Yipgo – Manage your life with an expressive language - <AUTHOR> http://yipgo.com#

<comment> 97-109-107 Looks like a child of emacs org-mode and consumer-friendly google calendar. Sounds interesting, what sparked you to do it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Seeing people adopt emacs, just for org was probably an inspiration. Jotting stuff down in free-form means people can build their todo-list structure to suit them so I'm hoping to see lots of cool things happening in the pages.

So far it's mostly techies that have come on board, hoping to get featured on Lifehacker or something where the true litmus test happens.</comment></comment>


Harvard's policies do not discriminate against Asian Americans – Federal Judge - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/10/07/federal-judge-finds-harvards-policies-do-not-discriminate-against <comment><USER2> it's disheartening to know american justice has become so influenced by ideology. for all the talented asians affected by this, america is not the only country which can offer the level of education exceptional talent needs. look across the atlantic and you will find exceptional institutions which welcome exceptional talent regardless of race.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. And yes, look into European institutions!

Special shoutout to my alma mater ETH Zurich: It's essentially free to attend if you can get in and, more importantly, stay in. Classes are in English. And, very important for Asians ;), it's the highest-ranked university outside the Anglosphere (e.g. QS 2020 ranked it worldwide 6th, the WSJ/Times Higher Education even ranked it No 1 in CS in 2016, ahead of Caltech, MIT and other heavy-hitters (not sure how the ranking held up to today)). Bonus: Zurich has good jobs for technical people, with Google and Disney animation research labs here although only a mediocre startup ecosystem.

Yes, about time to break Anglosaxon dominance in elite education. Even more important if they are so warped and racist that they prefer to uphold their pseudo-"meritocracy" to the detriment of excellence.

Spoiler: the discrimination is not really for the benefit of African-American or Latin-American students; it's for European-American students _of privilege_ (the latter qualification very important):

 _Each of the ALDC [athletes, legacies i.e. children of alumni /ae, those on the dean's interest list, and children of faculty and staff] preferences primarily benefit white students. Over 43% of white admits are ALDC, compared to less than 16% of admits for each of the other three major racial/ethnic groups. Indeed, due in part to the nature of the sports that Harvard offers, recruited athletes alone make up over 16% of white admits. We show that removing legacy and athlete preferences results in shifts in admissions away from white applicants with each of the other groups either increasing or staying the same. At the same time, fewer high-income applicants would be admitted._

[1] P. Arcidiacono, J. Kinsler, and T. Ransom. Legacy and athlete preferences at harvard. Sep 2019.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Judges with no formal training in mathematics and statistics are deciding statistical facts now?

Next: 1 is a prime number: Federal judge.

<comment><USER5> Judges are required to make decisions in many fields they have not been specifically trained in. If they were experts on every subject matter, there would be no need for lawyers, except maybe to present evidence.

Regardless, the ruling has nothing to do with "statistical fact". It has to do with whether the policy was intentionally discriminatory.

<comment><USER6> Then we're judging at the wrong level of the judicial system. Regardless of the intent back when the policy was instated, the current upholding of it knowing its effects is what needs critical evaluation.</comment></comment></comment>


The Wuhan Virus: How to Stay Safe - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/25/wuhan-coronavirus-safety-china/ <comment><USER2> I find a related article [https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/25/how-to-tell- whats-reall...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/25/how-to-tell-whats-really- happening-with-the-wuhan-virus/) much more interesting, it talks about the political (and social) context of this epedimic.

This bit, if correct, is the biggest "oh shit" part...

> Is the quarantine working?

> It's too soon to tell, but quite probably not. The confirmed numbers may be > just a fraction of the real total of infected victims, with many not yet > diagnosed or even showing symptoms. But the biggest problem is that the long > incubation period means hundreds of thousands of people left Wuhan long > before the virus was seen as a major problem—especially as the Lunar New > Year, when hundreds of millions of people return to their families across > China, was coming up. A lot now depends on where they ended up. The constant > expansion of the quarantine zone, which now covers a huge chunk of the > central Chinese province of Hubei, suggests that local transmission may have > been fierce and fast, outrunning the authorities. Modeling by foreign > scientists is producing disturbing results — 250,000 or more infected inside > Wuhan and large outbreaks elsewhere, with 60 percent or more of possible > transmissions needing to be blocked to contain the outbreak.</comment>


India: Facebook recruiting from the IITs; attractive offer - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/7040500.cms

<comment><USER2> Is it really surprising that Facebook would give the same offer to students coming from India that it gives to students coming from everywhere else?

<comment><USER3> I have a little professional experience dealing with outsourcing operations in a few countries.

You probably grew up in a Western democracy where racial discrimination was illegal and socially radioactive for most of your life. There are people who do not share that experience. Assume you had grown up in a hypothetical totally-not-India nation where government was known to be pervasively corrupt and where discrimination happened as a matter of course, and you knew in dealing with foreign countries that you were not in a position of strength vis-a-vis your negotiating partner. Would you necessarily expect them to treat you fairly?

Story time, with particulars elided: Japanese companies often pay employees in a fashion determined by an algorithm. It came to the attention of a supervisor of an Indian employee that information relevant to the employee's salary had not been communicated to the company and, as a consequence, he was not being paid his expected wages and had not been in some time. The employee was unaware of this and the error was in the company's favor. The company was totally blameless for the error happening.

The supervisor immediately went to the employee, apologized, and informed him that he would be paid appropriately going forward. He then asked the employee to wait for a few minutes while they figured out what to do about the six months of wages. The employee said it was OK, he understood that the company would not pay him.

Not five minutes later, the supervisor came back with the division chief and the head of HR. All three repeatedly apologized to the employee. They then presented him with an envelope: six months of the difference, in cash, accurate to the yen. It had been drawn from the petty cash drawer, and I have it on good authority that if the petty cash had been insufficient the division chief would have made good on it from his personal accounts within the hour.

The Indian employee was flabbergasted. _I_ was mildly surprised. But this totally makes sense in a particular mindset here. The Indian was totally ready to believe he would be cheated out of wages -- it wouldn't have been the first time. I was ready to believe the company or HR would drag its feet. From the perspective of a particular brand of Japnaese megacorp, though, both those expectations are not just wrong but so outlandishly outside the realm of possibility that they wouldn't even occur to anyone.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you specifically on the mindset issue but it is not just true for India but rather for all cultures. Here in India, business people can delay and prolong release of payments for long and people have come to expect that. So if you get payment (along with apologies for the delay) that would surprise any Indian for sure!

Similarly, as much as I despise and loathe it, majority of Indians will not hesitate to throw stuff/wrappers out of their moving cars on roads and highways. It is pretty OK for them. But I am sure it will shock and surprise Japanese and many other cultures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The base salary and the signing bonus is not so special to deserve a whole article.

</comment><comment><USER6> this is just going to further the rage on dice.com about the field going to hell in the states.</comment>


Leave Gmail in 10 steps - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dipasquale.fr/en/2018/12/02/leave-gmail-in-10-steps/ <comment><USER2> If you have Gmail click this link, it is an eye opener: [https://myaccount.google.com/purchases](https://myaccount.google.com/purchases)

Google knows every online purchase you ever made, every line item, the price you paid, the address it was delivered to, and so on.

Keep in mind that Facebook and Google also combine this data with offline data about you purchased from other companies, to complete the picture.

UPDATE: Here's an example of Google purchasing data about your offline purchases: [https://www.fastcompany.com/90230910/google-has-been- secretl...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90230910/google-has-been-secretly- tracking-your-offline-purchases-with-help-from-mastercard)

<comment><USER3> > Your purchases and reservations are brought together from across your Google > Account, from sources including: Orders placed using Google services, like > Google Play Store, Google Express, or through the Google Assistant. Order > receipts or confirmations received in Gmail.[1]

Wow I have a bunch gained from scraping my emails (there is an info icon that tells you the source). Mostly larger multinational merchants (Amazon/PSN), obviously the scraping isn't very advanced. Only covers a tiny fraction of my online purchases with receipts in gmail.

I also see a bunch of purchases made by a guy with the same name but on a different continent who frequently gives out the wrong gmail address (I get random mails from their friends from time to time). Thankfully they aren't buying uranium :P

Once again with google data collection I cant help but get the feeling that this is something that wasn't specifically designed for advertising. Why would they provide that link in the first place and draw attention to it when they could just do it behind the scenes (as Im sure the rest are)?

[1] [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7673989?p=orders&...](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7673989?p=orders&hl=en- GB&visit_id=636798360529048418-174744030&rd=1)

<comment><USER4> They probably let you see it because of gdpr, and wouldn't have before that law?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure. This is not a data collection, it is a filter on an existing data collection.

The data itself are your emails, which they keep because they are your email provider, and they already show them to you whenever you want them.

Which provides a very interesting workaround for google against the GDPR. But IANAL so probably I am missing something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > In exchange for free mails, would you let your postman open your letters, > read them, and insert ads related to their contents?

Note that this is not the case anymore: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail- ads.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html)

We never did that for G Suite, but with this announcement we also stopped doing it for consumer.

Disclaimer: Googler working on Gmail. Please stay :-)

<comment><USER7> I don't mean to hijack this thread, but I wonder: from my perspective, it seems that the trends in gmail have been towards a bulkier, slower design. And I hear tech friends complain similarly.

How does the Gmail team feel about it? It might be that the team thought that a heavier page with a mighty footprint delivers an overall better product. Or perhaps the team has an entirely different view?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > First, I strongly suggest you buy a domain name, so that you really own your > mail address

Any opinions on that?

I did so years ago (mostly for the reason of being independent of a mail provider) but meanwhile I realized you never "own" a domain. It's always just rented. It would be bad if someone gets in control of my domain so I just hope this won't happen before I'm dead... And even then it could be bad if it happens (although not for me anymore).

<comment><USER9> At $10/year it would cost $800 for your lifetime. Not too shabby to put control in your hands

<comment><USER10> More like $10 a year for the domain and $20/mo or more for the actual email hosting and provider.

<comment><USER11> $20/month?

I pay less than $3/month for web/mail hosting, full cPanel setup with 10GB storage and unlimited traffic.

<comment><USER10> $3/mo for unlimited number of inbox/addresses, or $3/mo per inbox/addresses? Note, I'm not talking aliases, I'm talking 'per user, entirely separate inbox/login'

<comment><USER12> Dreamhost Shared Unlimited has no user limits for $7.95/month (paid annually) and I think that includes one free domain name registration.

[https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/](https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/)

<comment><USER13> If you're going to host your own email for privacy reasons, don't get a package at a US provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have no complaints with Fastmail, great experience.

Android mail clients however - I really wish K-9 Mail felt more modern, it's perfectly usable but the ancient UI makes it less nice to use.

<comment><USER15> I've just switched from gmail to fastmail, and I'm not very impressed with Fastmail's iOS app (it's pretty slow to start / open / retrieve emails) or the lack of offline support it has.

TBH, other than the annoying ability to too easily swipe emails left and expose the Archive green button, I really liked the Gmail app - it was extremely fast and easy to use.

Anyone have any suggestions on a mail client for iOS? I _can_ use the Apple one (and am doing currently), but I don't really get on with it for some reason...

<comment><USER16> Outlook. Seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder why nobody mentioned zoho.com (from India) and products they offer. They have docs as well as other apps that any business needs and no privacy issues.

<comment><USER18> And an unreliable registrar that takes them down at will.

<comment><USER17> It seems that issue was related to automated algorithm. For long term solution and this never happens again, Zoho decided to be registrar themselves.

More information can be found out at:

[https://www.zoho.com/service-updates/blog/update-on-zoho- ser...](https://www.zoho.com/service-updates/blog/update-on-zoho-services- disruption.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why doesn't anyone every mention actually paying google and using GSuite, instead of using their free service?

<comment><USER20> Or using adblock

<comment><USER21> I think the author is concerned with a much deeper issue than a simple ad blocker.

<comment><USER20> Yeah. I don't disagree with the op.

But advertisements nuissance are not the reason. They are so easily dealt with by using adblock.nin some incarnation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If anyone's gone through this trouble already, care to explain how you did it? I've been thinking about rolling a VPS with postfix/dovecot, but it seems like such a hassle to maintain, and I'm not super confident in my ability to secure it.

<comment><USER23> Find an email provider, sign up/pay for service, and use it. I recommend buying a domain, so you can have a fairly static email address even if you end up changing providers later on.

Rolling your own email service never seemed worth it to me. You'll have to deal with backups/recovery, maintenance, and any quirks associated with the big mail places rejecting mails from your service. I'm almost certain someone will chime with "but it's not bad!", well, it's not bad until you're on vacation and suddenly your mail service goes down and now you have to either go without mail (stuff sent to you will be rejected), or stop what you are doing to fix it.

<comment><USER24> But it's not bad! Jk, I'm a devops guy so I set up servers and infrastructures for a living, and I still think it's a pain in the ass. Mostly getting TLS working is the hard part. If you don't get it right, your emails will all go to the spam folder of the recipient, or just not deliver at all. Hell even if you get it right, that _still_ might happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Any recommendation on an iOS mail app. I use the Apple one, which is fine if uninteresting. The Fastmail app is not very modern looking which I superficially care about. Any reasonable looking non-Apple mail app reads my email or collects my data.

<comment><USER26> I hate to say it, but Outlook is actually really nice.

<comment><USER27> Heavily disagree. The web version on mobile (android; both firefox and chrome) feels slow and works badly on low bandwidth connections and touch support feels badly designed (e.g. selecting multiple messages, working with attachments). On desktops/laptops the imap support is also subpar with problems with showing multiple drafts for one email in the web version.

This would maybe be excusable for a small startup, but for a company the size of Microsoft that is an embarrassing showing.

<comment><USER28> I think they're referring to the Outlook app, not the service

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been on this un-Googlify trend for almost a decade now, as a beta Gmail user I ran into the "wow, I'm really neck deep in Google telemetry" wake up some time ago.

The only stuff that I can't let go of is Maps as the author noted, and Youtube. I'll always use the best services and I like both.

Outlook.com solves a lot of the problems the author detailed with calendar items and contacts, as well as provides the storage necessary to host your email archive.

I'm willing to be datamined, but not by one monolith like Google for every service. That's really the problem and what people feel uncomfortable with.

</comment><comment><USER30> This article looks like an ad for fastmail.com

<comment><USER31> apologies for being off topic, but: I am a long time Fastmail customer, but the law passed in Australia yesterday has me somewhat concerned. Fastmail is an Australian company. Anyone else concerned?

<comment><USER32> As far as I can tell, it changes nothing, assuming that your email was sent as plain text. Although Fastmail stores your email on encrypted disks [1], it of course has the encryption keys for these disks. Even before the new law, they would have been subject to any Australian search warrant requiring that they hand over your email, and would not have had any technical reason for not complying.

In general, unless you and your correspondents are using PGP or some such, your email is readable by anyone who can obtain a search warrant in the country where your email provider resides. (Protonmail may or may not be an exception [2]).

[1] [https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html)

[2] [https://www.wired.com/2015/10/mr-robot-uses-protonmail- still...](https://www.wired.com/2015/10/mr-robot-uses-protonmail-still-isnt- fully-secure/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know if you can disable email on GSuite (i.e. change MX on my domain to Fastmail), but keep the rest? I use my GSuite account login on a lot of sites, I've got shared photo albums etc.

<comment><USER34> I do this. I use Gsuite but not their email. I changed the MX records of the domain to the other email host.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Not using Fastmail, but I'm working on this now. Bye, Google.

<comment><USER36> Isn't fastmail an Australian company? If so then they'll have to backdoor all software in the future since parliament passed these insane new surveillance laws.

<comment><USER37> Email is plain text anyway so why would it matter? If you want to keep it private you'll have to encrypt it anyway and then all their backdoors wouldn't change that.

<comment><USER38> There is a great difference between in-transit encryption and at-rest encryption. The former is not really comparable, as the existence of the email at rest will forever be vulnerable, in contrast to the time of transmission. A window of seconds versus years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The example mbox sender frequency script is measuring the mbone list at isi. I was on that list back in the nineties.

Here's a video from one of the top posters.

[https://vimeo.com/56349011](https://vimeo.com/56349011)

</comment><comment><USER40> Which other emailer has threads, snooze, and tabs? (need all of those really; hard to move without them) I do hate that I can't just pay for gmail and avoid the crappy ads...

<comment><USER23> > threads

Threads have been supported since, well, decades (message-id, In-Reply-To). Most modern mail clients support displaying messages in thread format.

> snooze I originally missed snoozing, but now I just create a task any time I > need to address something, or tag/flag it for follow-up.

> tabs

I'm not sure what this is. Can you explain?

> I do hate that I can't just pay for gmail and avoid the crappy ads

Just shows that google thinks that displaying targetted ads based on the contents of your emails is more valuable than you throwing cash at them. That's terrifying.

<comment><USER41> As another person mentioned, your email contents aren't used to target ads, and you can pay for gsuite.

<comment><USER23> As another person mentioned, if you have gmail and visit here, google knows about every purchase you have made, the price you paid, etc: [https://myaccount.google.com/purchases](https://myaccount.google.com/purchases)

They're not reading your emails, right? How else would they know this much information?

<comment><USER41> That's not what I said. I'd ask that you reread my comment. Your emails aren't used for advertising purposes. There are a host of features that require varying levels of email analysis (from spam detection to putting flight times on your calendar to reminders that you'll be receiving a package).

None of those things require targeting advertisements based on email content. And that's what isn't happening.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps not in the email interface itself, but you would be hard pressed to convince anyone that it's not shoved in a machine learning model somewhere.

<comment><USER41> I mean it's literally explicity in the privacy policy. They always kept email based targeting separate from broader data and stopped using it at all for ad targetting a year or two ago, seemingly because corporate (gsuite) users were concerned that the data might be used anyway or something, I'm not really sure.

I don't think you can get more explicit than "Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change."

[1]: [https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction- in...](https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the- enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Has anyone found anything which competes with Google Calendar?

<comment><USER43> The fastmail calendar is excellent, IMO.

<comment><USER44> Idk if it does anything beyond normal CalDAV stuff, but honestly, I'm not sure what more you'd want for a personal calendar. Does GCal have any useful exclusive features?

<comment><USER42> Have you had success with 2 time zones for the same event? I know there's a setting to enable it, but I haven't had success.

<comment><USER45> My fastmail calendar experiences:

\- timezone support is great and an explicit feature. You can pick the time zone when adding events and there is a dropdown at the top to view the calendar in the respective selected timezone.

\- you can scroll the calendar view flexibly and not just switch from month to month. You can for example scroll to see half of previous and half of current month. This fills me with so much joy and I can't understand why no one else does it.

\- you can't give someone else write access to your calendar. This is my major gripe with it and the reason I'm still actually using the gmail calendar in the fastmail interface.

<comment><USER46> Does it allow to omit timezone for an event so it always shows at the same time? It drives me crazy when I plan a trip to a different timezone that Google always shifts the times when I am there.

<comment><USER45> Just had a quick look and you can do that. You can set the time zone as Floating Time and it will be independent from the time zone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Moved from gmail to a VPS with dovecot, postfix and SOGo (provides xDAV, webui and activesync). Never looked back.

<comment><USER47> How do you deal with emails sent to gmail getting labeled as spam by default?

Also, qq.com and mail.ru block mails citing IP frequency limited and spam message rejected, respectively. I've found no way around these.

I just send one personal email a day, on most days.

<comment><USER28> I've never had that. My setup mostly did DKIM and all that for me. Never had mail arrive at the other end into spam. For incoming, I use rspamd. It's taken some training but it's a lot better now.

<comment><USER47> My SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are on point. No idea why it goes to gmail's spam.

<comment><USER13> It's possible your emails are malformed or contain weird headers, that gets them flagged very heavily as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The feature that makes it so hard for me to leave Gmail is the automatic bundling of promotions, updates, social, forums. That has made managing my inbox actually manageable. Is that any way to get a feature with another email provider?

<comment><USER49> It will be hard for me to leave Google Inbox because of the peaceful feeling I get from easily snoozing or marking my emails as done by the end of the day. I don't know if I will ever feel as accomplished and with as little distraction.

<comment><USER48> Snooze is a bit easier; boomerang is a service that offers that for at least outlook as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I did this 3 years ago and have not regretted the choice.

</comment><comment><USER51> I went with Namecheap as my Gmail replacement. I can use my own domain and setup was instant. The interface and admin panel are very clean which is nice, but $10/mo for one inbox doesn't really say "cheap" to me. Overall I am quite happy, though.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you abandoned Next.js for another front end framework/library? - <AUTHOR> I'm starting a new project as a technical lead. The last React app I built from scratch was as a freelancer using Next.js. Generally my experience with Next.js has been positive, but while I can still debate my options I'm wondering if anyone has run into problems that caused you to move away from Next.js? And if so can you please tell me about them. <comment><USER2> Next has been improving very much recently, and would definitely be my number one choice for the vast majority of React projects. What is making you look for other solutions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly to double check my assumptions and try to dig around and see if there is a downside to Next I'm blind to. Or any gotchas or problems that arise that I wouldn't expect a year or two into the project. Maybe excessive due diligence?

But I'd rather ask around while I have the chance before committing a ton of code.

<comment><USER2> With large community support and coperate backing, I think Next is well setup for the long term (5-10 years). I can't think of any direct downsides, however Next does "force" you in a way of writing application, which I personally think is a good thing, since it provides standardization and structure to projects (for example, routing).

Next can still be very flexible, with things like catch-all routes, you could even add another router on top of Next. It also supports customizing the Webpack configuration if needed, but there's plugins for almost all cases that I have needed to use (PWA/service worker, CSS/Sass which is now built-in, etc).

I think Next is one of the safer option for new projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts. I'm also a fan of opinionated frameworks. I was an early Rails developer and over years of freelancing seeing both framework codebases and micro-framework or from-scratch codebases I believe frameworks make decisions for you that are unimportant to your work in 80-90% of use cases.

<comment><USER3> Since you're the OP, and you were an early rails developer, I have to ask why you are more in favor of next than rails at this point?

<comment><AUTHOR> I live in Berlin now and Ruby isn't very popular here. It's much more difficult to find Ruby/Rails developers than React developers. The tech industry here is growing but still in its infancy, there aren't a glut of devs who started working with Rails when it was a hot new thing that have an appreciation for it. Javascript and Python are very popular, Ruby not so much.

<comment><USER4> A lot of my friends in SF tend to pick up a new language every year or two. Is this type comparatively rare in Berlin or are people just digging into a long list of other languages first?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the jobs I see Javascript, Python, Java & iOS are pretty much the entire market so there isn't a lot of opportunity to actually work with other langs and get paid for it.

<comment><USER4> Pretty much every language I've learned, I've learned on my own and only possibly later gotten paid for using.

For example, I picked up Elixir (which I currently make money using) by rewriting a Rails app into Phoenix four years ago. That app never made me any money, but it did provide a great motivation for learning Elixir!

Similarly, I'm learning Rust now. I'm going through books and videos, building toy projects and slowly picking it up. I've never been paid to write Rust, but that will likely change in the future.

Other languages, like Racket and 8088 assembly I've never been paid to write and likely never will but I don't regret exploring them a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Never choose a tool before you've seen the job. If you need the things Next does, use it. If you don't, don't use it. Just dragging whichever tools you've recently used into your next project is how some of the worst projects I've seen got built. There are many valid solutions to any problem in web dev, and they ALL have tradeoffs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which is why I am trying to get additional background on the tool before I commit to it.

<comment><USER5> Then you need to be more specific about the requirments

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very few downsides to Next.js generally. I'd say for smaller projects I really love leveraging Gatsby's plugin system (specifically the image transforms), but it's not as useful for anything dynamic where Next.js comes out ahead.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been looking more and more at liveviews as a better option maybe?

Laravel livewire/phoenix liveview.

Anyone know how these compare w/ nextjs/nuxtjs in terms of performance?

<comment><USER4> If you're doing a lot of computation that's entirely on the client-side, you'll at least want to look at JS hooks.

However, if you're doing things that require a trip to the server anyway, such as navigation, form validations, etc, you should get significantly better performance with LiveView. Sending tiny diffs over web sockets is a lot lighter than doing JSON requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why put another layer of complexity (and dependencies) on top of a solid and battle-tested library like React? Chances are that Next.js will be obsolete in 1-2 years while React will be even better and maintained (probably React will die in 5 to 10 years, just like any other lib/framework).

<comment><USER2> I don't think you understand the usage of Next if you think it will be dead in 2 years.

Application framework that gain good popularity stay alive for very long. Look at a lot of PHP frameworks for example.

Next will be alive in 5 years

<comment><USER9> How can you compare a PHP framework like Laravel (that sits on top of a language) with a framework (Next) that sits on top of a library (React) that sits on top of a language (JS)?

Next is not like Laravel.

<comment><USER2> Laravel uses Blade for rendering, while Next uses React. They are roughly comparable.

<comment><USER10> Blade is literally part of the laravel framework, it's not a third party thing like react is to Next.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I generally like next.js, but I have since built some things in Svelte [0] and prefer it for simple projects. Not dealing with JSX and complex React components is refreshing. It just works. There are some upsides to its static generation (with sapper) as well - it can create static pages for things that would need API routes in Next.

TLDR; For large projects that must make use of the React ecosystem I'd take Next. For smaller SPA projects I prefer svelte.

[0] [https://svelte.dev/](https://svelte.dev/)

</comment><comment><USER12> We chose to roll our own SSR, in an otherwise "normal" react + apollo app. This meant that, if we ran into bugs, that we weren't reliant on someone else to update an ecosystem to get unblocked.

It's worked out very well for us.

</comment><comment><USER13> I set up a react project recently using parcel, typescript, reach-router, and emotion css. I was surprised how easy and painless it was. In saying that, Next provides good value to a team with it's conventions and workflow.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would take a look at Gatsby. NextJS has had some major updates recently so It would be good to give it another look as well. I personally switched from Next to Gatsby and the main reason is Gatsby's GraphQL API which is fantastic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Having worked with both Gatsby and Next I definitely prefer Next. But also this web app is going to need a lot of dynamic content so I would not choose a static site generator like Gatsby for the use case.</comment></comment>


Why evolution is true:  the strongest evidence I have ever seen. - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxLR9hdorI

<comment><USER3> Somebody doesn't understand statistics. That aside ...

The ERV similarity as evidence of a common ancestor has mileage. The video doesn't give sufficient details to make the assertions that it does.

Are those ERV sequences predisposed to align to particular sequences and hence appear on particular genes? How many such sequences do we share with other primates? other mammals? molluscs? trees? What have these ERVs survived intact, what's the relative proportion of partials and do those match up too.

Even if the insertions are random, then are organisms more fit with the insertions at a particular point. Hence the virus could have affected multiple organisms randomly* but only those with the insertion at a particular location were fit enough to survive. This appears to contradict this being evidence of a 'recent' common ancestor.

The method that shows "evolution being true has a probability of 1" can also be used to show that the probability of extraterrestrial life is zero [abiogenisis observed = 1, number of stars O(10^23)].

\-- * = analogy: kids draw on their bedroom walls in random places (perturbed by height; this is equivalent to some sites being favoured) their mothers wipe off the drawings where they see them (virus at some sites reduces fitness of organism). Observe all kids walls, drawings only appear behind the bed - <USER2> kids all got together at some point and decided to only draw on the wall behind the bed (common ancestor).

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure that if you got struck by lightning at 9am whether they would let you onto a plane which would crash at 2pm.

I think you would need some sort of overnight hospital observation.

Therefore this entire argument is false.

/ID Logic</comment>


First Map-Based Car Navigation System Debuted 14 Years Before GPS - <AUTHOR> http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-topics/consumer-electronics/first-mapbased-car-navigation-system-debuted-14years-before-gps <comment><USER2> This is way older than GPS -- similar systems were out in the 20s and 30s: [http://99percentinvisible.org/article/analog-gps- scrolling-w...](http://99percentinvisible.org/article/analog-gps-scrolling- wrist-car-mounted-maps-roaring-20s-30s/)

<comment><USER3> Those maps look extremely similar to UK canal maps: [http://www.macclesfieldcanal.org.uk/mcmap3.htm](http://www.macclesfieldcanal.org.uk/mcmap3.htm)

These tended to be made into an almost straight line and printed on a single piece of paper with notable junctions and features only.

It would've been obvious at the time that the format would be ideal for fixed routes that these could be scrolled.

<comment><USER4> Something similar is often used for railway lines. Even Wikipedia has it on some pages, eg. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Eastern_Main_Line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Eastern_Main_Line)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The helium-gas rate gyroscope [1] is very strange. Honda's history says that it was built because it had only eight parts. It's a helium jet aimed at a pair of hot-wire anemometers. It wasn't a very good rate gyro, but it was cheap.

Etak had a rate gyro with a motor spinning a flexible metal disk, with the flexing sensed capacitively. I still have one of those somewhere. That was simple and cheap too, but still not very good. All these things had far more drift than even low end modern IC gyros.

[1] [http://world.honda.com/history/challenge/1981navigationsyste...](http://world.honda.com/history/challenge/1981navigationsystem/page03.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Video of it in action: [https://youtu.be/hOqig8rixOU](https://youtu.be/hOqig8rixOU)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not much later, and with its own completely different tech for auto navigation, came the Etak Navigator / [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak). A good bit of SV history there.

<comment><USER8> There was recently a very good HN thread on Etak [1] including comments from people who've seen it firsthand or have worked on related ventures.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744825](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744825)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also the road embeded tracking wire in the 50s. New is old.

<comment><USER10> Another option: magnets every so many units of distance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> cool</comment>


3 Simple "Forcing Functions" That Will 3-5x Your Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.danmartell.com/forcingfunctions/ <comment><USER2> Just pretend that a gunman is going to put a bullet in your wife's brain if you don't accomplish your goals. Easy!

Nothing like running through life shocking your emotions with a tazer to get things done!

</comment><comment><USER3> Entrepreneur blog span belongs in r/entrepreneur, not here.</comment>


Toshiba is officially out of the laptop business - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/9/21361081/toshiba-laptop-sharp-pc-computer <comment><USER2> Discussed at considerable length a few days ago here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24078799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24078799)

Also reported here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108838](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108838)

And here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108602)

The announcement two years ago that this was going to happen was discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17237567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17237567)</comment>


Photographer hassled by Port of Tyne for filming a sign on a wall - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/01/port_of_tyne_security_hassled_photographer_public_road/ <comment><AUTHOR> security guards are always doing this type of thing with complete disregard for the law. The police usually aren't much better though in this case they seem to have been ok.</comment>


The difference between managed infrastructure and managed code - <AUTHOR> https://read.acloud.guru/fargate-serverless-and-the-difference-between-managed-infrastructure-and-managed-code-e72f5f0d5ea <comment><AUTHOR> Part of the problem is that people are conflating the application notion of a server which is about software — with the infrastructure notion of a server which is about instances and/or heavyweight proper VMs.</comment>


Evolving how we work - <AUTHOR> http://jamesob.livejournal.com/96672.html

<comment><USER2> Dude hasn't been in the industry very long. Some weeks it's slack, some weeks it's deathmarch. It all evens out in the end.

The freelance model he suggests neglects one very important point. When I'm in the office, even if I'm goofing off right now, I'm available _instantly_ should there be a problem with Production.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is physical presence any more instantaneous than a phone call or e-mail?

<comment><USER2> It is if I was busy working for another client at the time.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would a web developer transition to making games with Unreal Engine - <AUTHOR>

Since I was a kid I've always wanted to make computer games. However, for reasons I'm not sure I can explain, I picked up Python and web development, and have been doing this for the last few years. However, recent news about Unreal Engine kind of reignited that spark and now I'd like to learn how to use it and how to build actual games with it. I'm worried about a couple of things:
- Could a 25-year old with almost zero experience with C++, Java and the likes realistically expect to be productive and creative with a modern, complicated game engine? To me it appears overwhelming. - I'm mostly interested in doing level design, gameplay mechanics and story - what do I need to learn first? The net is full of information from various sources and I'm not sure where to start. Thanks! <comment><USER2> There are two main ways to interact with UE4, Blueprints or C++. Blueprints are a visual scripting language. You can make a whole game just with Blueprints and never touch C++. Using Blueprints would probably be a good way to get started if you're familiar with programming but not C++. Once you sign up as a developer for UE4 you'll have access to tutorials, sample projects and forums. All of these can be useful learning resources.

</comment><comment><USER3> take a quake mod you love and start editing it to a game like the mod you want to build...

im not sure the engines are alike - but the quake source is very very clean. you can start to figure out what entities are and how things mvoe in 3d space. all while getting a lot of bang for your buck seeing your changes come to life from just a few lines of code

you can do the same for an unreal mod of course :) - just find a mod thats open source (like action quake or vanilla quake) and sort of in the direction your game wants to go (fps or top down, realistic weapons/physics or q3 style)</comment>


The team is the product - <AUTHOR> https://blog.delighted.com/the-team-is-the-product-ad0fe7cb1c69 <comment><USER2> It seems like this post was just some jargon-filled bullshit and a cheap attempt at promotion for delighted.com

Nothing to see here...Moving on</comment>


Have you been faked? - <AUTHOR> https://havetheyfaked.me/ <comment><USER2> >You have probably seen [https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/) by Philip Wang.

>But have you ever wondered if they made photos that look like you? Let's check!

>We collected the huge dataset of 428526 fake generated photos and extracted their facial parameters with [https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition](https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition). Now you can match your image against fake faces and compare with the closest matches. Enjoy!

Maybe it is just me, but how would I go if I wanted to harvest large numbers of "real" photos of "real" persons?

Having curious people uploading them to my website could be an easy way.

<comment><USER3> [https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/) only exists because someone already collected enough real photos of real persons to have a neural network learn their distribution well enough to generate new samples.

Harvesting even more photos is not really necessary at this point, and in any case, scraping them off the web would be faster than creating a novelty website.

<comment><USER2> >Harvesting even more photos is not really necessary at this point, and in any case, scraping them off the web would be faster than creating a novelty website.

But scraping them from the web says nothing about the source, even if you manage to remove all stock photos.

This way it is IMHO more likely that it is a "real" photo, most probably uploaded by a "real" user and the site has also the IP of the sender.

Morover, most photos you can find on the web have had their EXIF information removed by the host, maybe it is not the case for a casual user.

As I see it scraping them off the web is good for quantity but not so much for quality, this (completely hypothetical) approach would give less quantity but IMHO better quality data.

<comment><USER4> I definitely tried it with more junk images that I had in stock than real photos, so, there's that. There's moment where you need to know what face a computer would say resemble the most a sushi... So I'm not 100% sure about quality

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What happened here? [https://havetheyfaked.me/d/ed0949b5-7a05-4614-8b0e-267e4458a...](https://havetheyfaked.me/d/ed0949b5-7a05-4614-8b0e-267e4458a4e1/)

Also I got told I matched with this [https://havetheyfaked.me/d/c4662bf7-eb98-4c7f-a59d-6c96c9c1f...](https://havetheyfaked.me/d/c4662bf7-eb98-4c7f-a59d-6c96c9c1fe1d/)

<comment><USER6> There seems to be plenty of less-than-pleasant outputs from this net. I had a couple of strange ones when I landed: [1][2]. If those were generated with GAN, the adversarial network could really use another training pass with examples like this (and if GANs are not used, there could be a simple network filtering the first net's output).

[1]: [https://havetheyfaked.me/d/539e20e9-560c-4a8d-a2ba- ca89e2c9a...](https://havetheyfaked.me/d/539e20e9-560c-4a8d-a2ba- ca89e2c9ad5e/)

[2]: [https://havetheyfaked.me/d/86526a1d-bbe7-4956-8bec-a7e64e082...](https://havetheyfaked.me/d/86526a1d-bbe7-4956-8bec-a7e64e082b2b/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love this comment mood. Everyone losing it when some random small website asks people to upload their photo if they want to find out some random information. But everyone's cool with sharing constantly on FB, IG, uploading their photos and locations to massive companies, etc etc. The internet has reality distorted everyone's perspective. Orwell would be have something to say about it. Everyone loves Big Brother (FAANG etc) but distrusts each other. Divide and conquer much?

<comment><USER8> There's no reason to assume people commenting here about risks use any of those sites and post their photos to them.

<comment><USER9> There is no reason to assume that they don't.

<comment><USER10> There is. It would be inconsistent of them.

<comment><USER11> And people generally tend to be inconsistent in what they say and what they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Where does my face end up when I submit it to this website?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good question. the thing is that except you photo I have to extract its vector of facial parameters to match fakes. So with this 128-dimentional vector I can find you on other photos (if I had some)

All the pics and their vectors stay on this small server. if you want to be deleted please drop me a letter email@example.com

<comment><USER13> > _All the pics and their vectors stay on this small server._

This should be mentioned on the website.

> _if you want to be deleted please drop me a letter email@example.com_

There should be an easier mechanism to request a deletion of our photo. Better still, request permission from the user to store the photo in your servers before actually storing them.

I think this is the bare minimum of transparency that should required before letting people upload personal data, especially in this day and age.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree, thank you. Somehow I missed that, yep going to add with next update

<comment><USER14> Can't you just remove all the stored data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Already doing this! Cleaning up all the uploaded info in 3 minutes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, anybody have the balls to upload their photo yet?

<comment> Harvey-Specter What do you imagine is going to happen if you upload your photo?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This would be cool tech for finding single people you are attracted to based on a reference image.

<comment><USER12> This is a really cool idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> None of the matches looked _a ton_ like me, imo, but I tried five photos of myself from 2011-2018 and a couple matches kept reoccurring -- not as top match, but in the top few, so that was interesting.

I didn't trim my beard or mustache from 2009 - 2012, when I shaved it off entirely, and I didn't cut my hair from 1996 - 2017, so there's some good variation in these pictures.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well I'll be! It really works. [1]

Joke aside, I really enjoy both of these projects. It's fascinating that you can put a story behind every "fake" face.

1 - [https://havetheyfaked.me/u/f/7b8ec517-c5a6-4e43-8bae-5be69ee...](https://havetheyfaked.me/u/f/7b8ec517-c5a6-4e43-8bae-5be69eea183d/)

</comment><comment><USER19> was very worrried this was going to be like "haveibeenpwnd" glad to see it isn't

<comment><AUTHOR> haha well, I was looking at them too. I'm not a native speaker, so considered to use at least their name scheme haveibeenfaked.co or something. Fortunately chosen current option

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This needs to be open-sourced and self-hostable. (if it works, haven't uploaded anything)

</comment><comment> w-m They haven't faked Matt Damon yet. Thank god!

[https://havetheyfaked.me/u/f/ab60f524-6111-41a4-afef-211d299...](https://havetheyfaked.me/u/f/ab60f524-6111-41a4-afef-211d2995b688/)

<comment><USER21> One of the similar faces has a kid that could be his illegitimate son though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Am I the only one deeply disturbed by the emotional presence of these generated "people"?

<comment><USER23> I'm freaked out that literally non of these people exist - yet they're there. I can see them. Some eldritch shit yo.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Got two gdpr complaints, so I added automated removal of uploaded photos and metadata extracted from those photos.

Now photos and data are only stored for 3 minuites, then deleted (app artitecture requires server side processing of uploaded file and to compare results with your photo I have to store it - to be able to show)

Also reflected information above on the website itself. Thank you for your interest to this project!

<comment><USER24> Well done. Does this apply to all images that have ever been uploaded to the website, or only to the ones uploaded after your update? If an user uploaded an image 2 hours ago, will their image be stored or has it been deleted already?

<comment><AUTHOR> applies to every uploaded photo of this website, uploaded at any time

<comment><USER24> Nice, thanks for implementing this

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Already hugged to death it seems: Error 502 Bad gateway

edit: working again. So far I haven't been faked ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> yep needs some tuning // added some more resources to it

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can this same algorithm be used to find doppelgängers?

<comment><USER27> There are plenty of sites for that:

[https://twinstrangers.net/](https://twinstrangers.net/)

[https://www.ilooklikeyou.com/](https://www.ilooklikeyou.com/)

[https://www.twinlets.com/](https://www.twinlets.com/)

[https://findmydoppelganger.net/](https://findmydoppelganger.net/)

[https://www.twinfinders.com/](https://www.twinfinders.com/)

etc.

Disclaimer: This the result of a "find my twin" search. I know nothing about the credibility of these sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> not yet....but... :)</comment>


Conversations with the petroleum brotherhood in the UAE - <AUTHOR> https://harpers.org/archive/2017/12/i-am-here-only-for-working/?single=1 <comment><USER2> I had been born in Bahrain in the GCC or Middle East region and had stayed in Dubai for a period of time.

I was also an expat which meant no citizenship no matter how long I stayed (because thats how the middle east works) and almost all expats end up going home or to another country in North America or Europe.

One thing I noticed in Dubai is how it sort of represented an extreme outlook of how oil has affected the Middle East where it was both a boomtown full of money-crazed foreigners paying no taxes and also feudal nobility/sheikhs who rode their horses, practiced swordfighting/hunting and had huge estates while also being very fundamentalistically religious.

In my mind, the GCC or Gulf region reminds me heavily of pre-renaissance Italy where people were making huge amounts of money from trade, etc while also experimenting with new ideas. Albeit with the pope and all his religious police on the side doing their persecuting just like modern muslim institutions. Also the Arabs are more obsessed with money than humanity, art and science than the Italians.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a "blind man and the elephant" feel to that article. John McPhee, this guy isn't. He should visit a big fracking operation in Oklahoma, and its "man camps", for comparison.</comment>


Vroom: a tool for testing Vim plugins, by Google - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/vroom

<comment><USER2> The literate format is _fantastic_ : [https://github.com/google/vroom/blob/master/examples/basics....](https://github.com/google/vroom/blob/master/examples/basics.vroom)

(Disclosure: google employee, but not associated with the project, only just found out about it.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool! Their automation of Vim via Python uses a slightly different approach than ActualVim.

Might be worth seeing if either project can steal from the other.

It looks like they rely on Vim +clientserver, which isn't compiled by default afaik.

</comment><comment><USER4> Most interesting part about it for me was the note that they are supporters of neovim.</comment>


programming challenge - <AUTHOR> http://glyphtree.com/puzzles

<comment><USER2> The section under "Submission Directions" is exactly the same as the directions here: <http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php> verbatim even down to the exact version numbers.

Is there some standard testing package that these are both using? Otherwise it seems fishy.

<comment><USER3> I noticed that too. Googling the text yields quite a few matches; my guess is either they think "Facebook does it, so we should do it like that too", or it's a standard testing package or something.

[http://www.google.com/search?q=%22All+submissions+must+execu...](http://www.google.com/search?q=%22All+submissions+must+execute+in+a+*NIX+type+environment+\(sorry,+no+Windows+specific+solutions+are+accepted\).+You+are+not+guaranteed+any+libraries+or+plugins+beyond+what+is+part+of+the+language/interpreter+itself.+The+following+languages+are+accepted:%22)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The solution given is incorrect. It yields 29 white balls, while the following yields 35.

      1 jar1:2
      2
      3 jar2:3
      4
      5
      6 jar1:2 jar2:4
      7
      8
      9 jar2:6
      10
      11
      12 jar1:11 jar2:3
      13
      14
      15

<comment><USER5> Honestly, I wish I were on the other end of this. I wonder how many solutions I could find test cases to break even assuming I play nice and allow only positive integers?

Yes, I really did imagine all kinds of cases involving zero time and negative time rules (or having zero time to produce anything) and tried to conform them to the spec, but most of them conflict with the output requirements. Not all, though...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input Natsu, I edited the puzzle to require positive integers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So how is this "challenge" more interesting than thousands of problems on SPOJ, UVA, topcoder or project Euler?

<comment><AUTHOR> I challenge you to create a more interesting problem.

<comment><USER7> How about the same problem, but with each Jar having:

a) a known fail percentage - 40% of the time the Jar fails and produces nothing. Maximize expected win.

b) an unknown fail percentage, evenly distributed between 0 and 100%. Find a strategy that maximizes expected win over many runs (each run has new fail probabilities), by perfectly balancing between exploration of jars and exploitation. If you can find an optimal (and practical) strategy for this one I applaud you!

Also, I solved your example with a simple Python brute-forcer with < 1s run time. I don't know if I care enough to write a parser of your file format just to mail it in ;).

<comment><USER8> Under 1 sec is amazing. When you say brute force, do you mean that for the first step (TS 1), you took all the three routes available, [0,0], [1,0], [2,0] for jar 1 and 2. Cause that just makes the number of branches too many to be solved in a reasonable amount of time. I would love to have a peek at you code.

<comment><USER7> It is real brute force, but I do not investigate some stupid nodes. If I choose to not use an available jar during a timestep, I disqualify that jar, until another jar has been used, since there is no point in waiting to use a jar unless you want to save your balls for another jar.

The code is ugly and undocumented. I think the same could be accomplished in less than 10 lines of Haskell :). <http://pastebin.com/MfXK9fwS>

An implementation detail is that my branches are actually "jar1" "jar2" and "stepforward". To use a jar many times, you do jar1, jar1, stepforward.

<comment><USER8> As my first erlang program, I tried to solve this problem. The code is very ugly, and rather long for my taste, but it solves the thing in 917 steps. I also took the case where if no output has been gotten in a particular timestep, then do not consider any jars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> View source on the home page is interesting too.

<comment><USER5> I was kind of hoping it would explain what Glyphtree is, but it's a riddle/poem.

It has me wondering how 'loser' is defined and if a person can be their own 'friend' ... (read their riddle poem if that makes no sense to you).

<comment><USER10> "the world is a sphere, and friends don't cross each other."

My guess would be that the social graph needs to be planar (e.g embeddable on a plane so that no edges go across eachother).

The world is a sphere can be interpreted in too many ways. One would be that there exists a hamiltonian cycle for the graph and other would be that if you do a depth first search you'd always hit yourself eventually.

My strong guess would be that 2 friends is the least and the most a loser may have.

Biggest problem with too smart puzzles such as this is that there are way too many ways to legitimately interpret them.

<comment><AUTHOR> The social graph need not be planar, say if the world is a donut.

<comment><USER10> I'd consider that a minor adjustment as it would still essentially be a planar graph (with periodic boundary conditions). Locally both of the cases look identical.

Just checked wiki while writing this and toroidal embeddings are a subclass of planar graphs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry, the puzzle is asking for a global property. The new text has the adjustments.

<comment><USER10> I think I got it now. Don't read this if you are afraid of possible spoiling.

We are looking for a graph with highest possible minimum vertice count for any single node. The answer is 6. This graph comes from simply making a hexagonal tiling with node on center and vertices going trough edges. Any tiling with more angles does not produce a planar graph and we'd have to insert polygons with less vertices and thus less neighbours and therefore lowering the smallest edge count.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's possible to tile a sphere with hexagons. You have to throw a couple of pentagons in.

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

<comment><USER10> True. So for a spherical topology the largest minimum is 5. However for toroidal topology the largest minimum is 6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks like a really cool challenge. Reminds me a bit of the knapsack problem (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpack_problem>)

But something tells me the solution is going to be a lot less simple though.

<comment><USER12> If you treated this as a variant on the backpack problem, you run into trouble as you can't properly memoize or use dynamic programming. You use 'timesteps' as the size of the 'knapsack' since the number of balls is unbounded. At each timestep, you cannot determine the the optimal solution to the subproblem and you'd have to save every possible ball combination.

TL;DR - It gets to be a pretty messy/bad backpack and should probably be solved another way

<comment><USER13> Integer linear programming!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you run whois and check linkedin, you can figure out where the author most likely works and what sort of things they do... No names since he probably doesn't want to be googleable.

<comment><USER15> You can tell the author is the user who submitted this to hacker news.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I don't care to be anonymous. I don't work at the moment, I'm building connections and learning some business chops at an incubator to start a business. If you want to change life on earth as we know it, you know where to find me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another solution for white=35.

1

2 jar1:1

3

4 jar2:3

5 jar1:1

6

7 jar2:4

8 jar1:1

9

10 jar2:6

11

12

13 jar1:12

14

15</comment>


Free DNS from Duck DNS - <AUTHOR> https://www.duckdns.org/

<comment><USER2> Is this related in any way to the DDG search engine?

</comment><comment><USER3> Does it support DNSSEC and DANE?</comment>


Daily curated email newsletter of tech news focussed on Australia - <AUTHOR> http://thesizzle.com.au <comment><USER2> Great newsletter & great value. His writing style is fantastic.</comment>


Professor Emeritus Fernando Corbató, MIT Computing Pioneer, Dies at 93 - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-professor-emeritus-fernando-corby-corbato-computing-pioneer-dies-0715 <comment><USER2> He presided over the MULTICS project, which apparently was not prone to buffer overflows due to the features of the Pl1 language. [http://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic- multics.pdf](http://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics.pdf)</comment>


Apple Safari URL Spoofing - <AUTHOR> http://www.deusen.co.uk/items/iwhere.9500182225526788/

<comment><AUTHOR> The code used for this bug is very simple:

        setInterval(function(){ location="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html?random=" + Math.random() }, 10)

I assume this is what happens:

It redirects to a new URL every 10ms. The page isn't loaded within these 10ms and it's already redirecting to a new URL. Safari immediately shows the URL's domain while the page is loading.

The random part is probably required because Safari wouldn't cancel loading if it's redirected to the same URL twice.</comment>


KKR has acquired Corel, reportedly for $1B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/02/kkr-has-acquired-corel-including-its-recent-acquisition-parallels-reportedly-for-1b/ <comment><USER2> Corel seems like it's become a graveyard of old programs I used in the 1990s, like WinZip, PaintShop Pro and, amazingly, WordPerfect. And, of course, Corel Draw.

Oh, and this September will be see 40-year anniversary of WordPerfect [1]. (Though WP for DOS only came out in 1982.)

I wonder what their strategy is with this acquisition, since there must be some money in there still.

[1] [http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html](http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html)

<comment> chao- As an adamant aficionado of PSP over Photoshop, I never forgave Corel for buying Jasc and turning PSP into just another CorelDRAW. If I had wanted CorelDRAW, I would have purchased CorelDRAW. I did not. I wanted Paintshop Pro, and I had it, for a time.

A decade and a half later, though, my feelings are mostly numb.

Edit: Why did I like PSP over PS? At the time, PSP had better support for my tablet, and had hotkeys that made more intuitive sense for me. I did use PS for a while, sparingly from 2010 to 2015. In the long run, I don't do art anymore, and mostly just web design, for which my company uses Figma anyway. Occasionally we might contact something from a UX designer who uses Sketch, but we just import it into Figma anyway. Photoshop might as well not exist as far as I am concerned.

<comment><USER3> PSP was one of the few products that made Windows productive. It loaded quickly, worked smoothly, and the UI was elegant in a way that the PS UI still isn't.

Many things about PS still irritate users in a "That's just wrong, stupid, and annoyingly poorly thought out, and why do you keep adding pointless new features instead of fixing this?" kind of a way. [1]

PSP didn't do as much, but a lot of what it did do was more transparent and effortless.

When Corel bought it, they turned it into PSP Pro X Plus Special Edition Platinum Millennium Marketing Bullshit Edition. All kinds of cruft appeared, some of it was entertaining, very little of it was useful, none of it was elegant or beautiful.

[1] PSP had a "Create new from clipboard" option which created a new image from the clipboard with a single click. Boom. Done. In PS you have to select a new placeholder from a list of all other possible sizes, possibly after some scrolling and selecting, and then manually paste the image into the document. And now you have an image layer and a background layer, which is often not what you want.

<comment><USER4> Another piece of software that I thought made Windows productive in the 90s was Microsoft Publisher.

We got this bundled with...something? Maybe a printer? And I used it a lot for schoolwork. It was clean, neat and powerful. You could use it to layout a page really easily.

At some point they stopped selling it to normal people and brought out Microsoft Home Publishing instead. And of course it was complete crap by comparison.

I have since discovered that Adobe Illustrator is better than both.

<comment><USER5> I thought Home Publishing was just a bundle of Publisher and Works? That seems to be what searches turn up. They truly killed Works (which was crap), but Publisher still exists in zombie form.

Office 365 includes Publisher as do most Office SKUs. Office 365 Home in the Windows Store will install Publisher by default today, but for a long time with Office you had to do a custom install to install it, which is partly why a lot of people thought Publisher was dead because it didn't install by default.

That said, Publisher does feel like a zombie compared to the excitement it had in the 90s. I've wondered if that's because we aren't printing as much today (and there's basically no competition in the "desktop publishing" space at all), or if it's just how much of its development resources merged (back) to Word since the 90s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Corel was owned by PE (Vector) and had already been navigated around the private-public-private circuit, evidenced by $300MM of dividends paid out prior to this $1B sale.

The wildcard here is virtualization vendor Parallels: Dell went private with the help of PE and returned to the public markets via reverse merger with _VMware_ , which is now enabling Dell hardware+service subscriptions with a similar model to Microsoft 365.

PC desktop software has been neglected by Microsoft, Apple, Google and large ISVs, except as glorified cloud clients. KKR has a global war chest and access to roll up and integrate best-in-class desktop/edge software that runs on multiple physical platforms.

If they are successful on the software consolidation front, they could partner with hardware vendors, borrow a page from the Dell playbook and buy one, or kickstart an open hardware (Arm? RISC-V?) client ecosystem that is optimized for cross-device virtualized workflows.

<comment><USER7> The Parallels acquisition is part of what worries me. Having switched back to Windows, I can't find any VM software that runs as well as Parallels did (VMware is awful in comparison). I'd hoped that Corel's reason for purchasing is that they'd seen potential growth in making a PC version of Parallels. But if Corel has been sold, maybe the Parallels deal was just to juice their numbers for the sale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My dad was a D&T teacher (woodwork, electronics, that kind of stuff), but had a background in carpentry and construction.

The Corel suite of design products were his tools of choice, both in industry and when he became a teacher. To him, CorelDRAW was a leading product, and even now we've got a few old CD's of Corel products lying around the house. It was also amazing to me how someone with limited computer knowledge can use a software tool so well. He still double-clicks links on web pages, but he can create a full building plan with ease in CorelDRAW, so they must've been doing something right!

Despite being long retired, he'll occasionally work part-time when needed, and when he needed to cover for a few months I helped him get the latest Corel suite, and he really struggled to get on with it. I remember playing with it as a kid, and feeling the same way when I tried it out, so to get his work done I had to hunt down an old copy of CorelDRAW.

Corel seems to be a shadow of what it once was, and its software reflects that, so hopefully this acquisition results in better software for the future.

<comment><USER9> A few years ago I asked my dad about this same phenomenon:

> It was also amazing to me how someone with limited computer knowledge can > use a software tool so well. He still double-clicks links on web pages, but > he can create a full building plan with ease in CorelDRAW, so they must've > been doing something right!

I was interested in _what exactly_ made AutoCAD (in my dad's case) so easy to use, because if you've ever worked with it, man, it's anything but. I got to use it during my undergrad classes and the only thing I liked about it was AutoLISP :-). It's polished in every way but it's clearly a program that first hit the market in the 1980s.

Turns out my father didn't think it was easy to use at all, either, he thought it was awful. But he really needed it, so he really put in the effort to learn it. It wasn't some super-human feat, it took him about a week of practice on increasingly complicated drawings. He was already great at technical drawing so he just had to figure out how to do it with that weird program.

It's been a useful lesson ever since: given the right motivation, people will put up with _any_ UI. Rationalizing the design choices that went into it is not always the best avenue.

<comment><USER10> Tools like this can't be dumbed down, either. They need to expose hundreds of features, not because everyone uses every feature, but because everyone uses a different subset and finds them critical. Its really hard to make a tool like that really user friendly, its simply expert level software.

<comment><USER11> I would note that Photoshop has had, for about a decade now, a set of "configuration pre-sets" (I forget the exact term) under the Window menu. These allow you to, in a single click, turn off all the menus and palettes except those relevant to the subfield you're working in.

And honestly, Photoshop isn't even the best candidate for that approach, since some image-manipulation "jobs" can pull in every tool in the toolbox. It'd make perfect sense in a program like AutoCAD, or Excel, or an IDE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I used to love PaintShop Pro. I even used it when I worked at Adobe back around 2002. Of course my manager freaked out when he saw me using it: "But... You work for Adobe!"

I explained that I would happily use Photoshop if it would just do the one thing I really wanted: load several photos that I shot in a burst and then let me cleanly flip back and forth between them to pick the best one (most in focus, best facial expression, whatever).

I could load a few photos into either Photoshop or PaintShop Pro and then flip between them with Ctrl+Tab, but Photoshop would draw the notorious gray and white block pattern and slowly trickle the new photo onto the screen replacing the blocks. PaintShop Pro simply flipped instantly from one photo to another, so I could easily compare them with no distraction.

I'm sure Photoshop has gotten better since then (I hope). But PaintShop Pro got worse. Besides selecting the best photo, the other main thing I did was cropping. This worked fine back in the day, but then a bug crept in where selecting the crop tool would reset your display zoom level! This was not good when I was trying to crop precisely.

I dutifully reported this to Corel, and the response was that if I wanted to file a bug report I needed to pay for a support incident.

I didn't need support! I just wanted to tell them about something that used to work perfectly and now failed in the new version, along with easy instructions to reproduce the bug.

Still, I paid for a version upgrade every year in the hope that they might have noticed this problem and fixed it. Eventually they did (I think).

Adding insult to injury, every time I upgraded it lost my custom keyboard shortcuts and I had to re-enter all of them. There were only a few of these and it only took a few minutes, but still it was a pain.

I sent in another suggestion that they should adopt standard browser zoom shortcuts with some extensions:

      Ctrl+Plus: zoom in
      Ctrl+Shift+Plus: zoom in more (5x)
      Ctrl+Minus: zoom out
      Ctrl+Shift+Minus: zoom out more (5x)
      Ctrl+0: reset zoom to 100%

Never heard back on this one or saw them in the product, so I kept re-entering them every time I upgraded. Maybe I won't bother upgrading again, so I won't have to mess with it. That seems like the easiest solution.

<comment><USER13> PSP was never really a Corel product, it was a Jasc Software product which they acquired when they bought the company. Corel initially promised to maintain the Jasc office in Minnesota, where all of the development was being done. Eventually, just 3 years later, they closed down the office and fired most people. That essentially gutted the culture and destroyed any chance that PSP would ever be as successful as it was in the early 2000s.

<comment><USER12> Ah yes, thank you for bringing back bad memories! ;-)

Although I was only involved as a long-time paying Jasc customer, I remember the acquisition vividly. It was Jasc's PaintShop Pro that I used and enjoyed for several years before Corel bought them out. It really went downhill after that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I still remember the joy of receiving my first app on CD – CorelDRAW 5 I think – and discovering it required Windows 95, and then upgrading from 3.11 just to use that app..

Until I switched to macOS, I had always preferred CorelDRAW and Corel Photo- Paint over Adobe's stuff, because Corel felt more at home in the Windows GUI, whereas Photoshop still seemed to lean towards Mac UI conventions. Corel's tools were also more intuitive in general (drawing vector curves with the mouse was especially easier in DRAW than Illustrator, thought I cannot specifically remember why.)

Now, on the Mac, I prefer Pixelmator and Affinity etc. over Adobe because they feel more at home in macOS...

<comment><USER15> I also found Bézier curve drawing more straightforward in CorelDRAW! than in Illustrator. I made the shift so long ago that I can't remember the specifics, but the main difference was that Corel let you more easily switch among the modes for a point: cusp vs. smooth, split handles vs. symmetric, move mode vs. draw mode, etc.

There's a learning curve you can get past that makes this difference go away, and it's mainly down to grooving the modifier keys into finger memory. Once you stop consciously thinking "hold Command to switch from pen to white arrow mode" and such, you can work just as fast in Illustrator.

Illustrator helps teach you the modifier keys by changing the cursor as you hold down the modifiers. So, the next time you get stuck, just press them down one at a time until you get a cursor that looks like it should do what you want and see if it helps.

<comment><USER16> For people who are used to the Corel method, Inkscape works almost exactly the same.

I personally could never get used to the Illustrator way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's interesting to view acquisitions of _software_ companies by firms like KKR. They're after all the guys who bought RJR Nabisco [1] My money is on them ruthlessly cutting costs, laying off engineers and basically milking the cow for all its worth. It's kind of sad from an innovation point of view but clearly the management at Corel saw value in the deal.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJR_Nabisco#After_the_KKR_buyo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJR_Nabisco#After_the_KKR_buyout)

<comment><USER18> > It's kind of sad from an innovation point of view but clearly the management > at Corel saw value in the deal.

Of course they did, leveraged buyouts usually include huge payouts for those signing off on the deal.

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r I worked for a company that was bought out by Corel. They assured us at the time that everything was great, but the first wave of layoffs came 3 months later. History may never repeat itself, but it rhymes.

<comment><USER19> I'm starting to think these huge valuations and buyout prices are basically ensuring this will happen. Is Corel really gonna generate a billion dollars in profit for this company when free cloud-based alternatives exist to almost all of it's products?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My first Linux distribution was Corel Linux, which few people know about.

I wonder what might have happened if they had pushed on that track.

I'm actually surprised to find out Corel still exists.

<comment><USER21> I also bought and used Corel Linux when it first came out.

It was _great_. To me it is still the closest thing Linux ever had to being a really user-friendly desktop OS. No other Linux distribution ever since quite got that right as they did. It was based on a heavily customized KDE, they even replaced the entire KDE file manager with a new one written in-house (heavily inspired by Explorer). It worked so well, especially the integration of network share access - both SMB and NFS - which was often a pain on Linux back then, but on the file manager in Corel Linux, it just worked. But what I remember most about it was the beautiful icon theme they had made for it. They had applied it to everything, every single application was themed to look nice and consistent. Included was the Linux version of WordPerfect, which was great in days long before OpenOffice became a credible alternative. They also had a Linux version of Corel Photo-Paint, although that was half-emulated via WINE, but still worked well.

Unfortunately, the hardcore Linux crowd seemed to despise it, I guess because it was too user-friendly (even today many people in the Linux world are opposed to the idea of GUIs and user-friendly software, back then it was much worse) and maybe due to their inclusion of proprietary software. And then Corel killed it off, and the year of the Linux desktop never happened.

The assets were then picked up by another company called Xandros, which continued it somewhat, but IMO it was never the same again.

<comment><USER22> > even today many people in the Linux world are opposed to the idea of GUIs > and user-friendly software

I hear that a lot, but is that really true anymore? Linux Mint, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Fedora are all in the top 10 most-watched distros on Distrowatch, and two of those have Gnome as their default GUI. Say what you want about Gnome after Gnome 3, but it certainly was _intended_ as something to be a lot more user-friendly and embraced the idea of a GUI heavily. (Personally, after I gave it a chance, I grew to _really_ like Gnome 3; I think a lot of people's visceral reaction to it had to do with the fact that it was no-longer trying to be like Mac or Windows).

I've been using Linux full-time (no dual boot) since 2010, and consider myself somewhat of a "hardcore" user, and even I still mostly use a Gnome setup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm oddly attracted to quirky software, I've been a Corel Draw Suite user since version 3. My wife loves Wordperfect. So generally this reads like good news, software diversity wise, but KKR is no doubt going to look at some sort of 'pay us annually or it will stop working' scheme which would likely force me to never upgrade again.

<comment><USER24> > _reads like good news_

When has a private equity firm buying a business ever been good news for its products / customers / employees / other investors?

Most of the examples I have heard about have resulted in all of the qualified people forced out, the company's products getting driven into the dirt, huge debt taken on and quasi-fradulently pocketed by the private equity firm and its executives, with other stakeholders left holding the bag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> When I first saw this I assumed this must be a different Corel than the one who made some of my favorite programs of the 1980s. I was surprised they were still around! I haven't seen a Corel product in the wild for years.

<comment><USER26> I guess it's indeed a completely different Corel by now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> So, what will KKR have to do to Corel to flip it? How will they improve revenues?

<comment><USER28> They won't, unless they've identified a bigger sucker than they are. Private equity & software innovation don't mix.

<comment><USER29> KKR salvaged GoDaddy from shuttering completely and turned it profitable for the first time in its history. Sometimes it works.

<comment><USER28> I dont think GoDaddy survived by KKR hiring a top notch engineering staff and knowing what direction to take the technology in. They probably did some spreadsheet magic with debt and tricked some fools into thinking that was a value add.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Back in the 90s, RAM was incredibly expensive. Corel introduced a product called "Corel Xara", which operated a lot like "Corel Draw" but it was just massively faster.

I still use it to this day.

I've tried all the competition, and there's just nothing that's better for 2D. It's interesting because I get the impression that there are barely any users.

For a moment it was open sourced on Linux, but the Linux version was buggy and limited. The Windows version is fantastic. For $200 it would be a great product, but you can easily find it for around $30-$50 on Amazon or eBay. If I'm not mistaken, Corel licensed Xara from another company, and the version that's been on sale for the last 20 years is sold by the original company.

<comment> open-source-ux Xara (the vector illustration program) has its origins in RiscOS on the Acorn computer platform. Xara (the company) then build a version for Windows where it was much faster than both Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. Corel licensed Xara as you said, but after a few years Xara (the company) ended the licensing agreement with Corel and started selling the software again themselves. Xara is now part of the Magix portfolio of products.

It's fascinating just how many aquisitions and licensing agreements Corel has taken on. They bought video and photo editing apps from Ulead. They bought image and drawing apps from Micrografx too.

They used to sell Ventura Publisher, a heavyweight DTP program especially suited for technical publications.

As others have pointed out, Corel has had a large and eclectic portfolio of programs that few companies can match (anyone remember Corel Click and Create?)

The consumer app space seemed so much more varied and interesting in those days. Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic?

<comment><USER30> Interesting, I did not know that!

In the 90s, Xara was a revelation, particularly on budget hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Corel draw is still used a lot in India and through SE Asia. As it offers an integrated vector/bitmap/desktop publishing package, it is seen as value for money.

</comment><comment><USER32> > There are no layoffs planned as part of the deal

This was also the message when a previous employer became acquired by KKR. The layoffs came after each acquisition. Acquisitions followed by integration seemed to be a large part of the KKR strategy, at least from my limited perspective. And of course with acquisitions comes reevaluation of structure, processes, and roles among other things.

<comment><USER33> Also loading it down with "debt" in the form of obligations to pay KKR lots of money, then selling that debt back to the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I was actually happy about Corel, until this happened. I predict massive management interference. I seriously hope they don't go the Adobe way.

</comment><comment><USER35> [http://thedoghousediaries.com/4685](http://thedoghousediaries.com/4685)

</comment><comment><USER36> I have used so much Corel software in my life. Crazy to think that it was once what Adobe and Microsoft are today.

</comment><comment><USER37> Here an old CorelDRAW! user since 0.8 version. Pioneer company but I lost them once I moved to Macintosh + Adobe.

</comment><comment><USER38> People still use wordperfect. Legal profession really likes it.

I truly do not understand why having used both.

<comment><USER39> I've heard that the legal profession have to use Corel for certain documents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am curious about what will happen to gravit designer which was recently bought by corel.

</comment><comment><USER41> As an aside, anyone ever transitioned from IC SWE to private equity without an MBA?

<comment><USER42> Knowing people in the PE industry will help tremendously in that effort.

Good MBA degrees are vastly overrated in terms of knowledge gained, but (when done well) often vastly underrated in terms of social contacts gained and/or able to gain.

<comment><USER41> Are you in PE?

<comment><USER42> I am not in PE, but I have several friends and professional acquaintances who are.

One topic we frequently discuss is how to improve PE efficiency/profitability. In a nutshell, the vector of personal contacts seems to trump pretty much everything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> When I skimmed over the title, I thought it said "KKK has acquired Corel". That was going to be one of the more interesting reads for the day!</comment>


Pricify.co track the prices of your product and notifies you when they drop - <AUTHOR> http://pricify.co <comment><AUTHOR> We built Pricify.co because we needed a tool to track item prices on a lot of websites. The problem with most price trackers is that they work only with limited website. Pricify.co is the first AI based price tracker that can track products from any website. We already have hundreds of users. We are currently working on building a mobile app and a chrome extension.

We would like to hear all your feedback and questions about Pricify.co

<comment><USER2> >The problem with most price trackers is that they work only with limited website. Pricify.co is the first AI based price tracker that can track products from any website.

While I understand the _need_ to have at least one "buzzword" when publicizing a site/service/product, I would be interested in what exactly an Artificial Inteligence does in your product and why it is needed.

If I get the whole idea right, the thingy is essentially sending a periodical "ping" to a given site listing and jolting down the current sale price returned and, when the last price is lower than the one at the time the user "bookmarked" the site/item, send an alert to the user.

Maybe the AI is limited to "smart-parsing" the site/page to find the price?</comment></comment>


Deploying Social Software in Universities: Go Broad then Deep - <AUTHOR> http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2009/09/02/deploying-social-software-universities-broad-then-deep

<comment><USER2> These principles hold true for pretty much all social software, not just universities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. Us building social software into universities are Johnny-come- latelies when it comes to implementing social software. The enterprise and especially consumer space is far far ahead. So my post was an attempt to pull some wisdom from there and apply it to education.

<comment><USER3> Heh, I actually think the enterprise has much in common with universities/government tools. Because it's internal, it can hide its cobwebs from the public and get away with being quite delayed.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. But because there's far more companies and far more diversity in the enterprise than in universities -- the enterprise social software state-of- the-art is far more advanced than what exists in universities.

There's enough companies willing to experiment with using social software that there's some very large + sophisticated installs of social software. In universities. . . there's only a handful and not yet particularly impressive.

But I'd grant your point that the average university and average enterprise/government are both equally backwards when it comes to using social software.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dart Disappoints Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/10/10/googles-dart-programming-language-disappoints-hackers/ <comment><USER2> I see the need for javascript replacement, and Dart is a valid attempt at that.

What I can't see is rationale in inventing yet another language, when there are alternatives that already exist, have decent user base, and could be a good fit (see Lua, Ruby, Mirah, Coffescript).

Someone on the Clojure mailing list said that the best thing would be if VM/Runtime that will run Dart on non Chrome browsers could be reused/repurposed to run alternative languages like Coffescript or Clojurescript, it would be best possible solution.

<comment><USER3> > What I can't see is rationale in inventing yet another language

I can see that, if it's a significant improvement on the previous language _for the user base_.

That's not the case for Dart, I see a lot of truth in the quips "puts the Java back into Javascript" and "Takes a hard turn towards going back to more machine-friendly and less developer-friendly languages".

New languages are a fine thing, but Dart is neither original nor _interesting_ , it's mostly shoving back a heap-ful of Java into Javascript and calling it a day, that's not helpful.

Some sort of web IR all web languages could compile to would be useful (especially with broad support from other browser vendors), a chopped down Javascript with its problems fixed (JS 1.7's `let` instead of current `var`, "strict-mode" by default, structural types, typed object keys, an actual integer type) would be helpful, a "best subset" of Harmony would be helpful, Harmony itself would be helpful, a brand new language with PL concepts less than 30 years old would be helpful, but from what I've seen so far Dart is _none_ of these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A sensational tech article based on the kneejerk reactions of HN :(

This project has a lot of potential and is extremely ambitious. This immediate "my favourite feature x" is missing, or petty bickering over semi colons betrays lack of insight, and depth.

<comment><USER5> It's not just missing features or bickering over semi-colons - the much bigger issue is the fragmentation highlighted by Brendan Eich and quoted in the article.

<comment><USER6> I'm sure the CEO of Myspace was similarly furrowing his brow when Facebook came out.

The guy "on the top" is always going to FUD and poo-poo the upstarts. Whether they make it or not should be left to their own merits, not what issues the existing hegemony has with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish people would stop trying to make high level languages that run in the browser. Make a standard VM and then we can compile _all_ languages to that! The need is clearly there, how much JavaScript today actually starts out as some other language and gets compiled to JS?

Stop trying to fix the syntax and just give me a way to have any language I want.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand why someone would learn to use Dart, Coffescript etc when the effort could be put into developing a deeper understanding of javascript.

All I ever hear from developers sometimes is how browser X is breaking standards and then something like this comes along and I can't help but face palm. I'm embarrassed by the relentless pursuit of non-existent perfection from the developer community. Sometimes you just need to get the job done with the tools you have, and and learn to fucking use them instead of pursuing the grail.

<comment><USER9> Learning more and more about JavaScript will give you diminishing returns after a while. Once you understand prototype-based inheritance, common patterns and idioms, and how objects and integers work and have gone through the language spec, you might be better off as an individual starting to learn something completely different.

Dart and CoffeeScript are just other languages, so getting a rough handle on them should take an hour or so per. Just learning what concepts languages bring to the table (e.g. how does Dart do concurrency and how does that compare to JavaScript? How does it compare to Erlang?) can give you better insight into trends and the state of the art, and can give you new ideas about what is possible. IMHO, this is worth doing even if you're never going to use the language.

As for "breaking standards", as long as my JS still runs on Chrome, I'm more than content no matter what Dart does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The design goals for Dart look suspiciously like the original goals for Java, particularly _Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn_. In the case of Java, that just got us a crippled, verbose knock-off of C++. Hmm.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would have liked a scala flavored effort...duh!

<comment><USER12> And I wanted Python, but it's not like Google actually considers things that already exist when making new things.

On the bright side, _nobody's_ gonna adopt this. :3

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> More like "Google shocked to discover that nobody is on their friend list anymore".

They've gone to great lengths to make every software and hardware company on the planet their enemy. They would've had to really knock it out of the park.

<comment><USER14> How so? I still like a lot of their products and APIs.</comment></comment>


Apple Stock Tanks During Stevenote - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/apple-stock-tanks-during-stevenote/ <comment><USER2> I've given up on trying to understand the dynamics of AAPL.</comment>


Emotional and persuasive perception of fonts - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18459353

<comment><USER2> Not the best quality, but [http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pms.106.1.35-42](http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pms.106.1.35-42) seems to be the full paper.

<comment><USER3> Is there any source not behind a paywall?

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately not that I can find. I didn't even realize that one lead to a paywall, since it seems to be completely unlocked to anyone on an .edu.* network.

<comment><USER4> I can tell you that's not the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why did I get reminded of this - [http://hyperallergic.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/09/kanye-fo...](http://hyperallergic.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/09/kanye-fonts-MED.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone see how to get the paper from that web site? I am missing it...?</comment>