Challenges around building an app and how 'Hello Startups' program can help - <AUTHOR> http://discover.7cstudio.com/post/147283558367/challenges-around-building-an-app-and-how-hello <comment><USER2> Great initiative... Good one... Should be helpful for the startups looking to build products and get connected....

</comment><comment><USER3> nice idea. I hope it works.

</comment><comment><USER4> nice idea!!</comment>


Interviewing is a noisy prediction problem - <AUTHOR> https://erikbern.com/2018/05/02/interviewing-is-a-noisy-prediction-problem.html <comment><USER2> I work in a Danish municipality with 7000 employees where we replace around 2000 people each year of which half are education-interns[0]. So I think it's fair to say that we have a good deal of experience with hiring people. I've been involved with quite a few of these processes, and I'm truly fascinated by how many resources and how much effort Americans seem to put into hiring.

Our data shows that if you filter by education, then it's actually relatively easy to hire someone who will perform well. If you get 100 applicants and pick the best 10 based on their A4 sized application letter, their education results and their CV, then you'll typically end up with a pile of at least 10 people who are going to be good enough. Hell once you build that pile of 10 people, you don't even have to read through the rest of the applications because it really won't matter.

I say this fully aware that hiring the wrong person is the most expensive mistake any manager can make. It's just that people aren't really unicorns, and good enough is good enough.

Part of our success is how we onboard people. Because we do use resources on hiring people, we just save them for when people are actually hired. We try to make sure people get the best start they possibly can, because we have found that achieving great employee performance is our responsibility more so than the fresh hire.

As a result our interview consists of 30-45 minutes of small talk where we try to find the person with the best chemistry to fit in their coming team. Don't get me wrong, once in a while we do get an interviewee who flunks completely, but it's very rare.

We have tried a lot of the tricks by the way. We've done code reviews, we've done whiteboard algorithms, we've done live code and it really, really didn't help us get better workers but it did waste a tremendous amount of our time.

Our process is a little different when we hire managers. They get to go through a more standard HR process with personality tests and such. I'm not personally sure it helps though, but I don't have any data to back that last statement up.

0: I'm not sure what they are called in English, they work for half a year as part of their education.</comment>


Real-Time Expression Transfer for Facial Reenactment - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/thies2015realtime.html <comment><USER2> Really interesting to see, it still looks a little cgi'd, so its really cool to see how close we're getting to the uncanny valley. I suppose with some After Effects, you could make it even more difficult see the difference.

My only gripe is that there is always so much focus on the face. I understand that its subtleties make for a great research topic; however, I'd love to see this research applied to the full body. Given a full body shot, could we apply the same techniques to gait?

One of the major hurdles I see is background estimation if you move a limb (though, this might be able to be resolved with the same techniques used in photoshop for content-aware fill.

</comment><comment><USER3> "One could also impersonate the facial expressions of someone in more fitting business attire while actually dressed in casual clothing."

David Foster Wallace [I misremembered it as before edit Philip K. Dick] predicated this would happen. First it would be used to make you look like you were paying attention then it would be used to make you more presentable. He then predicts that when everyone does this it will have the effect of everyone abandoning video telepresence altogether and just going back to using voice only. I can't find the quote.

<comment><USER4> I haven't read Dick, but a similar passage appears in _Infinite Jest_ , by David Foster Wallace:

 _The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry 's psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognmoic Dsyphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking. Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone- consumer and ' thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention._

<comment><USER3> I must have misremembered. David Foster Wallace it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just happened to be playing L.A. Noire recently, which became famous for using motion sensors to transfer actors' facial expressions to their CG version. [1] It looks like this would have them from having to do the whole studio setup and recording for each actor they want to portray.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_L.A._Noire#Tech...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_L.A._Noire#Technical_development)

</comment><comment><USER6> How far away are we from celebrities licensing their likeness for puppeteers to wear in high budget films?

<comment><USER7> How far away are we from malicious "putting words in someone's mouth" a la "look - a video proof of my sociopolitical nemesis saying something utterly reprehensible!"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not a bad approach at the uncanny valley. Reddit face swaps are about to get a lot more fun.

</comment><comment><USER9> Something was missing from this video, so I fixed it: [http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yout...](http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DeXVspNUeiWw&start1=0&video2=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DMSbzh0w6Ex8&start2=&authorName=)

<comment><USER10> Your second video "isn't available"</comment></comment>


Today Is D-Day at the Center for Humane Technology: "A New Agenda for Tech" - <AUTHOR> https://humanetech.community/general/d-day-at-cht/ <comment><USER2> Really curious about this event.. CHT was getting lotsa traction with SV companies at board level.</comment>


Amazon fired hundreds of workers a year from one warehouse over 'productivity' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse-fulfillment-centers-productivity-firing-terminations <comment><USER2> Some of these facilities have thousands of employees. A few hundred firings in a year seems, at a glance, plausible.

In my experience when I was younger, low skill labour in warehouses often were employed with a wide net. Hire just about anyone and then fire the ones who show up drunk, high, not at all, slack off, pick fights, etc.

It's hard not to sound politically incorrect but these jobs attract unemployable people and they end up doing unemployable things and find themselves fired. My wife has similar stories about a Chrysler plant but holy cow those ones are unionized and never get fired.

I don't have all the facts but I'm just saying that on the surface, this is just kind of how it works. For all I know there may truly be something rotten and Amazon is being far more of a slave driver than is normal.

<comment><USER3> > Some of these facilities have thousands of employees. A few hundred firings > in a year seems, at a glance, plausible.

The article mentions these numbers are for a specific warehouse, and provides the total number of employees at that warehouse (~2500).

If you're firing over 10% of your workforce annually for performance, you have fucked up expectations.

<comment><USER4> I bet Fedex and UPS have a higher churn rate. I quit after the second day working in the hub.

<comment><USER3> Remember, this isn't the churn rate we're talking about. It's involuntary separation. I'd imagine the annual churn rate is _way_ above 10%. I don't doubt FedEx and UPS have high churn rates, but I also suspect they don't fire 10% of their package handlers annually.

<comment><USER5> That 10% fired doesn't adjust for churn tho. Over the course of a year there were at minimum 2500 employees working there, we don't know how many unique people worked there over the course of a year to find out their firing rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A friend broke his foot, and couldn't take off to recover because if he called out sick it would mean a week or two of not being scheduled. So he worked he can't be more than one minute late for a bathroom break or he is docked pay. They consider it stealing. If you get docked too many times you're fired. Some people have it shittier than others.

</comment><comment><USER7> > _" Assuming a steady rate, that would mean Amazon was firing more than 10 > percent of its staff annually, solely for productivity reasons._"

This is very common at a lot of white-collar places that do stack-ranking.

From a different perspective, places like Google reject 99% of candidates because they "only hire the best." Whereas Amazon warehouses seem to do the opposite - they are liberal in giving people a shot, and then rigorously weed out anyone with lagging job performance. I suspect a lot of people who get rejected at the interview stage for bullshit reasons would actually prefer the latter approach.

</comment><comment><USER8> Productivity is a really good reason to fire people!

(I'm not advocating for Amazon's labor practices, but the headline should read pro-Amazon)

<comment><USER9> > (I'm not advocating for Amazon's labor practices, but the headline should > read pro-Amazon)

Your view of 'amazon's labor practices is most likely gleaned from what you have read about them in stories which is most certainly slanted in one direction because it makes interesting reading. Kind of a 'where there is smoke there is fire' situation.

I don't know where it is written that warehouse jobs have to be non stressful or easy and they shouldn't push you. If you think the job is to hard for you at Amazon then don't work there or for them. Do people complain that sign up to be firefighters that they have to run into burning buildings? No that is part of the job. [1]

[1] Go ahead and figure out a way that 'no that's different' or 'no but that doesn't mean they need to assume all negatives and risks.

<comment><USER8> Not advocating != Advocating against

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Machines should think. People should work._

That used to be a joke. Now it's the new normal.

</comment><comment><USER11> Amazon has begun surveillance on their engineers too. There are variety of schemes in-pilot or deployed company-wide that downright scream 'dragnet'.

First, the revamp post _that_ New York Times article ended with a new HR head at the helm with new ideas that aren't strictly worse but none too much better.

Second, the peer review system, Forte, is a hogwash, from what I hear. It isn't taken into account for the infamous OLRs where employees are stack- ranked, which are now based exclusively on the inputs from the managers and the metrics they choose to focus on and the supporting documents/emails they bring to the table to support their bias.

Third, the metrics collection is relentless. Right from tickets resolved during on-call, to issues resolved during regular maintenance work, to code reviews or commits pushed, to design documents/wikis created/edited, to time spent building software, deploying it, code velocity... it's a mess.

Fourth, the employees get sent a daily questionnaire. And it is evident from the type of questions that they're trying to collect information on how employees react to those and if their answers are outliers or if their answers are trending towards employees who have shown poor performance previously and so on. The worse part is, when I refused to answer any of those questions, I was warned of "consequences", just as how I was warned of consequences for not submitting patents on behalf of Amazon for what they thought were valuable inventions.

Fifth, there are other internal tools (including build/deploy/test tools) that have sprung up that collect metrics per developer to see who's productive and how.

Sixth, the promotion process has changed so much that it has been reduced to a checklist and only when a manager deems his reportee fit enough, does the stars align and they get to tick off things on the checklist to get promoted. If you're not in the good books of your manager, or simply report to a manager who's biased, good luck with ever getting any recognition _despite the metrics_.

A lot of policies are straight out anti-employee, imo, right from how they decide compensation year-on-year, to their OLR process, to international transfer policies, to how employees are sometimes treated by the HR, to how 'well maintained' the offices are... it isn't even funny. Some engs truly are having a blast working at Amazon. I can't help but think they are in the minority (and these are mostly folks stack ranked in the top 10% to 20%). I can see them defend Amazon to death. I wouldn't fault them. They will come around some day.

I think, this culture/behaviour takes its seeds right at the top of the executive chain: The kind of hypocrisy that goes around at Amazon is plain for the HRs and Executives to see, and if they can't, I believe it's the stock price that is blinding their mind, clouding their judgement.

Apologies for the rant, and I admit that Amazon, specifically AWS, is otherwise a great place to hone your skills even if its relatively akin to baptism by fire.</comment>


Introducing Post Forking for WordPress - <AUTHOR> http://postforking.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/introducing-post-forking-for-wordpress/ <comment><USER2> Why reinvent version control inside of WordPress? I'd rather version my content in git and build a static site from that.

I think there's a real opportunity for github, or a github app, to revolutionize publishing by building on the existing content collaboration capabilities of git. I'm not the first to have this idea [1]; there are already people executing on it [2].

[1] [http://paulhammant.com/blog/github-as-a-cms-to-end- cmses.htm...](http://paulhammant.com/blog/github-as-a-cms-to-end-cmses.html)

[2] <http://prose.io/>

<comment><USER3> Because WordPress is a really mature platform for publishing that is vastly simpler than just about anything else out there, especially considering the power it wields. This is a really great enhancement to the platform and I'm excited to use it. Before, it was pretty difficult to collaborate on posts, especially after the initial publish date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised that blogging software still hasn't gotten the equivalent of "Suggest Edits" that Quora uses on answers. This would go a long way to making sure comments are comments on the content discussed and not issues of delivery like grammar, word choice and fact checking.</comment>


Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/03/18/mozilla-and-unity-deliver-award-winning-game-engine-to-the-web/ <comment><USER2> I do like Unity (especially the component/entity system) but recently I've been enjoying making games in plain ol' JavaScript (2, and 2.5D - granted). Everything is just so open: I don't obfuscate or hide anything, and it's all available via "view source". With an inspector/console you can quickly see how stuff works and start messing around with it.

Of course, 99.99% of people just want to play games - but the way I got interested in coding was by hitting RUN/STOP on C64 Basic game, tweaking the values, and seeing what happened.

Pushing proprietary file formats through asm.js is a neat trick and gives amazing results with little effort. But the long-and-potentially-boring "learn yourself webgl for real" route seems more "web". And if someone, someday, gets into game or web dev by trying to cheat at my games (the same way I did, back in the day) - that would be flippin' awesome!

<comment><USER3> You're a dying breed my friend. Most software developers, game developers including, have no appreciation for the technical aspects of their field, and no appreciation for the importance of thoroughly learning and understanding the foundations on which their patchy work is standing - they're glorified product managers and all they care about is the end product they can make a quick buck off of until it's superseded by another, not how well-crafted it is.

<comment><USER4> Using unity or a similar game engine has absolutely nothing to do with how "well crafted" your game is, nor does it tell if the developer wants to make a "quick buck".

I'm all for learning how stuff works and for taking pride in doing things well (showing appreciation for the craft, as you say), but how many people do you see making their own web framework to develop a web app? Maybe it makes sense in some cases, which is true for games as well. And it is even more true if your purpose is to learn, or to make something in a different way from established frameworks.

We stand on the shoulders of giants in lots and lots of ways, and we should make the most of it to continue to build great stuff (games, or anything else).

With that said, I stand by the opinion that knowing how the low-level stuff works makes you, if nothing else, more capable of using the higher-level stuff. We just need to choose the best way of doing what we want to do, with the time, money and tools we have :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is HUGE news if it performs as well as advertised. We have been creating games in Unity for a couple years and eyeing HTML5 as a possibility that just was never capable enough to trust with a major project.

Unity as a development platform is a joy to use, and now we won't have to have the same "Unity plugin or messy HTML5 game?" conversation for every new project.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I stalled with my plain 'ol Javascript games after the Unreal Engine demos, since I assumed it'd just be a matter of time before Unity got a plugin-less web export.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very exciting. This is a great way to get people playing your game without worrying about plugins. It will be interesting to compare the weight of a basic 2D game using Unity 4.3 2D engine to one written in a HTML5 framework such as Impact. I'm sure the use case is more for 3D gaming on WebGL, but using one toolkit for all development is definitely easier for the developer.

Regardless, this is great news and great trend. Corona SDK also announced WebGL support is coming soon [[http://coronalabs.com/blog/2014/03/07/coronacards-is-cool- he...](http://coronalabs.com/blog/2014/03/07/coronacards-is-cool-heres- something-even-cooler/)]. Lots of great new tools to play with.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there an straightforward way to solve the issue with crazy load times on big WebGL games? If I remember correctly, I played one a while ago and it had to download assets for ten minutes before I could play it and it was a huge downer. If this becomes the norm I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to get used to, but I was coming at this game from the mindset of playing instant gratification flash games.

It would be cool if the engine could figure out what assets to download on- the-fly, but I have a feeling that's not the case so game makers would still have to do a bit of work before making the games web-ready (instead of ideally just hitting an "export to webgl" button).

<comment><USER9> You can read/write local files from within a webpage. So I guess its possible. It would require looking into how WebGL loads assets and overriding this with diskIO operations not difficult.

The next problem would be asset management, but this isn't an important issue. A lot of game data is already stored locally with little to no protection.

I'd have to look at how javascript handles file I/O it might not be 'that' difficult.

<comment><USER10> There's localStorage and there's IndexedDB. The former is blocking and not ideal, but I think you can store blobs in IndexedDB and it's async.

<comment><USER11> You missed the Filesystem API

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/WebGuide/API/File_S...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/WebGuide/API/File_System/Introduction)

<comment><USER10> That's a new one to me. Sounds awesome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mozilla, please stop promoting nonfree software. It would be better to assist in the creation of a free game engine for the web instead of Unity.

<comment><USER13> I am a FOSS advocate as well, but I disagree that this announcement is a bad thing.

First, Mozilla has and does assist in the creation of FOSS game engines and tools (Gladius, CubicVR, help to various web ports like JSMESS and various open source game engines, etc.).

Second, even the LGPL shows that absolute avoidance is not always the best thing to do regarding closed-source code. Reality is more complex. Sometimes interoperability with closed-source code is good for everyone including free software.

In particular, a big benefit for free software here is that Unity games can now run on the web, an open platform. Before they required a proprietary plugin that did not work on Linux or BSD, but as JS+WebGL they can run on those platforms. (Yes, the games are proprietary, but visiting websites using proprietary code is basically unavoidable, both on the client and server-side. At least we can do it using FOSS tools now.) So this helps support free software OSes.

A final point, while the Unity engine is a proprietary codebase, they also have lots of code that is FOSS, see their github page. They are also working with even more open source code for the WebGL port, as it uses emscripten.

<comment><USER14> >First, Mozilla has and does assist in the creation of FOSS game engines and tools

Parent comment didn't imply the contrary. "stop promoting nonfree software" doesn't mean "stop only promoting nonfree software".

>even the LGPL shows that absolute avoidance is not always the best thing to do regarding closed-source code

If you ask the FSF, the LGPL should really be used as a last resort. Unity is not too common yet (and hopefully will never be as long as it remains proprietary), so I don't see why we should push it forward by helping its integration. Same goes for HTML5's EME. I'd rather have a purely open platform with less features and popularity than a platform with an open base and countless incompatible binary blobs sitting onto it. And even the abomination that EME is would at least be an actual standard.

>Unity engine is a proprietary codebase, they also have lots of code that is FOSS

If you can't build it, it's not worth integrating. The only thing this is good for is making a FOSS alternative (although I guess they keep the important bits secret). I'd be using Google Chrome if "99% open source" was good enough. By using Firefox (though Chromium would be fine if it weren't for the user- hostile features), I precisely want to keep a clean FOSS platform. Conversely, I only use an Android ROM because there's no good alternative, which is not the case for Unity. So I wish they'd keep it out for now.

<comment><USER13> I get where you're coming from, I think, but Unity is not related to standards in any way, unlike EME. Unity is just another game engine that can now run on the web. All we did here is help them along the way, just like we help other game engines to port to the web. It is not going to become a standard or part of the browser in any way.

Even with Unity (and Unreal and others) porting to the web, web browsers remain open, while web content (what ported Unity is) was always non-open (since practically all websites are not FOSS).

I agree with you on the other hand that EME would in fact be a danger to the openness of the web.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for your reply.

>Unity is not related to standards in any way

I know, I mentioned it. I believe a standard at least has some practical positive impact, unlike the integration of a particular closed platform.

>web content was always non-open

It's true that obfuscated JavaScript makes, in a way, a closed platform, but much less so, in my belief, than straight-up binary code (which Unity delivers and EME enables).

I get your overall point, but it just seems a slippery slope...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it just me, or it is a bit hypocritical for Mozilla to be talking about the wonders of the Open Web and then embracing two _very proprietary_ developer platforms to promote Asm.js

If they cared about the open web, and they cared about open source, they would be helping open source game engines like Ogre3D and Torque3D.

Instead, for the sake of expedience, we see them promoting proprietary components.

It was not too long ago that they were lecturing the world on the evils of proprietary video and audio.

<comment><USER16> _Is it just me, or it is a bit hypocritical for Mozilla to be talking about the wonders of the Open Web and then embracing two very proprietary developer platforms to promote Asm.js_

There is no contradiction here, on the contrary (heh!). Mozilla doesn't believe an Open Web precludes proprietary applications. In fact they've strongly argued that the web should be properly standardized so that it's possible for anyone, including commercial parties, to make clients for it, and that just opening up source code (ala WebKit, PNaCl, etc) does _not_ do this hence is a bad way to achieve an open web.

The point has also already been made that this makes it possible for Unity games to run on open platforms without requiring closed source blobs.

 _they would be helping open source game engines_

Uh, emscripten and asm.js have been enhanced to properly port many open source engines and game libraries long before this one was announced. I'm going to guess Unity was possible because they provided engineering resources to port their own engine.

<comment><USER14> >Mozilla doesn't believe an Open Web precludes proprietary applications

By definition, it must. It's a slippery slope and it's the reason Mozilla is vehemently against EME. The rest of that line sounds like nonsense to me in that context.

>The point has also already been made that this makes it possible for Unity games to run on open platforms without requiring closed source blobs.

Awesome, the joys of running proprietary software on Linux. Ah, why even have a FOSS OS then? Ditch it and get Windows! /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is awesome. I worked in educational technology building virtual humans ([http://alelo.com/](http://alelo.com/)), and have experience with a variety of game engines. Unity is far and away the most pleasant developer experience, despite being 1/100th the cost of some of the other commercial engines.

Pre-Unity, game engines were truly stuck in the dark ages.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great announcement. With plugins starting to go away due to browser changes and as a delta to mobile, this was needed. The end of 2014 Chrome will disable plugins that don't use PPAPI and all NPAPI plugins will no longer work (Unity, Silverlight and some other popular ones won't work). So glad they updated it and in the right direction to WebGL.

</comment><comment><USER19> "This is a big day for evolving the Web as a platform for gaming and we are very excited to see what experiences developers will bring to the Web using this powerful technology."

Slightly off-topic: I wonder if we're going to see more games being written to run in Web Browsers, or more games being written using web technologies like JS + WebGL but for desktop/mobile devices using things like phonegap/node- webkit [0] and then sold through various app stores such as Steam, iOS & Android.

The infrastructure for monetising web games in the same way that Steam and the App Stores has done isn't there yet, but maybe it will be soon?

[0]: Like A Wizard's Lizard [http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=205801...](http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=205801629)

<comment><USER20> As the game development pipelines from traditional engines are much more mature i think the premier way will be to develop there and just export to HTML. Resulting Apps are heavier though, so for small web only games or just some enhancement effects, there is still room for lightweight WebGL engines like three.js

But with Unity you can have one codebase and export to Win/OSX/Linux/iOS/Android/HTML5 and even consoles while some HTML5 engines offer an acceleration wrapper for iOS but thats basically it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What is the performance like for asm.js and WebGL compared to a native app for PC or Mac? What do you lose?

<comment><USER13> WebGL is basically at native speed. The only issue might be if a GL extension you need is not in WebGL yet, but that is moving along quickly.

asm.js can run close to native speed, depends on the JS engine of course, but it's not far off. See for example

[https://github.com/joelgwebber/bench2d](https://github.com/joelgwebber/bench2d)

<comment><USER22> To qualify, close to native speed means about two thirds of native speed in a best case scenario. Fine for games that don't stress the hardware to its limits, but not for top tier.

<comment><USER13> First of all performance is CPU+GPU, and the GPU side is basically at native speed. Many games are mostly GPU bound, so for them they would run at full native speed.

For games that are CPU bound, two thirds of speed is the current average on a set of benchmarks on Firefox, yes. But it will vary on codebase, and is constantly improving.

Regardless, you say that top tier games won't work. What is UE4 and the higher-end stuff Unity demoed, if not top tier?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I find it annoyingly disingenuous for Mozilla to pride itself on a "plugin- free web" when they are the ones making decisions that ensure languages other than Javascript will NEVER run without plugins.

Please stop hurting all of us with this artificially imposed Javascript monopoly

<comment><USER24> Yes, let's invent/promote a bunch of select technologies to the extent of directly integrating them into _some_ browsers and then call-it a "plug-in- free web". At least they came up with asm.js...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Article does not address licensing terms; what's in it for Unity?

<comment><USER26> Each platform for Unity has another license associated with it (eg: $1500 for Android Pro, another $1500 for iOS Pro). Another web target would be another $1500 license for folks to buy annually, I imagine.

<comment><USER10> Maybe they'll give it away in the free version like with Web Player authoring. Well, I can hope :)

<comment><USER26> When they were doing the Flash version, it wasn't free. Still, one can hope!

<comment><USER27> That was imposed by adobe not unity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> That seemed like the obvious next step for Unity after they dropped Flash and with browsers increasingly dropping NPAPI plugins; always nice to see predictions come true :)

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow, i have been waiting for this for years and wondered what took them so long. I love Unity and while its not free, other HTML5 engines will now have a hard time.

<comment><USER29> i wouldn't say they'll have a hard time - unity is just another choice among the hundreds of engines out there for web.

I would say that it benefits more people who aren't interested in programming. Unity is the visual basics of game programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm curious to know how networking behaves in a webgl build. Will my tcp sockets just work straight out of the box? That would be seriously impressive!

<comment><USER31> They won't, but changing your server to accept websocket instead shouldn't be too bad.

<comment><USER10> Don't even need to do that. There are a bunch of TCP-WebSocket bridges out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is a really good news as I have developed some small games in unity and I wished that I can create it using HTML5. So will there be a tool for creating graphics also or we have to follow same old html and images for that. And will there be an option to port games to android, iOS and blackberry??

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm curious if the generated JS files will have Source Maps to trace back runtime issues to the C# code.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if and how C# scripts (a big part of the Unity framework) are supported for the WebGL target.

<comment><USER18> C# scripts aren't used in the final output.

Unity is an engine where the scripting portion is Mono based, upon export it is converted into C/C++/Obj-C/Java for Desktop/mobile/web platform of choice. It will be similar for javascript, the exported asm.js supported javascript will emit from the export to WebGL.

Unity runs in the native platform it is in but Mono is their 'scripting engine' and part of their core engine much like UScript/UnrealScript is UDK's scripting engine. Unity uses Mono a little deeper than that but the resulting export is optimized for the platform it exports to. Since it is built on .NET it is alot like LLVM/JVM languages in that the IL/CLR/DLR are used to export all common languages used in scripting to a common output and this is also the reason you can use C#/Javascript/Boo (Mono versions) as they export to the same thing in the end native to the platform they are on.

I am sure there will be pluggable areas of the outputted javascript but for the most part you'll develop it as usual in Unity and won't mess with the output as much except to plugin third party toolkits etc.

<comment><USER34> To clarify a bit here...

Unity didn't say that 100% of Unity features will be supported in WebGL. Some scripts will, most likely, not be able to run in the WebGL builds initially. Also... Things like GI, or the new PhysX... I wouldn't count on if you are wondering how to prepare a game to be WebGL ready.

That said, I'm certain they will improve the WebGL build tech as time goes on, and eventually MOST of what anyone would need will be available. It just won't be available on day 1 of Unity 5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> you say what you want, I doubt professional, experienced game devs choose to release quality game with unity.

unity is great for young devs, prototyping and content creators, but it's not that much open so I doubt many dev really like to use it.

still a great thing for mozilla though

<comment> jon-wood Yup, little teams like Rovio with there obscure games about pigs trying to steal eggs wouldn't dream of something like that. Or that game no one's heard about where you launch aliens into space. couldn't possibly work in Unity.

<comment><USER35> coolish indie games, not that much popular either

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm seeing parallels between Unity and Flash (circa 2000). In a few years, we'll have the "Unity is dead, use <insert some other shiny technology> arguments popping up all over HN

<comment><USER37> Is that a bad thing? If something better comes along then it deserves to displace unity!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I followed this link looking for a live demo. I was sadly disappointed. This is certainly something I need to experience before passing any judgement.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm curious if they'll also add features such as In-app Purchases given that's a recurring issue in threads about HTML5 games.

<comment><USER39> Amazon is one good option for IAPs with web games:

[https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/platforms/weba...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/platforms/webapps)

edit - Forgot to mention, they even have a Unity plugin:

[https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/platforms/cros...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/platforms/cross- platform)

<comment><USER28> Interesting option indeed, it even has an AIR version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Immediately after a flash video is the quote "... strengthens support for Mozilla's vision of a high performance, plugin-free Web,"

...

</comment><comment><USER41> looking forward to a demo. This could be a nice way of getting Unity3d games to platforms unity doesn't support yet (Firefox OS devices, Ubuntu Touch etc) if the performance will be good enough.

</comment><comment><USER42> Who would be interested in "Unityify", an adaptation of Browserify that supports Unity3D's dialect of JavaScript? It would package npm modules so they ran in Unity, and include some shims to wrap the native Unity3D classes in node APIs.

</comment><comment><USER43> Too bad it's not WebGL 2.0.

</comment><comment><USER44> When will Dead Trigger 2 be available for purchase on the web?

</comment><comment><USER45> So, that's why they've been doing, instead of fixing the 64 bit version and improve multi-threading support.

Let's hope it works as advertised then.

<comment><USER46> You do realize that exactly the same Unity 5 announcement also announced 64 bit editor and improved multi-threading?</comment></comment>


Apple forces Facebook, Google, Microsoft to remove in-app games - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-refuses-to-allow-major-apps-from-microsoft-google-facebook-2020-8 <comment><USER2> This aligns with the idea of running what users have really downloaded at first. Apple removed apps who wanted to run ad-hoc code before. I'm curious why it waited years for realizing in-app app stores might occur similar issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google Stadia however is an interesting middle ground. To an extent it can be considered an interactive streaming service.

What if Netflix realises a movie where the user can decide different story lines? Would that infrange Apple policies too?</comment></comment>


SPDY Now One-Click Simple for Any Website - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/spdy-now-one-click-simple-for-any-website

<comment><USER2> Any numbers on real-world performance gains when using SPDY with CloudFlare?

<comment><USER3> We're still testing, but on CloudFlare.com we've seen a 8-12% decrease in overall page load times for HTTPS connections. That's in-line or slightly better than what we've seen testing Google sites. CloudFlare.com may benefit more than the average site because we use a relatively high number of objects and pull virtually all content from our own domain. Sites that don't have as many objects or pull from several third-party domains are less likely to see as much of a speed up.</comment></comment>


Pinboard API is down over 8 hours - <AUTHOR> https://api.pinboard.in/v1/posts/all <comment><AUTHOR> The status page is broken. There is not any response from offical twitter too.</comment>


AlphaGo and AI Progress - <AUTHOR> http://www.milesbrundage.com/blog-posts/alphago-and-ai-progress <comment><USER2> > comparing AlphaGo Distributed to, e.g. CrazyStone, is to compare two > distinct states of the art – performance given small computational power > (and a small team, for that matter) and performance given massive > computational power and the efforts of over a dozen of the best AI > researchers in the world.

I know the author probably doesn't have any stake on it, but defending that the state of the art should be categorized by the size of the team of researchers behind each product sounds like just being butt-hurt. "Look what this team accomplished with only two people" only compares the researchers, not the end results.

<comment><USER3> I didn't read it that way. That authors' goal is towards assessing progress in the field. To some extent, adding more researchers is like adding more CPUs; fuel for an industrial process, which should be corrected for when trying to gauge the rate of return on those investments at the current level of technology.

<comment><USER2> > when trying to gauge the rate of return on those investments

Exactly, when trying to gauge your team. Not the end product they produced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Hassabis at AAAI indicated DeepMind's intent to try to train AlphaGo entirely with self-play. This would be more impressive, but until that happens, we may not know how much of AlphaGo's performance depended on the availability of this dataset, which DeepMind gathered on its own from the KGS servers.

As an amateur (10k) go player who watch the Fan Hui games, I can say that AlphaGo seems to rely heavily on the training data. This is because all of its moves feel very human, even in circumstances where strong humans find better, weird looking moves. This is in contrast to chess AI (and even other go AI) that feel distinctly roboty in how they play. In watching a professional (9p) commentary of the games, it seems that Fan Hui not lose because of particuarly good moves of AlphaGo, but because of some specific mistakes that he made (this is not unusually, as most professional games come down to loosing moves, instead of winning moves). In this sense, AlphaGo seems to be playing at human level, but with fewer mistakes.

This is certainly impressive, but unfortunately AlphaGo currently seems to be a demonstration of synthesizing and automating expert human knowledge, instead of creating new knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know what his point was that it was predictable. If you were closely following the field, sure. There were some _super_ promising papers published at the end of 2014. Heck if you just saw the wave of deep learning results that were crushing various AI domains, you could have predicted Go would be on the chopping block soon. I was really sure that Go would be beaten by the end of 2015, which didn't happen. However almost everyone I spoke to was skeptical of that, and the outside world was totally unaware. And it still represents relatively fast progress, even if the progress is predictable.

Anyway I think drawing strong conclusions about AI progress from this single example is wrong. You need to look at general trends, which is definitely rapid improvement.

Here is a study about how fast algorithms are improving in general, after accounting for hardware speedups: [https://intelligence.org/files/AlgorithmicProgress.pdf](https://intelligence.org/files/AlgorithmicProgress.pdf)

>Chess programs have improved by around fifty Elo points per year over the last four decades. Estimates for the significance of hardware improvements are very noisy but are consistent with hardware improvements being responsible for approximately half of all progress. Progress has been smooth on the scale of years since the 1960s, except for the past five.

>Go programs have improved about one stone per year for the last three decades. Hardware doublings produce diminishing Elo gains on a scale consistent with accounting for around half of all progress.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting analysis, I recommend everybody to read it.

A note to the author: I had to change the text color to #333 before being able to read it comfortably; #888 was too light.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the note - it should be easier to read now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I think I actually said similar things about this being incremental progress when AlphaGo came out, what I would really enjoy would be an evaluation of how much progress the enhanced techniques represent _as AI techniques_. AlphaGo involved a Convolutional Neural Network driving Monte Carlo Tree Search with a linear approximator thing to speed things up. Convnets are themselves something of a hybrid system.

So, will the future look like combining together more and more hybrid levels? Is there a limit to the number of layers or pieces? Maybe only someone Yann Lecun could comment. Still, I'd be curious.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know how many GPUs will be used for the game vs. Lee Sedol? That distributed AlphaGo with more GPUs really scales up is impressive and scary.

<comment><USER10> My understanding is that once the neural network is trained you don't need as much computation power to put it in use.

<comment><USER4> In general, training requires far more neural networks requires far more computational power than using them does. However, AlphaGo combines neural networks with a traditional Monte Carlo search. This means that you can improve the performance of a trained AlphaGo by just giving it more processing power. Indeed, with a sufficient amount of processing power, AlphaGo would converge to fully optimal play.

<comment><USER11> It's not really the traditional Monte Carlo search; IIRC they're using UCT weighting for MCTS. Apologies if that's what you meant, but I think to most people "traditional Monte Carlo" means something different (probably uniform depth charges).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You're not going to be able to "rigorously model AI progress" at all well if you don't start by quantifying exactly what deep learning techniques are actually doing, and what resources they require to do it.</comment>


Syrian Electronic Army hacks global websites including Independent and Venturebeat - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/syrian-electronic-army-hacks-global-websites-including-the-independent-9887176.html

<comment><USER2> Some e-commerce sites in Brazil have also been affected, like www.pontofrio.com.br. It seems they hacked a portion of a CDN and injected a script.

Does not seem serious, security-wise.</comment>


PizzaQL – Modern order placement and management system for pizza restaurants - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pizzaql/pizzaql <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

My name is Antoni, I'm 16 years old self-taught developer from Poland. During my free time, I enjoy creating small open-source projects. Today, I'm happy to announce my biggest project ever, which is PizzaQL. It's an order placement & management system for pizza restaurants, built using modern technologies, like React, Next.js, GraphQL & more. Even though it is not finished yet, it is usable :) I would really like to receive constructive criticism & suggestions. Also, if you liked the project, consider starring it on Github - it means a lot to me.

Thanks!

~ Antoni Kepinski (aka xxczaki)</comment>


Nginx 1.13 released with TLS 1.3 support - <AUTHOR> http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-announce/2017/000195.html <comment><USER2> I don't understand why all these free open source projects are using nginx when it hides so many great features behind the premium option. HAProxy also has a lua module and you even has monitoring abilities for free unlike nginx

edit: a project like Kong could easily be done with haproxy as far as I know and you can actually monitor your server. [https://getkong.org](https://getkong.org)

<comment><USER3> Informations about HAProxy on multi-core hardware (TLS de- and encryption are CPU bound) are a bit discouraging. You can assign workers to cores, but there's no shared memory and therefore the official docs warn about some inconsistencies that might occur. There doesn't seem to be a consensus wether to use the multi-core feature or not. Also nginx supports http/2.

Regarding the status of the backendservers - I use monitoring with health checks for every backend server anyway.

That are the reasons I chose nginx as reverse proxy recently.

<comment><USER4> Lack of http/2 on haproxy by now is terribly limiting and very disappointing.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, and I can find no roadmap for it. It's a real shame.

I'm looking at moving to something a bit more application aware now, such as Traefik, which works better in my workflow anyway.

Will say though - HAProxy has been rock solid for me, and was a million times easier to configure and manage than F5 LTM for our use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Right now, nginx 1.13.x requires compiling against OpenSSL 1.1.1 or newer to get TLSv1.3 supported in browsers.

You need to compile the "draft-18" branch of OpenSSL as current browsers are on draft-18 (master is on draft-19).

<comment><USER7> that's the biggest weakness of nginx.... the whole compile stuff in a right way to get things/features really running there. And don't tell me it's easy to recompile nginx... you have to know a lot of nginx and switches to get the compiler setup well done.

<comment><USER8> Apache is also a giant pain in the ass to get http2 support, you have to basically chuck out the distro packages and do everything from scratch (including OpenSSL) unless you're on a bleeding edge distro.

<comment><USER9> Not to mention that http2 is buggy in 2.4.25 (fixes in 2.4.26 will be out in May). And yes, without a bleeding edge distro good luck.

Building apache from source is not only very straightforward but a great way to maximimize httpd performance (all modules static, only include the modules you need). OpenSSL on the other hand, that's distro specific, and definitely more involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good news. Now they should add ACME support directly to nginx so it can get and manage TLS certificates seamlessly for you.

<comment><USER11> You may be interested in NixOS' way. This is all what you need in your configuration.nix to get a webserver running with an SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt, including automatic refreshes before expired and everything:

        services.nginx = {
          enable = true;
          virtualHosts."example.com" = {
            root = "/webroot";
            enableACME = true;
          };
        };

[http://nixos.org/nixos/options.html#services.nginx](http://nixos.org/nixos/options.html#services.nginx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone know how quickly it will get pushed to the PPA here?: [http://ppa.launchpad.net/nginx/development/ubuntu](http://ppa.launchpad.net/nginx/development/ubuntu)

<comment><USER13> If you want to use a precompiled version from a repository, nginx has its own, which always stays up to date: [http://nginx.org/en/linux_packages.html](http://nginx.org/en/linux_packages.html)

<comment><USER14> Won't help, since you need to link it to OpenSSL 1.1.1-dev.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any browsers that support TLS 1.3 yet?

<comment><USER16> Mozilla and Chrome do, but disabled by default. Chrome recently tried to enable it and they had to notice that a bunch of crap-devices by bluecoat prevented it from working: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=694593](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=694593)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Still no server push though? :(</comment>


Facebook requires your number and then links your data - <AUTHOR> I don't use Facebook anymore, but I had to just sign up so I could test the new Facebook authentication within an app I'm working on. I naturally used an alias email address and a fake name (Boberius Kingslayer). Upon registering I needed to enter my phone number due to 'suspicious activity'. Okay, fair enough - I need to test this so I enter my real number which I've had for a few weeks under the assumption it just required an activation code and wouldn't link to my account.
I'm then shown a list of suggested friends. This included my sister, neighbor, friends from school... essentially the top 50 people suggested were spot on. The only app linked to my phone that this could be related to is Whatsapp, however I just read the T&Cs of Whatsapp/Facebook integration and they specifically say they don't share contact details: "Importantly, WhatsApp does not share your WhatsApp contacts with Facebook or any other members of the Facebook Companies, and there are no plans to do so."
I can't even remove my mobile number from Facebook without it threatening to delete my account.
I signed up via a desktop browser and didn't share my contacts.
I'd be interested if someone could explain how this can happen without breaking their own T&Cs somewhere? <comment><USER2> Your friends gave your phone number to Facebook via uploaded contacts data.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've now tried to sign into something with Facebook and it's locked me out until I upload a photo of myself due to 'suspicious activity'.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious why actions like this aren't governed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your friends uploaded their contacts and your number was in there.

All Facebook did was a simple match. Nothing crazy or nefarious.

Sometimes it really is that simple. Your phone number isn't a secure, hidden piece of data. It's scattered around and anyone you've ever give it to is at risk of disclosing it to a 3rd party, whether it be a website or another person.

</comment><comment><USER5> Contact a lawyer who will organize more people like you and hopefully do a lawsuit</comment>


20 Most Common Mistakes WordPress Beginners Make - <AUTHOR> http://smallbusinessgrowthhacks.com/20-most-common-mistakes-wordpress-beginners-make/

<comment><USER3> #2 is awful and is damaging for the Internet as a whole and a big oversight on the Automattic's part.

"admin" as a default username + lack of out-of-the-box rate limiting of incorrect login attempts + default login page address means that any Wordpress blog is bruteforcable. WP blogs are overtaken by malicious entities all the time, every day; they are used for SEO purposes and to spread malware. I would be hardpressed to estimate the actual spread of the problem, but a significant share of all malware online is spread precisely by the overtaken Wordpress blogs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree when will wordpress acknowledge this and make a change to the default username

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few of these issues could be completely avoided by using a hosted Wordpress service like Pressable or WPEngine. Both of these services offer hosting cheap enough where I don't even think about launching a Wordpress site anywhere else and it will probably be a long time, if ever, I worry about how my site is running.

<comment><AUTHOR> What issues could be avoided by using a hosted wordpress service?

<comment><USER4> My experience is with Pressable, so sorry if I'm assuming WPEngine is the same, but I can knock these off easily by using Pressable:

#2 - Default admin. I was given a secure admin password

#4 - <USER2>

#9 - Caching, and really that's an understatement.

#11 - Ignoring updates

#16 - Not using CDN

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome I will have to start recommending that.

Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This list of common oversights could apply equally to any CMS installation. Although I really dislike working in WP, I've also seen these same mistakes in other setups that clients have come to us with over the years.

<comment><AUTHOR> What are some specific oversights that you have seen with just WP?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> #1 Using Wordpress.</comment>


Never forget how cool coding make you - <AUTHOR> https://www.codepunker.com/smile/hot-girls-love-programmers-3

<comment><AUTHOR> *makes ... sorry about the typo</comment>


Google Maps Easter Egg - <AUTHOR> http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&saddr=San+Diego,+California&daddr=Sydney,+Australia&sll=23.241346,-123.925781&sspn=70.527083,151.347656&ie=UTF8&z=2

<comment><USER2> What puzzles me is that it tells you to go to Seattle first, instead of just jumping into the water right there in San Diego...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _These directions are for planning purposes only. You may find that construction projects, traffic, or other events may cause road conditions to differ from the map results._

</comment><comment><USER3> This is more sensible then swimming across the Atlantic. New York to Paris.

<comment><USER4> Which doesn't seem to be there anymore. I think Google generally suggested all travelers from the US to Europe to swim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps they meant kayak.com?</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a job title for product manager & software engineer? - <AUTHOR>

I have been a product manager for a number of years and have always dabbled in the coding side of things. Over the past couple years my technical skills have progressed to the point where I am now spending half of my time programming (django/python/html/css/javascript/angularjs) and half of my time as a product manager. This kicked into full gear when our lead developer left last year and I became the defacto person who knew both the product and its codebase the best.
I'm formalizing this time split in my job description with my employer and have the opportunity to pick a job title that reflects both roles.
I could obviously do something like "Product Manager & Software Engineer", but if there is a way to capture it in a single title that would be better IMO.
Any ideas? <comment><USER2> I would go with Technical Product Manager.

There are a number of cloud services companies (Amazon, Rackspace) that have folks onboard with this title. I believe they are usually former engineers who work closely with technical teams to define requirements, in some cases work out Proof of Concepts, and make architecture decisions.

In short, highly technical work that can't happen without significant experience shipping production code earlier in their careers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Palantir has what are called "Forward Deployed Engineers."

I think another possibility is "Product Engineer" or "Product Developer."

</comment><comment><USER4> I believe its called 'solo founder'

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, I would agree with you if it were a startup, but this is a 300 person company. I'm a PM for the product line, but also spend half my time coding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Product Development</comment>


Zomato finds advertising on porn sites is cheaper and has higher ROI - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zomato.com/post/135236716946/this-post-is-probably-safe-for-work <comment><USER2> I was going to say this sounds a lot like Eat24, and they did a way better blog post about it... but then he footnoted it. Sucks, because if zomato really did stumble on this on their own, they still won't look clever here.

Maybe the lesson here is "advertising delivery food on porn websites works for obvious reasons."</comment>


A Look at Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine: Half Square Foot Silicon Chip - <AUTHOR> https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3010/a-look-at-cerebras-wafer-scale-engine-half-square-foot-silicon-chip/ <comment><USER2> Interesting things I've learned about this chip after a little sluthing.

CEO implies in the FYI podcast that it can handle model sizes of a max of ~4 billion parameters per wafer. Respectable but not as large as I assumed would be possible when I first read of the scale of the chip.

CEO claims model parallelism will actually work well with these devices. Would be intriguing to know the limits of this.

Based on the cooling requirements, at least a GHz clock speed appears likely. If we take the heretical position that 1 parameter is >= 1 synapse, 4 billion parameters is about the size of a bee brain. 1GHz is about 5 million times faster than a bee brain.

It would take about 20000 such chips to simulate a human-sized network. Not economical and presumably the model parallelism would break long before this. But it is interesting to note that under the not implausible 1 parameter is >= 1 synapse assumption, we are only a few orders of magnitude away from human- sized networks training 5 million times real-time.

<comment><USER3> OK, a stupid question. Since this ANN if 5Bx as fast as animal neurons, couldn't it be "multiplexed" to simulate a much larger network in biological time (with massive state-storage memory, I presume)? I realize there will be propagation dependencies, but each dependency layer could be precomped before the next, I would guess?

Or is there a reason that this won't work (or at least won't be worth it) for ANN structures?

<comment> 0-_-0 > Or is there a reason that this won't work (or at least won't be worth it) > for ANN structures?

If all the weights and activations fit in on-chip memory, then you can do calculations at close to 100% efficiency. If you want to simulate a 20k times larger network, you also need to transfer the 4 Billion parameters per iteration, which would take a singificantly longer time. In other words, you would be seriously bottlenecked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unfortunately that archived link doesn't extend to "page 2".

Some more info easily found at cerebras's site,

[https://www.cerebras.net/cerebras-wafer-scale-engine-why- we-...](https://www.cerebras.net/cerebras-wafer-scale-engine-why-we-need-big- chips-for-deep-learning/)

> a very big chip, with memory close to cores, all connected by a high- > bandwidth, low-latency fabric.

and at this site:

[https://www.servethehome.com/cerebras-wafer-scale-engine- ai-...](https://www.servethehome.com/cerebras-wafer-scale-engine-ai-chip-is- largest-ever/)

<comment><USER5> Looks exactly like a mesh of Inmos Transputers except on a single chip! Back in the late 80s, I spent months trying to get backpropagation to work on a Meiko computing surface - but no real speedups were possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Site down, but here's another link:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191117035933/https://fuse.wiki...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191117035933/https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3010/a-look- at-cerebras-wafer-scale-engine-half-square-foot-silicon-chip/)

<comment><USER7> Seems a bit odd that it's down. This post has only a few upvotes right now, so the hug of death must have been pretty small.

<comment><USER8> I wonder how small a small HoD is really? 10k concurrent requests?

<comment><USER6> You are way high for almost anything but a company website that has an engineering team dedicated to it. Yes, there are exceptions (my blog could handle orders of magnitude higher traffic than that, but I had a multi-tier CDN in front of it with 100% full page caching. Did it need it, no, but it was fun to setup).

Typically speaking, most personal / non-professional sites going down from a HoD on HN probably got under 500 concurrent requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is academic effort that has been working on a similar concept for 8+ years. A recent paper that also discusses some of the challenges (routing around defects, ...) is [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.0120...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.01201/full) . If you dig into the publications and PhD theses conducted on this system, you will also find partial answers to some of the issues raised here in the comments (how to interconnect reticles, power supply (the first prototype had really scary centimeter thick copper bars that supplied the wafer). There is a second generation system in development..

</comment><comment><USER10> > Due to the complexity involved, Cerebras is not only designing the chip, but > they also must design the full system. ... The WSE will come in 15U units > with a chassis for the WSE and another one for the power and miscellaneous > components. The final product is intended to act like any other network- > attached accelerator over a 100 GbE.

So it's NIC bandwidth bottlenecked. Though 100 GbE is in the same ballpark as PCIe 3, but last I heard 40-100 GbE were pretty CPU-intensive compared to alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER11> The performance jump blows the mind. If AI is going to evolve like that our expectations will be rather silly compared to reality. Its kinda like [collectively] we haven't a clue what we are doing.

</comment><comment><USER12> How are they connecting the die that span reticles? A WL-CSP flow? Or just the regular process but the exposure for some of the layers is offset, so some fields over lap?

</comment><comment><USER13> Still no benchmarks, so this doesn't add all _that_ much to the earlier coverage, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER14> >They re-purposed the scribe lines – the mechanical barrier between two adjacent dies that are typically used for test structures and eventually for strangulation...

Glad I don't work at that fab! Would much rather my dies be singulated than strangulated

</comment><comment><USER15> Can't deep learning computations be structured such that a large number of smaller interconnected dies (but with the same total area) give the same performance as this wafer?

</comment><comment><USER16> Is the reason this hasn't been considered for CPUs before now intel and amd not wanting to produce safer scale chips?

<comment><USER17> This is a 5 kW chip. It's like trying to cool 2 kettles running continuously. Very difficult!

To even get power into the chip they have to have wires running perpendicular to the board - ordinary traces don't cut it.

This is a really far-out design that isn't appropriate for the mass market at all.

<comment><USER18> Two kettles in the UK, closer to three in the US where circuits typically top out at 1800w. I actually looked into the feasibility of installing some 240v circuits in my kitchen and ordering kettles/blenders/etc from Europe...too much work lol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone provide info on how you cool this beast?

<comment><USER20> A "cold plate" of chilled water cooled metal in direct contact with the wafer.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I were to build a box out of these, I'd do immersion cooling and place the chip(s) across the front of the machine behind laminated glass.

Keeping the fluid cool would be left to the ugly parts nobody would ever see.

<comment><USER20> Immersion cooling might not work since it depends on convection flow to move the heated liquid away from the plate. With a cold plate, pumps and pressure can be used to move the chilled water so that water in contact with the plate is always cool and heat is extracted and moved to the chiller more rapidly.

<comment><AUTHOR> You could circulate the fluid. Since it'd be boiling, temperature would remain constant near the surfaces and bubbles would immediately displace hot fluid. A condenser and heat exchanger would recycle the vapor back into the tank.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay $10/month to eradicate homelessness in SF? - <AUTHOR> This is for people that live/work in San Francisco.
There are currently ~7.5k homeless in SF and the number is growing each year. I'm curious if it's possible to build a startup that tries to eradicate this problem in the most efficient way possible that is not non-profit. Or does something like this already exist?
I know that the city is spending $241m/year to try to tackle the problem. However, as I understand it most of the funds go toward providing housing for the homeless. This might seem counter-intuitive, but I don't think providing housing today is the best long-term solution. I think the best solution would be to do everything we can to enable the homeless to start generating money for themselves again. The fundamental problem arises because the healthcare and social welfare system are so bad in the US on a federal level (and not primarily because of the increasing housing prices in SF, like many think it is). But I think we can build a for-profit, hyperlocal system that helps a city's population.
I also don't think that non-profits are the solution. With non-profits, often there is no pressure to make the best possible product because income is only loosely coupled with how good the product is.
Unlike other social causes, this is something that touches SF residents every day and makes their lives worse. This may sound harsh, but it's the reality. And therefore I think people would pay even they have zero altruistic tendencies.
How would I solve this issue and is it possible to get enough subscribers to tackle this issue quickly? Who knows.
I think it must be possible to provide an "anti-homelessness subscription" to the SF population. Half the price of Netflix and it helps to eradicate homelessness. I know that I would pay $10/month in a heartbeat if it would help solve this issue. What about you? Would you pay or do you have ideas how this could be approached? <comment><USER2> I think you may be over-simplifying the problem of homelessness. I agree that housing in itself is not a total solution. I also agree that healthcare and our social welfare system are a mess to some extent. However, there are many other things that need to be considered. Drug abuse, lack of willingness to seek out/receive services, individuals that choose to be homeless. Taking a long-term homeless person with a substance abuse issue to gainful, successful employee supporting themselves is not going to happen overnight and most likely not within a year. The support system required to solve the issue is massive at scale.

With that said, I do believe there has to be a better way to address the problem. One of the best solutions I have seen in a while came from HandUp ([https://www.handup.org](https://www.handup.org)). They basically created a crowdfunding platform to help homeless people obtain the things/services/etc.. they need. This I believe is similar to what you may be envisioning. I think the best solutions come connecting the individual to the right services/programs and ensuring they remain connected. You have to accept you will never have a 100% solution, but if you can touch just 10% you have made a drastic improvement in so many lives.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right, it's a super complex issue and thinking that we can remove the issue 100% is wishful. Thanks for sharing HandUp, I'll have a look.

As you say, I think any improvement in the right direction would already impact many lives positively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My understanding is that the rationale behind the housing-first movement is that all the other interventions are much more likely to succeed for someone who has stable housing.

There are a few reasons for this.

One is simply that it's easier for social workers to follow up on someone when they know where to find them.

Another is that in order to become eligible for most types of assistance, one needs to list a home address on the applications. This includes job interventions, adult education, food stamps, and the medical benefits that support addiction and mental health interventions.

Perhaps the most important is that stable housing removes one of the greatest stressors from a formerly homeless person's life.

If you're constantly worrying about where you're going to lay your head at night and whether you'll be safe there, that's a) a constant source of anxiety that's capable of exacerbating mental health conditions or driving someone to drugs; and b) doesn't leave the mind free to worry about longer term fixes for the situation.

Moreover, the prevalence of drugs on the street and the lack of anything else to do with one's time, other than worry, also drives people to use them and makes breaking existing addictions harder. Even a television would be at least a distraction.

Organizations that not only perform interventions but also study their efficacy have found that compliance rates for things like taking daily or weekly medications are much higher if people are first put into stable housing.

I applaud your desire to address the problems of homelessness in ways that existing players are failing to. You may first want to research what has already been learned in this space.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great insight, thank you. Yes, I know virtually nothing about the issue, that's why I made this post :-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: You have 1 year and enough money to live. What would you build? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I asked myself that question last November. Big project was finished and finances were good. I applied to YC Startup School to get into the "scene" and they accepted everyone by accident that year.

I ended up doing a startup for backup hosting[1] and a new open source GUI[2] to go with it. Not as grand as the ideas here, but I seems to solve a problem for some people.

If I had to do it again, I would start with a niche problem I know well and that other people are willing to pay for. Then learn new things on the way and expand where it makes sense.

1: [https://www.borgbase.com/](https://www.borgbase.com/)

2: [https://github.com/borgbase/vorta](https://github.com/borgbase/vorta)

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly? Nothing.

I think I would get more from investing in something boring-yet-reliable and finding another job. Do you really think that an idea someone gave you on the internet is likely to provide more happiness than having a cushion and retiring earlier?

At the very least, you should hold off for a few years until you have an idea and the technological/business skills/partners to implement it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Given what I value now, having a cushion and retiring early would not provide me much happiness so it is not hard for sth else to provide more happiness than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Random story/world/society generator, targeted at authors, game developers, and DMs.

There's a lot of very inaccurate ones. There's a few very accurate ones, like DF and Civ, but these require too much effort. I'd like to have something where someone can just bash buttons for inspiration, mostly pulling content off TV Tropes.

Some content might be crowdsourced, e.g. we could have a random clothing generator, where all the clothing is custom written by humans. Or say, a random village generator.

The crowdsourced and TV Tropes sourced content would be free.

Monetization might be subscribing to premium content. Content is written by higher quality reviewers, and payment goes to them, either as a Spotify-like "pool" or direct purchasing of bundles. So if you wanted a desert themed world, you can buy a desert-themed bundle.

Another monetization route would be picking a target market and focusing on tools for that market. Say, a DM-themed tool which generates dungeons or pickpocketing results.

</comment><comment><USER5> Global logistics service, with side aim of distributing surplus food to areas that need it.

Big data backed surgery scheduling for units with high contention, to minimize patient loss.

<comment><USER6> On surplus food distribution -- do efforts like this already exist?

I don't know anything about the area.

If not, it does seem like an area for impact using tech..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would try to build a complete ontology of human skills that makes it easy to learn anything efficiently. Started LearnAwesome towards this and contributors have started showing up so hoping to make good progress even without taking an year off: [https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn- awesome](https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome)

</comment><comment><USER8> A multi-language, remote debugging/metrics-first/featherweight-processes JIT platform like BEAM/HiPE targeting ia32/e, arm that can run as a process or an unikernel... written in a compiled language (C subset, C++ subset, Haskell, Rust, Crystal).

</comment><comment><USER9> A Roomba that can do wet washing, spot stain removal and some basic restoration stuff.

I also had an idea of an elbow greaser: a robotic arm that would keep applying a cleaning product eg alcohol and rubbing until a stain is removed.

</comment><comment><USER10> A new internet - decentralized to prevent all the walled gardens

<comment><USER4> How does this work? All the walled gardens are voluntary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Machine learning model to generate readable web page spam that ruins and inundates googles search engine.

<comment><USER12> A los of people beat you on that one</comment></comment>


We consistently underestimate kids. - <AUTHOR> http://peebs.org/we-underestimate-kids

<comment><USER2> I'm having a similar experience with my 8yo and his arduino. The coolest thing is to watch him google and struggle (and persevere) despite not being able to read all that well.

Its also bizarre to be with someone who can read and understand the word "instantiate" but is mystified by "pizza".

<comment><USER3> Rightfully so; Italian is cryptic!

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I suppose at a certain point the words that don't follow the rules are the most confusing. "Instantiate" follows the basic rules, "pizza" does not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 26 years ago I wrote a BAT file ("kristen") for the household MS-DOS computer, which would play Christmas carols whenever my two-year-old daughter typed her name on the keyboard and pressed the return key. She learned quickly to switch the system on, wait for the boot sequence to complete, and play music All By Herself.

It was a revelation: kids as young as that don't have eye-hand coordination enough to scribble recognizable letters, so grownups tend to underestimate their cognitive abilities. But give 'em an opportunity to type, and their world expands explosively.

Kristen's own son just turned three last month, and you can't tear him away from his iPad.

<comment><USER6> Thank you - I am going to buy a cheap laptop (maybe two to stop fighting) for each child.

Question: What should go on there? Or should I go for the iPad and push the "educational" games

<comment><USER7> Kids tend to take to tablets brilliantly in my experience. My son turned two a couple of months ago and he can unlock my iPad, swipe across to the next page, select his folder containing his apps (mostly educational, one or two fun apps) choose an app, play with it for a bit, close the app and open a new one. He recently learned how to work the camera which is pretty awesome.

Interesting side effect: He now thinks all smooth surfaces are interactive. We were on the train recently and he was swiping the window in order to close the train doors. Blew my mind at the time.

<comment><USER8> I remember playing video games with a younger family member before he could read. (I want to say the system in question was a Sega Saturn, but I'm not one hundred percent sure about this.) He didn't know what the menus said, but he knew exactly which options he wanted and how to move through several menu screens.

I was impressed.

Moral of the story: A halfway decent interactive interface can work wonders for a kid's ability to unleash his mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was the youngest in a tiny family, and never had much exposure to children younger than myself. As such, I grew up not liking kids very much - I thought they were obnoxious, loud, selfish little creatures.

Then, about 10 years ago, I met my now-wife and got pulled into her gigantic family, complete with dozens of nieces and nephews. Not really knowing how to interact with young children, I just talked to them like adults - not dumbing down what I said, making jokes and references that there was no possibility they would understand - I found it kind of amusing to talk to a child like that.

But, the funny thing is, they really responded to being treated that way. And, it was fascinating to see how they reacted to my comments and questions. A lot of times I would say something I thought was totally over their heads, yet they would inevitably furrow their brows, and come up with _some_ kind of response - often showing an amazing level of comprehension. It was really interesting to see how a child's thought process works, and how it changes as they grow.

As a perverse revenge against someone who didn't like kids, they all grew fond of me. I guess they liked being treated as people instead of dumb little kids.

Epilogue: I actually grew to like children... or the mostly-well-behaved ones, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've become interested in evolutionary psychology. Not at all expert, but when one considers the survivability of children in ancient (pre-historic) environments, seems logical that children increased the likelihood of survival by mimicking the adults they see; figuring out how to do the basics like feeding themselves, finding a safe place to sleep, taking cover during inclement weather, and generally assimilating adult behavior. The sooner they learned these skills, the better their chance of survival if they became separated from adults. Evolution selected for such behaviors. That conclusion is a thought experiment, and I haven't dug up scientific evidence, so an anecdote: I once came home from work to find my 6 year old daughter in my closet. She had put on one of my shirts, a tie and my shoes. She was holding an old briefcase. When she saw me, she said, "daddy, let's go do some business!". I believe that kids have a genetically driven need to emulate their parents and that need is rooted in evolution and is much more profound than we realize. Regrettably, the modern parenting and schooling systems squelch that need. Here's another anecdote: [http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/02/12070...](http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/02/120702crbo_books_kolbert)

<comment><USER11> _When she saw me, she said, "daddy, let's go do some business!"_

Did you?

<comment><USER10> I told her not to move and dashed for the camera. Then we talked about what she wanted to sell (ice cream) and who she wanted to sell it to (people from Germany [I was traveling there frequently at the time]).

I work from home when not traveling and we still talk about customers, partners and even some of the challenges that come up and what we're doing about them. Not sure exactly how it will manifest when she is an adult, but I am certain some good will come of the exposure.

You are absolutely right, don't discard those moments.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the reply! I read an interesting story here on HN about a father who helped his daughter set up her own business with a gumball machine. Here it is, DanielBMarkham: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3168077>

The parent story is also interesting. It seems like a good way to teach your children about a part of the world. I would prefer something other than soda or gumballs, though. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In 3rd grade I built a transistor radio for the science fair. I remember being so proud that I built it, but my mom seemed to be way more proud of that meaningless blue ribbon.

That's the problem, I think. It seems too many parents encourage artificial achievement that can be quantified, like grades or ribbons, which keeps kids from truly exploring what they are capable of doing.

<comment><USER8> This type of encouragement results in bright kids becoming good at doing things because they please parents / teachers / professors / bosses.

Whereas our best and brightest should be encouraged to work out things for themselves, push boundaries, and in general, innovate.

Kudos for finding someone that could understand and appreciate what you were capable of, though. Not all kids have that; as a kid it can be very discouraging when you don't have anyone who understands your work to talk to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> To be honest, I've seen kids doing better hack than that kid in the video using scratch... I don't think we are underestimating kids. If kids have natural talents to programming, then they will enjoy it. Don't push kids to do things just because it's cool to make it on their early resume.

<comment><USER14> When I was a bit older I made a primitive calculator in Delphi... you had to enter things in postfix notation, I think, because I couldn't figure out how to do the normal kind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Parent of a 4 and 1 year old here. Kids can be surprisingly smart and "dumb" at the same time. Their rote intelligence can shine if problems are presented in ways they can easily comprehend them but even simple emotional intelligence tasks ("if I kick my sister it hurts her the same amount as it hurts me when I get kicked") stump them. This confuses adults (myself included) and sometimes makes us expect more from them than would be realistic.

<comment><USER16> I don't think kids don't realize that other people hurt too. Kicking their sisters would be quite pointless otherwise.

<comment><USER17> He's talking about the principles of psychology and escalation of anger. Studies show that when you actually hurt someone, your brain devalues that punch and makes you think you didn't hit very hard, but when you get punched your brain blows it out of proportion.

Defensive techniques I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In 3rd grade I built a transistor radio for the science fair. I remember being so proud that I built it (and received 2 stations!), but my mom seemed to be way more proud of that meaningless blue ribbon.

That's the problem, I think. It seems too many parents encourage artificial achievement that can be quantified, like grades or ribbons, which keeps kids from truly exploring what they are capable of doing.

<comment><USER12> Wow, I'm really sorry about these multiple posts. Blame my HP Touchpad's browser...

Anyone have the power to delete these?

<comment><USER18> Looks like the duplicates have been autokilled, so only you and people with showdead enabled can see them anyway. Don't worry about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While I fully agree that we underestimate kids, I've got to say that my three- year-old spent a gleeful half hour riding up and down escalators back in March, and was sad when we said he had to stop. Little kids can be surprisingly smart and still be amused by simple, repetitive things that would bore adults out of their skulls.

<comment><USER20> Pretty much all I've ever wanted to do is walk down an up escalator (and vice versa) at just the right pace that I don't move. Then run a bit faster, slow down a bit, etc. All my earthly ambitions boil down to this.

<comment><USER21> Do it! What's stopping you?

<comment><USER20> Security. And, shame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Something I did with my kids early on was miss the fact that even though they can't talk they can understand just fine. My kids developed a much larger listening vocabulary faster than I ever expected.

</comment><comment><USER23> I remember how adults used to dumb things down for me or simply ignore me on matters they thought "a kid wouldn't understand", that's why I have a simple policy when talking with children/teenagers: treat them as if they're at the same level as me intelligence-wise.

Sadly, so far in my experience, most children are pretty dumb, for lack of a better word :-). That's why people underestimate them by default, never giving a chance to those who are indeed just as smart as many adults...

</comment><comment><USER24> _Some_ children are quite smart - possibly smarter than some adults will ever be. Most are not as smart as the average adult, however, and some will never be. None of this is really surprising?

Whether one is dealing with an adult or child, there's no need to make assumptions about intelligence. I mean, _some_ kids can spell and proof read better than adults, or at least type out the word "airport" correctly :)

<comment><USER25> I think you underestimate the number of kids who are _smart_, because we put them through the same curriculum and then disregard what they say and desire when they are teenagers. It makes it very difficult to see the huge variation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I take inspiration from Admiral David Farragut, who was captain of his own naval vessel by the age of 12 during the (US) War of 1812.

"Farragut was 12 years old when, during the War of 1812, he was given the assignment to bring a ship captured by the USS Essex, safely to port.[5] He was wounded and captured while serving on the Essex during the engagement at Valparaiso Bay, Chile against the British on March 28, 1814." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farragut></comment>


PythonJobs.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.pythonjobs.com/ <comment><USER2> Job site without SSL? That's new. Maybe they are just listing the jobs, and linking directly to companies' own postings?

        Email
        First Name
        Last Name
        Upload Resume

Nope.

So, yeah.. no.

<comment><USER3> Account creation and login pages are also served over HTTP. This site is insecure and should be taken down immediately.

<comment><USER4> It's a failure of the web browsers to work with a site that would let you be so insecure that it "should be taken down immediately".

Also, I appreciate and agree with the mindset that SSL should be ubiquitous and that this site _is_ insecure, but I gotta say, the way you're phrasing this reminds me of the most arrogant, spoiled customers that "demand" whatever pleases them to customer support and take out all their anger on CSRs.

You can share advice without being demanding and arrogant. Try it.

<comment><USER5> Conversely, I find his comment to be perfectly matter-of-fact, whereas I find yours (esp. your last paragraph) comes across as condescending, haughty and (ironically) arrogant.

<comment><USER4> So you think it's OK to demand the shutdown of a site, saying it "should be taken down _immediately_ "?

I wasn't kidding when I said it reminded me of the attitude some of the nastiest people adopt when dealing with CSRs. Completely forgetting the human element and just _demanding_ things all the time. A HN comment has even less of a say in whether a site be taken down.

Humility isn't a sin. How hard can it be to stop at "This site is insecure."?

<comment><USER3> _So you think it 's OK to demand the shutdown of a site, saying it "should be taken down immediately"?_

If it's potentially exposing the personal information of others, yes. The fact that the above statement values the hypothetical feelings of a person providing the aforementioned site rather than the personal information potentially exposed by anyone using the site suggests that perhaps priorities have not been evaluated properly.

My statement was simple, short, and to the point. No criticism of its author was made nor intended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are there people out there who only want to work in one language or be hired explicitly for one language? On the other side are there employers who only want people well versed in X language?

I guess what I'm getting at is: most great developers I've met choose and use whatever language is the best fit for the job, even if it isn't their favorite. Targeting a specific language appears to be more of a niche, to me, and not as forward-thinking (what if, in order to scale, a different language is more appropriate and you hired only Python experts?). So how typical is it for people to go through either side of this type of process when you're targeting for a very, very specific type of knowledge ?

Curious mostly; not trying to simply be contrarian.

<comment><USER7> The problem is unless you have some offband connections or doing your own startup it's very difficult to switch languages as a professional. For example, if I wanted to switch to Rails development I'd have no chance getting a job which asks for 5 years experience with Rails - I'd have to take a junior/intern position which would be a huge salary hit.

So regardless whether I could learn Rails in a reasonable time or not, I remain stuck in my pigeon-hole (exception is if a new tech comes along like Elixir, where you have a chance at getting in the ground floor).

<comment><USER8> You can keep telling yourself that, but actually most places asking for only five years' Ruby experience would kill for somebody with the same experience in a similar language. Rails really isn't that hard to learn, especially if you're taking a job that involves maintaining/enhancing an existing project. You would be hired as a senior. Well, unless you actually can't grok Ruby after knowing Python, which would be a sad state of affairs.

<comment><USER7> > most places asking for only five years' Ruby experience would kill for > somebody with the same experience in a similar language

I've yet to see any evidence that is the case (not necessarily Ruby, but in general)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're looking for Python jobs, there are plenty of alternative job boards - including Python's very own: [http://python.org/jobs/](http://python.org/jobs/)

<comment><USER10> Right. It's run by the PSF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems like [http://www.pythonjobshq.com/](http://www.pythonjobshq.com/) ? only the logo was changed. Is ithe same owner ?

<comment><USER12> They're both made with [https://www.jobboard.io](https://www.jobboard.io)

<comment><USER11> yes I know, but even the price to post a job is the same :D

<comment><USER13> \+ oh, the irony that the tool is written in Rails. :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> $199 seems pretty extortionate for what is just a jobboard.io site. Plenty of free places to post.

</comment><comment><USER15> Take a look at [http://importpython.com/jobboard/](http://importpython.com/jobboard/) It's a free Python Job Board. Plus jobs posted here are included in the importpython newsletter. It's 100% free.

Disclaimer - I am associated with importpython.com now.

</comment><comment><USER16> Definitely feel there needs to be a clearer distinction between the real search results, and the "Latest from the web" results.

For example, a search for "London" gives 3 hits - then a small little gap, and then a massive column full of non-python jobs

<comment><USER17> Searching "Montreal" gives a first result of Mortgage Advisor in Clinton, NY.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does someone remember the name of a website that you can use to propose your services like a contractor ? There was a bit of everything from art stuff to programming.

That site made me think of it. I'm in my last year of highschool and I'd like to make some money as a python dev with simple missions

</comment><comment><USER19> Love seeing sites powered by JobBoard.io - great product and great guy behind it.

I'm not associated with them in any way but as a boot strapper I love free high quality tools and they have one that's been superb for us.

<comment><USER20> Where is their free plan? The pricing page[0] shows the smallest plan starting at $149/mo.

[0] [https://www.jobboard.io/pricing-plans/](https://www.jobboard.io/pricing- plans/)

<comment><USER21> If your product is good, you don't need to have a free plan. If you're the sort of business that needs a job board, $149/mo is peanuts for the value you get.

[http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans- dont-...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-work/)

<comment><USER22> Comment above is replying to a GP who said

> I'm not associated with them in any way but as a boot strapper I love _free > high quality tools_ and they have one that's been superb for us.

What kind of reply is this?

<comment><USER19> A founder who helps evangelize the brands of companies who help me get to my goals. Something I think any community like HN should support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> looks like a front to "jobs by Indeed", actually

</comment><comment><USER24> What design template did you use for this? It's elegantly simple. Beyond Bootstrap, is it custom designed?

<comment><USER25> [http://jobboard.io](http://jobboard.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> WebDev only

=/

<comment><USER10> Yes, somewhat common these days. There is a lot of good and interesting work that can be done with Python (and many other languages for that matter) outside of web dev.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there a flag for "remote"?

</comment><comment><USER28> Hey folks! Use coupon code "hackernews" to post for free! Thanks!

<comment><USER29> Just tried that, "This coupon doesn't exist"

<comment><USER28> make sure you don't include the quotes - just: hackernews

<comment><USER29> Thats exactly what I did.

<comment><USER30> You forgot the secret invisible soft hyphen: "hackernews".

That's how you prove you're a worthy web developer.

You can also use "sʍǝuɹǝʞɔɐɥ" to prove you have wicked unicode chops.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Web Components, Just in the Nick of Time [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-8Lmg5Gobw <comment><AUTHOR> Threw away all frameworks in 2010, now frameworks are making a comeback again in 2017, despite browser standards having almost caught up.

Here are some quotes for thought:

> "And very much counter to today's ethos in a lot of the JavaScript > ecosystem, we built all of this with the hope that we would be able to > invest it all into the platform directly, and then we'd be able to evaporate > those tools away."

> "Every kilobyte we lean on the platform for instead of sending down the wire > really pays us back."

> "And the web, I believe, can be the single best way to deliver experiences > to those users (mobile) if we don't drown them in JavaScript."

> "Web evolution is freeing us to attack new and harder problems further up > the stack. That's great news for developers, but it's mostly great news for > users if we use the platform."</comment>