Ask HN: Where to find open source libraries? - <AUTHOR>

Where do you look for open source code (classes and routines) before coding your own?
I check github, then sourceforge, then roll my own.
Am I missing any other major sites?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> <http://freshmeat.net/> \- the biggest catalog you can find of released open source software, be it libraries or full blown. Strictly speaking, it is Linux/Unix software -- but almost all of it is open source.

Like with commercial software, projects vary greatly in their quality and maturity; but freshmeat also collects release history with changes per release, which would give you a good idea of how well maintained, and how responsive project maintainers are.

</comment><comment><USER3> Generally speaking, I don't look. If I'm not already aware of a library, it's probably not mature enough for me to be willing to trust it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Depending upon the area you are searching, I would turn to that community.

For example, Rails developers might turn to <http://rubygems.org/> for Rails gems. I tried to replicate this for the CakePHP framework by building CakePackages (<http://cakepackages.com/>) .

Outside of a framework, try searching Google Groups and asking on IRC for places where code is indexed for your specific language/development stack. I find pestering the framework/language core developers is an easy way to find out the information I need, and they are usually happy to answer questions as long as I document and answer those questions for others later (blogging, updating documentation, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER5> I usually use Google. This will cover blog posts or forum postings, too, which surprisingly often feature announcements of good libraries without any presence on sf.net or similar.

</comment><comment><USER6> A library to do what? Maybe we can help.

You typically don't go looking for libraries, you would have a certain task in mind and then use your google fu to look for that specific term which would hopefully turn you into some of them.

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://planet-source-code.com> has been kind to me in the past, although it seems to be lower quality than most.

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://code.google.com/> has been a good place for me.</comment>


Sony, SanDisk working on 2TB Memory Sticks - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10153657-1.html?tag=mncol;title

<comment><USER2> the way I read the article it's more about a format upgrade that will allow capacities _up to_ 2TB. Correct me if I'm wrong please...</comment>


A List of alternatives to Spotify - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/04/14/6-alternatives-to-spotify-you-should-check-out/ <comment><USER2> I used Mog for a while and was pretty happy. It's pretty similar to Rdio, except that it has a (claimed) larger library of tracks.</comment>


GNU C Library 2.26 released - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/729761/ <comment><AUTHOR> > A per-thread cache has been added to malloc. Access to the cache requires no > locks and therefore significantly accelerates the fast path to allocate and > free small amounts of memory. Refilling an empty cache requires locking the > underlying arena. Performance measurements show significant gains in a wide > variety of user workloads.

This is _major_ , and makes glibc's malloc competitive with (or better than) alternative mallocs like jemalloc. See [https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1708052-TY- REDISMALL91](https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1708052-TY-REDISMALL91) for benchmark numbers.</comment>


How to Raise Money in 9 Easy Steps: The VC Game - <AUTHOR> http://heyni.co/post/80672196813/the-vc-game

<comment><USER2> Well i'm definitely going to try and snapchat our executive summary now ...</comment>


Dying Organs Restored to Life in Novel Experiments - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/health/mitochondria-transplant-heart-attack.html <comment> T-A It occurs to me that mitochondrial decline also seems to be an important aspect of aging. If you can just infuse mitochondria through the blood and "the organelles will gravitate almost magically to the injured cells that need them and take up residence", that suggests a rather obvious rejuvenation approach.

<comment><USER2> But where do we get those new mitochondria from? I'm almost afraid to ask.

<comment><USER3> Maybe from cloning one's own cells, then carefully dismantling them to free up mitochondria without damaging them? I don't think a lot of the tissue should be required (that is, ounces, not pounds).

<comment><USER4> mitachondria are living organelles, they could simply be induced to replicate until the desired quantity is reached.

<comment><USER5> If I recall bio from school, they are super adapted to living in animal cells -- they probably couldn't survive on their own.

<comment><USER4> It's true that they very much rely on a nuclear genome, because some of their genes required for independent replciation have been lost. But surely there's a framework that enables the mass replication of mitochondria using our own cells as a source material.

I doubt blood would work because red blood cells contain effectively very minimal, if not zero, mitochondria (depending on stage of cycle).

Funny enough, the best bet might be taking mitochondria from sperm or egg. Human sperm have ~50-75 mitochondria per cell. There's on average 50 million sperm cells per ml of ejaculant and the average is 2.5ml per ejaculation, so 125 million mitochondria could potentially be harvested from an average guy in a single go, provided the extraction is an unrealistic 100% efficiency.

<comment> bjelkeman-again 50 million/ml x 2.5 ml x 50 = 6.25 billion, is what I get the number to be.

<comment><USER4> Ah yes, I totally botched the math. Thanks for that.

So 6.25 billion potentially harvestable mitochondria per average sperm donation.

Hard to say how much might be needed for a rejuvination test, but those seem like viable numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A brief search shows that mitochondrial transplantation for myocardial infarction was described in 2008. Astonishing work. This is starting to become more mainstream in the last couple of years.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18978192](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18978192)

</comment><comment><USER7> Wait, how do the mitochondria get back into the cells? Presumably the cell membrane somehow permits them to pass but how are they recognized? If a mechanism exists to recognize and permit them to move into a cell, doesn't that either suggest they can move out of cells as well and/or confirm the theory that mitochondria were symbiotes? That is, there's something in cell DNA that encodes a mechanism for foreign symbiotes to cross the cell membrane?

<comment><USER8> I was also surprised by this. In the papers where they did this work, they discuss many previously-known mechanisms for intercellular mitochondrial transfer - apparently cells can form nanotubes and exchange organelles, and that's relatively well-studied. That's not what's happening here, though, and they state that the mechanism at play is unknown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be hard to convince me to sign up for such a study, if there's a 50% chance they give me a placebo and I die.

<comment> Engineering-MD In clinical trials, pure placebos are very rarely used (only in mild conditions or where no treatment exists). Commonly novel therapies are compared against the current treatment of choice.

<comment><USER10> I was about to ask how ethical it could be to give a pure placebo in cases as serious as heart failure, when simply telling the patient (or the patient's family) that they received some other more conventional procedure should produce similar results.

<comment><USER3> I think this is never done. I suppose both groups receive two therapies, one of them being the best available therapy for the condition, and the other either the new therapy, or a placebo.

This requires new and old therapies to be compatible, though.

<comment><USER11> Studies will also be suspended if it becomes clear that one treatment is so obviously better as to be unethical to continue with the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It!!!

Could!!!

Work!!!!!!

(Apologies to Mel Brooks/Young Frankenstein)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you protect your privacy online? - <AUTHOR>

On  cryptome's  home page ( http://cryptome.org/ )  it has this statement at the top
"Privacy, anonymity and security services are deceptive, protect yourself."
This struck a chord with me because lately I have been becoming creeped out by the way I'm being profiled based on my online activity.
I don't like the fact that google, for example, gives me results that it thinks might be of interest to me or that the ads on sites that I visit for the first time are already tailored to my tastes.
Even if you don't allow cookies or you have a dynamic ip, just the information sent by your browser about your setup can be enough, apparently,  to attach a unique identity to your machine.
To guard my privacy I had been thinking about signing up for one of the services that offers privacy  but as the old phrase says "who guards the guards"? <comment><USER2> I personally use 2 Browsers (FF and Chromium) for those reasons.

FF is my browser to stay private, therefore i am for example constantly not logged into my accounts (google/gmail/youtube).

Additionally:

-) 4 Easy Steps to stop online tracking

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/4-simple-changes- prote...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/4-simple-changes-protect-your- privacy-online)

-) NoScript for FF

Stops every script unless you allow it.

According to <http://stallman.org/facebook.html>

_"Pages that contain Facebook "like" buttons enable Facebook to track visitors to those pages. Facebook tracks the users that see 'like' buttons, even users who never visited facebook.com and never click on those buttons."_

There also is a solution described to stop that, but NoScript technically should get rid of the problem.

-) Google has it's own privacy settings, i think you can prevent from being tracked too hard with setting those accordingly

-) DuckDuckGo is getting more and more famous, it's a search engine that market itself as respecting ones privacy and not bubble people (i personally still use google)

<http://donttrack.us/>

<http://dontbubble.us/>

-) I also use AdBlock+ so i am not bothered with commercials to annoy me.

-) If you are really paranoid you could use something like Tor/VPN

<https://www.torproject.org/>

[https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take- ano...](https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity- seriously-111007/)

i personally don't.

-) don't allow third party cookies

-) automatically delete all cookies after shutdown

-) don't use sync programs/functions

-) store data online only strongly encrypted

The reason why i have 2 browsers is, that when i visit an unknown site with lots of multimedia content and when i don't want to be bothered with looking for what script does what (to activate some video embedded on the site for example), then i can just copy it into chromium and it works.

And in chromium i can constantly read e-mails or visit youtube when wanting to leave a comment, in FF i can browse privately (so simultaneously).

If you are sharing your computer with people make sure

-) passwords aren't stored

-) to delete browser/download history in general

That is all i can think of right know.

Oh and e-mail:

-) set up own e-mail server and use encryption

or

-) choose e-mail provider having servers in a country that you trust and that maybe has an encryption feature (for example: Hushmail, located in Canada, free encryption - known to cooperate with us authorities though)

-> _if you don't mind paying, CounterMail probably is interesting for you_

<https://countermail.com/>

Update:

Of course, in these days many users just give their information away for free. They react with false assumptions about being tracked (most companies think it is service to their customers - people aren't bothered so much with ads that fit their needs). So if you use facebook and use it to chat with people, you update your status, have many apps on a smartphone and just click on "agree" everytime without being concerned, then you shouldn't be too concerned about being tracked by Google either. Then you are just a hypocrite.

<comment><USER3> To add one suggestion, if you want even more control than Adblock Plus, you can look at Request Policy (<http://requestpolicy.com>)

Instead of a blacklist approach like abp, you control which cross-site requests are allowed. Most of the time all a site needs is one xsite request to the domain hosting its static resources

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there such a thing in a system where your every click is logged and backed up somewhere?</comment>


How a company's aging workforce retrained itself for the cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-companys-aging-workforce-retrained-itself-for-the-cloud-11572192001?mod=rsswn <comment><AUTHOR> This article and all the people involved speaking on how the older generations decided or "pushed" to get training or "your job will not exist in a few years."

Why it is not up to the company, after making the move to change technology to train it's employees? They did so in this article, because they did not have access to enough potential new hire...

You do not make a change of technology that big in one day; this is a year- long process. Therefore, you can plan the training for your workforce because it is the right thing to do.</comment>


What happens when you don't sanitize data input - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/jWTXq.jpg

<comment><USER2> there was an xkcd comic with the same premise a couple of years back

</comment><comment><USER3> pretty creative. did it work in real time?

</comment><comment><USER4> and... did it work?</comment>


Ccv open sources near state-of-the-art image classifier under Creative Commons - <AUTHOR> http://libccv.org/post/ccv-0.6-open-sources-near-state-of-the-art-image-classifier-under-creative-commons/ <comment><USER2> This release is absolutely phenomenal. As liuliu mentioned in the release notes most of the pre-existing implementations are either not-that-good, closed source, or their datasets are closed. This is, seemingly, the first _good_ open source deep learning classifier out there! There is a whole cottage industry of commercial deep learning image classifier services springing up (like [http://www.ersatzlabs.com/](http://www.ersatzlabs.com/)) but this will surely make this technology even more accessible. I can't wait to use it in some of my side projects!

<comment><USER3> I think this is a great thing to put out into the community, and I hope it gains widespread adoption.

I do have a few things to comment on here:

The architectures themselves have never been closed source (hence publication). Frankly, I think Alex didn't release his implementation because until TITAN came along, you needed two GTX580 GPUs to do distributed training. This is unique (and difficult) to setup and support! Just "putting the code out there" is not useful to many researchers, and the architecture is in the paper already to implement and extend or modify. You will be bombed to death with support requests, even if you just say "this is provided as is". Many researchers don't want to deal with that IMO.

Data is EVERYTHING for training these architectures, and the ImageNet dataset itself is still semi-closed source, and hard to get. You have to sign up to get their license coverage if you want to download the original images for research. I _think_ you can get weblinks to the original data, which you could then ostensibly crawl yourself, but that gets murky from a copyright perspective.

It will also take a very, very long time to wget all 1.2TB of ImageNet. My download took about 45 days, so keep that in mind!

Most people just do not have the hardware to train a network of this magnitude. CIFAR10 is a much more appropriate dataset for consumer grade hardware/non lab-funded work IMO. I think this is one of the reasons most advances on this front have simply released the trained network parameters as a "black-box" preprocessor - it is much more useful for general tasks on normal laptops and PCs! See [http://fastml.com/yesterday-a-kaggler-today-a- kaggle-master-...](http://fastml.com/yesterday-a-kaggler-today-a-kaggle- master-a-wrap-up-of-the-cats-and-dogs-competition/)

I personally used a simple wrapper to DeCAF + a sklearn logistic regression to score a pretty good (96%) score for the kaggle Cats vs. Dogs competition on a Lenovo T400, and I think this is where the commercial usefulness will go as well. The training + data to get the "magic numbers" is probably going to be the KFC/Coke tradesecret formula of data science in coming years. Plowing through a bunch of floats in a particular format, then applying simple classifiers is good enough for many standard computer vision tasks, and could possibly be fit into a very small formfactor. Think FPGAs...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just the samples were moved to CC, which makes more sense. Code still is 3 clause BSD, and always has been.

</comment><comment><USER5> The code being in C and being highly optimized, it would be really awesome if they could comment their code better.

<comment><USER6> sorry for the accidental downvote, does replying reverse that vote? I think I saw someone post that it does, but HN can be smoke and mirrors sometimes

<comment><USER7> No, replying does not explicitly reverse a downvote, but pointing out your mistake sometimes causes others to fix it for you by upvoting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is the advantage of using this instead of OverFeat for natural images? I have been operating on the assumption that the strange license of OverFeat is not a problem, since you are using someone's software to feed in input, and generate a bunch of floating point values.

Are the floating point outputs of a program then "tainted" by the license of the code as well? If not, why not use the state of the art, which handles both localization AND classification?

I can see using ccv for custom datasets, though I am also assuming the 6GB TITAN requirement for GPU use is only for ImageNet, and not for a custom dataset? TITAN GPUs are pretty expensive...

I am very impressed by the result, as I have not been able to even approach OverFeat with my own work (pylearn2 + theano) thus far. Will definitely be experimenting with this in the future. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> From my understanding, you cannot deploy OverFeat in production because its license is only for research and evaluation purposes.

You still need TITAN for any reasonable custom datasets (with non-trivial data). The current CPU implementation doesn't support Dropout, therefore, you can only play it with CIFAR-10 (./bin/cifar-10.c) dataset if you don't have a GPU.

This is an preliminary implementation, I do plan to finish up CPU training part to be on-par with GPU in subsequent releases.

<comment><USER3> So you are storing the entire dataset on the GPU then, to speed up processing? Or is there support for a "minibatch" mode that sends chunks at a time to be processed?

Unless this more an issue with the model size of the "Krizhevsky net" being on the order of 6GB?

Also, does this mean you managed to get a 2D convolutional kernel optimized for Kepler architectures? If so, that is awesome! Alex's code is still only optimized for Fermi architectures if I recall correctly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really the whole dataset. For ImageNet, I have mini_batch size of 256, and I need to allocate the whole network on GPU for this mini_batch (which is 256 * the neurons in the network), and plus parameters (parameters is about 200MiB * 3 for updates and momentum). Also to speed up certain operations, the data need to be reshaped, and there are 500MiB scratch space just for that purpose. In total, I am using close to 6GiB GPU memory. You probably can get to only use 4GiB memory if the batch size is 128.

The code is never optimized to the extreme. I optimized the code to the point of being able to finish at reasonable time (9 days for 100 epochs). The convolutional kernel is parametrized (with template and some macro tricks, forward and backward propagation convolutional kernels are parametrized into hundreds of small functions) and the best parameters were chose with a mini benchmark in the beginning of training process.

<comment><USER3> So... duh. You would need > 1.2 TB to fit all of ImageNet on the card :). Thanks for clarifying, and pardon my brain lapse! Also, thanks for putting this out there - if I get some time I may send some pull requests your way. Awesome stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> You need 1.2TB SSD for sure to train the complete ImageNet dataset. The data is loaded into GPU memory only one batch (256 images) at a time. But the loading part will be the bottleneck if you use a rotational disk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a link to the their documentation for the algorithm: [http://libccv.org/doc/doc-convnet/](http://libccv.org/doc/doc-convnet/)

Had to dig for a few minutes and wanted to help others find it.

</comment><comment><USER9> As a user of and contributor to Caffe [1], I have to take the opportunity to plug it here. Like the CCV classifier linked, Caffe is fully open-source [2], has a downloadable state-of-the-art model pre-trained on ImageNet [3], and scripts/documentation that make it very easy to compute features using our pre-trained model or other models [4].

Unlike the linked CCV release (unless I'm misinformed -- haven't actually tried it, please correct me if I say anything inaccurate), Caffe supports completely customizable architectures via a configuration language, fully supports training [5], finetuning [6], and inference (feature extraction/classification) in these customizable architectures, and seamlessly runs on both CPU and GPU.

Caffe is also very fast; twice as fast at CPU feature computation as its predecessor DeCAF, and faster than cuda-convnet at training/testing ImageNet architectures on a Titan/K40 GPU.

The linked CCV release does mention Caffe, but quickly dismisses it due to the license. It's true that our pre-trained model [3] is licensed only for non- commercial use, but ALL of the Caffe code is BSD-licensed, including the exact script we used to train said model. So if you're a commercial entity, using Caffe for feature extraction/classification from a state-of-the-art network is a matter of purchasing a $1000 GPU (NVIDIA Titan -- I'm assuming you own a computer), downloading the ImageNet dataset, and waiting about a week for training to converge. This will buy you the ability to adapt the classifier to YOUR visual classification problem by finetuning [6], rather than being stuck with the particular 1000 categories the pre-trained model knows about.

[1] [http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/](http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/BVLC/caffe](https://github.com/BVLC/caffe)

[3] [http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/getting_pretrained_models.ht...](http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/getting_pretrained_models.html)

[4] [http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/BVLC/caffe/blob/master/ex...](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/BVLC/caffe/blob/master/examples/imagenet_pretrained.ipynb)

[5] [http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/imagenet_training.html](http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/imagenet_training.html)

[6] [http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/caffe- presentation.pdf](http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/caffe-presentation.pdf) (see page 14)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, Donahue, I actually referenced Caffe extensively in detailed documentation: [http://libccv.org/doc/doc-convnet/](http://libccv.org/doc/doc- convnet/)

This is a preliminary implementation, but is a complete one includes both training and testing code. The big difference is that ccv is a computer vision library in general and Caffe is a artificial neural network library. This does mean quite a few different ways of approaching things, for example, ccv's implementation does allow you to specify network topology, but doesn't have a implementation of local non-weight-sharing layer (because CIFAR-10 and ImageNet doesn't need such type of layer).

You can also chop off the last full connect layer and train a SVM on top of it with ccv, I actually plan to do exactly what you guys did with that and train on VOC 2012 dataset.

All in all, ccv 0.6 is a preliminary implementation of convnet, but it is important for a library claims to be "modern" to contain the said implementation. And providing the pre-trained data model with a liberal license (so that you can fine-tune your classification problem on top of the pre-trained data model) is also aligned with ccv's goal.

<comment><USER9> I hadn't seen the detailed documentation - thanks so much for the acknowledgments there!

And thanks for correcting me about CCV's support for custom architectures and training -- I'd just assumed that it wasn't supported since it wasn't mentioned in the post, but I guess this was more of a marketing decision as most users are probably just interested in feature extraction/classification from the pretrained net. :) I would argue that GPU support is pretty necessary for training modern network architectures a la Krizhevsky to be remotely practical, though.

I apologize if I came off as overly competitive or derisive, this is obviously very nice work and it seems like an attractive option for many users. Always happy to see deep learning made more accessible and open!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This older post explains better why we should care about it (or not): [http://libccv.org/post/an-elephant-in-the-room/](http://libccv.org/post/an- elephant-in-the-room/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Very cool :-)

On a sort-of-related note: anyone know of a good FOSS library for making a reverse image search? My current method is just to use findimgdupes, but this is rather slow and hard to script around. (Ideally, my desktop with my main private image storage would have a simple web interface that works like tineye.)

<comment><USER12> You are probably looking for image similarity tools. I've been playing with the IMGSeek tools [1] for a few months in my spare time. My hobby project is to create a reverse image search engine.

[1] - [http://www.imgseek.net/isk-daemon](http://www.imgseek.net/isk-daemon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been using the Stroke Width Transform (SWT) from libccv for more than a year now. It's amazing.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm needing a ELI5 for this..

</comment><comment><USER15> is there any image recognition software working with texturized 3D models as input for data training ?

<comment><USER7> Can you treat Z as just another color channel and use the same algorithms?

<comment><USER3> It depends - some algorithms exploit correlations between pixels to reduce the computational load. This is bad if the Z channel is not strongly correlated with the others (RGB are very strongly correlated in natural images). Since depth shouldn't usually be correlated with color, this might cause some issues. Some experiments were done in "Learning Feature Representations with K-means", A. Ng. and A. Coates. ([http://www.stanford.edu/~acoates/papers/coatesng_nntot2012.p...](http://www.stanford.edu/~acoates/papers/coatesng_nntot2012.pdf))

Give it a try, but also look at the underlying assumptions of your algorithm if it performs poorly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From [http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_C...](http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F) :

> We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software.

<comment><USER17> It's not software, it's a data structure.</comment></comment>


HTML side-scroller - <AUTHOR> http://duriansoftware.com/joe/A-new-toy:-HTML-side-scroller.html <comment><USER2> The Star War intro clone in CSS3/Safari uses 5% CPU on my MBP.

This scroll uses 20+%.</comment>


Balloons.io: an awesome looking realtime chat on node.js - <AUTHOR> http://gravityonmars.github.com/Balloons.IO/

<comment><USER2> Live demo up here if anyone else was curious: <http://www.pssdbt.com:3000>

If you want to run it yourself on a public-facing server, you'll need to change the connection to Socket.IO on line 2 of /public/js/script.js to point to your server instead of localhost. I also had to edit /views/themes/default/room_list.jade and put the 'each room,key in rooms' bit inside of an 'if rooms' statement because that was throwing an error.

Also worth noting, nothing is filtered (you can send <script> tags for example and they'll run for everyone).

<comment><USER3> It's also throwing a 404 error for modernizr. It's looking for it in /rooms/js/libs/modernizr..., but it's actually in /js/libs/modernizr....

This'd all be easier to confirm, obviously, if they'd have set up a demo site. Anyone else care to take a gander?

<comment><USER2> That's because they were using a relative reference, fixed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This could totally use a live demo.

<comment><USER5> Yes. But every chat application in node.js that has ever been presented in HN faced the same fate of being brought down to a crawling pulp whenever it had more than 100 or so concurrent users.

<comment><USER6> Which is a bit amusing, as I remember standalone IRC servers handling 40,000+ peak users with relative ease -- and that was back in the late 90s on commodity server hardware.

<comment><USER7> This makes me wonder, what is the difference in technologies? I never used IRC to be honest, was it downloadable software or was it web based? (I'm not that young I swear, I'll be 35 next week - I just didn't do chat)

<comment><USER8> No need for the past tense, IRC is very alive!

Popular GUI-clients would be Colloquy on Mac, mIRC on windows and XChat on linux. Just download one and see for yourself; Freenode is a popular network for hackers of all kinds, QuakeNet is the network for gamers (and also happens to be the biggest with ~60k users online at any given time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've yet to use Node.JS for anything yet even though I want too, it looks like Node.JS is only being used for analytics and chat applications is that all it is capable of or are people not fully using the power of Node? Balloons.io is a beautifully designed chat app, better than that of any other Node chat demo I've seen, nice one.

<comment><USER10> >it looks like Node.JS is only being used for analytics and chat applications is that all it is capable of or are people not fully using the power of Node?

Node is still immature, so it makes sense to use it _in spite_ of the relative roughness only when it has a distinct advantage over other available technologies. Its ecosystem has also streamlined the building of server-push apps.

You can use node/express in lieu of rails or django, but it doesn't offer anything particularly interesting here. Analytics and chat apps tend to be built on persistent servers that have long-running stateful sessions, which the node ecosystem has focused on making easy... you could use EM or Twisted or Netty, but they aren't as shiny / low barrier to entry.

So, we are seeing people take advantage of the comparable strengths of a new technology that makes certain apps easier to build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How scalable is this? I would think it's easy to put together something that serves, say, 100 users simultaneously. But how well does this scale to 100K users?

<comment><USER12> >But how well does this scale to 100K users?

It wouldn't. Designing a system to handle 100k simultaneous users is hard, and a problem few people suffer from.

Why would you ask this question?

<comment><USER13> _Why would you ask this question?_

Because maybe he is looking to develop a chat system that can scale to 100,000 users? There are many instances where someone is tasked to look at a technology and understand how it scales.

Frankly, it would be helpful for you to tell us how " _It wouldn't_ "

<comment><USER12> Because the order of magnitude is insane.

It's a) not a common problem, and b) is obviously non trivial with current technology.

The bandwidth necessary for 100k users would saturate many a pipe, and would immediately require more than one commoditized machine.

It's like saying "That's a cute little Prius you got there. How many semi trailers can it pull?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My first thought was 'oh, another node.js chat app...', but I have to say, the design is really slick - very cool.

</comment><comment><USER15> Found an interesting bug, you can inject JS code ... give it a try on <http://www.pssdbt.com:3000> demo

Just type <script>alert('JS Injection for the win');</script> on the chat box, it will execute for all members in the chat.

<comment><USER16> We fixed it!

<comment><USER15> Awesome

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What does "Twitter based" mean? It uses Twitter for authentication? Or it uses bootstrap? Or tweets?

<comment><USER2> Authentication it sounds like: "Balloons uses easy-OAuth for authentication with twitter. You can easily change this code to authenticate with Facebook, for example, lets with Facebook."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh - and they might want to add .DS_Store to .gitignore :)

</comment><comment><USER3> The readme isn't very well written. Would someone with Node.js/redis experience be willing to write a more comprehensive installation guide?

</comment><comment><USER18> The challenge in chat is really scalability. I see no mention about this.

How will it scale on 10 servers?

The UI is well executed.</comment>


DuckDuckGo: New Features from a Stronger Yahoo Partnership - <AUTHOR> https://duck.co/blog/post/311/yahoo-partnership <comment><USER2> Why not last year? They don't have data for it?

This is the only reason I still have to go back to Google a lot. When I'm searching for some programming language help/tutorial, I mostly use the last year (!gyear in DuckDuckGo to take you to google with 1 year search), since I don't want to be seeing how to do implement something for my app in Android 1.6 or Python 2.0 (for instance).

<comment><USER3> I use "last year" filters all the time with Google (via !g bangs), this !gyear is awesome. Thanks. TIL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> According to [https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical- implementation](https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation) they are using duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net to make these calls.

That subdomain seems to have a CNAME to results.duckduckgo.com which in turn has a CNAME to duckduckgo.com. Could they not have used yahoo.duckduckgo.com instead?

Yahoo owns and controls the DNS of yahoo.net - the DNS settings for duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net could be changed anytime by Yahoo - is that correct?

<comment><USER5> It says in the post that "To get access to the most relevant Yahoo technology, due to contractual obligations that call has to be associated with a Yahoo domain, in this case, duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net."

I'm curious about these contractual obligations. It seems Yahoo is making a lot of effort to ensure compatibility with DDG and its users, why insist on a trivial hostname matter?

<comment><USER4> Ok, I see. Yes, trivial for Yahoo but a hassle for DDG that now has to deal with adblocking scripts, explaining and so forth. Strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here I am moving emails and stuff out of Yahoo due to it's impending doom. Then, I see a company announce a stronger partnership with them. Hard to say if it's a good thing or bad thing. Maybe good so long as they have backup option they can practically flip a switch on. Thought they were using Yandex. So they're probably fine.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now if I could just filter out websites from my search result.....</comment>


Ask HN: Do you dislike PHP? - <AUTHOR>

A lot of the readers seem to dislike or even loathe PHP. Why is it so? <comment><USER2> What I like: PHP has a good (and often overlooked/underrated) runtime, with language- and runtime-level support for running each HTTP request in a fairly isolated environment. It has a fairly standardized deployment model and a decent set of standard libraries, especially for common web development tasks. The built-in support for mixing code and markup in a single file makes it ultra-easy to hack together a simple web page or very small application.

What I don't like: The standard library has grown organically and without much top-down design, leaving it with too many inconsistent names/APIs, gaps and overlaps in functionality. Object-oriented programming took hold relatively late in PHP's history, so it's not used consistently in the standard library and elsewhere. The language itself has too many non-obvious pitfalls, e.g. ways that array/map indices work, and the way that type errors and type coercion are handled. Support for programming-in-the-large (e.g. first-class modules or packages) is poor. Historical convention of mixing logic and markup means it now requires extra discipline to separate them. The language doesn't seem to be evolving toward any particular vision, and it's not really flexible enough that users can evolve the language themselves (ala Ruby or Lisp).

I've worked pretty happily with PHP applications, and seen a lot of good code written in PHP. But it's not my tool of choice for new projects, for the reasons above.

<comment><USER2> I forgot another one: There's very little tool or library support for using PHP for non-web-facing scripts. I like being able to use the same languages and libraries for both web and non-web code, and to have my web apps use the large body of e.g. Ruby or Python libraries that weren't necessarily designed with web apps in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> PHP's sigils are superfluous. Perl (from which PHP derives their use) utilizes sigils with respect to typing in order to denote scalar variables ($), arrays (@) and hashes (%). What does PHP use the $ sigil for? Everything but references (&). Why? Because.

PHP's standard library is extremely disorganized. What's the function to put a string into hexadecimal? bin2hex. What's the function to put a string into base64? base64_encode. How do you turn a base64 string back into a "binary" string? base64_decode. How do you turn a hexadecimal string back into a "binary" string? Oh wait... an explicit function doesn't exist for that. Not to mention the various inconsistent ways in which functions are named: afnctn(), afunction(), a_function(), et cetera ad nauseum. Many functions also have an inconsistent order of parameters.

PHP doesn't support integral values larger than that of a signed 32 bit integer. Even better, when you overflow an int, you get a float back! Did you know pack() and unpack() support arguments for the unsigned ints that PHP doesn't support? Genius!

Last I checked, PHP didn't use lexical scoping. Do you know how downright stupid and annoying that is?

PHP's thread support sucks. Period.

According to Cal Henderson at Flickr, PHP "leaks memory like a sieve." (<http://www.afup.org/IMG/pdf/flickr_php.pdf>) (of course this is an implementation issue)

The downright stupidity of some of the PHP users just baffles me at times. One look on the PHP manual (Especially at any of the pages about the cryptographic functions, such as md5() and sha1() ) is enough to make any seasoned programmer's blood pressure skyrocket.

Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like PHP. I also like what the did for the Open Source movement. It is free, with PHP>5.0 provided OOP support and has led the way all along. Without PHP there would have been no Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, my early websites etc..

The dislike comes mostly from purists and language evangelists who think the language is what makes a good programme.

I started programming ages ago. From Fortran, Cobol, Algol moved to Pascal (the greatest ever), went to C and the rest of them.

PHP has a lot of heritage that I object like sometimes function names are either full name or c-like. I bypassed them by wrapping a couple of functions and presto!

</comment><comment><USER5> I think a lot of the "Man I hate PHP" sentiment is really directed at the corpus of programs written in PHP rather than the language itself. I think it's popularity and accessibility to novice programmers has left PHP with a legacy of badly thought out and unmaintainable code in production that may even be worse than Perl 4 (and Matts Script Archive) ever had to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love it and I hate it.

I love it because it allows me to very quickly build stuff but I hate the inconsistencies that make it almost a requirement to visit php.net all the time.

And then there's a bunch of very ugly bits and pieces that now have to be supported forever due to backwards compatibilty. Strpos anyone ?

</comment><comment><USER7> Like all languages, it has it's place. I dislike it when it's used out of it's place, but I quite enjoy it when it's used properly.

<comment><USER8> I agree. A lot of complaints I've seen about the language, beyond its inconsistent function names and the occasional argument, are from people expecting the language to be more than it is. Different languages exist to address different problems and serve different purposes/platforms. Perhaps PHP is lagging behind Python and Ruby, but it's by no means a useless language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like PHP. I'm a .Net developer, but I started out with PHP and it's great to go back and use it from time to time. PHP has come a long way in the last 5 years and from what I've seen, the quality of frameworks and applications written with it have evolved a lot as well.</comment>


Where do you keep your cash reserves? - <AUTHOR> Hi! I've been curious about this for a while now, and have spent quite a bit of time reading research reports about it. After pouring through statistics and studies, I've decided to ask some entrepreneurs directly for input. So, here it goes. As an emerging business, where do you keep your cash reserves? In a bank savings account, in a money market fund, invested in equities (I imagine this is for larger businesses holding the reserves for longer periods of time), or somewhere else? <comment><USER2> Equities don't seem to be a good place for cash reserves. If you want to be able to plan future hires or purchases for your business based on how much money you have available, putting your money in an investment that can lose substantial value in a short period of time doesn't seem like a smart thing to do. A stock market crash can happen pretty quickly.

Owning a business is a risky enough investment, so you don't want to compound the risk it by investing your cash reserves in someone else's businesses.

The same is true for individuals. You don't want to put the money for your kid's next-year's college tuition into stocks. You're going to need to have that money available whether the market goes up or down this year. Stocks are a good investment vehicle for the long-term, but risky in the short-term.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very true. Thanks for the great input! Do you think it would be better for businesses to invest in money market funds or other reputable bonds then?

<comment><USER2> Bonds can also fluctuate in value over the short term. If you hold a bond to maturity, you're guaranteed to get your principal (original investment) and interest back (unless the bond issuer goes bankrupt). But if you need to use that money in the meantime, you'll need to sell your bonds at whatever the current market price is, which may be higher or lower than what you paid to buy them. If you buy very short-term bonds, like 4-week Treasury bills, this risk is minimized.

I think that investments that have a stable value, such as bank accounts and money market funds, are the safest choice for cash reserves. They're also convenient, since you can transfer money easily between these accounts and your business checking account.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. This was what I was thinking too. I'm curious, how many businesses actually put their money in a money market fund as opposed to a checking or savings account?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Restaurant Renaissance Means for the E-commerce Industry - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ins.world/what-restaurant-renaissance-means-for-the-e-commerce-industry-3b7bed4ae224 <comment><USER2> E-commerce=speed, old-school restaurants=cosiness&atmosphere. Both need to learn from each other.</comment>


The hidden lives of MySpacers - Why opinions from anybody but users rarely matter. - <AUTHOR> http://bokardo.com/archives/the-hidden-lives-of-myspacers/ <comment><USER2> It is really frustrating how lazy bloggers/investors always are rationalizing why great startups _should_ be doing bad, instead of figuring out what makes these "bad" startups do so great.

Nice example.

<comment><USER3> I don't think Myspace has any merit. I think it's doing well for the same reason that hit songs are doing well: random network butterfly effects. That experiment about showing people which songs were popular vs. not showing them-- due to totally random noise, one song (or startup) will be a little ahead, and then whoosh, it has all the listeners (or users). There's nothing about Myspace itself that makes it more likely among a field of similar, better-designed contenders to do well; it's just the random fluctuations of the market that made it king.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I don't think Myspace has any merit_

It doesnt matter if you don't think it has any merit, it's the 25+ million unique users per month that matter. Myspace is a great site in that it allows you to craft your profile into any look you want. This identity creation is what teenage users want. Combined with the network effects and you have the reasoning for myspaces success.

 _better-designed contenders_

There are a few better designed contenders such as BeBo and Mixi who are doing very well outside of the US. I don't believe facebook counts as a competitor since it's lack of customisability and requirement for users to 'conform' does not appeal to the same users as myspace.

<comment><USER3> You're missing the point. I'm saying that the reason for their success is not their own merit, but this random butterfly effect described in the linked study. It's a relevant discussion to have, since it indicates that there's a limit on how much you can control your own destiny in a social startup.

<comment><USER4> There is a butterfly effect, yes there is a limit on how much you can control your own destiny in a startup. But it's not an insurmountable obstactle. It means you can't just copy myspace exactly, improve it in a few minor ways, and expect to win over all their users.

In terms of competition, you may not realize what your competitor is doing that is stealing all your customers. From what I remember, the main competitor to Myspace was LiveJournal, and the networking features of myspace were far superior. Customized pages with photo albums and links to all the people you know are a lot more intrinsically interesting than an article about taking your cat to the vet. The other competitor I read about was friendster, which had a head start in social networking but was beaten because musicians and their fans used myspace. [0]

I remember the first time I saw myspace, all I really noticed was the music. The random user profiles barely registered, although I remember thinking it would be cool to have a band page with lots of fans attached.

[0] <http://emergic.org/collections/tech_talk_the_myspace_story.html></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't Worry About College by John Taylor Gatto [PDF, p. 26] - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://www.lifelearningmagazine.com/0804/MarApr08.pdf

<comment><USER2> absolute beauty, please read if you about to graduate high school; I suspect it won't be received well by current college students for the very reason it talks about.</comment>


Federal Investigators Spot Flaws in SpaceX Falcon 9 Rockets - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a25035/flaws-in-spacex-falcon-9-rockets/ <comment><USER2> > The Government Accountability Office identified persistent cracking in > turbofans that pump fuel to the rocket engines.

Wah?</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have side projects you want to sell? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN. I recently launched Hoverboard.io, which helps you show off projects you've built. I'm thinking about what direction to take it in, and one possible idea would be to allow people to list side projects as potentially being open for sale (and then making it easy to find projects that are for sale).<p>I personally have a few older side projects that I'd be open to selling, but I was wondering if other people are in the same position. Are there already any places that do a good job of offering that service? Is this something that anyone would be interested in? <comment><USER3> +1

My side project is <http://drop.sc> \- profitable and self-sustained.

I don't have the time to develop the site and I'm not really into Starcraft anymore. The site is very popular amongst the Starcraft 2 community.

An old version is available at <https://github.com/alexhanh/drop.sc>

Interested? Shoot me an email at email@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love the site. It would make a great simple personal landing page if you could you add third level domains (username.hoverboard.io) and let people CNAME their domain name to it. I recently paid $20 to flavors.me for their service that your site could also do, but yours seems more targeted to the startup/dev geek rather than the musician/graphics person.

I see there is a <http://hoverboard.io/username/blog.atom> link available. Could you make a <http://hoverboard.io/username/projects.atom> link as well that would just list the projects, description, and URL?

This would allow integration with various landing pages or IFTTT recipes and things like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words - sure, adding an atom feed for projects shouldn't be too difficult (although I can't promise I'll roll it out soon, but I will add it to the todo list).

Pro accounts with custom domains are planned for the reasonably near future too - that one is quite high up the todo list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd be interested in listing side projects for sale.

And, side note: I like the site. Wish I could more easily peek at other users based on tags or location - the search works but it's not quite friendly enough. A feed of recent blog posts would be great too. I would focus on these things - pretty basic expected functionality thats 90% of the way there - before adding in another feature. Also, as a matter of taste, I feel like almost everything (except the paragraph point-size) is about 10% too large, which these days is almost always related to a dashed-together "mobile-first" responsive build. Looks great all around though, nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback - yep, I didn't make it clear but improvements to search and an activity feed are all high up the to-do list (the activity feed - which showcases blog posts from people you follow, and from the posts that they recommend - is actually mostly built, but needs to be implemented elegantly). Search could definitely do with some improvement, I'm not happy with how that works/looks at the moment.

Thanks again for the feedback - really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd def. be interested in the idea of selling side projects. I think Flippa is more and more become infested with fake SEO/web 1.0 marketing sites and its hard for a real site seller to sell.

I have acouple sideprojects that would put up for sale.

Both self-sustained, profitable. One is: Studygig, <http://studygig.com>

If you are interested, contact me.

<comment><USER7> Hi there, i'd be interested in hearing details on studygig. Looking to expand my portfolio (as you can see from this thread!)

Email in my profile...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have two actually, one is a fully functioning designer t-shirt site with inventory, that still is up and produces revenue (1-200$/mo), and the other is a defunct android/iphone/web app, that is b2b (I didn't have to time to sell to business owners w/ a 9-5). Apptopia is one site fwiw, but I have never used it.

<comment><USER9> Can you please share more information with about the T-shirt biz. (Personal email in profile).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really like the site. I remember checking it out from your original Show HN and being really impressed. It seems like from the comments there is a need for a better place to buy and sell, but it seems like it goes away from the elegant portfolio look and feel of hoverboard.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, I'd be interested. I think sites like Flippa & Apptopia don't really cut it.

<comment><USER12> Why do you think that is?

<comment><USER11> Flippa is over-run with low quality, built for adsense type spam. The apptopia site looks good but rarely works. It totally ignores search queries - <USER2> displays whatever it wants.

I'd be interested in taking on projects where it's being sold because the owner wants to find it a better home - not just for the $.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good luck to your project. I wanted to verify similar ideas and built <http://www.ex-prj.com/>. Unfortunately the project itself will become to an ex-prj.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've released my staff management software under the GPL - <http://hey- jimmy.github.io/TeamSheet/> \- so any and all work on it is welcome.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Sell HN" would be an interesting thread. I like this idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, that's a good point - a Sell HN thread could be an interesting experiment. Should we go for it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like the idea of letting users list their projects for sale. It seems like it's a niche ripe for disruption. flippa is awful!

<comment><USER17> I understand that Flippa is/was very popular. I've never bought/sold on it myself, and am curious about the negative comments here.

Why is it awful?

<comment><USER16> The site itself isn't bad. I guess it's just an inventory problem. Most of the sites for sale seem pretty scammy. And I'm just not seeing many SaaS businesses for sale which is what I'm interested in.

Instead it's mostly blogs, adsense sites, and sometimes dropshipping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd be interested in _commissioning_ side projects.

<comment><USER19> Isn't Adhoc Labs in the business of creating side projects to see if they are viable? Or are you talking about side side-projects? :)

<comment><USER18> We do a lot of experimental iterations, sure, but that's not the same as stimulating others with different interests and talents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yep, and I've always wondered how to go about it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd be interested in buying "side projects".

</comment><comment><USER22> Possibly for both buy and sell.</comment>


No media attention yet, but Zillow will soon open an office in Vancouver, BC - <AUTHOR> http://www.zillow.com/jobs/openings/?l=Vancouver <comment><AUTHOR> This would be the second big US tech company expanding into Vancouver as of late, that is fast-growing but also its employees well (the other is Tableau Software).

I actually found the job postings on Linkedin originally. The Node.js position was classified "entry-level" on Linkedin but the posting is asking for 5+ years of software experience and 2+ years of Node experience.

By comparison, Amazon only asks for knowledge of compsci fundamentals and the software development lifecycle, and experience in one or more modern programming languages, for their SDE I positions.

I'm also a little disappointed there are no internships, at least for the time being.</comment>


Python Lib3to6 - <AUTHOR> https://pypi.org/project/lib3to6/ <comment><AUTHOR> In light of the recent Python 3.6 EOL discussion and the resulting comments about Python breaking backward compatibility, I wanted people to be aware of this option for maintaining support for older interpreters.

At the price of an extra compile step, you can write your code for Python 3.6+ and convert the syntax to be compatible both with newer and with older interpreters.</comment>


The source code for Unreal Engine 4 on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/muyelian/UnrealEngine-4 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure the intention of the code was it for it to be shared on the public internet in plain view without people paying the $20/month subscription. This strategy was an awesome move for Epic Games, please don't make them regret it with stunts like this.

The EULA explicitly says it is forbidden to distribute with non-license holders: [https://www.unrealengine.com/eula](https://www.unrealengine.com/eula) See 1b.

<comment><USER3> The cat is out of the bag. Anyway I doubt that this was unforeseen by the Epic team. Somebody was bound to make honest mistake with permissions sooner or later. You just cannot expect a few thousand licensees to not screw up all of the time. And once is all that is needed.

Their are lawyered up enough to prevent anyone from profiting from their IP on the major distribution channels.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely, but that doesn't make this OK. It looks intentional, the way its been committed under a single commit etc, Epic would have prevented public forking.

<comment><USER4> It is intentional. The github user has no other activity, and it's an involving conscious process to set the Unreal Engine repository to public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shouldn't this be accessible only to those who paid $20[1]?

[1]: [https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on- github](https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-github)

</comment><comment><USER6> What prevents someone from creating a game with this and skipping the $20 per month a 5% of gross revenue?

<comment><USER3> Nothing ... go ahead. If you fail - Epic is not going to miss your token payment. But if you manage to succeed their lawyers will bleed you dry for much more than the 5% of the revenue. Are you going to take your chances?

<comment><USER7> 20 bucks a month over the duration of a development cycle could be pretty significant. This will basically allow people to develop their game to the point where success or failure could be predicted, and Epic will miss out on the development cycle revenues from the failures.

<comment><USER8> "You can cancel your subscription at any time and keep using the engine, though without monthly updates."

from: [https://www.unrealengine.com/register](https://www.unrealengine.com/register)

<comment><USER9> Even if you cancel your subscription you are obligated by the original agreement to give Epic a royalty that is %5 of gross revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The legalities aside, the little bit of code I've browsed through is incredibly well written. And very surprised to see their build system being built in C#. Cool stuff. Almost makes me want to get back into making games.</comment>


Somaliland has embraced mobile money, but at what price? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/may/19/somaliland-mobile-money-zaad-inflation-economy-banking-remittance

<comment><USER2> Somaliland is one of the more interesting countries in the world, became independent back in 1991 and has been a regional success story with a complete absence of foreign aid or intervention, yet still are not recognised internationally. Far more viable as a nation state than Somalia, where intervention has continually worsened affairs..

Here is a documentary on Somaliland from the BBC by Simon Reeve: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRET1fHLWdE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRET1fHLWdE)

The spread of mobile money like Zaad and the more famous m-Pesa may well eventually cause systemic instability, but this is only really likely if the next step is taken, extending credit based on mobile monetary accounts.

The remittance angle will be incredibly interesting given crypto coin developments..</comment>


Modern day version of the original Macintosh team - <AUTHOR> I was listening to an interview with Tony Fadell and he was talking about how he closely followed members of the Apple Macintosh team and eventually followed them to General Magic. I was wondering what the modern day version of an engineering team like that would be? <comment><USER2> Probably much the same. Perhaps with so many startups it will be harder to build a team of superlatively talented engineers. However, very few products since then have had the same level of ground-breaking vision. Maybe there are very few Steve Jobs-like people out there.</comment>


Ask HN: Keypress sounds through headphones - <AUTHOR>

I like the idea of hearing my keypresses through my headphones while playing music. I feel I am more intimate with my code when I can hear the keyboard. Unfortunately my headphones block keyboard sounds. <comment><USER2>
      POKE 25609,50: REM It's still ZX Spectrum nostalgia week, right?</comment>


Google Whistleblower Doc Dump - <AUTHOR> https://www.zachvorhies.com/ <comment><USER2> This was extremely courageous and absolutely the right thing to do. Google has unprecedented control over information and it's important that the public be aware of how that information is potentially manipulated. A free society openness and dialog, not corporate sponsored censorship.</comment>


Chirply (YC S10) is Threadless for Paper Goods - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/y-combinator-backed-chirply-is-threadless-for-paper-goods/

<comment><USER2> This will be a winner because:

1) Targets women, so leverages 50% of patio11's awesome advice.

2) Unlike the similar product I'm working on, solves the huge problem of content creation.

<comment><USER3> forgive me for my lack of knowledge of HN lore, but what was the advice? (a link/keywords for searching would be good :)

<comment><USER4> Give the Business of Software guys a few months and there will be a video which answers one of these questions in an amusing fashion.

<comment><USER3> In the meantime, to build upon euroclydon's summary, do you have any recommended articles about catering to, um, middle aged women? (software! I mean software-wise!)

On your blog I found only something about abusive customers :)

<comment><USER4> I have quite a few HN comments about it. Most of them boil down to "You should try selling software to women. Women pay money for software, unlike 20-something white and Asian males. You are more likely to sell software which solves a pressing problem for her than to sell software which solves a pressing problem for him like 'How do I steal music more efficiently?' Also, since the industry spends a disproportionate amount of time and effort on the needs of techies, the software currently available to her largely sucks, and fairly few competitors are in any given niche relative to the market opportunity. This is profitably exploitable: make something that she wants, charge money, she will happily pay you money."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a slight tangent, but my dream service - and sadly I'm only half joking - would be:

* Enter in a list of all those family members I'm obliged to send birthday and Christmas cards to, including some basic demographic info

* Upload an image of my handwriting

* I'm reminded at the appropriate times to pick from a filtered selection of cards and enter a personalised message

* Printed & sent (bonus points: handwriting looks real)

Someone build this please!

<comment><USER6> haha, everything you just said is already in development! great minds think alike :)

<comment><USER7> Possible variant: Accept a picture/image of a handwritten message, and apply it (cleanly) to the card / piece to be mailed.

EDIT: I'm thinking of e.g. an image from a cell phone, if you can get sufficient quality. Not something that becomes significant effort for the user. Bonus points if, or necessary that it looks (fairly well) handwritten.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The logo, sketch-y theme and use of birds and clouds is strikingly similar to the Chirp conference website.

<http://www.chirply.com/> <http://chirp.twitter.com/>

<comment><USER9> I dare you to make a logo for any org with the name chirp at the root of its name with anything other than a bird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The link, in case people try .ly first: <http://www.chirply.com/>

A few things I noticed:

      - front page looks very different from the voting index, as though they're very different sites
      - front page lacks focus
      - index mentions tacky greeting cards but only shows blank white line-art empty cards rather than actual examples/previews (even if they're not real yet). I'd cut back (or shrink) the front page text and put some designs to vote on there too.

Hopefully the front page is just temporary until winning designs are chosen because all the best stuff is hidden behind it.

Related: Someone should collate "Threadless for x" and FML clone sites so people can see what openings are still available in the market.

<comment><USER11> i actually owned the domain chirp.ly back in the day. got an inquiry of purchase sometime that would fall in line with the conception of this company. though lost contact with the inquirer.

possible it wasn't the yc company, but i only bring it up because i've seen this happen several times on hn and hey, small world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, that's like <http://moonpig.com> then? What do they do differently?

Edit: Nevermind, answered it myself. Chirply does all paper goods, whereas moonpig only does cards, flowers, gifts, and bottles.

<comment><USER6> and it's crowd-sourced design, so the designs are better. Whereas moonpig is mostly about customized text.

<comment><USER13> Probably the more appropriate question is - how it's different than <http://minted.com>? I know TinyPrints is not crowd-sourced, but Minted is.

Please note, I'm not trying to demean your service or existence by any means, but just trying to learn how you're distinguishing and plan to compete with this super growing startups?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really neat! I just heard about this on Twitter and can't wait to get these cards out to the family next holiday season.

</comment><comment><USER15> The site looks great guys, can't wait until I can order my cards and wrapping paper from chirply.

</comment><comment><USER16> Greeting cards have needed fixing for a long time, but the traditional card brands have tended to pay for fitting/fixtures etc. to have a monopoly in stores (at least here in Aus). Always good to see more competition in this space.

</comment><comment><USER17> On my Mac, Safari & Firefox, the "Shop" links on the front page do nothing. Also not sure why the links there aren't seasonal -- the Christmas Cards link is useless, but a Valentine's Day link would be useful.

<comment><USER6> sorry about that! The shop isn't active so those links are empty links. Right now it's all voting and submissions :)

<comment> steve-howard It may be a good idea to let the user know that if they click the links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, I'm bachelor dude and I don't care for stuff like this and even I want to order from them. If this is how I feel, I can't even imagine what... this is going to be HUGE.

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome designs + Easy UI = Totally looking forward to ordering cards to send my mom :)

Congrats Gagan and Neel!

</comment><comment><USER20> So... how do I actually BUY these cards? I WANT TO GIVE YOU MONEY.

<comment><USER21> The cards go on sale after the first contest is over, at the beginning of March. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congrats Gagan, Neel, and the rest of the Chirply team!

</comment><comment><USER23> Congrats on the launch Gagan! Great piece!

<comment><USER6> thanks gustaf!</comment></comment>


Oracle attorney says Google's court victory might kill the GPL - jor-el http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/op-ed-oracle-attorney-says-googles-court-victory-might-kill-the-gpl/?comments=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Of course an Oracle attorney would try to put a scary spin on the decision.

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that Google used the Java API documentation and re-implemented the API for Android. The Java byte-code get's translated into Dalvik environment (DEX) code. There is NO JVM, etc being used. The Java byte-code was well documented in a book back in the days when Sun owned it.

Since Oracle have bought Sun, they have adopted patent troll techniques.

</comment><comment><USER2> > [..] Google's narrative boiled down to this: because the Java APIs have been > open, any use of them was justified and all licensing restrictions should be > disregarded. In other words, if you offer your software on an open and free > basis, any use is fair use.

Drawing this conclusion is a bit far fetched, isn't it? I there really a basis for the idea that the very specific "Oracle v. Google fair use" verdict can be applied to open source software in general?

<comment><USER3> I'm not entirely sure, but from my reading:

* There were two major questions, one was about copyrights, the other was about patents.

* I think that the district court believes that names and short phrases are not copyrightable. So the court excluded API names and class and function headers from the question. So a question that was left was whether the structure / sequence / organization of API's were copyrightable.

* The court doesn't hold that the structure / sequence / organization of API's are uncopyrightable, just that in Oracle's case it wasn't.

* I think the jury found minor copyright violations (9 lines of copied code and tests that weren't shipped in production), and I believe Oracle and Google settled those matters for $0. As a detail, the court noted that the 9 lines of copied code was written by the same person who was employed by both Sun and Google.

* So the remaining question was on patents, and the jury found that Google's implementation of code underneath API calls were original.

* The court phrases legal questions for jury consideration very precisely as an itemized checklist for the foreman to tally up unanimous consensus, which is left blank if the jury deadlocks. The first jury deadlocked on the most important question of fair use, and the second jury unanimously felt that Oracle did not make its case on the structure / sequence / organization. I believe one argument about structure related to whether the structure of names (which themselves cannot be copyrighted) were due to external factors of compatibility or industry expectations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> GPL might lose rights over API, but it shouldn't have them in the first place and certainly never intended to.

<comment><USER5> While it's a hyperbole the argument stems from 2 things as i can see it: The fact that Google ignored license restrictions, and the fact that Google "reworte" SUN's/Oracle's code and released it on a different license. The lawyer thinks this can be used as a precedent for other companies to violate GPL in general not just where an API is concerned and this ruling would decrease the level of protection that GPL provides making companies less likely to use it for their software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't see any explanation of how the ruling will kill the GPL in the article, just a lot of hyperbole. Reading it a second time, maybe the author is just taking a lot of logical jumps that I cannot understand. Can anyone give me a reasoned explanation of what the author is trying to say?

<comment><USER7> OpenJDK was available under GPL. Android took copyrighted parts of that software (the API) and released it under Apache, violating the GPL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's unfortunate that the API was judged to be copyrightable. However if Google's use of the API in a commercial product is considered to be fair use, then presumably any use of the API would be fair use, and in practice the API is therefore public domain. I suppose I'm confused by the whole thing.

<comment><USER3> From my reading, the names used for the API weren't copyrightable because copyrights didn't cover short names and phrases, so the remaining major question was whether the structure / sequence / organization of the API is copyrightable.

There was like a multi-prong framework for viewing whether use of the structure of API was fair use, and I believe one argument rested on whether the copying of that structure related to external environmental factors like industry expectations.

Another important aspect of the ruling was that copyrights were not meant to enforce monopolies, but rather patents were, and on the patent question the jury found Google to have written original classes and methods underneath the API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jury instructions are the interesting part of this: [https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/05/26/google_oracle_jury_instruc...](https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/05/26/google_oracle_jury_instructions.pdf)</comment>


Why it's so hard to find dumbbells in the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/21396116/dumbbell-set-shortage-nordictrack-bowflex <comment><USER2> Finally, halfway through the article:

> [home weight] sales usually start in the fall, hit their peak with January's > New Year's resolutions, then taper off as it gets warmer and people are more > likely to venture outside or go back to the gym.

> ...

> 95 percent of the world's dumbbells are made in China, Logan said. To curb > the virus spread, China instituted strict lockdowns from January to April;

> ...

> "It takes a month or so to get the products made and get them to the port," > Logan continued. "Then it goes from China to the United States" — landing, > she says in Long Beach, California — "and then if they're going to the East > Coast, they have to go through the Panama Canal."

> Once weights do get to America, ports, too, are subject to lockdowns and > social distancing, adding even more delays.

<comment><USER3> So, the supply shock is followed by an explosion in demand, and since "inventories are bad!", there is suddenly no goods available for purchase.

<comment><USER4> > and since "inventories are bad!"

It's not that it's "bad" to hold inventory, it's just expensive and risky. Tastes change, there's shrinkage, some things degrade over time, rents are high, and you have to finance buying/holding things you aren't selling. Obviously, just-in-time inventory isn't super resilient, but it has a ton of advantages most of the time. Perhaps it doesn't make sense for NOTHING to be stored near the point of sale, but it's not clear to me at least how that should be decided.

<comment><USER5> > Tastes change, there's shrinkage, some things degrade over time

I think most of these don't apply to dumbbells. At least not on a short term.

Now, the shortage seems to have kickstarted small shops dumbbell production lines (which are easier to put together than kettlebells)

<comment><USER6> Or pick up 2 bricks. I did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone reading this, let me recommend an extremely easy alternative: sand packed into trash compactor bags and then duck taped into "bricks" of various weights. This plus a big canvas zippered duffle are plenty for some very excellent training. See [https://www.goruck.com/equipment/sandbags/](https://www.goruck.com/equipment/sandbags/) for a commercial and readily available option.

These suckers can get up to 200# really easy, and are an excellent way to stay strong. Flipping one of these into a clean then front squatting it is PLENTY for 90% of people wanting to stay fit. Plus, overloaded progression is easy, just add more sand bags. Another classic is just to pick it up to one shoulder, then drop over your shoulder behind you, then repeat. Deadlifts are just picking it up to thigh height.

Add these homemade sandbags to a good rucking pack, and you're ready for an intense cardio session and strengthening routine. Just don't overdo it, rucking is really hard on tendons. Make sure to only ever increase weight or distance by no more than 10% a week.

I made a set of them for rucking, and it's amazing how fast a ruck pack gets mind alteringly heavy. At some point the brain just can't think any more. It's very enlightening.

<comment><USER8> you can also just do pushups and pullups, lunges, and other calisthenics. If you hit 100 push ups with a backpack full of something on your back then maybe you _need_ dumbells. All kinds of way to make these things harder. Go slow, go down suuuper slow, use one arm.

<comment><USER9> A good intro on Prisoner/at-home workouts can be found here:

[https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-prisoner- workout...](https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-prisoner-workout/)

I'll add in that Burpees are real gut busters and that the 'Deck of Pain' system is aptly named yet produces results quickly. I think it's the randomization element that gives you the extra 'umph'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We bought a home gym in March, just when the lockdown here was announced. We made the decision at 8am, picked up the stuff by 12am the same day and by 6pm all online shops were out of stock (within 24h after the lockdown was announced). Best impulsive purchase ever.

<comment><USER11> FYI your times are out of order. 12AM is the one in the middle of the night.

<comment><USER10> Ah, thank you. Always confusing that :) I meant noon.

<comment><USER11> The way to remember is that all the minutes after noon are definitely in the afternoon (including 12:01PM) so noon is the PM one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _" Even casual gym-goers might be able to justify the spend since weights at home are the only option when gyms aren't open"_

Which is false, as you could always just do bodyweight exercises instead.

 _" You can overload the body with bodyweight, but at some point you are going to have to add more."_

That may be true, but I would bet 99.9% of the people buying dumbbells aren't anywhere near that point.

<comment><USER12> > Which is false, as you could always just do bodyweight exercises instead.

lol, why dumbbells have been used for so long if they are useless ?

bodyweights exercises are quite limited, only three of them can are usefull for athletic people, dips (triceps) and pull ups( back + biceps) and handstand press (this one is very hard, shoulders). Push ups are very limited in term weight, about 50kg bench press equivalent (which is nothing). Raw squat is the same , doing 100 reps is not the same as doing 10 reps with 80kg on the back.

If you really want to exercise your legs, chest, biceps you have to use weights.

But of course if you are not into gym but only into fitness, you can do anything bodyweight

<comment><USER13> Because body weight exercises are much harder for most people it also is harder to progress from zero to hero with them but hero to super hero is pretty easy.

For chest you have push-ups and their multiple variations which most people still can't perform correctly (even "lifters") as well as body weight rows.

The moment you'll be able to do even one parallel wide grip pull up which at that point is an unsupported chest row so it's essentially a bench press in reverse just 100 times harder I'll concede that you might be done with body weight.

For biceps just do chin-up curls, row curls or towel curls.

For legs there are a ton of them and if you think they don't overload you well then I want to see you do even a single pistol squat.

It's also much easier to add progressive overload by a) changing the mechanics of the exercise so you isolate muscles more effectively and b) by adding a backpack with a few water bottles filled with water or sand.

So the real issue isn't that they aren't effective, but that most people lack the strength, stability and range of motion to start doing them and it's very demotivating when it might take you 4 months to do even one rep correctly. And that is without doing really hard stuff like planche which might take 2 years for an average person to do unassisted.

<comment><USER14> I disagree, the progress from hero to superhero is much more difficult. I can do many pull ups, I can do archer pull ups. In the gym I was just adding weights every time I felt it is too easy, 5kg at a time, nice little step up. During the lockdown I thought, okay, I can train for one arm pull up, I add half of my body weight in iron anyway. I still don't know how to do it gradually. I tried resistance bands and various progressions I found on youtube. They all feel like much bigger steps than adding 5kg every time. I ended up pulling my biceps when I moved from one resistance band to another.

Overall, I found it very irritating when people repeatedly told me: "oh, gyms are closed? try pushups at home!" Gym goers are already not "most people".

<comment><USER13> You know how many variations are there on pull ups? change your grip width and angle, can you do a parallel pull up? regular pulls up are so easy to overload even if you can't do the variations a backpack is all you need.

And honestly i want to see a one arm pull up with and a proper one (not when you hanging willy nilly sideways) with 150% body weight that puts you not only well above the average gym but well above the elite athlete territory here is Magnus Midtbø doing one arm pull ups [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zoN4DvEpKA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zoN4DvEpKA) and there is no way he can do it with 150% bodyweight, I don't know of a single climber that ever achieved that.

<comment><USER14> I do normal two arms pull ups with additional weight. If I could do weighted one arm pull up, I wouldn't have a problem to do them without weight at home.

I admit I was a big fun of bw workouts for 3-4 years. Until I realized that it is much easier to add another plate than dig youtube for more difficult progressions and suffer.

Pretty much the same way I can do a dozen of handstand pushups, but I have no idea how to move to one arm handstand pushup. I am not even sure I saw a video of one on youtube.

Moving through advanced progressions of bw exercises is much much more challenging than increasing number of plates on barbell. That was my whole point. I can see why people do it as sport, but it is a handicap for everyone who just wants to lift more.

<comment><USER13> For one arm standup push-up if you have push-up handles then you use one of them and the other arm on the floor and you alternate this basically puts more of the load on the arm that is on the floor while providing some support.

You can also use a palm on the floor and forearm on the floor if you don't have the handles or just use a book/anything to elevate one arm to reduce its range of motion and to allow you to transfer more and more weight to the other.

But for hand stand push-ups you have other ways of progression such as curling your body to reduce the center of mass and to isolate your arms, chest and shoulder more from your back and core.

I generally avoid one hand anything because it's too easy to get injured which is one of the main issues with body weight.

Most people won't be able to lift enough weight to get injured and unless you are doing singles/doubles you are more or less safe.

With tings like one armed handstand pushups it's way too easy to get to a point in your range of motion where you have absolutely no chance of holding that weight in fact it's rather easy to do it with normal hand standing pushups. There are safer options for shoulder/delts dominated pushups than hand standing ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dumbbells may be harder to find, but Rogue has consistently had kettlebells (made in America, in various sizes) for the last several months. Kettlebells are amazing tools for exercise, and can offer more movements than just bodyweight alone.

Shipping is not cheap, but you can outfit a perfectly good home gym with 3 or 4 kettlebell sizes and a jump rope.

<comment><USER16> Yet, Rogue has been out of all of their plates, barbells, dumbbells (both static and loadable), and most racks since lockdown, all of which are supposedly made in America.

<comment><USER17> Not true. They have a rotation of weekly stock in the last few months. You just have to be on top of it to beat everyone else as most items go OOS within 5 minutes. Barbells are consistently stocked weekly and plates as well. I've managed to build out my gym within the last 4 months with everything I need: rack, adjustable and flat benches, multiple barbells, over 700 lbs in bumper/iron plates, powerblocks and an echo bike. You can follow along (as well as tracking other companies stock) on the stock and shipping thread at r/homegym.

<comment><USER16> I've checked every couple weeks and never seen anything available for sale, I guess they moved onto the hypebeast business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've taken to filling 5 gallon buckets with beach sand. Cheap and it works. Put a broom handle across two and you've got a 100lb bench press/curl.

<comment><USER19> Have they ever fallen off, spilled the sand, and then you find that you hate sand because it's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm a parcel courier and I know first hand that not many postal companies will accept or burden their staff to handle 20kg or over and the few specialist heavy package postal companies that exist both struggle and churn through employees by the day. The reason is quite clear all postal companies are using zero-hour staff on minimum pay, and if you're a job seeker you will be better off being an office cleaner for the same rate of pay than to be ordered to deliver 20kg+ packages for 11hours a day with no time off, work health care plan, and the employers right to replace you at will. It's simple economics of health and well being.

</comment><comment><USER21> What is the community experience with resistance bands? I see them more frequently now and wonder if they aren't a reasonable alternative

<comment><USER22> I've been using them for years; I took a job where I was on the road a lot, and they're way better than hotel gyms. I like them better for arms than weights. Middlin to very good for upper back and shoulders. Buy a chest expander. "The Hook" by Sierra exercise[0] or Samson Cable Set[1]. Then read "Fatman's guide to cable training."[2] Useless for lower body, and they build a fairly different kind of upper body strength; more useful for grappling than picking up barbells. The True Archer Pull is pretty amazing as an exercise and should be considered a standard feat of strength the same way as the deadlift, IMO. They make a great combination with sandbags and/or kettlebells and are now part of my staple exercises (unnatural garbage like bench press are long gone).

[0] [https://www.sierraexercise.com/](https://www.sierraexercise.com/)

[1] [https://leviticus11.com/exercise-equipment/samson-cable- set/](https://leviticus11.com/exercise-equipment/samson-cable-set/)

[2] [http://yoga-horizons.com/pdfs/Fatmans-Guide-to-Cable- Trainin...](http://yoga-horizons.com/pdfs/Fatmans-Guide-to-Cable- Training-2.pdf)

<comment><USER21> Excellent, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds about right.

Now do office and children's desks at IKEA...

</comment><comment><USER24> Rowing crews often make barbells and dumbbells out of steel pipes, small buckets, and concrete.</comment>


Is it legal to use a program to apply for jobs - <AUTHOR> I'm frustrated with the process of applying for jobs on job boards and other sites answering same questions again. So I have created a python bot to do that task for me. I wanted to make that script as open source. But is it legal? <comment><USER2> Depends on the TOS of the site you're applying on.

</comment><comment><USER3> They might not have caught on yet. Post it on GitHub and see how long it stays up. Worst happens, GitHub takes it down.</comment>


Tech Companies Report Profits as 40M Americans Face Evictions - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxbwd/tech-companies-report-huge-profits-as-40-million-americans-face-evictions <comment> node-bayarea stupid journalists! Because of increased "digital transformation", money is moving from retail to online.Techn companies' profit have nothing to do with 40M who might fact evictions.</comment>


Joining the military- bad career choice with well paying job offer on the table? - <AUTHOR>

I have an offer to work on a trading desk (I know, I know - it's corporate, but that doesn't change the situation) at a Wall Street firm, but I've always wanted to join the military and serve. Is it a poor career choice for me to do so? Any advice is welcome.. <comment><USER2> If you want to join the military but you could also be looking at a good job, then I would do both. Accept the job and join a Reserve / Guard unit.

Go ahead and start with the trading desk and get going with it. After things have settled down with whatever changes you have had to make, then start talking to recruiters.

What you need to look for is the available opportunities in your area, and a recruiter can help you with this. For example, if you have an Army base close to your area then there is likely a lot of local Army Reserve opportunities available. If there are no local Army Reserve units, then you will need to look at National Guard units. Though I'm using Army as an example, you could do the same with any branch which has equivalents (and again, the branch will largely depend on local opportunities.)

Once you have located the local units which you could be based in (or close enough by commute) then try having the recruiter take you to each of them to talk to someone who can tell you about the needs of that particular unit. Hopefully that person could also tell you a little about the jobs available. You will probably find that the unit will have some needs which are more critical than others and this might mean the difference between being being bored with nothing to do and being active and needed.

The reason I suggest starting out as a part timer is because you have the best of all worlds. If you go into basic training / AIT and hate the military, then you get to go home and only have to deal with the military one weekend a month. If you love the military and feel that you want to go full time, then you have the option of making that switch.

Make sure you don't get pressured by your recruiters and MEPS. The recruiters will try to get you to go full time and MEPS is where you land your MOS (job.) I'm not sure exactly how MEPS work but when I went into the reserves I had to pick from a list of open jobs available in my area. If there are no open jobs that you like, I'm not sure what options you have. That is why I suggest you speak with a unit before you go, so that you can get a good idea of what is needed and what you will be doing.

I went into an aviation unit (Chinooks) and it was a lot of fun. The reserve unit I started out with was well funded and did a lot of work for the local community. For me, that meant free helicopter tours of places like Mt. Ranier. ;)

Another reason for checking with your unit is that you can see how active and how well taken care of they were. I served in two different units and the differences were like night and day. The first unit (Chinook Reserve unit at Ft. Lewis) was very active with most of their Chinooks in service and I had people fighting over my time for helping out in different areas. I could have easily landed a full time job there if I wanted to (another possibility, you can work full time military even though you are technically a weekend warrior.) The next unit I served with (Blackhawk Guard unit in Pheonix) had a lot of inactive aircraft and I hardly did anything.

From what I have seen I believe Reserve units are better funded but I could be wrong on that. The pro's for the Guard units is that they are more diversely located and I believe they have more benefits such as discounts on the state public schools.

Good luck and take things slow. Make sure you don't get rushed or pressured into anything.

EDIT: One issue you might run into is that you will have to take time for training. This might be a deal breaker for you and / or your job. You have some choice over your time away with the MOS you select. My aviation MOS was supposed to be something like 7 months on top of basic training but that was shortened quite a bit because we had a small class of people who were all college students (we were much stronger in the classroom environment than the typical Army recruit.) If you couldn't be away that long then you could pick a much shorter MOS.

</comment><comment><USER3> _I've always to join the military and serve. Is it a poor career choice for me to do so?_

Aside from the obvious answer that the first sentence no verb, I'd say this: Wall Street jobs will always be there (or if not Wall Street, similarly well- paying jobs for highly-skilled people) but you won't always be fit enough / young enough / single enough to join the miliary.

In short: Screw your career -- live your life the way you want to live it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd join the military, as long as you have non-financial reasons to do so. Then, you have a bunch of options -- get out after your contract, go reserves/ng, or retire after 20 and have a second career.</comment>