The sex-offender registry can be a life sentence - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/when-kids-are-accused-of-sex-crimes?intcid=mod-most-popular <comment><USER2> From everything I've ever read, there is no concept of rehabilitation in the USA. If you have ever been convicted, or even accused, of a felony or sexual crime in the USA then life as you knew it was over.

The concept of being able to pay a debt to society and for that to settle the books, and to then allow those people to return to society and contribute value again... is alien to America.

The problem _starts_ with the lack of rehabilitation and not with the original incident. If a person is deprived of the hope of ever living a meaningful life again, then what incentive exists against their prior behaviour? There is no disincentive that works when a life has already been destroyed.

Regardless of what it was, drugs, sex, violence, theft, or simply going to a demonstration and being arrested when someone else kicks off and you are convicted by proximity... once you deprive people of a future, of hope, then you really start bringing out the worst in them when you could have brought out the best in them.

<comment><USER3> Is this related to fact that there are people who profit over correction services in United States ? After digging around VICE article[0], lack of rehab in US made bit sense at least.

[0] - [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/whos-getting-rich-off- the...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/whos-getting-rich-off-the-prison- industrial-complex)

<comment><USER2> It is bigger and deeper than just that.

I've even seen comments on here regarding immigration that simply said if someone has ever been arrested then they shouldn't be allowed into the USA. (No qualifying statements on recency or severity, or even acquittal.)

With regards to crime (including the mere accusation of sexual things) the sentiment of the USA runs counter to the aspiration and promise of social mobility of the USA.

Yes others profit from maintaining the status quo, but worse is that people are judged for life, based on a single incident in their past. And as the article points out, the zero tolerance amplifies the destructive nature of a society that judges.

<comment><USER4> I've heard it said that much of it goes back to the Calvinists roots of American culture. The idea that there are good people and bad people, that you are one or the other.

Bad people deserve to go to prison, and therefore people in prison are all bad people. Why should any mercy by shown to bad people? Why should good people have to pay to help bad people? That sounds immoral.

By the same set of rules, good people deserve to be rich, so therefore rich people must be good.

It may not be correct, but it sure does seem to accurately describe how American culture works.

<comment><USER5> The ironic, depressing thing is this - strong support for the registry _and_ openly making jokes about prison sexual assaults (in movies, real life etc). How can someone support both at the same time, is beyond my understanding.

<comment><USER4> Because the goal is for bad things to happen to 'bad' people. Both of those things are pushing that agenda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the fight against the great boogeymen of Terrorism and Sex Predation, the US has lost common sense.

As a kid, when I was 8 years old, I played doctor with my neighbor, we we were both curious about each others differences and so we explored them. So, if I read this article, if this had been in the US, we could have been tried as sex offenders? How does this even make sense? Of course kids are curious about body differences between men and women.

And, when I read those stories, I really don't understand how a teenager could be convicted for having sex with a girl 2 or 3 years younger than her. I can't imagine how a girl sexting could be convicted for producing "Child Porn", that absolutely makes no sense.

And then the treatments describe are a form of abuse. I wouldn't want to be subject to a "penile plethysmograph".

It's really scary how easily it is to pass Orwellian by invoking "Think of the Children" or "To prevent terrorists". As soon as those two things are uttered, people seem to lose all common sense.

<comment><USER7> I'm gonna go against the grain here. I'll preface this by saying that I think all sex-offender cases should be handled on a case-by-case basis, and if we use a bit of common sense, things would be a lot better for everyone. Here's a scenario that is likely rare but plausible.

Some girl and boy both at age 15 could be sexting each other. Pics are exchanged, and the pictures are removed from the phone and placed on a computer hard drive. Neither party wants the pics found, so the classic, "bury the pics 10 levels deep in a made up directory that looks like a legit folder hierarchy" is used. A week later, the pics are forgotten about.

Fast forward 5 years. The hard drive crashes. The once teen has a few sporadic backups, but they haven't been regular. They go to a data recovery business. "I'm mainly concerned with the pictures and a lot of the text documents. Try to salvage as many of those as possible. Everything else is whatever."

The business gets to work and applies a could of filters to list of recovered media. Among the media exists 10 or so pictures of a young teen. He received them when he was 15, and he forgot about them. He had no intention of ever looking at them again. Hell, he would have deleted them ages ago had he thought about it, but now he has a hell of a story to explain to the feds.

I don't think teens should be prosecuted as sex offenders for exchanging pics of themselves with other teens, but I think the heart of the matter is in the right place. I don't have a solution to magically fix everything, because there are always going to be implications. Just don't ruins a kid's life for the truly innocuous mistake of exploring sexuality with someone of the same age.

<comment><USER8> The problem with "common sense" is that Americans have so little of it. Even though it's entirely legal, to most Americans a 40yo dating a 20yo may as well be illegal. And yet those were the ages of my grandparents when they met, who remained married until death and produced a wonderful family.

<comment><USER9> Americans can't feel that strongly about it... the current president and his (current) wife are 24 years apart in age.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Her friend, who had just given birth to a baby girl, had logged on to the > Michigan Public Sex Offender Registry Web site to search for local > predators._

"Sex-offender" registry is of course a total and complete abomination. But if you're going to write against it, maybe you owe it to yourself and your readers to not use the words of the enemy -- namely "predators".

There are no "predators". There may or may not be people who made a mistake earlier in life -- many of those mistakes would not even be frowned upon in many other parts of the world.

But to call people on a sex-offenders list "predators" is like calling everyone on a no-fly list "terrorists".

It's bigoted, it's despicable. And it's at least counter productive to use that word in an article that tries to fight the very principle of those lists.

Also, to continue on a related wording controversy that's really irritating, victims shouldn't be able to automatically call themselves "survivors". You're a survivor only if you narrowly escaped death. If your life was never at risk then you're not a survivor.

<comment><USER11> > There are no "predators"

Unfortunately, you're wrong. While there might be far fewer actual predators than the registry supposes, there are indeed actual predators on the list. The problem is that the registry is abused by law enforcement and the public through misunderstanding and continued by lack of intellectual integrity. Why read any public case notes of convictions when all you need to know is that they're on the registry? It takes so much _time_ to actually find out _why_ someone's on the registry. It takes a lot of thinking to actually figure out "hey this person was simply exploring their sexuality and no harm was intended". Why spend time and thought on that when you can just assume the worst and let someone else worry about truth?

<comment><USER12> The whole point of the registry is that it's supposed to contain only people that are perpetually dangerous; if it doesn't and you need to go to case notes to find that, then both the burdens placed on people for permanent registration and the consequences of being on the registry (which go beyond just being findable as a sex offender) and the existence of the registry itself are unjustified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That a society is fine with incarcerating 9 (NINE!) year old kids is disturbing... but, I am _haunted_ by the thoughts that a society on earth incarcerated ten year old kids for non-violent acts in the name of zero tolerance.

Zero tolerance for kids!! They don't understand the damn /meaning/ of that word for god's sake!

<comment><USER14> We must protect children from having their lives ruined!

We shall do that by ruining their lives!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a friend who plead guilty to two statuary rape charges that were false accusations, serving more time with parole than the maximum sentencing of the one charge he was guilty of, solely because the prosecution would drop the request for sex-offender registration, which would have done him permanent harm.

There are some real predators out there, and I understand the threats that make something like a registry necessary. However it has become a tool of the plea-deal legal industry and a mechanism by which non-predatory individuals have had their lives ruined by the state.

<comment><USER10> > _I understand the threats that make something like a registry necessary_

Necessary? But why do sex-offenders registries only exist in (a small number of) English-speaking countries, and in no other [1]? Are there no sex crimes in other countries?

Or does it have something to do with Puritanism and a general fixation with sexuality in those countries?

A registry is not necessary, it's yet another manifestation of American racism [2] and cruelty.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender_registry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender_registry)

> _Sex offender registration does not exist outside of the English-speaking > world, however. The United States is the only country with a registry that > is publicly accessible; all other countries in the English-speaking world > have sex offender registries only accessible by law enforcement._

[2] [http://www.albanystudentpress.net/large-racial- disparities-i...](http://www.albanystudentpress.net/large-racial-disparities- in-sex-offender-registry-prof-finds/)

> _The study indicates that approximately 1 percent of African American males > in the United States are registered sex offenders while white males are > registered at approximately half that rate. The growth of sex offender > registries reflects "a new form of punishment developed by the state that is > specifically tailored to punishing sex,"_

<comment><USER15> The problem with the sex offender registry is not that it exists, it is that there is no way to rehabilitate and get off it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The US are getting weirder and weirder and weirder. I just can't wrap my head around Trump, gun laws, life-time sex-offender registries, the messed up health care system.

Yet, I have only met absolutely nice, intelligent, loving americans, and I've met many. I feel sorry for them. They deserve better.

<comment><USER17> I find that it's easy to hate the US for what it has been doing to others (yes, yes, _tu quoque_ and at least the US isn't literally Nazi Germany) but what's really astonishing is what it's doing to its own people.

Sure, in theory citizens of the "home of the brave" have it pretty good but between the atrocious healthcare and welfare systems, the insane criminal justice system, the mass surveillance, the militarised police force, the widespread influence of religious conservative groups, and everything else... I'm not so sure US citizens are any less victims of the US than anybody else.

<comment><USER18> What you're seeing is the "though on crime" trap all politicians fall into. Vote for law X and show you're tough on crime. Oh you didn't vote for law X? Then you're not tough on crime, and that's why votes should go to your opponent in the next election. US politicians MUST be tough on crime or risk losing election.

<comment><USER19> > US politicians

In a lot of places in the US the Judges are elected. So never mind the politicians, the guy who just sentenced you to an absurd sentence did it because he needed the press for his campaign.

<comment><USER18> What I am speaking of are the crimes themselves, mandatory minimums, funding for rehabilitation, etc. That is set by politicians, not judges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is a huge problem with "accusation equals conviction", and a huge problem with "let's just keep adding punishments to already-convicted people". There also seems to be no automatic apology mechanism after wrongful accusations or convictions, requiring one to spend even more time and money to be given even the most basic repayments for a life-destroying situation.

If I had to pick one thing to fix first, it should be COMPLETELY ILLEGAL TO DISCLOSE MERE ACCUSATIONS (no media coverage, etc.). Disclosure, particularly for sexual crimes, has been shown to have just as much of a career-destroying and family-destroying effect as an actual conviction, and the "hehe, sorry, wrong guy, you are free to go" after the ordeal never undoes the damage. It is a shameful, garbage way for society to operate.

</comment><comment><USER21> _sigh_ ... I'm not sure what else to say. The problem with "Zero Tollerance", minimum sentencing and lifetime registries, is there's no accounting for edge cases or practical exceptions. I'm hoping that over the next decade or two, a lot of this can be rolled back into sensible laws, and justifiable actions.

<comment><USER22> It seems to be a prevalent mindset:

False positives are better than letting one slip through (see: MicroSoft hiring).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a society, we have no way to differentiate who we're mad at, and who we're truly afraid of. Rehabilitation options are nonexistent, as most prisons and jails removed them in the 90's. Offenders go to Prison and come out Convicts -- with better training, some more street smarts, complete with access to more drugs, guns, and tools of the trade.

America is not a country of second chances. Look at sites like beenverified and mugshots -- their sole purpose in life is to shame those who have been arrested/convicted and allow employers/landlords to discriminate in ways that really skirts the FDCPA (beenverified isn't a CRA, so, there are no repercussions of reporting inaccurate information, nor are there ways of getting that information changed).

Hell, even AirBnB performs silent background checks on people who are renting homes -- even after presenting them the official copy of my clean (aside from a few speeding tickets and an accident from 1999) FBI background report, they still say that there are 'public records' that they are using and for the 'safety of the AirBnB platform,' they don't want my money.

We have a long way to go until this country can truly start to fix the 'prison' problem, but, it won't start until the country, as a whole, starts taking a different view of rehabilitation, corrections, and punishment.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well if the predilection towards pedophilia could be managed or "cured" and if prisons did more than just house inmates I.e if they worked on rehab instead of punishment then perhaps the lifetime listings wouldn't be necessary. I won't begin to insinuate that I have the right balance between parents wanting to be cautious with who their kids interact with and the belief that people can change for the better. And then there's the case of adolescents who get caught up in the system before their minds are fully formed...

<comment><USER25> This.

In Norway (heck, in Scandinavia, and, is my impression, in most of North/Central Europe, too), there's strong focus on rehabilitation.

Inmates are encouraged to pursue education while incarcerated. If you want to enter a trade, there are workshops &c in the prisons where you can do your apprenticeship.

Also, in all but the (rare) cases where you are deemed to be a lasting danger to society, you are automatically eligible for parole after serving 2/3 of the sentence. This, combined with a maximum sentence of 21 years imprisonment, means that most offenders are released back into society after a maximum of 14 years behind bars.

During the latter part of your sentencing, you are progressively granted more and more freedom - for instance, halfway houses where you can go to work in the daytime but need to observe a curfew in evenings/nights. The idea, of course, being to prepare you for civilian life again.

Result? The recidivism rate is among the lowest in the world, at approx. 20% overall. (I didn't know that until I googled it while writing this comment.)

That being said, liberal me still feel somewhat less lenient towards paedophiles; I guess any parent does.

However, I don't think the solution is locking them up and throwing away the key; much better to provide counseling and treatment to bring their recidivism rate down as well. It is my firm conviction no society can imprison anyone for life just in case they should reoffend and still consider themselves civilized. Obviously, your mileage may vary.

<comment><USER26> > That being said, liberal me still feel somewhat less lenient towards > paedophiles; I guess any parent does.

It's a sickness. And we have (mental) hospitals for sick people. Problem solved, no leniency required.

<comment><USER22> There was a short documentary about pedophilia showing the opposite:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-Fx6P7d21o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-Fx6P7d21o)

It's a sensitive subject, but treating pedophilia as something that can be cured with medical intervention is rash.

This mindset is akin to treating homosexuality with shock therapy.

<comment><USER27> > This mindset is akin to treating homosexuality with shock therapy.

If like homosexuality it's not a mental illness then that means it is either a conscious decision to only be attracted to and target childrent (which I find unlikely) or it is natural occurence somewhere on the human sexual spectrum.

How do we reconcile that with the attitude most people seem to have, that paedophiles need to be severely punished for being what they are? Are they this way from birth like we consider homosexuals to be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why not just make it a complete registry. Put speeding on the list too so I don't have to worry about my kids getting hit by an unrepentant speeder.

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting catching a thread about America before all the americans wake up and start defending the status quo

</comment><comment><USER18> IMHO acts committed prior to 18 should not warrant inclusion on the sex offender registry, unless they are so egregious and violent that a high bar has been crossed.

<comment><USER30> Siblings are one of the main perpetrators of sexual abuse.

This isn't normal sexual exploration, but actual abuse.

[http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/sibabuse.htm](http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/sibabuse.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The key problem is the registry seems almost like a minimum penalty. Life in prison is a major penalty, life on the registry should be also considered as such. It loses all meaning when it contains people who have been convicted of taking selfies.

</comment><comment><USER32> The article mentions machines attached to young men's penises to "measure their arousal", a prosecutor demanding a photo of a teenage boy's erect penis, masturbation diaries – their so-called "therapy" sounds like a sexual assault in itself, sexual abuse committed by the state and its agents.

</comment><comment><USER33> cruel and unusual punishment anyone?

</comment><comment><USER34> lets be clear. rich people do not have to deal with this. denny hastert rapes a bunch of people and is still thought of as a good guy by the powerful and wealthy. how many more like him are protected? catholic church institutionalizes criminal sexual abuse but nobody in management goes to prison. corey feldman knows who raped him but cannot say it because that person has too much money and power in hollywood. hedge fund managers go to thailand and fuck child prostitutes but they come back here and invest in private prisons that make money putting kids in lockup for playing doctor.

some teenager sends a nude pic and get years in prison.

welcome to 'freedom'

i actually support the 'crackdown on sex crimes'... if it went after actual criminals!!!! politicians, CEOs, cops, bankers, all those people who routinely rape kids and get away with it.

but as usual, it just is a way for the rich to enslave the poor, extract money from them, abuse them, and discard them.

<comment><USER35> The current president is at a minimum guilty of multiple cases of sexual assault. Rich people do not only not have to deal with it, they are next to untouchable.

<comment><USER36> Wait what? Isn't he innocent until proven otherwise?

<comment><USER35> He pretty much admitted it himself, what else do you want? Or do you feel that because he lies all the time we should not believe him at all, even when he incriminates himself?

I'm fairly confident in declaring Trump guilty of that, this is not a court of law, it's an internet forum and the standards for both are different. In fact, the standards of proof for criminal law are different from those for civil law (see OJ), and I think it's a bit much to require the standard of proof for criminal law to apply to a forum discussion for someone who is on the record as stating the does _exactly_ that which others claim he did to them.

<comment><USER37> Myself and half the guys _and girls_ I grew up with are also guilty of sexual assault based on many people's current definition.

<comment><USER35> By what definition would that be?

<comment><USER37> Touching or suggestive language without explicit verbal or written consent would be one example.

I've personally been raped thusly on numerous occasions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: HardyPress – Use WordPress as a static site generator - <AUTHOR> https://www.hardypress.com/ <comment><USER2> I build a lot of Wordpress sites of all types of complexity, including sites that could benefit from being static. My main reasons for likely not using your service would be:

You become my new hosting company and that worries me. But more importantly, these 3 selling points "Support for Contact Forms 7", "Instant search out of the box", "Keep using plugins". I now have to vet plugins myself and guess if they are going to break in your system. It also makes me think about what I can or can't do when building themes myself which I usually don't have to do. The part about you injecting code into the site to add your own instant search is also worrying.

My main takeaway would be that your service is appropriate for novice users and maybe I'm not the target audience. But novice users might not know what static websites are or the differences between them and non-static sites and so I would market the service differently. Instead of focusing on technical features I would just sell it as a hosted Wordpress service with extra bells and whistles that make your sites faster than a normal host. The focus being fast, secure, ease of use, low maintenance etc and renegating the technical aspects about it being headless, generating static pages, WP running on a separate domain and so on to just a technical explanation page for users that are interested.

I hope I haven't dissuaded you, Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks for your thoughts :-)

Actually yes, we are a new hosting company, but the live site is hosted an a AWS-S3 bucket with a CDN in front of it, so, even if you don't trust us, I could feel quite safe with it.

In my personal experience, I used to have a web agency with dozens of WordPress installation to keep alive, mostly of them where simple "brochure" sites. I used auto-update mechanisms and caching layers provided by the hosting service, but it happened more than once to have security/performance/technical problems and headaches.

Only after I put the static copy of these sites online I started sleeping well at night. There was no way that things could go wrong.

Of course it is easier if you build them with the "static solution" in mind. Anyway you will find a compatibility list of the plugin you are using on the site dashboard once your site is on HardyPress.

<comment><USER3> I too have self-hosted dozens of Wordpress sites over the years, including reverse proxy servers to terminate SSL and cache pages, and CDNs to mitigate DDOS and reduce roundtrip times.

I don't bother anymore. I think your biggest competition today isn't self- hosted Wordpress sites, it's Wordpress.com, WP Engine, Pantheon, GoDaddy Managed Wordpress, etc.

I don't want to seem negative, but I'm having a hard time seeing why I would prefer your system to those. From my perspective the static site generation + services _adds_ complexity, it doesn't remove it. And I'd still have to maintain the Wordpress instance since it provides the backend.

If Wordpress is the backend, then a static copy, to me, just seems like one particular implementation of a caching strategy. I would not expect S3 to serve HTML pages any faster than Varnish, for instance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually there are a couple of things that I'd like to clarify:

1) There is no WordPress backend to maintain as it doesn't exists unless you turn it on in a temporary/hidden/virtual environment to make your changes. For the rest of the time it simply doesn't exists. No PHP, no MySql, nothing that can break. You don't even need to keep your installation updated if you don't want to.

2) The pages are not served from an S3 bucket but from a CDN with 20 edge server around the world. The bucket is only a "source of true" where the CDN loads the files when the "cache" is invalidated. This reduce the TTFB (Time to first byte) up to 10x from any location respect a traditional hosting service.

<comment><USER3> I think you've identified the right problems--security, pain of maintenance, performance. I don't think you're solving in them in the best way, but don't let that stop you! Hope your business is successful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gatsbyjs (reactjs based static site generator) is a very good free alternative. It has a plugin which allows you to use WordPress as a headless CMS to create/update content and another plugin which allows to push your the WordPress content to Github Pages (Gitlab or other static site hosting services):

[https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/tree/master/examples/usin...](https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/tree/master/examples/using- wordpress)

</comment><comment> alok-g Simply Static is an alternative for self-hosting: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply- static/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/)

I'm learning how to then put the static site on a CDN. Are there tools for that, or I would be using just FTP. Thanks.

<comment><USER5> You could just put a CDN in front of WordPress and presto change-o your site is static.

<comment> alok-g Could I use a CDN plugin (I found yours in a comment) in the Wordpress development environment itself? (I won't be hosting Wordpress live in production, only the static pages.) Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This concept is very good. Kudos.

One of my scariest memories of getting hacked (back when I was a total greenhorn and cloud computing was rare) was hosting Wordpress blog on the same server as our main site. It got hacked bad. We had viagra links in all our files and it was a total nightmare to cleanup. Upon research I found out that there is an entire market of people trying to find WP hacks and sell it online. God knows how big it must be now.

Anyway, thankfully now you can just host your WP blog on an EC2/DO instance and eliminate all risks. But always keep your WP database and instance separate is what I learned from that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great Idea! I haven't tried it yet, but This is really awesome in concept.

Also, you may want to alleviate some people's concerns about using plugins. The first thing that comes to my mind, would all my existing plugins still work. You'd probably have to try it out and do a test.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice idea, I hope it succeeds! However I would never move my critical WP stuff to a new unknown hosting, thanks. If it was some sort of plugin or special setup I could "install" on my servers I would really pay a decent amount for it though, it would be ideal IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks exciting. As much as I dislike WordPress, it's here to stay and clients ask for it by name.

This sounds like a nice compromise for those that want a GUI to make content changes but also want the security and performance advantages of a static site.

<comment><USER10> It's a nice idea for novices, but there are WordPress plugins that can create static sites from WordPress installations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there are some plugins that "staticize" your website, but

1) you still need to have and maintain secure the WordPress Installation somewhere. With HardyPress WP can be paused and restored when needed with a click.

2) you have to download the static version and upload it somewhere else manually (your client certainly can't do it on their own). HardyPress does it with a click.

3) contact forms and search will stop working. With HardyPress, if you use CF7, everything will work seemlessy.

To solve the problems above HaryPress needs to hosts your WP installation.

<comment><USER11> And pay you money :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, like for every hosting solution ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Congrats on the launch! Love the idea of speeding up WP sites via static pages. Do we need to transfer our domain to you as well or just the Wordpress installation?

Just posted to PH as well - [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hardypress](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hardypress)

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks Jason for your effort on posting it on ProductHunt.

We were thinking of postponing the launch on PH when the new version of the site is ready, but that's okay :-)

You don't need to transfer the domain to us (we are not registrar), you just need to set a CNAME when your site on HardyPress is production ready

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I scratched my own itch and made a plugin that enables you to put your entire WordPress site behind a CDN and manages intelligently flushing the cache.

[https://github.com/kingkool68/wordpress-cdn- integration](https://github.com/kingkool68/wordpress-cdn-integration)

</comment><comment><USER13> How safe is this in comparison to running WordPress in a container with all uploads go to S3 for example? WordPress provides ready to use Docker images which should be fairly easy to upgrade. Sure, it's not for the novice users...

<comment><AUTHOR> There is huge differences between running a live WordPress site on a docker container (where you still have php, mysql, etc), and running it as a static site in a serverless environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is anyone using it and can comment on stability and potential issues?

<comment><USER14> OK so I set up a test account an things are mostly fine, although there are still rough edges. For example, onece the static site is deployed and you click Login in the default theme, you get:

> error on line 12 at column 10: Opening and ending tag mismatch: meta line 0 > and head

This is after two first minutes, so I guess there are still things to work on. In any case, for more advanced users your product is a great no-no, since the main advantage of WP is that it's FOSS - who would want to become your hostage? I see a lot of potential for an open source solution, the idea is really good.

<comment><USER15> > since the main advantage of WP is that it's FOSS

Maybe, maybe not anymore. Now the main advantage of WP is that it's ubiquitous/low barrier to entry and has (too) many plugins/themes/etc available.

Incidentally, that's also WP's main disadvantage because those things greatly increase it's attach surface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is the value of using this over a service like WP Engine ([http://wpengine.com](http://wpengine.com))?

</comment><comment><USER17> Are comments integrated in this system?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use some external service like Disqus, Discourse or similar.

<comment><USER18> What about Wordpress.com/ Jetpack comments? Live commenting the Wordpress way would be wonderful

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could anyone make a list of free-alternatives? Tiresome seeing every little idea turning into a 5 USD a month SaaS-startup.

<comment><USER15> Free alternative: Host WP yourself? Use a different static site generator?

Come on, this clearly isn't yet-another-static-site generator for hackers but a commercial product for people who still use Wordpress, but not so foolish/desperate/cheap that they don't realise the security implications.

<comment><USER19> There are a couple of free plugins to make WP sites static, using various methods. So yes, use a plugin and you can get an HTML copy of your WP site with caveats that should make sense, and you can then host the html anywhere... there are 2-3 plugins that I saw, but I don't run a WP site so I can't comment on each.

This product looks like it'll do ops and stuff for you, so there may still be value if it just works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually with those plugin you still have some drawback: first you still need to have and maintain secure the live WordPress installation somewhere, second you have to download the static version and upload it somewhere else, last but not least your contact forms and search will stop working.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thiel-Gawker Case Divides Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/thiel-gawker-case-divides-silicon-valley-1464313446 <comment><USER2> From what I can tell, most people who have weighed in on the subject seem to agree that both (a) Gawker is a bottom-feeding gossip rag with no moral standing, and (b) Thiel is a cowardly hypocrite who publicly claims to be a "libertarian" while secretly coopting the apparatus of the court to get personal revenge based on an old grudge.

Is anyone who isn't a VC pal of Thiel's really "divided" here?

<comment><USER3> From what I can tell, most people who say that most people agree tend to insert their own opinions as though it's universal.

<comment><USER4> At least he had the stones to post his opinions under the flag of his own identity.

<comment><USER5> Are there any non-billionaires on the side of Thiel? Maybe I run in the loser crowd, but it's hard to support billionaires who use the courts and millions of dollars to address their grudges. When is that good for society?

Showing that video was gross. But do we want to live in a world where super rich folks use their wealth to destroy people or groups they don't like? I don't want Donald Trump to wipe out investigative journalism.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SourceTree for Windows 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sourcetreeapp.com/2017/04/27/sourcetree-for-windows-2-0-new-ui-faster-performance-and-microsoft-git-virtual-file-system-support/ <comment><USER2> The last several times I tried to update Sourcetree, it got significantly worse, with features and functionality being silently removed or broken left and right. Every UI 'improvement' they made felt backwards to me. Simple quality of life things like being able to drag files between the staged/unstaged area just stopped working.

Then, trying to guess/figure out the correct previous version you were running that had all the functionality you needed is a nightmare.

I tried to give this a shot.

1\. Run the installer.

2\. Prompt informed me that I should uninstall the previous version of Sourcetree. No other information on the prompt. Close the prompt.

3\. Nothing happens. I expect that the new version can't install next to an old version. No problem, let me go uninstall the old version...

4\. After about 15 seconds of going through the control panel, uninstall programs, look for sourcetree, etc...

5\. Sourcetree pops up. No notification that anything was installing. No customization of install options. No warning of any kind that this was actually being installed on your system.

6\. Oh, look at that. They removed UI components that I consider critical, with no option of 'toggling' those components - just a complete removal (ex: the sidebar that listed all the projects. I have a lot of projects, scrolling through tabs at the top is not good enough)

I really wish the Windows side of Sourcetree would get it's shit together. I'll be going back to my older version.

Sorry for being such a negative nancy. If anyone has a recommendation for another Git GUI client for Windows, please let me know.

<comment><USER3> This looks promising: [https://www.gitkraken.com/](https://www.gitkraken.com/)

<comment><USER4> Alas they've been promising rebase support for a couple of years now. Would love to try it when they do.

<comment><USER5> We have rebase support :)

<comment><USER4> Interactive rebase support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have they got rid of the treeview of repos? That was a vital feature. I never used the tabs because they didn't all fit on screen, and the tab UI doesn't allow you to distinguish between different repos with the same name. Ironically they seem to have adopted what I considered the worst feature of Git Kraken. Oh, and it let you see all your repos' status (what branches are checked out) at a glance. This is such a pain. I will definitely need to roll back to the last version.

Totally agree with other commenters - this application suffers from the most "changes that randomly f __* up the UI " of any app that I use (because it's still useful despite the havoc the developers inflict on the app)

<comment><USER7> ST dev for Windows here. How many repo do you typically work with at once? Would it help to show the "ahead/behind" indications in the tab headers?

<comment><USER8> Dude, you gotta fix the little arrows that let you scroll the tab bar. Each click just scrolls it like 10% of a tab so it takes 10 clicks to move it 1 tab. This is ridiculous.

Personally, I have a 2560x1440 monitor and I keep ST on it fullscreen. I usually have ~7 repos open but sometimes need to open up to 15. I can fit 11 tabs but look at how much wasted space is in each tab: [https://www.screencast.com/t/vKrSNe5APy](https://www.screencast.com/t/vKrSNe5APy)

On the older version of ST, like 1.5 or something, the tabs were only as big as the name of the repo so each tab was much smaller. This worked great.

Alternatively, make the tabs just add extra rows so instead of having a scrolling list, the tab bar grows vertically instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When it will be available for Windows 3.11? SCNR

<comment><USER10> God I thought it was the source tree of MS Windows 2.x. So disappointed. #grammar

<comment><USER11> I could tell what they were saying, but my inner grammar Nazi kicked in as well.

<comment><USER10> I wasn't into grammar nazi mode, more nostalgia nazi mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Used to pay for this before it was acquired by Atlassian. Never used it since. Thought I might try, given the major new version number, but...

 _You will be prompted for your Atlassian account details. You only have to login once to complete your registration._

No thanks.

Be warned, paying users upgrading from 2.x to current 2.3.x will be forced to sign up.

<comment><USER13> And in Atlassian's license, section 12: "You will not publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Products.". Enables trust a lot...

[https://www.atlassian.com/legal/customer- agreement](https://www.atlassian.com/legal/customer-agreement)

<comment><USER14> Let me follow up with our legal team to see why that's in there. Sometimes there is a good "legal" reason for these terms that are not quite obvious to the rest of us.

To the earlier comment, we have gotten a lot of feedback in regards to the sign-up to Atlassian Account. The fact is that you always required a license, so you had to sign-up anyway. But we took the license away and streamlined the sign-up into the product (yes, there are issues with people behind firewalls that we will have to address).

Personally, I don't think requiring an account is asking too much for a free product and down the road it will help us to provide a more seamless integration for people who use other Atlassian tools as well.

Cheers, Jens

<comment><USER12> I had a license, changed nothing, and your upgrade wants me to go waste 10 minutes to-and-froing to get on some new marketing database. Sorry, not cool. I feel like your company ruined a great product I was very happy with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here is a UI/UX comparison of 1.x vs. 2.x: [https://blog.sourcetreeapp.com/2017/01/27/sourcetree-for- win...](https://blog.sourcetreeapp.com/2017/01/27/sourcetree-for- windows-2-0-is-now-in-beta/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Was really disappointed in the UI direction they took in 1.8+, but fortunately they seem to have backtracked a bit (icons now actually have labels and a bit of color again, etc). Giving this a shot and we'll see how I feel in a few days.

<comment><USER4> Hrm, I'm the opposite - I like icons to have clear, simple shapes. But I like this too.

<comment><USER16> The problem was they removed _all_ color from all icons in 1.8, made them all gray with pencil-thin lines, and removed all the labels. The icons in 1.6 were perfectly fine - in 1.8, you couldn't tell anything apart. There was a huge thread in the Sourcetree JIRA complaining about this: [https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREEWIN-4306](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREEWIN-4306) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems like a great update to me. Much speedier than 1.x and the removal of the repo sidebar doesn't seem like it actually matters. It's 1 additional click to access your repo list but it seems like a good tradeoff for a bit more horizontal space.

Another positive change is the tab bar now occupies the entire horizontal space so you can fit a few more repos in. But, the tabs are still super wide (much wider than they need to be). This was changed sometime around 1.7 and I hate it. If you have repos with a lot of submodules you tend to have a lot of repos open so it really hurts this use case.

So yeah, please make the tabs less wide so we can have more open!

<comment><USER8> It's so much faster. I'm very pleased with the speed improvements. Every time I click on something it's almost instant. Before, not so much. Great job Atlassian!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like this new version a lot (it's so much faster!) but after having used it all morning, I'm noticing something that I really do not like.

If I click on a changed file to see the diff, the diff text shows up almost immediately, but it's blurry. Then, gradually the blurry text is replaced by sharp text about .5 seconds later. It's really nasty to see it and I feel like it's messing with my eyes and brain.

Is there any way to tweak this behavior? I feel like I would rather just see nothing until it can render it sharply.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand why they don't show the Windows UI on [https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/](https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/) if they already know I'm using Windows by showing me the "Download for Windows" button.

</comment><comment><USER17> How good is this compared to the relatively new Tower Git client for Windows? SourceTree for Windows should be a little more mature but the recent versions felt like a step backwards.

<comment><USER18> I briefly tried Tower for Windows a month or so as an alternative for SourceTree. The UI is nicer, but I found that it kept crashing on me.

<comment><USER19> It's been stable for me but I think it's probably too minimal, I will probably go back to SmartGit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My biggest gripe with SourceTree (and Atlassian products in general) is the poor use of screen space. Too bad this new visual look seems to do nothing to fix it.

<comment><USER21> What specifically do you think is a poor use of screen space?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Used it long time ago, but later versions became extremelly slow and bloated, just like everything from Atlassian. Now I'm using Magit which is fantastic.

<comment><USER4> Edit: all the annoyances below are fixed on SourceTree 2.

I have double sized-icons that overlap the text, and SourceTree 2 couldn't uninstall SourceTree 1, but this seems like a welcome return to form so far. The UI seems a little faster too.

\</comment></comment><comment>--

Yep. I use SourceTree daily [1]. Current state of SourceTree 1.x on Windows:

\- Highlighting files to see the diffs frequently breaks - you have the file highlighted but nothing shown in the diff view. You have to go to history and then back to see code changed in a file

\- Dragging changes to staging area is broken

\- Selecting upwards in a diff makes a non contiguous selection that can't be staged

[1] Alas none of the other git clients have a UI for interactive rebase, and I hate doing that on CLI.

</comment><comment><USER23> the nicest, and comprehensively cross-platform client I have seen is Smartgit ([http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/](http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/)). Its linux client works brilliantly!

Interestingly, it comes with integrations with bitbucket, github, etc to resolve pull requests and review comments.

<comment><USER24> GitKraken

<comment><USER25> Notes: non-free for commercial use and, most importantly, an Electron app.

I don't care about any of those currently, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What value does SourceTree provide when one can use 'git' in a terminal/command prompt?

<comment><USER24> What value does a car provide when you can use a bike? I'm using the CLI myself, but pretending that graphical software doesn't have any use is pretentious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'll have to give it a try, it can't be any worse than the previous versions, can it?

</comment><comment><USER15> By the way, did you get the 2.0 update in the old 1.9 version? I didn't :/

<comment><USER28> _Using SourceTree 1.9 or earlier? We implemented a change in the way we roll out updates (announced here) late last year, so if you're using SourceTree for Windows 1.9 or earlier you will not see auto updates for 2.0. Please download 2.0 directly from our website instead._

<comment><USER15> Damn, I read this "earlier than 1.9". Sorry.</comment></comment></comment>


After many revisions, I present my "pocket planner". I hope HN finds it useful - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/windsurfer/Pocket-To-Do/downloads <comment><USER2> FYI, your "action shot"s are not actually action shots, as they don't show your invention in use, just folded up. I highly suggest actually showing a real world example in your action shots. This would give people a better idea about how to use them while simultaneously showing their value.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm quite intrigued to see where you're coming from.

Please show us last weeks, for example..

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The idea is to print out a sheet, cut it in half, and fold them in half twice. You write your weekly plans on the left pane, and your agenda on the right. The grey area marks roughly when it is dark out. I didn't include between 0000 and 0600 as I figured it took up too much space and isn't useful for an agenda.

It's an Inkscape SVG, by the way. I'd love to hear about any forks :)

<comment><USER4> While I like the general idea of your 'schedule as a bar chart' solution, I see several issues:

1) There is very little space to write down appointments. I'd like to be able to write down at least a name and a location, even for a 30-minute appointment.

2) What about moved or cancelled appointments? I'm afraid things will get messy very soon.

3) How should I handle overlapping appointments?

Maybe I'm not the target audience, but I encounter these things daily.

<comment><USER5> For a back-pocket planner, I think it's nice and simple. Clearly it's not intended to incorporate all the features of a dayrunner or whatever. It's just a simple todo list + time-blocking.

1) The space is adequate if your appointments tend to be short eg _Bob and Cathy_ or _lunch_ and not complex like _Bob, Cathy, sys-eng group rep. re: develop timeline to cost out and deploy new server cluster for foobar project (see 3/10/2010 emails "foobar server" and 3/5/2010 "how do I price a webserver?". 6th floor conference room (call in number 1-888-555-1111 p:142678)_

2) The downside of any paper-based time planning is that it gets messy if you need to change things very often.

3) If you have overlapping appointments very often then I think you need to fix a more fundamental problem with your scheduling.

Unless you are some sort of genius, it seems really unlikely that you can seriously pay attention to more than one thing or person at a time. By trying to split your attention, there's a good chance you are less useful than you would be if you told one of your appointments to take a hike.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I agree it would be a nice way to do some personal time boxing ("How do I divide my free time between projects A, B and C"). But as I already noted in the parent post, this layout simply does not suit my kind of appointments.

However, I think most people in my situation would be able to use a daily version of this.

Three bars of six hours each: morning, afternoon and evening, for example. The additional height would allow me to write down overlapping appointments, and the extra width gives me room to write down some details. And in case of major messiness, I need to copy only one day to a new page.

re 1) Your example is ridiculous, but I really do need a first or last name and a location. Even for 30-minute appointments.

re 2) But there is quite a difference between changing a five into a six, or somehow moving an appointment in the bar chart.

re 3) I don't actually try to be in two places at the same time. It's usually just meetings and presentations I want even should attend, but simply overlap with other appointments. I do still want to know about them, so I can go but leave early, or drop in at a later time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really awesome! Glad to see productivity hacks that are not web apps for a change ;) There's something about actually writing stuff down physically instead of tapping them on to your phone... hard to describe.

I'll be giving this a go this week (after offsetting the times +6hrs)

<comment><USER7> yeh it's nice work - I'm really interested in ways that web-based infographics and usability ideas move into the real world - the Guardian/Observer print design has some good examples.

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/hubmedia/4383021104/>

I did a similar paper-based project a while ago - the business-card yearly planner:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/joelanman/367425390/in/set-7215...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/joelanman/367425390/in/set-72157594502722552/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool idea. I'd be interested to see what one looks like after a day of use.

I use just a sheet of paper from my notebook for notes and my phone keeps track of my agenda, but I could see how this could unify that. I'd need a much larger ToDo space, but that is what forks are for right? Thanks for this.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here at 73primenumbers.com, we're always on the lookout for this kind of paper-based innovation!

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks nice.

Something similar that I have used in that past.

[http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-online- emergent-...](http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-online-emergent- task-timer/)

<http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-series/>

I think these are a bit more polished with more options.

Edit: Online Flash version: <http://davidseah.com/tools/ett/alpha/>

Now I just use Things for mac. Works for me.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love this, windsurfer. It goes quite well with my existing GTD system, and I really appreciate that you've made this available. Thank you.

Note: for college students who'd like to use it, consider reading Cal Newport's GTD for students:

[http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/10/06/monday-master-class- ge...](http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/10/06/monday-master-class-getting- things-done-for-college-studentsmade-easy/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it :)

Note: I am a college student

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of the 'PocketMod': <http://repocketmod.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Moleskine has something like this, called the Weekly Notebook. Each spread has a page for appointments on the left (one week), and room for notes or to-dos on the right: [http://www.moleskine.com/catalogue/diariesplanners/12_month_...](http://www.moleskine.com/catalogue/diariesplanners/12_month_weekly_notebook/12_months__weekly_notebook__black_soft_cover__pocket.php)

It's a very nice product, and it looks a bit more presentable than your solution. This can be important when you are in a meeting or with a client (or just to yourself -- using a fancy planner motivates me to keep it neat and up- to-date).

</comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of my muji chronotebook, which I bought after being referenced by Jack Cheng.

<http://jackcheng.com/stuff-i-love-muji-chronotebook>

Its really awesome. I find it the perfect balance of flexibility and structure within a notebook. The way times are laid out are cool, but yet remain unobtrusive.

</comment><comment><USER14> Others have commented on this already, but this reminds me a lot of the charts I'd make for the first couple weeks of high school when I had new classes and couldn't remember my schedule. I think this is more suited for that kind of scheduling than something more corporate. It's just enough space to help you remember that English is at 10:45.

This would also be a good template for convention-goers to use to plan which events they'd like to go to. I can easily imagine this being a rip-out page in a convention pamphlet.

</comment><comment><USER15> looks awesome. reminds me of marc andreessen's 3x5 index card hack: [http://lifehacker.com/266387/marc-andreessens-guide-to- perso...](http://lifehacker.com/266387/marc-andreessens-guide-to-personal- productivity)

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems like the "bars" could be substantially thicker, thereby allowing more space to write in details of appointments and such.

</comment><comment><USER17> Folded in four it is about the size of my iPhone which has calendar app in it

<comment><USER18> I think it will be competitive with the iPhone once someone contributes a patch for MobileMe sync. At least it bypasses AT&T.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I'll integrate some social networking features and location awareness. I could easily capture a percentage of the iPhone's market share with that kind of innovation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> this is absolutely priceless; nice job.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looks good even though most people use A4 paper, start their week on Monday and have their lunch between 12:00 and 13:00 :)

<comment><USER21> Except the Americans. People who simultaneously refer to Saturday and Sunday as the "weekend" and start their calendar weeks from Sunday are, truly, exceptional.

<comment><USER22> Some things are allowed to have 2 ends. Why not weeks, too?

<comment><USER23> Thats actually what I have always considered it to mean. Like two ends of a rope.

Of course, thats probably more a function of having everyone around me call both days weekends and having sunday start off the week. I needed someway to justify it to myself...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google: Symantec antivirus flaws are 'as bad as it gets' - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/29/google-symantec-antivirus-flaws-are-as-bad-as-it-gets/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998774](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998774)

</comment><comment><USER3> Symantec really needs to be made a example of. If there aren't serious consequences for this inability to create secure security products, companies will continue to get rich off of creating insecure software. Symantec fixed the bug this time but I doubt they will create more secure software in the future.

<comment><USER4> Boycott anti-virus software. An afternoon spent on [http://decentsecurity.com/introduction/](http://decentsecurity.com/introduction/) is better for Windows security than any AV product.

Keep everything up to date. Use password managers and two-factor authentication.

Most malware comes from ad networks right now, so use uBlock Origin. HTTPS Everywhere should go in every intsall of Chrome and Firefox.

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/06/guide-securing-your- busin...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/06/guide-securing-your-business-s- online-presence-for-non-experts)

<comment><USER5> > An afternoon spent on > [http://decentsecurity.com/introduction/](http://decentsecurity.com/introduction/) > is better for Windows security than any AV product.

Sad when a single person who runs a joke Twitter account (@SwiftOnSecurity) can do better than an entire multibillion-dollar industry...

<comment><USER4> I talk to the person behind SOS regularly. They are actually quite brilliant and very passionate about consumer security.

The premise of Decent Security (and the fact that there's no name or monetization strategy attached to it) is why they can do better. They're not trying to sell you anything. They're trying to help people take control of their own systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To be honest, it really is. In the non-digital world, it would be the equivalent of finding out that a company which provides security services, had accidentally allowed its services to be provided to kidnap or kill their own principles.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Doctors are gentlemen and a gentleman's hands are clean" again

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guess who will be working late patching Anti-virus software tonight.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Very surprised this affects Mac OS.

"The bugs affect Norton Antivirus on Mac and Windows, Endpoint and numerous other Symantec products"

<comment><USER8> Why would this be surprising? It's a buffer overflow in a program with root access.

Is there something about Macs that prevents buffer overflows?</comment></comment>


It's Basically Just Immoral to Be Rich - <AUTHOR> https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/03/its-basically-just-immoral-to-be-rich <comment><USER2> It took a couple paragraphs before I realized this wasn't satire - or at least, the author didn't intend it that way.

By his logic, it's also "basically just immoral" to have 2 kidneys. Quoting except s/dollar/kidney/: "Because every kidney you have is a kidney you're not giving to somebody else, the decision to retain extra kidneys is a decision to deprive others."

Per [https://www.kidney.org/news/newsroom/factsheets/Organ- Donati...](https://www.kidney.org/news/newsroom/factsheets/Organ-Donation-and- Transplantation-Stats), "There were 5,538 living donors in 2014." Everyone else in the US, presumably including the author, is retaining more than they need.

<comment><USER3> you're missing the author's point: it would be immoral to have 1000 kidneys while others had 1 -- that's the scale of the problem we're talking about

<comment><USER4> A majority on this forum, including those people who believe their financial situation to be dire are still in the top 1% of the richest people on the planet.

Should our minimum wage workers be funding anti-poverty programs?

I think not, it's obviously more complicated, but the logic of such articles can usually be applied in such a way and that makes me distrust everybody who thinks in this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not at all.

However, so many rich people, big cuts in necessary programs, tax cuts, and a majority of Americans struggling economically just does not look good.

I'm not even making a judgement here. I am talking about that struggling majority acting out.

Gonna happen.</comment>


Maximum Entropy Intuition for Fundamental Statistical Distributions - <AUTHOR> https://longintuition.com/2020/07/20/max-entropy-intuition.html <comment><USER2> > Statisticians are quick to reach for the Central Limit Theorem, but I think > there's a deeper, more intuitive, more powerful reason.

> The Normal Distribution is your best guess if you only know the mean and the > variance of your data.

This is putting the cart before the horse, for sure. The reason why you only know the mean and the variance of your data is because you chose to summarize your data that way. And, the reason why you chose to summarize your data that way is _in order to get the normal distribution_ as the maximum entropy distribution.

The normal distribution appears in a lot of places because it is the limiting case of many other distributions, this is the central limit theorem. It is very easy to work with the normal distribution because you can add or subtract a bunch of normal distributions and the result is just another normal distribution. You can add or subtract a bunch of _other_ distributions and the resulting distribution will often be more normal. You can do a lot of work with the normal distribution using linear algebra techniques.

So, you choose to measure mean and variance in order to make the math easier. This does not always result in the best outcome. For example, if you need more robust statistics, you might go for median and average deviation, rather than mean and variance. Then when you choose the maximum entropy distribution from the result, you end up with the Laplace distribution. The Laplace distribution is very inconvenient to work with mathematically, unlike the normal distribution.

<comment><USER3> > This is putting the cart before the horse, for sure. The reason why you only > know the mean and the variance of your data is because you chose to > summarize your data that way.

No, it's not... A Gaussian is the best way to represent your knowledge of a value if you only know the mean and variance of its value.

So if you start with a stack of data and compress it down to a mean and variance, you've discarded most of your knowledge, and are left with a Gaussian as your best guess representation.

Yes if you were to boil it down to different summary data, like a max and min, you'd end up with a different state of knowledge and a different distribution.

But given a mean and variance, the Gaussian is your best choice of distribution, and not because of the central limit theorem, but because it has maximum entropy on those constraints. You don't always even have access to the source data in the first place, maybe just the summary statistics.

<comment><USER4> I would like to push back against this in favor of the original comment. The context of this remark within the article is:

> I was extremely confused as to why the Normal (Gaussian) Distribution pops > up everywhere—in kurtotically-ignorant financial market analysis, in nature, > everywhere. Thinking about it, the prevalence of the Gaussian is actually > rather abnormal. Can you guess why it's everywhere?

This is not a "compression of data" question. It's not an "uninformed distributional choice" question.

It's a "why is this distribution prevalent in Nature" question.

In this context, I think the CLT gives a better answer. There are a lot of averaging processes in Nature, and due to the CLT, averaging of independent perturbations _must_ give rise to normal distributions.

It's possible to perhaps go a step deeper than the above. In some physical systems, you can look at the second moment as an energy -- like the voltage- squared in electrical systems.

In this case, due to a-priori finiteness of system energy, the gaussian distribution can make a claim to being "inevitable" by the maxent argument in OP. ("In a system characterized by finite energy E, what is the least informative distributional constraint?")

<comment><USER5> Because additive processes are common. If the variables were multiplied together instead of summed, you'd get a different asymptotic distribution.

<comment><USER6> You'd get the lognormal, since multiplication is just the exponentiation of summation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I'd add to this is that this kind of thinking makes your coordinate system really matter.

Consider a measurement of some uncertainly sized cubes. You could describe them with their edge length or their volume. Learning one tells you the other. They're equivalent data. However a maximum entropy distribution on one isn't a maximum entropy distribution on the other.

Pragmatically, there's always something you can do (e.g. a Jeffreys prior), but philosophically, this has always made me uneasy with justifications about max entropy that don't also have justifications of the choice of coordinate system.

<comment><USER8> This seems important. Is there somewhere where this example is worked out in more detail?

<comment><USER5> [http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/prior.pdf](http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/prior.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thought experiment: suppose your friend drives 80 miles to visit you. They tell you the trip took between 2 and 4 hours. You have no further information. How confident are you the trip took less than 3 hours?

Now they tell you they maintained a constant speed throughout the trip, a speed somewhere between 20 and 40mph. How confident are you your friend was driving faster than 30mph?

The principle of maximum entropy, applied to each, gives you different answers. P(30mph) = 0.5 implies the trip takes 2hr40mins, not 3hrs. What gives? Which is the _real_ way we should formulate travel times?

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_(probability)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_\(probability\)) Credit for this example: Michael Titelbaum

<comment><USER10> This paradox is a good motivator for when Bayesian probability is a useful. Your confidence is a posterior probability which is conditioned on some prior information. Initially you have little prior information, except for an interval of time and distance. When you receive information about the derivative of speed throughout the trip, this meaningfully updates your priors, and so the posterior changes.

<comment><USER9> The upshot here is that choosing the max entropy distribution as your prior isn't enough, you also need to choose some particular way to formulate the problem. Particular formulations (travel time vs. speed, here) imply different max entropy priors, even though the formulations are equivalent. Worse, there are infinite equivalent formulations, all with different implied max entropy priors.

You can get around this by choosing a non-max entropy prior, like [1], or by deciding on the One True Formulation for your problem. But (Bayesian) updating on the other formulations of the problem won't do it, because there isn't any information in the other formulations -- they're equivalent (by def).

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffreys_prior](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffreys_prior)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can derive these distributions with a lot less algebra by characterizing them with invariances, rather than maximum entropy under constraints.

[https://stevefrank.org/reprints- pdf/16Entropy.pdf](https://stevefrank.org/reprints-pdf/16Entropy.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool! Thank you for sharing. We can get to these distributions a bunch of ways, and I find every incremental way to look at something, the better you understand it. Now, I'm about to get nerdsniped by symmetry and invariances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> With this method, you can derive all of statistical mechanics from information theory with constraints originated from thermodynamics. The observation of thermodynamic quantities, which are high level observations on particles (i.e. related to means, etc., and not to individual particles), puts constraints of the same kind as the ones listed in this article. This approach was pioneered by Jaynes (1952) "Information theory and statistical mechanics, I": [https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Information-Theory- and...](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Information-Theory-and- Statistical-Mechanics-Jaynes/08b67692bc037eada8d3d7ce76cc70994e7c8116)

<comment><USER12> > This approach was pioneered by Jaynes (1952)

minor correction: 1957

This is a more detailed introduction to the subject (from 1962): [https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/brandeis.pdf](https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/brandeis.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The Normal Distribution is your best guess if you only know the mean and the > variance of your data.

That's awful advice for some domains. If your process dynamics are badly behaved (statistically), such as power laws and likes, it turns out the "mean" and "variance" you're calculating from samples are probably rubbish.

Choosing a starting distribution is actually a statement on how you're exposing yourself to risk, there is no such thing as "best guess".

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm making no statement on what your priors are, just that if you have the mean and variance, the max entropy distribution is the Normal. If you know skew and kurtosis, you'll pick something else

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "And if we weigh this by the probability of that particular event happening, we get info ∝ p ⋅ log2(1/p)"

I fail to see the motivation of this step, and I think that's preventing me to see the argument as "intuitive". Could somebody explain?

The two steps back (info ∝ 1/p) it still makes sense to me: the more rare the event is, the bigger the resulting number is, so in the case the event happens, the more "surprised" we are, and more information is gained. However, what do we achieve by weighing the bitcount of the information with the probability?

<comment><USER14> Ah, I think I got it. The point of the exercise is not to formulate the concept of "amount of suprise (∝ amount of information gained) IN CASE the event happens" but the "EXPECTED amount of entropy gain", for us to know before it happens.

That's why we need to take a middle ground between very common events that aren't surprising, and gain us hardly anything, and rare events that gain us a lot of information, but happen so rarely that they don't matter a whole lot.

The formula derived here manages to find the balance between these two extremes.

<comment><USER4> I would agree w/ your statement here. The entropy is the on-average (or, expected) amount of information gained from seeing one "x".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love the article!

My only advice is to end with a list of maximum entropy distributions to showcase the many applications of this theory. I often refer to such tables when I have varying constraints and want the best choice for representing the spread of the data.

See the table in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_entropy_probability_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_entropy_probability_distribution)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much! Great idea!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This approach can mislead people because it by design make the hypothesis that the support is infinite and that the variance is finite, which is why it ends in a thin tail distribution in the first place.

Plus as said by klodolph the choice of arbitrarily restricting your knowledge to the mean and to the variance as summary statistics will lead to the Gaussian distribution. Moreover in practice restricting arbitrarily your knowledge is a violation of probability as a model of intuition as showed by Jaynes

</comment><comment><USER17> Logistic regression can actually also be interpreted as a maximum entropy distribution after observing some 'training data'.</comment>


The Book of Shaders - <AUTHOR> http://thebookofshaders.com/ <comment><USER2> His editor is very good, live preview of shaders, colour pickers, sliders for scalars, breakpoints. Check it out here: [http://editor.thebookofshaders.com](http://editor.thebookofshaders.com)

<comment><USER3> Which is the editor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a graphics programmer, I'm always a bit disappointed that materials on sharers tend to concentrate on fragment/pixel sharers and neglect vertex, geometry and tesselation shaders.

You can do pretty cool procedural stuff in a vertex shader (without any vertex data inputs). It's a necessity for animated models.

There's even less material on geometry and tesselation available.

This book seems to have rather nice pixel shading tricks but I'd like to see some stuff about the other stages too.

<comment><USER5> There are always (commercial) books like the "OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook, the "OpenGL Programming Guide" or the "OpenGL SuperBible".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A useful previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9215582](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9215582)

</comment><comment><USER7> You guys soul should check out this [https://www.shadertoy.com](https://www.shadertoy.com)

<comment><USER8> [http://shaderfrog.com/](http://shaderfrog.com/) is cool too, neat to visualize it right in the browser

<comment><USER6> I've got some OpenGL links on Github. There's a small section on Shaders. I added the above links: [https://github.com/melling/ComputerGraphics/blob/master/open...](https://github.com/melling/ComputerGraphics/blob/master/opengl.org#shaders)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is amazing resource!

Though there is some unexpected behaviour on the site. After load, it always automatically scrolls down to the last editor window, as all editors seems to be selected on load. This is on Chrome Version 49.0.2623.110 (64-bit)

</comment><comment><USER10> Can somebody explain to me the meaning of the variable names "st" and "pct" on this page[0]? I understand the code itself, but I can't puzzle out what the letters stand for.

[0][http://thebookofshaders.com/05/](http://thebookofshaders.com/05/)

<comment><USER11> "st" are texture coordinates, with "s" being the along the horizontal axis into the texture, and "t" being the vertical.

One major stumbling block with graphics is that you'll find lots of one letter names. "xyz" represents locations in the world, whereas "st" represents locations along a surface area. "uv" is also sometimes used for texture coordinates. There is a difference between them, but it's not interesting or relevant to a beginner. Just know that both are in use.

I would guess that "pct" is an abbreviation for "percent", given that it ranges from 0.0 to 1.0. It's definitely a poor choice of variable name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish the book was already done! Not many secti9ns have been finished since I've last visited a year ago. :(

</comment><comment><USER13> you are a godsend; this is so clear!</comment>


Android Income Report #7 (Indie dev makes over $1000/month) - <AUTHOR> http://makingmoneywithandroid.com/2012/01/android-income-report-7-october/

<comment><USER2> Is it just me or does it feel very wrong that this app profits from copyright infringement? Can companies like Apple sue for damages from his Fake iPhone 4S app?

The other Android income report which shows up here often is from kreci who profits from similar prank apps ([https://market.android.com/developer?pub=KreCi.net&hl=en](https://market.android.com/developer?pub=KreCi.net&hl=en)) which feed off of ad revenue.

Personally, I try to strive for a higher standard of app which should be the goal of most Hacker News readers.

<comment> shock-value Agreed completely. It seems crazy that the author is flaunting it too, as I'm sure that will make it more likely that he'll catch legal flak.

<comment><USER3> Seems hardly worth it for ~1K a month too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the other income reports that shows up is from someone who copied code for a Space Invaders game verbatim from Mario Zechner's, "Beginning Android Games". It's a great starting point for starting Android Games. Apparently the guy is making over $1.5k per month with 1/3rd from AdMob and the remaining from a more intrusive mobile ad company. It looks like there are some graphics improvements (new OBJ file for the spaceship) and a main menu screen but that's about it. It's a bit annoying, but on the other hand we have a guy almost making a living off of GPL software. (If he refused to release his GPL code, I guess we can be unhappy with him, but otherwise kudos!)

Another one is Frozen Bubble. There are a lot of clones based of Pavel forget- his-last-name's code. I'm not complaining about the existence of the clones as the code is open source.

However one of the developers irks me.

The developer's domain name for his support email was registered to a Kentucky Fried Chicken in San Mateo, CA very very close to Google HQ. I called. No one knew a thing about it. I sent info to Google through the appropriate channels, contacted the develoepr and then gave up after nothing happened and posted a review. All that happened was that my review has now turned invisible to others on the Market and his whois is now anonymized.

Excessive permissions on one his apps as well because of hidden analytics and phone ID mining. (I think if you're sending information off from a phone you should be explicit about it somewhere - at the very least on the web page for the app). He had pushed this app out and had 350 Google +1s almost instantaneously. 3 months later he hasn't even crossed 400. The devloper has seriously gamed the Market with several titles near the top rankings with just "okay" software.

Caveat about the KFC dev: I had a competing (not Frozen Bubble) game. For the first week of it being live it wasn't even searchable by name. Meanwhile his launched at the same time and his stats were reaching escape velocity.

Them's the breaks.

There are several ways to game the number of downloads you get. Some are more ethical and/or effective than others.

<comment><USER5> I'm Johannes, the Space Invaders guy. To make things clear right at the beginning: I love and support open source, not only because it's somehow making me money, but also because I think, as we are beings living in communities, openness and sharing are the ways. Before Mario published his book, he wrote a German tutorial on game development (which, same as the book, is great), that's where I have the code base from. I mentioned Mario in the app as well as in the Android Market description as well as on my blog and our website and left the game licensed under the GPL of course. There's not much more referencing I can do. I also once took the game off of the Android Market, but Mario told me to put it back on. Regarding the ads: The other ad network I use is madvertise. T me it's interesting that they appear to be more intrusive to you, since their banners actually are a lot smaller than those by AdMob. How come? I also use Heyzap which I also find a bit annoying, especially on small devices, which will be removed with the next update.

Personally, I really like quality apps and think on the long term, even if they are not financially successful, the gain is bigger with these apps than with apps that provide lower quality. However, also prank apps can be of good quality of course and in the end it's the user who is judging. There had been more or less successful fake iPhone apps on the Android Market almost since day one, but most of them don't exist anymore. That's also why I thought David's app would be removed fast, especially when the audience became bigger. This didn't happen so far, which surprises me a little. For David, I hope nothing like a lawsuit or removal will happen, but the possibility obviously will always exist.

<comment><USER4> Well first of all: kudos!

Secondly, I'm very glad to be corrected regarding madvertise as my European requests are on par with American requests yet my European fill rate has been horrible. Coupled with reading your blog and knowing that you used madvertise, I thought your "read phone state and identity" security permission was a madvertise requirement. (I meant intrusive as in security permissions, not screen space.) Again, very glad to be wrong. Apologies.

One of the things I'm enjoying about Android development is getting a chance to do it all. Artwork takes significantly longer than programming. Even loading the end product onto a couple of app stores can exceed total programming time. I am really enjoying getting to know Blender better.</comment></comment></comment>


Running Raspberry Pi natively in a Honda Civic - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologytell.com/in-car-tech/8104/running-raspberry-pi-natively-in-a-honda-civic-oh-the-possibilities/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR Man uses HDMI port to drive HDMI monitor. [HDMI monitor is in car and HDMI port is on Raspberry Pi, but this doesn't really matter as no other features of car nor pi where used.]

<comment><USER3> The thing I _despise_ about this and many other techno-dreaming articles is that they leave it up to the reader to do all the work of dreaming:

> "I love where that train of thought is going"

> "the sky's the limit."

> "it opens the door to some serious possibilities."

Such as WHAT WHAT WHAT? I refuse to fill in the blanks here. The author is gassing me up to get me on board to figure out some brilliant use for their trivial activity.

And I don't think the author even knows, they're just trying to generate hype.

<comment><USER4> Yep, I saw a lot of this when the Arduino came out as well. It's cool, but it was written about like it was the invention of fire. "The possibilities are endless...now what the hell do I actually want to do with this thing..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does "natively" mean in this context? It's a bit like saying my RPi is running "natively" in my "livingroom" when I plug it in to my "TeeVee".

What would it matter, either? I thought the CANBUS in the latest Hondas is encrypted now, and the OBDII was using proprietary codes. So you could make a goofy media player out of it. You're not going to actually do anything with real vehicle telemetry unless you use a app like Torque that has a database of reverse engineered codes.

Honestly, it'd be better if I plugged my Samsung Note 3 into that very same HDMI port. You're better off buying a used Android for the same price as the RPi, because at least that Android would have usable sensors in it and an UI subsystem built around touch and voice input. You might even be able to get network access on it. I mean, he's already planning on having an Android device around to use for network access on the RPi. The RPi is literally doing nothing here.

Buy a $5 MSP430. Hell, if you're spending $50+ on an RPi, buy 10 MSP430s. Install Energia. Use SPI to communicate between your laptop and your MSP430. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get it to work with Android, too. You'll be able to do significantly more than you can with the RPi.

<comment><USER6> RPi runs Linux -- which is infinitely easier to develop for than an MSP430 or Android. You probably could interface with the vehicle telemetry, but you would do it like you would with any PC: through some proprietary USB adapter.

The whole benefit of the RPi is that it gives you access to a ton of open source software and low-cost hardware in a cheap embedded platform. Try adding Wi-Fi to an MSP430; it will take an XBee and a ton of code to make it work. With an RPi, it's as easy as buying a $15 USB Wi-Fi dongle and configuring the interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A very strange piece, as other have observed.

My favorite part was:

 _Getting a homebrew Raspberry Pi interface to be usable while driving would take some finagling, as Gold said the Honda Civic would not show HDMI input unless the car was in Park. But give gearheads and Linux geeks enough time, and they'd figure out a way around that constraint. Once that obstacle is overcome, the sky's the limit. (Insert obligatory safety warnings about not streaming movies while driving here.)_

So, they realize the car is designed by, one assumes, people who know something about designing cars, but still just take it for granted that it's desirable to use a full-blown computer on a home-grown interface _while driving a car_. Why? In many countries you're not even allowed, by law, to use a cellphone while driving. Doesn't that make some kind of sense? Why would you make it sound like some kind of silly restriction, best defeated? Aargh. I don't want to die because some random "gearhead" is fiddling with his home- built GUI, trying to show a movie, while driving.

I'm as much of a Linux geek as the next guy, but I _still_ don't think it sounds like a good idea to use a computer while driving.

<comment><USER8> A lot of cars these days are coming with complicated touch screen displays, shockingly. Can't say that a home-built GUI would be any worse than my friend's aftermarket Pioneer with tiny on screen buttons. I haven't looked at car stereos in probably 5 years, but I'm sure this still is the case. Aftermarket screens required you to wire up to the emergency brake, instead people just grounded it out to the car frame and it worked while driving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry+pi+site%3Amp3car.c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry+pi+site%3Amp3car.com) has all kinds of similar builds

</comment><comment><USER10> Why is this a story? Did they do anything other than plugging a device with hdmi output into a device with hdmi input? I expected to see some sort of special UI configuration to make the pi more ideal for being operated in a car at the very least.

</comment><comment><USER11> A much more interesting talk from this year's QCon London by Simon Ritter: [http://qconlondon.com/dl/qcon- london-2014/slides/SimonRitter...](http://qconlondon.com/dl/qcon- london-2014/slides/SimonRitter_IsItACarIsItAComputerNoItsARaspberryPiJavaCarputer.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> bluetooth OBD II reader and a bluetooth adapter for the pi, and you'd have instant vehicle stats.

<comment><USER4> Or just run Torque on an Android phone and have the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Man plugs RPi into small monitor in car! Wow, such techno! So hip! Very inno!

</comment><comment><USER14> Whats big deal here?</comment>


NetBeans IDE 7.3 Released - <AUTHOR> http://netbeans.org/community/releases/73/index.html <comment><USER2> Best java ide out there imho.</comment>


Intel Acquires Egypt-based SySDSoft  - <AUTHOR> http://arabcrunch.com/2011/03/breaking-intel-first-acquisition-in-the-arab-world-egypt-based-sysdsoft.html <comment><USER2> ...some good news out of Egypt today :)

On a more serious note, this is an interesting trend. Google and Microsoft are ramping up investment; previously companies like Yahoo have also made major acquisitions (Yahoo! buying Maktoob last year for about $100m)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> first acquisition for intel in the Arab world</comment>