Inside the Goth Chicken: Black Bones, Black Muscle and a Black Heart - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/inside-the-goth-chicken-black-bones-black-muscle--a-black-heart <comment><USER2> It's like "How much more black could this chicken be?" And the answer is "None. None more black."

</comment><comment><USER3> _just one day-old chick of unknown sex goes for $199, plus shipping and handling_

How is this done practically? Can a company like UPS move living animals or are there special regulations?

<comment><USER4> Mailing chicks via USPS [1] is legal and common:

        Some animals are mailable under proper conditions. See the specific
        instructions as noted for the following kinds of animals:

        * Live bees
        * Live, day-old poultry
        * Live adult fowl
        * Live scorpions (only under limited circumstances)
        * Other small, harmless, cold–blooded animals

[1] [http://pe.usps.gov/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm](http://pe.usps.gov/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm)

<comment><USER5> that's great, where would we be without the ability to mail live scorpions...?! :)

<comment><USER6> Apparently we'd be without scorpion antivenin!

 _The mailing of scorpions is limited by the restrictions in 18 U.S.C. 1716. Under this limitation, scorpions are mailable only when sent for the purposes of medical research use or the manufacture of antivenin._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd think twice before murdering an Intagliated Chicken [1], whose marked body bears witness to a family shame, and life belongs to a man whose lust for power is without limit.

[1] Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail: [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7937744-surface- detail](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7937744-surface-detail)

</comment><comment><USER8> Are these the same as the special occasion black chicken soup they serve in East Asia?[1]

If so, they're not unusual and people think they are gamier and tastier than regular chickens. In any event, they carry a price premium.

[1][http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/dining/17blac.html?_r=0](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/dining/17blac.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER9> It says it right there in the first sentence. It's a Silkie chicken: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkie)

<comment><USER10> We had silkies growing up. I don't remember their meat being black, maybe we didn't eat those for some reason? (They're smaller than a standard chicken.)

<comment><USER11> The skin, meat, bones, and major organs are generally "black." Silkies are common at Asian markets here -- heck, I bought one this past weekend (for soup!) for $7.99, and there were literally hundreds available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it wrong the only thing I want to know is what it tastes like?

<comment><USER13> It tastes like black.

<comment><USER14> Orange chick I ate the other day tasted nothing like orange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I went to a chicken breeder a while back to get some new pedigree hens and they had a couple of these. They are indeed very striking. Beautiful birds.

</comment><comment><USER16> This breed does not seem to be as rare as the article makes them out to be. I can find them for $10 in the local classifieds...

<comment><USER17> Buy one and find out if the seller is legitimate :)

<comment><USER18> why? Best-case scenario, he ends up with a chicken.

<comment><USER19> Getting a chicken isn't an end... it's a beginning.

Walks on the beach, holidays together, frisbee, trying to cross a river with a fox and a boat that only holds two...

<comment><USER20> > trying to cross a river with a fox and a boat that only holds two...

This is much easier if, as you apparently have, you've lost your sack of grains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can only paraphrase Henry Ford here: _You can have any colour as long as it 's black._

</comment><comment><USER22> Once you go black you ... pay $1500 for a pre-fab coop?

<comment><USER23> Oh man, the time and money I've spent to have fresh eggs. I built a chicken- fortress in my back yard, and still I was defeated by opossums.

<comment><USER24> As a person who just built a chicken fortress in my back yard, how did they get in?

<comment><USER23> I apparently had a whole family of opossums to feed, and they were a lot more resourceful than I had previously given the species credit for being. Where the roof met is one place that was hard to seal. Any other little crack they can find. I used 2" welded wire for the outer part around a 2x3 frame, plywood nest box, and 1/2" hardware cloth for sealing up nooks and around the doors. At the bottom, the chickens would scratch and pluck the grass away eventually digging away enough for a small one to slip under. -Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm just here to watch the down votes. Also, buzzfeed has a list of odd- looking chicken (of course they do...)

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesgrebey/cock-a-doodle-oo-la- la](http://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesgrebey/cock-a-doodle-oo-la-la)</comment>


How to Give a Kick Ass Presentation - <AUTHOR> http://www.pubcon.com/blog/index.cgi?mode=viewone&blog=1187123220

<comment><USER2> i was skim reading after a while but i never caught my personal favorite - 'have something "GBP$"GBP$ interesting to say', no amount of eye candy can polish a god awful boring conclusion.</comment>


Show HN: Story Snacks – narrate snack sized stories – made in Elixir/Phoenix - <AUTHOR> https://storysnacks.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello community, I made this app as part of learning Elixir and Phoenix and I am open to your feedback on it.</comment>


What to do? & How to do? - <AUTHOR>

Hi
    I am an UG student keenly interested in robotics and automation. I like to work 24*7 but i don't know, what to do? and how to do?. Here I request you to give suggestions and guidelines. <comment><USER2> It's not that important in comparison with one simple act ... start!

Find something you're truly passionate about, and make up a project that you'll learn something from. If it's something you'd do as a hobby but it can be made into a business, you win twice.</comment>


Good tools to convert HTML5 to XHTML5? - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN—HTML5 is the Lingua Franca of the web. It is everywhere, and because of the forgiving nature of parsers relatively easy to author and to generate.
However, sometimes I need to adapt existing HTML5 content to XHTML5, its more strict XML compatible serialisation. For example when I generate eBooks, or want to use XML based processing tools.
Is there any tool that automates this translation? I have looked around but couldn't find anything yet, even if BeautifulSoup seems to be able to do a part of it.
The ideal tool needs to re-serialise the document with all the xml rules (lowercase tags, properly cased etc.). It should also wrap inline scripts and styles in CDATA tags… And some other requirements of the spec…
Bonus points if it can convert to polyglot XHTML ( http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-polyglot/html-polyglot.html ), which requires also accommodating the oddities of HTML parsing (commenting out CDATA sections, make script tags not self-closing, etc.).
And finally I'd like it to be able to normalise whitespace.
I'd love for it to be in JS, but Python or Java would work for me as well.
Thanks for your suggestions! <comment><AUTHOR> I found this package, [https://github.com/aleray/html5tidy](https://github.com/aleray/html5tidy) but that only does the serialising part.</comment>


Ask HN: What is success? - <AUTHOR>

I have been thinking about this lately, what success looks like. How far would I have to go before I would consider myself successful. So what about you? What would you have to do in order to be successful? Raise funds, go public, get acquired, make some money, make a living for your family, etc? Not the right answer, but for you personally. <comment><USER2> There's an old saying "Success is a journey, not a destination".

I mention that because, if you give yourself a bar [ie go public] now, you may change your mind later or fall into the spiral of continually raising that bar before ever crossing it. As an example of the former, you may see that your company can thrive without public funding (eg koch enterprises). As an example of the latter, you may measure success in terms of a favored lifestyle [which will always scale up to your income level -- you can never get too many rooms in a mansion or too many acres in an estate or too many floors in an apartment complex.</comment>


Ask HN: AngularDart vs Angular + Flutter vs NativeScript? - <AUTHOR> Till now I've been dealing with the backend, so my knowledge of the frondend languages/tools is limited. For my next project I want to code the frontend too (full stack?). I've been reading about Flutter, which seems promising for developing iOS and Android apps and maybe even desktop ones.
For Web, I thought AngularDart would be appropriate for code sharing between all apps. But by looking at their github, I'm not sure if it's in active development. On the other hand, Angular looks pretty good for web. But code sharing would be a problem with Flutter. But will be easier with NativeScript.
So, I'm not sure if I should focus on Dart ecosystem or JS/TS ecosystem. Please, share your experience if you been through this process. Thank you! <comment><USER2> I have had the same mindset as you. I got a project to create a website including the backend. At that time I started learning Flutter and Flutter Web also got released. But Flutter is easier to learn and faster to develop when comparing to other frameworks like React Native and all. Since I am familiar with Java and C# Dart was easy for me to learn. So I started to develop the website in Flutter Web. I finished most of the things within two weeks including the backend. But there is a problem in the performance when scrolling. It's a known issue. Same happening when browsing the site in the mobile browser. So I had to change the Framework from Flutter to Angular Dart. I started learning Angular TS few years ago by watching Udemy tutorials. But unfortunately I did not understand anything. But I learned Angular Dart myself by looking at the Documentation. Now I am good with the Angular Dart. As you have said in the post, code sharing will be a problem but only the code that you could share is Business Logic. You have to re create the UI for each Framework. It's not a big deal.</comment>


Type Checking in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.badoo.com/blog/2013/11/01/type-checking-in-javascript/ <comment><USER2> Well, let's see

        var mostRecent = '';

        if (type(c.messages) === 'array' ||
            type(c.messages[0]) === 'object' ||
            type(c.messages[0].text) === 'string') {
            mostRecent = c.messages[0].text.substring(0, 30);
        }

        return name + ': ' + mostRecent;

.. apart from the fact that he probably meant && instead of || in that condition, we've also now got a system that silently swallows errors. Bugs can lurk in it without any more symptoms than producing empty strings where more interesting strings were expected.

I much prefer my systems to crash when a programmer made an error, and do so noisily and detectably, so that the problem can be fixed. I also prefer the actual logic of my code to make up more than 20% of the lines. If you're going to add boilerplate type checks all over, the signal-to-noise ratio gets really bad.

So don't do this. Use Typescript if you want to check types.

<comment><USER3> Firstly good spot on the '||' instead of an '&&'. Will fix that now.

Secondly I completely agree about wanting a program to crash noisily and detectably in development, but in production I would prefer that the error is handled and the user can continue to use the app.

Finally I also agree that if type checking is really important to you, a compile to JS language like TypeScript or Dart are the best options. The techniques / approach I am discussing in this article are really for people who already have a large vanilla JS code base or want to learn a bit more about types in JavaScript.

<comment><USER4> Just wanted to add that TypeScript is backwards compatible with JS, so having a large vanilla JS code base doesn't really matter - it's already valid TypeScript code, so you can go and start adding type annotations and whatnot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use 'kind' from Agave for this. It uses the same technique (Object.prototype.toString() plus edge case handling) but ships with lots of units tests to prove it:

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

        ### Numbers

            kind(37) === 'Number'
            kind(3.14) === 'Number'
            kind(Math.LN2) === 'Number'
            kind(Infinity) === 'Number'
            kind(Number(1)) === 'Number'
            kind(new Number(1)) === 'Number'

        ### NaN

            kind(NaN) === 'NaN'

        ### Strings

            kind('') === 'String'
            kind('bla') === 'String'
            kind(String("abc")) === 'String'
            kind(new String("abc")) === 'String'

        ### Booleans

            kind(true) === 'Boolean'
            kind(false) === 'Boolean'
            kind(new Boolean(true)) === 'Boolean'

        ### Arrays

            kind([1, 2, 4]) === 'Array'
            kind(new Array(1, 2, 3)) === 'Array'

        ### Objects

            kind({a:1}) === 'Object'
            kind(new Object()) === 'Object'

        ### Dates

            kind(new Date()) === 'Date'

        ### Functions

            kind(function(){}) === 'Function'
            kind(new Function("console.log(arguments)")) === 'Function'
            kind(Math.sin) === 'Function'

        ### undefined

            kind(undefined) === 'undefined'

        ### null

            kind(null) === 'null'

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's how I do type checking in Javascript.

      function doStuffWithAVarietyOfParameters(s, a, b, i, ni, p)
      {
         var f = 'contractCategoriesAndAddExpandButtons()';
         UTILS.checkArgs(f, arguments, ['string', 'array', 'boolean', 'int', 'negativeInt', 'Particle']);

         // Do stuff.
      }

For functions with many parameters, I like to pass the parameters inside an object and give the keys descriptive names.

      function doStuffWithAVarietyOfParameters(o)
      {
         var f = 'contractCategoriesAndAddExpandButtons()';
         UTILS.validator.checkObject
         (
            o,
            {
               arrayParam      : 'array'      ,
               boolParam       : 'boolean'    ,
               nullOrFloatParam: 'nullOrFloat',
               particleParam   : 'Particle'   ,
               positiveIntParam: 'positiveInt',
               stringParam     : 'string'
            }
         );

         // Do stuff.
      }

Both functions will throw an exception if the arguments list is not as expected. The code can be found via the links below.

[https://github.com/tomcdonnell/lib_tom/blob/master/js/utils/...](https://github.com/tomcdonnell/lib_tom/blob/master/js/utils/utils.js)

[https://github.com/tomcdonnell/lib_tom/blob/master/js/utils/...](https://github.com/tomcdonnell/lib_tom/blob/master/js/utils/utilsValidator.js)

I do type checking similarly in PHP.

[http://tomcdonnell-tech.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/favourite- ph...](http://tomcdonnell-tech.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/favourite- phpjavascript-functions.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Always been interested in things like these. Did something similar with python decorators, just for fun - [https://github.com/kashifrazzaqui/pyutils](https://github.com/kashifrazzaqui/pyutils)

</comment><comment><USER8> Who would've thought that after years of cursing them for spamming me, I would read something interesting on their tech blog.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for summing up my thoughts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Firstly: they could just start using TypeScript if they really care that much about type erros, since TS is a superset of JavaScript they can start using it with their existing code, so there is no excuse not to use it.

Secondly: it's ridiculous that their way of handling type errors is by just silently hiding them. They could be making a lot of errors that will become really hard to find this way.

Thirdly: performing type checking on runtime in JavaScript is just stupid, things like this could be performed at "compile time" with TypeScript or the Google Closure Compiler.

</comment><comment><USER11> Basically adding "compiler bits" into your dynamically typed language application code.

<comment><USER12> Fixing the symptom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It appears you are doing this because you are never really sure what sort of data is being sent to your application. I would dump this sort of idea in favor of schema validation. if you are going to get data from a client application where the client developer can screw up the data, why not just validate the data as a whole before accepting it then you know your structure.

I really just can't stand all the type checking all over the place, it makes the code feel like all your reading is type checking and not the real logic of what is going on in this function.

Additionally, returning an empty string when i mess up a data structure is horrible for debugging. I would have to actually go into the code now to figure out why an empty string came back instead of processing as I thought it should.

if your really worried about exposing errors to the end user. wrap that whole thing up in a try catch block instead, log an error and don't display anything to the end user.

<comment><USER14> >It appears you are doing this because you are never really sure what sort of data is being sent to your application.

He's doing this because he wants type safety in his functions. If you have that, you eliminate one source of bugs.

>I really just can't stand all the type checking all over the place, it makes the code feel like all your reading is type checking and not the real logic of what is going on in this function.

That's a big problem with his approach. It's not scalable, and you can't rely on it (inevitably, developers will take shortcuts and you're going to have a hodgepodge of type checks littering your code). He might as well use TypeScript or Dart or Google Closure Compiler.

>I would have to actually go into the code now to figure out why an empty string came back instead of processing as I thought it should.

Problem number two with his approach. He doesn't actually have compile-time checks which is where you want your type-checks to be. Instead it's all run- time (and he ignores the errors), which raises the question, what the heck is he actually gaining from all this?

Again, he should just use TypeScript or Dart or Google Closure Compiler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've contributed to a little JS lib [1] that takes a similar approach, but expands all of its predicates with two modifiers: a `maybe` modifier that tolerates null and undefined; and a `verify` modifier that throws if the predicate returns false. I've found it quite useful for eradicating some common boilerplate from my code.

e.g.:

        var check = require('check-types');
        check.unemptyString(''); // returns false
        check.maybe.unemptyString(); // returns true
        check.verify.unemptyString(''); // throws Error
        check.verify.maybe.unemptyString(); // doesn't throw

[1] [https://github.com/philbooth/check- types.js](https://github.com/philbooth/check-types.js)

</comment><comment><USER16> Typechecking JavaScript is feasible. But will be really hard in practice.

We have worked for years on the Opa technology, cf. [http://opalang.org](http://opalang.org). Opa is a typechecked language with a JS syntax that compiles to JavaScript. Unlike JS though, the semantics of the language borrows to functional programming languages, to ensure the type system is sound and type checking feasible with almost full type inference.

Opa does more than type-checking to JS, but even if you just want to typecheck JS, basically you should look to design and implement a new programming language, with a syntax as close as possible to JS but with proper semantics and then that compiles to JS after type-checking. You could add a set of tools to help port actual JS code to this new language.

</comment><comment><USER17> With Typical[1], I took a different approach enforcing types on the functions.

[1]: [https://github.com/mattneary/Typical](https://github.com/mattneary/Typical)

<comment><USER18> The approach is interesting but the syntax makes it hard to use. Why not make the first arguments the types like one would expect?

<comment><USER17> I went back and forth with that. I think I went with postfix because there exists another syntax which looks prefix:

        T([Number, Number])(function(x) { return x; })

For this method, a function type is defined and then serves as a constructor that accepts a function as argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A simple "constructor.name" query covers most of this. You still need edge case checkers for null, Nan, and Infinity, but...

      function type(a) {
        var t = a.constructor.name.toLowerCase();
        return t.match(/^html/i) ? 'element' : t
      }

...handles the rest. Still, I liked this post quite a bit; it shows pretty clearly how odd type checking can be in a loosely typed language.

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds great! Looks like you can find similar functionality in underscore.js, although they ask you to do the checking explicitly, ie `isBoolean(true)`.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great solution -- by the end, that final 'type' object starts to look good;

       type.isNumber(4); // true

And it'd be easy to add validation versions, too, which might help clarify the types as one call per parameter;

       type.ensureIsNumber(myParameter); // throws exception if not a number

which might help your code fail faster.

</comment><comment><USER22> What's with the obsession about (static) typing?

I have written code in untyped languages all my life and it has never been a problem for me.

The only problem I see with bigger JavaScript apps is the callback-hell.

Funny thing is, most to-JavaScript languages focus on the type aspect.

If I could write linear asynchronous code everything would be much more readable after coming back to some code a few months later.

<comment><USER23> But have you used statically typed langauges? Unless you've used _both_ you won't be aware of the advantages.

The big one for me is inheriting other people's code bases, in dynamic languages they're a complete and utter nightmare, especially when written by incompetent programmers, which seems to make up a worryingly large number of programmers. Or someone just learning and not aware of conventions.

You just can't assume a method or function actually does what it says it does. Or returns what it says it does. And you can't even see what it's expecting or what things are being passed to it. You have to fine-toothcomb the method, it slows you down massively.

I have worked on a fair few bad code bases now and luckily for me the majority of that's been in static languages. It makes it _so_ much easier.

Some of the other advantages of static typing include:

1\. having incredibly good auto code completion

2\. never having to remember or look up a method signature

3\. to refactor massive chunks of code almost completely fearlessly

4\. to fix crap code without any fear of breaking anything else

5\. as long as you name your methods well, never having to annotate anything mundane (depending on your audience ofc)

There are also other things like that tend to go hand-in-hand because they're usually explicit, like not worrying about implicit conversion (apart from VB with option explicit off).

I've used both quite a lot over the last 10 odd years professionally programming and I've recently been thinking that I would actually prefer a mix, static typing on boundaries like method entry and new object declartion and dynamic everywhere else. I know little about compiler or language design, so I'm not sure it's even possible. C# kinda gets close with the var keyword, but the various disadvantages of static typing still rear their head quite a lot.

As a slight aside, People on HN always seem to talk as if they only write new programs, not maintain old ones. Am I the weird one for frequently having to pick up code that was written by someone else? Who often had coded themselves into a corner and then made up some excuse as to why they couldn't keep the client anymore?

<comment><USER22> I had to do some stuff in Java at university, it felt too clunky most of the time. :\

When using libraries, their functions always wanted their arguments to be some strange classes or implement some of their interfaces, which always seemed like big overhead to me.

Stuff like Smalltalk, PHP and JavaScript felt much faster in development speed.

<comment><USER24> Thats because Javas has a clunky type system and bloated libraries full of design patterns. In languages with better support for higher order functions the bit about needing to pass a strange class is much more lightweight.

IMO, real advantages of dynamic typing vs static typing are

* Simplicity. You don't need to learn a complex type system to start coding.

* Flexibility. Dynamic type systems don't stop you from doing useful things ike polymorphism and generics. In a static type system those need to be build in from day 1.

<comment><USER25> Completely disagree. Lazy developers not willing to learn a language can not count as argument against statically typed languages. This is a bit like suggesting you should better walk across the country because than you do not need to fuel your car or buy some kind of ticket.

And having to build more advanced type system features on top of a simpler type system is hardly a good thing either - type theory is not trivial and chances that you will get it wrong are large. Even experts in the field make wrong decisions, for example array covariance in Java an C#. And even if you get it right you will usually not enjoy (all) the benefits of compile time type checking and fail only at runtime.

<comment><USER22> When I had lectures about type-theory in university, it made me even more confident in not using statically typed languages. Those whole contra/covariant problems I read about seemed crazy to me :\

It felt like even the implementers of those type-systems didn't get it right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You might want to take a look at [https://github.com/philbooth/check- types.js](https://github.com/philbooth/check-types.js)

</comment><comment><USER26> BTW, I've written a module for the Node.js with similar API:

[https://github.com/CodingFu/typeof](https://github.com/CodingFu/typeof)</comment>


Magic Leap in talks for $400m Saudi cash injection - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/1628458e-18d7-11e8-9376-4a6390addb44 <comment><AUTHOR> I just can't wrap my head around the fact that they are about to have raised $2.3bn with a product that isn't released but in development for 8 years. 8 years. They almost started before the first iPhone.

<comment><USER2> They only got funding in 2014. Before that it was just a guy in his garage tinkering with concepts. People often think they've been making t for 8 years because that's when the company was founded. But actually at that time they were working on an iPhone app, not a headset.

<comment><AUTHOR> That doesn't matter. They still have been working on something for 8 years and haven't released a product yet.

<comment><USER2> 4 years. It matters.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Toshiba Pares Losses on Report of Apple Investing in Chips - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-14/apple-may-invest-billions-of-dollars-in-toshiba-chips-unit-nhk <comment><USER2> Reuters' story mentions that Apple would take a 20% stake while Foxconn would own 30%. With Toshiba keeping a stake as well [1].

It's certainly not in Apple's interest to let this industry consolidate further [2]. Memory prices have already been on the rise and Apple is using more of it (that actually could be the reason why it's rising).

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting- apple-i...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-apple- idUSKBN17G085)

[2] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/275886/market-share- held...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/275886/market-share-held-by- leading-nand-flash-memory-manufacturers-worldwide/)

<comment><USER3> Over the past decade, the memory market has been flooded with cheap chips, causing most players in this market to lose value while breaking even or making a slim profit on memory sales.

Hopefully, Apple is planning to single source or majority source their memory through Toshiba, and give them funds to develop more advanced memory on newer processes, as that is what this market needs to develop further and faster. Apple may extend their engineering talent into building their own memory controller perhaps, similar to how they have done a ton of in house design for the ARM SoCs used in the iPhone/iPad lineup, instead of using off the shelf ARM designs.

<comment><USER4> I am surprised to hear the negative sentiment on the memory market as for most users who build computers don't always look for the high-end memory. In fact, I am not sure how much performance gain one get from a high-end RAM on a gaming system.

<comment><USER3> IIRC it can give a 30% to 40% performance boost on APU based systems, as the increased bandwidth to the GPU allows for much faster processing. Alternatively, Intel decided to put a few hundred megs of cache on their iGPU, which has made their graphics performance much better, and lessened the gains from increased Ram speed.

[https://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/15/exploring-effect- memory-...](https://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/15/exploring-effect-memory- bandwidth-amds-kaveri/)

<comment><USER5> Gamer machines don't use APU, they have a dedicated graphic card.

<comment><USER3> Ugh, I've been trying to tell my friend that, but he won't even invest in the most minimal of GPUs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Vertical integration (e.g. designing and fabricating their own hardware components, sourcing their own raw materials) is probably the best investment of Apple's cash reserves.

<comment><USER7> Why? Don't they benefit tremendously from building (mostly) on an ultra- competitive, near-commodity components market?

When they want something strategic (Retina screens, custom ARM) they make a big investment, but I can't see how getting directly into the fab business gives them any kind of long-run advantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apple has huge offshore cash reserves. Investing (or acquiring) an offshore company makes sense for them. There are some speculations[1] about Apple buying Disney. I do not think that will be possible without a major tax break.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/rbc-analysts-speculate- apple-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/rbc-analysts-speculate-apple- acquiring-disney-2017-4)

<comment><USER9> The Apple-Disney fantasy has been peddled around for years. It crops back up every couple of years, when some analyst or business writer dusts it off for attention.

For example, 2011:

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-apple-should-buy- disney...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-apple-should-buy- disney-2011-04-19)

<comment><USER10> This idea made more sense when Jobs was leading Apple. He had significant shares in Disney due to his Pixar holdings, and at the time there was cross- board membership between the two companies.

Of course maybe that was a good reason for them never to merge while still coordinating strategically.

<comment><USER11> FYI, Bob Iger (Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company) sits on the Apple board.

[https://www.apple.com/pr/bios/](https://www.apple.com/pr/bios/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I could understand Apple going into CPU or GPU business. After all when you have 250M annual devices shipment, roughly the size of the whole PC market segment, these high margin cost could be eliminated, not to mention they aren't getting the best or what they need.

But Memory? But NAND and DRAM are commodity, in fact for most of their life time Memory companies tends to lose money. Not to mention China are pouring in tens of billions into memory Fabs alongside with billions of other incentives. In pretty much every business Chinese steps in is a race to bottom. I just dont see any value of getting a holding on to a memory fab / capacity.

<comment><USER13> This could change when/if computational RAM goes mainstream.

<comment><USER14> Well, I can imagine that if you can build a GPU, then you can also build a memory with processing elements attached to it. Therefore, going after CPU/GPU companies seems more sensible.

<comment><USER15> Memory/processing integration is not as simple as it sounds: [https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/134585/preci...](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/134585/precise- differences-between-dram-and-cmos-processes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Owning that much cash, why they don't just buy the companies that they need?

<comment><USER17> No way a foreign company will be allowed to buy Toshiba due to national security concerns. One of domestic players will be to chip in and be partial owner.

<comment><USER18> Why national security..? If there's a world war and all of a sudden Japan doesn't have computers? (genuinely curious)

<comment><USER19> > _If there 's a world war and all of a sudden Japan doesn't have computers?_

Pretty much. If you're at war you need that materials to feed the war machine, which includes the metal to build the plane as well as the computers that go in the cockpit (and let's not forget the knowledge to build it all).

<comment><USER18> Got it.

Kind of makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Apple buying the memory business seems uninteresting. That's a commodity business with low margins. Toshiba does make ARM CPUs, and Apple might want to get into the CPU business, but that's not the business being offered for sale.

<comment><USER21> _> Apple might want to get into the CPU business_

Apple is already in the CPU business?

Every iPhone and iPad sold in the last 5 years has used an Apple designed CPU core. [0]

Apple has chosen to keep the CPU exclusive to their mobile products as they obviously feel it gives them a competitive advantage. They could sell the SoC to others if they wanted to.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6X)

<comment><USER18> Amazing, the A10 is a quad-core 2.34 GHz CPU. My Late-2016 MacBook Pro has a 2 GHz Intel Core i5.

I don't know a lot about CPUs, but isn't the A10 more powerful? Why don't they use them for their laptops, already..?

<comment><USER22> You can't compare CPUs from different architectures (ARM vs Intel) based purely on clock speed. There are a lot of other differences which mean things like the A10 generally aren't faster than similarly-clocked laptop chips.

<comment><USER18> That's true.

Yes, I don't know a lot about CPUs.

<comment><USER23> It's true, a recent MBP will destroy the iPhone or iPad in a benchmark. You can't compare Apples to oranges with CPU speeds alone. However, you can run a benchmark. And on a popular one, GeekBench, the iPhone generally beats the non-Pro MacBook.

And:

"The iPhone 7 scores better on both single- and multi-core than any MacBook Air ever made, and performs comparably to a 2013 MacBook Pro."

[https://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/2385400](https://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/2385400)

[https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/6170528](https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/6170528)

[https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/15/iphone-7-geekbench- benchmark-...](https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/15/iphone-7-geekbench-benchmark- scores/)

<comment><USER24> where can I find an iPhone with single-core A processor that outperforms a MBP?

<comment><USER25> The benchmark runs either single core or multi core. Is not a single core iPhone.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Can I Do a Software Developer to Help Curb Climate Change - <AUTHOR> I'm wondering what I can do as a back end developer to help fight climate change. Are there any projects, companies, or niche industries I could work with? I'd like to work on something that has a direct impact, not like helping a campaign but a project that has direct,  tangible benefits for the environment. I've been reading about 3DFS, and I'm wondering if there's more companies or open source projects like this that I just haven't been aware of. <comment><USER2> I ask myself the same question so many times.

As a dev it's very difficult to make anything to help curb the climate change. You are ("we" actually) working in a particular sector with computers, datacenter, IoT devices, and many more. (and every sectors relied on that). Each device uses a lot of electricity, runs 24/7 (most of them), is made of rare-earth metals, and so on. We are working on projects to always be ahead of our competitors, so we need faster servers, and so on.

I do not see anything we can do as dev ...

However, in the daily life, you can do a lot of things :

\- buy food from local producers \- don't buy sh*t products from China coming on container ships \- change the way you are moving to go to work -> bike, public transport ? \- thing twice before buying something (especially electronics one) : do I really need a second tv to put in my kitchen ? and a second ipad ? \- ...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm very interested in this question as well. How can a developer use ones skills to make a positive change?

If you search on HN you'll find a few related postings. There's also a very good writeup on worrydream.

But so far I have not found anything concrete about what the current technical problems are that can be solved.

I started to reach out to a few companies in the cleantech space. My first impression is that it seems it's a rather secretive group not very open to (clueless) outsiders.

I'm pondering the idea to create a website where devs and companies fighting climate change could come together. I'm not aware of anything similar.

Obviously, you could try to get a job in that space and learn the industry from inside.

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't have children.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want- to-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight- climate-change-have-fewer-children)

<comment><USER5> Only if you and your spouse are not very smart. We need more very smart people to solve all the problems of the world and the best way we know how to make more very smart people is to get very smart people to have lots of children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know you said you don't want to work for a campaign, but the problems with fixing climate change really are more political than technical. You can donate your time through a company like Tech For Campaigns to help the democratic party of the US win elections.

<comment><USER3> They are both. Without political change, there's little hope but this does not mean technical change doesn't play an important role too (sufficient technological progress could push political change)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't use Bitcoin

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't! I think it's a egregious project tbh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Waste lots of paper and don't recycle it. This puts carbon in the landfill and takes it out of the system. Then new trees grow up and suck more carbon out of the air.

<comment><USER9> Sounds interesting and contrarian but in fact there are lots of carbon emissions from the manufacturing process of said paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what the impact of SV tech is? What would happen if everyone got rid of their smart phones and stopped buying new electronic gadgets?

<comment><USER2> -> What would happen if everyone got rid of their smart phones and stopped buying new electronic gadgets?

That will change a lot, for sure !

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you can create html, You should help raise awareness of companies using banned CFCs that burn holes in the ozone.

</comment><comment><USER12> Only do manual memory allocation.

</comment><comment><USER13> Port all unity projects to quake

Port all windows 10 features to lubuntu

Port all electron projects to html, js, php (lol)

</comment><comment><USER14> plant trees</comment>


Op-Ed Columnist - Tear Down This Cyberwall - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/opinion/18kristof.html?_r=2 <comment><USER2> _One result was a free software called Freegate, small enough to carry on a flash drive. It takes a surfer to an overseas server that changes I.P. addresses every second or so, too quickly for a government to block it, and then from there to a banned site._

There's something I'm missing here. It seems to me that any server that changes its IP so frequently would:

1) Reveal reasonably quickly the full range of the IP pool from which it chooses those addresses. Therefore, it would be simple to ban the whole IP range.

2) Rely on dynamic DNS that has to be queried directly. Therefore, it would be simple to ban access that DNS server.

I don't want to jump to conclusions, but if I'm not missing some crucial piece of information, this would mean that this "hacktivist" tool is merely being hyped by journalists who aren't tech-savvy.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting:

> If President Obama wants to support democratic movements on a shoestring, he > should support an "Internet freedom initiative" pending in Congress.

I am trying to find out exactly what this thing is, but (a) there are too many things out there called "internet freedom initiative", some dating back several years, and (b) I cannot find any bill before either house of the U.S. Congress with that title.

Can anyone point me toward exactly what he is referring to?</comment>


Rate my startup: SearchTrack – Collaborative knowledge sharing through links - <AUTHOR> http://searchtrack.co/signup/register?rc=120594565rcXCEQyvinJylCn%26source=hn <comment><AUTHOR> SearchTrack lets teams and individuals collaborate to collect useful content, contacts, products and services around any topic. They can then choose to make this research public so that others looking for helpful resources around that topic could save time.

Launched about 17 days ago. My team and I could really use your feedback. Thanks!</comment>


Patch to fix RSS feed for News.YC - <AUTHOR> http://scotchi.net/2009/03/patch-to-fix-rss-feed-for-newsyc/ <comment><USER2> Here's another option if you want a (hopefully) well-formed and de-duped news.yc RSS feed: <http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/room/newsyc?format=rss>

<comment><AUTHOR> Another fun RSS / Friendfeed hack: I use the RSS stream from searchyc to pipe my news.YC comments into my Friendfeed stream.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A couple folks mentioned I should post it here, full details here:

<http://arclanguage.org/item?id=9092>

And this feature request:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92734>

</comment><comment><USER3> Just awesome. Open source at its best: wanted the fix, wrote the patch. Hopefully pg^H^Hupstream will accept it after vetting.

<comment><USER4> Where do we go to see commit messages and such? I'm trying to gauge how open the project is, and am curious about details beyond the source itself.

<comment><USER3> I mean, you don't have access to pg's version control, but he released the News.YC source as a part of Arc (<http://arclanguage.org/install>) with the directive "go now, and bring forth clones."

That fits my definition of open.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd pay someone bits of currency if they could give me an RSS feed of my "saved" links.

<comment><AUTHOR> It'd be pretty trivial to add once the RSS feed in general is fixed (as in, maybe 5 lines of code). In some ways this patch is an experiment: if it looks like in general Paul is interested in patches I'll probably implement a few things on my wishlist. If this patch in some form doesn't go in, it's honestly not worth my effort to implement / fix things since I don't have any intention of running an arc news site myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can we also get the url, or at least the host, of the link in the RSS feed, as we get it on the homepage?

</comment><comment><USER7> Instead of a patch, could we have a separate RSS feed for stories in order?

(I'm being lazy here, as the change would break the News.YC twitterbot <http://twitter.com/newsycombinator>)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the current feed is basically invalid. It's not structured the way RSS feeds are supposed to be, and I'd consider breaking the Twitter bot better than breaking all newsreaders. I've at least tested in Mail.app and Thunderbird and I've heard the same for Google's reader. I'm a really heavy RSS user and news.yc is basically the only news site I frequent where the feed is not usable.

If I were reading via RSS that'd also open up some options for filtering with Yahoo Pipes, which I do with a lot of my RSS feeds, since I'm not particularly interested in the mainstream stories that hit news.yc (NYT, BBC, Slate, Salon, et al)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It'd be really nice if the RSS feed went to HN and not directly to the article. The RSS feed is useless to me as I have to have the HN page open anyway to get to people's comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tried it once with a Yahoo Pipes mashup. The problem is that it gets an "updated" status every time somebody writes a comment which is annoying for the way I read RSS.</comment></comment>


Satoshi Is Actually Building an Ethereum Company (and Other Developments) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jamesfickel/satoshi-is-actually-building-an-ethereum-company-and-other-developments-2c95c08685f7#.mdhhsxecl <comment><USER2> Wasn't Satoshi just outed as Craig Wright? Although, that story appears to have a lot of holes in it. If this is true, it's fascinating information.</comment>


The fear is real.  I listen - <AUTHOR> https://sneakerheadvc.com/the-fear-is-real-i-listen-b123823bd649 <comment><AUTHOR> If you've never started a company you can't appreciate how real this article is to the life of a founder.

Everyone in startup land is rah rah we're killing it talk. But oh boy if you're at least honest with yourself the reality is very different. You've got to project confidence to your staff and investors but for you circumstances are way different.

</comment><comment><USER2> Great post.</comment>


Science Friction - <AUTHOR> https://bluenotes.anz.com/metropolis-now/part-7

<comment><AUTHOR> light and fluffy but a really positive article for the future... instead of the usual discussion on world destruction through technology or robots taking over the world</comment>


Men and Women Entrepreneurs: Not That Different - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/10/men-and-women-entrepreneurs-not-that-different/

<comment><USER2> While data is nice, I see no info about "success" rates, how long the businesses lasted by founder sex, etc etc. This is just a couple polls on relationship status on starting a business, and reasons for starting.

"Not that different" mentally, once a business is founded, apparently.

</comment><comment><USER3> "We looked not just at the narrow slice of tech companies that gets featured most often on TechCrunch, but at the broader universe..."

I'm a fan of TC but it's helpful to remember that it is something of a reality distortion field.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not exactly surprising. I remember a similar study done on men and women IT employees, and they were also similar; similarly disinterested in social interaction (the one trait I remember distinctly.)

The women who end up being entrepreneurs have already been selected (probably mostly self-selected) by those traits.

The question isn't what those people look like, but what the people remaining look like. How do men and women swimming out in the general population look? Are there a lot more potential men with those traits waiting to bud into entrepreneurs than women? How do men and women compare in those traits in general? I find that a lot more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER5> data. gasp. imagine that.</comment>


Donate to the NHS Using Open Banking - <AUTHOR> https://nhscovid19.fund <comment><USER2> "[...] is a software design and development agency based in London. We built this site to demonstrate the power of Open Banking and crowdfunding for good." This makes it sound like a half self promotion. Does a health service with yearly budget of 150 billion USD ([https://fullfact.org/health/what-is-the- nhs-budget/](https://fullfact.org/health/what-is-the-nhs-budget/)), 99% backed by taxes, need crowdfunding?</comment>


Ask HN: What is the copyright policy for HN comments and discussions? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Comments are copyright of the author (by law, not by any policy on HN). HN has an implicit license to display them.

c.f. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641312) (by George Grellas, who is actually a lawyer)</comment>


We're witnessing a slow motion tech wreck - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/23/technology/tech-bust-private-market/index.html?iid=ob_homepage_tech_pool&iid=obnetwork <comment><USER2> Around a month ago, Marc Andreessen tweeted that we're coming up on 13 years of people saying there's a new tech bubble.

[https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/657172791100203009](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/657172791100203009)

The article talks about a lack of IPOs, which is a much more interesting conversation than "is this a bubble," but the headline is disappointing.</comment>


Schoolchildren in China work overnight to produce Amazon Alexa devices - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/aug/08/schoolchildren-in-china-work-overnight-to-produce-amazon-alexa-devices <comment><USER2> >Leaked documents show children as young as 16 recruited by Amazon supplier Foxconn work gruelling and illegal hours

16 is a legal age to work in many places of Europe, including my very own country. What exactly am I missing here?

Also isn't it a bit manipulative to call a 16 year old teenager a "schoolchild"?

<comment><USER3> Are they in school?

<comment><USER4> They are in a trade school, the work was setup by the school (and was probably "required") as is common practice in China (whether that is a moral thing or not).

<comment><USER2> Which is also legal in some places of Europe, it's called "practicing" or whatever.

<comment><USER4> I think the system in Europe is more about practicing skilled trade than just doing unskilled factory work. If this story was about kids apprenticing to be plumbers, then I think there would be much less outrage.

<comment><USER5> Depends on the course, same practical internship are pretty much of the level of unskilled work. Still not okay without at least a decent pay if you ask me.

<comment><USER4> I don't think 16 and a half kuai is very decent, but these kids are mostly from rural areas so it might seem like a good deal to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The company said in a statement: "We have doubled the oversight and monitoring of the internship program with each relevant partner school to ensure that, under no circumstances, will interns [be] allowed to work overtime or nights."

My dear Chinese friends, does Chinese govt bother to punish FoxConn for this or overtime is just norm in industry ?

<comment><USER7> I'd say it's very likely considering China has all but admitted that its previous policy of favoring Taiwanese companies to push for economic unification has backfired. I think it's a matter of time before China finds an excuse to kick every Taiwanese company out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sure, they don't sleep yet they are able to assemble complex electrical equipment. Perfect reasonable, no need to question. I've also always believed it when told there are people who work three full time jobs. What amazing people!</comment>


Fear Kills Businesses, Dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/21/fear-kills-businesses-dead/ <comment><AUTHOR> a point that needs to be highlighted:

In a conversation with veteran CEO and financier Steve Larsen, currently co- founder of Krugle, he advises:

Of course, don't be stupid. Have enough cash to run your business, but I think the doom and gloom crowd are getting too much airtime. Look for opportunities. Difficult times are when they'll most likely occur. When we're at 'steady state' and things are normal, good opportunities are much harder to find with GREAT opportunities nearly impossible. It is during periods of tumult and transition when you can spot things that lead to the greatest returns—if you are alert. So be alert.</comment>


A 'Violent Clash of Opposing Wills': How the U.S. Is Defining Space Warfare - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ep4kwn/a-violent-clash-of-opposing-wills-how-the-us-is-defining-space-warfare <comment><USER2> [https://www.spaceforce.mil/Portals/1/Space%20Capstone%20Publ...](https://www.spaceforce.mil/Portals/1/Space%20Capstone%20Publication_10%20Aug%202020.pdf)

The 40 page PDF from the Space Force</comment>


Kurzweil Critiques Avatar – Technology Applied Unevenly, Cast as Enemy - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/03/10/kurzweil-critiques-avatar-technology-applied-unevenly-cast-as-enemy/ <comment><USER2> A lot of his critiques are based on the assumption that technology is the main driving factor in human development and behavior. If I apply his logic to the real world here's some of the questions I would have:

-If lightweight body armor is available, why do our soldiers not have access to it?

-If the technology for filtering clean drinking water is available then why does half the world not have clean drinking water?

-If plastic surgery can improve or change our appearance why doesn't everyone use it?

He completely glosses over the fact that economic factors play a huge role in how technologies are used and adopted. That very fact is blatantly obvious in the film itself, you even have a main character who can't walk, for no other reason than the fact that he can't afford to pay to get his legs fixed.

The whole movie is about a company that is trying to maximize profits. Why would we expect them to buy top of the line gear for every single soldier if they can get away with cheaper stuff? My argument is supported over and over again in the film: the _only_ reason the protagonist was even involved was because the company was unwilling to lose money by wasting an avatar.

</comment><comment><USER3> Generally,almost all the last (last 5-10 years) movies made in USA is completely dumbed down garbage. I realize, that american culture as a whole is (and has always been) somewhat infantile, but, still let's say, Terminator and Back to the Future were excellent movies. The more country get deindustrialized, the more people move to "service economy and real estate" the more they become disconnected from reality, and less you need to entertain their minds.

My major concern with Avatar - why in the hell everybody are american in this movie? Does Cameron beleive that USA will still be the "power" in 100 years? Or without stripe/stars flags everywhere nobody would watch the movie?

<comment><USER2> Perhaps James feels that the message about putting profit and industrialization above human life is something the he wished to address to Americans because we can benefit from the self-examination?</comment></comment>


LambdaNative – A cross-platform development environment written in Scheme - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/part-cw/lambdanative/wiki

<comment><USER2> Keep in mind LambdaNative appears to be very opinionated about things like project structure (your code goes in this folder and is named like this), files (your images must be in this format and must be copied to this folder) or UI (your code must implement this kind of view, always, in this way). At first it looked really nice to see somebody already did all the grunt work to prepare Gambit-C for all those platforms (specially mobile), but the constraints were too much for me. Impressive project but not for every app.

<comment><USER3> > your code must implement this kind of view, always, in this way

Could you elaborate on this? It seemed the opposite to me: I implemented my own view/activity stack, calculated button positions in pixels (no layouts), explicitly specified which keyboard to draw where and when, and so on. Did I miss all the structure?

<comment><USER2> It was the glgui library that gave me that impression. It's true that there appears to be no built-in high level concept of a view as a container/ layout holder/ etc, we are talking about different things. I should rephrase that as "kind of GUI as long as you don't want to dive into raw OpenGL". It was more like, if I want to change how a button is drawn, do I have change the internals of the framework or is that a user-level supported API?

<comment><USER4> [https://github.com/part- cw/lambdanative/wiki/Function-300](https://github.com/part- cw/lambdanative/wiki/Function-300) has containers. If you just want to change the button properties take a look at [https://github.com/part- cw/lambdanative/wiki/Function-296](https://github.com/part- cw/lambdanative/wiki/Function-296) , you can even replace the texture on the fly (will have to find you an example).

<comment><USER2> It's true, it's more customizable and flexible than I realized when I first looked into it. I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That is pretty darned sweet. I had been playing around with interfacing BiwaScheme (written in JS) to PhoneGap, but if this works as well cross- platform as it does when compiling for the host system, that project just went on the back burner, quite possibly permanently. :-)

Looks outstanding!

</comment><comment><USER6> Would be lovely to see some screenshots on homepage.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.lambdanative.org/applications.html](http://www.lambdanative.org/applications.html) has a whole bunch of them. Also look at [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.bccw.rrate&...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.bccw.rrate&hl=en) or [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ecemgroup....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ecemgroup.teleport&hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm still not clear on what this library actually does...

<comment><USER8> It lets you write applications for Android, iOS, BlackBerry 10, OS X, Linux, Windows, OpenBSD, NetBSD and OpenWrt in Scheme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks very nice. I look forward to experimenting with it.

I used to use Gambit-C for command line utilities and misc. applications.

<comment><USER10> Mark,

I believe you reviewed mocl. It would be interesting to see your comparison of the two.

<comment><USER9> I am sorry I did not see your question earlier.

mocl is very interesting, but I only played with it. I think mocl's value lies in using Common Lisp code for the logic of an app, but still have some iOS or Android specific UI glue.

I would love to spend time experimenting more with mocl and Gambit-C for building apps, but, my real business is in text analytics and AI.

<comment><USER11> Just a few words to tell my experience with the tool:

./configure make

ERROR: required tool wget not found. brew install wget

ERROR: required tool gs not found. brew install gs

ERROR: required tool convert not found. brew install ImageMagick

ERROR: required tool xelatex not found.

LATEX???? -> GOODBYE

<comment><USER12> In case you want to change your mind XeTeX is now optional. Please note that there were good reasons to require it, as we do projects in languages having right-to-left script, or use higher Unicode characters (such as Kannada).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: GDPR means what to early-stage startups? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It means you are more flexible and will find it easier to explain to your users what kind of data you collect, why you collect them and exactly what do you do with them.</comment>


Silicon Valley Then and Now - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/why-silicon-valley-will-continue-to-rule-c0cbb441e22f <comment><USER2> Interesting article. I agree with the conclusion that the ability to attract talent is one of the secrets behind the Valley's success. Which is why I see US immigration policy as a major impedance to its' continued success. I am subject to US immigration policy's myself and have to fear for deportation in about a year's time when my current visa runs out. I will be moving to the West Coast after graduating from school in Boston precisely because of this unique mix of talent, creativity, courage and craziness that are going on in the Valley. With the huge surge in housing prices and the above mentioned immigration policies, I am not sure however how long this trend is currently still sustainable. Nonetheless looking forward to the experience.

<comment><USER3> One thing that occurred in the 60s and 70s that doesn't happen now is that companies actually invested in their employees and had significant amounts of training available. Hell, even in the 80s, before divestiture, I recall AT&T sending my parents (who both worked for the phone company) to classes on a regular basis. My dad sometimes teaching a class or two in Illinois (he'd be gone for a week).

Then and now, it takes curiosity, drive, as well as time and availability to continue to learn. For some of us, it is easy, for others that may have significant commitments, etc, taking time to learn something during what may be private/family time is hard -- people similar to this group had the opportunity to learn as part of their job back in the day.

My problem with US immigration policy isn't about those that come here to study, get an advanced degree and then start at a good role at a company (or start something). The problem I have is that many many companies are looking for a capable body at the lowest possible dollar and don't want to invest in their employees. IBM is a classic example of going from the former to the latter.

Before I am comfortable opening the doors wider, I'd like to see a bit of balance brought back. We already see the fraud of the private "for profit" universities -- Heald (for instance) -- making promises, taking money, and not amounting to much. We aren't going to go back to the day of companies investing as much in their employees as they did in the 60s-80s, primarily because we are at a different point in time and a number of people move around regularly.

All that said, we are missing methods and structures to help those I mentioned above (those hardest hit in the various bubbles) to facilitate growth and learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm possibly a bit of a dinosaur in my thinking, but of the three "2000s" areas outlined -- social, mobile, cloud. Cloud will have the longer legs (it is basically open, scalable timesharing). Mobile is broad and has a lot of avenues, but social really seems to basically fall back to "advertising". All three of these areas are dominated by software.

70s (well more 80s) to 2000ish, the valley was a healthy mix of software and hardware. HN seems to focus mostly on the software aspect of recent times, there are still hardware companies out there. The peaks that get attention, popular investment, and trigger the large growth help the valley, but a balance of disciplines, technologies, and platforms (hardware/software), really do help the valley.

An area trying to be "the next silicon valley" that ignores the unsexy things happening in low industrial areas in Fremont or Alamaden Valley aren't ever going to be the same. Yes, we are known for the wild successes, but there are a lot of little no names that have helped companies big and small (that became big) here along the way.

<comment><USER4> Social might, and that's a _hugely_ stressed "might", have legs as _media_ and the future of it, or at least a portion.

We've been watching the accelerating descent of traditional text and audio media, and more recently video, for the past 20 years. I've had a few epiphanies on this myself in the past year or so:

1\. "New media" actually is a pretty decent term. Much of tech -- pretty much most of it that concerns person-to-person exchange (as opposed as machine-to- machine systems controls and feedback) is effectively _media_. We should think of Facebook, Google, and Apple as largely media companies. Amazon straddles this line more with a focus on _commerce_ , it's also quite directly a media player through books and music.

2\. Magazines were created in the 19th century as aggregators of short-form narrative (fiction and non) as a crossover between individual pamphlets and full-length books. Improved print and distribution mechanisms promoted their spread, and by the first quarter of the 20th century several major periodicals still surviving (somewhat) had emerged. In a sense a magazine was a large bundle you could buy for a single set price. The individual items might or might not _all_ appeal, but many or most would. It was stepping back the purchase boundary from the individual piece to the collection.

3\. One thing that's happening now is that we're both _disaggregating_ individual periodicals, and _creating new aggregations_ at a larger scale. Hacker News is one of many options for selecting individual items pulled from diverse publishers. The concept's been around as long as there've been mailing lists and newsgroups -- comp.risks has cited various articles and news pieces since the mid-1980s. RSS syndication, Slashdot, Digg, and reddit, Facebook or G+ or Ello feeds, etc., all do much the same thing. What they _don 't_ generally do is directly compensate authors.

We're starting to see some changes in that regard, with Facebook apparently negotiating directly with publishers such as _The New York Times_ to publish material directly to Facebook. I'm not sold (I don't _do_ FB), but it's an interesting development.

I've been suggesting a broadband tax or similar automatic payment syndication scheme as a major, if not necessarily the only compensation model (see also Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and his broadband tax proposal). Google or major ISPs might also enter into this (or be forced to).

The negative on the future of Social is that social media networks seem to be awfully fragile and capritious. Facebook's fall could well be as fast as Myspace's was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No doubt the Valley will survive and thrive. However it will continue its path toward the business culture lead of Hollywood: further concentration of power and capital, more emphasis on acquaintance-level connections (something innately technical people don't often do naturally), and an ever-increasing cost barrier to entry. Hollywood of course has had the time to take this to the extreme, but the "work for free and hope to get noticed" effect is probably already upon us. I have to wonder how many startups are formed now with the intent to turn a profit from operations, rather than simply on the hopes of a large acquisition after obtaining some measurably significant social relevance.

</comment><comment><USER6> > The drive to build another Silicon Valley may be doomed to fail

This reminds me that there have been many attempts to duplicate Lockheed's "Skunkworks". They've all failed. I suspect they failed because they always tried to create a skunkworks by fixing perceived "shortcomings" of the original, not realizing that those shortcomings were what made it work.

It takes a lot of guts to create a skunkworks, because it defies all conventional notions of how to do things. Lockheed is very commendable for having those guts, but they remain the only one.

It also reminds me of Caltech, which remains the only university to have a pervasive honor system. Nobody else has the guts to even try it.

<comment><USER7> > This reminds me that there have been many attempts to duplicate Lockheed's > "Skunkworks". They've all failed. I suspect they failed because they always > tried to create a skunkworks by fixing perceived "shortcomings" of the > original, not realizing that those shortcomings were what made it work.

> It takes a lot of guts to create a skunkworks, because it defies all > conventional notions of how to do things. Lockheed is very commendable for > having those guts, but they remain the only one.

Except for Boeing's Phantom Works, NASA EagleWorks, various "advanced concepts" or "preliminary design" groups across other aerospace companies, and various small aerospace firms operating with minimal overhead and extremely talented engineers (Karem Aircraft's head actually specifically cited Kelly Johnson's original rules for a SW-type organization, plus there's Joby Aviation, Makani/Google, Zee.Aero). Sure, none of them have produced anything like an SR-71 yet, but neither has the original Skunkworks since then. The SW legacy of a tightly knit group of elite engineers operating with minimal overhead and freedom to try radical concepts is alive and well in aerospace though.

<comment><USER6> It's good to hear of others. I've never heard of any, and when I worked in aerospace nobody knew of any examples.

The JSF, sadly, is certainly not an example. (SW produced a lot more than the SR-71, they produced an unparalleled series of unique and spectacular aircraft.)

You've piqued my curiosity. Got any references to these comparing them to the original?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> PBS has a great documentary covering the rise of Silicon Valley:

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/)

<comment><USER9> Based on an excellent essay by Tom Wolfe:

[http://www.brightboys.org/PDF/Wolfe_Noyce.pdf](http://www.brightboys.org/PDF/Wolfe_Noyce.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The other way to understand the present is to be read up on current events.

The current DoD involvement in Silicon Valley is not a callback to the ARPANET so explicitly - the analogies are rough. But it's true that now, like then, the DoD sees the US in extreme danger of collapsing as a superpower like its old soviet rivals due to the huge changes and the challenges of the 21st century.

Today it is China, the Eastern tip of Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific arena that concerns the United States. Having been overtaken as the largest economy by China, and having grown only 0.2% this quarter compared to China's 7+%, and facing existential threats by China's ambitions to build the Chinese Dream of a New Silk Road and to become a great nation, the US is doing everything it can muster to arrange economic and security conditions in the world to maintain its order and its position at the top.

The Defense Department investment in cyber and the partnership with Silicon Valley is just one of many of these investments.

</comment><comment><USER11> More on the history of SV: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo) TL;DR: lots of tech started in SV during WWII -- radio research, radars, anti- radars, anti-anti-radars, etc...

</comment><comment><USER12> The interesting question, and I have no idea what the answer is, is whether Silicon Valley will recover from what's been done to it.

There have always been douchebags everywhere, but it used to be something that one was ashamed of. If you funded someone like Evan Spiegel, you didn't talk about it. You just pretended that it didn't happen and called it a learning experience. Now, we have a culture that values material success at the expense of all else, isn't really about technology or progress, and views Sean Parker levels of douchebaggery as a positive trait.

The Bay Area used to be for misfits who chose to go off and do their own thing: live among the redwoods, play with circuits and computers, go mountain biking. Now it's full of self-marketers who create the impression that they do all of that stuff, while actually being unimaginative corporate drones even worse than the last generation's kind.

All of that said, Silicon Valley has a long history and it's not going to be ruined forever by a few bad years. If Silicon Valley gets back to a culture of invention, and if we fix the culture by regulating VCs a bit (a start would be to block the anti-competitive back-channelling and social proof checking; we couldn't eradicate all of it _de facto_ but making it illegal would change behaviors enough to give us a chance at fixing the place) it could return to its old promise.

Another thing that Silicon Valley needs to do in order to save its character is fix the cost-of-living issue by crushing some NIMBYs. I think that the federal government needs to step in and crush every anti-development policy, unless there is a legitimate environmental issue.

I sincerely hope that the Valley does survive, because if you take the long view and look over the past 50 years instead of the past 5, you see that it has done more good than bad for the world.

<comment><USER13> This is a fine historical article. Your comment does not engage with it. Please stop using HN threads as pasting walls for ideological boilerplate.

<comment><USER14> The current system of down-voting and flagging is (evidently) insufficient to discourage comments like these. michaelochurch's comment is tantamount to trolling - it is spawned a acrimonious chain of vile and meta-vile. Nobody comes to HN for this. Nothing has been gained by engaging him. I'd go so far as to say nothing would be lost if the entire thread starting with OP's comment were removed. Perhaps HN could implement this feature?

<comment><USER15> I actually opened this thread just to ctrl-F "michaelochurch". I find him consistently interesting, and I strongly agree with him that Silicon Valley culture has weakened, though I strongly disagree with him on the root cause.

(He's basically way more left-wing than I am. I don't think the answer is "government regulation". The root cause of the corporatism creeping over SV is conformism, not capitalism. This isn't the thread for a detailed breakdown of my theory so I'll just note that both Jobs and Wozniak cited Ayn Rand as one of their biggest inspirations).

<comment><USER16> I think I'm pretty much in agreement with you, particularly on the 'conformism' part. There is a certain sameness to the "failure" and "disruption" these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article seriously reads like it was written by a 15 year old, and not a 15 year old who is excelling at writing. Ouch.

<comment><USER18> Note to dang: add a new feature to permanently block comments from a list of HN accounts that I specify in my profile.

<comment><USER19> Negative filtering is bad for reddit-like communities. We need people like you to see these comments and downvote them, for the benefit of all other readers.</comment></comment></comment>


Fuzzing Irssi (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://irssi.org/2017/05/12/fuzzing-irssi/ <comment><USER2> At work I help others to automate testing, build processes etc. Mainly I write Python, help others with Docker and Jenkins pipelines. How could I dive into fuzzing?

What's the best tutorial for fuzzing? Or should I pick some tool and focus on that and then extend from there? Something else? (We are mostly building embedded devices, mostly C and C++)

<comment><USER3> If you're using clang, I can recommend starting with libFuzzer. It's pretty straightforward to use - basically add one C file with a function definition, which gets called by the fuzzer engine with the test data. Add a bunch of compiler switches to the build, and you're done.

Note that for coverage-guided fuzzing you need a custom C/C++ build with some kind of coverage-tracking active.

See [https://llvm.org/docs/LibFuzzer.html](https://llvm.org/docs/LibFuzzer.html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just curious, are there any users of irssi that chose it over weechat-curses? If so, why?

<comment><USER5> I'm using irssi, and I guess the only answer I have is "inertia". I have an irssi setup/config which works. I could probably get weechat up and running fairly quickly, have looked at it already, but... irssi has, and continues to, serve me well, so I see no real reason to change.

Ninja-edit: didn't comprehend your question fully upon first reading. I didn't chose between them. Back in... 2007-ish? I got handed an irssi config by a buddy, and have tweaked it from there since. No active choice being made between the two. Sorry for the misinterpretation.

<comment><USER6> It's simple and it works. Does one thing well.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's news subscription service doesn't have a lot of news - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18281335/apple-news-plus-newsstand-needs-newspapers-magazines <comment><USER3> Of course it doesn't. Why would you join Spotify when people are already gladly subscribing to hear your songs on your website? Same goes here - <USER2> way, the newspapers are getting more money too.</comment>


BMW i3's Web Browser - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/06/bmw-i3s-web-browser/ <comment><USER3> That's a pretty underwhelming component for such a high-end car, it really bugs me to see them cheap out on such a crucial thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. The rest of the car is lovely. The navigation unit is fairly good - <USER2> the interactive stuff is just dire.</comment></comment>


How to Charge for Your Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikeperham.com/2015/11/23/how-to-charge-for-your-open-source/ <comment><USER2> In summary: License your software AGPL, require payment for MIT license.

Why isn't this more common?</comment>


Microsoft is infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft-windows-10-ads-taskbar-file-explorer <comment><USER2> How to disable said ads: [https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/106424/windows-1...](https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/106424/windows-10-tip- turn-off-file-explorer-advertising)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, but most here are miffed they have to do so in the first place. It like ordering a big mac, that comes with a leech beeing attached stealthly to your calf while you pay. Some people, wont notice, others won't care, most will have you a handy tool they found to pry it off, but some of us don't want to do business with some sick freak who would do that to begin with.</comment></comment>