National coronavirus hysteria will lead to disproportionate suffering - <AUTHOR> https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/national-coronavirus-hysteria-will-lead-to-disproportionate-suffering/news-story/56f887b32023c30efcc5f51346c92051 <comment><USER2> How can I bypass the paywall?

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought of my father, terminally ill with pulmonary fibrosis, when I heard of another victim of coronavirus this week.

He's confined to his house, alone since my mother died four years ago. He relies on family and friends to shop for him; they wave through the window and leave him food on the doorstep.

I spoke to him as news came in of a 90-odd-year-old woman dying in a nursing home. He's sick of the isolation and doesn't want the time left to him to be spent in solitary confinement. His first great-grandchild was born six months ago and he fears he will never see the boy again.

"Look, son, I'm 88 in August," he said, cheerfully. "I've had a good run. Whatever happens to me from now on, it's not a f..king national tragedy."

My father's attitude is, he believes, not uncommon among his contemporaries, who understand the tough reality of old age. As he put it, with his winning sarcasm, "These people in nursing homes aren't exactly snatched away in the prime of their lives, are they? Half of them don't know they're there, don't even recognise their children when they visit."

NED-1505-Reasons you can be outdoors - 0 It's brutal, but I'm sure he's right. If you're in an aged-care facility you're not waiting to be discharged and sent home in a few weeks. You're on your way out, and the exit's probably not that far away. Coronavirus is speeding up the process, and it must feel overwhelming to the medical staff on the frontline. Which is precisely why they shouldn't be making the decisions.

The health of a nation is not the sum of the health of its citizens. We require doctors and nurses to focus on their patients, but politicians need to take a broader view of the myriad components of a functioning, worthwhile society.

Sarcasm aside, when did life move from being precious to priceless? We lost 20 people to the disease in March. In the same month we lost another 13,000 or so to other ailments and accidents, but let's not worry about them.

As more facts emerge about the virus, it looks as though it does most harm to the chronically sick or the elderly, as do most respiratory diseases. And when old age is combined with a pre-existing serious illness, you're in real danger. So the high-risk group would be wise to take all precautions, withdraw from society if they wish, and resurface when there's a vaccine. We could devote enormous resources to looking after them.

Instead, we are asking the healthy, most of whom will be no more than inconvenienced by this latest strain of flu, to sacrifice or cripple themselves, their livelihoods, their children's future, to preserve people whose own future is already precarious and limited. Has anyone checked with the elderly, who tend to have a more sanguine outlook, to see if this economic suicide is what they want?

NED-1499-How ventilators work - 0 As individuals it's excruciating to assign a value to human life, and happily few of us are obliged to do so; but as a society we make those calculations all the time. Our highway speed limit is 110km/h; we could reduce that to 20km/h and watch the fatalities tumble, but the inconvenience would be intolerable. We let people swim and surf (at least we used to) from wild, unpatrolled beaches, and sadly accept some of them will drown, measuring the pleasure of millions against the misfortune of a few.

We are always managing risk, but suddenly in this panic no risk, to anyone, is acceptable.

Even news organisations have adopted this position, their HR departments issuing earnest communiques that declare "the health and wellbeing of our employees is our paramount priority". Sorry, since when? As part of my job I have been sent, and sent others, to war zones — yes, with bombs and bullets — to bring our readers the news. That's what I thought our priority was as journalists. Now half my colleagues in the media have emerged as trembling amateur epidemiologists, scouring the online world to find the youngest and healthiest victim to ramp up the terror and prove this disease attacks anyone, not just the old and sick, when that's manifestly not the case.

As Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford, said last week, "people with no comorbidities can relax; you may feel funny but the mortality is incredibly low. The wider question is how we best manage people with comorbidities and keep them safe and out of hospital." So far our leaders' answer is to paralyse the country and the prospects of everyone in it.

NED-1382 Australias Stimulus Package - 0 NED-1382 Australias Stimulus Package - 0

In Sweden, never thought of as a nation of daredevils (they're so safe they gave us ABBA and Volvos), the vulnerable are sequestered and cared for. They might have to sit things out until a vaccine is developed, while the rest of the people are visiting restaurants and bars, more or less as usual. So far it seems to be working.

No such luck here, though. Our reckless, hysterical governments tumble over each other to impose ever more ridiculous constraints on our liberty, supported by police forces that interpret their authority in a fashion sinister and absurd at the same time. And they have the audacity to quote "the Anzac spirit" as they order fit young men to cower in their trenches.

Some of us are not surprised that our elected leaders and their unelected enforcers have been found wanting, but what really shakes your faith in society is how meekly their ludicrous commands have been obeyed. Did anyone really think more than 500 people at Sydney's Bondi Beach represent a threat? And if so, why the same 500 limit around the corner at Tamarama's beach, a fraction of the size? And why a zero limit now? Why can't a solo sunbaker lie on the grass in a park without a police car moving him on? Why can't a boat owner take a run up the coast? Why can I only buy "essential" goods? Will PC Plod soon be inspecting my shopping bags for truffles and Toblerone?

Save your comments; I know there will be plenty of people rushing to justify any extreme measure that "saves someone's life". The curtain-twitchers are busy in Britain, dobbing in neighbours who leave their houses twice a day or have their girlfriend over. They've adapted to their police state very comfortably. Fortunate, perhaps, that Churchill's World War II promise that "we will fight them on the beaches" was never tested.

The driver of this madness is that the data we are working with, as has been pointed out by many epidemiologists, is fundamentally flawed. If we don't know how many people have been infected, we don't know the mortality rate. One of our panic-stricken pollies was on the radio on Monday warning people that even if they felt fine, they could be walking around spreading the disease. A disease with no symptoms that doesn't make you ill? Terrifying.

But those symptom-free people will never be counted, just as all the people who have avoided burdening the hospital system with their minor coughs and sore throats will never be counted, so the mortality rate is inflated. So too in Italy and Spain, where everyone who dies with the disease is recorded as dying from it, no matter whether they have been wiping their feet on death's doormat for months.

You don't need to be good at maths or medically trained to realise all these numbers are wickedly inaccurate. If the infection can manifest itself with mild symptoms or none, how on earth can we declare how many are infected? How many run-of-the-mill flu infections go uncounted each year? I've never been sufficiently troubled by a cold or flu to go to the doctor, so I've never featured in any statistics. Perhaps I'm freakishly lucky, but I doubt it.

Instead we have a simple division sum, but one where the denominator may be out by a factor of a hundred, or a thousand. If one in every 12 people infected dies, that's a nightmare. One in every 1200, with 99 per cent of them already gravely ill and of advanced age, it's not so frightening. And are the millions thrown out of work a price worth paying?

John Ioannidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University in the US, believes if we hadn't counted and tested this new COVID-19 separately from ordinary colds and flu (and the scary sci-fi name doesn't help), "we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average".

He may be wrong, but what is certain is that for many of our fellow citizens, this will be the year everything they've worked so hard for — their businesses, their savings, their jobs and dignity, their marriages, their sanity, their hopes and dreams and joy — evaporated.

One day we'll emerge blinking into the economic wasteland we have wilfully created, but next year winter will come around again, and with it more flu, no doubt with another horror mutation.

So what will we do then? You can only kill yourself once.</comment>


Republic Wireless officially launches, unlimited talk/text/web for $19/month - <AUTHOR> http://androidandme.com/2011/11/news/republic-wireless-officially-launches-unlimited-talktextweb-for-19month/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+androidandme+%28Android+and+Me%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><AUTHOR> Seems to rely on IP telephony service to make calls over wifi. Uses Sprint's cell network when wifi not available.</comment>


Nickel-78 is a 'doubly magic' isotope, supercomputing calculations confirm - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/6943.html <comment><USER2> I would have commented on the original site to get the attention of the author, but they don't seem to support comments (Science Bulletin seems to be little more than a press release repeater).

Computer simulations of physical systems cannot "confirm" anything. They "predict" things, which are then "confirmed" by experiment.</comment>


Linux support on Lenovo personal systems - <AUTHOR> https://www.lenovo.com/linux <comment><USER2> I live in Hungary, EU and most of the retail stores sells laptops with FreeDOS. Or you can choose that you want FeeDOS or Windows. But most people goes with FreeDOS obviously as you pay less and you get Windows on your "own way"

Why FreeDOS tho? Good question I never thought about it but I also never seen Linux on retail store laptops

<comment><USER3> Because FreeDOS is the easiest and lightest OS to put on, since it doesn't even have a graphical interface. It sounds like they literally put the most basic OS possible on so they can sell it and claim to Microsoft the person won't turn around and pirate Windows immediately.

If they actually wanted them to use an OS that's not Windows, they'd preinstall Linux on it. But that's not the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No. This link is about which distros and versions of Linux were tested on these models.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a little confused by the link, seems more like it is "they support linux" than "I can buy one with linux preinstalled"

<comment><USER4> The advantage of computers that you can buy without a pre-installed OS or with a free OS (freedos! Linus, etc...), is that you don't pay the Windows tax.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that's the point the parent poster was making.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't get it, when I try to configure a laptop I cannot select linux. Also, it's a lot of older versions?

I have installed Ubuntu on my Thinkpad t460 and it worked great out of the box.

<comment><USER8> This page has existed for quite a long time, actually. I feel like I had used it more than two years ago for a quick reference on which distro had the highest chance of just working without much effort on my part.

I don't think there's anything here that suggests Lenovo is now shipping with Linux installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there any benefit to ordering a thinkpad pre-installed with Linux vs re- imaging it myself after purchasing (besides cost)? I'd have a few one-off cases where it'd be nice to boot into a windows environment but would otherwise love a dedicated Linux laptop. I'm wondering if there is any special configurations that Lenovo adds to their Linux installs that I would be missing if I just reimaged a windows one.

<comment><USER10> I can see a benefit in companies that provide their employees with laptops. If a subset of their employees want to run Linux, I can imagine that they'd be more willing to provide them with a ThinkPad with Linux pre-installed than allow employees to re-image the company laptop.

<comment><USER11> Presumably any company that cares about this would have standard corporate images that they apply anyway?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Will those also come preinstalled with Lenovo "productivity apps"?

<comment> number-sequence and spyware, don't forget the spyware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We talked about reporting bugs to Lenovo just last week but didn't since it was running Ubuntu. This is a welcomed change!

</comment><comment><USER14> What benefit am I getting here over doing a fresh install?

<comment><USER15> Buying a ThinkPad with an Ubuntu preload will probably save you 100 bucks (or whatever a Windows license costs these days)?

That's how it works with Dell anyway.

<comment><USER14> I thought Windows was generally free for OEM buys, but I haven't looked in a while.

<comment><USER16> Windows Home, but not Pro. You get a bare-minimum media consumption platform with Win Home, no dev.

<comment><USER14> Ok, that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You should also add Suse Linux as lenovo laptops now come with pre installed RH, Ubuntu and Suse Linux.

</comment><comment><USER18> after using linux (even those with GUIs) for over 13 years, I would personally still buy laptop with windows installed as primary OS.

The ease of day-to-day apps such as Microsoft Office, especially Word and Excel is unparalleled. If you are into DB and work in place that has MS SQL, MS SQL combined with SQL Studio is a very powerful feature. IDE selection is somewhat better because you have more options available -- things like Visual Studio (even for non Microsoft programming languages) are available.

If you go down Linux route and you need GUI, a portion of your time would be consumed by hunting for and finding analyzing options available for you on Linux -- for GUI stuff, Windows seem to be default.

In my opinion, if I am buying a non-Apple laptop, unless Microsoft rolls out a Linux distro with emphasis on GUI and which they will support and develop, I won't bother with Linux as my default OS on my machine.

<comment><USER19> As a Linux on the desktop user for 15+ years (who has had some OSX boxes for some time and also has to run Windows from time to time), here's what I love about running Linux as my daily desktop driver:

* all software I need can be installed with some CLI commands

* similar to the server envs I tend to

* no hassle with anti-virus/malware/trojans/etc (I merely install clam-av for some compliance thingy, that's all)

* basic tools are top quality (I hate the default terminal apps on both OSX and windows)

* I can use decade old scripts to do all kinds of helpful tasks for me (backups, music mgmt, etc.)

* no need to look for some pirated software because I created some file with some software that I now do not have the license for at hand

* I know really well how to fix problems and that knowledge stays relevant (the OS is not moving stuff around all the time)

* Less resource hungry (apart from the browser)

There are some things I'm not too happy with as well:

* Having to read reviews before I can buy some hardware

* Touchpad not as good as Apple's

* Not sure if some USB-C docking station actually will work for me (no review from Linux users found at this point)

* The Hi-PDI screen story is far from perfect (yet slowly progressing)

<comment><USER20> Here at my job we have some devs using Linux (mostly Ubuntu 18.04) on recent Dell XPS 15 (Kaby Lake and up) with Dell's Thunderbolt 3 docks

<comment><USER19> Cheers. I'm looking for info on a USB-C dock with a Thinkpad T480.

<comment><USER20> Turns out some are using plain USB-C dongles to connect to external monitors and USB-A peripherals

<comment><USER19> that while also being able to charge the machine through usb-c, that's what i'm looking for :)

<comment><USER20> I think they are using the barrel jack to charge it - get back here in 24 hours and I'll have an answer to whether it works :)

<comment><USER19> my machine, a Lenovo T420, does not even have another option for charging than usb-c...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What was your worst technical mistake? - <AUTHOR> As an intern, I had a manager tell me that each developer will make at least one giant mistake during their career. The important thing is to have a plan of action, be transparent, and ensure that a similar mistake won't be made again.
Every now and then a story gains some traction that deals with an employee mistake, whether a small typo or a system design issue that wreaks havoc. Most recently, the story of a fresh-faced developer that dropped production while setting up his dev environment [0].
I'm sure there are many more stories that would could inform others what not to do or what warning signs to look for. What was your biggest mistake, how did you remedy the situation, and what were the repercussions?
[0]: http://uk.businessinsider.com/worst-first-day-ever-reddit-2017-6 <comment><USER2> I share this story from time to time whenever this question comes up. I'm probably a broken record at this point but I've always thought it important to set expectations clearly for new devs by being open about my own failures; and after the recent reddit post it seems about time to braindump once again.

I deleted /etc on a live, user facing, production cluster once.

Wrote a script to determine OS, settings, a bunch of other bits, and then configure the node appropriately. I sanity checked it for BSD, ubuntu, debian, RHEL, all the machines I thought it would run on.

Turns out there was a Solaris cluster.

Long and the short; the software I was configuring installed differently on Solaris, my script did not properly audit/validate, and proceeded to, upon not finding the right subdirectories when performing a traversal, declare itself done while still sitting in /etc and nuke the entire dir.

The joking lesson I tell myself from this I summarize as a quote my sysadmin mentor told me: "Don't miss."

Less glibly, and more actionably,

\- enumerate your edge cases and failure modes rigorously both from a "what do I expect" and a "what if" perspective. (kinda under this bucket, UNDERSTAND YOUR GODDAMN SPEC, AGGRESSIVELY; this is true both in ops and dev)

-Write your code with the EXPECTATION that bits will fail, and have it self audit.

-rm * is a big hammer. For all the press DD gets, rm * (and rf) should be used with care and proper precaution, ESPECIALLY if automated. Have extra "mental flags" to give extra care if you see rm *'s and such in your code.

-PHASED ROLLOUTS.

I'm sure there are more learnings, but those are what come to mind at a thought.

To answer the latter half of your question, the repercussion (and remedy) was my boss going to me: "whelp, you get to send out an outage email, and learn how to rebuild a cluster" (not before calling the other sysadmins into the room, having a brief moment of "let's point and laugh" and then sharing their own explosions, some of which made mine pale in comparison :) )

</comment><comment><USER3> An employee who dropped production on first day is not at fault, it's the company's fault. I have similar but not quite as bad story, deploying code that _almost_ brought down our company's main customer. My fault, but organization was at fault too (but to be fair we had ops people who shut it off when it caused problems).

So two thoughts:

1\. How bad the outcome is doesn't necessarily reflect on how big a mistake something is. Software is so complex that even small hard-to-avoid mistakes can cause big problems... and sometimes big mistakes only cause trivial problems. So while big mistakes make good stories (and I'm sure people will post some), every mistake is worth learning from.

2\. Most problems are, in the end, not an individual's fault. It's a whole system that failed. So don't just like for what you can do better, though that's important. Figure out where the system broke, and how to make the system better.

If you want to more deliberately learn from mistakes, Gary Klein's book "The Power of Intuition" is really useful.

(I am BTW writing a weekly email with mistakes I've made both programming and in my career - the story I mentioned above is the first email you'd get, and I just sent out the 41st, with plenty more mistakes to come. 20+ years of coding and still more mistakes to make! [https://softwareclown.com](https://softwareclown.com) if you're interested.)

</comment><comment><USER4> I used inheritance rather than composition when writing a wrapper to DataTable (before extension methods existed) in C#. I fixed it later for future companies, but it ran in about ten times the time it should have taken and it killed the product. A little while later I offered to come back to the company to fix the mistake. it would only have taken 2 to 3 hours, but by then the product was dead.</comment>


Show HN: Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Arduino - <AUTHOR> https://awot.net <comment><USER2> When I was in school, most my usage for arduinos was to get/send data via serial port, through a laptop or an RPi and sending it to a server.

This kind of projects would have made my life much, much easier.

I would have loved to see a "setup" guide in your getting started page.

<comment><USER3> Hello! I'm the author of this project. The website contains a full step by step tutorial [https://awot.net/en/guide/tutorial.html](https://awot.net/en/guide/tutorial.html) for deploying a standalone react app on ESP32.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Serious question: How efficient would it be to use low powered devices for a static website, rather than traditional servers?

Load balancing, and scaling (adding more micro controllers) seems like a big win.

Would the energy per request be lower of higher on the low powered devices?

<comment><USER5> Depends on the content and the amount of clients a mcu could handle at a time. For and arduino using a simple http server (no https) I think you can have up to 5 active connections before it crashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> what WiFi module does this work with?

<comment><USER3> Any that implements the Client interface. It is not limited to WiFi modules but for example also works with Teensy and the Ethernet shield. I use it with ESP32 and ESP8266 most of the time.</comment></comment>


One Question You Should Never Ask Your Boss - <AUTHOR> https://www.yegor256.com/2020/01/15/question-never-ask.html <comment><USER2> It's really good that we have people like this writing blog posts and getting notoriety for their views. That way, people might stand a chance of avoiding actually having to work with them.

Do you want to hear the kicker? His start up is a chatbot that he thinks replaces a project manager.

<comment><USER3> Are you allowed to ask the chatbot "what should I do next?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since this article is as opinionated as it gets, I'll throw out my own opinion: A good manager keeps his colleagues informed of the ultimate goal so they know what and why they are doing things. This way, during the tackling of smaller tasks, the team as a whole can make conscious progress to deliver what is expected. When requirements change, the manager should inform their team so that everyone is still aiming for the same goal. If a colleague is asking "what is our ultimate goal," then it indicates that you could do a better job keeping your team informed. If a colleague asks "what should I do next," then you look at the priorities and assignment them their next task(s).

If you deem your colleagues as "losers" for asking for direction, then consider that you're not fit to lead them.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think we can discount the article based on the unironic use of the word soldiers to describe colleagues.

<comment><USER6> I think we can discount it based on its content, written by the kind of manager who should be avoided like the plague.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What grade A bullshit. Proper Linkedin fodder.

<comment><USER8> This article presents it as very black and white, it's a question you have to ask but it is good to ask yourself what is next first before you ask someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, you probably shouldn't be asking "what next" constantly, but it is important to validate you're doing the right things. It depends how you ask it and the frequency.

In between decent blocks of work (epics, milestones, etc) I tend to ask my manager if priorities have changed since we last spoke and if he needs help with anything before I do the next feature.

This prevents me from wandering off and doing unneeded or less-needed work. That's also true agile.

<comment><USER10> I agree, especially if the employee is new to the job. I don't want my recently graduated surgical nurse deciding what to do next.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is literally the job of a manager to set priorities.

If workers set their own priorities then that manager is deadweight and should immediately be excised from the organisation.

Maybe not the point he was trying to make but if Yegor's manager is reading this, you know what to do.

</comment><comment><USER12> A subordinate that asks for something to do might be a "loser" who doesn't understand their job, but it's far more usual to be disoriented by inconsistent and shifting requests, to be burned out by micromanagers who punish personal initiatives, or simply to ignore news because one has been busy doing actual work.

<comment><USER13> Exactly, and even then this person is far better than someone who is actively avoiding work (it happens, perhaps more often in bigger companies) and never finishing anything. You could see this as a chance to help this person or as a signal that you yourself, the boss, has inadequately communicated the vision and mission of the work. I do avoid this question myself but I really don't blame people for asking. It can start a nice conversation: What would you do? It may just be that someone is brilliant but very insecure.

I don't like this piece. Typical advice from an extrovert with a big mouth. Try being helpful if you see a person lacking part of what is needed to do a job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hard agree, but not for the reasons listed. Instead, the reason to never ask your boss "what's next?" is because it shows your boss several things about your perspective which are not valued in employees.

First, it shows that you have capacity. Therefore, you need more to do. They may accuse you of sandbagging.

Second, it shows that you don't understand the plan. Since you don't understand the plan, you shouldn't be on a promotion or management track.

Third, it shows that you're eager to please. You can be counted on to pick up tough spare tasks that nobody really knows how to do; you'll put in the effort.

As many side replies note, there are plenty of better ways to communicate with your boss without leaving yourself open to exploitation.

</comment><comment><USER15> Excuse me but what's the manager supposed to do again?

<comment><USER16> Definitely not managing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >> A good soldier behaves differently. A good one wants to [blah blah]

The article and formulation smells of entitlement as bad cologne across the room.

You don't question your boss, you lowly peasant. Know your place.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have a very Task Oriented Job, along with some projects that I manage. I end every daily check in with my boss the same way. "Here are my current priorities and tasks, Do you have anything else you would like me to do as well?". It works great for us, it shows him what I am prioritizing and gives him a chance to adjust those priorities as he sees fit. It keeps there from being any miscommunications or from having priorities.

</comment><comment><USER19> So... When I finish my task I should just quietly sit there until the manager notices I'm not working and gives me something to do? This is just pure bullshit.

<comment><USER20> i think he rather means that you should pick a new task on your own, where - if you're "a good soldier" \- you'd pick the most important task yourself.

that said, i, too, don't agree with this article at all.

<comment><USER21> In the jobs I've worked, determining the most important tasks was done at the start of sprints in collaboration with management. Sometimes priorities would change mid sprint. (Which shouldn't happen but that's another discussion.)

Starting a task that hadn't been explicitly prioritized would get anyone on the team in trouble. It's never been difficult to get new work approved (just ask) but it had to be approved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is the manager that wants your bathroom breaks scheduled while s/he's on the golf course or tennis court sucking up to the boss... No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER23> Heh, I ask this question a lot.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can you flag a post for being toxic?

</comment><comment><USER25> Without a task management like Trello or Jira, we ask this question all the time. Bad article.

<comment><USER26> True... when I had to ask this question at a job, this meant things didn't go well. I was basically so bored that I had to go to my manager to figure out something useful to do. (Basically I ask my manager to do his job ;))

I don't think a Ticket tracker is needed to know what needs to be done next. Some people are really good at pointing out priorities and at the same time the boundaries of what I can do

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Dictatorial leadership style at play? Brute-force laissez-faire? Or just stolidity?</comment>


Analyse Asia 57: Innovation in Asia Banking with Neal Cross - <AUTHOR> http://analyse.asia/2015/09/05/episode-57-innovation-in-asia-banking-with-neal-cross/ <comment><AUTHOR> Synopsis: Neal Cross, the Chief Innovation Officer from Development Bank of Singapore (DBS) shared the story behind how DBS kickstarted its innovation efforts both internally with the bank and externally with the startup ecosystem from Singapore to Hong Kong. He also offered his thoughts and perspectives on the disruptive technologies to banking from blockchain and bitcoin to mobile payments.</comment>


Eden PHP - <AUTHOR> http://www.eden-php.com/ Eden is a PHP library designed for rapid prototyping, with less code. Yes, Really. <comment><USER2> you misspelled "Arsenal of Compoments" on the homepage

<comment><AUTHOR> It's no my web page, I only share that link :)</comment></comment>


Tovey explains the column geometry of the simplex method - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci1vBGn9yRc <comment><AUTHOR> Start looking around 4 minutes from the start</comment>


Ask HN: On what sites shall I register to reserve the name of my business? - <AUTHOR>

twitter.com aboutus.org
What else?
UPDATE:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017586.html

    * Digg
    * Delicious
    * Twitter
    * Plurk
    * Linkedin
    * Flickr
    * Facebook
    * YouTube
    * Gmail account
    * Yahoo Profile
    * MSN profile
    * FriendFeed
    * Bebo
    * MyBlogLog
    * MySpace
    * Netscape
    * Pownce
    * StumbleUpon
    * Niche social sites (aka Sphinn)
 <comment><USER2> Do a <http://namechk.com></comment>


Show HN: OneTool.app – private social feeds, group chats, tasks, docs, helpdesk - <AUTHOR> https://onetool.app <comment><AUTHOR> The app I have been doing has come a long way, but would need some ruthless beta testers and more feedback.

I believe this is suitable for production use, although it's still in beta.</comment>


Mobirise Free Website Builder v1.6 is out - <AUTHOR> http://mobirise.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We've just released a new _Mobirise_ v1.6. Please try and let us know your thoughts. Main changes in v1.6: * Link now can be set to the in-page anchors (with smooth scroll) and other project pages * Video background for all blocks * "Preview" button to test your site in the browser

</comment><comment><USER2> No Linux support. Oh well.</comment>


Unix OS Archaeology Tru64 Unix - <AUTHOR> https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2017/02/14/unix-os-archaeology-soviet-unix-clone-demos-pt-2/ <comment><USER2> Tru64 featured AdvFS, which was awesome for the time (pre-ZFS).

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

</comment><comment><USER3> seems this is the article you really wanted to link to...

[https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2017/02/20/unix-os- archaeolo...](https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2017/02/20/unix-os-archaeology- tru64-unix-part-2/)

<comment><USER4> Original Submission with Music Video in case link gets switched: [https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2017/02/14/unix-os- archaeolo...](https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2017/02/14/unix-os-archaeology- soviet-unix-clone-demos-pt-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Surprisingly Tru64 only reached end-of-life in December of 2012, with the last release happening in 2010. Depressingly, some of the modern software I write at work is required to be compatible with Tru64 5.0 as some of our customers are still running that OS.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article that's linked to is about a Soviet Unix clone. It's pretty cool, too.

</comment><comment><USER7> The MicroVAX II was alleged to have this etched into some revs, in Cyrillic: "MicroVAX: when you care enough to steal the very best"

</comment><comment><USER8> This link isn't for a post on Tru64 but rather:

"Unix OS archaeology – Soviet UNIX clone DEMOS pt.2"

Also interesting but perhaps correct the URL in the title?</comment>


Tim O'Reilly: Stop throwing sheep, do something worthy - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10045321-2.html

<comment><USER2> In reading some of the comments here, I wonder if O'Reilly's point is being addressed?

Most of the focus in the comments is on what makes a viable business model (ad-supported vs. pay-for-use) or a rational valuation (is Slide really worth half a billion?), but my reading made me think that O'Reilly was trying to get people focus on something bigger, specifically, is what you're working on worthwhile?

Like, if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, will you consider your life well-spent to have built that sheep thrower when you could have been doing something else?

<comment><USER3> He was definitely emphasizing a focus on something "bigger" and a shift away from many of the current crop of apps/startups. Can't say I disagree with him either. There are so many smart people out there. We can definitely do more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think a good rule of thumb at this point is to be extremely skeptical of anything advertising supported. If people won't pay you, are you really creating enough value to society to justify awarding yourself any warm fuzzies?

I suppose exceptions could be made for services like Google, which people would pay $1000/year for if that's what all the providers charged, but which happen to be advertising-supported.

"Make something people want enough to pay for." Now there's a terrifying heuristic.

<comment><USER5> This was exactly the common wisdom in 01/02. And then the economy turned around, and ad-supported was all the rage again.

So you're right - _now_. But if you've got enough cash to wait out the downturn, ad-supported businesses could be very profitable. It's always a mistake to try and extrapolate the present out indefinitely...

<comment><USER6> I don't think the question is whether or not you can run a profitable ad- supported business. The question is whether your product truly matters if people wouldn't pay for it.

I believe there are ad-supported products that matter, but I'm tired of being advertised to. I will pay for good products.

<comment><USER7> How will you find them?

<comment><USER8> When was the last time you first heard of a startup through a paid-for ad? (And then spent money on the service, or clicked on an ad shown by that startup and bought something there?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I totally agree with O'Reilly, Companies like Slide and RockYou do not deserve half a billion valuation and I am pretty much sure Max Levchin can do better than make social apps for Social-Networks.

<comment><USER10> How do you decide what's worth half a billion dollars? If a social network app will drive half a billion dollars worth of advertising profit over N years, then it's worth half a billion dollars, even if the same effort is better spent combating malaria.

<comment><USER11> Advertising revenues on social networks have historically been pretty poor.

I think what O'Reilly was getting at was people forming their startups that essentially chase the latest trends in what now amounts to a bubble. He makes a valid argument and we could all be looking back at what he said in the future and only realize then just how spot on he was.

<comment><USER10> I think you're probably right, but I also think there's a lazy argument out there that you could go halt malaria instead of making ad money, and that's a stupid argument; make the ad money and spend it on malaria if you're that committed.

<comment><USER12> You don't have to fight malaria or stop making money form ads. If you're going to make an ad supported app at least make it do something useful (GMail is one example of a useful ad supported app).

<comment><USER10> That's an argument against the entire entertainment industry. This is a debate over aesthetics, and I don't have much more to say about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think Tim is behind the curve on this one and startups have already stepped up to this challenge. Startups that create social networks or other semi- frivolous toys have already had a stigma attached to them for at least a year now.

<comment><USER14> tell me a startup that is not creating a frivolous toy

<comment><USER15> We're aiming to create practical, beautiful, inexpensive compressed air powered vehicles.

<comment><USER16> (Warning: Following comment irrelevant to OP's subject.) Wow, that's amazing! There're so many interesting mechanical (and electro-mechanical) innovations on your Technology page. My appreciation for _Hacker_ News just went up several notches since it's attracting folks like you. Are you funded? I hope so.

Who else is building such stuff that isn't _just_ computer science/engineering?

<comment><USER15> We're of course intending to raise funds. At this stage we're writing the business plan, putting together the engineering drawings, doing simulations, and sourcing components for the first prototype build. We'll be moving into fundraising mode soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The other day I had a crazy realization. If you add up the actual labor time required to create a lifetime's worth of standard goods and services, you get something like 5-10 man years. You can do something "worthy" that makes humans more productive, but since we are already so productive it doesn't make a huge difference. The $64,000 question is, if technology has increased our productivity so much over the past 50 years, why are we actually working more hours, and liking our jobs less? Why aren't we all retiring at 30 to do what we love?

<comment><USER18> Because "standard goods and services" are redefined as productivity increases. 20 years ago we couldn't afford half the stuff that is "standard" now.

<comment><USER14> AMEN. go into any food bank and ask the "clients" how many of them have cable tv and cell phones with data plans

<comment><USER17> Food is considerably more expensive than cable tv and cell phones.

<comment><USER19> Cable TV is about $100/month. Let's call it $25/week or $3/day.

Yuppie beans are around $3/pound, so $1/day should do for protein. Carbs in the form of rice or potatoes are cheaper. Veggies and fruit are about the same.

In other words, food can be about as expensive as cable tv.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If the iBeer thing is what I think it is, it's an application that will find you the nearest store to purchase beer when you tap the glass with your finger.

I don't see how that's some scathing critique of the devolution of society, moreso than the phone itself at least.

People can ignore what's going on in the world and contribute to the "downfall of society" or choose to live in a perpetual state of guilt about the success that the "first world" lives in at the moment, neither has a moral high ground. Your attitude doesn't matter -- but your contribution does.

The fact that the US is losing its edge in technology has as much to do with the rest of the world catching up or exceeding where we are. That's not cause for tears and somber attitudes, that's the third world gaining prosperity and health, and the second world joining the first world party. The luddites and idiots have been a problem as long as there has been humanity; that they've been in a leadership role in the US is a minor anomoly at best, and a self solving problem at worst.

I'm almost the perfect pessimist, but even I'm seeing the glass as half full at this point in history. Web 2.0's pretty overrated on the whole though -- maybe he could reclaim the conference time for something more useful.

<comment><USER21> No I think he's talking about the app that uses the accelerometer to simulate chugging a beer. That's it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am proud of not knowing what "throwing sheep" meant because it is Facebook related afterall.

<comment><USER23> Do you also enjoy telling people that you don't watch television?

<comment><USER4> Television rots the brain. Only watch anime on your computer monitor.

<comment><USER24> _Television rots the brain_

Like crack cocaine! <http://www.tvshowsondvd.net/graphics/news3/KiTHHat.jpg>

<comment><USER24> Ouch. Guess I'm the only Kids in the Hall fan here.

<comment><USER25> Big fan. Unfortunately, only over-the-hill Canadians (or near-Canadians) would catch the reference. I'll reimburse you one karma point.

<comment><USER24> _Unfortunately, only over-the-hill Canadians_

Has it really come to that? :) Well, the reference _was_ from the later crappier seasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In his Ignite Boston talk he basically said "startups are not where it's at. do something that matters"

<comment><USER23> Startups, or only frivolous (sheep-throwing) startups?

<comment><USER26> It was an overly broad statement, for sure

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's the video: <http://blip.tv/play/AbTEA4a8DQ>

</comment><comment><USER28> So basically, creating games is not worthy? How about creating art, or creating music? Writing novels?

</comment><comment><USER29> This summary is more robust: [http://greensear.ch/2008/09/18/tim-oreilly- keynote-at-the-we...](http://greensear.ch/2008/09/18/tim-oreilly-keynote-at- the-web-20-expo/)

And I found out through a Google Alert that O'Reilly mentioned Stormpulse.

</comment><comment><USER30> In a way, I hate to say it because I'm the kind of person who always thinks that people should do with their time or resources whatever they damn well please. BUT I wonder the same thing all the time: why are all these smart people spending their effort on yet another social/media website when there are so many other profitable or meaningful businesses to start.

</comment><comment><USER31> While reading the part - "and certainly aren't helping the environment by distributing tons of press kits and swag--not to mention flying in hundreds of attendees in a massive spurt of carbon emissions." - I got the feeling that the author wanted to continue on to say O'Reilly makes his money selling dead trees, but stopped short.

</comment><comment><USER32> If we're headed for a depression: what business types flourished during the Great Depression?

Is it really true that facilitating laughter and connection isn't worthy?

<comment><USER33> Entertainment flourished. People needed a way to forget their troubles, even if it's temporary.

<comment><USER34> Escapist entertainment only helps proliferate troubles. We need entertainment that improves us too. Classically, it was thought the two go hand in hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> You can't funnel creativity. For every satellite we send to Mars, there will be 20,000 things like SuperPoke and iBeer, and that's not a problem.

</comment><comment><USER36> he is echoing bubblegeneration.com

</comment><comment><USER37> Amen.

For all the buzz about "Facebook apps", has anyone looked at most of these things? Bug-ridden, ugly, utter shit. Facebook is slouching toward the Gomorrah of clutter. I hope something better comes along. I never liked Facebook (originally Thefacebook, lulz-on-a-vomit-pie) or that Zuckerberg clown, and I only use it because my friends do.

Sheep-throwing is a case of the exception attempting to _drive_ the rule. SuperPoke is a mediocre idea that has achieved some measure of viral success. It makes "success" (high user count) look _easy_ , and that's a catchy idea to many people. Does the "Million Dollar Homepage" really scale? Of course not, but it's an attractive idea that some kid out there can make $1m from a mediocre, one-flash concept.

With the right infrastructure and some luck, mediocre ideas _can_ lead to smashing success, even reliably. Take the board game _Monopoly_. The design of the game is quite primitive; not nearly on the level of _Settlers of Catan_ , much less _Tigris and Euphrates_ or _Puerto Rico_. But mass-producing and marketing a board game during the Great Depression was not easy, and there was a high barrier to entry, so the designer who was able to surmount this barrier was able to collect. Now that the barrier to entry for most ideas is low, the mediocre ideas that achieve lasting success are going to be _very_ rare.

In terms of the money and talent being wasted on mediocre ideas, one source of this problem is inherent to the VC culture. MBAs, by definition, are risk- averse people. It's an incredibly risk-averse move to trade two years and $100,000 (if you have, or can borrow, the money) for an assurance of elevated career status. Elite MBA programs are, compared to similar law, medical, or PhD programs, extremely unselective, and getting an MBA is a way to reach the executive level by (wait for it) schmoozing and taking classes-- in other words, without accomplishing or risking anything. To the extent that most VCs are elite MBAs, _of course_ they're going to be throwing their money after me- too social networking sites, which can be compared to other such sites on paper-- rather than original ideas that only the marketplace can evaluate. Investing money in social networking and "Web 2.0" is like buying the proverbial IBM, for which nobody was ever fired.

</comment><comment><USER14> the market will sort it out. have any of the yc guys gotten rich lately? in the end, no one but the franciscans is really interested in a vow of poverty.

beyond seed capital it doesn't even seem that rockyou and slide are swimming in cash. from yelp to loopt to twitter...at some point it will be put up or shut up on the revenue side.</comment>


Zero Cost Abstractions - <AUTHOR> https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2016/11/30/zero-cost-abstractions <comment><USER2> >The only proper way to reason about the cost of these

>abstractions is to inspect the generated machine code.

To me, that's a big problem with a lot of these Heldencompilers. They _may_ generate really optimal machine code. Then again, they may not, and the difference between optimizations working well and not working well in runtime efficiency is so great (I've measured 1000x for Swift) that they might as well be completely different languages.

For reference, 1000x means that 1 second turns into 16 minutes, and having that type of difference in something that's completely opaque is not a useful performance tool for me, because predictability is at least half the game in performance. So something like Knuth's transformation systems that turn optimization into a dialogue between programmer, compiler and instrumentation seems like a better idea[1].

[1] [https://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS185C/KnuthStructuredProgrammi...](https://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS185C/KnuthStructuredProgrammingGoTo.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Heldencompiler? Google is not turning up much.

<comment><USER4> Probably supposed to be Heisencompiler as a play on Heisenberg's uncertainty principal.

<comment><USER5> Is messing up branch prediction "Breaking Bad?"

<comment><USER6> No. See Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty awesome. One key bit of information that the compiler has is that the coefficients are a constant array of length 12, which makes the loop unrolling possible and also means that the register magic is in play - it's seriously awesome that the compiler does this.

That said, I'd expect something similar to happen with a well-written C program. Would equivalent abstractions in C++1{1,4,7} be "costly"?

<comment><USER8> All of the optimizations were done by llvm, so nothing stopping this from working in C++ with closures or C with functions annotated for inlining.

With C the lack of generics means that writing composable iterators is hard, though.

<comment><USER9> At least it's hard to write composable iterators that don't circumvent the type system completely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> His snippet is very close to what one would do in scala. And I suspect it is very similar to other functional languages. I have always wanted to have a comparison between the generated code of different functional languages for a similar program. One day..

<comment><USER11> Yes, Rust feels a bit like a mix of Scala and C. Especially match :)

<comment><USER12> I think ML is actually the strongest influence. Of course, Scala and Haskell both have ML influence, so there are things that look familiar from all three languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> OT and not sure if you're the author.. but what a beautifully designed website!

<comment><USER14> Not the author (Ruud), but I've been in touch with him.

The source code for his website is free software [0], so feel free to have a look or adopt it for yourself.

Ruud uses a small static site generator he's written in Haskell, and in his own words it "includes a tiny templating engine, an html and css minifier, and an aggressive font subsetter."

[0]: [https://github.com/ruuda/blog](https://github.com/ruuda/blog)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > But in any case, a missed opportunity for vectorisation is just that: a > missed opportunity. It is not abstraction overhead.

Does the same code implemented in C manage to vectorize? If so isn't that an actual "cost" in comparison?

</comment><comment><USER16> How difficult is it to add a "zero cost abstraction" like the ones used here? For example, what would it take to make this compile:

        for window in buffer.sliding_window(coefficients.len()) {
            let prediction = coefficients.iter()
                                         .zip(window)
                                         .map(|(&c, &s)| c * s as i64)
                                         .sum::<i64>() >> qlp_shift;
            let delta = buffer[i];
            buffer[i] = prediction as i32 + delta;
        }

with sliding_window returning an iterator over slices of the buffer?

<comment><USER17> "Zero cost abstraction" to me means a completely "static" abstraction, i.e. there are no runtime mechanisms _necessary_ to implement the abstraction.

Your sliding window is just a series of windows, so there is no reason why it couldn't be compiled in the "most" efficient way. In fact it probably does, just try it out by implementing the sliding_window as an iterable.

However there's always this problem with cleverness: It gets harder and harder to read and maintain. Also [http://wiki.c2.com/?SufficientlySmartCompiler](http://wiki.c2.com/?SufficientlySmartCompiler)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Fortunately these structures are not allocated on the heap, as they would > likely be in a language like Java or Python.

At least in principle, escape analysis would be used to allocate them on the stack. In HotSpot, simple iterators are commonly allocated on the stack (and then optimized further). When you have a JIT (which means you can afford one), general abstractions become zero-cost based on their use-site. The upside is that you get a few, general and powerful abstractions that are then completely optimized based on how they're used. The downside is that it is not guaranteed, and a JIT requires more RAM and power (and in practice usually a warmup period, although that can be solved).

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not familiar with some of these operations. I don't know what a Rust "slice" is. Or what "Zip" does.

Could someone show me the most straight forward equivalent in vanilla C? I assume there is no direct equivalent as temporary storage will be needed. But that's fine and would further serve the purpose of explaining why Rust is cool.

Thanks.

<comment><USER20> Uh, the C equivalent might be something like

        uint32_t *buffer = ...;
        uint64_t coefficients[12] = {...};
        uint16_t qlp_shift = ...;

        uint32_t *bufp = &buffer[...];
        uint64_t sum;
        for (size_t i = 0; i < 12; i++)
            sum += coefficients[i] * bufp[i-12];
        uint64_t prediction = sum >> qlp_shift;
        *bufp += (uint32_t)prediction;

Edit: this is incorrect

<comment><USER8> This is incorrect. The C code is more like

        for (size_t i = 0; i < 12; i++) {
            sum = 0;
            for (size_t j = 0; j < 12; j++)
                sum += coefficients[j] * bufp[i + j];
            buffer[i + 12] += sum >> qlp_shift;
        }

<comment><USER21> I think this is still a little off. Maybe you used bufp[i + j] where you meant buffer[i + j]? I may have something wrong too, but I probably would go with:

        for (size_t i = 0; i < 12; i++) {
            int64_t sum = 0;
            int32_t *bufp = buffer + i;
            for (size_t j = 0; j < 12; j++)
                sum += coefficients[j] * bufp[j];
            *bufp += (int32_t)(sum >> qlp_shift);
        }

I think this will put it in a form where the compiler should vectorize it[1], probably making the loop about twice as fast as the version shown: 3 vector loads, 3 vector multiplications, 3 vector additions and a horizontal sum versus 16 scalar loads[2], 12 scalar multiplications and 12 scalar additions.

[1] I presume the "various reasons the above snippet is not as obvious to vectorise as it might seem at first sight" is because the coefficients[] are 64-bit and buffer[] is 32-bit. But a smart compiler should be able to use PMOVSXDQ (packed move sign extend double-word to quad-word) here. Unless there is some other issue, I think the author may be underestimating the benefit of vectorizing here.

[2] While the author is right that most of coefficients stay in registers, there isn't actually room for all 12, so 4 of them are loaded from the stack every iteration. Since only 3 128-bit vector registers are required, they should remain there. I'm not sure if the excess loads are actually a bottleneck, though.

<comment><USER22> > I think this will put it in a form where the compiler should vectorize it

I played around with you snippet using the compiler explorer [https://godbolt.org/](https://godbolt.org/) . I tried a couple versions of clang, gcc, and icc and none of those were able to auto-vectorize it. Not sure why. Kind of a shame, since there would definitely be a speedup.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for testing it. You inspired me to try as well, and I've found that Intel ICC 16 and 17 will vectorize it if you put "#pragma vector always" before the inner loop. Without it, it thinks that the write to buffer[i] might interfere with the reads of buffer[i + j]. I think this is because it's trying to "jam" the inner and outer loop.

In addition, I discovered a couple other issues. I was embarrassed to see that I'd messed up the loop bounds in my example. But the bigger one is that AVX2 and earlier do not have a 64-bit x 64-bit -> 64-bit vector multiplication instruction. VPMULLQ was only added with AVX512, possibly because it requires a 512-bit intermediate.

This means that with 64-bit coefficients, the vector approach has to do the multiplications twice, and shift, and add. This is likely going to be slower than the scalar approach. But if you were able to switch to 32-bit (or floating point) coefficients, I think the vectorized solution looks pretty good. ICC estimates a 1.4x speedup, but I think that gets better with longer buffers.

I put the version with int32_t coefficients up here: [https://godbolt.org/g/GXNVe2](https://godbolt.org/g/GXNVe2)

<comment> Ruud-v-A Actually, the coefficients are only 16 bit, they are just widened before the loop. AVX2 and later are not widely supported, but there is pmuldq in SSE4.1 which is appropriate here. It takes 32 bit operands and and produces a 64 bit result. Because its result is 64 bit (as it should be by the way, because truncating to 32 bit _will_ overflow on real-world FLAC files) it can only do two elements per operation. A few adds can be vectorised too then, but you still need a horizontal add to get the final value. I think it is possible to get a small speedup, but definitely not the 4× or 8× that you might hope for with SSE/AVX. But at this point I would say that this is a pretty advanced optimisation, not your average "vectorise all operations in the loop, increment the counter by 4/8 at a time" transformation that a compiler can do easily. I am impressed that the Intel compiler can actually vectorise things here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would be curious to see a good C++ translation of that, which a modern compiler can unroll/inline about as well.

<comment><USER24> Given that the Rust compiler uses LLVM as its backend, and given that Rust's closure implementation was inspired by C++'s (though with extra compile-time machinery to make them memory-safe), I'm certain that C++ is just as capable of boiling these abstractions away as Rust is. :) (But admittedly I don't know if iterator adaptors like map and zip are in C++'s stdlib.)

<comment><USER25> Not part of stdlib, but it can be done using Boost. [https://godbolt.org/g/QBN5zP](https://godbolt.org/g/QBN5zP)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't know anything about FLAC, but is the implicit modular arithmetic the expected behavior here? What if a product or a sum overflows?

<comment> Ruud-v-A Good question! It turns out that 64 bit arithmetic does not overflow (I explain this in a comment in the source code [1]) up to the shift. The shift amount must then be large enough to fit the result in 32 (or actually, 24 or usually 16) bits. For a valid FLAC file this will be the case. For an invalid FLAC file it might truncate, but an invalid file cannot be decoded properly anyway. The shift amount is a 5 bit signed number [2], so it is never possible to shift by the integer width or more.

[1]: [https://github.com/ruuda/claxon/blob/91b6af9/src/subframe.rs...](https://github.com/ruuda/claxon/blob/91b6af9/src/subframe.rs#L476-L481) [2]: [https://github.com/ruuda/claxon/blob/91b6af9/src/subframe.rs...](https://github.com/ruuda/claxon/blob/91b6af9/src/subframe.rs#L576-L579)

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the detailed answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why no constant for the value 12? :(

</comment><comment><USER28> I like the idea of zero-cost abstractions very much. I think that eventually, we will move to functionally proven code - which is, of course, also a zero- cost abstraction, since functional verification is normally done at compile- time.

The snippet presented is completely unreadable to me though, and I think that in general, Rust is too hard to understand (and has some syntax which seems quite arbitrary).

<comment><USER8> > The snippet presented is completely unreadable to me though

I suspect this is just a matter of being used to things. For me, the corresponding imperative code is harder to disentangle. Whereas, knowing what zip/map/sum do, both the intent and the behavior of the code is abundantly clear to me.

<comment><USER29> I suspect that's right. I can describe what zip, map, and sum do, but I don't have an intuitive feel for what each one does or the patterns that they're usually used in because I haven't ever really done any functional programming.

I've seen side-by-side imperative and functional comparisons, written in Rust. Reading through the functional version of the code always gave me a very rough idea of what was happening, and reading the imperative version was always immediately clear to me. I think that it's almost certainly a function of familiarity.

<comment><USER30> Have you ever learned a new spoken language? At first, the learner understands by translating to primary language. Only later, with repeated experience does the learner stop doing so and become "fluent".

Its very similar when learning the functional style of programming. Even today having most of this functional style be intuitive, when I see a complex iterator chain (usually only when constructing a `Map`), I need to mentally unfold it into a loop.

<comment><USER29> > Have you ever learned a new spoken language? At first, the learner > understands by translating to primary language.

That seems like a good analogy. I underwent that process a few years ago while teaching myself to read assembly, and in the past, other spoken languages.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unity on Wayland - <AUTHOR> http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

<comment><USER2> It looks like Wayland isn't quite aiming to replace X, but it's close -- X will run on top of Wayland (one day).

More about the architecture:

<http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great news. I've been following Wayland on Phoronix and I was hoping Google was going to do this when they announced Chrome OS</comment>


PyBrain: The Python Machine Learning Library - <AUTHOR> http://pybrain.org/

<comment><USER2> Submitted many, many times:

<http://searchyc.com/pybrain?sort=by_date>

Some of these have substantial commentary.

<comment><USER3> The last one with an exact URL match was ~1 year ago. On the other hand, I just tried submitting a URL that someone else submitted 5 minutes, previous and HN translated that into an up-vote for the pre-existing submission.

<comment><USER2> That's the way the duplicate detection works here on HN. A recent exact match becomes an upvote, because if you think it's worth submitting then you would obviously think it's worth upvoting the original.

On the other hand, since old discussions are closed, repeats are allowed after a certain time. Likewise, if the URL isn't an exact match, it's not recognised.

<comment><USER4> What is the time delay limit?

<comment><USER5> However long it takes for the story to be removed from memory. HN only does dupe detection on the stories that are already in memory.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Market with Millions of Smokers Just Banned Vapes Entirely - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/a-huge-market-with-millions-of-smokers-just-banned-vapes <comment><USER2> i still find this absurd, the cause has not yet been identified and its localised to one country which makes it seem a little presumptuous to ban it outright

but if youll just wait with me a sec while i put this tin foil hat on maybe this was an intentional move, a whole host of new kids/teens have become hooked on nicotine, take away the vapes and they have no other source than good old ciggies

although im not sure that makes sense to me as surely they make more profit on eliquid and the various equipment than they do off standard cigs</comment>


Tell HN: My MD says that Europe is not preparing for containment but pandemic - <AUTHOR> I had doctor visit on Friday and naturally I cried about the situation and requested why not enough is being done to contain the virus in Europe.
It was explained to me that a lot is being done but nobody is preparing for containment but for pandemic.
I do not know how much of this is true but it would explain the delayed reaction. They have just given up and consider the containment (politically?) impossible.
It is also possible that a media campaign has started to condition people to accept this https://www.corriere.it/salute/malattie_infettive/20_marzo_05/chi-sono-morti-positivi-coronavirus-italia-787076ba-5f18-11ea-bf24-0daffe9dc780.shtml (if you know about more such articles then please reference in comments).
To my surprise, my doctor's personal opinion also aligns with this sentiment that it is OK when old people die.
I am sharing this because it has helped me to better cope with the situation mentally.
I am upset that the human life is not valued but I do not have to pull my hair out while seeing nothing meaningful being done. <comment><USER2> Containment was already impossible when news first broke in the west in late January. At that point the virus had already escaped not just Wuhan, but China. With airborne spread, r0 of 3-5, asymptomatic carriers, and ~2 weeks between infection and when it becomes severe enough to warrant medical treatment, it's virtually impossible to trace all infections. All it takes is one getting through screening and you have a massive epidemic - that seems to be what happened in Italy. Epidemiologists have estimated that it's been circulating in the Seattle area since at least mid-January - that was about 10 days _before_ any news of it hit Western media.

For some reason people tend not to react well when told "You will get it. Guaranteed. There's nothing you can do about it. If you're young and healthy you have about a 1 in 500 chance of dying from it; if you're old and sick it could be as much as 1 in 4." It may not be that your doctor thinks it's OK when old people die, just that it's inevitable, and it's not worth worrying about inevitable things.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think if people really think that all human life should be valued then every country would have implemented measures similar to China.

I thought first that it is incompetence but apparently it is possibly just matter of values.

<comment><USER2> China doesn't value human life - if they did they would never let air pollution in Wuhan get to the point where a good day is like the Bay Area when all of California is on fire, or have opened their arms to Phillip Morris such that > 50% of Chinese men are smokers.

China values political survival, and they know that if dead bodies are piling up on the streets, the days of the regime are numbered. That's why you see all these harsh quarantines now. Eventually they'll drop the quarantines, the coronavirus will re-infect China (because that's what viruses do), and about 20M people will die, quietly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not agree or disagree but I have thought that what strategy the Chinese have in mind.

They took very hard measures to contain the virus inside China but they did not close the borders to not let it spread out of the China.

Do they plan to close the borders now to keep the virus out of China as this would be politically more acceptable for them?

Because if there is pandemic then also they should be expected to have it again, or they will use some measures to keep it happening?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can't really stop a virus. But on the bright side, in France only 11 persons have died of 949 infections. In Germany no one has died despite 800 infections. That indicates that with access to proper medical services the death rate is actually quite low.

Find stats here: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-m...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus- maps.html)

The death rate for European countries is about 0.7% at the moment.

<comment><USER4> Those hospitalisations cause pressure on healthcare systems, which means that people without covid-19 but with other life threatening respiratory problems are at increased risk of death.

<comment><USER3> Is there any indication that the health care system will fail in any European country excluding Italy?

<comment><USER5> At the current point no, if we hit anything like 1% or above infected in a single country then yes we'll probably see that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Current containment efforts are made to let medical care systems handle the outbreak in a controlled way.

SARS-CoV-2 will be with us forever, maybe not everyone will get infected because of some immunity factor we haven't learned yet. But we are not going to be all isolated forever. Human contact is essential for our survival too.

</comment><comment><USER7> _I am upset that the human life is not valued_

I'm not sure how you get "human life is not valued" from this. Even here in the US there is a lot of talk about how containment simply isn't going to be successful, and that we might as well accept that this is going to be a widespread pandemic. If containment is going to fail no matter what we do, then pretending otherwise isn't going to help.

OTOH, accepting a pandemic, and the possible presence of a new seasonal affliction doesn't mean people don't value human life. There are still people working on (a) vaccine(s) for this, and treatments for it (or researching if existing treatments for similar viruses may help with this). If a vaccine is successfully developed, then we don't necessarily have to accept large numbers of deaths from Covid19 over the long-term. Yes, _some_ people are going to die, but that seems like a tautology anyway to me.

<comment><USER4> > I'm not sure how you get "human life is not valued" from this.

See for example this retired nurse who says that a pandemic would be a useful way to kill off many old people who tend to cause patient-flow ("bed blocking") in the system.

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus- news-u...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-news-uk- latest-june-andrews-bed-blockers-hospitals-scottish-parliament-a9384116.html)

<comment><USER7> I'm not saying there are NO examples of people who don't value human life. I was just referring to the context of the story the OP told in the original post. That, to me, didn't seem to contain much support for the "human life isn't valued" sentiment.

Beyond that... all sorts of people have different moral/ethical systems. I suppose people who believe in some brands of utilitarianism can adopt the position you cite here, and feel that it's justified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think that there are more layers in this story. There is medical community and there are politicians.

I expected that medical community would strongly advise in such situation about the policy that would save the most lives.

It is possible to politicians will find courage to take measures that will save lives. It is now up to them to find this courage.</comment>


Can Gary Marcus Make AI More Human? - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/544606/can-this-man-make-aimore-human/ <comment><AUTHOR> Based on the recent popularity of "Go, Marvin Minsky, and the Chasm that AI Hasn't Yet Crossed" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11020652](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11020652)) I came across this article about Gary Marcus' work on a hybrid deep learning / rules-based AI system for his stealth startup: [http://geometric.ai](http://geometric.ai)

Gives some interesting perspective to the other story.</comment>


The woman behind Apple's first icons - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-woman-behind-apples-first-icons/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526272)</comment>


Your Face Is Not a Bar Code (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/bar-code.html <comment><USER2> > In twenty years, at current rates of progress, it will be feasible for the > Chinese government to use face recognition to track the public movements of > everyone in the country.

When this note was published in 2001, I didn't expect the tech to become that good that fast. I was wrong. (Not that I thought it wouldn't happen, just that there'd be more time.)

<comment><USER3> Every breath you take, every move you make... I'll be watching you. Oh can't you see? You belong to me... The Police

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm of the opinion that identification should be the individual's choice, ie supplying credentials.

When organizations gain the ability to identify without consent, the door is opened for some very malicious practices.

<comment><USER5> The argument for public safety though has been pretty overwhelming.

Britain just scored a big win in the novichok poisoning case by being able to trace the movements of Russian operatives using cameras.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/world/europe/russia-uk- no...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/world/europe/russia-uk-novichok- skripal.html)

This trend will continue as long as the wins are bigger than the abuses.

<comment><USER6> This is a trap. You can't just say "well the wins are worth it at the moment" and not consider what happens when someone else - possibly with antithetical values to yours - inherits that power.

<comment><USER5> Your argument is an appeal for more personal liberty. And that's an honorable argument to make.

If, however, crime reduces your personal liberty to the point where you are uncomfortable walking outside, then cameras (and facial recognition software) will seem to add more liberty than it takes away. People buy products like Ring and security cameras for this very reason, they want to feel safe.

You might say, "Okay, but that's security theater. The real issue is because Donald J Trump, or an unchecked NSA might use them for more nefarious reasons. And it's not even clear they work to reduce crime..."

At which point the average person says, "I just want to feel safe at night when I walk the dog. And frankly, the investment in cameras are worth it if they help catch Russian spies..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > A free society is a society in which there are limits on what the police can > do. If we want to remain a free society then we need to make a decision

I think the amount of legislation that effectively limits privacy / freedom in the past years shows that western societies no longer want to. It includes increased bank regulations / attempts to abolish cash / hate speech regulations / surveillance regulations / GDPR etc. The question is no longer whether the private information of people should be owned by others, but about who should own it, businesses or the State.

<comment><USER8> GDPR is an attempt to grab some of the power back to the individual.

<comment><USER9> Governments are exempt from GDPR. Further it is regulators, not individuals, who determine which data processing activities are lawful. GDPR certainly takes power away from companies, but it transfers that power to the state, not to individuals.

<comment><USER10> Not exactly: _law enforcement_ has GDPR exemption, but it should apply to other branches of government. There's a controversy over this in the UK: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/05/uk_government_legal...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/05/uk_government_legal_challenge_immigration_exemption_data_protection_bill/)

Should the government be obliged to allow you to correct information that may otherwise be used to deny you residency? Absolutely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Average end user doesn't care as long as Instagram, Facebook, et. al. keep them engaged constantly with their devices.

Smartphone's are the new crack.</comment>


Ask HN: any success stories of couchDB?  - <AUTHOR>

We were developing a product and we approached investors. Almost all of them asked why are we using CouchdB and not something well known (among them). This is in India and most of them dont know a thing about technology. They wanted to know if anyone else has successfully used couchDB. Their definition of success is something like Twitter Facebook and Google. <comment><USER2> I googled a couple of helpful links for you.

This is just for couchbase, not couchdb in general - <http://www.couchbase.com/customers>

From this SO post [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1999744/promoting- couch-d...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1999744/promoting-couch-db-to- management) about 2 years old - BBC, Meebo, Ubuntu, Mozilla

[though Ubuntu is now giving up on couchdb because it doesn't fit their particular problem]

HTH.</comment>


Akamai thrives in the spirit of its lost founder - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/09/04/akamai_thrives_in_the_spirit_of_its_lost_founder/?page=full

<comment><USER2> I worked at Akamai as a contractor for a few months after they first started. Danny used to come by and kick the desks of the developers I was working with to "wake them up". He was kind of like a rowdy older brother type. He seemed like a decent guy though, it was really a shock to hear he died on 9/11. I've heard some theories that one of those hijackers on that flight had a gun and I believe it, I honestly don't think they could've stopped him otherwise.

<comment><USER3> From the article:

 _"The terrorists breached the cockpit somehow, and the one trained to fly a jet, Mohamed Atta, moved to take control of the plane. And it may be at that point that Lewin tried to stop the hijacking, according to the government commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.

He had the training for it, but he never had a chance. One of the terrorists was seated behind Lewin and stabbed him, possibly in the throat. Lewin was one of the first of many to die on Sept. 11."_

<comment><USER2> No one can say firsthand exactly what happened in there unfortunately, though it's entirely possible it went down like the article says.

There was a leaked FAA memo that claimed that he had been shot. Later it was claimed this was a first draft with incorrect information.

<http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26626>

I don't think it really matters exactly what happened, I only brought it up because I wanted to point out that I felt that he was a tough and very aware individual.

Possibly relevant:

Excerpt from "Year to the Twin Towers Disaster" Yediot Ahronot, Seven Days Magazine Section 6 September 2002. Translation by IMRA:

"Danny Lewin was the first victim of the biggest attack in history that morning, in which almost 3,000 people died. An internal memorandum of the Federal Aviation Administration sets that in the course of a struggle that took place between Lewin, a graduate of Israel's elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal , and the four hijackers who were assaulting that cockpit, Lewin was murdered by Satam Al Suqami, a 25 year old Saudi.

Some time after the attack the Lewin family in Jerusalem received a telephone call from the FBI offices in New York. On the line was the agent responsible for the investigation of the attack on Flight 11. He told Peggy and Charles Lewin that there is a high degree of certainty that their son Danny tried to prevent the hijacking. The FBI relied, among other things, on the testimony of the stewardess Amy Sweeney.

Sweeney called Michael Woodward, the flight services supervisor in Boston, from the rear of the plane: "a hijacker slit the throat of a passenger in business class and the passenger appears to me to be dead." To this day the American investigators are not convinced that Danny Lewin was murdered on the spot. An additional stewardess, Betty Ong, who succeeded in calling from a telephone by one of the passenger seats, said that the passenger who was attacked from business class seat 10B was seriously wounded.

The Lewin family, Danny' parents and brothers, have no doubt that Danny battled the hijackers. And it is for them a tremendous consolation. "I wasn't surprised to hear from the FBI that Danny fought. I was sure that this is what he would do," Yonatan, his younger brother, said. "Danny didn' t sit quietly. From what we heard from the Americans, the hijackers attacked one of the stewardesses and Danny rose to protect her and prevent them from entering the cockpit. It is a consolation to us that Danny fought. We see it as an act of heroism that a person sacrifices his life in order to save others. An act of heroism that everyone should do at such an instance and particularly suitable for Danny."

That battle in the business section ended quickly. Lewin was overcome and bled to death on the floor. Two additional flight attendants were knifed and the captain was murdered. The hijackers were already inside the cockpit. They announced to the passengers to remain quiet in their seats.

Also there is this:

But a childhood friend who served with Lewin in the Israel Defense Force says only a bullet would have stopped Lewin.

"He'd be more than a match for those skinny little (expletive)," said Brad Rephen, a New York lawyer who grew up with Lewin in Jerusalem. "With his training, he would have killed them with his bare hands."

"I can tell you, their knives would not have stopped him," he added. "He would have taken their knives or their box cutters away and used them against them."

Rephen recalls Lewin's injured hands after he returned from an Israeli anti- terrorist training course.

"They were pretty beaten up from the fighting he did," he said. "He knew how to fight with knives and take knives away from people."

He described Lewin, at about 5-11, 200 pounds, as "thick-boned." He says he witnessed him bench-press more than 300 pounds and squat close to 500 pounds.

"He was very, very strong and had a lot of meat on him," Rephen said. "They couldn't have subdued him by slashing him. The only way they could have stopped him was by shooting him."

<http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=13281>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's such a sad irony that the tragedy that took his own life was the biggest test and success of his technology.

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember this story from another angle - when Reddit was a few years old you'd see stories claiming his presence, an Israel ex-commando, on the plane "proves" that Israel was behind 9/11. Nutty, but these submissions were doing pretty well, often hitting homepage (IIRC some of them were from a site called "what really happened" or similar)

For me it was an early clue on the "social news" world that's still unfolding. I believe it might turn out to resemble humanity's past in surprising ways.

<comment><USER6> Reddit is a great site, but it has a serious issue with confirmation bias among its users. There's a tongue-in-cheek way the users acknowledge it by calling themselves "the hivemind" It's both good and bad though. Good, because you create an addictive experience for current users but new users can sometimes feel ostracized. Then again with 19million users, what do I know they're obviously doing something right with the community. All I know is while I may enjoy it I would never take any news I read on there as entirely factual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow. I never knew the story of Akamai.

I always knew it was in a lot of "behind the scenes" content delivery, but I always thought that the name sounds Japanese and that's where those guys are from. Guess I was wrong. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's the saddest thing, didn't know this.</comment>


How to Stop Services Like Unroll.me from Snooping on Your Gmail - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/04/stop-services-like-unroll-snooping-gmail/ <comment><USER2> Tldr:

Manage Google app permissions: [https://myaccount.google.com/permissions](https://myaccount.google.com/permissions)

Manage Google connected accounts: [https://profiles.google.com/connectedaccounts](https://profiles.google.com/connectedaccounts)

Manage Facebook app permissions: [https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications](https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications)

In all fairness, however, the title is misleading. Once you've given a rogue service like Unroll.me access, you can be sure they'll download every piece of information they can. All you can do later is prevent them from getting any future information. What we really need is a way to authenticate without surrendering any personal details to begin with.</comment>


Ask HN: What does the more intensive work in Rails/similar look like? - <AUTHOR> I've been learning Ruby on Rails and I've seen a lot of youtube videos of people building youtube and pinterest clones in like an hour or two.
What kind of work is done to diffrentiate from that? I'm curious what the more advanced workflows/projects look like. What work is airbnb or github doing?
it seems like a logarithm where you get a lot of results quickly and the rest is incremental improvements to get slightly better, or is it another pattern? <comment><USER2> [https://www.trip.com](https://www.trip.com) is 90% Rails I'd say. Everything you see on the surface is Rails.

As you grow, you do less of "belongs_to" and "has_many" and you do way more Ruby and way more Glue code that will work with all the models in the system and generate something for the user.

Scaling is a big issue, you constantly work around "best practices" that don't scale. (active-model-serialization for example) in favor of more fine-grained control over your models and data flow.

These days, the work is about 45-45-10, 45% you do APIs, 45% you do JS/React/etc... and 10% you do "Rails" (likely even less).

When the project grows, the monolithic nature of it starts to be a very big pain in the ass. We are moving more and more into services that do one thing well and not automatically include everything into the project.

Hope this answers your question

Tips: Forget Rails, Learn Ruby, HTTP, how things flow from the request to the response. Adopt universal best practices.

<comment><USER3> "Forget Rails, Learn Ruby" I disagree, Ruby is mostly nothing without Rails. It's a great language, but otherwise has little usage when it comes down to getting a job.

<comment><USER2> Even though I disagree with you, I didn't explain myself correctly initially.

Rails is a framework. You are not a Rails engineer, you are a Ruby engineer.

I see this a lot with people that started with Rails, they don't understand the basics of Ruby and it's capabilities, they look for "Array comparison Rails" etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're probably referring to videos like this[1]. That wikipedia clone has very limited functionality and the interface is _raw_ even for _internal_ use. I took a quick-lap over it, I didn't notice the author writing tests and/or using JS.

Indeed Rails is extremely good for prototyping, but building an actual MVP (let alone a product) takes a lot more than that + there are more stages that have been ommited for very good reasons from that video-tutorial.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zNouhuKaVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zNouhuKaVs)

</comment><comment><USER5> As a project grows, scaling takes a lot of work. Adding a new feature means making sure that it works with all of the other features that are already there. Having millions of comments means you have to figure out how to implement caching correctly. And so on. It takes a lot of work to manage large codebases.</comment>


Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web - <AUTHOR> https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/ <comment><USER2> Details currently standing out -

Methodology for identifying cross sub linking and classification as Neutral vs Negative had a significantly larger number of Neutral classified links that negative.

Negative posts are done by a small minority of subs, with a pretty skewed tail.

Attacks require a high level of similarity between the attacker and defender for an attack to occur. (e.g., r/conspiracy vs. r/worldnews, or r/mensrights vs. r/againstmensrights)

\---

Just to highlight what I consider a constant risk of any research in this area, I am considering simple ways to use this research to benefit an attacker.

In another reading of this, I should be able to figure out which subs are most suitable to fight against each other and instigate that fight.

Or to figure out how to ensure a fight wins and a sub dies out.

Figure 8 a is conducive - it suggests that attackers should ensure that they out co-ordinate and demotivate defenders, its the surest way to get them to move out of the sub and take it over.

This in turn suggests that attackers need to scour the web carefully to find innocuous sentences or interpersonal exchanges which would look _terrible_ to an outgroup member - this will allow for more ganging up and antagonism/emotional anger to push a point and isolate the defending members.

I bet most eve online players also realize that time zones would play hugely to the attackers advantage.

Perhaps subreddits for some communities should shut down at night, or at the times known attackers are most active?

\---

Its a nice article, And I think the focus on colonization during attackers while interesting, is likely not as interesting as the evidence of colonization during neutral linking events.

Can that be used to build a healthy meta cross linking of groups that allows for an improved flow of information between groups? Access to cross group experience and expertise ?

Incidentally this map looks like a great way to identify subs which are about to get a ban.

<comment><USER3> From reading your comment it seems like you could also create sockpuppet that is part of a target community and then instigate a fight between two different communities (a target and also one that opposes a target) that you want to eliminate?

<comment><USER4> We haven't looked into how sockpuppetry is done alongside attacks, but I presume that it would happen at a smaller scale.

BTW here's our previous research on sockpuppets that you may find interesting: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2127107-sock-puppet- acc...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2127107-sock-puppet-accounts- unmasked-by-the-way-they-write-and-post/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A bunch of scientists in 2014 discovers that there are flame wars on the Internet. Where were they in 1993? They are only 21 years late to the party.

<comment><USER6> Something being apparent (in a certain demographic) does not in any sense reduce the validity of scientific research in this area. There have been great papers on topics like these in the past, some of them even award-winning and read-worthy.

<comment><USER7> >worth-ready

Read-worthy for anyone who was a bit high like me and did a double take (sorry if this is against etiquette, I don't have anything substantial to add to what you said)

<comment><USER6> Oops, not sure what went on in my head there. Corrected!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to get email address from people that download my iOS app - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone, we are about to submit our app to the app stores. I am wondering if (1) Is it possible to obtain a list of email addresses of people that will download it (iOS and/or Google Play) and (2), if it was possible to ask people to enter their email address on the first page of the app. Thanks a lot for your help. Feel free to ask any questions. Aymeric <comment><USER2> IANAL. Depends on what you're going to do with the email address (and the other data you collect about the user). If it's send them commercial email, the critical question is whether or not using the app constitutes an "opt-in" in all jurisdictions. I think you have a good case under US CAN-SPAM Act, as implied consent under the guise of a "business relationship" is in play, but it's much less clear under the Canadian CASL rules, as you have to get explicit consent to receive CEM (implied and transitive consent isn't enough). And EU privacy rules are even more complicated, and cover more than just data collection for sending CEM. We use outside counsels in each jurisdiction when we need to answer questions like this.

P.S. - FWIW, I'm with valarauca1...nothing quite says "do not want" like an app (even worse, a website) that requires me to enter my email before doing anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> Generally speaking demanding data form your users before they get to experience/use your app is bad design. Its understandable to a degree for twitter ,tumblr, facebook, etc, because their services transcend mobile apps, and include a website that your account makes uniquely yours.

If all you are is an app, and the first thing I need to do is give you my email, to _use the app_ (or register an account), I'm uninstalling it.

:.:.:

Dare I ask why you want their email?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, the idea is to try some (re)engagement hacks in the case they did not complete the "signup process". Just so you know our app is an email application [http://mailcloud.com/](http://mailcloud.com/) that require people to add their email account.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:Who's Looking For a Cofounder? (March 2011 Edition) - <AUTHOR>

We get a lot of "Who's hiring" threads on HN, but I bet many people are looking to join an early stage startup as a cofounder. In your comment, you should probably mention where you're located, what stage your startup/idea is at, who you're looking for, what you can bring to the table, and your contact info. <comment><AUTHOR> Ok, starting it off myself:

[RTP (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) NC]

I am. I'm working on an open-source Enterprise 2.0 project; elements include social-networking (eg, a Facebook'ish piece, but intended for organizational use), knowledge management / discovery (using tagging, collaborative filtering, automatic text classification, semantic-web tech, etc.) and social- search. The technology stack is primarily Groovy (Grails for the front-end bits); but there is some Java code. As some functionality spins off into standalone services, I'm considering either Scala or Clojure, but no firm decision has been made yet.

More details on the current state of things can be found at <http://code.google.com/p/screwpile>, and there's a demo of a very early prototype of one of the components, at <http://spdemo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1/>

I'm looking for one or possibly two co-founders.

For one, I'd like to work with someone who is a top-notch UI/UX person with strong skills in terms of design, HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. and who can handle making the UI a strength.

For the other, I'm looking for somebody with a background in the sales / marketing / business development world... preferably somebody with actual experience doing B2B software sales, and actually closing sales. Any technical background would be a huge plus as well.

I'm in North Carolina and would prefer a co-founder to be local, but I won't categorically rule out working with someone remote, depending on the details.

I'm at a point where I feel like it's time to get into Customer Development seriously, and do the "get out of the building" thing and start getting feedback from potential customers; so that's a goal for the short-term, just to give you an idea of where this is at. Also, this is completely self-funded at the moment, but seeking outside investment is absolutely in the cards when this starts to look like it has some legs.

Finally... the (existing) code is out there, and Apache licensed... if anybody is interested on hacking on this stuff, but not interested in being a co- founder, feel free to jump in.

Interested? fogbeam [at] gmail [dot] com

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm located in Lafayette, CA. My current startup stage is the beginnings of development, using Silverlight for media and Ruby on Rails for website. I'm looking for someone whose decent with both Silverlight and Ruby on Rails, as I'm decent with Silverlight and quickly learning Ruby on Rails, and I want someone who has a very similar skillset. What I bring to the table specifically is a great knowledge of the targeted market, hobbyists and (grades) 6-12 students/teachers, as I'm in high school myself and I'm a hobbyist as well. As a result of knowing the market / being a user, it enables me to envision where this can go and how far it can go much better than the average joe.

The idea is a file-sharing platform for learning. People can create groups of mutual interest, or course groups. Within these groups users can share files with one another, including documents and videos. All content is viewable in rich format online, and it includes a very powerful document reader, along with the promise that all content distributed is free, downloadable, and shared for everyone else to benefit from.

If it sounds promising to you then feel free to email me at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> I am. I live near Sacramento, CA. I am a geo / mapping expert, some hacking, and very interested to learn by doing in the area of getting paying clients and building great tools. Have 8 years of env. science consulting and customer relations and marketing. Would love to make connections. lakeatsion /gmail /.com

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm working on <http://www.snapplans.com> and am looking for a marketing- focused co-founder. I'm at firstname.lastname@example.com. The first release of the site is just about finished and I need help with user acquisition among other things.</comment>