Serverless Aurora - <AUTHOR> https://serverless.com/blog/serverless-aurora-future-of-data/ <comment><USER2> Serverless is a bad idea, it was designed to serve big infrastructure providers as a way to increase their lock-in factor but the benefits to software developers is negative.

Serverless is simple but opaque; it's great for making demo apps but not ideal for real production systems. It narrows down integration possibilities, complicates large-scale development and deployment, and often, it makes it more difficult to keep track of backend errors... In addition to this, it makes you fully dependent on a single infrastructure provider; it takes away all your leverage when negotiating hosting costs.

The control panels of some of these services have become so complex and elaborate that you'll be wishing that you could just SSH into the server directly.

<comment><USER3> I built a fairly large system using the Serverless "framework" on AWS. It's been running for over 8 months now with zero maintenance and zero service disruptions, with an ingress of ~50M events per day and providing a sleek ReactJS/SemanticUI frontend that the users seem to really enjoy. Being a side project, it's been relatively stress-free.

While the application is still very profitable, the cost is ~10x its implementation on traditional servers. I'm not going to argue the pro's and con's, just providing some numbers. At this point, we're working to optimize the original stack in order to reduce costs.

I will say though...honestly, working with Serverless and the AWS stack is a very pleasant experience.

<comment><USER4> Details on this would be great. We do a lot of serverless for content publishing and 3rd party api integration work... I'd love to hear more of how others use it at scale.

I can confirm a couple things. It seems like we spend a bit more time getting things to work as expected.

Troubleshooting can get expensive given the system disappears.

Telemetry on the lambdas needs to improve. Finding what's eating time gets tough when you are looking to optimize. (A lot baked in to this statement but getting 800ms of compute to 400ms is sometimes important whilst staying on lambda)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately I cannot provice much detail about the nature of the application, however I can say that we collect and process various types of events and perform automated actions based on them. The ingress begins at API Gateway, runs through a pipeline of Lambda functions, ends up in a Kinesis firehose, and ultimately in S3 for further processing. The primary cost (~60%) comes from API Gateway acting as the event ingress point, which was a design mistake...though at the time it did make things easier.

We're currently working on migrating the event collectors to a pure CloudFront based solution (inspired by SnowPlow) where the events will be submitted to CloudFront via signed GET requests and the CF logs will be streamed to the same Lambda-based processing pipeline. Doing this will eliminate almost all of the overhead of API Gateway (still required for certain events that cannot be collected via HTTP GET).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was also the biggest news of re:Invent for me. Total game changer. No need to provision large R instance types to support the batch processing that happens a 3AM and sits idle most of the time. All environmental tiers can have 100% the same configuration.

I know of some projects burning millions a month in database costs because they like to replicate environments for testing branches. Switching to serverless Aurora would reduce that cost to probably low thousands.

Of course it all depends on how quickly it can scale up to meet the load and I reserve full judgement till I can try it out, but am very interested in this.

</comment><comment><USER6> The idea is exciting, but the pricing looks too high for side projects. The docs state "Aurora Serverless can scale from a minimum of 1 ACU to a maximum of 256 ACUs." Unless I'm reading this incorrectly, you are paying for 1 ACU 24 hours a day.

$0.06 * 24 * 365 = $525.60 per year.

This is more expensive than a low-end RDS instance. It's a shame, I immediately thought this would be the perfect solution for side projects and prototypes, but the pricing killed it.

<comment><USER7> You pay per second of usage and the ACU starts and shuts down automatically. If your DB is only actually accessed a occasionally then you are not paying for 24hrs of usage. I think the auto-scaling is the draw though, not necessarily the price. So you are only getting charged the the database is being accessed. I think the examples on the pricing page make it a little more clear.

<comment><USER8> FaunaDB Serverless Cloud has global ACID transactions with per-request pricing. You can optimize your queries for cost by looking at the response headers, or support your organization with an on-premise multitenant cluster. Learn more about pricing and features here [https://fauna.com/serverless](https://fauna.com/serverless)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish Amazon or Google would just make a simple key/value store to give minimal persistence for their serverless offerings. DynamoDB comes closest but it still overcomplicates things.

<comment><USER10> I'm not super familiar with DynamoDB except as a strict key/value store. You set a partition key, you ignore your range key, and you go--what's particularly overcomplicated about that?

<comment><USER11> Setting the number of write nodes and read nodes to match your workload. I was scaling up a system and as more things came online, the traffic became more bursty we were constantly bumping them up and wondering if we were allocating too much (probably useless fretting regardless).

Ultimately, we moved to an S3 only solution since we have such a low throughput environment and the simplicity is addictive.

<comment><USER10> Makes sense in the past, but with DynamoDB autoscaling that's largely gone by the wayside.

<comment><USER11> I hadn't heard about this feature update! Thanks for pointing me at it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am struggling to understand the concept of Serverless Aurora and AWS Lambda integration - they highlight that AWS Lambda would scale on traffic and there by Serverless Aurora kicks into support this scale - but there is a limitation on AWS Lambda inside a VPC[1]. So in order to really utilize the Serverless Aurora fully - the Proxy fleet would have special permission to access Aurora?

Also, has anyone solved the issue of AWS Lambda (in VPC) scaling beyond the limited IP space ?

[1][http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/vpc.html](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/vpc.html)

ENIs = Projected peak concurrent executions * (Memory in GB / 3GB)

<comment><USER13> But would you really need to put Serverless Aurora in a VPC? Is it even possible to do that? I expect it working like DynamoDB in this regard, the tables/database just exists and access is determined by IAM role.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is super interesting to me on applications where I'm using Heroku's $50/month Postgres plan. Almost inevitably I find that the only reason I've upgraded past hobby level is for performance, not scaling. That it would auto- scale under load is just the icing on the cake.

<comment> le-mark What performance problems were you having specifically? What are your use cases? Just curious to hear your experience.

<comment><USER14> Alas, I don't have metrics. Just seemed noticeably faster on the more expensive Postgres plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It looks really great. The only concern I have (relative to other serverless features) is that it does have a top-end architectural limit (256 ACUs).

It's probably not worth fretting over, but it is worth mentioning when comparing to DynamoDB. That means in building a serverless web app, you might look at starting with Serverless Aurora, graduating to regular Aurora (as usage increases due to pricing), and then perhaps moving off workloads better suited to DynamoDB as you discover them.

</comment><comment><USER16> Recent related discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15808271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15808271)

</comment><comment><USER17> Any ideas what replication model they're using under the hood to bring new instances online so quickly?

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if this can be accessed from Lambda VPCs?

<comment><USER19> It will be accessible via HTTP, just like all of Amazon's APIs. Doesn't matter if you are in a VPC or not.

<comment><USER20> Aurora is accessible via TCP (mysql or Postgres), not HTTP.</comment></comment></comment>


Stripe Alternatives - <AUTHOR> I have been looking for some payment processing / merchant service alternatives.
While I love the Stripe API like many others, we certainly do pay a high premium for it. The recent policy changes for older users like myself make the service much less palatable.
What other options are there besides the most popular Braintree/Paypal, Square, etc?
I'm researching in terms of:
* Low Cost (% and Per Transaction Flat Fee) * API quality * Possibility of commission/referral fee kickback * Trust / Reliability / Longevity
Am I missing anything? What would you recommend? <comment><USER2> We're at this point with Stripe too. Their fees are un-workable for anything in between tiny businesses and huge businesses (which they discount as loss leads for marketing).

Are you are a marketplace (Stripe connect), or just processing for your own behalf?

<comment><AUTHOR> For myself, and as referral for e-commerce and SAAS clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-alternatives-to- Str...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-alternatives-to- Stripe?share=1)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks but I find Quora responses for questions like this typically very spammy. I think the HN community has the right mindset and experience to provide more qualified recommendations.</comment></comment>


Creating fake Italian names with Markov chains - <AUTHOR> http://doubtingtommaso.blogspot.com/2008/03/markov-chains.html

<comment><USER2> Could you do the same thing with startup names please.

<comment><USER3> <http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html> ?</comment></comment>


Errors in open-source C++ projects which was detected with help static analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/a/0077

<comment><AUTHOR> The article is intended for C/C++ programmers, but developers working with other languages may also find it interesting. The materials collected in this article will be useful for authors of articles, books and blogs. Examples of errors can be used to demonstrate advantages of different programming styles for instance, why you should not try to make your code shorter by writing long expressions.</comment>


Our Programs Are Fun to Use - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codinghorror.com/our-programs-are-fun-to-use/ <comment><USER2> It amazes me how blind people who consider the web browser a great platform for simple, fun teaching software are to the fact that the browser itself and typical operating systems aren't simple and fun at all and cannot be easily hidden from the user. They hit you in the face with a multitude of icons, windows, menus, annoying animated effects in various tool- and menu bars. It's in stark contrast to tablets and smartphones, where users just need to unlock and press an icon to use an app (that will take over the whole display). The (desktop and to some extent mobile) browser is just a terrible platform for the user.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been doing something a bit related to this. I've been approaching programming as teaching. As I read books, I try to write code to accompany them. If they have exercises, I write code that will solve them. It certainly takes me to different challenges, things I don't normally face when writing typical applications. I especially enjoy doing this with completely non- computer-related textbooks, such as physics or chemistry books. In teaching the computer how to do these things, I most definitely benefit in understanding the tasks better myself.

Of course, when I do this I face some common hurdles. For instance, parsing whatever representation is used (equations or chemical formulas or whatever). In an 'interactive book' situation, I could see approaching an exercises section with a proper parser made available, so the 'reader' could easily manipulate the important portions of the problem. Other things come up too, such as using clumps of data. Whether a list of atomic masses of a mole of an elements atoms or proportional relationships between various factors, those things ought also to be made available in easy-to-use data structures.

I could see the IPython Notebook environment growing in this direction easily. People are already starting to use it as a platform for putting together entire books with a great deal of interactivity built in. You execute the code as you 'read' and see what it does step by step. In my opinion it should replace any scientific papers presenting any sort of data analysis as soon as possible. For whole-book projects, though, the platform needs some work. And the creators are aware of this and intending to fix issues and add features to support this. Read through their Issues page on Github sometime and you'll see authors really pushing the bounds of what the Notebook format can do and developers responding.

<comment><USER4> Do you still do this? I'm currently going back to school for a degree in CS and was thinking about doing something like this for my Calculus/Stats class... maybe with Highcharts or even D3.

Do you have any recommendations if I take this approach?</comment></comment>


Data Wrangler, an alternative to Google Refine - <AUTHOR> http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just had a demo at the NICAR11 conference, it looks very impressive. Restricted to 1000 rows and 40 columns, but can export Python script to process larger files. It suggests and shows previews for changes to the data, which is helpful, especially to those who aren't so experienced at data manipulation.</comment>


Tablet dollars: Android passed Apple for first time in Q3 - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/11/15/apple-ipad-huberty-idc/ <comment><USER2> Notable point being this part:

"Working from the tracking numbers IDC released two weeks ago".

Extrapolation, like this, has very limited use and is vaguely indicative at best and nowhere close to being reliable for anything other than fancy- sounding talking points.

<comment><USER3> / useful for click-bait headlines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not too long ago, android buyers were regularly shouted down on HN with "There's no tablet market, there's only an ipad market" when discussing how fun and usable the N7 is.

Interesting how things have turned out. I guess a low-cost quality 7-inch tablet was something the market was demanding but whatever cargo cultism Jobs/Cook and Ivy subscribed to made this an impossibility for a long time.

I personally have an N10 and love it. My main use case is downloading torrents; something I can't do on iOS without a jailbreak.

</comment><comment><USER5> The data presented in this article is extremely suspect. The methodology for both the collection of shipment information and the extrapolation to revenue are secret (or at least not reported here -- see the update at the bottom of the story). As a community that is concerned with accuracy and precision, I think we should be bothered by this. Instead it's a launchpad for arguments based on conjecture and personal anecdote.

</comment><comment><USER6> What does this even mean? Most Android tablets are cheap video players sold in China.

It's great that Android is enabling these devices to be built, but comparing the revenue of low end video players with iPads is nonsensical.

Android is a free OS that can be used to make any kind of embedded appliance. iOS is the operating system used in Apple's mobile computers.

How is it surprising or informative that Apple's share of consumer electronics revenue in general is lower than 50%?

</comment><comment><USER7> I love the update at the bottom which basically says "we have no idea how they got these numbers"

</comment><comment><USER8> Since Android phones have out-sold iPhones, it shouldn't be surprising that the same happens with Android tablets.

But what are the numbers when it comes to web traffic from those devices and app purchases etc?

<comment><USER9> If you're looking for a way to say "iOS is still winning", then yes, there's vastly more web traffic generated by iOS than by android. but that's beside the point. Android tablets are mainstream now. John Gruber's old article [1] "there is no tablet market, there's only an iPad market" is obviously no longer true.

<comment><USER10> It depends on what you mean by a 'tablet market'. On the hardware side, sure, there are plenty of companies that sell Android tablets (albeit often at a loss). On the software side however, I don't think there's a tablet market, there's just an iPad market. Owners of Android tablets don't buy apps and many of those tablets don't run recent versions of Android which makes it very hard to create the same quality apps that are available for iPad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So Amazon, Samsung, Google, HP, ASUS, and all other companies that make Android tablets now make more money together than Apple does on the iPad?

<comment><USER12> Yes, that is the assertion in the article.

<comment><USER13> That is the assertion of the _title_ , but the _body_ of the article (correct me if I'm wrong) refers to total _units_ , not noting that (A) it took Amazon, Samsung, Google, HP, ASUS, and all other companies that make Android tablets lumped together to out-sell essentially a single product[1] from Apple, (B) most of those devices were low-price low-profit-margin units as contrasted with Apple making some 50% profit off each sale, and (C) how many of those units were relegated to minor usage (or disused entirely in short order) for minor purposes (video player, occasional games) vs "heavy use" (broadly speaking; see other comment about actual network traffic).

My snide "it's Friday and this coffee was too strong" side envisions comparison of the aggregated productivity & vitality of our intrepid hero against waves of zombies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apple's investors, I can assure you, take precisely zero "comfort" in Apple leading in revenue. They care about profit. By that metric, the only metric that really counts, Apple is dominating.

</comment><comment><USER15> There should be a law that manufacturers have to take back their cheap tablets and phones for recycling so they don't end up a toxic pile in a landfill.

<comment><USER16> Why must there be a law? What major tablet market doesn't already have free electronics recycling available? In the US, most big-box electronics stores take items for recycling from any manufacturer. Given the very high price floors seen in used tablet markets (eBay, Craigslist, etc), I doubt all that many are being thrown out in the first place.

<comment><USER14> This is only because Apple basically invented the entire tablet market in 2010, just a few years ago.

This will change quite rapidly, starting approximately now, as various tablets begin to become more and more obsolete.</comment></comment></comment>


I Love Julia - <AUTHOR> http://technology.stitchfix.com/blog/2014/12/04/i-heart-julia/ <comment><USER2> I love Julia too, but it currently has a bug which kills my desired workflow: the plotting library (Gadfly) takes 30 seconds to import.

Yes, there are a number of workarounds. You can use python or R for plotting, you can keep a single interactive session going and reload your source file in it, you can precompile Gadfly into Julia's global precompiled blob, etc, but the solutions take time and effort that significantly offset Julia's value proposition (for me, at least). If you haven't looked at Julia yet you might want to hold off for a while until they get it sorted out. It looks like it might happen in the next version, 0.4, which hopefully will support pre- compiled libraries.

I feel like a bit of a dick for complaining about hiccups in a beta version, but I _really_ like Julia and I _really_ don't want to see it go the Clojure route and simply accept several-second delays in oft-repeated tasks. Drake, I'm looking at you -- Make can build my entire C++ codebase in less time than it takes your "make-replacement" to launch! I love your features, but the stuck-in-molassas feeling I get when using your program was enough to scare me away.

<comment><USER3> We're definitely not settling for several-second delays. This will get better soon.

<comment><USER2> Great to hear! Thanks for all the hard work, btw. Julia seems to be steaming ahead at breakneck pace, it's exciting to be along for the ride!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You know, one of the things that has annoyed me about python isn't that it's slow, its just it seemed like the BDFL was unconcerned about addressing performance. It is what it is, you can't fault them for having their priorities, but it bothered me. PyPy to an extent has done an excellent job of addressing it, but I'm really happy that there's a language like this that seems like it cares about making things fast without making it incredibly verbose -- I am impressed.

<comment><USER5> Not completely unconcerned, PSF did donate $10k to PyPy last month, so they do recognize some importance for speed, even if it isn't CPython's priority.

(and PyPy does break some python APIs and expectations, speed does come at a small cost, after all)

<comment><USER6> PyPy breaks _CPython_ APIs. Python language stuff is very well supported.

<comment><USER5> I was specifically thinking of `gc` at the time of writing, which is a part of python, not CPython. (though it only has reason to exist as a part of CPython)

but yeah, for... probably 90%+ of use-cases, it is the PyPy<=>CPython differences that are more notable

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Multiple dispatch alone make Julia lovable. I'm not a lisper, so I didn't really get the point until trying Julia. It's a beautiful way to solve the expression problem [1], and a nice alternative to pattern matching in functional languages.

1: [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExpressionProblem](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExpressionProblem)

<comment><USER8> R's S4 classes has multiple dispatch also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I _want_ to love Julia. The core language is excellently designed and better than the alternatives, although the performance in practice is not nearly as good as the benchmarks would have you believe. String manipulation and building recursive data structures composed of small types (trees) are especially slow, considerably slower than Python.

The libraries, on the other hand... I know it's new, but the DataFrames.jl package in particular gave me fits. Data frames are essential tools for statistics, and there are many problems. When I last used it, it took several minutes to load modest 10MB TSV matrices, and segfaulted entirely on slightly larger ones. It doesn't support indexes on both axes, and the developers made the extremely questionable decision to require that index names be valid symbols. I could go on.

I think the core developers should exercise more control over the library ecosystem, at least for the packages that are crucial to the type of workflow they're building the language for.

<comment><USER10> FWIW, I think the DataFrames package and its dependencies have consistently operated at the boundaries of what we know how to do efficiently in Julia. The package has had lackluster performance in many contexts primarily because it adopted many idioms from R and Python that were sharply at odds with Julia's type inference system. We're starting to clear those problems up, but there are still lots of unsolved challenges we need to resolve.

If you have any ideas about how we should modify the basic data types and functions defined in DataFrames, those ideas would go a long way to making Julia a better language.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, really late reply.

I fully appreciate that the type system imposes constraints that don't exist in Python or R. For my purposes in particular, and I think many people, I don't actually need a full-fledged data frame with heterogeneous types. What I actually want is a numeric matrix with labels on both axes and good methods for querying, group-by operations, etc. (And an equivalent numeric Series type). Big bonus for memory mapping and/or fast I/O.

I think this is an easier problem to solve, especially since factors and ordinals can be considered as a special type of numeric.

It has been too long since I've looked at the internal code structure of DataFrames.jl, but I think the biggest design flaws at the time were the requirements of index names to be symbols (probably should either be a flat String, or a choice between String and Int64), and axes on columns only. I can only assume the symbol decision was made for performance but you surely have worked with datasets given by investigators that use all kinds of random conventions for index names that don't fit the constraints of a symbol. Not to mention the very common case of numeric index names. I find it very annoying to read such a file in R and get "X1000" or whatever as my index names.

I actually tried briefly to dive in and fix the I/O problems, but the code style was daunting -- a few, very huge functions. If it hasn't been done, I would suggest breaking it up a little.

Anyway, I didn't mean to be overly critical -- I think you're doing a very important task -- but as an honest assessment of why I, as a busy scientist, found Julia to be more trouble than it was worth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author of the article says that relative (to Python and R) paucity of the libraries should not stop one from using Julia. I completely second this for another reason, which is the awesome PyCall package, using which you can make use of any Python library.

</comment><comment><USER12> I learned Julia in a week and implemented a EM test particle integrator in a couple of hours. Julia is fantastic, easy, and fast.

</comment><comment><USER13> Instead of Julia Studio, I would recommend Juno[0], the IDE based off of LightTable. While it still has some rough edges, it works very well.

[0]: [http://junolab.org](http://junolab.org)

</comment><comment><USER14> > If you want to install a branch instead of master in a repo, you can do > Pkg.checkout("name_of_package", branch="a_branch"). This kind of package > management is much better than what is currently available for Python > packaging.

Is it different from pip install git+...? See [https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/reference/pip_install.html#vcs...](https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/reference/pip_install.html#vcs- support)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting thing from this, for us that know Julia, is that Juliabox is open again without invite.

<comment><USER3> [https://juliabox.org/](https://juliabox.org/) for those interested in trying it. If enough people try it, there may be a queue, but there are no invites required anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel bad about sharing juliabox here some months ago blocking the service up with traffic. I hope it didn't cause too much of a headache for you julia guys.

<comment><USER3> No worries, it was a good kick-in-the-pants to work on scalability of the service :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a syntactical reason why Julia can be fast but Python can't? Would it be possible to use Python syntax and get the same LLVM performance? (aside from the difficulty of writing a new interpreter)

Put another way, does Julia sacrifice something relative to Python? Are the objects less flexible?

Could I write Python that compiles to Julia, without losing features?

<comment><USER10> If you're interested in this topic, you should watch this talk by Steven G. Johnson: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhlVHoeB05A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhlVHoeB05A)

tl;dr of the talk: Syntax has little to no effect on how a language performs. What distinguishes Julia from Python is that Julia's semantics were designed to be amenable to type inference. The results of type inference allow Julia's compiler to generate very efficient machine code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There were a few concerns I have about Julia packaging from this article and reading the docs [http://julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual/packages/](http://julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual/packages/)

* It looks like packages are installed in a global namespace that is shared by all projects. This seems like it will get messy when you try to run older and newer projects.

* The default way to add packages is to just Pkg.add("package-name"), this makes reproducible builds difficult. This is especially an issue with a language used in scientific contexts where reproducibility is extremely important.

Are there solutions to these issues that I can't see? I'm aware that Julia is a young language so I don't expect them to solve everything at once.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does Julia community have a typesetting tool(s) like knitr + Latex? a.k.a can i embed Julia code on to a latex document the same way I can do with R code? That is one feature that can convert me very quickly.

<comment><USER18> Not quite native, but you can use Knitr with Julia. Carson Sievert (IA State stats grad student) has written up some slides:

[http://heike.github.io/stat590f/gadfly/carson- knitr](http://heike.github.io/stat590f/gadfly/carson-knitr)

IJulia[1] is probably closest to the community supported equivalent, but it's based on IPython

[1]: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl](https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl)

<comment><USER19> There is also Weave.jl, which is young but looks like it is coming along very nicely: [https://github.com/mpastell/Weave.jl](https://github.com/mpastell/Weave.jl)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I do wonder why Julia caught on where lush died. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER21> There are probably a few reasons.

Julia has roots with MIT which immediately lends it some cachet, and probably made it easier to grow a vibrant community.

Lush (which is an unfortunate name btw) used Lisp syntax, which has never been favored by math, science and engineering types. It seems obvious that equations as expressed in the language should closely resemble those used in actual math - thus the syntax of languages like Fortran, Matlab and Julia.

Writing (or reading):

(setq vx (+ vx (* ax deltat))) ; update velocity

is much more awkward than:

      vx += ax * deltat  # update velocity

This issue gets worse with more complex examples.

Lush also allowed inline C, which was probably a bad design choice. Julia allows painless C library calls, which is much cleaner.

Those are just a few thoughts off the top of my head...

<comment><USER22> Which, btw., is written in Lisp as:

        (incf vx (* ax deltat))

The equivalent of += is INCF.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure that syntax was available in Lush. The line I cited was from a Lush example program.

[http://lush.sourceforge.net/lander04.txt](http://lush.sourceforge.net/lander04.txt)

<comment><USER22> In Lush a similar construct is called INCR. See its documentation. INCF in Common Lisp might be more general, since it supports a concept called _place_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's still early days for Julia, and performance is uneven. I wouldn't use it for serious work unless 1) an expert in your field is already using it (e.g. Udell and Convex.jl) or 2) you carefully benchmark your key computations. In my case, I wrote C++ and Python benchmarks and stumbled on a performance problem that the Julia team knew about and plans to address.

</comment><comment><USER24> Another interesting article about Julia by Evan Miller (was on HN a while ago): [http://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-betting-on- julia.html](http://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-betting-on-julia.html)

HN thread about it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7109982](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7109982)

</comment><comment><USER25> Is Julia being used in production at StitchFix?

</comment><comment><USER26> How can Julia be "on par" with C when it is itself implemented in C?

<comment><USER27> Because Julia has been carefully designed to allow functions to compile down to very fast machine code. There are a few important design choices that are necessary to make it possible to do this (type stability, etc) - there are a few talks about the design principles that went into making Julia.

However, numerical Python can be nearly as fast as C as well with very, very little additional work (using Numba means adding @jit on top of a function). The downside is that Numba only works on the 'numpy' subset of Python, basically.

<comment><USER26> Sounds like snake oil to me.

<comment><USER28> If you want to know the catch, it is that it has high latency at first run, and requires a full compiler at runtime. It is optimized for numerical work, where the long runtime make slow startup irrelevant and low latency is easily amortized.

But if you are suspicious, there are introspection utilities that let you see the generated native code. Give it a try.

<comment><USER21> As I understand it there's a plan to produce stand-alone binaries downstream, with no compiler needed at runtime.

It's using LLVM on the backed, so it should be quite possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oh wow, another person evangelizing about X obscure language from inside their pseudoacademic ivory tower yet providing no examples of anything useful they've done with it, or anyone has done with it for that matter.

Everytime I see this BS I think of this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrp57IAlh84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrp57IAlh84)

It's fine to say something more reasonable like "I have high hopes for this very early stage language in the future", but this kind of fanfare is the reason why stuff like Java got so big.

<comment><USER27> I'm not really sure what the point of this post is. Julia is a fun language to play with, it has a great and very helpful community and, in its niche, it's very good. Its creators have been very good OSS citizens and joined forces with IPython.

If you don't like it, don't use, but don't piss and moan about the fact that some people enjoy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I hate Julia. It is not about the language but rather about the community surrounding it. Take for examples this post. I have nothing against the author, but everyone using Julia pretends they have leveled the playing field. That they need more than C but don't want to waste their with Assembly because they are too superior. It is a bit like the Arch community, where superiority is claimed and all alternatives are dumbed down because they are not on the cool table.

Out of principle I don't engage with products like these because you either become part of them or will never get truly involved.

<comment><USER18> I've had the opposite experience. The mailing lists are friendly and, to the extent that I've seen people involved with the project claim superiority, it's in the very narrow context of scientific computing. (I mean, it's a super- early language project. Most of the people using it are people who _like_ new programming languages.)</comment></comment>


How long would it take to crack your password? - <AUTHOR> https://password.kaspersky.com/? <comment><USER2> Discounts the fact that brute force is rarely the best way to find out

Social engineering is far easier

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely.</comment></comment>


8th grader charged with felony hacking for changing teacher's digital wallpaper - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/2909321/8th-grader-charged-with-felony-hacking-for-changing-teachers-digital-wallpaper.html

<comment><USER2> Lengthy discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362307)

Other submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9356172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9356172)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362307)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368317)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9376847](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9376847)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393700](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393700)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. Have my upvote!</comment></comment>


Context-Aware Personal Assistant App "Friday" Makes Its Public Debut - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/20/intelligent-context-aware-personal-assistant-app-friday-makes-its-public-debut/

<comment><USER2> We've been working on this app for like 2 years, our much talked 'iris' app was just a off shoot from the friday IP. We're feeling so happy/relieved after the launch :)</comment>


Larry Wall: 5 Programming Languages Everyone Should Know - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR8fQiskYII <comment><USER2> Larry Wall is getting old, his shirts are getting less colorful.</comment>


A Few of the Funny Characters You'll Meet in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/a-few-funny-characters-youll-find-in-silicon-valley

<comment><USER2> Brilliant! I met them all. You forgot a few new ones:

\- Incubator partner/recruiter -> Like a vampire, only the blood of virgin startups attracts these folks.

\- Tech event organizer -> Recruits the same 5-6 VC and angels for 3-4 events every month. Lives off naive startups who pay to 'demo' at these events

\- Burned out bee -> Worked at 3 hot startups, he called them stupid and ridiculous despite each of them going Public. Keeps missing the big paydays for being unable to keep quiet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are awesome. Spot on, mate! Although I admit I have "recycled" some VC speakers for events I've put on in the past :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: k3sup ('ketchup') – bootstrap Kubernetes with k3s over SSH - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexellis/k3sup <comment><USER2> If you need an automated tool to set something up, that's a problem in my book.

From someone who understands k8s, but doesn't have much practical knowledge of it, the amount of "getting started" and "quick start" articles and tools is a major turnoff for me. If I can't easily read and understand the system and deploy it, I'm using blackbox system that I need to manage but can't understand.

I need an automated tool to deploy this thing, another tool to manage it, a tool to manage my applications, another tool to do specialized CI/CD, and so on and so on. Just seems insane to me.

<comment><USER3> Managing self-installed k8s is a pain in the ass right now, but not much more than trying to manually install Linux without using e.g. the Ubuntu installer. Would that put you off using Linux?

Speaking as a daily Linux user since 1996, there are so many parts of the system I still don't understand, but it's not necessary for me to e.g. understand exactly how the font catalog and text rendering works to write a document. The same is true here.

There are quite a few companies in this space trying to improve the self- hosted experience, just give it some time

As for all the tools you supposedly need, the only one you actually need is kubectl, and it's more than enough to accomplish everything. New ecosystems always endure this abundance of "helpful tools" before consolidating on a few important choices.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h If GNU/Linux was unusable without various hacked-on helper frontends, none of which was comprehensive and none of which even tried to standardize, then yes that would be a red flag. In practice, you have things like Ubuntu putting a nice frontend on, but you also have things like the Arch folks, who explicitly refuse to provide an installer because the "manual" process is totally reasonable. So as an outsider, my understanding is that there are plenty of different k8s distros, and a lot of helper frontends (and no clear winners among them); are there people who find vanilla/handcrafted k8s okay? Is there an "Arch K8s" distro? Or even, is there an Ubuntu of k8s (successfully hides away the details and produces a clean working system that never requires a user to leave the comfort of the GUI)? Unfortunately, I don't have the domain knowledge to tell whether any given helper scripts are going to bite me down the road, so this is a genuine question from someone who'd like to get into k8s but can't see which option is sane.

<comment><USER4> > are there people who find vanilla/handcrafted k8s okay?

Yes, we do.

> Is there an "Arch K8s" distro?

Kubernetes the hard way is pretty much Arch

> is there an Ubuntu of k8s (successfully hides away the details and produces > a clean working system that never requires a user to leave the comfort of > the GUI)?

Kubespray etc.

> so this is a genuine question from someone who'd like to get into k8s but > can't see which option is sane.

It completely depends on how much money your company is willing to spend on it. The larger the organization, the more it makes sense to go for "the Arch way". If you are a tiny start-up with single digit Devops folks, stick to managed offerings like GKE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is getting ridiculous. Ketchup is only 3 letters longer and where the hell does the s come from? If you expect my to pronounce it ketchup then spell it correctly. Otherwise I'm calling it k 3 sup.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely. I cannot stand these abbreviations, because they are optimizing for ease of typing rather than ease of reading.

<comment><USER7> I don't necessarily disagree, but it's probably a lot easier to come up with unique project names. So many names are taken in package registries or the community in general.

Also in this project, if they didn't say it was called "ketchup", then k3sup makes some sense. If we accept that k3s exists, k3sup sounds reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Yeah, but why is it k3sup? Shouldn't it be k3hup if it's ketchup?"

<comment><USER9> Really k8sup would be closest in both theme and also pronunciation.

<comment><USER5> What 8 letters are you replacing?

<comment><USER9> ubernete!

This program is a kubernetes boostrap, AKA k8s bootstrap, AKA k8s "up", something that _actually_ sounds like ketchup instead of kethreesup. The author not seeing that makes me both sad and angry.

<comment><USER10> but it bootstraps k3s, which is k8s .. but 5 lighter. (why 5? no idea.) so it's "k3s up".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "light-weight utility to get from zero to KUBECONFIG" \-- what is kubeconfig?

Here I am a total n00b in Kubernetes, hoping to get a clear path for learning it as an app dev. I heard K3S as "easier" K8S, but still confused how to get started and be productive with it (as app dev).

<comment><USER12> DISCLAIMER: I work for Red Hat Consulting as an OpenShift/Kubernetes consultant.

You might want to try minikube [0], minishift [1], CDK [2] or CRC [3]. You'll want to have a machine with a bit of resources available. 2 cores+, 8GB+ RAM, 20GB+ disk space for minikube, minishift, CDK. CRC is happier with 4 cores+, 16GB+ RAM, 40GB+ disk space.

kubeconfig (`~/.kube/config`) [4] is a little like your `~/.ssh` folder where your Kubernetes clusters sessions, credentials, metadata are stored & maintained.

[0] [https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube](https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube)

[1] [https://www.okd.io/minishift/](https://www.okd.io/minishift/)

[2] [https://developers.redhat.com/products/cdk/overview](https://developers.redhat.com/products/cdk/overview)

[3] [https://developers.redhat.com/products/codeready- containers/...](https://developers.redhat.com/products/codeready- containers/overview)

[4] [https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/organize-c...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/organize- cluster-access-kubeconfig/)

<comment><USER4> I would recommend Kind instead of any of these tools. It's the best local k8s evaluation tool I have found yet. We use it in our projects for local development too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Could this not be done -- perhaps more easily -- with Ansible?</comment>


Is ergodicity a reasonable hypothesis? - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.7224 <comment><USER2> Excellent article!

I love how they not only disprove a hypothesis that has been at the foundations of thermodynamics for a long time, but they even go about explaining why nobody thought of that before them.</comment>


Ask HN: Best Object-Oriented Programming Book - <AUTHOR> What's the best book for getting a handle on object-oriented programming? I'm an experienced web dev but new to OO. <comment><USER2> I was looking for a similar thing a while back. I don't remember why, but I decided on Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: [http://www.poodr.com/](http://www.poodr.com/)

Although it uses Ruby as the instructional language, you don't need to know much Ruby syntax to be able to understand the examples.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Object Primer by Scott Ambler (IIRC). Read years ago but got some insights from it.

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

[http://www.ambysoft.com/books/theObjectPrimer.html](http://www.ambysoft.com/books/theObjectPrimer.html)

Note that is the 3rd edition. I had read an earlier edition. He lists the differences between 2nd and 3rd.

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out the Head First: Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. It's pretty basic, but would be a good intro if you're brand new to OO.

<comment><USER5> Seconded. It's a great introduction to OOP written in a very approachable manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am relatively new to this myself, but at my work there is a lot of discussion of the SOLID principles: [http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.PrinciplesOfOod](http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.PrinciplesOfOod)

</comment><comment><USER7> I would highly recommend Eric Evans' Domain Driven Design as the second Object Oriented book to be read. Most any primer on OO will give you the foundation of ideas but Erick's book makes the knowledge useful and has been repeatedly called OO done right.

ISBN-13: 978-0321125217 ISBN-10: 0321125215</comment>


How does Google Analytics measure site speed?  - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/q/6166074/172322

<comment><USER2> Since the announcement of the Page Speed Toolbar I predicted Google would not simple crawl a website, it would render it.

Now we have previews in the search results, so we know for sure that Google renders websites.

Next to detecting hidden spam or javascript layout changes, I presume this rendering can be used to produce a waterfall of the site loading process.

So while Google does this with a HTML5 feature in modern browsers, internally it should already have:

\- page speed scores

\- render scores (perhaps render time)

of all websites in index, regardless the browser their users use.

That is how I think Google measures site speed; it uses these known non-HTML5 factors for ranking the fastest websites.

<comment><USER3> This is very likely how Google measures site speed for ranking, as well as anonymous submissions from the Google Toolbar. Google Analytics also lets you filter this data by other metrics such as browser and geographic location.

As for the W3C timing spec, it looks like Firefox is planning on implementing this too: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=570341>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really wish GA tracked all the metrics exposed by the timing spec, instead of combining them into one overall value. It's great that this reports numbers from actual users' machines instead of a headless render process on a monitoring server somewhere though. Here is hoping FF implements support for this soon.</comment>


Bolt Browser discontinued - <AUTHOR> http://www.boltbrowser.com/

<comment><USER2> It was more or less a clone of Opera mini (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_browser>, [http://cellphonequick.com/bolt-browser-3-0-now-available- at-...](http://cellphonequick.com/bolt-browser-3-0-now-available-at-android- market/)) running on Webkit (and some people argue that Opera should do it too).

<comment><USER3> bolt renders webpages like firefox on Pc.... i don't see how it clones opera mini

<comment><USER2> The strength of Opera mini are Opera's servers that precompute and massively shrink any web page for you[1] using their proprietary OBML. So did Bolt[2]. Firefox on PC don't use any Mozilla servers to render the page for you. Neither does Firefox on Mobile. These really are two classes of web browsers.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality>

[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_browser#Data_compression>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used this browser quite a bit. It was very good. It rendered fonts beautifully and it played media inline, without launching a new media player.

These are advantages over Opera Mini.

Also, it used Webkit as its core rendering engine (as opposed to Opera)

So it was really good!

</comment><comment><USER5> It's the first time I've read about this browser, has anybody experienced it, what can you tell about it?</comment>


Ask HN: Arguments against forming a union? - <AUTHOR>

What are the arguments against forming a union of software engineers? <comment><USER2> I always saw unions as protecting employees from abusive employers. In fact, the old rail road construction workers are exactly what it makes me think of. Those workers didn't have many other options for work and the employers were blatantly exploiting them. For them, a union made tons of sense.

On the other hand, most tech companies aren't really that abusive, or they won't retain talent for super long (see the recent NYT hatchet job on Amazon as an example). Given that so many tech companies in the U.S. Are "at will" employment, there aren't many perceived benefits of a union that I can actually think of. The downside would obviously be that new employees would be forced to pay union dues whether or not they wanted to join. It seems to me that due to there being more employment opportunities for what I do than there are people, I've got the most power, not the employer. If that previous statement is true, I simply see no benefit of organizing into a union. Gone are the days (for the most part) where you slog it out for 30 years at the same employer and get a pension for life. On the flip side, the mean salary is MUCH higher, so if you're living below your means and save, you have the potential to end up better than your parent's generation with their pensions.

Just my opinion. I would never join a tech workers union unless I was at an abusive company. However, an abusive company isn't a place I'd stay at.

<comment><USER3> At-will employment is more of an advantage for the employer than the employee. The employer is in a position of strength in and at-will arrangement. Yes, the employee can quit at any time, but the employee usually very dependent on getting paid, and will not quit unless the employment relationship is really bad.

At-will employment allows the employer to terminate the employment relationship for any reason whatsoever (with a few exceptions which vary from state to state).

Unions and most other developed countries in the world use the doctrine of "Just-cause". Just cause limits termination of employment by the employer to non-nebulous things like non-performance, breaking the law, policy violations, and business conditions. The employee is still free to terminate the relationship at any time. This is a fair balance because the employer is in the position of strength and has the upper hand in most instances.

Unions do have issues. It would be better if the US harmonized its employment law with the rest of the developed world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unions are what you want them to be, just like any other constructed organization. Just like there are many types of businesses (e.g. partnerships, LLC, 501(c)(3), etc), which can be further refined with their charter for specific goals, a union can be defined for whatever purpose you want.

If some of the traditional uses for a union may not be needed in the software industry, it could still be _very_ useful to charter a different type of union. Something like a very minimal union that simply had the goal of protecting against really big things like the recent scandal about cartel- style limiting of salaries. A union that - by it's own charter - only concerns itself with that kind of thing would be very low cost, and would serve to discourage that kind of abuse from happening in the first place.

Arguments for or against unions are useless without first defining what you mean by "union".

</comment><comment><USER5> I read that to join the workforce in Denmark you sign up for one of the Unions - so everybody in society gets someone on their side. And they also have employees on corporate boards by law. So they are trying to improve things for everybody.

So maybe I'm saying that a union just for software engineers isn't enough. It is a half-measure that doesn't really address any of the real worker problems of our society.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's funny, I had a similar thought while I was in the shower earlier today. I observed that while we _don't_ have anything resembling a trade union, I've never personally felt the need for it.

On the other hand, isn't it the case that while trades have unions, professions have professional associations? Just as doctors, lawyers and accountants do, so do we: the IEEE and ACM come most readily to mind.

<comment><USER7> the ACM couldn't represent me less...

<comment><USER6> Oh, interesting. Why do you say that?</comment></comment></comment>


Does a mature Linux mean there's nothing left to explore? - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/open-source/108314/linux-the-final-frontier <comment><USER2> His intro made me think of this: <http://xkcd.com/435/></comment>


At 8 snaps per DAU, Snapchat's $4BN valuation is high but not absurd - <AUTHOR> http://mobiledevmemo.com/snapchat-8-snaps-per-day-valuation/

<comment><USER2> While the article does touch on it at the very end, the assumption here is that every single photo shared on the service will include an accompanying advertisement. In my opinion, that seems unlikely. Only time will tell.</comment>


Who is the prototypical rich person? - <AUTHOR> http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2019/01/who-is-prototypical-rich-person.html <comment><USER2> An article by two economic academics proves something about "the Left", and it's wrong anyway because 'most rich people I know' something something something.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the smartest decision you made in life? - <AUTHOR> There are sometimes in life when we end up on a path that take us to places we can't imagine. What path did you take? <comment><USER2> The decision at about age 13 that no one would care about my job as much as I did. I lived in a town where aerospace booms and busts occurred often enough that I realized I should ultimately work for myself.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have any interest in this? - <AUTHOR>

Alright, so I have this tiny web application I use for myself. The main page is just blank with a button in its middle.
When I click the button, a text message is sent to my phone. I use this to find it around the house, because I misplace it frequently.
It's meets a very personal niche, but I wondered if anyone else had a use for it. What do you say? <comment><USER2> Hmm, I find calling the phone more useful. When I receive a text it only plays the alert sound for a second.

<comment><USER3> yeah, if on vibrate the phone will only vibrate once. Makes a lot more sense to call the phone with another phone (if you have one available).</comment></comment>


Feeble Retention - <AUTHOR>

I read tons of articles every day through Hacker News, Psychologytoday, etc., but I have trouble remembering it to actually apply what I learn. How can I improve my retention? <comment><USER2> Some ideas:

\- Blog the summaries.

\- Write one or more books with all of the information you learn.

\- Keep one or more "electronic notebooks" (text files) with your notes, organized by topic. Blogging is better though, if you tag posts, because that way the same notes can be found under more than one topic.</comment>


Need Capital? What's harder, equity or debt?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_72/s0912030511552.htm

<comment><USER2> Debit vs equity decision should be based on the tax advantage of debit vs probability of going bankrupt

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani-Miller_theorem></comment>


Employees Line Up to Get Microchipped in Wisconsin - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40710051 <comment><USER2> This story, or similar, has been posted multiple times over the last few days.

The most active discussion is from this post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836390)

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember back when I was a kid it was often talked about in certain circles that the mark of the beast that is discussed in the Book of Revalations of the Bible would be a microchip planted in the back of your palm.

The Book talks about how those who fail to get the mark will be outcast and unable to function in society. So it was said (in these circles) that it is likely these chips will be used as a kind of credid card, and without one you will not be able to conduct any financial transactions such as buy food etc..

It is the start of the end times!

<comment><USER4> " He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

I'm surprised with the generally conservative Christian population in WI that more people aren't actively against this in their community.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the vast majority Christians even worry about microchips anymore. It was a silly fear from the beginning that only caught on because of how novel and marvelous computers in general were and now that transistors have become more mundane, so have the old notions that piggybacked primarily on such novelties.

<comment><USER6> Hmm. I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss people's concerns about being microchipped--Christians or otherwise. We may hear more rumblings if this is implemented at scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have to admit I find it pretty amusing this is news. About a dozen friends and I have had these for 4+ years, voluntarily.

I no longer carry any traditional metal keys and have modified my front door, vehicles, etc to open via my implants. Friends even upgraded 2 vending machines at our hackerspace to work with them.

In addition to access, I use one to store master encrypted backups of files I might need access to in a pinch and the other I tell everyone contains a vcard with my contact info, but really it just auto-launches rickroll on their phone when they tap it. The tags are all r/w and I can update them as I like from my smartphone.

In a couple weeks I am getting a temperature sensor installed under my arm designed for animals. While temperature is not a super exciting sensor, it paves the way for more complicated ones in the future and I can see how it holds up over time.

My next after that is an HID ATA5577 tag that I can use to clone the HID door cards of most offices.

Once beta units begin to be produced I plan on getting a Vivokey installed which covers the typical use cases of a Yubikey and will allow me to do 2FA, ssh, password management, and cryptocurrency transactions from my body as well.

<comment><USER8> How do you get a chip big enough to store large documents into yourself?

An integrated temperature sensor sounds awesome, especially for a hypochondriac like me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"...there is no GPS tracking ability to it. It is really the same thing as the chip that is in your credit card."_

I had an RFID credit card years ago, but that turned out to be really insecure[1], and the issuer discontinued the program.

The contact-based chips in modern cards are _not_ the same. At all.

I wonder what would happen if some miscreant super-glued a few dozen RFID chips to the reader, or to a location close to the reader?

[1] [http://hackaday.com/2013/11/03/rfid-reader-snoops-cards- from...](http://hackaday.com/2013/11/03/rfid-reader-snoops-cards-from-3-feet- away/)

</comment><comment><USER10> > What if you get robbed?

> Like everything in life, it could happen.

> But, says Mr Danna, at least it is all in one place, making it easier to > cancel all those cards.

Are they implying you might get your hand chopped off but at least it's easy to cancel your credit card?

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think these would be useful, but not as a single chip in your finger. You'd want a more distributed solution; a memory chip holding your key somewhere like your shoulder, a crypto chip to generate the nonce in a knee, some nodes to emit EMI along the transdermal conduits to prevent eavesdropping and to act as decoys, that sort of thing.

That way, the transmitter could be in your finger, but it would be useless on its own. They would need to dismember you to get at the full solution, which would also be fragile to keep intact if anyone tried to remove while maintaining its functionality. Individual parts could also have failsafes to fry the whole system if exposed to atmosphere.

And at that point, unlike chopping off a hand, it'd be so much easier for a criminal to pull a gun on their mark and walk them to an ATM.

Come to think of it, a bodywide transdermal net would be pretty cool, if you included junctions for adding arbitrary modules to a common pin footprint. It would probably be difficult to install, but I dunno... people have put some crazy things in their skin, like a phone-sized single-board computer.

<comment><USER12> > They would need to dismember you to get at the full solution

Great, so thieves that are already amoral enough to chop off your hand will have to kill you instead! Progress!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If it's no different than an ID card, I think I'd rather have the card.

</comment><comment><USER14> So when you switch jobs you have to get surgery to get the device removed? I guess people will have to never switch jobs then. Sounds like a way to keep people from quitting a bad employer.

<comment><USER15> I don't see why you would have to get the chip removed. Access to company services could just be disabled.

<comment><USER16> Switching jobs would incur a slight penalty of 1) removing chip, b) re- programming chip, c) leaving chip. I think this is something a lot of people would like to avoid.

<comment><USER15> My guess is that there would be no need to remove or reprogram. I assume the chip simply presents a unique identifier and nothing more. The old company could just remove access based on the identifier and in a similar way, the new company could grant access using the existing chip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, what happens with these things if you get an MRI?

The chip may get fried, but that's not my main concern. Does it attempt to move through your body? Will it succeed at doing that?

<comment><USER18> They are supposed to be safe for MRIs. Kari Byron got an MRI with one implanted on Mythbusters for demonstration. - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDq_LBH_ZYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDq_LBH_ZYs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Voluntary, perhaps with a kick back for testing? Then maybe. Though I myself would not sign up for such until the regulations are in place governing privacy and such; even to the point of determining who is chipped and who is not.

At this moment, I am not quite sure how I feel about living in a world where we are chipped. Maybe it is a generational thing

<comment><USER20> No. "Voluntary" quickly has a way of becoming the de facto mandatory.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Voluntary team lunches, voluntary employee weekend retreats, voluntary work after hours off the clock...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> FSF better get on this sooner rather than later. I don't know how many of us would really have so much to complain about if these chips were truly, 100% under our own control.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cyborgs on the rise? Imagine the copyright / DRM mess that will ensue, once this will become way more invasive?

It will be literally like "we own you now!".

</comment><comment><USER23> Im not sure about the advantage of an implant vs wearing a ring in these cases. Anyone care to enlighten me?

<comment><USER24> You can't give your implant to someone else very easily.

<comment><USER25> Is the implementation well vetted?

I sort of default to expecting implementation flaws and eventual cloning.

<comment><USER18> This isn't new tech - RFID is an extremely common and well vetted implementation for physical security. This only replaces the fobs you have to carry with you (usually key fob or credit card sized fob) with a microscopic one under your skin. Every single office I've ever worked at (5) use RFID keys for facility access.

Some RFID implementations are vulnerable to cloning and other attacks (brute force, IIRC). There isn't any information about the implementation given here other than "RFID" and some implementations are much more secure than others.

There's attack demonstrations on some RFID access implementations on YouTube - some more viable than others.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Network Containers - <AUTHOR> https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=490 <comment><USER2> This is bomb. Interesting to see someone borrowing a page from microkernels to bring the networking stack into userspace.

Hopefully, technologies like this create a renaissance for protocol design. ZT does the heavy lifting in terms of security and routing, and devs are just left with a flat network that can be optimized for the particular application. We've already had some pretty big wins using ZT to do this for encrypting links between our own microservices -- it'll be even nicer when we can do this at the container-level, without any additional Linux kernel hackery.

<comment><USER3> (Post author and ZeroTier founder here)

I thought about titling this blog announcement "Tenenbaum! Thou art avenged!" but decided to stay away from the link bait. That and I hugely admire Linus. I actually think they were both right.

For those who don't know, I am referring to the epic smack down that occurred many years ago between Tenenbaum and Torvalds over microkernels:

[http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html](http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html)

I think Tenenbaum was right from a theoretical, academic point of view, but Torvalds was right from a pragmatic ship-it-now point of view. He was also right from an early 1990s point of view.

Linus was right because monolithic kernels are easier to build and faster for monolithic system use cases. In the 1990s, individual commodity computer systems were really not fast enough for extreme multi-tenancy beyond maybe multi-purpose use within an organization. This is the sort of multi-tenancy Unix was designed for: a box used by, say, a team or a university department. For this use case a monolithic kernel makes sense for performance and simplicity reasons. The advantages of microkernels just don't matter much, since the box generally has one admin and all the users are trusted. Messing with the kernel is not a big deal.

But then Moore's law happened. Now just about anything above a Raspberry Pi is fast enough to host _lots_ of stuff. Big servers with dozens of cores can host hundreds, sometimes even thousands of services. While they only take up single racks, these machines are "main frames" in the classical sense and can easily see diverse work loads belonging to multiple clients. It's incredibly wasteful to single-purpose these machines and let them sit idle.

So far we've hacked around this with virtualization mostly, but virtualization is heavy and ugly. Think of it as a thick microkernel that runs a bunch of other whole kernels as services.

On huge machines the advantages of microkernels really shine. You can extend the system without having 'root' in a global sense. Crashes of individual system extensions don't bring down the whole machine. Everything is multi- threaded to take advantage of lots and lots of cores. It's even possible to run system services in jails where they only have access to the resources they need so that a compromise (e.g. buffer overflow) in a driver does not permit compromise of the entire system.

So in the end I think Moore's Law has turned the debate a bit toward Tenenbaum. But Linux has so much momentum I doubt it's going anywhere. Instead I think we will see Linux evolve toward being more microkernel-y in the areas where this is most desirable. Network virtualization is one such area. Another is security zones. Soon we'll have really secure containers, allowing Docker multi-tenancy, etc.

But I wouldn't count out alternatives either. There's an opportunity here for something like Hurd if they could ever get that thing really moving. (Get the Hurd moving... huh huh huh...)

Edit: Torvalds was also right because Mach, at least at the time of the debate, was pretty slow. Mach is still not the best microkernel design. See this deck:

[https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs9242/04/lectures/lect05b.pdf](https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs9242/04/lectures/lect05b.pdf)</comment></comment>


An in Depth Guide to the Extreme Single Responsibility Principle - <AUTHOR> http://www.sleepeasysoftware.com/an-in-depth-guide-to-extreme-single-responsibility-principle/ <comment><USER2> Any open source project that is good example of SRP ?</comment>


Ask HN: Falsehoods project managers believe about time? - <AUTHOR> Inspired by this: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time<p>but for PMs <comment><USER2> I think there is still a disconnect between management and programming. Making changes to a large program seem trivial to management while it might be a daunting tasks for programmers as it may fundamentally change the overall design on the program.

Have you read the book Mythical Man-Month ?

Its a good read on the subject of time and management.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I've read it, it's a classic. I'm trying to formulate your comment into a "falsehood" PMs believe: "A very small change to a large program takes very little time." or sth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Making the team switch contexts is cost-free."</comment>


Next airline hijacking will be by a hacker from halfway around the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/john-mcafee-airline-hijacking-hacker-cyber-security/ <comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://www.hackernews.org/2015/09/20/john-mcafee-next- airlin...](http://www.hackernews.org/2015/09/20/john-mcafee-next-airline- hijacking-will-be-by-a-hacker-from-halfway-around-the-world/), which points to this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you dang!</comment></comment>


Why people overuse the E.R. (And increase the cost of health care) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2199645/?GT1=38001 <comment><USER2> At this point, I don't know how anyone can not admit that the U.S. healthcare system is an epic fail, and that we're long overdue to go universal.

One of the reasons doctors are "over-booked" is that they have to spend a inordinate amount of time fighting with these scumbag insurance companies just to get properly paid. Some top-notch Manhattan doctors won't even take insured patients-- cash only. As more doctors opt out of insurance, we're headed toward a three-tier healthcare system, with the uninsured at the bottom, the insured in the middle, and the very wealthy (self-insured) at the top.

The interesting reversal is in the fact that, decades ago, the AMA spoke out against "socialized medicine", fearing that, if doctors became government employees, their compensation would decline. Now, the AMA is coming out in favor of universal healthcare, because it turns out that the insurance scumbags are eroding doctors' remuneration more than government ever could.

<comment><USER3> Citation? I don't necessarily disbelieve, but I want to read more.

<comment><USER2> (Edited, 5:46 pm)

Are you asking me to cite my claims about the AMA or about Manhattan doctors not accepting insurance?

On the AMA:

Here's a record put out by the AMA in 1961, starring Ronald Reagan, against "socialized medicine": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs>

In 2007: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1EG-I3QnCk>

On doctors not participating with health plans: this is from personal experience. I had a rash of health problems six months ago and found that many doctors wouldn't see me unless I was willing to pay in cash. I would have to turn around and ask for reimbursement from the insurance company, which they might deny, since I sought the services of a non-participating doctor.

It makes sense that a doctor would not want to participate with insurance plans, if he's able to get enough work without doing so. Insurance companies add hassle, sometimes deny payment for stupid reasons, and generally wear up a doctor's time and patience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill No statistics are quoted, which greatly weakens the argument.

In my experience, the ER are where illegals go, knowing that they will not be charged. This can be shown because in states where illegal immigration is discouraged, the load on the ER goes down.

In addition, whenever the police pick up someone who is homeless because of drug or alcohol abuse, who is showing any signs of illness, they will take him to the ER. Since such a person is always homeless, and often sick, he will visit the ER several times in the course of a year.

<comment><USER4> Only anecdotal evidence provided, which greatly weakens your argument.</comment></comment>


Git bisect (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/git_bisect.html <comment><USER2> "To visualise this, it's simplest to think of the state of your repository as a point in a high-dimensional 'code-space', in which branches are represented as n-dimensional membranes, mapping the spatial loci of successive commits onto the projected manifold of each cloned repository."

[http://tartley.com/?p=1267](http://tartley.com/?p=1267)

<comment><USER3> That's really... good. I have the theory that whether or not you see this is as an attempt at a legitimate explanation or just a joke depends on your level of self-confidence. I think few people will actually understand it (if they do it's a miracle, since such understanding would be a product purely of your own mind trying to interpret sense into what it sees), but those who lack self- confidence will see the fault in themselves, while those with enough confidence upon realizing they don't understand it will realize it's a joke, because if it wasn't they _should_ have understood it.

Of course, now I'm open to a reply that demonstrates that it isn't a joke but makes perfect sense and that I'm clueless and overconfident... :)

<comment><USER4> Related:

[https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/](https://git-man-page- generator.lokaltog.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a revealing peek at the complexity of merged history. You can't project a "git space" onto a line, so a (linear) listing of commits just misleads you into thinking that your history is linear. That complexity is why I always prefer to rebase and keep my history an actual straight line.

TL;DR \- Merging is powerful, but comes with a cost. \- Rebase is your friend. Keep it simple.

<comment><USER6> Rebasing frequently is nice because it forced you to use Git in a way that makes rebasing pain-free, which leads to nicer Git usage in general.

In my earlier projects when I thought rebasing was evil, it was always because I was abusing aspects of the history that only made everything harder for myself.

(though then again there's surely a million different ways to use a tool like Git, this is all just in my experience)

<comment><USER7> The team I started on a year and a half ago, first out of college, has the soft requirement that the master git branch for each package be flat. Feature branches get squashed (or rebased into few commits), before being rebased onto mainline. I'm sure there are teams out there that don't like this, since you lose the history from the branches, but this is so great for just being able to _look_ at a history.

I have an alias that's like "git log --oneline --pretty" and a couple other options that I can't remember that gives me the flat graph of history. Digesting that is so much more comfortable, and also makes it significantly easier to understand where I'm at when I'm branching about for feature work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Light cone" isn't what it sounds like (to me): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone)</comment>


Interest Rates, Unicorns and What the Fed Means to Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/11/interest-rates-unicorns-and-what-the-fed-means-to-silicon-valley/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> > Already we can see that the public markets can't possibly absorb all the > unicorns at their current prices.

Is there any evidence to back up this assertion? Seems to me that companies are voluntarily choosing to stay private, not that public equity markets can't handle the unicorns. (edit: Or is he saying that unicorns are overpriced because private investors value these companies more highly than public equity market participants would?)

All in all, business models that can't handle marginally higher financing costs probably weren't all that healthy to begin with. Rising rates should shake out the weaker hands, in a form of creative destruction.

<comment><USER3> It's just unsubstantiated assumption, which is common when journalists cover things they have little knowledge about. If the public market can't 'absorb' it, then the prices will fall. A marketplace exists at these high pries because that's what people are willing to pay.

<comment><USER4> By why are they willing to pay these high prices now vs a few years ago? What has changed in the economy or investing climate and is it sustainable?

<comment><USER5> Totally inexperienced opinion here:

We're in an advertising bubble. Remember the ridiculousness surrounding the "Yo" app? People running around in circles about how it can be a great way to increase brand awareness due to the simplicity of it all? How it can connect with so many different apps? Yeah ... it's panned out _exactly_ like its detractors predicted: sharp declines in downloads, hype is dead, and people have moved on to the next social app fad.

Another factor I'm noticing is international money. Uber didn't start approaching ridiculous valuation levels until Chinese investors started getting on the train.

<comment><USER6> You cited one defunct app that never went anywhere as evidence of an advertising bubble?

While I definitely think display and video CPMs are overvalued compared to what they drive (which attribution solutions will help correct), there is strong measurable value that Google, FB and Bing are delivering from a post- click measurement standpoint. But let's just conveniently ignore these companies that drive billions in revenue for their customers.

<comment><USER7> > You cited one defunct app that never went anywhere as evidence of an > advertising bubble?

That they were able to raise $1.5M in seed funding is evidence of a bubble.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yo](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yo)

<comment><USER6> It is not. You are citing a single example of one company that got _seed_ funding from a few investors who are not top tier players.

Your point provides zero evidence to a bubble in the advertising industry, which is a behemoth filled with established players driving measurable value for their customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This time is different</comment>


Lawsuit: Trustwave owes $30M for 2009 breach at Heartland Payment Systems - <AUTHOR> https://cookcountyrecord.com/stories/511478100-lawsuit-data-security-firm-trustwave-owes-30m-for-2009-data-breach-at-heartland-payment-systems <comment><USER2> Hmm, this is just the lawsuit's intro put into an article.

Here's a story with comments from Trustwave. They call the lawsuit meritless, which appears to be so: [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/security- firm...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/security-firm-sued- for-failing-to-detect-malware-that-caused-a-2009-breach/)

Appears the two insurance firms filed a counter-lawsuit in another state, which is illegal in the US as you have to follow through with the first.</comment>


The Good Judgement Project - <AUTHOR> http://goodjudgment.com/gjp/ <comment><USER2> FYI, the leader of the Good Judgement Project is Philip Tetlock, who many consider the world expert on concrete techniques for forecasting complicated future events.

> The Good Judgment Project (GJP) is a project "harnessing the wisdom of the > crowd to forecast world events". It was co-created by Philip E. Tetlock > (author of Superforecasting and of Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is > It? How Can We Know?), decision scientist Barbara Mellers, and Don Moore. It > was a participant in the Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) program of > the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) in the United > States. Predictions are scored using Brier scores. The top forecasters in > GJP are "reportedly 30% better than intelligence officers with access to > actual classified information."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project)</comment>


Ask HN: Very tense while programming - <AUTHOR> I recently noticed that while coding I have a tendency to tense up many of the muscles in my body, especially the ones in my jaw. This is causing some major health problems related to my jaw joints. Have you experienced this? What did you do to overcome this tendency? I already use f.lux and am pretty aware of my monitor brightness/contrast with my surroundings. <comment><USER2> Set triggers for yourself to do a tension check.

I used to work in a cube farm with a coworker who had a very forced "please somebody ask me what's so funny" laugh that he would use several times a day. Whenever I heard that laugh, I would check my posture, relax my shoulders, and take 2 slow breaths. It converted an annoyance into a moment of rest, and helped me keep my back in shape at the same time.

Now I work remotely, so I've changed the trigger to whenever my cat touches me, which happens about as frequently.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use deep breathing exercises. My jaw does hurt from time to time, though. I don't care cause I love to write code!

</comment><comment><USER4> i tend to hold my breath. a healthier alternative is to do deep breathing exercises</comment>


The Mozilla Manifesto - <AUTHOR> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ <comment><USER2> I can't say enough good things about Mozilla and their values. After becoming disillusioned with Apple over the last five years, Mozilla feels like one of the last remaining forces attempting to stave off a computing world of digital fiefdoms (in addition to Automattic and Canonical).

<comment><USER3> Values listed on a web page are one thing. Actions are another.

I haven't been impressed with their actions over the past few years.

Just look at Firefox. Instead of striving to provide a lean, practical, extensible browser, all they've managed to do is copy Chrome as of late. The UI changes have not been for the better. The release schedule changes were very painful, and the version number inflation is pointless. While its performance and memory usage is marginally better these days, it has still been years without any significant improvement. It's not surprising that users are moving away from it to other browsers.

Then there's Thunderbird. Aside from Firefox, this was one of their only other pieces of useful software. Yet they've dropped their support for it to a minimal level.

What's worse, while neglecting their software that people actually use on a daily basis, they've embarked on pointless efforts like FirefoxOS and Persona. We don't need another mobile OS, especially one that's essentially crippled to only supporting development using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS (which, of course, are already available on Android and iOS, not to mention the other mobile OSes that are already widely available). Persona is clearly not gaining any traction.

The only encouraging thing out of them has been Rust. But even that seems to be rather loosely associated with them, and appears to be regarded as quite experimental.

I know, I know. I'm not paying for their software, so they don't have any obligation to me, etc., etc.. I'm merely not convinced that their actions really correspond to the principles in their manifesto very well.

<comment><USER4> Asm.js? Emscripten? WebRTC? Come on, Mozilla has really been pushing the limits of the web lately, in new and interesting ways that no one else will try.

<comment><USER3> Those aren't exactly encouraging projects.

Asm.js is, at best, a truly atrocious hack. Emscripten is only marginally better. They're both quite inferior when compared to NaCl and PNaCl, for instance.

Trying to further entrench JavaScript is not a step forward, and I don't think it's something that should be encouraged or considered positive. Actively trying to move away from JavaScript toward a more general, and sensibly- designed/implemented in-browser runtime would be beneficial. Even embedding Lua, Python, or some other reasonable language would be helpful. But creating horrid JavaScript subsets is not helpful.

Unless I'm mistaken, WebRTC mostly came out of Google, not Mozilla. So maybe this is not a good example for you to use?

<comment><USER5> Well if WebRTC came out of Google, then by God it must not be the Open Web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Man alive, Mozilla just inspires me

I am stealing this and the Turing oath to go as part of my own company's values background

I am especially glad they focused on the public good side of the Internet and did not get mired in privacy debates

This is going in front of as many UK council leaders as will listen at the LGA conference July

Thanks guys

<comment><USER7> Comments like this make me proud to work there. :'-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They say 'internet' rather than 'web' but Mozilla's recent direction seems very heavily web-only oriented to me (FirefoxOS, Persona and basically concluding Thunderbird). Are they actively working on anything serious which is not web-based?

(Not to put them down. I love Mozilla and what they have done for all of us. Just curious as to their direction)

<comment><USER9> Rust?

<comment><USER10> Rust seems more like a tool, a means to an end, rather than a product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mozilla is plain awesome.

Just donated some money to them.

<comment><USER12> As someone with the good fortune to work for Mozilla full-time, thank you.

<comment><USER13> I am honestly envious and happy for you who get to do it, Mozilla is great indeed. :)

<comment><USER14> Mozilla is hiring! Mozilla has offices in 8 countries and hires many remote workers.

<http://careers.mozilla.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mozilla is one of the bright stars in the computing industry. There should be some, we have enough dark empires like MS and Apple.

</comment><comment><USER16> The video ( <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2udd765yVMc> ) gives me goosebumps every time I watch it... Mozilla is simply amazing.

</comment><comment><USER17> There is one issue people haven't glossed over. Mozilla derives over 85% of their revenue from Google (by making google the default search engine). So a lot of their development involves getting funding from google. The problem with this is that you cannot fight for open standards (against google, it looks like of late) when you derive most of your funding from your adversary. You need an independent revenue stream, like Red Hat. Firefox can probably offer non-tracking services to corporations that have doubts over google's data policies. PS : I am a fan of Firefox, but it has been crashing way too often of late. Only the fact of me being a power web user (I have more than 70 tabs open on average) has kept me a continued Firefox user.

<comment><USER18> Anecdotal: I just got a Firefox OS / Keon developer preview phone this week, and the default search engine inside the browser appears to be Bing.

Anybody else seeing this?

<comment><USER19> It's been set to bing since the earliest versions of the browser app. I find it mildly amusing.

<comment><USER20> This has changed when <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=811824> landed...

<comment><USER21> Is that a security bug? I haven't seen access restrictions on normal Mozilla bugs before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > The Internet is an integral part of modern life—a key > component in > education, communication, collaboration, > business, entertainment and > society as a whole.

This is true. Alas, too many forget, that "internet" is not the same as "web" and think that everything internet is should be made of HTML, CSS and ECMAScript, instead of thinking of internet as the net of interconnected devices.

</comment><comment><USER23> Lets see how their values align with accepting bitcoin donations.</comment>


This Is What a Designer-Led Social Network Looks Like - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90157216/this-is-what-a-designer-led-social-networking-site-looks-like <comment><USER2> So it's basically evernote but with everything public-facing? I'm not sure I see the advantage of something like this over a simple shared filesystem.

<comment><USER3> never change, hn</comment></comment>


GDPR makes it easier to get your data, but that doesn't mean you understand it - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/27/18195630/gdpr-right-of-access-data-download-facebook-google-amazon-apple <comment><USER2> As much as it has been ridiculed, those GDPR data exports seem like a good use-case for RDFa or microformats:

The exports need to fulfill two use-cases, which seem often at odds with each other:

1) Provide the data in a well-known, easily machine-readable format, so it can be imported by an alternative service.

2) Provided the data in an easy to understand human-readable format, so users - even non-technical ones - can understand what data was collected.

JSON is a good format for machine-readibility and is relatively understandable for technical users - however, as the article explains, without the schema, it's difficult to be sure what many fields actually mean. Also, for non- technical users, it's not always clear how to open JSON files and, if unformatted, they might be hard to inspect without specialized software.

HTML on the other hand is very good to present data in a self-explanatory and understandable way and us even relatively easy to parse. However, the structure can be completely arbitrary, so for import, you'd effectively have to write a scraper for each data item and update it each time the formatting changes.

Seems to me, you could solve both problems by exporting everything as HTML file but reuse already known data modelf and annotate the actual data with a standardized notation.

</comment><comment><USER3> GDPR exports tell a lot about about how a company models their data. Some companies gives near a sql export which shows you their internal schema. Others use obvious export formats.

None use the same format for much of anything.

At privicy.com we are automating GDPR exports for your accounts, and so we study these export files.

It's almost like there is a competition for how to make the data different. Let's take location data as an example.

Latitude and longitude: are they Integers (google), Floats (Facebook), combined into one value as strings (Snapchat)?

Any why does uber record location every time you touch the screen?

And then there are people formats...</comment>


Ask HN: Asking for feedback on these local communities for travelers? - <AUTHOR> http://nomadclub.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> We are testing an idea of developing communities in different places in Europe, here's the first try: [http://nomadclub.co/](http://nomadclub.co/) In case your answer could be yes, what do you think the website should have and what do you think it'd be important for the service to provide? would you use it? we're happy to take any feedback! :)</comment>