Ask HN: Do people still use Bing.com? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Due to my country's political situation I use the Tor Browser a lot. Bing is the only search engine that reliably works with Tor. I thank them for that.

Google merely claims "your network is sending automated queries" and refuses to work or frustrates with 20 rounds of Captchas with ever-increasing time delays before ultimately rejecting service.

Sites with Cloudflare "protection" are also unusable through Tor Browser. Why use Captchas when you don't allow the user after passing those? I sincerely doubt they cannot tell a "robot" from a human user. Either they are incompetent or simply hostile to Tor users.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bing is a great search engine. Want to know how I know? I Googled it.

-Colbert

In all seriousness, I use Bing on my laptop and Google on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER4> It has been my main search engine for a few years. After Microsoft bought Powerset, Bing became broadly competitive with Google.

In the last two weeks I feel Bing has gotten worse, it often refuses to give authoritative answers for queries like "css grid layout specification" and instead spams you with spam pages with watered down explanations, inserted factual and grammatical errors, and lots of Google™ ads.

I know why Google does it, not why Microsoft does it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Depending on the place, and what to look for, I often prefer their maps. Furthermore it's often faster to load, maybe because almost no one is using it?

Apart from that, via DuckDuckgo only.

<comment><USER6> I'm trying so hard to use DuckDuckGo. At first, it was fine. Most specific queries it finds what I want pretty easily.

But it's horrible at finding local businesses, and so many times I get garbage search results for more generic queries. Now I've gotten good at guessing which searches will be succesful on DDG or not, that I go straight to google for them.

<comment><USER5> Again, depending on the place, there is Open Streetmap. Which means optically scanning for the businesses in a certain region. Sounds oldfashioned and impractical, but works for me from the desktop.

The largest issue I'm having with that is the lack of links to those businesses on their maps. Seems to be policy to not have them. But then again, I'm no power shopper, so I can live with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No, but I do use bing translate through the iOS app.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you miss public comment point counts? - <AUTHOR>

Comment point counts, as a measure of social proof, are double-edged swords: they might create feedback loops where more people tend to upvote the higher-voted comment, but they also act as informational signals. The message is simple: X number of users thought this comment was worthy of attention. But that can be a powerful data point when attempting to make sense of conflicting and equally persuasive views. Sometimes when reading a thread, I may wonder "how many other people agree with the comment I just read?" The most I can know is how many people upvoted it relative to the sibling comments, and even this is unreliable due to the time factor and the potential absence of any siblings.
Some people may find this to be intellectually "weak"... after all, in a perfect world, we would judge a comment based solely on the merits of its content. But sometimes our judgement fails, and it can be useful to see how it compares to the judgements of others. For example, I may read a comment and think "that's pretty stupid," but then see that it received 100 upvotes, leading me to think: "Well, maybe I missed something. I should reconsider the arguments being made; perhaps my perspective was based on faulty assumptions."
Additionally, if we see a comment that we strongly disagree with, but notice that it has received barely any upvotes, we may be less inclined to respond; we may think to ourselves: "well, nobody else seems to agree with this guy either, so it's not really worth picking a fight." On the one hand, the poster's views may go unchallenged, but on the other hand, it may avoid triggering a disruptive flame war.
Hiding comment points may be the best way to go; personally, I'm undecided. I just wonder if anyone else has any thoughts on the absence of public comment points, and how it affects your HN experience. <comment><USER2> Comment points, or karma points are meant to be for contributions to the discussion, rather than agree / disagree. Think of it as insightful versus wasteful. It's obviously abused and thus the mechanic doesn't work as intended.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been rehashed a fair amount on Hacker News. My recollection is that they were removed with a specific purpose -- to cut down on Paul Graham getting dragged into the middle of stupid fights, essentially -- and pg felt it was successful. So they are unlikely to come back. He got what he wanted and I see no reason for him to put up with the issue that prompted him to make them invisible.

HN is a free service. It has a business function for Ycombinator but it does not directly make money. I think especially as it became more popular, some hard decisions had to be made to keep it from getting out of hand in terms of sucking up too much time and energy for no real pay off.</comment>


Ask HN: SaaS forum with integrated login - <AUTHOR>

Hi Hacker News,
We are looking for a forum software to integrate into secapps.com. Is there a SaaS product out there that already does that? The requirements are:
* Integrated login - once logged in via secapps.com you are logged in into the forum as well * Fairly good looking and customisable * Flexible pricing plan - it may be used by more than 50,000 customers
Help is much appreciated. Feel free to provide your shameless plug. <comment><USER2> Discourse comes to mind: [http://www.discourse.org/](http://www.discourse.org/)</comment>


If California's a 'bad state for business,' why is it leading in job/GDP growth? - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-california-econ-growth-20160722-snap-story.html <comment><USER2> Ah, Hiltzik. Never finds an answer he didn't start with.

>The most obvious answer is that the business-friendliness and competitiveness rankings are pretty much baloney.

No, the most obvious answer is California's built-in advantages are enough to overcome idiotic government. Trade with Asia mostly comes through Los Angeles and Long Beach, it doesn't snow in populated areas, and California's #1 population size gives it political clout other states don't have.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank goodness places like Africa are THRIVING without all these draconian governmental regulations.

I guess all this government funded: infrastructure, education, public transit, etc. aren't contributing AT ALL to California's success, they should really target Sudan as a model for small government success. </s>

<comment><USER2> You're making some unfounded assumptions in the construction of this straw man. The first being that "places like Africa" aren't thriving economically (twelve countries had higher GDP growth than California last year despite low oil prices).

The second that businesses in less developed countries don't suffer under a lot of arbitrary taxes and regulations.

<comment><USER4> Higher GDP growth as a percentage? Comparing developed economies to developing ones with that metric isn't particularly useful.

<comment><USER2> I would argue it's the only number that's useful. Total GDP is a function of policies going back hundreds of years, which were likely to have been quite different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Compared with the other states I've lived in, California seems to have the least corrupt and most reasonable regulations. Sure I can find plenty of ridiculous stuff (the boneheaded 8-hr/day vs 40 hours/week rule) but by and large it's a great place to do business.

Those ALEC, Heritage foundation etc clowns are welcome to stay in DC and screw up other states. Their arguments are always data-free.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why didn't Tesla build its largest-in-the-industry battery factory here?

Why did Toyota move out?

"Business relocation expert Joe Vranich has been counting.

"I tracked for 2011, that 254 companies of all sizes and shapes and kinds left the state for primarily other states," said Vranich, the president of Spectrum Location Services in Irvine.

He told KCRA 3 that companies leave California for three primary reasons: "High taxes, excessive regulations and the threat of really ridiculous lawsuits."

Chevron is moving 800 jobs from their Bay Area headquarters to Texas, and Waste Connections shifted more than 100 jobs to Texas from Folsom.

"Two dozen companies commit to leaving California -- Prop 30 triggers business backlash"

[http://www.kcra.com/news/Two-dozen-companies-commit-to- leavi...](http://www.kcra.com/news/Two-dozen-companies-commit-to-leaving- California/18533954)

Detroit took 50 years to crash.

Not sure if most people are aware, but Silicon Valley led California with jobs growth, led California out of the recession.

If the rest of Silicon Valley moves to Austin et al, California's highest-in- the-nation personal income tax will need to go _much higher._

As a small business owner, the taxes and regs just scream "don't hire anyone!"

Arizona, Texas (no state income tax), Nevada (no state income tax) -- weather not too bad, real close to California.

</comment><comment><USER7> California is growing in spite of its draconian business regulations. Perhaps things would be even better with more friendly laws for small businesses.

<comment><USER8> >in spite of its draconian business regulations.

California is the most populous state, contains more people than the 21 least populous states combined. [1]

Taking China and India as a reference, I believe population is a big reason for its growth.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population)</comment></comment>


Neovim - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/neovim/neovim <comment><USER2> Thanks for trying to do what many of us secretly wished we could do but can't because of time/skill constraints. I will definitely move to NeoVim the second it's packaged (is it yet?), regardless if you've changed anything yet.

I hate the ideas many programmers have about backwards compatibility, that it's more important than development speed and modern concepts. There is nothing holy about Unix era software, chances are it's shit and a lot of it should be thrown out.

Look at SublimeText, it's got 1% of the features of Vim, yet it's converting Vim users left and right, by its sheer usability.

We as developers in the Open Source community should be ashamed people are still using Vim to write LaTeX in Bash running on terminal emulators. (Yes, it gives me shivers just thinking about how much each of those technologies sucks when you think about how good it all could be.)

<comment><USER3>
      > ...should be ashamed people are still using Vim to write LaTeX in Bash running on terminal emulators.

First, why? It works just fine. Second, is there anything better? I don't know of anything I would prefer to use. So until someone comes up with something, I'll stick to using Vim to write LaTeX in a Bash shell (might upgrade to zsh, we'll see).

<comment><USER2> No, it doesn't work fine. LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result, it has no API, is not extendable in a sane way, it's source code is so arcane there's books written about it, and if you've read the books the only thing you've learned is that trying to reimplement LateX is a fool's errand. And it's syntax is ugly.

Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better. They just both lack certain things we need, and LaTeX has those things.

Could you not envision things could be better?

A LaTeX that parses to an in-memory tree so it could be transformed before compilation?

A shell that instead of working on character streams worked on structured and annotated data streams, so it could intelligently interpret what is going on?

An editor that does have at its core an expectation that its output is ASCII character commands controlling a 1970s terminal interface?

Of course you'll stick to using Vim to write LaTeX in a Bash shell, I do too. Doesn't mean I'm not mad about it..

<comment><USER4> 1) You run latex twice only on really large and complex documents like books, and if you're writing books (not editing, see antipope.org for details) in Word, then you need professional help.

2) Markdown and LaTeX are designed for different tasks. Next you'll be telling me that if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw.

3) Find me the structured and annotated data streams first - and show me that the structure and annotations are correct - _then_ lament the lack of a shell that can route them to the programs that don't interpret stdin and stdout and stderr that way anyway.

4) I use vim to write latex when I write latex, but "in a bash shell" doesn't make any sense. You fire up vim from bash, yes, but unless you're trying to do an ex-style editing session, you're not editing in the shell any more than you're editing in the kernel or the tty driver...

<comment><USER5> You're completely missing the GP's point. Whether or not LaTeX is better than MS Word for task X is besides the point. It's that LaTeX has many obvious opportunities for improvement, ways to drag it into the current age, while keeping all its fundamental strengths. As do many similarly old tools such as Bash, terminal emulators and Vim.

These improvements aren't all that difficult to imagine, but they don't happen, because, well, why? GP seems to think an obsession over backwards compatibility.

<comment><USER4> Why expend manpower and energy improving a working solution just to do so when you have so many other broken things that need fixing first? That's a fairly self-answering question. There's a reason the expression is "If it's not broken, don't fix it".

<comment><USER6> We have tools that have virtually been unchanged for over 20 years. While the consistency and stability has been nice, there has been a lot of good things that have happened in software development and technology that those tools could really benefit from. You're honestly going to tell me you don't think that taking a second look at these tools and seeing how we could improve them would be a good thing?

What you're basically advocating is nobody should innovate because things are "good enough". With that sort of attitude we would never have any progress on anything.

<comment><USER4> That's not what I'm advocating. What I'm advocating is not wasting time and effort rewriting working tools just because the rewrite would be newer.

Which is _not_ what you're saying I'm advocating.

<comment><USER7> Nobody thinks it's a good idea to rewrite something just to make it "newer". The idea is to rewrite (or maybe just refactor) these tools to make them _better_.

It's also not "fixing what's not broken", but improving something that could... well... be improved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand I've been thinking on it for quite a long time already, newer shinier Vim is something I secretly wish for. On the other hand I found it quite problematic. The main problem of Vim is Vimscript. So "newer shinier Vim" is Vim with real programming language instead of vimscript. But it's impossible to remove Vimscript: it won't be Vim anymore. It affects not only scripting itself, but also how we interact with it in command mode, not to say about plugins we have already.

And here we have a project. Virtually nothing is done, previous commit was 20 days ago, and the last commit is adding the fundraiser link an hour ago. I mean, the author doesn't seem to be fanatically enthusiastic. And plans are quite generous. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I have some bad feeling about that. I'm thinking instead of "Hm, maybe better to write an open-source version of Sublime Text?".

<comment><USER9> "Hm, maybe better to write an open-source version of Sublime Text?" You mean, like Lime?

[https://github.com/limetext/lime](https://github.com/limetext/lime)

<comment><USER10> Nice, but I would have to know a little more about their philosophy before deciding I'm interested in the project. Their frontpage shows something as closed as Sublime's. "This is what we're doing with this tech, its gonna be great".

<comment><USER9> There's source code, a BSD license and the README describes their rationale right up front. In light of just the superficial information on github, your comment seems hyperbolic.

My interest in the project is in something with a design similar to Sublime Text that works remotely in an SSH session. There's also some exotica about wrapping Python in a Go process which I find interesting and terrifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thiago de Arruda (the author of Neovim) has also released a Vim fork with multithreading support (proof of concept):

[https://github.com/tarruda/vim/](https://github.com/tarruda/vim/)

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/65jjGqS1_VQ](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/65jjGqS1_VQ)

</comment><comment><USER12> A brave effort. Given your commit history, documented plan and great idea I was happy to back it [1] and hope you succeed. Best of luck :)

[1]: [https://www.bountysource.com/fundraisers/539-neovim-first- it...](https://www.bountysource.com/fundraisers/539-neovim-first-iteration)

<comment><AUTHOR> I greatly appreciate it, thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thiago if you read this, please do your fundraiser a favor and mention all the work and review that went into your thread safe message queue already.

There is a lot of skepticism about your capability of delivering, but i think it's clear that you already have the experience needed.

<comment><USER14> To make sure that your message does reach him, try to reach out directly.

His contact information is here:

[http://tarruda.github.io/](http://tarruda.github.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who uses Vim to write articles and documentation in addition to code, I'd really love to see a richer UI with proper support for features like variable-width fonts.

It looks like the developer behind this refactoring effort has some really good ideas for decoupling the Vim engine from the user interface layer. It'd be great if somebody could build a really good cross-platform Qt-based UI on top.

<comment><AUTHOR> That actually is planned on the first iteration of the fundraiser, see the FAQ

<comment><USER15> That's really great! After reading the FAQ, I have contributed $100. Best of luck with the project!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It sounds like they have no interest in getting this stuff pushed back upstream? There's no mention of it on the home page.

At this point it smells kind of Emacs/XEmacsish. Hope they can rally immense development effort.

<comment><USER17> The author of NeoVim (Thiago de Arruda) tried to add support for multi- threaded plugins to Vim and has been stymied[1].

I'm not sure how to get a patch merged into Vim. Bram Moolenar is the only person with commit access, and he's not a fan of most changes beyond bug fixes. My co-founder and I tried to add setTimeout & setInterval to vimscript[2]. Even six weeks of full-time effort and bending over backwards wasn't enough. Eventually we were just ignored.

I've contributed to a lot of open source projects, and the Vim community has been the most difficult to work with. I've been writing C for almost two decades, and the Vim codebase is the _worst_ C I've ever seen[3]. The project is definitely showing its age, and I'd love for something new to replace it.

1\. [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/65jjGqS1_VQ/fFiFrrIB...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/65jjGqS1_VQ/fFiFrrIBwNAJ)

2\. [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/-4pqDJfHCsM/LkYNCpZj...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/-4pqDJfHCsM/LkYNCpZjQ70J)

3\. If you value your sanity, do not read eval.c. It is over 25,000 lines and has over 400 ifdefs. The first ifdef checks for Amiga; the second checks for VMS: [https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/blob/master/src/eval.c](https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/blob/master/src/eval.c)

<comment><USER18> Your patches were broken. Now your answer is to fork? Sheesh.

> _The project is definitely showing its age, and I 'd love for something new > to replace it._

Then start over. Refactoring it will be nigh impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Migrate to a cmake-based build

> Legacy support and compile-time features

> Platform-specific code

Sounds like well-justified cleanup, although it's possible this project is underestimating the usefulness of feature selection.

> New plugin architecture

> New GUI architecture

Now that's cool and ambitious.

I wonder whether Bram has an opinion on this?

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm a hardcore Vim user and I just don't see the point of this.

Not only that, but Vim is charity ware and requires the license to be included. The license is most notably absent from the Neovim fork. Wonder if that will be added any time soon...

<comment><USER21> So I read over the license and you're right, the license does need to be included. However I don't see anything wrong with the project as long as the license is included in its distribution. The license doesn't go against anything Neovim is doing, provided they include the license and provide the project source.

<comment><USER20> Therein lies the problem; the license is not being included. I find this a bit concerning since the default in forking a repo would have included it. So this gives off the impression then that the license was deliberately removed.

Just to make it clear (most people on Hackernews probably already know this, but for the sake of anyone that doesn't), it would look like this.

hg clone [https://vim.googlecode.com/hg/](https://vim.googlecode.com/hg/) neovim

cd ./neovim

git init && git add . && git commit -m "First commit"

git remote add origin [https://github.com/neovim/neovim.git](https://github.com/neovim/neovim.git)

git push -u origin master

There you have it; an exact fork from Mercurial push out to neovim on github, everything included. Getting those license files out of there took some manual steps somewhere in between lines 1 and 3.

<comment><USER22> I think it's likely that the license was accidentally removed as part of cleaning up the build system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Let me just say that I recently had to build a 'new' UnixWare 7.1.0 system. I was stunned and delighted that I was able to compile vim 7.4 + then-current patches.

Couldn't compile git, python or a couple of other things I wanted, but at least I could use a reasonable editor.

<comment><USER24> That's awesome in a way. But this being Open Source you can just download the sources for Vim 7.4 in the future and use it on UnixWare 7.1.0.

While the rest of us (and maybe you, yourself) on Ubuntu 15.10 can use Neovim with all the cruft taken out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Finally, someone took this step. I really appreciate his work.

Don't get me wrong. Vim is an awesome editor and it is the only editor I'm using now. I've been using it for decades and still cannot find an editor which can replace it. Sorry, emacs, I tried several times but failed. I know it's my problem but I'm too familiar with vim's short-cuts.

However, I do think we can still do some improvement on vim, especially on its plugin systems. If you wrote plugins for vim, you know what I'm talking about. For example, can you quickly tell me the differences between map nnoremap nnoremap? How to write comment in vimscript?

To me, vimscript seems like a language patched by lots of authors with inconsistent goals. It's not as cohesive as Emacs Lisp. And there are lots of historical reasons why they do that --- I know, it's backward compatibility. But you have to move forward at some time.

With that being said, I do think it is necessary to have an editor which keeps the good parts in vim and improve it by not considering too much about backward compatibility. I'm so glad that someone did it for us.

<comment><USER26> There's viper mode.

Though, aside from a brief dalliance with emacs in the late 1990s, I've used vi / vim since 1987.

<comment><USER27> I tried Evil, which was supposedly better than Viper, and it got me 90% of the way to vim. But that last 10% kept me from staying (and also that emacs has way more typing/command lag than vim).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For those searching a combination between VI, Emacs and Haskell: [https://github.com/yi-editor/yi](https://github.com/yi-editor/yi)

</comment><comment><USER29> I actually had hoped "Neovim" would be a modern reimagining of a modal Texteditor for the modern time, along one of two paths.

Path 1: An html5+javascript based modal editor where buffers are actually DOM trees, enabling both code and other data to be rendered/edited, and also offering much richer visual enhancements. Javascript is already a great way for enabling a rich plugin ecosystem.

Path 2: Modal Textediting suited for mobile devices. For example based on python+kivy, or even C with SDL, it would be aimed to be portable and to extend the modal interface to touch-based gestures and speech recognition. Akin to "verbal vim", entering vim-like commands with touch or voice gestures, text editing on mobile devices like tablets would immediately suck a lot less...

<comment><USER30> Can't tell if you are actually serious about the above or not, especially path 1.

<comment><USER31> I personally think path 1 is _absolutely_ where editors should be going. Upvote from me.

NeoVim is a step in the right direction, but not far enough. The future is a more Light Table like environment ([http://www.lighttable.com/](http://www.lighttable.com/)). But Light Table (as visionary as I think its UI is) is written (and extended, AFAIK) in ClojureScript, a LISP-like language that nobody knows.

It it was written and could be extended in JavaScript instead, and configured to the extent that I could write VIM-like modal editor support for it, I might finally be able to give up VIM after 20 years for something better.

<comment><USER32> Getting a little ahead of ourselfs maybe?

"Nobody knows", lets just compare IRC. #javascript on freenode got 951 users. #clojure on freenode got 651 users. Even tho its not a good comparison, saying "nobody" knows clojure is very far fetched. It has a ever growing community, with several books published, and the whole point on Chris choosing Clojure shows enough of its maturity.

<comment><USER31> Search Amazon.com books:

ClojureScript: 10 results (only one of these actually has ClojureScript in the title)

Clojure: 89 results

JavaScript: 5,787 results

Sorry, there is no comparison.

I'm not saying Clojure sucks, I am just saying that it's not mainstream. ClojureScript even less so -- it's an offshoot of Clojure which was designed around the JVM, not browsers.

<comment><USER32> "I'm not saying Clojure sucks, I am just saying that it's not mainstream.", to be frank, thats not what you said; "... ClojureScript, a LISP-like language that nobody knows.".

Saying its not mainstream is no problem, but it tells you nothing about the quality of the language. What i do find problematic is that you are changing your argumentation from one comment too another. Clojure is a lang several people know, judgeing by books is a poor comparison as we can limit too the past year and compare and the difference would not be as stark, as you try to present it. Clojure also got 80 (?) books published in less then 2-3 years since its its rather quick breakthrough. There is no need to even try and claim "nobody" knows clojure, or "it's not mainstream".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I really like what he's setting out to do here but I was a bit put off by the fundraising setup. If the target isn't met the donations still go to him, and there's no pledge to do anything on that case. Is that right or did I miss something?

<comment><USER34> On the other hand the fundraiser is now over $8,000 which is enough for at least a month of work, I think it'll make the 10k in short order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ambitious. Best of luck to them--I've considered trying to do a full port to a language like Go or Rust, but I've never quite had the time (or self-hatred to try and handle quite so many corner cases as what I've seen in vim's code).

</comment><comment><USER36> Bram Moolenaar response to Neovim:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/vim_dev/x0BF9Y0Uby...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/vim_dev/x0BF9Y0Uby8)

</comment><comment><USER37> Good luck! This is a tough problem. Many have tried, and they all failed.

[http://www.freehackers.org/VimIntegration](http://www.freehackers.org/VimIntegration)

</comment><comment><USER38> This reminds me of the now dead [https://github.com/chrizel/Yzis](https://github.com/chrizel/Yzis)

Even though it has been tried a few times before and never seems to catch on I really like the idea and would be down to help except I haven't coded C in 15 years and don't really have any desire to go back. I wonder if there are parts I could help with in newer languages. It's always fun to pick up a project to learn a new language.

<comment><USER39> The big difference here is that it's based on refactoring the existing codebase. While not the most glamorous job in the world, it's more realistic than attempting to recreate the product of 22 years of development starting from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I applaud your effort but I worry that this step is not far enough to make a better version of vim. However I really think that we can do better and the famous, great editors (vim, emacs, acme, etc.) all have different features that make them great and unique. I prefer vim because of its modal nature which might be the reason why I find it also ergonomically superior (after remapping ESC to jf) - e.g. I don't like it to stretch my fingers.

On the other hand I never really script vim as I find vimscript just terrible. This is far better in emacs as it uses a decent programming language.

The third aspect I think is not well-designed is window/buffer-managment. In my opinion this point could be outsourced or developed in connection with a tiling WM or terminal multiplexer like tmux/screen (this part is best in acme).

A modern approach I thought about (Yet Another Text Editor Syndrome) would be a client-server architecture with a server node storing buffers with context information (filename, cursor, etc.) to which clients can connect. A client node could be on one hand a viewer (terminal or gui based) doing fancy thing like syntax-hightlighting, cursor control, searching and on the other a REPL (in any language) that just has to implement the bridge to a defined message protocol.

<comment><USER41> Lime text fits this description I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Cool project! It'd be nice if the build system was converted to GYP, so that it integrated well with libuv.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think this is a great project. The author appears to be extremely competent. I pledged $20.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think there are features (which the ability to embed a vim engine may enable) that would make it easier to improve one's usage of vim.

Real time analysis of actions, with suggestions for better ways to do what you just did. Long term analysis of actions, to see what are the biggest time wasters (ie, you often do a certain command that requires typing, maybe it might be better to make a function mapped to a leader based command. Or you tend to copy things with a range that you could have copied using a text object.

And that is what interests me about this. I really hope that separating GUI from the core and the exposure of streams will allow you to put an analysis engine between streams.

</comment><comment><USER45> kickstarter this please. I (and so many others I guess) would love to support this.

I'm worried that a lot of good projects die off because everyone have mouths to feed. I suspect that I have spent a large part of my adult life using vim, so I want to make sure a good successor comes through.

Take a look at LightTable - which was quite successful [1] in raising and delivering what it promised.

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light- table](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table)

<comment><USER46> Have you seen this: [https://www.bountysource.com/fundraisers/539-neovim- first-it...](https://www.bountysource.com/fundraisers/539-neovim-first- iteration) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The more I think about this, the more I like it. I badly want my vim to be multi-threaded and a separate engine, especially one that had a queue based pub/sub type interface could really open up some cool possibilities. At that point if you could give it the ability to use operational transform for the changes it would make remote editing, as well as remote pairing work really well. I know floobits is doing something similar but I would have to think this would make that much easier to pull off.

</comment><comment><USER47> But what about the children in Uganda?

</comment><comment><USER48> I would love to have Bram Moolenaar's input on this project.

<comment><USER36> I've just sent an email to the firstname.lastname@example.com mailing list. I asked his opinion on the Neovim project.

The subject for my email is "Neovim", so let's wait and see what his opinion is.

<comment><USER36> [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/x0BF9Y0Uby8](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/x0BF9Y0Uby8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> 300 comments in 24 hours.

nothing better than people word-fighting about writing tools...

-bowerbird

<comment><USER50> Right, haha, like comparing tool that does the same thing and just justifying or proving that this one is better -_-

<comment><USER51> Wait till you see what happens when someone comes up with neoemacs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> First off, what happens if you don't meet the funding goal, do we get our money back?

I think a big reason for Vims popularity is how ubiquitous it is. It's installed by default on most *nix operating systems. Even if I'm not privileged on a system, I can still pull down my dotfiles and have my familiar vim editing experience.

If I understand correctly, plugins written for Vim would be compatible with Neovim, but not vice versa?

</comment><comment><USER53> As far as I'm concerned, just moving a vim clone to git is a huge improvement.

Ever tried building vim from the ports tree on a <1GHz machine? Painful.

</comment><comment><USER54> I wish someone would try this again for Emacs :(

</comment><comment><USER55> If anyone is looking for alternative to vim then check out Textadept which has a curses UI version and a graphical UI version.

</comment><comment><USER56> I think one of the most important things about this is the last bullet point. "Development on Github." I occasionally look at the vim-dev mailing list and I see people attaching patch files to conversations. I think Github's collaborative development workflow could help the barrier of entry to updates a lot.

</comment><comment><USER57> Any worry about latency with this new plugin architecture? I'm not quite sure how the current plugins communicate with the main process, but I am sure that one of the things I would most like to see in a re-write of vim is a more responsive interface, even if I have a handful of plugins running.

<comment><USER17> If anything, the NeoVim will be much more responsive. Vim's current plugin architecture is simple: when plugin code is running, the UI is blocked. If your plugin has an infinite loop, Vim hangs forever. If your plugin does network I/O, Vim hangs until the socket read/write is finished. The only work- around is to use non-blocking sockets and abuse CursorHold/CursorHoldI autocommands and updatetime. That trick breaks the leaderkey, which is a show- stopper for many users. There are similar problems with syntax highlighting. Vim has its own (extremely inefficient) regex engine that blocks the UI when matching.

<comment><USER58> The regex engine was updated in version 7.4 and now is noticeably faster.

<comment><USER17> There's plenty of room for improvement. For example: if you run the same regex many times in a row, Vim rebuilds the DFA on each run. A cache of recently- used DFAs would avoid tons of wasted computation. Also, Vim doesn't free many regex-related data structures until you close the buffer they were invoked on. I had to work-around that bug when writing a plugin, since it caused Vim to use gigabytes of memory.

The best solution would probably be to switch to PCRE. Some Vim-specific stuff[1] would have to be special-cased, but Vim could get an order of magnitude speedup (and fix quite a few bugs) by using a modern, optimized, well-tested regex library.

1\. Vim abuses regexes like nothing I've ever seen. You can even match line and column numbers with the regex engine: [http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pattern.html#/\%l](http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pattern.html#/\\%l)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> If you can make Vim seamlessly work with a REPL then this would be worth me upgrading (if all my current vim plugins still work).

It's the only reason I use Emacs + Evil + trying to get it to be as close to a Vim clone as possible. You know how cool it is to type ":" instead of M-x?

<comment><USER60> "If you can make Vim seamlessly work with a REPL"

Have you tried the ScreenSend vim plugin? I use it for Python and Clojure, and occasionally other REPLized languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Bram Moolenaar just gave his opinion on Neovim. See here for his answer:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/vim_dev/x0BF9Y0Uby...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/vim_dev/x0BF9Y0Uby8)

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm not sure about libuv. Isn't that primarily for async I/O? This is a desktop application. Async I/O isn't going to significantly affect performance. And it doesn't make shit any simpler.

<comment><AUTHOR> libuv will be used mostly because it acts as a platform layer for many common system functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> First-class support for embedding wins a pledge from me. I wish you the best.

</comment><comment><USER63> if this ever gets off the ground there should be a complete spec sheet for the plugin commands so anyone can write their own vim core that interfaces with other guis and plugins designed for the original vim

</comment><comment><USER64> Get this story and many more in top5HN Newsletter. Signup at [http://top5hn.launchrock.co](http://top5hn.launchrock.co)

</comment><comment><USER65> Sounds nice, though I hope they keep support for more esoteric platforms. My only real choices on z/OS are vim, emacs, and the ISPF environment.

</comment><comment><USER63> the improvements to the plguin system sound awesome - hopefully it remove the need to do virtually anything in vimscript...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, anyone will be able to extend vim without knowing vimscript exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Good to hear that vim development takes on some speed again. Please keep compatibility with existing vim plugins.

</comment><comment><USER67> I wish them the best of luck.

Vim is already an IDE.

</comment><comment><USER68> $10000 seems to me a great amount for having this!

</comment><comment><USER69> Long Live Vim!

</comment><comment><USER50> Vim is already awesome as it is.

</comment><comment><USER70> Sometimes people would like to have just a as-small-as-possible "classic" vi (like nvi, or vi included in FreeBSD) to just quickly run through bunch of config files in a [remote] terminal. So, vim-minimal works well for us.

I am not sure that libuv is what we need, and it seems like another "monster" to be born, like "modern" Emacs (which is "aware of" such a crap like gconfig).

      schiptsov@MSI-U270:~$ ldd /usr/local/bin/emacs |wc -l
      85

"Do not want" meme.)

</comment><comment><USER71> It seems the trolls have arrived.

[https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/52](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/52)</comment>


WikiLeaks attack escalates - <AUTHOR> http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/11/30/wikileaks-attack-escalates.html

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised a flood that regularly takes an AWS load balancer offline isn't showing more link congestion...

get /:

      tsl@crabapple:~> time curl http://wikileaks.org/ > /dev/null
        % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                       Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
      100  5837  100  5837    0     0  20684      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 30087

      real    0m0.298s
      user    0m0.003s
      sys     0m0.005s

where:

      tsl@crabapple:~> dig wikileaks.org A | grep -A 1 "; ANS"
      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
      wikileaks.org.          2517    IN      A       18.104.22.168
      tsl@crabapple:~> dig -x 220.127.116.11 PTR | grep -A 1 "; ANS"
      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
      184.108.40.206.in-addr.arpa. 300  IN      PTR     ec2-184-72-37-90.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com.

palo alto:

      3  rtr-border1-p2p-core1.slac.stanford.edu (220.127.116.11)  0.796 ms  0.433 ms  0.400 ms
      4  slac-mr2-p2p-rtr-border1.slac.stanford.edu (18.104.22.168)  0.371 ms  0.415 ms  0.400 ms
      5  sunnsdn2-ip-slacmr2.es.net (188.8.131.52)  0.668 ms  0.709 ms  0.676 ms
      6  sunncr1-sunnsdn2.es.net (126.96.36.199)  0.808 ms  0.842 ms  0.823 ms
      7  eqxsjrt1-te-sunncr1.es.net (18.104.22.168)  1.231 ms  1.268 ms  1.247 ms
      8  equinix01-sfo5.amazon.com (126.96.36.199)  1.930 ms  1.780 ms  1.516 ms
      9  * * *

nyc:

      3 te2-7.ccr01.jfk07.atlas.cogentco.com (184.108.40.206) 0.564 ms 0.575 ms
      4 ntt.jfk07.atlas.cogentco.com (18.104.22.168) 0.664 ms 0.659 ms
      5 ae-2.r22.nycmny01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (188.8.131.52) 0.760 ms 0.731 ms
      6 ae-1.r20.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (18.104.22.168) 31.672 ms 7.974 ms
      7 ae-0.r20.sttlwa01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (18.104.22.168) 90.576 ms 98.458 ms
      8 ae-4.r20.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (18.104.22.168) 93.544 ms 85.011 ms
      9 ae-1.r21.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (220.127.116.11) 90.292 ms 108.205 ms
      10 po-2.r03.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (126.96.36.199) 78.070 ms 82.080 ms
      11 xe-3-3.r03.plalca01.us.ce.gin.ntt.net (220.127.116.11) 91.133 ms 91.491 ms
      12 * *

dallas:

      3 vb1300.rar3.dallas-tx.us.xo.net (18.104.22.168) 4 msec 0 msec 4 msec
      4 ae0d1.cir1.dallas2-tx.us.xo.net (220.127.116.11) 12 msec 0 msec 4 msec
      5 dap-brdr-04.inet.qwest.net (184.108.40.206) 0 msec 0 msec 0 msec
      6 snj-core-01.inet.qwest.net (220.127.116.11) 44 msec 44 msec 44 msec
      7 snj-edge-01.inet.qwest.net (184.108.40.206) 48 msec 44 msec
         snj-edge-01.inet.qwest.net (126.96.36.199) 44 msec
      8 22.214.171.124 48 msec 44 msec 44 msec
      9   * * *

<comment><USER3> The wikileaks tweet was 12 hrs ago. Difficult to sustain a DDOS for long periods.

<comment><USER2> If you look at netcraft's realtime global status link it sure seems like they are saying it's ongoing. They show mostly failure from all sites over the past 8 hours, and all locations minus romania failed the last test ~15m ago.

<http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/graph?site=www.wikileaks.org>

They have enviable RTT stability as well, even for a site not being DDOS'd:

      tsl@crabapple:~> for i in {1..10}; do curl -s -w "%{time_total}\n" -o /dev/null http://wikileaks.org/4oh4$i; done
      0.176
      0.180
      0.177
      0.174
      0.176
      0.174
      0.174
      0.177
      0.174
      0.176

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure 50% of the people on this forum have ran nmap against wikileaks, just to see. Anyhow: ssh and ftp are open but they terminate the connection after a delay when you try to connect, probably source ip restrictions. Same for ssh. They are hosted on EC2. I am assuming they are using the Amazon AMI, which doesn't take ssh root logins, and the user name will be ec2-user@[host].

The connection is open for the period of the delay. This might a viable attack vector for a DDOS? (If you cannot connect to FTP or ssh, you cannot upload files).

Note: Wikileaks is hosted on Amazon AWS Ireland. You're telling me the US government doesn't have the ability to pull an AWS server in Ireland with a phone call? Oh please. Wikileaks is a poor attempt by the US government to unleash an attack a group that funds its political opponents - this will occur in the near future.

<comment><USER4> Wikileaks only moved to amazon really recently, to avoid the DDoS attacks against it (or at least to lessen their impact on the site's availability), I think. Your conspiracy theory doesn't really have much weight behind it, unless you have other supporting evidence.

<comment><USER3> When conspiracy theories have supporting evidence they cease to be conspiracy theories.

Your Myers Briggs personality type is probably enfj.

<comment><USER4> intj, actually.

Wikileaks has now left amazon[1], after amazon was extremely unreliable. So, it was on amazon for a few days, and then went back to Sweden - according to your theory, pressured to be removed by the US government, which I'm not going to dispute, as that part makes sense. If it were a part of a conspiracy by the US government, it likely would have stayed there (seriously, changing providers a lot only makes people more suspicious and makes it seem less reliable). More evidence against your theory.

Furthermore, wikipedia describes conspiracy theories as "used almost exclusively to refer to any fringe theory which explains a historical or current event as the result of a secret plot by conspirators of almost superhuman power and cunning." Your conspiracy theory is a fringe theory, requires the US government to be extremely competent and cunning (releasing documents which damage the people releasing them to build credibility before releasing documents to give an excuse for an attack on another group is rather convoluted), and involves a secret plot. Note the complete lack of any requirement for evidence. A conspiracy theory can be correct or incorrect and still be a conspiracy theory, as long as it is not widely accepted.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1958939>

<comment><USER3> > intj, actually.

close ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a way to track those attacks? Do they come from random zombie boxes, or maybe the IPs are from somewhere in Virginia?

<comment><USER6> It's probably a mix. Some people might be using Low Orbit Ion Canon or a similar tool, some other people might be DoSing with their botnets, etc.

I'd bet there are some Governments involved as well as individuals who dislike Wikileaks.

Since the DoS attack comes from so many places, it's very difficult to trace.

<comment><USER7> Governments would no be likely to use tactics like DoS attacks. If they were attacking wikileaks, the most likely methods would be using political pressure to get the hosting revoked. If they wanted (or needed) to use technical solutions, they would probably either attempt more direct attacks, or attack the dns and routing systems.

<comment><USER6> The Chinese Government has been using hackers/crackers against Google and many other organizations. I don't see why the Chinese Government --or any other Government pissed off at the present moment-- wouldn't do the same with WikiLeaks.

<comment><USER8> Sure, they might... but the point is that a DoS attack is pretty naive and ineffective way to attack the site.

<comment> DanI-S Government handling of technology is often naive and ineffective...

<comment><USER2> You really believe the intelligence directorates of various top nation states are walking around jabbing glass ttys with sticks and saying "durrr"? Stuxnet, Titan Rain, Elliptic Curve Cryptography, Keyhole?

It doesn't take a genius to know DDOS'ing isn't going to accomplish anything of significance, basically you just have to be paying a fraction of attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems to be counter to the goals of the attackers, no?

Problem: Site is disseminating information that you view as confidential at a slow rate.

Solution: DDoS / otherwise stop the site.

Catch: The entire archive of unfiltered content is already widely disseminated via a non-DDoSable channel and in the event that you ever actually manage to succeed at your stated goal there is almost certainly a dead man's switch to trigger distribution of the cryptographic key to unlock said information.

It seems to me that by pushing this option you just bring the "enemy" closer to the nuclear option of simultaneous, mass, unfiltered release. Unless you think they're bluffing with the insurance file, I suppose? Doesn't sound like a good risk to take.

<comment><USER10> i doubt the attackers care what wikileaks disseminates, except insofar as it makes them a high profile target.

<comment><USER8> Buncha bored kids, no doubt.</comment></comment></comment>


What's new in Radi 0.7.1 (update to my HTML5 animation app) - <AUTHOR> http://radiapp.com/whats_new_in_v071.php

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm still steadily toiling away on my app project. Called Radi, it's a content creation app for the modern web. It does Flash-like vector animation using Canvas, but also video effects and JavaScript graphics coding: <http://radiapp.com>

I just finished another update with some new features that I think are pretty nice, so I thought I'd post it here.

It's still a free download. (Mac only for now... I've made an experimental Windows port, but it's not close to being releasable, lots of broken stuff.)</comment>


Obama to Expand Gun Background Checks and Tighten Enforcement - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/05/us/politics/obama-says-he-will-act-on-gun-control-in-coming-days.html?smid=tw-bna <comment><USER2> It would be difficult for the Obama administration to _loosen_ enforcement.

In 2010, for example, there were over 73,000 gun purchase attempt denials[1], of which over 48,000[1] were _known to be felons and /or fugitives from justice_ [2]).

The number the Obama administration attempted any prosecution of? 44. [1]

\--

1\. Washington Post, 4/11/13

2\. NCJRS</comment>


Free Electric: A Bicycle That Will Power Millions of Homes - <AUTHOR> http://inventorspot.com/articles/invention-week-free-electric-bicycle-will-power-millions-homes?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+inventorspot%2Farticles+%28Inventor+Spot+Articles%29 <comment><USER2> An bicycle powered generator is an expensive way to turn human food calories into electricity.

In the Middle Ages they raised dogs to run on a treadmill for hours, to turn the spit. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_Dog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_Dog) . That would be a more efficient way to power a generator, since dogs will eat things that humans won't.

We don't - because it isn't cost effective.

Buy a solar charger instead. A 100W solar panel is cheaper than this pedal- powered generator, and will produce power all day at no extra cost.

> How many homes would it power up through the efforts of many gym buffs?

Zero.

Here is is worked out - [http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/bicyclepower.html](http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/bicyclepower.html) .

The human won't even be able to heat the shower used to clean up after cycling.

<comment><USER3> Nice link. This idea reappears from time to time and each time I have think if I can write a small rant to explain why it's wrong. I'll bookmark this for the next time :(.

<comment><USER2> You can also point to [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The name is misleading (I'd like to use a stronger word here). The electricity is not "free", the person that pedals has to eat and the food cost money. If they are going to install this in a gym, perhaps we can count that as "free". If they are going to install this in a developing country during a famine, then it's not "free" at all.

Two very bad paragraphs:

> _"A person pedals the hybrid bicycle," explains Bhargava. "The bicycle wheel > drives a flywheel, which turns a generator, which charges a battery. > Pedaling for one hour yields electricity for 24 hours with no utility bill, > and no exhaust - no waste."_

Ignoring that you have to pay for the food, a person on a bike at full speed burns about 700 kcalories/hour, i.e. 800 watts. Just assume that all the energy burned by the person is stored in the battery, this is very very very optimistic. If you want to use the electricity for the whole day, you can use only 1/24 of the power, i.e 30W, that is only enough for one or two new low consume lamps.

> _That's right so many people – over half of the world's population – don't > have heat, lights, air conditioning, cell phones, computers or televisions. > Yes, this invention will help give more people access to energy that is free > and clean._

An air conditioner uses 1000W. So with 1 hour of biking at full speed and assuming perfect efficiency, you can turn on the air conditioner for 50 minutes. (Are you biking inside the room with the air conditioner?) Perhaps someone can charge a cell phone with this, but the other applications are not possible.</comment>


My first weekend of deep learning - <AUTHOR> http://blog.floydhub.com/my-first-weekend-of-deep-learning <comment><USER2> This is a remarkably good introduction; the author has spent a lot of time thinking about making the story both comprehensive and comprehensible. Bravo!

<comment><USER3> Thank you Paul!!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to Find Anomalies in JSONs? - <AUTHOR> Hello everyone, I have some JSON files(>1000, possibly stream of JSONs) which look quite similar.
If I want to find anomalies among them, what would be the way to go? I saw that k-means isn't the best method.
I don't want to find particularly examples which are just a little bit different from others, but examples which are VERY different. If you ever did web development, you might as well in your life have got a strange error inside a JSON instead of what you expected. I want to be able to get it with an  algorithm.
Why I want to do that? I have a few APIs I use, but sometimes they end up changing those responses or give out unknown response body's. I want my algorithm/model to be able to detect them and show me a list of the biggest anomalies.
If I manage to do it successfully, I'll make sure it's open source. Also if you know an easy way or an OSS solution, please also share). Hell, even if you know what I should study! I was studying deep learning but didn't find any known methods by me that I could use in order to make sense of that data. <comment><USER2> If I understand correctly, the type of data that's contained in the files is much more important the format. As a starting point, is there anything that's stopping you from reading the files in Python (pandas) for example and doing some simple outlier detection (interquartile ranges, standard deviations)?

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like a statistics question that doesn't have much to do with JSON. A starting point: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomaly_detection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomaly_detection)

You should probably start off trying the simplest thing that could possibly work for your use-case.

</comment><comment><USER4> > If I want to find anomalies among them, what would be the way to go?

What is an anomalous JSON file other than a JSON file that does not meet the specification[0]?

I have never gotten a "strange error" from a JSON parser. Most JSON parsers are very specific about whatever character they dislike. I would suggest that the algorithm you're seeking is in fact whatever is giving you the error.

If you're speaking to an API returning JSON, then you should be able to determine what the API is supposed to return to you. Many times different responses contain meaning about why the response is different than expected, like HTTP status codes.

Deep learning is a tool to use to solve a problem. Until you have a well defined problem it will be difficult to apply various machine learning techniques to it.

[0]: [https://www.json.org/json-en.html](https://www.json.org/json-en.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Cuelang may be able to help here. You can define a schema and then process all of the JSON. you can look for new/missing fields and constrain the field to a regex.

The docs are missing some of this. If you jump into slack, we'd be happy to help.

</comment><comment><USER6> Use dictdiff module between subsequent responses and then check if the difference in values is more than just atomics.</comment>


Darpa envisions the future of machine learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/darpa-envisions-the-future-of-machine-learning?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=1311a2c5df-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email <comment><USER2> Having being involved in efforts to standardize AI components roughly 10 years ago I can say that, even for somewhat delimited domains, this is not a trivial goal.

I really hope their effort can provide a strong enough push, even if not like the one that go us the Internet. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> This might be a good thing. I am still not convinced that machine learning is so great it is pictured to be, but the potential is certainly worth studying. Better tools and languages are a must in this area.</comment>


Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really) - <AUTHOR> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606

<comment><USER2> Wild. I just read today that the navy is funding EMC2 so that they can further their fusion research.

I also watched, just today, this vid: [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760...](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760&ei=KrwKSZq8N4TyqAPJsaiIDg&q=Lerner+fusion&hl=en) , in which Eric Lerner talks about dense plasma focus fusion. He makes the point, towards the end, that DPF fusion is about (literally) a million times closer to obtaining fusion than even the Polywell scheme. The core of these DPF devices are about as big as your hand.

I'm not putting down the Polywell scheme. I just thought the link to Lerner's talk was interesting as well. (It's also 64+ minutes long.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is the treehugger side of me, not the pragmatic side: where do we dispose of the waste? At the end of the day there's still waste created.

Here's some pragmatism: Why spend any money investing in a new short term solution when we could spend the same amount on renewable energy that never runs out such as wind, solar, tidal and for the most part hydrogen? In another few hundred years we will start running low on uranium (edit: Wikipedia says it can be reprocessed and used an estimated thousands of years). I think if we're going to transition from oil and coal we shouldn't just go to a new stop-gap solution. The next energy source needs to be renewable so we never run into the same problem again.

<comment><USER4> Thousands of years from now, we will be far more technologically advanced. When we run out of uranium, it will be orders of magnitude simpler to develop alternatives on the off chance that we haven't yet. I don't think finiteness of nuclear is a practical concern. When our energy needs exceed what our Dyson sphere can provide, we'll need an alternative to solar as well.

As for the waste issue... shoot it into the sun? I don't know what the tradeoffs are between renewables and nuclear, but if nuclear is far more feasible at the moment as I suspect, it seems pretty reasonable to go for it. I'm pretty sure we'll have a good solution to the waste issue within the next century or two.

(tl;dw, so I don't know if the video mentions any of this.)

<comment><USER5> "As for the waste issue... shoot it into the sun?"

Ah, if the rocket explodes, which does happen, waste everywhere!

Also, strangely, it takes quite a lot of energy to get to the sun (you might think one could just 'fall into it', but you have to fight against the earth's orbital velocity!)

<comment><USER4> This is exactly why they don't put the fate of humanity in my hands.

Finding a way to deal with nuclear waste just doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem to me. In the meantime, reprocessing the waste and storing the remaining waste somewhere safe seems like a prudent enough plan. If we can't find a way to get rid of it by the time we start running out of space, we stop using nuclear energy. We'll be far better prepared to switch over to solar et al at that point, assuming that nuclear is currently significantly more cost-effective than the alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Robert Bussard passed away last year of cancer at the age of 79. Check out his wikipedia page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Bussard>

</comment><comment><USER7> Very old. We all wish the Polywell would be funded, but who will shell out the cash?

<comment><USER5> According to wikipedia it was funded by this nonprofit, soliciting tax- deductable donations. <http://emc2fusion.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes - Nuclear should be much more prevalent than it is.

</comment><comment><USER9> tl;dw (Too long didn't watch.)

But yes: they should.

<comment><USER6> I watched it all last night - between the blurry slides and my dim memory of electromagnetics, much of it was over my head. But it was thought provoking, and a good example of a small team of bright adventurous people building something without waiting for 'permission'.</comment></comment>


The Carbon Transfer Process (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Carbon/carbon.html <comment><USER2> (I can't believe I've never heard of this!)

</comment><comment><USER3> indeed very beatiful tonal range here is a nice simple walkthrough [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgFw2w1GBFk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgFw2w1GBFk)</comment>


Ask HN: In web video players, is volume control unnecessary? - <AUTHOR>

It seems that volume can be adjusted in the OS or in hardware on every computer. Why do all web video players include a volume control? <comment><USER2> I think it's necessary - Windows has the (awesome) per-application volume control, OS X doesn't seem to have that which means you're setting the volume on everything.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes they are necessary. When I plug headphones in my computer the sound is really too strong when I go over about 30-40% of the volume control and each step is way too big. I use youtube and grooveshark's volume control when I have headphones and place it at about 50% so that I can have more control over my volume using the vol up/down keys on my keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like to hear system alerts (email, IM) at regular volume, but turn down YouTube when I'm supposed to be working.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like it yeah. it allows you to listen to whatever else you want instead of the you tube video , as an example</comment>


Ask HN: What are some fast geolocation databases? - <AUTHOR>

i.e need to lookup physical address based on IP in msec <comment><USER2> GeoIP is fast and there's free versions of the database.

<http://www.maxmind.com/app/benchmark>

<http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity>

</comment><comment><USER3> While I haven't tried them out myself, GeoIP should be a good bet (you can check if they meet your needs rather quickly by hitting their API) <http://www.maxmind.com/app/api></comment>


Live video from startup school - <AUTHOR> http://www.justin.tv/hackertv

<comment><USER2> Some of us were discussing this on IRC, and we think that having a "fire missiles" button would be a great revenue model for Justin.TV. I'd pay for it:-)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is so great. I've been in bed with a fever all day watching the talks, which are excellent. Had I made it out to Stanford I'd probably only have ended up in some other bed with the same fever watching them the same way. Thank you so much!

</comment><comment><USER4> cool, but it is buffering half of the time.

ah, and Justin tv, really needs to work on their interface. It makes myspace look good.

</comment><comment><USER5> Live chat using the web/IM/Email/SMS for startup school is also available here: <http://www.chatterous.com/landing/ss08/ss08/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Is the whole event going to be live on justin.tv??

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the whole thing.

It will also be archived, so you can watch it later if you want to.

<comment><USER7> Luckily as the thing is choppy as hell right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> We got a better internet connection - it should be ok now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great stuff!

</comment><comment><USER9> Live pictures of the event also here:

<http://www.futurique.com:8080/pingplog/yc/></comment>


Ether Prices Plunge in GDAX Exchange Flash Crash - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/13-ethereum-ether-prices-plunge-2500-gdax-exchange-flash-crash/ <comment><USER2> For the uninitiated, this often serves to gobble up anyone who had a resting stop loss order on that exchange all the way down to the low price. Ostensibly crypto markets don't account for circuit breaker scenarios. Very much wild Wild West.</comment>


Desert Creosote Bush Could Treat Giardia and "Brain-Eating" Amoeba Infections - <AUTHOR> https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2017-08-15-compounds-in-desert-creosote-bush-could-treat-giardia-and-brain-eating-amoeba-infections.aspx <comment><USER2> Whenever I read stories like this, I get really depressed because they remind me of how many species humans have caused to go extinct, how many more they have driven to the brink of extinction, and about the dire predictions of the collapse of biodiversity.

Even setting aside the arguably much greater ethical and moral issues with such extinctions, think of all the species that could have yielded remarkable and useful secrets to us after proper research -- if they still existed. Sometimes I wonder if by such wanton destruction is sealing its own doom.

Perhaps a cure to a some future cataclysmic disease outbreak might have lain in a formerly living organism that can no longer help us because we killed it off. Or maybe some revolutionary new material could have been inspired by an extinct species, had we only been able to study it.

<comment><USER3> The vast majority of all extinctions on the planet occurred before humans had anything to do with it.

<comment><USER4> That doesn't change the number of interesting chemicals we've missed from our own incuriosity/destruction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Polyphenols? Far too often you see inexperienced medical researchers who stumble across a polyphenol while screening natural products and think they've found a viable lead compound. This class of compounds is an unselective binder (plants have evolved tannins to denature any protein, including those in fungal plant pathogens) and impossible to elaborate. The SGLT inhibitors developed from phlorizin are an exception. You'd expect better from UCSD, though.

<comment><USER6> From the research article:

> _We previously developed a high-throughput screening CellTiter-Glo ATP > bioluminescence-based assay to assess antiparasitic activity [48], and used > this assay to test compounds 1–9 against the trophozoite stage of E. > histolytica, G. lamblia, and N. fowleri. Compounds 1–6 displayed dose > response antiparasitic activity against all three pathogens by reducing the > culture density by 50% (EC50) compared to untreated trophozoite cultures > (Table 3)._

If I am translating it correctly, they only tested this in vitro (not in rats, not in humans). So, as you say, this may not be useful to cure us. Relevant xkcd [https://xkcd.com/1217/](https://xkcd.com/1217/)

<comment><USER5> It's grape season! I've got a few scuppernog vines (that's the grape native to the US, _Vitis rotundifolia_ ) in the yard. They are bearing grapes plentifully. Scuppernogs have a thick skin, much thicker than the European kind ( _V. vinifera)_ , with astringent flavour (that's polyphenol tannins) . When you look at the surface closely you see little corky spots, where the hypersensitive response took place, a defense mechanism in plants against fungal infection. The tannins denature cellulase enzymes that are secreted by fungal hyphae in their attempt to invade cells, and cork is dry and just plainly indigestible.

Indeed, scuppernogs have an excellent reputation for disease resistance. The xkcd is very relevant, also for grapes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Creosote is amazing! It's responsible for that "desert rain" smell. There is also King Clone, "estimated to be 11,700 years old, making it one of the oldest living organisms on Earth" [1]

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Clone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Clone)

</comment><comment><USER8> I've heard creosote bush was used by Native Americans and early settlers as medicine for a lot of things.

It must have some properties, it grows in unbelievably dry and hot areas and nothing eats it. It doesn't seem to be susceptible to fungus or rots or really anything I've ever observed.

And if this has anything to it, there is a whole lot of creosote stretching from West Texas to California that isn't much good for much else. Except making the desert smell wonderful when light rains pass through.

<comment><USER4> Oryx eat it. We know this because some jackass decided to import a herd to New Mexico.

<comment><USER8> Interesting.

Wonder what a creosote fed Oryx steak tastes like? And presumably free from brain ameoba as well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How many treatments and cures for countless diseases and conditions are floating around in nature undiscovered? And how many of those helpful organisms, plants, microbes, are being destroyed by human activity? It is probably staggering.

</comment><comment><USER10> >Treat Giardia

Send that bush to China now! I have yet to know anybody who lived in a big city in China and never had it</comment>


Booting a Self-signed Linux Kernel - <AUTHOR> http://www.kroah.com/log/blog/2013/09/02/booting-a-self-signed-linux-kernel/

<comment><USER2> I'm confused, but maybe you can enlighten me: This article talks about using a tool called KeyTool to manipulate the keys stored on the machine. But if software is capable of doing that, wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose of UEFI to begin with? How is it ensured that it's the user operating KeyTool and not $MALWARE?

Why does KeyTool even run on a locked-down-by-MS machine? Have they signed it as part of the Linux Foundation bootloader? Why would they do such a thing? I don't mean for protecting-the-monopoly-reasons, but for straight security reasons as this clearly circumvents anything they were trying to accomplish.

I seem to be missing a piece of information here.

<comment><USER3> You have to disable the Secure Boot protection before you can run KeyTool - from the article:

      Traverse the BIOS settings and find the place where UEFI boot mode is specified, and turn it the "Secure Boot" option OFF."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an example of what I love about the open source community. Some argue that signed boot was an attempt to force the open source community out by holding the keys to the ability to boot, as it were. Some think it's just relentless advancement of the forces of centralization and the establishment's view on security. Regardless of all of that, we can now take advantage of it to ensure our machines can _only_ boot our trusted, linux/bsd/home-built OSes. I'm reminded of the car dealer crossroads from "In the beginning was the command line".

Open Source FTW.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, the fact that you have to go through such an elaborate procedure will deter many people from going open-source. Before secure boot, installing Linux was relatively straightforward, and that is one of the reasons for its success. Those days are drawing to a close.

<comment><USER6> Why can't this procedure be standardized and made straightforward? It's hard now, but hopefully in the future it will just be a typical part of installing the operating system.

<comment><USER5> Because the procedure requires making changes to the BIOS, and that can't be automated, or even standardized because different manufacturer's BIOSes are different. Recall this passage from the post:

"Reboot the machine, and go into the BIOS. Usually this means pounding on the F2 key as the boot starts up, but all machines are different, so it might take some experimentation to determine which key your BIOS needs."

That will be a show-stopper for most people.

<comment><USER2> That procedure was only needed in order to show how booting a non-signed kernel was made possible and later how that was turned off again.

The magic is in KeyTool and that doesn't require the user to alter the BIOS in any way. You boot from that USB drive (sb-usb.img linked in the article) by the usual methods of booting from an external drive. It will boot because its bootloader is the Linux Foundation one that was signed by MS. Then you launch keytool and change the key config.

At this point, your bios will boot a kernel you have signed.

The only BIOS intervention in the article was to first allow booting unsigned kernels (not needed with that sb-usb thing) and then to turn it off again. At least that was my impression.

<comment><USER7> Ah, hold on.

Doesn't running keytool require you to turn off security in the bios first?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice! It'd be good to pair this with some instructions on how to do safe key management by yourself, because you'll only ever be as safe as you keep your keys.

I would link to some here, but I don't even know of any best practices for keeping personal keys safe. (Use smartcard/physical-backed keys?)

<comment><USER9> > Use smartcard/physical-backed keys?

Basically, yes.

I'd be happy to share details of how I generated/store/backup my keys but be forewarned that I went the "extremely paranoid" route.

<comment><USER10> Please do. I haven't been able to find a vendor for smart cards in the US nor do I know exactly what to buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have to ask but I am not optimistic - would this get Linux booted on a Surface RT?

</comment><comment><USER12> so.... why exactly does UEFI exist again....? seems useless

<comment><USER10> It is a replacement for BIOS that first showed up on Itanium platforms. It adds quite a bit of complexity but also opens the door for new features like secure boot.

I won't argue whether it is useful but it is in nearly all new desktop hardware including all Apple x86 hardware. It is here to stay.</comment></comment>


Is Assange the target of a U.S. smear campaign? - <AUTHOR> http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/21/smear-campaign-suspected-in-assange-arrest/ <comment><USER2> I'm upvoting this so people can see how bad CNN's "reporting" has become.

The article headline is a question. Is that bad reporting?

They've done no prodding at the Swedish government or anyone involved, so they have no new information.

They link to the Sweden government's site via translated Google, when Sweden has also made the page available directly in English.

The quote a couple random internet blogs of no significance, then they quote Twitter.

There's also the invocation the elusive 'some' ("However, _some_ think the accusations could be legitimate.") and it all comes to a glorious climax when with a quote from SomethingAwful's forums (from the "General Bullshit" section, no less).

Meanwhile, Wikileaks is not seen as a news organization. Something is very wrong here.</comment>


Medisas (YC W13), A Company That Saves People's Lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/alextaub/2014/04/24/meet-medisas-the-company-that-saves-peoples-lives/ <comment><USER2> How can doing this in purely in "the cloud", "the web", possibly be a good idea?

Yes, there's a real problem this is solving ... until a shift change happens at the same time the hospital's Internet connection is down. Surely you could put a small, generic machine or two running your own software on the hospital's net that does the local work, or takes over if the Internet connection is down, etc.

Or do you depend on cell phone tech as a backup for the hospitals? In that case, the infrastructure at your end had best have some serious redundancy ... which is fortunately fairly easy and not that expensive to arrange nowadays.

Why I'm obsessing on this detail, besides normally rock solid AT&T have a long outage that might have covered our entire town or more yesterday? I live in tornado country, and know how easily services can get knocked out by weather of all sorts. Here's an extreme case I avoided by luck and preparation: [http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response- mode-...](http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode- may-22-2011-joplin.html)

<comment><USER3> When it come to the sad state of technology in hospitals, any improvement is better than the current state of things. Sure, this is the kind of software that would really benefit from redundancy and a waterproof disaster-recovery plan, but the main thing here is that someone tried and actually managed to make a dent into a very real problem in the industry. This is a small step in what I hope will be a near-term future for better healthcare. You have to start somewhere.

<comment><USER2> I don't think I've communicated clearly:

Bad paper handoffs beat no handoffs at all, or I suppose ad hoc last minute verbal ones, if this system is dead due to a transient communications outage.

Do you disagree with this point?

<comment><USER4> Existing electronic health record (EHR) systems already have to deal with this.

The ones I am most familiar with have on-site data centers, so it's not purely in "the cloud" but you can have webapps running from on-site servers and call them "cloud" systems if you want.

The existing systems have ways for printing out important data from a redundant computer system to hand out paper copies if the user workstations, network, or servers are down. I don't know what they would do if there was no electricity anywhere, but I assume hospitals could use their backup generators for this since medical equipment also needs electricity.

<comment><USER2> Hospitals tend to have specially provisioned power from the local electric company to minimize the change they'll have to use generators, which I assume are universally in place, although you can't always depend on them, e.g. Charity Hospital in New Orleans (a place where my mother worked in the '50s) only suffered a flooded basement during Katrina ... but of course that was were the generators were.

See my other comment for how this company sure doesn't seem to be telling hospital IT departments that they've got on side redundancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a Midwesterner, when I hear about medical tech companies saving people's lives, I immediately think of Epic based out of Madison WI. Is Medisas going to be going toe-to-toe with Epic? Epic is one of the very few Midwestern companies that I can liken to what I hear about the silicon valley mindset: Don't hire anyone over 30, don't ask about work/life balance, and you can't have the day off because _we 're saving lives, dammit!_

It's really weird knowing and hearing about companies and products you never knowingly interact with.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like Medisas is solving only a single problem while Epic, Cerner, etc. are larger solutions for the bulk of health record tasks.

I would be more interested to know whether Medisas will integrate with these existing enterprise systems or be an independent source of information. In terms of Medisas's long-term plans, could Epic, Cerner, etc. just add this same feature to their software and wipe out Medisas's market?

<comment><USER5> Yeah the article talks about Medisas doing one thing, but it's hard for a successful company to continue doing one thing forever. Eventually, it's likely they will branch out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We built a similar service in 2009 and applied to YC with it... but it was HL7 agnostic and ran an appliance in the hospital connecting to various EMRs and other components...

We were too early - this was on the first iphone and touch (pre-ipad)

We were bloked by the big EMRs and various other "too-early" nay-sayers (the average age of a nurse is quite high, and at the time - they thought there was no way they coud interact with a screen as small as an iphone)

Here's to hoping that medesis can succeed, and that this ideas time has come....

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a management problem first. A technical problem second. There are plenty of companies that run 24/7/365 that have people taking over others task without making the amount of mistakes found in the medical profession.</comment>


Redis author just released Disque, a distributed message queue - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antirez/disque#readme

<comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447185](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447185).

</comment><comment><USER3> Mods - please merge the two posts currently top trending on the front page on an identical topic with the one that makes sense</comment>


VSCodium: 100% Open Source Version of vs. Code - <AUTHOR> https://itsfoss.com/vscodium/ <comment><USER2> I prefer to help improve Microsoft's products and services better.

<comment><USER3> ...said nobody

/s

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used it for a few months now. The icon is great. I've had much less glitchiness and crashes than I had with standard VS Code (this is on Ubuntu 18.04). Really makes you wonder how many random crashes/glitches are due to poorly coded telemetry.

<comment><USER5> Zero for me and I've been using Code for ages.

Literally zero.

<comment><USER4> Before I would mainly get this one where the File > New Window menu item would simply crash the running instance of vscode 1/5th of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, basically the version we download to install is actually the open-sourced version + Telemetry, with an option to disable the telemetry.

For the privacy-conscious or Microsoft distrusting folks, you can either build from source or just install VSCodium.

Have I got it?

<comment><USER4> The binary they (microsoft) provide is under a different, proprietary license and contains code that we cannot see that is not open source. When pressed on the issue, they say it is for "patent concerns" which is laughable for obvious reasons. The deeper you dig on this, the sketchier Microsoft's stance seems.

There were a lot of pissed off people on their github about a year ago basically demanding that they fix this discrepancy, but they did not bow to the pressure whereas in other cases (i.e. being urged by the OSS community to rename GVFS) they do bow to such pressure, which raises the question why is this so important to them when the entire point of vscode is to have good PR in the OSS and developer communities.

Long story short, whatever they are putting in that binary that isn't in the OSS version, they really, really don't want to take out. But I bet at the end of the day it's for some boring beuracratic reason rather than something sinister.</comment></comment>


Mobile Patent Suits (An interactive visualisation) - <AUTHOR> http://bl.ocks.org/1153292

<comment><AUTHOR> Want to make your own? See this recent post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2877790></comment>


How do I fight Internet Defamation? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> _Not_ by trying legal actions to make the defamatory content go away (google the Streisand Effect to see why). This includes legal actions to get the site to remove the content.

Instead, you have to fight it with facts and evidence, in public. Or else you just have to ignore it.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are European or Argentinian: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wrote a long comment, then decided to turn it into a blog post cuz I know a good bit about the subject:

[http://michelerebooted.blogspot.com/2017/10/how-to-deal- with...](http://michelerebooted.blogspot.com/2017/10/how-to-deal-with- internet-defamation.html)

</comment><comment> kuro-kuris Personally and cordially getting in touch with reporters with a difficult to refute fact sheet helps. Being cordial is super important.</comment>


Microsoft shuts down So.cl - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fuselabs.org/post/158073843056/socl-is-saying-farewell-as-of-march-15-2017 <comment><USER2> Anything that threatens the Office cash cow will be destroyed one way or another...

<comment><USER3> Don't see how that was the case. Rather, this seems like the jettisoning of a tangential product like Google/Facebook/Twitter etc do on a regular basis.</comment></comment>


Iran says it's building copy of captured US drone - <AUTHOR> http://apnews.myway.com/article/20120422/D9U9U0A80.html

<comment><USER2> There is a world of difference between reverse engineering some of the software to decipher some logs and understanding everything there is to understand to build a fac-similé.

While Persians are clearly clever and educated, I submit they lack the industrial infrastructure to build a drone.

Let's keep in mind they currently have trouble properly refining their oil...

<comment><USER3> To give you an idea about us (Iran) have a look here, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iranian_Americans> , you can skip to Business/Technology section if you like, we survived a devastating war and more than 30 years of crippling sanctions that continues today. and I have to say we have pretty good infrastructure that you have no idea about it, which is good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      There were many codes and characters. But we deciphered
      them by the grace of God

Excuse me if I doubt any of the claims in this article.

<comment><USER5> So apparently, God is on everybody's side and has the set of all encryption keys.

<comment><USER6> The oldest MITM trick in the book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> During the cold war it was common to segment data so that the compromise of a single agent wouldn't cause too much damage. I doubt there's too much concern over the data the drone contains, but the hardware is state-of-the-art and perhaps it should also have an accident (maybe the centrifuges could teach it how to self destruct ... Or a North Korean rocket will accidentally fall on it).

I guess I'm waiting to see how much of this information is verified by someone outside the Iranian government (hmmm ... And the U.S. Government).

</comment><comment><USER8> Would it have been better for Iran to have said nothing or is this only to provoke the US & alies?

</comment><comment><USER9> There's always the chance that the drone was "lost" deliberately, in order to give the Iranians something useless to waste a lot of time on, or to deliberately mislead them on the true capabilities of the device.

<comment><USER10> I believe it was and it was a clear signal from a certain influential clique in the US defense establishment -- where [did] Leon work before? -- to the Israelis that USA will not allow any nation to dictate its strategic posture or present it a fait accompli.

<comment><USER11> Could you explain your reasoning? How is the US purposefully losing a drone in Iran somehow a signal to the Israelis? Surely Israel already knew that we were capable of / already flying drone over Iran considering their use in two of Iran's neighbors (Iraq and Afghanistan).

<comment><USER10> 2 pairs of shoes:

1 Put yourself in the shoes of US commanders unhappy about the possibility of one day waking up and seeing little blips heading toward Iran. You would have 2 choices and they are both lousy. Business is good. Oil is flowing. Who wants it all to go up in smoke? Certainly not America.

2 Put yourself in an Israeli analyst's shoes/head and rewind date to day of release of footage. 3 possibilities, 1 obviously unlikely, and other 2 just "shocking". (And I leave that for you to divine).

Now, I assert that US president and commanders are sleeping easier, and that Israelis are no longer so glib about sending aircraft over IRI and taking US involvement for granted. After all, if IRGC can bring down America's drone, Israeli F16s could also fall off the sky near the borders of Iran ... by the "grace of God" ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> don't take it personally, you decrypt someone else code , we decrypt yours, so there will be one to decrypt ours again. is all about decryption ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps they'll build it out of oil drums like their SAM systems? I don't think Iran is capable of putting together a decent steel drum band much less stealth drones.

<comment><USER13> I was under the impression that Iran has a pretty decent higher education system. And that it includes female students as well - with a noticably high percentage of female students in fields that are male-dominated in the west, like computer science.

No idea how they are doing in mechanical/aeronautical engineering though.

<comment><USER14> Iran is under an international embargo on military supplies, thought. The GP might be overstating the case or trolling, but I suppose getting the materials to build a replica, communication gear and fuel will be difficult for the iranians. Specially when some western country with the biggest military- industrial complex of the world is angry at you because you broke one of their toys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow. Will it kill civilians and crash like the original?

</comment><comment><USER16> They better watch out before they insert their USB cable into the drone's port. The last time they inserted without protection, they caught Stuxnet.</comment>


The meritocracy trap - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/12/the-meritocracy-trap.html

<comment><USER2> He seems to be warning against falling into a localised optimum, thus missing out on something better. Fair advice, but I don't think that's what's commonly a meritocracy.

Sadly unrelated, the term meritocracy was coined by Michael Young - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy) \- and was supposed to suggest a strongly negative idea. It isn't really used like that these days.

<comment><USER3> > It describes as dystopian society in future Britain in which intelligence > and merit have become the central tenet of society, replacing previous > divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a > merited power holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less > merited

Actually, there are echoes of what he is railing about in the modern 99/1%, destruction of middle class society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > A great idea, powerful work ethic and good design are rarely sufficient on > their own.

This seems too pessimistic about Silicon Valley. Plenty of well-executed great ideas succeed, and plenty of bad ones fail.</comment>


Study shows algorithms are not the answer to online dating - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304537904577277830191481536.html

<comment><USER2> _But the researchers found that the students' jam expertise could be easily undermined by making them fill out questionnaires explaining their preferences. Some of the worst-tasting jams (at least according to Consumer Reports) were now ranked the highest._

 _What happened? The scientists argue that "thinking too much" about preferences caused the students to focus on all sorts of variables that didn't matter, such as the texture of the jam or the presence of strawberry seeds._

This might have something to do with why most so many tech interviews seem to go so horribly wrong -- especially those that try to apply a standardized "quizzing cage" approach to filtering candidates. Everyone is too busy trying to ding the candidate on the basis of their response this or that contrived filter question to simply connect with them as a human being, feel their energy, and get a sense of what they're really about.

</comment><comment><USER3> Huh. I would try seeing what happens when you use Bayesian techniques, assigning a Bayesian update to each month, say, that a declared couple on your site remains in their relationship.</comment>


Just bought my first warehouse. 50,000 Sq Ft. - <AUTHOR>

What should I do? rent it out or use it for ecomm companies. Need some Help. <comment><USER2> Lease it to someone who knows what to do with the warehouse.

<comment><USER3> The first thing I think with "cheap <industrial>" is "superfund". I hope no one ever did any work with electroplating, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, VOCs, asbestos, explosives, PCBs, or any other fun stuff that will come back to haunt the current owner.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. Hopefully, OP got the inspection and testing done before buying the warehouse. Also the purchase agreement doesn't absolve previous owner of any previous environmental contamination and cleanup costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could you walk through a bit, your thought process, on buying a warehouse, for instance why you decided to purchase it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it at a great price... A very great price :)

<comment><USER5> But to what end? If I could buy a brand new dump truck for $1000, does that mean that I should?

<comment><USER3> I suspect you already know the answer to that. A brand new dump truck would be clean, with a minimum of oil, grease, dirt, or grime. I'm sure you could construct a large enough accommodation inside the bed of the truck to have the equivalent living space of a medium sized sailboat.

The great part of this is, when all of your clothes smell like diesel/gazole/etc., people will assume you are a liveaboard!

You would have excellent security. If you had a "home invasion", a simple press of a button would disorient your attackers and incapacitate them much in the way of the wicked witch of the East. If they have ruby slippers, I believe they would be yours by right of conquest.

Also, you could park almost anywhere you liked, at any time. No one questions a dump truck being anywhere, because they have so many uses. With a prudent selection of magnetic door logos, you could park for a nap in the middle of Market Street in San Francisco, Fifth Ave in NYC, or right in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.

<comment><USER6> Gold!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ask BiggerPockets.com, they would know more about best use of real estate than Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER8> Depends a lot on the location!

</comment><comment><USER9> visit top 5 co-working spaces around US/UK and start your own.

pros: you get to meet talented people and they will work in your space.

cons: your rent might not be that financially rewarding.

<comment><AUTHOR> love the idea but why would'nt the rent be too rewarding?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Where are you? If you are in the sfbay area, I may have a suggestion.

</comment><comment><USER11> So you bought something without really thinking it through.

GOOD WORK!!

If I were you I would look at increasing its value then selling it on as quickly as possible. You obviously dont have the vision or mentality to be an entrepreneur.

</comment><comment><USER12> Where is it?

</comment><comment><USER13> where is this located?</comment>