Keeping Your Company Asshole-Free - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hackfwd.com/post/33289256086/klass-kerstin

<comment><USER2> I was surprised to hear that they ask candidates to spend a couple of days working on a project, and then present that project to the company. That's a substantial time investment to ask someone to make on top of interviewing. If I was looking for work and every potential employer asked this of me, searching for a job could take weeks or months.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I am totally against hiring based on either stupid interview questions or tricky programming problems you will never see again. However, I think these guys take it a bit too far.

Maybe give them a project that only takes a couple of hours, just creating a simple module that does some very basic thing. Try to find out how they work rather than the final result.

<comment><USER4> The project/task really depends on the position applied for. All i can say is, that the project is usually discussed in advance and things can be worked out here. There are some fine folks here who were given projects which took only a couple of hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Re slide 20: I recall reading that it's a myth that people who use the word "I" a lot are particularly self-absorbed. I recall it being suggested that the opposite might even be the case, perhaps because people were acknowledging the subjectivity of their opinions rather than presuming to present an indisputable statement of truth. I would look for a link, but the word "I" is hard to google.

Edit: I might be thinking of this, or something like it: [http://www.businessinsider.com/what-does-your-use-of-the- wor...](http://www.businessinsider.com/what-does-your-use-of-the-word-i-say- about-you-2011-8)

<comment><USER6> > acknowledging the subjectivity of their opinions rather than presuming to > present an indisputable statement of truth.

I actually try hard to use _I_ wherever possible for that particular reason. Saying "I think a message-passing style would be best for this" is more honest than "a message-passing style would be best for this".

<comment><USER7> I don't agree with this because whenever you write something it becomes obvious that it is your opinion, even if it shared by other people. If it is somebody else's opinion and not yours, you would naturally say "somebody else's said ..." If you want to emphasize that is just not your opinion, you can also say so. It is much more cumbersome to keep adding "I think" when it is implicit in the context.

<comment><USER8> When you're the boss, your opinions are often interpreted as decrees. Tempering your tone with qualifiers is necessary to get others to share their opinions honestly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For some reason I took an immediate dislike towards the speaker, perhaps because I had previously read the article about programmers having a negative outlook (i.e. they're prone to being assholes) and his silly attempts to please the audience by making jabs at marketing and PR staff. How do you separate assholes from people you dislike for mostly unfair reasons?

</comment><comment><USER10> His presentation on slideshare: [http://www.slideshare.net/flaregames/keeping- your-company-ah...](http://www.slideshare.net/flaregames/keeping-your-company- aholefree)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great to see this post here on Hacker News! I work at flaregames and wholeheartedly agree with Klaas, we're asshole-free and that's not an understatement. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't help but wonder why I had such a bad taste in my mouth after watching the whole vid. These cheap attempts at jabbing PR and Marketing people (not to mention naming names and Deutsche Telekom 'joke') came off to me as cheesy and badly thought.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm enormously glad that Apple board did absolutely not keep their company asshole-free.

Writing this on computer that asshole created.

And btw, I do not know a single Genius (with uppacase G) who is not an asshole, so go figure...

<comment><USER13> I've met Donald Knuth, Steve Wozniak and Tim Berners-Lee; none of them seemed like assholes to me. I can't think of anyone I've met, whom I respect but consider an asshole.

By "Genius (with uppacase G)" you mean an Apple Store employee?

<comment><USER12> You are most likely correct in this. All geniuses I have briefly met are indeed nice. But usually this is a mask. Wait until you get to know them really well. Or read their bioagraphies. Oh, and I don not write this in negative way, no-no, I just have observed that that's the way it is.

<comment><USER14> I think you are confusing genius with something else. I'm not sure what yet though. Possibly a badger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it amazing how many people in a team _don't share_ their insights, assets or experiences with the team. Why is that? Is it fear?

<comment><USER16> It's probably the "I don't get paid for that" attitude ...

<comment><USER17> That is the worst. The "That's not my job" attitude is from people who are not team players and believe that they are above doing certain work, regardless if the work needs to be done. If you work in a problem solving profession, then you just can't have this attitude, because eventually someone is going to ask you to solve a problem outside your domain, and if you can't figure it out, then it doesn't get done or they get someone who will figure it out.

Although people bringing their stapler to the IT help desk is one of those times I might not be mad if the response was "That's not my job"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's always hard when you think "I was being an arsehole at that time". Hard, but good to realise. I think I had that moment just now!

In case you think I believe I'm always an arsehole, this isn't the case. But there have been times I believe I was. I'll have to work on it in future :(

<comment><USER19> I can't argue against you because I don't know the specifics. But to me, it seems those that are the most worried about themselves being assholes are the least assholish of people. People who do behave as genuine assholes never reflect upon their own behaviour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> that's really great hiring advice. i love this process!

</comment><comment><USER21> Define asshole, please.

<comment><USER22> A person counts as an asshole when, and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/10/ascent_of_t...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/10/ascent_of_the_a_word_by_geoffrey_nunberg_and_assholes_a_theory_by_aaron_james_reviewed_.single.html)

<comment><USER21> Thank you. Seems I'm surrounded by assholes then with such a broad definition. My thought was that an asshole (in general sense) was someone who always put himself first. Thats why I did not understand the post as well as I'd like. Again, thanks for taking the time to explain.

<comment><USER22> The Slate link really is worth reading. Assholology is _the_ hot topic these days, and I have frequently found that reflecting on my _own_ asshole quotient is more worthwhile than focusing on the assholes around me, to the point where I begin to consider that assholes aren't ALL bad!

<comment><USER21> Your definition made me stop and think about _how big of an asshole I really am_. It is tough to somehow relate and try and measure it, because I reason a lot of social interactions and judge them as logical entities. Like you said not all assholes arent that bad, because not all of them realize they are assholes.

Though your term used to define it is wonderful. I would major in asshology if given the chance. But it would require a minor in chraminology. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to create your mobile app backend with Kinvey and ql.io - <AUTHOR> http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2012/11/01/how-to-create-your-mobile-app-backend-with-kinvey-and-ql-io-2/

<comment><USER2> ql.io looks powerful. How much time does it take to learn/build the integrations?</comment>


Scipy - the embarrassing way to code - <AUTHOR> http://www.vetta.org/2008/05/scipy-the-embarrassing-way-to-code/ <comment><USER2> I've done lots of Matlab development, and this is too true.

Python is going to replace Matlab, but the pattern in the same.

People aren't really used to thinking about matrices and vectors as primitive types and operations.

By the way, this is an excellent resource for learning Matlab. <http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/16-720/handouts.html>

Look at the "working with images" section. If you manually touch every pixel in an image, you're doing something wrong. You code will be 5X as long, and 100X as slow.

</comment><comment><USER3> _The bottleneck in writing code isn't in the writing of the code, it's in understanding and conceptualising what needs to be done._

Good observation, succinctly stated. Most of my days are spent trying to figure out what I need to do, not how to do it.

<comment><USER4> Exception: interfacing with 3rd-party libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is exactly why I have urged people to learn Matlab (on this forum and others). Specifically, I'm sick of seeing hundreds of lines of code written in Java that are essentially a poor (slow) implementation of a one liner in Matlab that uses a 20 year old fortran library. I have to go back all of 8 days to find the following quote in response to my plea:

"...and I question the usefulness of learning MATLAB unless you actually need it."

The problem is, most people don't realize they need it and just plod along writing hundreds of lines of python, perl, ruby, java, etc. implementing a decade old numerical computation.

<comment><USER6> When you write a lot of matlab it becomes a different way of thinking. Instead of the for loops multiple levels deep you can write it all as operations to multi-dimensional matrices.

I would agree that many problems people spend time on can be found as single commands in matlab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The comments here on Matlab have me intrigued. I'm ignorant and have a few newb questions. How does it compare to the APL family of vector languages (J/K/Q)? How does it compare to Mathematica? What roughly are the licensing terms for commercial use (i.e. if you want to build a product with it)?

<comment><USER8> I would suggest looking into NumPy/SciPy instead of Matlab. Matlab has a very good library for numerical computation but in my experience, Matlab is absolutely terrible as a language for anything except matrix stuff.

NumPy gives you a good matrix syntax while building on an excellent general purpose language. Personally I felt NumPy is a lot cleaner and Python a lot more fun than Matlab though Matlab has many many "toolboxes"/libraries not in NumPy.

<comment><USER9> I second this sentiment. The difference in natural expressiveness is almost painful

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the deeper idea to take away from this is that knowing more theory is always a good thing

<comment><USER5> What does this have to do with theory?

<comment><USER9> if you don't know any of the theory behind a problem, you don't even necessarily know if theres a solution thats useful in practice.

A good example in Computer Science is the various reductions (efficient or not )between different problems, where you relate the difficulty of the problem to any other computational problem which you find you're able to encode within the structure of the orginal problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article seems to have two messages: one that it's better to fully comprehend the problem before you start coding; the other that learning a powerful library will save you pages of code. Both well rehearsed truths of computer programming.

As for myself I often find that I have to fully explore the problem on my own terms before I can maturely optimize my source.

<comment><USER11> _it's better to fully comprehend the problem before you start coding_

Often the best way to understand a problem is to try to implement a solution.

<comment><USER10> That's a very true observation mhartl and I try to touch on it in my last sentence although it is enigmatically worded as I was trying to sneak a "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" reference into it. Alas not all wordplay is destined for upmods!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> give J (an APL descendant) a try, it has some good tutorial thingies that appear right in the console thingie:

<http://www.jsoftware.com/stable.htm>

and here's a post about it:

<http://www.squidoo.com/jprogramming>

<comment><USER13> > give J (an APL descendant) a try,

J is not open source. Might be a factor to consider.

From the J site,

"Jsoftware licenses source for all the Jsoftware binaries. There are several factors in determining the cost of source licenses. Primary is the source itself: J Engine (portable C); Windows GUI support (C++); and Unix GUI support (Java). Secondary is the scope of use: internal; distributed products; and competitive (to Jsoftware) products. And finally the platforms: Windows; Unix; PocketPC; etc. The price range is from $10,000 to $400,000. Regular updates to our current source levels are available for separate update fees."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't believe nobody has mentioned Sage Math (<http://www.sagemath.org/>).

It's sort of a set union of every good free math program.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've noticed a similar conceptual pattern while investigating meta- programming. I think there's something fundamental going on here. Something that conventional programming constantly misses. Something remarkably simple, consistent and powerful. It's where code is data along a continuous path of transformations.

<comment><USER16> Read Godel Escher Bach. Given the comment above, you'll like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great article. Learn the hard way and it'll stick. Plus it's fun.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a familiar story, regardless of technology.

The more you work, the less you appear to have.

The efficiency paradox.

<comment><USER19> "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint Exupéry

<comment><USER18> Bulletin board material.

<comment><USER19> I have it posted at my desk in a nameplate frame. I try to adhere to it. I often fail.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can someone tell me how to reverse engineer this? - <AUTHOR> There is a neat little tool out there called HDDScan. It has the ability to SpinUp and SpinDown Hard-Disk-Drives, which does exactly what it sounds like. I badly want to know how it is able to do that. I already wrote Artem Rubtsov, but received no answer.
Since you can invoke this functionality via a command line parameter, i thought, it should not be that hard to just monitor its behavior with some Api monitoring tools. But no success. Even after some hours into IDAPro, i still have no idea...
But it somehow must go through the Win32 API, right?
No one seems to know, how to accomplish this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5367065/spin-down-hard-disk-programmatically-on-windows
Can someone help me, please?
Best regards <comment><USER2> It's not Windows of course, but you might look at hdparm [0] which does a similar thing on Linux. It's a wrapper around ioctls, which led me to 'Winsock IOCTLS' [1] which is maybe helpful.

`GetPwrDiskSpindownRange` page [2] has s potentially useful remark:

> _Starting with Windows Vista, power management configuration of the system > 's hard disk drives is controlled through the GUID_DISK_SUBGROUP power > settings subgroup. Use the PowerEnumerate function to enumerate individual > settings. For more information on using PowrProf.h, see Power Schemes._

But all I did to find that was search "spindown" on MSDN, so I'm sure you've seen that already.

[0] - [http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/zesty/en/man8/hdparm.8.h...](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/zesty/en/man8/hdparm.8.htm)

[1] - [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/bb7...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/bb736550\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[2] - [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/aa372692\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

<comment><USER3> Seems like there exists a win32 hdparam port

[http://axh.mbnet.fi/hdparm-win32.html](http://axh.mbnet.fi/hdparm-win32.html)

Fwiw hdd spin up / spin down is an ACPI function and you might want to research ACPI tools to see if that's possible using these tools.</comment></comment>


Amazon is eating the software (which is eating the world) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gardeviance.org/2016/11/amazon-is-eating-software-which-is.html <comment><USER2> Outsourcing generic business functions to external APIs is a current trend because fewer people want to duplicate efforts and "reinvent wheels" and trust in cloud computing increases.

AWS has a lot of potential to play a great role here but that doesn't mean they'll "eat all the software". There are similar marketplaces already, e.g. [https://algorithmia.com](https://algorithmia.com).</comment>


Stack Overflow: the Blind Leading the Blind - <AUTHOR> http://blogging-harmful.blogspot.com/2008/08/stack-overflow-blind-leading-blind.html <comment><USER2> _"... a working template that they could use to base Stack Overflow on: Usenet. Usenet has been around for almost 30 years now, and newsgroups like comp.lang.c++ are still active and full of experts discussing a wide variety of topics. But no, Jeff and Joel would rather make an Ajaxy shithole with no reason to draw true experts in. ..."_

It's not great to see an example of the Nerd bully at work. Anonymous, negative and probably wrong.

This is a bogus article. Why? Well firstly you can't gauge the writer? Who has written this? They have an opinion but everyone has opinions. So what is the meat of the writers idea:

      "Usenet is an active hive of technical
       users who know all the right answers"

Usenet is an example of a broken model. Sure you can ask a question and get an answer. You might get 50. So how do you work out who's is right and the best? Force of personality? Discussion? By the time you have followed this discussion the noise/sig has diluted the answer possibly for the person who asked the question. What about others who ask the same question 5 years down the line? Where is the knowledge trapped? How are the experts identified? What you get is a unfocused threaded discussion arguing the merits of proposed solutions punctuated by the random Star Trek pun or maybe a lame Simpsons joke.

The ideas behind Stack Overflow are worth looking at. Forget who is doing it. Don't like Joel or Atwood, Fine. But finding answers to specific questions, finding good answers, evaluating responders and filtering the best results and preserving them is a worthy idea. The filtering of information and building the reputations of users who contribute is proving to be a real problem. Something to look at a bit closer.

The questions and answers might be crap at the moment. But maintaining that an archaic system is the best way to do things is making a statement about the writer.

<comment><USER3> How about figuring it out by reading the answers and analyzing them?

Using my brain to critically assess what people tell me has always worked for me, and I usually -- for any nontrivial problem -- end up combining the ideas from all the (correct) answers. As for finding them later, I find searchable archives work wonders for that.

<comment><USER2> _"... How about figuring it out by reading the answers and analyzing them? Using my brain to critically assess what people tell me has always worked for me ..."_

Sure you can. But is there a better way? Can your way scale? Will your brainpower & intelligence be recorded and replayed for others?

Look at it another way. Would you take this approach to evaluating other types of information, links for example? Would you make a list of all the good websites and organising them for others to read? Or would you organise links utilising computers, software & inferred information form humans to do the same thing.

Yahoo vs Google?

<comment><USER3> _Would you make a list of all the good websites and organising them for others to read?_

Aren't you posting on a site that does just that? Manual contributions of stuff that people found interesting? Or were you thinking more of something like bookmarks in my web browser?

<comment><USER2> _"... Aren't you posting on a site that does just that? Manual contributions of stuff that people found interesting? ..."_

And at the same time illustrating the point of a Usenet Q drifting from the point and increasing the noise :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting - my StackOverflow answer (XOR) is now the subject of a blog post that's reached the top of Hacker News.

To clarify part of the article, the time granularity on the site isn't enough to pinpoint in what order the comments were made on the thread. Daniel Jennings' edit to his post existed before I posted my answer, so it's not his reply to my answer.

Every part of Stack Overflow is run and moderated by the community except one: the selection of the accepted answer. As long as you have one person in charge of selected answers you will always have to deal with their particular biases, which decrease the value of Stack Overflow as an objective reference to programming questions.

It might be a good idea that in addition to the answer selected by the asker that there be a community selected answer. This would be completely orthogonal to the up/down votes for the questions, and would only allow one selected answer per person per question. An approach like this would greatly serve to make Stack Overflow a more equitable and fair system.

In any case, I've had tons of fun learning new information and teaching people some of the tricks I know. I hope to see some of you there!

<comment><USER5> Clever solution.

Sometimes XOR seems magical (like with the XOR swap trick). Though in hindsight, it seems like the question was designed for the solution, not vice versa. XOR just happens to do exactly what we need in this case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting post. I agree with this, and I see at work often. The blind leading the blind, especially when you have new people in the team comming in. A smart newcomer will eventually realise the advice they are getting is not good, and move on to somebody else.

"What would be the best algorithm for finding a number that occurs only once in a list which has all other numbers occurring exactly twice. So, in the list of integers (lets take it as an array) each integer repeats exactly twice, except one. To find that one, what is the best algorithm."

I want the hacker community to answer this question (which seems more like a typical interview question). Ideas?

<comment><USER7> I must admit that I didn't understand his XOR solution. Can someone explain it?

<comment><USER8> Here's an example in python:

      >>> import random, operator
      >>> nums = (range(5)*2)
      >>> random.shuffle(nums)
      >>> nums.pop()
      1
      >>> nums
      [0, 4, 0, 3, 2, 4, 3, 1, 2]
      >>> reduce(operator.xor, nums)
      1

<comment><USER9> To clarify for non-Pythoners/non-coders: If you assume "nums" already contains the list, most of his code above is setup. You only need these two lines of his code to get the answer:

      import operator
      answer = reduce(operator.xor, nums)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow. This guy really hates Jeff Atwood.

Must be flattering to have someone go to so much trouble just to troll you. Nicely done, Jeff.

</comment><comment><USER11> That trick of his at the end of the post to give you access to StackOverflow is a classic. Funnier, though, if once you've done it, you use any OpenID at your disposal to log in - it generates an empty account for you within their system.

Of course, this could actually work out well as only people with a smidgen of interest in using the site will bother to try it.

<comment><USER12> Its not that big a deal. The cookie just gives you access to the private beta (which you could have gotten by just sending them a mail).

Once you have access to the beta, you can always create a new account whenever you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There seem to be a few different ways to use XOR on sequences of integers (or for exchanging the contents of two registers), and they're worth learning if you ever need to go on a job interview with someone who uses "Aha!" style technical questions.

Beyond that, however, I'm left scratching my head. Just the other day zenspider and I were debating whether the k combinator is a useful tool for programming or whether it is "clever" code. Am I wrong in thinking that using XOR for finding an integer that only appears once is rather clever?

<comment><USER4> You are correct - the problem was probably constructed with that intended result. The specifications are unusually precise when it came to how the input was formatted. If they were any less precise XOR wouldn't work.

        ..a number that occurs only once in a list which has all other numbers occurring exactly twice..

<comment><USER13> I think somewhere in the "drafts" of blog posts that never made the light of day is one about "programming by isomorphisms."

One of the greatest intellectual feats we have is to look at a problem and realize that it is isomorphic to some other solved problem.

A lot of "Aha" programming challenges either test for the ability to recognize these isomorphisms (or more likely, they are culturally biased towards people with a lot of social exposure to older programmers).

I suspect this kind of thing might be a test for a specific kind of intelligence. I do believe--in general--that all other things being equal, the smarter programmer is the best hire.

But gosh, I admit to fearing this kind of actual code in production. It looks like exactly the kind of thing that breaks--possibly in subtle ways--when one of the underlying assumptions turns out to be false or is changed.

Of course, changing assumptions are never part of the tests, so it might be "fair dinkum." So the follow-up question probably ought to be, "when would you actually use this device?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wait... don't the two solutions have the same time complexity?

The bitwise XOR approach should depend on the maximum size of the numbers (say k) along with the length of the array (say n) as O(nk), and just using radix sort on the array will take time O(nk) too.

If you assume that bitwise XOR is constant time, that implies that the numbers in the array are bounded by a constant, and therefore Radix sort can sort the array in O(c.n) = O(n). In either case, they have the same running time.

<comment><USER15> Good point, but no - XOR is clearly better. It is simpler and its constant factor is less than the constant of a Radix sort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wouldn't even start picking on the answers but I don't think that there are a lot of quality questions on stackoverflow. I quickly browsed through the ruby section and it was mostly questions that could be answered by googling or reading the documentation.

Maybe this will change after the beta is over..

</comment><comment><USER11> To this guy's point.. yes, the blind can be leading the blind, but _any answer is better than no answer_.

<comment><USER17> Not when the answer is seductively wrong. "No answer" means "keep on looking".

<comment><USER18> I think the site is _supposed_ to be for very specific technical questions, in which case there is less likely to be a 'seductively wrong' answer. Unfortunately most of the questions don't fall into this category, and either can't be answered objectively or leave more scope for 'bad' answers.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Pilot Projects Fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/why-pilot-projects-fail/250364/? <comment><USER2> LAUSD, where this pilot was done, is facing existential threats from progressive budget cuts, a school-board/teacher-union faction fight, and charter schools (however you feel about these things), and working on better school lunch is at best a sideshow to the real and huge problems. No surprise the pilot did not scale.

</comment><comment><USER3> _found students replacing the Beef Jambalaya_

Remembering my school days, I can picture a school cafeteria making an absolutely terrifying jambalaya. I mean, they couldn't get the whole dough + sauce + cheese thing down without the garbage bins getting most of the nutrition.

</comment><comment><USER4> The real issue is that school systems administrators are not food service experts. They are educators. Lunch operations should be entirely outsourced to someone who knows what they are doing, or else eliminated. Preferably the latter.

<comment><USER5> Eliminated? For some kids, it's the one reliable meal they get a day.

When it comes to feeding hungry children, the invisible hand of the marketplace does not have a very good track record.</comment></comment>


Gifty.co.nz -- gift lists made simple (my new little web project) - <AUTHOR> http://gifty.co.nz/

<comment><USER2> As per rrival and my reply, I'm not sure how you're going to get this to fly.

Australians and New Zealanders are notoriously thrifty when it comes to paying for websites. I'm not exactly sure what you offer that say a Google Document could do, apart from a nicer interface. It surely doesn't seem worth $10 to create a list of birthday presents (and I'm also unsure who would do that?)

I think you'd do much better partnering with someone like Stoeffels, David Jones, etc and getting them to pay you per person that signs up, or per purchase.

Also I think it's a bit offputting to put prices on there for things you don't offer, etc. Have you had any signups or actual payments yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> You might be right for birthday lists, but I think for weddings, $20 is not bad. Part of the reason I made Gifty is so people weren't forced to buy from a particular shop, or buy online, or whatever -- there are lots of such wedding registry sites our there already.

You're probably right about it being off-putting to put prices on there for things I don't yet offer. Fixed, thanks. :-)

<comment><USER2> I guess the problem is that people use wedding registries at stores as general registries anyway. For example, my wife and I bought some great stuff for our friends based on their David Jones registry, but found it for much cheaper at Peter's of Kensington. We then just called David Jones and asked them to take it off the list.

Not trying to trash your idea - you have good technology, now you need to monetize it effectively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why don't you make it free and make $ on the affiliate revenue?

<comment><USER2> Knowing the state of ecommerce in Australia and NZ I'd say because it just isn't profitable.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it's time to focus on a larger market? =) It is the internets after all.

<comment><USER2> Then I'd buy an international domain.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rod Rosenstein on Encryption at U.S. Naval Academy - <AUTHOR> https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/deputy-attorney-general-rod-j-rosenstein-delivers-remarks-encryption-united-states-naval <comment><AUTHOR> _" Responsible encryption is achievable. Responsible encryption can involve effective, secure encryption that allows access only with judicial authorization. Such encryption already exists. Examples include the central management of security keys and operating system updates; the scanning of content, like your e-mails, for advertising purposes; the simulcast of messages to multiple destinations at once; and key recovery when a user forgets the password to decrypt a laptop.

No one calls any of those functions a "back door." In fact, those capabilities are marketed and sought out by many users."_

No one?</comment>


How Area51 Hid Secret Planes - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/05/110520-area-51-secret-hid-craft-base-declassified-a-12-plane/

<comment><USER2> The article talks about the A12's like they were a failure for not being rolled out, but they made the SR-71 possible (and that whole project involved a lot of physical re-use as well as intellectual between the different planes).</comment>


Baltimore Tries to Use Eminent Domain to Condemn the Preakness Stakes Horse Race - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/volokh/2019/03/26/baltimore-tries-to-use-eminent-domain-to <comment><USER2> O'Malley had an uncanny way of destroying everything he touched. If these were actual public servants, they would do the no-brainer of moving the event to Laurel. There's no way that both tracks will survive.

<comment><USER3> Not everything is perfect here in Laurel, either. The track grounds are in disrepair, and there is a brewing scandal over housing conditions for workers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone have the paywall for the included WSJ op-ed?

source: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-baltimore-make-off-with- th...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-baltimore-make-off-with-the- races-11553459097)

<comment><USER5> If using Google Chrome, you can use the extension _Bypass Paywalls_ ¹

¹ [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- chrome](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back in the good old days, when men were men and men were free, gambling was legal in many parts of the state of Maryland.

It was unregulated. Free Market(tm) cultists would have loved it. Local municipalities were free to license gambling establishments as they chose with little oversight from the state. Maryland was surrounded by states in which gambling was illegal.

The Free Market(tm) saw such innovations as people building barges in the water on the Maryland side of the state border and then connecting them to land via docks and bridges to Virginia.

It was a golden age of Free Market(tm) Capitalism, where men were men and men were free, ahhh... the good old days!

In the 1960s, Las Vegas, Nevada and four counties in Southern Maryland were the only places in the entire United States of America where slot machines were legally allowed to pay out winnings in cash. Slot machines blanketed the entire southern half of the state and were found in every single business, to include doctor's offices and gas stations.

Unregulated, Free Market(tm) gambling brought with it a wave of crime and destruction that makes the troubled neighborhoods of today's Baltimore look like peaceful oases of quiet and safety and the gambling-fueled violence shocked the residents of Maryland so much that (until very recently) it was outlawed in the state, with few exceptions.

One of the few exceptions was horse racing.

As a condition of being allowed to continue operating, horse racing and betting on horse races was strictly regulated.

One of the regulations is that the races can only operate at facilities designated by the state, at times designated by the state.

The law that covers the use of eminent domain to retain the Preakness is not new. MD Bus Reg Code § 11-520 has existed for decades. It was the law when the current owners of the Preakness bought the rights, and obeying it is a requirement of their license.

The Free Market(tm) is incapable of supporting horse racing in Maryland, due to its reliance on public subsidies to continue existing.

The subsidies exist because tax revenue from gambling pays for the subsidies. The 50 or so gambling events per year pay for the facilities used year-round by other non-gambling equestrian activities.

The Free Market(tm) cannot be allowed to operate unfettered because absent strict regulations, piles of bodies tend to wash up in the Chesapeake Bay, their throats slit by organized crime gangsters fighting over their cut of the gambling revenues.

Ahh, the good old days! When men were men, men were free, men were free to murder their rivals to control the flow of gambling revenue, the Markets were Free and capital ism'ed.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you improve something, anything? - <AUTHOR> Do you have any general method? Is "improvement" a valid concept at all? <comment><USER2> Perfection is hard to achieve, seems like it would be the goal anyway.

You would have to improve all defects.

The worse defects obscure the lesser ones.

Ask not how do you improve, ask how do you not improve.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very broad question. But broadly, it would be:

Find out what "it" does, then change it so that it is:

1\. Faster

2\. Cheaper

3\. Less likely to break

</comment><comment><USER4> Define or determine the, or your, goal.

Identify existing solutions or methods, if any.

Determine deficiencies or frustrations.

Address significant ones of these you can tractably address.

Improvements may address inputs, outputs, results, experience (including UI/UX), robustness, scalability, speed, universality, extensibility, (revenue) conversion, risk, specificity, generality, and more.

TL;DR: Find an itch. Scratch it.</comment>


Mutant radioactive flowers in Nasushiobara (half-way between Tokyo and Fukushima) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/san_kaido/status/603513371934130176 <comment><USER2> I'll repost a comment I made in a discussion about the same image:

They are probably not "mutant" flowers, but "deformed" flowers. Do the offspring have the new shape? The flowers in the florist shop are filtered and you only see the good locking flowers.

For example in [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=mutant+flowers](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=mutant+flowers)

First image: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flower- Mutant-1145.j...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flower- Mutant-1145.jpg)

> Flower head with a mutated floret cluster (unknown species). (North Texas) > [...] 12 April 2009

Second image: [http://www.enchantedtree.com/flowers.html](http://www.enchantedtree.com/flowers.html) (near the middle of the page)

The image doesn't have a clear caption, but it's probably from Virginia in the summer 2004.

<comment><USER3> > Flower head with a mutated floret cluster (unknown species)

Gerbera x hybrida

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nor necessarily mutated or radioactive. This can be triggered by several pathogens or weather damage also.

But, if is mutated by radioactivity and is a stable mutation then you have a new and perfectly marketable product.</comment>


Flash Is Dead: What Technologies Might Be Next? - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/08/01/flash-dead-technologies-might-next/ <comment><USER2> POTS over copper wire. AT&T is legally obliged to continue offering/maintaining it (in California at least), but they don't market the service and you have to specifically ask for it.

a lot of people aren't aware of the situation. AT&T is continually trying to get out of their obligation (in California at least).

The fewer people who use it, the better AT&T's argument for discontinuing service becomes.

In the event of a widespread disaster, people who can make a phone call are going to have better access to emergency services.

<comment><USER3> They are jacking the prices up on renewal. They wanted 4x the current rate on every POTS line we had unless we bundled another service like wireless (cellular), DirecTV, or GoToMeeting

<comment><USER4> I remember paying ~$30/mo in 2012. Are you saying it would cost 50% more for one landline than an AT&T cell line with a healthy data plan?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I expect Microsoft to drop Windows Phones in the next 2 years, unless it rebounds, it doesn't make financial sense to continue investing in the platform.

<comment><USER6> It's interesting that the OS is not really a separate thing, after the unification of Windows they did. So to a greater extent than Apple and especially Google, the software side of MS's phone project gets maintained "for free"?

<comment><USER7> I imagine keeping windows compatible with 2 so different hardware platforms is far from free.

<comment><USER8> The hardware on a Windows 10 ARM tablet is more or less the same (Snapdragon 835) as powers a mobile, only the screen is larger and they remove the app that makes phone calls.

<comment><USER9> There's even rumors that the Phone Call app will even show up on ARM tablets with SIM cards at some point, for people that like the "phablet" thing. (Which is hand in hand with the rumors/indications that Skype might eat the phone call app entirely and just light up SIM-based calling if the machine is capable, regardless of form factor, possible with inter-device VOIP communication like it manages SMS pass-through, when enabled, now.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In my ideal world, PDF would be the next to die.

My problem isn't with PDF itself, but that it's overused in places where it really doesn't need to be. Academic papers are the big one, where HTML would almost always be a better choice. What's even more maddening is that papers aren't written using Adobe's PDF tools, they're written in TeX and then converted.

If you're an academic reading this, I implore you to please publish your papers in HTML (alongside PDF is fine too!). It makes them far easier to read, as browsers can reformat the document according to the readers needs.

PDF is a type-setting format for ensuring print-accurate documents. Please stop publishing content that is meant to be consumed online in it.

<comment><USER11> TeX isn't that widely used outside of fields like physics, math or computer science. Academics in others field like using Word.

<comment><USER12> TeX is great for very complicated situations, which doesn't describe what most people do.

<comment><USER13> (La)TeX is great when you don't want to manually handle formatting your text. I loved writing LaTeX for the simple reason that I could focus on the content, rather than having to constantly work on the presentation. The markup was simple enough that it did not get in the way.

Barring technical problems I much prefer LaTeX to Word or LibreOffice Writer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is questions asked really a good metric? StackOverflow actively discourages asking duplicate questions, and all the easy newbie questions haven't changed in a while, it seems inevitable that certain technologies appear to decline. I feel like traffic to questions, searches or other metrics would be a better indicator.

In particular, is facebook api usage really in decline? I'd be very surprised. For language/platform specific technologies, I would imagine if there were a decline the market for devs would get less tight. I'd argue that days a vacancy is open is a much better indicator than even raw number of job postings.

<comment><USER15> I think other measures would be more suitable.

Currently I am working with Mongoose and MongoDB. All the answers I find in StackOverflow are more than 2 years old.

<comment><USER16> I see the most recent question answered 5 minutes ago ([https://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=mongoose%20](https://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=mongoose%20)).

<comment><USER15> I didn't mean all the questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What about CSS preprocessors and grid frameworks? SASS/less and Bootstrap are heavily used right now and I like using them, but I can see the end of the road with CSS 4 variables and CSS grid (if not with flexbox already).

</comment><comment><USER17> It's a pity to see asp.net decline, MVC is really nice with great IDE support. If it's due to webforms dying then it's great news. It still angers me how webforms wasted my time as a junior developer thinking it was my lack of skill that made any page beyond the trivial extremely hard to build.

<comment><USER18> Before, I used to hate MS and .NET. Today I work as a .NET dev and love C# and .NET.

Honestly, I think the moves MS is doing right now is the correct ones. With .NET Core a lot of the "heavy" stuff has been liften away and projects can easily be run on any big OS.

I think we will soon see a rise in the use of ASP.NET. The productivity levels you get by using .NET and Azure is just insane.

<comment><USER19> I love C# but I'm moving away from it because I don't want to end up in a situation where my only hosting option is Azure.

<comment><USER18> I would say that with .NET Core, there has not been a better time to choose freely from hosting providers since you can basically run it anywhere.

You don't need to run Azure?

<comment><USER19> Maybe but I'm somewhat doubtful, Microsoft only really has an incentive to support Linux/Apple as far as enabling development on those platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think this is more or less accurate. Sad to see RoR to be declining.

<comment><USER21> I'm not a Ruby/Rails fan at all, but I work at a Rails shop. It would be interesting to know why the decline is happening, and what alternatives are replacing it. I suspect Elixir and Go.

<comment><USER22> Bear in mind that this is about Stack Overflow attention. It's quite possible that there's now sufficient documentation and experience in the Rails community that there's just less requirement for interaction with Stack Overflow!

It also seems likely that newer developers are going to be steered towards other solutions for web development.

<comment><USER23> If newer developers are steered elsewhere, then you have an aging population problem, which historically leads to decline.

<comment><USER20> Well we have discussed this in other threads already :-). That's the problem with Ruby in general that you can only solve certain problems with it. Beyond Rails,devops and some obscure embedded stuff they do in Japan there is not much that you can do with Ruby.

<comment><USER24> Embedded stuff in Ruby?

Now that's a story I want to hear. Any pointers?

<comment><USER20> Honestly I do not know. There was an article not long time ago mentioning that Ruby is not popular in Japan because of Rails but because it is used in a lot of places like embedded stuff etc.

[http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio- engineering/2017/5/...](http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio- engineering/2017/5/24/how-is-ruby-different-in-japan)

<comment><USER24> Thanks, that was really interesting. Guess I'll have to go and read on mruby now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> XHTML and everything associated with it. Well okay, it's probably already considered dead, since HTML 5 has replaced in it about 95% of contexts.

Turns out most people didn't want a web where a single syntax error could bring down a web page and went to the more relaxed HTML 5 the minute it was released.

And while they won't die as far as their main purpose is concerned, I suspect webfonts will become a lot less popular in future. The idea of using them for icons has turned out to be a non semantic nightmare that's best done with SVG or plain old images instead. So the likes of Fontastic may not be long for this world...

<comment><USER26> You're on to something. The xhtml fiasco has a lot of parallels to Flash, when you consider the ECMAScript history and its relation to ActionScript's evolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "If we would have been able to see Flash's decline in advance, what other technologies might be past their peak?"

People did see it! That one was easy. You couldn't convince Flash users.

Anyway, save yourself some time and skip the debate. It really wasn't worth it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Stack Overflow Documentation

<comment><USER29> I see what you did here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> For me, I'm replacing any of the ol' Flash style of thinking with Lua.

Specifically, MOAI: [http://getmoai.com/](http://getmoai.com/)

MOAI gives me everything that Flash gave me, but I have better (full) control over the stack, what goes into it, how its used, etc.

And then I just compile it all to Javascript and voila! No distribution hassles (except where I want it: i.e. when delivering to iOS/Android app- stores..)

</comment><comment><USER31> CoffeeScript. It had its time but it's focus on syntax failed to address much of what makes JavaScript difficult to work with.

jquery UI. Jquery still has some use in banging out a quick page but it too is no longer essential

Also possibly Bootstrap. What the hell is going on with development there?

<comment><AUTHOR> About Bootstrap: I, too, have questioned the viability of grid frameworks and CSS preprocessors here when we have CSS grids and variables, but I think Bootstrap is such a useful thing for a split designer/developer workflow that it'll live on and eventually converge into using CSS grid directly in a couple years.

Bootstrap team has made slow but steady progress over the last few weekends and is working on documentation issues, so it looks like a new release is imminent.

Update: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926640)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Flash Is Dead: What Technologies Might Be Next?

My vote goes to Platform-Dependent Apps.

<comment><USER33> Found a web developer.

<comment><USER32> Not really. I'm building apps on Web/iOS/Android. And it sucks writing the same code for three different APIs.

It's very intellectually unfulfilling work.

<comment><USER34> Write command line apps in C. The only platform that can't run them is iOS.

<comment><USER35> iOS can run Objective-C which is a superset of C, you can run the code natively and use Objective-C to display it.

<comment><USER34> iOS lacks fork and kills your app if it doesn't yeild for some number of milliseconds. It also lacks a shell and a video terminal emulator which are kind of nice to have for these sorts of apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wish Java and JavaScript were next! :-)

<comment> yoz-y I think JavaScript could be salvaged if, let's say starting with ES8, the new version would be incompatible and old scripts would require some legacy mode. That would allow fixing the major issues.

<comment><USER36> The problem isn't so much with JavaScript as it is with the JavaScript mentality - that is not to say JavaScript doesn't have a ton of problems.

No, the real problem is the mentality of cranking out new frameworks instead of actually building something useful on top of existing ones. Every year, the JS framework of choice changes to something new and you have no choice but to move on because the one you were using until recently has suddenly been dropped as the developers have moved on to the backwards incompatible next version.

And then there is the mentality of writing libraries for the most trivial of tasks - left padding, seriously?

<comment> yoz-y Javascript would benefit from something like boost. Not in a sense of a library because that already exists with lodash and underscore and what not. But in the term of community and acceptance: "Yes, boost is bloated and not always ideal, but it is almost always a better choice than reimplementing the thing"

<comment><USER37> Personally speaking, I wish this was Meteor.js - If only there was more hoorah for this tough as nails framework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Javascript

</comment><comment><USER39> Traditional web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, asp.net, apache wicket, jsf, Django and so on that generate HTML on the server.

Over longer term: proprietary mobile app development platforms (windows phone, apple ios, android).

All replaced by client side JavaScript.

<comment><USER19> My iPad 2 disagrees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It should be JavaScript, next: because JS is not Turing-complete.

<comment><USER41> Uh, not sure if you're referencing a joke or something, but just to make sure no one gets confused by your post: JS absolutely is turing complete, as is trivially demonstrated by implementing a turing machine in JS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Fossil fuel, hopefully.

</comment><comment><USER43> a wasm based animation framework.

<comment><AUTHOR> Err, the title is supposed to read "What Technologies Might Be Next [to bite the dust]?" I guess.

A replacement for timed/declarative animation on the Web is, of course, still needed (if for ads alone), but it looks like browsers/HTML5/JS libs are deemed good enough so instead of multimedia runtimes/engines we're going to see authoring tools.

Though audio/video sync and the state of SVG (and of SVG animation on FF in particular) leaves much to be desired IMO.

<comment><USER29> > _is, of course, still needed (if for ads alone)_

I think "needed" and "ads" should not go into the same sentence...</comment></comment></comment>


Google Chrome 51 disables HTTP/2 on most Linux distros due to old OpenSSL - <AUTHOR> https://ma.ttias.be/day-google-chrome-disabled-http2-nearly-everyone-may-15th-2016/ <comment><USER2> And right about here is where the claims that dynamic linking is better for everyone's security update schedule just falls apart, for this reader.

Dynamic linking does not make it easier to update things. There, I said it.

Updating things confidently and safely requires -- as the article wisely references -- testing those things, and the entire matrix of other things they interact with.

Static vs dynamic linking simply doesn't register. In _either_ case, the newer versions need to be built, and then tested together.

The only thing dynamic linking does is make it possible for distros to hamstring themselves[^] by tossing _everything_ into one big cauldron, so _nothing_ can be upgraded because it requires _testing too much at once_.

And here's the endgame. "Is OpenSSL getting updated on $distro?" "Nope."

Sigh.

\---

[^] And this is a red herring, in turn: dynamic linking isn't the real enemy either; it's the global sloppile approach to sharing dynamic linked libraries that really causes the mess. NixOS and others like that still use dynlinking, and yet have successfully immunized themselves from these problems by using content-addressable library versioning. So let's stop with the "dynlinking is better for security updates" claims. It's not. It's either unrelated at best, or actively a ball-and-chain making things harder and slower, and I submit as evidence OpenSSL versions across these distros.

<comment><USER3> I would be the first to agree that dynamic linking is evil, but how is this related with the issue at hand, which is client-to-server communication? No amount of static linking of Chrome would magically upgrade the SSL version being used to package Debian, for example.

What am I missing here?

<comment><USER2> Chrome did not previously rely on a dynlinked system library for the negotiation feature. Now, evidently, it does.

In making this transition, Chrome experienced a massive practical regression for many users, precisely because the dynlinked library is not sufficiently up to date for many people.

I'd say dynamic linking is related to the issue at hand, yeah.

<comment><USER4> No, it's not. The article is about missing support on the server side, not in Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Chromium team's blog post about this suggests that > 99% of HTTP/2 connections are _already_ negotiated with ALPN [1]. I imagine all of the CDNs and other large providers already use ALPN, so this mostly affects the long tail of small sites. It seems like the claims in the above blog post are overblown.

1 - [http://blog.chromium.org/2016/02/transitioning-from-spdy- to-...](http://blog.chromium.org/2016/02/transitioning-from-spdy-to- http2.html)

<comment><USER6> I have this strange suspicion that they could push the change to Google's servers and get ~30%. Add reddit, CNN, and ESPN and they're pushing 90%.

<comment><USER7> They might reach 30% with just Google -- but Reddit, and even more so CNN and ESPN are insignificant as percentages of web traffic, whether in the US or (even worse) globally.

CNN is not even in the top-50 websites, and ESPN is not even in the top-100 (e.g. in the Alexa index).

Heck, pornsites like xhamster have far better placements than either.

<comment><USER6> I'm old.

Google, YouTube, and Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're stuck on a OpenSSL version without ALPN, and don't want to deal with upgrading OpenSSL (or rather statically linking your web server to a newer release), consider using caddy[1]. It's a HTTP/2 web server written in Go, which comes with its own TLS library (crypto/tls) and thus doesn't have any dependency on OpenSSL. It even supports automatic deployment of a publicly- trusted certificate through Let's Encrypt.

[1]: [https://caddyserver.com/](https://caddyserver.com/)

<comment><USER9> I'm not a golang user, but I am curious, how hardened is the crypto/tls library? One of the reasons I use openssl is because I don't want a DIY crypto layer, I want something a lot of people have banged on. I'd hate to move to a new server, just to find out it is susceptible to a whole new set of Ye Olde Underrun Bugges that openssl patched ages ago.

<comment><USER10> It is maintained by Google and the whole go community since it is in the standard library. So, I think it is fairly secure (probably not as well tested as OpenSSL but the attack surface is smaller, bugs and security risks are still there, though).

What is important is that the library is not hardware accelerated and it thus uses a software accelerated AES cipher. So, I think it is a bit slower, but you would really have to measure it yourself.

Upgrading your Load balancer should not be that hard, though.

<comment><USER11> It supports AES-NI on x64 architecture, if available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Support for OpenSSL 1.0.1 will cease on 2016-12-31 [1], so distributions need to update anyway.

[1] [https://www.openssl.org/policies/releasestrat.html](https://www.openssl.org/policies/releasestrat.html)

<comment><USER13> Just because something is no longer supported upstream does not mean that the distributions won't support it anymore.

As far as I can tell it is more likely the package maintainers will backport fixes to their old version in those cases.

<comment><USER12> Sure, package maintainers may backport fixes to their old versions. But they need to fully understand _all_ upstream source code and follow _all_ commits. Otherwise they can miss important fixes: following only security fixes for supported branches is not enough. Sometimes project developers fixes bug/security problem in the code, but doesn't flag it as CVE because current code usage doesn't trigger it. But code in old branch could.

<comment><USER14> That's the current reality. That's how it was for years. Especially CentOS and other RH-based systems are more happy to patch than to upgrade. This caused the kernel 2.6.32-573 situation where lots of patches (over a hundred?) were applied by the distro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I struggled with getting HTTP/2 working with ALPN on Ubuntu 14.04 back in February. After building nginx from source [1] I ended up switching to Docker base images that support OpenSSL 1.0.2 [2].

1: [https://www.clay.fail/posts/ubuntu-http2-in-mere- hours](https://www.clay.fail/posts/ubuntu-http2-in-mere-hours) 2: [https://www.clay.fail/posts/hip-http2-using- docker/](https://www.clay.fail/posts/hip-http2-using-docker/)

<comment><USER16> I actually found your blog post [1] on Google earlier this morning after seeing this thread. It was hugely helpful. Thank you very much for writing it.

Was there a bug or technical limitation that made you switch to a Docker image or just preferences/ease of updating?

<comment><USER15> The main reason I switched Docker is there's an nginx image (on alpine) that supports ALPN. No compiling from source required, which simplified things (in my mind, at least).

<comment><USER16> Gotcha. As a heads up, there's a confirmed bug with HTTP/2 implementation on nginx 1.9.15 and 1.10.0. It seems to affect Safari and iOS (native and browser) markedly.

For me, the first HTTP/2 POST request to a server running the affected version of nginx would never leave the browser and Safari left a less than descriptive "Failed to load resource: Could not connect to the server." console message.

I'm having luck with 1.9.12 + OpenSSL 1.0.2h

[https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/979](https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/979)

[https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/959](https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/959)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> HTTP2 is a relatively bleeding edge technology at this point. Seems fine for it to depend on a recent version of Open SSL. It's not like HTTP 1.1 is going anywhere any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER18> Somebody tell me again about the supposed benefits of dynamic linking, if we have to recompile and redistribute all the dependent packages for every OpenSSL upgrade anyway?

<comment><USER19> > if we have to recompile and redistribute all the dependent packages for > every OpenSSL upgrade anyway?

Because we don't – look at how many updates Debian, Red Hat, etc. have shipped for OpenSSL vs. the number of times you've had to recompile dependent packages.

OpenSSL is also something an outlier because it's both critically exposed for security and has a somewhat unusual development model, so it's also important to remember that even if it _was_ true that we have to rebuild OpenSSL callers regularly, that's manifestly not true of the hundreds of other libraries where dynamic linking saves time and memory.

<comment><USER20> It's honestly so mission-critical to interactions on the internet---and computers are so increasingly assumed to be on the internet---it's a bit of a wonder that no-one to my knowledge has tried to roll it into the kernel as a core and necessary function yet.

<comment><USER21> It's definitely been discussed[1]. I last read about it when investigating the use of splice(2) in nginx; seems there are a few use-cases, but nothing really compelling.

[1]: [https://lwn.net/Articles/666509/](https://lwn.net/Articles/666509/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > We knew, since the end of 2015, that this change was coming -- we were given > 6 months time to get support for ALPN going, but by the current state of > OpenSSL packages that was too little time.

This hints at part of the problem - simply not enough resources. It's not that OpenSSL folks are slow or lazy (absolutely far from it) - but rather they've got tons on their plate already.

One day (hopefully) corporations will recognize that everyone can benefit by helping open source (either providing resources or $funding).

<comment><USER23> This is the package maintainers, not OpenSSL, right? Or does the OpenSSL group maintain all their packages on all these OSes too?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> In our case, we were building our own nginx anyways, so the fix was relatively simple to just statically link it against libressl.

This only affects the nginx we use on the frontend for SSL termination and the rest of the OS remains unaffected, linking against the OS OpenSSL.

</comment><comment><USER25> As usual, OpenSSL is screwing things up.

Been delving into hairy problems at work and yup, it's openssl's fault. More specifically it's the misguided way it handles multithreaded, and memory management. Yay.

<comment><USER20> This has definitely been a known issue for awhile, frustratingly.

At one point, a team I was working with had to code their own RNG replacement for OpenSSL's; the one in the codebase was behaving badly in a multithreaded environment. I don't know if the change was ever accepted back upstream; if I recall correctly, the initial response was something to the effect of "you're using it wrong" (as if multithreaded applications are some new and fascinating beast, and not increasingly just the way you do it to leverage all the performance a modern computer offers in hardware).

<comment><USER26> > At one point, a team I was working with had to code their own RNG > replacement for OpenSSL's

I recently released a RubyGem that does just that. It's unfortunate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Upgrading OpenSSL packages isn't a trivial task, either. Since just about > every other service links against the OpenSSL libraries, they too should be > re-packaged (and tested!) to work against the latest OpenSSL release.

Not necessarily. You could simply statically link the newer OpenSSL library with your web server and everybody is happy.

</comment><comment><USER28> Chrome was no longer accessing my site via http/2 – turns out that the docker nginx image has OpenSSL 1.0.1k. I switched to the Alpine image and that fixed it – a few nginx.conf changes needed, notably to change the user from www-data to 'nginx'. UID is 100 and GID is 101, which differs from the non-Alpine image.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why disabled? More like "will disable", unless you are on some island on the pacific - for the majority of Earth May 15th will come in more than few hours.

</comment><comment><USER30> Potentially, big sites won't be (shouldn't be) relying on system binaries for their web server etc. That would give them the freedom to remove unneeded modules, add custom modules and upgrade at their own speed.

</comment><comment><USER26> And TLS False Start, which reduces the average time of an SSL handshake by 30%, and can be enabled independently of SPDY and HTTP/2.

Fortunately, it was pretty easy to redeploy my HAproxy config to Xenial and enable ALPN.

</comment><comment><USER31> Can someone suggest a more neutral title for this?

<comment><USER32> Google Chrome 51 disables HTTP/2 on most Linux distros due to old OpenSSL

<comment><USER31> Ok, we'll use yours. Sorry for the delay—I forgot about this one over the weekend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Debian 8 (Jessy)</comment>


World's most powerful laser to tear apart the vacuum of space - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8857154/Worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-tear-apart-the-vacuum-of-space.html

<comment><USER2> Not content with merely understanding the universe, we are now intent on literally destroying it. Go science.</comment>


Margaret Atwood Discussing the Handmaid's Tale in 1986 - <AUTHOR> https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/margaret-atwood-discussing-handmaids-tale <comment><USER2> > Margaret Atwood discusses her book "The Handmaid's Tale" and the real life > and biblical events that inspired it.

I'm assuming the 'real life events' are simply the Middle East?</comment>


Trends in Internet Advertising: Banner ads share declining, Keyword based search on a rise... Ask HN: What does it indicate?? - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Brand_Equity_/Advertising_isnt_in_keeping_with_mediums_benefits/rssarticleshow/3212679.cms

<comment><AUTHOR> Banner advertisments are possibly one of the few rich content medium options that marketers can use to communicate the benefits of the product. While the proportion of banner advertisement has gone down from 58% in 1998 to 22% in 2006, how far do you think can it fall? If not banner ads, then what??</comment>


LambdaConf: White Supremacy Under the Guise of "Inclusion" - <AUTHOR> https://modelviewculture.com/news/lambda-conf-fuckery-white-supremacy-under-the-guise-of-inclusion <comment><USER2> I don't give a shit if somebody is an asshole in their personal life, if they're an expert we as critical thinking adults should be able to separate that from their arguments.

This "let's thought police our conferences!" stuff is SUCH bullshit I can't even fathom it.

<comment><USER3> Today is April 1st.

I think this article is a wizardly April Fools joke -- it comes off as 100% serious. But it can't be.

Not really.

After all, _nobody_ expects the Spanish Inquisition. Or Tailgunner Joe's McCarthyism. Or Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Or the Salem Witch hunt.

And all those things turned out wonderfully -- so why not do it again?

/s

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On top of that, the conference is now being sponsored by a fascist group ("Status 451").

<comment><USER5> All the fascists I know are in favor of allowing people they disagree with to freely speak without risking their livelihoods.</comment></comment>


Can Experience be Designed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/can-experience-be-designed-2/

<comment><USER2> "Architects design houses that lead to a spectrum of experiences, some foreseen, some not." ...that's not 100% true, if you look at some architects who also design the furniture they really do control the experience. Another good example of this is a store like Ikea or Apple where every bit of the experience is designed.</comment>


Catching up with top class engineers - <AUTHOR> I work in a well known company in a team full of top class engineers. While I am happy to learn and improve, I also find myself constantly getting "left behind". The company rewards initiative takers, so I frequently find myself getting work that is either too simple or something nobody wants  to do. I have tried to bring this up with my team lead. He seems to not worry about this too much as long as work is getting done, he isn't particular on who is building the expertise. Although I hate bringing up the gender angle to this - I am wondering if that is a factor here. I do not ask questions without first digging deep, I do my due diligence. I believe I am sincere in my efforts and eager to learn. How can I work around this problem? Without complaining to X or Y, what can I do at my level to get better and be considered for significant work tasks. <comment><USER2> I don't know the specifics of your situation so my suggestion may or may not be applicable.

That said I would suggest you spend your own time trying to solve some difficult problem that your team faces or designing or prototyping a solution for some complex software component your team needs. If you succeed that should earn you more respect for your technical abilities.

This has worked for me in the past. Once you get to a more senior role though I'd be careful of making a habit of it or you may get taken advantage of.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great suggestion. Thank you for taking the time to reply. So far I haven't been successful in picking projects that I could meaningfully contribute to. Also worth noting that most low hanging fruits are solved so the open problems are either really hairy or undiscovered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > The company rewards initiative takers

...

> and be considered for significant work tasks.

Hmmm...it looks like you need to take the initiative instead of waiting to be considered.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was alluding to the fact that because it is okay to not respect "boundaries" in some way. Very often, folks will grab work without any care about stepping on another person's toes. It becomes a sort of race to the bottom because very frequently, folks won't report a bug until they have a fix for it and then they open a PR and open a ticket.</comment></comment>


Facebook Chat in KDE Telepathy is in death bed - <AUTHOR> http://martys.typepad.com/blog/2015/03/facebook-chat-in-kde-telepathy-is-in-death-bed.html

<comment><USER2> Seems more like to be feature-related than money-related. You could use the official Facebook Messenger iPhone app which does not have ads and does not cost anything. Or you could open a WebView to [https://m.facebook.com/messages](https://m.facebook.com/messages) and remove the top bar. But the XMPP gateway inhibits features like read receipts, cash transfers, and Messenger apps, and requires additional supporting software for features like group chats, stickers, photos, voice messages...

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there some other reason that companies like Google and Facebook or trying to move away from open standards that does not involve money? I am trying to think if there is a good technical reason for doing this.</comment>


Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested? - <AUTHOR> http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/429695/Deals-for-Hackers

<comment><USER2> This strikes me more as a Woot for entrepreneurs instead of hackers.

What would be cool, personally, is have the site feature products which for one reason or another are known to be hackable.

Things such as the Girltech IM-Me which can be flashed into a spectrum analyzer, Open-WRT compatible routers, KisMac compatible wifi cards, the Breville BKE820XL hot water kettle which has a non-mechanical switch so it can be hacked to be controlled from your phone and send you push notifications when the water is boiled, remote control power outlets from AliBaba, Hot Air reflow stations, Emotiv's EEG, Quadrocopter kits to deploy some of the UPenn GRASP code, and so on.

++EDIT++

What I realize now, thinking about it some more, is a site like this might actually be ideal for hacker ore. Apple would never think to let their merchandise go on Woot, but something like a Samsung TS-H943 as shipped is in every sense of the word, mediocre - the one special thing about it is it let's one install custom firmware to read non-standard DVD's - it's only a matter of selection for digging up more deals like this that manufacturers would be happy to let go on bantler.com like sites...

</comment><comment><USER3> What would really be valuable and popular would be if you could find a way for us to get a group discount on these $80-$100 books that are priced as textbooks.

There is a huge amount of pent-up demand there.

Take the extreme but famous example of when one of those books, Lisp in Small Pieces, was mispriced for $13 including shipping at amazon.ca in 2007 -- it became the #1 seller, on a book that I imagine sells maybe a thousand copies in a year.

Nobody actually got their book (the publisher probably didn't have that many) and $13 is ridiculously cheap, but it's a fascinating story. Clearly, a lot of people had that book on their "someday wishlist" (a fantastic market for deal sites) or just appreciate a seemingly one-time deal on that kind of item.

If you can package books together, app-bundle style, or sell them out of season with the academic calendar, it would offer a good opportunity for price discrimination.

Also, although academic publishers are super-wary about the used book market, they also know that their textbooks are being torrented left and right. Maybe this would be a channel they could have more control in.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about "International Edition" textbooks? For example, the site could offer an international edition of a textbook for 1/10 the cost of the US edition. The International Edition textbooks are paperback, and of lower quality, but contain the same information, and are MUCH cheaper.

What do you think?

<comment><USER4> My understanding is that these are meant for developing nations, and the lower cost is an incentive for inducing education over there. Although it may be cheaper in the short term, in the long term you may be jeopardizing the business model and thus reducing developing nations' ability to obtain textbooks. Just throwing that out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is definitely an awesome concept, which has been tested by AppSumo. However, there are more aspects of "hacking" that you can explore - books, conference tickets, software discounts and membership discounts (can only think of <http://tutsplus.com>). I would be interested if you are able to offer deals on tickets for technology conferences.

A technology-focused Groupon is something that I would love to see.

<comment><AUTHOR> Discounts on technology conferences would be huge. Great idea - thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kudos for doing research before diving in. If it sounds like there is enough interest, one option could be to use a whitelabel daily deals service like Tippr.com. Although it is tempting to hack together a groupon-clone, in the end the software on the consumer end is generally the easy part when building a basic daily deal site. The time consuming part is everything that goes on behind the scenes. The support, writing, deal scheduling, deal sourcing, affiliate marketing, reporting tools, etc. This stuff often gets overlooked when creating a deal site. Tippr can handle as much of this overhead as you need which allows you to focus on marketing and helping source deals for your niche. If you are curious how the end white-label product looks, we've recently launched a white-label with BusinessInsider that they call Pipeline Deals (<http://pipeline.businessinsider.com>). This site runs similar types of deals - except targeted for business folk instead of hackers.

Disclosure: I'm a designer at Tippr. If you want to learn more, I can get you in touch with one of the business people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I appreciate the offer. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com to talk further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I took the survey but I wanted to share this thought here for some additional feedback. I work with some of the larger deals sites and having learned a lot about how they operate I cannot stress enough that if you are going to move into a niche market focus on value. This means potentially less deals and less often but in the case of your audience being focused on hackers, quality will win.

In the survey you offered time with Investors. This is something that I am sure would be in massive demand because this isn't something readily available to most people and could add tremendous value to any start up.

Other things to consider along the same lines would be a service less focused on regular deals but more on opportunities. We have access to Consultants who do x,y, or z. They could be investors, marketers, hackers, business develop folks or any other high value service. You would make those people available to a business for say 1 hour to discuss anything you care to. Now that would exciting!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea regarding the consultants. I'm sure there are a ton of consultants who would be happy to work with startups for cheap, in order to build long- term relationships.

Fantastic idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey guys, we actually built this concept the week of Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

We built The Evolyte Store in 14 days, spent 1 day marketing, and received nearly 18,000 pageviews and $30,000 in reserved sales.

We were selling a 32GB Wi-Fi iPad at up to $100 off and the business model was like Groupon + Woot had a superhero baby (a little corny, we know :)

You can read our case studies detailing every aspect of the design, development, and marketing process (what my firm specializes in) here:

[http://evolyte.posterous.com/pages/the-evolyte-store-case- st...](http://evolyte.posterous.com/pages/the-evolyte-store-case-study)

We're currently trying to figure out what we're going to do with this Store going forward as we only built it to market our professional services, and not to be an eCommerce competitor.

</comment><comment><USER9> Deals for hackers seems like it could be a good way to start off with a narrow scope and a targetted audience, but by calling your site DealsForHackers you are essentially limiting yourself from ever growing beyond this relatively small audience.

Personally, I think there's a more interesting market opportunity in helping developers monetize from the daily deals space, rather than making a daily deals product meant for developers as end-users.

That having been said, I'm still a hacker and I'm still interested in good deals. Too bad you don't have a field for survey takers to provide our e-mails so you can inform us of when we can use your service.

<comment><USER10> > Personally, I think there's a more interesting market opportunity in helping > developers monetize from the daily deals space, rather than making a daily > deals product meant for developers as end-users.

Things like a marketplace for matching deals to sites or a "Shopify" for coupon sites?

<comment><USER9> Maybe something like a Shopify, although those are unsurprisingly starting to spring up left and right. I'm thinking more of something like building a nice, consistent cross-platform API for deals.

Unfortunately, sites like Groupon have draconian developer terms of service (<http://www.groupon.com/pages/api-terms-of-use>). Basically, what they're saying is that you can show Groupon deals to end-users, but you can't do _anything_ else.

<comment><USER10> Holy smokes, that's worse than my employment agreement (but not by much).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What about a Groupon like site for freelancers and designers? Flash sale for a small quanta of work such as a mockup or design or protoype that would eventually help spread the freelancers/designers business as well (by building up a portfolio and referrals). There would obviously have to be a small limit on the number but each day a freelancer/hacker/designer could be featured and any number of "units" could be put on sale.

</comment><comment><USER4> I said this on the survey, and it seems that several others agree, but I would love to see more physical things on a daily deals site for hackers. AppSumo is too much SaaS for me, and I have a day job where I don't get to make those purchasing decisions. However, hackable things, books, software -- that I can really get into.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agreed - I think that books will be a big part of the service. Wholesale books aren't too expensive when bought in bulk, and the savings can be passed on to users / customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm. I left a comment in the survey but I figure I'd chime in here as well.

AppSumo can definitely move into this space as it's related.

There should be plenty of room in this niche as they seem to be the only player.

Would love to see what you can do in terms of defensibility and innovation.

</comment><comment><USER13> How would this be different than AppSumo?

<comment><AUTHOR> AppSumo is great, and there would certainly be some crossover between the two services.

However, DealsForHackers would focus on a wider range of offerings, beyond just software. Think discounted conference tickets, hardware discounts, hacker food (whatever that means), etc.

<comment><USER13> The current AppSumo deal* includes fresh underwear delivered monthly. A wider range than that?

* manpacks.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Groupon doesn't seem all that interesting to me...I've never really sought deals in that manner.

However, if you could pull off something like they do here at Bonktown: <http://www.bonktown.com/>

I might pay attention from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER15> AppSumo has shown that there's definitely interest in this area.

This is so flippin' easy to build that it comes down to this - are you passionate about it?

If you are, and you can dedicate a year to seeing it through, you will build a nice business out of it.

If you expand your "hacker" definition to include the audience that buys gifts @ ThinkGeek.com you could be on to something big.

When I say this is easy here's what I mean:

a) The tech is a piece of cake.

b) The design is linear and lots of examples for inspiration in this space.

c) You will make it or break it based on the strength of the deals, just like everybody else competing in this space.

For instance if you found a way to convince ThinkGeek to provide you with a 5% off or something from them (plus a comission to you) in exchange for long-term featured advertising you would essentially be in front of every major "geek" audience from slashdot to reddit to etc in no time.

Plus the company that owns ThinkGeek owns Slashdot and you'd be a perfect aquisition if you expanded your market, aggregated an incredible list of geeks with credit cards.

So go out there and get it done! I want my 5% off ThinkGeek by Christmas.

<comment><USER16> Hey guys

Noah from <http://appsumo.com> here.

Super interesting comments and a bit surprised / flattered so many of you guys know about us.

We're focused mostly on web software, generally web apps / content that help startups succeed.

What kind of specific stuff is it for hackers that we aren't providing today?

Ps. We have an HN Special - free Thinkgeek.com coupon ($10 off $40)

Email me: hn at appsumo dot com

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you don't want to build the daily deals software, you may want to check out <http://cajoots.com> (a project of mine).

Let me know if you have any questions: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER18> I own the domain Nerdeals.com (and have the Twitter name) because I had a very similar idea as this. Whoever does this should get in touch with me :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> HIGH LEVEL PITCH: DealsForHackers.com is a daily deals site for the hacker / startup crowd. (Groupon meets TechCrunch).

This is a concept I'm taking a pure Customer Development approach with - if I get enough people to say that they'd be interested in the concept, I'll move forward to the prototyping / initial deal gathering phase.

Why the new / anonymous account? My boss and co-workers read HackerNews constantly, and I'd prefer that they don't know I'm thinking about starting my own thing.

I'd love to know what the community thinks about this!

<comment><USER19> I like the idea, but ...

When did "hacker" come to mean, "someone who wants dinner with moneymen and books on success"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very cool concept - count me in!</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way to register a foreign domain name? - <AUTHOR>

Specifically, I'd like to register a domain name ending in .er (Eritrea). Does anyone know of a reliable and reasonably priced registrar that can facilitate this? <comment><USER2> If you're hoping for a great domain hack, I think you're out of luck. I don't think you can register at the second level, so you'd have to register a .com.er or similar. The Wikipedia article seems to indicate it's not a well- supported TLD at all. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.er>

Here's the official registry: <http://www.tse.com.er/aboutus.htm>

They are your best (probably only) contact. It might also be worth searching namepros.com/dnforum.com to see if anyone there has had experiences with the TLD.

</comment><comment><USER3> First, a really good site to find available domain names is <http://domai.nr/>

They link to a bunch of registrars, but I do have the same question, which of those registrars are a reputable.

</comment><comment><USER4> Be careful w/ foreign domains. I bought rankin.gs (South Georgia) a couple years ago from Godaddy, developed and launched a small side project for it, and a couple of months in the .gs registry went down indefinitely.

</comment><comment><USER5> Searches for .er are our most popular viewed results. Unfortunately, Eritrea's TLD management is in about as solid a state as the state itself—which is to say, not very.

We've no anecdotal evidence of _anyone_ managing to register an Eritrean domain name.

Funny thing though—the technical contact for the TLD is right here in SF.

Randy <http://nb.io> \- <http://domai.nr>

</comment><comment><USER6> 101domain has a lot of TLDs: <http://www.101domain.com/> (I've never bought a domain from them)

<comment><USER7> Do not buy from these guys or any other similar sites if you can find a person that speaks the language of the country you want to buy a domain from. For example they sell a .co.il for 65 dollars / year while you can easily find an Israeli registrar that sells for 18 dollars / year if you speak Hebrew. I also saw .co.il s selling for $200 + a couple of weeks ago on a similar site.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I bought an .ly domain recently ... it was $199 on 101domain.com but available from the Libyan Spider network for $75 (and they're fairly reputable).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Usually, though not always, domain.tld or register.tld lead to a registration agency.

<comment><USER7> Also, try en.wikipedia.com/wiki/tld to find the official registrars site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> domai.nr</comment>


Hidden gem: sound design gives Aussie a winning edge - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/hidden-gem-sound-design-gives-aussie-a-winning-edge-20120725-22p1j.html

<comment><USER2> wouldn't the single speaker put serious audiophiles off?

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... audiophiles ..."_

I'm not sure audiophiles are the market. Consider the source, _"powerful radio and wireless speaker for iPhone + iPad"_. Having a 1/4 decent sound for say .mp4 would be nice.</comment></comment>


IPad: Overhyped Flop or a case of Great Design Thinking? - bjelkeman-again http://emergentbydesign.com/2010/02/01/699/

<comment> bjelkeman-again This summary of quite a lot of discussions is to me closest to what I am thinking about the iPad launch.</comment>


Rands In Repose: The Taste of the Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/07/22/the_taste_of_the_day.html <comment><USER2> This is a great read along the lines of the GTD philosophy. Very simple to handle and very focused on continuing to complete tasks on your To-Do list. I've got to try this out now to slim down my To-Do list. It's getting a bit crufty.</comment>


Ask HN: What makes AWS more expensive than their competitors? - <AUTHOR> I was looking at migrating my website over to AWS because of their other services (autoscaling and more), but their prices are (imo) outrageous. I'm paying $80/mo at Linode for 6 CPU cores, 12GB RAM and 192GB SSD. According to the AWS calculator, a m4.xlarge (4 cores, 12GB RAM) with 40GB bandwith in/out it would cost $278. How come it costs so much more? <comment><USER2> It might be more expensive with this apples-to-apples comparison, but do you have any idea what the actual utilization of your linode server looks like? Unless that server is under heavy load most of the time, you would probably be much better off with a couple of smaller instances behind a load balancer. Add in auto-scaling to handle peak loads. This may still be more expensive, but now your website is much more reliable than running on a single server.

One other thing to consider: You can host static websites on S3.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've considered a cluster of servers before, but the server is actually under heavy load most of the time. It's running a LEMP stack and the database is fairly big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Because you can get hundreds of those quickly, and get rid of them a few hours later, and they are in the same network as all the other AWS services. If you just want a (few) server(s) consistently, you pay for things you don't use.

<comment><USER4> You can order and cancel Linode VMs equally fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> a t2.Large instance is $76/per month. You can reduce that even further with reserved instance pricing. T2 is much more akin to what Linode offers.</comment>


France will cut funding to its piracy police - <AUTHOR> http://paidcontent.org/2012/08/03/france-will-cut-funding-to-its-piracy-police/ <comment><USER2> It was something the new socialist government was bound to do, the only question was when and how. Cutting budget seems like the smartest way to do this, given the economic context.

Now let's see if they try what they were preaching 3 years ago, that every citizen pays a monthly tax and then can legally download anything he wants for free.

<comment><USER3> I for one am against the tax thing. I just can't make any sense of it and I don't see why some of my money should go to artists I don't support.

If the link between creation and income is destroyed, then who gets to set who earns what?

Also, I maintain a list of music I like. I make sure I give back generously in one form or another to artists I like. That's why I've got hundreds of actual physical records. I sort the list using different criteria such as the perceived value of the record that made me tick, the perceived value of the artist/band's overall career, the artist/band's visibility, whether the artist/band actually need the money, etc...

Now, I need to precise that bands I listen to are pretty obscure, sometimes are side-activities for those involved and usually don't come any close to paying the bills.

I see two issues hiding

1\. the greed of consumers who want the stuff for nothing and don't care about how artists eat and tour

2\. the greed of record labels who don't believe another model is possible (listen and then decide if it's worth one's money)

I'm all for bandcamp-like structure that help serendipity as well as letting artists and sometimes listeners decide for their own.

<comment><USER2> I'm not saying I favor their solution, just that it would be consistent since they fought for it when the right wing had majority rule.

The biggest issue I see is, since it would involve some sort of administrative power to redistribute, it would cause pretty crazy costs and inefficiences, thus annihilating the intended effect.

Now, cutting Hadopi is a step in the right direction, but I don't see this government leaving it be afterwards, since "let the market decide" is really not a popular way to do things in France, especially among socialists.

<comment><USER3> I could tell you were not backing the idea of the tax but as it sounds like a good idea at first, I wanted to balance it a bit. Indeed, the point you raise is sound.

I don't know how you feel about economic decisions in France but my impression is that they are all broken. Both the left-wing and the right-wing do very similar things while preaching by their colored book and saying the other side is doing it wrong.

I attribute the lack of economic direction and growth in France to both sides. What I find irritating is their tendency (on either sides) to make short- sighted decisions and follow the hype of the moment (effet d'annonce) which effectively means nothing can really be done on the long term when current affairs shuffle it all every once in a while.

From afar, it does look like a poorly handled country and no amount of red or blue changes anything to it.

<comment><USER4> For someone like me, who doesn't actually consume (and don't pirate) much of the content covered by those laws and taxes, I kinda feel wronged every time I buy a DVDR, a usb hard drive or key and so on. I use those to backup my own data (documents, photographs in raw+jpg, system backups..) and I feel sick to see even a cent of my money going to some random French singer I couldn't be bothered to care about. What little music I actually listen to (it's not a primary hobby for me) isn't even French. None of the money from the tax is ever going to the artists I do listen to from time to time.

Why should we subsidize a dying business anyway. Is this business that important to our daily lives ? I don't think so. Did they whine the same when modern technology destroyed other business practices or destroyed obsolete jobs, replaced by machines ? The music industry (the main whiner here) has existed for what, a century at most ? Let's just say it was a short-lived way to make a profit. People centuries ago didn't buy CDs or Vynils to listen to in their home. Is that business so essential to the world that we have to impose a tax on every citizen to sustain its existence ?

I'm not a pirate. I don't defend piracy. I just don't care for the music industry. It can completely disappear for all I care. There still will be music to listen to, just maybe not the drivel they're producing en masse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> nice to see a few mentions of the _real problem_ , which is not piracy, and criminalizing individuals, but the lack of legal affordable alternatives for consuming intellectual-property 'products'.

I don't know about tax as such, but can't see what's wrong with fees similar to ISP packages, or even the dreaded TV-license. With a fixed-fee (or perhaps a pro-rated fee based on income/social situation) you can get access to as much content as you'd like. As for the claim of that the link between creation and income is destroyed - I disagree. It should be quite easy to distribute the earnings fairly to artists based on usage patterns. In the days of analytics, click-counting, and measuring download bandwidth, it should be easy to see that one artist is much more popular than another, and hence deserves a bigger piece of the pie. It might not be 100% accurate, but I don't think the measurements now for sales and distribution are that accurate either.

</comment><comment><USER6> This was the main reason why I wanted Sarkozy out. That and the fact that he created "e-g8" as a way to get even more countries to do the same. He was very dangerous for stuff like this.

<comment><USER7> Same here. However I'm a little worried about Hollande too, for completely different reasons though. But democracy these days always seems to be about picking the lesser evil. Quite a sad thought actually.

Btw: I'm not french, I'm just watching from a distance.

<comment><USER8> If you want to not vote for the lesser evil you need to implement a voting mechanism that doesn't devolve into binary decisions.

Even France's run-off election eventually boils down into a binary choice.

Wise organizations look into real electoral methods systems like Condorcet: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method#Use_of_Condorc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method#Use_of_Condorcet_voting)

<comment><USER9> Condorcet is so '90s. The cool kids these days (including the German and Dutch Pirate Parties) are using transitively delegated voting systems like <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback>.

<comment><USER10> Lua and PL/SQL?!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>