Discovered a New Band? Find Out Which Songs To Check Out First With GoRankem - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/07/15/gorankem/

<comment><USER2> Love seeing something I've put so much passion into get coverage...something that people working day jobs will never know.

</comment><comment><USER3> a few people are comparing this to last.fm's top tracks - how does it differ? Why should i use GoRankem over last.fm to find good songs to check out first?</comment>


100 day goals - <AUTHOR> http://blog.42floors.com/100-day-goals/#.UlghiGRKnCY

<comment><USER3> This post boils down to one statement: "every 100 days we have a 20-day-long crunch time". I'm all for getting things done, but scheduling arbitrary crunch times is a great way to wear the team down until people quit.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. This sort of advice is great if you're the founder/owner, because you're the one standing to get rich when somebody comes in with a buyout offer.

If you're an employee at such a shop, though, this is a sucker's bet. Most likely your hard work is paid off with a bunch of feel-good bullshit about how you're changing the world, and the expectations that you'll do it all again in three months.

Having a crunch time (especially scheduled) is a tacit admission that you are not, in fact, reducing scope properly.

<comment><USER5> Startups are machines for learning. This isn't limited to learning the market and finding business fit and reproducibility, it also applies to all the participants, whether they are founders or employees. No corporate job is going to let you become a DBA and a Frontend Developer and a Backend Developer and a Product Manager all at once, in a production environment, with no safety net. There is no other place where you can learn at that depth, and there is no other place you can learn at that rate.

There is also something to be said for the experience of personally identifying with a goal, no matter what that goal is. The other people at your startup will quickly become your best friends (sure, maybe that's because you are spending all your time with them at the expense of your other friends). You work together, eat together, play together. The level of camaraderie and sense of membership that develops can only be compared to military service (I've done both, and it is very similar).

If you are lazy, or you don't want to sacrifice in exchange for an amazing experience where you will learn and grow more than you ever could anywhere else, then you shouldn't be working for a startup. There are plenty of big companies that will pay you a decent salary and let you stagnate, work 10-4, never expect or require of you any growth, and let you phone it in until you eventually die. Good luck whichever way you decide to go!

<comment><USER4> All I can say is, good luck with that attitude when you get married and have a family. Your perspective on what is important in life will completely change.

Believe it or not, you can be serious about your career without sacrificing your personal life.

<comment><USER5> I have been married for over 10 years.

I have 2 children.

Would you like to continue to chastise me from a position of authority on the subject?

<comment><USER6> You both seem to be guilty of universalising your own work values and denigrating the choices of others as either "lazy and don't want to learn and grow" or "too immaturely self-oriented!" Take it from the Bard: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recently did a challenge of 100 days of commits to side projects and I'm now at day 96. I think this was awesome for me, as it kept me really focused on my projects, even if some days I had only small commits.

I think my next challenge might be even more focused and look to launch one of my prototype projects in a specific amount of time. This will force me to focus and launch something, even if it isn't perfect.

<comment><USER8> My constraint is a bit different. All I have to do is work more than last week's day. For example, if I achieve for Monday 3.01 hours. All I have to do for this week Monday is to achieve 3.02 hours. It has gradually pushed me from 6 weeks ago of 23 hours to 30 hours this week.

Once I reach my goal of 30 hours a work week, my goal is to merely maintain the momentum and shift most of my workload 2-3 days so I am not working all week all the time. (Although, some activities must be done everday, such as studying)

<comment><USER9> What tool are you using to measure this?

<comment><USER8> An online time tracking tool I wrote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> super-serial Anyone else go to Amazon thinking 'hmmm, maybe I'll buy a 100 day goal calendar, it's probably only $5.'

The one he has on his wall is _$42.50 on Amazon_... I think I'll print out 100 pages and tape them to my wall.

<comment><USER10> Ha, my thoughts exactly! Here's a downloadable PDF in case you're interested: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/34726262/100%20Day%20Goa...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/34726262/100%20Day%20Goal.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Awesome!

I'm selling them at cost here: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/321226528853](http://www.ebay.com/itm/321226528853)

I might change the font a bit before shipping these out though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A 100 day challenge doesn't make sense for an established company (why would you do that to yourself?)

But for a startup, it makes total sense. You're moving quickly, and 100 days is enough time to make substantial progress while keeping yourself accountable to actually shipping. I think it sounds like a perfectly viable strategy. Definitely not for everyone.

I took his advice to heart and today is day 1 of my 100 day challenge (yesterday was day 0): [http://iambateman.com/today-is-launch- day/](http://iambateman.com/today-is-launch-day/)

<comment><USER12> nice

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There seems to be something deeply effective about setting arbitrary constraints. Obvious examples abound: haiku, twitter, 80-char code, screenplays in fixed-width Courier, 25-minute pomodoro, text-only man pages. Also, the metronome of practicing music (cadenzas don't count), the fixed 8 hour workday, the 12-tone music temperament..

I've wondered what a piece of software could look like with each function/codeblock written on 1 index card each. Linus seems to prefer one- page functions for C, but I like the extreme of the index card.

<comment><USER14> My first CS teacher in high school required index-card size functions (actually procedures because it was Pascal). It's helped me immensely over the year, because those 5-10 line functions end up growing into 100 line behemoths as features get added.

Starting with smaller bits gives you a longer mean-time between refactorings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is how I've gotten around my own productivity faults: not with a particular arbitrary date, but by publicly promising to a point of no return. It's incredible how much I've been able to do by setting expectations without too much estimation. By promising what I want to accomplish rather than what I think I am capable of accomplishing, it tends to push me to be more productive than I thought possible.

</comment><comment><USER10> I work at Thinkful ([http://www.thinkful.com](http://www.thinkful.com)) - <USER2> help people learn to code through coding projects and mentorship.

Thinking about using this with my team. I made a PDF so we can print it, thought you gals and guys might be interested too: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/34726262/100%20Day%20Goa...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/34726262/100%20Day%20Goal.pdf)

Edit: Here is a similar option available at Amazon, it's $42 ([http://www.amazon.com/Countdown- Calendar/dp/B004VP6XBK](http://www.amazon.com/Countdown- Calendar/dp/B004VP6XBK))

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm of two minds on this.

On one hand, making deadlines as short as possible is a great idea. It's too easy with one-year or two-year projects to six months arguing about infrastructure, requirements, and standards and end up delivering late or not at all. Every project should be required to deliver _some_ value in the first couple months.

On the other hand, three or four twenty-day crunch times every year is not sustainable. Unless they're planning a Logan's Run-style turnover of their current team.

</comment><comment><USER5> Since they are like $40 on Amazon, I'm selling them here: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/321226528853](http://www.ebay.com/itm/321226528853)

I think it will cost about $7 to print it and $5 to ship it (free shipping is included, internationally as well I believe) so this is about what I expect my cost to be.

<comment><USER6> Alternatively, a ream of paper and a printer works wonders

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 100 day goals are pretty effective when you make the right goals. They are pretty dangerous if you're aiming the wrong direction.

<comment><USER12> I've spent a lot more than 100 days listlessly wandering around with no direction, and I think 10 instances of 100 days aiming in deliberately wrong directions would've been more interesting, and I'd have learned more.

(Exception is if I got into horrible debt or did/received some sort of lasting damage).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "how fast it took" does not parse.</comment>


Ahead-of-Time Compilation (java openjdk 9 new feature) - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8166089 <comment><AUTHOR> It is the first steps to a hybrid JIT/AOT future for Java and JVM capable languages.

Very exiting ;)</comment>


Startup employers unwilling to mention % equity offered. - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Why-are-startup-employers-hesistant-unwilling-to-give-information-like-equity-offered-when-making-an-offer

<comment><USER2> That's much like promising you a salary of 200k ... in some undisclosed unit of currency. The rational valuation of it is roughly nil, even if they succeed. So you have to decide if you'd still take the position if that part of the compensation weren't offered at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> Then consider it to be worth nothing... which is probably what it will be worth. It wouldn't be an encouraging number anyway.

<comment><USER4> Nothing would be overvalued. Consider it worth a negative amount because of the opportunity cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When these companies hire people without telling them the percent, what caliber of person do they think they're getting?

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, i'm surprised there is even debate on this. If you don't know the %, then you should value the equity at $0.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you are being paid market rate, there is no reason for you to know the % of equity offered until you bring the company to an important stage. But if you are discounting your salary for equity, then it should be in writing.

<comment><USER7> Believe it or not, I have had applicants who have felt entitled not only to $85/hour (52 weeks x 40 hours equates this to 176,000 USD for this particular programmer whose only skill is Basic and C#), who was even asking for equity at this rate. This guy was talking about serious CEO pay even though he didn't even know our main language (Ruby) and would presumably require time to be acquainted with it.

The bottom line is you need to account properly for the past, the present, and the future. We pay $75,000 or $45/hour (if contractor) for a programmer with 3-4 years of professional experience (add $10/hour to your rate if you are not salaried or there is no guarantee of continued work a la contractor. We talk equity later.

<comment><USER8> Cost of living low or not, that is entry / mid-level pay. Ruby tends to be in high demand as well..your post is confusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, they must give you the exercise price; and if you assume it is a fair price (or 15% discounted, which is often the case) of $x/share, you know that e.g. if the company grows up 10 times in value, you get a bonus of $n _x_ (10-1) where n is the number of shares you get an option for. So in that sense, the total outstanding is not interesting.

It is interesting in the sense that you need to know the total company valuation to have an idea of how much the company can still increase its value. If an unknown facebook competitor "mugshotbook.com" is already valued at $5B without any users, it is unlikely your option will be worth anything ever, regardless of how much you are getting.

DO NOT FORGET: Options are a contract to buy in the future at a price known today. They are not equivalent to shares (if they were, you'd be taxed for the face value on the day of the grant!). If the value does not go up, they are worth exactly nothing. If you get facebook options with exercise price reflecting $50B market capitalization, and facebook IPOs at $50.5B when you are vested, what you earn is 1% of the share value of your options (because of the exercise price), not a penny more! In numbers: If you get $10M worth of facebook options today, and facebook IPOs at $50.5B, you get a $100K bonus for your (e.g.) 4 years of vesting, or $25K/year -- not shabby, but a far cry from the $10M you think you'll be owning.

</comment><comment><USER10> Tough. They have to.

<comment><USER11> Is there a law/regulation? (federal or state?) Or just a norm?

<comment><USER12> IANAL. Stockholder laws in Delaware are very protective. As a stockholder you probably can force a company to disclose some basic information like this.

Two problems:

1) You only have those rights once you've been granted the equity.

2) You would have to sue or threaten your current employer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To be fair, the percentage can be a pretty fuzzy number for a young startup in the middle of raising money.

</comment><comment><USER14> So let's say you know the percentage, like 10%. What would it mean to you? There's nothing that would stop them from diluting it to 0.0000001%.</comment>


Netflix: Stories about our new PAC and SOPA are not true - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconbeat.com/2012/04/09/netflix-stories-about-our-new-pac-and-sopa-are-not-true/

<comment><USER2> Can anyone give us a TLDR of this issue? I'm finding it quite confusing.</comment>


We Actually Built a Remote Team, and It Rocks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@davidrupp/we-actually-built-a-remote-team-and-it-rocks-a4b839cf4e05

<comment><USER2> The aligns very closely with my experience in a distributed startup. Of course there are challenges like the ones mentioned in the StatusPage post, but I felt that post exaggerated the problems greatly. For example, complaining about a 3 hour time difference and lamenting that this meant almost no overlap in working hours for team members. Sure, if your team makes no effort at all to align working hours when needed.

There are a few points that stand out and ring true to me. As someone who has thrived as a remote worker and made a career of being a generalist, I was similarly surprised to hear from StatusPage that these qualities aren't compatible. My team members and myself especially picked up new languages, tools, roles, and responsibilities and ran with them.

As far as communication, weekly phone meetings (no video needed) coupled with in-person meetings maybe once or twice a year served to keep us all on the same page. The main method of day-to-day communication was via persistent chat rooms and direct chats between people as needed.

After years of great progress, we had a successful exit in 2014. When I find my next team, it will definitely be in a remote role, as the benefits to me are so great that I've essentially ruled out working in an office in the future. If you've convinced yourself that your organization can't operate with remote workers, then good luck and I hope you find the team members you need.

<comment><USER3> It seems that "high quality audio solution", in their case polycom, in our case mumble + good mics and "no videoconferencing" are among the most common thing I see in successful remote work setups.

For reasons I can't seem to put down on paper, remote setups that insist on lots of video conferences feel... oppressive in a way that working next to someone simply doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd really like to hear more stories like this one. Please share if you have a working remote team.

I'm absolutely over the rhetoric about how you need to be in the same office to have any sort of culture. There are online communities every where, they all have their own culture, their inside jokes, their group think, etc etc.

Maybe I'm just a bit bitter about the topic but I grew up online, I find online social connections to be equally as strong as offline ones. I guess I just feel the whole counter argument is baseless and unproven and not held up by anything more than survivor bias, industry norms and what people say investors hate to hear.

The pros easily outweigh the con's. Some teams it will absolutely not work. Some teams its the best way forward.

<comment><USER5> Sure. We're a company of 300+, completely distributed and contribute to building 23% of the internet. The company culture is unique, quirky, effective, and clever. I can imagine working in an office because I did it for many years. Can't imagine why I would ever want to do it again. Never been more productive or effective.

[http://automattic.com/about/](http://automattic.com/about/)

A former colleague wrote a pretty good book about us: [http://scottberkun.com/yearwithoutpants/](http://scottberkun.com/yearwithoutpants/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've worked in both remote and in-house teams. I can't stress enough how important it is to go to conferences together.

It doesn't need to be the whole team at the same time, but I believed it was my job as manager to make sure my team could go to conferences (dev, UX, IA, design) in groups.

Those situations have an uncanny ability to blend excitement, thought- provoking questions, a bit of insecurity, and plans of action.

When folks returned, both remote and in-house, it lead to better camaraderie and better output. Experiences are things people share and hold onto.

</comment><comment><USER7> The biggest problem I've seen with remote work is management. You need the right people but management can also make or break the team. If they don't understand how to manage a remote team effectively it's going to be a disaster.

</comment><comment><USER8> I run a consultancy of about 15 including myself. We use a combo of Ventrilo ([http://ventrilo.com](http://ventrilo.com)) and Slack. I'd make a bet that our productivity and communication is better than 99% of any company.

Alternatives to Ventrilo (just my personal preference, really), includes Mumble and Teamspeak. Everyone is required to have a push-to-talk key, too. We give everyone their own office (a la dedicated channel for them), and have some scripts built into that allow us to page another user and tell them we need their attention.

</comment><comment><USER9> I did remote contract dev work for about 2 years with a startup (all members of our team of 3-4 were remote). It did take a little getting used to, but ultimately I enjoyed it. A few key things that helped:

1) Good communication (as many others have mentioned) - team members were always on chat (campfire->slack) while working. We also had semi-regular weekly video chats where we talked about what was going on. Video was nice because it helped to put faces to the people you were working with.

2) Don't focus on work 100% of the time - just like non-remote offices, people need time where they can chat about non-work related things, like games, home life, funny cat pictures, etc. Talking about these things helps create bonds beyond work, and improves the team imo.

3) Meet in person occasionally - the team all met once a year in person. Yes it can be a little awkward initially, but it also helps to further cement that there is a real person behind the chat.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been on (and managed) both in-house and remote teams. As an employee, I love the flexibility of working for a remote team -- you're more focused on getting the work done versus spending 'x' hours a day in your office or in your cube. On managing a remote team, it emphasized my need to ensure that everyone had a clear understanding of the tasks at hand for that day/week/month and that we were all communicating effectively (We used IRC, VoIP phones with a built in VPN (they could be on the 'network' when plugged into the back of the phone), and google hangouts).

If you add in the fact that I'm basically in rural Appalachia (Eastern Kentucky) and there aren't that many DevOps/Linux SysAdmin jobs for guys out here -- I'm almost forced to be a complete remote resource for most companies. I've been doing a fair amount of interviewing recently -- I've had companies tell me that their engineering staff is completely remote but their DevOps team is an extension of corporate IT and that they need to be in the office for that (um, what?), that I'd be their first remote employee (scary), or that they have a cloud environment and they want a distributed team, but, everyone's in an office somewhere because they don't have enough internal support for a remote workforce.

From a manager's perspective, letting go control of your team is scary: you lose the ability to check in on your employees by walking to their desk, you lose the 'butt in seat' visibility of your team, and you lose the 'over the cubical' conversations. What they don't immediately see is that those same things still exist, and still happen, but in different mediums. Employees will still chat amongst themselves in IRC, managers will still message people or note who is or isn't here based on activity. Giving up that control resulted in a productivity boost for my team -- almost everyone (there was one employee who had an interesting home situation and we had to get him office space to work) was twice as productive at home than they were in the office. We still had our team dynamic -- we'd meet up once a week for dinner and work from a shared working space one afternoon a week -- but we felt closer to one another and understood our goals and targets more.

</comment><comment><USER11> We do what they do, but not with voip phones, with Sococo. I work there, and our team is in 5 states and 2 continents. We use our own product for all of our development.

Its especially important to have regular team online meetings e.g. Scrum. This is both for communication and for socialization. Its easy to forget that other remote workers are people; its easy to quit talking to them. Seeing and hearing them daily makes them people again, instead of just an avatar.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was curious about their point with VoIP. (Implementation, that is!)

David, if you're here, are you guys using SaaS for your VoIP provider, or are you using FreePBX or something? Or just direct phone-to-phone voip with the port forwarding that entails?

<comment><USER13> I'm not David, but I work remotely (+900 time difference!) and regularly work with others over VOIP. Hardware SIP phones are pretty hard to beat, but we often use Mumble for pair programming. It is a bit fiddly to get used to but it has some very nice features and we actually prefer it to SIP. First, you can easily (once you get the hang of it) configure the sound so that it is really voice activated. This is actually quite important for us because only about 25% of the team are permanently remote. When the office is noisy, it really is nice not to hear the background. When I used to work in the office regularly, I would pair program "remotely" with other people in the same room -- it is just a lot more physically relaxing to have your own space. I can also adjust the other person's volume to my own liking.

Another nice feature is the really low overhead of the server. Running a Murmur server barely ticks over my CPU, so it is easy for each of us to run their own server. This allows people to essentially join conversations at somebody's "desk" at will. Everything is essentially a conference call so it is easy to casually come and go, which is less nice with most SIP clients.

Finally, Mumble is really low latency. Especially since I'm 9 timezones away, this is really important. We tend to pair program using Tmux and Vim (which is really efficient), so you really want the voice to not lag too much from the action. Honestly with a combination of Mumble, Tmux and Vim, I often completely forget that I'm not physically in the same room as the person when I'm pairing.

We tend to use Google Hangouts for our standups and planning meetings. We make good use of the video and screen sharing in those meetings. I wouldn't say that I need video overly much, but seeing everyone for 15 minutes a day does help me feel more in touch.

Anyway, I know we're not the only group using Mumble. You might like to give it a try.

<comment><USER12> Using Mumble had never occurred to me, but it's a great idea. Thanks! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Current (still on front page) HN thread on pros and cons of working from home: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9231541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9231541)</comment>


We don't need a string type - <AUTHOR> http://mortoray.com/2013/08/13/we-dont-need-a-string-type/

<comment><USER2> > _We can support that decision by considering the behaviour of a subscript, > or indexing operation. Should we index the logical character, or a specific > code point? Again, looking at unicode combining characters, there is no > actual representation, or even definition, of what a "logical" character is. > Sequences of combining marks are unbound, thus no fixed size type could even > represent a "logical" character. It would seem that operations on the string > need to be done at the code point level — exactly the behaviour for the same > operation on an array of characters._

Err, what? Indexing/slicing at the code point level?

That's about as useful for text manipulation, as a bicycle to a fish.

Makes me think the author never or rarely ventures outside ASCII.

Sounds like a bunch or rationalizations for providing half-arsed unicode support for his language.

</comment><comment><USER3> A string type that is not a sequence of characters can be allowed to be more efficient by being lazy. Say you are constructing a string like this (example in Python, but the principle holds no matter what language):

        s = ""
        for x in range(100):
            s += str(x)
        print s

If s is a sequence of characters, then for each iteration of the loop s needs to be reallocated to encompass the appended str(x) characters.

If s is an abstract string, then the += operation can be implemented as just adding a reference to the string to eventually be appended. Then when the print operation occurs, the whole string can be materialized in one go so that it can be printed.

Another, and more philosophical argument against string as a sequence of characters is that a string is no more a sequence of characters, than it is a sequence of symbols or a sequence of words or a sequence of sentences.

<comment><USER4>
        s = []
        for x in range(100):
            s = s.append(x)
        format s

In other words, this is something that holds just the same for vectors of any type.

The "philosophical" "argument" is really not relevant, since the difference between characters and "symbols" seems to be just what you want (whatever that is), while words and sentences can be represented by strings themselves. This is just a tangent that adds nothing to the question of how to represent a string.

<comment><USER3> You're missing the point. If you are appending items to a sequence, you are better of using a linked list type which is why your argument doesn't hold because you wouldn't be using an array type in the first place. But with "strings are character arrays" you can't choose. In the next step you get a proliferation of competing text types all because the default one wasn't defined as an adt.

Furthermore it isn't god given that the right way to iterate a text is character by character. Word by word or line by line is equally common. It's therefore completely arbitrary whether it's a character sequence, a line sequence or something else.

<comment><USER4> No amount of abstraction will save you from finally having to determine how to represent the end result. That is totally orthogonal to the ability to delay the accumulation of something to be represented that way (which is just one strategy to achieve efficiency for this case anyway).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Take a look at Common Lisp. There, string is a synonym for vector of characters.

There are no encoding problems, either.</comment>


What Safari's "Reading List" in Lion means for Instapaper - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2011/04/30/lion-safari-reading-list

<comment><AUTHOR> There are some legendary stories about what happens when Apple enters your market. I think Marco's right that he's pretty safe on the Instapaper front (for the reasons he says). That said, here's another tale of Apple entering a market, written by Cabel Sasser at Panic about Audion:

<http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/>

<comment><USER2> Panic's "Graduate from iTunes" banner ad campaign for Audion is a great example of trying for the pro/hardcore market when Apple has entered your space. Specifically, it's a great example of how it is very very hard to make it work out for you, but still, they tried.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Re: the Starbucks effect, I'm not sure I agree. I think the difference between Starbucks moving in next door and Apple implementing a feature like Reading List is that in the case of Starbucks moving in next door, their marketing drives foot traffic to the vicinity of your location--which you can then take advantage of. I.e., people walking by see your signage and therefore you can capture sales. It is the creation of demand, but it's the creation of demand that your own (much less resourced marketing) can then take advantage of.

In the Reading List case, there's no guarantee that customers that "get educated" about the product will necessarily ever find out about yours. It's still up to you to be in the same "location" as the competitor's product in order to benefit from their marketing.

This _may_ be the case for very well-known products that are always going to be discussed in concert with a feature launched by an Apple in the media, product reviews, etc. But it's certainly not categorically the case.

</comment><comment><USER4> The track record for Apple turning third party apps into features (as opposed to their own apps ala iTunes), has been pretty pathetic: usually what happens is that its so poorly done by Apple that the feature just stops being used and the functionality just flat out dies. Examples:

1\. Quicksilver <-> Spotlight. Spotlight is terrible. Everyone I know who used quicksilver just uses nothing now. They certainly haven't "switched" to Spotlight because spotlight doesn't do anything half as well as quicksilver did, not even launching apps for god's sake.

2\. Kaleidoscope <-> Dashboard. Another disaster. Dashboard seems to exist solely to be accidentally opened, or I guess for some people it serves as their dedicated weather "space". Apple does not hype up widgets at all anymore.

3\. Safari RSS. Does anyone actually use this? Or how about Mail.app RSS? At least here the third party RSS apps didn't die (although I see less people using RSS than ever, but I don't attribute this to OS RSS integration).

<comment><USER5> Most of the people I know that used to use Quicksilver now use Alfred: <http://bagcheck.com/item/0238-alfred> The rest are very happy with Spotlight, like myself.

On the other hand, the Reader button in Safari is awesome and if the new Instapaper-like functionality syncs that content, it will do quite well.

<comment><USER6> Also worth a mention for a Spotlight replacement: the fantastic and successful Launchbar. <http://obdev.at/products/launchbar>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with everything, except his last point:

"And if they build a large enough feature-set and backing service to make it a true competitor, they're likely to create a lot of potential Instapaper demand."

Isn't that a little backwards? If Apple builds a true competitor, then it's going to create a lot less potential Instapaper demand. See Watson and Kaleidoscope for reasons why.

<comment><USER8> I think he's betting on being able to implement better than apple.

He states: _My biggest challenge isn't winning over converts from my competitors: it's explaining what Instapaper does and convincing people that they actually need it._

So if apple deploys this _everywhere_ , more people will understand it. Since Instapaper already has such a huge user base, established users will (supposedly) say 'oh, I use instapaper. It's much better'.

So apple creates new users, which are then drawn to Instapaper's superior service.

This is all dependent upon Instapaper actually implementing substantially better, but so far apple has sucked at multi-device syncing of, well, just about anything.

<comment><USER7> I don't buy it. If Apple creates new users, more often than not they will keep them. I wouldn't count on Instapaper's huge user base (which I'm guessing is mainly the tech crowd) influencing normal, everyday users.

Sherlock beating Watson was a prime example where Apple's execution was somewhat similar (some say worse), but it still killed that product.

<comment><USER9> I'd argue that apple is largely responsible for android's success - normal, everyday people knew they wanted a touchscreen smartphone only after apple made it possible to own one, but more importantly, made it popular to own one with the iPhone. As long as there is enough of a difference between them to choose one over the other, I think he's right to bet on it being a net-win for him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What if Apple pulls Instapaper from the iPad/iPhone app store claiming it duplicates capabilities?

<comment><USER11> I don't believe they've ever pulled an app _that had already been up on the store_ for duplicating built-in functionality.

<comment><USER12> There was the kerfuffle at the start of the month with QuickPick. Apple rejected an _update_ to an app that was already on the Store that duplicated (future) built-in functionality: [http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/08/quickpick- update-in-limbo-for...](http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/08/quickpick-update-in- limbo-for-lion-similarities/)

The original version of the app is still up on the Store, but the update was rejected. Which is confusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not much unless OSX achieves higher market share than its competition or people on other platforms start to use Safari instead of their preferred browsers. That won't happen anytime soon.

I'd be more worried about a feature like this coming to Mobile Safari.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd rather have a "Video Viewing List" that gets video watching out of the browser. Apple is one of the few participants in the ecosystem that might have enough "market power" to do that at this late date.

<comment><USER9> I agree - I'm trying out <http://vhx.tv> after someone recommended it here, though it is still in the browser at the moment ( I believe they are working on apps). However, there's still a problem I haven't seen any video-instapaper service solve - how to cache videos for offline / multiple device viewing.

I think you run into a lot more issues with copyright enforcement, storage space, and ability to even copy files (different format, might only be served in flash) than text-based services have. We might have to wait until HTML5 video grows enough in popularity before seeing a decent implementation of this feature.

<comment><USER15> I have been using instapaper for a while and absolutely love it, but I think the real kicker for me was when iwas able to view what my social graph was saving for later with their twitter and fb integration.... That being said, I am a HUGE fan of Shelby.tv. I have tried a few other services in the space, but have yet to find anything that I go back to. I am finding their "always on" experience to facilitate choices. But again, I think the kicker is the social curation that I love most. They figure out which videos I want to watch based off my activity....

....now if only my instapaper filled up with articles that I wanted to read all by itself....

<comment><USER16> I have been on the shelby.tv alpha for a weeks... I love it and totally agree with all your points but I wanted to add that one of my favorite things is how easy it is to share the videos back out while you are watching them (retweet, tweet, post & comment on facebook).

Also, the application is extremely lightweight and doesn't get in the way of the video --- a simple, yet powerful experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If Apple brings this out, it wont have an API. They may promise one (like facetime) but Instapaper will still be #1 for at least another 12 months.

</comment><comment><USER18> Dude has a much better attitude about it than some other guys who ended up in a similar situation. (The Konfabulator tantrum comes to mind)</comment>


With Solve Media you'll never look at a CAPTCHA the same way again - <AUTHOR> http://nothingtosay.firstround.com/2010/09/with-solve-media-youll-never-look-at-a-captcha-the-same-way-again.html

<comment><USER2> Cool idea, but how does it work against spambots? That's the whole point of CAPTCHA. It's not supposed to be a place to add marketing copy. It's supposed to ensure actual humans are using your service. This seems like it's going to be incredibly simple to hack given that the letters are crisp and easily read. I do see that the example CAPTCHA "ads" differ from company to company, but there are still basically 3-4 plain text words in the graphic. If I were making a spambot, I would need to try submitting it 3-4 times until I find the word that works. Too easy...

<comment><USER3> I'm thinking the same thing. Especially since it uses this quoted text thing, just write your spambot to look for those anchors and extract and OCR the inner text, done.

It's a clever idea and maybe in the short article they couldn't fully explain how this works to defeat spam bots. I'd like to know more about it from a tech and sec perspective.

<comment><USER4> In theory they could prompt advertisers to create distorted ads, simply requiring users to visually decode the brand name.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but how many ads can you have? or you automatically generates a ton of variation of the same ads otherwise a spammer can just keep a dictionary with the ads images and the correct answer.

<comment><USER6> Better yet, build up a list of quotes organized by the brand. How many taglines can Toyota have? So even if the quoted text is obfuscated differently each time (new font, new noise), you can teach your bot to recognize the company logo and try one of the few taglines they have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I ever encountered a site that used this, I would probably just leave rather than subject myself to this gimmick. I have no desire to feel like a rat getting its reward of "continuing" in exchange for memorizing the highest bidder's slogan. I'm doing the website a favor by signing up, and if that's the way they are going to start our relationship, it's a signal that I shouldn't want to sign up to begin with.

That's just me, though, the same person that only fills in 1 of the 2 words in a captcha correctly. I tend not to respond well to authority.

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh goody, combining my two favorite things in the world: Captchas and Advertising!

It's good for the user: They get all the respect of a common parrot!

It's good for the site: They piss off their users!

It's good for the advertisers: They get to associate their brand with the single most irritating part of the modern web next to advertisements!

It's Win/Win/Win!

</comment><comment><USER9> This is not a new idea. <http://adcaptcher.com/> is at least one year old and it's already being used on a couple of sites.

</comment><comment><USER10> I thought the idea was really cool and appreciated not having to decipher warped text to fill out a CAPTCHA until I saw this example: <http://www.solvemedia.com/images/uni.jpg>

Your site would have to provide a LOT of value to make me want to watch a video to sign up for it (or, heaven forbid, to just comment anonymously).

</comment><comment><USER11> The author (title) is right; if Solve Media took over the CAPTCHA market, I would never look at CAPTCHA's again and likely not register with their customer's. I browse without ad-block extensions, but that in turn means I subconsciously ignore ad-like, site elements, which would include Solve Media's CAPTCHA.

I'm curious of Solve Media's affect on their customer's conversion rates.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hah, brilliant from a business standpoint. It's an ad platform running a captcha service as a front.

I've got to wonder how well it will work, though: at worst, a bot could just OCR and respond with random phrases from the ad, and get what? A 10% success rate? That's _astronomical_ compared to captchas. And to be less annoying, they'll have to be more readable and simpler and essentially hand-made: all of which contributes to easier bot attacks. So we have: hand-made + bot- vulnerable = more-expensive + not-a-solution.

Not that captchas are foolproof. There's quite a large business in human- botnets to break captchas.

That video is quite good, though. I love their captcha example.

</comment><comment><USER13> I just -love- that video pitch <http://vimeo.com/15041038> by Epipheo Studios <http://www.epipheostudios.com/>

</comment><comment><USER14> Publishers, I'm guessing, want to avoid SPAM without inconveniencing their customers. This idea seems to be pitching the latter (making it easy for the customer) but says nothing about the former (SPAM!). Apart from the other issue of showing someone else's brand as part of a sites conversion process, I think the fact that it does not talk about the spam issue might be a concern for publisher.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know if whether having a 3rd party logo in the middle of a form decreases or increases completion?

<comment><USER14> That's an interesting question. I wonder how they decide which ads to show on a given site (imagine seeing a competitors ad on your sites CAPTCHA!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wasn't there a startup doing this with videos? Video + simple question

</comment><comment><USER17> Very clever.</comment>


ODROID-C2 Compared to Raspberry Pi 3 and Orange Pi Plus - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/review-odroid-c2-compared-raspberry-pi-3-and-orange-pi-plus <comment><USER2> The real game-changer to me was the eMMC slot. SD cards are just so pitifully slow that it's unbearable to ever do any kind of disk IO on the pi. Even running apt-get update took forever.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope to get a card for the ODROID and run some of these tests again... Should've ordered it with my initial purchase so I don't have to spend another $7 on shipping!

Judging by the built-in eMMC on the Orange Pi, it's a substantial I/O boost, at least 4-8x faster than even the best microSD card.

<comment><USER3> It would also be interesting to know how eMMC compares to the SATA interface that used to be available on old Allwinner SoCs before they canned it.

I bought a CubieTruck (Allwinner A20) and a SATA SSD drive simply because it seemed to be the only cheap ARM board with decent I/O performance.

<comment><USER4> Explain this to me as one hackernews reader to another: how come people are buying Allwinner stuff? Are you not aware of the repeated GPL violations or do you think undermining all of our work is not enough of a problem to warrant a boycott?

<comment><USER5> Extending this logic, we should also avoid anything from China or any country with an oppressive regime, which have repeatedly been violating human rights (which I think is more important that violation of a software license).

In fact, if we're talking ethics and politics now, there's also labor, abuse of workers and local people losing their jobs to cheap overseas workers issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I bought five of these to do some Erlang, Rust, and Pony-lang distributed systems programming and testing on. Lack of mainline kernel support is a bit annoying, but that's being fixed with Linux 4.6 (which is getting S905 support).

The only other issue I've run into is lack of RTC being a bit more trouble than I'd anticipated for some things. None of the stuff I'm building directly has any hard dependencies on linear time, because it wouldn't be much of a reliable or deterministic distributed system if it did ;-), but some underlying facilities that I depend on don't take very kindly to having their clocks reverted back in time on a regular basis.

Those minor foibles aside... these are exceptional SBC's and very, very competitively priced. I'd probably donate a kidney for a proper SATA port on them though. :-)

<comment><USER7> Not sure if this is helpful, but you can get older, (but oddly still very powerful) xeon servers on Ebay for under $200. That's what I use for prototyping distributed systems. The advantage is the hardware architecture is the same you would use in a production system. I think maybe a lot of companies that maintain data centers are flooding the used market? For $250, I was able to configure 64gb RAM Xeon servers that clock in a little over 1/4 of the CPU speed of very high end brand new servers.

...not that I don't love Raspberry Pi, I considered using them, but prefer something where I won't run into compatibility issues for prototyping (and they have SATA ports).

<comment><USER8> Having five Xeon servers on your desk is not much fun when it comes to noise, but if you have some sort of server area yeah I agree you can get some good deals.

<comment><USER9> There's a ton of multi-node servers out there for dirt cheap. That way you only need one noisy server on your desk, or you can hide it away somewhere. I'm a fan of the c6100(ish) servers that have been getting offloaded on ebay lately:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-XS23-SC-Cloud- Server-4-node-8x-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-XS23-SC-Cloud- Server-4-node-8x-QC-L5420-2-5Ghz-96GB-C6100-Style-/191834473161)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-C6100-C6105-Cloud- Server-6x-1-8...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-C6100-C6105-Cloud- Server-6x-1-8GHz-2419-Hex-Core-48GB-RAM-3x-500GB-HDD/381299776313)

<comment><USER10> Have you heard a C6100? I haven't, but have heard they're insanely loud.

<comment><USER7> I think most server machines are probably pretty loud. They're designed to go in data centers where noise is not a factor. They put a lot of components in a somewhat small space, then they put passive heatsinks on the CPUs and blow air through the whole case, including the passive heatsinks. The fans are really loud because they are both small and powerful.

If you wanted, you could take the top off the case and then put bigger, quieter fans in, or perhaps put larger, quieter active desktop heatsinks on just the CPUs. I _think_ this would be okay, I don't think the rest of the motherboards usually require the fans, but I could be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He's going to have to revisit this when the Pine A64 ships. Also if you're willing to step up to the $99 price level, you should check out the Geekbox. RK3368 SOC, 8-core Cortex-A53 at 1.5GHz, 2GB RAM. [http://www.geekbox.tv/](http://www.geekbox.tv/)

I've been porting some stuff to it lately, along with a Ugoos UT4 (same chip) and my old Raspberry Pi.

I've also pre-ordered an AMD Opteron A1100 board. [http://lenovator.com/product/103.html](http://lenovator.com/product/103.html)

Will be interesting to see how AMD's Cortex-A57 performs compared to these other Cortex-A53s.

<comment><USER12> The pi are good enough for my purposes. Depending on what you want to do, at the $99 price level I started looking at [http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3150DC- ITX/](http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3150DC-ITX/)

<comment><USER13> I had the N3700 version of that board, and as a base for building a Windows 10 machine, it was very nice for the price. But Linux support for the onboard video was terrible, so I ultimately gave it to a friend who needed a Win10 media center PC. Once Intel starts officially supporting the Braswell/CherryView GPU in Linux (and it might by now; I got rid of it before the 4.4 kernel was released which supposedly supported it), it will make for an excellent, quiet Linux workstation or special purpose board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-c I bought an ODROID-C1 about a year ago. I was _very_ frustrated that it wasn't supported in mainline Linux kernels - only a vendor kernel that was fairly far behind, and didn't support what I had intended to use it for. I'm not sure what the situation is now with that board or Hardkernel's newer boards.

<comment><USER14> S805 mainline is a long process, but it's ongoing and happening with Amlogic's support and expertise.

See: [http://www.linux-meson.com/doku.php](http://www.linux- meson.com/doku.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I purchased an ODROID a couple years ago and got nowhere with it due to a lack of support. They had like one developer and over-committed and under- delivered. I'd never buy one again.

<comment><USER16> I've been running an ODROID-U2 for three years[1] now, and can't say I've had any real problems - still running Ubuntu 14.04 wonderfully. What was the model you got?

[1]: [http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2013/02/10/1230](http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2013/02/10/1230)

<comment><USER15> The one that stands out is the OpenCV library that never materialized. Another was video drivers. Best approach is to be your own judge and go look at their support forum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone have a recommendation for a board that has 3-4x "native" SATA III?

The AMD Opteron A1100 does, but it's meant for data centers and the $350 price point makes that clear.

<comment><USER6> The Minnowboard Max's have a SATA port. I have two of those little guys running as faux-HSM's. They're also excellent SBC's as long as you're willing to cross over the ~$100 mark.

<comment><USER18> I would love to hear more about this. I've been considering a similar use case for a while and haven't found anything really comparable to what is available commercially.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great performance improvements, but lacking much community and third party support, unfortunately.

<comment><USER20> I try! I wrote about using one one what used to be my self-hosted Ghost blog. I run Owncloud on it too and it works great.

Admittedly I haven't written much lately since I moved. My new ISP hasn't made it as easy to self host.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How come there aren't any Intel Atom based single board computers at a similar price point? These are basically phone or tablet class hardware, and if you go to any of the chinese stores, like Ali express or Banggood, there's plenty of cheap Atom tablets with Windows and Android dual boot. Wouldn't an x86 board be much easier to use with Linux and all sorts of drivers?

<comment><USER22> Just get a mini-itx board on eBay or a board-cpu combo:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Biostar-Mother- Board-A68I-E350-DELUX...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Biostar-Mother- Board-A68I-E350-DELUXE-Mini-ITX-CPU-Combo-Brand-New-Board-/262279282535)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Optiplex-745-USFF-Ultra- Small-F...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Optiplex-745-USFF-Ultra-Small-Form- System-Board-Motherboard-PK096-CN-0PK096-/272153998996)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-DH61AG-Desktop-Board- DDR3-Thin...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-DH61AG-Desktop-Board-DDR3-Thin- Mini-ITX-LGA1155-Refurbished-Board-Only-/182046976246)

And the CPUs are cheap too:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pentium-Dual-Core- Processor-G6...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pentium-Dual-Core- Processor-G630-2-7-Ghz-3-MB-Cache-LGA-1155-/111947799803)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/QTY-1x-INTEL-Celeron- CPU-G550-2-6GHZ...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/QTY-1x-INTEL-Celeron- CPU-G550-2-6GHZ-2MB-LGA1155-SR061-/131747970837)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pentium-G2030-3GHz-3M-Cache- Du...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pentium-G2030-3GHz-3M-Cache-Dual-Core- CPU-Processor-LGA1155-/201545162114)

<comment><USER23> Or just buy an old laptop. I recently bought a Dell E6230 (3rd Gen Core i3) from eBay for $90. Fully functional laptop including RAM, hard drive, keyboard and LCD.

People often forget that the used laptop market exists. I use a Dell E6220 now as my main laptop because it accepts 16GB DDR3 and lasts 6+ hours on a 6 cell battery.

Sure, I would love to have a laptop with an HD or 4K screen, but for $100-200 I can buy the next previous generation each year and use the old one as a server for projects.

They consume ~7W idle with the LCD on. I'm sure that would drop to 3-4W with the screen off.

I used to have a MacBook (2011), but the thought of paying $1500-2000 for a new laptop where I can't even upgrade the memory, WiFi, or storage (easily) strikes me as insane.

<comment><USER24> I buy or get stacks of old laptops: sure the boards are bigger but full featured and for experiments I do not really mind the size...

<comment><USER7> Why old laptops instead of old desktops? Because of the power consumption?

<comment><USER23> Yes. I am not aware of any recent desktop computers that can idle at 3W and provide close to the same peak performance as a used laptop does. Obviously Intel has been making good progress on this, I have heard that Sky Lake chips can idle at <10W, but those are still quite expensive.

Also by buying a used laptop you get something which is already designed for low power use (e.g. 35W CPUs are pretty much the maximum) and has a built in UPS. Even if the battery is worn out, you're still likely to get 30-60 minutes of run time.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for posting this!

The idling at 3w is a huge deal I think.

What do you use these for? Is there a way to add an extra NIC card? What models do you find work best for this?

Edit: This might be a really dumb question, but might it be possible to put a laptop CPU into a server motherboard? Not sure if the laptop i7's/i5's are LGA 2011 and if the motherboard architecture would be compatible? If this were the case you could use the server board dual NIC and out of band management.

<comment><USER23> > What do you use these for?

VM hosts mostly. I bought a bunch of 8GB DDR3 SODIMMs for cheap.

> Is there a way to add an extra NIC card?

You can get ExpressCard gigabit NICs for a reasonable sum. I have also seen dual gigabit mini PCIe cards available for around $50.

Me personally, I just use a managed switch which supports VLANs. None of the VMs I run are really network heavy (except when booting from a Zyxel NAS I turned into an iSCSI SAN), so having them share a 1GBit link isn't an issue. VLANs ensure appropriate separation.

They're also great to replace the wireless card if you want to make a professional grade WiFi AP. You can buy 802.11ac cards for around $80 which work with Linux. So you end up with something far better than the ARM/MIPS they sell on Amazon for the same price.

> What models do you find work best for this?

Any Intel NIC is usually very reliable. I also haven't had any problems with RealTek cards.

> but might it be possible to put a laptop CPU into a server motherboard?

I believe this was possible with Mobile Pentium 4 chips. You could put them in socket 478 with an adapter.

Nowadays though it's not possible. The architectures between desktop and mobile are too different (e.g. QPI speed, # of memory channels)

> Not sure if the laptop i7's/i5's are LGA 2011 and if the motherboard > architecture would be compatible?

They're not. The Dell E6220/6230 use a BGA mounted CPU, so it can't be replaced.

LGA2011 CPUs are special beasts. I was considering to buy one earlier this year because they're so cheap (compared to present day Xeons), but then you basically have to buy an eATX motherboard, server grade PSU, etc.

You can just now buy an LGA2011-3 mini ITX board, but it's really not worth it. LGA2011 CPUs are designed for multi-socket severs.

> If this were the case you could use the server board dual NIC and out of > band management

As per above, you can't do this. OOB management takes power too, and I doubt you could find a server board with these features that uses under 20W of power itself.

These laptops do have Intel ME though. I think some kind of OOB management is possible. I haven't tried myself though.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for posting this. This will definitely help a huge amount with the project I am working on (EnterpriseJazz.com)

What models of laptops do you looks for. I recently bought an employee a used Lenovo T410. Is that a decent model, or are there other models of laptop that work better?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there support for hardware video decoding on the ODROID? The Pi almost makes for a reasonable media center thanks to the hardware decoding, but I would like something with a little more oomph for the selection screen. This looks like it should be great for that, but I don't want something that's going to fall on its face when you try to decode video.

<comment><USER26> Kind of sad that a selection screen needs any oomph.

<comment><USER13> I've got a Pi Zero, Pi B+, Pi 2, and Pi 3, and the Pi 3 is the only one that has virtually zero lag on the "selection screen" for Kodi and OpenElec. The Pi 2's lag is barely noticeable, but the BCM2835 in the B+ and Zero does lag significantly (though playback is flawless on all of them).

That said, none of the Pis come close to a commercial set top box like the Roku 3 or Nvidia Shield TV, both of which are 60fps and buttery smooth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would like to use the ODROID C2 as a media player. The video and network capabilities are looking quite promising. I can't find much about the supported audio modes. Does anyone know if audio passthrough via HDMI is supported? Does the platform even need to support it or is it just a software thing and Kodi can do it anyway?

</comment><comment><USER28> Networking comparison of RPi B+, RPi 2, RPi 3, Odroic C1+, Banana Pi, and Utilite Standard: [https://netbeez.net/2016/03/17/raspberry- pi-3-iperf/](https://netbeez.net/2016/03/17/raspberry-pi-3-iperf/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Are there any relatively cheap cameras with global shutters that work with these boards?

</comment><comment><USER30> Any Hardkernel folks here ? I want to know how much cost saving can be achieved for a barebone C3 with only 1G NIC & may be USB 3 , having this version will be good for making clusters.

$20 would be very good number.

<comment><USER31> I think they'd have to use a different base board - the C2 uses an Amlogic S905, which as far as I know doesn't support USB3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Are there any opensource boards (similar to the Pi's), that have 2 (Gig) Ethernet ports?

<comment><USER33> Not exactly like the Pi's, and coming in with 5 Gig Ethernet ports is the Turris Omnia: [https://omnia.turris.cz/en/](https://omnia.turris.cz/en/). It is intended to be a router, and not really a Pi clone though. However, it is (almost) completely open. You can order the board only for $119, but that option will disappear soon if I got it right.

<comment><USER34> The Turris Omnia looks amazing! It's got everything I'd want in a home router. Do you know why it's due to be discontinued?

<comment><USER33> I participated in the crowd funding phase (waiting for my router to arrive later this year), and they have just updated their IndieGogo project page: [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/turris-omnia-hi- performan...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/turris-omnia-hi-performance- open-source-router#/updates) saying:

      At the same time, we will discontinue the "Board only"
      perk. The demand for this version was very low and it
      presents a complication for handling and logistics.

Just to be clear, it is the board-only option that is being discontinued, not the router+case! The case looks pretty cool to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've owned a XU4 for over a year now. It's been a great piece of kit (once I disabled the fan that is). For me the biggest advantage over the Pi is the extra memory. Especially if you plan to develop any sort of Java services.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there no good micro payments service online? - <AUTHOR> I've always wondered why is there no good service to pay small amounts, 10,50 100 cents, to creators? Similarly to paid content behind paywalls. I often find myself thinking, I would pay a buck to read this article, but I don't want to commit in paying 10 bucks a month. <comment><USER2> I think about this all the time too.

The problem is that the payment industry is a) heavily regulated and b) has monopoly from the likes of Mastercards and the Visas.

In order for Micro payments to succeed, someone (probably a well funded and connected team) has to figure out how to break through the 2 points and only then there is a chance. This is one of those problems that even though would need software but is more of a "tech enabled" business. Sure we can code an MVP to take "micro payments" quickly but how will they be processed ? If it goes through the usual processors, it doesn't make financial sense and then you have the regulatory stuff to mitigate fraud and money laundering.

It is also a chicken and egg problem. In order for this to work even if you get past my 2 points above, you need to partner with content providers and get all of them to use your centralized service. Sounds great for the consumer (kinda like google pay?) but may not be great for the provider as they are not limited to a centralized aka "I get to dictate" provider.

If anyone is up to solve this, hit me up for brainstorming. This is a billion dollar idea (not joking) but is not something that can be solved bootstrapped unfortunately. This is one of those problems which needs significant VC funding to put together a bunch of connected people and make things happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well plenty of options exist:

[1] Brave Browser - A browser that monetises your attention in Basic Attention Tokens... personally I think this is a weird solution and has many problems

[2] Steemit - A community which allows you to pay/earn by contributing... also a weird idea, prone to abuse and bad motivations

[3] Metamask - A browser extension which integrates crypto currency into your browsing experience. Allows you to pay a website small payments... this is probably the closest solution to your problem, but I find it a bit cumbersome and confusing to use.

The reality is that it's just not a popular problem that people need solved. Content creators don't really care about a 10c donation, they'd rather optimise for the 10$ donations.

Also, the micro-payments are almost equivalent to just showing ads on the site, but I guess everyone disables those now...

[1] [https://brave.com/brave-rewards/](https://brave.com/brave-rewards/)

[2] [https://steemit.com/](https://steemit.com/)

[3] [https://metamask.io/](https://metamask.io/)

</comment><comment><USER4> There's no margin in micropayments in general due to transaction costs.

And the problem with the 'what if we just get people to put $10 in every month, and pay the content creators in one single payment' approach to solving it is that actually, relatively few people want to do this. Which is the main reason you haven't heard of the companies that do...

</comment><comment><USER5> Because the fiat fees are too high + kyc as someone said below.

And even crypto is super high too. For example: [https://ethgasstation.info/](https://ethgasstation.info/)

average ETH transfer: $0.229/transfer

With ETH your fees can be equal to the micropayment itself. There may be other blockchains that are cheaper, but then of course even fewer people use those cryptos, so that 'advantage' that people advocate really isn't an advantage... If you're talking a buck then you could build something that does this with ETH for example, then it would be .229$/1.229$ = 18.63% fee as compared to total cost if you want $1 total sent to platform/creator (seems more reasonable). Or you could just take the fee out of the buck itself, that would be 22.9%.

</comment><comment><USER6> I guess that's mostly because there was no way to do it without intermediaries (banks, paypal etc). Which means that a) fees are generally too high to process micro-payments, b) payment processors require KYC and that's too much pain for a single-shot micro payment, plus your privacy is leaking. Some crypto projects are trying to fix this, but I don't think any of them is ready for 'normal' users.</comment>


[2008] On The Flight to Old Text Editors - <AUTHOR> http://al3x.net/2008/10/22/on-flight-to-old-text-editors.html

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of carpenters who use old hammers.

Sometimes the old thing is really the best solution, and attempts to improve it are misguided and fail. Carpenters will give the newfangled tools an honest shot and then decide that the old tools had a certain _je ne sais quoi_ that made them better.

It's not that you can't build a better hammer. Nailguns do exist. But still.. nailguns aren't hammers. A scaffolder can't use a nailgun to do his work, for instance. But I bet the guy who invented the nailgun claimed it would totally replace hammers and just forgot to consider the scaffolders. And now laymen on the outside ask, "What are those scaffolders doing carrying around hammers in 2011? That tech is like a million years old! Surely we can do better!?"

<comment><USER3> The difference is that in the case of hammer vs. nailgun, the old solution (the hammer) is the simple one, and the new solution (the nailgun) is the complex one.

With editors it's the other way around. Old editors are in no way simple, quite the contrary. Emacs is complex, and Vim, while seemingly simple, is complex once you want to change its default mode of working.

As in the case with the hammer, simple tools often work best - but in the world of editors, the new tools are often the simplest ones.

<comment><USER2> It's not clear that nailguns are more complex than hammers. What is the measure of complexity? Nailguns are easier to use for a complete newbie, so a nailgun could be seen as a simpler tool. Becoming an expert hammer user takes literally years.

There are many different ways to measure complexity. Learning curve, interface, potential for virtuosity, amount of time implementation took, etc.

Nailguns are wayyyyy simpler to use than a hammer.

<comment><USER4> As a one-time (long ago) silver smith, I can tell you that while there were more than 30 hammers on the wall, there was not one nail-gun. A brief tour of books on subjects from book-binding to leather engraving should demonstrate that there is not a one-size fits all replacement for a tool whose many forms have been developed over centuries (if I handed you a hammer used by a roman carpenter, you would know a.) what it was and b.) how to use it) is just silly. Try making the last finishing cut with a carving tool using a nailgun before you say anything about simplicity...

<comment><USER2> I think you missed my point. What you're saying actually supports my opinion on this issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's an argument here struggling to get out. As an emacs user, I agree with some of the ideas he is attempting to express, but then it just sort of gets buried in "I don't like emacs or vim." and "too much customization bothers me."

Maybe a better discussion than: "why are all these developers still using vim and emacs" is: "why haven't we come up with development tools in the past 30 years that are compelling enough to draw people away from vim and emacs?"

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I've never been able to stand eclipse. I get a big monitor and a fast computer, and eclipse ends up showing me code in a 20 row by 40 column window and jeez, I could see more code and faster using emacs in the first crts.

But the article, titled "On The Flight to Old Text Editors" told me little about why people are moving back to vim or emacs. What is the value that longtime eclipse or textmate users are seeing in emacs or vim? Speed? Keyboards? What problems of modern text editors does emacs and vim solve?

Mostly what I get from the article is that the flight to old school editors is a hipster thing. Oh yeah, gotta use the old school editors because we're hipsters. Eclipse is a sellout man. Textmate is for Lady Gaga. I edit it old school vim and emacs.

<comment><USER5> Which is funny, because I remember a few years ago (circa 2007) when Rails was just starting to get big and Textmate was the hipster editor.

All of which is idiotic, because anyone who chooses an editor based on image is most likely a terrible developer. That said, I think Textmate is a very good editor and one of the few capable contenders in the editor "wars". The biggest downside is that it is Mac-only.

<comment><USER7> Finally, a sane voice.

The notion of an editor 'war' is laughable. I'm sure in five years or so someone will innovate in the graphical editor arena and the pendulum will swing back. And, lo and behold, all of the bloggers and Tweeters will gush about their "10x" productivity increases. I never seem to get those sorts of massive productivity gains, as the hard/slow parts of development take place in my mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People forget that Unix itself is one big IDE. I use emacs to edit code, but in another terminal window I use make to compile or run tests, "find" and grep to look for stuff, tail to look at logs, custom shell scripts for lots of other things, etc etc. So emacs isn't an IDE, it is just a text editor, and the best one I know at that (I love vi for quick configuration tweaks, but not real coding).

</comment><comment><USER9> I use Emacs for almost everything. I used to use IDEs but became tired of waiting for all of the extra features to load. When I first began using Emacs I struggled for probably 6 months. Now I really can't do without it. I don't use it for email. I don't use it for the web. But I _do_ use it for Twitter, I've written papers in it using org-mode and LateX and I'm currently writing my third book on it. Once your fingers get used to all of the bizarre key- presses the editor just seems to fade into the background and you can just get on with your work.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a C/C++/C# developer I can't imagine giving up IDEs for vi. vi is my editor of choice for quickie edits on Linux but for project work it's Eclipse and VS. I've used IDEs since UCSD Pascal but really only recently got convinced they are a real productivity enhancer.

If I ask myself why I use IDEs I can really only come up with Intellisense, if I worked in a language that doesn't allow a high degree of completion, browsing, etc. I could easily go with something simple.

<comment><USER11> I plugged viemu into VS, now I've got all the nice IDE stuff but with the vim editing model, which I'm completely addicted to now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the amusing thing here is the assumption that people could make something better without first understanding what they are replacing. How can you expect someone to make a better vim/emacs, without understanding what made it great in the first place?

<comment><AUTHOR> And perhaps that's what made us stuck since folks that don't understand what makes it great can't make something better, and the ones that do understand it are satisfied with them like they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My primary objection to both of the 'sacred' editors mentioned (not talking TextMate---I've no knowledge of it) is that they violate the original Unix tool rule: 'One task, done well...' All of the bolt-ons so the programmer could sit on his virtual dead ass without leaving his environment just make chalk-board-scrapping noise as far as I'm concerned.

</comment><comment><USER13> Slightly off topic, but jEdit is an excellent editor on OSX. I'd highly recommend it.

I wrote a little guide about my jEdit setup a while back: [http://dhotson.tumblr.com/post/443485667/making-jedit- awesom...](http://dhotson.tumblr.com/post/443485667/making-jedit-awesome-on- osx)

<comment><USER14> I used jEdit for many years on linux and windows, but development has been stalled for a long time. Presumably moment dropped off quickly after the author Slava moved on to other projects. It's a shame. I'm trying <http://www.vicoapp.com/> instead these days. Not as good as jEdit, but at least people are actively maintaining the code.

<comment><USER13> I think you'd be surprised. It's picked up a bit over the last year or two. The jedit-users list is still reasonably active.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> By far my most heavily used program is KEdit which is a PC version of the IBM VM/CMS editor XEDIT written by an IBM guy in Paris.

In both cases, there is a macro language based on Mike Cowlishaw's Rexx which is elegant.

Why such heavy use of KEdit? I am a heavy computer user, and, except for Web browsing, nearly all my computer input is via typing. So, the first issue has to be, what software to type into?

Well, I don't want to type into just a standard graphical user interface (GUI) 'multi-line text box' 'control' because the functionality is meager.

Yes, I'm a Windows user: So, in particular I don't want to type into Outlook or Visual Studio. Since my most important work is applied math, I use TeX for that and for all my high quality word whacking; so, I don't want to type into Word. I use SQL Server Management Studio for data base 'browsing' but won't type anything important into it.

So, here's much of what I type into KEdit:

(1) e-mail to send,

(2) input to TeX for mathematical and high quality word whacking,

(3) blog posts such as this one,

(4) notes on everything I want to remember in programming, shopping, equipment repair, medical care, financial records, phone numbers, addresses, abstracts of Web pages -- everything,

(5) software source code, including T-SQL for input to SQL Server,

(6) most of my important program test input,

(7) looking at program test output,

and more.

E.g., a little KEdit macro does my telephone dialing. Another little KEdit macro types mailing labels.

More? I'm developing a Web site; it's my first serious HTML programming. Since I'm a Windows user, I'm using ASP.NET. Well, I want some good logging for the Web site. ASP.NET has some default logging, but I didn't like it. Well, .NET also has some lower level tools for logging; these tools do handle the important issues of multiple threads of multiple programs on multiple machines all writing to the same log at the same time. Good -- that's the crucial functionality I needed.

So, now I have some good data logging.

Since the log file is 'circular', the first thing to do when reading one is to sort it on, say time, date, and machine. And with multiple log files, there can be some duplicate lines. In using the log files it can be important to 'select' lines based on the user's IP address, the name of the Web page, the routine in the Web page that wrote the line to the log, the message number of the message within the routine, etc. Sure, all this can be done with relational data base, but for log files of reasonable size it can also all be done more easily just within KEdit, especially if write a few KEdit macros.

So, I look at and do the first cut analysis of log files just within KEdit.

To be clear, on the title of the article 'On The Flight to Old Text Editors', I never left my "old text" editor. I've been using KEdit or XEDIT since 1985 and was using good text editors before then.

Alternatives? I see no good alternatives.

Why?

Well, the article lamented:

"That a new generation of programmers flocking to these old tools is concerning, if for no reason more selfish than the desire for peers in my dissatisfaction. Without a consensus that we can do better, there's no incentive, no motivation, no market for improvements. If as modest a step towards a better editor as TextMate is abandoned, what hope is there for a true leap forward?"

Well, there's been no "true leap forward?" apparently mostly because of the overwhelming theme of the 'graphical user interface' (GUI) from the bean bag chairs and 'cognitive psychology' people at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the use of GUI ideas by Apple, Microsoft, X-Windows, and now, with further development, smart phones.

In particular an important special case has been the Web and Web browsers.

The PARC goal was to make computer interaction easy for the pre-school children of the PARC employees for future Xerox office machines, and the approach was to have a user interface much like that on, say, a microwave oven.

So, with GUIs what we've got is for pre-school children using microwave ovens, and that's not promising for a "true leap forward".

So, the assumption in the computer industry has been that humans should interact with computers via a GUI, almost exclusively.

For a user mostly just receiving information, maybe that assumption is okay, but, for a user generating information, no.

The good text editors were designed by some of the best programmers ever for use by some of the best programmers ever. So, it's no surprise that good programmers prefer good text editors.

Bluntly, for generating information, it is still very important to type, and so far for people doing a lot of typing a good text editor is by far the best software to type into, in particular, much, Much, MUCH better than any of the check boxes, radio buttons, text boxes, and multi-line text boxes of the GUI standards.

In particular, for programming, I've been doing that for a long time. I've always found programming to be fast, fun, and easy giving the input just via a good text editor. I could count on one hand all the times I got any benefit from 'interactive debugging' tools.

So, I tried Visual Studio. I saw a window with many 'panels', and I could never find what all the panels were for. Some of the panels were said to be 'dockable', and the intended meaning was obscure and not in my copy of Webster's. The one little window was cramped, and in strong contrast when I program I typically have a dozen or so windows open at once, using either KEdit or my favorite Web browser, for entering source code, for documentation, for earlier versions of the program, for other programs I can use as samples, for various notes, for program output, for searching for information on Google, etc. The one cramped window from Visual Studio is, in comparison, a bad joke. For just the typing, Visual Studio gives me just some little panel within the one window, and KEdit is MUCH better. It's easy to write powerful macros in KEdit, and I do, and I saw no promising way to write macros in Visual Studio.

When I saw that with Visual Studio the work is to be a 'project' and even a project to report "Hello World" starts with 50 MB, I concluded that Visual Studio was from the far side of Xerox PARC in luna-land.

For my present development I'm mostly using just Visual Basic .NET via a script program from command line text windows. I'm thrilled: The complier is fast, easy to invoke, gives good error messages, so far appears to be essentially free of bugs, and generates surprisingly small EXE files. Terrific. What's in the Visual Studio 50 MB has to be glop, gorp, and goop I very much don't want to have to work with when things go wrong, and with that much glop, gorp, and goop some things are very likely to go wrong.

So, yes, I do a lot of typing and do my typing into the best text editor I know of, KEdit.</comment>


The McDonalds Monopoly Fraud (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-mcdonalds-monopoly-fraud/ <comment><USER2> So, McDonalds bundled lottery tickets with all their products. The lottery structure was set up to deceive people who didn't think about it too hard, by making buyers collect sets in which one out of the set was orders of magnitude rarer than the others, but getting the common ones would make them feel like they had made progress. Then, for six years, every single one of the large prizes gets stolen by an employee.

Why are companies allowed to bundle lottery tickets with their products? It's no less of a tax on stupidity than the standalone lotteries are.

<comment><USER3> Purchase is not required to play these games. You can walk into a McDonald's and ask for a game piece and they have to give you one.

<comment><USER2> That sounds like little more than a theoretical loophole. Almost no one will pay the time and fuel cost to go to a McDonald's if they aren't going to eat anything, and McDonald's knows this.

<comment><USER4> Trivially, there are tremendous numbers of people who, by dint of their normal day-to-day, need expend no effort to get to McDonalds. Have you other objections that can be addressed?

<comment><USER5> People are buying the food. The "lottery ticket" you get is just a marketing gimmick, not an actual game of chance in exchange for money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Then there's the woman with a Stanford Ph.D. in statistics who has won million-dollar lottery prizes 4 times - [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023514/Joan-R- Ginth...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023514/Joan-R-Ginther-won- lottery-4-times-Stanford-University-statistics-PhD.html)

<comment><USER7> She has a friend (Anna Morales) who's won a number of smaller prizes too[1]. Seems a _fairly_ unlikely co-incidence.

There's the Canadian statistician who found a weakness in the algorithm producing "random" scratchie tickets[2].

[1] [http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/How_lottery_l...](http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/How_lottery_legend_Joan_Ginther_used_odds_Uncle_Sam_to_win_millions.html)

[2] [http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/](http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >Jacobson oversaw a security process that began at a printing plant where pieces were made, separated by value and stored in a vault. He was responsible for transporting those pieces...

Thinking a system is secure just because there is a process in place, however careless the design, seems like a recurring theme (society?).

I wonder if it's a psychological bias (or lack of security awareness) in the sense that you'd rather trust an system you can observe than a secure black box. Or maybe it is the fact that the workings of the system in place can act as a distraction to its possible flaws?

<comment><USER9> > Thinking a system is secure just because there is a process in place

ISO certification in a nutshell

<comment><USER10> More like, people who misunderstand what ISO 9001 certification means in a nutshell.

ISO-9001 is not meant to certify quality, but to certify that your quality management meets certain criteria, so that relevant information is recorded and made available for people to judge if if meets their requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The $1mm donation to St Jude's was pretty classy, even given the crooked scam. I hope it helps some kids.

<comment><USER12> You don't get to have a brand as profitable as McDs by quibbling over minor gifts to charities

<comment><USER13> The gift was not by McDonald's but by the scammer!

<comment><USER12> The initial gift was the scammer. The decision to continue paying it out was McDs gift.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> See also: the discussion thread on Reddit, where the submission there likely led to the submission here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3um3zh/til_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3um3zh/til_that_from_1995_to_2000_the_winner_of_the/)

</comment><comment><USER15> For the current NFL promotion they have game pieces on the medium drink, large fries and big mac (and some other sandwiches/main items but not all of them). So if you order the big mac meal with an upgraded fries but regular drink you get 3 pieces but if, like me, you unhack the system by ordering a quarter pounder meal with upgraded drink only you get zero game pieces.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does McDonalds do monopoly anymore? I noticed the article is from 2014 but this year they've been doing a similar promotion but centered around the NFL.

<comment><USER17> They did it this year in Australia.

<comment><USER18> And NZ

<comment><USER19> And Canada

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There were also game pieces distributed in Sunday newspapers.

</comment><comment><USER21> Somewhat unrelated, but there is a great documentary on Michael Larson; who figured out a software randomness flaw in the game show Press Your Luck, and exploited it live on TV to the tune of $110,000. In that day, $110,000 was an obscene amount of money to win on a gameshow. No game show was awarding even close to that.

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

<comment><USER14> The big thing about the Press Your Luck incident that people seem to overlook is that finding the flaw was half of the con, _exploiting the flaw_ was the much harder part. (that is, getting selected to being onto the show, answering the toss-up questions, _and_ getting the patterns/timing correct). It was more-or-less luck that everything worked correctly, and as noted in the documentary, the con almost failed at each point.

The Monopoly incident in comparison is just boring manipulation of insider information.

<comment><USER22> Can you explain the con and how to exploit it? Seems interesting.

<comment><USER14> Wikipedia has a good written summary of the con: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson)

The linked documentary is well worth watching, though.

<comment><USER22> Thank you, I tired watching the video, but wasn't that invested in the whole thing ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson#Preparations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson#Preparations)). That was pretty straight-forward and kinda simple. I wonder why the selections and big money squares were not randomized, could it had been a computing limitation?

<comment><USER14> > _I wonder why the selections and big money squares were not randomized, > could it had been a computing limitation?_

Keep in mind that this happened in 1984. The board squares were physical panels, and the panel selection software was analog.

In gaming, a random outcome is one the player can't accurately predict or influence. The Press Your Luck board at the time fit that definition, but Larson proved that was not a safe assumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It seems like he got a fair punishment for this. I guess for me its more along the lines of victimless crime. If you gobbling down burgers to try and win money knowing the odds, you clearly aren't that bright to begin with.

<comment><USER24> Putting everything else aside for a moment: are you saying that people who "aren't that bright" can't be victims?

<comment><USER25> More that there's no material effect to remove the rare prizes on a lottery that are only worth a penny on the dollar combined.

<comment><USER26> By that reasoning you should stop paying your taxes, since everybody else can compensate by paying a tiny, imperceptible amount more.

<comment><USER25> I didn't say the theft was justified. But I would agree that nonpayment of taxes is not a crime that "victimizes" hundreds of millions of people.

The main value of the product is the food. Even if all the prizes were stolen, I'm not sure if there would be a 'victim' in the consumer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: See information about whatever you're currently listening to on Spotify - <AUTHOR> https://l0rdcafe.github.io/readme/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello world, I'm a front end developer from Egypt and I've been teaching myself with the help of a mentor. This is my biggest project so far, I've been focused on avoiding using frameworks and instead building things for myself in order to better understand the fundamentals. Feedback is highly appreciated, and pull requests are welcome.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found and fixed a couple of bugs; should be more usable now. Please enjoy and thanks!</comment>


Basic questions and answers for GNU Guile from the perspective of a Pythonista - <AUTHOR> http://draketo.de/proj/guile-basics/

<comment><USER2> Has anyone any experience using this in place of emacs lisp? Wikipedia seems to suggest it is actually possible?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have not. But you may be interested in these:

[1] - [http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs)

[2] - [http://lwn.net/Articles/615220/](http://lwn.net/Articles/615220/)

[3] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449488)

[4] - [http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo)</comment></comment>


My tribute to Steve Ballmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2010/02/my-tribute-to-steve-ballmer/

<comment><USER2> Quite cool. Image -> ascii converter, including color in html, in Clojure.

Makes me want to learn Clojure.</comment>


FB spending millions to create a 'Supreme Court' that can overrule Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> https://news.yahoo.com/facebook-spending-130-million-create-212204730.html <comment><USER2> Did we forget that the Supreme Court is a Supreme Court that can overrule Zuckerberg? This feels like another step towards the creation of a private, shadow legal system designed to give the impression that corporations can self-regulate.

If we feel there are issues of justice at stake with these large social networks, maybe we should actually enact laws to regulate them. Then the public's courts can hold them accountable without the need for a pinky-promise by Zuckerberg to follow his advisory board's decisions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oxymoron: no comitee can overrule Zuckerberg since he holds the majority ownership.

This is just PR.

Zuckerberg is not bound by anything to actually execute the comitees decision.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe public pressure? If all turn against him, he will find out what control he really has

<comment><USER4> If he has a majority shareholding, one would assume he can just vote them out... or call for a vote to get rid of them and win by default?

<comment><AUTHOR> and stock would crash, top people leave etc etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Banks don't want private sector innovators like Mark Zuckenberg threatening their banker monopoly with libra cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER6> How is this supposed to work with a board of 20-40 esteemed individuals?

Will they have to achieve consensus, supermajority, or majority votes to dictate anything to Facebook? What about simple content removal appeals, will a single judge rule on reinstating content?

Are these independent appointed representatives paid to debate cases nonstop, or will they hold only a couple appeal cases a year, as volunteers?

<comment><USER7> IRL Supreme Court seems to have figured this out.

I'm guessing a similar model where you first appeal through the normal means and if that gets denied you'd have the ability to ask this board to review it. Board will only take on major cases.</comment></comment>