Does Parkinson's Begin in the Gut? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-parkinsons-begin-in-the-gut/ <comment><USER2> For something that is so central to our day to day lives and our health and well-being, it doesn't feel like there is enough focus on what goes into our gut.

By that I mean the number of people that test for allergies and intolerance feels low when you consider the potential payoff.

Just knowing that avoiding certain foods your body doesn't tolerate can massively improve your quality of life if you are indeed intolerant.

<comment><USER3> Very true, my wife discovered by accident 10 years ago she is fructose intolerant, didn't know before about it, and was basically always in pain as her family was focused on eating healthy by eating lots of fruit...

<comment><USER4> I'm fructose intolerant too, and when I discovered it, and I adjusted my diet accordingly, my life changed for the better.

Probably your wife knows about it but just in case, I've found a great relief in the low fodmap diet by Monash University.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This 2018 article rests on the assumption that Lewy bodies [1] are associated with a pathogen that begins in the gut and works its way into the brain via the vagus nerve. The way I read the cell biology section, Lewy bodies are the artefacts of a broken process in nerve/neuron cells.

It seems to me that the broken process is more likely to be senescence related than a pathogen caused disease that mainly manifests in the elderly.

Regardless, the main take-away I have is that chronic constipation without prior history may be an early symptom of Parkinson's. This fits the senescence model as degraded nerve function in the gut will cause constipation just like opioids do.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewy_body#Cell_biology](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewy_body#Cell_biology)

<comment><USER6> I don't think anybody is discounting senescence being a factor, but rather theorising the likely pathology of the disease which may be a combination of different factors, including pathogens together with senescence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really wish it were this simple, and altering your diet was a way to stave off or treat this horrid disease. My grandfather died from Parkinson's and it was terrible watching this man who was strong as a bull - even in his 70s - degenerate into a helpless old man over the course of about 3-4 years.

<comment><USER8> Do you mind me asking what diet your grandfather was following?

My father died last year and he had a very bad case of Parkinson's. The diet does fit with the explanation to Parkinson's, although there is also sleep apnea that might have been an even bigger contributor to his Parkinson's development.

<comment><USER9> Not OP, but my grandfather who died from Parkinson's had two risk factors. Growing up on a farm with pesticides and serving in WW2. Also didn't drink coffee. So you wonder how theses factor are related to diet. Perhaps all associated with "constipation" diets. i.e low in fiber.

<comment> blaser-waffle Anec-data but my grandpa had Parkinson's as well. WW2 vet, ended up getting a Ph.D in Chemistry and working with fuel additives, plus other interesting stuff. Meticulously planned eating habits, serious coffee drinker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Recently we have a surge of research linking medical conditions affecting the brain to the gut. Often attributed to bacterial that found a way to bypass the blood brain barrier via the gut .

<comment><USER11> Yes, my thought exactly. Seems to be a recurring theme, especially with autoimmune diseases.

Is there some central source to follow on developments on all the research surrounding this?

<comment><USER12> She's not an immunologist, but I really like Dr Rhonda Patrick's podcast about the bleeding edge of medical research. She covers microfauna often. [https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes](https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes)

<comment><USER13> I think you meant "flora", relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/1471/](https://xkcd.com/1471/) :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A while ago I studied traditional medicine like Ayurveda for a while. A lot of them state that disease starts from the gut . At the time western medicine totally rejected this idea and most likely not all disease starts that way. But over the last years I read more and more news that the gut flora and nutrition may have more influence than previously thought.

This makes me wonder in what other areas we have blinders on and don't want to see things that may be beneficial. Meditation is another area that was considered BS when started but suddenly is looked at more seriously.

<comment><USER15> yeah, try and explain the concept of 'agni' to people on HN lol

<comment><USER14> That's one of the easier ones :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really get sad seeing wishfull thinking like this. In mice, it has been demonstrated that parkinsons is linked to damaged neurons - the cells are damaged for the lifetime of the animal and the symptoms appear only later in life. I have parkisons on both sides of my family tree, I've watched people die from it , I'm watching close loved ones wither away even now. I despise these feel good articles that offer false hope to the aflicted...

</comment><comment><USER17> Not all bacteria is bad. In fact, without bacteria within our bodies there would be no us. It's been a long dirty and evolving road to get to this point. The First World's modern obsession with hand sanitizers and such is having unintended consequences. We should not be surprised.

<comment><USER18> >The First World's modern obsession with hand sanitizers and such is having unintended consequences

It's not...obvious...that hand sanitizers screw up your digestive bacteria. Compared to just soap? It's also not obvious, if it _is_ a concern, why toothpaste and mouthwash aren't more of a concern.

<comment><USER17> First, do note "and such." The point being the obcession with being hyper- clean is an historic blip.

We don't use soap as often. Hand sanitizers are a modern convenience. They're everywhere. In your purse. In your backpack. And so on.

Our normal and natural exposure to bacteria is being diminished. As our awareness of our bacteria-driven internal systems increases, pattern _are_ in fact starting to develop.

More and more</comment></comment></comment>


Is The Internet Dead And Boring? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/25/is-the-internet-dead-and-boring/ <comment><USER2> The fact that its getting so much debate means at least that there is some truth.</comment>


I'm giving 26 hours of time to help 26 startups I've never met - <AUTHOR> http://thauburger.com/index.html

<comment><USER2> Maybe tell people up front what code stacks you would help with? Save some time.

How are you qualifying the startups you are going to work with?

Love the idea btw

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of those posts were you're hesitant to upvote it because it could decrease you chance of being picked.

<comment><AUTHOR> @elwell if it helps, I will be responding to every startup that reaches out, regardless of whether there's enough time slots for us to formally meet. And I'll do my best to be helpful in those responses.

<comment><USER4> Hey, which is the right way to respond to you. Because I am hereby reaching out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome! You help other startups and are able to get exposure for them (and yourself) at the same time. I sent mt email and hope to share my experiences with you as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think this is a fantastic idea, I don't have any applicable questions really so I don't want to take an hour from someone who could really use it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Happy Birthday Tom. I think this is a fantastic idea, as I also like to help people out and get involved with interesting products.

I can see myself doing something similar one day, so I have sent an e-mail over hoping that we can talk further.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yay, I sent an email for my current startup BeeplApp ( [http://beeplapp.com/](http://beeplapp.com/) ) ^_^

Love the idea of giving back mate annnndd Happy birthday!

</comment><comment><USER9> Awesome project -- I can't wait to hear how it ends up. Definitely do a blog post afterward! (I applied.. can't wait to hear back)

<comment><AUTHOR> @gkoberger thanks! I'll be reaching out to folks later this weekend. I'm definitely planning on writing a post-mortem as well if people are interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Happy birthday.

</comment><comment><USER11> 26 hours for 26 startups... Gets 26 hours each or 1 hour per startup? Because if it's the later, I don't see how they could _code together_ in 60 minutes... I mean even you are Linus Torvalds it takes _some time_ to read the code-base if your project is not vapor-ware.

</comment><comment><USER12> Please help!

</comment><comment><USER13> Happy Birthday Tom

</comment><comment><USER14> And you are... ?

Grab your ego and shove it up your ass dude ;D

<comment><USER11> Even you _really believe that_ , you should have the decency to express your feeling in a polite way.</comment></comment>


Help My newsletters are flagged as spam.  - <AUTHOR>

Recently, my out going email is sent to spam and junk folders. Why? What can I do to prevent this from happening? <comment><USER3> Use a service like MailChimp.com for your newsletters, but be careful - <USER2> will ban you if a lot of users flag you as spam.

One thing you can do to avoid being flagged is make sure the people actually want your newsletter - they signed up to _your_ service at least semi- recently.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd also recommend subscribing to a dedicated mail service. There are dozens of variables that affect your mail delivery. You should read the postmark blog (<http://blog.postmarkapp.com/>) for a peek into those.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you have reverse dns records set up?</comment>


Quantios is hiring: help reshape the college admission process using data - <AUTHOR> http://quantios.com/index.php?page=jobs&hn=1

<comment><USER2> _puts on ex-Ivy League admission officer robe_

Boy, it's a good thing they've got someone with admissions experience on their team... <http://quantios.com/index.php?page=company>

Wait, wha? They don't?

How is this different from any other snake oil being sold to parents of middle class white kids (rightly) worried that junior's at a disadvantage?

"We use numbers!"

That's great, but at the end of the day, the admission offices don't. The decisions made at the elite schools are either obvious or highly random/subjective.

<comment><USER3> _at the end of the day, the admission offices don't_

Oh, they are very, very highly numeric places -- they just concentrate on the kind of numbers that have to be burned after calculation. ("We only admitted _how_ many black students this year? STOP. Pick up the green folders pile and find me students you think would do well if they stretched a little bit.")

I used to like Japanese universities for doing admissions via high-stakes entrance exams. Having worked on those systems, I think I now love them. Publishing the score distribution for the exam last year, broken down by department, with the exact passing score needed for admission _in the bloody application packet_ is just the cherry on top of the pie of awesome.

If Harvard leaked as much data as a Japanese university there would be a public firestorm. (Because Harvard engages in severe, systematic racial discrimination, but prefers to lie about the existence and extent of it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is not a solution. This is part of the problem.

College admissions and my senior year was hell. I worked hard so that I could impress the Ivies which rejected me. I don't have any regrets about my academics but many of my applications were not worth the stress.

<comment><USER5> What Quantios is trying to do is build a system that will show students good matches for colleges that fit their profile. College admissions will always be annoying but perhaps it will save students some of the time the time and frustration you went through.

<comment><USER4> It seems that the service is to make the system _appear_ more rational, to put a lens in front of The System, offer a consulting service, and offer an advantage to students that are willing to play the game with parents that take the initiative.

Why is the college admissions process ruled by for profit organizations?

Looking back, I spent too much time worrying about my scores and not enough time making sure my essays reflected my unique achievements and skills.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      Looking back, I spent too much time worrying about my scores and not enough time making sure my essays reflected my unique achievements and skills.

That's still framed in the broken system in place now. Can your really tell someone enough about you in a 2-page essay for them to make an informed decision about your application? Test scores are just as bad, if not noisier, signals; they're just easy to grok numbers, so like one of the other posters mentioned, they come with implicit authority. That entire process is broken; we're not trying to sell another snake oil "what are my chances" calculator. There's real science behind what we're working on, and it's not a consulting service for the wealthy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _We believe that the entire world is quantifiable. Do you?_

In my experience, this belief causes many serious problems. I hope it's not considered rude to express this here on HN, but I would suggest considering possible ethical issues before taking a job like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you give me an example of an ethical issue arising from this view? Quantifying something doesn't impose a system of beliefs on its own.

<comment><USER6> > Quantifying something doesn't impose a system of beliefs on its own.

I suppose that is true, but in practice, quantifications are often used by a system that does impose certain beliefs. When this happens (and even when it doesn't) those beliefs are seen to carry an air of objectivity simply because there are now numbers behind them.

It is _extremely_ tempting to treat subjective views as objective truth when there are fancy algorithms and numbers behind them. This leads to a willingness to impose certain views on people who disagree, and that's where the ethical issues can arise.

In the case of this particular product, there are related but separate issues having to do with encouraging the college admissions circus. Even if the intention is to improve it, the product would at best have the effect of propagating the myth that the college admissions process is fundamentally sound and can be perfected. In reality, adding more mathematical algorithms to the process will just give it a pretense of objectivity -- again, potentially harmful to millions of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My first sentiment is that this had already been done - and done pretty well - by other groups. Collegedata.com has a decent system and makes admissions predictions (though it's a front for a student loan company). Mychances.net appears to be very active in this field, too. It isn't clear to me exactly what criteria they use for predictions at any given school, but they have stated that they use gpa, sat, sat subject tests, class rank, ethnicity, state of origin, legacy status, and sports recruitment. In other words, other people seem to have done a pretty good job of extracting what they can out of the quantifiable data.

I hope it's not rude for me to ask what this new group offers that those two, plus collegeboard, unigo, and a handful of others, do not?

</comment><comment><USER8> Not to be negative but I saw their pitch at Duke and they actually embellished the amount of users on thier facebook app and stole information from other teams in a pitch competition

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry? Can you be more specific? Given what we're working on, reputation is all we have (albeit as a function of how well our software works). We'd never do either of those things.</comment></comment>


BBC Computer Literacy Project 1980 – 1989 - open-source-ux https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> I was born in 1965 and was an early micro-hobbyist from the end of 1978 onwards. I remember wanting an Acorn System One which was basically a hex keypad attached to a Eurocard. Unbelievably primitive.

In 1980 (aged 15) I got an Acorn Atom, (the predecessor of the BBC computer), with a great keyboard, 8K ROM and 2K RAM. Built-in BASIC and a built-in 6502 Assembler as well.

These computers were functional but bare-bones. You really could comprehend how everything fitted together. I was really blessed to be part of that generation at the very beginning.

The BBC computer literacy project was fantastic for replicating my experience to those immediately following me in school. The UK was an early world-leader in the number and quality of its programming talent.

The real tragedy was this was followed by the utterly useless national "ICT" curriculum in schools which was essentially all about teaching kids how to use Microsoft Office, and probably discouraged an entire generation of kids from getting involved in software. This still makes me angry.

<comment><USER3> Also born in 1965 and had an Acorn Atom. Went to two schools that had Research Machines 380Z systems. Didn't take any lessons in computing or ICT.

I had decided that I was going to be a computer programmer around 1975, I remember having to talk to careers advisers and the job didn't exist as a defined thing that you could do.

<comment><USER4> Careers advice was a bit dire back then, I remember being told I definitely shouldn't be a programmer and instead should be an actuary. Good job I ignored that advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's something seldom talked about, and maybe it's only my experience.

I was born '89 and in the midlands of the UK, so I missed these programmes (although my mother didn't and even as a non-techy person could write BBC basic on a C64, which is where I got my interest).

But growing up there were quite literally no resources to learn anything about computers or programming. All courses in school were "computing" which was Microsoft excel and word courses; if you were really lucky it would be Microsoft access. They were specifically tailored for office work, not understanding computers.

As I aged, I found courses on networking (specifically Cisco) in college, however they all closed the year before I could take them.

I did manage to take a college course but I had to commute 4.5hrs a day for 2 years to take it, which was quite demanding. And I was in the last group who could ever take that course. (It closed the year after I started, I was literally the last group in). And there the only thing they taught me programming related was Visual Basic. (Although they did teach me to crimp Ethernet cables).

Does anyone else have this experience in the UK? Did I just grow up in a bad area for computer science?

(I believe shortly after I left school they did start having lessons in programming though- maybe I am part of a weirdly lost generation)

<comment><USER6> The story I heard was that the UK Government, when designing a new curriculum for computing, consulted with Microsoft on what to include in the curriculum. Microsoft said office software would be really important and used the opportunity to pitch their own products. Now because everyone learned Office in school it's the thing that got used in the workplace and this self perpetuated up until a few years ago when (in England) I.C.T, which was the new name for the subject, got replaced by Computer Science which focused more on programming.

When I studied I.C.T, if the teacher knew how to code, she sure as hell didn't show it. What was it like with the BBC micros? Did the teacher know enough to teach the class? I know this is a problem with the current Computer Science curriculum.

<comment><USER7> > But growing up there were quite literally no resources to learn anything > about computers or programming.

This logical jump doesn't seem to make sense to me. Almost every developed country on earth used Microsoft Office in the second half of the 90s and the 00s. Why do you think in the UK it was specifically caused by it being taught in school, when it was also successful everywhere else when it was not taught in school?

<comment><USER8> > > But growing up there were quite literally no resources to learn anything > about computers or programming.

> This logical jump doesn't seem to make sense to me. Almost every developed > country on earth used Microsoft Office in the second half of the 90s and the > 00s. Why do you think in the UK it was specifically caused by it being > taught in school, when it was also successful everywhere else when it was > not taught in school?

Because the reason why every developed country used Microsoft products was corruption (you can call it lobbying if you feel good).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A _BBC Horizon_ (1978) episode at [https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/9d86b9d9acd846addced1578b0a1167f](https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/9d86b9d9acd846addced1578b0a1167f) quite clearly poses many of the questions currently in vogue regarding automation, its limits and its social impact. Amazing in some ways how little has changed. (Although perhaps television is far less lucid and the majority of people are no longer capable of sustained, rational debate?)

 _Real time trading systems don 't exist yet in American banks._

 _It takes man-years of work to prepare even simple software programs. Software is now a major cost in computers, often as much as 40% of any new application._

 _Some people believe that we must change from hardware to software: that we should stake our future on the chips - not by making them, but by programming them - and that we should use our software skills to develop high technology industries around them._

 _What will happen then to the men in today 's jobs? Can we all live on the wealth of automatic factories and the earnings of an elite band of 60,000 software engineers? It's time to think about the future... _ (49:50s)

 _Undoubtedly, I think we 're already in to a second industrial revolution._ (51:30s)

 _Silicon Valley, I am told, is filled with British experts._ (1:06:10s)

 _If, in fact, the silicon chip enables you to be more efficient, and proficient, then it equally assumes you have higher profits._ (1:09:30s)

 _In the long run we could build a better society [...] it depends on how wealth and income is shared. In the short run there is going to be tremendous social upheaval and I think no one would disagree with that._ (1:11:10s)

Another one broadcast exactly 40 years ago _today_ ... [https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/44f192e61ad3dbcbccd2311a15be4fd9](https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/44f192e61ad3dbcbccd2311a15be4fd9)

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting to learn about this and compare it to the American experience. I was born in 1982, and my educational computing history was all Apple; Apple II, then the Mac, then the Performa, and then I can't quite remember. But Apple all the way through. We had nothing close to what's being described here, which I have to give the BBC a lot of credit for.

In the earlier ways of my education, there wasn't much more to computer classes than letting us play games like Oregon Trail and SimCity. Later in middle school (for me, 1994-1996), we were introduced to Hypercard and MacPaint and WordPerfect as entry points into the computer as a professional tool. Hypercard in particular really stands out for me as a formative moment. It wasn't until high school (1997-1999) that elective classes were available for programming and multimedia art.

Much like some of you, I learned to "program" virtually by purchasing C and C++ books and learning things on paper, with no compiler and no way to actually run the things I was learning. But I consider myself very blessed to have been raised in the time that I was, in a school district that I consider to be fairly ahead of the curve in allowing and introducing computers to the students.

With all of that said, 99% of the most useful (and fun!) exploration came from my simultaneous discovery of the BBS, art (ANSI/ASCII), and demoscenes. But that is a whole other comment!

</comment><comment><USER11> Watch the 2009 docudrama "Micro Men" from BBC Four.

<comment><USER12> Or watch Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser watching "Micro Men": [http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/news/55409/](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/news/55409/)

<comment><USER11> The pub "fight" scene and the Mensa flirtation scenes are the best. There's no way that actually happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Such "great" memories, such amazing games.

I remember being at school, aged around 7 or 8 (I was born mid-70s) and we had an assignment to draw stars with a certain number of points, using the BBC Micro.

I followed the instructions, but I think I intentionally drew the last line of the star to be off-by-one degree (or maybe 5? I don't recall). From there the loop would begin again. I made some pretty Spirograph-style patterns on the screen and got a enthusiastic-yet-confused well done from my teacher.

My teacher for 2nd year Junior school was Mrs Hurley, Elizabeth Hurley's mum. My big brush with fame was that my mother threatened me with adoption by the Hurley family. I'm not sure how much she actually discussed with them, but my memory of that period is patchy at best. Yes, my mother was not a nice person to me growing up.

I also remember my chip and board designer father being disappointed in ~10 year old me for wanting to play games instead of learn assembly and other very difficult tasks. I think for my 11th birthday I got a "create games in machine code" or similar book, with a "go on then" pat on the back. Definitely left a lot to be desired in the motivational and emotional support departments, my parents.

(sorry to be all personal and emotional, just this post dredged up some memories that had lain dormant for a long time)

</comment><comment><USER14> When were these programmes shown on regular British TV? '72 here and don't remember it at all.

We had a classroom full of BBC Micros at school but for the most part they were used to play games. My introduction to computing was through the ZX Spectrum home computer and the electronics magazines of the time. By the time I chose my GCSEs I don't recall a single hour of computer instruction given by the school so I question how useful The BBC Micro project really was.

Given that the GCSE Computer Science syllabus (or whatever it was called in the 80's) didn't cover anything I hadn't already self-taught myself I skipped and continued to learn on my own time. It didn't help that the GCSE was in BBC basic (even at 15 I knew this wasn't something used by 'real' computer programmers) and the math teacher who taught that class was barely computer literate.

Turns out Electronics GCSE was largely filled with metalwork kids throwing components at each other but the teacher was enthusiastic and knowledgable.

Side note - I had initially thought that Systems Analyst was a good career path to pursue only to be told by my secondary (high) school careers councilor that software was a dead end because 5th generation languages would make programming obsolete within 10 years. I'm still waiting.

<comment><USER15> > When were these programmes shown on regular British TV? '72 here and don't > remember it at all.

Throughout the '80s.

There's a timeline on the website: [https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/timeline](https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/timeline)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This wave of computer-literacy programming was actually started by a series from the BBC's commercially-funded rival ITV, Christoper Evans' _The Mighty Micro_.[http://www.retro-now.com/the-mighty-micro-itvs-forgotten- com...](http://www.retro-now.com/the-mighty-micro-itvs-forgotten-computer- program/) [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqrLFTwrYemNYgb- hPXd3...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqrLFTwrYemNYgb- hPXd3Kiwe0L8vuyIr) (Evans also appears as a guest in the CLP's _The Silicon Factor_. [https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/b5047fb21312089c95fdf482cda3c697](https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/b5047fb21312089c95fdf482cda3c697))

I wonder if anyone has chased down people who remember Dick Brodner's circa-1980 home-automation setup in his Chicago house [https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/e0417b82d1c1a84345852bf21916073e](https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/e0417b82d1c1a84345852bf21916073e) , or found out what became of it or if anything remains of it?

</comment><comment><USER17> My career got started because of these programmes.

I even spent 5 years working as an engineer at the BBC. There were plenty of BBC micros around performing ad-hoc tasks.

</comment><comment><USER18> I recently contacted the BBC regarding this as I was involved in the curation of a temporary exhibit at The National Museum of Computing.[0] David Allen, the producer, along with a couple of others involved, were very friendly and keen to see this acknowledged for helping the home computer boom in the UK. For me personally, I don't think I would be where I am today without these programs. [0] [https://www.tnmoc.org/news-releases/2020/1/21/reliving- brita...](https://www.tnmoc.org/news-releases/2020/1/21/reliving-britains- heyday-in-1980s-home-computing-at-tnmoc)

</comment><comment><USER19> This was an amazing project for its era. There are millions of people who can trace their livelihoods to this project, and billions of people who can trace something they use everyday directly to it as well.

I know its fashionable for Brits to kind of beat up on themselves for how the computing industry shook out, but from this project came ARM and modern mobile computing. And without the inspiration from this time, we wouldn't have the Raspberry Pi series. It's an incredible global legacy that actually _worked_ as it should have even if precisely the effect of it wasn't what was intended.

</comment><comment><USER20> Having seen this I was wondering just what an impact this project had on the software industry in the UK, but the comments have this pretty much covered.

I'm not directly involved, but I've always had an affinity for computers since my junior school had one, and I got to take home the manual for the BBC one summer holiday - came back full of ideas of what I could do with it. I was allowed by my form teacher (who was a maths teacher) to use it as much as I wanted during break and lunch times, and whenever I finished the Friday afternoon maths exercises I could go on the computer (handily I finished them early, I was good at it back then).

Amazingly in my secondary school (from ages 11-16), computers were 'only for the kids who were bad at maths' \- the (grammar) school I went to had a really regressive policy, and looked down on them. Crazy - I had a ZX Spectrum (couldn't afford a BBC!), and did programming in my spare time. Never wrote a single line of code at school, despite wanting to.

Fell by the wayside, alas, and now at 48 I'm trying to make up for it, but the BBC project had such potential for all kids in my era.

</comment><comment> saw-lau Thank you _so much_ for posting this - can now work through all of the programmes while stuck indoors! Such wonderful nostalgia.

</comment><comment><USER11> ARM processors, such as the one in every iPhone and many other mobile devices, are descendants of the processors used in Acorn computers, the manufacturers of the BBC Micro.

</comment><comment><USER21> I worked on the bbc machine (and its precursors). Was employee 21 at Acorn. Wish I could say I contributed significantly, but not really. I was there though! Wrote some of the Atom OS among many other things. And the "filing system" that wrote files to cassette tape. Now that was a startup (Acorn, I mean).

</comment><comment><USER22> I remember reading about the project and the BBC Micro in a nice writeup at the Two-Bit History blog: [https://twobithistory.org/2019/03/31/bbc- micro.html](https://twobithistory.org/2019/03/31/bbc-micro.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> '78 reporting in. We had a BBC Micro in our school library in Derbyshire. That coupled with the Speccys and c64's floating around at the time are probably a large part of why I'm sitting here in SF working at a senior level in big tech. Thanks BBC.

</comment><comment><USER24> I got my first taste of programming thanks to this!

Around age 8, my school had BBC Micros and they taught us to solve picture- drawing puzzles using the LOGO language.

</comment><comment><USER25> The Spectrum Next needs to be mass produced. While the raspi is wonderful - <AUTHOR> need an 80's machine with all the pain points removed.

</comment><comment><USER26> I remember this!</comment>


Valve plans to sell apps via Steam ranging from "creativity to productivity" - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/08/08/valve-plans-to-sell-apps-via-steam-ranging-from-creativity-to-productivity/

<comment><USER2> What will this mean to the Ubuntu Store (and other distros "appstores") since steam is arriving on linux? I know competition (even if it's against a free service) and new things move the world but god damn everything is a mess, everybody wants to sell everything and make their own software haha.

</comment><comment><USER3> Soon? They already are. That article is from August 8th.

<comment><USER4> Valve announced this today: [http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/30/valves- first-non-game-...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/30/valves-first-non- game-steam-greenlight-software-now-available-50-apps-and-games-launched-so- far/)

I think the submitter got confused.

<comment><USER3> Ah, that's more interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the correction, thanks guys.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


LinkedIn Co-Founder Apologizes for Deception in Alabama Senate Race - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/reid-hoffman-alabama-election-disinformation.html <comment><USER2> > They also used thousands of Twitter accounts to make it appear as if > automated Russian bot accounts were following and supporting Mr. Moore, > according to an internal report on the project. The apparent Russian support > for Mr. Moore drew broad news media coverage.

also from [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/22/faceboo...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/22/facebook- suspends-five-accounts-including-social-media-researcher-misleading-tactics- alabama-election/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4eb218b514da)

> Morgan's efforts have stirred controversy because of his role at New > Knowledge, which has helped Senate lawmakers uncover the means in which > Russian agents weaponized Facebook, Twitter a

So person in charge of detecting "the Russians" couldn't find enough Russians and so he made his own Russians and possibly altered the results of US elections.

</comment><comment><USER3> > But at least a few Democrats thought their party could not shun such tactics > entirely if others were going to continue to use them.

And so the deception arms race has begun. Social media messaging is a toxic influence when centrally managed, inherently anonymous, or publicly accessible.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ironically, the company mentioned in the article for spreading disinformation has the following mission statement: "New Knowledge protects your brand from social media disinformation by identifying fake accounts, fake news, and propaganda campaigns."

Why choose white hat or black hat when you can profit from both sides. Ingenious!

—-

"The money went to a small group of social media experts that included Jonathon Morgan, the chief executive of New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm.

They created a Facebook page intended to look like the work of conservative Alabamians, and used it to try to split Republicans and promote a conservative write-in candidate to take votes from Mr. Moore.

They also used thousands of Twitter accounts to make it appear as if automated Russian bot accounts were following and supporting Mr. Moore, according to an internal report on the project. The apparent Russian support for Mr. Moore drew broad news media coverage."

</comment><comment><USER5> However misinformation for engagement didn't bother him on LinkedIn.

</comment><comment><USER6> So he apologizes now that he's been caught? Classy and totally believable.

<comment><USER7> And what is anyone in Hoffman's social circles going to say? "Aw, damnit, Roy Moore could have won if it wasn't for you"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every part of culture, every discussion, everything is a life and death political fight to half the country, whether on the left or the right. In their eyes, if you're not fighting against the other side you are complicit and the ends justify the means to power.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is apology in this case admission of guilt? And if so, can there be judicial intervention?

</comment><comment><USER10> This actually something that needs to get a special investigator too. Really really disastrous.

<comment><USER11> Why a "Special" Investigator? This isn't law enforcement investigating itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Basically, he's too rich to know where he's spending his money.

A good problem to have, but clearly he recognized this was a big screwup and he fessed up. Not more one can ask for.

<comment> fake-name > Basically, he's too rich to know where he's spending his money.

If you have that problem, _you have too much money_.

I've periodically considered a limit on the money people can have. I think if we limited people to a maximum wealth, after which taxes were 90+%, it'd go a fair way to fixing a lot of the issues with the world. Something like 10 million dollars seems reasonable.

(Note: this ignores all the ways people would weasel around any real-world legislation. Please don't argue about that, it's a thought experiment.)

<comment><USER13> Can corporations have unlimited money? 10 million barely makes payroll for some medium-large businesses.

And a thought experiment isn't not subject to discussion... otherwise why post it?

<comment> fake-name I'm open to discussion, just not "this is stupid because people would hire tax lawyers which would ruin it". I _know_ that, but it's a fanciful idea.

Anyways, a limit on personal wealth would need to be accompanied by a limit on corporate wealth (or corporate size, or some other lever).

Really, the thing that it all would require to make work would be the ability to make things illegal on the basis of _intent_ (e.g. intent to circumvent), which gets sufficiently close to thought-crime that makes me uncomfortable (and realistically makes the idea nothing but a pipe-dream). However, without some mechanism for preemptively dealing with rule-lawyering and such, I can't see any way to actively improve society with such a measure.

It'd be nice if there was a sort of duck-typing for laws. If it quacks like a tax haven, and walks like a tax haven, the technical definition of it is irrelevant, and it should be treated as a tax haven/whatever mechanism for tax avoidance. Unfortunately, that sort of rule-of-law requires a significant value-judgement by the judiciary that is untenable given the current legal structure, at least in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting how so many leftists who hate the koch brothers and their big money spending are fine with billionaire tech elites throwing their money around

But I suppose that's not surprising considering the top 10 richest districts and 73 of the top 100 voted democrat

[https://finance.yahoo.com/news/midterms-one-party- controls-w...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/midterms-one-party-controls- wealthiest-184200649.html)

Citizens United needs to be overturned ASAP

<comment><USER15> Huh? Overturning Citizens United is a key goal of "leftists", so much so that Bernie Sanders talked about it continuously during his campaign.

The entire GOP continues to vilify Soros though and seem perfectly content with Citizens United.</comment></comment>


Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ <comment><USER2> "oh our precious search deal"

Where was the free and open source distributed search engine?

"oh we cant support any protocol or any other technology! We don't want to be promoting anything! Unless we get paid of course!"

Where was p2p video? Why no BitTorrent? Not to long ago hosting video on a server was crazy expensive but at that time people still visited small websites.

It should have been as simple as:

<video src="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:0b239d7ccff9c46e816ba4f4b3ff813bea3691f5"/>

But in stead we got youtube which is short for: adware, censorship, spying, completely unreliable, a crazy resource hog to the point of not working on hardware older than 5 years.

And then there is privatized law making & privatized law enforcement.

If I put stuff out there from my own computer from the comfort of my house I'm subject to plenty of laws and regulations created by my democratically elected governments.

There are no multibilion robots shooting from the hip, there is no false- positive punishment without dialog. If I break the law the situation is carefully examined, I get fined or even imprisoned. Its not a perfect system but its better than persecution by robot.

The Google constitution (TOS) is something like: We may terminate you at any time without explanation.

That's not someone you want to enter into a relationship with.

Something modeled after YACY should be the default search engine. Its wonderful, you have it crawl the pages you frequent and it finds everything, other users crawl other things, nothing google could ever do.

In stead, if I type "1+1" in the search box you send me to google to solve the problem.

<comment><USER3> There are two problems with decentralized / federated p2p approach.

(1) Everyone pays for the infrastructure. That is, you pay for storing and serving the videos in a p2p video service. You pay for crawling and forwarding the search results to users of a p2p search engine. It may be unnoticeable if you run a beefy desktop / server on a 100 Mbit connection from a major metropolis. It becomes worse on your laptop or mobile on a metered connection, or on a rural DSL.

(2) The speed and reliability of a distributed system depends on all its nodes. SREs running a bunch of servers at many nines is one thing. You and me running goodwill p2p nodes is another. To achieve comparable reliability, many more nodes would be needed. Also, with enough nodes, p75 latency may be okay, but p99 is going to be poor. Compare to torrents, where last month's content may arrive in seconds, and obscure content from 5 years ago may take days.

The sad thing is that most people are not ready to shell out the amount which marketing companies pay for the ads they see. Even less are they ready to make their experience slower and requiring more technical chops.

For the few that care, there's PeerTube, ipfs, distributed search, etc.

If Mozilla only tries to pursue goals that have a chance of global success, I'm fine with that. Let them keep Firefox and Rust in a good shape; more than enough for me.

<comment><USER4> You're talking like we're still back in 2010 or something.

(1) Digital Ocean, Vultr, and Linode Boxes have a 300 Mbps port size, under polite use. That goes for every instance type. Search engines like Manticore or anything besides memory eating java things like elastic search can run under constrained environments in a cluster and when used with SSDs are really damn fast. Then there is Cloudflare who's services, as long as you don't abuse them, can help with massive distribution. Not to mention all of the storage backends that exist with really, really cheap storage. Backblaze, Wasabi, hell when some ingenuity you could probably use Dropbox apis for long term unlimited storage. This is your backbone.

(2) For extra redundancy and better distribution you can add in p2p which if used correctly can propagate new data to users within reasonable time frames and allow for data storage to be more resilient. Easily less than a minute in streaming environments.

Also, while IPFS is nice it doesn't have the resiliency necessary for the future. Mozilla won't do this but neither will any other browser making company.

<comment><USER3> Sure, the infrastructure is there for the tech-savvy.

But people who has at least a vague idea how to configure their own server are a small minority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Using Firefox on android I would only get the 'old' style Google search results. I installed a popular user agent switcher extension (featured by mozilla) that made me appear to be Chrome when on Google sites and I got the same rich results page as a Chrome user and it worked perfectly.

I had to uninstall it as I started seeing captchas everywhere. The recaptcha v3 test page gave me a score of 0.1. After uninstalling this jumped to 0.9.

<comment><USER6> > I had to uninstall it as I started seeing captchas everywhere. The recaptcha > v3 test page gave me a score of 0.1. After uninstalling this jumped to 0.9.

Wow, I had no idea this was the cause. I thought it was just Google straight up ranking Firefox lower (whether intentionally or due to bugs) because they don't care about fixing the experience for Firefox users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The sad part is that people are naive enough to think that companies that need/want money... are doing things for the better evolution of mankind, or for a better web, or for a better future. Companies are here to make money. Competitive companies will try destroy one another, always.

Google does not give a f... about users/web... They care like any other company to make money, because without money they cannot survive, just simple as that.

If the roles were inverted... Mozilla would have done exactly the same thing...

<comment><USER8> Mozilla is a non-profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone at Google want to make an anonymous account and confirm/deny? :)

Stuff like this really disgusts me, if it's true. The saddest part is that non-technical consumers will never care about walled gardens or the gradual centralization of the internet - because the truth is, the more centralized we get the more convenient everything becomes.

<comment><USER10> Stuff like this is never an outright order to break competitors. Most of the "features" requested for google sites would be solely chrome "features" that would break on the rest of the browsers.

Google also did the same thing with Internet Explorer/Edge where they put a transparent div on top of youtube videos that was "designed to give focus to videos" but broke youtube videos for all IE users.

<comment><USER11> >> Google also did the same thing with Internet Explorer/Edge where they put a transparent div on top of youtube videos that was "designed to give focus to videos" but broke youtube videos for all IE users.

In real life they did it accidentally, and then kept it when realised it works against Microsoft. Also kept the plausible deniability? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Was it also Google who decided that Mozilla had to spend a majority of their money on things other than Firefox development?

<comment><USER13> Yeah, Mozilla is wasting a ton of money, but they wont admit it unless Google stops funding them and they run out of ad cash. Even then i have a fear their marketdroids will start selling out their users (see Mr.Robot debacle) as a grasping to avoid losing their parasitic jobs, before giving up (and it wont be they who will lose).

All they need is programmers to write the code for the browser and someone to manage the servers where the code, bugtracker, wiki and website are hosted, anything else is unnecessary and frivolous waste of resources. Get rid of the parasites.

<comment><USER14> Thank you. From the Pocket stuff over Cliqz debacle to the Mr. Robot thing that went really wrong, i'd like to see Mozilla focus on their core product more, and less on any sort of auxiliary thing. I would love to have somebody correct me though if that's an unfair statement.

<comment><USER15> I second this I don't think it's unfair in the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm getting kinda tired of Google's bullshit. It's a small step, but as of today I'm ditching Chrome and moving back to Firefox.

<comment><USER17> Every step matters!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> See also:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19662852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19662852)

</comment><comment><USER19> Google was also blocking Microsoft Edge at every turn. I still suspect Microsoft countered this by intentionally blocking Adsense/Doubleclick ads like 50% of the time.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been on Firefox since 2014. Never looked back.

<comment><USER21> I've been using Firefox since around 2003 or 2004 - whenever I bought my first MacBook Pro. Firefox was way better than Safari. If I ever do need something that would "require" Chrome, such as a Chrome app, I use Chromium rather than Chrome, since I run only free/libre software on my Libreboot laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Stuff like this seemed to happen a lot back when webOS was a semi-serious contender in the mobile OS race. I remember that many times the downgraded functionality and bugs could be "patched" by changing the user agent. At the time I didn't think much about it, but it may have very well been a strategy to make android more "competitive"

</comment><comment><USER23> Gmail's memory usage seems to unreasonably balloon with time on Firefox for me. I wonder if it's intentional...

<comment><USER24> Fwiw this happens to me on Chrome too, for pretty much every Google app (Drive is probably the worst offender, especially because it's functionally just a static page when I'm not using it!)

</comment></comment><comment> way-way The chief way by which google and the rest of the adweb companies sabotage Mozilla's stated mission is through executive incentive alignment, everything else is mostly irrelevant details (he said momentarily forgetting who the audience on this site was).

</comment><comment><USER25> 'Chrome as the only option' is a hugely significant strategic issue for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER26> The same could be argued about Mozilla. They've gone out of their way to oppose Google at the W3C, at the expense of developers and users of the web.

List of good Web tech killed in W3C by Mozilla:

1\. NaCl/PNacl

2\. WebSql (in favor of the far worse and cumbersome indexed db)

3\. HTML5 storage / filesystem api

...

The grudge seems equally bad on Mozilla's side

<comment><USER27> > 1\. NaCl/PNacl

In favor of WebAssembly, which is a much better tech in terms of actually being able to achieve interop, no?

<comment><USER12> No, not really.

I have contributed towards Chrome's implementation of PNacl and wasm a few years ago. Wasm is _still_ not anywhere close to the capabilities of PNacl and has all the signs of a 'design by committee' specification. I will be (pleasantly) surprised if wasm gains more traction.

<comment><USER27> A major problem with PNaCl, as far as I can tell, was the Pepper dependency. And, again as far as I can tell, Google never came up with a credible plan for solving that problem (e.g. by creating an actual implementable spec for Pepper).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brutal Realities of Being a Founder - <AUTHOR> http://getfireplug.com/blog2013/05/10/5-things-founder-willing-talk-about/

<comment><USER2> No doubt. Being a startup founder is a f%@#ng nightmare. Fear, doubt, anxiety and stress are your constant companions... and pretty much your only companions. Nobody else understands what you're talking about even if you _do_ get somebody to listen to you babble. Every time you glance at Hacker News, or Google News, or Twitter you're seeing something about one of your competitors: getting funding, landing a big new deal, announcing a new product, etc. Nobody wants to return your calls or answer your emails, and all the people from various entrepreneurial support groups who supposedly exist to "help" entrepreneurs also don't understand what you're doing. Angel investors roll their eyes when you try to explain why your thing is going to work. VC guys will talk to you, only because they're hedging their bets in case you _do_ actually manage to get some traction. Servers crash, there's 2000x more work to be done than time to do it... the guy at Fedex Kinkos even thinks you're crazy and starts giving you business advice when you go pickup the latest batch of brochures. The waitress at the restaurant asks you why you don't "pivot" to a better business model. Your dog thinks you must be insane to keep going. You wake up in a cold-sweat thinking about the crisis of the day and trying to figure out how to make the impossible happen with no resources. The other startup founders you meet at "startup happy hour" events are all working on inane "cat picture social network" sites and can't have an informed conversation with you about your "Semantic Web and Social Networking For The Enterprise" startup. You'd have to be insane to keep doing this. You try to signup for a subscription at Hoovers.com but they don't do online signups anymore, forcing you to call and talk to somebody for a brain-dead simple transaction. Code that compiled perfectly fine yesterday won't compile today and you know damn well you haven't changed anything. You have nightmares about IBM launching a product that does what your thing does. Dating? You haven't had time to think about dating since Christopher Eccleston was playing The Doctor. You wonder, did your subscription to Triangle Business Journal just expire? Can you afford to renew it? Your $DAYJOB boss won't quit reminding you that "startups are a lottery and you probably won't win". You check the latest Hacker News post and it's filled with people talking about how all success just comes down to luck, and mocking the idiots who think they can actually influence events. Random people at Barnes & Noble are silently judging you as you sit there with your coffee and code... staring with their ghastly, pale faces, mocking you with their grotesque eyes, damning you with those horrible, hollow, eldritch eyes... the eyes, My GOd Th3 3yes _!% &#&(()&@&$#@+%^HNO CARRIER_

And then you realize that you wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. Because at least you don't have some jackoff $BOSS leering at you going "Sooooooo, Peter, how's it going? You _did_ get the memo about the new coversheets for the TPS reports, right"??? And you know that at least, win, lose, or draw, that you did it your way, and that you gave yourself a fighting chance at putting yourself in control of your own life. And because whether or succeed or fail, you learned valuable lessons in the process, and at least you did build _something_ damnit, even if it wasn't everything you wanted it to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> god this was a great comment. I laughed multiple times. Fedex people have stared at me as I sweat over which size to buy because of different costs. My friends who is a banker will send me business advice like he knows wtf he is talking about, but constantly talks down to me about "getting a real job in finance"... My dog literally wants to lay down on the day I'm just walking so I don't have to sit in the office or go home and talk about things, or other days is freaking out because I've been sitting in front of the computer all day.

basically, everything above is #RealTalk

<comment><USER2> Thanks. It was fun writing that. Both because it's mostly an accurate rendition of my thought process on a day to day basis, and because it was fun to try and throw in some nods to a couple of the greats who have inspired me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good stuff. Couldn't agree more. Being a founder is no easy task, most people think you're bat shit crazy, don't understand what you're doing or saying and it can definitely bring you down at times. But you know what - KEEP MOVING FORWARD. Forget the doubters, always be optimistic, stay alert, pivot when necessary, keep pushing forward and eventually - you will make it happen. If it was easy, everybody would do it. So to all on HN that are lonely, broke, confused, feel down and depressed at times, feel that the world is closing in on them - send me an email and let's chat! Haha!! Just keep on going guys, eventually it all makes sense (to everyone else, it already makes sense to us!!)

</comment><comment><USER4> Good post but fix those typos and grammatical errors before you submit to Hacker News man!</comment>


Writing a JIT Compiler in C# - <AUTHOR> https://www.mono-project.com/news/2018/09/11/csharp-jit/ <comment><USER2> For those interested in writing their own compiler in C#. There was a decent article a while back written by Microsoft employees with example code provided. Looks like MS have archived the post, but you can still browse the code (almost unadulterated) here:

[https://github.com/johandanforth/good-for-nothing- compiler](https://github.com/johandanforth/good-for-nothing-compiler) (not my github)

And read an expanded/in depth version of the original article (with a link to download the original source) here:

[https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/vihavain/k14/code_generation/pr...](https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/vihavain/k14/code_generation/project/msdn.microsoft.com%20-%20cc136756.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> The appendix ( _Converting Stack-Based OpCodes into Register Operations_ ) is the most interesting part to me. Targeting a stack machine is much easier when writing a compiler for the first time, but real-world machines are generally register based.

I couldn't find the authors' logic in a cursory look at the source code. Does anyone know where it actually is?

<comment><AUTHOR> _Targeting a stack machine is much easier when writing a compiler for the first time, but real-world machines are generally register based._

In general this is true, here however, we are targeting LLMV IR which is register based with _infinite_ registers; so it's kinda easy again :-) The hard part, register allocation, is actually done by LLVM.

This class implements the conversion: [https://github.com/lambdageek/mono/blob/mjit/mcs/class/Mono....](https://github.com/lambdageek/mono/blob/mjit/mcs/class/Mono.Compiler/Mono.Compiler.BigStep/CILSymbolicExecutor.cs)</comment></comment>


A nice podcast with the author of "Founders at Work" (Jessica Livingstone) - <AUTHOR> http://mfile.akamai.com/17650/wma/amazoncomh3.download.akamai.com/17650/wm.amazon.usa/books/JessicaLivingstoneInterview.asx <comment><USER2> Great submission, thanks. Just finished my fourth interview in this book tonight.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will hopefully get "Founders at Work" by March 14th. It is actually a birthday gift from my sister :p (along with 3 other books). I can't wait to get my hands on it `:D

<comment><USER2> I clicked 'reply' to recommend you an interview to start with, since I began reading out of order.

But no need -- start from the beginning and work your way in. They're all gems. There's a nice introduction from pg himself too.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome Daniel! I am currently busy reading "Small is the new big", "The Wisdom of Crowds" and "Unleashing the ideavirus" but I will drop all these as soon as this book arrives. I hope the content is thought provoking.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Fx - Poor man's serverless framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/metrue/fx <comment><USER2> Sorry if I mistunderstand. The readme is very limited. But this need a (vps or something) server that I own / manage ? It does not seem to upload the functions(s) to some cloud ?

In general I think 'serverless' means deploying code without managing some kind of server yourself.

<comment><USER3> It's a poor man's readme

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Your guys are so right about fx's 'Poor man's README, I will update it soon. Long story short, you can deploy fx on a host (cloud or localhost), then you can deploy a function to be a service in few seconds, just like AWS lambda ( but Poor man's lambda).

</comment><comment><USER4> Even the README says you need to start a server. So it's not quite serverless.

("Serverless", at least to me, means a platform where I don't have to worry about running servers.)

<comment><AUTHOR> README is not quiet clear, but for my understanding, lambda is kinda thing that helps you to do serverless, but lambda is also running on some kind of server maintained by AWS, right? fx is kind of lambda, but owned by yourself.

<comment><USER4> Well, yes, you can run your own server to provide yourself a serverless platform, but it kind of defeats the purpose... Since then you end up having to maintain your server anyway.

I suppose there may be a point to it if the serverless platform is extremely stable and never has any security issues or other things to update.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this just `up`?

[https://github.com/apex/up](https://github.com/apex/up)

<comment><USER6> `up` looks like it only runs on AWS. This seems nice as the only requirement is docker and I can run it on my $3USD VPS

<comment><USER7> Where do you get such a cheap VPS? I'm paying $5!

<comment><USER8> I pay $2.5 per month here: [https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7195281](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7195281)

<comment><USER9> I've had good experiences with Vultr as well. I'm surprised they're not more popular.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The new Yahoo homepage - <AUTHOR> http://m.www.yahoo.com/ <comment><USER2> I like the look better than the old one. Much cleaner.

But yikes! What's with the giant modal box covering the whole thing, demanding I bookmark the page? Why is it popping up full-page ads over the rest of the content because my mouse strayed over the links on the left?

Terrible.

Yahoo, if you're listening, here's my advice: Keep the design. It's pretty. Now strip out _all_ the javascript from that page. Then I'd consider using it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand Yahoo!'s focus, except that they own a large assortment of web properties (e.g. flickr, Yahoo! search etc.). I don't understand the positioning of the elements on the page and their relative importance. I don't understand the choice of the colour purple (very edgy, certainly not a majority favourite - ever seen people dress in purple??).

People are smart enough these days to know, who's the market leader in certain categories. The walled garden approach will not deter them from seeking out the best product just because Yahoo!'s own product is featured on their portal. This is essentially an early version Internet strategy, or the AOL approach, which will work for novice computer users, but as the population becomes more tech-savvy, will show ever diminishing results.

One strategy that IMHO makes sense to me surviving as a portal (aside from their web properties), is that of a personal aggregator, like netvibes, so the front page becomes a customized dashboard reflecting users interests.

<comment><USER4> I interned at Yahoo for two summers, but I worked in Break/Fix for the search clusters. I was no where near marketing.

As far as I could tell, non-tech-savvy users are their target audience... and there are way more of these people than you might think. Plus, Yahoo's finance property is pretty good.

Funny that you mention netvibes - I use it, but I use it as a glorified post- it note rather than a portal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 50% of the hover window always dedicated to advertisements? No thanks.

<comment><USER2> Hover windows at all. Please stop it.

For 15 years, the way you open a new page of content is by clicking something. This interface breaks that expectation by following links as soon as you mouse over them. That is a terrible UI decision.

If I want to open one of those panels, I'll click on it. That's what I've been taught to do by every website I've ever visited. There is absolutely no reason to change such a valuable affordance. So don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like it a lot better than the old one. They made a sensible and easier to navigate homepage while keeping the 'portal' concept at the forefront. Doubt this will turn the tide in their favor against competitors, but it is a good aesthetic step in the right direction. I also like the video they made for this <http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=14758196> .

<comment><USER7> I think I like late Jan '97 a whole lot better.

[http://web.archive.org/web/19970124192912/http://www10.yahoo...](http://web.archive.org/web/19970124192912/http://www10.yahoo.com/)

The further to the right on the internet wayback page you get the more annoying the yahoo site UI becomes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I will say this: they do things right. I added Dawdle as a site, and Dawdle search just did a site search on Dawdle for the search terms and kicked out Yahoo search results as good as Google's for each and every term I could think of. Now, if they could recognize that there's a search box and spit me out to Dawdle's SERP for my inputted search term, they'd get my homepage, no question.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yahoo is my default homepage and for a while there has been a link in the corner to view the new design. I didn't click on that till now, since then my default homepage is the new design. Looks about the same as before to me. If they get rid if the zooming cars, flying birds and other zany nonsense ads I will probably just live with... or not... maybe its time to try a different home page, any suggestions?

<comment><USER10> <http://ysearch.com/> ? ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yahoo needs to try something new and different. No amount of rearranging tabs & links or switching fonts is going to make a bit of difference in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cool video, going for the we'll throw a heap of acronyms out to wow the average internet user.</comment>


The piece of paper that fooled Hitler - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12266109 <comment><USER2> I from a crypto history book I read in high school: in WWI, German intercepts of Russian transmissions have the Russians illusions of German tactical genius. Somehow, Germans would often be in position to confound the Russians. The reason for this: Russian code clerks were badly trained. Sometimes there would be a couple of attempts to send a message followed by a plain-text transmission by the frustrated code clerk. This was a tremendous boon to German cryptographers in the long term as well as a giveaway of tactical maneuvers in the short term.

In WWII, the Germans had their turn at incompetence. Enigma machines were supposed to be "warmed up" by 3 random characters. The purpose of this is like an Initial Vector or a "nonce" in modern block cipher use -- a bit of entropy to help obscure often almost identical message headers. A lot of German code clerks were lazy and just typed in "AAA", which helped out the Bletchley Park cryptographers a lot.

Modern crypto technology is often very good, but only if used correctly. Security fails most often because of _human error_. (This includes programmers!)

<comment><USER3> While we're telling war stories. ;) Nonces played a role in a major American blunder too.

During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Admiral Halsey moved his massive Third fleet out of position to chase a Japanese ruse. The Japanese then moved their Central Force through the gap and attacked the much smaller and ill-prepared Seventh Fleet.

The commander of the Seventh Fleet sent several desperate messages asking for Halsey's help, causing Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor to send a message to Halsey asking, simply "WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR?" (Task Force 34 was the Third Fleet's detachment of battleships).

His clerk changed the message to WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR? And then, while forming the message, added the beginning nonce "TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG" and the trailing nonce "RR THE WORLD WONDERS". The "GG" and "RR" were indicators of the end and beginning of the nonces.

Halsey's clerk removed the first nonce, but left the last one "THE WORLD WONDERS" as part of the message, apparently missing the "RR". So when Halsey got the message, it read "WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR THE WORLD WONDERS".

Halsey interpreted the message as sarcastic criticism of his decisions by a commanding officer over official channels, and flew into a rage. He then decided to delay the Third Fleet's assistance of the Seventh Fleet, ostensibly to refuel his destroyers.

Had he sent the battleships immediately, they likely would have crossed the Central Force's T and crushed them. It would have been one of the greatest (and last) battleship duels in history.

Of course the blunder didn't affect the outcome of the war, or even the battle in a strategic since. The Seventh Fleet was able to turn the Central Force back, mostly through self-sacrificial courage on the part of the destroyer crews.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_world_wonders>

<comment><USER2> _the Third Fleet was able to turn the Central Fleet back on their own mostly through self-sacrificial courage on the part of the destroyers._

I know of that action from documentaries. Basically, the destroyers engaged heavier ship classes which they theoretically had no hope against. In some cases, "charged" is actually more apt than "engaged."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like this story, because it draws the whole complex masquerade operation together around a nice focal point.

Fortitude was a very complicated operation (see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude>, it even involved faking two entire fictitious armies :D) but executed brilliantly - one of my favourite pieces of war history.

<comment><USER5> Amateurs! One modern leader of an impoverished 3rd world country managed to fake an entire nuclear, biological, chemical warfare capability and the ICBMs necessary to attack Britain within 45mins.

And he did it so successfully we were forced to invade.

<comment><USER6> After doing it once, he had a lot of credibility when he said "Hey, remember the centrifuges the Germans helped us build in the 80's? and the chemical weapons we bought from Germany, refined with French equipment, and used to genocide the Kurds? Yeah, we're doing that stuff again."

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Al- Anfal_Camp...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Al- Anfal_Campaign)

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Iraq_and_weap...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did anyone else notice that the BBC tarted up their headline to the point that it's actually false? The piece of paper was written by the Germans. It didn't "fool" them. It was proof that the Germans _had_ been fooled, but I guess that's not quite as good for linkbait.

<comment><USER5> If you have broken the enemies crypto AND he doesn't know you have - then you can also send fake messages which they are going to believe.

So the Brits could have sent a message ordering a few panzer armies from Normandy to the Pas de Calais. It doesn't seem that this was ever done - presumably because it gave the game away.

Even more interestingly - the Brits kept secret that they had cracked enigma into the 1980s because after the war they distributed the 'uncrackable' German code machine to lots of rather gullible allies

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the headline I thought this was going to be about Operation Mincemeat (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat>) which is a pretty amazing story.

<comment><USER9> I thought the same thing, and was very skeptical about all this 'published for the first time!' as I could swear there was a fictional-historical movie made around the 60's based on the premise of Operation Mincemeat!

<comment><USER10> Perhaps you're thinking of "36 Hours", where German psychologist Rod Taylor tries to convince drugged and captured Army officer James Garner that the war is long over, the Nazis vanquished, but he's suffering from amnesia that occurred years later. As part of your therapy to recover your memory, if you could just confirm that you remember where and when the invasion occurred... Mincemeat is offstage, but I think it was part of the set up.

Saw it in a theater when I was a lad -- too young to properly appreciate Eva Marie Saint, alas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In light of this I'd like to point out jgc's efforts to help preserve Bletchley Park: [http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/1000-for-bletchley-park- thanks-t...](http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/1000-for-bletchley-park-thanks-to- geek.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is very tangential, but I just happened to finish the "Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman last night. If any HN military history buffs have not read it yet, do pick it up. Although about the opening of WWI, it provides some great insight into both World Wars.

<comment><USER13> Amazing book, highly detailed. Watching the madness of supposedly rational men bowing to militarism and nationalism, whipped along by supposedly inviolate plans and timetables, creating the conditions for not one but two world wars...it's all the stuff of nightmares.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. And yet, you walk away better understanding how those nightmares can become reality. By chance, I picked up Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" from a sidewalk seller, and was struck by her ability to address so many parts of a whole. After finding that she won the Pulitzer for "The Guns of August", I had to read it.

I've heard that JFK was a big fan of "The Guns of August", and made it required reading in his cabinet.

As an aside, Tuchman is now recognized for the following reflection, which is often paraphrased as Tuchman's Law: "Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena."

Oh, BTW: On the topic of encryption, I can't believe the Russians were sending unencrypted orders in WWI over wireless!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me, I'm still reading _Cryptonomicon_. I find Stephenson's work to be really hard to get into, then hard to put down once you do. Guess I'll keep at it.

</comment><comment><USER15> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat> should also be noted. Not only an amazing story/execution, but its successful outcome did have; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat#Impact_on_l...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat#Impact_on_later_operations)

Well worth reading the book by the same name.

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol>

Somebody needs to make a movie about this man.

<comment><USER17> There's a documentary (2009, imdb link: <http://www.imdb.es/title/tt1344315/>) called "Garbo, the Spy" (Garbo was one of his nicknames). It's in spanish but i'm pretty sure there are english subtitles on the DVD.

This work won the Goya (Spanish National Cinema Award) last year for better documentary.

I read the article and thought: "At least, some british recognition to Pujol" :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know if all the intercepted German WW2 dispatches have been decrypted? If there's a pile of undecrypted dispatches sitting in a vault somewhere, it could be of great interest to historians if someone applied modern computers and code-breaking techniques to them.

<comment><USER14> We wouldn't need any codebreaking techniques; we know their encryption method. I suspect feeding the papers through OCR would be the most time consuming part. I doubt decrypting would take any longer than SSL.

<comment><USER19> We know the method, but we also need the key used for any particular message, unless Enigma has been thoroughly broken. IIRC (from _The Code Book_ ), at the end of the war Bletchley park couldn't break German naval messages. (They used the same machine as everyone else, but with less predictable messages.)

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER20> Wasn't the whole point of Collossus that it was brute-forcing the messages on the more complex Naval keys until it found a candidate match? That's certainly what I remember from visiting Bletchley Park.

In any case, there are now (finally!) software implementations that are significantly faster than the reproduced hardware Collossus, so even if I'm not fully right brute-forcing messages should be viable.

<comment><USER21> From my understanding, Collossus was not used against Enigma, but rather, Tuny (an teletype based 5 bit XOR stream cipher).

<comment><USER20> Tunny was the British codename for data from the Lorenz machine, which is what Collossus was working on. The original Enigma machines were attacked by Bombe machines developed by Polish codebreakers pre-war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett is a great fictionalized spy novel centered around Operation Fortitude and spy catching in the UK during the second world war.

</comment><comment><USER23> Fun fact: The RUSI official quoted in this article, Amyas Godfrey, was a child star on _You Can't Do That on Television_.

<comment><USER24> Well, now there's an interesting fact I don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Pretty monumental read, going to take its place in the history books. Nice to see the wide range of HN articles out there.

</comment><comment><USER26> the brits did quiet a few things right, apparently

</comment><comment><USER27> I want to know how one actively becomes a 'double agent' - anyone know any books that tell the 'story' here or in similar cases?

<comment><USER28> Because of their code-breaking, British intelligence was able to catch most German agents as soon as they arrived. Some of them were given the opportunity to "turn double". One example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman>

<comment><USER29> Note that "given the opportunity" meant "given the choice between execution and turning double agent", though some chose to turn themselves in and offer themselves up as double agents of their own will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So thanks to this piece of paper West Germany and probably Itay and Austria too didn't become communist states because the Americans got there before the Russians?

Phew.</comment>