Darktable 3.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.darktable.org/2019/12/darktable-300-released/ <comment><USER2> I wasn't sure what Darktable was, but they provide a good summary on their homepage, which it seems many projects fail to do nowadays, so kudos to them.

> darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw > developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages > your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable > lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

<comment><USER3> It should also say that it fulfills the same purpose Adobe Lightroom does. I think this would help a lot of people. It's not an alternative for photoshop for example.

<comment><USER4> They probably specifically don't say that to avoid potential copyright issues. Depending on jurisdiction (I'm thinking specifically UK and EU here) you can't actually say that about a competitive product without encountering problems.

<comment><USER5> I'm note sure about the EU part, because in Belgium you can mention competitors, e.g. "Darktable aims to fulfil the same need as Lightroom" is absolutely allowed, without problems. There aren't even rules specifically for mentioning competitors, it's about comparisons in general. For example, saying your product is "the best on the market" counts as a comparison, and you'll need proof to back up your statements.

<comment><USER6> Even a lawsuit without merit would require lawyering up and suck scarce time and energy. Adobe has deep pockets and lawyers on staff. Darktable has volunteers.

<comment><USER7> You can file a lawsuit without merit about anything, you don't need merit.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I think never mentioning Lightroom is a way of steering clear of meritorious suits and reduces the likelihood of a frivolous one...since even a frivolous lawsuit could be fatal. Anyway, "here is our cool thing" is probably organizationally healthier than "us against evil corp."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Huge fan of DarkTable. As someone who doesn't want to lock my whole photo- processing pipeline into a subscription-based model for the rest of my life (Lightroom) it's by far the most powerful tool at my disposal.

That said, pain points for me have included:

\- Managing multiple databases across multiple machines. My use-case is I have a central database with all photos on one machine. Generally do initial edits on another and then move the files across. I have yet to find a workflow - with the "Local sync" feature, or simply moving files and their edit files across the network - that feels simple. Should be noted that dragging files + their XLF's from temporary machine to primary machine wont import into the "database" for you. And you have to make sure all your directory structure and naming schemes are the same on all your machines.

\- The community around "styles" (presets) doesn't scratch the surface compared to Lightroom's. There's one main website [1], but it's not really curated. I'd like to see more blog posts and pros offer these.

[1] [https://dtstyle.net/](https://dtstyle.net/)

<comment><USER9> > As someone who doesn't want to lock my whole photo-processing pipeline into > a subscription-based model for the rest of my life (Lightroom) it's by far > the most powerful tool at my disposal.

Couldn't you just outright buy a Capture One license?

<comment><USER10> I used to pay for a photo editing software and used it for years. Then they got bought out by another company and the SW languished. And there was no easy way for me to migrate my photos away from it. Today I cannot even run the version I bought - incompatible libraries, etc.

Photos will last longer than the SW used to edit them. Don't lock them in.

<comment><USER9> Neither LR nor Capture one lock in your photos though. The edits will be locked in I suppose but I don't see a way to not lock them in. Are you saying that Dark Table somehow doesn't lock in your edits?

<comment><USER11> At least LR does not lock in your edits; I'm fairly certain Capture One doesn't either. You can export either XMP sidecar files or DNGs with the edit history bundled in along with the RAW data. LR's centralized catalog is just an SQLite database, I believe, but I don't think the schema is documented publicly.

<comment><USER9> Genuine question, are those edits usable in another app though? I.e. even if the XMP notes that I used a range mask with some color filter, if capture one or DT aren't capable of this or aren't capable of reading the sidecar files, isn't this a de-facto lock-in?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a longtime non-professional user of Darktable on Linux, I _love_ it. It has allowed me to turn badly exposed raw photos into usable ones more times than I can count. Some of its tools are uniquely powerful, e.g., the equalizer. It's amazing what the Darktable team has achieved. Kudos!

<comment><USER13> Me too. Thanks especially to the awesome YouTube tutorials of people like harry, I have taken my photography yo absolutely the next level.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks- zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAs...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks- zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAsYVqTltmXyBjl)

I love the concept of this being a digital darkroom where much artistic expression occurs long after taking an exposure.

<comment><USER6> Bruce Willis's _Learning Darktable_ is pretty good, too.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkqe4BYsllmcxo2dsF- rFQw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkqe4BYsllmcxo2dsF-rFQw)

<comment><USER14> I'm guessing you mean Bruce Williams ;-). But yes, he has a very extensive set of tutorials on everything related to Darktable (40+ videos at this point) and he's busy adding some on Darktable 3. Also, he's a photographer with a lot of experience so a lot of what he presents is from the point of view of a photographer trying to get sensible results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thread from 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499)

2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753)

(for the curious)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed! The annual Christmas release. I do think it matters to note darktable yet again. This is a major release, of what has become a key piece of photographic software. It's also a wonderful example of some people deep into imaging math getting together to put some current thinking into nicely put together open source code, and a community of committed users showing up to try to understand and use the thing. One could think of it as the Dwarf Fortress of open source imaging software...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks great. I might ditch Lightroom for this and donate the subscription moneys to you instead, as a matter of principle.

But everybody is and forever will be comparing Darktable to Lightroom, so how about:

\- Add to website a clear comparison vs Lightroom.

\- Add to website how to import Lighroom catalogue.

<comment><USER17> I use an antiquated version of Lightroom on Windows that I shelled out for years ago, but I seem to recall that Darktable got Windows support 1-2 years back - I'd love to see a direct comparison to see if it's worth making the switch.

Feature-wise, Lightroom is great - my main beefs with Lightroom are performance and stability: it's slow, and crashes occasionally.

<comment><USER16> I'm not exactly against paying subscription fees.

What royally pisses me off with Adobe is that I now have pay them monthly to maintain access to my photo catalogue (edits/keywords/etc), but they don't use my moneys to improve their products.

I don't even remember when was the last useful new feature to either Photoshop or Lightroom, but I doubt it was within this decade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I upgraded yesterday and have been using this for several years. I'm running this on a mac which is not ideal from a performance point of view but am loving the UI refresh and the two new tools: filmic rgb and the tone equalizer. The developer of these two new tools (Aurelien Pierre) has a few nice very technical videos about how these tools and the Darktable rendering pipeline works on his youtube channel:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg/videos)

If you don't know it, Darktable is awesome and unique. It often gets compared to Lightroom but it goes way beyond what that can do in many ways. It's main weakness is really that it maybe offers too many ways to do things. In addition to some easy to use filters it also offers many specialized filters and tools. Also, masking and parametric masking is vastly superior and that works on pretty much any tool.

</comment><comment><USER18> What an odd coincidence, I was just looking up if there was a new version of Darktable available.

Slightly off-topic, but can anyone recommend a good app for consolidating all your pictures from different sources? (macOS)

I have pictures on Dropbox, Facebook, and a huge removable drive. I want to view all of these pictures in one place in chronological order. I have 50,000+ pictures and it is so overwhelming where to even begin. :-/

I can't seem to get darktable to do this do smoothly for me.

<comment><USER19> Solving this exact situation of disarray is why I built my company. [https://photostructure.com/about/introducing- photostructure/](https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/)

<comment><USER18> This looks like _exactly_ what I want. Is this an open-source project?

<comment><USER19> See this: [https://photostructure.com/about/introducing- photostructure/...](https://photostructure.com/about/introducing- photostructure/#how-else-is-photostructure-different)

<comment><USER20> TL;DR: Not open-source, but the author promises to open-source it if the company fails. Parts are already open-source: [https://github.com/photostructure](https://github.com/photostructure). Also, the app is free while it's in beta, but will eventually cost money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I personally use Rawtherapee which seems more advanced(but a little more difficult to use for beginners) than Darktable. Ιs there any reason to use Darktable apart from ease of use?

<comment><USER22> Just based on looking at the sites, Rawtherapee appears to focus on RAW "developing", while Darktable appears to also do photo management and Lightroom-style non-destructive editing.

<comment><USER23> RawTherapee does photo management and is non-destructive as well.

Darktable supports masks and parametric masks for almost all operations. RawTherapee on the other hand has a wider range of tools and support for profiles and raw formats.

<comment><USER22> Helpful, thanks!

RawPedia's "Features" page ([http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Features](http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Features)) doesn't mention photo management, and I didn't find anything by searching for "catalog" (Lightroom's name for a collection of managed photos), etc. It'd be great if the site had more info about that aspect of the app.

<comment><USER23> The equivalent functionality is the File Browser tab when you open RawTherape. You can filter images, assign ranks/color labels, create queues, do batch edits, assign a dark frame, etc etc.

It doesn't have "collections" or "catalogs" per se, if that's what you're specifically looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Huge fan of Darktable. For such a gui-centric set of updates, though, how could they not include a single screenshot?

<comment><USER25> I think developers should really take note of VS Code's release notes (e.g. [https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41](https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41)) which include lots of screenshots and animations of new features or improvements. Makes it very easy to see at a glance what has changed. But it's a lot more work than just dumping the git commit log, of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are screenshots (though not animations!) in the announcement for darktable 3.0 at [https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-3-0/15384](https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-3-0/15384). The images do really help to get a sense of the new features. It's a good point that it would be great to have such images accompanying the release announcement on the main darktable site.

<comment><USER25> That's indeed a lot better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Once a year I'm installing the darkroom and giving it another chance, but usually half hour later I'm deleting it.

It's slow as a hell. I don't understand why changing exposure on my 16 core i9 macbook takes up to 2-3 seconds for 24 mpix image. Same with zoom: 24 mpix image takes 3-4 seconds to zoom in/out! Really? How this software is written that simple actions are taking so much time? Enabling OpenCL helps, but not so much: changing exposure takes up to second (yes, 3-4 times faster) and zoom still 3-4. Meanwhile devs are spending time on css driven UI...

But UI is also unusable: it's very compact and many elements on a retina display are very close to each other, so I'm constantly miss-clicking them. Slider knobs are ridiculously small and hard to grab and drag. Numbers on controls can't be entered manually, so if you need some exact value you should spend seconds on dragging sliders until you get what you want.

Any other photo software are way ahead of this editor in terms of UI and performance, so I don't understand why this one gets so much attention.

<comment><USER27> "Any other photo software are way ahead of this editor in terms of UI and performance, so I don't understand why this one gets so much attention."

Can you name a few open source ones? I'm not aware of any open source RAW development software that comes close.

<comment><USER26> If we are talking only about open source, then RawTherapee. It's faster than the darkroom. Better UI. But unfortunately they both lose to a commercial software which is usually much faster in most processing/decoding scenarios. Personally I prefer to pay for a software which does its job well. Why not? Image editing isn't that tool which must be only open source. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How does it compare to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom?

<comment><AUTHOR> Like Lightroom, darktable handles collections of images and allows applying a recipe of alterations to tune up each image. But it is like Photoshop in that it allows a great deal of volition in what happens to the image. This is especially true in darkatable v3, which allows re-ordering of of the various algorithms (also known as the pixel pipe) which work on an image.

Unlike Photoshop, which is primarily a pixel-based editor, both Lightroom and darktable tend to work on the image in aggregate, with tools which are particularly useful to images created via a lens and digital sensor. Lightroom has a lot of its choice/sequence of tools "pre-baked", and there's a lot of wisdom in its choices.

The tools in darktable are more esoteric. They're based on a variety of traditional and recent mathematical work in image processing. It takes a bit more knowledge and taste to choose the best tools, and set their parameters well for a particular image.

Depending on hardware, you may find that the Adobe tools are a bit faster.

As a sibling poster mentions, of course darktable is open source, and not subscription-based. It has an active development community. As Pascal Obry, who managed the current release, writes in an email to the darktable list: "It is also an important release as new developers have shined in and proposed some amazing features." There's also active community of darktable users who help each other to understand how to use it to work on a variety of images. I find these discussions enlightening in order to gain a more general sense of ways to think about image processing. One home of this community is [https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable](https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a great piece of software and is a crucial tool for anybody looking to manage a RAW photo processing workflow using OSS. I've used it for years and am really excited to try the new release. What a great Christmas present!

</comment><comment><USER30> Darktable is amazing! Can't wait to try this new version!

</comment><comment><USER31> How good is Darktable as a tool for a non professional simply looking to organize all their photos? Maybe apply some automated improvements, and do some deduping?

<comment><USER10> Although I and many others use DT to organize photos, the developers are fairly open about not wanting DT to do too much of that.

[https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename- files](https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files) [https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq- filemanager](https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-filemanager)

They even make it their April Fool's joke:

[https://www.darktable.org/2011/04/file- management/](https://www.darktable.org/2011/04/file-management/)

<comment><USER32> What do DT users use for file/digital asset management?

<comment><USER10> Can't speak for others, but what I do:

I copy the photos from my camera to my PC. I then use rapid-photo-downloader to bulk rename and move the files to where I store all my DT files. I then import the directory using DT.

DT _does_ have some DAM capabilities (tagging, etc). Just don't use it to copy/rename/move.

<comment><USER33> This is pretty much my workflow too, manually copy from camera to PC, then import them into Darktable.

Edit and delete from within darktable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Gah, I would love to be able to use Darktable, but it doesn't yet support the CR3 files my camera outputs (since I opt not to use JPG). Once that's supported, Darktable will have a couple more users in my household.

[https://github.com/darktable- org/darktable/search?q=cr3&type...](https://github.com/darktable- org/darktable/search?q=cr3&type=Issues)

Congrats on the release!

<comment><USER35> Pretty ridiculous that manufacturers are still leaving ISVs to rely on reverse engineering in order to support their products. It's not like the formats are "protected" somehow by not being documented; they inevitably end up well documented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great news! Happy casual user here.

Just the other day I decided to include Darktable in my yearly donations. Not a chance. They don't take donations :-)

</comment><comment><USER37> My biggest issue with Lightroom is that it is dog slow with large catalogs > 100k images. It is as if it kept everything in memory. Can Darktable be used to store the data in mysql or postgresql?

<comment><USER14> It uses sqllite. If you work directory by directory, it's fine. Most of the relevant data is in sidecar files. Apparently it can migrate lightroom meta data to its internal DB (haven't tried this).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Does it support presets similar to Lightroom? My workflow is pretty basic, I got about 10 presets I use on 90% of the photos I take, depending on the lens exposure, etc.

<comment><USER13> Yes. They are called "styles".

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Not sure why the post by user "norlywtf" was flagged, I'm having the same issue: on macOS Catalina the UI comes up in Russian. I can read Russian, so it's not such a huge issue for me, but for someone who doesn't it'll be very non-trivial to find where to set the UI language because it's a tiny gray gear icon on a gray background, an the program does not use the Mac menus, nor does it respond to Cmd+, shortcut.

Interestingly, one of the most annoying UI aspects of the program, the lack of label capitalization, is not present in the Russian translation. Everything is properly capitalized there.

</comment><comment><USER40> I love the Darktable user interface and feature set, but for my camera, the default import profile for RAW images is way off, resulting in bland, flat images lacking colour depth and needing extensive tweaking to look presentable.

The same images look great after importing into Lightroom and require very little post-processing.

I would love to drop my $expensive Adobe subscription, but this is the one issue that prevents me from doing so.

<comment><USER14> It varies per camera model. With the latest version, you can at least turn off the default application of the base_curve, which IMHO is quite horrible in that it consistently blows out highlights. I default to using filmic now. Also, you can develop some default styles and presets to speed up initial processing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> any darktable expert here knows how to compare two photos side by side in darktable

Also, can we use magnifying glass, instead of zooming in and scrolling the photo

ideally, would be select two photos to compare, click on compare side by side, and the two photos viewed on screen

<comment><AUTHOR> Culling mode, new in v3.0, allows comparing two (or more) photos side-by-side. The new version also allows for zooming in on images in lighttable mode (control-shift-scroll) when in culling mode or when images are "previewed" (full screen via the "w" key).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The Santa hat app icon offends me! (I'm joking.) This looks like an interesting app, it's not as polished as LR, but it's functional and free - great work!

</comment><comment><USER43> But does it work on windows?

<comment><USER31> There's a windows installer available. Any reason to believe that it doesn't work well on Windows?

<comment><USER44> I think it was meant as a joke -- for a long time, there was no official Windows build because no contributor was using Windows so there was nobody around to maintain that buikd. I think that has changed now.</comment></comment></comment>


The Coming Privacy Panic - <AUTHOR> http://bryce.vc/post/6514946956/the-coming-privacy-panic <comment><USER2> People seem to have been predicting a "digital pearl harbour" for over a decade now. I think such a thing might only be possible if most computing moves into "the cloud" and cloud systems become highly homogenized, such that a single exploit could affect many systems in a single catastrophic event.

In terms of privacy I think the biggest threat is likely to come from governments, because if people's entire private lives exist online then there will always be the temptation to want access to more and more of that in order to optimise public services, carry out automatic policing and issuing of fines, censor individuals, monitor protest groups and so on. It seems unlikely that in a world of ubiquitous information governments will remain content with the occasional census data which they obtain.

</comment><comment><USER3> So according to this guy 'the next Pearl Harbor we confront will be a cyberattack that cripples America's electrical grid and its security and financial systems', but he's not sure yet what the investment angle is? Douche.

<comment><USER4> He wants to put his money where his mouth is. What's wrong with that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Password managers, social aggregators, etc. What other solutions to privacy are there?

<comment><USER6> Security in general including ChromeOS. It has security built in from the ground up, it's not just leaving out everything but the browser.

<comment><USER7> We're talking about privacy here. ChromeOS is a ridiculous suggestion.</comment></comment></comment>


Google's diversity post makes no mention of age - <AUTHOR> http://brianstorms.com/2014/05/googles-so-called-diversity-makes-no-mention-of-age.html <comment><USER2> I'm a google engineer who is _cough_ well over 40. I haven't experienced any age discrimination. The engineering team for the product I work on, Google Play Music, is roughly 15% older engineers (rough guess, because I don't actually know how old everyone is). And across google, many of the most well regarded engineers (not talking about managers) are also older folks. Should there be more older engineers? Possibly, but the population is skewed because google is growing very fast of late and the vast majority of hires come straight out of college.

Also keep in mind that software engineering is a tough profession, and burnout is a real issue. Many of the people I've worked with over the years have moved on to other careers, in high tech or in something completely unrelated. The luckier ones cashed out on stock options or IPOs, and no longer need to work for a living - they either have their own little companies where they play around or they just retire. I'd say probably 40-50% of the engineers I worked with in my 20s and 30s are no longer doing any coding.

Bottom line: age discrimination is generally not a problem at google. One discrimination suit means nothing - those happen all the time at every successful company, and most of them are from folks angling for a quick settlement. (I don't know the merits of the particular case in question.)

<comment><USER3> There's only one person on my immediate team who is under thirty. Much of the company's engineering leadership is on the "ex-dec" mailing list. Let's just say that there are no 22-year-old engineers on ex-dec.

<comment><USER4> Curious about the "ex-dec" mailing list. Link? Google isn't of much help (top result is this thread)

<comment><USER5> Since the discussion is age, I would say digital equipment corporation which would put everyone at 40+.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google's blog post about diversity stats doesn't say anything about age, they diversity website does (but not with age stats.)

Of course, there are _lots_ of possible diversity axes for which they don't have stats, including, among others, veterans status and sexual orientation (which, also, though they aren't in the stats, are addressed on the diversity web page.)

Its even weirder that the blog post complains that Google's federally mandated EEO-1 report includes only the information that prescribed in the federal mandate.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is one way to spin it but not what I mean. My point of the post is that it is unfortunate that the EEO-1 doesn't care about age, because age is a problem in Silicon Valley and it's going to be worse as the workforce gets older. The EEOC doesn't care about age, so we can't count on EEOC to require companies to talk about age. It's going to have to come from the companies.

<comment><USER6> > The EEOC doesn't care about age

"The EEO-1 doesn't include age" is a readily verifiable fact.

"The EEOC doesn't care about age", OTOH, is claim which requires some argument beyond merely the observation that EEO-1 doesn't include age. [1]

[1] See, e.g., [http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/litigation/selected/adea.cfm](http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/litigation/selected/adea.cfm) [2]

[2] which, I suppose, is also good evidence for the claim that "the EEOC doesn't care about keeping its website listing current cases particularly current", but that's a different issue.

<comment><USER7> > _is a readily verifiable fact_

Yeah, but people can also read behind the lines. We're good at pattern matching and we have a lot of experience in corporate bs.

<comment><USER6> > Yeah, but people can also read behind the lines.

Or, IOW, can insert their own bias into their interpretations without supporting evidence.

<comment><USER7> Or, IOW, can make assesments based on what they know, without necessarily having some kind of forensic level or mathematical level proof.

Which is an essential skill in real life (even in court actually). Seems like a lot of people, especially programmers, conflate real life discussions with theorem proving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I worked as a contractor at Google last year when I was 62. No age discrimination :-)

My opinion is that Google is hungry for good people, and they are casting a wide net.

BTW, a little off topic, it is much easier getting a job as a contractor at Google, so if you are curious about life at Google you might want to try the easier route. I think roughly 40% of the people there are contractors.

<comment><USER9> Note, most of the reasons why companies discriminate against old people can be mitigated by making them contractors, so I don't know if that's a fair comparison.

There is the insurance issue- not an issue if you are a contractor. (I mean, on a google Engineer salary, it's less of a big deal, but still, we're talking a 5x increase in insurance premiums, it's not nothing.)

Then, there is the hours issue; It is thought that old people usually won't pretend to work for long hours like young people will. But you don't want your contractors to pretend to work long hours, you are paying them by the hour! Here, the perceived disadvantage of old people becomes an advantage, if you hire them as contractors.

Old people expect more pay. Sure, contractors are expected to get more pay.

Then, I think there are some vestiges of "expected loyalty" that are left in the system. Firing a bunch of old people is seen as worse, I think, than doing the same to a bunch of young folks. Making them contractors mitigates this problem, too.

Now, I'm not saying that there _is_ age discrimination at google; I know a fair number of "greygoolers" or however you spell that. I'm just saying that almost all of the reasons why a company might discriminate against an old person no longer apply if they are hiring said old person as a contractor.

<comment><USER8> That is a good point about using contractors being more flexible, but that advantage holds across all age groups. Another good point on the increased health care costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They also don't give a breakdown of what colleges they hire from. (Which is a good heuristic for social class) Not everyone had the privilege to be able to go to Stanford.

<comment><USER11> Even if Stanford were a _public_ school with a well-developed CS program, it's still the nearest notable school. Is there a shock that Amazon and Microsoft hire a lot of UW grads?

<comment><USER12> There are many reasons close schools would have an advantage. I would be surprised if there aren't adjunct faculty at Stanford from Google (and UW from Microsoft) and interns sometimes prefer local opportunities to those far away.

It might be interesting to look at which colleges they hire from, but just drop Stanford (or control for the number of miles from Mountain View.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One other thing that I notice is that they didn't have an ethnicity group for Indians and Middle Eastern. Maybe they categorized them as white because their white chunk was huge.

<comment><USER14> The instructions are here: [http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.cf...](http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.cfm)

"Asian (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian Subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam."

"White (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Your "so-called" diversity blog post makes no mention of color-blindness. :-p

</comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps they're not including age because it's a lot more variable than "static" traits such as race and gender, even when using ranges. Such information would quickly become outdated, which is dangerous if they don't release updated stats often.

<comment><USER7> > _Such information would quickly become outdated, which is dangerous if they > don 't release updated stats often._

Nothing stops them from releasing it once a year.

It's not like people grow older more than a year each year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Except, it _does_. Click 'At Google' -> Greyglers.

[http://www.google.com.au/diversity/at- google.html#tab=greygl...](http://www.google.com.au/diversity/at- google.html#tab=greyglers)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and I mention Greyglers in my blog post. But Google's tiny mention way down on a page that there's a group of old-timers in the company is nothing new and is not part of their new openness about transparency, nor does it say anything about age demographics across entire workforce or hiring practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> That is because it is gender diversity that is the sexy topic (for obvious reasons). Then racial diversity often gets tacked on at the end as just some motions you have to go through to deflect criticism.

<comment><USER7> A lot of people overplay the defenders of "gender diversity" to look cooler/more progressive to their group (which sometimes is ironically motivated by trying to get laid).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Kubelist – Your curated weekly kubernetes news reconciliation loop - <AUTHOR> https://kubelist.com/ <comment><USER2> Nice. Could you add rss/atom please? All weekly programming lists I'm subscribed have rss. Thank you.</comment>


Show HN: RockingPage.com – Find the best trending websites - <AUTHOR> https://rockingpage.com/ <comment><USER2> Very nice, it would be great if you added more filtering options (for example, I'd like to exclude anything with 'coin'), and generate RSS feeds with those filters.

Great job, now I'll go back into the rabbit hole you've created!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your feedback. I am really glad you like our new tool :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When I see things like this, I always wonder how the data is acquired. I have had many ideas in the past that I couldn't really go through with as they were data-bound. I am sure it would be preferred to be kept relatively under-wraps, but I'm still curious.

If anyone has any conjecture, or if itrinity would be willing to explain a bit, it would be greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER4> The author wrote in a comment below:

> the ranks are based on Alexa rank and FB shares

This make sense but only for websites that are actually shared in social media (assuming you also pull Facebook, Twitter, VK, etc).

For other websites with high traffic but with less shares, this does not work (adult websites, tools, etc).

<comment><USER5> Hello, one of the developers here. What you said is not quite accurate, as our ranking algorithm will still rate websites with high popularity/traffic (Alexa Rank) even with no facebook shares / referring domains or any other metrics. They will not reach such high positions, but they will be ranked.

<comment><USER4> Makes sense. Following this thread, what do you think would be a good ranking strategy besides Alexa rank and social shares?

<comment><USER5> Definitely backlinks, number of referring IPs/domains is very big indicator of website Authority.

Besides that, UX factors like bounce rate, session duration, etc. are very good indicators as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 4 out 5 results are about cryptocurrency markets. So, it will be interesting see how was this actually built.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems that crypto is a really hot thing these days :) Actually, the ranks are based on Alexa rank and FB shares, so it should correlate with the real usage of these websites.

<comment><USER7> Seriously

Its a little disconcerting just how many Crypto related posts have shown up on Hacker News lately, with the strong comments that come with it

Maybe its a good thing, who knows

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks good! I will play a bit more with it to provide more feedback

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be nice to be able to sort be alexa or fb.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. We will consider it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> nice piece! I've already subscribed for a weekly newsletter!

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


Renminbi set to replace US dollar for trade in Asia Pacific - <AUTHOR> http://www.risk.net/asia-risk/news/1566563/renminbi-set-replace-us-dollar-trade-asia-pacific

<comment><USER2> So when are they going to unpeg the yuan from the dollar again?

<comment><USER3> Yeah as a result of the peg this effectively has no effect on the strength of the dollar.</comment></comment>


Preventing memory leaks in Backbone.js - <AUTHOR> https://paydirtapp.com/blog/backbone-in-practice-memory-management-and-event-bindings/

<comment><USER2> Ugh. Examples use Coffeescript instead of universally accessible Javascript. Looks very useful though; I've just started learning about Backbone, and the lack of a "right way of doing things" is disconcerting, coming from a lot of Rails usage lately. It takes me back to the days of doing a lot of stuff by hand.

Even without that uncertainty, it's definitely a bit tricky to move to thinking about everything being in the browser.

<comment><USER3> @davidw, Just use emberjs and focus on your app instead of boilerplate code. If you are coming from rails, emberjs is opinionated and should fit your style of thinking.

Emberjs makes building non-trivial easy while backbone makes building non- trivial apps hard but makes building small simple app easy.

People like talking about the size of emberjs but after you finishing stitching together numerous boilerplate code, you might end up with a bigger code base than emberjs and you are worst off as you have to maintain your boilerplate yourself rather than use a community curated codebase.

Two good getting started tutorial: <http://trek.github.com/> <http://emberjs.com/guides/router_primer/>

__Please i don't dislike backbonejs but we should use the right tool for the right job, backbone is not the right tool for non trivial app except you like boilerplate code. I also respect Jeremy Ashkenas. So my comments are not hate induced.

<comment><USER4> Getting started with Ember is a lot harder than your comment admits. I tried Ember recently and there was still a lot of stuff that was broken including the data model. That would make building a non-trivial app hard.

<comment><USER2> What I'm investigating Backbone/Ember/whatever for is a semi-embedded device that will ship with a web interface, so some semblance of stability is a major plus.

<comment><USER3> As we speak it is used in production by many companies. Click this link to see them all:

[https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/wiki/Production- Deployme...](https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/wiki/Production-Deployments- Page)

Shopitome is a very fresh deployment using emberjs based on this tweet sent today:

<http://twitter.com/inkredabull/status/268017623428657153>

<http://www.shopittome.com/threads/signup>

A few non trivial companies using emberjs in production are:

www.zendesk.com

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

<http://livingsocial.com/>

<http://www.groupon.com>

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

<http://basho.com/>

<http://travis-ci.org/>

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

<comment><USER2> Web production != shipping on devices production. You can very easily ship updates to the former whereas the latter is tricky. It means we need to be careful with everything we choose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree on the whole coffeescript thing, really it detracts from what you are trying to show. But on to the real point of commenting; I am implementing a system using backbone because it is a requirement of the company I am contracting for. I am writing several..plugins..I suppose you would call them, to make backbone work more like angular.js. If you're having issues with backbone and have a choice, I strongly recommend checking out angular. it is quite amazing and very flexible. while it seems like it should be opinionated it is actually quite flexible on what you must do once you learn how it works. A great example is view compositioning, it has a very strong templating system using definitions to create your own element sections. I am having a really hard time liking backbone, if I have to write all this code, really I would much rather write my own library to handle this stuff. So just my point of view along with a suggestion on something that I believe can take you much further and reduce the time you spend on the b.s.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been using chaplinjs as a backbone architecture for my last couple side projects and I really like it.

<https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin>

Simplified router, subviews, model binding techniques like described in the OP are all helpfully baked in.

</comment><comment><USER7> Two things you can do together to help, but need Backbone edge version (master) for the second, at the moment:

      1. myModel.on('change:title', this.render, this); // inside `myView`
      2. myView.dispose(); // when you are done with `myView`

This will automatically remove all the referenced binds onto `myView` and simply removing the root view as OP mentions is sufficient.

<comment><USER8> But you have to keep in mind, according to the code ([https://github.com/documentcloud/backbone/blob/master/backbo...](https://github.com/documentcloud/backbone/blob/master/backbone.js#L1234) ) this will only get rid of the events on this.model and this.collection. If you are using another field or model (like in your example myModel, if it is not the same as this.model) -- then you will still get memory leaks.

Backbone is a real pitfall here in larger projects and you have to keep memory leaks in mind when using Backbone events. (sadly JavaScript has no WeakMaps yet, which would solve the problem for us) That's why projects like Backbone Marionette or EventBinder exists which are handling the Backbone events leaking problem better than bare bones Backbone alone. See [http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2011/09/15/zombies-run- ma...](http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2011/09/15/zombies-run-managing- page-transitions-in-backbone-apps/)

In a very large application I'm writing at the moment I've introduced a common View parent class which extends Backbone views with proper subview handling and correct event disposal. So in my views I can write something like this (works very similar to the Backbone view's DOM "event" mapping field, but instead of DOM events we are talking about Backbone events here) [Edit: well, looking at the submission article, that's very similar to the solution described in the article]

        objectEvents: {
          'model change': 'reload',
          'collection reset': 'render'
        }

Then my View class handles the rest: it connects the events in the constructor and disconnects them correctly on remove(). The only thing you have to keep in mind is that you have to remove all old subviews explicitly when they get recreated. That's when my subview handling kicks in, because I have some helper methods like addSubView and removeAllSubViews which get called when re- rendering the parent view.

Backbone subview handling can be a real pain and memory management has to be kept in mind. Every time you are using the "on"-method you should ask yourself when this event gets destroyed and if it could lead to a memory leak. Or you should use something like EventBinder. <https://github.com/marionettejs/backbone.eventbinder>

<comment><USER9> _Backbone subview handling can be a real pain and memory management has to be kept in mind._

Which is one of the main reasons why EmberJS was created.

Sometimes I wonder why backbone is still getting so much love when saner alternatives (Ember, Angular etc.) have been around for so long.

Is it only inertia or is there perhaps a need for a framework in the middleground between backbone and ember (in terms of abstraction)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great pointing out that Backbone is _deceptively_ simple. No best practices to be found on backbonejs.org.

Always worth considering using a framework layer like Marionette to help you with architecture. Otherwise you _will_ end up writing something similar to it yourself. Which sometimes is necessary, but not always.

</comment><comment><USER11> Javascript memory leaks can be identified using Browser Profiler (e.g. [https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer- tools/docs/he...](https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer- tools/docs/heap-profiling)). Are there any other better/recommended tools for the job?

<comment><USER12> For IE specific memory leak testing, I've found sIEve to be very helpful: <http://home.wanadoo.nl/jsrosman/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't nested child views get garbage collected when the root view is removed?

<comment><USER14> If the parent is the only place where there's a reference to the child view, then yes. However like the article says, you often have things like event listeners that, if the child view doesn't clean up, will prevent the child view from getting collected. (And often, the listeners still do stuff causing buggy behavior.)

This is fixed by ensuring there's an off()/unbind() for every on()/bind(). I do this by following a pattern like the one in this article: [http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2011/09/15/zombies-run- ma...](http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2011/09/15/zombies-run-managing- page-transitions-in-backbone-apps/)

<comment><USER15> Yes, but if they are bound to the child's element and that is removed shouldn't that be sufficient unless the view is binding to other elements or window events?

<comment><USER16> It's quite common to bind to events on objects like models or collections etc. which will not be unbound just because the dom element is.

<comment><USER17> Isn't that true only for older Internet Explorer versions because they had two garbage collectors, one for DOM stuff and one for JScript stuff?

<comment><USER8> That's not a problem just for IE. It's a problem that browser vendors could only solve by giving us WeakMaps (which could come in ES6 [http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:weak_maps#wea...](http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:weak_maps#weakmap) )...

The problem is, you have a bunch of subviews which are registering events on some collection models... when you rerender your parent view your subviews get recreated but your previously created subviews stay in memory because the backbone events system still stores references to the old views which aren't really needed anymore. The only solution is to explicitly remove the events when subviews a destroyed (or better use a solution like in the submitted article) or use a library like <https://github.com/marionettejs/backbone.eventbinder>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I highly recommend onsi's Backbone.coccyx [1] for ensuring that views are torn down correctly.

<https://github.com/onsi/coccyx>

</comment><comment><USER19> Backbone.Marionette is pretty good at solving a lot of these issues but this is a great blog on how to do it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER20> AFAIR, it's one of the issues Backbone.Marionette is trying to fix with its bindTo/close solution.</comment>


Discs from the stone age (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.donsmaps.com/discs.html <comment><USER2> \- Hi Ngh, it's cold outside the cave may I sit by your fire?

\- Sure Ugh, sit here

\- Listen Ngh, what is it that you holding in your hand?

\- Just a bone disk with a hole in it

\- What is it for?

\- Dunno

\- Can I have it?

\- No!

\- I'll give you leather strap for it

\- Okay

\- (Ngh to himself) maybe I should make more disks

\- (Ugh to himself) maybe I should make more leather straps

<comment><USER3> Ngh is in a strange mood.

Ngh has carved a Bear Roundel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In an article posted yesterday that same one with a deer (eigth from top) has been hypothized as being a spinning toy:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16352109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16352109)

[https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-toys-kids- archae...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-toys-kids- archaeological-record)

<comment><USER5> Perhaps they would be used in a cord drill or pump drill? [https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/cord- dr...](https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/cord-drill-and- pump-drill/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: How I built an iOS app for my WordPress site - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ohsik/how-i-built-an-ios-app-for-my-wordpress-site-2d950bba9e34#.lzjzje3ux <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, I'm looking to get some feedback on my iOS web app for a WordPress site. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/goodnight- journal/id95708037...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/goodnight- journal/id957080373?mt=8)

Thank you.</comment>


HTML5 Fractal Pong - <AUTHOR> http://rkive.org/stuff/frong/

<comment><USER2> I was surprised to see that IE9 had better performance than either FF 10 or Chrome 18. Anyone else seeing this?</comment>


Ask HN: Living in Bay Area - <AUTHOR>

I'm a 22 year old programmer from Germany and at the moment I'm working as a programmer for a small web agency. After works I'm a student and I'm studying BA Business Informatics (I really don't know if this is the correct term). At the moment I have 2 years left for my graduation and I can't wait.
While I love some parts of Germany (employment protection, health insurance ect.) and being a german I feel like I don't belong here. I sick of this officialism and all of that bad weather here.
I hate it to wait until I can get my hands on something people in US are using quite a while (cause law in Germany is making it hard to get over here). I'm tired that companies in Germany are developing new software with technologies which are older than me.
Because of all that and much more I'm thinking about moving to a place where I can have all that I couldn't have in Germany. As I'm a daily hacker news reader I'm thinking about moving to the Bay Area cause I feel like all that cool hacker related things are happening there. It's the heart of IT (right?).
However I don't know how living in Bay Area is like. I read about it a bit but everyone is talking about expenses. I would love to hear a overall experience about living in the Bay Area?
How is it like? What are hacker doing in there free times (except hacking)? What are you doing with friends? Are you going to partys, hackathons? What are you doing in your holidays? Are a lot of people surfing in Bay Area? (surfing was always a dream of mine)
Giving me a feeling about living in Bay Area / Silicon Valley could change my entire life cause this is really important to me.
Thank you.
Foot note: Sorry for my bad english. I'm working on it and please feel free to correct my text. <comment><USER2> San Francisco is often described as the most cosmopolitan of American cities (excepting NYC). You may find it similar to European cities in terms of nightlife, cinema, cultural activities, and people's eclectic interests. Relative to Europe or Canada, there is little government support of arts or culture but that doesn't stop youth from innovating culture. So you'll find interesting people and interesting activities for entertainment.

San Francisco (and Berkeley/Oakland, across the Bay) are centers for culture and youth with adequate public transit and neighborhoods where rents are relatively cheap. The Peninsula and South Bay (the location of Silicon Valley companies) are suburban (wide expressways, shopping malls and office parks) and compare poorly to SF in terms of cultural activities but offer many opportunities for outdoor recreation. Californians tend to choose outdoor activities for recreation (running, biking, hiking, motorcycles) and late- night partying or club hopping often ends early for those who get up early for outdoor recreation.

Not many people surf (not as many as Southern California or our neighbor Santa Cruz but of course more than Europe!). It's an option if it's your dream. Surfing for some is an activity on a free weekend or an early morning before work (if the waves are good). For others, it is a lifestyle that leaves little time for career pursuits.

It's often said that Americans work longer hours and spend less time enjoying life than most Europeans (if enjoying life is defined as time spent with friends, eating food, drinking, or cultural pursuits). If you work in a startup company, that may be doubly true, as your peers will expect you to be focused on the tasks that will lead to success. You may find that a day at work in the Bay Area moving bits is not much different from the same in a European city. After work hours, you'll be tired but you'll likely find time to try a new restaurant or grab a beer with workmates or a roommate a few times a week. Among entrepreneurs, you will probably not have much free time on weekends and you should not expect holidays.

These are broad generalizations, of course, based on my own personal experience, so suitable only for stimulating thought and discussion. Your mileage may vary.

<comment><AUTHOR> First of all thank you for your answer.

At the moment I'm having a double life between working as a programmer (40 hours per week) and studying. It's pretty hard and I really don't have much time for friends and parties but it's fun too. I think it made me a other person and maybe a better person having this double life. What I'm trying to say is I think I can handle a lot of work but I a guy who has to know why I'm doing this all. If it is fun to work in a startup I will go that extra mile with a smile but if it is not fun at all I wouldn't do that for a long time.

While living in the Bay Area seems pretty expensive I think Software Engineers are earning enough to live well, aren't they? (Everytime I read salaries from Software Engineers on HN I'm really shocked cause you would never get that amount here in Germany)

Do you know if there is a chance to study for a master degree while working as a full time Software Engineer? That's what I'm doing right know and in Germany it is possible to study part time. It takes longer but it's ok and you can live a pretty decent life when it comes to money (not everything is money but that's a other topic).

Whats about getting a job in the valley as a Software Engineer. Is it hard to get a job because of all excellent engineers around?

Any chance of chatting with you about all that stuff? Maybe Facebook?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Surfing in the Bay Area is hard for a number of reasons: you need a car and a surfboard, the water is freezing cold (you need a thick wetsuit), Silicon Valley is inland and blocked off from the ocean by a mountain range, and the good waves are mostly for experts. That said, Cowell's in Santa Cruz is probably one of the best places in America outside of Hawaii for a beginner to learn. You can get there with a combination of train and bus and then rent a longboard for an afternoon. Pacifica isn't too bad for a beginner, either... but you'll need your own gear and a car.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not going to be easy for you to move out there, since by and large the US is not very friendly to foreigners, in official terms (getting a visa), so why not take a good long trip there? Try and stay a month by renting a room for that time, and just hang out... see what happens, how you like it, what you don't like and so on. You could probably plan for and do that during the summer, although I think you'd be really pleased with how much better winters are in the bay area than at home...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your advice it really sounds good to me. Although I think I'm pretty flexible and you know if you are sick of something you will give everything to make your dream work.

I searched a little bit and found out that I have pretty good chance getting a visa for work (developers are needed, I will have a graduation, I'm young and so on).

Yeah winters here are kinda hard and pretty cold. How is summer in the bay area? Is it extremely hot? I checked some average weather data from san francisco and it looked pretty good to me.

Renting a room will be kinda pricy but you are absolutely right about trying first before I gave up everything.

<comment><USER4> The weather there is just about perfect as far as I'm concerned. It rarely goes much below 10C in the winter, and it's not exceedingly hot in the summer either, unless you go far inland. It depends a lot where you are - it's much colder in the summer in San Francisco than, say, Fremont in the east bay.

In any case, yeah, go check it out, meet people, see what you think, and have some fun before you commit 100%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you have 2 years left before graduation how about trying to transfer to a local university as an F-1 student.</comment>


Patriot Scientific acquires Chuck Moore's patents including shboom - <AUTHOR> http://patriotscientific.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=231&Itemid=101

<comment><AUTHOR> Some background information, Shboom was a very advanced chip in its time, iirc the first one to execute a high level language directly. There are some questions about the value of the patents on this chip because it is very well possible that it could invalidate some of SUNs patents on their java processors.

With trivial modifications the Shboom will run java bytecode directly.

Maybe this is a prelude to patriotscientific going after Oracle? The timing is certainly nice. And patriot scientific has a bit of a 'history'.

<comment><USER2> Too bad Sun canceled its Java processors years ago because they were crap. It's not clear that there's any value in these patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Separately, I think someone has misunderstood Patriot's press release. The company didn't acquire Moore's patents; they've always owned the patents. They licensed them to another company.

Patriot and another company, Technology Properties Limited (TPL), are co- owners of Moore's patents. Both Patriot and TPL make their money by licensing those patent rights to other companies. The recent press announcement from Patriot merely says they've signed up yet another new customer.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, apparently they've got roughly 50 such licensees now.

Apologies!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Contrary to popular opinion, ShBoom does not, nor did it ever, execute any high-level langauge directly. It's far from being a Java processor. Yes, it's stack-based, but so are some other (unsuccessful) processors. There's a good reason why there are no Java processors in the world.

That doesn't mean ShBoom is bad or useless or that the patents have no value. It's just not the miracle some might be hoping for.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.allbusiness.com/technology/software-services- appl...](http://www.allbusiness.com/technology/software-services- applications/7249358-1.html)

[http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Evolve+Software+to+represent+P...](http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Evolve+Software+to+represent+Patriot+Scientifics+ShBoom...-a018113780)

I might be misinterpreting these then, but those seem to be fairly clear statements to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.

Specifically, it's a press release about the purchase of _a_ license. One of the parties mentioned as an owner of the patent portfolio, TPL, has claimed this before, so there's no real news here.

Chuck Moore has a page (<http://www.colorforth.com/vTPL.htm>) on the different opinions about ownership. It doesn't appear to have been recently updated to include a transfer of ownership. On the contrary, it indicates things are where they've been for a while: Chuck hasn't received any royalties on the portfolio and the ownership issue is a matter of legal wrangling.

<comment><AUTHOR> It appears they more or less stole the stuff from him, that's where the 'history' I referred to above came from.

I completely misinterpreted the press release, see above.</comment></comment>


The FBI Never Asked for Access to Hacked Computer Servers - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/alimwatkins/the-fbi-never-asked-for-access-to-hacked-computer-servers <comment><USER2> The title makes it sound like the FBI just made completely baseless assumptions. They had the computers inspected by a third party that is probably more reputable than the FBI on these sorts of matters.</comment>


Obama: My Plan for a Free and Open Internet - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@PresidentObama/my-plan-for-a-free-and-open-internet-c45e2f4ab1e4 <comment><USER2> I'm curious, does classifying the Internet as an utility make it easier or harder for the government to spy on it?

On one hand it should be easier since they'd have much more control over it, on the other, it's already pretty damn easy to get all the ISP data through a firehose directly to NSA's data-centers. Plus, there's the Post Office, which actually has much more privacy protections than the Internet right now. So I guess it's still totally dependent on the laws we make, and whether we let them spy on it or not?

<comment><USER3> I don't think this would impact government spying in any way -- it wouldn't be any easier or any harder.

Just as placing these similar regulations on telephone companies years ago, didn't make tapping phone lines any easier / harder.

<comment><USER4> How certain are you of this. My understanding is that regulating the telecommunications industry did make it easier to order both tap-and-traces and pen registers and that it helped to hold open the legislative door for CALEA, the Stored Information Act and others. Furthermore, much of the Bush- era expansion of internet surveillance apparatus was done by legislating internet communications under telecommunication law.

<comment><USER5> Net neutrality isn't a blanket term for "anything the government does relating to the Internet", it's focused on a specific issue.

I guess you could argue that net neutrality would make it easier to pass pro- surveillance laws, but I'm having a difficult time connecting the two.

<comment><USER6> > Net neutrality isn't a blanket term for "anything the government does > relating to the Internet", it's focused on a specific issue.

Of course.

> I guess you could argue that net neutrality would make it easier to pass > pro-surveillance laws, but I'm having a difficult time connecting the two.

The argument wouldn't be that net neutrality itself would make it easier. The argument would be that the regulation - especially if the folds ISPs under telecommunication laws or equivalents - could result in the import of large portions of legislation pertaining to communications access programs.

Much of this has actually already been done at the ISP level and the (surveillance) struggle seems mostly focused on the application layer.

So I guess I might agree that it may not bolster surveillance capabilities - if only for the fact that ISPs have already been mostly captured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Useful: "What is reclassification and why are net neutrality supporters pushing for it?" [http://www.vox.com/cards/network-neutrality/why-did-the- cour...](http://www.vox.com/cards/network-neutrality/why-did-the-court-rule- the-fccs-network-neutrality-rules-illegal#E6950020)

</comment><comment><USER8> This makes as much sense as a post titled "OJ Simpson: My Plan To Find The Real Killers".

Obama doesn't want a "free and open Internet", he wants a massive, distributed, ubiquitous platform for government surveillance.

<comment><USER5> Not only is surveillance a different issue, this is extremely hyperbolic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In regards to this point:

"If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it."

Are ISPs permitted to block illegal content currently? It would seem that this distinction shouldn't be left up to the ISP. Does this mean that my isp would be able to block me from visiting The Pirate Bay? Or could my ISP have blocked me from reddit when "The Fappening" was going down?

The way its been worded its implied that ISPs are permitted to block illegal content but not legal content. I'm just curious if its been that way all along or if this is something new.

</comment><comment><USER10> To me the most interesting part is this line: _...while at the same time forbearing from rate regulation and other provisions less relevant to broadband services._

As I understood it the rate regulation is a critical component of what Mr Obama describes as an _obligation not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access in and out of your home or business._ If most broadband providers are still monopolies, how can the FCC effectively prevent them from abusing that monopoly without some form of rate regulation?

</comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully, this has some real impact. This issue isn't going to be subject to a vote by congress, so this is a place where the president can have some actual clout.

<comment><USER12> _This issue isn 't going to be subject to a vote by congress, so this is a place where the president can have some actual clout._

That's never certain: The FCC regulates by way of Congress' authority, and Congress can change that authority any time it likes (and the President concurs) through the normal legislative process. They can also make trouble for future FCC appointments, call FCC members in for hearings, and otherwise make the FCC's life miserable.

It's absolutely one of the things that limits the FCC's freedom of action.

IMHO, this is simultaneously a political move (nobody loves Comcast), an ideological move (President Obama almost certainly believes that additional regulation in this area will be good for consumers) and a negotiation tactic (the more the broadband providers are worried about Title II, the more willing they'll be to support FCC neutrality regulation short of that).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: In My Country, People Still Use Hits To Describe Websites... - <AUTHOR>

I live in Kenya, and our internet adoption is blowing up right now, especially on mobile. I run an ad-based startup which I've been diligently building up to 140,000 users. I thought this was great work, considering the total addressable market for my website consists of just over 2 million people. But shock on me, when I embarked on sales, I've found that some of the biggest 'must-buy' websites still quote their hit count when pitching ads, and the ad agencies are buying it. Even Google Kenya has an ad campaign out for their local business directory where they quote that one small business owner is getting '12,000 hits per day' on her page. All of a sudden, my 140,000 users looks like spit in a hurricane. I heard this was also a problem in the earlier days for the more developed internet economies, so how did people get around it? <comment><USER2> I believe google adwords got around it by adding an option to optimize ad impressions by conversion value rather than click through rate or raw traffic.

i.e., instead of showing ads more and more when their click-through rate goes up. They show the ads more and more as the ROI (return on investment) goes up.

the ROI is determined by dividing the aggregate conversion value for that ad by the cost of running those ads

so $1000 in total sales to users who clicked a given ad that cost $200 in total to run (for those same users) would be:

1000 / 200 = 5.0

where another ad that you also spent $200 on but only resulted in $600 in conversions would be…

600/200 = 3.0

so the ROI is $5 (income) per $1 of ads in the first case and $3 per $1 spent on ads in the second case.

If you enable that feature, the first ad would be run _much_ more than the second one, in order to maximize ROI of the ad spending</comment>


Ask YC: IRC channel for startup people and/or YC hackers? - <AUTHOR>

Does such a thing exist?<p>If not, does someone recommend a preferred network to start one up? <comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I did a Google search and found this thread:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85189>

Looks like freenode #startups is the place to be, perhaps?

<comment><USER2> Exactly. It's not always real active... I guess that's a sign people are busy with other stuff, which is good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> IRC is a waste of time. The best things happen in real life.

<comment><USER4> Too right! Don't bother with email or phones either. They are useless :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hang out on freenode #fauna. there are a bunch of rails hackers and startup people there.

</comment><comment><USER6> #ai is good.

#python for help in python

#c++ to help ;)</comment>


We Don't Need More Scientists — We Need Better Ones - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/scientist_shortage_is_a_myth_.html

<comment><USER2> We don't need new scientists or better ones, what we need is more funding and money. With most western governments quick to slash science funding at even the smallest hint of economic gloom it's no suprise that science has been performing poorly.

The author of the article, as a medicinal chemist, should know that his kind of work is impossible without significant financial contributions. Even the cheapest DSC or triple quad is going to cost him in the mid 5 figures.</comment>


Google tightening rules on internal message board as 'new world creates urgency' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/google-content-moderation-internal-message-boards-memegen.html <comment><USER2> I feel like having a meme generator as a tool at work is just a bad idea for even mid-sized companies, let alone a company of Google's size.

Someone's pursuit for laughs will inevitably lead to some people feeling offended or hurt.

<comment><USER3> Between the lines they also say that employees spend too much time in divisive discussions.

Additionally they seem to want to compartmentalize content. Allowing people to continue to talk about everything and a wellness alternative.

I don't think it will work, because the wellness crowd will try to break into other groups at some point.</comment></comment>


Ioke - strongly typed, dynamic, homoiconic, prototype-based JVM language - <AUTHOR> http://ioke.org

<comment><USER2> Related audio podcast: [http://www.se- radio.net/podcast/2010-01/episode-154-ola-bini...](http://www.se- radio.net/podcast/2010-01/episode-154-ola-bini-ioke)

"This is a conversation with Ola Bini on his experimental language Ioke. We cover the idea behind the Ioke experiment as well as important language concepts and the thinking behind them."

</comment><comment><USER3> Recently I wrote a small Ioke tutorial in which a simple Rake clone is built. The tutorial assumes you've already read the Ioke guide, though: <http://jdp.github.com/biild/>

</comment><comment><USER4> The logo made me smile... a reference to Ioke's lack of parentheses in comparison to Clojure I'd guess.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone compare this to Clojure?

<comment><USER6> Ioke has lots of mutable state (rather than Clojure's strict lockdown on mutable state). Ioke isn't concerned at all with concurrency (which Clojure is).

They both have macros, and ioke's syntax looks nicer to non-lispers than clojure's. Ioke (iirc) is considerably slower than clojure, and kinda difficult to optimize.

<comment><USER7> > Ioke (iirc) is considerably slower than clojure, and kinda difficult to > optimize.

Throughout last year Ola mentioned many times in his blog, that he's not concerned with speed optimisation at this point, but mainly features. I'm not sure about the "hard to optimise" part... Also if you look at the Ioke manifesto[1]:

> This is really the full manifesto of Ioke, if you ever had to choose just > one. In any situation where I have to choose between expressiveness or > performance, expressiveness is always the answer.

Don't remember him mentioning anything about concurrency though.

[1] <http://olabini.com/blog/2009/05/the-ioke-philosophy/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I hear "homoiconic" I think of Cher.</comment>


The credentials trap - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2013/02/13/the-credentials-trap/ <comment><USER2> The post from Sivers' blog[1] a few days talked optimistically about how, at least in some ways, we're beginning to see a fix for this.

You can break out of the credentials trap by _making and doing stuff_ and by looking for people who make stuff. Public creations and contributions, even as simple as blogging, are becoming much more of an accepted credential (offering more external validation in Dixon's words) and that's great.

(Well, mostly great. Great that people might look at your github as a credential, perhaps going a tad too far when people proclaim that Github replaces resumes.)

I'm nothing but a wee programmer from New Hampshire, and while hating on Stack Overflow is cool around here[2], it allowed me to help thousands of people and create a (literal and S.O.) reputation. I wasn't thinking about career with all my days and nights contributing to StackOverflow, it was more of plain old poor time management mixed with some desire to be useful to someone. Yet SO and a tad of blogging landed me a book deal, which is a far more interesting outcome than anything my regular career-minded things (getting a degree and getting a job/experience) have done. By miles.

Unlike the external validation in the post (getting a degree), making stuff encompasses a much bigger pie. You aren't competing against the other people with law degrees. You're showing tangible reasons you might be useful. Really, if your field allows it, making stuff publicly is the best credential we've got.

[1] "It's all who you know?" - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5198956>

[2] As of writing the first comment is bashing the SO system, which is a typical top-comment for these sort of stories: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5210648>

<comment><USER3> Credentials are useful when done right.

My sister is about to graduate with a Art degree which most people think is fairly worthless and in some ways it is.

However, she also has her portfolio which is a good but not great indicator of quality. And even better she can point to her name in some movie credits and point out what parts of 'a major motion picture' she worked on.

Combine all three and it's a good resume. But, what credentials provide is the reason to spend more than 10 seconds on a candidate. Looking though a portfolio takes time as does understanding your job history, but credentials are FAST.

PS: Think about what the ideal credentials mean. O you won an award I recognize, well gee I don't know much about you but your probably worth that second glance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been meaning to write about this but so far my thoughts aren't fleshed out very well, so bear with me. I've been observing a trend with people that is quite interesting but I'm not sure if there's any useful conclusions to it.

I grew up in Germany, went to an okay university first, then a "good" university, became a management consultant for a while, enrolled in a relatively high end business school, went to Cal to do research and finally ended up in the Bay area and went through YC a while ago.

There were _very good_ (by some metric) people everywhere I went. I'm talking about the top of the class when I studied Math in Cologne, the 30 y/o tenured CS professor in Munich, the 22 y/o consultant who earns more than his parents etc.. Those people are often focused on achievement, grades, getting a good job, etc.

Recently, I've met a different kind of people. People that I'd consider _great_ at what they do. The people that you can ask a stupid question and they'll give you a considerate answer, the ones that do things out of an intrinsic motivation. To find out if they want to work with you, they'll sit down with you and talk, or work a problem over. I've had to write resumes all my life and then suddenly, a few years ago I stopped maintaining one and never needed it either.

I think what I'm seeing is that at the very high end in whatever field you're in, people won't care about credentials. But unfortunately, there is a middle ground on the "slightly less high end", where it is very important. Perhaps what you can do is "keep up appearances" until you pass that stage. If there's an easy way to get credentials (i.e. I don't think I benefited a lot from any degree I have, but they were easy to get and I could do other things I liked more at the same time), go for it.

 _Edit: Sorry if this lacks clarity, I wrote it in a hurry. I'll come back later to edit_

</comment><comment><USER5> "But optimizing for external validation is a dangerous trap"

You dont think this is strongly present in the startup world as well? In a number of ways I think many in the current form of the startup world are even more hungry for external validation but perhaps in a different way and from a different crowd.

"You're fighting over a fixed pie against well-credentialed peers."

This also present in startups but instead of fighting for the next rung on the latter you are battling others for a piece of a limited number of funds, eyeballs, reporter coverage, demand, etc. The point being is that there is always a bottleneck or constraint in any field entrepreneurial or not. I'd agree that for an engineer, while quite rare, startup success has the potential to enhance your career probably more than being a smashing success in corp but both are funnels in different forms.

<comment><USER6> The only validation that matters for the success of your startup is validation from your customers. And the list of things customers want is endless. Reporters, investors, bloggers, commenters on HN are second order at best, and most of the time don't really matter. There's no fixed pie you're competing for in startups.

If you don't believe me, try looking at which YC startups have the most "external validation" after demo day (a lot of blogs publish "top 10" lists, so that might be a good place to start). Then look at those same startups two years later. You'll find the correlation of "external validation" and real success is near zero.

<comment><USER7> _The only validation that matters for the success of your startup is validation from your customers. And the list of things customers want is endless. Reporters, investors, bloggers, commenters on HN are second order at best, and most of the time don't really matter. There's no fixed pie you're competing for in startups._

There's VC-istan and then there's the ideal of the customer-focused, lifestyle-business. I think you're conflating the two, which is not unreasonable because almost everyone does.

VC-istan is a system in which most people can't really play. You don't just decide to be a Founder and get sit-down pitches with Peter Thiel. You can't even get a real reason for a rejection (much less a decent chance at a timely acceptance) until you know people. It's an introduction-based guild system. That's probably inevitable and not the primary evil. The primary evil is that most of these VC-istan companies use "be a real founder some day" as a carrot they dangle in front of clueless 22-year-olds, who fail to realize that as subordinate engineers, they're getting absolutely no progress toward what they were promised.

VC-istan is a postmodern corporation, but it's effectively one company. The VCs talk to each other in all kinds of inappropriate ways, and they decide as a group whether you're hot (or not). If you're hot, you get the resources to hire 10 engineers. Or 25. If you're either lucky or a really good judge and hire good ones, you have a shot at something big.

"Founder" is just a mid-level PM position in VC-istan. If you're playing the VC-istan career game, you end up caring more about investors and press than customers. Why? Because you're a selfish careerist (you have to be) and your investors will continue to have influence over your success or failure at your next venture. Your customers won't.

VC-istan, for businesses, is get-big-or-die. You're competing for scarce resources, whether they be "eyeballs" or investor attention, because if you aren't growing at 100% per year, you're "walking dead", which means yesterday's dogshit. The postmodern corporation of VC-istan treats companies themselves as disposable (which isn't right or wrong, just a different approach).

What you're describing, where customers are king, is a different world: slow- growing businesses that are often decried as "lifestyle businesses", but actually comprise the silent majority of new economic activity. These firms might define success as growth at 20% per year instead of 150%. These businesses don't turn into billion-dollar concerns quickly, and they're hard to sell, but if you don't mind being there for 10+ years, they're probably a better option. You're not going to have to sell your soul to remain "in" with the VCs and cool kids, and you can set up shop in a low-COL location like Madison or Portland.

The difficulty in starting lifestyle businesses is that you have to put personal savings on the line, and our generation (as a whole) neither has that nor is likely to get there-- ever. You put a lot more on the line when you start one of those than you do when you take a check from a VC.

Additionally, the danger, and it's what gives VCs power, is that your lifestyle business ends up having to compete with a VC-funded machine-gunner.

<comment><USER8> >Additionally, the danger, and it's what gives VCs power, is that your lifestyle business ends up having to compete with a VC-funded machine-gunner.

Really? You fear VC?

I fear my established competitors coming down on price faster. I fear the new entrants (who are cheaper than I am) developing a better reputation. Most of all, I fear screwing it up myself; really, that's the only thing that will kill me fast.

VC funded companies are not even on the radar. If you have offices on castro street, or university ave? as far as I am concerned? you may as well be on another planet entirely. It's like companies that sell to big corporations, you know? Yeah, they can marshal huge resources... but they also have the pricing power to take absolutely tremendous margins. The people I know how to sell to? they don't even want to look at. The markets that I want to dominate? they are so small, that nobody real cares about them. (I mean, I would like the wider market, too, but if I really earn the market I want most? even though it's tiny, it's absolutely huge compared to my needs.)

Generally speaking? VC and sole proprietors go after different markets. We want different things. And we are good at different things.

>The difficulty in starting lifestyle businesses is that you have to put personal savings on the line, and our generation (as a whole) neither has that nor is likely to get there-- ever. You put a lot more on the line when you start one of those than you do when you take a check from a VC.

Maybe? either way, you are going to be putting years of your life into something that is probably going to fail. I guess with VC, you have a better chance of getting paid something, and you have a better chance of not having the debt follow you after the thing does fail, but eh, the real cost in both situations is the years of your life you spend.

Really, maybe there is something to the VC "fail fast" attitude, rather than what I describe as "the slog" - long years of living on sustenance wages, pouring the difference into your company.

If I had the last 10 years of my own life back? My slog, the time I spent pouring all my excess effort into this sort of thing? I don't know if I would do it. I might just stick with a dayjob, and get a hobby or something.

Or, maybe I'd do a VC-style "fail fast" - try an idea for a few months, then write it off as a failure if it doesn't come up during that time.

I mean, I don't have those 10 years to do over; I have the result. A bunch of servers, a bunch of contracts, a bunch of customers. A living wage, (but still like 1/3rd what google would pay me) and a bunch of contacts.

I am in a state where the only option is forward; I can't quit now or I lose 10 years of work (and a company with north of a quarter million in revenue isn't nothing... I mean, if I sold it? yeah, it's nothing. but it's a point from which I can try other things.)

So yeah. I am moving forward, (and I have made dramatic changes; other people (not VC, technical people that I know and trust) now own parts of my company. This is /huge/ - a big part of why I went into business for myself was to be my own boss, and I'm still the majority shareholder? but for the first time in a long time, I answer to other people. It is.... very different.) But, you know what? after those ten years? I am not so sure I agree with your statement that starting a business with your own resources is better than taking some idiot's money. It's certainly not easier, and worst of all, there is nothing to say "You have failed, go home, get some sleep, and go get a real job." which is the real danger. With a reasonable lifestyle business, assuming you can create value with your labour, well, you can keep going at this half- success level, really, forever. There really is such thing as being too persistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Many luminaries including Peter Thiel have been saying this but I see a little bit of a contradiction while comparing their statements to their backgrounds. Peter Thiel, for example, went to Stanford undergrad and law school. Chris Dixon has an MA from Columbia. PG has a PhD from Harvard etc...I'm also wondering if the reverse is happening in the startup world where investors see you unfavorably if you're not a 19 year old college dropout but instead have an advanced degree. In addition, like the previous poster pointed out, credentialism exists everywhere. People want to trust one source for vetting multiple candidates. This happens with YC for example. YC startups are more likely to raise money because investors trust the partners' judgement in vetting the founders.

<comment><USER10> These sorts of people have every incentive to target those more likely to be willing to serve as grist for their mill; young, idealistic, inexperienced individuals that will take the bait.

Never mind that most of them will fail, or that they're really not remotely qualified or experienced enough to produce good work in their field of interest. The amount invested is effectively pocket change, so much so that it doesn't matter if you have a 100 failures for every Dropbox.

It's a fools game to see the VC market as anything other than just another business industry, with different set or empty credentials. They use those credentials to convince 'entrepreneurs' to make themselves into a product to be sold, for pennies on the dollar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are we actually going to have data for iteration #5,678,922 of this debate, or will we just play Anecdote Poker again?

<comment><USER12> the post seems like a verbose attempt at "do what makes you happy". what precisely is being debated here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary." — Nassim Taleb

<comment><USER14> I am so using that. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > optimizing for external validation is a dangerous trap. You're fighting over > a fixed pie against well-credentialed peers. The most likely outcome is a > middle management job where you'll have little impact and never seriously > attempt to realize your ambitions.

That should be in every college freshman's welcome packet.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think one of the big draws of credentials is the ability to measure your success.

Getting into a great school or landing an important job is a lot easier to quantify than startup success.

A credentialed life might be much less exciting, but it removes a lot of doubt.

</comment><comment><USER17> The external validation isn't just outside the tech field though - the desire to work for a well-known corp isn't just to impress mom and dad.

The tech industry, to put it bluntly, has no idea how to hire people. Credentialing is _everywhere_ , even amongst startups. Do you know how many startups eyes light up when they hear about well-regarded-big-tech-corp on my resume?

I've since graduated out of big software companies, but my time spent there continues to pay dividends in the startup world today. It is the way it is, for better or for worse - but one thing is clear to me: there are perfectly rational reasons to pursue this kind of credentialing besides "so the proles who don't get it respect me".

</comment><comment><USER18> Following the Peter Thiel point, I think that the education system is currently flawed in the way that it sets up the end goal as being college. From the beginning (elementary), kids are trained to get good grades to get into a great college, but there's very little active discussion with students about careers and life in general at the early phases. Everything done at an academic level is to get into a good college, rather than learning for curiosity's sake and building something of value. I know this because I fell for it when I was in HS, and it's something that needs to change.

</comment><comment><USER12> like everything, apply a cost and reward analysis.

i was the first technical employee of a now well known, but still very much young and growing startup. i predict this credential will prove more beneficial than "software engineer, google" for a number of reasons.

incidentally, i was so young and isolated when i started working for startups that i didn't realize it was taboo or scary until it was too late. i wasn't optimizing for credentials; i just needed a job man.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think I was at the startup school event where she said this, she had a bunch of cute monster pokemon type deals to describe problems you run into with a startup, this was one of them. Engaging lady.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it a trap, though?

We, in the HN-sphere, have this irritating tendency to take outlier successes and people as indicative. Since no social-proof system on earth (university education, or investor affirmation) can identify excellence beyond the 98th percentile or so, we assume (correctly) that those systems are functionally ineffectual, and (perhaps incorrectly) conclude that people can safely tell those systems to fuck off. Most people can't. Most people need to exploit those systems, no matter how painful the level-grinding may be, in order to get food on their tables.

I think it's ridiculous that most people spend 3 times as much time proving they're capable of doing work than actually doing it. (Most corporate work is evaluative, not functional or important. See: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth- quadra...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadrant- work/)) However, very few people have the power to get out of that nonsense.</comment>


Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e26rp6qPbA

<comment><USER2> For reference, here's the paper that the speaker in this talk wrote about his quest to teach scientists how to program effectively:

 _Software Carpentry: lessons learned_

[http://f1000research.com/articles/3-62/v1](http://f1000research.com/articles/3-62/v1)</comment>


Ask HN: I want to host a HN Meetup... - <AUTHOR>

I live in a good area for HN meetups, but no one hosts them.  Since I haven't been to one I don't know what they're like.  The networking and potential for goood discussion interest me most.<p>I was curious: what location are these things usually at? Bars? Event rooms? Do people give lectures or do they just mingle? What about food?  What else should I keep in mind? <comment><USER2> "I live in a good area for HN meetups"

You want to host a meetup, so why are you shy of telling us the exact location?

<comment><AUTHOR> Research Triangle Park area. I'm on my phone so typing isn't the easiest.

<comment><USER3> RTP is well known abbreviation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are in SF area, tell me if you need help!

cheers!</comment>


The Porcupine Attack: investigating millions of junk requests - <AUTHOR> http://cloudflare.com/the-porcupine-attack-investigating-millions-of-junk-requests/ <comment><USER2> I think the link should be [https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-porcupine-attack- investigati...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-porcupine-attack- investigating-millions-of-junk-requests/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops. Can't see an obvious way to fix it. If nobody else has submitted it by tomorrow I'll do another submission.</comment></comment>


Woman Leaves Bad Online Review, the Owner Finds Out and Responds - <AUTHOR> http://themetapicture.com/woman-leaves-bad-online-review/

<comment><USER2> Wow, Are we supposed to feel sorry for the person posting the yelp review? They made themselves seem like a big baby expecting a restaurant to appease their every whim. These are very few reviews that yelp should remove, but this is definitely one of them.</comment>