Microsoft, Google, Others Threaten to Sue Adblock Plus Creator - <AUTHOR> http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Google-Others-Threaten-to-Sue-Adblock-Plus-Creator-467035.shtml <comment><USER2> Coming next, Unilever sue makers of televisions that you can switch off / mute during ad breaks.

Mothers sued for giving birth to babies that can close their eyes or even leave the room.

Microsoft should sue itself for having a windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file.

And what about Privoxy ? That's the one I use.

And Facebook purity.

When I go onto other people's computers I am still _always_ shocked by the reminder that the _user experience_ without these products is just so incredibly eroded.

Still, I'm a guy that thinks billboards should be taken down. What an abomination we have allowed to happen to our habitat. If the school put a billboard in every classroom, there would be an outcry; yet I have sat through many a 5 second ad during class with the teacher waiting to press "skip" on youtube.

<comment><USER3> > Coming next, Unilever sue makers of televisions that you can switch off / > mute during ad breaks.

Your post is a hyperbole, but Spotify's desktop client does this already for free users. If you lower the volume below a certain level on the client while an ad is playing, it will pause the ad until you raise the volume again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Adblock is the first extension I install and have done so for the last few years, even back before Chrome was on the market and everyone was using Firefox. I would like to point out that I DO disable Adblock for domains I want to support like blogs and sites I don't mind seeing advertisements on. However, I keep it on by default.

The problem for me is that I don't take too kindly to being tracked and targeted by advertisements. Even though Adblock isn't a completely mitigation of tracking, it does go a long way to try and make you less traceable by advertisers. I also am not a fan of distasteful advertisements either. Case in point: on The Pirate Bay I make sure I have Adblock installed before I go there so I don't get bombarded with Russian bride or pornography advertisements and popups.

Blocking advertisements is our right, this is ridiculous in my opinion. If users want to block advertisements, then, they can either detect Adblock (which can be easily done) and restrict access or find other ways to make money that doesn't involve spamming banner and sidebar advertisements. I don't install Adblock to deliberately take away money from websites that need ads for support, I install it because there is a lot of bad advertising out there.

I don't think such a case would go very far, but it will be interesting either way to see how far this goes and if the tactic of forcing the creator of Adblock to settle or go bankrupt is employed like it is elsewhere to eliminate threats like the copyright industry like to use.

</comment><comment><USER5> OkCupid has (or had, at least, haven't visited in a while) a pretty decent approach to ad blockers. They detect that you block ads and (after explaining that ads are a big part of the revenue of their service, for which you currently pay nada ...) offer you an option to pay a small sum not to have to see ads (or you can turn ads back on).</comment>


Ship found in Arctic 168 years after doomed Northwest Passage attempt - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/12/hms-terror-wreck-found-arctic-nearly-170-years-northwest-passage-attempt <comment><USER2> There was an earlier excavation of some of the frozen corpses as well and they were taken to laboratories to be studied. After thawing some of the gut bacteria, some were still alive. One of the scientist was smart enough to experiment with how the old bacteria handled modern antibiotics. Strangely many already had resistance[1]. And this discovery was largely unreported.

[1][http://tinyurl.com/z9sy2qn](http://tinyurl.com/z9sy2qn)

<comment><USER3> In case anyone else was confused, those corpses retrieved and studied in the above article were bodies buried from the same expedition, not bodies recovered from the sunken ship. Thanks for sharing the clipping though, very fascinating.

<comment><USER4> Yes the dug up bodies were from men who died during the expeditions first season, which had actually gone pretty well.

Unfortunately, they anchored the ships for the winter, shortly after those men died, in pretty much the worst place possible, on the western side of King William's Island.[1]

This is a spot where all the pack ice from the north west flows to, forming a huge towering jumble of ice. They fully expected their ships to be iced in for the winter, this was normal.

They expected to get underway again once the ice cleared in the spring.

But the winter was exceptionally harsh and the ice so thick that they remained trapped for much longer than they expected.

[1] Known as King Williams Land in those days, the remaining portion of the northwest passage, ironically, was just to the south of where the doomed ships were iced in. It would be John Rae ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rae_(explorer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rae_\(explorer\)) ) who would truly discover the final link.

<comment><USER5> this isn't related to anything, but out of personal curiosity can you tell me whether you are a manager? (you can mail me at the link in my profile, if you don't want to reply here for whatever reason). I'm just curious and have no follow-up either way. thanks.

<comment><USER4> I am not a manager. Why do you ask?

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the reply! I got downvotes before I removed the context, it doesn't matter and I removed that part (but I don't want more downvotes so I don't want to say, plus it doesn't matter.)

You can mail me if you want to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a fun Dan Simmons book "The Terror" that tells a (very) fictional account of what happened to them. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror_\(novel\))

<comment><USER7> I concur that the book is indeed a very entertaining read. It describes the ships (which btw were steam powered and had central heating) and the dreadful conditions that the sailors faced in great detail. Dan Simmons is a good storyteller.

<comment><USER8> Sea travel in general was apocalyptically bad for sailors until about 1910. I don't think people realize how dangerously shitty it was for people.

<comment><USER9> Reading about the ww2 Arctic convoys has the same feeling.

<comment><USER10> I can recommend _Three Corvettes_ by Nicholas Monsarrat - the author of The Cruel Sea - it is his account of his experiences at sea during WW2.

One of the few books that has moved me to tears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If only Stan Rogers had lived to see it...

"Ah for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage / to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea..."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage_(song)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage_\(song\))

<comment><USER12> My father's comment, upon reading the article:

"And if they had a barge lent by a friend, they could tie their cables fore and aft and gird her all around ... and hit the air and then take up the strain ... etc."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "If you could lift this boat out of the water, and pump the water out, it would probably float."

That is a fascinating possibility.

btw title should be amended "found by European explorers". Or change the date to 162 years, since it was discovered by an Inuit gentleman six years earlier?

<comment><USER14> There is some precedent:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_\(ship\))

It is worth a trip to Stockholm to see the Vasa. The photos on Wikipedia do not do her justice.

<comment><USER15> I can confirm this. It's one of the most impressive museums I've ever been to.

<comment><USER16> The whole thing is also a living example of lessons about project and product management: how uncontrolled requirements made by the major stakeholder (in this case, king Gustaf Adolf) changed the project scope (so many guns were ordered to be fitted that the ship had to have two gun decks, with too high center of gravity) which then caused a major technical disaster (it capsized in wind). And then starts the hunt for a scapegoat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The best part is that a local hunter found the boat six years ago. That's awesome.

<comment><USER18> "Given the location of the find [in Terror Bay]"

I tried hunting around online to find out how Terror Bay got its name after I saw this article on another site last night, but I couldn't find anything. Makes you kind of wonder whether the location of the wreck was known at some point, but nobody bothered to write it down.

<comment><USER19> I wondered about the same thing. Weird it's not remarked on more in the article.

<comment><USER20> The local Inuit have known that the ship was here for a very long time. The nearby island is called "the big boat is here" or "the boat sank here" in Inuit. lol.

[http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday- ed...](http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday- edition-1.3760173)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A years back I became fascinated with 19th century Artic exploration through reading Fergus Fleming's excellent book _Barrow 's Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy_.

I was therefore rather surprised to find that one of the bodies from the Franklin expedition, of Lieutenant John Irving, is buried not far from where I live in central Edinburgh:

[http://edinburghwalks.com/2014/11/30/heroism-cannibalism- and...](http://edinburghwalks.com/2014/11/30/heroism-cannibalism-and-the- north-west-passage/)

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the link. I love reading books about early adventurers who first explored our planet.

My favourite so far has been _Endurance: Shackleton 's Incredible Voyage_ about Shakleton's semi-doomed voyage to Antarctica where they survived an entire winter after their boat got stranded in ice. Mostly by eating seals... and their sled dogs at one point.

[https://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Incredible- Alfr...](https://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Incredible-Alfred- Lansing/dp/0465062881/)

<comment><USER22> Or you can read _South_ , and read Shackleton's own words [https://www.amazon.com/South-ENDURANCE-Expedition-Ernest- Sha...](https://www.amazon.com/South-ENDURANCE-Expedition-Ernest- Shackleton/dp/0451198808/)

<comment><USER9> Fantastic book and would be in the top reads I've ever had. Super cheap from Penguin too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've always suspected that tuberculosis played a large role in the demise of the expedition. We're pretty sure that some crew members had it and in the close quarters of the ships it's very likely to have spread unchecked. Combined with the obvious lead poisoning and the possibility of scurvy the expedition had very little chance of success.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279489/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279489/)

<comment><USER24> What's the source/cause of the lead poisoning?

<comment><USER25> Canned food afaik. The seals contained lead back then.

<comment><USER23> Right. The soldering used lead and was poorly done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's a documentary [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLqU8HP8r1o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLqU8HP8r1o) [YouTube]

</comment><comment><USER27> Imagine there would be a sole frozen survivor. No cars, no trains, no airplanes, no phones, etc.

<comment><USER28> Lord have mercy on the frozen man.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does it have a pair of glasses that are the key plot device in a Michael Bay movie?

<comment><USER30> Underrated comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Isn't there a cruise ship trying to make the northwest passage next year?

<comment><USER32> It's cleared dramatically as the Arctic sea ice is melting. The wiki has satellite pics, it's pretty dramatic

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage)

<comment><USER33> Despite the obvious CO2/warming reasons, wouldn't these research vessels/cruise ships cause more ice melt as well? (Breaking up the ice causing faster melt)

<comment><USER34> The Arctic is pretty big and there aren't many research boats. There are only a few dozen icebreakers in the world.

[https://news.usni.org/2013/07/23/u-s-coast- guards-2013-reive...](https://news.usni.org/2013/07/23/u-s-coast- guards-2013-reivew-of-major-ice-breakers-of-the-world)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Good thing this won't be a problem anymore.

<comment><USER28> Thanks to all of the hard work of the energy extraction industry, future generations will never have to deal with the lack of a Northwest Passage. They will, however, have to deal with a coral shortage.

<comment><USER36> So, how did this ship attempt to sail this route 168 years ago if there was no energy extraction industry?

<comment><USER37> They suspected there was a free water passage because the coast was well known on both side. But the interior of the land was _terra incognita_ , and that was the point of the expedition : finding the passage and going through it if it existed.

However, when Roald Admunsden crossed for the first time the North West passage a few years after the Franklin expedition was lost, it was not by boat, but with sleds...

From my understanding, given the size of the Terror and Erebus, the Franklin expedition could not have crossed the NW passage anyway at that time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Miraculous Decline in Deaths by Fire - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/the-miraculous-decline-in-deaths-by-fire/

<comment><USER2> _I am curious: what do you consider the most impressive but underappreciated measures of progress in the past 100 years?_

I like measuring the old standbys: Pestilence, War, Famine, Death. All of them are radically better, by any objective measure, in 2010 versus 1910, _virtually regardless of where you look_.

</comment><comment><USER3> There has also been a miraculous decline in deaths from scurvy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Believe it or not, the FDNY is putting this information out for a political reason.

They are trying to get away with closing 20 fire companies for 15 hour shifts (at night). This is a cost-saving measure at a time when a lawsuit which prevents hiring (<http://nydn.us/ag55My>) is making staffing difficult and expensive.

What the FDNY is not letting you know that firefighters are responding to more emergencies (medical, collapses, car-wrecks, etc.) than ever before. Also, that the night tours are when most fire fatalities occur.

Sounds paranoid of me to see an agenda behind statistics, but this is a situation with which I have much familiarity.

</comment><comment><USER5> Gee, there's been a 90% decline in deaths by fire since we stopped using open flames for light and heat? That's astounding.

<comment><USER6> The graph shows a continuing decline, with a sizable difference between even now and 1990. In fact, almost the entire trend since 1918 has been roughly linear — hardly what your hypothesis would suggest.

<comment><USER5> I don't know about that. Looks to me, just from eyeballing it of course, that there are two periods of logarithmic decay. The first in 1918-1969, then another period of logarithmic decay until present day. A brief Google search reveals some information that would seem to support there was a big change in fire safety in the 1970s:

[http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/08/09_williamso...](http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/08/09_williamson.shtml)

>"[Williamson's contributions] helped make the late 1970s the high-water mark of concerted fire safety science research in the United States, a level which has not subsequently been exceeded."

These contributions began in the early 1970s beginning with the classifications of plastics and their flammabilities. The overall tone of the article (admittedly, it is an obit for a noted physicist in the fire science field so it's bound to be flattering) indicates that the decade starting in 1970 began a sea change in fire safety and great gains in fire science.

That's my point. Big technological advances increase survivability and decrease risk. I don't get the round-eyed, slack-jawed wonder at the fact that there has been a huge drop in fire-related deaths in 89 years. Moving from open flames to electricity then improving building codes etc., provided two huge catalysts to change. Given that drastic technological change was the constant of the 20th century, this Freakonomics post just seems silly.

(As another responder said -- there's also been a dramatic decrease in cases of scurvy over the same timeframe. Similarly a "duh" revelation. I bet a graph of cases of kuru and measles would look about like the fire one.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what caused the spike during the war years, 39-43? Lower factory standards due to the war effort? I have no idea. Anyone got a clue?</comment>


Ask HN: Self-taught software engineer returning for a CS degree - <AUTHOR> HN,
I have a heavily time-constrained opportunity to study Computer Science, Bachelor's at ETH Zürich. To generalise by qualification, the school is one of the top ten schools in global university rankings.
Meanwhile, I have 4 years of experience as a SoftEng at a Swiss branch of a US-based industrial company, earning ~$120K. This I manage with a Mechatronics undergrad, whose curriculum was entirely removed from the world of CS. My work has seen me develop internal systems, frontend & backend, with emphasis on REST interfaces. Work is well-paid but not quite fulfilling. the rare bit of SE research is interesting, so is designing architecture; on the other hand, it's just gluing things together, no matter how well the glue is structured. (yes, that's SE in a nutshell)
I can't assess the worth of the degree. I will own the decision but I fear I am underqualified to weigh the advantages and disadvantages.
Conflicting opinions I have been given:
* experienced SoftEng, ex-SpaceX, EE degree: you're in the industry, stay in the game and just self-study to get a better job. (industry-driven)
* professor fluid mechs, doctorate at ETH: ETH is world-class. Dropping the uni name astonished new business associates and imprinted me in their minds favourably. (academia-driven)
My primary concerns are:
* does the degree devalue my prior four years of experience for a future employeer? As a competent SoftEng, I would hate to be disparaged just because university came after work.
* what career paths open that are difficult for a self-taught software engineer?
* expounding the above: at the end I will have a solid mathematical and CS foundation. What can I do with it?
* is it worth the >$200K investment (in opportunity cost, given foregiven earnings: assume that I can't work)
* bonus question: if looking for a career linked with China, how does that help?
I'm 26.
I would be grateful if you found the time to share your background and your thoughts. <comment><USER2> Similar situation to you I was working then got my undergraduate CS degree. For me the degree was more about me than the jobs I could find or the money I could make. I was curious and what I had learned up till that point wasn't sufficient. Starting the program I was loving it then I started to hit the main classes and was overwhelmed. I kept going and fought through it, not for lack of intelligence there is much of that but learning how to balance the workload and prioritize. Now work is easy. It has been for over 20 years. Learning how to prioritize is the key and finishing your the degree you start and plodding through it.

Once I graduated (around your age) I went to work doing CRUD and wondered if the money and time and degree was worth it. Finally I understood after some time that the degree is for me. No one can take that away from you. It's yours no matter the politics of the company. That's why you get a degree: for your own interests. If that degree benefits you in the future so be it. Great. Enjoy. But the perseverance you need to finish a degree must come from within you and not be of external needs. I had friends studying Chemical Engineering because "my dad told me to". Wrong reason. I convinced many to graduate early with a CS degree instead of a CE degree and they jumped at the chance.

I the end it's your decision and good luck with it. If you want to do it money shouldn't be the limitation, rather it should be your motivation and drive to get it done as with everything in life.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the time you have spent writing this down to share your experience.

Given that you have gone on to work on CRUD, as you've put it, have you ever entertained the thought of working more as a researcher?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you want the qualification study part time as a distance student with the lowest cost possible. There may be some worth to this degree but not $200k. You've proven you know this stuff. Distance learning will be easy for you.</comment>


How America Overdosed on Drug Courts - <AUTHOR> http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/how-america-overdosed-on-drug-courts

<comment><USER2> >By the time Darren was assigned to drug court, his addiction story carried almost every possible red flag for high-mortality risk: prior overdose, prior treatment failure, a childhood ADHD diagnosis, and a family history of mental illness. Any addiction doctor—or anybody who simply follows evidence-based treatment guidelines—would know exactly what to prescribe for him: opioid maintenance, by far the most effective treatment, known to lower the death rate of opioid addiction by between 66 and 75 percent.

I am a psychiatrist, and I treat many people with addiction problems. This formulation is a gross oversimplification. Opioid agonist therapy (methadone or bupronorhpine) is not trivial or one-size-fits-all. There are many other factors to consider, not the least of which is the person's interest in getting clean.

<comment><USER3> It is a generalisation but a good one. "Getting clean" is a loaded term. Most (not all) people who have "drug" problems actually have police problems. The drugs do them very little harm (impurities are a different story, but not as common as people think) but the police and legal systems do them untold damage.

Making the drugs available is by far the best treatment for most forms of drug addiction in the vast majority of cases. The simplest way to do that is to remove criminal sanctions from drugs and make prescription for addiction legal.

Addiction is a complex beast and demanding that people deal with the chemical dependence before dealing with the other problems in an addicts life is usually a cruel approach and ineffective.

This is something a psychiatrist should know.

<comment><USER2> I can't really agree with your premise. Our current situation is pretty broken, and our drug laws and enforcement have not achieved their stated aims.

That said, the legality of alcohol hardly keeps it from causing lots of people very serious problems. "Drugs do them very little harm" is fantasy, though you are quite right that a felony history and time behind bars only makes things worse.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious about a couple of your points here.

First, when people involved in addiction treatment say that drugs cause people serious problems aside from legal issues related to the drug itself, I wonder if they are biased by only seeing the users who hooked badly enough to land themselves in various sorts of rehab/therapy programs. Do we know how many people are using these drugs in a more casual way, suffering little to no real harm from them, and never coming to the attention of the legal system?

Second, you say below in reference to heroin being dangerous how many people die of overdoses every year. I was under the impression that the reason overdoses are so common is that, since it is illegal, there is no regulation or easy way to determine the purity of any given batch of it, so it is easy to accidentally overdose if you get a stronger batch than you're used to. If opioids are really that fundamentally dangerous, why is long-term monitored use of methadone etc not considered to be a bad thing, as opposed to going cold-turkey ASAP?

<comment><USER2> 1\. There is a strong selection bias among the people I see, biased towards people who are much more impaired. That said, many of them had a pattern of spending more time/energy on their addiction causing themselves lots of problems before they sought help. It is true that for some substances there are many people who use recreationally without major problems, and I don't see them (and don't need to see them) for treatment. I have never seen a casual user of intravenous heroin, but perhaps there are some.

2\. Difficulty establishing purity is one issue, but the overdoses happen just as often with prescription pain pills with predictable strength. Many people will continue to chase a bigger high and get in trouble that way. Other people (as described in the article) will stop using for a time and lose their tolerance, then assume that a dose that was previously safe is OK. Then they stop breathing.

Methadone clinics generally provide the same steady dose, which avoids this problem.

<comment><USER3> "There is a strong selection bias among the people I see" This is a real problem in drug policy. The majority of drug users stay well clear of medical professionals. They learn quickly not to discuss their habits with doctors or nurses as it leads all sorts of problems.

Prescription pain pills are _not_ heroin. They are dangerous in overdoes because of the effect they have on the breathing reflex. It is a common practice among the drug addicts I knew to never let a fellow user 'nod off', that is loose consciousness as it leads to death when they stop breathing.

This is not a problem for heroin addicts using heroin. But (in the world I inhabited 15 years ago) heroin was very rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article focuses on a single failed case, the actual worst case scenario. And though it is true cases like this exist, it is a tiny part of the story of Drug Court. It gives no credit to Drug Court's immense success. I have personally met dozens if not hundreds of addicts that came into recovery only through drug court, and have achieved long term recovery, and have become productive members of society.

After touting the worst case scenario and ignoring the success, this article puts a little missive in there about how doctors (those mostly with no personal experience in addiction or recovery) prefer opioid maintenance. This is but another marketing message for Suboxone, in the massive PR campaign underway to create an alternative to drug-free recovery through long term addiction to a pharmaceutical product. In the recovery community, Suboxone is referred to as Drug Replacement Therapy (DRT) because that is what it is, switching street dope for dope that comes from your doctor. It gets you high enough to avoid withdrawal, but not so high that you can't move boxes or burgers in an entry-level job. If you do try to get off the Subs, you will experience withdrawal that makes heroin withdrawal look like a walk in the park on a sunny day with a sno-cone and a puppy. This article also fails to mention the suicide rate of people on Suboxone. While I have no hard data on that (ONLY because it has never been studied), I can tell you it happens. It's happened to people I've known. It happens because so long as they are addicted to dope, doctor prescribed or otherwise, the deeply traumatized individual who is an addict remains traumatized. They will never experience the true freedom, healing and wholeness that comes only through deep self-examination and a conversion process of equal or greater magnitude, that leads to self- and social integration. DRT only treats the most visible symptoms of addiction, and does nothing to treat the underlying cause.

While I know not everyone succeeds as a result of drug court, on balance, it is a net positive. Some people need to be re-arrested 2 or 3 times before it takes. And some die. This is an unfortunate reality of addiction. And opioid maintenance IS addiction. It really is up to the individual to work through their trauma, and find the needed support to exist and find a reason to continue living. That cannot be imposed by law, coercion, or prescription.

Bottom line though, research the history of Heroin in the United States. A hundred or so years ago, heroin was touted as the solution for morphine addicts. It was the Drug Replacement Therapy of that time. We have been down this road before and we know where it leads.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's another problem with drug courts which I think is a bit more serious. Given the amount of judicial and supervision time required for a drug court, the courts tend to be very selective as to who can be diverted into that process. They prefer young people with no prior history and those individuals are put through a very stringent process with the threat of going to jail or prison for noncompliance.

The rub here is that that group of people (young, nonviolent first-time offenders) tend not to reoffend anyway. In that light, these courts take credit for putting someone through this process who would have been just as likely to never see the court again if she or he had just been issued a fine or given a stern talking-to. For this group, just being in jail for a night is enough to stop (or never get caught again).

What makes this sadder, I think, is that there are many other people in the system that would benefit from this kind of specialized attention from judges and probation officers. The success rate for that group would be much lower, but the individual successes would be more impressive. They just get put into prison over and over until all they can do is be a criminal.

</comment><comment><USER7> Prohibition/The War on Drugs is stupid. All it does is put money into the hands of criminals and costs the state money by locking people up who should be leading normal lives and paying taxes.

<comment><USER8> Why is your comment written with an assumption that one of the great things a person can do is to pay taxes? That same attitude is what got us drug laws in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This points to a more general problem of the lack of accountability of judges.

<comment><USER10> So how do we get there? More mandatory minimums? Less judicial discretion?

Since I think the solution is to get rid of the drug courts and move them into the medical system, and not to demand more accountability.

Plus, what of accountability for the politicians who set up the policies in the first place?

<comment><USER11> IMO we need to decriminalize drugs, treat addiction as a medical issue, and shift our cultural attitudes away from seeking punishment out of the justice system. But none of those will happen because there are too many people making too much money from the current paradigm.

And politicians have worked long and hard to ensure they have no accountability. As long as the place that they're from is aligned to their party affiliation, they have a job for life regardless of what they do.

<comment><USER3> "none of those will happen because there are too many people making too much money from the current paradigm"

Portugal

Colorado/Washington/Alaska

In the UK they have returned to prescribing heroin to drug addicts

In New Zealand there is new law around novel drugs that will make them legally available in shops if they can be proved safe

It is happening.

<comment><USER12> Colorado and Washington are already blowing it. They are taking tax revenue from the sale of marijuana and using it as regular tax revenue for programs such as schools. Just look at the insidious relationship government has with the lottery to see that we are just shackling ourselves to a whole other host of compromised interests. Once they get that money regularly, they are never giving it back with out a (corrupt) fight which means any means to use the revenue from drug sales can never be used for appropriate or creative means to further solve the drug problem and we will quickly find ourselves in the absurd situation where our elementary schools will be active drug pushers (see the recent John Oliver piece that highlights a New York Public School ad pushing gambling and the lottery as some noble activity).

It's the one major social issue that can completely fund, to the full extent of current science, the research and treatment of it's ill effects on society...and we are throwing the opportunity away that will be extraordinarily, if not impossible, to get back.

<comment><USER13> _They are taking tax revenue from the sale of marijuana and using it as regular tax revenue for programs such as schools._

Is that really blowing it though? I have nothing to prove my claim but I'd say a good dose of substance abuse comes from lacking agency as a result of poor education.

 _It 's the one major social issue that can completely fund, to the full extent of current science, the research and treatment of it's ill effects on society_

What about alcohol, which you could argue results in more violence and negative health effects than marijuana consumption?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mob programming – The mob rules, OK? - <AUTHOR> http://tooky.co.uk/the-mob-rules-ok/ <comment><USER2> Did something like this at a previous job without giving it a name. It was three of us around a single computer - we each took turns being the "typist" with the others mostly watching and helping, but also using their computers to lookup documentation or run a little ahead. Our job was to rebuild an existing product from scratch on a very short timeline and with some experimental new technologies none of us were familiar with. We programmed like this on a television in a conference room for about 2-3 weeks as we bootstrapped the program from nothing into a working core of functionality and abstracted away from the experimental technologies into something more manageable that we could use day-to-day. From here we split-off and worked in parallel and brought in the rest of the team - who had been maintaining the old product in the mean time.

The main benefits were that knowledge sharing was immediate as we all went through the same learning process and helped build the same abstractions. Problem solving was also incredibly quick. We eventually open-sourced the work and it has been actively used by others for about 3 years now.

Overall mob programming was useful, but I think only with the following constraints: \- Small mob size \- Limited time in "mob" mode \- High-level of maturity and ability to work as a team among mob members

I think this could very easily turn into something nasty and unproductive with a group of people who can't get along or aren't mature enough for this level of cooperation and teamwork.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have not had the chance yet to use mob programming on a real project. But I have used it when teaching workshops and trainings. And it worked pretty well.

The first thing I noticed is that no-one tuned out. When I organized my trainings so that participants do the exercises alone or in pairs, some would just not do them. They might have too much problems to even get started. Or, when pairing with a better developer, just let them do the work. In the mob, paid attention everybody joined the discussion. [1]

Also, I think there was a better shared understanding of the examples and the solutions after the mob programming. When working in pairs, I had to monitor 5-8 pairs in parallel and give them hints and explain stuff. With the mob, I could concentrate on one screen and join the discussion _all the time_.

And: Others were helping me out. At one point, a participant said: "I don't want to take the driver seat, I am no programmer, just a manager". Before I could even say something, someone else from the audience said: "Come on, try it. We tell you what to write, and after 10 minutes, we'll change again anyway".

So, to recap: I really like mob programming for teaching. I think it could also work well when a team wants to learn something new, has a hard design session or wants to bring new team members up to speed. I even think it could work during day-to-day work, but I have never tried that.

[1] Maybe I was just lucky and had a great group when we were duing mob programming. But I doubt that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Mob programming sounds rather inefficient to me, but I'll freely admit that I have never tried it myself. It might give good results if your team is disciplined and talented, but can't that be said of all approaches to team programming?

<comment><USER5> I'm optimistic about it, though I admit that I haven't tried it. Code written by a mob would have the benefit of receiving intensive review at the design phase. There wouldn't be many opportunities for a mob project to spiral out into duplicate functionality or mismatched modules. It's also potentially less taxing than pairing because you'd get the chance to sit back and ponder higher-level issues without constant prompting to fill in the next line. So the overall result should be higher quality in the average case, with less siloing of knowledge, and smoother daily output.

There are cases where you'd want the team to work more independently, but they have to be weighed against communication costs. Those pile up quickly on any team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "We haven't found a really good solution for a shared whiteboard yet."

May I suggest padlet?

[https://padlet.com/](https://padlet.com/) I discovered it about a 18 months back when I was trying to find a way to leave notes for my wife while at work behind a rather inconvenient firewall.

I believe it MAY work for what you're asking. I also rather enjoy the idea of mob mentality! Thanks for the read.

Edited to fix typos and misplaced quotes.

</comment><comment><USER7> No amount of testimonials will change my mind about this being a terrible idea...at least not in that format (1 driver, x observers). I'd be willing to try, 1 driver, 1 projector, X people with laptops. Break down project into tasks, allow observers to implement tasks as driver works on task, share code from/into project. That makes more sense.

</comment><comment><USER8> A 3.5 hour long meeting every day? This does not sounds like a good idea.</comment>


Facebook Horizon, a New Social VR World - <AUTHOR> https://www.oculus.com/blog/introducing-facebook-horizon-a-new-social-vr-world-coming-to-oculus-quest-and-the-rift-platform-in-2020/ <comment><AUTHOR> Ready Player One's Oasis, here we come. I know John Carmack has been talking about something like this for a while, and I'm interested to see how it is.

I was an early backer of the original Oculus for the promise of something like this. I've been excited about the idea of a programmable VR world since reading Snow Crash.

I'm just a little disappointed it's happening via Facebook, which I don't use, but at least they have the resources to really make it work.</comment>


A year of Geek Atlas sales (some facts about book royalties) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/year-of-geek-atlas-sales-or-some-facts.html

<comment><USER2> I guess I understand that, while providing a good insight into royalties in general, the article left out something more directly interesting:

Was it worth, monetary, to write the Geek Atlas? It wasn't written for the money, I read that. And I understand that the royalties are smallish, compared to the prices payed by the customers. But I do wonder if a book like that (targeted at a "minority", more a "novelty" thing from what I can tell) sells good enough to keep a single guy alive.

So - in the light of the recent talks about salaries around the world in general and in NYC/the bay area specifically: John - would mind sharing a very rough estimate of sales for this book?

(I guess the answer is "It's too personal", because otherwise it could've been part of the blog entry itself to further strengthen the "Not for the money" part, but hey - I guess it's always okay to ask politely)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have made about 1/12 of my annual salary from the book. This is great, but I consider the fringe benefits of having the book much more important.

<comment><USER2> Thanks a lot for responding. This again is interesting in the light of the salary discussion from yesterday. Thinking out loud here I assume that JGC isn't living on anything near a minimum wage. 1/12 of that could certainly be 1/6 to 1/4 of a yearly salary elsewhere, again refering to the gap in salaries for basically doing a similar job. Which changes a lot about the ROI here, for me.

Not that I want to undermine the effort you had to put into that project. I seriously cannot imagine or understand the work put into that book by you. And I certainly don't plan to write a book now...

What really is interesting about this number game is mostly that I come from the opposite direction of guy that wrote the comment ("Living of your book royalties") that lead to your blog entry in the first place: I assumed creating a book would suck in terms of money in general (except for the obvious exceptional cases like Rowling) and for a minority target group specifically.

Now, on the other hand, I can better understand why and how one could live off writing most of the time (obviously with numbers like yours you wouldn't be able to sustain a life in NYC, but again - the differences in cost of living and salaries showed that it should be possible elsewhere).

Thanks a lot for sharing this.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I seriously cannot imagine or understand the work put into that book by you_

It was a pleasure to spend the time on the book and if I had the means I would write another book. But I also need to make a living. If I get the time I'd like to do "The Apollo 11 Guidance Computer: Annotated Program Listing" :-)

<comment><USER3> I think most of us would love to see your take on that. However, in case anyone's interested, a book like that does already exist:

[http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Guidance-Computer- Architecture-...](http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architecture- Exploration/dp/1441908765/)

I haven't bought it yet but it's in my wishlist pending an Xmas purchase ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It already went round the HN mill last year but just in case anyone finds it interesting now, I wrote something similar (but about 50x longer, for various reasons) about my book, Beginning Ruby: <http://beginningruby.org/what-ive- earned-and-learned/>

Intriguingly, it seems from this post that Apress offers better terms than O'Reilly..

</comment><comment><USER4> I was technical editor of the (dreadful) Practical OCaml, for which I made £650 (about £450 after tax) for months of work:

<http://blog.merjis.com/2006/11/08/practical-ocaml/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Boy, I'm glad The Geek Atlas didn't get reviews like that! The worst anyone has said is "An interesting idea, but the author's choices seem overly idiosyncratic to me."

<comment><USER3> Ah, that reminds me of something. I was browsing the reviews for your book a few weeks ago having seen the book linked on your site and noticed the "worst" review you got (still 3 stars, though!) was written by a "P. Cooper." Paranoid as I am, I feel the need to note that this is/was _not_ me :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are paranoid. Also, if you had written the P. Cooper review I hardly would have held it against you. I thought his/her opinion was perfectly sensible.

<comment><USER3> I know. :-) I'm on "be nice and clear the air" alert as yesterday I got a bizarre e-mail from a HN user over a 2 line comment. Most of it can't even be reproduced here but the _most pleasant_ bit was the ending: _"Have a horrible day, and if you see your parents tell them that they did a sXXt job, and raised a sXXt human being."_

You can't keep everyone happy, it seems, but it's worth a try!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When considering publishing a book, one must consider how widely applicable the subject matter is and how widely the publisher can actually disseminate your work. I just published my fourth book, seventh if you count works that I have written for hire. I do not expect it to do as well as my previous works because the publisher is smaller and the domain of application is much more restricted. The publisher of my first few books is a subsidiary of HarperCollins and runs bookstores itself, so its channels are much more pervasive. This is shown in the royalty statements.

Self-publishing naturally boosts the ROI on small runs, but it is not without its drawbacks. Whenever I have thought of a book that I might self-publish, I question whether it is worth writing. The major publishers know their customer better than I could realistically hope to ever know. If they would not take it on, one must wonder about the market for it. I do not say this to mean one should not self-publish, but self-publishing is usually reserved for pet projects that one has developed as a hobby and want to share. If one is looking for a high ROI on the effort it takes to write a book, the larger publishers are the way to go.

Also, the longevity of one's work is directly related to how evergreen the content is. If one writes something sexy or novel, I suspect one would be lucky to get a year or two of decent sales out of it. I write as evergreen as I can. so to this day, I am still receiving cheques from a book that I published 4-5 years ago that are close to the same level as what I received originally. It remains in the top 3% on Amazon.com. This is highly unusual, but it can be done. You will seldom get rich off a single title, but you can develop several streams of passive income if you write well and can engage readers. My 2¢, fwiw.

</comment><comment><USER6> A compelling reason to self publish, if possible. Sure it's going to be harder to gain traction but you only need to sell a tenth the copies. Massive advantage if your subject matter is skewed towards the web anyway.

<comment><USER7> > A compelling reason to self publish, if possible. Sure it's going to be > harder to gain traction but you only need to sell a tenth the copies. > Massive advantage if your subject matter is skewed towards the web anyway.

It's not all it's cracked up to be. I just wrote another comment on this.

You can get 15% from a major publishing house for a semi-mainstream project, and you're looking at 60% from Amazon. The problem is, you're going to have to pay your own copyeditor, cover design, formatting, presentation, etc with Amazon. Realistically, you're looking at $1500 to $3000 to self-publish a quality piece of self-published work, and that's with a lot of hours of grunt work on your own, and then your work hasn't been shaped by an editor that knows what the market wants.

Nonfiction really just doesn't sell very well, so there's a realistic chance you won't recoup your expenses for self publishing. Of course, you could skip having your book copyedited professionally, but then your quality is going to be a lot worse. No matter how good of a writer you are, you get too close to your own work and really should have a professional go over it. When you publish with a mainstream house, that's part of what they do. When you self- publish, you're own your own and out of pocket for that.

If you have an opportunity to get paid speaking events or being recognized as an expert would increase your pay, you actually probably stand to make more mainstream publishing. Also, it's still probably better for getting your message out to many people.

You can probably maximize short term cash by self publishing if you don't worry as much about production quality, if you alreay have a huge fanbase (like Seth Godin for instance, smart of him to jump into alternate models), and especially if you can speculatively burn $5000 to $10000 to hire professionals and spend some money promoting and you could handle taking a loss or breaking even if it doesn't pan out. If you're already fairly established and successful, self publishing is very viable. If you're not, there's a lot of advantages to being signed to a major house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just did a lot of looking into this. First, yes, you nailed it - if you publish with a publisher, you do it because they're going to help you with distribution, presentation, and get you wider reach and impact. It's good for art and exposure, but not as good for getting cash, especially if you already know how to promote or have a significant fanbase.

With that said, a couple of things for anyone thinking of getting into this.

1\. You really want your royalties to be based on "suggested retail list price" if possible. That means you get the same amount no matter what price people sell it at. Here's a link that explains more:

<http://www.ivanhoffman.com/royalties.html>

> The significant question to ask is: "Upon what figure is the percentage > royalty rate to be calculated?" In other words, by what number do we > multiply the royalty rate? Examples range from "net monies received by > Publisher," "gross cash receipts," "the suggested retail list price," > "wholesale price," and perhaps other variations on that theme.

You're on net, which kind of sucks, because the publishing house and your incentives don't always line up. Generally speaking, publishers want to maximize their profit across the catalog, and might be happy to "price your work to move" - I won't get into complicated maths about demand elasticity, but publishers sometimes prefer to sell lots of books at lower prices, even if an individual author would make more at higher prices. If you're on suggested retail price royalties, this is a non-issue and your incentives don't really clash at all. In fact, then it's a big win for you if the mark the book down to sell more copies, which they still likely will as it's the current model of the publishing industry.

2\. I looked into self-publishing, and you can pick up a 60% royalty rate from Amazon Createspace, but your production quality is going to suck, you're going to need to eat a lot of upfront fees, thus you're taking on a lot of risk, and you're going to have make your own connections with distributors and bookstores and things like that (and you'll be approaching them from a position of lower credibility - they're still quite wary of self-published books).

I was going to self publish, but then realizing what Amazon wanted it's kind of ugly. They want an exactly formatted pdf of what your book would look like, and then the production quality is very so-so. And IMO, Amazon Createspace is the best self publishing route because of its tight integration with Amazon. If you go with a different self publishing company, you're looking at even more hassle trying to make distribution work correctly.

Geek Atlas looks good - congrats on that. I'll pick up a copy next time I'm settled down and not on the road. Congrats on that, it's a cool project and piece of art that I respect, notwithstanding our internet scuffling.

<comment><USER3> _I was going to self publish, but then realizing what Amazon wanted it's kind of ugly._

It's not strictly necessary to have your book available in Amazon or at other bookstores (or even in print form at all) to make a successful "book." HN's own Amy Hoy (ahoyhere) has made more from <http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/> \- a $39 e-book - than I have from selling > 10,000 copies of a print book published with Apress.

<comment><USER8> What are the numbers, roughly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is the new Barnes & Noble PubIt platform just detailed [1] for digital self-publishing. Royalties are 65% for the $2.99-$9.99 range and 40% for $10.00 <= prices <= $2.98. Supposedly with "no additional charges, regardless of file size" and "no hidden terms or fees".

[1]: [http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/04/barnes-and-noble-opens- pu...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/04/barnes-and-noble-opens-pubit-self- publishing-portal-details-co/)

</comment><comment><USER10> "That, by the way, is roughly how Amazon.com sells you books for so little"

What? You mean Amazon makes some sort of "margin" off the sales they make? How does that system work? I thought they'd make money selling google ads. I thought they pay the cover price and then get a little from the shipping</comment>


Spelling mistake prevented hackers taking $1B in bank heist - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/10/spelling-mistake-prevented-bank-heist <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262177) appears to have more detail.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good lesson to learn, even for the rest of us. A few extra minutes making sure your work looks professional can be the difference between $80 Million and $1 Billion.

<comment><USER4> Getting paid for spelling accuracy sounds like a fun job, I think I would be good at it.

at least wehn im nto guuefing off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The nature of the typo "fandation" instead of "foundation" makes me think the perpetrators were from a Russian speaking country. edit:spelling

<comment><USER6> I must point out that you have a typo in the word "from"

<comment><USER7> Also "where" vs "were"\-- if we're nitpicking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Considering "Hackers got away with about $80m" is the _subheading_ , when it deserves to be in gigantic letters with a picture of the Hindenburg under it, I am impressed with the PR agency who spun this story.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The title is a bit sensationalist because the number of transactions was also a factor, but anyway, they've lost some serious money on it (even if it was just one more transaction)

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't get how we can't take back and track bits. It's not like real physical currency was taken.

</comment><comment><USER10> One billion. Wow.

I'd expect _a lot_ of copycat attacks on central banks soon.</comment>


Analyzing Data from 34,000 Comic Books - <AUTHOR> Today (Mon, Sep 25 from 7:30 - 8:30pm EDT)
RSVP:
https://livestream.com/metis/events/7704104
Although critical analyses of feminism and sexism in popular entertainment are gaining momentum, the complexity of cultural influences means that discussions often remain qualitative and cannot draw on data-based evidence. Data scientists, however, have the ability to access and analyze digital sources, providing a unique opportunity to uncover and generate useful evidence for these critical discussions. Amanda Shendruk will discuss in detail her process of gathering, analyzing and presenting data from over 34,000 Marvel and DC characters, and what her findings reveal about gender representation in comic books. Covering super powers, naming conventions and team representation, Amanda will show how the skills employed by data scientists can re-energize broad cultural discussions.
About the Speaker - Amanda Shendruk is an award-winning visual journalist and data designer. She currently works at the Council on Foreign Relations finding ways to visually explain complex topics on foreign policy. Amanda has worked in newsrooms around the world, including at Maclean's Magazine in Canada and at the Guardian in the UK. <comment><USER2> Article by the speaker on the same topic: [https://pudding.cool/2017/07/comics/](https://pudding.cool/2017/07/comics/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember once hearing how there were some strange correlations between hair and eye colour and role and personality. I wonder if they will touch on that too? Either way, will be cool to see what they've found.</comment>


Google.com Ranks Slow Using New Google PSI Speed Rank - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/q/54658159/1199102?stw=2 <comment><USER2> Do as we say, not as we do.

PSI has been a pain in the ass from the day it was released. I can happily ignore it, but my customers don't.

<comment><USER3> I like the new version, Page Speed Insights actually measures page speed now. I used to get horrible scores even though pages were fully loaded in 1/3 of a second. Now I get perfect scores.

I have clients that made a big deal about PSI and did all sorts of things to raise their old scores. Then the system changed and they went from scores in the 90s to scores in the 30s.

The new system tends to brutally punish things like ads, even Google's own AdSense. Slow servers, bloated HTML/JS/CSS, all those things that make browsing painful get penalized in a much more fair way than before.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I agree, the old tool had many issues, and I think for the "synthetic" portion, moving over to Lighthouse (used in the browser, headless chrome) makes sense.

But, the sudden move from basing ranks off median vs to the 90th percentile, needs to be considered. (Or at least some function on outliers should be applied perhaps weighted by pageHits).

From my initial querying of CRuX and using the tool directly — it tends to punish highly trafficked sites, making it seem like they are "slower"...when they are often highly optimized.

</comment><comment><USER4> As someone who make the mistake of being obsessed with the Pagespeed Insights score. Was kinda like a Monty Python sketch to make all the adjustment need it on my code and server to get something >90... to then later get that score down thanks to Google analytics and another Google Scripts.

My advice. If your site it's over 70 you're probably good.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The tool encourages posting questions on stack overflow, so hoping to get a little traction and encourage an answer.

<comment><USER5> I wrote some of the updated documentation when PSI migrated to Lighthouse. I'll forward your question to the team. You can also try forwarding this question to the Chrome User Experience Report mailing list [1], because that's where this data is coming from.

[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chrom...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chrome- ux-report)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, really appreciate that. I posted on [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pagespeed- insights-d...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pagespeed-insights- discuss) ... Don't want to be too spammy, but can do the same.

<comment><USER5> I think it's OK to forward the question to the CrUX mailing list. They're the ones who are going to have an answer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Intelsat 35e Mission Press Kit - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/07/02/intelsat-35e-mission-press-kit <comment><USER2> > SpaceX will not attempt to land Falcon 9's first stage after launch due to > mission requirements.

Could anyone knowledgeable about the topic care to explain the rationale here?

<comment><USER3> For this launch, the rocket will need to launch a very heavy satellite (up to the rockets performance limit) to a higher altitude. Thus requiring all of its fuel. There won't be enough fuel left to land the rocket since they need to bring velocity back to 0. Weight matters a lot too (even the coat of paint on the rocket adds up) so having no legs would increase the performance of the rocket.

<comment><USER4> How common is a payload of this weight?

<comment><USER5> They're not uncommon but SpaceX doesnt see most, there are other higher- performance launcher platforms that can easily put these into orbit. SpaceX's next rocket (Falcoln Heavy) will roughly quadruple the capability of their platform. The other SpaceX limitation is their fairing size. They designed their rockets to fit under bridges on American highways which limits the size of the payload they can deliver.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Good UI - <AUTHOR> https://www.goodui.org/ <comment><USER2> Ironically, the website has horrible ui. Who thought that sidebar would be a good idea? Also, that huge newsletter sign up form just turns the site into click-bait.

<comment><USER3> Well, the advice was about optimizing calls to action and flow... as to the sidebar, I didn't even see it, I don't go fullscreen on my windows, so had to make it larger to see it after seeing your comment.

For me, I've moved away from trying to use any hover events for critical interaction, like that sidebar has. As tablets/phones are becoming the default choice, it makes sense to cater more towards that environment. The one thing that does stand out, is making sure to indicate there's more to read/do down the page, and the lack of an ever-present scrollbar in phones/tablets is a big one here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> lol, another try at selling marketing trickery as user experience.

<comment><USER5> I saw the little text box at the bottom jiggle at me and immediately closed the page.

#1 PROTIP to a good UI. Don't jiggle anything, anywhere, ever, for any reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I for one thought it was a pretty good advice for UI, especially for landing pages. A good landing page can make all the difference and it can be a pain/time-consuming when it isn't your specialty.

</comment><comment><USER7> #0 Try to reuse components that users are used to, like scrolling instead of making your own hover-to-scroll on your sidebar.....

</comment><comment><USER8> Many of the suggestions on the site are sound. But yes, their front end and design make a poor first impression.</comment>


'White space' technology to launch in late 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tech/news/a440084/white-space-technology-to-launch-in-late-2013.html

<comment><USER2> > Compared with other wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth or WiFi, the > radio waves used by white space devices can travel for much larger distances > and easily pass through walls. This is because they use lower frequencies > reserved for TV signals.

I stopped at this sentence, because the author doesn't know what he's talking about. The radio waves under discussion cannot travel a greater distance and are not better at passing through walls. There is a line-of-sight issue, but the author clearly doesn't understand that or how it ties into his argument. Suffice it to say that the claim as stated above is false.

If these wavelengths have so many advantages, one is compelled to ask why they've been abandoned in favor of others. The reasons are excellent, but a a bit too complex to go into here.</comment>


Show HN: 8base BaaS launches free tier - <AUTHOR> https://www.8base.com/products/developer-platform <comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, everyone, who participated in the discussion! That thread led to us making an awesome update of our pricing (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20876256](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20876256)). Early on we were really concerned about our business model. Looking at what's happened to Graph.cool, Parse, and Scaphold, we didn't want to die from a free-tier that no-one ever leaves. That's why we started with launching the 30-day free trial over a free-tier.

We've worked hard to find a middle ground based on the HN feedback. So the good news is we've changed our pricing for developers by making the following updates.

FREE TIER! It allows developers to build using almost all of 8base's features; free-forever but throttling the API. This makes everything on the backend/console usable while not supporting production use.

Our $8 plan was renamed as HOBBYIST and we've introduced a new $49/mo plan called DEVELOPER. The new plan has better limits at lower prices per unit and lets developers utilize their own auth provider – which used to be on the $149/mo plan.

We 10X'd storage for the same price in every plan and reduced charges for overages.

To accommodate long-running jobs, we've changed the way we charge for serverless functions to a combination of memory usage and time (Giga-byte minutes).

I hope these updates put a smile on a few faces! Cause the haters gonna hate...

Albert

</comment><comment><USER2> I've been using 8base for 4 months, and I'm loving it. Top-notch UI/UX in a backend-as-a-service.

The new $49/m plan is a step when you outgrow the Hobby plan, not having to go straight to "enterprise-level"

I haven't had any issue with support either.

Keep adding features, you're on the right path. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Glosster. Please keep the ideas coming.</comment></comment>


You are launching a new SaaS company – what PaaS solution would you use? - <AUTHOR> You are launching a new SaaS company - what PaaS solution would you use? If not PaaS, what would you use (guessing IaaS - AWS or GCE Kube)? <comment><USER2> Depend how much VC funding/ hosting credit obtained [1][2], if bootstrapped and selfunded (money matter) then bare metal [3][4][5].

[1] [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member- offers/bizs...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member- offers/bizspark-startups/)

[2] [https://aws.amazon.com/start-ups/](https://aws.amazon.com/start-ups/)

[3] [https://www.soyoustart.com/en/](https://www.soyoustart.com/en/)

[4] [https://www.hetzner.de/](https://www.hetzner.de/)

[5] any other provider (softlayer,packet,...)

<comment><AUTHOR> So you wouldn't use a Heroku or cloudfoundry etc? You'd go for IaaS. Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Or maybe even Kubernetes?

<comment><USER2> Oh sure! That also depend on project, skills, work load, system design, goals, SLA. And many project specific 'things'. Few more links attached. IAAS, bare metal means different price point.

[0] [http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/](http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/) (Heroku self-hosted)

[1] [http://rancher.com/](http://rancher.com/) ('Point and click Docker cluster ')

[2] [https://www.mindmeister.com/389671722/open-container- ecosyst...](https://www.mindmeister.com/389671722/open-container-ecosystem- formerly-docker-ecosystem)

[3] [https://www.ansible.com/](https://www.ansible.com/) (Server provision)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just start with a VM or dedicated server until you have scale that matters. Focus on product.

If you want an early head start with something like containers, then Kubernetes is nice and 1.4 has some good features to make it easy to scale across clouds/on-prem/colo in the future.

</comment><comment><USER4> Personally I'd make sure the various services were at least deployable as Docker containers. That way there's a lot of flexibility in switching providers, and makes it easier to deploy on prem later if/when you need to.

As for which platform? IMO the most important factor is which platforms the developer(s) are most comfortable/familiar with. The last thing a new SaaS startup needs is to waste time while the engineers figure out a new platform they've never used... Doesn't really matter how easy or cheap it is to deploy if there's no product ready to deploy ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> Currently debating between OVH, Online.net, and Hetzner.

Hetzner is cheapest but the other two have private networking.

If I didn't care about cost I would just use AWS or Google.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would use PaaS like:

Cloudways/Heroku because I don't want to spend my time on bothering with server management.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd use AWS Lambda</comment>


X Window System: Principles - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Principles <comment><AUTHOR> \- Do not add new functionality unless you know of some real application that will require it.

\- It is as important to decide what a system is not as to decide what it is. Do not serve all the world's needs; rather, make the system extensible so that additional needs can be met in an upwardly compatible fashion.

\- The only thing worse than generalizing from one example is generalizing from no examples at all.

\- If a problem is not completely understood, it is probably best to provide no solution at all.

\- If you can get 90 percent of the desired effect for 10 percent of the work, use the simpler solution. (See also worse is better.)

\- Isolate complexity as much as possible.

\- Provide _mechanism_ rather than policy. In particular, place user interface policy in the clients' hands.

</comment><comment><USER2> X Window System programming principles in 2020: Use xcb.

</comment><comment><USER3> oh X windows, how you haunted my youth. Don't worry, you only need to buy like 11 manuals to make sense of it. :)

<comment><USER4> I used to hate those eleven bloody manuals back in the day and didn't lose a single chance to complain about how the whole thing is a big designed-by- committee mess.

Count your blessings though: Wayland has pretty much no up-to-date documentation about anything except the most trivial concepts. The only reason I can do anything with it today is that I had the chance to learn it as part of my job, so I could invest 8+ hours/day in it for several weeks and read heaps upon heaps of source code (of variable quality), ask stupid questions on IRC and mailing lists, and not the least of all, attend some workshops that my employer was glad to pay for (and thank God they were 'cause there's no way I'd have spent that kind of money to learn about Wayland).

I mean, I definitely don't want to go back to writing code with the kind of technology that you can write a 12-volume manual about. Just thinking about Xlib makes me shudder. But I sure wish I had 12 volumes of information about Wayland...

<comment><USER5> If you're interested, the author of Sway recently open-sourced the draft of his book on Wayland: [https://wayland-book.com/](https://wayland-book.com/)

<comment><USER4> I know about that book, and it certainly fills a big void (but it is an early draft -- 3-4 years ago, when I had to learn it, this wasn't around). It's good introductory material, IMHO, and it says a lot about the priorities of the companies involved in Wayland (and FOSS in general) that it's pretty much the only one of its kind, and written by a volunteer. If Wayland ever really becomes a successful desktop technology, Drew DeVault will have played an extraordinarily important role in it.

It's nowhere near the kind of documentation that X11 had, but there is also no way that is ever going to happen without serious commercial backing. The team that worked on the The Definitive Guides to the X Window System book series was probably larger than all the teams that worked on all FOSS Wayland compositors in existence -- and could work on it full-time.

<comment><USER5> I know what you mean, I learned it around 1.5 years ago and there was almost no written material at all. The way I did it was to source dive into libwayland and weston for a couple weeks. There is no coalition of big Unix vendors all putting money into it trying to build their own desktop platforms this time. It's all the embedded people shipping small devices running mostly static software stacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Isolate complexity as much as possible.

ICCCM, where are you going, stop, stop now, you have no access he-</comment>


Preact: Countering the Perception That Open Source Must Be Free - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/open-collective/why-and-how-to-fund-the-open-source-projects-you-depend-on-da62a582307#.m2l03rvjm <comment><USER2> I've had this argument with a number of different open-source groups, and they all come back to the fact that open-source communities don't like charging for products or services and try to survive on voluntary donations.

I tried to explain that companies and governments (especially governments) just cannot donate money for open-source. In IT, everything has a price and is a line item and needs to be justified. If a company doesn't have to pay that $100 for a badge on a website, they won't.

I think the long-term answer for open-source, especially for frameworks and languages, is through open-source IT certifications.

Being able to pay for some kind of certification would be a boon for everyone. Developers can show case their skills (and get a tax-deduction on their investment), Employers have a standard they can look for when hiring devs, and open-source communities get money based on the popularity of their projects and can show case who is getting certs or hiring based on them - showing the value of their work.

I'd gladly pay $500-1000 for a cert (even one I know I'd easily pass), but have trouble justifying $100 for warm-fuzzy-feelings, even when I know its going to a framework I depend on.

<comment><USER3> Usually, paying somebody to do something that materially benefits you isn't called donating. As the article suggests, organizations should think of voluntary open source funding as insurance.

Of course, some companies _do_ just donate money for open source, many more donate _in kind_ \- e.g. with hosting services - and still others develop internally and donate source code.

Naturally they do this because continued maintenance of the software supports their business objectives, and not out of an egalitarian sense of charity.

<comment><USER4> Even though it's nice to think of it as insurance, it's not the same thing because it doesn't come with any actual insurance.

You can donate money to a project to hope for help when you encounter some critical bug in the future. However, you don't actually get any guarantees that the community will help with said bug or return your money if they don't. That's a really hard sell if you're trying to pitch it as insurance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And it's MIT license, or as I think of it, the starving artist license. Why not license under AGPLv3, the way MongoDB does? You want to use it in open source stuff? Free. You want to use it in commercial product? Commercial license is available for a fee.

<comment><USER6> No way... We're taking about a front end framework... Which means you really can't use it for any commercial front end.. period.

Not to mention no corporation would touch it with a 10ft pole

<comment><USER5> Sure you could. Pay for a commercial license. Corporations pay for those all the time, and usually don't even get source.

<comment><USER6> And that's worked out horribly for maintainers.. it's the whole reason for open-source. Look there are plenty of use cases where (A)GPL is perfectly suitable... a front end gui framework is not a good example imho.

I've used plenty of closed source tools in the past... and they've always bit me in the ass at some point. I'd rather roll/adapt my own, or use something with a permissive license I don't have to worry about. I participate in the broader community, and prefer ISC/MIT licensing for most of what I do and use.

If it's a given database server, sure, AGPL is fine as long as the client library is permissive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like to pay for software I use. Especially if it's something I use to make money.

But if you don't ask me, I won't pay. Too many people are afraid to ask. I'm happy Jason is working towards changing that.

</comment><comment><USER8> One solution that I feel hasn't been explored enough is a commercial reuse license: [https://kartick-log.blogspot.in/2016/11/a-commercial- reuse-l...](https://kartick-log.blogspot.in/2016/11/a-commercial-reuse- license-can-be-best.html)

Like open-source, this helps people reuse your effort to build something else, without having to reinvent the wheel.

Like closed-source, it's easy to charge users for the software, and not have somone undercut you by offering the same thing free.

<comment><USER9> I think you have a really good idea! It doesn't just solve the problem with open versus closed source, it also solves a different and much more fundamental problem, which is that people who work on free and open source software do not get rewarded proportional to the value they provide to others. People who work on free software generally do so in their spare time, and work on proprietary software to pay the bills. This should be a sad state of affairs to anyone who actually cares about free software, that the only way to do it is to make proprietary software to keep the lights on. If one of them makes a program that is of great value and utility to others, how might they expect to be rewarded? If they are lucky, they can expect a few donations. If they are very lucky, a reasonably paid position maintaining their program paid for by a company that probably produces proprietary software.

How much are Linux kernel devs paid? How much value does Linux provide to others? On the other side of the coin, how much does the CEO of Snapchat make, and how much value does Snapchat provide to the world at large? This is unacceptable, people who make truly useful things should be rewarded appropriately, it's not fair that people can profit off the work of others while giving none of it back. Pull requests do not put food on the table, when people are able to make a living off of open source software, we'll see a lot more of it than we ever did when they relied on charity, goodwill, and a day job writing proprietary software.

<comment><USER8> Agreed.

My proposal isn't intended to make open-source sustainable. I don't have any magic solutions.

Rather, my proposal is pragmatic. Can we derive some of the benefits of open- source in a sustainably-funded way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Imagine if every 6-figure dev gave just $1k a year to a basket of all the OSS they use daily.... Man that would be a different (and better) world.

<comment><USER11> That's such a brilliant idea. What if there was a website where people could divide up which OSS projects their $1k or 1% goes to? It could be anonymous, pseudonymous, or public, depending on how bold the philanthropist was.

<comment><USER10> Well let's bang out some details right here. First, payments. Taking them and then disbursing them. In terms of taking, we'd need a subscription, and probably monthly. In terms of disbursing, I'd like to aim for 100% with operating costs coming from people voluntarily adding _us_ to their basket. Locating the actual target of the money is also potentially difficult. It's easy for some projects (Redis -> antirez) hard for others (node -> Ryan Dahl???). Also, would have to take into account some OSS has deep backing, and probably doesn't need money. Last but not least, taxes.

To summarize: before beginning I'd like to find similar systems ('competition'), how to locate recipients, and how to move the money around without losing any of it to fees, ideally. The marketing angle is easy: 6-figure devs might like the idea of giving in this way. Your basket could even be a sharable point of pride.

<comment><USER12> > Locating the actual target of the money is also potentially difficult.

You'd almost always want it to go to appropriate foundations (501(c)3 or equivalent), not individuals, except when supporting projects that really only have a single developer and no organization behind them. That also makes it easier for companies and individuals to give, since they can deduct it from their taxes.

<comment><USER10> Hmm. I guess I was envisioning _the service_ as being the non-profit, and the disbursement need not be to other non-profits.

But this brings up a few interesting points. First, if you give only to the founder, and not the contributor, will this engender resentment? Second, ideally the result would be that the founder would work more on the project in a consistent way, but that sort of gift would need to be something more along the lines of a stipend over the course of a year or two. Third, if the amounts were large enough (which would be the case if _every_ 6-figure dev gave $1k/year), you could do something along the lines of the MacArthur foundation so-called "genius grants".

<comment><USER12> Foundation, not founder; foundations are required to be much more accountable with funds than individuals are. I'm suggesting in most circumstances that it's preferable to give to an accountable organization chartered with the stewardship of a project, rather than to any particular individual.

<comment><USER10> Well this is a useful discussion, because I'm realizing how much I want to give the maker/user community itself the power to hold itself accountable. To take your point to the logical conclusion is to assert that all successful OSS projects should have a foundation, or even a for-profit org. I'd like to see something looser, a dynamic, democratic assignment of value by those who benefit the most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To be honest, the only time I'm going to pay for open source is if you bounty or ransom it and I want it. Neovim for instance.

OpenSSH, probably never. Just being honest here. And considering half the population here blocks ads, I doubt they'd pay either.

<comment><USER14> Makes sense that you'd only want to pay for things that provide you with value directly. I think that applies when donating a small amount to support a project you make use of, when you get something in return (like a t-shirt or sticker), or as you say to fund specific features or changes you want. That also goes for sponsors: they should get value in return, and they do, like exposure and reputation in the dev community, a platform for their recruitment message, etc. To me, this dynamic seems quite different from ads, which are non-consensual and not tied to a direct value exchange.

<comment><USER13> Yeah. That makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> An annual budget of $6K is going to take a long time to gain momentum.

Compare against other successful projects, like:

\- VueJS, $9K / month: [https://www.patreon.com/evanyou](https://www.patreon.com/evanyou)

\- GUN (mine, an Open Source Firebase) $1.9K / month: [https://www.patreon.com/gunDB](https://www.patreon.com/gunDB)

It looks like the Patreon route is better than the open collective route.

I'd be interested to have a debate, though - just seems like the numbers tell their own story. No?

<comment><USER14> Well, the article specifically discusses Open Collective vs Patreon, referencing VueJS. What do you think of the differences mentioned there?

<comment><USER15> Jason seems to be opposed to the idea of a BDFL in exchange for a day job. To me, this is why the numbers are going to be different. Ideas need a prophet, a messiah to attach to. I'm strongly against centralization, but decentralization and P2P and "open" don't mean "lacking a visionary". And you can't hand a "rally call" over to a group of people - not that a group isn't powerful, but personality is important to any movement. And if a group adopts a personality, it becomes conformity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > [Preact is] still just 600–800 lines of code if you remove the comments.

I'd never heard of Preact. I still don't know what it is or does. Maybe it's truly groundbreaking. But how can 800 SLOC be a product? That's barely more than an afternoon's hacking session, not something to release and form a community around.

</comment><comment><USER17> I really hate the "gigantic block quotes between paragraphs" thing. It's very distracting from the flow and content of the article.

<comment><USER14> Yeah that's always a tricky stylistic choice - I include them because I know some readers prefer to scan headlines as opposed to reading every word, and I want to help them take something useful away, too. Though I do really appreciate thorough readers like you so I hope it's not too off putting :)

<comment><USER18> FYI, pull quotes usually duplicate segments of writing from the article body ---they're the article quoting itself, pulling out the highlights. You're supposed to be able to skip over them when reading the full article.

<comment>~ "they're the article quoting itself, pulling out the highlights" <comment>~

Like this comment: the pull quote was already present in the text.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Easy Way to Obtain a Website's IP Address That Hides Behind CloudFlare - <AUTHOR> https://soatok.blog/2020/05/09/how-to-de-anonymize-scam-knock-off-sites-hiding-behind-cloudflare/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR get the origin to send you an email and look at the email headers.

This won't work for lots of sites. I'd expect it probably also doesn't work sites that use most mail API providers, but maybe some of them have SMTP interfaces and preserve the headers.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can't send a DMCA request to cloudflare directly?

<comment><AUTHOR> CloudFlare has, historically, been very resistant to taking stuff down.

See the waxing poetic in the post about why they took down a Nazi propaganda site, for context: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily- stormer](https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't work if they use any transactional mail service.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the easy way.

A more effective way is to ask CloudFlare for MX records, or to look at IP address history for the domain name, but it's less easy (especially for nontechnical people).

Signing up for an account and looking at email headers, then typing their IP address into a WHOIS service to get the web hosting company to file abuse reports with? You can do that without ever touching a command line interface.

<comment><USER5> If they use a third party mail provider like Gsuite or Fastmail that won't work. If they really want to hide their IP they would do this or entirely avoid MX records.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most open source PHP eCommerce platforms don't have out-of-the-box support for the specific providers you're thinking of, and most scam operations like this are low-effort.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Node v6.6.0 - <AUTHOR> https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v6.6.0 <comment><USER2> Been waiting for _promises: Unhandled rejections now emit a process warning after the first tick._ I'm not sure how useful the warning is though.

Now using node v6.6.0 (npm v3.10.3)

$ node

> Promise.reject()

Promise { <rejected> undefined }

> (node:85928) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection > (rejection id: 1): undefined

<comment><USER3> This will save a lot of time across the Node ecosystem.

Forgetting to handle rejection is probably the most common error I see when people post Promise snippets in #node.js. Silent failure is so deadly. "Why do my requests hang?"

<comment><USER4> Sometimes you just want an error to bubble up and be caught above. There's absolutely no reason to catch every rejection in the scope where the promise was created.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, looks like it just checks on nextTick, so it only warns when you don't attach a handler synchronously. Versus warning only if it's unreachable (like on garbage collection).

Though it does emit another message when rejection is handled asynchronously.

        > var p = new Promise((_, reject) => reject('lol')) \
          setTimeout(() => p.catch(() => console.log('handled')), 0)
        UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection (rejection id: 5): lol
        PromiseRejectionHandledWarning: Rejection handled asynchronously (rejection id: 5)

Consolation prize?

Fortunately, most of the run of the mill promises I can think of off the top of my head get rejection handlers attached synchronously, like in upstream middleware. I might be drawing a blank, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems generators and trampolines involve considerably more CPU overhead in the 6.x series vs. 5.x, while tail calls are now fully optimized and/or the default stack limit has grown considerably.

Try running the following script with v5.12.0 and again with v6.6.0:

[https://gist.github.com/michaelsbradleyjr/d1b104137e8e00468d...](https://gist.github.com/michaelsbradleyjr/d1b104137e8e00468d83)

       node --version && node --use_strict ./mutrec_vs_tramp_vs_gen.js

<comment><USER6> > while tail calls are now fully optimized and/or the default stack limit has > grown considerably

That is great to hear. Now we can finally start _really_ doing functional programming in JS. Too bad about the generators, though.

<comment><USER5> Well, I'm not sure which one is the case, sorry to say (TCO or bigger stack limits, or both). I was only taking a guess as to why the mutual recursion example works for very large values in node v6.x but not in v5.x. But yes, if tail call optimization is guaranteed, then functional programming patterns can certainly shine the brighter for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not much to see here. The release next month will be more notable; that's when the 6.x series becomes an LTS.

[https://github.com/nodejs/LTS](https://github.com/nodejs/LTS)

</comment><comment><USER8> The last time I checked node it was 0.12.* . How did it become 6.* in a couple years time?

<comment><USER9> They adopted a different versioning system.

<comment><USER10> They adopted the _correct_ versioning system. The old one was rubbish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looking forward to node 6 being put in LTS later next month, we'll consider moving from node 4 then.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you use the Anaconda distribution of Python, you can install this with `conda install --channel amfarrell nodejs=6.6.0`

<comment><USER13> This is sort of an insane suggestion. Why use a Python distribution to install Node?

<comment><USER12> The biggest advantage for me is using conda environments to avoid having to install everything globally. That way if I want to switch back and forth between python2 and python3 or different versions of node, I can just do `source activate foo`.

<comment><USER14> For Node.js you can use NVM for the same purpose. It is specially suited for handling multiple node verions and installs everything to user's directory.

<comment><USER12> yea, but you can't also use it for installing a particular version of MongoDB or Postgres.

<comment><USER14> Yes, it's a valid point. That's said I personally prefer Docker for installing databases of all kinds on my development machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> dang it i just installed 6.5 this morning

<comment><USER16> I recommend nvm on your dev machines.

        $ nvm install 6.6.0
        Downloading https://nodejs.org/dist/v6.6.0/node-v6.6.0-darwin-x64.tar.xz...
        ######################################################################## 100.0%
        Now using node v6.6.0 (npm v3.10.3)
        $ node -v
        v6.6.0

<comment><USER17> I second something like `nvm`. Even homebrew takes a long time to update their Node versions.

That said, I use `n` because for some reason `nvm` makes my shell take more than a second to startup (I've tried tons of fixes and none work).

[https://github.com/tj/n](https://github.com/tj/n)

<comment><USER18> I have a little trick that makes nvm not impact your overall startup time.

First, put the version you commonly use in your path

      export PATH="${PATH}:/home/victor/.nvm/versions/node/v6.5.0/bin"

Then, instead of sourching nvm when your shell starts, do it when you call an alias instead.

      export NVM_DIR="/home/victor/.nvm"
      alias n=". $NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"

Now, you have a node+npm version by default, and you can do a quick flow if you want to change

      $ n
      $ nvm install 6.6.0
      Now using node v6.5.0

<comment><USER19> I thought the point of a package manager was not having to mess with stuff like that? "n" is simply better.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, sure, but sometimes you have to go a little bit extra to have it the best...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Zynga's privacy policy - <AUTHOR> http://www.zynga.com/privacy/

<comment><USER2> It is possible to have legal content be usable without resorting to gimmicks.

I randomly read MOG's ToS and found it incredibly scannible as it injects entertaining plain-speak header for each section. For example, one section is entitled: "MOG doesn't play well with countries who are on a shitlist".

More companies should do this.

<http://mog.com/terms_of_use>

</comment><comment><USER3> So there was I, thinking "God, this has got to be the world's lamest point'n'click," and then they threw a multiple choice test in my direction.

(My hands down favourite part is when they tell you that you're a privacy jedi, so please head this way to install an application that will keep track of your _points,_ so you can maybe get rewards.)

<comment><AUTHOR> _"God, this has got to be the world's lamest point'n'click"_

Yeah.. but compare it to most privacy policies!

<comment><USER3> Fair enough: at least they're trying to add some usability to their privacy policy [1], but for Zynga that was a game designing underachievement. I actually felt a bit lectured there! :-)

[1] If you haven't yet, check out <http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/privacy- icons/> (Privacy Icons).

<comment><USER4> Not entirely surprising really. Zynga makes no secret [1] of the fact that they don't actually design anything. They are very clear about the practice of copying [2] whatever is popular, slapping their own name onto it and peddling it off as their own.

And to top it all off, they then proceed to sue [3] the pants off of anyone trying to do the same.

[1]: [http://www.geek.com/articles/games/zynga-ceo-to-employees- st...](http://www.geek.com/articles/games/zynga-ceo-to-employees-steal- competitors-ideas-until-you-beat-them-2010099/) [2]: [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-zynga-is-just-like- micros...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-zynga-is-just-like- microsoft-2010-1) [3]: <http://www.google.nl/search?q=zynga+lawsuits>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The actual privacy policy is here: <http://www.zynga.com/privacy/privacy- policy.php>

For a legal document it's quite well formatted and readable.

</comment><comment><USER6> Absolute useless gimmick. I clicked without reading and still got 5 out of 5 on the "test".

When they make that test _actually difficult to answer_ , then it will be a good privacy policy.

<comment><USER7> I completely disagree. Read what you just posted... you got to the test and answered the questions. That means you read through the entire privacy policy. If any other policy would have been linked here, you would have skimmed it and moved on to the next front page HN link. The "game" design entices people to read, and is a very smart way to get people to read boring stuff.

<comment><USER6> I didn't read the questions - just picked the blindingly obvious answers. And I never read the policy, just clicked the buttons to see what was at the end.

As I am sure most did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's a brilliant way to reinvent something nobody would ever read because it's typically too boring. Reading the HN comments it's easy to see the difference between pure engineers and creative people. The engineers don't see how cool this is to introduce change into the world to actually help people. Remember Zynga didn't have to go to the trouble to build this, yes they exploit your personal info for financial gain but then agsin who doesn't?

</comment><comment><USER9> Well that felt more than a little patronizing.

<comment><USER10> You might want to grow a slightly thicker skin. The company makes facebook applet games for bored secretaries and 13 year old girls.

Sure, millions and millions in that segment, but still. It's a game company, not a law firm.

<comment><USER9> Let me put it this way, their actual privacy statement is perfectly readable and well organized. This thing, on the other hand, is intentionally baby talking to adults. I won't argue with regards to it's efficacy because I really don't know, maybe it's working great for them, but I find it profoundly depressing that people are viewing this as something remarkable rather than something that's essentially wtf worthy.

If taking a stance on that makes me "thin skinned" than I'll take that label.

<comment><USER10> Put it any way you want. You're complaining a gamelet company made a game out of their ToS that you find below you. Congrats, you're too intellectual for Candy Land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The page won't load finish loading for me.

</comment><comment><USER12> The cartoons make me feel much more at ease.

I particularly felt more at ease when selling my information to 3rd parties is presented as "Sharing". What nice folks over at Zynga, their just like my Uncle Jim who runs a real farm.</comment>