Lyft donates $1M to the ACLU, condemns Trump's immigration actions - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/29/lyft-donates-1m-to-the-aclu-condemns-trumps-immigration-actions/ <comment><USER2> Uber undermining the taxi strike [1] yesterday was pretty visible -- at least in my social circle here in Seattle -- and when Lyft made this announcement we all deleted our Uber accounts.

Will that have a material impact on anyone's bottom line? Who knows, but I'd love to see the graphs for new account signups/account deletions.

[1] Taxis were not servicing JFK in support of those who were being detained there.

<comment><USER3> I don't get it. How about other people that were not part of the protest and were trying to get home/get to the airport? How about the Uber drivers trying to make a living? Just because they were not part of your protest you'll give them hate?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it undermines the strike. Strikes are supposed to disrupt.

<comment><USER5> Strikes are intended to disrupt. They are not entitled to disrupt. There is a huge difference.

<comment><USER6> In most professions, there's a feeling of unity. Taxi companies and drivers will either stand with striking drivers, or be respectful enough to not disrupt their action.

Then comes Uber, the vulture that swoops in all in the name of disrupting the market. They're allowed to do it, sure. Whether it's morally right is another thing.

<comment><USER5> It is definitely morally right. Calling Uber a vulture ignores the reality that the world doesn't stop just because some protesters are unhappy.

<comment><USER7> "Some protestors are unhappy" is a really interesting way of phrasing "the federal government is embarking on a concerted attack on 1.7% of the population for reasons at best murky."

Be better, please.

<comment><USER5> Come on. Trump is doing lots of bad things, but if he weren't people would still be striking. The largest protest in American history happened before he even took office. Let's not pretend that people's emotions are less of a driving factor than the facts. Get over yourself.

<comment><USER8> Or maybe you should "get over yourself". If you care so much for the facts perhaps you should make sure to get them right. I suppose you're referring to the Women's March, which took place the day after Trump assumed office.

And it's remarkable if your claim is that without Trump's Muslim Ban there would still be protests at JFK this weekend. Are you really arguing that?

<comment><USER5> It is interesting that you say that, because I read about that protest in the Friday paper (from the 20th). The paper of course became available many hours before Trump was sworn in. Stop pretending that it was a reaction to anything he did in office.

I don't know exactly how different protests would have played out if Trump took different actions in office, but it is overwhelmingly obvious that the protests are the result of emotion, not facts.

Also, you seem to be confused about the phrase "get over yourself" means. It targets self importance such as "be better please", it makes no sense whatsoever as a response to my comment.

<comment><USER8> That's a skillful evasion of facts you just executed, going from your previous claim that the protest occurred before the inauguration to just that it was planned before then. Well played.

Your dubious claim about the motivations of large groups of individuals is not at all "overwhelmingly obvious."

Get over yourself.

<comment><USER5> Is it an evasion of facts to focus on facts that are relevant? If a protest was planned before Trump took office, that logically excludes actions taken by Trump as motivation for the protest. That is "overwhelmingly obvious" to anyone who isn't confused by the concept of causality.

<comment><USER8> I don't think anyone claimed that the Women's March wasn't planned before January 20th, that would be absurd. However it was still clearly a reaction to Trump's words and actions, and that doesn't require him being a sitting president first.

But it's worth noting the difference between that protest and the one at JFK, which I think it's pretty clear was a direct reaction to a specific policy created by President Trump. Using the Women's March as some sort of catch-all "haters gonna hate" dismissal of the valid concerns that many Americans have about the sitting president's actions is, to put it simply, a remarkable argument.

<comment><USER5> I never used the women's march as a "hater's gonna hate" dismissal. I never even dismissed the concerns of protesters. My point was that protests are based on emotion. I only felt that need to make that point because eropple took some weird offense to me saying that the cause of protests was people being unhappy. It is fine with me if you want to defend him, but don't pretend that context doesn't exist.

<comment><USER7> I took offense to your cavalier dismissal of _some real shit_ as "being unhappy". You trivialized it, and you knew what you were doing, and it was lousy behavior. And you shouldn't do that and you should be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think instead of commending Lyft for what could be seen as marketing (they also did not stand in solidarity with the JFK strike, we should be discussing ways that ride-sharing technology can be used to support unionized drivers. I admittedly don't know much about the details, but apps like Curb [http://gocurb.com/](http://gocurb.com/) at least claim to be working with licensed cabbies. I'd love more information on alternatives to the big ride- sharing apps that are more overtly focused on workers rights, instead of calling a fleet of contractors "disruptive."

</comment><comment><USER10> Lyft operates in Malaysia, where Israelis are banned from entering unless they get a letter of approval from the Ministry of Home Affairs, which is nearly impossible for the average Israeli. I'm curious if Lyft has any qualms about operating in Malaysia? I understand their disgust with Trump's action but I do hope they're consistent with their views.

<comment><USER11> To clarify, lyft does not operate outside of the states. They partner with Grab and DiDi.

For lyft to stay consistent with their views, they'd have to cease partnership with Grab. With the claimed $1MM donation they paint a positive picture for us(fellow HN users reactions show they are more likely to use lyft, lyft will thus earn off us), but it would simply be loss of potential revenue in the case of Malaysia.

<comment><USER12> Try placing your lyft pin in Kuala Lumpur airport.

<comment><USER11> That is the result of their partnership[0]. IMO, partnering with already established services is much safer than what Uber did.

[0][http://take.lyft.com/global/](http://take.lyft.com/global/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is a company that is losing money and having what's left of their lunch taken by a gorilla of a competitor (Uber) throwing away $1M like this? If I were an investor in Lyft I'd sue them.

<comment><USER14> $1M just got them the best PR campaign they could have hoped for.

<comment><USER15> By pissing off half the country?

<comment><USER16> Keep in mind that the American election system is such that only 20% of Americans (or 30% of eligible voters) voted for Trump in order to get him into office. So it really does not follow that a move against Trump would anger half the country. Trump famously lost the popular vote as well, and he has one of the lowest approval ratings on entering office of any President in modern history.

Finally, who's more likely to use Lyft? Trump's support base is shockingly hard to truly pin down, but certainly a lot of his base resides in rural areas, not cities -- areas where Lyft (and Uber) may not even operate or, if they do, the volume of rides is far, far lower. My impression, in fact, is that there's almost an inverse correlation between number of heavy Uber/Lyft users and Trump support in the area -- it'd be interesting to see someone actually try to verify/debunk that impression with real data.

<comment><USER17> Using your math/logic, what percentage of Americans voted for Obama?

<comment><USER18> Per [http://bipartisanpolicy.org/library/2012-voter- turnout/](http://bipartisanpolicy.org/library/2012-voter-turnout/) in 2008 there voted 62.3% of eligible voters in total; Obama won with 52.92% of this ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Barack_Ob...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Barack_Obama)), that makes 32.96% of all eligible voters.

In 2012, turnout was 57.5%, of which Obama won 51.06%. That makes 29.36% of all eligible voters.

The problem is that it's really, really hard to get numbers on the question "how many people did not register themselves for voting rights, even if they could legally have done so?".

<comment><USER19> You can usually get stats on turnout as both % of registered voters and % of voting age population. Neither of those is exactly % of legally-eligible population, but together they bracket it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone have a reliable source that Lyft was still operating at JFK during the protest? I can't honestly figure out if they were or not.

No horse in this race, just seen it reported both ways, trying to figure it out.

</comment><comment><USER21> I really really like Lyft. It seems Trevis is kind of a scumbag, kind of like Trump in a way who wants to win at any cost and has little sympathy for people in his way.

Hearing employees at Uber crying, drivers getting scammed into leases, terrible customer support. I'm glad I didn't accept the offer.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm surprised everyone is jumping on Lyft even though Thiel is a major investor in Lyft and a huge supporter of Trump.

I think it'd make most sense to avoid both services if you are concerned about the recent immigration ban.

<comment><USER23> Lots of boycotts are of the moment - like if I applied my politics and boycotted equivocally I couldn't buy gasoline or pay my utilities or work for my employer. When one breaks out (esp in a competitive market), it's easy to decide to join in (with fervor). It's always been that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Donald Trump is being powered by conspiracy theorist Steve Bannon, the "Breitbart News" head and board member of Cambridge Analytica, an analytics firm that used psychological profiling to cynically exploit the American electorate. Despite his inexperience and stated desire to "blow things up", he was appointed to an influential national security position, over the Joint Chiefs of Staff [1]. This is an existential threat to the American public and to the world.

1: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-38787241](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38787241)

2: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cambridge-a...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cambridge- analytica-steve-bannon-robert-rebekah-mercer-donald-trump-conflicts-of- interest-white-a7435536.html)

3: [http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data- cruncher...](http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-crunchers- who-say-they-helped-donald-trump-to-win/)

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

<comment><USER25> Please don't use the phrase "conspiracy theorist" as a term of disparagement or to indicate a particular bias. There are many that investigate conspiracies who have the opposite views of Bannon and are very skeptical and scientific.

You are giving a tool to the unscrupulous to bury conversations by labeling their opponents "conspiracy theorists."

Would you say Edward Snowden is in the same bucket at Bannon?

<comment><USER26> What phrase would be more effective in describing Bannon?

<comment><USER27> neo-nazi Leninist

The former term is how his detractors, including me, would describe him. The latter is a term he famously used for himself.

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve- banno...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump- s-top-guy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html)

<comment><USER28> That's not what Leninism means tho (it's not "smash the state" as Bannon says, it's about having a vanguard party and control of political power by the working class).

<comment><USER27> I completely understand that. But it's a term he used for himself, and I think it's funny to semi-accurately (not in terms of actual definition but in terms of someone's self-description) label a member of a Republican administration as a Leninist.

Though Bannon may be more accurate than he realizes about being a "Leninist" since he wants his faction to be the vanguard party with power derived from the white working class and voters who identify with such.

<comment><USER17> I think Bannon is an asshole and I wish he didn't have such a close position to the President. The only saving grace is that Trump is so arrogant, I don't think he will follow anything Bannon says that he already doesn't believe.

But since when is he a neo-nazi? Breitbart.com is about as pro-Israel as you can get, and Breitbart himself was a Jew. Trump's daughter Ivanka is also a Jew, as is her husband, who is now another special advisor.

<comment><USER27> There's evidence Bannon has been the chief author behind some of the recent executive orders. Especially the immigration order. Trump is arrogant but he's very easily influenced. And I'm not convinced he even understands what he is signing.

His antisemitism has been well documented. How he gets along with Kushner and Ivanka, I have no idea. I suspect they don't get along at all. There will plenty of books on Trump's Team of Rivals, though probably much less glowing than for Lincoln's similar team.

One reference for Bannon's antisemitism: [http://www.timesofisrael.com/stephen-bannon-5-things-jews- ne...](http://www.timesofisrael.com/stephen-bannon-5-things-jews-need-to- know/)

Speaking of which: I also wouldn't be surprised if Bannon is behind Trump's recent Holocaust statement in which Jews aren't mentioned at all.

<comment><USER17> Evidence? Trump pledged all of those since the beginning, before Bannon was involved in his campaign. "Easily influenced?" You're making shit up now. I've never seen anyone so ridiculous stubborn in such a position of power. Any evidence he's "easily influenced" besides your opinions? He hasn't even given up his Twitter account for God's sake and he doesn't listen to any of his advisors to shut up, except for the day before the election.

> How he gets along with Kushner and Ivanka, I have no idea.

The obvious answer is that he's not anti-Semitic.

You can try to make up stuff, or pull one off references from divorce proceedings, but he was head of a strongly Pro-Israel website, created by a Jew. If he's anti-Semitic, he's a failure. He's working for a president that obviously supports and loves Jews, since his daughter converted to Judaism without any issue from him, and his Jewish son-in-law is his top adviser.

If you think he's some Othellian figure that can endure working for so many Jews and espousing Jewish values, all for the chance to whisper one-or-two white nationalist policies into Trumps brain, you're absolutely crazy. Okkam's razor, dude. The simplest answer is that you're wrong and he's not anti- semitic.

<comment><USER27> The ADL disagrees with you regarding Bannon.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of- faith/wp/2016/11...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of- faith/wp/2016/11/15/anti-defamation-league-decries-stephen-bannon-while-other- jewish-groups-stay-silent/?utm_term=.83f5323cd31f)

As for who wrote the executive orders:

" Inside the West Wing, it is almost impossible for some aides to know what is in the executive orders, staffers say. They have been written by Stephen Miller, Trump's senior White House adviser for policy, and Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, according to people familiar with the matter. Ideas for some of the Trump executive orders came from transition officials and so- called "landing teams," " \--[http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trumps- flashy-executiv...](http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trumps-flashy- executive-actions-could-run-aground-234200)

How can someone be pro-Israel and antisemitic?

[https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/steve-bannon-made- breitb...](https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/steve-bannon-made-breitbart- space-pro-israel-writers-anti-semitic-readers/)

[http://forward.com/news/israel/354402/how-steve-bannon- and-b...](http://forward.com/news/israel/354402/how-steve-bannon-and- breitbart-news-can-be-pro-israel-and-anti-semitic-at-t/)

And of course he would put up working with Jews if it meant he had a seat at the table and a chance to enact his wildest dreams. In a choice between power and principles, most people chose power. Your proposed Occam's Razor doesn't work because you're ignoring the most obvious thing: the desire of people for power. If being Trump's right hand man means putting up with Kushner, then so be it. I'm sure Kushner, as the other key figure standing beside the throne, feels the same way. He can put up with an antisemite in order to be in the White House.

Think about it. Occam's Razor is for the simplest choice. Assuming Bannon's racism, Bannon's choice here is: work with Jews and have a lot of power, or avoid Jews and go back to the mundane life as a publisher with no seat at the table. There's really no question of what he would choose.

<comment><USER17> Think about it for even a second. Your story makes no sense. Is he an anti- semite or is he not? If he is, then why would Ivanka and Jared Kushner, both devout Jews, allow Bannon to join the campaign? They are Jews, how could they tolerate having him next to them?

Nothing you suggest makes sense. The only answer that makes logical sense is that he's not an anti-semite. None of your conspiracist theories make any sense.

But then again, if you think Bush was behind the 9-11 bombings, then there's nothing really to discuss either.

<comment><USER28> This is an interesting mental model about how people work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I agree that Uber should have participated in the strike. You said "welcome to post-truth politics" and "clearly and unambiguously untrue." Please demonstrate that I am a liar.

<comment><USER30> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13515263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13515263) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why will Uber not pull their heads out of their ass and have any moral-basis for operation? It's not like they don't hire a _ton_ of Green Card holders...</comment>


The Real Story Behind Bob Parson's Elephant-Killing "Safari" - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/04/01/bob-parsons-elephant-story/ <comment><USER2> To write any story about the poverty of Zimbabwe without making reference to the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe is almost criminal. Zimbabwe use to be the bread basket of the region and that didn't come to an end because of the elephants: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwe>

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh. This is a "real story" apparently based solely on a conversation with the guy who shot the elephant, who is now furiously doing damage control as best he can.

This must be a new definition of "real story" I'm unfamiliar with.</comment>


Another Person Who Didn't Pay His Web Guy? - <AUTHOR> http://easyautoinsurancequote.com

<comment><USER2> This is a universally bad idea to do, while I sympathize with being screwed by less than savory business people, this kind of action will most likely not result in getting the money owed and can only serve to cause you more problems.

Potential clients are going to be leery of dealing with you if they ever get wind of such a stunt and any legal standing that you had just went out the window.

If this was a final act to try to extract payment, you should know, they are not going to pay. For whatever reason, whether it be that they where unhappy with the results or they where just trying to scam you, they are not going to pay.

They will find another sucker to build it and not pay them as well. Eventually they will get someone who they either like or who they can play hardball with to get the work at a fraction of the price after the fact.

9 times out of 10 these situations result from a newer developer and a client that feels they did not get what they want. If that is the case with your situation, I would use the situation as a learning experience and next time document everything and get client sign-off further demand 50% up front, if they are not willing to meet you half way walk. Many times new freelancer will be afraid to ask for 50% up front for fear of loosing the gig, but working a gig for free is worse than not getting the gig at all.

Finally, while one a moral level I totally agree with your actions, you broke the law and you have ceeded a huge upper-hand to your ex-client. If they so chose to do, they could via the courts force you to hand over the source code and be awarded damages that far exceed the compensation that you would have received. You could end up owing them money if they force the issue and that is just the civil dispute you have also violated some criminal charges that they could pursue if they chose to be dicks about the whole thing. The have a totally separate case for slander as well.

If you want to disabling non-paying customers in the future, you need to specifically set up the contract as a license in which you own the source code and license it to them. Further you cannot access their machines and disable the code, it must call out to a licensing server that you own and operate. You can make ownership of the code transferable upon final payment of the contract but this is the only way to get around civil and criminal charges for disabling a clients software and the disabling has to be performed on a system that you own and operate.

</comment><comment><USER3> If this is not a scam, well done for him.</comment>


The X-FILES: avoiding concurrency boilerplate with golang.org/x/sync - <AUTHOR> https://rodaine.com/2018/08/x-files-sync-golang/ <comment><USER2> I never knew there exists other patterns for concurrency in 'x' repositories, thanks a lot.

</comment><comment><USER3> please no allcaps titles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, done.</comment></comment>


Android 2.3 Platform - <AUTHOR> http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.3.html <comment> brown9-2 Description of a new developer feature named Strict Mode from Brad Fitzpatrick (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Fitzpatrick>): [http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/eh2jf/gingerbread_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/eh2jf/gingerbread_aka_android_23_is_out/c181i0o)

Really neat how they are dogfooding and collecting metrics on performance from all the employees walking around with dev builds.

</comment><comment><USER2> The integrated SIP stack look excellent, but from <http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.3-highlights.html>:

"Support for the platform's SIP and internet calling features on specific devices is determined by their manufacturers and associated carriers."

This is disappointing, but not unexpected.

<comment><USER3> Well - Google have to be friendly with the networks. It's in their interest.

A phone OS which allows the networks to be totally supplanted wouldn't be marketed positively (by the networks).

<comment><USER4> > A phone OS which allows the networks to be totally supplanted wouldn't be > marketed positively (by the networks).

This is so backwards that it hurts. A Network which _wont_ support the latest and greatest phones with the most awesome features will lose out customers.

Around here where I live (Europe) you chose the phone you want and you chose the plan which fits your needs. Two entirely different and disconnected things.

I can't believe you Americans let the telcos boss you around like that. Didn't you believe in freedom of choice, and all that? Why do you put up with this? Vote with your wallets. Pay whoever gives you choice. Don't let Apple's (or Google's) latest shiny toy fool you into choosing serfdom, just because it's (currently) only available on a few (or one) carrier.

Where I live, the iPhone was launched (US-style) exclusive to one operator. This is totally Alien here, with a capitol-A. People had to go to a lower- quality network operator to get the first iPhone 3G. The market didn't like this, data heavy users didn't like going to a network with a reputation for being sucky on data. They waited it out.

Voila. More operators got it, because Apple figured they could sell more by not being exclusive. It's not that hard.

<comment><USER5> Americans allow this because in general it's much cheaper to buy a phone subsidized over contract. Only one carrier here (T-Mobile) provides a monthly discount for unsubsidized phones. Most people don't just have $500+ to drop when they want or need a new phone, so it's much easier for people to go on contract and spread out that cost, even if it costs more in the long run (which it usually doesn't since most networks don't make any distinction in monthly cost).

The carrier exclusivity, restrictions, and crapware are annoying, but in most cases it's not irritating enough to convince someone to pay $300 more for the same thing.

<comment><USER6> > _Americans allow this because in general it's much cheaper to buy a phone > subsidized over contract_

Subsidized phones are very popular in Europe, but the phone doesn't really enter the equation when choosing a network.

I actually think Europeans are cheaper than Americans ... over here people choose networks based on reliability and monthly bill, which is influenced by included minutes or bandwidth / area or demographic popularity (since voice minutes in the same network are cheaper).

I also have an iPhone, and in my country iPhones are still exclusive to a single carrier. But I did what every one of my acquaintances did ... bought one with a cheap monthly contract for 199 EUR; then unlocked it. And I didn't even pay my last 2 monthly bill (haven't used it, so I felt like it was unneeded); so they can sue me, but I don't really care because lock-in is not seen favorably in Europe and they've got customers with actual debts to worry about.

Of course, I wouldn't give this advice to other people ... just saying that the phone doesn't enter the equation; and the marketing campaigns are reflecting that.

<comment><USER7> My brother skipped paying a tiny amount like that - he received a letter from a debt collection agency demanding payment of the £20 bill, plus £100 payment for the cost of hiring a debt collection agency. He then payed immediately before it got any worse but his credit rating is still poor many years on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The new audio support is the most exciting thing to me here. Multitouch interfaces have such enormous potential for musical applications that have not even begun to be explored.

iPhones and such have long had the ability to drive PC-based instruments by sending MIDI or OSC signals through bluetooth or wifi, I have been to many gigs in the last year and seen people using iPads running touchOSC in their performance setups; however the high specs seen in current devices are easily enough to run fullblown synths, samplers etc on their own. This will open up the burgeoning art of musicians creating their own instruments to a much wider audience.

We're going to be hearing some pretty fun noises over the next year :)

</comment><comment><USER9> The new NDK lets you write an application entirely in C, no need to get your hands dirty with Java at all. Of course this only works with android-9 (2.3), so if you want to write a game that people can actually play you'll still need a Java wrapper, but going forward you can bet that a lot more game ports will be Gingerbread-only.

</comment><comment><USER10> This page discusses the highlights over 2.2:

<http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.3-highlights.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's a quick summary from the SDK release notes:

* Alarm clock APIs

* ability to detect first install time and last update time of an app

* Download manager API

* Mixable audio effects API

* A lot more locales (including indic language support)

* SIP VOIP support

* Front camera support

* 5-point multi-touch API

* Barometer

* Gyroscope

* NFC support (near field comminucation) - can interact using high frequency wireless communication with other stuff with NFC chips. Wikipedia has a pic of a phone interacting with a smart poster.

Can anyone throw some more light on NFC stuff and also why does a phone need a barometer?

<comment><USER12> Barometer = Altitude.

<comment><USER13> Or it just senses when it's going to rain.

<comment><USER14> Indeed. The reason that pressure altimeters work on airplanes is because your starting altitude is known and you calibrate the barometer at that point. As the flight progresses, you keep it updated depending on weather readings on the ground.

But I guess the phone can just get this information from the Internet. (Or it can just set itself to 29.92 if the GPS says you're above 18,000 feet!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's a great reddit post from the author of StrictMode: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/eh2jf/gingerbread_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/eh2jf/gingerbread_aka_android_23_is_out/c181i0o)

</comment><comment><USER16> FUCKING FINALLY, Audio access from native code. This is going to be awesome.

<comment><USER17> In general it looks like they are moving closer to pure-native app support -- native life cycle and more access to Surfaces as well. This is interesting as even quite recently the official position was apps would be written in Java with JNI portions to accelerate the slow parts. It's a good shift imo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sensor API now supports a barometer? Are they paying their dues to Gene Roddenberry descendent's yet?

</comment><comment><USER19>
        SIP-based VOIP

Good. Let's get some competition to the adware SIP apps that are out now (I'm looking at you, SIPDroid).

<comment><USER20> Are you saying the original open source Sipdroid (<http://code.google.com/p/sipdroid/>) is adware? If so, why don't you remove the ad code and publish a clean version? You can, it's open source.

Or are you talking about the many clones that re-sell it in the Market--which they can do because it's open source?

<comment><USER19> Yes, it seems to be becoming an ad for PBXes, which is now on the very front page when you open it.

I am aware that it's open source, which is what makes it so frustrating that this has happened to it.

I hope that somebody does do as you suggest, but it won't be me, at least not in the next several months. That doesn't mean I'm happy with the current state of things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wish they added partition encryption through the kernel (LUKS / dm_crypt).

</comment><comment><USER22> So...any word on when Android 2.3 will be available over the wire for Nexus 1? Surprised this wasn't mentioned.

<comment><USER23> A few weeks according to a "Developer Advocate" at Google: <http://twitter.com/retomeier/status/11830023140937728#> . Probably shortly after the Nexus S hits stores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wait, the NFC implementation is _receive-only_?

Doesn't this preclude using your phone as an NFC payment device (which would be transmit, not receive)?

Can someone confirm if I'm parsing this correctly:

"An NFC Reader application lets the user read and interact with near-field communication (NFC) tags. For example, the user can "touch" or "swipe" an NFC tag that might be embedded in a poster, sticker, or advertisement, then act on the data read from the tag. A typical use would be to read a tag at a restaurant, store, or event and then rate or register by jumping to a web site whose URL is included in the tag data. NFC communication relies on wireless technology in the device hardware, so support for the platform's NFC features on specific devices is determined by their manufacturers."

<comment><USER25> Yes, an NFC Reader application only supports reading. The chip on the Nexus S supports reading and writing[1] so, assuming the OS allows it, you can write an application to swap contacts or whatever.

1: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/06/google-nexus-s-review/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Any details on WebM support? I see it listed as a feature, but no specific API for it. I have an app where it would be very useful to turn a bunch of images into a video file, but I haven't found a reasonable way to do that and was hoping WebM would help.

<comment><USER26> There are APIs to play video and capture video from a camera, but for general encoding you may have to do it yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I remember discussing gestures and NFC back at Motorolas conference the day the iPhone 2g launched in the UK and back then all of us thought NFC would happen in the next 12 months! Glad to see its finally arriving, though this patent is going to prove interesting [http://www.nearfieldcommunicationsworld.com/2010/12/03/35337...](http://www.nearfieldcommunicationsworld.com/2010/12/03/35337/patent- application-hints-at-nokia-business-model-for-nfc/)

</comment><comment><USER28> <http://developer.android.com/sdk/images/2.3/selection.png>

This looks familiar...

[http://www.christian-kalmar.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/06/i...](http://www.christian-kalmar.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/06/iphone-copy-cut-paste.jpg)

<comment><USER29> or rather... it doesn't.

<comment><USER28> The draggable copy points seem to work exactly like the iPhone version. I never said that was bad, but it definitely seems familiar.

<comment><USER30> It works better, actually. The anchors are much larger, so there is less room for error (I have fat fingers!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Still no GPU accel for the GUI?

</comment><comment><USER15> Bouncy scrolling too. Yay.

</comment><comment><USER32> Finally I no longer need to use my clunky Nexus One trackball to pick text to copy/paste. Finally!

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone want to help us integrate NFC into our Android app?

</comment><comment><USER34> What's a SIP account?

<comment><USER34> Why downvoted? I truly didn't know, and a Google search didn't turn up anything.

<comment><USER35> A google search for "sip account" turns up "Easy to use VoIP phone system. Complete web-based telephony system" as the first advert, and the SIP page on Wikipedia as the second link and a bunch of tutorials and howtos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Finally. Google waited until the telcos told so to enable voip.

Remember most telcos a while ago removing the unlimited data plan? And apple forcing skipe to only using wifi on all platforms.

Truth that google allowed work arounds for being evil this time... you could use sip with the buggy sip app. And you could even get free sip from google voice if you had an old gizmoproject account.

<comment><USER14> _Truth that google allowed work arounds for being evil this time_

I doubt this is some conspiracy between Google and the telcos. It's more of a collection of unrelated events that happened to occur around the same time. AT&T wanted more money (around iPad launch), so they capped the data plan. Apple said, "sure, OK", so AT&T didn't risk losing any customers. The other carriers noticed the lack of backlash, and here we are...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Love how you can't read the android site in a android phone

Unless you send a android user agent, then it changes most of the css to enable it. Really a dumb move

<comment><USER37> Just tried it, and yes, this is sad. Gmail is another Google site that fails in the same unscrollable way, although at least there you can get around it by falling back on the HTML version. Do you suppose this is due to sniffing the particular User Agent being sent, or is it a general shortcoming of Webkit?

<comment><USER36> it's the general shortcoming of the site designers. they COPIED MICROSOFT MSDN website! that's enought to know it's no good :)

and that's even bad while viewing in the desktop. if you increase the font, if increase the header, to the point the header uses most of the screen space!!! how wants to see the header?!?

just don't use the header/sidebar fixed like that. it just _breaks_ the browser scroll functionality. in every browsers.</comment></comment></comment>


FB's Community Standards Approves This Violent Video - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/osvaldo.torres.5496/videos/10207663038320408/?pnref=story<p>"Thank you for taking the time to report something that you feel may violate our Community Standards. Reports like yours are an important part of making Facebook a safe and welcoming environment. We reviewed the video you reported for promoting graphic violence and found it doesn't violate our Community Standards." <comment><AUTHOR> As an artist, im the first guy to defend freedom of speech. i guess i wasnt ready to see this with my first morning cup of tea after a nice warm meditation. Or maybe it's my parental instincts finally kicking in.. but something feels wrong here.

side-theory : i bet if someone posted the exact same video of a mock Hillary Clinton execution.. it would be banned faster than Zuck can tell Merkel 'dont worry we wont post anti-immiagration content in germany'

..mic dropped.</comment>


A Dive Into Plain JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://blog.adtile.me/2014/01/16/a-dive-into-plain-javascript/ <comment><USER2> If learning JavaScript feels like jumping into the ocean and trying to swim for the first time, jQuery is, in some ways, like a motor boat driving beside you. The driver says, "Hey, hop on in. Why learn the basics of swimming when you can start covering ground?"

Speaking from experience, failing to learn the foundational aspects of the language in the beginning leads to a lot of poorly organized "spaghetti" code. It took me a lot longer to appreciate concepts such as closures and the nuances of DOM events because I relied on jQuery to do the heavy lifting for me.

Having said that, I have a lot of respect for John Resig and his essays / books (i.e. Secrets of the JS Ninja). After taking the time to learn about Resig's functional programming style and the design decisions underlying jQuery, I gained a much deeper appreciation for both the library and plain JavaScript.

<comment><USER3> I actually found that using backbone.js helped more with learning how to structure an app and about working with objects than writing vanilla javascript.

I was writing single-page applications just before jQuery was introduced, and I can tell you, my code was spaghetti because I didn't understand OO or functional design patterns. I didn't find jQuery to be a massive improvement in that, because I just linked data to DOM elements and everything was still all over the place.

Backbone forced me to write javascript in a cleaner way, even when I still didn't know what I was doing. I was breaking up my code into better methods and providing a better overall structure to my apps.

Now with Angular, I've taken that a step further to modularizing code, but I don't know how well I would have gotten on with Angular if I hadn't first learned so much from Backbone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Plain JS is great! I love writing it.

That said, as a site (or app) grows, you generally end up writing more utility functions than you expected, and at some point it cancels out the benefits of NOT using jquery (or another lib). You have to weigh these decisions out, but saying "plain JS is better than jquery" is misleading since, in the end, jq is also written in plain JS. Think of it as all of those utility functions you DON'T have to write.

Just make sure you understand vanilla JS and I see no issues with leveraging libraries to make dev time faster. Those libs are generally tested enough to ensure cross-browser compatibility and save you the headache of rolling your own everywhere.

<comment><USER5> An even better solution is to use something like component.io or browserify. Then you still write mostly plain javascript, but can pull in small components and utilities when needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Different frameworks can have very different approaches to doing similar things. I started writing Javascript in a place that used Prototype, a library which is now either defunct or just unused, but anyway its approach (and purpose) were rather different from jQuery. For instance, Prototype relies heavily on altering the built-in types, which today we consider a no-no.

I'm talking about this because I think it's interesting that people are moving from starting with jQuery to attempting not to use any framework at all. I'm in favor of that because it's best to know what you're working with before you start adding on, you taste the soup before you add salt.

But personally I wouldn't want to work on any kind of real project without something to handle a lot of the more tedious aspects of JS development. Of course there are always polyfills and "micro libraries" but at some point you are replicating some of the professed downsides of using a framework, or to put it differently, how many micro libraries equal a framework?

Another company recently posted about eschewing JS frameworks, followed by a lively HN discussion, only to announce their in-house "library" that does many of the same things we need frameworks for. IT seems like there's a circle here where a lot of people go from all jQuery -> questioning jQuery as a crutch to "real js development" -> realizing all the things that jQuery or similar handle for us -> resignation and acceptance.

So it may ultimately be more useful to compare the approach of different libraries or frameworks to see what we can glean from them in how we write our own JS, what works and what doesn't. Not to mention, there are things that jQuery just does not have, that would be super useful and show up in other frameworks, so those things just don't show up on people's radar if jQuery is the only framework they've tried. I'm talking about _anything at all_ for dealing with cookies. (Cookies, for god's sake! Not exactly an esoteric corner of web development!) I'm talking about turning a query string into an object and vice versa. Imagine you need to take a URL, modify one value in the query string, and write it back out. How do you do it?

Anyway, yes, definitely learn about document.querySelectorAll. Because part of what you learn when you do it this way is that that function does not return an array of elements like you may have hoped/expected. Welcome to the desert of the real.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's great to know what a library like JQuery is doing under the hood, but if you are going about your daily development using a progressive enhancement to access the dom using document.querySelector you are removing support for IE7 for no real reason.

You can query the dom in IE7 using other methods and this is the goal of a library like JQuery.

Progressive enhancements are aimed at providing an alternative for browsers that don't support functionality, not that don't support functionality the way you want to coded it.

</comment><comment><USER8> A couple more links on this topic:

Vanilla JS vs jQuery [https://gist.github.com/liamcurry/2597326](https://gist.github.com/liamcurry/2597326)

weaning yourself off jquery [http://substack.net/weaning_yourself_off_jquery](http://substack.net/weaning_yourself_off_jquery)

<comment><USER9> > Vanilla JS vs jQuery > [https://gist.github.com/liamcurry/2597326](https://gist.github.com/liamcurry/2597326)

I checked this and it is an opinionated BS.

You can't just replace $.fn.ready with a 'DOMContentLoaded' event. 'DOMContentLoaded' is not supported in a older versions of IE.

Also what if instead of this: "var newDiv = $('
')" I need this: "var newDiv = $('
Some text
<')"?

So overall that post is comparing apples to oranges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> * Why feature detect classList with `if ("classList" in document.documentElement)` and not `!! document.documentElement.classList` like described at the beginning of the article?

* Why add a style to a cloned node instead of directly to the node? Performance improvements?

* `$ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document);` won't let you have a shorthand for performing a query selector on an element. For that, you also need something like `Element.prototype.$ = Element.prototype.querySelectorAll;`. Likewise, you'll probably want the `on` shorthand applied to document and window too for consistency's sake.

* I also like to cast Array's forEach method to NodeList to iterate over values from a querySelectorAll. That way you can do $('a').forEach() instead of [].forEach.call($('a'), function(el)).

<comment><USER11> You could also just convert the NodeList to an array by running something like

        [].slice.call(nodeList)

That way you get _all_ array methods, not just forEach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> great write up. one thing to remember when traversing the DOM using native APIs whitespace matters.

e.g.
#textnode

        #textnode#textnode

<comment><USER13> Which can be safely ignored when using the firstElementChild, nextElementSibling properties and so on. They are not available in old browsers, but a polyfill should be available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is interesting in the same way I find it interesting to write C code to be closer to the hardware but I don't think the "so much smaller footprint" argument is very strong.

jQuery is cached more or less everywhere in every browser and CDN on the planet. Going around it seems silly to me.

<comment><USER10> Maybe footprint isn't as big of an issue anymore, but memory usage can still be. Including a framework increases the amount of memory a page consumes -- not just by the size of the script in bytes, but by how much memory the objects in that script consume. On phones or other devices memory can be limited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a bug in the removeClass() function. If you use a class with a reserved regex character it will fail.

I'd rather see this done with a small sets library anyway. removeClass = function (el, cl) { el.className = _.without(el.className.split(' '), cl).join(' '); }

</comment><comment><USER16> Now I'm thinking about the need of MVC framework at the server side %-) Many of things you really need at the server side you can do without a framework and as a result you'll control/understand your code better.

</comment><comment><USER17> I still need to support IE8 :(

</comment><comment><USER16> Thanks! Very intereting :-)</comment>


Thinking in Clojure for Java Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.factual.com/devblog/aaron/thinking-in-clojure-for-java-programmers-part-1-—-a-gentle-intro/

<comment><USER2> There really should be a comparison to something other than java, it doesn't seem fair.

<comment><USER3> Fair point! Well, Google will show you plenty of results for, e.g. "clojure vs. scala". What I was going for wasn't an unfair comparison, but rather a kind of bridge for Java / JVM folks who might be interested in a more functional way of life. My bad if I missed the mark. :-/

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's an unfair comparison at all. Comparing Clojure and Scala can only generate interest in a few small (though growing) communities.

You've done an excellent job of showing Clojure's benefits to a much, much wider audience - programmers not familiar with functional programming. Also it's compelling to hear that you're successfully using Clojure to efficiently "script" larger Java codebases.

Kudos for writing such a hype-less, non-condescending, and educational tutorial for Java/imperative programmers!

<comment><USER3> Thanks swannodette, very kind of you! Yes, it's been cool to layer Clojure on top of legacy Java and see what happens. Some want to sell Clojure as "a better Java than Java"... I think that may be a little misguided. But, there are certain situations where it rings true... at least IMHO

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think Clojure's goal is to be "better Java". Rather, that for whatever task you might consider Java, writing that task in Clojure should be:

      * easier to write
      * perform just as well
      * be concurrency safe

Clojure isn't there yet, but it's well on its way I think.

<comment><USER4> it's easier to have unsafe concurrency in clojure. It's certainly easier to get it right by default than in java, but it's still very easy to introduce a race condition or some such.

<comment><USER4> Typo, I meant easy not easier

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love functional programming. At least the functional parts of Python. However, Lisp seems better suited for computers than for humans.

Which is probably a side effect of having been created when 64kB was a decent memory size.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. For example, retaining a method name like "defn" seems more than a little suspect in an era of gigabyte memories, terabyte hard drives, and auto- complete IDEs.

<comment><USER7> 'defn' is hardly old-school; Python uses 'def' to define functions. Now 'car' and 'cdr' on the other hand...

This is far preferable to typing e.g. "public static void ..." all the time

<comment><USER6> defn harkens back to an era when using a computer meant using a teletype, putting an extreme premium on terseness in naming. And it's just an example, car, cdr, cons, etc. are just as bad. It's easy to memorize these but that doesn't mean they are the best choices for readability, writability, etc.

I have a hard time believing that the best choice of name for all of these operators just so happens to always be some 3 or 4 character string that's almost but not quite a word and seems to have dropped some vowels.

As for "public static void ...", that's a disease of another sort, equally as bad.

<comment><USER8> `defn' is a mnemonic for "define function". `cons' is a mnemonic for "construct".

`car', and `cdr' and replaced in clojure with `first' and `rest'.

Once you've spent ten minutes with the language, these names aren't going to trip you up.

<comment><USER9> People want to learn "new languages" without having to learn anything new.

<comment><USER10> Well put. There's also a tradeoff between learning-curve and proficiency in language design: many features that aid the one detract from the other. I think this causes much of the noise in programming language discussions, especially with Lisp.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Better to ask users to upload photos vs. have some canned images? - <AUTHOR>

Which is better for our social search/recommendation site? A) Have some standardized, category-based photos for users to select from when authoring recommendations (we have ~12 top-level domains/categories of recommendations).  But, also have the ability to upload your own photo if you want.  Pro: User can quickly add a photo that somewhat reflects the topic of the recommendation.  Con: The photo selected might not fit the content exactly.
B) Have no standardized, pre-selected photos but emphasize the photo uploader.  Pro: User-uploaded photos might be more accurate to the rest of the authored recommendation (e.g., Yelp photos). Con: People might not go to the trouble and there would be a lot of "empty" photos on the site.
Thanks!  Please add specific examples/urls if possible! <comment><USER2> best case i would have both. require the author to select a category when posting, and using this category either pull random image out of stock photos in the category or if you want to get cheeky, parse the text and run semantic to get a closer match (does it really matter though? :D ). if user decides to upload his own photo, just use that instead.

easy peesy</comment>


Paul Graham's Checklist, Would You Make The Cut? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/30/paul-grahams-checklist-would-you-make-the-cut-video/ <comment><USER2> Anyone else not want to watch a video to see a checklist? Anyone kind enough to paste notes?

<comment><USER3> PG's Startup Checklist

Been friends

Worked together for awhile

Don't come together for only the startup

If close friends, stick with it even if things look bad because things eventually get better.

Don't want companies run by committee.

Need clear leadership, don't want unclear sense of who the primary decision maker is. Want to know who they should address a question to.

But not a megalomaniac, just want somebody who steps forward.

Founder power is increasing, investor power waning, probably good because those most knowledgeable getting more power.

Lot cheaper to start a startup these days.

More socially acceptable to start a startup these days.

Conway said a lot of his portfolio companies were in New York these days.

\----

I hate watching videos too as interesting as PG is to watch, I took the hit for the rest of ya.

(I read much faster than anyone can possibly speak.)

<comment><USER4> This does not convey the sentiment that Paul expressed.

I took away : friends will work on a project through the bad times out of loyalty (which happens to be a good thing), while co founders who were not friends will bail at the point when the walls come crashing down.

<comment><USER4> Samuel_Michon, That's what I said... (almost) since you misstated one of the points 'if for no other reason than the co founders like working with each other' when PG actually said they will continue to work out of loyalty and not wanting to let their friend down.

<comment><USER5> Didn't mean to criticize you. I personally found it quite enlightening to hear Graham say that every startup will eventually go through a tough phase, whether or not the business has any chance of making it -- I felt that little nugget of truth needed some attention.

Everything else I said in that post were my own words, especially the reasoning on _why_ good friends stick it out. I find it kind of negative to simply put it on guilt -- I choose to believe that good friends work together and help each other out because they like each other, not because of fear of losing a friendship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> hmm... I don't think as an entrepreneur we should seek to optimize these metrics. These rules are ideal for Paul since they reduces his risk for investing, which is necessary as a prudent investor. Y-Combinator would be over the moon if 6 out of ten start-ups were successful. If you were one of those 4 who didn't make it, it would be devastating for you.

Ultimately as the entrepreneur your rules should be gear towards gaining traction. Think about it, you would be over the moon if 6 out of 10 persons sign-up. Gaining customers is your way of reducing risk. Concoct your rules for reducing your risk. I think Eric Reis, Steve Blank and the lean start-up movement are doing a great job at this.

So my advice is don't try to focus on meeting this check list but focus on obtaining traction. Oddly enough, all investors love traction.

<comment><USER7> This isn't my entire checklist. The interview wasn't even about checklists. They just stuck that word in the title to get traffic. If you describe something as a checklist, then everyone wants to see what it is to see if they're missing anything. Much like the list-of-n-things.

This is probably closer to what you want: <http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is actually a really good reason _not_ to start a start-up with friends, you might find that your friendship is the victim of either the success or the failure of your start-up.

<comment><USER9> So what? You may just discover that your friendship isn't that strong. If it is, it will endure and grow, whether your business succeeds or fails.

I wonder why people are so afraid to put their relationships on trial. An old adage says that you should not trust a friend of yours until you have tested it.

<comment><USER10> A friendship may still be valuable even if it isn't fit for a startup.

<comment><USER9> That's fine. Being friends does not mean being fit to work together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "...New York is full of energetic ass-kickers" - Paul Graham

<comment><USER7> We had a quite interesting conversation about NYC at the end but for some reason they cut it off. Maybe the cameras stopped working or something.

<comment><USER12> Does "quite interesting" extend as far as revising your view about the primacy of Silicon Valley for startups? NYC seems to have supplanted Boston as the obvious runner-up, which is already the first tectonic shift in the startup lithosphere in a long time (decades?), so if any place is going to give SV a run for its money it would likely be NYC. Curious to know how significant you think the trend is or might get.

<comment><USER7> It was about why NYC may be supplanting Boston as the number 2. If my theory about the reason is correct, then the trend will be pretty significant.

<comment><USER13> I am curious about you theory because I've been in NYC since web 1.0 so I like to see how your theory is.

Would you like to share it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think he misinterpreted the Twitter question. She seemed to be asking whether he would reject a group with an idea as compelling as Twitter if the founders didn't have the right personalities.

<comment><USER15> _"an idea as compelling as Twitter"_ \- proof that something is a great idea like Twitter only becomes obvious in retrospect. If you heard a description of Twitter just before it launched, you probably wouldn't think it would work (or wouldn't know one way or the other). Hence the importance of the founding team and how well they execute the idea.

<comment><USER14> Well sure, that might be a good answer. Another good answer might be, "the execution is more important than the idea." I was just pointing out that he misinterpreted the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Where's the rest?

</comment><comment><USER17> I will never tire of hearing pg's analogies and metaphors. I'm considering compiling them for a website.

</comment><comment><USER18> that site just auto-reloaded while i was watching the video. :|

</comment><comment><USER19> I founded a startup that was featured by the WSJ all by myself and have gone on to work on a new project which has some traction. I applied to YC with another idea and didn't "make the cut." I personally take that to be a greater challenge to succeede than any friendship or relationship could obligate me to. PG may have a checklist which works most of the time but I suspect that's the first step toward missing the outliers who define true success. No one's going to take the next Google seriously 'till its too late.

<comment><USER20> But for someone whose whole job is to find, and invest in, "the next Google", you'd think there could be some sort of recognizable _features_ that a Bayesian classifier could learn as positive weights (as, if there weren't, that person would guess correctly at no greater a rate than chance, and would therefore be replaced by a small shell-script/die roll.) Those recognizable features should then be able to be decomposed into discrete features—which could be written down as a checklist.

To put it another way—there are only two ways to do a job whose output is boolean (invest/don't invest): either algorithmically, or randomly. Any judging algorithm can be approximated by a checklist.

<comment><USER6> I think PG is on the right track with his investing strategy.

Lets say his probability of finding the next Google with this rule was a arbitary value of 0.001. I wouldn't know its exact value but I'm assuming it's non-zero.

He would have to invest in 693 companies before he has a 50% chance of hitting a google. I don't think they have gone that far as yet. It's just a matter of time.

<comment><USER8> There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of web companies, there is _one_ google, and maybe 50 or so (extremely successful) companies where investors from a seed fund had a chance to get in on the bottom rung they way YC wants to have it.

The chances of finding 'the next google' are a lot smaller than what you think they are, but the chances of scoring a really big hit (on the order of 10's of millions in terms of ROI for YC) are pretty good.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vote up if you want the submission title displayed as your browser title for bookmarking - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Looking a bit further, news.yc doesn't seem to be very SEO friendly or accessible either. Maybe there was a reason for not needing to be SEO friendly, but not accessible? By this I mean that apart from the topic not being in the title, there's no use of HTML tags to confer semantics from the blocks of text, e.g. no use of H1-H6 tags, no use of lists for comments.

Is there a reason for this? I just thought it was good practice, but I'm still just starting out in web design.

<comment><USER3> semantics are obsolete.

<comment><USER2> care to elaborate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Come on people use the feature request link!!!!

<comment><USER5> Not the most effective method of eliciting a response, so far as I can tell. I submitted this same request a while ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9337>

<comment><USER6> And I also made the request nine days ago. <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13273> We need more feedback in that feature request thread really.

Perhaps the problem is due to the code starting to emit HTML very early on, before it knows what the title should be, in order to start providing data to the browser. As opposed to building all the HTML for the page before sending a byte.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You mean you want the submission title to be the title of the comments page about it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Like now as I'm writing this reply if I wanted to bookmark this page, it would read "Y Combinator: Add Comment". From where you're reading it would read "Y Combinator Startup News". It would be more convenient for me if it was instead the original discussion/submission title. Right now, I copy the title beforehand, and paste it in when bookmarking.

Damn fast feedback, excellent work.

<comment><USER8> I second that. I bookmark many comments threads and the default title comes up as "Y-Combinator startup news". Then I copy the post title and paste it in my title field. It would be nice if I can skip the copy-paste step.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Whoops! Guys, if you hover the mouse over the submission title and right click, click on "Bookmark This Link...". This will add it WITH the submission title, instead of the default "Y Combinator Startup News".</comment>


Python vs Haskell : An unsatisfying exercise in comparative code linguistics - <AUTHOR> http://sandersn.com/blog//index.php/2010/01/05/python-vs-haskell-an-unsatisfying-exerci <comment><USER2> I've been deeming Haskell an amazing language ever since I've been a TA for a college course using it. For almost all students, this was barely their second CS course. Imagine my amazement when I started seeing them draw fractals for one assignment, solving a classical AI problem (n queens) for another, and parsing HTML for a problem set! Along many other interesting tasks (they had about 20 problem sets and assignments in total). I walked away from that experience with a very healthy respect for Haskell's power, especially when approached with a fresh mind.</comment>


Honey Encryption - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_Encryption <comment><USER2> Hmmm. This is pretty interesting. I could imagine doing the same with pre- written out messages too. Write two messages, one real with a stronger key or password, one with a weaker one. It would allow you to not only stop the brute force, but also give Eve bad intelligence.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's similar to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption) but a lot more rigorous and well thought out

<comment><USER3> Just FYI - some people[1] have expressed rigorous ideas about deniable encryption, too!

[1] [http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/454.pdf](http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/454.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, that sucks. The paper appears to be paywalled by IEEE[0]. Are there any freely-available references to this work?

Edit: Eureka! A pre-pub version on the page of the other author [http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~rist/papers/HoneyEncryptionpre.pdf](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~rist/papers/HoneyEncryptionpre.pdf)

[0] [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6876246/](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6876246/)

<comment><USER5> IEEE papers are also on sci-hub.cc

<comment><USER6> Interestingly this website is blocked on many corporate networks as "unethical" or "illegal".

<comment><USER7> What's "interesting" about this? The entire website is massive copyright infringement. It's extremely useful for researchers, but if you're going to the trouble of filtering and blocking content on a corporate network for legal reasons, isn't this exactly the type of website one would block?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While this is interesting, what effective bruteforce techniques are there against currently used encryption?

Even 3DES is still likely to be secure against all but state actors.

Mind you this can't be used with hashing since this effectively be a collision (could possibly be used with salt poisoning and potentially with variance in rounds).

<comment><USER9> > _Even 3DES is still likely to be secure against all but state actors._

Not if my passphrase is _S3cur3!_. The primary use case for HE is securing data that's encrypted with keys that a human chose.

<comment><USER8> If you are attacking pass phrase key derivative algorithms then it usually doesn't matter what encryption you are using unless it's something that was intentionally designed to protect passwords and is punitively slow.

This could potentially work but the problem is that KDA's are used to generate KEKs usually not to encrypt the actual data.

It also remains to be seen of this has an impact on the strength of the key especially for chosen plaintext attacks.</comment></comment></comment>


Open Journal Systems – Open Source Journal Management and Publishing - <AUTHOR> https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ <comment><USER2> Other comments have pointed out the prestige issue. My real issue with this is that academic findings need to be freed from the whole "paper" format: a static, discrete document. New findings compliment and invalidate older ones. In the old days there was no way to reflect this due to the static nature of print. The paper and its physical constraints do not need to exist with today's technology. One more thing -- How many times have you wondered if some journal somewhere has the answer to the question you're trying to answer (but don't know how to look it up)? The disparate, static content of journals resists the formation of a cohesive corpus of knowledge.

Github has no barrier to entry, yet does not have a prestige issue. People get hired based on the content of their github account. I can't see why funding agencies couldn't use a similar system to track the academic contributions of researchers.

It's ironic that the rest of the world has moved on to connected, consistent experiences while academics are still stuck with papers. I've been thinking after I submit my thesis that I should find other people that are likewise frustrated and try to build a better system for academic collaboration and dissemination. Perhaps something more like Wikipedia than a journal.

<comment><USER3> Alot of people want a wikipedia/github-like system but nobody will go there until it has the prestige. Academics are not early adopters. They are followers. I'm a professor in a STEM field at a major university so I'm speaking from experience.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. Would you say it helps if the funding agencies were on board with, say, having a non-profit foundation run this service? They would have a much easier time allocating their $ since the system can show who contributed what and how many people found it useful. I feel like PIs need to know they can pay the bills and as long as the money is coming we can get them to try out the new systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know of any activity in this space by YC? The largest journal publisher, Elsevier Reed, has revenue of £5.9 Bn and 17% net margin [1]. Seems like there could be some interesting (and socially valuable) scope for disruption.

[1] [https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http:...](https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%25202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_ar_2015.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwjL-I3l-fjRAhUJnRoKHVdMB7MQFggaMAA&usg=AFQjCNE-3XeKu70eMgu0_0xdiZR786Mw0Q&sig2=FJiLGCkiEnXXgMhpYEJeyQ)

<comment><USER4> How do you solve the core problem though? As far as I can tell, the real issue is maintaining the "prestige" part for researchers. Anything that reduces friction in publishing decreases scarcity...which decreases the perceived prestige.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's important to distinguish between researchers, reviewers/editors and publishers.

The academics who write a paper or make the decision to include it in a journal typically aren't paid. They benefit from the prestige signal generated by a famous journal (editors gain some control of research directions in their field and young academics get a signal validating the quality of their work). Publishers do the typesetting, hosting, distribution, marketing and other admin responsibilities and get grossly overpaid for this task [1].

The publishers clearly want to maintain the status-quo. However, I think both authors and editors would prefer lower journal subscription fees/greater open access for the papers. It would lead to lower costs for universities and broader audiences. However, coordinating away to this outcome is tricky, since (as you say) upstart journals are less prestigious so would offer lower initial influence and prestige to defectors. This is basically the classic path dependence problem from economics[2].

There are a couple of possible solutions to the problems:

(1) Incumbent publishers could be breaching European and American antitrust law. Competition authorities could prosecute them for charging excessive prices, bundling practices or placing unreasonable restrictions on academics wishing to make their research open access? Governments could also address this with specific policies.

(2) High profile academics, newly emerging fields or those particularly frustrated with the current system could coordinate to use open access publishing models. Tim Gower's discrete analysis is a good example of this [3].

(3) Researchers can develop alternative methods for assessing the quality of research, placing a lower weighting on the signal of journal prestige.

So I agree 'prestige' complicates the problem, but I don't think it makes it unsolvable. The more clearly the tech community explains the current system to government/regulators, the more likely they are to adopt sane policy in the area (1). The greater support the tech community can offer to disgruntled academics seeking alternatives (2)(3), the more likely they are to defect.

[1] [https://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals- so...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some- facts/#more-5430)

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

[3] [https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis- an...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv- overlay-journal/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is the code open source? Is it on GitHub? Hunted around the site for a while but couldn't find the code. Mainly want to know which langauage it was built with.

<comment><USER6> All your questions are answered on the "Download" page. It's GPL2, on Github ([https://github.com/pkp/ojs](https://github.com/pkp/ojs)), and it's written in PHP.</comment></comment>