US Government seeks to block AT&T & T-Mobile's $39 Billion Merger - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/u-s-files-antitrust-complaint-to-block-proposed-at-t-t-mobile-merger.html <comment><USER2> There are more than a half a million reasons why Congress will attempt to block this lawsuit:

<http://www.politicususa.com/en/att-democracy>

My guess is that Boehner will announce a bill to "defund" it shortly. That seems to be their favorite way to control the executive currently.

As a very happy T-Mobile customer, I nearly punched my monitor when I saw the announcement that it was going to be consumed by the Death Star. I did not have faith that the justice department had the cajoles or the honesty to actually try and stop it. I still have little faith that the government will be able to stop it, given that Congress has dropped all pretense of being anything other than available to the highest bidder.

<comment><USER3> I'm honestly interested into why you consider yourself a very happy T-Mobile customer. I'm in DC and have T-Mobile and they are god awful. Dropped calls, reception in my studio's living room but not in the kitchen, 3+ hours downtime after earthquake. Obviously the only thing they have going on for them is their low prices.

<comment><USER4> > 3+ hours downtime after earthquake.

In DC, all the services were down for about that long.

T-Mobile's coverage in DC is indeed quite spotty: at GMU where I work it's quite good. But at my home in Alexandria, it's far from hot.

But for me, there is one reason I use T-Mobile. The Nexus S. An unlocked, no- provider-junk, Google-updated phone which is updated 6 months before other phones and which has 3G support in Europe. [The last bit knocks out AT&T and Sprint's version of the phone, and it's a big deal for me]. Just wish T-Mobile would permit UMA on the phone.

<comment><USER5> The biggest reason I like t-mobile is the wifi hotspot; no matter how spotty their coverage is in an area, if you have wifi coverage, you have t-mobile coverage. At my parents' place in the mountains near aspen, or my girlfriend's mom's place in the desert outside sedona, there is no cell phone coverage by any provider, but as long as I have wifi, I can make calls. It goes a long way towards making up for their smaller network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The DOJ may be using its leverage to get better concessions out of AT&T. Basically, because AT&T set such a big cancellation fee for itself, the DOJ can bargain up to just less than that amount. It's saying, "shape up or we'll seriously make you eat that $7 billion fee!" I actually think the huge cancellation fee means the deal is more likely to happen because AT&T will tolerate a lot of regulatory arm twisting before walking away.

Exactly what AT&T will need to do I'm not sure. AT&T will probably be forced to sell any T-Mobile operations that overlap with AT&T's existing service just like in the Verizon-Alltel merger a couple years ago. Presumably this will be to small regional carriers so choice is preserved for people in those areas. AT&T will probably need to agree to some kind of consumer price protection at the very least to keep AT&T prices at current levels or lower for a number of years and protect existing T-Mobile customer contracts. AT&T might also have to sell or spin off its TV and home internet operations. The issue of ridiculous text messaging fees might come up, but nothing will be done about them.

<comment><USER7> If they made AT&T agree to use sims and antennas compatible with Verizon's LTE network, that seems worthwhile.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely. Device portability would add real competition to the market, but in reality, AT&T would never agree to that because their whole rationale for the merger is to reduce competition (per the leaked memo).

Verizon would also take major issue with this and most likely not allow any such AT&T devices on their network... and if VZW did certify a device, they would only permit the most crippled hardware from AT&T on their network.

True competition between the two telco giants is an exciting proposition though, hopefully this is eventually accomplished. Just look at what it did to the long-distance market: <http://video.wttw.com/video/1949293907/> (this is a PBS documentary on MCI breaking up AT&T premiering this weekend--good timing!)

<comment><USER9> Here is the leaked memo I think you're talking about: [https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chro...](https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0ByoTmm2HOgC_ZmM2NTNlYTYtOWY0NC00NTYwLWI0MzYtY2Y2NTY3MDYyZWE4&hl=en_US)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If there has ever been an obvious need to prevent a merger it's this one. I really hope that common sense outweighs AT&T's ability to purchase bureaucrats this time.

<comment><USER11> What is this obvious need?

<comment><USER12> As the article said:

 _"AT &T's elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low- priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market," the U.S. said in its filing._

That is an obvious need. There's too little real competition in the wireless space as it is. We don't need to be down to a single nationwide GSM provider.

<comment><USER3> There are other budget options in the wireless space, including Cricket and Boost

<comment><USER12> Cricket's apparently smaller than US Cellular and MetroPCS, neither of whom I even knew existed anymore.

Boost is an MVNO. I'm not sure if they really count in this discussion since they don't own their own network. They're really at the mercy of whomever they lease their capacity from.

I feel like this is kind of like making a case against the DOJ/Microsoft lawsuit in the late 90s by saying, 'it's ok if Apple exits the computer market, because there are still competitors out there like Amiga and Compaq.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> T-Mobile would clean up on this deal if the US Government succeeds. Look at that breakup fee: $3 billion in cash and another $4 billion in non-monetary benefits.

<comment><USER14> I think that's why they agreed to it. Would be interesting if this is the one thing that propels T-Mobile out of the back of the pack.

<comment><USER15> That, and if they do get the iPhone in Oct as rumored, I will switch from AT&T.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good. To have all the GSM spectrum being controlled by one carrier would clearly have been anti-competitive.

<comment><USER17> I'm not happy with the prospect of this merger, but I honestly don't understand why spectrum matters here. If all 4 companies used the same spectrum, would you then be OK with it?

<comment><USER18> Spectrum is a sparse and valuable asset that isn't easy to acquire control of - you generally never want one company in complete control of such assets, especially when it can be used for anti-competitive means. I believe having ATT control all GSM spectrum (control is loosely equivalent to 'own' here -- technically ATT doesn't 'own' it but for all practical purposes it does) would be disastrous if other wish to acquire/use spectrum for services related to what ATT offers.

<comment><USER17> True. And I'd agree that GSM is probably more valuable than CDMA as it is what most of the rest of the world uses, as has been pointed out too. Thanks for that.

I wonder now if people would be equally as upset by a Verizon/Sprint merger as it would effectively reduce the CDMA ownership to one company in the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is great news. I'm a happy T-Mobile customer and I've had bad experiences with AT&T and its predecessor, BellSouth, in the past. I don't want to be forced into AT&T.

Question: What can we do to support the government's efforts? Write our congressmen? Write the DoJ?

</comment><comment><USER20> The Sprint/Nextel merger led to a steady increase in mobile phone plan prices. One can only imagine what an AT&T/T-Mobile merger would do.

<comment><USER21> I love my T-Mobile plan, the customer service, the T-Mobile store down the street from my work, I love the whole company, and I hate the thought of all of that disappearing down AT&T's gaping black hole of a company. I really hope this deal doesn't go through, I'd love to be able to stick with T-Mobile for another 10 years or more.

<comment><USER22> Same sentiments here. So glad they are fighting this. I really don't want to send my monthly payments to AT&T. After being screwed over by them so many times, T-Mobile really is a breath of fresh air.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> From the article: "Should regulators reject the transaction, AT&T would pay Deutsche Telekom $3 billion in cash. It would also provide T-Mobile with wireless spectrum in some regions and reduced charges for calls into AT&T's network, for a total package valued at as much as $7 billion, Deutsche Telekom said this month."

I don't get it, I thought this would happen if the deal went through. What is this $7 bn package in the event that the deal is blocked?

<comment><USER24> It's a breakup fee as explained here:

<http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/ma-issues-breakup-fees.html>

<comment><USER25> How did AT&T not expect there to be a potential violation of anti-trust law? That's the first thing I was wondering when I even heard about this merger. Agreeing to a breakup fee without an exception clause for government intervention in this case is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

<comment><USER26> They were hoping to BS their way through congress. The thing is, cell phone vendors are _personal_ , _tangible_ aspects of people's lives. People typically* have much stronger feelings about their cell vendors than they do economic, foreign, or _gasp_ copyright policy.

* Not that I know, I'm pulling this out of my ass, but it sounds good. Possibly even correct.

<comment><USER27> Yet the Comcast/NBC deal sailed through.

Frankly, I think that's the path AT&T was hoping to follow: pass out a few lobbyist jobs, sail through.

<comment><USER28> "Yet the Comcast/NBC deal sailed through."

That's because neither are cell phone carriers. As long as people feel like they can jump to another service to watch their precious American Reality Dancing Survivor Fear Idol (say by ditching the wires and going satellite or vice versa), then they don't too much care about cable and entertainment companies.

Now, if NBC suddenly stopped making its programming available to anyone except Comcast cable subscribers, you'd start seeing public backlash. Until it happens, people can't fathom or choose not to acknowledge something like that happening.

<comment><USER27> > _"Now, if NBC suddenly stopped making its programming available to anyone > except Comcast cable subscribers"_

Comcast is already playing games with NBC-competing networks in direct violation of the terms they agreed to, when the merger was rubber-stamped. (e.g. The Bloomberg TV/CNBC channel kerfuffle)

Also, most Americans have _more_ freedom to choose a competing cell service provider than a competing cable provider. If a choice between two-to-three viable options is sufficient for them to not care about cable, why would they care about cell service being reduced to two-to-three viable options?

<comment><USER29> You don't have to buy a new TV to switch between cable or satellite providers, but you do have to buy all-new phones to switch between cell carriers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The breakup fee may be what T-Mobile was looking for all along since Deutsche Telekom AG has said it's not willing to invest more in the venture. $3 billion isn't chump change and I'm sure they'll take full advantage of those agreements (e.g. spectrum rights, etc) should the deal fall through.

</comment><comment><USER30> When was the last time a merger of this size got blocked by the Feds?

<comment><USER31> In 2000, the DOJ sued to block what would've been the largest merger in American history if it had gone through, a ~$120b combination of Sprint and WorldCom.

<comment><USER30> Thanks. I couldn't find a list of the largest blocked mergers, just of the largest successful ones (topped by AOL/TimeWarner). Pretty amazing how many of the large mergers turned out. WorldCom tanked two years later, so that would have been another combined failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if this gloriously epic lawyer-fail had anything to do with the DOJ's call? <http://bit.ly/oGKw2x> [Leaked AT&T Letter Demolishes Case For T-Mobile Merger]

</comment><comment><USER33> The extraordinary high breakup fee is important here, and it's there despite the many reasons we and the DOJ itself are citing. It seems that they breach everything - it;s a terrible deal for consumers.

So why are AT&T and their investment bankers pushing so hard for this deal? There is certainly an agency cost - the execs at AT&T want to do a deal and run a bigger company, and their lawyers and bankers want the deal to go ahead so they van get paid. However T-Mobile has to spend money on lawyers and bankers as well, and so some of that breakup fee will be used to pay them, as well as T-Mobile itself.

AT&T were banking on a compliant DOJ, and to be fair over the last decade there was very little push-back from any of the regulators. Since the GFC we would hope that they look over business dealing a bit more firmly, and this seems to be the case.

PBS have a very good article (video) on the topic. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XquULysO1E>

In Australia, NZ and the UK there is a Commerce Commission or Monopoles Regulator that can just say no to deals like this. It's sad that the DOJ has to do so via an expensive lawsuit. Your taxes at work.

</comment><comment><USER34> A lot of good points, but one I didn't see is what will T-mobile do if the deal falls through? $7bn IS chump change compared to what T and VZ spend annually on infrastructure. Unless DT wants to step up their game, T-mob will muddle along as #3 or #4 until a merger with someone goes through. And if the DOJ blocks T, they'll (probably) VZ, which leaves Sprint. Good luck with that...

</comment><comment><USER35> Yay, for once they do something for the consumer.

We'll see if they hold to it, or is just a sham only to be dropped after promises and payouts.

</comment><comment><USER36> Yes! I'm glad to see the government is taking a stance against it. Cell phone bills are expensive enough, I could only imagine what this merger would have done to them. I just pray they hold strong. This could be a really good thing for Tmob. Could seriously help level the playing field.

</comment><comment><USER37> T-Mobile has horrible service and horrible data plans. I'm sick of them and wish they would get sucked into the black hole that is ATT. Where I still will have horrible service and bad data plans.

Need to switch to Verizon.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm trying to understand why comments on Hacker News and Reddit are so uniformly against this merger. Is it because T-mobile has better customer service than AT&T (and most other carriers), and people are upset this will probably be lost?

When T-mobile came to the US, I was under the (perhaps incorrect) impression that they licensed their towers from AT&T (then Cingular). But my impression is that they, by now, have their own towers which will extend AT&T's network. Surely folks realize that mergers are badly needed in the wireless industry - that they are the solution to many of most onerous problems with wireless service today - and that artificially dividing infrastructure, as the FCC did, is tremendously wasteful.

<comment><USER38> > they are the solution to many of most onerous problems with wireless service > today

We disagree with what is the most onerous problem with wireless service today. The most onerous problem with wireless service today is carriers promising things that they can't deliver, then finding ways to up-charge their customers for features that were originally promised.

<comment><USER39> > The most onerous problem with wireless service today is carriers promising > things that they can't deliver, then finding ways to up-charge their > customers for features that were originally promised.

In my opinion these are symptoms of the REAL problem: telecos overcommit to investment in wireless infrastructure, then under-deliver every single time. Afterwards, they use non-sequiturs (iPhone customers keep us from investing! or we want to roll out 4G!) for what is obviously bean-maximizing behavior.

<comment><USER40> Funny that the CWA touts that the deal "will create" 96,000 jobs, not mentioning that that number is the high side estimate resulting from a promise by AT&T to invest $8B in infrastructure. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to estimate how much of that would become reality.

<comment><USER39> Hah! Hard to believe an acquisition like this would create jobs, especially as AT&T sells it as a "bandwidth/infrastructure acquisition."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This whole process is going to weaken T-Mobile even more.

Founders I've interviewed told me that the acquisition process plays head games with them and their people -- especially if it falls apart.

</comment><comment><USER42> _AT &T said yesterday that it was surprised by the government's lawsuit ..._

So now we know where Saddam Hussein's publicity man went.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why bother? There will be a few minor agreements and/or spinoffs, then it will be approved.

</comment><comment><USER44> Yay. About time the government did something for the consumer.

Thought someway somehow, ATT will get it's merger. They'll just spread more cash around.

Like TARP. Republican voted it down (for show). 4 days later they vote it up. At a cost of like $700 billion.

<comment><USER45> I'm not looking to debate this at all, but I'm not sure how program designed to prevent the insolvency of a major portion of US assets and the anti- competitive practices of one company are related or why you're singling out Republicans in both your metaphor or in relation to AT&T.

<comment><USER46> He's referring to bribes. Typically with Republicans you buy a few of the important ones and the rest fall in line pretty quickly, however with Democrats you have to buy each one individually but generally at a cheaper price. Admittedly it is hard to say which way is more expensive on the whole, but there is something more admirable about a whore who plies his or her own trade, than a pack of them where the only one with any sense at all is the one in charge.

<comment><USER45> I don't understand this at all. There's no direct bribing because of the ramifications, but there is a lot of post-office job offer and campaign contribution gamesmanship, as everyone recognizes. However, I'm not sure where you're drawing your data from. Could you enlighten me? My anecdotal perception is that the "required" donations operate largely the same between parties. As per data compiled by the reputable OpenSecrets, of the top contributing organizations from 1989-2010, most of them donate strongly to Democratic candidates (this I assume would be the amounts used to "bribe" politicians).[1] Regardless of this fact, I still don't see an analogy between a flip-flop vote (I don't know the vote numbers, so that phrasing might not be true) on TARP by the Republicans (while I don't know numbers, as I recall, the Democrats also voted heavily against a "bailout" package before voting for it) and the way that AT&T might use political clout to push through this merger.

[1] <http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php>

EDIT: Interesting to note, however, that AT&T is third on the list of all time donors and on the fence for Dem/Rep support. If the justice department wasn't full of appointments or hires as opposed to elected officials, this could strongly weaken the likely outcome of this suit. In any case, will be interesting to note the effect in upcoming elections that this has on AT&T's donation patterns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Eh, theres always Verizon. AT&T cant get out of its own way anyway. If the govet wanted to block something, they should have stopped Google from buying youtube...

<comment><USER48> Why? Are you aware that the only reason for Youtube's success the infrastructure of Google is? This is also the only reason why there is no real competitor.

<comment><USER49> Are you sure? YouTube was successful before they were purchased by Google, so I'm not sure how Google's infrastructure could be the only reason.

<comment><USER30> YouTube was tiny in comparison when Google bought them. They did an admirable job scaling to where they did, but it wasn't easy and it was still jut the beginning. They served ~100M videos a day and today serve over 3B videos a day (many in HD, which wasn't supported in 2006, the videos then were much lower quality). The amount of incoming video has also grown exponentially.

The YouTube we know today is because of Google and their technical chops.

<comment><USER49> OK, but the _only_ reason (as per the post I was responding to originally)?

Those ~100M videos a day were about 99M (I'm guessing here) more than Google Video was doing at the time.

I believe you that Google's technical prowess was a necessary condition to get YouTube to where they are today, but I find it hard to believe that YouTube did nothing whatsoever to warrant becoming the original name brand of web video in the first place.

<comment><USER48> The reason is the peering, the traffic volume of Youtube is not profitable without peering infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'm a happy T-mobile customer, and I hate AT&T, but IMHO the government has no business blocking this deal. Maybe the law allows it to block on nebulous competition grounds, but if it does then the law is an ass.

Business should be allowed to screw over customers as they see fit, customers can and must be allowed to walk away. And I can still walk away to join Sprint/Verizon.

Yes, neither of these companies may be offering me the best deal possible, but unless they are colluding, the government should not be involved.

<comment><USER31> If you count GSM phones as a market, which anyone who does international travel would, then the deal would reduce the number of companies in the U.S. market from 2 to 1.

<comment><USER51> There's a number of "global phones" available on Verizon that are dual CDMA/GSM. <http://b2b.vzw.com/international/Global_Phone/index.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I definitely understand the resistance to this merger, especially on Dan Hesse's part, but lets step back and think about what a "big two" would look like (Don't we live in a free-market?). A Verizon, AT&T dominated market is still going to drive innovation and maybe even more important an AT&T merger with T-Mobile will help to improve the quality of their service for their customers. As an AT&T customer myself, I'm all for it. One thing I know for sure; $7 Billion in failure is going to drive AT&T to do what it takes to make this happen ($3 billion breakup fee in cash an additional $3 to $4 billion in spectrum and services).

<comment><USER49> > A Verizon, AT&T dominated market is still going to drive innovation

Why? Why wouldn't they just stop with "You take your half of the market, we'll take our half, and we'll push through a 5% price increase every year for more or less the same services."?

It works for the cable industry, and I can't see any reason that wireless players wouldn't be delighted with this approach. Heck, with only two real players, they might even be able to gang up on Apple and demand a larger share of the iPhone profits in the future and start forcing carrierware onto the iPhone, as with Android.

A duopoly is not a functioning free market.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. We basically have a Verizon & AT&T dominated market now, with T-Mobile and Sprint being nothing more than an afterthought; I think Sprint more-so that Tmo, but I digress.

AT&T as put off putting up new towers to keep up with use for years. Ask New York iPhone users how well that's working out for them. Meanwhile, TMO decided to get serious in the US wireless game and has been spending a lot of money building out their next-gen network while at the same time reducing the prices of their plans (or at least giving you more for the same money). VZW seems to be the only other provider serious about rolling out a 4G network, and to my admittedly limited knowledge, ATT hasn't done _anything_ in that regard, besides try to buy the network off TMO.

Why would you possibly think anything would be different if they suddenly became the #1 provider? Based on their past actions, what would happen is they would drop all of TMO's low price contract-less all-you-can-eat plans and most likely stop the 4G rollout and just rest on what's already built. I wouldn't be surprised to see some price bumps or at the very least airtime/data reductions in there either.

What have you seen that makes you think anything else would happen?</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: US Visa application now requires you give old emails and phone numbers - <AUTHOR> In addition to asking for all your social media accounts, they ask for your old email addresses and phone numbers. Is having SMS two factor authentication now a privacy risk? Will activating SMS two factor allow homeland security to find my online accounts from my phone number? <comment><USER2> 5 years' worth of email addresses is going to be an interesting exercise in futility as I use different mail addresses for any commercial or public entity I communicate with. If I hand them a list of ~2500 mail addresses and tell them that no, I don't have a Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat/Instagram/whatever account they'll just look at me in a think-you're-being-funny-sonny kind of way and deny entrance.

<comment><AUTHOR> My concern other than the privacy implications is that I have so many throw- away social media accounts that I can't keep track of them. If one of them is discovered because of an old phone number of email address and is considered a valid reason for denial of a visa that would really hurt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Theoretically a person could create a fake profile of someone they didn't like, and use that to get them denied entry to the US, correct? If the US found the profile they'd demand to know why it wasn't included in the person's application.

</comment><comment><USER4> "The State Department regulations say people will have to submit _social media names_ and five years' worth of _email addresses_ and _phone numbers_.

When proposed last year, authorities estimated the proposal would affect 14.7 million people annually." [0]

[0] [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-48486672](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48486672)

<comment><USER5> ... not counting all the people those people emailed or otherwise communicated with, whose information is now queryable by the US government without their consent or knowledge (not that it wasn't before).

<comment><USER6> All the more reason to use Europe-based email hosting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Two submissions discussing this topic on HN:

2 days ago, over 70 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20065142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20065142)

8 hours ago, over 80 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20075608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20075608)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is similar to what is required from a USA citizen to obtain a visa to visit Iran.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Will activating SMS two factor allow homeland security to find my online > accounts from my phone number?

Yes. It's naive to think otherwise. And I wouldn't be surprised if they can even login into your online account with 2FA enabled with SMS.</comment>


The Ruby on Rails Tutorial for Rails 4.0 final - <AUTHOR> http://news.railstutorial.org/rails-tutorial-for-rails-4-0-final/ <comment><USER2> This is excellent news. Hartl's Rails Tutorial was easily one of the best tutorials for any full-stack framework that I've ever read.

Too many tutorials come up with overly-simplified examples that have no real utility. I hate looking at a tutorial that shows you how to build a toy app that is barely usable even by its own creator.

But Hartl's book takes you through one very feasible web app (a Twitter clone) while explaining common tools and practices in the process. TDD, Heroku, Git, Bundler, the works. When I finished the book, I showed it to some non- technical friends and we played with it for a while with absolutely no problems. Not once did I have to say "well, this is just a demo."

If you want to learn Rails, you won't find a better place to start than Hartl's Rails tutorial.

<comment><USER3> Yes, just to join the echo chamber for a minute.

For someone new to Rails, but not to OOP/web dev/sysadmin, Hartl did a really great job on highlighting how to work through the many decisions that are already made for you in Rails, but also some nice Ruby tips. He would also be really good about keeping it up to date and adding errata where needed to fix minor inaccuracies.

Totally worth the money, from a guy who learned Ruby/Rails from him and Obie Fernandez's book and struck on independent contracting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I basically owe a large proportion of how I earn money today to Michael Hartl - spending $100 on his screencast a few years ago was the best investment I could have made.

RailsTutorial is holistic, practical, and very well paced for total beginners.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find the Rails tutorial to be a terrible _intro to Rails_ (unless if you're already a web dev, or a crack dev), but a fantastic _intro to TDD with Rails_. I recommend JumpStartLabs' Blogger tutorial as the best intro to Rails.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have tentative plans at some point to make a product called something like _Learn Enough Rails To Be Dangerous_ to fill this niche. The plan would be to cover just the basics of Rails, while largely omitting TDD. Leaving out TDD would definitely be easier on a beginner—but it would also undoubtedly make him dangerous.

<comment><USER5> _I have tentative plans at some point to make a product called something like Learn Enough Rails To Be Dangerous to fill this niche. The plan would be to cover just the basics of Rails, while largely omitting TDD._

Awesome! I look forward to it!

 _Leaving out TDD would definitely be easier on a beginner—but it would also undoubtedly make him dangerous._

I would think the opposite actually: learning TDD often gives people a false sense of safety.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been working through the beta version of your Rails 4 book for the past couple of weeks, and it's been an absolutely stellar experience. As an experienced front-end web developer, I've not had proper experience with TDD before, but your book emphasises it's important while keeping it relatively easy. Only rarely have I transcribed some code without really understanding why or what it's for, and I feel like I genuinely get how my application (thus far) works.

My only concerns are with a few of the Rails conventions, which are probably due to my own conventions with JS and PHP.

Thank you for your awesome work. I'll definitely be buying a copy asap.

</comment><comment><USER7> I just spent an hour trying to set up Rails. Failed when running rails server on some sqlite error. Mi googled the error but none of the suggestions have worked.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rails Tutorial 2.3 not only taught me how to do Rails, but how to do web development. I had never made a non-static website before in my life or touched a line of Ruby code and I had no problem working through Hartl's tutorial. That really says something about the quality, most other framework books require years of web-dev knowledge and exposure to the language.

</comment><comment><USER9> For someone who hadn't done web development in ten years and then wanted to get back into it with Rails, this tutorial (for v3.2) was perfect. As others have noted, it demystifies the whole stack, even including tools such as Sublime Text as related plugins. Hartl is a great instructor.

</comment><comment><USER10> thank you for your ongoing, awesome work :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Was waiting on this version to start reading your book and start learning rails. Excellent news! Looking forward to reading this.

</comment><comment><USER12> This tutorial literally changed my life.

Props for making the best RoR tutorial available.

Thank you mhartl

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there a Rails Tutorial style book for Django?

<comment><USER14> Theres the Django tutorial but its not quite as comprehensive as Hartl's Rails Tutorial.

[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Still no rbenv love?

<comment><AUTHOR> I might add it in the full 3rd edition. The problem is that rvm and rbenv can't coexist on the same machine, so the barrier to using both is high. In particular, it means that I haven't been able to test rbenv myself, so I don't know it. I'd probably have to install, say, a Linux virtual machine just to use it.

That said, if you or someone you know would be willing to write up some material on rbenv to parallel the rvm instructions, I'd be happy to include it in the book. Please send any correspondence to admin at railstutorial dot org.

<comment><USER16> You can almost run rvm and rbenv in parallel by installing them under separate system users.

That's how I handle having some clients who use one and some that use the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> RVM, seriously..?

<comment><USER6> Is there a better solution out there? I've found it to be (relatively) painless thus far, though I've been caught out a couple of times.

<comment><USER18> I like rbenv, it's pretty lightweight.

The only reason to stick with RVM was gem-sets but everybody users bundler these days anyway,.</comment></comment></comment>


Ray Kurzweil Says He'll Get 'Unlimited Resources' to Work on AI at Google - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2013/01/ray-kurzweil-says-hell-get-unlimited-funds-to-work-on-ai-at-google/ <comment><USER2> This strikes me as an exceedingly poor investment. Granted it's an area he's almost religiously devoted to but I have seen no evidence whatsoever of any kind of RESULTS from him in this field.

If it were me choosing who to fund, I would make my main criteria who has actually made some progress, has solid models that show promise and not base it on who's the most willing to make tons of unfounded predictions.

<comment><USER3> God damn it... Not this again.

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=====MY PREVIOUS POSTS</comment><comment></comment><comment>=====

I don't think that's a very fair assessment of Kurzweil's role in technology.

He was on the ground, getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton.

As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and the seemingly sci-fi things they were now capable of.

"Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!"

"Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!"

"Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!"

"Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!"

I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=

In addition, I'd rank Minsky, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Peter, Norvig, Rafael Reif, Tomaso Poggio, Dileep George, and Kurzweil's other supporters as much more qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, than Kurzweil's detractors like Hofstadter, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and Gary Marcus. It seems that Hofstadter is the only one of that group who is really qualified to render a verdict.

<http://howtocreateamind.com/>

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=

Here's Peter Norvig himself on Kurzweil:

"Ray's contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we're working on at Google."

and him effusively praising Ray at a Google Talks event: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4> \- @1:25

<comment><USER4> What does it mean to say that Kurzweil was "heavily involved" in those breakthroughs? Did he contribute in a significant way to the science? Did he commercialize pre-existing ideas from academia?

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I think you're barking up the wrong tree here. Even his strongest critics generally concede that he's a brilliant man who has contributed significantly to technology.

Please understand, I'm not a Kurzweil fan boy. I do think a lot of his conclusions are inevitable in the long term - say 100 years out - but I'd guess it's 50/50 whether or not his timelines are too optimistic to benefit any of us here personally.

What I'm reacting strongly to here is the knee-jerk dismissal of his credentials and accomplishments by some on HN due to their incredulity towards his later ideas. It doesn't encourage an informed debate, and quite frankly smacks of a religious or political argument - which admittedly many of his supporters are just as guilty of.

<comment><USER4> I just want to know what that contribution was exactly.

<comment><USER3> Go to the 'Life, inventions, and business career' section here, as well as the overview section:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil>

<comment><USER5> I read that, and I'm still not sure what you're talking about. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Recognition_and_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Recognition_and_awards) is a pretty good summary of his accomplishments. He's had a full life, no question, but how much of it was AI? His biggest AI accomplishment seems to be in OCR technology with the Reading Machine back in the 70s. Other than that his strengths seem to be in commercializing inventions, and in attaching his name to his products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google scares me more than other companies because of their handle on AI. I wish they at least appeared to take existential risk around AI seriously.

Having Kurzweil near the top isn't exactly comforting, either.

<comment><USER7> Existential risk around AI? Really?

That's just multiplying through by -1 the typical nerd wet dream about the Singularity.

I can't even keep Rails, Apache, or git from occasionally shitting the bed; I am not worried about AI just yet.

<comment><USER8> _That's just multiplying through by -1 the typical nerd wet dream about the Singularity._

Well said. What is it that AI is supposed to do that's so scary, anyway?

<comment><USER9> What scary things do humans do, to each other and to lesser species? What amazing things do humans do? What concept lets humans do anything noteworthy at all? Here's a nice essay on the power of intelligence: <http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/power>

<comment><USER10> Since when does intelligence = human intelligence ?

You would think an intelligent person would know this.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't. Hence the curiosities and concerns about general AI, non-human intelligence, hopefully created by us humans, the first intelligences intelligent enough to design their successor instead of letting a weaker non- intelligent design process such as evolution happen upon it by chance.

The site I linked to has some good introductory material to the related concepts. (<http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/intro> is short and to the point.) <http://singularity.org/research/> lists some important texts to read, and following up on the authors will lead to more. (An author I will also recommend following for his practical pursuits is Ben Goertzel. Lastly, I think this is a good criticism of the Singularity Institute's general mode of operating: [http://kruel.co/2012/11/03/what-i-would-like-the- singularity...](http://kruel.co/2012/11/03/what-i-would-like-the-singularity- institute-to-publish/) But you should probably read that one last, if you intend to read anything at all beyond the simple introduction.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The detractors are few when the discussion is about IBM's Watson. It "competed against" the best Jeopardy players and is now said to be "going to medical school."

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/i-b-m-s-watson- goes...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/i-b-m-s-watson-goes-to- medical-school/)

But it's still a machine. Albeit with very sophisticated and very useful capabilities.

And as far as I know, has not expressed self-awareness.

Yet given the fundamental nature of how Watson works it would seem logical to think that Google might one day have to compete with IBM in a number of areas where Watson excels -- medical diagnosis for example. Or worldwide financial analysis.

To do so, Google will need strong voice recognition and text-to-speech capabilities which Ray Kurzweil can help with immediately.

<comment><USER12> My hunch is that voice recognition and text-to-speech are the _least_ of the concerns that Kurzweil will be dealing with. My guess is that his insights would be more applied to semantic reasoning using massive datasets (i.e., the Web), to build the engine that does the reasoning and answering rather than just the input/output layer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem with giving truly gifted inventors all the resources they want is that they often end up inventing Segways.

The kind of desperate, burning passion that Wozniak had when inventing the Apple computer doesn't seem to be something that any established company has ever been able to intentionally recreate.

<comment><USER14> Segway and all that Bell Labs stuff...

<comment><USER13> That actually is a good point. The thought crossed my mind while I wrote the above followed instantly with "well Bell labs, and to some extent IBM in the early days was different." I can't quite put my finger on why. Some sort of constrained, institutionalized invention in which a culture of talented but not "rockstar" inventors were allowed to simply sit around and try to impress each other (this was probably somewhat accidental), but at the same time were expected to be generating innovations and filing patents (this was the intentional part).

There was a fairly lively discussion (either here or on slashdot) a few years ago about whether or not Google with its 20% rule could be the next Bell Labs. Driverless cars and Goolge glasses are cool, but it wasn't quite the landslide of cool everyone was hoping back then.

It might just come down to the difference between "create a world changing technology for us, cost is no object" and "go work on whatever you think is cool, and don't worry about the bills".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >Google already has goldmine of info about us; knows where we are, interests, friends, reads our mails before we do. What if it understands?

I do not think that I am alone when I say "please, for the love of god, don't let this happen."

<comment><USER16> No, you're not alone, that's why I try to put my eggs in several baskets, some of them being my own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I appreciate the comments from sceptics, but I look forward to seeing what progress they make. I hope to see a lot of progress using deep neural networks, HMMs, etc.

I remember bringing a bumper sticker "AI, it's for Real" home from the 1982 AAAI conference and putting it on my car, so I may a little biased.

<comment><USER18> The number of cores Google has in their server farms is such a large number you need to use exponential notation.

To say it's an AI researcher's paradise is putting it mildly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> His resources will grow exponentially!

</comment><comment><USER20> I doubt that Kurzweil has truly been granted "unlimited" access to Google's resources. His title of "director of engineering" sounds impressive, but there's so far little indication he will be a very senior figure at the company.

<comment><USER18> Considering the resources given to something as standard as a team working on a better search algorithm, which is _thousands_ of servers, I'm pretty sure he's going to have access to pretty much whatever he wants.

A petabyte of memory? Two hundred thousand cores? Done and done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'll enjoy the ensuing hilarity within google if "Unlimited Resources(tm)" leads to a request for a datacenter full of GPUs...

Just sayin'...

</comment><comment><USER22> Not to mention if anyone will have the resources to create and host the singularity, it would be Google.

</comment><comment><USER23> sorry to be off topic, but the article used this word 'breathless.' I've noticed this word constantly appearing since about 18 months ago. Prior to that, I don't think I encountered it much except in reference to The Corrs' pop hit _Breathless_ (which drew heavily on an 80s Belinda Carlisle track). Am I the only one puzzled by its sudden surgence?

Sidenote: weird how 'surgence' isn't a word in the dictionary

</comment><comment><USER24> This looks like a lot of "20% time", concentrated in one person.

</comment><comment><USER25> This has got to be some kind of gag. Kurzweil is such a known kook that hiring him to work on AI is like hiring William Shatner to collaborate on your music project: the only possible way it could be legitimate is in an ironic sense.

<comment><USER26> Kurzweil did a lot of good work on AI a while back; he came by his fame legitimately, as an engineer and startup founder. If he had then kept his mouth shut about his predictions for the future, nobody would find his hiring at Google particularly surprising.

(Don't believe me? Google it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hope he'll use some of those resources to upload existing intelligences such as, oh, me. Of course, then I might end up in Google Drive or maybe a low- rated app in the Google app store....

</comment><comment><USER28> More proof that Google is SkyNet.

</comment><comment><USER29> question for you: how does Kurzweil's role in Google compare to Regina Dugan's?

</comment><comment><USER30> I think that the Kurzweil skeptics are focusing entirely on the wrong thing when they criticize Kurzweil's technical chops. He isn't being hired as an engineer; he's going to be Director of Engineering. If any of his ideas or proposals are fanciful, there are plenty of people, including Peter Norvig, to set him straight.

What is noteworthy about this hiring is that for the first time, a company with serious technical ability and resources is going to be tackling strong AI. No, there was nothing in the announcement that directly mentions strong AI but I contend that they will have to tackle at least certain aspects of strong AI in order to make significant progress in speech recognition. You can only get so far using the standard tricks that are used with traditional natural language understanding (NLU). At some point, the system is going to have to have an abstract model of the way the world works in order to mimic the assumptions that human intelligence requires in order to understand language.

This shouldn't be all that surprising given what they are trying to do with Google Now. Google Now is different from other products using speech recognition because it is _active_ ; it behaves more like an independent AI agent. Think about what Google will have to do to improve its performance; it will need to build a model the user's behavior in order to tune the probability distributions that underlie the best interpretations for what someone is searching for. You see, language understanding in humans sits upon a sizable foundation of innate assumptions about the way the world, including other humans, works. My claim is that Google have to duplicate much of this in order to get better technical performance from Google Now as well as search. It will need to have a prior knowledge about people in general and modify that knowledge over time by what it learns about a particular user. What I have just described is the missing component in efforts to develop strong AI -- the mechanism by which a distributed AI can learn to mimic aspects of human thinking via evolution. (I'm a functionalist, as you've probably gleaned already, so I would argue that the only way to improve NLU is to ground the processing in "real" understanding on some level.)

Now, Canonical could build a Google Now type system for their Ubuntu phones and seed the learning algorithms with an open source, wiki-AI type project -- you don't need Google to create such a system. But Google has the monetary incentive, resources, and now the technical vision (Kurzweil) to justify pursuing this on a large scale, just as they did with their search engine.

What was the primary thing that Apple did to reach their current level of success? They tried things that other people poo-pooed. It wasn't that the iPhone and the iPad were technically that amazing -- that's why people are unimpressed with the quality of the patents Apple has asserted -- it's that they were the first to seriously try a lot of the features that are now standard. As is often said around here, 90% of success is showing up. The company I work for directly competes with Google in areas related to Google Now and I tell you I got a little nervous when I heard they had hired Kurzweil. Again, not because of his technical abilities but because now we have to worry that Google is going to come up with something totally crazy out of left field. The fact that Kurzweil is crazy is _precisely_ why I worry.

</comment><comment><USER31> I know of a cool way he could test the unlimitedness of his resources.

<comment><USER32> ... he could buy a Nexus 4 on Google Play and try to get support for it from a real live person?

<comment><USER33> I bought a Nexus 4 and phoned up phone support to ask about the shipping. I was immediately connected to a live person, I was told when it shipped and when I would expect it.

Love the phone, totally worth it.</comment></comment></comment>


Distraction is a 4 letter word - <AUTHOR> http://stevecorona.com/distraction-is-a-4-letter-word <comment><USER2> I think we some times take life very seriously than it deserve. According to me, life as whole is meaning less and it is us, who define the meaning of life and we should be gentle to ourselves.</comment>


Steganography for Radio Amateurs: A DSSS Based Approach for Slow Scan Television - <AUTHOR> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.128.5217&rep=rep1&type=pdf <comment><USER2> tldr: Amoral research into how to break Amateur Radio regulations concerning encryption without getting caught.

Discussion of the purpose of and justification for these regulations not included in article.

<comment><USER3> Virtue signal received. Help is on the way.</comment></comment>


Indiana's inmates could soon have access to tablets - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc57.com/story/34960357/indianas-inmates-could-soon-have-access-to-tablets <comment><USER2> Very smart. I was in the Alaskan Prison System back in the 90's, and you could get a TV, a Playstation, or a Nitendo Gameboy if you had your Diploma/GED, had a prison job, and stayed out of trouble. Also, you could pay for basic cable TV. And, you could buy a CD Walkman and 10 music CDs.

There were no fights in those prisons. The halls were quiet. Inmates did their prison jobs during the days, and enjoyed some recreation in the evenings and weekends. And, they paid for it all out of their small prison income. Cheaper than hiring an extra 10 guards to keep the peace, IMHO.

And, if you add in that an inmate can have email access to their family, that is a huge plus.</comment>


Peter Thiel Has Been Funding Hulk Hogan's Lawsuits Against Gawker - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/05/24/this-silicon-valley-billionaire-has-been-secretly-funding-hulk-hogans-lawsuits-against-gawker/#fa8140778057 <comment><USER2> gawker put tesla on a death watch. they exploited their struggle and heartbreak, their endeavour to make the world a better place, for clicks. they hosted a video of hulk hogan having sex on their website despite him not wanting them to. maybe people dont realize just how fucked up that is because people tend to dehumanize celebrities. these are not journalists. these people are fucking scum. good riddance. the fact that a billionaire funded hogans case doesnt bother me at all. it reminds me more of bill gates funding malaria research than anything. another parasite wiped out for the betterment of humanity.

all the people saying this is creepy because its a billionaire shutting down journalism -- dont make me laugh. these werent journalists. and they sealed their own doom by doing things that were not only mean and cruel but super illegal. they did this to themselves. hogan was going to win that case no matter what.

i would have donated to his case given the opportunity.

<comment><USER3> Is Gawker the root of the problem, or a symptom of a larger one? Perhaps the problem is that people will ingest and internalize information from anywhere, without putting it through any sort of critical-thinking funnel. They let themselves become so convinced of something they read on gawker, that they actually try to convince other people it's true.

To put it another way: sure, good riddance to gawker. But what's to stop its successor? You may not like gawker, and your reasons may be valid, rational, or even altruistic. But you cannot dictate the will of its audience. What gives anyone, government or otherwise, the right to stop information at its source?

If you want to lessen the power of information, regardless of how "right" you think it is, the best way to invest your time or money is into teaching people how to think critically, and also _why_ to think critically. Unfortunately it's quite difficult to teach on that subject when you're silencing an opinion from one side of your mouth, and preaching critical thinking from the other.

<comment><USER4> I think you can silence the opinion of fuckwits like Gawker without losing the ability to teach critical thinking.

In fact, the silence might be better for studying.

<comment><USER3> The central tenet of critical thinking is to question everything. Why bother questioning anything, if you just saw your teacher shut down a source of information without giving you the opportunity to ask your own questions about its motives?

<comment><USER4> Gawker is a "source of information" like chlamydia is to the common cold.

Nothing is lost in the destruction of a source of bile about individuals and their private lives, it was zero-information content in the first place. To posit Gawker as a "worthwhile source" indicates a lack of critical thinking to begin with.

Or, I reject one of your primary premises and think you're drawing a connection to "information being stifled" that is tenuous at best given the nature of the information and the behavior of Gawker as an organization. I also disagree with the implied slippery slope on the grounds that the content being "stifled" was bile about individuals in their personal lives and devoid of artistic, journalistic, or any other praise or protection.

tldr: Fuck Gawker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (Reposting here since I'm not sure which submission on new is going to "win")

Sure does make this line in Thiel's Wikipedia page a bit awkward: "The Thiel Foundation is also a supporter of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which promotes the right of journalists to report the news freely without fear of reprisal" Oh, but I'm sure this wasn't reprisal against Gawker (and specifically Valleywag, which was always extremely critical of libertarian VC techbros in general and Thiel in particular), he was just so moved by the plight of a pro wrestler suffering immensely from a leaked sex tape.

Look, I'll get out in front of people accusing me of bias and just say it: I've always hated Thiel. I hate his politics, the behavior of _several_ of the companies he founded, and his smarmy "drop out of college!" advice. But even if you don't share my bile, you should be deeply disturbed by the fact that at least one Silicon Valley billionaire is talking about freedom and innovation with one side of his mouth, while using his money to try and destroy insufficiently sycophantic press outlets. We're moving ever-closer to a world where our industry leaders are not very distinguishable from 19th century robber barons (maybe not to you, but increasingly to the general public)

<comment><USER6> Please do not equate publishing the sex tape of an unwitting victim with freedom of the press... or Gawker bloggers with journalists, for that matter.

I don't agree or disagree with your statements about Thiel as I don't know enough about him to form an opinion, but Gawker seems to very clearly be in the wrong here. If Thiel in any way helped justice to be served here, for whatever motive, good on him.

<comment><USER5> > but Gawker seems to very clearly be in the wrong here

That's not really relevant to my point. Even if Gawker was completely wrong to do what they did, why did Thiel pick that case to donate to? Plenty of people file lawsuits just as valid as Hulk Hogan's every day. Or why didn't he file an amicus curiae? This is clearly an attempt to destroy press he has a grudge against, which is alarming even if the specific lawsuit he picked was a valid one and the defendants were "Gawker bloggers". Look at the bigger picture.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't matter. You don't need logical certainty("If you violate the law, you will be punished"), just some statistical possibility("If you violate the law, there's a small chance you might be punished").

The small chance that someone somewhere might file a lawsuit against you could be enough to frighten future Gawkers, which protects even the small-time people who can't afford their own lawsuits.

And if some Gawker executive says to himself, "Let's do a risk assessment on this person to see if he's likely to get outside support to fight back." Well, there's now the risk of leaving a paper trail demonstrating intent.

<comment><USER8> You're right that this lawsuit will have the positive effect of causing people to be less likely to publish sex tapes.

But it will also have the negative effect of causing news companies to be constantly afraid of publish anything negative about a rich person, because that person might secretly fund lawsuits against them. Gawker is being sued for 2 other things besides this.

<comment><USER9> Especially when you consider that Hogan dropped the part of the suit that would have allowed Gawker to use their insurance to pay some of the liability claim.

Odd, when you consider it shrunk dramatically the ability for Gawker to be able to pay the claim ($144M... Gawker only had $35M in revenue) - is the goal to be recompensed for damages, or to destroy Gawker? The latter seems much more likely, and chilling. Especially if you have a billionaire secret backer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is another one of those situations you can excuse away through specific context (Valleywag did plenty of crappy things) but the broader play here is worrying: billionaire finances lawsuits he has nothing to do with, in order to take down media entity that he dislikes.

I try not to think about the specifics and look at the broader precedent something like this sets and... erk.

EDIT: all specifics aside, I think what bothers me most is that he can do this in secret. We only found out because of, wait for it, the media. Maybe he'll fund cases against Forbes next?

<comment><USER11> Devil's Advocate: If the court system is presumed to be functional here, billionaire is funding a just outcome that could not otherwise come to pass.

<comment><USER10> That feels like a big presumption. The court system often seems to operate on a "biggest pockets wins" basis.

<comment><USER12> Bigger pockets than Gawker Media? Gawker was very easily able to afford its own defense - it's the damages they couldn't afford.

Can you explain how the bigger pockets dictated the Bollea outcome? It looked like the just outcome to me.

<comment><USER10> > Bigger pockets than Gawker Media?

Er, yes. Billionaire Peter Thiel has considerably bigger pockets than Gawker Media.

But that's not really my point, I was talking in general terms. The court system is not reliable enough that it will always find the right outcome no matter what.

<comment><USER13> If one side can afford a decent lawyer and the other can't, sure, the money probably makes a big difference. If one side can afford a great lawyer and the other can only afford a decent lawyer, maybe. If both sides can afford great lawyers... are there amazing lawyers who are _that_ much better than great lawyers? It seems to me like, beyond a certain point, having deeper pockets wouldn't really make a difference, and the case would be determined on ... its merits, and the choice of judge, and the choice of jury, and possibly other considerations. Well, the point is, it wouldn't be the money.

<comment><USER14> Idunno, with the law as complex as it is, and with civil procedure being as complex as it is, it seems like there is so much room to grow as a lawyer that I'm sure they have a similar 10x distinction, as in programming

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Setting aside the specifics of this particular publisher (Valleywag) and their criticisms of Thiel, it's very disturbing that someone with deep pockets can work to _secretly_ take out critical media like this.

<comment><USER16> Gawker took themselves out by putting a sex tape on their website without the consent of the people appearing in it. Perhaps Theil helped the process along, but he wouldn't have been able to do so if they hadn't been so reckless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My perspective is this won't have a chilling effect on _real_ journalism.

This, to me, simply re-iterates the ingrained expectations of conduct that journalism attempts to envelop and embrace as a profession. There are newsworthy stories, and there is muck raking. They are different, and on completely different ends of the integrity scale. Personally I like that the courts are a venue for recourse when there is perceived harm; sure, things could be improved mechanics wise but at least there's an attempt at "checks and balances" the way laws are written.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here is something else Thiel financed

[http://twitter.com/italkyoubored/status/730470870360203265](http://twitter.com/italkyoubored/status/730470870360203265)

<comment><USER19> My estimation of him just dropped to a new low. How cruel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why would Thiel need to fund this lawsuit in the first place? Don't lawyers usually take cases with the potential for a multi-million dollar payoff on a contingency basis?

Edit: Apparently there's another rumor that the Hulkster refused a generous settlement from Gawker in favor of taking his chances at trial. If true, the Thiel rumor would make more sense.

<comment><USER21> Do good engineers take their salary entirely in equity? In both cases, despite high payoffs, there is extreme variability in outcome. Running a serious lawsuit is very expensive.

<comment><USER20> Taking large cases on contingency is exactly the business model of many law firms. They don't charge the client directly, and take about 50% of the payout, plus legal fees if the court awards it. The firms take on multiple cases at once so they can afford to lose some.

Accepting funding from an outside party reduces the risk of making nothing, but eliminates the big payoff. Most serious law firms wouldn't take that deal.

Was the firm in this case very small? That's the only way this rumor would make sense. Even then, why wouldn't Thiel just point the Hulkster to a big law firm that could handle the case without help?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Valleywag is the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda," - Peter Thiel, 2009.

Always playing the long game. Also nice 0-1 creative use of litigation court as investment vehicle and vessel for cultural change and constitutional rights all in one.

<comment><USER10> Oh that we could all live in a world where the most terroristic organisation in our lives is... Valleywag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there a non-Forbes source? I'm not turning off my ad blocker.

<comment><USER24> It's on archive.is - [http://archive.is/JK6N7](http://archive.is/JK6N7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's how it looks to me:

A very big bully (Thiel) beating up a medium sized bulley (Gawker).

I hate bullies.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm betting it was Thiel himself who called the tip into Sorkin.

</comment><comment><USER27> Dude, your most recent comments on HN are defending Moldbug. This puts to lie any free speech argument there, so just say you're happy because Gawker is a bunch of SJWs and move on.

<comment><USER28> I have no love for his political views (or even computing views, for the most part), but has Yarvis/Moldbug ever defamed someone or published private videos? If not, I don't see the hypocrisy.

<comment><USER27> Nah, he just talked about how some ethnic groups are genetically predisposed to being good slaves. Seems to be a weird set of priorities where that is deserving of free speech protection, but Gawker as an actual press organization needs to be silenced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Peter Thiel is a delegate for Trump. I for one welcome our new asshole billionaire overlords. They've meritocratically proven that they're better than us and they deserve it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Good.

</comment><comment><USER31> When people say the signal to noise ratio is bad, articles like this are in the "noise" side of the statement.

<comment><USER32> So are posts like yours (and this one for that matter)</comment></comment>


Humble eBook Bundle - <AUTHOR> http://www.humblebundle.com/?humbleEbookBundle

<comment><USER2> Links to Amazon reviews for all the books:

[http://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Cinema-Cory- Doctorow/dp/0765329...](http://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Cinema-Cory- Doctorow/dp/0765329085/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Pump-Other-Stories-Paolo- Bacigalupi/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Pump-Other-Stories-Paolo- Bacigalupi/dp/1597802026/)

<http://www.amazon.com/Zoo-City-Lauren-Beukes/dp/0857662163/>

[http://www.amazon.com/Invasion-Secret-World-Chronicle- Chroni...](http://www.amazon.com/Invasion-Secret-World-Chronicle- Chronicles/dp/1451637721/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Things-Happen-Kelly- Link/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Things-Happen-Kelly- Link/dp/1931520003/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Beginners-Kelly- Link/dp/01560318...](http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Beginners-Kelly- Link/dp/0156031876/)

Bonus Books (If you pay more than average) :

[http://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Edition-Neil- Gaiman/dp/15...](http://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Edition-Neil- Gaiman/dp/1593077521/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Old-Mans-War-John- Scalzi/dp/0765348276...](http://www.amazon.com/Old-Mans-War-John- Scalzi/dp/0765348276/)

<comment><USER3> Also, links to reviews on Goodreads:

 _Pirate Cinema_ by Cory Doctorow – <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13539171-pirate-cinema> (rating: 3.82)

 _Pump Six and Other Stories_ by Paolo Bacigalupi – [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8503271-pump-six-and- othe...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8503271-pump-six-and-other- stories) (rating: 4.11)

 _Zoo City_ by Lauren Beukes – <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11351953-zoo-city> (rating: 3.68)

 _Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle_ by Mercedes Lackey – <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10824696-invasion> (rating: 3.73)

 _Stranger Things Happen_ by Kelly Link – [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66659.Stranger_Things_Hap...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66659.Stranger_Things_Happen) (rating: 4.00)

 _Magic for Beginners_ by Kelly Link – <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66657.Magic_for_Beginners> (rating: 4.01)

bonus books:

 _Signal to Noise_ by Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean – <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/957373.Signal_to_Noise> (rating: 3.88)

 _Old Man's War_ by John Scalzi – <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51964.Old_Man_s_War> (rating: 4.18)

<comment><USER4> You know what would be great if adapted by Goodreads?

Standard Deviation for ratings. I have a hunch that with the standard- deviation, all ratings for all books even out at 4/5. Not sure why, but I think that goodreads-users are too nice due to using real names.

Edit: Just played around with the "rating details" tab and numpy:

Magic for Beginners has a mean rating of 4.01 and a stddev of 0.99, Pirate Cinema has a mean rating of 3.85 and a stddev of 0.89, Pump Six has a mean rating of 4.11 and a stddev of 0.81, so looking at only the standard deviations, all books have a very similar rating. Interesting, but that doesn't tell me much, except that the standard-deviation is massive in this context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's also a Story Bundle (<http://storybundle.com/>) that is happening right now.

I think they also did the first eBook bundle some months ago, before Humble Bundle.

<comment><USER6> I actually find storybundle a much more intriguing project, whereas Humble is it's usual "Hipster" self - e.g. stuff I've already heard about, stuff that has a fair amount of promotion behind it in there first place.

With books, mostly unlike with video games, curation is an actual value-add: there's absolutely no way any one person could keep on top of all the new book releases.

<comment><USER7> The Humble stuff is largely from a certain clique of writers, a little monoculture in a way. I like the stuff, but I'd also like to see a little more diversity. Even if it's all contemporary sci-fi there's a lot more to choose from than the small group represented here.

<comment><USER8> If you want diversity, Leanpub authors can create their own bundles of Leanpub books (both their own and of other authors). Here's an example of what one of these looks like: <https://leanpub.com/b/node>

Of course, we're currently a bit of a monoculture too: mostly programming books, since our early adopters are largely programmers. But that will change as we grow, hopefully...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Scalzi and Bacigalupi books are so worth it.

Bacigalupi is a great author. I really liked the Wind Up Girl, and about 80% of the short stories in Pump 6 were good.

Old Man's War is a recent classic. I've read all the books in the series, and the first is the best.

I've read all the Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean collaborations, and honestly I don't care for McKean's artwork. It took me a while of looking at the preview to realize I'd already read Signal-to-Noise. Forgettable.

I haven't read:

       Cory Doctorow: Pirate Cinema
       Lauren Beukes: Zoo City
       Mercedes Lackey: Invasion
       Kelly Link: Stranger Things Happen
       Kelly Link: Magic for Beginners

Although I own the Kelly Link books. Never got around to them. My wife liked Magic for Beginners.

<comment><USER9> Invasion sounds a bit like Wild Cards and Bitter Seeds, both of which I loved.

I hadn't realize that Wild Cards is finally back in print!

[http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Cards-George-R-R- Martin/dp/076536...](http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Cards-George-R-R- Martin/dp/0765365073/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349805784&sr=8-1)

[http://www.amazon.com/Bitter-Seeds-Ian- Tregillis/dp/07653612...](http://www.amazon.com/Bitter-Seeds-Ian- Tregillis/dp/0765361205/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349805676&sr=8-1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it interesting that they still provide payment breakdowns by platform... and that Linux and Mac OS are still so much higher than Windows.

When those two were paying for games it was obvious why that should be, since games on Linux are so comparatively scare, but it doesn't make so much sense with eBooks.

<comment><USER11> My theory is that Linux is used by experts, usually people with high-paying programming jobs, who can afford to drop a little more money. Macs are more expensive, so they'll also belong to people with higher income. Windows machines are cheap, so they're bought by everyone else, and (on _average_ ) they can't afford to drop as much money on the various bundles.

Also, since Windows machines are cheaper, they're more likely to be bought by cheapskates.

<comment><USER12> For the Games bundles, I always figured it was Linux users showing that they're willing to buy games if people will make them for Linux.

<comment> dorian-graph People repeat that for every Humble Bundle and I'm still dubious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> It would be cool if they could offer "kindle keys" just like they do with steam keys.

<comment><USER13> That was my initial thought as well, but it wouldn't surprise me if there are layers of Amazon bureaucracy that would make that difficult.

I'd settle for a simple way to enter my Kindle's email address and have them email the mobi file right to my device.

<comment><USER2> I purchased the bundle and they will email the files to your kindle. You have to go to your Amazon account settings and whitelist firstname.lastname@example.com, however, in order to receive it.

<comment><USER13> Oh, awesome! I purchased it as well, but somehow missed the gigantic bold link offering to do that.

<comment><USER14> I'm still missing it... any help for us blind bats?

<comment><USER15> The option "send to Kindle" appears on the page <https://www.humblebundle.com/downloads?key=YOURUNIQUEKEY> after you purchase the bundle.

<comment><USER14> Ah! Twas looking under my account, has no such link... Thanks for your help!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A few things really upset me with that:

First, books are a special kind of products, they do not obey the same rules as commercial products, they are culture. To explain a little, I am french and we have a law for the unique price of books: the price you will pay for a book will be the same on amazon, at fnac, in your local bookshop or in a supermarket.

Second, the word e-reader is nowhere to be found, ePub is also not prominently featured, contrary to iPad and Kindle. For a no-DRM ebook offer, I would have thought that the standard format for ebooks would be more important than the name of the most DRM-filled devices.

Third, Pirate Cinema, Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners are CC licensed (some NC-ND, some only NC), I would be happy to know the license of the books that are here sold (included the other ones) and in the case of Magic for Beginners if it includes the non CC licensed short stories. For the first humble indie bundle, there was a promise that some games would be opensourced, a similar promise would be great here.

<comment><USER17> _"First, books are a special kind of products, they do not obey the same rules as commercial products, they are culture. To explain a little, I am french and we have a law for the unique price of books: the price you will pay for a book will be the same on amazon, at fnac, in your local bookshop or in a supermarket."_

You can pay as much _or as little_ as you wish. They are not gouging you, how could it possibly be objectionable that they are not forcing you to spend _more_ money?

<comment><USER18> The "Lang Law" [0][1] (Lang is in reference to Jack Lang who proposed it, as opposed to language) isn't meant to stop price gouging. It's to stop larger book sellers from being able to make special deals with publishers for bulk purchase discounts.

It stipulates that the publisher's book price on the back may only be discounted up to a further 5% by the retail store.

There are also other fixed book price laws [2] around the world.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law> \- English version [1] <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_Lang> \- French and more information [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_Book_Price_Law>

<comment><USER17> I see. I suppose I understand that, even if I don't agree it is good.

However I can't wrap my mind around why he would simultaneously want Humble Bundle to raise their price to "protect" local bookstores _and_ want them to license the books with permissive licenses that permit free redistribution.

Would he presumably be okay with the Humble Bundle if they were _non- commercially_ distributing the books for _only_ free with permissive licenses? Wouldn't that cause _even more_ harm than merely allowing people to pay what they want?

Or does he want the privileges granted by permissive licenses, but doesn't want Humble Bundle to have the same?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> On an unrelated note, that site uses SPDY (looks like it's on app engine or apps for your domain).

</comment><comment><USER20> If anyone cares, my two cents so far. Disclaimer: I love scifi and fantasy stuff in general and think that I have a rather high bullshit tolerance.

Started with Old Man's War and finished it in one go. Liked it a lot, although it was really simple. It was a great start for this bundle and set some high expectations.

I started Magic for beginners, a collection of short stories. The first one was.. weird. But fun and a good read. The second was unreadable. I tried multiple times, restarted.. No luck. Checked the third and it's a freak story in a q/a format.. Tried, failed. Last chance, story four. Maybe that one isn't bad, I was annoyed by now. The beginning is.. totally off though. I stopped, deleted the book.

How about Invasion? Deleted it after 10 minutes. I'll keep it in an index of reference books for crap that is impossibly bad. Its like a C-movie, but without the special effects and with a worse plot. Granted, Hitler/Nazi plots have a hard time with this German reader. If an author thinks that it makes sense to drop German-except-not-really quotes on every other page I'm deeply disgusted. Don't. Oh my god is it bad.

So.. I'm now disillusioned. I love the Humble Bundle stuff, but so far this particular one was exceptional in only one way, a bad way.

Obviously this is a matter of taste and maybe everything else is good anyway, but I cannot recommend this Bundle to friends.

</comment><comment><USER21> This bundle has some fantastic books. They did a really good job putting it together.

On to more interesting thoughts, I wonder if future ebook bundles will be filled with serial titles. In other words, you pay the nominal Humble fee to sample the first novel of several series; publishers will bite hoping you'll get hooked at full price. I don't recall seeing an appeal to episodic content in other Humble Bundles, but ebooks are a different market with different publishers looking at different trends. Interesting times.

<comment><USER22> The next John Scalzi book is going to be episodic. I'd far rather buy it from Humble Bundle than from Amazon...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh, they made an illustration for "hungry author" too: <http://cdn.humblebundle.com/1/hbb1/sad_author.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER24> Fantastic extension of the Humble Bundle concept. Good titles too, Old Man's War, Pump Six and Zoo City are all great books I've read recently.

</comment><comment><USER25> Might be worth mentioning that the two Kelly Link collections are licensed Creative Commons and available here free: <http://smallbeerpress.com/creative- commons/> Well worth checking out if you enjoy contemporary 'weird' fiction.

</comment><comment><USER26> Humble Bundle has such a great website design.

</comment><comment><USER22> The instructions for Android seem needlessly complicated. Here's easier ones.

\- install FBReader \- click on the EPUB link

Depending on whether you've done this before, you may get a dialog asking whether you want to make FBReader the default for epub.

What's more surprising is that neither Aldiko nor Kobo work this simply.

</comment><comment><USER27> Here's the post from Humble bundle blog, with a very short synopses for each book on one page.

[http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/33237485887/introducing- th...](http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/33237485887/introducing-the-humble- ebook-bundle)

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow.. ok, now i bought it but i didn't think it would be so much trouble reading the books on my iPad.. itunes? syncing? Bahh, i don't even know when i last used itunes :(

 _boots into windows to update some crappy buggy software to read an ebook on his tablet_

<comment><USER29> We are working on updating our instructions in favor of a direct download approach, which seems to be way better. Sorry about the iTunes favoritism!

-Jeff from Humble Bundle

<comment><USER30> You might want to consider adding "Add to Readmill" buttons to the post- checkout page: <https://readmill.com/developers/send-to-readmill>

(and no, I'm not affiliated with them, I just think they've built a great platform)

<comment><USER31> YESSSS Please do this, I'm really liking Readmill integration for the DRM free eBooks lately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> FWIW, Cory Doctorow's _Pirate Cinema_ is CC licensed and is [legally] available for free from his personal website: <http://craphound.com/pc/download/>

</comment><comment><USER33> Is really hard for my wallet to resist bundles like this. When the price and process get together, is easy to give your money.

Just bought a bundle for myself and one for my girlfriend.

</comment><comment><USER34> I had two of the books there on my Reading List. Instant buy!

</comment><comment><USER35> "Pump 6" is a fantastic book. I find the genre of Science Fiction short stories is very hit-and-miss. Pump 6 is a hit.

</comment><comment><USER36> Try donating $0.01 and see what happens ;)

</comment><comment><USER37> Some good books here. Well worth the buy.

</comment><comment><USER38> Why is Neil Gaimen in the humble bundle? I thought this was to help under- exposed artists, not writers who are already a massive success.

I say make room for talented writers who could use the money.

<comment><USER4> Gaiman's book is actually a graphic novel -

you could say this showcases more the work of the illustrator Dave McKean than Gaiman's work, with two more stories written and illustrated by McKean. So you could say Gaiman's name is for the pull, while the majority of the work was done by McKean, who'll probably get most of the money, too.</comment></comment>


Show HN: React-dom-confetti – Trigger confetti explosions on state transitions - <AUTHOR> https://daniel-lundin.github.io/react-dom-confetti/ <comment><USER2> Fun! The confetti effect was one of the first things I learned to do in JS, though it was a few years ago before React. A lot of finding splines manually.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's great! Just what I need for user oriented milestones :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Well done!</comment>


How do you wake up in the morning? - <AUTHOR>

Being a programmer usually consists of very late nights sat in front a screen, which makes getting up the next morning increasingly difficult.
After having a few nights in a row without much/any sleep, I find no matter how many alarms I set, I am never able to wake up the next morning. To the point where I have considered an electric shock anklet!
Is this a common problem; if so how do you over come it? <comment><USER2> I am trying a new method.

Code till I want to stop coding, wake up when I want to wake up.

The only thing is to do regular weekly progress checks. So at the end of the week, I'll actually take a stock check of what I have accomplished. As long as its pretty reasonable progress (say 40-50hours coding with actual results), then I'm good to go.

I find my body is hard to understand. Some days I can code for 12 hours. Some days I can code for 2. Some days I wake up bright and chirpy in the morning. Some days I dont.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your problem isn't curable without starting to sleep at night earlier. Reduce your room lights and screen time early enough in the evening to give your body a cue that it is time to go to sleep.

To answer your question, in the summer here at 45 degrees north latitude I am awakened by morning sunlight. In the winter, when sunrise is later, I awaken to a "wake-up light" with a bright bulb on a timer.

</comment><comment><USER4> 'Being a programmer usually consists of very late nights sat in front a screen, which makes getting up the next morning increasingly difficult.'

This is your problem. Being a programmer does not have to consist of these things. I work 8-10 hours a day, after that I go to the gym to get exercise and unwind. Once I'm home, IF I'm really feeling like I want to get something done I'll allocate a single hour to work that must end before 10pm. After 10pm is no more work time. I'll do something else, usually read, until sometime before midnight. Lights out before midnight and up at 7am.

Is it very routine based? Yes. Does it get me to bed where I have a 7 hour window to sleep every night? Yes. Do I still hit the snooze button? Of course.

But getting a consistant amount of sleep means I feel good every morning and am productive the rest of the day.

Footnote: 23 and single.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have a kid. Kids are very effective alarm clocks.

Seriously, about half of my days lately I wake up on my own, anytime between 4:30 and 6:00 am. The other half I wake up to my two-year-old crying, somewhere in the same range. Either way, I love that hour or two of quiet work time before I have to go to work.

</comment><comment><USER6> Honestly, we can give you short term fixes on how to wake up in the mornng without getting much sleep. In the long run, it will be really bad for you. The real issue is you not getting enough sleep. I suggest figure out a way to get at least 7-8 hours of sleep. It is worth it and you will find out how.

Having said all this, some of the below helps me "accelerate" my waking up in the morning:

\- Constantly nagging wife reminding me that I will be late for work. (might not work if u r single)

\- Even if your wife/partner/roomate does not nag, their waking up can help you get up (since you might hear their noise etc.)

\- Really annoying alarm which is beyond an easy reach with your eyes closed.

</comment><comment><USER7> Listen to your body at a deeper level. It tells you when you're tired. Do not let your mind tell you that you have to keep working/thinking or... some bad thing will happen. That's what the mind will always tell you. What does your body tell you? The only way to know is to stop, take a few deep breaths, and check in. If you're really tired, listen to that. Sleep is more important than that last line of code. Your body has an incredible intelligence that our culture no longer honors.

If you're a night person, honor that by setting the expectation at work that you'll come in later and stay later. My mind is completely foggy in the morning, and completely clear in the evening/night. My natural rhythm (when I get to do it) is to be awake until about 4:00 AM and sleep until around 12:00 PM. I let the first part of the day go by, and then work in the second part when my mind is far more clear, right until before I sleep. My best work frequently happens between 10:00 PM and 3:00 AM. When I hear about people waking up at 4:00 AM, I think, good for you, but that's not a universal prescription (look up the word "chronotype").

</comment><comment><USER8> I had the very same problem until a few weeks ago.

I decided to take the problem the other way around : \- What most devs want is to be in a quiet place to be in the zone.

Instead of coding till 3am and already be exhausted because of the day you had to make, get up at 5 and code directly out of the bed.

Get your shit done before others get to work. Then there is no reason to stay up late any more, and you can go to sleep around 10pm. The alarm clock will not be a pain any more.

I am still in transition but find this awesome.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sleep cycles, they're incredible. Disclaimer: not a biologist. Roughly every 90 minutes you almost wake up in your sleep, if an alarm wakes you up around this point you are much much less tired than if you wake in the middle of one such cycle. On average it takes 14 minutes to fall asleep.

I use DoubleTwist on my Android phone and it works incredibly, but that's a paid app you don't really need if you do the simple math.. and of course your mileage may vary. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> On Android, Alarm Clock Xtreme. It makes me solve math problems. Can also do captchas. It's truly the most important app I've ever used and I'm very thankful to the developer.

A side note: lack of sleep is terrible for your mental health and will seriously impact your work performance. Please get more sleep. And catch up on sleep as much as you can.

</comment><comment><USER11> To be honest, it sounds like you should really either reconsider how you are allocating your time, or reconsider how much work you are taking on.

My alarm in the morning is the iPhone "harp" ringtone, and it wakes me up no matter how little sleep I've had.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is no other way to fix it than to get more and timely sleep. You won't be able to wake up early if you have late nights with your laptop. Force yourself to stop working after 10pm. Read books if you feel the need to do something.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a common symptom of lack of physical exercise, drinking, smoking and too much weight.

You could try running, if you do it before 7pm it will help you sleep sooner and wake up more energized.

</comment><comment><USER14> It takes me 30-minutes... The alarm goes off and I hit the sleep button six times. You are probably young and you need more sleep. This may not help but it gets easier to wake up the older you get.

</comment><comment><USER15> i wrote a note about this: <http://tinyurl.com/accwjd9>

it's based on Steve Pavlina's advice: [http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up- right...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away- when-your-alarm-goes-off/)

tim ferris on sleep: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-ferriss/11-tricks-for- perf...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-ferriss/11-tricks-for-perfect- sle_b_2527454.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Always wake up at the same time (WE included), go to bed as soon as feeling tired : give marks to, and listen to your own body.

</comment><comment><USER17> Develop a stronger will. Get enough sleep. Have a consistent sleep schedule.</comment>


OBNC Oberon Compiler - <AUTHOR> http://miasap.se/obnc/ <comment> ainar-g I've always been fascinated by Wirthian languages. The radical simplicity, the focus on fast compilation and programmer productivity.

One question I haven't researched enough is, how did the people at ETH Zürich used Oberon for OS programming. AFAIK, all Wirthian languages have garbage collection, and the common narrative is that you cannot use a GC'ed language in an OS kernel. How did Wirth et al. work around this in the Oberon OS family?

<comment><USER2> Actually before Apple implemented ARC in its OS Around Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5, the Objective-C runtime in Mac OS X was a garbage collection runtime.

<comment><USER3> Wikipedia describes GC as being automatic memory management. I don't think it is valid to describe the traditional (pre-2007) osx/objective-c model of manual reference counting as a form of garbage collection.

Darwin itself is mostly unix+C. Hence, this does not respond to the parent, asking about GC in the OS itself.

<comment><USER4> >Darwin itself is mostly unix+C. Hence, this does not respond to the parent, asking about GC in the OS itself.

You're right, but just to clarify WRT your first paragraph, Obj-C _did_ briefly have a GC'd runtime between the eras of manual and automatic ref counting.

<comment><USER3> As you and neighbour inferred, I had not know of this. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Author of OBNC here. For Windows users there will soon be a pre-compiled version of OBNC out which includes all dependencies (gc, SDL, awk and the tcc C compiler). With OBNC it is easy to create Oberon interfaces to C code, so with not much effort you can use your favorite C libraries in your Oberon projects.

<comment><USER6> Given the language similarities, have you ever thought of re-targeting your compiler to generate Go code instead, thus taking advantage of the GC as well?

I see a problem with mapping SYSTEM to unsafe, though, as unsafe is not as feature rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > all Wirthian languages have garbage collection,

Not Pascal at least and I don't think Modula has it either.

<comment><USER8> Modula-3 had it, but it was possible to do manual allocation as well.

ALGOL-W, Pascal, Modula 2 (and probably the original Modula) did not have GC as part of the base language or library.

<comment><USER9> I don't think Modula 3 can be considered a language devised by Niklaus Wirth.

<comment><USER8> Good point. It did receive his endorsement, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Several other Oberon implementations exist for different platforms, including embedded systems, native windows executables, and the Java virtual machine: [http://oberon07.com/compilers.xhtml](http://oberon07.com/compilers.xhtml)

</comment><comment><USER2> OBNC is classic example of an incremental compiler, though i never liked the language, the compiler is worth looking at since it compiles Oberon to C.

<comment><USER5> The generated C code is also highly readable so there is a transparency in how each Oberon construct is implemented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oberon, Juice and Slim Binaries where really beautiful things.

But Worse is Better - [https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html](https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html)

<comment><USER12> I am also fascinated by these subjects, I am currently studying and reverse engineering the whole Juice / Slim Binaries thing. (Just to learn more about them in detail). Impressive stuff indeed, but not easy to comprehend.

<comment><USER11> It would be really nice if you could write out some kind of summary that could work as a starting point and historical record.

I studied those things when they came out, but I have forgotten most of it.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I already considered doing that. I am now analyzing hexdumps of actual slim binaries of some straightforward Oberon samples and try to match the details of those with the compiler/loader/linker code and the papers written by Michael Franz and Thomas Kistler. Being able to compile actual slim binaries was already a big challenge (the implementation was only available on old Macs and Win32 platform).

<comment><USER13> I'd love to see a writeup of that too. I read the original papers when they came out, and have wanted to do an implementation ever since.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Top CSS Interview Questions with Answers. Part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://codethat.today/tutorial/top-css-interview-questions/part-two/ <comment><USER2> I enjoyed this article quite a lot, but I would never ask these in an interview.</comment>