One of the Most Time Consuming Startup Roadblocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2009/07/14/one-of-the-most-common-startup-roadblocks/

<comment><USER2> To me this looks like the old outsourcing myth in a new(?) disguise.

The question remains: How do you find sufficiently qualified and trustworthy partners who are willing to remain on standby for tiny one-off tasks like these?

Moreover many of his bullets just make no sense whatsoever. How am I supposed to outsource "Fixing Post-Launch Bugs" (on my code-base)? Creating Unit Tests? Database Development?

I have personally witnessed more than one startup fail spectactularly because the CEO drank a bit too much of the outsourcing kool-aid. Over here in the real world it still takes quite a bit of time to bring a contractor up to speed, even on small tasks. In my expirience outsourcing makes more sense for slightly bigger chunks, to justify the overhead, instead of the teeny weeny bits.

<comment><USER3> I opened an office for a company in India (in protest). Eight people on staff (plus a little servant boy to serve them tea twice a day). One year later we scuttled the whole office and started everything from scratch. Everything they produced was garbage. Can you find talented people in India? YES. But it will cost you so much there is no point.

There is _no_ sense of company loyalty. There is _no_ sense of how to work independently without being told what to do. Status is defined as 1) how many people work under you, and 2) how many servants you have. If another company offers to give them 5 junior programmers ("freshers") to work under them instead of 4 you can kiss them goodbye. Oh, and never take their word about anything. You need to review the code on a daily basis to make sure something is actually getting done. Not to mention, while they will tell you otherwise, java and .net is the only thing they give a rip about, maybe a little php.

A startup is an inherently creative process. It would be like Bono outsourcing a new album-- then finding out they only play sitar. He would spend TONS of time documenting everything about how he wants it to sound and telling them in detail exactly how it should work. If he is _lucky_ they will get 75% there. Creative processes just don't work like that.

Large bureaucratic organizations can squeeze the cost savings out of outsourcing, but for a startup it's just asinine. The only exception is VERY rote tasks. Basically just data mining. Send them a link to a website that you want mined and they will do it pretty cheap. Now, you could probably write a script to do it in about the same time, but in some cases it's easier just to give it to them.

Now that I think about it, the reason I left to do a startup was because I wanted to get away from people who get a big chubby over Thomas Friedman but don't have a damn clue about software development.

I've had much more luck and a hell of a lot more fun traipsing around Guangdong and dabbling in manufacturing.

<comment><USER4> a little servant boy?

<comment><USER3> their words, not mine. the caste system is alive and well, now it just has a capitalist tinge to it.

<comment><USER5> That's incorrect. In India, a small company office will have full time 'peon' <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon> . This person will be responsible for various office chores, the main one being to get 'tea' from nearby teashop. [Imagine having an office boy here who gets a Starbucks coffee for you when asked.] This happens because in India, concept of 'vending machine' is not very popular and labor is cheap. A lot of times, young kid from a poor family seem to take up this job. This has nothing whatsoever to do with caste. I am from a smaller city in India and I haven't seen any caste system discrimination in my 24 years of living there.

<comment><USER6> > A lot of times, young kid from a poor family seem to take up this job. This > has nothing whatsoever to do with caste.

Oh really?

Let me suggest that you're using "caste" in a somewhat different way than we are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He thinks this needed a perl script or defining the task by email for an assistant? Seriously?

      $ wget -i urls.txt

I understand that this may have been a contrived example, but many of these foreign VA stories sound pretty contrived. Having worked with foreign and remote staff, I know that it is what you're able to make of it. But at the same time, there are some natural hurdles to doing this effectively at a small scale. It'd be easy to spend a lot of time managing the process, doing quality review, and providing feedback.

When you can scale delegation, or when you're talking about things outside of your skill set, then there is of course no question.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Micro-outsourcing" daily tasks isn't everyone's cup of tea but there are absolutely huge gains to be had if done carefully. Not just for technical and business tasks, but personal ones as well (cleaning, cooking, errands, etc...).

I find it really difficult to maintain focus when switching contexts from one task to another so for me it's really valuable to be able to fire off a brief email to hand off stuff that doesn't require my direct attention.

</comment><comment><USER9> The value of this depends on whether you can afford to make that trade of money for time.

<comment><USER10> Can you afford not to?

<comment><USER11> What happens when the outsource work isn't to your quality standards? You've wasted a lot of time already, and now you have to dispute it and waste some more time.

<comment><USER12> That's how my friend's service-based startup died before it even got out of the gate. He tried to outsource way too much overseas, not realizing the extremely low quality of work he would get (e.g. copy writing). He had to have a lot of it redone and burned through all of his cash before he got anywhere. (And he had a pretty weak business plan in the first place.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the idea of drip outsourcing but one common problem I have run into, and seen others have trouble with, is finding the right providers.

The hourly rates are not the problem, but the quality and source of the worker. I am location agnostic, but finding the source to do the work is sometimes a huge part of the time suck that happens when you are looking to to drip outsourcing.

<comment><USER14> Choose 2: Quality, speed, price. I do some freelance work, but not for $3 an hour.

<comment><USER13> This is great - I just wrote about exactly that topic - choosing 2 (but you can't have all three) on my own blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If the time required to write that perl script was longer than writing an email you should look into a different field.

<comment><USER16> If you think you are correctly estimating how long the script will take to write, and your estimate is "less time than writing an email," you should look into managing programmers in a large, clumsy corporation.

<comment><USER15> I am quite serious here. You already have the URI's, and you should be able to write this script in under 2 minutes. This reminds me of this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=703585>

The amount of time spent defining what you want is surely going to be equal to this.

<comment><USER17> > _It took me exactly 90 seconds to get the request to him_

Depending on how you code it's likely to take you more than 90 seconds to: Fire up the editor, switch into mental design mode, create the initial script structure, write the script, figuring out authentication/cookie management issues, picking the right regex (or selector), and then debugging the typo or the 2 unexpected problems that came up (as they will on average).

I think you can see the time and mental differences between that and:

"Here is the URL and credentials, can you log in, visit each page in my gallery and send me a zip with all the pictures?"

In the end you'll be more proud of a script approach, but that doesn't give you what you wanted in the first place-- i.e. avoiding the drain on your time when you have more important things to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> i agree with him - i can't code at all so i was forced to go this route to build some projects for my last position. i invested a lot of time in the specs to start with and as the contractor and i got more comfortable with what 'success looked like' it got a lot easier and soon he was suggesting improvements or implementing some features on the fly (you gotta earn that kind of trust). the key for me was to make sure each set of tasks was distinct and i could actually test something that works each week - ended up with 4-5 solid iterations before we finished and the weekly turnaround let me get a lot of good feedback from others.</comment>


Former Freemium Developer Details the Grim Mechanics of F2P Mobile Games - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7igijd/i_was_a_game_designer_at_a_freetoplay_game <comment><AUTHOR> From the Developer's Introduction:

" _Cracks Knuckles_ Let's do this dance!

* My soul is the chase prize in a lootbox, along with other, extremely valuable content (gotta be in good company after all). We'll call this box 'The Soul Box'.

* You can't directly purchase The Soul Box from the store. It's a rare drop on a powerful, Dark Souls style boss monster. High HP, insta-kill attacks, very timing heavy, the works. We'll just call this 'The Boss Monster'.

* The only way to fight The Boss Monster is with a Boss Fight Ticket, which is the rare chase prize in the 'The Wheel Game Loot Box'. A ticket cannot be obtained any other way.

* The Wheel Game Loot Box can __only __be obtained by getting the Five Keys from the Wheel Game. It costs hard currency (currency bought with real money) to spin the Wheel. Getting the Keys is rare, spins usually get you lesser loot boxes. Each of the Five Keys is different, and you can get duplicates. This means that you could have 20 of the other Keys, but still need to get the Fifth Key, just to unlock one of the Wheel Game Lootboxes.

 _The Fifth Key is way rarer than the other Keys. Like, suspiciously so.

_ Keys can be redeemed for other prizes, like event-unique cosmetics, just for that added temptation. They look amazing.

* The Wheel Game has a ridiculously long spin animation, with lots of flashing lights and grating music. Neither of those can be disabled. You must sit through it. Every. Single. Time.

* That Boss fight? You can't save up tickets for it. You're not allowed to spin the wheel when you have a ticket (the button just greys out). This means that learning the fight patterns is extremely difficult, as you're looking at hours (and tons of money) between fights.

* PvP is enabled during the fight against the Boss Monster. If another Player kills you during it, you lose the fight and they get half of the hard currency you spent getting the ticket. Prepare to get mobbed by griefers every time you get within a mile of that thing.

* Did I mention that the presence of so many PvP players in the Boss Fight will cause terrible lag spikes during the fight? Because that's a thing.

* The Boss Monster has an unskippable cutscene, every time you fight it. He wants to destroy the world because everyone is too sad. The voice acting is horrendous.

I think that covers everything... I'm feeling pretty good about the sanctity of my soul."</comment>


How to fix yellowed plastics on old computers [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU7vXMezW_I

<comment><USER2> Although this looks like it works if / when completed correctly, many retro computer collectors have found that after a couple of years or so, the yellowing returns.

The retrobright solution only removes yellowing from the surface. Over time, the bromine resurfaces and the case gets yellowed again. The difference though is that now your plastic is slightly more brittle thanks to the retrobright process, so in fact you're worse off now than before.</comment>


16-year old teen claims his search engine is 47% more accurate than Google - <AUTHOR> http://m.timesofindia.com/tech/tech-news/This-16-year-old-Indian-origin-teen-claims-his-search-engine-is-47-more-accurate-than-Google/articleshow/48553228.cms

<comment><USER2> "60 hours to code a search engine", sounds like someone is spending daddy's hard earned money at a high PR agency. Nothing solid in this article at all. This made me LOL - "It understands what a user would like before it serves up the results by dwelling deep into the content of the text, understanding the underlying meaning"

</comment><comment><USER3> It is laughable to suggest the search engine "accuracy" is universal and measurable enough to say that it's "47%" better.

</comment><comment><USER4> _> To test the accuracy of each search engine, he limited his search query to this year's news articles from The New York Times. He created several fictitious users with different interests and corresponding web histories. Tukrel then fed this information to both Google and his interest-based search engine. Finally, the results from each search engine were compared._

Willing to bet the search phrase did not include "site:newyorktimes.com"

</comment><comment><USER5> Good for him!</comment>


Machine Learning Cheat Sheet (for scikit-learn) - <AUTHOR> http://peekaboo-vision.blogspot.de/2013/01/machine-learning-cheat-sheet-for-scikit.html

<comment><USER2> I had a short look at scikit-learn for a hobby classifier I'm writing (it aims to email me interesting HN articles so I don't waste much time reading things I don't like or refreshing HN all the time), and it looks fantastic. I haven't looked at the code or used it very much, but the documentation is very thorough and informative, and the library itself is very extensive.

There are some things missing, (e.g. The naive Bayes implementation is offline, which is not very useful to me), but the library is fantastic for prototyping, at least. Congratulations to the people working on it!

<comment><USER3> Thanks :) We should really add online naive Bayes and it would be really easy. But no-one got around to it yet :-/ Feel free ;)

<comment><USER2> I just might! I'll issue a pull request if I do, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For predicting structure (which takes you to 'tough luck' in the chart as it's not implemented in scikit-learn), you can use structured SVM's through either SVM-Struct ([http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/tj/svm_light/svm_struct.htm...](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/tj/svm_light/svm_struct.html)) or JLIS ([http://flake.cs.uiuc.edu/~mchang21/softwares/JLIS/indirect.h...](http://flake.cs.uiuc.edu/~mchang21/softwares/JLIS/indirect.html)).

Though note that both libraries are free for non-commercial use only.

<comment><USER3> Or you could use pystruct: <https://github.com/amueller/pystruct> But I saved that for another blog post ;)

That is BSD licensed and pure Python, has some more feature than SVMstruct but is not as optimized (yet).

<comment><USER4> I had no idea your project existed; thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER3> I did a another post on that one. [http://peekaboo- vision.blogspot.de/2013/01/pystruct-more-str...](http://peekaboo- vision.blogspot.de/2013/01/pystruct-more-structured-prediction.html) The post still needs some more detail, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know nothing much about machine learning (though I was digging around scikit learn earlier this evening) but this is a diagram I can appreciate :)</comment>


The Last (or at Least Looniest) Newspaper in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/last-or-least-looniest-newspaper-america-321646

<comment><USER2> They describe the editor as pugilistic and nursing arbitrary feuds. I happen to live in a place with a one-man paper like the one described, who has the same problem.

Being used to metropolitan papers (with real governance, ethics, etc.) on the one hand, and limp containers for ads on the other, I had not met this beast. It has been educational to say the least.

I never quite understood, at a gut level, A.J. Liebling's notion of "freedom of the press ... for whomever owns one" until this. It's amazing how much power this can give the one who operates it, whether or not they have anything to say.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the freedom of the press afforded all of us by the Internet is probably it's most important benefit.

<comment><USER4> FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY</comment></comment>


Failed Startup Post-Mortems - <AUTHOR> http://3things.gitbooks.io/77-failed-startup-post-mortems/

<comment><USER2> Here's a book I wrote that covers 150 failed internet startups from the late 90's.

[http://amazon.com/FD-Companies-Spectacular-Dot-com- Flameouts...](http://amazon.com/FD-Companies-Spectacular-Dot-com-Flameouts- ebook/dp/B000FC0OCW/)

I think many of them could be successful if relaunched today.

<comment><USER3> Pud - bring back FuckedCompany. Based on all of our data, it's about that time.

<comment><USER2> People ask me all the time to bring it back. Was fun when it was happening and I tried to be funny and good-spirited, but now I have more of an appreciation for entrepreneurs and how hard it is to build a business... so I won't bring it back.

Also won't bring it back because of onwards and upwards.. and so on.

Thanks for asking though :) Still makes me happy when people tell me they like my work.

<comment><USER4> Fuckedcompany served an important role as a reality check on some of the more idiotic aspects of the bubble. As an entrepreneur who was active at that very time I really want to thank you for providing a bit of a backdrop against which my strategy made some sense. I realized early on that 'go big or go home' would probably translate into 'go bust or go home' and I felt that the huge number of businesses that ended up in the 'go bust' bin versus the ones that made it turned the whole art of running a business more into something resembling a lottery.

So I agree fully with not bringing it back but if we ever get into another out-of-control over-hyped dumb money situation then I really hope that you or someone like you will do a re-run of fuckedcompany.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most of these, given the order, look to be from our original compilation of startup failure post-mortems. We've compiled 101 to date which you can see here.

[https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post- mortem/](https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/)

Perhaps more useful, we also sifted through and analyzed each post-mortem to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure. The biggest reasons founders have cited has not been running out of money or the economy but building a solution looking for a problem.

<comment><USER5> > Perhaps more useful, we also sifted through and analyzed each post-mortem to > identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure.

"But you must provide an email to get access to that."

<comment><USER6> "And our email validator is totally broken"

<comment><USER3> We use an ESP to send the emails and sometimes, the PDF goes instantly and sometimes upto an hour. If you didn't receive for some reason, feel free to ping me directly. Email in profile.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't get that far. I type in my email, press the button and "Please enter a valid email address." appears. Not sure why I've been downvoted for the previous comment, your validator really is broken.

6 alpha chars @ gmail.com, on Firefox and Chrome on OS X 10.9.5. Really should work; doesn't. Console shows that you're passing an empty string to getElementById at some point.

<comment><USER3> If you want the pdf, feel free to send me an email, and I'll send it to you. (email in profile)

Note: I didn't downvote you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe I'm in the minority here, but it's really not cool to copy people's writing wholesale into a book. It's really a terrible way to pay back people who were willing to publicly share their startup failures (in a format they controlled).

Also, the "I'm not profiting, looking to profit from these collected works" disclaimer is almost as bad as "no copyright infringement intended" on YouTube videos. Regardless of your profit, it is still copyright infringement to copy people's content without their consent.

It's especially egregious that the original source is only listed at the end of articles, where there's no reason to bother clicking through (since you've already read it). Plus, in many cases the original sources had relevant and interesting images which are omitted here.

</comment><comment><USER4> Did you obtain the permission of the authors to republish their content like this?

And if so, did you leave out stories that may be of interest? Then I'd suggest you link those on a separate list.

And if you did not obtain permission then you probably should!

<comment><USER8> They didn't - my previous startup (Diffle) is on the list, and I was never notified. Nor did cbinsights.com, which has a comment here complaining about how this post ripped off their original compilation of stories. I'm not all that ruffled - I figure that once you put something on the web it will take on a life of its own regardless of what you want - but it would've been a nice courtesy to the folks who sweated over those startups.

<comment><USER3> Hey Jonathan - Anand from CB Insights here. Thx for the comment and for writing a great post-mortem.

One distinction - we didn't republish your post. We linked out to the original post you'd written and quoted a few lines from it which we thought were particularly telling about the reasons behind & process of shutting down.

That was the format we took throughout the post. Original link and a few line excerpt.

Hope that makes sense.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I'm following you. When I look for instance at:

[http://3things.gitbooks.io/77-failed-startup-post- mortems/wi...](http://3things.gitbooks.io/77-failed-startup-post- mortems/wishberg/README.html)

And compare that with the linked article:

[http://blog.wishberg.com/post/92014031388/the-final-note- tha...](http://blog.wishberg.com/post/92014031388/the-final-note-thanks-from- team-wishberg)

It looks as if the whole post was copied without any commentary at all.

The diffle one is exactly like that, not quite a 'few sentences'.

<comment><USER3> I'm commenting about post we did here - [https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post- mortem/](https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/)

We're not affiliated with the book.

<comment><USER4> Ah ok, sorry I see how it goes together now. That was a reference to a partial bit in the original comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are some interesting stories in here (check out the condom key-chain one), but it would be nice if they were broken down by industry, or at least didn't have quite so many service-offered-over-web/new-blogging-service stories. Maybe its just that there are so many of those these days? It makes me wonder if anyone reading this has some information breaking down startup failure rates by industry or sector... perhaps with average capitalization and length of operation before failure. It would make sense to me that the typical cat-video-sharing startup might have a much higher failure rate, but lower capital cost and years invested, than say, genomics startups or solar power startups. It might be good to see how gift stores, enterprise software or financial services fit in between those extremes.

Thanks for posting them here. This is great HN content.

<comment><USER10> the key-chain one is hilarious. That sets the tone from the start:

"Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar projects, I didn't know the first thing about starting a business. When I asked a successful classmate how to invoice a customer, he suggested I go to one of the large business-supply warehouses. "They sell 'Business in a Box,' " he told me. "It's got everything you need." I didn't realize he was joking until I asked a clerk for one at Office Depot."

<comment><USER11> Link: [http://3things.gitbooks.io/77-failed-startup-post- mortems/co...](http://3things.gitbooks.io/77-failed-startup-post- mortems/condom_key_chains/README.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It appears that the link is dead, giving a 404. Anyone have a copy up somewhere (or that they can send me privately)?

</comment><comment><USER13> Great idea. Would be useful to have a summary of the business model at the top of each article. For example #68 Overto I've got no idea what they did and I want to know before reading about why they failed.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm getting a 404, and the domain home says the user hasn't published a book yet. Has it been taken down for good?

</comment><comment><USER15> Could someone use this as training data to just generate them automatically?

<comment><USER16> This comment is comedy gold, assuming you're saying to automate failed startups

<comment><USER15> It would be so great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems the book has been taken down now, returns a 404.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, there are some suckers in this post who do nothing better than complain. Author did not copy anyone's content rather simply linked and compiled the list. By that logic you should also complain about Google because all they do is show results for query and link to other people's content.

Does anyone have link to cached version ?

<comment><USER4> Presumably I'm one of the 'suckers' you refer to.

Author copied everybody's content verbatim without obtaining permission first, what you are saying is simply not true.

I think this is a very worthwhile project but that doesn't mean the author should trample over other people's rights.

So no, your 'logic' does not hold up for google because they _LINK_ to the content rather than that they copy it and display it in their own environment (incidentally, google images does do that and I think they ought to be slapped for that).

<comment><USER18> Sorry .. I should not have phrased it that way. I apologize. I will try to be more constructive in my comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd also add Everpix as well: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life- and-d...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-death- inside-the-worlds-best-photo-startup)

</comment><comment><USER20> Twitpic is actually not dead [http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/18/6445597/twitpic-says-it- wo...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/18/6445597/twitpic-says-it-wont-be- shutting-down-after-all)

</comment><comment><USER21> This is an amazing resource. I just read a couple of them, it is gut-wrenching to read the founders' stories, but a reminder to everyone else to learn and not repeat them.

</comment><comment><USER22> PDF here: [https://db.tt/Ag5evB1x](https://db.tt/Ag5evB1x)

(converted from the epub)

</comment><comment><USER23> I applaud any startup founder who has the courage to do a write up post- mortem.

It's a hard thing to talk about the failure of your baby.

</comment><comment><USER24> Amazing idea! Is it possible to export this to a PDF or Kindle format?

<comment><USER25> Downloadable format seem to be available here: [https://www.gitbook.io/book/3things/77-failed-startup- post-m...](https://www.gitbook.io/book/3things/77-failed-startup-post-mortems)

(including Kindle & PDF)

<comment><USER26> @kumarm - any chance you could put the PDF somewhere? The link has been taken down. I was really looking forward to combing through that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> a while back I asked for something like this except for current startups, successfull or not, and what they have learned. currently I'm following Mediums startup section

</comment><comment><USER28> Exec is in that list but it is still going strong. It's not a failure post mortem, but a pivot.

<comment><USER29> They were acquired for a low amount: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/15/handybook-sweeps-up-exec- fo...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/15/handybook-sweeps-up-exec-for- under-10m-to-expand-west-coast-footprint/)</comment></comment>


A Magician of Chinese Poetry - <AUTHOR> http://www.chinafile.com/nyrb-china-archive/magician-of-chinese-poetry <comment><USER2> I wonder if it would be feasible to have the words of two languages living in the same word2vec vectorspace. So to understand a feel for a word in a poem of the other language, you can see what summation it is of words from your language

<comment><USER3> What if one language has a word that simply has no equivalent in another language? Wouldn't that word be 'off the charts'?

Chinese has many characters that are pretty much exclusively used for names and making sounds when transliterating other languages. If we're trying to put Chinese characters and English words on a vectorspace, you're going to be missing a lot of Chinese characters which have no meaning.

<comment><USER4> > What if one language has a word that simply has no equivalent in another > language? Wouldn't that word be 'off the charts'?

No. It'll still be mapped onto the word2vec vectors, but it would just take on bizarre, extreme, and highly unstable values due to maximum likelihood training. It'll associate that untranslatable word with all sorts of random other words like 'cheese' simply because 'cheese' happened to be used within a few sentences of the untranslatable, and the mapping will vary unpredictably with different hyperparameters, random seeds, datasets, implementations etc.

This often happens; for example, in a simple logistic regression, suppose you have 10 datapoints and 1 variable that separates them perfectly, what will maximum likelihood do? It won't give you a sensible odds ratio like 10, it'll give you an OR of ∞, because if the OR is ∞, that maximizes the chance of perfect separation since the likelihood of separation is always 1 and any finite OR would imply a slightly smaller likelihood <1\. (While a logistic regression using any kind of regularization or Bayesian prior will behave much better.) You can see this in image-classification CNNs when you give them a photo of something not in the training set - they just come up with whatever is the closest match for the flimsiest and most superficial of reasons. Or if you try to use a NN for time-series prediction and extrapolate out the prediction, it'll be an exact extreme trend, because it's not reflecting any of the real uncertainty.

This is why being able to ask a NN about its uncertainty is so useful: the regular NNs will just confidently predict bullshit because that's what you trained them to do. There's some nifty stuff about this in "Uncertainty in Deep Learning" [http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/yarin/blog_2248.html](http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/yarin/blog_2248.html) , Gal 2016.

<comment><USER2> Why would an untranslatable word take on bizarre values? If there are enough training examples of the untranslatable word, why couldn't it actually have a sensible mapping in the vectorspace?

p.s. thanks for the reference to that thesis. I've been wondering about uncertainty in predictions for a side project to predict athletic performance that I'm working on, so this is very timely.

<comment><USER4> word2vec is trying to predict the co-occurence of words; if there is nothing translatable about it, then it will be effectively random. When you fit a maximum likelihood to random stuff and force it to attribute pattern to the noise, it's not going to come up with any sensible mapping.

<comment><USER2> But just because it's "untranslatable" from, say, Chinese to English, doesn't mean that we can't see many Chinese-Chinese co occurrences of the word, so this Chinese word would still have a vector of significance relative to other Chinese words, right?

That is- if you ran word2vec on a Chinese corpus, this word would be represented adequately in the vectorspace.

Wouldn't it then make sense, if you could find a proper mapping from one language's space to the other (I don't know if this part is realistic, but maybe by finding correspondences between already-translated words), that this word would not land in a bizarre spot were it to be expressed as a combination of vectors from the other language?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great example of how language and grammar affects how one thinks and vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER6> For those interested...

      《鹿柴》
      空山不见人,
      但闻人语响。
      返影入深林,
      复照青苔上。

</comment><comment><USER7> I was named after this guy.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, that's beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER9> Chinese poetry inspired me to start learning Chinese.</comment>


Tracking Down a Fifteen-Hour Email Delay from Outlook and Office 365 - <AUTHOR> https://potatofrom.space/post/outlook-email-debugging/ <comment><USER2> RFC2181: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2181](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2181)

10.3. MX and NS records

The domain name used as the value of a NS resource record, or part of the value of a MX resource record must not be an alias. Not only is the specification clear on this point, but using an alias in either of these positions neither works as well as might be hoped, nor well fulfills the ambition that may have led to this approach. This domain name must have as its value one or more address records. Currently those will be A records, however in the future other record types giving addressing information may be acceptable. It can also have other RRs, but never a CNAME RR.</comment>


NameCheap e-mail hosting: from $3/year (3GB single mailbox) - <AUTHOR> http://www.namecheap.com/email/email-hosting.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> Not affiliated with namecheap (except hosting domains there), but this deal seems really good (esp. since google started charging for Apps domains). Has anyone tried it?</comment>


(1996) Neal Stephenson: Mother Earth Mother Board - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ <comment><USER2> Great link. Interesting how Stephenson believed in 1996 (probably correctly) that a directly wired connection from Manhattan to London was faster than a non direct connection from Manhattan to the Bronx.

Nowadays the speed of light is a good reason why the Bronx is a possible location for High Frequency Trading in Wall Street while London is not. (My calculations say it takes 40ms for light to travel London to NY).</comment>


The guy who made Apple's Playground possible - <AUTHOR> http://worrydream.com/Apple/

<comment><AUTHOR> Also check out this presentation of Bret Victor: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII)

Pretty interesting stuff, especially given this happened a few years prior to today's release of Playground.</comment>


Ask HN: Landing page of our upcomming product. What do you think? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
We are launching our product soon, this is already the 3rd version of our landing.
Link: https://staply.co
Could you please review it? Is everything clear? Or some parts need to be explained better? <comment><USER2> It looks like Staply solves a problem, but I don't know what that problem is. In your footer next to the copyright you have "We want to see a world where information is never lost or forgotten." \-- is this the problem you're solving? Keeping track of information?

The screenshot hints at a sort of shared folder space for placing things for design review and comments.

I would suggest adding a section above "Take a new approach" that tells me the problem I already have before telling me how Staply fixes it.

Where you say "Private" and mention SSL, I think this is really bare-bones privacy. That's more like "Secure" to me. Privacy implies that you wouldn't sell my data, that you would store it encrypted on your servers, and that your servers are secure. It's more than just the transport layer.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your suggestions. Especially about the privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks pretty solid. two things:

1) on the pricing page it states: "It means that you will be only able to access all the messages, files and links sent earlier than one month ago. Basically you will be able to access the data sent latest 30 days ago." \- This needs cleaning up.

"It means that you will be able to access all the messages, files and links sent in the last 30 days." would read better. As it is written it sounds like I can access history 2 months ago but not 5 days ago.

2) Lose the По-русски unless they are in a Russian speaking part of the world. I hate to say it, but you will lose customers in the US. There is a certain amount of xenophobia here, as well as the nationalistic "american exceptionalism", and other media fed concerns about Russian hackers stealing identities etc..

<comment><USER3> Thank you. We had hard time trying to explain it. "last 30 days" is so simple, thank you one more time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1 ) Perhaps this sounds better. Simple group folders for all instead Simple group folders for everyone

2 ) I agree with ErikRogneby. Lost the Russian from there. It doesn't fit there nicely. Perhaps add flags to the bottom instead of other languages.

3 ) The top should not be hidden and only visible when going to the top. hide it when scrolling down and show it when scroll it up. Or simply show it always.

I still haven't figured out exactly what you are trying to solve.

But i do like the page. It is nice and clean.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for such a nicely structured and helpful comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a typo in your "Take a new approach" panel. The URL in the image says techcrunch.com/stapy-files-for-ipo. I think you want it to say techcrunch.com/staply-files-for-ipo.

I agree with the other comments suggesting that it is not 100% clear why someone should sign up (from the landing page alone, at least). I think that a panel focusing on some of the use cases (that you've nicely identified on this HN thread) might make your service clearer, and help motivate more users to sign up.

Best of luck.

<comment><USER3> I must say you are really attentive :) Thank you very much. We are definitely going to include one more section with use cases, thanks to feedback in this thread.

</comment></comment><comment> Norm-- I'm not crazy about the main photo. It doesn't tell __your __story.

And curious why you need to have the mixpanel badge at the bottom right? What does it do for you?

<comment><USER7> > And curious why you need to have the mixpanel badge at the bottom right? > What does it do for you?

If you add the MixPanel badge to your site, you can track more events per month without upgrading to a paid plan.

[https://mixpanel.com/free/](https://mixpanel.com/free/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "We'll send you an invitation to this address"

That's not grammatically correct. Write "We'll send an invitation to this address" instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we'll fix it.

</comment></comment><comment> deepak-iiitb I agree that the usecase is not coming up properly. Additionally, I would prefer a "constant" value proposition rather than for so many stakeholders such as students, freelancers etc. If the usecase is generic, would prefer a generic statement.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is that screenshot the site itself? At first I thought I was seeing some chat app, so Staply must be some sort of browser plugin to connect it all together.

Basically, it looks like Staply is kind of a chat room app with file sharing as part of it. Or not? I was kind of confused.

<comment><USER3> Basically we are building a very open platform where you can invite anyone, for example one of use cases would be if you are organizing an event with lots of speakers and you need to collect their presentations and answer all their question regarding the timetable etc. Kind of like a shared folder+small Q&A, where all data is seemlessly organized so that you would know for sure which version of the presentation is the latest one for example.

<comment><USER9> Hmm, then I didn't really get that from the screenshot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable link: [https://staply.co](https://staply.co)

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems like Facebook share on signup is broken.

Looks good. Is it like Slack on top of google apps?

И клево, что есть русская версия!

<comment><USER3> Thanks! It is more like a dropbox shared folder with a chat built in :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Your copy could use some proof-reading:

>Forget about looking for a file or a link, in Staply the are always ar your fingertips.

<comment><USER3> Thank you very much, we were really excited to launch an updated version. May be we did it a bit too early :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> She's looking the wrong way.

Turn the photo around so she looks at the opt in.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like your landing! Perhaps show a few more features and examples. Clever product.</comment>


Experimental Gmail IMAP interface using oAuth - <AUTHOR> http://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/Home/oauthimap

<comment><USER2> This looks kinda wrong to me: the "wiki" is on google sites. Not on google code as the rest of these kind of technical wikis are (ie. GWT, Android).

Also, they use yahoo groups.

Just seems odd somehow.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Kevin Marks dug this out originally: [http://groups.google.com/group/webfinger/browse_thread/threa...](http://groups.google.com/group/webfinger/browse_thread/thread/f6ea2e0099a2a33)

I'm guessing this is what etacts are using. I wonder why Google haven't made an official announcement?

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone tried using this with the Ruby OAuth gem? (found here: <http://github.com/pelle/oauth-plugin>)

OAuth is quite cool, but the documentation and tutorials seem to be all over the place.

<comment><USER4> I need to update this tutorial (some things are outdated) [http://www.manu-j.com/blog/add-google-oauth-ruby-on-rails- si...](http://www.manu-j.com/blog/add-google-oauth-ruby-on-rails-sites/214/) but i have successfully used google oauth with rails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any obvious use cases for this? (Gmail IMAP or federated login outside the web browser)

Research for their operating systems?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main point is so you don't have to hand over your password to let programs access your email. Why would a service need your email messages? Maybe to do cool analytics like etacts, or do an improved contact import that prioritizes the contacts by how often you correspond with them.

<comment><USER6> One thing that particularly annoys me is when websites like LinkedIn and Facebook ask for your webmail password so they can suggest new contacts based on your email history. They promise they won't store your password, but it is shockingly insecure.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Behat provider to inject random values in features - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MKCG/behat-provider/tree/master <comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

last year I made a similar project at work to be able to inject values coming from our database into our Gherkin features.

I thought that it may help someone else to build more robust test so I decided to simplify it and to opensource it as I am not allowed to share the one that I made at work.

Feel free to contribute to it,

Kévin.</comment>


Wisp: Small-but-featureful embeddable Lisp interpreter written in Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/walpurgisriot/wisp <comment><USER2>
        > wisp lives in the ST (optionally IO) monad. separate
        > interpreters with completely segregated environments can be
        > run concurrently. wisp has a few IO facilities, but they're
        > completely sandboxed and can't accidentally affect the host
        > program or environment.

This is wonderful. There's already an embedded R5RS Scheme for Haskell ([http://hackage.haskell.org/package/husk- scheme](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/husk-scheme)) but it runs everything in the IO monad. That makes it fairly annoying for sandboxed embeddings.

<comment><USER3> Apart from its use of ST rather than IO, I'm curious how else Wisp compares to Husk. As far as I can tell, despite the name, Wisp appears to be a Lisp-1 (single namespace for functions and variables, no need to call "apply" or similar on variables referencing functions to call them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not to be confused with Wisp: Homoiconic JS with clojure syntax, s-expressions and macros: [https://github.com/Gozala/wisp](https://github.com/Gozala/wisp)

<comment><USER5> Or my: [https://github.com/espringe/wisp](https://github.com/espringe/wisp) (Whitespace lISP) with f-expressions!

<comment><USER6> You might like my whitespace lisp with f-expressions: [http://akkartik.name/blog/wart](http://akkartik.name/blog/wart)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone have any good, language agnostic resources for writing interpreters (not just for lisp)?

<comment><USER8> /r/compilers [1] has some good resources. You can also check its top submissions [2].

I also recently found Matt Might's Compilers class [3] via a submission here on HN. It has a lot of language-agnostic resources.

[1]: [http://www.reddit.com/r/compilers](http://www.reddit.com/r/compilers)

[2]: [http://www.reddit.com/r/compilers/top/](http://www.reddit.com/r/compilers/top/)

[3]: [http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2013/](http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2013/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://github.com/apsk/hlisp](https://github.com/apsk/hlisp) Another lisp in haskell

</comment><comment><USER10> I pine for a Lisp with the embeddable ease of Lua.

<comment><USER11> It could be trivially implemented in Lua as a pre-processor. Lua has lambdas, higher level functions, lexical scope and tail call elimination.

The main problem is that it doesn't have a ternary operator, making conditional expression problematic to represent (you have to wrap an if statement in a lambda called on the fly).

For something more fully featured, see [0], it is written in MoonScript (which itself compiles to Lua), and the parser depends on LPeg, but writing a S-expression parser is rather easy.

 _Edit:_ There's also lcl [1], which is implemented in C. Written by lhf, one of the Lua authors. From the test files, it looks very basic.

\--

[0] [https://github.com/leafo/moonlisp/tree/master/lisp](https://github.com/leafo/moonlisp/tree/master/lisp)

[1] [http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/lua-an-extensible- embedde...](http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/lua-an-extensible-embedded- language/184410014)

<comment><USER12> Wrapping an if in a lambda is unlikely to work as expected.

<comment><USER11>
        ((if foo + -) 4 6)

Can be compiled to

        (function()
            if foo then return plus
            else return minus
            end
        end)()(4, 6)

It is far too verbose to be used in manually crafted Lua, but acceptable if you treat it as a compiler target (with the caveat that the lambda creation will prevent LuaJIT from JITting that piece of code).

<comment><USER13> _Plug_ [https://github.com/meric/l2l](https://github.com/meric/l2l)

"A object-oriented, unicode-enabled lisp that compiles to and runs as fast as Lua. Equipped with macros and compile-time compiler manipulation. Comes with all built-in Lua functions."

<comment><USER11> Nice one! I started coding one after writing the above comment.

I have a question regarding your implementation: why do you use `goto`s rather than `elseif` to compile `(cond)` blocks? For nested blocks?

<comment><USER13> Oh I think it it was for the return value of cond.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google 'down,' let's do an experiment - mkr-hn A lot of people are unable to get to Google services right now. Including me. I'm curious to see if there's some commonality.
What is your
ISP:
Location:
Try to stick to this format so people who like to do data processing can easily make use of this thread. <comment><AUTHOR> Very high (and increasing) hourly packet loss on some of the backbones. They are probably fully down and the percentage is increasing as the rolling hourly window includes more of the outage.

       NTT <-> Verizon (9.09% @ 10:20)
       SBC <-> Level3  (8.33% @ 10:20)
       ATT <-> Verizon (4.00% @ 10:20)

[ [http://internetpulse.net/Main.aspx?Metric=PL](http://internetpulse.net/Main.aspx?Metric=PL) ]

EDIT: Smile! You're on CNN! [http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/10/tech/web/google- down/](http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/10/tech/web/google-down/)

<comment> mkr-hn A traceroute earlier showed no network issues. I should have done a pathping to have something to compare with.

<comment><USER2> I saw a G+ blog on it briefly as i got a search result to work. Here's the link. good luck reading it. [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDoQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stateofsearch.com%2Fgoogle- down- cleaning%2F&ei=uGvdUa6GCJHC9gSlqoGgDg&usg=AFQjCNGZyjNk7rOGMGbJQx5GoDjvGYLg-w&bvm=bv.48705608,d.eWU&cad=rja)

<comment><USER3> Back up for me. Comcast support was a JOKE.

<comment><USER2> Yeah it's back up for me now too. CNN had an article on it, funnily enough. They are headquartered in Atlanta though so they probably all got hit with the outage. Seems the southeast and comcast users were hit hardest

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> K, so this may be important. There are power outages around Charleston, SC, the location of a large Google data center. That could be the source of the downtime for Southeastern users.

</comment><comment><USER4> ISP: Comporium Communications Location: Rock Hill, SC

It's starting to look like East Coast USA. I'm talking to a few people outside of EST that are still able to access every service.

</comment><comment><USER5> ISP: AT&T Location: Meriden, CT

The main Google home page comes up for me; as does Google Voice and Google Docs. And my Google Apps email accounts are working.

</comment><comment><USER6> ISP: Comcast Location: Covington TN Does it have anything to do with the weather?

</comment><comment><USER7> Google.co.uk homepage was not working earlier: ISP: TalkTalk

Location: SW United Kingdom

</comment><comment><USER8> ISP: ETC - Ellijay Telephone Company Location: Ellijay, GA

</comment><comment><USER9> ISP: Wake Forest University Location: Winston-Salem, NC

</comment><comment><USER10> Heartland Internet Paducah, Ky.

pings to other major sites timing out

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow, nearly everyone who responded is in the East.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's back up for me. Kennesaw, GA -- Comcast.

</comment><comment><USER13> ISP:Comcast Xfinity Location: Strawberry Plains,TN

</comment><comment><USER14> ISP: charter Location: Roswell

Google seems to be working fine here

</comment><comment><USER15> ISP: Comcast (ComCrap!) Location: Huntsville, AL

</comment><comment><USER16> ISP: Earthlink Business Location: Charlotte, NC

</comment><comment><USER17> ISP: Comcast Business Location: Mt. Juliet, TN

</comment><comment><USER18> ISP: Comcast Business Location Ganiesville, GA

</comment><comment><USER19> ISP: Comcast + CBeyond Location: Acworth, GA

</comment><comment><USER12> ISP: Comcast Business Location: Kennesaw, GA

</comment><comment><USER20> ISP: COMCAST LOCATION: FORT MYERS, FL (SWFL)

</comment><comment><USER21> ISP: Comcast Business

Location: Alpharetta, GA

t-mobile is up in the same area

</comment><comment><USER22> ISP: CenturyLink Location: Tallahassee, FL

</comment><comment><USER23> ISP: Comcast Location: Fort Oglethorpe, GA

</comment><comment><USER24> ISP: Comcast Location: San Francisco, CA

</comment><comment><USER25> ISP: Time Warner Location: Memphis, TN

</comment><comment><USER26> ISP: Comporium Location: Rock Hill, SC

</comment><comment><USER27> ISP: Comcast Location: Tallahassee, FL

</comment><comment><USER28> ISP:Windstream Location:Charlotte, NC

</comment><comment><USER29> ISP: TW Telecom Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER30> ISP: Comcast Location: Winchester, VA

</comment><comment><USER31> ISP: Comcast Location Harrisonburg VA

</comment><comment><USER32> ISP: Comcast Location: Nashville, TN

</comment><comment><USER33> ISP: Comcast Location: Nashville, TN

</comment><comment><USER34> ISP: Comcast Location: Nashville, TN

</comment><comment><USER35> ISP: Comcast Location: Nashville, TN

</comment><comment><USER36> ISP: Comcast Location: Jackson, MS

</comment><comment><USER37> ISP: Comcast Location: Nashville, TN

</comment><comment><USER38> ISP: Comcast Location: North Alabama

</comment><comment><USER39> ISP: Comcast

Location: Roswell, GA

Edit: Up for me now at 10:47 Eastern

</comment><comment><USER40> ISP: Comcast Location: Brentwood, TN

</comment><comment><USER41> ISP: Comcast Location: Nashville, TN

</comment><comment><USER42> ISP: Sprint 3G Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER43> ISP: Comcast Location: Knoxville, TN

</comment><comment><USER39> just talked to a friend in NYC - no issues there, so doesn't appear to be entire East Coast

</comment><comment><USER44> ISP:twTelecom Location:Columbia, SC

</comment><comment><USER45> ISP: Comcast Business Class

Location: Tallahassee, FL

</comment><comment><USER2> ISP: Comcast Location: Staunton, VA

</comment><comment><USER46> ISP: Comcast

Location: Oak Ridge (near Knoxville), TN

</comment><comment><USER47> ISP: Comcast Location: Fairview, TN

</comment><comment><USER48> ISP: Comcast Location: Norcross, GA

</comment><comment><USER49> ISP: ComSouth Location: Cochran, GA

</comment><comment><USER50> ISP: DirecPath

Location: Atlanta, GA

Edit: it seems to be working now.

</comment><comment><USER51> ISP: Comcast Location: Augusta, GA

</comment><comment><USER52> ISP: Comcast Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER53> ISP: Comcast Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER54> ISP: Comcast Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER55> ISP: Comcast Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER56> ISP: Comcast Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER57> ISP: EPB Location: Chattanooga, TN

</comment><comment><USER58> ISP: Comcast Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER59> ISP: Comcast Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER60> ISP: Comcast Location: Atlanta GA

</comment><comment><USER4> Back up for me in Rock Hill, SC

</comment><comment><USER61> ISP: Comcast Business

Location: Charleston, SC

<comment><USER61> I switched the office over to the T1 that normally carries our VoIP traffic and it's been smooth sailing ever since. This is a Razorline connection.

traceroute www.google.com shows hops over level3 to 188.8.131.52. Over the Comcast link I was resolving www.google.com to 220.127.116.11 - which appears to be accessible now over the Razorline. Haven't attempted to access via Comcast, so it could just be that it's back up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> ISP: Comcast Business

Location: Nashville, TN

</comment><comment><USER63> ISP: ATT Business Fiber

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER64> ISP: Comcast Business

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER65> Comcast Jacksonville, FL

</comment><comment><USER66> ISP: Comcast Norcross, GA

</comment><comment><USER32> Comcast Middle Tennessee

</comment><comment><USER67> ISP: Comcast

Location: Atlanta, GA

EDIT: It's back now!

</comment><comment><USER68> ISP: Comcast Xfinity

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER69> Comcast - Chattanooga TN

</comment><comment><USER70> ISP: Windstream

Location: Little Rock, AR

</comment><comment><USER71> ISP: EPB Fiber

Location: Chattanooga, TN

</comment><comment><USER36> Back up in Jackson, MS

</comment><comment><USER72> ISP: Time Warner

Location: New York, NY

</comment><comment><USER73> ISP: Comcast

Location: Murfreesboro, TN

</comment><comment><USER74> ISP: TW Telecom

Location: Columbia, SC

</comment><comment><USER75> ISP: Comcast

Location: Greeneville, TN

</comment><comment> mkr-hn ISP: Comcast

Location: Winder, Georgia

</comment><comment><USER76> ISP: Comcast

Location: Tuscaloosa, AL

</comment><comment><USER77> ISP: DirectPath

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER78> ISP: Comcast

Location: Huntsville, AL

</comment><comment><USER79> ISP: GruCom

Location: Gainesville, FL

</comment><comment><USER80> ISP: Comcast

Location: Huntsville, AL

</comment><comment><USER81> ISP: Comcast

Location: Charleston, SC

</comment><comment><USER82> ISP: Comcast

Location: Alpharetta, GA

</comment><comment><USER83> ISP: Comacast

Location: Buckhead, GA

Just came back up

</comment><comment><USER84> ISP: ATT Fiber

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER85> ISP: Comcast

Location: Brunswick, GA

</comment><comment><USER86> ISP: Comcast

Location: North Alabama

</comment><comment><USER87> ISP: Comcast

Location: Portland, TN

</comment><comment><USER88> ISP: Comcast

Location: Monroe, LA

</comment><comment><USER89> ISP: Comcast

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER90> ISP: Comcast

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER91> ISP: Comcast

Location: Memphis, TN

</comment><comment><USER92> ISP: Comcast

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER93> ISP: Comcast

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER94> ISP: Comcast

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER95> ISP: Comcast

Location: Acworth, GA

</comment><comment><USER96> ISP: Comcast

Location: Decatur, GA

</comment><comment><USER97> ISP: Comcast

Location: Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER98> comcast: Lawrenceville, GA 30044

22.214.171.124 18.104.22.168

</comment><comment><USER99> ISP: TDS

Location: Knoxville, TN

</comment><comment><USER100> ISP: TDS

Location: Nashville, TN

</comment><comment><USER101> ISP: VC3

Location: Columbia, SC

</comment><comment><USER102> ISP: Unknown

Location: South TX

</comment><comment><USER103> isp: comcast location: atlanta, ga

</comment><comment><USER98> ISP: Comcast

</comment><comment><USER104> ISP: WOW!

Location: Dothan, AL

</comment><comment><USER105> TW Telecom

Memphis, TN

</comment><comment><USER3> Comcast

Atlanta, GA

</comment><comment><USER106> atlanta, ga comcast</comment>


Introduction to data science - <AUTHOR> http://datascienc.es/spring-2011-course/

<comment><USER2> Anybody have a code for the vimeo lectures? Thanks for the post!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry. I forgot that detail. Lol. It's 'datascience'.</comment></comment>


What is a magic number, and why is it bad? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/47882/what-is-a-magic-number-and-why-is-it-bad

<comment><USER2> I just have a Numbers class I import into all my projects:

public final static int ZERO = 0; public final static int ONE = 1; public final static int TWO = 2; public final static int THREE = 3; public final static int FOUR = 4; ....

(jk)

<comment><USER3> I've seen a project that defined string constants like:

       public static String HTTP = "http";
       public static String COLON = ":";
       public static String SLASH = "/";

with code that looked like:

       url = HTTP + COLON + SLASH + SLASH + ....

[NB I am NOT joking]

<comment><USER4> It can be fun with code like that to see if you can imagine situations where you could argue with a straight face that the code is OK.

       public static String HTTP = "http";

An argument for this might be that it allows you to easily change to https by changing that one line, although then the name of the string would be misleading.

       public static String COLON = ":";
       public static String SLASH = "/";

These are harder. Maybe you don't want ":" and "/" to appear literally because for some reason you grep for ":" and "/" a lot looking for instances that are syntactically significant in your language and you got tired of hitting those characters in URL strings.

All of these potential excuses fall, though, to the objection that all three of those could have been rolled into a single string, with a sensible name like URL_COMMON_PREFIX:

       public static String URL_COMMON_PREFIX = "http://";

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant.

This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.

\-- Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers

</comment><comment><USER6> No one seems to be mentioning another use of the phrase "magic number" which isn't bad at all - numbers put in files to mark the file type. 0xCAFEBABE in java class files, for instance.

<comment><USER7> Unix even has "man 5 magic", which describes the format of the magic numbers file that the "file" command uses to determine the type of a file (executable, object code, shell script, etc.) from its first few characters.

My personal favorite magic numbers are the values that debuggers use to fill uninitialized memory, like 0xDEADBEEF, 0xBAADF00D, etc.

Wikipedia has a good article on magic numbers:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(programming)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_\(programming\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That is about the worst top-rated answer I've seen in a while on SO.

<comment><USER9> Agreed.

In my opinion there are two kinds of magic numbers:

* the first kind is the one most answers describe: an arbitrary number used in various places that may change at any moment. The size of a buffer for instance.

* the second kind are numbers that represent something very specific but not immediately obvious when reading the code: for instance in a device driver "read_register(base + DEVICE_STATUS)" is much clearer than "read_register(base + 0x3c)". In this case naming the magic number is useful even if it's used only once in the code. It acts as a comment basically.

I'd also add that sometimes adding too many levels of indirection is a bad thing, and in the (currently) top voted answer I prefer the original over the "fixed" version. Either you do the right thing and make MAX_PASSWORD_SIZE something meaningful or you might as well write "if (password.length() > 7)". It's clear, non ambiguous and (in the example) not reused anywhere. Defining a macro for that just hides poor code and forces me to go look for the definition in order to understand what's going on (while debugging for instance).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd have personally thought the number used in the fast inverse square root ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root)) would qualify as a 'magic number', everything else is just a hardcoded value.

</comment><comment><USER11> I find these a lot with CSS - banishing them seem to be a major goal of LESS, SASS etc.

They also seem to crop up too often in JS / JQuery, particularly the manipulation of CSS.. where do you folks tend to find them?

</comment><comment><USER12> Also, it can be a good idea to yank out all of those into a separate config file. Although, it destroys locality, so it depends on the use case I guess.

<comment> qu4z-2 I wouldn't move it into a config file unless you're also testing the code works correctly with different values. Otherwise it's just asking for trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> New term added to my vocabulary - thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER4> I just call any constants that slip into my code "advanced technology numbers" if someone gives me a hard time about them.

</comment><comment><USER14> Caring about magic numbers is a distraction from real problems, such as getting your software working.

<comment><USER11> Once the software's working, and has been for several years, and it has become unmaintainable because lax guidelines let this stuff through, this sort of thing becomes your _real problem_.

<comment><USER15> Nah, ubiquitous session re-use, bad APIs, arbitrary data structures (e.g everything in complex sets of nested arrays), hardening of code against static analysis (e.g. database lookups to instantiate classes at runtime) rate way higher on my scale.

Local use of magic numbers (across 1 file) don't bother me any more, although I will recommend fixing them when I find them.</comment></comment></comment>


The Fundamental Physical Limits of Computation - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-fundamental-physical-limits-of-computation/ <comment><AUTHOR> [http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant- ph/9908043.pdf)</comment>


How the .NET Runtime Loads a Type - <AUTHOR> http://mattwarren.org/2017/06/15/How-the-.NET-Rutime-loads-a-Type/ <comment><USER2> This (somewhat) complicated process is also why generics can be fully reified in the CLR.

<comment><USER3> I love generics! Simplifies all my api creations deeply, huge re-use of code and very flexible implementations.

Eg. An API to a IoT cloud that lets user define their own type. The payload that i fetch is <T> so users can define their own type.

Another one is an api where i take a generic approach, so my only code that i write ( for every "class" / " model" ) is:

//every endpoint does a complete crud + jsonpatch + batch, also, all methods can be overridden to customize code. This is the code i need to write every time :p [https://pastebin.com/fp8MtpBu](https://pastebin.com/fp8MtpBu)

Note to myselve: extend the implementation to support expressions ( odata ) in the url ( similar to sql on top of an API through changing url parameters) and return the dto as response. :)

<comment><USER4> > I also use dto's in some endpoints. So i should extend the implementation to > support linq on the domain model ( on odata) and return the dto as response. > But this is for later i suppose

Please don't. I've ended up maintaining far too many abominations where developers got excited about generics and linq rather than solving real problems. You just end up with apps that should be simple and straightforward being a nightmare to maintain.

Generics, linq and inheritance all have their uses but if they aren't used sparingly they create more spaghetti.

Edit - at the very least, please be careful and use generics as sparingly as possible.

<comment><USER5> Do you have any examples of how generics could create spaghetti code? Given that they aren't control flow constructs, I'm having a hard time imagining such a situation.

<comment><USER6> If you try to use generics too hard you make crazy shit. I'm working on a system that has a Something<T, Y> but the Y inherits from the T and its all just a mad mess that makes no sense at face value. I guess someone thought it was a good idea at some point but the end result is just confusing as hell. Then you realise its just sitting upon 5 really simple Sql tables and you realise its really convoluted.

Its all about stepping back and going: "am I trying too hard?". Like that last 10% of making the code base 100% elegant is what ruins it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Two Things - <AUTHOR> http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/thetwothings.html

<comment><USER2> "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things" - Phil Karlton <http://people.famouswhy.com/phil_karlton/> (NB: "hard" things)

While we're being flippant: Every problem in computer science can be solved by adding another level of indirection - except for the problem of too many levels of indirection

<comment><USER3> and off-by-one errors <http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hate to break it to the HN crowd, but for most subjects there are really more than two things you need to know. This article is nonsense.

<comment><USER5> I don't think you read the article. It is only saying that there are two things you need to know in jest. If you looked at the article, you'd see that many fields, such as CS, have more than one set of "two things" that you need to know.

<comment><USER6> I will not comment on whether most fields can really be boiled down to just two notes, but you'll notice that the author states that one of the "things" about his rule of two things, is that everyone you ask will give you a different two. Since the multiple CS entries are all (I think) from different people, they do not violate the author's assertion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Startups:

Your product must be something people want.

Your product must be something you can make.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like the concept, but some of the particular examples posted here are questionable or just plain wrong.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, I like the concept but much of the responses are just flippant. There are a couple useful gems in there though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Two things about Hacker News:

1\. You will spend too much time here

2\. You will discover noprocrast

<comment><USER11> 1\. You will discover noprocrast 2\. It won't make a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Two Things involved in making life changes, like exercise or learning:

\- Do it today

\- Repeat

</comment><comment><USER13> The answers in the article are pretty cool, except for the programming ones. Just like in programming, people try to get cute with conciseness and end up making pretty unfunny jokes. Once you have heard the word "idiot" in anything having to do with programming, subsequent mentions are yawners.

But the whole idea of narrowing down everything to two core principles is awesome; so +1 from me, certainly.

<comment><USER14> I suspect that "the answers are pretty cool, except for <the ones regarding the subject I know a lot about>" is itself the most common reaction.

<comment><USER13> No, there were a few about topics such as economics (one each?), and a ton about programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On life (from the movie "How Do You Know"): 1\. Figure out what you really want. 2\. Learn how to ask for it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Set Theory:

1\. ZF

2\. C

or

Set Theory:

1\. Everything is a set

2\. Not everything is a set

<comment><USER17> Axiom of Choice has been on shaky ground for the past 50 years and really only continues it's existence through inertia. The second one has some deep wisdom in it though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Worth reading for this:

The Two Things about Biology: 1\. Evolution is the process through which genetic structures that are better equipped to reproduce viable copies will tend to proliferate. 2\. Except for the Platypus.

</comment><comment><USER19> Obviously the premise of "two things" is fairly ridiculous, but I bet it's an interesting thing to ask people at parties. I cannot stand party small talk, and the most fun I've had socialising with strangers were when I ask them straight questions like these.

Another thing I ask people, just out of curiosity since it's not insightful at the same level, is to just go through their average day. Sort of like a bottom-up description of their work/study/whatever live, instead of the top- down answer you get when you ask "so, what do you do".

Some people may think it's weird, though.

</comment><comment><USER20> Dentistry:

1\. Everybody hates Dentists.

2\. Dentists hate everybody.

<comment><USER21> #1 is true until you have unbearable pain and he gets rid of it for u

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mathematics:

1\. Everything you thought you knew about the fundamental structure of the universe before will only make you ashamed.

2\. It's all just vanity

</comment><comment><USER22> For Biology, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is wrong. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory>

Instead I would say: 1\. Some things can replicate better than others. 2\. Things replicate imperfectly, causing change over time.

<comment><USER23> When I got to that quote, I laughed and stopped reading. This list has clearly not been fact checked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, I've never seen an article both prove and disprove itself so well simultaneously.

</comment><comment><USER25> Two things about The Game:

1) You are playing The Game 2) You just lost The Game

<comment><USER26> 1) 391. 2) XKCD is your friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> MIT graduate I met 30 years ago told me he had a professor tell him that there are 3 things in life:

      1. things divisible by 3
      2. things not divisible by 3
      3. other things

</comment><comment><USER28> Brevity is the soul of wit.

<comment><USER29> Brevity is... wit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Electrical engineering:

1\. Maxwell's equations

2\. Information theory

It's amazing how much you can derive from just these two things, if you're willing to do a lot of math.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow - this is awesome and uber old, good find....adding to it.

Two things about Social Media:

1\. Content is King

2\. Everyone's an Social Media expert :P

</comment><comment><USER32> on Two Things:

1\. There are only two things you need to know for any subject

2\. When there appears to be more than two, divide the subject

<comment><USER32> on The Correctness of Two Things:

1\. There are only two things you need to know for any subject

2\. Sometimes there are exceptions

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Computer Science:

1\. Your code always does exactly what you tell it to and never anything more.

2\. You probably don't actually know what you're telling it to do.

<comment><USER34> An alternative 2. Solve big problems by breaking them into smaller problems.

<comment><USER33> I actually like that one a lot more.

Alternatively: 2\. Underneath, everything is a graphing problem

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Programming:

1\. As it gets complicated add indirection/abstraction

2\. Its about talking to people not machines

</comment><comment><USER36> Two things about minimalistic programming:

1\. lambdas 2\. there is no second thing

</comment><comment><USER37> Statistics:

Central Limit Theorem

Law of Large Numbers.

<comment><USER38> Statistics: 1\. Correlation does not lead to causation 2\. We like to think it does

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Teaching:

1\. There are no safe assumptions.

2\. Relate.</comment>


Why football, not chess, is the true final frontier for robotic AI - <AUTHOR> http://theconversation.com/why-football-not-chess-is-the-true-final-frontier-for-robotic-artificial-intelligence-62296 <comment><USER2> i think teamplay spirt are chalenging,

csgo must be dificult to play as a team, near game theory nash equilibrium.</comment>


Do we need another web analaytics program - <AUTHOR>

I was thinking about the future of my latest project this morning, and I realized that logically it should become a web analytics program. Now, this is something Google (and others) already do pretty well, so I'm trying to decide if it's worth the trouble.<p>Do we need another web analytics program, or is what we have 'good enough'? If not, what features would you love to see in an analytics site that you don't have right now? <comment><USER2> This is a pretty well developed space but I would think there's opportunity in combining analytics and optimization (like the way optimizely combines building and reading a/b tests, <http://optimizely.com>).

A pure analytics tool will be a lot of reinventing the wheel, but theres still room for growth in terms of quickly turning results into something that improves business performance.</comment>


Show HN: Kubenav – An open source mobile app to manage Kubernetes cluster - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kubenav/kubenav <comment><AUTHOR> kubenav is a mobile and desktop app to help you manage Kubernetes clusters. The app provides an overview of all your workloads and resources running in your clusters, including the current status. The details view of your workloads contains all the necessary logs and events to debug your clusters in case of problems. You can also edit and delete resources within the app.

The app is developed using Ionic Framework[0] and Capacitor[1]. The most parts of the app are implemented using React and TypeScript. For the Kubernetes API requests the app uses Go mobile[2].

[0] - [https://ionicframework.com](https://ionicframework.com)

[1] - [https://capacitor.ionicframework.com](https://capacitor.ionicframework.com)

[2] - [https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Mobile](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Mobile)

</comment><comment><USER2> When you apply "infrastructure as code", you should not be able to change manifests from a mobile phone without using git.

<comment><USER3> Do you mean gitops? I thought infrastructure as code was to make sure your entire cloud environment is code so you can reliability reproduce it. Either way, they're both concepts to strive for and tools market it this way, but the ideas have been around for a long time.

I use kuber for my sandbox clusters to try out new ideas or trouble shoot on the go. I think mobile debugging tools are pretty cool tools. Especially for SRE's. I used to carry around a foldable keyboard and be able to shell into pods to debug things.

<comment><USER2> There is no point for production code which is not in Git. As a toy/sandbox, sure this would be handy, but I wouldn't use it for a testing or staging cluster.

<comment><USER3> Why not for testing/staging?

Also gitops tools have sync so if you change something it'll auto generate a commit with its current state. No sure if you know about it but you should check it out! Staging environments don't want to be too far off from production but at the same time, it can and should be used to test things, so that production deployments are predictable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder why the Android version of this app needs permission to: 1\. Take pictures and videos 2\. Record audio 3\. Get precise GPS location, or any location at all.

<comment><USER5> Probably just default settings for some framework. But great question!

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. These are the default settings from Capacitor[0].

Thanks for the hint, I will look through them and remove some of them.

[0] - [https://capacitor.ionicframework.com/docs/android/configurat...](https://capacitor.ionicframework.com/docs/android/configuration/#default- permissions)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks nice, but I hope the devs don't need access to this kind of low level administration.

Also, how come GitHub disallows zoom for mobile? ...

</comment><comment><USER7> You should support the external authenticators like aws-iam-authenticator for authentication.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the mobile version support for EKS and GKE was added in the latest version. For the next version, I plan to add support for AKS.

To avoid this for the desktop version, kubenav uses the Kubeconfig file from `~/.kube/config` in the next version[0]. Therefor all cloud providers should be supported on desktop.

[0] - [https://github.com/kubenav/kubenav/pull/25](https://github.com/kubenav/kubenav/pull/25)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Finally a management portal that is swift! not that laggy kubernetes dashboard...</comment>


Growing Old on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://clayallsopp.com/posts/mirror-mirror/?

<comment><USER2> The interesting comments posted before mine prompted me to read the whole fine article kindly submitted here. The article beings with "There's an entire generation where every photo, message, post, idea between adolescence and adulthood is cataloged on Facebook." The posting of photos as conveniently as Facebook allows posting photos is somewhat new (as is home Internet connections with enough bandwidth to put up with an online service jam full of photos), but on the whole this doesn't feel new to me.

Maybe Facebook doesn't feel new to me because I am old (born during the Eisenhower administration, just as the Space Age was beginning). To me, Facebook in 2012 seems much like AOL in 1998: a huge, dominant force in Internet interaction among the general public that is already doomed by fundamental flaws in its business plan. I'm old, and I have seen predictions come and go over the years, but this is my prediction about Facebook, and I'm sticking to it: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it."

Facebook makes it MORE apparent, if anything, than the earlier forms of online communication did how selectively people report details about their lives in online communities. I've known some good friends through online acquaintance, interspersed with real-world interaction, for twenty years. I'm well aware that the online picture of any person is incomplete, just as the knowledge of one person by any one acquaintance is incomplete. I think Facebook provides some convenience in keeping up with a varied group of Facebook "friends" including several of my first cousins, one of my children who has grown up and moved away from home (he was an early adopter of Facebook, and is now largely tired of it), former co-workers, classmates, current members of the same professional associations, and so on. It's a lot of fun to see friends from different phases of my life interact and learn from one another. I've managed to make my Facebook wall be like a targeted Hacker News: a place where I can find thoughtful discussion of links I discover while Web-browsing. To me, that's something well worth growing old with.

The article includes the paragraph: "You can message someone you haven't spoken with in years, and yet it visually flows right under some unimaginably unrelated conversation from 2007. And when you realize that exact numerical gap between the years, it stings a little. Reading how you've changed, how they've changed, and thinking about everything that didn't happen in-between." That is the most startling default setting of the Facebook messaging system. My email inbox, which is sorted strictly by date order, obscures the gaps in communication I have with some correspondents. (Cleaning out my drafts folder from time to time discloses those gaps.) But real-world analogies of this are receiving Christmas cards after a gap of a few years in correspondence, and the like. The strength of communication in each relationship ebbs and flows, or so I have observed for more than five decades now.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree. I've seen several things like this surge and die before.

With the Nov. 2011 edgerank changes, ie forced "close friend" newsfeed, the one magical thing about FB, which I call _digital osmosis_ \-- ie keeping up with people without interaction -- has gone the way of the dodo.

I'm planning my escape: Valentines Day 2013 I'm closing my account. Working on a toolset to host my own timeline, on my own server. May keep a fake account to access a site here or there and keep up with a few vague acquaintances, but will stop posting and handing my data over to FB.

FWIW, I find many high quality conversations on Google+ these days since they've launched their communities (e/g/ big data community, DDD).

Now get off my astroturf ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love it when 20-somethings talk about "growing old."

I'm in my 40s, and I'm pretty much the same person I was in 2007. Same haircut, same career, and mostly the same friends.

<comment><USER5> I am in my 40s also. I have not changed much in the last 5 years, but then again that is just over 10% of my life. At 25, 5 years represents 20% of your life and the part of your life where most people change a lot. Perhaps we should both do something crazy and change our hairstyle for a couple months. Then we can reminisce later about that crazy period in our forties.

"Youth is wasted on the young" - George Bernard Shaw

<comment><USER6> That quote always makes me uncomfortable. I'm 27. I spend a fair amount of time desperately trying to uncover what it is I'm wasting my youth on, or else determining what it is I've already wasted it on.

Hah. Okay, maybe that was an accidental joke.

<comment><USER7> That quote was written specifically to make you feel uncomfortable. Older people love to quote it, because we all have a catalog of things that we'd love to go back and relive more fully, or do right the first time, or not do at all. The cruel irony of it all is that you probably don't know how you're wasting your youth until you look back on it in retrospect and facepalm. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have many aunts and married friends on Facebook who upload tons of images of their kids.

I wonder what plans, if any, Facebook has to reach out to those kids in 10 years time when they are "old enough" (heh) to use Facebook.

Can you imagine having your entire life documented on some website? Pretty creepy in my opinion. I have to discourage my wife to upload images of our kids.

<comment><USER4> I have a four-year old, and I've actually started thinking about that quite a bit.

I think an infant has no expectation of privacy. Any decisions regarding a baby's on-line presence is limited to the parent's common sense.

Now that my son is in pre-school, we're dialing back on his on-line presence. Pictures on flickr and facebook are being re-categorized to "friends and family."

As he gets older, we're going to respect his wishes as to what should be made "public." If he doesn't want the story of the cute thing he did put up on facebook, we'll honor that request.

I'll also help him navigate being on-line. I know a pre-teen whose parents won't let him use a Minecraft public server (because of the risk of creepy douchebags), but a LAN server for him and his buddies is okay.

<comment><USER9> > I think an infant has no expectation of privacy.

This is really funny out of context :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We have photo albums going back 4 and 5 generations. We have postcards sent by great grandparents and grandparents during the first world war. I can imagine Neal Stephenson like alternative stories about people falling out when they come back...

I think that - as often with the digital/Internet thing - it is not qualitatively _new_ having documents of yourself, but the huge increase in the _quantity_ of this information and the way it lives _outside your control_. Same way that mix tapes in the two tape drive days were copyright violation, but had a considerable time and effort barrier so not too many got made and they had limited distribution. Digital copying is low effort, and broadcasting trivial. Hence problems...

PS: I'm 54 and think about Life, Time &c quite often.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm 32 and Facebook has turned into a nightmare cavalcade of weddings and other people's children. No more smiling faces, parties or high jinks, just more wrinkles, more responsibilities, more towing the line.

<comment><USER12> Pictures of my kid are about all I post on Facebook anymore. The constantly changing privacy settings mean I don't trust it for posting anything especially interesting, so I've mostly stopped posting at all. Every once in awhile I put up a kid picture to make relatives etc. happy, but that's basically my only use case for FB now. Especially since I stopped wanting to read other people's updates too, when I discovered that many people I know have moronic political opinions that they feel compelled to share.

So maybe people block my updates because they are tired of seeing my kid, but I've probably blocked them because I got tired of reading about how Mitt Romney wants to ban tampons or whatever.

Also, "toeing" and "hijinks".

<comment><USER13> Are you familiar with Facebook's FTC settlement over privacy settings?

 _The order requires Facebook to obtain its users' "affirmative express consent" before it can override their own privacy settings. For example, if a user designated certain content to be visible only to "friends," Facebook could allow that content to be shared more broadly only after obtaining the user's permission._

[https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook- agree...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agrees-to- ftc-settlement-on-privacy.html?_r=1&);

I'm curious whether folks expect this settlement to keep the hijinks in line. Nothing particularly egregious seems to have happened to privacy settings since November 2011.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "These pristine reflections of our former selves will live on in the tombs of archived data; they will outlive us."

True. However, from what I have seen, most people don't even care what they were like before.

The majority of people are too concerned about their idiot kids and mortgages to contemplate and ponder about life, time, etc. Once you have kids and a mortgage, I doubt you will even care about backing up clayallsopp.com.

Don't take my word for it:

* the anti-war hippy generation. * the Ayn Rand crowd of the 60s/70s. * the Springsteen/anti-nuclear generation. * the Ron Paul generation.

They are all now (or will be) a bunch of yuppies worried about their retirement benefits. They have "better" things to do than to ponder about life, time, etc.

<comment><USER15> I think you are mis-reading the intention of the post.

It's not about caring. It's not that we want to go back and relive the past. It's more about how you are ready to message someone and some older conversation from 2007 pops up. It's a weird nostalgic feeling about something you don't really care about much. But hey it's out there.

<comment><USER14> You're right. I went off on a tangent. Apologies to the author. Thanks for politely pointing that out to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This and a few other interesting concerns are up in Delete[1] by Viktor Mayer- Schönberger.

This is a very interesting book that explains a lot of historical context for how the digital age differs from what came before. The linked blog post highlights the temporal aspect of digital memory - that a post from a day ago is as easily accessible as one from ten years ago.

Perhaps even more important is that because we limit what we post, context gets completely removed. So many people carefully curate their identity that the image we see of a person is not only an image from N years ago, but is also only what N years ago's version of one's self chose to publish to the web.

We definitely live in interesting times, I would encourage anyone that thinks on this phenomenon to check out the book.

1\. <http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8981.html>

</comment><comment><USER17> Someone once reminded me of how all our digitally catalogued photos come with status messages.

I don't know what difference that will make compared to analogue Kodak moments, but it's very interesting to think about.

Mostly, I'm happy that my childhood photos won't come with horribly-spelt comments. :)

</comment><comment><USER18> There is a way to fix this madness

<http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674>

</comment><comment><USER19> Nope. I treat Facebook as a 12 month delay line - any content older than that gets "deleted" (I maybe archive messages). I actually hate the whole idea and would have deleted my account a long time ago, but it's the only medium by which I'll get to see photos of my nephew until I build something simpler for our extended family to use.

<comment><USER20> I do the same thing but with 6 months instead of 12. I think the absolute limit is somewhere between 6 months and 3 months. Most stuff which is at least 3 months old is stuff whose only value is for reminiscing about later. On the other hand, sometimes I don't want to delete something at the 6 month mark because I find it to be still relevant or it is a cover/profile picture and I don't want to replace it. I've tried going without Facebook for a while, but I find that my peers use it a lot for communication. They tend not to like email which is unfortunate because email will outlive Facebook and the immediate successor to Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I must be the only one who finds that a bit... scary. But I don't keep old photo albums either.

Maybe it needs some kind of hate for your younger self to cut ties, cut hair, throw away old stuff and start a new life somewhere else, never looking back, while others reminisce.

<comment><USER22> Unrelated: what does your username mean? I'm hoping it's totally random.

<comment><USER21> It sure is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think of Facebook as being like 1950s TV. Peoples' pictures show the atypical moments of their lives that they _wish_ were typical: vacations, parties and weddings. No one posts pictures of their damn cubicles or dirty laundry.

A typical person who mistook those photos to reflect how peoples' lives _actually_ are, and not rare moments out of years, would become envious and miserable.

As with the 1950s, which were nothing like what TV portrays the era as being, I worry that future generations will see these 2012-era photos and ask if our lives really were this glamorous, with average people constantly taking vacations. Well, no. That was not reality.</comment>


Ask HN: Computer Science Student with free electives -- what should I study? - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to a state university, and am studying CS. Next year I get basically 3 semesters of free electives in any area I want to study. I will be taking an entrepreneurship class. But what you study to be most effective in becoming the best developer you can become?
My interests are mostly web, but am really interested in writing desktop software for Unix/Mac systems.
Here's what I am thinking: study more theory behind computing and languages, learn how languages and computers work, then learn a few languages that I can then take and learn about other languages. Does that make it sense?
What is your best advice for a CS student? <comment><USER2> Many of these are probably not electives, but here's the list of stuff that I'm glad I took or wish I had taken while getting my CS degree:

* compilers. Seriously. It's hard, but it's the single class I look back on as having made me a better engineer

* at least one "weirdo" math class. Non-Euclidian geometry, or group and set theory stuff, or whatever else you see that is off the beaten path and possibly taught by a well-liked professor. You will learn to solve problems better using non-standard techniques, and it may be just plain fun.

* One of the two or three classes in the philosophy department that deal with logic, puzzles, paradoxes, and such. You may be surprised at first that about a third of the people in those classes are in your CS classes, too. Figuring out what is computable and what is true isn't all done in your discreet math classes.

* A basic science class unrelated to your engineering field. Astronomy is a good one. Learn about your world, and possibly meet your future spouse.

* The most popular class on campus. Every school has that cool class taught by the famous professor that everyone attends. There's a reason for that. It's probably in the psycology, english, or history departments. Your spouse may also be in this one.

* Introduction to Civil Engineering. Knowing a bit about static forces, failures, and materials helps you when you need to build or fix stuff. These guys also have been engineers a lot longer than there have been software engineers. They teach you how to fail properly, perform repeatable tasks to ensure quality, and other engineering practices.

* Law for business students. Your business school offers an intro class to the law. It's like the first year of law school smashed into a single semester class for business students. It covers contracts, torts, agencies, and other things that will keep you out of trouble.

Yeah, most of these classes aren't in the CS department. Don't miss your opportunity to see the folks on the other side of the campus in that other quad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Take a design class, or typography. A programmer who can do some design and understands the theory behind it is inherently more of a self starter than one that can't do design.

</comment><comment><USER4> Art history. That's where all the girls are. Speaking from experience, here.</comment>


Show HN: SunScanner - my attempt at a better travel search - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
Long time HN reader here, first submission. I built SunScanner (www.sunscanner.co.uk) over the last two weeks, inspired by Kayak Explore and the question - can I improve the way we search for holidays.
The site is UK-focused, and searches the major holiday sites. I've done this all on my own, so any errors are mine, and the learning curve has been steep (the major problem I face now is to learn database optimisation - the database is large, and some queries can take some time).
I'd love to hear feedback from the HN community on this.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Looks pretty good to me, but if I limit the search to Heathrow and just a few months in the middle of the year, nothing comes up. Where are you getting your data from?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I should have disabled Heathrow for now, as no tour operator flies from there. Try any other airport and there are literally thousands of results.

Data comes direct from the tour operators.

EDIT: have now disabled Heathrow until I add data for that airport.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.sunscanner.co.uk></comment>


Ask HN: Do ads affect userbase growth? - <AUTHOR>

I've heard that early on advertising can deter your growth in building your user base, can create a bad reputation for you, users don't come to your site for the ads but rather the content etc.<p>For those of you with bootstrapped startups, did you launch your product with ads? If you did, did the ads play a critical role in user growth statistics? <comment><USER2> Speaking from a user standpoint, I generally don't mind ads if the service or product is good and free.</comment>