Lagos: Hope and Warning - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/html/lagos-nigeria-16011.html <comment><USER3> A great article, but maybe too much emphasis on "the impending catastrophe". Short of epidemics, fire and the like, the city is in permanent stasis: the conditions devolve to the point where there is an equilibrium with the arrivals from the country side.

It's unclear why or how could a disequilibrium form and stand in a free to travel country: as long as the metropolis offers even a modicum of economic opportunity, such as being a water seller at the intersection, that is already much better then being a subsistence farmer in an overcrowded country that experienced famine as recently as last year.

There is no catastrophe looming, just the slow grip of poverty following people around and slowly suffocating their lives, absent coordinated social organization and coherent politics to end it.

<comment><USER4> > It's unclear why or how could a disequilibrium form and stand in a free to > travel country: as long as the metropolis offers even a modicum of economic > opportunity, such as being a water seller at the intersection, that is > already much better then being a subsistence farmer in an overcrowded > country that experienced famine as recently as last year.

Lagos and all of Nigeria suffers from the same plague that is consuming the West: extreme inequality. There's economic growth but when the rich capture the overwhelming majority of the new wealth then, combined with population growth, you can get a population where many people are actually worse off as time goes on. This is why even as the economy grows the number of people living in poverty is actually increasing [1][2].

It's highly unlikely the government will/can/wants to address the inequality [3]. At some point the only "fix" to this problem will be, as it has been in the past, war. The growing regional and ethnic divisions just need another decade or so (by that time we'll probably see as many as 120m living in poverty) and then, suddenly, the water reaches a boil.

Ironically, if you speak to many Nigerians they'll tell you that inequality isn't a problem at all. If you work hard and smart enough you can make it. Sound familiar?

[1] [https://www.stearsng.com/article/inequality-in-nigeria-is- wo...](https://www.stearsng.com/article/inequality-in-nigeria-is-worse-than- it-looks)

[2] [https://qz.com/963465/some-of-the-worlds-biggest- countries-h...](https://qz.com/963465/some-of-the-worlds-biggest-countries- have-managed-to-wrangle-extreme-poverty-except-nigeria/)

[3] [https://www.oxfam.org/en/even-it-nigeria/nigeria-extreme- ine...](https://www.oxfam.org/en/even-it-nigeria/nigeria-extreme-inequality- numbers)

<comment><USER5> I am a little confused - why is this downvoted?

<comment><USER6> Because a simple thought experiment disproves his point and criticisms of the West.

If the "troubles" of a society are really the disparity between the richest and poorest, then a country like Somalia would be a glorious example of liberty and prosperity. Yet everyone there is poor and with extremely limited options in anything you might want to measure.

Clearly this isn't it. Maybe in order to get a healthy thing going you must have some extreme outliers as a result of the freedom/ability to let people do their thing.

<comment><USER5> If that is a reason, I think the downvote wrong. I think this is a place for exhange of views and debate, not an exam in which "wrongly" argued points are downvoted.

<comment><USER6> Because those points he's trying to make are extremist and violent it seems. "The only fix is war" seems like the typical extremist sound bite by someone with those views.

Proposing violence to fix an issue with which appears your friend is not well versed on seems just like the mass mob lynching of a "suspected" person doing X. The mob feels righteous at the time, only to learn the person killed didn't do anything at all.

<comment><USER7> That seems somewhat disingenuous, unless I've somehow completely misinterpreted OP's point. OP was not proposing violence as the fix, but merely stating the fact that historically only wars or other kinds of catastrophic events have reversed trends of increased wealth inequality [1].

Stating that as the basis for a debate is not the same as endorsing violence as the fix. It seems to be a tragic fact that different societies have not found a political way of solving this issue and that alone is worth discussing.

[1] [https://voxeu.org/article/europe-s- rich-1300](https://voxeu.org/article/europe-s-rich-1300)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have never been to Lagos but I do live in Cape Town South Africa, and there are lessons to be learnt here as well. Infrastructure in South Africa has declined dramatically in the last 20 years since the first inclusive elections in 1994. If you look at all state run institutions, like health, education, police, water, sanitation, conservation and everything else people take for granted in well run countries, you find a dramatic decline. What this translates to in people on the ground is a widening gap between rich and poor, civil unrest, growth in private healthcare and security, unreliable and expensive power supply and high crime rate, often violent. Sub Saharan Africa is a difficult place to invest in with corruption and the threat of expropriation of property a possibility. Will it ever change? I am not sure, it doesn't seem likely

<comment><USER9> I have driven though 25+ countries in West Africa from Morocco to Cape Town and now on my up to Cairo in the last ~2 years [1].

While I understand what you're saying, I have some things to add:

1\. Cape Town and Lagos (Nigeria in General) have virtually nothing in common. Cape Town is essentially Zürich compared to Nigerian cities.

2\. _state run institutions, like health, education, police, water, sanitation, conservation and everything else people take for granted in well run countries, you find a dramatic decline. ... a widening gap between rich and poor, civil unrest, growth in private healthcare and security, unreliable and expensive power supply and high crime rate, often violent._

You have just described the exact challenges faced by the United States.

3\. There are millions of stories about how bleak "Africa" is and how many challenges it faces. I have been constantly shocked by how developed many places are, and how fast they are not only catching up to, but in some cases surpassing "Developed" places. For example: have you been to Brazzaville? very nice and modern city, fantastic roads all over the Rep. Congo now - <USER2> Noire too. Lomé in Togo is another great example.

4\. In my experience Africans are positive and optimistic about the future. That means they're working hard to make stuff better, as apposed to those who sit around in the developed world and complain about how everything is getting worse. I wonder where we'll be in ~20 more years.

[1] [http://instagram.com/theroadchoseme/](http://instagram.com/theroadchoseme/)

<comment><USER8> I love Africa and its people, dont think I want to dismiss the continent as a lost cause but if you want to compare the US with Africa look at one index that of unemployment, South Africa is looking at an effective employment of 50% while the US has effectively 0% unemployment. I dont doubt the US has problems but its way better governed than African states

<comment><USER10> Two points: It is not useful to generalize "African states" because different African countries have different systems and qualities of governance. The current US system of governance has some characteristics that citizens of other countries would find unacceptable, eg the disconnect between popular and electoral college vote, the large amount of power of the presidency, the politicization of the judiciary. South Africa's constitution and constitutional court on the other hand are widely considered an example of good governance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> More Vanagons (T3) than Burning Man, Oregon, Santa Rosa and Turo app combined. Just let it sink in that those go for $8k USD each in the US and parts are scarce.

Also, flattening of the world, resurgence of populist pedagogues, crises of the majority of countries slowly/quickly becoming perpetual failed states. Corruption, manufactured consent and disengagement have led nearly every civilization to this same conclusion at around 10 generations or 250 years. It's not inevitable, it's just the doom of repeating history by being ignorant and passive.</comment>


Diversity matters when it comes to picking conference speakers - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mariatta/status/987450414298685440 <comment><USER2> My equally well-reasoned rebuttal: no, it doesn't.</comment>


Facebook Novi and Surveillance Finance - <AUTHOR> https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/novi.html <comment><USER2> It is worth remember that the current state of finance is already surveillance finance. Credit card records are sold and purchased, all large chains and stores do significant customer tracking on their own, more than just every item you purchase, when, and where. Even services like Gmail scrape information from your email for every receipt that you receive, although they purchase CC data either way.

<comment><USER3> Don't forget that due to increasingly heavy financial regulations adopted by FATF require financial institutions to have extreme surveillance data on all financial transactions and to report anything they themselves deem to be suspicious to the authorities. This includes things such as cross-border activity (logging in from a foreign ip) to using a VPN.

<comment><USER2> Yup, and of course there's also FinCEN, the IRS, the BSA which includes reporting of currency transactions, suspicious transactions, FBAR where you have to disclose all foreign holdings, and many other reports. I think similar regulations will hit cryptocurrency eventually, requiring holders to report their addresses they have the private keys of, sadly.

<comment><USER4> > requiring holders to report their addresses they have the private keys of, > sadly.

This might become the law, but how would it be enforced?

I thought the world leaning on Swiss banks for data was effectively an admission that anonymous accounts were unlinkable from the client side.

<comment><USER5> > This might become the law, but how would it be enforced?

By a few token measure that wont scale, just like current existing income tax structure. The main enforcement mechanism now is heavily reliant upon employers withholding on the behalf of employees and banks reporting on their accounts (the same entities that consider fines for felonious dealings just a cost of doing business); without it, existing tax enforcement would be toothless to most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "...rebranding of their Libra cryptocurrency project into the new Facebook brand Novi."

That is technically not true. Novi is a wallet Facebook is making for Libra. The wallet used to be named Calibra and caused confusion. Libra has not been rebranded by Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of this article from yesterday: Coinbase wants to sell blockchain analysis software to the IRS and DEA a year after its Neutrino acquisition [https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/67551/coinbase-irs- dea-a...](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/67551/coinbase-irs-dea- analytics-neutrino)

</comment><comment><USER8> Off topic, but this is so so so so smart!!!

> To contact me via email run one of the following scripts to generate my > contact information. I find this is an effective filter against the deluge > of emails from recruiters.

> Recruiters who do contact me will be named and shamed publicly.

<comment><USER9> Yes, run a script from someone...smart.

And wow, tbf that haskell script is simple enough to read w/o compiling. Never knew it was that easy to read. If you know a ceaser cipher then you can literally do it in your head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a fair amount of speculation in this article, some of which is presented with a bit too much certainty, IMO.

But it's mixed in with some pretty interesting details and references. It's worth a read.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cant wait for facebook to disrupt fintech with zero fee micro transactions. Been waiting for Mozilla/Firefox to do it as they are in a better middleman position.

<comment><USER12> wechat has been doing free transfers forever. Venmo too. Personal transfers on Paypal and Square cash are free too I think. Not too sure where the big disruption is.

<comment><USER13> Do this worldwide and you indeed have disruption.

<comment><USER14> Isn't PayPal worldwide?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >"After the initial announcement and code drop last year, the Libra name has been dragged through the mud by the press due to the project's complete disdain for compliance and their bizarre code drop."

Could someone who is familiar with this event say what was actually "bizarre" about the way the code was delivered?

<comment><USER16> They were ostensibly just getting Libra started and open to feedback from the consortium but a lot of work had already been done on the code. This is often a sign of openwashing.

<comment><USER13> For what is worth, what was released was a state of the art implementation of a consensus protocol with different technological opinionated choices (what signature algorithm, what hash function, how to store account state, etc.)

This did not have (and should not) have any impact on discussions around regulations. The development has also been ongoing in the open for a year since the announcement, so contributions and discussions are (and have been) welcome.

<comment><USER16> Is the "don't even use a blockchain" discussion welcome? It's hard for people to escape sunk costs.

<comment><USER13> Of course! We even did release a payment protocol based not on a consensus protocol but on a broadcast protocol: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.11506.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.11506.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Crypto finance should be, in general, run as open source, non-profit if it really wants to bring any societal change and democratize establishments. For- profit corporations running these programs under the garb of friendly deceptive branding can at most influence a behavior which is the only real positive.

<comment><USER18> It cannot be run as any traditional incorporated entity if it doesn't want to get essentially turned into one of the already existing financial services companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there reason to believe that their foray into the financial sector will be treated differently under a democratic president/legislators vs republican ones?

Basically do they have a dog in this fight?

<comment><USER20> Crypto currencies generally are more popular with people who have less trust in the state, while people who trust states and their currencies are more sceptical. The same line exists in the Democratic/Republican divide.

The question is how Facebook will market and promote their wallet and efforts. My assumption is that for end users this will be promoted as a way to buy and sell things and services via Facebook platforms (pay my cab driver via WhatsApp while travelling etc.) and the fact it's a crypto currency underneath is an attempt to reassure other financial players that Facebook won't take over their business, but allows interacting (in the end users have to convert from/to local currency, which requires banks etc.)

And with that it's less a topic in that political divide.

<comment><USER13> Note that there are also people like me, who trust their government for the most part but want a more transparency system.

<comment><USER20> It's not one dimensional. I simplified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is Facebook + what's left of their coalition allowed to set emergency monetary policy for Libra?

<comment><USER16> Libra doesn't really have monetary policy since it's supposed to be 1:1 backed by real money, but now that you mention it I wonder what they would do if (purely hypothetically) one of their backing bank accounts got seized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very much appreciated. This post tells it like it is, without equivocation.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is an open secret when Chinese government started heavily pushing for digital currency on top of blockchain. But everyone is smart enough to not talk about that...

Edit: Interestingly enough, the sensitivity surrounding block-chain (and AI, in the context of mass surveillance) is showing the effect of significantly slow down the mass adoption of the technology.

AI mass surveillance has already become an mass market in China. It however is still "a solution looking for problem" in US.

How this can play out in the longer term? For example, what would happen if the relinquish of privacy in the short term, allowed China to secure its strategic upper hand in economy size and technologies, through the value unlocked through Blockchain and AI?

From the perspective of US economy and technology development, it's a very challenging problem to figure out how to apply these technologies _quickly_. As there is literally zero resistance in China.

This issue is more urgent for AI. In addition to the fact that AI surveillance is already used everywhere in China, it's also super effective in the near term. For example, I can imagine AI can easily enhance the effectiveness of war machines to an entirely higher level.

Disclaimer: Intentionally putting moral judgement aside.

<comment><USER24> A thread having nothing to do with nice. Oh lets see if I can squeeze some silly propaganda into it. You could have just as easily made your point without the old trite propaganda about china. The propaganda gets boring and ineffective after a while. Why not try something different?</comment></comment>


OMG this keeps happening. My website keeps going down with 2000 views per day.  - <AUTHOR>

Do you guys know what I can do about this? I'm using dreamhost because it's pretty cheap but it keeps going down every time I get a huge traffic spike for no reason...<p>It's a wordpress blog. I use Super WP cache. <comment><USER2> You have self-identified the issue, "I'm using dreamhost because it's pretty cheap".

If you are running a site that matters to you, get it onto decent hosting. That is probably going to cost a bit more but will pay back in your site actually being available.

People seem to like wpengine ([http://wpengine.com](http://wpengine.com)) for WordPress.

If you go with some VPS hosting you could stick Varnish in front of the site, it's a while since I used WordPress but it generally seems to struggle when you are getting a lot of concurrent connections even with something like Super WP Cache. I wrote a thing for Smashing about the really basics of Varnish: [http://mobile.smashingmagazine.com/2013/12/04/speed-up- your-...](http://mobile.smashingmagazine.com/2013/12/04/speed-up-your-mobile- website-with-varnish/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I point my domain name to Amazon Cloudfront with my website as the origin server. Cloudfront respects your page cache, so most requests are served by Cloudfront (cheap and fast) and most users never even touch my original servers.

</comment><comment><USER4> dreamhost, bluehost, hostgator etc are notorious for this. It works fine at low volumes, but as soon as you are getting a few thousand hits per day, the site is mysteriously unavailable. Their offering is basically a bait and switch. As soon as your volume increases, they encourage you to upgrade your plan.</comment>


Well, that's one SEO hack... (view-source) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tutorspree.com/browse/new-york-ny-tutors/computer-programming <comment><USER2> <http://www.last.fm/robots.txt>

      Disallow: /harming/humans
      Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
      Disallow: /harm/to/self

<comment><USER3> Virtues last reward is a great game. I hope that the robots of our future will follow this protocol

<comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brilliant -- I love source code easter eggs

One of my favorites is on Vimeo - if you crack open the JS console, it pitches you on applying for front in dev work with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah! That's pretty brilliant. Nicely done, Vimeo. OK, who else has awesome source-code easter eggs?

<comment><USER6> Even the President is in on it:

view-source:<http://www.barackobama.com/>

<comment><USER7> On a related note, I know the candidates have nothing to do with this, but I'm extremely impressed with Barack Obama's web presence. I was also very impressed with Mitt Romney's web presence during the election.

<comment><USER8> Well it's not like they were short of money to spend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure John McCarthy was the creator of Lisp, not pg...

<comment><USER10> Whoops - good point. Fixing now. I'll take the blame on that one. Meant to write ARC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah...we scattered some ASCII easter eggs around the site. Favorite practitioners of various subjects. PG wins for programming (duh).

We'll send a tshirt to the first person to find them all :).

<comment><USER11> > PG wins for programming (duh).

...why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What makes you think it's SEO related? I don't think any search index would do anything with HTML comments.

<comment><USER13> I think he was joking :p

<comment><USER14> Or that they made their website interesting enough for us to and link back to the website, talk about it here, and possibly increase traffic ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any sites that publish the majority of it's content (or alternate) in html comments (view-source), rather than in visible markup?

</comment><comment><USER16> My favorite source code easter eggs are all the odd little tidbits scattered throughout the Space Jam movie website...still up:

[http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/lineup/lineup....](http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/lineup/lineup.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> I assume the giant comment is what we're supposed to see, but I'm not sure how that's supposed to have any impact on SEO at all. Seems more like a tribute than a SEO hack.

<comment><USER18> You obviously know nothing about SEO. Having a Giant face in a comment of your page increases clicks, on average, by 147%. Give or take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That is really cool - but who the hell found this, and how?

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know who the person in the homepage source code is?

view-source:<http://www.tutorspree.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm hoping it's Freddie Mercury.

<comment><USER6> I'm thinking it's Al Pacino in Scar Face. Freddie Mercury just as solid a bet though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> <http://www.youtube.com/robots.txt>

# robots.txt file for YouTube

# Created in the distant future (the year 2000) after

# the robotic uprising of the mid 90's which wiped out all humans.

<comment><USER21> These are lyrics from this song, "The Humans are Dead" by Flight of the Conchords: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoi1MSGu64>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> it adds 11.5k to the page (20% overhead) for an easter egg seems a bit excessive. it would be 10x smaller and more interesting to embed a js1k game or demo in the source.

<comment><USER23> gzip makes it quite a bit less than 20%

<comment><USER22> i dont believe gzip typically applies to html, only to loaded text-based resources, js/css. i could be wrong.

either way that page's html does not come in compressed.

<comment><USER24> Gzip applies to whatever it's configured to apply to, and text\html is likely the _most_ common mimetype gzipped.

tutorspree does indeed load with gzip:

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Server: nginx/1.1.19
      Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 21:19:05 GMT
      Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
      Transfer-Encoding: chunked
      Connection: keep-alive
      Vary: Cookie
      Content-Encoding: gzip

<comment><USER22> i'm not sure where you're getting those headers from, this is what i'm seeing:

      Connection	Keep-Alive
      Content-Length	59127
      Content-Type	text/html; charset=utf-8
      Date	Fri, 10 May 2013 21:24:38 GMT
      Server	nginx/1.1.19
      Set-Cookie	....
      Vary	Cookie

EDIT: i ran it through IE and got these headers too. Then ran it through some other online header-check sites and got your headers in one instance.

the majority of my tests resulted in these: [http://www.seochat.com/seo- tools/check-server-headers/?go=1&...](http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/check- server- headers/?go=1&tool=38&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tutorspree.com%2Fbrowse%2Fnew-york- ny-tutors%2Fcomputer- programming&imageverify=JG84X&timehsh=4869395a5754453d&toolsubmit=Check+URL+Header)

<comment><USER25> On Chrome Windows 7 x64:

        Content-Encoding:gzip

Maybe you're looking at the wrong resource?

<comment><USER22> i dont know what's going on. chrome here doesnt show gzip in the headers. various _external_ header check tools also show no gzip. where else am i supposed to look?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've done the same thing on one of my sites, it shows my gravatar image: view- source:<http://permutationer.com/>

</comment><comment><USER27> Best source code ASCII I've seen is from Rishi here: <http://explicitly.me/robots.txt>

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't see anything interesting.

<comment><USER29> You may need to maximize your browser to see the effect while viewing the page source.

<comment><USER30> Thank you. I have a two-screen configuration, and usually use the smaller screen for Web browsing, and the larger screen for writing. When I dragged the view source tab over to my larger screen, I saw immediately what the big deal was. Cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> interesting. I can see more details when scrolling

</comment><comment><USER8> He only wears shorts? Is there any truth in this?</comment>


Problem Solving using Graph Traversals - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/slidarko/problemsolving-using-graph-traversals-searching-scoring-ranking-and-recommendation

<comment><USER2> If you know Python you can experiment with some graph algorithms using NetworkX (<http://networkx.lanl.gov>).

Check out the tutorial: <http://networkx.lanl.gov/tutorial/tutorial.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I am glad to see this on the HN front page - excellent overview of graph theory and interesting ideas for using data flow and also a common API for several underlying graph datastores. The first part that used matrix/tensors to explain different types of graphs and operations was good also.

</comment><comment><USER4> For further background and more code examples I can really recommend O'Reilly's "Programming the Semantic Web" [Segaran et al.]

<comment><USER5> In a similar vein is the superb "Programming Collective Intelligence", also from O'Reilly.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.amazon.com/Collective-Intelligence-Action- Satnam-...](http://www.amazon.com/Collective-Intelligence-Action-Satnam- Alag/dp/1933988312/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Intelligent-Web- Haralambos-...](http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Intelligent-Web-Haralambos- Marmanis/dp/1933988665/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On page 25, the subscript for E in the second equation should be k, not m?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that would make more sense than what is currently there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> pdf: [http://s3.amazonaws.com/ppt-download/atti-ps- graphs-10072510...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/ppt-download/atti-ps- graphs-100725105805-phpapp01.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> Btw if youre further interested the authors other papers are listed at <http://markorodriguez.com/Lectures.html> . Bonus you dont need a slideshare account to download the slides pointed to by this story.</comment>


What project are you working on during the upcoming holidays? - <AUTHOR> http://myholidayapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Modern Warfare 2 and whatever beer I receive for Christmas. Holidays aren't meant for working.

<comment><USER3> Fall season has been incredible this year in regard to games. CoD MW2, Borderlands, Dragon Age, L4D 2, Assassins Creed 2, the list goes on.

This is when I wish I was still working in the gaming industry: game purchases were expensed, playing was considered "research", and we had "gaming holidays" when hot titles were released so we could spend all day playing. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote a god awful seismic tomography tool for geologists the past few months. The gory details: Written in Java, exposed as a web service that takes a path on the server that hosts the seismic tomography tool. The tool is accessed using a swing front end. So the user has to upload their files to the server using ftp or whatever, then login with remote desktop to the server and start the swing app.

These were all my bosses ideas. So I've decided to redo this project the right way over the break and come back to work with a solution I can be proud of! I'm thinking a basic PHP and html/css web app.

<comment><USER5> > These were all my bosses ideas.

When you already know a better, simpler, cheaper, and faster way to meet the stated goals, you can email your boss a counter-proposal, clearly outlining the advantages to your proposed approach.

This might be risky in highly political work environments (or with touchy bosses), but in general, they are paying for your _expertise_ , not your typing skills, and a decent boss will recognize and appreciate your initiative.

<comment><USER6> I'm guilty of this also, although yesterday when a consultant educated my boss about the existence of Virtualization (which my boss apparently knew nothing about) and I replied "oh yeah, I've got VirtualBox running on my dev machine, I do all of my coding on VM's", I realized that I am doing him a great disservice by not interjecting more. Part of my problem is that my boss tends to interrupt people when they are talking, which puts me off a little bit when I'm trying to explain an alternative technology or method to him. I don't think that he intends to be rude, and at first I thought that he was picking up on what I was saying and making a quick decision, and that is why he tended to shift the conversation or ask an unrelated question. I now realize that he probably doesn't always follow what I'm saying, he just thinks of something else and blurts it out in the middle of my explanation, so I need to be more forceful in getting my point across so that he can make a fully educated decision.

<comment><USER7> You don't necessarily want to be forceful, but you DO want to be concise. The biggest problems I see programmers/engineers/IT folks have is they tend to ramble on and on about the topic at hand. Managers, and non-technical people, want a relevant, but concise, explanation. Think elevator pitch. What can you explain in 1 minute? In 5 minutes?

<comment><USER6> That is excellent advice! I am (unfortunately) a 5 minute voice mail rambler, which my wife often makes fun of me for. Make it an elevator pitch, I'm going to remember that.

<comment><AUTHOR> 30s to get your point across. Time for the point plus 2-3 key supporting arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope it's ok to drop a small advert in here, it seems to be on topic.

If a good artist, designer or usability engineer is looking for a project over Christmas week then I and a friend(1) are going to be building a web app and would love a third partner. E-mail christmas09 at theplanis.com

(1) I'm a systems engineer who dabbles in marketing, Java Script, DBs and web apps - if you want a reference I can send you a beta invite for my current project. He is a lawyer who specialises in scripting languages and CSS.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am working on AppRabbit.com (sorry, just a landing page right now), a database web app composer. I'd love to be to Microsoft Access what Google Docs is to Word and Excel. There are numerous other offerings available right now (including Zoho Creator), so I am really focusing on being the simple, straight forward, and functional. I'm doing it on my own right now, but I'm not apposed to taking on a cofounder. Truth be told I'm not much of a designer or a UX expert, although I'm moderately handy with jQuery/Ajax, so I could really use some help in that regards.

</comment><comment><USER9> We are beta launching www.nixty.com. I've got a # of interviews scheduled with people in New England to demo the product and get initial feedback. If you live in New England and are interested in seeing NIXTY, then shoot me an email at glen at nixty.com. To borrow Fred Wilson's term, our BHAG is to become the "educational operating system of the web", just as Amazon is the default shopping system and google is the default search operating system -- we want to become the default educational platform for individuals, trainers/educators, and institutions.

</comment><comment><USER5> — Lisp compiler (ambitiously, an Arc/GOAL inspired dialect for games/multimedia, initially to target a Lua-like niche)

— TIGsource "Assemblee" game competition entry

— Client-side Javascript/canvas pixel art editor

— Playing with Adobe's Flex SDK

— Productivity application (as you may have guessed, it involves methods for keeping track of multiple parallel projects ;)

— Actual holiday stuff

— Clearing some of my backlog of video games I've been meaning to play. Top of the list is _Uncharted 2_.

</comment><comment><USER10> I just finished updating Phonalyzr to support Android 1.6+ devices, with a few more graphs and options thrown in:

<http://mld.dreamhosters.com/phonalyzr.apk>

I need to test it a bit more, but hopefully I'll put in on the Market tonight.

</comment><comment><USER11> Oh, so many ideas, if only I could focus.

\- Slime Volleyball in Clojure

\- Some text-based game or simulation to take advantage of Ruby's metaprogramming abilities

\- Improving an existing online game I run with AJAX/Facebook Connect.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's a suggestion for a project to work on this upcoming holiday. Freeciv web client: <http://code.google.com/p/freeciv-forever/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Mornings - Project Sleepalot.

Afternoons - build something fun using OpenGL, as I've always wanted to learn it properly. Ideas welcome.

</comment><comment><USER14> Palm webOS application. It's top secret :)

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought I'd get out and meet new people by working as a department store Santa. It's so different to what I'd normally do that it's bound to be... fun... right?

</comment><comment><USER16> PHP port of PHPXref. Alpha is done already :)

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://elev.at>

Replaying Uncharted 2 at higher difficulty level.

</comment><comment><USER18> A Maemo app for my soon-arriving N900.

</comment><comment><USER19> What holidays?

<comment><USER20> Take your pick:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:December_observances>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have 8 siblings, and several years ago, I took it upon myself to organize the our gift exchange. Every since then, it's been my responsibility to come up with the list of who buys for who.

At first I just randomly generated the list of buyers and recipients using a python script, but last year I got creative and made a puzzle website for my siblings to solve:

<http://markpneyer.com/christmas08/>

I had fun working on it, and [some of them] had fun solving the puzzle, so I'm doing it again this year. Oh, the possibilities.

<comment><USER6> I also have 8 siblings (and my name is also Mark, that's interesting). We do the gift exchange thing every year too, shopping for 8 kids is easy, shopping for 8 adults with spouses and children gets really expensive! I just have to say that your approach is awesome.</comment></comment>


Why Getting Into Harvard is No Longer an Honor - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/why-getting-into-harvard-is-no-longer-an-honor/2012/04/04/gIQAPhBVvS_blog.html

<comment><USER2> The misguided assumption here is that we live in a meritocratic world, which is simply not the case.

Furthermore, even in a meritocratic world, there are many things an "old money" student will be able to offer that others will not.

</comment><comment><USER3>
        > His great weakness? He's an Asian applying for financial aid.

Every single Ivy-league school has need-blind admissions; that is, an applicant's need for financial aid has no effect on their admittance ([http://www.admissionsconsultants.com/college/ivy_league_fina...](http://www.admissionsconsultants.com/college/ivy_league_financial_aid.asp)).</comment>


To all the people trying to solve the email problem with a new type of reader.. - <AUTHOR> http://www.matevans.co.uk/post/35846171668/to-all-the-people-trying-to-solve-the-email-problem

<comment><USER2> E-mail should be simple, quick, as should everything else.

Just build out a .muttrc then move on: <http://www.muttrcbuilder.org/></comment>


Sending money with Google Wallet - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/wallet/send-money/

<comment><USER2> No mention of how you get money out of Google Wallet back to a bank?

Edit: US only... figures.</comment>


The unsung heroes of scientific software - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/the-unsung-heroes-of-scientific-software-1.19100 <comment><USER2> Personally I believe that open code, raw data, and cleaned datasets should be requirements for publication in any peer-reviewed journal in which a paper claims that computational mechanisms were involved.

Failure to distribute the data and code not only greatly devalues the contributions of many scientists, it makes replication far more difficult, and opens the door for outright fabrication.

If computation is a necessary element of the research, it ought to be a necessary element of publication as well.

<comment><USER3> >Failure to distribute the data and code not only greatly devalues the contributions of many scientists, it makes replication far more difficult, and opens the door for outright fabrication.

Reasons why labs don't produce code:

(1) Fear of being scooped; suppose you put in tons of man-hours into a custom population genetics association study for malaria in Africa, you don't want your competitor lab to sequence a bunch samples in SE Asia and run your code as-is and publish a paper when you have the sequencers to do the same.

(2) Fear of competitors not being able to replicate stochastic ML results; some machine-learning and artificial neural network papers applied to Biology are stochastic. Past authors have been accused of "cherry-picking" the most "optimistic" runs that show positive results, e.g., ([https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/the-network- non...](https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/the-network-nonsense-of- manolis-kellis/))

(3) Focus on science, not tool production; most labs' focus is to produce publications, not open-source software. User base for scientific software is very niche, unlike Web MVC frameworks; making the payoff calculus of packaging and supporting external users not so great. Furthermore, most labs have custom databases making integrating external software, externalizing internal software difficult.

<comment><USER4> Just to follow up on your last point, I have found that folks are often happy to send code, but code written in research labs is generally horrendous. I don't think that the "publish or die" culture and a culture of releasing all relevant code is compatible. It takes time to refactor and produce clean code - time that can be spent chasing the next publication.

<comment><USER5> Then requiring the code to be published and runnable would have a salutary effect on the whole circus.

<comment><USER6> Not really... I don't see how that would be anything more than adding one more task to a million other tasks. It doesn't change incentives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been developing research software for +10 years and I experience this all the time.

As one example, over a decade ago I wrote a biological simulation program called CompuCell3D it was the successor to CompuCell, a 2D simulator of cells as cellular automata. Since then many papers have been written based on research utilising this software. Not only have I not been credited in any of these publications but my name has been removed from the software, the website never mentions my original contribution and the current maintainers of said software are not responding to my emails.

Granted this code has changed a lot over the years but there are still large parts of the code which are still verbatim from my original software. The researchers in this project see it as totally irrelevant that I wrote the original code because they value code creation MUCH less than their research.

This particular case is especially egregious but it is a good anecdotal example of the problem. Sometimes code is not as significant or as breakthrough as raw research. It really matters what kind of coding you are talking about. You don't necessarily credit the construction crew when dedicating a new building but you do credit the architect. Coders are under valued in today's research environment.

<comment><USER8> > Coders are under valued in today's research environment.

Exactly because it is a research environment. Coders are valued in a tech company environment because that's where they're the stars. In any other organization, such as a transportation company or a government bureau, a coder is just an assistant to the main tasks, and there is no reason it shouldn't be different.

<comment><USER9> And in scientific computing the senior researchers are not paid very much so the supporting developers/tecnhnicians are badly paid.

When I was a Research Assistant/Experimental Officer at a world leading Rnd organization I was paid about 1/3rd of what other jobs with similar entry requirements did.

<comment><USER7> That depends on who you work for. I've gotten paid well for research programming but only from top level universities and research institutions with money. Working for a state university usually won't pay well if at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very neat, but they're only indexing CRAN and PyPI right now. In my short time doing scientific computing (staff member at a university right now), I've seen a LOT of C and C++, but those don't have canonical package repositories. I think that finding all of those codebases (even if just limited to GitHub) and indexing those would be very interesting and would be necessary to have representation from a few fields.

<comment><USER11> I strongly oppose "just limiting to GitHub". If this is to be used as some sort of merit factor, its inclusion can't be contingent on using a particular centralized repo. For a start, there are several such providers. Larger projects might well prefer self-hosting, too.

<comment><USER10> I would oppose it too in the long run, but it would be the easiest low-hanging fruit for getting the ball rolling on including a wider variety of research software, and I was mostly making a suggestion for next steps in developing their (pretty cool) tool.

You have to start somewhere, and if you get GitHub working then it would be (hopefully) much easier to then include BitBucket, GitLab, etc. Indexing self- hosted repos would be pretty tricky, I imagine, if only because you'd then need to maintain a list of all of the servers to clone from.

Further, there's also the challenge of including software from all of the research groups who don't even appear to use version control, or if they do it's locked away on a private server or service. How does one attribute authorship rights to those people without source history?

Anyways, this is a long ramble now, but I'm mostly trying to illustrate that it's difficult to do what Depsy does with software when it's written in languages without a canonical package repository. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try to expand their reach just because "GitHub isn't enough."

<comment><USER11> I was kind of figuring that people would register their own software, rather than trying to somehow find them. It doesn't seem much harder accessing different repos on different servers than on just github. You still have to keep an url.

Of course, if it's not a public server then you can't do anything, but then again in that case the authors can't really complain they don't get any credit for what they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I think about unsung software heroes I think of Rob Scharein[1]. He is the creator or KnotPlot[2] which has enabled topological research to flourish. He recieves regular acknowledgement among topology researchers, and he's an awesome guy. Do yourself a favor and play with some knots.

[1] www.hypnagogic.net/rob/ [2] www.knotplot.com

</comment><comment><USER13> I fully agree with the principle that experiments should be reproducible. In systems research conferences (SOSP, Eurosys, OSDI) very few of the systems publish their algorithms. The worst culprits are the companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, who don't even publish all of their algorithms or systems properties. Google have published significant papers that leave out the key algorithms on how parts of their systems work (e.g., In Borg how does the scheduler synchronize the cluster state with the replicas? In Spanner, what are the properties of the underlying storage system, Collosus?). I would love to see all distributed systems papers be able to reproduce everything by just downloading a file that allows the paper's results to be reproduced. We can do it with the help of either virtualization or containers and software configuration frameworks (to parameterize the experiments). We can specify the hardware and network programmatically, we can install the software automatically, we can parameterize system software (with Chef or Puppet attributes), and run the experiments reproducibly. Without huge investment and cloud computing or Docker, we could specify systems that have reproducible hardware/network/software. The first attempt I've seen at this is www.karamel.io that allows you to design reproducible experiments by using JClouds to spawn VMs and setup the virtualized hardware, then orhcestrating Chef to install software that can be parameterized. I hope to see more of this line of platform gain adoption in our community. It would be a boon for research.

<comment><USER14> Lots of people have proposed and implemented VM-based reproducibility environments.

1) it's actually harder to get reproducible computational experiments than they expected. For example, you can run same VM on a different processor and get different results, which makes bitwise reproduction hard, and statistical tests for nonbitwise equality are harder

2) developing and maintaining the VMs and the environment takes a fair amount of effort from skilled people

3) the resulting improvements to science don't seem to exceed the cost thresholds implied by #1 and #2, and nobody's volunteering their time.

My conclusion: good idea, but probably not critically necessary.

<comment><USER13> That's good feedback. Although I'm considering mostly distributed systems, where full reproducability is not possible. For single-threaded, deterministic programs (discrete event simulations) where performance is not a measurement point, you can do it with VMs. The nicest thing would be to be able to parameterize experiments. Not just re-run them, but change the parameters for different runs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Soooo... should people get recognition, or not?

Re: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10838166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10838166)

</comment><comment><USER16> My unsung software hero is Dr. Jeffrey Lewis Fox (deceased in 1999 at age 51), Associate Professor, Department of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of Utah [http://pharmacy.utah.edu/pharmaceutics/news/1999.html#fox](http://pharmacy.utah.edu/pharmaceutics/news/1999.html#fox) He wrote MINSQ (now called Scientist), the only piece of software I have ever fallen in love with. He sold the first version for $10 (if I recall correctly) in 1990. It was so user-friendly that I was using it within 10 mins to solve a system of differential equations that were part of my PhD research. (Unfortunately, I don't find the more recent versions, "updated" by others, anywhere near as user-friendly.) He called his company, at the University of Utah, MicroMath. I assume he used the algorithms from "Numerical Recipes" to write MINSQ - I know that was the alternative facing me till his excellent software appeared. I really think the U of Utah should have kept the rights to the software and maintained it in his honour.

</comment><comment><USER17> I will use this opportunity to mention Maxima ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29)) that was developed by one of the best math professors that I have had the privilege to learn from: Bill Schelter. It was forked from Macsyma and released under the GPL and still appears to be actively maintained.

</comment><comment><USER18> What about generic tools, such as webbrowsers? The web was invented at CERN by a researcher, so I guess webbrowsers must have some value to the scientific process :)</comment>


How Cops Really Want to Police - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/how-cops-really-want-to-police/ <comment><USER2>
      "You want to really lower crime? Carl began.
      Let cops enforce the rules. The whole way.
      You ask any cop on the street and he'll tell
      you that he would love to dish out the punishment,
      on the spot

Unification of judical and executive branches?

They have a name for that sort of things - it's called Fascism. It was tried before and while they meant well the results were horrific.

<comment><USER3> I lived under communism for 10 years, and it worked. Crime was almost non- existent in my country. It took few cops to keep peace in each town.

By the time somebody went in front of the judge, everybody new who did it, and 99% of the time they were found guilty, and where shipped to jail.

Of course, there are many drawbacks to it. If you oposed the party, you will be swiftly send to jail.

Very effective, in a scary way. Then democracy came, and crime shot up. Still relatively low (compared to the US), but still much higher that it used to be.

In a democratic society, it will be problematic to have cops being judges too. The problem is that there will be always bad apples among the cops, and giving them such great power, makes a fertile ground for abuse, and with no real check and balances in place.

<comment><USER4> Could it be there simply wasn't anything worthwhile to steal?

<comment><USER5> Because theft is the only crime?

<comment><USER4> No, but probably the most common kind of crime (including robberies)?

Another reason could be that everybody had enough - nobody was rich, but nobody was starving in the streets, either?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This post shows the flaw in the common argument of "I'm a cop, so I know what to do with crime" or "I'm a teacher, so I know what to do with the schools" or "I'm a soldier, so I know what to do with the war". People subject to the internal incentives of a part of the system aren't the best people to make objective judgments for the whole system.

<comment><USER7> _People subject to the internal incentives of a part of the system aren't the best people to make objective judgments for the whole system._

And the alternative is ... "I'm the President, so I know what to do with schools(NCLB)" ?

Actually, you pretty much hit the nail on the head -- ask any soldier who's been involved boots on the ground in the American battlefronts in the middle east, and I betcha alot of them have a better idea of what's going on than your average news commentator or politician.

You may not like the analogy, but this very argument is the thesis of most Pres. Bush administration policy -- refusing the advice of those with what you call "internal incentives," which I'm loosely interpreting to mean -- on the ground with first-hand experience.

<comment><USER8> Well, the alternative you suggested is not the only alternative. As you point out, it's a rather bad one.

Perhaps a better one is to study similar situations, talk to all members of a system and get feedback, and then make a decision based on the feedback of all involved.

To use your example, asking soldiers what they want to do will result in one set of answers. Asking generals another. Politicians another (politicians certainly are incentivised/biased in this situation). Civilians in the affected regions another.

But to come up with the most objective judgment for the system as a whole, you should get people who are not in the system, but have access to all information available on it, including the desires of all involved.

<comment><USER7> certainly a preferable alternative to the one I provided. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the cops arguing for this happens to provide the exact reason why we have a court system:

|"Well, I hate taking that son-of-a-bitch to the station because those tests always fail and they get off (with little penalty). But these guys are a terror around here. Everyone drinks and drives - especially those guys who drive home after work. I'd love to give them a tattoo, right on their forehead - like one of those scarlet letters."

And here is another choice quote:

|"If a drug addict robbed somebody, we used to take his drugs away and give them to someone else. Then we used to make him watch his buddy smoke all his stuff. THAT was real pain!"

I'd like to leave the Judge Dredd act at the movies, please.

<comment><USER7> I'm assuming that you have first-hand experience with a) the police system or b) the criminal courts and legal system this cop is referring to. Bonus points for living in the inner-city and being familiar with drug trafficking.

That would give us a lot more context into why you think what the cops were doing was wrong, and, maybe more importantly, what your solution is to improving the problem (if there is one, which, of course, you know all about).

As Prometheus said in the comments below, it's obviously sometimes a wise decision to allow those to have an objective look at a situation -- not those who are looking at the issue from two inches in front of their face -- figure out how the system will operate.

I would submit, however, that that model is very reminiscent of the "Twitter can't scale" debate, where everybody and their grandmother is offering gratuitous advice on how the team on the ground should scale their project when they don't even know how it's built, with what toolset, and what the core problems are.

<comment><USER10> I happen to have a small bit of perspective on the situation. My mother grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and much of my extended family is still there. I spent part of my childhood in the environment, and there was a crack house across the street from my home for a small part of it. My cousin was in a gang. (This is in a major drug corridor in the southwest.)

There's a large difference between a community member as a judge and a cop who doesn't even live in the area and views those who do with contempt. This colors their judgement, and the punishment often has more to do with the perception of the "defendant" than the actual crime.

Is the justice system often worthless? Yes. Are the cops any better? Not really, and I'd find them much worse.

Fundamentally, the problem is that Johnny can't get a job because he can't do basic math or read. Jobs within their reach aren't enough to pay bills, and those who can get the jobs that pay the bills leave the community, sometimes even their own families. (Those who can are often expected to provide for those who can't, which gets really tiring.)

The role models are poor. Those who are raised in the inner city often speak with an accent that isn't accepted by those in business. And these things encourage those to get into markets that are less inhabited by convention --- grey markets and crime.

Which the police don't understand -- they just see a thug.

The solution is that the police should live in the neighborhood in which they're assigned, they should be from or previously lived in similar neighborhoods, and the judges that see cases should be similarly informed.

<comment><USER11> > The solution is that the police should live in the neighborhood in which > they're assigned,

There is a very good reason why most cops don't live in the area that they are assigned to.

It's called pay back.

If a cop arrests a gang member and they happen to be neighbours how long do you think it will be before something happens to the cop's wife or children when he is at work?

Cops, by design, don't patrol area's where they live.

<comment><USER10> 1\. In this world, it's a lot easier to find someone's address and phone number, making payback much easier no matter where one lives.

2\. While I understand the concern about the gang members and payback, the fundamental piece missing is that there is no accountability to one's community if you are an outsider to it. It breeds contempt, and it leads to the abuses of power that we see.

There's a fundamental difference between "that gangbanger" and "Rosa's kid." (Reminding us of the recent XKCD comment.)

Of course, crack changes everything and makes this ideal much harder, but the comments in the article show how disconnected from the communities these cops were. They no longer saw criminals even as human!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Police already have plenty of power: giving them carte blanche to be judge, jury, and executioner is more than slightly problematic.

Cops can be wrong (gasp!). It might -seem- that such-and-such a person is doing something wrong, but your "gut" isn't a reliable source of evidence.

At best this is an argument for more creative punishments from the bench. I can buy that, or at least could be convinced of that. But vigilante justice? No thanks. "Embarrassing" a husband because you _think_ he beat his wife is not the same as embarrassing a husband because he was _convicted_ of beating his wife. If public shaming will deter/stop domestic violence more than time in jail, let's do it. But as much as possible, let's punish the guilty, not the people some random Jane or Joe _thinks_ is guilty.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Every time we take a programmer downtown for writing buggy code, nothing happens. So now, instead, we just post their source on hacker news for everyone to laugh at. They _really_ hate that."

(Sorry, just trying to preempt the inevitable "not hacker news" comment.)

<comment><USER14> s/hacker news/Daily WTF

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What a load of hooey.

Simply put: Police officers are not my peers. They do not represent a balanced cross-section of my geographic or socioconomic neighborhood. A single police officer cannot perform the duties of the jury afforded me by the constitution.

If we're going to have street justice, let's do it in style. A former colleague's idea was to allow any arbitrary group of 12 people to act as judge, jury, and executioner on the spot. The natural result would be armed groups of 12 people riding around in vans...

</comment><comment><USER16> The civil libertarian in me shudders. The economist in me wonders if this could be made efficient and on-balance fair.

Could beat cops be given a budget of arbitrary punishment, enough to deliver on-the-spot 'justice' but not so much that any irreparable/irreversible damage is done?

Can there be a expedited appeals process and community or expert review to provide accountability and keep things from descending into a 'Training Day'-like scenario?

Would technology like public video of all cop interactions make such a system less prone to abuse?

It's the arbitrary informality of the process as described that scares me; delegating some snap judgment/punishment powers could be rights-preserving and welfare-promoting, with the right incentives and checks in place.

</comment><comment><USER17> I know a few people that have been victims of police aggression just because they weared black hoodies and baggy jeans and had their ears pierced. Giving more power to police officers is not that good. You don't fix the problems with the court system by shifting their responsibilities to the officers.

</comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only person who thinks this shit should be sent back to reddit where it belongs?

<comment><USER19> Not all stories with the word "police" in the title are reddit bait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Someone want to remind me how this is "Hacker news". Seriously people, we have reddit for this. Don't dilute this community.

<comment><AUTHOR> See gojomo's comment. The cops' techniques for "hacking" the judicial system are low-tech, but it doesn't have to be that way. I like to think that hacker minds can solve problems beyond social web apps -- or in this case, a web app for sharing information might be the right way to look at the problem.

Plenty of sites exist that deal with urban crime outside the judicial system:

\- ChicagoCrime.org (now EveryBlock.com)

\- Map mashups using data from Megan's Law registries

\- Some county traffic courts allow looking up offenses by the offender's name

\- Some courts also publish names and even mug shots of prostitution offenders

I haven't seen this discussed in mainstream news beyond some worried mutterings about civil rights, and I think it's an interesting problem, so there you go. Now, hopefully, the discussion will focus on smart solutions instead of devolving into a collective rant about police.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cops want to be powertripping assholes who aren't subject to any oversight? No way!

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm pretty sure a lot of them just want to tase you bro.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District is also good.

[http://www.amazon.com/Cop-Hood-Policing-Baltimores- District/...](http://www.amazon.com/Cop-Hood-Policing-Baltimores- District/dp/0691140081/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213825397&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER24> I have more faith that a slew of cops with families of their own, who just wants to make a living just like you would be a more endurable system than dealing with politically elected officials who get paid off to swing judgements certain ways, backed by a government that turns a blind eye and tells us it's not actually happening.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is great! The way the post is worded, I thought I would disagree, but I think that community policing is a great way to deal with problems. The court system seems okay at handling large problems, yet fails with petty crime.

An anarchistic community-based justice model might just work, especially if the police are already thinking this way.

<comment><USER26> The structure of everything needs to be changed for that to work though. That kind of power centralized in a small group is just begging for abuse, unless there's someone trustworthy to prevent it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would argue that anyone who becomes a cop in a major inner-city would eventually resort to similar tactics to deal with the overwhelming volume of criminal activity.

</comment><comment><USER28> give me a small percent of hope that some police know justice. I mean there is a place to ignore rolled stop signs, and there are places not to (near a school etc..)</comment>


Business Lessons from Apple Suppliers - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/11/20/business-lessons-from-apple-suppliers/

<comment><AUTHOR> The key phrase of this article: "To these long-time suppliers, GT is a reminder of two lessons they learned long ago: Don't rely too heavily on Apple and don't make promises you can't keep."</comment>


Ember.js Data Adapter for elasticsearch - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/karmi/ember-data-elasticsearch

<comment><USER2> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Ember.js a client side only framework?

So unless you are planning to use this on an internal dashboard or something, what stops anyone from dropping your index if you expose 9200 to the public with ES? Or am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's legitimate concern -- you can of course put an Nginx proxy in front of elasticsearch to deny DELETE requests (see eg. [http://www.elasticsearch.org/tutorials/2012/03/21/deploying-...](http://www.elasticsearch.org/tutorials/2012/03/21/deploying- elasticsearch-with-chef-solo.html))

But wait for an article at the <http://elasticsearch.org> blog with an example of a more sophisticated, Ruby-based proxy.)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Check out the example application as well: [https://github.com/karmi/ember- data-elasticsearch/tree/maste...](https://github.com/karmi/ember-data- elasticsearch/tree/master/example)</comment>


Program against your FPGA cluster like it's a single pool of accelerators - <AUTHOR> https://docs.inaccel.com/latest/tutorial/orientation <comment><AUTHOR> A product for you to build, ship and run FPGA accelerated applications</comment>


Evergreen – A Distributed Continuous Integration System from MongoDB - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/evergreen-ci/evergreen <comment><USER2> Example of evergreen in action: [https://evergreen.mongodb.com/](https://evergreen.mongodb.com/)</comment>


Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pcpratts/rootbeer1 <comment><USER3> I wonder if this is as big a win as it sounds. Regardless of what language you're using, you have to "think GPU" to get any performance from GPUs. The additional overhead of using CUDA/OpenCL syntax seems pretty small in comparison.

<comment><USER4> Yes, and it requires quite a low-level understanding of the architecture to "think GPU". SIMD, warps, blocks, threads, different memory types, no branching/identical branching per core, ... Some of this could probably be abstracted away but you definitely need to be aware and adjust algorithms appropriately. You can't just convert code and hope for the best, unless you just want a slow co-processor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had forgotten just how much I hate java namespaces.

import edu.syr.pcpratts.rootbeer.testcases.rootbeertest.serialization.MMult;

This seems like a pretty amazing project if the claims are true, though - <USER2> wasn't aware that CUDA was able to express so many of the concepts used to implement Java applications. The performance data in the slides is certainly compelling!

<comment><USER6> It's nothing compared to the pain of debugging in a language that doesn't have/encourage proper namespaces.

Ruby has Modules, but many, _many_ common libraries do not use them. I had fun recently debugging a project that (through transitive dependencies) relied on two different "progress bar" libraries, both with a class called "Progress", and neither of which was namespaced. Namespaces solve a real problem.

<comment><USER7> The thing with namespaces is that they also introduce a problem through the various using clauses programming languages provide and how that interacts with common tools like grep. An API that uses a naming-convention that emulates namespaces (e.g. as in Emacs Lisp) removes that problem. This also makes good harder to follow when reading, especially when C++ things like SFINAE are around and suddenly everybody is calling everything fully qualified again to make code look and be unambiguous.

Of course, that can be solved with proper tooling, but some people are just averse to using something more heavyweight than necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be good to post the code for the performance tests in the slides. [https://raw.github.com/pcpratts/rootbeer1/master/doc/hpcc_ro...](https://raw.github.com/pcpratts/rootbeer1/master/doc/hpcc_rootbeer.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> this sort of thing is why NVIDIA is supporting LLVM:

[http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/Releases/NVIDIA-Contributes- CUD...](http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/Releases/NVIDIA-Contributes-CUDA- Compiler-to-Open-Source-Community-7d0.aspx)

in other words, with that and the right frontend, you can take Language X, compile to LLVM IR, and run it through the PTX backend to get CUDA.

however, in the grand scheme of things, this probably doesn't make GPU programming significantly easier to your average developer (as you still have to deal with big complicated parallel machines); what it really does is ease integration into various codebases in those different languages.

</comment><comment><USER10> A comparison with AMD's Java offering, Arapi ([http://developer.amd.com/zones/java/aparapi/pages/default.as...](http://developer.amd.com/zones/java/aparapi/pages/default.aspx)), would be interesting.

<comment><USER11> Looking through the code, this seems to do the exact same thing as Aparapi. I'm surprised this was given funding given the high quality implementation AMD has put together.

The headline is misleading; only a small subset of Java can be ported to the GPU. It works great for inner math loops and such, but not for higher level problems. Even if the author managed to find a way to translate more complicated problems (I see object locking in the list of features), they would be better suited to run on a CPU, or refactored to avoid locks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Rootbeer was created using Test Driven Development and testing is essentially important in Rootbeer"

I'm not sure what the "essentially" means here, but this is the first "big" program I'm aware of that name-checks TDD, and a counter-example to my theory that programs where much of the programmer effort goes into algorithms and data structures are not suited to TDD.

Was the TDD approach "pure"? (Only one feature implemented at a time, with absolutely no design thought given to what language features might need to be implemented in the future.)

<comment><USER13> I'd think a project like this is ideally suited to TDD: you know what the results should be for most operations, and they are easily testable. It's the same reason the Perl 6 test suite has been so valuable to the various Perl 6 compiler projects. (Not that any of them claim to use TDD.)

<comment><USER14> I agree, the biggest philosophical problem with TDD in my mind is that it neglects design -- a little foresight can make all the difference, as in that sudoku case study that went off the rails. But if you are building to a vetted, stable spec as in the case of Java, design isn't nearly as important as compliance so TDD can shine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Its pretty cool. Of course you are probably using that GPU in a desktop, but an on die GPU in a server class machine? Something to consider.

<comment><USER16> The GPU in a desktop is the only interesting kind of GPU. The built-in GPU in servers is ten years behind the current cutting edge on desktops. Though servers can have PCI Express slots for modern GPU installation.

I think most of the GPU-based bitcoin farmers are using desktop hardware, but I might be wrong.

<comment><USER17> Well, there's really two classes of server GPUs.

One is the tiny ancient GPUs used to drive VGA outputs on servers. Those are hardly even worth talking about; they're only there so that you can hook a monitor up in an emergency.

And then there are real server GPUs, like nVidia Tesla stuff. Those typically don't even have video outputs, but they're on par with modern high-end gaming GPUs, possibly even better at some tasks.

I believe most bitcoin farmers are still using desktop GPUs, but that's largely just because they're running relatively simple kernels, all things considered, and because desktop GPUs are cheaper and easier to source.

<comment><USER18> To my knowledge bitcoin farmers found the hash rates of the Tesla based ec2 instances far slower than consumer grade high performance graphics cards

<comment><USER19> I'm not clear on the reason, but desktop GPUs from nvidia and AMD that have similar graphics performance, have very different bitcoin mining performance. The nvidia cards get about half the hash rate of a similar AMD GPU.

<comment><USER20> AMD GPUs are better optimized for integer ops, whereas on nVidia integer ops are basically a second class citizen.

Also, AMD tends to be more cores at a lower clock rate than nVidia. For embarrassingly parallel integer operations (like hashing) AMD blows nVidia out of the water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does this simply run your java code on the GPU, or does it parallelize your code automatically? The latter would be really cool.

<comment><USER22> This is indeed IMHO a central question in this topic, since parallelizing an algorithm is not an easy task.

So I guess you still end up writing your algorithm in OpenCL / Cuda and maybe use the serialization provided by this lib.

Update: (Just read the hpcc_rootbeer.pdf slides.) You write your _parralellized_ implementation of an Algorithm in Java - and it will be executed on the GPU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I prefer programming in CUDA over programming in Java. However, I have a lot of respect for the Java runtime.

If Rootbeer or something similar allows me to program CUDA stuff in Clojure, then I am impressed and excited.

</comment><comment><USER24> Has anybody used Rootbeer with language which compiles to Java bytecode (like Clojure)?

It would be interesting to see how functional languages designed for parallelism perform on gpu.

<comment><USER25> this was my first thought in reading this! as other people would said you would have to think in gpu terms, but a quick glance at the code looks like you could just look into the compile functions. I hope someone out there beats me to this because they'll do a better job :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > The license is currently GPL, but I am planning on changing to a more > permissive license. My overall goal is to get as many people using Rootbeer > as possible.

It would be bad to compromise the freedoms of the users in order to be able to limit the freedoms of more of them.

Any reason why the GPLv3 would be considered unsuitable? How about the LGPLv3?

</comment><comment><USER27> The title captured the true character of Java: Write once, almost run almost everywhere.

<comment><USER28> Don't spill the beans :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29>
      4. sleeping while inside a monitor.

... Can someone clarify what this is?

<comment><USER30>
      // In Java, all instances of Object are also a monitor.
      // See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_%28synchronization%29
      Foo myMonitor = new Foo()

      // To "enter" a monitor, you use 'synchronized'.
      synchronized (myMonitor) {
        // Inside the monitor, we could do a Thread.sleep.
        Thread.sleep(100);
      }

This is a very simplistic problem case. However, it is very possible for this to become a bigger problem. Because I can call arbitrary code when "inside" a monitor, it is very possible to call a method that does a sleep incidentally. (e.g. many implementations of IO operations will require some sort of sleep.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Seems much nicer than coding directly for CUDA or OpenCL

<comment><USER32> The host-side application could already be written using Java, atleast for OpenCL applications[1] (The kernel--that is, the GPU code--was still written in OpenCL). My only concern is that Java will make it more difficult to find out exactly what's going on in the kernel code, and hence more difficult to optimise.

Now, this also doesn't solve the issue of needing to consider the parallel architecture when coding the kernel to actually make use of the hardware. Nevertheless, kudos to the guys behind this.

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/javacl/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> At first glance this seems very impressive.

</comment><comment><USER34> Any security implications? Malware running on the GPU?

<comment><USER35> This is already possible, but it never was a problem. The GPU is just a slave to the CPU.

The biggest problem I could see would be when your computer becomes part of a botnet. Your computer could be used for brute fore encryption cracking. Again, this was also possible with just CUDA or OpenCL.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you design UI applications? - <AUTHOR> I recently built a basic GUI application to help with the chore of selecting photos for wedding album prints from a digital collection. The app merely saves the names of photos that the user selects (/likes). I used tKinter in PY. A few of my friends were also interested, but I found that my app wasn't robust enough.
I am curious to know what language/GUI programming paradigm is easy to learn for beginners and yields good robust solutions. I just started to look at QT which seems to support cross-platform. Please advise :). <comment><USER2> The Apple human interface guidelines are a good source of information: [https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface- guideline...](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/)

If you want something that isn't tied to Apple you can find a list of similar guidelines here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_guidelines#Exa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_guidelines#Examples)

Personally I find that KDE, gnome and xfce have great UI, you can find their guidelines in the list above.

Regarding implementation I'm a big fan of Qt, there's an excellent python binding as well (PyQt), which makes it easy to get started especially if you already have your logic implementing in Python.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks much for your kind reply. The first link has a lot of guiding philosophy despite it being attached to Apple, I will try incorporating this. I am a FW developer and when I developed this GUI and put it in few users' hands, I realized how counterintuitive something can be in terms of usability.</comment></comment>


Why US Major Infrastructure Construction Costs Are So High - barry-cotter https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/ <comment> barry-cotter It seems US construction costs are double or triple the norm in other developed countries in part because of using much more expensive and construction methods, in part because of procurement methods that are more lawsuit than project based (and in California the result of repeated incompetence, and also because of an unwillingness to look at best practices outside the US.

<comment><AUTHOR> The analysis (unless a whole lot of correction factors are added/introduced) makes little sense.

Besides the fact that in the US there is a level of specialization and limitations in the workers that is unheard of in the used comparison term Spain (which might cause an increase of workers in a "same" project in the US), an average construction worker in New York is likely to cost twice, maybe even more than what an average construction worker costs in Madrid, and this difference might well increase when we are talking specialized or high-skill workers (such as those employed in large infrastructures/tunneling, particularly if TBM driven).

A couple data points:

[https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/construction- worker/s...](https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/construction- worker/salary/)

[https://www.constructionworkers.eu/en/es/country](https://www.constructionworkers.eu/en/es/country)

And then there is different cost of materials, access to the sites, traffic and what not, and differences in the rock/terrain to be bored, etc., etc., the idea that the way bids/contracts are made and carried on, and the following litigations are the cause of an increase in costs/prices on may have some merits but the Author will need to provide much more data than what is in the article to be credible.</comment></comment>


Kisan Network (YC W16) is an online marketplace for Indian agriculture - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/09/y-combinator-backed-kisan-network-is-transforming-the-rural-indian-agricultural-market/ <comment><AUTHOR> Co-founder Aditya here. I'd love to answer any questions you may have, so please free to fire them my way!

The reason why we decided to build this is because the agricultural market in India is plagued by a middleman driven inefficient physical system where farmers do not have a say in the crop sale process. This is different from how the industry works in the US. But the fact is that in India, a huge majority (~85%) of farmers are small and marginal and therefore, have to deal with this system.

<comment><USER2> I've had something like this in my mind for quite a while now! I know what the situation is like because I've first-hand knowledge of all the trials and tribulations farmers in India go through when it comes to selling their produce. Already, irregular rainfall makes their lives miserable!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, farmers in general and especially in India face numerous challenges. From our own interactions with them, we found this to be their major one as it is directly linked to their livelihood and the income they make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey Ditty (can I call you Ditty?), great work. Truly impressed. I've been a social entrepreneur myself for many a year (since I was 18, so 2 years ago), so it's always great to see fellow entrepreneurs tackling the problems that define our time.

Two questions, one technical, one not. Do you guys use a microservices architecture on the backend? And if not, why not? Also, what is your MBTI (Meyers-Brigg personality type)?

Best, J

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing like that as we don't need one!

As for MBTI, mine is ENTJ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, why is your website - [http://kisannetwork.in/](http://kisannetwork.in/) devoid of any link to access this market place that you speak of ..?

      - No App Download link
      - No Telephone numbers toll free or otherwise
      - No product listing, (items, prices etc.) on the website
      - Just one email address to buy from farmers on your platform

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the question. We are currently in public beta in only one location in the country and as a result, the marketplace isn't live for everyone to be able to use. But, we are expanding this year to more locations in the country!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This require advertisement and trust from farmers; I had similar idea but with co-operative way .

Good luck and how do you handle issues like trade unions etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, trust from farmers is extremely important. Maybe the most important aspect here and we work daily to ensure and build that.

We haven't faced those sort of issues yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Making my first HN comment to say thank you for creating something like this!

I come from a farmer family. Sustaining is very hard for small farmers because middlemen make most of the profit in the current system (then there are pests and unpredictability of price/rain etc to deal with).

Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. You are very right in saying that middlemen make most of the profit in this industry and we are trying our best to ensure that both end buyers and sellers get the best deal possible because of the efficiency we bring into the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish you best. Really, awesome work. I deeply appreciate your efforts to challenge this gigantic problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great work Aditya!

</comment><comment><USER9> Amazing work man!</comment>


Automatic Labs. lays off 28% of its workforce, aims for profitability in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/13/automatic-lays-off-28-of-its-workforce-to-refocus-on-achieving-profitability-next-year/ <comment><USER2> So he was paying ~ $10 mil for 85 employees, assuming ballpark $100k cost per employee. Automatic has been around since 2012, which means they hired an average of 2 employees per month.

Is that hiring too fast? I wonder what went wrong.</comment>


Ask HN: Are Facebook apps no longer be reviewed? - <AUTHOR> My app has been pending for review now for almost 3 weeks. We have been waiting to officially launch our SaaS service because Facebook integration is part of the offering. Does anyone have any insight into this? Is there anyway to know when we might get reviewed? <comment><USER2> I think Facebook is reviewing ALL old apps at the moment in the wake of the CA data scandal. I have an old test app I haven't used for 8 years and I got a note from Facebook about it. So I wonder if there's a huge backlog.</comment>


More specialized matrix data structures in Clojure on CPU and GPU - <AUTHOR> http://dragan.rocks/articles/17/Neanderthal-015-Many-more-specialized-matrix-data-structures-in-Clojure <comment><AUTHOR> Source:

[https://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal](https://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal)

Also used for Bayesian data analysis on the GPU in:

[https://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera](https://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera)</comment>


Ask HN: What resources have you read for E-Tailing/E-Commerce? - <AUTHOR>

Any type books, blogs, resources, etc. that you found very helpful and useful in setting up your business in this area? <comment><USER2> Hey Dave just adding what I sent to you by email for posterity...

<http://www.ecommerce-blog.org/> <http://www.varien.com/blog/> [http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/webtogs-diary- of...](http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/webtogs-diary-of-an- ecommerce-start-up) [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-new-rules-for-successful- ecomm...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-new-rules-for-successful-ecommerce- websites)

</comment><comment><USER3> They're hard to find, because you have to filter out so much "Make money in 10 seconds!" type spam. If you're looking for background, I think there's a Dummies book on the subject, although parts may be out of date. Finding an objective look at all the offerings out there will be hard though. What exactly are you looking to sell?

<comment><AUTHOR> My partner and I haven't put our finger on the "product" yet. It would be helpful to understand the true back-end to an e-tailing or e-retailing type business.

<comment><USER3> Well, is it physical? Do you need to ship it, or just download it? Getting a transaction done is different from having to ship it, keep track of inventory, keep pages updated, etc. You don't need to update inventory of software you're selling as a download, its always there. But it matters when you have a physical product, because good software can help figure out shipping costs, taxes, etc.

There are a lot of turn-key solutions, like Yahoo or Ebay Stores, Amazon's Webstore, and a few more. Others let you build their code into your site, which can make for a more seamless appearance, but also involves a lot more coding work. Really, your product might dictate your software, so maybe you should figure it out first, and then concentrate on which features you want. They usually all have tradeoffs and benefits. Like I said, its hard to get good, objective info on them, but figure out your business first and then start looking.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's going to be physical, for sure.

How would you analyze the transaction/inventory/shipping process of woot.com?

<comment><USER3> Not sure what you mean. It appears they only sell one product each day. Not too hard to keep track of your inventory I suppose. It looks like custom software, I can't see any 'powered by' icons or any credits.

How many things will you be selling? Also important, do you make it yourself or does someone else make it and you'll be reselling? There are a lot of options for selling on commission (aka Amazon), dropshipping, and the like.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the main competitors for this new service/site will be woot.com. I've been fascinated with their traffic since launch and the loyal fan base that they have. The simplest of ideas: sell one product at an amazingly cheap price, for 24 hours, until it goes out of stock.

How do they get these items? How do they manage their vendor/supplier relationships?

They probably use drop-shipping since they are only selling one product at a time.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't count on them using drop shipping though. It means putting your customer's info in the hands of a third-party. and relying on them to ship it correctly for you. If you're supplying a different product all the time, that might be a lot of people to rely on. I'd guess they just get a giant delivery of the good's and take 'em off the pallet as they're bought.

Now, where they get them is a mystery. They could have connections to close- outs and liquidators or distributors that could get these items in bulk.

For some software ideas, you might actually want to check out this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232958>

<comment><AUTHOR> This is really helpful. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Woot! does not use drop shippers, they have their own warehouse in Dallas and they send our all of their own sales.</comment>