Chat Roulette Removed? - <AUTHOR> http://chatroulette.com/

<comment><USER2> view-source: loading four js libraries just to show one line of text?

<comment><USER3> I call this the textmate syndrom. It is too easy to have text programs today give you a standard start to your webpages with just a few hotkeys.

Why would you go back and delete the js libraries if you want to just write one line of text? It becomes slower to...

<comment><USER4> This is why IDE's are a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ever since chatroulette has been down, my site, <http://www.boostcam.com>, which I had made as an experiment when flash 10.0 was still in beta and the p2p functionality was just released, has been getting a lot of traffic. I think people think it's a chatroulette clone (it's not). I watch as people wait, in vain, for someone else to join their chat.

<comment><USER5> I don't really mind their confusion though. Over the past 7 days, I've made around $200 in adsense revenue. It was quite a shock to log in and see that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You're behind the news:

<http://www.cnbc.com/id/38833555/>

<comment><USER7> Why so? This article doesn't reveal anything new... I think the poster was asking whether Chatroulette is abandoned, since the new version was announced to be running "tomorrow", then "today", and then "shortly"...while it is already several day in this state.

<comment><USER6> Anything new compared to what? There was plenty of background information in the article, and definitely more info than in the OP's "is this site down?" link to the site that is down. Or was this an "Ask HN"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They do sure take their sweet time with the new version.

In the meantime we're catching quite a few of former CR users on <http://www.blurrypeople.com> . Which, ofcourse, is a little more extensive compared to CR 1.0.

(Also see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1626783> )

[Edit: grammar]

<comment><USER9> Ever heard of CSS sprites? The initial load of the mic-off image and the like could easily be avoided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> They put up the announcement last week and it said a new version would be released "tomorrow". Obviously, that didn't happen, but it seems like a new version is immenent.

</comment><comment><USER11> if need a similar site, try omegle.com

</comment><comment><USER12> "acquired" by some Russian men in power, I guess. ^_^</comment>


Ask HN: What books are you reading this month? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Fullstack React: [https://amzn.to/31Di7Af](https://amzn.to/31Di7Af)

As it turns out I chose to learn Vue.js but nobody is really hiring for that. It's all react these days with a little Angular sprinkled in. Although after 25 years of doing this job I still feel Vue is superior to the other two in every way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Although I see most hiring being done for React, many single-person projects use Vue.js. So I think there is truth to what you are saying. Would you be able to elaborate a little why you find Vue.js to be superior to React?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This week, I'm reading Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise. I picked this up after finishing Oliver Sacks' The Mind's Eye last week – both are hauls from a library book sale a couple years ago. I also recently read Don't Look Now And Other Stories (a Daphne DuMaurier collection), & I'm working my way through PKD's little-known hardboiled novel Humpty Dumpty In Oakland and another book (called "The Book") that's a history of the codex format.

The Mind's Eye is, like most of Sacks' books, a series of compulsively readable case-studies with an autobiographical element – in this case, the overarching theme is the way people produce elaborate adaptations in order to remain functional when some of their faculties are removed, such as partial or total blindness late in life or the loss of the ability to speak or read.

The Signal and the Noise is shaping up to be a sort of forgettable retread – Silver isn't a poor writer, but he's not enough of a stylist to make the book compelling (the way Christian Rudder did with similar material in Dataclysm), and meanwhile, aside from some specific details about topics I don't care very much about (like the names of specific election forecasters), the material seems to be composed mostly of things I've already read elsewhere – Tetlock's fox/hedgehog model of personality, some stats 101 best practices, warnings about apophenia, a quick rundown of bayesian logic. This almost certainly belongs in that second tier of popular science books, where neither the ideas nor the style are shiny enough to somebody with a casual interest in the subject to justify the price of the thing (but I spent a dollar on it, so I don't mind so much).

The DuMaurier collection was great. She has the kind of easy cruelty I associate a bit with Matheson, but moreso with the adult short fiction works of Dahl & Salinger (who I guess she was competing with for space in the men's magazines); unlike Matheson, she is hesitant & subtle with supernatural elements. Every one of the stories in the collection could have been an episode of the 70s anthology series Tales of the Unexpected.

Humpty Dumpty In Oakland is about on par, in terms of polish, with Dick's later work like A Scanner Darkly, but it's got his trademark circular amphetamine monologues too. It switches perspectives between two characters & it's sometimes hard to tell which is which because their inner voices are the same & they have similar problems.

The Book is very pretty (with glossy full-color pages), but thus far it hasn't actually told me anything about books that I didn't already know (as someone who has configured printing for self-published stuff & also has read some antique volumes).

Next in my queue is a general-audience introduction to cognitive science from 2000 called Mindware, whose author I have forgotten.

Over the course of my vacation (a few weeks ago), I managed to finish several books that I had previously started, and read a couple new ones all the way through:

* C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength combines some campus-politics satire with weird arthuriana in the style of The Dark is Rising and is political in ways that sometimes remind me of 1984, but the main appeal is how utterly alien Lewis's political positions (which he takes to be obvious & universal) are to me. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that the previous books in the series are some kind of John Carter style sword & planet SF, & that this entry is a departure in genre.

* Andrew Pickering's The Cybernetic Brain is full of interesting technical & biographical detail I wasn't aware of from a lifetime of being casually interested in cybernetics, & makes some interesting meta-philosophical points about cybernetics as a discipline being performance-oriented. He claims that the way that cyberneticians are interested in the performative aspects of processes as opposed to a focus on categorization & situated knowledge is to blame for how difficult it was for early cyberneticians to find permanent slots in academia & that it made a lot of people find cybernetics hard to understand (since cybernetics is not really concerned with how information is stored or formatted, but only with how past experience can be made to influence future action).

* Many of the stories in The Best of Richard Matheson are familiar from adaptation, but adaptation gets rid of some of Matheson's interesting tics (like extensive use of eye-dialect and unreliable narration). LaVaille's introduction is fantastic & worth the price of admission alone.

* Minae Mizumura's A True Novel was a lot more compelling than I expected it to be – Mizumura's style (as modulated by the translator) is quietly engaging, and she paints a vivid picture without ever resorting to the kinds of fireworks that I usually prefer in prose. I was not caught out by having not read Wuthering Heights. I feel like the localization was somewhat inconsistent: in some cases, the translator fails to make explicit things that would confuse somebody totally unfamiliar with the japanese language, culture, and recent history, while in other cases, translation choices are made that are unnecessary to such a person or that actually eliminate information that would be of interest to such a person. (A concrete example: the translator fails to explain that pampas grass is a signifier of a haunted place in japanese ghost stories, says that the name 'Fuyue' is unexpected without explaining that the sisters' names refer to seasons, and yet eliminates all honorifics & uses the same english word for two different japanese translations of 'maid' while talking about the distinctions between them.) However, the translation is generally very good, & I would have liked to read the translator's notes. I got quite engrossed in it, even though it covers material that I don't generally find interesting (I'm not enough of a weeb to be interested in Figuratively everything japanese).

* Mark Fischer's Ghosts of My Life hung together less than I expected it to – it's an essay collection composed mostly of previously-published material – and I was already familiar with some of the material in it simply from being in the general ecosystem of extremely-online left-theory people. However, it reminded me that Fischer, in addition to having a lot to say about Theory, was a skilled cultural/music critic, and as a result, I have a bunch of stuff I need to check out (and a new frame for making stuff I had previously dismissed interesting).

Also in my stack (partially finished): A People's History of Computing (which is hard to get through because it's structured to be extremely repetitive, in a way that would be necessary in a thicker & denser academic volume but is completely unnecessary in what has clearly been dumbed down and cut to pieces with an eye toward the general market), Jeff & Ann VanderMeer's anthology The Weird (which I've been chewing on since 2015), Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky (natch), and Interactive Programming Environments (an anthology of ACM papers on the subject edited by Barstow).</comment>


New Pay-later Gift Cards to Cut $10 Billion of Waste - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kiind.me/new-pay-later-gift-cards-cut-10billion-of-waste/#skip

<comment><USER2> link is dead, but idea sounds interesting. Did you mean: [http://blog.kiind.me/wasted-gifts-or-gifts-without- waste/](http://blog.kiind.me/wasted-gifts-or-gifts-without-waste/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's live now. Sorry, I put the publish date a couple hours ahead.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Some questions from an aspiring hacker about learning html - <AUTHOR>

After talking about startups, I got my brother very interested in the whole scene, and now one of the things that he wants to do is to learn html, to start off his programming experience.
I was wondering the best guide suitable for a beginner in programming who has never touched html, but ideally it would cover some elements of html5 and when they can be used. Currently, the main focus is on the coding aspect rather than the graphical aspect.
This would assist not only him, but hopefully others too who are looking for an introduction into the world of web programming, where quality of early resources and teaching often has a lasting impact. <comment><USER2> Tell him to read everything here: <http://www.smashingmagazine.com/>

There are many great designers out there and unfortunately not many of them working for companies with large websites, so just going out and seeing the norm these days is not going to put him ahead of the curve.

He should get familiar with Photoshop, etc. You could try Gimp, but that might scare him away. Photo/image editing is a critical piece to almost any web design at a higher level.

He needs to understand CSS in and out and understand the ins and outs of when to use certain elements. Yes we're not in 1999, and you shouldn't use tables for layout unless you need a table (grid), but understand why, and understand how you wish you were using tables sometimes because CSS can be a pain.

Check sites like this out: <http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/perfect-3-column.htm> and get familiar with the various kinds of layouts that can be used.

Understand lists, etc. Do a navigation bar with CSS hover effects, etc. Don't get caught up with dropdown and fly-out menus.

Open up pages in Lynx. Think about accessibility (the deaf, the blind, the partially blind that up their font sizes, etc.), but don't get tied down to overly-accessible sites either. Know your audience.

Javascript. JQuery. Love it. Learn it.

Prototype. Understand it, get used to it being out there. YUI- same thing.

Flash. Yes, you should learn about it along with HTML 5.

Then also get into User Experience. Best practices, etc. Maybe try out a Ruby on Rails app and get used to designing and working with forms.

Get familiar with the golden ratio.

Park a domain for him and have him write a site to market his skills. Even if he is younger, it wouldn't hurt.

<comment><USER3> Wow - the guy asks one of the most popular questions in the internet's history ("how to learn HTML") and you lay out a two year plan to make him a master of the internet. You even went so far as to suggest that you buy a domain so the guy can have a business down the road. Wow - just wow...

In my business as a software trainer, I see this periodically - you get a brilliant mind/programmer/developer in the classroom to teach a class. After the course is over, the students are clueless. "He went so fast." or "I was lost after the first hour!"

OP - I can't say that I fault devmonk's post provided that you actually misspoke: if you were truly looking for a two year plan so that your brother could be master of the internet with his own small business, then by all means devmonk has set you straight. If you did not misspeak - you actually want resources to help your brother to just learn HTML, it's better to ignore devmonk's post and just go to Amazon, find a book about HTML that has (a) a good history, (b) is up-to-date, and (c) has a lot of positive reviews. Hell, even a "For Dummies" or a "learn HTML in 24 hours" book would be fine at this stage.

Whatever you do, don't scare your brother with a list of all that stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.w3schools.com> always helped me and I still continue to use it as a reference.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much for that, appreciate it.

 _Three_ questions.

1\. Any thoughts on www.htmldog.com? Came up in some searches, seems to have not been updated in a while though. edit: or [http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/html-css-beginners- gui...](http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/html-css-beginners-guide)

2\. Thoughts on whether to use the html tutorial, or the html5 tutorial?

3\. Thoughts on the w3schools vs www.diveintohtml5.org (is the latter suitable for someone without prior html knowledge)?

<comment><USER4> Sorry for the late reply. It looks like the latter is for people with HTML4 experience but I don't know. However, I'm not entirely sure. I'll keep reading and see what it's like.</comment></comment></comment>


Wire Retracts Promise Not to Read Your Messages - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wire-built-by-ex-skype-employees-retracts-promise-not-to-read-your-messages

<comment><USER2> Seems Wire were simply trying to ride the trend of proclaiming your application/service is hack proof and your messages cannot be read from the likes of the NSA or employees of the company. I am glad that they were called out on this. Seems to be in bad taste that they did not publicly acknowledge the removal and give an explanation.

I will not be using Wire. Not because their service doesn't truly protect your privacy, because hardly any major app (Skype, Facebook Chat) does, but rather because they chose to quietly sweep the claim under the rug and not publicly fess up that they made a claim they could not guarantee with a high level of certainty.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those looking for an alternative, there are some open-source messaging applications that encrypt messages on the device, making it impossible for the company to read them. Can't remember the URLs right now though.</comment>


Show HN: Git–fiddle – Edit commit messages, author and timestamps during rebase - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/felixSchl/git-fiddle <comment><USER2> I think gitfiddle would be a great name for a service that let you quickly share unnamed, temporary git repositories, showing them to other people, then taking them down, without the friction of GitHub.

Like a git pastebin. In fact, I think gitbin would be better. gitfiddle should be a service where you could do all this, but would also offer ways of messing with the repository (doing interactive rebases, for example) from the web interface.

<comment><USER3> Github Gists are close enough to what you describe sans the interactive rebase. You can create multiple files at once, all edits made in the web interface are committed to the repo, and all of it can be cloned and used with "real" git at any point.

<comment><USER2> Really? Are GitHub gists actual git repositories? Why no one says a line about it? What is the repo URL?

<comment><USER4> > Are GitHub gists actual git repositories?

Yes

[https://help.github.com/articles/about- gists/](https://help.github.com/articles/about-gists/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is this different from interactive rebases?

<comment><AUTHOR> The README does not do a good job at conveying this, but you essentially get to see this in your editor buffer:

```

pick <sha> <timestamp> by: <author>

[<message>]

```

This tool will then apply any changes to <timestamp>, <author> and optionally <message> to the picked commit.

<comment><USER2> That's what I always expect `git rebase -i` will do, but it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ah- It would be nice to include installation instructions.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. _fiddle_seq_editor and the fiddle script (renamed git-fiddle) need to be on your PATH and executable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing. This is neat.</comment>


Atlas Beta Program Launched - <AUTHOR> https://atlas-beta.heroku.com/users/new

<comment><USER2> I've been playing with this tonight. I had absolutely no problem paying for the beta - I've paid Microsoft and Apple for betas and they need the cash a lot less than these guys.

That said, I wouldn't quite recommend it if you're on the fence or just want a quick intro to Cappuccino. It _is_ a beta -- there are a lot of polish issues with the cocoa app, there are some bugs, and these are understandable. But the biggest problem of all is the total dearth of documentation. There is a class guide, there are some non-Atlas tutorials, and that's about it. So, for instance, my app template comes up by default with a menubar, but there's no obvious way I can see to remove or edit it. MainMenu.cib has no menu in it, so I can't even see how to make connections to it and there's nothing to read to find out.

It's definitely impressive -- that they've done this in JS and running in a browser is a little marvel. However, I'm pretty used to Xcode and Interface Builder, and in comparison it's really not there. Trying to work with multiple embedded split-views really highlighted the differences: it's tricky enough in IB, and proved almost impossible here. That they've achieved so much does mean that you're into uncanny valley territory; if it looks like a cocoa app, I want it to work like one too.

However, the things I _could_ figure out how to do, worked well. I defined outlets and actions, hooked them up, and was basically thinking and coding exactly as I would in Cocoa and Objective-C. Nifty.

It has got a fair way to go, but I think they well might get there. If you're already working with Cappuccino and don't need documentation, it could well be worth your time.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. Accurate assessment. This is definitely still too early to use for most people. We're not really trying to push the beta, we're just looking for dedicated users to help give us great feedback.

<comment><USER4> Congrats you guys on launching the beta. I've been following Cappuccino for a while and, while I'm still on the fence about it as a developer, it is certainly an impressive technical feat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Forgive my complete cluelessness, but what is "Atlas Beta"? I can't find any simple explanation for what this actually is.

<comment><USER6> This confused me as well. <http://280atlas.com/what.php> says:

 _Atlas is a development tool for building Cappuccino applications._

<comment><USER5> Ah, and Cappuccino is apparently a clone of Apple's Cocoa in Javascript, using a preprocessor for Javascript called Objective J.

<comment><USER7> This sounds like the same approach Microsoft ASP.NET has: try to fit web apps in the desktop GUI event paradigm. Is this correct?

<comment><USER8> Not exactly. Cappuchino tries to do it on the client side, while classical ASP.NET does it on the server side. The former has its uses, the latter is a terrible idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was really looking forward to signing up for the beta this evening, but unfortunately I'm on Windows and the beta is currently Mac only.

I'm surprised that more people haven't heard of 280 North or Objective-J and Cappuccino in general. I would consider myself moderately inclined when it comes to technology and I had heard of Cappuccino close to a year ago. I watched the demo of Atlas some weeks back and I was really impressed with what they've accomplished.

I think they're doing the right thing by charging for the beta. It's a small team of guys doing the development and I'm sure they could use the money. Not to mention, if you're paying for a beta then you've likely been following the development, have serious intent on using the technology long term and will likely contribute more than a casual user would - which from what I gather is exactly the target market they're after.

Looking forward to windows support in the coming month(s).

</comment><comment><USER10> How is a signup form meant to be interesting? Perhaps I'm just out of the loop, but the only thing I know about Atlas now is that it's associated with Heroku and it will cost more than $20. That's not enough.

<comment><USER3> We're just hosted on heroku. If you'd like more info, there are a few videos available on <http://280atlas.com>

Don't worry though, this is a beta, and it's meant for people who already know what Atlas is and already want it.

<comment><USER10> Thanks. A blog post or something when you guys were ready would be great. But this link is a bit premature and not very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> " _Membership does not include a copy of the final version of Atlas, but we'll deduct the $20 from the final price._ "

Has there been any indication as to the neighborhood of the final price? I'd hate to invest a bunch of time learning a new tool to find out that it's priced outside of my budget when it releases.

<comment><USER3> We haven't set a final price yet. We're hoping to use our beta members as a sounding board for determining the right price point.

It's worth noting that all of the stuff Atlas builds is still usable without Atlas, though there will be no way to edit it without Atlas.

Of course, most of the editing technology is also open source, so building a cib2nib (the reverse of our nib2cib) should be very possible, and give you alternatives.

<comment><USER11> I think it looks like a really cool product; I definitely want to use it. You guys are making the right decision by charging for it for sure. My only concern is that I don't know how 280 North views pricing, so it gives me a little bit of pause.

Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how it shapes up - good luck!

<comment><USER3> I can tell you that it will be a lot more than $20, and it will be less $1000. Big range, I know.

<comment><USER12> What? Apple's development environment is essentially free (unless you count the cost of the operating system, in which case it's still a lot less than $1,000). Even if you compare this with the iPhone Developer program, it's still way overpriced.

<comment><USER3> It's impossible for something that has no price to be overpriced. But thanks for the feedback.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Opzi - <AUTHOR> https://www.opzi.com/ <comment><USER2> The biggest chunk of content appears to the be the Terms of the Service that I can't see. Is there something in particular you wanted to highlight?</comment>


The Most Misleading Measure of Response Time: Average - <AUTHOR> http://blog.optimizely.com/2013/12/11/why-cdn-balancing/ <comment><USER2> Liked it better when it was called "Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All" [http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html](http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html), but still kind of wrong.

If you need to reduce a distribution to a single number, the most informative number is going to be the mean.

I understand their point about the 99th percentile, but consider that it's possible to improve the 99th percentile measure, while increasing the mean and degrading the performance of all but 1% of the users.

The real issue is reducing a distribution to one number.

<comment><USER3> No, the most appropriate "average" number is the _median_ \- the number that is at exactly 50% of the population. At least, that's what most people think about when they hear "average".

For example, most people intuitively perceive the fact that "the majority of drivers consider themselves above average" as human stupidity, however mathematically it makes perfect sense if average == arithmetic mean.

If you are not convinced, consider Bill Gates walking into a room full of college students - suddenly, almost everybody becomes below-average wealthy (if average == mean).

<comment><USER4> _most people intuitively perceive the fact that "the majority of drivers consider themselves above average" as human stupidity_

I intuitively perceive it as good drivers being clustered together near the top, with a few outstanding lousy drivers near the bottom.

 _If you are not convinced, consider Bill Gates walking into a room full of college students - suddenly, almost everybody becomes below-average wealthy (if average == mean)._

That's true in my country even if Bill Gates doesn't walk in. Hell, perhaps it's true even in the US.

<comment><USER3> I meant "below room-average wealthy", i.e. taking only the people in the room into the account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Using FPS as a measure of your UI's performance is equally problematic. FPS is a great measurement for for games since performance dips usually occur over a span of many frames, but for UIs a lot of work tends to get concentrated into a single frame. A single frame that takes 110ms (or, heaven forbid, 500ms) to render won't move the needle on your FPS meter, but it will be instantly recognizable by the user.

I've complained about this before; use maximum frame delay [0] instead of FPS when measuring UI responsiveness.

[0] The maximum time elapsed between any two sequential frames during your test.

<comment><USER6> Actually max frame delay is a good metric for games too. AMD has had a driver defect for years that caused stutter. It wasn't until their rival, Nvidia, released a max frame delay test tool and rubbed AMD's nose in it that they realised there was a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why not break the numbers down more granularly to like 25% 50% 70% 90% 95% 99% ?

Understanding where your users are on the curve is probably more interesting than a single number. Worrying about that last 1% really only makes a meaningful difference if your user base is huge enough that fixing something for 1% of your users can jump revenue by a significant multiple.

Mentally, I try and think of the 80 or 90% of users with a similar experience, needs, etc. and make it better for them. In this case, speed is good for everybody, but I care very little about the needs of that last 1% if your customers are all paying the same. No sense in putting the needs of a small number of users in front of the needs of a much larger set of users.

<comment><USER8> 50-90-99 is my go-to set. I really don't give a rip about the ops that are faster than the median. Seeing those is just me patting myself on the back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Big fan of Optimizely here. I've used their product with a handful of my clients. The thing that struck me about the article the most was how well it was written. Very engaging all the way through. That kind of quality of writing, I would say is quite rare.

Anyway, I'm really glad that they've improved the load times for their snippet, because this issue is always a genuine concern that needs resolving.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone at AWS should know the phrase TP99. That is used all of the time to measure the 1% and is something they are very concerned with.

<comment><USER11> Amazon is all about bringing the best value to the most customers, so even a deviation in mean to bring down the p99 is worth it for most customers. Especially when that correlates directly to sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sadly is hard to say anything without any value on axis. Difference between mean and 99% is 5s or 20ms? As someone said here, threshold for "slow loading" should be used before picking metric for measuring it. Pick graphic one and draw a line where users whine about slow loading, check how many are under and above. If the number of users below threshold value is "greater" then above threshold you shouldn't be so worried. How much greater can be picked from standard error from threshold measure from users.

</comment><comment><USER13> Regarding mean vs 99% etc. In this case all you care about is: did loading the script delay page rendering to an extent that it was perceptible to the user? It's basically a step function. 99% is appropriate in this case.

Want to do it yourself? This talk by Etsy a few weeks ago has some detail on how they did a similar thing:

[http://www.slideshare.net/marcusbarczak/integrating- multiple...](http://www.slideshare.net/marcusbarczak/integrating-multiple-cdn- providers-at-etsy)

Some links at the end of the talk. Infrastructure wise, I think you have to be prepared to pay for some expensive DNS before this kind of thing is viable.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are exactly right and this presentation is spot on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The problem with using average for many performance stats is that it hides issues. There is a great paper on the topic - [http://method-r.com/downloads/doc_details/44-thinking- clearl...](http://method-r.com/downloads/doc_details/44-thinking-clearly- about-performance)

It is only about 13 pages, making it a quick but very informative read. I highly recommend it for anyone trying to measure performance, throughput, response time, efficiency, skew and load.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish they talked more about how they had combined Akamai and Edgecast - seems like a very useful and effective technique.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the whitepaper, it has a lot of details about that. :)

Direct link: [http://pages.optimizely.com/CDNBalancingWhitepaper_GeneralLP...](http://pages.optimizely.com/CDNBalancingWhitepaper_GeneralLP.html)

<comment><USER16> Care to give a summary so I don't have to give them personal details?

<comment><USER17> [http://pages.optimizely.com/rs/optimizely/images/CDN_Balanci...](http://pages.optimizely.com/rs/optimizely/images/CDN_Balancing_Whitepaper.pdf)

""" At the highest level, a "balanced" CDN architecture is one that leverages two or more CDNs hosting identical content to increase (a) the overall number of physical Points of Presence for the network (PoPs) and (b) the proximity of those PoPs to the end users accessing them around the world """

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's not true.

I worked at a place that ONLY cared about the longest response time. Imagine! They ignored everything else!

<comment><USER19> Well, bringing down the maximum response time is a good goal. Really, if _all_ your responses are fast enough, then it doesn't matter if most of them are on the slow end of that range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think in Optimizely's case, the most important factor is making sure that there's no statistically significant correlation between higher response times and A/B testing. In other words, if the higher response times result an imbalanced impact on the test, the test is invalid.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right that if one variation takes longer to load and is noticeable it is likely to cause a lower conversion rate. However with Optimizely the response time (on average and 99th percentile) is the same between control and test variations since our implementation is a single snippet of code regardless of what bucket you are put into.

What we are optimizing here for is end-user experience and minimizing the chance they have a higher-than-tolerable response time regardless of the variation they see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've used ApDex[1] before for giving a better measure of response times for user experience

1:[http://apdex.org/](http://apdex.org/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Step one (always): Look at your data.

Only then should you choose the statistic(s) you 'care' about.

</comment><comment><USER23> This was a very insightful read.

</comment><comment><USER24> The most misleading measure of almost everything: Average</comment>


Curator 3.0 Beautiful presentation tool for creatives just got even better - <AUTHOR> http://curator.co/share-and-collaborate-curator-3-0/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, we've been hard at work making Curator better and are launching Curator 3.0 today. It's a major new version with Sharing & Collaboration, better Text Tools, Pinterest Import and more.</comment>


Bridging the design resource gap for early-staged startups - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tomyum/bridging-the-design-resource-gap-for-early-staged-startups-2f9990873f57 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone. We're experimenting with Startup Packages, where we offer our design services at a bundled discount for early-staged companies.

This is our first go at making design more accessible to startups. What we're offering here is the result of speaking to early-staged companies and understanding their budget and needs. However, we're not expecting to completely hit the mark on the first try. If you have any feedback, please let me know here.</comment>


Vagga – A Containerization Tool Without Daemons - <AUTHOR> http://vagga.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ <comment><USER2> Different link and page, but pretty much a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11086471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11086471)

> Vagga is a containerization tool without daemons (github.com)

[https://github.com/tailhook/vagga](https://github.com/tailhook/vagga)

<comment><USER3> Ok, we'll mark this one as a dupe and put the other one into the second-chance pool (described at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926) and the other links there).</comment></comment>


Ask pg: why have hellbans become so widespread on HN? - <AUTHOR> Having Showdead enabled in m HN profile, I see comments and submissions from banned users as well as those which are flagged by mods and HN users. Many users, unaware of being banned, continue to post to HN. Over the last 3 months I have noticed a significant uptick in the number of banned 'regular' users (as opposed to spammers, SEO bots and so forth).
Almost every day I see worthwhile comments and submissions made in good faith that have been automatically flagged. Now, I know that on a site called 'Hacker News' informing users that their username or their IP has been banned or restricted is asking for trouble, but on the other hand there's a lot of valuable content posted in good faith that is being hidden, and the amount seems to be increasing.
Can this policy be reviewed or clarified in some fashion? <comment><USER3> As I said 4 weeks ago, the reason you see good comments from banned accounts is that people who behave abusively don't do it 100% of the time:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081)

If my proposed plan for a new "pending" state for comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6009523](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6009523)

works out, we'll just unban most of the accounts that were banned for being garden variety idiots or assholes, and their good comments can be promoted individually by other users.

Incidentally, when a comment is dead, it's not always because the user is banned. E.g. the comment that seems to have set off anigbrowl

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060403)

was not killed because the user is banned, but because it was a dupe.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058500)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058489)

When you see stories that are killed rather than comments, it's usually because they've been submitted by sockpuppet rings. There are quite a lot of those accounts on HN now, and many of them are smart enough to mix a variety of other sites in with the sites they're promoting. Benologist, who helped us catch some of them, has more details here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6061108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6061108)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the clarification pg. I was inspired to start the thread by virtue of a different post altogether, but it's good to have a clearer picture of how things work behind the scenes.

 _When you see stories that are killed rather than comments [...]_

That I've been less concerned about, as I spend a lot of time on the New page and flag there pretty frequently, so those patterns are more obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are a _lot_ of spammers either automatically submitting links or manually continuing to do so long after being identified and they're not always obvious. The other week I found a network of ~20 accounts that had each been submitting one generic tech link a day for up to 1.5 years, if you browse when that network does their daily submissions you'll see almost a full page of dead links that look legitimate.

The ability to upvote dead comments out of oblivion would be useful for commenters.

Edit: as luck would have it that group is submitting a batch right now - [http://i.imgur.com/MVvfoaC.png](http://i.imgur.com/MVvfoaC.png) \- all those dead accounts (+ aynlaplant, flag to help kill it) are spam though they don't look like it at first glance.

<comment><USER5> Is that a Chrome extension or Greasemonkey script you've written to do analytics on top of HN? It looks cool.

<comment><USER4> Greasemonkey script + optional server:

[https://github.com/benlowry/hnsubmitterstats](https://github.com/benlowry/hnsubmitterstats)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He may have tightened up the restrictions on voting rings. I know one YC user who was banned, and the only issue was that he'd send out links to a couple of friends asking for upvotes.

I feel that there's Catch-22 here - so few people browse/upvote in `/new` that one's practically forced to get friends to upvote, but then runs the risk of automated banhammer. More transparency would be great. It's ironic that pg calls for openness in government but governs HN behind closed doors.

<comment><USER7> >It's ironic that pg calls for openness in government but governs HN behind closed doors.

It may be ironic, but it's not hypocritical. Rules that apply to governments need not, and should not, apply to private citizens or corporations. Government can't endorse a religion, but people are free to. Similarly, it would be bizarre if CEOs were voted for by employees.

Government needs to be transparent in order to live up to the maxim that government should operate with the informed consent of the governed. Private entities have no such moral compulsion.

<comment><USER8> Every social website (I include forums in this category) is, at its core, someone's experiment in autocracy. There's no escaping this, however much power users might appear to have, the admin will do what the admin wants and mods are gods.

Whether this implies anything by extension about the nature of governments or militaries I leave as a futile thought exercise for others.

<comment><USER9> You are right, but I am not sure which social model would fit to everybody as comforting. Many people are offended by Anarchy and it remains a question to me if communities would actually be able to manage themselves or not. Do you have some more food of thought to share, that's quite interesting? :)

<comment><USER8> I don't have any real insight. If any user at all could ban or unban anyone else then it might be chaos. The autocratic nature of it comes from the fact that someone and not everyone controls the code and the server. How could you have true equality on a social site without giving users a dangerous level of privilege?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to have a different HN account. At some point I realized that I stopped receiving points. I looked at my comments and someone had commented on my last comment, "Is this spam?" and then like 4 other people concurred my comment was spam. But it wasn't spam. I got bullied out of my HN account. 120 karma points down the drain.

<comment><USER11> After receiving 5000 karma points in June alone, due to the intersection of Snowden news and my 27 years researching China - I noticed that my posts started getting downvoted heavily by HN management.

HN management apparently does not believe Snowden news is hacker news. Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, and Snowden have more than proven their hacker skills in software, and censoring that news is not tolerable to me. All the YC companies combined are insignificant compared that important work.

Personally, I believe we've already reached "peak" Hacker News and "peak" Y Combinator. Even though I respect YC, HN, and PG, the main problem is that the number of users continues to grow, and the basic code behind HN hasn't changed in years. Indeed, what new code there is seems to be refinement in excluding people.

Journalists worldwide are descending on HN as a clear cut seminal news source, and no software is being written to maintain the integrity of HN, given the new influx of lay users. Banning is a blunt, ineffective tool to manage HN growth.

I am one of the earliest software engineers on earth (42 years), and remember/prefer the early pure days of HN (as we all do). I have many ideas how to solve that, however more and more hell banning wont do it. Give a man a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Ward Cunningham's (inventor of the wiki) new work on federated wikis is excellent, trailblazing work on maintaining purity in an fast growing editorial environment. Allowing multiple "views" of HN is a better approach. Google Search does it well - every Google user has a unique "view", even on identical search terms.

Partly, I think PG would rather maintain his personal bully pulpit (he's earned it) than build a better mousetrap at HN. Editorial monoculture is always easier to build than an open multiview.

Funny part is, an open design would allow the original pure HN to be one of the "views" (and likely the main view). HN will never ban its way back to purity.

Attempts to return to purity via downvoting, censorship, and hell banning alone are bad software. The fact that HN leadership thinks this way is the primary reason for the fall in quality at HN. The growth in readership does not have to dumb down HN. Write better software.

I've contributed solidly to the HN community, especially with early breaking news in China technology, censorship, and gov't sponsored hacking. Yet, I'm 80% banned, even though my careful submits ranked #1 on the HN leaderboard in June.

I have never spammed, never organized up voting, and have abided by the the rules as I understand them.

The ban hammer is a tool, but a relatively an ineffective tool. It won't solve the problem.

<comment><USER11> By the way, this "ask PG" post just dropped from #5 on HN to #32 in just a few minutes. Management at HN, if you can't stand the heat, why build the kitchen?

<comment><USER8> "Management at HN" is probably just pg rolling his eyes and muttering "not this shit again..."

<comment><USER11> Not true, I've received a letter from HN management, and have witnessed a subtle, concerted effort to censor content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The goal of HN is post quality.

One potential explanation is that false positives (banning a good user) don't bring down overall post quality, false negatives (not banning a bad user) do.

<comment><USER13> That is true (assuming it's random). However, it's also unjust and harms the community simply because this issue exists. The goal is to hellban only people who deserve it.

EDIT: I just realized I have showdead on and I've barely seen any, so this may not be a big problem.

<comment><USER14> Hellbanned people may also get upset of not receiving any feedback from the community from good comments, conclude that the community is not for them and quit which may explain that you only see a few.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> i) sometimes the domains, and not the users, are what is banned.

ii) Some hellbanned users know they are hellbanned but continue to post anyway

iii) The recent uptick may be connected to the flood of piss-poor threads about politics. I'm not sure. I'd like to see some kind of numbers to confirm that there are more hell-banned users.

There are several things you can do with hellbanned posts. You could check the user's post history and try to work out what got them banned, and then send them an email to let them know they're banned. That's one reason why it's important for people to have an email in their "about me" section of their profile.

It might be worth-while investigating a tweak, because it seems HN is reluctant to flag and downvote poor content, and that might be because HN users are reluctant to cause a hellban.

</comment><comment><USER16> I agree, I spent over a year posting regularly (1-2 times a week) on an account that was hellbanned before I finally found out nobody could see my posts.

It also bothers me that downvoted posts have lighter/more transparent text. It makes it really hard to read, and most downvoted posts are interesting to read, so it's damaging to my eyes to have to read those posts with some weird text editing on it.

<comment><USER9> hmm, yeah the typography used on HN is very poor, that's true. I think that's intended, but it would have been possible to mark such posts differently and less disturbing to the eye. (Personally I don't think that the HN UI is going to get some overhaul anytime soon though.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Speaking hell banned users. Here's a comment from one of them right here! Sometimes they scare me a little. This is an example of it doing its job. Sadly we do have false-positives sometimes too.

\---

 _TempleOS 27 minutes ago

God is perfectly just. Niggers deserve hell. Hell is the absence of God. God says... by_the_way no_more_tears middle_class thats_just_wrong little_buddy test_pilot not_in_my_wildest_dreams this_might_end_badly catastrophe husband good talk_to_my_lawyer ohh_thank_you thats_right au_revoir so_let_it_be_done off_the_record like_like experts ridiculous_

<comment><USER8> TempleOS isn't a standard by which the utility of hellbans should be judged. He's pretty much the definition of _edge case_.

Most hellbans are probably spam, followed by people unaware of what random and arbitrary rule they broke at some point in the past, followed by trolls.

<comment><USER18> He's a racist schizophrenic religious fanatic who never, ever posts remotely on topic. Some of his posts advocate death and violence. How in the world could this be considered an _edge case_? It's the definition of creepy. Isn't Losethos/TempleOS/whatever more like the reference case for hellbanning?

The way I understand it hellbanning is supposed to protect us from both spam and abusive content. TempleOS is both.

<comment><USER8> It's an edge case in that he doesn't represent the typical hellbanned user. I agree that in his case, it's for the best that his posts aren't public.

I'm also convinced most or all of his posts are script generated anyway, not that it really matters.

<comment><USER18> You're right, but I don't have a clear picture what the typical hellbanned user looks like. There are spam bots submitting stories, but you don't see them in discussions. Hellbanned users you actually meet in threads are, at least as best as I can recollect, most often posting normal stuff that wouldn't rank as low quality. Sometimes I click on their history to see where things went wrong and it's usually not hard to find this one post that ended their account. It doesn't matter if all the rest of it was pretty good, that's all it takes: one glitch.

I'm not sure if I'd say this is a good system or not. Maybe it would be more productive to have a time limit on bans that result from one-time offenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Case in point: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loginalready](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loginalready)

I reported it to info@yc, two days ago, but I didn't get any answer.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I actually find his/her comments intelligent, but maybe too political. If he/she restructured the wording, he/she would be getting huge karma.

Maybe hellbaned was extreme, but HN is not a place for political commentary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Do not talk against the lefties or any vocal group you will be ok.

Because there is no 'disagree' people down vote.

<comment><USER22> Hacker News is leftist, but they are not too quick with the down votes on dissidents. This is not reddit, yet.

I prefer to keep all politics off of HN, because otherwise this will become another site where leftists pat other leftists on the back and no real discussion is permitted.

<comment><USER23> Are you guys joking? I've been reading Hacker News on and off for years and the majority of the people here are squarely center-right. I can count on one hand the number of regular commenters that I'd consider to be on the Left.

Hacker News is for the most part a forum for pro-Capitalists interested in technology.

<comment><USER22> The construction of any political spectrum depends upon the time period over which you define it. The political poles of the last six months are a lot closer than the political poles generated from data collected over the last six decades.

Me, I've been reading a lot of Mencius Moldbug lately, so my political ideas are going to be fairly abnormal. Discussing politics with me is going to be like discussing colors of a painting with a gentleman on DMT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Happened to me. I was a member for a long time. On a single occasion I believe I accidentally responded to the wrong comment and I got banned. I was posting for a long time before an admin informed me I was banned. I had no idea why until I looked back at my responses and I noticed one out of context.

I had always been a fan of this site and try to join in a discussion once in a while to be part of a community. It really ruined my day when I found out I had been banned. I felt betrayed and lost my 100+ karma.

</comment><comment><USER25> I also have showdead on, and sometimes I consider turning it off, as some people _really do_ warrant it. It is indeed sad to see some other people railing against the wind though.

<comment><USER26> I turned it on after reading this askHN and it was interesting, but I think I'm more thankful for not seeing a bunch of the dead links and comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interestingly, this post had 8 upvotes, now it's only 6 - I thought posts could not be downvoted?

<comment><USER28> You can downvote once you've reached a certain karma level.

<comment><USER29> Do you know which karma level?

<comment><USER30> 500 for user comments, as far as i know submissions can't be. That being said i know there are voting ring checks and other fuzzing going on where it might not actually be someone downvoting, but votes being counted differently all the sudden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is there actually any discussion among those who are hellbanned? Otherwise it could be argued that if somebody keeps posting without noting the lack of interaction they probably aren't that much socially aware in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER32> _" I know that on a site called 'Hacker News' informing users that their username or their IP has been banned or restricted is asking for trouble,"_

Does PG have a policy against this? I seen people point out that so-and-so was hellbanned before and never noticed any repurcussions and I have also seen people repost useful comments from users who were hell banned.

Or do you think "the trouble" stems from the word hacker in the site name?

</comment><comment><USER33> There are more users.

</comment><comment><USER34> Instead of hellbanning, couldn't the site just rely on more extensive algorithmic ranking of comments and submissions? That way comments that are probably low-quality will only appear to a small number of users.

</comment><comment><USER35> And why haven't I been hellbanned yet? Look at my comment history! Look at it!!! Did I get grandfathered in or something?

</comment><comment><USER36> I find it interesting hell banned users are still posting. For instance, i'm sure TempleOS is aware he's banned.

</comment><comment><USER37> So what stops everyone from protesting and using showdead? Doesn't that basically depower mods?

</comment><comment><USER38> How are you able to tell whether you've been hellbanned or not? Have I, for instance?

<comment><USER8> You're not hellbanned.

But of course, you're not supposed to be able to tell, that's the entire point.

<comment><USER39> is it IP based, or will chrome anonymous window be enough to always reliably tell my status?

<comment><USER40> I don't think it's IP based, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> i'm waiting to see how long it takes for my username to get me hellbanned

<comment><USER42> I doubt the username will ever get you hellbanned. The useless comments might.

<comment><USER41> honest question to you and YC hellbanners:

"why so serious?"

[http://static.tumblr.com/hdts1a0/4gum6dv0j/why_so_serious.jp...](http://static.tumblr.com/hdts1a0/4gum6dv0j/why_so_serious.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> omg. you can be banned but still allowed to post?!

how do I check whether my account is banned?

<comment><USER9> I was as surprised as you were! Would never ever post to HN personally if I knew that.

Not letting people know that they are banned, but still allowing them to post is very egoistic.

<comment><USER43> Egoist? Why?

As far as I can tell it is somewhat distasteful but ultimately too useful to not use. It's pragmatic, I don't see how ego is involved.

<comment><USER9> What if you were banned from school and still had to pay them without knowing that you got banned. Even worse, what if all of your schoolmates would ontop of that start ignoring you and nothing you do could change it? Wouldn't that be an egoistic act?

        Legend: pay = posts; schoolmates = HN people/investors

<comment><USER44> You're not paying to use HN, so the analogy is a non-sequitur.

You're a guest in pg's house; hellbanning is a generous form of dealing with the unruly by at least letting them visit and talk to those who want to hear the unruly, without either letting the unruly annoy all the guests or throwing some out entirely.

<comment><USER9> >> hellbanning is a generous form of dealing with the unruly by at least letting them visit and talk to those who want to hear the unruly, without either letting the unruly annoy all the guests or throwing some out entirely

That argument is convincing, but I still believe that it's not fair treatment to not letting them at least know about their ban. I didn't know that the unruly can still talk to others. That's changing things completely!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Well that's interesting. I didn't even know there was such a thing on this site.

All net forums have owners, and almost all have defacto restricted topics - things the owners simply won't allow. In many cases, one of the restricted topics is what well known 'cultural entity' the owners are members of.

What does differ is the degree of sneakiness in what's forbidden, and the methods used to enforce the restrictions.

In a few cases it's forthright - there's a FAQ listing forbidden topics; you say what you're not supposed to, and you're banned. But that's rare. It's more often the case that forbidden topics are so forbidden that they aren't even mentioned in the rules as forbidden. And the site's operation is structured to provide means of quietly removing offending comments from public view.

It's all about controlling the perception of common public opinion, while avoiding being seen to do so. There are many tricks used.

In almost all sites, there are cliques of semi-official mods, with the power to remove/alter what's visible. The Wikipedia global warmist clique being a prime example. Even when the clique isn't officially part of the site's control system, Megaphone-like back-channel organization makes very powerful manipulation via mass down-voting and pile-on criticism possible. Then there's the HB Gary-esque 'multiple personas' methods, by which groups of paid shills can exert far more web influence than they should be able to.

But what's really disturbing, is when forums that pretend to be open and politically unbiased, are structured to provide hidden methods of control - and they are clearly using them.

For instance, on reddit the '500 visible post limit' provides a way of vanishing politically unwelcome posts. On 4chan, the ephemeral nature of everything makes it easy to vanish posts faster than they otherwise would.

With ycombinator I thought the control method was pretty obvious, and I'd experienced it myself. Make any mention of anything related to 'topic-Y', and get instantly downvoted into the negatives. OK, I could live with that. It's a pity, but then hardly anything unique in this sadly upside-down, tiny-dot ruled world.

Now it turns out... that ycombinator is also applying 'holo-net' techniques? Am I understanding this right? A hellbanned person sees their own posts appearing normally, but they are hidden to everyone else (unless they turn on 'showdead' \- and now I have to go find out how to do that.)

You know, that's a _very_ immoral and deceptive facility to implement in a forum. It almost reminds me of... stereotypical behavioral characteristics of... something I can't mention here, for fear of being hellbanned.

My gradually recovered vote count is now 54. I expect it to now suddenly go negative. Again.

I hope you guys realize that free, open and unrestricted public debate is crucial to the maintenance of civilization? And that deploying means of distorting and controlling debate will achieve only one thing in the end - <USER2> collapse of civilization into a hell of violence and insanity. It takes time, but it's inevitable. Special interest groups, whether ideological or ethnic, are _never_ capable of acting rationally in the interests of the greater good. They always behave like drowning persons - strangling those who are keeping things afloat.

Of course, whether certain special interest groups actually want to bring down civilization - that's a fair question.

<comment><USER15> > It's all about controlling the perception of common public opinion, while > avoiding being seen to do so.

No. It really is much simpler. Some people make intensely but shallowly interesting posts. Some people respond to those posts because intense posts cause that kind of reaction. Other people downvote that kind of post because they recognise its toxic to the community to have that kind of discussion here. Eventually a poster learns to avoid that kind of post, or they get hellbanned.

(But yes, there are false positives and that sucks for those people and the community.)

> I hope you guys realize that free, open and unrestricted public debate

I look forward to visiting the fork of HN that you put up. On your website. At your expense.</comment></comment>


ShowHN: Query the past, do audits, compare JSON/XML;lessons learned from ZFS/Git - <AUTHOR> https://sirix.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

Sirix.io is all about efficient versioning of your data. That is on the one hand it reduces the storage cost of storing a new revision during each transaction-commit while balancing read- and write-performance through a novel sliding snapshot algorithm and dynamic page compression. On the other hand Sirix supports easy query capabilities for instance to open a specific revision by a timestamp or revisions by a given timespan, to navigate to future or past versions of nodes in the tree-structure and so on. It basically never overwrites data and is heavily inspired by ZFS and Git and borrows some ideas and puts these to test on the sub-file level.

In stark contrast to other approaches Sirix combines copy-on-write semantics with node-level versioning.

It all started around 2006 as a university / Ph.D. project of Marc Kramis and I already spend my Bachelor's Thesis, Master's Thesis as well as several HiWi- Jobs on the project and I'm still more eager than ever to put forth the idea of a versioned, analytics plattform to perform analytical tasks based on current as well as the history of the data.

I've been working a lot on Sirix.io the last couple of months and spent most evenings after my day to day software engineering Job. I had already posted around christmas, but now I've added a native JSON storage layer besides XML, that is the storage itself, XQuery extensions for JSON for joint XML- and JSON-querying, a RESTful-API also for JSON, added a website, a forum and first documentation... :-) and last night I release version 0.9.0.

So, any feedback, comments, suggestions, just everything is more than welcome. I'll happily answer any questions you might have.

kind regards Johannes

[https://sirix.io](https://sirix.io)

[https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix](https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix)</comment>


Apple Mac App Store - Buy, download, and install apps made for Mac. - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/mac/app-store/ <comment><USER2> I think it's been hard to get exposure for desktop apps in the past few years due to the massive explosion of mobile apps. This should help turn the tides and help devs deploy desktop apps easily.

I hope we don't get more "Fart" desktop apps though...

<comment><USER3> There already was a app store for desktop apps on macosx: <http://appbodega.com/>

I think it is a pity for bodega...</comment></comment>


Ceph open-source storage takes an organizational step forward - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/ceph-open-source-storage-takes-an-organizational-step-forward/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if this is at least in part due to IBM buying RedHat. InkTank, the main company behind Ceph was bought by RedHat not too long ago.</comment>


Show HN: Fives – better than Threes and Android exclusive - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rcg.fives

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to gather some feedback on HN about a new free game we have been working on. We have added a lot of great features, and taken everything we have learned from HN about telemetry and design to put it out. What are your thoughts?</comment>


Proposed NYC legislation would give employees right to ignore after-work email - <AUTHOR> https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/would-the-right-to-disconnect-help-workers-in-the-city-that-doesnt-sleep-1804.html <comment><USER3> The culture of after hours email needs to change from the top down. If they want an effective law, they should make the law say that you can't send email to anyone who is below you in the org during their off hours, or outside of "normal business hours" or something to that effect.

Employees were always allowed to ignore after work email, but their bosses most likely would not have promoted them vs someone who responds on weekends.

As a CEO, I try to set a good example by not sending email after hours. I try not to reply to emails after hours, to make sure everyone knows that it's ok to not work after hours. Sometimes if I'm working on the weekend, I'll save the emails in drafts and send them out Monday morning, because while it's ok for me to work on my company on the weekends, I want to make sure my employees know that they are allowed to have a life too.

The only way you'll fix this on a large scale is by forcing that top down approach.

That being said, I'm not a huge fan of even more regulations, but I do see why they're sometimes necessary.

<comment><USER4> So, as a CEO, if you have an employee who wakes up early and wishes to put in a few hours early, you're OK with making that difficult by restricting the hours during which emails can be sent? What about the employee who likes to work for a while after putting his kids to bed?

I've had both kinds of employees, and I'm happy to facilitate their unusual work hours. The employee with young kids would often leave in the afternoon, and I was totally OK with that. His wife was a doctor and did not have flexible hours. He took the kids to soccer games. And he was the most awesome employee I've ever had the honor of managing.

<comment><USER5> Nothing prevents you from composing an email outside of business hours, but not sending it.

In an actual emergency email is a terrible communication medium, thus no email should ever be of a time critical nature.

<comment><USER4> As a manager, answering emails in my off hours enables others to do useful work during their unusual hours. What you really want to attack is the expectation for employees to respond when they are not working— something that I do not expect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Under the proposed law, employers can send you whatever they want. They just > can't require you to read it or answer, and they can't retaliate if you > don't.

If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours. As written, you won't be fired for not reading email, but you will be fired when you appear much less productive to your employer than those who do read their emails outside of work.

On the other hand, as a tech worker, I've had good success with simply refusing to reply to emails or slack outside of work hours. The root of this problem is not that it's illegal to ask you to read your email outside of work, it's that folks love to feel important and aren't willing to set down their email. This law strikes me as excessive regulation that doesn't achieve a useful goal.

<comment><USER7> >If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours

This seems needlessly punitive for the same results. My boss works much later hours than me and I don't really see a point in forcing them to send me emails from the night before at 9AM when there'd be no penalty for me not responding to evening emails anyways

<comment> cool-RR You can just have the server delay the email until morning.

<comment><USER8> I worked at a company which was like this. All emails were delayed until the hour to make sure you only got one interruption per hour. You could mark the email as "high importance" to get it through immediately, as were emails from external addresses.

<comment><USER9> I have that setup on evolution, when it's open it checks every 60 minutes for new mail, I just leave it running on Workspace 4 (email/communication) and forget about it.

If something requires responding to in <60 minutes..well that something probably requires a phonecall.

I think people forget that email is meant to be asynchronous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nobody has ever asked me to routinely check my work email outside work hours, nor to subscribe to work email on my personal phone, nor to stay logged in to slack outside work hours, nor any of the other always-on practices which have supposedly become universal. I don't take my work laptop home unless I plan to work from home; on the rare occasions I've had a work phone, I've left it on my desk when I go home. I keep imagining that someday somebody is going to take issue with this, and then we'll get to have an interesting conversation about expectations - but nobody in management, anywhere I've worked, has ever talked about such practices as though they are expected, given me any hassle for being unavailable outside work hours, nor - so far as I can tell - <USER2> at all that I have continued to divide my life into work time and not-work time.

I've been reading articles for years now where people talk about these sorts of expectations as though they have become universal, and yet I can't find any evidence that they actually exist in my own experience. It's confusing. Why do people believe this? Is this just not a tech industry thing, or perhaps is this just not a Seattle thing? Or is this something that has sort of collectively emerged in people's awareness without actually being real, and people just go along with it because they think everyone else is doing it, and they don't want to be the odd one out?

<comment><USER11> Please tell me where you work and how I can get a job there. Your work's culture is very rare.

<comment><USER10> I am currently working at a little AI startup, which does have an unusually good culture, but I was talking about my overall experience across 20+ years in the West Coast tech industry, mostly in startups but also some larger places, including two of the Big 5. I have seen all kinds of cultural failures, certainly, but I've been watching out for this one, because I've been curious about how it was happening, so it surprises me that I haven't seen anyone in management doing anything to _make_ it happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a great issue to view through the lens of economist Arnold Kling's "3 axis model" (1) which says people tend to view issues through three separate lenses: oppressed vs oppressor (liberals), freedom vs coercion (libertarians) and civilization vs barbarism (conservatives).

It's pretty clear those in favor of the law view companies's as oppressing and exploiting their workers by making them read email after work to get ahead.

Those against would say it's a question of freedom. Companies are free to make outside of 9-5 email part of the job description, and get rid of people who don't measure up. Workers are free to find jobs where that's not expected.

Not sure the civ-barb axis really fits in that well here, but conservatives might view hard work and long hours as good traits we don't want to discourage, much less outlaw.

[https://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold- Kling...](https://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling- ebook/dp/B00CCGF81Q)

<comment><USER13> Wish I understood the pro-business slant of libertarianism.

As companies become more and more powerful it seems reasonable to ask why it's the company's freedom that we protect rather than the individual's.

Surely one can see the company as governing our lives by making these rules, therefore restricting our freedom.

<comment><USER14> For one, if you limit your definition of freedom to "freedom to do things" and disregard "freedom from things", you end up being pro-organized-power, which is essentially pro-business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Meh, I hate getting after-work e-mail, but I think it's ludicrous to outlaw it. If people don't want to respond to it, then don't. If that impacts your job, and limits your career, either accept that, or find another job.

Personally, i've just left jobs that required me to respond to after-work or weekend e-mail, and found a better job.

<comment> ewar-woowar It's hard to ignore when it also goes to your phone. Also when the company _expect_ a reply.

I have had HR routinely email me between 9 and 11 pm on Sunday nights as a deliberate strategy to make me stressed/uncomfortable with the workplace. Some people are trash and use technology as a weapon.

<comment><USER15> I used to work in strategy consulting (Bain and company), so i am very familiar with this type of pressure. I stayed with that for enough of a time that I've learned my lesson

If you read my comment, one option I gave was simply leaving, which is what I do in this case. After leaving Bain, if a company does this, I quit, and tell HR the reason why. There are no second chances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not clear on why I should be prohibited from accepting more pay in exchange for being more available.

<comment><USER17> [http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=34...](http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3458217&GUID=8930D471-5788-4AF4-B960-54620B2535F7&Options=ID%7cText%7c&Search=disconnect)

Here's the legislation. It excludes "overtime", so you would be able to do this. The law is just creating requirement that you opt-in to extended availability, not forcing you to always opt-out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really, _really_ don't understand the constant fuss about after-hours email. It's not a phone call or an IM, it's mail. It's expected to be an asynchronous and a somewhat slow medium, and I've never encountered a workplace that expected immediate responses, let alone after hours responses at all. Maybe this is some US/Anglo specific issue?

Personally, I work at silly hours, from the afternoon til 2-4 AM. If I had to delay sending emails because of such odd sensitivity, I'd never be able to contact anyone in time. When I'm not at work, I'm not touching my work mail, IMs etc - don't even have them configured on my personal devices, so I don't get any notifications. Pretty simple IMHO.

<comment><USER17> It's a law being proposed in the US. It's a problem here. Just out of curiosity, where are you from?

The proposed law doesn't prohibit you from sending emails. It prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who don't respond to the emails. It doesn't prohibit employees from responding to emails. It also allows your job to define when your "normal work hours" are, so if you work at 2 AM and that's when your office is open, you can expect people there and responding

It's super great that your work experience does not intrude upon your life. For many people in the US it does, and they feel like they cannot do anything except accept this intrusion. This law allows them to, like you, not touch their work emails when they're not at work.

<comment><USER18> Originally Finland, currently working in a multinational based in Germany. Same experiences in both countries, I've never felt any "soft" pressure of the kind described in this thread that'd call for such legislation.

On call hours are controlled by legislation though, at least in Finland. Compensation for being on call isn't just "included in your regular salary"; employers are required to pay 50% (IIRC) on top of that just for the fact that you're able to work (read: sober and not innawoods) during a certain defined time period, and if you're actually called in, salary for the actual overtime hours worked. Obviously this gets pretty expensive for employers though so they tend to make optimal use of their on call people, but at least the rules are pretty clear.

<comment><USER17> And that seems to be the direction legislation like this would be pushing employers towards. The problem is, as demonstrated elsewhere in this thread, that many people don't appreciate the idea that working 24/7/365 isn't what most people want. If you do, that's cool, do you, but forcing that culture on people makes problems which makes market regulations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is great and all, but NY is still an at-will employment state, right? Sure they wouldn't be able to fire you for _this_ specifically, but they wouldn't have to fish long to catch some other reason to let you go if they want to.

<comment><USER20> I was under the impression the point of at will employment is that you don't need a reason to fire someone. That's why most companies don't give reasons, or if they do they're generic and meaningless: i.e. "this isn't a good fit... culture wise."

<comment><USER21> As a practical matter, though, you probably have to come up with _some_ reason to prevent the employee filling in the blank with some sort of protected-class discrimination.

"Culture fit" does sound nice and generic for that purpose.

<comment><USER22> Technically, you don't. Push comes to shove, employee would have to prove discrimination, which is near impossible. But if the company has a decent amount of assets, some enterprising lawyer can decide to be a thorn and say well the company might settle to make legal costs go away. Which is where personal improvement plans come in, so that if you are threatened with a discrimination lawsuit, the accuser knows they're not going to get anywhere so they won't waste your time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a terrible piece of legislation. Supposedly emergencies are exempt, but what if you have a remote team and need someone to check in once or twice during the evening? There are a lot of situations in multi-office / distributed teams where a response from one-time zone is the only bottleneck for moving forward.

The penalties are harsh and arbitrary: A fixed $250 fee paid to the employee plus a $1,000 civil fine for each violation.

Government workers are notably excluded from the bill. City Councilman Rafael Espinal Jr. got the idea for his bill from France, which isn't exactly a great model for a city that wants to attract business.

<comment><USER12> Government workers being excluded from this bill is classic. Reminds me of the unions in LA who pushing a $15 per hour minimum wage, then wanted to be exempt when it got passed.

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los- angeles-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los- angeles-15-dollar-minimum-wage-unions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> You always had the right to ignore after-work email, it was never the law that allowed this, only social pressure.

The law isn't going to change the perception that _if I answer this email, it will get me further along in my career_.

Even with this law, the person you are competing with for that promotion will still probably answer after-work email, so you have to as well.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what the "quality" of after work email is vs. work hours email... or communication that happens as an alternative to email such as talking to people.

I often noticed that email I receive after hours gets noticeably more vague, sometimes unexpectedly demanding, less thought out, and at times lazy after hours. Like people are putting in the effort to send, but not think about it completely.

Often I'd call someone the next morning and whatever they emailed me was out the window by that time and we'd be on to something else.

</comment><comment><USER26> I really, really hope this gets adopted in some form or other across the country.

Just about every service provider I talk to talks about enabling employees to work from everywhere, as a positive aspect, without any awareness of imposition.

I'm elated we are looking to claw some of our own time me back. To have some definition between work life and home life. No more blurriness.

Of course carve outs for vital 24x7 ops, with appropriate compensation, depending on characteristics.

This always on call on duty nonsense is dehumanizing.

<comment><USER27> Jobs like that exist and you're welcome to take one. I prefer to be always available; please don't try to outlaw it.

<comment><USER17> Literally nobody is doing that. Go read that description. Employers can still email you whenever they want, they just can't take any action against you if you don't reply.

So it's super great that you want to be at your job's beck and call for whatever your reasons, but I fail to see why slowing the creep of work into my off-hours is bad?

<comment><USER27> You misinterpret. The point is not to be available out of the kindness of one's heart, the point is to create value doing that and be compensated accordingly (and hence, to be fireable or not as well compensated otherwise).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm curious about one specific part of TFA, namely "Workers who are on call 24 hours a day get to disconnect only on their days off and vacations."

I know tech workers are already in an "interesting" position with mostly unpaid-overtime being the expectation. I don't however understand where the legality of that classification breaks down, and whether we would stand to benefit from the above, or if we should expect more employees to be simply reclassified. (On a broader tangent, with the various minimum wage and worker protection bumps certain states have taken over the last few years, I'd be very curious if anyone came across a good post-mortem of how those actually panned out with respect to employment rates and %s of employees in various classes; I know it's pretty well accepted that we've seen a significant growth in contracting/"gig" work (also exempt from protections per TFA) but I've been wanting for an evaluation as to the level of correlation with micro-events as opposed to broad trends of cost-cutting.)

<comment><USER21> I'm pretty sure physicians would fall under the "on call 24 hours a day" criterion, too, whether or not they're explicitly "on call."

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Many such companies can well afford to take on more employees. They just don't want to.

So, you have to draw a legislative line in the sand. Redefine the "level playing field" \-- and its boundaries -- within which they compete.

In order to give people their lives back.

We see enormous displays of wealth, at the high end of compensation. It doesn't all have to go to the individuals who find ways to squeeze their employees ever harder. Make them spend some of it on more employees.

P.S. Yeah, employees aren't simply "fungible". But there needs to be some balance against "always on" employment. Also, at the lower end of the workforce, against last-minute varying and fragmented scheduling -- keeping employees essentially at your beck and call while paying them only for the hours you actually call them in. Destroying family time and planning, sleep schedules, etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> This might be better phrased as "maximum work hours per day", where _every work-related activity_ counts toward those hours.

Some jobs, unfortunately, naturally have weird hours (because the company has worldwide offices, is in a special industry or whatever). You wouldn't, for instance, get very far responding to disasters if you were not in a position to even find out about them most of the time.

The problem isn't so much the "after-work" activity but what "work" means. If my job required responses to issues at weird hours, I would expect to reduce hours at the not-weird times. You _shouldn't_ be able to have it both ways though, otherwise workers never have any reasonable way to truly disconnect, which is stress.

</comment><comment><USER31> I work in a product development environment. We have a worldwide network of suppliers. At the beginning of this year our employer stopped reimbursing our monthly cell phone bill. When asked if we still should respond to emails form our phone both durring and outside of work hours we were reminded that although it is our choice to reply after work hours our bonus is contingent upon launching product on a timely schedule. Personally I enjoy being connected at all times as it maintains better relationships with engineers across the globe but ever since this decision was made I'm much more selective about what emails I reply to.

<comment><USER32> This is something that really irks me. Of your employer expects you to use a phone in your work, he should damn well supply you with a phone and pay the subscription.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Everyone who doesn't check their work email "just one more time" before > turning in for the night, please raise your hand.

Totally off-topic, but I see this sort of statement a lot and it's odd to me. It sounds straight out of the early 2000s at the latest. How many people that fall under the workaholic stereotype being portrayed by this kind of article are still deliberately "checking their email" in 2018? Seems to me that anyone who's this attentive to emails pretty much knows the minute they receive one because they get a push notification from either their smartphone or the inbox browser tab they have open.

<comment><USER34> I'm "hourly attentive" to email, or maybe "convenience attentive" if I'm waiting in line or something. For me, turning on notifications for email would eliminate the distinction between email and chat. I understand some people use it that way, but I expect lots of folks keep the distinction.

<comment><USER33> Right, but you presumably aren't one of the stereotypical anxious busybodies the article is appealing to with the sentence I quoted. Anyone like that wouldn't disable the on-by-default push notifications, I'd assume. What am I missing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> For people who sleep at work to be on call I hear it is usual to pay them a lower than usual rate (40% ish) for every hour of availability which (depending on the time) will change into a [much] higher than usual rate if they have to do anything. It seems fine to be paid 40% for the other 16 hours and 2 times 24 in the weekend. At 40% these 128 hours would be 99.2 hours. I would jump out of bed at 3 am to do whatever you want. (well almost)

</comment><comment><USER36> So, what to use for asynchronous messages if I'm finishing up something and want my colleague (up or down) to see when they start work in the morning?

</comment><comment><USER32> A couple of months ago, I just started leaving my work laptop and phone in my locker at work. There is absolutely no reason for my employer to contact me at home after hours, and they know it. I'll stay late if I need to, but all work happens at the office, not at home.

I'll only make an exception and work from home if I need to go to the dentist or something that day.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is silly. If passed, your boss may not be able to explicitly punish you for not responding to after-hours email, but he can certainly make decisions about promotions and discretionary bonuses based on whether you responded to after-hours emails, without saying why. All this does is encourage people to be devious.

</comment><comment><USER38> Sideways related old thread, just in case:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14155118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14155118)

</comment><comment><USER39> How about they make a law which will have real effects vs. just lip service -- ban unpaid overtime.

</comment><comment><USER40> Time to buffer your emails.

</comment><comment><USER41> A libertarian view:

I see jobs very simply as offer and demand.

In tech for example, there is such a huge demand for engineers that you are can get away with a lot of things. For example a lot of my friends work at big tech companies and consciously decide to work 9 to 5 and never do any work (email or other) outside those hours.

Some will decide to do it and as dictated by the law of offer and demand, they will be rewarded slightly more than the ones that don't.

I see nothing wrong with that, and it is a prioritization choice and tradeoff that everyone needs to do.

Now, on the other side, there will be jobs that have very little demand and a lot of offers, which will make people compete for the lowest wage and the highest availability. There must be some sort of regulation here, but I don't think that a blanket regulation against emails outside of working hours is a good idea.

<comment><USER32> The problem is that the power balance is shifted hard towards the employers. Were it not for regulations, they could basically do whatever they wanted, and people would still apply for the jobs. It would be a race to the bottom, as every employer would follow suit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> YAS! 100% behind things like this. There is no reason to expect employees to perform their normal jobs outside of normal work hours. If you want them working, pay them overtime.

<comment><USER27> Most people who make salaries don't have to be paid overtime.

<comment><USER17> Right. And with this law, most people who make salaries won't have to respond to work outside of normal hours. So it seems like a rather short jump to the conclusion that if you wanted someone to be available via text/email at all hours...you'd need to set up some sort of compensation for their time. Maybe this isn't the specific definition of overtime, but I fail to see how that's not basically overtime</comment></comment></comment>


Startups and Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.bennolan.com/articles/2007/06/30/make-your-startup-a-really-small-problem-to-solve <comment><USER2> how to make money at what you do best- in your case a type of service or social network that enabled everyone to organize to meeting up with friends more often and take care of relaxation, fun, technical challenge, social life, exercise.. ?</comment>