Accessibility testing tools are lying to you - <AUTHOR> https://blog.vararu.org/accessibility-testing-tools-are-lying-to-you/ <comment><USER2> There is a surprising amount of misinformation in this article.</comment>


Quora Tech Talk - Webnode2 and LiveNode - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Shreyes-Seshasai/Tech-Talk-Webnode2-and-LiveNode

<comment><USER2> Awesome stuff. Not sure how I never considered batching ajax requests before... May need to play with this!</comment>


Raspberry Pi to get Android 4.0 - <AUTHOR> http://techpp.com/2012/08/01/raspberry-pi-to-get-android-4-0/ <comment><USER2> Here is an image of a CyanogenMod9 build, should anyone want to try it on their Pi: <http://www.4shared.com/archive/m_eBBrh_/android_sd_2tar.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> "Raspberry Pi, the credit card sized low cost mini-computer..."

Wow.. I am getting old.. I still remember being a kid and read that minicomputers were a cabinet size computer (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer>) as opposite to microcomputers which were desktops... I guess it's time to upgrade definitions :)

<comment><USER4> I'm a 16-year-old and that is also the definition I know.

Partly because of the ridiculously out-of-date "Computing Studies" Intermediate 2 Scottish Qualifications course I did at school, but it's mostly because I had the privilege of growing up with Windows 3.1, DOS, and QBASIC, as well as an old book from a used book store for beginners about "Programming Microcoputers".

      10 INPUT "Hello! What is your name?", A$
      20 PRINT "Hello there, ", A$

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This could end up in a lot of industrial type of projects. The raspberry could replace the mini2440 for a lot of things. Heck, even prototyping something with the Pi and Android would allow industries to iterate their equipment faster. Cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> Probably ready before the update for the LG smartphone I bought. _sigh_

But from the news coverage (don't own one yet myself) it seems that this is a good indicator for a generally healthy tinkering community. Sounds great.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now that will certainly spice things up.

<comment><USER8> I am not sure if 128MB RAM would run ICS well.

<comment><USER9> Most Rapsberry Pi's have 256 MB of RAM. Only the initial batch had 128 MB I think.

<comment><USER10> Model A is specced for 128 MB, but that's not available yet.

<comment><USER11> Model A was later respecced to have 256MB as well, just like Model B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I still don't understand the desire for Android on non-touch devices. At all...

The more exciting bit is XBMC being available in Android, in my opinion.

I have XBMC on my desktop, laptop, phone, tablet and raspberry Pi. Using a single app, I can play media from any of those devices to another. It's so simple and elegant and it blows my mind everytime I do it.

<comment><USER13> "I still don't understand the desire for Android on non-touch devices. At all..."

I have personal experience with this. My old asus eee 1000 netbook is now an android laptop running ICS. Check out android-x86.org. Its free and easy to set up.

It works. It works Very well. I've got a huge catalog of apps, it does what I want it to do, exactly like my phone. Basically whenever I'm doing something on my phone where I wish I had a bigger screen and a keyboard and better sound... Oh wait I do have such a thing, its called my android laptop. Admittedly 99% of the time its running a SSH app connected to something very big and far away, and a music streamer, so I don't "have" to run android, but it seems by far the simplest way to do what I want.

Also windows is not ready for prime time, as my son's virus/worm/toolbar encrusted desktop shows. That machine is about to become a hackintosh or failing that process, the worlds fastest android desktop...

<comment><USER4> While it has a touch-screen, my Samsung Galaxy Y Pro, a qwerty keyboard phone with a 320x240 single-touch screen shows that Android works, for the most part, great with landscape aspect ratio screens, single-pointer pointing devices, and physical key navigation.</comment></comment></comment>


Seth, I have updated your Passion/Pop Curve - <AUTHOR> http://rovivor.com/2008/05/seth-i-have-updated-your-passionpop-curve/

<comment><USER2> Do you think that it is possible to have a single product, but a "two-legged" marketing approach that caters to the center of both those bell curves? Are there any examples of this? I'd argue that as a brand, Apple does this (High end graphics guys love Apple, as do college chicks)</comment>


How to motivate (and avoid demotivating) teams - <AUTHOR> http://productguys.tumblr.com/post/30266226799/how-managers-should-motivate-teams

<comment> mth- I agree that measurement is an outstanding way to build a team. But, it is not a goal onto itself. Overarching the measurement needs to be a clear purpose.

This may seem insanely obvious, but sharing a single set of common goals can be really powerful and it is often surprising, but common, when you dig into a team to find no single vision or goal. The devs are concentrating on feature X, the sales people are selling future Y, the product people are planning feature Z. A single goal for the day/week/month can be revolutionary to a team used to working their own skills in isolation.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys - by no means does this post profess to be comprehensive, so I'm hoping to stimulate a larger discussion around this issue. Anybody who works in software should be able to relate on some level...

Thanks in advance!</comment>


Blockchain based elections would be a disaster for democracy - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/blockchain-based-elections-would-be-a-disaster-for-democracy/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not a blockchain nut so I can't be blamed for saying it can be used for "everything". In fact I'm highly skeptical that currency is its best use case. But elections are different.

The original poster is forgetting about a proposed infrastructure for such a system. I'd imagine there'd be federal, state, and local auditors of the blockchain. This means that every "vote" would be verified by hundreds of independent auditors in real time and forever. Second, the reporting would be public. Anyone with access to the blockchain could (and would) be able to verify their time-stamped and encrypted vote, but they'd also be able to count all of the votes for any election. So if they wanted to see precinct level voting totals, they could simply run a query against the blockchain. Same for municipal, state, and federal elections, along with any other items on the ballot.

In order to hack such a system, you'd have to circumvent people from using their identity on a massive scale, something that's just not feasible and if someone were to attempt it, there would be immediate flags and an immediate response. (AI does this today in real-time for general phishing and hacking scenarios - see recent Microsoft article on AI usage).

There'd be no more waiting. There'd be no more damaged ballots. No more lines. No more polling stations with human intervention and hacking capabilities. No more voter suppression.

The value of such a system vastly outweighs the original poster's knowledge of how this would and could be implemented to be safe and vastly superior to what we have today.</comment>


Building a new smart home system – need input - <AUTHOR> We are working on building a new home automation system for smart devices and are doing some research into the industry. I've created a quick survey in Google docs and would love to get some feedback from you. The whole survey should take less than a minute.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1jdXmeLIHQaPc63q1SzPl_Hj5H90avzbd3OBE-hBPboM/viewform?usp=send_form
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Boooo... Market research is one thing, hunting out millionaires is another.

What is your net yearly household income?

What is the value of your primary residence?

What type of phone do you have?

Do you own or do you plan to buy (within the next year) a Tesla?

Who lives in your home?

How old are you?

Please indicate your gender (only two options)

<comment><USER3> When a submission evokes a strong negative reaction or doesn't seem to contribute to HN, it may be best to just flag it.</comment></comment>


Google Used Tiny Cameras to Street View the World's Largest Model Railway - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/google-used-tiny-cameras-to-street-view-the-world-s-lar-1752677874 <comment><AUTHOR> This seems as good a place as any for a HN model railroader roll call.</comment>


Vermont Medical School Says Goodbye to Lectures - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/03/541411275/vermont-medical-school-says-goodbye-to-lectures <comment><AUTHOR> Another one bites the dust. This is a trend/fad that will likely be reversed once properly studied.

My wife went to a medical school that had recently adopted so-called "active learning" techniques. All the students secretly hated them, but wouldn't share this feedback with higher-ups (academic administrators) because med students, as a group, are generally rule-following, adaptable students.

The "non-lecture" format was frequently derided by students, in private settings, as "Dr. Wikipedia". That is, they were learning medicine by using Google and visiting Wikipedia pages. Because they had to collaborate on their own learning materials, even though they had no background in medicine.

About 50% of students I knew (secretly) spent thousands of dollars on recorded medical lectures to supplement the completely ineffective class "group activities", and thus did well on the tests (and USMLEs) anyway. They never reported this to professors or administrators. Again, they were "working around" the broken "active learning" system. One of the hilarious side effects of this: the supposedly "objective peer-reviewed studies" of this learning style won't show score/testing degradation -- because the students are so self-sufficient that they work around the failing format with supplemental lecture materials purchased online! Thus, they still achieve the grades they hope, and the administrators think the system is "working"!

There was, however, a very small subset of students who preferred the "active learning" format. Most of the time, these were students who came into med school with a stronger science background than others (e.g. had basically started studying medicine before they got there). One reason they particularly enjoyed the format: they could skip class with little effect on their grades.

<comment><USER2> Why do you even need a med school with these types of students

<comment><USER3> To be completely honest, as someone in medical school right now you definitely don't "need" the structure and materials that medical school lecturers and courses provide for those first two years. I however needed the structure and did not have the work ethic to do it on my own. Additionally the next two years of clinical learning most definitely require you to be at the hospital.

<comment><USER4> A professor of medical education once said to us something along the lines of 'The half life of the facts we tell you is about 6 years, so the actual content isn't necessarily that important. What is important is the language and that you learn to understand what you hear and read after you graduate.

5 years after graduation, I feel like I am only starting to truly appreciate that comment. I started medical training 11 years ago, and half of the stuff I read in books during first year was probably already known to be wrong.

The lectures we received were biased and incomplete, but they provided a largely up-to-date picture and, more importantly, a story.

<comment><USER3> The story definitely matters, I agree. But if you're good at making that story up as you read the book, why bother coming to class? I'd also argue that not everything is completely out of date. Only things like cytology or genetics and autoimmune disorders from what I can gather. Pathology is largely the same, as in the manifestations don't really change. You can get by studying a First Aid board review book from a few years ago and still pass step 1. Physiology doesn't really change, only treatments targeting the pathophysiology.

Medical Schools largely understand that everyone studies and learns differently and that's why they don't mandate you come to lectures. They're recorded for your own benefit as well. My professors would also provide several different learning methods throughout the preclinical courses to really hammer in those mainstay concepts regardless of how you learn. Be it quizzes, or team based learning, or straight lecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "Well this method of teaching is actually not as good as other methods. > Would you do that?"

A university did a trial. Lecture with active learning vs traditional lecture and sections. Simultaneous versions of the same class; random assignment of students; pre-written exams. Inexperienced postdoc vs highly-respected well- rated experienced prof. Mid-term results came in. The comment was that if it had been a _medical_ trail, they would have had to stop immediately, rather than finish the term. It would have been clearly unethical to continue to deny the control group the intervention.

<comment><USER6> Sounds interesting, source?

<comment><USER5> Story told by Edward Prather (Arizona)[1] at MIT[2]. I failed to quickly find an obvious publication.

My recollection is the course was elsewhere, he was invited to lecture (astronomy education improvement is his thing), and said let's instead set it up as a trial, and use this student instead of me.

[1] [https://profiles.arizona.edu/person/eprather](https://profiles.arizona.edu/person/eprather) [2] [http://web.mit.edu/physics/events/colloquia.html](http://web.mit.edu/physics/events/colloquia.html) May 11, 2017, but this link may rot soon.

EDIT: I should amend "inexperienced postdoc" with "who was trained in active learning instruction, and prepared the course with a highly-experienced astronomy education researcher". Because a key issue with active learning is that doing it well, and thus deploying it rapidly, is hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> MD here - I remember leaving a lecture theatre after 8 hours of didactic lectures, and I could not remember the topic of any of the lectures other than the one i'd just seen, and I could not remember a single fact from any of them. I persisted with the lectures as that seemed to be what was expected of us, however it generally seemed like lectures are there to suit faculty rather than students.

When it came to actual hardcore study for board and specialty exams, I used 100% active recall testing with flashcards with variable repetition based on performance (Anki mainly). I never had any problems passing anything.

I believe an excellent, underutilized way medicine could be taught would be computer based simulation of emergency dept patient presentations, with the player taking a history, performing an investigation and labs, and making decisions +/\- referring patient as appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER8> Minimum viable US medical school (in theory):

Prerequisites: High school AP bio/Chem/physics/stats. College biochemistry.

Standard interview process.

Preclinical: 1.5 years of online instruction and drilling (UsmleWORLD, firecracker, Pathoma etc) for USMLE 1. Cost ~$500 per year.

1.5-2 years clinical rotations. Cost: at current yearly tuition.

Then graduate, residency.

<comment><USER9> That's a reasonable approximation of PA school: publichealth.tufts.edu/Academics/Physician-Assistant-Program/Curriculum

<comment><USER10> Only when looked at from the craziness of medical school. Tuition: $42k/year (similar to most PA schools, though a few have better in-state pricing) [http://publichealth.tufts.edu/Admissions/Financing-Your- Educ...](http://publichealth.tufts.edu/Admissions/Financing-Your- Education/Program-Costs/PA-Program-Total-Annual-Estimated-Costs)

Also, "All academic coursework AND a bachelor's degree from an accredited university/college must be completed before submitting an application to the PA Program". A bachelor's degree is such a painful gatekeeper: four years of opportunity cost in addition to steep tuition. I'm not going to argue that undergrad is strictly vocational in purpose, but many students view it as such and thus get nothing further from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good! Lectures are terrible for students. It's fun and pretty easy to give a lecture though, which is why they persist.

This is a great example of a "flipped classroom", which is gaining traction across American higher-ed. A lot of research went into developing the SCALE-UP paradigm, which is a great place to start if you're curious:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCALE-UP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCALE- UP)

<comment><USER12> I am glad I didn't have to study that way. I am notoriously bad at "collaborative learning" in team settings. I probably wouldn't have learned anything in school.

<comment><USER13> Collaborative learning means less individual problem solving. The moment there is someone a bit faster then you in the group, the less occasion to think you have.

<comment><USER12> It's not even about someone being faster but just different. That together with some people being dominant I would probably contribute nothing to the group because my approach is often different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://compleatlecturer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the- compleat-...](http://compleatlecturer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-compleat- lecturer.html)

Historically the original mode of lecturing was simply the transcription by the students of the manuscript the lecturer was reading.

</comment><comment><USER15> At the University I attended most of the lecturers did not know how to teach.

So yea, you'd probably get better results from some system designed by good teachers that could then be replicated without requiring the talent that produced it on a regular basis.

But I'm sure that same training/workshop would be a much better experience when delivered by the minds that created it than a robot that is just repeating the steps.

When I went to University what I wanted was knowledge-sharing by subject matter experts with a passion for teaching. What I got in most cases was researchers that were reading from a script and essentially ticking the boxes of the course outline.

A well designed 'active learning' session is going to have value to students for the same reason a well designed lecture will, it was created by someone with the ability to teach.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's always interesting how many commentors' intuitions about education are completely opposite of what research shows.

Active learning has been shown in hundreds of studies to be superior to traditional lecture-based instruction. Here's a recent meta-analysis: [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/lectures-arent- just-b...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/lectures-arent-just-boring- theyre-ineffective-too-study-finds) [http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410)

And you don't need to learn from lecture 'first' to 'prepare' you for subsequent group learning or real-world learning. In fact, the opposite has been shown in research studies. Let students get their hands dirty with some field experience or try out a simulation even though they aren't quite ready for it yet or try to figure out some data, etc., and then when they receive a lecture on a related topic afterward, they will learn much more from it, because they can relate it back to their previous experience. They have a _reason_ to listen to the lecture, rather than just trying to listen and memorize for a some future test or experience they know or care little about. Several studies have compared for example giving a lecture first followed by a simulation or other experience, vs. the other way around. And lecture-first is always inferior. See for example research on productive failure. Here are some examples: [http://ideas.time.com/2012/04/25/why-floundering-is- good/](http://ideas.time.com/2012/04/25/why-floundering-is-good/) [https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/04/19/how-productive- fai...](https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/04/19/how-productive-failure-for- students-can-help-lessons-stick/) [https://bulletproofmusician.com/productive- failure-how-strat...](https://bulletproofmusician.com/productive-failure-how- strategic-failure-in-the-short-term-can-lead-to-greater-success-and-learning- down-the-road/) [http://manukapur.com/productive- failure/](http://manukapur.com/productive-failure/)

</comment><comment><USER17> It depends what you're studying.

I did part of my computer science degree on campus with lectures that I didn't find useful. In one ear out the other. I have to slow down at some parts but can zip through other parts, but a lecture is steady paced. Huge number of hours wasted.

I did part of my degree at distance. The profs chose great textbooks and it was much better. It's always there as a reference and I can go at my exact pace.

I can imagine though that history or something might require lectures. You don't just give the kids obscure books with no context. For computer science though, an intro to algorithms textbook is pretty straight forward.

</comment><comment><USER18> In my own experience learning and teaching Go and Bridge, two very complex subjects, a combination of lectures and interactive examples is best.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is interesting, but it depends on the proposition that "active learning" is clearly better than more traditional education methods. That's not nearly as plain or uncontroversial as the article implies.

One issue is that when educational techniques are compared, it is troublingly common for the comparison to be between simplistic and homogenous definitions that are only rarely encountered in real classrooms. Educators and non-trivial courses that depend entirely on lectures or entirely on active exercises are so rare they statistically don't exist. Every class I've taken, taught or observed was a blend of multiple types of learning and instruction, distinctions being ones of emphasis, not of type.

The article also seems to assume that there is a best, or at least better, way to teach that is independant of how individual students learn or what particular topic or discipline is being taught. That's, to be frank, ludicrous. It's been clear for a very long time that appropriate and effective educational approaches depend a great deal on what is being taught and who it's being taught to. For example, imagine teaching history without lectures, or programming without hands-on activities.

Good educators tailor the mix of approaches to their particular students and topics. I'm baffled why any educator would support the idea that lectures should be completely eradicated. Why not, instead, take a hard look at the curriculum and mode of instruction with an interest in determining the best approach for the most students and then trust your faculty to make appropriate choices on how to tailor it to a class---with the odd lecture once in a while if it's useful. If they've got a problem with some courses or educators depending on lectures to the detriment of students, the solution is to redevelop the curriculum and train the educator on different techniques---not to just outright ban one approach.

Medical students are generally top students that are highly motivated. Further, cohorts tend to be in all the same classes with each other, encouraging mutual support. Those traits, along with medical education being task focussed, argue for active learning approaches. But that isn't true of, say, freshman English.

Finally, there has always been a circular definition problem with new educational approaches. For example, "active learning" often seems to have an implicit definition along the lines of "self-directed exploration that _is sucessful_ ". If you tried it and it wasn't effective, then what you were doing wasn't active learning, QED.

<comment><USER19> Addendum: there's also a definition problem with "lecture". Pretty much any educator will tell you that they encourage---actively wish for---questions from and conversations with students during a lecture. Passive lectures without interaction tend to happen mostly in giant lecture theatres. In that case, the problem isn't lectures: it's class size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> hasn't McMaster (in Hamilton Ont. Canada) done this for ... decades?

<comment><USER21> Yes, they invented the "problem-based learning" method/style, I do believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Note to self: don't get sick in Vermont.

</comment><comment><USER23> > _" OK, if you like doing appendectomies using an old method because you like > it, and you're really good at it, but it's really not the best method for > the patient, would you do it?" Of course, the answer is always no. And then > you turn around and say, "Well this method of teaching is actually not as > good as other methods. Would you do that?"_

it's just teaching. which method pays more?</comment>


Disclosure of Additional Security Fix in WordPress 4.7.2 - <AUTHOR> https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/02/01/disclosure-of-additional-security-fix-in-wordpress-4-7-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> The following Cloudflare blog post addresses the same issue: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/protecting-everyone-from- wordpre...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/protecting-everyone-from-wordpress- content-injection/)</comment>


So I started mining bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://jlark20.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/bit-coin-mining-101/

<comment><USER2> Only 3 years late to the game.</comment>


The Rise and Fall of Polywater - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-rise-and-fall-of-polywater <comment><AUTHOR> i'd be remiss not to mention the author (Ainissa Ramirez's) wonderful book, "The Alchemy of Us," ([https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Us-Humans-Transformed- Another...](https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Us-Humans-Transformed- Another/dp/0262043807)) which explores how materials — and the innovations they made possible — shaped the human experience. She's a materials scientist and, as you'll see if you read the polywater piece, a terrific science writer.

Full disclosure: i work for the MIT Press. but i'll also disclose this: books and authors like Ainissa are rare; i'm not a publicist or a sales person. This is just one of my favorite books that we've published in recent years. Oh, and if you want more stories like the polywater one, check out this segment with her on Science Friday ("How An Undertaker Helped Develop Computers, And Other Untold Stories"): [https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/alchemy-of-us- book/](https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/alchemy-of-us-book/).

</comment><comment><USER2> My grad school advisor wrote a couple papers in 1970 and 1971 where they proposed a 3D structure for polywater, and then "disproved" its existence. The second one has a wonderfully scientific statement: "It is important to distinguish clearly between the essentially empirical interrelation of experiments achieved by the original model and the current attack on it, because it is obvious from ref. 1 that we have placed ourselves in the unusual and all too easy to discredit position of being authors both of the original model and of the new results against it."

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the curious consequences of the polywater episode was delayed development of diamond synthesis under metastable conditions, mainly by chemical vapor deposition.

After polywater, Deryagin was a very early claimant to having produced diamond by CVD. In light of his role in polywater, his diamond work was widely ignored. It took roughly another decade until Japanese work proved diamond could be made by CVD.

</comment><comment><USER4> Actually, polywater is the only known thing that can dissolve red mercury.

</comment><comment><USER5> "The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor" by Gerald Pollack is an excellent book with many recent experiments. He models the "fourth phase" as being a lattice of H3O2, which is has a negative charge, to possibly explain phenomenon ranging from blood flow, plant sap flow, cloud formation, surface tension, water vesticules (bubbles & droplets), swelling from injury, etc.

[https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/health- issues/the...](https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/health-issues/the- fourth-phase-of-water/)

<comment><USER2> Actual water structure is a long ongoing scientific research topic (I remember my undergrad biochem professor saying "water... you think it's simple then you learn about transient water structures forming in liquid phase" 20+ years ago) and I still see new articles about techniques being used to probe transient structures in liquid water ([https://www.nature.com/articles/379055a0](https://www.nature.com/articles/379055a0)). No need to invoke a fourth phase, liquid water on its own is plenty complicated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Obviously, the reason they cannot detect polywater anymore is the lack of n-rays: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray)

</comment><comment><USER7> Harry Gray told us in freshman chemistry, during the cold fusion craze, that Dick Feynman had told him "If polywater were real, dogs would drink regular water, and pee polywater."

</comment><comment><USER8> Another good example of bad science related to water is "water memory" (published in Nature!): the idea that water could hold onto the "shape" of molecules with which it was mixed. Fun times. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory)

</comment><comment><USER9> I clicked on the link to "Cat's Cradle." That looks like a really cool book!

<comment><USER10> Highly recommend. It's a good intro book to Vonnegut, the other being Slaughterhouse 5. Or maybe those are just my favorites!

Very effective mixes of comedy and tragedy, prose that borders on poetry at times, very imaginative concepts. He's able to walk you over that threshold of disbelief almost before you even realize it.

<comment><USER11> Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of excellent short stories that includes "Harrison Bergeron". "The Euphio Question" haunts me to this day

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Water does, however, seem to self-assemble into larger structures: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cluster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cluster)

That isn't to say polywater exists, or that you should go out and drink de- clustered water. It is interesting to me that a full understanding of the properties of water still eludes us, however.

<comment><USER2> The reason I have my current job is related to water clusters (I'm a SWE at a large internet firm). About 15 years ago I read about pagerank and graph centrality while doing molecular dynamics simulations of DNA and RNA in water. I noticed in my simulations that water would "cluster" at specific locations around the DNA, but I could only really see density, not the "structure". I realized you could create "graphs" of water clusters from the MD trajectories and then analyze them from the perspective of graph centrality. Unfortunately, nobody in academia/government labs had the infrastructure to do this kind of analysis (it doesn't fall under the normal HPC or supercomputer in academia) so I joined a large internet company to get access to their technology and computers. I ended up hiring some scientists to run MD simulations on spare cycles (sort of like Folding @ Home, but inside the datacenter) and we did some cool analysis (although never really did pagerank analysis of water clusters... I did hear somebody external did that, although I don't think it went anywhere).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just read about polywater in Humans [[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40858227-humans](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40858227-humans)]

This is a quick, fun read.

</comment><comment><USER14> Did the polywater "invention" come around the same time as the discovery of tritiated water (aka super-heavy water or T2O)? That could explain why this was somewhat easily believed during that time.

<comment><USER15> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water) references Jones (1952). "The Triple Point Temperature of Tritium Oxide". A Google Scholar search shows publications about "tritium oxide" in the late 1940s, like [https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.1746932](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.1746932) from 1948.

The linked-to piece says "1966, after nearly four years of work".

That puts at least 14 years minimum between them, and likely more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Polywater turned out to be 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."

That is an amazing punchline.

The article is like the longest buildup for a joke I have ever read.

<comment><USER17> "It was all water under the bridge now."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is Structured Water like polywater? Another New Age topic from Russia.

Some say these go back to the Orthodox Church belief that holy water is physically different from regular water.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't get it. When I first looked at this thread it linked to a Wikipedia page. I even commented on the contents of the Wikipedia page. (See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater))

Now my comment makes no sense because the context is gone, and I can't edit my comment to point out why.

<comment><USER19> It only takes a little work to answer such things. Both [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org) or [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=polywater&sort=byDate&type=story) lead to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23248733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23248733), which contains the answer:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249978)

I remember your comment ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249126)) because I had to decide whether to include it in the merge or not—so I checked the new article to see whether it mentions Cat's Cradle. It does, so I included your comment. If it hadn't, I would have left it where it was, but then many fewer users would have gotten to read it, and the replies it has since received would not exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problem is that you need a cold fusion reactor to make it, and that technology is still too new.

<comment><USER21> But did you see this latest article I just read? We're so close!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tl;DR: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater)</comment>


Dear Baby Boomers, Millennials Don't Suck - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/career-pathing/5adb7a33509c

<comment><USER2> These type of "Millennials don't suck" counter-rants would mean more if they weren't only coming from Millennials. People without any or much "real world" life experience don't realize just how valuable and eye-opening that experience is [until of course they have it, and by then they're knocking the next generation].

A common anecdote among rebuttals from Millennials is the whole wearing a suit to an interview. I'm wondering if the people who say "they should judge me for who I am, not what I wear" dress up for a first date? Or when going to a friend's wedding? Dinner at a fancy restaurant? A family member's funeral?

Especially ironic about this counter-rant was the ending: _Oh and remember how you said the internet was stupid when it first came out and now you can't function without email?_ \- does the author really not realize it was Baby Boomers who created the Internet and Web? If he doesn't want Baby Boomers knocking Millennials based on the behavior of _some_ of them then maybe he shouldn't be so quick to assume all Baby Boomers had the same thoughts regarding the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHl80Wmpj40](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHl80Wmpj40)</comment>


WikiLeaks Threatens Its Own Leakers With $20 Million Penalty - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/nda-wikileaks/ <comment><USER2> The old joke about the definition of chutzpah involves a guy who kills both his parents and then tries to get the sympathy of the court because he's an orphan.

But this may soon be superseded by the spectacle of watching Julian Assange suing someone for $20 million for leaking "his" information.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh come on, this isn't _that_ bad.

This is to protect people that have entrusted wikileaks with their information. Essentially what it's doing is preventing people within wikileaks from disrupting the release cycle.

<comment><USER4> Sure, OK, I get it. But at the very least it's hilariously hypocritical.

Does Wikileaks believe all organizations have the right to aggressively pursue leakers in court?

<comment><USER5> > _Does Wikileaks believe all organizations have the right to aggressively > pursue leakers in court?_

Probably so. I don't see how this is hypocritical. Wikileaks never says that governments or corporations should _enjoy_ their information being leaked. Wikileaks is just a publisher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a group that supposedly promotes openness, Wikileaks sure wants to keep their organization a secret. Who watches the watchmen, indeed.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, at least based on what this article says, it's not so much about leaking information on Wikileaks as it is about leaking information Wikileaks is going to release but hasn't yet. Maybe it covers the former as well but it just wasn't mentioned?

<comment><USER2> In my mind, that's even worse.

Wikileaks' own secrets are at least (in some sense) the property of Wikileaks, whereas I really can't see any way in which "information which Wikileaks was planning to release sometime later" counts as Wikileaks' property.

Does anyone remember when Wikileaks was actually a wiki?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Where is the evidence that this document is valid? It may be, but it could just as easily be forged.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. It's probably just more FUD to discredit WikiLeaks.

<comment><USER2> I'd love to know how you progressed from "possibly" to "probably" there.

<comment><USER10> And once again (I'm going to start keeping track!), we don't want to believe something is true, so we invent a controversy to avoid grappling with its implications. Go us!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wired/Poulsen/Lamo attack piece. Flagged.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo#Greenwald.2C_Lamo.2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo#Greenwald.2C_Lamo.2C_Wired_Magazine)

<comment><USER4> Flagging is for spam or offtopic posts, not authors you don't like.

<comment><USER11> You're right. And I commented about it, too. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Several people have already pointed out the tenuous situation between Kevin Poulsen and Wikileaks, so I won't retread old ground; that said, Poulsen is really just summarizing a piece from someone else in the new statesman: [http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen- green/2011/05/...](http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen- green/2011/05/wikileaks-information-legal)

I for one have never heard of The New Statesman before, but that doesn't necessarily mean much. Of particular interest to me was this (linkless) passing jibe: "but on the other hand they make routine legal threats, especially against the Guardian" - the only results I could find about this were _also_ from the New Statesman, and actually seemed rather to pertain to a claimed case of libel about Assange. Not any actual legal action, mind, just a twitter update from @wikileaks. And no indication of a routine about it, just the one hit - very clearly not what was being implied by the paragraph in the original article.

So I for one will be taking this "The New Statesman" with as much of a grain of salt as I was ready to do to the Kevin Poulsen piece.

Edit for links:

[http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen- green/2011/02/...](http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen- green/2011/02/wikileaks-legal-guardian)

<http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/statuses/32867678527950848>

<comment><USER4> Are you trying to wink-wink-nudge-nudge suggest that this document has been fabricated and the story is false? Otherwise I'm really not sure what Kevin Polsen's backstory has to do with anything.

Here's the citation for Assange threatening to sue The Guardian last year for basically trying to releasing Iraq war documents earlier than he had wanted: [http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the- guar...](http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the- guardian-201102?currentPage=all) I'm not sure why you had trouble finding it; lots of hits on google for "wikileaks threatened guardian." He has indeed made threats to sue the paper on several occasions.

And the New Statesman is a left-leaning "real magazine" in the UK that been around for decades, for whatever that's worth.

<comment><USER12> I was not at all suggesting the story was false; rather that Poulsen was further "interpreting" the story based on a prior "interpretation" by the New Statesman. [honest edit: I suppose this is a weak sentence. I really did not mean to imply any actual falsehood, rather two levels of the kind of linkbaity shift one finds all too often in online news.]

That said, it seems my Google-fu is weak; I did not turn up that link nor any kind of repeat-threatening of the Guardian. Thank you for the link. Frankly, I think that both the Wired article and the New Statesman piece could have benefited tremendously (newcomer credibility-wise) from including it.

Having now read the Vanity Fair piece, I'll retract my prior criticism of the New Statesman article. If anything, given that I've given Wikileaks a lot of my attention over the last several months, I'm not sure how this escaped my attention, but it puts a lot of things in a different light. I for one certainly thought the relationship between WL and its chosen newspapers was a lot more rosy.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough. Reading it again, the Wired post is pretty breathless. But I think the document speaks for itself.

You might also enjoy this New Yorker profile of Assange: [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all) It's from a year ago, so it's pre-Cablegate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To be fair, the US gov't (or any gov't for that matter) steals its information and tries to assert full control over it as well. Any comments regarding hypocrisy directed toward Assange ought to apply equally to all governments. The notable thing here is that, in line with the historically great 4th estate, we once again have a news outlet that can act as a peer, rather than a subordinate, of governments.

</comment><comment><USER14> Typical Wired sensationalist bullshit.</comment>


58 percent of Americans favor legalizing marijuana - <AUTHOR> http://www.gallup.com/poll/165539/first-time-americans-favor-legalizing-marijuana.aspx

<comment><USER2> Even though I don't touch drugs (besides caffeine, duh) I tend to fall into the "legalize everything" category --

[http://www.economist.com/node/13237193](http://www.economist.com/node/13237193)

My general stance is pretty much aligned with the above article; that drugs should have never fallen under a crime and punishment policy, but rather all focus should have been placed on public health policy. While I'm not pretending for a second that drugs don't ruin lives and families, it's only doubling the damage to criminalize these people's choices with little chance for rehabilitation.

This isn't even touching the political issues covered in the wonderful documentary _The House I Live In_

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/)

<comment><USER3> That link (economist.com) is behind a paywall. Is there another link I can read?

<comment><USER2> Google: "How to stop the drug wars - The Economist"

<comment><USER3> Interesting... I googled that, opened the _exact same link_ and it worked? I suppose The Economist checks the referrer header or something?

<comment><USER4> That seems to be becoming the standard model of how to operate a paywall - AFAIK the New York Times pioneered it and now everyone does it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I couldn't believe the other day when I was playing GTA 5 and it said "You can now buy properties" and flashed a medical marijuana dispensary on the screen. I was stoked! Makes the world even more realistic.

In my home state, Michigan, if you drive around there are billboards for "The Best OG Kush" and "Grow The Best OG Kush" also signs for pot doctors everywhere! 2 certs for $100! Anyways, what I always tell people is stop reading the news and just go about your business. In my world, and the world of the people I am around marijuana is more than legal, it is accepted. I have made a lot of pro pot comments on HN as I sit here smoking a joint (totally legal btw, the doctor said I should keep using for the next 75 years!), this is the first time where I just feel like the pot people have won. It's harmless and people are actually accepting that. Now I just hope the police do.

Its going to be important for the US to figure out the marijuana. More states are legalizing for medical every year and it has caused havoc on local governments trying to figure out exactly what rules and laws are determined to mean. Better for states to step up and legalize it, but it is time.

<comment><USER6> Pot, like gay marriage, has simply been a demographic matter of waiting for enough stuck up old people to finally die that the preponderance of opinion is in favor of it. When you're old, statistically speaking, people younger than you will be waiting for you to shuffle off, too.

<comment><USER7> Sure, whole classes of problems will disappear as old people die.

But we may not need to wait for grannie and her bridge club to die for this one; TFA notes that support for full-blown legal weed is up 14% _in people over 65_ since 2011.

<comment><USER8> Note that the average life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years old. 79 minus 65 is 14 years. So in two years, we can expect that 2/14ths of the population over 65 will have died, or ~14% of that population. A 14% increase in the population over 65 in favor of legalization in two years does not conflict with the notion that this is a demographic issue.

<comment><USER9> Life expectancy for someone who is 65 years old is actually 82.5 or 85.2 years (depends on gender) [1]. You are making a very common mistake by using life expectancy for someone born today -- that's a very different thing.

[1] [http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html](http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html)

<comment><USER8> I was hoping someone would correct me on that. So 84-65 = 19 years, and 2/19 = 10.5% predicted population churn in two years. 14% is 3.5%/10.5%, or 33% higher than the demographic factor alone would predict.

<comment><USER9> Your calculations assume nobody lives past the age of 84. You may want to rethink that.

<comment><USER8> It assumes that the average person aged 65 will live to 84, meaning as many will die before as after.

<comment><USER9> No. It is a prediction that someone who is 65 will live _on average_ another 19 years to age 84. It does not assume "as many will die before as after." The wikipedia article on life expectancy is actually quite good, if you are interested in learning more.

<comment><USER10> If the definition of _average_ used by life expectancy is the median, then yes, _by definition_ as many will die before as die after.

<comment><USER11> I hope nobody is actually redefining the word "average" to mean median, because that would confuse all I thought I knew about statistics.

Is there a less allegedly ambiguous term for the "traditional" definition of average, that is, the sum of many measurements of the same characteristic, divided by the number of elements measured?

<comment><USER12> Mean, surely?

<comment><USER11> Very true. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's kinda sad that while the US seems to be more and more open to the idea of legalised marihuana, here in the Netherlands we are slowly moving in the opposite direction. This might also have something to do with the EU: for example Franch citizens sometimes travel to the Netherlands to buy hash or weed. France doesn't like this, so recently our so-called coffee-shops[0] have been required to ask for identification and it's not allowed to sell hash & weed to foreigners. So what happens now is the weed is being sold on the streets buy Dutch citizens to foreigners - the new laws actually caused an increase in criminal activity.

Actually our laws are rather weird: a coffee-shop may sell hash or weed, but may not buy it - we still allow them to buy it, but I guess it has to be from some illegal sources since in the Netherlands we are allowed to grow a few plants for private consumption only.

Also, several years ago a French girl committed suicide in Amsterdam while under the influence of magic mushrooms[1]. Because of these kinds of incidents with foreigners magic mushrooms became illegal. There is still a legal alternative of course, "magic truffles", but it's saddening to see these kinds of changes in my country.

[0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_coffee_shop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_coffee_shop)

[1]: [http://www.simplyamsterdam.nl/news/French_tourist_in_Amsterd...](http://www.simplyamsterdam.nl/news/French_tourist_in_Amsterdam_commits_suicide_after_using_magic_mushrooms.htm)

<comment><USER14> From Italy, I always looked at the Netherland's position on drugs as the way forward. Really hope the change opinion that is happening in the US will also happen all over Europe soon (as it did in Portugal, and with great results, IIRC)

<comment><USER15> I always looked at the .nl laws as sort of Italian in that it's illegal, but an eye is closed:-) I think it's best to have things legal and out in the open, and regulated.

<comment><USER14> It looks like it is actually legal for coffee shops to sell, but not to buy and produce...

But I agree, much better to make a clear choice. At least if possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So....while doing some research for a friend going through chemo for her recurring cervical cancer, I found myself watching this documentary on YouTube about GW Pharmaceuticals Cannabis Labs UK BBC Tour ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIzFiC4UZqE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIzFiC4UZqE) ). They develop cannabinoid-based therapeutics (SATIVEX) and work with the world's leading Cannabinoid scientists in 7 Universities: Aberdeen, Hebrew, Buckingham, Reading, Complutense, Naples Frederico II & Insubria and The Institute of Biomolecular of the National Research Council, Italy.

I did more research on the company (this was around May 2013) and found out that their IPO just launched (ticker symbol: GWPH). I bought shares at around $8 a share. Today, 6 months later, their shares are trading at $29 a share.

</comment><comment><USER17> I advise everyone to stop smoking and research the options on vaporising out there. There are good portable products from $50 upward. It is much better for your lungs than inhaling (potentially carcinogenic) combustion products such as tar, plus you use less plant material to achieve the same effect.

This is true for both tobacco and cannabis, though I can't help but tell you that nicotine is a really nasty toxin[0], that you should avoid at all cost.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Toxicology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Toxicology)

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder what the percentage will have to be before it's legalised? 70%, 80%, 90%?

</comment><comment><USER19> This is about so much more than folks getting high. This is about finally winding down the disastrous War on Drugs. For the first time, I feel like the end might finally be in sight.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wait until their kids got their hands on it.

<comment><USER21> The kids might eat all their dinner and take a nap. That would be awful.</comment></comment>


Icon Babel – Transcend language barriers using icons - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1109109105?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> This is an app I made for breaking communication barriers. It's a simple, yet powerful idea. Use icons to communicate with anyone, regardless of which language they speak. The UI is simple enough that my three year old can use it. The UI has zero words, so the UI is internationalized out-of-the-box. Let me know what you think. All feedback is welcome. Positive or negative. Thanks!</comment>


Slackware changelog: "we're finally a modern, relevant Linux distro ;-)" - <AUTHOR> http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64 <comment><USER2> Welp, time to pick up over to BSD land. Pulse Audio is not something I want to live with on my machines. Sorry Patrick.

</comment><comment><USER3> Finally, Slackware became funny again (may I use "again"?).

</comment><comment><USER4> They finally added a package manager?</comment>


Congratulations - now stop being a wuss (a commencement address) - <AUTHOR> http://www.john-carlton.com/2013/05/congratulations-now-stop-being-a-wuss-3/

<comment><AUTHOR> "If you want to join the Feast of Life, you have to step up and earn your seat at the table. You will not be invited in. You will not stumble in by accident, or stroke of luck.

Nope. You must take responsibility for your own life… figure out what you want… and then go get it."

Some version of this is always the most important message ... and it requires constant repetition.</comment>


What should I do with my life? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/node/45909/print

<comment><USER2> > I'm talking about the garden-variety fantasy: Put your calling in a lockbox, > go out and make a ton of money, and then come back to the lockbox to pick up > your calling where you left it.

His researched book "What should I do with my life?" is interesting, in a college alumni notes kind of way, for picking up and opening to a random page and reading one of the 70 profiles (which are categorized). It's a _great_ coffee table book for kindling conversations.

I liked the profile of the woman who was a top toner sales executive.

</comment><comment><USER3> You think that you'll make lots of money and get back to your dream in 2-3 years but you'd be wrong. You'll be dead in 2-3 years. Perhaps not physically but this person right now that is you -- he will no longer exist, only someone who has memories of being you.

<comment><USER4> How are the two different? You might as well say that I will be dead in the next minute. What makes me is not this instant, this second, is the core me, the core ideas, perspectives, themes, aims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article has been sitting on my hard drive for a long time now, since I first read it and felt that I'd have to reread it many times over the years... My favorite part:

 _"Keeping your doors open" is a trap. It's an excuse to stay uninvolved. I call the people who have the hardest time closing doors Phi Beta Slackers. They hop between esteemed grad schools, fat corporate gigs, and prestigious fellowships, looking as if they have their act together but still feeling like observers, feeling as if they haven't come close to living up to their potential._

</comment><comment><USER6> A great book for when people have enough financial backup to explore a bit. Nowadays with people's 401k down 40% and underwater in their house, they can't afford to take a year off to 'figure life out'

<comment><USER7> Figuring life out doesn't have to take money.

You only get what Mary Oliver calls "your _one_ wild and precious life." So if living it well means giving up the 401k, walking away from the house and filing bankruptcy, then that's a valid choice.

[edit] I keep that poem on my desktop so I can read the last two lines every day and it is slowly coming to influence the decisions I make:

"Tell me what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?"</comment></comment>


Crash the Inauguration: How to Be at the Woodstock of Washington - <AUTHOR> http://www.crashtheinauguration.com

<comment><USER2> Great pr/bizdev move on the part of the creators (airbedandbreakfast.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a native Washingtonian, and I'm totally going to go if it's remotely possible for me to be in DC.

      Mom's apartment
       * 0.6mi from National Mall
       * Couch in living room
       * Internet available

<comment><USER4> And I'm a native Australian.

So I'm totally going to go if it's possible for me to remotely be in DC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My mother grew up in DC and was around for many inaugurations. They used to make metal parking signs for the inauguration saying "Kennedy Innauguration January 20th 1961". After the inauguration my uncles would go around and take the signs down. We have many inauguration signs around my grandmother's house. Now the signs are paper :(

</comment><comment><USER6> Woodstock of Washington?

<comment><AUTHOR> Estimated to be 4-5 million people, and the city is keeping bars open until 5am.

<comment><USER6> That sounds like a recipe for disaster.

There are going to be riots and the capital (and capitol) will be burned to the ground.

On second thought, that's maybe not a bad thing. We could get some real change then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most people who claim to have been at Woodstock weren't.</comment>


We finally got our startup to ramen profitability - <AUTHOR> https://veed.io/blog/journey-to-ramen-profitability-saas/ <comment><USER2> That was a really awesome read! What're you planning on doing once your cloud services are out?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, pleased you enjoyed it. We should cover the cloud bills by the end of November. I think they call it "Default Alive"</comment></comment>


Free SSL Certificate – Is a Free SSL Right for You? - <AUTHOR> https://www.godaddy.com/web-security/free-ssl-certificate <comment><USER2> This is so cringeworthy.

Godaddy is scared of letsencrypt.org so much it decided to make this propaganda stuff?

Ok I understand that letsencrypt.org provides only domain validation certificates, though it's better than nothing and it's free.

I've seen many small shops/businesses having little e-shops, probably made by their 'smart 12 year old nephew in a weeked', so at least they'll have a basic certificate, rather than nothing.</comment>


ModMyPi: how one student turned over £867,000 selling Raspberry Pi cases - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/23/jacob-marsh-modmypi

<comment><USER2> For those curious about the case itself, here's a link

[https://www.modmypi.com/shop](https://www.modmypi.com/shop)

<comment><USER3> The case looks great! Congratulations on your successful business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice article. There were of course lots of people who identified the need for a case as a market. The success here is that this young man got it to market and achieved enough traction to grow that into something more sustainable. I've met a couple of people who banked a few 10's of thousands of dollars selling cases for the Pi and then got out of the market when volume dropped to unsustainable levels. Not a lot of money per-se but a nice chunk of change to start on the next thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> The webshop is impressive, but lacks a basic item: a simple GPIO-controlled solid-state relay. It is the simplest (apart from blinking leds) and only necessary building block to get the Pi to actually do something in the real world (such as opening/closing a garage door).

</comment><comment><USER6> Quite unrelated, but can anyone explain to me how the first picture of the Pi in it's case stays static on the page until you scroll past a certain point (around the 4th paragraph) Then it scrolls just like any static image. Interested to know how this is done.

<comment><USER7> Something like this? [https://github.com/bigspotteddog/ScrollToFixed](https://github.com/bigspotteddog/ScrollToFixed)

<comment><USER6> Brilliant, thank you! I'll try this :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something like Raspberry Pi in a nice, aluminium case with room and cooling for two 3,5" drives would probably sell well as a home server for geeks. I'm hoping that's what FreedomBox will be.

<comment><USER9> Why would you need two 3.5" drives on a Pi? It would not make a very special NAS or small server, as you access the drives trough USB, sharing it with everything else - LAN and any other things you want to add. Yes, it's cheap and cheap to run, but also very slow and hard to maintain.

<comment><USER10> Slow, yes, but probably fast enough for most people.

Why would it be hard to maintain?

<comment><USER9> I'm probably some other kind of geek, feeling limited by a Gbit connection to the home NAS.

Hard to maintain: not sure about others, but I had stability issues with my Pies using USB devices like wifi adapters, memory sticks and webcams; I would not trust one to store anything important, especially on complex setups: onboard USB -> Powered USB hub -> USB to SATA adapter -> SATA HDD (with external power).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well done to them! As an aside, I love the look of their shopping site ([https://www.modmypi.com/shop](https://www.modmypi.com/shop)).

Any ideas on what the shopping cart would be - eg is this a heavy customisation / BYO or does it look like something familiar to HN readers?

<comment><USER12> Looks like OpenCart to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I bet that number is sales, not profits. I wonder how much he makes after production costs, shipping from the manufacturer, taxes to the manufacturer, shipping to the client, salaries to his two employees, profit taxes, etc.

<comment><USER14> Yes, that's the common interpretation of "turnover". It's also worth noting that he's successfuly expanded beyond his initial offering such that modmypi.com is a one-stop-shop for all things Pi. Plus modmypi donate 5% of all profits back to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.</comment></comment>


Android Full Disk Encryption Cold Boot Attack (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www1.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/frost <comment><USER3> Article looks a little dated, based on the fact that the test phone is an original Galaxy Nexus and only mentions Android 4.0.

I did a search on the Internet Archive and see caches of this page going back at least as far as 2013:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130115000000*/https://www1.inf...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130115000000*/https://www1.informatik.uni- erlangen.de/frost)

You may want to update the submission with a year.

<comment><USER4> PDF says 2012

[https://www1.informatik.uni- erlangen.de/filepool/projects/fr...](https://www1.informatik.uni- erlangen.de/filepool/projects/frost/frost.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That was not the 'Cold Boot' I was expecting. Awesome.

The paper is really nice and readable. TL;DR: Freezing the phone makes the RAM static and not clear on reboot, giving you time to sideload their custom recovery image that iterates the ram and looks for AES encryption key patterns.

<comment><USER6> After reading the article expecting a soft solution to causing a lock-up crash of the OS, I feel that your TL;DR needs to be clarified slightly:

Actual freezing. Like, putting the phone in a freezer to create sub-zero temperatures.

<comment><USER7> Hence "cold boot attack"

<comment><USER8> I worked on the original cold boot paper (Halderman _et al._ ) and I understood "cold boot" as "removing power", not as "lowering temperature". (It's a warm boot if you reboot from software, and a cold boot if you reboot by removing power to the machine.) It's understandable that people would have assumed temperature was the reason for "cold" because we had lots of pictures of memory with ice crystals.

Under many circumstances, the attack worked at room temperature; one main reason for using low temperatures was if you needed to physically move the RAM chips from one machine to another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is very similar to work done by J. Alex Halderman et al. in 2008 [1]. If you find this interesting, check out their paper. They give an example of a bitmap image in memory and its degradation over a number of seconds without power. It's a fantastic visual aid and you might be surprised by how well the data survives; if you're fast (5 seconds) it's nearly lossless.

[1] [https://citp.princeton.edu/research/memory/](https://citp.princeton.edu/research/memory/)

</comment><comment><USER10> None of this will work against a normal consumer device, since you cannot flash recovery until you do "fastboot oem unlock", which purposefully erases ALL user data. And most consumers do not walk around with unlocked bootloaders.

<comment><USER11> Actually the authors dutifully note this case, explaining that _" we show that cold boot attacks are more generic and allow to retrieve sensitive information, such as contact lists, visited web sites, and photos, directly from RAM, even though the bootloader is locked."_

<comment><USER10> Pretty unlikely. A large chunk of that data is not likely in ram, and uploading an image to fastboot will erase a lot of ram as well. You'll get some things maybe. But this isn't nearly the end of the world scenario the article seems to paint.

And also on more recent Android devices you cannot even perform an unlock of the bootoader without knowing the device PIN. Try it on a nexus 5x/6p/9.

<comment><USER12> From their paper:

> Once the smartphone is up again, the risk of loosing RAM contents is > defeated. Flashing the recovery image does not destroy important RAM lines > according to our tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing I've always wondered... is the PIN code or unlock pattern (and disk encryption key) protected by a hardware security module that rate limits attacks? If someone has physical access to the device and can image the flash drive, what's to keep them from brute forcing the tiny PIN code keyspace to gain access to the drive?

<comment><USER14> Most Android phones throttle the rate you're allowed to enter PINs if you fail multiple times in a row (from minutes to hours). You can set the phone to wipe the entire flash memory if too many PIN entries in a row fail.

<comment><USER15> But that won't help if you're up to the sort of attacker disk encryption is supposed to protect from, right? Disk encryption protects data at rest, in which case you can assume the attacker has loaded the flash into his own system and don't give a cent about Android's PIN restrictions.

<comment><USER16> It would if the KDF used to expand the PIN also used some per-device secret in a HSM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd be much more interested in this attack if they could get the keys from a phone with a locked bootloader.

I'd assume, encrypted or not, physical access to a phone with an unlocked bootloader means it's owned.

<comment><USER18> Locked bootloader should not have anything to do with encrypted user data being accessible or not... With a locked bootloader on Android devices, it can be difficult to flash a Custom ROM but your password won't help in that case... your password/pin should be used to decrypt your data.

<comment><USER19> It does, because they can't retrieve the keys from memory otherwise - Unlocking the bootloader is essentially opening the phone up to malicious code execution by anyone with physical access.

<comment><USER20> It would be more difficult and model-specific, but couldn't they attach a device to read the RAM chips directly? To perform this on most modern phones, they have to disassemble it anyway to be able to toggle the power quickly enough (since there's no user-replaceable battery).

<comment><USER21> They probably wouldn't be able to attach anything to the ram directly, as the ram chips on modern phones are soldered down BGAs. To get at the pins, they'd have to de-solder them, which would heat up the chips in the process. It might be possible to get at the ram over JTAG or some other debug bus in some devices, though.

<comment><USER22> This is probably in the realm of "if you're subject to this level of attack you have bigger problems", but, I wonder if it would be possible to laser drill after-the-fact micro vias through the PCB to get at all the BGA pads with absurdly small probes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Little reminder to the folks with Mediatek chipsets: the MTK bootloader does not support locking and you can trivially dump the entire flash (and rewrite it) at will.

<comment><USER24> ...which I consider a feature, not a bug. It's "insecure" in that I can't lock others out, but no one else can lock me out of my device either. Furthermore, since there's no "hidden state", I can just restore a full flash dump to get back to a known-good state without possibility of something malicious getting in and hiding from me in some secured area.

<comment><USER23> Indeed, and that's why I'm happy I have a mtk phone. But still, for some users it might be useful to know that their phones are (by far) easier to break than others'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It _sounds_ to me like this will not work if I actually power down my device before the attacker gets their hands on it, is that correct? (I tend to power down my phone before going through TSA lines, for example)

<comment><USER26> Yes, cold boot attacks only work if they can get to the machine before it is turned off. If it has been turned off while warm, the RAM contents very very quickly degrade. This is pretty interesting since most people don't get to turn their phone off when it is stolen. In the case of the TSA you're safe, though.

Fun fact: This is why during raids against cyber criminals reports claim they often dive for their computer to try and turn it off before being restrained. Police can do the same thing with liquid nitrogen and a desktop machine.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like a coil of heating wire around the chips that's triggered by cryogenic temperatures entering the computer case (or the PC's case being opened) would keep their secrets safe. I.e. if triggered, motherboard power is cut off, and the LiIon battery dumps power through the heating wire and quickly bakes the chips to 500 degrees.

<comment><USER27> Might as well take this to the logical conclusion and have some thermite set to go off if anyone tampers with the case.

<comment><USER28> There was an interesting experiment done on this at a DEFCON a few years back[1].

Thermite, even the more explosive copper-based variant, is pretty poor at destroying disk platters, sadly. Explosives or cutting equipment seem to be better, although the magnitude of the engineering challenge obviously increases.

1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y)

<comment><USER27> Cool, I'll definitely have to watch that. Thanks for the link!

Here's an alternate idea: rather than messing around with chemical explosives, how about filling the computer with poisonous snakes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does it even matter?

You can easily get a user to install some app that has all kinds of permissions, including all their contacts, camera, mic, current and past call history, phone number, etc. They wouldn't bat an eye.

<comment><USER6> That kind of user doesn't encrypt their phone.

This is more worrying for a professional locked down corporate device full of sensitive data or trade secrets. For example, I work in health studies - <USER2> worry would be patient info getting into the wrong hands.

<comment><USER30> So, what's next – business phone implementing a heater that heats the device?

<comment><USER31> Wouldn't be too hard or add too much bulk

<comment><AUTHOR> Just put an Intel processor inside!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Intel's TXT partially mitigates the desktop version of this attack by setting a nonvolatile bit indicating that the memory state is sensitive. On clean shutdown, the bit is cleared. On dirty shutdown, firmware clears RAM on boot (and the memory controller won't let that step get skipped).

Android could do a simpler version by unconditionally clearing RAM on boot in the bootloader.</comment>


The 1960's elegance behind Go's regexp - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CwgyzSoz5lVFrgTWb67_ar5kkidW2crOItBOnxRH9uI/mobilepresent <comment><USER2> The article by Russ Cox [0] (from which the initial Perl vs. Thompson NFA graph is taken) is a much more informative read. Also, I'm not sure why this always gets brought up as being a big deal: CS is all about making the right tradeoffs and I agree that sometimes there are cool tricks that let you _almost_ have your cake an eat it. But here, there is no such trick: backtracking has always been exponential and finite state automata have always been linear.

No surprises.

[0] [https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html](https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html)

<comment><USER3> Full disclosure - I work on the Hyperscan project at Intel github.com/01org/hyperscan

Regular expression implementation is fun and many interesting things have been done in this area. We are partial to the work of Gonzalo Navarro (in terms of summary papers) and the Glushkov construction, which predates the Thompson NFA construction and IMO is better in a number of ways for fast implementation.

I quite enjoyed the Russ Cox posts, but they are a very partial and idiosyncratic picture of regular expression implementation. RE2 is one point in the automata-style regex implementation space; Hyperscan is another, and there a bunch of other distinct and interesting approaches (e.g. the work from the Parabix guys, various hardware and GPGPU implementations, etc).

<comment><USER2> See, now _this_ is something interesting. When I get some time, I'll take a look at hyperscan. Looks pretty neat.

<comment><USER4> As the author of Rust's regex crate, Hyperscan is a work of art, both in terms of the algorithms it employs and its performance. (I don't think Hyperscan has been part of any publicized benchmark yet, so I'm only speaking with some limited experience I've had poking at it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I stopped reading when a post in 2017 compared anything to perl 5.8.7 which is older than what CentOS 5 shipped.

Perl 5.8.x was EOL in 2008. 5.10 was EOL in 2009.

The currently maintained versions are 5.22.3 and 5.24.1 and major redesign, refactoring, and rework has been done in the system including the regex parser. It went in the meantime from being a primarily recursive, backtracking NFA to using a DFA when possible, being primarily iterative, and only recursing when necessary.

Anyone intentionally picking a more than decade old version whose major version line was end-of-life nearly a decade ago to compare to their new hotness has completely invalidated the evidence for their arguments. All the great things the slides might say may still be true, but they are unsupported by these charts.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the author 'intentionally' picked it. Like all the other graphics in the presentation, it looks to have been sourced from somewhere else.

Edit: [https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html](https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html)

All the graphics come from the above, and no mention of the original article it was taken from. Nice.

<comment><USER5> Plagiarism v. cherry-picking (or is that pit-picking in this case)... It's difficult to say which is the bigger ethical issue. Both are extremely dishonest and misleading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Slightly off-topic: BurntSushi wrote a Go binding[1] for the Rust regex engine[2] (he is also the author) which shares the same approach (finite automata) but has a more polished, highly optimized implementation. It could be useful in some scenario for people facing performance issues with Go's regex engine.

[1] [https://github.com/BurntSushi/rure- go](https://github.com/BurntSushi/rure-go) [2] [https://github.com/rust- lang/regex](https://github.com/rust-lang/regex)

</comment><comment><USER8> _" [A regex is] a style of describing character strings. If a string successfully describes a regex, then it is called a match"_

Shouldn't that be "if a regex successfully describes a string"? I'm confused.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the Thompson NFA matcher could be pushed further if someone would bother to do it. One example is that since it finds all solutions to a given regular expression, it could be used within a larger backtracking matcher to support back-references.

Consider:

      (a+)(a+)=\1

With an input like: aaaaa=aa

The matcher will find these strings by the time it gets to the '=':

        (a)(aaaa)=
        (aa)(aaa)=
        (aaa)(aa)=
        (aaaa)(a)=

Each match will end up as a separate still-existing thread in the Thompson matcher. Instead of pruning them as soon as possible, keep them and recursively match the rest of the string with the back-reference set in turn to each until a match is found.

<comment><USER4> If I understand your idea right, then this is actually being done! [https://github.com/google/fancy-regex](https://github.com/google/fancy-regex)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TL;DR we use a subset of today's common regexps which allowed us to go lightning fast (as long as you don't need lookahead). Oh, and I'll neglect to be clear about that.

Nothing wrong in making the tradeoff but I didn't see it in the text.

</comment><comment><USER11> I do not get why there still is so much of a hype for regular expressions. They are hard to read and maintain. They have a relatively large syntax. Edge- cases are easy to get wrong with them.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like Tcl has been doing it right for a while...

</comment><comment><USER13> Seriously, can we stop fetishising old approaches and papers? Yes, there's some tricks we've missed along the way, but there's a thread of alchemical thinking in our community that is just plain unproductive.

<comment><USER14> It would be easier to take this comment seriously if Go wasn't a modern re- implementation of ALGOL 68.

<comment><USER15> 60s regex with 60s language. Hmm, I wonder which area (regular language parsing or programming theory) has seen more research since then :D.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Possible to recover from being a frustrated mediocrity for 30+ years? - <AUTHOR> I've been reading HN for awhile. I'm using a throwaway account to ask for advice.
Basically, I am a failure. I do about three hours of work in a month, seriously. And I'm an entrepreneur with a dream schedule! I'm floating along on some contracts but It's only a matter of time before I'm found out.  More importantly I detest myself for this.
I've read god knows how many posts about finding your vision and achieving goals. I know what my perfect day looks like but I can't ever follow through. It's awful. I have a sick feeling in my stomach every night as another day is wasted. There's no end.
The worst is being a member of HN where so many accomplished people work. Seriously, if I could break this mental block or disease or whatever I could be like that! At least I think I could. I'm so bored with FP vs OP, language debates, stack overflow book recs and all that because I've studied them all before. I should be teaching the guys who ask those questions with my experience by now, yet I have no experience...
I'm over 30 years old. Can I change? Is it too late? Has anybody like me ever changed? If so I would love to hear from you.
All suggestions welcome. However, I do need to keep earning a living so taking a year off in Tibet is not going to work for me very well. <comment><USER2> _I do about three hours of work in a month, seriously...I'm floating along on some contracts but It's only a matter of time before I'm found out._

I've had a few extended periods like this now (I'm only mid 30's myself). I guess I have/had a different perspective. I called these times "success".

I do admit, it is a drink best consumed in moderation. I worked my ass off to get those contracts that allowed me to float, but before long, I forgot that initial effort and started to unconsciously believe that I'd lucked into the whole thing, was an impostor and would soon be exposed.

A few things that helped:

Every once in a while I'd go up to the corporate headquarters of my biggest contract and have a look around. It only took a few minutes to realize that my few hours _per month_ were giving them more value than the paper-tied tps- report generating slackers they paid $75k gave them working full time. Even if I was the goof I felt myself in my darkest imaginations, _they were still getting their money's worth._

I volunteered. I found some places that needed help desperately, and I was the _smartest_ guy in the room, and I helped out.

I networked. I found some places where I was the _dumbest_ guy in the room and I learned everything I could.

There are two universal truths _(1)_ no matter where you are in your journey. There are people much smarter and more motivated than you and there are people much dumber and less motivated than you. I found that putting myself in situations where I could feel the gradient and my place on it was tremendously motivating.

 _(1) If you happen to be Donald Knuth or Chuck Norris, you should probably just ignore this whole section._

<comment><USER3> I really needed to read this. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Motivation has two dimensions: goal attractiveness, goal expectancy.

Goal attractiveness is basically how much do you want it and goal expectancy is how much you believe you can attain the goal.

As you can see they are two perpendicular forces which directly affect the direction your motivation/dedication towards attaining goals are pointing.

I don't know you, but a common problem many people face is that they look at the world around them and focus on other people's achievements and wish for the same. The only problem is on the motivation dimensions their scales get way tipped over..

As an example, you may look at what is happening on HN and wish for what Andrew Mason is doing with Groupon or Zuckerberg has achieved with FB. The issue is that while that goal is extremely attractive the expectancy of you achieving it is very negative and so the motivation vector ends up pointing in the negative direction.

Developing this argument as I go along, I would therefore say that the correct approach is to take stock of what your current strengths are, what your challenges are and strategize a plan. Namely one that sets you up with small bite sized goals which are positively geared for your current situation and continually update the goal statuses. Maybe have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and half yearly goals and work on them.

THEREFORE, you can definitely change, you just need to have realistic goals and discipline to tough it out.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find healthy people have more energy and are more focused. This always leads to more motivation. Do you eat well? Exercise daily? Sleep properly? I still think those are the three fundamental aspects of productivity/happiness. Of course this is a generalization - we all know fat programmers who are hugely (hahaha) successful. This shouldn't be controversial, the relationship between poor health and poor productivity is well established. Of course, you need to be honest with yourself, I've known some stupidly unhealthy people who thought they were really healthy.

More specifically to programming, we all learn differently. Some like books, some like videos, some are more hands on. Ultimately, you need to find what works for you, and spend the time and do it. There's no quick fix/easy solution. You need to spend time and get it done. I'd suggest small quick projects so that you get the benefit of iterating and learning quickly. If you aren't creative, contribute to something that interets you. Otherwise, pick something that'll solve a real problem you have and go for it. Even something as simple as documenting, you know, through a blog, your process can help.

</comment><comment><USER6> How are you able to work 30 hours a week? Are you lucky to be in some kind of management position, or do you have some valuable skill that could be productised?

As for motivation ... it's like a muscle. You can't lift 150 pounds if you've been lying in bed all day for a year. Don't expect to work a 12 hour day, either. Just get better.

</comment><comment><USER7> Time and Experience should not go hand and hand, so dont let that stress you out. I have worked with some devs in their 40+ that are horrible.

It seems like you know what you want, you are just afraid to try and lack the motivation.

My advice, step away from the computer for a couple hours a day. Take a walk or do some exercise, you would be amazed at how much that changes your mindset for the better.

Unfortunately there is no magic words of advice or book you can read to solve your problems. Sometimes you just need to man up, put the cards on the table and do what needs to get done.

Best of luck, hang in there.

</comment><comment><USER8> Change your environment. Get a job working for a really demanding (but intelligent/thoughtful) person.

Someone who's sort of Steve Jobs meets the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket.

Someone who will demand you push yourself and get out of your comfort zone.

Even a few months of working for someone like this can have an amazing effect on a person. Kind of like when you see someone come back from a military boot camp.

Definitely not the only way, but it really does work.

</comment><comment><USER9> Stop focusing on the results (being accomplished, getting things done, etc.) and learn to enjoy the process. Don't worry about working so you can enjoy a reward; learn to enjoy the work itself (or find something else that you do enjoy).

Life's too short to waste time today for a potential reward tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe its because your work is too solitary? It is very difficult to remain motivated when working alone as you don't get the feedback of having seen people benefit from your work and have a smile. Unfortunately this seems to be how a lot of IT/computing work is by its nature.

</comment><comment><USER11> Find other people's projects and/or ventures that you genuinely believe in and can honestly contribute and commit to. Then get stuck in. By doing this, you will build up your skills and more importantly build up your work habits.

</comment><comment><USER12> You haven't found your passion, something worth dying for. Like they say, you only start living once you start living outside of yourself.

</comment><comment><USER13> 1\. Realize that wasting time is getting you closer to your deathbed

2\. Try to write some short term goals on a piece of paper or notebook

3\. Google pomodoro technique

4\. appomodoro.appspot.com

5\. Start working your @#$ off

...

6\. PROFIT!

</comment><comment><USER14> what helped me was a supportive work environment a smart boss who managed to make me work. this is hard to find though. being on your own is poison. find people who can work with you and motivate you. humans are not meant to be alone.

</comment><comment><USER15> Assumption: I bet you'd step up the plate if somebody actually depended on you.

EDIT: i don't mean have kids :)

<comment><USER16> Please don't reproduce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Saving</comment>


How a Clojure pet project turned into a full-blown cloud-computing web-app - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/smartrevolution/how-a-clojure-pet-project-turned-into-a-fullblown-cloudcomputing-webapp

<comment><USER3> The part about how so much of web application development is just translating data from one format into another, and how objects just get in the way of that process, really struck home with me. With Google's key value store mapping directly to Clojure structs, which are then handed off to the HTML generation code or converted into JSON, it's clear that including a step to map to objects somewhere in there is totally superfluous. Which is exactly what I find in developing web applications in Java on a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER4> It would be awesome if they posted this in a real text format rather than lots of slides with (sometimes) very small text. I highly recommend the read, very interesting.

Their blog has an excellent article ([http://www.hackers-with- attitude.com/2009/08/intertactive-pr...](http://www.hackers-with- attitude.com/2009/08/intertactive-programming-with-clojure.html)) on using Clojure interactively with GAE.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can someone with recent GAE experience comment on how well it works these days? Any glaring problems, particularly with the JVM implementation? I plan to launch a Clojure web app in the next few months, and I'd love to avoid maintaining servers.

<comment><USER6> I'm on the Python end, and it's gotten a lot more stable and faster since it launched. A lot more features, too. A lot of the workarounds that we did early on to fix headaches and failure cases just aren't needed any more, so it's much closer to the abstraction we signed up for.

That said, if your site is always going to be small, you'll be able to do a lot of database queries much faster with MySQL, Redis, or what have you than with App Engine. The scalability wouldn't matter, so if you don't want to worry about database limitations, then it's a point against.

<comment><USER7> > That said, if your site is always going to be small, you'll be able to do a > lot of database queries much faster with MySQL, Redis, or what have you than > with App Engine.

If your site is small enough, you may be able to host for free on AppEngine. Even if it's not that small, AppEngine doesn't charge for availability, just for usage. In other words, you don't pay for idle time.

<comment><USER6> That is a plus. You can go very far within the free quota limits.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that if you want to use an external domain (clojuresombrero.com instead of closuresombrero.appspot.com), and you want users in China to be able to access it, then you need to run everything through a reverse proxy or they'll hit the Great Firewall block.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm regularly curiously peeking at the functional languages but I must say those slides did not convince me much - perhaps just bad choice of examples.

E.g. on slide 79 the sight of generating HTML through a DSL horrifies me. Littering the code with presentation details like that leads to maintenance hell.

Likewise in the comparison of slide 83 vs 85 I frankly don't see any difference between python and lisp in terms of verbosity.

So whatever point the author was trying to make - didn't work for me.

<comment><USER9> Having done the DSL templatng route in Perl, it's not really that bad. Really there isn't much difference between having the templates in a template language or a first class programming language. I can see it getting bad if you're not disciplined and mix you app logic with you display logic. But it's not really all that bad. I did it so I could use closures and what-not in my templates. Worked out well. Makes the higher level templates more readable.

<comment><USER8> Well, I commonly use template inheritance (in jinja) to great effect and can think of dozens little reasons why having the HTML in separate files makes a lot of sense (i18n, re-use, designers editing them, testing outside the app etc.).

I also found the code presented in the slide especially scary because it was intermixed with Lisp brackets and such. I imagine it would be a major pain to rearrange something in there, don't even want to think about exploratory programming in that style...

That's not to say it can't be neat in little one-off scripts - but for production code I'd be extremely wary of that technique.

<comment><USER10> Again you don't need to do it that way in Clojure. And in fact Enlive put solutions like jinja, mako, etc to shame:

      (defn viewc [params session]
        (let [navs (if (= (:action params) "reverse") (reverse navs) navs)
             [nav1 nav2] navs]
          (base {:title "View C"
                 :main (three-col {:left nav1
                                   :right nav2})})))

This is what a "template" looks like in Enlive. Enlive actually can extract HTML fragments out of a _pure_ HTML file and manipulate them. This means designers can work in pure HTML and the coder can manipulate those HTML files at will w/o putting any code into the markup.

<comment><USER8> Well, thanks for providing a peek, although I'm still not sure I could bear that syntax. I just find it very hard to parse (" _})})))_ ", seriously?), but perhaps that gets better with age/familiarity.

The "can extract fragments from pure HTML" part certainly sounds interesting. But still I have to wonder how well that scales to complex templates. I mean, mixing logic into templates is ugly, but the alternative - <USER2> separating the interpretation from the template - doesn't seem so rosy to me either. During a bigger re-arrangement I imagine it could become quite nasty to re-sync the new template version with what the code expects?

I assume the above "template interpretation code" was for quite a trivial thing. What would it look like for complex stuff? (70 chars of closing parentheses? ;-) )

<comment><USER10> Yet you're are okay with the following? :)

      {%for x in foo%}

{{x.bar}} {{x.baz|pluralize}}

      {%endfor%}

It's just different flavors of line noise. At least with Emacs you have paredit to manage code structure for you, no need manually track parens/braces at all.

<comment><USER8> _Yet you're are okay with the following? :)_

Quite frankly; yes.

Not pretty in any way but I guess 15 years of familiarity play their part and I have never had a big problem with that particular concept (it just works well for me in practice).

However, to each their own. Looking forward to see how compojure adoption will play out, perhaps at some point I'll just "get it" and wonder how I ever worked without it. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great set of slides - I wish I could have heard the talk live. I did add his company's blog to my RSS/Atom feed.

I would like to spend more time with both Clojure and AppEngine and the slides were some motivation. I am still a little skeptical however that Clojure base web apps will ever have the traction of Rails (I had a 5 hour sprint today to add two major features to a customer's rails web app: would have taken a long time to do with server side Java; I would guess that Clojure would split the difference).

I've bought 3 Clojure books, and I would by a 4th if the author of these slides would write a web app specific Clojure book.

<comment><USER12> I have to say that languages that favor immutable data structures and functional style are great for web dev. From what I've done in Clojure/Compojure compared to my experience in Rails, it's great not having a billion implicit magical parameters to each function (aka instance methods and magic instance/class methods that may not exist or be documented). You can really fit a lot of a functional web app in your head. Rails just spills all over the place and you slip on it and end up with stitches.

<comment><USER11> Thanks, that sounds right. That said, I have 3+ years invested in Rails, so it is difficult to make a commitment to another stack. I am doing a small (non web app) project with Clojure right now, which is fun and educational.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice remark on how the need for a "powerful" IDE is a code smell. The need for the IDE reveals that some abstraction the language should provide but isn't has to be handled by something else. No such problem with macros.

</comment><comment><USER14> Forget _how_ they did it. After looking at the first 20 slides, I'm more interested in getting in on the closed beta.

<comment><USER15> <https://the-deadline.appspot.com/login?continue=%2Flist%2F>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> All I wanted was a Pepsi.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm interested in the project, but the author's decision to write out his lecture notes on a series of 110 slides is a bit off-putting.

<comment> brown9-2 It help translates the speech into something for readers (like us) to be able to follow along with later on

<comment><USER16> Then post it in simple HTML on a web page.

<comment><USER17> Just scroll to the bottom of the page -- the transcript is right there below the comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> fla;dr?

[http://www.slideshare.net/smartrevolution/how-a-clojure- pet-...](http://www.slideshare.net/smartrevolution/how-a-clojure-pet-project- turned-into-a-fullblown-cloudcomputing-webapp#text-version)</comment>


CodeBunk: Online Collaborative Editor and Compiler - <AUTHOR> http://codebunk.com/ <comment><USER2> If I could make a suggestion... give some indication of what the editor can do on the site itself. Description, screenshot, that sort of thing.

If I could tell what it can do I would be more inclined to come back later and try it out. As it is, all of the login methods you support and the YouTube video you link to are all blocked at the office - so all I can do is admire your logo.</comment>