What are LTO Tape Drives and are they better than NAS? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uQVkUQ9T1I <comment><USER2> Tape is a scam. PERIOD.

I see LTO-8 drives sell for $3500 or so. LTO-8 tapes seem to be selling for about $120 or so today (although I couldn't find them a year ago back when a patent war was keeping them off the market)

The LTO-8 tape has 12 TB capacity. I see 12TB hard drives selling for $270. You save $150 using a tape instead of a hard drive, so you have to replace 23 disks with tapes to make back the cost of the drive, or a total of 276 GB of storage.

My experience is that you can write a sector to a hard drive and read it back correctly with p = 1-1e^-6 or so. I've never had the experience of backing up files onto an external hard drive and not being able to restore them, except in the case where somebody hit the drive with a hammer to pulverize the platters.

My experience with tapes is that "real world" failures happen at an 0.5-0.9 rate unless you're in a workflow where you restore from tape EVERY DAY. If you don't believe me, I suggest that you try it. Frequently I've seen people write a tape with my own eyes then tried to read the tape and found nothing but zeroes. One time I tried to restore a 4kb configuration file and was told by the IBM tape robot I'd have to wait 18 hours!

<comment><USER3> > Tape is a scam. PERIOD.

Tape is marketed at the "enterprise" \-- which is why the prices are where they are for drives and tape cartridges.

Enterprises that have regulatory requirements for multiple "off-site" backups buy these, as they allow them to check the "complies" box on their compliance forms they file quarterly.

But as enterprise customers are also low volume compared to the mass market, both the drives and tape cartridges are priced to recoup the design/build costs across a smaller number of units sold.</comment></comment>


An art show with hidden cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> https://andybauch.com/exhibitions/new-money <comment><AUTHOR> "New Money" opening on Friday in Los Angeles contains Bitcoin which can be stolen from the works. The art is created from 100,000 LEGO bricks and $10,000 in Bitcoin, and depicts visual abstractions of Bitcoin secret keys.</comment>


Humbling index: Where do you stand? - <AUTHOR> http://indexed.blogspot.com/2008/08/humbling.html

<comment><USER2> I think the point is: the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know.

I present an example from personal experience. It's not so much that I didn't know the concept being discussed, but rather the example I will present was used to kick off my real analysis class three days ago.

Consider a number, B (B for bad). Let B be the limit of the alternating harmonic series as the number of terms approaches infinity. The professor showed by merely switching the location of parentheses and rearranging terms that this same series can be shown to sum to 1.5B. Naturally, the number B, the limit, approaches ln 2. But by rearranging the terms, he showed otherwise. The point of the lecture was to show that the human mind, unless trained in the concept of limits at infinity, falls short. Now I know the reason why he was able to prove this was due to a result of Riemann, specifically that conditionally convergent series can be made to sum to anything you want by rearranging the terms in a sufficient manner (see Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis for a proof), much of the class was stumped as to why this occurred. Just when you think you have mastered something as beautiful as the calculus, when you start to dig deeper into the theoretical underpinnings of it, you realize that there is so much more to learn.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of the unconsciously-incompetent, consciously-incompetent, consciously-competent and finally the unconsciously-competent concepts...

</comment><comment><USER4> These graphs are somewhat misleading. As education (A) increases, knowledge (B) and "things you know you don't know" (C) increase on approximately the same curve. I'd say that A:C grows slowly at first, then gets steep, while A:B is roughly linear.

<comment><USER5> There is one other comment with same opinion on the site itself.

But the idea is not to get into such gory details. Its a fun thing. They essentially get the highly insightful statement in a very creative way. :)

I was definitely impressed to be reminded of Humility and what makes the best people this way.</comment></comment>


Putting a Speed Limit on the Stock Market - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/high-frequency-traders.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&smid=tw-share&pagewanted=all&

<comment><USER2> Keep in mind all of the Micro Recessions that are caused by High Frequency Trading.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tobin tax on all stock transactions. Problem solved.</comment>


Never mind - <AUTHOR> Please delete this <comment><USER2> This is a really weird way to look at conversations. Clearly your comment was useful, because you said what a lot of people were thinking, and prompted a very helpful explanation from a subject matter expert. Had you stayed silent, rayiner might not have felt any need to comment, and everyone would have been worse off.

Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Moreover, comment scores do not capture information about truth values, and displaying them would seem only to encourage people to confuse them with something which does. It doesn't _matter_ whether 'rayiner's comment has a higher score than that which prompted him to write it - what matters is that both the erroneous interpretation and its correction by a domain expert are there, publicly visible, for anyone to read and evaluate.

If anything, I'd argue that it's almost more worth going the other way, and hiding scores on one's own comments as well. I don't really know what purpose they serve.

<comment><USER4> >I'd argue that it's almost more worth going the other way, and hiding scores on one's own comments as well. I don't really know what purpose they serve.

I've never thought of that idea. I think I like it!?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sites like HN have made me realize it's actually more or less impossible to tell if a given argument is well-founded unless you have first-hand experience in the domain. Most people don't have experience in most topics, so upvotes were quite susceptible to "reasonable seeming" yet incorrect arguments.

</comment><comment><USER4> HN is not meant to be a karma competition. The cream will float to the top.

</comment><comment><USER6> Inevitably comment votes are going to reflect common thought patterns including misconceptions. Even though this is susceptible to groupthink and gaming, HN has pretty strong antibodies in that area, so I think it's less of a problem than the timing issue.

In short, the worst bias in HN comment scores are that early comments get exponentially more votes than late comments. It would be nice if later posts could get a boost to their upvotes to incentivize late contributions, and help better ones float to the top even after the conversation has died down a bit.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'll be honest, I'd like this - it would tell me (us) when others make better comments and help me (us) to improve my (our) own commenting.

It would also give readers an idea of how popular the ideas in the comments are - and perhaps, if we could show total up versus total down, whether the comments got a lot or a little attention.

This could be a privilege for those with high karma levels, similar to the downvote.</comment>


Pandemic Economics: 'Much Worse, Quickly' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/03/26/pandemic-economics-much-worse-very-quickly <comment><USER2> One thing on my mind with this is how different the cause is. In many cases, like the great recession, I'd say there was an internal structural, systemic cause for the collapse. But in this case, it's a virus, coupled with top down government lockdowns. That doesn't mean it doesn't economically matter, but wouldn't the recovery process be different, maybe faster?

This is just me thinking out loud; I also expect this line of reasoning could be really misguided. It's not like there aren't any structural problems in the world at the moment.

<comment><USER3> There are many issues:

\- young people have student loans.

\- old people put all their retirement into their house - expecting it to increase in value.

\- People will be crushed with medical debt (up to 20k) if they get coronavirus and have no insurance.

\- The same people have no income because of quarantines.

\- The rent is so high for almost every city if you aren't working you can't afford to live there.

If you do the math it seems like there will be a housing crisis when old people start to unload their expensive homes and realize quickly there are no buyers.

It'll probably be a couple months, but when it happens it's gonna be bad for homeowners. Probably better for society and young people though.

<comment><USER4> "People will be crushed with medical debt (up to 20k) if they get coronavirus and have no insurance." \- will people without insurance be allowed COVID-19 treatment? From what I understand it's emergency only and if you don't have insurance you'll be denied admittance into the ICU as that is not emergency care?

<comment><USER5> ER's cannot turn you away legally; and if you're bad enough where ICU is a reasonable expectation, it's an emergency.

It wasn't well received here, but there is technically legislation you can fall back on. Even if uninsured. EMTALA. At a minimum, they have to stabilize you such that you are not in immediate danger of dying. Which, again, severe respiratory distress tends to qualify.

This was the website linking to a battlefield consent card for the uninsured. [https://www.rickbradley.com/healthcare](https://www.rickbradley.com/healthcare)

Know your rights. It doesn't mean they have to do much more than that, and be ready to fight and raise all hell if need be if someone gets creative on their definition of "emergency". I'd recommend having your attorney, or the State Attorney General on speed dial, and be on good social terms. Make sure to have someone healthy and willing to fight tooth and nail for you as possible. There are few things as effective as a strong patient advocate who will not back down. Make your arrangements now, while you can.

Also, spread the word to everyone you can, and tell them to do the same. I highly doubt any hospital is going to want to risk the backlash of large swathes of their community slamming them simultaneously. Especially if many do escalate to the Attorney General. It's a pandemic, and they are the people in a position to help.

Note, if you have insurance, don't bother trying anything linked there. It's more of a last resort, and is basically guaranteed to eventually result in legal action to resolve things.

Has not been tested personally, but may well end up happening if I or the SO are unlucky and contract something in the next month or so. Also, I am not a lawyer. Just a guy who reads too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem is that even 20% down for residential and 30% equity for commercial loans is not enough in a stress situation. The real estate market needs to be properly securitized and put on futures and options exchange so risk can be dynamically priced in real time by real market participants. More than 50% of wealth is stored as real estate and we are in the stone ages with how that wealth is managed when we have better financial tools.

Also local governments need to enable online initial registration of cars even for non dealers...</comment>


The Art of Computer Programming (interview with Don Knuth) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/40462

<comment><USER3> Coincidentally, I was thinking of what Knuth said just last week, when one of my comments was downvoted into obscurity for promoting a supposedly obscure/contrived math formula over a lame switch-case :) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2817716> In reality, that formula is neither obscure nor contrived. I actually learnt it in high school ie. it was formally taught and we worked through how to come up with such functions given a set of inputs and outputs ie. essentially a bounded set mapping problem { 1->31, 3->31, 4->30,5->31, 6->30,7->31....}

So anyways, Knuth gave an interview maybe 10 years back where he lamented the lack of dexterity in math in American undergrads. He said even Stanford has to offer "remedial courses in math" for CS undergrads, because there is an "interest vs ability" mismatch. At that time ( during the 1999-2000 tech boom ), a lot of Stanford undergrads were indicating CS as their major. So they clearly had the "interest". But upon testing them, it was clear they didn't have the "ability". Hence this interest vs ability mismatch, and a need for remedial math courses at Stanford. At the time, I was studying CS with a bunch of Russian, European, Indian & American classmates. I found that Russians & Eastern Europeans tend to favor clever 1-line math code. They themselves were trained in physics and math & looked at CS problems as essentially a laborious function-mapping exercise. Whereas the Americans invariably wanted "readable code" and ended up writing verbose switch-cases and if-elif-endif clauses ie. essentially unrolling for-loops. Knuth's Concrete Math ( <http://www-cs- faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/gkp.html> ) was a sort of bible in my days. You had to know generating functions and recurrences and even stuff like complex powers. Like for instance i^i ( i raised to i ) leads to an infinite set of points with real and imaginary parts, scattered all over the 2D plane. You had to know cosets and Lagrange's theorem and set partitioning using cosets. Nowadays people simply enumerate everything as there is no penalty ( in performance terms ), so CS problems have a "select 1 answer from set of possible answers" flavor, rather than "contrive a function to compute the answer" flavor.

<comment><USER4> I just upvoted your old post. :-)

I did disagree with the solution (many who see the code would get confused), but it certainly was a positive contribution to the discussion, which is always my bar for upvote/downvote.

And I love Concrete Mathematics. I wish people would say Knuth is the author of TAOCP and Concrete Mathematics. And Ronald Graham is another great computer scientist. With that said I do distinguish computer science from programming.

<comment><USER3> "I just upvoted your old post. :-)"

Thank you!

"many who see the code would get confused"

I honestly don't think we should dispel confusion by dumbing things down to the point where all discrete math is squeezed out of the CS curriculum and all you have left is lame switch-cases and explicit enumeration so there is zero confusion but also zero insight into the problem. Some of the candidates we interview these days are a symptom of this very problem. Lemme give you 2 examples ( actual interviews questions we asked candidates ).

1\. write a function that returns the sum of the first one thousand odd numbers.

Expected Answer:

function foo() {

      return 1000*1000;

}

The candidate's answer :

function foo() {

      sum = 0;

      count = 0;

      i=0;

      while(true) {

        i++;

        if (i%2==1) {

            count++;

            sum += i;

        }

        if( count == 1000 ) {

          return sum;

        }

      }

}

Now, the candidate is a LAMP expert and can do magic with linux sys-admin tools, but really, this is such an incredibly lame solution. Yes, its "correct" and very clear and nobody will get confused looking at his solution. But what's more clear is that this person has never had a single course in discrete math. Sum of n odd numbers is n^2 is taught on day 1, its so fundamental and basic and even if you forget the actual result, it takes just 5 minutes to derive it from first principles ( just write the sum forwards to backwards, then write it again backwards to forwards, then add the two expressions, hey voila there you go! ). When we show him the expected solution, he is genuinely surprised and says we've pulled a fast one on him. "Its a trick question! ". He says he's never been taught anything like this in the classroom. That's just sad.

2\. Find all the integer triples that form right triangles whose smallest side is less than a million.

Candidate's answer :

for i from 1 to 1000000 {

for j from 1 to 1000000 {

for k from 1 to 2000000 {

      if i*i + j*j == k*k then print i,j,k;

}

}

}

Again, this is the "correct" solution and its eminently readable, but it is supremely inefficient and super-lame. Its like the candidate has never given any thought to the actual problem, and is just throwing loops and conditionals at it. I will refrain from giving the expected solution here, but any student of discrete math can generate pythagorean triplets in a much more efficient manner than the lame solution given above.

A little dose of Knuth's Concrete Math goes a very long way.

<comment><USER5> "Find all the integer triples that form right triangles whose smallest side is less than a million." Is this the kind of stuff that you work with on a daily basis? If it is, then sure ask away. But if you're just looking for a programmer, why are you asking discrete math questions?

<comment><USER6> Why focus on stuff that is done on a daily basis? Most places I've worked, the stuff done on a daily basis is relatively simple and could be done by most reasonably competent programmers. The hard stuff that is done once every month or two on the other hand is the stuff that really ends up mattering and the thing I'd want to optimize for if hiring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Now, to be put into that category of one of the best books of the century, that's a little bit embarrassing as they rank me with Einstein and Feynman - I'm not in that league really, I just didn't have as much competition - <USER2> had to have a token person in computer science!_

There might be a little truth here but, nonetheless, his devotion to those books made him a legend of our field. And to think people—well, I!—brag so much about so much less. His humility is disconcerting.

<comment><USER8> I think this is simply extreme modesty. Many researchers in the field often think they have discovered something new. Digging a little further, they discover that Knuth has been there already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of my favorite parts...

 _Looking forwards, what do you perceive are the biggest issues / challenges computer science faces, now and in the near future?_

 _The challenge of how can we go to sleep at night when there are so many things left to be done! (....) but I think so much more could be done by having better health care records and better ways of describing and visualising combinations of symptoms and combining statistical methods as well as visual methods, this would help doctors to understand things more clearly and quickly._

 _Not to mention the ways in which computers can help biologists to design better drugs. Everywhere you look there's something to be done which needs a good programmer to help achieve it. There's no shortage of challenges and little chance of ever running out of them._

It gets me a little personal validation that we still have many exiting challenges ahead.

<comment><USER10> > It gets me a little personal validation that we still have many exiting > challenges ahead.

I read that one of the US Patent Office people quit at the turn of the 20th century because he was convinced there was nothing left to do.

If I have learned anything, it's that for every problem humans solve, a few more pop up that we never thought would exist.

It makes me happy.

<comment><USER11> It appears that that story about the director of the Patent Office saying there's nothing more to invent is mostly made up, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Duell> or <http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/22779.html> or the most detailed debunking: <http://www.myoutbox.net/posass.htm>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Even in a casual interview Knuth feeds you enough nuggets to make you think for some time, e.g. the Jevons Paradox he mentions at the end (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox>). His faculties and rate of work does not seem to be affected by age (he's 73!), he's the Euler of CS (although I hope he lives longer than him).

</comment><comment><USER13> The CS department at Stanford has a weekly Theory Lunch during the academic year and we're fortunate enough to get Don Knuth to speak at least once every quarter[1]. His talks, although they start off from basically very little quickly become intensely technical and mathematical. It is quite astounding to see a man of his age have the kind of passion he demonstrates. Even more so the ability to translate interesting and quirky insights into deep mathematical and algorithmic statements (which is very apparent to those who go to his talks).

[1] <http://theory.stanford.edu/theory_lunch/>

</comment><comment><USER14> There is also a very long and interesting interview with him at <http://www.webofstories.com/play/17060>

</comment><comment><USER15> There's a much longer interview with Knuth posted originally at <http://www.webofstories.com/play/17060>. The transcript is probably interesting reading for anyone interested in the man; I imported it into Git and started formatting it into paragraphs at <https://github.com/kragen/knuth- interview-2006>, although I haven't finished.

I think it would be worthwhile for more people to (a) clone the git repository to reduce the risk that this primary historical source will be lost, and (b) reformat more of the transcript if they feel like it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I liked his answer for the question - why don't you do email?

 _Someone has to not be tweeting all the time, someone has to be thinking about things which need a long attention span and trying to organise material and build up strong foundations instead of rushing off across the frontier. It takes a long time to put out something that has the right style; I have to really think about it and if I'm going to do it right I have to spend a lot of time focussed on it. And I was being treated like an oracle, lots of people from around the world were asking my opinion about whatever, so after 15 years of email I decided that was a life time's worth._

<comment><USER17> Actually, you can still email Knuth, and his secretary will print the email out. See <http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html>

I can understand why he wants to be on the bottom of things, but I don't get why encouraging people to use postal mail rather than email is supposed to help. Email is just a medium, and it's a much more sensible way to move information around. The widespread habit of checking email every 5 seconds is by no means compulsory. I wonder why Knuth says that the batch mode communication he wants to do cannot be done properly with email.

<comment><USER11> I think it's just that he's trying to raise the barrier to entry a little higher. If you know you'll get a response in a few days or weeks on paper, instead of a day or two later in your email client, that makes you look for other, quicker ways to get the answer you're looking for, which reduces the load on Knuth (and his secretary).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The American Scientist list mentioned in the opening: [http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/100-or-so- boo...](http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/100-or-so-books-that- shaped-a-century-of-science)

</comment><comment><USER19> "I was born to be a computer scientist - I have a way of organising stuff in my head that just seems to make me a good programmer. I think everybody can learn to use computers, but only about one person in every 50 is a geek in the same way as I am. That means we can push the envelope and can resonate with the computer. The way we think helps to make it easier for us to know how to construct a machine."

One of the few people who can state it as a fact, without sounding arrogant.

</comment><comment><USER20> "I'm jealous of astronomers, for example, because people respect astronomers for doing astronomy because it's interesting just for its own sake. I studied computer science because it's interesting to study computer science."

Probably my favorite part of the interview.</comment>


Ask HN - HN like sites, for creatives? - <AUTHOR>

Writing, painting etc - any creative discipline. <comment><USER2> Creative coding and interactive installations? Try <http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/en_us> if you like those sorts of things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Designer News. It is more focused on UI and such than writing or painting though.

<https://news.layervault.com/stories>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://ffffound.com/>

<http://thisisnthappiness.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Programming is a creative discipline. HN is also reasonably attractive to writers. And at least one prominent member has studied painting.</comment>


How long does your nanosleep() really sleep? (2004) - <AUTHOR> https://www.dragonflybsd.org/presentations/nanosleep/ <comment><USER2> This bug is still there in OpenBSD. With the 100Hz tick rate, sleep(10ms) turns effectively into 15 milliseconds, or -- more likely -- 20 milliseconds if the system is lightly loaded and the program doesn't spend much of its timeslice.

Of course, some programs don't expect this.

Fun story, me and my little sister played a game online years ago. The Mana World. A game with an OpenBSD port. She teamed up with some guy in game. She also told me that guy had a terrible internet connection & slow PC. So once I found them, I watched this guy lag and move about in slow motion. I asked if he's running OpenBSD. He said he's running OpenBSD. I sent him a little patch and it's like he got a new PC and a new internet connection, just like that.. :-)

<comment><USER3> can you put this patch up somewhere, e.g gist.github.com or something? or atleast point us where to look exactly? thank you :)

<comment><USER2> Why, do you work on TMW?

Like I said, it was years ago. If I still have the patch, it's got to be on one of these spinning rust disks sitting in my closet. I'm on a trip so I really can't look for it now.

Assuming the client is still buggy (things like SDL2 have happened so who knows?), I'd probably look here first:

[https://gitlab.com/manaplus/manaplus/blob/485e9bb12bf5dda318...](https://gitlab.com/manaplus/manaplus/blob/485e9bb12bf5dda318ac0ccbf1d2a1cd86cf8c70/src/utils/timer.cpp#L64)

The logic won't run right if the timer is implemented with a sleep that ends up sleeping much longer than intended. If it works like it did back then (sleep is virtually always 20ms), simply incrementing the tick count by two every time should be enough to make it smooth on OpenBSD. Of course the correct fix is to keep track of actual time spent and adjust ticks accordingly. Or use a timer mechanism that has higher precision. IIRC setitimer[1] can get you a regular 100Hz alarm on OpenBSD.

[http://man.openbsd.org/setitimer.2](http://man.openbsd.org/setitimer.2)

If I'm not entirely mistaken, the old userspace implementation of pthreads worked with a 100Hz timer using this mechanism.

<comment><USER3> >Why, do you work on TMW?

oh, no. i'm just curious

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On modern FreeBSD, when I run the article's demo program, by default I see even higher and more variable latency than the author observed in 2004:

        0.017686
        0.031868
        0.055889
        0.008931
        0.014824

However, when I set the kern.timecounter.alloweddeviation sysctl ("Allowed time interval deviation in percents") to 0 (from the default of 5%), I get very low and consistently low latency:

        0.000036
        0.000031
        0.000030
        0.000037
        0.000036
        0.000040

There are pros and cons to both defaults.

<comment><USER5> Can you elaborate on the cons?

<comment><USER4> Sure thing.

Why make wakeup imprecise by default? The slop allows for some coalescing of nearby (in time) events into a single wakeup, saving power[0]. This article provides some figures that give a good intuition for why this might work: [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/06/how-os-x- mavericks-w...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/06/how-os-x-mavericks- works-its-power-saving-magic/)

See also: tickless kernels in general[1]; FreeBSD switched to a tickless kernel with coalescing about 5.5 years ago[2].

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

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

[2]: [https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=24777...](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=247777)

<comment><USER6> Yes it's true. This kernel has no tick.

<comment><USER7> "Well, that's what I heard!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Solaris 8 briefly had a kernel bug such that usleep() didn't sleep at all. I don't recall the details, just that after patching the system and rebooting things were behaving very bizarrely. I eventually realised the sleep command was returning instantly and from that tracked it to the system call, and then found a patch for the issue. Google is failing me in digging up any details. It would've been in the 2000-2004 time frame.

<comment><USER9> EDIT: Oy, TFA is from 2004. Never mind my comment about Solaris 8 being ancient.</comment></comment>


Search a film, find out who died - <AUTHOR> https://www.fallenfilmstars.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've been watching a series of Hitchcock movies lately while in quarantine, and kept wondering who in the cast is still alive. IMDB got a little tedious, so I decided to make a quick app out of it, where you can search a movie and see who in the cast and crew has passed on.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure yet what's more interesting, the information the site intends to provide (what actors have passed away) or accidentally coming across terrible B movies I didn't know existed like "Aliens vs Titanic", "Christmas Twister", and "Elf Bowling the Movie".

[https://www.fallenfilmstars.com/film/467839](https://www.fallenfilmstars.com/film/467839)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which hand baggage do you use? - <AUTHOR> I am looking to buy a new hand baggage (carry-on with wheels), but I nothing seems right.
Since I will be travelling by plane and currently all the flight that I will take has a limit at 7kgs for carry-on. But most of the bags I saw start weighing from 2.5 to 4.5 kgs. That seems like a huge waste. My 13' MBP is 1.5kg, along with the chargers and my kindle, about 2kgs in all.
So, I am looking for bag that is as light as possible and has a nice laptop pouch. I don't want a backpack. <comment><USER2> I have one of these: [http://www.jump.fr/duffle-bag--6/cabin-size-- 12/\--1/4461a-me...](http://www.jump.fr/duffle-bag--6/cabin-size-- 12/--1/4461a-medium-duffle-bag--4461A.aspx)

It does not have wheels. It weighs 1.1kg and is the appropriate size to go in the cabin. I travel almost exclusively with this bag as a carry on and don't check luggage.</comment>


Show HN: Noise up your pipelines with flute - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gaving/flute Screencast: https://vimeo.com/39440084<p>Probably the most useless thing I've ever written. <comment><AUTHOR> Screencast: <https://vimeo.com/39440084></comment>


$180 Per Second of BBC Output - <AUTHOR> http://nerdr.com/uk-bbc-tv-license-fee-us-perspective/

<comment><USER2> The BBC is a much-loved institution. Whenever politicians propose changes to the BBC, people get hysterical about the supposed damage the supposed wrecking will do. This happens even when the politicians involved aren't Tories.

The BBC is better value for money than the pay TV channels, because the pay TV channels can't force people to pay for their product. If the BBC channels went subscription-only, the price would be higher than it is now.

The BBC doesn't carry advertising. Lots of people like watching TV without being interrupted by adverts. And the free commercial channels like not having the increased competition for TV advertising space.

The licence fee / TV tax is also far from universally admired, but as the alternatives are also flawed and it's the status quo, it endures.

I'd prefer it if it was based on ability to pay, but (a) that would make it more expensive to collect and more time consuming to pay; and (b) there is a danger that if it was collected by the Revenue, that would be a step along the road towards the BBC losing editorial independence.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about a donation system? Like some channels here in the US have. That way, those who do like the service can pay and those who don't are free of the tax. Do you see that system working as an alternative to the BBC License fee?

<comment><USER2> Do those channels produce high quality TV?

My instinct is that it wouldn't bring in enough money to maintain quality, and that the incessant appeals for money would be as annoying as adverts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Let's start with the factual errors.

> That's for a TV channel and a pretty good website.

No, that's for eight or so TV channels, a similar number of national radio stations, a network of local radio stations, and a pretty good website.

> Well, if you are capable of receiving BBC broadcasts you pay the tax.

TV Licensing would like us all to believe that if we're capable of receiving any UK TV broadcasts (not just the BBC) then we have to pay, but it's not true. You have to pay if you actually receive a UK TV broadcast. Note that watching live TV through iplayer counts as receiving a UK TV broadcast, but watching an earlier programme timeshifted through iplayer does not. The BBC wants this changed, but this hasn't happened yet, I think.

> Every household in the United Kingdom is charged a flat fee

As well as not having to pay if you don't receive UK TV broadcasts, you don't have to pay if one of the householders is aged 75 or above.

Also, pubs/hotels/etc have to pay if they receive TV broadcasts, but it's not on a flat rate basis.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love (nearly all of) the BBC output e.g. BBC4 documentaries, CBeebies and CBBC (two entire kids channels with _no adverts_ ), BBC Radio 6, iPlayer, various tech investments like Dirac and Semantic Web for music metadata with Musicbrainz etc. but yes, the licence fee is a terrible regressive tax that should be replaced with something like extra VAT on TV purchases, so that people with multiple expensive TVs pay more and since you couldn't avoid it you'd save on enforcement costs.

But... the tories hate everything the BBC stands for and any political changes to their funding model will result in them taking the opportunity to control and/or destroy the BBC. This leaves me highly conflicted.

On a very slightly brighter note, they've stopped jailing so many young women for non-payment after a rash of suicides a few years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't realize it was that bad over there! Got a link for those suicides? I'd say, if UK citizens really do support it as they seem to do, then at least a proportional tax would be better. Having read into it a little though, the fact that it's technically a tax on information doesn't sit well with me (meaning if you didn't have a TV 20 years ago you were basically in the dark as far as video footage of world events were concerned).

<comment><USER3> Can't find any links to the suicides, I may be conflating the string of female prison suicides at Corton Vale in the 1990s (story: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/1852047.stm>) with the more general pressure from MP's to reduce the number of women (primarily young, poor, single and with dependent children) jailed for licence fee non-payment that occurred at the same time (it dropped as a result from 250 to 50 a year in the middle of the decade, still far too many and possibly still the leading cause of female imprisonment in the UK).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The TV Licencing system in Britain is quite widely publicized, but it isn't unique. See:

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Television_li...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Television_licence)

For example, France, Germany and Japan all have a flat rate licence fee to pay for their national broadcasters. Greece goes one step further and includes a surcharge on domestic electricity bills for this purpose.</comment>


In what niche does your favorite programming language surpass all competition? - <AUTHOR> And why? What makes them special? How do they make the job so much easier than everything else?<p>Some examples include but aren't limited to (not necessarily my opinion):<p>- Web Programming: Python(Django), Ruby/Rails<p>- REST Api's: Haskell(Servant), Python<p>- Machine Learning: Python<p>- Embedded Software: C, Rust<p>- Domain-specific languages: Haskell, Ruby, Racket, Lisp<p>- Data Science: Scala (spark), Python, R, Julia<p>- Game Programming: C# (Unity), C++ <comment><USER2> R + the tidyverse (dplyr, ggplot2 etc.) is easily the most elegant data analysis combo I've used. However, I tend to use Python for this usecase nowadays, primarily to reduce friction when working with others where Python is the lingua franca. Also, RMarkdown is superior to Jupyter notebooks in my opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you give an example of something you have to do all the time in Python that's a lot nicer in R?

<comment><USER3> Python, Numpy, Pandas is very inconsistent in comparison to R. For example, calculating and adding a column to existing dataframe using df.assign.

Coming from R, working in Python Pandas world, I am constantly googling, and checking the results of each command to make sure no errors and consistent output.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Embedded software: Rust, due to its easy-to-use tools, and powerful features, without sacrificing low-level functionality or speed.

Serverside web programming: Python, due to how useful Django's batteries- included approach is. And, its model representation of database tables, with auto-migrations.

<comment><USER5> You mention easy to use tools for Rust. Can you be more specific?

</comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux Web programming has to include PHP. You might might not like the language, but it easily beats other languages when it comes to the sheer volume of CRUD web apps built in the language.

It's available on every possible flavour of hosting (including shared hosting which makes it very accessible to many users). To setup an app can be as simple as copying PHP script files to a folder on the server. No other language can beat PHP for ease of server deployment.

</comment><comment><USER6> Text processing - Perl, I have used it for 20 years now to do this and it is still one of the best languages for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have any personal favorite examples? Maybe a recent from your history?

<comment><USER6> It is how regular expressions are built into the language itself in the same sense of how Go has goroutines.

For certain sets of problems, it makes it trivial. I remember cranking out a report in a few hours that took a Java team 2 weeks to re-implement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Compilers: Lisp

Nothing comes close to efficient tree matching or list processing, esp with its macros.

<comment><USER8> Which Lisp (or Lisp in general)? Because of homoiconicity?

<comment><USER7> Any Lisp or Scheme. Because of the cited features. Homoiconicity only helps with macros.

I should have mentioned Prolog also, because this is even better for compilers. You state the rules, and the system comes up with the optimal transformation by itself. Trees are natural as in Lisp. But unfortunately Prolog is not popular enough, and you rarely see an open source Prolog compiler. Ocaml took that niche, but prolog would be far better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Parsers and eDSLs: Haskell

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you written parsers in any other languages? Can you contrast?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Front end web development. It's so ubiquitous I don't need to name it.

<comment><USER11> Yes, jQuery is amazing. Err, sorry, I meant Mustache. Err, no, Backbone. Whoops, Angular. Um, React? No, Vue! Crikey, you must mean Svelte!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Controlling hardware: C.

</comment><comment><USER13> Modern javascript is pretty good for GUI development.

</comment><comment><USER14> Cloud backend: goLang (docker friendly, built-in concurrency)

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you used other languages here? Can you give a code example where Go shines here?

<comment><USER15> Not the poster you're asking, but in my case, have used Python extensively for cloud-related programming, lots of AWS lambda. Currently in a special kind of hell trying to move our company's lambdas from Python 2 to Python 3. It should be easy but there's an internal Python 2 library that is in everything that is massive and almost impossible to excise without significant effort. Started writing lambdas in Go, you ship your compiled binary and the lambda environment will never care what version you're running. Shipping a binary means I'm no longer worried about my build environment and pip and shipping all my Python junk the right way. Also in other areas, simply transposing some code to Go has had huge performance benefits over Python and concurrency is just so easy to pull off.

<comment><USER16> > Shipping a binary means I'm no longer worried about my build environment and > pip and shipping all my Python junk the right way.

I'm not sure it is that clear a win: for go, if you want to be able to reproduce a binary in future, you would still need to keep track of exact versions of all your build-time dependencies such as the compiler toolchain & all library dependencies, and version control or archive backup copies of these. You still may need to figure out exactly what version of each component you're running if serious security vulnerabilities are found in some component.

I agree it is much simpler and easier to ship a single statically linked self- contained go binary than a python app, but both languages arguably require a similar amount of effort to having a reproducible process to build and deploy.

<comment><USER15> Shipping is simpler. I'm using the Go module system right now and I haven't had any problems so far. I keep library usage to the minimum, mostly I've gotten by with only the standard library.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Three way Windows 8 improves language support - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/250487/three_ways_windows_8_improves_language_support.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Switching keyboard layouts and language settings under Windows and on other Desktop OSs I find something of a minefield.

It should be easy to just jump on somebody elses machine and change language and keyboard settings mid session, and at session start up.

I would ideally like to have a global system setting, which could be overridden on a user session or on a per app basis.

The shortcut to the control panel ideally will be painfully obvious - just a click away. So that if I sat down in front of another PC that currently was set for Arabic and Colemak (let's say it's possible hypothetically...), I could quickly take control and switch to my personal preferences. Could pair programming work?

I especially dislike the way this is currently done under Windows, so welcome change.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/21/using-the- lang...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/21/using-the-language-you- want.aspx)</comment>


Ask HN: What renders the terminal/shell? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, I am trying to gain an "exact process" understanding (similar to the detailed step-by-step analyses of "what exactly happens when you type in a command or a URL and hit enter" in CS instruction) of what forms a terminal/shell/"command prompt".
I believe I grasp the basics of windowing systems and TTY emulation, but I'm stuck on rendering.
What do I search for to figure out what exactly the characters-to-be-printed are handed off to on an OS - it wouldn't be the windowing system itself, would it? Is there some intermediary program or process that derives rendering logic for the characters (line wrapping and so forth) to be passed on as a window canvas?
Thanks for any help. <comment><USER2> This is different if you're talking about a console or a terminal emulator (in a windowing system).

In a console you might have a console driver, while in a windowing system you might have a text renderer. The text renderer can be a library that is still above the level of the windowing system, or in some windowing systems it can be a functionality provided by the windowing system itself.

For an example, see [http://www.pango.org/](http://www.pango.org/). (But note that there are other options for handling this layering. There is no principle of operating system design that says that this task absolutely has to be handled at one particular layer or another.)

</comment><comment><USER3> You might want to read "The TTY demystified": [http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php](http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php)

If you're on Linux and using a text console (Ctrl-Alt-F1 etc), IIRC the characters are rendered by the VGA card.

If you're using a terminal emulator like xterm or iTerm, it's different, but I don't know the answer.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's called a terminal emulator or just terminal. Examples include xterm, rxvt, gnome-terminal, st (supposedly non-crufty but probably full of crackpot stuff), kmscon (takes over the whole screen instead of using a window system), alacritty (super fast because Rust).

<comment><USER5> > alacritty (super fast because Rust)

Super fast because of GPU-acceleration would be more realistic.</comment></comment>


Core ML Community Tools - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/apple/coremltools <comment><USER3> There's a wwdc presentation on this where they show the tools in action. The first part is Core ML and the Tools part starts at 21 minutes in (it is about 40 minutes in total so definitely worth watching I found). [https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/710/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/710/)

<comment><USER4> Turns out generating a ML model is pretty easy too, even after training in Python. There's a simple 2 or 3 line conversion from keras/sklearn to an ML model.

[http://stsievert.com/blog/2017/06/11/coreml/](http://stsievert.com/blog/2017/06/11/coreml/)

I verified this because I'm a graduate student studying ML and I'll likely use this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any good Core ML blogs that are not already from here?

[http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=core+ml&age=10000](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=core+ml&age=10000)

<comment><USER6> I'm curious to learn how to think about the applicability of ML inside my app or server. I know I could hire an ML professional to do the thinking for me but a bootstartup can't really afford the time, money, and salesmanship required to locate and hire such a person.

What I'd love to see is something which says "hey! Here's ML technique X and these are the areas where X or something similar to X can be used."

Schools do well in transmitting this information to us - "here's multiplication. Use it to figure out how much 5 boxes of cereal cost if one costs $4.71" and so on.

If companies are trying to mass-ify ML, they need to de-ivory-tower-ify the applicability of ML in everyday thinking too.

Take face recognition - easy as pie to try out and understand but apart from the extremely limited use case of finding friends to tag in social media, what else can it be used for? Can it used as a diagnostic tool in neurology or ophthalmology? Can face recognition be used in police sketchups? No idea and not many blogs exist to think about such things.

The other problem with ML is that it has no component parts that we can extract and use on its own. Every ML technique comes fully formed - <USER2> recognition is a complete API. Are there constituent parts inside image recognition that, when combined with constituent parts of (say) face recognition, become a better ML tool? Again, I have no idea and no blogs discuss this either.

I want to use ML.

(Also, if you're going to link to your own blog, you should mention that maybe? Your HN username and your blog name are disjoint enough for the link not to be obvious.)

<comment><USER7> Maybe I can assist? I took a graduate course at Cornell called Applied Machine Learning[1] last year. The lecture notes are really great. The lecture notes survey a huge list of machine learning algorithms, and highlights its useful applications.

If you don't have understanding of regression vs classification, maybe skim through online resources to get a high level understanding of machine learning. Then you can dive into the lecture notes where you get breadth and a little depth.

Also the book, Building Machine Learning Systems with Python [2], is an amazing book where it applies machine learning techniques with python. I think this is the best resource on how to begin applying machine learning methods and it was helpful when I was implementing algorithms for the class, like kNN for clustering and PCA reduction + log regression for face recognition.

[1] [https://cornelltech.github.io/cs5785-fall-2017/lectures.html](https://cornelltech.github.io/cs5785-fall-2017/lectures.html)

[2] [http://totoharyanto.staff.ipb.ac.id/files/2012/10/Building-M...](http://totoharyanto.staff.ipb.ac.id/files/2012/10/Building- Machine-Learning-Systems-with-Python-Richert-Coelho.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Thank you. Will review.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Glad Apple have finally put coremltools on Github. It looks like they've added a lot of stuff recently as well.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you go about building a company to be acquired? - <AUTHOR> Long time reader, using a throwaway for anonymity.
I am software engineer who has worked successfully for some of the biggest software companies for a few years and went through a lot of the popular hyped wantapreneur literature (lean startup. zero to one, etc).
I have decided that next year I will quit my job and pursue my dream of building a company with the goal of being acquired. I understand that this is a very unpopular approach and that "this is what's wrong about everything". My question is, for those who have been in my position, or similar, what's the best strategy to succeed in this. What's a good way to go about studying and choosing a market, building a team, picking technologies, choosing buzzwords, assessing ideas and raising funds in order to maximise my chances of being acquired but not necessarily building a big sustainable business? Feel free to point me to material by people who have followed a similar approach. <comment><USER2> _lot of the popular hyped wantapreneur literature (lean startup. zero to one, etc)._

Not that it's really related to your question, but why do you classify either of those as "wantapreneur" literature? I'd say both books are full of useful advice to serious entrepreneurs.

As to the rest... think about it from the perspective of the would-be acquirer. What would they be looking for in an acquisition? Could be several different things: they could be looking to acquire people/talent (eg, an acquihire), or technology, or customers, or just brand goodwill.</comment>


Twitter is buggy - <AUTHOR>

It seems changes made to Twitter today introduced a few glitches for (possibly low-follower) accounts.<p>Example, http://twitter.com/sitemeer, none of the followers/following links are shown, hovering over the account link also shows 0 followers as well as 0 followees. <comment><USER2> That happened to me two days ago. The weirdness went away after about 12 hours. I assume they're doing some kind of slow/rolling upgrades a few servers at a time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was just experiencing the same issues. Some accounts are not even showing the normal headers followers, following, favorites, tweets and replies.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anybody got similar experience with other accounts?

<comment><USER4> I got exactly the same experience just a few seconds ago (@ddpelayo here)

<comment><USER5> I cannot reproduce it now.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean for you these accounts shows the correct values?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New NSFW content restrictions enrage Tumblr users - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/tumblr-nsfw-content-tags-search/ <comment><USER3> Along with the fact that if your blog is flagged adult they set robots.txt to noindex on your whole subdomain, so you're nuked from google (and there is nothing you can do about it). Now you're out their internal search engine too - They're doing their best to hide away the porn as much as possible without actually removing it.

<comment><USER4> A site:tumblr.com now returns 943 million URLs in Google. It would be interesting to see this number in a few weeks time.

<comment><USER5> 581,000,000 for me.

<comment><USER6> googlebubble makes google a bad source for this kind of estimation now, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As my friend said: "I love watching Yahoo spend nine figures on things only to offhandedly gut them like a child playing with sharp knives."

<comment><USER8> A great line. But maybe Yahoo is playing with dull knives, as it seems to achieve maximum pain for minimum gain.

<comment><USER9> One could also argue they're holding their knives backwards, so in addition to being causing damage by using the knife improperly they're also cutting their hands up by _bleeding_ money.

<comment><USER10> I'd characterize it as a knife with no handle.

<comment><USER11> More like a knife with a blade as a handle.

<comment><USER12> They grasp the knife firmly by the blade, and disembowel with the dull handle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a guy with a larger reach on Tumblr, I've been asking my readers about this, about how they would suggest handling this situation:

[http://shortformblog.com/tagged/nsfw-tumblr- feedback](http://shortformblog.com/tagged/nsfw-tumblr-feedback)

I've only posted a sampling of the responses I've gotten. I have more than 60 sitting in my ask box right now. People are REALLY upset about this.

</comment><comment><USER14> The market seems to be voluntarily making a massive hole for an adult-content- friendly blogging platform to fill, I wonder why the startup scene here isn't jumping on that?

(I'd do it myself if I knew of any appropriate payment system; but my only payment systems experience is with paypal, who hate adult content more than the blog hosts do, and bitcoin, which is unheard of outside of geek and finance niches...)

<comment><USER15> _The market seems to be voluntarily making a massive hole for an adult- content-friendly blogging platform to fill_

There is so much euphemism in that sentence when referencing porn that it's almost _palpable_.

That said, I agree. Doesn't everything on the internet start with porn?

<comment><USER16> > Doesn't everything on the internet start with porn?

It's hard to say, without a clear definition available or even, arguably, possible... [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)

Which strikes me as extremely weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder why this is blowing up today? It's not a brand new policy: it's been largely the same since at least April 29 of this year, i.e., before Yahoo bought Tumblr: [http://web.archive.org/web/20130426023137/http://www.tumblr....](http://web.archive.org/web/20130426023137/http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw)

What seems to be new is a) the addition of the "Adult" category, which is blocked from safe search tag pages even for people who follow a particular blog and b) a slight relaxation to the third-party indexing policy, where NSFW (but not Adult) blogs are now indexed by external search engines.

<comment><USER18> I don't use Tumblr, but I think you're underestimating the change. While blogs in the NSFW category had little restrictions, 'Adult' ones are completely hidden from everyone except those who have already subscribed. Characterizing Adult vs NSFW is arbitrary, so your blog might simply disappear without any warning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can see why: given Tumblr's focus on images, porn or at least NSFW material seems like a logical use pattern. For text, at least, I prefer Wordpress.

DailyDot doesn't cover this, but I wonder: what is the logical NSFW-friendly alternative to Tumblr?

<comment><USER20> Blogspot is one of them.

<comment><USER21> You're not allowed to make money on adult content on Blogger. [https://www.blogger.com/content.g](https://www.blogger.com/content.g) This is a recent change, and feels a bit like a shot across the bow designed to force the biggest adult bloggers off the service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Didn't David Karp say jus the other day on Colbert he wasn't going to censor Tumblr? What happened?

<comment><USER23> Because when someone like David Karp speaks, he is talking about a strictly, technical truth and not the practical truth of the situation. We punish are children for being deceptive when the pull this stunt, we reward[1] or ignore politicians and business folks.

The practical truth is that these blogs have been censored, because if Google cannot see something, it doesn't exist for 99.9% of the people.

1) You might be saying to yourself, I don't reward or approve this conduct. Did you watch West Wing? Did you like the C. J. Cregg character?

<comment><USER24> The other big question was, would Tumblr give up Colbert's data to the government? Karp's answer to that was to blink and say nothing.

Both answers, aroma of attorney.

May as well have had the lawyer do the interview instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From the article:

"Adult and NSFW content will be visible to anyone who has opted-in via their Settings page."

Seems reasonable...

<comment><USER26> Yes, but the point is that you cannot opt into being able to search for adult blog content.

<comment><USER27> What's the difference between NSFW and adult?

<comment><USER25> NSFW = 'Occasional' adult content

Adult = 'Substantial' adult content

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Looks like a good opportunity for someone to build something tumblr-like strictly for NSFW content that encourages people to build connections like tumblr does (or did)

<comment><USER29> The problem with a site explicitly being for NSFW content is users avoiding it in case it accidentally shows in history/logs. With tumblr they can claim to have been looking at/for something else entirely.

<comment><USER21> The subdomain would already show up in history and logs. It's hard to explain away e.g. fuckyeahboobies.tumblr.com

<comment><USER30> The vast majority of Tumblr users browse via the dashboard rather than the subdomains.

<comment><USER21> Is there a way to follow somebody without visiting the subdomain?

<comment><USER31> Yes - all via the dashboard/search functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> No big loss, since Tumblr search is TERRIBLE. As are most features - <USER2> service feels like a creaky pile of hacks for viewers and publishers alike.

A Tumblr directory/web crawler would be really great.

<comment><USER33> This isn't just Tumblr's search. They're cutting blogs off from search engine indexing too. And if you reblog anything from a blogged flagged as adult, it's looking like your blog gets flagged too.

A lot of the line between "adult" and "art" is very blurry, but anyone who deals with nudity is at risk here. Tumblr has a huge community of artists, who now have to worry of being censored.

"Sure, you can have a blog, but no one on the Internet will find it, ever." Sounds great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Pretty funny. Buy the new cool thing all the young people love, then start isolating and hiding the sex appeal that got it where it was.

</comment><comment><USER35> If you are surprised that Yahoo is ruining Tumblr you're either so optimistic that I envy you, or have no knowledge of the history of Yahoo or acquisitions in general.

</comment><comment><USER36> Crazy. Why would they prevent Adult-flagged Tumblrs from being indexed by 3rd- party search engines?

[http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw](http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw)

<comment><USER23> Advertisers don't want controversy. Advertisers are the customers.

<comment><USER37> Right. More specifically, here's what's actually going on:

10% of Tumblr is porn, right? And it's not _amateur_ porn, or "oh hey I reblogged a butt." No, the vast majority of that 10% is one thing and one thing only: mirrored rips of full galleries from paysites. Illegal, copyright- infringing rips.

Basically, if Tumblr had any sort of scalable process to distinguish these from their other content, they'd just shut them down immediately. Using Tumblr just to bulk-rehost copyright-infringing images is 100% against their TOS, that much should be obvious.

Basically, Yahoo gave Tumblr some good advice here: if they _don 't_ want to fundamentally restrict their users from posting adult content, then it's all Tumblr can do (legally) to sweep these gallery-rip Tumblrs under the rug, so that you can only find them by seeing a reblog from them or by knowing their URL (which also, a lot of the time, means "by following a link from a porn subreddit.") It's not that they're _adult_ ; it's that they're _in breach of copyright_ , and giving any public-facing path to them is the same as endorsing them (thus opening Yahoo to being sued for that infringement.)

This whole thing isn't about "OH NO A BUTT"; it's more for the same reason Mega's internal search won't show you "Adobe CS6 Master Suite [cw33t].rar", even though you could get that from them with the right URL. Hosting something is one thing; advertising it is another. Tumblr's emphasis on _free speech_ is a mask for one thing here: they want safe harbor provisions to apply to them as far as this content goes, by not giving it any attention/promotion.

EDIT: I reposted this _to_ Tumblr, expanded and phrased in a slightly more Tumblr-audience-targeted manner, explaining what safe-harbor provisions are and such. [http://leviaul.tumblr.com/post/55886555106/you- guys](http://leviaul.tumblr.com/post/55886555106/you-guys)

<comment><USER38> Actually, I think most of the stuff I've seen is amateur porn, either posted by its creator or reposted by others. You might be underestimating just how much genuinely amateur porn is out there these days.

<comment><USER39> maybe, but that might not be any better. I can imagine the consequences for being known for hosting "adult content" where nobody is checking the actor's ID at the door could be way worse than the consequences for hosting stuff the copyright holder doesn't want you to host.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There is a option in the settings:

       Browse tag pages in Safe Mode
       Hide content from NSFW blogs.

It works exactly like it says on the tin.

<comment><USER27> But, but ... censorship!

Seriously, I have to wonder who is actually enraged by this. If you want to browse for NSFW content, check the box and get on with it. If you want your NSFW posts to be displayed to unsuspecting people... I guess you're out of luck.

<comment><USER41> What if I want to browse for Adult content?

<comment><USER42> Then find something else - I fail to see how you have a particular right in this case for Tumblr to provide your adult content to you.

<comment><USER41> Oh, for sure, I'm not one of the "enraged" people; I just wanted to point out that it's not just a matter of changing a flag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't see a problem here - given that NSFW/porn traffic is worth much less than other traffic and even less to a generalized blogging platform like Tumblr, what's going on is that they are presently subsidized. This is an attempt at reducing the subsidy and making the platform less attractive for pornographers or even casual NSFW bloggers. For instance, if a porn pay site wants to create a blog to promote their site, why should Tumblr make it easy for them to do this on their platform? It doesn't really help them in any realistic way.

<comment><USER44> What's your source for that "NSFW/porn traffic being worth much less than others"?

As far as ads go, traffic is traffic, and clickthroughs are clickthroughs. Not only that, but Tumblr is a social media service, and like all social media services, they live and die by the amount of users they manage to keep. People who join for boobs are still people that can convince their friends to join.

<comment><USER43> No, traffic is not traffic in advertising. If you have a popular blog on home improvements, advice on mortgages or home purchases, the price you get for advertising is going to be orders of magnitude higher than advertising on random lolcat blogs, which in turn is going to be significantly higher than ads on porn blogs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> UPDATE: Tumblr says this was all a combination of poor design, anti-spam measures, App Store censorship, and plain old misunderstandings. [http://staff.tumblr.com/post/55906556378/all-weve-heard- from...](http://staff.tumblr.com/post/55906556378/all-weve-heard-from-a-bunch- of-you-who-are)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6073519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6073519)

</comment><comment><USER46> Thefreepornguide.com has a list of all nsfw tumblrs.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is really sad. I am unable to understand why the mainstream web companies like Yahoo! Google has such disdain for pornographic content.

I can fully understand that they do not want their family traffic to go there, but then why cant charge us a small amount and give a better access to all those adult blogs in much more efficient way ?

<comment><USER48> People don't want their products advertised next to porn.

<comment><USER47> Yes, that is perfectly understandable. Do not advertise those guys but there might be people who wish to do the same, also there might be other monetizations methods that can be used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> theworstdrug.com scrapes a lot of NSFW animated gods from Tumblr.

TechCrunch article here: [http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/what-is-it-about- porn-an-...](http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/what-is-it-about-porn-an- interview-with-the-founders-of-theworstdrug-a-nsfw-gif-site/)

</comment><comment><USER50> It seems that as long as Yahoo has resources at its disposal, it will buy and destroy everything it can. Even worse, their addiction to failure transcends management shakeups. I used to simply not care about Yahoo; now I actively want to see it fail.

</comment><comment><USER51> i want a search for porn tumblr sites only please! you guys can have the rest :)

</comment><comment><USER52> Doesn't the opt-in setting make this a non-issue?

(not a tumblr user, so I might be missing something)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can opt-in for "NSFW", but not for "Adult". [http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw](http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw)

<comment><USER52> Well that is unfortunate. Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> A sad day for attention whores and basement wankers indeed.

</comment><comment><USER54> Safer web always wins.</comment>


Amazon Taps its Inner Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1297929/print

<comment><USER3> It may not be all that likely, but I wonder what would happen if Amazon and Apple collaborate instead of dance-fight?

If Apple is working on an ebook reader it'd be the simplest way for them to take a slice of the pie - just show the reader to Amazon and say "That's a nice ebook business you've got there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it."

It depends on how much pie they'd like I guess.

<comment><USER4> I can't see Apple and Amazon working together. Apple tends to want to dominate the entire supply-chain and I think that only works when they're dealing with comparatively unsavy companies. Amazon gets the web well enough that they're not going to hand over control to Apple wholesale and I think that'd be a deal-breaker for Apple.

<comment><USER5> I can see them taking the publishing side end-to-end. Add stuff to Pages to simplify publishing a book -- all aspects, cover to cover. Become a middleman for offering indexing services. Have an online publishing service that automatically translates your file as an eBook, lets you order ego copes, and also enables bookstores to order it as product.

I know there are services out there, but the physical product is a bit shaky, and they don't have slick software integration with the service. Apple is in a great position for that kind of integration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Bezos claimed that Kindle e-books add 35% to a physical book's sales on Amazon whenever Kindle editions are available"

Wow, that's impressive.

<comment><USER7> Not exactly - he said Kindle sales make up 35% of Amazon's sales for books with a Kindle version. Not clear whether it added sales or siphoned off physical book sales.

<comment><USER6> That's what I'd heard in the past - but the my quote is directly from the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "For years, rumors of an Apple touch-screen media tablet have circulated, despite a now famous quote by Steve Jobs: "It doesn't matter how good or bad [the Kindle] is, the fact is that people don't read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the United States read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

For Jobs-watchers, this was a clear indication that he must be planning an e-reader, for Apple's grand poobah is the master of the red herring. In the past, he downplayed video on the iPod, insisting that no one would watch a movie on a 2-inch screen; denied that Apple was working on a phone; and claimed that anything less than a full-featured laptop wasn't in the cards -- until last year's release of the MacBook Air. When Jobs goes to the trouble of criticizing a competitor's products, downplays its significance, or offers a blanket statement about not pursuing a certain market, that's when he often goes in for the kill."

Gotta love that guy!

</comment><comment><USER9> The Kindle just looks more and more like an intermediate form, like MP3-enabled CD players (remember those?) Once you get people comfy with reading books on a screen, I'm not sure it's as big a step to the iPhone or a laptop, even if the (fairly convincing) case laid out for an Apple reader pad doesn't come to pass.

Of course, Amazon can win in distribution on other platforms, they are much better off for creating the Kindle themselves, and the Kindle compares well to AppleTV, a product seemingly far less likely to set the world ablaze. But this article offers some reasonable evidence that the Kindle doesn't seem as much like the iPod for books as the forerunner to it.

<comment><USER10> The other devices just have the wrong sort of screen. It's much more comfortable to read for long periods off the e-ink screens designed for it than off a laptop screen.

<comment><USER9> The e-ink displays are lovely. Still, dual-mode screens like the OLPC are bound to pop up more often in laptops and mobile devices. Then again, it hasn't kept Japanese phone users from reading on their phones.

[http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050138/lg-to- show-...](http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050138/lg-to-show-dual- mode-lcd-screen-at-ces)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Publishers better start selling e-Books directly at a price that leaves no margin for Amazon. This will both make the Kindle irrelevant to customers and Amazon's returns marginal. The longer they wait the less likely they will be able to sustain costs of leaving their print channels behind.

</comment><comment><USER12> "...more expensive Kindle... test-market to college students."

Good luck with that.

<comment><USER13> This is why we _don't_ snip quotes to make them sound better for our own snark. FTA:

 _Amazon has announced a larger, more expensive Kindle DX for textbooks and periodicals, which it will test-market to college students._

Last year I paid $500 - the price of a Kindle - for my textbooks. I didn't open most of them. Returning them was a pain in the ass. I hate going out and _buying_ them, period. If there's a device that lets me buy books each semester for only $50 total, or - not to suggest illegal activities - <USER2> lets me download them via my college's student hub, then I'm going to take the DX and never let go of it.

College students know a good deal when they see it.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that you can resell hard copy books. I usually spend ~$250/semester on used text books at the beginning of each semester (I'll buy them online), and get about $100 from selling them back (usually to the campus book store, although sometimes online if I feel I'm being ripped off too badly).

Net, I'm only paying $150/semester for books whose retail price is closer to $500. I don't think that publishers will be willing to price electronic books at 70% off retail like they would need to (since there is no resale of electronic books).

Ideally, they should 'rent' me the book for a semester for a huge discount (~80% off retail, say), and I have the option of 'upgrading' my rental to a purchase at the end of the semester (with no penalty over having just bought it outright upfront) if I decide I want to keep it.

That's basically what happens now on the secondary market. I get to 'rent' a book for a semester for the cost of the bid/offer spread, with the option to not the rental and just pay the original price.

<comment><USER14> I don't think you represent the average. Also, publishers try to deter this sort of activity by publishing updated editions every 2-4 years. This messes you up if you get holding the ball or if this year is the first edition. It also discourages booksellers from holding used books in stock (you can't send those back).

Then you have people keeping textbooks for various reasons. One of them is that it's hard to buy/sell books. You need to get in early.

Your $150 relies on both buying & selling used.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Old Arctic Ice Is Disappearing, and Taking the Rest of the Ice With It - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/02/20/global_warming_old_arctic_ice_is_melting_away.html <comment><USER2> When the Vikings settled Greenland over a thousand years ago they grew crops and raised cattle on it, hence the name.

I do appreciate that global warming is a fact, and that we are responsible. I also realize this is going to have severe consequences all over the world. I also don't think anything we do at this stage could slow down or stop the process, other than banning modern civilization. What we need to do is psychologically and politically prepare ourselves to mitigate the damage. This means cutting back judiciously on fossil fuel usage, without ruining the economy that we're going to need to be able to deal with the worst consequences. It means being prepared to help those countries or regions that will be worst hit. Hysterical articles about sticking our heads in the stand honestly don't really help at this stage, they just perpetuate the sense of controversy without contributing positively to the debate.

<comment><USER3> The best part of watching global warming unfold is watching the deniers move straight from "it doesn't exist and isn't a problem, so we should do nothing" to "of course it exists and is a huge problem, I've never denied that, but it's far too late to do anything now, so we should do nothing".

<comment> at-fates-hands While I'm in "even if its not happening, shouldn't we do something just in case it is" camp, I see a LOT of hypocrisy on the part of people fervently saying it does exist.

Al Gore? The guy who's the poster boy for climate change owns a huge mansion that's incredibly inefficient in its energy use:

[http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp](http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp)

"In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home"

This doesn't even take into account the amount of fuel the guy burns on all of his globe trotting talking about the evils of Global Warming. So yeah, there's the deniers, but it's hard to take these people seriously who are talking about the end of the world, yet are greatly adding to its demise.

I'm all for alternative energy sources, but when do you think you're going to get solar to a point where's its more economically feasible? I just got an estimate from a company last summer and to get a few panels installed and up and running, it was around 40K up-front and then I would break even with the energy savings in about 10 years.

Now think about low income families, you think they'd ever be able to afford something like that? Add in the fact renewable resource companies keep going bankrupt and I keep wondering when, if ever there will be a decent alternative to actually mitigate the ongoing damage.

<comment><USER4> Natural gas is relatively clean-burning AFAIK -- not perfect, but better than other fossil fuels -- so that seems like a bit of a red herring. He's an advocate for awareness of climate change, not a Mennonite. You can't attack him for using electricity.

<comment><USER5> More importantly it actually comes out alongside crude oil so the cost of getting it out of ground is minimal. Many oil rigs simply burn it on site instead of containing it due to the difficulty in containment and transport. There is actually a big issue in North Dakota at the moment where all the natural gas that comes up along with the oil is simply burned as there are no pipelines out there yet.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Meanwhile the Alfred Wegener Institute reported (October 2013) that the Antarctic sea ice coverage is the greatest for 30 years. I don't know what this means but it's odd that apparently good news (if it is) is more or less ignored in the more widely read media accounts.

</comment><comment><USER7> Bruce Sterling's Khaki-Greens are about due.</comment>


How to choose a laptop for programming - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-choose-a-laptop-for-programming <comment><USER2> Another 404 from this user

[https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-choose-a-laptop- for-p...](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-choose-a-laptop-for- programming-a9e36f8b4cfe)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-choose-a-laptop- for-p...](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-choose-a-laptop-for- programming-a9e36f8b4cfe) works

</comment><comment><USER4> 404 page

<comment><USER4> Woops, other user's comment loaded after I wrote this comment.</comment></comment>


Tensorflow.js – A Practical Guide - jaya-yellowant https://blog.yellowant.com/tensorflow-js-a-practical-guide-2ed58327c455 <comment><AUTHOR> The most practical use not mentioned here is probably to import existing trained models/weights. I can see it being useful for anything that you want to run in real-time (e.g., webcams apps like [https://github.com/ModelDepot/tfjs-yolo- tiny](https://github.com/ModelDepot/tfjs-yolo-tiny)) and can't pay a round- trip cost to server.

[https://js.tensorflow.org/tutorials/import- keras.html](https://js.tensorflow.org/tutorials/import-keras.html)

Training a model in the browser is the least practical use for tensorflow.js IMO (unless maybe you want to hijack people's browsers to help with training or something).

<comment><USER2> And if you want to just load generic pre-trained classifiers for a variety of tasks, ml5js (which uses TensorFlow.js under the hood) seems promising!

[https://ml5js.org/docs/quick-start](https://ml5js.org/docs/quick-start)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A nice introductory presentation about deep learning using tensorflow.js: [https://youtu.be/SV-cgdobtTA](https://youtu.be/SV-cgdobtTA)

<comment><USER4> wow! that is an amazingly well done video!

<comment><USER5> Interesting video except I found the vocal fry to be distracting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Noob question: Can anybody tell in a few sentences of plain english what is tensorflow, how it works and why seems to be so relevant?

<comment> s-macke Tensorflow tries to fit the free parameters (usually millions of parameters) of a function y=f(x). The fitting algorithm gets usually thousands or millions of examples of how the output y for a given input x has to look like.

For example, x can be tens of thousands of images of cats and dogs, and y can be 1 for a dog and 0 for a cat. The goal for the fitting algorithm is to find parameters that describe the concept of a cat and a dog so that it can can generalize and categorize general images of cats and dogs. A bad fit would be if the network just memorized the example images.

<comment><USER6> If I understand it correctly:

\- Tensorflow is the best tool to make the grunt work necessary to _calibrate_ the parameters of fitting algorithms.

\- Models of fitting algorithms are human proposed and where the ML 'art' is. Seems to be kind of reverse engineering.

<comment><USER7> Accurate, although in most cases, the art is not in choosing the algorithm (often a regular feed-forward, covolutional or recurrent neural network) but the hyperparameters (regularization, number of layers, units, etc.) and sometimes the way the data is fed (augment the dataset with distortions? sample negative examples randomly? etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there a TF/Keras in Python to JavaScript transpiler somewhere? I don't want to waste time retyping complex methods to JS. Thanks for any suggestion!

<comment><USER7> You can probably export your Keras model, load it in tensorflow.js, and train it. Makes more sense than transpiling.

Guide here:

[https://js.tensorflow.org/tutorials/import- keras.html](https://js.tensorflow.org/tutorials/import-keras.html)

<comment><USER8> Thanks! Do you by chance know if it is practical to convert huge .h5 Keras models to TF.js layers model? (~1GB). I have some state-of-art computer vision models and it would be great if they could be used in a browser with a WebCam, if they can fit into memory and be performant for inferencing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mobile has similar constraints as web (but to a lesser extent) so you will find more resources there.

Look into quantizing the weights (e.g., reduce from 32bit per parameter to 8 bits) to reduce model size: [https://www.tensorflow.org/mobile/optimizing#model_size](https://www.tensorflow.org/mobile/optimizing#model_size)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice introduction!

I think your step 4 code is messed up though?

<comment> jaya-yellowant Fixed it, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You were so busy figuring out if you could, you didn't stop to wonder if you should…

Joking aside this is super cool

<comment><USER11> I was going to upvote you 'til I read the last line

<comment><USER12> haha take my upvote sir. i'm looking forward to new breed of websites that abuse our browsers unknowingly. First mining crypto, now we will have people using thousands(millions) of web browsers as part of some elaborate compute cluster that runs some 'AI' deep learning crap to try and optimize branding/click rates etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Disqus vs. Proprietary? - <AUTHOR>

Which do you prefer when on a new site that you do not have an account for? Does using disqus change the way you interact with the site at all? <comment><USER2> I really enjoy using Disqus for a number of reasons.

1) Users can easily comment, with or without an account, with their Twitter, with their Facebook, etc.

2) It can create a greater amount of exposure for that particular post + comment (Through Twitter and Facebook broadcasts)

3) Disqus has a very clean look about it and the way it presents posts that I really enjoy

4) You can easily moderate + view statistics of various sites in one central location (Disqus website)

Hope that helps!

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably need more context to give a better answer. Seems like you are asking from a user's point of view. I'll almost always use disqus if it's available to leave a comment, generally because it's simpler.

Not having disqus doesn't change my willingness to contribute, providing I can do so simply..like entering my name and email. If I have to register/confirm/activate forget about it unless it's a site I'm particularly invested in (say, HN).

From the development point of view, unless you have specific needs which disqus doesn't meet, I don't see why anyone wouldn't use them. They've turned the "writing a blog in language XYZ" tutorials into 5 minute exercises. On the top end, they are used by an ever growing and impressive list of people. Finally, since you can export all comments at any times, I really don't see what you lose.

</comment><comment><USER4> From a user perspective, I find disqus a bit annoying ..

I don't know, it's a bit too "in your face" if you know what I mean? A good UI goes out of your way, disqus doesn't quite do that very well.

That's just my opinion.

I actually use disqus for tumblr, because there isn't much of another choice there.

</comment><comment><USER5> This discussion might be of value to you:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2500716/open-source- comme...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2500716/open-source-comment- engines)

There are also lots of other discussions related to this on SO.

In my opinion: with disqus you get to be lazy. That's fine. I use it on my personal site. I don't think it allows for infinite branching (like on Reddit), but that requires a pretty nifty nosql solution, were you to do it on your own.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you have a wordpress blog, you can try out Disqus and it will keep your comments even if you disable it.

I used Intense Debate for my Wordpress blog. After some annoyances, I disabled it and switched back to Wordpress' own comments. I'll probably try out Disqus when I have time... It will irk visitors, but you can switch between commenting systems if you want to test.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm having the same dilemma in trying to decide if I should develop my own internal commenting system for my new site or just go with Disqus.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if Disqus would promote people to comment or shy them away from it (maybe they don't like disqus for a reason?) Perhaps it makes sense to start with Disqus and if people request it build your own.</comment></comment>


The Major Lean Startup Mistake You're Probably Making - <AUTHOR> http://patrickleahy.me/post/35138062104/the-major-lean-startup-mistake-youre-probably-making

<comment><USER2> Doing useful things is good.

Doing useless things is bad.

This is not just a startup philosophy; it's a metaphor for life.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading! I guess what makes startup life hard is that because there's so much uncertainty, it's tough to get a read on what is and what isn't useful. But I think most Lean Startup types already know that. My argument is that the problem is compounded by the fact that if you've screwed up in the past, your selection away from hard work can be almost Pavlovian in nature.</comment></comment>