The Finder is dead.  - <AUTHOR> http://sachin.posterous.com/the-finder-is-dead-soon-a-pc-wont-have-files

<comment><USER3> This article is full of flaws.

Finder was just rewritten from the ground up, from scratch. Heavy investment.

Spaces is about windows management, which has nothing to do with Finder. Same with Expose.

iPhone and iPad deal with files, one way or the other.

<comment><USER4> the finder was rewritten (so i was wrong about that) but it didn't functionally change. Apple isn't actively innovating within the Finder.

Spaces and Expose are not "Finder" directly, but they are still concepts trying to deal with the issues around windows, multiple apps, and sharing between apps.

<comment><USER5> Look at Gnome shell for some fresh desktop innovation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do not want.

Limiting the amount of interaction the end user has with a hierarchical filesystem may well be a Good Thing. Increasing the degree to which each application is a black box containing all associated data is a Bad Thing. Making each application responsible for the mechanism by which data can be transferred, archived and synchronized is also a Bad Thing.

<comment><USER7> Excellent point. As frustrated as I am with the limitations of the "file" and "directory" abstractions. Without them, transfer, archival, and synchronization of data would likely be far more difficult than it is now.

Not that the systems we have now are anything to be proud of.

<comment><USER8> It seems Apple has evolved the iPad past "application / data - same place". It now looks like a common area with different types of data accessible by apps. This is actually a pretty good solution. People know how to use a search engine and the current hierarchy is not a good solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah. The command line is dead too. That's what purists believed in 1986. The Mac killed it. Except, it just keeps coming back because it's so danged useful.

<comment><USER10> How many people do you know, whose job title does not start with computer and/or IT and/or sysadmin, actually use the terminal?

Think of this as a "meta-filesystem". Instead of asking the OS for files and folders, an app just asks the OS for "photos" or "music". Most people, and by most people I am referring to the lowest common dominator like your grandmother, don't care where a file is and actually constantly loses where files are.

As with all things Mac, since Apple obviously dogfoods their systems and servers with their computers, the filesystem will not go away. But it will be hidden from the bottom 99% technical layperson who simply doesn't care. Files and Finder, like Terminal.app, will be there for those of us who do care.

You need to differentiate between what's good for the people/commoner and what's good for the developer/pro-user, since they are in _extremely_ difference market segments given technical proficiency.

<comment><USER11> _How many people do you know, whose job title does not start with computer and/or IT and/or sysadmin, actually use the terminal?_

Loads. They are called working scientists. Sometimes there is a perception that the world is divided into geeks and "appliance" users. There is actually a non-trivial amount of grey area in between.

<comment><USER12> Why do those scientists have to use the terminal?

Not a snarky question: I'm not very familiar with scientific computing and am curious (from a UI perspective) why, say, applications for office work manage to keep things essentially all in the GUI, but apps used by scientists can't. Is the problem that scientific apps don't devote enough resources to good/comprehensive UI or is it that what scientists do is better done from a command line?

Regardless: as I said elsewhere in this thread, this is why I'm starting to think of PCs/Macs as the workstations of this era. There will always be a need for them. But they're probably needlessly complex for most uses.

<comment><USER11> To answer your question, there's a number of reasons. Undoubtedly some do just come down to "historical reasons" but there are many reasons why a command- line is actually the right choice. The main reason is that the scientist wants to run a very specialised analysis of her data, and so is almost certainly either running custom code, or at least code that was developed in an academic environment. Creating GUIs that are flexible enough to cover all the things somebody might do with their data is a complex and time consuming task, and does not directly produce "science". It is a lot easier to use the command line to interact with your dataset. Moreover you often don't know what you want to do in advance ("if we knew where we were going, we would't call it reasearch"). Therefore a typical user may fiddle around with the command line trying to get the most out of their data, and then string it all together in a script - so again, a command line makes a good prototyping environment.

Certainly in my area (astronomy) I have seen some attempts to provide gui based intefaces to data reduction, and even mocked up a few myself; but the effort to reward ratio isn't worth it - especially since you are dealing with people who can, in general, follow instructions.

Also, do not underestimate the higher effiency of the commandline - after all, there is a good reason _we_ all use it. Even if there was a system administration gui out there, would most sysadmins use it? It's actually faster to type.

I think the "appliance" model of computing (eg. iPhone/iPad) is perfectly valid for a good percentage of the population at least for some of the time, but it won't render "classic" computers obsolete.

I also have to say that personally, I have generally been dissatisfied with attempts to disguise or flatten the filesystem by, for example, using tags instead. I actually think pretty damn hierarchically, so I often organise my material as IF it was a filesystem, when the application will allow me to do so - maybe it's just me?

<comment><USER12> Excellent answer, thanks, and I think my (also-hierarchically-inclined) gut agrees with your last paragraph: if you're gonna expose a complex filesystem to the user (and, for many usages, that's a good thing), hierarchical — with metadata/content indexing for fast querying — is probably the way to go. I'd like to hear of situations in this area where people think a tag system is/would be better than the hierarchy+index system, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the reasons I love the unix world and despise Windows is precisely _because_ things are not in black boxes. I can read and parse log files. Config is in text files that can be grepped. Automated processes are run from scripts that I can open and examine. Very little is done in a walled garden closed binary format. Even Apple's applications are folders inside of which I can find yet more scripts, text files, resources, etc. When something goes wrong I can usually figure out why. When something fails for some god-knows- why reason in Windows, I get an error box, and nothing else.

Please don't try to hide the guts of a system from me. It is the thing I value most about my Mac.

<comment><USER12> This is exactly why I think "computers" (using the 'folk' parlance here: I know iPhones and iPads are "computers") are on their way to becoming, essentially, workstations.

Complicated tools to do complicated things.

I don't see any reason that the Mac should ever move away from having Finder and Terminal (though they will become less and less used by the average user), but the vast majority of things that "end users" do with computers don't need to deal with this sort of stuff. The tools to make end user tools (end user tools such as device OSes, apps, and server software for end user apps to interact with), will always necessarily be of another level of complexity.

Let the Mac stay a Mac (read: UNIX), I say. But I don't want to do most of my non-techie stuff on it anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> While 90% of the time I agree with the ease of sandboxed and cloud-synced file management, there's still that 10% of the time that I'm annoyed by it.

If I want to copy, rename, share, or email a specific file I find it easiest to do it in the file. I find it almost as easy to do it in an app that facilitate it easily like iPhoto (with it's built in share and email buttons). I find it much more difficult to do it in an app that doesn't make it quite as easily facilitated through the UI, like iTunes.

I would love for the finder to go away, but I'd hate for it to go away at the expense of every app developer having to rebuild mechanisms into each app to expose general file manipulations that the finder handles quite well right now.

</comment><comment><USER14> In June or so (according to macrumors: [http://www.macrumors.com/2010/01/23/mac- os-x-10-7-appearing-...](http://www.macrumors.com/2010/01/23/mac- os-x-10-7-appearing-in-web-logs-dev-release-at-wwdc/)) 10.7 will be pushed out to developers at WWDC and we'll see for sure. Personally, I can't stand this speculation that, just because Apple designed an iPhone and iPad, that they're going to cripple the Mac. I think if they think people will be better off with a limited device, they'll just try and sell them an iPad instead of a Mac.

Hierarchical file systems aren't terribly usable--how many people do _you_ know who just splay all their files across their desktop--but I can't imagine Apple replacing it with just an app model. (Personally, I like Gmail's archive/label/search system for a filesystem UI, but it's hard to see what wrinkles we'd run into translating it into a general FS.)

</comment><comment><USER15> Yay! Lockin!

The future is one big black box that it difficult to manage or migrate.

<comment><USER16> Doesn't have to be, though. Can't you have both?

iTunes does pretty well but doesn't make it all the way. More a fault of the of metadata than iTunes. You are be able to access your music the old- fashioned (crappy) way – which doesn't make any sense for music – but there you go. All nicely organized in folders. That's how it should be. I want specialized apps, I don't think any generic file browser could be as feature rich as specialized apps without turning into some kind hybrid monster and usability abomination.

So it's possible. Sure, it's also hard.

<comment><USER17> It's possible sure, it's not hard, Apple will just never want to do it. Just like Microsoft, lock-in is not something they want to avoid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hope I'm not alone in really disliking the current over-use of the word 'App'. An 'App' is merely a shortening of 'Application', they are not different things. Even on the iPhone an App is still just an Application.

Postulating that the current model of user's interacting with files mostly because Applications are now called Apps is faintly ludicrous.

On the other hand I think that hiding the intricacies of the filesystem in a user-friendly way would be welcomed by most people that use a computer for non-technical purposes. It certainly reduces the likelihood of problems caused by accidental deletion of config/application data.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is exactly why I hate iTunes and the Apple ideology. I was using it for a while before I decided that the UI sucked for my massive collection of music. But getting those files out of proprietary codecs is a pain. No I do not want your monolithic Apple apps.

</comment><comment><USER20> It may not be dead, but its been in perpetual suck-mode for multi-monitors since its inception.

</comment><comment><USER21> It seems unlikely that the file system would disappear/become inaccessible altogether. Sure, when you want to edit photos you should have to dig around in folders. But existing apps already insulate you from these details - <USER2> by layering suitable abstractions over the file system.

Having the more general layer underneath gives you more power when you need it. It also gives all apps a simple, standard place to store their data. The raw file system has been slowly losing its prominence over time, but I really don't see a benefit in scrapping it altogether.

</comment><comment><USER22> Macs will be touchscreens. The OS will look like iPhone OS. This is not hard to see.

Web Designers: Wake Up And Smell The Touchscreen Coffee! [http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/web-designers- wake...](http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/web-designers-wake-up-and- smell-the-touchscreen-coffee/)

Edited to add: This does not necessarily mean access to the CLI will be taken away. I think Devs would revolt over that.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think you can go one step further and assume the browser is going to be the only app most people use. It's happening on the desktop, and there's no reason the same phenomenon won't happen on devices.

If this seems far fetched, look at it this way: most desktop apps are becoming more like browsers given how they use the network. Spotify is a perfect example (for those who've used it).

</comment><comment><USER24> This is bad. Sure, you can make the user forget about files most of the times, but not _kill_ it completely, because:

1) It'll be a hell of work to parse everything. Should my music clips go into the music folder or video folder? Sure, you can associate file extensions, but what if the software isn't installed yet? If two programs have to share files? The relations can fail in too many ways.

2) All software to ever run in this machine would have to fully implement it's own "file explorer". The picture manager will have to be able to rename, organize move files, as will the document editor, the video player, the text editor...

3) Less freedom of movement. What if I want to send a set of videos, documents and audio files to someone else? Would I have to open each app and politely ask it to send an email (which they will have to implement, too)? What if I want to backup an entire hard drive, with hundreds of different file types?

3) It'll be a complete hell if things go wrong, and you will have to resort to file management anyway. File lost extension somehow? Major file extension conflict? Unknown file type? You are screwed without manipulating the files themselves.

And don't even get me started on the reliability of your "in the cloud" future.

</comment><comment><USER25> In this delightful future, how do I change the app I use to edit my photos? Or change the app I use to listen to my music?

<comment><USER4> Every app should be able to access the music, photos, videos, and other files on a system through smart APIs. But the user doesn't need to know about it or manage it

<comment><USER25> So the user is going to be able to organise their files through smart apis, but doesn't need to manage it? How's that going work work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Has this guy seen the video for the iPad announcement? It makes it pretty clear that Apple intends on keeping Macs as the high-end/advanced machines, the iPhone as a somewhat limited portable device, and the iPad situated comfortably in between.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't see why the Finder and file concept have to die just because personal computing's storage model is evolving.

In fact Finder capabilities should only grow as many people choose to de- centralize and sychronize their storage.

</comment><comment><USER5> And so, the gap between those who can make and those who are limited to consuming widens. A computer ceases to be a bicycle for the mind and becomes just another environment for consumption.

Is this really what we want?

</comment><comment><USER28> I, for one, hope not - not specifically Finder, but the file/folder model in general.

I cringe every time I HAVE to drop to shell just to manipulate a specific file the way I would like to.

</comment><comment><USER29> Try attaching a photo from iPhoto to an Email.

<comment><USER30> The file browser in OS X shows the iPhoto library in it's source list.

<comment><USER29> Not on my Mac, OS X 10.6.2.

<comment><USER30> Any Cocoa application (it's an Apple thing obviously, so it's only going to work if the application is using their file browser), File > Open. Source list on the left, under the "Media" heading find "photos". All there, browsable by events and groups, or as a continuous list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A 10% market share company is going to change the face of computing... in a way that everyone has been predicting for the last 15, 20 years? I somehow doubt it.

<comment><USER32> To be fair, they were a 0% market share company when they changed the face of handheld computing (iPhone).

<comment><USER31> Has it? The iPhone is popular with geeks and rich folk, and mostly only in the US. Last I checked, such people weren't the majority of people. The iPhone has certainly pantsed WinMobile and Palm... but those were pretty easy targets to begin with. They haven't even come close to touching the global Symbian marketshare.

<comment><USER32> Who knows how accurate this is, but AdMob reports the iPhone as having a 50% share of the _worldwide_ smartphone market. Moreover, even if they had a 1% share, I'd still say that Apple has utterly transformed that market. Any new versions of WinMo, Palm, Blackberry, Symbian, Android, etc will be influenced by and compared to the iPhone OS.

src: [http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/49169-report- androi...](http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/49169-report-android- based-devices-threaten-iphones-dominance)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Voyage of the Beagle—blogged by Charles Darwin - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebeaglevoyage.com/

<comment><USER2> This has been retweeted by @tomhuxley repeatedly.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Henry_Huxley></comment>


Brexit: Theresa May to trigger article 50 by end of March 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/01/theresa-may-to-propose-great-repeal-bill-to-unwind-eu-laws <comment><USER2> >The pledge by the prime minister means the UK will leave the EU by spring 2019, before the next general election, with the prime minister also announcing plans for a "great repeal bill" to incorporate all EU regulations in UK law as soon as Brexit takes effect.

In what way is this not just a giant null-op?

<comment><USER3> The UK will be able to selectively repel laws afterwards. It's kicking the can down the road, since there is no way they can handle that particular can presently.

It is basically a lot of ado about nothing, with a grandiose sounding name which keeps on perpetuating the myth that the EU is imposing legislation (most legislation has to be approved unanimously, and the UK has veto rights), while doing nothing at all.

In two years time they'll actually start repelling some legislation, and that's what will be tricky, since every law protects/benefits a certain interest group. We'll see years of in-fighting about former EU law.

<comment><USER4> You've described how we were told the EU would work. But organizations have a tendency to get around restrictions on their power.

As a result, the UK does not have veto power and the EU is pretty much a legislative body without the appropriate representation.

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=gILTIDr4Ra8](https://youtube.com/watch?v=gILTIDr4Ra8)</comment></comment></comment>


Rare is the leader who can actually write well - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123154076720569453.html?mod=rss_Politics_And_Policy <comment><USER2> "If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, or whatever, the writing skills will pay off. Effective, concise writing and editing leads to effective, concise code, design, emails, instant messages, and more.

That's because being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need."

<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch08_Wordsmiths.php>

<comment><USER3> As a CS grad student with an undergrad degree in creative writing, I always feel like I have to explain how I got here.

I usually tell people I have an affinity for metaphors, and remind them that their desktop, folders and files are all electronic metaphors.

<comment><USER4> I'm double-majoring in CS and creative writing--I'm trying to synthesize a curriculum that leads directly to being an optimal choice as a game designer ( _not developer_.) People who think I'm trying to be a developer don't get the writing part, and people who think I'm trying to be something like a screenwriter don't get the CS part. It's all very frustrating, but I think it'll work out.

<comment><USER5> What _is_ a game designer, out of curiosity? I mean, I get the basics, but game designers don't do most of the programming, do they? They just need a general overview of _how_ the game is working?

<comment><USER4> I could explain it, but it's easier to just show you an example. A game designer writes things like this: <http://www.squidi.net/three/>

<comment><USER6> Coming up with new game ideas is the holy grail of game design, but a game designer's day to day work is creating and refining game content, often working with programmers to tweak the implementation.

For instance, take Super Mario Bros.: the developer would write the graphics rendering code, physics, make a level editor, etc, but it's the game designers who decided beforehand what the concepts would be, and work afterward to create and playtest the levels themselves until the game is fun.

For a more modern example, in World of Warcraft, developers push all the polygons and worry about collision detection and timing of spell effects, while game designers say "the fireball spell should do n damage at x range, and the Whatzisname questline should have such-and-such a set of rewards; here's the dialogue script."

If you prefer, you can think of developers as providing the toolkit, and designers as building the game with it, but in a much more iterative process.

<comment><USER5> Okay! That makes a lot of sense. Thanks a lot for explaining.

Are you in that job right now, to my parent post? What sorts of things have you learned from it? What trends do you see developing within the industry?

<comment><USER6> I don't work in the game industry. I'm just a lifelong player who has talked from time to time with game developers. So don't take this as gospel, but here's my take on long-term prospects.

"AAA" games, the real earthshakers like Halo and World of Warcraft, can only be made by large teams with multi-million-dollar budgets. Inescapable truth. Success in conventional game development has come to depend more and more on a corporate lifestyle: no loose cannons, no lone geniuses. Game developers have to master their C and C++ and perfect their 3D optimizations; game designers have to be very lucky, very hardworking, and very low-paid. (The design side is much harder to break into.)

Games from established studios have to be guaranteed moneymakers, mostly appealing to 15-to-35-year-old males, which is why we see lots and lots of online gunplay and me-too rhythm and karaoke games. The sudden upswing in rhythm and karaoke games points out the increasing mainstreaming of video games, though, which brings me to point 2:

Independent development. The internet has made it extremely easy to write a simple game in Flash or something and get it plastered all over the internet. You go viral with a decent business model, you can cash in, and quite a few games have already been optioned for downloadable console ports after an online success. Especially for casual games -- pick-up-and-go entertainment, usually in the puzzle category -- this can be a great road to recognition, and it's the only one available to the reclusive-genius solo programmer.

Solo development with internet distribution is also the only way to release game types that just aren't that popular these days. I've been playing a game named The Spirit Engine 2 [ <http://thespiritengine.com/> ] lately; if you look at the screenshots, you can see that it's not the kind of game that would fly on the mass market.

In fact, my advice to anyone who wants to "make games" is just to make games. Don't go work for a game company. You'll do more work for less pay than you would in any other programming job, and you probably won't even scratch your game-creation itch -- you think you'll be slaving away on Doom 7, but it's far more likely that you'll be fixing graphics buffer glitches in Horsez [ <http://www.amazon.com/Horsez-Nintendo-DS/dp/B000GJ0J1K> ].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Regardless of political belief, Reagan was a prolific writer of letters that were articulate and thoughtful. I seem to remember someone collected them into a book.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would add to this that writers ideally be able to use "8th grade English", so it is easy for any English speaker to read.

It's a global workforce. Yet too often, I see a colleague send a brain dump of 3 or 4 paragraphs to someone in another country. Imagine yourself having to use a translation dictionary for half of that?

It really helps if you use just common English words, in brief sentences. And yes, this might take extra editing time. Yet, this helps anyone reading it, not just those with English as a second language.

<comment><USER9> You're approaching it from the wrong perspective. English is the lingua franca. If your colleague were really nice, he would translate his message into Hindi, but that isn't an effective use of time. Neither is writing in Simple English.

Let the recipient use a dictionary. After a while he won't have to anymore.

<comment><USER8> That isn't really fair to the recipient. Why should he or she spend extra time figuring out what you said, and you spend no time at all making it easier to read?

<comment><USER10> If the company is paying me 10x what it's paying them then it's probably more cost effective for me to brain dump (if it's clear) than it is to clean up for the reader. This is not about outsourcing the same thing happens with emails from senior management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Rare is a company that made GoldenEye for N64.

<comment><USER12> Fantastic game. Played it enough back in college to realize that the spawn points in multiplayer weren't random. That realization changed the dynamics of the game somewhat....

More on-topic, I think the title is wrong. People who can write well tend to be better at social organization. Mao was - among other things - a librarian and poet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> the data doesn't necessarily back up that leaders _aren't_ good writers. maybe recent american politicians, but what about Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin (not a President, but on the $5 note), not to mention the writers of the federalist papers and constitution. maybe we're talking about a different kind of "write well".

<comment><USER14> Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is a hoot. (Lincoln is on the $5, Franklin is on the $100.)

Jefferson gets all the good press, but Franklin was more accomplished at more things. (Ben did fundamental work in electricity.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't write much in terms of stories, poems, blog articles, essays, etc. But I do write a lot in forum posts, emails and everyday work notes (into the tens of thousands of posts over the years).

Yet I've never got much feedback about my writing style. With ten thousand posts of careful practise, I would presumably be pretty good by now. What a wasted opportunity.

<comment><USER5> I find that forum posts (like on Hacker News) help a lot with writing essays, if for no other reason than it helps you develop your arguments. Ditto blog articles, though every blog is different and most of the "good" blogs are terrible.

Stories are different, though learning to construct an argument helps you plan out stories. Learning the aesthetics of a language isn't something forumming helps with. And poetry is an entirely different entity from either: it's almost all aesthetic.

The problem with feedback is that each thing you do is trying to do something different. If you state yourself clearly online, there's not much more you _have_ to do. And yet look at somebody like why the lucky stiff, who's elevated his writing style to a level above anything I've encountered online. He doesn't have to do that, but he does it anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> s/actually//

<comment><USER15> The only valid use of 'actually' that I can think of is to correct someone in a smug way ('actually: synonymous with 'you idiot''). Any other use seems to be filler. Am I missing some good uses for it?

"1 + 1 is 11" " _acccctually_ , it's 2"

<comment><USER17> I had a coworker who used to use "in reality" in place of "actually", which is even worse. Usually he used it immediately prior to statements that needed quite a bit of justification. It used to drive me nuts. Eventually I realized that when he said, "in reality," he meant, "in my opinion," and from then on we got along much better.

<comment><USER18> ACTUALLY, I was simply dropping the "my" from "in my reality", since in so many situations you seemed to be inhabiting your own unique reality. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> No Mussolini or Caesar on the list? Is it English only?

Isn't Mao's Little Red Book one of the most printed books in human history?

</comment><comment><USER20> That should be - "Rare is the leader who can actually write good"</comment>


Hack of 251 Law Enforcement Websites Exposes Personal Data of 700k Cops - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2020/07/15/blueleaks-anonymous-ddos-law-enforcement-hack/ <comment><USER2> I didn't realize Twitter and Reddit were suppressing discussion of the blueLeaks data.

It's an interesting position to take. If you can discussion of all leaked data dumps do you draw the line when it is about state actors?

Can you discuss Equifax hack, that is about personal information as well, but was done by state actors?

<comment><USER3> Wikileaks actually redacted a lot of (personal) data to protect people (tho some people like to claim again and again they did not).

BlueLeaks, it appears, does not, and contains home addresses and other personal information of cops.

Create transparency, investigate and show police misconduct? Great!

Put cops and their families at risk? Nope!

<comment><USER4> The Julian Assange "poison pill" link was posted on Twitter, and later the password to the archive was also posted. This provided FULL UNREDACTED versions of all the leaked info.

<comment><USER3> No, no password for any of the so called "insurance files" was ever released, as far as I know and can google. All I can find are recent (2019, 2020) articles talking about the files and how no password was ever revealed.

Relatedly, Assange described the files not as "dead man switches" to be unleashed in case of his arrest, extradition, killing as the media liked to portrait it, but instead said that the insurance files contained (unredacted) data that wikileaks intended/intents to release later anyway, in redacted form, and that the encrypted unredacted data was put online to be backups if wikileaks lost the data e.g. due to a raid. The remains of wikileaks activists could then recover the files from the torrents or other people who downloaded the torrents, and could decrypt them to get the data back (but wouldn't release the password into the wild).

Of course, that's what he/they said, and he/they might have lied. But so far we don't know, because no password has been released.

<comment><USER4> Somehow I got the password, but I never decrypted the archive. I remember reading about how it was leaked many years ago. Perhaps somebody has gone through and "cleaned" the archives so it's no longer visible...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >For example, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center has 29,114 accounts, and each one includes a full name; rank; police department or agency; email address; home address, ...

So that means that anyone with access to the system can get the home addresses of all their co-workers that also have accounts on the system? Why would all this personal information be associated with an account of this type? This isn't an HR database.

<comment><USER6> Honestly that's the most interesting part (at least until people sift through the data more) of this story. Why the heck are they storing sensitive data on what appears to be a CMS for e-commerce site?

<comment><USER7> Home addresses aren't considered sensitive information. If you own your home that information is public. Cops read people's addresses (and SSNs) out over the radio all the time for anyone to hear.

I'm not saying I agree with this, privacy should be protected better, but that's the US.

<comment><USER8> > Home addresses aren't considered sensitive information.

I wonder what will happen once the first protesters line up at cop houses or pranksters bombard them with spam and fake pizza orders. Not that I'd condone wasting pizza, but in many cases change only happens when the people in power have problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > the sites were running VBScript, using Microsoft Access databases.

Why doesn't this surprise me?

<comment><USER10> Someone had a talk at the DEFCON blue team village about police software and how trivial it was to find something. I think it was like database creds in a DLL and apostrophes in fields causing errors (likely SQLi). I can't remember if it was something they ran in the patrol vehicles or at precincts.

<comment><USER11> Linecon was terrible in this last convention(my first). Missed out on so many things I wanted to see because Linecon just got out of hand. I guess it is to be expected. :/

CCC being a conference of just ~10k allowed event goers to experience much more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This isn't right. Group behavior should not affect individuals in this way.

<comment><USER13> Why shouldn't it? Putting on a uniform assumes responsibility for the positions and actions of the represented organization - here the various police forces and unions of the United States.

Police officers aren't being judged or punished for the color of their skin, creed, religion, or sexuality but their choices. I find it hard to stomach the idea that people shouldn't be judged for the organizations they choose to represent.

<comment><USER12> > Police officers aren't being judged or punished for the color of their skin, > creed, religion, or sexuality but their choices.

No, many police officers are now being punished for being police officers.

You would just be doing your job properly - no racist actions anything unjust - and now these details leak out.

Yes there are police officers which are racist, I don't have data so I won't say few nor many, but there are. That doesn't justify this.

<comment><USER14> > being punished for being police officers.

Some of the logic is that bad police behavior is widespread enough that every "good" cop works closely enough with at least one "bad" cop, and yet via observation of outcomes, does not correct that bad cop's behavior (or doesn't correct it enough). They're thus complicit AKA bad cops themselves, and thus there are _no_ good police - everyone is sufficiently tainted.

The Godwin's Law version of this logic at work elsewhere is the German saying "if there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis."

The folk wisdom encoding "a few bad apples spoil the bunch". Doesn't matter if they were good apples going in, they're all bad apples now: the bunch is spoiled.

(Not expressing an opinion on the correctness of this thinking, just explaining what I know of it)

<comment><USER15> There are 700000 cops in America. I can name maybe 200. I've personally worked with maybe 50. I investigated 1, and could find no evidence of crime, though he realistically was likely committing some.

Out of 700000 cops I guarantee some are the scum of the earth who should be locked away forever. I don't know where they are. I can't effect that

It's like getting mad at the manager or an applebee's in Chicago because the waiter spit in your food at an olive garden in Seattle.

<comment><USER14> What was your process for investigation? Given that process, what crimes, if any, would you have found in the cases of, say, George Floyd or Breona Taylor?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> TFA says this could compromise user's password. I worked for a City and handled the police dept. You could go far by just using username as password...

Nobody wanted to hear about security.

<comment><USER17> > Nobody wanted to hear about security.

System/network security. I guarantee physical security would get someone's attention at a police department. The police in my family are paranoid and have even broken lesser laws to increase their own physical security.

I suspect this mismatch is because police (like average consumers) don't know the impact of a network security breach. It's a failure of imagination. Hopefully BlueLeaks helps to change this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does it seem a little disjointed between the article's content (exposing overuse and misuse of Fusion centers via a hack) and the headline/inline focus of "700,000 Law Enforcement Officers Exposed"?

Almost like they were allowed to run the article but editor didn't like the angle or something.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, my impression is that they haven't found anything interesting except shitty security of a widely deployed web app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a philosophical problem with leaking people's personal information but I admit that I'm curious. I want to see what's in this data.

<comment><USER21> It's definitely worth the torrent, especially to see how slow many LE agencies are with keeping up with the technical times.

<comment><USER20> I may or may not have the torrent downloading right now. At this rate, it may or may not be finished some time tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "After the BlueLeaks data was published, Twitter has permanently suspended the DDoSecrets Twitter account, citing a policy against distributing hacked material. Twitter has also taken the unprecedented step of blocking all links to ddosecrets.com, falsely claiming, to users who click that the website may be malicious."

Funny that Twitter had no problem with the Wikileaks dump from Bradley/Chelsea Manning.

</comment><comment><USER22> More interesting is why choose these shitty providers?

[https://blog.12security.com/darkness-at- noon-01-waxtitan/](https://blog.12security.com/darkness-at-noon-01-waxtitan/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Perhaps this will teach them their username is not an appropriate password. But probably not.

</comment><comment><USER24> Despicable. I assume the hackers were willing to expose their own addresses?

<comment><USER25> I assume the police were willing to shoot rubber bullets at themselves?

<comment><USER26> Oh please, of the hundreds of thousands of police officers who've done far more for the good of their society than you have, you're saying 100% of them deserve to be doxxed. That would be like saying "because x% of software engineers are pedophiles with child porn that they share around with others on their secret servers, all 100% of them are disgusting and deserve the mercy of the mob because they can't seem to fix the problem."

<comment><USER27> Software engineers don't rally to defend their coworker pedophiles. There is no thin binary line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If you are getting paid by tax dollars then your personal data is a matter of public record. It is vital for prevention of corruption for the public to know where the tax dollars actually go.

<comment><USER29> Including address and phone number? Doesn't that also enable public workers to be target of harassment?

<comment><USER28> Could this be a problem? Yes, naturally. But the good of preventing government corruption outweighs the bad in this case. There are existing laws against harassment that provide recourse.

<comment><USER30> So whenever there is a federal statute that criminalizes something means states shouldn't have redundant laws doing the same?

<comment><USER17> I would argue we are already way too far down the road of "redundant statutes".

According to the book "3 Felonies a Day", there are well over 300,000 crimes in US jurisdictions, which is far beyond what any person could read, know, understand, and internalize. At this point, if you're not a convicted felon, it's simply because the government isn't efficient at prosecuting, not because you haven't broken a law.

<comment><USER30> There should be periodic de duplication of laws. And also removal of laws are are now archaic —like being able to sue a spouse for abandonment or laws that impinge on civil liberties but aren't enforced.

For every new law they should remove one or two that are redundant or archaic.

Theft is illegal but then they have other provisions to make sure it really is illegal. Once is enough.

<comment><USER17> I agree. There needs to be more maintenance effort to reduce the "technical debt" of accumulated laws.

Sadly I think it's not done because there is no incentive. Voters don't vote out incumbents who add too many news statutes or who don't remove outdated/irrelevant/unconstitutional ones. I think it's a lot like refactoring code without the ability to write unit tests or know if the change had any secondary side effects for years or decades after.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clojure at a Bank – Clojure Code Immaturity - <AUTHOR> http://www.pitheringabout.com/?p=778 <comment><USER3> I came to Clojure after learning Scheme. One would think going from lisp to lisp would be an easy task, but the languages are so different. Clojure is an incredibly rich language, which is why so many blogs talk about how after 6+ months, the team is still trying to grasp all it has to offer. I started by rolling my own over and over again, only to discover a data structure or technique that erases 50 LOC and opens up a whole new world of program reuse. I have zero idea how someone coming from Python, Java, or Ruby would handle the transition, but I imagine it would be very messy at first.

I'm not sure why the team used single-letter names. Using non-descriptive arg and function names (if he did that too?) is about as anti-lisp as it gets.

I wonder if this blog, and other blogs like this, do a disservice to the growth of Clojure. Not only is it apparent that using a lisp and immutability is completely alien to the teams adapting it, they seem to take a very long time to ramp up into it, and the conclusion is always the same: they are still slipping and sliding, but at least they aren't breaking their noses anymore. At the same time, these blogs are informative of what companies are likely to get into and it should help stymie the surprises and perhaps keep the noise down for a while, so maybe it helps with growth by attracting those that are really willing to hack it. The author, as most are, is forthcoming with the early mistakes and surprises. This is most certainly to be expected when transitioning to any language, but it doesn't seem like there are many languages where bloggers feel inclined to dote on the initial shock outside of Clojure. It is a wonder that they don't complain about the lack of frameworks a'la RoR/Django and other things one would figure they'd want before diving in. Was it the lack of structure that made them go for it in the first place?

<comment><USER4> " I started by rolling my own over and over again, only to discover a data structure or technique that erases 50 LOC and opens up a whole new world of program reuse. I have zero idea how someone coming from Python, Java, or Ruby would handle the transition, but I imagine it would be very messy at first."

This is a good point and keeps happening to me. Otoh, there are a _lot_ built in (and so a lot not to reproduce accidentally). clojure/core has > 500 symbols in it[1]. Is there a systematic way to learn what is 'built-in' to Clojure vs waiting till one stumbles across specific items?

[1] (count (ns-publics 'clojure.core)) --> 580

(on the version of Clojure on my machine -> 1.4.0)

<comment><USER5> Do the puzzles at www.4clojure.com and be sure to "follow" the top 20 or so users. Once you solve the puzzle, you're shown the solutions of those users that you follow. I learned a lot of neat tricks that way!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Completely agree with learning the clojure core functions. It helps significantly when working with clojures data structures to know whats available.

I also made the newbie mistake of writing simple hash mapping functions that were already well implemented. The problem is coming from Ruby,/Java you're not intuitively aware of the standard functions compared to going from one OO language to another.

</comment><comment><USER7> _Therefore when we jumped both feet into Clojure we unconsciously brought with us the belief that comments just weren't needed_

I used to be in the "code tells a story, no comments needed" camp. In large part because two of my three university courses had automatic marking system which detracted points if comments exceeded a certain percentage of text mass. Habits!

Gradually I've been finding myself commenting more and more in my code. In FP (mostly F#) code I almost always end up with some incredibly information dense set of lines that needs at least some defense of its existence.

Having spent some recent weekends reading the sources of id-software games[1] I've started to really think about the approach to comments in imperative code too. I've started commenting lots and then cutting it down later. If anything, it helps me reason about my code better.

On a totally separate tangent, I feel like the kernel of most of my FP code for data processing is essentially array programming like APL / J, just way way way more verbose.

[1] <https://github.com/id-Software>

<comment><USER8> > In large part because two of my three university courses had automatic > marking system which detracted points if comments exceeded a certain > percentage of text mass

That sounds like a horrible system. Why'd they ever do that? The grading systems I have seen do the inverse, requiring certain amount of comments. That of course leads students writing gibberish just to fulfill the comment quota, but even that is better than penalizing for commenting.

<comment><USER9> There speaks somebody who has never spent their evenings wading through terribly project submissions with > 70% comments.

The 'why' would be that there's an entire class of newbie developer who write opaque code, and use the comments as an excuse not to write code clearly.

I see too many developer with the general attitude 'This code is opaque - <USER2> needs a comment', where I vastly prefer 'This code needs a comment, how can I make it less opaque.'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Disappointing as this article has an inappropriate title, it contains nothing relevant to a "bank".

<comment><USER4> This is the third of a series of posts about introducing Clojure at an investment bank.

The first and second posts are here

<http://www.pitheringabout.com/?p=693>

<http://www.pitheringabout.com/?p=749>

Tangentially, the 'swedish colleague' the author brought in to help with the transition to Clojure is the immensely talented Hakan Raberg (sorry don't know how to type umlauts etc on my keyboard) , who is a good friend and worked with me at ThoughtWorks before he went indie.</comment></comment>


Pump Up the Storage (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

<comment><USER2> Of note: what happens when a pumped storage reservoir fails.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_Station#Upper_reservoir_breached)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a poor article full of unrealistic assumptions. It's basically as if you took a worst case for CPU cache assumptions and then decided that, therefore, it would never be useful to put a cache on a CPU.

Not actually true.

In the real world, the wind is always blowing somewhere and the amount of sunlight falling is quite predictable. Fossil fuel plants aren't going to disappear entirely for a long time, but there is absolutely no obstacle to producing MOST of our energy needs from renewable sources. Real world storage installations are going in, in suitable places, all the time:

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on- business/industry-n...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on- business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/in-eastern-ontario-a-battery-five- times-the-size-of-niagara-falls/article8820070/)

The cumulative effect of all these batteries will be quite large, and no, it isn't necessary to store 7 days * the entire energy needs of the United States in order to be useful.

<comment><USER4> I think you're reading the article in a quite biased manner. I didn't pick up on any of the negativity you seem to have interpreted.

I don't think anyone here is against renewable energy, but certainly the storage of it represents a gigantic challenge. The article just tries to table some reasonable numbers for discussion. You've said nothing that even slightly contradicts the author's findings, and your vague insinuations that the author has an anti-renewable energy agenda is not helpful at all.

<comment><USER3> The author's calculations are for replacing the entire energy diet of the United States. He uses gross inputs to everything, rather than outputs and usable energy. He neglects any other storage capacity present in the country - no vehicle has any battery, no electrical device has any battery - and tries to calculate how much energy we need to store IF THE ENTIRE ENERGY PRODUCTION CAPACITY OF THE UNITED STATES DISAPPEARS ENTIRELY FOR A WEEK.

It's a nonsense calculation. The U.S. certainly isn't prepared today to go for a week without any electricity generation or even a single drop of fossil fuel burned, and there's no reason to demand that it be prepared to do so in the future.

The "findings" are akin to someone who says "The U.S. is borrowing a dollar a year. If we extend that to infinity, we find that the U.S. debt is infinite. PANIC!". They're nonsense. Have no meaning in the real world.

In the real world, one significant benefit of a widely distributed power generation infrastructure is that it won't all go down at the same time. The solar cells on your roof will keep generating electricity even if it's cloudy the next town over. And that means that the real-world requirements for a several-nines-reliability mostly-renewable energy infrastructure are several orders of magnitude less than what is being calculated here.</comment></comment></comment>


Inferno (Bell Labs' Plan 9 Successor) - <AUTHOR> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Inferno_%28operating_system%29

<comment><USER2> Tangentially:

I've begun to suspect that soon we will see a new era of operating systems due to the wide proliferation of virtual machines. Since so many things are running in VMs these days, and since most VM software provides a standardized/simplified view of peripherals, it is an area that would seem ripe for re-specialization.

Why have an operating system that only runs one app of importance have codepaths and resources dedicated to super-efficient forking? Why not have a network stack optimized for what is essentially routing (think http proxies or queue servers)? Why not an operating system with an FS focused on record storage and record searching (databases of most variety)? Actor model built into a distributed operating system -- sure, seems reasonable, and fairly straight-forward, and more efficient than throwing a runtime on top of the OS to redo a bunch of stuff, or get around it.

One of the big problems of operating systems was always getting enough people to use them on the wildly varying hardware to really justify good portability... VMs seem to help reduce that.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A few posts about and bringing up Plan 9 have been around HN recently, but I haven't seen a single person bring up Inferno.

Is it because it isn't well known? Or is there some obvious deficiency that everyone but me knows about?</comment>


(Thailand) Facebook faces immediate shutdown threat - <AUTHOR> http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/politics/1250114/facebook-faces-immediate-shutdown-threat <comment><USER2> tyranny at its worst! It´s nuts how some governments still continues opressing the people! Some day - soon I hope - they will realizet that trying to shut people up using force, comes at a prize!

<comment><USER3> All companies has to obey the laws. This is not a tyranny. In my home country it is illegal but not enforced. Don't forget Facebook is no different in bribes or so called "lobbying"</comment></comment>


How I learned to stop worrying and love the unicorn... - <AUTHOR> http://blog.teachstreet.com/team-teachstreet/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-unicorn/

<comment><USER2> Great article, and fun to see what is going on inside. We used a similar strategy with great success at my last company (though we were using Passenger).

Once you've nailed the zero-downtime deployment, it's a short hop to adding a small box (or a script on your test server) to do continuous integration and then moving from there to continuous deployment. For our small team this setup was really liberating.

If you head down that path, I'd love to see updates on what your team's experience is with that transition.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've stop/started continus integration a few times with a few different CI servers with mixed success. What did you guys end up using?

Right now, we have tests, but I'd still say we rely pretty heavily on hoptoad to let us know if we really broke something badly. ;)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, we relied on hoptoad as our backstop too. We used CruiseControl.rb running on a cheap low end server with a plugin for doing deployments.

<https://github.com/thoughtworks/cruisecontrol.rb> <https://github.com/aentos/ccrb_cap_deployer>

The code is simple to understand, self contained, based around rake, and worked almost immediately for us (after some configuration). We were a two person team. I don't know if the setup we had would have worked with a larger team.

It felt like it made an impact in our ability to turn code faster. We had a solid test suite, which helped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice writeup -- at Jambool/Social Gold we used a similar approach which enabled us to do deployments continuously throughout the day without interrupting transactions. This was key to allowing us to iterate faster and incrementally deploy small pieces of larger projects without having take downtime.

</comment><comment><USER4> Going from 1-2 deployments a day to 10 without downtime - Awesome stuff!</comment>


Surveillance Cameras Made by China Are Hanging All Over the U.S - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/surveillance-cameras-made-by-china-are-hanging-all-over-the-u-s-1510513949 <comment><AUTHOR> "In May, the Department of Homeland Security issued a cybersecurity warning saying some of Hikvision's cameras contained a loophole making them easily exploitable by hackers. The department assigned its worst security rating to that vulnerability."

They are placed around military army bases and are the #1 devices used to spy on Chinese citizens.

Someone messed up when approving this</comment>


Delayed_job (and other daemons) in a production environment - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobalean.com/blog/2010/08/16/delayed_job-and-other-daemons-in-a-production-environment

<comment><USER2> How are you running delayed_job or other custom daemons?</comment>


Lunascape. Now with: Choose your own rendering engine - <AUTHOR> http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/07/10/lunascape-3-popular-rendering-engines-one-browser/ <comment><USER2> Anyone has experience with it? As a user, as a developer? Thanks in advance!</comment>


Ask HN: What would you change about HN if you could? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I do not want a "mobile interface" in the sense of hamburger menus, etc. but mobile should be a little better, such as:

\- Bigger up/down vote buttons or more spacing.

\- Better mobile rendering of preformatted comments (currently unreadable without tons of awkward scrolling).

\- Better navigation of extremely long comment threads. (Indentation alone is lost after awhile; vertical lines might help.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Add support for exporting your saved stories to the API.

Right now I have to use a home made utility for it:

[https://github.com/JD-P/HackerNewsToJSON/](https://github.com/JD-P/HackerNewsToJSON/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to be able to only see new comments since I last viewed the thread. (On iPhone)

</comment><comment><USER5> Notification when someone replies to a comment I made.

<comment><USER6> Use 'dangrossman's [http://www.hnreplies.com](http://www.hnreplies.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Exclude news sources. HN was really awesome before it started being exploited by clickbait news that I don't mind but I can get via Reddit or consume directly. Content here that focuses on tech problems and neat solutions. Debate about standards but limited political stuff would be very cool Imo... kind like if I walked into a room of programmers and scientists and talked shop

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/) is what you're looking for then

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> \- larger font-size, especially on mobile and tablets

\- cleaner markup (no tables!)

</comment><comment><USER4> The title field is hard to work on iPhone when submitting a story. If the text is longer than the box it's hard to move around the title to edit it.

</comment><comment><USER9> A quote tag that doesn't break on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER10> API endpoint for all of my upvotes (might be after authentication or not)

<comment><USER11> [https://news.ycombinator.com/upvoted?id=davchana](https://news.ycombinator.com/upvoted?id=davchana)

<comment><USER10> Sorry, I was not clear or specific; i am happy for above, but I wished the same for all of comments I upvoted too.

<comment><USER11> [https://news.ycombinator.com/upvoted?id=davchana&comments=t](https://news.ycombinator.com/upvoted?id=davchana&comments=t)

<comment><USER10> Wow this is gold, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Automatic proxying of links through Archive.is or similar service to bypass paywalls and other bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Allow account deletion.

<comment><USER14> What does that mean? Delete all posts and comments made by that account?

That will get you a reddit style of threads:

[deleted] [deleted] [deleted]

Also many people are keeping copies of everything going on in HN via the API or scrapping, so that's probably pointless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> opening links, comment in an other tab.</comment>


Excalidraw – a whiteboard tool to sketch hand-drawn diagrams (excalidraw.com) - <AUTHOR> https://excalidraw.com/# <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

I am just one of the contributors

I made my first ever open source contribution on this project and about to fix the latest issue, very excited to share this project here! :)

Here is the repo: [https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw](https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw)

<comment><USER2> Would love to see objects snap at nodal points.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh wow my first HN reply! :)

this has been discussed previously: [https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/263](https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/263)

and here: [https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/157](https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/157)

I will put it to my priority todo list for the weekend :)

thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


Signs You're Living a Good Life - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/live-your-life-network/6-signs-youre-living-a-good-life-4aa19a602af <comment><USER2> "2\. A job that pays

Your colleagues might be the worst humans to work with but at least you have a monthly income. If you hate your job, either suck it up and be grateful you have a job or find a better workplace."

Doesn't this entirely contradict the title? The underlying point is that you have access to resources that you want. Limiting expenses up to the point where you don't want more then you have gives you the same outcome, minus all the job negativities.</comment>


Is San Francisco the Brooklyn to Silicon Valley's Unbuilt Manhattan? (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theawl.com/2013/01/is-san-francisco-the-brooklyn-to-silicon-valleys-unbuilt-manhattan <comment><USER2> Turn San Jose into a mega city and build good transit and let SF be the culture center it is.</comment>


AS HN: How do I build a sales team with little-to-no funding? - <AUTHOR>

Some background: I founded upgradeindustries.com, which sells my creation known as BoardX. BoardX, in a nutshell, is a boutique circuitboard for hobbyists and tinkerers that want something Arduino compatible but not quite as...gimpy.
I had a successful, but small, Kickstarter campaign that funded initial production. The money has been burned through with lots of exta items in stock left over.
So to the question: Every company needs a sales team, right? Or at least guy that's dedicated to spreading the word, making contacts, and staying on top of the blogs/social networks.
I've tried using friends, offering to kick them back some money from sales they generate, partial ownership, you name it, but nobody seems to stick. I know tons of engineers, but it's like nobody has the itch to spend time outside of their day jobs on something that won't pay off immediately.
My question is, how do I attract one of those types to my start up that's up and running, but is only barely self sustaining at this point? I don't see myself being able to quit my day job for a long time at this pace. Since I'm the sole technical founder, I really don't have ability to be lead designer and lead cheer leader without stopping one for the benefit of the other.
If anybody has experience in this arena, I'd sure love to hear from them. <comment><USER2> "Every company needs a sales team, right?"

Let's call it what it is: it's a 1-person company that sells a $75 item. I understand how you might think you need a salesperson but I don't think that's feasible yet. Put yourself in a salesperson-who-is-looking-for-work's shoes:

* Here's a company that sells a $75 niche/boutique item

* They aren't offering a salary

* You will probably make $15 per board sold (20% of gross)

* You need $3000 per month to live and $6000 per month to thrive

* That means you need to sell between 200 and 400 boards per month

* They don't have any customer lists/base to offer you (which means you have to come up with your own customers)

* Founder has no history managing sales team or doing sales

* Founder isn't able to make a full-time living yet

Would you do it?

How about if you gave them a 50% commission? They still have a $3000 nut to contend with which means they'd have to sell 80 boards a month. Where are they going to sell 80 boards a month? Do you have any ideas for them? You have to sell them on being a salesperson for you - you need to have the vision first for the "How?" and then find people that buy into your vision.

I think that most founders in your position are going to be the salesperson, the designer, the builder, the stocker, the mail room guy, the IT guy, the programmer, the financial person, the biz dev guy, the marketing guy, etc. Build up sales, build up stock, and learn how to do it all. Nobody said it was easy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eh I look at it like this: if a sales person is confident in their abilities in social marketing/online ads, it would be a great deal for them because they're getting in to it late in the game after everything else, including the board is designed on in stock. They don't have to worry about it being vaporware, etc.

<comment><USER2> Wait - that's not a "salesperson" in the traditional sense, is it? A traditional salesperson calls on clients, closes deals, and gets paid a commission for each sale. A "sales team" is a team of such salespeople. A salesperson couldn't care less about a lot of things you listed ("... staying on top of the blogs/social networks"). A salesperson cares about finding qualified leads, calling those leads, following up with those leads, and closing deals (and ideally for 1000+ units at a time in your case).

An "affiliate marketer" posts ads and gets paid a commission per action (account created, sale). The affiliate marketers want to create a buzz and get people talking about a product. Affiliate marketers though are thinking "One sale at a time" rather than "1000 units per sale". I think you could easily find affiliate marketers - that's never, ever going to be difficult as long as you are willing to pay a significant enough percentage (30%-50% will attract the better ones).

I'd just advise caution here and perhaps a little more study. You wouldn't be the first guy who some affiliate marketer "tricked" into signing an exclusive contract only to then learn that the affiliate marketer couldn't/wouldn't really sell your product...

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, affiliate marketing is generally more trouble than it's worth for a business my size, at least for the moment. I've just heard too many horror stories.

I guess what I ultimately want is a "salesman-ish" cofounder to do help with the business side and marketing, while I crank out what my customers want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The trick is finding somebody that has both shares your vision for your products, and the chops to sell. I don't think you're wrong to go with the percentage-of-sales angle, but you're selling a niche product that doesn't have widespread appeal, so it's important that your salesperson has access to the right potential customers. That may not be the friends you've already asked, so they're right to turn you down.

Some other things to try:

1\. List the parts needed to build X and sell them as a kit.

2\. A/B test showing and hiding your stock levels

3\. Get engaged (if your'e not) in websites and blogs with communities of people that buy this kind of stuff. You're likely to meet someone that may be interested in coming aboard on one of those sites.

4\. If you get a decent-sized community of customers, hold a contest to build the best thing using your parts. Winner gets a prize of some sort and their parts-list/instructions featured. You reap the rewards from sales of components to compete. (This one may not be feasible if your user-base is small)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm those are good ideas. At the moment, a rather strange side effect of having these boards mass produced is that the completed boards are cheaper than the boards + parts separated. So I'd actually make much less money selling deconstructed kits.

But yeah it's kind of strange, I frequently hear complaining that start ups can often seem to be marketing people looking for a technical founder to deliver their product on a silver platter. For me, it's just the opposite. I've got the product now I just need somebody to help put it on the map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're looking for a non-technical co-founder. Far easier to find one of those than it is to find a technical co-founder. Consider yourself lucky.

Try posting this on Quora (more business types) or a site like founder2be.com.

As somebody else said, the key is finding somebody who shares your vision, not just somebody who can sell.

You could also create an affiliate program and put it on a site like cj.com or clickbank.com who manage the affiliate relationship for a cut and send you lots of affiliates. Affiliates are basically the internet version of commission only sales reps.

Another option would be AdWords. If you can convert traffic that should be profitable. You can get longtail relevant keyword traffic for $0.05-$0.30/click if you bargain hunt+spend a lot of time w/ the keyword tool. Doesn't take a whole lot of signups/click to make that profitable at $75.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the tips, I'll check this out. I tried adwords, saw absolutely no ROI after lots of experimentation.</comment></comment>


Embedding Rhino - <AUTHOR> http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/tutorial.html

<comment><USER2> Rhino is very cool, but the documentation is horribly lacking. There are a couple tutorials on the Mozilla site. I believe this is the better one. It's enough to get you started, but anything even remotely complex is going to require lots of trial and error.

There are also quite a few little gotchas that you're left to figure out on your own. One that comes to mind as I skim through that tutorial has to do with the jsGet_ and jsSet_ methods used for implementing dynamic properties. You must implement both of them even if you only intend to use one. If you only implement the jsSet_ method it will mysteriously and silently fail. As soon as you add a corresponding jsGet_ method it magically works.

Don't forget about SpiderMonkey- <http://www.mozilla.org/js/spidermonkey/>. It's the C version and if I remember correctly people have already created modules in the cool scripting languages to easily embed it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh thanks for the tip. A quick search revealed this: <http://code.google.com/p/ruby-spidermonkey>

Niice! :)</comment></comment>


Programmers angry over blocking of GitHub code-sharing site - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1134717/programmers-angry-over-blocking-github-code-sharing-site

<comment><USER2> Probably the govt. was just trolling around</comment>


Yelp Plans to Go Public, Despite Booming Private Market - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/26/yelp-plans-to-go-public-despite-booming-private-market/ <comment><USER2> Hopefully they are not IPO'ing because of a negative long-term outlook ...

... among those I know, trust in Yelp has fallen a fair bit. Writing fake reviews seems to have become a standard business practice. And whereas in the past Yelp seemed to do a great job of identifying the best spots, now it seems to be happy if the top-ranked businesses are "good enough". I worry that the need to meet quarterly targets will only make Yelp worse.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. Could it be that they are looking to raise equity to make it easier to acquire competition?

Makes sense to me that they need to diversify their model to compete with some of the new ventures in the market. It might make more sense of Yelp to acquire the platform and the product knowledge than build it in-house. If they have equity in the market, it might be easier to acquire these companies with stock than through a private cash acquisition.

Not sure if that's true, but I'm throwing it out there for debate.

<comment><USER4> The smart money IPOs just before a market transition, and the retail-aid market is s-t-a-l-e for change. We've got the various players all lined up, but where it goes is anybody's guess. Yelp is preparing to do something, whether it's Groupon or GoDaddy remains to be seen, and an IPO would fund it much more easily than what they have now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> At the end the day, Yelp is a review site to vet places you plan to visit. There's still room for city guides I think.. Maybe Yelp can acquire them. With that said, with Groupon's purchase of Whrrl.. wouldn't a lot of companies be interested in purchasing city guide websites like UrbanDaddy?

</comment><comment><USER6> Despite being the clear leader in location reviews, there's still a TON of room to improve the location review and recommendations space.</comment>


A first GraphQL Server - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@clayallsopp/your-first-graphql-server-3c766ab4f0a2 <comment><USER2> GraphQL has nothing to do with SQL and a lot to do with addressing problems associated with choppy nature of REST in practice.

In essence, GraphQL query is a grocery list of stuff you want. Response is a grocery bag of what you wanted.

From REST perspective, GraphQL is a union of multiple REST query URLs presented as JSON hierarchy, turning each path fragment into a nested object.

<comment><USER3> GraphQL is always POST, no? It's not REST at all. It's not quite RPC either. There's a single handler for all API requests. I don't know if there's a name for this type of thing.

<comment><USER4> GraphQL is a query language. It's protocol-independent. It just so happens that HTTP POST is a convenient way to deliver queries. Instead of using an HTTP endpoint, you could just as correctly implement GraphQL directly over TCP, or messaging queues, or whatever you want.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but the manor it is going to be used in real life is HTTP POST, 99% of the time. This is the use-case it is trying to solve, after all.

<comment><USER5> I think given the current state of the spec that's pretty accurate. However we really view GraphQL as the way that front-ends/client specify their data requirements. One way of fulfilling that is to dispatch the queries to the server as is. However if you view this as an API to data, which can include client software, this can get a lot more interesting, and allows you to use different transports, messaging protocols, etc

For example on iOS we used GraphQL to transition our persistence from Core Data to a propriety (client) storage engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's I'm missing from all the GraphQL examples seen out there is some kind of interaction with database.

I think I understand how to `resolve` a path into a object. Array of objects should be similar, right? And how do I then describe that object with GraphQL terms? Can `resolve` function of fields get this object passed in?

<comment><USER5> resolve() takes the current field AST node as one of its arguments. Mappings to more complicated backends will demonstrate use cases of where this is needed. From that field AST you can arbitrarily descend into a ton of information, e.g. the subfields of the current field.

<comment><USER7> How does resolve deal with asynchronous calls? The name almost suggests that you might be able to return a promise?

<comment><USER8> Yes, you can return a Promise in resolve(). I believe it's mentioned in the first half of this talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY48GW87Feo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY48GW87Feo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In some ways GraphQL reminds me of Microsoft's OData.

It seems entity-centric though. What would a GraphQL 'mutation' look like that kicked off some process requiring the identity of say 3/4 entities plus some of its own input?

<comment><USER10> OData was nice on paper and very impractical in reality. I strongly fear that this is just Facebook reinventing it, making the same mistakes, but taking thousands of developers along with them because it's by Facebook and not Microsoft.

The big issue with OData is that it is highly flexible, and as such rather difficult to make cover all cases and keep it performant.

But maybe the real problem was simply that no good OData servers existed, barring the one from MS that tied directly with their ORM and thus your data model.

I really suspect that the flexibility that GraphQL gives immediately translates to complexity on the server side.

It feels like this is ORMs all over, just now between the frontend and the backend instead of the backend and the database. Give it a couple of years and we'll see the REST-version of the "just use plain SQL!" blog posts: "just hand-craft highly specific REST endpoints for exactly what your frontend needs!"

<comment><USER5> Hi I'm Nick Schrock one of the GraphQL developers at Facebook.

While GraphQL certainly shares some attributes with OData, we believe it is substantially different enough from Data that we aren't simply repeating the same mistakes.

There are a number of differences, but two in particular are striking.

1) Is that the GraphQL language is built with product developers in mind. This is a subjective/qualitative judgement, but we believe that it's just a much more elegant language, and that it is a more powerful platform for tool- building. We hope to prove this out in the coming months as both we and the community build tooling atop the language and the introspection system. 2) GraphQL is more constrained. A OData service has to support a huge number of operations that make it more of a generic querying service, rather than a highly structured way to expose application logic. We agree with you that often cover too much and without adequate performance guarantees.

In terms of complexity on the server side, I think this is a really legitimate question. Our answer is that although there is complexity, it is generally incurred on a much smaller set of core and tool developers. The average product developer who will just need to expose a capability via a GraphQL type and then consume it on the client will not find the system overly complex.

<comment><USER10> A bit late so you might not read this, but I really like your response and it's going to make me take a deeper look at GraphQL. Thanks for the writeup!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Way I understand GraphQL is not as a replacement to SQL, otherwise you get hopelessly lost at implementing it.

It is in effect a filtering language. You have database view e.g. "user" and you apply it to the given GraphQL and get less fields than the view defined. In this way from server side you have still bunch of functions (the database views) that take in arguments (e.g. User ID) and GraphQL and the view returns the subset of the view.

Above is simple explanation I would try to implement GraphQL. Mutators are a different story I have not thought about.

<comment><USER5> That would be one way to implement the system in a DB-centric way. However we believe that intermediate application code is pretty critical to any GraphQL implementation.

We model mutations as a function that can do arbitrary business logic followed by a client-specified query where the client can query data it knows must be updated in order for the view to reflection the state changes the mutation caused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do you get performance and not lots of nested queries out of GraphQL?

GraphQL looks nice in theory, and surely in practice regarding Facebook's storage architecture, I just wish it can be used on smaller project with DB backed data.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this just a RESTful interface to a NoSQL database, eg. MongoDB?

<comment><USER3> It's not RESTful. It's like RPC where you have only 1 global remote procedure that answers all requests.</comment></comment>


Quantum computer means dark at the end of the tunnel for RSA encryption - <AUTHOR> http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/research-news/dark-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-for-rsa-encryption-2016-03/ <comment><USER2> When they finally can factor large numbers enough time will have passed for security algorithms to migrate to schemes that are immune to quantum computers. Work on this is already progressing faster than practical quantum computers are.</comment>


Eton College exam question asks students to justify the Army killing protesters - <AUTHOR> https://www.indy100.com/article/eton-college-entrance-exam-question-army-killing-protesters-private-school-9090156 <comment><USER2> The full question, from the article:

> The year is 2040. There have been riots in the streets of London after > Britain has run out of petrol because of an oil crisis in the Middle East. > Protesters have attacked public buildings. Several policemen have died. > Consequently, the Government has deployed the Army to curb the protests. > After two days the protests have been stopped but twenty-five protesters > have been killed by the Army.

> You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to > the nation in which you explain why employing the Army against violent > protesters was the only option available to you and one which was both > necessary and moral.

If there are "violent protesters" or "rioters" who have "damaged public buildings" and, as a result of the riots, "several policemen have died," the government has some cause to use force.

The line between legitimate violent upheaval and illegitimate violent upheaval is blurry. I don't see anythig wrong with the question.

<comment><USER3> "I don't see anythig wrong with the question."

I think many would see it as rather tasteless given fairly recent UK history:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_\(1972\))

<comment><USER4> Really? "Event X from 46 years ago was bad and unforgivably handled by the government. Therefore, you should never prepare for giving a speech about a future event similar to X."

Just to be fair, I think an analogous prompt for Americans might be:

"Terrorists have just destroyed the Empire State Building and Willis (fka Sears) Tower in simultaneous attacks. Three days later, you have ordered troops to invade the suspected state sponsors of these attacks. Write a speech defending this military action."

<comment><USER5> Subtly different arguing for an invasion of another country. A better analogy might be "imagine that BLM protests have been raging for several days in Pittsburgh, write a speech defending the use of federal troops to clear the streets(+) and the use of drone strikes against suspected sniper positions."

(+) yes I know this is unconstitutional, that's the point

<comment><USER6> > yes I know this is unconstitutional, that's the point

How so? The National Guard is a federal troop organization that can be called upon by a state Governor in a state of emergency. Doing so is hardly a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this sort of exercise would be beneficial for everyone to do. Even the most benign government policies are enforced by the police and the military. I'm continually surprised at how often people offhandedly suggest that the government should do this or that, without even considering whether they would be personally willing to throw someone in prison for not going along, let alone if they would be willing to do violence to the person who refuses to go to prison. How many of our pet policies are we willing to do violence for, when push comes to shove?

Imagining the worst possible outcome and arguing that it's worth the price is a valuable exercise, and I think a lot of people would find it's not worth the price as often as intuition suggests, it's just not always as obvious as killing protesters.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure how you can have any kind of human society without some form of coercion a.k.a. violence

<comment><USER7> I agree, but I think it's valuable to make it explicit. Many people talk about requiring this or that as though it has no cost beyond just asking people to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Making a mountain out of a molehill. As others have said, the further up the chain you go the harder the decision you have to make. The wording of the question is careful to avoid the outrage that people are stirring up. If you believed the narrative people are pushing on Twitter you would think Eton are training young people to commit atrocities and get away with it. It's pathetic and it's tiring.

Side note: How awful is the design of the [https://www.indy100.com](https://www.indy100.com) website?

<comment><USER10> And it's not like the rubric was also posted. Maybe a speech sarcastically praising Tiananmen Square and Kent State would do well.

<comment><USER9> Exactly, this type of question is to appraise the student's critical thinking and how well they can defend an action. Not an assessment of morality. It reminds me of Religious Education GCSE exams where they give a statement such as (from my GCSE):

"Women should be allowed in front-line roles in the army. State your opinion and explain why."

They weren't looking for a "right" answer but were assessing critical thinking and the ability to defend your belief.

<comment><USER11> Given the setting 20 years in the future and the situation provided, and the task the students were asked to perform, it's entirely possible they'd at least tolerate, if not reward, some reasonable and restrained invention of future events and situations on the part of the students. Not creating some full-on sci fi world or whatever (though hell, depending on the reviewer and the quality of the work, maybe) but some plausible light world-building to support the speech. On something like this the speculative component is rarely _strictly_ limited to the question asker, within the bounds of taste, reason, and necessity.

[EDIT] which is to say I wouldn't bet that writing the answer from a point of view even _more_ abhorrent than the student may already find the lower bound for the situation would disqualify the student, and, done well, it might help them stand out from the ones who write theirs straight and conservatively. Cribbing patterns of argument from various tyrants and autocrats might be entirely appropriate, even if intended as an implicit indictment of this hypothetical future-UK government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >The prospective students of Eton are then asked to imagine they are the prime minister and write a speech to explain how they would convince the public that they did the right thing.

If they disagree ... isn't that kinda the point? Eton's like, the future-PM factory, right? Do they honestly expect they're never going to have to give a speech defending something they disagreed with, or at least, had strong reservations about?

(And, as others noted, it's not fair to call this killing "protesters", but rather, "rioters".)

<comment><USER5> > Do they honestly expect they're never going to have to give a speech > defending something they disagreed with, or at least, had strong > reservations about?

This is .. low-integrity behaviour, though? It _used_ to be part of the operation of both ministerial and cabinet collective responsibility that ministers had a responsibility to agree or resign. The gold standard of this was Claire Short, who resigned rather than support the Iraq war: [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1429856/Clare-Short- quits-C...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1429856/Clare-Short-quits- Cabinet.html)

Arguably the erosion of this has led us to the crisis of the present day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you have a problem with this question you have a problem with John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which has stood the test of time for a reason, and I propose such people look up Heterodox Academy [https://heterodoxacademy.org](https://heterodoxacademy.org), started by Jonathan Haidt among others.

They released the relevant parts of On Liberty I recommend [https://heterodoxacademy.org/mill](https://heterodoxacademy.org/mill).

Without diversity in viewpoint, you don't know what you know or not, and when you face someone with an opposing viewpoint, you find yourself impotent and confused. They will likely beat you in debate and influence others more effectively. Your emotions may become intense, undermining your ability to bring others to see your view. Challenging your own ideas teaches you and strengthens you.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is an educational exercise and the article is pure pearl-clutching. Being assigned a point to argue is how schools teach students to argue with research and reason rather than emotion and bias.

As an aside, this site has awful responsive design, with buttons and ads covering the content. Everything about the page reeks of clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER14> Link to the paper: [https://www.etoncollege.com/userfiles/files/KS%202011%20Gene...](https://www.etoncollege.com/userfiles/files/KS%202011%20General%20Paper%201.pdf)

The question should be viewed in context. There's an excerpt from Machiavelli on cruelty in politics and then the test subject has to answer three questions:

(a) summarize the argument,

(b) form an opinion of the argument,

(c) use the argument in a practical situation.

These questions are clearly ordered by increasing complexity and test the ability to (a) understand, (b) evaluate, and (c) use an argument. It's intellectually dishonest to take the question out of context. The point of the question is to adapt an argument, not to justify violence.

2010 paper has a similar question. It asks the test subject to adapt Thamus's argument to express concerns about the invention of computer technology.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is an interesting question (quoted in full in the article) for an exam because it forces you to face a difficult issue outside of your comfort zone.

In addition, let's face it and rightly or wrongly, Eton educates many of the future elite (CEOs and Cabinet Ministers) who will have to carry out this sort of task during their professional life, both in terms of making hard choices and in terms of taking responsibility for them and explaining them, even if hopefully in less extreme circumstances.

It would be interesting to have Eton explain what they are seeking in a 'good' answer.

If anything this 'outrage' about the question highlights the issues with social media, not Eton.

<comment><USER16> I was originally thinking along the same lines; this question is quite interesting, to see what kind of response it might elicit. However, after quickly mulling it over, the really objectionable part is that it presupposes that sending in the military is a good idea. Something that an impressionable, albeit privileged, 13-year-old may take to heart.

It could be turned into a good question quite easily: ask how you might deal with the situation, before you get to the nuclear option, and then how/if you could justify it morally.

<comment><USER15> The scenario of the question depicts extreme circumstances. It does not imply that sending the military is a good idea to deal with any protest.

<comment><USER16> Sure, it doesn't imply using military force in _any_ protest is justifiable. However, presuming the PM commands the army, then it's his decision -- and the context thereof -- that needs to be justified. It does imply that, in this instance, using the army was the right thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could be worse.

 _You want to sell out your country to foreign business interests. To convince the poor who will be hardest hit you 'll need to demonise refugees, immigrants and any other minorities necessary until you get the 1/3rd of the vote necessary to give you complete control of parliament._

 _Write a speech that makes your elderly voter base frightened of the other, but do so in a way that makes you seem like a jovial and inoffensive bumbler to them, and yet somehow convinces them that human rights, renewable energy and climate change are ominous hoaxes intended to steal their country from them by dangerous extremists._

</comment><comment><USER18> Paraphrase: Write a justification for the use of extreme physical violence against your own population to preserve the current established order. This assignment will be used to determine where you sit in this order.

</comment><comment><USER5> See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eton_Rifles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eton_Rifles)

</comment><comment><USER19> Of course PC principal can't stand for this but being able to argue any issue from any point of view is considered to be a hallmark of the well educated by people who have been in the education business for centuries. In 9th grade my history teacher routinely randomly assigned us to write one of two positions on the same issue (capital punishment is unjust, etc). Much of the present state of modern electoral politics can be traced to a widespread inability or unwillingness to understand the people who disagree with you.

<comment><USER20> I've been told by multiple people I respect variations of "If you cannot argue the other side's argument in good faith and well, then you really don't know what you believe yourself".

I do fail in this with some of the extremes. I just cannot figure out the why of the "flat earth" thing since I don't understand who "profits" in some way from a cover-up.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes there _is_ no good faith intent; "write an argument explaning why a Nigerian prince would use a random person from the Internet for a money transfer".

<comment><USER20> Other than the lack of a prince in the first place, I can actually see, given some of the US banking laws, a good faith argument where the offer is genuine. Won't believe it ever (much to regret of the actual IT industry trying to start there), but I think someone could do it well.

Although, that strays more into scenario as opposed to opposing beliefs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Small apps ideas to learn Node.js? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, so I've been reading a lot about Node.js and want to jump in with a quick (multi)weekend project to learn it. What apps would you suggest building to learn the basics and just have some fun? <comment><USER2> I'd suggest using Express.js node.js framework: it gets you up and running quickly. Trying to so something with websockets is fun as well and indicative of the (realtime) future of web apps.

<comment><USER3> Websockets are a lot of fun - maybe something like collaborative paint or some kind of multiuser game?

On a side note, anyone know of projects using nodejs in production?

<comment><USER4> I'm currently making a multiplayer shooter game for node knockout!

It's not currently very impressive, but I hope it will be in about 21 hours :) I might submit to HN depending on how well it turns out.

<comment><USER5> Submit it either way :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about a dead simple document sharing website that lets people read the same doc, on multiple computers, at the same time? (i.e. if you have a bunch of people on a call with computers up, the speaker can send around a reading link that lets him or her flip pages for everyone viewing.) I find myself wishing for this functionality pretty regularly lately. Broadcasting the pointer, real time comments & annotations seem cool too.

<comment><USER7> You could try DimDim ( <http://www.dimdim.com/> ). It's free for meetings with less than 20 participants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I made a Tweet Wall in a day, with Socket.io (for websockets) and TwitterNode (for connecting to Twitter's real-time search API). It was a pretty good intro to the concepts.

</comment><comment><USER9> I did a twitter to facebook page poster (using the like button), but haven't really been maintaining it. Maybe one that was better?

<http://t2fb.paulisageek.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> A language, like mine ;) pmlang.heroku.com

</comment><comment><USER11> How about a web chat program, with long polling? Fairly simple, and fun.

<comment><USER12> I can second this as a good way of learning. The Node.js site links to a very readable long polling chat app here: <http://github.com/ry/node_chat>. I learned the framework by modifying this into an IRC-style party game am now working on mobile clients for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The classic case of the solution in search for a problem? ^_^</comment>