Building Twitter Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> http://alistapart.com/article/building-twitter-bootstrap

<comment><USER2> Bootstrap attaining its current level of traction is quite remarkable and a blessing to the web.

The idea is taking hold that a web designer doesn't have to build everything from scratch in order to still be a respectable designer. The advantages of drawing upon a standard collection of reusable constructs are becoming clear to designers and non-designers alike. I've likened Bootstrap to jQuery with its wide adoption and plugin ecosystem. We've already seen the Bootstrap community form around the project in a similar way.

Writing a layout from scratch is sort of like writing a program in assembly language. That's where I feel like we're still at. I imagine that at one point there were people opposed to high-level languages like C because they abstracted you away from the raw nit and grit. Though you still have to write HTML and CSS with Bootstrap (especially if you want to customize the look), you are abstracted away from the tedious boilerplate code.

There are other frameworks in this space but none have inspired so many people to change the way they tackle web design. I look forward to a future where more is accomplished on a shorter timeline, thanks to efforts like this project.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like Bootstrap but I found it hard to do customized layouts with Bootstrap. This was an issue when I tried to create custom widgets.

I consider myself to be CSS illiterate; writing Less mixins from scratch was never an option for me.

Then I tried ZURB Foundation . And what I liked about Zurb was its "infrastructure "of SaSS and Compass. I found there is a very vibrant support ecosystem around Sass. There is of-course the Compass, Compass.app , Compass recipes,bourbon-compass, Sassy buttons and more; a lot of useful Sass mixins be found by Google search . I have found Zurb Foundation's SaSS codebase can seamlessly coexist with those other mixins , which allows me to focus on my java /javascript code knowing that the layout will be compatible. I like never having to writ a mixin from scratch; Zurb/sass allows me ti include mixins and merely customize parameters.

Zurb may not ship with as many widgets as Bootstrap but once I learned how to layout and style a panel with Zurb and sass, writing javascript code to add behaviors and methods to the panel is almost easy.

On the downside of Zurb, there does not seem to be any themes marketplace like those for Bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER4> It should be noted that this article is over a year old and is referring to Bootstrap 1.0

<comment><USER5> goddamn, thanks. +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's funny how the frameworks that came before (skeleton, ZURB, 960gs, etc) are always forgotten. IMO two things made bootstrap successful: 1) the Twitter brand 2) colorful CSS3 buttons

<comment><USER7> I was fairly "loyal" to 960gs, but when Bootstrapped was released, I switched right away. Bootstrap was responsive, which was a huge selling point, and contained a few components and javascript features, which were nice to have all bundled up in one package.

Bootstrap's documentation was another big advantage. It's a larger library than pervious grid systems but it's modular structure and excellent documentation lets you get started easily, while adding in deeper features with little friction or confusion. I also think Bootstrap's roadmap looks positive, as it is placing a larger focus on making quality mobile experiences as simple as possible.

<comment><USER8> I think the excellent documentation is one of the biggest things that's contributed to the success of bootstrap. As someone who started using bootstrap after literally having no experience with CSS/HTML/JS, the absolutely fantastic documentation means I have used bootstrap over everything else. It's very comprehensive, very approachable, and excellently designed :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bootstrap is awesome and popular but let's not forget other two frameworks Zurb Foundation and Skeleton, I've used all three, mostly Zurb lately and can say that you can't go wrong with any of them.

</comment><comment><USER10> It should probably be noted this article is a year old, especially given the current discussion inside Bootstrap is about removing dropdowns as a core component.</comment>


The Alphabet of Satire – Rube Goldberg - <AUTHOR> http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_urb-rube-goldberg.html

<comment><USER2> What? No comments yet? For THE patron saint of Java Enterprise Engineering???

<comment><USER3> That's really quite funny--and has the glint of truth. Precisely why no prior comments, the Rubeness of our own inventions makes us uneasy and we are reluctant to admit it.

Reflects easy observations amidst the hyped fervor of technologies, kind of a motto of our era, "why make it simple when it can be so complicated?"</comment></comment>


AmazonBasics Electronics Fire Safety Investigation - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-electronics-fire-safety-invs/index.html <comment><USER3> Shopping with Amazon has become increasingly difficult. I can no longer rely on the reviews, and the volume of results that come up for even a simple search make for a lot of searching. Amazon really, _really_ need to stop being the dumpster for cheap and nasty China-manufactured goods. And yes, of course I'm welcome to shop elsewhere if I don't like what's on offer, and that's what I'm increasingly doing. Bezos' loss, but he'll never notice.

<comment><USER4> I miss the Amazon from yesteryear when Prime was first launched. You could confidently read and trust the reviews, 1-click buy the item when satisfied, and have it show up 1-2 days later. Today that magic is lost; it's mostly a huge junk store with untrustworthy reviews.

Something I can't really get my head around is that it seems like such an obvious problem to identify within Amazon's ranks, and correcting it feels like something within their means, but they just ... don't.

Are there any e-commerce sites that exist today with the same magic Amazon use to have?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Articles like this aren't helpful because they pick and exhibit a few case studies instead of attempting to estimate base rates and risk proportions - <USER2> course some Amazon products have caught on fire, Amazon has sold a billion of them. What needs to be provided in this type of reporting is actual estimates of how many of the products may be dangerous, which is of course never provided or even attempted as an estimate.

<comment><USER6> I disagree with the assertion that this type of article isn't helpful. I would say it's 'not scientific', but not unhelpful.

I don't think Amazon is likely to release those statistics anytime soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this as it may change perception on both sides. Either the consumer sees this article and purchases less 'Amazon Basics' branded products, or someone inside Amazon sees it and decides to do something about it.

Not optimal, but far from unhelpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was under the impression AmazonBasics was very much like Costco's Kirkland brand, where they relabeled some other manufacturer's products. Maybe I'm wrong. Or it's hit and miss.

</comment><comment><USER8> This article is just a stupid hit piece.

A USB cord is not responsible for detecting short circuits. That's the job of the charger not the cord.

The best cord in the entire universe cannot prevent short circuits.

<comment> ctrl-j A short circuit is usually a wiring issue. A poorly manufactured USB cable can _certainly_ cause a short circuit.

Fire investigators are also well versed in the forensic investigation of these scenes. If his expert analysis determined the cord was at fault, there's a good chance it was the cable and not the device.

<comment><USER9> > A short circuit is usually a wiring issue. A poorly manufactured USB cable > can certainly cause a short circuit.

yes. also extremely high quality cables which have been damaged in the field can develop a short.

power supplies intended for use by users who cannot/will not inspect their cabling for damage (morally) should detect that the output is shorted and stop applying a voltage.

they're the only device in the "charger, cable, chargee" chain that can do anything about the situation.</comment></comment></comment>


The US economy suddenly looks like it's unstoppable - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/the-us-economy-suddenly-looks-like-its-unstoppable.html <comment><USER2> I'm sure Trump's trade war rhetoric will fix that.</comment>


Federal Research Suggests New Approach to Teaching Fractions - <AUTHOR> http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/07/18/37fractions.h32.html?tkn=TYCCvYyFRqTWe%2F53pDFlhN5H2Mg4o%2FQhgGLd&cmp=clp-sb-ascd

<comment><AUTHOR> I am quite astonished at how slow the uptake of showing fractions on a number line is in school mathematics lessons in the United States. That is routine and has been routine for more than a generation in the countries with the best primary mathematics achievement around the world. I picked up some of this implicitly from my home environment just by looking at rulers in my dad's home workshop. (He had rulers with markings down to 1/32 of an inch, as I recall, certainly down to 1/16 of an inch.)

Even here on Hacker News, among fully grown adults, when people raise questions about explaining fractions, many comments leap immediately to pizza slices--a valid model of some fractions, but a very poor model for general understanding of fractions. I took great care to email one of the co-authors of the Art of Problem Solving textbook on Prealgebra

[http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=p...](http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=prealgebra)

while he was writing the book to make sure that that book would have a good chapter on fractions--it does--so that I have a good resource for the mathematics classes I teach. Fractions are not insuperably hard if they are well taught, but they are rarely well taught at any level of mathematics classes in the United States. If you'd like more background on this topic, see _Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers ' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States_ by Liping Ma

[http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev- howe.pdf](http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf)

[https://webstorage.worcester.edu/sites/rbisk/web/marlboro%20...](https://webstorage.worcester.edu/sites/rbisk/web/marlboro%20%20mt%20910/teaching%20and%20learning%20mathematics%20-%20review%20of%20liping%20ma%20text.pdf)

for a comparison of elementary mathematics lessons in two different countries, with China generally having much more mathematically accurate and much more thorough lessons in fractions and fraction arithmetic, among other topics.

<comment><USER2> _pizza slices--a valid model of some fractions, but a very poor model for general understanding of fractions_

If you'd like, could you say a little more about why this is the case?

<comment><USER3> For one, I think that the pizza slices, by being in 2 dimensions, represents the fraction as portion to a (specific) whole without representing the absolute magnitude of the fraction. Both features are important.

<comment><USER4> If the pizza has an area of unit size (1) - how does a fraction not have absolute magnitude? And what does the fact that the pizza is in two dimensions have to do with it? If the pizza is modelled as a cylinder with unit volume - any slice has both volume/x volume, and area/x area -- where x is the area of the slice?

I'm not trying to be snarky, I would just like you to expand on what you mean?

I can see that pizza slices is a poor framework for working with general fractions -- and I agree that a number line is a fine way of visualizing magnitude... perhaps I'm just not familiar enough with what "teaching fractions as pizza slices" entails...?

<comment><USER3> Teaching fractions as pizza slices entails dividing the circle into 6ths, say, and shading in 5 slices[1]. The wedge in the circle shows relative magnitude; it depicts the fraction as a portion (numerator) of the whole (denominator) regardless of how big the circle is. The magnitude of the fraction is depicted only relative to 1.

On a number line, the magnitude of the fraction is depicted relative to _any_ number. In this sense, we capture the "absolute magnitude" of the fraction, by placing on a line relative to the integers.

      ---1-----0-----1-----2-----3---
                   ^       ^
                  5/6     13/6

An individual fraction, as a single-dimensional magnitude, is best represented in an infinite single-dimensional space, where magnitude increases forever in exactly one direction. A circle, on the other hand, has a finite amount of space. Maybe you're right: perhaps it is the infinite nature of the number line that lends itself to "absolute magnitude" rather than the fact that it is one-dimensional.

On the other hand (this is increasingly pedantic): While we could depict 1d magnitude "infinitely" in 2d with concentric circles of area 1, 2, 3, etc, using 2d area to depict a 1d magnitude is not intuitive. The natural alternative is to subdivide the space into units and show multiple discrete units. In 2d, 13/6ths would be two whole pizzas and one 1/6th-filled pizza. But in 1d, the units can be placed adjacent to each other according to the direction of increasing magnitude. In this sense, 1d lends itself to a natural depiction of absolute 1d-magnitude, but 2d does not.

[1] [http://www.primarygames.com/fractions/images/pizza_5-6.gif](http://www.primarygames.com/fractions/images/pizza_5-6.gif)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a bit meta, but the "fractions" thing cracks me up. There should be a Godwin's law for it... The probability of a story about public education mentioning "fractions" approaches 1.

Why are fractions a thing? Sure, the rationals are distinct from the integers and reals, but... Does everyone except me have PTSD from learning fractions or something? Why are they more important than any other math topic, subject, or aspect of education? By golly, if we could just figure out how to teach fractions, we'd have a bona fide education system.

I think I started noticing it after this Onion piece (NSFW) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btw1eh4mitQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btw1eh4mitQ)

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is an actual question for schoolteachers from a National Science Foundation study of elementary mathematics instruction in the United States. In Liping Ma's book (mentioned in my comment above, with links to two reviews), the author took the same NSF sample survey questions to teachers in China and compared how Chinese teachers answered the questions. Here is a teaching question for any reader of Hacker News who has ever had occasion to teach mathematics or explain mathematics to a friend or colleague:

"Scenario 3: Division by Fractions

"People seem to have different approaches to solving problems involving division with fractions. How do you solve a problem like this one?

1¾ ÷ ½

"Imagine that you are teaching division with fractions. To make this meaningful for kids, something that many teachers try to do is relate mathematics to other things. Sometimes they try to come up with real-world situations or story problems to show the application of some particular piece of content. What would you say would be a good story or model for

1¾ ÷ ½ ? "

This problem, providing an illustration for what it means to divide one rational number by another, proves to be extremely hard for United States teaches, but quite easy for teachers in China. What story problem would you devise to embed this calculation into a context understandable to children?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's clearly useful and appropriate to show fractions as a relation of a part to a whole, as a _portion of something_ , but it's almost always depicted in 2 dimensions (typically a circle) and therefore restricted to comparing to just one whole (i.e. the denominator of the fraction in reduced form). Using 1 dimension allows us to compare the portion to not just one whole but many familiar wholes, the natural numbers. I think it would also be useful to co- develop intuition of space and portions in 3 dimensions.

Maybe not everyone can get to it, I don't know, but the paper: [http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/121-siegler-etal- tics.pdf](http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/121-siegler-etal-tics.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm lucky enough to work at a place that is building Math games for K-6.

I watched the curriculum experts and content design teams white-boarding the many ways to conceptualize and visualize fractions for several weeks. It's not the simple domain you might think.

<comment><USER7> How do you explain the taboo about NEVER PUT ZERO ON THE BOTTOM!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As an earlier step, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods) have demonstrated utility. It's a shame their use is mostly limited to Montessori schools in the US.

<comment> T-hawk Oh my gosh, thanks for posting that! I went to a Montessori school and must have used those, but never knew it was a thing with a name.

I _see_ arithmetic in visual terms like those rods. Like to add 18 + 12:

      ++++++++++
      ++
        ++++++++
      ++++++++++

I actually "see" the numbers fitting together like that spatially to make the sum. Must have learned this when I was too young to consciously remember, and the most likely way that happened was with these Cuisenaire rods or some such physical objects. Amazing to suddenly learn now that that's a known and defined device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone else think that it's hard to teach fractions because _fractions are hard_?

The tenor of these conversations is always about how difficult it is to teach fractions, with an implicit judgement that this is bad because fractions should be easy.

The thing is, you construct fractions by generating the equivalence class of ordered pairs (Z_1, Z_2) where Z_2 =/= 0. I actually find elementary set theory easier to grasp than the formal construction of arithmetic over the rational numbers.

A lot of people would respond that we don't teach children the formal construction -- fine, but a lot of the behavior of the rationals comes from that formal construction.

I recall a class in my freshman year of college that required differential equations to do system analysis. The only problem was -- differential equations was next quarter. I think the rote algorithm they gave us to calculate simple differential equations was one of the most frustrating experiences of my academic career. I tend to think that if you teach students things as though they can't understand it, you'll often find that they can't understand it.

<comment><USER10> > A lot of people would respond that we don't teach children the formal > construction

Arguably, the way we teach fractions already follows the natural progression of formally defining numbers pretty much: You start with addition (which is somewhat hardwired into our natural number sense), learn that you can also reverse that to get subtraction. Then the big leap of symbolic faith[1] is subtracting a big number from a smaller one to get negative numbers. After this there's the idea of counting repeated additions and giving that a shortcut, resulting in multiplication, and the reveral of that gives division. The big mental jump then is dividing a small number by a bigger number, giving fractions.

[1] You have to remember that mathematics is basically formalising our limited number intuition into language, so we can manipulate the symbols as we would manipulate real world objects, greatly increasing our capacity to reason about these ideas. "Doing with Images makes Symbols," to quote Alan Kay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember being confused about what was the difference between fractions and negative numbers. I knew they were both "advanced concepts" but I didn't know if they were the same or how they were related. I asked the teacher, and she said I'd learn later.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope they're right in fixing this. The overemphasis on whole #s is counter to much of reality and how math is applied.</comment>


Elementary Algebra by K. E. Iverson (1971) (pdf) - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Papers/ElementaryAlgebra <comment><AUTHOR> Iverson of APL fame wrote a book on algebra that used his array notation and concepts. The copies are apparently hard to find. The submission was closest thing I found to final version.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_\(programming_language\))

<comment><USER2> Thanks! It is very interesting language indeed and the book is very useful to make first steps in APL.</comment></comment>


AVX register corruption from signal delivery - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205663 <comment><USER2> Reminds me of this post from 2017:

"Debugging an evil Go runtime bug" \- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15845118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15845118)

[https://github.com/golang/go/issues/20427](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/20427)

[https://bugs.gentoo.org/637152](https://bugs.gentoo.org/637152)

[https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/10/188](https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/10/188)

</comment><comment><USER3> The issue that led to this bug report: [https://github.com/golang/go/issues/35326](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/35326)

<comment><USER4> It's awful strange. Usually if your program crashes, it's your fault, not the kernel's.

<comment><USER5> When you support a compiler you get a massive stream of users complaining the at at the compiler has a bug, though in most cases it's the user's bug.

Of course there are also good reports where the user actually has found a bug in the compiler.

Though of course most are weird corner case or bugs in new features, there are a surprising number that make you think "wow, how could _any_ program be successfully compiled which this bug in the tree?"

<comment><USER6> I found a bug in the .NET compiler back when I worked at Microsoft, and at first no one wanted to believe me :)

It manifested when you had a single static member of a specific generic type in a class. The program crashed complaining about invalid CLR instructions. If you added a second static member of the same type to the class, or changed the type of the generic parameter, it didn't reproduce.

Turns out it was related to how the compiler used AVX intrinsics on CPUs that supported those instructions.

Pretty fun but took some convincing for people to believe it was a compiler bug.

<comment><USER7> > and at first no one wanted to believe me :)

I don't know why people think compilers are so infallible, or are more likely to be better written than your application. If people write bugs in applications guess what the same people write similar bugs in compilers too.

<comment><USER8> How many bugs did you find in (production versions of) your applications? How many in compilers?

<comment><USER9> I maintain compilers for a living for a safety-critical embedded OS. I've found dozens of bugs in the compiler, dozens of bugs in the OS kernel, and dozens of bugs in the third-party validation test suites we use to qualify the compiler.

I also live in a log cabin in the back woods and can go off-grid. I've seen shit you people would not believe. It's just a matter of time now. Dominoes.

<comment><USER10> Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion yet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me about one time when I've spent a week debugging random, but quite consistent kernel crashes, which turned out to be a gcc miscompiling kernel driver code to decrement stack pointer before ceasing to use some values in that stack area. There was one or two instructions, where if a re-entrant irq happened, would reuse that stack part and corrupt data there.

<comment><USER12> Sounds like the AMD64 red zone, which can't be used in the kernel context.

<comment><USER11> Aarch64. It was just a minor gcc bug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > To reproduce, build the attached program with "gcc -pthread test.c" and run > it on a 5.2 or later kernel compiled with GCC 9 (if the kernel is compiled > with GCC 8, it does _not_ reproduce).

I wonder if this is a compiler bug or a new optimization that broke the code.

<comment><USER14> From the link, it seems like GCC 8 does not cache a read from a variable, and has more memory access to read it, while GCC 9 reads that variable from a register every time. (Maybe from a corrupted register?)

<comment><USER15> From what I can tell, the issue is that GCC9 stores the result of a pointer dereference in a register to reuse on each loop operation but the loop operation needs to dereference the pointer each time to work correctly.

<comment><USER16> Sounds like it needs to be volatile then, or rather whatever atomic memory read the kernel has.

<comment><USER14> No, it sounds like it needs the kernel not to corrupt the value. There is nothing wrong with leaving the value in the register.

<comment><USER17> I believe the aforementioned pointer caching _is_ in the kernel--it's the pointer to the FP register state which is cached across preemption points _in_ the kernel.

<comment><USER14> Ok I see, that's a good point. Was not spelled out this well in the bug tracker comment. (If it is now it wasn't when I read it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How about another register? (XMM, FPU, etc.)</comment>


3 words addresses - <AUTHOR> http://what3words.com <comment><AUTHOR> I submitted it out of my curiosity. I posted here, usually HNers have more information than my own searching. In their mobile app I searched a place and then copy the words. Then I searched the 3 words location and it shows 3 differen locations. Anybody knows why? The word is ounce.assumes.grafted. The location matched the word is near Surabaya, Indonesia then near Chibougamau, Quebec and near saguache, Colorado.

Editing: autocorrect gone crazy

<comment><USER2> Same thing for my current location.

"We have divided the world into a grid of 3m x 3m squares and assigned each one a unique 3 word address."

"Unique" \- You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means...

<comment><USER3> I think if you look closely you will find some of those alternatives are plurals, just in case you made a mistake. "To avoid confusion, similar sounding addresses are also placed as far from each other as possible. The app will account for spelling errors and other typing mistakes and make suggestions, based on 3 word addresses nearby."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you're right. I checked my screenshot. It is different. For non English speakers it is not quiet good.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I can see how that would be a bit confusing.

I guess if you were using it in the real world you would hopefully have an idea of where in the world your target was and if your phone autocorrected to a plural you should still get there.

I would assume the option to show variations could be turned off when using the apis so it would depend on the use case as to whether this behaviour was desired or not and then utilised.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A review of all available Hacker News iPad Apps - <AUTHOR> http://daniel.hepper.net/blog/2011/09/a-review-of-all-available-hacker-news-ipad-apps/ <comment><USER2> Last time I looked through the iPhone clients, they seemed to all be overpriced, and half were abandoned and had one-star reviews saying they didn't work anymore.

I'm not going to spend $5 on a reader just so it can break when the developer gets tired of it next month. I wish pg would just make a mobile stylesheet, or at least not make it fixed width.

<comment><USER3> That might have to do with very low demand. Like 1 download/week. Only assumption though.

<comment><USER2> I think someone could definitely get a lot of visibility writing a free good Hacker News client, instead of trying to charge $3 and being annoyed that no one buys it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just curious, but what's wrong with the web version, viewed through Safari?

Or failing that, something like Flipboard?

<comment><USER5> The links are a bit small to click on comfortably, and the comments are rendered a bit too wide, which makes you have to zoom in and pan to read them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Hacker News HD page <http://www.welikeinc.com/> says "COMING SOON" for that app...

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it is available on the store. I didn't check the support pages, to be honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hacker News HD has been crashing for me for the past two months. The only way I can get it to work (for a day or so) is by uninstalling and reinstalling the app.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is strange, Hacker News HD works fine for me and never crashed during my tests. I found Hacker News! (the app with the blue icon) to be very unstable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I presented my findings at the HN Cologne Meetup yesterday evening and one attendant had the same issues with Hacker News HD. I guess I have to revise my conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have tried all of them and now I use reeder and I'm very happy with it!</comment>


The Littlest CPU Rasterizer - <AUTHOR> http://ginsweater.com/blog/2014/03/10/the-littlest-cpu-rasterizer/

<comment><USER2> Fun! When I saw spherical harmonics I was confused about why spherical harmonics would come into play in a voxel universe (isn't everything flat?). Digging into it a bit I found out more about spherical harmonic lighting: [http://www.research.scea.com/gdc2003/spherical-harmonic- ligh...](http://www.research.scea.com/gdc2003/spherical-harmonic-lighting.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The geometry may be flat, but relationships between objects are still arbitrary, so light can still hit things from any angle. Try as you might, you can't escape curves. ;)

That article's a classic; definitely worth a read for anyone interested in graphics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> cool ! shouldn't it be:

U32 ind = (xx-xStart + (yy-yStart) * 16+ ( zz-zStart ) * 16 * 16) * 2;

in your code, though ?

<comment><USER3> Whoops, yeah, you caught me. As I handwaved in the post, there's a little bit of implementation detail in the real code that I removed to clarify the algorithm. Fixed now, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wonderful! Great writing too, very clear and intuitive.

</comment><comment><USER6> i was trying to build a word cloud algorithm and then I had a question: how do you rasterize letter shapes?

I looked at pyCairo but I couldn't figure out how to use it. [http://cairographics.org/documentation/pycairo/3/](http://cairographics.org/documentation/pycairo/3/)

I asked on StackOverflow no answer [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21915335/getting-the- bitm...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21915335/getting-the-bitmask-of-a- text-string-in-python)

i found the true-type format shape files and extracted polygons from those - which i also don't know how to rasterize.

i know this not really a response to the posted link - which is very low level and interesting - but maybe someone here knows an answer.

<comment><USER3> I like stb_truetype myself. It's C so you'll have to bind it if you're using any other language, but it's a lot simpler than Freetype. (Less features too, but it'll take a .ttf and return a bitmap, which sounds like what you want.)

[http://nothings.org/stb/stb_truetype.h](http://nothings.org/stb/stb_truetype.h)

<comment><USER7> It's always great to see things that people would consider nontrivial programming tasks being done with a much smaller amount of code than they would expect from looking at the more "mainstream" libraries that do it. Public domain is a big bonus too.

In comparison, Freetype is absolutely monsterous; it is a few times faster according to some benchmarks I've found, but a few orders of magnitude bigger too. Sometimes you don't need the fastest, you just want something simple that works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the sorts of techniques used in 4/64K demos.

</comment><comment><USER8> Where can I find the complete source code?

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks good! Are your models procedurally generated or did you create them in an external program?</comment>


The netscape dorm - <AUTHOR> https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html <comment><USER2> From the top of the page:

      Greetings, people of the future!
      If someone has linked you to this page,
      they're probably trying to con you.
      Don't fall for it. In fact, stop reading
      right now. Don't read this page. Go read
      this page instead.

      I wrote this twenty years ago.
      Now is not then. You are being robbed.

      -- Jamie Zawinski, 2014.

Edit:

Has been discussed previously, and the original site seems to have crashed (is HN now so popular we can slashdot a site!?). A good roundup on the issues with her usual style is on [https://unicornfree.com/2011/fuck-glory-startups-are- one-lon...](https://unicornfree.com/2011/fuck-glory-startups-are-one-long-con)

Basically, we still need to fix the management of software lots lots more than we need to fix the interview process.

<comment><USER3> After reading your "Fuck Glory" link, I recalled something I'd read about prestige:

> "You shouldn't worry about prestige.... It might be a good rule simply to > avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to > make it prestigious."

The irony, of course, is that none other than Paul Graham wrote that in _How to Do What You Love_ : [http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> jwz commented [1] on a previous discussion of his diary after Arrington linked to it claiming "rah rah rah startups are awesome keep busting your ass [to make me rich] [some editorial liberties taken]" [2]. This is the bit that stuck with me

       I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it's
       true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as
       much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept
       under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people
       from the software industry, I'll bet you get a very different view of what
       kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented
       here.

It's well worth thinking about, particularly given the endless whining on here / in the industry that engineers aren't leaping at the chance to give up $40k or $50k a year in salary for a couple basis points in almost-certainly-never- gonna-be-worth-anything options. Therefore there's an engineering shortage that must urgently be addressed at the highest levels of government, which solution must necessarily include open immigration for engineers.

[1] [https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name- to-s...](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-sell-a- con/)

[2] [http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/27/startups-are-hard-so- work-m...](http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/27/startups-are-hard-so-work-more- cry-less-and-quit-all-the-whining/)

</comment><comment><USER5> 9 Years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545)

8 Years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100176](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100176)

5 Years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211360)

</comment><comment><USER6> I remember when silicon valley work life balance meant wandering around the cube farms as a little kid and seeing all the old people napping in their sleeping bags under their tables.

You step outside and the particular business park you were in was separated by miles of nothing in between. So after you get up, realize what time it was, you get in a car and drive a solid fifteen minutes without seeing many others.

Then when you get home you try to explain or relate to others about what it is you're doing they just don't care. They're busy with their television sets or radio or magazine. This internet thing you keep talking about won't ever take off.

Now it's still the same. People are still busy with their tvs but it's called youtube, they're busy with their radio but it's called instagram and they're busy with their magazines but its called Facebook.

Worse it takes me 40 minutes to drive two miles through the town and everything old is getting torn down to be rebuilt as high density four story duplex condos.

The cool thing is now is to disconnect. Funny how that reverb goes.

</comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the swirl society of Netscape: [http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html](http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> That moment a HN reference to your site causes a full scale DDoS takedown.

<comment><USER9> The hug of death.

I do wonder if this wouldn't be preventable with a better-designed web. Why fetch static media from the source anyway? You could grab it from your peers.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like you want IPFS: [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)

<comment> vezzy-fnord There's plenty of interest in replacing transfer and naming, but I don't see a lot in developing a post-WWW hypertext system. Are there any projects or did the WWW and HTTP kill off research in that area?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> previous discussions of note:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288671)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3283214](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3283214)

from [https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/vc- metadata/](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/vc-metadata/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GJCV4xo...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GJCV4xosoLEJ:https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there a link to what the original said? I remember reading the 2011 jwz doc in college and it was a huge topic of discussion in our CS community.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is now redirecting to a rather NSFW link...

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not a robot! :(

(open in a new tab if you get a 403 Bots Forbidden)

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks nuts.</comment>


Welcome to the Jet Age: How AI Makes Online Shopping Carts Smarter - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/08/08/online-shopping/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here's a more in-depth talk by Daniel Egloff (given at GTC 2017) that really gets into the details: [http://on- demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2017/video/s7139-daniel...](http://on- demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2017/video/s7139-daniel-egloff-prices-drop-as-you- shop-how-walmart-is%20using-jets-gpu.mp4)

Full disclosure: I work at Jet.</comment>


LinkedIn sued over allegation it secretly reads Apple users' clipboard content - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-linkedin-lawsuit/linkedin-sued-over-allegation-it-secretly-reads-apple-users-clipboard-content-idUSKBN24C010 <comment><USER2> People seem pretty upset about their clipboards, I wonder if apple/google will listen and make the reading of your clipboard something that you must get explicit user permission for (similar to your camera). IMO this is how almost every possibly permission should be and I think most users would agree with me that having 2 seconds of inconvenience when you first setup the app is worth the peace of mind gained.

<comment><USER3> It should just work the way that every user assumes it works: apps can't read it at all, but the user can explicitly paste from it

<comment><USER4> Right? On what planet should an app be allowed to read or write to the clipboard? The _only_ piece of software that should access the clipboard is the keyboard, and even that I have trouble trusting with all of these predictive services. I'd like to feel more confident that my most used device isn't loaded up with keyloggers.

<comment><USER5> On Android, one of the suggestions when you focus the address bar in Chrome is the URL currently on your clipboard. That's tremendously useful. (It helps that pasting isn't especially ergonomic on Android.)

<comment><USER6> To be honest I hate that they have gimped the address bar on android chrome. Its just one more button press if i need to edit the url, and i think its creepy that they read the clipboard to be frank.

<comment><USER5> I replace the address more often than I edit it, so personally I like it. But yes, reception has certainly been mixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> " According to the complaint, LinkedIn has not only been spying on its users, it has been spying on their nearby computers and other devices"

Facebook's SDK's which are embedded in more than 30-40% of all Android apps also scan the users internal network and also uses Bluetooth looking for devices nearby.

I was shocked to discover that more than half of the third party apps I had installed had Facebook's software embedded in them.

<comment><USER8> Is there a list of these somewhere? What are the steps needed to verify for myself? Exfiltration of data from my phone is theft; I prefer not to be stolen from.

So far I've found: Spotify Tinder Yelp Duolingo

<comment><USER9> I am a noob, so please correct if wrong. I think you can use the fdroid app 'ClassyShark3xodus' to scan apps installed and apks on your phone for trackers etc. [https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.oF2pks.classyshark3xodus...](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.oF2pks.classyshark3xodus/)

<comment><USER8> That got me far enough to get started, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Previous discussion of the issue: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716451)

Explanation from LinkedIn and the actual (open-sourced) code in question linked in the top comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23719995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23719995)

That explanation seems plausible to me, and would imply that there is no spying going on there.

<comment><USER11> > "According to the complaint, LinkedIn has not only been spying on its users, > it has been spying on their nearby computers and other devices, and it has > been circumventing Apple's Universal Clipboard timeout."

That's the last paragraph, which probably should have been stated sooner. The timeout issue could be a mistake, but if not it seems to support the spying theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What functionality would be broken if clipboards were changed to be completely unreadable other than when the user initiates a "paste" command manually?

<comment><USER13> All copying and pasting relating functionality would be broken, because clipboards literally function by granting programmatic access to applications.

"The user initiates a paste command manually" is a requirement that may be trivial for a human to express but near impossible for software to implement.

<comment><USER14> > "The user initiates a paste command manually" is a requirement that may be > trivial for a human to express but near impossible for software to > implement.

What? No.

Sure, there would be changes required, but both Android and iOS could support this pretty easily IMO.

<comment><USER13> How do you imagine that copying and pasting works on Android and iOS at the moment?

"There would be changes required" is a very euphemistic way to phrase what would basically be banning all apps that don't use the high-level views in the OS SDK from having clipboard functionality. Funnily enough, if Apple were to come out tomorrow and say "we're removing the ability to cut, copy and paste from any and all apps that don't use UIKit" this website would have a field day tearing them to shreds and smugly posting about "walled gardens".

Convenience, freedom, security. Pick two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well hello all the passwords that are safely copied from the password manager.

</comment><comment><USER16> Checking the clipboard for relevant patterns and possibly enabling user actions is not the same thing as stealing your clipboard. Consider the Apollo reddit app:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/hejb9i/ios14_catches...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/hejb9i/ios14_catches_apps_spying_on_your_clipboard/fvscjyz/)

<comment><USER17> Then these should be permissioned separately, the patterns perhaps available for inspection

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm wondering if a dependency common to these apps is the thing reading the clipboard.

<comment><USER19> Well, it's not rare. A lot of apps have sort of feature, search while inputing, to search before user completing spelling. And some apps go further to search and show what people copy from other place, because they thought user may want that. I think its original idea is to bring convienience to user, not to inspect privacy data. But this seems to end now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yeah, please just use mobile websites instead of apps whereever possible.

</comment><comment><USER21> So, do we need to redefine the term "sandbox" as it relates to secure software? Obvi, it doesn't do what we've been told it was supposed to do. Apple uses the term about 600 times per keynote, but we now know it's been lip service. They either lied or just did a shitty job securing iOS. However, "sandbox" doesn't necessarily imply secure; that would be a "secure sandbox," in which case we were all naive, heard "sandbox," and assumed it was secure, which by default and definition, it isn't.

</comment><comment><USER22> ...just imagine how many passwords must have leaked like this. Or is there some kind of 'limitation' when accessing clipboard data copied from password managers?

<comment><USER23> Some password managers have a feature to automatically clear the clipboard contents 30 seconds after copying a password. But I have only seen this on Android, Windows and macOS. Not on any iOS apps, likely due to tougher restrictions on executing in the background.

<comment><USER22> Yea, 1Password on iOS also clears the clipboard after 90 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To me the real problem is that so many people don't actually understand how clipboards work. If they did, they wouldn't have this (in my opinion) strange trust in their security in the first place.

As a developer and as a user: don't put things in the general/system clipboard if they're truly sensitive/secret. Developers especially really should be promoting the use of named and/or private clipboards (and of the share sheet in Android and iOS).

<comment><USER24> How am I supposed to use a password manager if I can't copy paste?

<comment><USER13> "How am I supposed to use a password manager if I can't put my plaintext password in a file that everyone can access?"

Like I have already said,

>> Developers especially really should be promoting the use of named and/or private clipboards (and of the share sheet in Android and iOS).

And for the specific case of a password manager, iOS offers Password Autofill integrations. It's not the OS's fault if developers are too lazy to use the right tools for the right job.

<comment><USER25> iOS does not offer auto fill for third party password managers and there is no unified service that Apple offers for web and desktop and works across OS and multiple browsers . So it is less to with developer laziness and more to do with lack of usability beyond iOS

<comment><USER13> > iOS does not offer auto fill for third party password managers

Yes, it does - see the section very literally titled "Integrate a Password Management App with Password AutoFill" at [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_autofill).

But again, many devs don't actually keep up with and/or look up the proper way to do things on the platform they're deploying on.

> and there is no unified service that Apple offers for web and desktop and > works across OS and multiple browsers

Apple has a duty to its own software. Why exactly is the onus on Apple to offer a magical grand unified service instead of on third party software developers to actually take the time to study and use the appropriate tools on each platform they want to deploy on?

If you want things to be secure you generally have to put in the work for it. 1Password spends resources building & maintaining browser extensions to integrate directly with input fields - why doesn't your password manager of choice offer similar? As a developer one could use named and/or private clipboards to actually have control over when and how the data their users clip is accessed - why not do that over complaining that a shared, global buffer that applications can access programmatically by design is, while convenient, also not exactly the most secure way to transmit sensitive data?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My hope is that stories like this help to educate non technical users about what a clipboard is and does. That in turn might result in improved clipboard privacy.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is very weird, I notice a lot of apps are doing this.

Even Firefox Focus, considered to be a "privacy-focused" browser, has this notification pop up every time you add a character to their address/search bar.

</comment><comment><USER28> shitty company that uses dark patterns[0]

[0][https://twitter.com/darkpatterns](https://twitter.com/darkpatterns)

</comment><comment><USER29> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER30> While LinkedIn is sketchy, this is a modern iteration of ambulance chasing lawsuits.

<comment><USER25> If it improves privacy by making the cost of acquiring a user's information higher then that's a _very_ good thing .

<comment><USER30> You can also say that ambulance chasers improve public safety by making errors more costly.

This isn't about privacy. It's a money grab by lawyers.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to use Android phones as programming environment? - <AUTHOR> I have to live without a laptop for about a month. I am looking for the best practices for programming from an Android phone, (and with a big screen Android TV if required). My phone has 8GB of RAM and is rooted. I am a regular user of Vim/ Emacs and would like to use those rather than GUI apps.<p>What's your experience with bluetooth keyboards? Has anybody used Android TVs as the display with proper GNU/Linux installations on the phone? <comment><USER2> Looks like one of the possibilities would be using a samsung phone that supports Samsung DEX: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU0cN_HcwMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU0cN_HcwMY)</comment>


Sarah Parcak, Space Archaeologist - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/sarah-parcak-space-archaeologist-1452887899 <comment><USER2> This article is a little disingenuous in how it represent this as something revolutionary.

Using remote sensing has a long and storied tradition in archaeology. The archaeology department at my university regularly flew out to collect photos of the region, and had been doing so since the seventies. Not to mention the use of balloons and dirigibles in the dilettante era of the profession.

Calling this "space archaeology" is more of a smart rebranding of an established practice. It is not a recent evolution in the profession, neither is it something where "More and more people are realizing there's this incredible tool". But "space" sounds fancy. Second, framing this as a tool in the battle against looting is typical of the TED minset. Grab yer technology A, grab yer problem B, shake it up, and boom, new shticky hook to take on the roadshow. It's like saying, hey, with email we can write warrants real efficiently so we can do searches in warehouses. MS Word a great tool in the battle against looting. It sort of is, but it also isn't.

It is true that Google and Bing maps have democratized aerial photography. But much of the highest resolution photos that Google or Microsoft has for many regions in the world are not collected by satellites but still by airplanes. This is especially the case for the oblique photographs (aka "bird's eye) which add a lot of complimentary value when doing site selection.

<comment><USER3> > This article is a little disingenuous in how it represent this as something > revolutionary.

We can quibble over the use of the word "revolutionary", but it certainly seems to be _effective_ : "In the past few years, she has spotted thousands of previously unknown tombs, temples and entire ancient cities, mostly in Egypt".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know Sarah. She's a lovely person, very smart and competent, with a genuine love of archaeology. It's great to see she's having such success.

</comment><comment><USER4> I find it amazing there is enough disposable cash to go around so that there is such a market for rare antiquities. I would presume these are not purchased by museums or institutions but by private collectors. I guess I still marvel at the vastness of some fortunes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Older technology is useful, too. Dr. Stephanie Dalley used old Corona Program surveillance images in seeking a historical location for the Hanging Gardens... but not in Babylon:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6vVxbAJAog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6vVxbAJAog) Who Built The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?

(PBS.com's version is paywalled)</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone interested in a GAE backup solution? - <AUTHOR>

As someone who runs a small Google App Engine (GAE) app, I'm currently planning on using a cronjob off a box at home to do backups. The thought occurred to me that it would be great if I could use an online service that backed-up my datastore periodically and stored those backups in the cloud. The question is whether anyone else would be interested in such a service. Are there any other GAE developers on HN? If so, would they be interested in such a service? <comment><USER2> You might want to an Osterwalder business model canvas to describe your idea better. Then you might get some meaningful feedback.

See this post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3359356>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing not much enthusiasm then for the idea...</comment>


Government policy triggered the financial meltdown and will almost certainly extend it. - <AUTHOR> http://www.reason.com/news/show/130330.html <comment><USER2> I love this part:

You can't lend money if you don't have it. And beginning in 2001, the Federal Reserve made sure lots of people had it. In January 2001, when President Bush took office, the federal funds rate, the key benchmark for all interest rates in this country, was 6.5 percent. Then, in response to the meltdown in the technology sector, the Fed began cutting the rate. By August 2001, it was at 3.75 percent. And after the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Fed opened the spigot. By the summer of 2002, the federal funds rate was 1 percent.

No mention of the reason for the low rates i.e. to spur economic growth. The administration wanted to PROVE that tax cuts cause enough economic growth to grow government revenue. The way to do that if the tax cuts aren't really working is to keep lowering the interest rate. Now that the whole house of cards has fallen down, it is very silly to be saying that less government would be the solution.

I would say that in June of this year I was a hardcore libertarian, and I have been pretty much since I had become politically aware, but after digging through the events and the economics of the crisis, my mind has changed. When it comes to financial markets, they are going to swing. But government's role should be to force publicly traded companies to have transparent books, and the financial industries where anything but transparent in the last few years. A stronger SEC would have helped in that regard.

<comment><USER3> When a company engages in systemic risk, it discounts that risk by the amount of the system the company doesn't occupy (e.g. if Goldman does something that will create a 10% chance of a $100 billion dollar loss, spread evenly across the financial industry as a whole, and if Goldman only makes up 5% of the industry, Goldman will only take into consideration a 10% chance at a $5 billion loss. The other $95 billion isn't their problem and their shareholders could sue members of the board if the board allowed the company to take it into account).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Superbly written, and a sobering read. As a proponent of small government, the ideas themselves are echoes, but I appreciate the wealth of evidence provided.

The big governments of the past sixteen (or, arguably, eighty) years have provided quite a bit of ammunition for political conservatives, and this spiraling crisis to me resembles an endgame for big government. Its bloat and poor decisions will result in bankruptcy and a timely education for those who've forgotten that the US government is inherently inefficient. This inefficiency is by design, for fear of a hulking administration was the primary motive in drafting such a constitution.

Or, this will become a runaway train, and the government will grow like a cancer til its collapse. Let's hope not.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, that's a terrible article, short on facts and long on ideology.

The vast majority of the subprime mortgages doled out were never sold to Fannie or Freddie -- they were bought up eagerly by investment banks who had lax leverage requirements. Many of these mortgages were originated by in-house origination units, so, yep, they knew what they were doing.

Blaming government regulation and lending to low-income borrowers for the financial crisis is like blaming the janitor at JPL for the Challenger exploding.

Talk about clueless...willfully clueless.

</comment><comment><USER6> Could we keep reason.com, mises.org, Krugman, Stiglitz, all titles with Obama, and all that on other sites? Please?

<comment><USER7> NickB's <http://www.newmogul.com> is a better place for this kind of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't see how you can be a libertarian these days while addressing the current financial crisis without presenting some kind of rebuttal to the commonly held view that it was the do nothing (aka libertarian) government that was responsible for prolonging the Great Depression. Also, the lack of regulation coming into the current crisis allowed banks to take on much more risk then they should have. Overall, it is not clear what solution this article is proposing.

<comment><USER6> > what solution this article is proposing.

If it's on reason.com, you don't even have to look at the article. The answer will always be "less government, more free market". They're boringly and religiously predictable, just like some people on the left always call for "the government" to step in and (magically?) fix everything. I think neither one is particularly intellectually stimulating and the ensuing debates have been acted out a million times on the internet.

<comment><USER9> Are they mistaken in this case?

<comment><USER6> Anyone who says they know exactly what went wrong with the current crisis and exactly how it should have been done is full of it, IMO. I think it will be years before all the facts have been digested enough to get a good idea of what really happened.

The best thing I've seen so far is this:

[http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10/my- views-on-the.html)

One inconvenient discussion the article leaves out is anything related to this:

"8. The critical deregulatory mistake was allowing excess leverage. Many deregulations get blamed but in fact contributed little to the problem."

They mention it with fannie and freddy, but don't mention it at all with regards to the big investment banks, which got an ok from the SEC to increase their leverage.

I don't doubt that bad regulations played a role in the problems, but attributing all the problems to the government strikes me as being simplistic, and an argument based more on faith than facts. Which was my original point about reason.com.

<comment><USER9> _Anyone who says they know exactly what went wrong with the current crisis and exactly how it should have been done is full of it, IMO._

This is the kind of rule that works until it doesn't. Seems better just to judge each explanation (of this or anything else for that matter) on its merits. And the place to start is with some specific thing the article says that you believe is false.

<comment><USER6> People are still debating the great depression, for that matter, so my expectations are that any debate here will simply go the way of typical libertarians vs the rest discussions that one finds all over the internet, rather than adding anything particularly new or interesting. There is a lot that we don't know - who knows what sorts of information will come out over the years from people like Paulson, Bernanke, those at the helm at Bear, Lehman, AIG, and so on. We're still in the middle of this and won't see the end of it for a while, so I really don't think we know enough to draw accurate conclusions. The fact that it's even a recession was only officially declared last week.

That said, I think the problem with the article is one of omission: he points out some regulatory issues, but is blind to the fact that the market screwed up in a lot of ways too:

* He barely mentions the ratings agencies, and how badly they got things wrong, the fact that they were being paid by the same people whose risk they had to rate, and some of what has emerged about how they operated.

* He seems to gloss over the fact that securitizing mortgages without a requirement for whoever is selling on the mortgage to keep some 'skin in the game' is a recipe for market failure.

* He only mentions excessive leverage for Fannie and Freddie. Not even discussing that for banks is indicative that he's simply out to push his point, rather than take a broad, ideologically neutral look at what went wrong.

* He talks about temporary easing of capital requirements. Libertarians like to point out that once the government gains some power, it's hard to get it back. I think the reverse is often true as well - 'temporary' measures become permanent due to lobbying and pressure not to let anyone fail. Perhaps it might have helped, though, but how and when to make those measures go away is a complicated subject in its own right.

* In terms of the bailout, it certainly appears that there are lots of dodgy aspects to it, but it's not like you can back up and run these things 10 different ways to see what works best. I think some of his criticism is sound, but perhaps other approaches would have been worse - it's simply impossible to say. Doing nothing (the real "keep the government out of it" plan) wasn't really an option due to the systemic risk.

* I do agree with his hope that we don't overregulate, but don't think we should fight any regulation, just look for sensible things that will 1) continue to allow financial innovation, but 2) patch up some of the problems with this round of things, and attempt to make future bubbles and busts a bit less drastic. They'll happen just the same, but I view people as basically "muddling through" in terms of the economy. It's too big and complex and vulnerable to new ideas and irrational exuberance to either regulate away all problems (at least without killing off a lot of what's good), and at the same time I don't believe in throwing up our hands in the air and saying "oh, the free market will take care of everything" - there are plenty of ways the market can fail, too.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wolfram Alpha - A Force To Be Reckoned With - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2009/07/27/wolfram-alpha-a-force-to-be-reckoned-with/

<comment><USER2> I think the warts in the natural language interface and limitations in data- sets made it difficult to see initially, but I really feel like there is something very exciting about Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram Alpha is doing something that feels almost like thinking. I give it input and it parses it, determines what I want, combines data in a novel way, and feeds me output. When it gets my query right and has data, it feels like I'm seeing a capability that was human-only previously now falling into the realm of AI.

Edit: Also, it is improving. At launch, I couldn't get it to understand 2 slices of bread and 1 slice of cheese (choked on the cheese) and now it does.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a thoughtful alternative take on Wolfram Alpha:

[http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-hubristic-user.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I use Wolfram Alpha for real on an almost daily basis - before I go for a surf, if you can believe that.

I've found that their tide report is far superior to the other offerings that I've found on the web. See here for an example: <http://wolframalpha.com/input/?i=san+diego+tides>

<comment><USER5> I don't get anything for that result. Or "Los Angeles tides" or "Santa Monica tides."

If I just put in "tides", it'll give me a dropdown where I can select a station -- I'm assuming the station that reports tides -- but after clicking a station near me, I still get nothing.

Wolfram and I have never really gotten along well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The only thing I really use Wolfram for is an integral calculator, but what an integral calculator it is!

<comment><USER7> I agree. I've been using it for differential equations- it's easier to jump into than Mathematica (I haven't had time to get into the syntax yet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The integrator is excellent.</comment>


Batch up frequent emails into paced summaries - <AUTHOR> https://www.paced.email/ <comment><USER2> Great idea, I've signed up already.

I have a pretty obvious feature request: I'd like to be able to pace weekly mails to a specific day of the week. I receive a couple of interesting newsletters, but they tend to arrive distributed all over the week and I'd prefer to receive them all for the weekend, i.e. Friday night.

So extending your original idea one could add more specific terms in your subdomain hierarchy. I.e. 19.friday.weekly.paced.email or 7pm.friday.weekly.paced.email.

I assume you should record the user's timezone on sign-up maybe? Or encode it too in a subdomain. I'm not sure which would be more consistent/simple idea...

I've you'd like to implement full cron schedules I'd assume you'd have to replace the wildcard * symbol somehow, but that seems more like an advanced/geek future and would have less appeal for mainstream users.

<comment><USER3> Hey kossmoboleat, thanks for signing up. I just found your reply. Not sure if you'll see this, but I do have some features on the horizon to accomplish this.

As you suggested, I will be allowing users to add their time zone and then a bit of UI for you to select day/hour for each of the periods supported. This is going to be pretty much next on the roadmap.

Rikki

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for posting! I'm the creator of Paced Email. I wasn't expecting it to be shared so quickly to Hacker News. A prominent dev Tweeted about it today and the site had a healthy footfall. Paced Email is definitely an MVP, but it's a solid one. I have many more features to add and would love to hear your feedback on it as it stands.

 _What it does:_

Paced Email aims to help reduce distraction in your inbox. By batching up frequent emails into paced summaries, you're able to concentrate more effectively.

 _How it works:_

      - Grab your username
      - Create programmable email aliases on the fly
      - Use your aliases on sites that send you emails too frequently
      - Get a single email containing all the emails received

_Examples:_

      email@example.com
      firstname.lastname@example.com
      email@example.com</comment>


Android and iOS Review Notifications in Slack - <AUTHOR> https://reviewbot.io <comment><AUTHOR> Initially built this service because there was no easy way to get Android app review updates in Slack. It's been expanded to included iOS App store reviews and email notifications are coming soon.

I'd appreciate any constructive feedback.

<comment><USER2> Just tried it. Works really well. Got everything hooked up in under a minute.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, glad to hear that.</comment></comment></comment>


Paypal launches Micro-Payments for online content - <AUTHOR> https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2011/02/paypal-the-best-way-to-buy-and-sell-digital-goods/

<comment><USER2> I left a critical comment, but I don't know if it will be approved or not, so I'll repost it here as well.

This is nice, Carey. Your main problem however was not your cut on small purchases. You real problem is that most tech savvy users don't trust you. PayPal has arbitrarily frozen accounts countless times, so much so that some people immediately withdraw funds as soon as they reach their PayPal accounts.

Yes, PayPal is not a bank, but it fundamentally acts as one, and my real bank would never freeze an account withholding my funds because I suddenly deposit more frequently than in the past.

Unfreezing an account is very complicated and often a lost cause. Dealing with your customer care department is a reminder that the Turing Test should probably be used for hiring purposes as well.

That's a big PR problem you have when you are claiming to be "The Best Way to Buy and Sell Digital Goods".

I appreciate your new features, and the fact that you are trying to enable not-quite-micro payments online.

I would suggest however a change to your policies when it comes to freezing and unfreezing accounts. Aim for transparency and clear rules, and make an announcement about these new customer friendly policies. Include a heartfelt apology to the community for the past "miscommunication". Have your customer care team actually pay attention to what the customer is saying, rather than just copying and pasting boilerplate answers that don't fit the customer's scenario.

Until you do those things, PayPal will just be a necessary evil for those doing business online.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think these are actually pretty good fees. This makes it actually possible to sell something for 25 cents and make money. Yes, a good portion will be used in fees -- you will be giving up 6.25 cents of your 25 cents. But that's significantly better than traditional credit card pricing, and you still keep enough of the 25 cents that it shouldn't be the make or break factor (the volume will be).

It's still not practical for true micropayments, such as charging a penny or two, but this does make some business models and products possible.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think their pricing is too high. 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12. An item priced 50ct (used as example in their screenshot), that'd be 15%. Quite a lot.

<comment><USER4> When I first started in ecommerce, it took us a year to get anyone to allow us to take credit cards, the rate was 28% when it was all said and done, and minimum transaction fees just clobbered us on any purchase less than $10 or so.

15% is fan-frikkin-tastic if its really as easy as they are making it out to be. Then again, it is paypal, so once I've collected about $1000 or so, I'd expect it to be frozen for no good reason until 2014...

<comment><AUTHOR> I do some e-commerce (secondary to our core business) and the fee usually works out at about 5%...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The term "micropayments" is misleading when the article's canonical examples are $12 and $19.99.

My idea of a micropayment is about $0.25, so a minimum $0.05 fee is way too steep.

<comment><USER6> I dunno, anything over 18c gives you more of the sale than Apple would take with it's 30% cut through ITMS, and lots of people seem perfectly happy with that arrangement...

I agree that a useable way of saying something like "give me half a penny to read the rest of this article" would be nice though..

<comment><USER5> Completely fair point with respect to the Apple comparison.

In the long run, I envision an enormous amount of economic activity flowing through micropayments, where everyone is giving/receiving payments based on their production/consumption patterns. In that world, their rates are too high. But for the world as it currently stands, it may be ok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The 5% + $.05 pricing isn't actually new on PayPal. The program has existed for years, it's just been very well-hidden.

I remember it took us hours and many phone calls with different people there to get it set up for us. Glad to see it got bumped to more visibility.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been using the micropayment account for almost two years - not sure why this is news except maybe they're now not hiding it? My minimum sale is about $4, and the micropayment works out better for most sales up to around $12, at which point I use a different processor. Using the micropayments approach has saved me a decent amount over the last couple years. Good to see them promoting it more heavily. What I'd wish is that they would allow you to use micropayment pricing and traditional pricing on the same account, and simply give you the micropayment pricing on payments under $12. Not sure why they can't/won't do that.

</comment><comment><USER9> I went digging to find out the real details[1].

I really like this: > For each transaction we'll charge you either standard pricing, or micropayments pricing – whichever is the lower rate.

It takes away the headache of choosing between the two systems while starting up.

However $12, is the lowest price point you'd want to use the micropayment model with. And as your volume increases, the 'low price point' drops to $8 with $100,000+ in monthly volume.

Just food for thought.

[1] [https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi- bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render...](https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi- bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/digital_goods)

</comment><comment><USER10> I said I'd update HN on my PayPal experience so here it is.

I've been using this feature (embedded payments) with the microtransaction fee schedule since last Friday, and have collected around £1,500 with no problems or account limitations.

I was expecting some limit on my new account, but as I supplied all the information required (passport, bank statements, the works), everything went very smoothly and I have to say that the embedded payments system is quite slick and converts well.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I may ask, what's your business? 1500 pounds is quite a lot in such a short time, for a new service.

<comment><USER10> No problem! The business is still in relative stealth right now, but it's basically a way of raising money for charity events, so the high revenue figure belies the fact that I'll be passing on a majority of the cash to charity.

We're still in private beta, but we'll publicly announce the service in a month or two.

On the whole it was a great launch and I'm pleased with how things are going right now - let's hope it lasts :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How much money does Paypal funnel through Ireland and yet again this offering is not available here. Neither is the Website Payments Pro solution ;-(

</comment><comment><USER12> Processing your micropayments: 5 percent plus 5 cents

Getting your account frozen and your business destroyed over night: Priceless

</comment><comment><USER13> This is really a good news buddy though doesn't seem practical such as charging in cents :)

Javin [url="[http://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2011/01/difference- between...](http://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2011/01/difference-between- fix-42-vs-fix-44-in.html) title="Difference between FIX4.2 vs FIX4.4"]Difference between FIX4.2 vs FIX4.4[/url]</comment>


DIY: Small $200 linux box  - <AUTHOR> http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/01/25/diy-200-dollar-pc

<comment><USER2> DIY super gamer pc $550:

intel p35 mobo $80

e2160 overclocked to 2.7GHz easy on air $80

2GB ddr2 800MHz memory $40

8800GT 512MB video card $220 [[http://www.ncixus.com/products/27328/88YFF6HUFEXX/Galaxy%20T...](http://www.ncixus.com/products/27328/88YFF6HUFEXX/Galaxy%20Technology/)]

250GB hard drive $60

dvdrw $20

case + ps $50 [<http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=204947963>]

will run cod4 at 1920x1200 max graphics

<comment><USER3> >e2160 overclocked to 2.7GHz easy on air $80

Wow... that's better than the holy grail of overclocking I remember, a Celeron 300A to 450. I wonder how high they go if you watercool them.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> downvote me for submitting my own stuff, but I figured you guys might like building a small and cheap linux box. i might even make one just to run apache-top for my server all day and see live hits come in.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice, that's pretty cool.

Along with the M2-ATX power supply I think I may have just found the brains to power my robot project (which currently uses the guts of a laptop which seems to be dying)

</comment><comment><USER5> Heh, I saw "DIY: Small $200 lunch box" and I was a bit surprised.</comment>


Show HN: my weekend project, understanding the Silk Road anonymous marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://burntbrunch.github.com/Silk-Rabbit-Hole/html/ This was more of a sandbox to play with Raphael and Flot than anything else but I think there are some interesting statistics in there. It'd be awesome to do this over time but I really don't have the spare time required. <comment><USER2> Note that the data is heavily skewed -- 77% of all SR listings apparently are for one UK seller, who probably just had the misfortune to pick that day to flog his wares. You'd need to automate data retrieval and average it over a few months to get a better picture.

(edit: listings, not transactions; thanks archivator for the correction)

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean the listings are heavily skewed - this is not about transactions but listed items on the marketplace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting data to scrape would be the reviews. Since the reviews are tied to the actual sales, it could give some kind of estimate what kind of sales volume we are talking about.

</comment><comment><USER4> How is payment received and goods delivered? Since you can't ship goods and take delivery via Tor it seems absurd to use strong encryption for communication when you're so vulnerable taking delivery. I haven't used silk road so I might be missing something, but I'd love to learn how they get around that.

<comment><USER5> Payment is done with bitcoin. For the delivery, I think the idea is that even if the package is intercepted and your address is on it, it cannot be proven that you actually ordered it.

I don't know if such a defense would hold up. It might depend on local laws. But it does make sense because otherwise you could get your enemies into trouble just by sending them unwanted illegal goods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So there is a total of just about ~50-80 sellers? I guess most bigger cities have far more drug sellers than Silk Road. But I would love to see more timeline based developments, i.e. if the market is shrinking or expanding etc. Otherwise great weekend project!

<comment><USER7> Bigger cities? Hell, there were more than 50 dealers at my college alone. It had 4,000 students and was several hours from any metropolitan area to speak of.

Then again, the selection probably doesn't compare to the Silk Road or other services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. I didn't know India was well represented there...

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice bar charts. How were they made?

<comment><USER10> Looks like jquery.flot was used from glancing at the source <http://code.google.com/p/flot/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> it's a total shame people have to resort to markets like this -- let's have a bar chart comparing the number of murders in a war sponsored by the US to the number of overdoses from drugs

<comment><USER7> Are you serious? Extremely few people "resort to this." The Silk Road is absolutely miniscule compared to the overall drug market.

I'm willing to bet that if I asked every person in my 5-floor walkup, I'd come out with a list of dealers comparable in size to the silk road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, this is pretty interesting. Perhaps you should approach Interpol and see if they would be interested in funding further development? <http://www.interpol.int/en>

<comment><USER12> To the down-voters. I had not considered that my suggestion could negatively impact your drug sales. My sincerest sarcastic apologies

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason you're getting downvoted may be related to the fact that this is not data Interpol would be in the least interested in. What they need are actual transactions/shipments/links to people, not some rather shallow stats extracted from a month-old copy of listings.

I'd be really impressed if someone actually runs a Bitcoin client that correlates transactions with prices from SR. Since most sellers select prices in USD, the values in BC are usually not nice and round. Then, you could start creating a profile of Bitcoin users and link them with given certainty to SR accounts. Now, _that_ might be of interest to Interpol/local agencies.

<comment><USER13> That's a stupid idea; helping law enforcement do their jobs. THey have large budgets, they can figure this shit out on their own and there's no need to help them oppress your fellow human. Drug laws in most countries are insanely stupid where non-violent drug offenders are locked up for a long time with violent offenders.

<comment><USER14> You should consider that not everyone agrees with your opinion. That doesn't make them stupid.

<comment><USER12> They do not always have large budgets. But for those agencies that do, why can't they invest in projects such as this?

I'm still trying to figure out why people are against practical applications of this project. It's datamining illegal online activities. Isn't law enforcement a no brainer here?

Please let me know what I'm missing.

<comment><USER13> I apologize if I seem harsh in my comments regarding this subject.

The practical applications will be abused. There are already projects by the CIA and NSA to massively monitor various communications platforms. The datamining isn't of only illegal activities, it's datamining of _everything_.

It's just not as simple as "datamine illegal online activities". You're basically going to have to monitor everyone using bitcoin, and then monitor all of silkroad, but once the users catch wind of surveillance they'll abandon it and move elsewhere and now you might as well monitor freaking everything to catch them.

You should check out the idea of a panopticon and Michael Foucalt's writing on it. Helping to create this project furthers the idea of a panopticon and that's a scary thing. The panopticon is a building that forces people in it to behave by having complete transparency. If you're watched all the time, you're less likely to do something illegal or morally wrong. Maybe that's a bit too philosophical for this discussion... <http://cartome.org/foucault.htm></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twisted and Python 3 - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/689068/ <comment><USER2> For myself this is the money quote of that worthy posting:

"There are effectively three string types in the Python [3] world: bytes, Unicode strings, and strings. And there are inconsistencies among them. For example, sys.path() returns bytes on Unix, but strings on other operating systems. In addition, cgi.parse_multipart() returns strings on Python 3, which is just wrong."

It'd be edifying to read about how this is a better situation (in python 3 versus 2) and/or how it might be ameliorated.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Python 3 lacks explicit Unicode strings using the u '' notation_

This at least is factually wrong; Python 3.3 made the 'u' prefix legal syntax again. On Python 3 it's effectively a no-op, since an un-prefixed string literal would be a Unicode string anyway on Python 3.</comment>


Windows 10 November Update Reset My Defaults - <AUTHOR> So I decided to do the November Update. It's big so it took a long time. Well afterwords it restarts the computer and I get a screen similar to the first install screen where it greets you.
Well, I decide to go about my business, and what's this, Edge is now my default browser. Oh and notepad is now my default text editor. This made me worry so I decided to check the privacy settings. All were now enabled. I haven't updated my other computers in the house yet, but this startled me quite a bit.
I thought I would post this here just in case this happens to anyone else and so others check just to make sure they don't suddenly start sending data they do not want to.
[1]: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/11/12/first-major-update-for-windows-10-available-today/ <comment><USER2> I definitely had Windows Defender enable itself (and delete some files I wanted to keep). It was pretty frustrating. I disabled it in group policy which should [i hope?] keep it off.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suggest you drop Windows. Or keep a hard drive with it installed to do Windows development, but switch to another OS as your primary.</comment>


At 652 seats, Transaero's A380s could top all others - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/todayinthesky/2013/10/18/at-652-seats-transaeros-a380s-could-top-all-others/3007917/#! <comment><USER2> You saw the same thing when 747's came out, lounges, bars, common areas, lots of seat pitch. All of these were eclipsed by high density seating over time. Eventually all the A380's will move to high density seating as well.</comment>