Ask HN: Let's Collaborate Over Small Projects, Meet, Learn & Ship - <AUTHOR>

Not sure if this was ever tried here before.
I love connecting with new people. And best way to meet them and learn from them is work with them. So we can, you know collaborate over small projects like one of those 'built this weekend' ones.
No this is not usual Offer HN. This is more like reoccurring thing where you throw in ideas, people take them up and collaborate over them. Ship them and viola! You shipped something and made new friends.
What say people?
PS: I am a designer so can do designing and stuff. <comment><USER2> If not collaborating, something that's worked for me is teaming up with someone while both working on separate projects, and just checking in with each other. Much harder to think "too tired right now, think I'll just play 360" when your opposite number is going to share progress the next morning and you don't want to be embarrassed with nothing to show.

</comment><comment><USER3> Come along to the November Startup Sprint Facebook Group: <http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_141079939271952>

There are a bunch of us trying to launch an app in November, there's a huge amount of really positive idea and feedback sharing going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Request sent! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would love to take part in something like this as well. My skills are widespread and always progressing, but I currently have experience in design and user interface, and am learning RoR.

Let me know if there's any way I can contribute!

</comment><comment><USER5> I really like that approach, and I plan to do several smallish mobile projects (Android+iOs mostly) in the near future. Would be great if we could find some common ground. I code.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just sent you a email

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know what I will be worth but if anyone wants a person who can think up processes and flows and things like that. (Even I don't know what I can do but still want to get onboard on something).

I can do some RoR programming, I made this uvaa.heroku.com in a few hours or so. Added a forum on my local copy but work halted so I never updated it.

Disclaimer: I am not an designer, I cannot tell you what color to use where or what your logo should be like (well I can make a rough sketch of it). I didn't write the css for that Heroku site. I just have opinions about how something should work.

If you are interested in such a guy, my contact details are at my profile.</comment>


Why Americans should work less – the way Germans do - <AUTHOR> http://m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/03/why-americans-should-work-less-way-germans-do

<comment><USER2> "However, it can also employ people by encouraging employers to divide work among more workers."

In USSR there were planned directives for employers "to create N workplaces per year". Say, if an area was being cleaned/maintained by four people, it had then to accommodate five till further notice. Yes, in USSR virtually there wasn't any unemployment...

</comment><comment><USER3> Another potential solution I see mentioned here that isn't proposed as such or further explained why this became true in the past, is that we can have another war because "war made deficits irrelevant."

<comment><USER4> We're already in a couple of wars. How many do we need to wage simultaneously before the deficit stops mattering?

<comment><USER3> Well seeing as human nature hasn't really changed much over our entire existence, and war apparently makes deficits irrelevant (according to the article), I don't think it is a question of how many is appropriate, but in which circumstances can war be conducted to give the outcome of deficits becoming irrelevant (for a country/economic-zone/etc, and assuming when deficits are irrelevant that things will be better)?</comment></comment></comment>


The Ising model: a cartoon picture of magnets that became ubiquitous in science - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-cartoon-picture-of-magnets-that-has-transformed-science-20200624/ <comment><USER2> That's very interesting. I found this simulator, try setting "field" to a value just a little bit off zero: [https://mattbierbaum.github.io/ising.js/](https://mattbierbaum.github.io/ising.js/)

</comment><comment><USER3> For others wanting a very "computer science friendly" introduction to the Ising model, Rice piles and other critical and complex systems (in the physics sense), I would recommend "Complexity and Criticality" by Christensen and Moloney.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/COMPLEXITY-CRITICALITY-Imperial- Colle...](https://www.amazon.com/COMPLEXITY-CRITICALITY-Imperial-College- Advanced/dp/1860945171)

</comment><comment><USER4> What's not touched on in this article and arguably explains the ubiquity of the Ising model: it's the maximum entropy model given a mean and pairwise correlations

<comment><USER5> That doesn't make much sense to me. The model is a model (coupled spins in a heat bath). The "solution" (the equilibrium states) can be found using maximum entropy considerations but that's not unusual. What makes the Ising model popular is that's simple and interesting.

<comment><USER4> Information entropy, not statistical mechanical entropy [1], which is a sort of Occam's razor for models.

I would not describe the Ising model as simple, not even in the 2d case and especially not the general spin glass (where W_ij can be anything).

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

<comment><USER5> That link has a couple of sentences about "maximum entropy models" and no references. From a quick search it seems that this is a terminology used in some areas thought. It's not yet completely clear to me what does it mean. (Seems to be about the Ising model which is selected from a large set of 'similar" Ising models; I would think of "Ising model" as the general thing.)

Statistical mechanical entropy is information entropy (and related to thermodynamical entropy). From the link: "The principle was first expounded by E. T. Jaynes in two papers in 1957[1][2] where he emphasized a natural correspondence between statistical mechanics and information theory. In particular, Jaynes offered a new and very general rationale why the Gibbsian method of statistical mechanics works. He argued that the entropy of statistical mechanics and the information entropy of information theory are basically the same thing. Consequently, statistical mechanics should be seen just as a particular application of a general tool of logical inference and information theory."

Simplicity is a relative thing, I guess. Let's say the interestingness/complexity ratio is high.

<comment><USER4> Statistical mechanical (Boltzmann) entropy and informational (Shannon) entropy are not the same thing, but they are closely related. Subtleties are important.

The Shannon entropy of the distribution of the positions and velocities is precisely the Boltzmann entropy of the same, but there is no statistical mechanical analog to the Shannon entropy of a (non-Boltzmann) distribution, to my knowledge.

<comment><USER5> > Statistical mechanical (Boltzmann) entropy

While Boltzmann entropy was first, and an important breakthrough, it has some limitations. Statistical mechanics is actually based on Gibbs/von Neumann entropy, which is equivalent to Shannon entropy. There are many subtleties indeed but I think the relationship between statistical mechanics and information theory may be closer than you think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something I found interesting when running analysis on Ising models; if you do an FFT (2 dimensional) on it, you get what amounts to a wavey star-like blob in the middle (assuming you center the lowest frequencies)

If that blob is a small dot, or even nothing at all; you have a stable system, and if you have a sprawling kind of wavey response-pattern, then your lattice is gone critical.

(Also it looks cool, and it's quick to diagnose by a glance.)

</comment><comment><USER7> An APL implementation showed up in 2018 but didn't get attention: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16597207](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16597207)

</comment><comment><USER8> I mostly scanned the article as it's getting late but it doesn't look like they discussed the funniest part of the story. Ernst Ising himself after grad school essentially become an obscure teacher and not a researcher, and I believe only until decades later did he become aware that his model was now the quintessential simple model for classical spins. It's funny especially given his name was attached to the model.

<comment><USER9> Looked up Ising's story on Wikipedia. It doesn't seem funny to me that he was unaware of the progress in the literature after being forced out of his job, then his country, then finally doing forced labor for the Wehrmacht.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This model is very useful for understanding magnetic refrigeration, which in turn gives deep insight into how entropy works.</comment>


How Medium Goes Social Using Golang and Neo4j - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/medium-eng/how-medium-goes-social-b7dbefa6d413

<comment><USER2> Last time i checked, neo4j REST API had a really limited support for transactions ( no way to have multiple request be part of a single transaction). Since go doesn't have a native client, i wouldn't use this combo for neo4j has my primary db.

<comment><USER3> Neo4j's streaming Cypher HTTP Endpoint (since Sept 2013) is fully transactional even accross requests, see [http://neo4j.com/docs/stable/rest- api-transactional.html](http://neo4j.com/docs/stable/rest-api- transactional.html)

<comment><USER2> Cool ! thanks for the info. I'll check that.</comment></comment></comment>


The Trainline (UK) website has a ridiculous security flaw and refuses to fix it - <AUTHOR> The Trainline deals with the private data of ~11 million UK residents' data every month, but doesn't seem to care much about security. Posting this publicly appears to be the only way they'll fix it.
I brought this to the The Trainline's attention through Twitter DM almost a year ago. They said they'd pass it along to the security team.
I've also spoken directly with a Trainline employee about this issue. He went straight to the security team, who had apparently been aware for some time and "hoped no one would find out".
Almost a year later and nothing has been done.
Note: this doesn't work if someone has signed up for an account with that email address (although it's not required to purchase tickets, many frequent users probably have an account).
How to view someone's personal information and access their ticket history (and refund or use any recently purchased tickets)
1. Sign up for a Trainline account using their email address
2. You're immediately signed in without verifying that you own the email
3. You have full access to their information/tickets.
Yup, it's that easy. <comment><USER2> Truly ridiculous, especially if they aren't taking it seriously, but you say this only affects users who check out as a guest? That does limit the scope, at least. I can confirm that attempting to register a new account with the same email address does error out as expected.

Upvoting to bring this to someone's attention.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah the scope is limited to those without accounts.

Try signing up with any other email address and you're immediately signed in — after being asked for the password you just chose, for security reasons.</comment></comment>


Idea for Facebook App - Need Candid Feedback - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's an idea I had for a facebook app. Can you guys please put it through the Ycombinator gauntlet and give me any ideas, or feedback you might have (positive or negative)

The Idea: A facebook app where you can enter all of your gift certificates/cards, the store, the value on the card, and the expiration date. You will then get notified when the card is about to expire so you can make sure to use it. I still need to think of a way to tie it into the social aspect of Facebook of course.

I got this idea after having three $50+ gift certificates expire on me! There must be a way to get these things organized.

<comment><USER2> Social aspect: what if your friends could claim your gift certificate if it is x days before expiry?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea. So when you enter your cards, you can choose a time frame for giving away your cards e.g., let me friends claim this card if I haven't used it at least one week before expiration.

<comment><USER2> Maybe one could it make somehow nicer, ie if your friend gets you to spend the gift certificate for ice cream in time, he gets an ice cream cone, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> BerkShares: <http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070619/lf_nm/usa_economy_berkshares_dc>

Apparently some cities in the US are devloping their own currency systems.

</comment><comment><USER3> The other alternative would be just to create an app to anonymously email mom and tell her to stop getting you those Bed, Bath, & Beyond gift certificates for your birthday.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha ha, that's great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're going to do that, why not make a generic "todo" app that can remind you should visit the dentist, or watch a TV program?

<comment><USER5> I agree with this... you'd be accomplishing the same thing as a generic todo list with a reminder.

Personally, the only way I could see you spinning this into something "worth it" would be the ability to swap unwanted giftcards with friends...

good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Way too specific.</comment>


Eve.js - A microframework for event delegation - <AUTHOR> http://evejs.com/

<comment><USER2> The actual link to the code is not working, but the github link is - <https://github.com/Yuffster/Eve.js>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is actually quite timely, as I'm looking for something more library independent to plug in to Meteor that doesn't carry all the other weight that Backbone does -- and also something to convert to a smart package.

Looks amazing.</comment>


Schematiq converts your Excel Spreadsheets into dynamic API's - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/schematiq-converts-your-excel-spreadsheets-dynamic-apis-darren-harris-1 <comment><USER2> Link to the product itself [http://www.schematiq.com/](http://www.schematiq.com/)

I don't see pricing, but major energy companies as customers, so I assume it's very expensive.</comment>


North Korea's official website: A case of very <strong> web design - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Strong-Web-Design.aspx

<comment><USER2> I've seen this type of markup produced by in-browser WYSIWYG editors that don't inspect the existing DOM/markup for redundancy when applying various styling commands.

In some dramatic cases, you would see alternating re-wrappings of (strong,bold,strong,bold,strong,bold) tags as users who were using different browsers (which produced slightly different markup for various style commands) would re-bold each others' sections of text from day to day.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wanna fly Air Koryo! Their slick website has sold it to me! If only I could find the online sales section..... <http://www.korea- dpr.com//Air%20Koryo/index.htm></comment>


Thought Experiment: World language - <AUTHOR>

If everyone in the world spoke every single language all of a sudden, do you think we would converge on a single mostly used language? <comment><USER2> An interesting thought experiment. Ignoring for the fact that it won't/can't happen ...

I've been in groups where most people spoke several languages sufficiently fluently not to care (and in some cases not to know!) which they were speaking. Every time this has happened the language in use changed according to the topic being discussed, sometimes in mid-word. Sometimes one language just makes it easier to talk about something than another.

In one book I have read it says something along the lines of:

        One speaks of love and such trivia in French, of food
        in Italian, of tragedy in Russian, does business in
        German, and addresses the servants in English.

Although the book itself is a parody, the passage rings true (although perhaps not in specifics).

Similarly, I regularly program in AWK, Python, C, C++, and ARM assembler, and I dabble in Lisp, Lua, OCaml and Haskell. In each case I reach for my most comfortable tool for what I'm working on, and it's not always the same one.

So I think if everyone were equally fluent in every language, there would be a pidgin arise, a language that is a mixture of the others, possibly with sub- languages for specific subjects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting response. Thanks for taking he time to reply. This was such an unusual submission that I thought it might be flagged or ignored. I really like that quote as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In all probability a new language would emerge. But just think of the cognitive load in knowing every single language. Ignoring the many and varied grammatical rules that languages have for a moment and just consider vocabulary.

Lets say you need around 3,000 words for a normal day to day conversation (though I suspect that it might be higher). That 3,000 words in Chinese, 3,000 words in German, 3,000 in Farsi. You get the idea. There has got to be more than 2,000 living languages in the world - admittedly some of them have only a handful of speakers - so you will need to remember 6,000,000 vocabulary items.

That alone is a nightmare but remember that not all words have direct translations from one language to another, English does not distinguish gender the same way that Arabic does. Japanese has different number words for different types of objects. So where some languages use only one vocabulary item others will require several.

English has, as I understand it, the largest vocabulary with more than 300,000 items (we didn't just steal people countries when we built the empire we stole their words too). Take it from me, no one knows them all.

6,000,000 - you don't stand a chance.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. I did not consider the cognitive load. It was just a random silly question that popped into my head. Setting aside the fact that it is impossible what do you think would happen to languages? And what impact do you think this change would have on other things (economic? international relations? education?)</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Would you sign this if you were me? - <AUTHOR>

I was recently approached by a media agency looking to syndicate my blog's content, make it mobile friendly, find and put ads on it and revenue share with me. The term sheet is a bit daunting though. The highlights are:
I get 30% of adjusted gross advertising revenue.
"Initial term is one (1) year.  Then, repeated one (1) year automatic renewals, unless Owner notifies [media agency] of non-
renewal in writing.  [media agency] will have a 30-day exclusive right of first negotiation after any termination, expiration or non-
renewal.  Owner will not have discussions or negotiations with any third party until 30 days of negotiation are complete." That was initially 2 years but I got them to work it down.
I only get paid if my amount payable exceeds $1000.. which I think will take a long time.
I have to put their logo and slogan on my site.
"Owner must ensure that factual assertions in the Internet Blog are true and that no content on or linked to by the
Internet Blog will be obscene, pornographic, abusive, harassing, intimidating, deceitful, deceptive, offensive, or violate any
law, or any right of any third party (including copyrights, trademarks, or trade secrets), or disparage [media agency] or its products or
services."
I'm a bit wary about that one as they hold me liable for what I write about.
"Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability.  [media agency] makes no representation or warranties express or implied and
disclaims any implied warranty.  In any case, [media agency]'s liability to Owner will be limited to $100."
Feedback greatly appreciated. Also, is Google okay with essentially duplicate content floating around elsewhere on the net? I thought this was a big no-no. <comment><USER2> No.

They're asking for too much in exchange for too little.

If you're interested in the economics of pro blogging, read this about how Gawker pays its bloggers: [http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/07/gawker-cuts- st...](http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/07/gawker-cuts-staff-pay- rate-for-third-consecutive-quarter.php)

<comment><USER3> What's the relevance between Gawker and his syndication deal?

<comment><USER4> It shows how much Gawker pays its bloggers per page view.

While the article implies the amount is small, it's still a number Paul can use as a baseline for comparison & negotiation.

<comment><USER3> It's not an equal comparison. These links are more relevant:

A post about blog syndication: [http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/01/17/make- money-from-you...](http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/01/17/make-money-from- your-blog-through-print-syndication/)

Another competing syndication network: <http://www.blogburst.com/>

<comment><USER2> Picky, picky.

Anyway, as create_account said, that was the idea...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here are my thoughts on it:

Have you tried going to advertisers directly and failed? It seems like this would be the only way that they could benefit you. If you want money, direct advertising seems like the best way to go. The rest of the terms put you in their pocket, and if they can't give you numbers (based on your current numbers) of when you may or may not get to the $1k threshold (based on their other numbers), then can you really trust that you will in 'no time at all'?

It seems like and infomercial, all promise and no product..

You can sell ad-space, or sell blog-posts (you already do some great reviews)

<comment><USER6> >>> You can sell ad-space, or sell blog-posts (you already do some great reviews)

As I understand it, he could sell ad-space anyway. They are offering to syndicate his content on another website and monetize it there...which is not mutually exclusive with selling ads himself on the original blog.

Only thing I would not agree with is the $1000 cap - there's a big risk of ending with nothing.

<comment><USER5> Ah, Thanks. That's not how I understood the OP, if that's the deal, and he still has full ad-control over his website and RSS..it's worth a second look at least.

I'd still want some sort of estimate of their expected timeframes..If they can't give you that, then you're an early adopter, and you should get better terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You'll never get paid. If you figure they can sell ads on your content at a $2 CPM (which is generous), then you'll need $1000/$2/0.3*1000 (or 1.67e6) page views to get paid and that ain't gonna happen.

</comment><comment><USER6> If I understand it correctly, what they want is to continuously copy your content to their website, making money out of it and give you 30% back? I think that isn't a bad deal, provided you can place any ads on your original blog. Is that true? Because then I see it basically as an additional income.

What I would worry about is the $1000 cap. If they give you 30%, it means that they need to make at least $3333 from it - and making such number from a blog is not easy. So you may really wait a long time, in which case it might not be worth it. IMHO reasonable cap is $100.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I ended up declining. Thanks for your help guys!

</comment><comment><USER8> start at the beginning: you don't say what you want to get out of your blog. fame? a job? money? a place to play? an audience?

if you've figured that out, there's an easy answer to whether you should sign this deal or not.

my 2c: you'll make a lot more because of your (great) blog than with it. a blog is one place you can truly be yourself and have control - do you want cede some control of your online personal brand to another party for a few thousand bucks?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm just looking for some spare cash to deal with credit card bills, rent and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dont do it. I dont think the returns are high for the caliber of your blog. I think you should be able to find a deal much better then that and with much higher returns. As others are saying you tell them exactly what deal you want. Dont accept their offer. Now I know i would be lost as to what to ask them so you should consult someone who is already running a profitable blog.

</comment><comment><USER10> If they approached you, you have the ball. Feel free to walk away.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can't you just use a wordpress plugin to make your content available for mobile phones? What is this company providing beyond ad sales that it deserves such control. I'd run the other way

<comment><AUTHOR> They host the mobile friendly site on a 3 letter domain along with other such syndicated content. I think the big thing is just that they find advertisers, but is that worth agreeing to these terms?

<comment><USER12> No.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Paul, this is pretty common legal language. I've seen a number of deals like this. As others have said, though, don't do it. You can probably come up with something much better.

</comment><comment><USER14> My advice: if you're the least bit squeamish, don't sign. Better yet, procrastinate on it for a few days and see if your thoughts change. Who knows - they may get antsy and start writing back with more info.

I do that - it's, "The Art of Decision Making by Procrastination" lol. I figure that if, after a week's time, I still want to do it, I should do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah i've procrastinated for about a week, and decided to get your opinions here. I could go either way but I feel like they would get more out of me than I would get out of them and I don't like being a means to an end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Comparing it to the Internet TV world, 30% revenue share seems awfully low. Hulu, for instance, passes about 70% of its ad revenue on to the content owner (i.e. you).

If they won't negotiate on the other terms then definitely get a better deal on the revenue share.

</comment><comment><USER16> No. The terms are unfavourable with too many escape clauses, and you should try to moneytize the blog on your own first (adsense/adverts/etc) to try and establish its market value/worth.

</comment><comment><USER17> Try to negotiate that $1000 threshold down.

Better yet, try and negotiate an advance on ad revenue.

Do you currently have any AdSense or Affiliate ad revenue?

<comment><AUTHOR> I already tried to negotiate that:

"I'm sure with your fan base and the cross-pollination you will automatically receive form other blogs and content within [domain] you will reach our minimum threshold in no time whatsoever. Unfortunately this clause is a requirement as is by our CFO."

<comment><USER18> Get the advance of $1,000 if you're worried that it will take so long. If they're so confident they can get there, then you're fine. Standard book author terms - hooray for precedent that strengthens your position. Again, they think that their $1,000 is enough - but only you can decide that.

I have no comment on the "harshness" of the other T&C's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You have the whole rest of your life to sell out. You can afford to wait.

</comment><comment><USER20> They say you can't link to anything "offensive"? That is a blanket clause that lets them say you have violated their terms whenever they want. It's also a wildly unreasonable restriction on your freedom.</comment>


The Secret of Successful Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/the-secret-of-successful-entrepreneurs/

<comment><USER3> This is such a pile of bullshit.

I'm nearly salivating in anticipation of deconstructing it. But, before I do, there's a worthwhile TED talk I saw recently [1] that makes a similar point (but doesn't fail at it): <http://www.ted.com/talks/ethan_zuckerman.html>

So, yes, I do agree to some extent that there are some liabilities involved in homogeneity of social networks. However, relating that to a criticism of "meritocracy", or relating it to innovativeness, or imagining that the world would somehow be better off if talented people didn't surround themselves with other talented people ... that's just dumb.

> ...the best and brightest (as measured by their SAT scores and GPA)...

Way to open, man. I took the PSAT when I was in the seventh grade, as part of a controlled social experiment, and supposedly scored OK on it (I was only given percentile scores relative to high school seniors). So I suppose my SAT score would've been OK if I'd ever bothered to take it, but my GPA was 3.0 at best. I'd hesitate to consider myself "best" or "brightest", but I'm not dumb by a long shot. This metric manages to simultaneously ignore bright, motivated people who do not follow traditional paths of success, while including people who do follow traditional paths of success who are nowhere near best or brightest.

> ...we naturally construct our social network so that it consists mostly of > people like us. (Sociologists refer to this failing as the self-similarity > principle.)

This is a failing? No, it's how people construct _support_ networks.

One of my hats is as a programmer. I've had a terrible, time-consuming, neverending project lately. If I get to feeling the need to decompress over this -- or to get help wrangling it -- I am not going to go chat up a lady in a bar. I want to find another programmer instead. Lawyers find lawyers, doctors find doctors, mechanics find mechanics, etc.

This guy is failing to see a social network as anything other than an information stream, a way of exposing yourself to as many new ideas and experiences as possible. While that's one aspect of it, it is not the totality of a social network.

And, hell, if my friends are anything to go on, most people maintain at least two completely different social networks anyway: one for each of their active interests.

> _The executives were invited to a cocktail mixer, where they were encouraged > to network with new people. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of > executives at the event said their primary goal was to meet "as many > different as people as possible" and "expand their social network". > Unfortunately, that's not what happened._

First off, he's wrong about that article (which I do not have access to except in abstract, dammit). From the abstract: "There was no evidence of homophily (attraction to similar others) in the average encounter, although it did operate for some guests at some points in the mixer."

Second, he's wrong in his analysis of it. Also from the abstract: "They were much more likely to encounter their pre-mixer friends, even though they overwhelmingly stated before the event that their goal was to meet new people." Well, duh. While I might _say_ that I'm attending an event to meet new people, if I run into someone there that I already know, I'm going to spend some time with them. If I haven't seen them in a while, I'm going to catch up with them.

You know what else I'm going to hope for? _An introduction._ My social network rarely, rarely expands by meeting random people without any common ground and then making friends with them. More likely, it expands in a degrees-of- separation way: one friend introduces me to someone they know, who I don't know, and so on and so forth. I think this is painfully obvious to anyone that's ever attended a party with friends.

> _What they found was that people tended to interact with the people who were > most like them, so that investment bankers chatted with other investment > bankers, and marketers talked with other marketers, and accountants > interacted with other accountants._

It surely couldn't be because they had an easy common ground to launch conversations from.

> _Instead of mixing with new people, the leaders made small talk with those > from similar backgrounds; the smallness of their social world got > reinforced._

What? So these subjects attend a party, which contains other friends and acquaintances of theirs, and they meet people, and it's somehow reasonable to conclude that,

a: meeting new people did not expand their social network;

and b: that they had small social networks anyway, because of a pigeonhole view of one social event they attended?

> _According to Ingram and Morris, the only successful networker at the event > was the bartender._

Bullshit. I'm sure that bartender has really gone on to keep in touch with anyone from that party. Assuming that the author's interpretation of this experiment is correct -- a tenuous assumption at best, considering the abstract -- the experiment would be a failure of selection bias, where the only metric for "success" is talking superficially to lots of different people, in a setting where nobody is motivated to talk to lots of different people.

> _He noticed that most entrepreneurs had a rather homogenous collection of > contacts. They might have lots of friends, but all of their friends came > from the same place and were interested in the same things._

I'm sure this has nothing at all to do with the massive demands of entrepreneurship. Assuming that the average entrepreneur needs funding to be successful, then of course the majority of entrepreneurs are going to know investors and other "money" people, or other resourceful individuals. Are we really trying to equate the social networks of entrepreneurs to, say, travel agents here?

> _...an elaborate metric of innovation ... the number of patents they'd > invented and ... all their trademarks._

 _smirk_

> _If someone has a brilliant idea for a new company, we assume that they are > inherently more creative than the rest of us. This is why we idolize people > like Bill Gates and Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey._

OK, stop. Just, stop. People idolize celebrities because they are powerful, wealthy, famous, or otherwise successful in some metric that appeals to the desires of the average person. I seriously, seriously doubt that any survey would rank "creativity" in the top 10 reasons that such people were idolized, and I certainly don't think that Bill Gates deserves to be described as a pillar of "creativity". Branson, for another of the examples, has been quite open about his strategies, tactics, and the desires that drive him, and plain ol' stubbornness would probably rate a lot higher in a description of his personality than "creative".

And by the way, just what sort of creativity are we talking about here? This guy seems to be trying to draw a parallel between creativity and his definition of success, but there are an awful lot of really creative artists in music, sculpture, photography, and art that are pretty close to broke.

If creativity is the primary driver for this notion of success, why aren't these artists all millionaires? Could it possibly be that there's something else that qualifies as the "secret of successful entrepreneurs"? I think so!

> _Unless we take our social circle into account – that collection of weak > ties and remote acquaintances who feed us unfamiliar facts - we're not going > to really understand the nature of achievement._

This article has not convinced me that examining social networks has led to any insights in the "nature of achievement".

Finally, to swing my Great Hammer of Justice, let's travel back to the quoted bit at the top of the article:

> _...and that tends to huddle together rather than spreading out to enrich > the country as a whole. This is Christopher Lasch's lament in "The Revolt of > the Elites" — that meritocracy co-opts people who might otherwise become its > critics, sapping local communities of their intellectual vitality and > preventing any kind of rival power centers from emerging._

This is completely and totally backwards. When smart, talented, ambitious people huddle together, great things happen; by gathering together, they are able to tackle together all of the obstacles that make great things difficult. [2] This has been borne out over, and over, and over again in history. Redmond, Silicon Valley, Detroit, England, India, Rome, Greece ...

Taking talented people and somehow "encouraging" them to spread out and associate themselves with as many diverse other people as possible _is the very definition of homogeneity_.

I am so relieved that poorly-thought-out, unresearched screeds like this are a dime-a-dozen these days, and that by this time tomorrow, nobody is likely to be discussing this article at all. [3]

[1]: I've just discovered that I'm capable of having TED on in the background on one computer, and concentrating on coding on another computer, while keeping reasonable track of the video. This is really neat to me.

[2]: In fact, is this not the primary motivation for every single co-working space and other common environments shared by like-minded people who want to be more effective?

[3]: With general respect due the author, who appears to have written some otherwise worthwhile stuff.

<comment><USER4> You came with an elaborate points, but you seem to forget the main problem that the author seemed to scratch surface of:

Smart people, just like other people, have ego. And when they get driven by it, they suck.

Now please reread your points.

<comment><USER3> > _And when they get driven by it, they suck._

I don't agree with this. As Randian of me as this will sound, I do think that ego is one of the drivers of many remarkable people. An easy example to trot out would be Steve Jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The real force at work here is the desire to explore and experience new things. Entropic networks arise when we welcome new challenges in our lives and embrace uncomfortable experiences.

Certainly, having a diverse network is a point of leverage for entrepreneurs, but the that network is caused by the same motivations that drive entrepreneurship, rather than being an impetus for success.

<comment><USER6> I think you hit the mark here. An entropic network is not so much the cause of success, as it is the effect of the entrepreneurial mentality that encourages exploration beyond a personal comfort-zone. This is the mind-set so often highlighted in great entrepreneurs; the ability, self-confidence and maybe even playfulness to break through boundaries and adventurously explore the unknown.

<comment><USER5> And maybe even disregard for social norms ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Counting patents is a flawed way to measure innovation. The results of the study seem less trustworthy as a result.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the Ruef paper if anyone is interested. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519766>

The study of social networks is incredibly fascinating, but the discipline is definitely in a nascent state. I think one of the biggest issues is that there is operational definition of a social tie. If you a create a network of people that a person has interacted with over a lifetime, it will likely look very different from the network of people the same person has interacted with over the last 30 days.

That's just one of the big problems to solve in the discipline. Since it's not a perfect science, it's going to be hard to provide "just the facts."

</comment><comment><USER9> Something about this article rubs me the wrong way, despite the fact that I agree with a number of things the author says. I think he's right on about the importance of diverse social-networks, and the value of weak ties. And I think this stuff is pretty well established now, so no surprise there.

But what this has to do with meritocracy and the identification of the "best and brightest" is a little questionable. These factors should correlate - <USER2> some extent - with being successful, regardless of whether or not an individual is one of his so-called "best and brightest" who went to Harvard or whatever.

If he had just said "If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, then make it a point to build a diverse network of connections with people of different backgrounds and interests" then I'd be saying "right on." But the harping about GPAs and SAT scores and Harvard just seemed to muddle the article up and distract from the point.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've started to wonder if the whole "creative class mega-cities" phenomenon is a mistake for a similar reason.

<comment><USER3> It is not. It should be encouraged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, an entire opinion piece, making countless of conclusions, offering countless of speculations, basing it all on some study, the citation of which of course is not given. It would have not been hard, name and date would have sufficed perhaps.

I say b __ __*. We all talk to strangers. A lawyer meets countless of clients who are not from the same background he is, think criminal lawyer, or negligence, or the guy who writes wills, or deals with trusts, not necessarily the commercial lawyer. So too a doctor's patients are as diverse a people as they can be. I think too enterprenours. Their customers could not be more diverse. We all chat to random strangers once in a while, we all meet complete strangers in very diverse settings.

I am not saying that people do not get together with people who have same interests. I do not however think that is all such people do, that their entire universe is "same tired thoughts".

Its nonsense. I hate opinion pieces. More facts please. Please just tell us the cold hard facts with possibly no commenting whatsoever. I have my friends to do the commenting, the best of which is of course my brain, and seeing as I have had my brain for 22 years it must be a tired and old same brain, so perhaps I should try and find a new brain.

<comment><USER12> [http://www.amazon.com/Linked-Everything-Connected-Else- Means...](http://www.amazon.com/Linked-Everything-Connected-Else- Means/dp/0452284392)

He was just joining up with the CS dept at ND when I was doing my msc there and I got to see him speak a few times. This is part of a general trend, we naturally appear to keep small social circles on average with a few "hubs" providing most of the connections to others. This is actually a pattern in distributions throughout the natural world, it's really an interesting topic to study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > It skims the cream from every race and class and population

Interestingly, it turns out poor "cream" whites and Asians are excluded from elite private institutions. Other races get preference for being poor, but only rich white kids get into Harvard.

[http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_divers...](http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html)</comment>


The Top of My Todo List by Paul Graham - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/todo.html

<comment><USER2> This was just on the front page eight days ago. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872613>

It seems like the reason this is allowed to get votes is that the link is to www.paulgraham.com while the previous one went to paulgraham.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I never saw the first link, that's odd. Sounds like there is a slight bug in the news tool.</comment></comment>


The Biggest Question of 'Mr. Robot' Is About Morality, Not Reality- - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/mr-robot-usa-morality-reality/400562/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> "Elliot's worldview may not be delusional, but it probably is too simplistic—good vs. evil isn't necessarily the same as good vs. Evil Corp."</comment>


Intel's Atom chip finding its way into servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/05/06/intels-atom-chip-finding-its-way-servers

<comment><USER2> "The chips aren't well-suited to general-purpose servers, but they can work well for server appliances -- machines that perform a specific task, like Super Micro's storage appliance -- and for home media servers, Brookwood said."

I feel like the headline is misleading, given this quote. (However, it's not the fault of the poster; it's the real headline on the article.)

</comment><comment><USER3> These would be great for really high density systems... 50 machines in 10U, or beyond. For certain cluster applications you could even make the individual systems not hot swappable to save packaging space -- just migrate the workload off of the cluster to service it.

I hope Intel is smart enough to capitalize on this and doesn't revert to their old foolish ways (like the days of CPU multiplier locks) to preserve the industry as it stands presently.</comment>


Facebook Campus Expansion by Gehry Partners - <AUTHOR> http://www.ilikearchitecture.net/2012/08/facebook-campus-expansion-gehry-partners/ <comment><USER2> Good indicator that it's time to short the stock more.

<comment><USER3> The fact that they are planning for the long term? It's interesting how we two seem to get such different signals from the same news.

<comment><USER4> Search for C. Northcote Parkinson's wisdom on the fate of organizations who build their dream headquarters. It's the chapter of the Parkinson's Law book titled "Plans and Plants".

(Hint/spoiler: by the time the building is done, they are irrelevant.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why? Most of the buildings at facebook are empty. The campus as is can hold up to 12,000 people; only 2000 work at their Menlo Park campus now.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry to see they're all being electromagnetically irradiated by those giant power lines.

On the upside, they'll save tons of money by not having to hardwire any of their fluorescent lamps...

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah, hubris.</comment>


Microchip Adds RISC-V Cores to PolarFire FPGAs - <AUTHOR> https://www.electronicsweekly.com/open-source-engineering/risc-v-day-microchip-adds-risc-v-hard-ip-polarfire-fpgas-2019-10/ <comment><USER2> > _From existing PolarFire FPGAs, Risc-V versions are inheriting security > functions including: DPA-resistant bit-stream programming, anti-tamper, a > cryptographical bound supply chain assurance, a physically un-clonable > function, a true random number generator and a side-channel resistant > crypto-coprocessor._

> _In addition according to Microchip the processors will have secure boot > (128kbyte boot flash), physical memory protection and, on all memories: > single-bit error correction and double-bit error detection. THe firm is also > claiming Spectre and Meltdown immunity._

With all this buzzword bingo, you'd think the company formerly known as Actel was actively marketing to a defense industry with selective amnesia[1].

[1] [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33027-8_2](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33027-8_2)

<comment><USER3> Microsemi is the company formerly known as Actel. Microchip is the company that makes (amongst other things) PICs and bought Atmel (AVRs etc)

edit: I see the article is the one in the wrong - it should have said Microsemi

<comment><USER2> The article isn't wrong; you're acquisition history is simply miscalibrated.

PolarFire is the operand signal...everything else is in the noise.

<comment><USER3> Ah yes - I missed an extra acquisition! Microchip acquired Microsemi (who acquired Actel)!

They are gobbling up everything now. FWIW - I quite like the Actel/Microsemi/Microchip FPGAs. Their ProASICs and Igloos have been solid for me.

<comment><USER4> Their software is utter crap, though – even by the standards of the EDA industry. Some of their tools (I'm looking at you, designer) are so old and unmaintained, that they still show the Actel logo.

<comment><USER5> Is there no Free Software alternative for those devices?

<comment><USER4> No. Unlike mainstream CPUs, for which sufficient information is publicly available to develop competitive compilers, FPGAs are closed systems. There is enough documentation to write the _synthesis_ and _map_ steps (which compile VHDL/Verilog/whatever to an architecture dependent netlist) and for the _place_ step (which assigns instances from the netlist to blocks on the FPGA device). For the remaining steps (routing, static timing analysis, and bitstream generation), hardly any required documentation is available.

For a couple of small, outdated FPGAs, some of that information has been reverse-engineered and used for open source software, but I don't know how reliable, e.g., their static timing analysis is. I would never, ever use that for a non-hobby project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting move by Microchip. The previous generation of FPGA had two variants. Igloo2 and SmartFusion2. The latter had an ARM hard macro. When they announced PolarFire, the ARM was gone and no indication of it coming back. That was a surprise to some of us SF2 users. However they very soon started to promote RISC-V as a softcore. The hardcore followup is a natural progression.

<comment><USER7> I was an employee there till 2018. The pivot to RISC V was made sometime late in Dec 2016. However thanks to high attrition due to Microchip acquisiton , this has been delayed quite a bit.

<comment><USER5> Attrition... Layoffs? Or exodus?

<comment><USER7> Exodus. Particularly in Verification and post Silicon

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if products are available yet or if this is just based on the announcement of an upcoming product.

I thought it was interesting since it's RISC-V in hardware from a classic/respected/well-established US-based company, which is not so common yet. Also it's "real" CPU cores even though they share a SoC with FPGA circuitry; this is not RISC-V cores being implemented on the FPGA fabric.

It's really "cores" and not "core", too: the SoC features one RV64IMAC core for monitoring (and probably hard real-time tasks) and a quad-core RV64GC for general computing/applications I guess. It uses DDR4 memory so it's quite beefy for an embedded target.

<comment><USER8> Also interesting when speaking of real CPU core with attached FPGA, see the SmartFusion2. However, it is ARM-based CPU.

<comment><USER2> FPGA-based heterogenous compute has been around since at least early 2000s on Xilinx Virtex-II Pro[1] with PowerPC hard IP blocks.

[1] [https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds0...](https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds083.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a subject I know very little about, would anyone care to enlighten me on some good use cases for this kind of hardware?

<comment><USER10> It's quite common to pair FPGAs with ARM processors. Xilinx Zynq (for example, there are many others) places a Cortex A-9 alongside Artix-7 FPGA fabric. In a sense Microchip are simply doing the same thing except with higher end cores and without paying ARM.

The use for this is simply where you need to couple some hardware bits with some software to control it, and you don't want to have a separate host computer (or your host computer is doing something else!). A simple example might be an experimental music synthesizer: You could generate sound envelopes "in hardware" (in the FPGA) because that requires tight timing and IO wired to the DAC, but control the notes and the song from the processor in software, because writing that in C or Python is way easier. The Zynq product page here has a few example applications: [https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon- devices/soc/zynq-700...](https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon- devices/soc/zynq-7000.html)

One use case I've actually seen is somewhat ironic: They were prototyping a RISC-V core on the FPGA fabric, and using the ARM core in the FPGA to serve memory and I/O cycles to the RISC-V core. (For this to make sense you have to know that prototyped FPGA cores run really slowly, eg. 50 MHz or less, so even a low-end ARM core can easily keep up)

<comment><USER9> thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's tragic that the "B" Bitmanip extension isn't ready yet for crystallization into the custom hardware on these devices. I suppose one could implement the specific ops needed in the FPGA part of the device, but that's clumsy.</comment>


Open Sans, how do we love thee? - <AUTHOR> http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/open-sans-how-do-we-love-thee-let-us-count-the-ways/ <comment><USER2> A short list of body fonts that render consistently well in smaller sizes:

      Open Sans
      Source Sans Pro
      Droid Sans
      Lato
      Pontano Sans
      Proxima Nova
      Museo Sans
      PT Sans
      Segoe UI
      Tondo
      Istok Web
      Interval Sans (Light)

<http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro>

<http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Droid+Sans>

<http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lato>

<http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Pontano+Sans>

<https://typekit.com/fonts/proxima-nova>

<https://typekit.com/fonts/museo-sans>

<http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/PT+Sans>

[https://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=3...](https://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=331)

<http://www.webink.com/face/1133>

<http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Istok+Web>

<http://www.fontspring.com/fonts/mostardesign/interval>

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, did you derive this list from anywhere, or is it just from off the top of your head?

<comment><USER2> It's my own list based on sifting through a metric ton of fonts available for online use, trying them for size and what not. I really like type design and related matters, so I used to do that for every project, the OCD way, and it was an _enormous_ time sink. So I ended up compiling a short list and started updating it every time I'd see a good type in use when surfing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd add PT Sans as also a great, free sans-serif font. In fact, sometimes I can't tell them apart: see the pairing here:

<http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/PT+Sans#pairings>

Open Sans is killing it in usage...1.9 billion font views in the last week, according to Google Fonts API: <http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans#stats> , which is more than 2.5x as popular as the next popular Google Font, Oswald: <http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Oswald#stats>

I'd love to see Open Sans used so frequently that Helvetica becomes fresh, again.

</comment><comment><USER5> Source Sans Pro is another great open source font, and it's by Adobe.

[http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/08/source-sans- pro....](http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/08/source-sans-pro.html)

<comment><USER6> I also really like Source Code Pro, my favourite coding font.

<comment><USER7> I was a big fan of ProggyClean but Source Code Pro converted me. And it works in more places. (If only there was an italic version. Syntax highlighting can look weird.)

<comment><USER8> Last time I looked, the font wasn't fully finished though. Maybe the italic version will come later?

<comment><USER5> It's open source, so if someone's willing to do it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since we are on this topic, I have a public service announcement: even though light Open Sans looks great and is trendy for headings, _using a light font weight for body text is a bad idea_ because it makes it difficult to read. I keep coming across examples on the web, always with bad results.

Thank you.

<comment><USER10> Are you on XP by any chance? It's got horrible rendering for light fonts in my experience.

<comment><USER2> Make sure you have ClearType turned on.

<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306527>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Open Sans like all the other Helvetica replacements (except Arial) are only cool the first few days. After that it's like, nah, gimme back Helvetica (which have been cool since the 70s):

<http://helveticafilm.com>

<comment><USER12> I prefer Helvetica Neue (1983); its spacing and curves are a little more relaxed than traditional Helvetica. Plus, Helvetica is notorious for being rendered poorly on Windows web browsers. Since Windows does not have a Helvetica Neue (unless the user has installed an Adobe design application), you can avoid Helvetica on Windows with a CSS font stack like:

      font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Arial,sans-serif;

<comment><USER13> I don't understand, Helvetica Neue renders awfully at body-text sizes on computer displays. Unless you need the light weights, use Arial. It's Helvetica made to look good on computers under 16px.

      font-family: Arial, sans-serif;

<comment><USER14> 16px is proper body-text size.

<comment><USER13> "Proper". I agree with Oliver Reichenstein's argument[1], but Google does 13px and it's fine. The font-size in most desktop apps is less than 16px. Human's are adaptable. 16px is just _more comfortable_.

[1]: <http://ia.net/blog/100e2r>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Didn't they effectively increased the "download size" of pages and slowed the rendering down because now pages depend on the font which has to be downloaded, at the same time as they made the rendering on Chrome on Windows looking worse? Is that progress?

<comment><USER16> Chrome on Windows is a real problem for webfonts and one that I'm astonished hasn't been addressed yet.

How is Firefox on Windows (especially XP) now? It's a while since I've checked.

<comment><USER17> I'm hopping between a few machines at the moment.

I don't find the fonts on Chrome under Vista[1] particularly bad. Not worse than other OSs. I have lousy eyesight, so most sites have lousy readability, so I often change the fonts.

It's weird that fonts on Windows, OS X, and Linux are all so differently blurry / sharp.

It'd be great if there was some user-understandable standard language so that users could chose the setting they prefer. You do get used to the differences, but it'd be nice to not have to do that each time I changed machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> All this doesn't matter to me while I cannot increase font size by zooming in the page. Why does it happen to more and more web sites? I zoom in because font is too small for me, but font size doesn't increase, only paragraph width increases!

<comment><USER19> Try using this in a user CSS:

      * { -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto !important; }

Why anybody anywhere thought that the behavior for 'none' was appropriate is baffling [1].

[1] <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56543>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am baffled.

OpenSans renders fine in IE and Firefox, but Chrome doesn't do it. Here is what I get on the WP page:

<http://imgur.com/XgmEN9P>

It is the same for every other site that uses opensans.

Windows 7, Chrome 26.0.1410.64 m, Font Size: Medium, Page Zoom, 100%.

Any ideas?

<comment><USER21> > Any ideas?

Chrome uses GDI for font rendering while Firefox and IE use DirectWrite.

<comment><USER22> Is there any relation between the font rendering engine and the font being hinted for Windows? When I saw the title of the article on the page my first thought was the font not being properly hinted for Windows.

<comment><USER21> You're right, it most likely means font is not hinted for windows. That looks horrible when rendered with GDI at smaller sizes because GDI hammers everything into pixel grid and doesn't do vertical anti-aliasing. DirectWrite features anti-aliasing in both directions and doesn't try to fit everything into pixel grid. Because of that non-hinted fonts look much better, although blurrier, with DW than with GDI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Recent-ish Firefox Android builds use Open Sans.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/03/improved-type-on- firefox...](https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/03/improved-type-on-firefox-for- android/)

</comment><comment><USER24> So, it turns out that when you have selectively added Open Sans typefaces as system fonts, this is what all these sites start to look like: <http://i.imgur.com/kgpY6WO.png>

I had added two densities so I could muck around with stuff in Pixelmator and was wondering why everyone had chosen the horrible slender version for body text on various sites, but apparently it just means whatever the system collection provides gets priority (which makes sense).

</comment><comment><USER25> Any recommendations for open source serif fonts?

<comment><USER26> I'm partial to Serif myself, so I know what you mean :-)

In addition to Droid Serif, Liberation serif and Linux Libertine and Gentium recommended here, check out PT Serif also. Very readable on high resolutions and medium body fonts...

All these sets below, are complete (R, SC, B ,IT, B+IT...) fonts AFAIK.

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/pt-serif>

Gandhi Serif, on the other hand makes excellent compliment to PT Serif as a beautiful heading font!

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/gandhi-serif>

I also use Alegreya a lot.....

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/alegreya>

In addition, these sets below, are complete (R, SC, B ,IT, B+IT...) fonts AFAIK.

<http://www.dafont.com/justus.font>

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Latin-Modern-Roman>

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/TeX-Gyre-Schola>

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/TeX-Gyre-Bonum> \-- Bookman clone.

These are not complete, but they are close relatives.

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Theano-Didot>

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/foundry/Alexey-Kryukov>

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Old-Standard-TT>

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Bentham>

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/DubielPlain>

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Theano-Modern>

Enjoy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This would be why my iPhone displays the page without text for 30 seconds until the font loads. Much as I like web fonts, using them for body text is painful.

<comment><USER28> Depends where the delay lies. If the font is loaded in such a way that page rendering blocks in all cases then they need to rearrange their code somewhat, but it could be your browser that is broken: unless there is something blocking rendering (the font being loaded synchronously in a static script tag or something) then the browser should render the content using an alternative from the CSS definition or what-ever its default is, and reflow once the font is loaded. While it is extra processing it isn't like modern phones are short of a CPU cycle or few.

<comment><USER27> Nothing is broken, it's just a design decision: do you show unstyled content or wait until you have everything. See [http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting- the-font-face-fout/#updat...](http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font- face-fout/#update2011) for details but the gist is that browsers used to differ (Firefox chose the approach you prefer) but have converged on blocking until the fonts have downloaded.

Currently the only way to get the behaviour you want would be using something like <https://github.com/typekit/webfontloader> and using CSS to specify a default to be used until the font has transfered:

body { font-family: sans-serif; } .webfonts-loaded body {font-family: "Open Sans"; }

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm a frequent user and massive proponent of Open Sans, which I think allows me to say how much I wish it had a Hairline and Black weight. I end up using Lato for a Futura-esque heavy weight. (eg: <http://techevents.co>)

EDIT: Lato for reference <http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lato>

</comment><comment><USER30> Looking at _both_ of those screenshots, am I the only one who finds font- rendering on Macs very blurry and extremely hard to read?

So blurry in fact, I find it's hard to tell that there are different fonts in those two screenshots. They just both look like text smudged over a while matte when switching back and forth between them.

<comment><USER31> Rather than designing to better fit the pixels you can see like on Windows, I'm pretty sure the Mac OS X hinting was designed to get progressively better as screen densities increased. Like their reliance on hardware acceleration in the window manager, it was a forward-looking technical decision built in to the OS.

Unfortunately, we got stuck in a 96 DPI rut throughout the 2000s and are only just coming out of it with high-DPI "Retina" displays. Now the Mac hinting decision makes more sense, and the ClearType technology looks bizarre, whereas for all the last decade it was the opposite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> There are a bunch of examples of Open Sans in the wild up on Typio: <http://www.typ.io/fonts/open_sans>

</comment><comment><USER33> "It's beautifully legible" I couldn`t disagree more. The body text set with opensans on Windows(especially in chrome) looks awful.

<comment><USER2> Care to show a screen grab?

There must be something off with your setup, because OpenSans _is_ very legible, even on Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> On a second visit, can you guys see webpages with webfonts without delay? My cache does not seem to work.

</comment><comment><USER35> It would be great if Open Sans could be part of default browser fonts along with Helvetica and Arial.

</comment><comment><USER36> > Let us count the ways.

I count at most one.</comment>


Ask HN: What's on your RSS reader? - <AUTHOR> I'm interested to hear what you think is good/important enough to warrant following, admittedly with the aim of expanding my list. I'd also be interested to hear what reader you use.
Here's my list (most of these are easily searchable so I won't link them):
Comics: Cube Drone, Dilbert daily, Garfield daily, Invisible Bread, lolnein, Poorly Drawn Lines, The Oatmeal, xkcd
Misc: xkcd what if?, John A De Goes' blog [1], Still Drinking [2], Krebs on Security
I use a Telegram bot [3] as a 'reader' of sorts (no affiliation).
[1] http://degoes.net/
[2] https://www.stilldrinking.org/
[3] https://telegram.me/TheFeedReaderBot <comment><USER2> Interestingly (on reflection, not surprisingly) since going back to RSS, I've been reading a _lot_ more from sites with expert content, but ugly typography.

\- Math Babe ([https://mathbabe.org](https://mathbabe.org))

            + Superb musings and coverage on the societal
              impact of everything becoming a prediction
              problem (occasional applied technical
              discussion)

\- Tech Dirt ([https://www.techdirt.com/](https://www.techdirt.com/))

            + Lawyers Rule Everything Around Me

\- Light Blue Touchpaper ([https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org](https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org))

            + Thoughts on infosec from Cambridge Computer
              Laboratory (influential on policy, excellent
              coverage of conferences)

\- Muckrock ([https://www.muckrock.com/](https://www.muckrock.com/))

            + News from the FOIA wars

<comment><AUTHOR> Tech Dirt seems to have quite a high volume. Do you use any filtering, or just manually scan over?

<comment><USER2> You're right --- I just skim the headlines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> \- Slate Star Codex ([http://slatestarcodex.com/](http://slatestarcodex.com/))

         + Really good analysis of complicated and interesting
           issues in science, medicine, politics, rationality,
           ethics, and community dynamics.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't actually use RSS for news, because all the regularly updating sites I read fall into four categories:

\- News sites like HN or LWN, where I find the RSS experience quite suboptimal compared to participating directly.

\- Blogs, which I read entirely via Planet aggregators: Planet Debian, Planet GNOME, Kernel Planet, and Planet Mozilla.

\- Comics, serialized stories, and other things where I want to read every page and remember what I haven't read. For these, I use Comic Rocket ([https://www.comic-rocket.com/](https://www.comic-rocket.com/)), which a friend and I wrote years ago. Every one of the comics you mentioned is tracked there, along with XKCD's What If.

(That's in addition to mailing lists, which includes announcement lists, and Twitter, which also covers things like This Week In Rust.)

<comment><USER5> I actually find RSS more valuable for sites that do not update often. You know, that one blog from an incredible guy who posts five times a year, or from a friend of yours who post a project update even now and then.

I also subscribe for sites that update very often, such as Hack a Day, so I can scan the headlines and sort very fast what I want to save for later (GTD style). For this, I use newsblur keyboard shortcuts.

<comment><USER4> I tend to use Comic Rocket for those rarely-updating sites too; anything with a next link works. For instance, I read [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/) that way, and several other things that update even less often (a few times a year).

Every time I try an RSS reader, I find myself drowning in things I don't actually care to read in their entirety. And I prefer to read almost everything on the original site, rather than in a newsreader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One source that I am always delighted to see pop up each week in my Feedly reader is The Codeless Code: [http://thecodelesscode.com/contents](http://thecodelesscode.com/contents) Each article is a parable or koan that aims to convey some kind of programming best practice. I'm very happy to recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's my pastebin: [http://pastebin.com/X6mMEMD1](http://pastebin.com/X6mMEMD1)

I removed the "IRL" category of people I know personally.

Lots of these are defunct. "Comics" is the only category I keep up with on a daily basis -- the rest is much more sporadic, just based on what catches my eye when I'm skimming the unread list. I have around 6000 unread items at the moment.

After Google Reader closed down, I switched to Feedly for a few months, then installed Tiny Tiny RSS on my shared hosting -- never have to worry about the service shutting down or modifying its features without my permission anymore.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, Tiny Tiny RSS is pretty good. It's reliable, it never chokes on a feed and it has a decent Android app.

I've been using it since before Google Reader shut down, and I'm quite happy with it.

<comment><USER9> Fiery Feeds[1] is a decent app for iOS that supports tt-rss.

[1]: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fiery-feeds-client-for- feedl...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fiery-feeds-client-for- feedly/id692742195?mt=8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> RSS feeds rock! Just needs a bit of tweaking to lower the noise, which is still very low, and best of all - untouched by algorithmic sorting, compared to social platforms like Twitter, Facebook etc.

Some interesting feeds we've created using Feedity are listed at [https://feedity.com/featured.aspx](https://feedity.com/featured.aspx)

 _shameless plug:_ Using our tool at [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), you can create custom feeds for any webpage (including Twitter and Facebook).

<comment><USER11> thanks for the shameless plug, I was looking for exactly this the last time I tried making a habit out of reading RSS feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mozilla Hacks [0] is pretty much the only feed that makes sense recommending here. There's a lot of very detailed explanations for technical problems and their solution in there, which I find pretty interesting.

Otherwise, though, less so a specific feed and more a general idea what to put in there: YouTube channels. There's a few channels which I follow, but I don't particularly fancy visiting youtube.com for it, and neither do I particularly fancy having a Google-account.

But YouTube offers RSS feeds for pretty much every channel, which solves both problems. Also has the added advantage of all the features that your RSS reader offers, particularly being able to filter out any video series that you don't care about has been incredibly useful to me.

If you want to migrate your subscriptions to RSS, there's also a button in YouTube to export all of them to an OPML-file, which you can then import into your RSS reader (if it supports import). Assuming Google hasn't changed the design of YouTube since last time visited, this button should be at the bottom of the "Manage Subscriptions"-page.

As for RSS reader recommendation, on desktop I use QuiteRSS [1], mainly because it's the most feature-rich RSS reader that I've found so far.

On Android, SpaRSS [2] is my preferred reader, with my main-criteria being that it supports at least filtering and OPML-import, is preferably FOSS, and plays nicely with my YouTube-usage (I use it together with NewPipe [3]).

[0]: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/](https://hacks.mozilla.org/)

[1]: [https://quiterss.org/](https://quiterss.org/)

[2]: [https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.etuldan.spar...](https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.etuldan.sparss.floss)

[3]: [https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.schabi.newpi...](https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.schabi.newpipe)

<comment><USER13> For youtube you could manually add channel or user ID's to the end of these URL strings to get RSS feeds:

[https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=](https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=)

[https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=](https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://cacm.acm.org/](http://cacm.acm.org/) \- Communications of the ACM

[https://www.hpcwire.com/](https://www.hpcwire.com/) \- HPCwire: Global News and Information on High Performance Computing

[http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/](http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/) \- Lambda the Ultimate

[https://openai.com/blog/](https://openai.com/blog/) \- OpenAI Blog

[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/) \- Shtetl-Optimized. The Blog of Scott Aaronson

[http://feedworld.net/toc/](http://feedworld.net/toc/) \- Theory of Computing Blog Aggregator

[http://deepmind-ai.blogspot.com/](http://deepmind-ai.blogspot.com/) \- DeepMind AI

[https://www.technologyreview.com](https://www.technologyreview.com) \- MIT Technology review

And a bit of fun:

[http://phdcomics.com/comics.php](http://phdcomics.com/comics.php) \- PhD comics

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/](http://www.smbc-comics.com/) \- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/) \- What If?

<comment><USER15> Thanks for this list, the MIT review looks great.

For ACM, I'm a bit confused, for the basic subscription they offer 1 publication (like a magazine) or you have to pick up a topic? They offer dozens of publications.

<comment><USER14> This feed [http://cacm.acm.org/magazine.rss](http://cacm.acm.org/magazine.rss) publishes ~25 articles once a month

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Which RSS reader do you all use? RSS fell by the wayside for me after Google Reader was shutdown. I thought HN+Reddit+Twitter+Medium would replace it but I still find myself missing updates from several wonderful sites that don't update regularly.

<comment><USER17> Inoreader has plenty of advanced features. It's better than what Google Reader was like.

<comment><USER18> +1 to inoreader, I've been using it since the demise of Google Reader. Stable, full-featured, and great mobile apps.

[https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wrote (and maintain) my own rss reader for iOS - [https://github.com/younata/RSSClient/](https://github.com/younata/RSSClient/), here's a trimmed down version what I follow:

News:

\- Electrek - [https://electrek.co](https://electrek.co) (Basically Tesla news, but ostensibly EV news)

\- Hackaday

\- MacRumors

Swift/iOS Dev:

\- Natasha The Robot - [http://natashatherobot.com](http://natashatherobot.com)

\- Swift Weekly Brief - [https://swiftweekly.github.io](https://swiftweekly.github.io)

\- This Week in Swift - [http://swiftnews.curated.co](http://swiftnews.curated.co)

\- NSHipster

Misc:

\- xkcd What If

\- Wait but Why

\- Mr. Money Mustache

There's also other stuff not really worth mentioning - serialized stories (mostly just feeds for a few reddit user's posts), my blog, some comics, etc.

<comment><USER20> Can you share what it looks like? The github screenshots link is broken

<comment><USER21> If you follow the link on the github page to the app store there is screenshots there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm a big fan of Feedly, have been using it since they came out and the constantly keeps improving stuff.

Among the things I subscribe too are about a 100 webcomics.

Decided to share all my RSS links here: [http://feedshare.net/theknarf/](http://feedshare.net/theknarf/)

A lot of different stuff on that list, but mostly programming, web development and comics.

</comment><comment><USER23> [http://thebrowser.com](http://thebrowser.com) (subtitle: "Writing worth reading") is one of my favorites.

It is basically one voracious reader (Robert Cottrell) who trawls the internet to select 5-6 pieces worth reading every day. It's a good combo of news, economics, science, and just random, beautiful writing – I really value non- tech-related writing it introduces into my feed/life. (There is a subscription fee to see more 2-3 of today's articles, but it's like $30 a year).

I also recommend subscribing to a filtered feed of HackerNews if you feel like it's taking up too much of your time but you don't want to give it up entirely :). I follow [http://hnrss.org/newest?points=100](http://hnrss.org/newest?points=100) so I only see articles that get at least 100 points.

</comment><comment><USER24> I just read Hacker News :).

shameless plug: I also created a weekly newsletter for frontend development - for lazy/busy people like me that don't want to sift through the millions of blogs/articles/aggregators. @frontendweekly1

</comment><comment><USER25> I use inoreader + reeder. Reeder integrates with Pocket so I can read offline.

I follow:

\- Newsites: HN, Dzone, Voxxed, ARS Technica, Highscalability...

\- Webcomics (Xkcd, Commitstrip, Dilbert...)

\- Youtube channels: [https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={channel...](https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={channelId})

\- Most of these: [https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering- blogs](https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs)

</comment><comment><USER26> Some tech blogs:

Benedict Evans: [http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/](http://ben- evans.com/benedictevans/)

Hunter Walk: [https://hunterwalk.com/](https://hunterwalk.com/)

Coding Horrow: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/)

Feld Thoughts: [http://www.feld.com/](http://www.feld.com/)

Mattermark: [https://mattermark.com/](https://mattermark.com/)

BEN THOMPSON: [https://stratechery.com/](https://stratechery.com/)

The Angel VC: [http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/](http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I use netvibes. Basically replaced my old "my yahoo" page about five years back. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I cut 80-90% of my feeds in the last years and prefer digests now because they provide more information for less time spent reading.

[http://ios-goodies.tumblr.com/rss](http://ios-goodies.tumblr.com/rss) \- iOS digest

[http://feeds.feedburner.com/SidebarFeed](http://feeds.feedburner.com/SidebarFeed) \- design digest

[http://feeds.newscientist.com/health](http://feeds.newscientist.com/health) \- some science news

[http://feeds.newscientist.com/life](http://feeds.newscientist.com/life) \- more science news

</comment><comment><USER29> I am using BazQux Reader ([https://bazqux.com/](https://bazqux.com/)). The name is awful and it is also paid, but it is very fast, stable and very similar to Google Reader.

Bonus point: it is written in Haskell

<comment><USER30> I also use BazQux and bought their lifetime subscription. Their site is written in Ur/Web[0] though, not Haskell.

0: [http://www.impredicative.com/ur/](http://www.impredicative.com/ur/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> \- anime/subs related stuff

\- webcomics (xkcd, alberto montt)

\- music (boards of canada wiki, music for programming.net)

\- java stuff (adam bien, onjava.com, planet clojure, grails.io, the server side, the cognicast)

\- job boards (wfh.io, functional jobs, stack overflow careers, clojurework.com)

\- coding stuff (atomic spin, adam bard, ycombinator, /r/clojure, the changelog, infoq)

\- mixed bag (ars technica, some reddits, waxy.org, thisiscolosal.com, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER32> I read the New York Times in mine via a phantomjs script that pulls out the text courtesy of DOM selector 'p.story-body-text.'

It's not perfect but I cannot find a closer approximation to the Kindle newsstand experience on a computer screen.

I am an All Digital Access subscriber of the Times and consider my actions justified under the Terms of Service, for whatever that is worth.

I use the Newsbeuter RSS reader.

</comment><comment><USER33> I use Feed Wrangler ([https://feedwrangler.net](https://feedwrangler.net)) as my RSS-service of choice. I use Reeder on my Mac and on iOS ([http://reederapp.com](http://reederapp.com)) to get at those feeds.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm using Newsblur ([http://newsblur.com](http://newsblur.com) YC S12), mostly through its Android application which works great offline in the subway.

</comment><comment><USER35> About 200 different feeds, so knowing what you're looking for would be good.

I use Brief on FireFox with Live Bookmarks. Let's me control frequency of downloads, navigate using keyboard, etc.

<comment><USER36> Just paste it on pastebin!

<comment><USER22> Or rather share your feeds on [http://feedshare.net](http://feedshare.net) !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> newsbeuter is nice and I use it myself [http://newsbeuter.org/screenshots.html](http://newsbeuter.org/screenshots.html)

</comment><comment> mike-- i wrote own reader :) [https://github.com/truerss/truerss](https://github.com/truerss/truerss)

<comment><USER38> Ditto: [http://www.weegeeks.com](http://www.weegeeks.com)

Does me. YMMV. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Here is the pastebin of what I follow

[http://pastebin.com/hc6yby4h](http://pastebin.com/hc6yby4h)

It is.... ummmm.....well rounded?

</comment><comment><USER40> The RSS reader I use is the one I (re)designed called RSSPBRRY. It's available on Github. Link is in my profile, for anyone who wants a peek.

</comment><comment><USER41> I use Slack, which has RSS-support. I have a channel, which is just for RSS feeds and some other occasional alerts. Works out pretty nicely.

</comment><comment><USER42> Simple hacked together feed reader/static site: [http://akurls.com](http://akurls.com)

</comment><comment><USER43> Are Technica, Mac Rumors, Macworld, MacStories,

MIT News, MIT Technology Review,

What If? (by Randall Munroe), Symmetry Magazine, Bret Victor's "Worry Dream"

</comment><comment><USER44> Made my own. [http://asl.am](http://asl.am)

</comment><comment><USER45> I use Feedly with Reeder for Mac as the RSS client.

</comment><comment><USER46> Thunderbird works great to me.

Ubuntu Insights.

</comment><comment><USER47> feedly because it's free but read thru reeder

</comment><comment><USER48> Alternate between feed2imap and rss2email.

</comment><comment><USER49> [http://feedly.com/smcleod/blogs](http://feedly.com/smcleod/blogs)

That's a link to the various sites, blogs, updates that I subscribe to, Phronix and Ars are both a bit noisey but other than them the rest I take good care to keep up with.

I personally think it's fantastic that RSS has made such a come back (some would say it never actually went away), it' such a simple, useful tool that's easy to integrate with just about anything.

\----

Another interesting discussion I enjoy having is finding out how people read / digest / discover feeds:

tldr; I use Feedly to manage my rss subscriptions and keep all my devices in sync, but instead of using the Feedly's own client, I use an app called Reeder as the client / reader itself.

I can see myself dropping back to a single app / service, which would likely be Feedly but for me Reeder is just a lot cleaner and faster, having said that I could be a bit stuck in my comfort zone with it so I'm open to change if it ever causes me an issue (which it hasn't).

\----

I use a combo of two tools:

 _Feedly_ \- [https://feedly.com](https://feedly.com)

RSS feed subscription management.

Features:

\- Keyword alerts

\- Browser plugins to subscribe to (current) url

\- Notation and highlighting support (a bit like Evernote)

\- Search and filtering across large numbers of feeds / content

\- IFTTT, Zapier, Buffer and Hootsuite integration

\- Built in save / share functionality (that I only use when I'm on the website)

\- Backup feeds to Dropbox

\- Very fast, regardless of the fact that I'm in Australia - which often impacts the performance of apps / sites that tend to be hosted on AWS in the US as the latency is so high.

\- Article de-duplication is currently being developed I believe, so I'm looking forward to that!

\- Easy manual import, export and backup (no vendor lock-in is important to me)

\- Public sharing of your Feedly feeds (we're getting very meta here!)

2\. _Reeder_ \- [http://reederapp.com](http://reederapp.com)

A (really) beautiful and fast iOS / macOS client.

\- The client apps aren't cheap but damn they're good quality, I much prefer them over the standard Feedly apps

\- Obviously supports Feedly as a backend but there are many other source services you can use along side each other

\- I save articles using Reeder's clip to Evernote functionality... a lot

\- Sensible default keyboard shortcuts (or at least for me they felt natural YMMV of course)

\- Good customisable 'share with' options

\- Looks pleasant to me

\- Easy manual import an export just like Feedly

\----

\- Now can someone come up with a good bookmarking addon / workflow for me? :)</comment>


How does the Twitter iPhone App implement a custom tab bar? - <AUTHOR> http://idevrecipes.com/2011/01/04/how-does-the-twitter-iphone-app-implement-a-custom-tab-bar/

<comment><USER2> I've been working on something[1] very similar for some of my own apps. It is available under the MIT license. What license are these recipes released under?

I decided not to mask the icons and opted for pre-masked PNGs because I couldn't match the style as well as I could in Photoshop. Yours is looking very good though. Maybe we should merge?

[1] <https://github.com/briancollins/BCTabBarController>

<comment><USER3> Alternatively, one could apply the mask on the GPU by setting CALayer's mask property.

<comment><USER2> Do CALayer masks support gradient borders?

<comment><USER3> Not sure what you mean by "gradient borders"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not being able to modify even the highlight tint colour of the UITabBar is a mini peeve of mine. To me it doesn't make much sense to force blue when a lot of the other UI elements have a tintColor property which works great.

I didn't have the time to do a custom one for my last project so we stayed with the standard blue in the end.

 _Edit:_ nice work though! Nice to see a thorough explanation of your thinking.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wrote something similar for an app that used Titanium. All javascript, of course, with select-state images and a 1x42 pixel background. I'll see if the company I wrote it for will let me release it as a snippet.</comment>


The confusing CAP and ACID wording - <AUTHOR> http://thislongrun.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-confusing-cap-and-acid-wording.html <comment><USER2> Generally interesting article, so I was struck by the ending:

> Also, the confusion does not only come from the overlaps in the wording, but > in the necessity to go into the implementation details to understand the > difference in a real-life concurrent application. In practice, this is one > of the difficulties that had led many people (me included) to look at the > 'NoSQL' world.

Consistency in database systems is a hard topic because maintaining consistency in any concurrent system is hard. Traditional systems provide you with a set of tools (isolation levels, foreign keys) that make a decent programmer capable of building a safe concurrent application.

Throwing away those tools and replacing them with nothing does not make life easier. The tool is easier to understand, but the problem is harder to solve.

This is not to say that NoSQL systems do not have a place - of course they do - but I feel like a lot of people adopting them talk about 'eventual consistency' while what they maintain is actually inconsistency.

Maintaining consistency in NoSQL systems when the application is nontrivial is _really_ hard - and if the developer is not up to understanding the locking model of a traditional DB, I'd be pretty surprised if they were up to working with an eventually consistent system.

<comment><USER3> Maintaining strong consistency in some NoSQL databases e.g Cassandra is merely a config parameter away. Really isn't that hard.

<comment><USER4> Are you talking about the same kind of consistency as the parent post?

<comment><USER3> There's only one type of consistency in the CAP theorem. The OP is probably just inexperienced with NoSQL databases since Cassandra, Riak and HBase all support strongly consistent operations.

<comment><USER5> But there is a second consistency he could be talking about, ie ACID consistency. Thus the article...

<comment><USER3> Let me clarify then. Strong consistency = ACID consistency.

If I write the data and then immediately read it I will get the new data under all circumstances.

<comment><USER6> And ACID DB solves a tiny fraction of consistency issues.

Most of the really difficult problems show up when you have multiple users and still need consistency.

Granted, ACID databases make solving most of these far simpler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very good post. The two meanings of "consistent", and the generally different ways database literature and distributed systems literature approach the world, are a really common source of confusion.

One way out of the confusion is to use different words. For example, using "linearizability", "serializability" and "strict serializability" may cut down confusion. These terms have complex-sounding names, but generally very approachable definitions. Aphyr's blog post on different models is a good place to start: [https://aphyr.com/posts/313-strong-consistency- models](https://aphyr.com/posts/313-strong-consistency-models)

Another set of terms that approaches a different part of this problem is Harvest and Yield, which can help explain real-world availability and consistency ([http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition- tolerance/](http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/)). Unfortunately, the original paper just seems to add to the term confusion ([http://brooker.co.za/blog/2014/10/12/harvest- yield.html](http://brooker.co.za/blog/2014/10/12/harvest-yield.html)).

</comment><comment><USER8> Hallelujah somebody wrote this article. I write a distributed database ([http://github.com/amark/gun](http://github.com/amark/gun)) and have repeatedly gotten into discussions where everybody is confused about ACID. This article actually takes the time and effort to attempt to delineate between some of the ideas. Thank you so much, I'll be quoting this in the future.

</comment><comment><USER9> >Available: "every request received by a non-failing node in the system must result in a response" [C2]

This is also confusing to people. It means successful response, you can't for example respond with an error and claim the system is still available. I've seen some NoSQL databases claim they were still available because the user was getting an error message back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I agree. It's not 'eventually consistent' but it's nearly available-in- CAP.

There are some elements on the CAP definition traps in the first post: [http://thislongrun.blogspot.com/2015/03/comparing- eventually...](http://thislongrun.blogspot.com/2015/03/comparing-eventually- consistent-and-cp_11.html). I also plan to do another post on this subject.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great article, although I am not an expert in both CAP and ACID, it looks very reliable to me.

I was surprised this was not mentioned yet: [http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how- the...](http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the-rules- have-changed)

(Eric Brewer revisits the CAP theorem and explains why it's not always a "black or white" case of "choose only two" triangle...)

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a kind of opposition between 'CAP as a theorem' and 'CAP as a tool to think about distributed systems'. The theorem does not leave much room for something else than black and white. But in the (great) paper you mention, there is a lot about "what is the future for distributed systems", it's more CAP-as-a-tool.

In the post (and in the blog) I stick to the theorem. It's not 'right' or 'wrong', it's a choice. I made this choice because a lot of people are deciding their trade-offs with CAP-as-a-theorem, while actually CAP-as-a- theorem cannot be applied to the problem they're working on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article also makes it even more complicated by calling the C in CAP "atomic consistency". While technically correct as that means the same thing as linearizability, that term is rarely used in comparison. When comparing the overlapping terms in CAP and ACID it just seems excessive.

<comment><AUTHOR> 'Atomic Consistency' is used in the CAP proof. YMMV, but I've seen it more used than 'linearizability' (it's easier to pronounce...). Agreed, there is no confusion when you use linearizability.</comment></comment>


Robots Track Moving Objects with Unprecedented Precision - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/robots-track-moving-objects-unprecedented-precision-0219 <comment><USER2> From the article:

 _System uses RFID tags to home in on targets._

 _Robots using the system can locate tagged objects within 7.5 milliseconds, on average, and with an error of less than a centimeter._

If you get to tag your targets with active tags, tracking them isn't usually that hard. Might be useful for motion capture.

<comment><USER3> you're wrong. RFID is generally a very poor way to track/locate. have you ever played with a tile? they're not accurate to 1cm (yes I know they use ble).

<comment><USER2> The point is that if you get to tag your objects with something, it's far easier than dealing with un-prepped objects. What they have here is a better way of locating RFID tags.

The real application for this is automated checkout, where the RFID tags on all the items get read. If you have good location, you can compare the item's visual image and its tag for discrepancies.</comment></comment></comment>