Clarence Thomas Asks First Question from Supreme Court Bench in 10 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/29/468576931/clarence-thomas-asks-1st-question-from-supreme-court-bench-in-10-years <comment><USER2> HN seems to be gravitating away from the guidelines (maybe it's the pull of the election season?) What do you think? Personally, I'm not a big fan of political stories on HN unless they concern technology. I feel like I'm already drowning in political news and opinion.

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic.

<comment><USER3> "some interesting new phenomenon" ;)

<comment><USER2> Ha! Well, I stand corrected. :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Actually, it's a good question. And I'm a anti-platelets liberal.

"He noted that the law allows someone convicted of a misdemeanor assault charge to get a lifetime ban on possessing a gun 'which at least as of now results in suspension of a constitutional right.' "

These days the right lawyer can turn a simple accident into a misdemeanor assault.

It was a good question.

<comment><USER5> It is a sound, relevant question. So would many others he (presumably) could have asked over the past decade.

Also, what is "anti-platelets"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh dear, someone can't just copy off Scalia's work anymore.

<comment><USER7> Have you ever read anything he's written while on the court?

<comment><USER8> It is nonetheless interesting that shortly after Scalia's death Thomas starts asking questions after a ten year silence.

It would certainly _seem_ to indicate he feels Scalia covered his questions in the past.

<comment><USER9> "correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there' "[1]

[1] [https://xkcd.com/552/](https://xkcd.com/552/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PageStack Android: Push/Pop web pages between your desktop & Android phone. - <AUTHOR> http://pagestackandroid.appspot.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I developed this with @hedgehog during Google Campout. You can now download this on the Android Market.

<comment><USER2> I LOVE it. I've been thinking of and meaning to make something like this for ages - thanks for doing it for us! Now, get out of my head. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, I've wanted this for a while, though not for android.</comment>


Learning how to learn - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-02-learning-how-and-not-to.html <comment><USER2> great article. the basic 3 points could be summarized as:

1) constantly look for associations

2) essentially use the pomodoro technique

3) test yourself on what you learned

an interesting learning workflow might be:

a) read a section of a book or a blog post

b) look for associations on how what you read relates to other things you know

c) ask yourself a test question relating to what you read, and answer it

d) take a 10 minute break, goto a

<comment><USER3> I'm sure this would be clarified in the book, but it seems their tips are best for gaining proficiency in quickly and accurately recollecting things you have already seen before, and not necessarily for learning something for the first time. I've certainty studied subjects where it takes ~20 minutes to recollect last lessons ideas into my head before I can proceed to new things, and for those types of subjects I think the 3 hour study block would be superior to the 30 minute blocks.</comment></comment>


Apple's Next Laptops Could Be More iPhone Than Mac - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-next-laptops-could-be-more-iphone-than-mac-1528992149 <comment><USER3> I've been figuring for a couple years now I'd have to abandon macs once my air dies. Apple seems bound and determined to shun developers and instead sell facebook machines.

<comment><USER4> I am a developer and I love using a Mac. The stock terminal app has improved so much over the last few years that switching to any flavor of Linux always leaves me wanting Mac OS. It also seems like >90% of the developers at all of the companies I've worked use Macs. I'm sure that's not the case for everyone but that's been my experience. What has Apple done to make you feel this way? What am I missing?

Disclaimer: my current laptop still has an ESC key also I used to work for Apple

<comment><USER5> Few things - not updating hardware for years, pretty much no innovation on the desktop (both, hardware and software), getting rid of ports on recent laptops, not having touch screens, horrible cables [1], etc...

[1] [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apple+broken+cable&t=ffab&iax=imag...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apple+broken+cable&t=ffab&iax=images&ia=images)

<comment><USER6> Apple doesn't make horrible cables, iffy anecdotal gif-evidence notwithstanding. Apple's reputation is quite decidedly for making high-quality cables.

"No innovation on the desktop" doesn't really mean anything. Who else is "innovating on the desktop" right now?

"Getting rid of ports" can also be interpreted as "moving to new and superior ports". Apple has always been brutal in weeding out obsolete interfaces and introducing new ones.

<comment><USER7> Every single Apple wire I've ever had up until the past couple years have all been trash. Whatever that white coating was only ever intended to look good in commercials. I never had a single wire ever fray on me besides theirs. It seems like they may have finally fixed the problem they've had for a decade since my latest replacement power brick seems to be going stronger than all the other wires, but I am probably just lucky so far

<comment><USER8> They've actually changed all the wires a few years ago: they feel more plasticky and are much sturdier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The company announced that its initial wave of 7nm chips will be available > first to its data-center customers—who are driving its greatest revenue > growth—not to the companies that build laptops and tablets.

Intel said nothing of the sort, in large part because their upcoming process is called "10nm".

</comment><comment><USER10> And complete their long slow transition from making computers to making appliances for web browsing and word processing

<comment><USER11> They don't care much about web browsing and care far less about word processing. They are making appliances as interfaces to services, with as many of the services as possible being ways to buy things from Apple. I'm not saying this to be cynical. I'm being quite literal that that is their business plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For most romantics that should be enough. Essentially the same thing as a iPad with keyboard.

ios is still to limited when it comes to usb storage but when that is "fixed" i belive 80% of all computer users could be satisfied with IOS.

Neglecting the fact that users want torrent software and the likes.

<comment><USER13> Are you expecting iOS? I'm sure that they'll ship macOS. There were rumors about internal ARM build of macOS years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really, I don't get why they just can't keep on doing incremental updates to the machines they have. I am still using a Macbook Air 2012. I am actually waiting for the successor to come out. This machine with 8GB and 512GB SSD is fine as it is. It might be boring but from what I know it is also what the majority of developers (or other users) want or need. Maybe NVM if there has to be some innovation. And maybe put some effort into keeping (or improving) the build quality. Can't be so hard. Oh, and fix the damn power supply cables for that matter (Magsafe is great but what about those cables)!

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks like my dream of having an MacBook Pro 15'' with octa-core Intel processors that support AVX512 and an Nvidia graphics card with which you can run CUDA will never come true. Now I just wish they could keep the Unix kernel of macOS, cuz I don't want a bigger iPad.

<comment><USER6> iOS is also sitting atop Unix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> No paywall: [https://outline.com/SBXeKp](https://outline.com/SBXeKp)

<comment><USER17> And it works with reader mode. Bless your soul, child.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Paywalled again. With 'could be' in the title rather than 'will'.

From this I guess they are guessing this based on the fact that Apple have been slow to update their laptops recently?

So one day soon Apple are going to come out with new computers that are a radical departure from the past, the x86 gone and their own chips powering the next generation of MacBooks?

Sounds great but in the same timescale Google are going to bring out something that is an Operating System but not as we know it, with A.I. baked in. Should be interesting times.

<comment><USER19> [https://outline.com/](https://outline.com/) works well to get past most paywalls. There's a chrome extension version as well.

<comment><USER20> Thank you! Web search for WSJ bypass has been mostly failing lately.

Downvoting you for being helpful is a bit uncharitable, +1

<comment><USER19> Glad it helped! No idea why I'm being downvoted. I have no affiliation FYI - <USER2> post about it every so often here literally because so many people complain about paywalls...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When to use tables for layout - <AUTHOR> http://olav.dk/articles/tables.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I get really annoyed by the recurring CSS vs. tables debates, because they seem to be so dogmatic and often based on misunderstandings of CSS.

CSS was initially designed to support every kind of typography or layout which was achievable using presentational HTML. It was rightly recognized that if some effects (no matter how ill-advised) were only possible using presentational markup, people would not migrate to CSS. This is the reason properties like "blink" were included in CSS.

Regarding table-like layouts, the corresponding CSS property is called "display:table", and was included in the CSS 2.0 standard 10 years ago.

IE however did not and does still not support "display:table". Therefore there is no direct CSS alternative to table-layouts which works cross-browser.

A table-like layout can still with some effort be emulated by pushing other CSS features like floats to the limits. But this is actually misusing these CSS construct for a purpose they were never intended for, which makes it generally convoluted and inflexible compared to "just using tables".

But it is important to realize that the problems with the CSS approach is not that CSS is badly designed - or requires a fundamentally different mindset - but simply that the implementation in IE is incomplete.

One should also realize that tables are superior only in some specific circumstances (as described in the article). Generally CSS is better and easier to use for layout, even considering the omissions in IE.

</comment><comment><USER2> HTML table elements are not the solution. They are a convenient hack that happens to be the best alternative in 2008 because the majority of users is still on an IE browser.

In fact, it is quite possible to get table-like layout behavior while using semantically correct tags. This is accomplished through the various display: table-type CSS properties.

As support for IE6 fades this long awaited dream will quickly become a reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> IE7 does not support display:table either, so the long awaited dream is still far away. Reportedly IE8 beta supports is though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why not instead of blaming designers who use tables for layouts that are nearly impossible to do CSS, blame the browsers (ie 6 and 7) that make these types of layouts impossible under CSS.

<comment><USER4> I agree that IE is to blame for the situation, but users don't care about standards, they want stuff to work. life sucks

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is missing the point...it is merely talking about when it is CONVENIENT to use tables for layout, not when one SHOULD use tables for layout. In a modern web world it is extremely inappropriate to use tables for non-tabular data. Yes, this means that oftentimes there will be messy CSS hacks to bring Internet Explorer into submission, but any designer/developer worth his/her salt is old hat at such tricks by now.

The proper time to use tables for layout is when one is laying out out a table. If you aren't, then you are simply performing a cop-out maneuver to save yourself time in website development. If that's what you want to do, do it, but don't call it something it's not. Just because it's easier doesn't mean it's better.

<comment><USER6> > _In a modern web world it is extremely inappropriate to use tables for non- > tabular data [even when convenient]_

Why?

<comment><USER5> Fair question. Semantically the <table> tag is created for just that, tabular data. If you use it for layout there are a number of problems. First, it is harder for screen-readers and other accessibility-based tools to decipher a website laid out with tables than one properly laid out using standards-based development. Second, you are adding needless bloat and confusion to your markup, as you will have completely unnecessary tags littered throughout your HTML. Third, you will be going against standards-based development, which is a worthy goal in and of itself.

CSS exists to separate markup from style information, that's its entire purpose. To use tables to lay out a page is to explicitly include style information in a place designated only for semantic markup.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps the solution is to make a better screen reader, one that can extract semantic data from non-semantic markup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, screen readers seem pretty useless if they cant handle a web page with tables-for-layout, since these are quite common whether we like it or not.

A sensible heuristic would be to treat tables without TH or THEAD elements as layout-tables, ie. just read them serially, while treating tables which contain at least one TH-element as a true semantic table. I'll bet this is the correct interpretation 9/10 times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does it seem like we are still in the dark ages of web design and layout? Lately, I've been excited that I can get away with using alpha transparent PNGs on my sites, even though we've had the technology for the last decade.

From the moment I began to learn HTML, I've been busting my head against this 4x4 beam standing here. The beam is bloody, but I'm still struggling with things that should be ultra-simple.

We have a variety of prior work we can use to investigate better layout strategies, namely from the print design/layout world and from the programming world, where we have layout managers a-plenty. It really is frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER9> According to accessibility gurus that I know (proper ones who run real controlled tests with screen readers, not just random people who read blogs) using tables for form layout (as shown in that article) is bad, because screen readers have "forms mode" and "tables mode" and a form inside a table forces them to constantly toggle between the two, making it extremely hard to follow.

<comment><USER10> The world will not write code for screen readers. How about writing screen readers that can read the code that the world wants to write?

<comment><USER9> That would be fantastic. The problem is that we're pretty much stuck with the screen readers we've got - even when the screen reader companies do release new versions (which they do painfully infrequently) most of their users stick with their current versions because the upgrades are so expensive. If you care about blind users (which you should; you're missing one of the great benefits of the Web if you don't) you need to cater to screen reader versions that are five or so years old!

<comment><USER11> It is pretty pointless to care about blind users, since they can't use most AJAX based sites anyway.

<comment><USER12> I thought this was the whole point behind "graceful degradation". If an AJAX based site does not degrade to still be useable/accessible when JS is off or unavailable, then it's not that well desgined to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Using tables for form layout is a bit of a grey area--both in terms of "abuse" and suitability. In my view, if you put your labels in TH cells and then you corresponding form control(s) [see note 1] in adjacent TD cells - _and_ make appropriate use of 'for' and 'id' attributes accordingly - this isn't such a problem.

However, using tables for general page/columns layout is ignorant. It also highlights fundamental weaknesses in your page designs to begin with; if you need to use tables to get around the "limitations" of your CMS, you should be educating your designer(s) as to what is and isn't possible.

In my experience, with considered design and type-setting - plus the "background to create appearance of columns" trick - there's nothing you can't achieve with semantically rich, minimalist markup.

I've been able to depend on the 'One True Layout' CSS columns framework since its inception and have yet to encounter a columnal page design it couldn't handle cross-browser.

[1] You need to be careful with things like groups of related form controls, however--such as radio buttons. These should always be displayed using a fieldset, along with an accompanying legend, which means tables aren't particularly suitable for semantically arranging this sort of complex interface. For things like simple login or user profiling forms though, I think tables are arguably an OK construct to use. But I never do, personally.

<comment><AUTHOR> What limitations in the CMS are you referring to? The limitations are not in the CMS, they are in the browsers implementation of CSS.

<comment><USER13> I was making the assumption that a developer may have limited control of what markup is being output by their CMS - if they were using one.

You can't always nail down every last character coming out of a framework, should you be using one, no matter how great it might be.

Anyway, as I said: it's not so much a problem using tables for form layouts. But I encourage you to look at pure CSS solutions for column layouts (such as 'One True Layout').

You obviously care about what you're producing, you should keep pursuing purer, more semantically rich (and appropriate!) markup.

If you want to discuss this one-on-one, you can get me via Twitter:

<http://twitter.com/Wrestlevania>

Look forward to hearing from you, Olav!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Using a CSS layout with floating boxes, the sidebar-box does not stretch to the bottom."

"The solution proposed by CSS gurus seems to be to create a background image with a colored area overlapping with the sidebar-area"

What about height: 100% with a dom layout something like:

      div#wrapper

        div#header

        div#main

          div#sidebar

          div#main content

        div#footer

</comment><comment><USER15> "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"

\- Emerson

That is, using div vs. table or vice versa, just because you're "supposed to" strikes me as being contrary to the true hacker mindset.

</comment><comment><USER16> You could always use the layout tag to take care of the CSS pedants :-)

<http://www.codeirony.com/?p=6>

<comment><AUTHOR> I know he is joking, but this would actually be a perfect solution if it generated HTML tables for IE - and CSS with display:table for any other user agent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Dude hasn't heard of definition lists for forms? They offer far better screen reader flow for disabled users than tables.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do definition lists offer a better reader flow?

<comment><USER18> They don't. A table row has exactly the same recursive structure as a definition list, and will be treated the same way by a screenreader. It's kinda sad how many people like to play the "accessibility card" without any actual understanding of how those technologies work.

What screenreaders do have trouble with, however, is static layouts where the "meaningful" content is buried six levels deep, and often at the end of the logical document, just to make room for a bunch of navigation aids and advertisements.

That, however, isn't a reason not to use tables where they help. Also, note that with just a tiny amount of javascript it's possible to come up with a document that displays in a nice table layout _and_ has a nice logical structure for screenreaders. It just requires that you get beyond the pedantry of the table.

<comment><USER9> Apparently forms inside tables are bad for screenreader users because they have to constantly switch between "forms mode" and "tables mode" to navigate them.

<comment><USER19> Bingo! Tables should be used for tabular data.

<comment><USER20> Forms are tabular data -- headers on side, data on the other.

Screen readers should have long adapted to that scenario.

<comment><USER21> > _Forms are tabular data -- headers on side, data on the other._

For very simple form designs, sure. But that idea breaks down when you have a more sophisticated form and need to consider horizontal "flow" between fields.

Tables are hammers, but not all forms are nails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Uh O... Thems may be fighting words.

<comment><USER6> Judging from the article not the title, it looks like he is reasoning not fighting.

<comment><USER22> Sorry...Wasn't really meaning that he was fighting-- just that this thread might get ugly.</comment></comment></comment>


Building a Lego server blade– what I do at work - <AUTHOR> http://smartfile.com/lego

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a time lapse build of the build too-- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdPOnSjH9qA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdPOnSjH9qA)</comment>


Legacy Firefox extensions – Alphabetical index - <AUTHOR> http://legacycollector.org/firefox-addons/ <comment><USER2> DownThemAll i miss it</comment>


Team members spending too much time on Stackoverflow. - <AUTHOR> http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/27555/team-members-spending-too-much-time-on-stackoverflow <comment><USER2>
      The issue is that the team sits remotely. They are in a
      different country and in a different time zone, so I can't
      physically be there to keep an eye on them and stop them
      from doing it.

Wow. Really? Is this not some knd of bullshit troll?

      I don't/can't ask the network team to block
      Stackoverflow...

Anyone who honestly believes that any given website can answer to the responsibility for any given team member, does not deserve to be in charge of anyone, anywhere, ever.

If you have developers that need network engineers to babysit them, then you're in charge of a nursery, or a kindergarten class, and failure to recognize those circumstances, means you lack the technical competance to be placed in charge of basically anything important.

<comment><USER3> You seriously don't have clue about either programming or Stack overflow. Blocking stack overflow over network would do more harm than good. It is the best possible resource for developers.</comment></comment>


This Post Was Too Long To Read, So We TL;DR'd It - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/18/tldr/

<comment><USER2> Amazing what putting a flashy UI around an outwardly boring piece of software can achieve. LIBOTS has been around since 2003 I think... Mint and Yodlee, Hipmunk and Orbitz - I wonder what other unglamorous services could be improved with a better UI? Maybe GDS?

Congrats to Jeremy for the coverage - good luck with any plans you have for TLDR!

<comment><USER3> Well there's a bit more to it than just OTS. I do a little work on the summarization part myself then there's also the extraction piece. I did spend a _few_ hours writing code. :P

Thanks for the congratulations, though; who knew a quick little weekend hack would get so much coverage? I didn't (hence why I didn't pump up the volume on the server's resources initially ;)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This will fail and I'll tell you exactly why. Longish articles are already being TL;DR'd by something, called "attention spans". So as this service gets better and more popular, and I'm not sure exactly how that's possible, the feeds it will be shortening will already be shortening by pressures from editors and audiences.

<comment><USER5> I joke about article length and even satirize myself, but speaking candidly, the drive towards link-batish titles and articles that simply summarizes other articles actually encouraged me to write _longer_ pieces, not shorter ones.

It's just simple contrarian thinking. There may be a massive market for blink- of-an-eye posts that are forgotten in moments, but there is a small niche of readers who are looking for reading they can savour and dive into.

Naturally, the market for blink-of-an-eye reddit front page posts is many orders of magnitude larger, but it also has many orders of magnitude more competition. Niches are smaller but with less competition.

The niche for blowhards may have a small readership, but the more the rest of the world goes towards tweets, the hungrier those readers are for that 141st character of exposition.

JM2C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Jeremy, an obvious suggestion, keep track of the traffic/traffic sources data, add adwords/amazon/etc... as soon as possible and do a series of blog posts on it. The traffic directed to your personal blog could turn out to be more valuable than the one going to tldr.it (i'm thinking about promotion of future projects).

Update: I don't know how much you can tweak the algorithm for a single site, but fixing the result of this:

[http://tldr.it/summarize/?summary[url]=http://www.reddit.com...](http://tldr.it/summarize/?summary\[url\]=http://www.reddit.com/)

and submitting it to reddit ("Reddit? tl;dr it.") is what i would do now :).

</comment><comment><USER7> I was hoping it would also cut boring posts from RSS feeds entirely.

The only thing preventing me from subscribing to the big news sites like techcrunch or the register is the sheer volume. I could subscribe to one feed that updates seven times a day, or to _fifty_ blogs that update once a week. Subscribing to more than one big site just isn't worth it.

Something that would remove boring posts from rss feeds would be pure gold.

<comment><USER3> That is another app idea I have that I plan on implementing when I get the time. I have the algorithms planned and so on, but who knows if I'll ever have the time to make it happen. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, I tried it out on with a few very mainstream sources. It appears that it just takes the first few sentences. I was led to believe that it somehow extracted meaningful information, sort of like Amazon's SIPs.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sites currently down.

If you're going to be featured by TechCrunch or big media, please contact your hosting provider and make sure you can handle the hits. This is exactly the WORST time to have your site down.

<comment><USER3> It should be up now actually. I doubled the resources on my box but I'm also getting hit with Twitter traffic from popular Twitter users. :/

I switched to nginx which seems to handle the traffic much better!

(Also: I asked them to hold this story til Wednesday so I could do a few things and check the stability of the app. Oops. ;))</comment></comment>


Elroy Air completes first test flight - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/28/20812547/elroy-air-cargo-drone-delivery-test-flight-camp-roberts-san-francisco <comment><AUTHOR> Worth noting: the rc Tx module and antenna used there are a team blacksheep 915MHz FHSS system, popular for long range fpv and freestyle quadcopter and wing flights.</comment>


LISP IDEs: CUSP rules - <AUTHOR> http://blog.diegodoval.com/2007/07/lisp_ides_cusp_rules.html

<comment> daniel-cussen I saw the prices for Allegro Common Lisp and Lispworks. 600 and 2000 bucks, respectively, per user.

</comment><comment><USER2> I get a

"java.lang.NullPointerException"

whenever I try to load the REPL. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER3> I got mine to work on the first install. Do you have the latest JRE installed?

<comment><USER2> Yes, I do. Does it have something to do with installing a LISP implementation?

<comment><USER3> Hmmm dunno much about that friend...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> IMHO, so much nicer than emacs + SLIME. but really I never liked emacs. (no flame intended).</comment>


Wikipedia Appeal - <AUTHOR> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Appeal7/en

<comment><USER2> I do not support wikipedia because you cannot correct errors and misinformation on that site. Editors who have apparently been around for a long time and got a lot of power by editing a lot of pages on wikipedia, will reverse edits that disagree with their preconceived notions.

This was the situation on a page where I participated directly in the events in question, was a first hand witness, am a domain expert, and was simply stating facts.

Reality disagreed with the editors ideology, and therefore, I was unable to correct the propaganda (which is what deliberate misinformation is.)

While I will refer to wikipedia on occasion, I will not trust it for anything that could have a political bias (which includes the entirety of economics and finance) and will not give them any money. Nor will I attempt to edit to correct errors. Now I just laugh at them.

<comment><USER3> It depends what you use Wikipedia for. As a source for political info it might be good or bad but you cannot rely on single source for this kind of information anyway. Math/physics articles are pretty decent, however.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, this was a page about a product. A product that leftists have an opinion about, but are generally pretty ignorant about.</comment></comment></comment>


The Third Age of JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.swyx.io/writing/js-third-age/ <comment><USER2> Current front end dev, here. My employer pays me to write JS, have been doing it for +4 years.

I've become comfortable with the fact that JS never stops changing (note the use of the word _changing_ , not _improving_ ). I concern myself with fundamentals, not framework-flavor-of-the-month. I encourage others to focus on the same.

What I am _not_ comfortable with is the stubbornly-held strong opinions many JS devs have. Much of the time, a particular JS dev will believe their way is the one-true-way(tm) (which is a problem among a lot technologists in general).

JS devs are the JS fatigue...not JS itself. I get bent when JS devs judge me for not staying up to date - JS is my 9 to 5, not my life.

For all the JS devs out there who hate me right now - check out Elixir, its the new "new."

FWIW, my personal projects are Spring Boot and Kotlin.

<comment><USER3> > stubbornly-held strong opinions many JS devs have ... a problem among a lot > technologists in general

Hmmmm... well, I might agree, but that would depend on the opinion. There was a time when all programming was done using GOTO as the sole flow-control mechanism until a guy with a stubbornly-held strong opinion named Djikstra taught us that GOTO was considered harmful. Yet it's also the most natural way to code: a lot of people argued with him (in fact, the reason beginners don't use GOTO any more is just because it's not there, not because they've gotten more sophisticated). It's also a stubbornly-held strong opinion among many, but too few, developers, that global variables are also harmful. Unfortunately they're also the simplest, most obvious way to code, so a lot of developers default to using them.

If a developer has a stubbornly-held strong opinion, I usually give them the benefit of the doubt to try to figure out why: often they have a good reason. (On the other hand, sometimes the reason is, "it's easiest", like using public static variables in Java).

<comment><USER4> The GOTO topic is an interesting one because Dijkstra inadvertently started a cult around the avoidance of GOTO. Dijkstra never intended this and one of the main reasons this occurred was because Dijkstra's original paper "A Case Against the Goto Statement" was editorialised as a letter to the author type article to speed up publication which resulted in the famous title "Goto Statement Considered Harmful".

This is a topic where both him and other prominent figures such as Donald Knuth have since its publication repeatedly argued for moderation in use of the GOTO statement and against the total avoidance of GOTOs.

My go to example for this is that in C and other languages that lack modern comforts such as exceptions(for better or worse) and destructors, GOTOs can largely simplify the handling of clean-up and error recovery code.

Another example is longjmp which is very useful in kernel-space or bare metal programming, and in implementation details for exception handling however outside of those niches, serves no purpose.

GOTO serves a very useful niche but can also make code nigh impossible to follow. Most other structured programming statements have the same threat but we have rules in place to avoid their abuse. The following cases can result in code that is just as problematic:

IF/ELSEIF/ELSE: overly large, overly nested, or mutating variables.

SWITCH/CASE: complicated fall-through.

FOR: mutating counter variables, mutating termination condition.

TRY/CATCH/FINALLY/THROW: exception hell/deep uncaught exceptions.

These control flow mechanisms should definitely be preferred to GOTO in most cases but they can be just as badly abused if you aren't careful. The big difference I find is that people are taught how not to abuse these mechanisms but most material about the proper uses of GOTO is almost taboo because of the cargo cult around avoiding its use.

Sorry if this doesn't really fit into the discussion but it's interesting to me how an initially very tame and rational counter-argument spawned a massive cargo cult.

<comment><USER5> > but they can be just as badly abused if you aren't careful

No, they can't. Old-school goto can create entire new problems in a codebase, that aren't possible to replicate with the structured constructs. That's the entire point of structured programming.

Of course, it's possible to use goto well. But eliminating it eliminates the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 2020 feels like a new age because of the browser ecosystem. The actual endpoint of the "second age" is probably the combined forces of:

1) Windows 7 Support officially ended

2) Edge now switched over to Chromium

With the exception of highly niche applications and markets, sites meant to be consumed on computers can aim for Chromium support and developers can rest assured they are covering the overwhelming majority of the market. Many slower-moving enterprises are standardizing on Chromium-powered browsers. Even NetFront (browsers used by video game consoles) is switching over to Chromium

The "Third Age of JavaScript" isn't marked by tooling or frameworks or code structure, but rather by developers able to focus on one browser instead of multiple. This new age will be marked by innovative use of APIs that people disregarded in the past because they only worked in Chrome.

<comment><USER7> > developers able to focus on one browser instead of multiple. This new age > will be marked by innovative use of APIs that people disregarded in the past > because they only worked in Chrome.

Ah, just like the good old days of `new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");` ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _The Third Era_ would've been far more dramatic sounding, especially when spoken by Patrick Stewart.[0]

Sorry, I couldn't help but draw an _Elder Scrolls_ comparison here:

"Behold, in darkness, a doom sweeps the land."

"I have seen the gates of Oblivion, beyond which no waking eye may see."

"These are the closing days of the Third Era, and the final hours of my life."

Each statement could just as well have been spoken by your typical late 30s web developer that's seen some shit. That's lived through innumerable instances of framework and toolchain hell. That's probably being pushed into management because they're almost 40.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGhlg4JqvQw#t=0m44s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGhlg4JqvQw#t=0m44s)

<comment><USER9> "And Gandalf said: 'This is your realm, and the heart of the greater realm that shall be. The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order its beginning and to preserve what must be preserved.'"

<comment><USER8> I stand corrected! _Equally_ dramatic-sounding. :)

Ironic that Gandalf was of course played by Ian McKellen in the films, and is good friends with Patrick Stewart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was surprised there was only a mention of frameworks.

One obvious shift I've seen is in the use of the WASM and Web GL compiled applications. The likes of Figma and Superhuman are making incredible leaps in user performance.

I suspect serious companies will make strides here.

<comment><USER11> That's super interesting, never heard that about Figma. Is the entirety of Figma in WASM or just the core drawing engine?

<comment> rudi-c Design document are stored, manipulated, and rendered in WASM and WebGL. The surrounding UI (toolbar, properties panel, layers panel, etc) is written in React.

It's done that way because documents can get really large and having more low- level memory management helps a lot there. On the other hand, writing UI in C++ is really tedious and React has served us great. For non-performance sensitive areas, I'd much rather use TypeScript + React, despite being comfortable writing C++.

So obviously we're big fans on WASM, but we don't expect nor want JS/HTML/CSS to go away anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Meanwhile, jQuery is still used on 74% of all websites [1] despite being part of the 'first wave' obsoleted in 2009. If all this Javascript evolution is failing to gain traction across the whole of the web, is it really transformative, or is it just innovation for its' own sake?

[1] [https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/js- jquery](https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/js-jquery)

<comment><USER13> React is not a replacement for jQuery. I've seen many codebases that are written in React, but still include jQuery for some legacy function in the app that references $.param or similar. Using this stat to say anything other than "jQuery is bundled on X% of sites" is pointless.

If you could determine which sites are built using jQuery as the primary "framework", that would be informative. But even then, jQuery is just a library of utility functions, comparing it to React/Angular/Vue is pointless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> 3rd-Age: People will finally learn to effectively use vanilla JS, DOM API, HTML5, and CSS3 and will stop relying on transient abstraction tooling. They will actually learn the standards rather than rely on a Tech team's rendition of the next new thing.

Roast me

<comment><USER15> Roast you? How about this: a version of this comment is posted on just about every JavaScript post for the last five years and it hasn't changed much.

<comment><USER16> > a version of this comment is posted... _for the last five years_

Sounds like he is right and you are too old and averse to change to admit it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this is spot-on, and I'm 100% here for it. Here's a secret: even JS developers don't like all the frameworks and build complexity. We like what they afford us, but the overhead has been a symptom of an immature ecosystem. I think most of us are glad to finally see the cruft starting to get shaken out as it matures.

</comment><comment><USER17> My guess: WebAssembly and the birth of the polyglot web. C#, Rust or C will life and interact with HTML and JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER18> My prediction - the third age of Javascript will be the same as the second with tooling headaches, "transpiling", and fractured dialects. Except in this age we are all forced to use it as major companies sandbox away powerful APIs in favor of more control of their stores.

Dark times are ahead. The future is chrome. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SCfNhyIo_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SCfNhyIo_U)

<comment><USER19> > Dark times are ahead. The future is chrome.

Nothing strikes fear into my heart like this does.

<comment><USER14> Reminds me of that one Spongebob episode where everything was chrome.

<comment><USER20> I was thinking more Fury Road myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Definitely does feel like something new is in the air. I got into front-end (after a few years of back-end) during the rise of jQuery and CSS layout, remained super excited about it even with the problems through the backbone years, checked out in disgust and retreated to the back end after my first few Angular apps. Apparently missed whole sub-eras (have no idea what Prettier and Parcel are). Svelte and Deno are both pretty interesting, React at least seems stable and oriented around a smallish number of straightforward concepts, seems almost safe to come back into the water. Almost :)

Still wondering, though, if there aren't a lot of cases where a document- oriented approach (moving markup rather than JSON, progressive enhancement, good old standards) wouldn't serve an application domain better...

<comment><USER22> parcel is a bundler.

Prettier is an optional part of developing in JS that is hard to live without once you're used to it. instead of worrying about perfectly formatting your code, just write it and let prettier fix the formatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The third age of JS is going to be really exciting. People treat JS-land as something that has a first class language that can build major production tools and applications. Cloud providers support JS for nearly all aspects of their large platforms. The one place where I anecdotally see a decrease is in full-stack JS apps, but that's because the entire premise of a singular back- end app is under scrutiny by the cloud ecosystem itself. JS just never had a chance to get more established as a back-end language before that happened.

<comment><USER24> What? Node.js is as strong as ever. With Next.js it's never been easier to create a full-stack JS app. I don't see what any of this has to do with the cloud.

<comment><USER23> My comments were an observation based on what I've seen recently, and none were intended to be a value judgement on any work being done in JS-land. I just don't see a Rails-esque competitor rising from JS land anytime soon and gaining enterprise market share. Cloud has to do with it because Cloud is increasingly how applications are created. Instead of a large framework to create an application with a language (Spring for Java, Rails for Ruby, Django for Python), applications are now mishmashes of cloud functions, no sql tables, sql data stores, message queues and auth wrappers, all of those without a specific language requirement. Like I said in my original comment, it forces every language based framework to question it's (comparatively) monolithic nature. This isn't a fool proof prediction by any means, but with the rise of cloud architectures I really don't foresee any languages birthing a monolith anytime soon. I'm sure lots of folks will use Next.js or something else, and it will be good a tool, but my bet is that even more companies will increasingly utilize the cloud to create less monolithic architectures.

<comment><USER25> Rails-like for JS is coming via RedwoodJS and blitzJS. How much successful they will be? I have no clue.

<comment><USER26> AdonisJS and FeathersJS has been pretty successful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _the Third Age is about clearing away legacy assumptions and collapsing > layers of tooling._

i feel like the bit about "clearing away legacy assumptions" wasn't substantiated very well – basically just "CommonJS isn't necessary anymore because ES Modules are a thing now". which is true, but i feel like a sweeping statement like that needs a bit more. and if that assumption is where other "legacy assumptions" stem from, it'd be nice to expand on it a bit

<comment><USER11> My take is that we're never going to see ES Modules in the wild in web apps as we know them today, outside of some tutorials or open source apps. There's too strong business incentives to the contrary, legitimate or not.

<comment><USER14> Business incentives like supporting Internet Explorer for clients $$$?

<comment><USER11> Obfuscation. If web app companies could, they'd send your browser a binary instead of HTML and JS.

<comment><USER27> isn't minification good enough at obfuscating the code? what does CommonJS add here?

(that's a legit question – i've sifted through webpacked JS a few times, and it mostly just added a bunch of

      (function(module, require, ...) {
         <your module here>
      })(...)

around the code. tedious to read, but not much in the way obfuscation)

and i guess if ES Modules turned out to be more performant (bc the module stuff is handled by native browser code, or maybe some HTTP/2 magic with loading), that could be an incentive for adoption

<comment><USER14> I've combed through minified JS a number of times. Not enough if you want to prevent someone from going through your shit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Like vite and snowpack, I've been also working on a project which aims to provide fast development experience. Unlike vite and snowpack, it supports CommonJS too and it's somewhat more configurable. Dropping it here, just in case someone finds it useful - [https://github.com/sarsamurmu/reboost](https://github.com/sarsamurmu/reboost)

</comment><comment><USER29> at yazz we have bet on javascript when many others are moving away. why? because javascript is here to stay as the defacto Browser language. Show me a Mainstream browser that plans to drop JavaScript support and we will Drop JavaScript too

<comment><USER30> I used to take this same perspective, but if you look at how you are coding javascript now, you're building and bundling, so though browsers may continue to run Javascript, that doesn't mean your code will always be written in Javascript.

We moved to Typescript two years ago, and now that I'm comfortable with that, and compiling to JS, I wouldn't be surprised to see good compilers for Rust or other languages become the standard in the future.

<comment><USER29> Good points. If typescript becomes the standard then for sure we would consider whether we should move our product to typescript

<comment><USER30> Typescript is becoming VERY popular. I Deno (the potential replacement for Nodejs) is written in typescript.

I hadn't worked with types before, and hated it when I first started, but once I got used to it, it's a nice experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> maybe.

but also, there's a classic pattern of articles which look back and describe a timeline of "past, present, future" where future starts tomorrow due to this thing I'm excited about today.</comment>


Whoa: It's 2012, and the World's Most Popular Email Service Is ... Hotmail - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/whoa-its-2012-and-the-worlds-most-popular-email-service-is-hotmail/259054/

<comment><USER2> From the article: "Microsoft's Hotmail was the most popular Internet-based email service globally as of May, with about 325 million unique visitors. Yahoo's service ranked second, with roughly 298 million users, while Google's Gmail garnered about 289 million users."

Notice the problem here? Maybe it's just an error on the part of the author, but if they're comparing "unique visitors" of hotmail.com to the published number of users of the other services, that's an apples to oranges comparison.

Also making this survey a little useless is the fact that many people are like me: I have a hotmail account from the olden days, and several years ago, I set it to forward to my Google Apps account, and it's probably going to stay that way until Microsoft goes out of business. So I'm listed as a hotmail user, even though I rarely give it much attention, and use Google Mail as my everyday tool.

Nevertheless, it's a catchy headline, and a good example of a platform long tail. Even though hotmail's sexy days are a decade or more in the past, it remains relevant because it's sticky, and even trend chasers like me continue to "use" it because my old hotmail address is still out there and continues to get mail.

<comment><USER3> I have both a gmail and hotmail accounts and I use Hotmail because it works, gets less spam, and I think google knows enough about me as it stands. Gmail does have a nicer interface but that's about it IMO.

<comment><USER4> That seems strange. I've had a gmail account since the first open days of the beta in 2004, and never get spam in my inbox. Their spam filtering works extraordinarily well for me.

<comment><USER5> Same for me. I'm far from a Google lover, but I opened my Gmail account in 2004 (when it was still invitation-only), and never, ever did I hesitate to put my email address even in the shitiest, scammiest sites/registration forums I see. Only about 5-6 spams in the past 8 years, an 0 false positives.

My previous experience with Yahoo (pre 2004) was _much much_ worse. I haven't use Hotmail though, and as I seriously doubt Apple's technical skills when it comes to cloud services, I don't feel safe to put my @me.com address anywhere public.

<comment><USER6> I guess I'm the only one that gets spam with Gmail. I receive about 15,000 spam a month of which 10-20 a day get through. Unfortunately my email address is in the JavaScript of a lot of websites due to a plugin I authored.

<comment><USER7> Not alone; I'm in the same boat, although I haven't done as much to get my address "out there"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We need to remember that Hotmail and Yahoo have a lot of worldwide users. I think these numbers are a little more accurate, considering Atlantic's reporting bias (page 20):

[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/46245195/Strategy%20and%20governance...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/46245195/Strategy%20and%20governance%20at%20Yahoo!%20Inc.pdf)

Gmail is also probably growing, at least if we compare advertising growth rates. I don't actually have data for the mail services and I realize there will be discrepancies, but this is from a presentation some time ago for the above case that sort of visualizes advertising (mail) growth:

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/46245195/comp.png>

</comment><comment><USER9> Everytime I try to close my hotmail account I get an error from the website and give up.

</comment><comment><USER10> We recently ran a pilot with some students from our 13 thousand student base. Our reports show: 69% Hotmail; 13% Yahoo!; 10% Gmail.

<comment><USER11> I'm glad I don't live where you do. Seriously. I would hate to be surrounded by that many people who don't know how to look past their nose.

<comment><USER12> As opposed to being surrounded by people looking down their nose?

<comment><USER13> I suspect there's a strong correlation between the email account host and the place on the early adopter curve.

There's nothing wrong about wanting to live near other early adopters.

<comment><USER14> What?

This whole conversation is disgusting. It's an _email_ account. But since it's ubiquitous and mainstream, now it turns into this weird cultural thing where we have to make sure we have the _right_ email account, lest we look like one of them.

Repeat after me: it's an _email_ account. Not a reflection on your identity.

<comment><USER13> It may be disgusting to you, and you may not understand what I meant, but I'm afraid, my friend, that doesn't change the fact that there are correlations between the choices you make and your socioeconomic profile. It's the whole basis of collaborative filtering. You like movie A, B and C and will likely like movie Z. You buy a Mac and are likely to book more upscale hotels, you keep an old yahoo or hotmail account and you're likely further down the adopter curve.

It's like when you visit a website and it's still using comic sans and looks like it was from the Geocities days, you form an impression. This is your brain do collaborative filtering. Same thing with email host.

Yes it's an _email_ account, but they come in different flavors and some flavors are associated with the early adopter (cool kids) crowd (@gmail.com), and some are associated with their parents (@hotmail.com)

<comment><USER14> > Yes it's an email account, but they come in different flavors and some > flavors are associated with the early adopter (cool kids) crowd > (@gmail.com), and some are associated with their parents (@hotmail.com)

Unfortunately, the "cool kids" part gives you away. Like so many things in life, you win by opting not to play the [horribly broken] game.

Being secure in your identity means you don't have to partake in idiotic status signaling like this. Why? Because you just _don't care_ about all the things you're told you should be doing in order to be 'relevant.' You're happy just to be you, and to do what you need to do. Culture still weighs on you, but it doesn't have to dictate your life. And you know what happens? Over time, people become _more_ interested in you because of this. They may question you, but they may also envy you.

The path to discover one's true self is a lifelong journey, and I bid you good luck on it.

<comment><USER13> "Unfortunately, the "cool kids" part gives you away."

I am unsure of your intention here, but I think you are just not getting this at all. If you are assuming I am a cool kid then you are mistaken. I am a 42 year old software architect at a fortune 500 company.

I think you have this all backwards. Early adopters picked gmail (as did all their friends) not to signal, but because it was better, faster, more secure. Those that didn't and stuck with yahoo and hotmail (and who continue to have their accounts hacked) are perceived by _others_ (no matter how secure they might be in themselves) as not keeping up.

Maybe an example will help, let's say you put your myspace account in your profile. You can be the most secure person on the planet, but people will look at your profile and a draw a conclusion.

"The path to discover one's true self is a lifelong journey, and I bid you good luck on it."

Haha - I think it's a bit of stretch to go from email host provider to some zen moment, but I guess you didn't really have any point to make, so resorting to condescension was the next best thing. :)

Now, let me get back to my Well account...

<comment><USER14> Ah sorry, didn't mean to be condescending. My beef (obviously) is with the downward perception of "not keeping up." I see it as unnecessarily judgmental, and I dislike people sticking up for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A lot of 90's kids who came online in the early 2000's (me being one of them) used MSN for instant messenger, and I still do to this day.

I use Gmail for email, the only thing my hotmail is used for is to sign into MSN.

<comment><USER16> You can sign up for MSN messenger with any email address.

<comment><USER15> Aye I know, but back then there weren't that many other providers. I wasn't too interested in who my provider was and I was too young to remember the yahoo days, it was my first email account and I used it solely for MSN (and a game I loved) for years. I wonder how many of us there are inflating those numbers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To me this isn't a surprise. It's anecdotal, but the majority of my social circle have hotmail emails. Followed by gmail and then Yahoo. So yeah, based on my experiences I would have assumed Hotmail is the most popular.

<comment><USER18> anecdotal: nearly every person in my contacts uses Gmail.

update: per the article, i'm one of those who has an "active" hotmail account, which i haven't used for e-mail for several years. i check hotmail once in a blue moon for stuff like Games for Windows Live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I haven't been to that site in probably 15 years. This is about what I think of: [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_o1MzQ- TV5SU/SIk8yBmT1ZI/AAAAAAAAEM...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_o1MzQ- TV5SU/SIk8yBmT1ZI/AAAAAAAAEMg/EiRyQP6qyR0/s400/hotmail1997.jpg)

The red logo, a lot of blue over the right half of the screen and I could have sworn that the login was on the left hand side, that's how I remember it.

This is the hotmail that is basically, burned into my memory until my death: <http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/ne/p/2006/1997-hotmail.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER20> Given the headline from 2 days ago – "Facebook forces all users over to Facebook.com e-mail addresses" – isn't Facebook the world's most popular email service?

</comment><comment><USER21> I have a reasonably popular app and I was stunned to see how much Yahoo and Hotmail addresses dominate. Very different from my friends circles.

<comment><USER22> I sign up for most apps with my Yahoo account, because why should I give Random App my real email address? For the most part I don't care what it's emailing me, so I just need an address where I can go to click on the inevitable "activation" link.

<comment><USER23> That is why mailinator.com was created...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Spammers and 419 bots probably account for a good chunk of hotmail (and yahoo) usage.

</comment><comment><USER25> It certainly is the most popular service for spam accounts registered to my company.

</comment><comment><USER26> I expect that trend to continue and increase further once Windows 8 ships with Windows Live authentication (just as Google's Android ships with GMail authentication).

</comment><comment><USER27> I have a hotmail account but i have not used it for years since gmail. So technically am I a user of hotmail ?

<comment><USER28> If you don't login, it's not counted. If you don't log in for over a year then the account would be deleted.

<comment><USER5> But if you forward it to say Gmail, then you count as a user (Gmail pings Hotmail for you).

<comment><USER28> Establishing a connection and doing the full successful authentication through a client, pop, or web counts as a login.

Incoming mail or a simple ping to the mail server won't counted as a user view. With all the spam, fake mails, and mail bomb pings, views would then report bajillions of hits and nothing would expire.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thank you Kiva – a letter from Kiva's Co-Founder and CEO - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kiva.org/2014/06/18/thank-you-kiva-a-letter-from-kivas-co-founder-ceo-matt-flannery

<comment><USER2> Though I've not used it myself, Kiva has always struck me as the sort of thing that people who were passionate about the web in the early days were always enthusiastically envisaging.

The web was seen as a powerful tool for taking advantage of the benefits of scale. Scale applied to charity & aid results in things like Kiva.

They just wouldn't be thinkable without the web.

There's no grand point to this comment, it's just a musing.

I guess I'm just saying that I think it's things like Kiva that make me proud to be part of the web.

Oh, and I suppose mixed up in my sentiment is a bit of lament that Kiva is a little-known exception to the rule rather than one among a great many examples of using the web to make the world a better place. (yes, wikipedia is another great example; I'm not saying Kiva's the sole bastion of human compassion on the web).

</comment><comment><USER3> If we talk about Kiva it's always worth to revisit this article [http://www.nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=3726](http://www.nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=3726) which asks some good questions about their model.

<comment><USER4> Also worth looking at Kiva's response to that article, though the editor of the piece you linked to many of Kiva's responses.

[http://www.nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=3731](http://www.nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=3731)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note: this Kiva is not the San Francisco brand of medical cannabis chocolate confections.

<comment><USER6> Second note: this Kiva is also not the company producing automated robots servicing select Amazon Fullfilment Centers</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Games for Seniors over 90? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, I haven't gamed for a long time and I need some advice. A friend's mother is over 90 and wants to try to some video games.
I have an Apple TV and my friend has an XBox. We are looking for simple, fun games that are not too complicated to learn. Multiplayer (in person with a second controller) would be great.
Just doing a quick search on the Apple TV, it's hard for me to figure out which games are compatible with an external controller. But the bigger problem is figuring out which games are "friendly" to the beginner.
Any advice? Thanks! <comment><USER2> Maybe sit with her and try a few different games and see what catches her interest.</comment>


10+ years of experience and no hash maps or Fizz Buzz for data engineers - <AUTHOR> http://nadbordrozd.github.io/blog/2017/06/20/you-wont-believe-how-this-islington-single-dad-is-making-ps500-slash-day-working-from-home/ <comment><USER2> I once attended an interview for a contract in the south of the UK with a company that I had applied to before a couple years back but sadly had a mandatory "must have degree" caveat. Strangely enough they'd dropped it the second time round.

I step into the interview room and this tired looking 55-60 year old gent asks me the first question.

> What does the "private" keyword do.

Said in such a tired fashion that I skipped the question mark to effectively transmit its delivery. So I answer, as you do and this gent breathes the biggest sigh of relief I've ever heard. I ask him what's up and he replies:

> You're the sixth candidate I've asked that to today and the only one to get > it right.

We have issues with finding real talent in the UK (my company STILL has an entire team of 4-6 developers to fill) and Brexit really isn't helping.

<comment><USER3> This can't possibly be true... can it?

<comment><USER2> I exaggerated the number a little. I think I was the third or fourth. At that company I met a contractor who thought architecture meant just turning everything into a Singleton. I was asked to write some tests for his code (fml).

> Its in the Gang of Four!

Was his defence.

<comment><USER4> One chap at my last place had a crusade against the global variables littered throughout the code base. By gods did he fight the good fight. After what must've been a good 2 years of active bitching and pruning, a new product was developed by a sub team without him - to be considered the pinnacle of tech that the team could produce.

Look at this - just a single global variable!!! Amazing! The progress!

Just that one global Dictionary<string,object> which contained everything the various classes would ever want, all easily grabbed with nothing more than a string and a quick cast into whatever the actual type was.

 _Magic_

<comment><USER5> I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but that is way worse than just having several globals.

<comment><USER4> So. Much. Worse.

(sarcasm on the internet failure)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've done a lot of recruitment over the years. In fact in a previous role I spent an entire year doing nothing but recruitment. This sort of thing is sadly commonplace.

It's not trendy or popular at the moment but asking somebody to write some simple code on a whiteboard is a _really_ _good_ indicator of whether or not they're a good programmer. Even if they're nervous and uncomfortable doing it you'll find out if they're a good programmer or not.

That being said you want to try and weed out the people who definitely aren't good programmers before you invest the time in interviewing them. Things like Codility _can_ be helpful, or you can do a 20 - 30 minute telescreen/Skype call and ask them to write out some code in a shared Google Doc.

Honestly, if you can't reliably write some simple code on spec - e.g., write a function to reverse a string in a C-like language (if you're recruiting for Java, C#, C, C++, Go) - you may be many things, but programmer is not one of them.

An argument I often hear against this sort of question is that it's not "realistic", but that misses the point. The point with problems like this (also Fizz Buzz, and the simple data structure problem in the article) is not to be "realistic" but to cut to the essence of a person's skillset and leave very little room for blagging. If you can't handle these things I don't believe you can handle more "realistic" problems either.

Being a software developer is obviously more than "just programming", but the fundamentals matter, and programming is absolutely fundamental to software development. Do not accept any hand-waving or flannel from anyone on this point, ever.

<comment><USER7> I would disagree. I was far better at that sort of thing straight out of university where we did a lot of small scale coding problems. Now I think a lot more about architecture and avoiding clever coding, more about database design and how everything fits together. I write far better code than I did 15 years ago, but I am poorer at white board style problems.

<comment><USER8> If we were talking about Google interview style problems - data structures and algorithms I might agree.

If you can't do something as simple as FizzBuzz, or reverse a string (in a language of your choice) then you aren't a programmer. You might be something else - a system engineer, possibly an architect - but you are not going to be useful in the role of writing code.

<comment><USER7> I am probably in agreement with you when you go down to that level of programing basics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I went to this data engineering interview and it appeared they had the same list of questions for all their roles (ranging from senior C++ engineers to Python ETL guys). After really struggling with some questions on libc, low level network and bitwise operations, I was asked "do you know how to quit vim?"

I've never felt more super human.

<comment><USER10> Little known fact: ! is pronounced 'dammit' in when in vim.

(at least for emacs users)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The story of the senior Java developer is startling but plausible.

If you work on legacy applications for 15 years and you're never the originial author who starts from scratch, it is very possible that you'll never write a main method. You always have one already.

<comment><USER12> I'd still expect such a person to have written standalone utilities and throw- away test applications.

<comment> Joe-Z Even then, this is stuff that the IDE simply generates for you. Why would I memorize the signature of a method I will probably never use?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why should I know the exact signature of the main method? It's not like you write it every day. Eclipse offers to add the main method for you with one clicking I guess IntelliJ does as well. Hell after programming only Rust/Haskell/... for a while I forget the order of the statements of for loops in C/Java

For the first question it is very much possible that the interviewer expressed himself not clearly enough what he actually wants.

<comment><USER2> how do you start to understand a technology you've never used?

<comment><USER14> You let the IDE do all the work?

<comment><USER2> and if that technology doesn't have IDE support? Lets say that due to an emergency you are the only person that can look at a problem with a WinForm client and there is an issue with Initialisation prior to the WinForm loading. Lets say (since this is a _very_ good example) that you need to create an architecture to share components between WinForm. Without knowing of static void main within program.cs you're not going to find the entry point and any attempts to share components is going to result in static sadness without doing some sort of service container gubbins or constructor shenanigans (although that will fuck the designer) prior to Application.Run(form) hitting in static void main.

The ignorance of static void main is a key reason why so many WinForm applications actually suck and why so many developers make the sad mistake of putting their user interface FIRST which has the knock on effect of making code reuse problematic. This is fine when people make utils but I have a very long experience of seeing companies struggle with this issue as their util grows into something more complex. The entry point IS important and if you're trapped in an IDE you suck. Go read pragmatic programmer the chapter: Wizards. You need to know how Wizards do their magic or you get burnt hard when the magic breaks.

<comment><USER13> you state that it's a problem when programmers don't know about the main function and I agree. The article on the other hand complained about people not knowing the exact function signature of main without thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I guess you missed [http://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in- tensorflow/](http://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/)

Along with a thorough discussion about why it works and how it could be improved would give me pretty good faith about a data engineer's capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER16> This has always been true in London - if you are willing to blag it you can get a well paid contract role. You can normally spot them because they have a lot of 3-6 month contracts, and no renewals

<comment><USER17> I've never had a contract that wasn't renewed (apart from one two week project based contract because the work was completed), in three years I've had four clients. All contracts started off as three month contracts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I realise that the way you've worded the exchange is just to make an example of your point, that said - I would've known the answer to the question, but the way it's worded might have made me look at you sideways in an interview if only because of how it's been framed.

If you had worded the query "Regardless of programming language, what's the [accepted/efficient] way to store a series of variables so that I can quickly find a single value later" I'd have given an answer.

Also, as hashtables / dictionaries are key-value stores I'd have been thrown off by the fact that in the question you're not looking for a value by a seperate key, but by the value itself. Fair point on the applicant not knowing how long that would take to return though, and not being familiar with the most common parts of the standard library after 16 years.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is 500GBP a normal contracting rate for such experienced developers? Seems so low, compared to mainland Europe.

<comment><USER3> Too true. Sigh.

We'll always have Switzerland, roel_v.

(It's Zug that has the 6% tax rate, right?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think that these people are not necessarily dumb. Thr problem is that they started traversing the knowledge tree depth-first instead of using breadth- first for at least a few years.

</comment><comment><USER5> The UK software contracting market seems to be flooded with people like this in general. It's infuriating if you can actually do the work because it makes it very difficult to make it past CV sift stage when everybody is blagging.

</comment><comment><USER20> This guy is just so awesome, and right!

Everyone sucks!

I loved hearing about how people suck. I LAUGHED with him, at them.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have personally encountered this because while working on a legacy java code base. Maps were never used because java didn't even have maps until after 1.3 or 1.4.

Our codebase pre-dated that by a long haul...

</comment><comment><USER22> Well, if thats true i am taking the next one-way flight to London.

<comment><USER23> In my experience at previous employment there were a lot of chancers in technical contracting for Java and front-end dev in London.

They all interview well, but when on the ground and asked to do stuff they are usually found out to be useless fairly quickly.

The "one weird trick companies dont want you to know!" is that it takes about a week or two for people to fully appreciate the contractor is useless and needs to be sacked, by which point they've made £500/day over a week or two which is £2500-5000 for half a month's effort which for a majority of people in London is a pretty tidy sum.

My lesson learnt from this is dont just quiz people in a face-to-face interview, but get them to _do_ something in the interview.

<comment><USER24> Contractor in London here. I've seen this for Python / dev-ops as well, well more the aftermath since the contractors were usually already gone. But the level of incompetence was jarring for someone on 500 pounds per day (this was before Brexit).</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Extensible framework to manage Microservices/Multirepos in pure shell - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SeedJobs/micromanage <comment><USER2> Great work!

I would like to invite you to add your concepts to GitAlias. I'm the maintainer and I see much value in microservices.

See [https://github.com/gitalias](https://github.com/gitalias)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your feedback and its great that you see value in this contribution. I will definitely be adding those to GitAlias in the near future

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very cool. I really, _really_ wish there was multi-repo PR support in Bitbucket and/or GitHub.

<comment><USER4> Interestingly enough, here's a discussion from 2012 on GitHub on Gitlab on this particular topic (as it relates to Gitlab) [https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/1298](https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/1298)

<comment><AUTHOR> similar to this have you checked out [https://www.zenhub.io](https://www.zenhub.io) .. those guys built an agile board on top of Github where you can have a PR and then link that PR to various issues.

However, something i see that can be done with the current script is to automate the process of opening a PR that cross multiple repos. A command that similar to `git flow` will flip various branches in various repos that match maybe a certain regex .. and then allow user to input the PR details (maybe based on a PR template as well) and then submit those to Github. On success, it will again add comment on each PR with a link to the other issues so that you have the Github issue reference link in there.

I am not yet sure if that is feasible but it seems an interesting thing to do and worth looking at

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        > We currently have a good 50+ git repository. Developing features affect very often more than one of these repos.

Isn't this just a monolith by another name?

<comment><AUTHOR> not really .. i believe it depends on what you really define as microservice. If we think at microservices as completely independent services that a change in them should not affect the system as a whole then i agree with you. However, very often, a microservice is independent but still tightly coupled in terms of logic with the rest of the ecosystem, so a change in that microservice out format for example will require other services that communicate with it to adapt to this change.</comment></comment>


You can teach a computer to play games, but better that it teach itself - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21645108-you-can-teach-computer-play-games-better-it-teach-itself-computers?fsrc=scn%2Ffb%2Fte%2Fpe%2Fed%2Fcomputersgaming <comment><USER2> I didn't get much from the linked blurb, but the title made me think: if you sample training data exhaustively and then run a learning process, could you then take the training data maximizing algorithm performance to then better train humans at the same task?

<comment><USER3> Check out this recent discussion on machine teaching: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9114053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9114053)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9109157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9109157)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just realized that feeding video from 2600 games into an AI is a form of cheat. All sprites are going to be fed perfectly into the AI as compared to using a video camera looking at at TV where pixels will not be perfect. Still a nice achievement, but one very complex aspect of "learn by watching" has been eliminated.

<comment><USER6> Normaizing video into a logical grid is a very simple preliminary task in machine vision. It's not a challenge for state of the art systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why not teach itself to teach itself to play?

<comment><USER8> your comment is deliciously meta =]

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tic-tac-toe - it isn't in the list. The only winning move is not to play.

<comment><USER10> nah, that's from season 1 of the Wire</comment></comment>


Ask HN: HN for mainstream news? - <AUTHOR>

I like keeping up with what is going in domestic an international news but browsing sites like CNN and even BBC have become increasingly tiresome because of headlines like "Donny Osmond is new 'Dancing' champ" and "Dog OK after swallowing 100 nails"<p>Is there a HN type site that caters to mainstream news with I hate to say it but "highbrow" tastes? <comment><USER2> Not an HN type but I like the Economist daily news. <http://www.economist.com/daily/news/>

</comment><comment><USER3> reddit?</comment>


Apple iOS 7 is sickening users, doctor confirms - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/09/27/is-apple-ios-7-actually-sickening-users/

<comment><USER2> not a bug, that's a feature.</comment>


Accidental SEO: How I got 400,000 page views without even knowing it - <AUTHOR> http://ginzametrics.com/accidental-seo.html <comment><USER2> In the interest of never letting the brilliant light of Douglas Adams fade, I'd like to drop his original observation of the phrase "it turns out."

The words of the sadly late, eternally great Douglas Adams:

"Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression 'it turns out' to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It's great. It's hugely better than its predecessors 'I read somewhere that...' or the craven 'they say that...' because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it's research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight."

<comment><USER3> I used this exact phrase in a presentation today and it helped me gloss over technical details that my non-technical audience did not need to listen to.

DNA's books are full of other good advice, although I have yet to try his approach to flying ;-)

<comment><USER2> I have to confess to, just once, when I was about twelve, trying to "throw myself at the ground and miss."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had something similar happen--found out a small feature I wrote six years earlier was getting nearly 3 million page views a month from almost exclusively iPhone users. Still not sure how they all found it (if it was just search engines I can't imagine the usage would end up being 99% iPhone users considering it's not iPhone focused).

<comment><USER5> What did you write? 3 million pageviews a month is amazing.

<comment><USER4> A mobile version of the Drudge Report. Before the days of modern smartphone browsers it was an especially frustrating site to visit and I wrote a scraper that reformatted out all the long lists of unchanging links. Didn't think about it (or use it much really--it was more of an academic exercise) and then years later realized it had gained [significant] popularity.

The news out of Japan has increased traffic. 140k page views yesterday and 3.4m in the last rolling month period according to Google Analytics.

<comment><USER6> It would be amusing if someone was somehow selling your website as a simple web view app on the App Store.

<comment><USER4> Bing bing. That's what it is. There's both a free and paid version. Time to contact the developer...

<comment><USER7> So what are you going to do? The easy thing would be to just shut it off, but more amusing thing would be to make the news links nonsensical (ie go to Onion etc).

Of course, the best thing would be to get your own cut of the revenue.

<comment><USER4> I asked for money and if I don't get it will cut it off. It takes a bit for an update to make it through the App Store, so I have a bit of leverage.

<comment><USER6> Instead of cutting it off, can you just add some ads on the page? Many will probably complain, leave 1 star reviews, and stop using the app, but in the meantime you'll make some money off the app (even the free version).

Whatever ethical issues inherent in profiting off scraped content have already been bypassed by asking for money, though any issues with the law could be a bigger concern.

<comment><USER4> After balking at payment, I have cut him off and asked that profits be donated to the Red Cross. We'll see, crazier things have happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> AwStat is unreliable, or at least, I don't understand how it works. I'm getting something like 50,000 unique a month, but with Google Analytics they are only 2,500. Not even close.

I doubt the author does even get 10,000 unique a month. The keyword "it turns out" turns out to be a not so popular keyword with only 8.1K search per month. (Data From Google Adwords Keyword Tool)

<comment><USER9> It's bots. Google Analytics starts out by only counting clients that run javascript, so that eliminates most automated queries right there. AwStats looks at actual requests from server logs, which is going to count a _lot_ of requests from poorly written comment spam botnets, email scrapers, and other non-vistors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me the time that I ranked #1 for something in the news because I wrote an article about the incident before it happened.

<comment><USER11> Ok, I'll bite - what incident/article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This incidence is an example of "QDF", or "Query Deserves Freshness". When a certain competitive keyword gets temporal spikes in links, tweets, and etc, Google uses QDF to give immediate boosts to these keywords on SERPs where it might not otherwise have been able to assault for years.

QDF is something that's supposed to hypothetically "turn off", but with the new valuation of tweets and shares, it seems increasingly likely that these social mentions are actually beginning to count (and persist) much like links.

See SEOMoz's study of how a similar thing happened to them for the term "Beginner's Guide" when Smashing Magazine tweeted it out suddenly even when it had existed (and not ranked for the term) for months: [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings- unexpected...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected- case-study)

<comment><USER13> The 400K pageviews he is referring to were for "Feynman Lectures on Physics", which was a PDF, which had zero backlinks and wasn't mentioned anywhere.

You are of course correct about QDF. The first half of his post is indeed relevant to that, but the major point is further down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Were you able to capitalize on any of the traffic? Get signups to the RSS feed at least? That's the problem with junk traffic: most don't really provide any value other than raw pageviews.

Content is still king though.

<comment><AUTHOR> To a certain extent, yes. After the "it turns out" post I think some people went around to other parts of my site and started submitting different posts to HN. There was one point where I had three posts simultaneously on the front page (it was a glorious moment).

That converted into about a doubling of my RSS subscriber base to just over 100.

But culling RSS subscribers seems to be mostly a game of posting and linking and getting buzz on close a daily basis, whereas I'll occasionally have one or two months of inactivity.

Otherwise, somewhere between 0.5 and 1% of visitors ever check out other posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it safe to admit publicly to handing out some copyrighted thing 400000 times? I don't think Feynman has been dead long enough for the copyright to expire?

Thanks for sharing the story, just wondering...

<comment><USER16> He said it was accidental, and he meant to put it in a private unindexed directory.

<comment><USER15> Does that help (who pays for damages in accidents - copyright owner could claim loss of 400000 sales)? Also even in the private directory he probably wasn't allowed to own it.

I am not judging him, I am only concerned for him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is great writing. It might not satisfy those looking for a studied approach to the topic, but it's definitely real world. Made me laugh. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Bad juju to post something that is widely read about how you promoted hundreds of thousands of times the illegal distribution of a book.

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't it very easy to rank for phrases that no one else wants to rank for? Sure you got some traffic, but it was probably almost entirely worthless traffic. Pick most any random phrase that no one else would ever want to rank for and you can probably get near the top of the search results for it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Like others have posted, I have also had a surprising number of page views without knowing it. The secret for me was Google Images. Got an iPhone image from Apple's PR site and uploaded it to my homepage. Now my page shows up in image search on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Once I realized what was happening, I added some code to my webpage so that removes itself from the frame it's embedded in. It's essential the same as finding it on a web search, but it's page rank is a lot higher on the image search due to the iPhone image.

</comment><comment><USER21> Note, for what it's worth, I could not find his site on the first page of Google using any of the phrases mentioned. I was going to check backlinks and the site isn't there to check.

The reason I was going to check is that there's no way he's getting that many visits on such an obscure term. There's simply not that many searches. Also without some kind of link, there's no way for a bot to even know your site exists.

Perhaps it's just me. I must be missing something. Maybe the article was a bit over-stated?

</comment><comment><USER22> Last year my browser extension ranked on the first page of bing and yahoo for the keyword 'google' : It resulted thousands of impressions, but it fade out the next days of course. It's not very useful trafic of course.

</comment><comment><USER23> now you taught SEO professionals put feynman lectures online in pdf with ads injected in feynman content! :)

</comment><comment><USER24> It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on rankings. About a year ago, I wrote a post on my blog about how to write a bot in Ruby using Watir, and I submitted it here. Within 24 hours, I had gotten over 1000 uniques and had a front page ranking for the term "ruby bot" and "ruby web bot". I run Google Analytics on my blog, and Google has provisions in its algorithm to account for "breaking news" and because my site rapidly received traffic and links, they chucked it up onto the front page for these terms.

I've maintained the rankings because of the links I received during that traffic spike as well as the traffic coming in through the search engine results. What better way for Google to test whether a site is actually decent or not than to rank it quickly because it's getting traffic, then keep it there or drop it based on the CTR and Bounce Rate of the site? It's possible to game these metrics, but not as easily as something like link or content spam.

For reference, the blog post is: [http://www.layeredthoughts.com/automation/how-to-write- your-...](http://www.layeredthoughts.com/automation/how-to-write-your-first- ruby-web-bot-in-watir-scraping-weather-com)

<comment><USER25> I can believe that CTR has a significant impact, but how could traffic have an impact? Matt Cutts says explicitly that search doesn't touch any data from Analytics in any way: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU>

<comment><USER26> It's not from Analytics.. Log out of your gmail account, clear your cache, do a google search for "it turns out" and then right-click -> copy the URL of the first hit. Then, paste that into notepad.

<comment><USER25> Isn't that just how they count CTR / from-Google traffic? I thought the previous poster was suggesting that traffic _from HN_ to his blog was upping his Google ranking (in addition to CTR), because Google detected a traffic spike indicating some variety of trending/breaking news. But if Google doesn't use Analytics data for ranking, how could they know that his blog was getting a spike of traffic from sources other than Google search?

<comment><USER27> Note the post you're discussing explicitly says "SERP CTR":

"It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on rankings."

We can see they're measuring it, it's obviously at least worth investigating as a signal, I'd be absolutely astounded if they aren't using it.

(I'm also a little surprised at Matt's continued insistence that the search team don't use CTR data from the Adwords and/or Analytics teams data. As a user-of-search, I'd like them to use _all_ available signals, and I suspect the Google Analytics data contains information which would noticeably improve the quality of search results).

<comment><USER28> It would probably be illegal. Google is the dominant player in both the analytics and the search space, using it's dominance in one area to strengthen in dominance in another would practically be asking for an anti-trust suit.

Plus it's incredibly easy to rig google analytics data, you can just modify the GA javascript you're serving.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Protect App-Based Drivers and Services Act" Uber/Lyft/Doordash Initiative in CA [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://protectdriversandservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Protect-App-Based-Drivers-Services-Act_Annotated.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Note that this is an Initiative Statute[0] (not a Referendum). This allows them to write a broader package of laws (rather than just "undo" any previous bill) to implement a broader wish list.

When reading the text of proposed law, note that "engaged" means _with an active rider /fare_, not all time available accepting rides on the app. 25 hours of actual engaged time in a week sounds improbably difficult to achieve in most areas.</comment>


How to start an EC2 Ubuntu Server for your developer in 6 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://www.edukatr.com/how-to-start-an-ec2-ubuntu-server-for-your-developer-in-6-minutes/

<comment><USER2> Spinning up servers like this is nice, but if all you want is a vanilla install, Rackspace is definitely the way to go. Their web site is far more user friendly, and they've got a nice iPhone app you can use to spin servers up and down as you like.

Amazon's advantage seems to lie in the far wider variety of machine images available, and in better tools for making custom images.

<comment><AUTHOR> From a pricing standpoint I have found Rackspace to be more flexible at the lower end 256MB slice but once you start going higher toward 1.5GB RAM it gets more pricier than Amazon. I am guessing you were referring to RackSpace Cloud. The pure Rackspace solution is very pricy compared to AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very cool. Are there AMIs that include ubuntu + web framework stacks? (say, rails+nginx+passenger)

<comment><USER4> Take a look at TurnKey Linux. We just announced free access to all AMI's (40), including Rails, Django, Symfony, LAMP stack, Drupal6, Joomla, Wordpress, File Server, Domain Controller, Torrent Server, Redmine, MediaWiki, Zimbra and many others.

Optimizations for EC2 include a custom developed mechanism (EBSmount) that auto-mounts EBS devices when attached, support for automating EC2 instance setup via user-data scripts, security updates installed on boot (prevents window of vulnerability) and an AJAX web shell and a rich web administration interface (over SSL).

Announcement: <http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/maintenance-release>

EC2 Details: <http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/ec2>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this info! This is a lot of software. Is it better to then build the stack one needs on top of the basic OS and then store it in S3 (cheaper than EBS) as your custom AMI and fire that up as needed?</comment></comment></comment>


5 reasons you shouldn't ditch the iPhone and switch to Android – BGR - <AUTHOR> https://bgr.com/2018/06/21/iphone-vs-android-2018-top-5-reasons-to-choose-apple/ <comment><USER2> I'm using Apple devices since 12+ years and never regret that I switched. The Apple support is the biggest plus. All the other 4 reasons are absolutely valid and keep me in the eco-system. It comes with a high price tag. But as I get the latest updates for iOS devices I have no need to change my iPhone every 2 years - I'm fine with my iPhone 6. Perhaps until autumn this year...</comment>


Emailbin.org a Place for Anonymous Emails - <AUTHOR> http://emailbin.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> creator here:

emailbin.org is running on elasticsearch with a hideous frontend of pure raw html hahaha

usecases:

* email signups

* posting of email threads to government

* your ideas

it is and will always be a free place to lay your emails to rest :-)

<comment><USER2> Always nice to see someone contributing resources like this.

You might consider adding https to the front-end, just in case someone uses it for activation url's.

What is your data retention policy?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to do remote pair programming? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> In case you like console: How about sharing a tmux session with Vim/Emacs in it? The remote peer will connect to your machine through SSH.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try zoom.us. Also has remote control. Used it for this very purpose several times.

</comment><comment><USER4> Google hangouts or Skype are ordinary tools people use to get started. Generating ongoing mutual interest and habits in pairing might be harder than picking a tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Screen sharing doesn't allow to switch keyboard. Or hangouts and skype allow to control editor for both participants?

<comment><USER4> If the code lives in a shared repository such as Github, there's no need to share a keyboard. When switching roles, the driver commits the changes from their local machine. The navigator updates their local copy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you tried that?

In my experience we switch more often, and codi is not in a shape to be committed - it wont even compile.

<comment><USER4> Yes. The code was on its own branch. It was part of a simple protocol for all remote pairing. The hard part of pairing is often social issues such as the way Git is used. Technology isn't really the critical factor. I mean remote pairing requires a change to the way people interact. Using Git differently is a change to the way people interact. The key is that people are interested in making it work. If they aren't, it doesn't matter what technology you choose.

The nice thing about using Git and hangouts or skype is that I can use Emacs and you can use Vim and someone else can use Sublime text.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, thaks for sharing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>