Wikipedia Redesign Concept - <AUTHOR> https://www.behance.net/gallery/16219877/Wikipedia-Redesign-Concept

<comment><USER2> This was submitted yesterday.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655287)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, it's actually a better link than this one.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite tech-related movies? - <AUTHOR>

What are some of the best movies that feature interesting technology, or portray development and hacking realistically?<p>I'll start: maybe not particularly realistic, but The Matrix (1999) has always been one of my favorite tech-heavy movies. <comment><USER2> Wargames

Hackers

Revolution OS

Freedom Downtime

Any/all Jason Scott movies

Short Circuit 2

I also made a short ~8min piece about GNU with Stephen Fry that I'm still fond of. [http://gnu.org/fry/](http://gnu.org/fry/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The Matrix is probably my favorite movie of all time. I've watched my DVD copy so many times that the DVD is wearing out (eg, has scratches, etc.) and I just had to buy a new DVD of it.

Otherwise, I like Hackers a lot (despite the unrealistic aspects), as well as Anti-trust. War Games is another of my favorites. Also, Tron and Tron:Legacy.

Swordfish is also entertaining in its own way.</comment>


AWS IoT Beta - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/iot/ <comment><USER2> It's important to highlight open source alternatives to AWS products. If you are looking at AWS IoT and wishing you could run it on your own servers, the Couchbase Mobile stack is open source and used for mission critical deployments by customers like General Electric, for IoT applications: [http://www.slideshare.net/Couchbase/offline-first-how-ge- int...](http://www.slideshare.net/Couchbase/offline-first-how-ge-integrated- couchbase-mobile-in-less-than-90-days-couchbase-connect-2015)

More info: [http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile](http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile)

There is a lot going on in this space and we are a general purpose database. If you're looking for native open source implementations that give you access to the whole stack, and interop with other tech like PouchDB and IBM Cloudant...

</comment><comment><USER3> So, my extremely quick read is this a framework for hiding stuff that consumes data from internet of thing appliances and makes some of that data available via shadows.

I wish amazon would do a better job explaining why this new thing is better than the last new thing from amazon. Many services feel close and similar until you dig into the target use cases. Even the FAQ doesn't have a list of target use cases.

<comment><USER4> An common architecture for IoT is to have sensors/actuators talking to a MQTT server (a message queue). Then processing it with some rules or exposing it as a REST API. This should enable all those things as SaaS. I guess the biggest change is the MQTT server and a rules engine

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm taking a 15-minute look at their IoT developer guide ([https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/what-i...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/what- is-aws-iot.html)) to get a feel for what, exactly, this service is providing. My guess is that they're trying to compete with Thingspeak, DeviceHub, etc. I'm not totally sure I'm capturing this right, because their documentation isn't great at "getting to the point", but here's my read:

1\. Internet-connected stuff needs to be able to talk, so awsiot needs to support messaging. So it looks like they're currently offering http (publish only) and mqtt (bidirectional pub/sub). They give each awsiot account a unique IoT internet endpoint (some-random-string.iot.us-east-1.amazonaws.com), and then parse everything into a stored state in the cloud (that's the device "shadow")

2\. Ideally you'd be doing this securely. awsiot appears to be generating its own x509 certs here, -- are they then an intermediate CA? Not clear on this. The documentation here is terribly vague and I have no idea what's going on. Not good for transparency. I can't even tell if they're forcing security, or if it's optional.

3\. State management. awsiot cloud-stores the state of devices, allowing you to check them (or to issue commands to either from a third-party device like a phone app).

4\. Communication between devices. They're claiming some kind of wholly undocumented authentication system for access to and control over device state. At any rate, they have a concept of device-based identity, and then based on that identity, devices are (or aren't) allowed to talk to each other.

I've done some IoT development, and though it's a bit hard to tell by their terribly inadequate documentation, I'm pretty sure this is intended for enterprise developers with massive IoT product offerings and very high product volume. AWS is much too complicated for a lot of the small device manufacturers, at least the ones coming in from the hardware side. To use this scalably (especially given you can only access it from CLI) with reasonable product volumes is going to require a lot of setup scripting to register devices, and I don't think companies will be able to afford the tooling cost until they're enterprise-level.

<comment><USER6> I was at Reinvent last week and attended a few of the IoT presentations. I have no commercial interest in IoT but am interested in tinkering with IoT just as a hobby.

I won a Intel Edison / Seeedstudio IoT kit with an edison already configured with a key pair for aws usage. [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0168KU5FK](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0168KU5FK) So I guess I will get some experience with this.

They announced both device SDKs and the inclusion of IoT into their standard SDK. I haven't downloaded the latest python sdk (boto3) yet to check if the IoT functions have been added yet.

Their documentation seems to make this more complicated that it should be but I also was handed a Amazon IoT button [https://aws.amazon.com/iot/button/](https://aws.amazon.com/iot/button/) and was able to connect it to my aws account and my home wifi in 2 minutes. I have it sending sns messages to me when I click it. So now I have a reference project that can be inspected for quicker learning.

If you can, get yourself a IoT button from amazon to play with if you are interested in their IoT offerings.

Once boto3 has the IoT sdk I will write a mac os x client for acting both like a device and subscribing to devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would love to see Amazon working into the documentation and usability of their existing products instead of create new ones.

<comment><USER8> Three hours pissing around trying to delete something from s3 with powershell from windows task scheduler today agrees with you :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > With AWS IoT, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all > your devices, all the time, even when they aren't connected.

This sounds like magic :)

<comment><USER10> also, MQTT has a "retain" flag that lets a publish linger on a topic to be read later, even when the publisher has gone offline. Seems like "shadows" is a fancy name for what MQTT already gives you.

<comment><USER11> AWS IoT doesn't support retained messages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems there has been a great number of Amazon/AWS updates and new product offerings recently. Does anyone know why this is the case? (I.e. why all these releases have occurred over the space of the last two weeks?)

<comment><USER13> AWS re:invent is yesterday + today: [https://reinvent.awsevents.com/](https://reinvent.awsevents.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems like a great way to hook up a home raspberry pi or other device to the cloud without poking any holes in the firewall. The free tier (250,000 msgs/month) seems like more than enough for a single 'smart home'.

</comment><comment><USER15> Serious question - does anyone know who is going to use this?

<comment><USER16> Presumably smart-device companies. I think the main offering here is the secure communications API. Companies who know how to build interesting hardware often aren't security experts.

Wifi connected televisions, for example, are often very poorly secured. Of course, it's not the end of the world if someone powers off your TV remotely or changes the channel.

But with internet connected devices becoming commonplace (the example they use on the page is a thermostat), security becomes more and more important. I would rather not have a hacker set my thermostat to 30C (85F) while I'm on a winter vacation. Or turn my stove on. Etc.

<comment><USER17> > Or turn my stove on.

Can we step out of the technology bubble for a minute and agree that not _everything_ needs to be connected and controllable?

<comment><USER16> I think there's a bright future for smart cooking appliances. Cinder ([https://cindercooks.com/](https://cindercooks.com/)) has made its way around HN a few times, and I'm pretty excited about it.

It's not even that it needs to be controllable from my smartphone, but I think it'd be cool to put some cookie dough into the oven, tell the oven "cook these so that they are just slightly crisp on the outside but gooey on the inside", and the oven would have sensors and the temperature control mechanisms to do this, then notify me when it's time to take my cookies out.

It makes sense for such a device to be able to download updates (new functionality, recipes, retuning algorithms, etc) from the internet.

<comment><USER17> If microwave "innovation" is any indication, this will result in ovens crammed with non-feature features and horrible UI/UX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems in direct response to the Microsoft Azure IOT stuff [1]. Not sure which is better as they both have the same pipelines at this point, although AWS has more data processing services available. Azure also seems more complicated to get setup or their website/documentation is a lot worse.

1\. [http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/internet-of- thin...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/internet-of- things/default.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER19> AWS and Azure.....I would go with Azure!

<comment><USER20> Does anyone have any knowledge of how this compares to Azure's offering? I have used Azure Event Hubs for a pretty simple task, and liked it. Curious if AWS IoT has anything Azure doesn't.

<comment><USER21> Event Hubs == AWS Kinesis

Neither of those have any built in rule functionality. You have to set up machines to pull messages and process them.

This offering is quite different in that it builds in declarative rule support for filtering/forwarding the data to other AWS offerings like DynamoDB, S3, Lambda, etc.

That said, you're still going to be writing a lot of code to turn it into a useful application or monitoring system.</comment></comment></comment>


More research finds "stand your ground" laws lead to more homicides - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2019/9/27/20887403/stand-your-ground-laws-homicides-crime-self-defense <comment><USER2> > States pass "stand your ground" laws to boost public safety.

Do they? Or do they pass them because imprisoning people for self-defense is unjust? In fact, judging by [https://www.vox.com/2018/8/25/17778712/stand- your-ground-ala...](https://www.vox.com/2018/8/25/17778712/stand-your-ground- alabama-black-woman-guns), Vox themselves believe stand your ground laws are not only necessary, but should be followed more consistently!

[https://heavy.com/news/2018/08/jacqueline- dixon/](https://heavy.com/news/2018/08/jacqueline-dixon/) says Jacqueline Dixon was acquitted (presumably due to stand your ground) - does Vox believe she should be in jail? They didn't bother to follow up how the story ended - they only covered it as long as it conformed to their narrative.

They're not just cherry-picking which stories to report - they're _actively_ ignoring the parts they don't like. I'll visit their page next time I want to be fed propaganda.</comment>


MetraLabs Tory – inventory robot scans RFID while roaming a store - <AUTHOR> http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?14057/ <comment><AUTHOR> See it in action in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGTkL_gacvU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGTkL_gacvU)</comment>


Gmaster – git client with semantic diff - <AUTHOR> https://gmaster.io/ <comment><USER2> This website seems to completely ignore the existence of non-windows platforms, to the point they don't even list supported OSs. Wow, I thought these went extinct years ago.

<comment><USER3> The usual excuse is 'Linux users will just want to use the command line tools anyway', which implies to me that the grand claims about the tooling being better are untrue.

A windows only dev tool in today's day and age seems ridiculous, honestly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FYI: installer auto-downloads but doesn't do any OS detection. Looks like this is Windows-only.

</comment><comment><USER5> Source? License? Pricing? ... No? _close tab_

<comment><USER6> Also, why do I need to create an account to use it?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I begin an open source game executable project like OpenTTD? - <AUTHOR>

Background: Python and C++ coder, mainly scientific/financial computing in Linux. Some exposure to DirectX, OpenGL and am aware of game loop mechanics and the basics of game design.
I'm interested in beginning a project like Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (openttd.org) or the TA Spring project (http://springrts.com/) primarily for my own learning/enjoyment.
Specifically, I would like to take an old Windows game and port it to Linux. I'm not interested so much in playing the game as I am interested in learning about the whole process and what it will involve.
Firstly, it would be appropriate to ask if this is a legal thing to do. Presumably it depends upon the current state of the game's IP, who owns it and whether they care?
Secondly, where should I be looking to learn about all aspects of a project of this scope? What particular topics should I be considering at the outset?
Initial points I have considered:
* Graphics libraries in Linux (OpenGL, SDL)
* Reverse engineering of executables
* Unpacking binary files (maps, textures etc) in whatever proprietary format is in use by the game
* Network programming and how to update older protocols (pre TCP etc) for multiplayer aspects
* Looking at the source code for other open games (FreeCol, FreeCiv, OpenTTD etc.)
Any comments would be extremely useful.
Thanks in advance.
Mike. <comment><USER2> If you are goint to port an existing game you definitely need to get permission from the copyright holders first. If you don't you risk being forced to shutdown the project later, after already having spent a lot of effort on it. (This has happened to fan remakes more than once.)

If you can't get permission, you're better off just taking the mechanics of the original game and making something based on those mechanics without using any of the original IP.</comment>


Sourcegraph: "A single example is worth 1000 lines of documentation" - <AUTHOR> http://codeinsider.us/i/4.html <comment><USER2> I initially disagreed, but the actual quote is better: " _The right example_ is worth a thousand lines of documentation."

There are many cases where explaining things is better, and a well-crafted explanation with a few sparing examples is often the best way to communicate an idea — but there are some cases where a particular example is clearer than any explanation could hope to be.

<comment><USER3> Decent documentation should include an example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "But they didn't go through and parse the code like we do. It couldn't tell you who else uses this particular function or repository."

It may have, but perhaps didn't present the UI for external users. Our internal version of Codesearch based on Grok ([http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/121010.html](http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/121010.html)) is far more powerful and works just like an advanced IDE -> find usages, callers, implementors, overrides, all kinds of auditing/analysis layers too.

Some Googlers practically live in Codesearch rather than use the local IDE indexing :)

<comment><USER5> As someone stuck with CScope on Linux, I really _really_ wish there were better alternatives for the wider world. (required features: works with C, query from terminal as well as from IDE (inc. Vim/Emacs), possibility to jump to func/type definition as well as callers/users)

Codesearch is probably the largest reason I am jealous of my friends at Google.

<comment><USER6> > As someone stuck with CScope on Linux, I really really wish there were > better alternatives

Doesn't clang (using a frontend like YCM[1]) provide exactly that?

[1] [https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe](https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe)

<comment><USER5> I didn't know about this! Looks like there's some experimental support for Emacs out there... Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really cool looking site, but I'm not entirely sure how to use it! I went to the site used one of the suggested searches (djano Charfield). A lot of the search results actually brought me to a 404 page (confusing?). Even then, since most of the examples listed were classes, I'm not entirely sure how this relates to "a single example...", as these weren't examples?

At the end of the day I love Javadocs though - I really feel like I get the best understanding from them because of ability to easily browse packages, go up and down inheritance hierarchy, see all implementing classes, and there are typically some good examples in it too.

</comment><comment><USER8> For me this really depends on the examples. I tried learning Haskell years ago and the examples I found were confounding. Reading through documentation and books on the language was much more helpful. Unfortunately, I still suck at Haskell.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find most the examples I need in Stackoverflow, along with community ratings and comments.

Which reminds me of another idea which I think I remember Jeff Attwood talking about: We all copy these snippets from websites into our code. Those snippets might have bugs that are later fixed by others on the web, or the APIs change or get deprecated, etc. It would be good to have a reference from the code to the web page so in the future you can remember where that snippet came from and look it up and maybe see if the community's recommendations have changed. But even better would be if the bugs that were fixed by the web-community ended up back in your code automatically. So imagine Stackoverflow with a gist-type comment system for the code snippets with versioning and community editing, and then you could somehow do a pull on those gists and grab the community's wisdom automatically.

<comment><USER10> Do people really copy snippets they found on a website into their code? I use examples on the web to further my understanding of a technical issue but would never cut and paste blocks of code. Aside from the copyright uncertainty, I simply wouldn't trust a piece of random code found on the web enough to pull it into my own.

That said, I do agree that if you've make choices in your code based on information that you found online, its good to include a reference to the source in a comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My only question is: why do they spawn git/hg processes? Why not use [http://libgit2.github.com/](http://libgit2.github.com/) (git) and some other library for Mercurial instead? That way you're not spawning and killing off processes, you just send data from a library

<comment><USER12> Yep, that's one of the improvements we're working on. We made a lib that wraps libgit2 (git2go) and knierem/hgo at [https://github.com/sourcegraph/go- vcs](https://github.com/sourcegraph/go-vcs) that we'll push to our live site soon. Initially we shelled out to git/hg for simplicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Examples and documentation are not substitutes in my mind. If you want your work to be used, you need both.

</comment><comment><USER14> For RoR's method_missing give me the docs

For apache configuration, give me the examples!

I really like the use case of helping upstream maintainers decide on method deprecation/adding helper functions. Fantastic idea

<comment><USER15> Not just Apache, Nginx frequently has this problem as well. A decently written bit of documention on how a module is supposed to work and what it does, but very unclear on how the syntax is actually meant to be written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Examples usually show you how do things like a parrot, but you don't get the idea of why these things happen as they do without some documentation.

<comment><USER17> I agree. I think the difference is the sequence you do it in. For me, it is so much easier to get the code and look at it and step through it, THEN read the documentation. This approach helps me to focus on the parts that are unfamiliar, which I will research in more depth. At some point, you do need to read the documentation. Just not necessarily monolithically before you start experimenting with the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I write ruby code. I have used snippets that I didn't fully understand. It turn out in the usual way "it works but I don't understand exactly how...". I ended with _simpler_ code that I understand, was able to write test and all by reading the documentation.

Depends on the example, as other users said.

<comment><USER19> Co-creator of Sourcegraph here. Just FYI, in addition to usage examples, we also display the documentation and fully-linked source code (so you can jump to definition, etc.)

Sometimes the documentation tells you exactly what you need. Sometimes you want an at-a-glance example. And sometimes you might want to dive into the source to figure out what's going on. Whatever it is you're doing to understand a piece of code, we want to make it as easy as possible.

<comment><USER18> Then I guess it's the whole package :-)

You're right, some times a code sample might make things clearer, especially for newbies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm extremely interested to see how Sourcegraph continues to define "right example" down the road. Collaborative filtering and more powerful heuristics both spring to mind as possible options.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just put a good example WITH the doc. Thats.. how its done :)</comment>


Kill the tech bro, save the world: how CEOs became Hollywood's new supervillains - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/06/tech-bros-ceo-hollywood-supervillains <comment><USER2> > _tech bro... CEOs_

Even in this headline, there's some pretty interesting equivocation happening between techies and CEOs overall. The article makes a decent case for why there's collective anxiety about tech companies, but neglects the question of "why _only_ tech?"

The ~1990s had a whole string of movies with bankers and investors as villains: _American Psycho_ , _Rogue Trader_ , _Glengarry Glen Ross_ , _Wall Street_ , _Boiler Room_ , and so on. Lately, we had had _Wolf of Wallstreet_ and _The Big Short_ , but in a post-2008 world where banking already _has_ trashed the economy we're surprisingly short on bankers-as-villains films.

We got a couple of global warming films in the 2000s, and a couple more in the 2010s, but I can't think of one which makes a serious attempt to cast oil CEOs as villains - certainly not in the sense that e.g. tobacco companies have been. _Avatar_ is probably the closest thing to "CEOs trashing the environment" that's been a hit.

Pharma companies lend themselves to human-interest tragedies, and we did get _Dallas Buyer 's Club_. But there's no whole genre here like there used to be with "the bank takes the farm".

So there's the missing question: why tech companies specifically? The most obvious answer is just "more impressive visuals". I'm not sure we're talking about a particular anxiety of the moment, or if it's just that banks and oil companies work better on the page than on the screen.

<comment><USER3> > Avatar is probably the closest thing to "CEOs trashing the environment" > that's been a hit.

What about "Erin Brockovich"? PG&E is a power company, though the hexavalent chromium was used to fight corrosion.

I did not see the movie, but the Wikipedia summary says the decision was traced to upper management.

<comment><USER2> _Erin Brockovich_ and _A Civil Action_ (about groundwater pollution) are both good examples, yes.

I guess it depends when the article starts its timeline. I was trying to think of movies from the 2010s or so, because I can think of a lot of tech CEO villains in that span but not many non-tech CEO villains. My best guess at why is that action films with corporate villains look better with tech companies. (For instance, _Robocop_ is way older than the article's timeframe, but fits the same villain narrative.)

<comment><USER3> FWIW, IMDB has a list of movies with both 'environmental issue' and 'oil' keywords at [https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword?keywords=environmental-i...](https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword?keywords=environmental- issue%2Coil&sort=moviemeter,asc&mode=detail&page=1&ref_=kw_ref_key) .

It seems to support your observation.

<comment><USER2> Ah, thanks for that! This is the sort of observation where I always worry that I've just got a biased sample, so any unrelated take on the topic is helpful.

I see a handful of very on-topic films there, _Trouble in the Peace_ in particular looks like an environmental version of _Hell or High Water_ (mortgages) or _Legends of the Fall_ (local government corruption and mistreatment of Native Americans). But those were high-profile films with famous casts, while _Trouble in the Peace_ looks like a sleeper labor of love.

Honestly, I'm really surprised we haven't gotten any good "oil companies ruin our lives" dramas this decade, you could do fracking or sea level rise or drought or... It feels like a weird gap in the set of popular narratives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> About the tech bro (and less of the successful CEO) problem, I think it is getting out of hand. Service workers (waiters, drivers, etc) in SF complain constantly of their behavior. What's funny its that it's usually the new blood, junior devs that behave like this. Why do they think they are kings of the world if they are on the lowest chain in the tech world? I want to sympathize with them but just can't understand their thought process. Also I've had issues with them, I saw a group of tech bros touching all the keyboards of the Computer History Museum, they don't even respect their own history or are grateful of why they are here to begin with. Maybe it's just that enough people are in tech now that we have a percentage of bad apples by pure stats. It worries me, since we are getting stereotyped by what I hope is a loud minority.

<comment><USER5> I have worked in tech for 15 years, around the world, an have never met this mythical "tech bro".

<comment><USER6> > have never met this mythical "tech bro"

The typical SF tech bro stereotype: Youngish white guy, BS in CS from Michigan, lack of self awareness, enjoys Pliny the Younger, Barry's Bootcamp, standup, rides a boosted board to work in SOMA.

(This is not meant as a critique, I probably satisfy a number of these checkboxes myself...)

<comment><USER7> That's what a bro is? No wonder I've been so confused these past few years.

A fresh grad, new to SF that doesn't yet realize he can't unironically like trendy beers, workout routines or gauche means of conveyance?

That's not a bro! You guys just needed a word for cultural immigrants that haven't assimilated yet without making yourselves sound like bitter townies, didn't you?

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure this is what 'tech bro' means to most people, because the term also gets applied to California natives who went to Stanford. (Obviously the completely inconsistent usage of the term is an issue in its own right.)

But you do strike a chord with _" a word for cultural immigrants that haven't assimilated yet"_. I know one person from the rural midwest who studied CS, landed in the Valley, and ended up leaving for some midwestern company - earning less money for work he liked less - because he couldn't assimilate. He swore teaching English in Japan had been less stressful and shocking than trying to keep up with the demands and hostility of SF culture, and honestly I don't find it hard to believe.

I've had people quite sincerely tell me that there's no such thing as "Bay Area culture", just an expectation that people do the right thing. I suppose it's one of those "fish in water" situations, but I still have trouble understanding the amount of hubris required to say "oh, other people have cultures, we just have the right way of behaving".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah yes, Hollywood, our moral arbiters that can't stop projecting their own issues on to everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER9> Might be reflective of a world where we fear oppressive systems (created by maybe evil maybe naive tech guys) more than strongmen (who now act as mere agents of said system).

<comment><USER10> This comment reminds me of "the banality of evil" concept.

src: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_banality_of_evil)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> They already were, in the anti-globalization anti-corporate backlash at the end of the cold war. Orcs and comic book supervillians and bankers had two decades in the sun, but the wheel has once again turned.

<comment><USER12> Even then, a lot of comic book super villains were essentially caricatures of CEOs, or actual CEOs. Green Goblin from Spider Man being a fine example of the crossover.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Lex Luthor, anybody? or Valentine from Kingsmen 1

 _edit: woops, didn 't look at the article before that. Lex is the core of the article_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > After all, what's scarier? The rise of the machines, or the rise of the > morally ambiguous men who pioneer them.

This article summarized things so well. I love it!

</comment><comment><USER14> The article isn't very deep, only pointing out a phenomenon by way of examples and without too much analysis.

I'd argue that villains need power to have teeth and believability. Our definition of power changes over time- that's why we don't see too many communist rebel Che Guevara knock-offs, for example, as movie villains anymore unlike in Predator or Escape from LA. But if it wasn't tech CEOs then tinpot dictators and rogue generals always work, because they're always in power somewhere in the world. There's also the archetype of the sinister senior intelligence apparatchik or bureaucrat as highlighted in Mission: Impossible, 24, the Bourne movies, and a ton of others even before the Snowden revelations or the Iraq War, because that's another example of American conception of power.

I'd argue that tech CEOs also make for an easy target because their public personas are often defined by their idiosyncrasies (Jobs' turtleneck, Bezos' shaved head) and perceived social awkwardness. Sometimes, in the case of Upgraded, it just feels cruel to stereotypically awkward or neuroatypical nerds. But there's at least one major counter-example: Ex Machina was a great Hollywood exploration of A.I. and the Turing Test, and its genius CEO villain was played by Oscar Issac as a charismatic, or at least chummy, non- stereotypical nerd.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder which other groups of people the Guardian would feel comfortable writing headlines about promoting killing for the good of the world.

</comment><comment><USER16> Something I've noticed about Hollywood bias. When there is a Republican President, the villains tend to be corporations ("Rollerball") or government ("No Way Out"). In other words, Republicans are the enemy. When there is a Democrat President, the villains tend to be aliens ("Independence Day) or natural disasters ("Twister"). In other words, Democrats are the heroes. Just anecdotal, I've never seen a study on it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Lex Luthor went from mad scientist to ruthless CEO sometime in the 80s or 90s.

<comment><USER9> I bet (mad) scientists/inventors like Frankenstein, Jekyll, Herbert West, Tom Swift, and Tony Stark became less plausible as intense specialization became more and more common.

<comment><USER17> We live in a world that has Elon Musk in it. Tony Stark stretches credibility much _less_ than contemporary characters in his genre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well they also are similar to dirty hedge fund operators.. no morale compass .. win and become filthy rich at whatever cost.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why would we take this article seriously? It's a bit of sexist toss to point out that "tech bros" are the issue. (They use the term to imply that it's men and that they're the dominate population within tech.. which isn't even close to being true)

The issue here is people who are over-promoted in the media and lack ethics.

Also in the article:

It goes from the use of stereotyping to the whole liberal "companies are bad" argument.

<comment><USER20> > They use the term to imply that it's men and that they're the dominate > population within tech.. which isn't even close to being true

This seems to contradict most of the information I've seen in the diversity reports from companies. Maybe there is some information covering the broader industry that supports this point?

<comment><USER21> I took GP to mean that "tech bros" (with all of the negative stereotypes that implies) are not dominant, not that men aren't.

<comment><USER19> Yep. That's what I meant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


American chestnut trees are "technically extinct" - <AUTHOR> https://timeline.com/american-chestnut-trees-disappeared-39217da38c59?source=collection_home---7<comment>1</comment><comment>---- </comment><comment><USER2> Good news! this article understates the current stage of development for at least one of the reintroduction projects.

A blight resistance gene (oxalate oxidase) has been added by state university researchers in new york. The genetically modified trees are being crossed with pure-bred chestnuts for improved genetic diversity before wider distribution. [http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/](http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/)

The plan is to distribute seeds from these trees within 5 years through a partnership between SUNY-ESF and the NY chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation.

I've committed to planting at least 4500 of these trees (interspersed across 60+ acres) in their native forest setting once available. If you care about the chestnut or ecology but agroforestry isn't your thing, these organizations could really use donations to ensure this project continues.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if it understates the status of these new breeds. They haven't been proven, yet. It could be 50 years before it's clear that they are resistant.

My parents are also doing this on their property, it is exciting, and I hope this new breed is resistant to the fungus.

<comment><USER4> You can be pretty certain the plants they've got are extremely resistant.

They designed a brand new type of testing for resistance to be able to make the progress they've made as quickly as they have. Instead of testing a whole tree they can effectively test blight resistance on a single leaf, allowing their time between generations to be measured in weeks rather than years. (Time to first leaf, rather than time to whole tree).

<comment><USER3> I hope that you and they are correct, of course. While reading through the information the NY organization had sent, it just appeared that they were less certain than that.

I am very excited. What was strange is that in order to accept the trees, you had to agree to an entire set of restrictions. You can not sell any nuts was one; another was you must cut down the tree if you ever sell your property, I suppose there is an exception if the new owner also signs onto to the agreement. Seemed a little awkward, but still worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The emerald ash borer is currently having the same effect on the billions of ash trees in North America.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_ash_borer#Invasiveness...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_ash_borer#Invasiveness_and_spread)

It's a similar story. The species was accidentally introduced from Asia in the 1990s, and it's spreading dramatically across the continent. No effective strategy has been discovered to stop the destruction as of yet.

<comment><USER6> They have effectively wiped out all Ash trees around central Ohio. Once these beautiful trees were 20 - 25% of our forest, tree lines, and even shade for parking lots. Now they are all gone. You can really notice it in areas where they haven't been removed by tree services. We have an abundance of woodpeckers now because of all of the dead standing trees around us. I wonder what they'll make baseball bats out of when the lumber supply runs out?

<comment><USER7> Louisville Slugger has started shifting to yellow birch and maple. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baseball-bats- mad...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baseball-bats-made-from- ash-may-fall-victim-of-climate-change/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article almost criminally understates the amount of success the restoration program has had in the last few years. The American Chestnut Foundation's effort to backcross the American chestnut with blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts has been successfully producing trees for over 10 years. Our local parks department has planted a number of these in our urban forest, including an orchard of a dozen trees or more. [http://www.kychestnut.org/louisville-american- chestnuts](http://www.kychestnut.org/louisville-american-chestnuts)

</comment><comment><USER8> From Wikipedia:

"Salvage logging during the early years of the blight may have unwittingly destroyed trees which had high levels of resistance to this disease and thus aggravated the calamity."

One of many good examples of humanities best intentions having adverse effects on an ecosystem or species.

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

<comment><USER9> Isn't salvage logging entirely just to make money? Humanity reaps what it sows.

<comment><USER10> The implication that anything done to make money is automatically bad is completely false.

The economic effects of "the invisible hand", whereby voluntary exchange yields benefits to both parties and provides an economic surplus, is a "win- win" whereby both parties are better off.

This is not without possible negative effects ("negative externalities") but it is the most effective way to improve people's lives we've found so far.

Remember that nature and natural selection works by a more damaging mechanism - "take what you can" \- and yet still manages to produce beneficial results - though obviously not better for every individual or species.

<comment><USER7> Much of the economic history of economic exploitation has been "take what you can" rather than free exchange.

It leads to the liquidation of a valuable long-term resource for a quick short-term gain. A fishery that would be worth many billions over centuries is liquidated for millions in a few years, for example.

This is especially true in the US, where so many plants and animals did not live within a system of property. The American bison was saved only because one or two landowner had a sentimental attachment to a local herd and spared them from the carnage. The passenger pigeon was exterminated for cheap meat with industrial hunting methods. Markets create positive sum games, but this was just destruction.

The opportunity cost of billions of American chestnuts producing valuable nuts and timber over the last century is incalculable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Everytime I hike in the region I wonder what it might have looked like 100 years ago with these trees.

I still find myself looking for them sometimes, have spotted a few here and there, many old giants that keep trying to send up shoots only to have them re-infected and die again.

</comment><comment><USER12> The North American Elm tree is also being wiped out as we speak in a similar very thorough manner: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease)

<comment><USER13> Yup. We lost two, massive elms in our yard this past spring to Dutch Elm Disease. By the time you spot it, it's too late.

<comment><USER14> I hope we've learned from the Chestnut fiasco that the 'solution' to this is probably not to cut down all Elm trees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lost biodiversity fills me with a bizarrely deep sense of sadness.

I'm really hoping biotech will advance far enough to A) stop the anthropocene extinction and B) eventually reverse it, if not by reviving species then by creating new and wonderful additions to our ecosystems.

On an odder tangent, this is also part of why I'm really excited about space habitats and eventual Mars habitats. When we start creating massive enclosed spaces where we fully control the conditions, I think we'll start seeing some beautiful engineered ecosystems. Utilitarian stuff at first, like those ugly- yet-functional urban hydroponics setups you see today, but eventually I'm hopeful we'll create some 'natural' beauty.

<comment><USER16> On a different tangent: do you think thus created nature will be beautiful to us? Will it be beautiful to people who are born there?

I wonder why the trees are beautiful to us.. Maybe because we are used to them and connect nice memories to the image of trees?

<comment><USER15> I don't think we'll create anything radically different enough to _not_ be beautiful.

Modifying what already exists is usually easier than creating something from nothing, and I would expect that to apply for engineering new organisms.

If you mean will the ecosystems be beautiful to us, as in, will a forest in a space station really be a forest, or more of a gaudy tourist attraction and/or a sterile research environment, I'm hopeful that we'll choose to include some allowance for beauty in our planning.

Kim Stanley Robertson's Mars trilogy touches on these themes a lot, and I'm also drawing to some degree from the Culture series' vision of orbitals. We're clearly centuries (at least) from being able to build orbitals, but I think far smaller ring structures - and even more likely mere two-body tether set ups - may be just decades ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm old enough to remember large chestnut trees on our old farm in eastern Pennsylvania, but they're all gone now. It's a genuine tragedy, and I hope botanists can produce a blight-resistant tree soon.

</comment><comment><USER18> This makes me very sad. I love eating roasted chestnuts as a snack. This might be part of the reason why I find chestnuts to be so expensive when compared to back home (spain).

Seriously, try to get some chestnuts and roast them (oven or microwave) with some salt. They are delicious, especially during the cold months.

<comment><USER7> In the U.S., chestnuts were one of the cheapest foods in the 19th century. They were gathered up in huge amounts and sent into the cities. Like passenger pigeon meat, which was so cheap that it was regarded as a food for the poor.

<comment><USER19> Coincidentally, both are now extinct.

<comment><USER7> The American chestnut is not extinct. Every single passenger pigeon is dead. Whereas there are genetically pure, blight-resistant trees still living in the wild, but they are so widely distributed that they couldn't breed naturally—each surviving tree is documented, and researchers are still searching for more, such as on isolated Appalachian mountainslopes. But new American chestnuts are being planted. The American chestnut is more like an animal that was nearly extinct in the wild, but rescued in zoos and captive breeding programs, and is now being reintroduced to the wild.

The American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation breeds genetically pure blight- resistant American chestnuts and plants thousands (4,090 in 2015) of seeds every year in an effort to grow genetically pure blight-resistant saplings. [http://accf-online.org/](http://accf-online.org/)

The American Chestnut Foundation spent decades back-crossing American chestnuts with Chinese chestnuts to develop a variety with the characteristics of the American tree and the blight resistance of the Chinese one. Since getting nuts in 2005, they've planted hundreds of trees in national parks; there's an orchard of a dozen in our city's nature center; there are thousands planted at the Flight 93 memorial alone. [https://www.npca.org/articles/939-cracking-the- nut](https://www.npca.org/articles/939-cracking-the-nut) [http://www.acf.org/](http://www.acf.org/)

Chestnuts are similar to American bison: only a few very small bison herds are genetically pure; but there are numerous large herds of American bison with a small amount of domestic cow genes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I will be very happy to see a blight-resistant chestnut in the US as a result of some genetic engineering. I am even ready to donate for such a good cause if this effort will ever be crowdfunded by known biologists in the field. Heck, I am even ready to get the US visa just to take part in planting them back, once they get saplings. Guys, do it!

</comment><comment><USER21> And there is this promising news recently. [http://scienceline.org/2017/01/american-chestnut-tree- good-s...](http://scienceline.org/2017/01/american-chestnut-tree-good-shot- making-comeback/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Growing up in CA, I had no idea about the former glory or struggle of the chestnut tree, and so found this piece quite interesting.

</comment><comment><USER22> Didn't realize it was that bad.

I'll continue to keep secret the location of the small grove of ancient mature trees where I gather the nuts each year. If word got out you'd have the crazies showing up wanting to cut them all down.

</comment><comment><USER23> There are a few still alive near my house. Several professors have come to take the seeds for use in these projects.

<comment><USER24> Perhaps they were acting on behalf of the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation, they have been working to cross various American Chestnuts with demonstrated blight resistance to create a fully resistant strain.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are a number of hybrid American chestnuts that are blight resistant. I have a Dunstan Chestnut that is doing rather well after a few years. It still gets the blight but heals itself over time.

</comment><comment><USER26> The real tragedy was that people were implored to chop down blighted trees. A few of those may have had genetic resistance that could have kept the species going.

</comment><comment><USER27> There is one in Stanley Park in Vancouver. I came across it and didn't know what the nuts were so collected several off the ground to look up. I didn't know anything about the tree before that.

For the curious: [http://imgur.com/a/eis4a](http://imgur.com/a/eis4a)

<comment><USER28> I am not a botanist and cannot say from the pictures but that might as well have been a european sweet chestnut, as its outside of the natural range either way and the european is probably more common.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you want to help the Chestnut tree join The American Chestnut Foundation - [http://www.acf.org/](http://www.acf.org/). They do research into developing disease resistant varieties of Chestnut.

</comment><comment><USER30> They have it backwards. They're technically not extinct, just rare. I've seen them in the wild.

My parents have one in their front yard they planted around 30 years ago from a sapling they found while camping. It makes me wonder if it's a resistant strain.

<comment><USER31> I think the term is "functionally extinct". The blight doesn't affect them until they're 20-30 years old. There's a very good chance they'll die. I don't think they've found a blight-resistant strain yet, just isolated trees, which always eventually get blighted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Butternut is also on its way out too thanks to canker fungus, but some have been identified that are resistant so those are getting bred.

</comment><comment><USER33> I always wondered if Americans cook chestnut spread ?

</comment><comment><USER34> Can I buy trees from lowes or homedepot or walmart to plant them? At Texas we do have some chestnut trees, but not too many.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's always a fungus or a bug imported from Asia. The Emerald Ash Borer, the Asian Longhorned Beetle etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> Cambridge, MA. Lone chestnut tree Enchanting fruit To a 70s child

Long gone now :\

</comment><comment><USER37> Hack its genom? Grow kevlar crusted chestnuts! There under the chest-nuttree, i betrayed humanity and it betrayed me.

Curious question- is there a law against CRISPR-terrorism?

</comment><comment><USER38> The best kind of extinct.

</comment><comment><USER39> > There used to be 4B American chestnut trees, but they all disappeared

Not long ago this would have been rendered as, "There once were four billion American chestnut trees, all now gone." People are no longer learning how to write, they're learning how to type.

<comment><USER40> Can you elaborate? The title, as presented here, is nothing spectacular, but it's not necessarily inadequate to the task. Also, the "all now gone" phrase in your alternate strikes me as somewhat awkward.

While reading your version I also wondered why you might go with "There once were" rather than "There were once"?

We all have our own pet peeves, though. I weep at the loss of the subjunctive in English (For most usages it's "I wish I WERE there", not "I wish I WAS there", dammit!!!)

<comment><USER39> > The title, as presented here, is nothing spectacular, but it's not > necessarily inadequate to the task.

I just see too many uses of "There used to be", which to me is a crude way to concatenate two stock phrases without reflection, but in a awkward way that grates on my ear. Also I think Strunk & White's concision emphasis still rings true.

> I also wondered why you might go with "There once were" rather than "There > were once"?

Voicing the candidates shows the difference. I imagine speaking anything I write, which reveals phrasings that would be hard to say out loud.

> We all have our own pet peeves, though. I weep at the loss of the > subjunctive in English (For most usages it's "I wish I WERE there", not "I > wish I WAS there", dammit!!!)

I have a funny story about that. A depressed child enters the kitchen and says, "I wish I was dead!" The child's mother says, "Oh no! Not that! Don't you mean 'I wish I _were_ dead'?" :)

> Also, the "all now gone" phrase in your alternate strikes me as somewhat > awkward.

Perhaps, but in my view not compared to "They all disappeared," which suggests proactive agency (did they run away?) rather than passive fate.

<comment><USER40> 'Perhaps, but in my view not compared to "They all disappeared," which suggests proactive agency (did they run away?) rather than passive fate'

Ah, I see your point. Sadly I think a generation or two of teachers maniacally chastising their students for ever using the passive form could have something to do with this.

Even in this forum, you'll find plenty of people saying that all writing need be direct, simple, and brief. There's virtue in that for quick memoranda, but to say that there's no place in the world for complex, abstract writing or the expression of nuance in careful word choice (as you describe) is a real shame. Too often I've been corrected by people who say "you mean 'I wish I _was_' because the subject is singular".

There's some evidence that language is what makes abstract thought even possible. Perhaps we're leaving our minds unable to comprehend abstractions when we reduce that available in our language. More discussion is at [https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without- langua...](https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/).

Or maybe I just need to get over it. I overcame my violent aversion to starting sentences with "or" and "and", after all.

<comment><USER41> Just want to say that what I feared was going to be an angry grammar-nazi- stand-off was actually a pleasant, friendly, and informative discussion of the possibilities of language usage in different contexts. Cheers for keeping your heads, all.

<comment><USER42> I was thinking pretty much exactly the same thing, more "grammar gentlepeople" please!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> They were all turned into peanut butter. True facts!

<comment><USER44> Eh, alternative facts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The American chestnut has become some sort of poster child for GMO advocates, but there is no need to resort to genetic modification to bring it back.

There have been and are blight resistant trees developed through conventional breeding programs.

I have hybrids on my own property that are blight resistant. There are some that are 95%+ American chestnut genetics and are not blight susceptible. There are programmes in both Canada and the U.S. breeding these trees.

Marker assisted selection might be used which I suppose is a kind of GM technology, but there is no need to resort to gene _editing_ or _splicing_. That is a far more expensive and has the disadvantage of having extremely bad PR.

Same thing for the non-browning apple, BTW. There was no _need_ beyond availability of funding and various ag department/company politics to resort to GM for that. There have been non-browning apple strains around since the 19th century.

I should also point out that there are rare instances of what appear to be naturally blight resistant mature trees in the wild found here or there. Maybe they're natural hybrids, or just lucky to avoid the blight, but if you find one, various breeding groups would love to know.

<comment><USER46> This is the kind of anti science drivel I never expect to see on HN, but here goes.

You paint this as being a 'gmo posterchild' when clearly, it is humans, scrambling with Every technology at our disposal, to save a species. Your whole rambling post harbors the implicit notion that 'GMO BAD, "Natural" GOOD' with no statement to support that backward notion.

The GM strains are superior in apples for a plethora of reasons, or they would use your obscure, bitter, non-browning, and less disease resistant apples requiring even more pesticides. But they do not.

I concede that quite likely we can use thousand year old tech to accomplish these goals. However the timeframe may be much longer (omitting red tape) for a result, and time is of the essence.

If you can substantiate the unsaid evils of GM vs breeding by selected random mutations, please, be my guest.

<comment><USER14> Tree genes work way differently than plant (like corn) genes. Trees evolve very rapidly. Genes vary wildly between generations.

Planting a ton of Chestnut trees, maybe mixing in come Chinese genes, and re- breeding the ones that seem immune is probably the fastest, cheapest way to get immune trees again.

\--

Side thought, is the company making GMO Chestnuts going to have IP on the seeds? That seems like it would create some bad incentives recreate this whole scenario with other tree species -Kill all the 'native', free trees of some species, reintroduce your expensive super-tree.

<comment><USER47> > is the company making GMO Chestnuts going to have IP on the seeds?

No. The ACF's only problem is insufficient funding -> insufficient production.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introduction to Redis as a JSON Store in Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/josecolella/Redis-With-JSON-Node <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys!. Wanted to share my experience with using Redis as a JSON store in NodeJS. Wrote about some potential strategies; with advantages and disadvantages, as well as some code to go along with the README.

Any feedback or experience that you want to share when working with Redis are greatly appreciated!

<comment><USER2> Great topic :)

Suggestion - also cover raw and MessagePacked JSON storage with Lua (see the benchmarking scripts in ReJSON's repo).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @itemarhaber. That presentation was amazing and helped me understand the underlying advantages and disadvantages. I will add this to the README</comment></comment></comment>


Why I am building a product with a tiny market - <AUTHOR> http://www.debuggex.com/firstblogpostpermalink <comment><USER2> I fed it a favorite regex... Bravo. Unfortunately, the permalinking fails with this particular regex, or I'd include it here. The visualization is so large, it more than fills my large screen. Still, pretty cool to see it render instantaneously and to watch it match example text. The regex is described here: <http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html> It will match either text or XML markup (it's used to tokenize XML), so try example text like '<div id="123">abc' or 'abc<?xml target?>'.

The JavaScript form of the regex follows: [^<]+|<(!(--([^-] _-([^-][^-]_ -) _- >?)?|\\[CDATA\\[([^]]_]([^]]+]) _]+([^] >][^]]_]([^]]+]) _]+)_ >)?|DOCTYPE([ \n\t\r]+([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F]) _([ \n\t\r]+(([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])_ |"[^"] _"|'[^']_ ')) _([ \n\t\r]+)?(\\[( <(!(--[^-]_-([^-][^-] _-)_ ->|[^-]([^]"'><]+|"[^"] _"|'[^']_ ') _> )|\?([A-Za- z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])_(\?>|[\n\r\t ][^?] _\?+([^ >?][^?]_\?+) _> ))|%([A-Za- z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])_;|[ \n\t\r]+) _]([ \n\t\r]+)?)? >?)?)?|\?(([A-Za- z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])_(\?>|[\n\r\t ][^?] _\?+([^ >?][^?]_\?+) _> )?)?|/(([A-Za- z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])_([ \n\t\r]+)?>?)?|(([A-Za- z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F]) _([ \n\t\r]+([A-Za- z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])_ ([ \n\t\r]+)?=([ \n\t\r]+)?("[^<"] _"|'[^ <']_'))*([ \n\t\r]+)?/?>?)?)

<comment><USER3> Wow. How the hell do you (OP) get it to render so fast? That was instantaneous as far as I could tell. I've seen websites take 5x as long to add a <li> to a <ul> ... I'm really amazed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, your browser does most of the hard stuff :) I'm not quite sure what others are doing that it's slow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Regarding business model and monetizing, here are some ideas:

1\. You could sell tutorials and ebooks on regexes. People who use your tool might want to understand why their regexes are not working.

2\. You could license your debugging code/technology.

3\. You could sell a corporate license to use your site. Corps's regexes won't be shared publicly. Others might be. Corps paranoid about people stealing their regexes might be interested in your product.

4\. You could ask for donations to support the site.

5\. You could make it social. Have people vote on regexes. Have another complementary site where people contribute test-cases for common regexes like phone numbers, dates, email addresses. You could hold competitions in different categories.

6\. You could offer a cloud-based regex parser. I know it sounds a bit absurd, but I want to throw this out there in case it leads to other neat ideas.

7\. You could save regexes and have people vote them up. You could have discussion threads around regexes.

<comment><USER5> _4\. You could ask for donations to support the site._

If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful. He is far more likely to make money selling a premium subscription to corporate users. He can even just say "site is free for personal use, and corporate users must pay $495/year". You would be surprised at how many businesses are paranoid enough about compliance that they will voluntarily pay even if it is unlikely that the site owner would ever find out about their unauthorized corporate use.

<comment><USER6> _If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful._

As far as I know, Wikipedia fundraising efforts have been very successful. They got $25 million dollars just last year.

[http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...](http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Foundation_raises_25_million_in_2012_fundraiser)

<comment><USER5> Yes, and as the fifth most popular site in the world, that is a pittance. They could be making billions with unobtrusive advertising. Given their traffic, the fact that they only raised $25 million last year means that nearly all of their users ignored their pleas for help. Further, when they do their begging, it is very obtrusive and disruptive to the user experience. Where alternative revenue models are available, begging shouldn't even be a consideration.

<comment><USER7> What revenue models? Advertising could skew/bias Wikipedia

<comment><USER8> why would advertising skew the factual information presented in wikipedia? Advertising is based off content, content isn't based off advertising.

<comment><USER9> One concern I saw mentioned was that after receiving advertising revenue, Wikipedia might become reliant on it, which would allow an advertiser to exert influence over the organization, such as demanding for articles to be removed that are negative to the advertiser's interests, with a threat to pull advertising funding.

But yes, I agree, it seems possible for WP to accept advertisement without compromising on its core values. Decide in advance never to give in to such demands, and do not take the funding for granted.

Deciding not to accept advertising might be short-sighted. With enough years of advertising revenue, Wikipedia might be able to work toward financial independence (where returns on investment exceed costs), and build an endowment like the sort that powers top universities.

<comment><USER10> They could set up a separate non-profit organisation (that donates its proceeds to the wikimedia foundation) to sell and manage the ads. Place the organisation in a city far from any wikimedia presence to counter casual contact. Put in the charter than there can be zero personnel overlap between the businesses at any level and that nobody at the ads company is allowed to edit any article on wikipedia or any reason, much less hold any admin credentials . Embrace openness: Publish as much as is practical about every deal, and make sure all ads on the sites are directly referenceable back to the deal in which they were purchased. Publish the names and resumes of all account managers.

<comment><USER11> ... if they can get by with donations, that seems a tad simpler.

Also, I don't have to watch any ads! Hurray for Wikipedia!

<comment><USER10> You seem to have missed the bit where they ran massive, obnoxious ads for months begging users to donate. And all for a pittance in donation revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Side note about debuggex.com itself: The "Phone Number" example is a bad idea. Please either remove it or otherwise relabel it to warn against using it.

Rationale: Almost everywhere in the world outside of US and Canada, phone numbers do not look like that, and interacting with websites that assume they do is frustrating. Even USians or Canadians may want to enter a phone number with an extension, which would get rejected by that regular expression (a colleague of mine got frustrated to no end by websites and bureaucracy assuming the 3-3-4 style of phone numbers when she moved to Canada, because she prefers not to use a cell phone too much, and her work number has an extension).

<comment><USER10> Even better: <https://code.google.com/p/libphonenumber/> Extensions still needs special-casing, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nothing about what has been built or blogged makes me believe this person really understands products or markets.

The logic of the points that are being made is flawed, starting with repeatedly conflating building a product for a small market with solving a small and simple problem. These are not the same.

In general, solving problems for small markets is just as hard as solving problems for big ones.

My advice is, at the level that you understand what to build to get to market, go after the biggest fastest growing markets you can.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no need to be so aggressive.

I think you misunderstood my argument. That may have been entirely my fault; I'm still learning to write.

Small and simple problems are rare in large markets because everybody is chasing after them. The low-hanging fruit get picked very quickly, and you need to produce more to reach the bleeding edge.

By contrast, smaller markets have more low-hanging fruit simply because there are not as many people picking them.

<comment><USER13> My apologies if you were offended, I didn't think that I was particularly aggressive.

Certainly not compared to what is possible...

I think I understood your argument, I just disagree with what you are asserting and your conclusion.

There is plenty of low-hanging fruit in big markets, because it is a proportionally bigger tree.

If you add the constraint that you want to do everything on your own, then the markets and problems you can reasonably approach are smaller, but I still argue that from a return on investment perspective, you should be looking for the largest market opportunity that you understand enough to build.

If you care to discuss in person, I'm on twitter with the same name. @ me and we figure out the best way to facilitate a discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sometimes building an excellent product or service in a tiny niche can also result in that tiny niche becoming bigger (by either a little or a lot). The MP3 player market was relatively tiny until the iPod blew it apart, ditto for tablets and the iPad, but I'm sure there are more niche examples.

</comment><comment><USER15> I tend to target niche markets because the odds of me succeeding are much higher. It's much easier to be the best of a small niche and like the article said everything happens on a smaller scale, so less risk. Most the wealthy people I personally know made their money from owning a small niche.

<comment><USER16> It's easi(er) to own a niche market, but it's also more likely that anyone decently positioned to compete with you can wipe out your profits with small changes to their product or pricing strategy

Not all niche markets are small in terms of revenue/cost either: there are product niches worth millions (or even billions) whose actual feasible customer set barely makes it into double digits. But when the niche is that small in terms of customers you find that despite the lack of threat from competitors it's actually the _customer_ that owns the niche....

<comment><USER17> That is true, but something else to focus on: with smaller niches, the _learning_ that takes place is often much higher and faster, and that is invaluable too.

My app is the absolute niche of niche ( [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauldavids...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauldavidsantana.timecalculator) ), but I learned _A LOT_ , especially about the official Android publishing process. I don't care if it doesn't get used by many people, because my target market was literally 1 person: my girlfriend.

In addition, the process of making this app was fun. Learning _AND_ fun; a goal that ALL of us here are striving for, right?

<comment><USER18> I think most people building products (as opposed to OSS) are striving for profitability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's one awesome regex debugger!

Going after such a small niche is a great idea as long as you know that the market is big enough to provide good ROI in both percentage and nominal terms.

I don't think the worry from a competitor "adding a feature and crushing you" is a very likely threat. As long as you can stick it out for a few years to build a brand name and continue to keep in front of the indefinite stream of people learning regex you should be fine.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't think I am in your target market based on your current positioning, however I am in a position where I would be involved in the decision as to whether my company would pay money for something like this.

The company I work for (as an SOA architect) uses regex heavily for many mission critical applications. It costs me 100s of Ks in testing effort when a back-end format experiences major change. We usually don't find a lot of bugs in testing but each missed parsing requirement could mean millions to the bottom line thus justifying the investment in man hours.

If you think support of regex is a tiny market, I am not sure you have considered all of your angles or fully understand your market.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to learn more about your use case and what's important in such large scale operations. Can you please email me at email@example.com?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> OP. Thanks for making debuggex! It has certainly changed the way I write regexes...I now reach for debuggex _before_ I start writing a new (non- trivial) regex. Fantastic tool.

One think that I would really love is to be able to used named capture groups like in Python.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Randle,

I read your blog post, and have kept named groups on my mind. Support for more languages is planned. However, I should note that it will be a premium feature.

I really appreciate the continued support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would love to see support for Re2: <https://code.google.com/p/re2/wiki/Syntax>

I mainly use Go and am used to Go Playground <http://play.golang.org/> for testing very small snippets and sharing them with others in IRC for education/debugging.

Debuggex is already part of my workflow when I write regular expressions, I was using it just yesterday to test some pre-processing of Markdown.

The value to me is already there, but right now it's something I could also do without... but if the regexp engine on Debuggex is the one that is in use in the language in which I wish to implement the regexp, then that does change everything. The value then becomes very high to me.

Debuggex can get you the first 95% of the way, but that last 5% of working out why something is not quite as you expect is where most of the pain is.

I generally find that the last 5% is implementation specific features and syntax (I have only settled on Go recently and tended to work in several languages at a time for the past 5 years, so most of my regexp pain comes from context switching languages and libraries).

Being able to select the exact implementation is the tipping point for me to reach into my pocket and pay.

</comment><comment><USER23> Good: The top left logo on your blog links to your website.

Bad: The first and last mention of Debuggex in the body text should be a link to your product.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was somewhat intentional. I had a larger plug at the beginning initially. I decided it did not seem genuine enough, and would take away from the content.

<comment><USER23> You are clearly genuine, but also a little naive business wise.

Please give this a read and let me know where the right place to link is, if not here.

1\. You are giving me quality content about your business experiences and decisions.

2\. You are giving me this information on a blog supporting a product which, by the way you've crafted the blog post, seems likely to be professional and loved.

3\. I'm a person who makes and uses regexps, a HN reader and I want to check out the product. I want to do this easily. The web uses links to do this. You've earned the right to link. It is exactly when you should. It is directly relevant and it is in "your home".

If you are in business, this is why you wrote the blog post. You've got me right where you want me. I'm interested and I have money. Make the path between "he should have my money" and "he has my money" as easy as possible. Link.

Let me use a crude dating analogy:

1\. Meet interesting person.

2\. Invite person to dinner.

3\. Groom, clean, prepare, cook, present, share dinner.

4\. Goes well, clicks, everyone is interested.

5\. Interesting person leans in for kiss.

6\. You back away, saying the kiss would take away from the lovely evening.

The kiss, and the relationship it hints at, is the point of the evening.

And since I see the horse, while on the ground, is still kicking somewhat and not all the way dead:

You are in business or you are not. If you are, know this and live by it:

Do the prep work, then ask, ask, ask. The worst that happens is no.

You've got a great product. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I am convinced. I'll add the links :)

<comment><USER24> Anecdotal confirmation: I probably wouldn't have clicked through (or found it) if the only link was the blog image - despite the first thing I did being to look for the link to the product. (Which is great, and might replace my current 'go-to' for this!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> As a small market pursuer, I had to say that a tiny market is different from tiny effort.

I developed torapp guilloche designer (<http://www.torapp.info>) for security printing industry, which is definitely a tiny market. But it did not mean less competition, and it is in fact much more complicated than a regular graphic editor like adobe illustrator and coreldraw.

Besides regular editing facilities in AI or coreldraw, I spent tremendous effort to handle all possible math formulas/curves as comupter algebraic system (CAS).

I would recommend people to pursue as big market as possible.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't think a visual regex debugger is a tiny market- it's every programmer who doesn't totally understand regex, or who will have regex that he needs help decoding. This is probably close to 99% of programmers.

<comment><USER27> If his market is "programmers who will pay for a regex debugger", it's probably much smaller than 99% of all programmers (and as a sibling comment pointed out, "programmers" are a much smaller market than many other).

<comment><USER26> Programmer market is ~12M. I agree that very few will pay though.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many- developer...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developers- are-there-in-the-world)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The problem is monetizing a small-market product, esp. an online product. If you go the advertising route, you have to get your page views _way_ up to earn anything; you can't do that with just one little server. If you go the subscription route, pricing is really tricky. If you charge just a little, in my personal experience a) most programmers won't pay anything, so you lose most of your market right there, and b) you'll go broke collecting a pittance from the few who will pay.

<comment><USER29> It feels like this is the quintessential "feature, not product" startup. The goal of these _should_ be either:

A. to acquire a huge customer base and then pivot into satisfying them with a larger "suite" offering which includes your original service as a feature,

or B. to _be acquired by_ another company with a huge customer base... and then integrate your feature into their suite. :)

I could see, for example, Github buying this (and other things like it) and launching a featureful, language-agnostic online IDE that compiles against Travis-CI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > "Why isn't my regex doing what I intend it to?" I've found that question to > be by far the most frustrating and time-consuming issue with developers I've > talked to

While I would totally use this tool, this statement indicates to me that he talked to a specific subset of developers.

I know that's kind of what the article is about, but still, this sentence makes it sound like he has solved the biggest time-sink for software developers.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wrote a regex tool a while back: <http://regexp.quaxio.com/>

It's open source so feel free to "steal" from it :)

</comment><comment><USER32> Admittedly I haven't spent too much time testing your product, but I just wanted to point out a few free tools that have been around for a while (which I use often):

<http://www.gethifi.com/tools/regex> (js regex tester) <http://rubular.com/> (ruby regex tester)

Have you heard of/tried these before?

<comment><USER33> That was exactly my first thought - I use rubular all the time and it's a great scratchpad for regexes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> i can not say the same about my product <http://onetimepost.com/> ... but it only took me a Saturday morning so ... it wasn't like something huge was lost xD

<comment><USER35> well, how did you market it? looks pretty neat to me.

<comment><USER34> shared the link on some few powerful websites like this .... truth is, very few people has an immediate need for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I once spent an entire month developing a very niche product. I figured about 100 people would be interested in it. Turned out only 11 were. :) I earned no money, gained no fame. Still i am happy i did it. It was challenging enough be fun. Sometimes challenge is all we need.

I don't think your product has a tiny market. Everybody uses regex and nobody actually understands it.

</comment><comment><USER37> _In a smaller market, everything happens on a smaller scale._

No. Scale has nothing to do with market size. Though you picked to build something (not yet a product) that seems to lack a market (defined as people willing to pay for it).

 _In a smaller market, you can demonstrate expertise._

Its actually easier to demonstrate expertise on bigger markets, due to its density. A small market can only have so many experts.

 _In a smaller market, you can iterate faster on non-programming skills._

This is more of an attitude than anything else. Its not a big vs small thing itself.

One question I have to ask is why are you trying to develop a new kind of product on an untested market, when you can improve on an existing product and just focus on selling? You are still picking the most difficult choice. And the one that usually tends to deliver a failure.

Once again for everybody: Don't build new things in new markets. Take old things and improve them.

</comment><comment><USER38> I just build things for myself, and I am part of the smaller market.

</comment><comment><USER39> Very cool! Two suggestions: show the examples more prominently (and my add a regex for email, cause it looks cool), and allow people to link to specific regexes.

</comment><comment><USER40> Checked out the debuggex tool. Impressive!

</comment><comment><USER41> Interesting arguments...But apart from IDEs like visual studios, How much do individuals and companies pay for developer tools? Like say a better debugger or a code coverage tool? How about VIM plugins or better editors? I too have some ideas for a better debugger that I have been working on.

</comment><comment><USER42> Wow, this really is the best regex checker I've seen. Great work dude, you must be Russian or Romanian.

</comment><comment><USER43> Interestingly, it seems like a lot of this is essentially a generalization of the advantages of B2B.

</comment><comment><USER44> Great product, I loved it but I'd be in great trouble trying to monetize, hope you'll nail it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Others have mentioned it too, but I was blown away with the speed of the renderer! By the time the return key sprang back up, the visualisation was displaying on my screen. How did you do that?

</comment><comment><USER46> Hi tsergiu,

May I ask you what you used for doing the layout ? All coded by hand ?

Good work anyway !

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yup, it's currently coded by hand. I'll find a more scalable way as more pages need to be added to the site. You can see that e.g. the blog post is just a page with a unique link.

<comment><USER46> I meant more, the layout of the regex diagrams :) (but I guess it's also "by hand")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This reminds me a lot of the regular expression reAnimator: <http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/>.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm in the same boat - building something I really want to build and use myself, not really caring much about product-market fit or any of that other stuff.

</comment><comment><USER49> One of these days, JS regex will support look behinds.. All my dodgy regexes that this would be useful for use them :(

</comment><comment><USER50> Interesting perspective. And regarding debuggex.com itself... Awesome. I'll be using it in the future. Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER51> I love niche products. The popularity of "things for everyone" (like iPhone/Galaxy) somewhat worries me.

</comment><comment><USER52> You can make an Eclipse plugin and sell it to corporations and/or OEM license it to IDE/tool vendors.

<comment><USER53> +1 on this idea. I would even consider targeting web development editors like Sublime Text 2 or Brackets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> That's a really cool little tool, and I think you're building a very lucrative audience.

</comment><comment><USER55> Just FYI.. This is built with AngularJS. One of the coolest product built with it too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've loved working with angular. My only complaint is that the current docs are somewhat lacking, but it seems that will soon be addressed: [https://plus.google.com/112439678898563138768/posts/LfWvcFfq...](https://plus.google.com/112439678898563138768/posts/LfWvcFfqjXA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Will you be charging for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I am planning to monetize. I have a few ideas for to do that as it approaches the end of beta, but I'd love to hear any suggestions you have.

<comment><USER57> Debuggex is a very well done and useful site. It reminds me of <http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/> in terms of utility and slickness of design. Alex Sirota of that site uses a sponsored area that is not obtrusive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> great product, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER59> Why? Because you don't need to make 1 cent off each tomato sold in USA to be successful. Even taking a cut of every water pump of a certain car is more then enough--for most of us.</comment>


Is software eating the world, or vice versa? - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/11/to-eat-or-be-eaten.html

<comment><USER2> Can't help, but think of...

      they lied to us
      this was supposed to be
      the future
      where is my jetpack,
      where is my robotic companion,
      where is my dinner in pill form,
      where is my hydrogen fueled automobile,
      where is my nuclear-powered levitating home,
      where is my cure for this disease

</comment><comment><USER3> Whether you're adding software to physical items or replacing physical supply chains with software, I think Andreessens point is that software is a high value activity.

While the Internet of Things is about connecting physical objects, the cool thing is that they're connected, and integrated, which requires software to handle the complexity.

<comment><USER4> However software is becoming commoditised, while hardware is now appearing to involve quite a degree of inventiveness, a characteristic following from the growth in low powered ARM devices, among others.

You can get a Som board with a Texas Instruments Omap 5, say from Phytec, running, well Android or Linux, or maybe a Exynos 5 running, well, Android or Linux. Or a plethora of others doing the same thing, like Raspberry Pi.

From the hardware viewpoint, it could be said that you do indeed eat the OS.

<comment><USER5> I think it's only the software _infrastructure_ (like operating systems, languages/compilers, libraries and frameworks) that's becoming commoditised. The market for actual solutions remains vibrant as ever. Be it automated car- driving or 3D-printing, or payment gateways, there is no commoditization for apps for new problems.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. On these devices the OS or even RTOS's for them are just the basis for further coding to accomplish this different conception of value added functionality. But unlike, say an iOS app, which leverages an underlying software platform ( running even on outstanding hardware ), these hardware efforts leverage the power of the devices and their peripherals. It's all back to C ( or maybe assembler or C++ ), and the code is more and more a facilitator for the hardware's value.

I should make myself clear that I'm thinking about hardware solutions that differ from current consumer products in the main, such as general purpose computers, or tablets and phones and so on.

But you're absolutely right that anything programmable requires software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's both.

The world 'eating software' is what is fuelling growth around the world.

Software eating the world is what is causing huge accumulations of capital in the world's largest tech firms, even though the total share of revenue by software companies is tiny.</comment>


The 3 Keys to Good Public Speaking - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/public-speaking

<comment><USER2> Heh. Skewers several of the "tech blogosphere" it-people. Too bad they'll think it doesn't apply to them.

<comment><USER3> of course it applies to them and they know it - but no one in their small gang will ever tell them</comment></comment>


Indieweb: Why Web Signin - <AUTHOR> https://indieweb.org/Why_web_sign-in <comment><AUTHOR> For bloggers and other netizens, the domain name is a powerful identity device. Indieweb philosophy is to leverage the domain-name as identification, superseding OpenID in simplicity.

Web Signin is not a general solution of course. Most people are not in control of a domain name or a homepage. But it would be relatively simple to build up an identity through cheap hosting, such as Neocities (free static websites), which are sufficient to build a Web Sign-in.

This is not yet a turnkey solution for the general public, but this Web Sign- in protocol is probably good enough for bloggers and other early adopters to start trying it out.

\</comment><comment>

A good example service of web sign in is Webmention.io, an implementation of the IndieWeb "Webmention" protocol. (Similar to Pingbacks from old blogosphere, or @Tags from Twitter)</comment>


The Croissant Way of Life - <AUTHOR> https://knowledgeartist.org/articles/8fdbb334-a9f7-4d4c-ab46-ca1c915280f5/a-good-croissant-makes-any-day-better <comment><AUTHOR> Lately I have been trying to be more in tune with the more sensing/feeling part of me (as opposed to the logical thinking).

The croissant is something that brings me disproportionate joy in life. Something that means a lot to me. And I decided to spend an entire morning writing about it :)</comment>


David Shane: Using Design Patterns in iOS [video] - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/41504128

<comment><USER2> It really needed to show the code on the screen. Why did they show the slides but not the actual code?</comment>


Celebrating 25 Years of MPI: Present, Past, and Future of MPI - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcs.anl.gov/mpi-symposium/ <comment><USER2> Ironically, the talks are given in serial rather than all at once.</comment>


Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/Failure/CMU-PDL-06-111.pdf <comment><USER2> It means when you have a thousand disks, you lose one every month (or a dozen every month if this paper is correct: "We find that in the field, annual disk replacement rates exceed 1%, with 2-4% common and up to 12% observed on some systems").

</comment><comment><USER3> It means that after it dies on the second day of heavy use, on average it will not die again until 1M hours later.</comment>