The education bubble: Tech progress may reduce the demand for high-end jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/04/higher_education

<comment><USER2> His point about the declining value of business school in particular is nominally sound, but he pinpoints the wrong source of the problem.

The problem with business school is that it's started seeing itself in competition with law school, and accordingly, it's started focusing on younger and younger candidates. Average ages of first-year MBA students have been getting younger, especially at the top-tier programs like HBS and Stanford.

This is, quite frankly, defeating the original purpose of business school: to be a finishing school, and not a preparatory school. Back in the day, you got an MBA because you had learned a thing or two in your work experience, and would like to reflect on it through the prism of various frameworks, theories, and leaders. But it was critical that you _had_ an empirical knowledge base to work with, or else the lessons were vague and meaningless. The topics demanded practical knowledge of the general subject.

Today, b-school is trying to position itself as an entry vehicle into the working world. You graduate, you go to b-school, you learn some mumbo-jumbo about how this whole working world -- which you've never experienced -- is supposed to work. And then you get sent off into that world, ready to be an entitled prick and piss off everyone around you who has actually experienced the real thing. People who will laugh at your frameworks and your theories, because they've heard them from the last 20,000 MBAs who came before you.

B-school can still be relevant in today's business world, and in the business world of the future. But it needs to decide what it wants to be. And, whatever that is, it should be something more than simply an alternative to law school for 22-to-25-year-olds.

<comment><USER3> "Today, b-school is trying to position itself as an entry vehicle into the working world."

I do think there needs to be something that fills this position though. I think the ideal would be for b-school to work more like BYU or a salmon farm, e.g.

* Students show up straight out of undergrad and learn for 3 - 4 months.

* Students start their own project and work on it for another 4 - 6 months.

* Students apply to Y Combinator or one of the other seed accelerators, and continue building out their business over the next two years.

* Students who have shipped something significant are then allowed to come back at any point between two and ten years later.

<comment><USER4> You know, I really like this idea.

What if in general there were an option for higher education that was more spread out?

I'm imagining a system that is more based on apprenticeship; where you work and you learn at the same time, and after a certain number of years, you have taken enough classes to be given a degree in some area.

I guess the idea would be to have a company that is also an accredited university (with professors who do research and publish papers and stuff). I've decided to call this a companiversity.

Lets pretend it is a software companiversity. I guess the idea is that you just hire the best students right out of high-school, and they agree to work for you and you pay them to work on various contracts that the companiversity takes (presumably less than someone with a degree).

They also get to take classes at your internal university and earn a degree for free. The overhead that it costs the university to administer classes is paid for by the products that they delivered.

I guess the idea is to eliminate the huge amount of debt that college students accrue, return some of the opportunity-cost loss that college students experience by not entering the workforce, and give students that are entering technical professions some semblance of experience to increase their market value once they leave.

<comment><USER5> _What if in general there were an option for higher education that was more spread out?_

This is how most higher ed actually works out in practice. Where I grew up in Minnesota at least 50% of students at the U of MN worked and went to school part time and took 6-8 years to get a degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad these articles are being written and taken seriously. We definitely need to end the heresy of questioning the value of higher education. Students need to understand that debt is the opposite of freedom, and student loans are (as the article pointed out) much harder to escape than almost any other kind of debt.

That said, I'd like to see someone take on education in a stronger form. This particular article mocks an english teacher (another one asks who would spend $250,000 to read chaucer). Alrighty, agreed, not worth spending $250,000 to read Chaucer.

How about engineering at a highly regarded state supported institution? How about Computer Science at the University of Washington or Illinois? Or even at a private university? How about going pre-med (though Medicine is clearly somewhat positional, rejecting many applicants than would be capable of completing the program), or to law school (probably even more positional than medicine in determining the value of your degree).

Please understand, I'm not saying the answer is an obvious "yes" or "no" in any of these cases. If you're a good enough programmer to pass data structures at college that teaches the class for real, it could very well make sense to drop out and do YC or take that 100K startup from Thiel. But we do need to start distinguishing between different types of education: different majors, institutions, motivations.

Definitely time to move past asking whether it's worth spending $250k to study Chaucer. There's much more interesting material here.

<comment><USER7> I think the bubble is already cracking and about to burst. If you take a look at all of the top for profit schools their enrollments have declined dramatically.

Some degrees are certainly worth the money. All it takes is simple 5th or 6th grade math, which is not done for any number of reasons.

I did the math, let me explain how it worked:

-My parents had $X saved up for me to go to college (in my name I might add, so it was legally mine)

-My dad was a faculty member at a local university which entitled me to free tuition

-I attended that school for over 2 years, for free

-I did the math that I could earn low to mid 5 figures with my degree, or make six to seven figures by dropping out and focusing on my current business I had been building

-I dropped out, and I made a ton

People are (or at least were) confused by what I was doing. I could have gone to a better school and not had a whole lot of debt. I could have stayed an extra year and a half and received my free college degree (minus the cost of books.) I did the math and it was damn simple math. Not a single other one of my friends did the math. Oddly enough, my brother did do the math and is attending an expensive engineering school for a degree in a special field.

Anyone who gets deep in to debt for a non-marketable degree is a sucker. Anyone who gets deep in to debt in order to teach that same degree to others as a university faculty member is a participant in an elaborate ponzi scheme.

There is nothing wrong with higher education. There is nothing wrong with devoting your entire life to something that will not earn you a penny. There is something wrong with elaborate and needless waste.

Technology can, and will, bring education prices back down to earth. Accreditation along with deep rooted special interests means this will take a lot longer than it should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What gets me about many of these articles is how broad a brush they often use when describing "the education bubble." And so I appreciate that this article at least gestures at different types of grad school, and how student/consumer demand may be decreasing.

But I'd to read more about specific bad "educational investment" decisions, and what makes these decisions bad, as a way of prescribing better pathways for students sizing up their college or grad school options. Specifically, what are the bigger competing opportunities that should entice these "kids" away from educational debt and opportunity cost? Thiel's program can only be a very small part of the re-balancing act, I think.

Point me in the right direction if you've already read it...

<comment><USER9> That is part of what makes a bubble a bubble. Individual houses have been good investments for particular reasons; individual e-commerce plays or telecom companies made sense in the mid-90's. But when people start calling up their broker to buy the next Internet IPO, or trying to invest in "housing" as a category--or when parents tell their kids to get "A degree," it naturally selects for the worst version of those.

Here are a couple examples:

* [http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=...](http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1290088)

* <http://chronicle.com/article/Many-More-Students-Are/66223/>

Thiel's program is more of a signal than anything. I dropped out of college five years ago, and people thought I was crazy. I had lunch a couple months ago with my high school classmates (from a regionally well-regarded prep school), and I'm pretty happy with how my career and prospects stack up.

<comment><USER8> Thanks. The relationship to the housing bubble is interesting, no doubt. In my mind, no two things have been more connected to class aspirations/freedoms over the last 50 years than home ownership and higher ed. There are class and race issues at play in both cases, which makes new prescriptions pretty tough to make, especially on a political level.

But a problem has been identified here -- too many people are spending too much on money on phantom educational assets. Now the solution -- _fewer people should go to college._ (Especially expensive low to mid tier schools?) I guess what I was really asking above, is: so what should they do instead? And I'm guessing the answer ain't so pretty, something even more offensive to the idea of the American dream than the analogous housing case, of "sorry, just keep on renting."

<comment><USER9> I went to college for a year, and I'm doing just fine without it. That used to be the standard path. There are plenty of well-paying jobs that don't require a degree--many trades pay far better than white-collar jobs, for example, and sales jobs often don't require a degree.

And there's nothing wrong with renting, either. You buy housing as you need it, just like you buy food as you need it--I don't feel ripped off that I eat peaches but don't own an orchard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Education is not an unstable bubble. Looking at the low and high end of the market there does seem to be an education bubble despite plenty of vary good state schools with reasonable tuition.

What people seem to miss is unlike the housing or gold bubble tuition costs don't really feed off each other. The high end is really just a luxury in another form and nothing is stopping Breitling from selling 300,000$ watches any time soon. And the low end is a direct government subsidy (like corn farming) which will continue as long as the government feels the need to waste money.

PS: As long as demand is unlimited and wages elastic Technology can't really destroy jobs in the long term even as it disrupts industry after industry. Still, people will always look for the best workers, so even if a degree might not mean an increase in pay the unemployment rate for people with a BS is 1/2 that of those without one for a reason.

<comment><USER11> It has more to do with people getting degrees for the wrong reasons: being educated doesn't mean you will always have economic security.

And that's where the housing bubble analogy comes in: there are many good reasons to buy a house, but doing so because you expect its value to increase constantly is not one of them.

<comment><USER10> The Education and Housing markets are complex systems. The bubble analogy works as a vary simplified analogy to describe how some markets can see sustained prices increases for a while followed by a sudden drop.

This works with Housing, at a fundamental level if people decided to more houses one year the price increases, and if people buy fewer houses one year the value of your house decreases which can quickly cycle though to dramatic shifts. However, if fewer people decided to get a degree the value of your degree increases.

<comment><USER12> Both systems have a constant: massive government subsidies that distort the true supply, demand, and economic ROI for the good. There could not have been a housing bubble without Fannie and Freddie, the FHA, and the protected-by- regulation class of bond ratings agencies.

Similarly, there would not be an education bubble without federal loan guarantees -- certainly they have escalated cost of college, and most of the shady for-profit colleges thrive on student subsidies.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, bubbles happen even without government action. Read up on the tulip bubble for a classic one. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania>

There is also plenty of blame to spread around. EX: Irish <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble> burst 2008. UK <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_property_bubble> burst 2008. Australian <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble> (yet to burst) etc.

What is really interesting is how little the price could increase before market forces brought things back to reality. Housing is such a large percentage of the worlds wealth that we never saw the sort crazy multiples over value that other bubbles get to. EX: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble>

<comment><USER13> Bubbles require rapid credit expansion. There may be varied reasons for what fuels a particular bubble, but the necessary precondition is easy money/credit.

When the government regulates the currency & credit markets tightly, then government should share in the responsibility for the bubble.

<comment><USER14> I'd recommend looking at a chart of GDP from _before_ the Fed was established for the express purpose of mitigating boom/bust cycles.

It looks like a jigsaw. If you look at a chart of actual numbers, it's pretty clear that the countercyclical tools available to the fed diminish the effect of bubbles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the author is confusing the members that currently make up the set of high-end jobs with the set itself.

In 1995 I was writing HTML templating engines and session management code. An HR person might have called me a "templating and session engineer." _By that definition_ the role I was filling is now obsolete: standardized technologies have been developed that mean I will never find work as a templating and session engineer again. I am not crying about that development.

The coming obsolescence of particular high-end jobs opens an opportunity for new high-end jobs. The world has fewer Unix admins per Unix server than it did fifteen years ago, and the world is better off for that. (Apropos the recent "Linux admin shortage looms" non-story recent posted here.)

The author is perpetuating the same fallacious argument that wheelwrights were at the dawn of the age of automobiles.

</comment><comment><USER16> It doesn't reduce the demand for high-end jobs, it might reduce the demand for the currently large variety of high-end jobs. I always thought that the development of science and technology pretty much meant that eventually everything trends towards pure symbol manipulation within a computerized environment, aka programming. Today we're programming ERP systems; tomorrow, automated asteroid belt ore extractors and 3d printers. Even then, I'm sure you'll have an even more bewildering variety of highly specialized technicians than you have today.

<comment><USER17> What happens when computers are able to do their own symbol manipulation?

<comment><USER18> It's hard to imagine.

The best I can do is think of Rome's slave based economy. Obviously slaves can do anything the free Romans could, and they did. The Romans were either plebes, dependent on government handouts like bread and circuses, or they were wealthy and then they mostly went into politics.

<comment><USER19> A Roman slave wasn't much like what we think of as slaves now (i.e. blacks on cotton plantations). Epictetus, for example, was a slave, and who even remembers now who "owned" him?

<comment><USER20> There were many black artisans in urban areas of the antebellum south who were slaves in just the way that Roman slaves were, doing highly skilled work without personal freedom.

[http://www.amazon.com/Artisan-Workers-Upper-South- Petersburg...](http://www.amazon.com/Artisan-Workers-Upper-South- Petersburg/dp/0807133132)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If only there were a way to short middling private schools. The hedgies shorting the for-profit schools are well documented. But you have to think that the lower- to middle-tier non-profit private schools--the ones that charge tuitions not unlike those of the Ivies--will be the first into the fire. Perhaps Goldman can create a Middling Private School Index (the MPX) and sell CDSs against it? The question: who can play the role of sucker on the long side? I know! Taxpayers!

<comment><USER22> Follow the model of John Paulson. He created a market so he could short the housing bubble and it made him one of the richest men in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The best evidence for an education bubble can be found at Starbucks. The amount of people who have advanced degrees and work at Starbucks is simply astounding.

<comment><USER24> Do you have any evidence that this is the case? Most of the people I know who work as barristas (Starbucks or otherwise) are college students or people obsessed with coffee. And in the suburbs the demographics change even more. (Seattle)</comment></comment>


Root a Mac in 10 seconds or less - <AUTHOR> http://patrickmosca.com/root-a-mac-in-10-seconds-or-less/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't work with disk encryption enabled or with a firmware password enabled.

And before anyone comments without reading the article: No, this is not unique to macs. This _particular_ article is about how to do it to a mac without any security features enabled. Pretty much any machine on default settings is vulnerable to this kind of attack.

<comment><USER3> It isn't even a vulnerability. It's just the state of the world.

And disk encryption doesn't actually save you from it, it just makes the attacker have to do more work. Namely plugging a device with a bit of flash on it between the hard drive and the SATA controller and then booting a stub OS from the flash which runs the OS on the original hard drive in a hypervisor with a key logger in the keyboard driver and waits for the user to type the encryption password.

Unrestricted physical access = root, the end.

<comment><USER4> >Unrestricted physical access = root, the end.

please explain how to do that for an ATM. kthx :P

<comment><USER5> Please explain how to get unrestricted access to an ATM.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england- norfolk-18093981](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-18093981)

gives a new meaning to 'hole in the wall' (the British term for an ATM)

<comment><USER7> And trademarked by Barclays Bank in the UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems to me that whenever something security related is published, there is an expectation that it has to be something completely new. Something that was previously thought impossible. It's almost as if software has no value if it doesn't exploit some new bug.

For example, everybody knows that root is allowed to do basically anything on a system. If you write a blog post about a technique that requires root access, the typical reaction is "boring, of course root can do that". Everybody knows it's _possible_ , and therefore it's considered uninteresting.

Why doesn't that same attitude apply to other software development? If I write a new chat app or a new operating system, nobody replies with "boring, of course a computer can do that". Even though everybody already knows it's possible to write an operating system.

It sometimes baffles me why the practical side of software development is often considered trivial just because it begins with a root shell, or in this case, physical access.

<comment><USER9> > For example, everybody knows that root is allowed to do basically anything > on a system. If you write a blog post about a technique that requires root > access, the typical reaction is "boring, of course root can do that". > Everybody knows it's possible, and therefore it's considered uninteresting.

It's considered uninteresting because _typically_ , the difficult part should be _becoming_ root. The root account is a single point of failure in any security architecture which includes it, so the expectation is that access to it is guarded in such a well-thought fashion that executing code with root privileges is a great feat.

Not that the code you run as root shouldn't be good all by itself -- hiding traces, being difficult to wipe out and so on -- none of which actually applies to the one presented in this article.

But in any case, the fact that, in ten seconds, one is able to do nasty things on a machine which readily exposes unlimited access in about 8 seconds is, at best, an impressive feat of automation.

> Why doesn't that same attitude apply to other software development? If I > write a new chat app or a new operating system, nobody replies with "boring, > of course a computer can do that".

If you write a new chat app, I'd probably reply with "boring", but a new operating system? No, that's a reasonable feat of technical prowess, even if all it does is boot, expose a minimal shell and multitask a couple of processes with minimal I/O. It's not necessarily impressive, but it does nonetheless allow for an interesting glance in the thought process of another programmer. It also requires a little work -- unlike, say, rooting a machine that basically gives you root prompt on boot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was hoping to learn about a Mac vulnerability, not a feature documented by Apple.

The Rubber Ducky is interesting though. I wonder if Android apps have the right APIs available such that an app could do the same thing. As long as your battery isn't already full, there's nothing suspicious about plugging your phone into a computer.

<comment><USER11> I believe that you can. Take a look: [http://www.guidingtech.com/15008/adb- control-keypress-broken...](http://www.guidingtech.com/15008/adb-control- keypress-broken-android-keys/)

<comment><USER10> Wrong communication direction. I want the phone to send key presses to the computer.

And of course it has been done, although it required a custom kernel: [http://cs.gmu.edu/~astavrou/research/acsac10.pdf](http://cs.gmu.edu/~astavrou/research/acsac10.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this new information? Essentially anything with single-user mode is pwnable when you have physical access.

<comment><USER13> It is new to me, although a blank page with the words "hold down command-S while booting" would have been a better article in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> FileVault will defeat this method. Turn it on.

<comment><USER15> For your entire disk though. If you only turn it on for your Personal folder, it does nothing to prevent this, and will in fact only give you a false sense of security.

<comment><USER5> There's no home folder only filevault anymore with newer OS X versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This isn't really a new attack, but it is pretty cool way of automating it. Other comments mention this being mitigated with full disk encryption and a firmware password.

As mentioned in the OpenBSD FAQ[1] an attacker with physical access wins.

[1][http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#LostPW](http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#LostPW)

</comment><comment><USER17> On the other hand, I find it reassuring that you can easily become root if you have physical access, since it means being able to easily recover from screwups with your regular account.

I've noticed that secure systems have the property that the more secure they are against attackers, the easier it is to be locked out of what you own.

<comment><USER18> My boss recently had a problem where they couldn't log into their Mac even though their password hadn't changed. With two minutes of googling I found it was very simple to enter single user mode and recover their account. Pretty neat, but a little disconcerting how easy it is to access your files if your laptop gets stolen.

Helps to hammer home the idea that encrypting your drive is really important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems to me this does not work with encrypted drive(s).

(writing this from a MacBook with an encrypted SSD)

<comment><USER20> How does encrypted SSD perform, compared to unencrypted? My SSD does reads/writes in the 500MB/s range. Does encryption significantly slow down performance?

<comment><USER21> It's noticeable for sure. My Samsung 830 SSD took a pretty serious hit in transfer rates. New full flash based Mac's like my late '13 retina i7 seems to handle it pretty well, though, there's still a noticeable difference. Worth it? Absolutely. If you do end up doing it - when prompted, I would recommend against saving your encryption key to iCloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> While physical access on almost any hardware (without whole-disk encryption) will always allow full access, it's good that this is sometimes raised as many people either don't know or don't internalize this.

A more interesting question is whether this should be the case. As has been noted, this is by design and made far more sense when computing devices weren't quite so mobile. Perhaps it should take more effort to boot into single-user mode? Perhaps FileVault should be on by default with a cloud- stored key tied to your Apple account?

</comment><comment><USER23> Does it work too if the account opened on the Mac is a non-admin account?

I'm a Linux person but my gf has a Mac. It became so slow an unusable after the years that I re-installed everything and created her a non-admin account to surf the Web and, months later, things seems pretty ok for her. I'm wondering if such a quick attack by plugging an USB device works too on an unprivileged account?

<comment><USER24> You have to reboot the computer, so no account is logged in when the attack is done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's one point I do not understand. After running this, you always need the ip of the victim to remote login, correct? or there's something I missed?

<comment><USER26> The script connects to your server. You open a listening socket on your server, then when the client connects it presents a shell.

<comment><USER25> I see, but Isn't that a risk for the attacker? I taught the idea was to run a server on the victim and connect to it... In my mind the script was supposed to post the victim ip on pastebin. There's something wrong with my approach? any good resource to understand the logic?

<comment><USER26> How is it a risk to the attacker? The attacker isn't presenting a shell on his server, the client is the one presenting the shell.

You could just as well post the IP address somewhere and connect later, but then you have to worry about escaping NAT.

I don't really know what resources would help, possibly the netcat man page? [http://linux.die.net/man/1/nc](http://linux.die.net/man/1/nc)

<comment><USER25> since you are statically sharing the server details... Isn't this as leaving your id card on the crime scene? anyway, for who might be interested, the technical term is "reverse shell" (the one in the article) or "bind shell" (the one I wanted).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you have physical access to a machine, you can reboot into single user mode and have root terminal access anyway. I don't see how this is any different?

</comment><comment><USER28> There's also the sudo fail (fixed in 10.8.5)

[http://cvedetails.com/cve/2013-1775](http://cvedetails.com/cve/2013-1775)

<comment><USER13> I thought you need to have access to an account that has sudo privileges and has logged in as root before (but don't know their password).

<comment><USER28> Indeed. So if people _always_ lock their screens when walking away, they should be safe. In practice, they often don't.

<comment><USER13> They need to have successfully run the sudo command at least once. In practice, most people have never done that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not really a vulnerability, so much as a fact of life: If you don't lock your house (ie, turn on disk encryption), the door is, well, unlocked.

</comment><comment><USER30> you know googling how to hack a mac reveals several results which although don't use the same method use similarly easy hacks... there is a file you can remove or add which 'resets' the machine to how it came out of the factory (but does not delete any files, including the user folder)

example: [http://www.hackmac.org/tutorials/how-to-create-a-new- adminis...](http://www.hackmac.org/tutorials/how-to-create-a-new- administrator-account/)

hacking with physical access is not usually difficult.

<comment><USER31> This (including the original article) is all hogwash. All that Mac users have to do is to go into Security preferences and click "Turn On FileVault".

No solution provides absolute security. But FileVault really goes a long way. Read the original article to the end: it says that this "attack" doesn't work on machines encrypted with FileVault. Neither does the ages-old single-user- boot technique from the article you linked to.

<comment><USER30> right, but in reality i used that google search result to root a mac in our office.

i'm sure filevault works, but bad defaults are security bugs as well...</comment></comment></comment>


Barley Aims To Be The Absolute Simplest Way To Create And Edit Websites - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/04/barley-launch/

<comment><USER2> I've been looking for something like this since spintoapp.com is shutting down and no longer supported</comment>


Review this app: SixCentral - client & proposal organization & management - <AUTHOR>

http://www.sixcentral.com/
This isn't my app, but I'm submitting it here on behalf of the guys who made it (http://www.frenzylabs.com/). Target audience is mainly freelancers. It was built in Django (a Python web framework) by two programmers and a UI designer. They came out of beta just yesterday.
Here's a short interview on it: http://www.fuelyourapps.com/behind-the-app-six-central/
EDIT: weird formatting. <comment><USER2> Not so much a critique of sixcentral.com itself, but it does seem like a case of developers writing developer tools. Is the freelance web design market large enough to support a site like this?

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://www.sixcentral.com>

Site looks pretty nice. Slick UI. Seems like a useful product to me but I think there are others apps out there that handle this sort of thing. I don't have any clients so I can't really say how it stacks up for sure.

You might want to mention to them that they can add their app for free on my startup, launchly (<http://www.launchly.com>), to try to get additional feedback and some analytics on their launch.</comment>


Ask HN: What books are you currently reading? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Recently:

\- The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War

\- The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

Both excellent and pair really well. Add in "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" and you've got some decent insight into modern Russia, I think.

Just finished:

\- Left of Boom: How a Young CIA Case Officer Penetrated the Taliban and Al- Qaeda

Interesting to read. Author is rather sure of himself, but I guess that helped him be successful. Also interesting to see what the CIA redacted, since they left all the redactions in place in the book and used classical music in the audio book to represent them. Kind of sloppily redacted at times, with the redacted country or entity clearly referenced a sentence or two later. And then there's strange things redacted, like the language of bootleg DVDs that are purchased in SE Afghanistan. It's Farsi, for the record.

\- The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age

If you're interested in kind of an overview of the cyber (yes, I hate the word too) space, from the perspective of nation states and the impact of their actions, this is a good read.

</comment><comment><USER3> A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson).

It's a cursory overview of all of history (title) from the dawn of time to the evolution of humans. It seems to be only slightly dated in some information, but really interesting to learn how the knowledge we assume is true today came to fruition over time.

Before that,

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Ben R. Rich)

Such an awesome book about not only the engineering feats achieved by Lockheed Martin during the Cold War Era, but the incredible ability to keep developments secret from the mostly everyone. If you want to know more about the purpose of Area51, check it out.

<comment><USER4> SkunkWorks was a fantastic read! The aviation history was great and I also really liked seeing how they accomplished so much with a small team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Right now: The Poet by Michael Connelly. Very interesting crime novel.

Before that: Best served cold by Joe Abercrombie. A great fantasy novel, the fourth after the First Law trilogy. I recommend it to fantasy lovers! It is standalone but I recommend reading The First Law first to have more info about characters and the universe of this novel.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm reading a few. The Power Broker (really good, but really long). The dictators handbook (good, but repetitive). Deep thinking (easy and enjoyable if you're interested in AI). Investment Science (very good if you're interested in math finance).

<comment><USER7> Investment Science - is that the one by David Luenberger? Green cover?

<comment><USER6> Yes! It actually has a bunch of really deep math hiding in plan sight (they have a chapter where they reinvent RL but call it dynamic portfolio optimization, and when they axiomize risk they are really talking about special measures)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds: really creative world-building in a galactic society and an engaging, twisting plotine.

The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor: this is on my shelf long-term as it's quite dense but it's apparently one of the best works on the Spanish revolution.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: unique intersection of themes with American immigration, industrialisation and gender all packed into one. Fitting themes for the politics of today though the book already seems slightly dated when it comes to gender politics.

Anarchosyndicalism: Theory and Practice by Rudolf Rocker. This is to compliment my interest in the Spanish civil war and the history of unionism/syndicalism.

</comment><comment><USER9> * "The history of western philosophy" by Bertrand Russell. A fun read so far (~100 pages). Russell is not afraid to tell the reader that he really dislikes Plato, and thinks he destroyed western philosophy.

* SICP (Structure and interpretation of computer programs). Learning Scheme for fun now with this book. I'm only in chapter 2 so far, but it is really fun

* "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hoefstadter. The story in one line: he have a theory that consciousness aries from "strange loops". Along the way he talks about fractals, programming, patterns in music and in pictures,...

* "The Idiot" by Fyodor Dostoyevskij. Fun read.

<comment><USER10> Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics is a nice book to read after SICP if you like torturing your brain with extremely thorough material written by and for geniuses that want to master something everybody think he knows bu he really doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 'The Woman in the Dunes' by Kobo Abe: Sometimes called the Japanese Kafka. Looks at a Japanese salaryman who is imprisoned in the bottom of a sand pit with a woman he does not know and is forced to remove the sand in order to protect a nearby village. Creepy and ripe for symbolic analysis.

Before that:

'Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps' by Robert Conquest. A nice, short overview of the Kolyma Region with a special focus on the especially brutal years of 1937-1938. Has some great eyewitness accounts as well as some semi-rigorous historical analysis (as well as appendices of camps, administrative regions at c.)

<comment><USER12> "The Woman in the Dunes" is an excellent film as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 'Salems Lot by Stephen King. Just got done with his memoir/writing guide "On Writing" and it's given me a new appreciation for his style. Currently going back and reading the books of his that I missed in middle school.

The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. First book I'm reading on a Kindle, so not yet sure how that will effect my perception of the novel (it is helpful for footnotes I've found). Absolutely fresh SciFi is rare these days so it's wonderful so far.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am reading the Dark Tower series. I have been meaning to read it for a long time, and with the upcoming movie I figured I should read it before someone spoils it for me :)

<comment><USER2> I'm jealous of you. Wish I could read it again for the first time.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I am having a pretty great time right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

<comment><USER16> I see quite a few people reading this on my commute. How do you find it so far?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> * Angel by Jason Calacanis about angel investing. ([http://amzn.to/2eOqkyn](http://amzn.to/2eOqkyn))

* Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris ([http://amzn.to/2uYv9LH](http://amzn.to/2uYv9LH))

* Softwar about Larry Ellison ([http://amzn.to/2uYHHmf](http://amzn.to/2uYHHmf))

* Wild ride about Uber ([http://amzn.to/2eOqrdh](http://amzn.to/2eOqrdh))

* Social Intelligence: the new science of human relationships ([http://amzn.to/2uYGueV](http://amzn.to/2uYGueV))

* Rereading - Letters to shareholders by Warren Buffett ([http://amzn.to/2h3xFe0](http://amzn.to/2h3xFe0))

<comment><USER4> How are you liking _Tools of Titans_? Any good take-aways?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Empire of Cotton. It's a story about the development of the international cotton trade, which was the specific environment within which many of the state and capitalist institutions we now live with were originally developed. It's a whirlwind of history about international relations, domestic relations, labor, and the development of the wage system. Slightly pedantic, but an eye- opening read.

The Name Of The Wind. I bought this because it was the #1 selling book in Borderlands Books last month (I always swing by that bookstore when I'm in San Francisco). Entertaining read, good world-building.

Linux: What Every Superuser Should Know. A No Starch Press book about Linux. It weaves a rich tapestry out of disparate knowledge I already had.

</comment><comment><USER19> Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Edited biographical anecdotes based on taped conversations. If you've enjoyed any of his videos, it's hard to read and not hear his voice telling the stories. I'm about a quarter the way through and am enjoying it so far.

</comment><comment><USER4> _The Handmaid 's Tale_ \- Margaret Atwood

 _The 4-Hour Body_ \- Tim Ferriss - Lot's of anecdotes from Ferriss' own experiments.

 _S._ \- by J.J. Abrams - Layers upon layers. Unlike anything I've read before and a true Abrams experience. Check it out if you haven't heard of it!

 _Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software_ \- Charles Petzold - Fascinating PopSci book on the origins of Computers and Code. Each chapter seems to build on the knowledge you've built from previous chapters. Interesting read for the programmer/computer engineer and VERY approachable.

<comment><USER20> How is Code? I am curious to know

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Kids books:

Currently reading _The Saga of Eric the Viking_ by Terry Jones. [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saga-Erik-Viking-Puffin- Books/dp/01...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saga-Erik-Viking-Puffin- Books/dp/0140322612/)

In the queue _Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls_ by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/014198600X/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/014198600X/)

</comment><comment><USER22> "Wireshark Network Analysis: The Official Wireshark Certified Network Analyst Study Guide"

Either I'm more of a nerd than I thought, or this is actually pretty well written. I'm really enjoying it.

<comment><USER4> Wireshark is a fantastic tool. If you do any web development also be sure to check out Charles Proxy, it's like Wireshark for HTTP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn [http://amzn.com/0345536932](http://amzn.com/0345536932). 2 weeks into the book and 8-week course of MBSR on my own with it's companion meditation and yoga app, [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jkz- series1/id700402554](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jkz-series1/id700402554). So far liking the book.

</comment><comment><USER24> If Our Bodies Could Talk by James Hamblin. There was a passage from his book hosted on The Atlantic that got to the front page of HN. It went over a crash course on sleep.

The book only has a small passage on the topic. Instead, the book goes over random topics from STDs to popping zits with the same depth that his sleep article followed. I started reading it, but gave the audiobook version a try. The author makes the book even better and would recommend that form instead.

</comment><comment><USER25> Mahabharata - Extremely interesting ethics in my opinion, also the cosmology is so inconsistent and interesting.

A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All: The Future Belongs to Work That Is Meaningful - Charles Hugh Smith

This one is a must read already and I'm only a few chapters in. His arguments are good enough and perfect is the enemy of good. Wish this book was more popular.

</comment><comment><USER26> Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance per the recommendations of a lot of HN'ers.

Have to say, having a pretty difficult time following it.

<comment><USER27> Agreed. I was really excited to read it because I like both Zen and motorcycles, but I found it really dull and didn't get much out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> \- How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architecture ~~ Carol Davidson Cragoe

It's a quick crash course to historical architecture, teaching how to recognize the different parts from different time periods and why they where made this way.

\- The Three Musketeers ~~ Alexandre Dumas

An old classic, funny and give an interesting overview of France in the XVIIe

</comment><comment><USER29> The Nix by Nathan Hill. It's excellent.

Review: [http://www.npr.org/2016/08/31/490101821/the-nix-is-a- vicious...](http://www.npr.org/2016/08/31/490101821/the-nix-is-a-vicious- sprawling-satire-with-a-very-human-heart)

</comment><comment><USER30> Aliens: The World's Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life edited by Jim Al-Khalili. It's a nice overview of various topics including the origins of life on earth. I think I'll look for some of the books and studies mentioned by various authors as follow up.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm simultaneously traveling through On Becoming A Person by Carl Rogers and my psyche. Wonderful read, and furthers some of the ideas I've picked up in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and a couple other books I've read over the past year...

</comment><comment><USER32> _The Guns of August_ \- Can't say I really recommend it, read _The Sleepwalkers_ instead. Barely talks about Austria-Hungary which was a disappointment.

 _Astrobiology - A Very Short Introduciton_ \- Good so far but I haven't gotten very far in yet.

</comment><comment><USER33> Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold - some of the books are great, some not so much, and one is like a Harlequin novel in space - not what I was aiming for. Finishing them for completeness, but after 10 or 11 or so, they become boring and mediocre.

</comment><comment><USER34> I figure this is a bit of an usual selection for HN, but here's the top of my in-progress list:

Moral Boundaries -- Joan Tronso

Known and Strange Things -- Teju Cole

The Feeling of What Happens -- Antonio Damasio

The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems -- Kofi Awoonor

And I just started Neil Gaiman's "Sandman".

</comment><comment><USER35> The Uplift War - David Brin

I had enjoyed Sundiver and Startide Rising from the same series quite a bit, but I have to be honest, this one is trying my patience. I like the whole uplift concept, but I'm finding the writing in this one a bit clumsy.

</comment><comment><USER36> Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future -- Ashlee Vance (ISBN: 978-0062301239)

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World -- Gary Vaynerchuk (ISBN: 978-0062273062)

<comment><USER20> Whats Jab about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> _The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_ by _Milan Kundera_.

I am taking a break from reading business/self-help/startup related books to read fiction. Milan Kundera is one of my favourite authors.

</comment><comment><USER38> Spin/Axis/Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson. The first one (Spin) has fantastic ideas, fast pace, and lovable characters. I found Axis fairly boring. Just started with Vortex.

</comment><comment><USER39> Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft

Science fiction and thrilling horror. Unique style. I recommend At The Mountains Of Madness. This man knows how to keep up suspense.

</comment><comment><USER40> Dune - Frank Herbert

</comment><comment><USER41> \- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master - Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

\- The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - Michael Pollan

</comment><comment><USER42> ReWork by by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried

</comment><comment><USER43> Three at the moment:

\- Dies the Fire (S. M. Stirling)

\- The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Alex Haley)

\- Give Me a Fast Ship: The Continental Navy and America's Revolution at Sea (Tim McGrath)

</comment><comment><USER44> _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_ by Jules Verne

<comment><USER45> I'm reading this right now as well. The last time I read it I was still in grade school, and it started my love of science fiction.

<comment><USER44> Same! I'm re-reading it as I started playing [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/567823005/nemos-war- sec...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/567823005/nemos-war-second- edition)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The Age of Jihad by Patrick Cockburn.

The brutal, heart-breaking history of the last 20 years of the Middle East. Field journalism at its best.

</comment><comment><USER12> Stories of Your Life and Others (Ted Chiang)

</comment><comment><USER47> 1\. Infinite Jest

2\. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic

3\. Garner's Modern English Usage

<comment><USER48> Oh my god Infinite Jest reassured me I wasn't crazy for hating the self- loathing I associate with weed. And in such a funny way. I swear re-reading a chapter or scene in that book is like a real-life dream sequence; I can't help but dissociating. I still didn't understand so much of it after I "finished" it, but that didn't stop me from pulling the same shit I do--jumping over chapters until it's interesting--with his other work, "The Pale King". You will not be disappointed by the candidness and "raw"-ness of the pale king, either. I almost wanted to applaud some parts of it--a familiar reflex for you, too, I'm sure.

<comment><USER47> In a way, I'm sad that I'm reaching the end of Infinite Jest...it's been such an enriching experience for me. Thanks for letting me know, I'm anxiously awaiting it. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> "Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American City", by Matthew Desmond

</comment><comment> jim-davis Ian Morris: Why the West Rules - for now Richard Baldwin - The Great Convergence

</comment><comment><USER50> -The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968, by Edward Baring.

</comment><comment><USER51> \- Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

\- Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

</comment><comment><USER52> We Have No Idea by Daniel Whiteson and Jorge Cham (of PHD comics)

</comment><comment><USER53> "How to Be a Stoic" by Massimo Pigliucci.

So far it's really good.

<comment><USER4> I've just recently become fascinated with Stoicism after reading the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck!

I've since read through Meditations, Letters from a Stoic and The Art of Living, and am really enjoying The Daily Stoic every morning before work. r/stoicism is also great.

Do you have any other books/resources you recommend on the subject?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

</comment><comment><USER55> Grande Sertão Veredas

</comment><comment><USER56> \- Essentialism by Greg McKeown

\- The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford

<comment><USER57> Watched a few great presentations by Greg McKeown. Very interesting, I think! Check out this one from when he gave a talk at Google:

[https://youtu.be/sQKrt1-IDaE](https://youtu.be/sQKrt1-IDaE)

<comment><USER56> thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Stock Market Wizards by Jack Schwager

</comment><comment><USER59> Game of thrones - a storm of swords.

</comment><comment><USER60> The Art of Thinking Clearly

</comment><comment><USER61> Take the Stairs - Rory Vaden

</comment><comment><USER62> I typically have several books in progress. I'll read a chapter from whichever one I'm in the mood for when I have some time for reading. Currently in progress:

"A Book of Abstract Algebra: Second Edition" by Charles C. Pinter [1].

"How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" by Jordan Ellenberg [2].

"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared Diamond [3].

"Introduction to Analytic Number Theory" by Tom M. Apostol [4].

"Algorithmic Puzzles" by Levitin and Levitin [7].

I've also got a 46 books in my Safari Library queue, although only about half a dozen are actually in the in progress state.

In addition to the above, I'm about 3 years behind on Analog, the science fiction magazine. Those are all on my Kindle and I'm slowly trying to catch up.

Recently finished:

"Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything" by Joshua Foer [5].

Probably going to pick up soon:

"The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far" by Lawrence M. Krauss [6]. Flipped through it at a bookstore and there were some very interesting things in it.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Book-Abstract-Algebra-Second- Mathemat...](https://www.amazon.com/Book-Abstract-Algebra-Second- Mathematics/dp/0486474178/)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G3L6JQ4/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G3L6JQ4/)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates- Societies/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates- Societies/dp/0393354326/)

[4] [https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Analytic-Number- Theory-A...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Analytic-Number-Theory- Apostol/dp/0387901639/)

[5] [https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science- Remember...](https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering- Everything-ebook/dp/B004H4XI5O/)

[6] [https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Story-Ever-Told-So-Far- ebook...](https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Story-Ever-Told-So-Far- ebook/dp/B01HMXUZIO/)

[7] [https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Puzzles-Anany- Levitin/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Puzzles-Anany- Levitin/dp/0199740445/)

</comment><comment><USER63> Courage by Osho.</comment>


Field programmable gate array that's 4.2x faster than a 16 core CPU - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-04-16/latest_fpgas_show_big_gains_in_floating_point_performance.html <comment><USER2> The title doesn't mean much if you don't specify _at what_. It's only about floating point, and the comparison is with a purely theoretical CPU.

<comment><USER3> Also, two of article's four authors work for Xilinx, which makes the FPGA in question.

Does anyone know how much these things cost? A quick google yielded nothing, but I may using the wrong terms.

<comment><USER4> Check farnell.com. They don't seem to stock the Virtex-7 family yet, but the price-range of the Virtex-6 family might provide some guidance (£350-£850).

Edit: This is for the naked chip, not a board. There's quite a discrepancy with int19h's findings, I don't know if that can be all up to the board?

<comment><USER5> Boards for high-end FPGAs like that are not cheap to make yourself either (needs like 6 layers or more, because they have SO MANY densely packed pins + you need one or two layers to feed its gratuitous hunger for power), so you'll probably end up having to buy some ready-to-use solution that probably quadruples that price...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Field programmable gate array that's 4.2x faster than a 16 core CPU", theoretically and only in regards to 64-bit floating point arithmetic.

What's with the link-baity titles lately?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm quoting directly from the article:

        Comparing theoretical peaks for 64-bit floating point
        arithmetic, the current generation of Xilinx's Virtex-7
        FPGAs is about 4.2 times faster than a 16-core microprocessor.

And with regards your question about titles "lately", I'd be interested to see what other submissions I've made that you think are "link-baity".

Thanks.

<comment><USER7> I think it was in reference to other titles submitted lately in general, not necessarily by you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone have an idea about how this would compare with current GPU performance ? My impression is that GPU's are currently way ahead of CPU's in floating point performance (though maybe not for 64 bit ?).

EDIT: To make this question a bit more specific, say I wanted to develop a really fast neural net implementation, which basically reduces to matrix- vector multiplication and function interpolation. Would I be better off looking to do this with a GPU or an FPGA given the current state of both technologies ?

From what little experience I've had with GPU's I think bandwidth to the device might be a limiting factor but I'm guessing this would affect either type of co-processor.

<comment><USER9> In my experience, it's not bandwidth that is the limiting factor, but _latency_. You'll hit the same problem with FPGAs if you're using it as a co- processor, as they are typically connected to the motherboard over PCI Express. If the vectors you're using are small (where "small" means small enough to easily fit into an L1 cache on a processor), then you probably won't see any performance improvement by offloading the computation to an accelerator.

I say this because in a matrix-vector multiplication, only the vector has data-reuse. You do a single pass over the matrix. I wrote a paper where latency killed any performance benefit from using a GPU, because the computation we performed did only a single pass over the data: <http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/papers/debs2010.pdf> If you're doing a matrix-matrix multiplication, then that's a different story because each element in each matrix will be reused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's a good text for learning to program these? (Or perhaps series of texts, as my knowledge of electronics and computational hardware is very superficial.)

<comment><USER9> In grad school, I took a configurable computing course in the ECE department. I'm a CS guy - I had never done any hardware design before. You may benefit from reading over my short writeups of the assignments: <http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/ece5530/>

I recall that in trying to describe the impact of the web to typical business folks, Douglas Adams compared it to trying to explain the ocean to a river: first, you have to understand that river rules no longer apply. Hardware is similar. First, you have to understand that software rules no longer apply. If you dive into this even a little, I predict you will be shocked (much as I was) how much of your concept of "computation" is tied up in sequential, memory-hierarchy based processors.

<comment><USER10>
      > If you dive into this even a little, I predict you will be shocked

Thanks, sounds like my kind of ride.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my website: http://colate.it - <AUTHOR>

Hi Guys and Girls I'm fairly new to web development and have just pushed a new personal project of mine online (with the hope that it will help get me a job!).
In short, the site gathers news links from various news outlets (i know there are probably plenty that do something similar) including less well-known sites in the West like Al Jazeera and China CCTV News to help give a more well rounded view (if the person wants). There is then an Opinions section where signed in users can write their opinion on a news story (the story doesn't have to be from my site). All users can read the opinions regardless of whether they're a signed in user.
You're feedback would be greatly appreciated but please don't be too harsh! I'm still learning and i know there's plenty more than can/should be done especially if i get some traffic. I've already taken on board some feedback and the site now displays images for stories as well as reducing twitter permissions.
Thanks so much <comment><USER2> Hi I am not a developer but I liked the Idea of this site, am from India and am studying for some services that requires constant News reading for general awareness. There is one site that clicked me very well, its Younews.in. One Feature I liked most is page scrapping original news page for pulling the news-text into browser. Its poorly done though but has similar idea as colate.it

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback my friend

<comment><USER2> :). Actually am very much interested in getting the customized News feeds into my mailbox or Reader. I have even tried some third party webtools like page2rss.com and feed43.com to scrap pages with particular "keywords" and create the feed. But due to my lack of Technical knowledge I end up wasting time. I still dearly want something that works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The thumbnail photos are a little blurry.

<comment><AUTHOR> yea a few of them are due to the size of the image on the source website</comment></comment>


Red Hat, 16%. Canonical, 1% contribution to GNOME - <AUTHOR> http://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/red-hat-16-canonical-1/ <comment><USER2> There's an interesting point hiding in the virulence of this post:

Canonical engineers work on Ubuntu.

Red Hat and SUSE have historically hired swaths of "upstream" developers, often just to work on their own projects and propel Linux along. When I visited an Ubuntu Developer Sprint a few years ago, as a former KDE developer, I was surprised at how few people I knew. It wasn't that they weren't engineers; it was simply that they were working on _Canonical_ projects: Ubuntu, Launchpad, Rosetta, etc., not j-random-OSS-project.

The interesting thing is that they've been _trying_ to hire more upstream folks. Most core OSS developers don't have a problem finding a job. They've also been at this a relatively short period relative to Red Hat (and SUSE), so there's would be no surprise, even if the hiring practices were similar, that the total commit count would be far smaller.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can never understand some elements of the Linux community to speak ill of other community members success.

Ubuntu is probably the best thing thats ever happened to the Linux desktop - its being installed by manufacturers the world over and thats years of contributions that are actually being used by people.

I'm at a bit of a loss to what Greg feels Canonical should do about this. Stop offering Ubuntu? Have Mark post a warm and fuzzy blog post? High-five Redhat engineers every time their code works?

Canonical have done a monumental service to the open source community via their Launchpad service. They provide space for documentation, VCS hosting, issue tracking, repository hosting and build services. They enable communities.

I'd also like to make a special mention to the thousands of hours Canonical engineers and Ubuntu community members spend pulling patches from "downstream" (other distributions including Ubuntu) and pushing them upstream (the kernel, GNOME, KDE, Xorg, etc) - this sort of behaviour fosters better software for the whole community - not just Ubuntu.

<comment><USER4> I know of people who do push patches back to upstream. (I used to spend a lot of time doing it.) But, last I checked, this wasn't really standard operating procedure.

Am I wrong? I sure hope so.

But I can't help but notice the Utnubu [1] project still exists. And still isn't Canonical supported.

[1] <http://wiki.debian.org/Utnubu>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "If you doubt, for a nanosecond, that Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization, then you're either an unapologetic Ubuntu fanboy or you're not paying attention."

1\. Poisoning the well is an ugly debating trick. 2\. He's somehow implying that marketing FOSS is not a useful contribution.

As for the numbers:

1\. "$SUBJECT is the percentage of contribution to the GNOME codebase." ... actually, no, it's the percentage of commits. I'm not refuting the value of that metric, but misrepresenting what's measured is again a debating trick. 2\. Red Hat has about 10 times the number of employees that Canonical has. Taking economies of scale into account, is the 16:1 ratio so bad?

Finally, given how well Red Hat's doing, should they really get into a fuss over any supposed free-rider phenomena?

<comment><USER6> > He's somehow implying that marketing FOSS is not a useful contribution.

Whether or not it's useful, the FOSS community does have some holy ground that shall not be trod upon. The extent of that holy ground varies, but one of the basic tenants of open source is Credit Where Credit Is Due. Generally speaking, the community is very flexible, but don't be surprised if this is where the gloves come off.

<comment><USER7> I'm not a Ubuntu hater, but wrt to "Credit Where Credit Is Due", I was recently at the Ubuntu homepage:

<http://www.ubuntu.com/>

NO mention of "linux" or "GNU" anywhere on the page. Click on the "How Can It Be Free?" link, and no mention of GNU or the GPL.

In fact the reasons they give are "1. It's Open Source" and "2. It's Managed and Funded by Canonical". Open Source is a side-effect of Free as in Freedom, a concept that Canonical is agnostic about. And I'm not sure what point 2 means.

I can understand not wanting to turn people off with scary-sounding words, but even Mac like to tout the "rock solid unix foundation" on which OSX is built.

<comment><USER8> I think they view GNU and GPL explanations as not very friendly to their perceived audience which is the common computer user. Branding it Ubuntu in their view makes it simpler to understand. I think they want to be like OS X and relegate discussions of BSD and Mach Kernel to some really hard to find page.

At least that's how i'm interpreting their pr stuff.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I agree. But I think the branding of Ubuntu as this "immaculately- conceived" OS is what annoys a lot of folks who know a bit about linux.

I think a simple mention on their front page would be enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Red Hat abandoned the desktop community/didn't take it seriously and then are surprised that someone who does gets all the mindshare and community goodwill?

It seems to me to be a miscalculation to say that the desktop hobby market has no money in it. All those younger school and university students which Ubuntu fosters will eventually be in positions where they get to choose what distribution is installed on their servers at work and it will be Ubuntu or Debian, and when GNU/Linux is rolled out on corporate or educational desktops these people are going to choose Ubuntu most likely.

I'd say either take the desktop seriously or re-evaluate your spending on it. Don't do a half-hearted job and expect people to love you. I understand this is probably the engineers getting frustrated at decisions which have been taken by the managers at RH.

<comment><USER10> I remember when RedHat dropped their desktop version (ah, Redhat 9...). At the time I remember thinking is was a dumb move. That having a good, well supported enterprise desktop was too important to RedHat and Linux in general. Then they did their half-hearted spinoff into what is now Fedora, and for a while it seemed like it desktop Linux languished.

Now, I'm pretty sure it was the right move. Enterprise Linux pays the bills. There are very few major installations of Linux desktops, and that's about the only place where you could extract revenue.

I think that they decided that they couldn't make both the enterprise and desktop users happy. Enterprise servers want to be stable and predictable. Desktop users want the new shiny. They had to choose one. So they went out, bought a suit, and went with the ones that gave them more money. Based upon their current financials, it's hard to argue with that strategy. And the funny thing is, they _still_ managed to contribute more code to Gnome than Ubuntu.

As a side note: I used to run all Red Hat servers... then dabbled in Gentoo but recently I've used all Ubuntu. Just this past week I've run into some issues with some very important software (to me), that seems to be related to something in Ubuntu. It runs perfectly in the more conservative RHEL 5, but fails on the more recent Ubuntu. This has made me think a lot about what I'll be using for my servers in the future...

<comment><USER11> You walked almost the same path as me then (re. distros), so I'll give you an advice: Debian. Ubuntu was never a proper server distribution. With their lack of own developers, majority of serious problems have to be pushed upstream as Debian issues anyways. If you liked the "conservative" RHEL, just go for Debian stable. It's the best of both worlds and it is what I'm happy to recommend these days.

<comment><USER12> The problem with Debian in the past (and I say this as someone who formerly maintained some packages and is a Big Fan) was that the release schedule was unpredictable. I don't know what that's like these days - anyone care to comment?

<comment><USER13> According to <http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729> the current policy is a two-year release schedule, with the next release expected in Q1/2 2012.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "If you doubt, for a nanosecond, that Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization, then you're either an unapologetic Ubuntu fanboy or you're not paying attention."

I didn't know Canonical claimed otherwise. All the way back to Launchpad Bug #1: "Microsoft has a majority marketshare"[0], they've been about marketing and sales. Most of the software I've seen coming out of Canonical has been of the "hundred papercuts" variety[1] - little stuff that's easy to fix, but hard to get developer attention for.

[0] <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1>

[1] <https://edge.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts>

</comment><comment><USER15> I won't know about Canonical's claims but it is sure that they're perceived to have more impact on desktop than Red Hat, and that's a very fair perception regardless of the number of commits Redhat does on one particular piece of the desktop.

Linux has been starving of a good, stable desktop, and Ubuntu has provided that. Regarding free-ride, sorry but that's how open source software works. If Ubuntu credits itself for code that RedHat wrote that's not right, but if Ubuntu claims they changed the Linux desktop they have a very reasonable point regardless of who wrote what.

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't the point of open source that people can fork and do what they like with it? Canonical has made a major impact on Linux as being the gateway drug for so many of us. I can honestly say I would not be using linux if not for ubuntu.

Linux needs marketers, otherwise we just have cool software that no-one uses.

</comment><comment><USER17> A comment by a dude called Simon on that page:

So: Red Hat employees 2 years ago: 2200. Canonical employees 2 years ago: 130. (Source: WP history for both).

That's a ratio of about… ummm… Just over 16 to 1! What a coincidence.

If this is a real fact, there is no point in this post.

</comment><comment><USER6> I learned several years ago that Redhat is probably the single biggest entity I have to thank for Linux, besides Linus himself. Start using RHEL, and as you begin to deal with bugs and such, you notice just how much is going on, and just how much goes upstream.

This has not changed, and generally speaking I hope it won't change; I don't spend much time browsing raw code, but they seem to produce the highest quality results.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a little off-topic but to me there's no significant differences among the main general-purpose Linux distros.

I help manage a ton of a mixed RHAT, Centos, Debian and Ubuntu servers and the day-to-day operations are the same; we just install apt in the RHAT-based servers since it's nicer (sure, there's the chkconfig vs rc-update and /var/log/secure vs auth or mail.log vs maillog, big deal).

I'd install or recommend one or the other based mostly on the versions of the applications (apache, postgres etc) that are packaged, if anything. Otherwise I say go with what you are familiar with or what your friends/staff are familiar with.

That's on the server side. On the desktop distros (which I don't use much) it's almost the same. I spent a few years moving from distro to distro and I came to the conclusion that the difference between a new and a previous release of the same distro can be bigger (for me) that the difference between two current distro versions, so again it doesn't matter or rather any little thing can tip the balance to decide one distro or another. It comes to a point where I install say Ubuntu in my laptop and WiFi doesn't work and I just install RHAT or whatever; it's faster to do a re-install with another distro than to troubleshoot the problem.

</comment><comment><USER19> > If you doubt, for a nanosecond, that Canonical is a marketing organization > masquerading as an engineering organization, then you're either an > unapologetic Ubuntu fanboy or you're not paying attention.

Call it what you will Ubuntu's success has everything to do with the default install being quite usable by end users. So what _should_ we call that? Neither marketing engineering sounds right.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you want people to use your software you have to invest in good engineering and you have to invest in good marketing. They're both crucial. Engineering alone doesn't cut it, nor does marketing.

Canonical's work is just as important, if not more so, in putting GNOME in the hands of users.

</comment><comment><USER21> RedHat is a billion dollar company, Canonical doesn't make a profit yet.

<comment> mkr-hn Canonical is a private company, and I don't recall any public mentions of finances. Where did you find information on their profitability?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ubuntu rocks, get over it

</comment><comment><USER23> The business model of Canonical is very simple and clean - themed, non- advanced-user-friendly version of debian (reuse) along with active promotions (money).

Why they should write code if their main activity is decoration and customizing?

Fedora people are the ones on the bleeding edge. RedHat is the second recycling of their effort, CentOS - the third. ^_^

Debian (especially) and Ubuntu are famous for their conservative, slow-moving, less-effort approach.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yet I cry every time I'm at work, being forced to to use red hat enterprise. The dated gnome desktop gives me shame.

Viva debian. And consequently Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER25> Microsoft has hugely more code in the Linux Kernel than Canonical.

After MS got their 22Kloc of Virtual Machine related driver code up-streamed, they massively outweigh Canonical's meagre to non-existent kernel contributions. Canonical just don't do infrastructure work, more or less.

<comment><USER26> Microsoft's code dump was later removed from the tree[1], while the Ubuntu developers have with worked with upstream for years.[2]

[1] [http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Kroah-Hartman- Remo...](http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Kroah-Hartman-Remove-Hyper- V-Driver-from-Kernel)

[2] [http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2008/09/20/plumbers-conference- retro...](http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2008/09/20/plumbers-conference- retrospective/)

<comment><USER25> I'm sure that both of these things are true.

It's also true that Canonical aren't very good at persuading their various up- streams of the value of accepting their patches. It's also true that they don't really do much general linux/gnome infrastructure stuff - they mostly concentrate on Ubuntu specific UI/UX stuff - which is very rarely adopted by upstream projects, for various reasons. It's also true that litl (<http://litl.com/>) a smallish, 40 person, single product start-up, has about the same level of Gnome contributions as Canonical, a company ~10x their size: (<http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/>)

I'm not sure of the wider meaning of these things is, really, if they have any; especially considering that I've currently got Ubuntu installed on all my computers.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Wants You To Become A Gmail Ninja. Or Look Like A Huge Nerd Trying. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/googles-wants-you-to-become-a-gmail-ninja-or-look-like-a-huge-nerd/ <comment><USER2> Link to the google post: [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/so-you-want- to-be-gmai...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/so-you-want-to-be-gmail- ninja.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why link to TC on this and not straight to the goods? Just curious, not flaming.

<comment><AUTHOR> saw it on TC first

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to be able to advance to a green belt ninja, but alas Video Chat is not available on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's been years and I still can't even filter/search using regexps or using my own custom headers.

</comment><comment><USER6> How is this not the # green belt feature: Access your mail via https.

Everyone should be doing that, it's like a 10 second config change to gmail.

</comment><comment><USER7> One thing I've never been able to figure out is how to get _all_ elements of the page to render securely. It seems in every browser I've tried, Gmail pops up a message asking if I want to display insecure elements. Is this safe, since I don't know which elements are displayed insecurely?

<comment> brown9-2 It's not Gmail popping up that warning, it's your browser.

(Although yes, it's gmail generating the links to both insecure and secure content, but distinctions are important to make)

By the way, just bookmark the https version of the site. Then you never have to worry about secure/insecure.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I meant the browser. Under Gmail Master there is a tip on how to always access your mail via https. I have that on, and always use <https://www.gmail.com/> in my browser, but there are still some elements that display insecurely, at least in Chrome. I just checked Firefox 3.5RC2 and IE8 and dodn't get this problem anymore.

Update: I just cleared Chrome's cache and now it works.</comment></comment></comment>


How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/page-abandonment-time.html

<comment><USER2> Great article, but it's also important to consider how the way we consume information is changing over time. The more interesting the article, the more likely it is to be instantly saved to Instapaper, closed, and consumed on analytics-devoid device like a phone or tablet.

This is very true for the way I'm consuming HN these days, and also very frustrating as readability parsers tend to ruin HN and Reddit comment threads.</comment>


My Presentation about "Writing Maintainable, Modular and Scalable CSS" - <AUTHOR> https://speakerdeck.com/ahmad/writing-maintainable-modular-and-scalable-css <comment><AUTHOR> I conducted this presentation during a meetup in Egypt. There is a video of me giving the talk but it is in Arabic. I will probably caption it :) Be gentle please it's my first time to give a public talk :) Link to the YouTube video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJNMdjtaaaY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJNMdjtaaaY)</comment>


Ask HN: Can I visit your startup in SF? - <AUTHOR> Hi there,
My name is Max, I'm a cofounder at Kera, and we're from Toronto. We started Kera to teach the world how to use software.
Cameron (one of my cofounders) and I are coming to SF the week after next (Oct 22-26) so we can make new friends and learn how companies like yours are educating and onboarding new users. We're also looking for advice about building our startup. If you're doing something interesting, have an awesome company culture, or just like hanging with Canadians, we'd love to meet you.
Any referrals or introductions are more than welcome.
You can find out more about Kera here (http://kera.io), and we can be found at @maxcameron & @camwest on twitter.
Thanks in advance,
Max
edit: my email is email@example.com <comment><USER2> I find this entire approach fascinating.

That someone can post this on HN and get a bunch of invites back.

Does doing something like this scale? What if everybody just decided to post "hey I'm coming to SF is there a place for me to crash" or "hey I'm coming to NYC anyone want to have coffee?" or "I have a problem writing perl..."

Since there are companies that you are trying to reach, and you must have some idea of the type of company you want to reach, why not put some effort into doing something other than the obvious easiest thing which is to post an "Ask HN" and see who bites?

(For the record I wouldn't feel the same way if a top commenter who spends much time on HN made a similar request because at least they have put time and effort into HN (and I don't consider my karma as anywhere near that point for the record.)

<comment><USER3> Why not congratulate OP for his initiative. The fact that som many people are responding so positively gives new members of the community (like myself) a wonderful impression of how helpful people are here. Look how many people are pitching in to help this person without any expectation of return.

Also, this is yet one community. You have no idea who all else this guy knows and by meeting with whoever responds here, they will gain from it.

I'd like to point you to a Reid Hoffman article which discusses the power of connecting with people from various networks:

[http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/24/reid-hoffman- linkedin...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/24/reid-hoffman-linkedin- startup-you/) (special attention to the bit on "The diversity of weak ties"

The fact that he's not a top commenter is even more inspiring. It shows that if someone has a good concept, takes initiative and quells any fear that "oh I'm not a big guy/girl on HN,I can't be that audacious" - well that person will get results.

Reminds me of Geothe's timeless words, "...boldness has genius, power and magic in it".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There have been quite a few threads like this on HN over the years (including one I made :-)). I wonder if there's some way of formalizing or aggregating the concept of visiting other companies, it seems there's an audience for it.

<comment><USER5> "Some way of formalizing or aggregating the concept"... like StartupCrawl? :-) <http://startupcrawl.com/> (My startup, Sauce Labs, participated in the crawl in 2009 -- it coincided with RubyConf that year, so there was a lot of flow- over traffic from RubyConf go-ers.)

<comment><USER6> Hmm perhaps if this were more than once a year?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kera looks great! Is it currently an idea that you're trying to validate or are you currently coding it up and waiting to launch?

<comment><USER8> We've done a lot of validation and have a bunch of people doing experiments with it. We can chat more about it if you want to reach out firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER7> great - i'll shoot you an email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi Max. My Name is Robert Reiz. I am the founder of <http://www.versioneye.com>. That is my second Start-Up. I am coming at the same time to San Francisco, from Germany. I like your product, I like Canadians and of course I like Beer :-) I will contact you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Robert. That's awesome. Looking forward to hearing from you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Checkout <http://openco.us/>, they are doing a kickoff today where you can spend an hour visiting a startup in their list, from airbnb to zynga and beyond

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like we're missing it :( Bummer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Drop by whitetruffle ( <https://www.whitetruffle.com/> ). We're located in Rocketspace coworking space. @froseph or firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Joseph,

Thank you so much. I hear Rocketspace has some wicked things going on.

I'll email you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Come stop by. <http://www.appdirect.com>

We're based in San Francisco but founded by two Canadians.

<comment><AUTHOR> Want me to bring you a bottle of CC or a double double or some ketchup chips? No joke.

<comment><USER13> Love the Ketchup chips. <3

Edit:

From Vancover...

<comment><AUTHOR> Done and done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very, very cool startup.

For us non-technical folk, you might wish to add a section to your how-to explaining how Kera.io would interact with proprietary data; for example, if our app happens to be financial, would you be able to see any of it? Or is the script hosted on our end?

(This may be obvious to a dev, but not to me, and therefore caused me to send this to our devs to ask)

<comment><USER8> The script is hosted on your end and data is pulled from our servers to yours, we don't store any personal information or anything on our side.

 _Edit_ : I'll update the FAQ

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Your software is really cool. Just wondering why you haven't completed your website yet. The "how it works" just takes you to a google doc. Anyway, best of luck. If you want to venture to Lake Tahoe, I'd be happy to grab a beer.

<comment><USER8> Well to be honest we were building our marketing website and realized that we were better off to just put it in a Google Doc since we can iterate faster on it. We literally update it in realtime while users watch which is a lot better than the marketing site refine/deploy process. Once things stabilize a little more we'll extract the information into a great marketing website. Probably in the next 6 weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Will you be bringing poutine?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you need it, I will bring it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is exactly the tool I've been waiting for; great work and good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words. Are you in SF?

<comment><USER17> Portland, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You're welcome to join us for lunch at ZeroCater. Email in profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome - i'll email you this weekend. How is zerocater not in Toronto yet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Come visit Startup House (5th and Harrison) to meet us (<http://attico.us>) and various other startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good! I'll be there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hey Max - we'd love to meet you guys in person and have you check out our sweet office and awesome company (ReTargeter). How about Friday the 26th?

<comment><USER21> Awesome company, and awesome dude, I'll attest.

Hey Brian!

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, Brian's awesome. He signed up for Kera a few months ago so we've been chatting for some time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Originally from Toronto myself. Part of a startup called Insight (YC). We're based in Palo Alto. Happy to grab a coffee when you guys are here.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be awesome. What's a good way to get ahold of you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We do payments (<https://www.ribbon.co>) and would love to show you our offices in SOMA.

email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much Hany, I really appreciate it. I'll email you asap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Max, Kera.io looks awesome, congratulations.

Happy to have you guys visit, and we'd love to talk about using the product too.

We're in SOMA. stefano ]a-t[ betable.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the kind words. I'll follow up with an email shortly.

Max

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Max, I'll shoot you an email, PagerDuty is originally a YYZ startup too and we're at 2nd and Bryant in SOMA.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking forward to hearing from you. Lemme know if you need anything from up here. Ketchup chips etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hey Max, stop by Gigwalk when you're down here, we're over on 4th and Bryant. I'll pop you an email. -Matt

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll gigwalk myself over to your office no problem. Talk soon Matt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow, great product. Any examples of companies using it or are you still in the early stages?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

The short answer is: yes.

Feel free to check out <http://verold.com>, <http://ptable.com>, and <http://happytables.com> to see Kera in production.

We also have some really cool case studies in the works with more "high profile" startups in Toronto. That being said, we're still a very early-stage company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not California, but if you find yourself in Denver/Boulder I'd love to show you around:)

<comment><USER8> Max is going to be in Boulder for Defrag. Are you going?

<comment><USER29> FullContact will be at Defrag, we could probably finagle something if you wanted to visit. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be amazing. Can you email me at email@example.com?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Come hang out with us (me?) at Livefyre. 3rd/Market downtown. email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Ben - thanks so much. I'll send you an email shortly.

Max

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Definitely welcome to come visit LaunchRock. I'm email@example.com.

<comment><USER31> And really dig Kera by the way. Could be interesting for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> We'd love to see you at CrowdFlower. Email forthcoming.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is an awesome tool. How did I not know about it?!

<comment><AUTHOR> It isn't really something people search for. It's going to be word of mouth until our category solidifies.

What are you working on these days?

Max

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> where do i sign up to invest?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're up for a coffee, let me know. email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> good luck guys!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Taige!</comment></comment>


Scrapinghubs Developer Data Extraction API for E-Commerce and Article Extraction - <AUTHOR> https://blog.scrapinghub.com/developer-data-extraction-api-for-product-article-extraction <comment><USER2> So delighted this product is shipped and live. Been working on getting this live with the team for a while. It provides a really useful API for extracting useful ecommerce and article data in JSON or CSV formats.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a product our team was working on for the last 1.5 y, excited for it to go live! Gives you articles and products from any web page in a uniform JSON format, combining data extracted from the web page (using both text, html structure and screenshot), and semantic markup.</comment>


RoR Quality Checklist - <AUTHOR> http://www.matthewpaulmoore.com/articles/1276-ruby-on-rails-code-quality-checklist#sti <comment><USER2> Totally disagree about STI.

I once had abstracted a complex application as a directed graph that have only nodes and edges. From there I STIed most of my business entities.

The resulting app had only two tables and complexity relating to the network was nicely separated from business objects. Which was kind of beautiful.

Now, about testing. Testing of controllers is the key, you say?

Strange enough, I think that unit tests (models) are the most important. Because controllers are dumb, and often they are not even the only way to access the logic.

What if your application is called by some AJAX framework that has its own MVC built-in, like Dojo?

If the design is right, I can get all of my app's functionality from command line, ignoring the controllers completely.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got mixed feeling about STI. We're using it for one of our larger projects with success. I don't like that they recommend polymorphism for everything; this makes iterating collections of the interface very difficult.

Controller tests are actually really important for a few reasons; one of the more obvious being user authentication. While our controllers tests are anemic when compared to our model tests, we do test the more heavily used controllers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Those arguments against using STI are equally valid with inheritance in general, which is to say not valid.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds good: "Although unit tests can be important for iterating features, for most young Rails apps, models are more simplistic. What you should make sure of is that all points of interaction for users are well tested, and stay un- broken from release to release.", but is plain bad. With REST controllers and multiple formats, it is a bad idea to not follow the Fat Model approach.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have an actual use for STI.

I store a data grid, of which there are two types of headers. Row and column headers. (Headers must be their own object for various reasons that are rather boring).

Rows and columns have identical fields. Voila! STI is actually kind of useful!

As for the rest of the article, it seems reasonable but not mindblowing. Good to keep in mind though.

</comment><comment><USER6> Check his HTML.

Judging by the unsemantic markup I'd say this chap has a way to go before lecturing us on software quality. I mean, <p> </p>, really.</comment>


Nvidia MLOps: The AI LifeCycle for IT Production - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/09/03/what-is-mlops/ <comment><USER2> I wish Nvidia would put more work into making sure that its stable software packages work together with other stable software. I have a laptop that's more than 1 year old with tensor cores (RTX 2070), but it's still not supported on stable Windows.

I had to install dev channel MS Windows + subsystem for linux 2 + NVidia CUDA 10.2 (an old version of the NVIDIA driver) to be able to run mixed precision training on my NVIDIA card.

I could try to run Linux, but in that case I may not be able to use the newest games that are created for the same NVIDIA card.

The situation is so bad that Jeremy Howard from Fast.AI suggests people to run training models on the cloud even if they put significant amount of money into having their own NVIDIA cards.

<comment><USER3> These are problems of third parties, not Nvidia.

Every game that runs on Linux gets full graphics acceleration.

As for Windows, PyTorch AMP allows for mixed precision training on native windows through conda, no apex needed. And of course, the same APIs from Nvidia are available on both.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, it's great to know that I can use PyTorch AMP for mixed precision training, I was following NVIDIA's documentation, and this wasn't explained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a lot of words and vendors here I've never heard of. Is this a legit rundown of a growing field, or is this Nvidia pitching me all their partners?

<comment><USER5> The lifecycle diagram is legit.

As for the vendors, Nvidia is just promoting their own services or their partners.

But there aren't any established players yet. It's still a nascent field.

<comment><USER6> ML Ops is a rapidly growing corner of the AI landscape: [https://www.cognilytica.com/2020/04/01/ai-today- podcast-135-...](https://www.cognilytica.com/2020/04/01/ai-today- podcast-135-ml-model-management-and-operations-2020/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Working for a devops consultancy and tooling conpany: this is definitely something we have been keeping our eyes on for the last couple of years. My personal opinion is that our local market might be a bit too small to invest heavily in this but I'm glad some of the big names can get benefits out of it.

</comment><comment><USER8> It looks like the "Data Fixes" section could introduce bias. "Select the right data" reminds me of researchers cherry-picking data for papers.

<comment><USER9> The purpose of that step is exactly the opposite: to use data that represents (as much as possible) the full generality of the space you seek to model. And on a more practical level, there are datasets that can't be used for commercial purposes but are useful for research (a well known but not the best example would be ImageNet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> for people who work on real production ML. what kind of data pipeline are you using before the MODELING part of it?</comment>