Starting a website is like having a baby - <AUTHOR> http://sachin.posterous.com/starting-a-website-is-like-having-a-baby

<comment><USER2> Actually, no. Starting a website is nothing like having a baby.

I think this may be the dumbest thing I've read all week.

<comment><USER3> Not everyone dumps their "baby" onto the street, ignore it for months and "build" another one. Some people try to start a business. Blood, sweat and tears and all that.

You take this too literally. He is just trying to connect to his inner "mangina".</comment></comment>


Iceland Jail Top Bankers for 46 Years, Europe 'Outraged' - <AUTHOR> http://yournewswire.com/iceland-jail-bankers-46-years/ <comment><USER2> Well, I would be outraged too if someone told me our Justice System is made entirely of people without balls.</comment>


Do geeks travel? - <AUTHOR> http://triptizer.com

<comment><USER2> The title does not match the link, the website seems to cater to more than just geeks. Also it does not say much about itself, just wants me to sign up!

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're curious, just throw in some disposable email (like yopmail.com). Having an account is part of the solution (where you don't just search for travel items), but we don't profile anything whatsoever.</comment></comment>


The origins of opera and the future of programming - <AUTHOR> https://the-composition.com/the-origins-of-opera-and-the-future-of-programming-bcdaf8fbe960 <comment><USER2> > it's easier to build your own than to gain an understanding of React.

And, in today's corporate how many story points did you complete this sprint "what have you done for me lately" panopticon culture, building your own looks like productivity, gaining an understanding looks like slacking - a fireable offense. Supposed tech labor shortage or not, few of us have the luxury of looking unproductive regardless of what we're actually accomplishing.

<comment><USER3> Oh, come on... Is React really that hard to understand? It's one of the simplest libraries I know. I was a self-taught web dev with only about a year (though, quite an extensive year) of JS/jQuery experience when I switched to React. I had never worked with a JS framework before and I knew I was going to need one for my next project, and for some reason I chose the new (at that time - early 2014) React, rather than the established Angular. And after going through the official tutorial everything went so smooth I was amazed by the power of React.

<comment><USER2> > Is React really that hard to understand?

Beats me, I've never tried to learn it - it was the author's example of a framework that's harder (or appears to be harder) to learn than to just reimplement from first principles. Replace "React" with something that does fit that description if you like. Unless you think there is no such thing?

<comment><USER3> Well, I guess there sure must be something hard to learn, but is rolling your own easier? I really doubt that. Or why then we don't see a thousand of frameworks in other languages? Are there no hard to learn frameworks written in them? I believe people set out to write a new framework because those that exist do not meet some certain criteria of theirs.

And just to imagine somebody lacking ability to comprehend something while having an ability to implement their own... Sounds weird.

<comment><USER4> I've rewritten fairly large systems and re-integrated them faster than I could ever have understood the original code.

I don't think React is in that category though, I think the concepts are understandable, the documentation is good, and StackOverflow is helpful.

I implemented a small React app while learning it which is in production and running just fine.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that's definitely true of established, in-house, undocumented, partly- working code bases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I mean a real connection between the history of opera and programming is the conflict between opera as a courtly art (Eric Raymond's "cathedral") and its life as a public spectacle ("the bazaar"). There is an excellent essay by Richard Taruskin title "the history of opera from Monteverdi to Monteverdi" in his Oxford History of Western Music. Even if you aren't a musicologist a read of the intro might reveal some analogies...

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the article is mistaken about the meaning of the word 'descant'. It's primary meaning is 'an independent treble melody usually sung or played above a basic melody', which would make sense for a renowned singer to reference!

</comment><comment><USER7> Side note: the audio-course mentioned in the article ([https://www.audible.com/pd/How-to-Listen-to-and- Understand-G...](https://www.audible.com/pd/How-to-Listen-to-and-Understand- Great-Music-3rd-Edition-Audiobook/B00DDVQIM2)) is probably the best Teaching Company courses I've ever heard (and I heard a bunch) and is highly recommended to anyone. I wasn't a big aficionado of classical music and opera before, and I am still not an opera regular now, but it expanded my education about what happened in that world and where things come from immensely. And Robert Greenberg's presentation is just excellent.

</comment><comment><USER8> I read all these nice articles, but the fact is most companies couldn't care less specially if their business area isn't selling software.

All these years after the agile manifesto, and the ideas are still the exception, not the rule.

<comment><USER9> >> _All these years after the agile manifesto, and the ideas are still the exception, not the rule._

Are you saying agile is the exception?

<comment><USER8> Yes, in many companies it degenerates into some kind of cherry picked items from talks that looks agile on the surface, but it is as waterfall as ever.

<comment><USER9> Maybe management just feels that waterfall is more tractable and easier to control. I feel like a good scrum-master has to subside their ego a bit to let the programmers write and bid tasks without intervening.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is the typical recent grad salary as software engineer? - <AUTHOR>

What is the typical recent grad salary as software engineer near the San Francisco bay area? <comment><USER2> I went to Harvard, and 100k seemed like a pretty typical salary for my recent grad friends, although commonly accompanied by stock and/or signing bonuses. I knew one guy making about 200k per year at an established company once you prorated out the stock awards over the vesting period.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was asked by HR and was told that its around 70k. How should I respond to question like this in the future?

<comment><USER3> What platform would you be writing on? Unless you're doing HTML cutups or working almost exclusively in WordPress, 70k is a joke.

<comment><AUTHOR> The company's software stack includes php and python. But on average, what number should I give? And start-ups vs larger companies?

<comment><USER3> In SF you should start at no lower than 90k. I would start at 110k and let them work you down to something more reasonable with concessions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 100k</comment>


Linux Handheld Computer, Pyra, Available for Preorder - <AUTHOR> https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/ <comment><USER2> Is this just a rebranding of the Pandora computer? It looks like it has been updated (they probably didn't originally have SIM card capabilities in the Pandora, which was gaming-focused I believe), but I haven't really kept track of the project, and it's not obvious from the linked page.

I have absolutely no need for this computer, but really want one. What would _you_ use it for?

<comment><USER3> At the moment I find myself carrying around a netbook (EeePC 901) and a smartphone (Xperia Mini Pro, slidey keyboard). I'm going to replace both of them with one of these - it's _well_ over twice as powerful as them put together. You might think it's a wee big to use as your main smartphone, but I'm psyched by the ability to run desktop software _comfortably_ on something that fits in a jacket pocket (apparently the nubs are easily precise enough to use as a mouse). Desktop software beats the pants off "apps", in the free software world at any rate. I actually don't give much of a hoot about the gaming controls - I think of it as like a chunky Neo900.

I'd like to have a go at controlling a wifi quadcopter with it though :)

<comment><USER4> >I'd like to have a go at controlling a wifi quadcopter with it though :)

I have two Pandora, and have done just this, albeit BTLE instead of Wifi (Edit: see [http://flexbot.cc](http://flexbot.cc) for a compatible device)! The nubs are superlative for the job - quite high resolution - and very ergonomic. I daresay the Pandora/Pyra are a perfect reprogrammable wifi controller for RC hobbyists .. I've considered trying to wire up a FrSky interface or something, but never got around to it .. maybe when my Pyra arrives I'll have another go.

BTW, I ported CRRC-Sim to the Pandora, and its really, really nice. Probably the best RC-sim platform I've ever played - having the nubs, and the screen all integrated into a handheld portable controller .. really, really nice! Hope you enjoy the experience too - watch for the CRRCSim port for Pyra, when you get it!

<comment><USER3> That's seriously awesome. You can get tiny FPV wifi quadcopters for pocket change from China these days, seems like the Pyra would be a perfect companion device.

Regarding CRRCSim, that's fantastic news. I'd never even heard of that sim. I got my first full-size CP helicopter last year and have only managed to not crash it by extensive sim practice in "HeliSimRC". It looks like CRRCSim can handle helicopters - if so, it's just about the perfect on-the-go timewaster program for me; even has the same control layout as the real thing!

<comment><USER4> Yeah you're really going to enjoy CRRCSim on the Pyra, I promise! Probably the best sim setup for RC hobbyists around .. at least in terms of hardware integration.

If you do get into FPV wifi+Pyra, let me know ..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a bit of trouble seeing a use case here, especially for a price tag of 330-400€. If I want linux, a decent screen and a good battery, I'll buy a Chromebook for 200€ and install Linux on it. If I want Linux tools and a small screen, I'll use my Motorola MotoG with GNURoot Debian and a bluetooth keyboard.

<comment><USER4> This is a portable handheld gaming device with excellent controls, a fantastic hardware design, and most important of all: a simply fantastic community, which will support the device like no other gaming-console manufacturer can.

Its open source. There are things happening on this platform that won't happen anywhere else (see: dynamic-recompilation that brings x86 titles to ARM, seamlessly), and its frankly one of the most exciting new platforms for gaming out there.

Which portable handheld gaming console has a repo like this - [http://repo.openpandora.org/](http://repo.openpandora.org/) ? :)

<comment><USER6> this is what i hoped the 'oooyeah' would become.. what a train wreck that revealed itself to be

i'm glad pandora, now pyra, and community is out there, even if this pyra is out of my price range

<comment><USER4> I think it really matters that the guys behind the Pandora/Pyra are open source enthusiasts, and not only can they talk the talk, but walk it too.. I mean, the thing with the Ooya was that there were just Too Many Suits involved, trying to cash in.. in this case, its techies driving the ship, and well .. it shows! The products are awesome! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome news! A rag-tag bunch of hackers got together and made their own hardware device. They stuck it out - battling con artists, economic destitution, and even a freakin' volcano - and managed to get the Pandora out there in spite of it all.

And now, they're doing it again! We have an open-source friendly ([http://repo.openpandora.org/](http://repo.openpandora.org/)) portable gaming console that is owned and operated _by the people, for the people_. Not a major corporation, not some faceless entity - real hackers, accessible to you and me, pulling it off where nobody else dared to even try.

I can't wait to have a Pyra in my hands! It'll be a very welcome companion to the two Pandora I already have .. Sweet news guys!

</comment><comment><USER7> They have a demo video of an early prototype unit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4t9Ys8wI6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4t9Ys8wI6k)

</comment><comment><USER8> I own an OpenPandora, and I adore it.. 8 year old tech, originally sold by a fraud (not involved in Pyra) and supported by a small team of super passionate fans running a community as a hobby.

I've preordered and cannot wait to upgrade my Pandora, which I use every few days.. even if it's just playing PS1 games on the train.

</comment><comment><USER9> Been waiting for this project ever since it was announced, a most worthy upgrade from my Pandora. What width the potential for DC, PSP and PC emulation along with 4G, this should cover most of my mobile needs, maybe I can even get rid of my smart phone for something with days or weeks of battery time again.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's the usecase for the Cortex-M4s? Is it smart enough to off-load non- computationally intensive work to the 16-bit chips for "low power", or are they serving some other purpose?

<comment><USER11> As mentioned in the sibling, media codec is the nominal case. They are included in the SOC, not something specific to this project.

Being ARM Cortex processors, they are 32 bit. Allocate them a chunk of RAM, upload a program and set them running. TI has a driver infrastructure and sample gstreamer CODECs.

[http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/OMAP5_GLSDK_Software...](http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/OMAP5_GLSDK_Software_Developers_Guide#RPMsg_client_sample_application)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a mobile linux solution i am looking forward to the pocketCHIP which should arrive this month. A bit basic maybe but cheap and useful enough for non- graphical stuff. At least thats what i hope.

<comment><USER13> I am looking forward that device's release as well. If it turns out well I will order one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Related question: What's the linux application situation on arm devices? Of particular interest is the emulator and office / productivity situation.

<comment><USER4> It is, simply put, superlative. On ARM we have most of the things that Linux users are used to, plus things such as dynamic recompilation being used to bring older x86 titles to the platform. Did you know you can run things like Starcraft on ARM because of the OpenPandora platform? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Will you be able to put a ThinkPad TrackPoint on the nubs?

<comment><USER3> Amazingly, yes. The whole thing disassembles by unscrewing, and as the nubs are separate components you could replace them with whatever you wanted. Given that both TrackPoints and the nubs use a square peg, it might even just fit without an adapter.

However it still wouldn't work the same - a TrackPoint responds to force, while the nubs actually move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't find this info anywhere: is the screen matte?

<comment><USER3> It looks that way:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChUw89lW4AA7rc-.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChUw89lW4AA7rc-.jpg) [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdRk7oEWwAEYRNq.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdRk7oEWwAEYRNq.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The site is very slow for me, can someone confirm this?

(when I click on "Click here to preorder" for example, maybe it has problems handling the traffic?!)

<comment><USER15> Maybe its running on a Pyra.

<comment><USER17> considering what websites used to run on 10 or 20 years ago, today's mini- computers (pyra / raspberry pi / ...) are more than capable of hosting websites and can deal with more traffic than you might think. that being said I doubt that's the case here (though I also don't think you were serious).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> ordered mine just now <3

<comment><USER4> Me too! Can't wait!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow that site is so responsive it hurts, never see sites that actually expand to a 2560x1440 screen.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this a joke?

<comment><USER21> Modular, Open Source hardware may seem to be a joke to some people. :S

I'm looking forward to developing full stack ES6 application on the go on my Pyra! Finally the power of Linux at my fingertips even on the BART! Though I hope the Debian can be changed to Arch...

<comment><USER8> There is no reason ArchARM shouldn't work out of the box... I might even consider branching off a release</comment></comment></comment>


Google Toolbar data and the actual surfer model - <AUTHOR> http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/07/google-toolbar-data-and-actual-surfer.html

<comment><USER2> Mostly speculation, but they do make a good case. Current Google PageRank incarnations are most likely long past "random surfer" models. Google simply has too much data available to be able to resist using it to improve its performance (and bottom line).

The problem, of course, is that the only way a google-killer will ever arise will be with a completely different approach and not just a data-driven refinement on the current one.

</comment><comment><USER3> They use all the data they get from every source they can get and they link it all together any way they can. I have no inside knowledge, but that seems pretty clear cut. What's to speculate?

<comment><USER2> What's to speculate? Plenty.

Are they still using PageRank or something completely different?

If they modified it, how did they do it?

Do they really use all available data? Or does the "don't be evil" mantra prevents them from using specific datasets?

What is their current "surfer model"? How random is it?

Until we have answers to these and other questions, I would say there is plenty left to speculate about.

<comment><USER4> _Do they really use all available data? Or does the "don't be evil" mantra prevents them from using specific datasets?_

I suspect Google believes using more data is always "good", so it's impossible for "do no evil" to mean "don't use data we legally collected". Does not compute.</comment></comment></comment>


Hackers text ATMs for cash via Windows XP flaws - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/hackers-text-atms-for-cash-via-windows-xp-flaws-7000027672/ <comment><USER2> So it's not as easy as walking into your bank, sending a text message to the ATM and walking out with a lot of free money.

You actually need physical access to a USB port of the ATM which is hidden somewhere inside. So I guess the hack here is that the money inside an ATM is very well hidden and even protected by exploding paint barrels so it cannot normally be stolen even with physical access for a long period of time. But it is possible to get the Windows XP based software to dispense money from the safe by injecting a trojan through USB.

Unfortunately, the article does not make that very clear.

<comment><USER3> Also you have to get to an USB port, seems like attackers know for some ATMs where to cut a hole in for that. But the real problem is that the machine isn't isolated well enough through hardware design. Just imagine you could access and replace the HDD. While it may use an XP exploit, that's not the real problem.

Since the life time end of normal XP (not even the embedded version), those "XP will doom our money" news spawn everywhere for no good reason.

TL;DR: It's primary a hardware design issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "a cyberattacker must connect the ATM to a mobile phone via USB tethering"

I've never seen ATMs (at least here in Switzerland) which you could just walk up to and plug in a USB device. Do Mexican ATMs come with USB ports on the front of the device?!

Don't forget:

"Law 3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore." [http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/magazine/2008.10.security...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/magazine/2008.10.securitywatch.aspx)

<comment><USER5> There was an article on here recently about a technique using this attack. Transpires that the usb port is under the cover at the front of the device, you just need to know where to cut the hole.

EDIT: Found it. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6984821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6984821)

The most wonderful part is that whoever wrote the software had the insight to add a phone verification step so other crooks couldn't run off with their software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Infographic has it all:

[✓] Trojan horse in physical, symbolic, form.

[✓] Fluffy cloud to represent network "stuff".

[✓] Shopping cart full o' ca$h.

<comment><USER7> Seems to be straight from The Onion

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like it needs physical access to ATMs USB port. Isn't the physical access most of the problem?

</comment><comment><USER9> This is hardly an XP specific vulnerability. If the attacker can access an ATM's USB port they could probably achieve this regardless of the OS.

<comment><AUTHOR> [citation needed]

<comment><USER10> Vulnerable USB drivers exist in pretty much every OS. For example, here's a vulnerable USB driver under Linux: [https://labs.mwrinfosecurity.com/system/assets/153/original/...](https://labs.mwrinfosecurity.com/system/assets/153/original/mwri_caiaq- usb-drivers-buffer-overflow_2011-03-07.pdf) , and a vulnerability in the FAT filesystem: [http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu- security/cve/2013/CVE-20...](http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu- security/cve/2013/CVE-2013-1773.html) . Those were found with real simple googling, I could find others with a tiny bit more work. Unfortunately, most kernel development teams do not spend anywhere near the time they should ensuring that the code they write is hardened and modular, so such attacks will only continue until we demand better development hygiene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was discussing this the other day with my friend. To the best of my knowledge (and please, if you know better then let me know) these attacks are only effective against the portable ATM machines like you'd find in small shops rather than "fixed installations".

As much as windows XP probably makes barriers to entry easier (well, that combined with generic locks) is this really much different to what Barnaby Jack was doing back in 2010 at Defcon[1]?

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bidDXuM4-2E](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bidDXuM4-2E)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would be interesting to see if NSA mounted those hardware exploits in ATMs, that would mean that you just need proximity to the ATMs. Or to think even bigger what if those trading robots hardware have those exploits?

NSA already affected the Web giants and Internet Security. If technical details on those hardware exploits, leak and make their way to a restricted few or the public then financial hardware is at risk and with it the financial industry.

With Russia having Snowden, I think those US bonds are not the only way that could inflict some damage.

</comment><comment><USER12> wow, the first cool hacking news I've read here so far</comment>


Ask HN: How much server space does a startup need? - <AUTHOR>

I have been wondering how much server space a successful startup like Codecademy needs.  We've read that they had ~200,000 unique visitors in three days, and that those visitors spent a long time on the site and completed ~2,000,000 lessons.<p>How much server space is required for this kind of volume?  Is it just a couple dedicated servers at a hosting company, or is it something more complicated than that? <comment><USER2> You can do 200000 unique visitors on a 80486. Oh wait, you did not explain what kind of product you have online. Is it a rails app? Does it need storage? Is it just static html?

Give out more details and people can probably give you pretty good estimates and ideas on scalability.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking of projects like codecademy. Something that uses a framework like rails or django. Something that needs a moderate amount of storage, but not a photo or video site where storage is the focus. Not just static html.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, this sort of information is still too vague to make even a stab in the dark at server sizing worthwhile. If you're curious about how much CodeAcademy needed, I bet someone would be willing to tell if you tweeted/emailed/facebooked them. If you're looking for more data points I bet a lot of start ups would be willing to share their server info (and a lot have here at HN).

If you're asking because you want to know for your own project, don't put the cart before the horse-build it, do some testing and you'll be able to make an assumption that is actually based on something more than guesses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I thought it would be easy to give a ballpark answer. I will keep an eye out for a discussion of scaling in regards to server needs.

Actually, if anyone can point to such a discussion on HN I'd appreciate it. I couldn't easily find a relevant discussion, because the word "server" appears in so many threads.

<comment><USER3> I just searched and maybe these conversations don't come up as often as I thought. On the other hand, it's also difficult to nail this sort of topic down because so many startups use Heroku, EngineYard, AWS, etc, so it's more like number of instances vs. number of servers. It seems Quora has a lot more insight. Examples here: <http://www.quora.com/How-Many-Servers-Does-X-Have>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You need as much space (as in, disk space) as there is content to server, plus a bit more. It's not the disk space you should worry about, though. (Even an entry level server at whatever hosting company will have plenty of space to host pretty much anything.)</comment>


Which tech startups are changing the game in 2014? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Chartboost: abstracting monetization for game developers is a great idea. Chartboost improves player experience while creating a pre-built network for great games to plug into. The network rewards good ad placement by measuring performance and rewarding game developers who don't spam their players.</comment>


Real Life Model of M.C. Escher's "Waterfall" - <AUTHOR> http://laughingsquid.com/real-life-model-of-m-c-eschers-waterfall/ <comment><USER2> Despite how it looks the yellow paddle wheel is not actually at the start of the track. The rectangular box at the start is not connected to the actual start of the track. It's far away from it, and it holds the yellow wheel and a bucket to catch water.

Next, ignore the beams, and focus only on the water track. Despite looking like it's climbing up, it's actually totally flat (i.e. you could make it from one sheet of wood). But tilted slightly so water flows from the start to the end.

Additionally the entire structure is not actually sitting on the garage floor, but rather is high up in the air, and the camera angle obscures this.

Hidden under the structure is a pump and an outlet at the true start of the track.

He pours water into the catch basin at the end of the track, and that same moment someone else starts the pump. If you watch closely you can see how it looks like the water he pours is being "swallowed", and does not actually flow down the track.

The water from the pump flows down the track, and out the spigot over the wheel and into the bucket.

Next you place beams carefully cut at angles to make them look like they are holding the track - but actually they are open on top.

But this is a pretty amazing piece of work.

<comment><USER3> When he walked towards the camera at the end, I was really hoping he would change the perspective to reveal the illusion.

<comment><USER4> It pissed me off when they did that in Inception. The whole point was that should be possible in a dream.

<comment><USER5> But it was; the walking worked, despite how it looked.

<comment><USER4> Right up until the camera panned. Suspension of disbelief shattered, and to what end?

<comment><USER6> Are you kidding? If they didn't do that, how would they demonstrate a trap that made any sense? That would have been far worse, I think.

<comment><USER4> Yeah maybe I totally forgot what actually happened, I just remembered my irritation :)

<comment><USER7> I was more irritated by the fact that the entire movie was clearly ripped from the chapter "Harmonic Labyrinth" from GEB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't believe no one noticed it.

The texture of the upper parts of the wood contraption feels unrealistic; there is almost no grain. The contraption itself is too bright compared to the ambient level of light; the white buckets are darker. There are 2 main sources of light: one on the right casting a shadow of the structure on the ground toward the left, and one light on the left that should cast a shadow on the ground toward the right... but it is missing (contrary to shadows on parts of the structure itself)!

This is obviously CGI. You would be surprised what a person with a few days of work can accomplish with off-the-shelf CGI software.

The poster's background suggests this. He writes "ImD-student" in his profile which may refer to the Interactive Media Division at the USC's School of Cinematic Arts. He also subscribed to the "indymogul" youtube channel which is an online video network and community dedicated to DIY filmmaking.

<comment><USER9> With this in mind, it's interesting to look at the "set design": miter saw, clamps, drawings, sand paper, wood scraps, sawdust and broom all strategically placed around the scene to add realism.

For giveaways thought, in addition to the strange shadowing and textures the parent mentions, there's the human factor. To me the acting seems just a bit off.

Kudos to the guy who made this though; I imagine just modeling that structure (and its shadows and reflections) in CGI was a fun nut to crack!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I gave it my best shot in SketchUp, and in the process discovered why I am not a 3d artist:

<http://imgur.com/EMUJL>

I think if you look closely you can see the barest edge of a bucket behind the central part of the structure, where they'd drain the actual initial liquid. (You can see that the fluid seems to arrest before that transition in the video, as well.)

<comment><USER11> and he edited the video so that the fluid flow looks smooth when the water reaches to upper most brigde. look closely at 0:43 there is something strange happening to the fluid flow. but alas great work!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From what I can figure, it's the usual perspective trickery (flat water track, vertical tower, perspective makes it look like they line up), and then there's a nozzle pouring out water from the tower top.

Note that the water doesn't appear to flow in front of the wooden knob at the ledge it's supposedly falling off.

EDIT: Looking again at the HD version it seems I'm mistaken. ars' comment appears to have it correct, though.

<comment><USER13> Looking at the sides of the channel you can see that they get lower towards the "top". I can see how the channel is flat on the floor and that the supporting vertical struts are simply cut to the correct height for the camera's perspective. I'm at a complete loss as to how the water drops onto the wheel though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> While this is pretty impressive, in the same vein I have to give Dyson (as in the vacuum cleaner guy and inventor of other things) huge respect for re- creating an Escher uphill waterfall as a garden piece, one that I would gladly display.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3046791.stm>

Better hi-res pic here: [http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/james- dysons-uphill...](http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/james-dysons- uphill-water-flow-illu.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890)

<comment><USER15> > _Derek Phillips, the Dyson engineer who spent 12 months building the > feature_

To be fair - this guy should be a target of your huge respect, not Dyson who merely financed the design work.

<comment><USER14> Actually, I only have normal respect for him, as he wasn't the one who was putting up the cash to see it done, he was only doing his job. And it DID take him a whole year to pull it off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> All so cynical. Take it at face-value, pay the guy to set up huge versions, and cancel fusion research.

</comment><comment><USER17> If anyone's having trouble picturing what this will look like from another camera angle, there was a relevant link on HN recently: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/01/19/133017843/your-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/01/19/133017843/your- lying-eyes-can-this-be-happening)

HN comments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2137152>

</comment><comment><USER2> Better link (high quality version): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v2xnl6LwJE>

</comment><comment><USER18> OK, I'm stumped.

</comment><comment><USER19> If you watch the platform near the wheel, you'll see that the water is actually going down since forward it the platform is in a lower level. I'm not an expert but, I haven't ever seen a pump making water flow that way, so maybe the water is always going down and the illusion is made by the camera position over a near flat object. Maybe you could tell the track position by watching how the water flows through corners... a pretty weird way if you watch closer...

</comment><comment><USER20> This video might help understand the illusion works: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUasuxHZXZo> \+ [http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Kokichi+Sugihara)

</comment><comment><USER21> I can't figure it out. And I'm sure this is not how he's doing it, but could you potentially use water mixed with very fine metal particles and then use a bunch of small electromagnets turned on and off quickly to pull the water/metal mixture along the path?

<comment><USER22> I am unsure if you could do it that way, but the water is likely mixed with copper, judging by the color.

<comment><USER23> Probably just blue dye to make it visible to the camera

<comment><USER22> Agreed, it is likely for the camera. A lot of blue dyes for water fountains and such are copper sulfate. Dyes for tanks or fish ponds are increasingly methylene blue, food dye.

I thought I would just extend the poster's thought experiment, not imply that magnets were indeed used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This clip is false.

<comment><USER2> Well obviously, but the question is how did he do it.

<comment><USER24> I was trying to allude to the "This sentence is false." fiasco :)

<comment><USER25> Ah, but the beauty of "This sentence is false" is the self reference, which of course breaks when you make the subject anything else. What you could do is say "this is not a waterwheel", and attempt to get at the whole "This is not a pipe" fun-ness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Guys I know how it is made, but my english is not enough to explain it.

<comment><USER19> Give it a try

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The most amazing thing about this (and other similar illusions) is that even if you know it's fake and know how it's constructed, YOUR BRAIN WILL NOT LET YOU SEE IT.

</comment><comment><USER28> so confused.

</comment><comment><USER29> No fair. Gotta move the camera to the left at the end a little bit so it is clear how he built it.

Maybe the structure is actually fairly flat, only a few inches off the floor at the highest point, but laid out, with shadows painted on the floor to make it look like it is vertical.

</comment><comment><USER30> The shadow cast on the yellow water wheel is not from the pillar you think it came from.</comment>


Google: Your Various ccTLDs Will Probably Be Fine From The Same IP Address  - <AUTHOR> http://www.huskyseo.co.uk/blog/google-various-cctlds-will-probably-fine-ip-address/

<comment><USER2> Seriously? You consider yourselves the masters of search and yet you are going to listen to him? Matt is quite known for giving half-truths. If you are wanting ccTLD's purely for language, then yes you would only need 1 IP address. If you are using them for SEO reasons, then you would need each ccTLD with it's own IP address AND located in the country of the ccTLD.

<comment><USER3> This is just blogspam, ignore the whole post. HuskySEO has been spamming up HN for a while now:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=huskyseo](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=huskyseo)</comment></comment>


A 2019 Guide for Automatic Speech Recognition - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/a-2019-guide-for-automatic-speech-recognition-f1e1129a141c <comment><USER2> So how can one actually use one of these systems? I'm familiar with pocketsphinx, where you download it and then run procketsphinx_continuous and it prints a transcription of the microphone. Or Julius, where you write a grammar and run it with that and it prints the output. The process for DeepSpeech seems to be along the lines of "get access to a machine with ten GPUs, find a huge dataset, train it, and then run that somehow" \- are there compiled models that can actually be shipped as part of an application?

<comment><USER3> Obviously the big cloud players offer their own APIs and SDKs (for a price), but there are a few other solutions worth looking at.

Facebook has open sourced some pre-trained models: [https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter](https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter)

Picovoice has some smaller, more efficient models capable of running on edge devices: [https://github.com/Picovoice](https://github.com/Picovoice)

Full ASR does require quite large models and datasets, but you don't need nearly that much power or data to fine-tune a model for your own domain.

<comment><USER4> Wasn't aware of Picovoice. Just tried the live do they have on their website... wow, it's... not great! Even if I spoke as precisely as possible or/and put on an American accent, it was _way_ off the mark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a little confused about the title because the first paper is from 2014.

It's also too bad this doesn't mention any traditional HMM-based ASR techniques, as HMMs continue to be used on many SOTA systems, particularly those that can be reproduced publicly: [https://github.com/syhw/wer_are_we](https://github.com/syhw/wer_are_we)

<comment><USER6> This.

The article quotes DeepSpeech, wavenets, LSTMs of all sorts; essentially, all the neural networks that scale terribly. DeepSpeech for example is pretty heavy and requires a decent GPU to get anywhere near a realtime factor of 1.

Meanwhile ASR through HMM's consistently hits realtime factors sub-1 and can run on small CPUs. e.g. the default models Kaldi ships with outperform DeepSpeech on a lot of modern examples, and are exponentially faster.

Moreover, training these HMM's is something that is feasible for a normal developer. Training newer models requires data of scale and quality (iirc Mozilla's models are trained on Common Speech which is an enormous crowd sourced dataset, and Google's wavenet models use an internal dataset of very high quality and quantity).

Until the models get more practically achievable, ASR for average people will probably continue to be dominated by Kaldi, Sphinx etc

<comment><USER7> I'm hitting full-encode/decode realtime-factor in the ballpark of <0.01x on a quad core CPU with a tuned wav2letter

<comment><USER6> wav2letter is pretty fast we haven't been able to break 1.1x on a t2.medium in any of our benchmarks -- what's your setup here?

I definitely think it's a big step in the right direction; it's easily 100x faster than DeepSpeech for us.

If I could have anything I wanted for xmas, I'd ask for a speech to text system that is fast enough to work in browser thru wasm or something.

<comment><USER7> My setup is a work in progress, see the sibling thread. My 2015 2-core MacBook is probably not faster than a t2.medium, so you should be able to hit the same sort of 0.05x ballpark numbers easily with the same sort of setup.

Is there a SIMD.js / WASM equivalent optimized convolution / GEMM? That's pretty much all we'd need to port this to web... well, that and maybe a language model that isn't 1GB. The wav2letter acoustic model I'm using is based on the librispeech conv_glu, which is almost entirely served by conv1d layers.

I've honestly already been considering a demo for my main project (which is mixed english / command decoding) that runs entirely in a web page, if you have engineering time to throw at your christmas wish, we should talk :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there any good quality OSS speech recognition libraries that are easy to get started with, or is it still so complex/expensive that this is a fantasy?

I really love the idea of hacking something together for development so I don't need to use my arms and hands so much, or could lessen my mouse use (for accessibility reasons), but I don't know how realistic that is.

Edit: I looked into cloud-based ASR, such as that provided by Azure and AWS, but that would mean network latency on top of the recognition latency, and that would drive me _nuts_!

<comment> wes-k I dream of building a competitor to Siri and google and I'd probably use [https://snips.ai/](https://snips.ai/). I think it gains recognition accuracy by having a limited skill set. Looks good though and has functionality for defining skills.

<comment><USER4> This looks interesting, as I don't need "conversation-level" ASR, I'd just need it to work with a limited grammar.

But I'm unsure of what Snips actually is - I had a look at the website, but I don't know if this is OSS, commercial software, a library or what?

<comment><USER8> I've been trying out Snips, it's pretty cool and works reasonably well. A lot of the overall system is open source and runs offline, but the training happens on their servers and is closed source AFAIK. You download the trained model and can run it on a raspberry pi etc offline. But they claim that what Snips offers for free isn't nearly as good as what the commercial offering does. My priorities unfortunately shifted away from finding out about the quality difference. IIRC Snips's business model is to create custom voice agents that run offline for other companies and services around that, eg. custom hotwords etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related guide from last week: A 2019 Guide to Speech Synthesis with Deep Learning ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20819672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20819672))

</comment><comment><USER10> Off topic: Why does that site not show the scrollbar? I use it to work out how long a post is...

<comment><USER11> It's a design decision that is gaining a lot of traction lately.</comment></comment>


Bumblebee Vomit: Scientists Are No Longer Ignoring It - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/science/bees-vomit-nectar.html <comment><AUTHOR> Headline award. Actually quite interesting.

Regurgitation speed —> viscosity of nectar —> sugar content —> energy levels.

The data helps determine best plants to cultivate.</comment>


Ask HN: Any Googlers want to help a fellow HN fellow out with a password reset? - <AUTHOR>

Please help me.
I've had this account for over a decade ago.
I got in when it was still invite only and you were only giving out like two invites per new account and it was really hard to get in. Its an old account and I have a ton of things in my email, files in my Drive, things in my calendar, and most importantly all my contacts and messages in Voice (I was a memeber of Grand Central and got switched over - loved that you added texts.)
I fail all the online prompts for resetting my password. I have no alternative email, I can't remember my security questions, and I can't remember the phone number I linked to the account.
I'm sorry if this is inappropriate for this board at this time; I haven't seen many Ask HNs for personal help in awhile. I hope you understand my dilemma; over ten years of accumulation is quite a lot to lose.
Thank you anyone here who might be able to point me in the right direction or give me a hand personally. My contact details will be in my profile. <comment><USER2> This is actually one of my worst fears. I'm a decade account holder too. I have two factor auth on and printed out my codes, but still frightens me.

I would love for Google to setup some sort of snail-mail, even for pay, way of account retrieval as a worst-case thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> > I have no alternative email, I can't remember my security questions, and I > can't remember the phone number I linked to the account.

I'm just curious how you expect them to authenticate you then.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you tried tweeting at Google asking for assistance with this? I am yet to try it myself but apparently you can bring companies' attention to your tech support problems now on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice try Kevin Mitnick...

</comment><comment><USER6> I have the very same problem.

I don't know whether it would really help, but I'm planning to send Google a snail mail.

<comment><AUTHOR> My next step is social media and emails to higher up's I guess. I don't know what else to do other than post here or maybe reddit if I can find the right sub.

<comment><USER6> I'll offer to pay to have my password reset.

I've considered showing up in person.

Or perhaps we could each buy one share of GOOG, then show up at the annual shareholder's meeting. :-D

<comment><USER7> I sat next to the Yahoo customer service for a while. Users called in every day and offered to send passport copies or copies of printed emails. One guy really came in person to the office. The response was always the same: "The person who signup up years ago didn't send us their passport so we can't use that for verification". Quite a few users also used fake birth dates (Jan/1st 1901), nonsense security question answers like "-" and fake backup email addresses which doesn't help. Anyway. Don't be surprised if showing up in person doesn't impress them.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps I could start a Change.org petition.

I find it really irritating that a company the size of Google, doesn't have a way to contact a live human for customer service.

Yes it's my own damn fault I forgot the password, that's why I'm OK with paying to have it reset. But I do want to have at least the opportunity to have a live human deal with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sure googlers read this forum and may reach out to you.</comment>


I'm Returning My Apple Watch 3 Cellular - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/im-returning-my-apple-watch-3-cellular-602d24899bfd <comment><USER2> > Back home, I have to unlock the door, climb like 20 steps — it's plenty of > time to connect to the wifi. Then I have to take off my headphones before my > sweaty t-shirt, so it would be great to just switch the current song to the > living room airplay system, so that there'd be no interruption. I couldn't > do it, and don't understand why switching between bluetooth and wifi > shouldn't just work

I'm going to sound like an old fart but this whole post sounds like a parody to me.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, i didn't even understand what this post was complaining about..

I'd hate to be on customer support for this kind of guy...

<comment><USER4> When I worked customer support, I didn't even care how big or small a problem was. It was all about the attitude of the person I was helping. I'd much prefer someone with a complex or difficult issue that had a respectful attitude than someone that had a simple problem but tried to force hell upon me while I tried to help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has to be the dumbest article I've read in awhile. This guy expected a product that's only been out for three weeks -- an Apple Watch with cellular to have all of the apps he wanted ported? If it were clearly a lack of software issue, does he really not know that developers fall all over themselves to support the new shiny Apple product as fast as possible -- except for Macs.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's no surprise the software isn't quite there yet, it's a brand new product, and it's a feature Apple said was _COMING_ , not that it was immediately available. In 6 months or a year, I bet it mostly just works, provided you spend all that money.

</comment><comment><USER7> The author should try a couple more guided breathing exercises. He must be out of breath from all this unchecked rage over whether Spotify works on his new watch while he runs.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very odd post. Author mentions the software isn't quite there yet and is using a developer version of the software. Apple noted during the announcement the streaming music feature would come later. So it's not even out yet. If that what a pivotal feature he should have waited to purchase, but something tells me, he choose to buy now, so that he would have material for a brief blog post.

</comment><comment><USER9> This sure is a lot of expense and hassle for simply playing music while running. We've had tiny mp3 players for over a decade now, I still use my little zen stone and it works great! ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Zen#ZEN_Stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Zen#ZEN_Stone)).

<comment><USER5> Does the Zen Stone allow you to track your running speed and heart rate real time? Can you leave your phone at home and still be reached/make calls in the case of an emergency? Can you stop by your local convenience store with nothing but your Zen Stone and pay for a bottled water?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Haha, this is definitely a satire article about the kind of people the author judges customers of 3G watches to be... but it's a bit harsh.

</comment><comment><USER11> We already did this one yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15436249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15436249)

As in, exact same article, different web server.

</comment><comment><USER12> If the author is returning it, will they get reimbursed for the $99 they spent on the Developer Program? I don't see why they would, but why return it if you're not getting all the money back?

<comment><USER13> that'd be a sunk cost, in economic terms. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seriously, what do you expect from the people that brought us such lovely software as iTunes? /s

</comment><comment><USER15> If the author of this post had spent a few minutes looking into what functionality the Watch had before purchasing it, he could've had a much different experience. This reads like the complaints of someone who didn't quite know what they were buying.

>I bought the Apple Watch yesterday, and yesterday is the keyword. How come I didn't run yesterday? Thanks for asking, in fact I did run, but yesterday I couldn't stream music because I had no apps.

The exact feature is described as "Stream 40 million songs with Apple Music right from your wrist". It's also clearly described on Apple's home page as "Coming Soon". Of course there are no streaming music apps like Spotify or Soundcloud yet. Apple's own music platform isn't even ready. I don't agree with Apple's approach of releasing a watch and announcing software or features that aren't readily available at launch, but I'm not going to then say "wait where is music streaming?" if I buy one before the feature is released.

What he could've done, given some patience, was sync a playlist of songs to the watch. It's had that functionality since day one.

>In summary, $432.92 for the Apple Watch Series 3 GPS + Cellular, $99 for the Apple Developer Program, $10/mo for Verizon, and $9.99/mo for Apple Music. I feel it's a bit too much for just streaming music while I run, I'm happy to just go with a non-cellular watch and some music pre-downloaded.

The author is being misleading. The developer program isn't required, this is the price the author paid for being impatient. The rest of the costs are required for music, but cellular functionality != music streaming. It has other uses.

>I have to unlock the door, climb like 20 steps — it's plenty of time to connect to the wifi. Then I have to take off my headphones before my sweaty t-shirt, so it would be great to just switch the current song to the living room airplay system, so that there'd be no interruption. I couldn't do it, and don't understand why switching between bluetooth and wifi shouldn't just work

Wearable tech is hard. I'm sure a device with a bigger battery and more powerful hardware could do this, but it's a small piece of wearable tech on your wrist. Give it time. (I can see why this wouldn't be a feature right now since AirPlay is direct streaming and it'd likely mean users burn through their battery as they stream music to their speakers from their watch).

>On the bright side, earlier today I went grocery shopping, turned my iPhone in airplane mode, and paid with just the watch. For spending more money, the Apple Watch works great.

Apple Pay is great on the watch. It also doesn't need cellular data, you can use Apple Pay without an iPhone present on any Apple Watch.[1]

I personally have a Series 1 that I use when I go for a run, I leave my iPhone at home. I have a playlist of music synced. I'm happy with my watch and don't have any need for GPS or cellular for the time being. Syncing a playlist of music works fine for me.

[1] [https://www.macworld.com/article/2916821/what-can-your- apple...](https://www.macworld.com/article/2916821/what-can-your-apple-watch- do-without-your-iphone.html)</comment>


Netheads vs. Bellheads (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.10/atm.html

<comment><USER2> TL;Dre-read: did any of the Bellhead ideas prevail? The Netheads seem to have won rather thoroughly. Was it less than complete in any way?

<comment><USER3> "Net neutrality" is this same battle still going strong. Transporting opaque bits is a commodity service with race to the bottom pricing. Segmented services are monetizable based on the value they provide to the user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah classic Wired. I read this one on paper, yikes dating myself!</comment>


Show HN: Easy way to onboard to AWS - <AUTHOR> https://coderecipe.ai/architectures/86530220 <comment><USER2> What do you mean "onboard to AWS"?

Onboard for what? Using what tools? What is the end goal you're trying to achieve?

To me, this seems like a trivially simple pipeline for processing data, and in what is likely to be one of the most expensive methods possible, given the almost complete reliance on Lambda to do ETL on every single piece of data going through, and then storing all that data in S3, which you then query with Athena.

I don't see how you could use this pipeline to process any non-trivial amount of data, and do so for anything remotely resembling a reasonable cost.

But maybe I'm missing something obvious?

Have you actually done the math for what this would cost on a per megabyte or per minute basis?

Have you run real world amounts of data through this system, and again for what purpose?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am putting together my architecture suggestions to guide people how to use AWS, does this look useful to you?</comment>


Fire-powered cell phone chargers being sold in downtown Manhattan - <AUTHOR> http://twitpic.com/b9tz8y

<comment><USER2> Twitter ID'd it as: <http://www.biolitestove.com/about/our-story/team/></comment>


Mozilla just launched an Android password manager - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/apps/2019/03/26/mozilla-just-launched-an-android-password-manager/ <comment><USER2> To save you guys some ducking, ducking and going, the official site is [https://lockbox.firefox.com/](https://lockbox.firefox.com/) \- the thenextweb.com article doesn't seem to include this link, unfortunately.</comment>


Cambridge hangout - Please name places in Cambridge with good programmers, good food, clean bathrooms, and free wifi. - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> in harvard square:

_boston tea stop_ - on JFK near staples. good wifi, great bubble tea. try the mini dumplings, they are AMAZING.

_b.good burgers_ - good wifi, good burgers/fries/shakes, sorta healthy fast food

_boloco_ on mt. auburn street - good wifi, good wraps, amazing nutella shakes

_darwin's 2_ - it's the new darwin's on cambridge street, and probably easier to find a seat there. amazing sandwiches. <http://www.darwinsltd.com/>

_petsi pies_ - it's hidden away on 31 Putnam Ave, so you can always find a good seat here. not sure if they have wifi. their coffee sucks, but their espresso is really good. also, the baked goods are delightful. you're likely to spot the famous photographer elsa dorfman eating dinner there.

in central square -

_1369 Coffeehouse_ - best coffee shop in central square. has wifi, but you have to pay to use it.

why do you need good programmers at your coffeeshop? you know you're just going to talk to them on email and discussion boards anyway.

MIT has free wifi throughout their campus. Harvard's wifi is locked down.

</comment><comment><USER3> My preferred method is to invite hackers over to my house. There is a big la- z-boy chair located next to a big peaceful aquarium, and a couch too; the free wifi is top-notch, and the coffee is better than most cafes IMNSHO.

Of course, you can't just show up... but if you're interested, find a mutual friend, show up at <http://www.mypunchbowl.com/publicparty/ce77a5939ec8e27be083> , or email me to express interest in working at an existing local startup that's developing a new consumer web app.

Shimon Rura

email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER4> Diesel Cafe in Davis Square (Somerville). In the past, a lot of YC folks used it as a hackspot. Not sure if that's still the case, but the last time I was there, I met a couple of (non-YC) guys in the booth next to me who were working on a web app. You can find programmers there.

Unfortunately, the wifi isn't free. And the bathrooms aren't quite as clean as Darwin's. =)

<comment><USER5> Diesel is the best place I know. The wifi is almost free if you pay by the month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was living in Harvard Square I use to always go to Darwin's Ltd. There's one on Cambridge Street and another on Mt. Auburn Street.

I can give a definite on good food, clean bathrooms, and free wifi. As for the good programmers... I'm not so sure about that one.

Enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Slightly offtopic, but does anyone know any such places in New York?

I can think of the Tea Lounge (Park Slope) annnnnnd nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER8> diesel and 1369. neither have free wifi. 1369 used to have free wifi (four years ago), but the laptop lurkers took over so they had to start charging.</comment>


Ask HN: Freelance work for a "semi-skilled" designer/coder. - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested in doing some freelance work for a few extra bucks, but I'm not really sure what my "skill" level is in terms of freelancing. I have 2-3 years experience with PHP (and CakePHP), CSS, Javascript, jQuery, and I'm pretty good with Photoshop. I'm also pretty good with C++ and Java, but I don't think that would be of much use for freelance-sized projects. For the most part, if I'm given some desired web project, I'll be able to put it together with a little Googling if I don't already know exactly what to do.
In terms of my level of design skill, it's tough to say... I don't have any live projects at the moment to show off, but I'd definitely say I'm an above average designer.
What are some of your recommendations? <comment><USER2> Look through Odesk and Elance to see what people are putting out there for jobs. It's a decent place to start. Keep in mind it's like any crazy market, there is everything from the ridiculously low paying to high end.

You know a lot more than you think you do. Whatever skill level you have, there are people who are worse who are winning the same sort of projects you would be bidding on. The absolute worst are those who never even start on the project (and possibly run with a down payment,) so you can't be worse than those people if you at least give it an honest effort. ;)

Outside of that. It sounds like this is mostly going to be a side thing for you. I would try not to deal directly with the "end clients" if possible. That's the true "business end" of web development and just because you have skills doesn't mean that you are going to be good at that side of things without putting in your dues. What I would do is look for other developers to help out. Look at developers / designers sites and see if they post jobs. Look at job aggregators. Another awesome source is Twitter, developers post there all the time looking for help.

Main thing. Have excellent communication. Let your clients know what's going on, even if it's bad. Bad news is far better than no news at all. They just need to know how to plan things.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Without a portfolio it would be tough to get a project. If you don't have a portfolio I would recommend making some stuff up. Take a popular site that you feel you can do a better job designing and do it. Everybody on Odesk or Elance has a large portfolio.

luck!

<comment><USER2> This is assuming design work, but it sounds like the OP is stronger in backend dev. You don't need a portfolio for that, but a list of projects on Github or something like that would help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> email me at davide at 39inc.com

<comment><AUTHOR> sent!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> put your email in your profile so people can contact you. also give me an email: fred dot leitz at gmail.com</comment>


The Law of Demeter in the era of microservices - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-law-of-demeter-in-the-era-of-microservices-3186f4c399a1 <comment><USER2> I hope you liked the post!</comment>


Condors or Lead Ammunition? (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://theecologist.org/2015/jan/21/condors-or-lead-ammunition-we-cant-have-both <comment><USER2> Lead or "non toxic" ammunition is a big problem. I only do shotgunning, but for these the empirical evidence is that the lead is a better tool to "kill humanely" than for example, steel. Steel doesn't have that "stopping power" that lead has, and requires a lot more, and bigger, shots, and will also have a shorter range than lead...

Also, one of the biggest improvement in hunting cartridges are the 'wads' which used to be plastic, and now are wool or fiber, in any case, biodegradable -- the steel cartridges don't have these as they need a 'cup' to protect the barrels as the shots go out, so you leave big pieces of plastic all over, to be ingested by /other/ wildlife, potentially.

So no real perfect solutions so far; Legally you can't shoot lead anywhere near waterways so we have to use steel, but for example last year I shot a duck, fair an square, nowhere near "out of range" \-- this was a 'dead duck' \-- we looked for it for 20 minutes to discover it had gone to ground and was NOT dead, it had been broadsided, but some pellets had gone thru the poor bird, and some of the pellets were in the feathers, because they didn't have the energy.

As much as I like hunting my supper -- and I hunt to fill the freezer so I don't _ever_ have to buy chickens -- I really hate to be in that situation where I inflicted undue pain for no reason other than some city environmentalist (who probably sit at his desk all day) making wide ranging decisions like this.

It's going to be difficult to find a metal as "good" as this job as lead; I would love for steel to work really, perhaps we could somehow devise a 'steel shell around a lead pellet' \-- that would allow 1) killing power 2) protection for lead leakage and 3) loads of time to use magnets to recover it from pretty much anywhere... I realise a good part of the energy of lead hitting a target it when it splatters, and the steel shot won't do that, but it ought to be better...?

Anyway, that evening we had duck, and we toasted the duck; unsuitable apology as it is.

<comment><USER3> This whole argument is pretty weaksauce. Learn to use the non-toxic stuff or stop doing it and just buy your meat. Either way don't go spraying a bunch of toxic heavy metal all over the show just because it's "humane" \- lead poisoning is pretty inhumane.

There's also no practical reason you can't have biodegradable plastic cups for steel shot.

I grew up hunting, mostly bigger animals, I never bought meat until I moved away from home. We didn't use shotguns at all, mostly because it's been clear that lead is bad news for ages, and you couldn't really get steel shot where we were. And a bonus of hunting bigger animals is that if you do it right the projectile doesn't exit. The whole post above just sounds like a bunch of entitled whiny "I want to have my cake and eat it too" bullshit.

<comment><USER2> There are no biodegradable plastic cups -- ask McDonalds.

No need to respond to the rest of your post, as you didn't bother reading mine anyway. Go back to hunting stationary target with 50mm rounds, it's perfect, you'll never find the carcass anyway.

<comment><USER3> My point is 'out of range' is different when you use steel. The subtext of the OP is that you'd totally use lead if it wasn't illegal. Which exactly the same backwards 'hurr durr desk-sitting city environmentalist ruining everything' mentality that nearly every single 'hunter' I know has now.

> There are no biodegradable plastic cups

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodegradable_plastic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodegradable_plastic) \- Why not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I advocate for non-lead ammunition, the story is a little more complex:

[https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/2/lead- ammunit...](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/2/lead-ammunition- ban-passed-after-feds-withheld-key/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems questionable to me that the article doesn't discuss differences in performance or other drawbacks of non-lead bullets.

I'm not an expert, but a quick Google search suggests that they may be more expensive, less easy to find, and more likely to pass through targets. I found at least one article that claimed they may have greater stopping power since they do not break up in the target as easily. However, I have heard anecdotes about steel shot having less stopping power than lead.

<comment><USER6> Hunter here. For big game like deer and moose, I actually prefer copper ammo. With lead shot, if I hit the shoulders or haunches and my family or I eat that meat, there's a very good chance we're eating bits of lead. Most Lead bullets disintegrate on impact, while copper bullets rarely fragment and penetrate deeper.

If I wasn't eating the meat, I could see the argument for lead, but it's a weak one at best. In my own experience copper bullets do not go all the way through large game. And I don't believe in hunting for purely for sport.

<comment><USER7> > For big game like deer and moose, I actually prefer copper ammo.

Surely you mean _copper-jacketed lead_ , right? I don't think that solid copper bullets would travel very far or carry much of a punch …

<comment><USER8> Given his concerns about feeding lead to his family, almost definitely he means solid copper. Modern lead-free solid copper bullets work quite well for many animals. Here's a sample article comparing them against traditional copper jacketed lead: [https://www.guns.com/news/2017/03/18/do-copper-bullets- offer...](https://www.guns.com/news/2017/03/18/do-copper-bullets-offer-the- same-performance-to-hunters-as-lead-bullets)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you live in the California condor range, and are concerned about the cost of non-lead ammunition, you might want to know about this program: [https://www.ventanaws.org/ammunition.html](https://www.ventanaws.org/ammunition.html).

They offer residents in the area with one free 20-cartridge box of condor safe ammunition per year.

</comment><comment><USER9> This lead ammo ban, especially the European one, is a thinly veiled attempt at blocking guns ownership, which somewhat failed two years back. Lead ammo is already prohibited in wetlands in Yurop (at least in Finland it is) and the EU ammo ban would have banned lead ammo pretty much everywhere even though lead does not enter the wildlife from a shooting range.

<comment><USER10> There's more than wildlife.

 _In Finland, shooting ranges are among the most common activities causing soil contamination. According to our study based on questionnaires and previous regional surveys, the total number of Finnish outdoor shooting ranges is between 2000 and 2500. Most of the ranges are small and only ca. 5% exceed 20 ha. Almost a third of the ranges can cause a groundwater pollution risk, while only few cause an immediate health risk. In the first instance, 50-60 shooting ranges identified as being high-risk areas should be investigated in detail. At present, the risk management options at Finnish shooting ranges are very limited. Hence, soil excavation combined with disposal is the most common remediation technique. Some of the remediation methods used in other countries have been proven unsuitable in Finnish conditions. Therefore, new, feasible, cost-effective and economical remediation technologies are needed. To exclude future contamination, a total ban of lead shot would be the most effective way._

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16458952](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16458952)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Gun owners love condors too. But we fear this issue will be used as political cover to restrict our rights.

</comment><comment><USER12> just use depleted uranium</comment>


Tri-Alpha Fusion spending $500M to develop commercial fusion by 2027 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/01/tri-alpha-fusion-spending-500-million.html <comment><USER2> For comparison, the German stellarator has the following stats: 250ms cure plasma duration. 150 shots in two months. 1.1 billion euro construction cost.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting setup! I loved the poster, as I didn't know of layouts other than the rotating ring of plasma.</comment>


Reality Check: What does Gartner really do? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080516_004925.html <comment><USER2> They are useless.

I remember a while ago I was reviewing whole disk encryption products for a large financial services firm. Gartner had a strong admonishment against PGP's product because "Pretty Good Privacy" didn't sound very professional and the company wasn't very 'mature'.

They never mentioned that PGP wrote one of the first open implementations of public key crypto, had one of the best track records in the biz, or had a history of standing up to government pressure.

Talk about valuing form over function.

We ended up not going with PGP's product because it didn't integrate with our AD infrastructure very well and their odd licensing requirements, but the Gartner's report never even mentioned those.

<comment><USER3> If you're a large enterprise company you don't want to be dependent on a non- mature company which has a high risk of failure and had a history of patent violations, government disputes and software security vulnerabilities. Simple as that.

I'm not saying Gartner is good, but I certainly wouldn't want to risk my company on PGP.

<comment><USER4> "but I certainly wouldn't want to risk my company on PGP"

All my privately owned clients do.

And none of them subscribe to Gartner or anyone else for "expert" opinions.

Unlike enterprises, they _have_ to get the best value to stay in business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was highly receptive to this article given its title but it turned out to be a toothless disappointment. Despite Cringely's self-congratulatory sense that he is "attacking the temple of IT" and "alienating an entire industry," everything he says about Gartner et al could be applied to any type of consultant, and nothing he says is particularly surprising or revelatory.

I was hoping for an article exposing the fact that Gartner et al are actually pay-to-play extortion rackets run against enterprise software vendors. The software vendors need their products to appear in Gartner's supposedly objective reports, but, hey, surprise surprise, Gartner only covers those vendors who pay them for <sarcasm>totally unrelated</sarcasm> research services, and, hey, surprise surprise, the vendors that pay Gartner the most money somehow end up with the most favorable <sarcasm>objective</sarcasm> research coverage.

There is a symbiotic relationship between Gartner et al, enterprise software vendors, and corporate IT departments. The IT department managers have no incentive to find simple, cost-effective solutions to their problems because that would mean cutting their own budgets and headcount. Rather, they need to justify their bloated budgets and headcounts -- Gartner provides such justification. On the other side, the enterprise software vendors need to justify their overpriced, overly-complex software -- again, Gartner provides the justification. All three sides of this unholy trinity know that this is a racket and that providing real value and usability to the actual business users is beside the point -- the real point is to provide money and jobs to the IT departments, the software vendors, and, of course, to Gartner.

Will the real Robert X Cringely please stand up and point out how naked this emperor really is?

</comment><comment><USER6> I once had to use some Gartner numbers and they looked really sketchy; they predicted that almost all desktop PCs would be the all-in-one iMac style in 3 years. I called up the main analyst (at a cost of $800) and asked him how he got the data.

After much hemming and hawing it turned out that he had sent out a questionnaire to 500 CIOs of medium-sized businesses, ~80 of whom responded, about their preference for this form factor. Nevermind that the vast majority of desktops are bought by large companies, or that the form factor has drawbacks which were not explained.

Total Garbage.

</comment><comment><USER7> The reports are only as good as the people who write them and the depth they go in to. Often, I find the information is superficial, gathered from technical documents and whitepapers, without actual/significant usage/testing by them.

However, if you know nothing about the topic, atleast they do provide a ballpark of what to look at, even if it is a broken window fallacy (you look at what is there rather than considering what is not).

</comment><comment><USER8> I used to make fun of Gartner (and the like). Then I went to an insurance company and people just didn't get the jokes :)

Naturally, I still told people my true thoughts and if you know how to justify your arguments _and_ have the technical capability to back them up with action you will be absolutely indispensable. (That recent book list had a book related to this subject, go find it!).

Great thing is when you leave (and you will leave) they feel a real loss (not that you intend harm), and all you have is a gain. Welcome to The Industry.

Learn to hack your way through it, or become part of the problem :)

</comment><comment><USER9> They're great at looking smart, but anyone that has taken stats 101 can see right through their surveys. Attended a conference once where people just drilled the so-called expert of all the flaws in the data-collection methodology. Felt kinda bad for the person.

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill What do they really do? They pass off shoddy reporting and questionable data gathering as facts to gullible people who work in large corporations.

</comment><comment><USER10> About frickin time!</comment>


Employee #1: Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/chris-slowe-interview/ <comment><USER2> "The thing about that time was we were all learning how to program web apps while we were building them and there wasn't really a standard operating procedure or anything."

I'm going to have to disagree and say 2005 wasn't all that much "wild west" when writing web apps. Maybe it was for them, but not the enterprise world.

<comment><USER3> Rails didn't exist yet. People were still building from scratch instead of using a framework to get started. It wasn't the "wild west" in that no one was doing it, but it definitely was in terms of ecosystems that had developed around web development frameworks

<comment><USER4> Rails was available as open-source then, but hadn't officially reached 1.0, and DHH was pretty much the only committer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Joining early stage tech startups is a gamble. Being an early employee at a highly successful company is 99.9% luck. I'd rather hear about the early employees at the hundreds of tire-fire startups without business models that investors sink millions into. I think a lot of unshared knowledge lies in those war-torn employees.

<comment><USER6> An interviewer once told me (when I mentioned a startup that I had worked at imploded) "You need some road rash to understand how to do things."

I agree with your point - it's worth learning about how things go at the failures too.

<comment><USER7> > You need some road rash to understand how to do things

This is assuming there _is_ a guaranteed way to become a successful company.

What the road rash will teach you is probably that starting an IT company right now is more like being a golddigger. It is all gambling, and the VCs are laughing their way to the bank because they know this, and they wisely spread their money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great series. As a fellow early employee I love for their stories to get told!

> That said, startups have culturally matured in the last ten years and it's > been fun to watch ... What's really great to see is that all those people > who were working 16 hours have now grown into their thirties and realized > that, "Oh, sleep is really cool."

Something I've noticed as well, though I think it is much more-so the people and not the startup culture. I know some younger people in the early stages of their companies and it seems they are still working really hard and devoting a large section of their life to their company. It does seem natural though that when people get a little older they diversify their life a little bit more.

<comment><USER9> Definitely not startup culture, more a computer/tech thing I think. Because this is accurate for anyone that grew up playing games. Also for LAN parties where initially you'd go 2-3 days without sleep but after a few of them you'd start sleeping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess a touchy question I would've liked to see is "How was it working with Aaron Swartz?," because he seemed like a wonderful person to work with.

<comment><USER11> Except that the entire team hated him. They don't talk about it since his death, likely out of respect, but they were pretty open about him fucking off to Europe and deciding not to show up for a few weeks. They were really angry about him claiming to be a cofounder and insisted that he had very little to do with reddit outside of writing web.py.

Funny how the accepted narrative changes after someone dies.

Edit: Background: [https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve- Huffman...](https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve-Huffman-and- Alexis-Ohanian-not-get-along)

<comment><USER3> > outside of writing web.py

Very little to do with it except for writing the framework that scaled it to acquisition? Seems like a fairly important contribution to me.

<comment><USER4> They ended up rewriting it in Pylons soon after the acquisition. So yeah, it's technically true that he wrote the framework that scaled it to acquisition, but were he not there, they probably would've just written it in Pylons to begin with - it was available around that time, and was fairly popular among YC startups of that vintage (DropBox also started out with Pylons).

<comment><USER3> You can say that about a lot of things though. The fact remains that he was there, and they did use web.py to get to the acquisition.

<comment><USER12> But what conclusions are you drawing from that? I think perhaps that might be where you and the OP could find some actual points for discussion vs just throwing facts around.

<comment><USER13> The point is that a spiritual cofounder is just as legitimate as an actual blood-and-sweat cofounder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would've liked to hear about more of his earlier life, pre-cambridge. How a person working on a phd at cambridge happened to have 2 open rooms in their apartment. A lot of what I'd be interested in is how people actually end up getting the ideas, or meeting the people, or being in the position to take the leap to the success that people have had.

<comment><USER15> Luck and being born to well-off parents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _I think the thing we learned most of all there was that breaking into > travel is really hard. There are a lot of big players and most travel > companies aren't technology companies. I can't tell you how many times I was > on a call and the other person on the phone was referring to their > engineering staff as "IT."_

And then they both laugh about it for several lines.

I don't get it. Is IT not what they're doing? I like being called an "engineer" as much as the next coder, but there's been plenty of ink spilled over how modern dev work has none of the discipline and care found in "real" engineering disciplines, which is why shit breaks all the time. Insisting that you do "engineering" instead of IT seems like naive egotism at best.

<comment><USER17> In the US at least, "IT" is the support staff that maintains networks, provides staff support, approves/rejects new employee software requests (mostly rejects), etc.

Software developers/engineers design new products for a company. It's a significant difference.

I personally don't mind being called "coder", "programmer", "software developer", or "software engineer" (the last two have been part of my formal titles), but please don't call me "IT".

<comment><USER16> I'm a coder and I've done all of those things, often at the same job where I was coding. Insisting on a sharply-drawn distinction sounds like it's just a way for coders to tell themselves that they're better than support monkeys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting part to me:

> Craig : So you were essentially working part-time?

> Chris : Part-time in startup hours but it was like a full-time job. I would > normally work from 6 to 2. Then go to sleep, get back up, and do it again.

> You know, your 20s are a magical period of time. I could get by on four or > five hours of sleep without any major side effects. Basically it was like > that for all of 2006. It was like two full-time jobs.

<comment><USER19> I dunno about most people but I can't function _well_ on 5 hours sleep. I feel normal but after 2-3 days of that, I just start getting stupid. Things that I'd normally figure out instantly will stump me for ages. I'll find myself staring at my screen thinking "I know this is simple and I know I can do this." If I'm only doing easy stuff I can cruise by, but if I'm working on anything demanding my productivity plummets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> He got offended by the term "IT" when talking about engineers. In Europe and most of the world that's actually the proper term for an engineering department.

<comment><USER21> No, it's not. Maybe where you're at, but not where I'm at.

<comment><USER22> Writing buggy code does not an engineer make. The pervasive, wanton disrespect for the title in the valley and the tech industry at large is absolutely disgusting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Money Quote: "The Internet has a long memory!"

</comment><comment><USER24> When they cover "Employee #1: Thredup.com", let me know lol

<comment><USER25> I couldn't get the damn modal to go away so I gave up. Too bad, seemed like a reasonable site.

<comment><USER24> A lot of startups are going to this forced-signup model. I'm not a fan (I don't work there anymore), but it does at least make the "funnel" look better on paper, sigh

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _I would say the first three to six months is gonna be a slog. It's gonna be a tough slog._

For better or worse this seems to capture a lot of early startup experience. It's not all the glory of sunshine, rainbows and TEDx talks.

</comment><comment><USER26> >"Craig : [Laughter]"

I commented on the last article "Employee 1: Yahoo" [0] regarding interjection of "Hahaha" by the interviewer. Seems it was changed to [Laughter], which seems much more inline and professional.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009360)

<comment><USER27> I missed the "hahaha", but came into this comment section to see if anyone else thought the "Craig : [Laughter]" got awkward from the get-go.

It is phrased like it's a response currently. Very staccato and interrupting the flow of the article.

I'd actually do the opposite and go more candid than professional, since "laughter" isn't quite informative. Perhaps something that looks like it's a side note, and less formal. So maybe;

(Chris laughs)

(Prompting another laugh from the interviewer)

etc.

<comment><USER28> > (Chris laughs)

(Prompting another laugh from the interviewer)

etc.

I think that's right, the same as in play writing.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I took your advice and prldr is now a visual RSS reader - <AUTHOR>

Last week I showed prldr.com, a small project I created during my weekends. The immediate thing I learned from the comments was that prldr had to be a RSS reader, which I already had in mind.
So after another couple of days programming prldr.com is now a visual rss reader. You read the news by just opening the links from the RSS feeds, simple as that.
features for now: management of feeds, import OPML file, keyboard navigation, automatic feed fetching.
ps: I disabled preloading of tabs, because some browsers tend to crash when opening 30 iframes :P. Have to implement some stack mechanism to do this. Expect it online tomorrow.
pps: Some bugs may exist. Still very alpha. Testing an idea right here. <comment><USER2> I have to say that the idea of prldr.com is very nice. Of course there are multiple RSS readers but I have not found any which preloaded my pages and had very basic, yet very functional, keyboard navigation + interface.

The simple left frame containing all my news items is clean with the color coding enabled, and browsing through with "j" and "k" is simple and fast.

That having said I do think this idea is very dependent upon the _preloading_, without it this is still a decent and useful idea but the preloading was the cherry on the cake.

Looking forward to see preloading back in and maybe some more work on the listing of available content in the left menu.

<comment><AUTHOR> youre right, prldr without the preloading isn't worthy the name ;-) Will be back in a day or so.

<comment><AUTHOR> ok it's back now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://prldr.com>

and a link to a demo: <http://prldr.com/demo>

</comment><comment><USER3> This does not seem very useful to me. I read my feeds by using Google Reader with Firefox, and middle-mouse clicking on any link that I want to actually read. By the time I've opened a few tabs this way, the first of them has loaded.

In fact, my tabs are even displayed along the left and grouped properly (using tabkit)

Why would I want to use prldr?

<comment><USER2> In your case it might be less useful, though you are making a lot of extra actions (?). Sure, you might achieve the same doing it your way, but people tend to reduce the number of (redundant) steps.

Two big pro's for prldr for me are:

(1) As titles of posts do not always explain the content in a good way I do not know if I will read it, using preloaded rss (prldr) I can quickly open all items consecutively without moving my mouse, just pressing "j".

(2) When I find something interesting, or at least think it is, I can scroll in my item and still use "j" or "k" to jump to the next item when I decide the article is not what I expected / want at the moment.

Summarizing, prldr might not be the thing for you as it is now, but I think a lot of people are not using their (google) RSS Reader(s) in such an advanced way as you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is very nice. Would help if you used colours on the buttons, moved the button at the top-left so it wasn't touching the edge of the window, stuff like that. Black everywhere is not the answer ;) But it's very usable and does what it's supposed to.

<comment><AUTHOR> did some minor polishing, removed the blacks :p.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the cost of sending an email? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I believe op is asking what is the "total" the cost of the internet infrastructure (so power, hw, administration, etc).

most of the replies here are approaching the question from the view of the sender's host point of view ignoring the server cost of the destination and the middle servers (??-- actually I don't know if the emails are still doing "hops" and using middle servers!?)

the calculation is even more difficult to be replied because different currencies and economies are being involved

yo, kose

</comment><comment><USER3> To whom? I mean... who is the sender here?

Different parties have different prices depending on who they are and where in the system they exist, the type of email, the volume, and so on.

A super simple answer may be: Look up the price according to Mailgun or SendGrid, and a simple answer is that it costs $1 to send ~4,000 emails.

</comment><comment><USER4> $ mail email@example.com

Subject: What is the cost of sending an email?

That's a really good question, BBB. The answer depends on a lot of things -- privately hosted? Using OSS only? Benefiting from the scale of a Google? How many emails are you sending on a monthly basis (since that will bring down fixed costs).

.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very hard to say.

For spammers with hacked machines: 0

Should this cost include hardware? Than it costs me at least the 1000 bucks my computer costs.

If not including the setup, than it's just the extra electricity that is used when a mail comes through as opposed to when no email comes through. I think this is the only value where it would be possible to clearly define it.

<comment><USER6> Cost of the machine is amortized over the number of e-mail sent, in other words OP is more interested in the average cost of sending an e-mail message, using statistical approximation... (i.e.: sending an e-mail from USA to China on average requires x amount of servers, middle-servers, data-centers, and these process y amount of requests per minute, with a cost of operation of z on average per minute, etc.)

see: [https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-send-an- email...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-send-an- email/answer/John-Kurlak?srid=CXzs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is the cost of sending mail?

What are you sending? Who are you sending it to?

The only thing email simplifies is how it gets there

</comment><comment><USER8> Including 'opportunity costs'?

</comment><comment><USER9> depending on who you send an email to and the contents of the email, it could cost you your life...</comment>


OwnCloud 7 is released today - <AUTHOR> https://owncloud.org/news/

<comment><USER2> Here's a link to the actual press release: [https://owncloud.com/get-public- cloud-flexibility-files-self...](https://owncloud.com/get-public-cloud- flexibility-files-self-hosted-owncloud-7-community-edition-2-2/)

The link in the OP doesn't actually mention v7 being released at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mac OS X is still not supported for running the server due to unicode issues - [http://doc.owncloud.org/server/7.0/admin_manual/installation...](http://doc.owncloud.org/server/7.0/admin_manual/installation/installation_macos.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> A nice upgrade! I'm glad the UI is getting constant attention - it leaves a bit to be desired.</comment>


EFF: Don't Mix Policing with Covid-19 Contact Tracing - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/dont-mix-policing-covid-19-contact-tracing <comment><USER2> Is the suggestion that undercover cops are roving the crowds to get identifiers from people's phones with such apps? I would think a Stinray or other SIGINT devices would yield a lot more (and more usefule) data.

<comment><USER3> The point is they'd have access to both, and the cat is already out of the bag on that. We already know they'll gleefully engage in parallel construction in the name of "winning".

EFF needs to smell wake up and smell the roses on this one. No authority can be trusted with any type of contact tracing technology.</comment></comment>


The latest Kinect for Windows SDK is here - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kinectforwindows/archive/2013/03/18/the-latest-kinect-for-windows-sdk-is-here.aspx <comment><USER2> This is a really incredible product. I don't have a kinect, but I have looked at a lot of the API code examples. The API is really powerful and capable of doing a lot of heavy lifting for application developers.</comment>


Ask HN: Frequency of Display Ads Based on Previous Search - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone else noticed a "sizeable increase" in the number of display ads they receive that seem to be based exclusively on their recent searches?
I'm sure it's always been there but the overall increase in frequency and improbable accuracy feels a little too "big brother creepy".
Is this borderline spyware? <comment><USER2> According to Google:

 _In addition, we may serve ads based on your interests. As you browse websites that have partnered with us or Google sites using the DoubleClick cookie, such as YouTube, Google may place the DoubleClick cookie in your browser to understand the types of pages visited or content that you viewed. Based on this information, Google associates your browser with relevant interest categories and uses these categories to show interest-based ads._

But you can opt-out of Google's behavioral targeting:

<http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html></comment>


Why irrationality is a problem of incentives - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/296/the_tragedy_of_the_social_epistemology_commons/

<comment><USER2> To paraphrase, there is a low correlation with people who create value (scientists, engineers) to people who reap its benefits, due to a large time lag (although that may not be the case regarding information technology). And in Western countries, people's survival needs have mostly been fulfilled. Thus the majority of people choose to turn their attention to emotional needs/goals (love and belonging, friendship, confidence) instead of value creation because this type of activity gives them immediate (versus lagged) rewards by being part of a larger social group, even if the activity itself is not rational (does not create value).</comment>


PiP - Python in PHP - <AUTHOR> http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jon/projects/pip/index.php

<comment><USER2> Can't we cut out the middle-man and just make all crappy -- errr _shared_ \-- hosting providers support Python?

 _In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center [...] and never writing PHP._

</comment><comment><USER3> At first I was horrified, but after some thought I realised that this is great. I've turned down a few PHP freelance jobs because I don't want to code PHP anymore. Maybe I could use this instead when it's more stable.</comment>


An Overview of Cryptography - <AUTHOR> http://www.garykessler.net/library/crypto.html <comment><USER2> No mention of bcrypt, so tptacek won't like it. :-)

(I wish this link [[http://www.matasano.com/log/958/enough-with-the-rainbow- tabl...](http://www.matasano.com/log/958/enough-with-the-rainbow-tables-what- you-need-to-know-about-secure-password-schemes/)] was in his user profile.)

<comment><USER3> Your wish is my command!

<comment><USER2> Hey, thanks! I just now saw this. I reference this article _all_ the time; now it'll be easier to find.

Bookmarks? What are those?</comment></comment></comment>


Remembering George Mueller, Leader of Early Human Spaceflight - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/feature/remembering-george-mueller-leader-of-early-human-spaceflight <comment><USER2> A song I'm currently listening to:

      Say to me, "No more, Apollo,"
      Say to me, "The job is done."
      And I say your words are hollow,
      And our work has just begun.

      Say to me, "We need the money
      Just to feed the poor."
      And I say, "Gee, that's funny,
      It's for them that we explore."

      Say to me, "We should be fighting."
      Say to me, "The world's at war."
      And I say we are uniting
      People tired of war and more.

      Say to me, "There's too much danger."
      Say we could be lost.
      And I reply, "I'm no stranger
      To danger. That's the cost."

      Say to me, "Our world is dying,
      Ready for its last hurrah."
      And I say, "Keep on trying
      'Til we find our Shangrila."

      Say to me, "No more, Apollo,"
      Say to me, "The job is done."
      And I say your words are hollow,
      And our work has just begun.

      And our work has just begun!

Seems appropriate.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oet1j9EA2fs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oet1j9EA2fs)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice photo of Mueller briefing JFK. Next but one, on Kennedy's left, is Werner Von Braun, leader of Hitler's rocket program. Here's NASA's bio page for Von Braun...

[http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/bio.html](http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/bio.html)

"The V–2s were manufactured at a forced labor factory called Mittelwerk. Scholars are still reassessing his role in these controversial activities"</comment>


Best, How? - <AUTHOR> http://thintz.com/essays/best-how

<comment><USER2> I think many people DO know the right answer, but most of them don't have the wherewithall to execute it.

"Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." - Thomas Edison</comment>