Why I will no longer buy Hardkernel products or deal with the ODroid Magazine - <AUTHOR> https://www.igorkromin.net/index.php/2018/07/06/why-i-will-no-longer-buy-hardkernel-products-or-deal-with-the-odroid-magazine/ <comment><USER2> Seems like an overreaction to me?</comment>


Tell PG: Thanks for the change to the "title" on each page - <AUTHOR>

Just wanted to say that I've noticed the change to the page titles, putting "Hacker News" at the end instead of the front, and it's a huge improvement for me.  Now I can see which tab is which, and when you have dozens of tabs open, it really helps.<p>Thanks PG. <comment><USER2> I never noticed, but the change sounds useful.

Although, with the community around here, I'm surprised nobody has made a browser extension to manage HN tabs ;)

(For bonus points, the extension would have to integrate HN search and comment scores)

<comment><USER3> I knew something changed, but I can't figure out what. This made me realized. Nice indeed for tab hoarders like me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Erm.. it's not like the lightbulb just got invented.

<comment><USER5> Agreed.

First: great that the title formatting has been changed!

Second: come on HN, do we really need a post about this on the front page..?

<comment><USER6> I disagree. The important thing here is appreciating about something. To be honest, I had never noticed the title showing 'Hacker News' at front before. I only open one link at a time to keep focus. To be honest I learned something today with this post: > Next time I write my website, I will treat title bar to be a scarce resource, and won't put any unnecessary stuff. > I will test my website by at least opening multiple tabs. > If you find something useful, or notice something changed that you really liked, don't forget to appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really needed this too, thank you PG.

I was going to post something like this yesterday, but then I thought it was probably redundant.

</comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately it has broken ihackernews.com. The comment page no longer shows the title of the article.</comment>


Why HTML Beats Markdown, LaTeX, and XML for Book Production - <AUTHOR> https://www.adamhyde.net/building-book-production-platforms-p2/ <comment><USER2> They don't actually give any reasons why LaTeX is wrong. They just say it is. I mean LaTeX has issues, but you gotta dive into them, man.

I've written a book in a mix of Microsoft Word and Markdown, and they both had the same problem: there's no way to place cross-file structure on your book. Like you can't easily place index tags throughout the text and automatically generate an index or autolink words to glossary entries. You also can't add new semantic entries. I haven't tried writing a doc in raw html, but I'd imagine you'd run into the same problems?

If I ever had to write another book _and_ needed to put it online, I'd probably go with reStructuredText.</comment>


Drops - <AUTHOR> http://the389.com/works/drops/

<comment><USER2> The sketch I liked the best from this site was "scrollbars": <http://the389.com/works/scrollbars/></comment>


There Is Only One Cloud Icon (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThereIsOnlyOneCloudIconInTheEntireUniverse.aspx <comment><USER2> I have long been amused by this — and it shows the dominance of marketing.

> Of course, there's only so many ways to draw a cloud, right?

Well into the early '00s I would draw the 'cloud' (typically on a white board) the way it appeared in the early TCP papers (the origin of the term): a more vaguely symmetrical or "round" shape, not something with a sharp straight bottom. A "dust cloud", if you will, that obscured its inner workings.

But of course once they heard engineers use that words, marketers misunderstood the metaphor, drew a cumulus cloud, and ran with it. And now we have a metaphor that doesn't actually mean anything. As usual.

<comment><USER3> > a metaphor that doesn't actually mean anything. As usual.

It is no longer a metaphor. Like the save icon, It is an idiom or symbol: a metaphor that has kicked the bucket. You can argue[1] that we shouldn't use idioms if we've forgotten what they originally refer to. In the case of "kick the bucket", you'd be right. It would be clearer and more accessible to just say "died". Few people have the sort of visceral memory of an animal being tied up in a bucket[2] and thrashing around that gives the phrase its extra punch. In the case of the save icon, we have no real widely-understood alternative. In the case of the cloud, the same is true. The danger is reinforcing a sense of understanding where there is none--but I'm not sure there is a misunderstanding here.

[1] [http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...](http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/)

[2] a type of butchers frame

<comment><USER4> I assumed (forgive the macabre topic) that "kicking the bucket" referred to the action of kicking over the bucket you are standing on in order to hang yourself.

I wonder if Mr. Safire has written about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The common feature to the cloud icons elsewhere in the article is "Two bumps on top, one large and one small" \- whereas in the BBC weather screen capture, the clouds have a single bump on top.

Of course, it's normal for icons to look similar - they're trying to symbolise the same thing - same as different fonts are trying to depict the same letters.

</comment><comment><USER6> See also: The one, the only, photograph of Earth (2001). [https://neil.fraser.name/writing/earth/](https://neil.fraser.name/writing/earth/)

<comment><USER7> Different clouds though, in that picture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is only one cloud icon in the entire universe that keeps going back and forth in time. As it is going backwards in time, it appears to us as an anti cloud icon.

</comment><comment><USER9> Clouds on the Noun Project [https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=cloud](https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=cloud)

</comment><comment><USER10> I work as a designer, and this golden ratio thing is hilarious. The only designers who consciously use the golden ratio are junior designers eager to find some deep, mystic design rule that will guarantee all their designs to be beautiful.

Everything looks like the golden ratio if you squint hard enough.

[https://www.fastcodesign.com/3044877/the-golden-ratio- design...](https://www.fastcodesign.com/3044877/the-golden-ratio-designs- biggest-myth)

</comment><comment><USER11> The same goes for many other icons. Like rss, wifi, and shutdown icon.

It makes sense, because once an icon becomes popular reinventing it with another design makes people confused.

<comment><USER12> Isn't it different because the RSS, Wi-Fi and Shutdown icon have been designed to represent a protocol and/or system?

The iCloud "cloud" icon was designed to represent a product, which implies other products could/should have found something else.

<comment><USER13> Apple didn't invent the cloud.

Apple's iCloud icon is a cloud icon. Apple's branding strategy is to hijack and monopolize common words like "apple", a warbof conquest against the English language

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Apple's cloud icon has rounded corners.

</comment><comment> E-M Article from 2011, but nothing has changed afaik...

</comment><comment><USER14> You have to check The Simpsons, I bet they did it first</comment>


Ask HN: How do you develop incredible coding skills? - <AUTHOR>

There seems to be a lot of tutorials available for beginners but how do you develop skills which take you into the top 1%? <comment><USER3> Coding. Coding. More Coding. You spend a lot of time working on problems. You learn to generalize. You save and reuse code. You go off and try stuff and make mistakes.

You read less tutorials, but you actually try to implement more stuff you read about, instead of reading it.

You learn from people. Those who know more, those who know different, those who study CS and those who study art, psychology, gerontology, whatever.

You go over what you learn. You teach, you tutor, you explain, you blog, so you get a better grasp on what you know, so you think about and recontextualize what you take for granted, so you can nail down ideas.

You go back and look at old code you wrote, and fix it. You read code, yours and others, bad code and good code. You submit a pull request to add a feature to something you use.

You stop worrying about being the top whatever, and focus on being better then you used to be.

</comment><comment><USER4> Writing code, thinking about code, reading code.

As an addendum to what adrianhoward said, work with people who are better at coding than you are, then work with people who are worse at coding than you are. You will learns loads of things from both.

<comment><USER5> _" then work with people who are worse at coding than you are"_

++$lots to this. Helping and teaching others is a stupidly effective technique to understand things better yourself.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I think you only fully understand something when you try to explain it to someone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1) Work with people who are better at coding that you are.

2) Write lots of code.

3) Repeat.

<comment><USER6> This. It holds for other skills as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is going to be controversial around here, but going back to uni and taking up compsci courses has helped me a lot

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm... surprising.. why do you think going back to uni later helped you...

<comment><USER7> To be part of the proverbial top 1%, you won't just be thinking about the code - you need to be able to understand the subtle interactions that happen within a software system, from high-level algorithms down to the low-level compiler stuff, and further down to the bare-metal OS layer. The kind of stuff you will learn from a decent CS course.

Now granted, you could teach yourself all of this, but then you'd have a teacher who knows absolutely nothing. It's worth having a mentor to guide you through all this. Doesn't have to be from a university, but it doesn't hurt either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see people at work hammering keyboards for 10 hour stretches 6 days a week and feel sad for the current state of the profession. Being a developer is about THINKING. Converting your solution into code is the easy bit (typing I say). Forget the language, concentrate on the solution. BTW architecture is just the crap that you need to do in YOUR environment. Chuck has it right - <USER2> FORTH my son. [http://www.colorforth.com/](http://www.colorforth.com/). Anything else is just domain/environment knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER9> 1) Get some open source projects in a technology you are familiar with and try to fix bugs. 2) A framework is a good example to learn good coding skills. As it gives a very structured, scalable code. So, you can learn few good techniques. 3) Get a person who you think writes good code to review your code. 3) Practice, practice and more practice.

Please note- there is no top here. Every developer's technique to write code would be different. So, you cant compare yourself with others. You just need to worry about writing efficient code.

</comment><comment><USER10> Though i am not among top 1% bit, here are few personnel skills

\- Choose you favorite language ( your can't have same skill in all languages so choose you base language mine is JAVA )

\- Work in opensource ( it will give you experience of reading and understanding code of other programmers, also your code will be seen by others )

\- Follow tutorials for tasks you have not fully grasp

\- Automation ( do automation testing for your code )

hope it might help

<comment><USER11> I mostly agree, but on the subject of languages we differ.

I think it's _critical_ to be able to think in languages outside your "favorite" language's paradigms. Java and similar languages, in particular, force you into a depressingly narrow range of looking at problems, and it will hurt your programming skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Try incredible stuff - challenge yourself. Break a rule or two now and then, then see how to make it unbroken.

</comment><comment><USER11> What would it mean to be in the "top 1%"?

</comment><comment><USER13> Do not be afraid to make mistakes.</comment>


American Pictures (1985) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.american-pictures.com/english/book/American%20Pictures-small-size.pdf <comment><USER2> This has been for sale as a paper book for decades, it's very popular. Jacob is also very frequently invited to talk about his pictures and experiences in America and he is still a well known figure in Danish society.

He was our neighbour for 4 years and he's very friendly, open and very nuanced for an activist of sorts. He often organises events for immigrants and unfortunate people, and invites them to his home. At some point he had a dozen people living there.

If you like the book buy a paper copy or invite him to speak. He's by no means poor but I'm sure he makes good use of any money he makes.

</comment><comment><USER3> This may well be worth the read, and certainly received its fair share of hype in the late seventies, but be aware that the author - at least in his native Denmark - has been repeatedly exposed for somewhat inventive interpretations of truth. For example, it has been firmly established that in actual fact he did not - as he claims in _American Pictures_ \- participate in or even experience any fighting at Wounded Knee in 1973, where he apparently only arrived when the incident was effectively over.

<comment><USER4> I only quickly read to page 11, (all pages super interesting) but I don't think it says outright he was there, though strongly implies it. But it says Wounded Knee made it apparent to him he was not a fighter.

<comment><USER3> Holdt's propensity for fabrication is well known. To the extent that that he was once featured on a Danish site reminiscent of The Onion - about how he accompanied Apollo 11 to the Moon, but arrived late for take-off and had to cling to the ascending Saturn V. On arrival, he found only sad and disenfranchised nazis there.

<comment><USER2> That's hilarious, you don't happen to have a link?

<comment><USER5> It's in danish:

[http://rokokoposten.dk/2015/11/07/jacob-holdt-beskriver- rejs...](http://rokokoposten.dk/2015/11/07/jacob-holdt-beskriver-rejse-til- maanens-bagside-i-ny-selvbiografi/)

<comment><USER2> Mange tak

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is so shocking! I lived though this era as a young white man in California, poor but totally unaware of the inhumane conditions that the book portrays. My ignorance frightens me. I wonder what atrocities still exist in our world today, and what we can do to bring them to an end.

<comment><USER7> I grew up in Appalachia we took food to people who lived in shacks. The county next to mine got electricity from the recc in 1979.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I skimmed through and every page I landed on was an interesting slice of life. The pictures feel "authentic", more so than the typical magazine photos I come across.

</comment><comment><USER9> Being born in the 1980s I was curious to see what the American Black population's poverty rate was in the 1980s. To my surprise it was as high as 35% [1].

1\. [https://www2.census.gov/programs- surveys/demo/visualizations...](https://www2.census.gov/programs- surveys/demo/visualizations/p60/219/fig07.jpg)

<comment><USER10> 50% around 1959... wow

<comment><USER11> Not really surprising given that was a deliberate policy objective of lots of places in the pre-civil rights era?

Even as late as 1985 the police could carry out what in any other country would be described as a terrorist attack, leaving a number of people dead and burning down 65 houses, without serious consequences to themselves. [https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/18/407665820...](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/18/407665820/why- did-we-forget-the-move-bombing)

<comment><USER12> I feel like folks have a bit of a skewed perspective on the timeline of the civil rights movement because of the way we teach it. For example, Brown v. Board was decided in 1954. We teach it as a culmination of a process (because it's more dramatic that way). But Brown was just the start, rather than the end, of school desegregation. For the most part, the south simply ignored the result. The famous event where JFK had to send federal troops to forcibly integrate the University of Alabama happened almost a decade later. The first school desegregation cases were brought in Mississippi in the late 1960s. As of 2015, there were still 174 school districts under court-supervised desegregation plans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is profoundly good and deeply human writing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Fascinating. Where did you find this?

<comment><AUTHOR> On Youtube, I subscribe to _The Louisiana Channel_ (for the Louisiana Museum in Denmark). Arthur Jafa mentions _American Pictures_ in this recent interview: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iprTrTgXvZ8&t=0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iprTrTgXvZ8&t=0s). So I googled it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a classic.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is so great.</comment>


New air-gap jumper covertly transmits data in hard-drive sounds - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/new-air-gap-jumper-covertly-transmits-data-in-hard-drive-sounds/ <comment><AUTHOR> Of limited use for reasons discussed in article and ars comments. Also, this is only one-way communication. So no handshaking is possible. And without knowing when the data starts, the infected computer would have to be constantly transmitting the payload data stream over and over.</comment>


Why Did Entrepreneurship Become So Difficult? - <AUTHOR> http://greyenlightenment.com/when-did-entrepreneurship-become-so-difficult/ <comment><USER2> Entrepreneurship has always been a rich man's game it's just recently that VC money has opened up an opportunity for a few kids right out of college. It's usually 200k-1m to buy a franchise. And slowly retail is getting eaten by tech and alt distribution. Most businesses have always be funded by your house equity which takes most of your life to build. or for the crazy credit cards.</comment>


12 steps to better code (Spolsky, 2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html <comment><USER2> Agile practices have made 6 and 7 (specs and schedules) largely irrelevant where I've worked. 12 (hallway usability testing) always seems like a weird one just to round out the numbers. 3 (daily builds) is probably too little these days, it should be continuous integration.

The rest seem just as relevant as ever though, and often just as elusive.</comment>


Who Is Charlie Munger? Wit and Wisdom from World's Most Irreverent Billionaire - <AUTHOR> https://www.fs.blog/charlie-munger/ <comment><USER2> Hacker News hug of death. Here's the cached site: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:q53MB1...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:q53MB1Pey0wJ:https://www.fs.blog/2017/02/charlie- munger-wisdom/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was actually somehow more interested when I had read "most irrelevant" instead of "most irreverent"</comment>


Gorb: Taking Personal Reputation To A New Low - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/12/gorb-taking-personal-reputation-to-a-new-low/ <comment><USER2> I saw Boord last week at a startup panel at Florida Intl Uni. It reminded me of Garcia-Marquez's book "In Evil Hour/La mala hora", in which a town is plagued by anonymous character assasination.

There are two problems that everyone latches onto when they hear about it: posts are anonymous, and you can't opt in or out. The model is coercive. If someone wants to attack you you are given no choice but to register and marshall your friends.

On the other hand, I discount objections that everyone immediately latches onto. Often that means the idea is simply strange or taboo, not unworkable. Remember that the first proposed application of anonymous digital cash was an assasination pool.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Providing an Annual Subscription Option Worth the Trouble? - <AUTHOR>

I have a subscription based web service that offers monthly and yearly subscription options.  I've found that a surprisingly high percentage of the time the annual subscribers simply forget that they've signed up for a subscription by the time the first year of the subscription comes up and it's time to charge them for a second year.  Most of the time they're shocked and angry that they've been charged even though they agreed to the arrangement.
This happens so often that I've thought about scrapping the annual option altogether.  I've also thought about sending them an email before the charge occurs as a reminder.
Has anyone experienced this and found a decent solution? <comment><USER2> We have the same setup. What we do is to send an e-mail every two weeks before the rebill, with a reminder that it's about to happen, and that if they want to cancel, they need to take care of it before <%= rebill_date %>.

Even with that reminder, we still get occasional e-mails from people who didn't see the e-mail, don't have access to that e-mail address anymore, or, for whatever reason, didn't unsubscribe in time. We just refund the charge and delete their subscription.

For what it's worth, we also get e-mails from users who comment on how much they love the app, how they use it all the time, and how happy they are to sign on for another year.

If you want me to get into the details of our code, let me know.

</comment><comment><USER3> Monthly automatic renewal is a convenience for your subscribers. Annual automatic renewal probably isn't. It can obviously create ill will and doesn't give you as much flexibility to increase subscription rates.

Opt-in for long term subscriptions would appear to be more subscriber friendly and avoid some of the issues mentioned. Offering multi-year subscriptions could provide even more cash upfront without the brand risks associated with automatic annual billing.

Opt-in communications would likely be no more resource intensive than implementing email notices about an automatic annual charge. My gut tells me that, "We hate losing you as a customer" may build more goodwill than "it's in the fine print."

Based on your post, customer service resources are being diverted to _former_ customer service. And there's no money in that. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> As mentioned by charliepark I think a reminder e-mail and a very forgiving refund policy seems to be the best way to do things from a customer relations standpoint.

On a business side of things do you have data on what the average retention rate of a customer is? If your average retention rate for monthly customers is >1 year maybe it's not worth it to even have the yearly subscription from a revenue standpoint. That being said if the yearly subscription retention rate is higher you should definitely keep that option available.

</comment><comment><USER5> How much time are you spending on these people? If they've forgotten about the charge, they're not likely to be customers anyway, so inconveniencing them slightly in favor of active customers who are actually interested in paying yearly might be worth it, especially if you implement the e-mail reminder.</comment>


Our Solar System Isn't Normal - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/05/06/181613582/our-very-normal-solar-system-isn-t-normal-anymore

<comment><USER2> I would argue the exo-planets we have found so far are a very biased sample. We don't have great technologies for detecting solar systems like ours. And at least the first few years of planet hunting we'll tend to find a lot of large giants orbiting close to their stars since they're the easiest to find.

<comment><USER3> I was very surprised that the article made no mention of such a bias. It was my first thought, too. I'm not terribly up-to-date on how Kepler has been detecting planets, but isn't it due to the 'wobble' of the stars? Surely they'll find planets that orbit faster (and wobble their stars faster) first. It'll take many many years of very consistent observations (or one very lucky day) to see a wobble (or occlusion) from a planet like our Jupiter.

<comment><USER4> Kepler uses occlusion, not wobbling.

<comment><USER5> Yes, and it's designed to detect Earth-sized planets as well as larger gas giants.

<comment> Tuna-Fish But detection probability is directly correlated to planet size and shortness of the local year.

Eventually, Kepler and Kepler-like probes will be able to locate all earth- like planets with orbits that cross the path between the star and us. However, this technique will find the larger planets with shorter orbits first.

<comment><USER5> Yes indeed, but the point is that according to current theories Kepler should already be finding more Earth-sized planets than it has and few inner gas giants. The observable evidence does not match the predicted model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think everyone here concentrating on sampling bias is missing the point.

The evidence in solar systems so far does NOT fit the theory involving a frost line, and giants like Jupiter are unexpectedly observed tightly orbiting suns. Whether our solar system is normal is conjecture, but our model for how solar systems are(were?) formed is obviously flawed. Pretty interesting find, imho.

<comment><USER7> I don't see how the fact that gas planets are capable of migrating inward shows that our model for planetary formation is deeply flawed. I didn't think the current model said that it was impossible for planets to migrate inward.

The point about sampling bias is that our current techniques are bad at spotting systems like ours. If this is true (I think it is, but I'm not qualified to say), we wouldn't expect the evidence to fit our theory even if our theory were true because we are nearly incapable of finding evidence that does fit our theory no matter how much of it there is out there.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps I mangled that a bit, instead of frost line I should have just said the seemingly most popular theory of how the solar system formed. From the article the bit that caught my eye:

Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, wrote me that while everybody is busy hunting for an Earth-like planet, they missed this story. "Before we ever discovered any [planets outside the solar system] we thought we understood the formation of planetary systems pretty deeply." We had our frost line. We knew how solar systems formed. "It was a really beautiful theory," he says. "And, clearly, thoroughly wrong."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's true that this could still turn out to be mostly observational bias, but I feel like everyone is missing the monkey wandering across the corridor.

The anthropic principle, that is. Isn't it possible that, while gas planets clustered closely around the star is the normal shape of solar systems, such a configuration is not amenable to complex life?

<comment><USER9> It would also be a good candidate for the Great Filter - the hidden factor that has stopped the development of all the other intelligent civilisations that would otherwise be out there. That would mean this is good news - we'd rather the Great Filter lies in our past (because that means we've already survived it) than in our future.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it's a good candidate; certainly it pushes some amount of the Filter into our past, but even if only 1 in 700 solar systems is Sol-like, there are so many we'd still expect to see tons of aliens. For a single-step Filter or for solar systems to even be a majority of the filter, you need a step so unlikely that it can push the presence of interstellar life down from, like, trillions of star systems to ~1.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the reply, and yes, that makes sense. What would you predict as the most likely other steps in the filter?

Looking at our own planet, I would guess that it's a combination of a) it being simply infeasible to send large animals to distant stars (we haven't yet colonised the moon or even made a serious attempt to colonise low earth orbit, and we might not do so before we run out of cheap energy) and b) technological singularities.

<comment><USER10> > What would you predict as the most likely other steps in the filter?

I don't know. Robin Hanson blogs a lot about it, but none of the steps seem terribly plausible although my favorite currently is big brains being feasible - in a number of ways, heads seem to be rare, big brains even rarer, and the costs of big brain _almost_ too expensive to bear because neurons seem to be unable to get more efficient; one paper I liked on the topic was [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/06/19/1201895109.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/06/19/1201895109.full.pdf) but you can find a lot of relevant material in <http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kepler has been revolutionary in discovering these 700 odd planetary systems, but we can't even begin to imagine what surprises await for when we point the James Webb Space Telescope at them.

One of JWSTs mission objectives is to study the planetary systems discovered by Kepler, and the origins of life.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Miss...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Mission)

<comment><USER2> What specifically will the telescope tell us about this exo-planets? It surely can't image them directly, right?

<comment><USER11> Not quite, but JWST will be out at the L2 point, beyond the moon in essentially what amounts to an earth-matching solar orbit.

It's large aperture infrared sensors will have an unobstructed view of the universe (unlike Hubble which is in low earth orbit, and so only gets 90 minute windows of observation).

Basically, using IR spectroscopy we will be able to analyse the atmospheric composition as well as the thermal emissions of exoplanets.

Finally, JWST won't be limited to a small, fixed field of view like Kepler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had no idea that:

"Or maybe it got ejected — astronomers are finding emigrant planets, lonely orbs that wander the universe with no star, just drifting. Maybe one of those used to live here."

There are planets not orbiting stars? I searched Google for "emigrant planets" and the npr article is the number 1 result for that. I think he invented the term. What are these called if I wanted to find more information about them?

<comment><USER13> They are more commonly called rouge planets.

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

<comment><USER14> I always thought Mars was the rouge planet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Being a long time fan of 4x games, well of space games in general, this article makes me smile. I remember reading game forums where one subject that always arose was galaxy and system formations. So many of our concepts are strictly based on the very little observable data we have. Its great to live in a time when many assumptions are proven to be just that.

Now the question that remains is, which configurations are more favorable to life, not just as we know it.

<comment><USER16> A bit off-topic, but can you recommend any recent space 4x games to check out? The last one I played was Galactic Civilizations II and I enjoyed it immensely.

<comment><USER17> There's a new-ish one called Endless Space, which I would describe as Gal Civ inspired.

It's a little weird in that all players take turns simultaneously (you still have movement restrictions, etc, but it adds a real-time component because you want to wait to react to your opponent's movements, but also there's a time limit). The impression I got was that it was a way to speed up gameplay (less sitting around while others make their moves).

But it's a cool little game, _lots_ of race customisation (with a few truly unique race benefits), interesting four-category tech tree (and equivalently, four ways to win), custom ship classes built out of components (like Gal Civ).

The combat is a little weird, they have some card-game-like thingy that can significantly influence battle outcomes.

EDIT: Not a turn-based game but there's also this: <http://triton.ironhelmet.com/>

Neptune's Pride is an always-on real time game played over several weeks in matches of up to 12 players. The mechanics are refreshingly simple, and there's a focus on diplomacy and betrayal in order to come out top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the author has the "frost zone" theory backwards. It's not that it's too cold for rocky planets to form outside the frost zone (after all, there are some planet-sized moons out there) but rather that inside the frost zone it is too hot for planets to hold on to hydrogen, so you don't get gas giants.

I would think that a gassy planet close to a star would have to have a really big solid or liquid core of heavy elements.

<comment><USER5> The frost line is the point at which ice crystals can form of the major planetary gasses. The theory was that outside the frost line these crystals would add to the density of particulates in the region, therefore larger planets would form outside the frost line and they would have a greater proportion of gasses than the inner planets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Couldn't the techniques we are using be biasing the results? Maybe solar systems like ours are simply harder to detect.

<comment><USER20> I agree, I'm speculating that by looking at a star wobble or it's brightness decrease that method of detection would bring up all these systems with close orbiting planets that would be bigger than "normal".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> And how many of those close-to-the-sun planets exclude the existence of earth- like planets a bit further out?

Maybe if they're Jupiter-sized, then they would make some orbits further out unstable, but if they're smaller...

The system can be different than ours but still just as habitable, or even more so.

<comment><USER22> Probably not, assuming our current theories about how these systems form are correct. Our best guess is that hot jupiters form about where our jupiter or saturn is and their initial orbit decays inward. If so, that would tend to destroy the orbit of anything vaguely earth-sized on the way in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> All the conventional planet hunting methods are biased towards fast, large, close-in planets. If we could run Kepler for 20 years we might see systems more like ours.

</comment><comment><USER24> That is AWESOME. The fact that there is so much diversity of planets and solar systems out there flabbergasts me. I don't even care about what kind or whether there's life out there -- just thinking about how there are so many different worlds with prevailing conditions that I never even dreamed of gives me the chills.

Space... space... so much space... gotta see it all...

</comment><comment><USER25> Regarding no gassy planets near our sun: The rocky ones, including earth, [are supposedly the cores of old gassy ones]([http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/4220/rocky-planets- could-h...](http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/4220/rocky-planets-could-have- been-born-as-gas-giants)).

</comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone know how far away we are from being able to confirm the presence of planets as we might on a photograph? Or the obstacles we face getting to a high enough resolution?

<comment><USER27> Minus five years? See this HST image from 2008: [http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/39/im...](http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/39/image/e/format/xlarge_web/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> When I read "nature prefers" and the author admits the data's sample size is less than a drop in an ocean (we found < 1000 solar systems), I just have to stop reading.

</comment><comment><USER29> What is normal in the context of the universe? What is context in the context of the universe?

</comment><comment><USER30> If space is infinite, it is entirely possible that we are ridiculously close to the norm.

<comment><USER30> Or that there isn't a norm at all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a grand example of our infinite hubris.

</comment><comment><USER32> "We have to figure out why our solar system turned out different from all the others."

Not entirely—we have to understand statistics and the anthropic principle, which states "observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it." (Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle>). In other words, our situation appears "perfect" because it was one of the many random combinations available which produced _an observer_ able to look at it. In other words, the fact that our solar system is so stable might just be a random anomaly, but the fact that it was so stable resulted in our existence, and therefore our contemplation of the fact.

As an analogy, winning the lottery is extremely rare—if you go and interview the person who won the lottery, they must think themselves very lucky. But on the grand scale, the probability of someone winning the lottery in the entire pool is exactly one. We know that a winner necessarily exists—just as we know that we, as winners of the cosmic lottery, necessarily exist. But that just tells us that someone won the lottery—something we already knew.

It may be that the lottery is rigged, and that there are some characteristics of our particular solar system which are amenable to life, and those things are definitely valuable to study and find out, so that we might be able to recognize other solar systems capable of supporting life in some way.

But by no means is our solar system special in any light: it's only special in that its particular conditions produced lifeforms able to observe it.

"We are a way for the cosmos to understand itself." - Carl Sagan

Another random question: are the planetary systems we've discovered similar to _each other?_ If ours is significantly deviant from a significant clustering that would be pretty interesting. And of course, that's surely what the original findings were probably about.

<comment><USER33> > But by no means is our solar system special in any light: it's only special > in that its particular conditions produced lifeforms able to observe it.

sorry, but i don't understand what's the logic here? it's not special, but it's only very special in sustaining/producing life? isn't that more than enough to call it special? :-)

<comment><USER34> Not in the requisite sense. Suppose that our existence depended on a purely random roll of a six-sided die coming up as 1. If the roll had come up anything else, we would not be here to reflect on it. But if it did come up as 1, that does not mean a mystical force guaranteed that it came up as 1.

Our existence (whether likely or not) does not constitute evidence that our existence was guaranteed or predetermined. Low-probability events happen sometimes, their actually having happened once does not make them high- probability.

<comment><USER33> it seems like you, and the top comment are interpreting this news story as some attack on atheism? i don't see how that's even related. is that your preemptive strike against non-atheistic interpretation?

<comment><USER32> Absolutely not. My intention was to broaden the point by introducing the mind- blowing anthropic principle and a new perspective on the conditions leading to life, nothing more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Goof balls can't even see most of the solar systems, and they are saying what is and what is not normal?

Hubris alert!

</comment><comment><USER36> Oh Heaven for Betsy. Every time some nitwit looks at new data with results they did not expect, suddenly every thing we have ever known is wrong. Give me a break.

Here's a "lightbulb" for you: A large gas giant near a star is created in the same fashion as a binary star system (a formation that is quite common) with the simple difference that the planet did not get enough material to actually become a star.</comment>


Ask HN: What is a commonly known tech topic that non-techies fail to understand? - <AUTHOR> Targeting managers and executives. If you were to help them make better decisions by explaining to them - in a sort of "ELI5" approach - useful tech topics (e.g. "How cookies work"), what topics would you bring? <comment><USER2> That technical people are not easily swapped like workers in some other industries.

That technical industries move faster than perhaps any other industry, and in the time you're taking to ponder a single decision your competitors may have built an entire product.

</comment><comment><USER3> The TV trope of "I can do this in 4 hours" "You have 1" is not actually how things work.

<comment><USER4> ...but "I need this yesterday."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bayesian inference. Someone looking like the suspect was at the murder scene. But there are millions of people looking like the suspect. The murderer was wearing a yellow jacket and the suspect has a yellow jacket in his wardrobe. But there are millions of people owning yellow jackets. If you know how Bayesian inference works, you know that the suspect is very likely the murderer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Assume the topic is a difficult one. The manager / exec you are talking to can always interrupt and tell you to skip to the more technical.

If you prepare to explain it to a five year old, and you could already explain it well to someone with domain experience, you can probably explain it to someone that lies in between.

</comment><comment><USER6> That the devil is always in the details. How well you can explain your problem to someone is not an indication of how easy it is to solve. The difference between "simple" and "easy".

</comment><comment><USER7> In Windows Development knowledge half life is 3 - 4 years In other words; every 3- 4 years half of my Windows knowledge becomes obsolete

</comment><comment><USER8> How data retrieval and storage with DBs works.

How an API works

What tech stack the company uses and why (what benefits are you utilizing)

</comment><comment><USER9> Net neutrality...

</comment><comment><USER10> A mixed bag here (not all technical but relevant nonetheless),

\- No free lunch

You can't invent outcome out of thin air. Laws of physics apply.

I have been often asked to "achieve outcome that requires a lot of effort" but somehow ... somehow find a way to do it without any of the effort.

"Bullet proof our backup systems .... in 2 weeks"

The problem with this is there's always some subset of people who will claim they can do it.

(By diluting the meaning of words such as "bullet proof" low enough to fit the time-frame)

\- HTML is not photoshop

So many people think a webpage is just a fancy poster.

\- The ability of programmers to solve your problems is directly proportional to how well the business domain and the problem itself is specified.

Software is the outcome of a process/function. If you don't provide your share of the input to it it will not magically come about from the ether. The lack of that information will be obvious in the end product.

If you go to the doctor but are too lazy to talk about which part of your body hurts ... well don't expect miracles.

\- Not all problems can be universally and indiscriminately broken down into smaller pieces

Also refer to the mythical man-month. I have seen a lot of people with what I call "lego-world mentality".

They think anything and everything can be broken down into smaller pieces and the output collected and stitched back together and they think that has no effect on anything (quality/timeline/integration).

It's like asking 4 chefs to each cook 1 egg to make one big omelette.

Even things that sometimes look like obvious separate systems/sections only look like that on the surface.

("You do the X part" .. "I do the Y part")

Again, It's not a lego world.

\- A sequence of next-best moves does not always lead to the absolute best solution (Local minima/maxima, lazy algorithm to the travelling salesman problem)

Sometimes you have to zoom out. In practice this means progress doesn't look like a consistent straight line over time. Sometimes you pull back to be able to gain more speed and jump further.

Not understanding this results in execs viewing anything that is not strictly and overtly progress as a waste. Further discouraging a class of important work and shaking the carrot on the stick for people to pump out features mindlessly.

\- Everything is much more flimsy than what you are lead to believe

Similar to the lego-world mentality. You see execs applying that (imaginary) mindset to certain things such as APIs and cross-system integrations.

They think it's like plumbing. You connect the Zendesk pipe over here to this other pipe and it just all flows nicely. Like a nice clean diagram in your head.

This perception is created because they only consume the surface-level marketing material but don't see the ugly crap under the hood.

As a result they under-estimate how fragile software is.

This happens in a lot of domains. For domains that people are not an expert in they tend to over-estimate how sophisticated/accurate the technology/processes are.

</comment><comment><USER11> Technical Debt

</comment><comment><USER12> Bitcoin</comment>


Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter - <AUTHOR> http://alexeymk.com/dear-dr-stallman-an-open-letter/ <comment><USER2> When it comes to well formulated talks about free software, none seems to beat those from Stallman's lawyer, Eben Moglen. He knows very well how to speak to a crowd, and tends to use local references and languages to explain concepts (professor of law and history of law). Stallman has excellent skills in seeing problems in software before they get noticed by everyone else, but when I want to introduce someone to the philosophy of free software I would rather put on a talk like _Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media_ from 2012 or the now 11 year old talk _Die Gedanken Sind Frei_ from 2004.

1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKOk4Y4inVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKOk4Y4inVY)

2: [http://www.archive.org/download/3_do_t1_11h_3-Moglen_a/3_do_...](http://www.archive.org/download/3_do_t1_11h_3-Moglen_a/3_do_t1_11h_3-Moglen_a_64kb.m3u)

<comment><USER3> Video of the second one: [https://archive.org/details/3_do_t1_11h_3-Moglen](https://archive.org/details/3_do_t1_11h_3-Moglen)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Look, Stallman doesn't care who he alienates. He doesn't care if you disagree. He doesn't care if he offends you.

That's what zealots do.

But as creepy, and petulant, and obnoxious as I tend to find him, I'm grateful every day that he's out there, because there are things he's right about, about which he's pretty much the only person with any visibility or credibility at all to say something.

More to the point, _he wouldn 't have that credibility_ if he compromised and made his position more palatable.

<comment><USER5> In all I think society is better off with zealots like Bill gates and a Stallman sitting at opposite ends of the table fighting it out tooth and nail.

<comment><USER6> Is Bill Gates a zealot? I'm not sure what I would have thought 10 years ago, but today that doesn't ring true to me.

(Perhaps Steve Jobs is a better example?)

<comment><USER5> Perhaps, but I thought Bill Gates/microsoft better represents a person that sits at the opposite end of the table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a great deal to be said on message-crafting. Leave that up to more moderate folks, like ESR (and yeah, that kind of tells you how extreme rms is, that Eric Scott Raymond is a moderate).

Stallman and the FSF are basically the platinum standard by which all free software rhetoric is judged. It is of utmost importance that they not bridge one iota. They are the reference implementation for what it means to have truly free software, what it means to value philosophy over culture, and to value ideals over pragmatism.

That's cost them, and yeah, that doesn't make them popular. But you know what? Their track record has been pretty correct. The number of infringements and abuses of power they have warned against have only multiplied--and will continue to multiply.

They're going to lose, of course, because the people they're trying to help don't want help. The people whose freedoms they hold dear forsake them and mock them and sell out at the smallest sign of convenience. It's a forgone conclusion--so, they might as well fail as martyrs instead of salesmen.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that ESR and the "open source" people have a fundamentally different understanding of software freedom than do the FSF. I'm not judging one over the other, but I think it's a mistake to conflate the two. It's not simply the narcissism of small differences; they have fundamentally incompatible motives, even if their means can be seem as congruent.

<comment><USER7> I think it's worth observing that the FSF position--absolute as it is--is _by construction_ incompatible with any other motive.

It seems like the best that can be done, for now, is to have congruent means. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ...am I the only person who didn't know that Stallman is a 9/11 truther?

<comment><USER10> I try to listen to all of his talks on the web and I don't think that I have ever heard him say that, but I might have missed it.

BTW, those four images are inflamatory. I can't find them on the fsf.org web site. If the author placed those there, and they have nothing to do with the FSF or Stallman, then this article should be hell banned, if that is possible. If Those four inflamatory images are from FSF or Stallman's web properties then I would like to see evidence (URLs please). Shame, shame, shame on the author if he just placed those images to be provacative.

<comment><USER11> [https://stallman.org/stopping-terrorists.html](https://stallman.org/stopping- terrorists.html)

In a footnote at the bottom here, he says he believes (believed?) Cheney played a role.

<comment><USER12> Wow, what a fallacy quote out of context. On the same page you linked he says:

 _I don 't believe that the US government directly planned or instigated those attacks._

<comment><USER11> I believe the footnote states that he changed his mind after having written the article. I also failed to see it the first time I read through, though I appreciate your desire to get the facts out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Walter Sobchak: Am I wrong?

The Dude: No you're not wrong.

Walter Sobchak: Am I wrong?

The Dude: You're not wrong Walter. You're just an asshole.

Walter Sobchak: Okay then.

</comment><comment><USER14> Uprated because I think the points Alexey makes are valid, having seen Stallman speak. I give the FSF money every year because of what they do, but... Stallman is out there. Then again, if he wasn't, would he have created the FSF?

Stallman doesn't appear to be very open to honest advice, so there isn't much you can do to change his approach.

</comment><comment><USER15> Stallman's answer:

"I am skeptical of advice from people who disagree with what I stand for."

<comment><USER16> Which is a great response, considering that the letter was about framing your message in a way that appeals to people rather than 'stop being so pro-free software'. Seems like he missed the point entirely, or just dismissed it out of hand because it was criticism, even though it was highly constructive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > That said, I nor the people that I spoke with about your talk found you to > be a particularly charismatic or persuasive speaker. The only people that > seemed convinced by your speech were the ones who had already been leaning > towards your point of view to start with.

I had the same impression a few years ago when Stallman came and gave a talk at CERN. I already agreed with him on most of his points, but I didn't expect anybody to change their mind just because of the talk.

<comment><USER16> I went to a talk Stallman gave when he was in Vancouver a few years ago. I found him not only uncharismatic, but almost actively so. Rather than promoting the FSF's agenda, I left with an even worse impression of it than I had originally had.

I give Stallman credit for his commitment to his cause, but at the same time I have to criticize him for maintaining his methods.

You want people to stop using Google Docs, because it's proprietary and hordes your data under Google's control? How about encouraging, spearheading, and promoting the creation of an open-source alternative? The suggestion of 'Just don't use Google Docs' isn't practical; people use it for a reason, and he doesn't seem to understand it, presumably because he doesn't 'collaborate' on documents the way that teams often have to. But if you put a free alternative in front of people, I'd wager you'd get a lot more converts.

Hell, how about just some modifications to OpenOffice to allow multi-user document edits using your native app, facilitated by a central server or peer- to-peer networking (e.g. zeroconf/avahi). Boom, now your full-featured word processor, which is _better_ than Google Docs, has all the features you want, plus a local copy of the file.

Stallman's arguments seem to be 'This thing you like is bad, so just don't have it'. It's like someone without any children saying "Why do you need a playpen? And so many toys? And baby gates? Just don't let your kid go near the stairs, problem solved.' If you don't understand the challenges involved, which he obviously does not, you can't really provide input on the process.

He's also generally opposed to Clang/LLVM, for the sole reason that it provides an even more freely-licensed replacement for GCC. Now don't get me wrong, GCC is ridiculously important, and might be the most important thing the FSF has ever produced, but it also devolved into a complex, unmaintainable mess. Very few people in the world were capable of adding substantial features, and even fewer were willing to do so.

Now we have a competitor, an open-source compiler toolchain which provides better results faster than GCC, while also including tons of new features that makes a lot of work easier for everyone (e.g. integrating source code parsing into your IDE so you can find programming errors as easily as your spell checker can correct words). Clang/LLVM have forced the GCC team to sit up and start implementing all the things they had no time or interest to implement before. Now _everyone_ gets a better compiler, no matter what OS you're on or what you choose to use. GCC is a significantly better compiler, and Apple is largely to blame. But because Apple is involved, LLVM is bad, because it can be used in non-free build systems, like Apple's or Adobe's.

And yet, _despite_ Apple's use of it in non-free software, it's still far better than GCC in a lot of ways. So his fundamental objection is that proprietary software exists and can be used, and not that it's being forced on users. Apple and other corporations have advanced the state of computing and compiler technology, and he's upset about it because of the very reasons these corporations were able and willing to put the money in to give us all something better.

I can't take him seriously anymore. He's been tenured for too long, and disconnected from users for so long. He has a lot to say about how the users of 1995 should use their computers, but nothing new since then.

<comment><USER18> Re: Clang/LLVM vs GCC, you need to understand Stallman actually stands for Free Software and considers the aims of Open Source Software as misguided. Clang is not "more freely-licensed" according to the FSF's definition. Once you understand this, you'll see Stallman's position is quite consistent.

<comment><USER16> I perfectly understand his position, and that his Freedom has to come via restrictions (just like our personal freedom requires the rule of law).

I don't think 'more freely licensed' is ambiguous, in the sense that the license allows more freedom of use of the code. It's not 'more Freely licensed', and it's not 'more free' (or 'more Free'), but in the end none of that is really relevant to the point I'm making.

The point, specifically, is that GCC is made better, and people who endorse, enjoy, and use Free Software have a better product to use, specifically because Clang/LLVM exist. He doesn't have to like the licensing, but it's an inherently better product in a lot of ways and his argument seems to be 'it can be used non-freely so who cares'. He can only plug his ears and sing to himself for so long before the world passes him by, and by and large that's what's happened already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow. This is written like no one has every said this to Stallman before. These are old arguments with well thought through answers (even if you don't agree with them). Ironically the letter demonstrates the same tone deafness it accuses Stallman of.

</comment><comment><USER20> I believe that Stallman is going to be Stallman. He made an incredible contribution to society, but what the free software movement needs with regards to public awareness is a Neil Degrasse Tyson / Temple Grandin / Steve Irwin.

<comment><USER21> I think you're looking for Eben Moglen.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Previously discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2477586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2477586)

</comment><comment><USER22> > You don't get somebody off heroin by lecturing them about how they should > value their freedom; you switch them over to methadone for a while and let > them slowly detox.

Really bad analogy. That's like saying the best way to quit smoking is to start chewing tobacco to give your lungs a rest.

<comment><USER23> Well is that not the point of nicotine gum and patches?

Anyway, it's a bad analogy because apathy regarding privacy is not an addiction. It's just apathy, informed or uninformed. Anybody who was likely to care about privacy but was ignorant/uninformed should not need to be weaned off privacy-abusing services. Anybody who was never going to care about privacy need not be pursued further.

<comment><USER24> > Well is that not the point of nicotine gum and patches?

Methadone really isn't analogous to the patch, though. It really is, at its core, replacing a socially unacceptable drug (heroin) for a socially acceptable variant (methadone).

The patch is used to help taper off the craving for nicotine by administering the _same_ drug, but in a regulated dose which gradually decreases, and using time-release (skin absorption is much slower)[0]. Methadone doesn't use this model.

Interestingly, when heroin is administered in the same controlled setting that methadone is, it has _better_ success rates and _less_ recidivism than methadone does. These are known as "diacetylmorphine maintenance" programs.

[0] In other words, think of the patch or gum as "extended release" versions of cigarettes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Observation: People have been writing this exact letter since day 1 of the GNU project.</comment>


ProductHunt is down - <AUTHOR>

I can't live without ProductHunt!!! <comment><USER2> I think Heroku is down...</comment>


Feds move to cancel iPhone hearing - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/feds-move-to-cancel-iphone-hearing-221062 <comment><USER2> The article at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11332965](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11332965) seems a bit more substantive and that thread is far more active, so I guess we'll treat this one as the duplicate despite its having been posted earlier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Correction: feds realise they have no chance of winning and back out to prevent a precedent that would hurt them in the future.

<comment><USER4> Completely agree. Just posted the exact same thing on a similar thread!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the FBI is playing games with the court system, could Apple call them out on it and convince the court to rule on issues anyway?

<comment><USER6> Not really, plus the first rule of law is to never ask a question you do not know the answer too.

Only a suicidal lawyer would even agree to do it, they "won" why poke the bear?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No, no, no.

This _NEEDS_ to go forward. It needs to be decided, once and for all.

<comment><USER8> To look on the bright side, this obviously-bullshit maneuver still weakens FBI's position for the next round.

<comment><USER9> I don't believe that is true unless it goes through the courts all the way.

This will be forgotten without a ruling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The headline now reads "Feds move to _postpone_ iPhone hearing" instead of "cancel".

<comment><USER11> I'd read it as they really want to cancel but it looks better to judge to postpone now and they say later we hacked the phone ourselves or we broke the phone and now don't need Apple anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's probably the hardware bruteforce unlock that's been floating around for about a year:

Example: [http://blog.mdsec.co.uk/2015/03/bruteforcing-ios- screenlock....](http://blog.mdsec.co.uk/2015/03/bruteforcing-ios- screenlock.html)

<comment><USER13> The article mentions the device might be exploiting CVE-2014-4451, which was fixed in iOS 8.1.1.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Hosting and Syncing Option for Static Generated Site? - <AUTHOR> What's everyone using to host and sync their generated static sites? Sounds like a simple problem, but it has its complexities.
For example, I've been testing GitLab hosting for my Hugo-generated sites, but ran into domain troubles that I couldn't resolve - and the 5-10 minute build time wait for larger sites was an issue too.
I'm also looking at Google Cloud Storage, but having to delete and reupload the entire site (which I believe is the recommended approach when rebuilding a Hugo site?) is a fairly serious timesink for a large site.
What are you all using as a deployment process? <comment><USER2> Would you mind specifying your issues with your custom domain on GitLab Pages? I can try to help you out. :)</comment>


How I added 6 characters to Unicode (and you can too) - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2016/10/inspired-by-hn-comment-four-half-star.html <comment><USER3> The rationale given for including mirrored half-stars as separate codepoints is right-to-left languages. I wondered why this was needed, since Unicode already has the a right-to-left mark (RLM)[1].

I found the answer in a comment on "Explain XKCD".[2] The RLM usually only reorders characters, but does not mirror their glyphs. The exception are glyphs with the "Bidi_Mirrored=Yes" property, which are mapped to a mirrored codepoint.[3]

The half-stars proposal includes a note on that property: "Existing stars are in the "Other Neutrals" class, so half stars should probably use the ON bidirectional class. The half stars have the obvious mirrored counterparts, so they can be Bidi mirrored. However, similar characters such as LEFT HALF BLACK CIRCLE are not marked as mirrored. I'll leave it up to the Unicode experts to determine if Bidi Mirrored would be appropriate or not."

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to- left_mark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-left_mark)

[2] [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1137:_RTL](https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1137:_RTL)

[3] [http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/BidiMirroring.txt](http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/BidiMirroring.txt)

</comment><comment><USER4> I also enjoyed this Hacker News article about adding the electrical on, off sleep, standby symbols to Unicode. [http://unicodepowersymbol.com/we-did-it- how-a-comment-on-hac...](http://unicodepowersymbol.com/we-did-it-how-a- comment-on-hackernews-lead-to-4-%C2%BD-new-unicode-characters/) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682)

</comment><comment><USER5> The one I'm surprised about is not the stars, but actually the bitcoin character. It's just a form of branding to me, and while I think there's interesting uses for blockchain technology, public interest seems to be a bit inflated. Plus that blockchain tech will likely outlive bitcoin itself.

<comment><USER6> It's not like there is some central Bitcoin company so what is the brand? Brands are generally owned by companies and are intellectual property in the eyes of governments.

<comment><USER7> Whatever it is, it's likely to be short-lived and therefore a questionable addition to Unicode.

<comment><USER6> Why do you think it will be short lived and on what scale is it short?

<comment><USER7> As other people said, blockchain technology will outlive bitcoin. In this case I am saying "short" to mean a decade or so. I expect Unicode to last much longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is great to see Unicode being able to encode almost every symbol people can think of, however I am still struggling to make them appear on my screen - <USER2> there a good font that has great coverage for unicode? Many times there are clever use of unicode yet I can only see empty rectangles.

<comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font#List_of_Unicode_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font#List_of_Unicode_fonts)

<comment><USER10> Keep in mind that what you want may not be one font that covers lots of glyphs -- that makes the font take up lots more memory and take longer to load. And you _definitely_ wouldn't want to use a high-coverage Unicode font as a dynamically-loaded Web font.

Operating systems are fine at understanding that different fonts are necessary for different glyphs, so what's better in a lot of cases is to have a _family_ of fonts that together cover all the glyphs you need. That's what Google Noto [1] is doing.

[1] [https://www.google.com/get/noto/](https://www.google.com/get/noto/)

Symbola is a good font for covering a lot of symbols, while not representing many text characters (on the assumption that you already have fonts you prefer for text).

That said, there's a justification for having a few of the fonts on that chart, like Lucida Sans Unicode and Arial Unicode MS, because they guarantee consistency without you having to install a huge font family. GNU Unifont is also interesting in a hackery kind of way, in that it achieves good coverage by using only pixelly bitmaps.

But on the other hand, Code2000 is an awful font. It eats gobs of memory and it looks bad. Don't use it just because it has a lot of glyphs.

<comment><USER11> GNU Unifont is just a fallback font, which I think is what the parent really needs since they're most concerned about seeing the symbol and I doubt consistent appearance with their font.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love this – but does it bother anyone else that the outlined and filled stars have different sizes? What's the reason behind that?

HN strips the characters out from comments, but they're displayed in the beginning of the article.

<comment><USER5> Unicode does not dictate how glyphs are presented. It just describes and categorizes them.

So how they look comes from the font that is used. For the proposal these fonts probably didn't exist yet, so it was probably just a (slightly sloppy) photoshop.

<comment><USER12> That's a good point, and I should have clarified, I'm referring to the full stars (not half-stars in the new proposal). Not a Unicode issue, but definitely something I've seen at least on macOS machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So glad the unicodepowersymbol.com stuff was helpful! We had a lot of fun getting the proposal together.

If anyone wants to submit some new characters, all of our documents are on GitHub [https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode](https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode)

</comment><comment><USER14> We need to hold the line somewhere. Preferably before corporate logos get into Unicode. I've seen Facebook and Twitter icons as Unicode characters in the user-definable space. This currently requires a downloaded font, but there's probably some lobbyist somewhere trying to get them into Unicode.

It's getting really complicated. There are now skin-tone modifiers for emoji.

<comment><USER15> Unicode is turning into a few useful characters amid a sea of junk. This will continue as long as people acquire status by getting "their" symbol(s) into Unicode. I don't see any way this can change.

<comment><USER14> How are Windows and Java, which are somewhat tied to 16-bit Unicode, handling this? It used to be that the astral planes didn't matter much, but now they do.

<comment><USER16> That's what surrogate pairs are for. [1] You're no longer working with one code point per character, but even with 32-bit Unicode there's no real guarantee of that (consider things like combining characters, accents, emoji skin tones, etc.)

[1] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/dd3...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/dd374069\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

<comment><USER15> Soon 20 bits won't be enough, either, and every Unicode program out there will break :-(

<comment><USER17> Unicode is 21 bits wide. And there's lots of space left. Heck, Emoji still make up very little of the total encoded characters, compared to "normal" human writing systems. (And I'd argue that emoji _are_ by now a normal addition to writing, considering how many people use them daily and can be glad to have them interoperable across different platforms, carriers, and devices. Something that hasn't been that way previously.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps we should have an escape code for SVG in Unicode, so we can describe any missing character.

<comment><USER19> Unicode Technical Report #51, which is where Emoji are laid out, talks a bit about the current thinking of the committees on this:

> The longer-term goal for implementations should be to support embedded > graphics, in addition to the emoji characters. Embedded graphics allow > arbitrary emoji symbols, and are not dependent on additional Unicode > encoding. Some examples of this are found in Skype and LINE—see the emoji > press page for more examples.

> However, to be as effective and simple to use as emoji characters, a full > solution requires significant infrastructure changes to allow simple, > reliable input and transport of images (stickers) in texting, chat, mobile > phones, email programs, virtual and mobile keyboards, and so on. (Even so, > such images will never interchange in environments that only support plain > text, such as email addresses.) Until that time, many implementations will > need to use Unicode emoji instead

[1] [http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Longer_Term](http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Longer_Term)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I simply cannot wrap my head around the direction of the Unicode discourse.

We're discussing the appropriate code-point for different smiley faces, obscure electrical symbols[0] or, in the present case, half stars to express film or book ratings, yet we have _no_ complete set of sub- and superscripts!

Am I mistaken in thinking it odd, that there's a complete Klingon alphabet but no representation whatsoever for most Greek or Latin subscripts? Or what if, heaven forbid, I'd want to use a 'b' index/subscript? Tough! Not even the "phonetic extensions", where subscript-i comes from, provides it.

Refer to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts#Latin_and_Greek_tables) or look for SUBSCRIPT in [http://ftp.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt](http://ftp.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt)

Surely there's the one or two actual scientists on the Unicode consortium? Or even the one odd soul still sporting a notion of consistency who finds it only logical to provide a "subscript b" if there's a "subscript a"?

How am I wrong?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682)

<comment><USER21> ISTM a great deal of trouble and complication could have been prevented by three special types of NBSP that meant "sub", "super", and "back to normal". It's true that some glyphs will be special-cased by some fonts, but in general the glyph is just shrunk and translated when sub- or super-scripted.

<comment><USER22> Yes, just like the LRE/LRO/RLE/RLO/PDF/etc characters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It would be cool to see the powerline symbols to be added to Unicode. The necessary user base should be already there.

See: [https://github.com/powerline/fonts/blob/master/README.rst](https://github.com/powerline/fonts/blob/master/README.rst)

A zsh theme with those characters in use: [https://gist.github.com/agnoster/3712874](https://gist.github.com/agnoster/3712874)

<comment><USER24> I have to disagree. All but 3 of those pictographs are already in the Unicode standard. You have to patch fonts because A) your preferred font may not have them and B) to make certain that the font meets Powerline's expectations.

The ones that are "unique" are a bit annoying because they replace defined characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane - Private Use section(E000-FFFF). Even though the section is "Private Use" it is often already defined by your OS's system font. There's the Supplemental Private Use Areas A (F0000-FFFFD) and B (100000-10FFFF) which can be overwritten safely.

I scare quote "unique" because two of those characters are full-height arrows; one right-pointing, the other left-pointing. These are already defined as u1F780 (🞀) u1F782 (🞂). It may be the case that some fonts that the triangles either A) don't actually go from floor to ceiling, or B) they have empty space behind their hypotenuse.

The only truly unique character is the "git branch" pictograph. Maybe, someone could write up a convincing argument to include it, but I can't imagine one. It's not a symbol you see to often even in the git community. And, I would bet if you looked hard enough, there's some mathematical symbol that would be suitable.

Just FYI, I've used powerline fonts daily for the past ~3 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's great but what we really need (ahem- what _I_ really need) is more maths-y characters, like ∑∏∫∀ and all the sub- and super- scripted letters: ⁱⁿₙᵢ and so on.

I can never find a lower-case Greek subscripted α or β when I need one...

<comment><USER26> > That's great but what we really need (ahem- what I really need) is more > maths-y characters, like ∑∏∫∀ and all the sub- and super- scripted letters: > ⁱⁿₙᵢ and so on.

Agreed, but what we need even more than the _symbols_ is some ((La)TeXy, says the mathematician) way of _combining_ them. For example (says the mathematician who doesn't understand the complexity of text encodings), why do we need a whole bunch of separate "subscript m", "subscript n", etc., glyphs, rather than just one "subscript" combining mark?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unicode is a brilliant idea, but it went off the rails with combining characters, especially when there is both a code point for a character and a combining set of characters that semantically are the same thing.

<comment><USER17> How would you solve things without combining characters? Especially the case where you can have multiple diacritics on a letter. Encode every single combination of all of them? Seems a bit wasteful, don't you think?

Precomposed characters exist because they existed in other encodings previously and encoding such characters has been one of the core principles of Unicode to ensure an easy upgrade path. Heck, we inherited box drawing characters that way, which I think are more questionable than combining diacritics.

<comment><USER15> At a minimum, I would not have any 2-character graphemes be semantically identical with any single code point.

> Seems a bit wasteful

If they were all separate code points, how many are we talking about?

Also, consider that nearly every Unicode program handles them wrongly. That's pretty wasteful of programmer time and money.

<comment><USER17> The precomposed characters only exist for compatibility with existing character sets and encodings. If you don't want to deal with them in your code, just normalize to NFD and they're gone. If Unicode didn't care about compatibility to legacy character sets at all, adoption would have been very different, I guess. By now it's probably a moot point since not supporting Unicode is foolish at best, but in the early 90s things were very different.

As for diacritics, it depends on what you care about for precomposing them. Actual usage for scripts in use currently? Then it's only a handful and the worst thing probably is Vietnamese or Ancient Greek which have a bunch of characters with more than one diacritic.

However, the current system with composable diacritics gives you plenty of flexibility: Need a character with a diacritic that isn't used in any language currently? Just compose them and you got it. Font support may be spotty (note that Unicode and font support are completely separate things – bashing Unicode for bad fonts is a fairly useless endeavour), but at least you can represent that grapheme in text without resorting to embedding images, or overlaying glyphs by other means (cf. TeX). Those options are also not interoperable with any other applications.

It also means that if some language now develops a script based on, say, Latin, and invents a new diacritic that can go on different vowels, you'd only have to encode a single new code point, not five or six of them. It scales far better and also isn't tied to any specific writing system. I can use ´ on a or on ω and it works the same.

And could you elaborate on how "nearly every Unicode program handles them wrongly"? I'd argue that most programs coming into contact with Unicode do little more than passing it along without caring about the contents at all. And trying to shoehorn human language into something an average programmer can handle without error is likely impossible. Language is complex, writing is complex; Unicode is complex as a result of that. This doesn't only apply to text, mind you, there are lots of things that are complex and are often implemented naïvely or wrongly by programmers who don't know any better. That usually means that programs are broken, and many programmers should know better. Not that we should try adjusting the world to broken programs.

<comment><USER15> > And could you elaborate on how "nearly every Unicode program handles them > wrongly"?

A good chunk don't do surrogate pairs correctly (or are even aware of them), the rest get tripped up by the combining character issue. Even for those who understand it, there are no clear answers: "should a combining character compare equal to a precomposed one?" And of course there are 3 levels of UCS support.

The whole existence of an unnormalized form is a gigantic mistake that could have been easily avoided - simply make the unnormalized form an illegal sequence to begin with.

Unicode programming hasn't gotten as bad yet as timezone programming, but they are well on their way :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What about 1/4, 3/4, 1/5, etc...?

<comment><USER28> ¼, ¾, ⅕.

For etc, start here: [http://unicode-search.net/unicode- namesearch.pl?term=fractio...](http://unicode-search.net/unicode- namesearch.pl?term=fraction)

You can use "fraction slash" to make any fraction, using super/subscript numbers: ⁷⁄₃₃

<comment><USER29> I thought they were talking about fractions too, but then I realised they're probably talking about fractions _of stars_.

<comment><USER28> Ah, I see. Something like ◔ "CIRCLE WITH UPPER RIGHT QUADRANT BLACK".

Someone requested something similar here [1], and someone else made it using CSS here [2]. As the article explains though, it would need to be used in text for the Unicode committee to accept it.

[1] [https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font- Awesome/issues/4147](https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/4147)

[2] [http://codepen.io/denwo/pen/azjXzL](http://codepen.io/denwo/pen/azjXzL)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Best part is where you swap Andrew West's first name for Adam

<comment><USER31> Oops, sorry Andrew! Many apologies! (I watched way too much Batman as a child and "Adam West" is wired into my brain.)</comment></comment>


Microsoft Azure is signing up 1000 customers daily - <AUTHOR> http://talkincloud.com/public-cloud/microsoft-windows-azure-momentum-1000-customers-daily

<comment><USER2> What's a customer? A new account? If you have an MSDN subscription you get Azure credits and you'd most likely sign up to take advantage of The Cloud. Are these excluded?

Not that I think that Azure bad or doing badly, it's just not clear that this is 1,000 businesses signing up each day because:

* they've done vendor selection

* Azure came out on top

* and they're willing to spend money on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm gonna guess #1 or #3. Not that Azure isn't making progress and doing well, but they're not the top choice in the market by far.</comment></comment>


Mention.net - <AUTHOR> https://en.mention.net/

<comment><USER2> Everything about this passes the smell test but that pitch video. Dom Perignon, gorgeous babe, party, "bro"... yuck.

That's half the audience tuning out in 30 seconds, and some more bailing due to the low-fi cartoon look, contrived 'problem', and ratty video compression. It's all out of place with the otherwise solid site design.

Checking it out nonetheless. Thank you!

<comment><USER3> Huh. I started with the video and closed the site. Didn't realize until I saw your comment that this wasn't a dudebro stalker thing like Girls Around Me.

I don't get it. The rest of the site is trying to be respectable.... which just comes off as really unsettling now after imagining it coming from the barhopping bro.

<comment><USER2> I get the core idea: alerts services are essentially ego-stroking services unless your corporation is big enough to reach PR critical mass.

But finding out who's talking about you is a graymarket use for this service. For a company to properly rationalize $240->$1200 a year for alerts, they have to feel this is a business tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, that is weird. Why the hell would you translate _your brand_? Visiting the site from Germany is an instant redirect to <https://en.erwaehnung.de/> (erwähnung being german for mention).

<comment><USER5> This was not made on purpose : trademark collision case with an existing german company :(

<comment><USER6> Trust me with this one: You need a better domain for germany. erwaehnung.de is just terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Feedback:

* Add option to restrict keyword(s) to headlines, titles, and/or keyword density. This is useful for generic terms that get mentioned frequently but aren't the actual topic resulting bad results.

* Domain blacklist, not just URL blacklist. For example, I want to block answers.yahoo.com and all region subdomains under it (eg malaysia.answers.yahoo.com)

* Why is it pushing me to download a native desktop app? I don't want a desktop app and the web app is quite nice.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have been using Mention for the past couple of months and even though their UI is not quite there yet, they are way better then Google Alert.

The only thing that is very annoying at the beginning, at least for me, was that I received A LOT of false positive mention... So I had to "Train" it a bit but now it's all good.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know if I missed it but a cursory glance through your dev docs[0] do not, imho, lay out your terminology. What is the difference between and alert, mention, mention task, etc.

Looks good overall. Can you talk some about your tech? Are you ingesting material and then polling via peoples interests? For example, Alice and Bob are interested in "Apple". Is there a query que with "Apple" in it that polls your db and alerts the people interested in the term "Apple"? Or is there some kind of push magic happening when material is ingested. I'm interested because I want to do alerting in some of my own apps.

[0]<https://dev.mention.net/>

</comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome, really seems to solve all my Google Alert and filtered Google search problems that I have hunting out press mentons of our products.

If I flag a Tweet, will it remove other good Tweets? For example, I see this Tweet I'd like to flag as spam, but I'm afraid it will kill good Tweets:

Gaia GPS - Gaia GPS ScreenshotsDescriptionSPRING SALE - Gaia GPS is currently $9.99 (50% off)!Gaia GPS is the... <http://t.co/e6l95crUL8>

Google indexes too many garbage sites like AppAnnie and WorldAppz, so it ends up being hard to filter good results day-to-day, but I think Mention kills those pretty nicely.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am a mention user for more than 4 months and it is far better than Google Alerts for me.

I received only 23 notifications with Google Alerts while I have received more than 1 thousand via Mention (tweets, blog posts, Hacker News comments, Reddit comments, ...). About 10% was false positive due to our Google Adwords campaign on the display network (some webpage with our ads was detected by mention).

At the end it is not perfect but it is the best tool that I have tried.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why does the title of this post mention a funding round and link to the actual product? It reads like a TC-style blog post. It's very misleading and a lost opportunity.

The product is interesting and probably a good idea in light of Google's shutdown of Reader. Google Alerts almost certainly won't be around indefinitely and Mention.net can jump in to scoop up a user base once Alerts is shuttered.

<comment><USER13> Have to agree with this... The moment I heard Google Reader was shutting down my mind went to Google Alerts, which is an even more obscure product that few (if any) alternatives exist for -- or so I thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, this is annoying. They auto-redirect to Google Play if you open the link on an Android phone. Reminds me of those online news papers that actively peddle their viewer apps, when all I want is to open a god damn page to read. Could have asked if I want their glorious app at least.

Sadly, I didn't get to see the video. Apparently they took it down.

<comment><USER15> I didn't see the vid on the homepage either, but I think I found it <http://vimeo.com/50765644>

<comment><USER14> Ha! Nothing can hide in these intertubes :) Thanks.

I must say they're quite responsive. Took down the vid pretty quick and also removed the funding brag from the title.

I would, however, suggest this one: "mention.net - Google Alerts done right."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Speaking of comparing mention.net with Google Alerts. The socialmention.net is a better (free) alternative.

<comment><USER11> I did'nt see any alert in socialmention.net. In fact I did not find anything else than a google custom search box... not very useful.

<comment><USER16> They are specifically searching social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, the same as what mention.net does.

Google Alert by the way does not searches Twitter, Facebook.

<comment><USER17> Go visit the site right now, there is nothing there but a exactly what the parent post said: a custom google search on the 'blogs' tab.

<comment><USER16> I don't know what you're comparing. I am comparing mention.net with socialmention.net. One is free, the other is not. Both provide the same exact service minus few bells and whistles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> interesting use of node.js/backbone.js

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting that there is not only iOS/Android/web apps for this, but a Chrome extension and Mac Desktop app as well. I would've figured that this was a service could survive on a web app alone (with email service).

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice!

</comment><comment><USER21> Fantastic product</comment>


Show HN: CryptoStandardizer – the one crypto API your toolset was missing - <AUTHOR> https://cryptostandardizer.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys!

I'm Yasen, one of the people behind CryptoStandardizer. It is a side project which was born from a pain I had on a daily basis while working with a few of my last clients.

As a web developer I see a trend of websites wanting to stay relevant by integrating crypto-related information and news on their pages and that's what my clients wanted to do as well. The task was simple at first sight - <USER2> crypto coins data from a few exchanges and let's unify it so it's easy to consume by our clients. It wasn't long before I came to realize there are a staggering number of exchanges, each using their own coin symbols (one would use DSH for Dash, while others would use DASH, for example).

CryptoStandardizer is exactly what it sounds like - it's an API that allows you to easily standardize crypto coin symbols across 100+ exchanges, make your system as stable as possible and as an added bonus it gets rid of your headache!

It's a work in progress, I'd love to know what you guys think of the project and I'll be more than happy to get ideas on how to make the service an even more enjoyable experience.</comment>


New MacBook Pro Taken Apart by iFixit - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/tech/new-macbook-pro-taken-apart-by-ifixit-found-to-contain-not-very-repairable-computer-parts-1678141/ <comment><USER2> Why not just submit the iFixit article itself? The submitted post doesn't look like it adds any value.

[https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Function...](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Function+Keys+Late+2016+Teardown/72415)</comment>


Biological and Machine Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://numenta.com/resources/biological-and-machine-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> More than encoding spatial information. And even more than predicting sensory input. Grid maps in the entorhinal cortex may be responsible for goal oriented action planning ;)

The entorhinal cognitive map is attracted to goals

[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6434/1443](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6434/1443)</comment>


Where did you have your great idea? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/03/31/whereDidYouHaveYourGreatId.html

<comment><USER2> I've heard that such stories are largely fabricated.

<comment><USER3> Me too.

Supposedly, almost everybody has their great idea at, or because of, work. They can't say so because of draconian IP agreements that stipulate the contents of your head are company property.</comment></comment>


Start-up helps teachers learn their lesson - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10303253-93.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5 <comment><USER2> Great idea. I had a similar idea not that long ago, but did not execute. To build a good system for teachers to find and review lesson plans and teaching techniques. To build a productive social networking site for teachers to share experiences with other teachers.

The freemium model would work great here, if a few teachers gain a free foothold, and find the service useful, they can then go to their district and request to upgrade to the paid version for all to use.

Now it all comes down to execution.</comment>


Surviving Childhood Adversity - <AUTHOR> http://mosaicscience.com/story/surviving-troubled-childhood-resilience-neglect-adversity <comment><USER2> This article is incredible. According to the Maslow was wrong. Love from others is more important than food, water and shelter. Is this true? I think so. In a very real sense, these other physical needs won't be me unless there is love. The degree of love in our life and resilience in the face of adversity shapes each person in this world.

<comment><USER3> Plenty of kids appear to have survived horrific orphanage experiences, growing up abused, and a complete lack of love. I'm yet to hear of one that made it without food.

<comment><USER4> > appear to have survived

Plenty of kids appear to have committed suicide due to such experiences. This is a very literal example of "survivorship bias" :-)

<comment><USER5> But _some_ survived.

How many survived with zero food?

<comment><USER4> To be clear, I'm arguing the other way around: not that you can survive complete lack of food, but that there are people who did not survive complete lack of love.

<comment><USER6> That's confusing coincidence with causality. You can't prove "complete lack of love", whatever that means, killed them.

<comment><USER4> I used "complete lack of love" as a short version of what another commenter wrote: "horrific orphanage experiences, growing up abused, and a complete lack of love".

I can agree that "complete lack of love" is rather hard to define, but are you _sure_ that it's just a coincidence, when an abused, humiliated, tortured person commits suicide?

<comment><USER3> I'm confident it did cause some of them to commit suicide. I am arguing, as someone else said - some of them made it. Nobody survived without food. Therefore it is silly to suggest love is more fundamental than food to survival.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the science of human-relationships called? (not exactly anthropology..)

Whatever it is, it feels like it's gotten much less attention than it deserves, going by the affect it can have on our lives.

Great article.

<comment><USER8> >What's the science of human-relationships called?

I'd say it's a combination of combination of Social psychology [1] and Developmental Psychology[2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Psychology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Psychology) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_psychology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_psychology)</comment></comment>