/12/21/one-of-americas- biggest...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/12/21/one-of-americas-biggest- chinese-language-newspapers-toes-beijings-party-line-china-influence-united- front/)

I think the proper policy is that HN users should upvote the sidetrack if they find that to be most interesting, and upvote the normal topic if they believe otherwise.

I'm sure admins can take a look into both Russian, Chinese, or even corporate influencers, and find ways to scale down their impact, which the admins should. If they're real opinions of a 1:1 person, then that's fair.

<comment><USER6> On carbon, trajectory counts. China's government is investing in clean energy and taking it seriously. America? ... Maybe this topic is a bad example for what you're trying to say.

My beef is seeing liberals succumb to red scare and hypernationalism regarding China. They have problems, but they've also done a phenomenal job for their own people these last 40 years.

<comment><USER7> Where is this partisanship coming from? There's no mention of being liberal or conservative upstream from this comment but this comment (and others of yours) are attempting to call out one party in the US and throwing fault their way. It's odd since it isn't a thing in the original article probably because it's not about the US at all.

<comment><USER6> The people from Google who've been demonizing the Chinese largely self identify as "liberal". Yes, it's awfully ironic.

I wouldn't call it partisan as they're nowhere close to mainstream Democrats.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jeff Bezos just unveiled his new rocket. And it's a monster - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/09/12/jeff-bezos-just-unveiled-his-new-rocket-and-its-a-monster/ <comment><USER2> Got to say, it must be great for advertisements to own a newspaper.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what the payload in horses[1] is.

1) [https://xkcd.com/1461/](https://xkcd.com/1461/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting how small the Soyuz is compared to the Falcon. I had imagined them to be around the same size, if not the other way round.

Also interesting, I had not heard about the Vulcan - only in development since 2014 and apparently a derivative of the Atlas without Russian rocket engines powering the 1st stage.

</comment><comment><USER5> Stop sniggering in the back.</comment>


Prismic.io: a developer-focused approach to content management - <AUTHOR> https://blog.prismic.io/UimoJ8uvzYwM4miB/introducing_prismicio <comment><USER2> Ok we're seeing these ones popping up quickly these days (osmek.com) here's my thoughts,

Short: not bad!

Long:

What we need here is not osmek or prismic or insert-random-new-thing, but it is a sane interface.

If you think you are good go solve that problem.

The whole point (mostly) of these services is to decouple content from presentation yet when every new service designs their own revolutionary API you just end up tying yourself to that specific provider.

The major problem is to get people to agree on the same thing of course.

But if that does happen then imagine the kinds of freedom it will bring to you.

A very simplistic one could be defining standard JSON objects and then building a CMS that works with those objects, then allow people to bring their own data.

</comment><comment><USER3> That video is unbearable and my brain intervened within 30 seconds and I found myself browsing another site.

Is there any textual info on this anywhere or do I have to force myself to watch that video?

<comment><USER4> There's some here [https://prismic.io/tour/writing- room](https://prismic.io/tour/writing-room)

I also find the recent trend of introducing things via videos, often with no text alternative, massively irritating.

Particularly when it's something developer-centric and code-related. Do you really think I'm illiterate? That I am browsing with sound on? That I want to sit through minutes of marketing guff waiting for you to get to the point? You can't skim-read a video.

<comment><USER5> I agree: the talking head against a white background is overdone.

That said, I've always thought this is a product/project opportunity: the reason most startups rely on talking head videos is because anything else gets more costly and time consuming. Making it easier to produce a product demo would be a huge help.

Edit: cleaned up grammar. I can has words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi guys,

Worth noting that prismic.io is created by the same creators of the [http://playframework.org](http://playframework.org)

</comment><comment><USER7> Whoever decided to play that music at that volume over the entire video needs to have their computer taken away.

Overall, from the marketing, that's all I can smell here, marketing. If this is targeting developers, there is a major branding error all over the site.

</comment><comment><USER8> Compare with [http://osmek.com/](http://osmek.com/) which was also recently submitted to Hacker News:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6481766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6481766)

</comment><comment><USER9> "Is it compatible with my project?

Yes, it is. As long as you do things right on your app, (...)"

um, so that's probably a no. I prefer technical description of a product than marketing nonsense. Also, I'm not going to watch your marketing video to find out what it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep sorry... falls under "english fail", which we're working on, promise. This first release is kind of marketing-y in nature - but we are putting together some articles on the architecture, technical decisions, and some of the technical features (like crazy-amazing diffs of structured documents) that will hopefully be more relevant to your interests.

<comment><USER9> I look forward to it then, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tech-no-logical if you want to introduce a product, please, please supply a working demo, and not some bad video full of marketing. _especially_ if you're targeting developers.

<comment><USER6> Fully working example in different programming languages on github [https://developers.prismic.io/examples/UjBmm8uvzeMJvE5V/les-...](https://developers.prismic.io/examples/UjBmm8uvzeMJvE5V/les- bonnes-choses)

<comment><USER10> FWIW, the fonts on the example site don't render correctly on Chrome 29 on Windows 7 and look like crap.

When will people start testing fonts on windows and not just go with whatever looks good on a mac?!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The video looks more like a parody than a serious video...

</comment><comment><USER12> I definitely can get behind the statement of intent that the 'content' part of a CMS needs to be managed better.

Unfortuantely, I think it's only one of the problem areas that cause developers to constantly reinvent the wheel when it comes to CMSs to fit their own needs.

<comment><USER3> I think the solution is just layers on top of Django, Rails etc.

Django's admin is a pointer towards a solution and with some refinement that solves part of the problem.

Easy-to-use modular objects that are geared towards typical content types helps another aspect of it.

And some mix of [http://startbootstrap.com/](http://startbootstrap.com/) with [http://bootsnipp.com/](http://bootsnipp.com/) would tackle a third part of this.

So - essentially we don't need a CMS - we need a CMS toolkit that enables building a custom CMS with a minimal amount of glue code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For anyone researching about making a better CMS, this is the single best blog I have followed for years: [http://gadgetopia.com/cm](http://gadgetopia.com/cm)

</comment><comment><USER14> Very slick site. Noticed some typos, that probably arose from fr to en conversion.

[https://prismic.io/pricing](https://prismic.io/pricing) => Should be "Gb of storage", not "Go of storage".

[https://prismic.io/tour/writing-room](https://prismic.io/tour/writing-room) => "Additional informations" (in the screenshot for the structured editing section) should be "Additional information".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads-up. Like all good start-ups, everything was put together at speed: the final FR->EN conversion is a current WIP and will be getting some love shortly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have been developing a product unrelated to yours (I think at least, the video wont play because of all the traffic you're getting and your site really does not explain it too well) and I had thought prism was a good base for a name also, but then the whole NSA thing happened and I promptly switched the name.

Definitely not trying to be a jerk, but I'm wondering if these guys are concerned about this at all?

<comment><USER16> The video is hosted at vimeo, I don't see why you think it's related to the traffic these guys are getting.

It plays just fine for me.

<comment><USER15> You're right, it could have been for any reason. Anyway, it didn't work at the time for me but now it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another gray font on gray background website. I think I'll just give up and order a new monitor. I can't read all these new fancy websites. I get it that developers have usually good monitors, but is it really necessary to use a light gray on a gray background?

Edit: Hold your downvotes, I'm talking about the website. Not the blog! The website does have some hard to read gray-on-gray.

<comment><USER18> I was curious about this.

The grey on white has a ratio[1] of 8.6:1 which should be perfectly fine.

The footer, light blue on dark blue, has a ratio of 3.8:1 which fails WCAG.

I can read both fairly easily. Contrast ratio maybe not a good measure?

[1]: [http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/](http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the link and research. Some of the text is #acb2b6 which is really difficult for me to read. It's not like this website is particularly bad. I've hold back on commenting before but I guess I just felt like ranting today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Content management in the modern world = i18n focus = translation service provider integration + test hooks for proof reading + translation memory + (for high value releases such as intial marketing push to new culture/language) potential focus group process hooks

There is absolutely no way any of these US-centric startups are doing this stuff right. No way.

</comment><comment><USER20> What tools are used to make the main prismic.io page?

I've been seeing tons of new-ish sites with the scroll down structure where it's like there are multiple viewing frames stacked vertically. Is this because everyone is using the same toolset/template?

</comment><comment><USER21> A "developer-focused" approach seems like overkill for most sites, but I could see it finding a home in large institutions (universities, companies, etc) that have dedicated development teams.

</comment><comment><USER22> So is Prismic.io a database as a web service? With a focus on storing content?

</comment><comment><USER23> His hair is unnervingly tall</comment>


Visualising Markov Chains with NetworkX - <AUTHOR> http://vknight.org/unpeudemath/code/2015/11/15/Visualising-markov-chains/ <comment><USER2> Awesome application of graph theory visualization tools. Here are two articles introducing these tools and other free software for networks, graphs, and flowcharts:

[http://lwn.net/Articles/639998/](http://lwn.net/Articles/639998/)

[http://lwn.net/Articles/640302/](http://lwn.net/Articles/640302/)

<comment><USER3> I'm personally a fan of graph-tool in Python land.

<comment><USER4> Mind to tell some pros for that?</comment></comment></comment>


all about Steve (Jobs) - Being Steve - <AUTHOR> http://www.romain-moisescot.com/steve/beingsteve/html/beingsteveFR.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is the most comprehensive source of information on Steve I've ever seen. There's more to the website than this one page (biography, media gallery etc.), just click around.

Enjoy!</comment>


A Prion Love Story (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-prion-love-story <comment><USER2> Stuff like this gives me a really nice, warm pride in the human race. As if this is what we were born for: to get out there and do something incredibly hard and life-threatening and on a monumental scale. I'm reminded of reading the transcripts of Operation Epsilon [0]; the foremost scientists in the world didn't think we could make an atomic bomb, but by concentrating incredible amounts of incredible people we got there in a few short years. Impossible things are frequently possible when a committed group of people set out to do them.

In particular, as the article notes, prion research is damned hard, and they had zero prior experience, and it's not the kind of thing you can put together yourself in your backyard with eBay supplies. But love and pure force of will pushed them forward and I don't think words could ever express how beautiful that is.

[0] Operation Epsilon, in a nutshell, was when we took a bunch of German nuclear scientists and put them in a bugged room and told them about Hiroshima and listened to their reaction, in order to figure out how close the Germans were to the bomb. I highly recommend reading the transcripts, they're fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER3> Woah. Fatal Familial Insomnia (F.F.I.). Caused by a dominant mutation, so ~50% of children are affected. But typically not symptomatic until middle age. Damn.

<comment><USER4> Just another example of how evolution selects for/against or doesn't select for/against traits. If onset isn't until your 50s, it's plenty of time to reproduce. Granted there might be reduced fitness because older people won't be around as much to take care of children, but back during caveman days, very few people probably lived to their 50s.

<comment><USER3> Huh.

Indeed, searching "autosomal dominant late-onset" does yield quite a few, in various species. Including autosomal dominant Alzheimer disease (ADAD).

<comment><USER5> Huntington's is also in this category. Although there may be anticipation (onset gets earlier after each successive generation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would be amazing to have a happy ending here. Such an inspiring story

<comment><USER7> Looks like there might be a happy end after all:

[http://www.prionalliance.org/2018/12/03/end-of-the-year- upda...](http://www.prionalliance.org/2018/12/03/end-of-the-year-update/)</comment></comment>


Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-leftist-political-corr <comment><USER2> In other words people voted for Trump because he's an asshole that resonated with themselves being assholes. It's so much less worrisome on the conscience when your President is also an amoral, racist, misogynistic liar.

<comment><USER3> What's your evidence of him being a racist?

I feel like this exact attitude of shouting "racist!" whenever something doesn't go your way is what drove white men and women away from the left. I've been left-leaning my whole life, and the last few years have been disappointing, I no longer associate myself with the left, at least the American flavor of it.

<comment><USER4> -_- Donald Trump called Mexicans rapists. The KKK endorses him, the American Nazi Party is stoked on him. Steven Bannon is going to be his "Strategist".

He's on tape talking about molesting women. Many women have come forward and accused him of trying to or having molested them.

Have you ever talked to his supporters about race?

<comment><USER3> "Mexican" is not a race. He didn't call all Mexicans rapists.

He doesn't control the KKK, nor the Nazi Party.

He is not on tape talking about molesting women, I've listened to the recording, and it's about grabbing the women who let him, which is consensual by definition.

And yes, women have accused him, but women also accused Duke lacrosse team. Famous people often get accused with zero evidence. Notice that NONE of the women who accused him went to the police and filed the charges.

So every single thing you wrote, besides Bannon, is either a lie or is out of his control. I don't know much about Bannon to judge either way, so won't comment on it.

Have you ever talked to the left supporters yourself? They are the most racist group I've ever met. Youtube is full of SJWs blaming white people for all the problems, only because they are white. The are now protesting and writing things like "Kill all the whites" on the walls. That's exactly what made me distance myself from the left.

And just to clarify, I don't support Trump, I don't like him, but for much different reasons than your made up ones.

<comment><USER5> > "Mexican" is not a race.

Yes, it is "a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same stock". [0]

It's not one of the arbitrarily-defined classical races (negroid, caucusoid, mongoloid) or one of those recognized as a "race" by the US census (which uses the classic races essentially, with new names, plus a new one for indigenous people of North America.)

[0] [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race[3]](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/race\[3\])

<comment><USER3> Word games begin. For most people race is white / Asian / black / other. You see something like that on every application form asking about race. I've never seen "Mexican" as an answer to the race question.

[http://mortgageporter.com/images/old/6a00d834522f5769e20133f...](http://mortgageporter.com/images/old/6a00d834522f5769e20133f6172144970b-pi.png)

[http://lensnola.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2...](http://lensnola.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/05/fact-sheet-detail.png)

The term you're looking for is not "racist", but "nationalist". You could probably call Trump that, though I don't think he made any statements about all of Mexicans, most of his drivel is about the illegal immigrants coming from Mexico.

<comment><USER5> No, bigotry based on nationality is called "racism", based on the broader definition of race that the one used on census forms already referenced upthread; this usage is well-established. "Nationalism" means something different, and not inherently bigoted, though nationalism is often accompanied by racism, and some "brands" of nationalism are quite racist (e.g., the white nationalism of Steve Bannon, Trump's new Chief Strategist.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a weird coincidence that a very close election was lost because of the writer's pre-existing hobby horse.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gad Saad and Jonathan Haidt bring sensibility to causes and effects of the Karpman drama triangle that displaced actual, past revolutionary action on college campuses / social sciences with mostly an imposter, going through the motions but stuck bikeshedding (i.e., microaggressions, SJWing) rather than attacking major social problems. There's also helicopter parenting, lack of movement leadership, fall of SFDS, extended adolescence, for-profit universities catering to student whims and other aspects which compound the situation. Critical thinking skills, respectful debate without onerous preconditions (i.e., demanding apologies/subservience) and proportionality of response could be emphasized more in education.

See also:

\- "ABOLISH ALL SCIENCE 'COS ITS RACIST! -SJW University Student" [https://youtu.be/1i80qaETtw8](https://youtu.be/1i80qaETtw8)

\- "Yale University Students Protest Halloween Costume Email (VIDEO 3)" [https://youtu.be/9IEFD_JVYd0](https://youtu.be/9IEFD_JVYd0)

\- [http://www.ted.com/speakers/jonathan_haidt](http://www.ted.com/speakers/jonathan_haidt)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/gadsaad](https://www.youtube.com/gadsaad)

</comment><comment><USER4> Lol people keep talking as if Trump has some landslide victory and massive voter turn out.

So far he's accumulated less votes than Mitt Romney in 2012.

<comment><USER3> That's not the point. It was supposed to be a very easy win for Hillary. Almost every serious forecast said so, almost every poll said so.

<comment><USER4> Argument in the post was pretty weak.

My point was the election was very close. Personally I didn't find it surprising Trump won. I know a lot of older people that were all in. It was shocking to see the change in rhetoric this year. Instead of debating traditional topics of economics etc, I dealt with a bombardment of videos/memes/etc that were either obviously fake or obviously strawman arguments. I know some conservative kids my age, most of them wanted nothing to do with Donald Trump. The ones that did, started calling themselves "nationalist" and talking as if they were apart of some great "race war". It was insane.

It saddens me to see the older generation sell my future because their fear of brown people and their inability to determine whats BS spam links.

<comment><USER3> What's with the ageist discrimination? Old people are people too.

4 years of presidency is not going to sell anyone's future. The worst that will happen, not counting a nuclear war, is

1) more gas/oil/coal gets mined, driving the prices down, and making the renewables unattractive.

2) increased CO2 emissions due to cheaper gas/oil/coal.

3) make the rich richer, everyone else poorer, which has been happening for decades in the US

Neither of these are particularly scary, it just sets the humanity a few years back, but maybe will force us to come up with some technological solutions to fight CO2 and other climate change issues.

Stop being so alarmist, he won fair, it's his turn to drive the bus. I don't like him, but things don't always go our way.

<comment><USER4> "it just sets the humanity a few years back"

Life is short man. Its not like in four years we can just simple turn back the clock and fix everything. We elected someone who openly molested women, I can't imagine how that must feel to a woman.

We don't know yet what the federal government will do about climate change. It doesn't look like they will do a lot tho. We still don't fully understand the problem, who knows. "a few years" could be meaningless or it could be everything...

<comment><USER3> He didn't openly molest women. Listen to the recording. He talks about the women who let him do it, which is consensual.

4 years will not destroy the planet, even China failed at that in their crazy building spree in the last decades.

<comment><USER4> Trump: Yeah, that's her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Bush: Whatever you want.

Trump: Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.

\-----

You are saying that's not misogyny?

He's talking about using his celebrity status to take advantage of women.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, you just didn't provide the full quote. Be ashamed for trying to BS our readers.

<comment><USER4> wut r u talking about? -_-

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everyone is talking passed each other.</comment>


You Know What's Cooler Than A Billion Dollars? A Billion Users. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/05/you-know-whats-cooler-than-a-billion-dollars-a-billion-users/

<comment><USER2> If you can't make money off a billion users, you've done something horribly wrong.

This whole article reads like someone who's just way too big a fan and has lost touch. When you look at brand surveys, Facebook is not loved. In fact, it ranges from borderline creepy to outright untrustworthy.

Why do people use it? Because it has momentum. To pretend that there's this mythical love affair between every Facebook user and the site is just naive.

</comment><comment><USER3> >Facebook users choose, daily, to have an intimate, personal and emotional relationship with the brand.

No, believe me, they don't give a rat's ass about "the Facebook brand". They are there because their friends are there.</comment>


2010's biggest IT security SNAFUs  - <AUTHOR> https://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/120210-security-snafus.html?hpg1=bn

<comment><USER2> On the one side: People's private information spread over the internet, big scandal.

On the other side: Facebook doing well these days.

:/</comment>


Show HN: A tech conference aggregator - <AUTHOR> http://www.techconferences.io/ <comment><USER2> This is great, I can see myself using this.

However, this suffers from being a SPA:

\- URLs are not persistent, meaning if I cannot bookmark searches I care about.

\- Outbound links are buttons for some reason instead of anchor tags. This means that ctrl-click does not work and will bring directly to the website.

Other things:

\- I don't think it's easy to filter conferences which are within an acceptable distance. A map-based search a'la yelp would go a long way here.

<comment><USER3> What does SPA mean?

<comment><USER4> Single page app

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Make the website button open in a new tab, or at least use an <a> element instead of a <button> (you can still use the .btn classes from Bootstrap in <a> elements if you didn't know)

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely will switch that up. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> I think that a filter by technology/subject would be nice too

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Date sorting is broken--I'm seeing the following in 'descending' order:

      November 6, 2016
      November 5, 2017
      November 4, 2016
      November 30, 2016
      November 3, 2016
      November 29, 2016

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice work. Feature request: track CFP dates and let people find conferences with upcoming CFP deadlines.

BTW, you have "USA" and "United States" as two countries, might want to combine those.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for checking it out. I like the CFP notification idea. Was planning to provide some sort of notification system for the conferences users save. And thanks for catching that, I need to clean the data a little bit.

<comment><USER8> It's really smooth, I checked to see if it was built in React given the speed.

On the same lines as the comment above, London and London Borough of Camden are listed separately too.

Edit: And you're printing some arrays into the browser console.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, its actually vanilla JS/Bootstrap Table. I need to spend some time cleaning up some console logs and a few other buggy things. Hopefully will push some changes tonight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> V. cool, but would be great to be able to use it as a tool of discovery: list topics covered using tags, and indicate rough # of attendees (I know some people prefer to only attend larger events)

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for including also the Google/Twitter/whatever sign-on. Perfect for reducing friction on trying services.

I'm interested in knowing about upcoming conferences in Europe. So some kind of grouping for the countries (NA, EU, Asia etc) would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe allow people to search by state (or other regional borders) inside of a given country?

Or sort by distance from a given zip code or city?

</comment><comment><USER12> Good idea. I tried looking for a tool like this quite recently because I keep missing interesting conferences around me or I find about them when it's already too late. I didn't find anything satisfactory so your tool has potential.

BTW. OAuth Sign In doesn't work in your app - it seems like you need to whitelist your redirect_uris at OAuth providers setup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just curious, which sign in provided did you attempt to auth with?

edit: found out the issue. thanks for the heads up. All fixed.

<comment><USER12> I tried most of them. :) But it seems like you have fixed it already, good job.

Out of curiosity, do you mind sharing what stack you're using?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its Node/Express/Mongo and just vanilla JS on the client. Tried to keep it as simple as possible!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be nice if the start/end date could be a range it seems tied to a specific start date for a conference, rather than any conferences starting after this date

it would be nice to see the fields filter down as other parameters are defined, if i set USA as the country, I should just see cities hosting conferences in the USA

Love how clean and quick it is though

</comment><comment><USER14> You know what would be useful? Ticket price.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have this for a portion of the dataset. Will definitely look to add it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks similar to: [http://lanyrd.com/](http://lanyrd.com/)

<comment><USER16> Which from what I've heard is sadly more or less dead (requests that require human attention are not processed, long downtimes)

<comment><USER17> Was acquired by Eventbrite a few years back. If I remember it was only a 1-2 person operation anyway.

Never quite lived up to the potential in my mind (or perhaps there just wasn't a big enough pain / market).

Still I like and respect it. I look at it weekly when I curate the Amsterdam startup digest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What counts as a tech conference? I don't see most industry conferences or sub-genres like hacker conferences.

Also, I notice you're dynamically loading content on every page view? Do schedules change every few seconds, or couldn't that be at least page-cached?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just want to say thanks for all the awesome feedback! I am going to put some time to help make it more useful for everyone. To best stay in touch, sign up on the site if you like and drop me a message. Thanks HN!

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice site.

I tend to use LWN's conference calendar and CFP calendar for this; this looks like the same thing generalized to a broader set of conferences.

</comment><comment><USER20> Regular conference goers - what conferences would you recommend if you had to pay for your own tickets?

<comment><USER21> Normally the smaller stuff. Eg for Python/data science in London there's a meetup.com miniconf that gets hosted in various company offices and you just sign up and turn up and listen to some cool people talk about whatever mad science they've been up to. Good places to find jobs/people too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't know what half of these conferences are. A brief description for each would be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER23> I see multiple conferences with "Invalid Date" \- is that expected?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. Still working on some of the data issues as it is pulled from a ton of third party sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How do you get the data?

</comment><comment><USER25> FYI, You have Texas listed as a country. Cool idea!

</comment><comment><USER26> See also: [http://www.myhuiban.com](http://www.myhuiban.com)

* Conference Partner - an academic website for conferences and journals built by Dou SUN (孙斗)

</comment><comment><USER27> Awesome stuff! Could we add Singapore in though?

<comment><AUTHOR> Any particular conferences in mind? Shoot me a link or two and we can get them up there.</comment></comment>


Ask HN What Would Be the Killer ARKIT App? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dronetopolisar.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN, We recently just completed our AR Drone Simulator and are working hard to innovate upon it. We all know that without depth sensors and a better viewing device, AR is somewhat limited to mobile. Would love to hear some ideas generated for all of us to innovate the AR space.</comment>


What are your million dollar ideas that you are too lazy to implement? - <AUTHOR>

<comment> one-two A free gym membership where you pay $1 for the days you don't show up

<comment><USER2> This would need to be implemented as a $30 membership that gives a $1 discount for every check-in over a 30 day period for the next month's payment, or better yet, $60 with a $2 daily discount because memberships below $30 aren't really enough to run a gym.

It would be better to give credit that can be exchanged for things. Better yet, become the company that sets up turnkey reward programs for active gym members.

<comment><USER3> or you could overcharge them, say $60/mo, then say to get the 30 back they have to come in daily.

<comment><USER2> The problem is at $50/month+ the service expectations become much more expensive to provide -- even though a dedicated member could get it back into the 30s.

Edit: what I mean is that if price ranges from $30-60 the average cost will be a lot nearer that range that's perceived as upscale gym. Whereas ranging from $0-60 would at least appear to be nearer the ordinary $30/month average. It would entirely depend on usage, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Indirect exchange site. You put in what you are willing to give away e.g. a CD and what you are looking for e.g. a coffee mug. The site trawls all the 'swap' sites (like Craig's list) looking for intermediate swaps that will achieve the desired result e.g. you have a CD, Tom has a tennis ball and William has a coffee mug. William wants a tennis ball and Tom wants a CD. The program matches you all up so you give your CD to Tom, Tom gives his tennis ball to William and William gives his coffee mug to you. A 'mega-barter' system like this removes the need for a currency ...

<comment><AUTHOR> That's like the story about a guy who uptraded a paperclip for a house. Nice.

<comment><USER4> Exactly! I heard a story about a guy who started off with a pen and ended up with a truck. I don't even know if it's true but it is inspirational. Actually that could be an interesting system in its own right - I have a CD and I want a car - show me the swaps available to make it happen ... though I actually think the major limitations for such a system would be an intractably large search space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Multi-language IDE (Compiler)

//Doubt this is a million dollar idea, but i love to have one ^_^

The idea is simple, as you are coding, you can switch between languages as you please. All languages able to access variables and methods in any other language you have already used. All you have to do is identify what language the sections of code are.

EG: <C#>

      public list<int> DataSet = new list<int>();

      public string GetSortedData(list<int> unsorted_data)

      {

        //sorts the data

        //Converts data to string (as delphi dosent have list<int> class... i think.)

      }

</C#>

<Delphi> //sory its the only other language i know atm

      ShowMessage('Sorted DataSet: ' + <C#>GetSortedData(DataSet)</C#>);

</Delphi>

It might be tricky to do, but damn would i want an IDE that can do that!

</comment><comment><USER6> Working for 15 years.

</comment><comment><USER7> An app which crawls over internet and gives best deal/price for any item you search and you never have to search 100s of diff deal sites to compare the lowest.

<comment><USER8> Look at <http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Beer subsidised by advertising all over the bottle.

<comment><USER10> Let's try to stay on topic. He asked for million dollar ideas. Clearly the man who invents free beer will become a trillionaire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> spx dispersion

</comment><comment><USER12> Jump to Conclusions Mat</comment>


Office campus proposed at site of Fry's Electronics store in N. San Jose - <AUTHOR> https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/04/15/frys-north-sj-brokaw-road-bay-west-development.html <comment><AUTHOR> "The project would require demolishing a 283,200-square-foot Fry's Electronics store. The warehouse building also serves as the San Jose-based company's headquarters."

Fry's is dead. Long live Fry's!

<comment><USER2> They could easily condense their floor space in the flagship Sunnyvale store to accommodate HQ functions ... if they survive.

<comment><AUTHOR> My point is that internet dealt them a body blow and now the virus has killed them. Going to Fry's even before the virus was a sad experience</comment></comment></comment>


Bcachefs needs more guinea pigs - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7ve3h7/bcachefs_needs_more_guinea_pigs/ <comment><USER2> You know what.. since I installed a fresh Arch Linux (Manjaro) on my laptop today, i'll give Bcachefs a go as my encrypted /home. You can also support the file-system monetarily via [https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs](https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs)</comment>


Is Web Design All About Hacking or Kludging? - <AUTHOR> http://ideonexus.com/2013/05/05/is-web-design-all-about-hacking-or-kludging/ Front end UI-design for the web seems to involve lots of workarounds and tricks to get past browser-compatibility issues and bugs. Do you consider these tricks elegant or a necessary evil of web design? <comment><USER2> Front end development has a few characteristics that make it particularly tough. You have to support multiple browsers (and the old versions of those browsers), as well as computers with different sized screens and input types. On the backend, you get to pick and choose what runs your code.

Also, to get anything accomplished you have to combine HTML, CSS, and Javascript. None of them were originally intended to do the things we're doing with them now in terms of layout or interactivity.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a hypertext document platform that was perverted to be a general-purpose applications platform as well as well as bolting on magazine-like layout requirements.

It is, intrinsically, a hack. The original design and implementation of its scripting language was a two-week rush-job. It embraces XML while using a more YAML-like syntax for styling.

It's gotten better but only by the sheer force of an entire industry dedicated to swimming up-stream.

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems as if the HTML5 stars have aligned pretty well lately. I find myself testing with Chrome, finishing the project, and everything works in Firefox and IE10.

</comment><comment><USER5> Heh, yeah those front end folk are insane for the crap they have to put into a page to get things to look pretty and work.

I think for those starting out it feels a lot like hacking and kludging, until you get your preferred libraries and methods worked out then you forget about how hacked up and kludged the process is. :-D

</comment><comment><USER6> First of all, Firefox appears to be fine without the extra "folksonomiesHeight" elements. If they're only needed for IE, at least wrap them in conditional comments.

Secondly, div.folksonomies and div.expandButton can both work without position: absolute if you replace the rules for expandButton with these: height: 25px; margin-top: -25px; text-align: right;

Pixel units aren't as bad as they used to be, modern browsers can scale the page regardless of what units you use. Replace font-size: 12pt with font-size: 16px to ensure the correct height.

As a general tip, look at the conditional comments used for the HTML tag in HTML5 boilerplate (html5boilerplate.com), you can use that to specify workaround rules for IE < 9 (and you could add an IE 9 class yourself). For IE 6/7 you can use Javascript expressions to calculate correct values.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! Thanks for the feedback! I will do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. He's complaining about bugs in IE7 that "weren't fixed until IE8" Seriously? It's 2013, the modern web runs on IE9 and up. If you're still building for IE7 support, then you have no idea what the consensus of the web dev community is. Google sites don't even run on IE7. 2\. His "hack" is necessary because he doesn't understand how to use CSS layouts properly. Instead of absolutely positioning those folksonomies, he should have been floating them and settings max-widths. You can't blame the web for your own ignorance. 3\. CSS3 browser prefixes are largely dead and gone and complaining about them is meaningless and misinformed. If you're still targeting Chrome 10 and below or an IE10 preview release (less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent each), then you're simply an idiot.

<comment><AUTHOR>
I realize that the majority of the web is beyond IE6, but when your customer calls you to complain that your web application is broken in their IE6 browser and their system administrators refuse to upgrade their Citrix installation to use a more modern browser, then you refactor your UI to be compatible with IE6.

I can't just tell the customer "You're an idiot," and wash my hands of the situation. You'll understand this firsthand when you get out into the professional world or you'll be that developer who management hides in the basement where you can quietly grumble to yourself about how stupid everyone else is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am trying to become a web designer/developer after years of working mostly in the backend. And the inelegance of solutions, the spider weblike creep of the code is a big bother. But it is a nice challenge too. To write an elegant, readable, maintainable code for a beautiful and pleasing UI/UX. There might be compromises that would have to be made in the UI/UX end in order to maintain sanity of the code. Finding the optimum balance could be an enjoyable challenge.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's exactly why I decided against working on web frontend stuff. It drove me crazy.</comment>


Danish board calls for retraction of controversial paper - <AUTHOR> http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/citing-scientific-dishonesty-danish-board-calls-for-retraction-of-controversial-paper-on-decline-of-western-civilization/

<comment><USER2> Here's a link I found to the paper in question:

[https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/nyb...](https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/nyborg-2011-the- decay-of-western-civilization-double-relaxed-darwinian-selection.pdf)

From my quick reading of the paper, Nyborg is arguing that based on Denmark's current immigration and minority birth rates, "by 2072 the total population [in Denmark] may consist of 60% ethnic Danes and 40% people of foreign origin." Since these minority groups have lower average IQs than native Danes [1], the average Danish IQ will _decrease_ from about 97 in 2013 to 93 in 2072. This "reverse Flynn-effect" will only increase with time since these foreign borns have a higher birth rate than native Danes. Nyborg then cites the correlation between a country's Average IQ and National GDP [2], and suggests that a drop of 5 IQ points is correlated with a 35% drop in Danish GDP. He ponders why many Danish politicians and intellectuals have ignored this data and encourages them to reconsider their policies before there is "an anti-Darwinian death spiral that dooms democracy, civilization, [and] welfare" (an argument very similar to that of Norway's Anders Breivik [3]).

-

[1] Racial differences in IQ have been well established for decades but there is no conclusive evidence for its cause. To give some concrete numbers, for the United States, the authors of a 1994 book found the average IQ of African Americans to be 85, Latinos 89, Whites 103, East Asians 106, and Ashkenazi Jews 113. Amerindians tend to score worse on average than white populations but better on average than black populations. These differences appear to be consistent over the past four decades, and still exist (although to a weaker degree) even after controlling for SES.

If you don't believe me (which you should, since this is a highly controversial topic), there's more information on the Wikipedia article about Race and Intelligence. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_IQ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_IQ)

[2] It's not the article he cited, but here is an excellent article that attempts to extend this theory. [http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm](http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm)

[3] In his manifesto, Breivik, who killed 77 people in the 2011 Oslo bombings, argued that Norway's (and the rest of Europe's) immigration policies are letting in too many immigrants, and these immigrants will eventually destroy Norway's national culture/heritage and bankrupt the nation's generous social policies. Breivik committed the attacks because he wanted Norwegians to discuss these policies before it was too late to change them.

<comment><USER3> Godwin's law / Association fallacy.

But thanks for finding the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A fairly clear case of the scientific community censoring a paper mealy because they don't like it via dubious methods.

If they disagree with the results then they should do their own analysis rather than lowing themselves to this.

A similar thing happened to Bjørn Lomborg [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg#Accusations_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg#Accusations_of_scientific_dishonesty)

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you sure that's what is really going on here? The submitted article reports,

"The DCSD found that the defendant had committed scientific dishonesty by appearing as the sole author of an article and by including a reference which did not support the data it indicated to support."

There have been researchers in this same field who have called for better analysis of data sets, only to find that the data sets are not available.

[http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/datasharing.pdf](http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/datasharing.pdf)

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026828)

[http://www.nature.com/news/psychology-must-learn-a-lesson- fr...](http://www.nature.com/news/psychology-must-learn-a-lesson-from-fraud- case-1.9513)

When researchers in a controversial discipline aren't being scrupulous in their scholarly practice, maybe there really is a problem there. (I express no opinion here about Lomborg, who works in a different academic discipline.)

<comment><USER3> "The DCSD found that the defendant had committed scientific dishonesty by appearing as the sole author of an article and by including a reference which did not support the data it indicated to support"

We all know what's really going on here. It's not a coincidence that this paper is very controversial.

Many, many papers would have errors like the above but are not hunted down like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The whole case looks personal and the panel was reportedly anything but impartial and competent[1]. This committee seems bizarre in general.

[1] [http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2013/11/helmuth- nyborg-g...](http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2013/11/helmuth-nyborg-gets- watsond.html)

<comment><USER5> _He has just been stitched up by three critics in one of the The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty which lurk in The Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Higher Education. In the midst of all this horrible nonsense, which has already caused him a lot of trouble and cost him his Emeritus status, I cannot help but be distracted by the funny names education departments give themselves. Innovation? I suppose a Committee for Public Safety is an innovation for Denmark, but the Jacobin terror got there first._

== From the link. Classic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We need more honey pot journals to flesh out ALL the nutters.</comment>


Verisimilitude, Belief, and Progress in Psychological Science - <AUTHOR> https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/06/verisimilitude-belief-and-progress-in.html <comment><AUTHOR> Found via Andrew Gelman's blog, which also has more comments and links to papers: [http://andrewgelman.com/2017/06/19/not-everyones-aware- falsi...](http://andrewgelman.com/2017/06/19/not-everyones-aware- falsificationist-bayes/)

It's a bit annoying that half of the discussion apparently happens on FB instead of the public internet.</comment>


Someone forked Signal and launched "Session" a new end-to-end encrypted IM app - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/__tux/status/1227183781469179905 <comment><AUTHOR> whitepaper: [https://getsession.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Session- Wh...](https://getsession.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Session- Whitepaper.pdf)

 _> Session is an open-source, public-key-based secure messaging application which uses a set of decentralized storage servers and an onion routing protocol to send end-to-end encrypted messages with minimal exposure of user metadata. It does this while also providing common features of mainstream messaging applications_</comment>