Walmart Is Getting Suppliers to Put Food on the Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/walmart-is-getting-suppliers-to-put-food-on-blockchain-to-track <comment><USER2> Every time we have a story like this, every time I ask - how does this work on a blockchain? Many people will talk about blockchain trustless-ness and how this doesn't requires trust etc. And I ask give me an end to end example of what are the trust issues here and how does blockchain solve it? I have yet to get a concrete answer.

So, again what trust issues does blockchain solve?

To ensure we are not talking about completely abstract things let's take a real life example. Here's an issue:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-welspun-india-walmart- idU...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-welspun-india-walmart- idUSKCN11G02A)

 _Wal-Mart Stores Inc on Friday said it will stop selling Egyptian cotton sheets made by Welspun India after the Indian manufacturer was unable to assure them the products were authentic._

How does blockchain help?

<comment><USER3> An olive farm makes some extra virgin olive oil in Italy. It is recorded at some date. They also make some virgin and some regular olive oil. It gets put in bottles and shipped somewhere. The shipping info is linked to the original production entry on the blockchain. An IOT device in the shipping load adds an entry to the blockchain saying that that it hasnt gone above or below some range of temperatures. It finally reaches a wholesale destination. At this point, it could go to a number of companies. In this case, any buyer could verify: 1) That an entry was made that this was extra virgin 2) that the olive farm is also making appropriate quantities of virgin and non-virgin olive oil - eg. not just labeling all of it extra virgin 3) where and when the shipping company picked up the olive oil from that farm 4) that this olive oil was transported in appropriate conditions

These are all timestamped, impossible to alter, and would require an elaborate planned fraud between a number of parties to fake.

How would you do this without blockchain? with a trusted 3rd party. Who can you trust when you are involving the russian govt, chinese govt, and US govt, and EU, and corrupt italian public servants? none of those groups trust any of the other parties completely.

<comment><USER4> Could you eaborate how any trust problem is solved here?

Points 1 and two aren't solved in any way, as the buyer has to trust the producer to not lie when making the entry. In other words, the trust problem here occurs before entry into the database.

Point 4 is already solved with by a multitude of companies selling those temperature-sensible stickers (and adding/removing the stickers is the same vulnerability as adding/removing the iot device).

BTW, with a blockchain solution, these are not at all "impossible to alter". That would only be true for a blockchain that is actually decentralized _and_ heavily mined. That implies a blockchain with a multitude of products using the same chain (e.g. not just an OliveOilChain), but then we approach the scaling border very fast, making a blockchain unusable for this use case.

<comment><USER3> "Points 1 and two aren't solved in any way, as the buyer has to trust the producer to not lie when making the entry. In other words, the trust problem here occurs before entry into the database."

The blockchain will show in time that X producer sells X amount of extra virgin, virgin, and regular olive oil. This will make it difficult for a small single origin producer claiming that ALL of their output is extra virgin. It would also make it difficult for a small producer to rebrand large volumes of some other olive oil as their own.

As for the temp-sensing stickers - add GPS, encryption and transmitting functions and you can add some cool features to temp sensing stickers.

Finally- there isn't THAT much data involved here for the $$ involved, you could do it on the ethereum blockchain or even the litecoin chain. There are quite a number of ultrasecure blockchains at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everyone is claiming this could be done with a database but no one knows all the details because the article is literally three sentences long.

The article states this initiative "helps reduce waste, better manage contamination cases and improve transparency"

This is how I envision this system working. I think the fact this is produce and not normal inventory is key.

Produce is produced by farmers, transported by shipping companies, stored in warehouses, and eventually ends up on a shelf after a long chain of custody.

Reducing waste and contamination sounds like a tracking system. So every food item gets an ID and as it moves through the system it gets logged with time, location, and so on. Pretty standard, and yes, totally doable with a database.

But this project also helps to improve transparency. Transparency to who?

The previous actors in our example. The farmer, the shipper, storage, maybe inspectors.

They have no inherit reason to trust each other. The last shipping company will blame the warehouse for the moldy food. The warehouse will blame the farmer. The inspectors said they approved of it but obviously its gone bad.

Maybe the 6 days to track this produce before wasn't really in tracking it, but dealing with the human element of the chain of custody. Two minutes to pull up a verified log of events.

<comment><USER6> The key here is "verified". The only way a blockchain is more trustworthy than a regular centralized database is if the nodes are distributed across a large number of stakeholders, and there isn't a chance of anyone gaining control of a majority. That itself becomes impossible since they are using a single account owner (Walmart) on a single cloud provider (IBM).

<comment><USER5> IBM's platform uses Hyperledger, linked somewhere below.

It has copy on its site stating it "allows multiple different parties to securely interact with the same universal source of truth."

I think the fact that IBM is running this, and not Walmart, is actually a plus. The suppliers don't have to worry about Walmart itself making data changes. Of course the details will vary, but I highly doubt the platform allows the account owner to unilaterally make changes to this source of truth. It's totally against the point of the project.

<comment><USER7> Having one party to run the system wouldn't need a block chain, just transparency. Make the data public, available to everyone, with daily hashes of the data of the day combined with the hash from the previous day. Sign that hash+date to prove it has been computed by this central party alone. If the hash cannot be recomputed then there is proof the data has been tempered with. All other parties need to do is to download and store these daily hashes in case of a conflict.

But all of that would be vastly simpler with a central trusted third party.

<comment><USER3> Global supply chains involve a number of superpowers who are at proxy wars with each other and a vast number of countries of which the majority have deep corruption issues. Who do you designate as the trusted 3rd party?

<comment><USER7> A company that has no skin in the game and which business it is to be a trusted third party. One of the big audit companies would be my first thought. But there are many businesses that play this role (exchanges, clearing houses, etc).

At the end the job is technically quite simple. Maintaining a semi-public database. It's pretty black or white.

<comment><USER3> How do you account for rogue employees or hacks at the trusted 3rd party?

Equifax was a trusted 3rd party with no skin in the game.

Facebook was too (at least it was trusted by the west, the chinese never trusted it).

<comment><USER7> The same you prevent fraud in any industry, procedures, checks and controls. But at least that party has no incentive to fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am a regular and boistrous cheerleader for the prospects of blockchain technologies to empower changes in the world... but I do not understand what is going on here.

This seems entirely centralized, and thus a very poor use case for a blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's no such thing as "the" Blockchain. Walmart is using "a" Blockchain, in which I'm guessing they themselves own and operate all nodes.

> Yiannas said blockchain was able to cut the time it took to track produce to > two seconds from six days.

With no more detail I can't even start to think how a Blockchain DB makes any difference?

<comment><USER5> It didn't say it was using "the Blockchain." The article clearly states its using the "International Business Machines Corp.'s blockchain platform."

<comment><USER6> > It didn't say it was using "the Blockchain."

Did you not read the title of the post, or the title of the linked article, or the article itself?

<comment><USER5> Ah yes, because all important details of a story are in the title.

<comment><USER9> No, but it is the very first thing you read

<comment><USER5> I would highly hope that someone would read the article, and not just the title, before complaining about how unspecific a word in the title was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess they didn't try with a "signed append-only log", they might be able to shave off even these two remaining seconds.

</comment><comment><USER11> Either I have greatly misunderstood the purpose of a blockchain, or they have... I'd love to see them add some details around how the blockchain actually saved them time and why a standard database of some kind wouldn't suffice.

</comment><comment><USER12> I can see where this might be good for some sort of accreditation, although there are other ways of achieving this. But this allows walmart to say "our product comes from XYZ" and independent parties can verify that.

</comment><comment><USER13> This blockchain uses IBM's blockchain technology, which is in turn created with Hyperledger. In both cases, the technology is called enterprise grade. That seems to be true - though, I'm not sure a blockchain is needed here. Maybe a ledger with distributed access, but not necessarily a blockchain.

[https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/platform/](https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/platform/)

[https://www.hyperledger.org/about](https://www.hyperledger.org/about)

<comment><USER5> Isn't then a blockchain an implementation of your ledger with distributed access?

<comment><USER4> Sure, but the most inefficient one. Why buy into all the _major_ drawbacks of a blockchain (essentially lack of speed and abundance of costs) if you can't use any of the advantages (decentralization)?

<comment><USER5> Why do you assume inefficient?

Private blockchains don't have to have nodes mining 24/7.

They can wait until the mempool is at a certain transaction count then new blocks could be added. Or they could mine 1 transaction blocks as they come in. It doesn't have to work like bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general.

Or maybe its batch-like and mining happens once a day at midnight.

There is no reward for adding a block so there is no race. All miners are known and block minting can be pre-planned.

<comment><USER4> If you don't mine heavily, the blockchain essentially isn't immutable. The race for blocks is the _only_ reason one can assume immutability. That is the core of the problem: If you don't have a chain that's heavily mined, you don't have the security a blockchain promises. Whats left is an unsecure database that feels like running on a C64.

<comment><USER5> That is true for Bitcoin and other public blockchains. It is not always true for private chains.

Lets assume 10 suppliers each add 10 new 'produce transactions' on some day. It also occurs during work hours, so maybe between 9-5 there is 100 new transactions.

The miners are all known nodes, in fact, only 10 of them if we assume each supplier gets one.

Once the 100 transactions are minted into new blocks and the day ends...

What exactly are the miners supposed to mine into blocks? There are no transactions. Nothing to add.

<comment><USER4> Scenario B: Walmart rents a $5 digital ocean VPS and installs postgres. Each producer generates a (e.g. GPG) key pair and sends the public key to Walmart. Each day, each producer creates a new entry in the db, signs it with his/her private key, and is done.

The mining is completely worthless in the scenario you described. Imagine either a rogue producer or Walmart having an interest in changing the database. In your scenario of 10 mining boxes the adversary would just have to buy 5 additional boxes and would have complete control over the blockchain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Hyperledger Fabric, which IBM is using, is explained here: [https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric](https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric)

There is a video that offers a high level view of farm to fork (agriculture products to consumers) using the block chain ideas in Hyperledger Fabric.

From Nigel Gopie, an IBM Food Trust speaker, says "The permissioned blockchains we rely upon (hyperledger fabric) don't use don't use proof-of- work or "mining" — unlike some other Blockchains like bitcoin — which is what consumes huge amounts of energy. " (from a tweet conversation after a presentation he gave in Denver April 2018: [https://twitter.com/analyticsbytes/status/984140954834632704](https://twitter.com/analyticsbytes/status/984140954834632704))

</comment><comment><USER15> Replace "Blockchain" with "Database" and it would all be true.

Walmart Inc. is getting suppliers to put food on the [database] to help reduce waste, better manage contamination cases and improve transparency.

Yiannas said [database] was able to cut the time it took to track produce to two seconds from six days.

<comment><USER16> Someone should fork that cloud-to-butt extension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Blockchain is the new NoSQL. In 10 years some poor engineer tasked with maintaining this thing is going to ask why they didn't use a more reasonable technology.

<comment><USER7> Resume driven development... Like running massively cpu intensive calculations in python, or storing 100 MB csv files in Hadoop. AI will be the same thing. We will see developers burning GPUs for days to solve problems that would be trivially and efficiently solved with a simple algorithm. And I have no problem with people toying with new technologies on home projects just to learn. But at work...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is a blockchain even required for this? Does it provide any technical advantage here in this case?

</comment><comment><USER19> > Walmart Inc. is getting suppliers to put food on the blockchain

Phew! Blockchain is NOT a database, you don't put something _ON_ blockchain. Blockchain is meant to track changes of data, not store the data. The size of the entire Bitcoin Blockchain over the last 9+ years is 194.86GB [0] i.e. it can be stored on your local hard drive. Therefore, you can't put "food on blockchain".

[0] [https://bitinfocharts.com](https://bitinfocharts.com)

</comment><comment> pure-awesome This just in!

Amazon to stop delivering goods by walking to people's front doors, now delivering through the radio waves!

</comment><comment><USER20> I eagerly expect the converse product: Blockchain enabled sanitation systems, that would allow one to relieve themselves on the Blockchain.

That's a billion dollar ICO right there.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is the article partially behind a pay wall?</comment>


Taming Large Rails Applications with Private ActiveRecord Models - <AUTHOR> https://kellysutton.com/2019/10/29/taming-large-rails-codebases-with-private-activerecord-models.html <comment><USER2> So this is really just hiding active record's methods in a model from the rest of the App?

I don't really understand why this would be an advantage in a large app.

It's more explicit, but then you have to slow down and add all those wrappers for active record stuff. I can also see it getting annoying/confusing if you have a mix of normal models and these models in an app that you are not familiar with.

When I think of and create a model I think of active record as part of that public interface. And unless I want to restrict stuff I would want the default to be exposed.

<comment><USER3> I agree. It just makes it harder to reason about what is going on and what will happen when you call methods.

A far better approach is to put related methods in concerns. When you do this based on features, lets say a concern called "SyncToTrello" that contains all the methods on lets say a "Task" model that are related to syncing to Trello. So when I have to refactor or debug the sync, I just open up the concern and look at the handful of methods that are related to just that. Rather than having to scroll through a 500+ loc Task model.

Using concerns has been a great way to tackle growth in our Rails application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is a wise approach for large Rails applications, but this just looks like the Repository pattern to me, with ActiveRecord used as the db interaction layer

</comment><comment><USER5> This is the DAO pattern, welcome to 1999 Ruby.

[https://www.baeldung.com/java-dao-pattern](https://www.baeldung.com/java-dao- pattern)

<comment><USER6> It's not that Ruby has never heard of this pattern, the article even mentions libraries that implement it (ROM, Sequel).

Rails made a choice to use the active record pattern instead. This article is about adapting an existing application to a new pattern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad they mentioned ROM and Sequel. But of course, pragmatism beats favoritism.</comment>


Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years with Nearly Nothing Going Wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economic-inequality/524610/?utm_source=atlfb&single_page=true <comment><USER2> I was expecting borderline opinion/proven/reasonable ways for individuals, since a 20 year plan across a generation sounds reasonable (for an individual).

Instead the article proposed government, policy, and social change... Which is pretty damn unreasonable for a 20 year plan.</comment>


How to Save a City Through a Website - <AUTHOR> http://www.lennyletter.com/politics/interviews/a477/how-to-save-a-city-through-a-website/ <comment><USER2> _There was a make-a-payment button, and I thought, What if we collected the PDF full of account numbers? What if we built a website to find people who were having problems paying their bills and we get their account numbers and we say we 'll log into their account and just pay some bills for them? That's pretty much how we've paid the bulk of the first early bills._

You go, girl.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know if there's somewhere we can donate to support Tiffani Bell herself? She's a definite force-multiplier for good.

<comment><USER4> Ping her on Twitter. She might have a structure for accepting a donation to support project outside the direct to-user context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A really awesome article, however I found this part around the end upsetting:

> The other angle is if I or another POC wants to be an engineer, will I have > to worry about "culture fit" at different tech companies? I figure that's a > term that's used to just keep people out at this point. "Oh, you're not a > culture fit," where the culture-fit definition is "bearded white guy that > wears flannel shirts," is a problem.

The political correctness using the word POC (Person Of Color I assume) is annoying. I work in a big tech company, and there's a lot of Asians and Indians (1st generation or not), definetely more than the national average. Are they not "POC"? Around me, white people are a minority. And in those white people, a lot of them are European. The culture fit is definetely not "bearded white guy that wears flannel shirts". What is not represented is Latino, Black. It surely is a problem, but propagating the "bearded white guy that wears flannel shirts" is definitely not going to help.

<comment><USER6> > I work in a big tech company...

This "culture fit" diversity issue is normally describing an issue endemic to the numerous smaller tech companies; if nothing else, big tech companies often have HR departments who have dealing with these kinds of problems as one of their goals, but they also don't have the same default expectation of "these people are my world so I need to not just work well together aoth them but also would have them as my best friends".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's worth noting that these people were not 'losing their fundamental right to water'; the government was not going to put the military around every super market or water source and deny people who hadn't paid their bills.

These people are losing a service they're no longer paying for, which is water delivered directly to their home.

<comment><USER8> I don't think that the facts you point to are lost on anyone here, though certainly some have a different interpretation.

I sometimes agree with this interpretation of 'positive human rights.' But I'd encourage you, in this case, to think about what has happened in Detroit.

The bottom fell out from under that city. There were a lot of dumb decisions made in the development, especially in how much they focused on horizontal- only growth. But it seems unlikely that the citizens could recognize it. Have you/would you check on the long-term finances of a municipality before you moved there? Inspect the grants they've received, conduct traffic studies to see if the infrastructure is justified and supported, and inspect their costs and funding means of infrastructure maintenance? Those are deeply-hidden systemic problems; not intentionally hidden, but completely obscured from the public eye nonetheless. If you bought into Detroit a couple decades ago, you probably couldn't see those underlying issues; all you saw was a lot of high- speed roads that let you get a big place for cheap out on the edge of town.

Now, decades later, your city has collapsed under the weight of its own largesse, and the main industry has shrunken enormously. Granted, you don't have to be an economist to figure that unions will push large industry away, and that putting all your eggs in one basket is hugely risky, but it can be hard to be so pessimistic in what seems either far in the distant future, or maybe even unlikely to really happen.

Anyway, you moved into a city that made implicit guarantees of service, and that crumbled. You moved into a city with economic activity, and that's gone. There are a lot of people who got burnt doing exactly that, and it makes a lot of sense to help those people out. Even if there are some people who move in to take advantage, it still makes our society work better if we try to help out.

Detroit wasn't special except in that they were ahead of the times. As more and more municipalities in this country move from soft to hard defaults, we're going to have a lot of people on the hook for bills they were unlikely to see coming, and in the face of economic slumps they never could have imagined. Whether we disingenuously call it a human right, or if we prefer to acknowledge it as community assistance, we're going to need a lot more of it in the coming decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article and SOJ propaganda are insufferable.

Detroit does not lack resources or technology.

They lack intelligent social organization and responsibility.

The lack of economic opportunity is not a cause for violence, otherwise every farming community in America 100 years ago would have been a bloodbath.

Corruption and stupidity all the way up and down are the problems. Enter into any Detroit social situation: personal, professional, civic - you will see tons of really bad behaviours all around.

Moroever, the terrible behaviour of residents compounds the economic problem: nobody wants to open shop there anymore. Making it a disaster.

People should move out of the worst neighbourhoods, have the bad homes destroyed, save the ones worth saving, and rebuild. It will gentrify quickly if there is security and the former residents will probably live much higher standard of living elsewhere.

<comment><USER8> People have done what you're describing. They've moved into the city core. A lot of the outer stuff, at this point, should just be considered ruins. The problem is that it's hard to write people's long-term residences off as ruins.

<comment><USER9> "The problem is that it's hard to write people's long-term residences off as ruins."

It takes leadership.

Not semi-corrupt status quo.</comment></comment></comment>


Blindsight (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm <comment><USER4> Probably my favorite hard sci-fi book. I haven't found the rest of the author's books (Peter Watts) as good, but I'm hoping his upcoming books change that. The sequel to Blindsight especially is a frustratingly opaque book, with a stilted pace in contrast with Blindsight (although several fascinating concepts are in there, if you take the time to read all the errata on the web in order to properly understand it).

Also his blog is worth a read: [https://www.rifters.com/crawl/](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/)

<comment><USER5> I lived through Chernobyl and I remember that radiation levels precluded robots from operating with radiowave remote controls.

What Soviet engineers did is to operate robots with high voltage high current... electrical currents through wires. Everything was pumped up, from camera output to controls. My friend also prototyped well logging equipment with PIC16xxx microcontrollers which also can be operated with (relatively) high voltage (I remember 12V) and associated high currents.

Well logging and Chernobyl disaster have one thing in common - high level of radiation.

I was reading Blindsight after I read Echopraxia and was already suspicious about author (heck, vampires in E. have contradictory abilities - <USER2> musculature and high power, for one example). But when I read about "aperture leackage" I bursted out laughing and threw (PDF copy of) the book to the farthest corner of my room. Engineers from end of 21st century completely forget about experience from the end of 20th century. Nevermind relative cost of high-voltage high-current wires versus optical links.

I divide fiction authors as being smart and being smartass (pretending to be smart with various things that look smart and hoping that he will cover things up somehow). Watts is a smartass by my classification as he thinks he can throw so many "ideas" there that reader will be overwhelmed and won't be able to find about true nature of his work.

So I will not hold my breath that Watts will improve.

Yet I found some concepts from Echopraxia interesting. For example, depth of planning - how intelligence services are planning, how higher intellects would plan. Echopraxia also made me thinking how and where Watts was (in fiction) or will be (in prediction) wrong and why. It raised my interest to long forgotten Noon series by Strugatskie brothers which serve as counterexample to what Watts have in mind.

To conclude, Watt's work is conceptually very good science fiction that is very badly executed. This is so because it provokes thinking and argumentation (the sign of good literature) but is also so wrong in details (the sign of bad literature).

Okay, I have to stop. Otherwise you will read a complete theory of everything by Serguey Zefirov soon. ;)

<comment><USER4> That's exactly what I found, but I think I'm more forgiving then your are. I agree, Watts is a smartass for certain* concepts, however I thought it worked in Blindsight because the story and concept is so original, and though- provoking that I didn't mind. It may because I didn't catch the technical contradictions like you did :)

Because of it's technical density, and thought-provoking concepts, I think it's a book that rewards rereading (my favorite types of books). I've read Blindsight twice so far, and the second time I was able to appreciate, and understand better the massive amounts of technical detail he was pumping into the book.

I may need a second reread of Echopraxia to get to a similar appreciation. In my first read (only a couple of months ago) I felt as if Watt's desire to be seen as smart starts coming off as a smartass. He buries every action in about 10 levels of subterfuge, and ambiguity, such that by the time I got to the end of the book, I knew I was missing about 50% of what was actually happening. What saved me was a Reddit thread Watts had done where he explained to his confused fans all the intricacies of the plot that he had hidden. Once I read through his explanation, I appreciated the book a lot more, and have to say if it was rewritten to be more understandable it would be at an equal or higher level of originality then Blindsight.

What do you mean the Noon series is a counterexample to what Watts had in mind?

* I say "certain" because he has a PhD in marine biology, so I assume his biological concepts are very rigorous.

<comment><USER5> >What do you mean the Noon series is a counterexample to what Watts had in mind?

Basically, Strugatskie's tried to anticipate what would happen if most of horrors that are imaginable by 20th century SciFi authors are taken care of and would not happen at all. Watts tries to extend horrors we are used to to new lengths.

If you look close enough, you'll see that these transhuman intellects are really parasites (trying to be symbiotes) that live on the body of humanity. They can't live outside, at least, it is not shown how they can.

The Noon series talk about individual people at their peak as authors were able to imagine at the sixties-seventies. They can be thrown into radioactive wasteland and live and thrive there: Обитаемый Остров - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power). They posses extreme fighting skills: the same Prisoners of Power - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Sikorski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Sikorski) was able to avoid being injured when ambushed with twenty soldiers roughly of mid-20th century average power, armed with machine guns and managed to destroy them all; the main hero of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God) managed to fight many medieval-level fighters and not kill anyone - basically, all people in the Noon are equipped with "the switch" that father of Siri has and they still can control it consciously.

In Blindsight Watts presented a device that is called "mentoscope" in Noon - see Siri memories about his mother and father fight. In Echopraxia it is revealed that these devices are used to bring whatever is pleasurable to populace: "they know how to make dream come true" or something like that about Echopraxia's pilot's marriage. This is about the same level of usage as in Prisoners of Power when Maxim's memories was recorded in Saraksh.

In Noon's universe, however, the mentoscope is used to speed up learning and to bring the skills that are hard to obtain otherwise (hand combat system "субакс"/"subax" \- why punch others to face when you can record what to do?). It is also used to suppress traumatic memories, bringing society member to his full potential again.

In Noon, everyone lives the fullest possible life, even people that are clearly brought to life by possibly hostile supercivilization. They help each other even when they do not agree. In Firefall, the chasm is so big I can't even feel a thing about anyone there (I still think about them, though). Why in hell people still use terror tactics in end of 21st century (Siri is the victim, Echopraxia's pilot's wife is the victim) instead of helping hand tactics?

<comment><USER6> The noon universe is a thoroughly depressing set of books.

Most of the plot invariably occurs not in the ideal Noon society, but in one or another form of recent/current dystopia: the totalitarian state of Inhabited Island's Saraksh, the feudalist gulag of EN-7031 in Escape Attempt, Arkanar's descent into a fascist police state in Hard to be God...

Over and over, the ideal humans from future-earth hold up a twisted mirror to our own life as they try to engage and help but discover there are no good answers - at best, they don't make things any worse; but often they fail in even that much.

Monday begins on Saturday is a much more upbeat story that's actually about people who are better than who we are right now, in an environment that lets them thrive; and you do need both those components for a utopia - <USER3> with A Thousand Years 'till the End of the World, which has people of similar character (or better; they overcome challenges of a difficulty that Monday begins on Saturday never presents its cast with in the first place) but in an antagonistic environment, and is again super depressing.

While Watts expands horrors we are used to to new lengths, the Strugatsky brothers are out to show that even ideally moral superhumans can't save us from ourselves.

<comment><USER5> Exactly.

But Noon series also show what life of these demigods can be. You are at the highest of your performance and climbing and you face problems that challenge you to climb higher from unexpected sides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A great book, one of the best sci-fi books of the 21st century perhaps. And its worth noting that its all online at that page because he released it as Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5

 _I 've set my latest novel free under the usual Creative Commons license ...

I do this only partly to add data to the ongoing get-rich-by-giving-your- stuff-away experiment. The other reason is that a lot of people seem to be having trouble actually finding the book in brick-and-mortar stores. All the buzz in the world is worth jack-shit if the product isn't readily available.

So check it out and go wild. And when your eyes start to fall out from phosphor burn, consider buying an old-fashioned paper version. There should be enough to go around before long: I'm told Blindsight's going into second printing._

[https://boingboing.net/2006/12/11/peter-watts- blindsig.html](https://boingboing.net/2006/12/11/peter-watts-blindsig.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Watts' back catalogue:

[https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm](https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm)

I also enjoyed his earlier trilogy: starfish, maelstrom and behemoth

a lot of the short stories are also good.

a recurring theme in some of Watt's writing is damage control for failing or broken civilisation -- for example there was an X prize competition last year for short stories starting from the assumption that a plane flight magically jumps 20 years into the future, Watts produced this: [https://seat14c.com/future_ideas/37D](https://seat14c.com/future_ideas/37D)

</comment><comment><USER9> An excellent book. Recommended if you like your science fiction hard and bleak.

<comment><USER10> Parent is not kidding about the bleak. Peter Watts is very proud of getting rejected by a Russian publisher for being "too dark".

It's a great read though; I can't think of many SF books that can hold a candle to it for sheer density of novel ideas.

<comment><USER11> I would definitely suggest giving Gregg Egan a shot (start with diaspora maybe?) and Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief. Neither are dark but I loved the ideas they mess around with. Same goes for Cicin's third body problem for how far he takes his ideas.

<comment><USER10> Egan IMHO works better in short stories than novels; he's at his best when everything serves to illustrate a single idea. _Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies_ is still one of my all-time faves.

Haven't tried _3BP_. Haven't even heard of _Quantum Thief_ , but that sounds fun; I might look it out.

One classic I keep meaning to reread is Olaf Stapledon's _Star Maker_. Never surpassed in scope, and you've got to hand it to someone who predicted teledildonics in 1937.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amazing 'teaser trailer' for Blindsight: [https://rifters.com/real/progress.htm](https://rifters.com/real/progress.htm)

<comment><USER13> The PDF copy of the presentation is better: [https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf](https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of the greatest sci fi books ever. I read it again on the long flights back home from vacation this summer. It's been a few years since the last re- read and I think I understood something new. I also suggest its almost sequel, Echopraxia.

<comment><USER11> Hehe love the "almost sequence" part of your comment. I always call it a sequel but your way is spot on. :))

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, can someone recommend something similar to this?

Last time I read Three Body Problem but got dissapointed</comment>


Real-time crash reporting tool Sentry raises $9M - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/23/real-time-crash-reporting-tool-sentry-grabs-9-million-from-nea-accel <comment><USER2> _sigh_ \- I really love sentry to bits. Very responsive support, all open source code, nice user interface, no nagging for additional services and very fair price (to the point where it's much cheaper to just host with them rather than trying to self-host, despite the thing being extremely well documented and fully supported for self-hosting).

I wonder what we'll lose first before they will eventually be sold to get the money back for the investors :(

Yes. I'm cynical, but it's always the same path in which good products eventually are shut down or get way too expensive.

On the other hand, I would be extremely happy if it was Sentry to prove to the world that you can in-fact take $9M in investment as an Open Source project and still stay independent, keep your original values and not be shut down by an eventual buyer.

<comment><USER3> David here, founder, CEO, and extremely stubborn with my perspective. To echo what Armin and others are saying, we're going to prove that you can build a company around an open source product without turning it into crippleware. There will be things that end up closed source (there already are, like our billing code), but Sentry itself won't be one of them. We're in a fortunate position in that we've been an established (albeit, small) business for a number of years now, so we're able to build off of that existing success and good will.

<comment><USER4> Great answer David. At GitLab we self host Sentry and love the product. I understand that pilif has reservations, some open source projects prioritized profit over stewardship after raising money. What we did at GitLab is write down how we think about this in [https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship](https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship) You may or may not want to do something like that at some point. Anyway, lots of success with Sentry, the product is great and the upcoming features sound awesome.

<comment><USER3> Huge props to GitLab. Definitely ahead of us organizationally, but one of the few companies that I pay attention to in the space that seems to be similarly aligned.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the kind words Zeeg. Please let me know anytime we can help with anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> $10 says the guy in the Christmas sweater is Ops/DevOps (I'm DevOps myself). :-) lol

The length of the beard is proportional to ops experience.

<comment><USER6> Funny, what is it about DevOps that either attracts or grows beards?

<comment><USER7> The lack of time to shave from continuously-deploying the code to make the alert dashboard stop blinking yellow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love sentry and i like mitsuhiko projects: flask, jinja2 and werkzeug. Sentry substantially improved error handling and realiability in my startup

</comment><comment><USER9> Congratulations guys! When I read that CCP Games was using Sentry on the PS3 for their multiplayer game Dust 514, I was pretty damn impressed.

Armin working there is what sealed the deal though - I've been following his work since I discovered Flask a few years back.

Long story short, I will be using Sentry for my next web app.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had the pleasure of meeting Cramer and his team last year at their office and left convinced these guys are very talented. I look forward to seeing what they can do with $9 mill.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the biggest problem with Sentry is that it will sample exceptions (I wonder if there's a way to switch this off with $$$?), meaning that I can't rely on it to view and examine every instance. Sometimes you need to fix things manually which requires every exception to be saved.

Since I want to get every single exception logged, Sentry feels quite useless and I wouldn't select it for my next project.

Other than that it has been a fantastic tool.

<comment><USER3> We're working on improving this. It's a tradeoff we made early on as our primary customers have always been very large tech companies (meaning lots of errors). In those cases individual events have little to no meaning, and what you really care about is the aggregate view.

That's very different than if e.g. you're a payments provider, and you literally need to know every transaction that erred, but that's also quite a different use case. In my opinion, you'd want to guarantee those errors are logged elsewhere (traditional audit logs), and utilize Sentry primarily for the workflow and alerting features.

<comment><USER11> But if I need another tool for logging those errors, I could use the same tool for both use cases, which would make Sentry unnecessary?

Ideally speaking a Sentry exception is the last escape hatch - if we can't handle something in code at least the error is sent somewhere so that developers can handle the issue. Following this the philosophy I'd like to follow is that every time I get a Sentry exception, I'll make a new ticket in Jira "handle error x, see link to Sentry", and ultimately there wouldn't be any errors sent to Sentry.

<comment><USER12> FWIW my company uses both Splunk and Sentry, I've found myself using them to combo together quite nicely

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've built a mobile crash-reporting solution around self-hosted Sentry. (To my chagrin, I've been unable to open-source the bits I built around Sentry.) Sentry is a great product and David et al are a great team. I'm hoping them continued success.

<comment><USER14> You should just come work at Sentry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Been using Sentry since early versions (even contributed some crappy plugins myself) and moved to hosted service immediately. Great tool, I am glad to hear this news!

</comment><comment><USER16> Hah! I used to own this domain, planning to use it as a tool for uptime monitoring and statistics. I'm glad that someone else is making real use of it!

</comment><comment><USER17> Great news! We've been using hosted Sentry for a while (couple of years) and it works really well for its price. Highly recommended. P.S Has anyone tried Golang support yet?

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats! How do you all feel this compares to TrackJS?

<comment><USER3> TrackJS is only JavaScript, whereas Sentry is cross-platform. In many cases a niche single language service works very well, but specifically for Browser JavaScript we go above and beyond most implementations and it's one of our strongest offerings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good for them!

On a side note, GCE has a similar feature with Stackdriver: [https://cloud.google.com/error- reporting/docs/viewing](https://cloud.google.com/error-reporting/docs/viewing)

<comment><USER20> It's not really the same thing. Sentry is far more general purpose, and doesn't require GCE. If your language or framework lacks support, you can add it. Also has a bunch more functionality.

Google's offering is great on App Engine (I've used it a good bit), but that's the sweet spot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Congrats David and Team!

</comment><comment><USER22> How is this compared to Apteligent/Crittercism?

<comment><USER3> The best way to understand the differences is to try it out. I haven't used either of these tools personally, so my comments are more general.

We focus on giving you an extremely rich crash report and day-to-day workflow tools, whereas often other tools are more about high-level passive analytics. Additionally we work cross platform (web, mobile, and desktop), and go much deeper than most things that simply aggregate logs.

<comment><USER23> I'm the co-founder of Apteligent. David, I'm surprised you would describe our solution as "high level passive analytics" unless you haven't tried it yourself.

I would say the difference is our deep focus on mobile user experience vs Sentry's focus on cross platform error reporting. To understand your users this also means you need more data than just crash. For example: app load times, network data, UI latency, etc.

<comment><USER3> Apologies (edited), I meant to suggest that other solutions are generally that. I definitely haven't used Apteligent (or Crittercism), but things like New Relic (which from a glimpse of screenshots, seemed similar), I would label as passive systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> congrats guys

<comment><USER25> Thanks Nik!</comment></comment>


Everyone Is an Entrepreneur – No Excuses - <AUTHOR> https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/everyone-entrepreneur-no-excuses/ <comment><USER2> This is just click-bait. some bullshit to manipulate our emotions so he'll have lively discussion and page views, and leads to sell his course.

</comment><comment><USER3> But what about money? No money, no fun, no company</comment>


Titan II Missile Explosion in Arkansas – 40 Year Anniversary - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a34061418/titan-ii-missile-explosion-damascus-arkansas-40-year-anniversary/ <comment><USER2> Arkansas was never in danger. I heard stories about this incident from a missileer I worked with. The issue was that as the fuel leaked out of the tank, the structure of the missile was no longer able to support its own weight. The nuke was not "armed" and had lots of fail-safe devices to ensure it would never go off. The commander was severely reprimanded for sending in the two poor (unqualified) souls who perished.

<comment><USER3> > The nuke was not "armed" and had lots of fail-safe devices to ensure it > would never go off.

Whew!

Though in fairness, the rocket wasn't supposed to explode in the silo either.

A good book about the incident is Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser:

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452798-command-and- cont...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452798-command-and-control)</comment></comment>


Record short app store review time - <AUTHOR> According to http://appreviewtimes.com/ the review time is currently record short. Only 2 days or less (and the trend continues downwards). This is a huge difference comparing to 2 weeks or more in the beginning of the year. Just curious, what is behind all this? <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-12/apple- shor...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-12/apple-shortens-app- review-times-in-push-to-boost-service-sales) This article explains what's going on! Finally, they are worried!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if the review time for apple will ever be as short as for android, which would be few hours(rather than up to few weeks)?</comment>


A long review of the social network that digresses into the hacker sensibility - <AUTHOR> http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end-of-intimacy-and-the-birth-of-hacker-sensibility/

<comment><USER4> This is an excellent piece. I'm afraid it's too long for most folks to read, which is really a shame. The whole time I was reading, I kept wondering how the web has affected our ability to focus and read, for example, long articles. 25000 words? Or a top 10 list?

Hack the planet.

Also, I think Richard Feynman is relevant here. In one of his Messenger Series lectures (I think it was the one about the distinction of past and future), he talks about how he believes the deepest understanding of humanity, and the universe in general comes from examining every aspect, no matter how distant from your own experience. The entire width of human experience tends to yield the most informed results -- breadth is better than depth, so to speak. Jack of all trades, and all that.

We'll see.

<comment><USER5> I appreciate the compliment. I kinda knew it would not be read by many because of its length - so I didn't even bother to submit it to hacker news. But I was pleasantly surprised today to see it on the front page. I have been thinking about breaking it up into smaller articles - but something in me has resisted. The most important point requires the reader to stitch together a great number of different threads - and would be largely intelligible without the background.

I tried to explain the idea over at esr's blog - because I thought the crowd there might be interested and might get it. Amusingly esr let loose at me (called me a sloppy thinker no less!) - and I realised it just couldn't be articulated in small bytes of info.

But yeah - intimacy comes at a great cost of time - the time spent really getting to know a person through great chats and extended exploration. This article assumes intimacy with the world because of the time required to invest in it. But if just a few people like yourself get a chance to look at it - <USER2> maybe even refine some of the ideas (which they certainly need) - then that's good enough for a first effort.

<comment><USER4> Splitting it up would definitely detract from the point. I doubt many would discern the irony in it.

One thing that's relevant: very few "hackers" obtain really good, close friends early in life. I've been lucky to have found a few very, very good friendships in middle and high school, and very few since. It continually amazes me how shallow and disconnected most people remain for most of their lives -- I find myself coming back to old friendships constantly (in terms of thinking about how we relate to each other). For example, playing in a band in high school was educational. Being so intimate (in certain ways) with my friends to a point where we could play musically and make mistakes and recover through mere eye contact was quite an experience.

It's something that's difficult to replicate, especially in a field that's so disconnected from human contact. I really appreciated this article because it articulated something I've felt for a long time but haven't been disciplined enough to accurately reflect upon.

<comment><USER5> Is that true about hackers not really having close friends? I don't know as many hackers as I would like - but two of my very closest friends are hackers (and how I came to be exposed to the culture). Besides that - I've always assumed that hacker culture is very closely related to nerd culture - <USER3> I find the greatest propensity for intimacy.

<comment><USER4> It's probably all relative.

I know that the friends I have from high school are much more intimate (again, in certain ways) than any other friends I've made since. It might have to do with the amount of shared adversity or something like that, and tons of people don't ever experience that. But who knows.

I'm only a single data point, so it's certainly dangerous for me to make assumptions like that.

<comment><USER5> I'd be surprised if the phenomena of the difficulty of establishing intimate relations later on in life isn't actually universal. The obvious reason why this would be the case is that people have less time when they are older. And intimacy requires lots of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow. 25,000+ words, and yet he missed what I think would be a much more compelling argument to support his thesis; ie: Apple is the perfect storm of Hacker plus Artistic culture. As a company it operates as a native in both the artistic and technological spheres, and that cross cultural influence gives it great power in both spheres.

<comment><USER7> They're making exceptionally tinkerer-hostile products. Maybe that culture exists _inside_ Apple, but they're doing as much as they can to smother it among the general public.

<comment><USER6> MacBooks are pretty tinkering friendly (from the software point-of-view anyway). iOS devices aren't so much.

But I think that spectrum of tinkerability shows the complete range of influences within the company, and could be a strength.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great article. I haven't had time to read the whole thing, but I disagree with the characterization of Jaron Lanier as an artist who can't speak technically (as the author of this article surmises from a choice quotation). Mr. Lanier is a rather gifted hacker.

<comment><USER5> I think my characterisation of his overall understanding is perhaps not generous enough. I think I was a bit too incensed at the particular argument of his I was focusing on at the time.

But the particular argument of his I was addressing is extremely poor. Perhaps this is more of a result of a lack of understanding about non-technologically related things like art etc... as opposed to his understanding of tech itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> But I want you to know from the bottom of my hearth that this won't be true.

*heart (ahah, yes. There is my contribution)

I like both Wordsworth and The Dark Crystal, but your thesis is drowning in prose. The majority of your intended audience cannot swim.

<comment><USER5> I agree - the artist in me wrote it for me - selfish creatures that we are. I really never expected anyone to read it - let alone see it on the front page of hn.

But I'm sincere about the efforts to change my ways. I'm writing much less and coding a lot more. ;)

<comment><USER10> A collection of essays like this would make a very nice book.

It's taking me a while to read in short bursts during work ("It's compiling.") but I'm determined to finish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hum. Completely artificial distinction. I'm both an artist and an hacker, and so are countless other peoples. Was Leonardo Da Vinci an artist, or a hacker? The most preposterous part is when he conflates "philosophers" with artists, this is ridiculous. Was Descartes an artist? Leibniz? Newton?

Overall, this is an irrational, artistic piece, and too long with that :)

<comment><USER5> Just because someone like you is both and artist and hacker doesn't mean the analysis of the two as distinct tendencies does not have any validity.

Part of what is frustrating about your reply (which I received a lot over at esr's blog) is that we're actually on the same side. While I'm invoking the distinction you're deriding - nevertheless I'm arguing that those who embody more one side than the other should try to balance their approach... and in fact become more like you - should you in fact be someone that has fused those tendencies in a balanced way. So what are you arguing against here exactly?

As for the conflation between artists and philosophers - it was a necessary simplification because I don't have another hundred thousand words worth of time to explicate the commonalities and the differences as I see them. I'm doing a phd in analytic philosophy - so I have some understanding. For the purposes of this article one can assume that the important commonality between the two is that they both have a tendency toward the production of ideology in one form or another. If you want to disagree with that claim - go ahead. But for me to care you'll have to do more than simply claim that I'm ridiculous. Pony up with an argument or be silent.

<comment><USER11> > _For the purposes of this article one can assume that the important > commonality between the two is that they both have a tendency toward the > production of ideology in one form or another._

I'd say that Philosophy, like science, produces narratives to explain the world. This is very different from art, which never pretended to provide any explanation.

As such, I don't think that non-verbal art generally produces an ideology. An artist, usually does, though, but not through his/her art, through additional, parallel works or discourses. See for instance, Dali's or Berlioz' books; or simply talk about music or painting with a musician, or a painter. The art narrative definitely is outside the scope of art itself.

I suppose most verbal art (litterature, poetry, etc) can carry an ideology. I don't know if the idea system is part of art itself, though. We could debate that an artist' impressions are used to utter his/her idea system without being part of it _per se_.

I suppose here a strict formalist approach to art. Some people would disagree, however I don't think any other approach to be mainstream nowadays. Your description of art and artists strangely rely upon obsolete 19th century notions, I don't know if it's an elaborate trick or a lack of knowledge of modern art, but it hampers your dissertation; these "romantic views" were more or less dead in 1917 both with Duchamps' fountain and dodecaphonism.

> _But for me to care you'll have to do more than simply claim that I'm > ridiculous. Pony up with an argument or be silent._

Sorry to have hurt you. I couldn't resist the urge to cry with the trolls. The writing of this piece is way too much casually conversational and magazine-y to be taken too seriously.

<comment><USER5> Okay - fair enough. I'll leave the discussion about art/philosophy/ideology there as it's too huge for this venue. But I appreciate you taking the time to explicate your view.

I can't resist however pointing out the delicious irony of your last sentence though. It's okay that you took its style to be an indication of poor quality.

I'm interested in attracting readers whose high propensity toward intimate behaviours allows them to look beyond various surface signals and engage with the purely semantic content of the piece. If you did in fact engage the piece in that way - then that makes your final comment so ironic that the thought alone brings me much pleasure in contemplation. Those who did will know exactly what I mean.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Medium's engineering interview process (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.engineering/mediums-engineering-interview-process-b8d6b67927c4 <comment><USER2> I've interviewed there after reading the article.

In fact, I can say that the experience was almost the opposite of what's outlined there.

I was there onsite, 4 interview sessions, 45 minutes each:

1\. Hangman game on coderpad (on a computer). 2\. Design an elevator (whiteboard). 3\. Tic-tac-toe solver (whiteboard). 4\. q&a session with product manager.

I was able to answer all the questions easily, and felt really good overall. After the interview, everyone generally "seemed positive" but in the end, I was rejected.

Throughout the whole process, I didn't even get to meet the recruiter who put me there. She sent me a cold rejection letter and zero feedback.

I was genuinely excited to read about their hiring process, felt it was going to be different, but I was pretty disappointed.</comment>


Learn from Folly source code the new C++11 features - <AUTHOR> http://www.codergears.com/Blog/?p=431

<comment><USER2> Awesome. I starred folly a while ago for the purpose of becoming more familiar with C++11 but I never really got around to exploring the source code. Great post.</comment>


With 1$, what is the best thing to buy online? - <AUTHOR> I'm getting ahead for Christmas, and I'm planning to give presents to friends and clients, but this year I want to get to the most people possible.<p>Any ideas of a good deal/product ? To give to developers, entrepreneurs and hackers in general <comment><USER2> Maybe the Humble Book Bundle[1]. I would encourage paying at least $5, but you can buy it for $1 and it's worth the mention I think.

[https://www.humblebundle.com/books/code-your-own-games- book-...](https://www.humblebundle.com/books/code-your-own-games-book-bundle)

</comment><comment><USER3> 1/790th of a Bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER4> a handwritten note to each and every person wishing them a merry c hristmas and why you enjoy their presence in life.

a $1 dollar gift would be an insult.

<comment><USER5> Assuming OP is in the US, postage alone would be ~46 cents. If you consider stationary/envelopes etc. this will likely cost more than $1 a piece. Not to mention the opportunity cost of writing the notes. I think the OP may need to reconsider their budget.

<comment><USER6> There are a few web-to-snail-mail services that are $1 for letters to US addresses, including paper, envelope, etc. [http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/send-postal-letters- on-...](http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/send-postal-letters-on-internet- via-email/7097/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A really cool app that costs $1 (cant think of one from the top of my head but Im sure there are), maybe something on self improvement

</comment><comment><USER8> Pay each homeless to sing Xmas song.

<comment><USER9> Just because someone is between homes doesn't mean they're absolved of dignity.

<comment><USER10> Or can sing.

(People would be wiser to pay me a dollar to _not_ sing.)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Barebones CSS – Minimal, responsive boilerplate for the modern web - <AUTHOR> https://mightycrow.github.io/barebones-css/ <comment><USER2> there is an extra </head> tag after the closing tag for the body on that site, it bugs me

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, will fix it. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> why less instead of sass?

<comment><AUTHOR> I use less at work so use to it :)</comment></comment>


Researchers discover a black hole feeding frenzy that breaks records - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10085.html <comment><USER2> Word for word blogspam of

[http://www.unh.edu/unhtoday/2017/02/feeding- frenzy](http://www.unh.edu/unhtoday/2017/02/feeding-frenzy)

<comment><USER3> Nobody submitted that link...probably because no HN'er who loves 'yay science' stories RSS feeds unhtoday.. Instead, people who are interested in 'yay science' subscribe to the aggregators because it is many of orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to subscribe to all the potential sources of 'yay science' stories many of which are as obscure as unhtoday.

<comment><USER2> Even if you choose to follow the blogspam sites, given that the actual source is referenced _right in the blogspammer article_ , why submit the abbreviated (sometimes erroneously) and adware-laden pale imitator?

<comment><USER3> Since I didn't submit it, I can only speculate. My speculation is that it's generally easier to submit the link that shows up in a person's inbox; with press announcements it's mostly a wash (the source isn't a scientific paper); and it's probably a bit more acceptable to repeat information on scientific topics since the idea of repeatability is embedded in science and the idea of copyright is not so much.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Women iOS Swift Meetup Group in Oakland, CA. Interested? - <AUTHOR> My fiance has been teaching herself to code for a while now and is now to the point where she wants to start chatting with other women about coding in Swift. We own a house in Oakland with a nice yard and would love to start hosting swift meetup groups. If you are interested please email me at: email@example.com or add a comment.
FYI: I'm a Product and UX/UI designer. You can view my work at: http://brendens.work/
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Are you guys coming to Swift Summit in SF in a couple weeks? (see: [https://swiftsummit.com](https://swiftsummit.com)). I'm one of the organizers, and previously ran a Swift meetup in SF. It would be great to have a chat about this with you there if you're coming!

<comment><AUTHOR> my fiance and I would love to. Are there any discounts available for the HN community?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> FYI, in case she doesn't know:

[https://www.womenwhocode.com/east-bay](https://www.womenwhocode.com/east-bay)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi

Not in Oakland or a woman (but a swift developer, 1 out of 3 ;)) but if she is learning to code, and wants to chat with other people, won't it be ok for her to just join regular swift groups? (I know there are a few around that general area).

Again, man here, so don't want you to take this the wrong way (might be because my wife actually gets along better with men then women) but won't limiting the meetup to a gender limit the talk and experience options you might get if you host this meetup?

<comment><USER5> Limiting the gender is probably expressly intended to limit the talk in a particular way as one of its central motivations. (It may limit it in other ways as a side effect, which may either be something the organizers haven't considered or a price they are willing to pay.)

<comment><USER4> I sorta kinda understand that, but where I live (southern europe) I always had different experiences. As soon as any talk/workshop/whatever is 'segregated', there is a lot more gender issues talked than when it is mixed. Over the top example, but as as soon as men (even in professional settings) gather only as men, sex related bits show up in talks/etc, and when it is a group of women (according to my wife) it usually degenerates into a feelings kinda talk over objective talks. When it is mixed, I never felt there were objectifying of women or female speakers focused to much on 'womens topics'

(and sorry if I seem insensitive, and I'm sure there are women (and men, and gays, and blacks, etc) that have been victimized, but for the last few years, I've found that the 'segregated' events end up being more and vile than the mixed ones)</comment></comment></comment>


Who's Doing the Talking on Twitter? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/08/twitter-global-social-media/402415/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I've long suspected that that the vast majority of activity on Twitter is famous people, brands/marketers, and people trying to win free sub sandwiches.

<comment><USER3> For random niche communities, twitter is great. For instance, I can tweet any SQL Server question to #sqlhelp, and frequently see some of the best consultants in the industry take a look and help.

IMO This mainly occurred because some people who were interested in providing free help and working towards community building had a nice incentive to do so (getting paid via other mediums/getting mind-share.) Nonetheless, still a hashtag I follow.

<comment><USER4> 140 character format seems very poorly suited to technical database questions. It's barely enough to name which version of the database you're using. I'm surprised this is a thing.

<comment><USER3> You would be surprised how much you can fit in when you want to, but most of the time you would use it to advertise a post on SO, your blog, or whatever if you couldnt fit the needed information.

Screenshots help a lot in this scenario, and the reality is that you are not asking super in-depth questions like "How do I take this proprietary database design and refactor it to do such and such" (generally, due to the volume issues with twitter) but more related to ops issues, performance, or other weirdness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I've noticed about Twitter: it's a medium where a bunch of people try to simultaneously sell the concept of Internet as this amazing network creating never-seen-before opportunities for communication, synchronization and learning as they're spending half their time complaining about "randos" and how they can't catch a break.

Which is really the Twitter equivalent of the humble brag: "I'm complaining about randos so that it's crystal clear that I am part of the enlightened elite and not one of those nobodies".

So in the end, the very premises of Twitter and other networks (connecting everyone, creating a network, fostering conversation) are provably false, they end up being the digital equivalent of the WASP country-club (or medieval Europe nobles) where a bunch of privileged people get to engage in inner- circle conversations with each other while simultaneously offering nothing but open scorn and contempt for the common people.</comment>


Show HN: A simple voice interfaces (VUIs) prototyping tool - <AUTHOR> https://tortu.io <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here. As a VUI designer, I have struggled with understanding how people will talk to my app. To understand it better I was meeting with users and was asking them to talk to my app. They thought the app was launched in production, but it was just me playing texts out loud using just Google Translate.

So my team and I built Tortu. Workflow is simple: you map out the conversation using flowchart and then test it with the in-browser prototype. The flowchart has only two types of blocks: "user says", "system says". The prototype has voice, text and "chat bubbles" modes.

We learned a lot while coding since we have never worked with flowcharts before. We use GoJS for building interactive diagrams. We were considering D3 but GoJS is built especially for diagrams and has features working out of the box such as "undo/redo", "copy/paste", "drag and drop".

For text to speech, we use Google Text To Speech and Amazon Polly. And for speech recognition, we use Google Speech. The frontend code is in Typescript (React), the backend is in Python (Django).

The tool is free and will stay free forever if you sign up while it is in beta.

Happy to answer any of your questions!

</comment><comment><USER2> I got a chuckle out of "GoJS 1.8 evaluation copy, not for production use" in the home page hero videos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, my bad. The video was recorded before we paid for the license. We'll re- record the video, thank you!</comment></comment>


Information gerrymandering in social networks skews collective decision-making - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02562-z <comment> awinter-py Saw an interview a few years ago with madeleine albright where she was asked 'aren't you excited by how social media is increasing political participation' and she used the phrase 'disaggregation of voices' to say 'not really'.

If I understood correctly, she thinks that mass social platforms provide the illusion of participation because you're speaking up, but because people don't coordinate IRL or in blocks, they end up having zero impact. It removes the necessary hierarchy for movements to make decisions and wield power.

Also cannot believe they picked orange for one of the sides, that's hilarious

<comment><USER2> > because people don't coordinate IRL or in blocks

Isn't that true?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The great thing about game theory is it's whatever you want it to be!

"In Stewart and colleagues' model, gridlock is assumed to be both likely and undesirable. It is unclear whether these assumptions apply in larger-scale decision processes such as national elections — in which gridlock is either extremely unlikely or impossible. "

So the entire theory is based on something that we observe does not happen and has no corollary in realty (voter gridlock) Okay....

</comment><comment><USER4> I was under the impression that in the past, viewers and readers tended to self-select for television, radio, and newspapers that match the opinions they wanted to read. "Old media" had editorial decisions and tone that affected collective decision-making.

"A small number of zealots ... bias vote outcomes" sounds uncannily like the narrative in the song "Non-Stop" from Hamilton (spoiler: "he wrote the other fifty-one" essays). So do social networks make this effect bigger? Smaller? Allow it to happen internationally?

That is not to say that a new medium has no impact on collective decision- making -- there are papers describing how the radio led Americans to elect people that sounded good, and the television led Americans to elect people that looked good. [https://doi.org/10.1080/01439688800260171](https://doi.org/10.1080/01439688800260171)

<comment><USER4> I wonder when we'll start to see candidates that get elected because they're really likable on Slack.

<comment><USER5> Tweets

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting concept, "information/social gerrymandering"

<comment><USER7> It is a quite scary concept, effectively a kind of instrumentalization of the filter bubble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Found this incredibly interesting. The concepts really strongly overlaps with a social media startup last week that I discovered which is trying to tackle the same kind of issue. [https://www.springchatapp.com](https://www.springchatapp.com)

It will be interesting to see how they deal with info gerrymandering in their smaller chatroom concept.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not just applicable to social networks either. Search results can and do swing things too:

[https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections- and-...](https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters- our-thoughts)</comment>


What It Feels Like to Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/09/what-it-feels-like-to-die/499319/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Fascinating! Death seems less scary if it's more like a vivid dream. I wonder how much influence a person's view of the afterlife has on these dreams.</comment>


Ask HN: How Do you manage your attention? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 1) List your priorities. 2) Take top most priority - do whatever is possible. 3) When nothing more is possible to be done for top priority, go back to 1.</comment>


Segway RMP-400 - <AUTHOR> http://rmp.segway.com/rmp-400-omni/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what problem this is trying to solve? 400lbs seems low for warehouse use..

<comment><USER3> You raise a good point; machine guns weigh a lot less then 400lbs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our really cool manipulating robot, named Cody, uses an RMP-50 Omni...

[http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/03/15/cody-new-humanoid- mobi...](http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/03/15/cody-new-humanoid-mobile- manipulating-robot-georgia-techs-healthcare-robotics-lab)</comment>


Dear Airline, I'm Leaving You...  (Megan McArdle) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/11/dear-airline-im-leaving-you/66750

<comment><USER2> I suspect the author is overestimating how much influence the airlines have over this process. Isn't the TSA paid for by taxes and fees on airfares? And doesn't the inconvenience and increased price from those fees lead to fewer flyers at the margin? It strikes me that if airlines could have prevented this creeping security featurism, they'd have done so already.</comment>


Blekko.com is Google without spam. - <AUTHOR>

blekko.com is Google without spam. <comment><USER2> Pretty interesting take on search, exposing some of the data that you know other search engines have on the back-end (analytics kinds of things), but also adding in a dash of folksonomy/user ratings.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://blekko.com>

</comment><comment> what-to-do I wish they had a /company hashtag, so when you search for a term, yo ucan only see companies related to the term.</comment>


Does a Slack bot to notify customer support is offline exist? - <AUTHOR> We are going to make a slack channel for external customer support. Is there a bot that looks at our support staff and if everyone is offline (due to timezone), let a user who is asking a question know that they should email us, or even better if the bot emails us and tells the user that we will get back to them in 12 hours?<p>Cheers! <comment><USER2> Actually, customer support is one of the main use cases for our bot, MailClark.ai

To answer your questions:

> even better if the bot emails us:

Yes, MailClark can do that! More info here: [https://mailclark.ai/help/slack- by-email](https://mailclark.ai/help/slack-by-email)

> tells the user that we will get back to them in 12 hours?

Not at the moment, but we are currently working on automatic replies.

Hope it helps :)</comment>


Meet the Man Traveling the World on $25M of Bitcoin Profits - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/bishopjordan/2017/07/07/bitcoin-millionaire/#373f81116261 <comment><USER2> Tldr: bought bitcoin in 2010 and got lucky sitting on it

I find these story of stories silly but also indicative of the market. We are in a crytpocurrency mania and these read like the "Meet the 25 year old dot com millionaire who bought stock in valinux/webvan/pets.com/etc!" from 1998 that dragged even more nontechnical people into the manic runup then.

All I know is people that I'd never expect to know what bitcoin is are suddenly talking about it. What's that tell you?

<comment><USER3> "What's that tell you?"

It's about to go mainstream.

<comment><USER4> It "already" went mainstream in 2012-2013. This is a second speculation bubble. It tells you to get out before it comes crashing down, because it will.

<comment><USER3> No, I don't think you understand the scale we are talking about here if this becomes a world wide common digital currency. Your political dogma is getting in the way of you understanding what Bitcoin's real potential is.

<comment><USER5> Bitcoin will never become the "world wide common digital currency": it's deflationary in the long term, very volatile int he short term, and transactions are expensive and slow. Maybe some other cryptocurrency could, but not bitcoin.

It could stay as a store of value though, like gold.

<comment><USER3> "it's deflationary in the long term"

Whether or not you think that matters is political dogma.

"very volatile int he short term"

Looking at the one year time scale BTC/USD is only about 2-3x as volatile as USD/EUR. Bitcoin volatility in general has been trending DOWN since it's inception as you would expect something to become more stable as the market matures and more people adopt it.

[https://www.investing.com/tools/forex-volatility- calculator](https://www.investing.com/tools/forex-volatility-calculator) [https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/volatility- index/](https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/volatility-index/)

"transactions are expensive and slow"

By what standard? A typical transaction costs less than a dollar and takes about 10 minutes. Once the people holding the block size hostage are out of the way you can expect the cost to return to cents and the speed to be more reliable at 10 minutes or less.

Anyone who thinks Bitcoin can be a store of value like Gold w/o having utility as money is fooling themselves. You need to both.

<comment><USER5> > Looking at the one year time scale BTC/USD is only about 2-3x as volatile as > USD/EUR

Are you kidding? BTC/USD easily has 10%+ swings in a day, and 300% in a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I sold a domain back in 2011 where the buyer offered to pay via Bitcoin. It was a decent sized transaction. I don't remember the exact exchange rate but it would have likely been upwards of 1,000 BTC.

I took cash instead.

I still look back on that and think "what if?"

<comment><USER7> At least you sold it. I registered a bunch of great domains when I was a college freshman in 1993. They were free to register, you only had to submit a form via email. I had, amongst others:

grateful.com eleet.com cjs.com snell.com

When Network Solutions won the contract to administer them, they started charging $70/year/domain and I was a poor student and let almost all of them lapse. I lost all of those ones. The only ones I kept were bikeworld.com (registered it for my dad's company) and chrissnell.com. Never made a dime off a domain.

<comment><USER6> I used to trade domains back when I was in college in 2007 (before the market crashed in 2008). It was still wildly lucrative. You could buy a domain for $10k one day and sell it for $30k two days later.

A lot of people had similar stories: they registered Cars.com or some other major domain back in the 90s, sold it for peanuts, and watched with dismay as it was eventually flipped for 7 figures 10 years later.

I know a guy who, on a whim, registered about 100 double-letter domains (AB.com, AC.com, etc.), then let them expire.

Each of those would be worth a minimum of $250k today

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >Mr. Smith—who asked me to conceal his real name

Thank goodness, since being identified is basically asking to be kidnapped depending on which countries he is visiting.

<comment><USER9> How is this significantly different than any other publicly extremely wealthy person?

... I guess liquidity?

<comment><USER10> It's worse than just liquidity, if he can unlock his wallet on his phone to verify it and its balance on the spot.... not only is it liquid but he's effectively carrying it on himself in cash at all times.

At least it's only $2.5 million or so remaining, since the rest is now likely in assets that require more effort than merely access to this person+phone (and attempts to rob a person of assets in a bank are usually more traceable than stealing bitcoin). Still seems a bit crazy though.

<comment><USER11> If he's smart he's storing his remaining balance in safety deposit boxes, etc rather than all on his phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The only question on my mind: where did he cash his money? Or, who has big cash to redeem his Bitcoin with million dollars transaction?

<comment><USER13> It's unlikely that he did it in a single transaction, he more likely split it up over a few days. Even a year ago, Bitcoin daily exchange volume was ~$160M, so he wouldn't have had _too_ many problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone else bothered that we didn't actually get to "meet" this anonymous dude?

<comment><USER15> Yes, I was slightly bothered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Isn't Satoshi probably a billionaire?

Now THAT is an interesting story. The guy must go through the struggle of fighting against cashing in every single day. Fun to ponder.

<comment><USER17> Yes, but thanks to the "feature" of a wallet if he ever lost his computer without a backup that money is effectively gone.

<comment><USER18> There are a million ways you can hide information securely (like a private key), and it's far easier than hiding gold. And only an idiot would keep a cryptocoin wallet on 1 computer with no backup.

You put your money in a bank and it's no longer _your_ money. Trust me, I had my main bank account locked up for an entire month due merely to (groundless) suspicion (basically, I made too much legitimate money too quickly (!!)). And then, Simple.com closed my account without warning, apparently due to violating TOS by not using it for "personal use only", which was total bullshit (messing up payments in transit AND not getting back to me for DAYS about where the hell they put my money: [https://twitter.com/pmarreck/status/739994477339758592](https://twitter.com/pmarreck/status/739994477339758592))!! Don't think for ONE SECOND that your bank money and your credit will always be accessible to you (not to mention fraud, identity theft, and other things that are not possible with cryptocurrencies). There're plenty of cases of some government dipping into accounts and helping themselves. If you think your money is safer in a bank than in a properly-secured private key, you're pretty naïve.

<comment><USER19> At least in the US, the worst case is a temporary lockup like you described. Banks are limited in how long they can hold your money. If your money is in a bank, it is guaranteed from fraud and theft.

You can't say that about Bitcoin. Add to that the fact that if you want to use Bitcoin to buy most anything you are going to have to either rely on a bank to handle transfers or find someone on the street with cash to buy the Bitcoin (dangerous with no guarantees).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Math guy explains bitcoin: [https://youtu.be/bBC- nXj3Ng4](https://youtu.be/bBC-nXj3Ng4)

<comment><USER21> Math guy neglected to mention the ponzi scheme aspect of these cryptocoins, where the early adopters amass large quantities of coins for no reason other then running the software for a short duration and significantly lower cost of processing cycles, all by design.

Rubes trading excessive amounts of fiat cash for digital tokens are baffling, and a testament to how deranged economics can get simply by assuming an asset is rare or desirable.

<comment><USER22> There's nothing ponzi schemish about that. The cost of mining is proportional to competition for new coins. Not much different than any other resource extraction.

<comment><USER21> The irony here is the "resource" being created by processing cycles is not rare. This is evident by the 800+ variations of cryptocoins. Often times, designers have chosen to 'premine' large sums of coins which are sold off directly for a set price, which then is arbitrary raised because people falsely believe these things are rare.

It's a ponzi scheme in a loose sense, as early adopters produced and acquired large sums of arbitrary numbers written to a database and _by design_ , as time passes later users running the same software on an equally powerful machine are "rewarded" with smaller numbers written to the database.

The entire service, and minting/production of database token/coins are reproducible simply by forking or running a new genesis block with the same protocol.

Denying the inherent ponzi scheme payouts designed into the early cryptocoin protocols is neglect or delusional at best, and at worst, purely deceptive.

<comment><USER22> Of course the resources are rare. Each cryptocoin is unique to the network that backs it. The network is more than the open source software of the clients. It's also the blockchain itself, which is made more difficult to reverse through proof of work, and the userbase that uses the network/blockchain to transact value.

Something being cheap at first, and then becoming more expensive as demand for it increases, doesn't make it a ponzi scheme. By such a definition, any stock that saw its value increase would be a ponzi scheme.

The assertion of it being a ponzi scheme is pure ignorance at best, and at worse, intentional deception and defamation.

<comment><USER21> For historical context:

      June 12, 2010, 08:14:44 PM

      This is an open offer by the way.. I will trade 10,000 BTC
      for 2 of these pizzas any time as long as I have the funds
      (I usually have plenty).  If anyone is interested please
      let me know.  The exchange is favorable for anyone who
      does it because the 2 pizzas are only about 25 dollars
      total, maybe 30 if you give the guy a nice tip.  If you
      get me the upgraded extra large ones or something, I can
      throw in some more bitcoins, just let me know and we'll
      work something out.

      My 1 year old daughter really enjoys pizza too!  She just
      smears it all over her face if you give her a whole slice,
      but she does eventually manage to get most of it in her
      mouth (minus a few loose toppings of course).

If you pay actual money for bitcoins to people who've generated thousands of coins for running a piece of software circa 2010, then you've really earned your "investment" into the pyramid of blockchain hype ;)

Source: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195)

<comment><USER22> It's called appreciation. It has happened to numerous assets. The definition of good investing is buying low and selling high. You're implying that something that produces investment returns beyond a amount is a ponzi scheme, which is absurd, and transparently so. You and I both know cryptocurrency doesn't meet the definition of a ponzi scheme. The only question is what's motivating you to make these false representations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I had a couple thousand Bitcoin once, but then I bought a lot of drugs :(

I calculate how much it would have been worth every once and a while -- obviously it's been 1+ million USD for a while now. Alas, I actually need to work to get money.

<comment><USER24> Buying drugs is arguably the most efficient use of money. Considering that the only reason we purchase things is to ultimately get more endorphins released by our brains. Drugs can directly hack that system.

<comment><USER25> Short-term efficient, yes. Long-term efficient, no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how he sold it and if any taxes were paid on it</comment>


What the Heck Is CSS Specificity? - <AUTHOR> http://designshack.net/articles/css/what-the-heck-is-css-specificity/

<comment><USER2> And that, my kids, is why CSS sucks. Cascading is the most stupid "feature" ever. Just imagine that we could've had classes with inheritance instead, which would reduce time spent on debugging the selector mess it is now; browsers would also parse the styles much faster. And then we could build modules or components, themes and frameworks on top of that. Add a semantic constraint engine with parametric styles (so I can say if I want two elements to align in some way), support for calculations, and coding CSS would be fun instead of frustrating. One can dream, I guess...

A much better rant on CSS general sulkiness: [http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/09/25/ten-reasons-why- css-...](http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/09/25/ten-reasons-why-css-sucks/)

<comment><USER3> Just because you don't like a feature or design choice doesn't mean that the entire language sucks. If used right, cascading can be incredible powerful. If used poorly, it's a total PITA.

You could make similar complaints about _insert your favorite language/framework here_.

If you want to make webpages, you're pretty much stuck with CSS for the foreseeable future. Better to promote best practice rather than writing off the entire language.

<comment><USER2> You are right. A single feature isn't a reason to think that an entire language sucks. But in this instance we are talking about a defining feature of the language. They're called _cascading style sheets_ for a reason. I know we're stuck with it for now, that's why I'm ranting. My god, this is like PHP in the 90s, if I rant against something, then "I'm using it wrong" or "I'm too stupid and don't understand how great it is". And in the meantime all the CSS "gurus" are teaching people that to centre an element it is perfectly normal to write { left: 50%; width: 400; margin-left: -200px }. Even worse, they squabble over which way to clear floats is the correct one, when the truth is we shouldn't be having to do this in the first place.

<comment><USER3> The tech community should have a discussion about the best way to move forward with CSS, but it will probably turn into this: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

Like it or not, CSS has legacy support built into millions and millions of devices that cannot be easily updated. Newer versions can come forward, but more likely than not, the best thing to do would be to build on frameworks such as LESS (or one of it's cousins) that allows you to code in a meta language. Combine it with some static analysis tools and you can create a system that warns you when you cascade too much (for some value of too much) and help keep you sane.

<comment><USER2> I guess that is why the web is so great, despite of all the technical problems. There was a good post recently about OOCSS and SASS, I think it is a good approach for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To avoid too much hassle, I once decided to only use classes. So instead of having #header, #nav and #footer, I had .header, .nav and .footer.

When learning CSS, we're told to use id's whenever we're targeting a unique element that isn't meant to repeat itself, hence the #header. So we apply this rule without looking too much into it, thinking it's wrong to use a class for unique elements like that, when it's actually not.

You just lose some readability in distinguishing unique elements from repeated ones, and you need to avoid using the same unique element twice. But ultimately your styling works the way you expect it to, and leave id's for anchors and JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER5> The 10-100-1000 factor is in a large base, shown recently in most browsers to be base-256. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388649>

</comment><comment><USER6> This is one of the last things I figured out when I was learning CSS, but it's arguably one of the most important. Once you realize that it exists, all of a sudden any new CSS you write will shrink and you'll understand all those weird quirks you were seeing but not understanding in your giant stylesheet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's a nice poster demonstrating CSS specificity with fish. [http://www.standardista.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/01/speci...](http://www.standardista.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/01/specifishity1.pdf)

<comment><USER8> I've always had a soft spot for Andy Clarke's (much older) CSS Specificity Wars poster: [http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/css_specificity_w...](http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/css_specificity_wars.html)

<comment><USER9> Clarke's lacks inline style and !important.

Sure, they should be used with care, but !important is actually really useful in responsive webdesign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > h2::first-line

…I've never seen this notation. I've always seen pseudos with just one colon.

Some quick testing in Textmate reveals that this does, indeed, work, as does the single colon I've always been using. Triple colons don't work.

And this only works for pseudo _elements_ ; pseudo _classes_ only work with single colons.

At least in Webkit; I didn't bother checking my simple test-case in Firefox, Opera, or IE.

Huh.

<comment><USER11> That's the spec as of CSS3, pseudo elements get ::, pseudo classes get :.

Practically speaking browsers will accept : for everything, possibly forever.

<comment><USER10> I learnt a new thing! And will probably never use it until browsers start being picky about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On a similar note, I'm currently in the planning phase of building a "specificity calculator" as a bundle for TextMate. It will mostly be targeted towards complicated CSS files and the people who create them but I imagine it will also be helpful for people new to CSS. Would any of you guys have interest in such a bundle?

</comment><comment><USER13> Specificity PSA: Don't use !important unless you absolutely, positively have to.

Recently I've run into WordPress themes where the author doesn't grasp the cascade and resorts to using !important. Widgets embedded on third-party sites are about the only good use I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Elements can never beat a class selector, even if you pile them on"

Uhh.. what about classes? Can you pile classes on to beat ids?

Can you pile ids to beat inline? (Well that kinda doesn't make sense).

<comment><USER15> It appears that 256 classes can override an ID.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388649></comment></comment>


Massive Downsizing at iROKOtv and South Africa Considering Police Body Cameras - tefo-mohapi http://www.africantechroundup.com/massive-downsizing-at-irokotv-and-south-africa-considering-police-body-cameras/ <comment> ghana-dev Wow.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you read Steve Pavlina's blog? - <AUTHOR>

What's your thought on it? Is it any good? <comment><USER2> I used to really like it. There's a lot of good, but in the last 2 years, increasing content that I'm not so much a fan of. For the most part the stuff in his "Best of" column on the blog is worth reading.

One of my favorites was applying the 30-day free trial to life habits: <http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/>

Also found his article on timeboxing useful.

More recently, posts like <http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/05/how-to-be- a-man/> don't really ring as helpful to me:

 _2\. Put your relationships second.

A man who claims his #1 commitment in life is his relationship partner (or his family) is either too dishonest or too weak to be trusted. His loyalties are misplaced. A man who values individuals above his own integrity is a wretch, not a free thinker._

Just not my flavor.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some very good articles on self-improvement.

Also some totally insane nonsense on spirituality and enlightenment. Which is probably what happens to you if you make your career out of self-improvement.

The early articles are excellent, including the first article I ever saw describing what we would now call a conversion funnel (only it was for shareware)

</comment><comment><USER4> I read it years ago before it got too new agey and the claims of spiritualism as fact. It was pretty good. Some great reflective articles in the pre Sivers era (I even bought his book) but unless you're into the spiritual and new agey stuff, there are others better worth reading who give more practical advice nowadays. It's down to your personal taste though!</comment>


A history of the personal computer: the people and the technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.retrocomputing.net/info/allan/ <comment><USER2> One interesting part of history that I want to write a chapter about at some point is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco from the early 1990s, including the relationship with DR-DOS.</comment>