All the OS you need which is not much - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonsteinberg.com/2009/11/netbooks/

<comment><USER2> _[Jolicloud] allows me to install new apps without the hassle of Ubuntu. Believe me, I was running Ubuntu before and app install and maintenance is a headache._

I find this to be a bewildering comment. Unless you are trying to install something that is not in the extensive Ubuntu repositories, installation and maintenance is trivial.

<comment><USER3> Well, he doesn't appear to have much background in programming from what I gather. So perhaps having to use apt-get is a hassle for him.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I'm not that technical. I find for the casual user that Synaptic and and command line installs can have issues. Also often dependencies are missing which requires me to fish around for whats missing.

I think Jolicloud offers significant app installation improvements for users only experienced with Mac/Windows.

From my experience installing apps on Ubuntu _sometimes_ and more frequently has challenges I have not experienced in windows/mac. I could see my parents using Jolicloud - I think they'd struggle on traditional Ubuntu, even though I'm a big Ubuntu fan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a moment I thought that was Jon Stewart. Anyway interesting site.</comment>


Streaming TV is about to get expensive – here's why - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/27/streaming-tv-is-about-to-get-very-expensive-heres-why <comment><USER3> Who could of guessed a resurgence in piracy after Netflix and Spotify.

Convinced until now piracy will continue to fall with legitimate easy to use services, and it has done. Take either convenience or low price away and you'll see people returning to easier options.

</comment><comment><USER4> I feel like this will fuel a spike in piracy. I used to think piracy was motivated by entirely by cost, but I can envision folks resorting to torrents to avoid a morass of confusing services.

<comment><USER5> Already happening for me and a bunch of people I know. I was happy paying for 1 service a month (Netflix) and having everything there. Then the studios started pulling their content for their own streaming services. I'm not signing up for a handful of subpar streaming services just because the studios got greedy. Netflix worked and worked really well.

So I got a Usenet subscription and a couple 6TB hard drives. Setup Plex/Radarr/Sonarr/SabNZBD and grabbed all the seasons of the shows I like to watch. For future episodes it is all completely automated. I just select shows I want to watch and the system finds them as soon as they're available every week, downloads, imports into Plex, and sends me a Slack notification. Some tech challenged family members have even come to me requesting a duplicate setup, a clear sign that this fragmented nonsense is not good.

<comment><USER6> > I'm not signing up for a handful of subpar streaming services just because > the studios got greedy

I can see why people feel this way, but there is a third option. Just don't watch their shows.

I don't understand why people feel like they have a right to consume whatever media they want.

<comment><USER5> I know I don't have a 'right' to consume any media. But I (along with many others) want to and will do so whether legal or not. Take that as you will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My wife and I have turned on Plex. Burn our DVD's to it and watch anywhere.

Conceivably, one could rent, check DVD's out from a library, or borrow them from a friend and add the programs to Plex.

<comment><USER8> forget DVDs, many libraries now carry blurays. With that said, unless you enjoy it as a hobby, the time it takes to do it (+the storage cost and electrical costs if you are transcoding it for storage) is hard to justify relative to even having multiple accounts.

i.e. if one spends only 10 hours a month ripping things, is paying $20-$30 a month for multiple services (or even $50-$100) worthwhile? of course it is for people who don't value their time (or view this as time well spent as it's their hobby), but for the majority of people, it shouldn't be how they use their time.

<comment><USER7> My wife loves watching Walker Texas Ranger. I ripped the complete series to Plex and now she can watch it anywhere, even at work.

You cannot stream that TV show from any service except Plex.

<comment><USER8> I'd agree that there are plenty of one off cases (And I rip for fun as well, I put hobby there for a reason), I'm just not a believer that for the vast majority of people its a useful use of one's time. (heck, its probably not the most useful use of my own time...)

And as an aside, I also like Walker Texas Ranger and not many libraries have it (or in non damaged condition ;) took me a while to complete it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People will find a way.. I see in the future one can subscribe to one of these streaming services for just one month, and then use recording software 24/7 to record all the shows and movies they want to watch in the future. Repeat with another service and slowly build your own database.

<comment><USER10> Something that can also happen is forming clubs where members share their subscriptions with others

<comment><USER11> John Wheeler once proposed the Single HBO-Password Universe theory.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One- electron_universe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I only have Netflix because my parents have it. I've used it just a few times this year, as most of the shows I used to watch on it have been gone for awhile. Over the air TV is more than enough for me at this point, and I can use a USB tuner so I don't even need to be in the living room to watch it.

The only result of this fragmentation will be increased piracy, just like it was before the golden age of Netflix. The article claims "The golden age of streaming is over", but I believe it ended years ago.

</comment><comment><USER13> We use iTunes TV purchases as a la carte dining for specific seasons of stuff we actually want to watch (or the odd episode of something to try it out). Chernobyl just showed up on it, for example, so we'll grab that at some point. We pay massively less for an indescribably better viewing experience under this system than we did under cable.

Hopefully that possibility won't go away.

<comment><USER14> $35 for a season of a single show seems incredibly expensive compared to $10/month for a bunch of shows. But once you realize how many shows you actually watch, that $35 a month starts seeming pretty cheap...

<comment><USER13> Exactly. In practice we spend maybe $150 a year. We have Amazon Prime video as a side effect and our cell company pays for Netflix for us. Without those two we'd maybe spend double, but we're still so much better off this way - <USER2> least because we really only watch the stuff we actually want to pay for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This has always seemed inevitable to me. TV studios are producing content at massive expense, and they're only doing so because they expect massive profits. $100/mo cable bills do the trick, but there isn't enough massive profit it everyone "just" having a Netflix subscription.

The market is going to test ways to continue to charge $100/mo or more (total household expense), and will only keep producing this "golden age of TV" if they find they can keep raking in big bucks for it.

If we did end up stabilizing on "most people just buy Netflix," over the long haul, I would expect to see studios quit producing blockbuster TV, and for content quality to look more like it did in the 80s/90s.

<comment><USER16> > If we did end up stabilizing on "most people just buy Netflix," over the > long haul, I would expect to see studios quit producing blockbuster TV, and > for content quality to look more like it did in the 80s/90s.

You mean the period just _before_ the drive to replace most scripted TV content with "reality" content as a cost cutting measure? That period is probably the peak of non-premium TV content quality.

Netflix is basically, a single premium channels with a slightly bigger catalog of third-party older content, and priced as such. If everyone subscribed just to one such service and not a huge package of non-premium channels, I'd expect _quantity_ of (non-premium) content to drop, but peak quality of (premium) content to stay the same and average quality of all content to go _up_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> the way I deal with that as a user is to unsubscribe from netflix for 2 months and subscribe to the other service, then unusbscribe from that one too and go back to the other, just keep rotating once a month.

Or just unsubscribe from everything and go back to reading books. My antilibrary is pretty big now and there's plenty of books at the library to keep me busy for 100s of years to come.

And then, there's all those classics that are in the public domain now, completely free.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if there will be a "good old games" service that lets you download movies and shows drm-and-spying-free and play on any device?

</comment><comment><USER19> I am almost at the point of dropping YouTubeTV. When it started it was a fair price ($35), had a lot of sports, a little news and a handful of channels that at least I never, or rarely would watch. Now that the price is up to $50 and the additional content is just your typical cable tv filler, it is one price increase away from being axed.</comment>


What's in a Wood? How Science Helps to Reveal the Eames' Vision (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/whats-in-a-wood-how-science-helps-to-reveal-the-eames-vision/ <comment><USER2> Today I learned Charles and Ray Eames created the incredible "Powers Of 10" short film that I vividly remember from childhood. How about that.

<comment><USER3> You might have seen the Eames' exhibits on mathematics[1,2], computing[3], and other topics[4] at museums or worlds fairs, starting in the 1960s and continuing to today.

[1] [http://www.eamesoffice.com/exhibits/mathematica-new-york- cit...](http://www.eamesoffice.com/exhibits/mathematica-new-york-city/)

[2] [http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/mathand...](http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/mathandscience/)

[3] [http://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/a-computer- perspective/](http://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/a-computer-perspective/)

[4] [http://www.eamesoffice.com/catalog- category/exhibitions/](http://www.eamesoffice.com/catalog- category/exhibitions/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The better minimalist architects of the mid 20th century were very much into careful choices of materials. Eames, Wright, and to some extent van der Rohe chose materials well for their big, flat surfaces. Minimalism in lesser hands looks much worse. If you replicated Fallingwater with gypsum board walls, it would look awful inside.</comment>


How Instagram Feeds Work: Celery and RabbitMQ - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.vmware.com/vfabric/2013/04/how-instagram-feeds-work-celery-and-rabbitmq.html

<comment><USER2> They are overstated the naivety of the "naive" approach.

The article states:

'directly fetch all the photos that the user followed from a single, monolithic data store, sort them by creation time and then only display the latest 10'

That isn't how the query would work. It is implying that the query would return all the results, clearly it would only return 10. I haven't read all the details, I'm sure Instagram does something better then this basic SQL now but it is silly in a technical article to overstate the problem in such an obviously incorrect way.

</comment><comment><USER3> In short, the feeds are heavily denormalized and are constructed when new photos are added by people you follow, rather than at request time.

They seem to favor using disk space and saving on processing time and memory.

<comment><USER4> Which was where Twitter had to go in their first major refactor, as well. Originally timeline views would be built on-demand, but that approach proved unscalable very quickly, so they moved to preemptively building timelines by copying tweets everywhere they needed to go at publish-time rather than request-time.

It's basically just an inversion; instead of the cache being a read-through layer over the database, the database becomes a write-through layer over the cache.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems that these problems would be better solved at the database level. It is just that the open source databases lack good implementations of materialized views and data replication to slaves. Instead you have this more fragile solution involving the Postgres, RabbitMQ, and Redis to accomplish nearly the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER6> This post is great.. but its from April 2013. I wonder how their architecture has changed since then?

<comment><USER7> They've since moved from EC2 to Facebook infrastructure, see their blog post here:

[http://instagram- engineering.tumblr.com/post/89992572022/mig...](http://instagram- engineering.tumblr.com/post/89992572022/migrating-aws-fb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Were they only using two RabbitMQ brokers? I have a habit of running one per machine, which allows every app to simply connect to localhost; but on virtualized clusters, RabbitMQ gets a network partition almost every other day, and having just two would obviously cut down on the number of partitions.

</comment><comment><USER9> If they are using EC2 hosts, I wonder why they don't use AWS SQS/SNS for their queue systems and Dynamo for their materialized views.

<comment><USER10> Probably due to lock in.

<comment><USER11> Isn't the cost of those services also a function of the number of requests? E.g. they bill on a request basis, not an hourly cpu time basis?</comment></comment></comment>


Cost of tools and services used developing Countly: $0 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.count.ly/post/33777818277/cost-of-tools-and-services-used-developing-countly-0

<comment><USER2> Great post Onur, I didnt know Amazon had a free tier! One of my other preferred tools is Trello.com for visual project management.

Great job with Countly! Would have been great to see the workflow you guys employ between the tools + any specific modifications you might have made for an open source tool/community. Maybe next time?

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried Trello before and I think its pretty lightweight and useful.

Great idea about an upcoming post :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Watch out with that AWS free tier, it's only free for a year.

<comment><USER4> Also many of the cited services are free only for opensource projects (webstorm ide, transifex, tender etc..)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's correct, I mentioned it at the beginning of the post

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice job with Countly, looks really good.

This has nothing to do with countly per se, but I think the notion of building products with tools & services that have zero acquisition/billing cost is becoming passe. There are so many tools and options available and the growth of the freemium business model around the software space ensures a growing ecosystem that's becoming more and more specialized around those tools & services. I believe we're rapidly approaching an inflection point where use of zero-cost tools & services is nearly expected.

Congrats to the team on the choices made in building the product, though. That's where the real value is in the equation.

</comment><comment><USER6> The current link is to the comments thread. This is the URL you want:

[http://blog.count.ly/post/33777818277/cost-of-tools-and- serv...](http://blog.count.ly/post/33777818277/cost-of-tools-and-services- used-developing-countly-0)

</comment><comment><USER7> I find it hard to believe they're hosting their app on a Micro EC2 instance. I mean, I do believe them but its very surprising. I've heard horror stories about simple blogs coming to a screeching halt when they get anything more than a few hundreds requests in a short time. Is it really possible to host an app like Countly on Amazon's free tier (EC2 specifically)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, since Countly Community Edition is open source we don't offer any SaaS from our server just yet. Countly Cloud will be the SaaS solution and I believe a micro instance won't do any good after the first week :) But a micro instance is powerful enough to host a website or a blog, even to open up your service for private beta.

<comment><USER7> I've been mulling over whether to take a dive into EC2 to launch a public beta actually so thanks for your comment. I've been trying to decide between EC2 or getting another 512 Linode to start. I think I will go for EC2 now mostly just to learn a few new skills and sharpen some old ones. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to go full cheapskate (not that I disapprove), AppFog has a generous free trier[1], no SSL though.

[1] <http://www.appfog.com/products/appfog/pricing/>

<comment><AUTHOR> AppFog, Heroku[1] and dotCloud[2] are all great

[1] <http://www.heroku.com/pricing>

[2] <https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice round up of tools, I keep forgetting AWS has a free tier, but mostly as I keep getting random issues with it not activating my account properly.

(p.s., the link is pointing to the disqus thread, not the article)

</comment><comment><USER10> You might want to add Tonido (<http://www.tonido.com>) to your toolset for file sharing. It works great.</comment>


A new type of cipher: DICING_CSB - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/phorum/read.php?1,1039

<comment><USER2> Creating your own cipher is basically always the wrong answer. There's a reason why we're still using AES, even though it's 10 years old.

<comment><USER3> Creating AND USING your own cipher is nearly always a bad idea (for typical non-security-clued developers, in particular, who are the ones most prone to this). Designing and analyzing one can be a fairly interesting and/or educational process (and all part of the process of public crypto research, which is what this is about).

Developers, by all means, should use AES and not some random unproven cipher. That does not mean new ciphers should not be designed and analyzed.</comment></comment>


Thousands of xHamster login credentials surface online - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/29/xhamster-login-credentials-breach/ <comment><USER2> Original source of the news about the leak it looks like, [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hackers-are-trading- hundred...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hackers-are-trading-hundreds-of- thousands-of-xhamster-porn-account-details)

<comment><USER3> Which received some discussion earlier today:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063564)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The passwords of all xHamster users are properly encrypted, so it is almost impossible to hack them. Thus, all the passwords are safe and the users data secured."

The passwords are hashed using unsalted MD5.

<comment><USER5> Eugh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> how I use porn sites:

1\. register an email account to some unknown email provider with unintelligible username and email names and don't use it for anything after registration.

2\. register to a new google account with another unintelligible username and email names referring to backup email registered in 1 and don't use it in any personal or professional needs.

3\. go to porn sites.

4\. after some time register a new google account referring to email registered in 2 and never use the old 2 emails in 1 and 2 again.

5\. repeat 4 every 6-8 months.

<comment><USER7> Honest question: why? This is a lot of trouble to potentially hide the fact that you sometimes watch porn.

<comment><USER8> Some people enjoy very specific genres. Do you really want your family and workplace to know you rather enjoy watching Klingons fellate Ewoks?

<comment><USER9> ...

I need a mind bleach now.

<comment><USER8> It is exactly this kind of bigotry that forces the KFE scene underground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> i can hardly imagine in what situation i would register an account on such sites using a cooperate email address... I mean, not only that i would expect those to be property of my employer (including mails sent and received that is) and thus potentially monitored for whatever reasons but i would also fear to get their brand into a situation like this.

I wonder if these people never considered to have a separate private mail address and what might be the reason for that.

<comment><USER11> I guess it could be for the same reason people reuse the same password everywhere --- convenience. And if the masses' reactions to things like Snowden, NSA, etc. are any indication, a lot of people just don't care whether they're being watched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know why anybody would register for a porn site just to comment. And, even if you do want to register, you can use any temporary email provider to keep your real emails safe.

The best one out there is [http://mytemp.email](http://mytemp.email) , I use it almost every day, sometimes for newsletters and sometimes to check product trials.

Seriously guys, people really register on porn sites?</comment>


Show HN: Weekend project in science-based art - GetAblation.com - <AUTHOR> http://getablation.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Any ideas what I could add to the page or fix on it?

I have no automated payment method yet, which I should set up sooner rather than later. I've tried to set up Stripe, but it's US only, so that leaves PayPal, I guess.

On the other hand, I do enjoy the 1 on 1 with customers, which is the current way of ordering/paying. Feels a lot more personal, which is what the whole thing is about as well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been yearning to do something pretty for a while now, so when I stumbled on these beautiful images, I built a website around them. I also used them as an excuse to learn about a few canvas and Raphael.js features. TypeKit came into play as well.

Running on a free EC2 instance and backed by a name.com domain it's pretty lean too.

</comment><comment><USER2> The prices you charge are probably a bit steep. Just my 2 cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> They could be lower if the posters weren't unique and I would be able to do offset printing in volume. Since they are unique, which I think is good, printing comes at a hefty price already.</comment></comment>


Break Up the Liberal City - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/opinion/sunday/break-up-the-liberal-city.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0 <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting polemic.

No arguments on government. Institutions which are _intended_ to be "of the people" should look like it geographically. Federal facilities already _are_ doled out around the country as political pork, but headquarters could be a little more distributed, in addition to back-offices. Even if it changes nothing about the nature of the institutions, it would likely increase trust in them. We could do with some of that. It _would_ cause more taxpayer-funded air travel, which certainly won't be popular.

The whole country benefits immensely from the research done by the densely packed brilliant minds at elite universities, and from the middle-class kids who were educated in their undergraduate divisions thanks to financial aid from their endowments. Trying to tax away their ability to fund low and middle income students seems like the opposite of what you want. Trying to dilute them into being like all other commuter colleges fits the author's point about disbanding clustered elites, I guess.

I think there is immense value in having elite universities. We should be making sure they are elite in terms of intellectual capability and academic work ethic, rather than family wealth, by raising all K12 schools to the standards of the ones that feed Ivies.

As I understand it, in the German higher education system, some universities _are_ the best in their field, but they are all state-sponsored and the admissions process is nationalized, with a merit component and a lottery component, and no special allowances for probable donors. Maybe we need that.

</comment><comment><USER2> There has been an over 10,000 year trend toward urbanization. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It can't work on so many levels.

Also consider red state economics work well for the youthful poor, too. Housing is much more affordable than places like NYC or SF or even Chicago. I live in Minneapolis. I would be taking a huge pay cut to live in a tiny place in any of these big cities. But then I don't want to move to Louisville, either.

<comment><USER3> But you'd probably also make 2-5x working in a city, assuming you're doing something like tech, finance, real estate, etc. Everything locally costs more, rent costs more, but there's still more dollars left at the end of the month. Cars still cost the same. Buy a house somewhere you want to live, work in a city for a while while renting the house, then move into your paid-off home elsewhere after 3-5 years.

<comment><USER2> In SF, I'd only make 10-20% more than MPLS. But my housing would be 2-5x. This is a pay CUT. Louisville it's even more extreme. I might get a 30-40% pay raise, but my housing would be 3x-8x.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article does not say _why_ we should break up the liberal city. It just kind of rambles.

It seems to want to lead to some sort of sprawling country where everyone has an equal portion of land and money, and incentivize "spreading out" jobs and taxes rather than concentrating them. So centers for investment, learning, and business building would lose money by taxation, then spread out geographically and lose people, and eventually nobody would want to do business in this country, or live here in the interest of the arts or academia, and people would leave in droves to foreign nations where there are still big cities where people can draw together their varied interests into a (somewhat) multicultural metropolis.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is a shame that, rather than accepting that there are vastly different peoples within the united states and we need to secede sovereignty to one another peacefully, we are intent on correcting one another on issues that are, for the most part, subjective and fall back on disagreements around moral axioms, about which reason has little to offer.

Why on earth should San Francisco and Dallas have any government in common? They should each go to hell in their own way.

Why are we fighting? Why not a firm handshake and a friendly wave goodbye?

</comment><comment><USER6> I have yet to see a serious piece of thinking from Douthat, and this piece doesn't change that. In fact, the only good point he makes is not one he intends: how inherently unfair our current structures are. "... actually weakened liberalism politically by concentrating its votes." This is true, and not a problem of the city, but rather of our outdated voting system. Not that we'll ever be able to address that.

</comment><comment><USER7> What an ass, this is the same holier than thou crap from the left that got Trump in in the first place.

"while the Trumpish hinterland languishes in resentment and nostalgia."

Come on these are people too and you can't just write them off as hill billies. They're not beyond reach if you try to reach them, but if you attack them they're gonna get alienated.

Edit: I read the first few paragraphs and didn't read the rest. I now see I was totally wrong.

<comment><USER8> Having read the whole thing I think this editorial is rather silly, but you're not giving it a fair chance. The portion you quoted is the author paraphrasing someone else's argument. His very next sentence begins with the sentence "I respectfully dissent."

<comment><USER9> > Having read the whole thing I think this editorial is rather silly

The solution is (probably) silly, although there are merits to the problem statement.</comment></comment></comment>


Dropbox's hiring practices explain its disappointing lack of female employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/02/14/dropboxs-hiring-practices-explain-its-disappointing%e2%80%8b-lack-of-female-employees/

<comment><USER3>
        "Subtle cues in the physical environment of companies such
        as Star Trek posters and video games lead to women being
        less interested in being a part of an organization when
        compared to a neutral office environment."

It also self selects for women who dig video games and Star Trek. Liking those things are geek things, not guy things and contrary to popular belief, women that like those things do exist. Furthermore, I'm certain that if you ask any male geek about the gender disparity in geek culture, I'm certain that near 100% of them lament about the lack of female geeks.

Women who show up in such an environment that don't relate with the culture aren't not relating because of their gender but because of their interests.

At some point in the founding of those companies the people there decided that they want their work environment to be as pleasant and fun as their home environment, after all you are spending 40-60 hours of your week there. That's a lot of your life. If that culture isn't your idea of fun, then you chose the wrong company to work for and should go work somewhere that does share your attitudes and beliefs or some soulless place that doesn't encourage employees to express themselves at work for fear of alienating anyone.

Dropbox is a desirable place to work at because of and not despite this culture. It's also desirable because there are a lot of smart people that are going to be successful in their careers. It's natural that many people, that despite their personal disinterest in the former (culture), might want to work at Dropbox because of the latter reason (success). Unfortunately, you don't get to pick and choose what parts of a company to accept. It was doing its thing before you arrive and no one has a right to establish their career at Dropbox without accepting most of the culture. Once there, you're welcome to try to change it, but doing so comes at the risk of being ejected from that culture because those working their may not like the changes you introduce.

Seriously, what give employee number 150 the right to reject and neutralize parts of the company culture that attracted the first 149 employees to work there in the first place? Don't like that? Boo-fucking-hoo. Start your own company or show up at a company early enough to influence the culture to be more to your liking.

I'm going to guess that those employees that left, complaining about the culture were not among the first 20 employees. If you're not among the first 10-40 employees at a large successful venture, you have no right to complain about culture because culture is always set by those that came before you. Don't like it? Then show up earlier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your entire comment seems to be based on the premise that either companies have a strong insider/outsider culture or they are soulless places to work. When in reality, there are many, many companies that have strong company cultures without somehow alienating a large number of otherwise qualified prospective employees.

Speaking as a person with a fair chunk of experience managing software development, I find it difficult to believe that management's only choices are frat-boy culture or soul-sucking bland corporation.

I'll speak very frankly. When a company has a half dozen or a dozen employees, when a company is scrambling for traction, it can be a great motivator to have a strong insider culture. Steve Jobs hung a pirate flag up at the Macintosh offices for a reason.

But companies grow, and part of growing is, well, growing. You need to select from a larger pool of prospective employees. You need to bring in some new DNA instead of doubling up on the DNA you already have.

I can't speak to this specific company, but as a general principle, successful companies become less exclusive and possible--I am not speaking about Dropbox --less discriminatory as they grow.

If you want an example, look at Apple. It's hyper-successful, and famous for how hard they work at inclusiveness and tolerance.

<comment><USER3> You're reading my post as a false dichotomy, however that was not my intent.

The culture of companies can and do change over time and will in response to wanting to be more inclusive if that is how it needs to change in order to be more competitive. Every single employee that joins a company, joins it knowing what it is and leaves their imprint on the company's culture as they spend more time there and become part of the group. No company's culture is static.

What I was getting at is that you shouldn't complain about the culture you willingly joined. Don't like everything you see, gain acceptance and be the change you want to see in the company. If you do things right, the company culture will become a little bit more inclusive without becoming soulless.

Complaining is what leads to soulless places to work at where everyone is quietly in fear of offending anyone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Of course, _correlation does not equal causation_. If there is something about their "culture" that is off-putting to women, you can't "fix" it by changing the hiring practices. You fix the culture and the hiring practices follow suit organically.

I suspect that the title is wrong, and that the thesis of the article is that there is something strongly biased about Dropbox's culture and the experiences recounted about interviewing there are one symptom of many.

I'm speaking to what I read in the article, of course. I'm not a woman and I don't work at Dropbox.

<comment><USER4> I was busy writing a comment while you cranked this out, so I'll just reply underneath yours since we more or less agree.

The premise of the article is a valid one but the arguments underneath are incredibly weak.

 _Perhaps a question on how Dropbox might be used to solve income inequality or the unaffordability of housing in San Francisco would reveal as much about someone's creativity—and more about their character—than questions about superheroes_

Certainly a refined hiring protocol that asks targeted and direct questions that allows the candidate to express and communicate their competence may _perhaps_ improve the metrics of gender-diverse hiring. Suggesting such a radical change like asking for an opine on economic disparity at a Cloud Services Provider however I think is going a bit too far just to step back and claim progress; _Post hoc ergo propter hoc_.

The author here seem to stumble across, and then walk right by a much more interesting story in the use of demonstrably masculine conference room names in which to conduct interviews. All we got out of that was one paragraph.

<comment><USER3> I see why the name "The Bromance Room" is a demonstrably masculine name, but not why "The Break-up Room" is.

The article said:

        "'The Break-up Room,' by a male"

... what if this woman had been interviewed in that exact same room by a female? Would that have changed things? What if a male later on were interviewed in the same room by a female? I dunno about you, but "The break-up room" is pretty gender-neutral to me and that any gender-bias that person felt is entirely in their own head, due mainly to the fact that her interviewer was may (a statistical likelihood in this industry).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _the male dominated frat-boy culture that Silicon Valley is increasingly being criticized for_

I don't know if frat boys are different now than when I was in school but all I know is you never saw them in the Computer Science building.

<comment><USER6> Things have changed a fair bit since I was in college (1994-1998).

A lot more of computer programming is higher-status, more marketing-driven and more about money.

You're seeing proportionally more frat guys interested now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Holy crap. An article with the words "cites research", with a hyperlink which _actually goes to a PDF of the actual research being cited_!

Would love to see HN rise to the occasion by discussing actual facts and data, rather than spouting opinion and speculation. (A popular pastime, to be sure, but it's always nice to do something different for a change.)

</comment><comment><USER8> To really make this point, the author should have explained why these questions are biased toward men. It's not immediately obvious.

</comment><comment><USER9> I agree with the author that asking questions about superheroes is going to weed out qualified people (unless the project involves superheroes). When I interview someone, I do my best not to ask questions irrelevant to the job. I don't know why someone would ask a question biased against people from different cultures, etc.

As for whether Dropbox should change its culture to be more attractive to women, that's their choice. They should be aware that their decor might turn off some otherwise qualified people, whether or not they choose to act on that information.

I've worked for and interviewed for Google for about ten years, and our training includes not asking irrelevant and/or culturally biased questions.

</comment><comment><USER10> It appears that using the example of a super successful SV company that doesn't seem to give a toss about diversity hurts the author's premise - <USER2> it actually makes an iota of difference.

He might want to start with actually making that case.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Her advice to Dropbox? "Founders are looking for 'objective' measures such as school ranking, GPAs, SAT scores, but fail to recognize that these are biased. Dropbox and other start-ups should pioneer new ways to identify people who can succeed on the core set of job responsibilities."

Yes, they're biased towards girls, who excel in school over boys from a young age.

"Indeed, the trend is getting worse. In 1985, 37 percent of computer science undergraduate degree recipients were women. By 2011 this proportion had dropped to 18 percent."

In 1985, the gender ratio in colleges was 1:1. Today, it is 3:2 in favor of women. So that means that not only did the percentage get chopped in half, but it did so completely against the larger trend.

The actual explanation can be found in the Norwegian Gender Paradox: the more men and women are free to choose their occupation, the more they choose stereotypical gender occupations. When men and women actually choose what they want to do, they don't choose equally.

To the great chagrin of feminists.</comment>


Ask HN: Google Reader goes down in 11 days, which alternative are you using? - <AUTHOR>

SO google reader goes away forever in 11 days, which of the pile of reader alternatives have you switched to? <comment><USER2> I use Newsify on the iPad, which announced plans today to integrate with Feedly[1].

[1]: [http://newsify.co/faq/general/what-will-happen-when- google-r...](http://newsify.co/faq/general/what-will-happen-when-google- reader-shuts-down.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The plan is to temporarily use Digg Reader until Reeder 2.0 for iPad comes out, then use that app standalone without a syncing backend (because I don't find RSS important enough to need ubiquitous access).

</comment><comment><USER4> We just had a poll regarding this two days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899263)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I missed that. Case (probably) closed.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Gitignore – easily add paths to .gitignore from anywhere in the repo - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nicolashahn/gitignore <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I'm not really sure why `ignore` isn't a `git` command, but this is how I'd imagine it working if it was. Any criticism is welcome, I don't write bash often, and maybe there's a good reason the command doesn't exist.</comment>


6502 transistor level hardware simulation in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/expert.html <comment><USER2> It's a few years old now, but still quite interesting to play with. The CPU itself is only 3.5K transistors but already looks amazingly complex until you visualise how it's broken down into individual, mostly independent modules:

[http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?t=2208&f=8](http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?t=2208&f=8)

[http://breaknes.com/](http://breaknes.com/)

(The Russians seem to have a fondness for detailed IC reverse-engineering. There's a lot of Russian-only information on the internals of the 6502, 8080, 8085, Z80, etc.)

<comment><USER3> there's some interesting tech-related wikipedia pages which are more detailed and useful in the russian version (easily translated of course)

<comment><USER4> Examples?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=visual6502.org](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=visual6502.org)

This has to be some kind of record for re-submissions.

</comment><comment><USER6> And then there is a dis-integrated version, with a lot of LEDs that show how the chip works internally: [http://monster6502.com/](http://monster6502.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> GitHub repository: [https://github.com/trebonian/visual6502](https://github.com/trebonian/visual6502)

</comment><comment><USER7> An interesting type of logic is DEC DTL "flip chip" technology, use in the original PDP-8. It uses all PNP bipolar transistors.

It's always interesting how they make flip-flops. In this case, the slave side is the typical latch made out of cross-connected inverters. The master side uses a diode-capacitor-diode gate. A capacitor follows the input signal. A pulse on the clock line transfers the charge to the slave latch.

[http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/dec/handbooks/Digital...](http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/dec/handbooks/Digital_Logic_Handbook_1967.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> There's also an ARM1 version, which is even cooler IMO [http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html](http://visual6502.org/sim/varm/armgl.html)

[http://www.righto.com/2015/12/reverse-engineering- arm1-ances...](http://www.righto.com/2015/12/reverse-engineering- arm1-ancestor-of.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's a bit of an evergreen without much in the way of comments.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Visual6502.org&sort=byDate&dat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Visual6502.org&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER10> Any lawyers here? Are the architectures of those old microprocessors like 6502 or 8051 copyright/patent-free by now?

Can one create a commercial game where the players should reverse engineer programs for some virtual hardware which have, for example, a virtual 6502 on board?

<comment><USER11> Totally free and clear.

Copyright on maskworks -- that is, microchip designs -- only lasts 10 years. (It's covered by a unique and unusual portion of copyright law, as microchip designs aren't considered creative enough to be covered by a traditional copyright.) In any event, this would only have covered the physical design of the 6502, not its architecture.

The 6502 was released in 1975, so any patents on its architecture would have expired in the mid-1990s. I'm not certain that any such patents existed in the first place -- the 6502 is largely inspired by the Motorola 6800, which was even older.

Anyways, the architecture of the 6502 is effectively in the public domain at this point. There are probably thousands of different hardware and software reimplementations at this point; including one in a game would not be a problem at all.

<comment><USER10> Thank you (and others who answered). So, no copyright, no patents, and I forgot to ask about trademarks, but I think I can do without naming things for what they are if I ever go for my idea of that game.

<comment><USER11> As a number, "6502" was never trademarkable, and what was left of the original manufacturer (MOS) was liquidated in 2001. So there's no trademark rights either.

<comment><USER12> Keep in mind that Western Design Centre also has/had rights to the 6502, and they're still selling variations, so the fact that MOS was liquidated doesn't necessarily mean much.

But presumably you're right in terms of ability to trademark it anyway.

<comment><USER13> You can't trademark a number as Intel found with the 80486, which is why they went with the 'Pentium' name instead of with 80586 for the next release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> this chip could cause pacman fever (pre RoHS)</comment>


Do we even need our brains? – Some Scientists aren't so sure - <AUTHOR> http://metascientist.com/do-we-even-need-our-brains/ <comment><USER2> Do the case studies of these low brain volume patients have criticism regarding the technology and interpretation of the scans? Also have there been studies where such patients have been studied post mortem to confirm the earlier findings?

<comment><AUTHOR> That would indeed be useful. I haven't been able to find any such criticism or post-mortem studies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Lorber's own theory was that brains have spare capacity and primitive brain structures that are more intact are more responsible for the brain functioning than previously thought.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true. However, it seems contrary to current neuroscientific theories.</comment></comment>


Notepad++ v7.8.2: Free Uyghur - <AUTHOR> https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v782-free-uyghur-edition/ <comment><USER2> Thank you notepad++ for taking a stand instead of conveniently brushing the issue aside.

It's at times like these when the 2/3rd generation diaspora should be undermining the governments actions loudly.

On another side note, I don't know if it's just me, but on Facebook I keep getting videos like "cool amazing Chinese inventions" and it's just a bunch of people doing farm work with interesting tools or just people working (like putting tires on a truck [in reverse]). I am somewhat to blame as I generally like watching those videos. But I have a feeling it is being heavily pushed by China as some sort of psy-ops PR.

Anyways. Life is political nowadays. Thank you again notepad ++.

<comment><USER3> >Life is political nowadays.

I don't know where the train left the rails but I think it's insane that politics, conversations about the people controlling our lives, became such a forbidden topic. We need to be better than that.

<comment><USER2> It probably happened when we decided to start doing cost benefit analyses on doing the right thing.

I'm glad the tide is turning.

It's time for the comfortable to help carry the burden and for the concerned to have their anxieties validated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This release had triggered a spam war on Notepad++'s github.

They still spammed its repository until 9 days ago.

E.g: [https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus- plus/issue...](https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus- plus/issues/7580)

</comment><comment><USER5> As I don't use Notepad++, I wasn't sure what this entailed (something on a splash screen? In the window title?). From a search of the github repo, it seems like the extent of the promotion is just a reference to this blog post in the "about" menu.

<comment><USER6> Aftrr the update notepad++ opens a text file that show patch notes + political messages like this if there is any.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This. Wow! More websites and apps should do this. I'm gonna add a banner to my personal website.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sad to see another project going political.

<comment><USER9> Don has made plenty of political posts with releases of Notepad++:

[https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v7.6.2/](https://notepad-plus- plus.org/downloads/v7.6.2/)

[https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v6.7.4/](https://notepad-plus- plus.org/downloads/v6.7.4/)

[https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v6.6.4/](https://notepad-plus- plus.org/downloads/v6.6.4/)

He's using the platform he's got to push a message he believes in. I'm not in either camp here, but Notepad++ is particularly useful software, so I'm happy to keep using it.</comment></comment>


John Koza Has Built an Invention Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com.au/scitech/article/2006-04/john-koza-has-built-invention-machine

<comment><USER2> I was thinking about what type of intellectual endeavor might be "safe" from this Invention Machine, and obviously anything that has an intractable evaluation function is "safe". Take, for example, user interface design. Can we build an evaluation function that will give an answer as to whether one design will be more preferred than another? Is something that we considered ground-breaking when it first came out (ie. the iPhone), obvious from "first principles" of design? The evaluation function is intractable because you couldn't possibly put the generated designs in front of a number of people to evaluate it because of the time it will take to iterate.

But then, could you evolve the evaluation function? Take a random sample of things that are considered to have fantastic user interfaces, break them down and evolve an evaluation function that is capable of designing at that level. Then test it against another set of randomly selected samples. And so on. Finally, test the designs on humans.

<comment><USER3> "you couldn't possibly put the generated designs in front of a number of people to evaluate it because of the time it will take to iterate"

It's common practice these days, google A/B Testing. Or Mixpanel, I guess.

<comment><USER2> A/B testing wouldn't be nearly fast enough iteration for something like this, I think. I don't know how many iterations it takes for the algorithm to come up with something useful, but even if it is anywhere in the 100s, A/B testing won't work or it'll take years...

How quickly, in terms of iterations, does this machine usually take to come up with something? I mean, it could get lucky pretty quickly, but what is a reasonable number to expect? I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> An old article, but interesting for the same familiar reasons. I've done some work in genetic programming, most of which was done for a graduate project that I really enjoyed. The part of this article I resonated with the most was the end where they discuss the issue of finding problems to apply this method to. I have had some designs for evolutionary algorithms floating around, and even started parts of a framework, but keep losing motivation for it for the same reason: if I get the GP system up and running, what do I run it on? What do I have to evolve? I hate that my creativity stagnates without a well defined problem...

<comment><USER5> all problems where you would have applied machine learning or statistics.

stock picking computer vision speech recognition discerning mathematical models of systems, effectively all of science, using symbolic regression

<comment><USER6> Problems for which you have solid models and tools (statistics) to solve them are the exact sort you wouldn't use GP or any sort of evolutionary computing (EC). EC is best used when the only other option is picking random solutions from the entire solution space.

At least that's what I've gathered.

<comment><USER5> Genetic programming is a vastly underapplied solution in modeling. You automatically get a rough mathematical model, analyze and understand and make progress with it.

The scientific community hasn't really embraced what vast computational power can do.

Some are catching on though - look for symbolic regression or automated scientist on google. (There's a fully automated 'robot' that does biology experiments built by a university prof in england though i'm not sure whether he usss genetic algorithms or genetic programming.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had lunch with John Koza many years ago and bent his ear a bit with an idea for speeding up the creation of pre-trained recurrent neural networks (ended up being the last example in my 2nd C++ book). He explained why my idea was both interesting and not practical. Years later I also took a tutorial from him at AAAI which was lots of fun.</comment>


Tesla already has 38,000 reservations for the Powerwall, but use case is narrow - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/05/tesla-already-has-38000-reservations-for-the-powerwall-but-use-case-is-narrow/ <comment><AUTHOR> I live in an NYC apartment, but if I were in a single-family house that had electric metering tied to time-of-day I'd buy one on principle.</comment>


Drafts of Chapters 5–8 from the Rails Tutorial 3rd Ed. - <AUTHOR> http://news.railstutorial.org/rails_tutorial_draft_second_launch/

<comment><AUTHOR> The newly released chapters are substantial, and should be enough to keep readers busy for a while. I hope to release drafts of the final four chapters some time in the next week or so.

(Note to the curious: No, I can't write chapters this fast. It takes me two weeks to write a chapter from scratch, a few days for a major editing pass, and half a day to do the final edit. All the draft chapters had been through at least a major editing pass before the [main announcement]([http://news.railstutorial.org/rails_tutorial_3rd_edition/](http://news.railstutorial.org/rails_tutorial_3rd_edition/)) last week.)

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there anything similar to Rails Tutorial for a JS MEAN stack?</comment>


CommonJS effort sets JavaScript on path for world domination - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/12/commonjs-effort-sets-javascript-on-path-for-world-domination.ars

<comment><USER2> Javascript is my favorite language, but building very large systems composed of interdependent modules is still very tricky and everybody does it differently (especially when you leave the browser and talk about the various server-side JS offerings).

The problem is that various ECMAScript standards committees never really considered "programming in the large". The CommonJS project is important because it aims to fill this gap and create a real JS ecosystem by:

1) Creating a standard for interoperable modules that handles scoping (i.e. module X can't mess with module Y) AND dependency resolution. 2) Attempting to define a set of standard APIs for binary data, files/sockets [streams], and anything else that you might want in a good standard library.

I encourage everyone who writes a lot of JS to join the CommonJS discussion group. Currently, the module API spec is mostly complete (and there are a good number of working implementations). The hot topic now is the Binary data API, which is extremely important because it will be used as a base for all subsequent modules that want to manipulate binary data.

<comment><USER3> You bring up some good points. The next ECMAScript standard seems to be aiming for some programming-in-the-large goals (though the new features may not be enough to satisfy everyone).

A couple months ago I saw some discussion about CommonJS on es-discuss which signaled that there is actually some influence flowing from CommonJS towards the new ECMAScript standard, with Brendan Eich briefly mentioning some of CommonJS' features. The ES committee is watching and learning from what is going on in the wild, and there is some overlapping consensus now on how JS can improve with regards to programming-in-the-large. This is a very good thing.

I'm curious how well and how quickly all these new server-side JS systems (nodejs, commonJS, V8, etc) will react to the upcoming new ES5. It now seems likely that JS coders will get to try out ES5 a lot sooner on the server-side than on the client-side, given how long it will take (forever-ish) for ES5 to be adopted in browsers.

<comment><USER4> CommonJS is tracking ES5. For the time being, we vaguely suggest that all compliant implementations must support all features of ES5 that are implementable or stubbable with existing JavaScript features. For example, Object.freeze can be implemented as a stub no-op so people are free to use the API in their modules, and get the feature when it's supported. The intent is to eventually make ES5 compliance a requirement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The biggest problem with "Javascript on the server" right now is that Javascript has no concurrency story whatsoever. You could easily hack in shared-state threading, but there would be no faster way to turn me off of Javascript forever than to do that. You could hack in message-passing, but it won't be clean and you're still going to have terrible fun trying to not pass mutable references, which, again, if you leave that in I will run screaming. STM isn't exactly going to be easy to stick in either.

(I say I will "run screaming" not merely because I don't want to deal with it, but because I don't want to deal with yet more libraries based on shared-state concurrency. No. I've left that behind and I'm not going back, and certainly not in a space where I've got an abundance of languages to choose from.)

Without a solution to that problem, I see this as a terribly, terribly wrong move, and a terrible time for JS to try to be picking up the server. Servers are _in_ the multicore age and have been for a couple years now.

(And if your answer is "well, we'll just keep all the tasks simple and we won't need multiple threads", I would remind you that you're running _on the server_ , which often needs to do, you know, _actual work_. A language that can't do that may have a small niche, but it's going to be an uphill battle against entrenched competitors.)

<comment><USER6> One solution that will almost certainly get implemented is WebWorkers. From that you get string-only message passing (though it'd obviously be easy to do json-encoding of data in messages) between js processes.

That, combined with event based non-blocking apis for managing multiple tasks neatly covers more or less everything you can do in many other mainstream languages like Python and Ruby (excluding some magic in native code extensions).

<comment><USER5> That makes some sense. I would agree that it should be optimized to specify that JSON-able objects should be passable in such a way that it is if they are being fully serialized out to strings then deserialized again, giving the implementation the ability to do some optimization (which may or may not be a good idea but you'd have to try it to find out, best not to write yourself into a corner), but actually doing that in a library would be easy enough.

Given the way that JS performance has been moving, that would indeed be able to take on quite a workload, if you can run a decent number of "webworkers" at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is kind of cool, but who is going to digest all of it? The techno folks may have some technology pieces working, but nobody out in the main world would be able to figure it out. I got a little dizzy just looking at all the links to all the pieces in just this one article. Let alone actually reading them all.

I like Java script but I think making it go server side is backwards. Why not make Python or Perl or Ruby go client side instead? (I am sure plenty of folks smarter than me have already thought about and probably worked on it.) Those languages already have all the parts they need except a connection to the browser dom. Java script has a connection to the dom and practically nothing else. These other languages have been getting tweaked for years on the server side. It just seems like such a big byte to get Java script to work as a regular language like the others. It also ignores some of the things that are lurking like Erlang and Clojure. It sounds correct that there are lots of Java script programmers. However are there lots of Java script _only_ programmers? I doubt it. While it is compelling to write one language every where, I dream about it sometimes, we aren't close yet.

So embedding the Perl, or whatever, interpreter into the browser is probably a chore, but it is also probably doable, the browser should be able to deal with multiple languages. I think it is just that the people that are capable of doing that job looked at it and said. "Crap! I will just learn Java script." So the reality in my mind is that programming in two or three or four languages is just easier than doing all that other work. Everybody does it. In fact we say I know Java, or Python, or Java script, but that is just a word to give us a frame of reference when we communicate with each other. In fact what we really know is how to program computers and Python is a subset of the total global programming skill that I have. It is a like speaking English in some specific domain. There is jargon everywhere, one can speak English but one tends to get easily lost if one listens to lawyers speak to each other or doctors, and one is also not a doctor or a lawyer. Does that mean we should create a generalized English that both doctors and lawyers can use in each of their specific domains? Seems a little silly when one thinks about it. Is making Java script work everywhere is really buying all that much?

<comment><USER8> Going the other direction (moving server-side languages into the browser) is simply not feasible with the current rate of browser development and adoption. It would be at least 5 years with a concentrated effort to accomplish such a task.

<comment><USER9> Disagree. Every month we're seeing a new "X to JavaScript" compiler, and increasingly they are being written natively in JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I want is an extension for my web framework that transparently pre- renders certain Javascript-generated parts of the page, and then sends the browser a serialized version of that page that includes not only DOM structure but fully wired-up event handlers.

This should be possible using HTML and <script> tags, but will take some serious work to become plausibly cross-browser. But if that work happens, there will be a way to automatically provide the usability/speed benefits that previously required dual client & server implementations without the attendant cost. And that will drive a lot of people to using whatever standards those tools are built on.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm glad the JSGI spec is fleshing out, the web connector API will allow many more frameworks to get started easily, rather than forcing Javascript programers to hack on java or C to build a webserver first.

Once JSGI is done, it really will allow the experimentation you see from Rack and WSGI in the respective Ruby and Python worlds.

I guess its about time to update my old mod_v8 to support jsgi :D <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408707>

</comment><comment><USER12> The CommonJS module system is really a step forward.

For the last two months I've been developing a webapp on Helma NG and I like it very much. Parts of the framework fit together nicely. The community on IRC is very helpful and provides answers in the rare cases where source code and documentations is not enough.

I also want to praise the project developers for their code quality -- even though I use a version from git I haven't had a single problem with frequent updating and re-building it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Funny that no one seems to mention that IIS runs JavaScript (aka JScript) on the server, and has since the beginning.

<comment><USER14> No one seems to _care_.

<comment><USER15> Too bad. I guess we'll just reinvent the wheel again simply because we don't like who invented it last time.</comment></comment></comment>


Collections for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.collectionsjs.com/

<comment><USER2> This is gold, thanks for the submission.

The biggest part is made by the great kriskowal, which gave us Q.js. Warranty of quality, if I may say.

<comment><USER3> Thank you.</comment></comment>


Career change advice - <AUTHOR>

Hi all, i am in my mid 30's with nearly 10 years experience as a systems engineer but don't find it very fulfilling anymore. for the past year I have been attracted to the idea of moving into web development but not sure how. I already finished an online bootcamp on Ruby on Rails and I am in general at ease with web technologies. My main blocker in actively pursuing a change is that my lack of previous experience in combination with my age will be a showstopper for someone to hire me. Any advice from you wise people on how should I approach this and maybe what kind of positions I should be looking for? <comment><USER2> As other two comments mentioned you have two options, create a github repository of your code and/or create a web app for hiring managers to see and review.

I believe ageism is prevalent in this industry. Most shops that have people in early 20s at junior positions in web development most likely will make excuses and not hire you in those roles.

You might be able to break in web development after joining a company in system engineering or devOps role and showing your web dev chops by using it to solve your and your colleagues itch in system engineering. In my last job, a colleague made the same transition by doing things for example creating an internal web site for system engineering group for weekly status report, storing online important customer configuration files, indexing documents for search etc. things that were annoying to people in his group and he made them suck less. Soon, he was asked to join our intranet development group, it was a lateral move for him instead of starting from bottom.

Another avenue will be to do freelance. Nobody cares about your age as long as you can deliver the work requested by client.

Personally, I made a similar move from system engineering in my mid-40s to webdev/analytics. It was clear during the transition while interviewing for webdev/analytics role that no one will hire me in such roles due to age as well as elementary quality of the code that I write.

But then something magical happened, I created a web app to scratch my own itch using the same quality of code that hiring managers were not impressed with. I guess thousands of others had the same itch and now I have 1,700 users, both individuals and businesses. Suddenly, I was being considered expert not in webdev but the industry vertical my web app targeted. I now consult in that industry vertical at rates much higher than what any webdev job would have paid.

</comment><comment><USER3> The big reason you see so many self-taught developers in this industry is that it's so easy to demonstrate that you're good at what you do. No $200k degree required. Just $7 for a domain name and a bit of time building something impressive to put there.

You can't do that with, say, doctoring or lawyering. There, you'd actually need a piece of paper saying you're good at what you do. Here, all you need is to be good.

Go build something cool. Optionally stick the source online someplace, but definitely put the end product someplace you can point to. Then point potential employers to it.

Incidentally, you're not old, and even if you were it would not matter. I went 10 years at one point never meeting a client in person. I could have been 112 and they would have had no way of knowing. Ignore people complaining about age bias. If you're good at what you do, people will want you to do it for them.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have not encountered this age-ism that you speak of, especially not against someone in their mid 30's. So, you should probably stop worrying about that.

Skill-wise if you've done a bootcamp and you feel comfortable coding then do a couple of example projects to put on your Github and get involved with an open-source project or two to make some contributions where hiring managers can see that you are actively coding. In this market, that should get you far enough. And don't be afraid to apply for positions you feel under-qualified for, because a lot of hiring involves looking for someone who is capable and able to ramp up skills as needed rather than relying on a very exacting skill history (and anyone who relies on such is probably doing it wrong anyways). You miss all the chances that you don't take!

</comment><comment><USER5> If you have time outside of work, can you build a web app that does something for you and see how it goes, and how you like it?</comment>


100,000 people pressure Apple to shut down 'Gay Cure' app - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/03/22/gay.cure.app.mashable/index.html

<comment><USER2> People seem to have a hard time understanding that freedom of expression goes both ways.

Whether or not you agree with the stance the makers of this app take they have the right to express it, just as gay rights activists can express their side of the coin.

<comment><USER3> Freedom of expression does not exist in Apple's app store. That has consistently been my takeaway from previous discussions on this topic, at least.

<comment><USER4> It would arguably be a violation of Apple's rights to force them to sell something on the App Store, except where rejecting it would be anticompetitive behavior. Nobody's stopping the 'Gay Cure' folks from doing it as a web application instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a bisexual man (who in no way claims to speak for anyone else), I'm torn on this.

Of course, I am fully supportive of freedom of expression and the phrase "I strongly disagree with your opinion but will defend to the death your right to voice it." But...can you imagine an app claiming to "cure" black people? That'd never be approved by Apple. "Curing" LGBT people is just as absurd as "curing" black people. Exposing children to such bigoted, offensive material is really awful. It should almost certainly not have the 4+ rating, and I'm really torn on whether Apple should even allow it into the App Store.

Stuff like this isn't just some abstract issue about 'gay rights' with two equally valid sides of an issue--this homophobia can ruin lives, and sometimes even result in death. It's really a very emotional issue that can't be easily dealt with or abstracted into some 'gay rights' issue.

I feel like I didn't express myself as well as I would've liked, so if anyone has questions, please feel free to ask them.

</comment><comment><USER6> As much as I don't think one can be cured from homosexuality nor that is a disease, I don't think it should be Apple's responsibility to decide on moral issues (although they have an history of doing so). Morality is people's individual responsibility, not companies, not governments.

<comment><USER7> So why are there no porn apps on the app store?

<comment><USER8> The screens get oily enough as it is...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The law against false advertising _probably does apply here_ , and as such the correct course of action would be to file a suit against the seller. I'd love to see them try to prove that their method actually "cures" something.

Without this option though, there's not really anything we can do. If someone believes this is worth selling, and someone else believes this is worth buying, then we're not in any position to tell them what to do with their money.

There are all kinds of scams and other ways buyers can get into trouble, and I certainly won't defend scams (I hate all of them). But in the end it is _the buyer's responsibility_ to call "B.S." and decide not to buy something. Apple can't be a parent to everyone. Even if they could be, what would happen as soon as you step outside the App Store and find something on Amazon or in a brick and mortar shop?

<comment><USER10> Unless it's a spiritual cure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple has taken measures to ensure that the app store is a walled garden. It has set the bar pretty high compared to other less regulated 'app stores'. It could be considered a strength/weakness. It is what it is....

If it was an anti-apple app then, @#%& you: Denied! Can't have anything ruining apples image, everyone else DIAF.

freedom of expression, more like a bigoted attack. This entire story has so many directions it could go.....

</comment><comment><USER12> See also the discussion from yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2349531>

</comment><comment><USER13> This just, again, shows the core problem with censorship. By removing the right for the user to choose which app to download, Apple takes upon itself to filter out "inappropriate" apps. Where do you draw the line? To some extent, something will always offend someone.

<comment><USER14> You draw the line at government control and stop trying to regulate the activities of private companies and people.

Being able to freely critizise the activities of a private company without fear of government sanction is what the 1st amendment is about. It is not about forcing private companies to adhere to any particular person's view of what they should or shouldn't sell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'll bet I could gather up a million people in America who would sign off their right to freedom of speech for a free Apple product and some free apps. I'm glad this country is not run by the majority.

Our freedom of expression is worth a million times more than stopping a few people pushing some evil religious agenda. 50 years from now, these nutbars will still be with us, voicing new inflammatory messages. The solution is not to silence them, but to educate everyone so the inflammatory message has no effect.

<comment><USER10> It's Apple's platform for "raking in the cash", not your platform for "freedom of expression."

Apple has a ToS, and Apple isn't censoring (def: "forbid the public distribution of") anyone.</comment></comment>


A way to make anonymous online donations - <AUTHOR> http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-way-to-make-anonymous-online-donations.html <comment><USER2> He had to give a postal code to register the card and presumably had his IP address logged. It should be easy enough to trace his real identity.

Yes, he says a fake address may have worked, but that may be criminal fraud. Also, the given address could be automatically checked against the geolocation of his IP address to make sure he's being honest. And it's not difficult to filter Tor/VPN IPs.

Another problem is that while he never gave personal information, he still created a pseudo-anonymous identity that can be profiled and potentially linked to his real identity based on a myriad of potential factors. Whereas if he used something like Monero (which he seems to be aware of), then there would be no such risk. There's really no point to this method anymore, and another commentator pointed out it wouldn't even work in certain countries.

<comment><USER3> >Yes, he says a fake address may have worked, but that may be criminal fraud.

How? I get how it might be the case if you're doing it to evade donation restrictions, but merely lying about your identity isn't fraud anymore than giving a fake phone number/zip code to the cashier when asked. AFAIK if you're not benefiting financially from the deception, it's not fraud.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud#Elements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud#Elements)

<comment><USER4> >merely lying about your identity isn't fraud anymore than giving a fake phone number/zip code to the cashier when asked. AFAIK if you're not benefiting financially from the deception, it's not fraud.

This makes me wonder if giving a fake phone number to a cashier to obtain a financial discount (like a supermarket club card) is fraud...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my country we have to activate prepaid debit cards by SMS, meaning that the prepaid cards are tied to our real life identity via our phone numbers.

Prepaid SIM cards need to be registered and tied to your SSN here, so a prepaid SIM would not work to get around this problem.

You might think I live in some authoritarian state or something but I actually live in Norway. In general life is good but I find these things disconcerting :(

I guess it might be doable to use one of those online services that will send and receive SMS on your behalf without registering any personal information. But I didn't try that and for all I know it could be that SMS from such numbers would be rejected or flagged by the bank.

<comment><USER6> Getting a sim card using social engineering is easier and safer. You go into shopping street in front of a cell phone shop, explain you're a foreigner in distress.

"Sorry to disturb you, but could you please help? I just lost my phone. I urgently need to be reachable for {"my ill grandmother", "my biggest client"}. I have money on me, and I already bought a new phone, but I left my id at the hotel in $next_city, and the shop won't sell me a sim card without it. I'm desperate! Could you please help me out and get me a 20€ prepaid card?"

Give it 10 minutes tops and you'll have your sim...

<comment><USER7> Or you can go to neighbouring countries and pick up 10 free sim cards at the local Lebara market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really old school, but why not stick plain old cash in an envelope? Make sure that the envelope contents are not visible (eg, wrap the bills in plain paper), and mail the envelope to the charity. Put a fake return address if you want. Explain in the enclosed note that the return address is made up. Or use the name of someone real - they will get a surprise tax receipt.

Yes there is a slight risk that someone in the delivery chain will open the envelope and steal the money, but I suspect the chances of this happening (at least here in Canada) are slim, especially if the envelope is inconspicuous.

Cash is still the ultimate way to make anonymous transactions.

<comment><USER9> Just don't lick the stamp, or they'll have your DNA to identify you with.

<comment><USER10> That's what the squirrel is for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > We don't want wealthy people to have an outsized influence on politicians. > And we want donations to be transparent so we can see how politicians might > be influenced by certain donors.

As a pure thought experiment, let's just admit that the rich _own_ our political process, and make it explicit:

\- You ballot gets multipied by the amount of tax you choose to pay.

\- All contributions _have_ to go through the Treasury, and are public.

\- If caught violating the "all your cash in the open" rule, the offender is disbarred from public service.

Again, this is not a complete thought, but the intent is to drive politics away from the current poker match, toward chess.

<comment><USER3> >\- You ballot gets multipied by the amount of tax you choose to pay.

I heard of a variation of this where the multiplier is ln(x) or sqrt(x), so there's diminishing returns from additional donations. That way the rich don't have as much outsized impact on politics.

<comment><USER11> I'm OK with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the US, another way to make anonymous donations to charity is to use a Donor Advised Fund [1]. For example Fidelity Charitable [2] makes it easy to make grants anonymously if you choose.

Beyond that, there can also be additional tax advantages to giving to giving via DAF, especially if you have appreciated stock, bitcoin, etc. [3]

1\. [https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable- organiz...](https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable- organizations/donor-advised-funds)

2\. [http://fidelitycharitable.com/](http://fidelitycharitable.com/)

3\. [https://twitter.com/philfreo/status/964970877338247169](https://twitter.com/philfreo/status/964970877338247169)

</comment><comment><USER13> > if in public life I am a well-known conservative Evangelical, but I donate > to a cause (say abortion education) that I privately support, I might prefer > avoiding any chance that the donee leak my information in an attempt to > 'out' me.

This sentence really stood out to me as an example of why politics has become so polarized.

If you have political ideals {A, B, C} and there are others who have ideals {A, B, !C}, and you allow your shared beliefs of {A, B} to either sway your opinion on C, or be not willing to communicate openly about it, then you are exacerbating the problem.

This forces people to try to try to identify with the group that they have the largest intersection with, and usually assume the ideals that that group has. Which means that a majority may silently be in support of C, but are so set in an us-vs-them mindset, that they allow !C to become part of their ideology.

<comment><USER14> I always thought people who just agreed with me on everything were boring, or afraid to admit otherwise. I'm no debate master, but I enjoy sparring with someone who knows more than I do, or has a view I hadn't considered.

Do schools even have debate anymore?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> To prevent MITM/downgrade attacks (such as by someone at the same coffee shop) you should always use an HTTPS link. Malicious parties can inject ads, trackers or botnet mining scripts otherwise. Here is a secure mirror:

[https://archive.is/RTF2i](https://archive.is/RTF2i)

</comment><comment><USER16> Payment processors have a way to block prepaid cards, and I wouldn't be surprised if many organizations used these as a blunt instrument to prevent fraud. A political organization can probably even decide to treat those transactions as though they were anonymous cash donations.

Though, I'm thinking of the US, so this may be different in Canada or elsewhere.

See, e.g., [https://support.stripe.com/questions/find-the-type-of- card-a...](https://support.stripe.com/questions/find-the-type-of-card-a- customer-is-using)

> The funding parameter of the card object exposes whether the card is a > credit, debit, or prepaid card. A card may be unknown if Stripe was unable > to determine its funding type.

</comment><comment><USER3> > __The way to nip donation fraud in the bud would be to require payment > processors to avoid processing any prepaid debit card payment for political > parties

If SaaS startups can block prepaid cards from being used for trials, there's no reason why this shouldn't be required for political campaigns.

</comment><comment><USER17> To be fair to PayPal and the link, the receiving organizations have been selling your name and address to each other for a long time. Make a donation to say the Red Cross and in a couple of weeks you'll be getting (snail) mail from org you've never even contacted asking for money.

</comment><comment><USER18> Do virtual credit cards like Google Pay do something similar to this?

<comment><USER17> Not really, as those are tied directly to you / an account. The article is a POC for how to give money and mitigate your identity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Monero anyone?</comment>


The Importance of Fuzzing Emulators - <AUTHOR> https://mgba.io/2016/09/13/fuzzing-emulators/ <comment><USER2> I used AFL (fast) on the TXR language and fixed a few issues as a result in release 148. None of them were corruption issues. Several were degenerate behavior. One was a termination via abort, due to something not being checked. I just fuzzed the parser, not even delving into semantics very much. Still, the parser involves expansion of macros and special operators, and is complicated enough in itself, so things can go wrong.

One issue that was uncovered was that the defvarl macro was improperly implemented. It is supposed to be like defvar, but not mark the symbol as special, giving rise to a global lexical variable (hence the "l"). However, it was actually behaving as a synonym for defvar. How AFL helped uncover this is that its fuzzing generated the form (defvarl) with no parameters. Now defvarl was marking the symbol special at expansion time. There was no error checking for the missing name, and so the symbol nil was passed to an internal function to mark a symbol special; and that asserted on nil being a non-bindable symbol. Of course, my reaction was, huh? How do we end up in mark_special when defvarl is being expanded? Oh shit ...

Another thing AFL found was degenerate behavior in the op operator for generating anonymous functions. op scans its body for numeric parameters, and then generates a lambda with a number of arguments based on the highest numeric parameter: (op whatever @1 @2) gives you, ignoring certain other details, (lambda (arg1 arg2) (whatever arg1 arg2)). AFL figured out that there is a problem if we do something like (op whatever @1111111111111111111111111111111). The expander wants to create lambda syntax with a huge number of parameters, which blows up memory. Though nobody would do this in a normal program, suppose that you have some application which accepts code and interprets it. Of course, you sandbox all the stuff which could let the code access the system---but issues like this means that you're open to DoS before the code even runs, just from parsing it and expanding its macros. You wouldn't sandbox off a useful programming feature like op. I just put in a hard maximum on the integer that can be used in the op syntax.

One more degenerate behavior AFL uncovered was in backquote nesting. The TXR Lisp backquote is spelled ^ (caret). AFL uncovered that ^^^^^^...FORM nesting blows up memory exponentially in the number of rounds, due to each round of nested backquote expansion multiplying the size of the expansion. This prompted me to finally add some optimization of the generated code to the sloppy backquote expander, which reduces the expansion growth to linear in the number of rounds.

After these fixes, I noticed speed increase in "make tests" in excess of 7%, too.

I look forward to more fuzzing.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a long-time emulator user, I'm honestly a little surprised at how little security checking sometimes goes into these programs.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, it's not really surprising. Emulators, and, more broadly, video games in general, tend to not give little to any thought about security.

To be fair, exploiting games and emulators directly aren't a particularly common attack vector. I've never heard of any wild malware that attempted to exec itself via a (legit) emulator, although IIRC arbitrary code exec on clients had popped up a few times in the wild on older multiplayer games (mostly CoD and various Source multiplayer games). Most of the "malware" stuff related to emulators I've heard of are cheap tricks (e.g. tainted emulator binaries on shady websites, EXE files deceptively labeled as ROMs) and not any fancy exploits.

<comment><USER5> Actually, video games are the main exploit vector for game consoles. Out of my memory there was the name buffer overflow in Zelda for Wii, and a font corruption issue in King Kong for the Xbox 360, which both were used to allow running homebrew software.

<comment><USER6> Attacking video games for code execution was the main entry point as the devices transitioned into semi-connected devices (the original Xbox, Playstation 2, Gamecube and then later the Wii), that has mainly transitioned now to "attack crusty old versions of Webkit!" for the current batch of consoles

Attacking emulators through games for code execution however is fairly novel

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd prefer if these emulators would just run in a sandbox so an exploit could affect your save files and nothing more. They are so complicated there will always be bugs.

<comment><USER4> Maybe it's time to pick up Qubes OS? (or Sandboxie, if you can't ditch Windows)</comment></comment>