Arizona police chief criticizes immigration law - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63T5G220100430

<comment><USER2> As a hypothetical individual cop in Arizona, would subjecting as many white people as possible to "papers please" be a reasonable way to protest this?

Obviously if someone can produce government-issued ID, you're done. But a few high profile cases of upstanding citizens walking around without ID being harassed by cops who were "only following orders" might get people to realize just how un-American this law is.</comment>


Monopoly Lawyers Shouldn't Write Monopoly Laws  - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/monopoly-lawyers-shouldnt-write-monopoly-laws-110417/ <comment><USER2> Lobbying and lawyers are one thing; ideas are another. Over time, the force of an idea is what carries the day, one way or the other, not short-term tactics aimed at pressuring politicians, distorting facts, or putting it over on the public.

This particular debate - that is, whether a society should confer monopoly rights for the benefit of inventors and authors - happens to be several centuries old.

An extremely articulate proponent for the anti-monopoly view was none other than Thomas Jefferson. Here is what he wrote to Isaac McPherson in 1813:

"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body." (see the full text of the letter, which is well worth reading in its entirety, here: <http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/mcphersonletter.html>)

This is a philosophical argument against the idea of patents generally, beautifully expressed.

In his day, Jefferson lost this argument and the framers of the U.S. Constitution added Article I, section 8, clause 8, which provides that the Congress shall have the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This was followed by enactment of the first U.S. Patent Act in 1790 and by an unbroken body of law ever since upholding patents with a vigor that is quite remarkable.

Today, patent and copyright laws are once again being re-examined from a philosophical perspective. Is it really true that monopoly grants of this type add value to a society by fostering creative activity? Do such laws truly benefit deserving persons or do they mainly promote the interests of faceless corporations and opportunistic trolls? Is it honest to call it "intellectual property" if this merely begs the important underlying question whether intangible rights (really, exclusive-right or monopoly grants) of this type should even be recognized by law?

These are legitimate questions and the debate is a serious one. But there is also a very legitimate argument on the other side of this debate, what might be called the overwhelming majority position of the past two centuries that has favored patents and copyrights. That argument was certainly not lost on the nearly 7,000 authors, professors, and other persons of all non-lawyer ranks in society who filed such strong objections to the proposed Google book settlement based on threats to their copyright interests as to cause the judge to reject it. Nor is it lost on the major technology companies who continue to file patents in great number even as they advocate against frivolous patents (see, e.g., the "Latest Patents" site, which duly notes a large number of patent filings by Google made with great frequency: [http://www.latestpatents.com/google-patent-applications- publ...](http://www.latestpatents.com/google-patent-applications-published- on-14-april-2011/)).

While there is obviously an aspect to this debate that involves lawyers, lobbying, and circular logic, those issues are in my view at the fringes of the debate, and it hardly promotes careful analysis to bring them front and center and to say that this is all that is involved in the fight. A superficial attack of this type is really no more defensible as a way of advocating a position than is the use of circular logic that is being criticized in the piece itself. Much more depth is needed to get to the most important issues at stake.

<comment><USER3> I don't quite see how you can say article I, section 8, clause 8 represents Jefferson losing the argument. In the quote you provide from Jefferson, he says:

        Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them,
        as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility,
        but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience
        of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.

Isn't article I, section 8, clause 8 embodying just what Jefferson said a society may do? Or are you distinguishing it from what Jefferson wrote because he specifically mentions profits, whereas article I, section 8, clause 8 allows Congress to give the inventors "exclusive Rights", which perhaps goes farther than profits?

Under a Lockean type of philosophy, which is what the majority of the Framers followed, a man was entitled to own the fruits of his labors, including mental labors. If the Lockeans had won, inventions would be property of the inventor forever. Article I, section 8, clause 8 implicitly rejects the Lockean view by only authorizing a limited monopoly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why does OP expect the cost of defending a lawsuit to be at least thousands of dollars? Presumably because OP isn't a lawyer, and thinks: (1) it isn't cost- effective to learn to defense him/herself and (2) he/she would need to hire a lawyer to handle the court procedures and substantive arguments.

I reject the OP's delineation of business vs. legal outright. If you're doing business on the web, you need to be able to defend yourself against C&D letters. Whether that means going to trial, settling the claim or calling the letter writer's bluff: you need to be able to do all three.

<comment><USER5> If you're going anywhere near a courtroom, or even anywhere near a mailbox where you would be mailing pieces of paper to a courtroom, you're into thousands of dollars. 10 relevant documents to be filed * 200 an hour = $2k, just to get out of the gate. Plus a couple hours of consultation, and a few 15 minute charges when they call you to confirm the spelling of your last name. Yes, they just did copy/paste on those docs, and yes, that's bullshit to bill you like that, but that's how lawyers work. The OP was lowballing it, even.

<comment><USER4> I was arguing for avoiding lawyers altogether by learning the subject matter, the court procedures, and handling matters for yourself. Court filing fees are tiny. The cost of your time is the biggest cost, unless you already know copyright rules and how to handle a pro se defense. It's not rocket science. If you don't want to pay a lawyer, then do it yourself.

What part of my post did you think invited an attack on lawyers generally? IAAL, so I'll just ignore the fact that you missed the point entirely, and move on.

<comment><USER5> The premise of the article is that you think it's a credible threat of a lawsuit, either because the person's crazy or the law's really broken.

If it's the type of C&D letter that you can laugh at and publicly post a silly retort to on the internet for the lulz, then yeah, go right ahead. Court filing fees may be tiny but screwing up a lawsuit because you didn't take Civil Procedure is expensive. You're saying you're a lawyer downthread.. would you really recommend DIY for any non-lawyer in any real case?

<comment><USER4> You keep putting lawyers up on pedestals and then trying to knock them down. Your question to me implies that lawyers are such specialists that you could never be expected to do their job. You do realize that law school teaches next to nothing about the actual practice, right? The rest is learned by doing. In most courts around the world, you have the right to defend yourself. If you think your time is worth more than a lawyer's, then pay a lawyer. The whole victim routine is tired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This pattern of circular logic for justification of presence is what enabled aristocracys to exist even in times where they were clearly better options.

I think its a human error to allow such behavior, but one whose results will, given enough time, be detected and corrected.

In the case of monopoly laws its worse in the us than europe, because our legal system only asks you to pay for your defense in the event of you losing the trial.

</comment><comment><USER7> But perhaps they could be paid with Monopoly money.

</comment><comment><USER3> His first assumption is wrong, at least for the US. Yes, lawyers are involved in lobbying for and suggesting the text of laws. However, lawyers that represent all sides are involved, and non-laywers can lobby just as well as lawyers.

The rest of his argument is essentially that obeying the law costs him money as an entrepreneur if he gets caught, and so the things he wants to do should not be illegal.

<comment><USER8> > non-laywers can lobby just as well as lawyers.

Lobbying costs money. Using the same sort of analysis as in the article, it's easy to see that the available funds for lobbying are heavily biased in one direction.

<comment><USER3> By that analysis, we'd expect in the US most lobbying on abortion law to be on the pro choice side, yet in practice there is a tremendous amount of lobbying on the pro life side.

Or look at business vs. labor issues. Again, heavy lobbying from both sides.

How about health care? Massive lobbying from all sides.

Environmental regulation? Same.

Immigration? Same.

<comment><USER5> Actually, in all of those cases it's the people with the most money. On abortion in particular, you've got a silent majority and an extremely vocal minority. I'm pro-choice and have never donated to planned parenthood, not because I don't support them, but just because I'm not that motivated on the subject.

Business vs labor, I'm not going to bother to try and write a thesis tracking down the funding but I would suspect that there's more money on the business side. Heard of "Americans for Prosperity"?

Same with healthcare. Note that Obama spent significant effort courting the health insurance lobby for his bill, combined with a little courting of labor and no courting of consumer advocates.

Environmental regulation? The oil industry vs Sierra Club? Please.

Immigration, I'm not even familiar with the sides involved, the minutemen don't seem organized enough to lobby effectively.

<comment><USER3> Note that in most of those cases, the side that you attribute the most lobbying to is the side that is trying to reverse current law. The pro lifers are trying to reverse the current pro choice laws. The oil industry is trying to get rid of environmental regulation.

Under the article's thesis, we'd expect most of the lobbying to be from the supporters of the current laws, trying to strengthen them.

<comment><USER5> Oil industry's had a few successes, notably a boatload of tax exemptions and subsidies that were started under the Bush administration.

Given that everyone's talking about the deficit right now, you'd think those would be on the chopping block, wouldn't you? Wonder why not.

Most of the lobbying is from people who are seeking an outsized return on their lobbying. Decisions worth billions to an industry can be influenced for mere hundreds of thousands.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: [Validating app idea] An app which allows you to hoist a private auction - <AUTHOR> Hello everyone.
I have an idea for an app and I am trying to validate the idea. I want to create an app which allows users to hoist a private auction (an English Auction). You create an auction in my app, keep some start time for the auction, you invite other users to participate in your auction by mentioning their email addresses. The auction happens and the highest bidder is decided. The actual transaction between the highest bidder and seller happens offline. (May be in some other use cases, there is no actual transaction)
@HNs:
1) Will you be needing this app? If so, what is your case? (if the use case is shady, just mention shady)
2) I am having trouble in figuring out the use cases. Can you guess any use cases for this app?
Edit: Only the users invited to the auction will be able to bid. <comment><USER2> You will get two types of answers here:

1\. People saying they will use it => From my experience people have absolutely no idea if they will actually want something until they get exposed to it, especially so if it's a social app.

2\. People saying they won't use it => This is also useless feedback for the same reason as above. People (including you and me and everyone else) have absolutely no idea if a mythical product will stick with them. They may like or hate the "idea" but this doesn't mean they will or will not use it. You shouldn't get discouraged by a comment about something people haven't even seen yet.

Just think of all kinds of "stupid" products that made tons of money. If the founder asked "I'm thinking about selling a bunch of small rocks as a pet, will you buy it?" on HN, probably most people will tell you to stop trolling. But the guy who made pet rocks actually made and sold them instead of asking. If he had asked on HN should i sell pet rocks he would have lost all his courage to start working on it.

TLDR: You should never get discouraged by some random comment on HN about your idea that doesn't even exist as a product yet. Also getting encouraged about a product that doesn't even exist yet is also bad because you probably will build something that people may like in theory but never use in practice. Which means, there's nothing good that can come out of asking for feedback on an "idea".

The only way to get around this is not ask for feedback when you have nothing to show, and instead just go build it. Build an MVP and ask for feedback so people actually can see what they're giving feedback on.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) No.

2) No. I can't imagine people using an app that has auctions that can't be enforced. The element of trust/enforcement is crucial.

Questions for you:

1) Are you talking about a native app? If so, why native?

2) How does this solve a problem that eBay doesn't solve?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) I am thinking about a web-app for now. 2) eBay's private listings is different. All the users can bid in an eBay auction. In eBay's private listings, just the username is kept confidential. Whereas with my app, only the users invited will be able to bid.

You talked about element of trust/enforcement. The one who is creating the auction is inviting people by their email. So, he will invite only those people who he trusts.</comment></comment>


Intel predicts 10GHz chips by 2011 (from 2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/intel-predicts-10ghz-chips-by-2011-20000726/

<comment><USER2>
        2000 Intel Pentium 4 1.5Ghz: Passmark score of 171
        Price of $819 at launch.

        2008 Intel Atom Z510 1.10GHz: Passmark score of 186
        Price of $45 at launch.

        2010 Intel Core i7 970 3.20GHz: Passmark score of 9954
        Price of $579.99 at launch.

Ghz used to be a performance mark in itself, now things are more nuanced. I'd say Intel still did right by their estimate.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Moore's Law states that the number of transistors in a common microprocessor > will double every 18 months. As well, it can be applied to processor speed > and many other computing/technology metrics.

That's not Moore's law any longer.

</comment><comment><USER4> One guy had his head on straight:

 _As Gropo pointed out, there is in fact a point where Moore's law breaks down. So far since about 1975 it has held, and it will continue to until about 2004 or 2005. At that point, we run into an actual physical-laws-of-nature barrier. As silicon-based transistors decrease in size, obviously, all parts of the transistor have to shrink. This includes the gap at the PN-junction. Once this gap reaches a certain size (currently estimated at approximately the width of five silicon atoms), quantum effects (strong force, weak force, et al) begin to overtake the electromagnetic force that allows the transistor to transist. In other words… it's no longer a transistor, just a really small piece of doped silicon that doesn't do much.

That is an absolute, no-way-around-it limit. After that we have only two choices: More transistors (bigger chips) or new technology.

Adding more transistors has the problem of adding heat, which means slowing the clock. And there will be a finite maximum for number of transistors as well…. these things have to operate in sync with each other, and at very high clock rates, propagation delay becomes an issue… that is, the information created on one side of the chip cannot be transmitted all the way across the chip within the space of a single clock cycle. Also, the areas of the chip near the clock generator will receive their clock pulses sooner than those far away. If the near-the-clock pieces rely on data produced by the far-from-clock pieces, your chip is in trouble. This is called "clock skew" and is a major design consideration for any chip built today… it only gets worse as clock speeds increase.

The point is, within ten years, we won't be using silicon-based computers. They'll be made obsolete by DNA/protein type bio-computers or maybe molecular computers. \- by MonkeyMan_

Well.. except for that last part....

<comment><USER5> Intel beat that limit with their (newly announced) vertical or "3D" transistor tech, which has taken about 10 years to develop: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/4313/intel-announces- first-22n...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/4313/intel-announces- first-22nm-3d-trigate-transistors-shipping-in-2h-2011) and a silly video to go with it <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkMaQJSyP8>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like the comments after the article - many people suggesting that Intel is selling themselves short with this prediction.

<comment><USER6> The first comment does, but the responses are more prescient:

 _Pullleeeeaze! What makes Moores 'Law' the end all and be all for computer advancements? It's not like the Law of gravity or thermodynamics for goodness sakes! Moores 'Law' has to break down at some point. There needs to be a whole new paradigm of microporcessor technonogy before we get to speeds of 128GB. It will either be optical or wave based_ (the rest of the thread is filled with snark about his "GB" typo)

then again,

 _By 2011 we will have implementation of Quantum Processing that will make the xHZ debate look like the colonists debating over sucession from the UK._

or how about

 _true, clunky beige boxes will be out of style. I was thinking more like 3 in. cube._

(would you settle for a MacBook Air?) Or there's also

 _As Gropo pointed out, there is in fact a point where Moore's law breaks down. So far since about 1975 it has held, and it will continue to until about 2004 or 2005. At that point, we run into an actual physical-laws-of-nature barrier. As silicon-based transistors decrease in size, obviously, all parts of the transistor have to shrink. This includes the gap at the PN-junction. Once this gap reaches a certain size (currently estimated at approximately the width of five silicon atoms), quantum effects (strong force, weak force, et al) begin to overtake the electromagnetic force that allows the transistor to transist. In other words… it's no longer a transistor, just a really small piece of doped silicon that doesn't do much_

which is true apart from the bit about 2005, because we're still _very_ far away from having any components which are only 5 Si atoms across.

 _The point is, within ten years, we won't be using silicon-based computers. They'll be made obsolete by DNA/protein type bio-computers or maybe molecular computers_

[takes a drink]

 _Do you know there is something called carbon nanotube? The nanotube is only 1 to 10 nanometer(1/1000 of a micron) in diameter and might be the second best conductor( next to superconductor) ever know to human beings. And yes, it can operate under room temperature. Also scientists are working on quantum computers. Just ask a scientist and he/she will tell you that a quantum computer will at least 10000 times faster than a current computer. Who cares about Intel's 10 GHz microprocessor?_

[takes another drink]

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> c'mon thats not fair. Sure they havn't delivered on the speed front ..but they overcome it with multicore tech, which in the end means the same thing to the users.

<comment><USER6> At the cost of significantly increased work for the programmer, yeah.

I must admit I've lost track. What _is_ the reason that clock speeds have stalled at 3 GHz? There was some fundamental physics problem happening, but I forget what it was.

<comment><USER8> I believe I have read, though please correct me if I'm wrong, that there is a problem with current printing methods. The way that microchips are built is sort of like those projectors we used to have in class; you would dark out certain places and the rest of the areas light shines through. So those spots where the light shines get etched away, and you have your transistor layout.

Only now the light rays are so close together they get tangled up with quantum effects. So there is this scattering effect, and we can't make the transistors any smaller, because the light is out of focus. The blurry edges caused by quantum dynamics seems to be holding us back.

<comment><USER6> That's one of the reasons why we're having difficulty making 'em smaller (though semiconductor engineers are very clever and keep coming up with new methods on that front)), but doesn't have much to do with making 'em faster. We've been making 'em smaller and smaller all the time, but clock speed hasn't gone up since ~2004.

<comment><USER9> "but clock speed hasn't gone up since ~2004."

And yet the latest i7s run circles around the CPUs of that time period, even when running code that is strictly single-threaded.

There have been tons of performance wins made over the last 10 years that aren't just from adding more cores and Intel's predictions were more or less right on the money, if you overlook the marketing mistake common at that time of using ghz as a shorthand for overall chip performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it amusing that they predicted 5Ghz chips in 2005 but that pretty much tanked with their inability to make a chip that could both run above 4Ghz and not desolder the holder it was in from its motherboard.

If you will recall however, the last time Intel became obsessed with clock speed it gave AMD a chance to deliver us the Opteron and a 64 bit x86 extension so by all means I'm egging Intel on! :-)

</comment><comment><USER11> To be fair, the best thing about 10 Ghz chips is that there's 10 of them.

</comment><comment><USER12> Read "The Pentium Chronicles" by Bob Colwell. The Pentium 4 is the time frame when marketing took over Intel and fed this Ghz myth when many knew it was a doomed long term path.

</comment><comment><USER13> an estimation over 11 years that's off by a factor of three (or 2 for IBM's z196 processor at 5 GHz) is good

<comment><USER14> It has four cores. I would count it as a 20 GHz unit.

Seriously, even the "mid 2011: 128 GHz" is not that off: how many cores are in a gaming-heavy GPU?

<comment><USER15> No, you don't go twice faster with two cars.

<comment><USER14> It depends on what you want. If you want to move your furniture from house A to house B, I grant you I can move them in half the time with twice as many cars.

If the workload can be divided, multi-core is a solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Will 10Ghz be possible in 2020?

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't rule that out with that Intel "3D transistor" thingie. Power dissipation goes down, clock can go up. And the device also gets smaller, so more cores can be put on the same chip.

Not only that, but we are only starting to play with memristors. Silicon still has some mileage.

<comment><USER17> I would rule it out. The 3D transistor design buys us just a few percent but really, we're starting to hit the walls of physics with our current technology.

<comment><USER14> IBM already has 5 GHz chips. Do they know some physics Intel doesn't?

<comment><USER17> Not really. They do have some cool fabrication tech though. They also run a different ISA and different pipeline which can make a world of difference.

Really though, I wouldn't expect them to hit 10GHz anytime in the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We got to 5GHz, that's pretty close in my book.</comment>


What the feud between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson says about translation - <AUTHOR> http://www.chronicle.com/article/Word-Wars/238993 <comment><USER2> I have not read Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin, but this piece led me to wonder if he was an inspiration for Stanley Lombardo's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are stark departures from previous translations that eschew meter in favor of clarity and meaning.

(As a side note, those translations are fantastic, and I highly recommend them.)

<comment><USER3> I've read it and own the two-volume paperback version (someone made the mistake of asking me what I wanted for Christmas a few years ago).

The actual poem left me completely cold (and it's the only version I've ever read). The footnotes and everything else are fascinating. Everything in Nabokov's own voice is always, and everywhere, a joy to read. He was, as he tried to explain, creating a reference work, an aid to scholars and students, not a translation to "enjoy". You turn to it to find out what Pushkin wrote in his poem, rendered into English, as accurately as possible. Wilson just failed to understand the purpose of this work and his criticisms were irrelevant.

I'm interested in people's opinions of the Lombardo translations. Looking for a version of the Illiad to read.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the explanation. That makes more sense, and that's definitely not what Lombardo did with his Iliad. Lombardo stresses clear and accurate intention rendered into English. He retains a verse form, but it's blank verse. It's very much a spirit of the verse translation over the letter. For example, he'll drop epithets here and there, assuming you don't need to know for the thirtieth time that Achilles is the son of Peleus, but he doesn't drop all of them so that you get to see them. It is by no means perfect, but I've read multiple translations (Pope, Fitzgerald, Fagles). The Pope is kind of wonderful for what it is, but it's dated and extremely loose in order to fit his verse form, and I would not recommend it as a first translation. I do recommend the Lombardo as a first translation. It's worth noting that no translation truly does justice to the original language, but I don't think that possible or even necessary.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. I really appreciate your comments about the Iliad translations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a book recommendation: If you want to get a feel for Nabokov (and his depth), have a look at the "Annotated Lolita" \- the editor points out so many details and allusions as to make your head spin.

[https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Lolita-Revised- Updated/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Lolita-Revised- Updated/dp/0679727299)

For something ever so slightly lighter, consider "Pnin"; for some heavy (but delightful) going, consider "Pale Fire". Bring time and a drink.

<comment><USER5> Do you have any tips/advice related to Dostoevsky? Editions? Annotations? I'll take anything.

<comment><USER6> I read Garnett and P/V translations side by side for a while and found P/V to be remarkably more vivid.

<comment><USER7> We've been using both P/V and Garnett on this Goodreads group for "Demons". The prose of P/V is often more arresting and grabs one's interest more readily; Garnett is also quite good in most places, and has the advantage of being available on Gutenberg for copy/paste.

[https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/207716-dostoevsky- demon...](https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/207716-dostoevsky-demons)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone bilingual in Russian and English, I have to say that translating between the two languages is quite hard.

* English has a fixed word order: "man bites dog" != "dog bites man". Russian allows words to be reordered, phrases split and interleaved, to achieve the desired emphasis, flow, or emotional impact.

* English has a flexible information structure: the topic and the focus can be in any order. In literary Russian, the information structure is fixed: the focus goes at the end of the phrase.

* The English verb system (emphasizing the relative order of events) and Russian verb system (emphasizing the aspect and manner of action) map rather poorly onto each other in either direction.

* One language may require a positive statement where the other requires a negative statement - and vice versa, with no general pattern. Compare English "the best movie ever" and the Russian equivalent "лучше фильма не видел" (literally, "a better movie [than this one] I have not seen")...

* Technical English loves to agglutinate random roots together to make a new word. Unpacking and serializing the result in Russian typically results in something long, awful, and bureaucratic-sounding.

* Russian loves hard-to-translate impersonal statements (следует, нельзя), and its system of diminutives/augmentatives doesn't have a nice correspondence in English.

* It is very often difficult to find a translation that matches both the intended meaning and the "feel" (positive, negative, common, unusual, colloquial, old-fashioned, scientific) of a word.

And that's even before you attempt to replicate a particular poetic rhyme and meter in a language less well suited for it.

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone dabbling in translation (I'm currently translating an English- language book my wife uses in homeschooling our kids to French), I have to say that it's much harder than it looks.

Despite having a pretty good command of both languages, some things just don't really apply. For instance, there was a lengthy discussion about CE, AD, and BCE dates, but in French we pretty much only use "av. J.C." and "ap. J.C" (before and after Jesus Christ), so I had to trim it down a lot.

Keeping the appropriate tone throughout is pretty hard, too.

<comment><USER10> Getting the tone of voice right is especially tricky in my experience. As a reader I always find translations harder to 'accept'; I am always left wondering where the author's work stops and the translator's starts, especially with the translated renditions of dialects and socio-economically stratified language.

Alas, there are only so many languages one can manage to read effectively in. For some languages, such as Russian or ancient Greek, I will likely remain dependent on translators.

On the topic of the ongoing migration to CE/BCE in English; I have no French lingual experience to speak of, but aren't ÈC (Ère commune) and ÈV (Ère vulgaire) equivalent to CE and BCE respectively?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> " _Beam's book does not really belong to the Russian translation wars. It is better assigned to that burgeoning field in the humanities, affect or emotion studies (subsets: shame studies, insult studies, disappointment, and regret studies)..._ "

That is one way to put lipstick on the flamewar-as-entertainment pig.

As for the argument itself, I applaud Nabokov's contextual literalism, but if the result is rough and uneven where the original was lyrical, I don't know that the author would thank him.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nabokov's intention in translating Onegin was obviously to create something like the circumstances of "Pale Fire." It has always struck me as funny that this is brought up as some kind of critical debate about approaches to translation, when it was more along the lines of performance art.

<comment><USER13> I've always assumed the opposite, where Pale Fire was a sort of self-parodical novel, playing on Nabokov's realization of his own eccentricities.

Although Pale Fire came out in 1962 and Nabokov's Onegin in 1964, he had been working on Onegin translation since at least 1950, according to a piece he wrote in 1955, yclept 'Problems of Translation: "Onegin" in English'. A favorite quote of mine from that Partisan Review article:

"I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity."[1]

I highly recommend giving the article a read if you haven't come upon it, and are interested in hearing his theory (and distaste for "substitut[ing] easy platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text") in his own words!

Performance art it may well still be! But, a performance involving writing precise treatises well before Pale Fire was released.

[1][http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan- review/search/d...](http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan- review/search/detail?id=326017) , the article starts on page 496/148.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the link!

Yes, I should have been more clear in original post. I think Onegin, Pale Fire, and his other critical writings on translation are all part of the same artistic performance. We tend to look at writers/artist through this kind of atomizing lens, distinguishing one work from another in a kind of consumptive mode. Each book as a product to be evaluated in relation to others, it's techniques separate from the experience of the work. I think this says more about the circumstances of art under Capitalism than a writer's/artist's subjectivity, especially in the case of someone like Nabokov, who was so obviously fond of meta-narratives and intertexuality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is an interesting and thought-provoking read. Thank you for posting it.</comment>


If you write JavaScript tools or libraries, bundle your code before publishing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Rich_Harris/how-to-not-break-the-internet-with-this-one-weird-trick-e3e2d57fee28 <comment><USER2> This is a terrible advice - please don't do it.

Say, your app depends on libraries _foo_ & _bar_ , and both of them depend on _baz_. Say, _foo_ is bundled with _baz v.1.1_ and _bar_ is bundled with _baz v.1.2_. If you used package manager you'd get _baz v.1.2_ and everything would work fine because _baz 1.2_ is API compatible with 1.1.

However, it does not mean you can use them interchangeably! If you pass an object created in _baz 1.2_ to _baz 1.1_ things might break because internal implementations of the two are different. Even having two instances of the same exact library may not work - e.g. if that library keeps some sort of internal cache.

NPM must be fixed so that packages that we depend on can't just be unpublished. Bundling everything together is not the right solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> > If you pass an object created in baz 1.2 to baz 1.1

How could that ever happen? Foo and bar are separate deps. How do they pass something between each other? _You_ can't pass something between the two baz versions because they are implementation details inside two different respective modules, foo and bar. The only way I can see is: bar passes you a baz 1.2 object, you pass it to foo, and foo passes that to baz... But if that could cause a bug, the whole setup is just wrong if there's any kind of contract saying that what you're passing is a baz object. If that's the case, baz needs to be a top level dep of your code, and foo and bar might just mention it as a peer dep. And I'm sure the OP wouldn't argue for bundling peer deps.

Maybe we need a real example :)

<comment><USER3> If I depend on Frobnicator 1.2 and Frobnicator-utils x.y, and that version of the utils depends on and bundles Frobnicator 1.0, then Frobnicator objects created with the utils lib may not be compatable with Frobnicator 1.2.

Moreover, if the lib has internal state, then even if its the same version it will be broken

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a broken system regardless of whether anything is bundled or not. If module X has a dependency on module Y, this is an implementation detail of module X and should be completely encapsulated in module X. If for some reason the system needs every copy of module Y to be the same singleton object in memory, then you need to create that instance centrally and pass it around to whoever needs it, _not_ just rely on the Node's require cache mechanism to hopefully return the same copy for two separate require calls in different places. That may be how the require cache works, but that's an implementation detail of Node and not the right way to ensure something is a singleton.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ok, this finally gave me a use case for webpack as opposed to gulp that I could appreciate, but then it introduced two new potential competitors in Rollup and JSPM, so there's still extra stuff to keep up with.

anyway I guess until it becomes industry practice to bundle everything I need to bundle stuff by myself that I will be using just to avoid this situation in the future (until it's fixed, but really I think bundle it all yourself sounds much more secure)

<comment><USER5> npm stats

      jspm 115,692 downloads in the last month
      rollup 95,038 downloads in the last month
      webpack 1,407,499 downloads in the last month

jspm I believe had a good thing going for a while but webpack has well and truly replaced them now.

<comment><AUTHOR> you missed the biggest one:

      browserify 2,218,006 downloads in the last month

But my prediction is Rollup will take off in a big way at some point in the next 2 years. It's not quite stable enough yet, but it's just fundamentally better designed than everything else. Rollup is the only tool I'm aware of that properly exploits static analysis of ES6 module syntax. Every other bundler is full of hacks and moving parts, Rollup's codebase is clean and beautiful. It's already very good for bundling ES6 modular code, it's just still got some kinks when it comes to integrating people's CommonJS code. And I guess not enough people are actually using module syntax yet for Rollup to come into its own, which is a chicken and egg problem. It will get there though.

Until Rollup is stable enough, I recommend Browserify. In my opinion Webpack and JSPM both try to do too much and are too prescriptive about workflow. My team switched from Browserify to Webpack a few months ago, and I now find it a bit suffocating and slow.

<comment><USER6> Webpack v2 also tries to use the static part of es6 modules (for DCE ?)

<comment><USER7> Yes, Webpack is also trying out "tree shaking" [https://github.com/webpack/webpack/tree/master/examples/harm...](https://github.com/webpack/webpack/tree/master/examples/harmony- unused)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Leaving aside all the advertisement and marketing.

JSPM -> sounds like a good idea until you try using it, and SystemJS is just sad. Its not the fault of the specs, its just that the creator is having difficulty with funding - as with any other good open source projects.

Webpack -> Slow, unstable and documentation is incomplete.

RollUp -> I am not going to listen to the author's comment on how awesome his product is -_-

I still think browserify is the only bundler out there that is sort of stablish.

I locked my email@example.com for 3 years and recently moved on to firstname.lastname@example.com

Being in the JS world you need to be conservative these days - especially if you want to ship in time.

<comment><USER7> No one also cares if you think browserify is awesome. Everyone has their favorites, deal with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ugh, no. Bundling should be done at the very end, when you're trying to build maintainable software. It's a mistake to bundle in the middle, because then even loosely-dependent modules will be limited to updating only when every intermediate dependency updates. Don't take these decisions out of the hands of the coders who are actually coding software.

<comment><USER7> Are you aware that jQuery _bundles_ Sizzle? I guess not.

[https://github.com/jquery/jquery#modules](https://github.com/jquery/jquery#modules)

[https://github.com/jquery/sizzle](https://github.com/jquery/sizzle)

<comment><USER9> I was under the impression that jquery bundles the kitchen sink, as well. It's sort of a special case. Those who use it, know what they're getting. The average npm module doesn't emulate jquery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can someone clarify what would happen in this scenario:

\- My app requires React.

\- My app also requires FooBarComponent whose dist is just a giant index.js which includes its own copy of React.

\- Now I get a bunch of errors because FooBarComponent and MyApp can't share anything between themselves. React really doesn't like it when two copies are running.

<comment><USER11> FooBarComponent shouldn't have been packaged that way (it can include such a dist file for some people to use, but the npm package shouldn't export that). The typical way is for it to not include React as a `dependency` at all but a `peerDependency`. Then everything will be importing the same instance.

<comment><USER10> > (it can include such a dist file for some people to use, but the npm package > shouldn't export that)

I think that is exactly what the article is suggesting we do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No, de-duplication and conflict resolution is much harder if dependencies are in a bundle. There are many better solutions to this problem:

* Fix NPM and make it immutable. If there's a legal problem allow a package to be flagged with a warning and redirected to its new name.

* Use bundleDependencies in npm

* and maybe even back-up your entire code directory

</comment><comment><USER13> Is Browserify falling out of favor? I've only just recently started to bundle my stuff with it instead of gulp's concat.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, Browserify is still quietly _way_ out in front of everything else (in terms of npm downloads).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also, can someone tell iOS libraries to stop relying on Cocoapods? After the github disaster, it should be standard to bundle dependencies.

</comment><comment><USER15> best thing I've read all week</comment>


Expedia to Acquire HomeAway for $3.9B - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/business/dealbook/expedia-to-acquire-homeaway-for-3-9-billion.html <comment><USER2> Big thread-[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510562](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510562)</comment>


Why I Want an iWatch - <AUTHOR> http://www.bnjs.co/why-i-want-an-iwatch

<comment> dj-wonk > I want to have basic control over my iPhone while it sits in my pocket or > bag. This is huge to me. Squeezing my hand into my pocket (1), pulling out > my phone (2), turning it on (3). Three steps just to check the time or > notification. Slide the lock (4) and enter my password (5), open an app > (6+). Six or more steps just to check the weather, read an email, look at a > web page, check my todo list, look at my calendar, read or reply to a > message, look at a photo, etc. Without having to enter my password I can > turn on/off wifi or bluetooth, use the flashlight, timer, calculator and > camera, but it's still five or more steps. When I'm done, I turn it off (7+) > and put it back in my pocket (8+). Every time. This is insane.

Ah, the pain of these wretched, insane first world problems. I wonder what Louis C.K. would say in response?

Wait, he already has some cell phone commentary: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk)

"Everybody has a phone in their pocket" ... "(back in the day) The phone was a thing. In a room. In your house, and you had to dial the f-ing thing, it had this rotor thing..." "Now we have _this_ (shows his phone) which is amazing" ... "The sh _tt_ est cell phone in the world is a miracle!" ... "Your life sucks around the phone, why are you so mad at it?"

But in the spirit of problem-solving, here are some potential solutions or reframings:

* Don't put the phone in your pocket in the first place. (Minimize unnecessary movement, like the lean manufacturing people teach.)

* Pull the phone out of your pocket while pressing your phone on the fingerprint scanner in one graceful motion. (for a recent iPhone)

Better yet, take a gander at this and consider worrying about a problem with a tad more impact: [http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic- underclass/](http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/)</comment>


The idea of empathy for all ignores the limits of human psychology - rising-sky http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/no-you-cant-feel-sorry-for-everyone-rp <comment><AUTHOR> Too true. Spend a day reading the official online news outlets for China and Russia and you'll know how tribal we are to the bone. Unfortunately a lack of empathy plus a controlled press leads very quickly to mass delusion.</comment>


9 Amazing Science Gadgets - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC4uU_157oo <comment><AUTHOR> The first gadget is by far the most important; it shows wave motion in two dimensions, at a 90 degree angle, the first is vertical and shows compression/expansion of the various wave constituent parts.

The other is horizontal, and shows the apparency of wave motion.

Observation: It should be possible to create spiral waves in space, using both principles...</comment>


Pingo: Plugins for Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dullgiulio/pingo

<comment><USER2> Might I suggest a third communication method: stdin/stdout? It should be very easy to implement, would work better with really small process and would be much more cross-platform compatible without having to invoke the TCP stack.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool.

I can see using this to construct an application made out of plugins, where their isolation provides fault tolerance, I can kill and restart a plugin as needed.

Now if it had heartbeat between the main process and plugins, so that unresponsive plugins would be killed and restarted automatically. Plus a restart strategy as a config parameter for the plugin so if the plugin dies, it can be restarted automatically. Basically a one_for_one restart strategy as in [http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/sup_princ.html](http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/sup_princ.html)

Does it make sense to panic in the constrctor [https://github.com/dullgiulio/pingo/blob/master/plugin.go#L5...](https://github.com/dullgiulio/pingo/blob/master/plugin.go#L59) instead of returning nil, error

<comment> vezzy-fnord Have you looked into Suture, which is just that - supervision trees for Go? ([https://github.com/thejerf/suture](https://github.com/thejerf/suture))

<comment><USER3> I've looked at Suture before and now pairing it up with pingo might be a good idea because Suture can add supervision capability to this library.

As a standalone library, Suture gets close to what I want, except that the way Go's runtime works, if there is a panic in a goroutine, another goroutine cannot recover(), so if I create a service that suture supervises, and that service starts a goroutine that panics, suture will not handle it, the whole process will crash. Pingo get's rid of Go's shared heap memory, so if pingo's plugin panics, Suture could restart it, this maybe a good combination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmm. So not to be critical but isn't this just rpc? It feels very much just like rpc development. If you look at the net/rpc package you basically do the identical thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great idea, as Go 1.4 currently only supports static linking this is _huge_ \- emulates dynamic linking a bit like Chrome/Firefox addons "sandbox" style.

<comment> vezzy-fnord I wouldn't call it "huge". Using net/rpc to emulate shared library plugins has been the primary recommended technique to anyone raising the question for a while now. This simply makes it into a library.

Another method is using code generation: [https://github.com/progrium/go- extpoints](https://github.com/progrium/go-extpoints)

<comment><USER6> Agreed, not huge, and well known.

Code gen is probably the most sensible way to approach the static nature of Go (and also generics, when all is said and done ;). While it is true that the pluggable platform x on Go should allow for any compliant plugin, at deployment time, the plugin set is known and effectively static.

Irony here is that given that the chaining of tools is emerging as the most natural way to build up the feature sets, the fast compile time may not be so fast anymore.

<comment><USER7> If you use go generate [1], you check in the generated code, and only the author of a library pays the cost of code generation, not all the downstream dependencies.

You pay a price for not recompiling from the real source; in particular, after a security bug is fixed in a code generator, the downstream libraries won't automatically regenerate their code.

On the other hand, it's no worse than ecosystems such as Maven or Linux distros where people commonly download binary libraries rather than compiling from source.

[1] [https://blog.golang.org/generate](https://blog.golang.org/generate)

<comment><USER6> There are other options. This thread interested me enough to start sketching out a different approach. I don't see the point of the maintainers of the exoskeleton generating an unbounded set of permutations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The same name as a Python Library for single-board computers (though in Python, not Go): [https://github.com/garoa/pingo](https://github.com/garoa/pingo)

</comment><comment><USER9> I see this project as a helper for transition from "dynamic loading plugins" to "microservices" mindset :)

<comment><USER4> You'll see the extreme similarities to writing a microservice here [https://github.com/asim/go-micro](https://github.com/asim/go-micro)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is very similar to Python's "multiprocessing" module.

What does it use for marshalling? JSON?

<comment><USER11> It's using Go's net/rpc package [1] from stdlib, so it would have to be encoding/gob [2], also from stdlib.

[1] [https://golang.org/pkg/net/rpc/](https://golang.org/pkg/net/rpc/)

[2] [https://golang.org/pkg/encoding/gob/](https://golang.org/pkg/encoding/gob/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How is this different from the pattern established in database/sql?

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm curious about how this concept is accomplished with other compiled applications such as Apache and it's modules?

</comment><comment><USER14> The name choice is so close to a children's television show:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingu)

<comment><USER15> And a slang for penis in many dialects of Spanish</comment></comment>


LinkedIn – Good or Bad? - <AUTHOR> http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or-bad/

<comment><USER3> _Connecting with random people. Some people just seem to want to connect with as many people as possible. What's the point? The connections you have with people you know just get lost in the noise. My policy is to only connect with people I already know._

This takes away the power that LinkedIn provides and defeats its entire purpose. LinkedIn isn't a network to meet your next potential friend - it's to engage with others in your industry and openly share your network in a semi- private manner. When I'm looking for a job, it's beneficial if the hiring person is just a 2nd connection away because then you can send them a PM. Send a short, friendly message and you're increasing your chance to be noticed.

If they don't respond, or accept your connection request, whatever - <USER2> personal.</comment>


A Networking Protocol Built for the Lowest Latency Interactive Game Streaming - <AUTHOR> https://blog.parsec.tv/a-networking-protocol-built-for-the-lowest-latency-interactive-game-streaming-1fd5a03a6007 <comment><AUTHOR> We are working on a low latency, high frame rate, interactive video streaming platform. We built our own networking protocol for this and thought we'd share some of the decisions we made and where it's going. What ideas do you have for us?</comment>


The exec Statement and A Python Mystery - <AUTHOR> http://late.am/post/2012/04/30/the-exec-statement-and-a-python-mystery

<comment><USER2> Note also that the behavior changed in Python 3: exec is now a function, and changes to locals made through exec won't show up in the original scope.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks -- I updated the post with a note about Py3k.</comment></comment>


A Social-Networking Service With a Velvet Rope - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/business/yourmoney/29stream.html?ei=5090&en=888707969bffacba&ex=1343361600&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1185714669-UnAjU+tEgO9NwWTezQPing

<comment><USER2> Heh, I thought it was going to be about: <http://www.top20network.com/></comment>


Help Your Website Convert - <AUTHOR> http://www.performable.com/blog/8-useful-tips-to-help-your-website-convert/?src=feed

<comment><USER2> Link to a link with very little added content. The linked article ( [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/06/design-to- sell-12...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/06/design-to-sell-12-tips- to-help-your-website-convert/) ) is not bad though.</comment>


Apple A5X quad-core confusion, explained - <AUTHOR> http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/03/apple-a5x-not-quad-core/

<comment><USER2> [http://www.anandtech.com/show/5072/nvidias- tegra-3-launched-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5072/nvidias- tegra-3-launched-architecture-revealed/2)

Graphics comparison:

Tegra 3 (Kal-El) @ 300 Mhz: 7.2 Gflops

A5X (2 x Power VR SGX MP2): 2 x 19.2 Gflops = 38.4 Gflops

Actual GPU clock on Tegra 3 unknown (in this article) but if it was 400 Mhz that would be 9.6 Gflops which would be exactly 1/4 of the A5X.

<comment><USER3> Is the dual-core in the A5X faster than in the A5, excluding the GPU?

<comment><USER4> Unknown. We'll have to wait for some benchmarks to see the clock speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wasn't very confused to start with. Is it fast enough? Yes/No? Yes.

<comment><USER6> Very hacker-like attitude indeed. /s

<comment><USER7> At the end of the day this is what counts. Is it fast or not. What else are more cores for if not for more speed and performance.

I don't like that attitude calling someone not hacker-like because he doesn't cares about cores! It's all about creating something better and that has nothing to do with counting cores.

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(hobbyist)>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting - I definitely believed there were four cpu cores in that chip yesterday. It'll be interesting to see what is made of this double speak, lord knows if someone like samsung pulled a trick like this the condemnation from the true believers would be severe.

<comment><USER9> > Interesting - I definitely believed there were four cpu cores in that chip > yesterday.

I have trouble understanding how that could be done, they clearly stated "quad-core graphics" as opposed to the A5's "dual-core graphics" (the A5 using a SGX543MP2 with the A5X probably being a SGX543MP4), there was no fudging around or tentative to make it anything but.

<comment><USER10> I was thinking you were joking and then I realized you were serious. Were you? Did you see how you used the same phrase to mean two different things?

      ... they clearly stated 'quad-core graphics'
      ... as opposed to the A5's *'dual-core graphics'*

All of Apple's messaging around the iPad and 4S are 'dual core' means two CPUs. And with the 'New iPad' (nobody calls it an iPad 3 I notice) they said the A5X with 'quad core graphics'. They are being imprecise in their messaging and since it is uncommon for them to be imprecise it seems to reflect they are perhaps a bit touchy about the Tegra-3's claim of being quad-core.

So it was painfully easy for a non-technical person to come away from both the announcement, and the 'features' on the web site, thinking that there are four CPU cores in the new iPad. We can debate if that was an honest mistake or a calculated risk, I expect it will turn out badly for Apple either way.

[1] "The dual-core A5 chip delivers even more power. ..." <https://www.apple.com/iphone/features/>

[2] "The A5X chip with quad-core graphics drives four times the pixels of iPad 2" <https://www.apple.com/ipad/features/>

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Apple generally hides tech specs, so when they do talk techie it's for a very specific reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I didn't realize there was confusion. He was pretty clear about quad core graphics and the iPad site on Apple is pretty clear about quad core graphics but a dual core cpu.

</comment><comment><USER13> Tegra 3 vs. A5 benchmarks (Transformer Prime vs. iPad 2) [http://www.anandtech.com/show/5163/asus-eee-pad- transformer-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5163/asus-eee-pad-transformer- prime-nvidia-tegra-3-review/3)

BTW: Apple claims x2 GPU performance over iPad 2 - suggesting the doubling of GPU cores to MP4 is the only source of increased performance. Because the iPad 3 (?) has x4 the pixels of the iPad 2, half-speed seems expected (if using full resolution). The same thing happened for the first iPhone retina display, so not that surprising. It's likely game devs will use the same solution as on the xbox360: less than full resolution.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is still much we don't know about the A5X. The A5 in the iPad (which is different from the iPhone 4S's and Apple TV's A5) is clocked at 1 ghz per core. The A5X could be clocked higher. We won't know until the benchmarks come out.

The A5X does have two additional GPU cores. They could be clocked higher or lower than the old GPU cores or the same. Again we won't know for sure.

We do know that the new iPad has a battery almost twice as a big as the iPad 2s. Clearly there is a lot more pixels and horsepower to push.

Just because a tablet has more or less cores won't tell you everything about its computational power. Some companies may go with more cores clocked lower, while others with fewer cores clocked higher. Others will focus more on GPU performance (and in having the GPU accelerate non-graphical tasks), while others will focus more on CPU power.

Ultimately Apple probably couldn't have gotten the battery life it wanted with a quad-core CPU and quad-core GPU at the same time. Apple clearly is prioritizing GPU power, as they have been pushing the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch as portable gaming devices. Apple has also been pushing the GPU to be used for general computing purposes.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the A5X having faster core speeds for the CPUs.

Battery life is the biggest concern for mobile devices. Some companies are putting CPU power first, while others are putting GPU power first. This is good for consumers.

</comment><comment><USER14> After all the bickering, he ends the article with

> _The new iPad is a Dual-Core tablet with a graphics engine that is 2X the > speed of the iPad 2_

out of nowhere. 2X? He just provided evidence that the iPad 2 is 2x faster than Tegra 3 - it's obvious the new one must be at least 4x faster since it's driving four times more pixels (they wouldn't launch a new iPad that performs _worse_ ), and that would make it even more than 4X faster than nvidia.

<comment><USER15> He did not provide evidence that the iPad 2 is 2x faster than Tegra 3--rather, he showed that on _one_ benchmark that isn't entirely relevant it performs twice as well. His theory is that the new model is 4x faster _on that benchmark_. But the real point is that the particular benchmark is of limited utility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had to ... as patiently as I possibly could ... explain to a woman yesterday that her iPhone 4 was not 4G (LTE). I think people like her are who Apple target with this sort of marketing. Don't misunderstand, I don't believe Apple made users believe they were getting a 4G phone with the iPhone. I just think companies like AT&T, Verizon, Samsung and Apple word things in a manner intended to put their customers in a certain frame of mind.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is worth noting that the new iPad has the same GPU as the Playstation Vita. I think that says something about the gaming performance implications for the chip. I doubt the Tegra 3 stacks up, because if it did, surely Sony, a company that needs great portable gaming performance, would have looked much harder at the platform.

</comment><comment><USER17> no surprise apple is just pulling marketing stunts like always</comment>


Latest Snowden Doc Shows NSA Spied on German Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/new-snowden-document-reveals-us-spied-on-german-intelligence-a-1055055.html <comment><USER2> I agree that this is a legitimate intelligence target. All of the allies spy one one another all of the time, that's how we keep trust.

I think the biggest scandal that isn't discussed often enough (in the US) is not spying on foreign government officials for legitimate security-related reasons (e.g. this), it is spying on foreign government officials to give the US an advantage in trade negotiations or worse passing on "tips" to US-based private companies so they can gain an advantage during negotiations/bidding.

The US constantly beats the capitalism drum, and that's fine. But it seem hypocritical to beat the capitalism drum with one hand, while with the other quietly subverting capitalism by giving certain favored entities tips and advantages.

Even people in the US should be asking why large US corporations are given these tips/advantages/etc while small-medium US businesses are not. Let alone the immorality of helping a US company win against a foreign one due to state supplied corporate espionage.

The justification "well China does it!!1!" while true, is just kind of pathetic. China does a lot of things, doesn't make it right for a country that claims it is the beacon is capitalism and democracy to do the same.

<comment><USER3> > The US constantly beats the capitalism drum, and that's fine. But it seem > hypocritical to beat the capitalism drum with one hand, while with the other > quietly subverting capitalism by giving certain favored entities tips and > advantages.

For many of us, "capitalism" involves precisely this -- the wealthy using their wealth and power to cement their position.

<comment><USER4> The correct definition is "cronyism", not "capitalism".

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

<comment><USER5> Leninism/Stalinism/those fucking Trots/Maoism isn't true Communism.

<comment><USER6> It isn't. It is state capitalism. It is still capitalism.

<comment><USER7> If pure capitalism isn't robust enough that it won't devolve into cronyism then it's just as worthless an ideology as "communism", and for much the same reason. It's not enough that something sounds good and works in theory - humans have to be able to implement it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Spying on other spying agencies seems like 100% fair game even if they are our allies. I don't think the NSA should be collecting massive amounts of data on ordinary citizens in a way which violates our constitutional rights, or that they should collaborate with other intelligence agencies to effectively do the same thing, but I think they should still exist and they have a real reason to exist.

Not enthused about this leak.

<comment><USER9> So is Snowden still a whistleblower? Honest question, not trying to be snide.

If you abscond with 1,000 legitimate mission-oriented documents for every 1 document you leak that pertains to something you think an agency shouldn't be doing, are you still blowing the whistle? At what point are you no longer able to use that title as a defense? 10,000 documents for every 1? 100,000? Can he be both a whistleblower and a criminal or are the two mutually exclusive?

I don't have answers to these questions so I hope someone else does.

Try not to downvote for simply disagreeing with the question, as though it were even possible to disagree with a question.

<comment><USER10> Snowden didn't decide which document's to publish - journalists did. He handed over a trove of information, among which was damning evidence that our government was/is doing something they shouldn't, and gave journalists the responsibility to publish relevant documents appropriately. I for one believe that the releases have been done with impeccable professionalism, and in fact if it were up to me I would have been even more liberal with the releases (Greenwald, Poitras, et al. have actually worked with the government during this process).

<comment><USER11> This.

It is amazing how many people don't know this (that he did not just leak everything indiscriminately).

<comment><USER12> Yes he did, to journalists.

Before the downvote button is spammed: He simply did not have time go go over every single one of the 100,000+ documents he claimed to leak, and give them to journalists in an intelligent manner. There simply was not enough time between him leaving the country and the documents being revealed for him to have done that.

So yes, he did very much indiscriminately leak them.

<comment><USER11> No, from the context of the post above mine, it is obvious that by "leaking indiscriminately" I meant to the general public.

You are either lacking context comprehension skills or intentionally splitting hairs to make Snowden look bad...

<comment><USER12> How are journalists not the general public?

Giving classified documents to _anyone_ who isn't cleared to see them is the "general public." Journalists are no exception. Not sure why you think that.

<comment><USER13> Are you arguing that Snowden giving all of the documents to me would have produced the same outcome as giving them to journalists to review and redact and write articles about?

<comment><USER12> Yes.

What qualifies you, or journalists, to know umpty-squat about national security?

99% of what snowden leaked had _nothing_ to do with the privacy of U.S. citizens. Nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like a non-story. The NSA was in possession of a couple of documents created by German intelligence. There's no evidence how they got them. Perhaps there was a leaker inside of the German intelligence service who posted a copy of these memos to a pastebin? They have no idea how the Americans got it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Many people are saying the same thing:

> Spying on other spying agencies seems like 100% fair game

> This is legitimate activity for the NSA

> I'd be pretty angry at NSA for being incompetent if they didn't spy on > foreign intelligence agencies.

Correct. This is what spy agencies do. Edward Snowden is an American Hero, and it is a shame what has happened beyond the obvious. His name is invoked for shock headlines, and at this point there is almost no reaction to these disclosures and that is worrying. If there was a way to lower the power distance between "Government Actors" and citizens, we could expend resources cooperatively instead of competitively.

Until then, there will be numerous government agencies AND companies, on many continents and countries, building systems to collect and analyze your data creating a single point of failure. That sounds counter intuitive, but if we assume all of your data is essentially uniform and the Chinese/NSA/BND etc. all have essentially the same data. If even one of those places has a breach event, your data will be in the hands of bad individual actors. This leaves aside, that the data is already in the hands of questionable players.

To conclude, the Snowden docs were illuminating but no longer hold the shock they once did. Not much has changed. The initial disclosure confirmed for a lot of us what we already knew, and publicized it to those who didn't. The ongoing disclosures are marginal now and really a function of leveraging Snowden's name for ad-traffic. Hopefully, going forward there will be a framework for protecting privacy that regular, everyday people can easily use. Until then, these disclosures are just a disheartening reminder of the inability to seperate gov. tyranny from legitimate activity.

[0]Snowden is living in an undisclosed location in Russia, a country hostile to the US, and barred from entering America without being tried for treason. Disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Currently the more get's leaked, the more I'm afraid.

I live in Germany and I hope that there won't be any global war. But currently the policits between countries getting stranger and stranger. Mostly due to the governements. Shouldn't they suppose to work for freedom and not war?

I mean I think even germany will send weapons to bad behaved countries (americans aswell), just for the money, who cares about weapon embargos?! Money is all and the fact that so many people care so much about Money and some kind of 'status' inside their culture makes things really really worse.

I hope that I can live in peace until I die. Hopefully.

<comment><USER17> _Shouldn 't they suppose to work for freedom and not war?_

Here's an interesting take on that[1][2][3].

        Father: You're gonna make the world safe for democracy!

        Joe Age 10: What is democracy?

        Father: Well it's never bright clear on myself.
        Like any other kind government it's got something
        to do with young men killing each other I believe.

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

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun_\(film\))

[3]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKuhMS-N9ns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKuhMS-N9ns)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A signals intelligence agency conducting intelligence operations on foreign signals?

Stop the presses!

</comment><comment><USER18> There's some weird activity in this thread which I think bears mentioning.

Lots of people saying either "good, this is their job" and "old news"\-- shill trademark phrases. I'm not making any accusations exactly, but I am concerned at the mass of simple, positive, and vapid comments in this thread.

<comment><USER17> Let's face it, there are almost certainly NSA / CIA / FBI / $ASSORTED_GOVT_TLA plants here. Or, if not actual human plants, at least an automated system that posts astroturf "pro military-industrial-espionage complex" comments on their behalf. That they use this kind of technology is well established. And considering that HN is a pretty prominent social-media site, frequented by a lot of potential influencers in the technology community, I think the odds are approximately 100% that this site is one of their targets.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. Which leads to two questions: 1) Why is this post so far down the page? and 2) If anyone is qualified to combat automated (or perhaps even human) astroturfing by technical means, it's YC. Dang/other mods, are there efforts underway to detect and mitigate this?

I ask both on principle and because the quality of discussion is noticeably damaged by having to wade through many questionably real comments before finding actual discussion.

And of course it's not just the Americans doing this, undoubtedly the Russians/Chinese etc do something similar.

<comment><USER17> Looks like there has at least been some academic research on detecting astro- turfing on social media, although not sure if anybody has looked for the JTRIG stuff specifically.

[http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/view/2...](http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/view/2850/3274)

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3768](https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3768)

[http://ra.ethz.ch/CDstore/www2011/companion/p249.pdf](http://ra.ethz.ch/CDstore/www2011/companion/p249.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd be pretty angry at NSA for being incompetent if they didn't spy on foreign intelligence agencies. FFS, that, and spying on heads of government/military, is their ultimate purpose.

Counterterrorism and such, which has the slippery slope to spying on private citizens, is completely secondary at best.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not a big fan of the NSA, but isn't that kind of their job..?

</comment><comment><USER22> Edward Snowden's just created a Twitter account. I've never seen the follower count go up that quickly: [https://twitter.com/Snowden](https://twitter.com/Snowden)

<comment><USER23> looks legit.

<comment><USER24> "Edward Snowden @Snowden 3h3 hours ago:

Meanwhile, a thousand people at Fort Meade just opened Twitter."

It surely sounds like him. And Chuck Norris can confirm. Hi Ed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is legitimate activity for the NSA, but it plays badly in Europe. My guess is that Snowden and his friends are pandering to folks in Europe who naturally dislike this kind of thing, and particularly to folks in Germany.

Imagine the reaction on the far right here in America to a news report that Russia, Germany or France spies on American intelligence agencies. It's natural that such things should happen, but its also certain to create discord among certain factions here in America.

</comment><comment><USER26> All information might as well be completely free and open to the public for the security the practice of counter spying provides us. Additionally, the reason this level of infringement of privacy is so damning is that it completely absolves any notion of trust the German authority might have had towards the US. Attempts to form a more cohesive alliance in international politics will not be fruitful with this strategy.

<comment><USER27> What is Germany supposed to do, align with Russia? They really don't have any choice.

<comment><USER26> Probably not but I don't see any reason why this kind of information needs to be sourced through spying rather than through a formal declaration between intelligence services. Not that that process need be transparent, just that the act of willing participation by the German administration would likely produce a more amicable friendship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

But seriously, is this not what the NSA is paid to do?

<comment><USER29> The "I'm shocked, shocked" meme from Casablanca is most appropriate when the speaker is themselves hypocritically complicit in the wrongdoing being described.

So... I think it's up to the German Minister of Security to say they are shocked, shocked that the USA is spying on the people Germany uses to spy on the US.

<comment><USER30> So maybe a more apt classic movie paraphrase would be "Hey! There's no eavesdropping in here--this is a SIGINT room!"

<comment><USER29> Great Strangelove reference!

But I should be more clear. I'm not saying what you said isn't funny, it made me smile! I'm just trying to share that under certain circumstances, it's even truer to the original scene and thus funnier.

:-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Since they've tapped pretty much _everything_ then isn't it physically impossible that they cannot spy on _everybody_?

</comment><comment><USER32> So...spies spied on spies doing spying? I'm not seeing the problem here.

</comment><comment><USER33> Trust, but verify.

</comment><comment><USER34> well I guess we know who watches the watchers.

</comment><comment><USER35> Isn't that their job?

<comment><USER36> Look where this is published.

<comment><USER35> Ahh, missed that. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I guarantee that the only reason the NSA did this was so that some few fatsos could continue to live in Germany, drink great beer with their friends, live in a swank apartment in the old town, and collect their foreign earned income exclusion.

<comment><USER38> looking at recent busts of Russian "spies" (quotes because they were so inept in their activities) in US, it is pretty much the same picture - young lazy morons from well-connected families get a good job in a good country (i.e. like a trade representative in US of a Russian state owned corporation) with only downside is a possibility of being deported/non-grata-ed if busted (again they have been so inept that US seems to happy to just get rid of them instead of keeping them in prison)</comment></comment>


Elassandra: Elasticsearch implemented on top of Cassandra - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vroyer/elassandra <comment><USER2> A while ago (4ish years) Jake Luciani implemented Lucandra (Cassandra as the store for Lucene indices) and Solandra (extension of Lucandra - solr on top of Cassandra). I used both of those at one point.

It was really interesting work.

OP - was elassandra influenced by either of those in anyway?

[1] [https://github.com/tjake/Lucandra](https://github.com/tjake/Lucandra) [2] [https://github.com/tjake/Solandra](https://github.com/tjake/Solandra)

<comment><USER3> Also, Stratio's lucene index: [https://github.com/Stratio/cassandra-lucene- index](https://github.com/Stratio/cassandra-lucene-index)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In solr vs elasticsearch, my understanding is that solr is more correct and has faster & better algorithms for certain edge cases. Though I'd be interested in hearing the details of any differences of opinion.

Therefore Stratio's Cassandra Lucene Index is worth an equal mention. [https://github.com/Stratio/cassandra-lucene- index](https://github.com/Stratio/cassandra-lucene-index)

<comment><USER5> Solr is operationally more complex to cluster (at least it was a few years ago) and the API is less intuitive in my opinion.

Elasticsearch is terribly broken in a lot of ways, but it's awfully easy to get up and running.

I'm not sure which I'm holding out for. That Solr will be easier to manage or that ElasticSearch will stop doing terrible things.

<comment><USER6> Would be curious to hear what Elasticsearch is doing wrong if you don't mind. I have no dog in the fight, I just always hear good things.

<comment><USER7> I've used Solr in production for about five years. All of the pain with Solr is up-front. Once you get it running, set up your schemas and you have your indexes built, it just hums along, doing its job and being obscenely fast.

Trying out Elasticsearch, my experience was that it really wants to be run in a cluster, but it also loses data pretty easily. I had more issues with it crashing and it's generally a lot hungrier for memory.

Both have non-obvious shortcomings. Solr's schema will make you believe that it likes deeply nested JSON documents. False! It actually wants pretty flat "documents" without nesting (you /can/ nest, but it usually doesn't do what you want without some extra legwork). ES will have you believe that it supports lots of query types and they'll all perform great on semi-structured data. My experience was that it was difficult to predict performance, but that generally the fancier the query the worse it would be.

Solr's querying functionality is not extremely powerful (though they "helpfully" made it offensively complex with different query parsers and stuff) but performance has always been excellent for me.

IMO, if you don't need clustering, Solr is definitely better. A cranky but robust piece of engineering from before scaling was everything. ES has better documentation, a better "getting started" story, and is generally a lot more user-friendly. Aphyr's posts about it have made me wary of using it without a re-indexing story.

I haven't tried Solr's scaling stuff because I haven't needed it, but I would expect it to be in pretty rough shape compared to ES because it's not a primary use case for Solr and it is for ES.

<comment><USER8> We use SolrCloud cluster where I work. The initial setup is rather daunting and involves reading up on Zookeeper, and Solr terminology on Collections, Cores, Shards and Nodes. But once the reading is done, clustering is effortless to execute. Solr 5 and 6 have a robust REST API for managing Collections.

The new SQL / Parallel Streaming has also made querying multiple collections a cinch.

<comment><USER9> What's daunting about running Zookeeper?

Most of the problems that I have had are with the ZK clients and not the server. As long as you follow the operational documentation (there are a few basic rules) it hums along nicely. We have a few clusters with Kafka and have a decent process in Chef:

[https://github.com/bloomberg/zookeeper- cookbook](https://github.com/bloomberg/zookeeper-cookbook)

<comment><USER5> Compared to ES documentation on clustering it's a lot of work. ES merely requires a seed host to connect to and will gossip the rest of the cluster. No external service needed.

On the other hand, it's had its share of improperly handled split brain scenarios. I still think it has problems with partial split brain (where A and B can't talk, but C can talk to both of them).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks very interesting, however I'm concerned about some of the implementation details...

1\. It mentions using secondary indexes - its my understanding thats a huge no-no, as they have to hit the whole cluster 2\. Uses "lightweight" transactions - also another perf hit, as lightweight transactions have (anecdotally) a 6x slowdown...

I like the idea but I'm curious if these are issues and whether these uses are something the author is looking to replace...

Very interesting idea though!

(CoAuthor of cassieq here so these were things we had to learn about.)

<comment><AUTHOR> indexes are together with the data. the partition key becomes the _routing key, so you can always search 1, x, or all nodes depending on your _routing value

lightweight transactions are only used on schema-changes (which are/should-be rare)

<comment><USER10> Awesome, i watched the demo video... i will be trying this. Thanks for the info on lightweight transactions, sounds like the perfect use then!

As for the indexes - are they standard Cassandra secondary indexes? "Custom secondary indexes" \- does that mean that it just looks like a secondary index, but is actually backed by Elastic search?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cassandra offers a way to create your own custom-secondary-index. In this case, the secondary-index is backed by elasticsearch/lucene.

Though you can't query it from cassandra yet. You have to use the elastic- search rest-api.

<comment><USER10> Thats ridiculously beautiful! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is a typical use case of elassandra + kibana with cross datacenter replication [https://github.com/vroyer/elassandra/blob/master/cross- datac...](https://github.com/vroyer/elassandra/blob/master/cross-datacenter- replication.md)

<comment><USER12> @vroyer, we are currently migrating the MSSQL + Elasticsearch backend of [http://apply4u.co.uk](http://apply4u.co.uk) as well as [http://thulya.com](http://thulya.com) to Elassandra. Our initial tests are very promising. I'll be happy to share more details soon about these production use cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand... elasticsearch is built on top of lucene indexes. Data indexed with a postings lists is designed around the search use case. Don't know too much about cassandra but it's not a search engine?

Would like to know more about how indexing is handled.

<comment><USER14> Closest thing Cassandra has to behaving like a search engine is the new SASI indexes. Good deep dive here: [http://www.doanduyhai.com/blog/?p=2058](http://www.doanduyhai.com/blog/?p=2058) which describes how its different from elastic search in "SASI vs Search Engines" section.

        - SASI requires 2 passes on disk to fetch data: 1 pass to read the index files and 1 pass for the normal
        Cassandra read path whereas search engines retrieves the result in a single pass (DSE Search has a singlePass option too).
        By laws of physics, SASI will always be slower, even if we improve the sequential read path in Cassandra

        - Although SASI allows full text search with tokenization and CONTAINS mode, there is no scoring applied
        to matched terms SASI returns result in token range order, which can be considered as random order from the
        user point of view. It is not possible to ask for total ordering of the result, even when LIMIT clause is used.
        Search engines don't have this limitation

        - last but not least, it is not possible to perform aggregation (or faceting) with SASI.
        The GROUP BY clause may be introduced into CQL in a near future but it is done on Cassandra side,
        there is no pre-aggregation possible on SASI terms that can help speeding up aggregation queries

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good naming ;)

</comment><comment><USER16> seems interesting, but our current elasticsearch is as a third party service - so that means we need a third party cassandra service that would also suppot elassandra on top which seems unlikely - does anyone know of any I can look at?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if there's any. One of the good things is that you don't have to overprovision shards, since each node has 1 shard for each index.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is close to my heart, I love these integrations!</comment>


Refer an Engineer - Get $20K + Your Genome Sequenced - <AUTHOR> https://dnanexus.com/blog/2011-06-21-referral-bonus

<comment><USER2> Am I correct in assuming that DNANexus does not bring anything new to the table in regards to full genome sequencing? It seems they are just offering better storage/analysis via cloud computing.

<comment><USER3> Yes, they are not a sequencing company, they are a post-sequencing analysis/storage company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see that prize just increasing the number of bad referrals that they receive.

<comment><USER5> It will increase all referrals... Especially now that engineers know that they are serious about hiring someone good. Maybe before they were on the wall and didn't know if the company valued employees, or how much... But now they have a number. It's worth $20k+ to them just to FIND a good employee.

Can you imagine the job security that brings? If they get rid of you, it's going to cost them another $20k just to get started! They aren't going to fire you on a whim, that's for sure.

<comment><USER6> A good engineer doesn't have to worry about job security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is anyone else _much_ more excited about the DNA sequencing than the money? =\ As a person with 4 Tesla MRI images blown up into posters on my wall, I'd love to have my DNA sequenced.

<comment><USER2> I know 23andMe provides _genotyping_ for relatively cheap, but that's a long way off from full genome sequencing. We still need to develop better browsers to parse and display the data meaningfully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, this is bound to backfire. Naively you'd think that this would be a win- win-win situation for company, employee and referrer alike. But emotional monkey-brain psychology intervenes. Frankly the idea of a friend of mine getting that kind of scratch for referring me to a job would put a bad taste in my mouth and poison the friendship. For whatever reason, if he were already working there and the company had an internal referral program (as many companies do), I'd feel fine about the arrangement, maybe because I'd assume his motivation in that case would not be mercenary.

One good thing about this offer is that it's an attention grabber and signals that they're willing to pay a very large multiple of that $20,000 to the prospective employee as wages. But it also signals a certain level of desperation and that they don't have enough hot shot, well connected software engineers on staff to attract others in adequate numbers, with all that implies about culture.

Or maybe it signals they're too stingy to pay a good professional recruiter's fee. Or that they despise that peculiar semi-sentient, parasitic life form as much as I do. :)

<comment><USER5> I think you should re-examine. Referrals for jobs (and many other things) only work if both parties are on-board. So he can't do it underhandedly.

He has provided a service for them (your name) and you (their name) and gets some kickback in return. He would have done it for your for free, because you're a friend, but the company is another matter.

His taking the money doesn't in any way alter your friendship. His finding you a good job should be a bonus for the relationship.

Do you think that your friendship is sullied by him taking the money? If someone offered me money to help one of my friends, I'd take it in every circumstance I can think of. There's just no downside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the most disruptive company in this space is Halcyon Molecular -- ex- PayPal guys, connected to Thiel/Founder's Fund, and working on making sequencing as cheap as other blood tests. (I know a few great computer people who have gone there; I don't really know the wet-side people.)

<comment><USER2> I wonder how close they are, they have been running for a while now. Apparently it takes several hours to read 2000 bases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I will gladly split the 20k 50-50 in case anyone here is interested in joining dnanexus. Will the real engineers please stand up?

<comment><USER11> Could you maybe talk a little more about what the company is doing, either here for via my email?

Thanks</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Thoughts on newest comments being obscure from start - <AUTHOR>

If a thread has been around long enough for comments to earn a few points, when I finally make a comment it's never given a chance because it's placed at the bottom immediately. I'd like to request a change to the comment system that takes newness into account. <comment><USER2> there's always going to be a set of criteria where you don't get a fair chance with a commenting system, imo.

chronologically, late posters get ignored because there's lots more content for people to get to. earliest posts tend to have the most attention.

reverse chronologically, early posters eventually get ignored and people who duplicate/repost early content tend to get rewarded for doing so. conversations tend to be more circular and rehashing happens often.

weighted, late posters get ignored because the quality posts rise to the top, and people tend to not read down far enough to hit the new posts. quality posts get more attention and replies, further pushing down later posts.

LESSON FOR HN POSTING: early bird gets the worm.

</comment><comment><USER3> This site has many special features, like rewriting of the post titles by stealth moderators, extra weird pagination with expired links? but newest comments are usually at the end anywhere.</comment>


How To Build A Ship in a Bottle - <AUTHOR> http://boyslife.org/hobbies-projects/projects/2459/raise-the-sails/ <comment><AUTHOR> The detailed version on how to do "impossible bottles" (with ships): <http://www.answers.com/topic/ship-in-a-bottle-2>

Some of them a pretty crazy: [http://www.moillusions.com/2006/04/impossible- bottles-pictur...](http://www.moillusions.com/2006/04/impossible-bottles- pictures-collection.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Well that ruins it for me. I always thought ship-in-a-bottles were much more awesome than that- i.e. you assemble the thing inside the bottle, rigging and all, using a stick and glue or something like that.

Sometimes the mystery... it's just better that way.</comment>


Ask HN: Are Progressive Web-Apps viable? - <AUTHOR> I read that the main selling point of PWAs is their offline functionality and their approachability, but I also read that app-cache is deprecated and not all browsers want to implement service workers.<p>So do you think running a PWA instead of a native app is a viable strategy in the next 12 months? <comment><USER2> yes, viable and vital see more here [https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web- apps/](https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/)

<comment><AUTHOR> What about the app-cache/service worker issues?

Are they real or is this just FUD by the native app makers?

<comment><USER3> Chrome, Firefox and Operas support service workers. Service workers are "under development" for Microsoft Edge. Service workers are not supported in Safari.

Of all the vendors, Apple has the most reason to keep people stuck on apps.

Both the app-cache and service workers seem to be a kludge to me. The app- cache doesn't do enough (doesn't load things proactively, doesn't have a strategy for invalidation) and service workers are just another place for badly written procedural code to hide.

It all brings back memories of the ill-fated Netscape Netcaster

[http://sillydog.org/netscape/communicator/faq/netcaster.php](http://sillydog.org/netscape/communicator/faq/netcaster.php)

and I can't figure out why they just don't introduce something useful like the ability to download a ZIP file with HTML, CSS and images in it and "install" that.

<comment><AUTHOR> > the ability to download a ZIP file with HTML, CSS and images in it and > "install" that

Isn't the app-cache like that?

From what I heared it simply stores a bunch of files for offline use but can't get updated incrementally, like a zip.

<comment><USER3> See

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Using_the_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Using_the_application_cache)

the application cache can make a download sticky or non-sticky in the cache but it does not trigger the download until the web app requests it in the act of doing requests.

A Microsoft Office document these days is a ZIP file that has XML files in it as well as images, media files, all kinds of stuff. Why can't I make an old fashioned static web page and upload it like a book? (And then from there develop interactive capabilities)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>