Xcode 7.3.1 is available on the Mac app store - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id497799835?mt=12 <comment><USER2> That's a really long time to patch that critical git 2.7.4 vulnerability. Have they even patched the openssh UseRoaming bug yet?

Using only Apple tools to interface with foreign git repositories on the internet is a high risk sport these days (weeks (months))...

<comment><USER3> Upstream fixed the issue a couple days before Xcode 7.3 was released (and didn't even have their story straight about what version actually contained the fix). The fix was available in the 7.3.1 beta less than a month later, so I'm not sure where you get "months" from there.

As for the OpenSSH issues you mention (CVE-0216-0777 and CVE-0216-0778), those were fixed in OS X 10.11.4 months ago.

<comment><USER2> The git bugs were announced around March 15th (with some funny business going on with 2.7.1 and 2.7.3, before 2.7.4 came about). Debian released patches for git in DSA-3521-1 on March 19th, Xcode didn't fix this before 7.3.1 yesterday. That's about a month and a half. Beta versions of Xcode can't be used to submit to the app store, so they aren't useful because any serious developer will still need to have the latest stable xcode installed and probably set as default to not risk appstore submission problems.

Debian: 4 days to patch. Xcode: 50 days.

The openssh bugs were announced around January 14th. Debian released patches for OpenSSH in DSA-3446-1 on the same day. I guess Apple finally fixed it in OSX 10.11.4 which was released on March 21st. That's more than two months. Thanks for the heads-up, though, after two months with no patch I kind of assumed there would never be a patch.

Debian: 0 days to patch. OSX: 67 days

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who hasn't used XCode in a while, why is this release news-worthy?

</comment><comment><USER5> Holy multi-GB download Batman!

How do developers on slow and metered connection deal with this?

<comment><USER6> How do developers on a slow and metered connection download OS updates? Surely that's 100x worse.

<comment><USER7> I'm travelling semi-permanently (away from "home" ~9 months now). I had to update OS X and Xcode recently. 11GB fortunately only took 2 days (and $60 of data charges) since I'm somewhere with ok cell LTE. I did have to delay the update for a month or two until I was somewhere I could do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Will the Mac App Store download only the diff?

<comment><USER9> It did for me, was about 235mb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Glad that the XLIFF file import bug is fixed

</comment><comment><USER11> Why is this interesting? It looks like any other Xcode update.</comment>


Cubr – A Rubik's Cube Solver Written in Python and using Webcam Input (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbarker.net/projects/cubr <comment><USER2> > Cubr is a project I completed in three weeks at the end of my introductory > computer science class at CMU

This guy wrote a 7,900 line Python tool for his _intro CS class_. Call me impressed.

<comment><USER3> There's a showoff at the end of every semester for the students in the class to show off their final projects. It's amazing to see people who, before coming to CMU, had never programmer in their life, program things like A.I. assistants, fully-featured games, and incredible vision-based tools. Probably one of the most (in)famous CS course at CMU depending on who you ask.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I gathered a fairly large set of data on the HSV and RGB values of each > colored sticker in different lighting situations.

Wouldn't LAB have been a much better and easier choice?

</comment><comment><USER5> While reading through this I was thinking: this sounds like a 112 term project where a guy went ham, read back at the beginning and it was

</comment><comment><USER6> Can someome explain why him understanding Hidden Markov Models would've helped with the color identification process?

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like a post from 2013, it should have "(2013)" appended to its HN submission title.</comment>


The Mother Lode of Data on the Mobile Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2009/12/mother-lode-of-mobile-internet.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Link to the original morgan stanley page: [http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/mobi...](http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/mobile_internet_report122009.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> The first chart fails to correct for time (I'd generally expect more people to be using any service in 2007 than 1999, so the raw numbers don't tell me anything).

It is difficult to compare growth rates in the second chart because the two things we want to compare are stacked on top of each other. It's not clear if the growth rates are similar or different.

The third chart similarly fails to illustrate its point. It's not clear if time spent online is remaining constant from year to year--increasing time spent on Facebook does not necessarily decrease time spent on Google. It's also unclear if search engines and social networking sites are competing for time--it seems straightforward that what Google sees as successful (users find results quickly, spend most of their time reading linked sites) is not what Facebook is trying to optimize (time spent on facebook.com).

</comment><comment><USER3> Direct link to the presentation: [http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs...](http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/2SETUP_12142009_RI.pdf)

It's worth having a look at it -- there are numerous goodies inside not mentioned in the article! :)

PS: Interesting detail on Slide 93: "Morgan Stanley is currently acting as exclusive financial advisor to AdMob, Inc ("AdMob") in relation to their acquisition by Google Inc, as announced on November 9, 2009. The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions. AdMob has agreed to pay fees to Morgan Stanley for its services that are subject to the consummation of the proposed transaction."

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how $40 of advertising revenue per internet user per year is even feasible. Many of those users are children who can't buy things without a credit card. I can't imagine that the average amount of money spent on the internet per year per user is greater than $40. But I may be wrong.

<comment><USER5> People often pay for ads per click and per thousand impressions. Having purchasing power isn't really a prereq for clicking or viewing ads.</comment></comment>


Brute force or intelligence? The slow rise of computer chess - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/08/force-versus-heuristics-the-contentious-rise-of-computer-chess.ars

<comment><USER2> Maybe intelligence itself is more about brute force than we think it is?</comment>


AI Researcher Ben Geortzel's review of Jeff Hawkins 'On Intelligence' (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2004/OnBiologicalAndDigitalIntelligence.htm <comment><USER2> News? The review is 5 years old. this site just ended up in my ban-list.</comment>


iOS and MacOS unicode text handling bug causes crash - <AUTHOR> http://openradar.appspot.com/37458268 <comment><AUTHOR> Going to say that this is pretty bad.

FakeUnicode [0] claims that setting it in an Wifi SSID is enough.

I can personally attest that my iPhone is currently stuck at the lock screen, crashing back to that when I enter my pin; after receiving the character in a Twitter DM (causing an iOS notification).

[0] [https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/963335318601531392](https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/963335318601531392)</comment>


Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html <comment><USER2> Readers who have observed my behavior after 1976 days of participation on Hacker News know that this is by far my favorite link to share in a Hacker News comment, so I'm glad to see this on the front page as an article submission today.

My one comment about the article is that most of what gets submitted to HN as a breathless press release on a research "breakthrough" is often not even based on experimental research, but rather on correlational research, so the study goes wrong with problems that Peter Norvig's excellent article doesn't even discuss much. Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2] points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. Press releases are usually misleading.

But, yes, definitely read the submission here, as it will help you check each submission to Hacker News you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the submission.

[1] [http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174)

[2] [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by- coi...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coincidence- only-journal-press-releases-versus-journal-articles/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this page has no <html> or <body> tags, it just gets down to business with <div>. Is it a fragment meant to be included elsewhere?

Can... can the whole Web be like this?

<comment><USER4> Sort of: [http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD- html5-20110525/syntax.html#opti...](http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD- html5-20110525/syntax.html#optional-tags)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an excellent article. It helped put numbers and precise definitions behind several things I had sorta intuited before and also corrected me on a couple of others. :)

As part of internalizing the bit about P(H|E) vs P(E|H) [Warning sign I4], I wrote up a quick gdocs spreadsheet to let me play with the numbers: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10JrG42iKY- LhcnaKU7O7...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10JrG42iKY- LhcnaKU7O7B5EezOKoZ0OH7Y4HeXZkWIc/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER6> It pretty actively depresses me that my statistics class never _actually_ discussed how loose the connection between hypothesis testing (what we normally call a statistical test, frequentist) and a genuine updating of hypothesis probabilities (Bayesian) actually is.

Dear frequentists and Bayesians: could you people kiss and make up already? The rest of us are pretty tired of having to run bad numbers to get papers published _and_ of having computationally intractable statistics to run. Please come up with a compromise.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this conflates poorly designed studies and preliminary or hypothesis- generating studies. If not for uncontrolled proof-of-concept studies, or pseudorandomized designs such as those used for post marketing studies, we would a) not have any new medications and b) rarely learn about unanticipated toxicities. It turns out that us clinical trial folks are more Bayesian than the cult of p<0.05 would lead you to believe.

At one end of the spectrum, we rely heavily on uncontrolled single- or multiple-ascending dose studies to prove to ourselves that a treatment is likely to be safe in next-step studies, and to guess at optimal dose. At the other, we learn a great deal from post marketing surveillance about unanticipated toxicities - because our priors based on big phase 3 studies may still be insufficient to accurately estimate risk. Neither of these designs are randomized or placebo-controlled - and in neither case is it an indication that 'something is wrong', even though an RCT would be _better_ in both contexts. Better, if cost were no object and patient safety were not a concern.

I realize my fellow Brunonian does include some offhand caveats - but it worries me to read comments about how this negates most social science research.

<comment><USER8> Not at all... He states merely that if someone has the option to have a control and chooses not to, you should be concerned. Specifically he hits on the fact that some fields can't have a control (sometimes just due to ethical reasons).

<comment><USER7> I think the distinction is that we /often/ choose not to have a control, for a multitude of reasons, so as a cause for concern it's highly nonspecific. Much like the critique of small samples - there are underpowered 5000-patient multi center trials, and well-powered 30-patient trials.

As I said, I think this is a nice introduction but can lead one to discount, well, anything other than large randomized placebo-controlled trials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how one moves in the opposite direction. I am not even sure how to frame my question. I have been given hell quite a lot for trying to explore it, conversationally. But say you have a working hypothesis and are getting results and you know of some research that fits with the situation. How does one effectively present something like that? Not as "proof" but as a place for others to start thinking about the problem space?

I don't ever seem to see scenarios like that addressed.

<comment><USER10> Have you read [http://blog.sethroberts.net/](http://blog.sethroberts.net/) ? It's not clear to me if that addresses your question, but Roberts criticizes professional science for too much focus on expensive testing of popular hypotheses and not enough on generating and cheap winnowing of ideas.

<comment><USER9> I have not seen that before, thank you, but it is currently not wanting to open properly for me.

<comment><USER10> No idea about your access problem, but posts like these are why it came to mind: [http://blog.sethroberts.net/category/personal- science/](http://blog.sethroberts.net/category/personal-science/) [http://blog.sethroberts.net/category/health/](http://blog.sethroberts.net/category/health/)

<comment><USER9> Those links work. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great post! This shreds much of the research in social science. Should be required reading for every science major or science journalist.

</comment><comment><USER12> I love Norvig's articles, but by not having a date on them, I wonder if I am reading the news or ancient history.

<comment><USER13> This one is timeless anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google cache link: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xeMschA...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xeMschA84JIJ:norvig.com/experiment- design.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> And we get 503 responses already.

There won't be much discussion if no one can read the article.

<comment><USER15> Working here also cached in Google (search on the title + Norvig, click the 'cached' link)</comment></comment>


My Science Tattoo: Why I did it, and what it means - <AUTHOR> http://micheltriana.com/2012/11/01/my-science-tattoo-why-i-did-it-and-what-it-means/

<comment><USER2> Cool tattoo, but I'm quite sure the claims about the golden ratio being "all over" arts and nature are overblown. It's still a cool geometric concept, but as far as I know many of these "truths" are simply factoids stemming from confirmation bias.

Wikipedia has a brief list of some disputed observations here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio#Disputed_observati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio#Disputed_observations)</comment>


A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) - <AUTHOR> http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html

<comment><USER2> Favorite part:

"Foot-Shooting Prevention Agreement: I, (your name), promise that once I see how simple AES really is, I will _not_ implement it in production code even though it would be really fun. This agreement shall be in effect until the undersigned creates a meaningful interpretive dance that compares and contrasts cache-based, timing, and other side channel attacks and their countermeasures. (Signature) (Date)"

That being said, for my PHP+MySQL bretheren:

<http://phpseclib.sourceforge.net/>

[http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/encryption- functions....](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/encryption- functions.html#function_aes-encrypt)

<comment><USER3> The first person to actually do this has lots of HN karma coming his way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice flash animation explaining AES:

[http://www.cs.bc.edu/~straubin/cs381-05/blockciphers/rijndae...](http://www.cs.bc.edu/~straubin/cs381-05/blockciphers/rijndael_ingles2004.swf)

</comment><comment> brown9-2 This is pretty neat. How long did it take you to draw each panel?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm embarrassed to say: each one took about 10-25 minutes. The math ones took a lot longer. I used up two Sharpie markers in the process. My handwriting was hard to read, so I had to do a lot of editing with Paint.net to make them legible.

<comment><USER5> That was amazingly well done. I wish you'd have been around to teach my Secure OS class when we were taught AES implementations. ;)</comment></comment></comment>


USDA expected to lose 2/3 of research staff in move to Kansas City - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/453571-usda-will-lose-two-thirds-of-research-staff-in-move-to-kansas-city <comment><USER2> I think it makes sense to spread federal employment across the country instead of concentrating it in Washington DC, which has become a high-cost area. Especially for agriculture, having offices in the Midwest makes sense.

<comment> evil-olive It seems like it would make sense to have offices in DC as well as satellite offices in farm country. The problem is...they already have those: [https://www.outreach.usda.gov/USDALocalOffices.htm](https://www.outreach.usda.gov/USDALocalOffices.htm)

> USDA unveiled Kansas City as its chosen location on June 16, and employees > have until Sept. 30 to move there.

This...makes no sense at all. DC has a high cost-of-living, but uprooting an entire family and moving them cross-country on 3 months notice is also expensive and very disruptive.</comment></comment>


What learning Lisp taught me about other languages - <AUTHOR> http://ryepup.unwashedmeme.com/blog/2008/03/30/what-learning-lisp-taught-me-about-other-languages/

<comment><USER2> I did not like this post. Of his four insights:

* two of them are common to _almost all_ high-level languages (Python, Ruby, and Tcl all have regular syntax that deliberately improves on C/C++, and dynamic types practically define "scripting" languages),

* one of them is spurious (Visual Studio programmers don't care how much precious memory they waste as long as Intellisense keeps working, and plenty of C programmers use vim), and

* the only insight here that has enough valence to be interesting --- on the scoping and binding rules of variables --- is covered so superficially that it's hard to tell whether the author actually understands what he's saying. You mean "learning lisp" didn't teach you enough to evaluate Python's closures, or Ruby's block/lambda idiom?

This article won't be a total loss if it prompts somebody to write a more knowledgeable and useful article on the lessons a Lisp education brings to bear on modern languages. I'd love to read that.

<comment><USER3> I'm interested in your critique but it seems to me you've misrepresented two of his points.

#2 compares Lisp's minimalism to any language with more complicated syntax, not just C/C++. So I don't think this insight is "common to almost all high- level languages". (The idiosyncracies he mentions are from Ruby and Python.)

#3 isn't about Visual Studio's memory usage, it's about it being _slow_ [1]. When I work in C#, many times a day VS is unresponsive enough to break my flow, so much so that I go off and check a website like this one (it's better than sitting there feeling angry). This is disastrous in a programming tool, so I don't think the author is being precious.

(There's also a deeper point to be made here, which is that the ultra- interactiveness of Lisp and Smalltalk environments is so different from what one experiences in the likes of Visual Studio that it makes a qualitative difference in one's programming.)

There may even be a little more to #1 than you give him. "In Lisp it feels like types are a tool I can employ when I need it" refers not just to static- vs-dynamic typing but also to the fact that one can easily write functions without having to make up types to hang them on (i.e. programs don't have to be organized into object models). That's not true of all high-level languges.

I share your desire to read more knowledgeable and useful writing on this topic. But I did like the post because it's clearly coming from real experience.

[1] Admittedly, much of this slowness is due to the add-in bizarrely known as Resharper. But that's Visual Studio's fault too - for being so backward and provincial that it needs a humongous third-party workaround to achieve bare tolerability even compared to Java.

<comment><USER2> Addressing your points in the opposite order:

#3 may be true for C# development; I read a lot of C#, but don't write it. But I did spend 4 years writing a significant amount of systems C++ code in VC++, and --- at least 8 years ago --- VC++ was _significantly_ better than any comparable C environment.

We can get into a tit-for-tat on it versus, e.g. GCC, but I feel like one way to lose a programming environment shoot-out is to imply that Microsoft half- asses that part of the business.

Regarding #2, you seem to be sticking up for the author's implication that Ruby has "complex" syntax compared to Lisp. Clearly, most languages have more "idiosyncracies" (here defined as: "notation of any sort") than Lisp. That doesn't make Lisp's austerity an interesting lesson to take to other languages; it is, in fact, the major failure of Lisp.

There is a notion, unaddressed in the original post but far more important than any of that post's insights, that obsessively regular syntax is crucial to metaprogramming. Even defined down to "true macros", this is simply folk wisdom: you can get "Lisp-style macros" out of any language that gives you access to an abstract syntax tree.

Finally, call the two "mainstream" high level languages Ruby and Python (relegating Perl and PHP to uh, different, uh, categories). Both share the type system the author appreciates in Lisp.

<comment><USER4> > it is, in fact, the major failure of Lisp.

I won't even mention macros, but I'm curious as to why you think s-expressions are a failure? It's one of the things I like BEST about Lisp.

<comment><USER2> I like s-expressions too, but --- and I'm asserting this without a shred of evidence, appealing to the better angels of your common sense --- most developers, Peter Norvig notably included, believe other languages benefit from having more notation. For one thing, to a point, increasing the level of notational "richness" of a language improves comprehensibility of code.

<comment><USER3> Just curious - has Norvig said that explicitly or (like Steele and Gabriel and Weinreb and others of that generation) has he just been pragmatic?

<comment><USER2> I'm referring to Norvig's comments on Arc, which suggest more notation (albeit notation that remains isomorphic to sexps).

<comment><USER5> Where/when did Norvig comment on Arc?

<comment><USER2> <http://www.archub.org/arcsug.txt>

<comment><USER6> I don't see much there to suggest Norvig is a big fan of adding syntax to Lisp. In fact you could read "This seemed to satisfy the infix advocates" as an expression of the _opposite_ viewpoint.

<comment><USER2> Reasonable people could disagree, unless/until Norvig clarifies, but I'm going to take his apparent conversion to Python as evidence that Norvig is not a sexpr fanatic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Speaking as someone who's happiest with haskell and scheme, I have to say that what he needs to learn is that bad type/macro systems are oppressive, but good one's are amazingly powerful and expressive. (As that would be much better than simplistic types = bad but macros in general = good continuum)

The question is, how do you develop an aesthetic sense for these without say reading the research literature on both topics? I mean, it suffices to use the good examples of each for a while, pushing their strengths to the limit, but that at best gives folks a one dimensional view of the design of linguistic features, rather than a richer sense of strength, weaknesses, and tradeoffs.

As some other folks have mentioned, the other points are sort of irrelevant to the core of C#/++/java et al experience.

One point that seems to be missing is the (I think standard) point that interactively testing code by being able to interactively define or execute functions is FANTASTIC for developing, because it facilitates (IMHO) an easier process of evolving the software

</comment><comment><USER8> I've played with Lisp a little, and I'm amazed at how many complex things such as Emacs can be built from a few simple axioms.

<comment><USER2> A few simple axioms and a _whole lot of C code_.

<comment><USER9> apt-cache show emacs22-el

      Installed-Size: 13080

The wonders of emacs are embodied for the most part in the most primitive Lisp dialect still in widespread use. Emacs Lisp doesn't even have lexical scoping, and it's still amazing.

Not that I have anything against C, when it's used to bootstrap a Lisp implementation, at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't get all the love for lisp. In my lisp experience I remember being in debugging hell trying to count out between 18 and 19 close-parentheses to add some parameter I'd forgotten. Bad memories.

<comment><USER11> if you're having that much trouble debugging paren, put them all on their own lines and use indentation. then it'll be easy enough to fix.

<comment><USER9> If he used an editor that auto-indented parens, he would probably be using an editor that had M-x forward-sexp and M-x backward-sexp too, so the debugging wouldn't be a problem.

Still, 18-19 close parens sounds excessive. The source for ourdoings.com has 1 place with 9 close parens in a row, 4 places with 8, and 7 with 7. That's in 13KLOC.

<comment><USER4> I looked and discovered you were using Jetty, does that mean you're using SISC or JScheme?

<comment><USER9> <http://brl.codesimply.net/>

<comment><USER4> Funny, I didn't say Kawa because I've always assumed SISC was more popular... I didn't know about BRL though, thanks for the tip!

<comment><USER9> Kawa can't capture continuations, so SISC definitely gets more attention. However, Kawa is way faster. If you read SISC's performance boasting you'll notice that it only compares itself to other Scheme _interpreters_ on the JVM. Kawa is a compiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given that this guy's main complaint with C#/.NET (as opposed to VS) is essentially that it allows the designer of a library to enforce hiding of the implementation (see [http://ryepup.unwashedmeme.com/blog/2008/02/13/brief- list-of...](http://ryepup.unwashedmeme.com/blog/2008/02/13/brief-list-of- things-that-make-working-in-c-frustrating/)) I'm not sure the rest is worth taking seriously.

<comment><USER3> That's not his main complaint at all. His complaint is that C#/.NET inhibits him from building abstractions natural to his problem. He gives three good examples of this, obviously drawn from real experience working on real problems. He also gives good examples of the kind of workarounds one is forced into when blocked by a language or library from growing one's own program in a sensible way.

I'll add that, in my experience, most claims about programming that talk about "enforcing" are rooted in theories or processes _about_ programming that bear little relation to what hackers actually _do_.

<comment><USER12> That's one way of interpreting it. But it does seem that what he felt was natural was to override methods marked as "do not override" and access members marked "private" or "protected".

Does your experience include creating a public binary API and shipping multiple versions of it? Just asking.</comment></comment></comment>


Slackware 13.1 Released - <AUTHOR> http://slackware.com/announce/13.1.php <comment><USER2> Memory lane...

Slackware was my first distro: downloaded over a 2400 baud modem in 1991 (my family may never forgive me for hogging the phone line for 2 days :-)

Tip of the hat to Patrick Volkerding and crew.

<comment><USER3> That's pretty amazing, since it was first released in 1993.

<comment><USER2> Seriously? I traveled a lot on business in 1991, and I thought that I had an HP laptop loaded up with Slackware. That said, I just googled Slackware and version 1.0 was officially released in 1993, as you said.

I guess that I have not been using Linux for as long as I thought. Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too bad it was released just too late to integrate the latest update to Xfce in months (4.6.2).

</comment><comment><USER5> This was the distro that I used for 6 years with the same install, every upgrade was seamless, I never had the same trouble-free experience with another distro.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great stuff. Slackware was my second distribution after Ygdrassil... GNU/Linux has come a LONG way.

<comment><USER7> what OS are you using now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a not so computer literate family member who wants to see what this whole linux thing is about but don't know whether to suggest Ubuntu or Slackware? Thoughts or suggestions?

<comment><USER9> Slackware. No doubt, far easier to use and maintain than Ubuntu.

<comment><USER10> Why?

<comment><USER11> He was kidding. Slackware does not install any distro specific GUI stuff so you need to know how to configure the servers that you are interested in or hope that the package maintainers have one available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Slackware was also my first Linux distro. I have always liked it for its beautiful simplicity and getting out of your way.

When I first saw a SuSE install I felt pretty overwhelmed and overloaded by all those ridiculous choices, checkboxes and dialogues. Plus the multitude of wizards and tools for making tasks "easier" were just an abomination and very often did not work.

And I always hated RedHat's automatic update tool which would read update information from a central server but search for the RPMs on a different mirror then - because very often those mirrors were not in sync.

Here is to you, Patrick!</comment>


It's your first programming assignment, now what? - <AUTHOR> http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/Home/your-first-programming-assignment <comment><USER2> _If the program is automating a manual process then you should try--or petition for the right to try performing that process yourself so that you can become what the program is supposed to become. At the very least you should spend time watching people do things the old way, talk to them, ask questions, let them show you pictures of their kids, buy them drinks, get them drunk and provoke them into talking shop._

This is great advice! Programming is the "how" to accomplish a "what". Many of us don't spend enough time on the "what" to do the best job we can on the "how".

OP provides more recipes than theories. Great post!

<comment><USER3> I strongly agree. I also strongly recommend the flip side, which is to operate the automatic process so you can better understand what will make it even more friendly and effective for its users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good stuff. This would apply not only to beginners though. I know lots of programmers who have worked for years that have either forgotten or never learned this stuff.

EDIT: ...or just don't care.

</comment><comment><USER5> I expected this to be for freshmen in college. I liked it anyway.

</comment><comment><USER6> Depending on the size of the project, step 7 can (and should) easily be the most time and labor intensive part of development. By all rights, this step ought to be called Design, and may well generate the documentation and a plan for testing of some kind.

UML becomes _very important_ if your project generates its code from it, as quite a few companies do. This means you may not be able to start coding at all until the design is in some state of finality.

<comment><USER7> I used to think UML was a cute, if overused, joke. Then I found out companies were serious about it. Recently I heard that my friend's gf was going for her _Level 2_ certification in UML. Not Level 1 you see, Level 2. Her UML skillz are literally going to go to the next level!

Meanwhile I still feel that the very idea UML can be useful, at all, is utterly perverse. The whole idea stinks to me.

<comment><USER6> The real power of UML is harnessed when the model actually generates the code. When that's a part of the process, then the model IS the code, and the model also becomes documentation that's guaranteed to be accurate up-to-date.

This also gives you the great benefit of mandating a comprehensive design phase. Once a model is complete (whatever that means in a given project) and reviewed, the rest of the coding is often trivial.

I also find that the mere act of learning UML is a tremendous education in architecture, even for developers who are naturally good architects.

<comment><USER7> I have no idea what you are talking about, you may as well be speaking Klingon. Hearing phrases like "This also gives you the great benefit of mandating a comprehensive design phase" makes me want to kill myself. I advise you to quit your job.

<comment><USER6> Allow me to rephrase:

UML modeling tools will generate code that fulfills your model. You'll get more-or-less complete headers, with your objects and method prototypes, and you'll get implementation stubs. If your design is sound, then the process of filling in the guts of the implementation can be quick and straightforward (ideally, but I find this usually pans out in practice).

If your project requires code to come from UML, then any architectural changes are made in the UML tool, not directly in code. This means that the model is _always_ accurate. In my company, the models are the primary documentation; if you need to know how a module works, you can look at the model and see every object, attribute, and relationship, both within the module and to other pieces of the project. And unlike every other piece of documentation I have ever seen, these models are guaranteed to be accurate, because they literally write the code.

A process like this requires you to think -- a lot -- about the design of your program before you even open a text editor or IDE. That's what I mean by a mandatory design phase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hate to be a cynic, but your first assignment will be to make whatever it is work. As this is your first real programming gig you will probably be given a hopeless assignment with really bad or zero infrastructure to build upon. Lacking development infrastructure or even fellow developers to work with, you will become a pawn in company politics you are totally unaware of.

My advice is : bite that bullet. Work like a demon and spend your evenings building the infrastructure needed to produce a working piece of code. Spend your day time hours building code that is just good enough to demo. Talk to people and get feedback, but avoid giving your immediate superior the idea that you're going behind his/her back.

Working like this blows, but do it for half a year to a year and suddenly you're an experienced developer.

Now move to a different location.

(If you're lucky enough to land your first real-world assignment in an environment where there are experienced seniors to consult and you have an existing build and test procedure, I would give different advice.)

<comment><USER9> My first professional assignment (besides the one-day-a-week high school internship) was to make a particular bit of DHTML work in Netscape 4.

It's funny how that first assignment can influence your career path...</comment></comment>


Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes - <AUTHOR> http://www.creativeapplications.net/windows/hartverdrahtet-infinite-complexity-in-4096-bytes <comment><USER2> I'm pretty proud of my programming skills. I've worked in everything from assembly to JavaScript, JIT compilers to websites to large-scale, fault- tolerant distributed systems. etc. etc.

But demoscene programming is still the one thing that leaves me totally in awe, feeling like I wouldn't even know where to start to achieve what these guys pull off. Even if I could imagine fitting all those drawing and sound generation routines into 4k, how on _earth_ would you script the whole thing in that little space? How would you encode and execute the sequence of camera paths, music events, and synchronize light flashes with the music? And make it consistent in time, as opposed to depending on the speed of the CPU? I just can't even imagine what the main loop would look like.

<comment><USER3> For a general discussion of synchronisation, Martti Nurmikari gave a talk at Assembly last year

[http://thedemoscene.tumblr.com/post/8659078065/martti- nurmik...](http://thedemoscene.tumblr.com/post/8659078065/martti-nurmikari- gives-a-talk-on-the-basics-of)

Alcatraz use an interesting system based on Clang and llvm to export all that from Maya as source code

[http://thedemoscene.tumblr.com/post/22588846914/digi- alcatra...](http://thedemoscene.tumblr.com/post/22588846914/digi-alcatraz- talks-about-exporting-3d-scenes-from)

<comment><USER2> Excellent links, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool, but I think my favourite 4k demo is still Elevated, which is much less obviously procedural. (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE>)

<comment><USER5> Bloody hell, that's brilliant. That's really 4k?!? The intro gave me chills. I wish the geometry were less obviously faceted, but the texturing is astonishing.

Of course the OP is brilliant too. Kudos to all these guys!

<comment><USER3> iq has a presentation on the techinques used

[http://iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009...](http://iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something to keep in mind is that these groups spend months building a world in these 4096 bytes. These aren't weekend hack jobs. Near the end they may be hacking off individual notes from the music, or letters from the credits to fit within their byte budget.

Very little of modern programming can replicate what it was like to work on old systems outside of these kinds of competitions.

For those interested in the music side of these productions, many of the composers use this to write the music. <http://4klang.untergrund.net/>

</comment><comment><USER7> If you are not familiar with 4k intros, you may wonder how things are organized at the executable level to achieve this kind of packing-performance. Probably the most important and essential aspect of 4k-64k intros is the compressor. Have a look here: [http://code4k.blogspot.de/2010/12/crinkler- secrets-4k-intro-...](http://code4k.blogspot.de/2010/12/crinkler- secrets-4k-intro-executable.html)

<comment><USER8> I've always wondered how they managed to pack so much information into so small a space. Obviously it's all algorithms which generates everything at run time. But still, it's very impressive!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Or ~4096 bytes of Kolmogorov complexity...

<comment><USER10> Yes, its not literally "infinite complexity in 4096 bytes", but I think poetic license is entirely justified here... it is a sort of visual poetry after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, colour me impressed.

Interesting side note: demos tend to use music with pentatonic (ambient) or whole-tone (dreamy) scales. They're easy to harmonise, which makes it easy to procedurally generate decent-sounding music.

<comment><USER12> When watching demoscenes these days I find myself always waiting for the dubstep 'drop'. Sadly I think modern music is starting to spoil this sort of thing for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Easily forgotten, a lot of today's demos' complexity lies behind API calls to graphics drivers and OS system calls, whose implementations don't count to the byte limit.

<comment><USER14> Just like early PC 4k's used the BIOS/DOS interrupt routines which were not counted either. And before that, there were all these custom purpose built chips for doing graphics and audio synthesis.

When making 4k intros for Linux (may apply to other platforms) you have to do your own startup and runtime linking code because otherwise the executable will go over the limit before it does anything. Because of this, you will have to minimize the amount of libraries you use and the amount of functions you use. The name of every function you use must be included as a string in the (uncompressed) binary. So even though you can use peripheral libraries, there is an incentive to minimize the amount of library functions you use.

And what are the libraries that are used? You need to get something on the screen, so many demos use SDL or similar, like this:

      SDL_Init(...);
      SDL_SetVideoMode(width, height, 32, SDL_FULL_SCREEN);

instead of:

      xor eax, eax
      mov al, 13h
      int 10h  ; I wonder if I still remember this correctly

The former is not much easier (or harder) than the latter but the latter is simply impossible with a modern computer.

Then there's OpenGL and Direct3D, which are used to talk with the GPU. These days a GPU is basically a method of drawing triangles really really fast. But it draws only triangles and you have to program all the lighting and whatnot. Then there are fancy shader tricks you can do, but they're not (a lot) easier than it was when poking pixels directly to video memory.

It's arguably easier to do 3d graphics using a GPU than writing your own triangle fillers and perspective correct texture mappers. But this is a double edged sword. Getting shit done with triangles only is a constraint that did not exist back in the pixel pushing days.

And finally, audio. Writing a software synth consumes quite a big chunk of your byte budget. Back in the day, there were dedicated synth chips in computers, from the SID to the OPL-3 in SoundBlasters and Ad-Libs. Programming them was not super easy either, but I'd guess it takes a few bytes less than writing a PCM-emitting synth from scratch and sending that data to the sound output.

So what you say is correct, library implementations don't count to the byte limit. But if your message is that it makes stuff easier and it was 2000% more hardcore in the 1990's with DOS, I disagree.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I think you got the int 10h right (not sure I remember this as well)

But then came VESA which was a little bit more complex and of course, screen sizes bigger than a segment (ouch)

About audio, IMHO it's much easier now, dealing with those interrupt handlers and dma controllers wasn't easy. Of course, once the library worked it was ok.

<comment><USER14> > Yeah, I think you got the int 10h right (not sure I remember this as well)

10h is correct. The contents of ax register might not be. Is the graphics mode (13h) supposed to be in the al or ah part? That I can't remember.

> But then came VESA which was a little bit more complex and of course, screen > sizes bigger than a segment (ouch)

Yeah, early VESA Bios extensions were hairy. With VBE 2.0 you can get a simple linear framebuffer with a high resolution quite easily.

> About audio, IMHO it's much easier now, dealing with those interrupt > handlers and dma controllers wasn't easy. Of course, once the library worked > it was ok.

Interrupt handlers and DMA controllers were used for PCM audio. I agree that writing that stuff by hand was harder than doing it today with libraries. And you'd still have to write the PCM-emitting synth.

But chip synths were generally programmed with simpler memory mapped I/O and they did the actual audio synthesis for you, not only PCM output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The technique used here is raymarching. Relevant thread on pouet: <http://pouet.net/topic.php?which=7920>

<comment><USER17> Yeah and there's many WebGL samples of this awesome technique:

<http://www.postronic.org/h3/pid65.html>

<http://y-alice.blogspot.com/2012/04/final-submission.html>

One pointlessly bouncy (but fun to make) experiment I ported from desktop GL to WebGL a short while ago:

<http://glsl.heroku.com/e#2417>

Set quality to 4 or 8 as fast as you can unless you already got one of them 2014 GPUs.

That being said, none of those are 4K =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does this give anyone else the sense that with amazing processors we have available that we're being really wasteful with these bloated apps we currently have?

I mean if these guys are able to do this in 4K, what else could be done in operating system terms if we achieved that same level of excellence?

<comment><USER19> These demos rely on the OS to access sound & graphics, they could not reach the fidelity they do without the OS hiding away much of the file size. You could not do a 4K demo if you had to include the infrastructure to load a modern graphics driver & OpenGL/DX libraries. They are also only small in terms of package size. This demo for example uses about 550MB of RAM while running(Win7x64).

<comment><USER20> That's not true in the least. We used to do 4K's in dos. Which was a glorified executable loader.

Once your program started executing you were on your own, graphics, sound, memory management, everything. People still managed to get the first level of descent into 4K.

<comment><USER19> I didn't say you could not make a 4K demo at all. I said you could not make one if you had to include an OS, drivers & DX/OpenGL libraries that most modern 4K demos rely on. You could probably make something like this demo in DOS, but it probably would look nowhere near as pretty.

My point was that modern 4K demos are still fun, but they should not be looked at as though they are great examples of efficient uses of resources. You have to watch out for Man on the Moon Syndrome where people start asking "Why can we get infinite 3D fractal explorations in 4K of space, but Ruby's binary is 10MB!!?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The lossless 60 fps high definition video capture is currently unavailable (traffic limit). Any mirrors (or torrent would probably be a pretty good idea)?

YouTube 1080p version seems to have pretty terrible quality.

<comment><USER22> Somewhat humorous that the full resolution demo of a 4k intro is too large to handle on the server. Just post the source

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not only are there 4-kilobyte demos, there are also 256- _byte_ demos.

<http://dang.posterous.com/256-byte-demos>

[http://www.pouet.net/search.php?what=256+bytes&type=prod...](http://www.pouet.net/search.php?what=256+bytes&type=prod&x=0&y=0)

</comment><comment><USER24> I once spent hours looking for an internet archive or community of demo scene files / artists. There doesn't seem to be one out there in the eyes of google. Can anyone familiar with this art form please provide links to your your underground hangout? :)

<comment><USER25> This is a very thorough list of the most famous (read:best) and most influential demos: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3840830>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The entire 4k competition from that party is here

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdG-5Fhnx-I>

well worth the watch...

</comment><comment><USER26> German hartverdrahtet -> hardwired / hardcoded but also 'wired hearts' (the opening shot and the primitive the scene appears to be made out of)

<comment><USER27> "Herz" is the German word for heart. Do you mean that "hart" sounds like the English word "heart"?

<comment><USER26> Yes, it looked like a play on words. In dutch (halfway between English and German) it literally means heart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here's my first 4k production: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBcwQCBpEiE>

If you want to play with this type of code right now in your browser, check this out... <http://glsl.heroku.com/e#2431.0>

</comment><comment><USER29> Note that if you crave this kind of world of limited resources and ingenuity for packing things very small, it still exists in a professional setting in hard real-time embedded systems.

I heard a story at my company about fixing a bug a couple years ago. Memory was full, so in order to do that, the engineers rewrote the UI messages to allow the extra instructions to fit into memory.

</comment><comment><USER30> What a piece of art!

</comment><comment><USER31> it's things like this that remind me how sucky my "skills" actually are

</comment><comment><USER32> Demoscene!

</comment><comment><USER33> I was an intern at a game company last year. I showed the CEO some of the stuff that is going on in the demoscene. He got really worried and told me to not show that to any of his staff. He was afraid that it intimidates his highly paid coders and designers. I found that rather disturbing. How are you going to kill Hollywood if you are afraid of algorithms?

<comment><USER34> Any game coder worth his salt knows fractals. Many veterans from the demoscene ended up in the game industry at some point. In the 90s most wizkids dreamt of living off making games, and many demosceners made intros to cracked games.

Good game coders like Carmack have little to feel intimidated about.

<comment><USER35> Your point is good but saying that Carmack shouldn't feel intimidated is probably not helpful. ;)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can a seasoned developer approach design and be good enough? - <AUTHOR>

Good enough to prototype his ideas without needing someone else to do the design work or spending ages for simple tasks...<p>Do you have any recipes for success in this department? <comment><USER2> I asked myself the same question around 6 months ago, so I talked to the most talented designer I know and asked him for a list of the most influential books he had read whilst developing his skills.

Here is the list, in the order he recommended reading them:

Creative Process: [http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive- Others/dp/140...](http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive- Others/dp/1400064287)

Design Thinking: [http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Rand-A- Designer%60s-Art/dp/030008...](http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Rand-A- Designer%60s-Art/dp/0300082827/)

Typography: [http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Type-Designers-Critical- Stude...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Type-Designers-Critical- Students/dp/1568984480/)

Spatial Relationships - Grids: [http://www.amazon.com/Making-Breaking-Grid- Graphic-Workshop/...](http://www.amazon.com/Making-Breaking-Grid-Graphic- Workshop/dp/1592531253/)

Reduction: <http://www.amazon.com/Symbol-Steven-Bateman/dp/1856697274/>

Color Theory: <http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Color-Subjective-> Experience/dp/0471289280/

Branding 101: [http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Brand-Identity-Essential- Bra...](http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Brand-Identity-Essential- Branding/dp/0470401427/)

I've been making my way through the list, and it is amazing how much my approach to design has changed. Before I was winging it and was never really sure if I was making something that would look good, but now I feel like I have a solid foundation to build on.

</comment><comment><USER3> First of all, stay away from Bootstrap. Learn the basics first then get yourself familiar with Photoshop. You can learn the basics by reading books like "The non-designer's design book", "Design Basics" or something similar.

Then go pick out well designed websites and try to recreate it with Photoshop. You can use Dribbble for this. Try to pay attention to every pixel and recreate it exactly as you see it, or it'll most likely end up ugly. After a while you can try to add your own stuff onto it.

After doing this for some time, you'll have learned how to do simple stuff with Photoshop, you'll have learned what kind of layouts each type of website uses and you'll be able to use these layouts for your own projects. You'll learn how to effectively apply subtle effects and much more.

Basically, the fastest way to become good at design is to copy other people's design.

Also, remember that anything you design at first will probably look ugly, but you need to keep tweaking it until you find something that looks good.

<comment><USER4> Actually, I found easier to learn designing directly in the browser, instead of using photoshop. After all, I wanted to learn design, not photoshop.

And as a bonus, you'll get a headstart when you'll want to learn responsive design.

<comment><USER5> This way your designing process is limited to your HTML/CSS skills, while the point of being being good designer is to have no limits(except imagination)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For prototyping or even some beta products any popular css/js framework would do. You should've heard about bootstrap.io, just make sure at the end when you go public, customize it a bit.. so it won;t look like other dozens of websites.

<comment><USER7> I second this motion. Bootstrap is a great place to start. There are a couple of other things such as background images, fonts, balance, icons (ex. FontAwesome) and some other minor changes you can make to make your website look even better.

There was a great post on HN a couple of weeks ago, unfortunately I've lost said link - just google for 'x ways to make your website look better'.

<comment><USER8> "unfortunately I've lost said link "

If you upvoted the story, it should be in your saved stories link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can only tell you what worked for me. Get a copy of The Non-Designer's Design Book ([http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin- Willia...](http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin- Williams/dp/0321193857)) to learn the basics. Then practice, practice, practice. Design something, then try to figure out what you don't like about it. Use the concepts from the book to describe how it falls short. Throw it away and try again with something else. Eventually it'll just start coming naturally, much like programming did once upon a time.

<comment><AUTHOR> a good book advice plus a nice smile on my face... thanks!</comment></comment>


HTML 5P CODE - <AUTHOR> http://www.html5pcode.com/ <comment><USER2> Check the "Relevant video" on the blue box, down-right corner.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out the JS code behind this.. Oh the humanity!</comment>


Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130517/yahoo-board-to-meet-sunday-to-consider-1-1-billion-all-cash-deal-to-acquire-tumblr/

<comment><USER2> If the deal goes through Yahoo would now own the Tumblr audience, so Yahoo would have a product with a young audience, the audience Marissa Mayer wants for Yahoo, however, how would they move that audience over to other Yahoo products?

An acquisition of Tumblr seems very much like the acquisition of reddit by Advance Publications. They both have huge audiences that are passionate and growing fast but have great difficulty monetising their audiences effectively and are providing no real value to the parent company (other than the _potential_ for the sites to become profitable). If Yahoo bought Tumblr how would they ever convert the audience into Yahoo users?

I guess it comes down to: what value is there to any company in "owning" an audience if that audience has no interest in becoming the audience of the parent and will actively resist it? People would get very angry if AP started pushing their ownership of reddit onto reddit users, having Wired articles automatically frontpaged, things like that would drive everyone away, how will Yahoo avoid that?

<comment><USER3> "how would they move that audience over to other Yahoo products?"

The way the article is phrased (though we must remember it's third-hand at best) leads me to believe the strategy may be to go the other direction, to meld core Yahoo strengths (whatever that may be) into Tumblr. That is, integrate Yahoo offerings into Tumblr rather than the other way around.

<comment><USER4> Tumblr is ad inventory for Yahoo. Specifically, mobile ad inventory -- most of Tumblr's revenue comes from mobile ads. Mobile is a huge area of growth that Yahoo is anxious to stay on top of. They don't need Tumblr's audience to go anywhere other than Tumblr, and if they're smart they won't even try.

<comment><USER5> Just redirect the money hose to their own bucket. :)

<comment><USER6> It's a bit more than that. Tumblr will decline if they just view it as a turn- key solution.

<comment><USER7> > _It's a bit more than that. Tumblr will decline if they just view it as a > turn-key solution._

Yes, because they can find the billion offered elsewhere, right?

I call BS. Tumblr would accept even if Yahoo wants to turn it into Zombo.com.

<comment><USER8> I read that sentence differently: Not "Tumbler will decline the offer", but "Tumbler (the platform) will decline in usage, just like geocities did"

<comment><USER7> A, ok then. Didn't think of that interpretation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, looking forward to the next Accidental Tech Podcast - should be very interesting to get Marco Arment's perspective on this. First Instapaper, now Tumblr.

I wonder which will be a bigger deal for Marco...

[Edit - I also wonder whether he had an inkling that these conversations were taking place. He has been discussing his tumblr roots a bit more than usual recently, including his undocumented podcast easteregg that he built into tumblr, and the fact that the tumblr source code was open source, but not public, which allowed Marco to use it for future endeavors...

Edit 2: And this little hint from his Blog on May 11th.

"I ended up joining Davidville instead, for less money, because David would let me work on a brand new Mac with any keyboard I wanted and more than three feet of desk space. A few months later, we started Tumblr. Turned out to be the right move. "

]

<comment><USER10> Please note, I have zero inside information on this.

Wikipedia attributes cofounder status to Marco[1]. Let's assume that he got a raw deal from Karp and had a potential 30% stake in the business. He worked on it for 3 years and 7 months. Let's just assume he fully vested (not quite accurate, but the math is easier). Over the course of five rounds of funding, maybe the final ownership stake of the founders was diluted from 100% to 10%[2]. Marco owns 3% of the company, and walks away with a hair over $30 million pre-tax.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Arment>

[2] Handy infographic: [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/10/14/understanding-...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/10/14/understanding- how-dilution-affects-you-at-a-startup/)

<comment><USER9> David Karp has 25% of Tumblr [1], and makes it clear, that to start off with - it really was just David and Marco.

"...Marco Arment, Karp's first and, for a long time, only employee at Tumblr."

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/02/tumblr-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/02/tumblr- david-karps-800-million-art-project/)

<comment><USER10>
        "Employee"

Wow, that's a kick in the balls.

<comment><USER11> I don't follow. Also: Marco calls himself an "employee" as well.

<comment><USER10> Everywhere else, he's described as a cofounder. Being shrugged off as an employee would be insulting.

<comment><USER9> Interesting question - would you rather be a cofounder with 5% equity or an employee with 6% equity. (In the tumblr case, worth about $10mm more).

Given that most (everyone?) would rather be the employee with 6% equity, it brings into focus what's really important at the end of the day.

All else equal, the founder/cofounder label might be worth something to the ego, but, having been one of 100 or so "founders" of Opsware, and also having worked at a company where the "Founding CEO" joined almost a year after I did, I've grown to recognize that "Founder" is nothing more than a label, doesn't really signify that much.

Total Compensation Package (inclusive of equity) is what's important.

[Edit: I guess some people might consider "Founder' of a successful company to be a proxy for their reputation, and reputation is very, very important, as it can be leveraged during salary negotiations, or, raising money/hiring. So, from that perspective, being known as the "Co-Founder of Tumblr" might be relevant]

<comment><USER12> I see an analogy to the "Vice President" label in big companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> With tumblr as a curation hub and Flickr as a pool of images, maybe yahoo will next aquire a video pool (Vimeo?), a sound / music pool (soundcloud?) ... Having a small network of creative sites each with their own communities, tied by a single hub would be pretty cool.

<comment><USER14> Except that Flickr shows how poorly Yahoo will manage this acquisition. I feel sorry for all those Tumblr lovers that will see their favoured product ground down by mismanagement and neglect.

<comment><USER15> In the past Yahoo has butchered their acquisitions. However, Marissa Mayer is a product focused CEO. I see her doing a good job of not messing up the Tumblr experience if Yahoo acquires it.

<comment><USER16> I think she is already trying to fix Flickr, in fact.

<comment><USER17> The iOS app, which is one of said attempts, is outright awful, so I haven't seen much of a track record to assuage my reservations about her ability to improve the offerings. Upcoming.org was also shut down in a really stupid way, regardless of whether you like the service it self.

Very reminiscent of Google's way of going about things, actually. :)

<comment><USER18> > The iOS app, which is one of said attempts, is outright awful

It has a 4.5 out of 5 star rating in iTunes.

<comment><USER17> I wonder how many of those people use it for uploading. It's so-so for just browsing (the images in the feed are - very - downsampled).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't something really weird going on in the world when you can sell a company with almost no revenue (let alone profit) and no obvious business model in the horizon for $ 1.1B, or is it just me?

<comment><USER20> You are buying the potential for profit.

Not exactly the same thing, but in a way it's similar to buying a broadcast license. Companies pay millions/billions for the right to project some media onto eyeballs.

<comment><USER21> Except a broadcast license is protected and inherently limited by the govt. Tumblr's position in the world is neither (ask all the tumblrs that have come before). It's really nothing like buying a broadcast license.

<comment><USER20> Please read my comment again. I never said it was the same thing.

> It's really nothing like buying a broadcast license.

Both provide access to eyeballs, and both are bought with the intention of monetizing that somehow... usually with advertising. That's a similarity in my book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Curiously, they had this tumblr clone called Yahoo! Meme ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Meme> ). Which, IIRC, was developed by Yahoo Brazil and I guess marketed mostly in the south american market. I guess it didn't get anywhere since they killed it in May 2012.

</comment><comment><USER23> If this goes through, it may be amusing to see Yahoo doing better in the social space than Google (is with G+). Tumblr seems like a very wild, organic community that is its own social network. If Yahoo treats it the way Conde Nast has with reddit, it could turn out to be quite the boon for them.

<comment><USER24> Do you think Conde Nast believes reddit has been a boon for them?

<comment><USER25> Of course. They could sell it tomorrow for a nice multiple. They bought it for like $15 million and could easily sell it for $100+ million.

<comment><USER26> Conde Nast hasn't owned Reddit since 2011.

<comment><USER25> Technically, no, just their parent company.

 _"In September 2011, Reddit was split from Condé Nast, and now operates as a subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Even Archive Team won't be able to save Tumblr.

<comment><USER17> I think a lot of people would be interested in supporting a Kickstarter of some sort, though.

<comment><USER27> I've personally archived a few blogs, and the amount of data on tumblr is just incredible. Just a single one was almost 2.5GB. There's probably millions of blogs on tumblr.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps image archival could be something for a second tier.

It's just too important to give up over; a half-baked solution is better than none.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yahoo needs a company like this to address two major issues. First, they lack a social offering. Second, they need to draw in more users, and I imagine Yahoo is hoping to bring over a large user base to their other products via integration with their ecosystem. If Yahoo does acquire tumbler, it will be interesting to see how they choose to integrate it (if they do at all).

<comment><USER29> Big-time integration would be a huge mistake.

Look at how big of a lead on photography Flickr when Yahoo purchased them. After the purchased they were told to focus on integration.

Flickr is a shadow of its former self

<comment><USER30> For the first time in 6 or 7 years I didn't renew my Flickr sub this year.

It's not just that I've grown older, it's that fundamentally Flickr no longer delivers the content and community, and blame for that must lie at Yahoo's door and their failure to innovate with photo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why did someone leak this much information about a secret deal? Kara Swisher is an awesome reporter and the go-to for this kind of article, but whoever talked had a reason for doing so. One plausible guess; someone on Tumblr's board is trying to cement a second offer from another company. This article now names a price and a deadline.

</comment><comment> UVB-76 Isn't Tumblr an IP nightmare, and wouldn't Yahoo taking ownership make it a giant target for litigation?

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder why they're deciding to offer an All-Cash offer rather than some part of the offer being in Stock. Yahoo's stock has done well lately and should be fairly attractive to Tumblr investors and management. Given the size of the potential acquisition, there aren't that many alternative suitors, so Yahoo should have pretty good leverage here, especially since Tumblr has gotten heat over the last few years regarding their lack of a business model.

Maybe Yahoo is afraid that offering say ~$400MM in stock would dilute the existing shares and irritate existing shareholders?

<comment><USER33> you don't want to suddenly create a huge stockholder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Oh no... time to move off tumblr...

</comment><comment><USER35> If this does happen it will be very interesting to see Tumblr's progress over the next year. Will give insight into whether Yahoo has turned the corner or whether it is the same Yahoo we have seen in the past 5 years.

<comment><USER15> Yahoo seems to be making a lot of the right moves in terms of product design and development talent. I think they have a good chance of being able to help monitize Tumblr in a way that doesn't ruin the user experience. Like you said, this will be a true test for the new Yahoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Tumblr is a media company at the core. So it should work out well for Yahoo.

<comment><USER37> What exactly does that statement mean?

<comment><USER38> Nothing

> Tumblr is a media company at the core.

Tumblr is a glorified blog hoster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The next Flickr? Hopefully they can keep innovating after an acquisition...

</comment><comment><USER40> Too much soap opera style info for someone who is "considering" an $1.1B deal.

It seems a bit odd, and everybody knows how these Hollywood style "romances" tend to end..

</comment><comment><USER21> Yahoo really needed a product to fill in that Geocities gap.</comment>


Apple's auto layout and visual format language for JavaScript (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://ijzerenhein.github.io/autolayout.js/ <comment><USER2> I find this layout model annoying to work with. Everything is like a loaded spring, and if you forget one constraint, it may rip the whole layout into 0-sized pieces.

This model can't express wrapping, so it can't gracefully scale layouts down from desktop to mobile sizes (when you have a 3-column layout you have lots of control over column widths, but no way of turning them into 3 rows instead).

CSS Grid and Flexbox are pretty good. Conceptually they're messier than mathematically-beautiful constraints, but in practice they're more powerful and more robust.

<comment><USER3> > so it can't gracefully scale layouts down from desktop to mobile sizes (when > you have a 3-column layout you have lots of control over column widths, but > no way of turning them into 3 rows instead).

On Apple platforms (UIKit on iOS) handling such layout changes is done with another mechanism on top of auto layout. Something they call "Size Classes". You get a callback saying eg. "view has changed to Regular width, Compact height" and you switch to a another set of auto-layout constraints + animate as desired. This size class system is used for stuff like handling rotation on the iPhone and transitioning to split-screen mode on iPad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I stopped using the visual format language. It was great for a while. The new constraints are much better with type checking:

            NSLayoutConstraint.activate([
                button.centerXAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.centerXAnchor),
                button.centerYAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.centerYAnchor, constant: 0)
                ])

<comment><USER5> They're even better when you define some operators for them:

      NSLayoutConstraint.activate([
          button.centerXAnchor ≈ view.centerXAnchor,
          button.centerYAnchor ≈ view.centerYAnchor + 10
          ])

<comment><USER6> Anecdotally, that way lies ballooning Swift compile times.

<comment><USER7> It's not anecdotal. We used Anchorage for some time before dropping it for this very reason. There's a compiler warning available to you to let you know if any line or function takes more than a certain amount of time to compile. Our autolayout code that used Anchorage became the #1 source of warnings when we enabled it.

<comment><USER5> I've been using my operators for a long time without a problem. I think the secret is the fact that I'm using custom operators that have no other overloads, which avoids the combinatorial type system explosion during evaluation. The operators I use are ≈, ≤, and ≥ (which can all be typed on a US English keyboard using the option key). I admit there are overloads on the normal arithmetic operators for doing constants/multipliers too, but those haven't ended up as a problem (it's quite possible that the use of the custom operators constrains the expression enough that the arithmetic ones aren't a problem).

For context, I've had the options on to warn on expensive expressions for a long time and we use a _lot_ of these operators everywhere and I think only once did we ever have an autolayout line flagged, and that was due to a complicated expression used to come up with the constant value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Auto layout is not user-friendly enough to make sense on the web. 99% of the time the format is not readable at all. Does anyone honestly think this: [ 'H:|[view1(==view2)]-10-[view2]|' 'V:|[view1,view2]|' ] is readable?

Especially since Apple admitted their mistake and is moving towards SwiftUI.

<comment><USER9> I mean, it doesn't look any less readable than CSS.

Maybe CSS is syntactically easier, but the relationships between elements are much more hidden (width: 100%; _of what?_ ) so I'd call it a wash.

<comment><USER10> You don't think CSS grid[0] is more usable than that? Templates are basically a ASCII-visible representation of the layout.

[0] [https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/](https://css- tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was tasked with building a bespoke JavaScript framework for the web last year because that's just what the world needs right? :) Anyway, one of the requirements was that it be similar to building an iOS app so all the views, layouts, and styling needed to be done with code. This would have been really cool to have to jump start some of that work.

P.S. I know there are a bunch of frameworks out there that do the same thing I built. The company I built it for specifically wanted a custom one for themselves. It's decisions like that that led me to leave. Still, fun project and I learned a ton.

<comment><USER12> Commonly known as "not invented here" syndrome

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here)

<comment><USER13> Non-mobile: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of [https://gss.github.io/guides/ccss](https://gss.github.io/guides/ccss)

</comment><comment><USER15> Headline reads like this is open source Apple code. It's not.

<comment><USER16> Here's the umbrella website for these auto layout libraries using the Cassowary algorithm [http://overconstrained.io/](http://overconstrained.io/)

It seems this was Apple's auto layout, but links to the developer documentation are now broken. My conclusion the last time I looked into this is that it seems Apple has switched to a different approach with their new SwiftUI layout engine.

Edit: this blog post from October discusses the switch from Auto Layout to SwiftUI in some detail [https://kean.github.io/post/swiftui-layout- system](https://kean.github.io/post/swiftui-layout-system)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is impressive but I think it's interesting that Apple is seemingly jettisoning Auto Layout with the introduction of SwiftUI with Stacks and Alignments.

Having worked with a lot of different layout and alignment systems, Auto Layout seemed to me to be considerable overkill. I found it generally not worth all the brain power needed to understand it and more importantly debug it when it isn't doing what you want.

<comment><USER18> Even before SwiftUI (which is a paradigm shift), Apple released the NSLayoutAnchor API, which superseded VFL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is an intriguing effort. When I was doing iOS development, I used both AutoLayout and the ASCII-art constraints.

The whole time I was doing it, I wondered why I couldn't just use CSS.

It seems that every UI toolkit has a different method. And every one that I've worked with makes me wonder why they don't just use CSS.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looks cool. Is there something like that available for non-Apple desktop apps?</comment>


Aaron Winborn: Special Needs Trust - <AUTHOR> http://aaronwinborn.com/blogs/aaron/special-needs-trust <comment><USER2> It doesn't matter what community he is part of, nor who he is. He's a hacker, a father of two beautiful girls and a husband. He's being robbed of his life, and his daughters robbed of their father.

What matters is we can help. All of us — some of us (me) have been lucky enough to get help and support when we needed it most from people we didn't expect it from.

We can help him; we can help his family. Even if only a little, and even though we know what the future will hold. So let's just do it.

Skip the squabbling over politics; national healthcare, etc. It _doesn't matter_ \- _what matters is him and his family, right now_.

<comment><USER3> The most thoughtful comment unfortunately buried underneath HN bull-fucking- shit (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4229330>)

This might be the straw for me. Fuck this place.

<comment><USER3> I stand by my comment, negative votes and all.

I'll take a few more negative votes for this comment, please...

<comment><USER4> How can you go from complaining about HN bull in one post to begging for downvotes in the very next one?

<comment><USER3> I was being ironic ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've heard of several cases of programmers getting ALS. This seemed statistically unlikely, since the ALS site stated that only 5 in 100,000 acquired the disease.

Then, I googled "programmers ALS" and found this study: <http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/162/12/1146.abstract>

It suggests that programmers do have higher risks. (Still, keep in mind that the study is small, and even if there are increased risks, the odds are still low.)

</comment><comment><USER6> More info on ALS: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001708/>

If I ever get something like this, or anything that eventually "locks-me-in", or something that destroys my mental faculties, I'm going to kill myself before the worst of it happens, around the time when I'm still able to do so. It's the only decent thing to do for yourself and the others around you.

Your opinion might be different.

<comment><USER7> What I think I would personally do wouldn't be too different. However, I think making statements like "It's the only decent thing to do for yourself and the others around you." is awfully harsh and judging to people who are actually in the situation. It seems to imply that they are somehow selfish by not ending their lives. Its important to remember that they are in the situation and you are not and therefore they have an understanding of their choices that you do not.

Anyway, its also relevant that most life insurance has a suicide clause.

<comment><USER8> My understanding is that voluntary withdrawal of artificial ventilation is not an uncommon choice for locked-in ALS sufferers, and does not count as 'suicide', but as 'death from ALS'.

EDIT: I do agree with you 100% though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hackers may be interested in the story of Jaimie Heywood, who when his brother was diagnosed with ALS started his own garage-biotech company to try to find a cure. Sadly the brother died but the effort lives on and Jaimie went on to start PatientsLikeMe.com.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heywood_(chief_executive)> <http://westcityfilms.com/smsf.html>

<comment><USER10> See especially Jamie's TEDx talk. "Wouldn't it be great if the technology we used to take care of ourselves was as good as the technology we use to make money?"

[http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_heywood_the_big_idea_my_broth...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_heywood_the_big_idea_my_brother_inspired.html)

And to bring it back full circle to HN: Once original Basecamp sunsets, we think PatientsLikeMe has the oldest continuously-running Rails app; the oldest commits are from 2005, running Rails 0.5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really sad news and I will donate to his Trust fund but I can't help but feel strange knowing that I am donating to a fellow programmer. I see posts like these on Facebook and other collaboration sites and I rarely even bother reading the articles.

I wish we could take care of all the sick and elderly equally but such is life. Instead of blaming it on the government, the system, society or anyone else, I suggest we donate to the cause to help this man live as well as he can, while he still can.

Nobody deserves to be robbed of their life like this.

<comment><USER12> What about people who are sick like this but are not famous programmers? Who will donate to them?

Government exists, in part, to share the costs of society among all its citizens. Roads, transit, military, and in most countries of the world, healthcare.

<comment><USER11> This is exactly what my point was about. Perhaps I didn't express myself properly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I posted another sad story about a felow developer earlier today. This guy was going in for a double amputation today.

<http://twitter.com/iwarshak>

It's easy to say but I'm going to really try and keep a sense of perspective the next time I'm complaining about something.

<comment><USER14> > Christian, husband, father, software developer. In that order.

Maybe this is a horrible thing to say but when I read something like that I just completely turn off. Religious fanatic sick? Their invisible space god can take care of them! I love how he put his stupid superstition not one, but two places ahead of being a father. That's really cute.

I donated to the Python programmer with ALS but I think I'll let Jesus help this guy.

<comment><USER15> In most churches the advice given to men and women in terms of prioritizing your life is: God, spouse, family, work. I realize that you think that his God isn't real but that really stops you from ever caring about someone? If your father had cancer and believed in God would you speak to him in this way? Why go through life being so harsh?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When the site is back up, I'll definitely donate as this is a terrible thing to happen to anyone. Not being able to hug your daughter or turn the pages of a book you are reading to her must be torture.

It does bring up the discussion of how people with low chances to live need $100,000s of care in the final months of their life. Must be tough to bankrupt yourself and your family that survives you knowing that there is not much you can do to avoid fate. But people myself included would do anything to survive just a few more months.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sadly before I even opened the article, I knew this was going to be the result of the lack of a proper healthcare system in the US. :(

<comment><USER17> Why is it that when I suggest we emulate Canada's system (which is province- by-province single payer) the Democrats accuse me of being a Ron Paul right- winger (Nooo... not the States!) and the Republicans accuse me of being a socialist (Nooo... not single payer!)?

Not only is the US healthcare system broke and broken, but nobody in power is willing to imagine a solution that might work better (probably because such as system would require tackling the major corporate interests across the board, like big pharma) :-( I wouldn't be optimistic that we'll get things fixed.

<comment><USER18> The issue is whether a state-by-state single payer system would be universal. It would not be in the US--the Republican states would never enact it. How would Canada's system react if Ontario had single payer but British Columbia did not?

<comment><USER17> Actually Canada has had issues with provinces not coordinating medical issues very well. They are actually less centralized than the US is. One of the reasons why SARS hit Ontario so hard was that there was no equivalent to the CDC nationally or at that time in Ontario.

But for the US, if you sent things to the states, coverage could follow residency, and states could decide the level of coverage they wanted to provide (coverage varies significantly between Canadian provinces btw).

The big problem for the states is you can't do it as long as Medicare is fully federal and Medicaid is so heavily regulated by the federal government. You'd probably have to hand these programs to the states first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I met Aaron a couple years ago at a DrupalCamp media module sprint. He's been generous with his time and efforts to help others. I'm sad to see him struggle in his latest video. I hope the best for him and his family.

</comment><comment><USER20> There's no PayPal in my country (I use Google Checkout and Skrill). If there's an option to donate in a different way I'd do it asap!

<comment><USER16> You don't need a paypal account.

Click the one-time donation button. Then click the 'Continue' link where it says "Don't have a paypal account?"

Then complete your donation and you're done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Disability insurance seems like something everyone should get if they possibly can -- if you're an entrepreneur and often move jobs, it may be worth having personal coverage vs. relying on employers, since they change and may have inconsistent coverage. Probably the most important coverage after basic health insurance and auto coverage (if you drive).

I'm kind of on the fence on long-term care insurance, though (independent of disability). It is dramatically more expensive, basically prepaid nursing care, and depends greatly on your assumptions about the cost of health care and general inflation.

</comment><comment> j-b I have two daughters of my own who are roughly the same age as Aaron's and it's crushing to think about how those girls will be affected by losing their Dad. Donated..

</comment><comment><USER22> text only cache [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BZM_fc5...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BZM_fc59iG8J:aaronwinborn.com/blogs/aaron/special- needs-trust&hl=en&prmd=imvns&strip=1)

<comment><USER23> the full version cache includes donation links

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BZM_fc5...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BZM_fc59iG8J:aaronwinborn.com/blogs/aaron/special- needs-trust&hl=en&prmd=imvns&strip=0)

<comment><USER22> I was having trouble loading the full cached version, figured images were the cause. Thanks for that though, full cache seems to be loading ok now.

<comment><USER23> You're right, text-only loads faster. I whish I could link paypal directly but it looked unsafe to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I want to thank everyone for their ongoing support. I was surprised, pleased and humbled to find my post on Hacker News. I love the Open Source community, and am proud to be part of it.

</comment><comment><USER25> This remind me of another programmer who got ALS: Hal_Finney

</comment><comment><USER26> I thought this was going to be an article about "special" needing "trust", which seems like it might be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER27> [http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/16/us-vitamin-e- users...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/16/us-vitamin-e-users-show- lower-als-risk-idUSTRE72F9B320110316)

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMYIJlmeSFM>

</comment><comment><USER28> I hope this guy won't have a problem with PayPal should his fundraiser work.

</comment><comment><USER29> And here we go again with the title changes. Dude, whoever you are, would you please f%^#ng stop? This is _not_ helping. Saying "Drupal Developer" clearly lets anybody reading this site know that the person in question is "one of us." Changing it now means that the only people who will pay attention are the ones who happen to know who Aaron Winborn is.

<comment><USER30> Original title: "A Drupal Developer is Dying and Needs Your Help."

The new title reduces the information and context about the article by several orders of magnitude, which is a tragedy given the gravity of the situation.

To all who read this comment, please upvote the OP so that it stays on the front page longer and signals "must read" with its large number of upvotes.

This heavy-handed re-titling of HN posts has got to stop. If any incident can clearly demonstrate why, this is it.

<comment><USER31> This is exactly correct. Information content in headlines is important, and clearly the moderator is incompetent at this role. You have to tell people why they should care, and the target page title probably is NOT good at that. In 99% of cases, the target page title will be a bad title on HN.

If the moderator disliked the direct appeal for aid in the original headline (I speculate, since he has not deigned to defend his editing), a proper title would be something along the lines of "Drupal developer has ALS, appeals for help". If Winborn is better known, you could go with "Drupal developer Winborn has ALS, appeals for help". If he's very widely known, you can assume most readers know who he is and go with "Aaron Winborn has ALS, appeals for help".

This conveys all the information needed for readers to evaluate the link, without being a direct emotional appeal.

I'd be happy to give the HN moderators a class in editing if they like. Editing is a learnable skill. Or, more likely, the HN moderators can continue fucking it up.

<comment><USER32> Mods need to take account of context when reviewing titles.

The context the original title in the blog post is totally different from here on HN hence the desirability of a different title. It's just good UX to take into consideration the different end user.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Malicious Cyber Activity - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/29/message-congress-regarding-continuation-national-emergency-respect <comment><USER2> a reference to the executive order mentioned

\- [EO 13694] [https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/sanctions/Programs/...](https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/sanctions/Programs/Documents/cyber_eo.pdf)

\- [EO 13757] [https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/sanctions/Programs/...](https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/sanctions/Programs/Documents/cyber2_eo.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> TLDR - this extends an order which allows for adding persons and organizations to the OFAC SDN list for attacks. The SDN list is a list of people who can't enter the US and can't do business with US people and businesses.

</comment><comment><USER4> We've always been at cyberwar with Eastasia.</comment>


Jimmy Is Everywhere: On James Baldwin's FBI File - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/james-baldwin-fbi-files/ <comment><USER2> "I am Not Your Negro" is a fantastic documentary about Baldwin.

In that documentary, filmed in 1960's, the same questions were asked that are often asked today. William Buckley asks Baldwin, "Why are negros so upset ? You are on TV commercials, movie leads, you hold positions in government. Isn't racism in the past."

That was before I was born. But in my lifetime the Tuskegee medical experiments were still being performed on black men. I witnessed a landlord ask my parents to pretend they were taking an apartment so that the blacks in the waiting area could be told it is no longer available. I had a young detective in Chicago privately disclose to me that as a cop he would just followed black people (if there were more than one in the car because the odds one of them might have a warrant would be higher) in his cop car until they committed a traffic violation. He used racial profiling so effectively that he became one of youngest detectives of all time.

In my college years the US government was selling highly addictive and destructive drugs in African American neighborhoods as a covert way to raise funds. But when that story broke it was pushed off the headlines because the Monica Lewinsky scandal was more important. The reporter who broke the story was so disheartened he killed himself.

And in just the past years we have seen too many snuff films and needless deaths.

Yet I still personally encounter people who claim African Americans haven't experienced racism in 100 years. And what are they complaining about, "they seem to be in most commercials these days and hold high positions in government, so racism must be in the past". Because why bother learning what the Black Lives Matter movement stood for when you can just snark "all lives matter". But if you were snark "Pro-life ? You mean you are a vegetarian ?", some of those same people would be so annoyed they would burn down an abortion clinic. But black people burning something, that anger they can't understand.

Will the U.S. ever come to terms with our racist past ? Will our future grandchildren be ruminating on these issues simply because many people keep casually dismissing the suffering of others.

As a side note, I am conflicted if general interest stories like this should be on HN as they are too emotionally charged.

<comment><USER3> _> The reporter who broke the story was so disheartened he killed himself._

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

<comment><USER4> Nothing suspicious sounding about that.

<comment><USER5> 'Multiple gun shot suicide'

Indeed.

<comment><USER6> Dick Fuld shot himself twice in the heart and still wasn't able to kill himself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anyone's interested in buying it, I can attest that the book in question is a fantastic coffee table tome.

It's very striking, reading the file in 2018, how various things which are basically political suppression and harassment are all lumped in under "national security" by FBI men writing reports at type writers.

I have no idea why, but I assumed this kind of thing would at least have a different euphemism!

</comment><comment><USER8> One the most impactful statements on race that I've ever encountered. That led me on a multi-day bender watching all of Baldwin's talks and speeches on youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0L5fciA6AU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0L5fciA6AU)

</comment><comment><USER9> I read Ta-Nehisi_Coates' "Between the World and Me" right after Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" and felt such shame that so little has changed in America between the two.

I felt like I read the same book twice.

</comment><comment><USER10> We are all Jimmy now.

<comment><USER11> >The new edition of Talking at the Gates contained an afterword which detailed the contents of the file the FBI opened on Baldwin in 1961 and maintained until 1974. In December 1963, his name was added to the Security Index, a list of people to be sought and detained in the event of a state of emergency.

>Baldwin's own telephone was never tapped, as far as the record shows, though there are Bureau records of his conversations with people whose phones were. In 1967 he was made the subject of an F#1 Stop Notice, or "lookout", so that his arrival at US airports was reported. In this instance, it was by means of a telephone call as he collected his luggage from the carousel

>In the mid-1960s, Baldwin was semi-resident in Istanbul. The FBI tracked his movements there, took note of his eviction from an apartment for "homosexual activities", and of his intention to form an artistic association with the Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal and the actor Engin Cezzar. An interview from a Turkish newspaper was translated and sent to Washington with two sentences emphasized: "Baldwin had settled in Istanbul in March of 1966" and "After finishing his book the author will return to America". Statements he made in the American press on Civil Rights affairs while in Turkey or in France were clipped and filed.

>It includes scattered reports on Baldwin's movements around the world, records of "pretext phone calls" made by agents for the purposes of soliciting information by deceit (posing as an "auto salesman" or a "member of a peace organization", among other things), snoopers' accounts of public meetings and private encounters, articles by and about Baldwin clipped from press sources, as well as oddities such as letters of complaint about his books or media statements, written to Hoover by concerned citizens.

Really? This is all of us now? Sounds to me like they really targeted this guy.

<comment><USER12> Maybe alluding to that "they" have much more intelligence on each and every one of us by default, than they got from a targeted guy back then.

<comment><USER11> I understand that was the intention, but we aren't all being specifically targeted by the FBI. If they can collect as much information on us without specifically targeting us, imagine if they _did_ target you?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Double Entry Accounting for Laravel/Lumen - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ekmungai/eloquent-ifrs <comment><USER2> As someone trained as an Accountant but working as a programmer, this has me itching to start a port over to DotNet Core.

This looks like some pretty cool functionality!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks chief. I'd be more than happy to collaborate on the DotNet project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very nice. I don't like the API with arrays, but hey, seems to get the job done.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm actually thinking about creating a Lumen API on top of it to expose the internal objects as json

<comment><USER3> I'm a big fan of the JMSSerializer. Allows you to keep your code strictly OOP while providing a nice interface for (de)serialization of many codecs. It's battle tested and plays nicely with other modern libraries.</comment></comment></comment>