Ask HN: How do you teach kids to program? - <AUTHOR> Some context: My sister is 12 years old and her vacations are coming up. I was thinking about teaching her some programming. She has some basic understanding of computers and knows what programming languages do(she has some idea about if-else and loops but she can't code yet). I would like to get some pointers from the HN community regarding the same. You could suggest me a programming language that kids take up fast or any programming related game(kids like it to be fun!). All other kinds of suggestions are welcome. <comment><USER4> Kids or not, I would recommend starting with a problem to solve.

Programming by itself can be boring and is definitely not as rewarding as other stuff (games, etc) especially if you're just a beginner so learning it "just because" is going to be a hard sell.

Find a task or a problem she's having that she's currently doing manually and help her automate it.

<comment><USER5> I've been trying to get my son interested. He's in the same boat... Knows a little about conditionals and loops etc but hasn't caught it yet.

He wanted a RC car.. so I asked him to pick an old one apart. Taking parts from that, he built one without steering and just on off control. So now I've got an esp32 and a servo and got trying to make a steerable rover.. he's not going to get all the programming but he's definitely interested.. also the mechanical parts are also pretty interesting and approachable for him (we burnt a couple of hours trying to make a steering mechanism with LEGOs and didn't get anywhere)

I'll start him with prettifying the web page and adding bells and whistles (calibrating the servo, displaying connected/disconnected status etc and whatever catches his fancy)

Fair warning: requires a lot of time and patience.. also go slow (very hard for me to do).. but yeah, this is the time he's gotten the most interested

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just started with Processing for the first time yesterday and it got me thinking straight away that it'd be good for this sort of thing.

It's super simple to get started with, just a single download gives you a (very basic) "IDE" with loads of examples built in (ranging from very simple to pretty complicated). The other thing is that it's all very visual from the get-go so you can really see what you're doing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Other people recommended Scratch, but I personally think that it's a poor educational programming language. It's extremely limiting and lacks abstractions such as script-local variables, procedures that return values, and a first-class way to group data. As a result, people pick up poor programming practices such as storing results in global variables or using strings for compound data.

Snap! ([https://snap.berkeley.edu/](https://snap.berkeley.edu/)) is based on Scratch and Scheme and features local variables, lambda expressions, and first-class lists (both Scratch array style and Lisp linked-list style). You could also look into Racket ([https://racket-lang.org/](https://racket- lang.org/)), another language similar to Scheme. Both these languages have multimedia capabilities that make them attractive to new programmers and a more sensible design that better captures the essence of abstraction and composition.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would try PICO 8. I'm unsure if 12 is too young, but it'd be great if they have any interest in games. I made my case a couple weeks ago, pasting it here:

When I was a kid, I was heavily into video games and had a burning desire to create my own. However, the options for doing so were not great. One of my middle school teachers tried to introduce us to programming via creating Space Invaders in perl, which went as well as you might imagine. There were a few GUI game making applications that were all terrible and extremely limited. I eventually managed to make a game using Flash, but all the overhead of arcane Actionscript APIs was overwhelming and discouraging. I stopped programming and for several years thought I was going to go into media, creating films and animation. I eventually picked up programming again in college, but there were many years of programming experience I could have had if I had stuck with game dev.

I'm convinced that if PICO-8 existed when I was originally interested in making games, I never would have stopped programming. PICO-8 is the perfect balance of easy-to-learn and powerful. Lua is a good first language because it's so small, and encourages you to build your own solutions rather than rely on magical libraries. For example, I never knew how a list-shuffling algorithm (Fisher-Yates) worked until I needed to write my own because Lua and PICO-8 don't provide one.

The limited sprite and sound options encourage you to spend time not on the assets but on the gameplay (the code). It's quick to get things on screen and working because the PICO-8 API is simple, logical, and not arcane (cough Actionscript cough).

Basically, it introduces programming in an instant-gratification way that's able to grab and hold a child's attention, while still being powerful enough to produce games that aren't hamstrung by toy programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER9> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16464909](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16464909) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13499626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13499626) how to teach kids to code - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER10> My daughter started with code.org and logo when she was 6. Then she tried scratch 2 years later. Now she creates minecraft modes with mcreator and some simple games in unity. Just remember not to press her too much. Most girls learn programming in more creative and less technical way. Try to make it fun.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would use Elm. The language itself is very high level, but designed to be as simple as possible. I think that's ideal for a child still far from the job market, who might never need to learn how to do all that bit-twiddling that programmers don't even realise they are doing most of the time. [https://elm- lang.org/](https://elm-lang.org/)

But you'd have to do some work to assemble resources and learn how it works yourself. Examples of the kind of stuff you can start with at [http://outreach.mcmaster.ca/showcase.html](http://outreach.mcmaster.ca/showcase.html). Anything you make can be published to the web.

</comment><comment><USER12> My son built a simple web page. Writing HTML is a great entry. Then we will build up from there.

</comment><comment><USER13> I show them how simple could programming really be [http://kids.klipse.tech/](http://kids.klipse.tech/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I've heard Scratch is nice, and my library has some fun looking books about learning programming (I think with Scratch). You can whip together a simple game pretty quickly, so if that's what she's into, that could work. I plan to teach my kids using Scratch when they're older, but that's several years off so I don't know the specifics yet.

Scratch may or may not be the right answer though, depending on what she's into. Python is fantastic, but I don't see it being very good for getting something graphical working in a short amount of time (that's what usually keeps a child's attention).

</comment><comment> a-saleh I can talk from my own experience, as I learned programming at similar age (like 17 years ago) :-)

* I learned with Visual Basic For Applications, because the IDE was bundled with every MS Office installed, so there was no setup required.

* Visual Basic was comprehensible enough for me as a 12yo. I had some basic understanding of programming from my dad showing me basic on some vintage Yamaha computer with arabic OS [1], so IF-ELSE, PRINT, GOTO 10, but couldn't code yet :P

* I remember that the path to hello world in VBA was fairly straight forward. It didn't take too much of typing to get a MessageBox with "Hello World" on screen. I think after that we were writing few programs with multiple messages after each other telling a short story or something.

* I remember after first few lections, we enabled the 'option explicit' that enabled some rudimentary type-checking (or was it just requiring explicit variable declaration?) and I didn't like it at first, but after it started catching typos in my variable names, I grew to like it :) Static/dynamic typing proponents take that for what you want.

* I remember we mostly did simple text-based programming. Million Message boxes and Input boxes. Simple quizes. Simple verbal puzzles. Simple calculators (no parsing, you entered first number in input box, then operator in second input box, then second number in third input box, and finally answer in message box would appear.) Making poem generators was fun. Maybe some simple text-based adventures. I remember having fun :) I think it took us half a year or more to start working on some graphics and making simple games?

* the learning was pretty hands on. We were a group of 5 to 10 kids in a class, everybody was trying to do the same assignment.

* I remember it took me a while to realise I could do "x = x + 1" in my code and what that meant :D In math (we already were solving simple linear equations at school), it wouldn't compute. Functional-programming proponents, take that for what you want :-)

[1] [https://www.msx.org/wiki/Sakhr_AX-350II](https://www.msx.org/wiki/Sakhr_AX-350II)

<comment><USER11> > I remember it took me a while to realise I could do "x = x + 1" in my code > and what that meant

That's the sort of thing I called bit-twiddling in my own comment. Some of these ideas get so ingrained in older programmers that we forget how much mental overhead they involve. I only got a sense of it myself after I returned to a somewhat imperative language (Python) after years of using functional languages.

VBA is great if you want to make spreadsheets do things they couldn't otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For older kids, I like this interactive javascript book [https://software- tools-in-javascript.github.io/js-vs-ds/en/](https://software-tools-in- javascript.github.io/js-vs-ds/en/) and this simple set out [https://software- carpentry.org/lessons/](https://software-carpentry.org/lessons/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I have been working on a set of tutorial to teach kids programming with Scratch. I taught my 5 year old how to program using the new Scratch 3.0.

I would highly recommend trying it. The visual format is easier to grasp and you can have a lot of fun making games and animations.

You can add her own voice or pictures right into the stage.

I have not tested it on a tablet, but I think it should work as it is not a web based platform in the 3.0 version.

<comment><USER16> Would love to see this product tmaly!

<comment><USER15> I am slowly working on it. I have a new baby, so I had to pause for a bit.

What is the best way to reach you when I have updates?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Get a Raspberry Pi for her. The latest images of Raspbian come with a pre- installed Pi edition of Minecraft as well as Python libraries for modifying the game world on the fly and making mods. There's also a book by No Starch Press called "Coding with Minecraft" I've heard good things about.

<comment><USER18> Just a note: any book about Minecraft won't apply to the Pi Edition, which is a specially-made edition based on a _very_ old version of Minecraft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If she has an iPad, take a look at Codea. It uses Lua and is focused on game development. There are plenty of bundled examples. I created Pong in a couple of hours, without having used Codea before. It really helps to have a bluetooth keyboard so that half the screen isn't taken.

</comment><comment><USER18> code.org has really good programming resources and activities, including some basic Scratch-like games that teach the basics of algorithms with Disney properties and so on. Go to code.org and look at the Hour of Code stuff.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've heard great things about the microbit: [https://microbit.org](https://microbit.org)

</comment><comment><USER21> Flowcharts are way to teach the logic. Since it's a kind of art, kids like it. At least mine 8yo likes it.

</comment><comment><USER22> [https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Coding 4 Kids [https://www.tynker.com/](https://www.tynker.com/) tynker* [https://www.computerscienceforkids.com/beginningvisualstudio...](https://www.computerscienceforkids.com/beginningvisualstudio..). C# + SmallBasic curriculums* [https://www.codingkids.com.au/careers/](https://www.codingkids.com.au/careers/) coding 4 kids - <USER3> [https://makecode.com/#about](https://makecode.com/#about) Microsoft – make code* [https://github.com/robotopia-x/robotopia/](https://github.com/robotopia-x/robotopia/) Github for Robocop

[https://developers.google.com/blockly/](https://developers.google.com/blockly/) Google Building Blocky with Javascript

[https://computationalthinkingcourse.withgoogle.com/unit?unit...](https://computationalthinkingcourse.withgoogle.com/unit?unit..). chat bot

some other coding sites found by me, a science teacher: [https://studio.code.org/s/express](https://studio.code.org/s/express) I like this - it's easy - if I am required to teach middle-school kids some coding I will probably use this; [https://www.computerscienceforkids.com/beginningvisualstudio...](https://www.computerscienceforkids.com/beginningvisualstudio..). curricula for SmallBasic, C#, Java, VisualBasic for kids+ ; [https://makecode.com/#about](https://makecode.com/#about) Microsoft IoT + coding for kids [http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/thinkcspy/inde...](http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/thinkcspy/inde..). Interactive Python; [https://www.lazarus-ide.org/](https://www.lazarus- ide.org/) Lazarus = Free Pascal - some teachers use this; [https://jsfiddle.net/](https://jsfiddle.net/) some teachers like this - nothing to install, code Javascript online; [http://happyfuncoding.com/](http://happyfuncoding.com/) the one site I can always remember the name of; [http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/](http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/) am I allowed to love Newton's Cannon, written in simple Javascript on one page?

</comment><comment><USER23> I would start with C pointers.</comment>


YouTube CEO says EU regulation will be bad for creators - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/22/18008406/article-13-copyright-directive-youtube-susan-wojcicki-robert-kyncl <comment><USER4> So Youtube _does_ have a CEO, after all! /s

It irritates me that no article I have _ever_ read discussing Youtube's _failings_ mentions anything about the people in charge. There have been several articles over the past couple years pointing out Youtube's ill effects on the world. In each case, the author makes it seem that Youtube is just a force of nature, with nobody at the wheel.

Meanwhile, the past week I've read two article that reference Susan Wojcicki, and neither are critical.

At least when Zuckerberg encounters the public, there's a chance someone might give him a piece of their mind over Facebook's failings. I doubt Wojcicki ever hears feedback from the public... nobody knows who she is.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just so we're all on the same page, this is article 13.1: [https://eur- lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...](https://eur- lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52016PC0593&rid=3)

"Information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers. Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate. The service providers shall provide rightholders with adequate information on the functioning and the deployment of the measures, as well as, when relevant, adequate reporting on the recognition and use of the works and other subject-matter."

Now, as written, that seems to be not so bad for Youtube who already have content-ID for the rightsholders, but bad for other competing services starting up which would have to develop it?

<comment><USER6> As written, that sounds like indecipherable garbage.

<comment><USER7> That's the intent. A lot of EU regulations are written in a way that could be interpreted in almost any way, making it impossible to be 100% compliant and leaving you at the mercy of politically-minded regulators.

<comment><USER8> First GDPR now this. Is the EU trying to become a new age China?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is already widespread censorship and suppression of dissent [1] and content on these platforms by new 'ministry of truth' government formations like the Atlantic Council that are completely arbitrary with no due process or transparency.

The EFF was recently interviewed [1] and discussed some of these issues and highlighted the importance the Santa Clara principles [2] for more transparent operation.

It's better to have formalized mechanisms than arbitrary behind the scenes processes these companies are running anyway with no transparency. Creators do not benefit from lack of transparency and no due process so this sudden concern for users on article 13 by Youtube and others without rolling out some due process consistent with the Santa Clara principles is entirely self serving and insincere.

[1] [https://therealnews.com/stories/social-media-purge- silences-...](https://therealnews.com/stories/social-media-purge-silences- alternative-media-outlets-that-had-millions-of-likes-2-2)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/09/santa- cla...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/09/santa-clarita- principles-could-help-tech-firms-with-self-regulation)

<comment><USER10> Not sure what suppression of political content has to do with copyright. I'm not saying that it isn't an important issue, but it's hard to see the relevance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "YouTube has already invested more than $60 million into its Content ID system"

That actually seems low to me, given we're talking about numbers (revenue, users) in the billions.

<comment><USER12> I think the fact that so little has human oversight and no direct way of disputing with a human is probably how they can handle it.

<comment> shady-lady Exactly. So the solution YouTube has isn't appropriate. They should invest in a better solution even if that involves having more humans in the loop for review/approval.

That's the true cost of their business. They'd just like to portray it as the law being an ass rather than their solution being inadequate for the laws.

It's a clear case of "Our machines aren't humans and we don't want to have to comply with laws that could substantially damage our payroll spend"

<comment><USER13> How would you ever manually review 400 hours of video per minute (likely much more by now). It's just impossible. And who is to say that the human reviewers would make no mistakes. It's not always a clear cut decision I'm guessing.

So either you have an automated and overzealous ContentID system or you limit upload capabilities for smaller creators (which would be the death of the internet).

Obviously the best solution would be to burden the copyright owners with prooving that they own certain content. So just DMCA pretty much. The copyright system is just so broken really. It only favors big content owners and middle men.

This whole shitty EU law comes down to this: Old media/distributers were asleep at the wheel for 20 years. Now they realize they're being replaced. So they fight back the only big slow incumbents know how. Legislation and law suits.

<comment><USER14> > The copyright system is just so broken really. It only favors big content > owners and middle men.

Lol no.

It favors people who create original works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Nothing more, nothing less.

It does not favor people who feel entitled to steal others' intellectual property, and/or who try to circumvent protections.

I really enjoy making docudramas and people enjoy what I create enough that they pay for it. That only works because of copyright.

I regularly pay the copyright office a $50 fee to register the works I create that I believe are most likely to be infringed. I also send around a dozen DMCA takedown notices once or twice a week. If not for the DMCA I would be sending cease and desist letters and filing lawsuits. This is way better.

(It should be noted that the DMCA does not take away my right to sue infringers (and win). It simply provides a simple way for me to quickly stop unauthorized distribution of my work, which happens to be what I care about most, as without the ability to control the distribution of my creative work I could not even dream of making a living from it. Without the existence of powerful tools to stop people from simply copying my work I wouldn't be making it. Which would suck.)

> Now they realize they're being replaced. So they fight back the only big > slow incumbents know how. Legislation and law suits.

What do you recommend? Fistfights?

<comment><USER13> > I regularly pay the copyright office a $50 fee to register the works I > create that I believe are most likely to be infringed. I also send around a > dozen DMCA takedown notices once or twice a week. If not for the DMCA I > would be sending cease and desist letters and filing lawsuits. This is way > better.

Yeah that's true. I'm saying DMCA is better than ContentID and its ilk.

Let's take a piracy example. I completely agree that DMCA-Takedowns directed at Google should be checked and (if the claim is valid) processed. It gets very problematic when you proactively filter uploads. Uploads should generally be allowed by default.

> What do you recommend? Fistfights?

No. Adapt. I realize this is easier said than done. But any company today has to constantly innovate. Never assume any given business model is save for anything more than short to mid-term. This is easier for tech companies because they breathe this kind of culture. But in the not-so-distant future every company will become more like that, or not exist anymore.

<comment> shady-lady > This is easier for tech companies because they breathe this kind of culture.

Eh, no. Tech companies have, by and large, just ignored existing legislation thus enabling them to host mountains of content at negligible cost.

They opened the floodgates - they should deal with the water (both that which is original & that which is stolen). They are 100% the cause of this issue and should be 100% of the solution.

If they're not able to do that, then they should get out of the business altogether.

Ignoring laws to lower your costs is not innovative in the slightest. Using the excuse that the internet is a new medium is malarky. Existing rules apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Part of me hopes that this mess will at least have the positive side-effect of more people embracing copyleft practices, but I doubt it will happen.

<comment><USER16> Maybe there will be youtube "wrapper publisher" services that cater for indie producers by handling all the copyright management for them for a minimal fee?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> YouTube's own policies are bad for creators.

<comment> rv-de Why? (Serious question - not trolling.)

<comment><USER18> It favors creators who produce many short and basicaly clickbait videos every few days. Instead of the insightful deep dives, or the critical responses to other creators' content.

<comment><USER19> Well yeah, because that's what the majority of viewers want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The best way to benefit from a pie isn't to turn the plate upside down but to make and take a cut for yourself.

Afaik, this is just a way to reduce profitability of YouTube, which YouTube will be cunningly passing down to the creators and advertisers.

<comment><USER21> By reduce profitability, do you mean increase losses because they have literally never made money on it. Keep hammering them down and Google will eventually shut it down.

<comment><USER18> Sources please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is rich. Every YouTube creator that I follow has at least one video whose purpose is to rail against YouTube's mystifying demonetization policies, their trigger-happy DMCA policies that aggressively favor major copyright holders, and their opaque and useless litigation process. Here's one for reference: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bGZ_a6gL0f4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bGZ_a6gL0f4) . Listening to the CEO of YouTube cry "but think of the content creators!" is about as transparently self-serving as a US politician crying "but think of the children!"

<comment><USER23> I don't think peoples complaints of YouTube are invalid at all.

But I think it is interesting how much credit these people that monetize YouTube don't give google at all.

Video hosting has always been expensive comparatively. They are large files. You tube stores multiple resolutions of your files.

YouTube hosting your video is free. You don't pay for it. These people that are bringing in $500 - $4,000 crying that 'youtube isn't giving me all my money' seem to also have a sense of entitlement in itself.

YouTube has a relationship with its creators. Creators get free video hosting, a video social platform and they can earn quite a bit of money doing it. YouTube in turns get a portion of the ad money too.

When YouTube demonetizes something they lose money too. They know their system can hurt their bottom-line in the end.

Understanding this is a business relationship between the two entities would probably make their attempts more professional. Maybe open a business that represents a large sets of these YouTubers instead of each one make a video about it. That way their collective views are significant chunk and they can apporoach YouTube as a professional entity.

Instead they post drama videos about it.

<comment><USER24> _> Video hosting has always been expensive comparatively._

Torrents seem to be doing it perfectly fine for free.

People keep speaking about YouTube as if its main function is video storage, while if fact the main thing they bring to the table these days is suggestions, search and a massive pre-established audience. If there was a way to plug into their search/suggestions/ads without giving away control of your video files, a lot of high-earning content creators would likely to do just that. However, there is no such option. I'm not aware of any reliable video search outside of Google.

 _> Understanding this is a business relationship between the two entities would probably make their attempts more professional. Maybe open a business that represents a large sets of these YouTubers instead of each one make a video about it._

But that's the thing. Content creators don't want a business relationship. The promise of Web 2.0 was that there will be no editors or publishers, just a generic UGC platforms. This idea is massively backfiring right now in all kinds of ways.

<comment><USER25> > Torrents seem to be doing it perfectly fine for free

.. for quick 30s clips that you want to spread virally through a txt msg to my tech-illiterate mother?

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure BitChute uses WebTorrent, although I don't know if that's for mere hosting or just to reduce bandwidth use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is even better:

> The burden of copyright proof will be too high for most independent creators > to instantly demonstrate.

If I record a video, and YT bans it because their faulty algorithm triggered a false alarm, how exactly the "burden of copyright proof" should be "too high" for me?

First of all, they should prove that someone else owns the copyright. If they're mistaken - because of copyright trolls or faulty algorithms - <USER3> should be their burden, not the authors'.

<comment><USER28> > First of all, they should prove that someone else own the copyright. If > they're mistaken - because of copyright trolls or faulty algorithms - <USER3> > should be their burden, not the authors'.

That's rather optimistic; it's not a court of law.

According to the rules as written, Youtube is responsible for not taking down the content. If they do not take down content which is actually copyrighted by someone else, they are the ones getting huge fines. Of course they'd err on the side of caution in this case.

<comment><USER29> _Of course they 'd err on the side of caution in this case._

I think this is symptomatic of an underlying problem with the increasingly centralised Internet.

It used to be that if you wanted to share content online, you put it on your web site and others could visit. If it was infringing someone else's copyright and they objected, they would send a friendly message and/or legal C&D notice to you, and you'd probably all be sensible about things.

Today, ISPs don't tend to provide everyone with some basic web hosting allowance any more, while a tiny number of huge third party content hosts are making staggering amounts of money from redistributing others' content as a middleman. However, those hosts typically have no obligation to anyone to provide this service.

So all the small creators are making themselves beholden to businesses that see them as the tree that money grows on but are quite happy to cut off a whole branch if there's any fruit that might be rotten rather than risk spoiling the lot.

On top of that, a significant proportion of people are also uploading other people's content to the hosting services, but for some reason the hosting services get to have magic legal shields that mean they can be running extremely lucrative business models based in no small part on turning a blind eye to being accessories to infringement, all while offering debatable social benefits over what we used to have instead.

So I think "erring on the side of caution" is probably understating things. The hosting services would do almost anything to defend that legal shield and their business model, because as things stand the hosts are basically laughing all the way to the bank while mysteriously immune to the normal laws that apply to you and me and while having no real obligation to the people who provide the very content on which the hosting service depends.

<comment><USER30> Defintermediate all the things, so someone else can reintermediate them.

The Internet has been handed over to de facto monopolies operating under a thin pretext of competitive legitimacy.

We'll probably see antitrust action to split them up in twenty years or so, by which time it will be too late to make a difference.

The only thing that can change this is physical server decentralisation, which is going to rely on massive bandwidth improvements and nation-state grade security protocols.

When I can run a personal server on a personal device and serve content to thousands - some of whom may want to peer it, if it's interesting enough - then we may see a genuinely free Internet.

As it is, instead of "seeing censorship as damage and routing around it", the Internet has been seen as political damage itself, and the political system has effectively neutered it by reducing it to yet another financialised cultural channel.

<comment><USER14> > When I can run a personal server on a personal device and serve content to > thousands - some of whom may want to peer it, if it's interesting enough - > then we may see a genuinely free Internet.

Uhh... you can do this right now.

Like most people you may not have the skills or equipment necessary to do so, but 100% anyone can do this today, down to hosting their own DNS server. (And then they can discover that it is much cheaper to pay someone else to do it for them.)

<comment><USER31> If you don't have the skills or equipment to do something, you literally cannot do it.

<comment><USER32> The skill barrier is low. It's all turnkey now with cloud platforms. Literally just a web tutorial away. The hard part is the audience and the fact that video hosting is expensive for individuals.

<comment><USER29> But depending on which "cloud platform" you're using, you're drifting back towards centralisation again.

Possibly the most important change that my previous post alluded to was that everyone's ISP used to bundle some basic web space in the same way that they bundled a basic email account and ran their own Usenet server. You automatically had a web site if you just ticked the "on" box, and you could upload your content with a simple FTP transfer. Many ISPs provided some "my first web site" level instructions to get you started on building things yourself, even with the inevitable "under construction" graphic.

Sadly, those days are mostly gone. With the rise of centralised hosting (sorry, "cloud") services, ISPs seem to have backed away from including those kinds of secondary facilities in their typical plans, except for maybe email addresses. And so now, it is mostly only larger organisations and the geeks and enthusiasts who self-host in any meaningful sense, and everyone else is hosting their basic business site on Facebook, their blog on Medium or WP, their geek-friendly site on GitHub, their vlog on YouTube, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if we'll see YouTube creators push towards more educational/documentary style videos.

</comment><comment><USER33> Google ignored EU so long and one day EU's lawmakers got upset.

Dear Youtube / Google / Alphabet, this mess is on your head.

</comment><comment><USER34> what a joke. Youtube is bad for creators with their censorships//demonetiztion for most of the time absolutely no reason.

</comment><comment><USER35> >"This legislation poses a threat to both your livelihood and your ability to share your voice with the world," Wojcicki wrote. "And, if implemented as proposed, Article 13 threatens hundreds of thousands of jobs, European Creators, businesses, artists, and everyone they employ. The proposal will force platforms, like YouTube, to prioritize content from a small number of large companies.

I find it extremely hard to believe that an ad business that depends on scale and a long tail of videos, would ever just limit it to videos produced by big companies.

I'm sure they'll make do even if it passes, because they literally have no choice.

<comment><USER21> Are you actually suggesting that Google, a company that is infamous for shutting down products, will never shut down or limit this one?

<comment> rv-de I keep my fingers crossed they'll shut it down. Youtube is a dysmorphic pile of garbage with little gold nuggets here and there. A new not-ad-based platform would be preferable - Vimeo would be a great alternative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> They really should add "Image credit: " to the text beneath the image to indicate that it is not an image description.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't care if it's bad for creators, I care if it's bad for users.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is so weird why is she complaining? YouTube already has this copyright censor system requested by Article 13 built with ContentID none of their potential competition has, I don't think it would be hard to comply for them and its not like they ever really cared for small content creators in the first place. This just sounds like double speak, in reality Alphabet will be delighted to have the EU shoot itself in the face like that, they won't bribe/lobby the EU for its removal guaranteed.

</comment><comment><USER27> > The proposal will force platforms, like YouTube, to prioritize content from > a small number of large companies.

That's orthogonal to what the Article 13 really says. If anything, it will "force" the platforms to prioritize original content over remakes.

<comment><USER28> It's orthogonal to the intention, perhaps.

However, in implementation, it's much easier to make a few deals with large companies, rather than to ensure that each of the tens of millions of nobodies with 10 subscribers completely adheres to the letter of the law.

<comment><USER27> All the better - it would be great if YT finally started to have some serious competition.

<comment><USER28> How would this lead to competition? Any competition would have exactly the same problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The EU has passed this law so that it can be there waiting to be used to shut down dissidents.

It doesn't make sense otherwise.

These are smart people. With mostly bad ideas IMHO, but smart. They know what they're doing. This law has too many issues to be good for regular people.

<comment><USER40> The EU has passed this law because of the lobbying of the record industry, movie industry etc... There's really no need to search for some Big Brother conspiracy theory. Maybe the law can be _abused_ that way but I doubt that's the main motivation.

<comment><USER41> The record and movie industry? No, Europe has a different industry lobbying these issues that Americans tend to be oblivious about: newspaper publishers. A lot of the regulation is lifted verbatim from laws newspaper publishers lobbied for in Germany. This is why the regulation deals with issues like citing news stories -- a direct result of newspaper publishers going after Google.

The content filter however seems to be the logical result of YouTube's impasse with collecting societies like GEMA and its ilk -- not quite the equivalent of the RIAA because of the complex legal situation surrounding its licensing requirements (tl;dr: in some situations you can be subject to GEMA licensing fees without actually using GEMA registered music).

In a nutshell: RIAA is infamous for going after teenagers who illegally fileshared a few MP3s, GEMA is infamous for going after small businesses and non-profit events for publicly playing or performing music without permission. They're both problematic but in very different ways.

<comment><USER40> I'm French and in France I can assure you that I mostly heard musicians being very outspoken in support of the law. That's the whole "exception culturelle française" for better or worse. France is very protectionist of its cultural industry.

But you're right that newspaper definitely favor the law as well which is a problem for unbiased reporting.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, hence why I mentioned GEMA and its equivalents. But the dynamics are a fair bit different from the usual RIAA noise you hear about internationally.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Senzu – collection of robo advisors, p2p lending and more - <AUTHOR> https://senzu.io/investing <comment><USER2> I definitely think investing is confusing to some folks, especially when just starting out it can be intimidating. There's a huge opportunity for new tech ideas and solutions to help clarify and simplify getting started with investing.

So cheers for working on this problem.

I don't mean to hate on your new product...But what the hell are those estimated returns numbers?

Those should probably be removed asap.

I'm not sure where you are in the building/testing phase for this so maybe a lot more changes are coming. At this point it's not obvious this first iteration simplifies investing for someone new to it and may seriously be making things worse. Put yourself in the shoes of a first time investor arriving at your site, might they still have questions before feeling ready to choose an investment company to click on and are you helping answer at least some of those initial questions...

What are those risk and liquidity things? How did you come up with that? Are blue links affiliate links to these companies? if so are there no rules for these programs?

Are you guys comfortable with how robo-advisors and investing work?...Each clients situation will be unique based on things like their age and their goals, etc. so information should be presented with that in mind. If you're not comfortable with details of this stuff I would think twice before launching this particular site.

Sorry if this came across as rude. I wouldn't want someone to get confused or deceived.

Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with the estimated returns? Also what do you think would help simplify this for first time investors. What details are you referring to when you talk about how robo-advisors or investing works?

<comment><USER2> How can you estimate returns?

When it comes to investment products like these, _there is no way to know what the future return will be_.

Imagine for example a new first time investor visits the site. They are unfamiliar with these types of products. If they see something like "estimated returns: 8.5%" that person might mistakenly think that's the type of return from choosing that investment company.... Which of course is not true. It could be higher it could be _much_ lower. No one knows what will happen in the stock and bond markets in the future.

Now I realize you are not selling these investment products yourself, but the government's rules for disclosure and advertising can give a lot of insight about how to avoid confusing or misleading potential investors. You will see even in cases where past performance is mentioned, there is a clear disclaimer that 'past performance is no guarantee of its future success'. If one needs to be that careful to avoid confusion regarding showing past returns, hopefully you see why estimating future returns are treated even stricter. [https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/mfperform.htm](https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/mfperform.htm)

How did you get those numbers?

<comment><USER3> I see what you're saying. For most of the robo-advisors it is the past performance our portfolio on each platform from 2013-2015. We hook into an API so we can see how each portfolio is doing. For the other ones it's usually the return advertised on their website. A lot of these platforms advertise a return rate on their website but you're right that they add that "past performance is not a guarantee of future performance".

If you hover over some of the elements you will see more info

<comment><USER2> OK, I'm not sure what past performance you pulled off these companies websites. But for your portfolios you seem to be claiming you have a 90/10\. So I am guessing you are relatively young, in your 20s maybe early 30s. Are the numbers you got from the other websites the same portfolio? If not, I don't think it's fair to put them side by side like that.

If you want to use a 90/10 you can but something for a more typical portfolio or a way to adjust the buckets seems to be a more common practice. One reason is if a person visits a site and just sees returns from a 90/10, that would be misleading if this person needs a totally different portfolio with a different risk profile (maybe someone a bit older who needs a 60/40). More text can help clarify what is going on.

I clicked on the Acorns portfolio and it's not even technically 90/10\. It's 30% real estate - it's biggest holding. This isn't your fault as many people can and do call REITs stocks because of them being traded on stock exchanges. But really they are trusts investing in real estate. So if someone already owns or is about to buy real estate and they want to diversity their other future savings into stocks and bonds, then calling REITs stocks is not helpful.

Quote from Vanguard REIT website: "Appropriate for helping diversify the risks of stocks and bonds in a portfolio." If REITs are stocks how are they appropriate to help diversify the risk of stocks....Can be confusing to someone new to investing. [https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundIntExt=I...](https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundIntExt=INT&FundId=0986)

One more thing to keep an eye on is how you show returns if you are going to. Averaging annual returns or annualized returns can be tricky.

For example. If the last three years returns are 8%, 8% and 8%. Are the average returns 8% or 8.7%?

This gets more extreme with real numbers as just in the last 10 years stocks have been as low -37% and as high as +32%. Whats the average return for these years -2.5% or -8.4%. Big difference.

Just to be clear I think it's OK to compare products side by side and show historical returns. But I would be really careful that you're disclosing the necessary information and making sure you are comparing the same things apples to apples.

<comment><USER2> This a link to GIPS. The Global Investment Performance Standards website. There's a ton of information on there and a lot of it won't be needed for your project. But going through the handbook might be useful.

GIPS is "A global standard for investment performance reporting gives investors around the world the additional transparency they need to compare and evaluate investment managers."

There's a link to the current handbook on the right. It's free.

[https://www.gipsstandards.org/Pages/index.aspx](https://www.gipsstandards.org/Pages/index.aspx)

<comment><USER3> Cool. Thanks for all the feedback!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are the recent threats from the REvil hacker group credible? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> What does legit mean in this context?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested to hear if HN community thinks their recent threats are credible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reworded the question for clarity</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook refuses to call a drone a drone - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/03/27/facebook-refuses-to-call-a-drone-a-drone/

<comment><USER2> The same way it calls everyone you know your "friend"?</comment>


4 Things Startups Should Learn from Moneyball - <AUTHOR> http://idea-stack.tumblr.com/post/17926925187/4-things-startups-learn-from-moneyball

<comment><USER2> I though this was a great movie as well and quickly picked up all the lessons in it for startups. I even recommended it to my co-founder to go and watch it.

One lesson I learned was that we have to have blind faith in our startup. I am pretty young so I don't get much objection to doing a startup, but I can see how this can be a problem to someone who has more responsibilities like a family, or puts higher education in jeopardy. Billy Beane himself lost his chance at higher education to go after his dream. The other point of objection is the startup itself, people might not see the potential in the startup like you do. Some people just won't get it, they won't think it will work, even after you explained the ultimate vision. Billy got shit from everyone, the scouts, the coach, and the sports commentators, who are almost equivalent to trolls. To these people you just can't explain how you eat what you kill, it's a concept they will never try and simply won't understand the fulfillment of the hunt.

My other favorite takeaway was in the beginning of the movie when Billy put a scout on the spot and repetitively asked him "what's the problem", referring to the teams main challenge. The scout saw the problem the way they always see the problem, the wrong way. Billy new that if they went about the season looking at the problem the same way they did the previous year when they lost, then they would naturally lose again. For alcoholics recognizing you have a problem is the first step. Startups know we have a problem, in fact startups wouldn't exist if there weren't any problems to solve. Picking the right problem to solve is key, as long as solving all the little problems that go with running a startup. A co-founder might recognize that they are not seeing the mythical hockey stick on their charts. Some might suggest that it is because the landing page design sucks, while the real reason is that the startup doesn't explain clearly how it can benefit their users. Being able to recognize the right problem is key in our success, we should make sure to look at it from all angles so as to not overlook it. Sometimes it is having the right tools in place, however, most of the times it's making sure you are listening to your users/customers.</comment>


Russia cyber attack targeted voting software and election officials - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/bombshell-intel-leak-reveals-russia-cyber-attack-targeted-voting-software-and-election-officials/ <comment><USER2> Interestingly, (and despite an erroneous popular belief), prior to this there was no evidence Russia "hacked" the election other than social-media-enhanced "firehose of falsehood" propaganda.

In other words, holy shit. Looks like someone in the intelligence community decided to hit back a Putin after his recent comments.

<comment><USER3> Had the exact same thought. The timing of the report is perfectly placed after the Russian president's most recent remarks and the Russian Congress's report on American influence efforts on Russia's elections.

From the contents of the report it's very clear this Russia-attributed activity is associated with an espionage campaign rather than a manipulation campaign, though more details may be forthcoming on there being an actual effort to perform active manipulation.

The Russian effort to use true (white), gray (stretched) and black (false) propaganda showed sophistication mostly in its ability to adapt and react very quickly. The actual messaging was pretty weak - primarily appealing to those who already held some of the same thoughts on their own. Both Russia and the United States know that white propaganda is the most effective propaganda because it penetrates, resonates and persists better and because developing sources of truth (white and gray) are able to build stronger platforms than those based on falsehood. In this instance it was the true statements spread by Russia about corruption in the United States, war crimes, etc that were able to resonate and activate masses of people.</comment></comment>


Why salaries don't rise - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-salaries-dont-rise/2015/03/11/38c08cea-c81d-11e4-b2a1-bed1aaea2816_story.html <comment><USER2> Software development is supposedly a high-demand skill. And, I hear that companies can't seem to hire anyone qualified. I still get dozens of recruiters contacting me, each week. Yet, with all of that, my salary has remained stagnant for the past few years.

My guess is that people have no idea what they're worth, so they don't ask for anything more. I see way too many developers who are getting paid pennies to the dollar. I see upper-end developers working for 70-80k.

Look, people. If you have skills, you should be getting paid 150k+ a year. Please, stop taking menial salaries. You're hurting all of us.

<comment><USER3> Why don't I strap on my job helmet, and squeeze down into a job cannon, and fire off into job land where $150k salaries are just ripe for the picking.

I'm trying to find a kick ass salary, I'm great at what I do, but the _only_ place I can find such high salaries are contracts in Switzerland. $180k - $225k.

What kind of frontend/uiux jobs are out there for $150k~?

<comment><USER4> High end at Google for UI designer is ~160k according to Glassdoor. That's in line with what I've heard from friends as well. UI design does have lower salaries than other types of software development, in some cases much lower, so I doubt you're going to be getting 150k+ unless you're pretty senior.

<comment><USER3> The thing is I'm not just frontend. I build product from A-Z. I can ideate it, build a strategy, a business plan, mock it, design it, code it, deploy it, market it. What role should I be looking for? I'm great at stepping back and looking at it from the bigger picture instead of hammering out details. Should I be looking for project management roles? Product designer? Art director? I have no idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wages are not stagnant, they have begun to rise.

And this is simultaneously at a time when Americans just received one of the greatest purchasing power increases in modern history, as the USD has skyrocketed in the last nine months (so far that the USD and Euro are near parity).

November

"Wages and salaries climbed last quarter by the most since 2008 as a dwindling number of unemployed per job opening approached a tipping point."

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/wages- pois...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/wages-poised-to- rise-as-signs-emerge-of-improved-u-s-job-market)

December

"An important measure of household income rose in December by the largest amount in nearly 8 years, signaling a long-overdue rebound in family earning power."

[http://finance.yahoo.com/news/families-are-finally- earning-m...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/families-are-finally-earning- more-151120875.html)

January

"Average hourly wages, meanwhile, jumped 12 cents to $24.75, the biggest gain since September 2008"

[http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/article9388535.html](http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/article9388535.html)

Wages aren't rising as quickly as expected, because the labor force is not tight enough yet. The U3 is only partially accurate.

The labor force participation rate is sitting near a 40 year low and the U6 unemployment rate is still significantly elevated.

The U6 was about 9% in 2004 (8% by 2006). It's 11.4% as of February.

<comment><USER6> This, right here. This is what matters. It's not just that U3 and U6 mean something entirely different but that even the "employed" are people working 20hr jobs, i.e. what anyone else would consider part-time work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yeah... no. The reason salaries aren't going up is in the piece but casually dismissed as if it doesn't matter. Instead of "following the money" to people who own companies, why don't we follow the smell of bullshit to the BLS. Unemployment numbers are laughably phony. Of course workers don't have bargaining power - there are millions of people who've been out of work for half a decade desperate for a job and yet not counted as "unemployed".

Also, add in health care cost increases that employers have to pay but that don't show up in salary surveys.

<comment><USER8> That's part of it, sure. The other part of it in America is the successful suppression of any sort of labor movement and the success of efforts by the very rich to drive a wedge between the merely affluent and the middle and lower classes.

America has a real strong strain of the "I'm not poor, I'm merely a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" sentiment.

<comment><USER9> Organized labor getting everything they wanted is what led to basically all US auto companies going bankrupt.

<comment><USER10> You ought to read this:

[http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/03/05/myths-and- facts-...](http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/03/05/myths-and-facts-unions- and-organized-labor/198343)

<comment><USER7> Mediamatters? Seriously? Well, okay. Let me find an equally credible source:

[http://www.aei.org/publication/maybe-patriarchal-labor- union...](http://www.aei.org/publication/maybe-patriarchal-labor-unions-are- to-blame-for-rising-inequality/)

<comment><USER10> If you can find factual errors in the source I linked, or errors in interpretation of those facts, I would be keen to hear them.

<comment><USER7> Oh, I'll accept your link uncritically if you do the same for mine.

<comment><USER10> Of course I didn't tell you to accept it uncritically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My own theory:

For most employers, there's something almost inconceivable about rising salaries. It's been routine for so long to have layoffs, to tighten belts, to pull together in these tough times and sacrifice, that market power over labor has been internalized into the entire way they do business.

If you read any HR industry literature you'll see a lot about the costs of a bad hire and missing out on candidates because they were out of a company's budget. You will not see concern about the opportunity cost of leaving a position vacant. If a company spends six months hobbling along understaffed, waiting for the sure thing to walk in the door for $5k less, that will seriously harm their business. It isn't considered.

There are a lot of things like that, aspects of employment that the employer won't change because it simply isn't done. This sort of creates an informal price ceiling, which has exactly the effects you'd expect: lower supply (discouraged workers, low labor force participation), "shortages", and more or less frozen wages.

</comment><comment><USER12> I love that a nation and an industry that is bent over backwards against unions (both in policy and in stereotypes) gets surprised when wages don't go up.

What do you think pushes companies to increase wages, rainbow ponies? Benevolent investors? Gee.

Organized labor.

<comment><USER13> Unionizing works for micro-optimization but rarely works at macro level, when entire division, company or industry can be outsourced.

To quote from [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america- and...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a- squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all)

"Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone's screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cant we just fire all these finance guys out of a cannon into space?

<comment><USER15> Yeah, right; where are you going to get the money to finance the cannon?

<comment><USER16> Out of next year's budget, just as we learned by watching the finance guys. Or maybe by selling some debt to another corporation to be used as a valuable tax reduction device.

<comment><USER17> ...and just like that, we have become the finance guys.

<comment><USER16> But cool finance guys who know how to code and correctly recognize Tom Baker as the best Dr. Who.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's important to see what the average _age_ of these newly employees are, age of those unemployed, and also who is exiting the job market.

If the newly employed are young (and therefore making lower wages), and those unemployed (or leaving the job market, or just not looking) - are older, and therefore commanding higher salaries - that alone could account for why salaries not increasing on average.

It would be useful to get a breakout of salaries biased by tenure, so as to accommodate for the confounding impact of average age of employed/unemployed/left-the-job-market.

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe the article refers more towards the assembly line worker, but GM IT receives an annual merit increase (a.k.a. raise) across the board.

YMMV based on performance, but if you worked the year you get something.

But I do agree that 'returning value back to investors' is sucky. I'm of the opinion rewarding your employees, and hence retaining your employees and their knowledge brings value to the company, and in the end, the investor.

</comment><comment><USER20> Big difference from the IT industry and other Industry is IT is still evolving and defining itself. This not only means that those in the feild have to learn far more than other trades to do the same job as it changes. But also this lack of stabilisation has not allowed standard certification and qualifications that stand the test of time. Compare that with accountants and lawyers. Yes they have new thinsg to learn, but controlled and lesser in volume. They also have qualifications that are as current today as the day they got them.

There is no standard body that has recognition globaly or the history and in a market in which things change so much, it is hard without seperate area's.

Other industries have governing bodies and they in part act like Unions and protect workers and standards for the fiarness for all. Actors guild and book and music rights another area of contrast to software.

Lets face it software has developed a culture of free and open which is great, imagine if music and books were more towards that model.

So I can see why many feel the industry is and the people working in it are overly taken advantage of. Let us not ignore all that learning and long hours has a burn factor and people burn out quicker than some other profesions. Those prefessions factor in pay to compensate or have standard pension deals.

But IT is and will be a while until itself has a good standard and until then it is down to individual companies and it is not since the Googles and the like came about that a level of appreciation for what is involved has come into play.

But IT is if you compare to the book industry, still defining the format and types of size teh book should be and ink colour and paper thickness and other details. There is a lot of abstraction from creative aspects and the implementing of those.

Also the trade has been easy picking for TAX and with that UK introduced a rule IR35 just some may say to hit IT contractors. Yet in contrast the building industry, they can get a CIS that in effect means you pay less National Insurance than normaly would. Like say in other not so old industries like IT.

So IT is still as a trade young and with that has less protection and measure of worth than other trades.

Also let us not forget the move from companies to focus more onto share dividends than not and experdited trading that makes it mroe trigger happy. If they can get away with paying 50k a year and say the job is only worth that and use that to class people as over qualified, when the job is actualy underpaid perhaps. Well easy to cry for more fodder into the labour market and one persons poor wage is another persons gold. Just makes it more a case that not skill level and what they are paid are not the greatest of metrics .

Still, startups allow you to cut out the wage aspects and many other ways get you into tapping directly instead of more often, feeding into the companies pocket from your own quality of life.

Still there are many things in life that have not resolved, I can purchase fair trade chocolate and know the farmer got paid fairly and yet read about local dairy farmers being underpaid for milk at a loss and no fairtrade logo on milk ever.

So many unfair things propagate in life. Way to view it, if dairy farming as a industry gets treated badly and is more established than IT then, we take what we can get.

Least for a while yet and things are more standard. C today is not C when invented and things change more often than fashion wardrobes at times. At the very least enjoy the ride.</comment>


PC Shipments Rise After Several Quarters of Decline - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/pc-shipments-rise-after-two-quarters-of-decline-11562884892?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I just got a new PC. It is the size of a power supply. A300W with Ryzen 5 2400g. Seems to be able to handle everything and only cost $429 in parts total.

I am thinking about only buying mini-PCs from here on out.

I guess the next thing I want is a super light weight OLED monitor that rolls up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good, now how can I get a business class laptop running AMD processors?

I love the HP Elitebook series (still on an 8560p but want to move to a Zbook Studio x360) but their current offerings are super pricey and only offer Intel processors on that terrible, nightmarish land of horror known as HP.com

<comment><USER4> Work provisioned me with a ThinkPad A485 equipped with Ryzen 5 2500U. It's been a good experience so far, but I haven't tried it with anything besides Windows 10.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the software startup environment in your city like? - <AUTHOR>

After reading the Berlin thread (edit: and the recent Canada thread), it made me curious about what others thought about the software startup environment in the places they're located in. Where are you? What things would be useful to for people who would consider starting up there? Is it nascent, growing, non-existent? Who are the movers and shakers? Particular industry focus?  We obviously hear a lot about the big dogs like Silicon Valley and Alley, but it'd be interesting to know about other places from those most active/experienced with them.
Not looking for anything with statistical rigor (though that's welcome too), just subjective experiences and fun anecdotes.
As I'm in Silicon Alley, I won't say much about it other than being thrilled to see my home turn into such a great place for software. Growing up in Brooklyn, I would never have imagined what it has turned out to be/is turning into. <comment><USER2> I think people fixate too much on the supposed perks of SFBA and NYC. I concede that there is a kind of company best delivered from one of those two places; if your company is in any way premised on riding some kind of tech industry zeitgeist, it helps to be in the middle of the tech industry. But for the rest of companies, I can think of a bunch of reasons why you'd be better off elsewhere.

So to make that concrete, an unscientific comparison of Chicago (where I am) to SFBA (where I worked for ~4 years):

* Talent is cheaper in Chicago by high-single-digit percentage points

* Talent is more abundantly available in Chicago. There are (obviously) fewer overall candidates, but the competition for them is much lower.

* If you're in a specialized field (as we are), it's even better: the SFBA talent competition seems most intense for high-premium specialists, and markets like Chicago have disproportionately fewer opportunities for those specialists.

* Housing is significantly cheaper and thus dollar-for-dollar better and more convenient than SFBA.

* Public transportion as vastly superior in Chicago than in SFBA, which increases both the effective availability of housing (more neighborhoods are easily commutable) but also overall quality of life (if you want a tree-lined street with kids, you got it; if you want a 1 block walk to your favorite bar, you also probably got it).

* Much less "networking" in Chicago than in SFBA. I've met a lot of Chicago startup "luminaries" for various reasons, but can't think of any event where I could do so reliably, unlike SF.

* The startup population is growing in proportion with the nationwide startup population. This is in contrast to NYC, which is growing disproportionately fast. Our big names are Groupon, 37s, Grubhub. We've got a small number of local YC companies.

* I'm a bad person to ask about the funding market but it seems anemic compared to SFBA or NYC or even Seattle. This is a better place to bootstrap.

* I also think it's an easier place to bootstrap, because Chicago has a large number of businesses, and more diversity in business size (from a large population of approachable stable small businesses to a large population of major enterprises) and vertical (trading, banking, pharma, law, insurance, food, hospitality). I think this is a stark contrast to SFBA which, if you're not freemiuming to the whole Internet as your strategy, has an "ice cubes to Inuits" vibe to it.

* Way more available office space, both in the Loop (downtown) and on the north and near-west side (if you want to be SOMA-trendy about your company).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really informative post, tptacek. Thanks.

How do you feel that Chicago rates on "serendipity creation" (which I meant to ask in the OP, and seems like we could classify it separately from regular "networking")? Does it feel like a place where you can walk into non- official/industry events like coffeeshop/co-working-esque places and find collaborators? In a similar vein, do you see geographical clustering of startups, with the attendant bump-into-people at the deli counter effects?

<comment><USER3> I feel like the "serendipity creation" is overall at a good level. I overhear conversations about startups, design and programming in general all over Chicago. There are Geographical clusters. From my personal experience there's only 2/3 "locations/buildings" that I know are the startup buildings. And Chicago is a super small city. I run into people I've met at meetups on the train and downtown all the time by chance.

It's an enjoyable location :}

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in Incline Village at Lake Tahoe and the development scene must be deep underground or doesn't exist. I'm sure it it won't be a problem to get some rooms for meetings and collaboration happening. All non tourist relevant resources seem to be easy available. In Reno it looks probably better but the commuting gets to you, especially when the winter kicks in again.

</comment><comment><USER5> None, non-existent. They are conservative thinkers and don't understand the tech industry, so any risk is too risky for them. It's very sad. So what happens is young people who potentially have the best understanding have to go elsewhere, whether to start a company or be hired by a company who has money - because they don't exist here because it's impossible to get funding unless your idea is based on similar brick & mortar models. It makes me sad, and frustrated.

</comment><comment><USER6> ann arbor michigan, from a friend's perspective.

<http://a2geeks.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=18481175>

<comment><USER2> A2 is probably a great place to start a software company. The city is very livable, cheaper than most major metros, and has a steady source of talent. More importantly, the market in A2 is small enough to reduce turnover; you can list the well-known companies on two hands, so absent an offer from one of them, team members can either (a) relocate out of the whole region or (b) accept a terrible IT job closer to DTW.

(I worked for 4 years in A2, right next to Dug, and apart from everything I have to say about A2 I wouldn't hesitate to go work for him at Duo if I had an offer).</comment></comment>


Versionista: Diff on Obama's Technology Policy - <AUTHOR> http://versionista.com/diff/JAS9LMr5qU7q8BSroV8KzQ/

<comment><USER2> I'm much more interested in the web platform here (versionista) than I am the particular content being tracked - this looks like a great tool with a ton of uses.

</comment><comment><USER3> He did not revise his technology positions. He made his webpage smaller and easier to read for the mainstream. Changing your site does not mean you changed your opinion.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. His detailed PDF is unchanged, just this summary page.

When did we start mirroring /.? This was on there earlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From what I can tell, there isn't a huge change in the actual content of the message.

It's been simplified and summarized, with a lot of the statistics removed, but the overall message remains intact. Also, the original document is available as a PDF at the bottom of the page, with full detail.

Most likely, they streamlined the page to provide a simpler reading experience for the non-technical voters. For the more tech-savvy voters who want details, they left the full white paper available.

<comment><USER5> Doh. Sorry, maxklein and lallysingh. Goes to show what happens when I take the dogs out in the middle of writing a comment. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> warning... visiting the versionista site crashed my iphone

</comment><comment><USER7> piss off with this stuff here

<comment><USER8> ScottW, what's with the violent rejection of this article? Was this article Political? Yes. Does it deal with 'hacker culture'? Yes. Should it be discussed? Certainly.

What's important to remember is that while we are hacking away at our latest Facebook App, politicians & lobbyists have been hacking away at our culture. Indeed the PATRIOT ACT was probably one of the greatest hacks against our Constitution whereby it greatly altered how some things functioned. These issues that Obama brings up will affect you, me and the next generation of hackers to emerge.

Don't encourage the apathy that has come to plague a generation of American's and at the very least don't be apathetic about the government that regulates the things that you care about because one day you may just get screwed over.

I apologize for the general assumptions I've made about your character but the character of your remark was disconcerting, maybe you could explain a little further in detail why we should be "piss[ing] off with this stuff here"?

<comment><USER9> _what's with the violent rejection of this article?_

Where's the article? I see no article.

 _Does it deal with 'hacker culture'?_

On the basis that there is not "it", then the answer would have to be no. "It" doesn't deal with hacker culture because "it" exists not.

 _Should it be discussed?_

See point above.

I would concur with ScottW on the basis that this is neither an article nor a point worth discussing, just a misleading headline with a link to an admittedly cool piece of technology.

Let's keep the brain-dead misleading "Hey, check out this cool link lolz" dumb-ass headlines to other sites, please. I check reddit regularly and have no need of that trash here.

<comment><USER8> From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_>(publishing)

Article (publishing): An article is a stand-alone section of a larger written work. These nonfictional prose compositions appear in magazines, newspapers, academic journals, the internet, or any other type of publication.

Semantically speaking it may not be an article digested by some 'dude' at a 'desk' at a 'newspaper'. Nonetheless, it does reveal useful insight, particularly how Obama perceives the global economy and how to get ourselves aligned with it so that we stay #1 in the years to come (which means us hackers have jobs).

Regardless of that, you are right, the headline is misleading, so help the community, here's some advice on writing headlines: <http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-write-headlines-that-work/></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Review my mapping startup idea - <AUTHOR> http://mapfaire.com I've made an MVP for a service that lets you create a customized map with your points on it - can be used as a store locator / office listing / shop finder, anything.<p>Any thoughts / feedback? <comment><USER2> No offence, but aren't you six years late on this?

This looks like one of the hundreds of startups launched in 2004 with the idea of "Put pins on a Google Map and save it in a database". Lots of those startups got funding for it, and they've all run their course.

Since the functionality you're planning to build is now actually built into Google Maps itself, what's your purpose with this thing?

From an implementation standpoint, I'd ditch the "name your map" and "log into google" steps. Start off with a randomly generated unique URL and let the user immediately start sticking pins into a map. If they decide to "save" at some point, you can hit them up for account details. That's the standard way of doing things like this these days.

<comment><USER3> I see your old map app and a raise you a collaborative multi-user map app <http://multimap.wakawakafoobar.info/>

Multiple people can view and control the map in realtime. nodejs, socket.io, dnode, and google map api.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you give a description of your service? "Put yourself on the map" doesn't really explain the concept of your service.

<comment><USER5> I think it's a 'tinyurl for location'

<comment><USER6> How is that a startup? Is my lolcat site a startup too?

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily the best example:

[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1916286,00....](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1916286,00.html)

(Building a Media Empire Around I Can Has Cheezburger)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sudhir, it looks nice. Can you please tell us more about it and how it can be useful to people?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm looking at it from the pov of small businesses - if you want to make a store locator, you can do it here in a few minutes.

Same thing for businesses who want to help customers get to their restaurants, bars, shops, etc.

I'm looking at allowing businesses to brand the map with their own colors and logo, so they can effectively have a branded locator without the development cost.

</comment><comment><USER10> In case you're interested, OpenStreeMap (<http://www.openstreetmap.org/>) is a free wiki map of the world. As an option instead of Google Maps.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sudhirj,

I really like the 37signals-esque appearance you gave it.

Please email me... I have a few ideas I'd like to share with you privately.

</comment><comment><USER12> Congrats on launching something. Ignore the haters. I have to agree with iampims, people will give this 10 seconds before moving on, and it's just not clear what it is for. I would recommend fixing your tagline as a first priority so people know exactly what the service does. Goood luck!</comment>


Remote Storage is now available on Cozy Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cozycloud.cc/news/2014/08/12/when-unhosted-meets-cozy-cloud/

<comment><USER2> How do cross-domain restrictions work with Remote Storage? Does the server distributing the web app have to whitelist the Cozy Cloud URL?

How robust is the offline synchronization, e.g. what's the largest amount of data which has been synced over an intermittent connection? Can more than one client be offline concurrently - how are conflicts handled?

<comment><AUTHOR> We didn't stress test it so I don't know how it would react with big files and conflicts. It's a first version to say that we are compatible with it. If people shows interest in it, we'll improve it to handle edge cases if needed.

Whatever, I imagine you could find most of the answers to your question on the Remote Storage forum and website:

[http://remotestorage.io](http://remotestorage.io)

[http://community.remotestorage.io/](http://community.remotestorage.io/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why can't we crowdsource the search for the missing MH370 flight? - <AUTHOR>

If the world's govts and private agencies can donate the latest hi-res images of the region where there are now massive search operations of the missing MH370 flight (hope it never crashed and all are well somewhere!), can't we plug the images into a web platform and do a crowdsourced search of the entire area?
Some of my questions related to this are:
1) How long does it take for military satellites to hi-res photograph an area the size in question?
2) How many such satellites are there that can be deployed for such use by world's militaries and companies?
3) If the recent hi-res satellite images can indeed be obtained, is there a software platform that can then take these images and distribute them to individuals and make sure every sq.inch of the area has been visually combed by humans? <comment><USER2> There are a few issues I think.

1\. The imagery you see on Google Earth where you see features (such as floating luggage) is actually taken from aeroplanes travelling up and down. It takes a lot of time as you can guess to do that and processing time, and the area to cover is huge.

2\. There are satellites that can be used, and tasked for (e.g.. using the Space Charter), if we wanted to identify pieces of floating luggage. However the window that these satellites can view upon the world is quite small, and the search area is very very large. It also depends on where the satellites are pointed at if geostationary, and if they move, what path at which time can be got (I'd imagine several passes across the globe would be needed to cover the area).

There are other satellites that could be used, and have done in cases of disasters - here they can find roads and destroyed houses for example. They might not be able to spot floating luggage, but they should be able to help identify large chunks. Even with this case, I think the huge surface area is going to be prohibitive in this case also.

3\. Weather. For both aerial imagery and satellite imagery - the weather, cloud cover is important. I'm not sure of the cloud cover there at the moment, but I've read reports of thunderstorms in the vicinity.

\----

>is there a software platform that can then take these images and distribute them to individual

Yep

Folks may remember the 2007 search for the missing pilot Steve Fossett [http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/11/fossett_search](http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/11/fossett_search)

The number of individual images are going to be much much more - but in our case the number of online volunteers is going to be high also. I think the lessons learnt may be the same though. This used Amazon Turk.

For the recent Hurricane Sandy - the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team used something called MapMill to do the same kind of thing. [http://irevolution.net/2012/11/01/crowdsourcing-sandy- buildi...](http://irevolution.net/2012/11/01/crowdsourcing-sandy-building- damage/) [http://opengov.newschallenge.org/open/open- government/submis...](http://opengov.newschallenge.org/open/open- government/submission/mapmill-crowdsourced-disaster-damage-assessment/) This used imagery from the civil air patrol.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's being done - please help out here [http://www.tomnod.com/nod/challenge/malaysiaairsar2014](http://www.tomnod.com/nod/challenge/malaysiaairsar2014)</comment>


New Algorithm Allows Autonomous Cars to Change Lanes More Like Humans - <AUTHOR> https://www.lifidigital.co.ke/2018/05/new-algorithm-allows-autonomous-cars-to.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is good.</comment>


From Moleskine to Market - <AUTHOR> http://ilovetypography.com/2008/03/12/newzald-moleskine-to-market/

<comment><USER2> Ironically, I found the typeography of the main article so hard to read I had to use Readibility. The main font appears to be one of these two:

<http://typekit.com/colophons/vcb6rkj>

The combination of font and size chosen is an exceedingly poor match for 96dpi web rendering.

<comment><USER3> The font rendering varies wildly between browsers: <http://i47.tinypic.com/1125ssp.png>

From left to right: Firefox (Win), Chrome (Win), Safari (Win), Safari (Mac)

Firefox renders the font way too light, Chrome (this version at least) falls back to a default font, and Safari on Windows uses incorrect kerning and renders the some characters too narrow. Only Safari on Mac renders the font acceptably (except from the heavy diagonal on the capital N and the oversized apostrophe, maybe).

<comment><AUTHOR> Another data point for you, Opera on Gentoo Linux:

<http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/4621/1231150731.png>

To me it looks pretty similar to your Firefox screenshot.

<comment><USER2> That isn't using the right font either. The 'e' is all wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know how the economics of font creation work out?

This seems to take an enormous amount of time to create [what appears to me to be] a very niche product that sells for only $250.

<comment><USER5> It is terrible. An old girlfriend worked as a type designer and rampant piracy makes selling fonts to end users a terrible business.

These "Type Foundries" make their main revenues by designing custom fonts for magazines where you can earn 5-6 figure sums. e.g. Martha Stewart may want a custom script font family for her magazines. She'll turn to a company to design a font exclusively for her. They also make money when selling large bundles of licenses to media companies that tend not to pirate fonts. Much the same way Adobe sells lots of software to institutions, but suffers piracy among hobbyists. Except there are thousands of font options, many of which are free.</comment></comment>


Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it. - <AUTHOR> http://aralbalkan.com/1504

<comment><USER2> Well, 1000 item limit on offset wasn't introduced recently. It was always there, and it was always documented. It's actually that no matter what you do, query always returns max 1000 items, offset just works "locally" on these items. There have been workarounds floating around the net, I remember one about using filtering on timestamps.

What is not documented is 1MB limit on memcached entries and also on HTTP response size (I found out only cause of exceptions). And there is 5 second limit on urlfetch with undocumented cryptic "DownloadError: ApplicationError + various numbers" exceptions.

What is tricky is that many limits happen only on production servers, so you don't discover them on a development one.

On the plus side, limits are very generous on memcache total size. Which is good as even trivial operations on datastore take a lot of CPU cycles.

Still, limits can be good. They force you to architect your application in a different, hopefully more scalable, way.

</comment><comment><USER3> This beta state is taking too long. And there isn't much communication. I dropped out a month ago and consider all those working hours as time wasted.

Don't get me wrong, they are giving a fantastic opportunity to long tail sites with a free service. It's just not for what I need. My under $10 a month web hosting gives me 400GB/1TB and python as cgi for low volumes, clustered and with 99.8% uptime.

Amazon might have downtime but they have been up and running for a while. And have a pricing system. Google needs to catch up fast.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well written and I learned a few new things about limitations of the AppEngine platform. Definitely worth reading if you consider trying something on AppEngine so you can know ahead of time what some of the less documented limitations are.

Some of the things the article mentions that I never realized: 1MB limit on python variables, 1000 limit on offset (which together with the 1000 limit on results means you can only ever fetch 2000 items).

<comment><USER5> More competition on the way. Check out 10gen.com.

<comment><USER6> Don't forget appjet.com!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google App Engine has all the makings of a great service, but for the reasons listed in the article, it fails...

* ...1M limit is also on files uploaded — early on, created a game application with Django on GAE but had to trim down my /dict/words file to words with less than 9 characters as it had to be under 1M or it wouldn't upload...

* ...really don't mind the 1000 call limit as you really shouldn't be doing that much DB access for a single transaction... ...but the lack of aggregate functions (and the GAE team suggested "workaround" is an inelegant non-ACID compliant hack that really is dreadful when you consider the next point...) and inability to run any offline processes against the complete data repository (if you go over 1000 records). There's been some rather arcane AJAX hacks to mediate this, but to me, that's an awfully inelegant solution.

* ...I bumped up against quotas by simple performing ONE DataStore read/write with a 200-300K object pickle/unpickle... ...not the total quota, just the singles got tagged as CPU-intensive...

</comment><comment><USER8> "This includes files. So you can't host that 1.2MB PDF you want to offer for download as part of your site."

This is what the static directory is for.

But in spirit I agree that the 1MB limit is troublesome...let's just make sure we get the facts straight.

<comment><USER9> Well... static files aren't writeable, and there is also a limit on their size as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This guy doesn't understand that these limitations are not just arbitrary, they stem from the architecture of the service. In order for it to scale, Google needs to make sure the applications are doing everything in small chunks. I bet even the background batch tasks, when they come, will require the developer to break the tasks in small pieces, map-reduce style or otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER11> SSL support is deal breaker for me.

<comment><USER3> Same here.</comment></comment>


Writing an x86 emulator in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://tadeuzagallo.com/blog/writing-an-x86-emulator-in-javascript/ <comment><USER2> Here's another one:

[http://bellard.org/jslinux/](http://bellard.org/jslinux/)

[https://github.com/levskaya/jslinux- deobfuscated](https://github.com/levskaya/jslinux-deobfuscated)

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/copy/v86](https://github.com/copy/v86) has a MIT license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know you're not too interested in performance here, but replacing DataView with a Uint8Array will probably get you a 10x+ win - DataView is extremely slow and V8 can't optimize calls to Program.getUint8(PC) in the same way that it can optimize Program[PC].

<comment><USER5> Thanks, indeed I didn't make any efforts to make it faster, but this seems fair... I honestly didn't know DataView was that slow, it got fibonacci(40) down to 1m53s. Faster than PERL according to [http://fengmk2.com/blog/2011/fibonacci/nodejs-python-php- rub...](http://fengmk2.com/blog/2011/fibonacci/nodejs-python-php-ruby- lua.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Writing an x86 emulator to run in javascript on an x86 machine. (although of course this would work on ARM etc. too).

Pretty cool though in all fairness.</comment>