Endgame: collapse is beginning in earnest - <AUTHOR> http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/02/endgame.html

<comment><USER2> I remember coming across an innumerate post on this blog once before, bringing in some reality, and being told to leave. I note that there's no quantitative analysis in this post. His message seems to be that the sky is about to fall because some state governments aren't paying for food stamps, etc, which is reading a bit much into it.

Here was that post: [http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/07/trailing- edge...](http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/07/trailing-edge- technologies.html)

He thinks that going back to the 50s and getting rid of microcontrollers in sewing machines would save substantial amounts of energy, and he didn't let the fact that those microcontrollers draw minuscule amounts of energy compared to the sewing machines and could result in a net savings if they allowed it run for a second less change his mind. So I would take anything he says with a grain of salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> I confess (as the poster) that I'm not a huge fan or even a regular reader of this blog.

But his writing is often stimulating, provocative and insightful; and moreover provides a useful counterpoint to the startup and technology blogs I spend most of my procrastination time reading.

Edit: note that he is not saying "the sky is about to fall", on the contrary he specifically says "the changes involved won't be sudden". Whatever flaws he has, he is not the alarmist, paranoid type. He is urging awareness and preparedness in the face of some worrying trends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > half the American workforce has no steady work, decaying suburbs have > mutated into squalid shantytowns, and domestic insurgencies flare across the > south and the mountain West,

Lucky for me I'd been off-planet on vacation at the time of the war. There wasn't much to do. All the bowling alleys had been wrecked, so I spent most of my time looking for beer. One day I was out looking for a nice place to build a city for my children when I spotted a mutant in the forbidden zone. I landed my vehicle to pursue and destroy this genetic freak before he could warn other mutants in the underground caves.

<comment><USER4> Thank you, you have made my day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"If I read the signs correctly, America has finally reached the point where its economy is so deep into overshoot that catabolic collapse is beginning in earnest."_

The problem is the author did not read the signs correctly. There are definite problems to be sure, but the catastrophe he is predicting ("stock their pantries ... learn a practical skill or two") is paranoid, head-for-the-hills nonsense that seems to crop up a lot these days, not only because of the political and economic changes that have occured over the last decade, but also thanks to the Internet, which lets such views gain a much wider audience and amplification than they would have in the 20th century.

One comment about local tax revenue: There will be a correction in some states, starting with California and many municipalities. The end of state funding and a sharp reduction in property tax revenue will force layoffs, bureaucratic restructurings, and an end to the generous pension and benefit plans that many public servants now enjoy. It just can't be sustained. But he is going too far in his suggestion that it's part of some "end of days" scenario.

<comment><AUTHOR> _paranoid, head-for-the-hills nonsense that seems to crop up a lot these days_

It is worth noting that this blogger, while a major commentator in the 'collapse scene', has always been on the other end of the spectrum, arguing for calm and reason against the paranoid, head-for-the-hills types.

Not that he is telling people to head for the hills in this post - rather he seems to be arguing that we should pay attention to some what is really going on, and prepare ourselves for possible repercussions accordingly.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't the mere existence of a 'collapse scene' suggest such commentators still enjoy enough idle time (aka sufficient employment, food supply, shelter, leisure time) to make the commentary in the first place, and thus that the prognosticated magnitude of the economic collapse is exaggerated?

People are not dying of exposure or starvation in refugee caravans across the plains, as they did in the 30s. Urban families are not sending their pre-teen daughters to work 14hour factory shifts 6 days a week just to be able to afford semi-rotten food from the nearby grocer, as they did at the turn of the last century.

It seems we would have much further to fall before genuine survival is imperiled.

<comment><AUTHOR> _It seems we would have much further to fall before genuine survival is imperiled._

I quite agree, things have to get a lot worse before most of us here are seriously affected. But I think it is worth being aware of the trends.

To quote Gibson: "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the sake of all my American friends here as some sure signs of a country's imminent collapse (from direct experience). First there will be water shortages and the mains water becomes undrinkable. Second you will get electricity blackouts at irregular intervals and then the country will reach a point where the electricity is more off than on. Thirdly the pot holes in the roads will start growing. Fourthly the cops - especially the traffic cops will become very friendly in the pursuit of bribes and very zealous in enforcing all rules and regulations.

If you are experiencing any of these recently in the State you are living, I suggest you increase your debt to maximum (you can pay it down the line with hyperinflation money or just ignore it) stock up on your ipods and laptops and host your application on a .eu or .asia domain and enjoy the new exchange rates!

For more information on survival tactics you can contact the flatearthsociety.org :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why does he say to "clear your debts" in preparation for the collapse, I would think you should fire up more debt, its all going down anyway ... ?

<comment><USER9> I think because he's predicting deflation. In deflation, the currency increases in value, so your debt effectively gets bigger. In a deflationary time, cash is king.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't care for the doom and gloom talk, but the story "Star's Reach" from the same author is interesting: <http://starsreach.blogspot.com/></comment>


Ask HN: Why would you ever choose pay per click for advertising? - <AUTHOR>

Given the difficulty of differentiating between real and bot traffic, why, as the person paying, would you choose pay per click vs pay per sale, or pay per sign up or pay per <actual goal>? I am not well versed in internet advertising, but from what I've recently read on here, it seems like pay-per-click is terrible. <comment><USER2> While fraudulent traffic is a very real and annoying issue, it's largely irrelevant when you're optimizing campaigns based on things such as ROI or conversion rates. If the traffic source does not pan out you either attempt to figure out why and fix it or simply move on to another.

In this sense, while you may be paying for the traffic on a click by click basis, you're still effectively buying it based on achieving your goals.

Additionally, buying PPC traffic is far more accessible then attempting to get things done on a pay per sign up basis.

</comment><comment><USER3> Almost all advertising systems/platforms today self-optimize when you are bidding against other advertisers vying for limited ad space. It doesn't matter how you bid because at the end of the day there is an expected revenue per impression (or per thousand like an RPM) that is used to determine how much exposure you get.

For example:

CPC - You bid $1 per click to a sign up page for more information on your product. You get a conversion rate of 10% so after spending $10, you get one sign up and the CPA cost of that lead was $10.

CPA - You bid $5 per lead on the same system and observe the same conversion metrics. Now assuming the clickthrough rate was the same on that ad network, they only made $5 after the same number of impressions shown vs. the CPC model. The effective CPC they made from sending over 10 clicks was $.50 instead of a dollar.

The ad platform will eventually optimize itself to give you a lower share of impressions if you bid the $5 CPA because it can normalize expected revenue/returns regardless of bidding models. This is why with a lot of CPA deals, they require a test period to suss out the economic viability of your bid before they will commit to delivering a large amount of impressions on a CPA model on your behalf.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not everyone has a product to sell. Some people are affiliates or make money through ads.In which case, PPC is a form of arbitrage for them. Others have an offline product, and only run ads to increase brand awareness of that product. So pay per actions makes little sense, since they can't track them.

There are also some niches where there's more ROI in PPC.</comment>


Show HN: Tweet up to 280 characters from any Twitter account - <AUTHOR> https://char280.carrd.co/ <comment><USER2> Also:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15346763](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15346763)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15345739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15345739)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15344960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15344960)</comment>


Show HN: React-Native and MobX LUISAVIAROMA Ecommerce iOS APP - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/luisaviaroma/id1339089012 <comment><USER2> Congrats on launching! Would you be interested in doing an interview for [http://madewithreactnative.com](http://madewithreactnative.com) and having your app featured on the site? If so, please contact me via the email address in my profile.</comment>


North American Numbering Plan Expansion - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan_expansion <comment><USER2> Interestingly this topic was in the very first issue of the storied ARPANET Telecom Digest back in 1979 or 1980.

Now, 40 years later, I wonder if all this matters any more. I make very few calls through the POTS; most voice calls I make are through FaceTime, WhatsApp and the like.

In addition, the requirement that each endpoint have a unique identifier is a billing matter more than anything else these days. A big business can have as many outgoing calls as it wants each with the same ANI pointing at the "main" phone number and should be able to receive as many incoming phone calls at that "main" number just as a web server could. The changes to SS7 to support this would be a lot cheaper than the cost of expanding the digit space.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I'm reading this correctly, the plan is essentially to add one bit of address space? (11 or 00 after the first three digits.) How much time will this buy? Is there a longer-term plan to use these two digits for more possibilities after the transition period?</comment>


Different Ads, Different Ethnicities, Same Car - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/12/business/media/toyota-camry-ads-different-ethnicities.html <comment><USER2> On Hulu, I've seen many BofA ads that target my family's racial demographic. I assumed not everyone was seeing these ads, and that BofA was doing the same thing Toyota did here.

It's interesting to see how Toyota is potentially seen as engaging in stereotyping (in a negative way) here. All marketing involves stereotypes, to some extent.

I was also surprised to see how the NYTimes characterized the recent Dove ad in this article. They make it seem like there was a linear progression from a dark-skinned woman to a white woman, but it was actually a loop involving three women (the white woman turned into an Asian woman, who turned into the dark-skinned woman, to complete the loop). And the dark-skinned woman has specifically said that she disagrees with the sentiment that she was somehow victimized by the ad. [1] But to hear the NYTimes tell it, the ad was a simple transition from blackness to whiteness.

1: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/10/i-am-w...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/10/i-am- woman-racist-dove-ad-not-a-victim)</comment>


Dear Eric, the proper response is I'm sorry - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2010/02/18/dear-eric-the-proper-response-is-im-sorry/ <comment><USER2> Whenever privacy as a topic comes up in discussions on the forums I follow, a lot of people chime in with a fairly dismissive "no harm, no foul" kind of attitude. They don't mind the Eric Schmidts and Jonathan Schwartzes and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world proclaiming the death of privacy, because apparently no-one in the Facebook generation cares.

It's odd how when something like this becomes public, when everyday, non-geek people actually appreciate the implications of what is going on, there never seems to be a shortage of people who care, and whatever Schmidt says there obviously are examples of real harm being done.

I have been saying for a while that I think privacy and data protection will have to get worse before they get better. Right now, our societies are drifting into a situation where governments and megacorps can build databases for whatever purpose they want, because as long as that is all they are doing, the average guy in the street doesn't know or care.

But as we are seeing increasingly frequently now, those databases are subject to both deliberate abuse and accidental compromise. There can be consequences for very large numbers of people and/or very serious consequences for some of those people.

We need serious laws, with company-destroying penalties attached, to protect the privacy of individuals and regulate the collection of any kind of potentially sensitive, personally identifiable data in any database, and we need them _before_ the frog is dead.

<comment><USER3> _We need serious laws, with company-destroying penalties attached, to protect the privacy of individuals_

We already have them, and I don't think we don't need more. There is a fundamental difference between the government spying on citizens or abusing the information they collect, and companies doing so. People voluntarily sign onto Facebook every day, and the company does _not_ violate its privacy policy (if it did, you'd have grounds for a law suit). If Facebook users find its privacy policy acceptable, I don't think establishing contrarian laws is a proper response. It's not the government's place to institute laws to protect consumers from themselves. I don't believe Facebook abuses the customer's trust (and there are already contract laws against such things). The proper action here is educating people about privacy, not adding more legislation.

<comment><USER4> Uhh, I voluntarily signed up for GMail and GMail _ONLY_. This however does not imply that I agreed that Google can package their "Facebook-Killer" without as much as asking.

In my opinion that's actually worse then Apples completely slimy attempt to smuggle their software onto my box without asking. Just because I had the bad sense to install Itunes.

Don't be evil; Ha!

<comment><USER3> Has your privacy been compromised in a way that conflicts with their privacy policy? If that's the case, you can file a lawsuit. Otherwise, the legal system cannot help you (and should not be able to help you). If this is a huge concern for you and it wasn't covered in their privacy policy, you shouldn't have used their product. If you implicitly trusted them, you can stop doing so now.

I agree that they are wrong. I just don't think we need more legislation to patch it up. It's between consumers and the companies - the government has nothing to do with it.

<comment><USER5> And when privacy policies change, do I have to re-evaluate each time/product that may or may not be involved (since google products are sort of all merged into one)? If I do re-evaluate, and decide I no longer agree with the policy, and I delete my account is my data really gone or will the data still be there, just hidden, and part of the new policy which may give them more rights to for example sell that information? I believe facebook makes notifications of these changes, does GMail?

There are lots of issues that a simple 'privacy policy' document does not solve and may that it adds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He's not very good as the public face of Google, is he?

Especially as his privacy blind spot corresponds to the one PR topic that has the ability to genuinely harm Google.

I wonder why the geek-friendly faces of Sergey and Larry don't appear more often and why someone doesn't persuade Eric to stay in his lair, errr, office a bit more.

<comment><USER7> No, he's not a good public face is you are want to hear him tell you what you want to hear. He is an excellent public face if you want him to tell you want really went down. It's refreshing and encouraging. No company should have to play to the lowest common denominator.

<comment><USER8> _No company should have to play to the lowest common denominator._

Well, if you boast that you have hundreds of millions or even a billion users... You might want to spend a lot of time thinking about the lowest common denominator.

<comment><USER7> I understand what you mean, and why you say it. I do, however, disagree. From a pure business stand point, it makes sense. From a technological stand point, I think it hurts them. I'm having a hard time expressing this nicely, so I'll say it plainly as a I can. Hopefully no one takes offense.

I don't want Google wasting time on things that are only there because people are dumb. I'd rather them spend time on things that help people get smarter, not allow them to remain ignorant.

Again, this is a lot harsher than I intend, so hopefully you understand the meaning. My apologies in advance.

<comment><USER8> _I don't want Google wasting time on things that are only there because people are dumb. I'd rather them spend time on things that help people get smarter, not allow them to remain ignorant._

I think we are in violent agreement on this principle. In the case of Buzz, I think they failed us both. I understand we shouldn't have to build software that throws up massive confirmation dialogs "Really, REALLY publish those public photos on Picasa of you mountain biking on a "sick day" to the following 12 frequently emailed people at your workplace including your boss and the dragon lady in HR?"

But at the same time, making people smarter shouldn't mean making people figure out the non-obvious consequences of the choices you give them. I _still_ can't figure out exactly how the original Buzz worked or didn't work... I think it boiled down to whether you created a profile, but I'm not sure and I'm not going to try it to find out.

I hope Google find the middle ground and do a better job of designing software that has great user interfaces, software that makes its affordances visible without nannying or nagging users.

<comment><USER7> "Software that makes its affordances visible without nannying or nagging users."

That's a difficult task, one which I think we'll be wrestling with for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I get the feeling that Eric doesn't always remember he's in PR and that no prizes are awarded for arguing with the company's critics.

He should really stick to simple, upbeat, sympathetic messages. To be honest I'm surprised he didn't learn that after his last privacy debacle.

<comment><USER10> The thing is, the last one wasn't even bad at all. I don't think he actually made the usual "if you're not doing anything bad what do you have to hide" argument, I think he said "if you have something you want to keep secret, maybe you shouldn't be on the Internet" which I agree about.

Though I guess your point is about PR, and I guess I have to agree it could have been phrased more positively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I had to guess, Eric Schmidt thinks he can't apologize. At this point, they've set a big precedent: they're willing to automatically network you based on information that you've given them. If they apologized, they'd have to neuter future roll-outs and remove this automatic user base, removing a major competitive advantage. How many other businesses have products that are popular enough to piggyback a social network? Not many. Google can, and they want to keep it that way.

</comment><comment><USER12> The level of outrage being directed at google over this seems to be far greater than that directed at facebook when they made a lot of their users' information public by default.

<comment><USER13> Google messed with email. Email is one of our oldest electronic media; we all know how it is supposed to work. Changing the default privacy rules of your email inbox and address book without asking you _very clearly and explicitly in advance_ is... well, sabotage. Also: Bait and switch.

Facebook is a sandbox. People kind of understand that. I sign on to Facebook knowing that (a) I don't know for sure what it is; (b) its inventors aren't quite sure what it is, either; (c) we're going to find out by trial and error. Whereas I sign on to GMail because _I want a personal email system_ , which despite all its flashy trappings retains the underlying semantics of email. If I wanted a social network, or another sandbox, I'd have signed up for one. And I'm not sure _anyone_ wants a thing that impersonates a personal email system for a decade and then decides to become something else overnight without warning or clarity.

<comment><USER10> > Facebook is a sandbox. People kind of understand that.

Which is why I tend to cite Beacon as their biggest failing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Eric Schmidt is painting a pretty grim picture, especially when considering his other views on privacy:

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities." - Eric Schmidt

<comment><USER7> You are twisting his words (or at least your comment makes it seem like you are). He doesn't suggest that you shouldn't do these things. Rather that the reality is these days, if you don't want people to find things out, the only guaranteed way of preventing that is by not doing it. This isn't his view on privacy; rather, it's his view on the state or privacy. Where it currently stands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> At some point the extreme conclusion of what happened to the lady with the violent ex will happen. Once you pass a certain number of users you need to expect people using your service aren't that computer savvy and really aren't going to spend the time doing more than the bare minimum to use your service (e.g. check e-mail, post a picture for friends). After all, a lot of people are put on these services by their tech savvy children or siblings who spend the bare minimum of time setting up a todo list or basic tutoring on how to use this service for its basic purpose. It seems pretty much a bad idea to change the rules and not think of the implications to a more public revealing of data to world for these people. Particularly when you take what is generally regarded as a private service (e-mail) and turn it into a public service.

</comment><comment><USER16> bs. GOOG is business, not personal -- inherently no privacy.

Along with the running-up fanfare of "privacy settings", GOOG knows exactly what it is doing.

And the title just emphasizes cynicism: It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.</comment>


Machine-learning Reddit's TIL to find new content - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thoppe/today-AI-learned

<comment><USER2> "TIL: Rafael Quintero, a mexican drug trafficker, once tortured two students with ice picks and buried them alive for accidentally walking into his private dinner party."

Some parties just get out of hand...</comment>


Python Beowulf cluster from old computers - <AUTHOR> http://rpiai.com/2015/04/18/python-beowulf-cluster-find-a-use-for-those-computers-that-are-10-years-old/

<comment><USER2> One thing I found interesting (that's somewhat tangential to the article) is the use of Tor to scrape a website. I'm trying to figure out whether that's good to scrape pages that may rate-limit you. By 'good' I approximately mean morally justifiable both towards who you scraping, and the Tor network.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it legal to scrape shipment tracking information? - <AUTHOR> I've checked out TOS on a several postal service websites and not finding anything preventing this in TOS. Is this a generally legal? <comment><USER2> Which region/country are you referring to? What's the use case?

IANAL, but I used to work at one of the large transportation providers. For the high-volume tracking use cases, web site scraping probably won't cut it (too slow, probably get blocked by the carrier). Most high-volume trackers used the carriers' APIs. It was sort of a love-hate relationship and my carrier would sometimes block high-volume carriers who ran refund services on behalf of other customers.

In short, whether it's "legal" or not, if you are doing a high volume of tracking for refunds you will be at the mercy of the carrier who could cut you off at anytime. A firewall against that is to have a bunch of high-volume paying customers of that carrier who would pitch a fit if your service was turned off.

[Edited for clarification]

</comment><comment><USER3> From experience with using carriers tracking information world-wide: scraping will be fine for low volume usage and if we are talking personal use cases.

If this has any professional smell (as in you make money with whatever you use the data for) you will want and need access to each carriers API for several reasons:

\- accuracy of data: this is not guaranteed for the web views, they may (and are) usually outdated by hours \- volume of updates: carrier APIs usually come with rate limitations and can also require contracts for uses

</comment><comment><USER4> Why scrape when, at least in the US, all the major players (USPS, UPS, FedEx) have free API that you can use to query tracking information?

<comment><USER2> Two (weak) reasons I can think of: 1. If doing a low-volume of tracking requests, it could be an easier implementation instead of learning the ins and outs of an API. 2. No carrier approval required for web scraping, unlike the APIs.</comment></comment>


Hk, The new Heroku Client written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/heroku/hk <comment><USER2> Hi everyone, I'm the new maintainer of hk. It's actually not very new :) You can see that Keith Rarick did most of the work on it over a year ago, along with some other major contributors: [https://github.com/heroku/hk/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/heroku/hk/graphs/contributors)

What is new is that I moved it to the Heroku org this week and will be spending a lot of my time turning it into a proper replacement for the Heroku Toolbelt & gem.

It's still very early stage software, though. There isn't currently a supported installation method, and it's very far from having all of the necessary features to fully replace the old client. Also, the UX will probably change frequently and things may break, eat your data, etc. So don't rely on it just yet :)

That being said, I'm really excited to see where we can take this in the next few months. Hk is already a great starting point. Go is very fast and lightweight, and offers some nice advantages over Ruby on the distribution & installation fronts.

Hopefully we'll have something exciting to show in a couple months!

</comment><comment><USER3> I use the two Heroku tools `foreman` and `heroku` regularly. I've recently switched to their Go alternatives, and for one thing, the speed has improved[1].

However, the Heroku client is mostly network bound (communicating with their API), and on an average connection this speedup hardly matters.

I wonder what the other benefits will be?

[1]

      $ time heroku help
      real	0m0.409s
      user	0m0.146s
      sys	0m0.036s

      $ time hk help
      real	0m0.008s
      user	0m0.003s
      sys	0m0.004s

      $ time foreman run echo hello
      real	0m2.062s
      user	0m0.199s
      sys	0m0.100s

      $ time forego run echo hello
      real	0m0.886s
      user	0m0.205s
      sys	0m0.097s

<comment><USER4> The benefit would be EASY cross platform support. From experience building Vagrant installers: it's a pain in the butt. Shipping a single binary client would probably simplify things greatly.

<comment><USER5> There are two reasons I rewrote Foreman in Go. You hit one of them square on the head. A single binary with no dependencies that can be cross-compiled on a Heroku dyno makes things _much_ simpler.

Foreman was originally written in Ruby which ideally means it runs on any machine with a Ruby interpreter. When you get down to it, though, the differences in fork/exec between Ruby 1.8, 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius, etc make this a nightmare scenario of a different sort.

If you go to [https://gobuild.herokuapp.com/ddollar/forego/master/darwin/a...](https://gobuild.herokuapp.com/ddollar/forego/master/darwin/amd64) you get a working program as a single binary in one step. Using bsdiff I can even ship binary diffs for fast upgrades (this is how `foreman update` works in the new version)

Oh and as a side effect the new Foreman is quite a lot faster to start up (Rubygems initialization is _sloooooow_ )

<comment><USER6> I had no clue `forego` was actually available. This is incredible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Using the heroku client every day, I noticed this new client does not namespace any of the commands. Subcommands of hk are:

        hk create # create app
        hk destroy # destroy app
        hk apps  # list apps
        hk set    # set config var
        hk unset  #unset config var

Compare to heroku's (preferable, imho) commands:

        heroku apps:create    # create app
        heroku apps:destroy   # destroy app
        heroku apps           # list apps
        heroku config:set     # set config var
        heroku config:unset   # unset config var

The command 'hk set' doesn't tell you any semantic information at all about what it's doing - I prefer the original syntax for its convention of being explicit.

Other than that minor complaint, seems like a really cool project, going to look through the source later.

<comment><USER2> The commands right now attempt to map directly to unix equivalents where it makes sense. set, unset, & env are the traditional unix commands for modifying the environment.

The main problem I have with the flat, non-namespaced commands is that there will be far too many of them once we've implemented the full command set.

Anyway, as I wrote in my other comment, this is very early software and it has a long way to go before I'll recommend that regular Heroku users rely on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heroku is going to loose Solaris and a couple of other secondary target OSes if they go down that route. Golang can cross-compile to Linux, Darwin, Windows and a couple of BSDs.

EDIT: It really seems that they are going down that route. They are also working on a Go implementation of Foreman here: [https://github.com/ddollar/forego](https://github.com/ddollar/forego)

<comment><USER9> Just do go build -compiler gccgo hk to build using GCC

<comment><USER10> You have to manually compile the go tool though, as it doesn't come with gccgo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the kind of thing that Go shines at.

</comment><comment><USER12> On a side note, I would like someone with experience here to tell me how you can actually create command line commands? In this case, they seem to use:

        hk <insert command here>

I would like to do something like:

       abc <some command>

Basically something like a Rails scaffold generator. How difficult/easy is this? Googling didn't help much..

Note: It doesn't have to be built with Golang..

Thanks

Edit: Thanks for the replies :)

Note: It doesn't have to be just Go, I'm just asking in general..

I would basically like to create a scaffold generator. So, when I do

        abc generate test

I would like a file named test.html (or something) generated..

Thanks again..

<comment><USER13> Perhaps check if this is good enough for you [https://github.com/robmerrell/comandante](https://github.com/robmerrell/comandante)

<comment><USER12> Thanks, this is excellent for a Go implementation. And I will definitely use it! I was asking in general though..

</comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU

      $ hk 47
      Statement: Greetings, meatbag

</comment><comment><USER14> Last time I looked at heroku, I had to install some non-open-source command- line tools to interact with it.

So I'm wondering, is this alternative opensource now?

<comment><USER8> The CLI has always be open-source. They even put links to the implementation on the download page here [https://toolbelt.heroku.com/](https://toolbelt.heroku.com/)</comment></comment>


Twitter releases Gizzard, a framework for creating distributed datastores - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/04/introducing-gizzard-framework-for.html

<comment><USER2> With all the downtime and seemingly permanent "Older tweets are temporary unavailable" messages why would anyone want to build on platforms they've created?

Maybe they have good ideas but I think part of the reason people are looking at Cassandra etc is because the high-profile sites using/developing these platforms _actually work_.

<comment><USER3> This is such a cynical and short-sighted comment. Did twitter have scalability problems? Yes. Does this mean that any and all technology that comes out of the company is junk? On the contrary. If anything, getting battle tested software that was built in response to solve massive scalability issues is going to be better than not.

Clearly they've worked through a lot of their problems at this point; I'd imagine this is some of the code that let them do so.

Nevermind the fact that a reply like this is disrespectful towards people who are giving you the fruits of their labor _for free_. Shame on you.

<comment><USER2> Maybe they nailed everything with Gizzard, but it'd be more convincing if their scalability and other problems were actually solved. I'm not sure why you alluded to those problems in the past tense - <http://status.twitter.com/>.

If I wanted to be disrespectful I'd have said their problems are still very real and very often and for that you'd have to be retarded to assume they've gotten anything but marketing right so far.

Would you build on gizzard right now? Their status blog is full of very recent reasons why it's premature for them to release anything and even more so why it's premature to trust or be grateful to them for doing so.

<comment><USER4> Our uptime could use some improvement, surely. You will bear in mind that it has improved substantially over the last year. It's largely because of things like Gizzard...

I think one of the compelling things about Gizzard is that unending list of crazy and obscure failure conditions that cascade in unpredictable ways and take the site down--all of those that have occurred up till now are encoded into the design of Gizzard so that they do not occur again.

We have not fixed those "unknown unknowns", to be revealed in the future, that can cause a Gizzard system to crash. But my guess is that, over the last year, we have built in fail-safes for scenarios that exceed anything most people have ever experienced or ever will experience-- and by a long shot.

I love Cassandra, I think it's awesome. Twitter plans to move its Tweet storage to Cassandra. Suffice to say that Cassandra is young and the reliability of Cassandra with our throughput and our (very very large) corpus can use some improvement. Cassandra is not yet ready for production use at Twitter despite the fact that it has been deployed successfully at Digg and elsewhere. The Cassandra community is improving the database very rapidly. In a year or two I expect Cassandra to be a reasonable option for many popular web sites. But, even then, Cassandra's design has certain limitations that might prompt you to design a custom store (or consider alternatives). And indeed, there is a lot of stuff we have at Twitter that we have no plans to store in Cassandra unless there are substantial design changes.

An advantage of Gizzard here is that it is more flexible. You could, for example, build a document-partitioned inverted index with Gizzard such that you could do local intersections on each shard and merge these intersections in Gizzard itself. You might, in fact, use Gizzard in front of Lucene to do just this. There is no way to do that with Cassandra though perhaps they will build such features in the future. (To anticipate an objection, Lucandra is not document partitioned so it will suffer from fundamental efficiency problems for a certain class of search queries.)

<comment><USER2> There's no disputing you guys have massively increased your stability in the last year, and while growing enormously as well which makes it much more the victory.

But it would be good if you could go into more detail on your blog about what parts of twitter are dependent on Gizzard and especially distancing it from your remaining problems rather than just exclusively talking about how it works.

<comment><USER4> I think you've given a good suggestion for upcoming blog posts.

Gizzard is used by two systems at Twitter. One of them is called FlockDB and we are working on open-sourcing it (indeed, FlockDB is why we open-sourced Gizzard). FlockDB stores Twitter's social graphs. I cannot tell you (yet) how many QPS we do do or how many edges there are in the various graphs, but suffice to say its a lot and we run lots of complicated queries like "who follows both @aplusk and @oprah but does not want any of @aplusk's retweets," etc.

Gizzard is NOT perfect. But we think you'll find it is resilient to a large class of failure scenarios (that have, in fact, occurred over the last year, so this is not just the theoretical fault tolerance of a project that's been deployed on a small web site with simple requirements). With your help, it could be even better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If a shard goes down, writes to it are queued on a Gizzard middleware host. What happens if that Gizzard host is then lost?

<comment><USER6> The queues are local to each host so you'd lose those writes, but since writes are written to a journal on disk, you can apply some redundancy strategy to that as necessary. Depends on the SLA really.</comment></comment>


HN: Looking for a Student Design Co-Founder - <AUTHOR>

Myself and a couple other developers are starting a company, which is going to create web applications geared towards students.  We have three ideas now that have the backend prototyped, but we need to bring it to reality.  Therefore, we are looking for a student web designer to join the team who has experience or is willing to learn how to design user interfaces.
You will have an EQUAL share as the rest of us and will be a co founder and equal in every way.  We would love to describe our ideas to you.  We already have the design done for our home page (outsourced design)  but we need to design our other applications.
Basically we are looking for someone striving to be a part of something and is preferably currently a student.  Please email me at the following address: rah5051 AT gmail DOT com
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> we are located in State College, PA although I think we could work remotely.

</comment><comment><USER2> Have you considered just outsourcing the design part of your app to freelancers?

</comment><comment><USER3> It might help if you tell us where you're geographically located.

</comment><comment><USER4> where are you guys located?</comment>


The Simple Joy of "No Phones" - <AUTHOR> https://macleodsawyer.com/the-simple-joy-of-no-phone <comment><USER2> I think it's important to contextualize cell phone usage. While I totally agree with the author that using phones in social situations is rude and distracting, I like to compare it to reading a book or newspaper. It would be rude to pick up a book in the middle of a conversation. Likewise with a phone. I think it would be easy for someone to extend that and say "everyone is on their phones all the time, just today I was on the subway and everyone was on their phone". Well in the 1950s everyone was probably reading a newspaper. Same difference. so phone usage prevalancy is only disturbing to me in situations like the op describes.</comment>


Intel Quark D1000 microcontroller [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/quark-d1000-programmer-reference-manual.pdf <comment><USER2> Important characteristics of the Intel® QuarkTM microcontroller D1000 CPU are provided in the following list:

• 32-bit processor core

• IA-32 instruction encoding [1]

• 5 stage pipeline

• Harvard architecture

• 8KB of on-chip data SRAM

• 32KB of on-chip data/execution FLASH

• Deterministic 21 Cycle interrupt latency

• Minimal processor initialization for fast power-up

Above from the PDF

[1] IA-32 architecture subset, no segmentation support.

<comment><USER3> I don't think [1] should be a footnote. This is not an x86. This is a new 1970-style ISA with a textbook RISC implementation, but without the ISA that made RISC work. I predict this will fail, not because of the Quark ISA, but because Intel can't compete with the sheer diversity of microcontroller implementations that can only come from a highly competitive market. ARM currently hold sway in this market, with MIPS in niches. In future I expect to see RISC-V show up where license cost or customization matters more than software legacy.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't bet against the oldest and biggest CPU vendor.

Atmel of Arduino fame had $1.4B in sales last year. Microchip who was the hobbyist's go to before the Arduino had $2.1B in sales. Freescale who is the corporate descendant of Motorola microcontrollers had $4.6B.

Intel had $55.9B in sales and $11.7B in profit - more then enough profit to buy every chip those other three companies made last year.

Intel missed mobile - almost no cell phones have Intel inside - they are going to catch the next wave or die trying.

<comment><USER5> But, unlike the PC market with 2-3 major manufacturers, Intel can't bully around thousands of independent shops and OEMs that buy 1K/10K/100K quantities of Atmel/NXP/Freescale/Renesas/TI parts every year.

I lead system architecture for one of them and Intel is so off my radar that I wouldn't even look twice at the Quark/Edison line. Unless they want to give them to me for free, that is. If those chips are their IoT play, I'm not seeing any advantage yet. Show me how you're going to complete with TI or Broadcom.

And how many $3 D1000s do you have to move to match the margin generated by one server-class CPU core?

(BTW, NXP bought Freescale earlier this year so it's really 4.6B + 5.6B once the merge is completed.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It bothers me that you can't execute out of SRAM. That doesn't bode well for bulletproof firmware update, unless there's something that I'm missing.

<comment><USER7> Firmware upgrade doesn't necessarily need internal SRAM, it just needs to be able to execute out of one bank FLASH while writing the upgraded one. Its perfectly workable and bulletproof-able with this setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I want to know what the advantage, if any, is of using a Quark over say a PIC32 or an Arm?</comment>


Novels with giant, possibly magical, libraries - <AUTHOR> https://www.charlieharrington.com/novels-with-libraries <comment><USER2> "I'm the disreputable dog. I'm your _friend_ " <3

\- _Discworld_ is an obvious thing here.

\- _Anathem_ has a distributed network of libraries of most knowledge with an interesting time-limited distirbution scheme.

\- _Snow Crash_ has A Librarian -- and also a hypercard knowledge system.

\- _If On A Winter 's Night, A Traveller_ by Italo Calvino features books and libraries prominently. They're not exactly magical, but they're not...not magical, either.

edit: it's not a novel, but the library in the sands in _Avatar_ is another fine example of this trope.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks -- I'll be adding all these. Can't believe I forgot the Stephenson examples. The Calvino book looks great.

And.. the Disreputable Dog. I'll always be her friend, too.

<comment><USER2> [https://www.lrb.co.uk/v03/n17/salman- rushdie/calvino](https://www.lrb.co.uk/v03/n17/salman-rushdie/calvino)

"I have quoted this line in full because it is the last example on record of a bad sentence by Italo Calvino."

If you haven't yet, check out the audiobooks of the Abhorsen books. Tim Curry makes an excellent snarky cat with mysterious powers...

<comment><AUTHOR> "instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the ("neo- realistic") novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic."

Chills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_ has a "dataset", basically an educator PDA for a child (covered in fake fur, IIRC) that contains a nearly bottomless amount of information. It's captured and used by an alien race to get a technological advantage in a local war.

I really like the idea that even a kid's toy would have petabytes or exabytes of data, just because it was easy for the designers to include it.

<comment><USER4> That book also had the archive at Relay, and the archive in the low beyond, the subset of the archive that the _Out of Band II_ carried.

I think that another of his books in the series, _A Deepness in the Sky_ had a broadcast library, a set of core information that was repeatedly broadcast throughout the galaxy, at least that's what I seem to remember.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel#Literatur...](https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel#Literature)

I was going to list a lot I could think of, but I figured it would be easier to link here. Not linking to TVT because I started this fork, no ads, and less censorship.

</comment><comment><USER6> Also missed the late, great Terry Pratchett's library of The Unseen University [0].

[0] [https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Library](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Library)

<comment><AUTHOR> Somehow I've never picked up any Pratchett books but, after reading this, I'm in:

      *The Library has endless shelves (some of which are Mobius shelves)*

Which one(s) should I add to the list? And, more importantly, where should I start reading?

<comment><USER6> I would start with "The Colour of Magic" which is the first book and gives an overview of "Discworld"[0]. After that there are quite a few guides relative to the preferred order and you'll have to make your own decisions based on your personal preferences [1].

[0] [https://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/discworld-reading- order/](https://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/discworld-reading-order/)

[1] [https://www.discworldemporium.com/content/6-discworld- readin...](https://www.discworldemporium.com/content/6-discworld-reading- order)

[https://bookriot.com/2018/09/11/discworld-reading- order/](https://bookriot.com/2018/09/11/discworld-reading-order/)

[https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-to-read-terry-pratchetts- discwor...](https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-to-read-terry-pratchetts-discworld- series-in-one-h-1567312812)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll pick up "The Colour of Magic" this weekend. I'm now remembering that I've read "Good Omens" that he did with Neil Gaiman, and I made a note back then to start exploring Discworld, but never followed through with it. Time to fix that.

<comment> munk-a As an alternative, I might suggest starting with "Guards! Guards!" since it's one of the good plot arc beginnings and actually directly involves the library and L-Space.

I'm also a bit less fond of "The Colour of Magic" since I think his writing style was weaker in his first few books and since his characters were not well established. Both "The Colour of Magic" and "The Light Fanstastic" are very fun books but not quite at the same quality level as his later ones once he found his rhythm and built up his world.

<comment> ur-whale Fully agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco) surely? The tantalizing sense of loss as rare texts are censored and erased for ever, leaving as their only trace suggestive references and mentions in other works gets me every time.

<comment><USER8> Came here to mention this one :)

I particularly love it because so much of the library was forbidden knowledge guarded by a religious sect... those words almost always mean a good read is ahead :P

Umberto Eco has said he came up with the idea of the library (and some spoiler-related things) before coming up with any of the characters or premise.

</comment></comment><comment> T-A He missed Rainbows End [1].

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, good call! Forgot about that one. I'll add it to the list. I am huge fan of his Zones of Thought books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Given the mentions of the word throughout the article, I was entirely expecting to see _Palimpsest_ by Charlie Stross[1] in there somewhere. It does feature a very large library, although the plot is more time-travel (and temporal engineering).

[1] [https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/palimpsest- intr...](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/palimpsest-intro.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds almost too perfect - I'll add it to the list (as well as my near- term reading list).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Genevieve Cogman's _Invisible Library_ series features a library that connects to multiple parallel worlds, with the portals anchored by books in its collection that are variants unique to that world. e.g. an original edition of Grimm's fairy tiles with extra stories. The library is big enough to have an internal transportation network.

</comment><comment><USER11> Probably Ink and Bone should be on there [[https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317174/ink-and- bone...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317174/ink-and-bone-by- rachel-caine/9780451473134/)]

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll add it to the list! I've been on a middle grade / YA tear lately, and this looks excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for the list but you forgot one of the best series of all times that contains many libraries: A Series of Unfortunate events. I'm slightly ashamed to say I saw it on netflix, rather than reading the books. But, i hear the books are great too.

</comment><comment><USER13> Borges gets extra points for having infinitely long books in his magical libraries. If you ever flip from a page, you will effectively never see that page again.

</comment><comment><USER14> The library in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun has always stuck with me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Greg Bear's _The Way_ books have a fairly wondrous library which is central to the plot of the first book

Larry Niven's _Protector_ also has a huge library that played a key role in that book

</comment><comment><USER15> Topical is _The Book of Sand_ by Jorge Luis Borges. After all, the distinction between a whole library and a single book is rendered meaningless once infinity gets involved!

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't read much. But movies and TV shows (and Anime) have tons of mysterious libraries.

* Terry Pratchet's Discworld -- `nuff said.

* The Pagemaster (90s film about kid getting trapped inside of adventure books)

* Beauty and the Beast -- The library was the only non-magical part of the enchanted castle, ironically.

* "National Treasure" movie has a few important library scenes

* A Certain Magical Index -- Anime / Light Novel: the female lead "Index" is literally a character who had a library implanted inside of her.

* The Mystic Archives of Dantalian -- Anime / Light Novel: Another one where the female lead is a library of sorts. She's more bookwormish than Index, and actually hangs out at a normal Library most of the time.

* Read or Die -- Another anime with library / paper themed superpowers

* Harry Potter -- So many shenanigans happen in the Hogwarts library, I don't even know where to start.

* Full Metal Alchemist -- The librarian was instrumental to the plot. Its mostly an action show, but there was a period where they had to research some stuff at the Alchemist's library.

* The Ancient Magus' Bride -- I wasn't too fond of the show in general, so I haven't seen it all yet. But there was a very memorable magical library episode. Effectively, the magic library was a trap which can only be escaped if the human receives something from inside. The lead character kept returning to the library (her personal life sucked, so she needed an escape), while the Librarian would continuously give her something so that she could escape each time. When the Librarian ran out of things to give her, he rips up the magical library card (hoping she never returns again). Unfortunately, the lead character is adept in magic and finds her way back even without the library card, to a disastrous consequence.

* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- A classic, is it not? I guess its a single book that they're working with, but the singular book is magic-space tech that has all the information you could ever need. So its basically a library.

* Ender's Game -- Honorable Mention. Ender's video game with the giant that he plays by himself effectively functions as a library. Its where Ender has self-reflection, and where the malevolent forces push Ender towards one direction of his psyche. Its as much of a "Library" as the "Pagemaster" was IMO.

\</comment><comment>--

EDIT: Apparently 'The Pagemaster' is a book in of itself, and is listed in the article. I didn't know that. Harry Potter was also on their list.

<comment><AUTHOR> Speaking hyperbolically, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood might be the best content across any medium that I've consumed in years. Speaking _somewhat_ less so -- if you're thinking about trying out anime, start here, it's amazing and hilarious with great characters and an intense storyline.

<comment><USER16> Its hard to beat Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood in general. Its kinda got something for everyone in my experience. A huge variety of people I know like it.

I would argue that there were better anime out there, but they are difficult to get through and may require a good understanding of "anime culture". Ex: When they Cry, or Madoka Magica I would argue are superior.

When they Cry requires a general understanding of visual-novel harem style stories, while Madoka Magica requires a strong understanding of the typical Magical Girl plotline (Sailor Moon, Cardcaptors, Lyrical Girl Nanoha are pretty much required watching BEFORE you watch Madoka Magica)

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>-----

In contrast: FMA: Brotherhood is self-sufficient. You can enter the show without knowing anything about anime and enjoy it. The only "risk" I have with the show is the chibi-styles / super-cartoony that they push randomly.

Its otherwise a very serious plot, with some quite dramatic moments. So a lot of people feel it to be bipolar since it also uses "cartoon physics" on occasion.

</comment><comment><USER17> The Final Encyclopedia?</comment>


An Anonymous 4chan Post Helped Solve a 25-Year-Old Math Puzzle (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-helped-solve-a-25-year-old-math-puzzle/ <comment><USER2> This is one of my favorite stories. There is some good info on the superpermutations problem (which is now known as the Haruhi problem when looking for the lower bound of 14) here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,_or_the_Haruhi_problem)

This has the original proof that appeared on /sci/:

[https://mathsci.fandom.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem](https://mathsci.fandom.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem)

And here is a paper authored in part by "Anonymous 4chan Poster": [https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf](https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf)

<comment><USER3> And here is the original thread on /sci/

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181024190314/https://warosu.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181024190314/https://warosu.org/sci/thread/3751105)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> /sci/ is a weird place, but there are some extremely brilliant, bored minds there. They published a guide: [https://sites.google.com/site/scienceandmathguide/](https://sites.google.com/site/scienceandmathguide/) that was great for me as an undergrad.

</comment><comment><USER5> An interesting use case of superpermutations is for password cracking on devices that use rolling codes. I recall Samy kamkar using de bruijn's sequence to more quickly find the unlock code for garage doors [1]. Not sure what the difference between the de bruijn sequence [2] and superpermutations are though.

[1] [http://samy.pl/opensesame/](http://samy.pl/opensesame/) [2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence)

</comment><comment><USER6> (2018)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, yes.

<comment><USER6> Oh! not an admonishment, just for others. Sometimes dang comes along and fixes titles.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: In 15 years from now, what do you want your life to look like? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Calm, quiet, peaceful, and secluded. In many ways, the opposite of what it is like right now.

And a bigger vegetable garden than I have right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> financially independent and retired, working on side projects in Hawaii.

</comment><comment><USER4> Peaceful, along with world peace. No, not the Metta kind.</comment>


What makes an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur? - <AUTHOR> http://drodio.typepad.com/effecting_change/2007/10/what-makes-an-e.html <comment><USER2> The Virgin Airlines story is probably apocryphal. According to Branson's autobiography, Virgin Airlines was the idea of Randolph Fields, an American lawyer with no background in the airline industry. He got a couple pilot friends to help him out with it and then approached Branson for funding. Branson liked the idea (mostly because "it'd be _fun_ "), and funded it over the objections of the other Virgin Group executives.

It's similar to Steve Jobs' role in Pixar: he had little to do with the initial idea or execution, but put up nearly all of the cash and so ended up with majority ownership.</comment>


Ask HN: Any real-world application VueJS application? - <AUTHOR> Is there any open-source project using VueJS at scale with implementations of:<p>- CRUD using validation - Real-time reactivity - etc.<p>All available resources tend to be for beginners, and none for advanced users. <comment><USER2> Not sure if it fulfills all of your requirements, but Gitlab[1] is using Vue.js

[1] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab-ce)

<comment><AUTHOR> I already scanned their repository few times, but they are not using it for complex components.

Also, they do not use it for complex forms with VueX and validation, which is missing in the VueJS community at the moment.

[1] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/tree/master/app/asse...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/tree/master/app/assets/javascripts/vue_pipelines_index)

[2] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/tree/master/app/asse...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/tree/master/app/assets/javascripts/vue_realtime_listener)

[3] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/tree/master/app/asse...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/tree/master/app/assets/javascripts/vue_shared)</comment></comment>


How Obama's team used big data to rally voters - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/509026/how-obamas-team-used-big-data-to-rally-voters/

<comment><USER2> Long article, but well worth the read. It surprises me how much data their campaign had had access too, especially about how Rentrak turned each cable viewing household into a reference-able number that the Obama campaign could track. Maybe its just conspiracy minded thinking, but seems to me Rentrak could have easily provided geographical data (addresses/neighborhoods/cities) to match those "anonymized" households.</comment>


Traceroute Lies: A Typical Misinterpretation Of Output - <AUTHOR> http://movingpackets.net/2017/10/06/misinterpreting-traceroute/ <comment><USER2> As a network engineer who gets similar reports fairly often, I recommend watching "Tutorial: Troubleshooting with Traceroute" (a.k.a. "A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute"), as recorded at NANOG 62 (there's also an older presentation from NANOG 47, IIRC). It covers the same stuff John's article does and more. A PDF of the slides [1] is also available.

John alluded to this in his "side note" but often (the majority of cases, IME) the TTL will not be decremented inside of the MPLS core so you, as an end user, will have no visibility into it. You'll just see, for example, hop #4 (Los Angeles) then hop #5 (New York City), completely unaware that the IP packet actually passed through (MPLS "P") routers in Phoenix, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, and Washington, DC, in between.

You'll see the same thing -- although at a different layer -- when Q-in-Q tunneling is in use (assuming L2 protocols are also being tunneled).

N.B.: On common Linux distributions, there are usually several traceroute variants available. They are not all created equal. If a "regular" (UDP) traceroute won't work, you can try using ICMP or even TCP.

[0]: [https://youtu.be/a1IaRAVGPEE](https://youtu.be/a1IaRAVGPEE)

[1]: [https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/tuesday_steenberge...](https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/tuesday_steenbergen_troublshootingtraceroute_62.49.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great post. This is a very clear explanation of the routing situation. The last image is especially good.

What's needed is some kind of L2 Traceroute. It's maddening that an increasingly common piece of routing infrastructure is invisible to almost all common troubleshooting tools.

Edit: Cisco has one for their routers [0]. Since each hop would have to be traced locally, an L2 Trace would require orchestrating against all hardware devices in the route which introduces legal complications. A new discovery protocol might be needed.

[0] [https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst6...](https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst6500/ios/12-2SXF/native/configuration/guide/swcg/l2trace.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> For those wondering, this is the MPLS to which the author refers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching)

</comment><comment><USER5> I rarely see mpls lines decreasing ttls. What I do see is traceroutes which are something like

2ms 3ms 38ms 5ms 8ms 9ms (target)

That 38ms showing packet losss too. I suspect it's the control plane that doesn't prioritise responses.

As I have no access to intermediate hops, nor even a business relationship with the owner, traceroutes, and things like bgp.he.net, help me work out where problems may be occurring and sometimes let me reroute.

Even on private wires it's hard to explain to network providers what an outage means. Sometimes a 10ms outage can be the difference between your application working and failing. Had a mikrotik at one event this year that I think was bouncing the queuing process from core to core. Looking at the rtp before and after showed it often throwing 30 packets out of order - about 15ms. Occasionally it would simply drop them, and that causes a major problem with broadcast video as normal FEC can cope with 20 losses on the trot at most.

Had to change ISP in kiev a couple of years ago because of a frequent 136ms drop. I'd isolated it to the next upstream provider from our existing isp, but nothing more could be done as it seemed that was their only real transit provider, and 130ms doesn't really stop Facebook from working.

</comment><comment><USER6> Would have been nice if MPLS was spelled out when introduced, or you could use one of those hyperlink things I've heard so much about to link to a reference...

<comment><USER2> I suppose, although the target audience will already know what MPLS stands for (Multi-Protocol Label Switching, FWIW).

<comment><USER7> The post explains MPLS's impact on getting traceroute wrong, and its target audience would thus be people getting traceroute wrong: people who know what MPLS is likely understand its impact on traceroute traces already, however there would be a very large overlap between people not knowing about MPLS and people misunderstanding traceroute output.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The other big lie is re. symmetry.

Replies may not be travelling the same path as the request, but traceroute offers no visibility of the return path.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it common for MPLS routers to decrement the TTL inside the packet for each hop within the MPLS network? I thought that the whole point of MPLS was the packet doesn't need to be looked into?

<comment><USER2> IME, no, the TTL usually isn't decremented. It is configurable, though, and is sometimes done for visibility and/or troubleshooting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Last I remember newer versions of mtr include MPLS labels in their output to help avoid this confusion, but that version wasn't included in CentOS 6 perhaps even from EPEL.

</comment><comment><USER11> is there a way to identify a MPLS router aside from just analyzing the traceroute? Would be nice if the hostnames had an identifier in them for that.

<comment><USER12> It's not ideal, but if you ping an internal MPLS router you'll typically see a very different RTT to the one you see from traceroute. (On the other hand, you'll often see nothing at all, since internal MPLS nodes often aren't using publicly routable IP addresses.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That traceroute example doesn't lie at all, just creative writing. The author conviently does not mention VPN not once. Plus, MPLS service providers have been around awhile. It's technology is well-understood.

Traceroute can missrepresent where latency is due to how it uses the TTL field, but increasing the sampling size usually averages out that issue.</comment>


Writing in Cafés: A Personal History - <AUTHOR> https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/writing-in-cafes-a-personal-history <comment><USER2> I've written a lot of software in cafes. The combination of background noise, interesting people to talk to once in a while, people-watching possibilities, the travel to/from, switching physical space, etc., have always been helpful.

\- Happy Donuts in Palo Alto was a particular favorite, and still my go-to when in the Bay Area: a great hangout for Stanford students, software developers, late-night stoners with a need for donuts. It was sad that homeless people would show up at 1 am to try to sleep as much as possible before daylight, interrupted once in a while by staff waking them up (legal issues I think). An early-thirties lady walked in with her parents late one night and stood under the huge cosmic donut on the ceiling saying "this is the place .. this is where I wrote [my dissertation]." Good vibes all around. They supplied Google with donuts for a while.

\- Three Bees in San Mateo, Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto, Stanford CoHo, and Tart- to-Tart in San Francisco were other favorites.

\- Current hangouts are Camino Bakery, Krankies, Ardmore Coffee, and the Coffee Mill in the Winston-Salem, NC area. As a remote software developer I need to get out of the basement several times a week.

[edit: spelling]

</comment><comment><USER3> I did my entire bachelor degree studying in cafes at night. Each coup of coffee was very vivid reminder: I've payed for a coffe, so I had one hour (as much) to write, to study, and to think. It was a great constraint. I'm still searching for great cafes everywhere I go. It's a great personal pleasure.

<comment><USER4> That sounds like a good idea, might have to give it a go. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The great cafe short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Hemingway. [http://www.mrbauld.com/hemclean.html](http://www.mrbauld.com/hemclean.html)

<comment><USER5> Thanks, that is great. I always used to claim to hate Hemingway to get a rise out of people, but man, that guy!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with multitasking overload - <AUTHOR> I've noticed recently that way too often I will open a program to do something and then notice something that I was doing earlier, finish it or work on it for a while, then finally go back to the original app, remember what I was supposed to be doing and go back to it.
Does anybody else have this problem? I find myself getting caught up in this loop all the time.
Ironically, this is an instance of that, I'll probably get distracted by some article after I submit this and not go back to what I was doing. <comment><USER2> Maybe these things you forget about aren't very important to you? For example, if your house is on fire, you won't open an app and then be too distracted to run out.</comment>


These weeks in Rust  - <AUTHOR> http://cmr.github.io/blog/2013/11/09/these-weeks-in-rust/

<comment><USER2> Weird, this isn't something I expected to see on the front page of HN. :P

To clarify, one of our community members (cmr) compiles these posts to summarize all the interesting developments in the language over the course of each week. It's an indispensable resource for those of us who can't devote ourselves full-time to Rust development (really, I'm in the IRC channel every day and I wasn't aware of half of these). It's also probably the best way for casual observers to keep tabs on the progress of the language in general. You can see the full archives here:

[http://cmr.github.io/blog/categories/this-week-in- rust/](http://cmr.github.io/blog/categories/this-week-in-rust/)

Thanks again, Corey!

<comment><USER3> As a casual observer they are a very interesting read, as are the meeting minutes that get put up.

Both "this week in rust" and meeting minutes are posted to /r/rust, which is a good resource for those who want to keep an eye on how Rust is rapidly developing.

<comment><USER4> The meeting minutes are fascinating reading! The jostle of the decision making process is interesting, but I really relish the buffet of juicy technical details.

Pity that r/rust is still fairly low volume.

<comment><USER5> There are a couple of submissions a day. For a language as young as Rust I wouldn't call that "low volume".

<comment><USER4> I meant the volume of comments, rather than submissions.

And I wasn't comparing to other programming subs, just saying comment threads don't get nearly as long as they _ought_ to given how much activity is going on with Rust itself.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I call bullshit on Computer "Science" - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-call-bullshit-on-computer-science <comment><USER2> What does Computer "Science" have to do with programmer productivity? That's like claiming Physics is not a science because you can't measure physicists' productivity effectively.

<comment><USER3> "I don't understand this thing so I'm going to call it bullshit."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Computer Science != Software Engineering. Sounds like your beef is with Software Engineering.

<comment><USER5> My beef is mostly hyperbole. But FWIW, my beef is with our industry. Despite my hysterical and contrived rantings, there are a few good empirical results, but those researchers are awfully lonely. There are maybe two(!) good books on the subject, Peopleware and Making Software. How many people making decisions about developing software have read either or both?

Most claims about variances in programmer productivity cite a study that is more than fifty years old. How many programming languages have been developed since that study, and who (if anybody) has done empirical research into deciding whether there are attributes of a language that have a direct bearing on productivity?

I agree with claims that automatic garbage collection, not OO, is the single most important productivity lever to come out of Universities and into industry. How do we know if this is true or false?

<comment><USER6> _"There are maybe two(!) good books on the subject, Peopleware and Making Software."_

What about Fred Brooks's works? Not being facetious -- curious to know if they slipped your mind or if you just don't rate them.

Criminally underrated comment on the topic: "Part of the problem is that the discourse on methodology is mostly conducted by people who don't themselves do the work. Imagine a bunch of managers working out a 'process' for, say, mathematicians. They'd be laughed out of the room." (gruseom, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406051>)

Along that vein, while we're talking scientists -- are there studies on scientist productivity? Even for computer scientists, I'm pretty sure no one's going around debating whether an academic paper is better if it's written by two researchers versus one. The one obvious parallel I can think of is peer review vis-a-vis code review. But that is a process for after the initial work is produced, not one that dictates how someone should conduct the thinking process for their job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This post makes good points, the title is a bit unfortunate however, since it has little to do with what the author actually claims.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think there's some level of equivocation going on in this article.

P1. Computer Science has to do with computers.

P2. Science is more than formal systems, namely empirical evidence and studies.

C. Computer Science is incomplete if it does not incorporate empirical evidence.

The problem as I see it is not that Computer Science is not Science in the sense that maybe Chemistry and Biology is a science. It's called "Computer Science" not "Computer" + "Science". The term is atomic, in my opinion and you can't really draw the word "Science" out of the name of the field and derive some kind of meaning out of it. CS tends to hang out somewhere between the maths and sciences, but not fully one or the other. I'm not sure how you would go about applying the scientific method to programming.

Also, I think the beef is with software engineering as stated before.

</comment><comment><USER9> I cannot rightly apprehend the confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

<comment><USER5> [http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-cannot-rightly-apprehend- th...](http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-cannot-rightly-apprehend-the- confusion-of-i)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yep, we really need to get on fixing all of the terms related to the various computing disciplines.

Companies only confound this further when they want "computer science" degrees, when they really want software engineers. And most software engineering programs I've been exposed to are a joke. Maybe I just need to get out more...

I also have no real ideas or thoughts on how "we" need to "fix" this somehow. Just frustration.

</comment><comment><USER11> While I agree that "Computer _Science_ " is a bullshit term (would be more accurate to call it something along the lines of "Computation Theory" or "Computation Mathematics"), this article misses that point and attacks the term for the wrong reasons. I call bullshit on his understanding of what computer science is.

And for what it's worth, I think Computer Engineering isn't a particularly strong engineering discipline either...

</comment><comment><USER12> Who cares about programmer productivity? The whole notion of trying to quantify, measure and predict it is anti-thematic to what's going on at Y Combinator.

Want to see programmer productivity? I'll show you it to you in retrospect. Tools?!?! Languages?!?! How about passion and motivation???

If you're a big company trying to implement the next big thing, just buy it or hire someone with a track record of success.

</comment><comment><USER13> Almost as a rule, studies with "science" in the name are not true sciences.</comment>


Fuck Shit Up - <AUTHOR>

The year 2014 is over and I know many of us are pursuing our goals and endeavors ambitiously. Let's keep going! One thing I learned over the years is every idea has its time...you just have to be ready for it.
It's about to be 2015 and I just want to wish everyone the best of luck this year. 99% of startups fail, odds are..., first time founders - fuck that! Just do it and don't look back. If you haven't done so yet...just dive in. For those of you pushing hard everyday, you've already come this far...
A year just went by and I think my goal for 2015 is spend more time outside. Outdoors offices are happening for me.
Good luck everyone! Cheers to those of you who had the balls to chase your dreams. <comment><USER2> Sorry, couldn't resist.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion- Fuck Shit Up [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBJuhxU7oHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBJuhxU7oHQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cheers bro. Good luck to you in 2015!!!

</comment><comment><USER4> Cheers man! have a great 2015.</comment>


Almost killing someone with a drone - ux-app http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/13/7205741/i-almost-killed-someone-with-a-drone

<comment><AUTHOR> The author could have experienced the same by flying a kite or throwing a boomerang, but what's amazing (to me) is asking for political action to protect you and others against ones own misjudgment... There's a severe regulation in place in France, but it doesn't stop amateurs from flying drones in crowded areas, with no accident to report anyway (during the same time, thousands are killed on the road).

I remember one day, I dropped a yo-yo from my balcony, from the 17th floor. Yes, I could have killed someone. Should Yo-yo be regulated? It seems so absurd, I could almost doubt the author's honesty and wonder if it's just lobbying in disguise.

</comment><comment><USER2> Panic is not the answer here. Training and regulation is.</comment>


Qt WebGL Streaming - <AUTHOR> http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/07/07/qt-webgl-streaming-merged/ <comment><USER2> From an earlier discussion of it: "The OpenGL calls are sent over the network and transformed into WebGL calls in the browser. It's not video-streaming. The browser is executing WebGL in a canvas. Textures, buffers, glyphs, etc. are sent as well.

You need a browser with WebGL support. Tested on IE11, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Chromium."

[http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/22/qt-quick-webgl- streaming/](http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/22/qt-quick-webgl-streaming/)

I assume only a subset of OpenGL calls can be sent and things like 3d volume textures would eventually require WebGL2?

<comment><USER3> In this case, they are building the OpenGL ES 2.0 version of Qt, and WebGL is basically fully compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0. It's accelerating the toolkit itself. If you wanted to use GL directly I think you would have the same restrictions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I understood correctly, it is technology similar to GTK+'s Broadway [https://www.google.com/search?q=gtk+Broadway](https://www.google.com/search?q=gtk+Broadway)

<comment><USER5> Here is a docker image I made if anyone wants to quickly try out broadway [https://github.com/moondev/gtk3-docker](https://github.com/moondev/gtk3-docker)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Some time ago I published a couple of blog posts talking about Qt WebGL > Streaming plugin

I had to search to find out for sure what he was talking about. A Qt application runs a small, local web server, streaming UI calls to a WebGL context on a page you view through your browser of choice. [http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/22/qt-quick-webgl- streaming/](http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/22/qt-quick-webgl-streaming/)

This differs from Electron in that your backend is C instead of JS, your UI is Qt instead of HTML, and the runtime doesn't embed the browser. I'm just guessing, but I suspect you also don't develop any code on the browser client context.

I've also personally found value in running Electron from a page in a local HTTP server process, so I don't find that part too different, but YMMV.

Maybe it's more appropriate to say this is like per-app RDP via WebGL.

<comment><USER7> If I'm understanding you correctly, I don't believe that's the intended use for this technology. This is about streaming an application over the Internet, from a remote server, not from a localhost server. I can't think of any advantage to building a locally hosted Qt app that way. If you want to run a Quick/QML app locally, you just run it — there would be no gain and numerous penalties in running it through a web browser.

(It also doesn't seem useful to compare it to Electron-based apps. The Qt comparison to an Electron app would be a Qt/QML app that uses Qt's WebEngineView, a control that embeds the Chromium browser.)

<comment><USER6> That's a good point. I could also see this being useful on IoT devices to provide better UI fidelity for configuration tools across the LAN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 3 years back I wanted to do something similar with a different approach. Instead of sending opengl commands, I chose to encode the Qt ui into video streams (also with a platform plugin, so no code change from the Qt developer side) and use either webrtc or mediasource api. I prototyped this, but I was unsure about the business value of it.

At the time, what I wanted to do is an app store that is across browsers and platforms.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious to see the latency of this webgl approach. I had for few times, thought about the same approach, however, I thought this should be slower than sending video frames.

The method I tried to use was a mixture of vnc and h264 frames. for interactive surface, such as QOpenGLWidget, I send with h264, but for static content like a button, I used vnc-like approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a bad design if you care about latency.

All UI interaction requires a round trip from the browser to the server, with a whole new set of GL commands sent back to the browser. It's a fancier version of VNC ultimately.

It would never work well over the Internet, it might be tolerable on a LAN.

<comment><USER10> The video also shows a bit of stuttering. Fluid 60fps should be seen as minimum requirement when comes to such interfaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone answer the question for me, why? What is the user case for this? Is it mostly for when you have an existing app that you want to access remotely?

I'm not giving it a hard time, I legitimately can't see the user case and want to know.

<comment><USER8> I wanted to do the same before. the idea was a platform for software as service.

You see, not all software are ideal to be implemented with pure web technology, although the limitation is quickly going away.

One example is expensive 3D modelling tools, such as Maya and 3D studio max. they are still desktop apps. They suffer from high piracy rate due to their prices. this is a negative feedback loop. You price them higher, you will have more people pirating them.

So this streaming Qt thing is a solution for quickly making a conventional desktop app into a web service and you can charge people with subscription.

This is a combination of the power of server machine and the convenience of the web. As web is not as capable as desktop app on 3D rendering, threading and direct accessing to GPU hardware.

Streaming the software ui is a viable solution for SAAS already, for example, as I know, both office 365 and the online version of libreoffice use this approach.

What I wanted to do was making a platform to make this easy. But I eventually gave up, because I think the biggest developers who would adopt this are heavy 3D graphics companies, and that narrows down to Adobe and Autodesk, as computer graphics is very labor intensive and monopolized. They both are big enough to develop their own solutions.

<comment><USER12> So legitimate users that paid good money for their licenses will now be forced to use a blocky slow streaming video solution instead of fast responsive interface on their Xeon/64GB RAM equipped workstations... AND pay perpetual monthly subscription for something they owned before?

I see that going down well with your actually paying customers :)

Remember, you're not gaining money when you're screwing over paying customers to hunt people who aren't going to pay anyway.

<comment><USER13> It's not video streaming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand what "streaming" means here.

Is this a video stream of a QT UI being rendered in the server ad-hoc for the client?

Is this a QT UI being converted to WebGL (planes, meshes, etc) on the fly?

Is this a QT UI compiled for WebGL?

<comment><USER15> To me it looks like "a way for javascript programmers to make a UI without having to learn Python or C++".

<comment><USER16> Couldn't be more wrong. The GUI is written in C++ and is running on the server. It streams its OpenGL calls to a web browser.

It's basically a way to remotely view a Qt app. Like VNC but faster and better integrated into browsers.

<comment><USER14> But VNC is video streaming, right?

What are the instruction being sent to the browser? "paint this text" here, "paint this surface" here, etc?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They should really have a demo available on the web to try out.

<comment><USER18> I'm guessing it's pretty hard to scale, given that it is effectively a remote session like RDP.

It would be interesting to see a local demo that pairs with WebAssembly, though.</comment></comment>


How many laws did Apple break? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/02/08/how-many-laws-did-apple-break/

<comment><USER2> This concerns conjectured laws of the marketplace, like "Law 1: Larger size makes growth increasingly difficult."

It has nothing to do with the breaking of actual laws, like anti-poaching collusion, which is what I expected.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I usually like Monday Note's analysis (Jean-Louis Gassee has an interesting history with Apple [0]) but this smacks of clickbait.

[0] Apart from being an Apple board member for years, in an alternate reality, Jean-Louis Gassee becomes the new Steve Jobs when Apple buys BeOS instead of NextSTEP. BeOS was Apple's preferred choice for the OS X rebuild but they balked at the price JLG set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only law that doesn't get broken is that over a long-term period well-run companies tend to out-perform poorly run companies, although luck does play a big part as well.

<comment><USER5> If you qualify it with the word "tend" it's more of a trend than a law.

Men tend to make more than women, but that doesn't mean there's a law behind it.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, though I was just being facetious. The point I take from the article is that the opinions of business bloggers are worth about how much we pay for them.</comment></comment></comment>


Despite Accord With Apple, Music Labels Still Fret - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/business/media/02apple.html?_r=1 <comment><USER2> Best part of the article is the end ...

"In some ways, the tension stems from Apple's power over the industry, but it also echoes the traditional divide between suppliers and distributors. Several years ago, some labels withdrew their videos from the Yahoo Music service over a dispute about compensation. Before that, when MTV began in the early 1980s, the music industry eagerly provided videos in the belief that they would help sell records, though they later regretted having provided free content for the cable channel.

They believe they created MTV, and will say they revived Apple,said Mr. Goldberg, speaking about the music industry in general."

<comment><USER3> The best thing about that part is that the labels should have been very accustomed to the divide between suppliers and distributors...but they were accustomed to finding themselves on the other side.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple GUI Notepad using C++ natively made in my high school in 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vibhoothiiaanand/CNotepad <comment><USER2> No matter what language type of C++ he is using, I find this an amazing achievement for a high schooler.

I didn't write my first line of code until I was 20 years old in college, and 8 years later I am now a lead developer at one of my country's largest telecommunications companies.

I can't imagine how amazing this guy is going to become being able to build this at such a young age. Keep it up!

<comment><USER3> There's lots of kids as young as like 12 out there on the internet programming complex projects all on their own.

Granted, it is amateurish code for amateurish projects, but the users don't care and gladly eat it up.

<comment><USER4> This guy comes to mind: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egukLtEhyP0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egukLtEhyP0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Building a text editor is fun. It's the ultimate scratch your own itch project.

I remember building one back in the day (2002) with Visual Basic 6.

Unfortunately I lost the source code but I still have the website's code. Feature wise it had syntax highlighting, column selection, project wide find / replace, file edit history (timeline), multiple clipboards, splits and more.

Does anyone remember what that really good text editor control was in VB6? It did most of the heavy lifting. It wasn't a built-in control.

<comment><USER6> That sounds like CodeMax, or its descendent CodeSense.

CodeMax was originally a product by Barry Allyn (WinMain software) and it was pretty good.

Unfortunately though for him the market was pretty small and it was difficult to survive as a commercial product. It was open source for a short while and that was when CodeSense came about.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, it definitely wasn't CodeMax but CodeSense rings a bell, but I'm only about 10% sure it was CodeSense.

I think I would immediately know the name if it were mentioned. It was much faster and better than anything at the time when it came out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you like stories about kids going way above and beyond in programming, read about Raymond Lau and Stuffit.

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

</comment><comment><USER8> Shouldn't the title of this have a "Show HN: " prepended?

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated, Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice.

>> I would now love to opensource the project for everyone.

Where is the license?

Learn more about licensing here: [https://help.github.com/en/articles/licensing-a- repository](https://help.github.com/en/articles/licensing-a-repository)

</comment><comment><USER10> I dont know what age range high school encompasses where you are, but assuming its similar to the Uk thats a mighty achivement, especially considering your frank recognition of the bugz

<comment><USER11> OP appears to be from India.

I've interacted with several HS graduates from India, and those who opt for CS in HS (11th and 12th grade; usually ages 16-17) are usually taught C++ in Turbo C++ 3.0. This release of Turbo C++ was released in 1990.

That's... not great. For reference, the C++ programming language was first standardized in 1998.

Thus, most graduates never learn _proper_ C++ in the sense that a lot of what they're taught doesn't even compile on modern compilers and they aren't aware of many new* features.

That said, this project is still pretty impressive for an HS student, even if it's written in ancient C++ and requires DOS to run :)

*new = anything introduced to C++ in the last three decades (after 1991).

However, apparently they've introduced Python3 last year, so hopefully the situation will improve :)

<comment><USER12> I've been spittings hundreds of c++ code back in 1996-1999, not knowing that it was not...standardized. You may be astonished at the complexity. The only downside was that it took minutes to compile it on 386DX and Borland's C compiler was faster with C. Inline assembly was a commonplace back in the day, so to know C/C++ actually meant to know Assembly and hand-optimize code more often than not.

<comment><USER11> I've worked with plenty of complex legacy C/C++ :).

The downsides are that it doesn't run on modern machines, is difficult to maintain, and you need to implement dozens of workarounds to do basic things that can be done in modern languages with just a couple lines of code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mine's not as cool but I did a similar project using Qt and C++:

[https://github.com/Giancarlos/qNotePad](https://github.com/Giancarlos/qNotePad)

I wanted to make a cross platform text editor that was simple and consistent throughout different platforms. I found it easier to do it in Delphi cause I wasn't sure how to hook up a syntax highlighter for it. I'm proud of the small bits I did code though. C++ isn't really my strongest language.

</comment><comment><USER14> The function declarations are formatted in such a way that it makes you think the prototypes come after.

Solid project, but I suggest you run the file through something like clang- format.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't care how many bugs it's got. The fact you've done something that isn't 700MB Electron app gets my upvote. Great work!

<comment><USER16> Simple thinking is frowned upon nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What school was it? :) Maybe you could share the curriculum/syllabus of coding classes in that school? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> It is Kendriya Vidyalaya[1], chain of Central Government Schools in India, so they have almost one school in almost in a district of a state. or sometimes two or three in the state depending on Population Density.

So at that time Syllabus is something like this[2], it is not exactly same, almost same and I think this was overall pattern of that[2], now it is again revamped[3].

At our time it was more like 4 hours theory/week and 1.5/2 hours lab sessions(which sometimes becomes theory).

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

[2]: [https://www.kv1bhuj.org/admin/downloads/1997118251study_mate...](https://www.kv1bhuj.org/admin/downloads/1997118251study_material_xii_comp\(1\).pdf)

[3]: [http://cbseacademic.nic.in/web_material/Curriculum19/Main- Se...](http://cbseacademic.nic.in/web_material/Curriculum19/Main- SeniorSecondary/14_Computer_science_New.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11>
        #include<conio.h>
        #include<dos.h>

This appears to be for DOS, and I'm betting this was written in Turbo C++. From what I've heard from my friends, almost all schools in India still use Turbo C++ (in DosBox) to teach C++. Ew.

<comment><USER18> 36 year old me is very glad to have learned VGA graphics programming with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ during high school. I've met kids these days coming out of university CS degrees in the U.S.A. that still don't have a solid grasp on how pointers work.

I believe it is in every programmer's interest to have a deep understanding of the system for which they are working on, even if they don't need to use the low level tools from day to day. Teaching C++ in DOS can still provide an excellent CS foundation IMO.

<comment><USER19> I would even argue it is much better than trying to do so on a more modern system, as you directly can just use graphics and color (which is both fun and helps teach a lot of programming concepts that are useful to know for building UIs later) without wasting a ton of time learning some UI toolkit that will be neither instructive nor actually-useful in the real world (as even if you choose a good one, it is almost certainly going to be obsolete by the time you go to get a job).

<comment><USER20> Here is a nice quick tutorial on using the frame buffer in Linux: [https://cmcenroe.me/2018/01/30/fbclock.html](https://cmcenroe.me/2018/01/30/fbclock.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ethreums Parity Hacked. Half Million Ether(150M USD) Frozen - <AUTHOR> http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/11/07/ethereums-parity-hacked-half-million-eth-frozen <comment><USER2> See also discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642856)

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642856)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is exactly what Cardano is trying to avoid with Haskell based smart contract language and formal verification. [https://cardanodocs.com/technical/plutus/introduction/](https://cardanodocs.com/technical/plutus/introduction/)

<comment><USER5> They are formally verified but pretty low level (just like Blockstream Simplicity).

For the record Bitcoin already contains a pretty simple but useful scripting language [0]. See [1] and [2] for some interesting scenarios utilizing Script.

[0]: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script)

[1]: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contract](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contract)

[2]: [https://curiosity-driven.org/bitcoin-contracts](https://curiosity- driven.org/bitcoin-contracts)</comment></comment>