Evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062275 <comment><USER2> I do believe that parasitic load probably has significant effects on a variety of psychological variables and preferences. But the web of causation here is extremely complex; neither do I think testing this hypothesis by looking at state-level governance is particularly useful. Instead, you would want to attain individual psychological response measures related to preference or acceptance of authoritarianism, and related that to individual parasitic load within a particular community; even better would to get longitudinal data showing that within-individual changes in parasitic load are correlated with changes in preference (controlled experiments here face ethical hurdles four obvious reasons). Even then, you are going to have to account for factors that may be correlated with the likelihood of getting parasites and having attitudes that are favorable to authoritarianism.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian governance, and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare."

There are so many varied and interacting and nonlinear threats to human welfare that I don't know if the number of variables to control for (if even identifiable and measurable and appropriately transformed) would allow for meaningful result with only a few hundreds countries as data points.

</comment><comment><USER4> There has been some psychological research which hints at this relation of how diseases from outsiders bias decisions against those communities. The literature seems to suggest that it's an evolutionary response to protect the community and these biases are difficult to detect because they are so innate in how we assess risk and process threats to a group.

I was just saying the other day that we're one Coronovirus-like pandemic away from seeing sweeping changes in government policy that lend themselves to authoritarian rule. Changes that go beyond what we've seen on removing the red tape around how hospitals are run and how the spaces within them can re- purposed for other use.

Imagine a virus that has the properties similar to covd-19 but a higher mortality rate, affecting children and working age groups. Containment of a pandemic would be trivial if you knew the location of infected patient and everybody with whom they've been in contact with over a 14 day period. That data is already available from the fact most people are mobile phone users. It's just the data is not shared. Containment would be more specific and targeted. At the moment health professionals rely on self-reporting by patients to follow the spread of a pandemic.

The pretext for dissolving these artificial boundaries between the pools of data owned by corporations, intelligence services, health institutions would be easy to provide in the interest of protecting the government and the public. It would seem both responsible and reasonable to the public if the mortality and symptoms were terrifying enough. It can be argued that China's alleged effectiveness in dealing with the virus in cities with populations larger than LA, London and NY was due to an authoritarian government model. We also see our governments working with the private sector to handle this pandemic.

Governments are scared because they do not have visibility on the pandemic's spread because of problems in scaling tests, using numbers of confirmed cases serve as poor proxies for decisions to be made. I don't think it would be long before someone starts asking the question, if we had richer data on confirmed patients and who they'd been in contact with, could we have nipped this in the but before it had the impact its had on the economy and put the health system at risk.

<comment><USER5> I'm actually surprised that we haven't had a government try to access that kind of data. They've been generally going at it for all kinds of "small" stuff, burglary, riots, and they're not trying to get their hands on it to combat a pandemic?

<comment><USER6> It might happen eventually. Possible explanation for why it hasn't happened yet: it's influenced by how the government employee views their relationship to the individual.

I work with very detailed patient data in a state health department. It's been drilled into me that patient privacy is above everything. Everyone I work with is out to help these people. We would be ashamed if we looked at, let alone made decisions with, data beyond what was necessary.

Law enforcement is different. One of their major tasks is to gather data. Data on people suspected of a crime. Or data from innocent people that can lead to suspects.

Maybe convincing public health to push the boundaries of collecting personal data to combat this disease will be as hard as convincing law enforcement to be less gung-ho. It goes against long history of professional ethics.

I have no sources, so take it with a tub of salt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A large exception would be Russia, and to a lesser extent, all of Eastern Europe. The extreme cold in Russia helps suppress parasites, yet it has historically been authoritarian. It's also worth noting some of those countries that for awhile provided interesting exceptions, such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian territories.

<comment><USER8> > such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded > by authoritarian territories.

Liberia wasn't particularly free as most of us here might understand the term. While the freed slaves' constitution was modeled on the US Constitution, civil and political rights applied only to the freed slaves who came over from North America and their descendants, while Liberia's indigenous population was neglected at the best of times, oppressed at the worst. (And even among the freed slaves' descendants, those connected with Monrovia's Masonic Lodge formed a political elite that others could never hope to enter). To a considerable degree, the political strife of the late 20th-century was due to rage at this skewed system of government.

<comment> blaser-waffle > Monrovia's Masonic Lodge

I'd heard of the Freed-Slave-vs-Local-Pop thing in Liberia before, but never about the Masonic Lodge. Got a source?

<comment><USER8> This is so prominent an aspect of Liberian history that a simple Google search "liberia masonic lodge" will give you a great deal of reputable reading material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I admit to not having done more than skim the abstract, but couldn't it be just as likely that authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease (and famine, etc.) through ineptitude?

<comment><USER7> That's seems especially reasonable to assume if we look at the divide between North Korea and South Korea, a division that has only existed since 1950. South Korea has had increasingly better governance and increasingly less parasites, in contrast to North Korea.

<comment><USER10> South Korea really took off after General Park Chung-hee seized power, he built the economy and modernized the country. One of the great success stories is the praziquantel story. Korea had a schistosomiasis problem; they developed a process to synthesize praziquantel cheaply (the original Bayer process was more complicated) as part of the eradication campaign. That was in the late 60s. The Park dictatorship was overthrown only in 1979.

<comment><USER11> And even up until 1972 the command economy in the north and the (more) liberalized economy in the south hadn't really diverged. NK's growth slowed as they lost the support of the USSR and went negative during the collapse. Not really what you'd expect if authoritarianism was the cause of economic collapse, but exactly what you'd expect if during that time, a hostile state ascended from superiority to supremacy.

It's absurd to view the Koreas in isolation since they were both extremely obviously the subjects of a proxy war in which one side lost decisively. The two countries' economies were driven by export and the US and USSR were by far their largest partners. That wasn't an accident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Was considering this, that the debates about authoritarian vs democractic philosophy are moot currently. There are times where your population must be treated as a herd. While we often see the "father" metaphor for authoritarian leaders, they're really playing the role of shephard. When not dealing with situations where people may totally screw over others unintentionally, this shepharding becomes unnecessary, & ends up only being a power grab

</comment><comment><USER13> > According to a "parasite stress" hypothesis, authoritarian governments are > more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of > disease-causing pathogens

This predicts that governments will become more authoritarian during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. This is unsurprising given the widespread demand for large scale government interventions. Among the major damage Covid-19 leaves behind may be to give authoritarianism a better reputation.

</comment><comment><USER14> Errr, so if I get this, nations where there are high rates of individual stress are more likely to welcome authoritarianism - and parasites in people indicate one such stress. Pretty much everyone welcomes peace from a "strongman" over chaos of war or economic dislocation.

It is hardly "we are all ruled by a secret state of bugs".

</comment><comment><USER15> How do they address causation in these studies? At first glance, it seems like authoritarianism would be predictive of parasite presence rather than the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER16> (2013)

<comment><USER17> also (Plos One)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If I was Canadian I'd be really angry knowing my tax money funded this man's career. After reading Murray's previous publications I feel like the world is really unfair and I certainly think less of Social Psychologists and Tulane University and UBC.

</comment><comment><USER19> Correlation is not always causation.

<comment><USER20> I don't understand why this comment is made as frequently as it is. Do you think the authors of the paper aren't aware of this fact? Do you think they didn't think of this when they did their research?

<comment><USER21> I imagine that the authors are so likely to be aware of this fact that you can take for granted that they are.

Having said that, there is absolutely a valid question of did they incorrectly rationalize their approach, or rely on studies that did so, such that they in their own minds thought they addressed the issue when in reality they hadn't. My sense is that parent comment to which you replied probably didn't read the study, the original studies, or consider the point I'm making (sounds like a shot from the hip after reading the title), but the viewpoint isn't necessarily invalid.

Given that some authors have a very real and emotional attachment to ideas they are trying to prove out in such studies... the rationalization error is one to watch for...

<comment><USER20> What you say is true. I like the way you phrased things. What you write about the authors potentially having a bias that blinds them is nicely put. If someone has reason to think this I'd welcome reading their commentary.

I am tired with people just saying that correlation does not always imply causation. As if this is somehow insightful. Whenever I see this I think less of the person who writes it. It's as if they don't have enough common sense to assume that authors of a study that relies on statistical analysis don't know this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Guess we'll have to do something drastic about our billionaire load if we want to get rid of Trump.

</comment><comment><USER23> The title is a tautology.

</comment><comment><USER24> The elephant in the room is almost certainly that poverty causes both parasites and authoritarianism

<comment><USER25> Or is it authoritarianism that causes poverty and parasites?

<comment><USER26> What came first?

<comment><USER27> "First" does not equal to "cause" either.

<comment><USER5> Second rules out cause though. If you have A=>B and B=>A as possibilities, and you can rule one of them out with a very simple question, that's a good way to start.

If computers came after electricity, they didn't cause electricity. That says nothing about the possibility of electricity causing computers, but it brings us forward nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> a plosone paper published in 2013, enough said

<comment><USER29> Can you elaborate? Thanks.

<comment><USER28> plos one is one of the journals that most people treated as none significant one in the field, and institutions in China effective ban researchers publish papers on it ([https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07025-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07025-5)). And the retractions from this journal is increasing ([https://mobile.twitter.com/retractionwatch/status/1212396706...](https://mobile.twitter.com/retractionwatch/status/1212396706870026241)).

The reputation is so bad that wikipedia includes a sentence in the entry as "In 2016, Jeffrey Beall described PLOS One as a scientific spammer. Owing to concerns about the peer review process at the time, he considered the journal more as a digital repository than a scholarly publication.[41]" A recent event resonates with this which is described as "CreatorGate" on wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_One#CreatorGate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_One#CreatorGate)), which even in the abstract of the paper, as quoted from retractionwatch ([https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/03/plos-one- retracting-p...](https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/03/plos-one-retracting- paper-that-cites-the-creator/)), "The paper, about the biomechanics of hands, gives a shout out to "the Creator" as early as the abstract, which contains this sentence: 'The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.'" If this can be slipped by review process, any thing can happen. I still yet to met any senior scientist who is proud to say in public whose group published on plos one.

<comment><USER29> Thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So roughly the plot to V for Vendetta in how the far right UK government came to power.</comment>


Evolution of Autosuggest at BloomReach - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomreach.com/en/blog/2018/05/evolution-of-autosuggest-at-bloomreach.html <comment><USER2> As a former intern at BloomReach (many years ago), having watched from the sidelines since then, it's great to see the company doing so well. The idea, then and now, was that the tooling that enables huge retailers like Amazon to automatically optimize user experience and SEO at the same time, by server- side auto-generating things like related-product widgets [0], could be brought to the entire universe of retailers. Some of the smartest colleagues I've ever worked with put together massive data pipelines and highly-available, low- latency systems to facilitate this, and the company's grown like a rocket ship since then, branching into data analytics and CMS (and now autosuggest) to provide a one-stop shop for any business looking to optimize their product presentation. And culturally, the values of internal transparency and meritocracy I learned there continue to inspire my own technical leadership style. For anyone with the level of product diversity where these types of systems start to make sense, I'd recommend them in a heartbeat.

[0] [https://www.bloomreach.com/en/products/organic](https://www.bloomreach.com/en/products/organic)

</comment><comment><USER3> I looked at Bloomreach's customers page, but couldn't find anything like the experience explained in this article. All of those autosuggests were pretty janky with bad results.

<comment><USER4> staples.com is one of the sites that has BR autosuggest.

Complete list can be found here (want to make sure that you filtered for the product: Personalization): [https://www.bloomreach.com/en/customers?products=personaliza...](https://www.bloomreach.com/en/customers?products=personalization&industry=all)</comment></comment>


What Is This Verizon Event And Why Was I Invited? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/07/what-is-this-verizon-event-and-why-was-i-invited-could-it-be-dare-i-say-iphone/ <comment><USER2> If Gizmodo does not get invited, then we'll know for sure if it is the iPhone announcement.</comment>


The agena programming language - <AUTHOR> http://agena.sourceforge.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> I found it via reddit, and also thought it was interesting. Sadly it sits now in the bottom of my upcoming languages to pick up... And it is a long list. I still have to write some more Forth to be comfortable with it, and then follow (in no particular order, as I still have to decide which is the next best) haskell, lua, go, factor, python (again, I have forgotten a lot of what I knew), agena and probably another one or two I don't remember ATM

<comment><USER2> Oh you've left out clojure and scala in your list ;-) Unless you've already done those. Thanks for the link. Checked it out -- interesting. but too many others on my list, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I said I had at least two I didn't remember. Thanks for pointing them :D Clojure is in fact closer to the top, after reading some blog posts by a clojure programmer.

<comment><USER2> Do you typically just go through some tutorials till you get comfortable or do you actually write something in a new language you've been wanting to do ? How do you go about it? Some of your languages like lua, and go have been on my list, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I try to code something, and then write some pointers for later use. To learn some PostScript, I wrote a randomly generated christmas postcard with Koch snowflakes and some other L-system fractals that looked good for Christmas, with Lisp I added a lot to Paul Graham's raytracer in ANSI Common Lisp (beside writing one program for a paper and some other odd code, Lisp is my second language to C, now).

I am trying to write another raytracer, in Forth, but I just can't get to do it, so I will probably ditch it as a project. As for JavaScript (just know a little... I use it mostly as I would use C), I wrote some code I use in my blog. Learnt Java to do some assignments for the University... Lex for a tool to somehow parse C (long story :) and so on.

I always try to write some code that will be "useful", or is in my list of "try to code this!" and well-suited for the language and then comment that code, thus I don't forget everything I used for it.

But it is hard to have a lot of different projects, and sometimes (like in Forth) I stall :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks interesting. Thanks for the link.

> Agena is based on the ANSI C source code of Lua, a popular and widely used > Open Source programming language.

I am curious, what does Agena provide on that Lua does not? I haven't used either.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I have similar questions. On these kinds of issues, I often have meta- questions more than proper questions about the language. My first question isn't why they made design decision X or Y, but, what was it about existing languages that led you to make a new one? Presumably there was something, and often, knowing what it was may be more useful info than any number of pages of semantics.

It is cool that they have both a free implementation _and_ a full manual, though, which probably somewhere in it contains the answer to my question.</comment></comment>


Vitalik on the blockchain's problems so far and how it could yet help the world - <AUTHOR> https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/vitalik-buterin-new-ways-to-fund-public-good/ <comment><USER2> Is there anything technically wrong with replacing all instances of the term "blockchain" with "browser history"?</comment>


An Interview with Brian Kernighan (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mihaib/kernighan-interview/index.html? <comment><USER2> His view on advances in Computer Science in the future...

> we make a lot of progress, we are able to undertake bigger projects, we can > build things which are much more interesting and sophisticated than what we > could do 10 years ago. [...] But the amount of messy, intricate, awful code > that doesn't work very well and that's underneath all of that has also > increased enormously. In some sense I guess we'll continue to make progress, > but it'll always be kind-of grimy and not-really-done yet. Because people > always take on more than they can reasonably handle, they're always > overreaching, and they seem never to go back and clean up the stuff that > they did before.

</comment><comment><USER3> > K: I don't use fancy debuggers, I use print statements and I don't use a > debugger for anything more than getting a stack trace when the program dies > unexpectedly.

Ha! Who would've thought that the author of so many books on software engineering prefers using print statements for debugging. Great interview!

<comment><USER4> From "UNIX For Beginners" (2nd ed., 1979) written by him:

>The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

However the previous sentence is:

>The debugger adb is useful for digging through the dead bodies of C programs, but is rather hard to learn to use effectively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A month ago this (recent) video interview with Kernighan was posted here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10080956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10080956)

Notice that since then, the rest of that video interview has been posted:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFK6RG47bww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFK6RG47bww)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what he thinks of the fact that one of his bit twiddling algorithms is standard fare at job interviews.

<comment><USER7> Well, it's not like he hasn't created stuff that's standard fare at UNIX, Linux, businesses, modern OSes, education, etc.

An algorithm being a standard fare at job interviews looks to be on the bottom of such an accomplishment pile.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it the End of Work? - <AUTHOR> Interesting article<p>http://blacksheepvalley.com/2016/11/the-end-of-work/ <comment><USER2> Please submit articles, not Ask HN, for links.</comment>


Selling the Eiffel Tower, Twice - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/man-who-sold-eiffel-tower-twice-180958370/?no-ist <comment><USER2> It sounds ridiculous now, but consider that when it was first put up, the Eiffel Tower was meant to be a temporary structure for the World Fair in 1889, with the term giving Eiffel the rights to commercial exploitation of the tower for 20 years, after which it was meant to be taken down. The terms required the tower to be build to be easy to dismantle.

Even though it was decided not to take it down in 1909 when the rights reverted to the city, it was not a given it would remain up permanently.

<comment><USER3> Which makes me wonder how long it will actually last. The last time I was up there there was an awful lot of flaking rust visible on parts that - to me - appeared to be structural.

<comment><USER4> My impression is that surface rust tends to form a protective layer that prevents deeper rust, so sufficiently massive steel objects aren't in much danger. I could be mistaken.

<comment><USER3> Yes, hence I mentioned flaking rust. Surface rust, if properly treated can indeed protect deeper layers, more in other metals than in steel but it is a well known concept, a protective 'skin' that prevents further oxidization. Flaking rust is when the rust splits of layers of steel, typically seen in steel that has been 'folded' while being forged. That's not a good thing, it allows water and air access to those deeper layers by creating space where the rust has pushed away the surface layer from the deeper layer.

Even so, those elements the Eiffel tower is made out of are about 1" thick (25 mm) at the base of the tower and there is plenty of redundancy in the design so it's not like it will fall over next Tuesday.

I wonder how you'd tackle repairing it, those are for the most part forged rivets hot joining the steel elements, you could drill them out to replace an element but that would have to be done extremely carefully to first take the load of that element with temporary bracing.

I'm pretty sure the city of Paris will do a lot to keep their iconic landmark, but this will be an expensive operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Victor Lustig once conned Al Capone. Let that sink in.</comment>


Review My Project - WriteYourRep.org - <AUTHOR>

https://writeyourrep.org
I made this because I believe that we should easily be able to communicate with our representatives. It's easy to get caught up in the tedium of participating in politics or informing your representatives of your opinions, so I've made it dead simple to send them a letter through the mail.
The application lets you select any Senator or Representative, broken down by state. You simply type your letter, we take care of the rest and mail it to Washington, DC.
We never read your letters. They are encrypted and added to the printer queue. When the printer processes the letter, it stuffs the envelope automatically. We then delete your encrypted letter from our database entirely.
Any feedback? I know it's pretty rough looking and I'm working with a designer on facelift. <comment><USER2> I _love_ the project but I don't think you capture the value proposition effectively in your sales copy. My feeling is that if I keep asking myself how does this justify the cost then you didnt sell me on the value, you sold me on the feature set. I also think the value is probably working with organizations that are political in nature because they'll want their base to use this.

Honestly, the design is fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback. I was concerned about there not being enough explanation on that as well. I will take time over the weekend to shift this around a bit. I appreciate you taking a look at the application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Check out this UK equivalent for ideas: [https://www.writetothem.com/](https://www.writetothem.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://writeyourrep.org](https://writeyourrep.org)</comment>


Is This Journalist Guilty of Low-Level Vandalism, or High-Damage Hacking? - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/low-level-vandalism-or-high-damage-hacking-day-two-of-the-matthew-keys-trial <comment><USER2> > "If you bill a thousand dollars an hour, that will help us get it > prosecuted"

The person who said this (Brandon Mercer) needs to see a courtroom, conviction, and jail cell. Conspiring to misrepresent damages in a criminal proceeding is a crime.

</comment><comment><USER3> > For example, Leiderman specifically pointed out the word "fag," saying that > an "IRC expert" would explain its use to the jury. (In chan culture, "fag" > is frequently used as a suffix for anyone or anything).

While it was baseline insane to give a bunch of known hackers login credentials, I can't help but wonder how Kafka-esque this trial is going to get.

<comment><USER4> Having just been to trial in relation to the very group involved in the Chippy1337, I'd say it'll be a complete mess.

We ended up with the prosecutor reading out hundreds of lines of IRC logs consisting almost entirely of in-jokes that nobody in the room but me could understand.

<comment><USER5> > We ended up with the prosecutor reading out hundreds of lines of IRC logs > consisting almost entirely of in-jokes that nobody in the room but me could > understand.

Out of curiosity, and if you're at liberty and in the mood to answer, how did you pass voire dire? Were attorneys on both sides comfortable with your familiarity with a computing subculture?

Did your familiarity with computing even come up?

<comment><USER4> Well, as the defendant I didn't really have to pass voire dire.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for your reply. I misread "Having just been to trial" as "Having just been in a trial".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm obviously biased, but the loaded question in this title drives me insane.

</comment><comment><USER7> Could someone tell me why Brisbane Airport blocks this as adult material?

<comment><USER3> "Hacking" or "4chan" most likely.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do karma points work differently after 1000? - <AUTHOR> Just noticed that after I submitted an article which got quite afew up votes, my karma points went up by less than half that number.  Anyone know if that's a bug or afew tire of post 1000 karma?  At first I figured someone probably downvoted my comments somewhere, but now I'm noticing that this has been a constant thing. <comment><USER2> Upvotes which are suspected to be from sockpuppet accounts do not increment the total karma counter, or count in the weighting of a submission.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's something busted with the algorithm then, unless some people are secretly stalking me. Even my friends don't know my HN handle.</comment></comment>


Gif2xlsx – Convert GIFs to Excel files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pugwonk/gif2xlsx/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> > Why is your release binary built in debug mode?

> Be grateful for what you have.

I loved the FAQ overall. But something about this at the end made me bust out laughing.

<comment><USER3> A note for the privacy-conscious: binaries built in debug mode may contain more personally identifiable information, including full paths and names. Looking at his profile page, he does not seem too worried about concealing his identity, but it's just something to keep in mind if you want to release something (pseudo-)anonymously.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, this information often even makes it into the app store. You can sometimes decompile (or run strings on) an app and see a developer's home directory, for example.

<comment><USER5> There is a pitch on the Swift forum to encode only the file name in a binary instead of the entire path, or hash it. The OP there makes some points about file size, even.

[https://forums.swift.org/t/we-need-filename/](https://forums.swift.org/t/we- need-filename/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Because error handling is boring, and when my wife says "what have you been > up to today" there needs to be more for me to say than "well, I wrote this > converter".

I want to hire this guy. I need to build a company first.

</comment><comment><USER7> Somebody recently asked a question on a forum that if you had $100m dollars would you still be coding? I think this project definitely answers the kind of coding I'd be doing :)

<comment><USER8> I'd say I would be coding more! Own projects I chose tend to be more interesting to me than some work someone else dumped on my desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel like this sums it up quite nicely:

> Also, let's be honest, if you've got time to convert GIFs to spreadsheets > then you've sure got time to wait for it to finish.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is actually exactly 1 year ago, and the guy spent two days finishing the project, very well done!

BTW I was assuming that the program can somehow produce animating Excel file from gifs. It will be cool if it works that way.

<comment><USER11> From the readme:

>Animated GIFs are converted on a one-frame-per-worksheet basis, so you have to step through the worksheets to animate them. I was originally intending using conditional formatting and iterative calc to display these, but unfortunately the Excel team* seem to have single-threaded the calculation of conditional formatting and it was far too slow to render.

* I used to work on the Excel team so one could argue that this is partly my fault.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This aspect of many Microsoft products is pretty under-appreciated. Many of them are immensely programmable from the outside, and expose pretty decent object models on top of which to write programs. First money I ever made with my coding was writing VBA in MS Access for some warehouse which wanted to keep track of tens of thousands of different train parts. It was so easy I couldn't believe how much I got paid.

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I)

<comment><USER14> That's a fabulous clip - I was in one of the shows where Matt did this routine, and live, it's utterly brilliant.

And the one joke is superb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Usage:

> gif2xlsx myfile.gif

> Output will be saved as out.xlsx in current folder. If there is any output. > If not you can have a full refund.

Yep definetly my kind of dev guy.

I also do stuff like that, sometimes I take it further

like in the help description: [http://justpic.info/images4/1100/usage_king.png](http://justpic.info/images4/1100/usage_king.png)

</comment><comment><USER16> Cute, Confirms my experience though. Conditional Formatting in Excel is a nightmare, they got me excited at first, but I wasted so much time and got so frustrated with them - I gave up and have never used them since. As the article says performance is abysmal in large spreadsheets, also they do not play well with Excel tables, (which I use a lot) you end up with thousands of CF formulas in tables, they keep breeding and mutating and you cant stop them!

</comment><comment><USER17> Oddly enough I started on a new (boring, work related) project with the OpenXML SDK just yesterday. From what I've seen so far it's really nice.

</comment><comment><USER18> Imagine taking a screenshot of Excel that has opened one of the generated spreadsheets... And then converting it again!

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone in the demoscene used Excel a while ago to similar effect, although I suspect that wasn't automatically generated: [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53021](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53021)

</comment><comment><USER19> So... a pull-request to merge a feature branch into ImageMagick is coming soon? :)

<comment><USER20> Surely IM does this already. /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great fun. This reminds me of a program I wrote in the days of AIM to convert an image to HTML so you could put a picture in your AIM profile.

</comment><comment><USER22> >Has computer science gone too far?</comment>


Ask HN: Is it normal to have to build an app for the interviewing process? - <AUTHOR> I recently applied to a startup for an internship, and they responded by asking for a "work sample" For this work sample, the company has provided specifications as well as required technologies for a web app I am supposed to build.<p>I have never done an internship before so I don't know if this is unusual, but it feels like a bit of a red flag... <comment><USER3> It depends on the job and mostly on your level of experience relative to their requirements. When I was very first entering software engineering, self taught, most of my interviews went like you're describing. I had built a few apps which I was proud to demo, and usually they'd ask me to build something in 8-12 hours according to their spec.

I wouldn't do it NOW, but just starting out it was actually a lot of fun and I learned some neat tricks along the way. That kind of interview landed me a great first job and launched my career.

So I wouldn't consider that a red flag all by itself.

However I would push back if the scope they ask for is unreasonable, ie if it would take more than a Saturday or so.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a few perspectives here, not specifically for internships:

[http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give- cand...](http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give-candidates- homework-assignments-knock-it-off)

I think the company should be very clear about the maximum amount of time you are expected to spend on tasks as part of the application process. There are some cases where companies do this kind of thing to get candidates to do unpaid work.

From your perspective, perhaps the most useful and actionable thing you can do might be to get more offers for internships / work from a range of other companies (easier said than done, of course). Ideally offers not just from startups -- larger orgs, despite their other faults, can have a more professional approach to hiring people.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, it's common. But it should be something simple - a toy app that you could build in an afternoon and that isn't useful to the company.

If it looks like something they'll actually use in production or if it would take more than a day to complete, those are big red flags (trying to get free work or just not respectful of your time and work-life balance).

The idea is to demonstrate that you're able to do the type of work the company will want you to do using the technologies you'd be using on the job. It provides a sample of code to discuss in technical interviews to get a sense of our ability to communicate about technical topics. And because everyone gets the same coding project, it allows the hiring team to compare candidates' skills in an apples to apples manner.

</comment><comment><USER6> I actually like the idea. It provides a lot of opportunity to excel. Let us assume the project is to write a 'Hello world' application. You have 3 choices 1) ignore the assignment, 2) do a simple application 3) go overboard - <USER2> a requirements document, design document, project plan, code, test plan,....

If you do option 3 there will be one of 2 reactions - they decide you are overboard and do not want you, and really if they cannot appreciate the hard work, they are not worth getting wrapped up in, or they will go ga ga over you and want you immediately.

</comment><comment><USER7> Let's face it, if you can't make a pong app for your platform in a few hours then you're probably not an app developer. If you can't point at a portfolio of work and/or customers then building a work sample isn't unheard of.

That said, you will own the finished product (right?!) so add it to your portfolio when finished, eg post screenshots etc on your website.

Be cool about it though, make sure you're enthusiastic and mention you will be posting the project on github or whatever (if that's what you do). If they demand they own it then that's a red flag.

Remember you are also hiring THEM as much as they are hiring you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Really depends how complicated the app is and how close it is to their actual business. There are some startups out there that see this as a "hack" to get their mvp built. If it's just a toy app that's ok although it sounds excessive for an intern.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's not uncommon, especially if you're working with mobile technologies.</comment>


Tips of becoming skilled Engineer - <AUTHOR> Hi guys , i am a developer and working on Ruby on Rails for the last 3 years. Working on web applications or such a long time gave me a good experience but i dont know where i will end up. I want to work for some challenging companies or may be startups because i think startups allows you to experiment things out of the box but i dont know what should i do to boost my skills that meet the needs of any company. I mean what skills should i focus on to become an asset. In the meantime i am also interested in data sciences and wants to play with big data as a data analyst but i dont know in which direction i should take steps. Your suggestions and advices are welcome. <comment><USER2> I think you have to focus software engineering or data science, not both.</comment>


Dear MBAs, go the extra mile when pursuing a startup internship - <AUTHOR> http://www.humbledmba.com/dear-mbas-go-the-extra-mile-when-pursuing-a-s

<comment><USER2> _Engage with the general startup community: Build up your twitter account, blog readership, and Hacker News karma score_

If someone makes a hiring decision based on my NH karma score or # of twitter followers, I don't want to work there.

<comment><USER3> no one is advocating making a hiring decision based on 2 numbers. but they can show involvement and engagement in an online community, which can be valuable to a startup

<comment><USER4> Why? I'd rather have an employee who was the best at the job I need them for than an employee who is good at tweeting.

<comment><USER5> All other things being equal I'd rather have an employee who had a personal following of the right kind.

This is because it shows:

\- They care enough about what they do to do it in their off hours.

\- They do it well enough to gather some respect.

\- "Marketing" is much easier, and much less distasteful, when it can be done by and to people who respect each other about things they genuinely like. And start ups need all the marketing help they can get.

There are only a few people out there who have skill sets that are so unique that there isn't someone just like them who also has a valuable on-line reputation.

I'm certainly not a special snowflake, and I'm a domain expert in three fields. I meet people who are better than me all the time.

Are you sure you are one of the ~500 people in the world who are so good that only their specialist knowledge matters? Or should you think that every asset you can bring, no matter how seemingly unrelated to your job description, adds something to a start up that may help them succeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised this blog keeps popping up. I realize the guy got an MBA and wasn't impressed with his experiences, but isn't constantly harping on MBA's a little like the 14th century flagellants? Bad MBA. Bad MBA. Forgive me of my sins. /rant

I guess being in an MBA program myself means I know the realities of the system, so maybe these articles aren't for me, but all the same...

</comment><comment><USER7> Full disclosure: I'll be starting in a parttime MBA program this fall, in a top-10 B-school. I write code for living, but want to explore what else is out there for me.

I find some of his advises interesting, especially proposing your own internship project.

However, I strongly disagree with him just dissing a person who wants to get involved and is willing to do "anything". I really would like an MBA like that. One, who is willing to learn, take on projects beyond his/her comfort zone, make a contribution where it is needed. That person, IMO, is almost an entrepreneur, as s/he is taking a risk, which most other MBAs aren't.

Saying "I'll do anything" doesn't make the MBA-intern clueless, rather makes him a lot more motivated and open-minded about his career and future path.

Just for example, imagine a Product Manager/Marketing person who can actually do QA and comes up with product vision after playing with a product, rather than just doing surveys. Imagine an HR person who would actually work with the Dev/QA to understand the company culture, as it grows, rather than just follow the path that has been laid out before him/her. Etc...

Edit: I take criticism very well and would love to learn the fallacy of my argument. If you do decide to downvote me, please do but I'd love to understand why.

<comment><USER8> "Saying "I'll do anything" doesn't make the MBA-intern clueless, rather makes him a lot more motivated and open-minded about his career and future path."

When you say "I'll do anything", I hear: "I'll do anything that you want me to do"

That's the problem. I don't want to spend more time figuring out shit for you to do than you spend actually doing it.

I would rather hear you say: "I'd be willing to do anything, but I know that I could really help with ________"

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. I can totally agree with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not trying to be mean, but right now my perception is that a guy with an MBA is probably not much more useful to a startup than a thoughtful guy who reads TechCrunch and gets microeconomics.

Could anyone summarize the core insights they got from their business education?

</comment><comment><USER10> "8. Do an unsolicited SEO analysis if you want to do marketing."

Great. That's all we need... more unsolicited SEO "improvements".

<comment><USER3> there's a difference between being solicited for SEO "consulting" and a potential intern at your company showing he or she is knowledgeable about online marketing and willing to get his or her hands dirty

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great advice. The main thing that seekers should takeaway is that an extra body often creates MORE work, not less. The more self-sufficient someone can present themselves as, the better.

<comment><USER3> totally agree

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I did my MBA internship with a startup (15 employees) by helping them find some channel partners in south-east asia. This was a startup where the product was out and sales team was being expanded.

Overall, I agree that there is very little application for MBA framework in a startup environment. If nothing else, the MBA candidate should be put in charge of closing some sales.

</comment><comment><USER13> I agree with a lot of this. I tried for the good part of a semester trying to get a non-technical startup internship before Rich @ WePay had a similar post. Being able to explain what I can bring to the table besides "I'll do anything" is the reason why I have the internship I have now. Vague terms like analysis got me no where; specifics they liked.

</comment><comment><USER14> > 8\. Do an unsolicited SEO analysis if you want to do marketing

Not very humble....

When you see something that is wrong, there are two possibilities - it's actually wrong or you are.

Even if it's wrong, your analysis may not add any value even if it's completely correct. For example, better SEO may be 9th on their list of priorities and they only have resources for the top 5.

It's not about you.

<comment><USER15> "You may not care about SEO, but here's what I noticed..."</comment></comment>


Towards Machine Intelligence by IBM Research - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08262 <comment><AUTHOR> There exists a theory of a single general-purpose learning algorithm which could explain the principles of its operation. This theory assumes that the brain has some initial rough architecture, a small library of simple innate circuits which are prewired at birth and proposes that all significant mental algorithms can be learned. Given current understanding and observations, this paper reviews and lists the ingredients of such an algorithm from both architectural and functional perspectives.

<comment><USER2> You should probably put that in quotes, since those words are not your own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> From reading the introduction, it sounds like the author is covering similar ground as the book _The Master Algorithm_ [1] by Pedro Domingos[2]. If you find this interesting, you may find his book interesting as well.

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

[2]: [http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Cites Schmidhuber besides Hinton and friends, so that is good.

But where is mention of Marcus Hutter and his AIXI formalism? Any review of machine intelligence is incomplete without that.

<comment><USER5> I was unfamiliar with AIXI, so that was some interesting Google. Also, this:

"Since AIXI is incomputable, it assigns zero probability to its own existence."

<comment><USER6> AIXI has many known problems. The interesting thing is that it is kind of like a mathematically pure and elegant model of machine learning based AI. So any problems with AIXI might apply to our current approaches to AI.

The biggest issue is that AIXI doesn't believe it exists in the universe it is observing. It thinks it's playing some kind of video game. From this it doesn't believe that it can truly die, it doesn't believe it can affect it's own brain in any way, and it doesn't care about anything other than maximising some "score" that the "game" provides it.

<comment><USER7> Also, AIXI has only one layer of hierarchy to its model, and has no latent parameters for its causal structures (Turing machines), nor any allowance for compactness or uncountability of learned spaces.

It's a really incredibly bare-bones, skeletal model of a learning agent that makes very rigid, unrealistic modeling assumptions _and then_ adds on computational infeasibility.

<comment><USER6> I don't know what you mean by hierarchy, latent parameters, or compactness. It models with Turing machine which are very general and can simulate other Turing machine that are unboundedly huge.

The biggest issue is that an agent can't model the universe as merely a set of inputs, outputs, and score. But there may not be a better way, it's quite a difficult problem.

<comment><USER7> >I don't know what you mean by hierarchy, latent parameters, or compactness.

The first two are terms from statistics. The last refers to topological compactness.

Come on, these are vital things to know if trying to build statistical models.

>But there may not be a better way, it's quite a difficult problem.

It's probably not quite so difficult if one actually knows statistics and analysis. Or so I'm guessing.

<comment><USER6> Yes I'm aware, I just don't see how they are relevant to AIXI, an AI with infinite computing power that can model anything with a universal Turing machine.

Statistics jargon will sadly not make AIXI work. It's problem is very deep.

<comment><USER7> >Statistics jargon will sadly not make AIXI work. It's problem is very deep.

It's not _that_ deep. It's, at worst, dealing with the Curse of Dimensionality because it has no notion of randomness: when the inputs it receives are noisy, the prior probability of Turing machines with the noise bits pre-encoded will drop exponentially with the length of the noise. Hence why compactness and other assumptions about the real-line tend to help in real-world statistics: they make it easy to notice noise and operate with imperfect precision.

Philosophy jargon about "self-awareness" isn't necessarily going to yield more insights than it always has (ie: Chinese Room, ie: very little).

<comment><USER6> Any realistic approximation of AIXI would use probabilistic Turing machines. That either output probabilities instead of exact predictions, or perhaps use probabilities internally as well.

However for true AIXI with infinite computing power, that doesn't really matter. Randomness can be represented as a stored random seed data, and isn't treated any different than any other unknown variables.

I never used philosophy jargon or even the word "self-awareness". I stated my issues with AIXI in plain english and explained them. It has literally nothing to do with the Chinese Room.

<comment><USER7> >Any realistic approximation of AIXI would use probabilistic Turing machines.

That would be a fresh model of AI, rather than an AIXI approximation. You should probably look into that idea.

>However for true AIXI with infinite computing power, that doesn't really matter. Randomness can be represented as a stored random seed data, and isn't treated any different than any other unknown variables.

Tsk tsk. It's a curse-of-dimensionality issue. If we have N bits of optimally- compressed random seed plus M bits of structure (and yeah, AIT has ways to separate a string X into its structure and random bits iff you have the normal Halting Oracle), then the prior probability of that particular machine is 2^{-(N+M)}. The noisier the input dataset, the larger N grows. In normal learning, we want M to be constant (which we can usually assume it is: the universe mostly doesn't acquire _new_ causal structure while we're looking at it), which then allows the posterior probability of good hypotheses to rise logarithmically with sample size. If each sample contains noise, then we actually have to split things up:

2^-M for the causal structure, where M is constant and the posterior thus gains information logarithmically. 2^-N for the random seed, where the ground- truth random seed actually grows linearly in length with each sample we observe (because of the bits of entropy Nature used-up to _make_ that sample); the prior probability of each random-seed _drops_ logarithmically as the number of samples grows we anticipate seeing grows.

So while this is all very informal, I'd have to say that a noisy Solomonoff induction actually suffers from a Curse of Dimensionality because it assumes everything is discrete, while more typical machine-learning models based on continuous distributions can learn well in the face of noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do people generally read these things before upvoting? Legitimately curious.

It lists some possible goals to achieve more general human-like intelligence beyond the fancy function approximation we get with deep supervised learning, as stated in the abstract for both architectural and functional perspectives. In general I find the language fairly wishi-washy and the writing often awkward, but it is a nice summary of relevant thoughts and concepts. Beyond the abstract, here is a bit of summary and my thoughts.

For architectural aspects, it lists:

1) Unsupervised - Agrees with LeCun, Bengio, etc. But not sure it's fair to conclude this yet, maybe it should be reinforcement? our brains are prewired to do some things

2) Compositional - basically hierarchical, aka deep. Seems reasonable.

3) Sparse and Distributed - again plausible and empirically seen in deep learning. One reason ReLu neurons are nice is that they lead to sparser distributed representations.

4) Objectiveless - a metaphysical statement having to do with the Chinese room argument? This seems to mean not optimizing an objective function with gradient descent, and instead "Clearly, the learning algorithm should have a goal, which might be defined very broadly such as the theory of curiosity, creativity and beauty described by J. Schmidhuber". Seems vague and not clear.

5) Scalable - Again not the best choice of words, it seems to argue for parallelism as well as a "hierarchical structure allowing for separate parallel local and global updates of synapses, scalability and unsupervised learning at the lower levels with more goal-oriented finne-tuning in higher regions. " I am disappointed no discussion of memristors or neuromorphic computing was here.

For function aspects, it lists:

1) Compression - sure, pattern matching is in a sense compression so this seems fairly obvious.

2) Prediction - "Whereas the smoothness prior may be considered as a type of spatial coherence, the assumption that the world is mostly predictable corresponds to temporal or more generally spatiotemporal coherence. This is probably the most important ingredient of a general-purpose learning procedure." Again, reasonable enough.

3) Understanding - basically equivalent to predicting?

4) Sensorimotor - not clear? Similar to human eye movement?

5) Spatiotemporal Invariance - "one needs to inject additional contex" having constant concepts of things?

6) Context update/pattern completion - "The last functional component postulated by this paper is a continuous (in the- ory) loop between bottom-up predictions and top-down context." Constant cycling between prediction and word state update, pretty clear.

<comment><USER3> _Do people generally read these things before upvoting? Legitimately curious._

I don't. And that's because HN doesn't have separate "upvote" and "save" features... upvoting _is_ saving (or, saving _is_ upvoting, however you want to look at it). So I save (upvote) anything that meets the bar of "the title is interesting enough for me to think I might want to read this eventually".

<comment><USER8> A save feature would be nice perhaps. Although maybe the philosophy of HN is precisely "upvote if something seems interesting enough to read" rather than (or in addition to) "upvote if you have read this and think it's good".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Favorite quote: "An intelligent algorithm (strong AI [66], among other names) should be able to reveal hidden knowledge which might not even be discoverable to humans."

<comment><USER10> I am confident that knowledge exists which is not only undiscoverable by humans, but also beyond our intellectual capacity and impossible to grasp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the main idea can be summarized pretty simply. The most important next step towards general intelligence is creating a learning algorithm that can solve a sufficiently general class of problems without much tweaking by humans, and it couldn't hurt to list out the properties such an algorithm would have to have.

</comment><comment><USER12> Most of this ideas have been pioneered and implemented by Jeff Hawkins and his team at Numenta. See his book "On Inteligence" or the open source project at numenta.org.

</comment><comment> bra-ket how very unsurprising. my advice to the author and the rest of the field would be to read a bit more on learning and memory in humans. AI starts with I.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm too lazy to read this but not enough not to throw my two cents.

Non-human mammals are amazing considering how many of them are incredibly capable very early. I'm thinking mostly of large prey for whom the ability to walk and run is crucial. Basically they need to be able to do many things very quickly. It's incredible to see how fast so many new-born grow in so many species.

Also, I've searched for the word "play" in this article and found no occurrence. To me how young mammals play and more importantly what drives them to do so is the core mystery behind the development of the mammalian brain. I suspect that once this is cracked, a big part of the work will be done.</comment>


Why you shouldn't use Vagrant - <AUTHOR> http://plumbing.pipelinedeals.com/why-you-shouldn-t-use-vagrant/

<comment><USER2> We don't use Vagrant for an easy to setup dev environment. It's for two main reasons: 1\. Consistent environment across all developers, even in my case which is only 4 devs. One person being a version ahead on node could cause problems. 2\. The same environment as production. Getting rid of almost all problems that come from moving from dev to qa/staging due to environment change has been a god send.

Of course it's going to take awhile to setup. It seems like the main argument to push away from it is time spent on setting it up, but this article even says setting up MAMP can be difficult at first. Ever tried to get MAMP to work with non-standard PHP extensions? Good luck. apt-get install php-redis is much simpler.

You do need buy in from the whole team to really get the time out of it, but that seems like a problem with tool consistency across the team - nothing to do with vagrant specifically.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _The thing they leave out, the big giant piece of the story that they > always, without fail, gloss over, is that setting up Vagrant is hard_

No, it was an 1-2 hour affair, without even reading the manual. Maybe you're just not competent enough?

</comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one who fails to see what any of this has to do with Vagrant? My only takeaway from this article was that the author doesn't like to deal with virtual machines.

</comment><comment><USER5> Testing on Vagrant is quite useful when you are forced to deploy on Linux in the end.

</comment><comment><USER6> home brew works on Linux too. Not that it is better than yum etc at all. They are different things.</comment>


Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/25/facebook-juggernaut/ <comment><USER2> Articles like this define corporate or national peaks.

In 1986 IBM recorded the largest profit ever recorded by any corporation in the the history of the world. Nothing would ever be able to compete with IBM. The media was in a swoon about how amazing IBM was. But IBM was already losing ground in the PC market, and they were losing ground in electronics to the Japanese. In 1993 IBM was struggling to avoid bankruptcy.

Circa 1991/1992 there were articles about how Japan was taking over the world and nothing could ever compete with them because they were relentless. But the early 90s marked the beginning of global retreat for many Japanese companies (with a few exceptions, like Toyota).

In the late 90s nothing could stop Microsoft, yet the late 90s marked the beginning of the era when Microsoft's momentum began to fade.

Somewhere around 2006/2007 Google was the most perfect collection of human beings that had ever thought to work together and nothing anywhere, ever, would ever be able to even conceive of an idea that could compete with Google.

In 2010 Facebook is an unstoppable juggernaut and nothing will ever be able to match the unbelievable genius that runs this organization.

In 2014 MingaMingaYXZ corp is run not by mortals like you and me, but by people so inhumanly smart they must really be gods that have temporarily taken human form.

Then in 2016 we will be told that MingaMingaYXZ secretly had problem abc the whole entire time, and so they never really had what they needed to compete against ZunkZunk corp.

Around that time, the media will tell us that ZunkZunk corp is, of course, run by people of such incomparable brilliance that aliens from the future travel back in time to beg for advice to deal with the problems they face a million years from now.

<comment><USER3> You need to post this to a blog so I can link to it every time someone tells me that nothing can stand up to Facebook.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, that is a good idea. I posted it to my blog:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/business/excessive-praise- marks-...](http://www.smashcompany.com/business/excessive-praise-marks- corporate-peaks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can Anything Stop Facebook? Absolutely.

Facebook is the new AOL. A "training wheels" site for the rest of the internet.

The cycle of new sites taking market share away from the leaders will be a regular ongoing event, much like the boom-and-bust cycle in silicon; and like the weather.

As interoperability increases, as it has been doing with emulation layers, virtual machines and dual-booting, new sites will offer "translation stages" to help everyone keep possession of their data.

This day is here already, with "inter-CRM" transfer sites. The scrapers and data-porting sites will stay on the attack; each new market leader will have to win on their merits, rather than according to their walls.

Walls, dang. That went out with East Germany, one would hope.

Here's to a better future, to all 450,000 of my best friends.

<comment><USER5> Facebook _can_ be seen as the new AOL.

      "Hey, there's this thing I can use on my computer to keep in touch with friends,
      events/celebrities/companies of interest to me, and where I can play games …"

      "Oh, yeah, I've got that too; you mean the internet, right?"

      "Duh, I mean Facebook!"

However, I think there's a proper place, and need for something like Facebook.

Going to a blog, or a company's website, or a forum, or whatever, is like reading a particular magazine, or going into a particular shop, or going to your usual club, or whatever. You know exactly what you want, and you go do it.

Going to Facebook is like walking along the corridor, or street, or hanging out in the staff room, or town square. You randomly bump into friends, co- workers, acquaintances, and just say hi, or exchange gossip, or recommend to each other whom to talk to too, what events to attend, where to shop, what was on TV last night, the weather … . And then you go back to doing proper, specific stuff.

Facebook doesn't hold a huge appeal for me personally, since I don't do much of the real world things it provides the online equivalent of. But for most people, doing those things, whether on or offline, is an essential sauce to their lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Facebook could very well be dead in just a couple years.

Social networking is very trend-driven. If something new and exciting comes along, or even if cultural views shift and facebook is no longer considered cool, it could die almost overnight. Of course, due to it's huge user base, it would take a while to die (like myspace).

</comment><comment><USER7> It's one of the fallacies of human psychology that people, particularly young people, have a false sense of urgency.

10-15 years ago Microsoft was an unstoppable behemoth. Many--me included--had a hard time seeing how they wouldn't completely dominate the computing landscape.

Since then Microsoft is still a behemoth but this is largely based on inertia.

I don't fear Facebook becoming or owning the Web. In time there will be a new meme that will unseat Facebook.

This inevitable decline is also part of the human condition. Facebook is still in this nascent period of growth. At some point they'll become so large that there really is nowhere to go. So then instead of playing an offensive game, they'll play a defensive one. Every new idea will be a threat to their turf. It happened to Microsoft. It'll happen to them.

Microsoft, as it exists now, is a vehicle for selling Windows and Office licenses. Nothing else matters. Look at the disastrous Kin. You take the successful Sidekick (which MS bought) and then spend two years rewriting the OS to be some flavour of Windows. And it dies.

Look at Sony. The PS3 is/was a weapon in the next-gen optical format wars. This delayed its launch giving the Xbox360 a huge first-mover advantage. The cost of the Blu-ray drive gave the Xbox360 a price advantage.

I call this the _advantage of singularity of purpose_. The more you try and do, the greater disadvantage you're at. It's why small startups can succeed against behemoths. It's not just that they're more agile. It's that startups don't (generally) have conflicting goals (eg Microsoft's phone division wants to make great phones but Microsoft wants to sell Windows licenses).

Facebook is already showing signs of defensiveness typical of behemoths. Just look at their reaction to Twitter and them co-opting basically everything else anyone else does (eg Places a la Foursquare).

Foursquare may well be dominant for the next year. It's valuation in that time may go 5x or even 10x its alleged $35 billion valuation. But something will unseat it eventually. Even the Roman Empire died eventually.

One of the biggest use cases for Facebook seems to be for games and this is where I think they're weakest. It's something for which your social graph has very little meaning most of the time. I've played 1-2 of these games and typically you find a bunch of random people to neighbour/ally/etc with rather than people you know.

What value does this have being inside the Facebook ecosystem? None other than possibly discovery.

One thing worth noting is that valuation really means anything but. Valuation in the classic sense means the ability to generate income. Valuation in terms of the stockmarket, VCs and investors is something else entirely. It's nothing more than an opinion or expectation on _future value_.

Google makes more money than ever yet it's value peaked in 2007. At that time the sky was the limit (or so it seemed). Now? It's not seen as being as sexy as it once was.

One last thing: the social space is (clearly) "hot" at the moment. In my opinion I think there is a definite "social bubble" that will at some point burst. A lot of importance is placed on the "social graph". This is particularly true when it comes to the (currently unrealized) future of "social search".

Personally I don't think this idea has nearly as much potential as some seem to think it does. Some think that Facebook's ownership of the social graph will eventually give it a competitive advantage against the likes of Google. I disagree. What's made search successful is scale. What's the advantage of limiting that to the people you know rather than everyone in the world?

Anyway, Facebook will eventually be another Yahoo.

<comment><USER8> > Even the Roman Empire died eventually.

The Roman Empire last the better part of a thousand years.

In popular history folk ask "how did it fail?"

In professional circles they ask "how the heck did it last so long?"

<comment><USER9> While I am no history scholar (most of my info comes from reading the Wiki and watching the history channel) I think the 1000 year thing is a bit of an overstatement. The western roman empire (The part that actually had rome in it) only lasted ~450 years (fell in 476), and really it reached it's peak long before that.

As I understand it the Rome that tends to captivate people's imaginations is the era between Julius Ceasar (Rome the TV show) and Marcus Aurelius (Gladiator). Lasted about 150 years.

Rome didn't really fall, it more so decayed slowly over a long period of time, which I think is probably more suited to the point of this article with regards to LJ, and a future vision of Facebook.

<comment><USER10> I'm a part-time history scholar but Rome is not my focus. However I'd throw the following dates into the mix:

264 BC (start of the Punic Wars) Roman Republic controls the Italian peninsula (as far north as Pisa) and is militarily aggressive

146 BC: Roman Republic dominates the Italian peninsula, has subdued the Greek mainland and razed Carthage

44-15 BC the transition from Republic to Empire

476 AD Western Roman Empire collapses.

1025 AD Eastern/Greek/Byzantine Empire is still a significant power

1204 AD Sack of Constantinople

It's hard to say exactly how long they were a power. Behaviorally, they were a strong, aggressive power for 250 years before becoming an Empire. And they were a significant power for 1000 years after losing Rome. So for over 1500 years they were an important state in the Mediterranean. You've got a good point that major events we think of when we say Roman Empire occur in a fairly short span, but I think it's quite accurate to say "The Roman Empire last[ed] the better part of a thousand years"

So I think it's fair to say the Roman Empire lasted 1000 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If William Gibson calls Facebook a mall, I suppose Neal Stephenson would call Facebook a Burbclave [1].

[1] [http://books.google.com/books?id=RMd3GpIFxcUC&pg=PA191](http://books.google.com/books?id=RMd3GpIFxcUC&pg=PA191)

</comment><comment><USER12> Apocalyptic articles like these only continue to be published because people read them; they rarely reflect anything real except a linear projection of current trends.

Take, for example, [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/poll/2008...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/poll/2008/nov/06/uselections2008-republicans) [http://www.noozhawk.com/mark_shields/article/1109_mark_shiel...](http://www.noozhawk.com/mark_shields/article/1109_mark_shields_the_republican_party_is_dead/)

These predictions have clearly proven false; they are mere protractions of two recent events glued together.

</comment><comment><USER13> _I dislike Facebook because they're mediocre._

Quote of the day - I never could clearly express what exactly I dislike about Facebook. It's just not joy to use. UI is mediocre, functionality is mediocre, even API is mediocre.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's interesting how this Facebook backlash is so similar to the Google backlash, around the time Gmail came out. Back then people was terrified, not only that Google was an unstoppable juggernaut, but also that Google was a privacy threat.

Companies aren't armies and the internet isn't a battlefield. Facebook provides some services which you may find useful, just like Google or Amazon. You have alternatives and you have the freedom not to use a given company's services. It's really nothing more elaborate or sinister than that.

<comment><USER15> Well, it's similar in that both are backlashes but...

I've never been bothered by Google because Google's business model is clearly leveraging the open Internet. I've been disturbed by Facebook for as long it has been on the horizon because it has had the opposite incentives to its business model...

<comment><USER14> As I said, both are backlashes fueled by overhyped fears of the company's power and disrespect for privacy. All analogies break down somewhere, and you are correct in the fact that Google is a search engine (plus ancillary services) and Facebook is a social network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Time.

People get bored. People grow up. People move on.

<comment><USER17> My mom is on Facebook (sorry, not a joke) but even if her age was the limit, that still means that Facebook will be relevant for 20+ years.

So I doubt that is what is going to kill Facebook.

<comment><USER18> I think the fact that "my parents are on facebook" might be what kills facebook. Thankfully mine aren't, but I know some of my friends do have parents who are their friends on facebook, and I have to watch my mouth accordingly. (Luckily my own wall is still a haven for all sorts of filth which will never be shared with my relatives or workmates.)

If you've ever seen lamebook.com, a fairly high proportion of the entries involve inappropriate comments by young folks being intercepted by aged relatives. Sure, you can block certain things from certain people, but those controls are pretty unwieldy. Eventually the young folks will have to find somewhere to hang out _without_ their parents.

<comment><USER19> Yet this fear is largely self-imposed. My parents have Facebooks, and I encourage their use of it for socializing. I, however, am not friends with them. They're not upset by this. Yet many of my (IRL) friends are friends with their parents, and have similar complaints.

Perhaps the future of Facebook is not the expansion of your social graph, but the isolation of your social graphs. Perhaps that will be what kills the behemoth Facebook, the same ease of use, but with better controls over what persona you represent to what people.

<comment><USER17> Thats kind of what frid.ge is, isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Simple. Apple will unseat Facebook. Just the number of people working with Apple devices is mind boggling and Google comes way second with Android devices.

Just like everything, Steve Jobs will redefine how social networking should be done and people will agree. Steve is definitely itching to making strategic partnerships and spend some of that 50+ billion cash reserve.

</comment><comment><USER21> Facebook doesn't have ambitious projects? Wtf?

Facebook's instant personalization is the most interesting piece of web infrastructure since, well, advent of the web itself. It's scary too, but big, fundamental improvements usually are.

If they succeed, Facebook will become something much more important than a giant walled garden. Walled gardens wither eventually, but being a critical piece of web infra, that's something huge.

<comment><USER22> > _Facebook's instant personalization is the most interesting piece of web > infrastructure since, well, advent of the web itself._

i haven't had a single instant personalization "moment" since it launched. mostly i'm just reminded to log out of facebook when i see my name on some random website.

<comment><USER23> you may want to look into facebook disconnect.

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ejpepffjfmamnamb...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ejpepffjfmamnambagiibghpglaidiec)</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Opening Siri, Developing Echo Rival - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/apple-opening-siri-developing-echo-rival <comment><USER2> It looks like Apple's plan is to enable something similar to Android's intent URIs:

"To work with Siri, the third-party apps will need some kind of search-query box that Siri could fill with the user's verbal request once the app is accessed. It's unclear what would happen if an iPhone or Apple Watch owner had multiple apps that did the same thing, like Uber and Lyft, and then asked Siri to "book me a ride home." (Don't bother asking Siri to book an Uber ride today; the results are typically terrible.)"

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article, I really liked the end of if...

<comment><USER4> Especially the part where th...</comment></comment>


Should I import by blogger blog to posterous?  - <AUTHOR>

I do not fully understand the value proposition of posterous. Fill me in? <comment><USER2> If you're happy with Blogger, stay with Blogger. I use Posterous because I can chuck things in via email, their bookmarklet, their nice rich text editor, and the iOS app. Plus it's nice being able to paste in things like a google maps link and have the actual map itself magically appear in the page.</comment>


The Country of Vietnam Resolves to Localhost - <AUTHOR> https://blog.shodan.io/the-country-of-vietnam-resolves-to-localhost/

<comment><USER2> I don't quite understand what this means: "out of the nearly 5 million banners in Shodan for Vietnam 1.5 million of them resolve to localhost." "there are a total of 1,528,188 banners in Shodan that resolve to localhost".

I can gather that this is the company Shodan, and that they make reports regarding internet connected devices, but what is a 'banner' is this instance?

<comment><USER3> I had to look this up: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_grabbing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_grabbing)

In the context of SSH, a banner might be

root@localhost's password:

or more accurately SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.9p1 Debian-5ubuntu1 which is the first thing a particular SSH daemon will send on receiving a connection from a client

<comment><USER2> Ah I've heard these referred to as 'login banners' or '<service name> banners' before. Thanks!

One wouldn't normally 'resolve a banner' though, since it might contains the version of a service used, and other information other than what a Unix `hostname` command would return. You'd resolve the hostname mentioned in the banner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > every customer's IP resolves back to localhost

What does this even mean?

First of all, what does it mean than an IP resolves to a hostname? I thought it's the otherway around: hostnames resolve to IPs.

Second, isn't this .. normal? localhost is always your local machine.

Please help me understand

<comment><USER5> DNS works both ways. It has pointer (PTR) records which allow you to assosciate an IP address you control with a domain name. Those are the opposite of an address record (A) with which you assosciate a domain name you control with an IP address.

For Google.com, I can get an A record (IP address)

        $ dig +short google.com a
        18.104.22.168

but I can also get a domain name for that IP

        $ dig -x 126.96.36.199 +short
        par10s22-in-f14.1e100.net.
        par10s22-in-f14.1e100.net.

Google uses a service domain 1e100.net for their machines.

Although maybe OP only means the hostname in the banner message. I grepped my mail logs for hostnames from Vietnam and couldn't find any IPs that would resolve back to localhost.

EDIT: 'nanofortnight [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068054) found a range of addresses that do.

        $ dig +short -x 188.8.131.52
        localhost.

<comment><USER6> To be a bit pedantic, you don't actually resolve the ip address itself.

A reverse dns lookup actually just does a lookup of {the ip address with octets reversed}.in-addr.arpa:

            > host 126.96.36.199
            126.96.36.199.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer par10s22-in-f14.1e100.net.

You can actually look that up directly too:

            > dig +short ptr 188.8.131.52.in-addr.arpa
            par10s22-in-f14.1e100.net.

When an isp gets a ip allocation, they specify the nameservers to use, and are responsible for that "subdomain" of the in-addr.arpa domain. If you trace the full resolve, it first goes to the root .in-addr.arpa servers, then arin.net nameserver, then finally you end up at:

            ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
            208.58.216.in-addr.arpa. 86400	IN	NS	ns3.google.com.

which will return the actual ptr record.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone explain how this link has made it to number one on the front page, when it seems from the comments that no one understands what the page is saying?

<comment><USER8> Maybe people are upvoting in the hope that somebody will be able to explain it.

<comment><USER9> i'm trying to understand the problem too :v

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Based on some very rough sampling, a significant majority of the addresses allocated to VDC in the 123.16/16 network reverse resolve to localhost. This appears to be intended behavior, and accounts for ~70% of the numbers in the Shodan report.

        $ dig @184.108.40.206 -x 18.104.22.168

        ; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> @18.104.22.168 -x 18.104.22.168
        ; (1 server found)
        ;; global options: +cmd
        ;; Got answer:
        ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 29897
        ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

        ;; QUESTION SECTION:
        ;0.0.16.123.in-addr.arpa.   IN  PTR

        ;; ANSWER SECTION:
        0.0.16.123.in-addr.arpa. 21265  IN  PTR localhost.

        ;; Query time: 64 msec
        ;; SERVER: 22.214.171.124#53(220.127.116.11)
        ;; WHEN: Wed Feb 18 08:14:37 2015
        ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 64

        $

In fact, if you go through the list of networks advertised by AS45899 [1], I imagine that you'd find this is the case for quite a few of them. A quick look indicates this to be true.

[1]: [http://bgp.he.net/AS45899#_prefixes](http://bgp.he.net/AS45899#_prefixes)

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't know what they are referring to. I noticed that Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group owns 220.127.116.11/18 and 220.127.116.11/23 and a lot of IPs from those subnets have a PTR record of static.vdc.vn.

However, static.vdc.vn resolves to 126.96.36.199, not 127.0.0.1

There is another large network, 184.108.40.206/188.8.131.52 that seems to have PTR records of static.vnpt-hanoi.com.vn for all IPs, however that hostname has no A/AAAA record.

Pretty sloppy.

Looks like this has nothing to do with DNS, instead it's the hostname the machine displays in its banners for services like FTP or SSH.

<comment><USER12> No, those are the reverse DNS entries for their IPs. For example, try looking up:

184.108.40.206

You can get a list of affected IPs by searching as follows:

[https://www.shodan.io/search?query=hostname%3Alocalhost](https://www.shodan.io/search?query=hostname%3Alocalhost)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> VN here. It's hostname of DNS server. I traced route to any domain and got the server IP.

[http://www.ip-tracker.org/locator/ip- lookup.php?ip=113.165.1...](http://www.ip-tracker.org/locator/ip- lookup.php?ip=184.108.40.206)

BTW, I don't know why they did that.

</comment><comment><USER14> Banner here seems to refer to the 'banner' output of ssh, or telnet, or some other service (those are the most likely however imho).

When you connect over services, the banner (the first information presented to the client, before authentication) can be configured to include the 'hostname' setting of the server you have connected to.

If I am right about that, this means that the hostname setting of the server is still set to localhost, as it is default out of the box until configured.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's an old-known vulnerability (2009) used to bypass spam-filters: [http://www.mounirorfi.com/blog/2015/02/18/why-vietnam- resolv...](http://www.mounirorfi.com/blog/2015/02/18/why-vietnam-resolves-to- localhost/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't know who the target audience is but I think the author should include a small parenthesis explaining "banner". I thought it was referring to their software crawling ad banners online or something.

<comment><USER12> I will try to explain those terms in the future, sorry! I'm used to speaking in security circles where that term is widely understood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do you mean reverse DNS? Can you provide an example?

<comment><USER18> Not poster, but: [http://www.ahbl.org/content/ahbl-policy-blocking-hosts- rdns-...](http://www.ahbl.org/content/ahbl-policy-blocking-hosts-rdns- localhost)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> May be there are some bugs in shodan's tracking system that always return "localhost"

</comment><comment><USER19> Is "banner" an unusual translation of... hostname, i guess? I don't get it.

<comment><USER20> Banner is whatever information a remote connection gives you when you connect.

For ssh that will be some information about the server, version of ssh, hostname, and (hopefully) a prompt to login, or a request for a key.

For http, it will be a handful of headers about the server.

Tools like Shodan scan the internet looking for active connections, and try to banner-grab on common ports, looking for details like server versions, operating system versions, etc for a long list of protocols like telnet, http, ssh, smtp, vnc, remote desktop (often with screenshots of the remote system, disturbing often unauthenticated straight to the desktop or running program), etc.

If you're of a malicious mindset, when a new vulnerability is discovered, or an old one, you can look up a list of vulnerable systems from the database, searching by service and version, rather than scanning the internet yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How do " _banners in Shodan [...] resolve to localhost_ "??? WTF??? This is quite cryptic. Luckily, I live not on Shodan, but on planet Earth where `localhost` resolves to 127.0.0.1.

</comment><comment><USER22> can anyone explain is that significant or funny?

</comment><comment><USER23> Can someone explain me what I have just read ?</comment>


Powerful Programming Languages, Take Two - <AUTHOR>

So let's say it's 50 years into the future. You and your startup team get together for a weekend to crank out the next killer app. (Surely you haven't given up startups by now, have you?)
You all put on your neural helmets and begin to have a conversation about where the users are, what strategies you'd like to use, and the types of things you'd like to do in the future. At the end of this discussion, the computer creates a 10-minute neural "video" of your agreement along with a working application. Any newcomer to the team can "watch" the neural video and not only understand the application, but also understand what decisions were made and why, and how things should change in the future. The working application consists of 40K lines of assembly, automatically created during the discussion. To change the program, you just need to repeat the discussion process you did to create it -- ie, no assembler language knowledge is needed. Of course you _could_ go in and hack the assembler if you chose.
Conversely, at the same time, Arc++, The Next Generation is out. For this same amount of work, the code needed is this:
Floog()
Which of these is the more powerful programming language? Why? <comment><USER2> If you believe in the great nano-hardware apotheosis, 50 years from now you won't program, you'll advise. Startup hackers will write essays like pg does now, except their audience will be swarms of semi-cognizant nanobots who will decide on their own if their suggestions are worthwhile. Only the efficient ones will have their choices passed along to the next generation. There will be great religious wars at the atomic scale as the bots try and decide where best to put their molecular parentheses. All this will happen so fast it will be unnoticeable to humans, most of whom will be too busy keeping each other entertained.

<comment><AUTHOR> My crystal ball doesn't work much past the Great Singularity, so can we limit the discussion to somewhere half-way between here and there? At the extremes, a lot of discussion falls apart. Plus, I don't want no nano-bots arguing over parentheses. Little buggers should be using braces instead. : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Long before the advent of computers, mathematical notation provided a way to more precisely express ideas than natural language. Of course, if you are verbose enough, you can express mathematical ideas with prose. But the corresponding mathematical notation will probably be more clear and easier to manipulate than the prose version for someone well versed in both "languages."

Programming languages can similarly provide for precise, concise expression of ideas.

Your example is a huge leaky abstraction waiting to happen. What if something about the resulting program is very different than what you expected or wanted? How do you know at what point things went wrong? How do you fix it? What if there were ramifications that were not clear at the high level of your conversation, but the machine dutifully did what you "wanted", with repercussions like Mickey in the Sorcerer's Apprentice?

The only way programming languages will no longer be useful in the future is if algorithmic thinking is no longer useful. Is that your assumption here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Programming languages can indeed provide for precise, concise expression of ideas, but how precise must the description of a problem be in order for the computational machinery to express it within parameters necessary to satisfy the user?

So what if the program is very different that what you expected or wanted? Is this such a new thing? A better question would be "what if I could be wrong eleven times in a week and finally be happy. Would that be better than taking a month to accomplish the same thing?" I think you're looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

I think by marrying mathematical concepts to computers you're continuing down a path that may no longer be useful. While it's true that computers are mathematical creations, the question isn't whether a program is "correct enough", rather whether it is "useful enough"

We're already using poor, leaky abstractions to grasp and create programs -- it's called the English language. The guys who created E-bay didn't work out the calculus of various bidding strategies -- they implemented a simple online bidding system. We're not looking for mathematical perfection. We're looking for maximum value with minimum effort.

Or maybe I'm smoking crack here. Are you saying that the ability to make the most complicated precise programs using the least amount of syntax is a good thing? If so, why would that be?</comment></comment>


What are we supposed to do with Google+? - <AUTHOR> http://log.maniacalrage.net/post/10808855537/what-are-we-supposed-to-do-with-google

<comment><USER2> Since the article doesn't give much of an answer, I will:

Because it is setting with more blogging capabilities, meaning you probably don't need a small personal blog on a one-off site like livejournal/blogger/etc anymore. It's easily set up to both share with your friends and share with the public, and easy for the public to subscribe to you in a less-confusing way than having both people pages and fan-pages (like on fbook).

I have a site and blog for serious posts (mostly JavaScript Canvas stuff) and I used to also have a blog that only my close friends followed (it was Livejournal). Most of the stuff posted there was amusing or interesting to me but I didn't want to crowd out my serious blog.

On Facebook you can write "notes" but they aren't very typical. On G+ long- form status updates (5+ paragraphs) _are_ typical so I can use it to replace what Livejournal used to do much more naturally than I could have with Facebook. Google+ is essentially much more of a blogging platform than Facebook seems to be, and I really like this.

A lot of people are already using it like this (a blogging platform for friends or the public) ie Tom Anderson (of MySpace fame):

[https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts/2ggynxog...](https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts/2ggynxogpLD)

I've never seen similar posts on Facebook, save for the very rare note.

I too had a Flickr but I don't use it anymore. Few people looked at it and most of the images I want to post are not professional enough to post there, meaning I'd only post maybe 1 image a month on it. With Google+ I can give my friends more image-laden updates into my personal life. I like this. (I could do this on Facebook too).

There's nothing wrong with keeping up both. If I think something is good enough to share on facebook then I will post it on G+ and post a _link_ to it on Fbook.

<comment><USER3> _There's nothing wrong with keeping up both. If I think something is good enough to share on facebook then I will post it on G+ and post a link to it on Fbook._

I think there is a line we have to draw though in terms of where we spend our time - that's what's "wrong" with keeping up both. I read a quote once from Sonny Rollins, a famous sax player, who said something to the effect that his influences made him what he was just as much as who/what he didn't listen to. In other words, what you ignore defines you to an extent just like what you avidly pursue defines you. We can't expect everyone to keep up both, I think. I doubt most people care that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let me ask you this. What do you do when a friend says they are on MySpace? That is exactly how I see my friends On Facebook after I make the switch to G+ over the next few months. I will still log into Facebook to see what is going on, but for the most part I am only keeping my Facebook account because I admin several pages. For now I am double posting things to FB and G+, but eventually I will stop. IMO, G+ is another social platform, just like Facebook was when there was already Friendster and MySpace. Some people with jump ship, some people will keep both accounts.

<comment><USER3> The key question, I think, is will you stop double posting to Facebook even if the growth of G+ stays the same? What if, in three months, you notice that no one is talking about G+ anymore and there is hardly any activity compared to what it was in September - will you still move forward with the "Shut out FB" idea?

I'm not trying to be rude so I hope my post doesn't come off that way. You seem to be very sure about your move away from FB and that makes me genuinely curious as to that mindset.

<comment><USER4> Well no, I am a fairly analytical person. If G+ dies I will not hold on just because.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would _like_ to use Google+ as a nicely integrated social feature for my organization using Google Apps. There are some seriously cool things we _could_ do with it. But we're stuck without. The last time we had to integrate non-apps and apps accounts it was a headache, I'm not eager to join + with a non-apps account and go through all the migration hassles again.

</comment><comment><USER6> What are we supposed to do with your post?

\- Ask a few rhetorical questions that make it obvious we are confused about something on the internet? Then answer those stated questions with ambiguous meandering thoughts that amplify your confused state.

\- Realize that some services mean different things to different people. Use it as it suits you best, don't try to fit others' uses to yours.</comment>


The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer/ <comment><USER2> It is no doubt cheaper to pay someone to colocate your own hardware, but in my experience running production services on my own colo'd hardware: it is far cheaper and easier to just use a cloud provider in the long run.

I ran a widely used teleconferencing system for years that served a ton of traffic, and the amount of time it took me to manage my boxes, handle issues, and deal with one off setup processes was far more costly than the amount of money I started paying Heroku every month a few years later.

I know Jeff isn't factoring in the other hidden costs here: but be wary. Unless you are a truly massive operation I don't see how you can possibly do this and save money vs going the easy route and using your favorite PaaS. Just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER3> He's failing to factor in the cost of parts and remote hands hourly labour in his colo TCO.

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought you was talking about Cubbit Distributed Cloud Storage when pictures and wording similar to their presentation.

[https://www.cubbit.io](https://www.cubbit.io)

</comment><comment><USER5> Endoffice.com order links are 404</comment>


Dartino Project, Fast, flexible, and productive development for devices - <AUTHOR> http://dartino.github.io/sdk/ <comment><USER2> Dartino is an experimental project to enable highly productive development for embedded devices. Note that this early version of Dartino only supports a single embedded device – the Raspberry Pi 2. Very soon it will be available an another supported device - Dartuino 2016.

</comment><comment><USER2> The goal of the Dash effort is ultimately to replace other languages as the lingua franca of embedded devices development.

It is a pity that there was a failure with plans of making Dash (Dart) as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you openly discuss your company's challenges? - <AUTHOR> We are a bunch of people surrounded by our corporate/business borders.  I would argue that the world would be a better place if companies were more open about their problems/challenges so others could build solutions/products for them.
What would it take for you to share your company's challenges with the outside world? Anonymity? Small trusted groups?
I'd like to set up a forum/medium for this type of information sharing. <comment><USER2> Anonymity for sure because there are some corporate issues that I would like to discuss without the worry that HR will want to get involved.</comment>