Mint 18.2: Still the best Linux desktop - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/mint-18-2-still-the-best-linux-desktop/ <comment><USER2> I've never understood the love for Mint. All it is is Ubuntu with a Gnome 2 style desktop and things already configured for Linux newbies. I installed it long ago and it was way buggier than Ubuntu.

Right now on openSUSE Tumbleweed with Gnome Shell, couldn't be happier. And if I were to give a vote for most 'desktop ready' system, I'd go with Fedora (the only thing I dislike about openSUSE is how PackageKit and YAST are always fighting over updates and stuff, they need to just get rid of one, but then again the thing I love about openSUSE is YAST).

<comment><USER3> The problem I have with Mint is that a dist-upgrade is not possible. You can try it, and break everything in the process. They officially recommend a clean wipe and install. Or at least this was the case a few releases ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's no longer the case, you can dist-upgrade to 18.2 from 18.1 or 18.0. See: [http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3306](http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3306) for the how-to.

<comment><USER3> Good! Let's hope they make this possible for major releases as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I've been using Linux Mint for years now as my main desktop.

It's amazing considering he signed himself under article reporting Mint containing malware.[1] Fool me once..

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/has-your-linux-mint-desktop- bee...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/has-your-linux-mint-desktop-been-hacked/)

EDIT:

I dug a few more.

[http://www.infoworld.com/article/2703044/does-linux-mint- nee...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2703044/does-linux-mint-need-better- security.html)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1osyn5/linux_mint_cr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1osyn5/linux_mint_creator_clement_lefebvre_responds_to/)

Just stay away from this train wreck of mismanagement.

</comment><comment><USER5> The desktop that has the maximum number of core developers - including kernel, desktop, ux and userland is Fedora. And it shows.

<comment> old-gregg Meh... and this army of developers still hasn't figured out how to ship a distro with a proper font rendering. Having to do [1] is insane. And every time you bring this up, there's always "looks fine to me" or "a matter of taste" argument. Nope it's not.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/5ea3bx/font_renderi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/5ea3bx/font_rendering_in_fedora_25/)

<comment><USER6> I understand your frustration, but the difference between freetype and freetype-freeworld is exactly one define:

FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING

I'm sure you know why Fedora didn't enable that. It's not because they wouldn't want it.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I don't know why. Care to explain?

<comment><USER8> Apparently [https://freetype.org/patents.html](https://freetype.org/patents.html)

<comment><USER9> Didn't know about that. Thanks for the link.

When is the last of the ClearType patents due to expire? Is the patent expiry date based on the Publication date/Filing date/Priority date + a fixed number of years?

<comment><USER8> I didn't know about this before myself, so I'm afraid I'm not in a position to help clarify your questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For an experienced Ubuntu user, who knows how to configure their system to their liking, including switching the DE if desired - what exactly would be the benefits of migrating to Mint?

<comment><USER11> Not having to do all that....

I wouldn't migrate to it just to migrate. Migrate to it when you would have migrated anyway.

<comment><USER10> > Not having to do all that...

I maintain a script that configures a pristine installation of Xubuntu to my exact preferences.

Migrating to Mint wouldn't save me the trouble of writing / updating the script. While I'm sure Mint works out of the box (IMHO, so does Ubuntu), it won't bundle the exact shortcuts and settings tailored to my workflow.

I don't even need to switch desktop, I just use Xubuntu that runs XFCE out of the box (and kindly discards the Canonical commercial / user-intelligence "features"). Not sure why a programmer would need anything more than XFCE as their DE, but you can also get an Ubuntu "flavour" (i.e. edition) for any of the popular DEs, including Mate.

> Migrate to it when you would have migrated anyway.

Indeed, I suppose Mint would be at the top of my alternative list if I absolutely had to get off Ubuntu for any reason (which seems implausible). Otherwise, seems like it's a more newbie-friendly (and somewhat bloated) rendition of Ubuntu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is very little difference between Mint and straight Debian. I prefer Debian because it's more stable and has a continuous rolling release cycle.

Ubuntu pissed a lot of people of when they forced Unity down our throats. This is why many moved to Mint in the first place.

<comment><USER13> ...when they forced Unity down our throats.

Alternative desktop environments such as Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Kubuntu have always been available on Ubuntu. Unity was never forced down anyone's throat; it was made the default; that's all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Manjaro (Arch) w/xfce is pretty great, too.

[https://manjaro.org/](https://manjaro.org/)

<comment><USER15> It is indeed. It finally made a Debian defector out of me.

<comment><USER16> Eh, I don't know. I like Arch but it can be a lot of work. For my main dev machine, I use Ubuntu to just get shit done, particularly given the fact that many open source projects have a Debian package if not an Ubuntu PPA.

Arch did make me a bit more open-minded about systemd. I still think it's a bad move architecturally, but it does make a lot of things more convenient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I remember reading (this was around when version 17 launched) about a couple serious issues people had with Mint. Have these been fixed/addressed?: 1) the mixing and/or renaming of Ubuntu and Debian packages - resulting in the maintainers just blacklisting upstream packages when something breaks because of this (even security updates! which, if I remember correctly, were set to 'optional' by default which is just stupid) 2) Mint, at least at the time, didn't publish any CVEs (what the hell is with that? seems nutty)

<comment><USER18> what about the time that they published ISOs with a back door for a while? That was a classic, aslo handled really well as I'm sure you can imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not really, I am pretty happy with Ubuntu in what concerns using GNU/Linux.

No longer have any patience to play around with distributions.

</comment><comment><USER20> Some issues with 18.2:

\- Nemo has huge issues handling icon spacing in HiDPI mode; this is a major regression and the reason I only upgraded one of my computers to 18.2 until this is resolved

\- Cinnamon still freezes/stops responding/windows disappear with alpha barely above 0 on Intel HD either randomly or when switching to another logged in user

</comment><comment><USER21> _Mint 18.2 ran like a champ on my work desktop. This is an older Dell XPS 8300. It has a 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, 8GBs of RAM, and an AMD /ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card._

This fellow has a very different idea of what an "older" computer is than I do.

</comment><comment> shady-lady No, it's not.

Used it for years due to the hype. Switched to Fedora & Gnome - delighted ever since

</comment><comment><USER22> Arch Linux is best Linux!

</comment><comment> grey-sunshine Is this for real? Do people really use Mint?

<comment><USER11> Mint's pretty great. I use it because it's basically a lightweight Ubuntu.

<comment><USER23> What does it remove from ubuntu?

<comment><USER11> I don't know, and TBH I don't care, it just seems like the mint ui is more responsive, and it feels more intuitive to me (but that's likely a personal preference)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Best distro is the one people complain most about because they use it most. That would be vanilla Ubuntu. Also you have to appreciate the irony now that they are returning to Gnome there are people out there unhappy about that just as there were people unhappy about switch to Unity.</comment>


The Inside Story of Tor, the Best Anonymity the Government Ever Built - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/179537-the-inside-story-of-tor-the-best-internet-anonymity-tool-the-government-ever-built

<comment><USER2> This is a great talk at Defcon about Tor. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=864FxA3jmHk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=864FxA3jmHk)</comment>


Building Digital Subscriptions for Hardcore Sports Fans - <AUTHOR> https://couchpotato.substack.com/p/sports-20-supersub-strategy <comment><AUTHOR> What do you all think? Will sports teams/leagues start pushing these from an org level or is it best suited for players to build their brands?</comment>


Parallel Worlds exist and will soon be testable, expert says - <AUTHOR> http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pelletier20131227

<comment><USER2> This is a poor, and fairly useless article. The source it links to is better though.

Summary. Brian Greene is a respected and credible theoretical physicist who teaches at Columbia and has written several books.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Greene](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Greene)

Greene wrote a book published in 2011 about multiple universes called "The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos".

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Hidden-Reality-Parallel- Universes/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Hidden-Reality-Parallel- Universes/dp/0307278123)

When he was doing his book tour for that one, the 9News article was written and features an excerpt from the first chapter of the book.

[http://www.9news.com/news/article/182664/509/Is-there- anothe...](http://www.9news.com/news/article/182664/509/Is-there-another-you- reading-this-in-a-parallel-universe)

Somebody at this IEET site, whatever it is, found the 2 year old article and today published a poor summary of it filled with mumbo jumbo and hand waving. That is what is linked to by OP.

To find more information about how the multiverse theory is testable, presumably the details are in his book, which has fairly good reviews on amazon and is the #4 best seller in the category of Quantum Physics.

A summary of the book's content is present on a wikipedia page dedicated to it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Reality:_Parallel_Un...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Reality:_Parallel_Universes_and_the_Deep_Laws_of_the_Cosmos)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a terrible article. It contains no information about how what is going to be testable. It also contains sentences that make no sense, eg, "Researchers at the WMAP space telescope recently discovered a force 10,000 times larger than the Milky Way". The Milky Way is not a force.

<comment><USER4> It also uses "begs the question" to mean "suggests the following question" \-- though, sadly, that's not unusual at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please note that IEET has nothing to do with IEEE or similar institutions who will only publish peer reviewed material. This article sounds like it takes parts from proper science and others from Quantum Mysticiscm [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism)

</comment><comment><USER6> What in the world is this pseudoscience garbage doing on HN?

</comment><comment><USER7> How will we test for these worlds? Per the article, let's talk about psychology and sociology instead

</comment><comment><USER8> Some "science" is just warmed over religion.

<comment><USER9> The method is useful. Any establishment derived from a discovery is a religion. Observations of the past can never offer certainty over the future. Nothing can. Life is a gamble.</comment></comment>


Fraudulent Groupon Photography Deal Calls Attention To Service Drawbacks - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/groupon-photography/

<comment><USER2> Being neck-deep in the wedding and portrait photography industry and seeing "how the sausage is made", I'm completely not surprised this happened.

I see photographers getting their images ripped off quite often.

The _apparent_ barriers to entry to becoming a "professional phothographer" are pretty much gone (get a DSLR at costco, setup a website, profit!). Unfortunately, many of the new entrants to the market don't really know how to run a business, what's involved, or how to price their services in order to actually make a profit.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your tips for startup? - <AUTHOR> Any tip...? <comment><USER2> If it's about an AI startup here are some tips [https://medium.com/@frag/how- to-fail-with-artificial-intelli...](https://medium.com/@frag/how-to-fail-with- artificial-intelligence-b3c4b1966bb3)</comment>


Alan Kay's: Why is FP seen as the opposite of OOP rather than an addition? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Why-is-functional-programming-seen-as-the-opposite-of-OOP-rather-than-an-addition-to-it/answer/Alan-Kay-11?share=a52bda70 <comment><USER4> Maybe common FP languages are missing a control structure somewhere that would encapsulate the progression from stable state to stable state (the transition of which is purely functional) while the glue between transitions is as free as procedural code? Let's take my field, HPC, as an example, the same would hold for game engines: There isn't really a reason why Kernels couldn't be functional and performant, in fact CUDA is in many ways a data oriented language, however _outside_ the kernels there is often the need to swap pointers for example, so one can save unnecessary memory copies between timesteps. The data in question often tends towards tens or hundreds of gigabytes (the size of the cluster node memory), so you _really_ don't want to allocate that fresh between kernels. I don't know enough of Haskell to decide whether Monads would be of any help, but these pure FP languages just don't seem to allow me to ask how something is going to perform and how to approach the maximum possible performance for a given algorithm, their syntax only seems to care about functional correctness.

<comment><USER5> Monads are actually the "missing" control structure that encapsulates progression from stable state to stable state, and moreover allows you to combine etc. those progressions in a functional fashion.

If you look at the type signature of (>>=) (monadic bind), it says

(>>=) :: Monad m => m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b

which, if you instantiate m with a monad that represents state, you you can read as "given a progression 'm a' from state to state with return value of type 'a', and a function that uses this value to construct a progression from state to state with a return value of type 'b', then I can compose both progressions, and get a progression from state to state with return value 'b'". (These "return values" are used to transfer information from one progression to the next progression, and are the only thing that take a bit getting used to).

So pure FP languages do allow you to specify step-by-step progression.

Seen from this point of view, Alan Kay's statement 'there is no reason to invent "monads" in FP' is just nonsense, because he has no experience with pure FPLs, and seems to be only familiar with Lisp, which is a very impure ad- hoc FP.

So while I agree with his conclusion "both OOP and functional computation can be completely compatible (and should be!)." (see e.g. Ocaml for a fusion of both concepts), and I am not particularly impressed by his reasoning.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for your answer, but what about my specific example with pointer swapping? I'd need a way to control memory handling in a procedural way in between pure state transitions. It probably goes further than that still - <USER2> in general hides from me what happens with intermediate results on the hardware - I'd need a way to have it use preallocated memory pools, because these operations are repeated in a very regular pattern (once per timestep or solver iteration) and thus always occupy the same memory. Versioning of previous states can (due to hardware limitations) only be done by file output. I've never seen a pure FP language covering this because it seems to fundamentally go against purity principles, but as long as this is the case I reckon it's simply unusable for any but the smallest scale numerical applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me, these are the key points:

 _< more detail excluded here> This idea did not die, but it didn't make it into the standard computing fads of that day, or even today. The dominant fad was to let the CPU run wild and try to protect with semaphores, etc. (These have the problem of system lockup, etc., but this weak style still is dominant.)_

I wonder what the <more detail excluded here> is?

 _More main stream is that big data systems used_ * _versions_ * _instead of overwriting, and "atomic transactions" to avoid race conditions._

 _So: both OOP and functional computation can be completely compatible (and should be!). There is no reason to munge state in objects, and there is no reason to invent "monads" in FP. We just have to realize that "computers are simulators" and figure out what to simulate._

</comment><comment><USER7> having a tough time following this as it seems to require familiarity with the subject already. Anyone able to provide or link to a more introductory version of this topic?

<comment><USER8> Seek out other answers on Quora by Alan Kay? Also check out Tea Time from the Croquet project: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project#Synchronizatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project#Synchronization_architecture)

IIUC one idea here is to apply the concept of 'reliable function' into the object oriented world:

> For example, this would allow "real objects" to be world-lines of their > stable states and they could get to their next stable state in a completely > functional manner.

So [object_in_state_A + message_Y] => [object_in_state_B] is some change in an object as a result of receiving a message. This 'transformation' is functional i.e. always produces the same result, given the same input state and message (similar to the pure function concept in FP). Also, the transformation 'rules' only see exactly state_A and not some invalid in-between state. This allows reasoning about these transformations clearly. The object is a history of object states: [object_in_state_A -> object_in_state_B -> object_in_state_C] etc. Note only the 'stable' i.e. valid states are exposed by the object (they're unavailable during transformation) so any view is consistent.

Now to compose many such objects into larger system that is also consistent, see the Virtual Time idea (David Jefferson) or the earlier Pseudo Time idea (David Reed). An overview of Virtual Time is here: [https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/08/20/virtual- time/](https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/08/20/virtual-time/).

The rough idea is that all messages are stamped with a virtual timestamp - <USER3> any receiver can determine the exact order in which to apply the incoming messages. The whole system moves forward in virtual time, correcting for any out-of-order delivery - the real time of each message isn't important anymore.

<comment><USER9> Aside from the virtual Time idea, it strikes me as very similar to how Elixir programs work. :-) Well Erlang as well but the Elixir language design encourages maps and typed maps which resemble objects more so. It'd be neat if you could re-wind your entire app with a virtual time (like clojure Scripts debugging setup).

<comment><USER8> Right - Erlang does the 'objects and messaging' idea quite well. I'm not sure if all effects of sending a message to an Erlang process are 'isolated'? E.g. could a process write to the disk directly or would that also be manifested as a message?

The result of having a time base universally embedded in all messages and object histories is that there is no 'global' system state. You can only look at the system at a specific snapshot, even while it may continue to evolve.

<comment><USER9> Yes, actors in BEAM can modify files and there's a small bit of local state which can be set without messages (the process dictionary). However, much like Haskell you'd still need some point where real side effects could occur. It'd be possible to do all file actions via specific actors using messages which could then be modified to support "time-travel".

<comment><USER8> Right - you'd also need object 'histories', so handling every message in effect produces a new version of the process.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How logging made me a better developer - <AUTHOR> http://vasir.net/blog/development/how-logging-made-me-a-better-developer

<comment><USER2> It's a simple way to do it - I think usually a good stack trace for errors or a debugging environment which allows break points might cover most of this functionality and give some other information a simple console.log would not give you.

That being said, I like the idea of tracing information the developer specifically thinks is relevant as its called and having it logged out.

<comment><AUTHOR> For errors I'll always log the full stack trace (in JS, at least). This helps a ton for when errors occur, but I find that often times it's not explicit errors that are a problem (e.g., making sure the right message is sent and received from a queue system). Of course, setting breakpoints can give more information, but it's not always obvious where a breakpoint needs to be set (e.g., when a new person comes on the team) - for me, logging points me to where I need to set breakpoints, speeding up my development time.</comment></comment>


Lacona – Real Natural Language Text Commands for Mac [In-Browser Demo] - <AUTHOR> http://lacona.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: Lacona is on Kickstarter, shooting for launch in January.

I'm the developer, feel free to ask any questions!

<comment><USER2> Can you eject stuff from it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Out-of-the-box, no (I needed to cap myself to prevent scope creep). But adding that functionality as a custom command would be very trivial. If a member of the community does not make a custom command very early on, I will likely do it myself, because that would be super useful.

Custom Commands are built using Javascript, and have all of the power of Node.JS at their disposal. Check out more details here: [https://github.com/lacona/kickstarter-nerd- details](https://github.com/lacona/kickstarter-nerd-details)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Who knows, I might even do it myself</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rent-a-troll: Researchers pit disinformation farmers against each other - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/disinformation-campaigns-not-just-for-state-actors-anymore/ <comment><USER2> Are there only Russian trolls? I only seem to see these mentioned by Ars (I think Saudis and Israelis may have been mentioned too but that's like a 100 to 1 ratio at best). I am pretty sure Russians aren't the only ones smart enough to have taken advantage of this opportunity. I think it could be interesting to write an article about the global state of troll farms, to compare their tactics, I assume Chinese trolls are very real and operate in a different way for example. Bot farms working directly for a government are also distinct than those offering services to random companies.</comment>


Ask HN: designing for interactive querying of large-scale high dimensional data - <AUTHOR>

Hello Folks,
I am looking to get some inputs on architectural design on data storage and processing for something new I am working on.
I have large scale datasets (read a few hundred TB) which are used to generate data to power analytics. For the most part the analytics are usually data aggregations along different dimensions which are computed in an offline fashion (think Hive/Pig/Hadoop) and then fed-into/stored in an RDBMS or an in-memory data-store. This allows for fairly low-latency/highly responsive 'online interactions' either via a web-page or an API.
However the new features that are being contemplated involves allowing users to slice and dice the data along various new dimensions. Previously since the dimensionality was low, the batch jobs would compute rollups of the cartesian products of various combinations of these dimensions. The 'online interactions' could then be reduced to a mere lookup operation. This no longer seems viable with increased dimensionality and high cardinality.
So to get to the question, does anyone have any suggestions on new/interesting data architectures/data models/solutions that would be suited for slicing and dicing large-scale datasets along different dimensions while keep interactivity high/latencies low.
Looking forward to hearing from the resident data gurus. TIA.
PS:
1) HN n00b here. Apologies if I am doing anything wrong. 2) In the comments, there is an example provided (here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7770551). <comment><AUTHOR> Example/Fabricated scenarios below

A simplistic view of the old scenario: Assume something like Google Analytics that tracks different websites traffic data. Previously a user could filter various website stats(unique users, time spent by users on a site, number of pageviews by user et al), by gender, by age, by device. So for example, interact with the data using a filter that picks all males(3), that are in an age bucket(assume 5 different age buckets) and that use a specific device category(assume 15 different device catgories). Here the cartesian product becomes 3(gender) X 5(age buckets) X 15 which would make it a maximum of 225 data-points per day, per website that is tracked.

And now the new scenario: Besides the number of dimensions going up i.e. more multipliers in the cartesian product above, the way a filter works is being tweaked as well. So previously where it was an AND across different dimensions(eg. all males AND 25-34 AND Windows Tablet users), now it is an AND between dimensions and an OR within a dimension(eg. all males AND [25-34 OR 35-44 OR 45-54] AND [Windows Tablet OR Windows Desktop] AND [Some fourth dimension option 1 OR Some fourth dimension option 2]... ). This makes it a combinatorial explosion i.e. its roughly 3! * 5! * 15! (even for the old scheme).

<comment><USER2> Check the following;

GoSquared is a web analytics app that covers exactly the sort of scenarios you mentioned.

In brief, they use Cassandra and Redis for their backend. Redis is their middle layer for fast writes, sorting, aggregations (hourly, day, weekly, monthly), while cassandra is their "persistence" layer where they store the aggregations as a blob. Within Cassandra they optimize heavily on data locality for fast lookups of 'contiguous' rows using partitioning and clustering keys.

When they need to pull them back, they scan the key ranges and pull their blob from Cassandra, then push it into Redis, which, with the various default data types, does a lot of the heavy lifting.

You should watch the following presentation from them:

[https://engineering.gosquared.com/video-databases-tech- gosqu...](https://engineering.gosquared.com/video-databases-tech-gosquared)</comment></comment>


Single Test for All Virus Exposure Opens Doors for Researchers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/health/single-blood-test-for-all-virus-exposures.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Related article in Science [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6239/aaa0698.abstract](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6239/aaa0698.abstract)

New modality for population health modeling.</comment>


New Assange book calls for radical overhaul of the URL system - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10741157/Julian-Assanges-conversations-with-Googles-Eric-Schmidt-to-be-published.html

<comment><USER2> see also [http://www.xanadu.com/](http://www.xanadu.com/) / [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

<comment><USER3> Too bad that Ted Nelson has shut down all attempts of hackers to create working software that uses ZigZag data structures.

It is a sad story. It is an infuriating story. [http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715](http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715)

[http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/](http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/)

<comment><USER2> I would love to hear Alan Kay's take on Project Xanadu.</comment></comment></comment>


BananaPKG – Low Level Package Manager Linux - <AUTHOR> Hello guys! If you have built your own GNU / Linux (Linux from Scratch) system and do not have a package manager. Or if you need something lightweight and portable for virtually all Linux distributions ... I'll introduce you to the Banana Package low-level package manager. BananaPKG was written in Shell Bash, with it you can (Create, install, update, search) packages.
Packages have .mz extensions that are simple packaged packets and compressed with the TAR + XZ utility.
The project is Brazilian, all Portuguese speaking. If you are a good translator, we could make the site in English;) "bananapkg dot github dot io" <comment><USER2> Why not tar.xz extension?</comment>


How A College Student Makes 6 Figures From His Dorm Room With A Facebook Game - <AUTHOR> http://prairiecast.com/hatchlings-and-social-gaming-with-guest-brad <comment><USER2> How is this app monetized? How are most facebook apps monetized?</comment>


Pigeons Classify Breast Cancer Images - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34878151 <comment><USER2> The US Coast Guard had a test program that fitted a pigeon pod beneath helicopters to help find life rafts and bobbing people in the ocean. The pigeons were much more effective than the human crew.

[https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/that-time-the- coast-...](https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/that-time-the-coast-guard- tried-using-pigeons-for-sea-rescues)</comment>


What are people working on in coffee shops? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/life-learning/what-are-people-working-on-in-coffee-shops-cdf351e28b6#.qkbcq8v2h <comment><USER2> Ha! I'm reading this in a coffee shop at this very moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, the irony ;) Did you ask the person next to you what they were working on?

<comment><USER2> Damn! I really should have, would have been a perfect follow-up to the article :)</comment></comment></comment>


Foamy Rules for Tools - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/11/02/the_foamy_rules_for_rabid_tools.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I've had my own brush with this concept but from the other side of the table. We were talking about tools at work (IDEs, languages, virtual machines, etc.) and came to the conclusion that it would be best if everyone used the exact same setup. This would make it easy to transition new people to the team, make updates easier, and if anyone had a problem there were a lot of people that probably had that problem and could help resolve it for everyone.

After thinking about it a bit (and reading this article) I think I have changed my mind. Actually, I think I already knew this was my viewpoint, I was just too blind to listen to my inner voice. I _am_ foamy about my tools (Sublime Text 2 ROCKS!) and I'm pretty sure that everyone else is too. But you have a different set of tools and I'm _not_ foamy about your choices, and I never will be. Even if you force me to use them.

Some things make sense to standardize (languages, version control systems, etc.) but some things are very personal and, in the end don't really affect the output. IDEs / editors jump to mind as something that are heavily personalized yet don't really affect the code in any meaningful way. We all aren't forced to use the same hardware (keyboards, pointing devices, headphones, pen, paper, etc.) so why force software down our throat?</comment>


Beta Testing Is Dead - oscar-the-horse http://www.horsesaysinternet.com/web-medium/beta-testing-is-dead/

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything has it's limits. Google and Facebook don't release much without testing internally for a while. Neither does Twitter.

<comment> oscar-the-horse and that could be their downfall. the bigger the company, the bigger the ego.

they do have brand considerations though. so skunkworks and separate brands for each app.

it loses the leverage of being attached to the main entity. but innovation is so critical it's worth it imo.

for features it's valid to take a small percentage of traffic and test. it's what facebook do. they get statistically significant results in a short period of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> It's been dead for a long time from what I can tell

<comment> oscar-the-horse that may be true. and that's a good thing.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Open Source Database Schemas - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Vheissu/Open-Source-Database-Schemas

<comment><AUTHOR> As a developer I often encounter the issue when starting on a new project the best way to architect the database. What is best practice, what will the database that holds my applications information look like and this is where I got the idea to create this Github repository.

At the moment it is pretty bare, I am going to be adding in more schemas shortly. A few based on already popular services and a few other more niche schemas. The reason I've put it on Github is because I thought it would be awesome to see other people contribute schemas, improve upon existing ones and help create the ultimate schema repository.

The general idea is that the schemas are loosely based, so they can be interpreted into any database. I've tried sticking with generic terms for numeric values like Integer and String for text. These are not exports you simply import, you still have to build your database, they're just more of a guide and something I've been wishing existed for a very long time.

<comment><USER2> It sounds like you are thinking of a database abstraction layout, something you probably have an object relation mapper sitting on top using it, easy way to get structured models in and out of (non)persistent databases/caches.

<comment><AUTHOR> In many aspects, you are correct. It's more of a guiding repository helping you properly architect your web application, especially people who don't use ORM's and manage their application structure on a data level. It gives you an idea as to what you should be building into your app as opposed to guessing and missing something further on down the track.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is seriously cool. I've used database-answers before, but most of the schemas are outdated, hard to follow and or incorrect. If I get the time I will gladly contribute to this because I think a well designed schema is very important.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is very, very cool. If I can contribute, I will. But I shall certainly be using it. Thanks!</comment>


Inter – open source and legible typeface - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rsms/inter <comment><USER2> Previously discussed (664 points, 92 comments): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784583](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784583)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been working with this font since the last time it was posted here and I am far from bored of it. I did contact Rasmus the developer as I needed a little bit of help self hosting it, Rasmus got back to me very quickly which was very nice.

If anyone is using this font do note that it is no longer 'Inter UI' but 'Inter'. Update your CSS accordingly even though there is a legacy @import for the old font name.

Also take note of the glyphs, there are plenty of them and you can use them for UI elements.

If you are doing fractions in your HTML then Inter will do a neat job of displaying them. Calling this a 'font' is an understatement, it does it all and redefines what a font should be - variable, fully featured and with excellent support in Rasmus + contributors.

</comment><comment><USER4> This project has one of the best designed homepages and introductions to a project I've seen for a long time: [https://rsms.me/inter/](https://rsms.me/inter/)

<comment><USER5> I looked at that page and was impressed. Does anyone here have suggestions on freely licensed serif fonts that focus on readability (non-system fonts)?

<comment><USER6> You may be interested in Source Serif Pro[1]. Incidentally, Times (New) Roman was also designed with legibility at very small sizes in mind, though unfortunately it's become the very defintion of bland serif font. You may also want to check out Charter[2].

[1] [https://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-serif-pro/](https://adobe- fonts.github.io/source-serif-pro/)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I switched last time this was posted and I've liked it a lot.

With Cinnamon on Fedora it's very pretty.

</comment><comment><USER8> Part of the legibility is your screen time, how much time did your spend reading that font. I'm using DejaVu Sans for about 10 years and while there may be slightly better fonts, it's not worth it to change it. Just pick one font and stick with it, don't change it every six months. This goes for websites and OS as well.

Arbitrary changes are annoying because you are losing your hard learned visual parser settings.

On mobile when I'm about to read longer article I use plugin to change all elements to medium size black on white sans-serif.

For legibility, consistency and familiarity is more important than finding the perfect font.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but the perfect font would still be perfect. Which could benefit people that are not unbiased yet.

<comment><USER10> Maybe someone could explain to a font-illiterate what is different about a new font like this, why do people keep making new ones, and won't all new ideal, clean, readable fonts converge to be indistinguishable from each other because they have the same requirements?

<comment><USER11> What's considered "ideal" changes. For UI typefaces the medium they're used for has changed (HIDPI screens are the norm now), so it's causing a small renaissance of type design for screens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kinda wanting to have this set the default system font for MacOS replacing San Francisco. Unfortunately requiring a lot of hacking around the OS to do so.

</comment><comment><USER13> If your UX requires a font that is optimized for rendering at small sizes, it's bad UX. Just use a larger font size instead.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me a lot of San Francisco, though the terminals are a bit more oblique.

</comment><comment><USER15> Any font where l and I are too similar is not legible to me.

<comment><USER16> Click the sample image and scroll down to the Alternate Forms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What exactly is the difference between an open source font and a free font? I mean, don't we also have the bitmaps?

<comment><USER18> Most fonts are vectors (font scaling is mostly just simple vector math) rather than bitmaps. Additionally, the vector format fonts use internally is highly optimized for usage performance (think about how much text is rendered on a screen at a time or in a document), and to a lesser extent storage size, and not always particularly useful in reverse engineering (reverse designing?) the designer's intent for a given glyph.

Some open source fonts you can see every source control change of SVG documents or similar, which eventually get fed into a font processor for "compilation" into the final font formats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure if it's not rendered correctly in my browser, but I think the kerning could be improved.

</comment><comment><USER20> nice looking font</comment>


Female termites found to clone themselves via asexual reproduction - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2014-11-female-termites-clone-asexual-reproduction.html <comment><USER2> This is an excellent format for popular science reporting: the article is followed _immediately_ by an abstract and a link to the original paper. Wow. How long has phys.org been doing this?

</comment><comment><USER3> If the species is reproducing fully asexually, isn't that an evolutionary dead-end? Sexual reproduction is a huge evolutionary benefit. Many species can do parthenogenesis as a fallback, but if it's the _primary_ form of reproduction then the evolution of the species is hamstrung.

<comment><USER4> > Sexual reproduction is a huge evolutionary benefit.

It's not clear that this is the case. Many bacteria, fungi and plants do not appear to reproduce sexually and are highly successful.

Evolution by natural selection does require that there is variation between individuals, but there is variation even in asexually reproducing species due to mutations and errors in DNA replication.

<comment><USER5> And I think it might work more favorably for ants anyway due to the nature of the colonies.

For example, with the 'zombie ant fungus', once the colony detects an infection it will remove infected ants or prevent infections from continuing. Ants are remarkably good at clearing their nests of infections.

Naturally this kind of 'communal parasite insulation' would preclude the queen from having to constantly adapt to new threats, and can rely on simpler functions such as mutation to adapt to environmental changes.

And anyway, this asexual reproduction is (purportedly) only for queens. The males+queen still participate in sexual reproduction for workers. In addition, ants send their oldest members out the farthest from the nest, so in reality they're constantly being replenished by new variations.

[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-zombie-ant-fungus-is- ev...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-zombie-ant-fungus-is-even-more- sinister-than-you-thought)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Life, uh, finds a way.

</comment><comment><USER7> Could someone tell me please who first suggested the idea of reproduction without sex?

...your wife?

(bonus points to name the movie)

<comment><USER8> Rightly down-voted. How dare you have a sense of humor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would it be considered cheating making love to your girlfriend's clone?</comment>


Megaupload to Universal: You've Got Some Explaining To Do - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-to-universal-youve-got-some-explaining-to-do-111228/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps its just me, but when I read about the UMG/Megaupload thing I can't help but thing that UMG did this an intentional stab against a rival/competitor and alleged piracy service, hoping that no one would notice, but someone did notice.

Now instead of owning up to anything (let's face it, the music industry has never been one based on honesty), they are going to dig in their heels and try to deny everything, eventually pegging the blame as a 'clerical error' on some intern or lower management?

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I haven't seen anyone on the side of UMG make any salient points that would show otherwise.

<comment><USER3> Isn't "clerical error" essentially the same excuse that Kenneth Lay & friends made about the frauds perpetrated by Enron? In that case, they alleged that intentional bad acts were carried out by employees and that the executives had no knowledge of their activities. This prompted new law stipulating that company executives could no longer claim ignorance of illegal activities by employees as a defense.

Is "clerical error" the new refuge of this same mentality? _"We can't claim they broke the law without our knowledge, but we can claim they made a mistake."_ Can we, and should we, make this similarly illegal? Or should we stike closer to the core issue, where executives may be lying about their knowledge of fraud/mistakes to deliberately take advantage of any benefits that may arise from them? Is this even practically enforceable?

<comment><USER4> Anybody can claim anything, that's the whole point of an adversarial judicial system. ideally the other side will poke holes in the defense's argument.

One, perhaps worthwhile, change would be to tie penalties to income. it's impossible for a corporation to do jail time. $100,000 would be a lot for most people, but for many corporations this is a tolerable sum. being held accountable for, say, up to 10% of revenue would get some attention.

<comment><USER5> In anti-trust cases the EU has fines tied to the earnings of a company. I believe they can go as high as 15% so for large corporations like Microsoft it can become quite the sum. I believe Microsoft were fined 1.5 billion euro before they gave in to the demands.

<comment><USER2> I worry in the US that fees like this would be accused as being 'job killers' by their friends in politics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I read this and my heart sank:

 _Universal later added that it had a deal with YouTube to take down content even if it doesn't infringe their rights._

<comment><USER7> Youtube already denied this.

<comment><USER2> Link/citation/source? Very interested in this.

<comment><USER8> Here's the Ars Technica article on the matter: [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/news/2011/12/umg-we-have-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/news/2011/12/umg-we-have-the-right-to-block-or-remove-youtube- videos.ars)

YouTube's statement was added as an update at the end of the article.

<comment><USER9> > Update:YouTube provided Ars Technica with the following statement: "Our > partners do not have the right to take down videos from YouTube unless they > own the rights to them or they are live performances controlled through > exclusive agreements with their artists, which is why we reinstated it."

So, certain companies have access to some sort of Youtube backend and they can shut videos and such without prior Youtube/Google permission (due to time limitation, I'd guess). Although Youtube/Google has the power to overwrite any changes made by these 'partners' (don't know which word to use).

Does that seem right?

<comment><USER10> Considering how Google has handled "customer support" in other areas of their business, the "override" option sounds like a cop-out.

What Youtube/Google should have done is require an arbitration system funded by "rights-holder", backed by monetary damages if they abused the system. Instead, we seem to have a system with no downside-risk for the media companies of over-reaching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> everyone who was around in the amiga scene days knows that kimble is a very 'special' person, to put it politely.

i love him for going all the way regarding the 'mega song' issue though. and besides that, he is one of the few (?) people who came back rather strong after going down when the 'dot-com bubble' bursted.</comment>


Apple loses another unreleased iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20099899-37/apple-loses-another-unreleased-iphone-exclusive

<comment><USER2> A pretty bold headline/article for not having any pics to back it up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seriously?!</comment>


Taking a gap year to travel the world only turns the young into fantasists - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/09/david-mitchell-students-gap-years

<comment><USER2> Oh yes, it is better to prepare yourself to the dead-end desk job in a country that has fallen out of touch of the developing world, or in other words, has stagnated.

Jobs of the future will not be lawyering or doing corporate programming in England. They will be in solving real-world problems anywhere. And traveling can at least give some perspective for that.

Anything else is sticking your head into the sand and believing that the economical domination of the West will be eternal.</comment>


CommercePipe – Australian business data aggregator - <AUTHOR> https://commercepipe.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Our aim is to provide users with the information to find new potential clients, customer, suppliers and investments that meet your criteria, as well as managing risk in an easy manner so that you can spend less time researching and more time doing actual business!

<comment><USER2> Not looking super credible when you website misspells "intelliegence"... (and five whole works away from the phrase "data quality" too...)</comment></comment>


Hi, I'm Mark Bao. - <AUTHOR> http://iam.markbao.com/ <comment><USER2> $10 billion by 30? How old are you today? Is this just a ego-stroking joke?

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, good luck...</comment>


Google's text-to-speech engine randomly inserts phrase "he now praises the ipad" - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=38538 <comment><USER2> "Larry Page used to use an Android. But that is now at an end with" works just great. :)

[http://translate.google.com.mx/?hl=en#auto/en/Larry%20Page%2...](http://translate.google.com.mx/?hl=en#auto/en/Larry%20Page%20used%20to%20use%20an%20Android.%20But%20that%20is%20now%20at%20an%20end%20with)

<comment><USER3> On translate.google.com [1] it works fine.

[1] [http://translate.google.com/?hl=en#auto/en/Larry%20Page%20us...](http://translate.google.com/?hl=en#auto/en/Larry%20Page%20used%20to%20use%20an%20Android.%20But%20that%20is%20now%20at%20an%20end%20with)

<comment><USER4> Still broken on regular translate.google.com for me, using your link...

<comment><USER5> It's only broken for the female voice, with the male voice it works fine. But i have no idea how google choses which voice to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that you can reproduce the bug by asking it to speak "filled with":

<http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/filled%20with>

Or something like this (closer to the original bug):

<http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/patterned%20with>

<comment><USER7> Your first link got me "Filled with so much drama he now praises the iPad". Tee-hee...

Edit: Youtube version: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyCGrWMk8Ws>

<comment><USER8> Along similar lines: [http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/hit%20his%20head%20so%20h...](http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/hit%20his%20head%20so%20hard%20with) ;)

<comment><USER9> [http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/After%20Larry%20Page%20un...](http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/After%20Larry%20Page%20unfortunately%20hit%20his%20head%2C%20he%20renounced%20android%20so%20hard%20with)

<comment><USER7> I just couldn't resist... >sigh<

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbHzcWMMpec>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like the 'filled with so much drama' quote is from here:

[http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/12/01/surprised.that.reader...](http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/12/01/surprised.that.readers.willingly.share.data/)

Strange, it appears to be text from a random news article. Some kind of bad training data? Or memory corruption?

<comment><USER11> Some kind of human error during training seems likely - the intonation isn't neutral, it fits the context. Maybe they were trying to fix the pronunciation for that one phrase, but applied it incorrectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does Google still allow translation suggestions & help? Sounds like a cleverly executed prank that resulted in the database getting bad information added.

I'd cite a page number but I don't have the novel on me. I seem to recall I'm Feeling Lucky mentioning that in Google's infancy, the user translation project left curse words on an alternate language version of Google's homepage for a short time, which led to the abandonment of user translated material for important Google properties.

Edit: Mystery solved on the Reddit comments, it comes from [http://fr.zicos.com/mac/i26331784-Hearst-magazine-CEO- offers...](http://fr.zicos.com/mac/i26331784-Hearst-magazine-CEO-offers- testimonial-on-iPad-publishing.html). More info seems to reveal that "so much drama he now praises the iPad" will be spoken if "filled with" is used on Translate.

<comment><USER13> Facebook I think not Google [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/29/facebook_translation...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/29/facebook_translation_turkey_prank/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just tested this on my Nexus 4 and it reproduced. I guess I now praise the iPad.

<comment><USER15> Allow me to express my envy for your having a Nexus 4, the unattainable device...

<comment><USER16> Ordered November 27th, still waiting :(

<comment><USER17> You should try an iPad. I hear they're quite good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of that bug back in 2007 when Google translate would take "sarkozy is chirac" and translate it into "Bush is classless" or other completely different text.

[http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/10/23/google-translates- stra...](http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/10/23/google-translates-strange- results/)

<comment><USER19> This is probably just an artifact of how Google Translate works. It uses statistics to see corresponding terms and presumes that that's how it's translated. Sarkozy used to be president of France, Bush of USA. What was probably happening was that the phrase "President Bush" was being matched up against "président Sarkozy". So it figures out "President" in French is "président" (correct) and "Bush" in French is "Sarkozy" (incorrect).

Sometimes "Baile Átha Cliath" (the Irish for "Dublin", the capital city of Ireland) gets translated as "London" (the capital of the UK). This is due to Google Translate trying to match up Laws in Ireland (in the Irish language) with UK laws (which would be very similar or potentially based on the same original law). However in the Irish law "Baile Átha Cliath" would be replaced with "London". Here's an example of it: [http://translate.google.com/#ga/en/L%C3%A1%20alainn%20inniu%...](http://translate.google.com/#ga/en/L%C3%A1%20alainn%20inniu%..).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Has the issue been fixed already ? I was not able to reproduce it by doing a English to french translation of 'filled with' and doing a pronunciation. I did see the YouTube video demonstrating the problem though.

<comment><USER21> I can't reproduce it either, perhaps it has something to do with localized and personalized stuff that Google always tries to slap on every request (obviously, I'm not from US).

EDIT: it works if I use one of the provided links (see comments below) for US female voice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> At the risk of engaging in humour on HN, when my computer starts to tell me "It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again", I will worry.

</comment><comment><USER23> "lled wid" and "filmnd widd" also do it. "pilemd wid" and "demd widdd" add the word "attacks".

"condemned with with end with" and "demned go diamond with" are interesting.

<comment><USER24> For "demned," see: [http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/Minister%20Gordon%20Brown...](http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/Minister%20Gordon%20Brown%20condemned%20video)

Original article: [http://mobile.france24.com/en/20090312-dispute-grows-over- fr...](http://mobile.france24.com/en/20090312-dispute-grows-over-frances- piracy-law-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> TIL: fuzzy search turns up unexpected results that are sometimes amusing.

<comment><USER26> It appears to be slightly more complicated than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is so much fun :)

[http://translate.google.com/#en/hi/Bill%20Gates%20went%20to%...](http://translate.google.com/#en/hi/Bill%20Gates%20went%20to%20the%20apple%20store%20enraged%20with)

</comment><comment><USER28> This one is great :) "Bill Gates went to buy his new Surface tablet. But being filled with so much drama he now praises the iPad." [http://translate.google.com.mx/?hl=en#auto/en/Bill%20Gates%2...](http://translate.google.com.mx/?hl=en#auto/en/Bill%20Gates%20went%20to%20buy%20his%20new%20Windows%20tablet.%20But%20being%20filled%20with)

</comment><comment><USER29> On Google Now [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW-79Rs7ORo&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW-79Rs7ORo&feature=youtu.be)

From:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11jr75/need_some_bo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11jr75/need_some_body_to_help_confirm_something_on/c6n6n96)

<comment><USER30> Does the same thing on the nexus 7, but with a lot of stuttering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Seems to happen with other words too:

<http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/patterned%20is%20with..>.

Produces: "Patterned is bad" or "Pattern this bad"

</comment><comment><USER32> Reproduced this on my Galaxy Nexus.

Video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VifsRbAEsaM&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VifsRbAEsaM&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER33> Has this been fixed? I've not been able to reproduce this.

<comment><USER34> It hasn't, change the resulting language to English and you'll see the issue is still occuring.

<comment><USER35> Still doesn't do it for me.

<comment><USER36> I think you'll need the female voice. No idea how to change that, though.

EDIT: Try the US version: <http://translate.google.com.mx/?hl=en#auto/en/filled%20with>

<comment><USER37> This doesn't work for me, unfortunately. I keep getting the male voice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is it just me, or has Google been trolling Apple a lot lately? The "sell" search "bug" on their stocks site, now this?

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow, this speaks volumes about their QA process, especially for Android. This bug is known since October '12, how hard can it be for a company with 50k employees to fix a bug like this?

<comment><USER40> This has got nothing to do with Android other than the fact that google translate and voice synthesis is available on Android.

<comment><USER39> Yes I know, this is a bug in Google Translate. However, the bug was found by a user using Google Now and was reported in the Android issue tracker. The issue was described very well and is reproducible. I am criticizing that nobody seems to check the reported issues and the time it takes for Google to fix the reported problems.

<comment><USER41> It's a travesty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Trap street?

</comment><comment><USER43> Still works better than iOS Maps did at least.

</comment><comment><USER44> in b4 apple patent infringement suit</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any web service that aggregates past and ongoing token sales? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Check out CoinMarketCap.com:

[https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/](https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/)</comment>


Lorempixum: Generate placeholder images (not just gray boxes) - <AUTHOR> http://lorempixum.com/ <comment><USER2> This isn't quite 'lorem ipsum but with pictures'.

You could use actual dummy text instead of lorem ipsum. ie: "This is dummy text. This is a sentence that talks about sport as the copy for this section will be inserted later to discuss sport."

The purpose of lorem ipsum is to remove distractions. It's textual noise to say "here is where text will go, and how long it can be, but we're not focussing on copy at the moment".

These randomly generated actual pictures are still worth 'a thousand words', as it were, instead of saying nothing like lorem ipsum does.

I thought this might generate the equivalent to lorem ipsum text before I clicked through and was disappointed.

<comment><USER3> I have to agree. Early on in our page design, we had some nice hi-res pictures we were using as placeholders. The problem was that it made the rest of the page elements look better at first glance than they actually were. Once we knocked out the images, we realized the page looked like crap and we had to go back to the drawing board.

(not saying our page looks great now, but it's definitely progressed from some pretty ragged looking early versions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice, but there's no option for "cats only." As a result, I'm afraid I'll stick to <http://placekitten.com/> for now.

<comment><USER5> placekitten was actually the inspiration for this website (to make it possible to show pages with placeholder images to humorless clients).

<comment><USER6> Humorless clients wouldn't mind <http://lorempixum.com/300/400/sports/10/> <http://lorempixum.com/300/400/sports/4/> or <http://lorempixum.com/300/400/fashion/7/> ?

<comment><USER5> They probably would. (It's not my website, I only know its history.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm actually partial to keeping FPO images as default and gray as possible. That way everybody knows exactly what is temporary, and there is no confusion.

"Everything looks great but we're not crazy about the vegetable picture you chose."

"...Yes we agree, that is a temporary image and can be ignored."

</comment><comment><USER8> The reason why "lorem ipsum" is latin is that since the language is almost extinct, it looks like real copy but it's very difficult that someone can send it to the printer by mistake, thinking it's the final text. (by the way, perhaps to typeset for the Vatican press they use something else...)

So, placing a real image as a placeholder is not a good idea.

<comment><USER9> Lorem Ipsum is actually abstracted one layer further. It's based on some text by Cicero, but it has been altered so it wouldn't even be readable if you knew Latin.

<comment><USER8> Part of the Lorem Ipsum from Adobe is a pseudo-latin translation of a pseudo Rudy VanderLaans text on typography, concerning the legibility of typefaces. It's a rather convoluted insider joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Get placeholders related to the site you are developing, by pulling images from flickr based on tags_

<http://flickholdr.com/>

<comment><USER4> That's actually pretty cool, and would work well if you curate your own image set with a unique tag.

Otherwise, it adds a bit of risk if you have sensitive clients. "Nurse" and "nursing" can return photos of nurses at work, a nurse smoking a cigarette in an old ad, women in sexy nurse costumes, or a river otter. The quality is also extremely variable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a big fan of all these image generator thingos. I made yet-another- placeholder-generator too ( <http://mrspeaker.github.com/lowersrc/> ). The thing I like about my one is that it's all done client-side - not all my clients have the best internets ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> I use Placehold.it extensively. Most of the time wireframing requires non image placeholders. [http://placehold.it/320x210&text=Hacker+News](http://placehold.it/320x210&text=Hacker+News)

<comment><USER13> I second this, I use placehold.it constantly whenever I'm building with html or css. I never use the text feature like the link above, it defaults to showing the image size and I've found that to be more useful because it's a quick reference designers or project managers or anyone else can use to figure out the size requirements for that images replacement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't tell you how happy I am that there is finally a placeholder image service that will serve up _different_ images of the same size on a single page.

Just add a query string: "<http://lorempixum.com/230/180/fashion?#{rand(10000)}>

</comment><comment><USER15> This has been done before, but this is a particularly nice version. One because of all the options and two because the pictures are really cool.

Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER16> These services are quite cool, but I keep getting bizarre/distracting images (read: not great as placeholders).

For instance: <http://lorempixum.com/output/sports-h-g-640-1920-8.jpg>, <http://lorempixum.com/output/fashion-h-c-300-420-7.jpg>

<comment><USER17> <http://lorempixum.com/640/1920/sports/8/> <http://lorempixum.com/300/420/fashion/7/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is very very cool. However I noticed something familiar about the logo:

<http://www.brumfieldhay.com/images/PurinaLogo_LG.JPG>

Personally I would change it to avoid trademark issues. Although you might be okay as long as you don't use a red colored version of your logo.

</comment><comment><USER19> Oh, cool, that's a great way of solving a problem I need to solve with LiberWriter. Thanks for the inspiration!

</comment><comment><USER20> I liked the one with cats better.

</comment><comment><USER21> I loved placekitten.com, can we have one that does Star Wars images? :P

</comment><comment><USER22> Gotta say, I love the domain.

</comment><comment><USER23> I usually just drop in a picture of Will Ferrell as Elf. Works for me!

</comment><comment><USER24> <http://placekitten.com/> is superior

</comment><comment><USER25> nice, but this is better <http://placekitten.com/></comment>


Social Media is PR on Steroids - <AUTHOR> http://akshat.posterous.com/social-media-is-pr-on-steroids

<comment><AUTHOR> Are there any sites, you fell in love with which you found on google?</comment>


Google AMP is bad for e-commerce - <AUTHOR> https://thirtybees.com/blog/amp-is-bad-for-e-commerce/ <comment><USER2> Despite understanding and largely agreeing with the concerns against AMP Cache that get discussed any time an AMP article gets posted on HN, I cannot stress enough on how relieved I feel to see the lightning icon next to a mobile search result, especially on my now aging phone.

Most content websites have become such a massive crapfest of ad-bloat, bad UX, huge page sizes and general usability hell that it's nigh impossible that I'd be able to reach the actual content of a non AMP site in the first 5-10 seconds of clicking on its link. (On my phone that's an additional 1-2 seconds for registering the tap, and 1-2 seconds for navigating to the browser)

My click-throughs to non AMP websites have reduced considerably.

So say what you may, AMP (or FB Instant or its ilk) will prosper until the mobile web experience stops being so crappy.

(Edit: About a decade ago, when mobile browsers were in their infancy and data plans were slow and limited, I distinctly remember using Opera Mini for mobile browsing because it used to pre-render pages on the server and send a very light payload to the phone. This saved you both data costs and made mobile browsing even realistically possible)

<comment><USER3> Personally I don't think the idea behind AMP is bad. But the implementation is dangerous as it artificially fragments the web. I guess fewer would oppose AMP if google made some machine verifiable guidelines for "light" webpages that would earn them this "icon". Linked from the "fat" page by some "link" meta tag.

<comment><USER4> >if google made some machine verifiable guidelines for "light" webpages that would earn them this "icon". Linked from the "fat" page by some "link" meta tag.

That is exactly what AMP is; with the exception (a huge one, I know) that Google also then caches the page on their server and serves it from a google.com host.

<comment><USER5> For Google, the hijack is the prime feature; AMP is the PR vehicle that makes it swallow.

AMP could have been done without the huge exception, but then Google couldn't profit from it.

<comment><USER6> The fast, non-blocking content loading is the main feature. I took a radical path when developing my site and made it AMP-first. Instead of having an AMP version of each page, every page is its own AMP version because it's an AMP page.

Even served from my cheapo shared web host and not Google's AMP cache, I have pretty-much instant loading of all pages: [http://multithreaded.link/2017/08/lyft-customer- acquisition-...](http://multithreaded.link/2017/08/lyft-customer-acquisition- costs-decrease-uber-stumbles/)

It's a good framework for building super fast pages. I will admit it's a little riskier to build a site on top of technology a large company owns, but this is a risk that you also have when you use React or other frameworks.

<comment><USER7> Your "About", "Contact", and "Privacy Policy" footer links don't work (they go to "#").

<comment><USER6> Yeah sorry about that! I just launched it recently so I'm still getting everything going. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author seems to completely misunderstand the point of AMP. It was never designed or created for dynamic, interactive content, especially e-commerce.

This is like complaining that a hammer is bad for driving screws.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think its that. Its that AMP is borderline an anti-trust. But the point is, even with the speed and possible ranking boost, does it boost conversions? More traffic without conversions generally does not help an e-commerce site.

<comment><USER8> > Its that AMP is borderline an anti-trust.

And why is that?

> More traffic without conversions generally does not help an e-commerce site.

You should not be using AMP for e-commerce, at least not for anything but a static product page.

Again, if you try to drive a nail with a hammer and it doesn't work, the fault isn't on the hammer, it's on you.

<comment><USER9> > And why is that?

Because you only get a ranking boost if your page

> contains a <script async > src="[https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>](https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>) > tag inside their head tag.

and

> is allowed to be cached in the Google AMP cache

<comment><USER10> As the otherwise pretty wrong article correctly states: There is no such ranking boost.

<comment><USER11> Not even for Google News purposes? That's 90% of the AMP links I see.

<comment><USER10> Was talking about Google Search. Don't know about News. But the original article was about e-commerce.

<comment><USER12> What if your ecommerce is fronted by news or blog?

<comment><USER10> News shows up in the Top Stories carousel, not all blogs. If the news is so newsworthy the Top Stories carousel is the right space.

<comment><USER9> Not correct.

Just look at this example: [http://i.imgur.com/84FvZmA.png](http://i.imgur.com/84FvZmA.png) Notice how the news carousel is completely unrelated, and the pages do not otherwise show up in the search.

Also notice the awesome bug in Google where "Nazi flag" returns "Flag of Germany".

<comment><USER10> Oh, certainly for English results showing news results for that query is very, very relevant given what is going on in the US with people waving actual nazi flags. You can see that if you e.g. search for a flag that isn't in the news (like danish flag) there is no news result.

I'll report the flag bug.

<comment><USER9> You'd think so. But many blogs and ecommerce sites have started dressing their content up so that it ends up in that carousel, even if it's not actually relevant.

Google always ends up putting news from a sailing event from last year in that carousel when I search stuff about my city. Especially awesome in Google News & Weather, where 90% of the news are from last year.

Google seems to just displays the top X search results that happen to be AMP, no matter how old they actually are.

That said, an antitrust complaint was filed with the EU anyway, so we can all just hope your employer is forced to end AMP sooner rather than later, and we can all replace it with a solution that doesn't rely on any single group's implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Conceptually I hate AMP. I wish they would just have guidelines for fast load times, and award better rank and a lightening badge next to pages that are adhering to those guidelines. I HATE that Google restricts design, re-formats pages, and serves your content.

That said, AMP clearly isn't for eCommerce. You want dynamic, personalized content for eCommerce. Recommendations based on past pages visited, or search terms, or your location... It's not just about fast loading pages.

Some eCommerce may fear that their sales will suffer if someone else gets a page that's in AMP and then Google's new rankings put that page over their own... But that's no reason to convert your site to AMP. It's a good reason to build out landing pages specific for search terms, do paid advertising around keywords, and just generally market your products / site.

Generally speaking, people who come in to product pages straight from Google are just doing price comparison anyway -- it's just a step in the decision journey, but if you've done a proper job of marketing your business, customers that buy tend to go straight to your site and do a search using your own search tools.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why would you build your whole site on AMP??? Please read this before think about build AMP. [https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/12/progressive-web- amp...](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/12/progressive-web-amps/)

<comment><USER9> > Why would you build your whole site on AMP???

To get a ranking boost? For some search terms, moving to full AMP gives you a ranking boost catapulting you from page 13 or worse to the #1 result. So if you don't use that, someone else will use that advantage.

<comment><USER14> Guardian for example runs their own AMP cache and gets in page 1 without Google AMP cache. Also AMP is one in many factors that is used to decide site relevance. Amazon and many other sites that don't use AMP gets featured in page 1 on mobile.

<comment><USER9> The guardian may run their own CDN, but all guardian search results in Google Search redirect to the Google AMP cache.

For example, current #1 result for "guardian" is [https://www.google.de/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/a...](https://www.google.de/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/16/grace- mugabe-zimbabwe-south-africa-diplomatic-immunity)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> AMP is fine. AMP Cache is embrace, extended and break the web in fairly fundamental ways.

<comment><USER14> Cloudflare provides AMP cache. If you don't want to use Google CDN.

<comment><USER16> Cloudflare's AMP cache is even worse. If someone goes to a website behind/rehosted on Cloudflares AMP that has a link from that site to a third party site (say, yours or mine) that third party site will be spidered and also rehosted on Cloudflare AMP.

Then when someone goes to the intentionally Cloudflare AMP site and clicks through to your site your actual domain never gets the hit. Instead all traffic remains within Cloudflare and you never see it.

Additionally, after 2 months of trying to contact anyone at Cloudflare about this exact situation happening with the most popular page on my domain (saw the cloudflare AMP bot in the logs) I still can't get a real person. Their support is attrocious.

<comment><USER17> Get a lawyer. They're copying your content and misrepresenting a link to their site as yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "AMP does not allow for use of forms". This is wrong [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp- for...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-form)

…and similarly the rest of the article seems badly researched.

<comment><USER18> The biggest key to me was the complete ignorance of why a pagespeed might be higher despite "overall load time" being slower.

Perhaps, author, because of how those pages are painted

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's a whole lot wrong with this article. Chief for me is the absolute ignorance around AMP -> PWA flow and browser-native payments API: [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/07/payment- re...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/07/payment-request)

This tech may seem trivial to broadband users, but has demonstrated itself to be effective in mobile-heavy, low-bandwidth markets (ref India & myntra.com)

</comment><comment><USER20> So AMP is not even faster than other mobile pages without the google CDN? A pity so many prefer something like AMP to generally stripping down their sites. Get rid of JS unless absolutely necessary, compress/remove images, remove all this ad and bloat, and your page, whatever category it fits in, will load blazyingly fast. What happened to good old sole HTML and CSS, served statically or server-generated for lightning speed?

<comment><USER21> It's not only not faster but it's often slower — AMP puts 100KB of render- blocking JavaScript into the critical path. If you can render a page with less than that, you're likely to beat it, which I see regularly on iOS.

<comment> squeaky-clean Not only that, but because of the limitations of AMP, many AMP sites are getting slower and slower as they attempt workarounds. I've seen many sites recently that do section headers as a large image-as-text, I'd guess because they want to use a custom font? Even worse is AMP won't load images until you've scrolled them into view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> AMP is terrible for the decentralized, open Web in general.

</comment><comment><USER23> Breaking down a few of the concerns in this article:

> With AMP [chat applications] cannot be used

True currently. There are no chat application amp extensions, yet. This could change in the future. Vendors interested in implementing one for AMP should get involved at [http://github.com/ampproject/amphtml](http://github.com/ampproject/amphtml)

> AMP does not have any markup specific to checkouts

Most web pages move from shopping cart to payment by changing URLs. This would work just fine with an AMP page. There is in fact at least one vendor who has integrated payments with AMP already: [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp- acc...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-access- laterpay)

Also take a look at [https://ampbyexample.com/advanced/payments_in_amp/](https://ampbyexample.com/advanced/payments_in_amp/)

> AMP does not allow for use of forms

See [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp- for...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-form)

> They really do not support a logged in state, or user preferences. Things > like recommended products, or recently viewed products will not work with an > AMP page. None of the personalization aspects like "Hi, Lesley" are done > with AMP.

See the (perhaps poorly named) [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp- lis...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-list) This supports loading content specific to the user, even on a cached amp document.

> if search and filtering are a large part of your site's mobile navigation, > AMP will be useless.

This is exactly what amp-bind was built for: [https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp- bind/](https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp-bind/)

> Google Analytics is not supported on AMP

Google Analytics is fully supported in AMP. Here's the Google Analytics support page: [https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/amp- analytics/)

> If you use a different suite of tracking such as Piwik or kissmetrics, they > will not work with AMP.

There is a large list of analytics vendors that have direct support here: [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/analytics/analytics-v...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/analytics/analytics- vendors)

Other vendors can be added with a small amount of configuration. Here's a guide for Piwik, for example: [https://www.elftronix.com/guide-to-using-piwik- analytics-wit...](https://www.elftronix.com/guide-to-using-piwik-analytics- with-amp-on-wordpress/)

Alternatively, vendors can submit a configuration to the AMP project which is just a few lines of JSON, then the vendor will be supported more directly.

> Ad Revenue is Decreased

The link is to a single article from a year ago. There are many studies pointing to the opposite effect as well.

> A/B testing is not supported

See [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp- exp...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-experiment)

> Performance

I'm not sure what URLs the author used, but I tried to find a similar overstock recliner page that might be the right one. I found:

[https://www.overstock.com/Home- Garden/Recliners/Leather,/mat...](https://www.overstock.com/Home- Garden/Recliners/Leather,/material,/18555/subcat.html)

The author tries to use a google.com/amp URL, but these redirect when not coming from a search click. Much easier is to take the CDN amp URL, which is served the same way:

[https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.overstock.com/Home- Garden...](https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.overstock.com/Home- Garden/Recliners/amp/Leather,/material,/18555/subcat.html)

I loaded both of these in Chrome, simulated a mobile device, network tab, and throttling with Fast 3G. Here were my results:

* non-AMP: 42 requests, 1.1 MB transferred, Finish: 10.3s, DomContentLoad: 3.38s, Load: 9.52s

* AMP: 35 requests, 408 KB transferred, Finish 5.87s, DomContentLoaded 1.28s, Load: 5.88s

The AMP page is 60% smaller and hits the load event in 40% less time. However "loaded" is a funny term in the world of javascript driven websites and needs to be looked at more carefully.

I suspect that the author's referenced tool is reporting "fully loaded time" as the time that the last network event ended. AMP pages intentionally delay loading images below the fold to prioritize visible content. This results in some images loading later without impacting the user experience. For example, as I scrolled in the AMP page, the "Finish" time would move ahead to a new time as new images were loaded. With events like analytics triggers, looking at the time the last network event finished is typically a misleading metric and won't work correctly with most amp documents.

If you load filmstrips in Chrome's Performance Tab, you can see this more clearly. Filmstrips display what the page looked like at snapshots in time after loading starts. For my quick test with network throttling, the non-AMP page takes a little over 6s to finish reaching it's final state and the AMP page takes about 2.2s. So AMP here is nearly 3x faster as the user would perceive it on similar connection speed.

</comment><comment><USER24> Privacy issues aside, I don't get AMP, most of the time it doesn't even work right and I'm using chrome on my android tablet.

It either doesn't load or goes back to the previous page after a few seconds.

</comment><comment><USER25> Disclaimer: I'm working on ROBOAMP (an AMP generator)

AMP has limitations, like any piece of technology. Once you understand the limitations you should be able to plan your attack accordingly.

We are pre-launch but if you want early access and test our automatic generator please email me.

</comment><comment><USER26> Should have stopped at Google AMP is bad.

</comment><comment><USER27> Anyone else annoyed at how evernote web clips are completely busted on AMP pages?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I imagine it will likely be shelved soon either by lawsuit or just by Google's closing it down.

<comment><USER28> I appreciate your optimism, but my read is that current Google management is very heavily invested in this idea and will fight hard before they give it up.

In addition AMP has penetrated other platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

The cat is out of the bag, and it will not be easy to put it back.

<comment><USER29> _The cat is out of the bag, and it will not be easy to put it back._

Yup, now that those damn users have gotten a taste of speed & low data usage, it's gonna be hard to drag them back to how it used to be. We had a good thing going, and they didn't know any better.

<comment><USER28> No one is advocating for users to have a bad experience and large downloads.

<comment><USER30> The author of the article being discussed expressly states that AMP is bad because it doesn't allow chat services or 3rd party integrations. Those are two examples of things that often lead to a bad experience and large downloads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I cannot see AMP remaining viable in the long run. I think there is going to be a lot of push back or non adoption because the walled garden is just a way to track users and advertise to them better.

</comment><comment><USER32> What do you say about blogs? I understand that AMP is harmful to e-commerce based websites but what about blogs that are totally based on content and Google ads? How does it impact them?

</comment><comment><USER33> wtf is this guy talking about? This article has so many errors, it should be retracted.

</comment><comment><USER34> Mot google projects die organically, with a short life span. No need to keep bashing AMP like this.

<comment><USER35> This particular AMP-bashing post just reminded me to go change mobile Safari's default search engine to DDG, which I'd been meaning to do so I stop being sent to terrible AMP pages, but kept forgetting to do because in the moment I'm always more interested in finding the info I want on a non-AMP page than fiddling with settings. So it was useful to me.

<comment><USER36> You can use Duck Duck Go to stop Google showing you AMP links in search results by starting your searches with "!g".

If AMP was so good for me vs just good for Google I would expect them to allow opt out for those, like me, that don't want to see AMP results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, to avoid having to argue the same problems always again, here's a summary of some of the technical and antitrust issues with AMP:

1\. You have to embed the AMP version from Google's servers, you can't self- host the AMP js, or run it from another CDN. This makes your site unavailable in, for example, China, relies on Google's systems, and ensures that Google knows every user of your site.

Source: [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec#required- mark...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec#required-markup)

> contain a <script async > src="[https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>](https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>) > tag inside their head tag.

2\. You need to allow Google to cache the content, and all Google products will always link to the Google cache version. You can not opt out of this. You can not ensure users visit your own CDN version. You can not prevent Google from displaying modified versions of the pages (for example, the header UI of AMP pages in Google search, and the swiping between pages gesture).

Source: [https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq](https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq)

> Q: Can I stop content from being cached?

> A: No. By using the AMP format, content producers are making the content in > AMP files available to be cached by third parties. For example, Google > products use the Google AMP Cache to serve AMP content as fast as possible.

3\. Pages that use AMP get a massive indirect ranking boost. Yes, they don't get directly boosted, but they get added to the AMP carousel, between the ads and the #1 result, or between the #1 and #2 result. If, for a given search term, none of the top pages have an AMP result, Google will boost the first 3-4 pages that have an AMP result to this place – even if they'd organically rank on page 10 or later. In some situations, I've seen results from page 13 boosted to #1.

</comment><comment><USER37> Tried today to find a way to let amp-img mimic CSS' background-size cover paired with background-position. Not possible, so I need still to use CSS' background-image without AMP's preloading feature.

This is one of the most used features in HTML/CSS to handle images, people are complaining in the Github issues, others rewrite the whole Internet in AMP with AMP components.

This is ridiculous, Google just wants to restrict other ad networks' JS and recreates HTML/CSS/JS for no real reason.</comment>


HP Memristors Will Reinvent Computer Memory 'by 2014′ (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2012/07/hp-memristors/

<comment><USER2> The title should be edited so that the year it was written is appended. Tack a (2012) onto that title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'm sorry for forgetting that this time.</comment></comment>


Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JetBrains/lets-plot/blob/master/README_PYTHON.md <comment><USER2> I've been using R professionally for 4 years. I've been a Python programmer for 6 years. I've shipped large scale applications built on both languages to production.

Findings:

I honestly don't get the hype around R's plotting capabilities. ggplot2 is nice, but far too magical to be easily understood by beginners.

Python offers more intuitive memory management than R (which is really more a statement on how bad R is at memory efficiency).

R blows Python out of the water when it comes to expressing concise and readable linear algebra/stats computation. Done right, base R looks like mathematical pseudo-code.

R's non-standard evaluation is an under-appreciated killer feature. I've seen complex and powerful DSLs implemented implemented in base R. Python has some support for this kind of thing, but nowhere near the level of R.

I tried the Tidyverse and found it to be too magical and unstable. In general, the R package ecosystem is weird. Look at Stack Overflow and you'll find people touting all sorts of different packages to do simple operations. Needing to download a million random packages from grad students of the internet is a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER3> Genuinely curious: what do you mean with respect to "R's non-standard evaluation" and its relationship to DSLs? Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER4> R some very lispy meta-programming features. Very briefly, if I'm a function (go with me here) `foo <\- function(x,y){whatever}`,and someone calls me, `foo(bar,baz)` I get to know that `baz` is "bound" to `y`. The caller doesn't even have to have a `baz` in scope; substituting `y` for `baz` is done lazily, if the function never asks for the actual value of `y`, there's no problem. You can read more about this here [http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Computing-on-the- language.html](http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Computing-on-the-language.html)

<comment><USER3> Great

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been a Python lover for decades. I dislike a lot of characteristics of the R language, but the ggplot2 package is superior to anything in Python visualization space. It is really excellent.

<comment><USER6> Wickham was really on to something with ggplot and it's graphical grammar concept for plots. That and Tidyverse in general, I believe, has saved R from irrelevance.

I wish more projects would use that way of thinking but it seems that in the jupyter/julia/python world there's too many choices and they all attempt a "kitchen-sink" approach for visualization.

<comment><USER7> Honestly, R will be fine, even apart from tidyverse.

There's a huge shadow universe of scientists running particular R packages for these analyses, which never gets seen from HN/programmers.

While Python is definitely (sadly, IMO) a better language for building ML systems (because more people know it, and it's harder to write impenetrable code), R is definitely a better DSL for statistical analysis, modelling and graphics.

It's a shame that R takes its lineage from a language developed in the 70's (S), as that's a cause of many of the inconsistencies in the core language.

<comment><USER6> I agree R would have been "fine" without Tidyverse-- in the sense that it would keep a persistent survivable niche base.

I suspect, however, that it would not be anywhere near the top 10 of the TIOBE index like it is now and that it's userbase would consist of mostly of statistics practitioners rather than huge swathes of people that need to perform any basic data analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do try Altair. Here's a post from someone who comes from ggplot2 to Altair - [http://fernandoi.cl/blog/posts/altair/](http://fernandoi.cl/blog/posts/altair/)

here's the path to Altair scrapping 20k lines of code to make the api simpler - [https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/1006929128119926786](https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/1006929128119926786)

Altair is really good. Probably as good as ggplot2

<comment><USER9> I love Altair but the practice of encoding data alongside the plots makes it unwieldy for sharing jupyter notebooks (by default a 5000 row limit). Github also fails to preview Altair plots in .ipynb right now

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is it different from plotnine? [https://projectcodeed.blogspot.com/2020/07/ggplot-grammar- of...](https://projectcodeed.blogspot.com/2020/07/ggplot-grammar-of-graphics- in-python.html)

<comment><USER11> From a cursory glance at both projects, it looks like plotnine doesn't do interactivity, for a start?

<comment><USER10> I wonder why they decided to start from scratch in Kotlin rather than just add the interactivity feature to plotnine. Now we have two competing projects...

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure that there have been multiple attempts to recreate ggplot in python.

I can think of 3-4 off the top of my head.

<comment><USER12> AFAIK plotnine is the only one with substantial adoption (2.3k stars on github) and active development for several years.

Would be curious to hear which ones you're thinking of (since I wouldn't be surprised if the are others, but also am guessing no others hit both points)

<comment><USER7> Honestly, I've definitely seen at least 3-4 attempts hit HN over the past nine years or so.

Plotnine is the only one another human has told me about, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this an official JetBrains project? Will it be supported?

<comment><USER13> Yes. You can see it in the url: [https://github.com/JetBrains/lets- plot/](https://github.com/JetBrains/lets-plot/)

<comment><USER5> But does it means that it is a corporate project. Something that won't die when its leader get a better job?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks interesting but it feels like this space is a bit crowded with all of the plotting libraries out there for python.

<comment><USER15> And yet none has filled the "enjoyable to use" space ;)

<comment><USER14> Ya true. I usually end up jumping around depending on use case. Matplotlib ,seaborn, plotly to name a few.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't think ggplot2 has API

<comment><USER17> Read beyond the headline.

> The Lets-Plot for Python library includes a native backend and a Python API, > which was mostly based on the ggplot2 package well-known to data scientists > who use R.

> R ggplot2 has extensive documentation and a multitude of examples and > therefore is an excellent resource for those who want to learn the grammar > of graphics.

> Note that the Python API being very similar yet is different in detail from > R. Although we have not implemented the entire ggplot2 API in our Python > package, we have added a few new features to our Python API.</comment></comment>