Baking with the Bread Whisperers of Paris - <AUTHOR> http://www.saveur.com/baker-apprentice-frederic-lalos <comment><USER2> During college I did something similar to what the author did--volunteered at a local bakery to learn the secrets of bread making. That volunteer work lead to a summer job.

A few sporadic notes from the experience:

\- Good bread is less about secret ingredients and more about process.

\- Milling flour on site was how we made moist loaves with little to no added oil. The natural oils in the wheat go rancid quickly after the wheat is milled. Similarly, nutrient levels tank.

\- Bakery hours are awful. In order to have fresh loaves for the day, the sponge person is up before 3am mixing everything for the first rise.

\- Breadmaking is an _art_. Ingredient proportions are more like guidelines and the actual amount of flour/water/etc can vary wildly with the weather/climate.

\- Random skill acquisition: I can "dual-wield" loaves of bread on the kneading table (aka knead two loaves at the same time for higher throughput). Also I can roll rolls. Which is harder than you'd think.

Zero regrets with the experience. A few days ago I realized we forgot to buy buns for the pulled pork sandwiches we were making and I was able to look up a recipe and make my own from scratch. The pulled pork was good, but people flipped out about how fantastic the buns were.

<comment><USER3> Interesting: so when you say 'no added oil' you mean just the fresh-milled flour, salt, water and sourdough/yeast?

<comment><USER4> Pretty sure GP means yes. Bread literally just needs flour, salt, yeast, and water. White flour has little to no oil. Whole wheat flour does but the oils to go rancid too quickly. You don't need just-milled whole wheat flour to make good whole wheat bread. White flour doesn't need any added oil.

Edit: Anyone interested in learning to cook, Americas Test Kitchen Cooking School (And also Cooks Illustrated Cooking Science and Science of Good Cooking) would probably be good for much of HN's audience. It is much more of a cooking "textbook" than most cookbooks. It explains what you are doing and why you do it instead of just a big list of recipes. There is also Modernist Cuisine but those are really pricey.

<comment><USER5> For bread, I don't think you can get much better than Tartine Bread [1]. Chad Robertson takes you through making bread from just flour, salt and water by making your own yeast starter.

For general cooking, I will also recommend La Technique [2], its short and digestible (puns always intended) increments of learning that, while old, are fundamental and classic.

If you can work through La Technique and something like Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking [3] (Which is great, but, very dense) you could move on to (and invest in -- they really are expensive) Modernist Cuisine [4], for which I think you need a good basic education on the fundamental building blocks of cooking.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F8H0FNW](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F8H0FNW)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812906101](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812906101)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WTIW93C/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WTIW93C/)

[4] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982761007](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982761007)

<comment><USER6> Anyone interested in the Modernist Cuisine might check their public library.

We've got copies here in the Seattle system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The bread under discussion is itself part of a revolution. Since the invention of the steam oven a century before, French bread was the insipid, if iconic, industrial baguette. TOday's loaves are the result of a 1980s a reactionary movement in bread baking led by Lionel Poilâne. Poilâne revived artisanal bread, much more delicious and satisfying, which now we take for granted.

(Amusingly people liked his bread so much that there were always queues outside the bakery in the morning. In the Soviet Union they printed photos of this in the newspaper to show that even in the West there were bread queues, so all the claims of a better life there must be propaganda.)

The article also mentions Guy Savoy: his restaurant has three stars which is presumably why he is name-dropped. What they should have mentioned is that when you eat there, not only does the sommelier pair wine with your course, but a bread "sommelier" comes by with a special cart and recommends specific breads for each course as well.

Poilâne's shop in the 7th retains a lot of anachronisms: walk in and everybody greets each other, and the ladies behind the counter liked to hand little treats to my son when he was small.

<comment><USER8> We were in Paris on vacation a couple of weeks ago and visited Poilâne. Wow. Lots of variety in this tiny shop, and everything we tried was amazing. We ended up going back the same day for more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > a meal without bread is unthinkable in France.

It's an overstatement, it's totally thinkable (and in fact people often don't eat any bread depending on the kind of meal).

</comment><comment><USER10> This article is really doesn't tell me much about the bread-making process, the people who make it, or what the author actually did while on-site besides touch a hunk of dough. Was expecting more, especially from Saveur.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. It did make me hungry for bread though. I have a friend who is a baker here (in the US) but I imagine it is quite different then working in France. The bakery she works does make bread, but the vast majority of what they sell are different kinds of sweets. I think there is a much lower demand for fresh bread here.

<comment><USER12> I spent some time post-college working as a baker; our primary output was bread (with some cookies, cakes, and brownies etc as well), but the vast majority of our bread was sold to local restaurants. If you're running a bakery that's selling direct to consumers, I can imagine that it would be pretty hard to make ends meet on bread alone.

This had the curious result that when I was in Carmel-By-The-Sea a few weeks ago, I went in to what was ostensibly called a "bakery" and tried to buy a baguette, only to be told that they only sold pastries and cookies and didn't make bread at all. I was extraordinarily put out by this.

<comment><USER13> Was it a French bakery, by chance? The French have traditionally distinguished between bakeries that bake breads and rolls (which they call a _boulangerie_ ) and bakeries that bake pastries and sweets (a _pâtisserie_ : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A2tisserie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A2tisserie)).

I dunno how much that distinction still holds in modern France in the era of the supermarket, of course. But it wouldn't be surprising to a see an upmarket French-inspired U.S. bakery using it as a way to signal authenticity.

<comment><USER12> It was called "Carmel Bakery", so it didn't label itself as either a boulangerie OR a patisserie. It was very misleading.

<comment><USER14> About 400 miles to the north, there used to be a palindromic bakery (the Yreka Bakery):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yreka,_California#Palindromes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yreka,_California#Palindromes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If I can find the recipe I will post it , there is a great French style bread I have made in the past. It takes a lot of elapsed time but not much extra time in terms of what you have to do. And the results are sublime.

<comment><USER15> Not "exactly" the same recipe, but close.

I remember that I let it rise 3 times and punched it down and re-kneaded (not just the stretch-and-fold), separated by maybe 45 minutes each time.

I seem to recall that I used King Arthur brand flour (no GMO's) and used bread flour with a smaller amount of thoroughly mixed in whole wheat flour.

Using the oven, I pre-heated to 375F and used a spray bottle to mist water onto all sides of the oven. Another suggestion of putting a cup of water into a cast iron skillet placed on the bottom rung of the oven, would probably work also. The purpose is not to dry out the crust so much that it becomes uncomfortably hard.

[http://www.tastebook.com/blog/recipes/2699447-Pain-l- Ancienn...](http://www.tastebook.com/blog/recipes/2699447-Pain-l-Ancienne- Rustic-Bread/?redirect=true)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ghostery counted 95 libraries -- without blocking, it literally cripples my MBPr on load.

<comment><USER17> > cripples my MBPr on load

AMD E-350 laptop from 2011 loads fine. Something is terribly wrong with your computer or your config.

<comment><USER3> Thinkpad X200/4Gb/Chromium 57/OpenBSD: takes around 20 seconds to load (not very good adsl) then scrolls fine and smooth. No add-ins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> nice baking video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUuKstAWof4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUuKstAWof4)</comment>


Unwrinkly – The World's First Affordable Automatic Clothing Steamer - <AUTHOR> http://www.unwrinkly.com <comment><USER2> This seems like something I'd actually be interested in... I think. Here's some feedback from someone who did not register - it would be very helpful to give some idea of the order of magnitude of the price. Something like "Fresh and wrinkle free clothes, all for less than $XXX". I don't care to register to get a discount if it is out of my 'reasonable' price range anyways.

All those pretty pictures on the website, and you won't convert someone in your target demographic (I'm an unmarried mid-40s male who likes to dress nice) because you aren't presenting the most important piece of information. I don't care about the difference between say $900 and $800, but I don't know if you are talking about $20 or $200,000 for this product. Don't make me research what a competing item would go for, you already have my attention.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate that feedback. The reason the price is not included yet is because we are still finalizing our costs and still doing research as to what consumers would be willing to pay.

I can tell you it will be in the range of $150-$250.

<comment><USER2> Thank you, that is helpful. That is a very reasonable price and now I will register.

One way of being vague about a price while still revealing order of magnitude information is to compare it to a similarly priced object - "Fresh clothes for less than the cost of a dryer!", giving you some wiggle room while still letting your customer know it is not comparable to the cost of a car or house or sandwich.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you will register :)

Yeah we will definitely add some sort of information regarding price on the website really soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Unwrinkly is an automatic clothing steamer (for all genders) that instantly sanitizes, deodorizes, de-wrinkles, and freshens your worn clothes in 10 minutes or less.

Check it out here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vPQElZ6Dcg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vPQElZ6Dcg)

Join the club today and get a discount!</comment>


The Economics of Electronic Dance Music - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartasset.com/blog/economics-of/the-economics-of-electronic-dance-music-festivals/

<comment><USER2> A decent read. And the first time I'd heard that DI.fm started at my alma mater, Binghamton University ( [http://www.di.fm/about](http://www.di.fm/about) ). I wouldn't have known Ari anyway since I graduated a few years before, but even while I was there, there was a good group of EDM fans and artists. We'd stay up late in the fine arts building making tracks in the MIDI lab.

</comment><comment><USER3> We've certainly come a long way from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone)

and: [http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r41/freepartypeople/Spira...](http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r41/freepartypeople/SpiralTribeTheFreeForceOfTeknoFlyer.jpg)

<comment><USER4> Or not: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrKIhoRn3Gw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrKIhoRn3Gw) There are plenty of weird, fringe elements that are still very much a part of EDM.

<comment><USER5> I absolutely LOVE psy-trance. The best parties ever.</comment></comment></comment>


Get Shit Done: The Middle Way - <AUTHOR> http://deadsimplelog.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/get-shit-done-the-middle-way/

<comment><USER2> I was also wondering why Window Mobile failed but iOS succeeded so many year later. I don't exactly know what the differences are. But I guess it's the marketing strategy. iPhone got accepted due to the success of iPod Touch which gives user the fun part. It's really the widgets that attract and propel users' experience. The same reason for Facebook, it didn't soar before the Zygna games attract all the users attention. It's a sad fact, though.</comment>


Universal basic income and the end of the republic - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/497244-universal-basic-income-and-the-end-of-the-republic <comment><USER2> The end of the Republic imho is not UBI, but when politicians raise their salaries and their priviledges.</comment>


Turbulenz engine on WebGL Podcast - <AUTHOR> http://thewebglpodcast.com/2/

<comment><USER2> Anyone that has used this platform, please give us your opinion.</comment>


Gwern on Nootropics - <AUTHOR> https://www.gwern.net/Nootropics <comment><USER2> I experimented heavily with nootropics right around the time Limitless came out. I shudder when I think of the copious amounts of time and money I squandered. It is a fool's errand. It is virtually impossible to quantify efficacy absent any real scientific rigor and the potential to do more harm than good is great. The most important lesson I learned about mental well- being and cognition after all was that there are no shortcuts. Diet, exercise, mindfulness, and persistence in whatever you are trying to become better at are the only ways to actually improve. At best the rest is inert snake oil and at worst you are harming yourself.</comment>


Refugee urges thousands at hacker congress to use skills to help newcomers - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/hamburg-chaos-hacker-conference-refugee-keynote <comment><AUTHOR> The Guardian gets extra points for calling her the one thing she doesn't want to be called: refugee. Sigh. :(

(I got to talk with her very briefly after the talk, in the speaker's room while I was finishing my own talk. I hope she comes back to future CCC events and can show things the hacker community has done to help.)</comment>


Beginners guide to RegEx (& how to use in Google Analytics) - <AUTHOR> http://www.blueglass.com/blog/regular-expressions-dont-use-ga-without-them/

<comment><AUTHOR> this is definitely one of the best introductions to RegEx that I've seen b/c it is explained in layman's terms with very understandable examples of how to implement, test and experiment within google analytics.</comment>


Introduction to musl, the best light-weight Posix.2008 library - <AUTHOR> https://www.musl-libc.org/intro.html <comment><AUTHOR> Binaries statically linked with musl have no external dependencies, even for features like DNS lookups or character set conversions that are implemented with dynamic loading on glibc. An application can really be deployed as a single binary file and run on any machine with the appropriate instruction set architecture and Linux kernel or Linux syscall ABI emulation layer.

In fact even pthread is included!</comment>


PostgreSQL 9.1 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.postgresql.org/about/news.1349

<comment><USER2> The only thing I feel is wrong with this (really: the /only thing/, which is fricken awesome... I love PostgreSQL from the bottom of my heart, and have been using it for almost all of my database needs since the late 90s) is "per- column collation": collation is not a problem "per-column", it is a problem "per-index", which means you really want it "per-operator class".

Here's the use case: you have a website, and you have users using it in English and French. With per-column collation, you are being advocated to have two fields, one english_name, and one french_name, that have /the same content/, but are defined using a different collation, so that the ordering condition on them becomes language-dependent.

The effect that has is actually terrible: it means that the size of your row (and yes, this may end up in TOAST, but there is still a massive penalty to going that route) ends up becoming ginormous, and the size of your row will just get larger the more languages you want to support as first-class citizens in your app.

Instead, what you /want/ is to just have an index english_ordered and an index french_ordered, and you want to be able to select which index you use for any specific query. If you "do it right", you'd also want to be able to support ordering the data using German collation, but it would "just be irritating slower".

Now, if you don't use PostgreSQL much, this may seem like a pipe dream of extra standards and complex interactions ("how will you specify that?!", etc.). However, it turns out there is already a feature that does 99% of this: "operator classes", which is how PostgreSQL lets you define custom collations for user-defined types.

Only, PostgreSQL operator classes are slightly more general than that, as you can specify an operator class to be used when performing order operations for your index; and, even more importantly: they are already being used to work around a specific case of operator-specific collation.

Here's the example: let's say that your database is set up for UTF-8 collation, and yet you have this one field you want to do a "prefix-match" on: WHERE a LIKE 'B%'. The problem with this is that you cannot use a Unicode collation to index this search: it might be that 'B' and 'b' and even 'Q' all index "exactly the same" for purposes of this collation (and there are some other corner cases with the other mapping direction as well).

So, to get index performance for this field, without changing your entire database to collate using "C" collation (which works out to "binary ordering"), you have a few choices, with one of them being to create a index that uses the special "operator class" called text_pattern_ops ("text" in this case as the field is likely a "text" field: there is also varchar_pattern_ops, etc.).

Once specified in your index, PostgreSQL knows to use it for purposes of the aforementioned LIKE clause. You specify this while making your index by specifying the operator class after the column.

        CREATE INDEX my_index ON my_table (a text_pattern_ops);

The next piece of the puzzle is that an ORDER BY clause can take a USING parameter to pass it a custom operator, and you can always (obviously) use a custom operator for purposes of comparison. So, you now are in the position where you should be able to do this:

        CREATE INDEX my_index ON my_table (a english_collation_ops);
        CREATE INDEX my_index ON my_table (a french_collation_ops);

        SELECT * FROM my_table
            WHERE english_collation_less(a, 'Bob')
            ORDER BY a USING english_collation_less;

So, really, the only thing that needs to be specified, is we need the ability to have "parameterized operator classes": as in, we really need a "meta operator class" that takes itself an argument, the string name of the collation, and then returns an operator class. With this one general technique defined, we not only drastically increase PostgreSQL's user-defined type abilities, but we better solve this whole class of collation problem.

(Unfortunately, I suck at e-mail, or I'd get on the PostgreSQL mailing list and try to argue for this in a more well-defined way; maybe someone else who cares will eventually see it and become this feature's champion; or, of course, come up with an even better solution than mine ;P.)

<comment><USER3> For my multi-lingual-content-needs I work with a main table which only has the non-translatable data items and a subtable which contains the translatable content, one row per language per row from the main table. Then I do a join to get a single full 'object' in the language of choice. And per the postgres docs I can choose collation at query time. Thus the following query would do the trick if I'm correct:

select * from main_table join sub_table on main_id=sub_id where sub_table.language='fr_FR' ORDER BY my_translatable_col COLLATE "fr_FR.utf8";

No bloating tables, just a join and correct collation.

<comment><USER2> Most content is not "translated", it just needs to be differently collated. If you have a company directory, you have the names of every user in the company in a table, and you need to display that information in a collation based on the locale of the viewing user. Having to have a new table for every language that contains the same data as the main table is just pointless overhead. Also, while you can choose the collation at query time, the point of per- column collation is to let you have an index over that collation. Can you please demonstrate how the use case of "company directory" would be cleanly and efficiently implemented using per-column collation?

EDIT: I've been looking more into this COLLATE keyword that they have added, and I'm actually somewhat curious to see if I can make this work (where the optimizer manages to choose the right index) by something like the following, in which case I'm going to be seriously happy... ;P.

        CREATE TABLE my_table (a text);
        CREATE INDEX my_index ON my_table ((a COLLATE "en_US"));
        CREATE INDEX my_index ON my_table ((a COLLATE "de_DE"));
        SELECT * FROM my_table ORDER BY a COLLATE "de_DE";

<comment><USER4> Simply out of curiosity for this same topic, do you happen to know of a good resource for finding out even just some of the less trivial differences that this solves? I'm sure it does but off hand I don't know them (I'm not all that multilingual).

I understand it'll bring in glyph orderings that don't exist in en_US or whatever you've got the default set to, such as 'Ç' in french among others.

<comment><USER2> I do not have a good resource, however, I know a few off the top of my head: 1) characters with modifiers, like umlauts, sometimes collate the same, and sometimes collate differently; 2) multiple characters may collate as a single character, such as "ll" (I just did a search to verify that this was the case in Spanish, and found the Collation page on Wikipedia, which you might find interesting); and 3) different locales may choose to collate numbers using different algorithms (in English we usually expect "1,000" to sort after "200", but if "," is a decimal point, then you might not).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (Mostly) like a clockwork: A new year, a new release. And like every year before we find a beautiful collection of new stuff to play with.

Even better this time around: It's looking as if the next release of Ubuntu will get 9.1 packaged which spares me from manually packaging or using a PPA this time around.

The new features each release introduces are too sweet to skip just because a distribution is lagging. And ever since I began using PostgreSQL at the 7.1 days I have _never_ experienced a bug that really affected me. No byte of data has ever been lost, no single time did it crash on me due to circumstances beyond my control ( _cough_ free disk space _cough_ ).

Congratulations to everybody responsible for yet another awesome release!

Yes. I am a fanboy. Sorry.

</comment><comment><USER6> For a trivial, synthetic write benchmark that I usually use to benchmark hardware and/or config changes, I'm seeing slight slowdowns for non-concurrent loads, and solid improvements for concurrent loads with.

For 1-2 clients, I'm seeing ~8% slower.

For 4 clients, 7.2% faster.

8 clients, 15% faster.

16 clients, 16.4% faster.

32 clients, 11% faster.

64 clients, 10% faster. Aggregate performance starts to level off here, so I stopped.

These are just cycling super simple INSERTs/DELETEs against the same table, columns data is 1K string, 100 byte string, then a concatenation of the pid and current iterator count. No indexes or primary keys. Each client is just a fork that performs 10,000 INSERTs, then 10,000 DELETEs in a loop of 10,000 iterations.

For the record, that's around 6,729 writes per second with 32 clients. If I set synchronous_commit = OFF in each client before running the benchmark, it's 27,157/sec. Then, if I reduce the first column size to 100 bytes, it's 50,592/sec. Impressive. I'm sure the synchronous_commit improvement would be much more drastic on disks without BBU write caches.

Database server is a 4-core Nehalem-based Xeon with 16GB RAM and a SAS disk array. PostgreSQL configuration has been decently tuned and full write durability is retained all the way down to the disks.

</comment><comment><USER7> I recently switched to PostgreSQL from MySQL and I couldn't be happier about it.

<comment><USER8> It seems that in general this decision should be made more frequently than it is, at least for new projects. Why do not more people select Postgres? Is it comfort level with MySQL? Tools and extensions?

<comment><USER9> I have an unusual reason, but a strong one: I primarily use relational DBs for large-scale analysis of frozen snapshots of data, rather than transactional loads. PostgreSQL has MVCC features built into it at the most fundamental levels where they cannot be disabled, and as such it's not suitable for the types of queries that I frequently run against MySQL. In the most extreme (and trivial) case, you can't run a "SELECT COUNT(*)" on a table in PostgreSQL without a full sequential scan of your data, which can be a huge expense when your row counts are in the tens or hundreds of millions. MySQL, in contrast, can return a cached answer instantly, which isn't possible under PostgreSQL. Less trivially, MySQL is still drastically faster for aggregates on low- cardinality fields.

Yes, I know you could set something up with triggers, but the point is that it needs to be simple enough for frequent, ad-hoc usage. Usually the time I need to know how big a table is when I just made it, and I might well drop it five minutes later. I'm not going to set up an elaborate network of meta-data tables when MySQL will just do it for me for free.

Not trying to hate on Postgres, by the way. I fully get that it's superior in most regards, and I use it frequently just for the much stronger support of user-defined functions. But MySQL does still have a few tricks left in it.

<comment><USER10> If I remember correctly it is only with MyISAM you get instant count(*) while InnoDB, just like PostgreSQL, has to look at every row of the table (or every row of the index since InnoDB also supports index only scans). This is due to both PostgreSQL and InnoDB being MVCC (multi-version concurrency control) database engines.

And MyISAM is only fast in very specialized workloads with low write and read/write concurrency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Finally! True serializability! Never let anyone (including the docs for older postgres versions) tell you that predicate locking is too hard to implement.

<comment><USER12> Kevin Grittner will be talking on Serialization this Friday, September 16th 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. His talk will be recorded... so those who aren't in Chicago can see/hear it later next week. <http://postgresopen.org/2011/schedule/presentations/61/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Should I as a web app developer at a startup be looking for an RDBMS beyond PostgreSQL, probably a commercial one?

I have somewhat of a database background, so I see the obvious advantages of PostgreSQL over MySQL. In particular, things like more procedural language support, a better query optimizer, better concurrency control, etc. (Though things like Amazon RDS are compelling from a deployment perspective.)

I fundamentally believe that using an RDBMS, rather than a NoSQL data store is the right approach for rapid development of web apps. (Though, I primarily mean this as an attack on, e.g., MongoDB, since I think Redis is great, just not a replacement for an RDBMS.)

However, I have almost no experience with the more advanced end of the RDBMS spectrum, primarily because they tend to cost money (for the real, non-free versions). Should I be learning/looking at DB2? Should I be learning/looking at Oracle?

Or do the additional features of these more advanced RDBMS options require such specialized scenarios (a bank, a big enterprise) or such specialized hardware (weird clustered setups) that MySQL/PostgreSQL will always be just as good?

<comment><AUTHOR> A short, probably biased and not 100% precise answer would be: no, you don't need to look for a commercial RDBMS.

The real answer is: always evaluate options. Make sure the solution you choose supports everything you need and that you will be able to learn how to use it or hire people who can. Without knowing what your requirements are it's impossible to say, but in the vast majority of cases, PostgreSQL will be as good as Oracle, MS SQL Server or DB2.

If your evaluation indicates that you need to pay for one of these, double and triple check it... and only if you're 100% sure that's the case, shell out for a commercial RDBMS.

<comment><USER13> I think that's probably true, though I do wonder from a purely engineering standpoint what features Oracle/DB2/MS have at this point that PostgreSQL does not. Special index types? Query hints? Suggestions for physical layout on table creation?

<comment><USER14> Materialized views and query hints are the big ones the PostgreSQL is lacking.

<comment><USER4> Query hints are not likely to happen, at least not in the way that they do in other databases. There's been a number of discussions about it and you can see some of the aftermath at <http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/OptimizerHintsDiscussion>

As for Materialzed Views, there's some options there currently, though it looks like native support would be a lot nicer: [http://tech.jonathangardner.net/wiki/PostgreSQL/Materialized...](http://tech.jonathangardner.net/wiki/PostgreSQL/Materialized_Views)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you happen to be in Chicago, or near Chicago this week, be sure to come to PostgreSQL Open from Wednesday to Friday this week(Sept 14th-16th).

<http://postgresopen.org/2011/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Congrats to the team for a really exciting release. We can't wait to ship it here at Heroku.

</comment><comment><USER16> KNN indexing!

<comment><USER17> Can anyone give an example use case for this? I'm not sure I fully understand what it means.

<comment><USER18> In spatial queries, find the 5 restaurants closest to me. In full text search, find the 5 words closest to "fuschia" so you can spell check, or try to search for what you __think__ the user meant to type.</comment></comment></comment>


This is why you ship - <AUTHOR> http://tommy.authpad.com/this-is-why-you-ship <comment><USER2> I want to hear people who flopped say "just ship it".

Because how many second chances do you get?

The people who get lucky always say "do what I did" - it's a constant theme in business, they take credit for their actions when it was more of right time, right place, that cannot be easily duplicated.

<comment><USER3> I believe it's the same, you'll waste no more time at a failing project while being able to put your time into a possibly successful next project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I seriously hate that this sort of bullshit blogpost gets upvotes on HN. Is there content here? No.

It's a veiled advertisement for another shitty iOS word game.

And I can't even downvote.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry it got upvotes. I wanted to keep it short, but I thought it was interesting that we thought we should release the social version, didn't, were proven right by feedback BUT got valuable users because of some luck that shipping brought us. I thought that was interesting and I thought I'd share it. I intentionally kept the name and all details about the game out of the post so it wouldn't feel like an ad. I linked to it for those who were curious but that's it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is completely the wrong message, but there's something useful hiding here. "Just ship it" is idiotic, and can cost you tremendously in many ways.

Rather, the appropriate message is: "Make a decision, and move on."

The misstep was waiting a month before shipping when it was ready to ship. Waiting a month for a decision is stupid. If the decision was "Don't ship it," that would have been fine too. As long as a decision being made, you have somewhere to go and something to do. Decision paralysis, though, can kill a company.

</comment><comment><USER6> The same kind of arguments can also go on, and are just as fruitless to persist in, within the mind of a single developer...

<comment><USER7> Are they really that fruitless, as a rule? As ck2 pointed out, the other side of this coin is "we skimped on design in favor of moving fast and shipping, and now we have an unfocused product with a janky architecture that will be near impossible to recover from because we've already launched."

I'm the kind of person who exhibits that endless internal deliberation, so I fully understand the need to keep that in check. But, as is often the case, I think the key is finding balance and adjusting based on awareness of your own propensities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As mentioned in a few other comments here, posts like these seem to be more fluff then real advice. I'd rather hear more about the struggles of the teams disagreement, and how you came to a good plan from those discussions. You can tell me all day to _jump off a bridge_ because the one time you jumped, it worked out and you landed on nice fluffy pillows. However, that doesn't really change my mind about _jumping off a bridge_. It seems much more constructive to talk about the inner workings of "why" I should do something, rather then just "Hey! Go. F^$#ING. DO. THIS."

Secondly, is " _Always ship. Always. Fucking. Ship. God damnit, SHIP YOUR CODE ALREADY!_ " (end of the article) really necessary?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Really crappy feeling realizing that people got offended enough by how mediocre your blog was to flag and get it banned. My apologies HNers, I'll try to do better next time.</comment>


What Kids Are Learning About Thanksgiving Is Changing - <AUTHOR> https://time.com/5725168/thanksgiving-history-lesson/ <comment><USER2> Living in New England, you'll see many roads, even schools named after tribes and chiefs like Pequot and Metacom. I always wonder at the reasoning behind that, a rosy view of the past, remembrance of what was lost, just plain ignorance of what happened? The Great Indian War and what led up to it left a mark there that lingers to this day in one form or another.

I'll tell you though, the Puritans became the very thing, if not worse, they were escaping in England...</comment>


Ask HN: Who is going to buy RIM? - <AUTHOR>

I personally bid for Motorola but then again I have no idea <comment><USER2> Why not Samsung? I would imagine having a portfolio of patents that they can use to keep Apple at bay would be worth 6-7 Billion. Plus, they could use the enterprise advantage that Blackberry has to further dominate their Android position.

</comment><comment><USER3> The only remaining viable part of BlackBerry (as RIM is known now) is their BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) service, which is like WhatsApp, but came out a decade ago. The user base is still very large (60m worldwide), so the platform could valuable as a standalone offering or as part of another mobile services company.

The patent portfolio will likely go to the highest bidder, independent of any company assets. No one needs their devices or the OS. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Samsung are all candidates, or it may go to a consortium of some/all, as has happened in the past with the sale of Nortel's portfolio.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think Google has any pressing need to buy a 2nd struggling manufacturer.

I would guess Amazon, Facebook, or maybe a big Chinese corporation.

</comment><comment><USER5> Fairfax supposedly is working on a deal for 4.7b but they are worried they won't be able to acquire the necessary financing to make it happen.

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/fairfax- st...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/fairfax- strikes-47-billion-deal-to-buy-blackberry/article14470689/#dashboard/follows/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's has no scence for a cellphone company to buy it, the company is going to fail anywhere, the most reasonable opsibility is for some non-competitor organization , I bet for canonical so they can make their phones with ubuntu..

</comment><comment><USER7> Why buy it? Looks like their customer base is heading for something close to 0 within a few years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Their patents silly.

Now I am starting to think they will auction them off to get more money

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> RIM? That doesn't exist anymore. They are called "BlackBerry" these days[0].

[0] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-30/rim-changes- company...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-30/rim-changes-company-name- to-blackberry.html)</comment>


Poetry – Dependency Management for Python – v1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/releases/tag/1.0.0 <comment><USER2> We have moved our dependency management from pipenv to poetry and hasn't been more happier than now working with and publish Python modules.

Now we use pyenv with poetry to run all our projects in Python with venv in project instead of decided by poetry default settings. We changed the settings with:

      poetry config settings.virtualenvs.in-project true

After this in hgignore or gitignore added .venv folder.

Now everything is the way we wanted, with Pipenv many times faced issues that the project worked with requirements.txt but not in Pipenv. Didn't have this issue moving to poetry yet.

Also with emacs support and automated deployment tools the predictability of poetry made our team easy to work with and publish Python application modules.

<comment><USER3> Nice. I do however much prefer keeping the venv out of the source tree where they do not interfere with `tree` and `grep` and whatnot. I'm curios what benefit you see with having the venv cluttering the work-space ?

<comment><USER4> It took me a while to be convinced to switch to in-folder venv but the benefits are

* VS Code configuration so much easier as you can point to the correct env using a relative path in settings.json and check that in

* Predictable paths to execute tasks / build

* No outside of development tree vens that you forget to clean up or forget to deactivate

* No different to node_modules, .git or similar when it comes to "polluting" the local project tree as you can .gitignore it

<comment><USER5> > as you can .gitignore it

As well as ignore config in codecov, black, flake8, mypy and so on...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The recommended installation method still doesn't work without manual intervention. For the reference, I use WSL with the latest Ubuntu LTS version.

\- I tried using the recommended installation method of

        curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/get-poetry.py | python

Didn't work. I don't have python installed, just python3. Fair enough.

\- Using the above method, but replacing `| python` with `| python3`: The installation works. But trying to invoke poetry gives this error:

        /usr/bin/env: 'python': No such file or directory

Turns out poetry executable is calling python in the shebang.

\- Manually changed shebang in `$HOME/.poetry/bin/poetry` to `#!/usr/bin/env python3`: Now poetry runs successfully.

I mean, it works, but it is fragile (shebang probably needs to be manually reset at every update), not beginner-friendly, and not ergonomic. Installing using pip3 has the same issue. In comparison, pipenv is much easier to install. I was hoping this issue would not be present for poetry v1.0, but unfortunately it is.

<comment><USER7> Curious what's stopping you from symlinking python3 to python? In fact, I'm surprised the package manager didn't already do that (I thought it did for Debian and its derivatives, including Ubuntu). Does WSL throw a wrench in that or something?

<comment><USER8> Because python link/binary is python 2, which you might also have installed

Being able to rely on python being python 2 and python3 being python 3 is pretty useful

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Even putting aside it's approach to dependency management, Poetry has a fond place in my heart for making it so much easier to publish to PyPI.

If poetry did nothing but simply the process of publishing and updating python packages, it would still be an amazing tool.

<comment><USER10> I've read of another project for publishing to PyPI called flit. Anyone knows how they compare to each other?

<comment><USER11> Poetry tries to help you manage your whole project while flit is just for building your library (and optionally uploading; you can always use twine to do the upload). It's all-in-one versus one-job-one-tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I'm excited that Poetry hit 1.0, I'm actually more excited about the fact more devs were added to the maintenance team and that it transitioned to a project namespace. Sébastien was previously the sole dev with commit access so I'm hopeful this gives the project a much healthier future.

<comment><USER13> The project org has two (public) members and the second highest contributor has 10 commits with <600 lines. It would inspire more confidence if the project is transferred (invited) to pypa some day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been watching poetry for the last couple years, hoping that it is THE replacement to the virtualenv/virtualenvwrapper/pyenv workflow.

pipenv never felt quite right. poetry has felt really close.

I'd love to know if anyone has made this jump and their experience.

<comment><USER15> Same here. I got really excited by pipenv, but every single time I've tried it, it takes 10+ minutes to determine the dependencies and build a lock file (see issue 2284 [1]). It just makes it un-usable for a lot of my use-cases, e.g. setting up a clean environment for exploratory data analysis. Does anyone know if poetry improves in this area?

[1] [https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/2284](https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/2284)

<comment><USER16> (See my other comment)

Yes, I haven't encountered any of the slowness in dependency resolution that Pipenv has with Poetry. It does still feel a bit slow compared to package managers from other languages, but not in a buggy way, so I would attribute it to not being that optimized yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> hopefully v1.0 now means it's pretty stable. using poetry so far has been painful, the gains you got with the improved dependency resolution were unfortunately somewhat impacted by crazy annoying bugs, like `poetry shell` not actually activating the virtual environment [0]

[0] [https://github.com/python- poetry/poetry/issues/571](https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/571)

edit: gah, still hitting baffling errors:

      $ poetry env use /usr/local/bin/python3
      [NoCompatiblePythonVersionFound]
      The specified Python version (3.7) is not
      supported by the project (^3.7).
      Please choose a compatible version or loosen the python constraint specified in the pyproject.toml file.
      $ poetry env use /usr/local/bin/python3
      [NoCompatiblePythonVersionFound]
      The specified Python version (3.7) is not
      supported by the project (>=3.7).
      Please choose a compatible version or loosen the python constraint specified in the pyproject.toml file.

v1.0.0 generally seems to work smoother though

</comment><comment><USER18> For whatever reason, I've never understood the point or actual benefit of virtualenvs.

Having lived more in the JS ecosystem for the last several years, my ideal workflow would be a copy of how the Yarn package manager works:

\- Top-level dependencies defined in an editable metadata file

\- Transitive dependencies with hashes generated based on the calculated dependency tree

\- All dependencies installed locally to the project, in the equivalent of a `node_modules` folder

\- All package tarballs / wheels / etc cached locally and committed in an "offline mirror" folder for easy and consistent installation

\- Attempting to reinstall packages when they already are installed in that folder should be an almost instantaneous no-op

PEP-582 (adding standard handling for a "__pypackages__" folder) appears to be the equivalent of `node_modules` that I've wanted, but tools don't seem to support it yet. I'd looked through several Python packaging tools over the last year, but none of them seemed to support it yet (including Poetry [0]).

The only tool that I can find that really supports PEP-582 atm is `pythonloc` [1], which is really just a wrapper around `python` and pip` that adds that folder to the path. Using that and `pip-tools`, I was able to mostly cobble together a workflow that mimics the one I want. I wrote a `requirements.in` file with my main deps, generated a `requirements.txt` with the pinned versions and hashes with `pip-compile`, was able to download and cache them using `pip`, and installed them locally with `piploc`.

Admittedly, I've only tried this out once a few weeks ago on an experimental task, but it seemed to work out sufficiently, and I intend to implement that workflow on several of our Python services in the near future.

If anyone's got suggestions on better / alternate approaches, I'd be interested.

[0] [https://github.com/python- poetry/poetry/issues/872](https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/872)

[1] [https://github.com/cs01/pythonloc](https://github.com/cs01/pythonloc)

[2] [https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools](https://github.com/jazzband/pip- tools)

<comment><USER2> Node and npm are no better than JavaScript tools used for dependency management. I had a project in node 6.0 refuse to work with node 8 and npm failed to upgrade. No different than python 2.7 to Python 3.

Just browser and JavaScript silence the errors and might result in things cannot be seen. This is not the case with Python "No errors must pass silently unless explicitly silenced".

<comment><USER19> Totally agree; node_modules starts to break horribly when you use the wrong node/npm command to access it. This is unfortunately causing a lot of misconceptions because people usually judge tools by short-term experiementations. node_modules works very well in that scenario and gets the most love--until it doesn't, you tear hair for those nasty bugs, and sadly can't even convince people with your experience ("it works perfectly for me, I don't know what you're talking about.")

I guess the node_modules approach is fine for Node, since the native binding story is quite bleak and no very people are deep into it anyway. But for Python this would be a complete no-go given how pervasive extension modules are. I don't know what went through Ian Bicking's mind when he first designed virtualenv, but so many aspects of it just reflects that tight cross-language integration Python is so good at (the bin/include/lib structure, copying/symlinking binaries into place, setting up env vars to trick foreign build systems into working, etc.). I wouldn't want it any other way even if I could go back in time and involve in its original design. Well, maybe a few minor improvements, like offer a more beginner-frieldly interface than activate scripts, or more heavily promote running the binaries directly, but the design is just… correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know if the situation with using `poetry` with `pyenv` has gotten any better? I like poetry's approach, but I had a very difficult time getting it to play nice with my system last time I tried.

<comment><USER21> I use this workflow with poetry 1.0.0 just fine

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's the advantage of using poetry compare to vendorize your dependencies and check in the whl files (which can be manylinux binary) into your version management system?

<comment><USER22> This is actually pretty straightforward:

      pip wheel -w ./wheelhouse -r requirements.txt

Then you can modify your script to insert every whl in sys.path. Add wheelhouse directory to version control and you get a repo that can easily reproduce anywhere that manylinux is supported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why would I use this instead of Anaconda?

<comment><USER24> They are pretty different tools. Poetry is a dependency manager and packaging tool, Anaconda is a pre-configured environment for scientific Python.

<comment><USER25> I guess the comparison would be to Conda which also allows for declaring dependencies and building environments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is there a good way to build a portable package containing dependencies for installing on an airgapped system?

<comment> ctrlc-root Take a look at Twitter PEX. I gave a short talk on it earlier this year ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abnwINA50DE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abnwINA50DE)).

<comment><USER27> Pex doesn't support pep 517 but shiv does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I thought the billions ways to sort out dependencies and environments Python were its messiest part. I've been using a custom little batch script on windows to streamline that a bit as I mainly use python for small utilities as opposed to big projects - [https://gist.github.com/leoncvlt/10e67d9415e61eff0f5010ef6fe...](https://gist.github.com/leoncvlt/10e67d9415e61eff0f5010ef6fec51d8#file- evenvo-bat-L33) \- but interested in giving this a spin!

</comment><comment><USER29> Big discussion about project 4 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672436](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672436)

</comment><comment><USER30> Since pipenv is pretty much dormant, this seems to be a nice alternative. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER31> Just to note, dev dependencies in Poetry is still rather flaky vis-à-vis projects forever in pre-release mode e.g. Black. Consider sticking with Pipenv if you have heavy dev dependencies requirements.

<comment><USER27> Nowadays its just --allow-prerelease

<comment><USER16> If I read the 1.0 changelog correctly, I think you don't need that flag anymore

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Messing around with major/minor Python version compatibility and dependency conflicts has always been my least favorite part of Python. A tool like this is much appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER33> This looks pretty nice! Definitely reminds me of the node ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER34> it has a nice comparison to pipenv

<comment><USER35> I don't think that was a nice comparison.

It just says that he doesn't like the pipenv cli, and some decisions made, but doesn't say why or how poetry is different.

The only thing it goes into detail with is a bug in pipenvs dependency resolution, and how their resolver avoids that bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's not clear from the current title but Poetry v1.0.0 was just released: [https://github.com/python- poetry/poetry/releases/tag/1.0.0](https://github.com/python- poetry/poetry/releases/tag/1.0.0)

</comment><comment><USER37> Looks like Randall's comic needs an update!

[https://github.com/dephell/dephell](https://github.com/dephell/dephell)

[https://xkcd.com/1987/](https://xkcd.com/1987/)

<comment><USER38> Big up to dephell ([https://github.com/dephell/dephell](https://github.com/dephell/dephell)) which makes it pretty straightforward to convert from one dependency management system to another, while the dust settles.</comment></comment>


Reverse engineering Android from binary to source - <AUTHOR> http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=06.%20Android%20M%20on%20zWatch <comment><USER2> This article is fascinating, and having done board bringup work, I understand the challenges that the author faced. He did absolutely top-notch work. Getting a board that does _nothing_ , has no debugger, no output of any kind going is really hard. However, to me the most important quote in the story is this:

> As per the GPL (under which the Linux kernel is licensed), the manufacturer > had to have provided a written offer of sources. Needless to say that a > random chinese company (SmartQ, currently owned by Huami) does not care even > a little about this sort of thing. I checked theit site every which way I > could, and found no sources. Emaling them produced no reply, of course. Of > course, why would it? I tried to find some people on LinkedIn who might > help, but I was told in no uncertain terms to go away.

With increasing amounts of SW development moving to low-cost countries, this sort of attitude may well eventually destroy the availability of the 'free' software that these manufacturers rely on (besides hurting the GPL + homebrew firmware communities).

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, how the Chinese system of "openness" works means that detailed hardware documentation is often freely available if you know where to look, even that which would be NDA'd and basically impossible to get from a Western company:

[http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297](http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297)

Consider if the SoC was from Broadcom or Qualcomm or some other Western company. You'd probably be able to get source code, but having that doesn't show as much about what else the hardware can do as they're not going to share datasheets with you (and there's unlikely to be anyone willing to leak them either.)

Edit: have you looked at Ingenic's site? They have what appears to be Linux source code available:

[http://www.ingenic.cn/en/?product/id/6/lm/1.html](http://www.ingenic.cn/en/?product/id/6/lm/1.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ingenic does. Which is of no help as it has no drivers for this watch. See last paragraph of my article

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> dimity - nice hack :)

I'd argue that the most critical piece of work is power management for the watch. Did this magically port over or does the system just run at full whack?

Cheers,

Nick

<comment><AUTHOR> Android does power management relatively well. In the kernel I am working on (the one I mentioned in the end - the almost-working one) I have a few cool hacks I am trying, like using the JZ4775's DMA engine as a sensor hub (it is a small MIPS cpu that cna run arbitrary code)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I'm interested in is running Debian and X on the watch... any pointers?

<comment><AUTHOR> It already has a linux kernel with WiFi support. Android build tools will happily package your ramdisk together with the kernel into an android boot image. The "system" image you provide to the unbricking tool will be written unmodified unto the system partition.

That is to say that the work is all done for you. Enjoy :)

<comment><USER5> Cheers. Sounds promising :)</comment></comment></comment>


Samsung ships low-cost 128GB SSDs - <AUTHOR> http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/07/08/samsung.mlc.128gb.ssd.ship/

<comment><USER2> "The company hasn't named customers or prices..."

Suckered in by the headline... again.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if people actually read these articles before voting them up. There is absolutely nothing informative here. A more appropriate headline could have been "Drive manufacturer, Samsung, still making drives". That has about as much substance as this article. In any case, it certainly would have been more correct since announcing that manufacturing has started is not the same as shipping.

There are no quotes or even a hint at how the drives will be priced to support the "low cost" claim. The closest thing is the mention that Samsung has "started mass production of 128GB solid-state drives based on multi-level cell (MLC) technology that should dramatically reduce the cost of switching to flash storage in notebooks". It doesn't get any more vague than that. Besides, "low cost" is a relative term. A 128GB SSD on New Egg is $3k. If Samsung managed to produce new drives at a third of that cost I guess you could say the drives are "low cost" in comparison, but it's certainly not low cost when you're considering putting one in a $2k laptop.

This is just bad journalism.

<comment><USER4> Prices are dropping rapidly; I have a hunch that this Samsung drive is the same as the 128GB OCZ SSD that is selling for under $600.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish manufacturers of flash devices were a lot more up-front about read vs. write speeds and details on wear-leveling.

What I would love: a drive that would tell you when it was 1 month from failure.

In the meantime, there's this 2.5" CF Raid 5 adaptor:

[http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/23/centurys-sata-adapter- sup...](http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/23/centurys-sata-adapter- supports-3-cf-cards-cheap-ssds-for-all/)

<comment><USER4> SMART exists; the SSD makers just need to use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It really depends how low priced it is. SSDs are probably the future, but they don't have enough of an advantage for me to care to pay more than a standard hard drive - which in fact likely has more storage anyway!

Bring me a SSD which is the same cost or less per GB and I'm there, until then I'll just be waiting...

<comment><USER7> I'd pay extra for a smaller drive that used less power and ran cooler. The article also said it ran faster than spinning disk hard drives.

<comment><USER8> How much extra would you pay?

<comment><USER7> That depends on when my current POS dies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A 6 word headline with 3 of them being incorrect. Is that a record?

Production != shipping, and they didn't name a price.

<comment><USER8> At least it got the Samsung and 128GB SSD part right.</comment></comment>


Magic: The Gathering – DevOps Deck - <AUTHOR> http://blog.xebialabs.com/2015/10/26/magic-the-gathering-devops-deck/ <comment><USER2> Not sure, but "GitHub Library" seems too expensive.

"Master Kim" costs merely 5 mana, and is a 7/7 creature plus other benefits. Way too cheap to summon.

The same stands for "Jez The Humble Monk". 4/4 creature for converted mana cost of 3, which by itself is too cheap, and forestwalk and an ability on top of that.

"Docker", the same as "Master Kim", except it's even cheaper.

"DevOps" seems more or less sensible, as it requires all the mana colours, what by itself is difficult. But why made it an artifact? It works only once, when put into play. It would made more sense for it to be a sorcery.

"Continuous Delivery" has too powerful and too cheap ability, and it's not limited in any way in a turn.

And so on, and so forth.</comment>


Cat Person (Fiction) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person <comment><USER2> I really enjoyed this piece of short fiction. Very of the moment. Recommend the audio version especially as read by author ;)</comment>


Why we are not showing Gone Home at PAX - <AUTHOR> http://thefullbrightcompany.com/2013/06/21/why-we-are-not-showing-gone-home-at-pax/

<comment><USER2> A thoughtful explanation of a principled, reasonable decision. I give them two days before they're buried under an avalanche of brainless dorks ranting about "censorship."</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone Using Typescript with React Native? - <AUTHOR> What are your experiences? What does your setup look like? <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/issues/56...](https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/issues/5634)</comment>


Detection of novel coronaviruses in bats in Myanmar - <AUTHOR> https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0230802 <comment><USER2> A speculative theory backed by purely circumstantial evidence gathered online of covid-19's origin is that chinese researchers investigating coronaviruses in bats working near the wet market in Wuhan had an accident and became infected, one who apparently disappeared and has been presumed dead.

I don't know if that's pure conspiracy theory nonsense, but it certainly seems risky to be doing this kind of thing:

> Free-ranging bats were captured, and rectal and oral swabs and guano samples > collected for coronaviral screening

Especially considering the potential for asymptomatic spread...

<comment><USER3> How do you suggest research be done?

<comment><USER2> With great care and from a distance.

If we're manually catching and swabbing wild bat rectums, I don't think we're doing a good job of keeping a distance, especially considering how far technology has progressed.

<comment><USER4> Humans and bats aren't going to stop interacting, not least because guano is an excellent fertilizer and the easiest way to get it is by giving bats incentives to defecate over your fields.

That being so, and given the utter implausibility of bat-butthole-swabbing robots or whatever, would you rather we had people taking the negligible additional risk of doing this kind of research, so that we have a chance of being able to prepare in advance for the arrival of zoonoses like SARS-CoV-2? Or would you rather be taken by surprise?

Going by the current state of affairs in the world, I have to say that being taken by surprise seems to have very little to recommend it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bats migrate. Migration brings species into contact with one another. (Even indirect contact such as sharing the same water source). With species in contact, viruses can spread. All this is perfectly normal.

What's new here is that climate is changing, causing migration patterns to change, causing new interactions between species that previously did not interact. Some of which are eventually brought into contact with humans. Again none of this is new either, except for the climate change part. All of this could and did happen already without climate change, but climate change can turn things up a few notches by making migration pattern changes much more wide ranging than before.

So essentially what I am saying is it seems plausible that Covid-19 and its hit on the economy is one of the first "gifts" of global climate change. This seems to be right in front of our noses, but unnoticed by the whole world.

<comment><USER6> Climate change is one of those issues where you can draw a line between any problem and it. Maybe someone just ate an infected bat? Or got bit by a live infected bat? Seems way more probable.

<comment><USER5> True, to your first part. Question is, how did the bat come to be where it was.

The flip side of being able to draw lines to climate change is that there's a reason you can draw lines to it, namely the underlying reality that it touches just about everything, meaning it could in fact be playing a role.

Obviously it's not conclusive though.

This may turn out to be one of the recurring themes of climate change linked problems: they are linkable in theory, but in practice it's hard to be conclusive. With this theme continuing on for the next few centuries of human history as more problems emerge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A recent interview with the last author, Dr. Jonna Mazet, former director of the pandemic intelligence project disestablished by the current administration in September 2019: [https://katz.substack.com/p/audio-edition-the-pandemic- preve...](https://katz.substack.com/p/audio-edition-the-pandemic-prevention)

</comment><comment><USER7> Note that coronavirus is a big family of virus, only a few (2?) are transmisible from human to human and also potentially deadly for humans. Most of the virus in the coronavirus family don´t infect humans or are not harmful. You may get just a normal cold, and you are fine a week later.

They found 6 new versions of coronavirus, but IIUC they are not harmful for humans. This is business as usual.

<comment><USER8> FEIW, there are at least four common coronaviruses (229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1) that humans transmit, and based on the CDC's language there are other less common ones.

[https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/general- information.html](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/general-information.html)

<comment><USER4> The larger point is that coronaviruses as a family are unusually good at mutation and recombination, especially in the facilitating environment of bats, which typically have a high viral load. That makes them of particular concern as a potential source of novel infectious diseases in humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does bats have covid19 immunity serum?

<comment><USER10> The answer is even more fascinating then that: [https://get21stnight.com/2020/03/30/why-do-we-keep- getting-d...](https://get21stnight.com/2020/03/30/why-do-we-keep-getting- diseases-from-bats/)

<comment><USER11> Interesting article thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


So you want to build a generator - <AUTHOR> http://galaxykate0.tumblr.com/post/139774965871/so-you-want-to-build-a-generator <comment><USER2> A generator is also known as a compiler. The main difference is that in a generator, sometimes the rules are hardcoded.

In fact, almost all of books pertaining to design of compilers will help you in designing good generators.

Additionally, not mentioned in an otherwise great article directly, only implicitly in those "frameworks" part, is an expert system. An expert system is more general logic framework than grammar-based system, that uses first and higher order logic (backward, forward propagation, "blast" methods, simplifications etc.) to derive solutions given some starting "nouns", the set of which can be generated using any other method. The main pro of an expert system is that if the rules are properly encoded, it will not generate anything outside the constraints (except maybe bottom which means invalid input). This makes expert system reliably easy to control, and a large enough expert system can actually encode a grammar _and_ a good story structure.

The main drawback of those is that until recently, they had trouble dealing with existential statements (e.g. for every monster in a set, the monsters XP must be within a delta and increasing by at least delta2) but that has been mostly fixed in advanced languages such as Isabelle/HOL - things have come a long way since Prolog.

As for "perceptual differentiation", tere have been attempts to construct difference-tracking neural networks, mostly successful, and use a certain way to generate novelty and detect such input, in addition to being self-training.

Sadly, nobody yet succesfully combined both of the above to create a machine to generate novel logic. That would be sort of a true AI - maybe a worthy extension of OpenCog.

<comment><USER3> _A generator is also known as a compiler._

I'm really not sure I agree with this, at least at any useful level.

I work on solving constraint problems (one of the mentioned options in this article). I have a reasonable knowledge of compilers, and excellent knowledge of the inside of a constraint solvers, and there is very little, if any, practical overlap between the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought this was going to be about making your own electricity from some kind of rotary motion. I am so old.

<comment><USER5> I thought this would be about code scaffolding tools (only because of my recent frustration and research in the subject, which I will explain now).

I've been looking around for an authentication microservice and/or nodejs application starter kit. The core idea is that passportjs is installed with sane defaults, ready to add some social network support, ready to enable as an openID provider. For the user: register, login, edit profile, maybe a public ``GET /users/:username``. The appropriate middleware export to use in microservices (Supporting Laravel and flask would be a gratuitous plus).

Most of what I've found is not explicitly the scaffolding I'm looking for. I'm not looking to use a nodejs version of WordPress (aka automagic monolith framework with plugin ecosystem). I'm looking for something where the application is scaffolded out instead of hidden behind automagic. Something where the express/koa is laid out in traditional webserver fashion ready for natural tweaks, addons, etc. No opinionated subversion of control from the dev, no reverse engineering and forking the framework for trivial tweaks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something I've been wondering:

If I create a generator with 10 possible unique outputs, and each output is substantial enough such that it would qualify for copyright protection had I created it directly, do I have any copyright over the outputs of my generator by virtue of creating the generator itself?

What if I build the generator but don't actually run it myself, and instead other people run it by clicking the "generate output" button?

How about if my generator has a million possible unique outputs? Or ten trillion?

<comment><USER7> The first case is clear. The works are created by you, and the involvement of a tool of your own making has no effect on copyright. If you make a line-art generator program and print out 10 million sheets of paper filled with random scribbles, they are all copyrighted works by you, just not very interesting ones.

The second case depends entirely on how you license the generator program. If you sell the generator and don't make an explicit claim over produced works, they are the copyright of the person who clicked the button. The act of creation doesn't have to be more complicated than that (after all taking a photo also involves just clicking a button).

<comment><USER6> > If you sell the generator and don't make an explicit claim over produced > works, they are the copyright of the person who clicked the button.

I'm not sure this would meet the "threshold of originality" standard [1]. The simple act of pushing a button _can_ meet the requirement for "at least some minimal degree of creativity" (as in your example of taking a photo), but I don't think it would do so when there is no relationship between the manner or timing of the button push and the output of the tool.

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

<comment><USER7> Most generators have a random component which is seeded from a timestamp. In that way, the user provides the creative input to the generator.

If the generator doesn't randomize anything but just produces a preset sequence of outputs, that's different -- my feeling is that such a program's complete output is a single work by the program's author, since it's not affected by any external input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This talk was related to generation and surprises [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000412)</comment>


Google may shut down its news service in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://techgraph.co/hubs/google/google-may-shut-down-its-news-service-in-european-union/ <comment><USER3> As an EU citizen, I'll go against the grain here and say that I will indeed miss this service.

The idea that google has made "a killing" of news.google.com is just silly. There are, I'm sure, related benefits, but they don't serve ads on those pages, they simply aggregate and sort various news services.

As someone who appreciates getting different viewpoints, having the articles sorted like this was a great value.

This is a classic case of the news media shooting itself in the foot.

To me, this akin to restaurants saying that concierge desks need to pay them to refer customers to them. Just ridiculous.

<comment><USER4> If we're talking about news.google.com, then yeh it's ridiculous. That site is just headline links. It's not "content", it's a list of text links.

The foundation of the web is text links. So the EU wants to charge for HTML links. Struggling to see the logic there. Users click those links, read the story content, and end up on the news website. _That_ is the fair transaction right there, no money needed.

Unless I'm missing something? Is this about the web or app? I don't use the google app so not sure if clicking links just opens a web view in app?

<comment><USER5> > The foundation of the web is text links. So the EU wants to charge for HTML > links.

What's scary here is how this would effect other aggregators of news: HN, reddit, automated online RSS Feeds, etc. These kinds of overreaching regulations don't happen in a bubble, they trickle down to everyone. So the question: why is Google specifically targeted?

Is this part of the Big Tech Backlash[0] - specifically... the flow and control of information? Or is it more like a Netflix thing, where I think that 'The Old Guard' News Orgs may be overvaluing themselves.

Also, it was my understanding that News Organizations voluntarily submitted and made an effort to be compliant with Google News[1]. That is, Google News doesn't display news source data without permission (I think they did early on?).

I'm certain that if Google (or other large-scale News aggregator) required permission to be listed, most news orgs (enough to make a viable product) would happily comply.

[0] [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22The%22+%22EU%22+Tech+Backlash&n...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22The%22+%22EU%22+Tech+Backlash&norw=1&ia=web)

[1] [https://support.google.com/news/publisher- center/answer/4078...](https://support.google.com/news/publisher- center/answer/40787?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We can certainly argue if the "link tax" is a good idea.

Google, however, playing the hurt and wounded entity because they're no more able to leech "free" content to make a killing is, well, not very plausible.

Don't want to provide EU users with Google News?

Well, good bye and good riddance.

<comment><USER7> > leech "free" content

Google News doesn't (in itself) have revenue. No ads.

If you'd said Google Search or Youtube, then that's a completely different thing. Those are multi-billion dollar products, and I suppose your argument is that Google doesn't add any value between site/youtuber and customer?

But Google News? It's one thing to have a service for free. It's another to force someone to pay to run a free service.

"Playing the hurt"? I have seen zero indication of that. All I've seen is "Shrug, if that's the rules you make then a product like this cannot exist. We'll shut it, then".

I don't use Google News, myself.

> Well, good bye and good riddance.

People who like this kind of product (that now cannot exist) and news sites, would disagree. E.g. see what happened in Germany when the link tax was introduced.

You may not like it, but users (clearly… I mean they used it) and news sites do.

And now it's a thing that can't exist in the EU.

<comment><USER8> News sites complain about Google stealing their content, which is why the law came into existance in the first place. Which is, of course, ridiculous, because they profit a lot from the eyeballs sent their way by Google.

It's just plain greed, and I'd rather have Google shut down their news service instead of getting some unholy exemption which would stiffle innovation in the news gathering area.

<comment><USER9> Even though I'm not in favor of this law I understand the point of view of the news outlets. Basically it's a team effort: Google aggregates the news which gives users a convenient entry point to access articles that interests them from a variety of websites but of course that wouldn't be possible if journalists didn't write the articles in the first place. Google wins by having more people use their services and log into their Google account, news outlets wins by reaching a larger audience through Google.

But then, from the point of view of the news outlets, the benefits from this arrangement are not split fairly because they're the ones who do the hard and expensive part (writing the articles, investigating etc...) while Google merely links to them while making money from ads and collecting user data. If they're lucky the user _may_ end up clicking on the headline to actually access the website, and then if they don't have an ad blocker they _may_ generate a couple of ad impressions. Basically they're left with the scraps even though they're the one who actually did most of the actual work.

Now I think the link tax is a bad solution to this issue but I also think it's not completely fair to call news agencies "greedy" in a blanket statement. The business model of journalism in the internet era is still very much an open question.

<comment><USER7> I agree with all that except it should be clearer that Google doesn't gain anything (except PR?) from actually running Google News. There are no ads on it.

Google probably does gain from people logging in (though you can use Google News without logging in, it probably does cause people to log in, even if just a little more).

If the newspaper has ads from Google, then Google does take a cut (that's the business logic), and arguably Google News is similar to the newspaper buying ads on Google Search, except they don't have to pay.

People do pay for Google Search ads to drive traffic to their site, and for newspapers that probably gives them ad revenue and signups.

Newspapers get a similar service from Google News for free.

"Should Google (or anyone else) pay newspapers in order to run a news aggregation service" really boils down to "how much $ is a login worth to Google"?

It becomes a formula:

Google News value to google = google_news_users_per_month * fraction_not_logged_in * fraction_who log_in_because_of_google_news * value_of_a_login_to_google

Let's guess some numbers:

1M * 0.7 * 0.2 * $0.01 = $1400 per month

If Google has to pay developers, server infrastructure, AND newspapers more than $1400 then Google loses money on this and SHOULD turn down the product. I say this as a shareholder of GOOG: If it doesn't make financial sense then stop wasting my money.

(but yes, there's also brand value)

PS: Yes, there's one more value to Google, and that's the general: "More Internet use is a benefit to Google because any increase of Internet use will have a fraction on it go to sites that have Google ads on them". But saying that's bad is as if Google were to give free Internet, and people would demand that Google _pay_ to give free Internet to people, because users would browse to sites where many of them would have Google ads on them.

<comment><USER9> If Google news holds so little value to Google, why didn't they shut it down at the first sign of controversy? After all they publicly oppose these laws and shutting the service down would remove a big argument of their opponents, wouldn't it?

In particular I'm sure Google benefits from news indirectly by giving them valuable info about their users (you can tell a lot about somebody by what news they're interested in) and also by adding one more potentially useful service to the Google "suite", giving one more reason for users to commit to their ecosystems. That being said I'm incapable of judging of the actual monetary value of either of these things.

>People do pay for Google Search ads to drive traffic to their site, and for newspapers that probably gives them ad revenue and signups.

>Newspapers get a similar service from Google News for free.

That's a bit of mental gymnastics here. That's like saying "people pay to have google ads, but you can also get listed in the organic results for free! Thanks Google!". If I go to Google news then I expect to see news, them only displaying newspapers that agree to pay for it would make the service objectively worse. That would be like having Google search only listing ads and no organic results.

As rational actors it's in the newspaper's best interest to create content that interests people and it's in Google's best interest to promote that content to make their service valuable. Nobody is giving anybody a freebie here.

<comment><USER7> I obviously don't have all the data about why Google is or isn't shutting Google News down.

But given that we are in 2018, not right after 2001-09-11 as when it was created, even if Google News doesn't add anything _positive_ to Google's bottom line or PR (big, BIG "if") there's a huge cost to shutting it down to Google PR, since it's another example of Google shutting a popular product.

If the EU is doing this, it actually gives Google an excuse, in case they wanted to shut it down anyway. And nobody else would make a replacement because it's just not economical.

Yes. I agree that "being logged in while browsing the Internet" has value to Google.

You may disagree on what that value is. I may be _way_ off, but it's a Fermi estimate. I encourage you to plug in the numbers you would estimate, and see what monetary value Google News has to Google, and see if a link tax with amounts that news sites would actually care about makes economic sense.

> That's a bit of mental gymnastics here.

I agree. It's more a counter-point to "obviously Google should pay" than a suggestion for a better model.

> Nobody is giving anybody a freebie here.

On this we agree. Both supply-side parties add value, and all three parties gain value. To say that one of the parties is a "leech" is not accurate.

If the EU forces Google to pay a meaningful fee to news sites, then that may (in my estimate: extremely likely to) completely erase any benefits, and it'd be rational for Google to bug out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've got to say - I found it REALLY difficult to find an authoritative or trustworthy source on what the link tax is.

From my understanding here's the rub: there are two definitions. One definition is you'd have to pay a publisher if you link to their article whilst quoting it. That's what the opponents are saying. This seems disingenuous, since it's the quoting the article that triggers the tax - <USER2> the link.

The supporters characterize it as: If you rip off a significant part of a copyright work the publisher can charge you since you're taking their copyrighted work (whether you link to them or not).

Now people are saying sites link Google News would be affected because they list lots of news sites quotes with links to the source. I would've thought it was pretty obvious however, if the aggregater quotes enough then there's no point to click through and therefore the revenue accrues to Google rather than the publisher. This seems fine to me -- there should be a charge for that behaviour. What's more it actually seems self-levelling. If Google doesn't quote too much and people click through then there's no incentive for the publisher to charge Google for the content since they're generating demand and charging Google would cause them to be de-listed.

So let's move on, why is Google complaining? Well it seems to me that it's actually in Google's interests to be able to leech off these publishers by stealing their content wholesale and this would prevent that, and apparently they think whining publicly is a reasonable strategy. It's not.

<comment><USER11> I believe the root complaint is the link shows the "Title", a small snippet, and/or a thumbnailed image.

The concern is that it's a law essentially designed to punish large companies for essentially doing what the internet is built to do: link to other sites.

To not have any snippets and just display raw URL links would be to essentially go back to the early 90's in terms of user experience.

Edit: Also, arguably, the headline itself is a quote. How can you charge someone for quoting something newsworthy? That seems to be the very definition of fair use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hacker News would technically be affected by the same Link tax. It would probably not be enforced but still.

It's such a stupid idea and I really lose hope about the future of a free internet when I see stuff like this. Hopefully saner minds will prevail

<comment><USER13> > Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hacker News would technically be affected by > the same Link tax. It would probably not be enforced but still.

The "link tax" isn't a tax on actual links. That name is a misnomer, it applies to links that _reproduce key parts of the linked content inline_.

So, for example, Google News links duplicating the headline and providing a summary. Because, in essence, Google News is copying content from news organisations/sites reducing their traffic (usually skimming headlines is enough to cherry-pick the few things you care about) while themselves profiting (keeping people on Google sites and around Google ads longer).

Whether this "link tax" is the right solution is debatable, but I hope we can agree that Google and Facebook abusing their dominant position this way isn't health for the world.

This does _not_ apply to HN, because HN isn't reproducing any of the linked content inline.

<comment><USER14> What about RSS ? Many news sites have a RSS feed : * [http://www.spiegel.de/schlagzeilen/tops/index.rss](http://www.spiegel.de/schlagzeilen/tops/index.rss) * [https://www.lemonde.fr/rss/une.xml](https://www.lemonde.fr/rss/une.xml)

So as an individual I can use them, but the dead Google Reader would have meet the same issue than Google News ?

<comment><USER15> The publisher can control how much content is exposed via RSS (typically just the lede), whereas with presenting scraped content by third party news aggregators, the user will never need to visit the origin site.

<comment><USER16> The publisher can also control how much is shared with third party aggregators, either through robots.txt or a paywall method.

Which has been the case since search engines became a thing.

<comment><USER15> That isn't the same at all. A publisher cannot use robots.txt, and much less paywalls, to indicate a part of text that can be shared in syndication.

<comment><USER16> A paywall can. The page displays the snippet the publication is allowing to be shared, while the paywall hides the rest. I believe this is what a few of the bigger US newspapers are doing right now.

<comment><USER15> Ok, but that would require regular readers to have credentials for the paywall. I understood the discussion to be about scraping publicly accessible sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some random site says that another site reported and doesn't link it to the original article?

Is this them getting ready for the link tax? So now we will see these "news" sites that regurgitate other peoples news omit links to the original articles as to not pay this "tax"?

Will this actually be beneficial in the long run? Omitting core internet functionality, linking, because it costs extra. Only help to spread fake news as links to sources and references will be omitted. Or is there some clause that only tech giants will be taxed? How do you define a giant then. Certainly google but what about Reddit? Or Hacker News?

Don't have answers to any of these questions but until we know more I'll be very skeptical of this "link tax"

</comment><comment><USER18> It has been gone from Spain for some time now.

I thought I was going to miss it, but honestly, I don't.

I also thought that the news services would crumble and die. They didn't, but their news quality took a dive. I can't say whether this is causality or just correlation.

<comment><USER19> > _I also thought that the news services would crumble and die. They didn 't_

"The [Spanish] law...cost publishers €10 million, or about $10.9 million, which would fall disproportionately on smaller publishers" and led to "smaller Spanish aggregators, such as Planeta Ludico, NiagaRank, InfoAliment, and Multifriki shut[ting] down" [1].

[1] [https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech- policy/201...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-spains-google-tax-has-been-a-disaster-for- publishers/%3famp=1)

<comment><USER18> When I said "news services" I meant publishers, not aggregators. I didn't know or use any of those aggregators you mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder who those same publishers are going to blame when their visitors drop by 13% as they did in spain.

But maybe that's intended, as smaller publishers would suffer the most the large publishers would finally be able to decide what is news and how it's to be distributed.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study- spains-google-tax-news-shows-how-much-damage-it-has-done.shtml)

<comment><USER21> Too many small publishers are not good. The small publishers which gain revenue because of Google are too dependent on it. Hence they cannot criticize Google else indirectly their SEO is affected. Larger independent publishers have to compete with smaller clickbaity non professional publishers and also have to serve clickbait. Because Ad revenue is mostly a zero sum game. The smaller publishers who do not have many journalists just make clickbait titles eat into professionals who are also dependent on Ads.

It is in Google's interest to have multiple small publishers instead of few large publishers, because Google can blackmail the smaller ones more easily and multiple publisher speaking against something is more difficult then few grouped publishers.

If the publishers and Google's interest clash, it is a good thing for the readers. If they align, it is a very good thing for Google, a little good for publishers and bad for readers.

<comment><USER20> every publisher is "small" at first. This is about not rocking the boat for larger publishers by better, maybe more professional, upstarts.

The argument about click-baity titles is relevant to whether a publisher is small or large. Every large publisher now has a yellow press sub-brand that just pushes out trash with click-baits.

<comment><USER21> Larger ad dependent publishers have to push out click bait because smaller publishers push it out. If larger publishers would not do clickbait if smaller publishers do, they go out of business, because smaller ones steal the share of money.

Ad revenue is a zero sum game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this related to the news shown on the start screen of the android chrome? If so I will miss it - not at all. I think I can count the times I saw something interesting in that list on one hand and I never found an option to get rid of it.

<comment><USER23> No, it's not related to that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> People are pointing out that Google doesn't serve ads on Google news, and that they drive clicks to news sites, like this is some kind of huge favor. Its not, its strategy. Google wants to be the choke-point for every page lookup on the web. They have the stats on what people search and news is obviously a big one, so they provide services like this to put a moat around that sweet sweet ad revenue that might leak away if users were to ever use anything other than Google as the first thing they open in a browser.

</comment><comment><USER25> The phone book is listing my business number, and they're not paying me?!?

Outrage!

The phone book should have to pay me to list my number!

<completely silent phone>

Oh, wait...

</comment><comment><USER26> So, HN should pay "techgraph" for linking this article?

<comment><USER27> HN is not a megacorp that forces websites to use an awful amp version of their own websites. HN only provide a simple link and heading.

<comment><USER26> The law even mentioned "amp"? How specific!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have very much hope that Google shutdowns really big things in Europe eventually, things like YouTube, maybe some parts of Android and stuff.

I'm very curious if it'll cause governments or business to crawl and ask for mercy or if it'll lead to Google replacements emerging in Europe.

In China, Google's exodus provided a way to emerge multitude of local services which make me think that what Google does is not a rocket science and other can do it as well, there is just no incentive. Anyway, that's just random thoughts, it would be really interesting to see what would happen if Google left Europe in a big way.

<comment><USER29> There is already a youtube "replacement" from Europe: Dailymotion, and it's absolutely terrible.

They are only surviving by hosting copyrighted content and bombarding it with Unskippable ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is it the content-preview (however small), the content-gathering or the linking that will cost money?

Google could (re-)write the headlines and micro-summaries themselves (using machine-learning technologies) and just provide links, without copying anything from elsewhere for previewing purposes. Embedding no snippets and thumbnails at all from the media-/publisher websites would turn Google News into a text-only site, making it a lot less appealing to the audience.

</comment><comment><USER27> For anybody, (like myself), who cannot stand Google's amp version of popular website's, try this: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/amp2html/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/amp2html/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Original source:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/18/google- ne...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/18/google-news-may- shut-over-eu-plans-to-charge-tax-for-links)

</comment><comment><USER32> It may actually help the large subscription news sites. If all the news aggregators went away, I'd be more likely to pay for news from a reputable publisher to curate my news for me.

</comment><comment><USER33> The link tax is an end to organic search results. You want to be found on google, then you'll need to buy clicks using adwords. Google wins

</comment><comment><USER34> And another one gone, and another one gone Another one bites the dust

</comment><comment><USER29> Would the Apple News widget shown on iOS also be affected by this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't know as it is still unclear, how much "link tax" is going to affect the newsstand, but there is a less chance of Apple news to get banned as apple is paying to the publisher for publishing their content on Apple news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> don't they mean not providing European sourced news globally, for example if they provide something from Der Spiegel to US users wouldn't that be hit with the link tax?

</comment><comment><USER36> goodbye and farewell

</comment><comment><USER37> I hate both Google and the media, so this is great news.

</comment><comment><USER38> And nothing of value would be lost.

</comment><comment><USER39> This seems more like an empty threat and a bargaining position. If they wanted to shut down they would, not leak to the media incessantly about their intentions.

Why are they pushing amp on publishers if this content doesn't matter to Google? This is extremely self serving and then trying to play innocent is disingenuous and predatory.

There are no principles at stake here, only the exploitative business interests of a monopolistic business. The standard PR playbook of misinformation, lobbying, 'think tanks' and and 'helpful' opinion pieces is being rolled out, which is the predictable reaction of any well resourced interest hellbent on getting their their way.</comment>


New Social Network Allowing Users to Have Freedom of Speech - <AUTHOR> https://kontackt.co <comment> noah-kun This happens every time someone gets butthurt on a mainstream social site, it's getting tiring.

So, the site offers "freedom of speech"? Can I go on there and slander someone or do insider trading? Can I share copyright material against DMCA takedown notices? With any luck yes and they go to court.

What these folks really want is a place to indoctrinate and coordinate attacks on marginalized people. Thankfully they usually don't succeed.

Look at the user list--"Admin" and "test123". Check the terms of service--it's Lorm Ipsum placeholder text.

I'd also poke fun at their unlicensed use of Ricky and Morty giving an... ungodly gesture (), but hey it's a "free speech" site that means they can rip off whatever they like... oops, they're at `22.214.171.124`, a GoDaddy shared hosting service in the US. Moreover, it seems to be registered to a Canadian or by a Canadian company so hate speech laws are going to be even more developed there.

<comment><USER2> "Freedom of speech" is the absolute worst positioning for a chat/social space. It's practically begging for every "social outcast" to show up and go on some socially unacceptable screed just to test if they really can say wtf they want. Then this actively attracts more of the same and it's the perfect recipe for radicalizing people and actively creating monsters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> And it seems to be down already..

<comment><AUTHOR> tweaks perfection isnt easy

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I went on a mastodon instance once that was will with people who had been banned from other social media sites for being 'too far to the left'. It was pretty entertaining for a while, watching people who were all like-minded screaming into the void.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Sign up with Facebook"

<comment><USER6> Or email</comment></comment>


The human brain can create structures in up to 11 dimensions - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/science-discovers-human-brain-works-up-to-11-dimensions <comment><USER2> Wouldn't feature be a better term? or Am I missing something?</comment>