The most incredible time-lapse video I've ever seen - <AUTHOR> http://www.danoah.com/the-most-amazing-time-lapse-video-ive-ever-seen

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting genre, the time-lapse while pan in HD with hyperbolic music. But I'm just burned out on them. Something about these videos just seems overwhelmingly self important and cheesy.

<comment><USER3> Everyone would be much better off watching Koyaanisqatsi for time-lapse pan with good music and less self-importance: <http://www.hulu.com/watch/27800>

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately Hulu is so over-saturated with advertisements you have to be willing to put up with ads throughout the whole presentation, and heaven forbid you try to jump through to see what lies in store.. (79 seconds remaining)

<comment><USER5> Jesus, if there's _one_ movie that ought to be seen without commercial interruption, that's it. The whole thing is about condemning the commercial interruption of the biosphere. Koyaanisqatsi on Hulu a bit like seeing advertisements for bacon during "Babe".

<comment> cupcake-unicorn Oh wow, I agree. The commercials on it are surreal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >In layman's terms… he used a camera. Not a camcorder. A DSLR camera. And he put each individual picture together on a computer to make it into a video.

That's... exactly how time-lapses are usually done. Not sure where the amazement comes from exactly.

<comment><USER7> So what he gets is closer to what you would get with real cinematography gear than you do with even pro-sumer type camcorders which code to a particular video format.

Unlike others I'm not raging anti-HDR, my eyes tend to see in HDR and so these images can look more "real" to me than images which have more limited dynamic range.

I do however really dislike the motion compensation TVs that make movies look like video. That suggests making an impressionist painting look like a polaroid is a "good" thing when part of the art is the look. Why I don't get the same negativity about HDR I don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't have a favorite movie or a favorite book or favorite band. But I have a favorite time scaled video. It shows an owl. Make sure the quality is set to 1080p and you are in fullscreen mode, or you'll miss half the action: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji_x8RU4zIo&NR=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji_x8RU4zIo&NR=1)

It's just an animal doing what it's doing, no post processing or dramatic cuts. Yet, watching all the details of what's happening in the short sequence amazes me every time I watch it. It's also the only thing I ever had on my screen that made my cat show a reaction (she treats it like a wall otherwise).

edit: Had conflated time lapse and slow motion. Fixed the text and will never come to Hackernews while having my mind filled with other work again. Ever.

<comment><USER9> While the owl is neat, slow motion is basically the opposite of time lapse

<comment><USER10> I'd call it more of a dual than an opposite. They're both showing you things you cannot see with the "naked eye" due to time limitations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Other nice ones:

<http://vimeo.com/22439234>

<http://vimeo.com/51454212> (founder of ReadItLater/Pocket)

<comment><USER12> <http://vimeo.com/40234826>

For me, this is by far the most awe-inspiring.

<comment><USER13> <https://vimeo.com/24410924> is also quite amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you like this then you should check out Baraka, this film has a few shots that were inspired by it. The follow up - Samsara - is also excellent.

<comment><USER15> Back in 1985, Ron Fricke, the same director of _Baraka_ (1992) and _Samsara_ (2011), created the most impressive time-lapse film ever made till then. It was called _Chronos_ and it's available online [1]. It's very interesting to watch how the moving pictures match the soundtrack to capture the essence of Time [2].

[1] <http://youtu.be/1K9N9flhOx4>

[2] <http://youtu.be/1K9N9flhOx4?t=25m24s>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author writes: "If you can, watch in in HD. This one needs to be watched in HD."

There's a regional TV, furniture, and appliance store here in Madison that has an LG 84" 4K TV on display (resolution - 3840 X 2160P) and they're using this loop, along with some similar indoor shots of big shopping mall atriums and cities at night as their demo.

If you can view it on a 4K TV, that's the way to watch it, not just HD.

I asked the salesman what's driving the TV, because I didn't think BluRay had the bandwidth to do it. They said they were running the demo loop off a hard drive, and they didn't have any other content that specifically used the full 4K resolution. (He tried to sell me that the upconversion would make my existing 1080P devices look better.) Their price was $16,999 for the TV, and they told me they had actually sold one. Way beyond what I can afford, but I left wanting one.

<comment><USER17> Does Vimeo even have an ultra HD mode? It looks decent on my desktop monitor (2560x1600), but I'm fairly certain Vimeo was just streaming me 1080.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was just thinking it would be cool to turn your desktop into a slow moving time lapse (extends throughout the day), many of the shots in the film would make a nice wallpaper.

I have too many side projects ATM, someone go build this!

</comment><comment><USER19> While I was watching I couldn't tell (on some parts) how it was different from just filming. I understand there are probably differences with quality but beyond that? Not saying it wasn't good just might not be my thing.

<comment><USER20> You have a combination of very long time between shots (eg the people walking on the beach), and very long shots (eg the flowing river, where each individual shot probably is ~20-30 seconds). Most of this is impossible to shoot as regular video.

<comment><USER19> That was maybe what confused me. For some reason I thought they were all still shots but then there was motion. Thanks, I wasn't even considering things like exposure time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Time-lapses are very cool, but this one is pretty generic and has lots of the flaws people spend a lot of time trying to avoid in theirs. It has some very disconcerting focus changes and unreal looking edges, as well as some very uncanny stark lines.

</comment><comment><USER22> <http://vimeo.com/24253126> ocean sky at night

</comment><comment><USER23> See also: <http://timescapes.org/>

</comment><comment><USER24> Wish it was on youtube instead,I could not watch it on my tablet.

<comment><USER25> It is on YouTube, along with his other timelapse videos. This isn't a new one.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewTU7DNP500>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wow, that makes me homesick for Moab and Arches in general.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if he bothered to license the music.

</comment><comment><USER28> music is - Thomas Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor) by John Murphy

theme from scifi movie sunshine</comment>


Escape_utils - Faster string escaping routines for your ruby apps - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/brianmario/escape_utils

<comment><USER2> That's pretty rad!

Github hiccuping on me. Some of the code is not showing in github e.g. [http://github.com/brianmario/escape_utils/blob/master/lib/es...](http://github.com/brianmario/escape_utils/blob/master/lib/escape_utils/rack.rb)

Cloning works, tho.

<comment><AUTHOR> strange, I can't get to it either - hopefully it'll be working tomorrow after they all sober up ;)</comment></comment>


I Blame the Babel Fish - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/i-blame-the-babel-fish <comment><USER2> Sorry, but I just don't buy it.

We've fought countless wars throughout our past with surprising frequency. It diminished in Europe as they consolidated from a loose collection of warring states to nation states with foreign policies and alliances (not to mention the printing press). The only big change was in the brutality of war as the participants changed from a professional army to a conscripted army starting with the French revolution, but that has little to do with the ease of expressing ideas (unless you count the spreading of the idea of a conscripted army).

Since that time, the frequency of wars has steadily decreased, especially after the Vietnam war (due to the dissemination of inconvenient information).

People have listened to far-left and far-right broadcasts ever since broadcasting became a thing. Internet echo chambers are nothing new. Before that it was pamphlets and newspapers, and before that, street criers and public houses.

The world is steadily becoming a safer place. The only difference is that as we become safer, our perception of "safety" becomes further and further warped. Things that would have been shrugged off even 50 years ago are looked upon with horror and fear today.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it really _causing_ polarization, or is it causing more groups of people who were previously separated to become less separated and thus bringing the already-existing differences into a context where they can't be ignored?

I think if you ground yourself in history, and look around the world, you will see that there were _plenty_ of very real differences between people and groups of people in both spatial and temporal directions, and anybody who had the idea that "everybody in the world is mostly the same and generally agrees with each other (and me)" was simply unaware of how deeply false that has always been.

If you look at it that way, a reflexive closing of the ranks after these decades of increasing contact with others is quite predictable, and I'm pretty sure you can expect it to continue apace for the next couple of decades at a minimum, and there's basically nothing you can do about it except somehow manage to restore the communication environment back to around the 1950s or earlier.

(After that, I expect another wave of internationalism similar to the one that currently exists (albeit sputtering and fading) between the elites of the US and the EU, but much more widely spread. But before that can happen, a lot more countries need to get much, much wealthier.)

<comment><USER4> Isn't one pretty much the other?

I look at the overall dynamic as epidemiological. You need both the disease agent _and_ the transmission vector. But if you've got a latent agent, and a suitable host, then providing the vector _will_ trigger the pandemic.

If you look back at history, you can view the Inquisition and 30 Years War both as attempts to retain ideological purity in an environment where the spread of undesireable agents (ideologies) was promoted by a new reproduction and transmission system (mostly: printing, also increasing literacy rates).

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

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_years_war](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_years_war)

<comment><USER3> "Isn't one pretty much the other?"

In terms of the "polarization", no. Either it was mostly pre-existing and unrealized, or increased communication created the polarization. I'm saying that the communication revealed already-existing polarization rather than is creating it. Give people 1000 years ago a sudden total Facebook and I have no reason whatsoever to believe that they'd all discover their one true unity of belief; I daresay they'd find even _greater_ polarization.

Of course it isn't 100% one or the other, and theoretically some sort of 50/50 situation could be the case, but I'm not particularly convinced the Internet is creating polarization to speak of. As I said, I think the idea that people were non-polarized and basically agreed with each other has always been false, even in something as specific as the US. Parents have voted Republican while their children have voted Democrat for a long time.

Which also means, don't expect it to stop anytime soon. Generally when people say they want the polarization to decrease, they _really_ mean "I want everybody to acknowledge the intrinsic and obvious rightness of my position and agree to share it"; I mean, nobody who decries polarization ever seems to volunteer to switch _their_ personal beliefs that I've seen. But it turns out that while that was always a fantasy, we can now all see up close and personal just _how much_ that's a total fantasy that isn't going to happen.

<comment><USER4> If you change one element of a system and the result of that change is a sudden and significant change in system dynamics, I'd say you're splitting hairs in allocating causality.

Communications created _manifested polarisation_ , if you will. The previous state didn't have that. Comms created the new situation.

<comment><USER3> But I'd say in return that's a serious goal-post hike. When people write these sorts of articles and decry modern social media for "polarization", they are clearly claiming that it is creating it where it didn't exist before. It is a totally different problem if it is revealing something that has always existed in a way that is harder to ignore. The moral responsibility for Facebook et al _creating_ polarization is much greater than for Facebook _discovering_ the already-existing polarization.

Also, if one believes this is a problem to be solved, the solutions for "Facebook is creating polarization" and "Facebook is revealing already- existing polarization" are _totally_ different. And wildly different in feasibility. There are absolutely real differences that emerge from the two possibilities. One situation could be solved by just basically shutting down the social Internet, albeit at great cost. (And other possibilities, but all at great cost.) The other... well... there hasn't been a lot of success at fundamentally changing human nature, and most serious attempts lately have caused more problems than they've solved.

<comment><USER4> In the case of FB, the question to me is whether or not the introduction of FB _changes_ the dynamic.

If, say, phone and SMS-based activities simply shifted to FB, without any significant change in scope, scale, speed, use, or outcomes ... there's a case to be made for "the medium changed, but the behaviour didn't".

If the _behaviour itself changes_ , in scope, scale, speed, use, adoption by specific groups, or outcomes, _then_ that out becomes far smaller.

Put another way, if there's some extant potential, say a charge differential, or a water reservoir at elevation, and you provide a conductor or remove the barrier keeping it from flowing -- I'd call that a causal relationship.

Or are you saying that a dam failure resulting in a valley being flooded out is simple a realisation of the existing potential and polarisation of high and low elevations?

I'm not buying that.

Media enables. And if costs are reduced, it enables that which was simply not previously possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I particularly resonate with the 'exceptionally large echo chambers'. My parents whom I love dearly have surrounded themselves in the interwebs by people who present a message of hate clothed in the veneer of patriotism. As far as they are concerned "everyone" thinks that way, it is damaging indeed.

<comment><USER6> And what echo chamber would they say you've surrounded yourself with?

<comment><USER5>
       > And what echo chamber would they say you've
       > surrounded yourself with?

If they were being dismissive probably Pollyanna liberalism. Generally though, since we have a healthy relationship, we talk about the differences in the messaging we are exposed to and discuss the underpinnings of those messages. On many things we have a high degree of alignment in our views.

For example, we both agree strongly that our political institutions have become dysfunctional through partisan extremism. I tend to be idealistic in that I strongly believe the tools to "fix" that are built into the system itself (and can argue that point using the recent election as evidence to support that claim) but they feel strongly that structural changes to how the institutions are built is the best solution.

<comment><USER6> My extended family has a similar spread of opinion, and I'm glad we can discuss and accept the differences. I think it's important to identify and interact with people you respect who have opposing views.

If you can simply dismiss differences in opinion as based on ignorance, lack of insight, prejudice, echo chamber effects, etc., you don't have to evaluate your own opinions as much.

And repeated exposure to weak opposition to your opinion also serves to strengthen them, with a kind of meme-inoculation effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some thoughts on the internet from Adams' himself (1999)

[http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html](http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html)

<comment><USER8> Not found?

The requested URL /dna/19990901-00-a.html was not found on this server.

Apache/2.4.10 (Debian) Server at www.douglasadams.com Port 80

Would love to see what you were talking about, love Douglas Adams!

<comment><USER9> [https://web.archive.org/web/20160923110912/http://www.dougla...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160923110912/http://www.douglasadams.com:80/dna/19990901-00-a.html)

<comment><USER8> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I go back and re-read DNA's HHGTTG series from the first book to the last one at least once every year or two. Upon each reading, it becomes less and less of a hilarious poke at the future possibilities, but rather a sad reflection of what we have become.

I remember the first time I read the books 3 decades ago, I yearned for such a device as the Guide. But now I have the very device that I carry with me everywhere (albeit with a shiny Apple logo on it, instead of the MaxiMegalon publishing corp.), and I can't help but wonder if it has made my life better or worse.

Excuse me, I am just going to go outside and wait for Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged to show up and insult me...

<comment><USER11> One of the few good things my father did was to record the original radio play broadcasts onto compact cassettes. They're long since overplayed and stretched, and I don't have a player, but I listened to them over and over again in the 80s and 90s

<comment><USER12> Eventually they were released on CD.

<comment><USER11> Hmmm $160 on amazon.com and £45 on amazon.co.uk — good job I'll be in the uk this summer

Also the best theme tune ever!

<comment><USER10> "Journey of the Sorcerer" \- written by The Eagles, no less!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a very timely post for me, since I was discussing this idea with a friend just a few weeks ago. I left that conversation thinking that on the whole, maybe, just maybe, the internet is becoming a net negative force on society.

Yes, lots of good has been done--Wikipedia, other outlets of free culture, email and its decentralized model, etc.--but on the whole, I think that _just maybe_ it's poised to do more bad than good. As this post mentions, the internet and its promise of a free and instant global megaphone for any idea whatsoever is a powerful tool for manipulation, deceit, and power struggle on a grand scale. The human psyche isn't yet ready for this kind of instant firehose communication, but it seems to crave it, and our darling internet megacorporations are happy and eager to provide it, carefully tuned to be as addictive as possible.

Furthermore the human population on a grand scale doesn't have the critical thinking and reasoning skills necessary to filter this firehose: huge swaths of people in the world don't have good access to education, and in the US at least, with our high schools already at the bottom of the barrel and our universities increasingly becoming diploma mills/expensive trade schools, I don't see the education situation improving. But critical thinking and reasoning skills, which are the foundation of a good education, are exactly what we need to combat this.

I grew up in the Bay Area, and my entire life has been centered around computers, the internet, and the good they can do. It was really saddening for me to reach this conclusion. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope we can do something to remedy things. But these problems are largely cultural/human nature problems, not technology problems.

<comment><USER14> This isn't the first time it's happened. The printing press and radio both were followed by waves of "fake news", conspiracy and the like.

But ultimately people stop buying the National Enquirer. The FCC shows up to enforce some basic rules about truth telling and libel.

And... Facebook changes their algorithms to stop allowing crap to bubble up? Twitter decides to actually clean up their platform at least a bit?

Places like /pol/ can exist without them being mainstream, but when mainstream platforms host fringe views because '1st ammendment lol', then you start having issues.

In "the old internet", if people were being toxic, you'd just kick them off the forum, out of the chat.

<comment><USER13> I don't disagree, but the difference with the internet is that it's so easy to be anonymous, or at least hard enough to unmask that it's not worth it, and the cost is almost nothing.

With a printing press, you have to procure materials, a printer, wide distribution of physical items, etc., and all of those contacts mean that someone somewhere can probably point fingers if the law wants to find you. But try finding the people behind the 10,000 anonymous Reddit throwaway accounts, half in foreign countries. Or the guy writing fake news articles that get picked up by Twitter, who paid for his hosting account in Bitcoin and lives in Thailand. Radio is more anonymous, but can't be instantly shared in the same way things can online. A friend would have to tell you the frequency, you'd have to make time in your day to tune in and listen, and if a pirate station gets shut down there's not always another one lined up to take over instantly.

That's the problem here--nearly free, instantaneous, global, _mostly anonymous_ communication, that friends and family can share into your inbox instantly and effortlessly. Firehose after firehose turned on, aimed directly at you, by people wearing masks. That's why this situation is different from the printing press or the radio.

<comment><USER14> my theory has always been that 95% of the issues are generated by people not _that_ motivated. Like if you get banned from twitter a couple of times then you'll just kinda give up.

Or you'll just say "twitter ain't for me, gonna go for nazi mastodon".

Infowars exists, there's always going to be a platform for these people, but it's more about making their efforts less worthwhile in other parts of the net.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Why is the world moving towards a more authoritarian kind of rule all of a sudden, and why is this happening now."

Is it really all of a sudden? Counting communism as authoritarian (as it always ends in dictatorship), strong moves towards authoritarianism have been happening for over 100 years? I guess they have happened since the US proclamation of independence and the French Revolution, and before that the world was already authoritarian because there were churches and kings.

Perhaps US independence and French Revolution were flukes, and people (or at least rulers) craving for authoritarianism is the norm.

Perhaps it is simply the herd nature of humans that is to blame? They either want to be leaders or have a leader to look up to?

</comment><comment><USER16> _We seem to need some time to react, time to grow some thicker skin lest we're overly vulnerable and allow ourselves to be goaded into making big mistakes, such as accidentally empowering authoritarian regimes, which tend to be very capable when it comes to using communications systems for propaganda purposes._

Or, perhaps the move towards authoritarian regimes is, itself, a reaction to that sense of vulnerability. I have read that during times of crisis in tribal cultures, the men in charge close ranks and get a lot more controlling generally. I think that bit came from some psychology class I had.

In other words, if this feels out of control, some people will react by wanting to be controlling. That can go bad places.

</comment><comment><USER17> > _Douglas Adams totally nailed it when he wrote that removing barriers to > communication could become the cause of conflict._

Where are all the really big wars since the advent of mass media? There's a large amount of forest-for-the-trees-ing here. In our domestic politics, we've grown more polarised, but our societies in general are more harmonious, more integrated. One of the problems the globe is facing is that the lack of wars has removed one throttle on human population growth. Removing barriers to communication has significantly improved civil rights as well.

I guess my point is that just because things aren't perfect now, doesn't mean that they're worse than they were previously.

<comment><USER12> I think you could easily make the case that without mass propaganda World War II would have turned out completely different. There are some serious echoes of the past in the present.

<comment><USER17> WWII's mass propaganda did _not_ have the 'zero bar' suggested in your article. It was state propaganda, not 'the babel fish'.

It's also not like WWII Europe was a 'harmonious group' (or Europe of almost any era). I think that's a core error in the article; that before the babel- fishing internet our societies were harmonious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of my all time favorite books. If you have not see the BBC TV series of it I highly recommend it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_\(TV_series\))

So this is an interesting read you have here. I think the largest issues is that because of our technology we have allowed everyone to only hear their option. If you are in the US and you are conservative you watch Fox, if you are liberal you watch MSNBC and if you are in the middle CNN. It was not always this way. You came home and turned on ABC, CBS or NBC news and the news was delivered in a non-partisan fact based method. Then you could debt it with your family. You did not get force feed view points.

Today you never have to hear anything you do not like which leads to a closed minded view of everything.

<comment><USER3> "You came home and turned on ABC, CBS or NBC news and the news was delivered in a non-partisan fact based method"

Getting news from only one partisan viewpoint is not the same thing as getting "non-partisan news".

<comment><USER18> You are splitting hairs. The point was there was no "tailored" view of the news. There where 3 and they had standards that they all followed. We do not have that anymore, we have infotainment, not the news.

<comment><USER19> Really? What about tabloids? What about Rush Limbaugh? What about Bill O'Reilly? A shitload of people consumed primarily absurdly terrible news sources before they were on the Internet.

<comment><USER12> That's absolutely true but the horizontal peer-to-peer connection wasn't made it was mostly one-way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't count the number of times I've quoted this exact passage from Hitchhiker's Guide when bemoaning the current state of things. I'm not sure if Adams knew how prescient his words were, but it appears to be true (at least for humans) and is profoundly sad.

</comment><comment><USER21> An interesting historical analogy -- in the decades leading up to the Great War, telegraph use exploded, transoceanic cables were laid, suddenly everyone could talk to everyone. Communications technology moved faster than political organization. War followed.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a ton of truth to this, and it's something I've come to realise, strongly, especially over the course of past U.S. election cycle and subsequent developments.

Media _are how society communicates_ , and if you change the messaging and control elements of a system, you're going to change its function, tremendously.

Mind, that's not a _new_ concept, just one that I've finally grokked.

I've just run across Darnton and Ross's _Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800_.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/09/books/after-the- revolution...](http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/09/books/after-the-revolution- the-arts-lived-on-and-the-censors-were-silenced.html)

Earlier, there's Elizabeth Eisenstein's _The Printing Press as an Agent of Change_ :

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent- of-...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-change- communications-and-cultural-transformations-in-early-modern-europe-volumes-i- and-ii/oclc/856017228)

(The 1968 article inspiring this is a shorter synopsis of the concept: [http://www.worldcat.org/title/some-conjectures-about-the- imp...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/some-conjectures-about-the-impact-of- printing-on-western-society-and-thought-a-preliminary-report/oclc/60377645))

Eisenstein worked significantly from McLuhan's _The Gutenberg Galaxy_ [http://www.worldcat.org/title/gutenberg- galaxy/oclc/98079330...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/gutenberg- galaxy/oclc/980793302)

Clay Shirky's formulation is "I study people on the Internet, which is to say, I watch people argue". His view is that the more people can communicate with one another, the more you can find someone you disagree with. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CEN4XNth61o](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CEN4XNth61o) (starting at ~2m)

[https://www.xkcd.com/386](https://www.xkcd.com/386)

So:

1\. This stuff matters. Tremendously.

2\. The responses to technology are not uniformly good.

3\. _Media revolutions change societies._ It's not a question of "how do we get back to status quo ante?", it's "what will be the new status quo".

4\. See #2: #3's implications need not be an improvement.

5\. This stuff is covered, _in excruciating but vitally significant detail_ , in a massive amount of literature dating to the Ancient Greeks and before. All those Communications Studies majors you (and I) laughed at at Uni? There's actually a there there. (And if you want to catch up a bit: MOOC ICS (if you can find the series link): [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NhbHHpKPQL4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NhbHHpKPQL4)

6\. This isn't, as some of the kids today are claiming, just old people getting old. It's kind of a big deal. It's not the _first_ big deal, but it also helps put in perspective how _earlier_ big deals were big deals. Like what happens, say, when net literacy increases from about 25% to upwards of 90%? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848)

7\. Demagoguery and Fascism. The role of mass media in the spread of both is profound. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue) [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230800939_5](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230800939_5)

8\. The power and draw of epistemic systems. As my friend Woozle pointed out: as communications gain in users and influence, they attract those who would seek to use them to personal, financial, or political advantage. There's almost an evolutionary cycle of this. [https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_epistemic_systems_gain_social_and_political/)

________________________________

More by way of a bibliography:

James Gleick, The Information.

Marshal McLuhan. Various.

MacKay, Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everyone

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

Jeremy Norman, The History of Information. A simply amazing website I've just stumbled across. The past 2.8 million years of information and media. Some 4,000+ articles, and 92 themes. Bernays, Propaganda and Public Relations [http://historyofinformation.com](http://historyofinformation.com)

Popper, The Great Transformation and others.

J.S. Mill, several.

Charles Perrow, Ordinary Accidents and Making America (I think).

Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution.

I've been trying to organise my own thoughts on this, the best effort (a stream-of-consciousness rant some months back) to date -- _not_ good, mind: [https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/t7qwp_va18sogdmm_xsslg](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/t7qwp_va18sogdmm_xsslg)</comment>


Ignore white space in code review - <AUTHOR> https://blog.github.com/2018-05-01-ignore-white-space-in-code-review/ <comment><USER2> It'd be fun to think up a Python POC that lets you insert a backdoor via one of these code reviews...

Syntactically significant whitespace. (It took me a _long_ time to get over that and start enjoying Python...)</comment>


Whistleblower: Hackers pwned key systems of leading ISP in Austria for 6 months - <AUTHOR> https://blog.haschek.at/2020/the-a1-telekom-hack.html <comment> kalium-xyz Seems like a lot of attacks have been happening during the ongoing pandemic.</comment>


The Architecture of Open Source Applications - <AUTHOR> https://aosabook.org/en/index.html <comment><USER2> I've had the idea for a while to start a club to read through open source projects, compile them, extend them, note architectures and design decisions, look at documentation and CI/testing organization, etc.

Do something like one project per month with one topic among the above per week. Haven't found the right group of folks to experiment on with this yet.

Edit: Send me an email if you'd like and I'll think about hosting this virtually.

<comment><USER3> On a similar note, I've thought about putting together a presentation on debugging and understanding large codebases by fixing a bug on a large project whose source code I've literally never seen before. I figure that by picking a codebase I have 0 experience with, there's less risk of skipping over steps.

The biggest hurdle for me has been actually finding a project I'm interested in where I haven't yet gone poking around the source code for some reason or another.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I've also been interested in writing more about orienting yourself in novel codebases. I don't think it's explored very much.

It's a pain to write about because you have to find some contrived error (real or not) in a contrived app. I've got a draft of a post but without the examples filled in.

Would like to read (and share) what you've got.

<comment><USER4> It's not explored very much because most new developers try to push for greenfield development and they're trying to split everything up even when it doesn't need it.

Now we're having multiples of codebases to comb through.

<comment><USER5> So true. Also with respect to documentation, which you have to put in a blog rather than contributing it to the project where it can be maintained. It's bizarre to be literally the last port of call for work you've actually done, when people would rather refer to obsolete blogs on things you addressed years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FWIW the Oil project was partly (negatively) inspired by the very helpful description of bash's architecture:

[https://aosabook.org/en/bash.html](https://aosabook.org/en/bash.html)

The maintainer expresses some regret about the parser architecture. I referenced this in several 2016-2017 blog posts:

 _OSH Parses Shell Scripts Up Front in a Single Pass. Other Shells Don 't_ \- [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/13.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/13.html)

 _OSH Can Be Parsed With Two Tokens of Lookahead_ \- [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/17.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/17.html)

 _The Thinner Waist of the Interpreter_ \- [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/26.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/26.html)

 _Word Evaluation_ \- [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/03/09.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/03/09.html)

\----

This principled architecture ended up paying off in a couple unexpected ways, which I wrote about earlier this year:

 _Oil Uses Its Parser For History And Completion_ \- [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/history-and- completion....](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/history-and- completion.html)

 _Oil 's Parser Doesn't Worry About Aliases and Prompts_ \- [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/alias-and- prompt.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/alias-and-prompt.html)

Summary: in addition to the regrets expressed by the maintainer in the article, bash actually has multiple ad hoc, incorrect parsers for its own language! They are incorrect to the point that a separate project (bash- completion) has code to paper over the errors.

Oil uses the same parser for all use cases. Moreover, its parser isn't littered with orthogonal concerns like the interactive prompt and expanding aliases.

\----

However I still need help finishing the project -- see what I've cut here: [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/08/risks.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/08/risks.html)

And feel free to contact me (address on home page and in profile)

</comment><comment><USER7> If curious see also

2019 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20731206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20731206)

2015 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9418788](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9418788)

2013 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6404929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6404929)

2013 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6613748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6613748)

2011 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2904425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2904425)

2011 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598643)

2011 (a bit) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578071](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578071)

There have been many other submissions ([https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=aosabook.org](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=aosabook.org)), but those seem to be the nontrivial threads about the book itself.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was inspired by the AOSA many years ago and I had studied (and held out) as an example the Apache architecture (about 18-20 years ago). It is indeed a pity that so many younger software engineers really have no idea of how heavily used real-world systems get built. Nor do they understand all the various tradeoffs and corner cases that need to get handled to make products work well in real life.

Building Apache from source (including a few key addon modules) and configuring it to work for a small set of tests was step 1 at my organization then. Those successful at this would then get into the source itself. Fun times!

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately deep technical depth is unwarranted and unwelcomed in many organizations. In fact you repeatedly get told that "the customer doesn't care about your code". At the end of the day adding yet another 'if' condition to patch up things is what is usually appreciated.

<comment> non-entity > I once worked at a place where we had an endpoint on an application taking a > long time because of a weird DB query, like 12+ seconds to query a few > hundred rows. Was pretty much told if we didn't figure it out today it > doesn't matter, we'll ship it like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been working through the first volume in a reading group with a few friends. Some chapters are definitely better than others, and it often requires awareness that it captures a snapshot of thinking from ~10 years ago, but it's been a good experience.

<comment><USER11> Could you please elaborate on the chapters that you feel are the best to study?

Cheers!

<comment><USER10> So far we've read the chapters on Asterisk, Audacity, Bash, BerkeleyDB, CMake, Continuous Integration, Eclipse, and Graphite.

Of these, I liked the chapters on Bash, BerkeleyDB, and Graphite better than those on Asterisk, Audacity, CMake, and CI. I had trouble getting through the chapter on Eclipse, although there were some interesting bits.

The chapter on Bash suffered a little, in my personal experience, because about 70% of it was a rehash (with a slightly, but not sufficiently, different perspective) of information present in the Bash man page, which I had previously read in a reading group with some of these same people.

But really, the chapter that's best to study is probably the one you're currently most interested in, even if it's "not as good" as another considered in the abstract. Just remember not to assume that the entire book is of the same quality, whatever your experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Telepathy is one of the coolest most useful most modular pieces of software i've ever used, a modular pluggable framework for chat, & I am always so glad to have a chapter of this book talking about that all.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a pity it's "open source" and not free software including Emacs, in particular, which has been rather successful itself and as a model long-term.

I wonder how some of these architectures have really helped with maintenance. For instance, I'm familiar with Open MPI and its rather sorry maintenance history with continual breakage and at least partially unnecessary lack of compatibility. Then it still seems the best bet for general purpose MPI...

</comment><comment> site-packages1 Very good book, but I would love a version working with modern tooling and software products. I remember going through these maybe 5-7 years ago and thinking at the time that they were using some really old paradigms and software. Would love to see some covering software with modern languages as well, like Rust.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the most important you can take away from it, is that a good architecture takes the problem into account that the project tries to solve. Too often I hear calls for some kind of architectural holy grail, that solves all problems.

</comment><comment><USER14> Want to double star this resource. It covers many interesting (and advanced?) topics like distributed system, building your own database, meta programming, and template engine.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a brilliant idea! It would be great if they start with something everyone uses such as editors - example: Vi, Emacs, Code, browsers such as Mozilla etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is all the content on that website representative of what is in the book when you buy it?

</comment><comment><USER17> This should be part of any serious computer science program subject.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd like to see Kicad, Freecad and Inkscape covered.

<comment><USER19> Can't speak about the other projects listed but FreeCAD has a great landing page on their wiki.

[https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Developer_hub](https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Developer_hub) (I especially liked the forum post from the contributor who detailed the geometric constraint solver - very neat)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great book! I think I will read the whole thing.</comment>


Product Graveyard: Commemorating the most memorable dead products - <AUTHOR> http://productgraveyard.com/ <comment><USER2> Oh wow. There is a not insignificant amount of software on my work computer that is apparently dead. Guess that makes corporate licensing cheaper?</comment>


Ask HN: What is still preventing FOSS Tax Software in 2020 - <AUTHOR> HN, as tax deadlines loom closer in the US, what is preventing a FOSS version of Tax Software?
One that doesn't have any dark patterns and caters to 80% of common requirements majority of the population has. The proprietary software can still cater to the remaining 20% of cases which can be arguably complex.
I'm sure there's tax rules that are constantly changing and keeping up with them is difficult, but I'd imagine this is where social coding such as GitHub etc... would flex its strength.
How would one go about structuring a project like this without it being torpedoed by the current incumbents who arguably wouldn't want something like this to become mainstream. <comment><USER2> Take Turbo Tax for example, look at all of the updates it has to do when the IRS changes something. Then again more for when each state changes something in the state forms.

An open source tax software would have to do the same updates to compete with Turbo Tax and others.

The IRS has a free to file form and Turbo Tax online has a free to file IRS and state for college students and people who take the standard deduction.

I want to write business software for Linux and MacOS so that Windows does not have the monopoly on business software. When I mean business I don't mean media creation tools or Excel but accounting programs that can manage a business and finance it.</comment>


Tell HN: Everything's Abstracted and No One Knows What's Going On - <AUTHOR>

What I mean exactly is, "We're so abstracted. Very few people know what's going on." But, that doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Now before you get upset with me, I am not saying that I know everything, or even much at all. I am merely making observations of what I see in the web developer / programmer mind-set at large.
Relatively speaking, there are a very few number of people who truly understand the underlying technologies, libraries, processes that are being run when they utilize abstracted interfaces. Those abstracted interfaces, by their very nature, remove functionality; or at least limit it. Abstraction targets the general purpose use; not every possible use or niche use.
Yes, abstractions are great at making complex tasks easy to implement reliably and quickly in most cases. But, I am not talking about most cases. I am talking about the need to innovate. To make truly innovative things, you must break those things down to their base components, and rearrange them at the core. You can't do that using high level abstractions.
Hacker News is filled with people whining about how innovative they would be if just given the chance. But, they just keep doing the same old, tired rehashes of the same things. Why? Maybe they aren't looking for the right problems to solve. Or, maybe they don't know what's really possible, limiting their ability to think of innovative solutions.
I guess the point I am getting at with all of this, is that perhaps we should all try a bit harder to try to understand what's really going on when we use those libraries and abstractions we have come to embrace so much. <comment><USER2> This post is a bit all-over-the-place, but I'll bite. I used to share this belief once. The only gains to be had from intimately understanding underlying structures are to be found in performance optimizations. You don't model a problem space by thinking in terms of what values go into what registers. If that were the case, we'd all be writing web applications in Assembly. Abstractions help us to reason out a solution without getting lost in implementation details. As Dijkstra puts it [0], "In this connection it might be worth-while to point out that the purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise." This is why the whole idea of Domain Specific Languages is so interesting. Any loss in flexibility is more than compensated for by the gains made in expressiveness when you can treat low level entities as black boxes.

[0] "The Humble Programmer" - [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340....](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't read the whole lecture yet, but you kind of flipped my whole argument on its head. Well done.

I still think it's helpful from time to time to think a bit deeper about the details of what's actually happening below the top couple layers of abstraction, though :)

<comment><USER3> Look, if you actually understood what an abstraction means, you and the rest of these guys (JoelsSpolsky, I'm looking at you) wouldn't even be pulling the "mightier than thou REAL PROGRAMMER" argument.

You know what debugging is? It's patching up the leaks in abstractions. Thus, we all think about what's behind the abstraction pretty much every working day.

Ya'll soap-boxing is annoying the fuck out of me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like you have had a bad day, so I won't hold this too much against you.

I suggest you not take all of this so personally.

Have you read the lecture that okal posted the link to? It's from the early 1970's and speaks to the early days of when abstractions were first being implemented for computers in general. Perhaps it is you who does not understand what abstraction means.

<comment><USER3> It's not that I had a bad day, is that you used the age-old "REAL PROGRAMMER" argument, which is and remains, annoying since the 70's.

Me? I write in machine code – in 'raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.

<http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> I was not saying there is such a thing as a "real programmer." I am not sure where you're getting that from. I was merely attempting to spur some debate surrounding the recent trends towards very superficial "innovations" being put forth by many on Hacker News. I am not saying I have the answers to any of these questions. And, I don't think I am better than anyone for thinking a particular way. I just want to learn and try to understand the world around me. That's it.

<comment><USER4> What makes you think you can't be truly innovative by using somebody else's construction? There are new things to be done by building off of somebody else's work or by starting from the ground up. If you attempt the latter, you can almost be sure that your work will be less fruitful, unless you have some truly unique perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Abstractions acts as a cognitive tool for you to think about problems and solving them. Whole human civilization is based on abstractions. Numbers are themselves abstraction, other notations based on numbers uses numbers to create other abstractions and so on.

As far as coming up with innovative idea is concerned, if you start digging into abstractions and taking things apart at low level, you will be overwhelmed with so many concepts that you wont be able to see simple patterns and solutions and will be tied up in the complexity because of the limitations of human brain.

We build abstractions to overcome our brain limitations and still be able to innovate.

</comment><comment><USER3> "To make truly innovative things, you must break those things down to their base components, and rearrange them at the core. You can't do that using high level abstractions."

What the? How did you even reach that conclusion? That's a fallacy. It's all an abstraction, all the way down to machine code, like it or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry. I don't mean you should not use any abstractions. I am saying that you must understand what's happening below those high level abstractions to be able to come up with truly innovative solutions to problems. We should definitely continue using abstractions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I guess the point I am getting at with all of this, is that perhaps we should all try a bit harder to try to understand what's really going on when we use those libraries and abstractions we have come to embrace so much."

The answer to the question is "follow the money".

People don't get paid to learn the inner workings of something. They get paid to do stuff that produces results even if they do it in the worst possible way. Except for a rare few companies (who usually are very good at what they do but are rare), the incentive to make things better does not exist.

The short and even medium term payout of deeply learning the inner workings of something is very small. The people who decided that are the ones with the cash and cash is what most people follow.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pretty sure this gets me downvoted to hell, but...

Things are worse than you say!

Everything is not just abstracted, but most things are abstracted half- assedly. And we've raised a generation of people where the majority (though not all) have learned only the half-ass abstractions.

The end result of all of this is personified in things like serious discussions about JavaScript being the "assembly language of the web".

ohgodwhy?

<comment><USER3> I know what you mean, all I really need is a keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler, and a beer.</comment></comment>


Western Digital Announces Acquisition of SanDisk - <AUTHOR> http://www.wdc.com/en/company/pressroom/releases/?release=e5f16023-3969-4cd0-bc3b-fe7e35572518 <comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10424856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10424856)</comment>


Tree-Hugger: Source Code Mining for Human - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/codist-ai/introducing-tree-hugger-source-code-mining-for-human-b5fcd31bef55 <comment><USER2> thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Very welcome :) The original author here. If you have any comments please do share. Hope you will like this little one. We have plans to add support for other languages and more APIs soon</comment></comment>


Halt and Catch Fire - <AUTHOR> http://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire <comment><AUTHOR> I just finished watching season three on Netflix and thought I'd promote what might be my favorite TV show of the last few years (perhaps not quite as good as Stranger Things). for those of us who are old enough to remember modems with acoustic couplers and eight inch floppy disks, it's a bit of nostalgia. For the youngin's who didn't live through it, it's a somewhat accurate history that shows that innovation and out-of-the-box thinking existed in the previous incarnations of SV.

</comment><comment><USER2> One of my favorite shows. I wish that it got the coverage that it deserves, because it's been awesome. I hope that AMC doesn't shelve it in favor of yet another Walking Dead (which bores me) spinoff.</comment>


What Java web framework would you use? - <AUTHOR>

I may have an opportunity in the near future to do a bit of Java web programming, in exchange for many shells and beads.  Having not done much with Java in the recent past, I'm not up to speed on the current state of lightweight application frameworks, and so I am poking the collective brain of all the people here at Hacker News.  If you were going to develop a web application in Java, what framework would you use? <comment><USER2> There's no choice anymore - it's got to be Seam. It's the first Java EE framework to really learn from Rails, eliminate the XML through annotations, natively support Hibernate as the ORM, and still keep the perf and tooling advantages of static typing, use the application servers for automated, efficient state management, and generally make the vast API resources of the JEE stack available.

On the UI side there's a lot of support for JSF components, which is good for someone like me who wants to write the backend and have the UI just work. The Seam code generator makes pretty instant CRUD applications that go a lot further than any of the Rails auto-scaffolding apps.

And, if you think Java's too verbose and inelegant - there's no reason not to write much of the application in Scala or Clojure.

And besides, it's by Gavin King. Gavin King made Hibernate. I know of no ORM in any other language that approaches its feature set - though SQLAlchemy in Python is moving in that direction, and acknowledges Hibernate as inspiration. Hibernate used to be a maintenance nightmare because of the XML; the new annotation based version keeps the power but is a lot more DRY.

The Java community really did a remarkable job of killing off the XML bloat in the current Java EE stack - and only within the last year or so.

[if anyone out there is as enthusiastic about Seam as I am, I have budget for several freelancer projects using it, some of which are actually not boring, and may evolve into startups - contact me on here]

<comment><USER3> waldrews: I have some freelancing bandwidth if you have an interesting project. My email is in my profile while yours is not; send me a line and we'll chat.

<comment><USER4> neither of your emails are in your profiles. it needs to be in the "about" section to be visible.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

+1

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I prefer Wicket over Seam for lightweight web applications. I spent a year or two trying to like JSF and I just can't do it. I find that Wicket's approach to building the UI is more closely aligned to how I work and think.

I've also played with the Stripes framework a bit and it seems like a nice option but I haven't done anything extensive with it yet.

Hibernate is my default choice for the persistence layer. It can be a little tricky if you're tying into an existing legacy data model with a bad design.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry to hijack the discussion, but are there any good Clojure frameworks? The JVM is fine, but programming it with Java is too horrible to even discuss :)

<comment><USER7> I think the only two choices you have right now are Enclojure and Webjure. Both of which are pretty young at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Struts 2: Kickass framework that gets out of your way with almost no XML. This is more WebWork than Struts 1. <http://struts.apache.org/2.x/>

Guice: Dependency injection goodness. <http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/>

Google Collections Library: Makes java.util less painful and awkward to use. <http://code.google.com/p/google-collections/>

And don't forget to use IntelliJ IDEA. Bitchin IDE. <http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/>

and YourKit for profiling: <http://www.yourkit.com/>

Using the above will make you a happy camper. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER9> Warp Widgets is the most innovative framework I've seen in a long time. It support static type checking for the EL: <http://code.google.com/p/warp-core/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I succeeded in transitioning my workplace out of the dark ages about a year go; I chose Spring. If nothing else, use the IOC container and AOP. While it cannot reduce the xml-sit-ups, the Eclipse plugin does simplify their maintenance. I've not yet toyed with EJB3, so I have no comment in that respect. The other specific benefit of Spring is that the .NET side of the shop has the Spring port which eases the conceptual hurdles as engineers bounce from project to project. All that said, I'd not heard of Seam and I will be investigating it as an alternative.

</comment><comment><USER10> I know this is probably an unpopular answer, but I'll answer anyway (I'm not a framework sort of person).

None of them... Write your own. This is what I did for Mibbit, and it worked out very well. Of course it depends on what you're writing, and if any frameworks out there are up to the job, so maybe this advice is unhelpful for you.

You might however be surprised just how easy it is to create your own custom framework.

<comment><USER11> What mibbit does is significantly different from what most "CRUD" type of apps do, though. I mean, you have templates/views like everyone else, controllers, but then your 'model' is an IRC server, right?

<comment><USER10> Sure, it is a special case in that there's the long lived http connections - comet if you're into buzz words.

The irc client is just a plugin to the server though. Very much a general purpose system...

As I say though I'm just not a 'framework' type of person - apart from when its my own ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh, and GWT is my #1 choice where applicable.

</comment><comment><USER12> Lately, I think most people use Spring and Hibernate. I haven't used Java for a while either, though, so I may be wrong.

Maybe you could run Rails inside a JRuby instance and deliver that... :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> Have a look at AppFuse: <http://www.appfuse.org/display/APF/Home>

IMHO a great Java Web App "Framework"...

</comment><comment><USER14> <http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/>

(Disclaimer: never tried it)

<comment><USER15> Guice isn't a web app framework at all...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> All I can say is, thanks for all the feedback! This is really useful stuff...

</comment><comment><USER16> Wicket. If database is involved wicket+databinder.

</comment><comment><USER17> Rails + Jruby

<comment><USER18> Ramaze + Sequel + JRuby

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would use Spring and Ibatis.

</comment><comment><USER20> WebObjects

</comment><comment><USER21> grails</comment>


ZFS for Mac OS X Breaths New Life - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/ I'm not sure how many folks have been mourning the seeming loss of ZFS for Mac OS X for as long as I have... but I thought that this was not only great news, but a tremendous opportunity for folks to really pitch in and help a very worthwhile project for those who value their data!<p>Very exciting! <comment><USER2> What I'm actually more interested in is what Apple is intending on using instead of ZFS.

All indications are that ZFS will _not_ be the next filesystem for OS X, yet they'll need to replace HFS soon seeing as it's the worst-performing and fewest-featured filesystem in use with this generation of operating systems. HFS+ is showing its age in multiple places, and Apple could really take advantage of some of the newer features available in modern filesystems to make a huge difference and increase the power and performance behind some of the current features (a la Time Machine), with techniques such as snapshots, transactioned reads/writes, and more.

<comment><USER3> AFAIk the main argument against use of ZFS is that it would be relatively resource hungry, making it a bad candidate for use in e.g. A MacBook Air. I have Googled, but couldn't find recent data about this. Does anybody know about any? If performance isn't good enough on some target hardware, could one do better, or would it require dropping features? Which ones?

<comment><USER4> Without encryption, compression, or deduplication on I don't think there would be very much overheard - more than traditional file systems, definitely, but still relatively very little.

Encryption would require significantly more CPU (<http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=9886>)

Compression would require moderately more CPU (depends heavily on the compression algorithm) though you can actually speed up disk access with this - which is the real bottleneck ([http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/zfs_compression_a_win...](http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/zfs_compression_a_win_win))

Deduplication requires lots of memory (I think I saw 1-2GB per TB of data quoted someplace) and will increase CPU load a bit, but for certain workloads can save a lot of writing and diskspace (think Virtual Images or a dataset like Dropbox's).

I'm not involved in ZFS development (just an avid user) so take this with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER5> With new Core iX processers now being able to do AES in hardware, I wonder if the CPU requirement for encryption will go down significantly once/if support is enabled.

<comment><USER6> Not all Core iX processors have support for the new AES instructions.

<comment><USER5> From what I can tell, most if not all of the new Sandy Bridge based Core iX processors will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Breaths new life" is a bit misleading' no? From the project page: "this code project will be used to record issues and ongoing development (if any) of this extension"

As well, only a single commit to the git repo since July. :(

<comment><USER8> Depends on which one you're looking at. Alex's repo has a tremendous amount of work. I've been doing little work since the initial build and installer since work picked up.

I went ahead and merged mine up.

<comment><USER7> Ah, I see now. Hiding on the "untested" branch. :-)

Sorry for any confusion then, and I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those (like me) who are clueless on what ZFS is, the wiki page has a good overview:

      In computing, ZFS is a combined file system
      and logical volume manager designed by Sun
      Microsystems. The features of ZFS include
      data integrity (protection against bit rot,
      etc), support for high storage capacities,
      integration of the concepts of filesystem
      and volume management, snapshots and
      copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity
      checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and
      native NFSv4 ACLs.

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

<comment><USER10> ZFS is really cool. The best things that stood out out to me when I researched it a bit a while ago (though there is so much cool about it) are

1) more storage than you could ever possibly use–you won't run out. 2) you can add and remove drives on the fly. 3) you don't have drives you mount, you have pools you can add to and remove from (on the fly). 4) great redundancy/error- checking built in, in all forms.

I'd love to see it on the Mac, officially…

<comment><USER8> You can add and replace, but you cannot remove drives.

<comment><USER11> Sure you can. You just can't shrink the size of a pool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know if Oracle is still developing ZFS, or just Btrfs? Has the situation changed so that Apple may include it on next iterations of OS X, or are we stuck with HSF+ forever?

<comment><USER13> ZFS development continues; they recently released encryption support. Based on the rumors, it sounds like Apple is now writing their own filesystem.

<comment><USER5> Too bad. I wonder why they did not throw support after btrfs if there were licensing issues with zfs.

<comment><USER13> From Apple's perspective, Btrfs has worse licensing than ZFS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> ZFS runs amazingly well on FreeBSD at the moment. Very, very stable and incredible. I love having to not worry about bad blocks / sectors anymore! I also love raid-z2 which allows 2 failed drives simultaneously. Just an amazing comfort. We can see this on Mac OS X with some effort!

</comment><comment><USER14> ZFS is fantastic; it was my file system when I ran Solarid on my Sun workstation (until I replaced it with Ubuntu).

I did get bitten once, wiping out a whole bunch of data very unexpectedly, which I thought was a great ZFS weakness - [http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs- email@example.com/msg0...](http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs- email@example.com/msg09919.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> What I am interested in is, are there any ZFS patents that Oracle could use to sue Apple once they eventually broadly ship ZFS?

<comment><USER4> Apple won't be broadly shipping ZFS, which they made pretty clear when they pulled it from Snow Leopard.

They haven't made an official statement, but the general consensus is that they couldn't agree on licensing terms with Sun (ZFS is licensed under the CDDL) and so they bailed on it. Oh how I wish they had worked things out.

That said, Oracle is also unlikely to do them any favors.

<comment><USER16> _That said, Oracle is also unlikely to do them any favors._

You can always hope. It's not like Ellison and Jobs aren't BFFs. Oracle did write a version of their DB engine for OSX server for no, discernable, reason at all. I don't remember any customers asking for it particularly so this decision had to come down from way up top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does this support newer zfs and zpool versions? (newer version = more features)

Here's a list of where other platforms are at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Comparisons>

</comment><comment><USER18> I'll be that guy.

breath = noun breathe = verb

"Breathes" New Life

That is all. :)</comment>


Facebook iOS SDK causing crashes on startup - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk/issues/1430 <comment><USER2> Workaround: enable airplane mode and disable WiFi

Issue in Facebook's tracker: [https://developers.facebook.com/status/issues/17391881029111...](https://developers.facebook.com/status/issues/1739188102911114/)

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing blocking (the right) Facebook domains with e.g DNS could help also?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it works.

<comment><USER5> Can you list them?

<comment><USER6>
        facebook.com
        fbcdn.com
        fbcdn.net
        fbsbx.com
        fb.com
        instagram.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, second time this year. Not a good look for Facebook. Will definitely push to not include their SDK in any apps I work on in future based on this.

Also a good reminder of the fact that third party dependencies come with associated costs, I guess!

<comment><USER2> Last time this happened TikTok and Google crashed as well and now they hold it up.

Perhaps they did some countermeasures?

<comment><USER8> Only certain sdk versions crash, maybe they've updated

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> AGAIN‽ Just 2 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097459)

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, maybe don't put an opaque blob from Facebook in your app?

</comment><comment> jerome-jh Should we correlate that with the current anti unit test campaign?</comment>


New Software Continuously Scrambles Code to Foil Cyber Attacks - <AUTHOR> http://datascience.columbia.edu/new-software-continuously-scrambles-code-foil-cyber-attacks <comment><AUTHOR> Link to paper: [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi16/osdi16...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi16/osdi16-williams- king.pdf)

I'm one of the co-authors on the paper. Let me know if you have any questions! (And no, we didn't come up with the title of the article. One of the Columbia journalists did.)</comment>


Ask HN: What Google Alerts have you set? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> In the past I had a problem with my content and even the graphics from my biz site being stolen by quite a few sites. I used Google Alerts from that point on, taking randomish phrases from my text content, directory structure, etc, that don't produce too many hits, which greatly eased the effort in finding and dealing with the thieves.</comment>


Open RoR Positions + Telecommute + Bacon = BLISS - <AUTHOR>

I have 4 open RoR positions. Here's a quick description: • Open to telecommuting • Very stable, 40+ hour positions • Challenging application in a complete open source environment • International app that has hundreds of thousands of users • Flexible work schedule<p>And if you've read this far, you should also know that these positions come with all the free BACON you can eat! :) <comment><USER2> Where i should drop CV ? Or maybe this is part of recruiting proces .. figuring it out ;)</comment>


Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-inequality-idUSKBN150009 <comment><USER2> flagged but open discussion from last night:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13407794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13407794)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a little one sided, both in the Reuters piece, and in the media in general. Most journalist and politicians seems focused on the wealthy, but forget that the vast majority of people aren't poor because Mark Zuckerberg is rich.

Sure, the wealthy needs to pay their taxes, just like everyone else, but it's not going to magically pull 2 billion people out of poverty.

<comment><USER4> absolutely right - wealth distribution isn't a zero-sum game

<comment><USER5> I think it may be a zero sum game.

This universe and planet has finite resources. There is only so much iron/steel to build cars, rare earth metals to build electronics.. Fundamentally that's a zero sum game?

Sure in the recent short term, we've got lucky that population was small relative to planet size and we got significantly better each year at extracting resources. Even if we get lucky again and find a way to extract resources from space and energy from some amazing new tech. At some point that too levels off, especially as population keeps increasing exponentially, but energy capture/generation does not. Then we are back to zero sum game.

Historically most tribes/kings etc got rich at the expense of the workers/slaves they exploited. Wealth distribution has and long term mostly will be zero sum, or so it seems to me?

<comment><USER6> _There is only so much iron /steel to build cars_

Steel doesn't really have an innate value, the value only comes when you've turned your steel into cars. If someone comes up with really clever way to make the same car using 30% less steel then we've effectively increased the total value of a fixes amount of steel and thus we are no longer looking at a zero-sum game.

Sure in a large enough time scale there are only so many atoms in the universe and you can't fight thermodynamics (we think...), but that kind of argument is really interesting when looking at a practical level and time frame.

<comment><USER5> >> when looking at a practical level and time frame.

Consider the current rate of population growth: 2017 7,515,284,153 2010 6,929,725,043 2000 6,126,622,121

Roughly 1.28% growth per year. Unless you are able to make a car using 30% less steel EVERY 21 years you are in trouble within "a practical time frame". Oh and you also need to reduce the emissions by 30% every 21 years per person just to maintain current pollution levels.

Exponential growth is a beautiful thing for income, not so good for consumption.

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jul/07/research.waste](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jul/07/research.waste)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _> The eight individuals named in the report are [Microsoft's Bill] Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg._

With the exception of Ortega, Buffett and Slim, that's a lot of wealth concentrated in tech. Hmm...

<comment><USER8> Yeah, i find it always funny when so called futurists say:"The AI Revolution will lead to a few Tech-Barons owning everything without any possible recourse for the rest of society." To which the obvious reply is: "I thought they had already won that battle?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The real issue is here is how much assets _with finite supply and cruicial to human existence_ (e.g. food and water supply, real estate, cruicial technology) can be brought under control of few individuals with such wealth. For example if someone buys the majority of land, there will not be an easy way out even if the monetary wealth distribution will change.

I am wondering why isn't it more often discussed that wealth yields assets that yields even more wealth, because this is how capitalism is set up. This means that the situation cannot be easily improved because wealthy individuals have supeior knowledge and assets to enrich themselves further.

<comment><USER10> You hit the nail on the head.

I don't care how rich the rich are as long as our systems are set up to _guarantee_ a minimum level of access to basic resources including housing, drinkable water, food, internet access, safety, healthcare and education.

As long as these minimums are guaranteed with a large buffer (and every century the minimums go up) I am fine with the wealthy having a lot of money. In our system, the banks invest that money anyway, when the rich aren't using it. These investments represent belief about future demand -- which may result more and more in a plutocracy. But as long as the rest of humanity lives comfortably, I don't care.

Safety nets produce real choice. They allow you to spend time raising your kids and educating them. The kids can join the new knowledge-based workforce. You can as well, since you can take time off to learn. We can maybe travel to the stars.

But without the basic guarantees (vouchers, single payer based) many people are stuck in dead end jobs or worse, grinding poverty. It's like a poker tournament where most people have a really small stack AND can't afford to fly out of the tournament. So much wasted opportunity for human knowledge.

The other thing is smashing the knowledge silos - patents on drugs etc. The way science and open source grew is that anyone could stand on the shoulders of giants and their contributons added to the growing body of knowledge. That's how you serve the long tail eg cure malaria the same way wikipedia has articles on obscure topics and linux runs on toasters. Public platforms outperform private ones.

To sum up: tax the robots, guarantee the basic safety net, put education online and use colleges for tutoring and certification only, promote patentleft for drugs and open source for software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is an incredibly misleading statistic because they use NET wealth, which means that they subtract your debt from your wealth. That means that if you have more debt than wealth (not necessarily a bad thing), you have _negative_ wealth. This is the case for roughly 40% of the world's population.

This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion people in the world. It's also the same metric Donald Trump used in that story his daughter liked to tell, about him walking past a homeless person and saying "that guy is 700 million dollars richer than me".

Income and wealth inequality is a huge problem, but stats like these are incredibly misleading and shouldn't be used to make the argument.

<comment><USER12> > This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average > groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion > people in the world.

But isn't that true? If you are not born into a family that will give you a huge dept and a second mortgage on the house, you are better of.

<comment><USER13> No, not necessarily. Cash flow matters more than debt. Spending all the money that you earn and keeping your net worth at 0 is actually a great way to live (at least until you retire). Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average income potential. I'd rather be worrying about being born into the family with just a little debt, but struggling to pay it off.

<comment><USER12> > Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average > income potential.

I don't understand that. A family with a huge dept is a badly managed family. How can there be anything good coming from that?

<comment><USER13> In order to get huge debt you need to be able to demonstrate a high income potential, high enough to convince the creditor to lend you that kind of money. If you have huge debt, it's likely you can pay it off sooner or later. Also, you won't get it as an uneducated working class family. The background of a huge debt family usually results in an above-average income for the offspring.

<comment><USER12> I don't really need to demonstrate anything with credit cards looking to the US for example. Thinking of those nasty dept packages that got so prominent 2008.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For the curious:

 _The eight individuals named in the report are Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico 's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg._

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't it more important to look at how the absolute wealth of the poorest, than the relative wealth?

<comment><USER16> It is if you care about the poorest.

It isn't if you care about your message and narrative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oxfam released a similar stat last year, and the BBC's More or Less team didn't think much of it. The wealth numbers they're using aren't necessarily well-behaved when they're totted up the way Oxfam has done, as there are a lot of cases where wealth as-measured isn't an intuitive measure of "richness". For example, a new graduate with tens of thousands in loan debt will still have a chance at better long-term income than someone with neither the qualification nor the loan who has higher numeric worth.

That said, it's harder to find examples where the a high wealth implies a low buying power, so this doesn't necessarily contradict the crux of the piece. Either way, it's worth being skeptical of misapplied statistics.

Sources: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26613682](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26613682) [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03fj84x](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03fj84x)

</comment><comment><USER18> These measures I don't think are a good way to measure, because I think there's a difference between someone who's very wealthy on paper because of high stock prices, and someone whose's wealth because they got a disproportionate share of income. The latter represents money diverted in the here and now to someone else, and the former represents money that can be diverted in the future. Of course, you can ask Elizabeth Holmes how much of a billionaire she is now with Theranos, as an example of how paper wealth doesn't always translate.

It's possible for someone to be very IPO stock rich, but not actually have received much income. This is especially true for founders who started with their stock, instead of being given it as a bonus.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. It's still an indicator, although it shouldn't be taken alone. The yearly energy consumption of a person is another that is often recognized as relevant, especially since the duration of our species is now determined by our glasshouse gas emissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is better explained by the amount of impoverished people in the world.

I thought poverty was down! I would rather fight inequality by eliminating poverty. Tax the robots and redistribute wealth to social safety nets!

</comment><comment><USER20> What if those 8 people spent all of their wealth buying goods and services from those poor people?

To spend all of that wealth, every fish would have to be caught, every forest mowed down, every drop of oil burned, to have enough natural resources to spend all of that money.

I'm sure I'm wrong and others will correct me, but I still can't help but feel it's in some ways good that the wealth is so concentrated it can never be fully spent.

<comment><USER2> Consumption of resources is measured in trillions of dollars per _year_.

These incredibly wealthy people have captured a very small slice of overall human productivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's amazing how little they actually have to spend to make people think they are philanthropic, and not just greedy assholes.

<comment><USER22> I was surprised to see Zuck and Larry on the Giving Pledge list, not that they gave, to your point, but at least they've promised to.

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

<comment><USER21> Throw your name on a list, throw a couple bucks you'll never miss at someone, and have a couple pressers. The wealth inequality gap is enormous, and we celebrate the people doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> note that half of that lot have given pretty much all their wealth to charity. There is an argument that their ability to deploy that wealth to good effect is far greater than that of the american govt? In away - its a very positive message

<comment><USER23> The alternative would have been to tax them more and use the tax results to help people. Let's compare:

Taxes:

      - Predictable income
      - Democratic control over the spending
      - Big risk of misuse due to lobbying

Charity:

      - No predictability, depends on the whim of those who could spend
      - No democratic control
      - Small risk of misuse due to lobbying

I welcome everyone to add to both lists. From my comment history it should be pretty clear that I'm not a fan of hoping that those with money are in a charitable mood, but I know there's a strong faction with an opposing view of the world, which could help balancing such a list.

<comment><USER24> \- Taxes are largely avoidable by those with sufficient wealth.

\- Taxes reduce economic development by those who control capital.

\- Taxes reduce charitable giving, especially by those in the upper middle class.

\- Charity doesn't require the implication of violence for noncompliance.

\- Charity encourages more direct management and oversight by those who give.

I would also argue that "No democratic control" is not true for charity, but rather that control is biased in favor of those who control capital.

> I welcome everyone to add to both lists. From my comment history it should > be pretty clear that I'm not a fan of hoping that those with money are in a > charitable mood, but I know there's a strong faction with an opposing view > of the world, which could help balancing such a list.

Note that my suggestions are not accusatory, but in the spirit of this statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Greed is good, baby...I mean poor people

</comment><comment><USER26> This stuff gets eaten up in the UK by people like its crack cocaine and oxfam have an agenda to push to tunnel more funding their way.</comment>


We used a cryptocurrency miner as a heater this winter - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017/12/25/cryptocurrency-miner-ethereum-heater/ <comment><USER2> What in blazes is this "riser" stuff? Is this a x1 PCIe lane routed over a (totally non standard) USB3-A-to-A cable? Or is it an actual way to "extend" PCIe over USB3?</comment>


Observables and Data Flows in Angular 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://ngconf.azurewebsites.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> I gave this talk, if anyone has any questions feel free to ask. I'd also like to point out this was given at ng-conf Isreal [http://ng- conf.co.il/](http://ng-conf.co.il/) and that none of the spec and hard work involved in getting this into Angular 2.0 are mine (on the contrary, I'm the guy with the annoying questions ;))</comment>


The $62,550 machine no one bought - Honeywell's Kitchen Computer remembered - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/27/tob_kitchen_computer/

<comment><USER2> This is begging for a link to Val Henson's photoset of her with this delightful monstrosity at the Computer History Museum...

<http://www.valhenson.org/kitchen.html>

(Context: Val wrote chunkfs and large chunks of ZFS, among other things)

<comment><AUTHOR> Love it. Thankyou.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> They priced it wrong by almost $3,000.</comment>


Show HN: A simpler fantasy hockey game - <AUTHOR> http://www.puckboss.com

<comment><USER2> > Hey Rookie! Please Facebook to play.

No thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough, I'm working on email authentication but fb auth got me off the ground quicker!

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry but there are innumerable solutions for multi-provider authentication. Unless you only spent marginal time on it. In that case, I'd wait for soliciting feedback from a potentially Fb-skeptical crowd.

Feel free to ping me when you get that part done; you almost had me playing.</comment></comment></comment>


How a Remote Town in Romania Has Become Cybercrime Central - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_hackerville_romania/all/1

<comment><USER2> But how can the police arrest these wealthy business? They create jobs!

</comment><comment><USER3> I reckon its because Romanian people are simply smarter than everyone.

<comment><USER4> There are some exceptions though... :)

<comment><USER3> Haven't met any. Hopefully soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Free accommodation on me!</comment>


Mosul Dam collapse 'will be worse than a nuclear bomb' - <AUTHOR> http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/11/mosul-dam-collapse-worse-nuclear-bomb-161116082852394.html <comment><USER2> HN thread from earlier this year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209228)</comment>


Show HN: Maildown – the right way to send transactional mails - <AUTHOR> https://maildown.dev?v=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I just launched Maildown.

Maildown is a transactional email API built for developers - it does away with the WYSIWYG editors and clunky interfaces of some of the bigger email providers, instead focusing on its simple and scalable REST API, which allows you to create emails using markdown syntax

Thanks for looking, Chris

</comment><comment><USER2> Automatic unsubscribe I (the developer using Maildown) can't do anything about seems like a no-go for _transactional_ mail?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's intended for transactional, but could potentially be used otherwise- hence the unsubscribe option is required for GDPR

<comment><USER2> Not necessarily in that way. It might be easy for you this way, but does it break the product for your users?

I.e. lets say I do indeed not use it for transactional mail, but send a newsletter. How do I reliably fulfill my obligation to remove a customer from my newsletter database if they request so, if your service adds an unsubscribe link that doesn't inform me about the user request?

If I'm not using it for newsletters, you're saying I need a second transactional email system to communicate with the customers that pressed your opt-out link but I still need to communicate with?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thank you. My entire life I was waiting for this service. Your copy resonates 100% with me.</comment>


Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 Dual-GPU Monster Graphics Card Launched, Tested - <AUTHOR> http://hothardware.com/Reviews/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-590-Dual-GF110s-One-PCB/

<comment><USER2> Argh. The article makes one little nod to CUDA, and then doesn't mention the compute capability. _Sigh_.

<comment><USER3> "... each with 512 CUDA cores". So it's a Giga-core machine? Wow.

<comment><USER4> Giga usually means 10^9 (or 2^30); don't you mean kilo-core?</comment></comment></comment>