Five tips on making every day count, by Richard Branson - <AUTHOR> https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/five-tips-making-every-day-count <comment><USER3> To save you a click, here are the five tips:

5\. Do something fun as you start your day

4\. Just do it!

3\. Set goals and challenge yourself (and write them down)

2\. Have a break

1\. Do some good

<comment><USER4> Yup, if advice were edible, this stuff is the empty calorie junk food. I'm surprised I didnt see "no pain no gain" in there too.

<comment><USER5> This reads like a throwaway article from LiveStrong or eHow.

<comment><USER6> Maybe successful people are good at keeping things simple?

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel as the the most successful people I know 1. have routines and keep to them (whereas most people don't) and 2. keep their routines very simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty damn good advice.

With regards to exercise and breaks (two of the items in here), I think it is pretty much proven to be beneficial for productivity as well, but just to add my anecdotal success...:

I used to hit the gym at around 18-19 in the evening. I would often be tired and the gym would be crowded.

Then I switched to going around 13-14, breaking up my day. I found it gave me tremendous energy coming back from the gym to the office - and I would often have new ideas on how to solve, whatever I was working on.

So if you have this kind of freedom in planning your workday, I encourage you to try it out - exercise in the middle of the day.

<comment><USER4> Assuming you're employed, how do you go to the gym in the middle of the day? By the time you've commuted there, changed clothes, worked out, showered, dried off, changed again, and commuted back, you're well over any lunch break time allotment I've ever seen.

<comment><USER8> For me personally, I get an hour unpaid lunch. I skip the shower. 4 days of the week I lift (one main lift with 2+ minute rest, 4-5 accessories with 1:30 rest) and one day I have enough time to run 3 miles (a little faster than a 9 minute mile).

On days I run I wash my face and put on a fresh pair of underwear/socks. Maybe I'm gross but I think the shower is honestly unnecessary.

<comment><USER9> It really depends on your genes. Some of us sweat a lot as soon as we do any kind of exercises, enough that changing clothes wouldn't be enough.

Using water as cold as you'll tolerate helps keep the shower very short though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > You don't have time for it, you make time for it

I think this applies to many things, not just for fitness. Our time is limited, depending on how much money you have and where you live you even spend more (or less) time in some things.

But in the end, there's some time that we choose on how to spend.

</comment><comment><USER11> From the article on failure yesterday:

"There are many different ways to think of failure, most of which seem designed to soften the sting of it. In Courage to Soar, Ms. Biles unpacks her own thoughts on the matter. This memoir, "written" by a 19 year-old and published three months into her explosive post-Olympic popularity, is a pretty blatant cash-grab. Still, the book's purpose, beyond racking up sales, seems to be to inspire younger readers, young girls in particular. But why do we look for advice from the most talented in society? What do they know of our struggles to rise up, dripping and stinking, from the swamp of mediocrity? Here, for example, is Ms. Biles describing how, after some initial struggles, she finally managed to nail a tricky skill – a release move on the uneven bars called a Tkatchev in which you let go of the bar on the upswing and fly backward, usually straddled, over the bar before catching it. "And then, just before practice ended, I said to myself, I'm going to do it this time. And you know what? I actually did!" Must be nice."

</comment><comment><USER12> To literally follow in Branson's footsteps implement the tips thusly:

Kitesurf, Be confident, Jot notes on a notepad whilst flying first class Relax Cut a cheque to charity

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't think any of the tips actually go towards "making the day count" except for #4, and even then it's such generic and bland advice that it doesn't serve any purpose. This doesn't seem like it was written by Richard himself, it comes off as detached and some sort of appeal to make him seem relatable in this day and age. Especially considering the amount of pieces on "his" blog.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is slightly off topic, but I always thought that, if I were loaded, one thing I would do more of would be kitesurfing. Which makes me feel very lucky today (I am NOT loaded), as I already kitesurf.

</comment><comment><USER14> 0\. Have $5.1 billion so you can do all the above

<comment><USER15> The irony of a comment like this on an article that only suggests things that are basically free.

He didn't suggest you jet off in your private plane for a quick refreshing week on your private island. He suggested you take breaks, start your day doing something you enjoy, exercise a bit, write down your goals, and work hard. I fail to see where money comes into it.

<comment><USER16> Money plays a big role in these. It's clear from each point, especially start your day with something fun. That is an incredibly hard thing to do for a lot of Americans, especially those who are poor. When you wake up poor for years and years on end, the ability to just "will yourself" into doing something "fun" in the morning to start your day, when all your mind can do is wonder if you'll have enough money for food later, or who will make fun of you on your commute, or any number of stresses, is nearly impossible.

Money plays a huge role in a person's ability to find a peace and calm moment in their day. And it doesn't help when some rich jerk walks in and says "what's the problem, too hard to wake up feeling happy and able to do something fun? ha, never had that problem! good day!". Ick.

Money plays a huge role in all of this. Yes, writing down your goals is basically free. Taking breaks isn't. Taking breaks can often include a risk of someone yelling at you, or you missing an important phone call that would have been really useful to get, etc.

Money is really important. Yeah, you don't need $5B to do this, but the point is that the advice is tone-deaf considering it comes from someone who does not have the common worries or problems of the common person.

Edit: The article is extra tone-deaf because it indeed does suggest you "jet off in your private plane for a quick refreshing week on your private island" like you quipped. The pictures he included in the article make it clear what his idea of a break is.

<comment><USER15> Exceedingly few people are in a position where they can't do any of these. I've lived on little money, and wondered how to make it stretch to get enough food, and none of these were "nearly impossible". It changes some of what you can do to meet them, it does not make it nearly impossible.

It may be _psychologically_ hard. If you're tired and worn out, yes, you'll find it hard to buy that you should make space to rest or exercise or have fun, but that's exactly when you need it the most, and when it will benefit you the most.

Not taking breaks and setting aside time like this is more costly than taking them. Yes, it may be logistically hard to do it in ways that prevent a boss from yelling at you - I've had times when I resorted to going to the toilets to get a few minutes breathing space. But if it isn't possible? That's a strong signal you _need_ to find something else (and yes, I know it is hard for many, but it is rarely impossible).

A lot of these are traps in that it's very easy to get into a cycle where you think you don't have time. But if you think you don't have time for exercise, for example, you'll soon find yourself with even less time as your energy levels drop and your performance tanks.

<comment><USER16> > Exceedingly few people are in a position where they can't do any of these.

That's not really what I said, though. I said that having money plays a big role in someone's ability to simply do these 5 things. It matters - <USER2> money or not makes a difference. I was responding to, "I fail to see where money comes into it" by explaining how, for hundreds of millions of people in the USA who are not well-off, _money does come into it_. It it out-of-touch with America and the world to say it doesn't.

> It may be _psychologically_ hard.

It may also be _physically_ hard. You are discounting the struggles of so many Americans by dismissing that these things can be hard for people. They are good advice, but it does't make it easy, especially "easy to do when you have no money".

> Not taking breaks and setting aside time like this is more costly than > taking them.

Absolutely agreed. It is a privilege of the rich to optimize for the long term and to ignore short-term problems. Not taking breaks isn't something a lot of people do by choice - they are forced into it by circumstance and have a hard time getting out of it.

<comment><USER15> I'm not discounting that it may be hard, but I still think you're overplaying what kind of difference it makes to your ability to do these types of things. I'm sure there are some people somewhere that works every waking moment, but I've yet to meet any. Including people with very little money and who work ridiculous hours.

What I _have_ seen are lots of people who argue they have no time because they are tired and prioritize choices that are mentally easier and get stuck in a vicious circle that way. It may sounds like this advice is not meant for them, but I'd argue the opposite: It's exactly when you're in those kind of circumstances you _need_ to learn to make time for these things. Learning how to make time to rest and reflect is one of the most essential skills you can learn if you want to find ways of improving your life.

And that applies just as much to poor people as to people with lots of money but stressful jobs - very few people think they have plenty of spare time.

If this was _easy_ it'd be pointless advice - we'd all be doing it.

> Absolutely agreed. It is a privilege of the rich to optimize for the long > term and to ignore short-term problems. Not taking breaks isn't something a > lot of people do by choice - they are forced into it by circumstance and > have a hard time getting out of it.

I disagree. There will always be corner cases, but I've been in plenty of situations where it was tempting to think I don't have time for breaks. But the moment you start thinking you don't have time for breaks it's doubly important to take them, because it implies you're too caught up in what you're doing to realize how you're affecting your own productivity. You'll do a shitty job not just in the long term but in the short term too.

A lot of people _think_ they are forced into not taking breaks, but my experience is that most people who think they can't, very much can. You'll find even highly paid people in senior jobs insist they can't take breaks, and then spend hours acting like zombies instead, rather than take a break and keep their productivity up. Yes, there are the odd corner case with bad bosses that'll count every second you're not doing your job, but there are most certainly not hundreds of millions of people in those kind of circumstances in the US.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you schedule your day/week? - <AUTHOR>

I am interested to know the community how do you divide your day into various chunks to cover spending time with family,working on your product,9-5 jobs and other things? <comment><USER2> I don't actually schedule anything, but I've got a number of things to juggle. Thankfully, I've got a wife who runs her own business and understands the rigors of being a bootstrapped startup-er.

That said, I'm more goal-oriented than calendar-oriented. I try to set weekly goals, and chunk them down into daily goals. Each day, I'll set one must-do goal per "thing" that I'm involved in (startup, consulting, family, life). If I manage to get other stuff squeezed in, that's a bonus.

This way I don't restrict myself to only spending time with family between 6-8pm...I do it whenever I want and get the rest done when appropriate. Obviously some items (consulting) may require more strict calendaring, but you can flex around that.

For me, a hard time-based schedule is not going to make me more productive...it has the opposite effect on me. So, I'm lucky enough that I can work things in a way that work for me best.

Cheers, AL</comment>


Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings. 1 year now!) - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN. I like this community a lot and want to see if there's anything I can do to make you a little more successful. No strings. To give you an idea of what I might be able to help you with, let me tell you a few things I've done to help others...
- I've been organizing my own Arduino workshops and teaching laymen how to build things (there's a session tomorrow, actually!),
- I'm participating in the venture-lab.org internet class and helping people learn to apply the Business Model Canvas along with lean startup methodologies,
- I organize tech community social events that help build our young community here in South Florida,
- I advise a few local single founders who are without technical expertise and guide them toward good long-term technical decisions for their startup,
- I'm an early adopter, enjoy playing with new tech and can provide strong, constructive, specific feedback,
- I'm a relatively accomplished developer and engineer,
- I understand good design from bad design. Aesthetics are not lost on me,
- I have a family and juggle a mediocre work-life balance that's gradually improving.
If there's something I can help you with, just ask here or @mikegreenberg on Twitter. Be specific about what you're trying to fix/solve/accomplish. The more details you provide, the better I can help you out. :)
This thread actually marks the one year anniversary that I've been doing these and it's been quite satisfying for everyone involved. I hope this inspires other people to help out even if you don't think you have anything useful to offer. Actions like this will only improve our community (locally and across the net).
Cheers! Mike
PS: I'll typically reciprocate the amount of effort/consideration that you've shown in your request. If you show me that you're thoughtful about the feedback you want from me, I'll be more apt to give you something useful. I'll accept any requests made before the end of today and will attempt to respond by the end of the weekend.
PPS: You can check out my previous submissions if you want to see the sort of feedback I can provide. <comment><USER3> Mike, wow...thanks for the offer. I re-launched my site as a paid service about a month ago. It is an online text editor for Dropbox. (I guess you can disregard this if you are not a Dropbox user).

I hope you don't mind temporarily shelling out $6, but I would really appreciate it if you could sign up for the service and answer a few questions:

\- Is it clear how to sign up for the service on the home page?

\- Does the signup/payment workflow feel straightforward?

\- Is it clear how to get a refund? Is the process straightforward?

\- Does the app feel fast or slow?

Thanks! Very very much appreciated. The site is <https://www.textdropapp.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hiya! Sorry it took a bit. (I've been fighting with taxes.) So...

\- Signup: I was a little surprised when it sent me directly to Dropbox to signin. I thought it was an error, but realized it was asking me to signin so I could authenticate your service. Then I authenticated and was faced with your price. I don't think this is the right way to do it. I know you're trying to test the viability of your product (separate from your price) but I think there's more going on here.

First, you didn't warn me about a price with the exception of mentioning a "subscription" and a 7-day guarantee. Waiting until after authorization frustrates me because if I didn't want to signup, now I have to go back to dropbox and cancel my authorization there (instead of just closing the page and moving on with my life).

And even though you're using an inverted pricing model (subscription price grows with wide-spread use), you should use that to create a sense of urgency to signup faster instead of hiding it after authorization. Use demand to compel them to try sooner by showing the raising price up-front before they authorize Dropbox.

\- Then there's the issue of permissions. Because the first experience with your service via Dropbox is "Give this random app FULL access to your ENTIRE dropbox." I think it's a lot to ask someone when they just want to edit their text files with your service. It could help if you prepare them before sending them to the authorization funnel with a warning/explanation screen.

\+ The app is incredibly snappy and a pleasure to use.

\+ The search bar is helpful even if it wasn't immediately obvious that it was search. I think it was easy to discover though. Maybe make it robust enough to support fuzzy search (a path of app/js/main.js could be found by searching for "appjmain") and masking (*? characters).

\- PLEASE put some basic file handling functionality. (Delete, rename, move would be helpful...) Anyone editing dropbox text files will probably want these functions as well. (If they're there, I couldn't find them.) It also wasn't clear how to "close" a file aside from switching away from it.

\+ Refund seemed to be cake. I'll let you know if I have trouble getting the funds back. (Big fan of stripe.js, too!)

Hope this feedback helped. And again, sorry for the delay.

<comment><USER3> Hi Mike, please, no need to apologize for the delay. I really appreciate you taking the time to look at this.

These are all great points, especially regarding the signup process and and permissions. I think you have validated some of the concerns that I have had regarding these issues.

I do have delete and rename, but maybe I should pop up a quick intro screen for first-time users to get acquainted with the functionality.

Thanks again and all the best to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _\- I'm participating in the venture-lab.org internet class and helping people learn to apply the Business Model Canvas along with lean startup methodologies,_

Hi Mike - Thanks for the generous offer. Appears like you have a lot of knowledge to share.

Could you share your experiences in applying the Business Model Canvas and Lean Startup methodologies? What are some common pitfalls startups fall into when trying to apply these concepts?

When do you start using the canvas? ie Could you use the canvas with no potential ideas, only perceived customer problems?

The context to the questions is: Curious to know how you conduct a brainstorming session (ie session to generate ideas) and then knowing where to go next. When do you start using the canvas?

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for being awesome Mike.

You could really help me by having a look at <http://localbeer.me> and making suggestions on how I can bring targeted (craft beer drinkers) traffic to the site. It's sitting at 4-10 visits per day right now. I'm not sure if I've got the design wrong, or if it's just a boring site in general. Is there a killer feature I could add? (I thought auto-locating breweries near you was a killer feature). There is a chicken and egg issue here as well, because the site will get way better if people review beers, but with such low traffic, nobody is reviewing beer. Maybe some suggestions on how to tackle this chicken and egg issue?

<comment><USER6> As a general beer lover, I can give you some issues. I've visited your site before, but forgotten about it. The main issue is this is solving a problem I don't have: I already know where all my local breweries are (and you're missing some in DFW, most notably Deep Ellum and Peticolas). But that's not the point--you aren't telling me anything particularly of note about these breweries. I've been to them, I know what their tap list looks like, and I follow them to get updates.

What is more important to me is building a system to find _where_ I can find my local beer. Who's got the Rahr seasonal? Who's got Peticolas Velvet Hammer on tap? People (including me) have tried to tackle it. The problem is that distributors control that data, and they're not keen on giving it up.

Anyway, I'm sorry to give harsh feedback, but I don't see me regularly visiting this site. It doesn't make my life better at all--it's just a neat way to look at stuff I already know. I think the site looks great, just solves a problem I don't have.

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't have said it better myself. I'm not interested as where the beer came from (although, that's definitely interesting information i'd want to find when I'm already enjoying it) as I am where I can find good beer to drink! The best kind of app for that might be a mobile app where I can log the beer I had and where I'm drinking it so I can try it again later (or recommend it to someone else through your app).

Once you have people posting what beer they had where, then you don't need the distributor's information anymore. Then you just need to go to bars with great beer selections and get the locals into your app.

Of course, before you go down this route, you might want to pop into a few bars and ask the patrons if they would even use such an app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hello Mike!

It's good of you to offer your help to the community, especially as you have a lot of valuable experience to share!

Basically I'm trying to decide on my next project to work on and I would find some constructive criticism on a handful of my ideas very useful!

I'm kind of torn in multiple directions but I would like to make something that actually brings me some revenue!

Most of my other projects have been for the fun of it & not monetized/free to use so far.

I could list my top 5 ideas and you could throw back a hell yes / hell no based on your gut instinct!

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, shoot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd just like to point out that I've come to Mike for help on numerous occasions and he has always given me fantastic and useful advice. If you need to get questions answered, Mike is the guy you want to talk to.

Oh and Mike, I still haven't been able to find an internship for this summer. Thought I had one locked down, but I guess not. Still trying though! Oh and thanks for the interview skills book, it was amazingly helpful.

</comment><comment><USER9> Mike being awesome as always. Thanks for another round of "No Strings!"

I'll piggyback, as always, and offer to help any HNers with machine learning, statistics, Python, or NumPy/SciPy questions they might have. Feel free to comment here or email me (address in profile).

Have a good weekend, all!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mike, thanks for continuing to be awesome.

I'm working on a hardware startup. So, what would really help me right now is your thoughts on this question I posted earlier - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899105>

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! Found a video you might be interested in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> hi Mike!

I have been reading your offer posts for a while now and always wanted to ask you something, but never thought i had a question worth asking.

Today is different :)

I would really love some constructive criticism on the usefulness, usability and viability of my little side project.

I know there are one a penny of Twitter schedulers, but what I wanted to build was a simple emailing service where I could schedule a bulk of tweets in one go. Do you think that could be useful to others beside me?

I tried to post before as a Show HN post but didn't get much attention... perhaps not getting too much attention is also a feedback i should think about, though..

the project: <http://buffero.me>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there!

I agree with Brian in that your treading dangerously close in name, look and feel to the current market leader and might find yourself getting a C&D or a terse email before you ever hit any real traction. I'd reconsider your brand before moving much further. It'd be a shame if your technical accomplishments get tarnished over some bad PR situation.

Regarding your product, I think email input is a difficult feature to pull off. No matter how simple you make the format, your users will find a way to screw it up. And users will blame your service for the poor experience. Having to defend your product to customers and training them to properly use a product is VERY TOUGH.

Further, if you want email input to be the one feature you use to differentiate yourself from your competition, that feature had better be MAGICAL. Posterous is one example of a company that used email input to help users publish content to their blog as it's key differentiation. They put together a great blog platform, but the email input was their 10-second onboarding. "Email your first blog post us and we'll set everything up for you!" THAT'S MAGIC.

Your differentiation aside, I don't think that's what your biggest problem is. I realize this is an MVP, but I think many people take the MVP thing too literally. If you're launching a product in a market which has (as you state) a lot of competition, your MVP launch should at least perform on-par with the rest of the market. First impressions are hard to fix and launching a sub-par MVP will likely doom you to failure by obscurity.

What you should do: Start thinking about how you want to improve on what's out there. If it's email input, then iterate on that feature over and over until it's like magic. On each iteration, get people to use the feature and see if they like it or hate it. I would even take Brian's suggestion and use Buffer's API so you can focus on THAT feature alone. (And don't get discouraged.)

<comment><USER11> Hi Mike! Thank you for your honest comments! I've received a couple of comments already about the name - too similar to bufferapp. Unfortunately, I decided to go with the name i've chosen before I did a better research of what's already out there. But I agree, I need to change the name before I proceed further. Lesson learned: do an extensive research beforehand, always. Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well if you want to help, Sign up for the Dropdock beta at <http://getdropdock.com> and give us your feedback next week when we launch our private beta ;)

PS: Your awesome, Keep doing what you're doing. You are an inspiration

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll offer some feedback right now... I think the product is pretty slick, but your site suggests this is the "easiest" way to send a file. A big question remains on what the first-time setup is like. How do I get other people on my "list" and how much friction does that process have? Because if it's any harder than right-clicking a file, selecting "Send via Email" and typing an email address, I'm immediately out.

Maybe other people could be asking this same question (and leaving your page before dropping off their email addy)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hi Mike, do you have any experience building 3G or 4G enabled CDMA/GSM devices? Ideally this would be an FCC certified module that would be dead easy to interface with. I have no antenna design skills to speak of so that's a concern too. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't directly have experience, but the company I'm working for is in that space. Did you have specific questions? Maybe I could ask an expert here?

<comment><USER13> Mike, no that's ok. Thanks again for offering your help, really do appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is more of a SEO question.

I got 100,000 pages, all computer generated, but all high quality information as well (not scraped/duplicate content). Should I make them all indexable right away, or gradually so as to avoid any Google penalty?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not an SEO expert and have no familiarity with Google's page rank algo, but if I had to take an educated guess:

100k of content from one domain would probably never just spring up overnight. It would probably be best to publish your content from most linked to least linked over a period of time that makes sense. This way, the content that is gradually posted is not likely to have dead links (while the target is still waiting in the queue to be published). You're still probably going to have some negative impact if all the content links to itself and nothing from the outside linking in. And I understand Google's crawlers now detect organic content generation (comments, likes, linkbacks, etc) so if that sort of interaction makes sense in your content, you might get negatively affected if it's not there as expected.

Just some thoughts and take it with a grain of salt, of course! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hello Mike. I would really appreciate it if you can give my new product, pgXplorer (downloadable at pgXplorer.com) a whirl and give some feedback. It is a desktop GUI client for postgres v8.4 and above.

<comment><USER16> Davy -

I regularly use psql as part of my job, but I gave pgXplorer a whirl. It seems less responsive than psql, but that's a big reason why I use the command line client anyway. One thing I noticed is that you're asking for "Port" twice in the connection properties dialog - I think you mean "Password" in the second instance. I'm probably not your target audience, but I'd like to know - what's the proposition? Why use pgXplorer instead of pgAdmin, for example?

<comment><USER15> Thanks a _lot_ for your feedback. I truly appreciate it.

Nothing can beat psql in speed in my opinion. pgXplorer carries the overhead of a GUI of course and there is an added level of abstraction when talking to the database. pgXplorer has been built with ease-of-use in mind.

> ..you're asking for "Port" twice...

Sorry about it. It has been rectified at the source. I shall be updating the installers shortly.

> what's the proposition? Why use pgXplorer instead of pgAdmin, for example?

Good question. I started with the premise to supplant pgAdmin as the open source GUI tool for postgres. But I don't hold that view anymore. I am thinking of pgXplorer as another open source GUI for postgres.

There are several design choices that are different from pgAdmin (and possibly other database GUI tools).

* First of all, we have one instance of pgXplorer handling only one database at a time. So in the unpalatable event that pgXplorer crashes, it brings down only that instance. While one could launch multiple pgAdmins as well, it lists all connections regardless.

* A 2-D grid like layout for tables,views and function on the main canvas with search option to quickly highlight a desired item. Very useful when dealing with names in Unicode, where there can be no perceptible alphabetical order (like Japanese).

* The SQL editor/console is fully Unicode ready. In pgAdmin, when doing a search/replace with Unicode characters, pgAdmin's editor does not work well.

* Editing tables and inserting data in tables handled in a better way than pgAdmin I think. Bulk updates can be done in pgXplorer when a single column is selected.

* Copying and pasting data into LibreOffice Calc/Excel _with_ headers. Also, it is quicker than pgAdmin.

* A simple table designer for newly created (columnless) tables.

These are some salient features of pgXplorer. More features are on the anvil.

<comment><USER16> I'll make it a point to keep giving it a whirl, if only to help out a fellow HN'er. I do agree that there's room for improvement in the desktop DB client world, but I've not run into the problems with e.g. Unicode, that you mentioned. This is probably just my personal use history (I work for Mapquest and spend a large amount of time doing geographic queries). As I said, I'll continue giving it a whirl as best as I can.

One thing that I have found virtually intolerable in any DB GUI client I've used is the latency after connection, presumably to load table definitions and other data for display. With psql, I connect and I just start going - <USER2> latency is imperceptible. I know that having such metadata readily visible is the reason people use GUI clients, but I find that I frequently don't need that. It's very easy for me to do a \d $tablename to see columns, or select count(1) from ... to get rowcounts as needed. In fact, the cost for doing this is roughly the same as the cost of clicking a table name to expand a schema in a GUI, so really all this sort of behavior does is get in my way.

Another thing which I would find enticing would be special attention to displaying query plans. The output of "explain" isn't exactly the clearest, even to someone who's got a pretty good idea how a DB works, and I run explain queries infrequently enough that I have to check the documentation to make sure I'm understanding the result. Even simple clues - e.g. color coding the output so sequential scans are red, for instance - would help.

Best of luck with it, though - and if I can help or if you want to bounce anything off me my e-mail is in my profile.

<comment><USER15> > latency after connection, presumably to load table definitions and other > data for display

You are correct. Particularly to have auto-completion on table names in the SQL editor, highlighting primary key columns, etc.

(1) I understand that psql can be quicker in experienced hands. For me, particularly having to type out chinese characters for table names (I am not a native speaker of the language) is really difficult. pgXplorer eases some of that pain by auto-completing. So, in this specific case of mine, it is a bit quicker.

> Another thing which I would find enticing would be special attention to > displaying query plans.

I presume you know about <http://explain.depesz.com/>? Very useful and open source too. I will be trying to add something similar in pgXplorer as well.

Thanks a lot for the helpful offer. I will certainly connect by email to discuss some related things to the project.

Edits: (1)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Curious case of Customer Validation - <AUTHOR>

You have a killer idea, say a brain implant that functions as a telepathic device.
You've figured out the logistics, You need a billion dollars to develop the prototype and cover overheads, legal issues and other crazy stuff.
And now you need the validation, will the average Joe sign up to have his head bust open and pay a ridiculous fee to have this implanted ?
How do you find customers? Do they really need this? Is this really a practical solution? Will they pay for it? For some this part might be simple, for others not so much (including myself, thats why i'm writing this post :O).
Too many startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want.
They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product without ever showing the product,
even in a very rudimentary form, to the prospective customer. When they fail to reach broad uptake
from customers, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether
or not the product was interesting. When customers ultimately communicate, through their indifference,
that they don't care about the idea, the startup fails.   - http://theleanstartup.com/principles
head over to
http://shipquick.co
for a simple solution to this issue of customer validation. Validate Quicker to Ship you Idea Quicker.
Even I am validating this problem right now !
Cheers. <comment><USER2> I think this sounds like a useful problem to solve, but your landing page hasn't made me curious enough to give my email.

You need to make me believe that you can pull it off for me to root for you in that way. The way the page currently looks, it seems to imply you don't know how you will build it.

Hope that's helpful feedback.

</comment><comment><USER3> A clickable link would be nice ;-)

<comment><USER3> [[http://shipquick.co](http://shipquick.co)](http://shipquick.co\]\(http://shipquick.co\))

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks rman666 !</comment></comment></comment>


Scalable System Design Patterns - <AUTHOR> http://horicky.blogspot.com/2010/10/scalable-system-design-patterns.html <comment><USER2> As a programmer the saying "A picture says more then a thousand words" often feels like a fallacy but Ricky Ho has a history of illustrating his points beautifully. His nosql patterns post is another very good read: <http://horicky.blogspot.com/2009/11/nosql-patterns.html></comment>


The Future of Electric Cars Is Brighter with Elon Musk in It - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/opinion/elon-musk-tesla.html <comment><USER2> I was a bit appalled by his recent behavior but I must say the good largely outweighs the bad when speaking of Elon Musk. We need more, not less, people like him who dare shaking things up and dreaming big. I really think that if EV start taking off it is mainly to his credit, he put legacy car manufacturers on notice and left them scrambling to evolve from diesel to EV.

</comment><comment><USER3> He needs to stay off twitter. It is a huge distraction. SEC should have banned him from social media to protect him and his companies from future issues including legal and pr related matters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Surely though one of the reasons for the success of Tesla and SpaceX is that the high profile of Musk and he's always in the press. Far fewer people know of what is going on in GM electric vehicles or NASA compared to the latest SpaceX launch or newest Tesla update. Its one of the reasons Tesla is so popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Credit Musk for making a sexy high end EV, for sure. However, how big is the market for luxury EVs really, will the Model 3 be a success and can mainstream manufacturers profitably sell lower-end EVs? All those questions are still unanswered.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nope. The smart money is on Tesla bankrupting and having a fire sale. Elon made a bad decision in how they setup the assembly lines of the Model 3 requiring rework on the assembly lines processes and more importantly capital expenditures (cap-ex). He almost destroyed the firm with a single tweet, almost was tied up in costly (time and money) SEC battles, and is always one interview away from saying the wrong thing.

The electric vehicle market is only viable because of the stupendous efforts Mr. Elon did in getting to this moment, however, if Tesla fails, the electric market will bear the stigma of: We tried that in 2010 and it did not work.</comment>


The Connections Between Race, IQ, and Neuroplasticity - <AUTHOR> https://bostonreview.net/race/michael-e-staub-mismeasure-minds <comment><USER2> Think you've already submitted this story a few times:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19868213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19868213)</comment>


Escape Velocity - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1475-escape-velocity <comment><USER2> That Rails has an _escape_once_ method is a big part of the reason I stopped using Rails. If you think "double escaping" is a problem to be solved by creating a helper method that won't escape what's already escaped, now you have two problems.

EDIT TO ELABORATE:

Problem 1 is the original problem, that parts of your code do not agree upon what a particular string represents. This is the "strings problem," the mother of XSS and injection vulnerabilities. [1]

Problem 2 is that the _escape_once_ method papers over these problems, making them harder to detect, and preventing you from hunting down the logic errors that cause them. (Since these errors often occur in upstream code, you need to find them _before_ they execute to be safe, which is why compile-time methods [2] work best.)

[1] [http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2007-08-15-a-bright-future- sec...](http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2007-08-15-a-bright-future-security-and- modern-type-systems.html)

[2] [http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-10-18-a-type-based- soluti...](http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-10-18-a-type-based-solution-to- the-strings-problem.html)

<comment><USER3> The article should have pointed out that Github is running Rails 2.3, and that this is where the problem exists.

Rails 3.x has reworked the entire escaping situation and now avoids the re- escaping trap (strings must be flagged as "HTML safe", otherwise they are escaped on final injection into a document). It still has escape_once, but it's not used by Rails itself.

You are of course right to blame 2.x for its flaws, but let's not blame entire projects for problems that have been fixed. (Not that Rails 3.x does not have other egregious inefficiencies, but that's another story.)

<comment><USER2> I stopped using Rails not so much because of the existence of the _escape_once_ method but because of what its introduction in 2006, and its continued use in mainstream Rails methods (until 2010 when Rails 3.0 was released), said about the direction of the project.

<comment><USER3> What did it say about the direction of the project, in your opinion? I can see how one might conclude that the developers are idiots based on that method, but I have to say that what I get out of Rails vastly outweighs that stupidity.

<comment><USER2> It made it hard to believe that the project wouldn't be plagued by security problems. For me, that was enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And here I thought that Ambrosia just released the Escape Velocity source code.

<comment><USER5> Same here. Was an extremely funny space trade / exploration / shooting game. PC users missed out on this great piece of classic Mac shareware.

Small "let's play" video: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VX6TZEfqf4>

<comment><USER6> Windows users only missed out on the first two games when they came out. EV Nova (the third game) is available for Windows and the first two games are available as free plugins for Nova.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> To people horrified by the Rails code, keep in mind that Github is running Rails 2.3, which is very old and near the end of LTS. Rails 3.x has reworked the entire escaping situation and now avoids the re-escaping trap (strings must be flagged as "HTML safe", otherwise they are escaped on final injection into a document).

<comment><USER7> So, what's their upgrade path situation? Are they going to try to hold out indefinitely on 2.3? Upgrade at the last possible moment? (Ick) Switch out of Rails when the situation becomes intolerable?

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't know. I don't know anyone at Github who might answer this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Just by replacing the escaping function with a more optimized one, we've reduced the average request time by 45ms, and we're allocating 20,000 less Ruby objects per request. That was a lot of escaped HTML right there!"

I generally stay away from web development so forgive me if this one is obvious, but why does so much text need to have HTML escaping performed in order to render the page? Also is there a way to quantify how much text that is? Like a few K per page or a few hundred K?

<comment><USER9> My guess is that it has something to do with the fact that Github is made up almost entirely of user generated content. Just load a Github project page. From top to bottom, you have:

        * Username in the header (which is probably validated with a specific format,
          so probably doesn't need escaping).
        * Project summary entered when the project is created.
        * Drop-down with list of branch and tag names.
        * Latest commit message.
        * List of names for all folders and files tracked in git for the project.
        * Readme text.

That's just the homepage for a project, and each one of those things could potentially contain malicious HTML or JS, meaning it should be escaped before rendered on the page.

<comment><USER10> Not to mention the pages that display actual code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a disappointing post. After the ambrosia software announcement the other day I thought they had open sourced escape velocity.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very cool. I'll have to check this out. That profile tool looks interesting too. I've been using the rack-mini-profiler gem but it might be a good idea to do a deeper dive.

As always GH, thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm always amazed by these startups doing what _seems_ like really simple optimizations and reaping these enormous benefits. If your tools support profiling, you should at least give it a shot once in a while. The fruit are hanging low indeed if Github can reap this kind of reward with this small a tweak.

</comment><comment><USER14> FTA: "273,006 objs avg/req"

Wow, that is...a lot...is that mostly rails or is that in user code?

<comment><USER15> Seems kinda par for the course for a Rails app.

[http://meta.discourse.org/t/tuning-ruby-and-rails-for- discou...](http://meta.discourse.org/t/tuning-ruby-and-rails-for- discourse/4126)

Scroll down and you'll see that on an average request, Discourse eats up 230,000 strings [which are all objects in Ruby] per request.

The entire thread is about relaxing the garbage collector so that it won't run until the request is over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love stories like this. Make me wish I could spend more time in Ruby land creating/fixing slow code.</comment>


What do you guys think of this side project? - <AUTHOR>

http://www.learnfrom.it
i work a full time job and am running a successfull online business with couple of partners. Just for fun i noticed a lot of success stories being posted on HN so figured i'd put together a website where people can share their success stories and others can learn from it.
it was literally put together in 3 days so it'll probably contain lots of bugs!
what are your thoughts on the idea? would you personally use it? what should I do to get people to start posting their stories on the site?
thanks <comment><USER2> well, would just really simplify your front page - I get info overload looking at the top 30% of the first screen - two menu bars and an adwords advert. I would also take the adwords off when you start, just to reduce clutter and because you wont make much on adwords in the beginning anyhow.

If you're interested in stories, try to create a clear vertical work flow for your user on the homepage - my type of front page would have your slider showing some stories posted by other users along with their photo, and a "post your story" button. I would move your category list off to the side of the page.

Also, it would be better to focus on one type of category when you start, because it'll be easier to get a critical mass of stories to interest users who want to learn about that topic. Your current cat list might be spread too thin. Goodluck!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the ideas. they make perfect sense. i basically purchased that template from a site and plugged in my code since i'm not the best with graphics!

any ideas what other sites i can use to purchase simple templates based on what you recommended?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> clickable - <http://www.learnfrom.it></comment>


Google's Flipboard Competitor: Propeller - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20110915/its-called-google-propeller-and-its-aimed-at-flipboard-and-facebook-too/

<comment><USER2> A social news app called Propeller? It'll never work. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propeller.com>)

</comment><comment><USER3> AOL used to have a news site called Propeller. AM I the only one who finds it confusing that Google doesn't know/care?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd be more in Flipboard's corner on this if they had an Android app.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like I need to release my flipboard-esque competitor soon. <http://yfrog.com/h440970584p> <http://yfrog.com/mg3ahp>

</comment><comment><USER6> Google is going to make a ton of enemies (probably too late) if they keep going after every god damn idea. Damn - make your results better.

<comment><USER7> I've had a few friends and myself go through this. What generally happens is Google flounders and fails. They are extraordinarily bad at launching products and even worse at building momentum. Kind of like Microsoft really... I guess its something to do with getting to big, to much bureaucracy.

Its more or less a validation of your product, and probably won't hurt your product if its already got momentum. Hell even gmail hasn't even toppled Yahoo or hotmail and most would agree its Googles second strongest product.

If you don't have momentum however you're screwed. People won't take you seriously and if you need backing or help its going to damage you. This happened to me last year, I have a fully completed product ready to go live, I just hung back and waited for Google to nose dive. I think I'll launch in a few months as I have another project I want to finish first.

If they get a foot hold as they did with maps, you're stuffed. I had a group of friends running mapping companies similar to google maps, but years before hand. One company doesn't exist any more, another moved into a support structure and has managed to survive.. but its not really what the people wanted to do... its what they had to become to survive.

The thing about Google is you have no chance of competing as they release products below production costs by shifting money around. You can't compete. but like I said Google is full of fail ... launching around 1000 products a year... seems every 2-3 years they have one that actually works...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _At the time, sources said, Google told Flipboard execs that if it did not buy the start-up, it planned to do a version of its own._

This kind of 90's era Microsoft-style predatory tactics from Google is hurting innovation in the Valley more than patents. Small companies with innovative products are at the mercy of Google.

No wonder Apple, MS, Oracle, etc. are suing Google for patent infringement. Can you blame them?

<comment><USER9> It's always buy v build, the rest of your comment doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER8> Google is a copy cat.

Yelp, Groupon, Facebook, Twitter, Skyhook, Flipboard.

See any pattern?

Does it make sense now?

<comment><USER10> Facebook is a copycat (Friendster, MySpace, Orkut etc.)

Yelp is a copycat (CitySearch etc.).

Groupon probably isn't the first deal site.

If we didn't have VisiCalc and 1-2-3 and Excel, we wouldn't have Apple's Keynote.

That's how this industry works: large enough markets attract multiple companies. Increased competition causes all players to step up their game and lower their prices. This benefits consumer i.e. you and me.

This is exactly how things are supposed to work.

<comment><USER11> Innovation is the commercialization of a good idea. So, the ideas are easy to come by, but combining the good idea and the commercialization is what really makes something innovative.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are Group Chat Apps Repeating the Same Mistakes of Email? - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-group-chat-apps-arent-perfect <comment><USER2> Group chat is more effective than email but more fragmentation if no good way to control. So base this i think the group chat like slack prefer "channel" which is a type of small group or created by a single target. This will decrease the fragmentation. As the slack reboot does.</comment>


Indoor mapping with Estimote Beacons - <AUTHOR> http://estimote.com/indoor/

<comment><USER2> From my experience as someone who has already implemented an complete iBeacon based iOS App that is used as an art gallery guide I don't believe that this indoor location tracking you're advertising is working when there is more than one person in the room.

As my academic advisor always said: Every human is an 80kg water bag thats disturbing the signal.

Did you test this with multiple persons in the room and if so, what was your result concerning accuracy.

<comment><USER3> You are right that people and their bodies might absorb Bluetooth radiowaves, but our solution does combine several different techniques to minimize that effect.

This is the first version of our SDK and we encourage developers in our community to test different setup with more beacons or beacons located a bit higher, so there is always a line-of-sight between phone and beacons.

<comment><USER2> > [...] but our solution does combine several different techniques to minimize > that effect.

Can you elaborate on this techniques? What is it exactly that you're using?

<comment><USER4> We have a team of data engineers in data science and PhD's measuring all the signals we receive from the beacons and performing algorithms (e.g. trilateration, least squared etc) and combining this with positioning signals we can process based on positioning of the device. The trick is to account for different devices, different antenna placement on models etc. So over time we build a database that improves accuracy based on usage. Regarding people being present, we can account for that if we predict that signals are reflecting differently based on estimated density. These are super challenging problems so we have a team dedicated to it, and iterate quickly.

<comment><USER2> Cool, thanks for answering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Low energy bluetooth is neat technology and I'm impressed with Estimote too.

My question is what happens when the batteries die in these beacons if you have set many of them them up in a constellation like this for intra-room location? Do you have to replace all together and reconfigure or is there some easier way to replace individual beacons that have gone flat and reconfigure them to act exactly like the one they are replacing?

<comment><USER3> This Jakub from Estimote again. Few months ago we have released "Power management" for beacons you can read more here: [http://blog.estimote.com/post/91749152580/estimote-rolls- out...](http://blog.estimote.com/post/91749152580/estimote-rolls-out-the- worlds-first-power-management)

Thanks to these features our beacons can save energy when not used, so if you enable "smart mode" they should last more than 2-3 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It says it doesn't support their stickers because they are intended to be placed on moveable objects. That sounds like it is a hardware limitation, otherwise why would they be restricting their developer community? Still very excited about this.

<comment><USER3> Hi there, this is Jakub, Co-Founder of Estimote (YC S13). Our Indoor Location SDK was designed specifically for Estimote Beacons (the bigger one with bigger battery, not the stickers). Estimote Beacons with their adhesive layer were designed to be sticked to walls vertically. Thanks to their position and antenna orientation we are able to "estimate" position of the user inside the building. Indoor location is also power-consuming for beacons while they broadcast a bit more often, so we can do better math while analyzing data. Stickers were designed for movable objects with much shorter range and a bit longer advertising intervals.

<comment><USER7> Very cool SDK Jakub, congrats! Lots of possibilities.

What is the coverage area of 1 beacons? If I want to map a big hall, how far should each beacon be placed one from another?

<comment><USER4> Hey this is Steve Cheney from Estimote. We encourage you to experiment. Basically you can cover a fairly large venue (100 feet or more on a side) with just 4 beacons. It depends on some of the variables of the venue -- walls, surfaces, existence of metal and glass for instance. But the point of the SDK is to provide smoothing and consistency and have the phone itself help resolve user location while beacons also continually reduce error propagation of signals. We have a team of PhD's building this product and taking into account tons of smart data science. The ultimate goal is to have a venue covered without requiring an entire "cell network" of beacons. You can get greater accuracy by testing with multiple beacons per wall though. We would love your feedback on what works best for you as you iterate so we can also put these improvements into the SDK.

Thanks for the support!

<comment><USER8> Would a space with multiple aisles (think grocery store) be hard to map with your current algorithm? Or if I add beacons to each aisle I should be good to go?

<comment><USER9> No connection with Estimate personally, but given what I've observed about their beacons' signal strength and what they said earlier focusing on mapping the four walls of a room, I would place the beacons along the store's four edge walls, and for better coverage in isles, I'd place beacons at the far walls of each isle end. If the device can't see both beacons, one on each end's facing wall (the outer wall, that is) then I'd consider placing more in the middle, perhaps one every 3-5 isles? It's tricky, because if the signal strength is uneven, I expect the algorithm might get confused, unless the calibration or additional beacons can help. It's possible that they'll also release an update (if it doesn't already work this way) that will support beacons "in the middle of the room" but I expect the initial release was to map rooms with the fewest number of beacons possible. In a grocery store, you might even want a beacon per "section", so if you approach frozen pizzas, you can offer those deals, or whatnot. Detecting one beacon is a lot less work than trying to locate someone using every beacon within range.

The biggest sticking point for me, seeing this release, is remote management if you deploy that many beacons (how do you know if the battery died in one?) and/or powering the beacons from other sources at some point to ensure they last longer? Oh and it said iPhone, so does this mean Android is excluded, or this is simply a first release, and as iBeacons, you can't really advertise for Android these days? :)

Finally, it would be very interesting if you were also able to use WiFi and any other signal strength indicators to assist in triangulating where a user happens to be, including perhaps M7/M8 motion. I'm sure you've thought of this. Bravo for the work so far!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any reason why the devkit is three beacons and not four? If you need a minimum of four.. it seems a bit daft not to have that as the default size and then sell single addon beacons as necessary.

<comment><USER3> This was a historical reason. When we started shipping last year we decided for 3 beacons since it was more fun with three than one prototyping beacon apps.

Since most of the typical rooms have 4+ walls we require at least four bacons to work with indoor.

Adding more beacons does improve accuracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is the reason you cannot simply use a software/cell phone GPS solution to accomplish the same thing that there's poor granularity and potentially also poor indoor GPS reception indoors?

<comment><USER9> Yes. Wifi triangulation can work, but it's not precise enough unless you have quite a few routers. You end up having to use other signals that you're nearby, and track the device's own movement, I expect. In a way, what you have here is "indoor GPS", it's just tricky to get things as accurate as we expect right now. Ultimately, I expect we'll have to rely on lots of signals, including (for some use cases) cameras or Kinect-style tracking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can this help me find my cat? He's lost somewhere in my house. And before you ask, yes, he has a smart phone strapped to him.</comment>


Signs your team might be too large - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jayfields.com/2012/06/signs-that-your-project-team-might-be.html

<comment><USER2> Perfectly valid, but incompatible ideas are how you reach your global maxima. You implement both of them and the one that has the implementation that makes the code better is the one that wins.

Ideas are ethereal. Code is real.</comment>


A Short Course in Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman - <AUTHOR> http://edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/thaler_sendhil_index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A couple of excerpts to get an idea of what is inside:

'During the mid-morning break (with cookies), Richard Thaler shows videos from a 40-year-old study (Walter Mischel, 1973) of children offered one cookie now or two if they wait. The observed behavior correlates strongly, by almost any measure, with both the economic success of the parents and the child's future success. Hypothesis: small behavioral shifts might produce (or "nudge") large economic results.'

and

'Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate for his work in behavioral economics told us about priming—how a subtle influence radically shifts how people act. So, in one experiment people are asked to fill out a survey. In the corner of the room is a computer, with a screen saver running. That's it—nothing overt, just a background image in the room. If the screen saver shows pictures of money, the survey answers are radically different. Danny went through example after example like this where occurred. The first impulse one has in hearing this is no, this can't be the case. People can't be that easily and subconsciously influenced. You don't want to believe it. But Danny in his professorial way says, "Look, this is science. Belief isn't an option". Repeated randomized trials confirm the results. Get over it.'

'The second impression is perhaps even more surprising—the influences are quite predictable. Show people images of money, and they tend to be more selfish and less willing to help others. Make people plot points on graph paper that are far apart, and they act more distant in lots of way. Make them plot points that are close together, and damned if they don't act closer. Again, it seems absurd, but cheap metaphors capture our minds. Humans, it seems, are like drunken poets, who can't glimpse a screen saver in the corner, or plot some points on graph paper without swooning under the metaphorical load and going off on tangents these stray images inspire...'

</comment><comment><USER2> An interesting book on the same subject is Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational.</comment>


Barack and Michelle Obama sign production deal with Netflix - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/obama-netflix-deal/ <comment><USER2> Can't wait for this. I've always wanted to know the Obama's through a more personal lens, outside of the political spectrum. Additionally, it paves a new path for politicians after public service. White house is not the only place where a difference can be made in the world.</comment>


A "Rube Goldberg theory of regulation": Net neutrality hearing gets testy - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/a-rube-goldberg-theory-of-regulation-net-neutrality-hearing-gets-testy.ars

<comment><USER2> _Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) had only a single question for Genachowski: net neutrality wouldn't prevent ISPs from blocking copyright content shared online, would it? With that concern addressed, Berman had nothing else to ask._

Wow, what a giveaway.</comment>


Writing on your Gatsby blog leads to JavaScript bloat - <AUTHOR> https://matthewphillips.info/programming/gatsby-pages-manifest.html <comment><USER2> I prefer Hugo 1000x times</comment>


How to Cheat in Computer Science 101 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/genchang1234/How-to-cheat-in-computer-science-101 <comment><USER2> > Steps to rewriting a function

> 1\. Analyze why the code works

> 2\. Find the difference between the working code and your nonfunctional > function

> 3\. Find the bug in your function and apply the "difference" you discovered > from Step 2

"No matter how small, crib notes can be conspicuous. Commit them to memory for an innovative, unencumbered cheating method."</comment>


Quora's Technology Examined (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bigfastblog.com/quoras-technology-examined

<comment><USER2> Quora should come up with a tab closer to make it easier to bail out when you discover you have accidentally followed a Quora link.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting that they use MySQL and not some NoSQL solution.</comment>


Al Jazeera's Top Stories of the Year - <AUTHOR> http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/spotlight/aljazeeratop102010/

<comment><USER2> Wow, these are all really surprisingly and disappointingly conventional and mainstream.

If someone had told me these were the BBC's top stories of the year, I would have bought it.

<comment><USER3> Here are CNN's top stories for comparison: [http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2010/12/specials/timeline.yea...](http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2010/12/specials/timeline.year.in.review/index.html?hpt=C1) (warning: uses a timeline that you have to click through instead of a list, but it's fairly painless for a timeline)

<comment><USER2> Looks like it has some of the same stories, but it's definitely much more US- focused. But that's definitely the case for virtually all the major US media, which are very much in to US navel-gazing. The BBC is much more international in scope, and is much closer to Al Jezeera in that sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great list. It's remarkable how little the US figures in it.

<comment><USER2> Judging just from the content of the headlines, that's true.

But if you think a bit about it, the US plays prominent roles in almost all of the stories.

\- _WikiLeaks_ \- The US obviously plays a huge and role in this story.

\- _Flotilla: Gaza back in spotlight_ \- The US is a huge supporter of Israel and a central participant in mediating the "peace process" in the region.

\- _Haiti: A series of catastrophes_ \- The US has played a central role in the overall plight of Haiti, and is arguably one of the major reasons the Haitians have been so ill prepared to deal with the catastrophes that struck them.

\- _Gulf Oil Spill_ \- Obviously, this happened in the US itself.

\- _Pakistan: A flood of misery_ \- To my knowledge, no US involvement in creating the economic conditions in Pakistan (unlike in Haiti).

\- _Chile: A miracle rescue_ \- A US-made drill was the one that reached them first, if I remember correctly. And a team from NASA was on hand to help.

\- _World Cup: The games come to Africa_ \- Don't know anything about sports, so can't really comment. But I'd expect there's not much of a role for the US in this story.

\- _Europe: Rising to the right_ \- I think Europe's Islamophobia and its rise of right-wing parties is influenced by the same in the US. Though, of course, there are plenty of native influences there too.

\- _Iceland: Eyjafjallajokull erupts_ \- Ok, this one has nothing to do with the US at all.

\- _Europe: Facing austere times_ \- The global economy is very interconnected, and much of what happened and continues to happen in Europe on this front is influenced by what happens in the US.

So, out of 10 stories, maybe 3 stories tops didn't have much if anything to do with the US. In the rest the US was either a central player or peripherally involved. Which isn't really surprising, considering it's now the lone superpower and likes to meddle in many other nation's affairs.

<comment><USER4> As you say it's not surprising that the US is involved in a most of the stories but other than the Gulf Oil Spill and maybe Wikileaks I wouldn't say they're ''about'' the US. Gaza for example is primarily an issue between Israel, Palestinians, Egypt with the US along with Iran, various Arab countries, the EU, Turkey, etc. as one of many important players.</comment></comment></comment>


Ikea changes logo to use Verdana font, designers angry - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1919127,00.html

<comment><USER2> The title (of the submission) is wrong. The logo hasn't changed.

They just changed the font used in catalogues, switching from a customized version of Futura (used for 40 years) to Verdana.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, sorry about that. I really thought they changed the logo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Whats all the fuss? The average consumer would never even notice the difference. Looks the same. And for that matter, why would the company spend the money to make the change throughout the organization? Sounds like a waste of money, for little positive impact, and more negative response than is necessary.

<comment><USER2> Did you read the article?

You got it backwards. They made the change to cut costs.

The fuss is because Verdana is intended to be used on screen, and it's ugly when printed.

<comment><USER3> You're reading way too far into the content of my post. Keep It Simple.</comment></comment></comment>


My thoughts about App.net - <AUTHOR> http://9elements.com/io/?p=757

<comment><USER2> Excellent article, exactly what I think about the idea. I really hope app.net eventually becomes what you hope, it's a great chance!</comment>


Defending PHP - Jimbojw.com - <AUTHOR> http://jimbojw.com/wiki/index.php?title=Defending_PHP <comment><USER2> I don't disagree that there are times when PHP might be the right tool, but these reasons are pretty bad.

PHP's support for "lambda" is a joke, even compared to Python's limited lambdas. I question how often "eval" is used in practice, except maybe to get around limitations of the language.

In fact, there is nothing on that list that Python and Ruby can't do, except for a few things that are probably bad ideas anyway. If the author is impressed by built-in functionality like array sorting, I am guessing they have never seen the standard libraries of Python or Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER3> The best part of that article is the bit where he feels obliged to write another article apologizing to the Ruby community for offending them: he never once mentioned Ruby in the original article! Talk about sensitive.</comment>


Cyberpunk 2077 release pushed back to September 17, 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cyberpunk.net/ <comment><USER2> This makes me sad. I was so looking forward to this game.</comment>


Quantum Physics Could Make Secure, Single-Use Computer Memories Possible - <AUTHOR> http://www.nist.gov/itl/math/onetime-011414.cfm

<comment><USER2> Link leads to an error page:

"Inactive Content

This page is in the process of being created or has temporarily been inactivated. If you have any questions please contact the following person:

Pamela Corey

email@example.com"</comment>


Oracle Ceases Development For Intel's Itanium Chip - <AUTHOR> http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/20110323/oracle-ceases-development-for-intels-itanium-chip/ <comment><USER2> Money quote "... In so doing it reminded the world that the Itanium chip exists at all"

</comment><comment><USER3> This is more about Ellison and Hurd poking HP in the eye than technical merit. Itanium is a niche product for sure, but its selling, its sales are growing, and it provides a huge wealth of r&d "ip" (in the talented staff sense) when it comes to the problem intel has to solve every year "we have twice the transistors we did for the last design... what are we gonna do with them".

<comment><USER4> Microsoft abandoned it last year, and in January Intel discontinued compiler support. Not exactly the first rats to leave...

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

<comment><USER5> The loss of Intel compiler support is really telling. IA-64 leans very heavily on its compiler to get good performance -- it's almost as much a compiler project as a silicon one.

<comment><USER6> Discontinuing a support for a product developers don't use isn't really telling at all. Most Itanium development is done using compilers from the operating system vendor, not with ICC. Intel still provides the code generators for those compilers.

<comment><USER7> It is if the only selling point for the chip was it's advanced capabilities if you used the custom compiler.

If people are only buy Itaniums to run legacy x86 code THAT is significant - it would be like Apple announcing sales of Macbooks but admitting everyone just used them to run Windows

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there anyone on HN who can speak in Itanium's defense? Anyone used it and been impressed? We've all heard the Itanic jokes -- but surely there was some gold buried in there?

<comment><USER6> I did software development for NonStop Kernel on Itanium for a few years. 5 years ago, Itanium was FAST. Our software was twice as fast as competitors who used twice as many processing cores. Problem was that, unlike x86, Intel's Itanium roadmap moves slow and continually plagued by problems. About 2-3 years ago, with cost reduction in mind, we began porting software over to Linux on x86. Initially we needed 2.5x as many x86 cores to reach the performance of the 1.6Ghz Itanium 2. By the time Intel began shipping Westmere-EP processors early in 2010, each core was nearly 1:1 with Itanium, and at half the cost and 3x the density.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. The NonStop has always intrigued me as a platform. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can understand Microsoft and Red Hat, because it takes actual work for an OS to be intimately aware of the architecture. But for Oracle wouldn't it just be running a cross compiler and testing on another set of boxes?

<comment><USER10> Doesn't Oracle build Java now? Building a competitive JVM requires a fair amount of knowledge of the underlying architecture.

On top of that, it's hardly trivial or cost-free as "just be running a cross compiler and testing on another set of boxes" sounds. My guess is they've done the calculations, and Itanium doesn't earn them more money.

<comment><USER5> Or rather "earns them less money then they can make from selling SPARC Enterprise M-series machines to former HP Superdome customers"

<comment><USER9> If a customer was screwed by the Itanium end-of-life, and responds by choosing SPARC (under Oracle's custody) to migrate to, they almost deserve what's happening to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Itanic.</comment>


Developers, just get over yourself - <AUTHOR> http://nilskoerber.com/developers-just-get-over-yourself/

<comment><USER2> I've seen better diatribes on bathroom stalls.

</comment><comment><USER3> What about the users? Twitter's connectivity to other apps and websites is one of the things that make it useful.</comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Play Store for Android Apps? - <AUTHOR>

I am searching for alternative means of organic distribution for my apps. Any suggestions? Thanks! <comment><USER2> What are you not getting from Google Play, that you would like from your alternate or additional distribution channels?

<comment><AUTHOR> The recent manual evaluation of apps have suddenly become a bit too restrictive in what can be done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Amazon Appstore's probably the next-biggest market for English speakers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Anything for Latin, Asian (non-english), Russian folks?

<comment><USER3> Yandex? Opera (the browser people) also do an appstore for a bunch of non- English markets I think.

For Latin America I think the Play store is the only good option, I know heaps of android users here in Costa Rica that only use that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Opensource: F-Droid

Another one I know is SlideME.</comment>


NoSQL Took Away The Relational Model And Gave Nothing Back - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/10/28/nosql-took-away-the-relational-model-and-gave-nothing-back.html <comment><USER2> I'll bite as well. Are NoSQL databases faster? Smaller? Simpler? If any of these statements are true, then they are giving something back, although quite possibly that trade-off is not of interest to the author.

I am reminded of another Holy War (beware! reminded-of is not a euphemism for is-just-like): "Ruby took away the power of static typing and gave nothing back."

<comment><USER3> Generally, the pros and cons list should be isolated down to a given implementation. While you can vaguely state that NoSQL data stores are fast, and that horizontal scaling is generally easier on NoSQL, that isn't always the case, and doesn't apply to anywhere close to every situation.

MongoDB offers some REALLY cool features that enhance development speed. Inserting into a table that doesn't exist? It creates the table on the fly. Querying from a table that doesn't exist just returns an empty result set (instead of an error, or exception).

If I had to speak in specifics though, I think it's pretty easy to say that NoSQL stores allow for querying very large datasets faster than you could on a relational store on similar hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> NoSQL does not mean nothing...

Redis does not use the Relational Model not because it promotes a simple key- value model, but because it proposes a different paradigm and data model based on fundamental data structures.

MongoDB for instance does not took away the relational model at all, in some way. So what NoSQL are we talking about? :)

NoSQL was a good marketing idea at start, but now it's starting to be really misleading.

<comment><USER5> The term "NoSQL" has _always_ been misleading. The various "NoSQL" systems have very different underlying models, and defining them by their lack of SQL makes discussions about tend to develop an adversarial, "us vs. them" tone. It adds way too much noise.

I don't care about "NoSQL" - I like Postgres and SQLite. What makes the _individual_ "NoSQL" databases interesting, though?

Redis is in a design sweet spot, IMHO. The pure key-value stores seem way too low-level to me, but the support for atomic operations on lists, sets, etc. in Redis is very handy. It also works well as a cache for other databases, and newer commands like BLPOP are very cool.

While I haven't used CouchDB much, its model is also interesting, and I can see its trade-offs being an excellent fit for certain problems (just not mine).

<comment><USER6> Some say NoSQL = "Not Only SQL", implying that there are alternatives to purely relational DB's. I think this definition fits better than the implied purely unrelational DB.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, but that's just damage control, after a whole bunch of "Death to relational databases!!!" hype. Of _course_ there are alternatives to RDBMSs. What are filesystems if not hierarchial databases?

"NoSQL" is about as useful as rallying behind "languages without camel-case" (NoCC!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Flamebait title is wrong. From the article:

Update: Benjamin Black said he was the source of the quote and also said I was wrong about what he meant, ill-informed even. His point: The meaning of the statement was that NoSQL systems (really the various map-reduce systems) are lacking a standard model for describing and querying and that developing one should be a high priority task for them.

<comment><USER8> The title was a quote, so it was not wrong, what he disagreed with was the interpretation.

<comment><USER7> It's most certainly misleading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's (still) stupid arguing that NoSQL systems are crappy at proving the things RDBMS systems provide. (Because they are, and no one has ever said differently, it's akin to yelling at a Bugatti Veyron (yeah, I went there) for being so bad at flying.)

I'm not using CouchDB because I needed relationships and the RDBMS features of SQL Server but decided at the last minute 'Ehh oh well, let's just try this fancy NoSQL business, I'll rewrite all the RDBMS features into my code'.

Believe it or not I'm using CouchDB because I want to run map/reduce on a bunch of JSON! Astounding, right!?

</comment><comment><USER10> I see it as a high-level vs low-level thing.

The relational model is a high-level language for describing the structure of data. And a pretty elegant one if you can look past the awkwardness of dealing with current SQL databases (not a fault of the model itself).

That said if you want to scale and tune things you often need to drop down to a lower-level view in order to get things done, hence NoSQL. But that's not to say the relational model isn't still useful, or that it shouldn't inform any formal reasoning done about data in NoSQL systems.

I have some more thoughts on this here: [http://matthew.yumptious.com/2009/07/databases/nosql-and- the...](http://matthew.yumptious.com/2009/07/databases/nosql-and-the- relational-model-dont-throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater/)

<comment><USER10> To the downvoter - curious what exactly you disagreed with?

<comment><USER2> Up to you, but I'd say let that kind of thing slide. The ideal is that if someone disagrees, they'll explain themselves. Downvoting is supposed to be a mechanism for voting on whether a point adds to the discussion or not.

So either (a) your point did not add to the discussion, in which case further discussion about your point just adds to the noise without contributing signal, or (b) the person or persons downvoting disagree with you but are too lazy to contribute to the discussion by explaining their perspective. In which case, why worry about them?

Responses--whether positive or negative--are discussion gold. Downvotes aren't worth the worry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The name relational model is quite unfortunate, as it leads to confusion about what the model is (not much to do with 'relationships').

The key concepts are using sets to store data (making you think about your data in a way where duplication of tuples and orderings don't mean anything), and always using values instead of pointers to store your data and references.

I think that these concepts are very useful when it comes to managing data, but they seem to get lost in the all the talk about "relationships" and "sql" and "structured tables".

</comment><comment><USER12> I know Ben Black and I can assure you he is very experienced with NoSQL data stores. He is calling for more attention to the query interface to these various data stores. He's specifically not saying they should be relational or dismissing other merits of NoSQL.

</comment><comment><USER13> "A relational model of data for large shared data banks" [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.110...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.110.1845&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

He gives criticism of the then existing databases (hierarchical and network), then proposes the relational model and the concept of a query language (though not an actual languages - this predates SQL).

Interestingly, one of the hierarchical databases (IMS) is still going strong: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Management_System#H...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Management_System#History)

</comment><comment><USER14> I would disagree - I'd say that NoSQL is an exploration into disassembling the component parts of a RDBMS in order to get performance gains in exchange for losing features that aren't needed for your _particular_ engineering problem.

</comment><comment><USER15> I dont get the big hoopla about NoSQL.

Its a different way of doing things than traditional RDBMS (which very successfully served us well for over 20 years). Why cant we just choose the best tool for the job, after looking at pros and cons?

</comment><comment><USER16> "The meaning of the statement was that NoSQL systems (really the various map- reduce systems) are lacking a standard model for describing and querying and that developing one should be a high priority task for them."

I don't see why the relational model (or some subset thereof) won't work for most NoSQL databases.

Key-Value store? It's essentially just a relational database where tables can have one primary key and one other column.

Document store? Essentially just a dynamically typed relational database.

Graph database? You probably would have to add to the relational model a bit, but Codd did write a bit about recursive queries.

</comment><comment><USER17> I can't talk about all NoSQL but I can talk about CouchDB as I have worked with it some. It gives multiple write nodes, easy replications and syncing, it gave map reduce. I love it

</comment><comment><USER18> 'With NoSQL all relationships have been pushed back onto the poor programmer to implement in code rather than the database managing it. '

OK I'll bite.

Yes. I, the poor programmer, want to implement relationships in my code, rather than adding a secondary language to my application to manage relationships (the database itself never 'managed this' for me, I had to do it manually).

<comment><USER19> Welcome to MySQL in 1995. You'll be wanting to "manage" transactions next...

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I do actually, because I want a storage system to be a storage system and an application layer to be an application layer.

I've seen corporate code bases consisting of entirely PL/SQL before, it's a nightmare. No thanks, from both a maintenance perspective and a performance perspective. YMMV.

<comment><USER19> Yep, nothing says performance and reliability like doing everything in the app.

Here's a neat trick - for every query SELECT * FROM TABLE, then filter and sort it in the application too.

<comment><USER20> Here's a better trick - treat a database as an indexed storage layer that's doing the minimum of CPU work or complicated transactional conditions that create lots of blocking and bottleneck conditions for threads on your monolithic back end.

And then implement the app logic in some slow-ass web language that doesn't hold a candle to your database's optimized C. What happens when your web server can't keep up? Buy another web server. That's an easily solvable problem. A saturated DB, on the other hand, is very hard to fix, especially if all of your application logic is running in it and would require a rewrite to scale.

<comment><USER19> There's an awful lot more to computing than websites.

FWIW I work on a "non-scalable" RDBMS that comfortably handles thousands of commits/sec, tens of thousands of selects/sec and tens of terabytes of data. All done with stored procs, one database, no need for "sharding" either. Will it scale indefinitely? No, but neither will anything else. The limits of the RDBMS are orders of magnitude greater than the NoSQL crowd think they are.

<comment><USER20> SSDs?

A HDD is limited to well under a thousand reads per second, and there's multiple reads per SQL select, so I'll assume either yes or you're leaving something out. If the tens of thousands of reads are over a 4MB table that stays in memory and the rest of your 10TB are infrequently accessed, congrats, you have a single-node problem. If you actually need to deliver, say, 1,000 queries per second over a 10TB dataset? It's not happening in an RDBMS unless you get a whole bunch of SSDs.

Also, RE: websites, of course, substitute your environment's front end if you'd like.

<comment><USER21> Its year 2010, we've invented RAID a while back. Stripe and mirror everything and you get decent performance without SSD.

<comment><USER20> Ok, you're up to 3k random reads per second at the absolute peak. Realistically more like 2k for 6x10k disks at RAID 0, and it's awfully hard to even fit 10TB on a RAID1+0 setup. What's that, 10x2TB? Good luck with the latencies on those 2TB disks.

Still doesn't add up to 10k select statements per second over a 10TB dataset on a singlenode. Even without writes, that's not happening. I call BS on grandparent post.

<comment><USER22> That shows a lack of understanding of what kind of hardware is being used in the real world to handle this.

With a half-decent SAN with 15k drives and 4Gbit fibrechannel connections, you can get 1000+ IOPS without the storage system even breaking a sweat. Under load it can easily give 10 times that.

This is something that's everywhere in the business world.

Pair this with a bunch of cores and a few GB of memory, and you can have an RDBMS that chews through impressive amounts of data. Unless, of course, you optimize nothing and swamp it with lame queries that do nothing that table scans. Funny enough, the same people that are fine with doing everything in code are the ones that can't be bothered to think more than one second about what kind of queries they are throwing at the database.

<comment><USER23> No kidding, it's like a battery backed write cache doesn't even exist in the NoSQL world. I was able to easily drive 200MB/sec of random IO on 25 15K drives.

<comment><USER23> Btw, this was 200MB/sec of random writes. I didn't even bother with random writes. I could have gotten the writes to be basically sequential if I had bothered to write a COMB style UUID generator. I happen to be a fan of UUIDs for the surrogate keys as it makes database merging so much easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Taking away the relational model was what they gave us.</comment>


Lost In The Apple Mapgate Discussions - <AUTHOR> http://kirklove.net/post/31983851865/lost-in-the-apple-mapgate-discussions

<comment><USER2> I propose #Mapplegate

</comment><comment><USER3> Well written. Agree to all lines but

> DropBox kicked Apple's ass when it came to "cloud" management of files

How so?

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish everyone would chill out. Inciting tech violence is such an immature and boring snooze. Relax.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why must we attach "gate" to something every time there's some big story?

<comment><USER3> Not a BIG story but a BIG story with negative undertones. It probably gets its trends from the Watergate Scandal [0].

[0] <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well said, though none of this is a problem FOR ME as long as they do the hardware right AND provide room for others to do the software right,</comment>


The maturity of visual programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.craft.ai/blog/the-maturity-of-visual-programming/ <comment><USER2> This article doesn't even mention LabVIEW, probably the most successful and most used VPL ever.

<comment><AUTHOR> In fact it did, but some last minute must have remove it from the lists. We're gonna edit that :)

We're not familiar with it though, it is used to simulate integrated circuit, right ?

<comment><USER3> It interfaces extremely easily with _lots_ of obscure measurement devices / cameras / sensors / step motors and other hardware, and makes it trivial to make graphical user interfaces for them. It compiles to machine code and has an easy model for concurrency.

In a previous job I made computer vision-powered robotics for food and agriculture, and it was almost entirely LabVIEW with some things implemented in C for speed.

Even with years of experience I found it a pain to work in though, compared to text based languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another type you might want to mention: Ladder Logic: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic)

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice overview. Flowhub belongs under 'dataflow' though</comment>


DevCleaner: Remove Xcode garbage easily - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/devcleaner/id1388020431 <comment><AUTHOR> I've created a tool to easily track and remove some cached files that are stored by Xcode - and usually never ever removed. This could lead to tens of gigabytes on systems that were used for development for a longer period of time.

Especially "Device Support" files are tends to take many gigabytes of space. Those are files with OS symbols that are downloaded from a device each time a new version of iOS is released. This is what's downloaded to Mac when Xcode is "Preparing for debugging..." \- it's ~2-3GB per iOS version. As you can imagine, that could grow to a very substantial sizes.

It allows also to set reminders to run it periodically.

Tell me what you think!</comment>


254 Neurons per Cell in Genetic CA for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://frme.at/p/qi6DH

<comment><USER2> Sweet. I did a lot of this kind of experimenting about 6 years ago (ironically, during the first semester of an MBA...) and built a full featured simulator that had critters with genomes which were used to build a grammar which was used to construct a neural network which was used to guide the critters on a heat map and the critters with the best temperature had their genomes selected for breeding. It's fascinating to watch the critters go from acting randomly to acting purposefully over the couple of minutes.

One of most impressive things (to me) about my experiments was the insight they gave me into the real world.

At the risk of mentioning Java, you might check out Repast (<http://repast.sourceforge.net/>). It's a great, though overwhelming, framework in which to build these kinds of things and it's what I used for mine...

[Hmm... This post inspired me and I booted the simulator up again... Maybe I'll clean it up and put it on GitHub...]

<comment><USER3> Oh man, Repast. I love the simulator but I had a heck of a time initially trying to get anything done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I get a bunch of warnings when compiling it, but it runs.

<comment><USER5> Very few projects have a warning free compile these days it seems. So much so that I'm usually surprised when I see a warning free compile. I remember the first time I compiled emacs. I was seriously impressed by the lack of warnings at the time having become so inured to them everywhere else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Other stuff:

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

<http://adam.ierymenko.name/nanopond.shtml></comment>


Trump Won't Kill America, Bitcoin Will - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/trump-wont-kill-america-bitcoin-will-a2be67247969?source=linkShare-3e4d3e72fc4a-1500165661 <comment><USER2> Cryptocurrencies are the ultimate hedge against central banks banning cash. And that is almost a guaranteed event judging by increasing AML/KYL tightening in regulation. Only time will tell if it will be Bitcoin that turns out ahead of all other cryptocurrencies in the long run.</comment>


Promising application of BERT and psychology to get emotions from Marketing Copy - <AUTHOR> https://clevertap.com/blog/how-emotions-incite-response-lessons-from-the-covid-19/ <comment><USER2> Interesting little nugget. Always wanted this to understand how my notification copy will help convert my users!

</comment><comment><USER3> It's fun to take your favorite Twitter handle and cut/paste 4 or 5 tweets from there into this and see the emotion portrayed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Works on tweets and personal emails too!

</comment><comment><USER5> Great little tool for tweet copies!</comment>