PepsiCo Wants to Sell Healthy Food, Consumers Want Chips - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/pepsico-wants-to-sell-healthy-food-consumers-want-chips-1481481896 <comment><USER2> It's a little dishonest of this article not to point out that junk food is engineered- I mean _literally_ engineered, by teams of scientists running controlled experiments- to be as addictive as possible. This isn't a question of those wacky consumers and their revealed preference not matching their stated intentions; human willpower should barely enter the conversation when this topic comes up.

If PepsiCo is genuinely serious about encouraging healthy foods, the only way that's ever going to work is if the Lay's and Doritos are re-designed to be less appealing. Putting them in a fight head-to-head with the healthy foods in their current state is a fight the healthy foods are always going to lose, even if Pepsi's intentions were pure as the driven snow. But they can't (again, irrespective of whether they're good or evil) because that would kill the brands and competitors would simply swoop in and take the market share; so once again we have a coordination problem where regulation is realistically the only solution.

<comment><USER3> Is it possible to engineer healthy and addictive food?

<comment><USER4> I like to think diet pop can fit into this category... but then there's the backlash of "unnatural chemicals" which sceptics believe must obviously be bad for you.

<comment><USER5> > the backlash of "unnatural chemicals" which sceptics (sic.) believe must > obviously be bad for you.

You mean like the fact that they inhibit beneficial intestinal flora [1], or that numerous studies have found that people have a higher risk for diabetes if they drink diet soda [2], or that people gain weight when they switch to diet sofa from regular [3]?

Yeah, those wacky skeptics - they'll believe anything...

[1] [http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/10.1139/apnm-2016-0346#....](http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/10.1139/apnm-2016-0346#.WDxeChIrKRs)

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23364017/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23364017/)

[3] [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0167241#sec020)

<comment><USER6> It's literally impossible to gain weight from drinking diet soda. It doesn't have food energy. It can't break thermodynamics. It can only be explained by other factors like people over compensating with other calorie consumption.

<comment><USER7> Could things such as chemical imbalance or just the chemicals themselves affect metabolism / digestion, causing weight gain?

<comment><USER8> That requires some good research to prove.

What is known is that suddenly cutting caffeine after large regular intake will cause weight gain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be easier to make people give up most of their rights and freedoms than it would be to make them stop eating bad food that will make them an expensive burden to the healthcare system. The only solution is to regulate and tax the way cigarettes are. All that Pepsi goes to fund all that diabetes and heart disease. Everyone, including the highly competent managers and researchers at Pepsi, knows it is bad for you. That does not mean no one should work for Philip Morris - it just means there are probably more virtuous ways to spend your time. Ultimately, society will give the people what they want, so we should tax the bad wants.

<comment><USER10> I never understood why it's ok to tax alcohol, and keep the price of sucrose high for Cuban-American farmers, but anti-freedom to tax it's cousin fructose.

<comment><USER11> The left criticism of sugar taxes is simply that it's a regressive tax, which disproportionately harms poor people. Forcing only certain people to reduce their sugar consumption like this is a bit repulsive.

A lot of policies would make more sense if we had radically different systems in place to mitigate their side effects, but we simply don't. Until then, things like the trans fat ban are solid, fair policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The WSJ and Pepsi mention " Quaker oatmeal, Naked juice and Sabra hummus" as "good for you" foods.

I've never tried Sabra hummus, but the others are super sugary. A couple years ago I made a conscious attempt to eat less salt and sugar, and once you do so it's amazing how much sugar you notice added to virtually every processed food you'll find at a grocery store.

Cooking food from scratch is basically the only way to have control over your diet.

<comment><USER13> I've seen jars of honey-and-mustard and chocolate-chip hummus in the grocery store in the US. Needless to say, this is not how people eat hummus anywhere else in the world.

<comment><USER14> instead they just leave out the chickpeas and call it halva...</comment></comment></comment>


The Point of Tipping (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@koenfucius/the-point-of-tipping-ed7e25104199 <comment><USER2> > If customers have the chance to tip, we can assume that they will reward > good service more handsomely than mediocre service.

No, they don't.

People almost always tip the same percentage.

> But experienced waiting staff will be skilful at spotting who is likely to > appreciate superior service (and indeed what superior service means for > individual patrons).

Which in the US often experienced wait staff may avoid serving black people, or give worse service, because of the expectation that black people tend to give lower tips.

These are standard points in the "tip or no tip" debate, which also covers the interactions between the tipped and non-tipped staff, and tip sharing.

As such, the views given here don't really seem to address the larger debate, but only interpret an economist's view of how tipping should work from a theoretical standpoint.</comment>


Surveillance cameras in Pennsylvania use hackable Chinese tech - <AUTHOR> https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/surveillance-cameras-in-parts-of-pennsylvania-use-hackable-chinese-tech/article_00d0e402-c123-11e9-a99b-17f772ee5fba.html <comment><USER2> >"Any idea how many kids in public schools are on probation?" Skrinjar asked.

>Two thousand, he told them.

>"We have their pictures," Skrinjar said. "We can put them in the system and restrict where these people go, and keep them out of areas they're not supposed to be in."

That people who don't understand how unacceptably dystopian this is can rise through the ranks of law enforcement says a lot about the culture of law enforcement.

>The Caucus requested copies of agreements governing the use of the cameras and, in response, Zappala's office said none existed.

The good ol' "we're not in violation of policy because there is no policy".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some people will have a HTTP 451 with this url. But it's available here: [https://outline.com/KTn97c](https://outline.com/KTn97c)

<comment><USER3> Which means that they violate their visitor's privacy, and don't want to stop it.

Funny, that such a site reports about other's privacy violations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, a lot of reputable news sources have the same issue with the GDPR rules.

<comment><USER4> Yes, and - to certain extent - it is understandable, but I have seen similar (conceptually) messages expressed in much nicer ways.

This one sounds to me plainly rude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hackable systems would be very useful to gangs and organized crime. They could stay a few steps ahead of law enforcement. They could also know when you are not home or where all the latch-key kids are. Would the companies running these systems be liable for damages, or is that too hard to prove?</comment>


Fishfish, new Posix shell by the author of Hex Fiend - <AUTHOR> http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/fishfish.html

<comment><USER2> This is just a dupe of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073162>

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice work! Will it be possible in the future to write plugins as in zsh?</comment>


GitHub was down - <AUTHOR> https://status.github.com/ <comment><USER2> We just started using Gerrit, but using Github authentication. Can't sign in! Not doing our own account management appears to have been a poor decision.

<comment><USER3> Every time a service like Github goes down, I always swear to myself I'll replace that dependency with a project that takes days, weeks, or months to implement will ensure I'll never have hours or minutes of downtime ever again.

<comment><USER4> I run a gogs[0] instance, which is a GitHub clone with great performance characteristics. I use it for both company and personal projects, and we haven't had any downtime. No more productivity drop when github is down :D.

I recently discovered another huge dependency I have when coding though : StackOverflow. That's going to be a lot harder to replace though...

[0]: [https://github.com/gogits/gogs](https://github.com/gogits/gogs)

PS: Yes, I realize the irony in using a github link here...

<comment> dmitry-k >No more productivity drop when github is down

It could have been the motto of RhodeCode ([https://rhodecode.com](https://rhodecode.com)). Self-hosted repository management not only has a benefit of having one's uptime under control, but also is much more secure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've heard some good things about GitLab but seems like the majority of the OSS community is still on GitHub (...for now).

<comment><USER6> Why would one assume that their self-hosted git will never go down or will be up more than github?

<comment><USER7> At least when it's self-hosted, it's your responsibility and you can fix it. When you are anything larger than a tiny company, this is much less risky.

Remember that 'the cloud' just means 'someone else's computers' so you are subject to their infrastructure management practices and uptime guarantees (or lack thereof).

<comment><USER8> Even for a company much larger than tiny, you're better off with GitHub from a reliability perspective. Most medium companies (up to hundreds of employees) do not have operations staff anywhere near as responsive as GitHub's are.

Look at their status history. The vast majority of companies could not boast such a record for their internal operations.

<comment><USER9> Not to mention if it's one person who decided to set up the self-hosted solution and then that person leaves. How reliable is it then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm looking forward to the postmortem—GitHub usually does an excellent job with those.

<comment><USER11> I'm looking forward to the post looking forward to the postmortem - HN usually does an excellent job with those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had just posted a link to an issue in github and when I tried to click it to see if it worked, I was wondering if I did anything wrong. Github has so much activity that many people could be thinking the same right now.

I also guess hundreds of persons are wondering if the commit they just pushed killed github's servers.

<comment><USER13> I did the same. I spent a solid minute trying different things and googling to figure out what was wrong. Checked the status page and bam!

It's still down. :(

<comment><USER12> Now there is a human Denial of Service attack because everyone is refreshing their pages like theres no tomorrow.

<comment><USER14> All DOS are because of humans?

<comment><USER12> When used as an attack, the efficient method is to buy servers or to have a botnet to do it for you.

<comment><USER14> But a human sets it in motion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has anyone got a good Github backup script that's actually robust? Something that will reliably go through all your company private repos and clone the lot. I've found a few, but they're all clunky and in serious need of adaptation. (e.g. [https://gist.github.com/rodw/3073987](https://gist.github.com/rodw/3073987) which is the best I've found so far.)

Hard part appears to be finding one that does an organisation account well, not just a user.

What are other people here actually using?

<comment><USER16> You could try github-backup [0]. Quoting from the description:

      It backs up everything GitHub publishes about the repository,
      including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis,
      milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars.

And did I mention that it's written in Haskell!

[0] [https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup](https://github.com/joeyh/github- backup)

<comment><USER15> Sounds good :-) Are you actually using it? What's your experience using it to try to back up an organisation account?

edit: "github-backup does not log into GitHub, so it cannot backup private repositories." So, looks like that won't do it for us, sorry :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Strangely, pulling from and pushing to github works. Just that no page on their website loads.

<comment><USER18> The git hosting is fairly independent of the web site. It happens fairly frequently that one is down and the other isn't. The git hosting has a resilient distributed back end designed to maintain redundant replicas and be highly available. The web site is, I believe, a huge Rails app.

<comment><USER19> Not only the website, all the github pages sites were down also

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Latest update [0] says:

      Service is recovering and we are continuing to monitor.

[0] [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages)

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://status.github.com/messages/2016-07-21](https://status.github.com/messages/2016-07-21)

by the way, why the status from July 15, 2016 to July 21, 2016 is red ?

<comment><USER21> It looks like they've lost a chunk of data - the last items in my news feed are from the 14th of July.

<comment><USER22> My activity is missing on my activity page, but the issue I just filed like an hour ago is there on my contributions page. I suspect that perhaps some of the feeds and lists have to repopulate, but nothing is really missing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Github was good while it lasted. Back to SourceForge.

<comment><USER12> Then if SF goes down we'll go back to emails & patches. Issues will be tracked with post-its & todo lists and communicated by voice.

<comment><USER24> Young blood here. Can we go further?

<comment><USER14> There's only so far tin can and string will go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is the new "It's compiling!"

</comment><comment><USER24> I would like to take this moment to remind everyone the new episode of Mr Robot is out.

</comment><comment><USER26> Are there companies out there that include Github as a critical part of their infrastructure such that if the web front end or GIT hosting goes down that their production servers are affected?

I'm sure there are but how many people would actually have been affected by this specific outage which only seemed to affect the web front end?

<comment><USER27> I've been planning to do a static company page, deployed as a GH organisation page. Maybe I should have a fail over plan that can run off of S3 or something, and a short TTL on the DNS records...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Well that was scary. I pushed some changes and noticed the CI server didn't do anything and it reported no changes. So I checked the PR and sure enough it doesn't show any of my latest commits although git seems to think all is well.

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks like it's up again.

<comment><USER30> and down again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Yeah, I noticed.

Saw that Syncthing had an update for the desktop-version and wanted to check that the Android-client was on roughly the same version number, so that the protocols wouldn't be incompatible.

And because GitHub was down, I couldn't check the changelog, meaning that I had to go to such crazy measures as opening the Syncthing-app to check what protocol-version it displayed, which turned out to be a hundred times quicker than rustling through some changelog, but uh, something something, ramble ramble.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is why you keep your code in a GitLab self hosted machine with 2 cheap disks in raid. Github should be used as mirror.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd be interested to see what exactly caused this. They are usually very good about preventing downtime.

</comment><comment><USER34> Probably a DDoS from a foreign actor.

<comment><USER35> What are the main motivations for foreign actors to DDoS GitHub?

<comment><USER36> There have in the past been some ddos attacks that were most likely by a foreign actor, but they were directed against individual repo's that contained material that the attacker wanted to suppress.

See [http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/ddos-attacks-that- cr...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/ddos-attacks-that-crippled- github-linked-to-great-firewall-of-china/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks like github lost two weeks of its public activity data.

</comment><comment><USER37> Obligatory "If only Git was a distributed system" snarky comment.

But this is seriously not a good time. Using gh-pages, hard deadline tomorrow morning.

<comment><USER38> Might [https://surge.sh](https://surge.sh) help?

<comment><USER37> Sure, but the stuff I need is already hosted on github. As is most of the API docs I need.

At the very least I need URLs for my stuff so I can put them in things I'm writing. But I need to check github to find them.

Basically, every 3rd thing I looked up in the last 20min was hosted on github.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> GitHub needs to move slower and break less things. When was the last time Google was down for more than a minute?

<comment><USER16> The world ought to move faster, so that the red on status page would appear green (Doppler effect [0]).

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> They say everything is operating normally but my latest commits are still missing. Have they lost data?

</comment><comment><USER40> Everyone should have a mirror on gitlab or bitbucket

</comment><comment><USER41> Don't worry, it will come back soon

</comment><comment><USER42> Github downtime is pizzabreak time

</comment><comment><USER43> All the company stopped, yay!

</comment><comment><USER44> Major service outage...

</comment><comment><USER43> Time to procrastinate.

</comment><comment><USER45> Seems straightforward.

<comment><USER46> 500, everything I ever built is on github including my webpages, I am screwed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> my blog is hosting on github pages.

</comment><comment><USER48> back to normal now

</comment><comment><USER49> And it's up!

</comment><comment><USER50> I guess its up

</comment><comment><USER51> github pls

</comment><comment><USER52> How it's possible in the modern world with all software development practices that project as github.com can be down for more than 10 minutes?

<comment><USER53> It's pretty amazing it wasn't down for more than 30 minutes.</comment></comment>


Scientists create crystal which would allow us to breathe underwater - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-create-crystal-which-could-allow-us-to-breathe-underwater-9772871.html

<comment><USER2> Read the update:

> _Update:_ [...] _Prf McKenzie made a calculation error. Pls note that it is > not a SPOONFUL of this stuff, that we need to rid a room of oxygen. It is a > bucket (10 litres)._

Still some details don't make sense:

> _A few grains contain enough oxygen for one breath, and as the material can > absorb oxygen from the water around the diver and supply the diver with it, > the diver will not need to bring more than these few grains._

If the material is so good absorbing oxygen, it will be difficult to make it release the oxygen again. So while diving you don't need the oxygen tanks, but you need the batteries to heat the material to release the oxygen. I'd like to see the actual calculation of the necessary weight, volume and reliability.

> [...] _the crystal could be valuable for lung cancer patients who must carry > heavy tanks around with them,_ [...]

This user case _may_ be more realistic, because you can plug the equipment and recharge the batteries in any building you go, and in the 12v plug of the car, but it would not be useful for a long field trip. But the story has so much hype that I'm still suspicious.</comment>


Ask yc.news: Opinions on EC2? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking into Amazon's EC2 "web service", and I'm wondering if anyone else here has looked at/utilized it.  What are its strengths and weaknesses?  What did you use it for?  What should it not be used for? <comment><USER2> I use EC2 and I do swear by it. I see the initial extra effort you need to put in to get it to work right (designing for failover etc) as: 'the more you sweat in practice, the less you bleed in battle'.

I first ported a toy app that I wrote (<http://www.instantwordsearch.com>) to EC2 - as an exercise. I personally learnt a lot in the process. Now I use EC2 for everything I do. It is a _LOT_ of fun (imho).

Interesting links: [http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/amazon-ec2-for-people-who- prefe...](http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/amazon-ec2-for-people-who-prefer- debian-and-python-over-fedora-and-java/) [http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/custom- debian-ec2-amis-from-xen...](http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/custom-debian- ec2-amis-from-xen-images/)

<comment><USER3> Hm... the toy app you ported took about 5 seconds to respond. Slo-o-o-o-ow. Is that EC2 overhead?

This is the kind of thing we were trying to avoid and ultimately (again) decided on our own servers in a data center.

<comment><USER2> It is near instantaneous for me and I am in Seattle,WA,USA. I've heard from many sources that AWS is slow if you are outside the US. Someone even brought this up in the AWS dev conference and the Amazon guys just dodged it and gave a generic 'things are being improved' response.

If <http://www.instantwordsearch.com/> look up is painfully slow but <http://www.instantwordsearch.com/backstage.html> (statically served 103KB text) is very fast, then you can conclude that the problem is with my app. Otherwise it might be safe to blame EC2.

<comment><USER3> I am in Austin, TX and the front page took 5 seconds. I did not type anything or clicked anywhere.

The problem with EC2 and other super-managed hosting solutions (Joyent comes to mind) is inconsistency: I am sure they're moving VMs around, and occasionally they end up on overloaded servers.

<comment><USER4> But I am equally sure that EC2 does not oversell CPU/RAM resources and does not move VMs around. I don't think Xen even supports memory overcommit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We're announcing a product that manages EC2 instances in the next week or so (along with Solaris Zones, Xen, and vserver instances). So far we're seeing pretty good results with the people who are using EC2, but reliability is currently less than ideal. If EC2 were on the various hosting reliability charts I'm pretty sure it'd be down in the bottom half of the pack (and given some of the podunk three-server operations out there calling themselves "hosting providers" this is pretty dismal). As far as I can tell, you can expect several minutes of downtime every month, and sometimes longer. Most of the top tier hosts average a couple of minutes per year downtime...but the fluid nature of EC2 should make it possible to get near 100% uptime...when Amazon takes a network segment down, they can theoretically do a live migration of your instances. So far, they don't seem to actually have the capability to do so.

The S3 piece of the equation brings it back up in usefulness...but I don't know that I'd want to rely on it exclusively for my web applications just yet, unless high volume storage was a core part of my problem domain.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've not used it, but have a read of this: [http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/07/04/AmazonEC2S3Does...](http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/07/04/AmazonEC2S3DoesntCutItForRealApplications.aspx)

<comment><USER7> That post ("Amazon EC2 + S3 Doesn't Cut it for Real Applications") contains a false statement which the author has not corrected, even though commenters there quickly pointed out its falsehood. The falsehood is: "There is no persistent storage in EC2 so if your virtual server goes down for any reason such as taking it down to install security patches or a system crash, all your data is lost."

Instances can reboot, under operator control or due to a crash, and still retain their existing hard drive storage. Only less frequent 'instance termination' causes a loss of hard drive contents.

True, there are no guarantees that any instance won't be terminated by Amazon or other system failures at any time, so you're supposed to have your own backup and persistence strategy. But in practice, full terminations are rare, and Amazon has even given warnings when system upgrades mean large instance turnover is expected. (Though, there is no guarantee they will do so.)

So the falsehoods above are "[data is lost] if your virtual server goes down for any reason" and both concrete examples given, "taking it down to install security patches" and "system crash".

<comment><USER8> Three days ago I received an email from Amazon alerting me that "one or more of your instances are running on hosts degraded due to hardware failure.", and giving me a week to migrate to another instance. I have a script that creates daily instance images as a back-up procedure, so the "migration" was just a matter of starting another instance using the most recent image and I was up and running.

I looked back on my logs and found out that the particular degraded instance was running since June without any problems or shutdowns. Not bad for a VPS...

I'm very aware that Amazon provides no guarantees, but I have to say that my confidence on EC2 increased after this incident.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it's super useful for certain kinds of things where you need lots of servers on-demand. For most startups I think boring old fashioned dedicated server accounts are the way to go. The price, simplicity, and control is unbeatable IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER10> We run a live video cluster on EC2 that scaled from 10 nodes to 100+ and back again several times. Amazon keeps things running smoothly even when we're pushing close to 2gbps of video to 14,000 simultaneous clients. So I would say it performs very well for jobs requiring lots of computation or bandwidth.

However... we have our web servers in a colo. Ping times to EC2 aren't fantastic, so we use a traditional CDN for static content and a colo for application servers in order to keep things snappy.

</comment><comment><USER11> I talked to a guy last night at TC40 who swears by EC2. But he recommends using RightScale on top of it. I've given only a cursory glance at RS, but it looks interesting. And the guy just sold his company in the past week so it definitely worked for him.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> First impression:

My requests time out an awful lot:

Read timeout. Please try again later. If this persists please visit the AWS developer forums to see if it's the result of a known issue.

That and doubts about permanent storage are downers.

<comment><USER2> Can you please give more details about your set up, the country you are accessing EC2 from etc? I am curious to know coz I am in the process of putting all my eggs in the EC2 basket now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in Austria, and I quite often ssh into servers in the US, with no problems at all. I've been having lots of issues with the EC2 tools timing out, though.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I've heard that many non-US users have problems with EC2.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Go Parallel - <AUTHOR> http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/06/18/go-parallel

<comment><USER2> I haven't taken much time to really read over the Go documentation or work through their walk-through the entire way but this is just a simple and elegant description of go routines and channels that just clicks for me.</comment>


Ask PG: Is Founders at Work 2 still pending? - mck-

The Mixergy interview with PG (Feb 2010) mentions Jessica working on a second edition of Founders at Work.
PG: "You know, that is her deepest wish. If she is watching this, she'll be laughing so much at this point because that's what she would like the most too to be able to spend more time on the new version of Founders at Work. There's a new, she's working on a new edition, with a bunch of new interviews."
Any updates on this?
[1]: http://mixergy.com/y-combinator-paul-graham/ <comment><AUTHOR> Yes, she still plans to, but we have two small children and spending time with them is more important to her.

<comment> mck- That is the most satisfying answer; I couldn't agree more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I hope so, I really enjoyed Founders at Work. I read it when I was 16, loved making things on the web but had no idea about startups in the Valley, being from London. Jessica's talk at Startup School felt like an update, which was great.

</comment><comment><USER3> Project "Founders at Work II" should be funded by YC. May it gets completed.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wasn't aware of that Paul Graham interview on Mixergy. Thanks for sharing the link.

<comment> mck- You're welcome -- I only found out about them recently too</comment></comment>


Comparison of the aesthetics and design of luxury car engines  - <AUTHOR> http://osunick.com/2013/02/01/engines/

<comment><USER2> For something like the lexus, where everything except the dipstick and brake fluid cap are accessible, I wonder why they wouldn't get truly innovative and do away with the concept of a standard opening hood.

For the most part, this will only be worked on by people in the know. Does the hood of a car have to open for everybody? Can't we get access to all the more common bits by a gas cap like flap?

<comment><USER3> It's been done on a few cars. The MCC Smart car is mid-engined, so it features s "service flap" where the hood would be for things like fluid reservoirs. The engine bay is accessible by lifting a flap in the trunk. The Audi A2 was front-engined, but used a service hatch arrangement as a weight-saving measure - the hood was designed to lift off completely and had no hinges or prop.

A service hatch would be a fairly substantial design problem on a performance car. It means that the manufacturer is forced to locate the various fluid bottles close together, most likely near the very front of the car. This is prime real-estate for air intakes and radiators, because taking air from the high-pressure region at the nose has double benefit - more airflow where you want it, less drag where you don't. Elaborate routing of fluid hoses and reservoirs would mean extra weight, which is generally anathema in the car industry.

<comment><USER4> The Porsche Boxster and Cayman have no service hatch for the engine at all, and a tiny section under the hood that has a few reservoirs for fluids.</comment></comment></comment>


Social Science Palooza - one paragraph summaries of human behavior studies - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/opinion/07brooks.html?_r=4&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print

<comment><USER2> "Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they're facing attractive female opponents, even though the risk-taking didn't improve their performance."This one</comment>


Ask HN: How do you pick a niche for webdesign services? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> do you mean by industry? or geographic location?</comment>


Rails 5 Drops EventMachine Dependency - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/23305 <comment><USER2> Nice to see the dev team working on this (and thanks to everyone involved). Though it should be noted that according to Mike Perham (developer of Sidekiq and Inspeqtor), the EventMachine dependency remains if you use Redis: [https://twitter.com/mperham/status/693171320415072256](https://twitter.com/mperham/status/693171320415072256)

To quote him on the subject: "To be clear, this is progress but I wish EM wasn't required at all".

EDIT: To be fair on the topic, one of the core team members, Andrew White, also mentions that "Everyone on the core team wants to get rid of EventMachine if possible". So it's just a matter of time I guess.

<comment><USER3> Could you (or someone better informed) give a brief summary on the drawbacks of event-machine and the plus-sides to removing it as a dependency?

<comment><USER4> The biggest problem is it's not as well maintained as core Ruby is and working with it is highly quirky to put it mildly. There's a handful of people that know how to write proper event-driven Ruby code and many of these are not actively involved in the EventMachine world any longer.

It's basically a thin Ruby wrapper around libevent and isn't nearly as neat and tidy as something like Node.js is by comparison.

There's also a lot of long-standing animosity towards it. Example: [http://www.slideshare.net/KyleDrake/hybrid-concurrency- patte...](http://www.slideshare.net/KyleDrake/hybrid-concurrency-patterns)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: HyperApp – 1k JavaScript framework for building web applications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp/ <comment><USER2> If you're interesting in a reactive template library that doesn't require a compiler for non-standard JavaScript syntax, check out a library I've been working on for a little while now, lit-html: [https://github.com/Polymer/lit- html](https://github.com/Polymer/lit-html)

Where JSX would look like this:

        const view = (state, actions) => (

{state.count}

            <button onclick={() => actions.down(1)}>-</button>
            <button onclick={() => actions.up(1)}>+</button>

        )

The lit-html would be:

        const view = (state, actions) => html`

{state.count}

            <button onclick={() => actions.down(1)}>-</button>
            <button onclick={() => actions.up(1)}>+</button>

        `;

Nearly identical. lit-html uses `<template>`s and cloning, so that it doesn't have to do any expensive VDOM diffs.

<comment><USER3> > Nearly identical. lit-html uses `<template>`s and cloning, so that it > doesn't have to do any expensive VDOM diffs.

So… it's not doing reconciliations and is just replacing the entire tree on every render, losing things like cursor position and forcing the browser to re-render and re-layout the entire thing?

<comment><USER4> Highly recommended to watch [https://youtu.be/Io6JjgckHbg](https://youtu.be/Io6JjgckHbg)

<comment><USER3> Yeah nah, I'm not watching a 30mn video on something I'm not interested in to get what amounts to a 2-paragraphs answer.

<comment><USER5> 30m sends you home? Watch it on 2x and skip parts you aren't interested in.

<comment><USER6> I really want a way to get a generated voice recognition transcript for all that content people really think needs to be in video form. 2x playback is still 14:45 too long in this instance.

<comment><USER2> It's not that anyone thought it _needed_ to be in video form, it's just a conference talk. For reading there's the readme here: [https://github.com/Polymer/lit-html](https://github.com/Polymer/lit-html) and documentation site here: [http://polymer.github.io/lit- html/](http://polymer.github.io/lit-html/)

They both go into how lit-html works and how it doesn't just throw away and recreate the DOM on re-renders, though I admit the docs could still be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an exceptionally simple library to use in place of React. Both its performance and the development experience have been great.

My company's been using it in production for more than a year now without any issues. Highly recommend giving it a look.

<comment><USER8> Just out of curiosity, what was your use case that you deemed this a better option than react for?

<comment><USER7> We use Hyperapp to power our most complex UIs (decision trees, onboarding sequences, etc.). We didn't need any of the existing React ecosystem for that, and by removing React, we saw several benefits:

1\. Smaller library for faster page loads

2\. Simpler API, docs and library made it easy to get started and understand what's happening behind the scenes as well as debug any issues we faced

3\. We aren't supporting a project run by Facebook, which I personally view as a good thing given Facebook's many previous issues. Facebook's patent clause (while it no longer exists) was a factor in our original decision.

I would choose Hyperapp again for my company, and I use it for personal projects as well.

<comment><USER9> Why not Preact?

<comment><USER7> It came down to preference. I find HyperApp's codebase simpler to read/reason about (it's a pretty straightforward single file), and I prefer its API over React/Preact's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not very performant compared to other v-doms [https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework- benchmark/master/we...](https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework- benchmark/master/webdriver-ts-results/table.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an old benchmark, we're in the same ballpark as React now. Hyperapp is also not just a virtual DOM, but also a state management "all-in-one" kind of thing.

<comment><USER11> It's not old, it was last updated two days ago:

[https://github.com/krausest/js-framework- benchmark/commits/m...](https://github.com/krausest/js-framework- benchmark/commits/master/webdriver-ts-results/table.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant the benchmark is using an older version of Hyperapp.

[https://github.com/krausest/js-framework- benchmark/tree/mast...](https://github.com/krausest/js-framework- benchmark/tree/master/frameworks/hyperapp-v1.2.0-keyed)

The js-framework-benchmarks is very much maintained and actively developed. It's our go-to benchmark when fine-tuning for a new release.

In addition to that, the latest code on master (still unpublished) includes some notable improvements:

[https://github.com/hyperapp/hyperapp/pull/663](https://github.com/hyperapp/hyperapp/pull/663)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've seen "Show HN: HyperApp" type of submissions at least 5 times earlier. Congrats, you made a 1Kb JS library. Please stop spamming HN though.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hyperapp&sort=byPopularity&pre...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hyperapp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=1&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER13> I don't even get why it is important that it's 1kb. Give me a library with great API and easy to use. Nobody cares if library is 1kb or 100kb (minified).

<comment><USER14> > Nobody cares if library is 1kb or 100kb (minified).

You do if your app needs to be mobile-friendly. 100kb can easily add an extra second or two to the page load on a bad enough mobile connection.

<comment><USER15> It isn't just on bad connections: [https://medium.com/dev-channel/the-cost-of- javascript-84009f...](https://medium.com/dev-channel/the-cost-of- javascript-84009f51e99e)

<comment><USER13> Article has 300kb+ of javascript on mobile, loads pretty fast on 3G. I don't know what you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the same vein there's Mithril. It's 8kb but includes a router and a fetch polyfill!

I love these little JS frameworks :)

[https://mithril.js.org/](https://mithril.js.org/)

<comment><USER17> Mithril is nice. One downside is it doesn't lend itself really well to compound components. Everything has to be passed down through attributes.

<comment><USER18> True, but by passing the same object as an attribute to a pair of Mithril components, I can have them share state. (Can be restricted to the scope of a parent component if desired.) Is there an additional requirement for compound components?

<comment><USER17> There isn't a built-in way to detect type of component. It would be useful when you want a parent component to encapsulate certain logic/behavior but not hard-code the presentation. I know there's name() but it only works if my component is a function. Otherwise I think I need to assign some special identifier, which sucks.

You can see a great presentation of the technique in this video: [https://youtu.be/hEGg-3pIHlE](https://youtu.be/hEGg-3pIHlE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love hyperapp! As someone who thinks Elm's architecture is ideal for building webapps, it's great to be able to almost replicate it in JS. It's simple enough to get started quickly but still robust enough to build actual apps and not just toys.

<comment><USER20> You might be interested in this: [https://github.com/pakx/the-mithril- diaries/wiki/Coming-From...](https://github.com/pakx/the-mithril- diaries/wiki/Coming-From-Elm)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hyperapp will be a lot more Elm-like in a future release, see this too: [https://github.com/hyperapp/hyperapp/issues/672](https://github.com/hyperapp/hyperapp/issues/672)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I got confused thinking this was a new thing from Zeit -- who made Next.js and Hyper.app ([https://hyper.is/](https://hyper.is/))

<comment><AUTHOR> HyperTerminal

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This makes me almost want to write web code again - compared to things like React and Angular 1-2-3-4-5-6.

<comment><USER23> Just curious what intrigues you about this framework in ways that React does not?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hyperapp is Elm for the rest of us. I wouldn't compare it to React as they are solving slightly different problems. Hyperapp's state management is built-into the framework. In this way, Hyperapp is a tad more "high-level" (abstract) than React.

<comment><USER24> > Hyperapp is Elm for the rest of us.

Curious who you think Elm is for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Elm is for anyone. I love Elm.

"for the rest of us" is a common English language idiom/phrase.

[https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41687/meaning- of...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41687/meaning-of-the- phrase-for-the-rest-of-us)

I know the idiom mostly from For Dummies' books. I'm implying that Elm, while great, is not as user-friendly, intuitive or easy to use as Hyperapp.

I'm saying that Hyperapp is deeply inspired by Elm, but also designed with extreme devotion to details, minimalism, and simplicity.

<comment><USER24> > I'm implying that Elm, while great, is not as user-friendly, intuitive or > easy to use as Hyperapp

First, Elm is designed to be user friendly. The designers of the language have put effort into ensuring the error messages are understandable. The messages even include information on how to potentially resolve them! Elm's error messages are much more friendly than most Javascript error messages I've seen.

Second, there is nothing intuitive about programming. If there were we wouldn't need years of training to gain proficiency: you could simply give a human being a computer and they would be able to do it in the absence of conscious reasoning. Despite our best efforts and research there has yet to emerge a language that is intuitive.

> designed with extreme devotion to details, minimalism, and simplicity

I believe Elm is also designed with these concepts in mind.

It sounds like it's not the kind of simplicity you're used to and that may be why Hyperapp is _for you_.

I interpreted the phrase, _for the rest of us_ , to be a false equivalence between all programmers that do not use Elm and programmers with the same opinions and needs as you. I think I understand your point better now but it would have been clearer if you had left out that phrase and enumerated why it's better for _people who need X_ instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've tried hyperapp and liked it a lot. I loved that can read full source code and actually understand what it is doing under the hood.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a crucial aspect of Hyperapp that often goes unnoticed because simply no one in their sane judgment expects it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This looks pretty awesome! Inspired by hyperscript I assume?

[https://github.com/hyperhype/hyperscript](https://github.com/hyperhype/hyperscript)

Question: I was looking over the source and noted that you weren't building your virtual dom with the document fragment API [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/DocumentFra...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/DocumentFragment)

Is there any particular reason why? I'm curious because it's my general understanding that creating a document fragment and attaching your vnodes to that and then pushing to the dom is more efficient especially for diffing

<comment><USER27> I have heard that as long as elements aren't actually in the DOM, they are as fast as fragments, so you can use document.createElement instead of fragments. No idea if that's true or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is the best thing I discovered since leaving React. x10 dev speed for me, not to speak about loading times. Superb work!

</comment><comment><USER29> So far, the Infinite monkey theorem is just giving us an infinite number of javascript frameworks, and no Shakespeare

<comment><USER30> I'd disagree. React is very much a "Shakespeare" of javascript frameworks. It has solved UI dev by making even the most complex types of UIs predictably programmable. (Note: not including redux in this, which no developer who owns their time would use)

<comment><USER29> >>It has solved UI dev by making even the most complex types of UIs predictably programmable.

What's that they say about each and every framework. IMHO there is no Shakespeare and all JS frameworks will eventually die once web assembly is in place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How does this compare to Preact?

<comment><AUTHOR> I replied to another similar comment but the TL;DR is that both are solving different things. Preact is a React 15 clone.

Hyperapp is basically Elm in JavaScript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Side question: Isn't it grossly inefficient that in Redux, you have reducers that return an entirely new state object? Wouldn't it be better to return some kind of data that represents just the diff you intend to make, like {op: INCREMENT, arg: 1, key: "Foo"}?

<comment><USER14> It depends. If you are making a shallow copy every time via `Object.assign` or the `{...obj}` syntax, then yes, it is rather inefficient. But a) for many (most?) apps it's Good Enough™, and b) you can always use a specialized library like Immutable.js to greatly reduce the overhead.

I'm not sure about what would be the benefit of the scheme you are proposing. Are you proposing that the diff then gets applied directly to the state (`state.foo += 1`)? If so, you would remove a powerful assumption that Redux gives you: that a state object will never change from underneath you after being returned from the store. If, instead, you would make a shallow copy of every value affected by the diff, then you haven't gained anything over Redux, and in fact have made the API significantly more complicated for no benefit (aside from maybe slightly less boilerplate for deep paths).

<comment><USER32> Oh right, immutable data structures are good for exactly this situation. I've been in mutation land for a while now. :)

However, now I'm newly confused: Yes, I'm proposing that the diff then get applied directly to the state by the Redux infrastructure, and I don't understand why that would break any important assumptions provided by Redux. Is there an example you could give of how this might create a problem?

<comment><USER14> You would have to be much more disciplined with your approach. With Redux, if I store a reference to any part of the state, I am guaranteed that the value will never be changed by Redux itself (so, unless I manually mutate it, it is guaranteed to be frozen [0]). Because of this, I can do things like safely store a value off of the Redux state inside a component, and when the state changes, I can compare the new value against my stored value to see if it has changed. If you directly mutate state, then the reference would update in- place, so there is no way to compare changes locally without first making a copy.

It also goes the other way: _I can 't accidentally change the state_ by mutating the object I get back. With your scheme, any "accidental" mutation on any part of the state will _actually_ change the state. This opens up a whole world of bugs, because any time you want to store part of the state locally (inside a component, for instance), you have to remember to make a copy if you want to guarantee that no unwanted side effects occur. (Plus, getting into the convention of "everything is immutable" means you can generally be much more confident about passing objects around without fear of them being mutated unexpectedly.)

Edit: Now that I think about it, what you are proposing sounds pretty similar to MobX.[1] You should check it out if you haven't already. I personally strongly prefer Redux for the reasons I mentioned, but it's a pretty solid library either way.

[0]: In development, it's very easy to enforce this with Redux by simply calling `Object.freeze` on the state in the root reducer, completely preventing the state object from being mutated.

[1]: [https://mobx.js.org/](https://mobx.js.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How does this compare to Inferno, which you can also use JSX and Hyperscript with - [https://github.com/infernojs/inferno](https://github.com/infernojs/inferno)

This seems smaller in footprint, but does it also win in runtime performance and stability?

<comment><USER19> Hyperapp can use JSX via the transform-react-jsx plugin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've really enjoyed using Hyperapp so far. Looking forward to building more with it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Does it work well with inputs? (text, checkboxes, radios, selects)

<comment><USER36> Seems so [https://codepen.io/anon/pen/yjrydY?editors=0010](https://codepen.io/anon/pen/yjrydY?editors=0010)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It looks more like Elm

<comment><AUTHOR> If all goes according to plan, it will look even more like Elm in the next major release (2.0).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wow, there's an overwhelming total of 2 comments in the source file. The first indicates a constant value. The second lacks all context. Looks like typical JavaScript code.

<comment><USER39> This comment violates both the site guidelines ("Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.") and the Show HN guidelines: see "In Comments" in [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

<comment><USER38> Understood. I'll refrain from such comments in the future.

<comment><USER39> Appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Another Virtual DOM thing - which is obviously wrong.

<comment><USER25> Can you explain (or link some source) why is Virtual DOM wrong? Actually curious.

<comment><USER41> Hi. I'm the author of Mithril (one of the virtual dom frameworks mentioned elsewhere in this thread), so I think can answer that.

To be honest, there's nothing inherently "wrong" with it. There are various techniques to implement templating engines and they all have pros and cons.

Lately, VDOM performance in micro benchmarks has sort of plateaued, and recently non-vdom systems like Svelte (an AOT compilation system) and Surplus (a KVO system) have been making some splash as potential candidates to surpass vdom performance. One could argue that it would be "wrong" or "a waste of time" to try to one-up template performance by attempting to make a new vdom implementation because existing ones are pretty much as optimized as they can be. Since there hasn't been nearly as much effort put into alternative algorithms, it probably would be more fruitful to explore a non-vdom approach instead.

Do note though that I'm talking about R&D sort of stuff above. For people building actual apps, vdom performance is generally good enough for a vast majority of real-world use cases (evidenced by React's popularity) and one of its appeals is that it lends itself to being manually optimizable it if you do end up with a ridiculously ginormous DOM.

<comment><USER42> > Since there hasn't been nearly as much effort put into alternative > algorithms

Angular2+ team is actually have done an awesome job at experimenting in this problem space. And they've moved away from generating code that is similar to what Svelte does long time ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why?

</comment><comment><USER44> This one is 25 bytes gzipped [http://vanilla-js.com/](http://vanilla-js.com/)

<comment><USER26> You do realize that this is simply a page that advocates using plain JavaScript and isn't an actual "framework" right?

I mean I can see the point you are trying to make, but it feels mildly disingenuous to link to this without explaining what you really mean.

<comment><USER45> It's just a joke really.

<comment><USER38> I have a better one.

Knock knock... blank page... <Ctrl>+<Shift>+: "Uncaught TypeError: cannot read property 'a' of undefined."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HAMR – 3D Hand Shape and Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/hamr-3d-hand-shape-and-pose-estimation-from-a-single-rgb-image-225cba26ce2 <comment><USER2> In other news, there's a Google MediaPipe hand tracking example.[1][2] It's still documented as iOS/Android only, but there's now a hand_tracking directory under linux desktop examples![3] Results have been mixed.[4]

[1] [https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/on-device-real-time- hand-t...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/on-device-real-time-hand- tracking-with.html) [2] [https://github.com/google/mediapipe/blob/master/mediapipe/do...](https://github.com/google/mediapipe/blob/master/mediapipe/docs/hand_tracking_mobile_gpu.md) [3] [https://github.com/google/mediapipe/tree/master/mediapipe/ex...](https://github.com/google/mediapipe/tree/master/mediapipe/examples/desktop) [4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwgjgT9hu6A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwgjgT9hu6A) (Aug 31)

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't see any mention of how long it takes to recover a mesh from an image. I imagine it's a significant amount of time, not including training.

What I wonder is, if this technology was fast enough, could it be used to caption sign language?

The full publication: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09305](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09305)

</comment><comment><USER4> This looks amazing and really useful for real-time sign language translation!

<comment><USER5> It's worth paying attention to the deaf community's thoughts on any tech that comes along, gloves etc., for translating sign language. Short version, ASL is more than hand gestures and past efforts at solving this tend to focus more on assisting the hearing than the deaf.

This is a really good write up on the issue of signing gloves and tech: [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/why-s...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/why- sign-language-gloves-dont-help-deaf-people/545441/)

<comment><USER6> Thank you for the constructive reply and the link, it will certainly be useful. It is hard for me to properly respond, when this topic (sign language machine translation) comes up. You cannot encode sign language as text! You generally cannot understand what two people are talking about informally, if you don't know them. Oh well...

<comment><USER5> My high school had a fairly large deaf program. I took Latin with a majority of the students being deaf/hearing impaired. Best part was watching the translator relay my smart-ass jokes to the other students. I'd say something and a half minute later get people grinning at me. It was a fun experience and helped prepare me for performing in other countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Other work: [https://github.com/xinghaochen/awesome-hand-pose- estimation](https://github.com/xinghaochen/awesome-hand-pose-estimation)

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe the soli radar is just unnecessary, if you have a low light camera or just illuminate with IR.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is one problem where getting the results in software is very impressive, but the problem becomes much simpler with just a modicum of extra hardware.

LeapMotion[1] devices accomplish this with nothing more than a pair of cameras in a matchbox, in real time. And this kind of hardware is already becoming standard on cell phones and laptops.

Still, the killer obstacle for the applications I was trying to make was not precision, but _latency_.

Amazing work on HAMR - I wish they had the latency numbers in the article too!

[1][https://www.leapmotion.com/](https://www.leapmotion.com/)

<comment><USER9> Interesting. I didn't notice any significant latency when I was using it.

Or were you trying to make musical instruments?

<comment><USER8> >Or were you trying to make musical instruments?

Bingo :) The latency was pretty low, and good for UI, but you'd want <10ms total latency for musical instruments.

<comment><USER9> I can relate. My biggest disappointment in this regard were Android devices - such flexibility and potential! But still, they couldn't deliver.

This goes to show that consumer-grade hardware(and associated software) is not up to par with the requirements of making music.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Contemporary Views on Serverless and Implications - <AUTHOR> https://m.subbu.org/contemporary-views-on-serverless-and-implications-1c5907c611d8 <comment><USER2> Well, the people who dismissed the term 'serverless' early on as trite, misleading, and vague were proven right: these days it's a cloudy notion about something loosely cloud-related, such that posts like need to exist that can clarifying all the possible meanings with one-liners using real terms of art; yet the term clearly has cachet with technical-ish and nontechnical decision- makers as a Solution that unlocks Value and other more-good-than-bad outcomes that are bullet-shaped and made out of silver.

Players who jump on the term train are complicit in milking the confusion of people for gain. And that's perhaps much of the reason why we haven't unlocked the concept's value. To move forward, it would be useful to clear the air at the start, but the direction that consultants, customers, cloud providers, and developers will take the message is far from certain.

<comment><USER3> No offense but this comment is very pretentious. I think you're trying to say you don't like the term serverless itself. Your writing, on the other hand, tries really hard to sound intelligent and takes 2 paragraphs to state something you could have stated in less than a sentence.

<comment><USER4> ... an ad hominem argument from a throwaway account probably supports the OP's point, for what it's worth. I'm not sure you achieved the intended goal here, or what that goal was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I find this article frustrating. Yes, basically you can classify any managed online service as "Serverless". Amazon was somewhat clever when using this term for Lambda, although personally I hate it (there are servers in the back end, all that's changed is who provisions, manages, and supports them).

On the Berkeley paper:

>For a model training problem: "Lambda's limited resources and data-shipping architecture mean that running this algorithm on Lambda is 21×slower and 7.3× more expensive than running on EC2."

Did Amazon pitch that Lambda is always the better solution that EC2 for every problem set?

An experienced engineer or architect must be able to weigh the pros and cons to decide on which solution is correct. Lambda, FaaS etc doesn't solve every use case. Is the author just trying to point out this specific fact or is it a frustration that Lambda isn't a silver bullet?

>It is foolish to assume that we've all the serverless primitives necessary to solve all current and future programming problems.

Who is arguing we have them all?

<comment><USER5> > Did Amazon pitch that Lambda is always the better solution that EC2 for > every problem set?

Nope, which is why they have things like [https://aws.amazon.com/batch/](https://aws.amazon.com/batch/) as well. I don't know why the paper picks on lambda either.

<comment><USER3> Lambda is pretty useful. My team had a use case for data pipelines and some quick, easy monitors that do health checks. I despise the term serverless, but yeah... I see posts like this one, and it's amazing even among seemingly intelligent circles, there are so many folks who will shit on something or a concept with absolutely no alternative or solution from them.

Don't just complain. If you know of a better way, tell us or go do it yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me serverless is inverting the traditional client-server model of the web. Provided the right application code the user doesn't need the server. Conversely the server needs the user primarily for business justifications. If there is ever an opportunity for disruption this is certainly it (if done correctly).

</comment><comment><USER7> Serverless seems to me like another one of those mostly fashion-driven things where the actual use cases are applicable only to a very tiny minority of developers.

If you're small then serverless provides no real advantage over Docker or a VM with a small footprint that's easy to update.

If you're large enough that you want automated infrastructure scaling, well, technical considerations as far as things such as latency, service dependencies and data storage become complex enough that you're going to need a bunch of custom components and people who can manage them.

It seems like FastCGI has come around again, except that it's way costlier and more difficult.

Things like edge caching and a few latency-sensitive self-contained functions are a few of the very real use cases for this (which CloudFlare and others seem to be working on), but aside from that it's another specialty application that seems to be taking over for no particular reason, much like iterations of NoSQL and other faddish garbage.

<comment><USER8> CGI and FastCGI are _really_ underappreciated as ancestors for this technology. They also mapped the same problem contours - using VM languages means paying the VM startup time cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When AI can code, design, publish to automated infrastructure and get feedback from users, the demand (and salaries) for developers and designers can/may drop precipitously.

<comment><USER10> My job is applying a rigor of thought to unclear and sometimes conflicting specifications, and figuring out what users/clients "really" want. It'll take strong AI to be able to do that.

A less-capable AI may be able turn clear and unambiguous specifications into working code - but someone needs to create those clear and unambiguous specifications.

By analogy, creating a perfect camera will not put artists out of business.</comment></comment>


How to spot a fake review on Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.wikihow.com/Spot-a-Fake-Review-on-Amazon <comment><USER2> Or paste the URL into FakeSpot. Although I have found FS to be incorrect at times, flagging reviews as legit when they clearly are not.

It's becoming more and more widely known that there are numerous items with fake reviews, and Amazon doesn't seem to care. I wonder if this might lead to their downfall?

Along with the counterfeit items[1] and poor price/review count sorting. As a made-up example, an item with three five star reviews can rank higher on sorting than an item with say one hundred reviews with an aggregate of 4.7 stars. I'd take the latter any day. And sort by price; it goes (another made- up example) $2, $2.50, $6, $3...

I like Amazon for Prime, the wide ocean of selection, the reviews -- when not fake. But _caveat emptor_.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/20/birkenstock-quits-amazon- in-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/20/birkenstock-quits-amazon-in-us-after- counterfeit-surge.html)</comment>


A Tour through the Visualization Zoo - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1805128 <comment><USER2> Has anyone seen an example of an effective arc diagram in the wild? I always find them completely opaque. I'm not surprised to learn that ordering the nodes so as to make the diagram readable is a non-trivial problem.

<comment><USER3> Similarly I find parallel coordinates diagrams hard to grasp. I know they show direct and inverse correlation between neighboring variables but surely there are much better tools for that.</comment></comment>


Show HN: SpikeTime – time tracking alternative for project teams and freelancers - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiketime.net Hi guys,
we are following HN on a regular basis and we are quite impressed with the quality feedback. Today we want to show our own product.
Yes, it's another time tracking software. BUT we are freelancing for about 5 years and we found it pretty hard to find a decent time tracking software which is not terribly complicated but still has all the features needed for freelancers or small companies. That's why we decided to build SpikeTime.
We appreciate any feedback.
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Hi guys, we are following HN on a regular basis and we are quite impressed with the quality feedback. Today we want to show our own product. Yes, it's another time tracking software. BUT we are freelancing for about 5 years and we found it pretty hard to find a decent time tracking software which is not terribly complicated but still has all the features needed for freelancers or small companies. That's why we decided to build SpikeTime. We appreciate any feedback. Thanks in advance!</comment>


The trouble with 'floor' and 'ceil' - <AUTHOR> http://mortoray.com/2016/01/05/the-trouble-with-floor-and-ceil/ <comment><USER2> The author of that piece hasn't thought hard enough about the issues. floating point, no matter if it is binary, decimal, base-100, or oct-precision will always cases where numbers are not exactly precise. That is an inherent issue with floating point that must be considered, and the author makes a mistake to attributing his problems to floor() and ceil() instead of floating point.

0.005 works for his domain, and someone else may find that 0.001 is what is right for them, and the existing floor() and ceil() functions give them predictable tools to do that. If he only needs to draw boxes on integer aligned grids, that solution is fine, but it will break all over again if he tries drawing rotated boxes, lines, triangles, etc (plus he'll find other numerical issues that he can currently ignore).

He says 0.005 is an acceptable fuzziness. But now 17.9949999 will round down and 17.9950000 will round up. That cliff is still there; he has just moved it and thinks he solved it. A guy I used to work with called this "squeezing a balloon" \-- you didn't fix the bulge, you just moved it somewhere else.

Finally, he appears to approve that printf prints 18.0 when the input was 17.999999. That is convenient in some cases, but a lie in others:

a = 17.999999 b = 18.0 print a, b --> 18.0, 18.0 print a - b --> 0.0000001

<comment><USER3> I agree my initial examples were not clear enough to illustrate the problem precisely. I've added a section now about idempotance and how this slight varation in floating point is causing my original problem.

Your point about floating point not having exact values is precisely the issue, and that is what my added example tries to demonstrate. My previous article, linked from the intro, about floating point tries to cover that aspect a bit more.

[http://mortoray.com/2015/07/06/essential-facts-about- floatin...](http://mortoray.com/2015/07/06/essential-facts-about-floating- point-calculations/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is "unexpected" about floor(17.999999) to return 17 instead of 18?

Maybe my assumptions are wrong, and this is a truly curious question. I would ALWAYS expect floor to "basically" return the number in front of the ".", however close it is to another number. If you want that, you should use round().

<comment><USER3> This is the "correct" behaviour of `floor` obviously, but the unexpected part has to do with floating point accuracy and use domains.

Numbers will end up slightly lower or higher than an expected value simply due to accuracy in calculations and minor differences in input.

For example, suppose we have two UI elements, one with a width of 80% and the other expressed as a factor as 0.8. Depending on how specifically these are parsed and processed this may result in slightly different values. For the user creating the UI however they'd expect the same result.

The epsilons I introduce into my floor/ceil code is meant to deal with these minor variations.

<comment><USER5> I think another contributor to the author's surprise is this subtle detail about the behavior of Python's `print` statement. From the docs[1]:

Python only prints a decimal approximation to the true decimal value of the binary approximation stored by the machine. If Python were to print the true decimal value of the binary approximation stored for 0.1, it would have to display

        >>> 0.1
        0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625

That is more digits than most people find useful, so Python keeps the number of digits manageable by displaying a rounded value instead

        >>> 0.1
        0.1

[1] [https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/floatingpoint.html](https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/floatingpoint.html)

<comment><USER3> Python actually seems to show a much higher precision than other languages (higher than C's printf default I belive).

Interesting is that print can show an exact representation of any floating point value, but of course 0.1 can't be represented exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is just sweeping the problem under the rug. Round would probably be a better choice for them, but it wouldn't solve the problem, since you can't get rid of that discontinuity.

Generally a good rule of thumb is that unless you are certain you need floor or ceil, use round.

<comment><USER3> Yes, round is usually a safer choice, but in this case we had reasons to use floor and ceil, and thus had to deal with the issue.

I've added a section to the article with a more correct snapping function showing the issue more clearly (I hope).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had some very similar, very troubling PHP code.

      var_export($var) // 18
      json_encode($var) // 18
      serialize($var) // 18i:18;
      var_export($var == 18) // false
      var_export(floor($var)) // 17

Ends up PHP floats have a configurable precision and an actual physical 32/62 bit (depending on the system) in memory value who are separate and some operations use one and some the other. It was particularly troubling because I'd hope to be able to serialize and unserialize numbers losslessly but that was not the case.

<comment><USER8> Can you provide a working 3v4l.org example of this issue? I'm very interested is what triggered it to not output the correct values for json_encode and serialize.</comment></comment>


Having attained middle-income status, Vietnam aims higher - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21703376-having-attained-middle-income-status-vietnam-aims-higher-good-afternoon-vietnam <comment><USER2> Having been there just last week (and every 4 years or so) the speed with which society and businesses move is breathtaking.

In my limited, sub-30-years lifetime, every single time I have visited Vietnam it seemed like visiting a different country.

The first time, there were barely any cars in an ocean of scooters and bikes. Hanoi still looked very much Parisian, with its allées and surface canalisation. I also dimly remember, there was a kind of fascination with all things Western.

The second time, construction sites were everywhere. Also, what somehow stuck out to my teenage brain was the entrance of something. Its earlier absence only became noticeable when it now appeared: Brands. Franchises. Be it milk or Vespa, or Haprosimex, they arrived. Also, entry of the heavenly air conditioners!

The third time, the streets were more congested than ever before. The middle class went to their new middle class supermarkets and demand fueled the availability of foreign goods like sausages and toast. Sill tasted like crap. Mainly because they were the American variety. Local fresh markets were seen by many Vietnamese now as 'poor people's markets' and lacking food safety.

To buy any movie or PC game, you just had to walk into one of the myriads of shops and ask for the CDs or DVD(s). if you knew the Vietnamese name, that is. Which 98% of the time, has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with its original name. With the help of my cousin, I managed to buy 'Mighty Defence of Medieval Fortresses' (Stronghold) and 'Battle of the Three Gods' (Age of Mythology) for about 3 fiddy dollars. Then we proceeded to play the shit out of them the whole summer.

This time, tourists are now relatively common. Vietnamese children (at least in HCMC and Hanoi) have gotten used to them, meaning they won't look at you like you are an Alien if you are non-Asian looking. But they'll still look at you and be very friendly.

KFC, Burger King and Popeyes have arrived.

The biggest change however is: EVERY SINGLE PERSON SEEMS TO HAVE A SMARTPHONE. And they do stuff with it. They use the shit out of it. From the 5 year old learning English on Duolingo, the 20 year old lurking Zalo or zing.vn, to the 80 year old granddad snapping pics of his orchids and mango tree - they are ALL on facebook. Thus, EVERYONE is on the internet. Unfortunately this time I didn't travel to the more remote regions, so I do not know about those. But I can imagine the network effects.

The craziest thing is, coming from a 'developed' first world country in the EU, I have to say Vietnam, and all its people are so infinitely more dynamic than most of Europe. One might say it is due to the youth of the population with the low median age, but it is more the openness of the old to technology that surprises one.

Here, many elders are exceptionally wary of the internet and privacy is hold in high regard (which I think is good!) while in VN everyone readily embraces its possibilities. It's a kind of 'use now, worry/fix later' attitude. Or actually:'use if works, y worry?'.

What does this mean for the future of Vietnam, and the region? What does it mean for Europe; stagnating, left behind, or wisefully treading carefully? in the grand schemes of things and the world? I don't know. Apologies to everyone, I didn't plan to bother you with this wall of a text, maybe the recent impressions needed to be processed desperately. So to anyone who made it this far, thanks for reading dem brain spillings, dunno what to think of it.

What I do know is though, my highest Flappy bird score was 163, and it was the cause of two exams missed.

<comment><USER3> I like HCMC. It feels very cosmopolitan and forward thinking. I think the corruption needs to be sorted out, but it's interesting that even with that there are so many western shops (apparently it was because of the previous president who opened up the country to foreign businesses?).

The canals/waters are still very polluted though but everywhere I go there is construction :).

<comment><USER4> " I think the corruption needs to be sorted out,"

The 'Communism' needs to be sorted out.

<comment><USER2> Tbh VN is only Communist by name these days, plus retaining the power structure and one party system. One could even call it hyper capitalist and it would not be an overstatement. Basically China Light with certain differences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How Asia Works is one of the best books I've read this year. [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B3M47VC/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B3M47VC/)

The handful of countries than have industrialized in the 20th century (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) have taken similar paths that are very different than the policies suggested by the IMF and the World Bank. This Economist article, despite the positive tone, makes Vietnam sound more like the stalled developments in Malaysia than the success of South Korea.

<comment><USER6> It sounds like Vietnam has done a much better job of keeping politics out of private industry though. Compare with Malaysia and its blatantly racial (and often harebrained) preference schemes, which end up stifling growth and encouraging talented non-Malays to GTFO.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumiputera_(Malaysia)#Policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumiputera_\(Malaysia\)#Policy)

<comment><USER7> All of the business owners I surveyed verbally in Vietnam earlier this month outlined horrific amounts of government red tape and informal facilitation payments for even the slightest bureaucratic requirements. That includes both locals and foreigners.

<comment><USER8> I find it interesting that most post-Communist societies don't ever really get rid of their Communist-era massive bureaucracies. There's never any clean-up or reform, nor any real moves to weed out corruption. Its just one day the red tape goes from centrally planned projects to capitalist projects. Often, the real red tape cutting means a culture bribes and other favors towards government officials. Russia is a pretty good example of how high-corruption and bloaty bureaucracy remains post-Communism. Businesses there just consider bribes part of their budget.

<comment><USER9> Has any country, ex-Communist or otherwise, ever been able to clean up/ tone down their bureaucracies, except the case of a total collapse?

<comment><USER10> Estonia seems to have succeeded quite well. Not totally trouble-free, but astonishingly different from Soviet times and in many areas cleaner than non- ex-Communist neighbours around Baltic sea.

A lot of this probably has to do with the fact that the Soviet bureaucracy was imposed by an occupying force that was loathed, and once that rule ended, Estonians went back to basics, something they had had before WWII and something entirely new.

<comment><USER4> I would argue that Eastern European countries did have a 'collapse' and a 'massively pivotal event' which afforded them the opportunity to toss the communists from power and start anew.

Nobody in Eastern Europe would even hint at communism these days, so many died and were oppressed ...

This is very different from Vietnam and China wherein they are 'post- Communist' countries trying to 'outgrow' their 20th century communist ideals and find a 'new way'.

I suggest both in China and Vietnam the political apparatus still believes they 'adhere to communist principles'.

Very different from East Europe.

Cultures and histories are so different it's hard to compare.

Arguably, China has had a lot of 'red tape' to deal with for a few thousand years :)

<comment><USER10> Yes the old system suffered a full bankruptcy, and indeed it is hard to compare to different cultures.

The Chinese call their system "socialist market economy" but I would call it "communistic capitalism" (communistic administration system, capitalistic economy).

<comment><USER11> I was under the impression the administration just follows thousands years old tradition of mandarins and bureaucratic administrators - nothing particularly communistic about that. Although, I'm not an expert on the subject.

<comment><USER10> I think you're right; the thousand-year-old model of administration in China actually has lots in common with real communism as it was implemented in China, and in Soviet Union. The names are different; there's no Emperor and no Mandarins but there's a General Secretary and there are party officials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cambodia is in a place where Vietnam was ~30 years ago, it will be interesting to see how it fares over the next 30 years.

Their GDP growth has been consistently >5% over recent years (500% in 20 years) except for 2009, and there is a lot of foreign investment coming into the country.

It's a pretty amazing place to visit, you can sense the opportunity. Capitalism is doing wonderful things for them, far better than they were under either of the communist regimes.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure where you'd draw the line between the communist and capitalist regimes though, particularly somewhere like Cambodia with its truly remarkable web of allegiances over the last 50 years and Hun Sen in power since 1979...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tangent. This "middle income" designation seems to have us stuck in the same rut that we were in when using "third world". It didn't initially mean 3rd place, but ended up being understood as such, and thus bestowed undeserved stereotypes. Well, byusing the term middle income we are locking ourselves into a paradigm were we are fighting to keep a middle class and take for granted the lower and upper class. We should instead be approaching the issues in a more nuanced manner, one in which we work so that no one is without their basic human needs being met and income inequality is reduced such that there is no group of 55 people that have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of global population.

</comment><comment><USER15> According to (former) Vietnamese that visit Vietnam and have family there, South Vietnam still retains many of its pre-war capitalist culture and roots compared with the Communist North (and also compared with China).

There is also a large now successful Vietnamese Diaspora in the US and perhaps other countries that are familiar with Vietnam and might want to do business there.

<comment><USER10> It would make sense that people who worked and fought for South Vietnam were originally mostly from there.

If they then left as refugees to U.S. and now come back as investors, it's likely that they invest to the places they know and remember, i.e. the south.

<comment><USER3> A lot of the younger generation are going back (those who didn't experience the war)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1322&v=YbwJ6F3sI...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1322&v=YbwJ6F3sIpI)

<comment><USER15> Thank you and it makes sense. This is a way that economic development (should) work. We are "exporting" entrepreneurs who use the skills and mindset of the US to Vietnam to help with their nascent capitalist market economy. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Even though I was born and lived there for almost 20 years and coming back almost every year for the last 10 years, I really don't feel this kind of fast development described in the article. Politics really has big impact on economic development and the country has struggled as much as others within the region. It follows similar pattern like China's and it heavily got influenced by politicians who favor policies leaning toward China. Only cities like Ho Chi Minh and Ha Noi get that much of attention and heavy investments. Other parts of Vietnam is still in very poor condition. However, I really believe that it's a very good place for investment besides all the political mess because its workforce contains young/large/talented people.

<comment><USER17> Well it's only logical that the two biggest cities see development first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've done a lot of B2B business in Vietnam over the last year, this article does not surprise me. The people there are kind, super smart and very hard working.

I'm recently back on the market for a (software engineering) job. If anyone has any leads for a westerner to find work in Vietnam, I'd love to talk to you.

</comment><comment><USER19> Request for clarification, this is at the end of the sixth paragraph:

      Trade accounts for roughly 150% of national output, more than any other country at its level of per-person GDP.

How can something account for more than 100% of output? Should it be 50%, or am I missing an economic term here?

<comment><USER20> If you import components worth X and export them in assemblies worth Y, the contribution to output is Y-X, whereas the contribution to trade is Y+X.

So they must be doing a lot of assembly work. For example, I believe there are no semiconductor fabs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> hey I liked the previous title better

<comment> Jean-Philipe Me too!</comment></comment>


Thoughts on .tel and WebFinger - <AUTHOR> http://masonlee.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/thoughts-on-tel-and-webfinger/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a really interesting discussion, spurred by Dave Winer's posts on the need for a global namespace for dispersing microblogging away from centralised services:

[http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/08/06/anotherBrickInTh...](http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/08/06/anotherBrickInTheCloud.html)

[http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/08/07/tradingOneCentra...](http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/08/07/tradingOneCentralizedNetFo.html)

[http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/08/13/looselyCoupled14...](http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/08/13/looselyCoupled140charMessa.html)

What's the best way to resolve simple usernames to feeds (and other endpoints)? .tel? webfinger? i-names? Something else? All of the above?</comment>


ITunes + CSS3  - <AUTHOR> http://judsoncollier.com/blog/fullstory/21/ <comment><USER2> <http://files.willnorris.com/misc/iTunes9/response.html>

The page rendered in Webkit-compatible HTML. Pretty damn impressive on Apple's part.

<comment><USER3> Not really sure what you mean. This is the way just about every, no, every single online store is rendered. The only outlier until this morning was iTunes, which for some obscure reason (legacy, historical) chose to have proprietary XML and a proprietary renderer. If anything, this is what should have been done ages ago, considering they invented all this technology.

Arguably, the store continues to be hindered by not being web enough. I've often wanted to have multiple tabs since (gasp) I may want to look at more than just one item simultaneously. Its also still difficult and confusing to send links to iTunes pages to people. Individual items are a bit easier with iTunes 9, but linking to the "Movies" section, not so much.

<comment><USER2> Pretty damn impressive because it's gorgeous. Most online stores look like they're made out of HTML. iTunes looks wholly different. It's a reminder to me as a designer that the web is capable of handling much more than I put it through at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just to be clear: a huge amount of this stuff isn't really in CSS3. A lot of it (most of it?) is custom-built Webkit stuff.

I'd been curious about why each release of Webkit added more of these obscure features. Now we know.

<comment><USER5> Check your regexes. The webkit-only tags used are

-webkit-appearance -webkit-appearence [sic] -webkit-background-clip -webkit-border-image -webkit-border-radius -webkit-box-reflect -webkit-box-shadow -webkit-box-sizing -webkit-gradient -webkit-mask-box-image -webkit-resizer -webkit-scrollbar -webkit-tap-highlight-color -webkit-track-piece -webkit-transform -webkit-transition -webkit-user-select

Many of them will be in the final CSS3 spec, e.g. box-shadow and border- radius.

Great work pushing HTML5 and CSS3.

<comment><USER6> I'm curious what HTML5 features are being used? Are they using <audio> or <video> tags? That seems like the most likely. Or <canvas>.

I've noticed "HTML5" is getting thrown around a lot lately. It's the new "AJAX".

<comment><USER7> From the very limited view we have so far, they aren't specifically calling out for an audio or video tag in the CSS.

They are _definitely_ using canvas though. Going through the inspector, the round audio buttons are made with canvas.

<comment><USER8> It seems to be the animated part of the button that is a canvas. The static part you see before starting the sound is a background picture on the div, created using inline image data in the css.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Remember when people chastised Microsoft for doing similar things (using IE- specific HTML/CSS for parts of an application interface)? I guess Apple have the web standards street cred to get away with it.

(I know it's not entirely the same, but... just sayin'...)

<comment><USER10> I think this is entirely different. Apple is using CSS3 to generate compliant HTML files for their application interface (see the link to Will Norris' post, which includes a link to a HTML file you can view in any browser).

I think this is interesting not simply because Apple moved the iTunes Music Store interface from proprietary XML to HTML, but because this might allow for (unauthorized) third party iTMS interfaces, similar to pymusique/SharpMusique: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharpMusique>

<comment><USER9> _using CSS3 to generate compliant HTML files_

A significant chunk of the CSS is vendor-specific. Similarly, the HTML contains Apple-only attributes and segments designed to only be interpreted by iTunes. Neither the HTML nor CSS is "compliant" (ie. validating).

 _to a HTML file you can view in any browser_

Except it's completely broken in anything but WebKit-based browsers, and isn't functional outside of iTunes.

They've moved from proprietary XML to proprietary HTML. This doesn't open up any new doors for third-parties; it's just a convenience for the people at Apple to design new content for the store.

<comment><USER11> This design choice is significant because most of these properties, or their equivalents, will be or are already implemented in several CSS3 rendering engines: it's a great demonstration of what we will soon be able to do with cross-browser support.

The fact that IE or browser x can't browse the iTunes store is less important than some other tactics on Apple's part such as lack of non Apple device support...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you want make progress on in 2020? - <AUTHOR> A new year starts with a lot of hopes and dreams, and why not, there is usually some energy at this time of the year, and it's a good time to start new things or focus on bettering existing works/hobbies.<p>What do you want to spend time on in 2020, why and how much time are you going to allocate to it? <comment> to-too-two Not really hacker related, but to improve at illustrations. I'd like to do it professionally one day. How about you?</comment>


Best Pocket Drone for Projects - <AUTHOR> https://chartersreviews.com/best-pocket-selfie-drone-for-vacations-the-idea-is-genius/ <comment><AUTHOR> People usually ask,

How long does this pocket selfie drone stay up in the air?

Answer is about 10 minutes. So if you are looking at shooting HD videos or images of projects that may require creative output, with captures from almost impossible angles - while at it - remember to start flying it down from the 9th minute.

Comes with extra battery for quick re-launch to the air...

Keep exclusive memories and events in amazing rich colors!</comment>


Hacking Autism: App Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://hackingautism.org/idea-gallery

<comment><USER2> The app gallery isn't really a gallery. It would be nice to see more information in each one, almost a review. What does it try to solve, is it advanced learning or behavioural? Some screenshots, maybe even a video demo? Unfortunately most of the sites they link to are not the best at conveying this information either.

</comment><comment><USER3> totally agree laserDinosaur - we need to do a much better job (working on it) with the new website, launching soon. please help!</comment>


Never Anger Your Web Developer (Check The Source) - <AUTHOR> http://www.claridgeproducts.com/

<comment><USER2> Looks more like "Check that one developer at the company you're using hasn't angered another and decided that the most professional way to deal with this problem is to wax-childlike in your publicly available code" to me...

Whatever jimbob did wrong pales in comparison to that, IMHO.

Jimbob needs a lesson in the way he is expected to decide upon specifications before coding; Whoever wrote that in client's code needs to take a bruised arse down to the back of the queue at the local unemployment office.</comment>


Apple rejecting apps with "pad" in title - <AUTHOR> http://www.macnn.com/articles/10/04/09/attempt.at.clarifying.platforms.has.side.effects/

<comment><USER2> I propose a new app. Its like the magic 8 ball. You shake your ipad and it tells you if your app is likely to be rejected.

You think its random, but its actually quantum-entangled with the Steve's brain.

I'd name it _"The Magic 8pad"_ but then...

<comment><USER3> And best use the Magic 8pad _before_ you build the app, so it'll save you the trouble if your app will be rejected anyway.

<comment><USER2> Won't work. Because the app has had interaction with a quantum system, the app will be both approved and rejected until you build it, shake it, and observe the result thus collapsing the Steve-form into a definite state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like "note pad"?

<comment><USER5> Bachelor Pad? Or are those kinds of apps banned too?

<comment><USER4> Or Paddington Bear's Island Adventure?</comment></comment></comment>


Passing Open Files Between Processes with Unix Sockets - <AUTHOR> http://jstorimer.com/2012/05/07/passing-open-files-over-unix-sockets.html

<comment><USER2> In case you are interested in the "low-level" implementation, there are C example in the manpages (tested on Ubuntu Linux):

       man 3 cmsg

Look for SCM_RIGHTS;</comment>


A Brief History of Popcorn Time [The Verge] - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/23/9600576/popcorn-time-history-timeline <comment><AUTHOR> Hmm... Disclaimer: before you hate on why I wrote [The Verge] - I forgot that you can see the source on the right side of the the title here on HN.

Anyways, what do you guys think of Popcorn Time?</comment>


High Electric Bills Saved The Computing Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/27/ibm-intel-amd-technology-cio-network-computing.html?boxes=Homepagechannels

<comment><USER2> Im not sure that electricity was the main driver here either. From my point of view the impetus was building a processor that was high performance and not needing active refrigeration to keep it from burning up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Real trend, silly framing: if power bills hadn't been the limiting factor, progress would have accelerated to the point where something else was, and solving _that_ "would have saved the computer industry".

</comment><comment><USER4> > The problem is that most software applications couldn't take advantage of > all those cores, even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars in > computer science.

This is such a tired argument. All these problems have been long solved in Computer Science. Intel had 4000 CPUs in its Paragon System in the 199Os.

The software has been around long enough, my particular lineage is : Newsqueek, Alef, Limbo, Go.

The commercial world chased the Mhz (2 oxen or 1024 chickens? as Cray put it). It's not my fault you all thought C++ and Java was the way to build the future. It wasn't in 1995, it isn't now.</comment>


Discovering Spider Bots with Syslog-NG and Stream Processing - <AUTHOR> https://www.striim.com/blog/2018/04/when-yandex-behaves-oddly-discovering-spider-bots-with-syslog-ng-and-striim/ <comment><AUTHOR> this blog post may be vendor specific but the practices can be used with other streaming frameworks</comment>


Show HN: Backlogs – Collect users feedback and create product changelog - <AUTHOR> https://backlogs.co <comment><USER2> I love the idea of this! What was your inspiration?

I feel like this could be a pretty nice uservoice alternative

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi raybb, glad to hear you like it! A few months ago, I was building a community indielog.com. I received lots of feedback (feature/bug). They went into my email, twitter DMs, etc. I just thought it would be nicer to have a single place managing them all, so I built Backlogs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How does this compare to Canny for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know people will ask this question :)

I have considered Canny honestly. Great product, awesome founders!

But the pricing is not that friendly for bootstrappers like me. Backlogs offers generous free plan for developers, which we all like. So pro plan, the pricing is flat $29/mo (billed yearly), no tracking users and usage.

All essential features will be included in the free plan as well, like collecting feedback, roadmap, changelog, dashboard, email notification, etc.

Integration wise, Canny did a good job on third-party apps integration, which right now we don't have any, but we will add more in future.</comment></comment>


FairPhone 3, the first data on the next generation of sustainable modular mobile - <AUTHOR> https://wp.me/p6Ol9m-3WC <comment><USER2> I own a FP1. Parts availability and upgrades have not been as good as one would like for FP1 or FP2. How could a purchaser be confident that FP3 can have a reasonable lifetime to minimise WEEE?</comment>


Japanese Humanoid Robot Can Keep Its Balance After Getting Kicked - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/japanese-high-power-humanoid-robot-hrp3l-jsk#.T6kZb1TDts8.hackernews <comment><USER2> I made something with similar qualities: see my prototype <http://tinyurl.com/cgayg87></comment>


Italy: Whole-town study shows 40%+ of Covid-19 infections were asymptomatic - <AUTHOR> https://nuadox.com/post/622389960556806144/covid19-asymptomatic-cases-study <comment><USER2> This is a verbatim rip of Eurekalert's blogspam of

[https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/198833/whole-town-study- reve...](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/198833/whole-town-study-reveals-more- than-40)</comment>