Unix Command-Line Kung Fu - <AUTHOR> http://www.deer-run.com/~hal/Unix_Command-Line_Kung_Fu_(SANS).pdf

<comment><USER2> Amazing that I just now learned Ctrl-R after so many years of bash use.

</comment><comment><USER3> The suggestion on page 28 to use .[^.]* to match dot files is wrong I think, it won't match anything with a second dot in it, when they really want to avoid '.' and '..'.

<comment><USER4> No procrast kept me from fixing this and I couldn't stand it. The example is right and I am wrong. I was thinking about regex syntax, not globbing syntax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always seem to learn at least one new trick with each of these.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow! I learned a lot! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER7> Hmm,

Text starts talking about tab completion without giving slightest explanation of what it is. Oddly, I was wondering that a few week ago. Any guru ready to give a hint?

<comment><USER8> Tab completion is pushing the tab key at the command line or in an editor (it's often not tab in an editor, eclipse uses control-space I think). The computer will then complete what you were typing for you as if by magic. I have written whole dissertations just by typing the title and then leaving a heavy book on the tab key _.

_ Different commands lines and editors vary, but in general tab completion will complete the current word/filename/command if it is unambiguous, and provide some kind of listing if it is ambiguous -- so on the bash command line it will beep if it can't complete, but pushing tab twice will then show all the possible completion.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A place to vent your frustrations where you might get solutions - <AUTHOR> https://www.3hoursolutions.com/frustrations <comment><AUTHOR> I'd like people to tell me what bothers them during their workday so that I can find solutions.</comment>


Investigation of an Airborne Aircraft Carrier Concept (1973) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/529372.pdf <comment><USER2> This is the old "parasite fighter" concept. It came from a big problem in WWII: fighters had less range than bombers, so bombers had no fighter protection near their targets.

Then came "fighter-bombers". The F-15, which is a fighter, has almost the bomb load of a B-29, considerable range, and the ability to fight its way to a target. It also can usually put a bomb on the target, rather than somewhere in the general neighborhood, so fewer bombs are needed. (In the WWII era, bombers had trouble consistently hitting the right city. There were cases where the wrong country was bombed. So vast numbers of bombs were dropped.)

<comment><USER3> For those not familiar with that: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command#The_early_...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command#The_early_years_of_the_Second_World_War):

 _" It was common in the early years of the war for bombers relying on dead reckoning navigation to miss entire cities. Surveys of bombing photographs and other sources published during August 1941, indicated that fewer than one bomb in ten fell within 5 miles (8.0 km) of its intended target."_

And that is in _daylight_ bombing.

I also remember reading that some British bombers accidentally bombed British mainland in bad weather (with at least twenty miles of sea between their target and Brirtsh mainland) [http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C2454254](http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C2454254) may mention such cases, but isn't online.

<comment><USER4> Being so used to GPS, it's hard to wrap my head around that.

With an easily affordable consumer electronic device that can fit in my pocket, I have better navigational abilities than the absolute best money could buy until a handful of decades ago.

<comment><USER5> It fits in the pocket alright, but you're conveniently forgetting about the dozens of satellites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the ZRS series of helium filled flying aircraft carriers with on-board biplanes. They didn't last very long though.

USS Akron (ZRS-4) - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Akron_%28ZRS-4%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Akron_%28ZRS-4%29)

USS Macon (ZRS-5) - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macon_%28ZRS-5%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macon_%28ZRS-5%29)

</comment><comment><USER7> DARPA is contracting out for the drone version right now.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/11/10/...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/11/10/the- pentagon-wants-an-airborne-aircraft-carrier-for-drones/)

<comment><USER8> Interesting. Seems that there would be no need for expensive catapult/catchwire operations. Just synchronize speeds and grab the drone with a big mechanized claw of some sort. Drone takeoff could be just like dropping bombs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh that is a lot of fun. I find the idea of stacking micro fighter jets inside a 747 pretty amusing. (not to mention the 'nuclear powered airplane' which is the final evolutionary stage of this platform :-)

Of course it does _not_ look like the unholy love child of a Parrot AR drone and a nuclear air craft carrier :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> Vehicles in aircraft was a popular concept in the 70s. See the Phoenix aircraft from "Battle of the Planets" aka Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. Don't judge my bad taste in entertainment too harshly, I was just a little kid at the time.

<comment><USER11> man, now i know what it was! - about 35 years ago, living in USSR near border we had some reception of some foreign TV and this was like nothing else available on USSR TV, these series blew our minds, it was literally "out of this world" :) I'm actually torn right now between curiosity to watch it now and fear that it will spoil the magic that it built in my mind those decades ago :)

<comment><USER12> don't go back and watch it. trust me. Look upon the memories fondly instead ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain the purpose of this? The only reason I can think of to have this (which Animats mentions in a comment) is to allow fighters with modest fuel tanks to attack deep in territory they couldn't otherwise reach. But this problem is a _lot_ easier to solve with in-air refueling, which has been used since the Korean war.

<comment><USER14> you may not want the enemy to know you're sending a fleet of fighter jets in their direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A new idea: "Pentagon Seeks Aircraft-based Drones for Future Missions"

[http://www.defensenews.com/article/20141111/DEFREG02/3111100...](http://www.defensenews.com/article/20141111/DEFREG02/311110031/Pentagon- Seeks-Aircraft-based-Drones-Future-Missions)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> DARPA have a new round open looking for alternative approaches: [https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=a73e0ea...](https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=a73e0ea615c675383c1529c5ad631249&tab=core&_cview=0)

</comment><comment><USER11> it definitely can save money/time/etc... when used in a most typical modern conflict against localized and less [military] powerful enemy, like Iraq, Libya, ISIS, etc... that lacks modern airspace offense/defense capabilities.

It would be much less useful against another type of opponent, like Russia, China, probably Iran (at least it comes close to it), Syria (has pretty functional fighter jets and bought S-400 missile systems) - ie. the ones who possess capabilities of striking airborne targets hundred miles away.

<comment><USER16> Striking requires targeting. S-400 is a very impressive piece of tech, but in order to strike something thats 2k miles away, you need to be able to see it. (Unless it has blind fire capabilities where you can target an area/altitude and have the missile search for a target there.)

Jamming and other countermeasures would make something like this that is a drone mothership very interesting over large land masses.

US has a huge edge anywhere there is water, but deep inland, have a fully mobile and defensible air field that can go anywhere is extremely compelling. Doubly so when you already have established air superiority.

<comment><USER11> >in order to strike something thats 2k miles away, you need to be able to see it.

that is done by satellites in particular. And China for example develops ballistic anti-ship missile which would be able to strike targets 2K miles away. A ballistic warhead coming at 10M would present next level of challenge even for ship-based anti-missile systems. I don't see a flying aircraft carrier able to carry any meaningful defense capabilities against such an attack. My point here is that, even more than in case of naval aircraft carrier, such flying carrier would be useful only when total dominance is established, which wouldn't be the case with any meaningful military opponent. Of course there is no actual plans to fight an actual war against any such opponent :)

<comment><USER16> If US were to engage in open war with any other nuclear armed nation, fate of a few aircraft would be the least of our worries.

Even if no nuke ever reached North America, the consequences will. Case in point is Fukushima radiation being detectable on the west coast. ([http://www.whoi.edu/news-release/Fukushima- detection](http://www.whoi.edu/news-release/Fukushima-detection))

Granted those are trace amounts, but if a full scale nuclear war took place in Eurasia, we'd definitely would feel effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks like great material for a movie ;)

<comment><USER18> Avengers did that :).

<comment><USER19> Along with 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow', though I recommend not wasting two hours of your life on it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple enable Markdown for iMessage? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Because the only people that use Markdown are programmers. I know, we think we're the center of the universe but the other 99.999% of the population have no idea what it is, nor do most care to learn it.

And Apple designs for masses, not niches.</comment>


Ask YC: Grooveshark Lite, What Do You Think? - <AUTHOR> http://listen.grooveshark.com/

<comment><USER2> Amazing.

This is easily one of the best interfaces for a music player that I have ever seen. The music selection is great, load times are nice and there are no ads. Did I mention the interface is both gorgeous and efficient?

I would prefer that it played a song when I clicked on the title rather than having to hit 'Play Song' each time. Other than that stunning job on this application.

Edit: I felt I should have been more constructive/useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> The download client stinks. I have OS.X Tiger, and the client farked on me, and doesn't allow me to do anything else to it. No idea how to fix it.

It took me 3 days to get accepted into program. That isn't such a big deal, except there was no confirmation email/text to let me know that the request went through. I ended up signing up three times till I figured it out.

Songs keep disappearing and reappearing when doing a song search. Within minutes. If a song disappears and it's on your queue, there is now way to know. The playlist just gets stuck there. And as others have stated, the play button not actually starting any playing is rather annoying. And this was on XP.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For people with trouble streaming -

[http://www.grooveshark.com/blog/2008/04/22/update- grooveshar...](http://www.grooveshark.com/blog/2008/04/22/update-grooveshark- lite-streaming-issues/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Minor problem on first use:

      1 Search for song "Concord Dawn Morning Light"
      2 Click on first song title
      3 Click on Play button on lower right, as I'm used to from every audio device and program since I've been born.
      4 Uh, nothing.
      5 Double click on song.
      6 Nothing.
      7 Oh, I have to click Play Song, or that cryptic little control on the right of the name.

Should be an easy fix I'd guess.

Nonetheless, pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER5> So I get on, search for "costello" since he was on the radio on the way home, and listen to "watching the detectives". Cool!

But then the music stops - shouldn't it continue playing on down the list? Seems to me the right default is to play until told to stop.

(Oh and that's Mac + FF2, worked fine for me unlike the other guy on this thread)

<comment><USER5> I tried it out at work this morning, and couldn't get anything to play on either firefox or safari. I can queue up music, and hitting play changes it to a pause button, but the song never starts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't work on my mac + firefox. "Play song" doesn't work.

Barring that, I am impressed with the clean UI, very iPhone-esque.

<comment><USER7> Heh, when I load the page it just says "Alternative content" in an H1. I am using Iceweasel with javascript disabled and Gnash instead of Flash though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excellent design. Really, much better than anything I could ever do. My humble attempt at constructive criticism follows.

The "play song" overlay is too obtrusive. It feels interruptive, which is what the transparency is trying to avoid. Maybe make the X out button bigger and more prominent?

Also, does anyone know if there is a way to kill the Flex initialization and loading bar? It just feels amateur.

Finally, the biggest thing I'm looking for in a site like this is the ability to quickly download whole albums? Maybe you should cross-reference the album search with an index of the album, so as to ensure it only downloads one copy of each song, and have a one-button album download feature.

Also, isn't it a trivial process to determine which links are still live by seeing if each user plays through the song's entirety?

</comment><comment><USER9> This is so impressive. It has some really obscure music too.

By the way, was this made in Adobe Flex?

<comment><AUTHOR> That it was

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> scary cool. is it legal?

<comment><USER11> "is it legal"

Good question. Hope someone can answer that here, for those of us who care about that sort of thing.

This looks like the best thing I've seen to replace napster. Good job!

<comment><USER12> >for those of us who care about that sort of thing

and for those who don't, I have one open waffles invite right now, first to email gets it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Way cool, fast and responsive with a clean interface. I was impressed when I drag and dropped an album to my playlist, it's nice to see such an intuitive GUI.

</comment><comment><USER14> Cool, but it stops every 15 seconds for me, making the music unlistenable (the "Popular" category is already 95% unlistenable due to the horror that is average taste in music...but searching turns up all sorts of good stuff). Since the major labels aren't historically friendly to this kind of thing, I suspect it won't last long even if they try to make it profitable for the labels. Indie labels are far more open-minded.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is awesome... the interface is so slick. The player didn't work but I'm impressed by the breadth of the music library.

</comment><comment><USER16> The only problem was the "play" button.

Otherwise, fracking awesome.

<comment><USER17> Someone has been watching Battlestar Galactica.

The play button doesn't work for me either. Firefox and Ubuntu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I prefer hypem.com for discovering music.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not working for me. Ubuntu 8.04. Firefox 3 beta 5. The interface works, but the song doesn't play.

</comment><comment><USER20> just incredible design and interface - many congrats. Mind sharing details about what you used?

</comment><comment><USER21> The interface brings to mind a cross between iTunes and the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER22> killer user interface

</comment><comment><USER23> your christian rap genres are all messed up. I was playing around browsing and you gat pranked or something. Christian Gangsta. Hahaha.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a larger than normal amount of tech IPO's happening? - <AUTHOR> Uber, Lyft, Slack, WeWork, GitLab, PagerDuty, Pinterest, Zoom, and the list goes on. Has anybody noticed the trend lately? What are the prevailing theories why this is happening? (e.g. cash out before crash, odd timing, etc) <comment><USER2> Something else to note. Very few of these companies are making a profit. In any case the losses are getting fatter. Lets see how it plays, we have been here before

</comment><comment><USER3> Cash out while the bubble is good.</comment>


How Mark Zuckerberg's Altruism Helps Himself - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html <comment><USER2> Quote from the article: Mark Zuckerberg did not donate $45 billion to charity. You may have heard that, but that was wrong. Here's what happened instead: Mr. Zuckerberg created an investment vehicle.

In doing so, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan did not set up a charitable foundation, which has nonprofit status. He created a limited liability company, one that has already reaped enormous benefits as public relations coup for himself. His P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock. Mr. Zuckerberg was depicted in breathless, glowing terms for having, in essence, moved money from one pocket to the other.

An L.L.C. can invest in for-profit companies (perhaps these will be characterized as societally responsible companies, but lots of companies claim the mantle of societal responsibility). An L.L.C. can make political donations. It can lobby for changes in the law. He remains completely free to do as he wishes with his money. That's what America is all about. But as a society, we don't generally call these types of activities "charity." (End of quote)

<comment><USER3> Exactly. This is what kills me with the recent trend of claming billionairs are heroes.

This year, Bill Gate has been all over the internet, "saving the world". But most of the money he gives away is invested by his "charity". And it goes into companies making military equipments, mining, extracting oil, etc. causing direct destruction of the causes they are pretending to protect.

E.G: I lived and worked in Africa. I saw the results of the "green revolution" made by Monsanto, an destructive agriculture program financially supported by the Gates. It's ugly. The continent is still recovering from it (and apparently they are in better shape than some parts of India).

But the Gate foundation says they want to help Africa : they fight malaria. So on one hand african people can starve, have no control over their agriculture or natural ressources, but they _may_ be saved from malaria in 10 years. This is hypocrisy at its best.

They are not heroes. They are smart investors. And for one thing they build for others, they build 3 for themself and may destroy many things on their path. Do not get blinded by their (good) PR.

<comment><USER4> > This year, Bill Gate has been all over the internet, "saving the world". But > most of the money he gives away is invested by his "charity". And it goes > into companies making military equipments, mining, extracting oil, etc. > causing direct destruction of the causes they are pretending to protect.

Any source for that?

<comment><USER5> Here is a link to the foundations financial records. I did not see anything that I would object to but maybe the GP will look over the actual data and enlighten us.

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General- Informatio...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General- Information/Financials)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have to say, I don't care what Zuckerberg spends his money on, it's his money. I found it pretentious when he deigned to write an open letter to his daughter informing the world that he was going to go on a spending spree, but I'm also not too keen on everyone on both sides analyzing whether his motivations are pure. If he was going to buy a thousand jet planes and start a jet plane demolition derby I don't know if anyone would bother asking if he might have some ulterior motive.

Then again, I don't go in for hero worship, do I have any need to identify who is doing something heroic and who isn't.

<comment><USER7> I think you missed the point: Zuckerberg is doing this to avoid paying taxes on his billions of dollars of accumulated wealth. Part of that money should be going back to the society that helped him earn it. Instead, he will have complete control over how it is spent.

<comment><USER6> He is under no obligation to pay taxes he does not owe. Tax deductability of charitable giving is effectively government spending, so take it up with your lawmakers if you don't want that. It has no bearing on Zuckerberg from a legal perspective, and since I'm not out to judge him, I don't really care if he decides to spend his money on a foundation or give it to the government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This might be a downvote target, but I think it's worth it. So here I go.

I'm curious to know why HN is overall supportive of Zuckerberg in this matter (based on top voted comments in similar threads). Here are my views and logics about this:

1\. Just because a person is a billionaire, it does not mean that they should be treated the same as Buffett or Gates. If today there is a chance if winning a lottery worth tens of billions, and tomorrow a random person is a winner, is does not mean that winner is comparable to Buffett and Gates.

2\. Warren Buffett became a millionaire in early 60s, then it took him 3 decades to be a billionaire on paper. Compared to this, Zuckerberg's path to be a billionaire was at least one order of magnitude faster. This does not mean that he was a genius developer, or a great business man. Many people tried building the same app as Facebook. In my view, Zuckerberg simply won that lottery, the very same way that there were many pubsub apps out there, older and arguably better designed than Twitter, but Twitter happened to win the lottery.

3\. The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable. The business model of Facebook is questionable. The way Facebook handles its users privacy is questionable. In a more similar space, Larry Page also had a fast track to the billionaires club, but what he built, and how he built it, is way more sound. There are many apps hat could replace Facebook, bit there aren't search algorithms as effective as Google. You can live without Facebook without making a difference to you life, when was the last day in your life that you did not Google?

4\. If we put Buffett, Gates and Page in one group, and people who won big lotteries in another, and I'm asked to play a machine learning classification algorithm, my brain would give Zuckerberg a high score of being a member of the second group.

<comment><USER9> That's the beauty of capitalism -- the market decides value, not some random bystander.

Who really cares whether you would group Zuckerberg with Buffett and Gates or not? I don't understand why that is relevant to the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >Maybe Mr. Zuckerberg will make wonderful decisions, ones I would personally be happy with. Maybe not. He blew his $100 million donation to the Newark school system..

Hopefully Zuckerberg learned a valuable lesson there -- improving inner city schools is simply not contingent upon how much money is thrown at them.

Case-in-point: [http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html](http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html) (warning, long read)

Are we really going to begrudge Zuckerberg for trusting Cory Booker, who was by all accounts very persuasive, and investing $100M+ in inner city schools? That's hardly bad behavior as the article seems to imply.

<comment><USER10> > improving inner city schools is simply not contingent upon how much money is > thrown at them.

Because of the prevailing infrastructure. If instead he had created a customized boarding school for the inner city kids somewhere safe and pleasant we'd be seeing real meaingingful change in their outlook right now.

As it is, they were in the same unhealthy environment they've always been in. It's not the schools, it's the teachers, the streets, their peers, the home life, everything.

A boarding school is the best solution to fix all that.

<comment><USER11> Research shows that school racial integration alone increases outcomes for all children by high double digits. In fact, racial integration is to my knowledge the only reliable method anyone has bothered to attempt to improve educational outcomes in underachieving schools.

What are referred to as "inner city schools" can more relevantly be referred to as re-segregated schools or just never-integrated schools.

ProPublica came out with extremely compelling data on this subject just several weeks ago.

<comment><USER9> Is this the article you're referring to?

[http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/how-5-florida- schools...](http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/how-5-florida-schools- ended-integration-and-became-among-worst-in-state/)

It's a bit thin on data / statistics..</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Serverless Containers with Google Cloud Run - <AUTHOR> https://thecloud.christmas/2019/7 <comment><USER2> For those like me looking for a comparison point:

> In some sense you can compare it to AWS Fargate and Azure Container > Instances. But the difference here is that Cloud Run will actually > automatically scale to zero, and you only pay for resources during a > request.

This seems really cool.

On the one hand, I appreciate the simplicity of serverless "Cloud CGI" as it were. But on the other hand, I have been confused why these always tie to a particular language and runtime.

Why can't I just run a binary in response to requests. I.e., real cloud CGI?

This seems made for me.

<comment><USER3> You should be able to put any binary into a docker container for cloud run.

<comment><USER2> That was my point; Cloud Run seems suited for my needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In an effort to share knowledge by writing daily articles in our 12 different advent calendars at [https://bekk.christmas](https://bekk.christmas) I contributed with this article in [https://thecloud.christmas](https://thecloud.christmas). It's just a short introduction to Cloud Run, how it compares to alternatives such as FaaS and Kubernetes, and some info on how to build and deploy to Cloud Run. If you want to learn more about Cloud Run there are several links to both the Cloud Run announcement blog posts from Google and the official documentation. Hope it can inspire someone to check it out for their serverless journey. I have been using it for a while for smaller services that integrate with both Cloud Datastore and Cloud Pub/Sub, and I think it works really well :)

</comment><comment><USER4> It would depend on the time to get a service to respond when scaled to zero. Otherwise it seems to be twice the cost of fargate with AWS, if you need to have it running all the time to get reasonable response times.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't "exactly" work that way. The instance doesn't disappear after the request is served. It hangs around in case there's another request (for a while), but you only pay while the request is active. In practice "cold starts" are single-digit percentage of most common workloads (# of requests that are cold). Also FWIW it's not just scale to 0. Scaling any number of instances up will hit cold starts, the difference is this happens automatically versus fixed cluster sizes which have to either be pre- provisioned for peak, or tend toward much slower scale up times.

Disclosure: I work for GCP

<comment><USER6> These averages that always get dropped to alleviate all concern tell me that serverless container cold starts will never be solved.

No platform will sweat to improve the start time of an environment 10x, not when it only affects <10% of executions that tend toward commodity prices.

Individual end-users must occasionally endure the waking up of successive microservices and devs must risk a bad first impression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The biggest issue I saw when evaluating Google Cloud Run *(for containers) is that a container needs to have an external IP address in order to access a managed database.

I hope they address this soon!

<comment><USER5> Curious as to why having an external IP/URL is a problem. If you're using almost any cloud service that has an API for adminstration (e.g. an API to tear down a VM), then is that really different to a public endpoint secured with platform-managed authentication? (which Cloud Run provides). Is it because you need firewall rules?

<comment><USER8> Many organizations insist on making everything private, i.e. running on an RFC1918 IP address, within the corporate 'perimeter', cloud included.

True, a cloud has an API, and that tends to be public rather than private, and that doesn't play well with the above approach.

There are some band-aids for this, such as Google Cloud's VPC service controls, which restricts which clients can access the Cloud API, providing a second layer of defence to IAM.

Personally I find this approach retrograde, because it assigns an element of trust to entities within the perimeter, whereas the BeyondCorp zero-trust approach does not, and plays well with the way public clouds have been designed (public endpoints).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What about permanent storage? A separate managed database is needed i guess? (Just like the rest of the serverless solutions)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is correct. That is one of the constraints of stateless share- nothing processes. This is also described in one of the principles in "The Twelve-Factor App": [https://12factor.net/processes](https://12factor.net/processes). All common/permanent state must be stored in common storage for all the processes.

Depending on the kind of permanent storage needed, you could use one or more of the managed databases offered by Google Cloud. Here is an overview: [https://cloud.google.com/products/databases/](https://cloud.google.com/products/databases/). You could also provision another open source database yourself either in Compute Engine or Kubernetes Engine, e.g. MongoDB. There is a lot of these on Marketplace, again for example MongoDB: [https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/click-t...](https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/click- to-deploy-images/mongodb).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much did it cost to build Google+ from concept thru production? - <AUTHOR>

I'm astounded by the awesomeness that is Google+. How much did it cost to build Google+ from concept through to launch? <comment><USER2> I'd imagine this is unanswerable. Many components likely are used in more than one Google project.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was an article that tried to piece it together a few days ago, I think they quoted around 550 million. Can't remember the article.

<comment><USER4> 550m would put it at around 3000 man years which seems a tad high.

<comment><USER5> 3000 man years is 100 people working for 30 years! Or 100 people working for 3 years!

Also 550m equated to 3000 man years includes hardware costs or not?</comment></comment></comment>


Deutsche Bank: Germany's Financial Colossus Stumbles - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/10/deutsche-bank-germany-financial-colossus-stumbles <comment><USER2> Deutsche Bank is counterparty to 55 _trillion_ euros of derivatives contracts (about 65 trillion USD). I worked for 3 years on its trading floor. It was Sales-a-gogo. "Print as much as you can". It's one of the very biggest counterparties to derivatives. Imagine if there was basis risk of only one tenth of one percent on those books (ie hedge imperfection usually due to a third factor such as credit quality or geographic mismatch). That would mean a P&L of 32.5 billion dollars. For risk on only one thousandth of the notional value of its derivatives books. Deutsche Bank is only worth 22 billion dollars.

Now of course such P&L could be positive too, but inevitably, when the wolves of the markets start hunting, they'll seek out the positions that are "wrong way". Let alone if DBK starts to try to unwind some of these derivatives. I bet it wouldn't be able to unwind even 2% (1.3 trillion!) of the books without blowing itself up.

I think this bank is Exhibit A to the catastrophic excesses of the past 20 years.

<comment><USER3> You've hit the nail on the head, the derivatives they have on their books are massive compared to shareholder equity. "Counterparty risk" are the words nobody analysing bank's derivatives positions wants to hear.

It's a terrible mistake there has never been a separation of investment banking from commercial banking in Germany (i realise the line is hard to draw), because the German taxpayer is essentially guaranteeing this shoddily run bank.

Unfortunately German politicians seem to be quite oblivious to this problem. Joe Ackermann (then CEO of DB) was giving Merkel advice on the financial crisis of 2008, so there seems to be some asymmetry of information there...

<comment><USER4> Not only giving advice: "Deutsche Bank boss throws party, Merkel foots the bill" ([http://www.dw.com/en/deutsche-bank-boss-throws-party- merkel-...](http://www.dw.com/en/deutsche-bank-boss-throws-party-merkel-foots- the-bill/a-4596587)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> German media makes a point that Deutsche Bank has been hit hard with the fines from their (past) crimes. Investment bankers and CEOs took their bonuses and moved on. Spiegel reports Deutsche Bank used $15 billions since 2012 for legal disputes.

<comment><USER6> I wonder why there isn't more resistance against the exorbitant fines the US charges European banks every year. These fines have become a significant business risk and should be regulated in free trade agreements, just like subsidies are limited in such agreements. For many European banks, the US business is a money drain, i.e. it costs them more than they get from it. However, they cannot escape US regulation and legal exposure as long as they want to have the ability to trade US dollars. In the end, this is a hidden tax the US charges on all banks world wide, just because it is powerful enough to do so.

<comment><USER7> US Regulators fine all banks in the US that they catch flagrantly breaking the law. They don't just fine European banks - have a look at how much they have fined the likes of JPMorgan or BoA over the last few years.

Likewise, regulators in Europe dish out fines a-plenty. The FSA certainly did over the LIBOR scandal recently.

European banks could mitigate risk in the US by trading legally or by ceasing trading there at all. If they really think they can't trade legally then their business is not welcome.

<comment><USER8> It's not the regulators, it's the prosecutors in New York, who have jurisdiction over the European banks since USD transactions are cleared there.

The problem is that banks absolutely cannot afford to risk going to court, since losing a case could mean losing their ability to deal in USD, which would be the end for them. That means that the banks _must_ settle any case brought by the prosecutors. The prosecutors in New York have used this leverage to squeeze billions in settlements from the European banks. The "justice"system has basically turned into what amounts to a protection racket.

<comment><USER9> With "protecting" you mean for example protecting the money laundering business in Mexico?

Your perspective is too generalized, thus ultimately false. The case depends on the size of the bank.

In the case of a famous British bank, the prosecution literally stated that they could _not_ prosecute the bank because it would have been too much of a big impact on the economy.

They got fined with the equivalent of a few weeks of profit, and who knows how much they ever profited from such illegal activities.

Doesn't sound a protection racket to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe now we'll finally get eurozone-wide mutualised deposit insurance.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that will solve it. Just like the eurozone money solved all the problems 15 years ago.

<comment><USER12> Precisely part of the problem was to give everyone the same currency but make every country fight each other for debt.

<comment><USER13> More precisely everyone got the same currency but didn't have to actually live by the stability pact. The politics of Euro membership were more important than the reality. Greece should never have been allowed to join, France and German routinely ignored the Stability and Growth pact.

The problem with DB is that Germany cannot let it fail because it underwrites its export economy, plus it would be a national humiliation. However bailing it out after imposing austerity on the PIGS, especially Greece would pour fuel on the fire of anti-German sentiment in the EU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Moving from the UK to Germany, I chose Deutsche Bank based on its reputation.

Pros:

* English! There is always someone on the phone who can speak English, and they can even send their letters in English. (for Germany, this is very rare)

* More "high touch" \- there is a person assigned to your account

* I can't remember if this was the case in UK, but I noticed that transfers to some Western EU countries have no fees and happen almost instantly. Yay!

Cons:

* Buggy app and web interface, sometimes the login fails or hangs randomly (revenue was €31.95 billion in 2014, it's understandable that they can't afford spending too much on this)

* The way to authorise online transactions is with a piece of paper with 100 codes printed on it (TAN list). This was a shock, but it's apparently common here.

* Taking advantage of new customers. They offered me a loan which I later realised had a ridiculous interest rate. (I guess this isn't exclusive to DB, but silly me expected that a good, more prestigious bank would value longer term customer relationships)

* Stupid useless cards. The default account (€5/month) comes with a card (EC Karte) that can only be used at German ATMs and in most German stores. Good luck trying to do anything online with it. For that you need a credit card (extra €5/month), the very idea of something like VISA Debit seems completely alien to Germans.

<comment><USER15> I'm a (german) DB customer as well, and I can't say I share a lot of these experiences.

> _Buggy app and web interface, sometimes the login fails or hangs randomly_

This never happened to me, maybe I'm just lucky. There used to be a problem with the web interface when you entered the banking system's URL without "[https://"](https://") but that's not really the same.

> _The way to authorise online transactions is with a piece of paper with 100 > codes printed on it (TAN list)_

I think the TAN list is just there to get you started (and for some technophobic Germans). I used it to set up SMS TANs immediately, and I think there is still an option for a dedicated TAN generator device (at least there used to be). Don't use the TAN list!

> _Stupid useless cards. The default account (€5 /month) comes with a card (EC > Karte) that can only be used at German ATMs and in most German stores._

An EC Card is _the thing_ you need to go shopping in Germany. It's entirely appropriate for this country, and contrary to what you claim it works just fine internationally (at least mine does). While it's true that some banks offer a separate VISA credit card, it shouldn't be a problem for you to get one elsewhere. As for VISA debit cards, I'm not sure if those even exist in Germany.

<comment><USER16> Actually most of the time German VISA and MasterCards work as a debit card. Payments are cleared from your checking account / Giro, instantly or nightly, so you are never really in debt, rather than being a second account that is always negative and partially or fully paid off each month. I am not sure which type is more common, but I usually ended up with the debit card style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Headquartered in the same city as the bank, the newspaper said

I thought their HQ is in London.

<comment><USER18> the bank is headquarted in Frankfurt: [https://www.db.com/en/content/Imprint.htm](https://www.db.com/en/content/Imprint.htm)

As far as i know the Investment Banking branch mainly operates from out of London.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just announced that they're tendering for EU3b, $2b debt, stock up 11%

</comment><comment><USER20> Well, Germany has been allowed to act as the emperor with no clothes for a while now; an economic powerhouse sitting on empty pension chests with an ageing population.

To compare pension fund assets:

        US: $46k/capita
        UK: $42k/capita
        Netherlands: $76k/capita
        Germany: $2.9k/capita

[http://www.oecd.org/finance/Pension-funds-pre- data-2015.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/finance/Pension-funds-pre-data-2015.pdf)

<comment><USER21> My colleague from Greece has been giddy as a schoolboy about this story all week. Not quite the roaring, thunderous fits of laughter as with the Volkswagen scandal, but this is still developing.

<comment><USER22> I'm from Germany and the troubles of the Deutsche Bank please me to no end. The only thing I'm scared of is that it will be declared "too big to fail" and bailed out with tax money, while at the same time there's no money for schools, police, refugees etc because Wolfgang Schäuble is obsessed with his "black zero".

<comment><USER23> As an Irish person living in Germany (partially as a result of an extremely ill-advised bank bailout), it's quite amusing to watch. I've watched this _exact_ scenario happen in my own country, except with retail "pillar" banks instead of investment banks. I compare bankers to the monarchy of old, they are completely unelected and hold a huge amount of power.

You can be sure that if the shit really hits the fan, Deutsche _will_ be bailed out, no matter the cost. I would bet anything on this happening.

<comment><USER22> _Deutsche will be bailed out, no matter the cost. I would bet anything on this happening._

The bank always wins :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Germany led by Merkel has set itself up for trouble.

Cyprus and Greece have created a precedence for creditor bail-ins. Public finances are stretched due to refugee inflows and opposition to Merkel is growing even internally in her massive coalition government.

This setup may lead to something not predicted (ie. DB not getting the guarantees it needs or even a creditor bail-in) or more predictively the rise of left or right-wing non-established / populist politics.

<comment><USER25> Public finances are only stretched because the German government (and the electorate) has a weird aversion to taking on new debt. If she wanted to, Germany could essentially borrow money for free thanks to extremely low or even negative interest rates.

<comment><USER26> 1) I'd hardly call them stretched. 2) I wouldn't call it a "weird aversion". Weimar Hyperinflation (and the consequences) is still in the public's heads. Compared to other places I have lived people in Germany are indeed more reluctant to debt-finance things in general and "save before buying". I think it's a fairly healthy base attitude (but I'm probably biased being German). It's less valuable currently with near 0% credits everywhere but as a base mindset it helps avoid the trap of not finding a way to generate the expected revenue streams eventually.</comment></comment></comment>


Maloder: OSX binary loader for Linux. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shinh/maloader#readme

<comment><USER2> I would have preferred the name "MacLoad: there can be only one".

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how hard it would be to implement the Apple Obj-C runtime's ABI for GNUstep so that this could be used to run obj-c programs and perhaps eventually actual Mac apps. If it were shown to be feasible, I would expect the combination to get a lot of attention as an alternative to Wine for running proprietary apps on Linux.

<comment><USER4> The actual Objective-C API is very small and can be (naively) implemented in an afternoon. I'd expect programs that already work in GNUStep like GNUmail could be had running by someone who has knowledge of how LD_PRELOAD works but no other experience with GNUStep and OSX in a week or two.

<comment><USER5> The only significant thing missing from _Objective-C_ itself is garbage collection, I think (which completely changes the game on Mac OS X). Blocks work, of course, and besides that, Objective-C doesn't actually add that much to C (that's sort of the point).

The Cocoa APIs are, of course, fairly incomplete. From a quick Google search, they don't seem to have finished Core Data, and I'd imagine things like Core Animation are quite a ways off. Then, there's the integration problem. People that are likely to develop with an alternative implementation of Cocoa are likely to be "Mac people", that is, user interface evangelists (Lion's iCal design aside). GNUStep apps don't fit in with Gnome, or KDE, or, well, any desktop environment that a large group of people care about.

As a person (admittedly, I'm just a student) that has developed both in Cocoa and GTK+, I've found convincing myself to work on my GTK+ projects to be a chore. To put it only somewhat mildly, Cocoa is probably the best framework I've ever used. Want something to smoothly slide to the left? You can do that, in one line of code. Want to pull down some data from the web and parse the XML response, all in a background thread? That's easily achievable with Cocoa, and you don't even have to think about the threading issues. It just happens.

GTK+ et. al. are, of course, open source projects. They're created by volunteer developers (let's leave Red Hat out of this, for convenience). In the end, though, does it matter to developers? Cocoa is fun. GTK+ has mostly directed me into hours of reading C API documentation while I'm writing code in languages that are not C.

I'm not really sure where I intended to go with this - it has little to do with the original post, which I think is an incredibly impressive piece of work, solving a task that make my API and UI concerns seem like minor squabbles.

<comment><USER6> GNUStep also has garbage collection (albeit Boehm, not the same as the collector in OS X). Yes, it is missing from the language, but it doesn't make OS X special. And all that needs to come along is a version of GNUStep that fits in with the desktop environment on a platform before people start developing for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Off topic: asking for some advice, since this loader sounds close to what I want. The problem: I need to use a _huge_ C++ codebase that is developed on the Mac, and is used to generate a shared library used in a Java app with JNI, SWIG, and loaded with loadLibrary. It would be fantastic to be able to build a shared library on the Mac, and be able to use it on both Macs and Linux servers. Maintaining and building 2 versions is a nuisance. (A complete build takes a couple of hours, even on a fast box.) Probably not possible because shared libraries are very different on OS X and Linux, but long term it would save me a lot of time if it is, even if I had to patch the Linux JVM.

<comment><USER8> This loader will be buggy and incomplete, by it's nature, and won't really solve the problems inherent in loading a shared library from another OS into an existing native process.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the response! It was a long shot, but I thought that I would ask in case someone new of a stable and reliable way to use OS X shared libraries on Linux. I imagine it would be easier on NetBSD.

<comment><USER9> Not really. The problem is the binary format itself - Linux, *BSD, and pretty much every Unix but AIX these days uses ELF, but OSX uses MachO. The two aren't compatible.

The easiest way to do this reliably would probably involve writing your own mini-linker load the Mach-O binaries in Linux from the JVM, bypassing dlopen() and friends.

<comment><USER10>
      > pretty much every Unix but AIX

OSX is actually a certified UNIX.

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/08/mac-os-x- leopard-r...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard- receives-unix-03-certification.ars)

<comment><USER11> and? Nowhere is the opposite stated or implied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is very cool. Forgive me if I'm missing something but this only runs very specific command line programs right? (ie no iTunes)

<comment><USER13> For now. In theory, with enough emulated libraries, you could probably run anything with this. But I don't think the point is to run "random mac app" on Linux: it's probably more likely to enable something like iPhone development, which right now is Mac only.

<comment><USER14> Just watch as Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decides to shut this down because the developers aren't paying to buy the macs needed for development.

<comment><USER15> Is there any precedent for your assertion?

<comment><USER16> yes.

[http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/apples-iphone-lockdown- ap...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/apples-iphone-lockdown-apps-must-be- written-in-one-of-three-la/)

<comment><USER15> I don't consider the 3.3.1 situation to be relevant, as in this case you would be running the official Apple toolchain.

If you had brought up the section of the iOS Developer License Agreement relating to "non-Apple-branded hardware" you might be in the right ballpark, but the legality of a similar clause in the Mac OS EULA was cast into doubt in the Psystar case. Psystar aside, the (non-commercial) OSx86 scene continues to thrive, unhindered by Apple.

At the end of the day, given that you would be running the official Apple toolchain, how would Apple be able to prove that a particular iOS app was not built on a Mac?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read the name of this, and thought "Mal Odor... oh dear."

That being said, this is like a Mac version of Wine for Linux? If so, cool.

</comment><comment><USER18> On the other side, is there a good "ELF.kext" or "Linux.kext" for running Linux programs on OSX?

</comment><comment><USER19> It's not too late to change its name.</comment>


Building a Real Business - <AUTHOR> https://lessaccounting.com/blog/real-business/

<comment><USER2> Very nice article representing the perspective and reality of the true craftsman. I often feel I'm one of the few people who has no desire what-so- ever to chase investors. It's not what I do. I build stuff... and I'm very successful and happy.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is basically saying, why is all the attention on supermodels, there are so many pretty people out there who are not modelling?!

Yes, but so what?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> the anti Y Combinator perspective...

<comment><USER4> If you read the essay, it's clear he's not anti-startup, much less specifically anti-Y Combinator. He is pro- other things instead, and saying the "traditional" (lol) startup culture is overshadowing all other choices.

That's very different than "anti-YC."</comment></comment>


The Clearest Evidence yet That Apple, Inc. Might Be Working on an ARM-Based Mac - <AUTHOR> http://social.fool.com/blog/43404572179 <comment><USER2> I think it's what Steve Jobs would've wanted and would've done (full control over Apple's computers hardware). So I would like to see it happen. As the article says, with Apple having already switched to weaker Core M chips in Macbook Air, there's a very high chance its ARM chip will be significantly faster than the latest Air. For Macbook Pro it could switch to AMD Zen chips next year, also rumored:

[http://www.dailytech.com/AMD+Zen+Processor+might+power+the+u...](http://www.dailytech.com/AMD+Zen+Processor+might+power+the+upcoming++Apple+MacBook+Pro/article37663.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> They need to give Macs touchscreens and work with Apple Pencil.

Intel chips are still useful so they can use Bootcamp for Windows or Linux.</comment>


Participate in the 2018 Go User Survey - <AUTHOR> https://blog.golang.org/survey2018 <comment><AUTHOR> Direct link: [https://google.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aVjFSKq2vgjRHUN](https://google.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aVjFSKq2vgjRHUN)

</comment><comment><USER2> The post should have the link at the beginning. I had some difficulty finding the link because it was buried at the end of the 2nd paragraph. The post is written as if the author assumes that everyone is intensely interested in every detail. It would be so in an ideal world, but in reality, a lot of people are going to be primarily interested in the survey.

</comment><comment><USER3> Filled. I made sure to suggest keeping the old branding since that blue gopher has become so iconic.

</comment><comment><USER4> Happy to have filled out the survey. We use Go daily at my company; it powers all of our microservices.

</comment><comment><USER5> Gosh this is long...! Still at it :-)</comment>


Remote debugging mobile devices - <AUTHOR> http://thecssninja.com/talks/remote_debugging/

<comment><USER2> I've used Winre in the past, but there were some other great resources I didn't know about in this presentation.</comment>


Coming 2014: A Smarter, Interconnected You - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/30/coming-2014-a-smarter-interconnected-you/

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. The Social Web: Beyond Friends and Social Media

2\. Connecting Everything: Physical Objects Go Online

3\. Dynamic Personalization: It's About You

4\. Big Data Meets AI: You - Only Smarter</comment>


Github:Enterprise for SMBs - <AUTHOR>

How many of you would consider using a tool similar to Github:Enterprise if it was priced much more competitively? Say 250$/year, and if you want a new major release again $250/year - on-premises install, unlimited users and repositories.<p>I know there are a bunch of open source Github clones, some more, some less supported, but I have a feeling a well (and constantly)-developed and pleasing interface would help us all. <comment><USER2> Atlassian Stash? It's obviously focused on just repository hosting and it's not "$250/year", but the prices are certainly a lot lower than what GitHub charges.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is already GitLab[1], which I haven't personally used but have heard exceptional things from people who have. It's MIT-licensed, distributes new releases regularly, is designed to fit exactly this need, and is attractive.

I don't know if it's feature-for-feature complete with Github, but from the screenshots, it certainly looks close enough to fit the needs of many.

Are you planning to start from scratch?

[1] - <http://gitlabhq.com/></comment>


History Being Made: Mom Wants An iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/06/history-being-made-mom-wants-iphone.html

<comment><USER2> When I showed my mom my iPhone last year, it was the first phone that she could easily figure out how to make phone calls with. She also figured out how to send email and listen to music, all within 15 minutes of using it for the first time.</comment>


Two Billion Laptops? It May Not Be Enough - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/business/18digi.html?hpw <comment><USER2> Hmm, at $250 a pop, OLPC is on the price range of a netbook. iPad is a few steps away as well. It's very much possible that the iPad could get to this price range, if not even cheaper with the economies of scale for a project like OLPC. Yes, I realize OLPC needs a crank, etc. But, what's not to stop Apple from coming up with iCrank (I also believe Apple has created a new niche of developers iCranky using their iPhone OS 4.0 - but I digress).

Before you point out about Apple's closed platform, do think about how easy the App store is and how much more depth of interactivity and detail the iPad could bring to learning.

<comment><USER3> Cranks are not esthetically pleasing. And if Apple did create iCrank, you'd have to go to the Apple store to have someone replace it when it broke off. But we both digress...

But seriously, they said the same thing about computers in general, about their ability to bring more depth of interactivity and detail to learning. Somehow I doubt lack of specific kinds of technology are the major hindrance to learning today, at least in developed countries, er, ahem, the US.

<comment><USER2> iCranks jokes aside, the biggest point that's important is that great teachers with decent tech can make wonders but great tech can't necessarily fix broken teachers.

Well, the education marketplace in the U.S. is not that organized and I can't think of that many great apps out there I would personally use in an academic setting. The reason why I think Apple has a whack at this because the iPad is very primal in the way you interact with the device; but the App store is what makes the iPxx successful.

<comment><USER3> You think Apple has a whack at bringing technology into the classroom/education because the interaction is primal? Never mind that Apple has traditionally had a major share of the education market, I don't think specific technology or UX/UI is the major hindrance to continued/increased use of computers in the classroom, it has more to do with finances, politics, perception of what it means to be "computer-literate", the lack of applications that are truly educational (rather than mostly rote memorization and bookkeeping (the kind that exist now that we agree that we wouldn't use in an academic setting)).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Ars Holiday Gift Guide 2018–good tech for the home and home office - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/?p=1412157 <comment><USER2> I just picked up a set of the Pebble speakers that are covered in this link. We've been using Amazon Chime at work, and the sound from my laptop speakers during calls was terrible. For twenty bucks, the Pebble speakers have made a world of difference. They're pretty good for music at lower volumes, but if you're looking for something loud, they do get pretty distorted after about 70% volume.</comment>


F. Scott Fitzgerald's Shimmering Visions - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/142383/f-scott-fitzgeralds-shimmering-visions <comment><USER2> Bill Gates favorite quote is from the Great Gatsby: "His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it."</comment>


A Basic Just-In-Time Compiler - <AUTHOR> http://nullprogram.com/blog/2015/03/19/

<comment><USER2> I was so hoping this was a JIT compiler for BASIC...

<comment><USER3> I was hoping for a JIT into BASIC...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is not a just-in-time compiler, it's an ordinary compiler. JIT compilers make judgements about which code to switch from some form of interpretation to machine code, on the fly. This project just compiles the whole equation.

<comment><USER5> You're really speaking about advanced JIT techniques. JIT isn't about switching between compiled code & interpreted code, or fast & slow code. It's about combining compilers and interpreters to get the benefits of both [0].

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in- time_compilation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation)</comment></comment>


Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-on-desktop-a-real-competitor-to-electron-4f049ea6b061 <comment><USER2> The road block for adoption will be Dart. Why they didn't just choose Typescript or go with native javascript is beyond me. No one uses Dart. It was probably the poorest design decision they could make.

<comment><USER3> Dart 2 is a very solid language. It's primarily an OO language but does have some functional elements in it. It's very similar to Java and C# and most dart developers think it's a better version of Java and C#. It has more features like stream, asynchronous and mixins built into the language. It's in fact a full stack language as you can write server side code in dart as well. I think Google's long-term goal is to make dart/flutter compatible with mobile (iOS and Android), web, desktop (macOS, Linux, Windows). It will be truly write once and run everywhere.

<comment><USER4> Can't agree more. Much better choice than js/ts

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I believe flutter will be the only thing that will be truly "write once, run everywhere" as it will be compatible with with mobile (iOS and Android), web, desktop (macOS, Linux, Windows).

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm wondering why people don't write cross platform applications with Qt.

<comment><USER6> Does Qt have the same features as Flutter? I'm thinking about an excellent IDE, hot reloading, ability to target mobile and desktop etc.

<comment><USER7> * Excellent IDE

Yes. It's well-written C++. Any IDE can handle it, but the also have their own which gives you a few more things, like drag'n'drop design.

* Hot reloading

Depends.

Old-school Qt? No. It's more powerful, but can't hot reload.

New-school QML? Yes. But you are limited to QtQuick, which is only on-par with Electron's features.

* Ability to target mobile and desktop, etc.

Yes. Supported targets include: Windows, UWP, Linux, macOS, Andorid, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, QNX, and other embedded platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Flutter isn't a competitor to electron as you can't target web browsers with it.

I tried Flutter over a year ago and found the instant reloading of code nice and has most of modern features but went back to native as the library support is still non-existent.

The real competitor to flutter is kotlin cross-platform from jetbrains. Most android developers are already familiar with kotlin, unlike dart, and also has great tooling.

I look forward to seeing which one wins mind share as they are well designed options.

<comment><USER9> Incorrect. You can target web browsers with it.

> Dart's flexibility in compilation and execution doesn't stop there. For > example, _Dart can be compiled into JavaScript so it can be executed by > browsers. This allows code reuse between mobile apps and web apps._ > Developers have reported as high as 70% code reuse between their mobile and > web apps. Dart can also be used on a server either by being compiled to > native code, or by compiling to JavaScript and using it with node.js.

Source: [https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart- dd635a054ebf](https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf)

<comment><USER10> Dart can target web but Flutter doesn't yet have support for browsers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll have to check it out, because this seems to be what I've been waiting for: access to Android and Windows eco-systems, reasonably small .exe sizes and excellent performance.

The other things are just icing on the cake: best in class framework, hot- reloading, runs on IOS (until Apple gets irritated), development on Linux, and a more than decent language to write apps in.

</comment><comment><USER12> Flutter for ios android web win mac sounds like the holy grail of cross platform development! Tempted to invest v significantly, one major concern though is the focus on Angular for web. IMHO Polymer would have been a much better choice, since most browsers now support web components custom elements natively, so Angular focus is a major turn-off for me.

</comment><comment><USER13> The biggest question is will companies start migrating to Flutter from Electron.

Plus who will decide to use this in a market dominated by Electron?

<comment><USER14> [raises hand] If it can avoid a >100 MB hello world, I'm on board. That makes it worth learning a language I would never have heard otherwise.

<comment><USER7> If that's a serious suggestion then...

* Dart/Flutter {iOS, Android} [0]

* (Scheme|Lua|C)/IUP {Linux, Windows, macOS} [1]

* (QML with JS)/QtQuick {Windows, Linux, macOS, UWP, Android, iOS...} [2]

* (C++|Rust|Go|Python...)/Qt {Windows, Linux, macOS, UWP, Android, iOS...} [3]

* (TCL|Ada|Haskell|Python...)/Tk {Windows, Linux, macOS} [4]

* (TCL)/Hecl {Windows, Linux, macOS, Android} [5]

* (Scheme|C|JS|Haskell...)/GTK+ {Windows, Linux, macOS, Android^} [6]

* (C++|Python|Ruby|...)/WxWidgets {Windows, Linux, macOS, {Anywhere GTK or Qt run...}} [7]

(^ May not be stable or officially supported)

... All the platforms listed are cross-platform.

Some look native, some don't, but no Electron app does anyway.

Most package to single binary, some need proper packaging.

All are very simple to get started.

Tk has the least features, but TCL is just a shell language, so getting started is ridiculously easy. However, Tk can do things like inject its frames into any running process's window.

QT and GTK+ are the most powerful, which can confuse newcomers. But they're still simple to do simple things with.

I've used all but Flutter in a professional environment (but evaluated it), sometimes as maintainer, sometimes building something new. They're all solid. Different drawbacks with all of them, but there's always tradeoffs in programming.

For a beginner, I'd probably recommend QtQuick or WxWidgets.

[0] [https://flutter.io/](https://flutter.io/)

[1] [http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/](http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc- rio.br/iup/)

[2] [http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquick-index.html](http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquick- index.html)

[3] [https://wiki.qt.io/Language_Bindings](https://wiki.qt.io/Language_Bindings)

[4] [https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TkCmd/tk.htm](https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TkCmd/tk.htm)

[5] [https://www.hecl.org/](https://www.hecl.org/)

[6] [https://www.gtk.org/](https://www.gtk.org/)

[7] [https://www.wxwidgets.org/](https://www.wxwidgets.org/)

<comment><USER15> Most of them have been tried for ages and never got anywhere, and still look like crap (e.g. tcl).

Others have crappy support for different platforms (e.g. GTK and Windows/OSX) and that's for decades, not just because they are new.

None of them has the promise of Flutter: modern JS-like language, dead easy development, simple IDE support, cross platform, nice UI toolkit, hot reloading, and so on.

<comment><USER7> > modern JS-like language, dead easy development, simple IDE support, cross > platform, nice UI toolkit, hot reloading, and so on.

That would be QtQuick.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Observation of a Narrow Pentaquark State, Pc(4312)+ - <AUTHOR> https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.222001 <comment><AUTHOR> Full title:Observation of a Narrow Pentaquark State, Pc(4312)+, and of the Two-Peak Structure of the Pc(4450)+</comment>


Can someone with Google Places ties help me out? - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Places/thread?tid=5b78eb5d425d1d28&hl=en&fid=5b78eb5d425d1d280004b784b25f6712

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoever left the comment, then erased it, thank you. The contact led me down the right path.</comment>


AMD Threadripper 1950X Linux Benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-tr-1950x <comment><USER2> Ah Phoronix tests. Run a lot of things, show a lot of numbers, but never worry about meaning (or correctness).

So, can someone explain the Scitkit-Learn 0.17.1 results?

<comment> TD-Linux At least the good thing is you can run the same benchmark locally and figure out what went wrong. Anandtech posted similarly wonky results for Chromium compiles on Threadripper, but that one isn't reproducible.

<comment><USER2> I think they "explained" afterwards that they use an older version of Chromium that predates the switch to clang and spends all of it's time in the single- threaded MSVC linker. (Which immediately explains much of their results...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does anybody know how long it takes for a 1950X to compile the latest Linux kernel? I know that for 2xEPYC it is circa 15 seconds.

<comment><USER4> In the article he says he gets it down to ~36 seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> How things have improved. I remember my 386DX/33 with 4MB RAM + 16MB swap that took a little over 24 hours to compile a Linux kernel back in the mid-nineties ;-) Now get off my lawn kids..

<comment><USER5> Compiled gentoo for a week a few years ago - a kid!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love to see the benchmark on clean build of Android Platform (AOSP) code base.

I remember it took somewhere between 40 -minutes - 2 hours depend on system and which AOSP version to build.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this with Threadripper in NUMA mode or in UMA mode? I don't think the article says.

I think UMA might be the default.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is Threadripper a decent buy for a workstation setup? Or is Xeon still king?

<comment><AUTHOR> Read the benchmarks. Then judge for yourself for your specific workload.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ten pages. Bleh.

</comment><comment><USER10> Too bad that these AMD CPU's also contain convenient capabilities through PSP to add a hardware backdoor to a computer which one cannot detect from the OS.

@Phoronix: RISC-V-based and other open processors and computers are much more interesting. Could you test and report about compatbility of open and consumer-friendly computers with linux?

<comment><USER11> Do you know of a RISC-V CPU suitable for desktop use? As far as I know, no one yet produced any silicon for that market.

<comment><USER12> Seriously, I don't know of any publicly available RISC-V silicon with even an MMU, say nothing of 'desktop' class.</comment></comment></comment>


Farming gave us salmonella, ancient DNA suggests - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/farming-gave-us-salmonella-ancient-dna-suggests <comment><USER2> So, when I went to pet a tiger, I was told to wash up because they carry salmonella. Fun fact: big cats carry all sorts of strange bacteria because they eat raw meat and lick themselves.

<comment><USER3> Humans are the weirdest omnivore. The only reason we can eat meat is because 1-2 hundred million years of our homoerectus ancestors predigesting meat by cooking it.

At our evolutionary roots we are a tech bubble, but that tech, cooking, was discovered by a species that we would put in a zoo if it was still around.

<comment><USER4> > The only reason we can eat meat is because 1-2 hundred million years of our > homoerectus ancestors predigesting meat by cooking it.

Not true. Chimps, our closest relative, eat meat which means our common ancestor also ate meat. So not only have humans been eating meat before cooking, our ancestors going back millions of years also ate meat. Also, human populations, like the inuit, eat meat without cooking. It's quite a task to start a fire in the frozen arctic. Anthony Bourdain had a show on the inuits a a while ago. And that's not including human populations throughout the world that eat insects/etc.

Cooking is what allowed humans to eat more meat and more efficiently, but it's absurd to claim humans only started eating meat after learning to cook.

<comment><USER5> it is not absurd. cooking would have helped ease the evolutionary transition to being able to digest meat. aside from that we are still very poor at digesting meat.

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/red-meat- processe...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/red-meat-processed- meat-death-mortality-health-cancer-heart-disease-vegetarian-vegan- diet-a7016986.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Didn't it also give us small pox, plague, and pretty much every other major disease? Living closely with animals and with each other (which farming allows and requires) created the grounds for all sorts of diseases right?

<comment><USER7> Yes. Two other sources for this are the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, [1] and the video Americapox by CGPGrey. [2]

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel)

[2]: [https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk](https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just watched a BBC short video on this area.

[https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0850nn0/was-the- neolithic-a-...](https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0850nn0/was-the-neolithic-a- big-mistake-)

</comment><comment><USER9> That kinda sucks, but I figure civilization is worth severe food poisoning

</comment><comment><USER10> Title should say "Animal farming". Plant farming did not give us salmonella.

<comment><USER11> The article implies it might have done, not directly through the farming of plants directly but because humans settled in one place for agriculture instead of foraging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Related book: "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond

</comment><comment><USER13> *husbandry

</comment><comment> 1-6 Farming gave us salmons and salmonella. FIFY

</comment><comment><USER14> The agricultural revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

<comment><USER15> >> _The agricultural revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race._

Go in a forested area somewhere and live there. Let us know how a disaster the agro revolution and today's inventions are.

Yeah, life was all peaches back then

<comment><USER16> That's not exactly the same thing. Back when humans were hunter gatherers there was a lot more forest and a lot more fauna to eat. You also had a tribe that stuck with you for life. Modern inventions weren't known back then so you wouldn't even know how to miss them. There was less work to do and the work you did had real meaning. It's completely possible that life was better for the average person back then.

<comment><USER17> More fauna with hunter gatherers? They were causing mass extinctions since they picked up spears!

The whole reason they were usually 8nomadic was because they depleted local food supplies and had to move on.

Once they had better nutrition (the source of huge barbarian myths) but agriculture has advanced far past that now.

<comment><USER18> You're really wrong about this. Pack hunters, such as wolves, lions, or early humans, do affect local prey populations in temporary ways, but they don't destroy ecosystems. Agriculture does destroy ecosystems.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple's Steve Wozniak: 'We've lost a lot of control' - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/12/08/steve.wozniak.computers/index.html?hpt=C1

<comment><USER2> > _Despite his frustrations with gadgetry, Wozniak is still a gearhead. He > says he carries five to 10 cell phones around with him at a given time. > Sometimes he'll set up half a dozen of them, along with standalone GPS > units, on his car's windshield, all navigating him to the same spot._

What?

(I have to say, I respect Woz as an engineer, but this kind of odd behavior reduces his credibility as a popular technology prognosticator for me.)

<comment><USER3> It doesn't seem that odd to me.

I can see carrying around multiple phones to test the features and usability against each other.

I can see testing the GPS in multiple phones against one or more dedicated GPS units.

<comment><USER4> There's many reasons why you would use multiple GPS. I'm sure Woz was being Woz and testing which works the best by flat out competing them against each other and his own knowledge.

Plus I remember having a GPS tell me I was at my destination in downtown Manchester when we were actually 5km from the street address. I had another tell me to perform a U-turn on a one way street when I missed a turn that didn't exist.

I don't see it as odd, I'm sure at once one time he was carrying 10 cell phones to see which ones he actually wanted to keep. IIRC he said he usually keeps an iPhone and a Blackberry on him at all times, which I'd imagine would be his main pair, beyond that he'd probably simply be testing newer phones or different styles to see if they're better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel that the same could have been said after/during the industrial revolution. When the tools to enact change become so large that no one person can build a product (whether that be a vehicle, or a desktop computer), there will be someone warning that our dependence on technology is increasing.

Not that I don't agree with Woz, but I think it helps put this in perspective. If the internet or our power grid had some massive failure how easily would life continue? Would businesses continue to operate? Supply chains for food and production? These are important questions, in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> > When the tools to enact change become so large that no one person can build > a product (whether that be a vehicle, or a desktop computer), there will be > someone warning that our dependence on technology is increasing.

That's not correct, vehicles are regularly made from beginning to end by a single person (the Ferrari Way). I think what you mean is that an _average_ person can no longer be expected to construct 9/10ths of what we believe we use during a day. (I'd argue you use a chair, which is still easily constructed, far more than you use a computer or a television. Our arses basically migrate from chair, to chair, to bed.)

<comment><USER6> Maybe a Ferrari is assembled by one person, but it certainly wasn't manufactured by one person. So that doesn't really count.

<comment><USER4> Now you're playing technicalities. No one since 0 AD has likely manufactured something solely by themselves, because a carpenter building a house wasn't making his own nails and hammers and saws.

One person can easily manufacture a whole vehicle, no question about it. A chinese man hand-built a (somewhat) replica Lamborghini in his basement; an Italian man built his own supercar sans the Audi V8 engine; and people regularly build small engines, and this guy built most of his own V8 bike engine: [http://thekneeslider.com/archives/2010/04/15/bmw- with-694cc-...](http://thekneeslider.com/archives/2010/04/15/bmw-with-694cc- homemade-v8-engine/)

So I'm sorry, but it's easily capable. I wouldn't argue automobiles, because by the simplest definition an automobile is very easy to self-manufacture given that a vehicle doesn't require windshields, doors, lights, indicators, anything.

One man today can still easily (with time) construct their own home from ground up. I helped lay a 30'x30' cement floor with nothing but a shovel, mixer and barrow. Beyond that the house is easy and I've literally done everything else from brick laying to electrical and plumbing to siding and framing.

Like I said, an average person cannot do these things today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This quote rocks: "I wanted to accelerate the world's advancement in the social revolution that it would cause. So I gave away my designs for free."

</comment><comment><USER8> _"... I didn't design this computer to make a lot of money, I wanted to accelerate the world's advancement in the social revolution that it would cause. So I gave away my designs for free. But eventually, Steve Jobs came and said, 'Why don't we build it for (consumers)?' ..."_

Closest thing I've read by Woz explaining the origin of the Apple business plan. Replace Woz with a herd of 'Woz-like' engineers and you get Apple now. Removing Woz meant Apple also removed the freedom it once had.

</comment><comment><USER9> Irrelevant to most, but the tangled mess of network cables behind the "Woz" in the interview really ticks me off. I'd love to have a word with the network folks there.

<comment><USER10> It was filmed at the Computer History Museum, so it's like that on purpose. Though, it doesn't look like this is the one, I know that they have one of Google's original racks which looks about as messy. (as seen here: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/building-a- computer...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/building-a-computer-the- google-way.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel compelled to point out that Woz isn't Apple's anymore and hasn't been for a long time unless I'm completely missing something.</comment>


Happy Birthday, Alan Turing - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

<comment><USER2> How time flies. It was two years ago today that I blogged this: [http://blog.jgc.org/2009/06/alan-turing-deserves-apology- fro...](http://blog.jgc.org/2009/06/alan-turing-deserves-apology-from.html) which lead to great things: <http://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/hello-john-its- gordon-brown.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> No doubt.

I sometimes think we fail to pay enough credit to the early pioneers of the computing field. I was recently reading the "Artificial Life" book by Levy[1], and it starts off with a lot of history about Von Neumann, Turing, and a host of other characters. Fascinating stuff, and that definitely has nudged me to try and make some time to do more reading about the "early days" of computing.

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers- Bio...](http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers- Biology/dp/0679743898)

</comment><comment><USER4> A good day to pick up a copy of Cryptonomicon and start reading it.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Computing Machinery and Intelligence_ [aka "the Touring Test"]

<http://orium.homelinux.org/paper/turingai.pdf>

<comment><USER6> I can recommend the following to accompany Turing's paper.

<http://plover.net/~bonds/mind.html></comment></comment>


CloudCache - on-demand caching on the cloud - <AUTHOR> http://getcloudcache.com/ <comment><USER2> I like the idea, but HTTP requests are painfully slow compared to a database hit. What if the API takes a second to respond? You'll be serving far fewer pages. One thing I do like is this statement:

"Why not memcached? Memcached is a great project and we wouldn't say a bad thing about it. However, there are many cases where setting up and managing your own infrastructure for caching doesn't make sense."

I'm glad to see they aren't trying to trick you into thinking this is the _superior_ solution. Rather, they focus on how it's the _easiest_ solution (or easier than setting-up memcached anyway).

I think this is a really cool idea.</comment>


eBay and Stripe to exit Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/a3e952dc-ec5c-11e9-85f4-d00e5018f061 <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/7BXyO](http://archive.is/7BXyO)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm glad Satoshi never asked for permission when making Bitcoin.</comment>