Cray ARMs Highest End Supercomputer with ThunderX2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/11/13/cray-arms-highest-end-supercomputer-thunderx2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Beats Intel Broadwell _and_ Skylake in many memory-bound codes and surprisingly enough it can compensate with core count and clocks for its meager SIMD units even when running strongly instruction and cache-bound codes like GROMACS.

Among the many questions remaining consumption/efficiency is certainly among the top and which accelerators will the ThunderX2 platform be paired with first? NVIDIA does not have (officially) an Aarch64 driver. AMD's OSS ROCm stack however will soon be released for Aarch64 [1].

[1] [https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/211](https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/211)</comment>


Notation as a Tool of Thought (1980) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm <comment><USER2> In Physics and Mathematics it is widely accepted that having an efficient notation is of paramount importance when thinking about a given problem. A good example for this are Maxwell's equations:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations)

Using the vector differential operator notation those equations neatly fit on a napkin, whereas Maxwell's original equations (written in Integral form) would cover several pages. In fact, looking at his original manuscript always fills me with awe for the man as he had much less sophisticated tools at hand for his job but still managed to discover the beauty and simplicity of electromagnetism with them, which would also provide the foundation of special relativity.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Most texts stop at the 4-equation notation that has both electric (E) and magnetic (B) fields, but with a small extension it becomes a single equation, which is lorentz-invariant: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariant_formulation_of_class...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariant_formulation_of_classical_electromagnetism#Maxwell.27s_equations_in_the_Lorenz_gauge) \- I regard it as a much more fundamental and succinct description of how EM fields work.

<comment><USER4> The covariant notation is concise and to some even elegant, but it is also less useful in practice. One often has to deal either with electric or magnetic field specifically as opposed to EM field tensor, and even if one does not need that, it is often possible and useful to work with only electric (or magnetic) component in 3D vector notation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A former hedge fund manager and all-around thoughtful guy, Brooke Allen, says he thinks in APL. He's also the dude who does Staffup Weekend and is trying to change how people hire. A few years ago, in a different job market and another time, he had dozens of people learn APL as part of a job application process. 0_O

<comment><USER5> Getting paid to program in APL sounds pretty fun to me- It's a shame most of the jobs seem to be finance-based.

<comment><USER6> I suggest checking out GNU APL. There are relatively few libraries, so there is lots of room for contribution.

<comment><USER7> Iverson's later language, J, is also open source. It doesn't require a special keyboard, has top notch documentation and online support resources and is open source under GPL3. It might or might not be a better place to get started than APL depending on a person's goals.

[http://www.jsoftware.com/stable.htm](http://www.jsoftware.com/stable.htm)

<comment><USER8> It's not really open source. Only the "core." The development environment is excluded.

(Looked into it recently and I was disappointed.)

<comment><USER7> Between the command line, scripts and Emacs the J IDE isn't really a big deal for me. Because J was a closed source commercial product and dates to the 1980's their may be copyright licensing issues tied into the code base. It's hard to release existing projects into open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> See also Brett Victor's "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable": [https://vimeo.com/67076984](https://vimeo.com/67076984)

<comment><USER10> It was 2 am in the UK and I wanted to sleep. I had to watch the whole video. It's excellent. Absolutely brilliant! Thank you for the link.

Now it's 3 am. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For some context (relegated to the very end of this HTML version), this is Iverson's Turing Award Lecture article following his winning the 1979 ACM Turing Award. Here's the ACM's PDF photoscan of the original publication: [http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1283935&type=pdf](http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1283935&type=pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> Somewhat off-topic, but the unicode symbols like Greek letters are broken in google chrome. A shame... And also kind of ironic, because boxes with question marks inside certainly aren't the best kind of notation.

<comment><USER13> They look fine on both Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

<comment><USER14> lol</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: User-testing for things with no GUI (e.g. programming langs, databases)? - <AUTHOR>

I do a lot of video user testing, A/B testing, website analytics, etc. related to sites that I manage.
But for something on the backend, like a programming language or a database, how are these things user tested? Do concerns about usability fall by the wayside because most users will become experts in the system?
If user-testing is not used, how are users taken into account when deciding on the roadmap? <comment><USER2> While I am no expert on testing, I'm pretty sure I have some reasonable answers (I'll address programming language/databases examples, since it really does depend):

1\. Programming language While this is probably more difficult than my cursory attempt to explain, it seems that testing programming language is more a problem of ensuring consistent, and expected input & output as well as performance characteristics of stdlib and core code across versions.

for example -- if you're writing stdlib for working with strings, you can write unit tests for most of the string functions, and do some simple timing analysis as well as output analysis to make sure that with every revision of the code that might make it into a next version maintains same-or-better test performance.

2\. Databases I think that you can probably talk to the guys at rethinkdb or any other up-and-coming database about this -- there are certainly things you can test, of course like throughput (+/\- heavy load), number of clicks to do a certain function that has been determined to be a core feature, etc. I think in the database world, you have a duality in the "user" \-- yes, the UX must be good, but also, databases look to perform well and consistently, you must address the programmer and the normal user side of the developer that is using your new tool/database.</comment>


Thank you for using Microsoft OneDrive - <AUTHOR> https://preview.onedrive.com/bonus/ <comment><AUTHOR> > "By clicking the button _above_, you agree to receive promotional emails > from OneDrive."

So, the button to the left shouldn't have any real effect?</comment>


OpenBSC: 3G Voice Works - <AUTHOR> https://projects.osmocom.org/news/59 <comment><USER2> This reminds me of being a kid in the 90s trying to sort through all the acronyms and cryptic messages trying to get Linux installed. Maybe 15 years from now we'll be able to click a couple of buttons on a slick website and have our own 3G network up and running.

<comment><USER3> Not if the FCC and other regulatory agencies have anything to say about it...

But telecoms standards are certainly _extremely_ complex; mainly because they are truly designed by very large committees with plenty of bureaucratic process. I did briefly try to read through and comprehend all the 3GPP standards in order to understand the whole system end-to-end --- from the microphone of one mobile to the speaker of another --- but gave up pretty early, and I'd consider myself pretty knowledgeable about the Internet stack from HTML through HTTP, TLS, TCP, and IP, all the way down to the bits on an Ethernet cable or the signals an 802.11b/g transceiver emits.

If you've seen the 802.11 standard, that's about the limit of what I can still understand with a bit of effort. The 3GPP specs are in a similar style of thick standardese, but around 10x denser and more voluminous.

Then again, I don't think it's impossible --- maybe if I had a lot more free time and interest I could. After all, Fabrice Bellard wrote his own _4G_ base station:

[http://bellard.org/lte/](http://bellard.org/lte/)

Some people can explain all the details of what happens when someone visits a URL in their browser. Maybe Fabrice can explain all the details of what happens when someone turns on a mobile, associates with a network, and makes a call with it.

<comment><USER4> 3GPP set is easily among the worst standards I've ever read. I often thought that it was deliberately made so, in order lesser companies and individuals would not be able to make their own baseband. Not to mention references to proprietary documents.. I'm _very_ impressed that somebody managed to make a working BS out of this. Still it's strange to choose 3g, 4g is much lighter technology.

<comment><USER5> re "strange to choose 3g": as some operators even phase out 3G completely, we can expect 3G base stations to be available cheaper than ever. That's only one of the reasons: Osmocom started out from the security analysis perspective; having 3G openly available is a benefit to the general public as well as small business in various ways.

(The opening lines of [https://osmocom.org/news/30](https://osmocom.org/news/30): "3G is dead, you may think. From the perspective of large scale operators, that may well be the case, but this is precisely the reason why Open Source support for 3G is becoming increasingly interesting: when the focus for earning money shifts towards LTE infrastructure, the threshold for setting up 3G networks is becoming easier to surpass for everyone else.")

<comment><USER4> 3g operates on licensed frequencies (sold for billions in some countries[1]), so you won't be able to setup a functioning network anyway. Maybe in some 3rd world country, in the middle of nowhere or a tiny femtocell..

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_auction#Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_auction#Germany)

<comment><USER6> And this is the thing that cheeses me off the most.

Look at the economic activity created around a "junk" wireless band: 2.4GHz. It is junk because of absorption by water molecules, and that's why microwave ovens use it.

Despite how crappy it is, and how much interference it gets, it is so, so useful. WiFi, Bluetooth, and dozens of other protocols. We get so much use out of it.

If some other bands were opened up in the same way for unlicensed use (conforming to a TX power limit of course), we could create more and more applications, especially if it was a bit lower in frequency to allow longer range communication with reasonable power consumption.

But there's no space worldwide for that, because it has all been sold off or otherwise provisioned. It is such a shame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who doesn't follow the cellular scene as much as I probably should, the immediate question I ask is: what is the impact of this development work from the security standpoint of (potentially stealth) voice/data interception on ordinary telco-provisioned cellular devices?

I realize GSM implements horribly broken authentication schemes, that almost all cellular devices out there implement GSM (and GSM fallback) in order to be implementationally complete, and that it's subsequently trivially possible to (near-transparently) take over arbitrary devices using reasonably inexpensive hardware and a bunch of open software if you can jam the 2.5G, 3G and 4G bands.

I'm just curious what the hurdles are to do this for 3G (and beyond), from an academic security standpoint. There are obviously whole swaths of layered encryption and so forth that would need to be dealt with, I expect that; and I admit my total ignorance - and curiosity! - as to what that is.

I vaguely recall obtuse rumors that suggest the existence of privately-owned 3G implementation(s) out there that do what I'm describing. I'm curious if this open-source work is lowering the barrier to the accessibility for this sort of thing.

This is an important question - I recall reading at least one story (I think from here) about the questionable legality of unsolicited cellular wiretapping operations (done via GSM) that have been noted by the news media.

(As an aside, I think that open-source GSM implementations exist is kind of neat - if you're ever in the middle of nowhere (or an equivalent setting) and you can setup base stations, old GSM phones are hundreds of times cheaper than CB radios.)

<comment><USER8> > what is the impact of this development work from the security standpoint of > (potentially stealth) voice/data interception

I think those things already exist, the Stingray is just the most-publicized of its ilk. Big price tags provide plenty of incentive for closed-source implementations, or possibly just licensing something already made.

The open-source versions often serve to democratize or to remind, of the possibilities that've existed for some time. I think it'll enable some small- fish to do bad things that the big-fish have been doing for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hsdpa will be the really exciting accomplishment. Congrats on this in-between step!

</comment><comment><USER10> Since not everyone knows the background/industry it might help to:

Add a simple overview explaining the motivation, goals, and ultimate value created by Osmocom

Explain why you are working on 3G when it's not a new technology

Explain how everything is going to be free as you claim without running into any IP / patent issues.

<comment><USER11> It's not that kind of website. OpenBSC and associated projects have been around for a very long time.

They're working on 3G because it's the next logical step for where their project is up to.

<comment><USER10> The main site doesn't have this info either from what I could find: [https://osmocom.org](https://osmocom.org). Is there a better site?

You say it's been around a long time,but how is that relevant? They are actively asking for support so it's good to get their ideas known.

Your response about 3g doesn't inform much. To the lay person 3g is old tech so it's a natural question to want to know how it will help people. Undeveloped areas without a lot of investment capital maybe? Why should we guess?

<comment> vertex-four Note that 3G is still current-ish around the world, and is often what you'll pick up in rural areas many places. In my country, it's pretty much just major city centres that have 4G, and many phones still exist which don't support it. In my city, it's often incredibly difficult to pick up 4G because of granite buildings.

Osmocom's goal is to create an open source implementation of mobile telecom standards. An open source implementation would allow people and companies to build non-encumbered mobile devices and telecom networks. This is important if you think free software is generally an important thing.

Osmocom run a GSM network at CCC each year, allowing people to place calls and send text messages to each other for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this potentially an open-source self-hosted alternative to Twilio?

<comment><USER13> Not really. This is tech to create your own 3G phone basis station and network, for a twilio clone you want something that connects to the existing phone networks, and probably over some kind of internet protocol and not wirelessly ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Connects to the existing phone networks probably requires money and special contracts with existing phone network providers.

<comment><USER14> As does using certain wireless spectrum. It _is_ easier to write a Twilio clone (as in, it can be done with sufficient time and resources); you just need to call bandwidth.com with your checkbook open and ask them to interconnect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> the FCC needs to allow citizen bank cellular spectrum

<comment><USER16> Such as LTE-U? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_in_unlicensed_spectrum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_in_unlicensed_spectrum)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems that this [https://www.amazon.com/Mikrotik-RB951G-2HND-5-Port- Gigabit-W...](https://www.amazon.com/Mikrotik-RB951G-2HND-5-Port-Gigabit- Wireless/dp/B00EQWUZM6) has all you need for much less $$ and time.

<comment><AUTHOR> That has nothing to do with 3G, it is just WiFi.</comment></comment>


MIT's Deep Angel erases objects from photos with AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90246009/this-mit-tool-can-erase-anything-or-anyone-from-your-old-photos <comment><USER2> Every single sample they posted is bad. None of them achieve the intended effect or goal of replacing an experienced photoshop edit.

MIT doesn't mean everything is news. Another university lab could have produced the same thing with the same results. FastCo wouldn't have written about it and nobody would have cared.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. Even some really simple nearest neighbors + blending works way better than any examples in this article

[http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/scene- completion/scene-c...](http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/scene- completion/scene-completion.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems like it works worse than photoshop's content aware fill, which tries to do the same thing with a little more user guidance.

</comment><comment><USER5> Fortunately [0], it doesn't quite work,

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union)

</comment><comment><USER6> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17900750](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17900750)

</comment><comment><USER7> During some voluntary work, I had erased the ex- of some fellow from an old photo 15 years ago. It was cool, and every body lined up to get a lot of stuff erased. Yet soon it will become trivial!

</comment><comment><USER8> Deep Stalin would be a more appropriate name.

</comment><comment><USER9> In other news, they can CONSTRUCT fake videos and photos. Not take away only.

We will need digital signatures to become mainstream for checking sources. Otherwise video evidence for a courtroom or court of public opinion will be very dangerous to rely on!

And "detection" is a no-go because this arms race is like an AlphaGo situation where the difference between the truth and a fake becomes so small that no one will be able to tell.</comment>


Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition now available - <AUTHOR> http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs <comment><USER2> Speaking as a guy who (currently) only uses Visual Studio at home for recreational programming, and not at the office, I'm pretty happy about this. The Express editions are OK, but it's nice to have access to extensions, like VisualHG for Mercurial integration. (Yeah, I know I should switch to Git, but I really like Hg.)

<comment><USER3> Honestly, Mercurial is just _better_ than Git -- the only reason I switched away from it is because Github. Constantly contemplating switching back.

<comment><USER4> Bitbucket is better than Github anyway. And you can use Mercurial there...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Visual Studio Community 2013 is free for any non-enterprise application development."

What's left out to make it non-enterprise development? Or to put it another way - how are they restricting its usage & preserving sales of Visual Studio?

<comment><USER6> I believe what they mean by "non-enterprise application development" is the slightly later on clarification saying "for teams of up to 5 people" (or less than 5 people, I forget exactly). So likely you will get a free license, which you can use to register up to the max number for community, and if you try anything beyond that it will ask you to buy a license. Or something along that line.

They also mention that Community has the full power of Visual Studio with no features really removed. It's just the licensing for whatever size teams that matters.

<comment><USER7> It's kind of funny; it's not like the price of the actual license is a big obstacle for anyone making money with the tool -- but _managing_ the licenses and staying _compliant_ \-- now _that 's_ a cost I don't want. Just like windows licenses. Is it per user? Per core? Per CPU? Can I have any number of (vm) instances per cpu? Per server, or was it per cpu socket? Can I upgrade? Can I upgrade the hardware and keep the license? It's madness - I don't have time to waste on crap like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What happens when a desktop equivalent of android becomes the mainstay?

Microsoft makes 25% of it's revenue from Windows. And an equal amount from server and tools(this is where VS belongs). Xbox makes 13% and Bing 4%.

Office makes up 32% of the revenue. If MS can sacrifice a part of the 25% which VS is a part of and retain or perhaps increase the net revenue from other segments ( by attracting developers), then it will be a successful move.

Attracting developers will only be half the game. It will still have to find a way to ship more devices with Windows and for that it will have to make Windows devices and phones primarily an attractive option.

With most consumer computing now occurring on mobile devices, sales of devices with Windows will determine Microsoft's future. The consumer segment will have an effect on the enterprise segment as well. Microsoft will then end up eventually losing all their revenue streams.

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/19/microsofts-business-in- thre...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/19/microsofts-business-in-three- charts/)

<comment><USER9> They are betting the farm on Azure and doing what Ballmer had probably been tasked to do for the last 10 years: wait as long as possible before becoming a services company.

<comment><USER10> Are they really making money with Azure? Isn't that one of the most competitive markets at the moment? I'd imagine the margins are slim to none as everyone is trying to price each other out.

<comment><USER11> ... Have you seen their prices?

<comment><USER12> ... Have you seen their prices?

Correct me of I'm wrong, but aren't they the same or lower? [http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-chops-azure-prices-to- match-a...](http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-chops-azure-prices-to-match- amazons-latest-reductions-7000027898)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One can only hope jetbrains will offer a cheaper personal license for Resharper now that it can be used on the community edition as well

<comment><USER14> They would be very smart to do this, because with Roslyn around it won't be long before Visual Studio itself is feature comparable to R#.

<comment><USER15> They really, really need to finish their Nitra project ASAP. R# for any language including custom sounds very competitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a side note, since many people here use python, VS has great Python integration: [http://pytools.codeplex.com/](http://pytools.codeplex.com/)

<comment><USER17> node.js too [https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/](https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a great time to reiterate that startups receive Microsoft's software for free, obviously including all versions of Visual Studio.

Check out BizSpark.com or get in touch with me if you happen to be a YC company (firstname.lastname@example.com).

(Also, sorry for popping up in all the threads - We have a lot of threads here right now about VS options and I want to make sure that people know that they might be able to get VS Ultimate for free.)

<comment><USER19> The first hit is always free. This is a trap for new companies. Microsoft doing what it does best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is great for anybody who's had the pleasure of using MonoDevelop

<comment><USER21> I wonder how else it will affect Unity3D development, now that the real .Net stack can work on other platforms.

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r I hope this includes MFC and ATL for C++. I've kept my version 6.0 from 1998 just for that, but it's too painful to use these days.

<comment><USER22> [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/11/12/visu...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/11/12/visual- studio-2015-preview-visual-studio-community-2013-visual- studio-2013-update-4-and-more.aspx):

>VS Community enables you to develop everything from Windows Forms and WPF and MFC to Windows Phone and Store to Azure and ASP.NET

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Love Visual Studio. If a Mac/Linux version is provided, that's perfect for me.

<comment><USER24> Visual Studio doesn't run on the .NET runtime entirely and uses WPF. Thus all of the C++ logic and WPF itself would need to be ported for that to happen.

<comment><USER25> I suppose there is a lot of windows and C++ black magic going on under the good in VS, but since all the editing and compiling tools are all managed in VS 2015 (The OSS "Roslyn" tools are used for compiler, syntax highlighter, refactoring etc.) and those bits are free for anyone to use, it _should_ be quite possible for the community to make an IDE for Linux/MacOS that feels a lot like VS does on windows (Maybe the SharpDevelop team will take on Roslyn? Haven't heard).

Of course VS is a huge beast of an application and there are thousands of parts that will be more or less impossible to port straight over because of ties with windows (Profiler for example).

<comment><USER24> I would agree, although I doubt Microsoft will lead the charge there. The money is in selling MSDN licenses which means they are going to be on Windows anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like "the evil empire" of old realized that releasing its platform as Open Source would revitalize its platform.

This is eventually what happens, after the first mover monopolists collect their rent for a decade. I don't mean it in a bad way, just as an observation of repeatable economic trends.

After all, now Microsoft needs more app developers to develop Windows apps and compete on the mobile front.

<comment><USER25> It's mostly them becoming a service company (Azure) rather than a software company (Windows, Office). The more people that can push code to azure, the more money they will make in the future. So giving people the tools to do that for free makes a lot of sense. Still charging the big money from the enterprises of course, because not doing that would be insane.

The mobile thing is relevant of course, but Azure is where they are betting the farm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wait wait wait so codelens is not locked to Visual Studio Ultimate anymore? I'm sure that's one of the key questions here?

<comment><USER28> I installed the new Community Edition this morning and do not see any codelens features...so I guess it is still Ultimate only

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So I currently have an VS Pro + MSDN subscription. I need MSDN for running Windows Server VMs (I dev on a Windows Server 2008 VM currently). Is there any cheaper version that gives me Windows licenses for my dev systems now that I don't need to pay for VS Pro?

<comment><USER14> Microsoft run a few programs - Action Pack, DreamSpark, BizSpark. If you qualify then you get a lot of software for (fairly) little money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is great, now people have Visual Studio as an option for Python development, I have to say... Python Tools for Visual Studio is A+. I honestly prefer it to PyCharm, and I use PyCharm on Linux because I don't get to use VS.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm just glad to have access to the option Debug / Attach to process, one of the many very useful little features that were annoyingly omitted from the Express version in the past.

</comment><comment><USER31> Let's say I'm an independent developer. Can I develop/test/distribute/commercialize my applicatons with this license?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. From the FAQ:

Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community? A: Here's how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community: Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really curious if the Community Edition will work with Xamarin.

<comment><USER25> Should work with the free tier of Xamarin. Afaik, you can download a free VS + Free Xamarin and churn out an iOS+Android app using C# immediately.

<comment><USER32> Xamarin currently offers VS integration only for the Business or Enterprise editions, the Free tier has no support for VS. You can however use a trial version of Xamarin (Bussiness or Enterprise) for about 30 days that will let you build iOS and Android apps with some limitations (the built executable has a limited life time, one day I think). After 30 days you can buy a Xamarin license or the tool will revert to the Free Xamarin tier (this one is severely limited - application size, integration with external libraries and so on).

According to this video [http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual- Studio/Connect-event-...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual- Studio/Connect-event-2014/040) Xamarin (Bussiness or Enterprise) should work just fine with VS Community.

<comment><USER25> They plan to change it, from [http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin- expand-global-...](http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-expand- global-partnership/)

      Free Xamarin Starter Edition for Visual Studio Users –
      Today, Microsoft announced a new, free edition to Visual
      Studio—Visual Studio Community. Visual Studio Community
      contains support for extensions, which means it will be
      Xamarin compatible with from day one. We want to help make
      Visual Studio Community a tool for anyone to create native
      apps for iOS and Android, so we are announcing our plans to
      enable our freely available Xamarin Starter Edition to work
      with Visual Studio Community. We are also doubling the size
      limit on apps that can be created with Xamarin Starter Edition,
      so that you can build even more capable apps for free.
      This will be available in the coming weeks.

<comment><USER32> Thanks, I've seen their blog on other HN thread a few minutes ago. The future looks good if you write pure C# code, but if you want to use something like MonoGame you will still need to buy a Xamarin license.

I suppose Xamarin will offer VS support for the Indie license too, doesn't make much sense to offer support only for the Starter license. The Indie license allows you to use libraries like MonoGame.

<comment><USER15> The logical next step!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Can I code web in VS community like html and css?

<comment><USER34> Ofcourse Yes. Its basically its a modified version (well most modifications were in the license) of the Visual Studio Professional Edition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Using VS professional 2013. Is this better?

<comment><USER36> No. This is a slight downgrade from VS professional 2013. But that's the whole point: that you can now get 95% of the way to VS Pro 2013 at no cost.

<comment><USER37> What's the downgrade?

<comment><USER38> license

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Halleluja!

</comment><comment><USER40> If MS keeps giving away its software for free, how is it going to make money? Hopefully it won't ad advertising. Is it because a lot of people become comfortable with the tools and companies upgrade to the paid version for a few extra features?

<comment><USER24> You cannot use Community to make enterprise software. Enterprise software described the entirety of the people willing to drop $2,000+ a year to use Visual Studio.

This won't impact their primary market, especially when you consider that MSDN subscriptions are often considered the primary benefit of using Visual Studio.

<comment><USER41> > You cannot use Community to make enterprise software.

Not quite. You cannot use Community _IN_ an enterprise other than for contributing to open source, academic research, or classroom learning. There's no restriction on using it to _MAKE_ enterprise software.

<comment><USER24> But being in an enterprise is what I was talking about.

And hard as I tried I couldn't find the details as to what that means without downloading the new version.

<comment><USER42> [http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=1335...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=13350) page 10 but I'm not sure if it's only about organizations up to 5 but it's fine if you are Individual?? : "Example 2: A Fortune 500 firm has outsourced the development of its store-locator mobile application to a small agency. The application is not an open source project. The agency has 5 employees working on the project and would like to use Visual Studio Community 2013. Since the agency is a contractor developing this application for the Fortune 500 firm, and since the application is not an open source project, the agency cannot use Visual Studio Community 2013 for developing and testing the application. "</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dunning-Kruger and other bogus memes - <AUTHOR> https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ <comment><USER3> Opinion: a log like decrease in happiness vs income is basically consistent with "more money doesn't make you happier". Sketching a graph that is completely flat is misleading however. The only question is, at what point on the log scale is the increase small enough to disregard (compared to other life factors).

Another one from the article: I'm arguing _without empirical evidence_ of the superiority of good type systems (Note: I try to stay away from claims about what those are). I also think it's not possible to make controlled studies on this area - which is why it's such a contested issue. Studies use either students and/or toy problems, or irrelevant datasets such as bugs reported against github repos etc. The only way top make a valid study is to have N teams implement and maintain a product with the same spec over K years and then compare the results and try to factor out developer skill. I say it's not a feasible problem to solve. We'll have to stick to arguing type systems _without_ evidence to back up the argumebts. But that is the best kind of arguing, after all.

<comment><USER4> > Opinion: a log like decrease in happiness vs income is basically consistent > with "more money doesn't make you happier".

I think you mean log-like _in_ crease.

Assuming so, then more money _does_ make you happier (although at a decreasing rate per dollar per year.)

<comment><USER5> The GP is saying it may be negligible at a certain point, compared to any other conceivable factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So I write this as an academic who actually has read and cited Drs. Dunning and Kruger's (in)famous work. This is a little off the cuff so it isn't going to have the citations it should.

The generalized thing that the authors are talking about is information literacy. It is the process that includes not just understanding the information but identifying the need for information, locating it, understanding the information, evaluating the information, and then applying the information to some affect. Interestingly, it has found a home primarily within the libraries because...well they are really solid place to go for how information is organized.

"Making search easier for students can therefore be a double-edged sword: while it enables students to get to information faster and easier, it can also reinforce unreflective research habits that contribute little to the overall synthesis of a research paper or academic argument." [0]

More broadly from research I have been involved in on student information literacy, self report data is spectacularly garbage because of underlying misconceptions students' hold about what they did. One semi-famous observational study showed that students strongly conflate finding a piece of information with understanding it. That was a 'whoa' moment for me. Cognitive conflation of access to a piece of information and deep coherent understanding of it. Houston...well you know the rest.

I personally attribute that in large part to fundamental problems in how we as a society think about education. This is philisophical about how we fail to differentiate transmission of information from the development of insights and understanding. We teach information as if it is both of those things. Science, as much as people scream otherwise isn't facts. Facts are the result of science. There is a lot of other work showing it is really hard to get faculty to change teaching practices. The reality is it doesn't matter. Society, not just teachers, need to think about information different and think about knowledge different ly for us to break out of this loop.

[A]Dimmock, N. (2013). Hallmarks of a good paper. In N.F. Foster (Ed.), Studying students: A second look (7-17). Chicago: ACRL.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like the difference between perceived and actual scores fit the popular understanding.

The people who perform the worst have the most inflated perception of their performance, while the people who perform the best underestimate their performance.

I think people take Dunning-Kruger and apply it to their everyday anecdotes. They are thinking in terms of relative differences rather than absolute, and thus the pop-sci understanding may not be that far off from the original.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems paradoxical that the Dunning-Kruger effect is being applied to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

<comment><USER9> This was my first thought.

I'm sure the noble prize awarded to the Dunning and Kruger's work in psychology was just a result of a bunch of imbeciles who didn't realize it was a "bogus meme".

This article was absolute drivel.

<comment><USER5> I just did some quick googling. It seems they received the Ig-Nobel award, not an actual Nobel prize. This award is a bit strange, I don't fully understand... It's some kind of parody:

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

<comment><USER10> It's simply there to highlight the wide and wooly range of things being practiced under the umbrella of science. I find it pretty heartening - <USER2> world needs research on slug poop and the psychology of sexbots, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In regards to software engineering, The Leprechauns of Software Engineering has lots of good examples of this type of thinking.

[https://leanpub.com/leprechauns](https://leanpub.com/leprechauns)

</comment><comment><USER12> The most interesting thing about the graphs isn't the slope, but that "perceived score" is far more tightly coupled to the individual's perception of their overall ability than their actual score. But that could be an artefact of how and when questions about ability were asked (conjecture: I haven't read the original paper)

<comment><USER13> "Perception of their overall ability" seems to have a different scale that the 2 others, so the important point is not the actual values but the correlation measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The money/happyness one is particularly interesting to me. If money does not equal happyness why am I so happy when I get more? I make more than 75k so obviously 75k isn't enough.

<comment><USER15> The fact that you want more is irrelevant. You may be unhappy and believe that more money will make you happier, but it could be just a false belief or a bias.

<comment><USER14> But the question presumes that somehow you are unhappy because you don't have enough money. What if you are already happy but more money makes you more happy?

Money is not a cure for unhappiness seems like a more accurate phrase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh man, it's the HN link I was born to read.

The way people throw around Dunning-Kruger in particular is so aggravating. You can pretty much always tell they never got anywhere even close to reading the research.</comment>


Retraining Baby Boomers to be Programmers in 6 Months - <AUTHOR> http://wesleytansey.com/retraining-baby-boomers-to-be-programmers-in-6-months/

<comment><USER2> The basic idea here sounds great, but as someone who just went through a roughly similar training (self directed) over the past 4.5 months, I'd like to comment on the choice for Python:

I went through most of Learn Python the Hard Way:

<http://learnpythonthehardway.org/>

It was great! I then thought I'd do Codecademy for extra practice. It was so frustrating to use I gave up after a couple hours.

Codecademy's automatic method for checking my code often indicated I had bad code without telling me why, when I had produced the correct answer. Furthermore, instructions were often unclear so I would often incorrectly interpret what the exercises wanted me to do.</comment>


Juul Tried to Position Itself as a Responsible Actor. It Backfired - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/juul-tried-to-position-itself-as-a-responsible-actor-it-backfired-11569193666?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I don't think kids should vape. I don't think vaping is 100% harmless. I don't vape or smoke. I also think that there is some contingent of people who are excessively worried about vaping and looking for problems that don't seem to exist. It doesn't help that there is conflation between cannabis and e cigs, and that (based on best evidence right now) the fake cannabis liquid is causing the handful severe lung infections.

I don't mind more regulation here, absolutely make sure it's safe and find a set of ingredients that cause the least amount of harm to humans. Why is vaping perceived as so dangerous? Compared with cigarettes its damn near harmless. I don't get it.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure we can say it's damn near harmless at this point. It hasn't been around long enough to measure the really long-term health impacts, especially considering there are chemicals present in vaping that aren't in traditional cigarettes. They've only seen wide use for a little more than 10 years. Do we really know what propylene glycol will do to lungs or bodies over decades? There are also some harmful chemicals that are actually _higher_ in e-cigs [0]

In short, while available research points towards these things being safer, we really don't know what that margin is. Even if it's, say, 10 times safer, if vaping explodes to more than 10x the current smoking population then net harm could still be increased. Or not! But that's my point: we really don't know.

Personally, I don't think they should be outlawed. I think fruit flavors should be banned just like they are in cigarettes, and I think anti-smoking education campaigns need to ramp up their message to include vaping as a "no, just don't ever even start" part of the effort, and e-cigs should be required to only be marketed as aids for quitting smoking.

[0][https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/141/4/e201735...](https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/141/4/e20173557)

<comment> atom-morgan > I think fruit flavors should be banned just like they are in cigarettes

Should this apply to vodka and other liquors as well?

<comment><USER4> Does Vodka enter your lungs?

<comment><USER5> It enters your body and is absorbed by your bloodstream. Is the delivery mechanism the issue?

<comment><USER6> The delivery mechanism is certainly _an_ issue here. Food additives are tested for how safe they are to ingest, and they are not tested for how safe they are to inhale. In general we know that there are a lot of compounds safe to ingest which are not safe to inhale.

Just to pick an obviously stupid example, I could chug a can of soda (or seltzer, if you prefer) in one go. It would contain around 2.2g of CO2. If you put that 2.2g of CO2 in my lungs, I would be dead. (Well, you would have to keep it there. It would at least be very painful.)

Or to pick another obviously stupid example, I could drink enough alcohol to kill myself. In most situations, I would vomit or pass out before I got to the fatal dose. But instead, I could give myself an alcohol enema and just _die_ (which does happen, from time to time). So, delivery _matters absolutely._

For the non-obvious examples we (at least) need data. If you are putting "high" concentrations of a chemical (for some appropriate definition of "high") in your lungs you will want some good safety data. For ingestion we already have an FDA approval process. You may disagree with the methodology, but at least it's there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm all for holding companies accountable, but I don't understand why Juul seems to get all the blame here, in a way that many other companies don't. Why isn't underage drinking Budweiser's fault? Why are mango flavored Juul pods problematic but mango flavored White Claws aren't? Not saying I think Juul is blameless here.

<comment><USER8> I agree with your sentiment, but to answer your specific question comparing e-cigarettes to alcohol (or really Juul to Budweiser) - public acceptance. Alcohol, love it or hate it, is an integral component of human cultures going back millennia. Drugs (other than alcohol) are also important, but I would wager alcohol on its own is more important than all of the other recreational drugs combined (I welcome arguments against this unsubstantiated claim).

People love to hate cigarettes, especially cigarette companies. Juul just got an enormous amount of money (almost 11 digits) from what was formerly Philip Morris. For the most part, attempts to regulate cigarettes have been successful. Hell, arguably attempts to regulate other drugs have been successful (the war on drugs is a mess, but outlawing psychadelics did impact their availability). Alcohol, on the other hand, is accepted by most people. Attempts to outlaw it have been less than successful (contrary to popular belief prohibition in the United States actually did decrease drinking, but it was still _very_ unpopular).

Taking alcohol away from Americans is like taking away our guns. Maybe it's for the best, but prepare for people to literally die fighting you. E-cigarettes however are still relatively nascent and could be banned before they'd be anything more than a footnote in human history.

<comment><USER9> Just to nit this / expand because I liked the "integral component" aspect and had not thought of it -- alcohol saved lives in our shared history due to it's use in disinfecting water. Smoking has been around across civilizations for some time, but alcohol/beer had a utility and was used everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's really bad news that ecigarettes are now banned in India. Smoking is a huge public health issue there.

This is a moral panic. Somehow it touched a nerve...

<comment><USER11> That or tobacco still has a huge lobby there. Their entire history is to lie cheat and steal to do anything to keep their customers smoking.

<comment><USER12> Juul got billions from Altria, parent company of Philip Morris which makes things like Malboro. Doesn't make sense for a tobacco giant to lobby against itself, unless it was a competitor lobbying specifically against PM/Altria.

<comment><USER10> It does! A pack of cigarettes is about $0.06 to manufacture. A world of heavily regulated guaranteed profits is better than a world where you are subject to technology disruption. Juul could easily be replaced by some better tech, which almost certainly wouldn't come from Altria.

I absolutely believe the cigarette companies are behind some part of the current PR kill-job on ecigs. They simply benefit the most.

<comment><USER12> That could be true, yeah. boourns311's comment also helped me understand the viewpoint a little better. I'd be a little surprised if they were investing in Juul while also trying to sweep it away, but it's the tobacco industry. They're always doing anything they can to keep themselves afloat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's so much opportunity in this market to end up better than smoking. First and foremost, by making reduced or no nicotine the standard.

Juul could have taken a play from the soda manufactures, selling people flavored water (without the hfcs).

I believe vaping is safer (and more depending on the carrier compound) but we know nicotine will still have its troubles.

<comment><USER10> What's wrong with nicotine? Or is it just the addiction?

<comment><USER14> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/)

"Nicotine poses several health hazards. There is an increased risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal disorders. There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer. It also affects the tumor proliferation and metastasis and causes resistance to chemo and radio therapeutic agents. "

<comment><USER15> "Nicotine is one of the most addicting agent (sic). The US surgeon general (2010) has concluded nicotine to be as addictive as cocaine or heroin."

Is this really true? The last time I looked carefully into this claim, I found that pretty much everyone conflates nicotine and tobacco, and that the precious few studies on nicotine showed minimal addictiveness. E.g.:

"However, substantial evidence exists to suggest that nicotine's reinforcing effects alone are not sufficient to account for the intense addictive properties of tobacco smoking ..."[1]

If anyone has further references, that would be great.

There are also known health _benefits_ of nicotine [2][3]. Probably, just like for every other drug, we need to better understand the risk vs reward tradeoffs.

[1] [https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/25/4/444](https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/25/4/444)

[2] [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xw7agz/four-surprising- po...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xw7agz/four-surprising-potential- health-benefits-of-nicotine)

[3] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a- nicotine-p...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine- patch-make-you-smarter-excerpt/)

<comment><USER16> <sample_size=1>I am 100% addicted to nicotine. I have managed to quit drinking alcohol from a 1L/day vodka habit. I switched to vape years ago, haven't smoked a cigarette in years, and have been cutting down the mg/ml level of nicotine in my vape for months now. Once I go below 6mg/ml I start to get very very unhappy, and if I switch to 0mg, I start having symptoms I recall very well from detoxing from booze.</sample_size=1>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know a lot of young people who would never smoke a cigarette (because cancer), the kind who only eat organic, but who vape "because it's perfectly safe and harmless"

I asked some of them "how do you know it's safe?". The typical answer is "it's just water vapor and nicotine"

<comment><USER10> Seems rational to me. What's the implicit illogic?

<comment><USER18> 1\. Nicotine is not harmless.

2\. Flavor additives and other agents used in vaping "juice" are not nicotine nor water.

<comment><USER10> Thanks.

1\. Many in the scientific community believe that the evidence suggests that nicotine is _relatively harmless_ , on par with suntanning or coffee (which contains acrylamide). You are right, nicotine isn't harmless, but many in the scientific community believe that nicotine is _relatively harmless_.

Nicotine isn't why cigarettes are bad. It isn't why 85% of smokers will die from smoking related disease. Nicotine itself is a cognitive enhancer, like caffeine.

2\. I agree. It's an issue. We should also know more about how specific vape hardware "cooks" the juice and creates new chemical compounds. There should be industry standards and consumer-safety regulations.

Sigh... the thing is, I wish we could approach this non-politically -- like a design problem.

 _Let 's design vapes that are safe and good for you!_ Which, of course, vapers(?) want as normal product consumers. But, it becomes politics because the thought of healthy and effective new consumer drugs absolutely terrifies people. People want it, though. Why can't they have what they want in a manner that is as healthy and effective as possible?

Know what I mean?

<comment><USER18> > People want it, though. Why can't they have what they want in a manner that > is as healthy and effective as possible?

You'll find no argument from me. The comment you were originally replying to though pointed out that some (many?) vapers are currently unaware of or are trivializing the risk of "cooked juice". And that it's ironic that many seemingly health-conscious people are doing so.

That is not a rational response. That is trying to justify a behavior that still has unknown long-term health implications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >> Why is vaping perceived as so dangerous? Compared with cigarettes its damn near harmless

Vaping is also much more expensive than cigarettes. If Juul contributes to getting huge amounts of young people addicted to nicotine what do you think they'll do when they can't afford e-juice? We've already seen the results with fentanyl being the trade-in of choice.

<comment><USER5> >> Vaping is also much more expensive than cigarettes.

Are you serious? A pack is between $5 and $10 depending on where you live. You might go through that in half a day.

A bottle of e-cig "juice" is like $30 and lasts you for a month.

And I don't even understand the allusion to fentanyl...

<comment><USER20> juul is considerably more expensive than other products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This whole thing has nothing to do with keeping kids off nicotine and everything to do with keeping people of all ages on cigarettes.

Vaping is safer than smoking.

Let's say I'm Phillip Morris. I sell Marlboro and a slew of other cigarette brands. E-cigs come along, offering a safer alternative that is importantly much more cost effective. They're eating my lunch.

How do I kill this industry? I buy Juul. I remove the fruity flavors (which people of all ages enjoy more than tobacco flavors) and I claim that I'm doing it to protect the children.

Juul is now much worse off; big tobacco gets to claim that it's looking out for the kids; last step is to manufacture a public crisis to have cover for over-reaching legislation that bans what would otherwise be the least harmful of all age-restricted products.

Keep smoking.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Vaping is safer than smoking_

We don't have evidence for this. Vaping appears, due to its lack of combustion, safer than cigarettes. But we don't have the science to say it's safer.

This unfounded leap--from reasonable hypothesis to finding--is part of what is getting Juul in trouble.

<comment><USER21> Okay, let's say we accept this. We have plenty of science and evidence to say that smoking cigarettes directly leads to cancer, yet we are fine with cigarettes being legal. Why are we ready to ban vaping because of what we _don 't_ know, but we're fine keeping cigarettes despite what we _do_ know?

<comment><USER22> Cigarettes are heavily regulated, rarely allowed in public places any longer, banned for sale to minors, taxed, and societally increasingly unacceptable.

We're not making them illegal, but we're making them as undesirable as we can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Keep in mind that America bans college students from drinking until they are 21. Because that helps the children.</comment>


Stanford = Army, MIT = Marines - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/buzz/piaw/B4wChKfzFka/Theres-no-reason-why-the-Boston-area-shouldnt-be#1275962135261000 <comment><USER2> It's more complicated than that. Many MIT professors are unapologetic about their relentless focus on engineering, but the MIT administration sees it as a problem that so few alumni achieve business success and make big donations.

<comment><USER3> Ayup.

When I was an undergrad about twenty years ago (brlewis, you were an undergrad then, too, right?), the Dean for Undergraduate Education was on record as saying "too many MIT graduates work for too many Harvard and Princeton graduates", and the administration was retooling its admissions policy and curriculum so that the school _wouldn't_ have such a single-minded focus on training people to be brillant engineers.

Has the pendulum swung back since then?

<comment><USER4> I was an undergrad there twenty years ago too, but I was a physics major, not CS. My experience was that for science graduates, their training is mostly geared towards getting them into graduate school, not a job in industry. The prevailing attitude then (and probably now too) was that if you went into industry instead of academia, there was something wrong with you.

<comment><USER5> I went to University of California - Santa Cruz for my undergraduate in physics. Around my year, the administration realized that a lot of the students were having trouble transitioning to non-academic jobs. So much so that they started an "applied physics" program which allowed more classes in electrical engineering and computer science, and made a required class called Physics in Industry that I have had the privilege of speaking in a few times to tell young physicists how and why they could transition into a career in software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anybody remember (for example) Reagan's cabinet? George Schultz, captain of Marines in WW II, secretary of labor then of treasury for Nixon, secretary of state for Reagan. Donald Reagan, lieutenant colonel of Marines in WW II, CEO of Merrill Lynch, secretary of the treasury, later chief of staff for Reagan, James Baker, USMC service in Korea, switched jobs with Regan. And isn't the current governor of Oregon a Marine veteran?

As for Stanford & MIT I couldn't tell you.

<comment><USER7> There are certainly Marines who've been tremendously successful after their military career--but that's not what the training and culture optimizes for. Look at Marine heroes--Chesty Puller[1] was such a "candid speaker" that the thought of a political career is laughable. Smedley Butler[2] retired, then wrote a booklet called "War is a Racket." These are the men that are the subjects of Marine running cadences, not George Schultz and James Baker.

Full disclosure: I did a tour in the Marines, found I couldn't get a civilian job, joined the Army for one more tour, and am now employed by a Fortune 500 company.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesty_Puller>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler>

<comment><USER8> I agree that I cherry-picked reservists (and could have gone on to Chaffee, long-time senator from Rhode Island, Paul Moore, long-time Anglican bishop of New York, etc. etc,)

But frankly, the regular Army types who have gone on to distinguished political careers have been relatively few and not always distinguished as politicians: among presidents, Taylor, Grant, Eisenhower. To the extent that Army veterans, regular, reserve, or Guard, are more conspicuous, the disproportion in numbers must count for something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Like all good and easy to understand argument this one simplifies things and glosses over some details, but overall I buy it. At least it's definitely true nowadays. MIT had a spectacular history of Electrical Engineering but for the last N years they have concentrated on the "next cool thing" syndrome, the worst case being the MIT Media Lab.

We have to remember that there are major outside influences that are shaping these institutions, especially for Stanford, being in the eye of Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER10> > MIT had a spectacular history of Electrical Engineering but for the last N > years they have concentrated on the "next cool thing" syndrome, the worst > case being the MIT Media Lab.

Stanford doesn't seem to have suborganizations that are as externally visible as Media Lab and the like.

> We have to remember that there are major outside influences that are shaping > these institutions, especially for Stanford, being in the eye of Silicon > Valley.

I may be too close, but I don't see Stanford as being radical or innovative in its organization.

For some relevant comments by Stanford's current president see <http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/100526.html> and [http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi- bin/videologger.php?target=100...](http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi- bin/videologger.php?target=100526-ee380-300.asx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like the old joke any Marine will tell you:

"A Marine gets out and goes on his first job interview. The interviewer asks: 'I see you were a Marine. What did they train you to do?'. Marine answers: 'TO KILL PEOPLE SIR!'"

</comment><comment><USER12> As a PhD student at MIT with many friends at Stanford, I'd like to say that both schools provide an abundance of opportunities for an engineering student to choose a less specialist path: business school classes, leadership in student organizations, student advocacy, business plan competitions, even industry consulting.

As with most universities, the opportunities are there, and your education is what you make of it.

As to Rebecca's comments on large-scale projects, when DARPA funding first dried up, the CS and AI Lab (CSAIL) turned towards industrial sponsors and pursued a vision of pervasive computing, incorporating advancements in networking, speech, and NLP. But there has been no shortage of recent DARPA sponsored large-scale projects (e.g. the DARPA Grand Challenge, command and control systems for urban search and rescue, semi-autonomous forklifts for war zone unloading).

<comment><USER13> But are any of those large scale DARPA projects pushing the foundations like some of the prior ones did? The ones you list are very applied, which may be appropriate for a nation at war, I took her point to be "where will the foundation for the next big thing come from?"

Hmmm, where would we place their VLSI project (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project>), which among other things according to Wikipedia supported BSD?

<comment><USER12> IMHO, semi-autonomous robotic control is one of the holy grails of CS.

Robotics hardware is maturing rapidly, but the software algorithms for visual sensing, planning and manipulation aren't there yet. This is standing in the way of robots running (vs walking) efficiently, tidying up your cluttered desk, or taking care of our elderly.

<comment><USER13> " _semi-autonomous robotic control is one of the holy grails of CS_ "

Agreed 100%, and it's a difficult and worthwhile set of AI problems (just not ones I'm personally interested in :-). I have no trouble with the Grand Challenge given that the state of the art makes it practical, it's that other ... perhaps more foundational stuff is apparently being neglected. The stuff that's "wow!" in 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is a point of exaggeration. I don't think smart as they are, MIT engineers need an adaptation program like the marines to the real world. That's what comes with smartness, flexibility to think and adapt. You cannot say the same for a marine with physically extreme skills.

<comment><USER15> Not really. If you're an expert at "psets" that doesn't make you an expert at the far wider array of skills needed to survive and prosper in the real world. Sure you might have a 160 IQ and are able to instantly slice through any engineering problem that comes your way, but that alone will at best get you a permanent cubicle job as "Sr. Engineer".

That said, I agree that smart people have a far better chance of being able to _learn_ the other skills. But the difference between the two outcomes relies largely on the attitude the person has. So the culture they're trained in should somehow instill in them the importance of the wider array of skills, so that the individual will internally emphasize and strive to learn them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not sure I agree with the analogy for MIT/Stanford as an _institution_ (in terms of the curriculum, administration's goals, etc.), but I definitely think it's true for the students and overall atmosphere.

Blowing things up and hacking on random projects :is to: MIT students || Starting a new business :is to: Stanford students

MIT folks also often use the word "Sloanie" (referring to someone in the business school) as a fairly derogatory term. (Though I guess this is a common view in general).

</comment><comment><USER17> Not really relevant, but the Army isn't much better than the Marines at preparing soldiers for the real world...

<comment><USER18> That may or may not be true, but it doesn't mean that it's not their goal.

Here in the UK the Army's advertising is all about people who joined up and learned skills. I think the current one is about a girl who joined the Royal Signals and 8 years later she's an expert in "telecommunications" (it's an ad, so they're no more specific than that). By contrast the Royal Marines advertising is simple: "99% need not apply".

<comment><USER17> Functionally, ex-military folks often end up in DC doing government contracting or consulting related to military agencies and intelligence. So that's mainly for signals and intel guys. They earn way more money doing the same old job.

For everyone else, their skills are useless although pretty much everyone I outprocessed with were angstful stop-lossed guys wanting to go into law enforcement in their old towns.

Besides, the incentives are to keep people in the military, not train them to get out...so it's really either DC or bust.

<comment><USER19> I think you are _mainly_ right. There are a small subset of us ex-Army folks with special skills that weren't signal or intel guys. That number is dwindling every year, partly because those highly skilled jobs (mine was calibration related) are being pushed to the DA civilian side. Also (as you correctly mention), you can do a short 4 or 5 year active tour, then get out into the civilian world and make literally 3 times the salary doing the same type of job.

I think the Army tries to pride itself on training people to get out ("Hey we pay for college, we help find you jobs when you are outprocessing!"), but the reality of the situation is that _most_ of the Army isn't getting trained for their exit to the civilian world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow. I don't know about Stanford, but she captured my MIT experience (Course 2, '95) perfectly.

<comment><USER21> Stanford student here, I don't much about MIT but I guess that's true of Stanford. I don't know if I buy the implication that Stanford is sacrificing the quality of its engineers for it, but she's definitely right about the focus. There is a lot of emphasis on entrepreneurship here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember seeing Stanford advertise a full semester course in iPhone programmig back when developing for the iPhone got really popular. I don't think MIT had anything similar, and it does show how Stanford is willing to quickly adapt to today's software landscape.

<comment><USER23> Around the same time & if memory serves, I saw "Hacking the Google Interview" course by MIT so I guess that tells the story.

<comment><USER13> Heh. But the course you're referring to is 4 day IAP (January, the Independent Activities Period) course and clearly wasn't for credit.

There are some formal, frequently with a small amount of credit, more serious courses that are taught during IAP, like 6.092 "Introduction to Programming in Java" or even (as captured by OCW in in 2009) 6.096 "Introduction to C++".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting. If you assume Carnegie Mellon and MIT are parallel (and in this respect, they are), this explains a lot about CMU :-)

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't know about the army/marines analogy but I know that "IHTFP" would not have taken hold on Stanford campus :)

<comment><USER13> What about the Institute Screw Contest: <http://www.mit.edu/~apo/big-screw/> ?

Note that while participants/targets have to agree to be in it, it is generally rewarded for poor preformance of one sort or another, e.g.:

1989 Gerald Sussman: for a _really_ bad 6.002 term he taught.

1985 Shirley M. McBay: amazingly bad Dean for Student affairs.

1971 Ken Browning: Also a legendary Dean for Student affairs; a parody issue of the student newspaper was entirely dedicated to him. Although I don't know if he was indeed really bad, my only solid first hand info is from a member of a failing residential fraternity chapter.

<comment><USER25> Thought about it some more, seems if you want to use the arm forces analogy, MIT is more like Navy Seals Hell Week :) Tough while you're going thru it, but the friendships last a lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm just surprised that Buzz seems to have taken the place of FriendFeed.</comment>


Ask HN: I use and love Golang. Should I learn python? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Depends on what you program. I find useful Python for exploratory programming, when testing out things, etc. The REPL allows me to tinker fast. The large collection of libraries, for me, means that I hardly ever have to start from nothing. However, for heavy duty production code, I find Golang to be faster, easier to deploy to multiple nodes.

I don't have experience with either language in creating programs for others to use. All the programs I write are for in-house users. But I would suspect that it is easier to distribute Golang programs as long as you are comfortable with the cross-compilation features which do allow you to create executables for multiple target platforms.</comment>


A Java Fork-Join Calamity - <AUTHOR> http://www.coopsoft.com/ar/CalamityArticle.html

<comment><USER2> Article is pretty badly written and disorganized, and produces little in way of actual facts, use cases, or code.

Not to mention, author has a conflict of interest since his company is developing (and selling training/consulting for, I'd guess) a Fork-Join framework.

Not saying he does not have a point, but you'd have to hunt that point in the forests of non-sequiturs and the underbrush of irrelevance.

<comment> captain-asshat Are we reading the same article?

He has an ordered, referenced critique that explains exactly why java's fork/join doesn't belong in the JDK.

I don't think it's really appropriate to call this a conflict of interest; industry professionals do this all the time. Java should be under special scrutiny from the smartest people we have, now that it's owned by Oracle.

I don't know where you get the impression that this is badly written, but in my opinion this outshines much of the writing we see on HN.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Services like InstaFameNow for Twitter? - <AUTHOR> was wondering if there are any? <comment><USER2> [http://instafamenow.net/](http://instafamenow.net/) offers twitter followers packages as well, you can check them out.</comment>


Shellcode Injection - <AUTHOR> https://dhavalkapil.com/blogs/Shellcode-Injection/ <comment><USER2> Almost every program nowadays is compiled with W^X (--no_execstack) by default which means the memory is not executable and writable at once (Windows equivalent is DEP). Still a good example of how a basic overflow can lead to arbitrary code execution. A follow-up post using ROP or return-to-libc would be interesting, with W^X enabled.

<comment><USER3> I'll try it next. Thanks for the suggestion :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favourite resource for these types of exploits used to be phiral.com (see Wayback Machine circa March 2007 [1], since it doesn't exist anymore), belonging to author Jon Erickson who wrote "Hacking: the Art of Exploitation" [2].

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20070305111749/http://phiral.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070305111749/http://phiral.com/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking:_The_Art_of_Exploitati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking:_The_Art_of_Exploitation)

<comment><USER3> This book is quite good. It was my first introduction in this area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The same author refers to another article of him, in which he explains the basics of buffer overflows quite nice. [https://dhavalkapil.com/blogs/Buffer- Overflow-Exploit/](https://dhavalkapil.com/blogs/Buffer-Overflow-Exploit/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Here are 2 good courses on Assembly and Shellcoding on x86 and x86_64 if you are interested:

[http://www.pentesteracademy.com/topics?v=nhr](http://www.pentesteracademy.com/topics?v=nhr)

</comment><comment><USER7> Why "echo 0 | dd of=foo" and not simply "echo 0 > foo"?

<comment><USER8>
        echo 0 > foo //wont work with sudo ..
        sudo echo 0 > foo //will fail ...
        sudo sh -c 'echo 0 > file' //If you want echo with sudo

else what author has done is right

<comment><USER9> piping to `sudo tee <fname>` is also a nice alternative

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I must be missing something. If you can create an executable which is suid you already have root...

<comment><USER11> The scenario is someone else has set setuid on an executable which is vulnerable to buffer overflows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > ... -fno-stack-protector -z execstack

Does anyone know how common stack protector is in the wild?

<comment><USER13> From the responses to this stackoverflow question: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1629685/when-and-how- to-u...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1629685/when-and-how-to-use-gccs- stack-protection-feature)

The protection only protects under some circumstances not all. So this demo still seems valid. Also the protection comes at a cost of extra code (and extra execution time).

This means to me that any IoT device probably does not have stack protection.

<comment><USER14> Actually, this demo would be stopped if the stack protector was on. The demo relies upon overwriting the return pointer that controls where the function jumps to upon returning.

The stack protector acts as a guard against overwriting that value without knowing a key that is stored elsewhere in memory. You'd need some memory disclosure issue to get the key or brute force the key.</comment></comment></comment>


SaltStack Mining Attack - photon-torpedo https://saltexploit.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> >>> If you're here, chances are you're already compromised.

WTF does that mean? Our salt implementation is on an entirely private network, so why would I be more likely than not to be compromised already?

\----

Edit: Re-downvotes -- This is a sincere question. Is there some evidence that the majority of salt implementations are compromised, or some mechanism by which this hits private networks? Or is that line just for dramatic effect?

<comment><USER2> I assumed that the problem was that if a master is accessible on your intranet, it could be hit with some sort of XSS attack from browsers inside the firewall.

But apparently there are 6000 people just straight up exposing their masters to the internet:

[https://gbhackers.com/saltstack-salt/](https://gbhackers.com/saltstack-salt/)

<comment><USER3> But that's like half the point of SaltStack. It's supposed be secure enough to run on the public internet to manage road-warrior endpoints.

"I found this site called Alexa that lists a bunch of companies that just straight up expose their web servers to the internet. Crazy."

And I have some bad news about how many companies are exposing their VPN servers to the internet too.

<comment><USER4> It's really not.

You also wouldn't expose your database just because it's password-protected?

I bet all these public servers have a firewall running to protect other services.

Shouldn't be hard to include the saltstack port(s) and whitelist the relevant IP addresses.

Also,the main difference with your example is that the clients that connect to webservers and vpns are either not known in advance or don't have static IP addresses.

<comment><USER3> Anyone who's putting their Salt master on the internet is having to deal with clients without fixed addresses. And it's not uncommon to have to deal with clients that aren't known advance which is when autosign scripts are used.

Sans the current CVE this is otherwise a service that is safe to expose to adversarial networks.

<comment><USER4> From Algolia's outage retrospective:

      What we did so far:
      We've secured the impacted SaltStack service by updating it and adding additional IP filtering, allowing only our servers to connect to it.

So clearly unrestricted access wasn't a necessity.

I understand it's a pain, I've been running a 1000+ server stack with puppet on a public network and relied on iptables to secure it. But I'd rather cope with the daily iptable rules update than having to fight a 0-day exploit...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> SaltStack has a long history of home brew protocols, internally written encryption, security issues, and bugs. I'm not surprised they would end up being used as a vector for attacks.

<comment><USER6> Exhibit A: CVE-2013-2228.

As described inthe relevant entry [0] on Debian's Security Tracker:

> _SaltStack RSA Key Generation allows remote users to decrypt communications_

The fix [1]:

      - gen = RSA.gen_key(keysize, 1, callback=lambda x, y, z: None)
      + gen = RSA.gen_key(keysize, 65537, callback=lambda x, y, z: None)

\---

[0]: [https://security- tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2013-2228](https://security- tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2013-2228)

[1]: [https://github.com/saltstack/salt/commit/e8ce66cf688b43aeb3e...](https://github.com/saltstack/salt/commit/e8ce66cf688b43aeb3e716e78b1af3a08e9940e3)

<comment><USER7> Jesus that's some rookie stuff right there

<comment><USER8> They also built their own low-level network protocol based on 0mq. Back when I tried it, it had constant keepalive issues behind NAT and would randomly lose messages (that was in 2014, probably better now).

<comment><USER9> It wasn't any better as of last year, and its constant connectivity issues were part of the reason I abandoned it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We all got lucky on this one. The outcome could of been much worse, like secret leaking and rm -rf. We record everything that saltstack does and the scripts didn't even upload anything from the infected servers.

<comment><USER11> You may have been lucky, but that was not the case with everyone. Some of the entries appear to be missing, but last night someone setup a honeypot and was posting what they saw.

Adding keys to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys, scp'ing sshkeys, flushing iptables.

I am of course one of the idiots that had it exposed to the internet. I wouldn't do it with a database, but I didn't think twice about salt. Where was my head!

<comment><USER12> Those things you listed are easily fixed which is what I assume they meant by lucky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Our server were affected. They added a cronjob which ran every minute wgetting a .sh file and executing it. Most of the time the server which the file was in was either offline or returned 404, but every once in a while it returned the malicious script. When this script got executed, it killed our nginx server, which is how we noticed something odd was happening. If it wasn't for nginx dying, we might have not even noticed we were infected.

Here's the contents of the sh script for the curious. [https://pastebin.com/CbupwQMG](https://pastebin.com/CbupwQMG)

<comment><USER14> Looks like it goes through a massive amount of effort to eliminate competing miners and malware. Should neuter that script and run it periodically on boxes :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This hit RamNode too.

> This message is to customers with VPSs on our legacy SolusVM system.

> At approximately 20:34 eastern (GMT -4) on May 2, recently published > SaltStack vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-11651, CVE-2020-11652) were used to > launch cryptocurrency miners on our SolusVM host nodes. The attack disrupted > various services in order to allocate as much CPU as possible to the miners. > SSH and QEMU processes were killed on some of our CentOS 6 KVM hosts, > causing extended downtime in certain cases.

> Upon detecting the disruption, we quickly began to re-enable SSH, disable > and remove Salt, kill related processes, and boot shutdown KVM guests. After > careful analysis of the exploit used, we do not believe any data was > compromised.

> RamNode was not specifically targeted, but rather anyone running SaltStack > versions prior to the one released a few days ago (April 29).

<comment><USER16> > After careful analysis of the exploit used, we do not believe any data was > compromised.

If someone had code running as root on their machine, they can't say that statement with any confidence whatsoever.

<comment><USER15> > If someone had code running as root on their machine, they can't say that > statement with any confidence whatsoever.

Indeed, I think you need to assume all guests running on the affected nodes are now compromised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Algolia got impacted too, apparently their Salt masters were opened to the whole internet: [https://blog.algolia.com/salt-incident- may-3rd-2020-retrospe...](https://blog.algolia.com/salt-incident- may-3rd-2020-retrospective-and-update/)

<comment><USER6> One of DigiCert's Certificate Transparency logs was likewise open to the entire Internet -- and likewise compromised [0]:

> _I 'm sad to report that we discovered today that CT Log 2's key used to > sign SCTs was compromised last night at 7 pm via the Salt vulnerability._

Several other "high-profile" sites have been compromised as well, including LineageOS and Ghost. I expect we'll hear of many more in the next few days.

\---

[0]: [https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/ct-...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/ct- policy/aKNbZuJzwfM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This impacted ghost.org hosting really bad [https://status.ghost.org/](https://status.ghost.org/)

<comment><USER19> Impacted LineageOS too - [https://twitter.com/LineageAndroid/status/125682105610016358...](https://twitter.com/LineageAndroid/status/1256821056100163584)

<comment><USER2> Oh god, the responses. Half of them are completely unrelated, asking Lineage to support particular phones.

And then there's someone who saw "salt" and tried to help:

[https://twitter.com/mvonwi/status/1256989787321438209](https://twitter.com/mvonwi/status/1256989787321438209)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Debian hasn't fixed this yet in their packaging so you might want to work around that if you are using that as a salt-master server.

[https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2020-11651](https://security- tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2020-11651)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm so grateful this happened over the weekend, when I had time to respond. My girlfriend woke me up and told me the CPU-fan was going crazy in the living room. I realize this isn't the case for everyone. I extend my deepest consolations to those affected.

</comment><comment><USER21> Former SaltStack user here. If you're using it, just stop. Switch to Ansible, a Kubernetes/Helm/Flux solution or experiment with Chef Habitat if you're feeling futuristic. SaltStack is just bad. It's buggy, clunky and has really bad error messages. Its only saving grace is that it came before Ansible, but that's only relevant in a historical context. Just no.

<comment><USER22> None of those are compatible solutions.

Ansible is very inflexible when it comes to configuration and how you structure your playbooks.

Kubernetes/Helm/Flux only works if you're inside k8s. I don't know why you would be using Salt for that.

Chef Habitat looks nice, but again. I'm doing more then just management of applications.

The only real alternative to Salt is Puppet. So, No. Just no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We got hit by this on Saturday night :|

</comment><comment><USER24> How does things like these affect Monero's reputation?

I saw Monero mining in JS libraries, now it is in virus form.

Thus, why Monero? Does Monero somehow discourage these "practices"?

<comment><USER25> Maybe it's to do with the fact that monero tokens are non-fungible, unlike some other crypto-currencies.

<comment><USER26> I think you mean 'fungible'. Non-fungible means 1 XMR is not equivalent to another 1 XMR. The use of ring signatures, key images and transaction amount hiding gives Monero its fungible properties. This makes it computationally difficult to trace a particular transaction graph. This provides fungibility beyond that of Nakamoto style coins, in that you cannot easily block/identify addresses or transactions.</comment></comment></comment>


Lego Porsche Crashtest in Slow-Motion (2017) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCPWPj4JHqg <comment><USER2> So, how many parts were actually damaged after this?(probably only a couple)

And the good bit: you can put it back together again!

This is what they mean with rapid disassembly I guess. One of the problems in the Lego sorting project is how to disassemble sub-assemblies that arrive in unsorted lots and that's a very hard problem to solve due to all the various ways in which the parts can be assembled. This is a pretty nasty way of solving that particular problem but the number of parts damaged would have to be very low for this to be a feasible real world solution.

some more pics here:

[https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/c-t-beim-ADAC-Der-Lego- Porsc...](https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/c-t-beim-ADAC-Der-Lego-Porsche-Fun- Test-und-wummms-3706254.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who has used a facility like this to crashtest 2-ton vans, I am absolutely tickled both by the absurd premise and by the similarity in resulting footage.

</comment><comment><USER4> Slightly unrelated, but I bought this exact model last year, after 25 years of not playing with Lego.

It was SUCH a joy to put an audiobook in my ears and work away on this. Sooo relaxing. I called it LEGO-therapy.

I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was surprised to see that the rear portion of the car wasn't as heavily damaged, but when they picked it up, I noticed the floor appeared to be one large piece. My guess is, that was able to absorb enough of the crash energy, to bring the vehicle to a stop.

<comment><USER6> I have made one of these and it is not one piece. The floor is just very sturdy because it has a lot of long flat bars and is very will connected with a lot of fixings.

The "skin" of the car on the other hand is very flimsy because they had to use a lot of tricks to get all the panels to have the correct angles with only standard LEGO parts. Many of them will flex when you touch them because they only have 2 attachment points.

I can highly recommend making this model. It has a 4 speed transmission with paddle shifters on the steering column. It's one of the most mechanically interesting models I've put together, and yet all of the complexity is practically impossible to see once the model is made.

One question I have, was the speed of the crash test scaled down to factor in the scale of the model or was it done at the full speed of the full size car. If it wasn't, it wasn't a very fair test!

<comment><USER7> Later in the video there's a brief glimpse of the crash at real-time camera speed. The car is moving very fast.

Whatever the speed, this doesn't look survivable, for either occupants or frankly any imaginary plastic people in the range of all that wickedly sharp LEGO shrapnel and flying wheels. I think a real 911 would do substantially better in a crash test; this is more like the result of those supercar crashes you see where some poor sod has lost control into Armco at 180mph.

<comment> village-idiot Anytime the drivers compartment is completely open on one side _before_ the paramedics cut it apart is a very bad crash indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> village-idiot I really enjoyed the first crash shot, where you only saw the back of the target with legos spraying in every direction.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anybody know the music piece they play during the slow motion footage?

<comment><USER9> Johann Strauss II - The Blue Danube Waltz

<comment><USER10> ... which also crops up in 2001 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPNlnm_i44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPNlnm_i44)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ok... now bring us the Bugatti chiron!

</comment><comment><USER12> Why???

<comment><USER13> Money. This was done by a company for their website and probably some of their magazines. But from a personal point, the journalists probably did it so someone pays for their chance to build this beauty, and they let it crash so they can afterwards enjoy to build it a second time..</comment></comment>


RDF for Intrepid Unix Hackers: Grepping N-Triples - <AUTHOR> http://blog.datagraph.org/2010/03/grepping-ntriples

<comment><USER2> Other than coolness, why reinvent this wheel? It's very easy to load and query RDF graphs with jena and sparql <http://openjena.org/ARQ/Tutorial/query1.html> you don't even have to do something horrible like learn basic java syntax, there is a command line... bin/sparql --data=doc/Tutorial/vc-db-1.rdf --query=doc/Tutorial/q1.rq

Jena's the defacto standard library for dealing with RDF atm, it's pretty easy to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> This originated entirely from practical concerns. I came up with the set of AWK aliases referred to in the blog post when working with some large N-Triples datasets on remote servers that had no RDF tooling installed nor available. AWK, thankfully, is installed everywhere.

Had I had an opportunity to use better tooling, Java tooling would still not have been my first choice. Dave Beckett's excellent `rapper` and `roqet` command-line utilities (<http://librdf.org/raptor/>) are generally far simpler to install and use.

<comment><USER2> Dave Beckett certainly does good work... I guess I was just curious what would lead to this scenario and what you're wanting to do with the datasets in such a raw format? You can also install allegrograph, which is written in lisp so that should make this crowd happy, it's free up to 50M triples or something. Oracle 11g also works, but we had to have custom patches to get decent RDF performance. It was not meant as a criticism, it just seemed like a lot of work vs just pulling into some triple store. Sesame is another good choice...</comment></comment></comment>


I'm calling it: Social networking is over - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/3062925/social-media/im-calling-it-social-networking-is-over.html <comment><USER2> _Reddit was a social bookmarking site_

I'm trying to wrap my head around that. How has Reddit ever been anything more than a link aggregator?

<comment><USER3> Social bookmarking site just means aggregator with a comments section.

<comment><USER2> Bookmarking to me implies a sort of persistence that one can go back to. Reddit is an ever changing stream with the page changing at each refresh.

That's like calling a raging river a Boat Parking Lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All the classic mistakes of forecasting (like Jim Cramer on TV): 0\. Doesn't assign probabilities to the prediction. 1\. Doesn't consider alternative scenarios. 2\. Doesn't allow for the possibility that he could be wrong.</comment>


Floating Point Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2014/07/07/floating-point-numbers/

<comment><USER2> Obligatory link to _What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating- Point Arithmetic_

[http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.ht...](http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems there's an error in the text:

"must be representable in binary using at most 52 bits for double precision and 23 bits for single recision. In other words, for double, 2^52f is an integer in the interval

0≤2^52f<2^52"

52 bits are used in the double but the highest 53rd bit is implicit for all IEEE754 doubles which aren't denormals. And denormals use less bits as they approach 0.

The text misses both important aspects of the standard.

And what's with that "I've always known him by his nickname "Velvel"" and then using the nickname from that point on? Sounds like Monty Python sketch: [http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9svCBKWpCRQ](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9svCBKWpCRQ)</comment>


Taming the Golang Stack Trace - <AUTHOR> https://integratedcode.us/2016/05/25/taming-the-golang-stack-trace/ <comment><USER2> This looks neat, looking forward to trying it out on my distributed systems.</comment>