Stay up late while you can. It pays off - <AUTHOR> http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/stay-up-late

<comment><USER2> For all those in their early 20's who are reading this - you should know one thing. Nature has blessed you with the ability to stay up late and still get things done the next day.

Most people in their twenties abuse this skill and go out partying all night. I know I did a lot of that.

The reason you have this skill is because it's designed for child-rearing in your 20's. That's my hypothesis. People with children don't get much sleep.

So either use this skill to push your career/skills forward, or use it to raise small children while you're still young. Either way will leave you better off. If you push hard to make some money, and then have kids, maybe you won't need to work 9-5 when you do have kids. If you have your kids early, then you'll have the time and energy to put into your work when you're a bit older, because your kids won't be draining your energy.

The sub optimal solution is to have your kids later on, at the same time you realise you need to work hard to push ahead. That's doubly taxing and twice as hard.

<comment><USER3> It's a weird thing though ... now that I'm 35 I definitely can't bang out work until 3am like I used to 10 years ago. On the other hand, I have significantly more knowledge and better methods than I did then.

It's a bit unfair.

<comment><USER2> Youth is wasted on the young - my new favourite saying.

Somehow a young person has to work out a way to hack the process, by gaining wisdom and maturity before their youth has run out, and apply it successfully. (and, to be fair, 35 _is still young_ ). To be more correct, someone in their 20's need to work out how to think like someone in their 30's or 40's, before they turn 30. Young people who do that are going to be successful, no doubt. The big problem is that a 20 year old has to listen to, and accept advice from, a 40 year, something many have problems with.

<comment><USER4> Getting the young to have the experiences of the older and wiser is never going to happen. It is more productive to retain or regain whatever you consider the value of being young into old age. Personally, except for some aches and pains in my joints, I haven't noticed any real decrease in any of my abilities as I have gotten older.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are no obnoxious ads on the site (no ads at all that I saw). There is no obnoxious Flash or scripts. No weird color schemes. No animations. Nothing objectionable at all that I could see, even to the most sensitive person.

So why did the submitter link to the print page, which for many of us will bring up a print dialog that we then have to dismiss, instead of linking to the main article page?

<comment><USER6> Well one advantage the print view has is that it's at least centered, whereas the normal view is off to the left. Though this only makes a difference on higher resolution screens and it isn't enough of an issue to outweigh everyone having to dismiss a print dialog / deny ad impressions, in my opinion.

<comment><USER7> On the contrary, the print view has longer lines, which makes it harder to read on a widescreen display.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A while back I worked for a company that didn't care about the schedule I worked so long as the work got done. Eventually I was rolling in around 11am to noon and leaving around 9-11pm. Having that place to myself in the evening was bliss. Also sleeping on my natural sleep schedule (3am to 10am) greatly increased productivity.

Sadly they refused to switch me to salary (I was hourly & quick at my job & actually had to underperform & work slowly to keep my paycheck decent) so I finally quit. The best feeling in the world was when they had to hire 2 hourly replacements to do my job.

Moral: If someone is good at their job & is a happy, trusted and efficient employee, value them and treat them accordingly. If their job is not 9-5 critical, let them work the schedule when they are the most productive.

</comment><comment><USER9> What he really means is work on your craft. Staying up late has nothing to do with it.

<comment><USER10> The advantage to staying up late is that you can focus on what you want to do, rather than having to work for someone else. Being in the office alone can be incredibly productive, I find it a lot better than being at home alone. I used to do a similar thing, go into the office on weekends and stay late at night, to work on my own projects. I started my own business that way.

<comment><USER11> Not to be a hater here, but I believe by working at the office on work computers, your job might be able to claim the rights to your business. I'd be careful with that one.

<comment><USER12> Not might, they can. Don't work on non-work projects on work computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, this line just triggered a memory for me:

 _I played music really loud and drank Mountain Dew_

As an undergrad I briefly had a job in a warehouse somewhere working the midnight shift. I don't remember who I was working for; I'd actually forgotten the whole thing. But reading that line about working late at night brought back a sudden rush of how fun it was. There were two or three guys and we cranked up _Brave New Waves_ (a reliable source for what became known as indie rock) and in between getting the work done played tricks with the fork lifts.

This was not to become my craft, though. Maybe I missed a calling.

</comment><comment><USER14> Longfellow put it well:

"The heights of great men reached and kept, were not obtained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night."

</comment><comment><USER15> This doesn't really seem to counsel staying up late, as much as it counsels working while your spouse is asleep. It could just as easily be really early in the morning (which was my method at one point in life).

<comment><USER16> Likewise. I've never been good at staying up late, but I wake up at 4am everyday for about 3 hours of uninterrupted work time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are two things my dad has always told me. 1) "Always make sure you get paid" and 2) "Work hard when you're young, you can handle staying up late"

</comment><comment><USER18> I would be interested to read a good paper about how sleep patterns changing with age.

I also wonder about how waking hours not only shifts as we grow old, but I wonder if life-span has been tracked and analyzed in terms of waking hours.

<comment><USER19> For all my career, I've worked late. When running my own business or consulting, I tended to have a 3 or 4 am bedtime.

This fall my daughter started school. I have to be up at 6:00 AM in order to get the day started and drop her off for classes.

This has completely changed my sleep patterns, and thus my work patterns. Feels like it takes a lot longer to get anything done. So I definitely agree that you should take advantage of late nights while you can.

<comment><USER8> I spent several years in an industry where we'd have call time at 6 or 6:30am, which meant a 5am wakeup. I am a night owl so needless to say it sucked. By the weekend all I'd want to do was sleep. The thing is, between shows my body clock would revert right back to the old 3am bedtime schedule.

Isn't it amazing how you can get the same number of hours of sleep but if it isn't on the schedule you naturally prefer it can feel less refreshing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Psh, everyone at my school thinks it's crazy that I stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning. That's when all of my best work gets done.

</comment><comment><USER21> Something he doesn't touch on, but it's one reason I am willing to work on Saturdays: When the office is mostly empty, it's quiet and you are more productive.

<comment><USER22> For me it's not just quiet that helps. It's that doing things on my own time makes me much more relaxed about how I do it - want refactor that bit of code that works ok but you know it's ugly as hell? Want to try YUI3 when your whole site is written with YUI2 and you've got no great reason to upgrade? Want to redo that button with a background image that isn't quite antialiased properly? There are a whole slew of things that I just can't justify from a business point of view, but that have huge potential in terms of personal payoff. But once I'm on my own time I can sit down and try them out. Those that work out I take with confidence into businesss hours, those that don't are just a little self-development time.

Before anyone mentions it, I am somewhat internally conflicted in the sense that this kind of stuff _should_ be built into the "on the clock" time. But it is how it is.

NB: the sad thing is - what he says about kids is absolutely true. With 2 kids now, even when I do get a little time to myself it is still laced with some guilt that I could be spending that with my family. And if I do put extra hours into to work it affects the whole family. So work stress translates directly to family stress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The issue for me isn't so much about working till late at night, but the fact that I cannot wake up in time for my engagements for the next day.

Anyone solved that problem?

<comment><USER24> Wake up real early and work _from_ late at night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Michael Bierut has a funny slide he uses in his presentations, in which he notes that his name is not spelled "Beirut" (like the city in Lebanon).

</comment><comment><USER26> Plan your career so that you can retire by 40.

</comment><comment><USER27> I love that this is on HN from AIGA. Advertising industry is more brutal than tech startups... you kill yourself working on client demands, not your own products.

So if you're hiring a front-web developer and their past history includes a reputable ad agency, you're likely going to have a good candidate for early- stage startup.

</comment><comment><USER28> you work hard and it pays off, it's amazing how many people forget that.

</comment><comment><USER29> This article recommends working an extra shift at the office for free and creating an expectation with your boss that you can do twice the work everyone else can do in the same amount of time.

My recommendation would be the opposite. Carefully manage expectations and pace yourself if you want (a) to ensure your longevity as a tech worker, (b) to avoid serious health problems and (c) to avoid later regretting missing out on the valuable social and emotional opportunities of your youth.

You can develop your skills in your twenties without creating unfortunate imbalances.

<comment><USER30> _My recommendation would be the opposite. Carefully manage expectations and pace yourself if you want (a) to ensure your longevity as a tech worker, (b) to avoid serious health problems and (c) to avoid later regretting missing out on the valuable social and emotional opportunities of your youth._

Sure, I can see how that would work for perhaps even most people but it's different strokes for different folks. Ultimately, people need to make their own minds up because it doesn't always work one way or the other.

I regret _not_ working a lot harder in my early 20s and haven't ultimately derived much value from the "valuable social and emotional opportunities of [my] youth." Indeed, working harder and more deliberately has led to _better_ social and "emotional" opportunities. It's hard to "regret" the past significantly considering I'm happy now but if I could go back and wipe most of my memory, I'd work my ass off 100x as hard at that stage of life.

<comment><USER13> Strongly agree. One of these days I want to write a manifesto against "work- life balance". Yeah, you heard me: against. "Balance" implies a tradeoff. Work, when you have the right work, _is_ life.

That's not to say there's no such thing as overwork, spending too little time with your family or what have you. But it's time someone stood up to the prophets of complacency.

<comment><USER31> As you allude to, work-life balance is something we tend to need if we aren't able to make our work something we believe in wholly. I spent the past year hoping to trade my day job for my dream job, but I think I've come to the conclusion that at least for me, the only way I'll ever find it is to make that job myself. It's liberating and daunting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm somehow in the same situation Michael was in the 80s. I'm young, my couple has to wake up at 6 and I can stay in bed easily till 8. I've been trying to be productive in my personal projects (programming) either at night, after she goes to bed, or starting up very early at 6... but I haven't been able so far.

At night I'm brain-dead after the whole day programming at the office. On the other hand, in the morning I need at least 30 min to _really_ wake up and start thinking correctly in front of the computer and that doesn't leave much time to do almost anything before going to work.

Anyone with a good advice?

<comment><USER33> Having a nap after work before continuing, and then continuing may help.

Or have you tried going to bed really early and getting up much earlier?

<comment><USER32> Never tried to have a nap before continuing, although now that I read you it sounds like a natural thing to try. Thanks.

<comment><USER33> Good luck! And keep in mind that napping is a skill to practice. Don't despair if you can't fall asleep within a few minutes the first few times you try it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Windows Holographic open to OEM's - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/06/01/opening-windows-holographic-to-partners-for-a-new-era-of-mixed-reality/ <comment><USER2> That video is the most painful thing I've ever seen in my life.

Let me be clear when I say that. It was literally the most painful thing I've ever seen.

When I was young, I stepped on a nail so long that it poked through my foot. I was scared and in shock, so I slowly pulled the nail out of my foot. Blood squirted everywhere and I passed out. I couldn't walk for weeks. Even today I walk with a limp.

That was nothing compared to watching this video.</comment>


You Can't Teach Speed: Falsifying the Deliberate Practice Model of Expertise - <AUTHOR> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2277977

<comment><USER2> Honestly, I could practice any instrument for 10,000 hours and still sound like I was touching up a chicken. Or try learning a language for 10,000 hours and sound like I was speaking it through a bucket of horse glue with the accent of a freshly minted coin.

There's a reason "The plural of anecdote is Gladwell"...</comment>


The Great Microservices vs. Monolithic Apps Twitter Melee - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/28/the-great-microservices-vs-monolithic-apps-twitter-melee.html <comment><USER2> Anyone else tired of people arguing complex concepts in tweets? So hard to read. People don't usually talk in single sentences.

<comment><USER3> Yes, extremely. I receive questions from time to time for which the answer is complicated (and if I simplify the answer, the important nuance will be lost). I usually write my response in a gist and tweet a link to it.

But the thing is: Twitter is extremely easy to use and the barrier to tweeting is extremely low, more so than email. People are more inclined to tweet than to send an email, even for complex subjects. As much as I dislike it, this is how things are, so better accept it and use it to your advantage than trying to fight it or complain about it.

<comment><USER4> But why hasn't a twitter clone/alternative that would allow more than 140 characters taken off yet then ?

<comment><USER5> There's an interesting startup that I think does that. It's called Facebook.

<comment><USER6> Then why are people using Twitter then ? You cant say Facebook is like Twitter with more characters in the messages,it simply doesnt work.

<comment><USER3> Because Twitter has a lower barrier to entry. Yes the 140 character limit sucks. But because of the character limit, people are more inclined to open Twitter in the first place. The psychological advantage of that outweights the disadvantage of hitting the 140 character limit later, at least for users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why is it "microservices" vs "monolithic"? It's not black and white, it's a continuum. Why would 300 microservices make more sense than, say, 6 medium- sized SOA apps?

According to the article, the point of microservices is scaling development, not scaling as in req/sec. But development scaling can already be done without microservices. You can already split source code in multiple files. You can already refactor classes into multiple smaller classes. So then why are microservices "awesome"? Why does it make more sense to have 300 microservices, each 500 lines, compared to 6 medium-size SOA apps, each consisting of 25.000 lines spread over 50 files/classes?

Now, if you have 200 developers then I understand why splitting your app into 50+ independent microservices makes sense. But I get the feeling that lots of developers, even those in 3-man teams, are jumping on the several-hundred- microservices bandwagon.

<comment><USER7> We had this debate at my company. You might want to read this:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/an-architecture-of- sm...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/an-architecture-of-small-apps)

It's important to realize that you are wrong when you use the word "continuum". In a true continuum you can move in both directions with equal ease, whereas there is an important asymmetry in the tension between micro- services and monolithic apps. Read this part:

"There is an important asymmetry between an architecture of small apps and an architecture of The Monolithic CMS. If you have small apps, and decide you want to move to a monolithic CMS, then you must do The Big Rewrite: the exhausting effort of reproducing all of your funtionality so that it is handled by your one, all-consuming CMS. But when you move from the monolithic CMS to an architecture of small apps, there is no need for The Big Rewrite. Instead you take some small part of your CMS, rewrite it as an independent app, set the app on its own port, use your webserver to proxy the app-on-a- port to whatever URL the CMS was previously using for that functionality, and thus you've taken a step towards a new architecture without having to rewrite anything but the functionality covered by your new, small app."

I did not hear the phrase "micro-services" until Martin Fowler wrote his essay in March 2014, but clearly, what I talked about in that essay, 14 months ago, is what we would now call micro-services.

<comment><USER8> That's the first time I've ever read it was hard to move from a collection of small services to a monolith, and easy to move from a monolith to small services.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, that seems totally backward from my experience. I notice no justification is given either, apart from describing both refactors (small->large and large->small).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I also think a lot has to do with language and deployment. Etsy uses PHP for their entire codebase. PHP can be easily hot swapped without any overhead. It's all scaffolded and thrown out every pageview. This provides a much simpler deploy process and has much less impact.

Java on the other hand takes time to warm up. It just isn't practical to redeploy the whole app when you are just updated one aspect.

</comment><comment><USER11> But, I have more services! But, each of my fewer services do more!

And this folks, is why IT is still a joke in most quarters.</comment>


Google building "Games at Google"? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/25/google-not-serious-about-online-gaming-this-job-offer-suggests-otherwise/

<comment><USER2> Without a social network, Google Games doesn't make sense to me. It would mean that Google is turning into a portal.

If such a product is being planned, I'm sure it's part of a larger 'social strategy'.

<comment><USER3> Google already has a social network, they just don't have a name or homepage for it (those are important). Presumably this would tie right into Profiles, Buzz, and Contacts.

Google can easily build a social network around Android, I'm not sure why they aren't going that route. They know who you contact most, they know how you contact them. They just need a private version of Buzz and integrate it into Contacts and they'd be a major threat to Facebook.

<comment><AUTHOR> IMHO, gmail (or android) contacts are not "friends" or people one wants to share things with. Gmail could morph into a rolodex, like linkedin, but unlike facebook.

<comment><USER3> These are the people you text and call all of the time. You already share with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could they just be creating a "Game Center" for Android?

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there any market Google isn't trying to encompass?

<comment><USER6> Google Deep Sea Fishing?

Google Petroleum?

Googleburgers!

<comment><USER7> > _Googleburgers!_

I don't know if I should be afraid of the "I'm feeling lucky" button for that, or if it's incomprehensibly brilliant.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A DJ Khaled Reddit Bot - <AUTHOR> http://joelotter.com/2015/04/01/dj-khaled-reddit-bot.html

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. And inspiring. I need to start writing about the things I'm building. Maybe I'll do a Reddit Bot in Java and record that! Thanks for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I just recently moved my blog over to Jekyll, and that theme is just too gorgeous for me to not want to write on it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is amazeballs! You rocked my world.</comment>


Insecure default in Elasticsearch enables remote code execution - <AUTHOR> http://bouk.co/blog/elasticsearch-rce/

<comment><USER2> Yet another reason to have your dev stuff run in a separate VM. The attacker in theory could still do the same trick, but he'd first have to guess the IP of the VM (probably simple, since a lot of people forward local ports) but all damage would be limited to the VM (yes, I have the users vagrant and root on that VM). Still not perfect, but much better.</comment>


Blind man sees wife for first time after having a tooth implanted into his eye - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197256/Blind-man-sees-wife-time-having-TOOTH-implanted-eye.html <comment><USER2> _By that time he had already spent eight years without his sight after a tub of white hot aluminium exploded in his face at work in a scrapyard._

This is why you should always wear safety goggles.

<comment><USER3> While true, suggesting safety goggles as a guard against exploding white-hot aluminum just makes me think of that goggles meme. What was it again?...

<comment><USER2> I assume there is something higher-grade than chemistry-lab splash goggles for this. There must be some protective equipment available for people working with white-hot aluminum.

Nobody should have to do a job that can lead to blindness.

<comment><USER4> _"Nobody should have to do a job that can lead to blindness."_

I agree. Yet in our society, where efficiency must often be balanced against safety, risk cannot be fully eliminated.

Council workers would surely be safer if the roads they repaired were closed for the duration, but we cannot stomach the roads being fully closed. Furniture movers would certainly suffer less chance of back injury if there were four men lifting that dresser instead of two, yet no-one would hire them if their prices doubled. And the aluminium smelter might well be able to significantly reduce its injury rate by investing billions in a new process, but the product would no longer be viable and the factory would close, simply moving the risk to a less caring jurisdiction.

One can continue like this all day. There's always a compromise, and most developed countries have settled upon a sweet spot. Workplace injury declines with advancing technology, and we should certainly do our best to minimise it, but while society values economic competitiveness over absolute personal safety, you can never eliminate risk, and maybe not even then.

<comment><USER5> You'd be surprised how many jobs can lead to injuries, including blindness.

I met a piano tuner with only one eye one day. He was tuning a grand piano, overstressed the string, it broke and the little loop at the end of it was shot off straight into his eye...

I'll bet you he never thought that piano tuning can lead to blindness either.

<comment><USER6> One of the most dangerous jobs is... farming. Tons of guys get arms torn off on tractors, etc.

<comment><USER7> Just read on Doc Searls's blog of the death of a friend of his who fell off his tractor...

[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/07/07/a-good-man-is- ha...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/07/07/a-good-man-is-hard-to- lose/)

<comment><USER4> Oh, gross. What a way to go. You know it wasn't a pleasant death when the police take a day to identify someone killed on their own property.

Sigh, I really hate the pointless deaths of good people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Smart idea using the tooth to prevent rejection.

So now I'm curious. I want to see his wife...

<comment><USER9> shhh don't tell asdlfj2sd33 about this comment (it'll set him over the edge)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is why surgeons get paid the big bucks. Makes the average programming job look pretty trivial...

<comment><USER11> Unless you're both a surgeon and a programmer you probably shouldn't make sweeping statements like that.

I'm just a programming but I think a large portion of the bucks surgeons make is due to the expense and duration of medical school.

<comment><USER9> And the fact that they work directly to save/improve/alter life whereas great software projects tend to be somewhat disconnected from the actual life saving thereby making their authors somewhat removed from that 'thing' that allows doctors to charge the big bucks.

<comment><USER11> You know there's a lot of medical software right? And I'm not just talking about record keeping. What do you think most high end medical and scientific instruments run on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think they talked about this in the Bible: something about an eye for a tooth and a tooth for an eye.

<comment><USER11> 15 points? This is currently the top comment on a medical breakthrough restoring sight? This is why I left Slashdot.

<comment><USER13> yeah like the other comments are better. One guy wants to see the wife, the other thinks this makes programming look trivial, etc

Surgeons don't post here & we wouldn't understand them anyway. Gimme a funny comment any day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm still confused why they would use a 'tooth' oppose to something else...

<comment><USER15> I'm guessing teeth can join well to flesh without rejection (mine seem good on this anyway) and also don't reject implanting foreign matter (filings, those little diamonds chavs^W people have, etc.) they're basically a bridging medium; an interstitial that avoids rejection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> ...and then he said 'ahhhh! I'm blind!'

<comment><USER16> I got modded down? Jeez you guys have no humor. Slashdot's way better

<comment><USER17> While from this thread alone this may look like slashdot, the community happens to put a much higher emphasis on _conversation_ rather than praising an individuals wit.

At the risk of being down modded myself for not contributing to the thread I just thought it might be worth pointing that out and reminding those that seem to have voted on this particular thread as though the emphasis was on humour.

I'm not exactly one to throw the first stone, as my karma/comments/submissions are far from exemplary, but I do try to stay in keeping with the ideals of the community.

<comment><USER18> I actually like a bit of humour; when applied correctly it can accentuate the gist of an item and throw into sharp relief what the "community" really thinks. In this case: facinating story, but, come on, it's from the "Daily Mail". Humour, quite simply, is required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wish there were more Weekly World News links on HN.

</comment><comment><USER20> I hear that among some goths, a snapshot through a human-tooth-mounted lens is the most desired MySpace Angle of all.</comment>


What can I put in my software development blog to make it a good showcase of me? - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/133318/what-can-i-put-in-my-software-development-blog-to-make-it-a-good-showcase-of-me

<comment><USER2> There's no right answer to this one. If you're looking for page views and notoriety then choose hot-button topics with a sensational headline. If you want the blog that you'd like to read, then just write about interesting things that you are working on at the moment - or things that you want to learn about.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the most annoying things in software development? - <AUTHOR> As a software developer, which tasks do you find most annoying in your daily work? Which part of your job would you like to outsource to someone else if you could? <comment><USER2> \- Make a change that fixes a bug

\- Before committing, clean things up by removing a debugging statement and some whitespace

\- Bug reappears

\- Undo the cleanup

\- Bug remains

It's amazing how often this happens. It usually takes a good half hour to find what's actually wrong. A good indication that you're close is that your development environment will mysteriously hang or your house wifi will go down. That's the universe putting in its one last shot at wasting a little more of your time before giving up and letting you win.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that has ever happened to me. There can be stuff like caching or hot reloads working/not working in your favour but if the bug is fixed, it's fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > As a software developer, which tasks do you find most annoying in your daily > work?

Having to tell others (contractors, collaborating 3rd parties, etc.) what they shall do and how to do it. We've got an issue tracker and a TODO list and tons of TODO/FIXME/XXX comments in our code base. How about working on those? Pick an issue in the tracker (or if you've found some TODO/FIXME/XXX that hasn't assigned a tracking ID, create a new own) and work on it! Oh, and please don't ask me for a pinned down specification for each and every detail; it takes me more time and work to write down such micromanaging specs, than it'd take me, to write the code myself.

You think meetings are productivity killers? At least you can zone out in those and mentally work problems. People asking to be micromanaged, that's what really grinds my gears.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a developer it seems I am subordinate and I am not privy to any business decisions or direction which is information that is not communicated, and we are often not consulted.

Never do I here, oh we are thinking of going in this direction. What do you think?

Rather it is "We ARE doing this, and we need to get it done in 2 months, how can you make it happen?"

<comment><USER6> > As a developer it seems I am subordinate and I am not privy to any business > decisions or direction which is information that is not communicated, and we > are often not consulted.

Either your company has a bad culture, or your Product Manager doesn't believe in a collaborative process or you are not working for a small enough company. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Waiting. Just in general. Waiting tends to piss me off

...Waiting for tests to run

...Waiting for code to compile

...Waiting for someone to return an email / message / text / whatever

...etc

I probably don't actually spend that much time waiting everyday. But when I do have to sit and wait for something, I go nuts.

<comment><USER8> If you work on or manage Windows machines, then waiting for Windows Updates can really suck. This may not seem directly related to programming, but it can be when you have sandbox virtual machines that are perpetually non-updated after being reverted to previous snapshots, or when you often break operating systems. Virtual machines make for an IT Groundhog Day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fighting to get my estimates accepted. I try as often as possible to give good estimates. This seems to always mean mine are a little longer as I don't give optimistic timelines. I get pushed back to shorten timelines and I'll sit on my head refusing to do so. This is almost always when it comes to dealing with obscure bugs. It's very difficult to give a timeline for those, so after digging around and trying to find the root of the problem (or at least a general direction) I give an estimate of a few days (3-5, sometimes 7) for that. Fighting to have these estimates accepted is painful. It's especially annoying because one is made to feel like long estimates are an indication of slacking off. Everywhere I've been it's the same thing. It feels like a bargaining exercise at your local street bazaar. Not fun. Also, mildly demotivating for a short period of time.

</comment><comment> what-no-tests Building something (with great effort) then tearing it apart because the product team decided to go a different way.

Over and over again.

<comment><USER10> Ugh, you need a new product team if doing that is the norm. It's gonna happen sometimes, but shouldn't all the time. Maybe you can push back on them before getting too far into the builds, force them to think through things a little deeper?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh how many things there are that annoy me. Here are just two:

Number one has to be the idea that software development can be outsourced to save time. It takes the same amount of man-hours to develop the software plus about 40% more to manage the relationship with the outsourcing firm. Then another round of contracts/specifications/budgets/bs to fix the things that weren't in the original spec.

Number two is the idea that some people are just too important to get involved in specifying a product but they'll certainly tell you that you have done it all wrong two days before release. I may be a little bitter about that.

</comment><comment><USER12> Bikeshedding during code reviews

<comment><USER13> What's bikeshedding?

<comment><USER14> LMWTFY [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_trivialit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sitting in meetings that had nothing to do with me

<comment><USER16> Then just don't go to those meetings. Problem solved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Convincing software developers that networks disconnect, hardware fails, and data gets corrupted.

<comment><USER16> What do you mean "networks disconnect" and "hardware fails"? I have no idea what you're talking about.

<comment><USER18> I can give you an example.

I inherited a system which, on a scheduled basis, completed the following, in order:

* Drop a database * Rebuild that database from REST queries

The process took under a second and the "downtime" was acceptable. However, if there was ever a short connectivity outage, or the upstream was down, the result of that was that the database was dropped and inaccessible for 24 hours until the next scheduled run.

I'd put forward that we build a new database _first_ and then, only if successful, perform a swap. Maybe we could implement a retry. But then came the response I knew I was going to see: "Well if your network's not reliable hire competent network admins that's not my problem".

In a sense they were correct, it wasn't their responsibility to ensure the network doesn't ever drop. It was however, their sheer laziness that led to repeated service outages.

<comment><USER19> Nice story.

Reminds me: on a project I was on, we created some tests where we manually pulled the network cable out of some PCs (on a client-server LAN app), to check whether the app at least gave a reasonably appropriate error message instead of just hanging. Fun times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Scrum (especially the estimation/tracking cycle), and the people who inflict it on you

</comment><comment><USER10> Some things here (meetings, bad managers, etc.) are all too true, but not unique to software development/developers!

The most frustrating is when I am completely convinced a change I make is going to resolve some failed tests, and then I run the tests, and something still doesn't work. Or I fix something and cause another problem. I enjoy the challenge of getting everything right, but just feel betrayed when I'm convinced I do it right and I'm wrong.

Can't outsource that, though. What I would love to outsource is the actual writing of the testware. I like thinking up all the test scenarios, but wish I could do a brain dump and have someone else write the testware.

The other thing I wish I could outsource is any documentation creation or review. Probably because I can think a lot faster than I can write, and then also feel like I have to take extra time to document things precisely because I might not be able to have a dialog with whoever is reading the docs.

</comment><comment><USER21> Non-technical direct management.

This tends to include many of the things listed by others here, like not having estimates accepted at face value (because they don't understand development), lack of communication of business goals (because they believe developers just implement, they don't understand "product"), lack of consideration of developers' ideas (see last), deadlines without input from development (because developers will inflate their estimates)... But for some reason, developers can't just learn management, they have to find someone "skilled" from the outside, technical understanding be damned.

</comment><comment><USER22> Dealing with incompetent managers.

</comment><comment><USER23> Content development, Small bug, yeahh something like those things that required some time. And also, image fixation requires more time than it should be lol

</comment><comment><USER24> Requirements churn

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean e.g. requirements that change over time or requirements that get added during the project?

<comment><USER13> Both would be somehwat equally annoying in that they change the scope of the project.

<comment><USER5> Requirements are like deadlines. Made up things to keep us controlled.

<comment><USER25> Requirements keep management controlled, exposing them to the concept that change has cost (manager here).

<comment><USER5> Setting the scope of the work is what is keeping management controlled.

E.g. "In Version 1.0, it will talk to these 3 services only..."

But that is different from 'requirements' which I take it as 'things that are required' and have a non-negotiable connotation about them.

E.g. "It must work with all of our services"

Since it is not know which requirements are actually required and which are BS, it may be better to call requirements 'requested functionality' and what is planned to be delivered 'project scope' and drop the requirements word altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Scrum meetings. Hard to outsource though.

</comment><comment><USER27> Dates and times

</comment><comment><USER28> Encoding issues</comment>


Teacher Tells Off Neil Armstrong for Faking the Moon Landing - <AUTHOR> https://kottke.org/20/06/teacher-tells-off-neil-armstrong-for-faking-the-moon-landing <comment><USER3> An interesting angle I learnt recently that I hadn't considered on why the landings weren't faked: they didn't have the camera technology to do it.

Apparently camera tech at the time for slow motion (for the movement in low gravity) made the ~hour long takes essentially impossible. I hadn't realised that the recordings were single takes, but to slow down to quarter speed, maintaining ~30fps broadcast quality, would require 120fps cameras that didn't exist, and more continuous tape recording than was possible by several orders of magnitude.

We really were in the very early days of video/TV technology, and it wasn't until these technologies improved and we collectively forgot how they were that the theories really started to get going.

[https://youtu.be/_loUDS4c3Cs](https://youtu.be/_loUDS4c3Cs)

<comment><USER4> > than was possible by several orders of magnitude.

Nitpicking here, but it clearly couldn't have been by "several orders of magnitude" since they were using tape that was 1/4th of that for the actual recording.

<comment><USER5> I think the argument is that the landing was broadcast televised (streamed, not filmed).

The linked video seems to compare the "instant replay" drive (rather than a traditional film camera) for the orders of magnitude. The similar comparison of film-to-film seems to have ore to do with splicing and the switchover from one reel to another.

Anyway you look at it, conspiracy theorists will always say "they had 2% of US GDP for a decade... they could have invented any number of technologies to assist with the filming".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The way I look at it, the Soviet Union would have been closely monitoring the moon landing. If they had a reason to believe that it was faked, they wouldn't have hesitated to say so.

<comment><USER7> The Soviet response basically eliminates any conspiracy theory.

While the moon landings obviously were not plastered all over the news media, the Soviets almost universally, although quietly, praised and congratulated the astronauts and NASA on their achievement.

If the landing was faked the response would have been drastically different.

<comment><USER8> Interesting to think that nowadays this might actually happen, i.e. some country or power might actually call the opposing power's achievement a fake, despite knowing it is true.

Back in the day there was a lot less information available for everyone, yet today this seems more likely to happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Buzz Aldrin took a more direct approach with skeptics.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrtye8nhC30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrtye8nhC30)

<comment><USER10> Came here for this.

Don't even have to open it - it's a solid punch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have long believed that the human mind is just a massive machine extremely capable of finding patterns, even when no pattern exists.

It only takes a few stars in the sky for us to see a polygon of a greek hunter or a lion or a scorpion. We quickly forget all of the plethora of times we look at clouds and see no distinct shapes, but the second we see a human face or a dog in the tufts of cloud, we get excited and forget the likelihood of an oasis or mirage.

As soon as we get some hint of signal, our brain insists that it try to rationalize it as a pattern and we must go through a painful process to let our ego down gently if we are not to believe we have found a real "signal in the noise".

</comment><comment><USER11> "[...] [Name Withheld]"

Followed by: "Mr. Whitman, [...]"

Nailed it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > all the evidence circulating the globe [...]

But I thought it was flat?

<comment><USER12> It was flat, until the Elves receded to the West, then it became round.

<comment><USER13> The flattening field projected by the Silmarils disappeared with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> \- A Russian computer vision PHD did a study of the entire Apollo mission footage and prove 100% that the whole thing was made in a studio. The lights, the background, everything prove this fact beyond any doubt. - The story of "oh the 400000 people involved would have spoken" is accepted by people who have never worked in a big company, or on a very big project. Everything is siloed. The number of people seeing the full picture on any endeavor is always very small. All those organisations work in a pyramid way. The one privy and understanding the truth were a very tiny group at the top and we probably don't even know their names. And let's be clear, a number of useful things came out of the people working on the Apollo mission. It was not all about the faking of course. - The story about "the Russians would have known and spoke" does not make sense when you know that at some level, they are no countries ! It well described in numerous places (books, documentaries), that the one really in power are cross border, international etc... See the footage between Medvedev and Obama some years ago. Does it seem like leaders in conflict. At some level, the earth is addressed as one. The countries are artificial constructs. Yes they are wars, they are races for technology etc.... but there exist a level where those things are just part of the divide and conquer, as well as distract from real truths. So some Russians probably knew but would not make any sense to end the phony countries war/conflict. Just think that Eisenhower daughter married a Russian astronauts, and that Werner Von Braun was an ex Nazi. Why isn't this more widely mentioned ? Does it make sense in a context of countries really fighting each other ? - There is this push recently for saying "oh it would have been more simple to really go there than to fake it". How can someone be so brainwashed and stupid to end up with some argument. This people saying that probably do not have kids born in the internet age with mobiles, and flat screen at home etc... Try to explain them we went to the moon 50 years ago before all of that....And don't tell me about the little robot on the surface of Mars, the Moon, or whatever.... - <USER2> deflector story is laughable. Do some research to what the official claim about that is. It's a shocker. Basically the laser signal is supposed to be so faint when back from the moon that they could be picking any random signals and make it appear as the ray of light back from the mirror. It's really an abuse of weakness and ignorance. In his response Armstrong is here typically looking down on the whole fooled population when throwing this argument. Sorry if it's that hard to really accept the whole thing was phony but we really need to grow and move beyond accepting the lies and stop calling names people who did their own search and know what's real. You can be educated, knowledgeable, have a sort of normal life and still fully be aware that no we did not sent military agent hundreds miles away in a rocket to play golf !! no we did not do that and I also doubt Elon Musk sent a Tesla car in space. We have urgent important real problems to tackle and should put all this space distraction to rest for now. We should be considering space once we have managed to really have a full understanding of what is really happening on the ground around us.

<comment> blaser-waffle A 6 hour old account spouting off about how moon landings were faked.

Low effort, IMO.

The serious trolls and professional shills have accounts that are years old and have longer post histories.

<comment><USER14> spouting ? those are facts... ycombinator is testing the level of awareness from its community that's it. But the case has been closed long ago with an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence backed by real proven sound facts ! Sorry if it is hard to accept. Example: [https://www.aulis.com/raytracing_as11.htm](https://www.aulis.com/raytracing_as11.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very clever directing to them to your shills.</comment>


On Anxiety: How Changing Your Mindset Makes All The Difference - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/better-humans/2ef308253e61

<comment><USER2> Everything that happens in the universe, and your life, is controlled by the laws of physics. Trying to stop bad things from happening is like trying to prevent gravity. Control over anything is an illusion. That's how I see it, anyways.</comment>


LogMeIn acquires Lastpass - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lastpass.com/nl/2015/10/lastpass-joins-logmein.html/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10359491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10359491).

</comment><comment><USER3> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10359491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10359491), which has more comments.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10359491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10359491)

This is the same day</comment>


Corona Simulator - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/ <comment><USER2> > "As Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown > University, put it: "The truth is those kinds of lockdowns are very rare and > never effective.""

uh, except... the one we all just watched be successfully implemented in wuhan?

<comment><USER3> Except what was really implemented in Wuhan was really not just quarantine, but was also an _extreme_ form of social distancing, where essentially the whole province of Wuhan was locked down.

<comment><USER4> *Hubei

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing about this sim bothers me. Having points bounce off each other means they migrate more slowly and increases the effective contact graph diameter. Bouncing points aren't meaningful for the system being modeled. Me staying at home doesn't restrict your movements: our decisions are independent.

IMHO he should turn off the collision model. The effect will still be there, but the logistic parameters will be different.

<comment><USER6> Yeah this is good for cells in a blood stream, not humans. Also humans interact with other humans unevenly: you see your family and coworkers more often and for more time than a random barista. Except the barista where you always get your coffee on your lunch break. And then you have social mavens who interact with loads of people. If you work in an office with 15 other people, your social circle is likely on the order of like 100-200 people. If you do public speaking for a living, your social circle is in the thousands. Would be better to simulate it that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I don't get is that we keep hearing quarantine isn't effective, yet it seems to be in China and South Korea: [https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-lockdowns- work-s...](https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-lockdowns-work- statistics-by-country-2020-3?amp)

<comment><USER8> I think it's more of, quarantine isn't economically feasible. But then, things that aren't feasible can often become feasible in different circumstances.

<comment><USER9> Economically it doesn't make much difference. You can either isolate people now or later. The period of isolation will be roughly the same because you have to wait for the virus to exhaust its pool of hosts (in a household). Definitely _politically_ it makes a big difference.

<comment><USER8> Now and later make a HUGE difference economically. Time value of money. Business cash flow. Not to mention, if it turns out to be unnecessary later, later becomes never.

<comment><USER7> The scale of the problem will be so much larger because we aren't doing a quarantine. In an exponentially growing virus, one single day makes a large difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The thing is, with these models. Everyone will eventually catch the virus and either dies off or recovers. If this happens in real life, the consequences are dire and catastrophic.

Social distancing and avoiding large groups will obviously save lives and we flatten the curve to allow for treatment of individuals that will require hospitalization. But once the novelty of social distancing wears off. Will the number of cases where people get affected explode once again?

The question is when will this virus go away? (if ever). Will everybody catch it eventually? Will the panic fade and Corona be just another (and much deadlier) strain of the flu?

<comment><USER11> That's actually not correct, and the point of the simulations is to show that. By social distancing, you reduce the likelihood of everyone getting the disease. The use of social distancing brings the probability that everyone gets infected at some point closer to 0.0 but doesn't make it 0.0. It's possible to have a result where you either have people who were never infected, or ones who are fully recovered.

That's what they're driving at.

<comment><USER12> The major error with the model used in the article is that, in real life, all the points will eventually start to move again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice simulations. But I believe that using a population of only 200 individuals might be giving misleading results because it enters too fast the logistic limit part of the curve before you can experience the early exponential part. [https://www.dummies.com/education/science/environmental- scie...](https://www.dummies.com/education/science/environmental-science/the- environmental-science-of-population-growth-models/)

<comment><USER14> Yep. Would be nice if they let the user play around with the parameters. Might not be feasible to animate thousands of objects in a browser though.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. The most, at best, could be 1,000, but will that be enough? This project was likely built on a tight deadline and getting it out quickly onto multiple devices was the goal.

If someone has a better approach, I'd love to hear it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The comparison between social distancing and quarantine has 0 sense. In Italy, we tried distancing, but without strict measures, people won't listen and the virus kept spreading. You can't enforce something like that without police action

<comment><USER17> We're there in Seattle right now exact same failure mode

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There seems to be a very well defined separation between those who have a relatively high chance of becoming critically ill, and those who have a very low chance. Depending on what you are optimizing for it could be more important to keep those groups separated.

I wonder if having known that for weeks now has lead to better social distancing between those groups, even if interactions within the low risk group has stayed rather high. Could lead to a lot of spread with very little detection because we largely only test for and catch the really bad cases.

</comment><comment><USER19> My understanding of a lot of countries approaches is that they're not trying to minimise the total number of people that have or will be infected, but they're trying to minimise the maximum number of people infected at a time (to ensure that healthcare is still available to everybody that needs it). In these simulations, that would correspond to drawing some horizontal line across the chart and trying to keep the orange under there the whole time.

I'm not sure if the long-term outlook is "we're all going to get it" like the flu, or we're trying to stave as much of it off before a vaccine is widely available.

<comment><USER20> > trying to minimise the maximum number of people infected at a time (to > ensure that healthcare is still available to everybody that needs it).

It is so, at least in Italy. Basically they told us the reason of these measure is to spread the cases over a larger time frame... but nobody has said it's to reduce the number of cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can I just comment on the (IMO bad) choice of colors? It's hard to see the difference of sick and recovered, especially in the big square.

Other than that, nice simulations. :)

<comment><USER22> Indeed, the contrast is low and probably not very accessible. Their design system should consider that so it's not up to some designer or developer to decide case by case during crunch time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> >"Recovered person can neither transmit simulitis to a healthy person nor become sick again after coming in contact with a sick person."

The assumption is wrong. There are several cases of recovered patients getting coronavirus again. This virus is similar to HIV. [https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/japan-woman- covid-...](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/japan-woman- covid-19-coronavirus-second-time-recovered-12474880)

<comment><USER24> From the reports I've seen, they have tested positive again which is different than getting it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think this pandemic will reveal many facets on the effectiveness of quarantines/lock downs.

These measures always have a political meaning, because they effectively create a separation between those included and those excluded from the quarantine. Such a political move will pressure some politicians toward implementing these lockdowns if they are targeted toward foreigners and away from them if implemented toward a domestic subgroup.

It may be easy to ban travel from Europe, but very hard to ban travel from Washington state.

</comment><comment><USER26> The people who don't understand this stuff, aren't failing to understand it because no one wrote about it. It's because they are not white collar or college graduates and are not likely to read The Washington Post in the first place. My father is the perfect example of this. He's dyslexic and so he struggles to read detailed journalism and gets all of his information from cable TV news like Fox News.

<comment><USER27> There's really not a 1:1 relationship between "college" and "white collar", and "curiosity".

Plenty of people with their fancy college degree are incurious, and plenty of people that barely made it out of high school are curious.

It's an appealing shorthand, but it's not a great one.

<comment><USER26> Obviously there's not a 1:1 relationship. And I never made such claim. I am saying that the people who read detailed journalism tend to have a higher reading level, e.g. they work in a job where reading and analysis is a daily part of their work, this would be considered white collar.

Please don't put words in my mouth when I never said there was a 1:1 relationship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can't view due to cookiewall, is this an article _about_ a simulator somewhere (that someone could link) or is the simulator their own?

<comment><USER15> Why don't you support the paper and buy a subscription?

<comment><USER28> Because it isn't nearly worth $90 to me, I barely ever read any of their articles.

It's also not something I can look at before deciding whether I want to pay for it, not like a product in a shop or something I can order and return (unused) for 14 days. If paying 50 cents for this article was possible, I would have no idea what I'm getting (beyond the title "Corona Simulator") or whether it's worth it, though a one-time 50 cents charge would definitely be more considerable than a recurring and more expensive subscription.

<comment><USER15> Where do you get your news?

<comment><USER28> General news? Most things that actually impact my life, people (colleagues, friends, family) will tell me about it; the rest mostly passes me by. Some comes from HN, and when there is a big story I'll sometimes browse to nos.nl, but that's about it.

Tech news I keep up with at Tweakers.net, where I have a subscription. Well, and HN again of course, but a lot of that is personal blogs, show/ask HN posts, and a minority of what I click is research/tech news which then breaks down further into many different outlets.

I also use Reddit but the closest sub I have to news is r/globaltalk, so that's mostly people talking about what's going on near them and not journalists that need to be paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem we're seeing is that too many people are moving. Seattle was maybe 25% slower Sunday than normal. That's not enough, people aren't respecting social distancing or even the 250 gathering limits. Seattle pd is failing to enforce as well.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a great intuitive set of models. It also suggests scenarios where a poorly implemented quarantine could make things worse by intensifying contact and increasing spread between those isolated together, and then releasing everyone while still contagious. It drives home that if people are forcibly kept in close quarters for quarantine, its essential to see the full time period through. If resources might eventually wear thin enough that a quarantine may not be sustainable, it's probably better not to do it at all.

<comment><USER30> I think it illustrates what happened on the 'cruise ship' (i.e. close proximity, clustered) quarantines, but it doesn't very well explain what real, individual quarantine would do.

<comment><USER31> What was interesting on the cruise ships is how few got it. Of the 3,681 tested, only 696 had it - after a month of close quarters. That's under 20%.

Doesn't that suggest it doesn't spread particularly easily?

All in all, 1% of those that caught it died, and cruise ships skew towards older people.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Do You Do Mac OS X Maintenance? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Here's a nice checklist osxdaily: [http://osxdaily.com/2012/03/04/mac- maintenance-tips/](http://osxdaily.com/2012/03/04/mac-maintenance-tips/)

Most of the time, I just clean up my desktop and reorganize files. Also, at least once a month, I simply navigate in the finder and delete old, barely used and unneeded files and apps.

If I find my Mac to be significantly slow, I backup files and apps I only need, and do a clean install of macOS.

</comment><comment><USER3> Onyx has always been a great go-to-tool for me. [http://www.titanium.free.fr/onyx.html](http://www.titanium.free.fr/onyx.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Daisy disk is nifty for figuring out what's eating my disk space.</comment>


O(n) Sorting Algorithm: Quantum Bogosort - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathnews.uwaterloo.ca/Issues/mn11103/QuantumBogoSort.php

<comment><USER2> Some programmers on 4chan came up with a "Sleep sort" algorithm and then proceeded to optimize it, complete with example code:

[http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1295544154](http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1295544154)

It essentially spawns a new thread for every item in the array, sleeps for an amount of time that scales with the item's value, and then prints out that item. So it's O(n + timeScale * $biggest_input)

Pretty funny / entertaining if taken lightly :P

<comment><USER3> That seems like a ridiculous implementation of a quite reasonable algorithm. Instead of spreading them out through time, you can spread the values out through space. Assume you know that you elements are all positive integers less than 100 (or can be mapped to such). Allocate an array of length 100. In O(n) time, you can read through your unsorted list, and copy each element to the appropriate location in the array. Then you can read through the array and print out the values in order.

<comment><USER4> That sounds suspiciously like an insert sort.

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

<comment><USER3> Similar but asymptotically different. In insertion sort, if your partialy sorted list is [1,5], and the next element to insert is a two, you would scan the list until you arrive at the five, which. In the system I described the partialy sorted list would be represented as [1,_,_,_,5], and you would update the second element so it would be [1,2,_,_,5].

EDIT: After thinking about it, you could do the insertion step in O(1) time if you use a linked list instead of an array. The part where insertion sort gets its log(n) factor is in scanning the list, which can take (on average) no less than log(n) time.

tantalor is correct in identifying this algorithm as pigeonhole sort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading into this topic a while ago. Here is a relevant Wikipedia article. I, for one, look forward to the day when we all can have all our problems solved by destroying the universe.

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

<comment><USER6> Hahahaha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the time-space complexity of destroying the universe?

<comment><USER8> Time O(1). Space O(n).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More information about bogosort: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort)

</comment><comment><USER9> I coded up a quick implementation of this in python, but in testing I found that after the algorithm was done I actually wanted a shuffled list.

</comment><comment><USER10> I may not understand quantum computing properly, but would not this approach require N entangled qubits? If no, can someone explain how it would function on less than N qubits, for example 1? If it does require N qubits...I can imagine a classical solution with O(n) and slightly less ridiculous hardware requirements.

<comment><USER11> I think it requires N*log N un-entangled randomly initialized qubits. Please correct me if I'm wrong...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is your Gmail spam filter too aggressive? - <AUTHOR>

I've been alerted by one of my clients who uses Google Apps that they are missing a lot of emails. I went looking and found all of them in the spam folder. This prodded me to check my Gmail spam folder and it really had a lot of false positives in there. A quick Twitter search reveals many people who noticed the same behavior starting around the beginning of May.<p>Have you noticed the Gmail spam filter being too aggressive as well? <comment><USER2> I receive a lot of emails and always try to zero it out along with the spam folder (I use both gmail and google apps for business email) and generally find the spam folder 99.9% spot on. It almost never accidentally spam the wrong mail. I probably get somewhere around 300 emails per day give or take.</comment>


San Fran Muni's new logo is a clone - <AUTHOR> http://blog.weareakta.com/2012/06/we-are-flattered-really-but/

<comment><AUTHOR> If anyone knows anyone at SFMTA or Method, we would love to speak to them! :)</comment>


DARPA's cheetah robot is now faster than Usain Bolt - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqpO58x7vuE&feature=youtu.be

<comment><USER2> Robotics aside, "Usain Bolt" is the most sublimely perfect name for a runner I have ever heard. On reflection, such a perfect name can't be an accident -- I think he must have gotten it from Central Casting.

The runner-up in the perfect name contest (about names that perfectly fit professions) is "Carter Burden", the name of a New York City politician I knew from the 1960s:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/24/nyregion/carter-burden- pro...](http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/24/nyregion/carter-burden-progressive- patrician-54-dies.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm)

Third place goes to Hale Champion (third place only because it's too far over the top):

[http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Reporter-political- fig...](http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Reporter-political-figure-Hale- Champion-dies-3286072.php)

"Carter Burden"? "Hale Champion"? These names aren't accidents! It's all part of a grand plan! :)</comment>


GUIX: Reproducible builds – a means to an end - <AUTHOR> http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=8407 <comment><USER2> Typo in submission title: It's Guix, not GUIX. Guix is not an acronym.</comment>


North Korea Missile Appears to Have Flown Over Japan, Abe Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-28/north-korea-fires-missile-yonhap-reports <comment><USER2> Does anyone ever wonder if these missiles run their path due to glitches/malfunctions in the code rather than what's instructed by the operator? It's just hard for me to fathom why a country would _intentionally_ fire missiles at other countries, especially when it's a battle they cannot win.

<comment><USER3> North Korea is absolutely at, or very near, a strategic position wherein attacking better-armed foes is a winning strategy. Consider:

1\. NK's economy is in shambles. The regime has almost nothing to lose.

2\. NK's regime does not care about human life (as evidenced by abuses against the people of NK). They would have no qualms about killing many many foreign civilians.

3\. NK's populace/military would either not know about such an attack, would be convinced by state media that it was a justified attack on a military target, or would not be in a position to do anything about it.

4\. Every country which NK _has_ threatened (US, Japan, SK) is in all ways the opposite of the above: economically robust; government/military respecting of human life (of course there is room for debate there); populace respecting of human life and wary of war.

That means that any attack from NK against one of the above countries plays out as follows:

1\. NK obliterates a population center. It has now demonstrated a capable threat.

2\. NK makes demands (food, money, land, autonomy, whatever).

3\. Victim country (say Japan) can either retaliate with precision strikes, retaliate in kind, retaliate with massive force, do nothing, or give in to demands.

3.a. Retaliating with precision strikes takes too long. NK launches another devastating attack. It is clearly not an option for the victim to lose another population center.

3.b. Retaliating in kind would be unacceptable to the government and populace of the victim country and the world at large. And if it were, it would not be worth the chance of a second attack from NK.

3.c. Retaliating with massive force (the "Trump" option) is absolutely not an option. Like the previous response, it would be completely unacceptable to the rest of the world, but most importantly, you would now be in a war with China who has to contend with a flood of refugees from a destroyed country.

3.d. Do nothing. Another city gets destroyed. NK is desperate, and there are lots of cities it can blow up until it gets its way.

3.e. Give in to demands. This is the only outcome that is all-around tenable. NK is happy, and further massive loss of human life is prevented.

NK is in an even _better_ position if they can win their demands by merely demonstrating _capability_ of destroying – or accidentally destroying – a city (e.g. by launching missiles _over_ Japan), because they can repeat that trick more frequently than by _actually_ destroying a city.

<comment><USER4> I've wondered if the best strategy might be to flood them with material goods. Just an absolute torrent of everything they could want.

Or maybe do insane things like put really nice billion dollar ships offshore and blow them up once a month.

Somehow demonstrate the asymmetry to a larger portion of the population.

<comment><USER5> and then they tell their population that you're giving them the material goods because they defeated you in a war, and that they blew up that ship.

<comment><USER4> Not one ship, dozens of them, month after month after month.

But that was mostly a silly suggestion, the idea is to try to think of a way to make the idea that things are better elsewhere more available to the broader population. No idea if it is possible, but I think trying to do that might be more humane than ever harsher economic sanctions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For context, it should be noted that it's not the first time a NK test missile crosses over into a neighbour's air space, see [1] for recent example, although I'm pretty sure they did the same thing a few year ago.

So basically: nothing new.

[1] [http://safeairspace.net/information/north- korea/](http://safeairspace.net/information/north-korea/)

<comment><USER7> While they often violate other countries' air space, this is the first time he has flown a missile OVER a Japanese land mass. This is a major big deal to the Japanese. Source: I'm in Tokyo right now... :/

<comment><USER8> Were you (or citizens in general) actually able to see the missile crossing the sky?

<comment><USER7> The missile crossed over Hokkaido, which is the northern large island in the archipelago. I doubt it would have been visible from Tokyo. I don't know whether anyone saw it up there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In Japan, I think that I couldn't do anything if missile landed. Because J Alert, alerting system that announce emergency for Japannese people, alerted missile fired at 6:02 am and informed passing throgh hokkaido at 6:06 am. We cannot do anything while missile passed through japnese sky.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sometimes I wonder, how it is to be an engineer working for a crazy dictator.

I would guess you get some special privileges, you are not tied to any regulations but your constrains are budget and supply chain efficiency.

The dictator does not need to explain things to the public, does not need to obey the law so you can have a crazy idea about that machine you want to build and if you can convince one guy, you have it all.

<comment><USER11> I don't know any specific examples, but I wonder how much of our knowledge today came from people working under these conditions. It's terrible, but do we now retain knowledge learned from people experimenting on humans under Hitler, for example? How many warfare techniques were developed by kings or other absolute leaders asking engineers to build novel weapons with no constraints?

<comment><USER12> Thanks to the Nazis, I know my maximum time to survive in freezing water is about eight minutes. That can't be the only example.

<comment><USER13> That's really not correct.

[http://gcaptain.com/cold_water/](http://gcaptain.com/cold_water/)

<comment><USER14> Interesting find!

I also did some recreational ice swimming (and read much more about other maniacs who do it regularly): so I can totally see how hypothermia does not kick in as quickly as people think it would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So I'm a little confused, what's all this talk about anti-missile systems? Are they even real or just seriously over-stated? If you look at where Hokkaido is I feel it's hard to believe that some protection system wouldn't activate when the missile lands on the eastern side if the island.

<comment><USER6> The anti-missile system being talked about recently is in South Korea, not Japan.

<comment><USER16> No, Japan is supposed to have some too.

<comment><USER17> Wonder why the did intercept, that has to have been a lively debate

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, is Missile Defense vaporware? How come these systems are always part of the conversation until there are real missiles to stop? Am I just missing all of the successful takedowns?

<comment><USER19> The Patriot Anti-Missile system had plenty of successes and a few failures broadcast on live TV during the first Gulf War.

But I think the idea is to only use them when the launched missile is on a trajectory to hit a target you want to defend. First, it costs money. Second, each time a defensive missile is deployed, there is inherently some information leakage about the defensive capability. So if you're going to make such a disclosure, you want it to count.

<comment><USER20> Patriots in the Gulf War were pretty good at shooting down incoming Scud missiles - but Scuds are fairly slow short-range missiles, with a range of ~200-700km depending on the version.

This was probably a Hwasong-12, with a range of ~5,000km. It would be a much more difficult target to hit, especially at maximum altitude or on terminal approach (where it would be traveling very fast indeed).

Patriots have gotten much better since the first Gulf War and we have other systems designed to shoot down ballistic missiles, but it's still a very hard problem that we've not completely solved. It seems likely that the reason we've not shot down a North Korean test missile is that there is a high enough possibility of failure that it wouldn't be worth the risk.

<comment><USER19> I'm sure there is great optimization possible from 80's tech, which out of computational necessity, communicated by satellite to mainframes at NORAD. And if you think about it, a defensive missile doesn't have to outrun an offensive one. It just needs to be in the right place at the right time. It doesn't have to have pinpoint accuracy either; errors can be corrected by sizing and/or clustering the defensive payload.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It seems like the Kim regime is backed into a corner where only the capability to launch nuclear weapons will ensure that they aren't wiped off the face of the planet.

<comment><USER22> It's easy to mock the DPRK, but its actions are perfectly rational. The leadership has realised that nukes are necessary to remain in power.

<comment><USER23> That seems to be canonically false, however, due to the fact that they had the metaphorical "gun to S. Korea's Head" long before they had nukes, and despite bragging for years about their intentions the international community was still very limited in their actions.

Nukes seem peripheral to the core capability of just being able to do enough damage before you can be stopped that anyone is afraid to engage you. (to provide an example; if you watch the news running up to the iraq invasion, many outlets were _very convinced_ we'd see WMD used against us, but that didn't seem to be the primary or even tangential cause for hesitation at the time.)

<comment><USER24> It's not just about how much damage you can cause, it's about who you can cause it to. At some point, if the only damage N.K. can do is to S.K., a third party might choose to take action against N.K. before they have the capability to hurt that third party.

Put in real terms, if the U.S. strongly believed that N.K. would be able to deliver a nuclear warhead to the pacific northwest accurately in the next year, a preemptive strike by the U.S. that causes massive casualties in S.K. in retaliation might go from unthinkable to "a hard decision that needs careful thought." to those in power in the U.S.

<comment><USER25> No, they could nuke China. Even if they don't they could send hundreds of thousands or millions of refugees poring over the border.

There is a reason China plays ball with them.

<comment><USER24> I'm confused what this has to do with what I wrote? I'm not sure I'm interpreting it correctly, as I can't seem to see how it applies to my own point. I was addressing "That seems to be canonically false, however, due to the fact that they had the metaphorical "gun to S. Korea's Head" long before they had nukes".

I'm just noting that "ability to cause a lot of damage to ally" and "ability to cause a lot of damage to _you_ " can have different weights in the decision process.

<comment><USER25> I see your point. I read your comment as 'worst case they can only attack S. Korea' but re-reading it I clearly missed the point.

> I'm just noting that "ability to cause a lot of damage to ally" and "ability > to cause a lot of damage to you" can have different weights in the decision > process.

Definitely true. But at this point with so much made in China, Korea, and Japan I'd expect that any big political disruption in East Asia would end up being extremely disruptive to the US even though we wouldn't (in this example) be under attack ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Japan PM needs a strong show of support and response to North Korea from Trump and the US.

</comment><comment><USER27> Don't most countries (especially the neighbors to those with violent tendencies) have automatic defenses against missiles? If Japan has such a system, did it fail to trigger? I just find it very weird that a missile would be able to pass across a country uninterrupted.

<comment><USER28> Shooting down a missile with another missile is very difficult, especially if it's an ICBM moving at full speed.

Couple that with the fact that Hokkaido is as far north as you can get in Japan (as far from Tokyo and other major population centers further south, so there may not be missile defense systems there. Israel's Iron Dome only has a range of 70km, so I doubt, even if Japan had better technology, that they'd have one of these set up everywhere across the islands.

Being that Hokkaido is so far north, if you look on a map it's very very close to Russia. Not knowing the exact trajectory that it took, it's plausible that it went over Japanese airspace but was obviously not on a trajectory to impact the island itself. The article doesn't say where it was headed, just that it was in Japanese "airspace", and that it landed off the coast.

So plenty of reasons why it wasn't shot down. I'll add one more: the last thing you want to do is try to shoot down a test rocket and fail. Because if you fail on the test, the enemy will be more willing to believe you'd fail on the real thing, too.

<comment><USER29> NHK just reported on TV it passed directly over Hokkaido, but landed 1200km straight east of Hokkaido in the sea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe North Korea shorted the market yesterday? Missile over Japan... Market down now. Coincidence? This might be an easier way to get money than asking for aid

</comment><comment><USER31> > Several missiles were fired by North Korea, NHK cites Japan's government as > saying.

> Missile likely landed off eastern coast of Hokkaido, NHK says.

Thank goodness.

</comment><comment><USER32> Someone posted this on Twitter: "Alarm from JP Gov. 'A missile was fired from North Korea. Please evacuate to a sturdy building or basement.'"

[https://twitter.com/Chihokomoriya/status/902276766705664000](https://twitter.com/Chihokomoriya/status/902276766705664000)

</comment><comment><USER33> the danger in this world has always been the day irrational leaders of insular states gain the ability to affect any other nation at will.

the issue seems to be, no one wants to be the one that is preemptive in fear of being blamed for setting the whole thing off.

long term is, how does the world protect itself from such as this? is there any true protection possible at this time. Just as the USSR and the USA had too much to lose during the Cold War the US and China, if not Russia, in the mix, all have too much to lose, but smaller states or failing states are a danger. Pretty sure we can list out states of increasing risk. Can any of them be permanent bought off or that a stupid fantasy?

<comment><USER34> Can someone explain why it's so hard to build a missile shield around the US? We've been at it for decades and it's still not reliable. Meanwhile, Israel has the Iron Dome. I know we're a lot bigger, but I feel like this should still be possible, yes?

<comment><USER35> We have one, but intercepting long range missiles is very hard.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground- Based_Midcourse_Defense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground- Based_Midcourse_Defense)

There are also lots of political issues around weaponizing space and deploying interceptors where we would need them. The US had to withdraw from a treaty with Russia in order to build the current system: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- Ballistic_Missile_Treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- Ballistic_Missile_Treaty)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Shouldn't the title be _OVER_ Japan since it is reported to have gone over Japan?

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't get it. Why would North Korea do something this provocative? Surely they realize that the US president is unstable and would be more than capable of lobbing a missile their way out of anger and/or for ratings?

<comment><USER38> Because they don't believe he is that stupid. After all they did not harm anyone in this "test". Trump cannot claim retaliation if he or an ally was not attacked.

<comment><USER39> Trump has said, his own words, that threats are sufficient to provoke retaliation, not merely an attack. Whether this is sincere is still an open question. But is insincerity useful? Because what Kim is successfully doing if there's no response is proving Trump's insincerity. And if an attack is provoked, he's proving Trump's bad judgment. Either way, it's bad for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm surprised it was not shot down. This will probably be the final nail in the coffin for Shinzo Abe.

If you're interested, odds are the next Prime Minister will be Yuriko Koike.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does the US have a THAAD installation in South Korea? If so, is it possible that the THAAD missiles launched and missed these? If they weren't launched, why not?

<comment><USER42> The US reportedly knew beforehand about the launch: [https://twitter.com/nktpnd/status/902286999855476736](https://twitter.com/nktpnd/status/902286999855476736)

But besides that, THAAD is for the terminal phase, so that'd not really work well for something that landed ~1000km east of Hokkaido.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> fwiw a friend of mine worked in this field during the cold war. He told me that the Soviets would routinely test their missiles (as did the US) by test launching a randomly picked rocket from the fleet. The difference was the US always launched from Vendenberg whereas the Soviets would just launch from whatever silo the missile was in. Not so different from this scenario really.

<comment><USER13> The US and Soviets usually notified each other in advance of ballistic missile tests in order to prevent unpleasant misunderstandings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Well, when they finally blow a major city to smithereens, let nobody say that it took them by surprise.

</comment><comment><USER45> Has CNN started the countdown?

</comment><comment><USER46> Someone is getting bombed to hell...

<comment><USER47> Statistically unlikely. It may not even make political sense to do so. Send Un some Scotch, wheat, and rice - he will settle down for a nap.

<comment><USER46> >Statistically unlikely

You forget that the US is run by someone that makes policy 140 characters at a time and is proud to be "the most militaristic person there is".

So while I agree with your Scotch plan being better I still think they're getting bombed to hell.

<comment><USER47> I'm kinda old. Trump is president, not dictator. He doesn't scare me. He talks a lot, and I don't agree with much if what he says, but he's just a public face to a country that had been running for more than two centuries.

At this moment in time, I see bombing as being unlikely. The Norks leaders have been batshit insane since before I was born, and I was hatched in the 50s.

<comment><USER39> Pretty much the sole basis for considering DPRKs leaders crazy is the Kim family's ridiculous rants. The rants use weird language, and insincere threats.

And so now the U.S. president is modeling that behavior: Weird language (fire and fury) and it seems designed to be insincere, and just for laughs. It factually hasn't changed the calculus of KJU.

<comment><USER47> At risk of offending, I don't believe Trump is modeling that behavior. I don't think his rants are ridiculous, meaning that I believe there's a (sane?) reason behind them.

I feel I need to stress that Trump doesn't scare me. I don't believe he is dumb, I believe he is a fan of gamesmanship. I don't think he is insane. I don't think he is going to cause society to collapse. He scares me exactly none.

I also, unfortunately, need to add that I didn't vote for him and don't particularly approve of him. I'm just not even remotely afraid of him.

I suspect you see what you want to see and draw similarities where there aren't any to worry about. For as much as the politicians change, we keep trudging on. Truly, you'll be alright. It's very unlikely that things will change in a meaningful fashion. We are very much on a trend towards better, and have been for millennia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The U.S. government is in disarray (to understate it) and is in a moment of weakness. I am sure Pyongyang knows this and is testing the waters to see what it can get away with. Will a meaningful, competent retaliation come?

Maybe they went this far because all the previous probings confirmed the weakness. How much further will they go? Who else will come out of the woodwork and start strutting around now that nobody has the will or know-how to stop them?

<comment><USER38> This hypothesis doesn't really make sense. Why would NK want to see what it can get away with? All they need to do is show to their enemies that they have the capability to cause incredible loss of life and they will achieve their goal of staying in power. They don't actually need to cause actual loss of life to do so. Actually performing a missile strike for example in Japan is not in their own interest because once they step over a certain line it's game over.

<comment><USER39> _[Kim Jong Un] has said things that are horrific. And with me he's not getting away with it. He got away with it for a long time, between him and his family. He's not getting away with it. This is a whole new ballgame. He's not going to be saying those things, and he's certainly not going to be doing those things._ \- Trump, barely two weeks ago.

The hypothesis makes a lot of sense, because merely proving Trump's insincerity, and that nothing has actually changed policy wise, has intrinsic value. DPRK did such a missile test in 2009, to much deserved outcry, but there was no escalating response. But this is supposed to be a whole new ballgame.

So is it a new ballgame? Or was that insincere?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> North Koreans are the build an accurate rocket like the British build a reliable car. They were probably aiming for Seoul.

I don't feel bad making a wisecrack since there isn't a substantive story about this on the handful of news outlets I checked.

<comment><USER24> > I don't feel bad making a wisecrack since there isn't a substantive story > about this on the handful of news outlets I checked.

This story ends with " _Developing..._ ", so not having a substantive story might be more a factor of it being a very recent development rather than it being poorly reported or not worth reporting. I'm not sure that's a good metric by which to judge whether it's okay to joke about, at least in the early stages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> They crossed airspace. Nowhere do I read that they were aimed at land, or any place with people. This particular source (Bloomberg) is most sensational of them all (comparing to nu.nl, Al Jazera and Reuters), but they all agree that it only crossed airspace and dropped into the ocean.

I remember reports of Russia's fighter jets crossing (I think) Finland's airspace, which were explained as "one nation testing another's response time and alertness, common events even in peacetime". This was back when there were more Russia-related tensions (the Ukraine annexation thing). I wouldn't be surprised if North Korea is doing that with Japan's airspace.

Flagged for (1) picking the least clear source available (can happen by accident) and (2) editing the title from "appears to have passed over" to "appears to have fired towards" (that's definitely sensationalizing it).

<comment><USER51> Russian aircraft semi-regularly test British air response times.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Cappuccino-like framework in JavaScript, here is my start on "Atlas" - <AUTHOR> http://nodestep.hokuasoftware.com/ib/

<comment><USER2> Why call it the exact same name as the very-similar-but-not-the-same Cappucino/Objective-J IDE product from 280 North?

Even though 280 North's IDE named Atlas is now defunct, think of all the google-search confusion that will result. It'd be kind of like naming a new GNUStep Objective-C IDE for Linux "ProjectBuilder".

<comment><AUTHOR> It wont be called Atlas. Right now Im just relating it to Atlas, which like you said is defunct. Im just in the early stages of developing the framework and tools and am looking for feedback.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I see. Hence the quotes, sorry, I should have gotten that.

I developed some pretty complex apps using Cappuccino and Atlas, before Motorola bought them and shitcanned it. But even before that happened, I stopped using Atlas, and I think there are probably a lot of lessons about how not to make a GUI-builder-IDE-like-thing that one could derive from Atlas (and a lot of similar projects). Doing the GUIs in code actually ended up being a lot easier.

Smart guides and drag and drop are great when they work, but infuriating when they don't snap to the right coordinates, and the inspectors don't let you edit all the properties you need.

My advice/feature request for you and anybody contemplating a similar project is to have some part of your GUI builder that lets the user get 'close to the metal', such that in cases where the GUI to build your GUIs isn't yet smart/sophisticated enough to do what they need, they can directly edit the underlying representation of the GUI objects (which kind implies that it is some kind of human readable textual format)/

E.g., if under the hood your GUI definition is a big JSON structure, have an 'Advanced' tab where you can directly edit that JSON, so that the user can edit literally every single property of the objects when they need to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. You are right, each object is serialized as a JSON structure (freeze dried) and then instantiated when the GUI loads. Definitely that JSON should be editable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome! Are you going to rebuild Atlas? Is this going to work with Cappuccino?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I am going to rebuild Atlas, but not in Cappuccino, in a new JavaScript-only (no Objective-J) framework im calling cupertino.js. Just looking for feedback on the idea right now.

<comment><USER3> What will your strategy to be to associate widgets to code? Are you going to have target/action and outlet things you can drag to separately displayed controller source code like with Interface Builder?</comment></comment></comment>


BP loses laptop with 13,000 Gulf claimants names - <AUTHOR> http://www.securecomputing.net.au/News/252882,bp-loses-laptop-with-13000-gulf-claimants-names.aspx <comment><AUTHOR> Some more detail here[1]. I have to ask, why was the data held on an unencrypted laptop?

What penalties do BP face in the US over this? Anyone?

[1] - [http://www.npr.org/2011/03/30/134963073/bp-laptop-with- claim...](http://www.npr.org/2011/03/30/134963073/bp-laptop-with-claimants- personal-data-disappears)</comment>


Forbes forces readers to turn off ad blockers, promptly serves malware - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, I de-minified/de-obfuscated Forbes' ad block detection to see how they're doing it - they really try to make to tricky difficult to prevent and came up with a manual filter to add that prevents their adblock detection from identifying if adblock is on or not.

I would post it but it's on my other computer and AdBlock must not sync its customisations.</comment>


Reddit was a misinformation hotspot in 2016 election, study says - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/reddit-election-misinformation-2016-research/#click=https://t.co/JVg7Yq6g9o <comment><USER2> Reddit is a misinformation hotspot right now. It's a tabloid where the most decisive and sensational tidbits rise to the top.

</comment><comment><USER3> Political content on reddit has always been trash. The reason everyone wanted spez to create a politics subreddit back when only admins could create subreddits wasn't so they could talk politics, it was so they could unsubscribe from it.

<comment><USER4> This is true for most groupings. A Facebook group which I mod made a similar decision to create a sub group for politics and ban politics in the main group.

Worked amazingly well at keeping the vitriol and nastiness down</comment></comment>


Adding NetlifyCMS to Your VuePress Website - <AUTHOR> https://blog.michaelbrooks.dev/adding-netlifycms/ <comment><USER2> Much to my surprise and embarrassment after setting a few websites up with netlify CMS on gitlab CI/CD using vuepress, can't write/edit posts from android mobile. Doesn't work at all. Since 2017

[https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/issues/441#issuecomme...](https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/issues/441#issuecomment-350426891)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is really disappointing and I wonder what's taking them so long, I hope they fix it soon.

<comment><USER3> I believe it's mostly Slate that's holding things up, but partial Android support (8 & 9) arrived in June [0], so things are slowly progressing.

[0] [https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/pull/2853](https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/pull/2853)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> NetlifyCMS is great for blogs. Anything more complex, I wouldn't recommend.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious. What would you recommend for more complex stuff?

<comment><USER6> For static sites Forestry.io is good. The editor experience is great and you can do clever stuff with front matter - including adding a component based layout builder.

[https://forestry.io/blog/blocks-give-your-editors-the- power-...](https://forestry.io/blog/blocks-give-your-editors-the-power-to- build-pages/)

<comment><USER7> Co-creator here. We just launched some starters if you want to kick the tires. [https://forestry.io/starters/](https://forestry.io/starters/)

The UI for these starters doesn't show off advanced stuff, but click on "Front Matter" and add complex fields/groups/blocks to get a feel for the UI.</comment></comment></comment></comment>