FuzzBeed – Randomly generated BuzzFeed - <AUTHOR> http://fuzzzbeed.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> Note that there is more to BuzzFeed than listicles (listicles are about 26% of all BuzzFeed articles), although they are certainly the most notable part of BuzzFeed content. In fact, the "The [X]" listicle prefix construction has died off.

I wrote a blog post this week about the subject: [http://minimaxir.com/2015/01/linkbait/](http://minimaxir.com/2015/01/linkbait/)

(HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893448))

<comment><USER3> I end up at BuzzFeed content through social media or aggregators. Maybe it's because of who I follow, but I never end up at listicles and at pieces of content like this:

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/mallorymcduff/hiking- period?utm_term...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/mallorymcduff/hiking- period?utm_term=4ldqpia) (Which is not going to be for everyone, but it's more of a Medium-style piece.)

BuzzFeed cops ridicule on one front while covering a few bases and building a (presumably) profitable, capable media venture overall.

<comment><USER4> I do agree that Buzzfeed does some great stuff, but their homepage rarely reflects it.

<comment><USER3> I think it's an interesting strategy regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice. The headlines should all be followed with "number X will blow your mind", "You will not believe number X", and other variants.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wait these titles are randomly generated? I just got "18 Wives with stupendous jugs"

<comment><USER7> So did I. Makes me suspect it's not completely random...

<comment><USER8> Hey, I'm one of the guys who worked on this. Once we generate the articles, they're persisted on the website so that you can share them with your friends. If you want to generate a new article, go to the "Write for Us" page (link on the right of the top menu)

<comment><USER9> I think you guys just created a tool that's gonna be used by actual buzzfeed authors

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/bsansouci/fuzzbeed](https://github.com/bsansouci/fuzzbeed)

<comment><USER10> Seems like they committed/pushed their Flickr API key[0] secret? Or is it just a dummy value?

0\. [https://github.com/bsansouci/fuzzbeed/blob/master/server.js#...](https://github.com/bsansouci/fuzzbeed/blob/master/server.js#L14)

<comment><USER8> Hackathons ;)

<comment><USER10> I emailed the commit author to let them know, just in case.

<comment><USER11> Good. Looks like a job for [https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo- cleaner/](https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/) and a new API key + revoking that one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is very well done, especially the fact that the generated articles are not just headlines, but actual real articles!

</comment><comment><USER13> My tears of laughter have yet to dry and my tummy hurts. This is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Is there a way I can archive this to keep it forever and laugh until I die? I'd fork this in a heartbeat and host it on my server so I never have to leave my house again. Remarkable.

<comment><USER14> [https://github.com/bsansouci/fuzzbeed](https://github.com/bsansouci/fuzzbeed) via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908323)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Presumably because they copied BuzzFeed's HTML without editing, iOS Safari suggests I download the BuzzFeed app. Hah.

</comment><comment><USER16> That's funny because I always thought Buzzfeed was randomly generated Buzzfeed.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why is it so slow? Looking at a 30 second load time on ipad...

</comment><comment><USER18> It looks like there are a few things blocking (slowing) the loading of the page - could be fonts or some social-media stuff.

Great project! :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome work! I've been thinking about doing something like this for a while – you beat me to it :)

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's one generated from actual trending and real stories [http://popist.com](http://popist.com)

<comment><USER2> The original link is a parody of BuzzFeed article construction, which is the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well done :P

I've pulled similar shenanigans, I made one website for my school: [http://latestart.cf](http://latestart.cf)

Then later: [http://slatetart.tk](http://slatetart.tk)

<comment><USER21> If you are downvoting my comment, please tell me why so I can improve my comments in the future. Cheers

<comment><USER22> Your comment does not appear to have any relevance at all to the topic of this discussion.

<comment><USER21> I thought it did just because of the URL name switching, but I see your point. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Package manager vs. Docker - <AUTHOR> http://alexander.holbreich.org/2015/09/package-manager-vs-docker/

<comment><USER2> A straw man argument. Something Vagrant-like is better than tar-like, because you can have many versions of software, each in its separate VM? Ridiculous.</comment>


I Cut the 'Big Five' Tech Giants from My Life. It Was Hell (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/02/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hell/ <comment><USER2> Most of this difficulty seems to arise from the fact he would block a website just because they used a AWS/Google backend, instead of simply just stop having a Google/Facebook etc. account. The latter is relatively simple to do, the former is nearly impossible (as it is seen in the article).

<comment><USER3> It does make more sense to me to just use Tor then block everything using AWS/Google, as much as I dislike those companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Actually, for IT guys, there's a lot of subsitution self-hosted products and docker images, ready to be deployed on independant VPS. But it's obviously not mainstream or end-user friendly...

<comment><USER5> True,

Mail=iRedMail (with SOGO)

CloudStorage=Nexcloud

WebGit=Gitee

....and much more

Everything on Vultr with 1vm (Freebsd) with around 12Jails, and Backup to tarsnap.com (because i am truly paranoid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > He usually starts the class by asking people if they know when their phones > are communicating with cell towers. "Most people say, 'When I use it,' but > the answer is, 'anytime it's on,'" he says.

is it using so much power when "off" the above isn't believable :P

</comment><comment><USER7> > Critics of the big tech companies are often told, "If you don't like the > company, don't use its products." I did this experiment to find out if that > is possible, and I found out that it's not—with the exception of Apple.

</comment><comment><USER8> I liked the article, but a few things rubbed me the wrong way.

She said she stopped using Signal because the service was hosted on AWS, and that she didn't want to use Apple products.

If a service is hosted on a large hosting company or a small one, it doesn't seem to matter. Also, Apple is probably the best large company for protecting our privacy.

I liked the phrase "I am a digital vegan and a real one" (or something like that). 'Digital vegan' is an interesting expression.

<comment><USER5> >Apple is probably the best large company for protecting our privacy.

At least the Marketing works at Apple ;)

But your probably right, since Apple makes no Money with user-data. On the other Hand China, give up your stance on privacy for having access to a Market...well.

I'm not a "digital vegan" but i refuse to eat shit.</comment></comment>


Test post please ignore... - <AUTHOR>

I'm making sure self posts work in my Hacker News client for Android. <comment><USER2> Here's a comment on a self post to test if those work too.</comment>


Go for a walk. You're allowed. It will help - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-go-for-a-walk.html <comment><USER2> I figure the author of the article will be a victim of natural selection soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not in Spain unless you're walking your dog. ;-)</comment>


Ask HN: Best file format for archiving photos - <AUTHOR> Today I discovered that macOS Catalina dropped support for some raw image formats. I have 20,000 photos from 19 countries archived in one of the newly non-supported formats. Lots of people long dead, and places that no longer exist, or that I will never be able to revisit. Luckily, I have an old Snow Leopard machine that I can dedicate for the next six months converting these files to something useable. But what? Since they're camera raw, I'd rather not go JPEG. I'm considering TIFF, but want to make sure there isn't something better that might still be supported years from now. <comment><USER2> I've been working on digital archiving for a while now (check my profile for my current project). Here are some points to consider:

1\. Don't delete your originals. Your conversion process may end up being lossy in some way (like with color depth or with metadata), and your future self will thank you for keeping the originals.

2\. TIFF is a container format. It can hold a JPEG, or a lossless format. Don't think that all TIFFs are lossless.

3\. Can dcraw not read all your originals? I've been really impressed by how many different raw formats that tool handles. You may not need to convert them if dcraw handles them. If PhotoStructure can import your raw files, dcraw can (as PhotoStructure uses dcraw under the hood for raw-to-tiff conversions).

4\. Know that the default for images is to become irrelevant to the viewers of tomorrow. Add whatever content and context you can to as much as you can.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format#Standardizati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format#Standardization)

</comment><comment><USER4> Probably something lossless, ubiquitous, and that can handle more than 8 bits per channel. I think TIFF is the major standard and has been so for decades.

Of course that may change in the future but at least, because TIFF is ubiquitous, I am sure that it will be easy to covert to a new standard and that there will be plenty of time to do it.</comment>


From Russia with bandwidth: A Russian start-up shows how 4G wireless might work - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/16846752?story_id=16846752&fsrc=scn/tw/te/rss/pe

<comment><USER2> I'm about to move to a rural area where landline internet is unavailable, so I'm watching 4G development closely. Clear offers 4G in the nearby metropolitan area (DC), but I'll still be a good 20 miles outside the footprint. I'm not looking forward to conforming to Verizon's 5GB monthly limit on 3G even if I do understand the business need for the restriction.

</comment><comment><USER3> You know, I'd like a clear definition on what exactly each "generation" of wireless technology means. From what I've read, everyone seems to have their own definition for what constitutes a generational change in wireless technology, which signals to me that this these labels are that much more marketing fluff (like Comcast's "SpeedBoost").

I'd be okay with them structuring their marketing like this for user looking for a quick shorthand if they actually wrote down what those shorthand terms meant. However, they're not actually doing that. Worse yet, they're going back and revising the boundaries between generations so that only the latest technology is at the latest generation. When EDGE was introduced, it was marketed as 3G. These days, its considered "2.75G," whatever that means.

How can I know what the difference is between 3G and 4G when the differences between generations aren't clearly explained and are subject to historical revision?

<comment><USER4> That might be an American thing, dunno... In Europe things seem quite clear (or at least they are consistent ;) )

* GSM -> 2G

* GPRS -> 2.5G

* EDGE -> 2.75G

* UMTS -> 3G

* HSPA -> 3.5G

* HSPA+ -> 3.7G

* LTE -> 3.9G (here I agree with you: this is something advertised as 4G, mostly because of the speed difference)

* LTE Adv -> 4G

I don't know about non-European standards.

That said many of those numbers are just a handy way to explain to the common user concepts like: "An intermediate GSM=2G to take us to UMTS=3G". Hence it is called 2.5G. Then UMTS takes longer to appear then expected, so in the meantime a new intermediate standard appears between GPRS=2.5G and UMTS=3G. Etc... :)

Hope that helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All the most innovative wireless technology gets deployed in Asia. Mobile operator features (like cellphone payments), mobile phone features, and network capabilities are on the whole about a decade behind in the US.

The big thing about Yota in Russia is the lack of download caps. That is unusual for Russian ISPs and a source of many complaints.

But holy shit, read the comments on the Economist. Is everyone there a troll or a moron?

</comment><comment><USER6> Just get a clue what WiMAX is, even Mongolia got it in 2005.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deployed_WiMAX_networks>

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://client0.cellmaps.com/tabs.html#cellmaps_intl_tab>

</comment><comment><USER8> Sorry, but WiMAX isn't 4G. I've also used their service and found it to be quite slow.

<comment><USER4> I think that technically WiMax as in 802.16e (note the 'e') isn't properly 4G, but the following (802.16m, I think) is.

A bit like LTE isn't 4G but LTE advanced is.

However that's from a purely technical point of view. In terms of speed: LTE >> 802.16e.</comment></comment>


Why Women Aren't Welcome on the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one that is getting tired of this never ending sexist drawl of one-sided political articles pretending to be tech articles? This BS is ruining my hacker news experience.

There is very little truth to the vast majority of these "women are the victims of everything and all men are to blame" polemics. Sometimes bad things happen: but it really has nothing to do with gender. Most bad people are bad independent of their gender.

It's always easy to spot the real sexists: because they can't stop generalizing the whole world into this statistically irrelevant dichotomy of gender. Maybe there are SOME people who do actually act based upon this particular metric, but I've never known any one of them (male or female) to do so without having had some prior negative experience with the opposite. It's tit for tat: and as they say "two wrongs don't make a right" [no matter what sex you are].

So please, can we put the brakes on the rest of this low grade moralizing and get back to actual tech news?

I vote for no more political BS on hacker news. If you want to moralize join a religion. This place is supposed to be for hackers and tech (both gender neutral).

Thanks.</comment>


Washington Post starts to use SSL - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/

<comment><USER2> Yeah, They are using Entrust Extended Validation SSL Certificate.

Thanks for The Update...</comment>


Google Enters The Social Enterprise With Public Debut Of Google+ For Businesses - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/29/google-enters-the-social-enterprise-with-public-debut-of-google-for-businesses-free-through-2013/

<comment><USER2> So, supposedly VCs like to ask entrepreneurs "what would you do if Google enters your space?" Have you ever wondered what you would _actually_ do in that case?

Some entrepreneurs talk about those "vomit moments" when something happens that makes you want to vomit.

Well... I won't be losing any sleep over it, but Google just "entered our space" (in a manner of speaking). We've been working on "Enterprise 2.0" stuff, heavily involving social-networking (ala, G+ or Facebook) but for enterprise use.

So, what _do_ you do when Google does that? Well, I always imagined my answer to a VC, to that hypothetical question, would be something like:

"We'd stay the course, continue to innovate and become even more hyperfocused. Google has never shown a tremendous affinity for enterprise plays, and it's not their strength. They're a formidable competitor because of their size and resources, but this isn't what they _do_. It _is_ what we _do_."

So, how does Fogbeam Labs react to this? We stay the course and keep developing our products and solutions, and become even more hyper-focused, of course. If this means anything to me, it means we have to be even better at interacting with our customers, understanding their problems, and working with them as a partner, not just a vendor.

We expect we'll still have a lot of advantages over "G+ for the Enterprise" in a number of areas, for some time to come. Not the least of which is because of our focus on deep integration into business activities and workflows and integration with other apps.. as opposed to simply being a very superficial communication channel that is basically just a complement to / replacement for, email.

Aside: None of this was unexpected. Google does have _some_ enterprise presence, and them doing G+ for the Enterprise is hardly a surprise. We've only been wondering "when," not "if." Them actually doing it doesn't really change anything from our perspective.

<comment><USER3> Kind of depends on how well Google executes. If they really get it and execute well, then you have a real challenge. If they don't then you've had your market validated which is a positive.

I read the announcement and thought, "Wow, that puts David Sack's (Yammer CEO) comments on the valley in perspective." Sounds like David had a heads up this was coming and ducked out of the way into the waiting arms of Microsoft.

Microsoft has shown that you can throw huge amounts of money at something and not make a very good business out of it (Search is my current favorite example), Google has similar issues when it comes to being 'lean' (too easy to build a product that costs $1m/day in OpEx to run from day one.)

So you need to solve the problem better, be more responsive, and be more cost effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Other thread here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448395>

</comment><comment><USER5> All I want is a "-1" button.

<comment><AUTHOR> If theoretically there is a -1 button, where exactly are you going to use it :)

<comment><USER5> Anywhere that it's appropriate.

To expand: the paradigm of only offering +1 and not -1 is, to me, akin to the whole "everybody's a winner" problem; if I go to a product page, and all it has is a +1 button, and the 'score' is 0, then there's absolutely no context to justify the score.

Is it that the product is brand-new (and/or just added the +1 button), or conversely, is it that the product is horrible and though the +1 button has been there a year, nobody has clicked it?

Whereas if I were to visit and I could see that the score was -1000, then that would give me a very good indication that the product (or some aspect of it) sucks.

Then of course there'd likely be situations where there'd be a mix, and so it'd be good to see a representation that took all votes into account, e.g. [+1000/-500]; with that, I could see that the sample size is moderately sufficient (1500), and that _most_ people approve -- but that it's not without detractors.

Mostly, though, I'm tired of "everybody's a winner".

<comment><USER6> Unless you look at things like app reviews. Where users are much more likely to complain than to leave positive reviews. I think the same applies for other +1/-1 options. People that don't like things run around jumping and yelling how much they hate it. Most of the ones that have positive things to say don't unless you put it right in front of their face.

<comment><USER7> _\- A dissatisfied customer will tell 9-15 people about it. And approximately 13% of your dissatisfied customers will tell more than 20 people about their problem. Source: the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC.

\- Happy customers who have their problems resolved will tell 4-6 people about their positive experience. Source: the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC._

[http://www.customerservicemanager.com/customer-service- facts...](http://www.customerservicemanager.com/customer-service-facts.htm)

<comment><USER8> It would be interesting to see an updated version of the study on which these statistics are based, which takes in to account social media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If google had shipped Buzz for Domains, it would have crushed Yammer.

<comment><USER10> Buzz was used a lot internally at Google, and was pretty handy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You still can't make a profile with the name of your business. And I could be wrong but I checked this morning and I didn't see any way to add a "Google for business" account to my existing G+ account, so I would need to create and manage two profiles with the same name: my old one for "personal" stuff and a new one for the new G+ for Business features.

<comment><USER12> You've been able to make business pages for a while now, example:

<https://plus.google.com/106626622878120060227/posts>

I think this new 'Google+ for business' is only available to paying Google apps members, it seems.

However, Google apps members can already use Google hangouts, can setup circles for internal sharing, and so its mostly the convenience of the defaults etc. that are new value. I wonder how much Google plan to charge for that.

<comment><USER11> My page can't follow people until they follow me first. I can't build a useful news feed for my page to follow. I can't view normal people's posts as my page, which means I can't leave comments either, which means I can't get my page any visibility, which means people probably will never add my page to their circles.

<comment><USER13> as a person who doesn't want to be associated with random companies, i hope this stays that way.

Your business is not a person, and shouldn't be behaving that way. If you want people to follow your page, perhaps you should put out some high quality content that makes it worthwile to follow your page.

<comment><USER11> How will people see my content if they're not following my page?

<comment><USER14> I hear there's this thing called "Hacker News" where interesting stuff sometimes gets posted. =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> According to Google's official blog, their recent Wildfire acquisition just closed a couple of weeks ago, and I'm interested to see which ways they'll leverage Wildfire's tools to make Google+ the first stop on the route to managing a brand's interactions on all the various social media platforms.</comment>


Ask HN: Has 9p (plan 9 protocol) ever been used seriously? - <AUTHOR> The question is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. I've been teaching myself Limbo programming lately and studying the design of Inferno (including with the Plan 9 protocol which inspired many aspects of the OS) but I'm not really finding many applications that really use the 9P/Styx protocol on the internet. It seems like Plan9 never really took off, neither did Inferno.
If you know of any serious usage of the 9P protocol or have experience working on it, or any takes on it, it'd be very educational! <comment><USER2> I don't know anything about that usage, but I've seen it mentioned in connexion with libvirt, and I assume there's a good reason it's maintained in NFS-Ganesha, though I haven't used it: [https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs- ganesha/wiki/9p](https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/wiki/9p)

9p appears to be used on Tri-Labs HPC systems, which tend to be serious, if not entirely open: [https://github.com/chaos/diod](https://github.com/chaos/diod), [https://github.com/chaos/9nbd;](https://github.com/chaos/9nbd;) I'd seriously consider what they do if I had free reign building a new HPC system.

<comment><USER3> 9p is used in KVM's VirtFS

[https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles11/book_kvm/data/kvm_...](https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles11/book_kvm/data/kvm_qemu_virtfs.html)

[https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2010/ocw/system/presentati...](https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2010/ocw/system/presentations/597/original/VirtFS_LPC_2010_Final.pdf)

[https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/VirtFS](https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/VirtFS)

<comment><USER4> Yes I know someone who has a sever farm runnning plan9 and I believe is using this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe it's used by Docker's (Moby's?) DataKit product inside Docker for Mac/Windows: [https://github.com/moby/datakit/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/moby/datakit/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER6> 9p suck over ip. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IL_(network_protocol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IL_\(network_protocol\))

</comment><comment><USER7> Rob Pike works for Google now. He used to be responsive to reasonable questions but (from my personal experience as a time-waster) very intolerant of time wasters.

Charles Forsyth did a lot of limbo work, he is also responsive to well formed, reasonable questions.</comment>


Amazon tried to shut down a protest by deleting employees' calendar invites - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-attempted-shut-down-warehouse-conditions-protest-deleted-calendar-invite-2020-4 <comment><USER2> I sincerely wish Amazon employees well and the best of luck working out their grievances, but

> [...] told The Seattle Times that the company deleted the invites from its > internal calendar, [...]

It looks like the event was created on the company's internal system. You cannot expect the company to be OK with keeping this sort of stuff around. Do your organizing using tools outside of the company you're organizing against. You must expect anything pertaining to such activity to be removed swiftly and likely used against you in their fight to quell opposition.

<comment><USER3> > You must expect anything pertaining to such activity to be removed swiftly

You actually should not because the US has plenty of legal protections that cover the employees right to organise as well as prohibiting companies from engaging in practises that make this impossible.

<comment><USER4> > prohibiting companies from engaging in practises that make this impossible

I'm pretty sure this would exclude utilizing company equipment (i.e. email) for that purpose though. To illustrate: if you worked at Walmart and used their posters to make picket signs that wouldn't fly under employee rights.

<comment><USER5> Email is not inventory to be sold, or even depletable. This is more like putting up a flyer in the break room. Technically the cork board gets damaged by the push pin, but it's not particularly relevant.

<comment><USER6> Energy and (wo)man-hours to run an email server infrastructure and all of the security to go along with it.

<comment><USER5> Which is basically a fixed cost, like putting up a cork board. So as I said, not particularly relevant.

But as you're helping shoehorn property rights into support for authoritarianism, I will point you to some legal advice directly:

[https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/shop-talk-rules- unio...](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/shop-talk-rules-union- related-conversations-activities-work.html)

As long as Amazon prohibits using their calendars for _all non-work content_ (and enforces this), they're in the right. Otherwise, this is censorship targeted at employee organizing and they're in the wrong.

<comment><USER7> It's not a fixed cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow ... this is fascist kind of management ... it was when the company I worked at started blocking IT job search websites and I knew it was time to leave.</comment>


Functional Programming and the J Programming Language (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/math-talk/functional1/

<comment><USER2> I took Howland's (author of the linked page) functional programming class five years ago. Definitely the hardest course in Trinity's CS department (sorry Lewis).

J was a lot of fun for the first few days when you have the novelty of averaging a list of numbers in four characters. It wears off fast after that, especially since (at the time) this course came after three semesters of C, Java and C++ respectively so students hadn't yet been introduced to concepts like currying and now had to learn both the concept and an obtuse syntax at the same time. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the course was required for graduation so students had no choice but to tackle both. Definitely kicked my ass and scared me away from FP for a while. Now that I write Scala for my day job some of the concepts from this course have come back to me and I've started to grok J, though I have no desire to ever use it.

It's worth noting that Trinity now starts freshman in Scala and though J has been dropped, the functional programming class is now taught in Scheme and Haskell so students there wind up with a very strong background in FP.

Fun fact: the entire department's website is written in J, which is why it's never been updated. Howland retired two years ago and no one has the inclination to learn J to update it, so it remains in all its 1998 glory. Not necessarily a bad thing, it's very usable. On the other hand, half the faculty listed have retired and no one ever updated the site...

</comment><comment><USER3> J is a rather odd choice for teaching functional programming. It distinguishes "nouns" (first-order data), "verbs" (first-order functions), and "adverbs"/"conjunctions" (essentially second-order functions -- not arbitrarily high order) at the syntax level. This means currying is pretty limited, common higher-order operations like composition (@:) and partial application (&) can only be done to first-order functions, putting functions into data structures gets awkward.

The article doesn't seem to say much about J's treatment of all functions as aggregate operations on arbitrarily high-dimensional arguments. Since functions are "polymorphic in dimensionality", instead of a bunch of nested loops, you write just the loop body. You control the orientation of the loop nest by changing what a function expects as its lowest possible argument dimensionality. This mechanism is what J has that isn't readily available elsewhere, and it's sad to see it left aside.

<comment><USER4> I think forks and hooks are also interesting higher-order functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Note that in C we say that the value 4 is assigned to foo, but in J we say > that the name foo is assigned to the value 4.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like this succinct description of functional programming at the beginning. I never really understood what defined "functional programming" before other than using higher-order functions.</comment>


What are some things you'd want to do/continue doing when things get better? - <AUTHOR> http://remindmewhencovidisover.xyz/ <comment><USER2> Travel</comment>


Why Vector Clocks Are Easy (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://basho.com/why-vector-clocks-are-easy/ <comment><USER2> Also to be taken with its sister post: [http://basho.com/why-vector-clocks- are-hard/](http://basho.com/why-vector-clocks-are-hard/)

<comment><USER3> If anyone from basho is here, the link[0] at the end of this article leads to a 404. I guess it might've been moved to this[1].

[0]: [http://basho.com/technology/why-use- riak/](http://basho.com/technology/why-use-riak/) [1]: [http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/theory/why- riak/](http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/theory/why-riak/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OK, in that case we are ready for the next level: Interval Tree Clocks ;P.

[https://code.google.com/p/itclocks/](https://code.google.com/p/itclocks/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Hash histories are more light when you have an unbounded number of replicas.

[https://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/publications/papers/pdf/h...](https://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/publications/papers/pdf/hh_icdcs03_kang.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting but vector clocks are still kind of unwieldy.

The example from the article is people trying to figure out when the group should all go to dinner; no one actually cares the end result, the only that is needed is agreement. This isn't free in many real-world problems. Knowing that you have correctly stored the final value is sometimes required. Vector clocks only lets you fix the problem after it has occurred.

</comment><comment><USER7> Dave has to sort out the conflict, but wasn't that the exact same person who couldn't be reached to sort out the initial conflict?

<comment><USER8> Dave was available at times 1, 2, and 3

Dave is not available to resolve the conflict at time 4

Dave sorted out a conflict at time 3 in all versions of the the story. The problem is that nobody else knew which message was from time 2, and which was from time 3. Vector clocks fix that problem.

Now in this particular case you could use a normal clock, but in more complicated scenarios that can lead to mistakes where vector clocks still work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> +1 Good read, and explained clearly. Helped me for my distributed systems class last semester.

</comment><comment><USER10> That sort of mechanism is useful for database systems which have to decide in what order to write out blocks to keep the database consistent. That requires partial ordering, but not total ordering.</comment>


True Freedom Comes with Basic Income - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eros.com/universal-basic-income/

<comment><USER2> Power always wants it's subjects to be more dependent on it.</comment>


Study: US could save $600B in admin costs by switching to a single-payer system - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/single-payer-system-could-save-us-massive-administrative-costs-2020-1 <comment><USER2> This is true, but more important than how we pay for things is WHAT we pay for. The U.S. could save even more by implementing more proactive treatments to reverse chronic issues that put a heavy burden on the medical system. Curing T2D alone could alleviate dozens of chronic medical problems that are infinitely expensive to treat the symptoms of at the late pathological stages.

[https://youtu.be/5LTWJOi3bCo?t=2](https://youtu.be/5LTWJOi3bCo?t=2)

</comment><comment><USER3> That will never happen. The Medical industry and its lobbyists would never allow their access to the public trough to be taken away from them.

Nevertheless, it's always amusing to hear American screams that a single-payer for all would be unaffordable, when most other poor, tiny countries all over the world have no great problem at all with doing that.</comment>


The Art and Science of Smalltalk (1995) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/Art/artAdded174186187Final.pdf <comment><USER2> Using Smalltalk was a great experience.

And Oberon which was inspired by Smalltalk's brother, Cedar, as well.

I got to learn about workstation user experiences which were more interesting than the UNIX way.

Sadly both failed to get adoption, but many of their ideas live on.

<comment><USER3> First time I see a mention to Mesa or Cedar. Can you point some references? Out of curiosity, is there any environment to play with?

<comment><USER2> The closest you could get to them was the whole line of Oberon operating systems, namely Oberon, Oberon-2, EthOS and AOS (Blue Bottle).

As Wirth was inspired by them. Also those environments are hard to get to nowadays, as ETHZ failed to make any of them get out of the university into the mainstream.

I got to use them as they were considered new, but you need some computer archaeology to find anything runnable nowadays.

Mesa is where Niklaus Wirth got his inspiration for creating Modula-2. Likewise Cedar is how he got inspired for Oberon.

Mesa was a strong type systems programming language at Xerox PARC which replaced BCPL.

Eventually Cedar was born out of Mesa by adding support for RC with local GC for collecting cycles, objects and list manipulation support.

Being developed at Xerox PARC, its designers wanted to provide the same REPL, interactive debugger and dynamic code loading experience as their colleagues had on their Interlisp-D and Smalltalk environments.

Some of designers later joined Digital Research/Olivetti to create Modula-2+, followed by Modula-3.

These environments represent some of the most important research in doing systems programming in GC enabled languages.

 _Mesa Language Manual_

[https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxmesa5CSL793MesaLa...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxmesa5CSL793MesaLanguageManualVersion5.0Apr79_10261698)

 _the Cedar Programming Environment, a state-of-the-art programming_

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.105....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.105.3163)

 _The Cedar Programming Environment_

[https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparcteCedarProgra...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparcteCedarProgrammingEnvironmentAMidtermRepo_13518000)

 _The Xerox Development Environment_ [https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxsddxdtsandPrincip...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxsddxdtsandPrinciplesSep85_6240532)

 _Adding Garbage Collection and Runtime Types to a Strongly-Typed Statically- Checked Concurrent Language_

[https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparctddingGarbage...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparctddingGarbageCollectionandRuntimeTypestoa_1765837)

You can get lots of other Xerox PARC documents at [https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xerox](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xerox) and see how advanced their workstations were vs what was happening at AT&T.

.NET, Java (including Android) and commercial Common Lisp environments are probably the closest to the experience described in those documents that we can reach out nowadays.</comment></comment></comment>


Identifying dog breeds using Keras - <AUTHOR> https://able.bio/devforfu/identifying-dog-breeds-using-keras--767qpxs <comment><USER2> Machine learning is still considered "new" or "difficult" so people often respond to posts like this with comments like the one that says "Nothing impressive, existing architectures were used". Writers only get enthusiasm if they raise a benchmark with a brand new approach.

For researchers and people spend a lot of time on ML, I totally get that. There isn't anything _new_ here. In fact, I correctly guessed nearly the entire content of the article from the title alone (transfer learning, using Keras' "Application" models, etc). But why does that matter? It's still a useful article to a lot of people and it's well written.

There is still a dearth of practical advice on how non-specialist developers can solve everyday problems with ML. The truth is that the majority of real projects that real companies need done could be done exactly this way. Using this approach, a developer could get decent results and be done with a project in hours instead of months.

For some reason everyone thinks it's fine to post an article about how to speed up your CRUD website with a Postgres indexes even though it's been done millions of times before, but ML posts get dismissed if they aren't making some kind of research breakthrough. I personally feel like we need a lot more approachable discussion around ML like this in the world. Every dev should feel comfortable getting started with this kind of work if they want to.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. There's too much of an academic paper culture around ML. It makes the field very unapproachable. It's as if people don't actually use it for anything practical and they only care about the science and math.

It is getting better though. It's great to see people post articles like this and even if it has been done before seeing different approaches and seeing it written in different ways goes a long ways towards educating people.

I'm hoping the JavaScript ML / DL ecosystem expands more since that would greatly accelerate its adoption and allow more developers access to ML.

<comment><USER4> Recent tendency in ML/DL academic papers is applying described approach on some public benchmark, and showing improvement over current State of The Art results.

<comment><USER3> ML/DL is certainly doing better than most but it still has the academic culture. It is increasingly more common to release code on github so the result can be reproduced and people can adapt their research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While it might not be novelty (and therefor it doesn't seem impressive to some), Transfer Learning is actually highly efficient even for small datasets and should at least be considered before wasting energy and money in building your own convnet. Its a good first step when tackling a new problem in this problem space.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. I did the same exercise with the pretrained Xception and 2 dense layers at the end and only got 83% accuracy. Thanks for sharing the tweaks you made, that's good to know. I wasn't aware of those techniques.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd love to see this network tested on hybrid breeds (but still trained on pure breeds) to see if the probabilistic output would be divided between the two parent breeds.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nothing impressive, existing architectures were used, InceptionV3, Xception and InceptionResNetV2. Fine-tuning those models resulted in a slightly worse accuracy.

<comment><USER8> Still it seems like a good write up. Yes, it is not innovative, it provides a good presentation and "here's how I solved this every day, company problem." I think this has a benefit in the Data science. Yes, it glosses over the retrieving and preparing your data section, which I feel is the most work in these problems. However, it gives an idea of how to combine your knowledge and think as a new Data Scientist. So I think it is helpful to some people. As other people said there is a plethora of similar articles in other Software Engineering fields that rise consistently in the front page of Hackernews.</comment></comment>


Google Cloud PostgreSQL create dialog screencap - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/gregsramblings/status/840637364267446272 <comment><AUTHOR> Docs: [https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/](https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/)

</comment><comment><USER2> What's with the disk speed?! A SSD that only does 240MBps and 15kIOPs?

Why would I ever want this over a pair of 1U colocated dedicated servers, each with an m2 NVMe? The price is alarmingly close at 1y and obviously much cheaper for the dedicated ongoing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know how the backups get done? eg block based, WAL based, pgdumpall based, etc?

The docs seem unclear on this. Hard to tell if backups would be transaction consistent. :/

<comment><USER4> From docs: "Cloud SQL logs in as the cloudsqladmin user to perform automated backups.". I'm guessing it is transaction consistent as they log in via SQL, and they warn about performance decrease.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. That helps, but it's still guesswork rather than explicitly said (which it should be).

Hopefully a near future version of the docs lets us know clearly. :)</comment></comment></comment>


A game where the smart players lose - <AUTHOR> http://www.weidai.com/smart-losers.txt <comment><USER2> The smart players can always play dumb. Camouflage is evolved even before smart exists...</comment>


Woz on watches, addiction and being played by Seth Rogen - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31463351

<comment><AUTHOR> On his watch: "You can take in in the bath tub at least once"</comment>


Microsoft using WebKit for their Bing PagePreview feature? - <AUTHOR>

Just spotted this in my web server logs:
X.X.X.X - - [02/Jun/2012:11:25:45 +0300] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 371 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b"
Is Microsoft now using WebKit instead of their own code? <comment><USER2> Apparently. Why are you hiding their IP?</comment>


Moon Landing Faked—Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories  - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=moon-landing-faked-why-people-believe-conspiracy-theories

<comment><USER2> Typical disinfo from the so-called "Scientific" American </sarcasm>

Actually, this article touches on something key to understanding these sub- cultures (as well as the appeal of right-wing radio):

 _Since a number of studies have shown that belief in conspiracy theories is associated with feelings of powerlessness, uncertainty and a general lack of agency and control, a likely purpose of this bias is to help people "make sense of the world" by providing simple explanations for complex societal events — restoring a sense of control and predictability._

Does anyone have more resources (sudies, books, etc) along the lines of the take-away above? I am very interested in this phenomena.</comment>


Things I've learned during my PhD - <AUTHOR> https://fossilsandshit.com/2016/09/15/shit-i-learned-during-my-phd/ <comment><USER2> If "Having a relationship during your PhD is insanely difficult" then does that mean that married people, or those with children, should not get a PhD?

If so, then it sounds like the PhD process is systemically discriminating against people based on marital status. Unless, is such behavior is an essential requirement for the job?

"At Imperial College, almost every grad student I know was suffering from some sort of mental or physical health issue."

And people think PhD students shouldn't be unionized.

Oh, that's right, it's not a "job". Grr. Silly me.

<comment><USER3> That caught my eye as well, though my thought was more along the lines that 'during your PhD' could have been left out and the statement would have retained its truth. Probably more due to PhD students generally trending older and the conclusion being more a matter of timing than particular circumstance.

None of which is to disagree with the ideas regarding unionization. I just think it's largely orthogonal.</comment></comment>


Google reacts to Apple's US patent victory over Samsung - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19389732 <comment><USER2> I wonder what the likelihood of a cross-license deal between Apple and Google would be, and if their OEM manufacturers would be covered. Apple could stand to make a lot of money from Android if every maker is paying them, much in the way Microsoft makes money from Android OEMs. Using the free mobile OS could become very expensive.

As much as I'd like to see the marketshare of Windows Phone increase, it concerns me that the obvious result of this lawsuit is that the only way to make a smartphone is to be in position to have a cross-license, no-copy-no- lawsuit agreement like Apple and Microsoft have. This severely restricts competition. I'd like to see Windows Phone succeed in the market, but I wouldn't want to see more independent OSes crushed underfoot in the process.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is a simple way to solve this. Ship the phones without an OS. Then consumers would have the choice of installing Android, Windows, Symbian, or what have you. Ideally the OS would boot from a micro SD card, or at least installed from one.

<comment><USER4> That's a great idea! That way you'd have the worst of possibilities: software upgrade hell all around ("company X is not upgrading the OS Y on devices Z and W anymore"), hyper-confused buyers (most consumers can't even insert a sim- card without help, let alone _pick an OS_ ) and an all-around tendency to nightmarish support experiences ("we don't fix X phones if you install Y on them!")

That would be a huge step back from a consumer perspective, IMHO. The "mobile revolution" is in full effect because the devices have got SIMPLER, not "more open". But I'm sure Stallman and others of his kind would LOVE it...

edit: removed "neckbeards" reference that could sound offensive to more zealous uber-nerds.

<comment><USER5> While most of your argument is solid, there's no need to bring the level of discussion down to Reddit standards by using terms like "neckbeards". Your last sentence overshadows an otherwise good comment.

<comment><USER4> I'm really sorry, mentioning Stallman always brings out the worst in me...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No matter what Google says now, this sets a bad precedent and some of these patents could be used to go against Google on a trial. Wether or not Apple chooses to do so is another story.

I see this trial as a missed opportunity to rethink patent law in the US. However I don't blame Apple on this one, I blame Samsung. They made it so easy for Apple to make a case that now these patents have been somehow ratified. Had they not make their products so damn similar the jurors would have probably thought twice before the verdict and its implications.

<comment><USER7> What about blaming the insane counterproductive patent system instead?

<comment><USER8> counter-productive for??????

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This judgement says nothing about innovation. Note to whiners: copying isn't innovation. Apple innovate (and have exceptional design taste), that is why they are successful. Samsung just produce thinly disguised, poorly made knock- offs. Samsung have history, before the iPhone Samsung made Blackberry knock- offs, its what they do.

The important aspect here is that Apple went after the most obvious plagiarist (and softest target) first. Now there is a precedent, Google were the most blatant IP thieves and I have no doubt (nor do Google) that Apple are just warming up for the big game.

<comment><USER10> Obviously, you didn't look at all the designs Apple claims are copies. Unless you believe Apple invented the mobile phone, I don't think you can just claim that this isn't preventing innovation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google is clearly not too happy about Samsung cornering the Android Market. Samsung can wrest the control any time and popularize their version of Android leaving the rest of the android crowd in dust. Samsung makes huge profits on Android while Google does not. And that explains Google's stance.

That said, Android makers already pay substantial amounts to Microsoft as royalties. So Google posturing is just plain farce. Android is not free.

</comment><comment><USER12> >> Following the Samsung verdict, Bill Cox, marketing director for Microsoft's Windows Phone Division tweeted: "Windows Phone is looking gooooood right now."

Is he saying that Windows Phone isn't looking good compared to Android if you ignore the legal troubles Android is in?

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands "Following the Samsung verdict, Bill Cox, marketing director for Microsoft's Windows Phone Division tweeted: "Windows Phone is looking gooooood right now.""

Too bad the carriers aren't listening much. I've been waiting for Verizon to carry more Windows 7 models. The only one they currently have is the HTC Trophy which is already a few years old.

In some regards, it doesn't matter what happens to the handset manufacturers, the carriers still have the last word on whether they're going to carry them. They're effectively controlling the supply of the handset, regardless of demand.

<comment><USER13> One of the problems I think is that MS dictated specs _too_ tightly. So basically there are about 10 versions of what's basically the same phone in different packaging, which really doesn't appeal to carriers much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> To be fair, Apple offered to license its patents to Samsung already and Samsung said no. Sure, Apple was asking for a lot, but Samsung could have negotiated for a better deal, they just didn't think they had to.

Ultimately, there will be cross licensing deals and patent trades made and this isn't going to "slow innovation" as much as pundits believe. It's just going to be a case of trading money to buy innovation instead of doing your own R&D like Apple, MSFT, Motorola, and Nokia have done.

<comment><USER15> That situation would completely lock out any new innovators from entering the market, since they would need (a) enough money up-front and (b) the explicit permission of most if not all leading patent holders.

The major companies would effectively be using unjustified patents as a form of collusion to erect insurmountable barriers to entry around the US mobile market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a ridiculous farce and it's going to end up destroying all three phone OS manufacturers and dealing massive damage to the entire mobile technology space, especially to smaller developers and possible innovators. Everyone knew if the patents came out it was a MAD situation but I guess someone thought they could win.

Edit:

Changed the wording on the first sentence. Good points from replies about it really being smaller innovators getting caught in the crossfire.

<comment><USER17> This is naive, this won't hurt much the big guys. It will only hurt small startups trying to enter the market. Samsung, Google and Apple can afford this fight. Google already paid over $10b for motorola and is already using that to sue Apple. They'll keep doing that until Apple is cornered to cross license its patents. Just like Apple and Microsoft did. Eventually, Apple, Google and Samsung will have cross licensed patents and will stop suing each other. Life will go on.

But small startups who can't afford the dozens of billions of dollars these companies are spending to keep Apple off. Those are the ones who will be hurt. Next time an innovative startups tries to disrupt anything Apple is doing. They'll be put out of business because they use pinch to zoom. And this trial has set precedence in Apple's favor. This result is terrible for any small app developer. You should be worried about them, not Apple or Google.

<comment><USER4> It could hurt _some_ of the big guys. Whoever gets sales blocked in their biggest markets could suffer big time (or even go out of business)...

That "Apple is the bogey-man and they'll eat anyone that does pinch and zoom" argument is turning into a hollow fallacy. It's not _just_ Apple and they won't sue _everyone_ \- it's an all-out war against very specific players (Google, Apple, Samsung and a couple others) that was even _announced_ by Jobs before it happened. Not like they're moving entirely to the business of "patent trolling the world". "Innovative startups that try to disrupt anything" will be safe, IMHO... (except, of course, if "disrupting anything" means blatantly copying everything, from hardware design to icons...)

<comment><USER7> > "Innovative startups that try to disrupt anything" will be safe, IMHO...

And you expect people to invest in business in the hopes that your "Humble Opinion" holds true?

I'm sure most startups are safe from being sued by Apple... as long as they don't become a threat to their business.

And of course, no startup is safe from IV and other patent trolls that are feeding this patent insanity.

<comment><USER8> They are more likely to get bought...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pony, Actors, Causality, Types, and Garbage Collection - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/presentations/pony-types-garbage-collection/ <comment><USER2> Pony is an amazing language, but I feel like it burned its entire complexity budget. Reference capabilities are really great, but they have this weird special syntax around them, and they're all termed in a very unique way.

I very much want a language like Pony because, as this talk demonstrates, it's doing some incredibly cool and powerful things. But it's pretty confusing.

Rust types like Arc, Mutex, &, &mut, and affine, have been wayyyy easier to learn for me because they aren't totally new concepts - I know what Arc is, Mutex, references are, moves are new but that's just one thing and it wasn't too crazy coming from C++. I know how to convert between these types because they're regular structures, with methods and documentation like all other structures. This is in really direct contrast to my experience with Pony where I had to learn like 6 new keywords, try to map them back to my own reference model, and, worst of all, trying to remember the strange incantation to map between them. I bet this is a "learn it once" thing, and it would be fine if that were the _only_ new thing, but it's not - there are object capabilities, actors, learning the runtime/GC, learning new libraries, etc - there just isn't enough complexity budget in my brain for all of these things.

I contrast this with Rust, which people consider quite hard to learn, and Pony has just been way, way harder. It's a little "too good" \- nothing in Pony is unjustifiable, like not having assertions/ failures, but I really want those things! Division by 0 is a perfectly fine thing to define as returning 0, I seriously don't even care, but it's just one more straw.

All in all, I was so hooked on learning Pony at first, totally enamored, and then I just found that I couldn't justify putting in the time.

I ended up writing an actor library inspired in part by Pony for Rust, using macros, and I've been fairly satisfied - though there's much more Pony offers, by far. I'd really like to see more actor model languages crop up, and incorporating many features that Pony has, but maybe making some 'worse is better' decisions in a few places.

<comment><USER3> I had the opposite experience to you. I found Pony much easier to learn than Rust.

Reference types are probably the trickiest bit to learn, especially in how they relate to Pony's generics. Everyone is different, but I found learning the 6 reference capabilities to be a lot easier than trying to understand borrowing and lifetimes in Rust.

I readily accept other reasons not to pursue Pony; it's library ecosystem is budding, the runtime is still a bit unstable, and there is limited support for non-x86_64 architectures. However, I invite anyone reading this comment to form their own opinion of the language. I feel I've benefited greatly from learning it.

Also, Pony has a pretty active community on Zulip, where you will find people who will jump at the chance to help you get unstuck while you're writing Pony. [https://ponylang.zulipchat.com/](https://ponylang.zulipchat.com/)

<comment><USER4> > _I feel I 've benefited greatly from learning it._

I have this feeling (or maybe I should say "hope") that once you learn Pony reasonably well, you kind of take that "reference type awareness" with you and it will make you a better programmer no matter what language you are programming in. It basically makes explicit what you should already be doing implicitly.

I really should put in the effort to learn it someday

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been following Pony for a couple of years, and fear they've lost momentum and drive, which doesn't bode well for the future of the language. My major grief is no support for "locked" (or synchronous) patterns, ie. when actor#A needs to modify actor#B and have the change accessable in the same Actor#A::Behaviour. In my own Actor framework (C++), I'm forced to implement a LockToWorkThread() pattern where I prohibit Actor#B from being scheduled on other work threads while locked. This way 2 Actors can interact from an "atomic" Behaviour() function. However, C++ doesnt protect against sharing pointers so I'm always on eggshells.

<comment><USER6> It seems like your major grief is at serious odds with the design principles of the language itself.

It's very difficult to introduce any kind of synchronous behaviour that doesn't also allow deadlocks. "Locking" an actor to prevent it from processing messages would very trivially allow for deadlocks - and since Pony intends to avoid them by design, the language can't ever allow for it.

Why are promises not fit for your purpose?

<comment><USER7> Verona has been exploring the idea of "behavior-oriented programming" as compared to "actor-oriented" like we have in Pony.

Verona's model allows for something along the lines of what is being suggested. How that works out in the long run, we'll see. It's still very early days for Verona.

A number of folks working on Pony also are associated with Verona and vice- versa so there's a cross-polination of ideas going on.

[https://github.com/microsoft/verona](https://github.com/microsoft/verona)

In particular see:

[https://github.com/microsoft/verona/blob/master/docs/explore...](https://github.com/microsoft/verona/blob/master/docs/explore.md#concurrent- mutation-and-memory-safety)

and

[https://github.com/microsoft/verona/blob/master/docs/explore...](https://github.com/microsoft/verona/blob/master/docs/explore.md#concurrent- ownership)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to extend an invitation to anyone who is interested in learning more about Pony to join us in our community Zulip. Various Pony core team members, committers, and other interested folks are often on and regularly answer questions etc from people who are interested in learning more.

[https://ponylang.zulipchat.com/#](https://ponylang.zulipchat.com/#)

And you can find more Pony related content on the website:

Talks (and what-not): [https://www.ponylang.io/community/planet- pony/](https://www.ponylang.io/community/planet-pony/) Papers: [https://www.ponylang.io/community/#papers](https://www.ponylang.io/community/#papers)

</comment><comment><USER8> Actors are described here:

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3418003](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3418003)

</comment><comment><USER9> Judging from github contributions and user profiles it looks like the creator, Sylvan Clebsch, works in the Microsoft Research Lab, but he isn't involved anymore. Someone else working at Microsoft, Sean Allen, is the new owner?

[https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/graphs/contributors)

Is MSFT involved with pony (that'd be huge) or is this just a MSFT employee side project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sylvan Clebsch now is on Project Verona, alongside David Chisnall that used to contribute to GNUStep and also researcher on CHERI CPU.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project- ver...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-verona/)

The Imperial College hosts a Microsoft Research unit.

<comment><USER9> wow so many languages being researched/developed at microsoft. There's this one too: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/bosque- prog...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/bosque-programming- language/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Microsoft Research does lots of cool stuff, occasionally some of it actually lands on Windows.

MDIL (Windows 8.x .NET compiler based on Bartok from Sigularity), .NET Native, async/await and C# 7+ low level features (influenced by Midori), WSL (picoprocesses came from DrawBridge), Windows 8 USB stack (P language), driver validation (Z prover),....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a clear explanation of how Pony's concurrency (actor) model is different from Erlang/Elixir, and what implications that has in practice?

<comment><USER3> Yes there is! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0m0_qtfzLs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0m0_qtfzLs)

<comment><USER8> Actors are described here:

[https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3418003](https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3418003)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was excited about Pony a few years ago.

But then the company went bust and development slowed down. I checked it out again ~ 1 year ago and both language and ecosystem did not look terribly healthy or active.

What's the current status?

ps: I love the video + synchronized slides side by side. I wish this was more common for talks. There should be resizing functionality though.

<comment><USER7> Hi,

Excellent question. I can't address "healthy or active" as those would really be your own metrics to decide.

We have a lot of things going on including:

Work on a new dependency manager: [https://github.com/ponylang/corral](https://github.com/ponylang/corral)

Work on an installation tool to make it easier to get started with Pony: [https://github.com/ponylang/corral](https://github.com/ponylang/corral)

A lot of work has gone into making our release process across projects much easier to deal with as it was problematic before.

Joe, a core team member, has been working on ideas to address problems that we've seen folks experience with Pony. He has a semi-functional experimental compiler that will hopefully see the light of day eventually.

We've been working on some runtime improvements that will eventually see the light of day.

Most of the work that goes on these days is in repos other than the ponyc repo that most people tend to look at.

In the end, the important thing to know is that Pony is a volunteer driven project and thus, moves at a different timeline than something like Go or Rust with a lot of backing.

Those of working on Pony are doing it because we believe that in the long run, the time we put in outside of our jobs will be worth it. But our timeline is probably a lot longer than other folks.

-Sean, a Pony core team member.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://github.com/WallarooLabs/wallaroo](https://github.com/WallarooLabs/wallaroo) is probably the largest example of an open source pony project.

</comment><comment><USER13> What's the status with Wallaroo Labs and Pony, are they still using the language?

</comment><comment><USER8> Actors are described here:

[https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3418003](https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3418003)

<comment><USER14> Regarding the spam with these comments from ProfHewitt: I don't know anything about Prof. Hewitt personally, so this isn't intended as an insult (assuming the user ProfHewitt actually _is_ him). However, he has been banned from Wikipedia in the past[1] for inappropriate self-promotion (specifically regarding actors), which might be relevant given that the article in the parent comment is Prof. Hewitt's.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Carl_Hewitt#Short_history...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Carl_Hewitt#Short_history_of_Hewitt_at_Wikipedia)</comment></comment>


Mac OS X market share cracks 8% - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9115988&source=rss_news

<comment><USER2> Does anyone care to guess what the _critical_ level is?

Presumably at some point OS X stops being a niche market, and producing cross platform software becomes almost mandatory.

I'd guess 30%.

<comment><USER3> It's exactly the point at which the loss of revenue due to incompatibility is greater than the cost of developing cross-platform.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for exactly restating his question. I needed that.

<comment><USER5> Hey, it made things clearer. For example, when you break it down like that, you might realize that the cost vs. benefit analysis is different for different kinds of software -- there is no "critical level" in general. This is good news for Apple. As their market share grows, software crosses that threshold continuously (as opposed to all at once). That makes their platform become continuously more appealing to users too, creating a positive feedback loop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Uh. In other news, no wait, in the same news (the site the article is based on, link at the bottom), Linux' market share almost _doubled_ in 9 months. How's that for growth ;)

<comment><USER7> I was intrigued by that, too.

However, iPhone share is growing quicker and it's going to be slightly embarrassing when the iPhone passes Linux in market share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> well with the five or so apple laptops and desktops i have in my house alone i wonder what took them so long. but really, i would like to thank microsoft for vista ;)

disclaimer, not including two iphones and various generations of ipods :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Are they counting the iPhone, iPod touch or iPod etc operating systems as part of OS X?

<comment><USER10> No. This includes desktop OS only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to see market share stats broken down by segments of the market, i.e. business, servers, consumers, etc.

I suspect OS X's consumer market share is much higher.

</comment><comment><USER12> Too bad it's a fake *nix. Not compatible out of the box with 95% of linux applications.

<comment><USER13> darwinports does a pretty good job. And for many things, the mac has better software available.

Besides "fake *nix" could apply as well to linux as to darwin. Remember that OS X actually licensed the Unix name...

<comment><USER12> No. You can compile the vast majority of unix projects on linux and run them with no modifications. Darwinports is ok if you want only the top 1% of popular projects, often several versions behind.</comment></comment></comment>


Makerbase: A place to tell the world what you made - technolo-g http://makerba.se/

<comment><AUTHOR> So no info what it looks like and to be put on a waitlist you have to link it to your twitter account? From the description, it could be something interesting, but that's asking a bit much.</comment>


NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/

<comment><USER3> This can only mean that they have already broken the Skype encryption - <USER2> want their opponents to use it.

<comment><USER4> They don't need to break it, Skype already offers backdoor access for governments.

<comment><USER5> Has this really been established, or is it just presumed?

I vaguely remember reading something about the skype team saying they would "cooperate" with law enforcement officials, but I'm not sure if that meant actually listening in on encrypted conversations or just sharing the IPs and time of connections to servers.

<comment><USER5> I guess what I meant in short is: Please cite your sources.

<comment><USER6> The article has this problem too. "An anonymous source says a friend of a friend said he knows someone that thinks..."

This reads as FUD they made up to sell ad views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heise reported last year that the Austrian police is able to listen in on Skype connections. Neither Austria nor Skype confirmed or denied the story back then.

<http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/113353>

</comment><comment><USER8> Related: <http://zfoneproject.com/faq.html> (from the creator of PGP software)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the link.

The Zfone FAQ page mentions, that Skype uses VBR codec for audio which is insecure:

"Johns Hopkins University researchers have observed that when voice is compressed with a variable bit-rate (VBR) codec, the packet lengths vary depending on the types of sounds being compressed. This leaks a lot of information about the content even if the packets are encrypted, regardless of what encryption protocol is used. We strongly recommend that you avoid using VBR codecs if you want to make a secure phone call.

<...>

...This means that Skype is vulnerable to VBR leakage regardless of the quality of Skype's built-in crypto."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think the encryption issue is the big problem. I am sure skype's codec has been hacked already. The p2p issue could be addressed by just placing giant routers in isp's like the US did at the telcos. The bigger problem would be transcribing a million streams at once. Also, transcribing arabic words. Thats probably what they are mostly interested in.

There are good acoustic models for english but I doubt there are for arabic. Even if there were, the processing power requirement would be insane. I doubt amazon EC could handle a million streams at once even if they used smaller grammars focusing on suspicious words.

<comment><USER11> more Pashto (<http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=pbt>) than Arabic (<http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=arb>) there's less than 10 million Pashto speakers in the world (about 8M are in Afghanistan) vs. 250M++ for Arabic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's bizarre, considering Skype already has built-in hooks for the police force to use

</comment><comment><USER13> Offering "billions" sounds a bit ridiculous. Wouldn't you start with a couple million and see if there are any contenders before you break out the big blank check? Something's fishy...

<comment><USER14> Isn't it enough money to just pay for the phone calls?

See the headlines now - NSA offers free VOIP service - no payment necessary, no advertising, just the fact that you have to be OK with them listening in on your calls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> By its very nature, eavesdropping on P2P is a tough. How do you monitor all the packets that are routed through different paths? The only way would be Deep Packet Inspection. But again the packets are encrypted with 128 bit key. So even if you get the packets, you'll have a tough time decrypting it.

The Skype binary also is heavily obfuscated. It wont even run if a ring 0 debugger is on your system.

It definitely deserves a billion dollar bounty.

<comment><USER16> Um, the best antireversing/antidebugging people in the world still don't have casual game crackers beat. For "a billion dollars", I might substitute "free xbox".

<comment><USER17> I hear that 'Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell' is kind of annoying to break the protection on :)

<comment><USER16> Hey, I totally went out and bought that title. I just never got around to it. If you wanted to call me out on it, you might be doing me a favor.

[edit]

Context:

[http://rdist.root.org/2007/04/19/anti-debugger-techniques- ar...](http://rdist.root.org/2007/04/19/anti-debugger-techniques-are- overrated/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In other news, Google is launching a free phone service called Google Voice. Perhaps this is their monetization strategy.

<comment><USER19> Adding to the urban ledgend i've heard so many times: "google is the NSA" :)

<comment><USER20> And so is facebook too, donchaknow? Given that HN attracts all the smartest people who would probably figure this stuff out, I'd wager that pg is really a CIA operative. In fact, I suspect Microsoft is as well. I mean, if you are the NSA, what better way is there of looking at everyone's personal, electronic data?

<comment><USER21> Hey, and Digg is run by the government!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Iam not sure if NSA is serious about the money. However, iam sure NSA can force skype to provide them with the encryption algorithm for wiretapping. So instead of spending billions of money on third-party vendor, they might as well can work with skype. My 2 cents

<comment><AUTHOR> How are you sure? It's not a U.S. based company- it doesn't appear NSA would have any holding over it.

"The company won't disclose details of its encryption, either, and isn't required to as it is Europe based."

Hence, their alleged offering of "billions".

<comment><USER23> Didn't they get bought by Ebay? Aren't ebay US based?

<comment><AUTHOR> You could definitely be correct. But the article isn't that old, unless they got bought in the last thirty or so days. Quoting the article this time shows an interesting choice of words:

"But corporate parent eBay, having had to write down $1.4bn already following its $2.6bn purchase of Skype back in the bubble-2.0 days of 2005, might see an opportunity here. A billion or two from the NSA for a backdoor into Skype might make the acquisition seem like a sensible idea."

By "parent", if they get into trouble with an agency like the NSA and Ebay is U.S based (for the sake of argument), even though Skype was acquired, couldn't they 'break free' so-to-speak, and head back to Europe with their main operations? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Europe appears to still be their main base of operations while Ebay is like a corporate funding "parent"... that's how I view it from the article, but I could no doubt be mistaken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The Register on Cryptography and Security is always a good laugh.

<comment><USER16> Actually, Dan Goodin at The Reg is a really credible industry reporter, who really does do actual reporting. This runs under someone else's byline, though.

There's no actual publication (outside of academia) that is good on crypto.

<comment><USER25> What about Bruce Schneier's blog? I'm not into crypto so asking out of curiosity.

<comment><USER16> Without getting into drama, let me suggest that Schneier's personality and notoriety may not match his nuts-and-bolts contributions to the field. I wonder what cperciva thinks about that, but he's also far more polite than me.

<comment><USER24> I second that. And also rise to very questionable policies, in particular patenting things not clearly his. Also personal experience with his people not playing ball in standards committees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone here actually believe that the NSA would pay billions to crack the protocol for an app that runs primarily on Windows machines?

<comment><AUTHOR> I run Linux and use Skype, it's available for Mac's too... why the assumption that Windows is the main player?

[http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/choose/?cm_sp=sv|d...](http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/choose/?cm_sp=sv|download- _-site|sidebar-_-download_lnk|en_us)

But I like brl's interpretation...

<comment><USER19> I use it on linux too and know way too many people who use it on Macs. I agree, its not quite right to limit it to Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> this sounds like a diversion - it doesn't address what would seem to be a much larger problem of knowing which conversations are worth listening to. also wouldn't help establish the context of the conversation/decode its actual meaning.

</comment><comment><USER27> Doesn't Skype make money(as in profit not just revenue)?

</comment><comment><USER28> You only need to read a few books on the history of spying to know GCHQ, NSA et al have repeatedly made major technological breakthroughs and kept them hushed up to exploit a new edge over their adversaries. You wouldn't expect them to say Skype was easily compromised, would you? They would say the opposite.</comment>


As We May Think (1945) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ <comment><USER2> Wow. He anticipates many future inventions. I suppose we can forgive him for not knowing about the transistor. He does talk about the possibility of using vacuum tubes for switching the telephone network, among other things.

Interestingly, he mentions the vacuum tube again when talking about unknown unknowns that might increase technological progress:

"Technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube..."</comment>


Innocent Brother Was Made Into a Bombing Suspect: Sunil Tripathi's Sister Speaks - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/sunil-tripathi-sister-sangeeta-media-labelling-her-brother-bombing-suspect

<comment><USER2> The good thing about this bad publicity is that more people know he is missing. Hopefully, he turns up and in good health.</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I get feedback on my project before the launch? - <AUTHOR> Hi! I've made a project that I think is pretty cool, but I'm not ready to submit it to Show HN or Product Hunt yet.
I would like to find the first 10-20 people to check it out and give me feedback before I share it with the larger audience.
Can you guys recommend me a good place where I can find them?
(If anyone is interested, it's a platform for sharing/discovering web development learning resources. Send me a message to firstname.lastname@example.com if you'd like to help.) <comment><USER2> I am building that platform. check out www.crowdraising.co (Hey HN Hive mind, this is very clearly inline with the OP's query.)</comment>


Swiss reject additional immigration curbs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30267042 <comment><USER2> Whatever one might think about the result of this "votation",I think it's great that people can make their voices heard directly.It keeps politicians in check.Sometimes the people can take bad decisions,but at least they own that decision,they are not constently delegating power to an "elite" that decides for them.

I wish more countries had this "votation" system.And that's the whole problem with the EU.Why would some folks in Germany ,for instance, decide for people living in Spain, or Greece ?it cannot work on the long run. Would americans accept Canada,or Mexico having a saying in how USA should manage its finances?its agriculture? There is a need for international agreements,of course,but USA isnt ruled by people abroad.Switzerland isnt part of the EU,that why it remains a true democracy.

<comment><USER3> As we can see with Switzerland, it strenghtens extreme positions.

Let me ask you a question: why should people in Northrhine-Westphalia "decide for" people in Bavaria? Shouldn't we dissolve our federal parliament?

Having done that, why do the people living in Stuttgart "decide for" the people living in Karlsruhe? Shouldn't we dissolve the state of Baden- Wuerttemberg?

The answer is, of course, that decisions should be made at the lowest level where they are making sense. And in this regard the EU is imperfect.

But you're throwing out the baby with the bath water.

<comment><USER4> The referendum system has been in place for more than a hundred years and it's hard to argue that Switzerland has a tradition of extremism.

Far right parties are on the rise everywhere in Europe, regardless of the voting system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The direct-democracy thing is unique to Switzerland. I don't know of any other country where politicians threaten each other publicly saying things like "If you continue behaving badly at XY, we're going to make a referendum, the people will decide and you'll be screwed".

Also, Swiss people tend to use "us" when they talk about their politicians whereas Germans use "they". This really shows how Swiss stand behind decision made by their government whereas Germans - in comparison - act like infants being totally at the mercy of their leaders (who are elected every four years and basically do what they want during that time).

The theoretical down-site of direct democracy is that if the population is stupid, you'll get instant stupid decisions forced onto politicians. A small, well-educated population shouldn't have this problem though.

More of my experiences within Switzerland you'll find in here: "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" [http://goo.gl/EIX4UX](http://goo.gl/EIX4UX) (Full disclosure: If you're from the EU and looking for a tech-job over here, I'd be happy to help out).

<comment><USER6> You're right, it doesn't work at scale. California (four times more populous than Switzerland) is plagued with plebiscites on every imaginable topic. Often they get passed into law while being in direct conflict with other previous or even concurrent referenda.

<comment><USER7> I've heard the big problem is that a referendum can't raise taxes, but can require the state to spend money.

It would be cool if each proposal had to be financed (e.g. "sponsoring this thing will require raising state income tax by 0.024%"), though I guess that's impractical?

<comment><USER6> That's not true, a referendum can raise taxes. However on account of a previous referendum these tax-raising propositions need a 2/3rds supermajority to pass, while spending projects require only a bare majority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Okay but why?

Good intentions? Open hearted?

Or looking for cheap labor?

(I'm actually asking, no clue about Swiss culture)

<comment><USER9> Studies have shown that in the UK immigrant populations pay more in taxes than they pull out in benefits, I imagine it's the same in Switzerland, despite what neo-fascists might want to believe.

Population growth in Switzerland is currently at 0.6%, so immigration can help supplement this.

Basically there's no good reason to limit immigration.

<comment><USER2> > Studies have shown that in the UK immigrant populations pay more in taxes > than they pull out in benefits, I imagine it's the same in Switzerland, > despite what neo-fascists might want to believe.

It doesnt say anything about the real cost of immigration.All I know is that the british people are getting less and less benefits per people,their healthcare system is being privatized and education is getting more and more expensive,without the "neo-fascists" in power. The ruling elite is doing everything so that more and more people want to vote for what you call "neo- fascists".

And frankly there is no "neo-fascists".It's the bogeyman the elite uses in order to scare off people and make sure they vote "the right way".Fortunatly less and less people are falling for that scam.

<comment><USER7> > their healthcare system is being privatized and education is getting more > and more expensive,without the "neo-fascists" in power.

Huhwhat? The recent damage to the benefit and healthcare system and the huge increase in university fees both happened under the current Conservative government, not because of immigration but because of policy. Turns out the left-right axis is real, and the far right really is further to the right (e.g. UKIP's deputy leader recently said that he couldn't see the NHS surviving in its current form because it didn't have any free-market competition).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Headline is somewhat misleading. The referendum was rejected but it was a rather harsh measure. So even those wanting to slow down immigration may have voted no.

From the article: The country voted in February to re-introduce immigration quotas, in effect opting out of an EU free movement agreement.

<comment><USER11> We added "additional" to the title to try to fix that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> They also voted against increasing their gold reserves and against cutting tax privileges for millionaires. Seems that they just voted for whoever was able to put the most money behind their campaign.

<comment><USER13> Why would they want to increase Gold reserves anyway? Surely holding strategic foreign currency reserves is broadly more useful.

<comment><USER3> Because gold bugs and fiat money.

Gold bugs are kind of the more conservative variant of Bitcoin fans.</comment></comment></comment>


Gnuplotting - Create scientific plots using gnuplot - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnuplotting.org/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad to see that gnuplot has come a long way since the last time I tried to create publication quality plots with it and ran away in horror to fall in the arms of the usual commercial suspects. But these days, python based solutions have more appeal, I like matplotlib a lot.</comment>


Font using dots instead of letters - Design your own version (type a mapping) - <AUTHOR> http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/

<comment><AUTHOR> I coded up this page in response to the comments from my HN post on Thursday - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687> . There was a lot of interest / critique re the mapping between letters and dots, so I resurrected this UI for experimenting into a better web form.

Thanks for the comments on Thursday - I enjoyed battling it out :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Try clicking the "random" link a bunch of times to got a feel for the possible variations.

</comment><comment><USER2> Are you really able to read this? :D

<comment><AUTHOR> For sho. Took a little time, but there are only 26 letters so it's easier than you'd think.</comment></comment>