Ask HN: Freelancers outside US and EU. How do you find quality clients? - <AUTHOR> I'm from Tunisia and I have been a freelance developer for about 6 years now. I get clients mainly from Upwork (oDesk). My hourly rate went like this:
2010-2013 $16/hr
2013-2015 $20/hr - $24/hr (with some occasional $30/hr jobs).
My ideal hourly rate is between $30/hr to $40. But I have been struggling for more than a year to find clients with that rate without success. I have more than 5500 hours worked on Upwork and 100% job success rate and earned the Top Web Developers badge, so I'm not sure where the problem is. I also have good English communication.
I thought it may be because of the drop in quality of jobs posted on Upwork in the last couple of years so I tried other ways including AngleList, Monthly HN Freelancer posts but still no luck.
Now it seems obvious to me that the best tech jobs prefers that the developer lives in US even if the job is remote. Am I right? Any guidance or help is appreciated.
Thanks <comment><USER2> what's the language you do programming in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Microsoft Stack and I do front-end development too.

<comment><USER2> I figure the reason is because you've been charging too cheap prices for a long time, or rather always, and it's reflected in your job history.

If you've always charged $20, why would anyone pay you more now?

Some freelancers get paid $50-80/hour only, but you probably are going to be stuck with your current rate.</comment></comment></comment>


Bill Could Destroy Uber's Unsustainable Business Model - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmpaq4/this-bill-could-destroy-ubers-unsustainable-business-model <comment><USER2> Regardless of what you think of the bill, that's a bogus test. I may want a guy to come do a contract job for me on certain hours according to a certain spec and meeting certain compliance standards. Maybe these aren't even my restrictions, but those of a client. I might need some one for a specific job who I don't generally, so I get a contractor. He still has less control over how he does his work.

On the other hand, I have had bosses who don't care if or when I come in, so long as I get the work done. I have also had those who want me in a desk, nine-to-five.

It's a bogus test, and like so many other things governments do, will cause a long-term problem for a short-term gain. Politicians spend more time touting their bill than they do considering and mitigating its actions.

<comment><AUTHOR> The bill does account for that which is why classes of contractors have been able to win exceptions for it. The test is not an end-all for independent contractors, but I think the test is pretty good as, for example, if you work in one of those Turk platforms for Amazon/Facebook the work you do is considered contracting but to actually make money you HAVE to do 40+ hours and are given very few options about what type of work you can do (do you want to look at child porn or do you want to moderate hate speech or do you want to do these other family of tasks which are not as rewarding but less taxing psychologically). In your case, I think you're misunderstanding the control of work. He's not gonna rearrange his life schedule for the work, nor will he be forced to live in your house nor will he make any major outside of work changes. Less control refers to algorithmic bosses that in the name of a flexible work schedule end up rearranging your whole day-to-day schedule.</comment></comment>


Ancient Greek and Egyptian Interactions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.oup.com/2016/04/greek-egyptian-interactions-literature/ <comment><USER2> >"You Greeks are children." That's what an Egyptian priest is supposed to have said to a visiting Greek in the 6th century BC.

I don't know what the need is to be vague. According to Plato, this was said to Solon immediately preceding the story of Atlantis.

"Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore." [http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is pretty good evidence that the two cultures influenced each other in waves. Egyptian culture was a lot more stable earlier and records some Greek history even before the greeks do in terms of greek settlement under the Acropolis going back way further than documented evidence.

The Atlantis myth actually comes from Egypt to Greece- and much of Greek early knowledge of themselves comes from Egyptian historians.

Later after the conquest by Alexander (surrender) the influence on Egypt is fairly massive. If you ever get a chance visit the temple of Hathor north of Thebes.

One of the most "intact" temples still standing and huge Greek influences. Was just there in January and had to ninja in with Military escort as Egypt is a bit unstable now.

</comment><comment><USER4> A fun blog post that leaves out many other fun connections to today. Even the word we use, "Egypt" is the Greek name (Aígyptos) for the place known as al Misr. And the demotic language was just that: demotic is a Greek adjective that just means the colloquial language of the people (demos) as opposed to the hieratic (priestly) speech or Received English. Saying it is called demotic as if he'd written "those smalltalk programs were written in a language known as object-oriented"

It's really fascinating how much opression/occupation literature there apparently was, given that in western literature they are often the _conquerors_ (before the 1940s, Godwin's law would have referenced Napoleon; before him it would have been -- Pharaoh). I hadn't realized how much turnover there was, but I suppose in 3000 years there's time for a lot to happen.

Another fascinating connection is between Egypt/Ur/Babylon et al and the pre- Aryan Indus culture. It appears likely that writing spread from the fertile crescent to India via trade, as it did to the Phoenicians and thence to Greece and to us.

</comment><comment><USER5> Note that Hermes Trismegistus is a local syncretism rather than a full equivalent as the article implies.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article. The Ancient Greeks, were from what I understand, very open about how (most of) their culture was essentially handed to them by the Egyptians via the trading colonies the Greeks, who were a seafaring people, kept at the Egyptian shores.

<comment><USER7> Do you have a reference for this? While Greece was strongly influenced by the cultures of the Near East and Egypt, it entirely misstates the situation to say that "most of their culture was handed to them." Edit - Walter Burkert has an excellent, short book on this - The Orientalizing Revolution

<comment><USER8> At least in the specific case of Herodotus, in his Histories, he has several theories about Greek customs borrowed from other cultures. He also has a relatively open mind about different cultures having customs that are better. For example, he talks at one point how he thinks the Persians (who were often enemies with different city states) have a good custom of raising young children (males) separate from the parents until a certain age so if they should die it is less of a hardship.

<comment><USER9> Herodotus was fantastic because he was the first historian, but he is seriously lacking as a historian if you judge him by modern standards. That doesn't detract from him as a great man and an intellectual pioneer, but it does mean we should be skeptical of his theories.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus#Egypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus#Egypt)

<comment><USER8> For sure, everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt. I was just giving an example of a specific Greek who had some of the ideas the OP was requesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article has a glaring omission. The Minoans were trading regularly with Egypt millenia ago.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> Good read!</comment>


Goals, Sprints, and Tasks - <AUTHOR> https://www.technolaaji.com/goals-sprints-and-tasks/ <comment><USER2> The author should invest in a new keyboard. The shift key and all punctuation keys on the current keyboard are broken.</comment>


Super Mario Bros. game was just 31 Kilobytes. How's that possible? - <AUTHOR> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/where-do-all-the-bytes-come-from-f51586690fd0/#.fxlrfohvy <comment><USER2> No, no, no.

1\. Super Mario Bros. is 40KB (PRG ROM is 32KB, and CHR ROM is 8KB). That said, I suppose if you were to compress the ROM, you probably would end up with value like 31KB.

2\. Levels don't use RLE or LZ77, that would use too much space. Rather, the game uses commands like "from now on, use this ground fill pattern", "draw pipe here", "put a staircase", "put a goal". Super Mario Bros. uses two bytes per object, representing the following information: XXXXYYYY PSSSVVVV, where X is horizontal position within the page, Y is vertical position within the page, P moves to the next page, S is a command, and V is its parameter (length or number of an extended object). Y positions bigger than 0b1011 are used for special commands (as such parameters would be rendered out of bounds).

3\. Graphics aren't compressed as they are stored in CHR ROM, and are directly accessed by the PPU (PPU cannot access RAM). However, as the graphics are 2bpp, they don't use as much space. Palettes are used to not restrict the entire game to 2bpp - note that 16x16 blocks have different color palettes. Some tricks are used to reduce the number of necessary tiles - for instance, clouds are the same thing as bushes, just with a different palette applied.

4\. Demoscene is misleading. The way demoscene works is that most things are using procedural generation, meanwhile the levels in Super Mario Bros. are actually designed, and graphics were drawn by an artist, they aren't using some arbitrarily picked mathematical function chosen because it looked cool. The game has to be playable after all.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, nothing in this article has anything to do with how the NES worked. If you want a real introduction to the hardware, "I Am Error" by Nathan Altice is a great book about how the NES worked. It includes a chapter about how SMB1 in particular stored its level layouts.

<comment><USER4> I once did a project scripting AI for Mario on SMB1 on an emulator, and I watched the game's memory pages as I did so I could learn more. To my surprise, I saw the pages of arrays of hex bytes in the memory mirroring what I saw on the level, the layout was very literally transferred directly. When Mario moved, the current screen and the next one were clearly visible scrolling by in memory, which different hex bytes representing different tile types.

<comment><USER5> You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow as someone who knows the NES well this article contains an error in almost every paragraph. They really got all the technical stuff wrong! So many made- up numbers everywhere!

To explain Super Mario a bit better, it's really not using many tricks. The graphics are uncompressed and take up 8KB. The code is uncompressed. The only thing really compressed is the levels. The explosion in video game size from then to now is because asset detail grows O(N^2) - if you double the detail of a texture you end up squaring the size.

<comment><USER7> Developers are also just lazy or plain believe in snake oil. On PC, Titanfall 1 had uncompressed wav files for audio which was 35GB of its 48GB file size, the reason being 'decoding audio incurs a performance cost and we want the maximum performance for our players'.

Not only is using lossless audio unnecessary (no in the world is gonna hear the difference between a wav/flac or 320kbps mp3 gunshot), the decoding cost for mp3 or ogg is miniscule.

<comment><USER8> That is just brutally asinine. Probably one guy in the whole dev team believed this load of crock and the rest of the team had to follow him off the cliff because he had a senior title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > They can cram 30minutes of an entire 3d shooter into 64kb because they > understand and know so much more about their data.

Erm, not really. Most of the time it's because they spend like 3 minutes of loading time generating textures and all in memory before displaying anything on screen. And they rely on the giganormous graphic libraries of Windows (for Windows demos) + the huge driver stack that would never fit in 64kb in the first place.

I am much more impressed by demos built to run on "the hardware" back in C64 and Amiga days.

<comment><USER10> About the driver stack that would never fit:

When you have a single hardware (C64, Amiga...), it is not more complex to address than addressing drivers. Peeking/poking ports and directly addressing video memory is not much costly in bytes.

<comment><USER11> I think, though, that this is why, back in the '90s, there was so much hand- wringing about recent developments (at the time) in computing leading to the spiritual death of the demoscene. All that hardware heterogeneity meant that democoders end up far removed from the machines they work on.

It's turned out to be at least somewhat true, insofar as oldschool demos still carry a lot of cachet despite the hardware not being anywhere near as capable. I don't know which one took more effort or skill to build, but, on a gut level, 8088MPH just _feels_ cooler than kkrieger.

Maybe that's just me showing my age, though.

<comment><USER12> Considering they had to write custom tools for pretty much everything, including a visual language and editor to design all art assets almost two decades before that became a thing in AAA games and create custom compression schemes down even -IIRC- custom floating point representation that would compress better, i'd say that .kkrieger was the one that took more effort and skill.

(though a lot of that work was largely based on their initial work for .the .product).

8088MPH is certainly very cool, but a large reason is that nobody had bothered with the original IBM PC much before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My reading enjoyment was really harmed by the indiscriminate occasional lower- casing of the units. According to the notation I was taught, 1MB is 1 megabyte, while 1mb is 1 mili-bit - a fractional unit (used really rarely in information theory) that is 8 billion times smaller.

Note: I think you can actually talk about fractional bits in information through

</comment><comment><USER14> Super off topic but....

> Which, for the next 2 billion folks in emerging markets, on 2G connections, > is like the worst idea ever.

Which emerging markets still use 2G? In almost all of the world 2G is being phased out and it's in developed economies where it is scheduled to take the longest. Many emerging markets had their infrastructure created after 2G was obsolete and are already on better technology.

[https://www.emnify.com/blog/global-2g-phase- out](https://www.emnify.com/blog/global-2g-phase-out)

<comment><USER15> I know that some hub/station on which remote sensors to monitor cows' temperature communicate with a web server with a 2G technology as they were designed many years ago.

And it's an issue as operators phase out 2D...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just clever use of tiles, proper encoding of assets, and making you code lean.

Back in the '00s, I made a j2me mobile realtime multiplayer online strategy game, which included animations, music and sfx. It was 60kb, because I wanted to target as many devices as possible.

Later it grew till about 200kb

Lots of space and performance optimizations.

<comment><USER17> What game was this? (Can I find JARs anywhere?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "Basically, we're sending more data to smaller devices simply due to screen > resolution. Which, for the next 2 billion folks in emerging markets, on 2G > connections, is like the worst idea ever. But I digress. That's a different > post."

I'll take the devil's advocate position on this tangent. Mobile data infrastructure is remarkably reliable and cost-effective in emerging markets.

Anecdotally, I live in Canada. We have some of the most expensive and restrictive mobile phone service in the world. 4G coverage is still spotty, even in major cities. On a recent trip to Morocco it was really astounding to me how much cheaper, faster and more ubiquitous 4G service was.

Here is some actual data:

[0] Global pricing of 1GB of data: [https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide- data-pricing/](https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/)

[1] Mobile data speeds by country: [https://www.opensignal.com/reports/2018/11/global-state- of-t...](https://www.opensignal.com/reports/2018/11/global-state-of-the- mobile-network)

</comment><comment><USER19> This was also on reddit today: [https://pay.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/dfv6n3/l...](https://pay.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/dfv6n3/let_that_sink_in/)

Interesting that a single screenshot of the game weighs more than the entire game.

<comment><USER12> That is because they didn't try, this screenshot[0] is 1980 bytes which is much smaller than the linked image (and something like OptiPNG might make it even smaller) :-P

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/ABFJbYW.png](https://i.imgur.com/ABFJbYW.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I prefer the inverse of this question. Something like... Why is the iOS Uber app taking up 250mb on my phone?

<comment><USER21> Wow. Really ? Thats like, really bloated;

<comment><USER20> Yep. To be fair, it's 211 app and 39 docs and data which I assume is a map cache

Facebook is 235 app size. These are both basically just clients for backend Rest, seems crazy at this size

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This article shows how the author has a vision about developing nations still working on 2G and SNES to web game development as almost being the same. Back then people didn't even talk about RAM but ROM so it's a totally different scenario, and about the 2G maybe you think South Korea is a developing country too well they're the first ones with the 5G technology in the world implemented at comercial scale.

</comment><comment><USER23> Very good talk by David Braben about the original Elite where he describes tricks they used to cut the size: [https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game- Postmorte...](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem)

</comment><comment><USER24> It's unlikely that the final image displayed is 180kb for a 256 * 240 resolution, this would imply that the color uses 3 bytes (RGB). i think it's coded in one byte (256 colors).

So i'd say the final image would be 60 kbytes. Can someone confirm ?

</comment><comment><USER25> Ask HN: I wonder what the fewest lines of code that have earned the most revenue is...

</comment><comment><USER26> This article is from 2015. The title should reflect that.

</comment><comment><USER27> .kkrieger wasn't 64K, it was 96K.

</comment><comment><USER28> Great write-up! Pondering this question is the thing that brought my into software development in the first place. It was fascinating back then how my big, expensive, PC/XT would struggle to make anything run half as smoothly as a Game Boy. PC games with contents spread over several floppy disks, taking MEGABYTES of space and slowly crunch-crunch-crunching whenever I'd go to a different screen in Quest for Glory, but you could play in the immersive game of Zelda seamlessly.

It's good to look back and appreciate the fundamentals, since there was a lot of clever thinking in this we can learn from today. There are often times I'll come up with an overly hefty solution in a generic case, instead of thinking like Nintendo did about focusing on making something cool to look at with a fun experience, though with a much narrower scope. NLP is one place I see this a lot - it's often very easy to make aws happy when I go through GBs of data, for something where 95% of the value to the end user could be reached with a 50kB file on the S3. Dapps are another one - helps a lot to think like a Nintendo dev in the 80s about what the reusable parts of your data are.

<comment><USER29> > Great write-up!

It's an awful post, it would take less time to point out what is correct than highlight all the mistakes.</comment></comment>


Digital Forensics: 5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=5-ways-to-spot-a-fake&print=true <comment><USER2> Code to do the cloning detection: [http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/tonight-im- going-to-write-my...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to- write-myself-aston.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> They forgot "if the image is facing you from a rack in a supermarket checkout line, its a strong indicator of a faked photo."

<comment><USER4> step 6 train your eye by studying mistakes <http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In a world of controversy, fake and staged photos can be helpful.

<comment><USER6> huh?

<comment><USER5> People fake and stage photos when they find it helps their 'cause,' hence the need to spot it when it happens. I am not advocating staging them. A Palestinian kid was killed in a staged shootout with Israel. Truth all the way.</comment></comment></comment>


I run a small newsletter and I'm trying to get more subscribers. Any advice? - <AUTHOR> I write a newsletter focused on helping millennials succeed in the workplace and in life. My newsletter typically features two interviews from prominent business people as well as a few interesting articles. <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the link: [http://www.arilewis.com/newsletter/](http://www.arilewis.com/newsletter/)</comment>


Peer-to-Peer, Personal web platform Tonido SDK released under Apache 2.0 license - <AUTHOR> http://www.codelathe.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/22/announcing-the-tonido-platform-sdk/

<comment><USER2> This is a nice affordable piece of hardware, but I'd have to imagine that most of the biggest ISPs (e.g., Fios, Comcast, etc) would not allow you to basically run your own web services via your home internet connection. But, if your ISP allows, I wonder how web app performance using the tonidoPlug compares to shared and/or dedicated web hosting services?

<comment><AUTHOR> It comes with 512 MB RAM. Performance should be better than shared hosting</comment></comment>


Pure CSS3 accordion - <AUTHOR> http://www.red-team-design.com/css3-accordion In this article you'll learn how to create a pretty simple animated accordion with CSS3 :target pseudo-class. <comment><AUTHOR> It's because the accordion is made with CSS only and it uses the :target pseudo-class. The back button is not "hijacked" :)

<comment><USER2> Yes, it is, because it's not doing what I expect it to do. It's neat, but it's still hijacking.

<comment><USER3> Why is it not doing what you expect it to do? When content on a page changes, an entry should be added to the history.

<comment><USER2> I don't think that everyone is still used to it.

Many pages have scrolling ticker-style feeds - hitting "back" doesn't rewind that.

<comment><USER3> I would argue that entries to the history should be added when user interaction was involved and when a significant amount of the content has changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This guy: <http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/>

Has been at it for years, lots of good stuff there.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is pretty awesome; anyone know how many mobile browsers support this? We've been relying on jQuery mobile, but it's a bitch and a half convincing it that we don't really want pretty rounded shade borders around the icons, or that we don't want them on the left-hand side.

</comment><comment><USER5> The back button flips back through the accordion, which is unexpected, and not very elegant.

<comment><USER6> Was going to say this. I really detest sites that hijack the back button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the page content is taller than the browser viewport, you will, due to the nature of hash links, jump/scroll to the expanded entry. This may or may not be desired.</comment>


Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases - <AUTHOR> http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/18/0956797611432178.abstract?rss=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Finally found a link to the full text PDF: [http://portal.unitbv.ro/proxy/download.ashx?dec=1&url=uh...](http://portal.unitbv.ro/proxy/download.ashx?dec=1&url=uh4QwdELmSQKwh0PmD07tSpMxqiKsSZJmS0LvD4BvD3LtqfOvhALl9aNl8YM0cYN1cYM1noS0PAT09eN0dlOlnwUmCtRvgMKwg4CB6X)!

<comment><USER2> I wonder what percentage of the students had studied game theory and realised that the expected outcome of either medicine was the same...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Speaking English and french as foreign languages (germen being the mother language), I can largely agree with the OP, from my experience. While it's hard to explain why it is like that, for me it takes out some cultural biases you most of the time have when you think in your own language (profiency in said foreign language required).

</comment><comment><USER4> If someone has a native-level of fluency in more than one language, would the decision-making bias remain?

<comment><USER3> Good question, possibel that it goes the way as with dreams. Have to ask my girl-friend about it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Living abroad, half the time I find myself thinking in another language. I recently decided which foreign language I should spend my time on next. Turns out my teacher doesn't speak English so I'll be learning my fourth and final language via my third language. Confused? I am, though I suppose I'm making a sound decision...

<comment><USER6> I learned some Spanish in English, which is not my native language. I've found the key is to think in whatever language you are using most as much as you can; at least in the beginning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My anecdotal experience says just having the ability to verbalize in different languages(3 in my case) makes you reason for a longer time. I suspect, that helps avoid some sort of biases, but might be a crippling factor in some situations(time-constrained decisions) .

<comment><USER8> In this case the experiment compared bilinguals who had the problem presented to them in their native tongue with bilinguals who had the problem presented to them in their second language. It found that answers were dependant on the language they had been presented in - when the answers were in a foreign language there was less decision bias. It seems that being bilingual did not prevent people from having this bias in their native tongue.

<comment><USER7> Yep, read the paper. But am very uncomfortable calling this a decision bias. It's more specific than that. It's about aversion of risk and how framing a decision in loss terms vs gain terms leads people to decide differently(see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring>). Otherwise i agree the bilingual subjects do display the bias in their native tongue. Am gonna try reasoning in all three languages i know and see how that affects my decision making :-P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds reasonable. My experience (native polish, almost native english plus ukraininan and russian) says brain is rather unable (or it's not used) to use multiple languages at the same time. So if you think in foreign language (I mean: language you don't usualy think in) brain hasn't enough words (or is too lazy to look for them ;)) to make big analysis of problem so It doesn't do that.

</comment><comment><USER10> this is absolutely true. having become fluent in french as a second language, i find that i seem to make decisions much more rapidly and with less consternation than in English. when i first noticed this, like the authors of the paper, i concluded that it did have a fair amount to do with being emotionally distanced from what i was saying, so awesome to see it formalized!

</comment><comment><USER11> Kipling noticed this - in his book Kim (Indian) is thinking in English to overcome hypnosis :)</comment>


Mindfuck. Libraries are just an institutionalized form of piracy - <AUTHOR>

Mindfuck. Libraries are just an institutionalized form of piracy. Thoughts? <comment><USER2> "piracy" is a misnomer for "copyright infringement." Libraries don't infringe on copyright. For example, a purchased book can be lent, according to long established law and practice.

Ergo, promoting this thought is not only wrong, but it serves to feed the voracious posssiveness of the large-scale copyright holders who want to take away rights we already have.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you spend on food? - <AUTHOR>

Do you eat out more than you cook your own food?
How much do you spend weekly?
I'm slightly puzzled that ordering out is more expensive than cooking for ones self. Shouldn't centralized preparation be more efficient? <comment><USER2> I balance it more or less equally. Lunch is generally at the office cafeteria, so I won't count that. Weekend lunches are kitchen experiments, so think of it as lab work and don't count it either.

Breakfast is typically cereal, or toast and marmalade, but on weekends I might do scrambled eggs, or pancakes and if my girlfriend's around, we might do something like PohaPoha); or Upma](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upma>Upma); or something else fancy, but it's always at home.

Dinner is where the trade-off happens. I'll cook at home one or two days and eat out three days. So what happens with the remaining two days of the week? Leftovers from the two days that I do cook.

When I eat out, I end up spending not less than $10 on a meal. If I cook at home, I spend maybe $10 for two and a half meals. Why the difference? From what I can tell, there are several reasons...

At home, I cook once and cover several meals. I have no wastage because I refrigerate leftovers and eat them the next day. I decide what I'm gonna cook before I buy the ingredients. Each dish a restaurant makes has to serve one person. They buy the ingredients in advance and hope to break even on what they use. More often than not, then end up with wastage that they must throw away. This is factored into the menu.

The restaurant also needs to pay rent for their premises, pay salaries and follow health guidelines. You could factor your house rent into your meals, in which case it should shoot each day's meal up by $30 or more. You could also choose to pay yourself whenever you cook, pushing it up another few dollars, and as far as the health code goes... you decide.

<comment><AUTHOR> (there's also the cost of refrigerating your own meals)

even with rent and salary overhead, it still surprises me that some buffet- oriented system (which eliminates the one-dish:one-person problem you described, and reduces staffing) hasn't made eating out vastly cheaper.

the only thing cooking at home seems to have going for it is that most people are not otherwise productive with their time in the evening anyway.

that and the "homemade" connotation - which i suppose translates to something real if you have a family, in terms of time spent together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a college student, I spend about $20 for food per week. Rice, eggs, and beans are dirt-cheap and they keep me full. Not sure if they're nutritious enough, but I'm alive -- that's good enough for me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I follow a strict diet plan, which involves eating the same thing every day. It lets me eat cheaply, because I can buy in bulk. I spend $25 a day.

I eat a lot too, because I like good food. I might eat out every second or third day and spend $100 a meal, including drinks.

I could save money by cutting down on going out, sure, but it's a small price to spend for the enjoyment of the food and the company and the environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> what are you eating every day at $25?

<comment><USER4> A _lot_ of fruit, vegetables, oats, chicken and beef.</comment></comment></comment>


Books About Basic Income - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/basic-income/the-big-library-books-about-basic-income-b9763071b987 <comment><USER2> Another _huge_ collection of shrouded Amazon affiliate links (tag sssubi-20)... followed by a Patreon beg.</comment>


Japan may extend Hayabusa2 asteroid mission to visit 2nd space rock - <AUTHOR> https://www.space.com/japan-hayabusa2-asteroid-mission-eyes-second-target.html <comment><USER2> Amazing how once they are out there they can squeeze (or try to) more life of these missions.</comment>


Cult Live is a game in disguise - <AUTHOR> https://www.saasgeneralist.com/post/cult-live-is-a-game-in-disguise#1 <comment><USER2> Okay.

Cure.fit/Cult.fit or whatever is the brand is apparently only available for India/UAE phone numbers. Great.

<comment><USER3> Is number mandatory? Can you signup with email?

Also they basically went from IRL centers to full live (they had limited live classes previously but nowhere near this scale, or with celeb instructors) in a matter of couple weeks. Great opportunity to go international with live, however not sure if this is something they can quickly build, or could have foreseen.

<comment><USER4> Well, correct me if I am wrong, but I would assume that it takes months of discussions and negotiations to get celebrities to do a training video in the exact format you want. You need directors, lighting, sound and then video editors to cut and place your timers etc (as seen on the app). And then no celebrity comes out willingly saying I want to do this. You have financial and legal discussions and what not. So, I really disagree with you saying that they did this in a matter of weeks. I do agree that the timing to release these couldn't have been any better.

<comment><USER3> If that was indeed the case with them, then they really had some foresight.

Because this is the 4th week of lockdown here and they didn't have all these celeb classes before that.

Also there isn't a lot of special lightning, direction going in some of those vids. Definitely seems like a non trivial amount of work, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Anyone who's serious about being fit will not want to be seen playing a game to get fit.

Sports?

<comment><USER6> Sports have it reversed. The players work out so that they can play sports.

While this is for people who want play games so that they become fit

<comment><USER5> For sports at a professional level you are correct.

Most people (not professional athletes) play sports for a combination fitness and recreational activity.

Sports are games that make you fit.</comment></comment></comment>


Counterfactual Regret Minimization with Kuhn Poker - <AUTHOR> http://blog.varunajayasiri.com/ml/kuhn_poker.html <comment><USER2> This is cool. I was actually asked for the optimal strategy for player 1 in this game as an interview question for a quant research role; I didn't know anything about game/decision theory, other than the basics, and so I only got as far as determining what to do with an Ace and a King, and then figuring out that you should bluff with a certain frequency if you hold the ace.

Anyhow, I came up with another question while considering this problem. Player 1 should only bluff at the optimal rate if player 2 punishes them for deviating from this rate by changing the frequency that they call when holding the king. Otherwise, Player 1 gains more on average by bluffing with the queen more frequently. So, how should Player 2 figure out if Player 1 is actually bluffing at the optimal rate (and not higher)? It could happen, with exponentially small probability, that Player 1 decides whether to bluff randomly, and bluffs with the first 10,000 queens before ever folding with a queen. How does Player 2 distinguish this from Player 1 only ever bluffing with the queen?

But perhaps this is something that the Nash Theorem deals with? I don't know. Any comments from people who know more than me on this are welcome!

<comment><USER3> > Player 1 should only bluff at the optimal rate if player 2 punishes them for > deviating from this rate by changing the frequency that they call when > holding the king. Otherwise, Player 1 gains more on average by bluffing with > the queen more frequently. So, how should Player 2 figure out if Player 1 is > actually bluffing at the optimal rate (and not higher)?

You're describing exploitative strategies - that's the kind of circular thinking of "if he knows that I know what he knows...". In a Nash equilibrium neither side has an incentive to change their strategy even if they know what their opponent is doing. If you're betting at the optimal frequency, there is nothing that your opponent can do to counterexploit your strategy. If you're deviating from the optimal frequency, your opponent can adjust, you can adjust in return and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the uninitiated like me it's confusing at first the following sentence when deriving the Nash equilibrum:

"If first player has a K, because of 1. and 2., he would only lose if he bets. So first player should pass if he has a K."

It actually means that the first player always loses on average if he bets (expected utility -1/2 if not mistaken). If he folds however the expected utility is clearly zero since half of the time wins and half of the time loses.

I have not reached yet the description of the algorithm.

I actually find somewhat paradoxical that the first player should fold with a K and bluff with a Q! I remember that I loved little results like this when years ago I first followed the game theory course in Coursera. It was a little dry but I completed it nevertheless since I found it quite fascinating. I do wonder what possible applications are for my working field, machine learning, to apply these kind of algorithms. I would love to have an excuse to devote some time to it.

<comment><USER5> > I actually find somewhat paradoxical that the first player should fold with > a K and bluff with a Q!

Bluffing is a strategy that wins against the middling hands you can convince to fold, and loses against the strongest hands which just call you anyways. The game is special in that when you have a middling hand, your opponent _never_ has one, so they _always_ either correctly call with the best hand or correctly fold with the worst.</comment></comment>


Best vs. Easiest Tool For The Job, or Why I Dislike Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://shadyacres.tumblr.com/post/61560297240/the-microsoft-tool-for-the-job

<comment><USER2> I have nothing against grandmothers, but I think of Windows as an OS designed for grandmothers. Everything has to be 'easy enough for one's grandmother'. There is nothing wrong with that. But I am, just a bit, beyond that level. I find it cripplingly limiting.

Windows has become so simplified that it does nothing easily...unless all you do is play solitaire and read web pages.

This is true of most MS applications. They are all project based. Two clicks and you have a working project. It is great for a MS sales demo. But when you have a real world task and it needs to move beyond a MS project template....look out.

I much prefer process tools. They do very little for you. There are no two click projects. You have to know what the process pieces do. The advantage is that they will connect in an infinite number of ways but this requires sufficient knowledge. The perfect example is the Linux command line (|).

An example: In the 90s I had a MS universal subscription that included support. It was a great deal. I needed to create a web frontend to a database. Two clicks...working. Nice. Then I noticed that data was stale. Newly inserted data in the database did not appear in my application wo restarting it. I could not figure it out. I called support. A MS engineer helped me. He was great, an expert. It took him a _man-week_ to fix this!

I recently did something similar - a TCP server using Python and MySQL. It took a little longer to get anything to work. But I did not need an 'expert' to meet the last requirement.</comment>


China's Tencent Buys 12% Stake in Snap - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-08/tencent-buys-10-percent-stake-in-social-media-company-snap <comment><USER2> 3 quarters of low revenue and high expenses, does China feel the company growth prospects plus its relative poor performance make it undervalued to the public?

Maybe just a gamble?</comment>


If driverless cars save lives, where will we get organs? - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2014/08/15/if-driverless-cars-save-lives-where-will-we-get-organs/

<comment><USER2> Prisoners (ala Larry Niven's "The Jigsaw Man").

Hospital brokered Markets (if we ever legalize sales).

tldr; Bre Pettis via Erin Griffith's answer: 3D printing.

<comment><USER3> Another answer is in the movie "Never Let Me Go", one of the most bleak movies ever made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Grow them in vats? There was a story about lab grown vaginas a while ago; hoping this happens for organs too soon.

</comment><comment><USER5> Police shootings.

</comment><comment><USER6> Motorcyclists.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pedestrians.</comment>


My Knuth reward check - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcfn.com/2011/05/my-knuth-reward-check.html <comment><USER2> Wow, I was not expecting this article of mine to appear on Hacker News. The error I found was in volume 4a page 574 (as the memo line on the check shows). The solution to exercise 67 on that page says a particular circuit uses 6 ANDN gates, which I thought should be NAND gates. It gets a bit more complicated because Knuth was referring to the ANDN op code for MMIX, but there was still a mistake. (The other error I noticed was n choose k on page 824, but I checked the errata and it had already been found.)

</comment><comment><USER3> well, what was the mistake then?

<comment><USER4> To save anyone else the trouble: the errata can be found at <http://www-cs- faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html> , but it hasn't been updated to include this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _I have to admit that trying to find an error in a book is a strange vacation goal_

Come on, I can only wish I was smart enough to set myself such a goal realistically. And to reach it? Would make this a vacation of a lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER6> Found two errors back around 2000 or 2001. Cashed both checks. Figure he would want to keep the balance correct on his accounts. :) Only slightly regret it.

</comment><comment><USER7> So it's a fake check?

<comment><USER8> Knuth stopped writing real checks due to the possibility of check fraud: <http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html>.

For that matter, almost all recipients considered the bragging values of the checks to be worth more than the few dollars in reward money; very few (or none) have been cashed.

<comment><USER9> Still seems like a bit of a gyp. I hope that Knuth is willing to provide a real cheque for real money if you ask. He did, after all, promise real money.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure you can sell that for more than $2.56. Hell, if you get one I'll commit to buy it off you for $5 plus postage. Email in profile.

<comment><USER11> Why would you want a DK check with someone else's name on it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I assume the error wasn't included to save Mr. Knuth from an avalanche of people "finding" the same error and demanding a check.

<comment><USER13> That's not the way it works; the "finder's fee" goes only to the first person to find an error.

Knuth also pays for suggested improvements, but these are a bit harder to get.

(Not that you asked, but I've got one of each.)

<comment><USER12> Cool. Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This will get downvoted but...

Until we actually know what the error was, _it's not true_.

<comment><USER8> What are you trying to say? That the author may be lying? He would be found out soon enough - it would be stupid to try. That the error is not real? Knuth seems to think so, and the author is primarily claiming to have received a check anyway.

<comment><USER14> It would be reasonable to reveal the error in question, rather than tease us with just the cheque. Besides, Knuth or not, it's still valid when we learn what it is.

<comment><USER8> In case you hadn't noticed: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2525309>.

<comment><USER14> Well then, -10 karma, it was worth it :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unicorns, Startups and Hosted Email - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thinkst.com/2015/10/unicorns-startups-and-hosted-email.html <comment><USER2> Gmail is good, but it's not the features so much as the complexity of running my own mail server that's stopping me moving off it (to say nothing of the fact I am not a "Unicorn"). The current DIY offerings are far too heavy and complex. It's a pity because there are a lot of apps that could use the identity/data layer of email if it was simpler to use. By simple I mean if we were inventing it today then a simple JSON under the protection ssl would be a decent starting point. Extensions over the basics could be flagged in the subject header with the payload as another JSON file in the basic attachment infrastructure. While it would be more complex it shouldn't be too many times more complex than the dime a dozen "IRC client in language X" or a REST interfaces.

Maybe I am wrong regarding traditional email though, is there a simple and easy DIY email stack around these days?

<comment><USER3> E-mail software is not complex. It's all based on a simple line-based text protocol. The stack is also pretty simple to learn if you spend an hour on it.

The administrative headaches range from general user woes to networks that don't want your mail or have various ways of handling it, and you regularly have to address new and unusual problems. But this has nothing to do with the stack or protocol. This is because not all mail is made the same, not everyone does it right, and spam is really god damn annoying.

Don't run your own mail server unless you want to find out what makes BOFHs cry.

<comment><USER4> At one point I "inherited" an email system that had ~120 different domains hundreds of servers worldwide and pretty much every email program known (including Lotus Notes) - migrating that to one email system while keeping the whole thing running was no fun at all - largely as nobody cares that much about email until it doesn't work then they get very upset and shouty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think this is that surprising. A lot of those firms would already have large-ish engineering teams already but managing the complexity of the mail servers is just not a good use of that resource.

Mail is a mostly solved technical problem, and having 'better' mail servers than the next guy isn't going to put food on the table any more.

<comment><USER6> Mail is a commodity now. It would be like trying to program your own switchboard or run your own phone lines,

<comment><USER7> > It would be like trying to program your own switchboard or run your own > phone lines

You mean like a PBX? Most companies with >= 50 employees do this. Smaller/newer ones will definitely tend towards a managed service for this though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The comment there by Anonymous:

"Reminds me of this: "The Hostile Email Landscape," by Jody Ribton [http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email- landscape/](http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-landscape/)

In summary: Start sending email from a new mail server and the established players will likely mark it as spam. Market captured."

<comment><USER9> I am often installing whole new email servers (author of [https://poste.io](https://poste.io) here)... And thats not true, at least from my experience - well unless your first email is not "super promo whatever"...

<comment><USER10> Just so you know, there are quite a few typos and grammar issues on your homepage.

<comment><USER8> Indeed, and at least the typos (like the "interenet") can be easily detected with the free spell checkers (and even some grammar issues!) It can help efesak2, but it's off topic to what we discuss here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Will be interesting times for EU startups when at the end of January 2016 model clauses and corporate bindings break down due to the 29 Working Group and EuGH decisions.

<comment><USER12> Could you please elaborate and provide links about what happens then? This sounds important, yet I have never heard about these things...

<comment><USER11> IANAL.

The EuGH court made it's decision that safe harbor is no longer considered lawful (triggered by a law suit by an Austrian against Facebook in Ireland). It basically says that EU data protection agencies can investigate companies for data protection issues even if the EU company uses an US company that is Safe Harbor certified.

This is due to the fact that the EuGH considers NSA snooping unlawful, especially that EU citizizens do not know about the spying and have no legal way in the US.

Beside Safe Harbor US companies provide data protection for EU companies based on EU model clauses. US enterprises share information about their employees back into the US based on 'corporate bindings'.

The 29 Working Group of EU data protection agencies issued their opinion last week on the EuGH decision

[http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data- protection/article-29/press...](http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data- protection/article-29/press-material/press- release/art29_press_material/2015/20151016_wp29_statement_on_schrems_judgement.pdf)

Interesting parts:

\- Safe Harbor is unlawful for EU companies ("In any case, transfers that are still taking place under the Safe Harbour decision after the CJEU judgment are unlawful.")

\- Model clauses and corporate bindings can only be used until the end of January 2016

"In the meantime, the Working Party will continue its analysis on the impact of the CJEU judgment on other transfer tools. During this period, data protection authorities consider that Standard Contractual Clauses and Binding Corporate Rules can still be used [...]

If by the end of January 2016, no appropriate solution is found with the US authorities and depending on the assessment of the transfer tools by the Working Party, EU data protection authorities are committed to take all necessary and appropriate actions, which may include coordinated enforcement actions."

Most unlikely those will be extended beyond January 2016 if one reads the opinion of different national agencies.

PS: Gmail is based on these legal frameworks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The people saying the software isn't that complex are missing the point. Everything's easy for the person who has never done it. Even if you include all of the DNS/SPF/DKIM garbage the initial setup can be done quickly. Then the support time sink begins. One person's outbound email bounced. Another person is getting too much spam. A third person is missing perfectly valid email because it keeps getting marked as spam. Third parties are complaining at you, or trying to hack you, or both. Oops, time to upgrade because of another TLS bug. You get the idea. Burning a couple of hours one time is no big deal. Burning half of someone's day, every day, is a problem.

Still, a lot of developers' addiction to gmail in particular continues to mystify me. I work on open source, so I don't care if people see what I put up on Google Drive for discussion, but there's no way I'd choose to put company- confidential email on a competitor's servers. Google competes with a lot of other companies. I guess infosec just isn't as important to some people as aesthetics.

</comment><comment><USER14> The frustrating thing about this is that we're starting to see companies that make google accounts mandatory.

I've already been in the position of being told "make a google account or lose your job" once. I chose the job, I have rent to pay. But I really don't want a google account, and critically, I _do not_ agree with googles terms of use.

Unfortunately, there's no way for me to flag to google that I have made the account under duress, and thus I will be subject to their data fracking techniques against my will.

Facebook was talking a few years ago about developing Facebook for business, I can see that taking off like a rocket too.

I'd really like to see some federal level intervention on the topic of employers strong-arming employees into legally binding agreements with third parties.

<comment><USER15> I don't see the problem here. You use third party products and services all the time in your professional capacity.

If your employer wants you to have a google account, i assume you'll use it for some job-related things. So it doesn't need any of your private data/usage profile (use company address/phone nr etc).

<comment><USER14> The difference is in who the legal agreement is between, from googles (and the courts) perspective.

For example, I do, in my professional capacity, use perforce. However, the agreement that perforce has is with my company. I'm just a number on the sheet of "how many users".

A gmail account is a privately held account. The agreement is between me and google. Any liability is mine, and google invests heavy effort into continuing to track my via a plethora of cookies, fingerprinting techniques and other methods even after I log out. They do that on the basis that I _personally_ have agreed to submit to it, my employer isn't involved.

It's on the same level as if an employer mandated which phone company you could use. I don't mind my employer insisting on me using a specific provider, if he is providing the phone and paying for the plan. I might choose to leave that phone at work when I'm not on call though. But if it's my phone and I'm paying for the plan, I should have the right to choose who I give my support to.

The alternative road takes us down a dodgy path of corporate alliances, where companies agree to have each others employees scratch their backs, and to hell with consumer rights. We're already seeing it with companies in the US paying wages on pre-paid visa/AA/mastercard cards. Inevitably, the employee ends up paying all the fees. $5 to check your balance, $10 to transfer it elsewhere etc.

<comment><USER16> In practice, there is pretty much zero chance you'd have any problems with Google. But I support your stance as a general rule - an employee should not force you to enter into personal commitments as a part of the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Running a mail server isn't a black art. With projects like sovereign (on github), it's even easier.

Companies and people throw away their privacy so lightly - it shows a puzzling negligence.

The internet is at its strongest when it's decentralized. Stop using proprietary services when decentralized alternatives are readily available!

PS: I think Hillary Clinton did the right thing by running her own mail server, she shouldn't have used it for classified documents (if she did), however.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not surprising at all.

Hands down, Google Apps (not Gmail) is the best hosted email service for businesses. That's why companies use it. It's so good that wasting precious engineering resources on reinventing the wheel makes absolute no sense whatsoever. Oh, and don't forget email deliverability, spam detection, and a slew of other features that your cobblestone of postfix, dovecot, and roundcube will never even come close to reaching feature parity with.

</comment><comment><USER19> People focus on different priorities. I don't think it's hard to understand. They just care less about privacy. Scaling is more important to them. And your emails can be encrypted on your client side if you want to. Just make sure those encrypted emails aren't so suspicious that they want to crack them.

</comment><comment><USER20> honest question, what's an "Unicorn"?

<comment><USER21> A startup with a $1B valuation.

<comment><USER22> Ok. I will invest 1$ in random startup for 1/1000000000 of the company - congratulations we have a new unicorn.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of something Michael Lewis wrote:

"You have a dog, and I have a cat. … You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23>
        > So every time a twitter executive sends an email,
        > people at Google can read it?

Can they, legally?

<comment><USER24> Legally I'm sure there's something in the TOS or contract that allows them to access the data if necessary.

Realistically, the number of people who can actually access customer data such as email and documents is probably quite small and heavily audited. Even accessing scrubbed telemetry data is probably audited.

<comment><USER25> >Realistically, the number of people who can actually access customer data such as email and documents is probably quite small and heavily audited.

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google- rep...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google-reports-nsa- secretly-intercepts-data-links)

Realistically, Google had no idea who had access to their customer data back then.</comment></comment></comment>


OS X Lion - Causing hair loss as you use your Mac. One follicle at a time. - <AUTHOR> http://www.papermodelplane.com/box/lion.jpg

<comment><USER2> This feels a little more akin to a Reddit post, but it is amusing nevertheless.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh, totally. Just was having a laugh about it

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'll admit it - I laughed at "The KFC Famous Bowl of window management"</comment>


Microsoft hosts the Windows source in a monstrous 300GB Git repository - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/microsoft-hosts-the-windows-source-in-a-monstrous-300gb-git-repository/ <comment><USER2> Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559662) There's even an MS employee from their Git team participating in the discussion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Slightly OT, but I've only ever used Git for version control. At the end of the article, the author mentions that Facebook uses (a custom version of) Mercurial instead of Git.

What are the benefits to using Mercurial over Git?

<comment><USER4> If I remember correctly, the reason Facebook switched to Mercurial from Git was because they needed to make some changes or add additional functionality and Mercurial is an easier system to do that with, apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Explains the need for [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudioalm/2017/02/03/...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudioalm/2017/02/03/announcing- gvfs-git-virtual-file-system/) then. Crazy.

<comment><USER6> It's on the first paragraph of your link:

> For example, the Windows codebase has over 3.5 million files and is over 270 > GB in size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What takes up most of the space in the repo, is it just from code or are a lot of binaries in there? No doubt the windows code base is particularly large, but I would have though most of it would be slow moving.

<comment><USER8> This is speculation, but if they have design assets, sounds, videos, localizations, and other things that aren't technically code but are totally part of Windows, then I can definitely see why it'd balloon to that order of magnitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Same version control as Linux!

<comment><USER10> For Linux they don't use virtualized file systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well done Microsoft!</comment>


Why you shouldn't share links on Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@intideceukelaire/why-you-shouldnt-share-links-on-facebook-f317ba4aa58b#.rj6k9uaro <comment><USER2> Previous discussions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11875419](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11875419) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11868077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11868077)

</comment><comment><USER3> While this is a repost, what I didn't know is,

> Whilst it's not possible to get links for a specific user, you could easily > run through results all day* until you find something interesting.

There's only a system to find links people shared and you can't tie it to a specific user unless the link itself references the user who shared it.

So, no quite as bad as every headline would have you believe?</comment>