Don't soak your dried beans - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-dont-soak-dried-beans-20140911-story.html <comment><USER2> Want to drop your bean preparation time down to about two minutes?

Cook them in a rice cooker. Just put them in with about 3:1 water to bean, press the button, and it turns itself off when they're done. Cooking time is still about an hour, but preparation time is a couple minutes.

I add olive oil, salt, and herbs (meat eaters can add bacon, ham, or whatever), which may add another minute to preparation time. You can make several meals worth of beans with a few minutes' effort and a dollar or two of ingredients.

I recommend the Hitachi Chime-o-matic if they still make them.

<comment><USER3> In a pressure cooker, time is under a half hour.

I live at high altitude, so no amount of time just boiling in a pot will ever soften dry black beans.

<comment><USER4> We've taken to pressure canning dried beans in pint jars. All that, plus the end product is shelf-stable so you can build up a variety of pre-cooked beans in the pantry for convenience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was under the assumption that uncooked beans contain enzyme inhibitors (which make digestion more difficult), and germinating the beans before cooking reduces the effectiveness of these inhibitors.

This article isn't nearly as scientific as I hoped it would be.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps germinating the beans also triggers a process similar to malting of barley for beer making. It breaks down some complex sugars, making them easier to ferment, and perhaps easier to digest as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like to soak beans for over 24 hours in order to let them start to ferment (lactobacillus, not yeast) a little. It can be tricky to get the right timing, but I think that the slight tang is quite tasty.

<comment> dj-wonk Speaking of bacteria and beans, if you eat sprouts (uncooked), you might want to look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_sprout#Bacterial_infectio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_sprout#Bacterial_infection)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought it's a safety issue. Not sure which type but one of the beans definitely have to be soaked.

<comment><USER9> Kidney beans should _definitely_ be soaked prior to cooking. The FDA recommends soaking dry kidney beans for 5 hours then cooking them for half an hour to dissolve the toxin they contain. It takes a surprisingly low number of beans to induce the toxicity, as well.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaseolus_vulgaris#Toxicity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaseolus_vulgaris#Toxicity)

<comment><USER10> The information in that wikipedia article seems incomplete or contradictory. It says that boiling for 10m degrades the toxin. If that's the case, why is cold soaking for 5h necessary?

<comment><USER9> 10 minutes of boiling for regular kidney beans will degrade the toxin. If they're dried, however, you need to soak them in order to rehydrate them.

"ten minutes at boiling point (100°C, 212°F) are sufficient to degrade the toxin. For dry beans... soak at least 5 hours."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I make really delicious slow cooker black beans every Sunday, following this recipe I found online:

[http://cafejohnsonia.com/2013/02/how-to-slow-cooker-black- be...](http://cafejohnsonia.com/2013/02/how-to-slow-cooker-black-beans.html)

She recommends skipping the soak and I haven't noticed any problems yet!

<comment><USER12> It says they only last a week in the freezer?? I'd think they'd last at least a month or two, no?

<comment><USER13> I think it was just poorly worded and the one week timing would be if you stored them in the fridge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I do agree that unsoaked beans are more flavorful, but I disagree with the assertion that "soaking does absolutely nothing to reduce the gas-producing properties of beans". I've eaten them both ways for years, and in my experience, unsoaked beans definitely produce more flatulence. The exception to that is pressure-cooking. Pressure-cooked unsoaked beans do not seem to produce any more flatulence than soaked. I'm not sure the scientific reason for that.

<comment><USER15> I know this is anecdotal but yeah, I have been eating pressure-cooked beans for 30 years now and I don't even recall the last time I had gases because of beans. I don't even get why people have problems with beans in the first place. I assume it is only because pressure cookers are not common in some countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Everyone here is mentioning the "bean flatulence" effect that soaking apparently prevents. Adding my two cents: if you take the article's advice specifically for red kidney beans, you'll have bigger problems than gas.

[http://www.foodreference.com/html/artredkidneybeanpoisoning....](http://www.foodreference.com/html/artredkidneybeanpoisoning.html)

Nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER17> Title is misleading, as the article recommends not soaking beans in _cold_ water.

Those of us who cover the dry beans in water, bring to a boil, drain, soak in warm water, drain again, then cook as required by the recipe are vindicated later in the article. That's when it mentions that the fermentable oligosaccharides responsible for bean-related flatus are largely removed by that method.

If you're going to soak uncooked beans in water cooler than pasteurization temperature for any length of time, it would be wise to inoculate your water with a safe fermentation bacterium, such as by adding a blob of yogurt. That will reduce the amount of _internal_ fermentation that happens later, and if you opt to sprout the beans instead of cooking them, the safe bacteria may be able to outcompete any pathogenic bacteria that may have remained on the surface of the dry beans.

</comment><comment><USER18> For larger beans like kidneys, I disagree. But for split lentils, various dals, navy beans, etc, you can get away with not soaking them. One thing I have found (and Cooks Illustrated concurs) is that you should salt both the soaking water and the cooking water.

</comment><comment><USER19> Here's a paper on PubMed that found soaking reduces oligosaccharide content (that's what gets eaten by your intestinal flora to produce flatunelence) but not nutritional content: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12489819](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12489819)

Eliminating sugars and starches likely impacts both the texture and flavor, however. Likely negatively.

</comment><comment><USER20> >Don't soak your dried beans! Now even the cool kids agree

Apparently socks and sandals are in fashion this year. Is this a phase the cool kids are going through or is it science?

Including heinz five bean, I think I've had 8-10 different beans in the last year. Which bean is this article so scientifically talking about.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am genuinely curious, why is this post on Hackernews' front page? Yes I know this type of comment is typically frowned upon (and will happily accept the downvotes), but seriously--a story about cooking beans with some vague science and anecdotes?

<comment><USER22> It's ironic that something named "Hacker News" focuses so much on rationalism & observable "proofs".

This article seems to be in the spirit of a Hacker. Vague science & anecdotes on something that seems to work is a pathway to discoveries & innovations.

<comment><USER23> There's a difference between hacking and hand waving. One of them generally has some empirical evidence to present afterwards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I thought the reason to soak the beans was not for texture or flavor, but to make the easier to digest. Ya know, that whole 'beans beans are good for your heart' thing?

</comment><comment><USER25> I've cooked beans almost every day for years and my experiences are not at all in line with what the amateur in this article thinks he has discovered.

<comment><USER26> Can you elaborate? How do you cook your beans?

<comment><USER15> I also read "amateur" all over the article. In Brazil people have been cooking beans for centuries and honestly I cannot even understand his doubts or questions. In the past we used to soak beans overnight just because otherwise they would take ages to cook in regular pots (and some people still do that when they only have regular pots to cook with). But that was it, just to speed things up. No (real) difference in flavor, digestion etc.

Nearly every house in Brazil has a pressure cooker. Even in favelas everybody has one. I would say 90% of them were bought just to cook beans every other day. The basic brazilian way is to simply cook the beans in the pressure cooker with nothing else but water. Then we it reaches the biting point you want (between 20 and 40 minutes, depending on the beans) you take a big spoon of that, smash it in another pan with garlic and some chopped onions and oil and then put it back into the cooker, plus salt to taste. And that is it. Nothing more.

If the whole soaking or cooking debate was real, specially considering the gas issue he mentions, I think Brazil would be the biggest polluter of methane in the world by the way.

EDIT: grammar

<comment><USER15> Seems that indeed we are the biggest polluter of methane in the world, unless I am getting this wrong: [http://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/index/bean- consumptio...](http://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/index/bean-consumption- per-capita)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Please do not spread this incorrect information!

The reason you soak beans is not to improve the flavor. It is to dissolve the flavorless and indigestible sugars that give you massive bean-gas when you eat them. If you soak beans well before cooking -- then change the water and cook them -- then change the water again and rinse them well before finishing the cooking process -- you will have a tasty, nutritious treat that doesn't make your ass explode!

That's right! You can have totally fart-free beans. Only most restaurants and chefs are totally oblivious to this fact, so you can't really trust prepared beans any time you go out. There should be a certified-fart-free label for the restaurants that really know what's up.

<comment><USER28> I've also always heard that, but isn't that one of the myths that the article supposedly disproved?

<comment><USER14> I don't think the article disproved it. In my experience, soaking does definitely reduce the flatulence effects.

<comment><USER28> True, it didn't disprove it. I was merely going based on the quote, "...suffice it to say that even with almost all of the alpha-galactosides gone, there wasn't a consistent marked decrease in human flatulence." They went on to say: "We reduced the alpha-galactoside content by 90% but we haven't done anything to dietary fiber," says Gray, "and dietary fiber produces similar effects."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blackhat 2010 Videos - <AUTHOR> http://zitstif.no-ip.org/?p=425

<comment><USER2> The site seems to have melted down, but based on the Google cache, all of the videos linked are already available from <http://blackhat.com/html/bh- us-10/bh-us-10-archives.html>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I had to restart my server. It's back up. :-)</comment>


Ask HN: Can you control your dreams? - <AUTHOR> I've read about lucid dreams, and several ways to achieve this state. However I wanted to know if any of you guys was able to fully control your dreams, every night.<p>Can you just go to sleep and then choose what you want to dream this night? <comment><USER2> I spent some time practicing lucid dreaming. I wasn't overly successful, but I was able to become aware in a double-digit number of dreams.

Usually that resulted in me waking up very shortly after becoming aware.

A handful of times I was able to hang on to the dream for a while and do what I wanted, more-or-less.

I should spent more time with it, but I haven't done it in a few years now.

</comment><comment><USER3> I experimented with lucid dreaming many years ago and found it to be quite intriguing. I highly recommend trying it.

It took a few months of practice to be able to do it on demand. For me that meant keeping a dream journal by my bed and diligently writing in it every time I woke up.

The trick I used to transfer control of the dream to my conscious mind was to "touch my nose"; I had to keep reminding myself while conscious to do so.

I eventually stopped doing it because oddly enough I started feeling not as rested as I would have liked after active dreaming.

It was not so much the case that I could choose what I would dream, though I suppose that might be possible. It was more like I would be in a dream setting determined by my subconscious mind and then I would take control and do whatever I wanted-- fly, use magic, take the story in a new direction, whatever. But it was always clear that I was dreaming.</comment>


Obama close to announcing measures to punish Russia for election interference - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-white-house-is-scrambling-for-a-way-to-punish-russian-hackers-via-sanctions/2016/12/27/0eee2fdc-c58f-11e6-85b5-76616a33048d_story.html?utm_term=.36332116492b <comment><USER2> Punish Russia??

How is this achievable? Russia is not a tiny third world country. It's a huge nth world one. Its oligarchy/government couldn't care less about any additional inconvenience applied to the general population. People are cynical beyond the touch point of any such measures.

Also, how about attempt to identify and correct the results of the interference?

This punishment business sounds like wagging the dog -- not doing anything that matters, just populistic noise.

Apologies if this sounds harsh, had to get it off my chest.

<comment><USER3> Well, if common people who are struggling, get continually reminded of the obscene wealth the oligarchs and Putin have accumulated at their expense, they may not be so complacent about how the country is run.

<comment><USER4> Just like what happened in Cuba, North Korea, Iraq and Iran then?

Sanctions achieve nothing except making the US hated around the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> what is the evidence for russian government hacking ?

edit: [https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/heres-the-public- evidenc...](https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/heres-the-public-evidence- russia-hacked-the-dnc-its-not-enough/)

The fbi and even lynch said there was no evidence. Everything is so vague and speculative, its too similar to the iraq has wmds fake news.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. I also wonder what public opinion would be if MSM headlines read "US planning to retaliate against Russia for exposing the truth in US politics".

There are so many ironies here. The US has been involved in interfering and over throwing governments for decades. The public should not be upset that the truth was exposed, but rather should be calling for more truth to be exposed. Let's expose the Republican corruption as well.

<comment><USER7> >The public should not be upset that the truth was exposed, but rather should be calling for more truth to be exposed.

Perhaps - but having the "truth" be "exposed" by a foreign government undermining your electoral process and waging a propaganda campaign on behalf of one party exclusively is not something the public should be calling for. The interests being served by that exposure will always be those of their government, and not your own, and certainly not "the truth" in any objective sense.

Otherwise, one could just as well say that the governments the US has interfered with ought to be grateful that we "exposed the truth" in their case as well.

>Let's expose the Republican corruption as well.

You mean, let's hope it's in the national interests of foreign governments to expose Republican corruption, and that they choose to be honest about doing so.

There are two separate issues here, which often seem to be conflated for political purposes, or implied to be in conflict - the value of the integrity of the electoral process and the value of an informed electorate.

If we presume that the only way to achieve the former is to destroy the latter, then we're implicitly conceding the legitimacy of our own state.

<comment><USER8> >Perhaps - but having the "truth" be "exposed" by a foreign government undermining your electoral process and waging a propaganda campaign is not something the public should be calling for

I can't imagine any situation whereby uncovering the truth undermines democracy.

That sounds distinctly Orwellian, in fact.

<comment><USER7> >I can't imagine any situation whereby uncovering the truth undermines democracy.

Can you imagine a situation in which the truth uncovered by a foreign government or some unaccountable agency like Wikileaks is not, in fact, actually true? Or where, as with Wikileaks, the selective exposure of some truths and withholding of others is meant to serve an explicit political purpose and to bias, rather than inform, the electorate?

<comment><USER8> >Can you imagine a situation in which the truth uncovered by a foreign government or some unaccountable agency like Wikileaks is not, in fact, actually true?

Yes. All that would achieve would be to undermine wikileaks' credibility.

They literally would just have to do it once and every leak subsequent to that would be suspect.

The main reason why wikileaks _has_ had such an effect is because they haven't yet released any lies.

>Or where, as with Wikileaks, the selective exposure of some truths and withholding of others is meant to serve an explicit political purpose and to bias, rather than inform, the electorate?

If you were the subject of such leaks you could offset this problem by releasing the rest of the information to the media rendering its selectivity pointless.

The only way selective exposure as a means of propaganda works is if you _actually wield a large degree of influence or control_ over the media (which _does_ undermine democracy) and can 'bury' stories.

The DNC can make a claim to that (CNN, CBS, Viacom) as can the RNC (Fox) but wikileaks doesn't wield any influence over those corporations.

<comment><USER7> >Yes. All that would achieve would be to undermine wikileaks' credibility.

You're assuming that the accuracy of the information Wikileaks releases is crucial to its influence or credibility, but I disagree. A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can put on its shoes, after all.

I submit that Wikileaks is more influential because of political bias than it is because of objectivity.

>I don't doubt that the mainstream media would hammer home the point that they released lies in the past from that point onward.

Many Americans have been trained to mistrust the mainstream media and to assume they are biased, corrupt and bought by corporate and political interests.

People who would be susceptible to political influence from sources like Wikileaks would likely also reject the credibility of the mainstream media, so the intended effect of influencing _partisans_ wouldn't really be countered by MSM rebuttals.

The question is whether the set of such people is large enough to actually influence an election.

>If you were the subject of such leaks you could offset this problem by releasing the rest of the information rendering its selectivity pointless.

Yes ... and your releases wouldn't be believed, because many people have been trained to assume that politicians are corrupt and that their denials regarding accusations of scandal are lies.

Also, guaranteeing that anyone who leaks inaccurate information will be answered with a leak of accurate information probably doesn't set a good precedent regarding the integrity of classified material.

>The only way selective exposure as a means of propaganda works is if you actually wield a large degree of influence or control in the media.

I present to you the recent US Presidential election in rebuttal, and argue that selective exposure as a means of propaganda worked quite well in that case. Not because of Wikileaks' influence over the media, but because of their influence over social media and the cynicism of the electorate.

<comment><USER8> >You're assuming that the accuracy of the information Wikileaks releases is crucial to its influence or credibility

It did real harm to Dan Rather and CBS's credibility when they did it:

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

Wikileaks' position is even more precarious than theirs since unlike CBS they own no distribution channels. If the mainstream media choose to ignore them then they're toast.

>I submit that Wikileaks is more influential because of political bias

This doesn't even make any sense: the average Trump voter and Assange do not see eye to eye.

>Many Americans have been trained to mistrust the mainstream media

They've got plenty of reason to mistrust them but that doesn't always stop the truth from being believed.

What has trained them to mistrust the mainstream media in any case, is lies. If they care about that (and all evidence points to the contrary), they can start by lying less.

>People who would be susceptible to political influence from sources like Wikileaks would likely also reject the credibility of the mainstream media, so the intended effect of influencing partisans

Partisans don't decide elections and the stupidest part of this post-election hand wringing has been the complaints about the idiocies they believe and how they were influenced.

What killed this election for Hillary was low turnout by non-partisans, not Trump.

>assume they are biased, corrupt and bought by corporate and political interests.

No need to assume. Plenty of evidence for this.

>Yes ... and your releases wouldn't be believed

I think if the DNC released their own emails they wouldn't have much trouble getting people to believe that they're real.

If they released _actual evidence_ about Russian hacking then likewise.

>many people have been trained to assume that politicians are corrupt and that their denials regarding accusations of scandal are lies.

Again, there's no real need to 'train' people for this because it's self evident and relatively more truthful and scandal free politicians (e.g. Sanders) _do_ have a greater tendency to be believed.

>I present to you the recent US Presidential election in rebuttal, and argue that selective exposure as a means of propaganda worked quite well in that case.

I present to you Hillary Clinton: the most compromised, scandal ridden politician that the DNC could possibly run and the only person who, under the microscope of wikileaks, could actually end up making Trump look good.

If Sanders was the nominee Wikileaks wouldn't have had anything of substance to leak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only retaliation I can think of that would be both proportionate and ethical would be to hack secret data of the Russian leadership and release at least part of it to the world public. The Russian government is accused of two things: hacking and creating fake news. Assuming that the allegations are correct, a perfectly mirrored response would include hacking and fake news. However, it would be unethical for America to create anti-Russian government fake news of its own. So the only part of a mirrored response that would be appropriate is hacking followed by an at least partial public release of the hacked data.

<comment><USER3> No need to create fake news, the corruption in Russia is insane, it goes straight to the top, involving vast amounts of public money. Putin's net worth may even be in the 100's of billions ([http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/02/15/putins-net- wort...](http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/02/15/putins-net-worth- is-200-billion-says-russias-once-largest-foreigner-investor/)).

Life is tough for the man on the street in Russia, they wouldn't be happy knowing the entire government is profiteering at their expense.

All the US would need to do is flood vkontakte, news comment boards etc, with repeated facts of corruption, as Russia has been doing many years now in the West.

<comment><USER10> The poorman does not need someone to teach him he is getting screwed

<comment><USER3> Russians are aware of corruption at the local level, but not that of the highest level, nor its scale.

They might tolerate it if they themselves were getting better off, a social contract of sorts. But if people are worse off, and they know it's at least partly due to oligarchs and Putin enriching themselves, at their expense, Putin may find his grip over the people isn't as ironclad as he may think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have been saying this since pre-election-- the way this has been portrayed in the media as well as other coverage of politics, ect leads me to believe that they will throw out the election results.

I dont know what will happen after, but this election has been framed as "tampered" and the language and posturing in all media does seem indicative of creating a narrative that will over turn the results

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure how that is legally possible at this point. After the electoral college cast their vote, does the outgoing president have any sort of authority on this?

<comment><USER13> Until Trump takes the oath of office at the inauguration on January 20, 2017, Obama is the US President.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The first thing they could to do to punish Russia is to release actual evidence of their election tampering instead of just talking about it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Thinks about this for a moment. The US cant be obvious about where their hacks originate from, which means the US will be hacking other peoples computers, non-Russian if you like, in order to attack Russian targets whilst covering their trail. So in a way, if you support this game of rhetoric even though the tech companies like Google & Facebook actually help fuel your bias which in turn manipulates your actions, then go ahead and put your hand up to be hacked by the US. I'm sure they will oblige.

</comment><comment><USER15> > A year later, Xi reached an agreement with Obama that his country would stop > commercial cyberspying. (Feng Li/Getty Images)

But the NSA continued commercial cyberspying against Petrobras. These people are not to be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER16> I hear it's going to be a _very_ stern lecture.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do iOS/Android Dictionary Apps get their Data? - <AUTHOR>

There are plentiful of Dictionary apps on iOS/Android, to name a few :- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.nghs.android.dictionnaires&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bravolol.bravolang.englishchinesecdictionary&feature=search_result https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.movinapp.dict.enes.free&feature=search_result https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sedevelop.dict.enesen.free&feature=search_result<p>Where do they get the dictionary data to make those apps? Do they license them from somewhere or there's an open available data? <comment><USER2> [http://www.wiktionary.org/](http://www.wiktionary.org/) Data available under CC-BY SA license

<comment><AUTHOR> data needs to be converted to sql/sqlite?</comment></comment>


Open-source Dropbox alternative powered by Git - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bazaarlabs/gitdocs

<comment><USER2> Some mention of hosting this on GitHub and BitBucket here. I can't imagine Git-As-A-Service providers would be thrilled with this kind of application, it will completely hammer their services compared to the occasional commits and pulls that occur with a code base.

It will probably update their conditions if they don't already preclude it. Or maybe they will embrace it with a premium pricing plan. I certainly wouldn't count on hosting this against BitBucket's free plan.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ever try committing a 100meg file into git? 100% CPU for 10s of seconds. Game over.

Git is a great idea for this, but in practice it performs terribly.

<comment><USER4> I have this same problem with mercurial. Is there a better alternative for source control of large files?

<comment><USER3> I hear perforce is the go to solution for people who really need this. Or dedicated media asset management solutions.

<comment><USER5> Perforce is expensive ($740 per user) but I can't imagine using anything else. Just about every major game studio uses it to the best of my knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just curious - why are there so many Dropbox alternative posting lately? Is re-doing an already elegant solution really a top priority for people? I haven't looked at this post at all (so I'm not trying to make any judgement on it), I'm just curious as to why so many people are interested in making Dropbox alternatives lately.

<comment><USER7> I'd assume the short version is that Dropbox:

1) Isn't free

2) Is accessible to $stateAuthority if they come knocking

3) Makes your data access reliant on a third party who may or may not be up in an emergency or:

4) Could disappear at any time and take your data with them

So basically, the same problems that affect every cloud solution provider ever.

<comment><USER8> I'd be interested in which `free` you are talking about. Beer or speech (or both)?

Because for me, the prime reason I refuse to use Dropbox[1] is that it's unfree software as per the speech definition. I am _not_ running software on my computer that needs internet access and transmits files when I can not verify what this program does, in addition to my personal policy of reducing my usage of unfree software to an absolute, unavoidable minimum.

[1] I'm studying CS and it's really annoying how ubiquitous Dropbox has become among the student crowds. I stopped counting after about the first three dozen attempts of people trying to get me to use Dropbox.

<comment><USER7> Mostly as in beer. You have to cough up cash to get a respectable quota.

Personally, I think you're being rather paranoid on the whole free software (as in speech) thing, but hey, whatever works for you :)

<comment><USER9> 18.2GB for free isn't enough?

I guess not when companies like box.net are giving out 50GB for free. =/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just want to add a quick comment about our goals for gitdocs. Obviously this was never intended to be a 'dropbox-killer', in fact at Miso we actually use both. Dropbox for videos, large binary files, business and legal files.

Instead we use gitdocs for storing our "docs": Task lists, wiki, planning, collaborative design, note taking, code snippets et al. And the gitdocs web front-end (<http://imgur.com/eaTTY>) is optimized for that since it renders wiki pages (formatted markdown/textile), has full code syntax highlighting, file search, revision history and a rich text editor.

</comment><comment><USER11> Dropbox wins on UX, which is where FOSS fails almost every time. A quick way to know whether such projects will fail: if they mention anything about the technologies used. Making it obvious to use and "just work" is what is needed.

Too bad that is actually the hard part.

<comment><USER12> Look at Sparkleshare's website and see what you think?

<comment><USER13> The problem is setting up the Git server. Even if you use Github - and then you have to pay if you don't want your files open to the public - creating the repo, adding the keys, understanding what they have to put in the Address field, etc is still extremely difficult with the knowledge (and patience) of the average person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For synchronization of your personal files, check out Unison.

<http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/>

<comment><USER15> Seconded - I've used Unison to sync across PCs and between different OSs for many many years; it just works

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not really an alternative till it supports clients for all sorts of platforms and mobile devices IMHO

<comment><USER17> So, Windows support then? And most mobile devices will be able to access the files through the browser, no need for a client to do that, like with Dropbox.

I love the idea and the hackyness over it all. Love it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's neat because it can be used on top of git without any additional effort but it'd be more interesting to see something that leverages git's server-side post-push hook to notify the other clients about changes. gitdocs, depending on the polling interval, either has an increased probability of causing merge conflicts or does a crazy amount of git pulls.

<comment><USER19> Actually, it uses file system events so the pushes occur instantly. However, the pulls are done with polling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The real problem with this is that Git is awful at versioning binary / large files.

</comment><comment><USER21> The readme suggests to use bitbucket.org which I didn't realise had _unlimited_ storage, even on the free plan for up to 5 users?

So if the CPU issue can be resolved for committing large files, could it be used as a backup for your warez etc?

</comment><comment><USER22> Related: <http://sparkleshare.org/>

</comment><comment><USER23> I think Lipsync - <https://github.com/philcryer/lipsync> \- might be better, Git isn't great for lots of large binary files.

</comment><comment><USER24> A comparable alternative is never going to free for everyone. Someone has to pay the Amazon fees for S3 use. Isn't it true that the few Dropbox users who do pay for it support all the ones who do not?

</comment><comment><USER25> Hah, I've done something similar to this, except it uses SVN. Cross platform too! But you know what sucked? Performance. SVN is slooowwwww when it came to binary files.

You can check it out here.

</comment><comment><USER26> This was posted here a few weeks ago, but at the time it was Mac-only. Now it works on Mac, Linux, and Windows. I assume this is the reason for the re-post.

</comment><comment><USER27> It reminds me again that Dropbox is hard to beat.

</comment><comment><USER28> I had a same idea right after dropbox but I lost the thought about the clients for all popular OS.</comment>


NET core vs. JVM - <AUTHOR> https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/faster/csharp.html <comment><USER2> Was there something in particular you found interesting?</comment>


Peugeot EX1 Now Holds The Electric Car Lap Record At Nurburgring - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmocrazed.com/2011/05/peugeot-ex1-now-holds-the-electric-car-lap-record-at-nurburgring/

<comment><USER2> More like the electric go-kart.</comment>


Good startup ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-ridiculous-startup-ideas-which-eventually-became-successful

<comment><USER2> great share!</comment>


You Won't Believe My Morning - <AUTHOR> https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/03/my-morning.html <comment><USER2> I didn't quite get the moral of the story.

Can someone explain to me frankly what he meant.?

<comment><USER3> "Horton Hears a Who"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is quite entertaining and worth a read.

</comment><comment><USER5> This was cool until it became your typical vapid New Age "why can't we all just get along" nonsense. I get enough of that from every corporate media source our culture bombards us with.

>your world has been advancing exponentially in technology but remaining stagnant in wisdom. You're rapidly gaining tremendous powers but still behaving like short-sighted primates. The voice of wisdom is there, but it's being trampled over by political parties, religions, and nations too mired in blind conflict to lift their heads up and see the bigger picture."

<comment><USER6> Yeah I got that vibe too. The world is a dark and scary place and preaching to the choir like this doesn't do anything to help.</comment></comment>


Goole removed access to older Street View images - <AUTHOR> Now you cant access older street view images in Google Maps.<p>On the top left corner was a dropdown to select a older version of the current location. Now Google removed this functionality. <comment><USER2> untrue. I see the street view history there</comment>


Ask YC: Startup Capital. How much do you need? - <AUTHOR>

Me and two friends are planning to do a startup next summer in Amsterdam. At first we figured that we would all put in E10,000 (=$14,700). However, due to changed circumstances, we're now considering E6,000 (=$8760) p.p. Would this be enough to start with? As a side question: how much would a team need in SV?<p>NB Living expenses will amount to about E800 (=$1168) p.p./month. So E6,000 should keep us alive for at least half a year (given no other costs of course). <comment><USER2> If you like ramen you could probably live off $1200/mo in SV.

I do :)</comment>


GitHub Open Sources Its Atom Text Editor - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/06/github-open-sources-its-atom-text-editor/

<comment><USER2> This is already on the front page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7704859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7704859)</comment>


Any hackers looking for Technical challenges and also be a co-founder? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I am looking for two strong (not physically though ;) cofounders, who are available and interested in taking up challenges. I'm not expecting anyone to be a Guru, just with some varied web app development experience, motivated, committed and excited at the prospects of implementing my webapp idea.
Problem statement:
At present, web is ruled by Social Networking which is on Rage everywhere. I am developing a personal web-app (as personal as email) which is complete  opposite of this and I feel this will also soon catchup as people have to live with both - Personal and social. App is more related with personal tracking and improvement. "This webapp is an Event Recording mechanism which stores events that are happening in Ones life. user has to log those events. Events can be good or bad that happen to every one." More about the app once you evince interest and mail me. Obviously I am holding the many punch-lines till the formation of team.
Though my webapp is intended as visually rich personal logger, it also targets social networking by sharing ones personal event logs. So, it is going to be a disruptive app.  I am completely confident about this app. This web-app has a WOW factor in it and is definitely going to be successful, if it has right mix of founding hackers with right attitude. Everyone partnering in this project, will have a win-win situation(EQUITY) as I see good monetizing power for this webapp. I don't want someone with just experience, I want someone who has as much of a passion for the idea as I have.I would like to hear any feedback about this idea.
I am also aspiring for winter YC2011 or atleast Summer YC2012.If you are interested, please mail me with your phone number and other details. I will personally call you and we will work out a deal. I know you hackers are already busy with your own ideas. I need some one who wants to take up more challenges and be committed till we taste success.  I feel with 2 or 3 sound hackers, this webapp can be realized in 4 to 5 months. If you have friends looking to do a startup please pass this along.
Thanks alot for your time.
My Email: techeye101 [at] gmail [dot] com <comment><AUTHOR> As this webapp is gonna be visually rich I am expecting hackers who are strong in Image/Video handling and presentations like QWIKI,(CSS3 ) animations for Graphical representations of data. Guys, drop a mail and lets discuss..its gonna be pretty challenging :)</comment>


The Secret Histories of Those @#$%ing Computer Symbols - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/computer-symbols-history/

<comment><USER2> Single page: [http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/computer-symbols- hist...](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/computer-symbols- history/all/1)

<comment><USER3> Further, it was submitted 5 hours before this item:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610309>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first time you can find the @ is from a 1448 but it was used as a measure , meaning 1/4 of a quintal (an ancient spanish weight measure) . (In spanish with photos of ancient @'s) [http://tejiendoelmundo.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/la- curiosa-h...](http://tejiendoelmundo.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/la-curiosa- historia-del-simbolo-de-la-arroba/) (In french) <http://hapax.qc.ca/Pourquoi_arrobe_dans_10646.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> The beachball was present in NeXTStep, there's no mystery over where Apple got it!</comment>


The very strange writings of Putin's new chief of staff - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-very-strange-writings-of-putins-new-chief-of-staff?intcid=mod-most-popular <comment><USER2> Not that strange if you are familiar with Vernasky.and other Russian scientists. Holistic big picture thinking is characteristic of Russian education.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well it looks like at least he's found a successor he can truly count on.</comment>


Show HN: Silk, a profiling tool for Django - <AUTHOR> http://mtford.co.uk/blog/2/ <comment><USER2> Probably not a good idea to keep your profiler open to the world as long as you allow reading from arbitrary files. After a bit of fiddling around I was able to read your secret key from the settings file. It starts with 'es!b3'. And your soundcloud password. Sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice... I did make an attempt to filter out sensitive stuff but clearly did a bad job. Thanks for letting me know. I will eventually introduce a demo app rather than my own site.

<comment><USER2> I've sent you an email with the precise steps to reproduce it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very cool, this seems much nicer than using hotshot to profile Django.

I'm a little confused by this page though: [http://mtford.co.uk/silk/request/1907/profiling/](http://mtford.co.uk/silk/request/1907/profiling/). Why is wrapped_target listed so many times for a single blog post query? Is there a hierarchy to the profile calls that's not shown? Oh, does it go deepest level to highest level calls?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats a great question... that def shouldn't be there. render_to_response is actually dynamically profiled i.e. the decorator is applied at runtime via configuration in settings.py. This looks like its probably a bug with that. Cheers, will look into it

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks very interesting! We currently use django debug toolbar for profiling, which seems to have a lot of overlap. I like how Silk stores the profiles of multiple requests - that seems to be a nice differentiator. What else? Thanks for the awesome contribution to the Django community!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep django-toolbar is great! My aim with this was, like you said, to provide the history of multiple requests, but also to provide finer-grained profiling with the decorator and context manager. Not only do they capture execution time but they also capture the queries that were executed whilst they were active. The aim was extra visibility all round really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really great tool, massive fan, made some good use of it in the ~15 hours since I installed it yesterday evening. Are you aware it seems to bork the admin interface?

If, after installing Silk, I use admin to update a record, I get "You cannot access body after reading from request's data stream" \- this applies across all admin models and pages. It's not really that big a deal, as I rarely use the admin pages now, but it might have knock-on effects that I haven't seen yet. (Commenting out Silk in the installed apps list clears the problem up straight away.)

I'll ping you an email with the stack trace.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks really nice.

Have you thought that instead of sending the results to elasticsearch? Instead of using something like newrelic this could take it's place..

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not a bad idea, it would probably be more natural than the rigid filters that are currently in place for the requests and profiles. As far as having this running in prod I've only really thought of siphoning off the results to celery or something similar to avoid impacting response time, but a spray and pray at Elasticsearch would work just as well.

What's nice about the current setup is that it takes very little effort to get up and running but I suppose could make that configurable...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wrote [https://github.com/rory/django-sql- inspector](https://github.com/rory/django-sql-inspector) a django app to profile SQL queries done in multiple pages, including showing stack trace of where it's being called. You can find out which function(s) are responsible for long SQL requests.

</comment><comment><USER8> What is the overhead (roughly) for this guy? I do absolutely _love_ the idea of using elasticsearch for this instead of a traditional database.

Using celery or django-rq to delay the processing also seems reasonable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tbh, probably fairly bad atm. I haven't done anything empirical but atm Silk will create a record for every SQL query executed during the request/response cycle effectively doubling the number of queries. Not only that but it also saves down any non-binary HTTP body to a TextField, and this isn't yet configurable.

I think the Elasticsearch/Celery option is a good shout if this were to ever be used in production. Celery would help with the issue of response time but it wouldn't solve the load impact on the database (although I guess could also configure a different SQL database in Django).

I will certainly do some investigation into this at some point :)

<comment><USER9> StatsD might be better since you are just recording datapoints + text field I'm assuming.

[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python- statsd](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-statsd)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds interesting... i'll take a look. The fact that its UDP would be helpful in avoiding the need for a dependency on celery/message queues.

What's it like in terms of getting the data back out?

<comment><USER9> You can write your plugin for the back end to dump it. It defaults to graphite which would be familiar enough I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> After reading through this intro, it isn't clear to me if I can use the decorator or context manager to profile code outside the request/response cycle.

Any ideas if that's the case?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at the moment. Silk doesn't actually save anything down until right at the end of the cycle i.e. in process_response of the middleware. Had to do this to avoid issues with atomic transactions. I certainly don't mind adding this as a feature if people would find that useful - perhaps by detecting that no request is in process and then commiting profile data on the fly if that's the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For people interested in production monitoring I've created [https://appenlight.com](https://appenlight.com) \- and our python middleware will integrate and start timing django applications without any code changes required (except 3 lines to load middleware itself).

@mtford great job!

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for posting this! Could you add a download link somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure just added this to the intro. You can download via [https://github.com/mtford90/silk/releases](https://github.com/mtford90/silk/releases) or install through pip install django-silk

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> absolutely great tool!</comment>


Worlds best conversational chat bot doesn't use any Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/MitsukuChatbot/status/1307303755453542401 <comment><USER2> Is there a standardized way to measure the performance level of chatbots? I.e. how does verifying claims of 'the best' work?

<comment><USER3> There is not.

Especially if you think about what you want to measure you see the difficulty: should it pass as human? should it help you? should it entertain you?</comment></comment>


Google explains the Pixel 2s super stable video recording - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/12/google-explains-the-pixel-2s-super-stable-video-recording/ <comment><USER2> I want google to explain what happened with their Pixel 2 launch</comment>


Hacker 'Weev' Sends SoundCloud Message From Prison - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/04/15/weev-soundcloud-message/

<comment><USER2> I will hand it to Weev, even though he's spending 41 months in a jail cell he's still trolling people this time it's the justice system. Pretty clever how his friend setup an anonymous PBX service for Weev to record and upload to Soundcloud via a phone call. Once they revoke or monitor his calls he'll have to resort to writing a good old fashioned letter and then someone scanning it and uploading it somewhere.</comment>


HN flaw:  no discussions with naive computer users. - <AUTHOR>

How can one build a product that appeals to a huge market without being familiar with what naive computer users want and can understand?<p>Shouldn't HN have discussions involving naive computer users? <comment><USER2> There are many many places to have discussions with naive computer users; HN is one of the few places where you can have a discussion whose participants are likely to _not_ be naive, and that is where a large part of its value comes from.

In order for HN to have discussions with naive users, it would require frequent visits by naive users, which would be the end of HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> You could have a section of the site devoted to those sorts of discussions.

<comment><USER3> Why would they come here? Why would they come back?

<comment><AUTHOR> They could have an impact on the sorts of products that get built.

<comment><USER3> What have you done to change in-design products, with no benefit to yourself? Remember that we're talking about non-techies, who aren't excited by the latest, shiniest thing around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Short answer: no, for reasons stated by others.

Longer answer: naive in what way? Yesterday I asked a friend to preview my app when it was ready. She's probably an example of what you had in mind: mid-40's Facebook-using iPhone owner who threw her last computer out 10 years ago. But she's not at all naive in the context of the application: as the office manager for a small company she's the _perfect_ type of person to evaluate it.

The problem with the question is that non-computer experts (which I expect is what you mean by naive) don't form a useful enough group by themselves. What you need is to _understand_ your market and then ask people in that market how the app should work, show them examples of product, etc. and then you can get real insight.

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems likely that most HN users are familiar with naive computer users, whether at work or as the tech guru for friends and family, and as such are painfully aware of what they can understand. What they want is another question and is too vague to be of much use without specifics. Naive users can also be impaired users (intoxicated or half-asleep) too. Drink up, we have to do usability tests later.</comment>


The myth of the "right tool for the job" - <AUTHOR> https://tqdev.com/2017-the-myth-of-the-right-tool-for-the-job <comment><USER2> This is a great article, we've just been discussing the same thing in our podcast. We're chatting to an engineering Manager about constantly learning new languages and skills to stay ahead of the game and adapt to the ever changing coding languages.

Some great insights on Erlang and objected orientated programming.

[http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/coding-languages- leader...](http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/coding-languages-leadership- skills/)</comment>


Show HN: Open Socialism – Hack on a democracy/capitalism alternative - <AUTHOR> https://opensocialism.com <comment><USER2> Maybe spend a bit less time telling me why "democratic capitalism" is bad, and a bit more time telling me why your system is good.

You fail to tell me what actual mechanisms you're proposing to fix this, and until you've got that you've got nothing.

Is it just a call to action? Asking people in tech to think about the problems?

Because the people who were inclined to think about this already are, whether it's Charles Stross talking about interfacing centrally planned economies with capitalism in his novels, or the pirate party working on fluid democracy.

I'm also not convinced your socialist/communist political theory is up-to- snuff. No one is arguing that the capture-value/create-value disparity isn't a big problem, but claiming that it's all because of human-selfishness instead of more nuanced coordination problems is concerning.

Read meditations on moloch, and less communism 102. Don't make an ideological tract, try to build something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

The essence of open socialism is to have a cooperative system without free enterprise. I think most people would accept that without resources expended due to competition and controlled wealth inequality, a cooperative system is more productive since everyone is working primarily on the good of society, not for their own personal gain. A large proportion of the surplus created can be reinvested into the good of society and not go to a small percentage of wealthy people where it often does more harm than good. I think on paper this type of system is much better for the majority and for long term progress.

The traditional (valid) criticism of such systems (eg. communism) is that the 'state' has too much power in these and those in control will become corrupt. Open socialism is quite focused on this key flaw and primarily addresses it by having society run much like an open source project, with all deliberation and operation done entirely in the open. Add to this the consensus seeking model to making corrupting decisions more difficult.

I posted it here hoping that people would give feedback or help if they are interested.

Cheers

<comment><USER2> I feel like you're talking through me.

When I said "Created value vs captured value", I was essentially saying

>cooperative system is more productive since everyone is working primarily on the good of society, not for their own personal gain

I'm not misunderstanding what the problem is with capitalism, or what socialism hopes to achieve. So please to read my feedback with that in mind, and don't just keep trying to explain socialism/communism to me.

I'm on-board, capitalism is bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> You seemed unclear about open socialism and my motivations for posting so I tried to clarify. Anyway, let's keep chatting on github if you are keen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I created Open Socialism as a compelling alternative to democratic capitalism.

Democratic capitalism had some good years and achieved a lot, but it has started to be highly inequitable and exploitative. With modern technology and science (including agile and open source practices) we can create much more equitable and productive systems.

I created a tl;dr page for software industry people - [https://opensocialism.com/tldr-for-software- people](https://opensocialism.com/tldr-for-software-people)

I have written a moderate amount but it is more a starting point to be iterated upon. Any feedback or help is greatly appreciated.

[https://github.com/open-socialism/open- socialism.github.io](https://github.com/open-socialism/open- socialism.github.io)

Happy to answer any questions in the comments.

Thanks

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you read a good part of the canonical literature against socialism/communism? Because you make a lot of points that have been discussed in the past, and you don't address the criticisms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

The classic issues that I am aware of are:

\- Those in power have too much power and cannot be deposed democratically. As such they will assuredly become corrupt.

\- 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need' means that people aren't incentivized to strive and will be lazy and won't invent and innovate.

This page [https://opensocialism.com/open- socialism](https://opensocialism.com/open-socialism) covers these two points.

Are there other classical issues I am missing? Is there any literature you would recommend for this?

Thanks

<comment><USER3> These are criticisms people say on the streets, and they vague, empty and lack explanation. Although I also find your answers vague and empty, it's nice that you tried to answer them.

Anyway, I think it is safe to ignore that discussion, because it is way too common and biased.

My humble suggestion is that you should start on the purely economic side of the high-level discussion. This[1] is something that raised a lot of discussion (pro and against the socialist side) between top economists of the previous century and that has lasted many years. I think you should start there.

[1]: [https://mises.org/library/socialism-economic-and- sociologica...](https://mises.org/library/socialism-economic-and-sociological- analysis)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I did some research on that book. The 'economic calculation problem' seems to be the main point. I disagree that market forces are the only way to price goods and services. Why can't goods be priced that factor in the aspect of supply and demand, but also factor in the cost of offering those goods and services, both the immediate cost and the cost to the environment? It doesn't seem like an impossible problem, just that it takes deliberate effort by the state.

Note that in open socialism goods and services (including food, clothing etc.) are priced.

I generally agree that around 100 years ago when 'Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis' was written socialism was difficult to impossible. Now with modern technology I think that it is possible and has less problems than capitalism.

Is there some key flaw in socialism that you think prevents it from being viable?

<comment><USER3> The idea of the State coming up with a method to calculate prices taking account of supply, demand and cost, was a topic of intense debates that followed the publication of that book.

See, for example, Oskar Lange and Henry Douglas Dickinson proposals, and Friedrich Hayek's rebuttals.

What I am begging you is to stop thinking you have all the right answers before getting to know what other people have already said on the topic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I was hired and fired in 2 weeks, for no reason - <AUTHOR>

I was hired and unhired in 2 weeks, for no reason except being told that "our plans changed". I joined as employee #1 of a YC startup. I spent a week working with them before joining. They liked me, and I liked them. I officially joined as the COO. Deal was to work remotely, till we all figured out the visa. And then, suddenly I was told over a 'catch-up call', that they have to rethink the hiring decision because they really needed someone with a different skill set. The conversation was friendly and polite. Now finger snap - just like that – I am out! Specifically, I was politely asked to leave. Its the strangest experience of my life. They keep reiterating that its not performance related. I believe it. The problem is:
- I let all job offers go (I had a few good ones)
- Told my friends/family about the job, and that I will be moving to America
- Reached out to all my contacts (including everyone who was trying to hire me) and attempted to sign them up for this YC service
- I reached out to several people (e.g. at Google, FB, Partners at a management consultancy (i.e. my former employers)) asking them for a potential investment into this company ("Use our personal networks" was a key strategy), some of these helped me find a job that I turned down I like the founders - they are good guys. I may even understand that they need someone else, but personally that has left me with few options and in a bit of a depressed state! For my wife, this was such a huge decision (to join a startup and move to another country), and it was just awkward to convince her first, and give her the news. I am not being very articulate about why this sucks – but any help/advice would be awesome. I have a masters in CS, a failed startup and 6 yrs of management consulting behind me <comment><USER2> I don't understand what you're asking. You had a job and now you don't have a job. Are you asking why? If your problem is that you don't have a job then the easy answer is "find a new job".

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like they made the right move. Hiring a non-technical for employee #1 doesn't sounds like a smart move, given that the founders should be doing any sales/bizdev at the early stages.

</comment><comment><USER4> Happily for you, it's possible the other job offers would still stand after only two weeks.

This is really not uncommon at all.

The lesson to be learned, is that you should not have invested so much money time and effort in going to work for this company.

This is a cost that you gave to them, in allowing them to hire you for less money than they would have to pay, if they had to hire locally (and thus, from a smaller pool of potential employees).

Mobility of capital, goods and employees only benefit the oligarchs, not the little people.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can understand that you are upset and confused. That is only natural in the circumstances.

For me, being the COO and working remotely is the red-flag. That role typically requires being on the ground ASAP. Wouldn't you need a Green Card instead of just a visa?

If you are bothered by the decision, you could re-connect and demand more specific answers so that you don't fall into the same circumstances again.

</comment><comment><USER6> Except for an upvote I am sadly not able to help you any further...

... hope others may find this, though. And the best of luck for your next steps.</comment>


Free Wifi available to foreigners visiting North Korea - <AUTHOR> https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/13165/free-wifi-available-foreigners-visiting-north-korea/

<comment><USER2> It's a trap.</comment>


Computational feat speeds finding of genes to milliseconds instead of years - <AUTHOR> http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2010/march/boolean.html

<comment><USER2> Here is the paper: <http://www.pnas.org/content/107/13/5732.long>

</comment><comment><USER3> So in terms of curing cancer... where does this get us? (i'm not being sarcastic. it sounds very promising but I don't know enough on the topic to judge how significant it is)

<comment><USER4> First of all, don't ever trust a popular science writeup from the school of the corresponding author. It is almost certainly meaningless hype.

Secondly, PNAS is a good journal, but not a great one. He was almost certainly rejected from the top tier. (Nature, Science)

As someone who works in this field, finding genes that are similar in some way to two disease related genes is not at all novel. This is the goal of literally hundreds of computational methods. It sounds like what he did was to build a decision tree from a set of training data - hardly an earth-shattering application.

Edit: Wow, after fully reading the paper I am stunned how commonplace this analysis is. This exact approach has been taken for analyzing microarray data for the last decade. This does not warrant in any way the breathless writeup it receives in the original post.

Under what hypothesis would one expect nature to follow boolean rules? This approach ignores any subtle relationships or multifactorial causes of gene expression changes. The more I read the more I am convinced that this is utter garbage.

What really makes me mad about this is that increasingly the way to get ahead in science is to overstate your results and then have friends of the corresponding author "review" the manuscript. If you'll notice, this was submitted by Irving L Weissman who, according to his website is "Director, Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine". It is very odd that it wasn't submitted by either the corresponding, nor the lead author. It is very clear that this article did not receive the scientific scrutiny that it should have.

<comment><USER5> Regarding who submitted it, PNAS works differently from other journals. Weissman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and as such he gets to contribute a paper X times a year. It still gets peer reviewed. The question of how well things are reviewed applies to other journals as well.

<comment><USER6> There's also the process of "communicating" papers. In those, a NAS member can essentially vouch for other authors twice a year, and provide outside reviewers of their choice. This track is ending as an option this July, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With this kind of thing, the devil is always in the details. He's looking for genes whose expression levels correlate with those of genes known to be involved in the process of interest. This is not a new idea. The trouble is that spurious correlations can arise in all kinds of surprising ways, and swamp the interesting ones.

</comment><comment><USER8> What's the computational technique used for this?

<comment><USER9> Call the oracle function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I started off thinking it was another gpgpu application but the theory of boolean implications is something new to learn. thanks for the article.

</comment><comment><USER11> Before clicking on this, I jokingly thought to myself "let me guess, this is yet another NoSQL is better than ___ article"</comment>


20 Stunning 3D Landscapes - <AUTHOR> http://blogfreakz.com/news/20-stunning-3d-landscapes/ If you didn't already know, I am an avid gaming enthusiast and these 20 beautiful 3D landscapes take me back the days I was slaying boars in Hyboria and enjoying a quick pint of ale in the Ironforge Inn. <comment><USER2> blogspam. the source:

[http://nenuno.co.uk/creative/design/20-stunning-3d-landscape...](http://nenuno.co.uk/creative/design/20-stunning-3d-landscapes/)</comment>


Containers as kernel objects - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/723561/7c66c9c1ce021cf5/ <comment><USER2> I'm hoping containers disappear, not become pervasive.

<comment><USER3> Could you elaborate on why do you want them to disappear?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Facebook Interview Preparation - <AUTHOR> So, I'm a freshman in college, and I have an interview with Facebook this week. I have been reviewing all kinds of algorithm work, but this will be my first technical interview, and I'm not really sure what (specifically) I should be reading over and familiarizing myself with. I suppose this can be generalized into a "what should I know for a technical interview" question, as well. <comment><USER2> I recently interviewed with Facebook and here are a couple of the questions they asked me:

1) how do you find the square root of a number using only basic operations?

2) how do you position a button over the bottom right corner of an image using only css?

I spent a lot of time reviewing my linked lists and other basic data structures, but that ended up being wasted time. In my case, I knew the answers to both, but let my nervousness ruin my responses. So my biggest advice is to just relax and trust that you'll be able to figure it out. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you interview for the software engineering position, or a general web development one?

<comment><USER2> I wasn't really interviewing for a specific position. They reached out to me and I thought it would be interesting to see what they would offer. I did two interviews, but didn't take it any further than that. I mentioned I was good at front end stuff which was why I was asked the CSS question.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple fans have click-signed more than 100,000 words of legal contracts - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/797928/apple-fans-have-click-signed-more-than-100000-words-of-legal-contracts/ <comment><USER2> The article also states:

 _" Tech giants, like Google and Microsoft have contracts that are significantly more wordy and hard to understand."_

and

 _" unlike Amazon, AirBnb, Adobe, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Instagram, Slack, Tinder and WeChat, Apple does not include a consumer-hostile "binding arbitration" clause, which would block their customers from ever taking them to court."_

So, it seems that, as large companies go, they aren't the worst.

</comment><comment><USER3> In Germany, the typical click-through contract you only get to see after you have purchased the product, or that is for software required to operate hardware that you have already purchased, is invalid.

So I happily click.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some free software tools you want? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to build out my portfolio with free software. What are some tools you would like to have that aren't currently free. <comment><USER2> I'd really like a self-hosted videochat solution that had a native client. Basically something like Mumble ([https://mumble.info](https://mumble.info)) but for video.

The reason I want it is because most large videochat solutions have a really high variance in latency and reliability. If I just want a small group chat with friends, I'd have far fewer issues if I just self-hosted. I've already found this to be true for Discord audio versus self-hosting Mumble.

<comment><USER3> You're looking for Jitsi Meet.

<comment><USER4> Well, depends on whether you consider an Electron client to be native, but Jitsi Meet is definitely great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would want stuff that many things to do without needing the web browser, working by free software based command-line operations.

In many cases, I would want to access remote data sources using the SQLite command line, by SQLite extensions which provide them as virtual tables so that SQL queries can then be performed on them including joins with other data sources, copying them to local files, etc (all of this comes "for free" once it is implemented as a virtual table; SQLite does the rest).

</comment><comment><USER6> A codebase tool to check for duplication.

Something that can find repetition in a codebase, which could be extracted. Fuzzy matching for duplicated code would also be a great feature too. Not sure if exists, but it's something I've always wanted

<comment><USER7> For golang projects I had good success using this tool [https://github.com/mibk/dupl](https://github.com/mibk/dupl)

<comment><USER6> Thanks mate! Looks like a cool little project, would be great to extend it for other languages too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm glancing at my phone for apps/services that I paid for because they were better than the free alternatives. Here's sampling: Dark Sky, Dropbox, Quizlet, FiLMiC Pro, Camera+, Zoom (but recently canceled).

I paid for Anki iOS app but the interface is so clunky (even though experts swear by it) that I never really got good use out of it.

<comment><USER9> I know this will sound absurd, but buying an Android Tablet for Anki was an investment that has easily paid for itself.

AnkiDroid is amazing. ~14k cards, so I've committed a lot to Anki.

<comment><USER8> I found your article on how to use Anki.

[https://senrigan.io/blog/everything-i-know-strategies- tips-a...](https://senrigan.io/blog/everything-i-know-strategies-tips-and- tricks-for-spaced-repetition-anki/)

I'm likely not going to use Anki but many of the tips and strategies in your article resonated with me. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Text to speech software that can convert a text file to an mp3 using modern high quality voices (think Alexa, Google, Siri, or Cortana). Free software that does this does exist, but typically with only the voices included with the OS which usually aren't that great.

<comment><USER5> That would be good, but I would rather it did not use a lossy format as its output though, but rather raw (lossless) data written to stdout so that you can then use a separate encoder for whatever format you want (whether lossless or lossy, including MP3 if wanted, but Opus is better).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps a lame example, but I'd love it if someone would build a good PHP SDK library for Box.net. There are two libraries out there which are unfortunately disjointed and relatively unmaintained and unfortunately Box engineers won't create an official SDK in PHP.

<comment><USER12> The two libraries out there that I found seem to be hand-rolled -

Box.net have an official OpenAPI descriptor at [https://github.com/box/box- openapi](https://github.com/box/box-openapi) , that you can one-time feed into an OpenAPI-to-PHP codegenerator such as [https://github.com/janephp/open- api](https://github.com/janephp/open-api) or [https://openapi- generator.tech/](https://openapi-generator.tech/) to produce a PHP SDK.

This should help address the "relatively unmaintained" part, but the disjointedness is perhaps going to rely heavily on how idiomatic the generated code looks (and you will almost certainly want to ensure there is low- memory/streaming support for file upload/download APIs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like rustlings to work on repl.it

I'd also like an app that I can take a picture of a recipe on paper and then scale all the ingredients by some multiple (half, triple, etc) (obviously also converting ounces/tablespoons/cups/etc).

<comment><USER14> Hi! What's not working with rustlings and repl.it? Feel free to email me email@example.com

<comment><USER13> Hi Amasad! I almost replied to my own comment yesterday after I discovered that the rustlings readme[0] now has a link to "Run on repl.it"[1] (as well as Gitpod). Evidently this was added ~11 days ago[2]...although I personally thought it would be a more complicated solution than just configuring the .replit file correctly in the rustlings repo. I had independently come up with the same solution to make the 'Run' button rebuild the .cargo but it felt too 'hacky' for me to accept as a final product and suggest to the rustlings team.

0: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings](https://github.com/rust- lang/rustlings)

1: [https://repl.it/github/rust-lang/rustlings](https://repl.it/github/rust- lang/rustlings)

2: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings/pull/471](https://github.com/rust- lang/rustlings/pull/471)

A couple of months ago my friends and I tried to get rustlings working in repl.it . I really, really wish I had documented those efforts thoroughly but at the time it was just an exploratory deep-dive to determine if I should follow up with documentation of issues and more detail, and I decided against using my time for that...kind of regret that now.

Three issues I remember facing:

A) inode not updating in the shell even when files changed in the GUI editor. [seems improved now]

B) /home/runner/.cargo/ (and some other supporting directories i think) disappearing after some time / series of actions and-or inaction [today only via inactivity?]

C) At some point we realized the shell wasn't a 'real' shell but I can't remember what led us to this conclusion, just that it got in our way when debugging the above issues.

(A) [Basically fixed already] What I remember is that the repl.it shell environment, while being extremely high fidelity, seemed to have some idiosyncracies in the way the filesystem worked vs a typical bare-metal OS. Two months ago I had trouble where 'rustlings verify' worked okay but 'rustlings watch' wouldn't notice that a file had been edited. Oddly enough, any shell command investigation would also report that the file hadn't been edited/modified recently, but 'cat file.rs' would still output the saved changes.

(B) [Partially fixed, still an "issue" due to long re-builds but not hard blocker] /home/runner/.cargo disappears after any inactivity. This seems more predictable now than I remember it two months ago - two months ago I might only be able to run 'rustlings watch' once and then very shortly after, the shell would no longer be able to find the rustlings binary anymore and I'd have to rebuild from scratch. Generally there were some errors whenever rebuilding, so the solution for me was typically to create a whole new repl.it from scratch and do the initial build. I don't remember what errors caused the "need" for a new repl.it from scratch every time I needed to rebuild it. This still seems like an "issue", sort of, that the rustlings .replit file has a workaround for which works reasonably well and I suspect this behavior is fairly necessary for repl.it the business. But the binaries still disappear after a short inactive period and need to be rebuilt which takes quite some time on the free tier (10+ min?).

(C) [null, and generally not an "issue"] No memory of what behavior caused us to give the shell the moniker "poverty shell" but overall I've generally found the repl.it shells to be extremely high fidelity such that I generally don't realize I'm using a slightly handicapped system. However, this seems to have changed for python shells...now I seemed locked into something like IPython and can't get to a linux shell via exit(), ctrl-D, etc. Maybe this was always the case and I only remember using the linux shell in the C/C++/Rust repl's.

0: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings](https://github.com/rust- lang/rustlings)

1: [https://repl.it/github/rust-lang/rustlings](https://repl.it/github/rust- lang/rustlings)

2: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings/pull/471](https://github.com/rust- lang/rustlings/pull/471)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd live a tool like grafana but with minimal to no javascript, whilst keeping the plethora of backends compatibilities. Just simple graphs from any tsdb with fast page loading speed.

</comment><comment><USER16> An alternative to the Dropbox SDK for applications. Yes I can use NextCloud, and sync files with WebDAV... but now I'm forced to use WebDAV and must be careful of all of its foibles. Where as if I want to use Dropbox. I add the sdk, hook it up, user grants permissions, and boom, files get synced into an application specific sub folder like magic.

</comment><comment><USER17> A really good, full-featured (Heroku-level) PaaS you can deploy to your own Kubernetes cluster.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I want ecom software which rivals Shopify but it's free and self hosted like Discourse.

Payment method support: stripe and PayPal are enough.

But must have shipment tracking maybe through integration from some service.

All Shopify alternatives suck.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm looking for source to source interprocedural C slicers. If anyone knows of any freely available let me know please. :)

</comment><comment><USER20> A gant chart and project planner, like MS Project but good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Im working on a project management tool called kanception.io it is free and in beta now

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I need a simple seo tool to find keyword rankings and check backlinks without going through the complex routine of google adwords or costly keyword platforms. Will you be able to build such a tool and make it open source?

<comment><AUTHOR> With a google search I found several free keyword planners and backlink checkers

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'd like Bitwig Studio to be open source :(</comment>


Previously Withheld Messages show Boeing employees knew of 737 Max problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/text-messages-show-boeing-employees-knew-in-2016-of-problems-that-turned-deadly-on-the-737-max/2019/10/18/8578c990-f1ca-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html <comment><USER2> * [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21293497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21293497)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21293550](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21293550)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21292860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21292860)</comment>


You Are Not a Gadget- A Case Against Web 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/you_are_not_a_gadget_web_20.php

<comment><USER2> _The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful._

I think aggregated behavior is interesting. While it may be true that Wikipedia and Facebook (and perhaps even more pertinently, 4chan) are networks of individuals chopped into a "mush", each of these resulting mushes has its own unique character and identity. A mega-individual, if you will. I can't see how he could consider that meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish that guys like this would be more specific than "Web 2.0". That phrase has become so overloaded that it is now meaningless.

What is he against, exactly? Curvy pastel controls? Cloud computing? Ajax? Quick access to useful information? Social networking? What? I believe he means "crowd sourcing". That is a term with a specific meaning. He should use it.

And of course, because we have crowd-sourcing, and the benefits it has brought, individual expression is dying. Fewer and fewer people blog their own thoughts. Expressions of one's artistic individuality on the internet are few and far between. Riiiiight.

The internet reflects reality. The reality is that there have always been a whole lot of groupies and trend-followers. And there have been a much smaller number of people who forge their own path.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wikipedia is a relatively reliable source for information on controversial political topics. Simply stated, Wikipedia editors tend to be a lot more anal about facts and details than policy makers and journalists. It's also an excellent source for information about marginal ideas.

Either Lanier doesn't have much of a case or MacManus does a poor job of summarizing the book.</comment>


Tactics of Psy-Group, Black Cube Revealed in Canadian Court Battle - <AUTHOR> https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3739390,00.html <comment><USER2> The fact that these 'sting operations' by private agencies were intended for planting in newspapers is an interesting issue. Reminds me of an article about how a BBC report about language tests for immigrants caused the UK government to inaccurately crack down on people who were taking tests legitimately [https://twitter.com/natematias/status/992739616443772928](https://twitter.com/natematias/status/992739616443772928)

Basically, the media is really eager to 'expose' things, but what happened before (if the information was collected by a partisan entity) and after (if the exposé led to overreaction) is something to consider...

</comment><comment><USER3> OT: Paul Grahm founder of YC was placed on some kind of a blacklist by SV Israeli supporters after the twitter spat he had during Gaza bombing a few years ago. I believe the spat was between PG and Mark Suster, if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER4> This was the only link I could find about this:[https://pando.com/2014/08/05/graham-and-suster-square-off- ov...](https://pando.com/2014/08/05/graham-and-suster-square-off-over-israel- and-gaza-as-tech-industry-increasingly-pays-attention-to-the-real-world/)

<comment><USER5> I can do nothing but commend pg for his commitment to stop what I personally think is close to shooting fish in a barrel. Except it's people and the barrel is mostly dry.

<comment><USER4> I think PG is entirely wrong and Mark Suster was entirely right on that subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a commercialization of mafia tactics.

<comment><USER7> Mafia is mostly a commercial enterprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Honest inquiry. Has anyone else here had their behavioral patterns hacked by a psy group?

There's not a support network.

<comment> wu-ikkyu How would you know if that was happening?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Psy-Group" and "Black Cube," huh?

You know, for two covert intelligence gathering firms they sure could have chosen names that are a little less conspicuous.

</comment><comment><USER10> If these were true, how would a company protect against such attacks? Esp. family members or vulnerable employees

<comment><USER11> There is training, but basically all of if surrounds not being an idiot with strangers. Aside from people accepting bribes, most of these stings involve the target trying to impress someone. They brag. They think this new person might help them land a job in the future. Or: That pretty girl you met online ... she isn't in to you.

The military deals with this issue through other means, mainly by trying to prevent employees becoming vulnerable in the first place. Living in secure housing with stable costs of living. Retirement planning / pensions. Not allowing people to fall into stupid dept (payday loans etc). And making sure employees feel valued enough that they want to stay with the company. An employee who feels secure in their position, who sees a clear road to advancement within the organization, doesn't feel the need to brag to strangers. Corporations would do well to consider these tactics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So who else here is part of these groups? It stands to reseaon that thier best client is themselves.

</comment><comment><USER12> Which newspapers Black Cube contacted tells us so much about what goes on behind the scene.

</comment><comment><USER13> Someone boasting about being a "Commander" is not the same as having been one. I had hoped that this piece would have done a bit more research.

Basically, there are two groups, Black Cube and Psy-Group who are completely different. The former is investigated for trying to run sting operations that make no sense. The latter is asserted to be a part of Trump's social manipulation group that got him elected. Something that could have been a part of Cambridge Analytica.

So this article offers almost nothing of substance about the latter group.

</comment><comment><USER14> Where is the HN relevance? Did Psy-Group or Black Cube employ tech to conduct its influence operations? Were systems compromised? Was there a troll center posting in forums? Influence ops via technical means are a real problem for journalism and online communities and something relevant to HN. I'm not seeing how this article aligns with HN.

<comment><USER15> > Did Psy-Group or Black Cube employ tech to conduct its influence operations? > Were systems compromised?

It's not mentioned in the article, but Black Cube did try and succeed to break the gmail address of Laura-Codruta Kovesi a couple of years ago (she's head of the Romanian anti-corruption agency, a sort of what Antonio Di Pietro and Mani Pulite was for Italy back in the '90s). Allegedly the Black Cube contractors/employees used a social engineering scheme in order to gain access to Kovesi's email. The two Black Cube contractors were subsequently arrested and they've just been given a suspended sentence, so that they can happily go back to Israel and pick other clients.

<comment><USER13> The article doesn't cover that. Do you have any references?

<comment><USER15> A quick google search gave me this article in English: [https://www1.agerpres.ro/english/2016/09/14/former-sri- offic...](https://www1.agerpres.ro/english/2016/09/14/former-sri-officer- detained-in-black-cube-case-kovesi-targeted-by-tornado-operation-15-42-25) (from the national Romanian press agency) and there's also a dedicated section on Kovesi's wikipedia page in Romanian on which you can use Google Translat: [https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Codru%C8%9Ba_K%C3%B6vesi...](https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Codru%C8%9Ba_K%C3%B6vesi#Cazul_Black_Cube).

The email thing is mentioned mostly in Romanian-only articles from 2 years ago, can't find the exact ones I remember reading back then. I found this new article in English, though ([http://business-review.eu/news/romanias-dna-head- on-black-cu...](http://business-review.eu/news/romanias-dna-head-on-black- cube-scandal-no-email-hack-in-my-case-105605)), in which Kovesi denied that anyone successfully managed to hack into her emails. But the facts are that 2 Black Cube employees have just been found guilty by Romanian justice in this very case (and then they let them return home, to Israel).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tinder Launches a Spring Break Mode - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/26/tinder-launches-a-spring-break-mode/ <comment><USER2> Isn't than Tinder favouring sex workers?</comment>