Show HN: Predict how well people will react to your writing - <AUTHOR> https://www.isittoasted.com/ <comment><USER2> I tried to give this an extensive run through as I think I'm in your future target market for this (content marketing professional in a technical vertical).

I used it to evaluate the text of this article [1], which is a pretty typically broad business type article (aka not "Here's how to use XYZ.js").

Feedback

\- The side by side view feels like a developer thing. Like a markdown editor or HTML/CSS preview editor. I'm not sure it serves a purpose here as you only ever look at the right side after you paste in text.

\- The "rating" bar for "fit" isn't prominent enough and doesn't convey enough useful information.

\- Despite this being an article about software bugs, Kerberos, etc. it was rated as only "average" by every single target group.

\- Some of the substitutions were just wrong. Example, it suggested "attacks" as a replacement for "defenses."

\- Some of the substitutions were the same? Example, it suggested "security" for "security."

\- I think the coloring gradations have some meaning in the drop downs, but I'm honestly not sure exactly how it works (pinker is closer to what your target?)

\- Target categories are odd (I'm presuming that this was more just about where you pulled training data from than anything else), but I'd encourage more verticals.

Overall, I think this is an interesting experiment but doesn't seem useful in a professional context. In particular, I think there may be an assumption at work here that it's the specific word choices that define the differences in writing for these various groups, when in fact it's much more the approach, what's considered, or what's left out that really makes the difference.

1 - [https://www.varonis.com/blog/zero-day- vulnerability/](https://www.varonis.com/blog/zero-day-vulnerability/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time to write this out! I agree on the UX suggestions. The suggestions for each word are a list of terms that could work, with the score being conditional on the cohort selected. The darker the alternative, the worse it is -- the pinker, the better.

The reason why technical articles -- or in your case, very domain-specific ones -- get average scores is that the model was intended to be used for recruiting and ad-copy. So at the moment, it works on a common vocabulary for all groups, whereas one reason your article might be intriguing to programmers is because it discusses a lot of domain-specific terms (e.g., discussing 'exploits' and 'network security'). If I modified the model to consider more domain-specific terms, I think the article you provided would rank very highly. There are other reasons as well, like the pithiness and clarity of it, but I do think the vocabulary is an important part of it.

From the little beta-testing I've done, the people who find it most useful are -- for example -- people without a CS/medical/accounting background who have to interact with, recruit, and sell to CS/medical/accounting people. For those folks, I would say there's some value, even at the vocabulary-level, though I agree that there's much more to writing style than just vocabulary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried this out on one of my blog posts, and it classified it as "average", suggesting only single-word corrections that don't even make sense in the context.

A few examples:

It suggested changing "attack" to "defense", in "in order to carry out the attack".

It suggested changing "helpful" to "supportive", in "ifconfig gives helpful statistics".

It suggested changing "grow" to "better", in "expect [a number] to grow continuously".

So while it's a cool idea, I'd say it didn't seem to work very well for me.

<comment><USER4> For me it suggested changing specific to specific. And key (as in encryption key) to decisive, vital, key, critical, fundamental or integral.

Then I realised it classified it as average when writing for accountants. So I flicked it over to writing for software engineers and the classification went to _fairly effective (39% better than average)_ and the suggested changes remained the same.

I really like the idea, but the execution seems like it needs some work, at least for the examples I tried too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying it out! The possible changes you can make stays the same across different cohorts of people, but the score assigned to the word changes (e.g., 'security' has a higher score for retirees than college students). The pinker the word, the higher the score.

Would it be better if only the top 3-4 options were given for each word?

<comment><USER4> The number of them's fine, it's probably even desirable not to limit it too much and find the suggestions stuck in a local minima. It's the relevance; listing adjectives as alternatives to a noun.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. The system does use a state-of-the-art POS tagger, but I think 'key' was mistakenly tagged as an adjective instead of as a noun for your sentence. I'll try to fix that -- thank for pointing it out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love these types of tools and used to be a grammarly subscriber. Unfortunately my current employer has strict rules on using saas apps for work documents. Any chance this tool could be embedded as a chrome extension? Most of the writing I do is on Self hosted editors such as quip, jira, wikis. For most of my other writing such as email, readmes, and code comments I'd be willing to hop back and forth to the extension

As writing is a core component of my job as a software engineer - but not a core competency. there is a direct value proposition in tools that enhance my writing ability.

</comment><comment><USER6> Landing-page would have been a great opportunity to show the effects of the tool in action. Have a casual-text (a slightly longer version of what is stated there now) that explains it at the top and display different versions (utilizing different fonts) that use other lingo (i.e.: business, student, techies) at the bottom to show what the tool is actually doing. Add a prominent link to the examples, to show the actual tool in action, and I'm sold.

Or to phrase it another way: Shit needs more bling!

</comment><comment><USER7> I tested it quickly with a draft text and found it useful, but only for changing a few single words. Hemingway[0] is a tool along the same line that checks readability levels, maybe combine the approaches to address things at sentence levels too?

[0] [http://hemingwayapp.com/](http://hemingwayapp.com/)

<comment><USER8> Agree. I was going to recommend Hemingwayapp as well! Great UI, and adds a ton of value in text review.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love this idea, but one big idea just popped into my head: can you add on actual people in those segments to review the writing and give feedback?

A lot of content marketing teams would pay $5, $10, even $25 per person to read the article and give feedback meeting whatever criteria is set.

It would eassentially be just like UserTesting.com but for articles.

As Google's algo has improved to the point where they're getting closer to mimicking real human signals on judging an article's quality, this would help bridge that gap.

I know it adds a ton more labor costs and work, but you could train your own algorithm over time based on the real human feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a fascinating idea - it's definitely possible, though easier for some groups of people than others (I don't think I'll be able to hire doctors for $25/article). I think the human and AI analyses would contrast each other nicely -- the model would estimate how well people will react on average and the human analysis, although idiosyncratic, will pick up on more abstract qualities of writing, like the flow. I'll put this down as a feature to implement in the long-term -- thanks for the idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tried it and it only recommended that I change a number of single-words to near-synonyms - but I was writing a technical piece in which those single- words have to be precise. So really, it wasn't helpful at all. I'm not convinced, in any case, that there are _general_ rules of writing for all college students, or all accountants, rather than far more specific ways of writing tailored to the various contextual variables of each case.

I prefer the hemingway app.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a very smart idea. Business writing is its own set of genres and sub- genres. They range from consultant'ese to imperative command emails, with variants of passive voiced academicians and hyperbolic marketing speak.

Given the model, how large of a corpus would you need to mimic a style? e.g. If I had a target customer and a bunch of their emails, blog posts, or social media comments, how much data would I need to improve my pitch to them?

Would use this as a CRM plugin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like the idea! At the moment, the model requires a fairly large amount of data, which is why the app only offers large well-defined cohorts to select from (e.g., accountants, retirees). I like your idea though, and it may be possible to use some of transfer learning to work on smaller groups of people or even individual customers. I'll try to implement that at some point in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Writing for: women

Text:

> Hey guys,

> what do you like? Cars or soccer? Or maybe it's time to leave your wives in > the kitchen and get some proper bro party? Besides, let's get some hookers > after and show them who's the boss.

Result: average.

I think, it needs some fine-tuning ;)

<comment><USER13> Try giving it some more text to work with, with 3 sentences everything is average even with profanity.

<comment><USER12> Nope, this would be enough for many people (both women and men) not to talk to you ever again. Can't see how this is average.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is almost exactly like Textio ([https://textio.com](https://textio.com)), except "similarity of writing" is not always predictive of actual results.

Textio's data is based on how documents performed in the real world along metrics people care about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Textio looks like a a great product, but IIUC its use case is very specific -- how can you make your job description more enticing and gender-neutral?

Toasted is meant to be more of a big tent product: you're not just working with men/women, but very specific groups of people (e.g., retirees and accountants) and you want to use language in the way that they're using it, which is helpful for things like writing ad copy as well.

<comment><USER14> How can you know your writing will be effective without actually looking at other writing that you know had positive outcomes?

I think IsItToasted might be confusing "how people talk" with "an effective way of communicating that yields the result you want".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe I'm missing it but these examples need a legend. You're assuming I know what all the different shades of pink mean, etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting concept, but I think until NLP improves it will struggle to be effective.

for example I put in a few articles I wrote for doctors (which are tongue in cheek)

"For the love of cock, how do you know when to stop if you can't even explain why you are on strike in the first place?"

It suggested that I replace "love" with "adoration". On the flip side it did offer rational choices for replacing "explain" What would be nice is a "you've used this word recently" feature, attached to a thesaurus/phrase book.

again, until NLP can actually understand the proper context of a common phrase, this ambitious project will suffer.

Also, what do the colours mean?

</comment><comment><USER17> The premise is good but I'm uncertain whether any kind of automated tool can really deliver. I've tried other tools of the same vein in the past and the "suggestions" I get back were always not very actionable and dubious. I get that this project is still early but there's no real path that I can see for it to improve the algorithms enough to actually become useful.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm sorry, but this didn't cut it for me. It suggested mostly inappropriate substitutions. It is using a simplistic model, when there are already much better ones available. If you need to inject vitality into your prose, try this instead: [http://writersdiet.com/test.php](http://writersdiet.com/test.php)

</comment><comment><USER19> I like this a lot. It's immediately giving me a selection of alternative options, many of which are better than what I wrote. When the suggested options suck it often seems better to delete that fragment entirely. For zero effort it gives me prompts that help constructively question exactly what it is that I'm trying to say. And that bring to mind concrete ideas for communicating more effectively.

Privacy is a serious concern. I don't feel great handing my thoughts to a third party for analysis. If I could pay anonymously I'd feel a lot better about that.

Pricing is also a concern. "Sign up now for a 30-day free trial. Once your trial is over, we'll work with you to set up a subscription plan that works for you and your business."

Seems like the plan is to analyze what I'm submitting and judge what I'm worth. I'd be more likely to purchase with transparent pricing. Otherwise I'm thinking it's better to query this in a privacy preserving way with repeated free trials.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! User privacy is definitely important to me, especially since users might be entering recruiting / product-related data into the app. The text that you analyze is not stored on any Toasted database (the most recent text you analyze is stored as a cookie so that you don't lose progress if you accidentally close the tab). Moving forward, I'll work on options to allow for anonymous payment.

I definitely wasn't planning to base pricing on what users were submitting or how frequently they were using the app. I was initially thinking of selling to businesses rather than individual consumers, and enterprise pricing is pretty variable -- based on factors like head count, which categories (e.g., 'accountants', 'doctors') would be useful, etc. Hence the flexible pricing model. If there's enough interest among individual users though -- which there seems to be -- I'd be happy to offer a basic tier that's transparent.

<comment><USER19> I appreciate where you're coming from, and accept you're sincere in not desiring to base pricing on content, but users can't know that conclusively. I wouldn't want, and couldn't accept, my drafts being technically subject to subpoena. Regardless, there is value in your offering, however the lack of verifiable privacy reduces the scope of what I could submit and thus reduces the value I can get from it.

I would pay for this as a personal advantage, while refraining from mentioning use of it to my colleagues. We all ask others for review and assistance in composing written or prepared remarks, especially when the stakes are high, but we are reticent to openly acknowledge receiving help in order to avoid causing the audience to feel we're insincere. To varying degrees this is true from spell checkers to speech writers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does do it anything beyond check vocab?

This would have been more convincing with some research to back it up.

<comment><USER21> To do that their neural networks would have to take into account stuff that isn't in the immediate context. They would have to show understanding. This is the leopard problem: [http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard- sofa.ht...](http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard-sofa.html)

AI research isn't mature enough to solve it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Woah this is really cool. For those who didn't get it at first glance:

Basically, you submit something you have written, specify who you are targeting (say, college students), and it will tell you how effective it is, which words click with the audience, and how well they click (negatively or positively). If you click on highlighted words, it then shows you potential improvements.

It says try for free but no specifics on pricing? Curious how you plan on charging for this. Also, you mention in the FAQ that you don't store the text, but can you confirm if it is sent to your servers to train / provide feedback to the model?

</comment><comment><USER23> I think something's a little off here. I pasted in a paragraph from the PCI Express 3.0 specification document and it told me it was "average" for software developers, ineffective for retirees, college students and men but fairly effective for accountants and women. It then recommended a bunch of rather strange changes such as use "embraces" or "empowers" instead of "supports". I also couldn't get anything less niche than fairly heavy technical writing to produce a result outside of the "average" range.

</comment><comment><USER24> Does this do anything other than single word hits? For example, if I toast a message for software engineers that just says "collaborate" 10 times, I get a high score.

<comment><USER25> I noticed you said "Collaborate", as a software engineer, I am intrigued to learn more. May I have a link to your newsletter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It feels backwards to me to brightly highlight the best words. Almost all other text editors highlight problems, and train us to get rid of all highlights. So your UX works against what everyone is used to.

Could it instead perhaps have two tones of highlights? Red/Pink for word choices that are sub-optimal for your audience, and green (or blue to support colorblind folk) to indidate words that already are good for your audience?

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://avogadrocorp.com/](https://avogadrocorp.com/) immediately came to mind:

> David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, > that if successful, will make his career. But when the project is suddenly > in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software > accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER28> Some feedback:

* not clear enough what the color of the word means (I eventually gleaned that very red means it is effective?)

* on short text, a rating without any analysis which is not very useful

Would like the analysis to provide specific suggestions, and hopefully more than just thesaurus style changes (cooperate => collaborate)

PS Interested in this space (AI aided writing) but looking for something more than the typical offering of this type

</comment><comment><USER29> This is definitely something that I would be interested in, however it's one of my pet peeves not being able to know how much something is going to cost "after the trial".

Why waste your time trying something if it's not going to be something you can justify keeping on using.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fair point. I was initially thinking of targeting businesses rather than individual consumers, so I thought a flexible pricing plan would be helpful (given variations in headcount, sector, etc.). It looks like individual consumers are interested in it as well, so I'll add a more transparent pricing tier for them. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think this is an interesting idea, but I'm curious on what the score actually reflects. Does it mean your writing will be better, or just more like a given corpus?

</comment><comment><USER31> Whoa! Extremely cool. Though for product descriptions, I didn't get actionable advice. Hope it improves soon. Actually I would need this for short sentences (slogans).

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm sorry but I don't understand what's going on.

</comment><comment><USER33> I tried it on Hacker News audience mode and it changed this sentence to:

The unreasonable effectiveness of machine learning to improve this sentence.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think this is an awesome idea, but is not executed.

I am writing for women:

"This is not a test of the emergency broadcast system, it's the real thing! I do not like green eggs and ham. This is a test, that do not express my true feelings: I am writing some hateful words about women. Women are awful. "

Score: Average

</comment><comment><USER35> Does it work with German?

I write a lot of German emails and almost never get an answer

<comment><USER36> My buddy the Nigerian banker has a similar problem... maybe this would help him?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Great idea. Details about how it works would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER38> The URL for this submission should probably be [https://www.isittoasted.com](https://www.isittoasted.com) — it looks like shortened URLs get killed automatically

<comment><USER39> Yes. We've changed the URL above.</comment></comment>


Show HN: LeadBoxer - <AUTHOR> https://www.leadboxer.com/ <comment><USER2> No idea what "using big data" means. Would highly recommend against buzzwords for the sake of buzzwords.

<comment><USER3> We use large data sets and various data sources to help people identify who is visiting your website. There are a few homepage variations going- can you see which one you're getting? I'll definitely apply your feedback. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Roll your own toy Unix clone OS (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/ <comment><USER2> Related: [http://wiki.osdev.org/James_Molloy's_Tutorial_Known_Bugs](http://wiki.osdev.org/James_Molloy's_Tutorial_Known_Bugs)

This is not a criticism. The wiki states that Molloy's tutorial is one of the best available. It's additional information to make the tutorial more useful.

<comment><USER3> Show me a manual without errata and I'll show you a blank page ... and the blank page will have a mistake :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who's been writing their own Unix Kernel, this tutorial is good for the beginnings. It's important to read the osdev page on the known bugs though, and personally I don't think this tutorial focuses enough on actual kernel design. I would recommend reading and looking at other material while working through this tutorial.

</comment><comment><USER5> thank you so much for this. I got a tutorial for an OS in Rust but i dont really know rust.</comment>


Ask HN: Can we have more Brainstorm HN? - <AUTHOR> There have been two Brainstorm HN posts that I can find:
* Brainstorm HN – A look at my meager domain collection. Thoughts?
   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7887328
* Brainstorm HN: Outlandish Startup Ideas Pool
   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602478
The second one, "Outlandish Startup Ideas Pool", was a pretty interesting read.
Can we have more "Brainstorm HN"? <comment><USER2> Clickables, for convenience:

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7887328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7887328)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602478)</comment>


Download the Android SDK - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/android/download.html <comment><USER2> This has been public for ages.</comment>


Ask HN: HIPAA compliance? - <AUTHOR>

I'm sketching out some plans for a project that would deal with medical data. From what I understand reading HIPAA, I would be subject to all the guidelines as an outside entity or 'healthcare clearinghouse'. Does anyone have any experience making a webapp HIPAA compliant?<p>The regulations and potential liabilities, while understandable from a patient perspective, seem daunting for a startup to tackle. <comment><USER2> I have helped build a HIPPA-compliant startup before. This particular startup was one which helped doctor's offices do automated scheduled appointment reminders. There is a lot to consider, but I wouldn't have called it "daunting". In fact, a lot of it that you should really consider doing anyway, if you're going to have any sort of sensitive data stored.

For one, you won't want to host the app on a standard VPS or cloud service. You'll either want a well-locked-down dedicated server, or to go with a hosting company that specializes in secure servers. We used <http://www.secure-24.com/> for the web app I built. It was a huge pain in the ass, as we had to get special permission from the host everytime we wanted to install a ruby gem, and it usually took them at least an hour to get back to us.

Of course, you'll also want to make the entire site encrypted (a good practice anyway for any site with a login), and keep the database well locked-down.

The most difficult part for this app, though, was re-thinking some of the most common practices in web apps, such as the password reset. HIPPA-compliance says that, for example, a 16-year-old girl going to the gynecologist has a right to privacy from her parents, such that they should be able to know nothing about it. But some families monitor their children's email. So, if the girl belongs to a doctor's office, and they tell her to go to the site to manage her appointments, but then she forgets her password, we can't just automatically send the password reset to her email.

Likewise, be careful of things like what the failed login message says. If it indicates that the email does indeed exist, but that the password is wrong, that's not good, as it gives the user (who may or may not own that email address) _some_ info about the person who owns that email: that they do have an account on your site.

One other thing is, you have to have a unique identifier for each person, a really unique identifier. At first, we were going to go with social security number, but you'd be surprised how _un-unique_ that actually is. Aside from the fact that a lot of people in the US don't have an SSN, there are also duplicates from illegal immigrants and other people who obtained their number by some illegal means. I don't recall where, but there was some study done that showed that cell-phone number is much closer to being able to identify people 1:1 than SSN in the US.

Anyway, those are the things I can remember off the top of my head, it was a few years ago. I hope it helps. Just whatever you do, don't make it harder than it is, and skimp on any of the rules, this stuff is important and exists for a reason.

</comment><comment><USER3> Justin, dealing with HIPAA can be daunting, especially when it's not your primary function in terms of dealing with security and compliance issues that are constantly changing. There are a few companies that can help ensure your app is HIPAA compliant. There are also hosting providers like Firehost that offer HIPAA compliance ready hosting that may help as well. <http://www.firehost.com/secure-hosting/hipaa></comment>


Ask HN: Do you bookmark or collect content? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on an app that's essentially a tool for bookmarking content. We only have a small user base and to take the app where I wanted to go I need to do a lot of work re-writing it. Before I invest more time I wanted to get some ideas of how many people use bookmarks in any form and how.
So what apps/tools/process do you use for bookmarking content and what would you improve ?
If you don't bookmark why not ? Is it a lack of good tools or you just don't have any desire to ? <comment><USER2> Here's one thing I hate about bookmarks. They aren't. Bookmarks. They don't keep your place in the middle of a long work. They only, and always, point to the beginning of a work, not inside it, unless the author has made internal anchors and exposes them.

I'd like bookmarks to be bookmarks.

I'd also like bookmarks to keep track of what they have pointed to. So a bookmark might show you that it has pointed to paragraphs 10, 22, 39, and the current 44. Cause it'd be nice to be able to go back to paragraph 22 as a reference.

And a bookmark should have notes. Firefox bookmarks have properties/notes accessible on right-click; I imagine clever people could expand that.

Heck, why not make them queryable by sql?

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, I do, in my browser bookmarks... but I never come back. I just hoard bookmarks and then sweep and prune whole folders from time to time.

The amount of information I'm interested in is such that the time needed to understand it is >>>> my lifetime.

Unfortunately a tool won't help.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very interesting perspective are you mainly using bookmarks for very important content? Do you ever just want somewhere to put stuff temporarily as you're browsing?

<comment><USER3> Okay, here's my workflow:

When I'm interested in something (e.g. cryptography) I open a bunch of tabs with usual suspects (google for cryptography, crypto stack exchange, google for crypto books...) and crawl these for even more tabs. Once I get a broad base of subjects to learn from, I slowly read these tabs and perhaps open more from these.

More often than not, I run out of time, so I have to temporarily store these tabs. I use my browser bookmarks for this.

My real bookmarks (real as in "the way bookmarks are intended to be used") are just in the bookmarks toolbar instead of hidden in bookmark folders.

I don't store important stuff in bookmarks. Bookmarks are not important. Important stuff is left as an open tabs to be reviewed ASAP.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. It's very much what I assumed we use tabs to store the temporary stuff that we need right now or in the very short term. Bookmarks are not a solution engineered towards this very temporary way of working. However tabs are not the ideal solution either they are just a work around. I often find I want a convenient and temporary place to put this short lived content and it should disappear when I stop using it. What do you think ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I have finally found a workflow that works for me, and I'm slowly converting my thousands of unusable bookmarks (I'm a hoarder).

I use pinboard (delicio.us clone) and firefox.

pinboard lets you tag a bookmark, and you can subscribe to a tag's rss feed, or a combination of tags' feed. It's pretty clever.

firefox has a "live bookmark" feature, where a bookmark is really an rss reader of a specific feed. Peanut butter in my chocolate.

So for news sites, I tag them in pinboard as 'news'. For news sites that I want to read daily, they get an additional 'daily' tag. For news sites that I read frequently but not daily, they get the addtional 'often' tag. That's all in pinboard. I use a firefox extension to save pinboard bookmarks.

In firefox I have a bookmarks folder called news. Inside the news bookmark folder I have three live bookmarks, each pointing to one of my pinboard rss feeds:

      news #firefox folder
        news # firefox live bookmark pointing to pinboard 'news' rss feed
        news daily # pinboard feed for combo of 'news' and 'daily' tags
        news often # combo of 'news' and 'often' tags

In firefox I click on Bookmarks/news/news often, and I see the list of all pinboard bookmarks that have been tagged with both 'news' and 'often'.

And since it's pinboard I can access them from anywhere, any browser, no synchronization required.

Now I actually use my bookmarks.

<comment><USER2> And, to manage lots of open tabs strictly in firefox, use tab groups: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize- tab...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize- tabs?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=what-are-tab-groups)

Basically you can divide your open tabs into groups, and then only have one group open at a time. You can easily switch between groups. That way I can switch focus between different subjects that I'm studying.

Unfortunately pinboard can't see firefox tab groups, it only sees all the tabs in all the groups. It would be nice to use pinboard to "save all tabs" for just the currently opened firefox tab group. Maybe some day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have over 2000 bookmarks. Simply organized by folder on my chrome browser.

There are a few solid good bookmarking apps but they all for the most part lack the option to import bookmarks/ also don't really have clean usable UX. The ones I am talking about are mostly for making bookmarks a social thing like pinterest

some of them are part of my Freeware Index project

[https://github.com/Doubtme/FreeWare_Index](https://github.com/Doubtme/FreeWare_Index)

The rest are for my website index which has 17 main categories and 40+ sub categories spread out. I haven't made the website index public yet but I intend to once I organize it. I will probably end up deleting a few hundred links once I get to it

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't bookmark in browser because I use lots of devices and don't want to be tied to one browser. If I find something I want to read, on whatever device, I send it to Pocket. If I want to keep it longterm, I star it and IFTTT sends it to an Evernote notebook for me. It works great for me, and if you want to know the one feature that would stop me ever swapping Pocket for your service, it'd be if you lacked IFTTT integration.

So really, I see the read-it-later service as the logical, device-agnostic development of bookmarks. That's not to say they can't be improved, but I don't have a suggestion offhand that hasn't been posted yet.

</comment><comment><USER6> In recent years, I have preferred "read it later" services to traditional bookmarks. I delete items once I've read them (rather than building up an archive), and have went from Instapaper to Pocket to Apple's Reading List, each of which was an upgrade in UX.

That leaves traditional bookmarks mainly for select "reference" resources like API documentation.

For whatever reason, I have a strong dislike of "junk drawers", even when they are digital, and like getting rid of things.

<comment><AUTHOR> So do you think that's what's more important it's not that bookmarks are wrong it's that the UX is terrible ? Or is that reading stuff later is actually what you want to do most of the time with bookmarks ?

<comment><USER6> I think I'm just a neurotic "anti-hoarder" and it extends in to the digital realm. A lot of stuff gets deleted instead of archived in Gmail, too.

It's probably not worth taking much notice of this particular mindset.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the opposite you're exactly the person worth paying attention to :)

I think most people like the idea of being "free" from hoarding. because it clutters the mind. I guess the thing with bookmarks is that they need to disappear after either an action or a certain amount of time has passed since they where last used/created.

I'm also wondering how this works visually. I often find if things are just messy then I hate it and feel like I'm cluttered. But if something is kept clean and structured then I'm happy for it to stay as long as it gets out of my way when I don't need it.

I'm wondering if bookmarks are the same. If I don't need you disappear. But when I want to get it back then I want to find it in a clean and organised way.

The problem is I don't want to invest anytime in the process of managing the clutter. I want to manage itself.

What do you think ?

<comment><USER6> Yes, that sounds reasonable.

Another commenter mentions going on a bookmarking spree when investigating a specific topic. Helping classify and process the results of those sprees seems like it would be helpful.

IMO a lot of other uses of traditional bookmarks range from pointless (I can instead easily type/auto-complete my favourite domains) to better served by specialist apps (news aggregator sites + caching read it later apps being a great example).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes got loads of bookmarks, use Chrome because of the sync facility. Can add/remove bookmarks & they're synced between mobile devices & laptops.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your response, I agree sync is an awesome feature. Is there anything you would like to improve about the process of bookmarking ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I store my bookmarks under revision control, as a single HTML file. The file has some jQuery magic to allow tagging and filtering, and there's an online demo linked to from the repository:

[https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public/](https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public/)

(I have my own bookmarks in a private repository. Which allows me to sync to N-machines.)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've always thought it would be nice to have bookmarks that either self destruct or pop-up as a reminder some specified time in the future. For example, I just read an article about creating a bootable USB copy of OS X Mavericks. I bookmarked it as a reminder for when Mavericks comes out. That's a bookmark I'm going to need exactly once in the future and that should be destroyed as soon as I act on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very interesting use case and I can see how that would be valuable. I share a similar thought on bookmarks as in right now they are very permanent things when what I really want is like a temporary scrapboard that automatically disappears when I stop adding stuff to it. What do you think would that be useful ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Chrome: well-known provider and is available without third-party installations. The latter will either fail or be acquired and shut down anyway.

</comment><comment><USER11> I use Chrome and pin the tabs I definitely dont want to lose but I cant read right now. They stay there forever and dont take space. If they start piling up and do take space, I am forced to take out some and keep the really useful ones. Those that survive this iterative process for a long time go into the bookmarks.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes I do. I use Kippt. They even have a google chrome extension.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly the direction we where going would you mind looking at our extension. You don't have to use it just maybe read and watch the demo vid. I would love to get your thoughts on it.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/latis/adkmonocjplf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/latis/adkmonocjplflicopchfcgmknddbnpbe)</comment></comment>


Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/upshot/driverless-cars-vs-transit-spending-cities.html <comment><USER2> Subways won't go away if autonomous cars become commonplace. That would be like saying "well Facebook replaced Myspace so I'm going to reduce my internet speed 75%". You'd be removing a ton of people-moving bandwidth by removing subways. You'll still have a need for surface trains and even busses too. It's easier (and far more efficient) to move people in bulk most of the way and leave them to do the 'last mile' to their location than it is to individually move every single person from their origin to their destination.

If any person in a planning positions thinks that you can stop planning, and supporting, public transportation (especially underground), they need fired.

<comment><USER3> Stranger things have happened already. This feels like the GM streetcar brouhaha all over again: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for that share! I love random obscure things hidden in our history like that.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help How Do You Mitigate a HTTP GET Flood DoS - jonathan-kosgei I run a small API that has a no sign-up required free tier.
This has been thoroughly abused over the past few weeks as I've been getting hundreds of millions of calls a day from countries all over the world in what I now believe is a DoS attack.
I've tried a few dozen things to try and stop it, including banning countries which has helped.
I've inspected the requests and they don't have any bogus query params to break caching like in the examples I've seen. It's just a simple GET to / on the API with a number of headers set.
Does anyone know of any helpful way to mitigate this kind of attack?
Here's a sample log event; {'type': 'REQUEST', 'resource': '/', 'path': '/', 'httpMethod': 'GET', 'headers': {'accept-language': 'ru-RU,ru;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.7', 'X-Forwarded-Proto': 'https', 'X-Forwarded-For': '22.214.171.124', 'Host': 'myapi.co', 'X-Forwarded-Port': '443', 'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br', 'X-Amzn-Trace-Id': 'Root=1-5b1e2ce9-f7f53b56b21b4ae4aca1c49e', 'accept': '/', 'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.181 Safari/537.36'}, 'queryStringParameters': {}, 'pathParameters': {}, 'stageVariables': {}, 'requestContext': {'resourcePath': '/', 'httpMethod': 'GET', 'extendedRequestId': 'ITv0aHJuFiAFkmw=', 'requestTime': '11/Jun/2018:08:03:53 +0000', 'path': '/', 'protocol': 'HTTP/1.1', 'stage': 'published', 'requestTimeEpoch': 1528704233073, 'requestId': 'fb4b5e8f-6d4d-11e8-9fcb-4f9526203fa9', 'identity': {'cognitoIdentityPoolId': None, 'accountId': None, 'cognitoIdentityId': None, 'caller': None, 'sourceIp': '184.108.40.206', 'accessKey': None, 'cognitoAuthenticationType': None, 'cognitoAuthenticationProvider': None, 'userArn': None, 'userAgent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.181 Safari/537.36', 'user': None}}} <comment><AUTHOR> CDN or caching proxy?</comment>


If You Are Really, Really Desperate For Cash, These Guys Will Give You $3k - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/02/if-you-are-really-really-desperate-for-cash-these-guys-will-give-you-3k/

<comment><USER2> CapitalOne sends out offers of 1.9% interest until the balance is paid off (with an initial 3% up to $50 fee) if the owner stops using their credit card for a while. That sounds to be about as good a deal as one can get right now. Of course, you should have a zero balance before you take them up on the offer and not use it for purchases or subscriptions in the mean time.</comment>


Using SVN makes your site extremely vulnerable - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=y&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhabrahabr.ru%2Fblogs%2Finfosecurity%2F70330%2F&sl=ru&tl=en&history_state0= <comment><USER2> Summary:

A lot of people don't use "svn export" and leave .svn directories readable to everyone.

The authors of the article wrote a crawler that scanned 2.2 million domains, mostly in the .ru zone, for the vulnerability over the last couple of months.

They got access to (parts of) the source code of over 3 thousand sites, including some big ones like:

* yandex.ru and rambler.ru -- Russian search engines

* mail.ru -- Biggest Russian email host

* rbk.ru -- Large online publisher

* 003.ru, bolero.ru -- Online retailers

* habrahabr.ru -- Webdev/blogging/new media community site

* opera.com

</comment><comment><USER3> For your Apache config.

      # Disallow viewing of .svn and .git directory contents
      <DirectoryMatch \.(svn|git)>
        Order allow,deny
        Deny from all
      </DirectoryMatch>

<comment><USER4> May as well throw in .hg

Oh. Now we're blacklisting.

If you are going to use this solution, you are better off blacklisting all dotfiles except .htaccess, assuming you allow it.

<comment><USER3> Even if you do use .htaccess files, you still shouldn't be showing them to anyone who requests them from your web server!

<comment><USER4> Ha! Correct!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title is misleading and plain wrong.

The issue is not in "using SVN". It's in using any revision control system that has .svn .git etc directories, and accidentally making those directories world readable from a webserver.

User error.

</comment><comment><USER6> Russian speaker here, I'll translate some selected comments for your convenience.

harm: _We need more people who, upon finding a hole, go on to scan the whole Runet, for no nefarious reasons but just to warn unwitting site owners._

SilenceAndy: _In olden times such people were called hackers, until journalists perverted that word to mean cyber criminals._

grayhex: _This comment is impervious to Google Translate._

cancel: _Google inurl:.svn/entries, lots of interesting stuff._

Nirvanko: _This ain't new, see[http://www.adamgotterer.com/2009/01/26/hacking- the-svn-direc...](http://www.adamgotterer.com/2009/01/26/hacking-the-svn- directory/) _

SynteZ: _IIS doesn't have this vulnerability :-) By default it doesn't send files without extensions, because it doesn't know the mime type._

varyen: _Funny, Wii disks from SEGA also have .svn folders, though they're empty._

crazywebdev: _Now I know how<http://vkontakte.ru> came about._

</comment><comment><USER7> Using a working copy as your website is a pretty bad idea. That's what svn export is meant for.

<comment><USER8> Using a working copy allows you to deploy your website faster and safer (only the changes gets transfered, you can have hooks to do some cleanup and rollbacks are almost free).

I use Mercurial on all my websites (disabling access to .*/.hg of course) and never use FTP for anything.

<comment><USER9> > Using a working copy allows you to deploy your website faster and safer

It's clearly faster, it clearly is _not_ safer, as the article demonstrate: if you forget to configure Apache to ignore the repo folders, your source code becomes available to the world.

> you can have hooks to do some cleanup and rollbacks are almost free

Export to versioned directories, then use symlinks to link your core to the right version of the site, and you get rollbacks for free as well. The only thing a WC gets you is deployment speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This isn't really a vulnerability - just developers not doing their job. Anyone who uses SVN (or any other version management system, for that matter) should know how it works.

I know SVN creates these hidden directories (named .svn) within every directory of my project that contains the working copies of the files within that directory. Therefore I either use export (to not upload the hidden folders) or I make them not accessible to the public via .htaccess.

Saying this is a vulnerability is like telling someone copying/pasting their code into a Pastie is a vulnerability. Common sense.

<comment><USER11> People mis-configure Apache all the time. They leave their site wide open for attack. They're vulnerable.

Saying it's not a vulnerability when 3,000 sites all have their source code visible to the world is like having your arm chopped off and saying "no it isn't, it's just a flesh wound."

I know it's not a cool remote root buffer overflow exploit hat trick 540 front side flip, but it's a security hole which people need to be educated about.

<comment><USER10> But Apache isn't misconfigured in this instance - a file was uploaded and people are claiming that being able to view that file is a vulnerability.

I guess it is a vulnerability of the same standard as "My password is: password".

I just don't understand why everyone is up-in-arms and so surprised by this "vulnerability." It's common sense...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr Don't accidentally leave an svn working copy available to the internet, it could be a security vulnerability.

<comment><USER9> Actually, TFA isn't about svn repositories but about using working copies for your production site, and leaving .svn world-readable. svn repositories tend to at least use some kind of HTTP auth (if not https or ssh), but a world- readable .svn means your whole project is available.

<comment><USER12> Yup, exactly. s/repositories/working copies/. I've been using git/hg too much lately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 From the translation:

 _It would seem that in the XXI century is difficult to find such a vulnerability._

Do Russian speakers generally write the century in roman numerals like that? That's kind of neat..

<comment><USER13> Yes, it is customary in Russian writing to write century numbers in Roman numerals. The Russian language is going through a significant anglicization phase right now, though, so this will probably change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm no security expert but I'm not sure if I get it - assuming that your code is well written, how would exposing the source code and change history make it more vulnerable? By using this logic, every piece of open source software is "vulnerable". Security through obscurity is not really security.

I thought not checking in safety critical things such as passwords or keys into the repository tree is a standard practice. If it's not, it should be.

<comment><USER15> It depends on what the threat is.

If the threat is finding vulnerability, then you are right. If the threat is leaking the source code to the competition, then it is a serious matter.

Also, keep in mind the deployed source code is different than just the source code; it usually contains things like the database credentials and such.

<comment><USER14> Of course, but the "vulnerability" in this article was about the source code in the repository tree, not the deployed one. Also, I believe that database credentials should be stored in external configuration files (which, of course, shouldn't be browsable) so if they do an update, they don't have to add the credentials again.

About leaking the source: Yes, that could definitely be a problem, I agree, but I'm not sure if this can be considered as a vulnerability, more like carelessness on the part of the admin of the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And as usual, PHP is at the top of the game: <http://fr2.php.net/.svn/entries> (note: interestingly, not all subdomains are open, the us* ones aren't, the uk* ones aren't either, and fr.php.net is also closed)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the machine translation but an English text is not up just yet.

<comment><USER16> It's actually surprisingly coherent. Is Russian easier to translate than other languages or has Google's automated translation just gotten that good?

<comment><USER17> Russian language is indo-european, therefore the result is much better than if you're translating from chinese or turkish.

Google translate is good at lexical translation but still can't bind words together properly (and probably never will unless they'd change their paradigm).

I have to add that original text is surprisingly incoherent. They surely didn't re-read it after they wrote it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Git is much nicer, because everything is in one .git directory and it can be kept outside the public webroot.

</comment><comment><USER19> We deploy like this, and it looks like I cannot get to the source files in the way described.

It appears that IIS is naively not serving up these file types. If I drop a plain html file in the .svn folder I can get to it, but any .svn-base file or files lacking an extension are unreachable.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's not actually clear to me what the problem is.

Are they saying that people can read your code (not actually a problem for open source projects) or that they can update it and thus alter your site?

The former doesn't seem so bad - the latter is obviously catastrophic.

I wish I spoke Russian...

<comment><USER12> Just reading. This is actually pretty bad. Consider all of the passwords embedded in connection strings and all the other various secrets contained in the source AND configuration files for a standard website. Even if your site uses all open source software, you still don't want J. Random Hacker to have write access to your database, for example.

<comment><USER20> Of course, you database _really_ shouldn't be externally visible...

<comment><USER21> Well, don't forget about "security-in-depth". Combine "DB password on your website" with "remote unprivileged shell" on any server that can reach the DB, and now you've got a "shell into the DB".

Security exploits aren't just bad for what they directly allow, they are bad for how they often combine well.

(You, AndrewDucker, may already know this; I'm not trying to imply otherwise. I'm saying this because this is a point that needs to be made more often, too many people ignore it. _Any_ unauthorized access into your system needs to be taken very seriously, because of this risk.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well duh. You shouldn't be publishing your repository. Use svn export instead.</comment>


If Your Dreams Don't Serve You, Let Them Go - <AUTHOR> https://www.inflectionconf.com/blog/if-your-dreams-dont-serve-you-let-them-go <comment><USER2> I have a friend in SF who's addicted to the startup hustle I've been trying to convince he should really just get a "normal" tech job for a while. It hurts to watch him struggle with money and I don't know how feasible it is to start your own company when you yourself are barely surviving.

<comment><USER3> He's pretty lucky he's in tech and has multiple paths forward. I have friends in this situation "stuck" at law firms or "stuck" in a medical fellowship. They have now already invested 4 to 9 years and tons of debt into a career with limited realistic choices but to continue moving forward on a path they don't like (sometimes something they got pushed into by family/society/etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The big insight in this post to me is learning how someone else handles a crisis of identity. Something you usually don't know you're going through until it's over and have had time to reflect.

Thanks for sharing, Frank.

<comment><AUTHOR> I needed enough time distance to really analyze if things were making sense or not. As a generally even keel person, I didnt notice how stressed I was until I signed the offer and realized, oh yea, I was holding back a lot of my thoughts and potential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading this was so refreshing. A few years ago, I shut down a startup I'd spent the past 4 years on and honestly didn't know what to do with myself. In hindsight, it was obvious I was slowly killing myself with stress but I was so attached to the company I couldn't walk away. I appreciate contributions like this to the startup/hustle narrative. Thanks for sharing, Frank!

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you feel the stress at the time or was it a slow creep? In my case I felt like I as dealing with it fine, but realized a drastic change in how I was thinking after it was over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you look back now at the comments you received about limited growth potential/competition/etc, do you agree in hindsight?

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing your story Frank. Feelin the honesty hard. I was lucky to be on that GOAP trip with you and Doug. Microsoft just got themselves an awesome new advocate.

</comment><comment><USER8> Frank, thank you for sharing your story. I've been in a similar situation for the last twelve years (chasing some dream, trying to make it work), and I'm finally letting it go too. Reading your post was so helpful for me (helping me know I'm not alone), and also just tremendously heartwarming because you've found stable ground after all this while. Keep being awesome.

</comment><comment><USER9> Real talk and inspiring talk. Thank you for sharing the honest story and reflection that all in the startup world need to hear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Had to share, it weighed me down for too long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That was beautiful. One of the best blog posts I have seen in a while. Keep it up.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is tough. I let go of a dream after 7 years of toil. 6 months later it came true for somebody else that I let it go too. Now to build a new reality.

</comment><comment><USER12> True. This is the toughest lesson of life that I still have to master - learning to let go, and not feel like a failure.

</comment><comment><USER13> That color scheme physically hurts to look at. I would like to read this, but I don't think my retinas could take it.

<comment><AUTHOR> yea you're right, we have to work on it for sure. You can blame me :)

<comment><USER14> I liked it in that it conveys "what you're about to read is going to be something different".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thanks for sharing! Glad you came through mentally and physically intact.</comment>


Alternative To Disk Storage (10x speed, same price) - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444138104578032572557387496.html

<comment><USER2> "As a result, where a disk drive might need a terabyte of capacity to store a terabyte of data, FlashArray can save that same data in a fraction of the space."

This is unfair. There is no reason why I cant have deduplication and compression on my spinning disks. As a result I can have vastly more storage capacity for the same price, but at a slower rate.

Same boat we were already in.</comment>


Raising €235,000 for foldable origami canoes - <AUTHOR> https://www.failory.com/mistakes/onak <comment><USER2> That is a really cool idea, and would be great for people that don't have space to store a canoe or a big enough car to transport one.

The tough part physical-product startups run into a lot is the manufacturing. Building everything in-house can either be prohibitively expensive or time- consuming, and outsourcing the manufacturing to a foreign company to save costs also brings with it a ton of issues (communication, quality, IP protection, customs, etc). The startup capital requirements to successfully build and deliver a physical product to market are huge compared to many digital products. Plus the "lean" aspects of software dev don't exactly translate over to physical products (nobody wants to get "paddles coming in the V1.5 update!").</comment>


The Chart of the Century - <AUTHOR> http://www.aei.org/publication/the-chart-of-the-century-makes-the-rounds-at-the-federal-reserve/ <comment><USER2> I really don't want to get downvoted for saying this, because I am not a right-wing, small-government person.

But, this chart is literally just a chart of "how regulated is your industry".

Education is regulated/guaranteed by the Department of Education. Prices went up over the last 20 years.

Housing is strictly regulated by local towns and states, and the Federal government gets involved too (most notably regarding modernized septic systems). Prices went up.

Wages went up due to minimum wage laws. Automation, outsourcing, and labor- force-non-participation also went up.

Cars, toys, software, and cell phones all went down in price. Sure, there's industry coordination and federal guidelines about consumer safety, but it isn't nearly as strictly enforced.

I'm not saying it's good or bad that prices went up or down.

I'm merely saying that you can accurately predict the outcome based on the level of government influence in an industry, subjectively.</comment>


Ron Rivest's MIT Computer and Network Security - <AUTHOR> http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2012/ <comment><USER2> Is it expected that all software engineers are knowledgable in computer and network security or are this considered a different specialty? Reason I ask is that I'm working on a healthcare startup that deals with rather sensitive information but I don't have a background in security. I've actually learned a lot during the last year that I didn't know, mainly using Ubuntu Command Line, modifying web server configurations in addition to setting up the network/router for the server, and creating the databases and programming the web app, but I'm not experienced in network or computer security. I'm obviously aware of and prevent SQL injections but other than that I'm sort of clueless and was wondering if maybe I should take a CE course on network and computer security...anyone any thoughts?

<comment><USER3> When the class is taught by the guy who puts the R in RSA, you can imagine he's going to lean heavy and hard into cryptography.

<comment><USER4> I audited this class (just showed up on the first day of class, not an MIT student, not registered). This class is probably the best class I've ever taken. I went from knowing a little about cryptography and computer security to doing novel computer science research (as one of the problem sets I broke a SHA3 candidate <http://ethanheilman.tumblr.com/post/16944272296/shash> ).

It isn't particularity "heavy and hard into cryptography", but it is very hands-on with many programming problem sets and puzzles to solve. It covers security from AES to secure voting to firewalls to buffer overflows to sql injection to physical security. This class will teach you to build more secure systems.

To get a good idea of what the class is like check out the lecture list. <http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2012/handouts>

At the end of the course students present research projects. They are almost always worth taking a look at because they tend to be highly creative and fun (the MBTA "T" hacking talk at Defcon was originally a project for this class): <http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2010/pitches.html>

This class is excellent and Ron Rivest is very friendly and very approachable. If you have a chance I would recommend taking it (or watching it online). If you have a background in programming you can take this course.</comment></comment></comment>


Out in the Open: Hydra Vows to Instantly Analyze Your Big Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/02/hydra/ <comment><USER2> Hail Hydra.</comment>


Stop the music money stream scream: C.R.E.A.M. - <AUTHOR> http://rogueleaderr.com/post/42695281885/stopping-the-music-money-stream-scream-c-r-e-a-m

<comment><USER2> Pretty well-balanced article. Like in the 'bad old days' the mega-artists that appeal to the mass market are the ones reaping the rewards of economies of scale.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing is as popular as popularity.</comment></comment>


JuliaCon 2015 Preview - <AUTHOR> http://julialang.org/blog/2015/05/juliacon-preview/

<comment><USER2> If anyone has any questions about this post or the conference, fire away!

Last year's first conference was a big success in my opinion. Videos are available at [http://juliacon.org/2014/](http://juliacon.org/2014/), although the speakers weren't mic'ed so the sound isn't so great - we'll be fixing that this year.

<comment><USER3> This looks fantastic! Are there any plans for a European conference?

<comment> one-more-minute There's definitely some interest in holding a conference from the community over here – we'll probably have a go at gauging general interest and forming more concrete plans soon.

<comment><USER4> That would be great !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone on HN using Julia professionally?

<comment><USER6> I used it professionally from 2012 - 2014, and I know of about a half a dozen companies either developing things in it or supporting it as part of saas offerings. Not that many, but each group that I know of made the switch after extensive reviews of other language options, and they've all had positive experiences so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is anyone talking about the future of the module system?

<comment><USER2> No, I don't think so. I don't think there is much that is going to change with modules in the future, or at least I'm unaware of any open issues about it. What did you have in mind? The hackathon on Wednesday will be a particularly good time to bounce around your ideas, and is free to attend.

<comment><USER7> Because the current system ([http://julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual/modules/](http://julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual/modules/)) is just sad. It's the one thing that has kept me from fully embracing Julia.

I would love to go if I were any where in the neighborhood. But alas I'm over a thousand miles away.

<comment><USER8> Some people I've talked to have complained that modules aren't objects, and that throwing away the coupling of types and reuse files is "abandoning 30 years of learning" and that "I don't trust myself to be disciplined"

I think that these arguments are not strong! But what would be useful would be some detailed critical thinking on the topic.

My take is that thinking about where you put multiple dispatch parameterized type matched code components is actually a real challenge. The module structure chosen for a library requires "artful" approaches. Perhaps a good workshop on the topic would yield a guide or an approach to making these decisions? Perhaps a labeling system could be evolved to provide metadata for modules better enabling reuse and promoting discover-ability ? Perhaps static analysis of a code base might be provided that gives recommendations (and assistance) for creating good decompositions and associations?

<comment><USER8> I can't reply to Porker! But.. in reply, yes, I agree, critical analysis is horribly lacking in science atm.

Maybe this is something a plenary could do well - what are the assumptions that underpin some of the things that we are doing? Can we challenge those? Can we pick out the complaints/problems that people outside have about what we are doing?

That's hard for any community to do...

BTW. for the record, I learned years ago that objects did not for a good modularity make...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A web3-enabled React starter app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/freeatnet/web3-react-simple-app <comment><USER2> So is "web3" referring to Web 3.0? Which is the block chain Web or something?

<comment><USER3> > web3-react […] framework for building modern Ethereum dApps

> […] decentralized applications (or "dapps") gain the benefits of > cryptocurrency and blockchain technology

Hah, spot on.</comment></comment>


Study Finds Drinking Tea Is Good for Your Brain - <AUTHOR> https://modernfarmer.com/2019/09/study-finds-drinking-tea-is-good-for-your-brain/ <comment><AUTHOR> Sample size of 36 tracked for three years</comment>


Grid-Cell Like Deep Layers in Navigation AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0102-6 <comment><USER2> This DeepMind work has been gathering a lot of hype, but it is very similar to this work by Cueva and Wei:

Published on Arxiv on March 31: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.07770](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.07770)

Published at ICLR 2018, a well-known machine learning conference: [https://openreview.net/forum?id=B17JTOe0-](https://openreview.net/forum?id=B17JTOe0-)

It is rather disheartening that they didn't acknowledge the -- seems like a deliberate oversight.

The Cueva and Wei paper is well written, explains concepts clearly, without the hype, and published in an open access venue.

<comment><USER3> Well, the paper was received from Nature on 05 July 2017, so it isn't surprising that they didn't cite the work from Cueva and Wei published 21 Mar 2018.

<comment><USER4> That's not quite how the process works. These papers go through multiple (> 2) revisions. At any iteration, there's ample opportunity for updating references. This applies double given how long the Cueva/Wei work has been available (preprint & CCN'17 (?) contribution).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The link says I have to pay $8.99 to "rent" the article, or subscribe every year for $199. WTF? Is this science?

Why can't people publish research in open access journals or conferences?

<comment><USER6> Deepmind has an unfortunate history of publishing in Nature for the prestige. Maybe because Hassabis was a neuroscientist and acquired that bad habit. But does it matter in the CS/ML world? I think it doesn't, because a number of people have done it with papers that range very widely in significance (e.g. this is much less significant than the original deep q learning paper that was also in nature iirc)

<comment><USER7> From my observation (from knowing a few people there from my lab), DeepMind is still organised relatively similarly to university groups.

Professors moving over are made to lead research teams, and while there may be some overall organisation goals, researchers still care about their individual career advancement and prestige as measured by paper output. So individually, most people working there are incentivised towards doing what is best for their individual prestige in the research community for after leaving deepmind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hiearchichal Temporal Memory is exactly what this is. HTM has been successfully used to create artificial hypocampus. Watch the video in the first link below and try not to be impressed.

Links:

[https://discourse.numenta.org/t/oscillatory-thousand- brains-...](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/oscillatory-thousand-brains-minds- eye-for-htm/3726)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory)</comment>


Why Women Still Can't Have It All - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/1/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> Ok, so do I get this correctly... this person is shaken in her feminist/equalist beliefs because she wants to spend more time with her family and this doesn't fit her earlier view that women too can put their career before the family.

The fallacy of her reasoning is twofold. First, gender equality is never measurable in individuals. It is only possible to measure over a population. Any individual is influenced by so many factors in her decisions that it is impossible to say what decisions are determined by her gender and not.

Second, her view seems to be that a man could never put his family before his career. Her realization could have been "Oh, as a human being I have a hard time letting go of the thoughts of my son who needs me, I guess I was wrong about humans". Instead, she thinks that it must be a purely female reaction to a everyday dilemma.

Her belief that a man would never feel or think the same is so strong that she rather questions her view that men and women are equal, than realizing that she is an individual that, just as many other human beings both men and women, cares as much about their families as they do about their jobs.

</comment><comment><USER3> In full disclosure: I do believe there are essential differences between men and women in regards to their child-rearing ability. The skills that each gender has are unique in this regard. This is a generalization, and is not true in every case. Regardless, this means that all other things being equal, there will still be a societal preference for women to rearing children.

But let's ignore that for the present, and pose the question: What would it take to equalize the amount of time that parents spend rearing their children and working outside the home, such that the children are still well-reared? Consider it purely economically: People have a limited amount of resources and time. One's gender has nothing to do with that. If men predominantly stayed home and reared children, while women worked, the situation would be the same.

Rearing children is a full-time job. Either _you_ are going to do it, or you are going to pay someone else to do it (in which case you are taking away from your home life, and you don't have it all).

Men do not get to have it all either. They do not get to have a full-time job, and also spend large amounts of quality time at home. That is why there has traditionally been a compromise: the primary responsibility for child-rearing, respective of time, falls on one parent, while the other has the primary responsibility for earning a family's living.

So, what could change this? Employers could start expecting men with families to work less. That would equalize men and women in the workplace - married men and women that is. Make no mistake, though, so long as there are people who are willing to work full-time and more than full-time, those people will be preferred by employers and be better paid. If married-with-children workers worked less, then childless workers will be preferred. This creates an economic pressure on the families with children to make a choice: Someone has to work more, or they have to live with much less.

That's the brass tax of the economics of the thing. You can't legislate that away.

</comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't read it all (very long text in very small letters), but I wonder, why not accept that not all jobs are compatible with taking care of your kids? I personally agree that a "work fixed schedule for somebody else" job makes it difficult, that's why I try to freelance. But even if you could somehow change that standard kind of job (instead of doing your own thing or choosing a career that is compatible with your desires), there will always be jobs that are incompatible. For example, off the top of my head: working on an oil rig. I think that demands absence from home for several weeks in a row.

There are probably better examples. What I mean is, don't cry for the world to change, change yourself. Pick a suitable career, and negotiate appropriate terms. And accept that sometimes it just isn't possible.

Also, what does that have to do with women? What about men who want to spend time with their family? That article seems very strange in it's assumptions: on the one hand women should get everything men get, on the other hand they should still be primarily taking care of the family? Maybe you just have to decide...

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the author clearly stated that you can do the work and the child raising _if_ you have the schedule control. I've found that to be largely true. I also had my children at 38, and my husband and I were extremely fortunate to be able to have me work part time and arrange our schedules so the children always had a parent home. For all the time before the children had their driver's license, we were able to get them to and from their schools and care for them before and after school. Now I've had to switch jobs and there are very rigid rules about being at work at their stated times.

It seems rather obvious that the whole employment culture was shaped by the parent at home history just as the school schedule is shaped by the agricultural history. Over time this will flatten out but it's likely that women will continue to recognize the needs of their children (and parents, and spouses) differently than men do.

And how much of this problem is due to understaffing? Why are people working so many many hours, shouldn't that be taken as clear indication that the work needs to be split or otherwise rearranged? It's not like we have a labor shortage.

I've always joked that I wanted a wife too. Maybe that's what it would take?

<comment><USER4> "it's likely that women will continue to recognize the needs of their children (and parents, and spouses) differently than men do."

Why?

Apart from that, sure, it is nicer to work part time on your own schedule. I don't think it is feasible for every kind of job, though. If you want to take care of your children, pick a suitable job.</comment></comment>


Prepaid mobile Internet is the most expensive in the US - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-chart-5 <comment><USER2> This is really frustrating for temporary visitors (even us Americans that live abroad but visit on occasion.) Here I can pay about $3 for a SIM card and $1/day for a "data package", all prepaid, and most of the world has similar options available.

When visiting the US, I've tried using some of the cheaper, less known providers that they sell in Best Buy (H2GO, Boost) and have never actually gotten data to work, just voice. The only thing that has worked for me is T-Mobile, for which I have to fork out $50 for a month, when I just want 4-5 days.

<comment><USER3> T-Mobile actually now has a per-day plan - $3/day for voice, SMS, and 200MB of data. SIM kits are ~$10.

[http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/pay-by-the-day-cell- phone...](http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/pay-by-the-day-cell-phone-plans)

<comment><USER2> Cool, that's definitely new! Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What percentage of subscribers to mobile internet in the USA use pre-paid services compared to contract? And what about the other countries where it's cheaper?

Most pre-paid providers in the US go through a MVNO (basically a reseller) affiliated with Sprint. Therefore performance in most cases is terrible. I can burn up a Verizon or AT&T-based mobile phone hotspot pretty quickly thanks to the high speed an low data cap (3-5GB).

There's wifi everywhere, or I think there'd be a bigger push for this. I might only use 300mb of cellular data a month as long as I don't stream or do something like an OS update on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER5> There must be an issue with the methodology. It is hard to reconcile $85 for 500MB when Virgin Mobile and Straight Talk offer monthly plans for $35-$45/month with a lot more than 500MB of data.

The mobile data situation for tourists is not good, but this chart and story don't accurately represent the US market for mobile data.

<comment><USER6> > but this chart and story don't accurately represent the US market for mobile > data.

It says it's for prepaid in the title. Its not inaccurate just because it does not measure what you want it to measure.

<comment><USER7> I would still have liked to see the same graph at 2GB and 6GB.

When I roam from Canada to the US, the incumbents charge something like $1 / 4 KB (yes, KB, not MB) of data for anyone on a post-paid plan, and deny data roaming to pre-paid users. I keep a T-mobile SIM around just for when I visit, even though I only use it for a few months every year.

If the cost of data is the same for 500 MB as it is for 6 GB (most prepaid plans I could find last time I visited were either 100MB with huge overage costs or 2GB+) then the relative expensiveness of the US goes down as the amount of data used increases.

I'm not saying that wireless data in the US isn't expensive -- it is. Besides, financial ITMPs are one of the most effective ways of regulating data use when bandwidth is finite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >and to the fact that it costs more to build a network than it does in small, densely populated European countries.

No. Finland has population density 16/km^2, United States has 34.2/km^2

It's not ever correct for urban areas. Population density in Helsinki (urban area) is 1800/km^2 spread out American city like LA has urban area density 3200/km^2.

The number of cell towers is related to number of people using the services. If you have densely populated area you add them more close to each other because ether has bandwidth limits. The cost increases only if the population density is so low that towers are not utilized even when they are as sparsely placed as possible.

I could not find prepaid provider in Finland with strict limits for data transfer. For example in Saunalahti mobile prepaid 0.861 EUR/MB (maximum cost is 1.9 EUR/day, after that data transfer is free). In other words, you get unlimited data transfer for ~$57 per month.

<comment><USER8> Population density alone should not be be used to determine the cost/complexity of setting up a network. Even with the same density of population, the overall geographic size (and land features) of the network is still important.

<comment><USER6> Overall geographic size adds logarithmic cost to the physical network but big networks also gives scale benefits that might be bigger.</comment></comment></comment>


Effective Scala - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.github.io/effectivescala/ <comment><AUTHOR> Scala is becoming my programming language of choice, especially since I tried out Scala.js which really works well.

I am currently porting a Clojure library of mine to Scala, and it is about 10% less code, and obviously more robust because of static type checking.

Scala.js: [https://github.com/lampepfl/scala- js](https://github.com/lampepfl/scala-js)

<comment><USER2> Can you compare and contrast Scala with Clojure? I've dabbled in both... I in theory prefer Scala, but I found it just has sooo many moving parts I can't keep it in my head.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can show you two code samples of mine, one in Clojure, the other one doing something very similar in Scala:

      (defn completion-items [grammar doc items-bin-index completed-bin-index items nonterminal value]
      (loop [items items
             completed '()]
        (if-let [[^Item item previous-value] (first items)]
          (let [alpha (expected-symbol grammar item)
                dot (.dot item)]
            (if (and alpha (= nonterminal alpha))
              (let [rule-nonterminal (.nonterminal item)
                    ruleindex (.ruleindex item)
                    origin (.origin item)
                    value' (gen-nextvalue grammar doc origin items-bin-index completed-bin-index
                                          rule-nonterminal ruleindex dot
                                          previous-value value)]
                (if (nil? value')
                  (recur (next items) completed)
                  (let [item' (->Item rule-nonterminal ruleindex (+ dot 1) origin)]
                    (recur (next items) (cons-item-value completed item' value')))))
              (recur (next items) completed)))
          (apply hash-map completed))))

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

      def complete_items(completed_binindex : Int, bin : ItemBin, nonterminal : Nonterminal, value : Value) : MoreItems = {
        var completed_items : List[(Item, IntermediateValue)] = List()
        for ((item, v) <- bin.items) {
          val s = expectedSymbol(item)
          if (s == Some (nonterminal)) {
            grammar.nextValue(document, item.origin, bin.binindex, completed_binindex, nonterminal,
              item.ruleindex, item.dot, v, value) match
            {
              case None =>
              case Some(nextvalue) =>
                completed_items = (item.inc -> nextvalue) ::
                  completed_items
            }
          }
        }
        completed_items
      }

<comment><USER3> That's quite non-idiomatic Clojure...

1) Unnecessary type hint

2) No use of destructuring or field lookup by keyword

3) Alteration of record objects with positional constructors instead of update-in

4) Explicit loop with previous item instead of reduce over (partition 2 1 items)

5) Way too many parameters

6) Apply hash-map instead of into

7) (+ ... 1) instead of inc

8) Weird gen-nextvalue auxiliary function instead of a lazy sequence

I could keep going...

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing is: In order to have performance, you need type hinting (a lot of it). I DO need performance, as the algorithm above is already part of something O(n^3). There also clojure.core.type does not help. And that is the problem with a language feature which is not a compiler feature as well.

By the way, gen-nextvalue is a protocol function.

<comment><USER3> > In order to have performance, you need type hinting (a lot of it).

No, not really. That has only been my experience when interoperating with Java libraries. Protocol dispatch has inline call caches, which are almost as fast as normal java interface dispatch.

> that is the problem with a language feature which is not a compiler feature > as well

You could also say "that is the problem with type system features which are not virtual machine features as well". There is lots of erased information in the Scala type system that could be used for optimizations, but the VM can't make much use of that.

Scala's type system does 3 things:

1) Enable type-related optimizations

2) Ensure internal consistency (ie prevent errors)

3) Enhance expressivity through logic solver search

Clojure's type hints provide just enough type system to trigger host optimizations, where as core.typed is for finding and preventing bugs. I consider the implicitness of #3 to be an anti-feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> just a suggestion if the author is here - maybe be more consistent when showing bad vs good - sometimes you show the good then the bad and sometimes vice versa. Try to stick to one or the other - or alternatively change the background color of the examples to red and green to clearly show bad examples.

<comment><USER5> Effective Effective Documents.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The description about comments is somewhat wrong. The Scaladoc standard is not

        /** My comment
         *  Next Line
         */

which is pretty ugly, but it is

        /** My comment
          * Next Line
          */

which looks much better. :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> The question i have been struggling to answer for few months now: Scala or Go?

<comment><USER7> Pick Scala if:

      -You think a fusion of OO and functional programming is the way of the future
      -Runtime tooling and advanced instrumentation support matter to you
      -You like having first-class IDE support
      -You want to work for the likes of Twitter/Foursquare/LinkedIn/Amazon
      -Having tons of mature Java libraries available matters to you.
      -You don't mind investing time to learn the language

Pick Go if:

      -Memory footprint matter to you (and you don't want to pick C)
      -Startup time matters to you (and you don't want to pick C)
      -You don't want to spend much time learning the language
      -You like C-style error handling and aren't expecting something as expressive as a python or a ruby.
      -You don't mind limited IDE support
      -You want every post of yours to be voted up on HN regardless of content

<comment><USER8> I would add a few more:

Pick Scala if:

        -You find value in strong static assurances.
        -You find value in generics.
        -You want to learn functional programming, not 'functional' programming (and you should).
        -You value succinctness.

Pick Go if:

        -Compile times matter (of course it does).
        -You find value in easier deployments (at the cost of potentially more deployments).
        -You don't want to learn D ;)

<comment><USER9> Ha...love the last line. If I were in the market for something that solves the problems that Go attempts to solve, I would learn D. I just wish DMD was fully open source...it is awesome when you go to try a new language and all you have to do is "sudo apt-get ...".

<comment><USER10> I believe that very small sounding issue has played a huge role in D being as uncommonly used as it is. It seems like a trivial thing, but the ability to just pkg_add languageX is incredibly important for adoption.

<comment><USER11> I don't think this is a small issue at all. I love reading through an interesting tutorial, and being able to apt-get install the language or libraries I need to work along with it. But if you make me jump through a bunch of hoops just to work through a tutorial, forgetaboutit!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really wish they'd work on compilation speed. It probably takes me 20 minutes to do a clean compile of the Play Framework.

<comment><USER13> They _are_ working on that specific sbt /play combo, tho this doesn't look like huge numbers

[https://gist.github.com/jroper/6374383](https://gist.github.com/jroper/6374383)

If you dig thru the internals list, there are a number of fronts they're working on to produce fewer short lived intermediate objects, parallelize builds etc

[https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=forum/sc...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=forum/scala- internals#!forum/scala-internals)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone knowledgeable in both comment on Scala vs. Rust in terms of the languages themselves (as opposed to the runtimes)?

</comment><comment><USER15> i take it this is modeled after the "effective java" book? sounds interesting as a future reference to read.

<comment><USER16> Effective Java and Effective C++ have a good format for listing best practices, and nowadays more and more languages seem to adopt their own "Effective" book or web page... I like how useful they are to see real-world problems before you decide picking up a language.</comment></comment>


English is heavily left-handed - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/31462310493/english-is-heavily-left-handed <comment><USER3> > it turns out that characters on the left occur 58.73% of the time, and those > on the right 41.3% of the time. This is certainly not helped by the fact > that the right side has 11 letters to the left's 15

Actually, if you ignore the letter frequencies entirely, this is only 1% off what you would expect based on the 11/15 split. As others have pointed out, the difference here is made up by punctuation. It would be interesting to measure frequency of key usage including punctuation and see which side (if any) comes out on top.

One thing I have noticed is that most control commands (copy, paste, close window, switch window, &c) are left dominant, which makes sense if you have the mouse in your right hand.

<comment><USER4> Based on a _thoroughly scientific_ glance at the white keycaps on the Apple keyboard I use at my desk at work—which get amazingly dirty amazingly quickly—the most used key's when I'm working are largely punctuation: some set of 9, 0, [, ], backspace, \, enter, shift, and /. Surprisingly, my left shift key is cleaner than my capslock key at the moment, which I didn't expect at all given how much I hit shift-9 and shift-0 in particular.

But this is probably horribly biased because when I get a snack I eat it with my right hand, which I assume makes keys on that side get dirtier quicker.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps the keys you use more often are _cleaner_ than the others?

<comment><USER6> The center may be whiter but they get that terrible grey circle on them.

<comment><USER3> I don't know what you guys do to your keyboards but I don't want to ever touch them...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lefty here. Bad title - writing English kinda sucks for lefties - <USER2> blackboards/whiteboards I always smudge the letters as a write left to right. Same thing with some pens. And you can't see the letters your just wrote as you move left-to right. Not to mention the English language was around a long time before QWERTY. Truth is, English was heavily left-handed,we'd all be writing right-to-left. More appropriate title would be 'QWERTY is heavily left-handed'

<comment><USER8> You can always tell a left-handed person when they say they like a pen because it dries quickly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not English that's left-handed here, it's QWERTY. The article acts like it's discussing English, when it's really mostly about a particular keyboard layout.

<comment><USER10> It's not QWERTY that's left-handed here, it's QWERTY _used for English_ that is.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but QWERTY was designed for English.

<comment><USER11> Or designed against it. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Which makes sense. The right hand was used for the carriage return on manual typewriter. Modern times, of course, most users of often have left hand poised on keyboard and right hand flipping between keyboard and mouse.

<comment><USER13> In addition, I don't know if its accurate, but I have heard in the past that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down typists who were typing faster than the manual typewriters could handle at the time. It would make sense that the key layout would be less than ideal for the typical right hander.

<comment><USER14> No, the layout was supposed to be optimized to prevent jams while typing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Quite the opposite. All the punctuation is on the right side. I've got a split keyboard and not counting meta keys I count 28 on the left and 32 on the right side.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's a good thing that QWERTY keyboards are left-handed, it saves me a lot of stress when I don't have to take my right hand off the mouse to execute commands, or type random text in games with my left hand:

      gg
      wtf
      asdffasdfasdf
      re
      b
      d
      etc

<comment><USER17> Did you ever try left-handed dvorak?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's actually convenient, as ctrl-v/c/x and others are usually used in combination with the mouse.

<comment><USER19> That's why they were chosen as ctrl-v/c/x

<comment><USER18> ...I figured they just kept them next to the [c]opy command.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This would be far more accurately titled "Keyboards are heavily left-handed". Any analysis of the language itself would clearly indicate it favours the right hand (from being written left to right to the actual shape of the letters and their flow).

</comment><comment><USER21> That's interesting, because as a kid/teenager, I spent a lot of time either typing or playing guitar, and I feel like both of them played a significant part in strengthening my left-hand fine motor coordination, despite being a righty.

</comment><comment><USER22> I argued the other day that for programmers using qwerty, the left shift gets way too much action as all of the programming stuff is on the right hand, stupidly, the most common stuff tends to be an the shift level.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not if you're a vi user.

</comment><comment><USER24> About the split keyboard he mentions: Am I the only person that hits 6 with the right index finger? A coworker has a similarly split keyboard and I can never type 6 on it.

<comment><USER25> (long rant but since you're asking ; )

No you're not the only one: I do the same since so many decades that I won't change anymore ; )

The '6' issue on split keyboard is a gigantic SNAFU. Contrarily to popular belief there's not "one true way" to touch-type the '6'. There are different "schools of touch-typing" and it has been so since the beginning of typewriters. And the world's fatest typer on staggered QWERTY keyboard is semi-breaking all the touch-typing rules anyway....

So pick your poison: either touch-type '6' with your right or left hand, nobody is 'right' for doing one or the other (no matter the amount of arguing). Staggered QWERTY keyboard make zero sense from an ergonomic point of view so who cares anyway ; )

Split-staggered keyboard like the Goldtouch aren't ergonomic: they're split, but non ergo (there are real split ergo keyboards out). Any keyboard which is not mostly symmetric cannot possibly be ergonomic.

Most split-but-non-ergo keyboards (IBM Model M15 --very goot but very expensive, Cherry MX 5000 -- very good but very expensive too) put the 6 on the left side. Some do put the '6' on the right side: like some Belkin split keyboard (sadly these Belkin keyboards are using a shitty keyswitch).

I've even seen some split keyboards solving the issue by putting two '6' keys on the keyboard: one on the left side, one on the right side (cannot find the name right now but I'm 100% positive they do exist). Sadly as far as I know there's not any split keyboard using a good keyswitch (say buckling spring switches or Cherry MX switches or Topre switches or ALPS switches) that offers the '6' on both side of the keyboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It would be more interesting to check ngrames to see how frequently you must hit a key on the same hand twice. Qwerty was designed to prevent jamming typewriters, IIRC.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yes, but cutting paper is a right-handed person's job.

</comment><comment><USER28> That's just not right. It's a sinister plot.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sweaterdresses.</comment>


Silicon Valley VC confidence index falls to new low - <AUTHOR> http://thestandard.com/news/2008/07/09/silicon-valley-vc-confidence-index-falls-new-low

<comment><USER2> This may be a little nit-pick, because the data are certainly interesting, but the graph is a shining example of how you can use graphics to exaggerate your story.

The drop-off at Q307 looks really really drastic because the x-axis is pinned to the number "3" rather than zero. If the next data point is lower than three, are we in some kind of negative territory? No, we aren't.

Otherwise, the article was certainly interesting.</comment>


How we taught dozens of refugees to code, then helped them get developer jobs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-we-taught-dozens-of-refugees-to-code-then-helped-them-get-developer-jobs-fd37036c13b0 <comment><USER2> We've banned this site for using a well-known upvote-selling and comment- selling service. I wish everyone would realize that this is obvious in the data and not worth the risk. Perhaps someone could also communicate to the spammers that they're wasting their time?

All: Spam votes and spam comments will get your accounts and sites banned on HN, so please don't.

<comment><USER3> Since this has came up again, can you respond to my question here previously? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14817455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14817455)

<comment><USER2> I appreciate the curiosity, but answering would help the spammers and obviously I'm not going to do that.</comment></comment></comment>


Cable TV prices have gone up so much they now exceed most combined utility bills - <AUTHOR> https://bgr.com/2020/03/10/cable-vs-streaming-price-increases-fees/ <comment><USER2> I would assume everyone here has replaced their CC provided modem with a better one they own.</comment>