Do you think the desktop is dead? - <AUTHOR>

There's a lot of hype surrounding mobile first. As long as they keep manufacturing large displays, I believe we still have a long way to go. What do you think? <comment><USER2> Extending the life of the desktop: all the Internet-based ( aka cloud) services we use more and more like Gmail, Dropbox, Evernote, Spotify, etc which make it trivial to switch from phone to laptop to desktop and back. Even Apple is in the game now, with iTunes Match and the ability to download purchased apps, music and videos to all your computers. Used to be a huge pain to keep things straight on more than one device. Today, I never worry about it. Thinking of switching from just a laptop to also having a faster, larger screen desktop at home base.

Some day, there will be enough computing power and storage in a tiny device and we'll just have different size screens. But that's a ways off.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can live off a laptop, but that's not what mobile first is about.

The desktop is not at all dead if the alternative is only reaching pad and smartphone users. Not even close to mortally wounded for business or home. My kid's school switched them to iPads and they immediately identified the problem--they hate typing on the things. My son takes paper notes. They're fine for consuming, but that's it.

Then there is the problem of app discovery, not to mention the pricing and business models that exists in the mobile world. They pretty much limit success to the few at the top with a lot of sharecroppers scratching out a living down below. It's even bad enough that Fred Wilson backed off a tad from the mobile first mantra.

More here: [http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/mobile-first- for-...](http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/mobile-first-for-saas- desktop-pcs-dead-nope/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Sorry but I have to say it "Betteridge's law of headlines" so NO.

If by mobile first you mean smartphones and tablets, absolutely not, these don't have enough processing power to replace desktops unless all you do is email some docs and web, anything intensive (IDE, virtualization, image/video editing, vector design, 3d, and the list goes on) will require at least a laptop. Also most PC gamers will keep on going with the desktops not even laptops (I'm more a casual gamer now but the games I run don't even exist for any tablet, and most laptops will have to run them in low settings)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to think we are going to see a new wave of innovation on the desktop - web apps have been catching up to a mostly static target but perhaps now there will be enough impetus to improve. I think that workflow and data relation management are two areas that the desktop has an advantage over the web (mostly due to processing power, speed of data transfer and graphics capability)

I'll stick my neck out: due to the influence of mobile and web apps the file system and explorer as we know it will have disappeared in 5 years to be replaced with something better.

<comment><USER6> Windows 8?

<comment><USER5> I said better! :-) no seriously, the desktop in Win 8 hasn't changed and the metro side doesn't make the most of the graphics processing power or real estate of a desktop machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Mobile first" is a design strategy, which ensures that you identify the primary content/features when making responsive designs.

It has nothing to do with which device is more important or more common.

</comment><comment><USER8> No. With touchscreens, it will morph even further and converge with TVs (or become the TV -- you know, what you watch general video on, not necessarily what is fed by TV).

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been hearing the "desktop is dead" thing repeated over the last 12-15 years, maybe longer. Yet the desktop is still around. What we are seeing though, is a blurring of the lines between desktop and mobile devices like laptops. At work my fairly high end laptop becomes my desktop via a docking- station setup. Other innovations will likely morph the desktop into something more portable and lightweight while retaining all its power.

</comment><comment><USER10> I believe there was, is, and always will be a sub group of technology users that are 'computer hobbyists'. The percent of total computer users who are NOT in this group has gone way, way up. But I believe there is still this core group of tinkerers.

This used to be a required demographic to have endorse ones computer product, but no longer. Most users just want to do stuff and don't care about technology.

</comment><comment><USER11> No. The one in front of me still has a lot of life in it, as do the four monitors. I have yet to do any serious work on mobile devices, including laptops (except when tethered to large monitors and a keyboard).

I expect the desktop will remain, if only as a convenient horizontal surface on which to place a keyboard and one or more displays. It won't matter where the computation takes place.

</comment><comment><USER12> NO ! The desktop is just as important as the smartphone and tablet !

It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. A smartphone is great to tweet, etc. But you wouldn't want to Photoshop a poster with it. There are just so many shades of grey between those two extremes and it all depends on the use case you are specifying.

</comment><comment><USER13> In the home market it is dead except for hardcore gamers. Business is trickier. I'd say it has been mortally wounded. Most people have a macbook or thinkpad that powers large displays, but they still take it with them and maybe use the small 13 inch screen at a coffee shop.

</comment><comment><USER14> The Transaction processing always will be desktop.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Great insight!</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone else feel that ProductHunt is going downhill? - <AUTHOR>

I used to really enjoying checking out product hunt every day, now not so much.  It's just too full of mindless sites and tools geared for the 20-something/design crowd that should really just be features of a site.  There are gems here and there, but they are rare.<p>Maybe I'm just too old and cynical to get it anymore. <comment><USER2> Maybe it's just me because what you see in product hunt now, is exactly how I saw it since the beginning. I could never get myself to care to check it at all in the way I do HN

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's changed since they let so many more people submit/curate the links. It's become more hive-like.</comment></comment>


Spotify and Emotional Surveillance - <AUTHOR> https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly <comment><USER2> We need some kind of laws.

If you pay for a service. They cannot sell your data to third party. They can personalize things for you, but your data is your data.

Everyone should be allowed to clear their app use history. That should be a law.

</comment><comment><USER3> For someone who's been harping about how great Spotify is for years, I kinda of feel like an idiot for not realizing this side of it earlier. Of course they're going to monetize emotional data... what else would they do?

Assuming even as a paying customer one's data is mapped with FB/phone number/email/friends/profile name against a myriad of other data for advertising. As silly as this might seem, I almost feel a bit betrayed...</comment>


Most of the code you write, has probably been written before. Why not reuse it? - <AUTHOR> https://codepilot.ai/codepilot-ai-feature-code-seeker/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_campaign=codeseeker <comment><AUTHOR> This time with a video explainer. Any feedback is appreciated</comment>


Sweden: wiretap all internet and telephone traffic - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brokep.com/2008/06/22/fra/

<comment><USER2> Yes this is f-----g offensive. It pisses me off tremendously.

I hope not only Belgium will take us to court for this.

What kind of braindead imbecils come up with stuff like this.

Too many decisions being taken over our heads.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I worked at The Pirate Bay, I'd have a poison pill around my neck in case obedient assholes bust through the door and want to take me to a bunker for indefinite torture.

The parliament might as well put a swastika on the Swedish flag.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen before:

Swedish govt != Nazis

after:

Swedish govt = Nazis!</comment>


What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know About You? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/magazine/17credit-t.html <comment><USER2> 28K to renovate a kitchen. On a credit card. Sheesh. Sometimes I feel like I'm on a different planet as everyone else. I could sit in my kitchen all day thinking of "renovations" that could be made, and come up totally empty. I mean, if it heats up frozen pizza it meets the full specifications for a kitchen, right?

<comment><USER3> I can only assume you are single or at least living alone? And male...

I am all against stereotypes, but my experience is that women never run out of home decoration ideas.

<comment><USER4> Heh. I wish there wasn't papers and computer crap and other junk in random piles, but that's because I like to be able to find things and don't want crap in the house that nobody is going to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Canadian Tire seems to uniquely have the ability to correlate specific product purchases with repayment behavior. BoA knows that I shop at WalMart, but they don't know what I buy there. Perhaps this is one reason that WalMart wants so badly to get into the banking business? Finding a way around paying 1%+ on merchant fees is probably the more compelling reason, though.</comment>


Taika Waititi Calls Out Apple's MacBook Keyboard Backstage at the Oscars - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/f1k4nd/taika_waititi_calls_out_apples_macbook_keyboard/ <comment><USER2> I was expecting a quick call-out, but man he went on for quite a while. Very specific about what he doesn't like about them, and I can't believe how much time he spent railing on these keyboards (well deserved, IMO).

One thing that didn't make sense though was he mentioned the iMac keyboards. I assume he meant to say MacBook/Air/Pro, since those are the ones getting all the hate.

<comment><USER3> I _hate_ the desktop Apple "Magic" keyboard. The keys are too close together, so prolonged typing on it cramps up my fingers something awful. The key travel is absurdly low, so it's easy to miss characters. The up and down arrow keys are only half the size of the left and right, because reasons.

I wouldn't classify the Magic Keyboard as _disastrous_ the way the MacBook keyboards have been, since it doesn't suffer the same types of catastrophic reliability problems. But ergonomically it's a horror show.

<comment><USER4> And _I_ hate mechanical keyboards that can be heard five rooms away. It's a frigging desktop, you can use any keyboard, and using the magic keyboard doesn't bother anyone else unlike clunky mechanical keyboards that are supposed to be ergonomic.

<comment><USER5> Maybe you just haven't tried mechanical keyboards? Or perhaps you haven't tried a good one? I think once you start using split keyboard - it's hard to go back to using regular boards, same thing for when you start using mechanical keyboard. But once you start using mechanical, split keyboard (Kinesis Advantage, Ergodox, etc.) - you never willingly go back to using regular keyboards.

<comment><USER6> This seems like vi vs all other editors then. I should stick with vim because I will always find myself on some other system where vi is the lowest common denominator. I should stick with a straight, flat keyboard because I will always end up with a straight, flat keyboard. Having temporary joy created only by making all other moments comparatively unpleasant seems like a bad trade.

<comment><USER5> "Lowest common denominator" argument in our industry is a false dichotomy. One should try different things and choose whatever makes them happy. Fortunately, our field is so deep, there's always stuff to choose from. If you don't like Vim/Emacs/VSCode/Atom/etc. - fine, use something else; If you don't like Javascript - there are multiple ways to transpire/compile into it, choose the one you like; don't like OOP - try FP; etc. Doing something because most people doing it, using tech-stacks simply because they are popular, choosing QWERTY layout and not trying other options, etc. - hinders self-growth of an individual and stymies innovation in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Small keyboards in general make you contort your hands, wrists, and shoulders.

I imagine writers have it even worse than programmers.

<comment><USER5> > I imagine writers have it even worse than programmers.

Well, I dunno about that. One of the major projects I'm currently working with, has over 130K lines of Clojure (tests excluded), and that is not too big of a project. I'm too lazy to figure out the proper way to count "words" in that project `wc` shows over 5M. In comparison - "War and Peace" [technically] is ten times smaller.

Programmers do type a lot. Possibly, way more than writers have to. And that's just code. Have you ever thought about how much typing happens outside of coding? When reviewing PRs, replying to emails, etc.

That is why every single programmer _must_ invest into choosing the right keyboard; learning how to maintain a proper posture; maybe learn non- traditional ways to input text - Vim and Emacs keybindings; try Stenographic input¹; Speech recognition², etc.

Because when they don't - sooner or later they end up having problems: back and neck pain, headaches, RSI, hemorrhoids.

\---

¹ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb- dB6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g)

² [https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2019/voice-driven- development...](https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2019/voice-driven-development- who-needs-a-keyboard-anyway.html)

<comment><USER8> I'm an editor and writer and at my last job I got interested in how many words I typed a day. I put some applet on my work computer that tracked them across all applications. It was usually less than I thought; something like 10-15k words per day, sometimes more like 5-8k.

Think you're probably right about how much programmers type. I was going to write that if a programmer sets something up to track how much they type, they'd have to measure it by keystroke because I don't know whether all aspects of most programming languages would count as "words". Plus navigation, shortcuts etc. Tracking by keystroke or character would be better. But then... if you asked me what I consider a high or low number of keystrokes for a working day I'd have no idea what to tell you, whereas if you told me you typed 20-30k words or more in a day I'd be hoping you are using a good keyboard and sitting properly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The worst flaw(s) of the MacBook Pro was (and still is on the 13") that the keyboard and trackpad didn't work properly. The second worst flaw was the lack of a physical esc key.

<comment><USER10> 16" Pro has a physical ESC key. keyboard still sucks just as bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Taika Waititi, a guy well-known for being very serious in front of a microphone and never elevating the trivial for comedic effect.

<comment><USER7> He sounds like he's got some sort of physical problem with his shoulder and tendon in his forearm.

In the video he complains about the smallness of the keyboard causing his shoulders to be in a bad position. He also talks about the "bounce back" of the keys.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/taika-waititi-demands-apple-fix- th...](https://www.cnet.com/news/taika-waititi-demands-apple-fix-those- keyboards-at-oscars/)

Would be great if Apple just ran with this and reinvented the keyboard. That might mean nothing more than an external split keyboard that tents, for example.

<comment><USER12> Is he not aware that there's hundreds if not thousands of keyboard models on the market? Now, if he was talking about the Apple TV remote, that I'd be totally on board with.

<comment><USER12> Only -1? Stop slacking off shittwaddles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> hn > reddit > twitter

can we keep going

<comment><USER5> I'm not an expert but I think that's how Internet works. Those who don't like that, probably can send their complains to Tim Berners-Lee.

<comment><USER14> When Tim considered a chain of 2 hyperlinks, he probably didn't expect it to take 20 seconds because of all the JS crap that gets loaded besides the actual content.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, Tim definitely have not envisioned the rise of JS crap, nobody has, even not Brendan Eich.

<comment><USER15> Parkinson's Law applies to JS (Sturgeon's Law does too). What else is new? Use effecting script-blocking tech.

<comment><USER5> Can't agree more. Brave Browser incredibly cuts so much crap out of every payload. Sometimes, I feel (with the way how things usually done in the US) someone may try to lobby for "this kind of technology needs to be regulated..." kind of BS.

<comment><USER15> It could happen, given our "one dollar one vote" system. But precedent and trends favor user rights to block and screen- or just plain reader mode, if not use GreaseMonkey (Brave's site-specific script system is called GreaseLion). DRM got a carve out for HD video, ebook vendors want it, so support the EFF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Who is taika watiti and why has he not appended a "old" to the beginning of Reddit.com?

<comment><USER17> Taika Waititi is an amazing director/writer/actor. If this is really you, What We Do In The Shadows and Jojo Rabbit we're fantastic.

<comment><USER5> > Taika Waititi is an amazing director/writer/actor

First of all - he is a vampire. And then all the other things you've mentioned.</comment></comment></comment>


Rust vs. C++ Benchmark Game - <AUTHOR> http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=rust&lang2=gpp&data=u64q <comment><USER2> As pointed out in the reddit thread, this may be more a measure of the llvm backend used by rust to the gcc backend. A more accurate comparison would be against clang.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't matter much what the backends are, it's important to be able to demonstrate the effective implementation of the problems posed by the tasks being benchmarked. Especially for the new language. Of course, if your language is designed as to have the limited chances of being universaly fast, it's another story. But Rust is designed to be able to reach at least the speeds of C and also allow for a more modern approach. That's the real worth of the contributions to the "benchmark game:" demonstrating the capabilites of the language, even if it's just on some of all of possible tasks.

See also Rust vs Haskell: [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=rust&lang2=ghc&data=u64q)

And Rust vs Go: [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=rust&lang2=go&data=u64q)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've only started to investigate rust for server side programming ( websocket in particular) but saw many discussions about the limitations rust has regarding parallel programming. Yet, iirc servo did parallel rendering of html page, so that seems a contradiction. Anyone here knows about that ?

Specifically, i'm currently hesitating between golang and rust for coding a small Websocket chat server. I'm ready to use beta code because rust seems more promising to me in the long term than golang, but not if the language itself has severe fundamental limitations on server side programming.

<comment><USER5> Depends on the kinds of parallelism you want. Rust has built-in support for parallelization, but tasks are mapped 1:1 to threads. Currently M:N threading is also supported, but that will be removed. Consequently, applications requiring lots of tasks (including highly-concurrent websocket servers) won't do well with the built-in mechanism.

Context: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8459888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8459888)

<comment><USER6> Can someone explain me why that is? It just seems like it is the dumbest thing in the world to me. The OS may be good at scheduling, but why not have a built in library providing you with an alternative? Native threads are usually really slow to start and stop, because they have high memory use and even modern OSs can only handle on the order of 10000 of them.

When I saw this decision my first reaction was "Well, that was a promising language. Shame about that." I can't be the only one...

<comment><USER7> A systems programming language without access to a systems feature isn't much of a systems language.

Also, it doesn't _preclude_ green threads. As others have mentioned, Rust is low-level enough that all of this is a library issue, not a language issue. You can write whatever concurrency primitives you need, and they'll be no less privileged as the ones the standard library gives you.

<comment><USER6> Well, yes, but anything that's merely a convenience and not in the standard library won't see much use, as I've understood programmer nature.

<comment><USER7> Rust's standard library will be much less privileged than in other languages, due to Cargo existing from the start. It's going to be much more slim than most, we've already pulled lots of things out into their own packages. Also, given that only part of the standard library will be stable at 1.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rust really interest me. However I want them to get to 1.0 before I can evaluate whether or not to use Rust in my app. Currently I am using Go and it stable for my needs. Rust could make me switch once they get to 1.0 and people start writing more projects in Rust.

I want to add that stability in deciding to use a language in an application is very important. How good the standard library is and how much traction the language is gaining in projects and particularly open source projects is also important.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. However sometimes it's good to do tiny side projects in a language. This allows you to learn, see if it's really nice, help the language and its ecosystem to develop and become stable.

For use outside of production it seems okay. There are two Sinatra/Flask/Express style web frameworks (Nickel and Iron), a browser engine (Servo), a game engine (Piston) actively developed. So if you have interest in any of those or interest in implementing something like that you might be able to make your project shine. Also really nice on your portfolio if you ever want to get a job where Rust is already in use.

Or one just has fun with it. :D

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I would do a small project just for fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rust seems to do worse on the string-y tasks (fannkuch, k-nucleotides, regex- dna). A lot if you look at single-thread performance. Does it handle strings differently from C++?

(From what I understood, Rust gives you similar control over memory allocation as [a sane subset of] C++, so intuitively it should come out relatively close)

<comment><USER10> With respect to regex-dna, there is still substantial room for improvement in the Rust library. It's currently using a full NFA simulation (albeit specialized to native Rust code with the `regex!` macro), while the competing C++ library (RE2) has been tricked out by Russ Cox with a parallel DFA implementation. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found on the Rust subreddit.

[https://pay.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2jm4vq/rust_0120_vs_c...](https://pay.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2jm4vq/rust_0120_vs_c_computer_language_benchmarks_game/)

<comment><USER11> Incidentally -- reddit supports https by default now, so you don't need to use pay.reddit.com anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very impressive. What we need now is some sort of a good mainstream all that uses it to spread its popularity..

How is rust when it comes to deployment. C++ is a real pain to deploy for large projects. Compilation setup is also a massive headache in c++.

<comment><USER7> With Cargo, getting a nice repeatable build is much, much easier. There's still work to be done on this front, but I'm _incredibly_ excited by this RFC: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/403](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/pull/403)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This issue on the Rust repo is very relevant: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/18085](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/18085)

</comment><comment><USER13> The server is down for me.

<comment><USER14> Same, but google had the time to cache it.

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fbenchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org%2Fu64q%2Fbenchmark.php%3Ftest%3Dall%26lang%3Drust%26lang2%3Dgpp%26data%3Du64q)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I'm not a huge fan of benchmarks, this is quite impressive, given the age of Rust. C++ does better memory-wise in pretty much all benchmarks.

<comment><USER16> Don't read too much into those memory use measurements - they are just enough to suggest programmers might have made a space/time trade-off, nothing more.

<comment><USER17> Considering that memory management is one of the headline features of Rust, memory use is certainly important factor to analyze.

<comment><USER16> That may well be, but the benchmarks game measurements are not a good basis for that analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Actually LLVM vs GCC backend benchmark.

<comment><USER16> Is there a Rust tool chain based on GCC?

<comment><USER19> Not with full up to date language support, but there's a mature c++ toolchain on top of llvm

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wish there was a D comparison. It seems to have similar goals.

<comment><USER16> Make your wish reality - take the program source code and the measurement scripts and publish your own measurements.

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#languagex](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#languagex)

If you have a linux install the benchmarks game scripts should work fine, and you'd probably get help from the D community --

[http://firstname.lastname@example.com?p...](http://firstname.lastname@example.com?page=3#post- juawuohxdfcxtbraejnv:40forum.dlang.org)</comment></comment>


Twitter is down – "Something is technically wrong." - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ <comment><USER2> First I had problems refreshing my timeline in Tweetbot. Twitter.com (home page) was giving 'Something is technically wrong', but my profile page would load.

I couldn't tweet from there but tried again and it worked... but now I'm not able to get anywhere via web or apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same here - Sacramento, CA

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Same from Dallas. The landing page is up, but when you try to view tweets you get the error.

</comment><comment><USER4> Same from India, the status page [1] is holding it up though, saying "All systems operational. Updated a few seconds ago".

[1] [https://status.twitterstat.us/](https://status.twitterstat.us/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like api.twitterstat.us hasn't reflected the outage; currently showing "All Systems Operational" [https://api.twitterstat.us/](https://api.twitterstat.us/)

<comment><USER6> It's not a real outage unless the status page is solid green.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some clientside APIs (embedded timelines, for example) still seem to be working.

</comment><comment><USER8> Same from Toronto.

</comment><comment><USER9> Down in Toronto, NY, and DC

</comment><comment><USER10> Same in Victoria, Canada.

</comment><comment><USER11> yep - the post-mortems on these things are always interesting

</comment><comment><USER12> Oh, man. I guess we have to start going outside to yell at strangers again?

</comment><comment><USER13> Down from Brazil.

</comment><comment><USER14> Same from the UK</comment>


Show HN: A step-by-step, open-source tool for easy Docker deployments to AWS - <AUTHOR> https://zenc.io/deploy <comment><USER2> It seems like cloudformation can replace a lot of this error handling stuff [https://github.com/zenclabs/deploy/blob/master/src/service/a...](https://github.com/zenclabs/deploy/blob/master/src/service/aws/cluster/adhoc.ts)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes indeed!

The reason CloudFormation isn't used is because it's a lot slower. It also has its own bugs, so it didn't seem like a big win: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46280080/cannot- delete-a...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46280080/cannot-delete- amazon-ecs-cluster-using-cloudformation)

See [https://github.com/zenclabs/deploy/commit/72c1fc847661a0ed0d...](https://github.com/zenclabs/deploy/commit/72c1fc847661a0ed0df3c2286551a01522bc3ecc) for the old CloudFormation equivalent :) Happy to bring it back if there's demand for it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm assuming this creates some sort of load balancing or ngnix routing to the cluster? (Some additional info on the page would be awesome!)

Thanks for sharing such a useful tool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, we set up a separate Application Load Balancer for each of your deployments.

It's technically possible to share a single ALB for several deployments, but it becomes harder to manage and sharing the same ALB between dev/prod/staging for example isn't necessarily a safe design (e.g. if you run some load testing on one deployment, it should not put other deployments at risk).

Will add more docs, thank you for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> demo looks good.. link to Docs ?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a quick manual in the README at [https://github.com/zenclabs/deploy](https://github.com/zenclabs/deploy). We'll add some docs on the landing page too :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do You Usually Visit the Same Small Number of Sites Every Day? - <AUTHOR> I was thinking about how big the internet is, then my own browsing habits.
I realised I frequent a handful of the same websites everyday by habit. News, Sports, HN, e.t.c.
Do most of you use the internet the same way?
I imagine that there are also people that visit even less of the internet and stay within Facebook's walled gardens. <comment><USER2> In order to break the habit of going to the same sites, and to ween myself off social media for content discovery, I started my own personal Yahoo.

Yahoo originally started as a link directory. [1] So I built my own link directory that I browse when I'm bored.

It's hosted as a github page [2], and I update it whenever I find a site I like. I get a lot of use out of it and I hope the idea catches on; everyone should have their own link directory.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo)! [2] [https://bmsauer.github.io/yayhoo/](https://bmsauer.github.io/yayhoo/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess so. Though it's more a small number of sites for each topic rather than overall. So I'll visit three or four social media sites, three or four web development sites, three or four gaming news sites, etc.

Makes me miss the days when we used to just randomly search Google and see what came up. Or go through webrings/directories/affiliate lists/whatever.

</comment><comment><USER4> I do. I call it my loop, or loops. I have a folder in Chrome's bookmark bar called Loops, and inside are four folders called Dev, Tech News, Politics, Sports, which each have links to 4 or 5 or 8 sites, a few of which are Twitter lists.

I usually open all the links in one folder once or twice per day just to see if there's anything readworthy.

(I also have an RSS reader with 100+ feeds, but I rarely launch that anymore; it's just too overwhelming.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, and that's because of the websites' need to increase "engagement" in order to drive their advertising profits (well, not the case of HN but most), and the feedback loops in the brain specific to each site which we crave after visiting said site has become a habit.

</comment><comment><USER6> Usually, yes. At some point I created myself a little batch file to run on startup, which actually opens up the websites I frequently visit.

</comment><comment><USER7> I miss the days when I had iGoogle as the homepage, getting one line updates from a small number of sites via RSS. Today's solutions seem to cluttered for my needs.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sure, because only a few websites have new content every couple of minutes. No point in visiting a site daily that updates monthly. There's RSS for that.

</comment><comment><USER9> Aside from shopping or specific searches, I only regularly visit a couple of subreddits, hn, xkcd, and fuckinghomepage.com. Every few months, highscalability.com. I only view Facebook once or twice a month to check notifications and check up on any updates from folks.</comment>


Webkit Web Inspector Updates - <AUTHOR> http://webkit.org/blog/829/web-inspector-updates/ <comment><USER2> I used to use Firebug exclusively, but since developing a WebKit oriented web app, I had to use the web inspector. At first I hated it, but after I got used to it, I never go back to Firebug.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's too bad that Firebug keeps stagnating/backsliding, introducing bugs from version to version but not really improving the development experience much. (I have some friends who stick to Firefox 2 or even 1.5, because Firebug there works better in some ways than the more recent versions)

It's nice that the webkit inspector is picking up the slack, but it'd be even nicer if someone had the time/resources to sink serious development into firebug and keep both of these tools advancing.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm genuinely excited by this. This is a great chunk of really valuable enhancements, particularly those surrounding inspecting Ajax requests and the debugging -- I make heavy use of both.

Previously I've had to revert to Firebug for specific features -- like seeing formatted JSON -- but I think that's behind me now. Yay!

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know how long it usually takes webkit features to appear in Safari?

<comment><USER6> Do you care? Just run the Webkit nightly.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. The WebKit nightlies are usually more stable than a lot of the "production release" software I use.

And its development console is awesome.</comment></comment></comment>


Medical devices A ticking time-bomb  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/05/medical-devices

<comment><USER2> This is interesting because at least one of our medical instruments runs on Windows Embedded and as part of the OS customization process, we turn off the "sync to time server" feature. The time is set during installation, and unless a customer or a service engineer notices something wrong, never touched again.

Why do we do this? Well, because we run into the same problem everyone else who wants to sync to a time server in a lab or hospital does: the hospital's IT people don't want anything on their network that isn't absolutely required to be there.

Clinical IT is understandably suspicious of anything on their network, but it will take cooperation on all sides before anything changes in this arena.

</comment><comment><USER3> FDA requirements for electronic data transmission (21 CFR Part 11) are a hassle to implement even for devices starting from a blank slate. That being said the sooner NTP standards are universally required, the better. As the article mentions it will be very resource-intensive to retrofit devices for this standardization - an EMR consultant's dream project.

</comment><comment><USER4> Once again, the complexities of coding using time-related concepts rears its ugly head. There should be standards for time synchronization and tracking. All medical data should be timestamped to a global uniform standard like GMT.</comment>


YouTube can terminate anyone they deem "not commercially viable" - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/du95s3/ysk_that_youtube_is_updating_their_terms_of/ <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, the terms and conditions in other Google products such as Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android Studio already include similar language. I don't believe this clause was added specifically for YouTube.

[1] Google Chrome Terms of Service - _12.2 Google may at any time, terminate its legal agreement with you if ... (E) the provision of the Services to you by Google is, in Google's opinion, no longer commercially viable._ [https://www.google.com/intl/en_sg/chrome/privacy/eula_text.h...](https://www.google.com/intl/en_sg/chrome/privacy/eula_text.html)

[2] Google Chrome OS Terms - _11.2 Google may at any time, terminate its legal agreement with you if ... (E) the provision of the Software or Services to you by Google is, in Google's opinion, no longer commercially viable._ [https://www.google.com/chromebook/termsofservice.html](https://www.google.com/chromebook/termsofservice.html)

[3] Android Software Development Kit License Agreement - _9.3 Google may at any time, terminate the License Agreement with you if ... (D) Google decides to no longer provide the SDK or certain parts of the SDK to users in the country in which you are resident or from which you use the service, or the provision of the SDK or certain SDK services to you by Google is, in Google 's sole discretion, no longer commercially viable._ [https://developer.android.com/studio/terms](https://developer.android.com/studio/terms)

</comment><comment><USER3> To me this means that Google are within their rights to remove access to a system that THEY deem to be not commercially viable.

Rather than "hey, you're not making us any money, you can no longer access Youtube" it's more "hey, this service we're offering you is costing us more to run than we make out of it, so we're going to shut it down".

People are reading this wrong IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1193988444873060352](https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1193988444873060352)

> The section of our Terms that you're referring to is _not_ about terminating > an account if it's not making enough money – it's about discontinuing > certain YouTube features or parts of the service, e.g. removing outdated/low > usage features. This does not impact anyone in new ways!

Told ya.

</comment><comment><USER4> So, Does this mean that the YouTube has a clause to ban your account if you are using ad blocker? I would say that a person with numerous subscriptions and watches YouTube daily (non ad block user) would be considered commercially viable.

<comment><USER5> Accounts are free and if you are not uploading completely unnecessary. You can still access the RSS feeds for each channel regardless if you have an account or not.

<comment><USER6> Someone recently [1] got his Google account (think Gmail, Docs, etc) banned for watching YouTube without ads via some Android app.

[1] [https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/2723](https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/2723)

Upd: added link

<comment><USER7> Source?

<comment><USER6> It was posted here on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see this in the current (local, can't figure out how to see English/US version) terms already.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's not really clear on what The Service is, is it youtube of all of google services?

</comment><comment><USER10> Isn't Youtube still unprofitable? It always seemed too good to be true to let everyone upload their petabytes of useless videos that receive 3 views and never generate any revenue for anyone.

Maybe the days of free storage are just ending.

<comment><USER11> If you got to make money, you got to make money - Thats okay.

Major worry here being if I dont be a "money earning user" for Youtube i.e. I have ad blocker and I do not monetize / upload videos, will I lose access to ALL my Google products? (All being analytics, webmaster tools, gmail being 3 main ones)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think there's any problem here.

Nothing lives forever and YT is not PG&E, it may shutdown and never return. Similar things happened before, e.g., MSN Spaces, myspaces, etc.

It's actually a good thing to say this upfront.

<comment><USER13> I think this is not about the service shutting down.

It's about the service terminating accounts for selected unprofitable users only.</comment></comment>


Why do people want to leave our planet for Mars or other uninhabitable worlds? - happy-go-lucky On Earth, we seek greener pastures and would never move to a place that's less greener than our current one. So far, we don't know of any other world that's as exciting as ours. So, I'm wondering why one would want to leave Earth in the first place? There's an estimate that the Earth's age is about 4.6 billion years and it has supported life as we know it. Why would one want to go to a place that's totally unsuitable for living in and try to make it habitable? I would love to go explore space, but I would always return to Earth because this is the best place to live. Do we know of a celestial body that got destroyed by a killer asteroid or something like that?<p>Please share your thoughts. <comment><AUTHOR> "Greener pastures" doesn't always mean literally greener pastures.

And there are other reasons to go places besides you think it'll be "better" than where you are now: exploration, for example. Scientific curiosity. Adventure.

Not everyone that has set out exploring has done so because they thought they'd find a "better" place (which is thoroughly subjective), rather in hopes they'd find a _different_ place.

Earth may be the best place for _you_ , but you are not everyone.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm late to the Bitcoin party - <AUTHOR> I'm a bit late to the Bitcoin party and want to get involved. There's a few things I need to clear up and ask before I dive in:
Are exchanges any use? Things like Coinbase seem very agressive in knowing personal information about me, asking for a scanned passport, and that's a big no-no for me.
Are there other alternatives to Coinbase where I can just buy a bit of BTC with my credit card, and preferably without the intrusiveness of Coinbase? <comment><USER2> im sorry to tell you that the majority of bitcoin exchanges will require quite a lot of personal information, usually a photo of your passport/drivers licence at minimum and in many cases a picture of you holding the card. this is simply their only way of trying to protect against people using it for money laundering or card theft, think about it, if you find/steal/clone a credit card and can open an anonymous account you could clear out the card into untraceable BTC and be gone like a ghost. (well OK youd probably have to anonymize it a little more but the idea s there)

alternatives exists and i believe there is even one built into the android wallet app mycellium but most will require a lot of verification, your only other option really is to use local bitcoins or a similar service to buy from someone near you, but this usually comes at an increased cost.

i actually cant think of any way off the top of my head to buy coins without full registration or personally knowing someone with them already, there used to be ways to get them using uKash or paysafecard and even second life linden dollars but i think theyve closed off all those various holes now

<comment><USER3> There are hundredes of Bitcoin ATMs, quick and easy with variying levels of scrutiny but usually charge a necessarily high price ([https://coinatmradar.com/](https://coinatmradar.com/)).

Local Bitcoins should have been your first (and only) answer. Sure it is kind of cyberpunky "dangerous" and you need to talk to strangers, but that's what Bitcoin is, its a feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's really not safe to buy/sell BTC with a credit card. If you want to avoid KYC you could try LocalBitcoins.

<comment><AUTHOR> I need something similar to Coinbase where I can attach a card and just buy some BTC without all the KYC BS you see in Coinbase. There has to be something like that which is heavily vetted by the BTC community? I've seen local bitcoins, but I want to keep everything as virtual as possible.

<comment><USER5> The problem isn't the risk of the service being a scam (which vetting by the BTC community takes care of) but the risk that the users are scamming the service.

Without all the 'KYC BS', it would be too easy for someone to use stolen credit card numbers to buy Bitcoin which would quickly bankrupt the service or at least cause them to have to pay high processing fees or have their processing terminated.</comment></comment></comment>


BlackBerry announces an Android phone with a sliding keyboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/16/9554393/blackberry-priv-sliding-keyboard-video <comment><USER2> Good news !</comment>


Latency of Scaleway, the cloud provider offering multicore ARM servers - <AUTHOR> http://philipmw.github.io/2017/06/24/latency-of-scaleway.html <comment><USER2> To anyone outside the USA, this is old hat. Yes, latency matters for interactive traffic. Yes, the Atlantic (and Pacific) oceans are big and light ain't getting any faster.

<comment><USER3> RTT based on the speed of light should be 54 ms. Say 70 ms because it won't go as the crow flies, so could actually get twice as fast in theory.

<comment><USER4> You're discounting TCP ACK overhead, and time taken by switches.

<comment><USER3> Ping doesn't use TCP and the time taken by switches can be reduced, theoretically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has nothing to do with Scaleway, the latency results would be the same no matter the provider.

</comment><comment><USER6> So, where on the North American continent are people going for a small (ARM or otherwise), dedicated server that doesn't break the bank?

A few years ago, dedicated Raspberry Pi hosting was a bit of a thing for a bit.

I looked a bit, a few months ago, but I didn't turn up what appeared to be a clear winner of a choice.

<comment><USER7> x86 offerings are so cheap now, is there still a market for this kind of ARM hosting? I would argue that you will achieve at least equivalent performance from an entry level KVM or Xen VM.

Perhaps there is still a market for the security concious or workloads sensitive to noisy neighbours.

Somewhat of a tangent - although not small scale, I have found the packet.net 96 core ARM offering to be good value.

<comment><USER8> Correct me if I'm wrong, but ARM is much less power hungry, and produces less heat. Both options that at scale means potential cost savings on resale.

It might not be enough to offset the other costs, but it could be enough to offer a less costly service. At the end of the day though, half of what you get with AWS is a ton of library support in many languages for using AWS services.

<comment><USER9> >ARM is much less power hungry, and produces less heat

This seems like a myth repeated without any proof to back it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why not measure application response times on instance instead of at home? Would have been more interesting to see how $my_web_app runs on some t2.micros vs some arm boxes?

</comment><comment><USER11> I just use Cloudflare's free plan with my Scaleway servers, so Scaleway could be hosting from low earth orbit for all I care.

<comment><USER12> How would you speed up a dynamic real-time app with cloudflare? It'd not like you can cache real-time results.

<comment><USER11> I don't. The stuff I host on Scaleway is there because 1) I don't want to host it in the US, 2) an ARMv8 experiment, or 3) I need redundant bootstrap capacity in case GCE or AWS goes down.

The dynamic stuff I host for personal use uses a variety of cloud services as backends, and those are anycasted. One app I wrote in a hurry uses Google Sheets as a backend, and that's worked surprisingly well for the effort it took.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting people are worried about this with Scaleway because I don't remember reading this with Slicehost or Amazon EC2 while they were ramping up.

So, is the bar so much higher or is it something else?

I used Slicehost and EC2 from Europe with total disregard for latency because I never had much users. For my (mostly internal) servers it was fast enough.

And even now, I have the cheapest Scaleway machine with a public-facing website that seems to be running fine a small Angular4 + Java backend app.

I would also like to see a graph showing the latencies between all the AWS regions. Which I guess will show that AWS regions do have a logic and that having servers next to your users makes sense.

Still, why worry about this from the start when your monthly 'budget' is less than the price of your coffee breakfast and you get unmetered bandwidth?

</comment><comment><USER14> What's weird is that the distance from SF to Paris is 9000 Km, which is 30 light-ms. So the theoretical minimal latency would be 30ms.

How comes we're 5 times above that ?

Is the latency introduced by routers ? If yes, then that quite doesn't make sense : I doubt there is any in the middle of the Atlantic.

Is the routing that inefficient that the data travels 50000 km ?

<comment><USER15> What people typically mean when they say speed of light is the speed in vacuum. For optical fibers, you can reduce that number by about 30%. It's also unlikely that there is a straight line from A to B, and each network hop will introduce additional latency - there are > 10 hops from my home connection to Scaleway, and that's with both ends located in Europe.

<comment><USER14> Good points. The 30% increase and the not-straight-distance could explain a 50% slowdown. But here we have a 500% difference.

Also the number of hops probably isn't really relevant : there probably isn't any router in the middle of the Atlantic, and just like you said there is already a bunch of router on an European-only route whose latency would most likely be below 10ms.

<comment><USER15> It's not really a question of where the hops are located. There'll be a couple of them in Europe and a couple in NA. Each will introduce a bit of latency.

The numbers from the article are also round-trip times (that's what you get with the ping command), so you'd have to double whatever number you come up with from the one-way distance alone.

<comment><USER16> > _The numbers from the article are also round-trip times (that 's what you > get with the ping command), so you'd have to double whatever number you come > up with from the one-way distance alone._

Indeed, the theoretical minimum ping time for 9000km is 60ms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is really obvious. You should lose karma for up voting it.

<comment><USER18> I was hoping this would show us some benchmarks, that is, an Apple A10X ARM based server could be pretty darn fast based on the perf metrics I've seen. And off the damn charts in terms of power per watt. Not that Apple is selling any, but _cough_ theyshouldbe

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I highly recommend Packet.net instead of Scaleway if you care for bare metal or ARM. Their storage is local by default, which makes a huge difference in operational stability. In addition, their staff is super helpful.

As far as ARMv8, and Erlang go, I would suggest you not bother. At least in casual testing, I found P99 latency to be massively higher than the equivalent x86. BEAM just doesn't seem to want to do a massive number of schedulers well.

<comment><USER20> Packet.net's cheapest server looks to be about $37/mn while you can get a Scaleway server starting at about $3. I run a small website and I use Scaleway despite the latency because I don't want to spend more than a few dollars a month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I use scaleway for some of my side projects. The latency is noticeable but with a little bit of cache adjustments and a free cloudflare plan in front of it, it is fine.

I took about 5 sites from a $50 a month shared cPanel plan that included a few WordPress blogs and some custom sites and put them on a $3 a month scaleway instance and haven't had a bit of trouble.</comment>


Ask HN: Can we get colapsing comments? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, could we have the comments at least the top ones to have a colapsable > on them?
The reason for this is that sometimes the discussion on a post is not relevant to it but it gets to the top of the comments for some reason. And I have to scroll through a huge block of random things to get to the actual comments. Which is very confusing since it's hard to get the indentation of the lower ones without seeing the top.
So I would like to be able to close that just like in any IDE allows you to do in order to read the others topics.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> There's a Chrome plugin for that [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- collap...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- collapse/bbkfcamiocfccgmcjngdljolljhifdph?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494756)

But please don't post questions like this here. As the guidelines ask, send them to email@example.com instead.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you run Safari, check my profile. Tiny extension to space things out more and add collapsing comments :)</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to get a PhD in computer science remotely - <AUTHOR> I have a masters degree and lot of good publications in top conferences. But, I currently work at a research lab and can't do a phd fulltime. Is it possible to do a part time PhD remotely? Few weeks of physically attending the university a year is okay. And since it is remote, any where in the world is okay as long it is a good university. <comment><USER2> The university of York in the UK supports distance learning Computer Science PhDs. You're required to be onsite a few weeks a year but it's mainly remote.

[https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/postgraduate/research- degrees/phd/](https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/postgraduate/research-degrees/phd/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. UK seems to be a nice destination. English speaking, as well as low fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> (Note that my experience is with US PhD process)

I have not heard of someone doing a PhD remotely from day one. It is definitely not unheard of to be mostly remote once you have mad some progress with you PhD. This can occur for example once you are writing your thesis, or due to an unexpected life event (such as your partner is starting a new job in a different state). Much like everything else with grad school, your experience will heavily depend on your advisor.

As for part-time, this is a little more murky. Most advisors will not want to fund (tuition and stipend) someone doing PhD part time, due to the very likely scenario of your PhD taking a much longer time to complete. It is not uncommon to work part time while doing a PhD though (such as a few hours of contracting/consulting).

</comment><comment><USER4> While it is likely possible to do the work required for a PhD remotely, I am unsure that an advisor would wish to mentor a remote PhD student. Finding an advisor willing to work with you (as well as school willing to admit you remotely) are likely to be the biggest barriers to such an endeavor.

<comment><USER5> Yes.

It is definitely possible to do a PhD part-time: many universities offer part- time PhD programs, and I know people who have done this.

Doing it part-time _and remotely_ is harder: even if a university allows this, an individual academic might (quite-understandably) not want to supervise a student on this basis.

I do know of one person who successfully completed a PhD at London South Bank University whilst living in Canada: he traveled to London a few times for physical meetings with his supervisor, and had more frequent electronic communications with them. He also had the advantage that the subject of this thesis was related to what he was doing in his job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't teaching or mentoring others a requirement for a PhD? It has traditionally been seen as a route into university employment at the lecturer/researcher/professor level. It is a lot more than just the next qualification up from a bachelors or masters degree.

</comment><comment><USER7> Many PhD programs in Europe are thesis-only; i.e. you don't have any classes. Typically this is because you need a master's to apply in the first place.

No classes means that you only need to be around to meet with your advisor occasionally.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're working as a researcher already, and have published in top conferences, why do you need a phd? Do you want to work as a professor?

</comment><comment><USER9> to flip it around: what's stopping you ditching the job and doing a phd fulltime? is it money? if so, is it possible that your employer or another or another org would be interested in sponsoring a phd on some topic they could potentially apply?

</comment><comment><USER10> probably not, because the point of the PhD is to thoroughly exploit you for a few years, for almost free, to generate content and do chores for your professor and you can't really do that as well when the student isn't around.

<comment><USER9> [http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/](http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What was Python 1 like? - <AUTHOR> I can hardly find any information or code snippets about it online. Has anyone worked with it? What were the drawbacks that led to Python 2? <comment><USER2> [https://www.python.org/download/releases/early/](https://www.python.org/download/releases/early/) has a tarball of Python 0.9.1. Andrew Dalke got it to compile on OS X and documented his changes in README.reconstructed.

The following is an excerpt from README.reconstructed.

Some quick differences from modern Python I found when using the resulting binary:

      - classes must have the (), as in
          class Spam():
            pass

      - There is no '__init__' function for instances. The
          classes in the library by convention use 'Create()'
          and that must be explicitly called.

      - The library code does not consistently use 'self'.

      - Only single quote strings 'like this' are allowed. "Double quoted"
          strings are not allowed.

Edited to add some details from README.reconstructed and credit the porter.

<comment><USER3> 1.0 also added lambda, map, filter, and reduce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It barely registered for me at the time that Python had changed. But using it back then, it felt quite a bit similar between late 1.x and early 2.x, just with creature comforts gradually appearing and bulking up the language:

No decorators

Old-style classes(a distinction that makes almost no difference if you are using the class as a simple container with no inherited methods).

List comprehensions appeared in 2.0 and I struggled to grasp them for a little while.

The runtime might not have supported any cyclical reference collection(or I was just unaware at that point, being a student).

No iterators (2.1) or generators (2.2)

Python 1 to 2 was a simple transition, as it didn't do much to reassess the language's basics.

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember no big changes, nor any breaking changes, from Python 1.5.2 to Python 2. The major version bump was mostly a marketing move. At that time, a 1.x.y version number didn't look mature enough for some companies.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/2.0.html](https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/2.0.html)

<comment><USER7> _The largest new feature in Python 2.0 is a new fundamental data type: Unicode strings. Unicode uses 16-bit numbers to represent characters instead of the 8-bit number used by ASCII, meaning that 65,536 distinct characters can be supported._

It's interesting that both Python 2.0 and Python 3.0 made fundamental changes to how the language deals with text.

<comment><USER8> I can see why they redid Unicode in 3.0, if that was their understanding of what Unicode was.</comment></comment></comment>


New Gamespot redesign - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-new-gamespot/2300-6415477/

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually really like it -- this site has been around forever, never thought of it as a business until I saw the cubes and workareas during the video (that didn't suck -- I didn't even cringe watching it)</comment>


How Japan's visionaries saw the future - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180725-how-japans-visionaries-saw-the-future <comment><AUTHOR> As an interesting side note, that capsule building was used in the old DOS PC game Transport Tycoon as one of the futuristic type of buildings that would appear in cities in late game. [http://sidenote.hu/wp- content/uploads/2009/09/nakagin_capsul...](http://sidenote.hu/wp- content/uploads/2009/09/nakagin_capsule_tower_1.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER2> While some of their ideas, like composable, modular buildings are even more feasible and relevant now, given how much fabrication occurs offsite these days, the aesthetics of the buildings can seem painfully dated (see the capsule building).

If we were to compare Metabolism to Brutalism, another mid-90s architectural movement and style, we can see how the motivations behind an aesthetic can influence it's staying power. To the Metabolists, they were making a big, provocative art project. Their goal was to envision a future, in all their violent masculinity.

In contrast, the Brutalists were concerned with providing the most practical solutions to modern problems. They did things like bordering a compound with a specifically shaped wall to limit the noise pollution of those new 'highway things,' or revealing the pipes to the inhabitants to create a sense of honest construction at a time when the workings of buildings were hidden in the service of form.

I'd argue that the Brutalist structures remain practical so long as the problems they set out to solve remain, but that the Metabolist buildings were impractical from the start because they were never meant to be.

<comment><USER3> Huh. My understanding is that brutalism's claimed emphasis on practicality was kind of a pose, and that it was more of a competition to see who could be the most anti-bourgeois, to the extent that the working class hated living in honest, unpretentious brutalist public housing since it was so uncomfortable.

As an added bonus the rise of brutalism and international style, and the attendant disdain for intricate and expensive craftsmanship in favor of honest mass-produced clean lines, put a bunch of working-class craftsmen out of work.

Of course, I got all this from one read of _From Bauhaus to Our House_ , so it's a little prejudiced.

<comment><USER2> I never considered that the move away from ornaments might be a net negative on working class jobs. That's a little chilling.

_From Bauhaus to our House_ was published in 81 (near the end of the movement), so it's completely possible that Brutalism had strayed from it's original ethos by then.

Still, outside the book, it should be noted that some of the recent backlash against the style is based on looking at an unmaintained building, and then blaming it for crime rates etc, conveniently ignoring other soci-economic factors.

Also, one of the flaws/features of the style was that since you're showing the materials, they needed to be high-quality and maintained. You couldn't just paint over cracks. This means that they're sensitive to neglect, and often, they were.</comment></comment></comment>


What Happened at Chernobyl? - <AUTHOR> http://www.babeled.com/2009/12/07/what-happened-at-chernobyl/

<comment><USER2> There have been a number of reports about Chernobyl. This one was rather sparse on details and seemed to have as its take-home point "The USSRians were morons, this could never happen in the US because we are better and people who do tests on reactors go to jail." Now, this is not very useful. What happened in Chernobyl was a combination of technical failure, failure to follow regulations, bad design and an error cascade. This combination was significantly more likely in the conditions in the USSR at the time, but accidents on a smaller scale have happened, even in the US. <http://www.csirc.net/library/la_13638.shtml> is an interesting read, especially the first document linked. It contains data and detailed accident reports for a number of radiation criticalities in various situations. Failsafes are good, but they are not enough, and someone stupid, uninformed, or willful enough can always find ways of circumventing them.

<comment><USER3> The USSRians made some decisions which, in retrospect, seem pretty evil. For example, I hear they were cloud seeding to force the fallout to be rained. This hit Belarus very badly. BUT if they hadn't done this, then the clouds would have continued towards Moscow and many many many more people could have been affected. The one thing I do criticize them on, though, is not evacuating people earlier. I also hear they never told anyone the extent of the accident until many days later, when they were already poisoned by radiation.

As for the actual accident - there were many factors at play here, including miscommunication between the day and night shift people, untrained staff, bad reactor design etc etc.

I just hope people learned from the accident and we can prevent this from happening again.

<comment><USER4> Soviets only tell the people of this catastrophe, when independent scientists from Finland reported that radiation levels are unusually high, if they could, they would get away with this, no matter peoples' health.

<comment><USER3> Probably. They did wait something like ten days, afterall... :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> did he really say renewable??? fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe he is not referring to nuclear power but energy in general, though I don't know if renewable is still the right word to use.</comment></comment>


ASk YC: Your opinions on my website. And a few questions. - <AUTHOR> http://staging.dashbard.com/

<comment><USER2> The screenshots need to be clickable to get a bigger version.

Looks ok, offhand, but what's the compelling reason to use this instead of something else that's already out there, like basecamp?

<comment><AUTHOR> >The screenshots need to be clickable to get a bigger version.

Ah, should have thought of that. :)

>Looks ok, offhand, but what's the compelling reason to use this instead of something else that's already out there, like basecamp?

There are amny features which can be useful, and which basecamp lacks. It might be their business decision to not build those features, but those features can make this target a different subset of people for whom having the features is absolutely needed.

<comment><USER2> Maybe you should highlight those things somewhere?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, So I am almost ready to go live, and want YC opinions before I do. Your opinions and feedback(good/bad/ugly) very welcome.

You can login as demo/demo

And now to the questions,

1\. Should I launch it in this situation. I ws hoping to launch it after I had some more features. But I am already 15 days late, than the deadline I set for myself.

Why I want to launch it now:

Of course I want real users so that I can not just be coding in vaccum, but solving real problems of real people.(TM)

Why I should wait:

Umm, I do not want to screw the launch. First impresiosn are last impressions.

2\. How should I advertise this:

Options:

Social media: Umm, IMO, this is not a low involvement app, and would require substantial pre sell, before people would like to use this. Plus social media wont really be the people I am tragetting.

Adwords: The current bid prices for "project management application" is in the ballpark of 5$ per click! Even if I can get an awesome convert ratio of 10%, the cost to acquire a cutomer would be 50$. Ouch!

Advertising on blogs which target this market. Ok I think I will try this.

3\. What should I charge for this, and when should I start charging.

When:

I want to offer this for free for sometime(say three months), after that I want to charge for serious usage. But I do not want to give away a lot of hings for free, coz once I bring on a paid plan, there would be backlash, unless there is substantial value add. Also once you set a price, in people's mind you set an implicit value for the product. So keeping this free for a long time does not seem wise.

How much:

Cant really think of an answer to this, before I can think of an answer to "when".

[PS. Sorry about the formatting. I can never get the post to display nicely on news.YC]

<comment><USER3> I will need to think of a better business model. I don't think you'll be able to compete will the big players.

The only way i think you will be able to compete would be to offer all the great features plus those of your own for free, and look monetize in some other form.

I think your 3 month out look is extremely optimistic.

good luck, hopes it works out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Initial, "first 3 seconds" impression of the front page is a good one. There are few things though:

The "JOIN NOW" part of the login section needs to be toned down. It looks like a desperate attempt to grab an attention of 80 yrs old with an eyesight problems. Besides you are using 3 font sizes in this section, which makes it look clumsy.

"Signin" should be "Sign in", "Logged out sucessfully" is misspelled too.

Try resizing your browser window and see how the page looks at wide and narrow widths. It does not look that good and this needs to be fixed.

Upon logging in however I can't say it's ready to go live. It just feels like a prototype rather than a shippable product. Even not considering the functionality, it's just not polished enough and does not look visually appealing.

If you launch now, I can pretty much guarantee you it's going to be a failure. However, if you are at liberty to treat this project as an experiment, I'd suggest to go ahead and launch. Learning from the failure is one of the best and quickest ways to get a real world experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have tried it at various width of 1024 * 768 and above. Wat width did you have problem with. (We are not really targeting 800 * 600 really)

<comment><USER4> With a very wide window the front page is all clumped to the left side of the window, which looks odd. With a narrow window the "Sign In" dialog jumps to the bottom of the page.

It's OK to assume that a visible area of the page should be X pixels wide. But it's not OK if the content starts jumping around when the window is resized.

For example, I never have any of the browser windows maximized, so they routinely end up being narrower than 1024 pixels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> having done it myself, I think to do lists are the web's hello world... albeit longer and more complicated (this was the same advice I was told the 1st time I publicized my 1st rails app on YC); you actually have some good ideas though

quick suggestions:

-for the basic to do ui though I'd check out <http://todoist.com>

-instead of the current quick entry ui u have now, why not just make it less clicks to enter any tasks (like an always showing add to do)

-it would be nice for projects to have to do lists (a la basecamp)

Until you get your UI stuff worked out I'm not sure you can charge yet

</comment><comment><USER6> My thoughts about your questions: 1\. Launch - its fine in its current state and you'll be able to get feedback.

2\. I'd use PayPerPost, StumbleUpon, maybe Adwords...here's what YC users say: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104627>

3\. For this question I'll refer to Chris Anderson [http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?curre...](http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all)

Side Note: I wish it had better time tracking - that way I could use it for my freelance web work.

<comment><AUTHOR> >3\. For this question I'll refer to Chris Anderson [http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?curre...](http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?curre..).

Umm, is this not exactly what I am thinking, provide basic usage for free, charge for serious usage?

>Side Note: I wish it had better time tracking - that way I could use it for my freelance web work.

We are planning this feature, I think billable time can be an extremely useful feature.</comment></comment>


Calling Out Google's Bullshit - <AUTHOR> http://startupdispatch.com/opinion/calling-out-googles-bullshit/

<comment><USER2> Having worked for a comparison shopping engine, I blame users.

The typical user of the typical comparison shopping engine is not a user in any real sense of the world. They accidentally stumble onto the site, almost always from Google, and click out to a merchant before they even realize they're on a comparison shopping engine. There are like three guys who actually type the URL of a shopping engine into their address bar and intentionally search on that site for the product they're looking for. This holds across basically all of the top comparison shopping engines. Their direct traffic is almost non-existant, and they are utterly dependent upon search and paid traffic to survive.

And it's all the users' fault. The various engines have spent nearly a decade and literally millions of dollars trying to figure out how to get people to come to them when they want to buy something, and they just don't want to. Users can't deal with remembering a _second_ URL to go to to find something on the internet. They want to go to Google and type in what they're looking for and find it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like this post is just troll linkbait. What are the alternatives? To weed through every review in the sites listed in the SERPs? Check each and every site (each with their own design and sometimes horrible UI) write down the prices in Excel and sort them by price? I have limited experience with Google shopping US but I know that in Germany if you submit your products in a CSV you will get listed at Google shopping. Also you are always free to sort the results by price. So Google provides a API for you to submit your inventory and scrapes reviews and provides a user friendly unified interface for people to compare prices of different retailers (leaving out SEO efforts)...and that's a bad thing??? The fact that Google shopping is always the first result is also not true here is a search for "keyboards" [ <http://imgur.com/GMZBs> ] at Google Germany (can't replicate it with US Google because I don't even get Google Shopping at google.com).

tl;dr I call bullshit on this article.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I use DuckDuckGo

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not callout everyone?

Bing? <http://i.imgur.com/SOmwD.png>

Yahoo? <http://i.imgur.com/oZmIp.png>

So much about this is missing the mark. For example, the supposed Sears quote that Google is ripping off; turns out Sears must have "ripped off" Nikon: <http://www.nikon.com/news/2010/0915_d7000_02.htm>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's like calling Ebenzer Scrooge greedy. Bing and Yahoo don't apply.

At the same time, notice that neither Bing nor Yahoo have one of their own sites as the top result. The top result is Nikon.com in both cases. Not the same thing as Google.

<comment><USER4> I get the same top, non-ad result for all three properties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "we want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible" -- larry page was talking about the google search engine, not google shopping. If you go to google shopping in the first place, its because you're looking to buy something, otherwise just stay on google search? There's a multitude of other shopping comparison sites out there that all do the same thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do people forget that tech-savvy hackers aren't the only people who use Google?

My mother "The Yahoo" is THE internet.

How misleading is planting a 'Shopping Results' on top of the search results page for average, non-internet savvy users ("there are thousands of us!")?

It used to be simple enough to use for my mother. It isn't anymore.

<comment><USER6> I think at some point Google realized that it could do a better job at answering certain types of queries for the end user than just showing them 10 blue links and this is the case when there's high shopping intent. If the end user (average) gets a better experience, then why is it wrong for them to promote G! Shopping? Also, Google has always maintained that it aims to organize the world's information. When you're shopping, that data can best be organized as a combination of availability, price, shipping options, etc.

Let's assume that your mom was shopping for the Nikon D7000 and only clicked on the organic results:

1st result: DPReview - Review site with comprehensive review of the D7000. Price/Purchase options at the bottom are not as comprehensive as on G! Shopping.

2nd result: Nikon - Bad pricing options, enjoy paying full retail.

3rd result: Amazon - Basically same as the 1st since Amazon owns DPReview but it's a good shopping option.

4th result: Wikipedia - No pricing options, pretty bad result if your aim is to shop.

Now compare that to the Google Shopping result: On the 1st click, I can see: \- Pricing options from many stores, including local ones that carry it. \- Aggregated reviews across the web (editorial reviews means from magazines/publications vs. user reviews from normal users) \- Seller ratings so I know who is reputable and who isn't.

At the end of the day, I think the average user would have gotten more information and more pricing options than if they had to click on a link to a bunch of different stores or third party sites.

I think it's fair to say that it's harder and harder to get to the top of Google without paying for it and the heyday of SEO-driven business models may be at its end in many categories.

Just my 2 cents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> re: youtube and the video filter. The topbar and the sidebar are two totally different things. I think is more than OK for youtube to be in the topbar. In fact I want it there. I click it all the time when I want to move my search to youtube.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but look at it this way: the 'image' link performs the same function in both the top and the left nav menu. The 'video' link from the left nav menu, on the other hand, is replaced by a link to YouTube.

This wasn't the case until a couple of months ago. Obviously, this is to drive more visitors to YouTube.

Think how your father would view this if he was new to the internet - he would automatically assume that YouTube was the default video search engine, just like Google. He would never know Vimeo, DailyMotion or others.

It's not misleading to us because we're on HN. But think of the average computer illiterate user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not this nonsense again.

 _Larry Page: "we want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible"_

That was pre-IPO Google! if you haven't noticed the web changed quite a bit since then and companies do evolve, especially the ones who want to remain relevant.

Also It's not like Google is selling the items in shopping search it's just a different view for shopping results, and I'd argue that sending users elsewhere and not computing the solutions (results) or visualizing them immediately is a weakness that I'm glad to hear Google is working to address.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh noes its not.

Google is promoting its own content when better alternatives exist.

And why does Google want to do that?

Because the longer a user stays on Google, the more ads he clicks.

It's all about the money at the end of the day. Google used to care about the user, but now it's a giant middle finger with a search box.

This is not evolution; this is a company selling you a car with 10 years of warranty, but reneging on the promise 3 years down the line.

Change I can understand, but this shit is telling internet entrepreneurs who use SEO: screw you. IMO, that's not too good for the internets

<comment><USER8> So go to other sites, I assume your browser has an address bar.

Also: _SEO is killing America_ : [http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/the-information- die...](http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/the-information-diet-stump- speech)

If Google is killing SEO then they are making the world a better place.</comment></comment></comment>


How I Learned to Make Money - <AUTHOR> http://dangerouslyawesome.com/2011/10/how-i-learned-to-make-money/ <comment><USER2> Great post. I hope it gets the attention it deserves but it might terrify those who want developers not to know the value of the true value they create.

The biggest thing any developer needs to know what is easy for me isn't easy for my customer. By putting this at the center of how you see things the world becomes clearer as well as the interactions. A lot of people will try to knock down your value, you might do it yourself. The truth of the matter is knowing your value will get you your value. Not knowing your value will give off the vibe tha tyou can be beaten down.

I no longer get requests from people who care too much about what they will pay me. They should understand I'll cost them less in the short and long term for their overall investment and if they want 5 hours of my time vs 50 hours of someone with 1/10th of the experience, they can go do that.

To recap the point about something being hard for others that is easy for me:

My friend is a doctor. Just like surgery is hard for me and easy for my doctor friend. To the point that he can give himself or me stitches when drunk. And I trust him.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Your analogy reminds me of this post by Sivers: <http://sivers.org/obvious>

<comment><USER2> Sweet post, I haven't seen it before. Definitely agree with it's sentiments.

I guess something that needs to be addressed is, how can developers value their work more? We see the why, not always the how.

<comment><USER3> 1) Get to know _who_ the customer is. 2) Practice empathy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I generated 1000 random faces for my game in Python - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@janjilecek/how-i-generated-1000-random-faces-for-my-game-in-python-83340079013f <comment><USER2> against the tidal wave of ML this is quirky and refreshing and neat, thanks</comment>


Statistical analysis of the drug war in Mexico and corresponding corruption - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2010/06/the-impact-of-the-drug-war-in-mexico.html

<comment><USER2> Original post:

[http://blog.diegovalle.net/2010/06/statistical-analysis- and-...](http://blog.diegovalle.net/2010/06/statistical-analysis-and- visualization.html)

The author compares police records, death certificates, and the historical record of well-known massacres to identify inconsistencies regionally and over time. (Looks pretty rough in Juarez.)</comment>


Googlers find over 50% of the bugs in Microsoft's Massive Update - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3983846/googlers-found-over-50-percent-of-the-bugs-in-microsofts-massive-update

<comment><USER2> The article has a link to a list of all bugs found by Google engineers in non Google software:

<http://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/research/></comment>


Message in What We Buy, but Nobody's Listening  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/science/19tier.html?_r=2

<comment><USER2> Great article, a biological twist to marketing :-)</comment>


ValioCon 2012 - Web Design + Development Conference in San Diego in April - <AUTHOR> http://www.valiocon.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Last year's ValioCon was great. My favorite talk was by Ethan Dunham (the fontsquirrel/fontspring guy) about font hinting and the current state of web fonts. (Did you know font hinting is like a programming language in and of itself?) I went in not expecting to get too much from the talks, but definitely walked away with a lot of valuable insight on a wide variety of topics. Definitely looking forward to the conf this year.</comment>


Twitter exec accidentally leaks acquisition - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/twitters-c-f-o-suffers-a-social-media-faux-pas/

<comment><USER2> Using Twitter DMs to discuss sensitive corporate business? Using your own product is a good idea, but sensible limits should be applied.

</comment><comment><USER3> I still remember the Twitpic fiasco. I wonder if there are any companies that does the process of acquisitions publicly.</comment>


What are the psychological origins of procrastination? - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/10/what-are-the-psychological-origins-of-procrastination/?utm_content=bufferf2a5c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><AUTHOR> I think here is the key point.

"Because people are motivated to maintain a positive self-concept, goals connected closely to one's sense of self or identity take on much more value." I think here is the key point.</comment>