The Recomputation Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://www.software.ac.uk/blog/2013-07-09-recomputation-manifesto <comment><USER2> Going to bang a small drum here and proclaim:

When doing science, don't use a tech stack that will be obselete next year or in 3 years. Use something that will be AROUND; something that is well defined, something that other people can use down the road on a different system.

Virtual machines are "okay". Running them requires having the hypervisor working correctly and - hopefully - the original architecture supported.

Personally, I used Common Lisp for my Master's work. Other examples of tech stacks that are very stable are C, C++, and Fortran.

<comment><USER3> For certain research problems, different and often obscure tool sets are required. That, to me, is a great argument behind recreating everything your environment needs in a VM - unlike Chemists who can't bundle up their lab into a little transportable box, Computer Scientists can.

In making the argument for recomputation to aid its adoption, it's important not to add too many constraints on the researcher e.g. "Your results should be reproduceable _and_ written in C because it should still be around ten years from now."

Even an obsolete language in a working VM sandbox can be edited and inspected to make changes, verify correctness etc. If you want to extend the results of that research you may have a porting project to update the code to more a current language, but that's leaps and bounds ahead of how things are now: read and re-read the paper until it makes sense and implement the algorithms from scratch.

Agree with your hypervisor/architecture point but I suppose there has to be some broad architectural choice made.

(The author of this article was my PhD supervisor. I've always found him to be an inspiring, forward thinking researcher so as much as I love the recomputation idea on merit, I'm also a little biased.)

<comment><USER4> How are all these VMs going to react if people switch, say, to desktops with ARMv8, or whatever comes next?

<comment><USER5> I can emulate a PDP11, a Nintendo Gameboy, or any other old system.

There are perfectly functional x86 emulators for ARM already. Many people used to run Windows on PPC macs via emulation too.

<comment><USER4> Emulating a Gameboy is fine, but emulating a large-scale scientific computation may be just a little bit more demanding, I'm afraid. :/

<comment><USER5> It will be slower, but I don't think unusable. Actually, comparing gameboy (and other consoles) is not really a good idea, as they are systems where getting all the processors exactly in sync is important and difficult. Emulating a PC is much easier, as no-one expects to get exactly equal speeds out of processors, as every PC model is slightly different.

As I say, I (and many other people) emulated x86 windows on PPCs for years. I ran visual studio and it dragged a little, but was fairly usable. Certainly it won't be as fast, but then again by the time x86 has died and people have moved, hopefully systems will have got fast enough to make up the difference!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi, this is Ian Gent, author of the Recomputation Manifesto.

Many thanks for all the comments.

If anybody wants to get in touch to work in any way on recomputation, please do! You can find me very easily on google.

Special thanks to @lifebeyondfife, I worked out who you are and you were a pleasure to supervise too. Hope all is going well.

<comment><USER7> Nice article, and thanks for coming by!

What are your thought on how to treat performance benchmarks, or really any claims that one algorithm is "better" than another? Since these are often extremely hardware specific, I've been wondering if instead of a VM it makes sense to offer a full bootable image.

Are there virtual image formats that can be either run within a VM or copied to a USB stick and booted?

<comment><USER6> I've thought about this quite a lot because people often ask me.

My main comment is that for one algorithm to be judged against another, the more different environments it is tested in the better, and we can get a deeper understanding of its performance profile. If it's always better then that's clear. If it is sometimes better and sometimes worse, either it's not really better, or there's some dependency on the hardware or other environment: but that is an interesting result in itself.

However there is always a place for very hardware specific claims. E.g. "For this chip/motherboard combination this flag is better", and for that we might always have a problem.

Interesting thought about the either VM or booting. Somebody suggested to me making live images (as in live dvds) which would serve this purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> TL;DR: any computer science paper that presents practical work without disclosing source code should not be accepted to any scientific conference or journal.

Agree on all. I've been few years in research in computer security before quitting for industry. I must report that so many papers that presents some kind of algorithms (I would say the majority) very rarely also provides the source code of the implementation. I have always thought and advocated for that any computer science paper that presents practical work without disclosing source code should not be accepted to any scientific conference or journal.

I know (because I did many times) that opening the source takes an incredible amount of time, but it is mandatory for being capable of 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. Writing code and keeping private in research is just a non sense.

<comment><USER9> Your TL;DR should read "...source code _and a virtual environment that allows the process to be repeated_..."

From the article:

"There has been significant pressure for scientists to make their code open, but this is not enough. Even if I hired the only postdoc who can get the code to work, she might have forgotten the exact details of how an experiment was run."

also

"The only way to ensure recomputability is to provide virtual machines"

To that end, the site [http://recomputation.org/](http://recomputation.org/) is mentioned as a repository for recomputable experiments.

Point being: source code alone does not specify the process or workflow in which it was used.

<comment><USER8> sorry... TL;DR was intended for those who were not interested to read my whole comment.

actually the idea of providing VMs preconfigured to run the test is very good since it saves time both for who write the code and for those who want to test

> Point being: source code alone does not specify the process or workflow in > which it was used.

I completely agree! when we released the code, we spent hours to clearly define the environment where the code had to run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those who may skim the article without reading the actual manifesto, the closing paragraph is rather keen:

> A manifesto is a call that people reading it should vote for your point of > view. Don't vote with a signature or a petition. Vote by making your > computational experiments recomputable. Do it at > [http://recomputation.org](http://recomputation.org), or at your own web > site, or at another repository. But make your experiments recomputable.

Full manifesto linked from the article: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.3674v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.3674v1.pdf)

Before even reading the article I was thinking to myself "gee, this might actually be one of the best use cases I've heard for vagrant/etc". Turns out that's exactly what this is :)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is great. I see that the first reference made in the paper is to my joint paper in Nature arguing for release of source code. Even that seems like a radical step too far to some scientists, goodness knows what they'd think about this, but it's a great idea.

<comment><USER12> Since John seems too modest to link to his own paper, here it is for those who were as curious as I:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7386/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7386/full/nature10836.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hope "Recomputability" emerges as a distinct term.

At least in the biological sciences, I'm seeing the term "reproducibility" used a lot where the meaning is much closer to "recomputability", i.e. "you can repeat the exact computational steps we performed" \-- without necessarily saying much about either the lab-work and/or sample-collection parts of the project, or the possibility of performing similar analyses using different tools/platforms.

(I'd also like to see a bit more recognition of the importance of full reproduction -- i.e. someone starts with the same hypothesis or idea and does their _own_ experiment -- in modern science).

<comment><USER14> That's where I see recomputation as not _quite_ pushing the same goals as reproducibility, even though its advocates often couch them as the same goal. Recomputation can be useful, but re-running the exact same code in the same virtual machine isn't really an independent reproduction of the claimed scientific result. That often benefits from _not_ using the original source code; two independently written implementations claiming to implement the same approach and achieving the same results is a much better reproduction.

In the natural sciences, independent reproduction often finds subtle dependencies on the original apparatus that change the interpretation: when lab B tries to reproduce lab A's results on slightly different equipment and can't, it can highlight an unnoticed dependency on some specific feature of the original equipment, and may throw into question the original paper's conclusions. You would never have found that if, instead of lab B independently reproducing the result, lab A just packed up their equipment into a shipping container and shipped it to lab B, who unpacked and ran it unchanged. That's what the VM approach is arguing for, and that's not really reproducibility.

<comment><USER6> I completely agree. A recomputation of an experiment is not ensuring reproducibility of the scientific result. It's ensuring reproducibility of the individual experiment.

The analogy I have given is with cold fusion. If we could reproduce their exact lab setup then we could find out if the results were real - i.e. were not misread or anything, and assuming they were, have a chance of explaining the anomaly.

But no, it's not the same as reproducibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is fantastic - and a serious challenge.

Recomuputability is to all intents and purposes the goal of devops and testing. And we are stumbling around at the edges of proving one environment it same as another.

This is one to watch - hell one to join in

<comment><USER6> Yes that is good point. There is one advantage to recomputability. Which is that - at least in the first instance - all that matters is being able to recompute the specific experiment for a paper. So testing as in "it works on other examples" is less critical. But indeed, as you say, there's close links with testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> imho, he is missing the most important point, and walking in the wrong direction instead.

He is true, that science requires recomputation, the ability to verify or falsify results. But recomputation in science is more then just the ability to run the black magic box again. A black magic box makes it worse, because the box might change and fail over time, and its black magic VM. Recomputation requires source code, that is human readable.

So my suggestion instead is to use a combination of Gentoo and Linux Containers instead. Gentoo enforces that everything on the machine has its source code that did run through the compiler, and Linux Containers encapsulate the project in a way, that a simple backup can preserve it.

 _well_ I normally prefer Debian because of lower maintenance cost. But Gentoo could play out its strength in this edge case.

<comment><USER5> I think both are important. My real hope, in the long term, is that people will package source in the recomputable VM, and recompile it as part of the recomputation.

However, particularly when academics are gluing together multiple pieces of software, often which are themselves quite fragile, just trying to reassemble working software can be almost impossible.

I have a number of things I wrote myself from when C++11 was first coming out (yes, I possibly shouldn't write software with compilers for unfinished languages, but I like to live on the state of the art). Now C++11 support in gcc is finalised and some corners have been cleaned up, these programs don't compile any more. I know how to fix them, and have. I wouldn't want someone else to have to do that.

<comment><USER16> Languages change, their compiler changed, a Gentoo backup would come with sources of the compiler you used to compile your C++11preBeta project also.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A VM is fine but at least it should be minimal so you can see what of the 400MB matters. A minimal environment (boot to TeX? Would be good).

<comment><USER6> For the sample chess problem experiment, we do also provide a tarfile or zip of the experiment directory, which is just a few MB. So if that works in your environment, you're good to go. If not there's the 400MB to fall back on.

Obviously it would be nice to know exactly which bits of that are unnecessary to save space, but for now I'm happy enough to be able to give you something that works.

<comment><USER17> Sure, just thinking longer term. Dependencies are important to understand for replication. Eg your result might be only due to a dodgy random number stream (say). What do you need to rebuild? What should it be robust to?

<comment><USER18> If you have a working VM, and non-working tarball, you can "binary search" for the right environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This should apply equally to papers in Economics as well. The R&R Excel debacle was embarrassing.</comment>


When student journos start banning newspapers we know we've hit peak censorship - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/city-university-tabloid-ban-sun-mail-express-peak-censorship-a7425156.html <comment><AUTHOR> Difficult to get actual title (which is 119 characters) into the 80 char limit.

Title is "When students at the country's top university for journalism start banning newspapers we know we've hit peak censorship".

The article is about why those students are wrong to ban these newspapers from their campus.</comment>


The Secret Power Behind Why We Pick Crowded Restaurants Over Empty Ones - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3016506/dialed/the-secret-power-behind-why-we-pick-busy-restaurants-over-empty-ones

<comment><USER2> Yeah,of course it's powerful, as long as (for sake of @exciting simplification) we forget about introverts or people actively avoiding mainstream and seeking niche/unusual stuff.</comment>


Traitorous Eight - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight <comment><USER2> "Beckman and Shockley ... selected the location in Mountain View, near Palo Alto, California. The place did not prove very successful: Shockley's colleagues at Bell Labs and RCA refused to move to a rural location with no long-distance phone service."

This anecdote is worth considering in light of YC's view that companies located outside of Silicon Valley are unlikely to be successful. It's easy to forget that SV was farmland not long ago.

<comment><USER3> Everywhere has long-distance now.

<comment><USER2> That's the point. YC should not limit themselves to only SV based companies

<comment><USER3> Oh, I'm sorry I didn't know. I was attempting a gentle quip. Ah well, thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Apple iPad 2 Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/print/4225 <comment><USER2> hi,

in case of sites which have just a couple of paragraphs per page, link to the print-version of it

but in cases like this which has a lot of content/analysis/graphs per page, please link to the main article

they deserve our support through ads</comment>


A policy of mass destruction - <AUTHOR> http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/a-policy-of-mass-destruction/

<comment><USER3> Yep, another article about the perils of financialism.

Unfortunately the ability to raise money (or make it by trading) isn't well correlated with the ability to use money to make wealth.

Donald Trump, for instance, was recently voted "most respected businessman" by the readers of a major Men's magazine. Perhaps people are impressed by the lifestyle he leads and the fact that he's put his name on buildings all over Manhattan, but he's not really a businessman... he's somebody who plays a businessman on TV.

Back in the 90's, Trump lost money running casinos, back when the industry was booming and, for everybody else, running a casino was like having a license to print money.

So, if you're the kind of person who cares about profit and loss and who also thinks business can solve problems, delight customers and provide meaningful and renumerative work it's very frustrating to see somebody like that have a reality distorsion field that lets them live a lie and involve a lot of people in it.

Now the U.S. economy is maybe 5% or 10% B.S. and you can find many valid criticisms but it's basically on the level. That's why we're the world financial center.

You look at places like Russia where the physical and human resources are so great but it's a 80% B.S. economy and the government is 100% corrupt and that's very sad.

</comment><comment><USER4> An analogy for privatisation and increasing an economy's capital dynamism is turning up the heat in a reactor. The added energy makes the entire system more powerful if properly directed. But the steam doesn't _want_ to drive a generator; if it's easier to breach a weakness in the containment structure then so be it. The higher the temperature the stronger the containment need be.

Russia was privatised shockingly fast without building up a competent judiciary, informed public, nor the rule of law necessary to direct that activity. So it settled for the path of least resistance to profit and turned inward and venal.

We are still learning about engineering economies on an international scale like this; it doesn't always turn out as "mass destruction". In today's FT Jim Yong Kim, US nominee for the World Bank, comments on being "born in South Korea when it was still recovering from war, with unpaved roads and low levels of literacy. I have seen how integration with the global economy can transform a poor country into one of the most dynamic and prosperous economies in the world. I have seen how investment in infrastructure, schools and health clinics can change lives. And I recognise that economic growth is vital to generate resources for investment in health, education and public goods" [1]. The "policy of mass destruction" headline is needlessly hyperbolic.

[1] [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e2adc88c-7733-11e1-baf3-00144feab4...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e2adc88c-7733-11e1-baf3-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1qWMUbwoJ)

</comment><comment><USER5> Dismantling the state run businesses should have been done more slowly, to allow the Soviet people time to adapt.

I'm not saying the communist oligopoly should have been left in place. But, dismantling it so quickly simply allowed a different oligopoly to be put in place, with little net improvement for most people.

Some would argue that not letting the people adapt to the change was exactly the intended result, though.

<comment><USER6> > Dismantling the state run businesses should have been done more slowly, to > allow the Soviet people time to adapt.

Poland, Hungary and the Baltic countries mostly did this, and they had far less problem after communism than Russia and most other former Soviet republics.

<comment><USER7> The difference between Baltic countries + Poland vs. Ukraine, Moldova and Russia is a lack of independent juridical branch of government, ephemeral property ownership rights, no rule of law, and, in general, more paternalistically minded people (towards government regulation of / interference in business). All of this makes medium sized business almost impossible to survive; rapid privatization in 1990s (as per subject article) seems totally irrelevant factor to me as a person living here: I see a reprivatization wave of roughly half large enterprises after each election cycle here. Corporate raidership is run by judges, governed by executive branch of govt by phone, and local analog of FBI is just a tool to bereave tasty property, they have no connection to justice at all. So how capital can accumulate in such an environment? There's no way.

<comment> guard-of-terra Who knows whether it is the reason behind the economic problems of 90-s, or it is a fallout of those.

Perhaps if the whole country has not been rapidly blasted into a decade of absolute poverty, we'd have less corrupt justice and more rule of law.

<comment><USER7> My basic thesis is Capitalism in Eastern Europe is not gonna work until solid property ownership system is established, until the property and the capital is protected [from corrupt statesmen] by law, and this protection is enforced in practice.

East-to-the-Poland nations can remain in this "half-assed capitalism" state forever, the transition is not gonna happen automatically.

Poverty is just a consequence of such conditions, so it will remain as is until transformation of juridical branch of government is over.

<comment> guard-of-terra The solid property ownership system isn't going to establish itself. What do you think can (should) be done to establish it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Some economists argue that mass privatisation would have worked if it had been implemented even more rapidly and extensively." This is always the argument about any failed policy. These researchers should do a wider study that includes privatization efforts before 1990.

We could conduct some pretty sweet experiments in virtual worlds. Would libertarianism really work if it were the law? A real welfare state? Privatization of a communist country? Start a virtual world with those laws and see what happens. Some obvious drawbacks include: \- self-selection of participants (you could get around this by controlling who is allowed to participate) \- lower motivation (being unable to pay your actual rent has a pretty different effect from having a low virtual bank account balance) \- natural anonymity of avatars (there are plenty of things people do online they'd never do in real life)

But a well-done research study could probably account for a lot of those things.

Maybe the IMF should conduct some virtual world experiments before shoving their current pet policy down the throats of millions of people whose government just collapsed. This isn't the first complaint I've heard that goes, "The policy forced on X country by the IMF turns out to have ruined everything. Oops."

<comment><USER9> This is impossible. In fact, the whole pursuit of mathematical economics and economic modelling is flawed. Se here for a fuller explanation: <http://mises.org/daily/3638>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> When you replace a "central planned" public economy by a "central planned" private economy you have not done anything at all.

The problem is being "central planned" in the first place. Companies should not grow to a level in witch they get profits from monopolies and privileges, but for giving a service for the people.

We are learning this the hard way, in the west we have institutions that are "too big to fail". The politicians solutions? Make them even bigger so they can trick the people for a while until it makes a bigger boom in someone else election year.

The Federal Reserve and the ECB are central planning our economy and it is not working for the general population.

</comment><comment><USER11> Tl;dr A bunch of politicans with geopolitical goals made central policy on how to direct a bankrupt nation in turmoil. A nation which has existed in perpetual corruption under collectivism. Yet this is described as a failure of privatization?

I can't wait for the day Russia isn't under corrupt leadership. The natural and human resources there are vast and untapped. To think what the world would be like if they had followed Adam Smith instead of Marx.

<comment> guard-of-terra Corruption wasn't a killing problem for USSR. Inefficiency was.

There wasn't much to be stolen. There wasn't much to be earned either; hence the inefficiency and the lack of determination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I believe that the IMF, World Bank and friends are primarily economic pillagers. I think that destroying economies and taking over countries is their main purpose.

They normally go after second and third world countries. Recently they have begun attacking the first world.

I think that the financial crisis could have been resolved in a number of ways. However, they decided to deliberately exacerbate it and perhaps deliberately induced it to begin with. I believe that the goal is to redraw international borders by forming new supernational poltical entities, and they think that they cannot do that with healthy economies during peacetime. They believe they need a new world war.

The theory looks to be something along the lines of "you've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelette". I think that the fact that these people are taking these destructive actions behind everyone's backs means they are untrustworthy.

I know, I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist who is too stupid to comprehend the intricacies of the hard science of economics.

</comment><comment><USER13> Whoa. I never knew this "couponing" was how the post-Soviet economies went about privatization. It seems like perhaps the exact worst way to go about de- centralizing an economy, especially when little-to-no financial and corporate management expertise existed in the population steeped in generations of collectivism. I don't think this is an anti-capitalism lesson -- it's a lesson on the dangers of the widespread implementation of good-sounding academic ideas with little basis in reality.

A good-sounding idea of my own: I wonder what would have been the result if all privatized operations had been sold to the highest foreign bidders, with the cash disbursed to the citizens who had been the putative "owners" of these enterprises. Instead of the post-Soviet kleptocracies, perhaps a real industrial base would have developed, with intimate global ties.

<comment><USER14> Your good-sounding idea failed gloriously in a large scale in East Germany (just that the money was used to pay back part of the debt). The problem is that most sales processes can be rigged (ours definitely was), if only by making up such a complex procedure that only those in the know are able to fill out the forms in the short time allocated by the same people.

I guess that every "simple" idea on how to approach decollectivization was tried in one of the former socialist or communist countries (there were a whole bunch to try theories on, after all). That the author probably chose the one they could most easily pick apart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Naomi Klein's 2009 film "The Shock Doctrine" (imdb: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1355640/>), available on netflix, looks at similar subject matter.

In short, the 'chicago school' economics lead by Milton Friedman posit that as-free-as-possible markets, de-regulation and privatisation are economically beneficial. In practice (see: Argentina, Chile, etc) they only seem to further the gap between rich and poor, and the 'shock doctrine' way of destabilising the existing economy and government to achieve this is pretty disgusting.

<comment><USER16> > In short, the 'chicago school' economics lead by Milton Friedman posit that > as-free-as-possible markets, de-regulation and privatisation are > economically beneficial.

They are. You want a comparison? Let's compare Chile to North Korea, and the wealth gap in those nations. Free-as-possible markets aren't perfect. They may not even be good. But they're better than the alternative.

<comment><USER17> "Free-as-possible markets ... are better than _the_ alternative[, North Korea]."

That's a nice false dichotomy you've got there.

<comment><USER16> Wow. In the future, if you're going to put quotes around something someone said, make sure they actually said it. Re-arranging words that I used into new sentences doesn't count.

<comment><USER17> I made no attempt to hide my editing. I stand by it, too -- I only stated explicitly what you were implying.

You followed the dichotomy "Let's compare Chile to North Korea" with the dichotomy "Free-as-possible markets [or] the alternative", in a context where the parent comment had already associated Chile with "free-as-possible markets". Are you now going to insist that you were not intending to associate North Korea with "the alternative"? Because I find that pretty unlikely.

<comment><USER16> I should have used a plural instead of the singular. There are, of course, many alternatives to the free market. Communism, socialism, feudalism, anarchism, capitalism, cronyism, and quite a few other isms. And free markets are better than all of those alternatives. You don't think so? Examples, please, instead of non-existent dichotomies.

<comment><USER17> Indeed, the mention of North Korea as an alternative only got under my skin owing to its proximity to the implication that there was only one alternative - I probably wouldn't have bothered grumbling if only that "the" had been an "any".

A market that was "as free as possible" would have no government regulation at all - there's one of those in Somalia. How's that for an example?

<comment><USER16> > there's one of those in Somalia. How's that for an example?

First, I asked for an example of an alternative that works better. You gave me an example of what you think a free market system looks like.

Second, that's not even an example of a free market system. That's anarchy. Anarchism. An ism. A free-market system still has a functional judiciary, a respect for property rights, etc etc. Somalia has none of those.

<comment><USER17> Of course Somalia's not an example of something that works better. I meant it as (I guess the term would be) a co-example; there's no market regulation, & it's pretty obvious that pretty much anything else works better.

However, I do insist that, strictly speaking, anarchy is a free market system - it's the reductio ad absurdum of free-market-ism. It's only fair if you're willing to cite North Korea, a totalitarian dictatorship with absolute state power, ie the reductio ad absurdum of state regulation, as an example of such. North Korea also lacks a functional judiciary, a respect for property rights, etc etc.

I take it you at least consider justice & law enforcement to be sectors that benefit from state regulation - and I'd be surprised if there were no other such sectors as well.

To take less extreme examples:

* the (pre-Obamacare, as it's too early to judge the new setup) US healthcare system, which is less regulated than most developed countries', is the most expensive & least effective.

* In the UK, the cheapest & most reliable part of the rail network is the part in Northern Ireland... being the only part that wasn't privatised back in 1993. Everywhere else, costs have grown & reliability has fallen.

...

To try to find some common ground here: you believe in "as little regulation as possible", but that "as little as possible" is not none; I believe in "as much regulation as necessary", but that "as much as necessary" is not totalitarianism. I suspect these beliefs are, in the end, adjoint - <USER2> approaches to the same fundamental idea, although we may disagree on the details. Does that seem reasonable to you?

<comment><USER16> > Does that seem reasonable to you?

Actually, I can sum up my beliefs very simply. I am against big things. Big government, big business, big whatever. Big things breed corruption. I don't mind regulation or even government involvement, as long as it's happening on a very local level and I have the freedom to live someplace else.

<comment><USER17> Okay, I can get behind that. I feel a certain amount of government is necessary to stop big business, big gangs (mafia & the like), or whatever from getting out of hand -- but too much government has its own problems. As you say, corruption, whoever gets too big.

Similarly, a certain amount of unionisation helps keep big business under control, but too much leads to the workers holding the populace hostage.

And so on -- balance in all things, really. Although what constitutes "balance" will vary considerably depending on what you're looking at. (Law enforcement needs more regulation than most industries, for instance.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A quote from none other than libertarian idol Ludwig van Mises comes to mind:

 _"If a man has been hurt by being run over by an automobile, it is no remedy to let the car go back over him in the opposition direction."_

But the real motivation for the rapid privatisation was not economic growth or stability. Indeed, the article states this:

"Its aim was to guarantee a swift transition to capitalism, before Soviet sympathisers could seize back the reins of power."

In other words, the goal of rapid privatization was to prevent, at any cost, the return of Communism. Was that a good idea, from an economic point of view? Probably not. But an ideology that, several times, nearly plunged the world into a nuclear war, and was responsible for the deaths of over a hundred million people, between the gulags, famines, and the Great Leap Forward, might have generated a bit of fear among the Western countries, who wanted to get rid of Communism as quickly as possible. Similarly, emancipating the slaves destroyed the economy of the South for two decades -- but it was worth it.

<comment> guard-of-terra "But an ideology that, several times, nearly plunged the world into a nuclear war"

Citation needed. Any nuclear conflict had two sides. One of those tended to be USA.

Also, USA is the only country to ever drop a nuclear bomb on a city.

<comment><USER16> > Also, USA is the only country to ever drop a nuclear bomb on a city.

The peace we're enjoying now is a direct consequence of that. After the realization of the devastation, everyone suddenly lost the appetite for using those weapons again. Which is why there haven't been any nuclear bombs dropped on any living person in the last 70 years.

<comment> guard-of-terra Maybe so, still I don't see why one can accuse one party in "nearly plunging the world into a nuclear war" while turning the blind eye on another side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra A new analysis showing how the radical policies advocated by western economists helped to bankrupt Russia"

Funny thing is, it is instantly obvious to anyone living in the country.

Those "policies" looked like they're aimed at destroying any research or production capacity short of mining of natural resources.

Of course, incompetence played leading role in the process, not just malice.</comment>


A tool, approved by WhatsApp, to automate the distribution of fact-checks - <AUTHOR> https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2019/here-comes-a-tool-approved-by-whatsapp-to-automate-the-distribution-of-fact-checks/ <comment><USER2> This should be fun for 2020...</comment>


I have found a serious AirBNB BUG - <AUTHOR> If you login with Facebook into AirBNB and you had a previous account, set up with AirBNB that was utilizing the same email address as your primary Facebook address, your account will be rested and all your personal info, including reservations made, will be lost! <comment><USER2>
        rest /rest/
        verb

        1. cease work or movement in order to relax, refresh
        oneself, or recover strength.
        1. be placed or supported so as to stay in a
        specified position.

        rest /rest/
        verb

        remain or be left in a specified condition.</comment>


Ask YC: Starting a web startup in India? - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
Do you think is a good idea to start a startup in India?
I came to SV hoping to start development of my application but the costs are just too high... so now I am considering to do it in India... I have worked in India before and there is just no comparison with the costs and I know there are plenty of qualified people over there...
What do you think? Any advice? <comment><USER2> you had to move to make a cost comparison?

<comment><AUTHOR> We did not "move", we just came here to see what Silicon Valley was all about and if maybe we could make it work down here... it was more like a field trip; besides, no matter how much you read about a place nothing compares to actually being there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> the cost is less but are you from India?, if not then you may have tough time to get things done quickly - its better to know someone down there (a co- founder may be) - also the culture and social structure is way different than SV - so you may take time to get used to it ... may be i can help you more if you can post your email address ...GOOD LUCK

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I am not Indian - Im Mexican, but I lived and work in Hyderabad for two years and have some contacts over there.

thanks for the offer, I would really appreciate all the help/advice I can get... Thanks! firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment>


US states redrawn so as to have equal populations - <AUTHOR> http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/assets_c/2010/01/reform_gis_main_map_800-20713.php

<comment><USER2> Original: <http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/>

Close-up of NYC area: <http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/nyc/>

This was probably carved out by hand. However, this would be an interesting problem to solve using integer programming, a technique that has been used to model the related problem of gerrymandering.

<comment><USER3> For some reason I find it hilarious that on the new map Staten Island is part of Jersey..

<comment><USER4> As a Brooklynite, the idea of being affiliated with Long Island rather than Manhattan fills me with horror.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, as a resident of Michigan, there are no words, in any language on Earth, that could begin to capture the joy I feel at the idea of excising Detroit (though I fear it may have already metastasized).

<comment><USER6> This data is already 10 years old. That means Detroit has already started shrinking, and therefore the new Detroit, if kept as an independent city, would be consuming more of Michigan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Brilliant. Even in the senate, you can argue that low-population states like Wyoming shouldn't get 2 seats, or that Wyoming needs 2 seats to maintain control of its interests. Periodically redrawing state boundaries sidesteps this whole debate/dilemma.

Can this idea be further generalized? Minorities can be oppressed or powerful; strive to so intertwine motivations that minorities are eliminated.

But with some caveats. <http://akkartik.name/blog/2010-01-23-21-24-35-soc>

<comment><USER8> > Can this idea be further generalized?

A silly generalization: At birth everyone draws a lot --- or throws a die with fifty sides --- to decide which state he will belong to.

<comment><USER9> And when a new state is added - free rethrows!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It looks like Washington State and Alaska are merged. That makes little sense politically or organizationally. Where's Hawaii fit into this? Assuming 50 reapportioned states that's 6 million per state, and Hawaii only has 1.3 million people.

Rio Grande State should go north with the Rio Grande and not include Arizona. That is, it should be El Paso/Las Cruces/Albuquerque/Santa Fe and up into southern Colorado. As it is, it looks like ABQ would be a border city, and that makes little sense.

<comment><USER5> Hawaii is problematic, being a significant fraction of the target population level, yet very isolated. Alaska doesn't really make sense to combine with anything either, but its population is pretty much rounding error (it's got, what, as many people as maybe three blocks of Manhattan?) so it probably wouldn't matter that much.

Though maybe it'd make more sense to just grant Hawaii independence and sell Alaska back to the Russians or something--the whole noncontiguous territory never sat well with me anyway.

<comment><USER10> Wouldn't it make more sense to sell it to the Canadians if contiguous territory was a big issue?

<comment><USER11> Only with vacant possession - you aren't getting rid of Palin that easily

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My only complaint is that they still left the UP as part of Michigan... it would look much cleaner to throw that into another piece. If you ever wondered why it became part of Michigan read up on the "War of Toledo" - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War>

<comment><USER13> Having Chesapeake split by Baltimore-Washington is unfortunate too.

<comment><USER14> Well, the alternative view is that it's split by the Chesapeake Bay. It's a bit tough to tell whether it got Annapolis and the Bay Bridge, though.

<comment><USER15> It's pretty clear that both Annapolis and the bay bridge went to BW, but Chesapeake got the Bay Bridge-Tunnel which almost makes up for it.

For all the trouble it would cause, I know quite a few people who wouldn't mind parting with old Baltmo' for good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting to see that Missouri hardly changes at all.

<comment><USER17> That means the MO just so happens to have roughly 1/50th of the US population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So are the populations normalized to one Long Island?

And on a totally unrelated note, sometimes Rhode Islands are used as units of area. I knew a girl in college that told me she grew up on .53 RI ranch in Texas. I had no idea what she was talking about, then she explained to me that RI = Rhode Island. I think they used a small plane to get around.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement#Various_countries.2C_regions.2C_and_cities)

</comment><comment><USER19> Only change I would make: Include Santa Cruz in SF Bay state

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Attribution: I found it on Fallows's blog: [http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/thought...](http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/thought_experiment.php.))

<comment><USER20> working link [http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/thought...](http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/thought_experiment.php)

<comment><USER21> Link to the creator's page, with said map: <http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can anyone tell how he did this? Was it through trial/error?

<comment><USER19> Probably looking at county populations

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The state of Willamette would be the place to live. Nice weather, mountains, desert, ocean ... Linus.

<comment><USER24> I don't like crowded places. So when I go visit the U.S.A, the best places to stay for me are the Great Basin, High Plains, and Rocky Mountain High.

<comment><USER14> Most of Willamette is not very dense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What happened to Hawaii?

<comment><USER26> Part of Coronado.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> what's happening with HN?</comment>


H-1B in 2020: Immigration Visa Faces Further Restrictions - <AUTHOR> https://insights.dice.com/2019/12/03/h-1b-2020-immigration-visa-restrictions/ <comment><USER2> Honestly this was long overdue. The amount of abuse in the H1B program is staggering especially in IT consulting and staffing agencies. They find all kinds of loopholes to legally pay the minimum prevailing wage to maximize profit.

Unfortunately, legitimate employers also have to use the same H1B visa due to the lack of a points based immigration system.

This has led to quite a bit of collateral damage and has turned many legitimately high skilled professionals and grad students away from the US towards EU and Canada.

At the end of the day, these steps still don't address the root cause of work visa abuse - your legal presence in the US on H1B tied to the employer. You probably need legislation to address this and it's nowhere in sight.

<comment><USER3> As far as I know, H1B are transferable, so you are not actually 'tied' to the employer. Some employers are actually reluctant to hire H1B as some people accept jobs they don't really want and then find a better job thanks to H1B transfer being much easier and cheaper than requesting a new H1B.

<comment><USER2> I should clarify - legal status in the US is tied to your employment status, not necessarily to a particular employer. If they lose their job, they have 60 days to get an H1B with another employer before they start accruing illegal presence.

Also, there isn't really something called an H1B transfer. its a new H1B application every time you change your job, just that you dont go through the annual lottery if you already went through it once or have an I-140 approved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This topic is a perennial favorite on HN.

Invariably someone will offer the opinion that they should auction the visas so the highest paid get it.

Someone else will respond what about junior people joining it and salaries in Michigan vs San Francisco and so on.

I'll tell you what struck me about this article: the data is staggering. The drop in acceptances is much greater than what I would have guessed. The distribution among the firms is about what I might have guessed. But 30-60% rejections is definitely news.

<comment><USER5> > This topic is a perennial favorite on HN.

Because it's an important issue.

> Invariably someone will offer the opinion that they should auction the visas > so the highest paid get it

Haven't seen it yet.

<comment><USER4> > Haven't seen it yet.

Heisenberg!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Finally someone is cracking down on the H1B1 mafia. Stop bringing in 7 Indian contractors instead of just hiring 2 americans to do IT work... I'm looking at you Verizon, Tata, Infosys, Cognizant, and every other "staffing company" a.k.a import cheap foreign labor to flood the IT market.

<comment><USER7> It is not about Indians vs Americans. You could continue your argument with: or bring in 1 hard working Chinese or European, but this is missing the point. American economy needs more qualified workers than the US education system can produce. Now you either starve the economy or force US companies to hire abroad. Non of these options are great for the economy overall. More over, the H1B holders are rarely cheap or flood the market. It it was true the IT staffing wages would go down instead of going up.

<comment><USER8> > IT staffing wages would go down instead of going up.

They have hit rock bottom here in DFW area. If you are generic 'java/.net programmer' or a `QA tester`, I've seen rates as low as 25$/hr.

<comment><USER9> Unless Dallas is significantly different than the rest of the world, I find this wholly implausible. That would match entry level offshore rates. So next $25/hr resume you see, please pass it along and I'd be glad to hire that them

<comment><USER8> [https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=a47c478572895fae&tk=1dr64o...](https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=a47c478572895fae&tk=1dr64o6me34rl001&from=serp&vjs=3)

found this on page one of indeed search. enjoy.

<comment><USER10> >Federal security clearances

If you've got an active security clearance you should definitely run far, far away from this sort of job.

>Flexibility for those needing time off for jury duty, voting, military leave, etc

Two out of three of those aren't even a "perk". That's a legal requirement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You know where they are headed instead? Canada.

There has been an huge influx of Indians from US coming to Canada. I've seen it first hand in the Toronto market.

We had shit salaries to begin with, and this isn't helping.

<comment><USER12> We had 5 developers move to Canada.

They are being paid far above market value because they wouldn't agree to drop down to Canadian salaries.

Further, new hiring has shifted to Canada (we didn't hire devs in Canada at all) and there is a new office now because 5 devs is quite a few, as opposed to the single remote Canadian we used to have.

I suspect salaries are only gonna rise. At least the devs who moved from within our company are being paid well above local market value.

<comment><USER13> I have come across companies that stopped hiring in the US and moving jobs to Canada.

Even a Silicon Valley company with good funding recently that I applied to, with a job posting in San Francisco, eventually hired in Canada.

<comment><USER14> That's true for FAANG companies as well. They have slowed down hiring in US since it has become really hard to bring that talent in the country. Instead they are slowly moving their work to other countries and doubling down on hiring there. Source - I and many people I know have been approached for jobs in Countries other than my country of residence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting to note that they are cracking down heavily on service and consulting companies as they are the reasons why most people find it hard to get a H1-B. FANG salaries are quite good and the increase in rejection % for FANG-ish companies is a little discouraging though.

<comment><USER16> Over 90% acceptance in all cases (IBM excluded, as the article states it's probably due to their service business), 95% for the majority. Why is that discouraging? Looks to me as if even with very stringent checks they didn't find many reasons to block.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, one of the three things will happen

1- Companies will start hiring citizens and pay them higher salaries leading to shortage of skills and re-skilling of people with other skills into IT.

2- Companies decide to forgo lower NPV IT projects and invest money elsewhere. Accept products without customization. Demand for labour and wages remain close to where they are.

3- Remote work for even project management takes off. It is successful enough that wages actually fall further.

Which one is most likely or will it be a combination of three?

<comment><USER2> There is evidence for all three happening

1 - Bootcamps and coding schools are a thing now.

2 - companies moving from on-prem to SaaS reduces the level of customization and the need to hire talent in-house.

3 - Many companies are setting up massive offshore offices (Canada,EU, India, even Brazil). With cloud services this is even more easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As someone, who argues for H1b, I support these changes. The H1b visa should be restricted to the well-qualified, i.e. people who hold Master's degrees or higher and actually qualified for the jobs (not the body shopping TCS & Wipro types).

<comment><USER19> I have a BS in CompSci. I hired a person with a masters in CompSci from Syracuse.

She didn't know what null was. Nor did she know how to write a single line of code.

Which leads me to believe that Either she lied about that degree (unlikely because her visa was tied to it), or that a masters isn't a sign of anything.

<comment><USER18> Exceptions & anecdata can be found anywhere... I am not saying a graduate degree is the only necessary qualification, but one among other such as their OSS contributions, relevant work experience etc.

But strict enforcement is needed to prevent H1b fraud by body-shoppers. I do believe there is a significant need for H1b developers, just a higher quality filter.

<comment><USER14> Not just exceptions. I have hoards of friends who have bachelors degree and they moved in through H1 route, but now working in FAANG or similar competitive start-ups because they are skilful and are making 130k+. But I got your point, there has to be a quantifiable way to judge talent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It looks like the Trump administration is looking to make the H1-B system follow its original intent: bring rare labor to these shores. I look forward to seeing the labor market change where there are five to seven Indian contractors doing basic web programming all living in a rental ghetto in a 2 bedroom apartment. We've been treating all labor unfairly. We've exploited poor from foreign shores and squashed the ability to develop native talent.

<comment><USER14> I agree to that, not just it kills local job market, it is exploiting foreign workers. I read Theranos' account, and I imagined many Indian workers kept working because they had no choice to say No. The moment they say no, they will lose their job, and getting a H1B sponsoring job in 60 days? Ain't nobody got (enough) time for that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Go ahead and put all sorts of restrictions but atleast consider giving permanent residency to those who have been waiting for several years(10+ years)

</comment><comment><USER22> So much misinformation in this thread. H1B's don't get paid lower. Law requires that they be paid market wage and no native workers are being undercut.

If you see this happening, then you can actually report it to DoL (I have had a call from a DoL investigator about H1B abuse at a past employer based on a complaint filed by an employee).

<comment><USER23> The law also says there can be no gender wage gap.

I've worked at several big tech companies and they all abused H1B's. The immigrant workers were paid a lot less than citizens. It pissed me off because the immigrant workers were treated like crap and also I would imagine it puts downward pressure on my own salary.

I worked at a company that gave referral bonuses to employees for new hires. It went like this: $2,000 for a white. $3,000 for a black or Asian. $5,000 for an Indian. HMMM.

There's little incentive for an individual to report anything. You've seen how "whistleblowers" get treated. Up against a big company with a legal department, chances are good that they know how to put up chaff, redirect, deny and obfuscate their abusive practices. Why stick your neck out when it's a systemic problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Could this speed up the shift to remote work? Why even bring people to the US when you can employ them where they live?

<comment><USER25> Another aspect of immigration law that is shaken up by the growth of remote jobs is that it makes work restrictions unenforceable. Pretty much all expat digital nomads who travel around to work are doing so on tourist visas. It'll be interesting to see how governments react as this becomes more and more common

<comment><USER26> Most governments don't care about restricting work unless you are there to take a local's job.

<comment><USER25> If that were true then foreigners on F1 and H-1B visas would be allowed to start their own companies. That not only doesn't take away jobs for locals, it creates new ones. But that's illegal.

<comment><USER26> Can't they start the company and then sponsor themselves?

Also H1-Bs are specific to The US so does not negate my comment about _most_ countries and their attitudes to remote workers. Even if technically not allowed somewhere, no one's going to start a campaign trying to deport remote tourist workers.

Remote workers pay local consumption tax while not draining value from the local economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wild idea: Remove all caps completely. Instead, require a US$1M annual fee.

That way, companies can get all of the workers that they are in dire need of, but demonstrably without the possibility of undercutting local labor.

<comment><USER28> A move like that will actually undercut labor much more, and not just tech labor. It will cause huge outsourcing to Canada(which is already happening to some extent) and to places on the other side of the world. Given that 100 IT jobs create about 30 non-IT jobs supporting them, it's going to hurt the local economy. Once entire teams are built in other countries, companies would prefer hiring new workers there just to keep communication overhead low, forget about the lower cost.

<comment><USER27> Perhaps so. It does seem like a fast track "all you can eat and right away" feature would be a draw, even for the steep fee, but maybe on balance it wouldn't be enough. Maybe toss in permanent residence after five years, or something like that.

FWIW, the H-1Bs I've worked with have been good people and as competent as locals. I worry some about them being abused by their employers, but that's their trade-off to manage. I have noticed, though, over the years that demand for my skills has lessened noticeably.

Thanks for your answer.

<comment><USER29> If you are willing to spend 1M a year and think permanent residence is a draw then you can just go with the EB1 GC and it will cost much less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anyone know if they are cracking down on TN visas too?

</comment><comment><USER31> The "H-1B Approval Rate" chart has two problems with the y-axis: 1) the 75 and 100 grid lines should display and marked, 2) it is misleading by setting the y-axis range at 75 to 100. Because it gives reader an impression that approval rate drops to almost zero.

If you want to emphasize the disapproval rate, just make a disapproval rate chart, which can have the y-axis range at 0 to 25.

<comment><USER13> Classic example of "How to Lie with Statistics?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Good.</comment>


Programming in LIL: A Tutorial (1974) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ultimate.com/phil/lil/tut.html <comment><USER2> It has always surprised me that more assembly languages weren't written this way, as a C-like language with a fixed set of register variables.

Then again C maps fairly well to PDP-11 assembly language anyway so perhaps there isn't/wasn't much of need for a more user-friendly lower-level assembly or implementation language.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a bug in the first example. t0?

<comment><USER4> Looks like bad OCR:

      mov x,r0
      add y,t0
      mov r0,w
      add z,r0

t and r have some similarities, more or less depending on typeface.

Or, maybe human OCR; just spotted the disclaimer at the top: _It has been re- typed by Phil Budne, who is to blame for any transcription errors._</comment></comment>


The Great Python.org Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://jessenoller.com/2012/11/28/the-great-python-org-redesign/

<comment><USER2> Ugh. My host is giving me nothing but heartburn. Great.

Link to the original RFP: <http://pythonorg- redesign.readthedocs.org/en/latest/>

PSF Blog post: [http://pyfound.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/pythonorg-is- getting-m...](http://pyfound.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/pythonorg-is-getting- makeover.html)

Link to the winning bids:

[http://redesign.python.org/assets/Python-proposal- Sept2012-c...](http://redesign.python.org/assets/Python-proposal- Sept2012-cleaned.pdf)

[http://redesign.python.org/assets/divio_python_presentation....](http://redesign.python.org/assets/divio_python_presentation.pdf)

I'm working on the hosting issue now.

<comment><USER3> Excellent presentation from divio, would highly recommend to check it out, especially for designers or those who work with designers. The wireframes_design.pdf, referenced from the presentation, apparently is also available: <http://redesign.python.org/assets/wireframes_design.pdf>

<comment><USER4> I wonder if it good UX that the site is designed around first-time-to-python users (and sponsors maybe?) and recurring reasons to come back such as events and the blog (the actual python users) are way down in the footer?

<comment><USER3> Events and blog entries featured on new landing page proposal, I believe, are also intended for new users, convincing them that the language is actively maintained and has an active community around.

Experienced developers probably don't come to Python.org for development news and new events anyway—there are other channels, including fellow programmers.

Those new to the subject (potential developers or sponsors), though, have nowhere else to go and are 100% likely to end up on Python.org. They also can easily leave forever if not interested.

So, from this standpoint the UX should work well for new users first and foremost. If it does, it's probably good UX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The top navigation with the colored lines is great, similar to the bbc website <http://www.bbc.co.uk/> where each of the topmost items have a different colored underline.

Now for the negatives:

those gradients in your main navigation ( ABOUT, DOWNLOADS, etc... ) is horrible. I see this a lot in bad Wordpress themes. It's dated, looks bad now, and will look worse in 6months.

The blue SEARCH font color on the blue background is a poor contrast choice.

Those Python 2.x, 3.x buttons look terrible too. It's the gradients, remove those inner grey gradients, it doesn't add anything to the buttons, doesn't even make them stand out.

Your code formatting screen looks great.

The responsive layout also needs work. The double navigation bar on ipad doesnt look nice. The search bar on the iphone is WAY too small. that should either be stacked / above / below the nav, not side by side on a 320px screen.

\---

web design is going flat, with big font types, and big images, everything is square, clean.

<http://www.hulu.com/> <http://www.uniqlo.com/us/> <http://www.ebay.com/new> [http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/11/05/the-walking-dead- kill...](http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/11/05/the-walking-dead-killer- within-review)

Personally i would keep it simple like backbone documentation

<http://backbonejs.org/>

\---

Good job though :)

<comment><USER6> There's some odd execution-level details I noticed also: all the big grey buttons for downloads look pre-pressed because they use a dark-to-light gradient which makes them look beveled in. In case the designers have never actually seen a physical button in real life before, buttons pop out and need a light-to-dark gradient indicating that light is hitting the top of the button.

I wrote a blog entry on this topic awhile back: [http://flyosity.com/design/making-rounded-rectangles-look- gr...](http://flyosity.com/design/making-rounded-rectangles-look-great.php)

<comment><USER2> thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Man, I really thought that the OP was using a bit of hyperbole on the Divio proposal, but holy shit - that is the single best presented and thought out proposal I have ever seen. I'm sure they went a bit above and beyond due to the high profile of the site involved, but I'm seriously impressed. What a fantastic reference point for what a design and website proposal should be.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, their proposal was out of this world. Never seen a company pour that much time and effort into a presentation before.

<comment><USER7> What a smart marketing tactic (that paid off in a sales win too) to just throw everything into the proposal and kill it. Very smart, and it speaks volumes about the organisation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The overuse of gradients really makes the website look cheap and like a malware website.

The highlighted gray navigation link on hover doesn't contrast at all with the blues.

On the other hand, disregarding the color scheme and gaudy gradients, the layout is solid. Clear separation of hierarchies and relationships will make for an easy to navigate website.

<comment><USER10> I came to say the same thing.

I see that Jesse acknowledged some critiques above and said he would pass on the feedback so hopefully it doesn't fall on deaf ears.

<comment><USER2> Yup. Already passed on to the team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A (perhaps redundant) request: Please please do not sacrifice usability for beauty/design. I love current Python docs and I think they're one of the best out there.

Thanks for the hard work! It looks great. :)

<comment><USER2> The docs are not part of the redesign except perhaps for updated style sheets. See <http://pythonorg-redesign.readthedocs.org/en/latest/>

<comment><USER3> I believe this is the relevant quote from the linked page:

> The proposal may feature a retheming of <http://docs.python.org> but need > not do so.

IMO Python documentation actually looks _very_ nice now (not sure if anything was written about that redesign). I hope very much that readability and clear looks won't be compromised. =) Docs may deserve some improvement from navigation standpoint, but this would require more than pure stylesheet update.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks really modern. A really impressive improvement over what python.org currently has. I'm no usability expert, but links look like links and buttons look like they can actually be pressed, a small detail that gets overlooked these days.

<comment><USER2> We are definitely keeping an eye on usability we have several experts on the team reviewing each design bit by bit

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks good. I think I should point out that the current version of python.org is actually pretty decent in the scheme of programming language/codebase sites (there are some real eyesores out there!)

<comment><USER2> Just to add - a comparison to the lowest common denominator is not what we're after :)

<comment><USER14> But he's right, the current Python website looks a lot better than some other websites _coughPHPcoughGocough_

My 2 cents, I really like Nodejs's website. Closer to Python, I'm really digging the websites for the Pocoo packages (Flask, Jinja2 etc).

<comment><USER2> No need to go site/language bashing :) We're going to make it look good, usable and a showcase for Python. Other language sites while good for "competitive analysis" aren't needed to make ours shine.

Let's just stay civil

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love love love the final wireframes in the Divio presentation... They almost don't need to go any higher-res than that. But then the few linked screenshots at the bottom seem to suggest a very rendered look done in gradients and 3D buttons which I don't love as much.

</comment><comment><USER16> There's also a version up on the PSF blog: [http://pyfound.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/pythonorg-is- getting-m...](http://pyfound.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/pythonorg-is-getting- makeover.html)

<comment><USER2> And a cached copy: <http://jnoller.github.com/redesign_cache/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Most open source projects need people like OP to rebuild their website!

<comment><USER18> Most open source projects would love to have $70K to spend on professional designers to rebuild their website. ;-)

<comment><USER2> And most would love to have people working on it for years to scrimp and save the money, evaluate proposals, fight the stop energy and "good enough" crowd.

Money was the least of the problems. That, at least you can make through hard work and sweat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I have put up a gh-pages quick and dirty cached version here: <http://jnoller.github.com/redesign_cache/> I sincerely apologize for the total hosting fail.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, 70k for a glitzy closed source web site? I'm much more impressed with things like npm-www which are clean, effective, and great examples of using the language in their own right.

<comment><USER2> Uh. No. The website, all source and everything will be open source, based on django and other open source python work/etc.

You missed a great deal of facts.

<comment><USER20> Hey, at least he thinks it's glitzy. That's a plus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm pleasantly surprised that PyPi will be prominently featured on the official python.org redesign!

</comment><comment><USER22> Tiny nit: the code examples seem to be using a variable named `l`, which is one of the "names to avoid" per PEP-8.

<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#names-to-avoid>

</comment><comment><USER23> Will the development / design be done in an open source manner so that we can contribute? Or will only the 2 contractors be able to work on it?

<comment><USER2> Until we hit close to the final major milestone for delivery and payment, it's up to the team. After that it's all open source and community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> OT: Does anyone know what happened to official Ruby site redesign proposal?

</comment><comment><USER25> l is a bad variable name, in that font it is worse.

</comment><comment><USER26> Any cached version available?

<comment><USER27> If you're running Chrome, just add cache: in front of the URL and boom! Google cached version.

<comment><USER28> TIL how to use Chrome. Thank you.

<comment><USER29> I got tired of having to look this up and decided to write a Chrome plugin to load the cached version of pages. You can download the extension from here - <http://blog.sdqali.in/downloads/GetCache.crx>

You might find it useful.

EDIT: Fixed minor typo.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Truth about Kermit News (1994) - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20150206005208/http://omen.com/knt.html <comment><USER2> The aggravating thing about CP/M systems in the late '70s and early '80s is that everybody ran same OS and processor and standard UART chips but each had their own floppy formats and few were interchangable. But serial ports were solid, so I wrote a simple 8080 CP/M transfer program called MFT that used simple checksums AND (drum roll!) also sent over file names and supported wildcards!

The bootstrap was that I had the 8080 assembler code formatted as debugger commands so you could push the 'source' over the link into a file and feed it into the debugger, patch in the port number for the serial UART chip, then save as an executable. It could have been a commercial product but I was too busy just using it to solve migration problems locally.

</comment><comment><USER3> I often used Kermit not for speed, but because it had an excellent built in scripting capability. This allowed me to schedule downloads, run remote commands, etc, at night when the phone line wasn't in use:

[http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ckscripts.html](http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ckscripts.html)

The scripting also worked for scripting telnet sessions, so it wasn't just for dial up.

</comment><comment><USER4> Man i did not expect to see a buzzfeed title from 1994.</comment>


Everything you need to know about Venture Capital, presentation by Danny Rimer (Index Ventures) from Future of web apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/cape/index-fowa/ <comment><USER2> That was a brilliant presentation, the slides alone don't do it justice. Luckily the audio will be posted soon on futureofwebapps.com.

Theres some videos of FOWA presentations available on Ian Forresters Blip.tv page but unfortunatly this talk isnt one of them. Check them out at http://blip.tv/?sort=date;date=;topic_name=fowalondon2007;s=posts;page=1</comment>


Linux Kernel Module Rootkit – Syscall Table Hijacking - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/linux-kernel-module-rootkit-syscall-table-hijacking-8f1bc0bd099c <comment><USER2> This is interesting and everything, but...

Are there Linux rootkits in use in the wild?

About 2001, I encountered a user-level Solaris root kit. But I don't why would you bother with a LKM rootkit? If you can load a module, you already have root access. Just do your stuff.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you miss most from pre-quarantine life? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I miss going to the movies...I'm not sure if movies in the theater will ever be the same, given how profitable direct to streaming has been (e.g. Trolls 2, which netted Universal more money in 19 days than the original did in its entire theatrical run of 5 months). I have 2 home theater setups (one indoors and one outdoors) with projectors and 100+ inch screens and Dolby atmos surround in each, but there is still something magical about watching movies in the theater.

I also miss restaurants. I love cooking, but not every meal every day. Delivery is a nice break, but I like sitting in a restaurant, and having someone else cook and do the dishes.

</comment><comment><USER3> I miss many things, but by far the biggest is being able to go the gym. Working out is one of the key ways I stay sane, especially after working behind a computer screen day-in day-out. I miss going swimming (only pool around here is at the gym), I miss going to the movies, I miss people being upbeat, and mostly I miss seeing my family and being able to give everyone a hug!

<comment><USER4> I work out at home with dumbbells, door frame chin-up bar and a mat. But boy do I miss having the whole bunch of equipment that lets me vary up my routines to keep things interesting and _hard_ at the same time.

Incidentally I'm nearing the middle of the GoodLife Fitness 30-day Ab Challenge. If you asked me to do 65 ab crunches followed by leg lefts AND planking without stopping for a rest a couple weeks ago, I'd laugh because no, no I wouldn't be able to do that. But I can now. When its done and over, I will be able to more than double that, which seemed impossible before, but no longer does.

So all is not lost. After this challenge, I'll have to find another one to stay motivated until the gym opens and is safe enough to attend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seeing people's faces, smiles (instead of a mask)

</comment><comment><USER6> Going to a bar for craft beer

<comment><USER7> My local micro brewery will deliver anything from 2 pints cask craft ale and any number of keg and can beers they deal with on a weekly basis every Friday. It actually tastes better at home than in the bar but I miss the people and interactions that go with it.

<comment><USER4> Every pub has that one guy who tells outlandish stories about his incredible overly-exciting life. Nobody believes a word he says, but it is part of the entertainment you pay for in each pint.

As we now save a whole lot of money on store-bought booze, we begin to understand, and truly miss the bar markup and tipping costs.

<comment><USER7> I'm British so I don't think I've ever tipped in a bar in my life. We do tip in restaurants but it's not expected like in the US.

It's not just the conversation, I just generally like the vibe in country pubs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Going out and not having to constantly make sure that I'm keeping my distance from people.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sex outside.

</comment><comment><USER10> I need a haircut. Badly.

</comment><comment><USER11> I miss getting together with a my family.

</comment><comment><USER12> Playing team sports

</comment><comment><USER13> Best moments with my family and friends

</comment><comment><USER14> Peace of mind.

</comment><comment><USER15> Being able to hug my mom.

</comment><comment><USER16> Being able to pay my rent

</comment><comment><USER17> A beer at a bar

</comment><comment><USER18> Nothing</comment>


Forensic Analysis of the Tor Browser Bundle on OS X, Linux, and Windows [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://research.torproject.org/techreports/tbb-forensic-analysis-2013-06-28.pdf

<comment><USER3> tl;dr Tor Browser Bundle is pretty darn safe on Linux. OS X and Windows - <USER2> traces are left around.

</comment><comment><USER4> This essentially confirms that rather than trusting any particular OS, it's better to run things in disposable VMs or on bootable flash drives with write disabled.

<comment><USER5> Do note that most virtualization software keep extensive logs, often times including names of ISO files mounted. Additionally, it can be hard to boot a VM from a USB key (for example, this is not possible by default in VirtualBox).

Using bootable flash drives seems like the only method that doesn't leave local traces, except perhaps in the BIOS/UEFI.</comment></comment>


VMware Buys Nicira for $1.26B - <AUTHOR> http://bhorowitz.com/2012/07/23/vmware-buys-nicira-for-1-26b/ <comment><USER2> Vinod Khosla talks about entrepreneurs having a deep understanding of an area instead of surface knowledge to make a difference. I guess, Nicira is one such example where deep technical know-how of founders helped them disrupt the networking industry with ground-breaking innovation.

Congrats on many levels! Nicara=1.3 times Instagram but several magnitudes greater than Instagram, when it came to solving hard-technical problems. I know, it is a dubious comparison but I am biased towards entrepenuers/founders who solve hard-technical problems. I am pretty sure, someone will argue that Instagram was pushing the boundaries of sharing, and in some fuzzy/meta way improving the human condition and experience in non-tangible ways, and in the process will end-up solving hard-technical problems (scale, data-science blah- blah). Let us just say, I disagree. Expecting to be voted down to oblivion.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, infrastructure can only be as useful as the applications they support. Technologists love solving hard technical problems [1], but ultimately, isn't the main goal to improve peoples' lives? Almost all the engineers I know would prefer to work on sophisticated interesting problems than "another web-app," but there isn't much point if it is just for our own edification.

I can understand your disdain for Instagram's frivolity, but people said the same about Twitter and it ended up playing a major role in the Arab Spring, whereas almost no one outside the techworld knows or really cares who runs their infrastructure. Of course without this infrastructure it all wouldn't work.

Like you say, comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges, you can't really argue one is fundamentally more important than the other.

[1] <http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html>

<comment><USER4> Twitter is much closer to being classified as infrastructure in my opinion.

Instagram is a pretty much a self-contained service (i'll draw no conclusions about the frivolity it enables, just wanted to draw a distinction between the two.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This should have interesting fallout with EMC and Cisco's relationship. Cisco has invested heavily in creating a Nicira competitor internally ([http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/cisco-announces- its...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/cisco-announces- its-850-million-spin-in/)).

Also, Nicira was contributing a lot to Openstack networking, at least as of the Diablo release, in the Quantum plugin and I believe in nova-network in general. That will have repercussions for HP, Dell, Rackspace, or anyone else heavily invested in Openstack.

I had the pleasure of working on a small project in which Nicira was involved. I didn't work directly with them, but they seemed really sharp. Many congratulations to them on a great exit.

<comment><USER6> I think VMware has made it fairly clear for a while that any part of the stack they touch will belong to them if they want it to. Even storage, which must make EMCers nervous.

Several people predicted that Nicira is a feature and the VMware of networking will be VMware; those turned out to be true, although in a different way than predicted.

<comment><USER7> Why would it make EMC nervous? They own 80% of VMware :)

<comment><USER8> When EMC'ers get nervous, they get mean. I'd be more worried about them meddling in VMware's affairs. They've done this before when they shoved a whole bunch of software products onto VMware that they didn't want.

Watch and see what happens. This "revolution" might fizzle pretty quickly if EMC gets involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nicely done, nicely done. Got to love it when someone takes a real problem and nails the solution. When I first read about these guys (as an operations person myself) I thought, "Ya know, if they can make this work they will have a helluva solution."

<comment><USER10> I'm not very savvy on what goes on with large scale networks and whatever market Nicira is in, but this blog post tells me extremely little beyond giving everybody high-fives.

What problem is Nicira solving, exactly? (It's certainly possible that the problem-space is too advanced to really tell it in layman's terms, but I can't even tell if that's the case here).

<comment><USER11> Why would you expect a blog entry from someone who invested in the company and wants to celebrate its success to explain the technical details of what it does? That's like showing up at a party when the first human walks on Mars and walking away disappointed because everyone's drinking champagne rather than giving a technical presentation on the landing mechanism.

If you want the technical details, try Nicira's website. They have a 3 minute Nicira intro video: <http://bcove.me/lydym25p> (skip to 1:10 for the meat). Or, just imagine if you had VMs in multiple racks within potentially multiple data centers and, on the fly, you could use an API to provision a private 10.0.0.0 subnet so that the machines could talk to each other as if they were directly connected to the same physical network switch. In a nutshell, virtualized TCP/IP tunneled over TCP/IP.

<comment><USER12> It's not clear to me that your example actually motivates a new technology. If these VMs all have IP addresses, then they can all talk to each other already -- no special subnet is needed. And unless this virtual subnet is performing VPN-style encryption, this virtual subnet does not provide any additional security or data isolation on top of what TCP/IP already provide (ie. you can only read data addressed to you unless you control the physical hardware and put it in promiscuous mode).

I'm not contradicting the idea that this technology is useful (obviously VMWare's acquisition speaks for itself), but I would like to see a motivating example that _can't_ be accommodated with plain TCP/IP.

<comment><USER13> It looks remarkably similar to VCider which I personally use and love.

And it DOES provide additional security because it reduces the number of open ports that you have to firewall between servers. Mistakes do happen when you are managing large number of servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone explain what problem Ncira solves? I've been to their website, but I really don't understand what they're doing.

<comment><USER15> Virtual networks and routing. IOW no need to have big iron routers, eg Juniper and Cisco.

Cost reduction is a major advantage, but also network flexibility and ease of setup are wins.

<comment><USER14> Isn't performance a problem though?

<comment><USER15> Aparently not. Read some technical explanation on it, but can't remember the details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is it really possible to be independent (not bought out) while being successful and in business when your area of operation (virtualization in this case), closely overlaps with that of another much bigger, wealthier company (VMware in this case) ?

I like the Steve Jobs quote where he says he doesn't like companies whose sole goal is to eventually get bought out by a bigger player. I personally would like to build a company, cultivate culture within that company and stay independent, even if that means more competition and less cash-in-hand in the short run.

<comment><USER6> Arguably the cloud and enterprise virtualization markets are separate and Nicira could have made money from cloud providers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They say the only requirement from physical network is IP connectivity. Technically it's straightforward to build a virtual machine on top of IP.

The real matter is to see that IP virtualization is the future of networking. However, I'm suspicious on the efficiency of that kind of virtualization as it might consume more CPU energy and maybe cause some lags between networks.

<comment><USER6> Conveniently, they recently posted on that topic: [http://networkheresy.com/2012/06/08/the-overhead-of- software...](http://networkheresy.com/2012/06/08/the-overhead-of-software- tunneling/)</comment></comment>


CC/iTunes Hackers Laundering Money? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG%2EBiz/iTunes/news.asp?c=37761

<comment><USER2> Title is wrong, this isn't 'laundering' its just fraud.

So the TL;DR version - App has a way to purchase virtual goods, app vendor 'sells' such goods but money from Apple at the end of the day doesn't add up to the number of goods they sold. Reason is that some of the 'sales' are contested by users which then result in charge backs and Apple returns the cash and deducts that out of what they send to the developer.

This sort of stuff will eventually kill 'in-app' purchases. The fraud rate is too high, the money too lucrative (which keeps the fraud rate high), the laws protect the consumer (that is good btw).

So the developer is left 'holding the liability' which is to say their virtual goods are 'stolen' and they don't get paid what they expect. Apple doesn't lose, the Credit Card companies don't lose, only the developer does.

So if you are looking for a startup idea, figure out a way to provide a remote 'kill switch' on virtual goods. Which is to say, from the developer's perspective if the purchase doesn't completely go through and stay valid, the item vanishes. That will kill the black market for such goods and return the problem to direct fraud vs the indirect fraud which makes it hard to fix.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=amazon+gif...](http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=amazon+gift+card&_sacat=See- All-Categories)

notice something?

Amazon gift cards go for more the face value. (This is the common situation on ebay).

2 possible answers

1) People are idiots (not discounting, this) 2) Credit Card fraud.

(possibly others)</comment>


Please review my app: RightRental.com - Carfax meets Zillow for Renters - <AUTHOR> http://RightRental.com

<comment><USER2> Beautiful home page.

But, how are you going to fill it with content? If I do a search and don't find content, I'll permanently bounce.

Maybe you could do a double focus: +Search for reviews (de-emphasize for now) +Leave a review (increase emphasis on this)

I'd tap into the desire for people to vent. Then, overtime, with enough venting (or endorsing), you can provide the content as a value as well. But, until then, you'll be permanently losing visitors.

Also, I'd say become the go-to site for a specific geographic area. Then expand from there. If you have a thousand posts, but only 10 posts per city, there isn't a lot of value. But, if you have a thousand posts in one city, but few elsewhere -- you may just have a chance.

Design wise, seems like you know your stuff. Great colors!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious why you ask users to run Safari / Chrome and not Firefox or IE8? Are you writing your site against webkit specifically?

Other than that, it's a great looking site. However, I found myself leaving quickly since there was no data on rentals near me (or in my state, for that matter.) I suspect this will be your biggest challenge moving forward.

<comment><AUTHOR> We built the product from idea to implementation in 2 weeks. We decided on using CSS3 techniques liberally and rather than work on downgrading for different browsers, we spent the time making a better experience for the most compliant browsers. It is in our plans to have a downgraded experience, but thought the warning was a good apology for the time being.

Thanks for the feedback. We are in the process of expanding our data. You could have added your own information... what could we do to tempt you to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice execution on the homepage. Very inviting and intuitive to run a search. I love the underlying concept.

Rental screen (ie: [http://www.rightrental.com/foxford-county-mayo-connacht- irel...](http://www.rightrental.com/foxford-county-mayo-connacht-ireland)) could use a bit more contrast on the datasheet portion.

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks great, but the banding and overlays on the sample property report totally threw me off for a moment - it looked like something had gone wrong. Perhaps a less visually distracting approach would work better in that area.

</comment><comment><USER6> I also like it. Pretty. A bit busy though. Once you got the basics polished, need to get actual data in of course, the chicken/egg problem will be large (it would seem) in a site like this. Any thoughts on how you'll tackle that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Many. :-P

The market for rental data has two big issues--the first is fragmentation-- many rental listings only appear in locally traded publications (your local classified) and for only a limited time (a few weeks). The second issue is that much of the listing data is vague--"Beautiful home in Upper East Side." Which means getting detailed current and historical information is a tough problem. It's not just a tough problem for us either--it's a tough problem for Renters!

We have so many thoughts on how to bootstrap this that it's hard to start this conversation unless you're really interested in the answer. So... as a teaser, I'll tell you that we've already started a LARGE mechanical turk campaign to seed key markets. We've also started the process of importing a number of public records that don't give us rental prices directly, but will let us create a model for what the rental prices SHOULD be--given some insight we have to traditional CAP rates (what a property should rent vs its purchase price and current interest rates--to make for a good investment).

Given those approaches do you see any other opportunities for us to bootstrap?</comment></comment>