My transition to an Ubuntu workstation - <AUTHOR> https://ryannjohnson.com/writing/my-transition-to-an-ubuntu-workstation/ <comment><USER2> I don't get author's complaint about reinstalling Windows every few months, imho it is completely insane. Even in the age of Win95/98 I never had a need to re-install more than once a year maybe and I was in school at that time and all software was downloaded from shady sources. Now - there is zero need to re-install at all, I only do it when I change hardware platform completely - storage, MB etc.

Same with "unsolicited popups". What are you using that does this? Windows itself shows me reboot needed popup once a few months maybe and that's about it. Some software can show it's own popup when I launch it and it is often relevant.

Windows is not perfect and Linux is great (and not perfect too) but really, some complaints about Windows seems to be straight from late 90s, with custom virus packaged Win98 distributives on torrents.

<comment><USER3> Even with a paid Windows 10 _Pro_ you get ads for games right in the Start menu. It's insane.

<comment><USER4> My favorite Windows feature is how the start menu search is so slow. I hit the windows key, type the name of the app, hit enter and I get an Edge window with what I typed as a Bing query.

<comment><USER5> Disable websearch, and just start typing right away.

I agree that a lot of Win10 defaults are derpy. But just tune it a bit and its reasonably power user friendly. Maybe not what you want to support personally, but sufficient for professional use.

<comment><USER6> How do you disable it?

<comment><USER5> Registry >.> [https://superuser.com/a/1325836](https://superuser.com/a/1325836)

Like I said, maybe not the crap you want to put up with in your personal life, but as a professional tool... worth tweaking to suit your needs.

(Oh, and in a full professional environment, can also be set by group policy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Even when I was running Windows, I would wipe my computer every few months. > I kept a "Backup Image" handy with all my settings already installed. I've > spent far too many hours trying to undo damage I've done to my systems by > installing random software from the internet onto my workstation; I've come > to value the option of resetting my computer to a known, healthy state > immensely.

I often thought I was the only one. On Windows, macOS and even Ubuntu I was reinstalling my OS at least three or four times a year. I had install scripts and GitHub repos designed to reconfigure my machine after each install. The process always took a full day.

Now I'm on NixOS. I have three .nix text files, .emacs, .bashrc and that's about all I need to backup in order to clone my environment on any machine.

I've also stopped reinstalling my OS all the time, as I always know my machine's state, just by looking at those few files.

<comment><USER8> I was puzzled by the article authors statement on this. My main daily machine is Windows 10. It's been running the same 'copy' of Windows 10 since late 2016, and has gone through all the major updates since then, and has had many applications installed and removed on it since then. Office has gone from v2010 thru v2013 to Office 365 (effectively v2019), and I'm always playing with new software. The machine still runs perfectly fine, with no strange problems, errors or slowdowns.

To rebuild it to the state it currently is, would take me several days of installing and configuring, for very little benefit. Imho, there is no reason to reinstall your OS every few months.

<comment><USER9> For me, Windows XP was the last version of Windows I found the need to reinstall regularly. I skipped Vista, and from 7 onwards, I never felt the need to do a reinstall.

I set up my current desktop with Windows 8.1 more than 5 years ago, upgraded to Windows 10, and still use the exact same installation to this day. It even survived a migration to a new SSD when I upgraded the PC a few years back.

The "needs regular reinstalls" meme had merit 10+ years ago. These days, not as much.

<comment><USER10> I used to update my memes and references every few months, but since Windows 10 came out I haven't needed to reinstall my memebase as often so I am still running some old memes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The "hardware as commodity" is an ideology that I've been playing with for a while. I have my personal cloud that I can access via VPN, including a Windows desktop running in a VM, personal photos and home videos sync'd to a NAS using SyncThing.

De-coupling the portable device (which, due to its portability, is much more prone to breakage or theft) from the data that it captures or has access to.

My journey to this ideology was close calls with data loss due to both hardware failure and theft. Rather than backing up to a central location, have the data "live" at the central location, then back it up off-site somewhere.

This can also have both negative and positive security implications in the even of a lost or stolen device, but those scenarios are likely not quite as bad as if you've got a whole whack of data on the device as well.

This can be done across platforms too, as far as my experience goes. It's unrelated to the author's transition to Linux / Ubuntu. My stable consists of android phones, iPads, Chromebooks (which don't really count because they embody this ideology already), laptops running both Linux and Windows. Although I'm also most of the way through transitioning away from Windows (but RDP is just so good for controlling a remote GUI).

<comment><USER12> What do you use for your personal cloud?

<comment><USER11> It's a mish-mash. A bunch of VMs running on ProxMox, Wireguard is the link from the outside world, QNAP NAS for document storage and running SyncThing server for phone photos and videos backup, a couple of Windows VM's we RDP into for banking and centralised documents and spreadsheets. Also PiHole running on a VM so my 'roaming' browsing is nice and clean. Also, although off-topic-ish, ZoneMinder and LMS (lightweight music server - which the author linked to in comments a week ago or so: [https://github.com/epoupon/lms](https://github.com/epoupon/lms)) VMs accessible via the VPN.

Nothing particularly "integrated" like Sandstorm or NextCloud, but I haven't had the existential need for that level of accessibility.

The QNAP NAS (like Synology) has personal cloud apps, but I don't tend to like doing things the easy way. Going down that path also locks services into a particular hardware dependency. VMs are easily backed up and restorable to ProxMox running on new / different hardware if necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > I used to salivate over computers. News of the next most-powerful processor > or RAM upgrade was irresistible for a period of my life.

I can relate to that. Of course I'd love to have an 8-way Xeon Platinum with a terabyte of RAM (so I could use Slack) to run Emacs and my terminal sessions, but I can't really justify that. To say nothing about the noise.

Or build a Cray-2 shaped box with a beefy GPU on each of its 11 lobes immersed in Novec bubbling like a real Cray 2.

Or a Connection Machines CM-2a-like box with 16 boards hosting 8 RPi-like boards each with each core/thread lighting up one of 32 LEDs on the front. Or fewer SBCs on each if I figure out how to light up LEDs based on SIMD usage in them - 128 nodes is quite a lot.

I deeply admire the art that goes into making a Rome, a POWER9, a 28-core Xeon or an IBM z15. I designed a stack-based CPU in college and I know how hard it is to get everything in place. It's just that I have no use for any of that. Quite frankly, my Xeon tower server is almost 90% idle at any given time, its memory almost completely deserted, as is my Core i3 and my Celeron laptops.

<comment><USER14> I used to be the same way; I'd pore over data sheets and whatever else, I wanted to optimize _everything_.

Then one day, I dunno, I snapped. I think some minor tweak broke something and I just gave up. I wanted to not care about it ever again.

As it happens, I ended up buying a Mac, but I imagine you could just as easily get the same effect with Windows. The trend continued with iPhone and iPad; I don't care about specs, other than "can this hold my pics and music" or "can this run the 5 tools I need to work".

I guess I only started caring about specs again when Apple introduced broken- by-design keyboards and the ridiculous touchbar. Somehow that snapped me, again. Like suddenly someone put a tack on my comfy seat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had terrible tearing with my default Ubuntu 19.04 install last week, too. I'm using an Intel integrated GPU. The solution was to create the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf (and the directory, as it didn't already exist but does get checked by X11 if present) with the following content:

      Section "Device"
        Identifier "Intel Graphics"
        Driver "intel"

        Option "TearFree" "true"
      EndSection

No more screen tearing, in my case!

<comment> amiga-workbench It's quite irritating that these settings aren't sane defaults that the driver falls back on, but at least it's simple to configure.

<comment><USER16> One's sanity is another's insanity. I dislike vsync'd desktop (and it is my #1 annoyance with Windows since 8, i just put up with it) so for me the sane option is the existing default one.

<comment><USER17> Could you elaborate why?

<comment><USER16> Due to responsiveness. When i move or resize a window, the UI feels too sluggish with the window (or its edge) being several frames behind the mouse cursor (which is composited by the GPU on top of the most recent framebuffer state).

Without a compositor running (which introduces its own lag due to having to draw all toplevel windows in its own backbuffer) and v-sync, everything is up- to-date.

There is tearing, of course, but the only time it bothers me is when i watch a video - in which case i enable vsync in the video player. But other than that i prefer the responsiveness.

FWIW it is the same in games too, i always play with vsync disabled and i always notice when a first person game (where i have direct control of the camera with the mouse) is rendering behind the current state (some games use previous game state(s) to keep the GPU busy). And yeah it annoys me when it happens.

Some people suggest high refreshrate monitors, but to me that feels like a workaround that lowers the problem's impact, but doesn't make the problem go away.

<comment> amiga-workbench Is the real solution here to use a display with adaptive sync?

<comment><USER18> Adaptive sync is not being used for composited desktop, only for apps that are fullscreen (i.e. no need to coordinate several different processes to random intervals).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > I'm able to focus better. I never get unprompted system popups on my screen > except during boot.

i3 helped me so much with focus. I can also move around and manage my entire workspace with my keyboard which feels more concise.

It's not really a time efficiency gain so to speak, more like a mental headroom gain that lets me be more productive. I'm not flicking between windows and spaces with alt-tab to try and find what I'm looking for. I'm just going right to what I want with a keyboard shortcut. It feels a lot more like working at a purpose built workstation rather than a consumer OS that I've stuffed software development tools into.

<comment><USER20> I tried getting into i3 but having to use the command line for things like selecting wifi, changing screens and battery saver modes is so cumbersome.

<comment><USER21> I had the same issues running i3 on top of Ubuntu, but Manjaro + i3 ([https://manjaro.org/download/community/i3/](https://manjaro.org/download/community/i3/)) ships with a nice GUI for managing this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _For instance, if I want to plug in a USB microphone, headphones, and two > displays to my computer all at once, I 'll have to do some configuration > through the command line to make them work correctly._

tbh this kind of thing is why I keep leaving linuxes/unixes/etcs. the amount of background knowledge you need to have to do this without spending hours each time is _immense_ , and I didn't grow up with it so I don't have it.

<comment><USER23> This is something I do regularly and I have no problems on Ubuntu 18.04. What's the matter exactly?

<comment><USER24> I was wondering the same thing. I've been on Ubuntu for 2 years now and I've never run into an issue here.

EDIT: I see it now. He's running Ubuntu SERVER with i3 window manager installed and not the actual desktop distro. Just a guess, but that's the root of the issue.

<comment><USER25> Yeah it beats me why people do this and then complain about Linux as a desktop.

<comment><USER26> I feel like it's an open problem at this point. I think Sway is the nicest experience (given that it's very similar to i3, while being more user-friendly and not hauling all the Xorg cruft), especially with multiple monitors and stuff like input configuration all centralized.

An idea: Provide a GUI (or web-based with local server, like Fish's configuration) application that lets you make changes like Wi-Fi, sound, displays, time and date, basic window manager configuration and all the other things that you'd need to go into a config file to fix. This could be paired with Sway or another tiling window manager and made into a distro for people currently using DEs to inch their way into a tiling WM.

<comment><USER27> Let's move all that into systemd services and make the DE just a DE that talks dbus to them :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I will say, using a more full featured desktop environment can help with the transition (KDE or Gnome). The issues you had with usb devices requiring you to drop into a shell go away. Things like external displays just work, removing the awkward xrandr fiddling before a presentation.

</comment><comment><USER29> For the screen tearing, I noticed you're using i3 which doesn't include a compositor. If you install Compton, that will fix the tearing issue. :)

<comment><USER30> With nvidia's driver and multiple displays I still get tearing with an active compositor. Took me a long time to discover the "Force Composition Pipeline" and "Force Full Composition Pipeline" options in nvidia-settings which fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Plus, open source has come a long way in terms of stability and reliability > over the past 5-10 years

I'd say the same about Windows ;-)

No. Seriously. My Linux environments have been rock solid since the early 2000's.

</comment><comment><USER31> Using Ubuntu since 2012 on i5 with 8GB RAM. Eclipse for Java Dev work. Thunderbird for Mail. Firefox my favourite browser. Skype for Call.

Never regretted anything.

Thing I like about this set up is that it does not come in way of getting things done.

</comment><comment><USER32> Gaming on Linux is fine these days. Surely not a blocker for switching for the most part (except for some edge cases like some multiplayer games that depend on some weird anti-cheats).

<comment><USER33> I've made quite other experiences with my setup. I'm not that experienced but with my Ubuntu and i3 setup with the standard drivers from Nvidia I couldn't get playonlinux or wine running. I can't exactly tell what the problem in the end was, but it definitely is not as easy as on Windows or even Mac imo.

<comment><USER32> I surely won't recommend Nvidia for anything Linux these days. Get a decent AMD card. That said, Nvidia should work with Wine too. Most problems with Wine are caused by missing dependencies, like 32-bit libraries that are often needed for 32-bit games naturally.

<comment> blaser-waffle Nvidia with the binary-blob drivers are fine. Not great, but fine. Some updates broke things and required work but got em fixed.

That said, looking at AMD for the next (linux) build, both in CPU and graphics card.

<comment><USER32> I wouldn't call them fine if you consider general progress of the Linux desktop. Their integration with the whole stack is simply broken, due to Nvidia refusing to upstream their drivers. It's the reason they for years couldn't support PRIME (Optimus) and Wayland use cases, and despite their very slow efforts to address that, a lot of it is still broken for their blob (like XWayland use case).

Basically, if you care about the progress of the Linux desktop, don't use Nvidia, since it's only holding it back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Screen tearing is usually a compositor issue. I still find it terrible that this is not dealt well by default in Ubuntu in 2019.

</comment><comment><USER35> Something I've appreciated after replacing Windows with Ubuntu on most of my machines is the ability for me to take its SSD out and put it in another computer. Really handy for travelling.

While I could get a small laptop for portability, its pretty hard to match the price/performance of a desktop. Also like how I can put together a desktop that is really quiet (PC has a NH-D15) even while under high load.

</comment><comment><USER36> The problems you mention that you haven't solved are solvable. Are you looking for advice? I admit, I don't quite understand the reason for the opening post.

<comment><USER12> The things I would miss most leaving Mac...

1\. Uploading my Signature in Preview and being able to sign and edit PDF documents on any of my Apple Devices.

2\. Screen rendering quality, on Mac everything seems to be sharper and more crisp than Linux on the same device.

3\. Keynote. I so want a cross-platform replacement that is nearly as good.

4\. iMessage integration with phone. I can send sms/iMessages from my Mac.

But I am planning to switch anyways. As all these companies move to a "service model", I feel like I am only leasing my software, and tools that make the hardware work. Furthermore, it feels impossible to get under the hood anymore.

Would love any advice or recommendations for the above.

<comment><USER37> For 2. That's funny, for me mac screens look like a blurry mess while Linux are the sharpest thing around with infinality patches.

For 4. There is kde connect (you don't need to run kde to have it). Works only with android though afaik.

<comment><USER7> Also messages.google.com with Android. But with the obvious caveat that you're giving extra data to Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I also tried using Ubuntu with i3 for several months. I went back to an iMac, for two reasons:

1) a 5K 27" screen means I can have 3 or sometimes even 4 columns of code on screen in my Emacs at the same time, and there is no way to get 5K with a PC

2) the totally broken clipboard in Linux causes constant annoyance: I want reliable, predictable copy/paste for text that works the same in every application, with the same keystrokes, and that does not auto-copy on selection (this is important, because I often want to paste OVER a selection)

All the other complaints I had were minor: I was able to somehow get the hardware to work, I did not connect external monitors (which has always been a disaster in Linux), stuff mostly worked. But these two were showstoppers.

<comment><USER39> Tangentially related, but I hate by-default enabled middle mouse paste on Firefox. I use autoscroll (hold middle mouse) to browsing, and it keeps sending paste on the site. Why is it enabled by default??

At best it's mild inconvenience, at worst it leaks company data to outside websites that bother to capture it.

<comment><USER40> Because this is how copy-paste always worked on X11.

I'm used to it, so I hate apps that don't respect it. The option to disable it is an app-specific option to override the environment's default behaviour.

<comment><USER39> Is there a way to globally disable middle mouse paste on X11? I don't really use it anywhere, and when i do, it's mostly by accident

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> >>Maybe I'm spoiled with Linux, but I like that I can install the OS without worrying about a license. Windows does this, and I don't know if it's the financial burden I don't like, the mental overhead of keeping track of where my licenses are, or perhaps even just the idea that I don't really have full control of my software.

I don't recall the last time I had to worry about licencing. The licence gets bound to the particular hardware ID and it activates on its own, you don't even have to type in the licence code anywhere during installation. Very weird argument to use against Windows nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER42> I also highly recommend Fedora. The polish is far higher than Ubuntu.

<comment><USER13> And just using a Gnome shell with almost no customization AND NOT WORRYING AT ALL ABOUT THAT is a huge productivity boost.

If we haven't wasted so many hours writing the perfect WM theme, selecting the perfect colors, making the perfect icons and backgrounds, we'd be long past the Singularity and enjoying our superintelligent agents taking care of our every need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't see any problem with re-installing windows though as often as you like.

By being a little disciplined, you can have a fresh install of windows, configured with all the apps you need from woah to go in little over a couple hours.

I like having a scriptable install of windows in case I completely lose a system while travelling, it's easy for me to completely restore and be productive again within a few hours (just buy a new laptop).

Choco really helps here too.

      choco feature enable -n allowGlobalConfirmation
      choco install googlechrome
      choco install firefox
      choco install 7zip
      choco install vlc
      choco install git
      choco install paint.net
      choco install sql-server-management-studio
      choco install vscode
      choco install visualstudio2019community

gets me to 90% of where I need to go.

<comment><USER44> Boxstarter makes it even easier, as you can just do Win+R, and type [https://boxstarter.org/package/nr/{packages](https://boxstarter.org/package/nr/{packages) from choco separated by commas}. It bootstraps chocolatey and installs everything, and I can be running on a new system in 10 minutes.

[https://boxstarter.org/](https://boxstarter.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Related: How do people manage their dotfiles? I have mine in a git repository, but then I have a hand maintained bash script to make symlinks from the right paths to those files in the repo.

<comment><USER46> Similar to you I keep mine in a git repository, but I use dotbot[1] to manage the symlinks to the proper paths.

[1] [https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot](https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I liked the last in point in particular. It's one of the reasons I don't keep dotfiles around and even my vim configuration is minimal.

I'd rather get used to defaults in case I need to use another computer in a pinch than getting used to a system and having to google how to do every little thing when in another system. I picked up that habit, when I had to work on remote servers nearly every day.

That's probably a bit zealous of me, but I've gotten used to it.

</comment><comment><USER48> I switched from win 10 to debian-10 because of incompatibility of docker with win 10. What a pain is that to install that stuff. Its back to 1990, lets install all from the command line. Took me over a day just to get my wireless working on a acer laptop. When that was finally working, had to spend a day to delete stuff because otherwise it wont update. Sudo became my friend. Its an insane experiment for 2019.

</comment><comment><USER49> It was maybe three or four hours after switching from Windows to Linux that I began being the biggest Linux snob in the entire world.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is 2019 the year of the Linux desktop?

<comment><USER51> Microsoft seems to think so.

<comment><USER52> When you can get Office on a Linux desktop I'll believe that.

<comment><USER51> It was a lighthearted remark, but primarily thinking of WSL. Let's face it, tiling window manager enthusiasts aside, relatively few people use Linux because of the glories of its GUI. WSL gives most people all the "desktop linux" they are likely to want.

<comment><USER53> KDE experience is far better that Windows 10

<comment><USER13> Gnome Shell is far better than Windows 10 for me.

From time to time I end up needing to figure out why someone's Windows laptop won't connect to my home wifi (where Linux, Macs, BSDs, Blackberry's and everything else connects to flawlessly) and I have to dig through the vendor- specific control panels that vary from vendor to vendor, from Windows to Windows, from OEM to OEM...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> What does HN think of storing your backup of your pics on Google Pictures?

It's free and has unlimited storage for typical quality photos. Is there any downside to this besides privacy concerns?

</comment><comment><USER55> it might be a good idea try a linux distro</comment>


Exploiting 'INSERT INTO' SQL Injections Ninja Style - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathyvanhoef.com/2011/10/exploiting-insert-into-sql-injections.html <comment><USER2> The fact that this article got any up votes, let alone 31, is a testament to how many non-programmers read this board. Like InclinedPlane said, Sanitizing database input is database 101. You can't even call yourself a hobbyist programmer until you understand that.

For non-technical people: If someone is building you a website, put a single backslash(and only that) in any text fields on your site. If it breaks when you submit, chances are good there is potential for SQL-injection. This is not a 100% check that will catch everything, heck it's not even a 70% check. But a poor programmer that doesn't know anything about SQL-injection will likely build code that fails this test.

<comment><USER3> You find it strange that this is upvoted on 'Hacker News'? Hackers like tinkering and understanding why things work. I understand the principles behind these flaws and am not interested in the article because I'm hoping it will teach me how to avoid SQL injection. The article is actually not about that; instead it's illustrates how a skilled attacker may specific features of MySQL to exploit flawed code in a stealthy way.

As a sysadmin, this is interesting. I help out people who run WordPress sites, for instance. While I do my best, on a practical level not all of the code can be audited or rewritten.

As an SQL coder, this is interesting as he's cleverly crafting code in a language I've spent a fair amount of time playing with, and about which I would like to know more. It's interesting to see how someone might do SQL injection in the same way you might wonder how people pick padlocks, despite having no need to pick padlocks yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! We all know SQL injections can be a common mistake. And the example php code is just that: An example. My focus wasn't the php code, or how to avoid this exploit, most of us already know that. But like you said the point is the interesting usage of SQL in this particular situation.

Glad you liked the post =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is not exploiting INSERT INTO; it's exploiting horrible developers.

Rule #1: Never trust the user.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is sort of interesting, but I'm not sure how it applies to non-black hats. If you are responsible for this code just switch it all to mysqli and be done with it.

<comment><USER6> Why do you believe only black hats should be able to understand various sql injections tricks like this?

<comment><USER5> These techniques seem to only be useful against absolutely brain dead coding practices. As I said, if you're responsible for this code it's not useful to understand every aspect of this vulnerability, you just switch to a different implementation (preferably parameter binding using mysqli). This analysis is like learning techniques on how to stealthily steal a bike that is "locked" up with nothing more than twine. That's not really useful except in an "all knowledge is useful" sense.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, I really dont agree. I have two roles that I regularly play as a developer, one is 'creating a solution from scratch', and in that situation - as you have said, I dont really need to be aware of these kinds of possibilities, just because I can avoid the problem entirely. Unfortunately the other role I frequently play is 'performing work on something someone else has built', and in that case I rarely have the ability to throw out everything that is there and start from scratch - which means I have to have an understanding of this kind of thing and know what kinds of changes will provide the greatest 'hit' in terms of security, while balancing those changes against the possibility of breaking existing work.

Besides, I find knowledge useful in a general sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In 2011, one should never need to resort to building SQL with string concatenation in web applications.

If you are on Python, consider using SQLAlchemy or OurSQL. If you are on PHP, consider using Doctrine, Propel, or PDO.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought they were phasing these functions out (mysql)? I've been using PDO for the last couple of years.

<comment><USER9> The problem is not which driver you use. It's whether you concatenate strings to form sql queries and then execute them against your database.

<comment><USER2> I think the point he was trying to make, was that using prepared statements with PDO or mysqli would prevent this

<comment><USER8> exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> is it works also with prepared statements ? or only with really lame code ?

<comment><USER9> It's injection attacks. Using prepared statements will prevent that.

<comment><USER11> It is not actually prepared statements that does that, it is parametrized statements. Prepared statements is a related by mostly orthogonal concept.

Prepared statements are about caching parsing and query planning and storing queries for future use, this gains performance and convenience but not necessarily security. You can use parametrized queries without storing them as prepared queries at the server. This is what Perl DBI, libpq (the C binding for PostgreSQL) and many others do.

In PostgreSQL you can use PREPARE and EXECUTE directly instead of through the convenience functions in your driver and be vulnerable to SQL injections. E.g.

      PREPARE foo (boolean) AS SELECT $1;
      EXECUTE foo (pg_terminate_backend(42)));

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Escape your strings. Ninja problem solved.</comment>


ASK HK: Review my startup: NextCoast, a total web CMS. - <AUTHOR>

Please review my startup, NextCoast. Essentially it's a full CMS platform that does Social Networking--as in your own private social network, an easy CMS, blogging, Mobile Web (in development) and online collaboration
Right now our target market is small-medium businesses, giving them tools to do everything from a small scale website through our CMS to collaboration with the social piece of our application.In the future we will be expanding to professional companies, offering a fully integrated CMS with social, collaboration, and CRM.
What are your thoughts on our site, our approach and our software?
Thanks in advance for all your help!
Link: http://nextcoast.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't think small-to-medium businesses will know what CMS, or a next- generation web application are.

Is your web site powered by your software? If so, I'd suggest that your software support SEO-friendly link-paths like Drupal or Wordpress (bringing that up because they're on your front page)

From what I can tell from your web site, you're offering turn-key hosting for people who don't want to set up and run their own Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal sites - instead they'll use your software? I think the problem is that your web page is using jargon you understand, not that they would understand. I'm guessing that your customers will 1) not want to think about web, they want to run a coffee shop or whatever 2) want guaranteed pricing (which you offer, which is great) 3) a good design - do you do graphic/web design as well, or are you working with someone? 4) Want someone local. Where are you? Your tagline could be

My opinion of your software is that you've recreated Drupal, which is fine, but there are so many modules available for Drupal that you'll always be playing catchup.

Hope this helps, you can criticize one of my web sites if you want :)

</comment><comment><USER3> The description above is clearer than the website. The picture of the iPhone makes me think you are a mobile software development company. Why does the iPhone screen read "Lewis Direct"?

The text links at the top ("Home", "Social", "Website", "Mobile") aren't spaced far enough apart for me to parse them as different links. Coupled with the "Web Social Mobile Monetize" text in the header graphic they create an overwhelming impression of jargon which dissuades me from wanting to read the actual text. You could probably link to most of those pages from a single "about us" page and keep the main page cleaner and your signup funnel more focused.

Nobody reads these days, so I think having such a mass of text is a bad idea front and center. The stronger bits of the page are further down. Unfortunately, everything below the green bar rolls offscreen on my 13 inch Macbook, so the immediate impression is simply of a lot of text in a fairly unreadable color scheme. The strongest explanation you have is ("Web + Blog + Social") imho, although you might want to double-check that the wording resonates with your target market -- people might be very clear that they want a website rather than a blog and calling your system a blog might put them off.

Most powerful inducement to checking out the CMS would probably be seeing it in action. Drupal lets people play around with a live version that gets reset every now and then. Could you do something similar, so that people can see and play around with what they'll be buying?

All suggestions intended constructively. Good luck with the business!

<comment><AUTHOR> You can go to sign up, and get your own site to play with for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Site: Typography is inconsistent and hard on the eyes. Spacing is off. I'd recommend looking into a WooTheme.

You don't show us what you've actually built.

I clicked on "Mobile" and instead of an actual mobile app, I saw a traditional website crammed into an iPhone screen.

Approach: I can't speak to your engineering capability, but from a product & marketing standpoint (1) you're probably trying to do too much, and (2) you should look at investing more in design/usability.

</comment><comment><USER5> Adam, firstly thank you for building this. There is a real need for this. As many others here will point out to you, your website is not delivering your product message or value proposition. However, that's a separate concern from evaluating the product itself.

Overlooking the problems with the site copy and design, I went on to sign up to try it out. It took me a couple of attempts to register. I'm not your target customer, but even so do you really need to know your customer's date of birth? Finally, when I click on the link in the registration email, I land on a page which says before I use anything, I must contact an account representative. My login is failing even though I'm pretty sure I'm using the correct username and password.

If as a techie, I found your site hard to navigate, it's going to be nearly impossible to get non-techies to use or buy it.

I understand you are building a difficult product, but there's a lot of research to be done to catch up with the latest developments in this space.

For starters, please see <http://www.weebly.com> for a well-executed version of your idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> As far as I can see _get your social network website running in the time it takes to make coffee_ (adapted from one of the sub-pages) is your core value proposition, and it should be in big letters on the home page instead of generic phrases like "leap-frog your competition and be a leader, not a follower" and sentences listing technologies.

Much of your text reads like it was written for search engines rather than humans to read, and your screenshots and examples could be a _lot_ more attractive.

Looking at the price points you're looking to charge, paying a professional designer and copywriter would be worth the money here, assuming the end product is fit for purpose.

</comment><comment><USER7> Far too much text on every single page of your site. I clicked through them all but didn't want to spend 10 minutes reading just to figure out what you do. Fix this with a big, catchy headline along with a short 2-3 sentence description of what you do and a video or screenshots of your software.

</comment><comment><USER7> Clickable: <http://nextcoast.com/></comment>


Show HN: Sharp11 – Music Theorization and Improvisation Engine - <AUTHOR> http://julianrosenblum.com/sharp11-client/ <comment><USER2> Very nice. Is the function that determines whether a chord inversion is likely to be correct based on any sort of well-known algorithm? I don't have the musical fluency to comprehend what the intervals all correspond to. Seems like a neat solution, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally original. I came up with it by looking at lots of examples and seeing patterns emerge. It's not perfect, but it turns out that checking a select few indicators is sufficient in the vast majority of cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/jsrmath/sharp11](https://github.com/jsrmath/sharp11)

</comment><comment><USER4> I am usually fiddling with or listening to livecoded music, which evolves in time from silence to (sometimes) pleasing sounds, so it was refreshing to hear more consonant and familiar sounds. I thoroughly enjoy playing with this, but I would have to learn more music theory to really 'get it'. Amazing!

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds a lot like a high schooler just getting into improvisation. There's little art going on here. What about phrases? Motivic development? There's more to improvisation than just scales and rhythm.

And I say that was a composition major.

</comment><comment><USER6> How do you generate your rhythms? Is there structure or just randomness?

<comment><AUTHOR> Configurable randomness. A particular beat has probabilities of containing eighth notes, triplets, or sixteenth notes based on the "Rhythmic Variety" setting, and those notes have a probability of being rests based on the "Rests" setting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That is cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER8> The improvisations are really cool!

</comment><comment><USER9> don't give up your day job</comment>


Pakistan leaks photos of people shot at Bin Laden compound - <AUTHOR> http://english.aljazeera.net/video/asia/2011/05/201155161514334290.html

<comment><USER2> To whom do these photos do any good? Pure necrophilia.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that word means what you think it means.

<comment><USER2> I know what I said.</comment></comment></comment>


Logitech limits number of additions and deletions of Harmony Hub devices - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/esiv9b/psa_to_harmony_hub_users_avoid_unnecessary/ <comment><USER3> So first Sonos, and now Logitech, effectively bricking devices to discourage and impede a second hand market for their products.

Not only is it anti-consumer, it's ecologically unsound, preventing re-use of a working product and encouraging more plastic crap to go to landfill.

Interesting to note that these are both premium brands. Are they relying on the majority of their customers being non tech savvy and unaware of the policy, or are they betting that most customers will accept the practice?

My guess is that they're assuming that revenue from customers forced to purchase a new, not secondhand product, exceeds revenue loss from those who are aware of the policy and won't purchase. Short term thinking, at best.

<comment><USER4> I think they rely on laziness.

It's easier to buy a new product than complain about it to support, so out of a 100, maybe 5 will complain, and maybe 60 will buy a new product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it really so hard for companies to not do these shitty things? What would the increase in profit be? Does outweigh all the negative PR? Do they even think about this? There must be some rationale....

<comment><USER6> It does not. Probably the decisions are not thought out that well. In the end these things haunt them for years. Look at m$, even after all the years of open sourcing, contributing and etc. they are still not trusted. Few other examples pop to my mind: medium.com, oracle, google (graveyard), ethereum (fork), 2016+ apple keyboards and so on

<comment><USER7> Except that it doesn't really matter and most people in general don't care because they don't know. Say what you want about Microsoft, but the fact is the world runs on Windows and MS Office with exceptions for fraction of macs and some weird geeks running some funny penguin systems. Not only that, but if you're young enough you never had a chance to experience the 'evil Microsoft'. Same goes in similar fashion for other companies you've mentioned: Oracle/Ethereum - what's that? Google - the world runs on it and Gmail. Apple keyboards - 'it works for me' and so on and so forth, sadly.

<comment><USER6> I do agree with you on general point. However, I don't think reputations are to be dealt in absolutes. I would like to discuss your points one by one:

> Microsoft

* MS Office is still the best office suite as of today, I don't think anyone would argue.

* Windows is still the most 'compatible' and 'easy to use' OS today for non-apple hardware. I don't think penguin system users will argue. This is coming from someone who used linux with breaks for 10~ years. It is still _hard_ to get it working as it was years ago. However, for years I heard many developers refusing to consider anything .NET, MSSQL,... related to be picked for tech stacks due microsoft history and current ecosystem. Money definitely lost on their part

> Oracle

* Same, tech people refusing to get involved with Oracle due their litigious nature. Money definitely lost

> Ethereum

* I am not the best person to talk about this and this might not be the example. Fork reduced my trust in cryptos in general as my expectations were different.

> Google

* Gmail is great email service. On top of that free. Same with Google search. However I would argue that Google new products which "lock you in" will not be as popular because of their abandonment of many services

> Apple keyboards

* This is more personal, but I saw similar experiences from others. Terrible keyboard, terrible replacement keyboard reduced my trust so much that I moved from their ecosystem. This is on top that components were soldered resulting in non modular expensive laptops (can't replace it myself fast/cheap). Money definitely lost on their part

Edit: formatting

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My squeezebox radio is a damn fine machine with the best sound among my bluetooth speakers, but it is now almost completely useless since it has not been updated in years and spotify dropped support.

This is planned obsolescence at its worst, opening up firmware once you drop support for a product should be mandatory.

<comment><USER9> This is not planned obsolescence. People used to complain about PO but with smart devices there is no need for it, the manufacturer can just disable your device remotely and invent some bullshit business reason for it.

<comment><USER10> Is there a term for that? I was thinking "hostile obsolescence" or "active obsolescence".

<comment><USER11> Obsolescence as a service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> See the comment on Limitations on Unifying Devices too: [https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/esiv9b/psa_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/esiv9b/psa_to_harmony_hub_users_avoid_unnecessary/)

<comment><USER12> That is insane. What could possibly lead to those decisions?

<comment> m-p-3 Greed mostly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ok, I will never by anything from Logitech. They obvious have zero respect for their customers.

I wonder how the product manager sold this feature to management? I don't think many people's bonus is contingent on "let maximize how hated our brand it".

<comment><USER14> they still make the best right handed mice, after all these years.

but yeah, the Hub was an interesting piece of tech I maybe wanted to get sometime, not anymore.

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL I actually have to disagree, I bought Logitech stuff for the last 14 years. At some point, anything I bought from them was amazing (i have a g9 that lasted me 10 years, I still use the g600, various keyboards, the g13 for gaming).

Now, I purchased the G502 and used it for a year (at work and home, lot of use). I had to stop, their pointy finger area is elevated instead of "dropping" like traditional mouse. The consequences are that you put strength through the whole finger for a click, rather than a soft push on the tip. I developed finger pain after a year, had to switch mouse.

<comment><USER14> thanks for the warning. what did you change to?

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL I had an unused g600 and went back to that. It's comfortable, although I do miss the "free spin" of the wheel. I use the 3rd mouse button as middle click (it's on the ring finger). Since I use that a lot, saves me dealing with hard to click wheel buttons

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > Due to the product Terms of Use. Next time, your remote will no longer be > able to make further updates to its configuration, when it gets disabled.

How can this possibly be a thing on a device you paid for and own?

I mean, I know how it can be implemented through software, but why is it not illegal?

<comment><USER15> I suspect what you paid for and what you own is the hardware itself. The rest (software) is licensed on certain terms.

I don't think this distinction would hold up in court, though, at least in the EU, where consumer rights are somewhat protected. When you buy a physical device with certain functionality described on the box, you have a reasonable expectation that it will deliver said functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's next, geofencing so that devices are bricked once they leave the building in which they're first set up?

<comment><USER17> VCRs had something like that due to technical differences. DVD players had region locking on purpose.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code)

Vodafone DE had exactly what you describe with their home 4G modems - <USER2> to within a km or post code of your home iirc. Still probably does.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, a home modem which you are renting as part of a contract to receive 4G under certain terms is quite different to a consumer product you bought in a shop bricking itself when you sell it to someone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, that sucks.

IMHO, Logitech has (or is it had?) pretty outstanding hardware. I had two RumblePad 2 (the original ones) that survived over 10 years of abuse (buttone mashing, dropping, rage due to losing to my brother 30 times in a row in fighting games). Still the best gamepads I've ever used.

Are there any realistic alternatives to Logitech?

<comment> saiya-jin Microsoft's Xbox ones are actually preferred and compatible these days on PC. They work out of the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> and so it turns out "Smart" just means "always online DRM for hardware".

</comment><comment><USER21> Would people who buy used devices actually buy a new one instead if they can not find a used one? I've got a vague feeling that the overlap of used- and new-buyers might not be large enough to justify the practice.

It reminds a bit of movie piracy where exorbitant losses were claimed while ignoring that people would not have bought _each and every_ movie instead of pirating it.

<comment><USER22> The overlap probably isn't big, but it depends on the type of device. For instance, I've bought plenty of used computer hardware from a certain local vendor selling off-lease equipment. So at the cost of accepting that the device was used for a year or two in some company and may have a scratch here and there, I could score a decent display or a laptop at 1/3 of the price of a new model. If I can't find what I want this way, I usually do pony up and buy new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't get the rationale behind these policies.

I mean, there must be a set number of allowed resets/additions/deletions.

Two possible extreme cases:

1) this (unknown) set amount is so large that the overwhelming majority of users (let's say 99%) won't ever hit it

2) this (unknown) set amount is so small that the overwhelming majority of users (let's say 99%) is likely to hit it before or later

If #1 it makes no sense as it affects such a small number of devices to be irrelevant, if #2 it makes no sense because it would cause an uproar of the customer base.

And the sheer fact that there is a set limit to reset/additions/delections that is not explicited in documentation exposes the manufacturer to possible lawsuits.

 _Cui bono_?

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

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow this is crappy. I know you didn't really own your software, but sounds like you don't even own hardware products anymore either. Then I know this is a worry about cars and tractors too, I think years ago one was trying to say it's copyright infringement to repair your own tractor.

<comment> m-p-3 John Deere is the company you have in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's despicable.

I bought a Harmony Hub a while ago to turn my projector on and off (and set my stereo to the right input) with Amazon Alexa. The UI and setup process are really terrible. Can anyone recommend a good alternative?

(I actually intended it just as a stopgap until I hack my own IoT IR blaster, but haven't gotten around to it)

<comment><USER26> I am not aware of any serious competition. But it seems like a fairly simple product for a startup to create, and the market is probably huge.

<comment><USER14> the IR signals DB though...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 This is the kind of thing I'd send Logitech to small claim court if that happened to me. If you can't play nice with a device I purchased and own, then I deserve to get my money back.

It sucks, I kinda like Logitech products and own many, but unless they change their practices, they're on my blacklist.

</comment><comment><USER27> There it is, even companies that had good reputation start doing it. You no longer own what you guy, you now have everything as a service, even the hardware you think you own.

</comment><comment><USER28> What happened to the company that had a generous warranty policy? I went through 3 keyboard replacements for free and got a newer model each time. I miss that.

<comment><USER29> Can you explain the reason for replacing your keyboard 3 times and in what frame time?

That seems a bit excessive.

</comment></comment><comment> Joseph-Stalin Eh, this is a little too authoritarian for me.

</comment><comment><USER30> Current title: "Logitech limits number of device resets to prevent reselling"

Is there a way to down-vote stories? This is just a link to a reddit thread where one or more random people think it might be "to prevent reselling", and there are numerous other hypotheses in the same thread...

<comment><USER21> Submissions can not be downvoted but they can be flagged. If there is no _flag_ link below the submission title, it is because you do not have reached the karma-threshold for it. The threshold is most likely there to prevent abuse of the downvote or flag feature by new accounts. If I remember correctly I could downvote after reaching approximately 500 karma.</comment></comment>


Why So Few Women In The Technology Industry - <AUTHOR> http://glipho.com/techmediafusion/why-so-few-women-in-the-technology-industry

<comment><USER2> Surely video bloggers are in the media industry, not the tech industry?

</comment><comment><USER3> The same talk, over and over again. The problem is DRY!</comment>


Simple techniques to improve your health in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/2015/07/10/simple-techniques-to-improve-your-health-in-2015/ <comment><USER2> "The current nutrition fads favour low-card high-protein diets"

What level of card consumption is recommended?

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting and educating post. But i want to know is there any standard way to measure the requires amount sleep one needs in each 24 hours- i'm asking because i rarely have up to 5 hours sleep per day?</comment>


How L1-minimization can recover highly degraded images - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_algorithm/all/1

<comment><USER2> Only in the world of cookie-cutter journalism could this be described as a "chance discovery"-- a professor intentionally tests an algorithm, hoping to solve exactly the problem described, and discovers it works better than expected.

From the article: "Compressed sensing was discovered by chance... Candes... was experimenting with a badly corrupted version of the phantom meant to simulate the noisy, fuzzy images you get when an MRI isn't given enough time to complete a scan. Candes thought a mathematical technique called l1 minimization might help clean up the streaks a bit... Candes expected the phantom on his screen to get slightly cleaner. But then suddenly he saw it sharply defined and perfect in every detail..."

<comment><USER3> Also, this (again, from the article) is just bizarre:

"At present, most of our audiovisual info is stored in sophisticated compression formats. If, or when, the format becomes obsolete, you've got a painful conversion project on your hands. But in the CS future, Candès believes, we'll record just 20 percent of the pixels in certain images, like expensive-to-capture infrared shots of astronomical phenomena. Because we're recording so much less data to begin with, there will be no need to compress. And instead of steadily improving compression algorithms, we'll have steadily improving decompression algorithms that reconstruct the original image more and more faithfully from the stored data."

Someone, Candès or the author, doesn't seem to understand what they're talking about.

<comment><USER4> Why do you say that? Seems like a reasonable application of compressed sensing.

<comment><USER5> You can't generate information from nothing. Compression based on sparsity seems to be making assumptions about the level of detail in a picture[1]. If you stored 20% of the pixels in Obama's face you may miss a spot of acne.

I can't imagine trusting to this technique for pictures of the galaxy. After spending a bazillion dollars on a space telescope we aren't going to "throw away 80% of the pixels".

[1] - I'm not certain of this deduction. Can somebody with more background confirm or deny?

<comment><USER6> Isn't this a case where entropy shows it isn't possible? Once you degrade the quality/quantity of the information, you can't get it back. You can find a clever way to hide what you did, but this doesn't add information, you're just interpolating. This isn't bad however, as we normally don't use all data we could (do you look at your pictures with 400% zoom factor?), and a rescaled image can highlight some detail you would have missed.

By the way, those bazillion dollars aren't wasted, because if you take the image, don't throw away pixels, but do as if it were a bigger image which had lost pixels, you can get something useful out of it.

<comment><USER7> > Isn't this a case where entropy shows it isn't possible?

Most real world pictures are not random. So you can guess what it looks like from areas near it.

<comment><USER8> More precisely, the entropy of real world pictures is considerably lower than the entropy of all pictures (the vast majority of pictures are static).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For a much better explanation of this stuff from Terry Tao (mentioned in the article as being responsible for much of the theoretical basis of the technique; Fields medallist; very very smart chap) see [http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/compressed- sensing-...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/compressed-sensing-and- single-pixel-cameras/) .

One important way in which I think the Wired piece is Just Plain Wrong: you _don't_ sample a small fraction of the individual image pixels. You take a small number of samples, each of which is a kinda-random combination of image pixels.

Some examples and further quite-friendly explanation here: <http://www.acm.caltech.edu/l1magic/examples.html> .

More from Tao: [http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/the-uniform- uncerta...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/the-uniform-uncertainty- principle-and-compressed-sensing/) and [http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/reflections-on- comp...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/reflections-on-compressed- sensing/) both of which are mostly links to more detailed things, well worth reading if you don't mind mathematics.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the link; that made a lot more sense. The way Wired described it made it sound like the L1 minimization was almost irrelevant. The closest to a pseudocode I could get out of their article was something like: 1) apply an L1 minimization to do a first-cut noise reduction on some random noisy data; 2) apply an iterative algorithm to the result until convergence. That made it sound like all the magic was in the invention of some crazy algorithm for #2, which isn't really the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is a more detailed explanation of how this works.

Imagine you have a pixel image, with missing data, and with noise. Imagine you know _a-priori_ that the image was generated simply by placing a few white circles against a black background. Then data was lost/discarded, and white noise was added to the remaining data.

(The white circles are cross sections of the patient's blood vessels or some such feature (bile ducts, in this case), and contain a contrast agent. The contrast agent appears white on the MRI, everything else appears black. )

Now that you know the pixel image has such a simple form, you don't need to do fancy noise removal to clean it up. All you need to do is figure out where the white circles are. Once you know where the are, you can just redraw the image based on your calculated locations of circles instead of reprocessing the old one.

You can play the same trick in k-space, which gives you a potent MRI reconstruction algorithm.

In practice, this doesn't work as well for more complicated images such as brains or abdomens. There is just much more to draw, and the images cease to be sparse.

<comment><USER4> >In practice, this doesn't work as well for more complicated images such as brains or abdomens. There is just much more to draw, and the images cease to be sparse.

Compressed sensing works just fine for brains, abdomens etc.. because the images need to be sparse in _some_ basis (e.g. wavelets), not in the original space.

<comment><USER8> I haven't seen any good compressed sensing reconstruction for brains, though I'm not 100% up to date on the literature. Can you give me a cite?

The best I've seen is Candes/Donoho's reconstruction based on curvelets, but they don't offer any real improvement over regular reconstruction.

<comment><USER4> Check out Lustig's thesis. He finds that you can keep the same brain image quality while accelerating the sampling considerably.

[http://yonit.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/axs/ax.pl?http://www- mrsrl...](http://yonit.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/axs/ax.pl?http://www- mrsrl.stanford.edu/~mlustig/thesis.pdf)

<comment><USER11> Has someone been able to improve the (spatial or temporal) resolution of fMRI scans using this technique?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems really interesting, but I don't understand why you'd get rid of 90% of the image -- wouldn't it be much more useful to simply enhance the current images to 10x higher resolution?

That seems to be what the scientists are doing for the MRI, but the author seems to think this would be useful in that it would allow people to throw away a lot of data. I think it would be much better for extrapolating even farther from the data we have.

<comment><USER13> It's more that you only need to collect 10% of the data to begin with, not necessarily throw away 90% of what you do have.

<comment><USER14> It turns out that the gains from only computing the paths of a subset of the rays are offset by the cost of recovering the compressively sensed data.

I could be wrong, though -- I only did this back-of-the-envelope a few months ago. I never really tried that hard to make it work.

<comment><USER15> (I'm assuming this is a reply to my raytracing comment)

This is most likely true. Additionally, raytracing just might produce samples that are too regular for this to work well. I haven't really thought about it :)

<comment><USER13> Regularity helps, not hinders, but it's surely not going to be real-time. It _might_ be faster than ray tracing every pixel, but that depends on many factors that I don't know/understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's some confusion between "compressed sensing" and "L1-minimization" in the comments and the article.

L1 minimization here refers to trying to represent the image as a linear combination of basis functions a1 f1+a2 f2+ ... by minimizing objective function fit(a1,a2,...)+sum_i |a_i| where "fit" represents how closely the reconstruction fits the image (for instance, squared distance). The second term in the sum is the L1 norm of the parameter vector, and it has a special property of being non-differentiable at 0, and often causing individual components a_i to become exactly 0 during minimization, hence resulting in "sparse" solution vector.

Compressed sensing refers to the idea that when the image is sparse in the chosen basis {fi}, it's sufficient to take a small number of random measurements of the image. We can then compute "fit" approximately which gives us a different objective function that we minimize. The result will be close to what we'd get if we used the original (full) "fit" function

</comment><comment><USER17> Enhance!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk>

<comment><USER18> Better: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cool. Didn't expect so much interest on HN for a highly mathematical concept.

If you're interested in a blog solely focussed on CS, here's one: <http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/>

<comment><USER20> gane5h, thanks for the plug :)

For compressed sensing to work when one needs to know in advance that the signal (image or anything else really) is sparse or compressible, Once this is known, one needs two findings that are just plain surprising and are the reason there is so much excitement in this area:

\- the signal needs to be acquired "incoherently" and there is much work going on in that area, Most hardware is currently not designed to do this incoherent acquisition (this can be done cheaply in MRI which is why you see some applications there) and much work is currently going into designing new sensors that can performed this new kind of acquisition, Much of them are listed here: <http://igorcarron.googlepages.com/compressedsensinghardware>

\- once it is "incoherently" acquired, then one can reconstruct the original signal using linear programming technique solving an l1 problem, But after four years of intense competition between different groups, we now have faster solvers that are approximately solving the l1 problem without linear programming or the lp (p between 0 and 1) and even L0 problems..

For more information, you may want to check the blog or the big picture site: <http://igorcarron.googlepages.com/cs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I might be mistaken (I'm not an expert), but isn't the article mixing up compressed sensing and low-rank matrix completion?

edit: Also, they present all of compressed sensing as if it were just that one algorithm for image reconstruction (which samples in the original space, rather than an incoherent basis). Tech media fail?

<comment><USER21> Compressed sensing and matrix completion are almost the same (take that with a large set of caveats, but the basic L1 recovery process is the same.) Tech media fail, anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why hasn't this made it into Photoshop or GIMP yet? What would it take to implement this to enhance images?

<comment><USER8> Gimp doesn't have this because in addition to the image, you need explicit knowledge of where the image came from.

Suppose you have an image which you already know is a cartoon. Compressed sensing can clean it up, but uses explicit knowledge of what cartoons look like. Similarly, if you know the image is scanned text, a different compressed sensing algorithm based on scanned text can clean it up.

But if you don't know where the image comes from to begin with, compressed sensing won't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm curious about what are the consequences of the discovery.

What effects will this have on the storage of photos?

Can this principal be extrapolated to other forms of data?

<comment><USER4> Despite the article's somewhat confusing presentation, compressed sensing isn't primarily about photos. It's a principle that can be used to reconstruct any sort of signal from a small number of measurements. The only requirement is that we can find a representation for that signal that is sparse (every signal maps to some vector of mostly 0s). Luckily, most natural signals have this property (whereas random noise is not sparse in any representation).

The fundamental breakthrough here is that we can acquire signals (photos, recordings, MRI volumetric images, etc...) using a much smaller number of samples than previously thought possible. A useful application: let radiologists accurately image the body in less time. A weird application: Single-pixel cameras ([http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2006/10/single- pixel-c...](http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2006/10/single-pixel- camera.html))

<comment><USER23> Thank you for the more in-depth explanation. The signal pixel camera is an interesting application.

I would imagine one of the most powerful applications would be compression of files. Might make things easy for big websites like facebook. Or allow zip to make files smaller. Or a flash card that hold more information.

I'd had to learn more about the technology. But EE standpoint there are two big questions:

 _How fast is the process?_ I'd imagine that it work fast enough for images, voice and but not fast enough for video. I'd imagine the speed will increase as people start playing with it.

 _And does the photo have to be compressed using the algorithm?_ The single pixel camera idea and many other signal capture operations really open up if you can just take a swab of the signal at random intervals. Perhaps a cool little program could be written to hunt for the necessary data points and capture them.

This technology will definitely bring improvement to many fields over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> More details: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=756176></comment>


Show HN: GaIn Index. Data visualization site.  - <AUTHOR> http://gain.globalai.org/

<comment><USER2> I'm just curious, how long did it take you to build this? There are a lot of js frameworks put to work here :))

<comment><AUTHOR> First Github commit happened on July 29th. Today was the launch date. As for the data itself, the model went through several consultation rounds for over 8-ish months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Built with node.js, backbone.js, mapbox, d3.js, modestmaps.js and more.</comment>


Vintage "Soviet Santa" Postcards Were Propaganda for the Space Race (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://hyperallergic.com/476788/vintage-soviet-santa-postcards-were-propaganda-for-the-space-race/ <comment><USER2> As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union/Russia, this brings back a TON of nostalgic memories. The entire aesthetic is triggering (in a positive way)

I don't take a jaded approach to the idea that there is an intersection between my childhood innocence and state propaganda. Plenty of North American traditions I see my wife and friends feeling nostalgia for are also based on church or state "ideals" that become beloved traditions over time.

You only call the Soviet ones "propaganda" because the USSR was the enemy.

<comment><USER3> It is called propaganda because it is advertising which is paid and sponsored by the state. Also propaganda does not try to encourage the sale of a product, service or idea. Propaganda is not bad per see (like in this case - it is actually very nice).

And also this is not "Santa" \- it is Дед Мороз (father frost).

<comment><USER4> If you want to think of propaganda in terms of advertising, it's sort of judgement advertising. Doesn't really matter who pays for it. The purpose is to not let people make their own judgements on certain things. While the purpose of advertising products is to inform public about existence of products. Using propaganda in advertisement is usually illegal too.

<comment><USER5> >the purpose of advertising products is to inform public about existence of products.

Really? It's not like any of us don't know of the existence of Coca-Cola; I think that the vast majority of advertising we encounter on a daily basis is for products we know about already (even though this is probably less true now than it was towards the beginning of my life.)

> Using propaganda in advertisement is usually illegal too.

citation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So does that mean that these are also propaganda?

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/First_ma...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/First_man_on_the_moon.jpg)

[http://cconnect.s3.amazonaws.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/10/...](http://cconnect.s3.amazonaws.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/10/2011-Topps-American-Pie-Base-Card-First-American-in- Space.jpg)

[https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV- AD398_VISUAL_G...](https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV- AD398_VISUAL_G_20110701032530.jpg)

Is celebrating your achievements propaganda?

<comment><USER7> Any art form that was created by the Soviet artists will be considered propaganda since it was state sanctioned. And they were pretty vocal and straightforward about that, art was to educate the people. In US, art many times is just away to make money. But I actually prefer the propaganda art. My favorite propaganda movies are by Tarkovsky - Mirror and Stalker....

<comment><USER8> > Any art form that was created by the Soviet artists will be considered > propaganda since it was state sanctioned

How does this follow? Are US Army ads propaganda? How about NASA posters? Agricultural statistics leaflets?

What do you call media that uses manipulative language to stir popular feeling through appeals to emotion that was privately funded?

Nowhere in the dictionary does it say it's propaganda iff it's state- sanctioned: [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/propaganda](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/propaganda)

<comment><USER9> Well there was America's Army[1], a video developed for the US Army. There are a whole series of these games and if they are not propaganda I don't know what is.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Army](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Army)

<comment><USER8> I'm not asking if the US army has ever produced propaganda. I'm asking if _everything_ it produces is propaganda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If NASA put out these postcards, we'd call them "marketing". Why is everything Russian "propaganda"?

<comment><USER10> Propaganda is meant to convey or reinforce an ideology. Since, at this time in history, there was a real "hearts and minds" battle between East and West, these kinds of campaigns can safely be considered propaganda. Similar postcards made by NASA at this time would certainly be propaganda as well.

A similar example in the West today is those ads for the US Army they sometimes show before movies.

<comment><USER11> JFK's famous "we choose to go to the moon" speech would be propaganda also.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting that their Santa looks a lot like the US/UK version of Santa designed by Nast, later popularized by the Coca-Cola Co.[1], and not a continental Santa.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_suit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_suit)

<comment><USER13> It is supposed to be [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ded_Moroz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ded_Moroz), not Santa. (The article somewhat implies that Ded Moroz was a communist invention based on Santa Claus, but in fact this is not true.) And you can see even in the postcards and the article that he doesn't necessarily has a red dress, although I suspect (maybe some Russian can clarify) that the red dress is the influence of the West.

<comment><USER14> Russian Wikipedia says Ded Moroz is a merger of earlier folk and literary characters in Pagan-like tradition, with Saint Nicholas who was imported in the mid- to late 19th century.

E.g. this card is Saint Nicholas from sometime before the 1917 revolution: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ded_Moroz_Snegurochk...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ded_Moroz_Snegurochka_Christmas_card.jpg)

while this is an interpretation of the old Moroz character in traditional garb, by Victor Vasnetsov: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%94%D0%B5%D0%B4_%...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%94%D0%B5%D0%B4_%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B7.jpg)

White coat seems to be more in line with the tradition, but frankly I dunno if Ded got much of graphic development before Nick swooped in, as he seems to be more of a figure of fairy tales and some literature.

It's left to dig up why the card above depicts a Nicholas of Nast's design.

<comment><USER15> > Saint Nicholas who was imported in the mid- to late 19th century.

St. Nicholas is a hugely popular patron saint in the orthodox church, he was not imported from the west. The average person there probably knows more about actual Nicholas from history than many elsewhere.

One of the things Nicholas is famous for is punching a heretic and by this and associated actions resolving the huge theological controversy of Arianism and resulting in the nicene creed used directly or as a basis for most other creeds in other forms of christianity (see also great schism & filioque). Incidentally Arianism has a resurgence in some strands of protestantism, which of course, speaking of propaganda, is more prevalent in countries favoring the historically devoid Macy's Red Reindeer 'Santa Claus'..

Here is an article with many russian faithful including Putin venerating a rib bone of st nicholas:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40062807](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40062807)

But yes, this does have little to do with the red 'miracle on 34th street' shopping and reindeer st nicholas, and that is probably an import, true

more about actual nicholas from a russian-ish source:

[https://russian-crafts.com/russian-saints-icons/st- nicholas....](https://russian-crafts.com/russian-saints-icons/st- nicholas.html)

<comment><USER14> From what I gathered, Orthodox Nicholas didn't have the habit of giving gifts to kids, which is what the folks sought to borrow from Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not even a single Снегурочка on this cards? No concept of women in the bright space future!?

<comment><USER17> There aren't any on this page but the Soviets definitely had space posters/postcards with women too. Especially since the first woman cosmonaut predated the first woman astronaut by 20 years.

Example: [https://66.media.tumblr.com/cb254106ab11f89194fc172c1948f897...](https://66.media.tumblr.com/cb254106ab11f89194fc172c1948f897/tumblr_mq9sdu6BeH1sq5s0qo1_640.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's an exhibit at The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis about Winter Holidays in Russia that highlights both the state and the church's celebrations from about 1900-1970. Though celebrations started coming back in 1935, they displayed contemporary newspapers showing how the state truly embraced it to help with the hardships during WWII. It was a great exhibition, I went a few years ago but it seems to be running again if anyone is interested.

</comment><comment><USER19> I love these vintage posters and artwork. In current times they are less propaganda and beautifully capture the essence of a certain time and culture. They are equally interesting posters this side of the 50s onwards that could be looked on as propaganda but also again capture an essence.

Communism was a response to the incomplete transformation from feudalism to democracy, for history buffs its easy to understand its context and its incredible that something so radical and egalitarian in its objectives was actually put into practice, that this was even possible in a time filled with feudal instincts, interests and attitudes itself is astonishing. The rest is history.

Future generations can learn from the multi dimensional failure in practice and learn to recognize how the significant gaps between ideals and reality came into being and use the same understanding to also recognize the significant gaps between our ideals and reality of current power structures and how the world works and is. That is our propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER20> Lots more of this kind of thing here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SPACECOMMUNISM](https://www.reddit.com/r/SPACECOMMUNISM)</comment>


McKinsey's corrupted culture - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/03/09/mckinseys-corrupted-culture/ <comment><USER3> McK alum here. Article is drawing conclusions on 6,000 ppl based on allegations of actions of a few. Client confidentiality reigns supreme within the culture, though no cultural is monolithic. Stuff always slips through.

For example, consultants at McK are labeled as 'conflicted' if they have served a competitor of a client in a given industry. Therefore, no consultant at the firm can serve competing firms. And the firm's institutional knowledge which gets carried over is stuff you can read in HBR/McK Quarterly.

Can't excuse blatant securities fraud, but to paint the entire industry with such a brush is slightly sensationalist.

<comment><USER4> "Consultants at McK are labeled as 'conflicted' if they have served a competitor of a client in a given industry." and in couple of years consultant runs out of industries.

<comment><USER5> Only if they've been burned so many bridges that they can't do further work for the firms they've worked with in the past.

<comment><USER6> I believe it is common in Law firms as well.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Law>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Disclosure: I'm a management consultant with one of the big firms.

Management consulting business is built around providing knowledge to clients. There are several ways to get it:

1\. Face a new client problem and think long and hard how to solve it.

2\. Ask colleagues who have experienced similar problems before for general guidelines - "frameworks" or "best practices" in consultant-speak.

3\. Share some proprietary knowledge in a disguised form, e.g. percent ranges instead of absolute numbers, or get client's data and tell them where they are versus the industry[1].

4\. Directly share proprietary knowledge.

(Have I missed anything?)

In my experience: (1) is usually ~80% of work, (2) is ~19%, (3) is ~1% - happens very rarely and only with explicit client's consent, and (4) is strictly prohibited - people may violate it, as people my violate any law, but any management consulting firm is very strict about such violations.

To me, (1) has no moral problem whatsoever, and (2) is probably not very different from how _any_ professional is getting experience - <USER2> McKinsey/other consultant's cases the speed of sharing the new codified knowledge is obviously much higher than in other industries, but that's part of their business.

My personal opinion - grey area in consulting industry is certainly not darker than in many other professions. Author of the article probably underestimates percentages for (1) and (2) above.

[1] Example: there are databases that management consulting companies keep on e.g. operational performance indicators. You can get access to some aggregate statistics from that databases in exchange for providing your own data. The individual data points are never shared.

<comment><USER8> (3) happens surprisingly often outside of MC, just between consenting firms. When I've worked in the financial industry it's quite common for a third party firm to benchmark everyone and provide positioning, etc. data. It often works in everyone interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Must read book on this topic: "House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time"

[http://www.amazon.com/House-Lies-Management-Consultants- Stea...](http://www.amazon.com/House-Lies-Management-Consultants- Steal/dp/0446576565)

</comment><comment><USER8> What happens at McK is far less than what happens when competitors steal employees from each other (which happens all the time), the reason you hire employees from your competitors is not to steal insider information (although this does go on), but to steal someone who's done it before and knows what mistakes to avoid.

<comment><USER10> there is an enormous difference between the knowledge about structural advantages and disadvantages of steel T-beam in the suspension bridge and the knowledge that Company A is planning to bid a 100M on the contract for the bridge across that river in that town.

<comment><USER8> Sure and the second is clearly illegal in either case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My 2c as an ACN alumni... the author's conclusion could as such be extended to the entire consulting industry. There are three reasons this does not hold though:

\- consultants are bound by strict NDAs

\- the client hires me because of my experience in the field (which includes competitors) and needs to live with the fact that I'll carry that experience with me

\- if the client didn't want me to carry my experience with me from their project, he'd need to pay me for the rest of my days for just doing nothing

<comment><USER12> even if they are bound by NDA's they can still use what they know to make decisions for the new client.

<comment><USER11> Hello Laurenceputra,

If that particular knowledge contributes to a clearer image about how the industry works, then yes, you (as a consultant) can use that knowledge.

If however that particular knowledge is classified, then you won't. If you were to divulge such classified information the client might ask himself what you would do with what is in your head once you leave the project...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a McKinsey alum, I must say I did not feel any resonance with the position of the author. In fact, I was very surprised at how strictly the firm prohibits sharing of confidential information between clients. Quite often, consultants had to choose studies (the McKinsey term for a client engagement) very carefully because it may preclude you from ever working with certain clients again. McKinsey certainly has a number of faults, this issue is not one of them

</comment><comment><USER14> Here is a better article about what is actually happening: [http://www.businessinsider.com/raj-trial-prosecution- opening...](http://www.businessinsider.com/raj-trial-prosecution-opening- argument-2011-3)

</comment><comment><USER15> McKinsey is the wisdom-laundering Bing Toolbar of corporate strategery!</comment>


How to Mount Your Google Drive on Linux with Google-Drive-ocamlfuse - <AUTHOR> http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-mount-your-google-drive-on-linux-with-google-drive-ocamlfuse/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0g&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=59885c1e04d3010d885df6d6&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter <comment><USER2> This looks great. And being written in OCaml, it probably has less bugs than the official clients do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it possible to mount several "drives" (different Google accounts) at the same time?</comment>


PHP Fog Raises $1.8 Million To Be The Heroku Of PHP - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/10/php-fog-raises-1-8-million-to-be-the-heroku-of-php/ <comment><USER2> Don't really get this one. First off, PHP doesn't have the deploy/run process of Sinatra/Ruby/Node/etc. Second, 1.8 mil isn't much money; that's probably the amount you could bootstrap with some past success. And the business-plan- like graphic doesn't reveal that there's anything interesting in their tech approach than any commodity hosting.

<comment><USER3> I am also confused. What are the benefits of phpfog if it normally only takes 15 min to create a linux server with php/mysql on amazon ec2? The only things I could see different are db slave replication and http caching, but generally those you don't worry till much later, and are not critical.

<comment><USER4> If you haven't been paying much attention to EC2 until now, getting your head around the pricing structure, what plan makes sense, and the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time. PHPFog's value proposition would seem to be "We've figured out EC2 for you, and have default VMs setup for Drupal and Wordpress and a way to deal with those system's need for permanent disk space. If you can get your code in a git repository we'll handle the rest." Just getting Drupal and Wordpress out of a shared hosting environment is a huge win security/stability wise, and if their VMs have a configuration that deals with a lot of the well known attack vectors that aren't shared host related all the better.

I'm not sure that I'd use it myself, because I'd like to spend to time to get familiar with EC2, but with shared hosting becoming a less reliable solution as internet traffic patterns change (and shared hosts increasingly go he commodity route) there's going to be a lot of PHP professionals (and PHP hacks, and non-programmer hacks using PHP systems) looking for a turn-key cloud solution, so I can see the interest in PHPFog.

TL;DR: There's large swaths of the PHP community that doesn't know how to make EC2 work, PHPFog is aiming to be their middleman.

<comment><USER5> > the whole "You have a VM but no permanent disk" thing can take some time.

Not to sidetrack the discussion, but EC2 has had persistent disk storage since the fall of 2008 ( <http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/amazon-elastic.html> ).

<comment><USER4> Hey, not a sidetrack at all, and I appreciate the link.

At the risk of putting this __back __on discussion though, from the outside EBS looks like a separate, but complimentary product for EC2, which will further muddy the waters for someone not familiar with Amazon's platform, which leaves room for a someone like PHPFog to swoop in as a middleman to provide a turnkey solution to the problem of getting PHP developers and Drupal/Wordpress site owners up and running in a scalable cloud environment. It's not that this is hard for someone to solves on their own, it's that for a lot of developers in the PHP Ecosystem there's too much inertia to get around to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone else tired of hearing about "the Heroku of x?" However, you can be pretty sure you hit the right combo of good timing and implementation when your own startup is followed by services which are referred to as "[insert your startup name] of x."

ETA: Let's have some fun and play with the tagline they have on their pricing page which is "Like Heroku, but better."

Like Heroku, but without ninjas and rockstars.

Like Heroku, but better, but less cool.

<comment><USER7> Tired or not it's not a bad way to make value proposition clear and in hindsight is pretty handy:

\- "Youtube is the flickr of Video" - <http://slashdot.org/articles/05/08/14/1320217.shtml>

\- "AdMob is the doubleclick of mobile" [http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/200...](http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/11/google_buys_adm.html)

etc

<comment><USER6> Sure, but wouldn't it be better if you could make that proposition from your own presentation without having to refer to other services? If PHPFog is the Heroku of PHP, then what was Heroku the Heroku of? ;)

<comment><USER7> You do realize that "The Heroku Of PHP" is not a line from PHPFog right?

It's how TechCrunch is explaining what the site is.

<http://www.phpfog.com/>

<comment><USER6> Actually, it's right on their pricing page. Maybe they didn't think of the line themselves, but it's on their site and not as a quote.

PHP Fog is like Heroku for PHP. But better. We will provide simple one-click installations of some of the most popular PHP applications out there.

ETA: However, I do agree that "like Heroku for PHP" is a big difference from "is Heroku for PHP." My mistake.

<comment><USER8> It's a good way of explaining it to people as many more have heard of Heroku. It's not like their directly competing so I can't see a negative side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The future is heterogeneous Platform as a Service (for example, <http://dotcloud.com/>) in my opinion. I can't imagine going back to Heroku where I can only host Ruby along with a selection externally hosted add-ons.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why is Shopify listed under the apps? I always thought Shopify was a hosted rails app.

<comment><USER11> [http://blog.shopify.com/2010/6/18/official-php-adapter- for-s...](http://blog.shopify.com/2010/6/18/official-php-adapter-for-shopify- api)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Like the service, hate the name. Though I personally would like it better if it included plug-and-play framework too. (Heroku has Rails, for example)

</comment><comment><USER13> i hope the funding will allow you to create a free plan, like heroku. i like the idea of whats provided. i don't like the pricing structure.

<comment><USER11> We are working on some features I think you will be excited about!

<comment><USER13> i hope so. been following progress since you guys announced it (here? i don't recall). i'd like to see it fit my needs, but it doesn't yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> nice work!I hope to use it when I can get an account. I just hope it is as easy as they say.

</comment><comment><USER15> Congrats Lucas!

<comment><USER11> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Google sued over excluding white and Asian men in hiring to boost diversity - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/01/google-accused-lawsuit-excluding-white-and-asian-men-hiring-boost-diversity/387532002/ <comment><USER2> Note that this article will highly likely be flagged out as happened to the other instances of this story from different news sources. I guess some topics are too controversial even for HN.

<comment><USER3> It's an article from a reputable source. Why would it be flagged?

<comment><USER4> Controversial.

HackerNews, does not deal with feminism, affirmative action, or criticising darling companies of anything to do with sexism or racism.

Unless your name is Susan Fowler and you work at Uber.

This will probably just lead to a lot of fighting in the comments.

<comment><USER5> > This will probably just lead to a lot of fighting in the comments.

That and a whole lot of name calling...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500974](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500974)

</comment><comment><USER4> Further reading from other times this has been posted:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500974](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500974)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551)

</comment><comment><USER7> America needs to figure out what it wants from diversity efforts. Does it want--

1\. To just achieve color-blindness.

2\. To achieve color-blindness AND help counter-act the cumulative effects of past discrimination.

It is wants to achieve 2, you can't use a purely meritocratic system for college admissions or hiring.

</comment><comment><USER8> For an ongoing discussion of this topic see: [https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/81aw5u/google_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/81aw5u/google_accused_in_lawsuit_of_excluding_white_and/)</comment>


Thread patterns (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/thread_patterns/

<comment><USER2> These are so great! I recognized a couple of them from hacker news as well -- so perhaps they might be usable here in a semi-automated way to detect bad conversations?

(I know there's already a flame-war detector. But other patterns might be useful as well.)</comment>


Google to drop chrome apps in favor of progressive web apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/12/05/google-wants-progressive-web-apps-replace-chrome-apps/ <comment><USER2> And here's the solution to Electron problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's a very good point imo!</comment></comment>


Ubuntu and the dangers of collectivism - <AUTHOR> http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=312070&sn=Detail&pid=71616

<comment><USER2> I read a good few paragraphs there thinking they were talking about the OS.

> "Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'" -- Mark > Pilgrim

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is misfiled. It is about polemics, not software.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article seems to completely miss the point of collectivism, and sees it as something that is enforced as opposed to something that comes naturally due to altruism, as barriers to cooperation are lifted.</comment>


Apple Official Swift Education Course - <AUTHOR> http://swifteducation.github.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> Link to Github: [http://swifteducation.github.io/](http://swifteducation.github.io/)

Link to course on iTunes U: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/app- development-teaching-...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/app-development- teaching-swift/id1003406963)

\---

TL;DR: Apple has apparently, via some sort of collaboration with a university professor, published last week — during WWDC — a really solid-looking learn- to-code curriculum for Swift that is kind of on iTunes U but that is really on GitHub.

source: [https://medium.com/ios-os-x-development/apple-has- published-...](https://medium.com/ios-os-x-development/apple-has-published-a- great-free-learn-to-code-course-for-swift-on-github-feb5e4d70691)</comment>


Linux 5.2 Is Introducing the Fieldbus Subsystem - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.2-Fieldbus-Subsystem <comment><USER2> > uses TCP/IP paired with specialized protocols designed for delivering real- > time performance

Real-time and TCP? huh? TCP has 3 second retransmission timeouts halting the entire stream. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> Yes, you were missing "paired with specialized protocols designed for delivering real-time performance".

You're welcome.</comment></comment>


Does Time Flow? New Clues Come from a Century-Old Approach to Math - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407/ <comment><USER2> Someone here on HN pointed to an article making what seemed to me to be a reasonable claim that the fundamental unit of EM radiation is not the photon, but instead the single oscillation of an EM wave. It seemed reasonable to me that if our ability to detect EM phenomena is limited, then we'd artificially pick whatever units were easiest to measure, namely the photon, as the quantity to reason about, regardless of the possibility that a smaller quantity might actually be more naturally accurate. Since reading that proposal, I've found myself looking a lot of physics journalism with a much more skeptical eye, especially when claims are made that the photon is part of the families of primary particles. I find myself reading this article, and getting a feeling that some of the foundations we build upon aren't what they seem. And that always leaves me a little more excited about the future.</comment>