Responsibility and the Encryption Debate: A Response to DAG Rosenstein - <AUTHOR> https://www.justsecurity.org/46036/responsibility-encryption-debate-response-dag-rosenstein/ <comment><USER2> Didnt we try this before ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper) chip) and it was determined to be a Bad Idea?

<comment><USER3> Wow, TIL clipper ships (your link) were so extensible.

(This is what you meant to post, please don't kill me: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip))

<comment><USER4> > Wow, TIL clipper ships (your link) were so extensible.

The real problem is that they were highly vulnerable to piracy ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "By Rosenstein's definition, all of those things should be considered "warrant-proof," yet he is not advocating that Congress should outlaw people throwing out or destroying papers"

Isn't this considered destruction of evidence and already illegal in the context of a court case? What're the subtleties of this-- does it need to be an already-ongoing case?

<comment><USER6> > _Isn 't this considered destruction of evidence and already illegal in the > context of a court case?_

IANAL; my understanding is that it is only destruction of evidence if you're being investigated (or perhaps have reason to believe that you will be investigated; again, IANAL and this it not legal advice), at which point you ought to know better. Otherwise, the result is ridiculous: any piece of paper I throw out _could_ be evidence in some future, yet unknown, unfathomable to me trial — how am I to know now? If I toss _anything_ , then how could it be used as evidence? I'd need to keep _everything_ to be sure, which is absurd. And, like the article continues: what about conversations? That _could_ show wrong-doing, but I'm not recording it.

The point the author is making is that there have long existed things that _could_ be evidence but that have always been possible to destroy prior to anyone knowing that something is afoot. In that regard, those things are "warrant-proof": by the time you know to issue a warrant, you can't find the item that would incriminate the person. But we're not getting legislation crazy about those. A warrant is permission to take a look, not a guarantee to find what you're looking for.

Frankly, I think that opponents of E2E encryption are greatly overstating things; I think a fair amount of the time, LE will be able to work around it: criminals will set stupid passwords, they won't use the tech at all, they'll be caught by other means (hey, we found printed records, your buddy's drive wasn't encrypted, we found a non-technical smoking gun, like a literal smoking gun).

(Ideally, I'd like to see my data essentially being an extension of my mind that perhaps LE can look at; but I shouldn't be compelled to help them do so. But the current gist I get from politicians is that they'd essentially like to outlaw E2E encryption, and you'd never even get a warrant for your data, because BigCo provider would get it.)

<comment><USER7> This is 100% about mass-surveillance.

Targeted individuals can already be endpoint hacked in countless ways, which completely nullifies any form of encryption. But that doesn't scale to whole populations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess that the broken URL in

> A detailed response to the technical requirements and feasibility of his > proposals is best left to technologists and cryptographers.

is [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/usa-liberty-act- wont-f...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/usa-liberty-act-wont-fix- whats-most-broken-nsa-internet-surveillance), that might be of interest to the HN crowd.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rather than using the example of evidence that used to exist but no longer exists, I think a better preexisting example is evidence that has been deliberately hidden. After all, encryption is just a method of hiding data from everyone that does not know the key.

If law enforcement knows that the plans for the bank heist exist they still might not know that those plans are currently located in the suspects ex- boyfriends garage. The garage is not warrant proof, the police just don't know where to apply the warrant. The exact same thing is true in the case of encrypted data. Law enforcement needs the key to apply the warrant.

<comment><AUTHOR> If they can get a warrant, they should get a warrant. LE does _NOT_ need a backdoor key exercise the warrant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Responsible backdoor is an oxymoron.</comment>


Redis Flash: Double the Performance with NVMe - <AUTHOR> https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-flash-double-performance-nvme/ <comment><USER2> SSD Caching, and using better busses like NVMe instead of SATA are huge leaps forward for performance. Apple for example gets gigabits a sec of read/write performance thanks to NVMe storage in their newer iPhones.</comment>


How often do you guys give interview without studying? - <AUTHOR> Lately, I've this strong feeling that I should be honest in an interview and present myself as I would appear everyday at work. What this means is  I may not know some of the algorithms but have information about time complexity etc about it (Red-Black trees ahem). So, I just appear in the interview and most of the time I just do fine. Many times  I'm hitting the optimum solution for problems/data structure even if I don't prepare for them. Sometimes I totally miss though as it is hard to come up with the solution if you don't know about it earlier.<p>How many of you think this is the right way to appear in an interview or may be conduct one ? <comment><USER2> It's good to take a time for preparing interviews but before job hunting, not for every interview, like 1 week studying algorithms and so on, .. and then go with your knowledge, i think you will feel secure when solving something than might be new instead of being afraid because "i didn't studied this" .. but for companies like Google or Facebook, be as much as academically prepared as possible

</comment><comment><USER3> It never hit my mind that i would study for a interview. I mean they i want them to hire me and not a temporary superlative from myself. I usually just try to be as relaxed as possible and have fun with the people interviewing me, getting to know their persons.

Given i havent had much jobs so far. But from 7 written applications i got 3 jobs.</comment>


Apple is building its own Mac CPUs, does this mean ARM has won?[video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbkFfo7w3II <comment><USER2> At the end of that video the presenter mused about the possibility that Apple having success with their ARM chips might help other RISC chips and the RISC-V was named specifically. Isn't this a bit of a red herring? It's my understanding that ARM64 and RISC-V aren't compatible and porting Linux or Windows to RISC-V would be as big of a jobn as porting it to, say, the Intel Itanium.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seemed to me like Chris just wanted to mention that there are other upcoming open-source RISC designs such as RISC-V which has gained interest from other major semiconductor players; he explicitly ended the Apple-ARM topic and then mentioned this[1].

[https://youtu.be/vbkFfo7w3II?t=798](https://youtu.be/vbkFfo7w3II?t=798)</comment></comment>


Visual Studio Code 1.7 - <AUTHOR> https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_7 <comment><USER2> They had to rollback the update:

> Unfortunately, we needed to roll back the 1.7 release of VS Code. One of the > great new features in 1.7 is the automatic acquisition of typing files when > writing JavaScript and TypeScript. These typings files drive the > IntelliSense (code completions) experience in the tool. The feature was so > great that we started to overload the npmjs.org service. The right thing to > do in the short term was to revert the release. If you had already upgraded > to 1.7 you would have been prompted to install another update and you should > now be at 1.6.1 again. We apologize for this inconvenience and we're working > hard to make both short and long term fixes to bring you a great editing > experience in VS Code.

<comment><USER3> Auto downgrade. That's a first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Microsoft and TypeScript team are doing amazing work with this editor! There are so many interesting features in it, gave it a shot few weeks ago and was really satisfied. And it is probably the first electron app that didn't feel like rest of the bunch, that are pretty much hogs and not very responsive (especially when we talk about editors and IDEs).

But you know, I can't hang Emacs and Vim on the wall and leave them there. It just got so much under my skin, and I got so much used to them that using GUI editor after few years of them just feels odd. And I use them for 5 years. I can't imagine how it is for people that used them for 20+ years...

<comment><USER5> I've been using the Vim extension for quite a while and it's become fairly robust. I think it bests jVi in Netbeans.

<comment><USER6> Which vim extension in particular?

<comment><USER7> Not GP but probably VSCodeVim

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah haha this is too funny, I just this morning caved from trying to have a functioning version of Ubuntu on the macbook work gave me, booted back into OSX, and spent a good 30 minutes scrolling through the VSCode keyboard shortcuts JSON, writing down the ones I was interested in relearning on post- its and lining them around my monitor.

And not four hours later they release a pretty little printable PDF.

Not very on topic but I hope some of you can at least get a hoot from my misery.

<comment><USER9> It's not like it was very difficult to have a simple key binding list before the update. There are many json to html table websites out there, or you could just paste it in vs code and use multiple cursors to remove all the json syntax in like 10 seconds.

<comment><USER10> No, you use regexes for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When MS gets into something, they really get into it.

VS Code has exceeded pretty much all my expectations with the pace it has been progressing at.

<comment><USER8> The biggest thing for me has been the consistency. They already had an amazing IDE (Visual Studio), then they buckled down and made an amazing paired-down version (VSCode). It works well, does all the things I'd want and then some.

Compare to Google releasing a chat client / message handler (google voice app), another one (hangouts), taking away functionality (removing shared sms/hangouts convos), then releasing two more chat apps (allo/duo). Or countless other occasions they've done this.

I was just thinking today after yesterday's HN thread on the new Macbook and "everything wrong with it." People were complaining that nobody can really match the build quality of Apple, which is a shame because it'd be great to have a windows / linux device with high build quality (that isn't hacky). Imagine if Microsoft put their weight behind manufacturing a dope laptop like Google has been trying to do with the Pixel phone?

<comment><USER12> What about the Surface Book?

<comment><USER13> Regarding Linux... the Surface Book (and Pro) are rather unique devices, as far as hardware is concerned. You loose a lot of core functionality if you run anything except Windows on them. I've tried.

If you want a strictly Windows-only device, they're not bad. (Buggy drivers aside.) The N-trig stylus technology is absolutely amazing if you do graphic design. But if you want to dual boot into Linux, you'll be happier with a more traditional laptop.

To be honest, I tried both a Surface Pro 3 and a Surface Book as my primary laptop. In the end, I keep going back to my 2012 MacBook Air. At least for me, Apple still has an edge in overall experience.

<comment><USER14> If you do graphic design, you may not want N-trig styluses. The biggest drawback of their system is that it _requires_ a certain, higher amount of pressure to register a stroke—higher than the Wacom or Apple Stylus counterparts.

See [https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3ttia5/sp4_pen_not...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3ttia5/sp4_pen_not_picking_up_lighter_strokes_advice/) and how people seemed considerably more happy with the Wacom technology in the Surface 1, than the N-trig with the latter iterations of Surface tablets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The combo of Typescript and VS Code is really well done. Transitioning from JS to TS is well supported by documentation, IDE integration and language design.

Apple once made people very happy when they adapted things and workflows that are important to Unix users. Now they're drifting away from that. Microsoft is going in the opposite direction and seems to listen to what developers really would like to see.

<comment><USER16> Yes. With TS2 the type gathering is much easier, but there are still many libs out there with outdated type definitions or none at all.

They got this "allowJs" flag, which I found a good idea, but I never got it to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I recently started doing more and more javascript font-end work as opposed to C# backend stuff. So, of course, I started with Atom. But I kept having issues with it, and ended up playing around with VS Code and loving it.

As someone who really loves the C# language, I was really questioning if I liked VS Code just because it was Microsoft. Was I some kind of Microsoft fanboy? I'm glad to see a lot of the "front end" community embracing it - it's weirdly validating to me. :)

<comment><USER18> It really is remarkable. You wouldn't think that an editor based on the same engine would be this significantly better than atom, but vs code continues to defeat atom in performance and native features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As much as I wanted to like Atom over VS Code, I find myself changing and starting most of my new projects in VS Code exclusively.

One thing that surprised me that VS Code didn't have was multiple cursors?? (like Atom and Sublime have by default). I didn't realise how much I use that feature (for renaming variables in a short procedure/function block etc). There is probably a plugin for that somewhere, I guess.

<comment><USER20> It does have multiple cursors. See [https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/editor/codebasics#_multip...](https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/editor/codebasics#_multiple- selections-multicursor)

<comment><USER19> Ah, Thanks - I see now the shortcut is [Alt-click] as opposed to [Cmd-click] in the other two editors. I just didn't dig around enough to find the right key combination. But I guess this shows how ingrained muscle memory and habits are hard to change, and why certain editors remain people's favourites.

<comment><USER21> Be warned though... this is one area where vscode is noticeably worse than atom or sublime; There's no alt-click-drag support so making a rectangular edit is much more work; you manually create the correct selection on each line. It's one of the few things I miss from Atom (and one of the main reasons I switched to textmate way way back).

<comment><USER22> alt+shift+click-drag mate. Drag a rectangle and hit an arrow key seems fastest to make a column.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love using VIM to edit, but stuff like the following makes it hard for me to resist switching.

"ATA makes typings files almost invisible. A TypeScript language server that has ATA enabled watches your package.json files and automatically installs the typings files of all dependencies in a cache on your file system. It does the same when it finds references to well known client-side libraries. When you then invoke IntelliSense, the TypeScript server uses the typings files in the cache."

<comment><USER23> There's no need to switch editors for that. The language servers can be used by any editor that supports the language server protocol. As far as I know nobody has written a plugin for Vim yet, but here's a discussion issue on the neovim tracker: [https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/5522](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/5522)

<comment><USER24> Also, async completers like deoplete[1] offer non-blocking completion.

However...

> stuff like the following makes it hard for me to resist switching.

I don't think one should "resist". IDEs (VS code _is_ an IDE, at this point) are very powerful. I really wish vim-modes would go away; I would like to see Neovim _embedded_ in VS code and friends, instead. By "embed" I mean: nvim is the text editor, it does everything; it lives in the "document" area of the IDE; and you can bind nvim keys to IDE functions/commands (such as "Open Type...").

[1] [https://github.com/Shougo/deoplete.nvim](https://github.com/Shougo/deoplete.nvim)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I typically bounce between vim and Atom for Python development, with occasional forays into VSC. VSC has come along very nicely to the point where I may just make it my full time GUI editor.

Can anybody recommend some must have plugins for Python development on VSC?

<comment><USER26> \- Python for VS Code: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=donjayam...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=donjayamanne.python)

\- Django Template: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bibhasdn...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bibhasdn.django- html)

\- Django Snippets: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bibhasdn...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bibhasdn.django- snippets)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really like their openess on Github[1] and fact that they're using Projects feature[2]

[1][https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode)

[2][https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/projects](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/projects)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm really surprised by just how polished and fast Code is. It's like Atom but better in almost every regard with the exception of plugins available. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER29> I wonder if this could be a reason so many comments mention better speed than atom.

Couple of months ago I've wiped out all extra plugins in atom and installed just ones I'm really using. Atom became much more responsive, very noticeable difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not a negative comment in the thread so far. That's amazing for something Microsoft, as anyone who's been around here can attest. There's a corner being turned here; time to buy MSFT?

<comment><USER31> I mean, it's been a big couple weeks of releases. Between Surface Studio, the new speech recognition results, Teams, and this VSCode update (barring the npm issue) they seem to be really hitting their stride, in a way that hasn't been seen in years. Just in time to start clawing back tons of market share from Apple, too.

But I'm sure 2017 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been using VSC since June-ish and I couldnt be happier. I never used Sublime (Atom was my go-to before VSC), but I don't think I'll be switching to another editor for a long time. Love the nodejs debugging too, and obviously the non-atom-like performance ;)

</comment><comment><USER33> Well done, Microsoft!

So many new features again. Always happy to update and read the change log.

<comment><USER28> Code is the first editor I've used that might actually replace Notepad++ as my always-open-editor-used-for-absolutely-everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I recently switch from atom, but the one thing I hate is that it doesn't save open files or folders between runs

<comment><USER35> It does (or maybe it is 'Project Manager' extension). Try it out.

<comment><USER34> Tried Project Manager, useful but didn't keep the folder open :(. And I checked my settings, I have "window.reopenFolders": "all"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I still prefer using the free edition of VS2015. Maybe too stuck in my ways.

<comment><USER37> I have no idea why anyone would prefer VS Code for C++ or C#/.NET work on Windows. For everything else, Visual Studio has never been particularly great.

<comment><USER8> I think a strong pull for it is its node debugger. At least for me. I'm not building giant C++ libraries (or however you C/C++/C# folks do) so it's just the right weight for what I do.

Last time I tried to install Visual Studio it was like 9gbs for the core.

<comment><USER38> VS 15 let you pare that down upon initial install. A services dev doesn't need a WPF or Winforms editor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I liked VS Code when I tried it. But...

It irked me when I found out you had to disable telemetry per project/file. That really should be a global setting. Obtaining telemetry data through attrition is not something that will spur my adoption.

I'd rather stay with Atom, vim, or even Eclipse.

<comment><USER40> Umm, you can disable it globally. They have pretty amazing documentation, 3 seconds of searching later:

[http://vscode- docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/supporting/faq/#...](http://vscode- docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/supporting/faq/#how-to-disable-telemetry- reporting)

Windows

      Close VS Code.
      Open the command prompt.
      Type cd %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Visual Studio Code\resources\app
      Type notepad product.json
      Replace enableTelemetry=true with enableTelemetry=false.
      Save the file via CTRL+S and exit Notepad. Collection of usage data should now be disabled.

OS X / Linux

      Close VS Code.
      Open the terminal
      For:
      Mac Type cd <PATH-TO-VSCode>/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app/Contents/Resources/app
      Linux Type cd <PATH-TO-VSCode>/Resources/app
      Type vi product.json
      Replace enableTelemetry=true with enableTelemetry=false
      Save the file via Esc ZZ. Collection of usage data should now be disabled.

<comment><USER41> The current docs ( [https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/supporting/FAQ#_how-to- di...](https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/supporting/FAQ#_how-to-disable- telemetry-reporting) ) seems to indicate that it's just a normal pref now, you don't need to edit the app to do it.

I wasn't able to figure out what version readthedocs was last generated for.

<comment><USER39> Telemetry and crash report still enabled by default. Unsure of what will happen upon update if the global settings file is altered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The Keyboard Shortcuts Reference reminds me that I always wanted to have a keyboard shortcut spaced repetition learning program where you actually have to press the key combinations. Maybe somebody could write an extension to VSCode.

</comment><comment><USER43> keep these updates coming, it's a truly beautiful product. At times it makes me feel I should switch off Emacs for go/node development due to it's debugging being so nice versus using something like delv.

</comment><comment><USER44> Mostly ruby developer here these days.

Just installed VSCode, installed a Ruby plugin (with the required ruby-debug- ide prereq), and opened a project. Debugger seems to just work. Very impressive.

Tried the vim bindings, doesn't seem to be working so well. This is something I'm used to -- vim bindings rarely work well outside of Vim. Basics like "diw" (delete inside word) don't work though.

I'll probably stick with Vim for my day-to-day editing, but you can count on me using VSCode for debugging. Not a big fan of Rubymine -- too sluggish for my tastes.

<comment><USER45> Which extension are you using? I'm using vscodevim and diw, ciw, and the likes work.

<comment><USER44> Was using vimStyle, I'll try some of the other ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm currently working on nightly builds for ARM and Intel linux-based systems (including Raspberry Pi and [Chromebook, Android] <\- under Debian jails).

I could really use one or more Raspberry Pi 2/3 testers on a Debian distro (ideally Raspbian) for early feedback.

Hoping to announce the project on HN properly myself when it's ready (it's a very early state, although extensions are working), so I'd ask for discretion of whoever feels like helping me out.

<comment><USER10> Try posting to reddit. On the respective product subs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Kudos to MS for Visual Studio Code and Typescript for bringing a bit of sanity to the world of JS.

</comment><comment><USER48> Dear Microsoft, PLEASE native SFTP sync support. I will switch from Sublime permanently.

<comment><USER49> Why not use git?

<comment><USER22> Sometimes your cheap shared hosts don't have git on the other end.

<comment><USER50> You should try Digital Ocean $5/month. Have root access, etc.

Is there a shared host cheaper than that?

<comment><USER51> I don't know if there is any shared host cheaper than that (I suppose there are but I'm too lazy to check right now), but sometimes the appeal in using a shared host is in some of their features which you don't get in a VPS (e.g.: cpanel).

<comment><USER50> Also be very careful, with "Dirty COW" hack, anyone can become root as long as they can run their own binary on any shared host.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was wondering, like there is usually a "recommended plugins" list for Vim, does such a thing already exist for VS code?

<comment><USER5> Already exists, use the extensions panel (the square icon in the left most side of VSCode)

<comment><USER15> Thanks, knew the extensions panel, but not the "recommended" and "popular" parts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The vscodevim vim bindings have improved greatly since a couple of months ago and is comparable to Sublime's vintage.

These features are still missing and are keeping me from switching completely from Sublime:

\- Project wide symbol fuzzy search (cmd+shift+r in sublime)

\- Read from stdin (`git show | code`)

</comment><comment><USER52> I couldn't find a good tutorial about using VSCode for Python development. I'd like to setup debugging, intellisense and the interactive shell, but the info is sparse. Do you have any suggestion?

<comment><USER53> I'm thinking of moving away from pycharm when this year runs out and moving to vs code + python. It has full debug, scm, virtualenv support (which was broken in pycharm 2016.x for a time) and intellisense. I would still use Brackets for html and css because I love quick-edit, the ability to edit a css rule or color by hovering and hitting ctl-e.

<comment><USER52> PyCharm community edition is very good. Maybe all the features aren't necessary. But VSCode would allow me to use it in other environments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> _Keymaps for Sublime and Atom_

They are on a mission.

<comment><USER55> I was so excited, but it turns out there's still no middle click for block selection :(

<comment><USER16> I like to read these release discussions so much.

Everyone has their pet feature, most of them stuff that I never use or didn't even know they existed.

I personally like ctrl+/ to comment out blocks or mark stuff from the integrated terminal, both didn't work the last time I tried it.

<comment><USER56> Commenting out is there, you can search the keyboard shortcut settings to find the proper key. Actually, there are multiple commands on that subject:

\- editor.action.commentLine toggles comments

\- editor.action.addCommentLine & editor.action.removeCommentLine

\- editor.action.blockComment for block comments

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The one unfortunate thing about it is that it doesn't work/isn't packaged for Raspberry Pi.

I don't understand why they don't make a package for the pi, if it's a JS app anyways

<comment><USER58> [https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/wiki/How-to- Contribute#b...](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/wiki/How-to- Contribute#build-and-run-from-source)

<comment><USER57> Doesn't compile on my system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Sometimes throwing everything out and starting over is bad. But you know what? Sometimes it's pretty damned good. Amazing how quickly you can iterate when you throw out all the cruft.

</comment><comment><USER60> Upvote when I see this, visual studio code is just awesome and makes me much more productive ( on Windows)

I think there has to happen a lot when a version release won't make it to the front page :p

</comment><comment><USER61> I've tried it, but I'm not as big a fan of the UX, so I'm sticking with Atom. Also, Atom is easier to customize to your liking, I've already written custom commands for it and modified the CSS. Also themes are lacking in VS Code.

What I would like to see is Atom embracing the IDE to the same level VS Code is doing. If Atom had a proper debugger UX that all language could use, and better auto-complete. Those are the only things I find better in VS Code.

<comment><USER62> Thing I like the most about Atom is it's integration with Github for plugins, and even issues for those plugins. Last week there was a bug introduced in the latest build impacting split pane diff, error came up, with a link "Click here to submit an issue". I clicked it, and instead of taking me to a submission form, it intelligently took me to an issue _already made_ and being discussed.

I'm very impressed with it as an editor (so impressed it got me to divorce Sublime), but I am curious to give VSS a whirl on of these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Actually, I'm not a fan boy of something (except hockey, basketball, .. nevermind). However, Visual Studio is awesome! thanks a lot!

</comment><comment><USER64> Twitter:

> Whoops! 1.7 release rolled back to 1.6.1 due to issue downloading definition > files for IntelliSense

</comment><comment><USER65> Have been using VSCode for months now and I like it a lot. Only thing I am missing coming from PhpStorm is a good merge tool. For some reason I found JetBrains' one really appealing and I struggle to find 3rd party ones that do not feel clunky.

</comment><comment><USER66> I can't see horizontal layouts. I reinstalled from scratch and still can't see it.

<comment><USER15> "To enable horizontal layout for the current workspace, use:

The View menu Toggle Editor Group Layout."

<comment><USER66> Ah, it's one or the other. That sucks but thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I wish wish wish MS would add built in, offline spell checking. The plugins I've tried are pretty buggy, and I would love to spell check markdown and documentation. (Also, spell check applied only to _comments_ would be cool too!)

</comment><comment><USER68> I gotta say, the speed with which they add new features to VSC is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER69> Interesting to see that all screenshots are taken on a Mac...

</comment><comment><USER70> As an Atom user, I gotta say this looks like a solid release and I'm excited to give VS Code another try. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER71> lol, they just rolled back to 1.6 since users were DDOSing npmjs.org ;)

</comment><comment><USER72> CSS completions in HTML, I was waiting for that one (for Polymer projects).

<comment><USER73> Intellisense for script tags in HTML still not working though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> It's interesting they base this on NodeJS instead of Chakra.

<comment><USER74> Isn't Chakra a alternative to V8 as opposed to NodeJS?

There is a variant of NodeJS, that is based on Chakra instead of V8, but it might not be mature enough to use here I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I'm going to have to rate this as "probably never going to work". I really wanted it to succeed, because I actually like Microsoft and want a new editor, but the pure amount of ignorance this thing began with and continues to display is just too much.

* Didn't launch with tabs, a plugin system, or code folding

* Still no Projects or Workspace. You can open a "Folder", which behaves like a workspace, but you can only have one open at a time.

* When you search/find-in-files, it uses the left UI element, which is just dumb for search in code as you can only see about 20 characters per line. Yeah you can expand the window, but do you want to do that every time?

* Can't drag the UI elements and attach them somewhere else, which is a common staple of modern GUIs. This would fix the search "problem"

* No support for FTP or SSH as far as I can tell (I do see an extension or two)

When it wasn't launched with tabs, I gave it the benefit of the doubt thinking they were just releasing something Alpha to get a feel for the market. But they consistently can't put out common sense, modern day features. I feel like a couple guys at MS got bored and decided to randomly work on an editor without researching what is great about other editors first.

Sorry for the harshness of this post, I'm just disappointed, and love code editors.

<comment><USER68> You can have different instances of VSC open if you want to use 2 different workspaces at the same time. On Windows I just right-click the task bar and do "New Window" for that.</comment></comment>


Homeless Lose a Longtime Last Resort: Living in a Car - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303847804579479930243974564?mg=reno64-wsj

<comment><USER2> _Officials say these bans aim to prevent nuisances that can be created by those living in cars, and most are enforced only on a complaint basis._

Nothing scares me more than comments like that from government officials. A law that is selectively enforced is effectively an invitation for police harrasment. Either the law makes sense, or it doesn't. If individual civil servants get to decide when to apply a law, you've got a big problem.

<comment><USER3> It's only an invitation for police harassment if you're breaking the law. And in your version, you would instead have been arrested / fined immediately regardless of anyone reporting you.

The bottom line for selective enforcement is that the police recognize that there is a priority structure in laws. They have limited resources and cannot enforce every law, everywhere, every time. While I would rather see this law unmade, the second best thing that can happen is exactly what is, which is the police only getting involved if an actual legitimate issue is raised.

EDIT: A second pertinent example is noise ordinance, which this is similar to as a "public nuisance" law. The law is not worded that it's OK as long as all your neighbors are OK with it. In your world, police would be walking around neighborhoods with a decibel meter and fining every non-compliant house, regardless of whether you cleared everything with your neighbors, or even if your neighbors are the ones making all the noise at your party!

<comment><USER2> I see this a closer to something like prostitution laws that are selectively enforced in many countries and lead to large scale police corruption/harassment.

Random rant: my limited experience of police treatment of homeless people in San Francisco leaves quite a lot to be desired. I've spent about one month in total there and I saw police hassling homeless people quite frequently. Anything that makes that easier is bad in my mind. Sure - poor people are an "irritation" by some definitions but they remain _people_ even if their existence is inconvenient to some.

<comment><USER3> I agree with your principle whole-heartedly; I was just pointing out that I feel that police harassment is an orthogonal concern, and that selective enforcement is a Good Thing in the vast majority of cases -- ie, all the ones you never hear nor think about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate to be that guy, and I'm going to sound like an ass, but this is 100% his doing. Software worker in Palo Alto for 30 years making as much as 150k has no excuse. Save some money stupid. Also, when you get fired and can't find another job, perhaps you should move out of your $2150 a month rental. That's enough for 4-5 months or more in other places. $1700 a month SS isn't much, but it's enough to not be homeless in other places in America. It's not enough to live in Palo Alto. MOVE.

All that being said, I'm not sure what the point of making criminals out of homeless people is. No reason to kick people when they are down.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps you're right in his particular instance.

But the issue is the same even for those who end up homeless through no fault of their own.

Moving for the homeless has many hidden costs, including the time and effort required to rebuild the local network of support one has built over many years.

<comment><USER6> Also, in my experience, moving is expensive. At least if you want to take more stuff than fits into a suitcase.

Another thing that bugs me about the moving advice is this: It is good advice for an individual or a family, but it becomes extremely problematic if too many people do it. Many of the places where living expenses are low are also places were the public finances at the local level are in a catastrophic state. "Unemployment tourism" can be the deathblow for the municipal level if, as is the case in many places here in Europe, the municipal level has to finance much of the social infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's very unfortunate, but the main character also an interesting study in skill set relevance and retirement planning (or lack thereof).

He's a software engineer in SV... By all the common stereotypes, he should be in the winner circle and living the life. Agism is definitely an issue in tech, but it's likely that he is not up to date with some of the more modern languages or techniques, resulting in lack of employment.

If he lived there since the 70's, he could have had a paid off place. (Typical mortgage is 30 years term.) If not save by paying off the mortgage, he could have also saved via 401k or something similar. It probably never really occurred to him that employment might be so hard to come by or that things would get so pricey. Coming from an eastern european background, I was conditioned that if you have a paid off place, you can withstand a lot of up and down swings in the economy and the world.

As a society, we should really be focusing on helping people properly market themselves and acquire/update skills needed AND re-enforcing the need to plan for the future. Not really sure how we'd go about implementing the latter without annoying people though...

<comment><USER8> > Agism is definitely an issue in tech, but it's likely that he is not up to > date with some of the more modern languages or techniques

Why do you suspect that he is likely not up date? The first part of your sentence mentions ageism, although the second part sounds a lot like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well if Palo Alto is willing to spend $250,000 they could pave a bit of parking lot and put in a bathroom/shower unit like exists in campgrounds. But that seems a bit extreme.

The guy profiled was tech worker for 30 years, but allegedly "not good with money." If you're in your 20's don't be that guy. Live within your means, save for those future days.

<comment><USER10> As a 20-something, does anyone have any advice me for or know of resources where I can learn about financial management?

<comment><USER11> I don't know about links, but the basics are simple enough: track what you spend and save some % of what you make. Avoid debt for things that lose value (e.g. cars). Debt for things like houses that retain value can make sense, though. Always keep money in reserve. Pay off the high-interest debt (e.g. 30% APR credit cards) first. If you do buy any complex investments, keep in mind what conditions cause gain or loss. For example, I recently saw an annuity/ETF product where they let you invest in indexes and cover the first 10% of any losses, but you gain at most 10% annually (they get the rest). It took me a while to realize that this means you get a 10% upside and 90% downside.

I'm sure others can give you more common sense advice.

<comment><USER12> > Avoid debt for things that lose value (e.g. cars).

This is actually not terribly good advice. Debt does not become especially bad depending on whether what you used it for is gaining or losing value.

This rule is really a proxy for, "Don't buy an expensive car, boat, or plane, relative to what you are making." Now that is a good rule. There's no reason to hide it behind a false rule. Financing a purchase that you could pay cash for can sometimes be wise, even if the purchased item is losing value.

<comment><USER11> If you fall on hard times, you can sell things. If you have to sell something like a car that lost value, it won't be as good as being able to sell something like a house that holds value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems to be largely a means of pushing the problem elsewhere.

"Um, could you please be poor some place else? This is Palo Alto - we have a prosperous reputation to uphold."

<comment><USER14> It is, but that's nothing new. The cops in NYC have been known to give the homeless a McDonalds meal and a bus ticket up the coast.

I'm curious what the prevalence of work-from-home software jobs will do, over time, to the ridiculous swell in cost-of-everything in the bay area though. I realize that, like Manhattan for finance, there's some status associated with being in tech in the bay area, as well as legitimate opportunities. But there are high-paying tech jobs in places where you can live much more comfortably.

<comment><USER13> Many people want to be where other people are - the center of the action for their particular universe. They vote with their money.

You're right that status is a big part of it. Manhattanites look down on the "bridge and tunnel" crowd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At the risk of sounding (or even outright being) cruel, Mr. Smith's real problem is that of terrible financial management skills. Keep in mind that when he moved out there in the 70's, the Valley was not nearly as expensive as it is today. And, with a software engineer's salary during its heyday, he could have very easily purchased -- and paid off -- a place for him to live. As he, himself, said, he made a choice to stay in the area even after he lost his job. He could have made a choice to move somewhere cheaper.

At the age of 70, after a long -- and I'm assuming successful, based on his highest salary -- career, having only a "meager" savings is no one's fault but his own.

<comment><USER16> >At the age of 70, after a long -- and I'm assuming successful, based on his highest salary -- career, having only a "meager" savings is no one's fault but his own.

I sympathize with him. I do not intend to save since there is no point when the future of the country is so uncertain.

<comment><USER17> If you have high salary now and do not save for retirement, I really hope you won't burden society when you are out of job at 65 by either dying young or living exclusively on social security. Spending all income is as selfish as it gets.

<comment><USER16> We live in what is called a free country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "The neighbors in the community, I think, wanted to be reasonable, but they didn't feel safe having their kids go to the center"

Making laws to make the neighbors feel safer! Fantastic! "Don't be poor around me, I don't feel safe."

This is one of the worst forms of NIMBYism. And treating the disadvantaged as dangerous is a form of prejudice. How unfortunate that people only seem to care about racial prejudice.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hard to fathom that a 30-year seasoned veteran of software engineering can't find a shred of work in the heart of Silicon Valley. According to the article, Mr. Smith hasn't worked since 2006? Something is terribly amiss here.

</comment><comment><USER20> I find the overwhelming perspective of comments approaching this article to be, fascinating. I also think that Diogenes of Sinope would have a great deal to say concerning the matter.

I would say that it's a fallacy to dwell on why Mr. Smith is living in an RV or what he could have done to prevent himself from landing there. After all, it doesn't answer the question of why the state thinks it ought to so finely dictate the comings and goes of a person or where it is that one should choose to sleep. To seek shelter is as much a natural right as any of the others and to deny someone easy access to readily available public shelter should come with the same level of concern as restricting speech.

I think it's more interesting that we choose to allow those who do own or can afford to rent property to dictate and bully others for the convenience of their avoiding a "nuisance." Since apparently choosing to reside in a house grants you greater worth than choosing to reside in a car.

</comment><comment><USER21> "An ordinance passed by Palo Alto last year would punish people cited for living in a vehicle with as much as a $1,000 fine or six months in jail."

Yep, that's exactly the incentive they need to not be homeless. /s

</comment><comment><USER22> Only 15 emergency shelter beds in all of Palo Alto?! And an estimated 150 men, women, and children competing for those spots every night? That's disgusting.

Companies who have HQ's in Palo Alto: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Companies_based_in_P...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Companies_based_in_Palo_Alto,_California)

Not one of those companies, some of which are valued in the billions, could pick up the cost of sponsoring another ten emergency beds? Another five, even?

<comment><USER23> Possibly, but they'd have to bring in their profits from offshore, and that would be taxed.

<comment><USER24> Ahhh, but you see, if they were taxed, then Palo Alto would have the money to build more shelters.

<comment><USER25> Palo Alto doesn't have an income tax. Maybe California or the federal government would have the money though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I don't see why they needed to make this law specifically against living in a vehicle. Most places already have some sort of limit on how long a vehicle can be parked on the street. Usually around 72 hours and you have to relocate to another street (it doesn't count to just move it a few feet). Let them sleep in their car... as long as they move it to another street every few days.

</comment><comment><USER26> Let's assume started in 1978 with 30k. Pay increases of 5.75%/yr which gets him to 151K in 2007. assuming saving 10% and a 8% return per yr that's 628k in 401k. Let's assume market takes 40% and losses job with 2-3 years before SSN. Out there you could easily blow through any kind of retirement savings pretty quickly.

<comment><USER17> 4% of 628k (safe withdrawal limit) is 25k - this is amount you can withdraw in pretty much perpetuity (for 62 year old). 25k combined with SSN (20k/year) is very close to average family income in US and guarantee good living in most cities in US (outside of Bay Area/NY and a few other zip codes).

Saving 10% is borderline enough to retire on if you do not make stupid financial moves (like moving out of market in 2007 or living in most expensive area in US). It's not enough to be financially secure - you need to save 20-25% for that (totally doable on software engineer salary).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Serious question: Are there trailer parks in the area? A place where you can rent land for parking a mobile-home long term?

I am not at all familiar with the SF/Valley rental market, other than hearing how it's exorbitantly expensive and rents keep growing. I'd have to think there would be somewhere where rents are not so expensive. I have a hard time believing a standard suburban studio or one-bedroom apartment would cost $2800.

As for the article, it sounds like the man profiled here isn't really making rationale decisions, so it's difficult to tell how bad the situation, outside of this anecdote, actually is.

<comment><USER28> There are a couple of RV parks in the area. I want to say they're $700 a month plus electricity. Not sure if any of them would be up for multi-year residents, that's more of a mobile-home (trailer) park thing. Of which, there are several in the area and from what I can tell from Google maps, they're all full.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does Palo Alto have regulations regarding minimum apartment size? If not, lower-cost microapartment complexes might make a good long-term investment.

<comment><USER30> Good luck building anything in Palo Alto.

<comment><USER29> I'm not familiar with the real estate situation there beyond "people are being priced out of Palo Alto". Is the city averse to all new construction or just lower-cost housing?

<comment><USER31> Google "Palo Alto NIMBY".

<comment><USER32> AIUI, the NIMBY-ism in Palo Alto is second only to that in San Francisco.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yes, Your Dating Preferences Are Probably Racist - <AUTHOR> http://www.theestablishment.co/2015/10/30/online-dating-racism-matchmaking/ <comment><USER2> TLDR: A professional matchmaker finds their clients need to pay them because said clients are loathsome jerks who can't get a date any other way.

Next up: Most people are still shallow.

</comment><comment><USER3> If the author makes 2.5 matches per person _interviewed_ (in other words, at _least_ 60% were immediate _mis_ matches), perhaps she's in the wrong line of work in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER4> Weird; I guess I'm in the outlying group then.</comment>


S-Lang Programmer's Library - <AUTHOR> http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/ <comment><USER2> I'm still using Jed as my primary editor.

S-Lang is great (your mileage may vary, but Emacs-LISP gives me headaches).

Jed is slick and fast, and I always miss the way it auto-indents code in other text editors.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I'm not mistaken, Goldman Sachs' proprietary programming language is also called "S-Lang" (securities language). I take it that this is not the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a blast from the past!

Iirc, that was hot around the same time as SIOD (scheme in one defun) and tcl.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes :-)

I found that in Lynx ang Gopher+ source code.

The project is still active.

<comment><USER5> It being in Lynx is my fault (IIRC). Was a lot easier to get coloured screen output than with ncurses back in the dark ages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Terrible choice in name.

</comment><comment><USER7> I assumed the article was about the statistical language S</comment>


Diversity begets Diversity - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.gusto.com/growing-our-engineering-team-in-denver-diversity-begets-diversity/ <comment><USER2>
      Our recruiting team is sourcing only female engineers.

This is a definition of "diversity" with which I was previously unfamiliar.</comment>


Stereoscopic Rendering in WebVR - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/09/stereoscopic-rendering-in-webvr/ <comment><USER2> Happy to answer any questions folks might have!

</comment><comment><USER3> I know it's been done before, but I can't wait for the return of hyperlinked VR content :)

<comment><USER2> :-X Will have more to say on that, stay tuned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could you please say more about "permissionless content creation". Distributed content creation and management is a concept I have been intrigued with for 10 years. Not sure if those are the same thing or not.

<comment><USER2> There's no gatekeepers on the web. You want to distribute your content? Connect a box to the net.

This is in opposition to having to get your "app" approved by either Apple or Google or Microsoft.

Can you elaborate on what you see as the differences you see between distributed content _creation_ and distributed content _management_?

Note: you do have to pay an ISP for a connection to the _net_ (not the web) and having a domain name is nice (but not required, also more net than web), so I think it's safe to say there are gatekeepers to the net, but not the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you think teams will be able to leverage the same spatial visual information to provide or pair with technologies for spatial audio?

A lot of the game libraries assume and need 3d rendering in order to provide proper sound blocking (from objects) and in scene spatial depth. Having that concept considered in these experiments would perhaps provide for novel and consistent ways for people who are blind or low vision to gain awareness of the scenes (if audio can be attached by design or even by user preference) and augment or improve usability (end-user enjoyment?) if provided.

<comment><USER2> I've very very recently implemented some positional audio. Combined with animated elements, it's very convincing.

One thing I think might be problematic is the idea of constraining audio to enclosed spaces such as rooms.

For example, with web Audio, it's trivial to make the sound fade off equally in all directions in a circular area around the emitter. How you "contain" sound to a quadrilateral space is something I'm not able to visualize how I would implement.

If anyone has any prior art or recommended reading, I'd happily digest.

<comment><USER6> Oculus's docs on "Introduction to Virtual Reality Audio" may be of some use[1], specifically the section on environmental modeling[2].

The general idea is to model reverberations and reflections given the distance of a point sound source to the nearest flat surface, giving the impression of a "contained" sound.

[1]: [https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/audiosdk/latest/c...](https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/audiosdk/latest/concepts/book- audio-intro/)

[2]: [https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/audiosdk/latest/c...](https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/audiosdk/latest/concepts/audio- intro-env-modeling/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really looking forward to the the stereo rendering of non-WebGL content, HTML+CSS, which the Mozilla team is working on. More challenging path to figuring out but will open a lot of possibilities.

<comment><USER2> In particular, we have some ideas for preserving depth information between CSS and WebGL. Imagine, Z Fighting between something rendered in WebGL and something else positioned with CSS. Or I think a more compelling use case: correctly positioning an Iframe in a WebGL scene.

It's something we're looking into, but will take a significant amount of investment in platform (two very different parts of the rendering engine suddenly have to communicate).

For now, it's very low hanging fruits for content creators or engine developers to work with WebGL. It also doesn't hurt that it's much more performant.

On the other hand, it hurts accessibility.

<comment><USER7> Yes ideally they'd be able to be composited together at the depth buffer level. But even separate I can see a ton of devs making some very cool more UI-centric applications just with CSS mode. Can't wait to see the webdev community understand what can be done with VR and the webstack in 2016.

<comment><USER2> [http://tridiv.com/](http://tridiv.com/) looks sick, but I'm not sure what feature they need that's missing from Firefox.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Windows Console Tools - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal <comment><USER2> Is there some MS event going on right now?

<comment><USER3> Build 2019

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So Microsoft has the chutzpah to create a github repository trying to dupe people into contributing enhancements to components of their for-profit spyware?</comment>


Project Plowshare - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare <comment><USER2> Along the same lines - Project Orion:

> Project Orion was a study of a spacecraft intended to be directly propelled > by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the craft (nuclear pulse > propulsion). Early versions of this vehicle were proposed to take off from > the ground with significant associated nuclear fallout; later versions were > presented for use only in space. Six non-nuclear tests were conducted using > models.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_\(nuclear_propulsion\))</comment>


An Adventure in the Low Status of Software Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-other-half-works-an-adventure-in-the-low-status-of-software-engineers/

<comment><USER2> This article was posted a week ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033051](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033051) (170 points, 19 comments)</comment>


Jeff Bezos delivers graduation speech at Princeton University - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBmavNoChZc

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised he's such a mediocre speaker. This speech is full of tired clichés.

I know, case in point - kindness is hard.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to skip the drawn out intro, Jeff's speech starts around 6:00 mark</comment>


A Brief Introduction to Urbit - <AUTHOR> http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2013/12/a-brief-introduction-to-urbit.html

<comment><USER2> I have a hard time taking Urbit seriously given that the documentation is full of tirades against strawmen of modern programming language theory. When confronted with the arguments the core developer seems to repeatedly fall back on misinterpretations about how the Church-Turing equivalence states that all models of computation are equivalent, and thus means his ad-hoc systems are as good as any result from the last 35 years of PL research.

</comment><comment><USER3> This strikes me as a good platform for a kind of programming RPG, similar to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c)</comment>


Edward Snowden wins Swedish human rights award for NSA revelations - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/01/nsa-whistlebloewer-edward-snowden-wins-swedish-human-rights-award

<comment><USER2> Which is interesting because Sweden is UK's main European partner in spying on the other European countries.</comment>


Detecting visited links by using redraw timing - <AUTHOR> http://dev.jigawatt.co.uk/dev/linkvisit/visitedchrome.html

<comment><USER2> Looks like it's known and was marked as "won't fix", but it seems like a major privacy vulnerability to me.

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=252165](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=252165)

</comment><comment><USER3> Detected visited links in Chrome on Android (I don't have laptop with me at moment).

Looks like it works for Chrome and IE. See files here:

[http://dev.jigawatt.co.uk/dev/linkvisit/](http://dev.jigawatt.co.uk/dev/linkvisit/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Very clever and quite accurate once I bumped up the link count. Running Chrome on Win7.</comment>


Calculating 316 Million Movie Correlations in 2 Minutes (Down From 2.5 Hours) - <AUTHOR> http://dmnewbie.blogspot.com/2009/06/calculating-316-million-movie.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, I submitted this article because it has sat in my bookmarks for a while and I've referenced it quite a number of times over the past few months. I thought it may be helpful to some of you who work on similar problems.

I like it because when most people think of "giant datasets" they think they need some special tool to process it. Infact, there are such tools and I use them everyday (namely Hadoop), but this article is a reminder that with the proper forethought and consideration for the data structures in question, it is quite possible to wrestle a large dataset on a single machine.

Also, people always wonder how to better optimize their code. I think this is one of the few examples I've seen where the author went through a series of steps to obtain the optimization they had in mind and documented their strategy well. It serves a practical purpose too.

If you want to try your hand out at this problem you can obtain the dataset here: <http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Netflix+Prize>

and follow the forums here: <http://www.netflixprize.com/community/>

</comment><comment><USER2> I hate to ask this, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Can someone explain this to the rest of us (maybe just me) what the heck this article is about?

This article started right out of the gate assuming the reader was well informed of the context.

<comment><USER3> k-nearest neighbors is a simple approach for prediction in machine learning. The objective is to predict the value of a function at some point for which we don't have an observation in the training set. In the Netflix Prize, this means predicting the rating a user _U_ would give to some unrated movie _M_. The kNN approach is: 1. Identify the k users most similar to _U_. This is called the "neighborhood". 2. Have these k neighbors vote on the rating that _U_ should assign to _M_.

The premise behind the above scheme is that similar users will assign approximately the same rating to a particular movie. To actually implement the kNN scheme requires a notion of "similarity" for step 1 and "voting" for step 2. The linked article is using Pearson Correlation as the similarity function (aka the "distance metric"), and some kind of weighted average as the voting function (as mentioned in [http://dmnewbie.blogspot.com/2007/09/greater- collaborative-f...](http://dmnewbie.blogspot.com/2007/09/greater- collaborative-filtering.html) )

I don't think this would work very well on the Netflix dataset because the training set is super sparse. I deliberately glossed over this above, but users in _U_ 's neighborhood who haven't rated the movie _M_ are useless when voting on the value that _U_ should assign to _M_! So you have to make a call about how you form the neighborhood: do you just find the k nearest users and only average over the <= k users who actually rated _M_? Or do you find the k nearest users who actually assigned a rating to _M_ (ignoring _U_ 's neighbors who haven't rated _M_ )? Either way, with a dataset that's as sparse as the Netflix data, you're going to have a hard time forming useful neighborhoods since either you're going to have neighborhoods where there's very little information to go off of, or the "k most similar" users are actually really not very similar to _U_ at all, leading to inaccurate prediction.

More info: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-nearest_neighbor_algorithm>

Chapter two of the excellent and free book "Elements of Statistical Learning" has a better exposition of this idea. [http://www- stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/download.ht...](http://www- stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/download.html)

<comment><USER4> (Not really on topic, but if I could nominate this as an example of the ideal HN comment, I would. It'd be nice to have a gallery of things like this attached to the guidelines. Thanks jey!)

<comment><USER5> Seconded. Excellent work, Jey.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


20 New York City Startups You Need To Watch - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-new-york-city-startups-to-watch-2010-3

<comment><USER2> no tumblr?</comment>


Are the Jailbreaking Days Over? - <AUTHOR>

Does Apple's announcement today regarding over the air updates effectively end the "jailbreaking era"? Now that Apple can push updates to the phone without the user connecting it to their computer, won't jailbroken phones be constantly at risk of being bricked by the latest and greatest iOS update from Apple? I'm sure the jailbreaking community will come up with something, but what if...? <comment><USER2> there is always a solution, first of all, update to the new os with a jailbroken firmware(when it will come, if ever)can be a solution, keeping exploits safe is another, also i think iOS it's not the safest os ever created. the more you challenge the hackers to find something the more they will. There was always a bug "ready for use" so maybe noone looked very deep.

If there wil be the need hackers will find.</comment>


The problem with taking seed money from big VCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.cdixon.org/?p=256 <comment><USER2> This seems so obvious and yet something I hadn't thought about until I read the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> We took seed money from one of the largest VC firms in the valley. We didnt know they even did seed rounds, and this is not publicized. Additionally, they invest as an angel syndicate, and don't use their official VC name. All of this because they understand the problem entrepreneurs face with taking seed money from big VCs. The fact that they've thought this through from the entrepreneurs point was a huge plus factor for us.

</comment><comment><USER4> So that's the downside: the Big VC will make a Series A harder _if they are the first to reject you_ when shopping for that Series A.

Solution: don't approach the seed VC for a follow-on, skip it or postpone it until last resort, in which case the new alternatives can used as 'Stalking Horses' on the seed VC anyway if playing hardball.

Big VC seed money is a good endorsement and help for a company, and the upside is the chance of an easy follow-on from them because they have the pockets: but wait for them to come calling first, or have some Stalking Horses ready if you sense being played. Otherwise just skip them altogether on a Series A.

</comment><comment><USER5> This argument doesn't play... All investments have similar if not equal concerns: is your current investor going to re-invest? Might potential rivals instead collude in their offer?

<comment><USER6> If I take $100K from an angel no one is going to wonder why the angel isn't putting in $2Mil in the next round - angels just don't handle deals that big.

If I take $100K from a VC and that VC opts not to put in another $2Mil, everyone will wonder what the VC saw that made them not want to invest.

<comment><USER7> Haven't you got bigger worries if someone who invested in you once won't invest again?

<comment><USER8> You're missing the point of the article. It's that the seed VC will essentially have control of the _appearance_ of your startup's chances for success.

If they don't reinvest (for whatever reason, _even if your company is in good shape_ ), you will look bad. If they do reinvest, they won't be doing so at fair value.

<comment><USER7> Good point, you're right, I missed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the other hand, if this strategy is widely known. People won't look any more if they invest again or not.</comment>


Bernie Sanders Is Running for President Again - jules-jules https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/19/18200479/bernie-sanders-running-president-2020 <comment><AUTHOR> Did we ever find out what the "leverage" on Bernie referred to in the Podesta emails was about?

</comment><comment><USER2> Yeah, well, he is too old now.

<comment><USER3> Age has little to do with a serious discussion about a viable president unless pragmatism is your centeral criterion. Clinton was the pragmatic choice... she lost. Warren and trump are old, Clinton was old.

The central criteria for choosing a president should be their choices and moral compass, a strong voice and leader, the ability to turn a movement toward generating money for the candidate and a finger on the pulse of what's actually going on.

<comment><USER4> It has a lot to do with the discussion when the average lifespan of a U.S. male is 79 and people generally vote for Presidents, not VPs.

It also has a lot to do with it when the current 72 year old President shows -- at the very least, arguable -- signs of cognitive decline, and the oldest President ever also showed similar signs towards the end of his term. There are exceptions, but these cases are representative of the typical case, not the exceptional case [1]

Stress is a factor in the above.

Nuclear weapon deployment (not even war) remains one of the greatest threats to civilization and would likely impact another (climate change). The U.S. President must be able to make a fast & sharp decision on this matter should the need arise (though I have to say, Bernie seems likely to make the right choice, which is _always_ "do not launch")

[1] "…most abilities tend to peak in early midlife, plateau until the late fifties or sixties, and then show decline, initially at a slow pace, but accelerating as the late seventies are reached." (Schaie, 1989).

<comment><USER3> I trust Sander's political positions over all other candidates, and if we get a good three years of Bernie and 1 year of his choice of VP, I'm ok with that. He's clear and right about most issues and he's right that climate change is the number 1 issue and he's the only one saying that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


It would cost $175k to clone Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://pricetaghq.com/blog/correct-price-1-billion-instagram <comment><USER2> I feel the article vastly underestimates the difficulties associated with scaling to Instagram's size at buyout and the time it takes for developers to come to terms with and accommodate that. The first 80% of Instagram is the app and sharing, the next 20% of building the network out is where all the value was created and the majority of development time was invested.

The founders described it as "replacing all the components of a car while driving it at 100mph", and even having worked on projects orders of magnitude smaller (albeit with a considerably more complex datamodel) I can't say I disagree.

<comment><USER3> True. I watched an interview of one of the founders and he revealed that Instagram is just a offshoot feature of their original product. So the cost of mistakes are not taken into account.

It's like someone proving out that E=MC^2 AFTER Einstein already figured out the problem.

It's still a cool exercise to do! I wish he would do that for more sites and apps! I bet the Draw Something app isn't that expensive to reproduce.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree with both of you guys. And of course I am making a lot of assumptions, but wanted to help devs realize the value of different components of a business. Because if that wasn't the case, Facebook could have just build an app just like Instagram.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting article, and besides all the good and proper reasons for this, I also believe it was a way for facebook to "show off" how much they have and can spend. And yes good teams are worth a whole lot.

<comment><USER5> Yes, there is a lot of marketing involved in this acquisition, besides the importance of Instagram in the industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome article. I think Facebook did the correct move, otherwise, other big tech company would have acquired Instagram instead.

</comment><comment><USER5> Drop.io: $10M Snaptu: $70M Instagram: $1000M Having everybody talk about your latest acquisition: Priceless! There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER7> It is a great app, but I think Facebook overpaid

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, sometimes we underestimate the value of assets that cannot be easily estimate

</comment><comment><USER9> It's a nice app based on a simple idea. It's worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> BRB, making Instagram

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess developing is being too easy...

</comment><comment><USER11> Really interesting! Looks like FB overpaid! Ha

</comment><comment><USER12> I guess teams are worth a lot more than I thought

</comment><comment><USER13> Finally someone takes a different stab at the Instagram news!

</comment><comment><USER14> I thinks is worth it. A great app. And a good strategy of FB to absorb a potencial competitor</comment>


Privacy, Anonymity, and Big Data in the Social Sciences - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2661641

<comment><AUTHOR> > _" For example, Latanya Sweeney [21] from the School of Computer Science at > Carnegie Mellon University, has demonstrated that 87 percent of the U.S. > population can be uniquely identified with a reasonable degree of certainty > by a combination of ZIP code, date of birth, and gender."_

> _" [21] Sweeney, L. (2002b). Achieving k-anonymity privacy protection using > generalization and suppression. International Journal on Uncertainty, > Fuzziness and Knowledge-based Systems 10(5): 571-588."_

[http://dataprivacylab.org/dataprivacy/projects/kanonymity/ka...](http://dataprivacylab.org/dataprivacy/projects/kanonymity/kanonymity2.pdf)

Of course, I was told that my tin-foil hat was on far too tight when I said you should never answer the infamous chat question, "A/S/L?"

A bit more seriously, I'm beginning to wonder it is even possible to properly anonymize/de-identify MOOC student data well enough to satisfy all the FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) legislation requirements. It seems the "other information" requirement of the law would make compliance impossible.</comment>


The Average American Man's Body - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/this-is-the-average-mans-body/280194/

<comment><USER2> The worrying thing about this is the shift in perception.

Most people are going to put Todd at "a bit over weight", but not "near obese". Add a few kilos to Todd to tip him into obesity, and most people are not going to see much difference.

Give people a Todd image of BMI > 35, with no physical activity, and still most people aren't going to call that Todd obese. And if it's a woman the discussion suddenly becomes polarised with accusations of "fat shaming" and "healthism" and "nanny state" and "causing eating disorders". Very obese women are called "curvy" or "voluptuous". Any attempt to discuss the health effects of over weight are dismissed as a fascistic attempt to control other people.

There are so many _weird_ ideas around obesity - "it's not sugar, it's high fructose corn syrup! We weren't overweight until HFCS!". Maybe HFCS is worse than regular sugar, but we also didn't use to drink 64 fluid ounces of 10% sugar syrup. ([http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/01/the-7-11-dou...](http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/01/the-7-11-double- big-gulp-holds-200-more-than-the-average-adult-humans-stomach/))

<comment> __--__ We also didn't used to have the government telling us to increase our consumption of grains and carbs and decrease our consumption of saturated fat. HFCS also didn't used to be in every piece of packaged food in the grocery store. I used to be able to buy pizza sauce without having to painstakingly search for one without soy in it.

You're right, there are many weird ideas around obesity. They start with many weird ideas about food in general.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady The first time I visited America I was shocked at the portion sizes. I ate at a nice Italian restaurant. We took home the leftovers from my meal and that managed to feed another two people. I think it's the attitude that excess is good/bigger is better that's the problem.

<comment><USER3> What I find curious is the presence of countries like Mexico, Lybia, Egypt in the same tier as the US.

Apparently wealth and the culture of abundance are not the only factors affecting obesity.

<comment><USER4> Mexico is not a poor country. It's GDP/capita (PPP adjusted) is similar to Poland or Lithuania. Not exactly the US or UK, but there isn't any shortage of chicharrones or chimichangas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm the kind of person that always look at the positive in every situation. Which often makes me seem callous, this is one of those times.

I see the average getting fatter and therefore that makes me more attractive because I am tall and lean.

Obviously I'm not thinking long term about societies healthcare costs. But right now I'm feeling pretty smug.

<comment><USER6> You shouldn't feel callous - you have a good point and honestly deserve to feel good about yourself. Obesity, or rather weight in general, for some reason has become a touchy subject. It seems now mentioning someone's weight is taboo.

The truth is, people need a wake up call. Being overweight gets way too much not only protection, but positive reinforcement. It's a tricky one to solve - you don't want overweight people to hate themselves or suffer, but at the same time you need the nation as a whole to recognize this as a dangerous issue and address it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Americans seems pretty short nowadays compared to some countries in Europe, where average is near 5-11 and a few over 6'. Still a few short countries here in Europe too.

<comment><USER8> America is a nation of immigrants, and genetics determine most of height, so comparisons that ignore country of family history are silly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks like a mean rather than a median distribution,so our American here is probably heavier than than the "average" normal. Weight distributions are starting to skew to the right due to the existence of a small percentage of utterly massive individuals. 15 kilos under normal weight is extremely skinny while being overweight can go into over 100 kilos at the extremes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would rather see something on body fat percentage. BMI is not an ideal measurement in terms of health for a lot of body types.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree. BMI accounts for height by its own definition and for health/body types by leaving large margins for the definitions of normal/overweight/obese.

It might not be a precise measure for some individuals (athletic, heavy muscled males) but what percentage are those in the context of a whole country ?

As an average/indicator over a large sample is perfectly acceptable, in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> BMI is const x weight/height^2. Volume is proportional to height^3, unless you believe tall people grow in only 2 directions. So BMI ~ height. That's why most of the NBA is obese.

<comment><USER2> Everyone mentions athletes whenever BMI is mentioned.

Most people are not athletes. Most people do very little exercise. When using BMI for an individual you ask them if they do any exercise, but for populations it's fine.

<comment><USER4> I mention the NBA due to height, not athleticism. BMI is an overestimate for tall people and an underestimate for short people, due to the scaling law I described.

<comment><USER2> Most people are not NBA tall, so luckily it's no such a problem for BMI over mass populations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So I will plan my next vacation to the Netherlands...

<comment><USER12> One of the first things you will notice is how tall people there are. The second thing you'll notice is that food portions in restaurants and cafeterias are much smaller. Strangely, nobody starves.

<comment><USER13> "One of the first things you will notice is how short people there are. The second thing you'll notice is that food portions in restaurants and cafeterias are much larger. Strangely, everybody feels hungry all the time."

<comment><USER12> Sad but true :-/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, time to work out.

</comment><comment><USER15> Fat American Todd looks a bit like Charlie Sheen.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ewww</comment>