Show HN: FPGA Ultrasound Imaging on a Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://un0rick.cc/FPGA-Rpi <comment><USER2> Seems worth mentioning that incorrectly used an ultrasound can burn bones. (Specific frequencies in bony areas moved too slowly).

I didn't do enough research to understand this (but just enough to verify it). I learned it initially from my wife who's an NP. When I mentioned a previous DIY ultrasound article to her she looked skeptical and mentioned the risk of bone burns.

<comment><USER3> I have never heard of this being an issue for diagnostic ultrasound. Since I'm trained in (cardiac) ultrasonography, I think this would have come up... I also did a brief lit search and didn't identify any obvious examples.

I suspect your wife is referring to therapeutic ultrasound, which can damage bone [1]. But this is not the ultrasound people are getting of their heart, abdomen, or pelvis in general.

1 = [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11731056/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11731056/)

<comment><USER4> US Bio effects of diagnostic US are discussed at (painful) length in undergraduate radiography training here in New Zealand. We are fairly well aligned with the UK in our training pathway but in my (limited) experience echo techs don't seem to come from a radiography background while ultrasound ones do. Could be a local situation though. Broadly, the priciples seem to be ALARM and perhaps don't do 'souvenir' scanning of foetuses. I wonder if anywhere follows that.

<comment><USER3> Good point, my training excludes fetal ultrasound, so this might be one reason yours and mine differ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The github is a little more descriptive and answers a few more questions: [https://github.com/kelu124/un0rick/](https://github.com/kelu124/un0rick/) (though don't expect all your questions to be answered here either).

I'm curious what the FPGA approach offers above a regular CPU/DSP approach in plain English (quod non intellegunt: technerdese attracts followers, latinnerdese less so). I've been interested in FPGA's since dabbling with them a couple years ago but haven't come across a use case that's tangibly beneficial yet. If this is one, I'd love to contribute, but I'm not so far gleaning that from the docs. Can OP assist here?

<comment><USER6> Ultrasound processing is actually pretty niche: you have a whole bunch of channels with a very high sample rate (tens of MHz). In the case of medical ultrasound, a typical handheld ultrasound probe can have range from 50 to 150 parallel channels.

Because you need fast, parallel DSP, FPGAs actually really shine for ultrasound. And because production volumes are relatively low, the NRE to jump to an ASIC generally isn't justified. Just about every modern ultrasound machine does signal processing on an FPGA.

<comment><USER7> Today a graphic chip is also good to compute ultrasound images. I suspect that you can even do it on a CPU. I'm not sure if it is _that_ practical to process in a FPGA if you want to compute non-potato image quality: you would need to handle tons of data by the FPGA, so either use a gigantic one (with a ridiculous price) or somehow page the data (but that's quite complex to do then...) -- this seems way more difficult than simply addressing the GiB that are avail in any modern CPU/GPU.

<comment><USER8> Not really: people have reacted to more capacity being available by getting in more channels. You can control a 1980s 20 channel ultrasound using even an atom cpu, not a problem (though will still get close to max cpu capacity). So what did we do ? Well we made chips, I believe the best one now has 4000 channels and there's test models of 8000 channels. A quad xeon can't process that. But it gets worse.

Because information is encoded both in the direct signal and in the interference patterns between different probes you'd want to evaluate both of those (if nothing else it gets you a wider field of view, but really it gets you more than that, for instance you can get full 3d from a cross-shaped array). Unfortunately that scales with the square of the number of channels. This doesn't even work on FPGAs at the moment, so they basically limit interference processing to only 100 or so of the 1000-2000 probes they have these days.

This is a problem that keeps coming back. CPUs can do nearly everything in processing, but with one exception they suck at it.

That means that when doing these things, you can use CPUs, and people are always pushing that, if you accept to be 2-5 years behind the state of the art for advanced applications, or you accept that you have to spend 50$ per piece where others can get more processing done for 1$, or "much less but still enough" processing done for 0.1$ (FPGA, DSP, microcontrollers, ...).

Good luck in the marketplace if you go CPU.

CPUs work where your complexity is above a quite high lower bound, and they stop working once you hit a certain level of data processing. Below that lower bound, they are absurdly expensive. Above the data speed limit they just can't keep up.

Now there's niches where the strengths of CPUs outcompete other approaches. For instance, you want to create stuff to interface with ancient equipment. Lots of that is necessary, and lots of it is custom. For telecom companies, banks, factories, ... here CPUs and the fact that you can do one at a time are tough to beat. Sure FPGAs can do it better, but that's not the point here. They're much harder to design, so a one-off (or couple-dozen-off) designs use CPUs, plus they're very unlikely to hit the data rate limits.

Even there CPUs tend to have a disadvantage. Lots of environments where these things have to operate aren't exactly pristinely clean, cooled and free of static and interference. CPUs don't deal with it half as well as especially FPGAs do. You want a closed box that has to operate at 70 degrees without cooking itself with constant electrical arcing around it ? Don't go for a cpu on a large mainboard. You can't cool because any cooler will get clogged and destroyed in a matter of weeks at the most.

<comment><USER9> " For instance, you want to create stuff to interface with ancient equipment. Lots of that is necessary, and lots of it is custom. For telecom companies, banks, factories, ... here CPUs and the fact that you can do one at a time are tough to beat. Sure FPGAs can do it better, but that's not the point here."

Guy I worked with had a recurring gig interfacing FPGA's to older Telcom equipment. Multiplexing multiple gigabit Ethernet channels into one very high speed channel which then was fed into a microwave up converter. Last and final one they did the FPGA put out like 25W. I can't imagine doing that with a CPU of any type.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> An amazing portable US is soon coming from Butterfly Network. The transducer plus DSP is on a very large integrated circuit, and it can do breathtaking stuff for a device of this size and cost, like real time Doppler US (show blood flow in the image).

[https://www.butterflynetwork.com](https://www.butterflynetwork.com)

<comment><USER11> I'm looking forward to the introduction of this device, but it should be noted that color Doppler is also available on the VScan handheld. I think MEMS sensors are going to revolutionize the industry by making the probe an inexpensive part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It uses Project Icestorm which is absolutely great. So much better using an open source toolchain than the proprietary horrors that FPGA vendors inflict on us. I wrote a quick intro here: [https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/playing-with- picorv32-...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/playing-with-picorv32-on- the-ice40-hx8k-fpga-breakout-board-part-1/)

It's a real shame that larger FPGAs aren't yet supported.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool project :)

I just got back from shenzhen where I purchased a handheld ultrasound probe with built-in screen about the size of a really chunky smartphone for $1800 with wifi & connection to ios/android

<comment><USER14> I am very interested in hacking on some ultrasound projects. Do you know if what you have is available for online purchase anywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here -- I had played with a wireless probe and developed a very basic python framework around it, see [https://github.com/kelu124/pyUProbe1](https://github.com/kelu124/pyUProbe1) .

Same origin: Shenzen. Very friendly contacts there, always a pleasure to chat with fabs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My understanding is that the probes are the expensive part. The rest is added value, for sure, but there is something of a monopoly on high quality piezo crystals used in the probes. This ensures that the current players don't compete much on price.

<comment><AUTHOR> As a way to go around this issue, I sense a bit of progress through compressed sensing, see for example [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/12/e1701423](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/12/e1701423) . This would enable one (with enough horsepower) to get 4D imaging with a single element. This is very early, but I do plan on using this hardware to test the feasibility of single-piezoelement pseudo-imaging.</comment></comment>


[Cloudflare] One More Thing: Keyless SSL and CloudFlare's Growing Network - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/one-more-thing-keyless-ssl-and-cloudflares-growing-network/

<comment><USER2> Earlier post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8379315](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8379315)

Dupe detection seems to have failed due to the trailing slash.</comment>


Motherhood in the Age of Fear - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/opinion/sunday/motherhood-in-the-age-of-fear.html <comment><USER2> I've noticed how casually people say, "that should be illegal" nowadays. Usually it's half-joking, but it expresses a real sentiment about how even mild transgressions are seen as legal matters.

I have no doubt if you took a poll asking people if it should be illegal to leave a kid in a car for any amount of time you'd get overwhelming support. And, of course, that's how people like the woman in the article end up fearing prosecution after leaving her child alone for a few minutes.

> Women are being harassed and even arrested for making perfectly rational > parenting decisions.

By the way, this may be even more true for men, who are routinely viewed with a skeptical eye when it comes to parenting decisions. The glee at which our current culture laughs at the perceived incompetence of men with regards to parenting has taught us all to expect fathers to be completely boneheaded at all times.

<comment><USER3> It should be illegal to harass or prosecute parents for leaving their child alone for a few minutes....

What really astounds me is that I'm not that old, and I clearly remember being able to run around or ride my bike around town for _miles_ without any adult supervision, at the age of 8 or so. Things have really changed in this country.

<comment><USER4> I did those kinds of things too and a lot more.

Crime rates were much higher back then and there were no cell phones or other easy communication devices that would allow the kid themselves or a random pedestrian or motorist to rapidly notify authorities if something is wrong.

The safer our society gets the more afraid we become and the less tolerant we seem to become of risk.

I wonder if it's a cognitive analog of the hygiene hypothesis for allergies. There's a part of our brain that is built for a world of conflict, danger, and scarcity and in an abundant modern developed nation it just has nothing to do but declare war on phantoms and crusade against minute or non-existent risks.

I've had debates with people recently about how bad crime is becoming and how dangerous things are. I show them graphs of crime and violence for the past 30 years. I often get total unironic disbelief -- as in they _don 't believe it_ and think the sources are biased and there's some kind of conspiracy to suppress the real statistics on crime. Things were much more dangerous in the 60s through the early 90s and people felt a lot safer.

<comment><USER3> >The safer our society gets the more afraid we become and the less tolerant we seem to become of risk.

I completely disagree. Even with our crime rates being much lower than decades ago, the US is still nowhere near as safe as Japan, yet in Japan they're not remotely as risk-averse as we are (particularly in regards to kids being outside without their parents). It's very much part of their culture to have kids walk themselves to school at an early age.

I'm pretty sure it's similar in western European and Scandinavian countries: they're very safe too (particularly the Scandinavian ones), and don't treat kids and parents this way.

This is something unique to the US.

And this really touches on something I think Americans are really, really horrible at: thinking about the rest of the world. Instead of looking at our brains and trying to use psychology to figure this out, why not just look at what other humans in other countries are doing? Americans are not biologically unique. This is a cultural problem.

<comment><USER4> The thing that doesn't work with that argument is that our crime rates really were substantially higher back when we let our kids roam free. We aren't as safe as some countries but we're a lot safer than we were in, say, 1980 or 1990.

The urban crime wave of the 1970s - 1990s really was pretty awful.

<comment><USER5> So what you're saying is...the kids were the real criminals all along.

<comment><USER6> Everything is fine now that we got all those little hooligans off the streets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Right now on Arstechnica there is an article about the ridiculous rate of death during labour in the US: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/why- do-so-many-moms-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/why-do-so-many- moms-die-and-suffer-in-the-us-stupid-negligence)

I feel like this is all somehow a strange result of personal responsibility mutated monstrously - society doesn't care about whether you live or die, but it'll do everything in it's power to make sure you're shamed for the slightest screw up.

<comment><USER8> That's a great example. I have a family member who works in the health care data field, with the idea that enough data leads to better diagnosis and better outcomes. The topic of maternal mortality came up and how the US, comparatively, is rated worse than every other 1st world nation. His take was that 1) the other countries aren't reporting deaths correctly, 2) the data definition is not the same across nations, and 3) US women entered pregnancy with more comorbidities. So in essence a person in a medical field intended to keep more people alive for longer failed to recognize that systemically the US is doing worse than other nations because "data is deficient" and then blamed the dying women for being fat, old, unhealthy. Read here minorities specifically. Apparently no other nations in the world have old, fat, or unhealthy pregnant women.

<comment><USER7> That's an excellent example of pushing agency back upon the patient.

And I'm confused how "dying from complications directly caused by childbirth" would be reported differently in other countries. Maybe that's why Sweden has such a low murder rate, it's not "death by gunshot", it's "spontaneous exsanguination during a hospital stay".

<comment><USER8> I think the US has fairly broad definitions of maternal mortality, i.e. death within 3 months or 1 year of birth or something like that.

Some deaths related to the childbirth happen after the birth is officially over. Think sepsis from c-section complications or untreated post-partum leading to suicide.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I took a look and that's exactly it - the US records over a year and the rest of the world a lot lower, so that could pick some stuff up. But I don't think that explains the higher mortality - I imagine the longer one lives after childbirth, the better odds one has that they will continue to live longer, and it certainly doesn't explain why minorities have so much of a higher rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> She makes a good point, here:

"We do not think about the statistical probabilities or compare the likelihood of such events with far more present dangers, like increasing rates of childhood diabetes or depression. Statistically speaking, it would take 750,000 years for a child left alone in a public space to be snatched by a stranger. Statistically speaking, a child is far more likely to be killed in a car on the way to a store than waiting in one that is parked."

<comment><USER10> That narrative is unacceptable to power structures that rule through fear. If people really internalized the fact that (for one example) a person in the UK is more likely to die from swallowing a bee than through terrorism, many totalitarian policies would be undermined. Likewise if most Brits accepted that it's riskier riding a horse than taking MDMA, the war on drugs would suffer.

Fear is just such a useful tool to keep people moving in the general direction you want that politicians and plutocrats will not give it up, and niether will marketers. Meanwhile the media has generally embraced sensationalism and fear for a very very long time. People are inculcated into a culture of fear to sell shit, to control them, to siphon money from them, and who's left to show them the way out?

The prototypical example is that so many people fear flying commercially, yet don't blink at getting into their cars to drive.

<comment><USER11> I think that's the thrust of this whole situation. When people say "that should be illegal," it's because they're so accustomed to the idea of an all- encompassing, all-regulating government, that they can see no other outlet for their anger than to suggest new criminal laws.

<comment><USER12> In many cases the motivating emotion isn't anger, but jealousy. Others live as they wish they had permission to live.

<comment><USER13> But in fact they do have permission to live as others do. But they lack the nerve or the means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I certainly feel sympathy for the writer and anyone in a similar position. However, she writes as if every American is vulnerable to this sort of harassment, when in truth it's only those in most of America. In large swathes of USA, the general public would not call the police over this, and if they did the police would laugh at them. I live in such a place, although I'm not so sure about the community in which I've been working recently.

It's no surprise that many communities have this dysfunction. Decades of carefully cultivating only one approved narrative, that you all must buy the same things and live the same way has been very good for marketers and the authoritarian plutocrats who employ them, but very bad for you. In an age of remarkable policy consensus (more war, more spending, more oppression, more, more, more), the heated political discourse often amounts to nothing deeper than, "They _disagree_ with me! How dare they?!?" This doesn't leave much room for "Well, if Sally's parents let her play by the road, I guess you can too."

You don't have to live where mothers are harassed like this, but let's face it the job market is better there. Still, you can visit the rest of America. Just drive in any direction. If you get more than fifty miles from an Applebee's or Best Buy, you can probably stop right there, or keep driving, or whatever. If you see a park, drop the kids off. It's fine.

<comment><USER3> That's the problem: the places where you can parent rationally are also places where it's hard to find good food, good medical care, or good jobs. And strangely, the voters in those places are the ones that are usually pushing for more war and more defense spending.

<comment><USER14> I don't think that's the case at all. Lincoln, Nebraska. Population 250,000. My neighbors would watch my kids if they happen to be out playing by themselves. I'd do the same for them. No police involved. :) There's even modern medical care and grocery stores here. ;)

Hillary Clinton won this county (Lancaster). She won Douglas county too (where Omaha is).

It's nice.

<comment><USER12> If you and your neighbors are watching each other's kids, it's only a matter of time before you have this problem too. Lincoln is not dangerous for children. They don't need to be watched.

<comment><USER15> My assumption here is that aantix is referring the more passive "watching" that happens in these sorts of environments, meaning "keeps the children in mind while going about other business" and not the strict interpretation of "never lets the children leave their line-of-sight"

Functionally, the passive form of watching just means being available to adjudicate disputes and administer first aid.

<comment><USER12> Children's disputes and the kinds of injuries for which neighbors can offer first aid are _also_ not dangerous. We could imagine a scenario in which a dispute among children could lead to a death, but that scenario would be vanishingly rare as an actual event. The children are probably safer with the neighborhood bully than they would be hopping in the car every time an errand needs to be run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 24/7 news cycles have somehow convinced the US that this is the most dangerous time in history for children when in fact, the complete opposite is true. It's very sad.

<comment><USER17> That and the rise of weekly detective shows that focus on sexual crimes. SVU is in its 19th season, somehow. Criminal Minds is about to start its 14th. And there are plenty of others like those.

Contrast that with 30 years ago, when we had things like Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and regular Law & Order. Those shows featured murders committed because of robberies and affairs and the like. The more modern versions are basically all pedophiles and rapists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Question: I am a student in germany and in my early 20s.

When I look back, for example at my summer holidays, we were biking for miles to spend the afternoon at a public swimming pool in a neighbouring village (approx. 40 min bike ride, maybe more). Or we were filming a lord of the rings-type movie deep in the woods, complete with building a small "castle". We also had a river in the woods my parents were always warning me that I can't get in there because I might drown, since it was more rapid than it looked like. So in elementary school I had nightmares for a few weeks of drowning inside the river, but that was all. I was still allowed to play there with my friends. For example, we once were building paper boats and see which one makes it the farthest.

Friends in the city were allowed to use the public transport (it's how every got to school...) to move around freely in the city.

Also, i clearly remember waiting in the car for my mom to get something.

I can't imagine growing up without being allowed to explore the world, be it nature or man-made.

Is this really different in the US?

</comment><comment><USER19> > "It's not about safety," Dr. Sarnecka told me. "It's about enforcing a > social norm."

That sums it up pretty well. We aren't in an age of fear so much as an age of self-righteousness. Everyone is constantly on the lookout for an opportunity to preen their moral superiority, and to condemn the failings of others, particularly in any situation involving children.

<comment><USER20> Humungous what!? Are you harassing me!?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yet another example of what constant consumption of hyperbolic media coverage about horrific cases does to our collective psychology and ability to assess risk.

In Iceland they leave sleeping kids parked in strollers outside the coffeeshop. I can't tell how many times I've wanted to do that. But then I remember the friend of a friend whose kids were taken away for doing just that.

<comment><USER22> So, leaving your kid in the car _is_ actually a significant danger for them in America, because it creates a risk of men-with-paper-trail taking your kid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How common is this, really? Are parents in the US being regularly harassed for minor things like in the article? I'm not trying to discredit this person's story, but it's easy to believe that this is an "issue" when everything is anecdotal.

<comment><USER24> It's going to vary based on where your live. And even if there are local laws, you might be subject to just how much of a busy-body your neighbors are.

In Illinois, it's illegal it keep children ages 6 and under in a vehicle unattended for more than 10 minutes. Someone 14 years or older must either accompany or be within eyesight of them.

These laws largely exist because of advocacy groups such as _Kids 'n Cars_[1] whose founders often had children who died while unattended in vehicles and they want to "save" other parents.

As a parent myself, I think these rules are absolutely bonkers. Kids might be less safe these days in hot cars because windows are now automatic and not manual, but there's likely a technical solution to that problem that does not require jailing anyone or ripping families apart because they ran in to get a coffee.

[1]: [https://www.kidsandcars.org/](https://www.kidsandcars.org/)

<comment><USER12> Wow that organization may be worse than MAD. How many poor families have been made poorer still because parents who never harmed anyone have been thrown in prison by our overzealous drunk driving laws?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I agree with the overall theme of the article. People certainly overreact. It lost me when it attempted to make it a gendered issue. If anything, it has it backwards.

Imagine that we had an article that described the tyranny of high expectations at work for men? And how privileged women were because expectations were so low that something incompetent for a man would be fine for a woman? I worry that we got stuck on 'men are privileged' and are incapable of seeing anything else in any facet of life. Any gap between men and women is measured with the same male privilege yardstick.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think people are affected about consuming fear from news papers, tv news and movies.

The Information Age has given us much more access to information than before. We are not accurately assessing how dangerous something is.

Watching fearful content on tv can affect your subconscious mind that later leads to rational avoidance of "fear".

Why couldn't fear and violent content on tv affect the brain? A tv Programme could be like a computer program instructions. Then you have to consume the right type of content.

Micro mort the probability of dying from an activity. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm reminded of Lenore Skenazy who in 2008 let her 9 year old son ride the NY subway alone:

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

<comment><USER28> Lenore is directly referenced in the article! She is the Free-Range Kids blogger.

<comment><USER12> Odd that the headline skimmer didn't expect that...

<comment><USER27> Haha I read the article but didn't actually remember the subway woman's name until I googled for the story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A social worker I know told me about little girls with venereal diseases, which they got from their mother's boyfriends or stepfathers.

Sometimes people make the decision to move to a place which is nice because of a homeowner association's strictness, then complain that the HOA is enforcing it's rules on them as well. Or the same really for living in a suburb with an eagle-eyed police force.

If you live in an area where people want you to watch your kids then you will have to watch your kids.

The real problem is children of very negligent parents who are not being protected, not yuppies who move to or travel to some uptight suburb and then complain the police enforce the law on them too.

<comment><USER12> I don't think I understand your reasoning. The busybodies aren't calling the HOA; they're calling the police. If we punish those who are mostly guilty of having assholes for neighbors enough, is that going to make life better for an 11yo with gonorrhea? Wouldn't it be better for CPS to have more time to help children with actual problems?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Last weekend I took my family to the beach. A women started hollering that my ten month old was putting rocks in his mouth.

I had to pretend I was as concerned as she was about it, and that it wasn't something he'd done a hundred times before in the backyard.

Hearing that similar types of "neglect" get legal action has made my wife paranoid for years. So far, I assume it's a very rare getting-bit-by-a-shark- like occurrence. I hope I'm right and she's wrong.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why didn't they just leave the car running though...

</comment><comment><USER3> This is exactly why I think it's absolute lunacy to have children in the US these days, and I actively advocate against it. If you want to have kids, move to a country where you aren't charged with a crime for leaving your kids alone under the age of 12.

In Japan, kids are basically forced to walk themselves to school at the age of 7 or so, without their parents. Here, that would cause the parents to be thrown in jail.

Raising kids in this country is dangerous to your personal safety if you want to avoid jail time. Don't do it. This article isn't exaggerating.

From the end of the article: "Instead I worry about all the ways our country seems to be at war with children, even as we insist our greatest responsibility is to protect them." Exactly: we _are_ at war with children, and parents too. The rational choice is to avoid the situation altogether. If you're reading on this board, you're probably affluent enough to head to greener pastures if/when you decide to have kids.

<comment><USER32> > if you want to have kids, move to a country where you aren't charged with a > crime for leaving your kids alone under the age of 12.

Or, you know, perhaps try to change the laws?

<comment><USER33> The laws are put in place as a measured response to real threats. You need to remove those threats first before the laws can be changed.

<comment><USER9> Generally speaking, there is nothing 'measured' about the way the democratic process is influenced by widespread irrationality and emotionalism.

I see no reason to believe that these laws are a result of a measured response. I see reason to believe the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Now is simply not a good time to bring people you care for into the world. It's a shit show on so many levels, and you're not likely to substantially improve it by raising a family in this environment.

<comment><USER35> Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents.

<comment><USER34> Huh? That's not my intention.

It's my genuine view that if one wants to improve this situation, the best thing they can do is forgo children and get involved in education and politics. People become hamstrung with familial obligations, and we could really use a generation of more adults focusing on our nation's hygiene rather than growth.

<comment><USER35> Alas, intention doesn't much influence this. If you bring in a generic flamebait trope, we're likely to get a generic flamewar thread.

One way to counteract this is to make comments that are much more specific. Your second comment is a step in that direction.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are you a PHP God? Anonymous Free-Speech Platform (VC-backed) Needs You - <AUTHOR>

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Availability: Full-time Location: downtown San Mateo, next to Caltrain
Send your resume to firstname.lastname@example.com No recruitment agencies, please <comment><USER2> "anonymous free-speech platform" - that's is a very lofty description of a site where you can go shoot the breeze about celebrities and so forth.

a lot of people who work on anonymity and free speech related software focus on things like subverting national firewalls put in place by oppressive totalitarian regimes - you just want to give people another way to dick around on the internet. not that there's anything wrong with that.

<comment><USER3> yeah, very lofty for a website that harvard students use to find anonymous sex.

<comment><USER4> <http://www.boredat.net/>

wow... that really is all anyone uses it for. Good luck monetizing this, guys. Though it does seem like a valuable service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whoever wrote PhpBB was not living in the Valley, where all message boards are "poised for rapid growth" and backed by VC money, even primitive weekend projects like Twitter.

Web 2.0 news that I see lately have started to drop me into "uncov mode" more and more often...

</comment><comment><USER6> "PHP God" brings to mind something like this:

<http://www.energycenter.com/auction.folder/Kali2.JPG>

</comment><comment><USER7> What about adding it to <http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs> ?

<comment><USER8> That appears to be for YC funded companies only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> PHP God with mastery in heavy DOM manipulation. Pretty nice combination :))

</comment><comment><USER10> bring the pain bitch.

Good luck. I'm sure you'll find what you seek.</comment>


Best Vim Tips - <AUTHOR> http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Best_Vim_Tips

<comment><USER2> Good post, I'm (more or less) an emacs guy, but vimtutor + this + 1 to 2 days of my time might certainly convince me of switching to vim.

(warning, by no means am I trying to instigate yet another emacs vs vim thread but here I go)

Not to hate on emacs, since it has served me well as an advanced editor for the past year or so, but I sometimes feel so lost in its sea of features and a never-ending config file that I often end up saying to myself "If I only I could take the time to learn lisp maybe I could _really_ start using emacs that way it should be used", nevertheless, learning vim versus learning lisp is certainly more cost-effective for my time.

<comment><USER3> Note that VIMScript has grown into a pretty nice extension language for Vim in Vim 7.2.

<comment><USER4> I really love vim, but Vimscript is imho braindead. Yes, you can do pretty much everything in it, but it's an example of a very poor language design. Perhaps not even Perl can beat it in its manifold syntax.

<comment><USER3> Well, VIMScript was not "designed". It kind of grew all over the place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> tab completion also works for help: it cycles through all help keywords that contain the present text (not just suffixes, as in normal tab-completion). eg. try

        :he lvis

and press tab.

I like the inline arithmetic:

        CTRL-R=5*5

Note the "=" comes first. I just discovered that "CTRL-R5" inserts that line from your cut-and-paste history (or something).

<comment><USER6> CTRL-R inserts from the register that follows it.

See :help i_CTRL-R and :help registers

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, I didn't know about several of these. Thanks for this!

</comment><comment><USER6> This is just the tip of the iceberg.</comment>


Ask HN: You built and they just came? - <AUTHOR> Are there any stories when you went ahead and just built something, did minimal (or no) marketing and users just came? <comment><USER3> Yup, twice. When I first started making Photoshop plugins and selling them, I did nothing but make a website & mentioned it on a Photoshop developer email list. I was extremely fortunate that one of the readers mentioned my plugin in their own newsletter of 30,000 subscribers. Google then picked up the site, gave me good rankings for the phrase Photoshop Plugins, and that carried me along for a while. Though I wish I'd been more proactive with my marketing & product development in later years.

Before that, I made a website called the South Park Kenny Translator [1] and I don't recall doing any promotion at all, besides it being on the same domain as my Photoshop plugins. It's been around for almost 20 years now and even landed me an interview on BBC Radio. The Kenny Translator is inherently viral though: the whole point is sending Kenny-encoded messages to friends.

Nowadays I'd be much more proactive about marketing. My current Indie Conference [2] side project went nowhere for a couple of years, but suddenly got a spike of subscribers when I mentioned it in a reply here on HN last month. It wasn't intended as deliberate marketing, but it had more impact than 2+ years of nothing but hoping the Google gods would look favorably upon me.

[1] [http://www.namesuppressed.com/kenny/](http://www.namesuppressed.com/kenny/)

[2] [http://www.indieconference.com/](http://www.indieconference.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think these stories would be accidental more often than you think. In our world of internet you have to be promoting yourself for any kind of attention.

Your product has to be outstandingly super good to gather users without any marketing.

</comment><comment><USER5> depends on how minimal I guess.

I once ran a p2p site called flashseed. The basic premise was that it was a torrent tracker that solved the two major failings of bittorrent - <USER2> seeding and incomplete swarms, by hosting a static copy of the file.

I posted it on a forum, but due to the ill-conceived name people thought it was a free seedbox rather than a tracker. It blew up overnight and crashed the server. 99% of the files uploaded turned out to be pirated movies and TV shows. At the time isohunt was being sued and the legality of the site was unclear, even if I did comply with DMCA. After some thought I decided it wasn't worth the effort, and let it die a natural death...

If I were to do it again I'd probably make it invite-only

</comment><comment><USER6> I built Badabing! An app to see your friends bikini pics. And they just came, in droves. This was 2012

<comment><USER7> what happened to it?</comment></comment>


Gedit is unmaintained, some thoughts - <AUTHOR> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gedit-list/2017-July/msg00001.html <comment><USER2>
        Also by contributing to gedit (probably for free), you help this guy
        selling gedit on Mac:
        https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/57936/gedit
        If you read this, please don't buy gedit there, there is a free (but
        older) version here:
        http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/mac/gedit/

Well, looks like selling a newer version is something that's entirely marketable, then.

Maybe contribute to gedit _and_ try to sell an even newer version for Mac? Selling free software isn't a bad thing to do.

<comment><USER3> > Maybe contribute to gedit and try to sell an even newer version for Mac? > Selling free software isn't a bad thing to do.

AFAIK Gedit is GPL, at least, I'm not sure how this guy can sell this software while not violating the license at the same time.

<comment><USER4> I have seen people complain like this often. It's like people don't understand the meaning of free software licenses. Anyone can use the code in any context as long as any changes made are available. Yes, totally no restrictions. A business can build a billion dollar company from gedit and not give the original author anything. This is how it works.

<comment><USER3> > It's like people don't understand the meaning of free software licenses.

It's like people don't understand there is many different "free software licenses" as well.

> A business can build a billion dollar company from gedit and not give the > original author anything.

A billion dollar company which sells GPL software will have to provide the entire source and its modifications to their clients and make it available as GPL so that the client can exploit it commercially without giving a single cent to that billion dollar company.

<comment><USER5> True, but if your customers don't choose to do that, your business model stays intact, which is clearly what's happening here.

Moreover, if you understand that this isn't a violation of the license, what were you saying in your original comment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how often it's actually used. The niche appears to be "notepad for Unix like systems".

Meaning some intersection between a person likely to use Linux as a desktop, but wants an editor mostly geared for the not-tech-savvy.

Not discounting gedit, but it feels very narrow niche to me.

<comment><USER7> I've been using gedit as my main programming environment for more than seven years now (mainly C++/JavaScript/Python development). It integrates neatly with GNOME 3, has a very clean, uncluttered interface and has all the features I need through plugins (Git integration, embedded terminal, word based auto- completion, block editing, highlighting of white space, auto-formating). Coming from DOS/Windows I never got my head around Emacs/Vim due to the "non- standard" user interface.

<comment><USER8> I'd recommend Geany, many more developer features yet still quick and uncluttered, though you'll still have to go to the view menu and hide the sidebar and message panes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A very good (and much faster) alternative is geany - [https://www.geany.org/](https://www.geany.org/)

<comment><USER10> I switched to geany over a year ago and couldn't be happier. Clipboard support in gedit just kept getting worse and geany is so much faster and less prone to crashes on very large files that would easily lockup and crash my desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For an actively maintained alternative (fork) to gedit, see xed: [https://github.com/linuxmint/xed](https://github.com/linuxmint/xed)

</comment><comment><USER12> > It is important to write more libraries, sharing the code and maintenance > among several similar applications.

It's not easy to write generic code.

<comment><USER13> More importantly generic code is almost inevitably bloated, less efficient, and more complex compared to code which only attempts to solve the actual problem at hand, as opposed to attempting to provide a generic solution for all imagined use cases.

A simple example would be a PRNG. Specialized version:

      int dice_roll = random(1,6);

Generic version (this is from C++'s standard lib):

      std::default_random_engine generator;
      std::uniform_int_distribution<int> distribution(1,6);
      int dice_roll = distribution(generator);

The specialized version does not cover non-uniform distributions, nor the use case where you need multiple PRNGs with independent states.. and is much simpler and more straight-forward because of that.

Often generic solutions are the best trade-off in the end, but one should not assume that more generic is automatically better.

I think the reliance of modern programmers on libraries which offer highly generic (and thus almost inevitably sub-optimal) solutions is one of the primary reasons for software boat.

<comment><USER11> How do you mean, suboptimal? The fully generic version is 2 lines of initialization more than the restricted version. Is 2 lines not an accepted tradeoff for being able to change the engine, and crucially, to draw numbers from _any_ distribution you want?

Furthermore I bet the generic, templated version is as small and fast as a naive implementation. It's all templates so it's all static code generation.

<comment><USER13> >How do you mean, suboptimal? The fully generic version is 2 lines of initialization more than the restricted version.

I.e. a 200% increase in code size! Now imagine that throughout the entire code base.

> Is 2 lines not an accepted tradeoff for being able to change the engine, and > crucially, to draw numbers from any distribution you want?

It is a complete waste if you don't need that functionality. That is the point. Generic solutions solve problems you don't even have, and that comes at a price.

>Furthermore I bet the generic, templated version is as small and fast as a naive implementation. It's all templates so it's all static code generation.

You kinda missed the point. I did not even specify how random(a,b) was implemented, so making statements about the speed of the compiled code makes no sense here.

C++'s templates are another nice example of the cost of generic code, though. They are one of the primary reasons why compiling C++ is so slow / resource intense. They have to be instantiated at compile-time again and again and again.. which is a non-trivial process, much slower to compile than a plain non-generic function call. Also they are historically infamous for producing hard to understand error messages.

<comment><USER11> That is _not_ a 200% increase in code size. It's a fixed two more lines of code, that _may or may not_ translate into a bigger binary (if correctly implemented it probably doesn't, even if it increases compile time a bit). I mean that's just silly. I'll assume you write everything in one-liners, right, since for some reason you find it important to minimise the arbitrary measure of lines of code?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I liked the Gedit from Gnome 2 and what shipped with Ubuntu 12, and 14. The Ubuntu 16/17 and Gnome 3 Gedit is crap. I hate the UI change. The removal of the menu, the ugly hamburger menu with few entries. Gnome 3 is like KDE 4/5 a trainwreck - instead of create a cheap ripoff UI, why not stay with what worked - Gnome 2 and KDE 3 were perfect, had a good UI, just slap a modern theme over. And the newer worse incarnation aren't even touch friendly, well like Win10 - ugly, slow - Win7 is the better one. Only Apple with macOS and Google with Android get it right, iOS6, iOS11, Android 7 all look great and modern, and the UI doesn't suck.

I will install "Ubuntu Mate", it comes with Gnome 2 shell built with gtk3.

<comment><USER15> I don't use gedit, but in general I like look and feel of GNOME 3 applications:

* Emphasis on undo instead of confirmation dialogs. Though, some applications got implementation completely wrong. Contacts, I am looking at you. It delays deleting a contact instead of offering a real undo, which means that if you exit early no action is performed at all.

* Different colors for constructive / destructive actions used consistently across applications.

* Keyboard shortcuts window. Though, I don't understand why most applications insist on making it modal, which essentially prohibits looking at shortcuts and trying them out at the same time.

* Headers bars. I prefer those over traditional menu bars, especially if number of different actions to perform is limited. Though, portability suffers as making it work in environments without client side decorations requires some custom code. Thus, if developer didn't take this into account it probably doesn't work.

* In-app notifications (used for example for example for undo I have already mentioned). Though, AFAIK this doesn't seem to be builtin part of GTK yet and require a little bit more custom code than other widgets.

* Empty placeholders! (Though, they might have been there already?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, I've often fantasized about maintaining Geary or Empathy (also on the unmaintained list).

Gnome needs solid lightweight email and messaging clients but I'm not sure I have the time to do it.

I find that, now that Gnome has builder, the thing holding me back is lack of documentation on how to get started with gnome dev (and use the numerous Gnome libraries).

Earlier this week there was some talk on HN about google's kubernetes having "documentation for geniuses" but it seems pretty approachable compared to the Gnome stuff.

I think it's mostly because I'm not a strong enough C programmer and it's a tall order to document things like GObject well for n00bs but if I knew how I worked I'd be happy to document it for others.

<comment><USER17> Empathy is unmaintained? I think of it as being practically brand new. The ongoing deaths of the legacy chat clients and protocols have clearly taken a toll on enthusiasm.

<comment> iso-8859-1 And yet, irssi still lives :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I see empathy is on the list of unmaintained software - it replaced pidgin (which is still maintained), and is now itself maintained.

Maybe the lesson on that one is to work more with external apps instead of replacing them.

</comment><comment><USER19> What are the qualifications for becoming a maintainer? Is the bar set high? Is there a vetting process? I am interested but I'm not sure they will accept just anyone as a maintainer.

<comment><USER20> A person who has submitted some pr fixes and shows an understanding of the software stands a good chance.

<comment><USER21> Usually it is the guy who forks the original, and gets burried beneath patches?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "If you read this, please don't buy gedit there"

The same misconceptions about GPL again and again and again and again. The gist of the GPL is to give more freedom by limiting limitations, that is, you can compile a GPL software and sell it for a trillion bucks and nobody -not even RMS himself- will bark at you, provided that if you made any changes to the software you make their source available along the compiled product.

The GPL is not about preventing users from selling the software, but rather about preventing users from imposing limitations on other users, which is exactly what commercial software licenses do. You can download a Debian image, stick it onto a USB memory and sell it for 100 bucks, but you don't get the right to prevent me from doing the same, or even sell it at half the price. That's the way the GPL promotes both openness and competition.

<comment><USER23> The author does not claim selling gedit binaries is illegal. Only that it is unfair.

The rational is that it uses someone else's free (as in free beer) work and sells it with very little added work.

<comment><USER24> Which is why there is little to nothing money to be made with desktop related software, with FOSS development model.

<comment><USER23> OsmAnd+ managed to have more than 100k paid installs (according to Google) while being open source: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand.plu...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand.plus)

For most people, it is easier to pay than to compile software.

<comment><USER25> Considering you can freely download fully functional builds from F-Droid, that's more likely a consequence of ignorance than laziness. Is it ethical to profit from ignorance? Especially when others chose not to profit from yours? What about when that ignorance is harmful to your ideals?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Or use Kate instead :)

<comment><USER27> Doesn't that pull in all the KDE libraries in the process, if the rest of the software you use is built around GTK?

<comment><USER28> The GNOME Editor is hardly a good place from which to cast such criticism, though. Gedit pulls in a whole load of entire external Desktop Bus services in order to work, and indeed a second Desktop Bus, not only some shared libraries inside the editor process. Moreover, that editor process isn't the one that one might naïvely think it to be.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056252)

<comment><USER27> I'm making the assumption that most people who'd be using gedit are already running Gnome anyhow, and would already have all that stuff pulled in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Gnome needs a react native bridge.

<comment><USER30> Linux has Electron compatibility already. On desktop there is no good reason to worry about "native" control performance.

And considering that React Native can barely seem to keep the controls in sync on iOS and Android [0], trying to throw in a tiny minority platform like Gnome makes no sense at all. Better to build controls for raw X or even an OpenGL UI implementation. It's not like it's impossible to do the latter. [1]

In fact, VS Code _already_ runs mostly everywhere, has gotten a huge amount of community mindshare in an amazingly short period of time, and at this point I couldn't imagine ever using gedit for...well, anything, really. Why would I?

P.S. Not a downvoter.

[0] A friend is working on a project that's run into a number of "bug on Android, not on iOS" that, once patched, became a "bug on iOS and not on Android" issue. Rinse and repeat.

[1] [https://kivy.org/#home](https://kivy.org/#home) [http://www.fltk.org/index.php](http://www.fltk.org/index.php)

<comment><USER31> > On desktop there is no good reason to worry about "native" control > performance.

I take it you've never used a Java Swing application.

<comment><USER30> You're right. I should have said there's no reason to worry about _competently designed_ UI control performance.

Swing was, in fact, an absolute disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Something odd is going on with FOSS scene in general, for some time. I really don't like seeing great apps like gedit getting unmaintained.

Crap like systemd gets ton of corporate funding, versus tens of really beautiful apps getting slowly neglected.

Not a good direction in general.

<comment><USER33> Corporate focus is almost certainly on Linux on servers rather than Linux desktops.

<comment><USER14> Systemd is not good. It tries to solve too many things and tries to extend and replace more and more core functionality. So many security holes. In a year or two, we will look back and say it was a very bad timeframe and several bad decisions. Unfortunately both Debian and Redhat switched to systemd, meaning all distros based on them as well. Only a few distros are left, let's hope some sane people revert that hype.

<comment><USER34> I've got no 'skin in the game' as I don't use Linux, but ask yourself, if systemd is so bad, why is it so popular amongst distro maintainers? There must be some things its doing right. Even if you don't like systemd it's still a good idea to understand those that do, if nothing else it'll make you more effective in a debate about it.

<comment><USER35> Bundling. Gnome > logind > systemd.

Yeah yeah, Gnome can work without logind. But doing so is not easy and require ongoing patches as new versions of Gnome rolls out.

And Gnome is THE gorilla in the Linux DE world.

<comment><USER34> Systemd was popular with distro maintainers before GNOME started to be built around it. What was responsible for that initial surge of popularity (amongst distro maintainers)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why would you need Gedit when you've got Sublime? 70$ and worth every cent.

<comment><USER37> You mean the one that's been in beta for the last 4 years without a stable release in sight?

I like Sublime. I enjoy using Sublime. I paid for a Sublime license. Still, the appearance of its impending bitrot made me switch back to Emacs.

<comment><USER36> To be honest the Sublime Text 3 "beta" has been perfectly stable for me for the past 2 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's pretty irresponsible to make something and then abandon it. It's like having a baby and neglecting it.

<comment><USER23> A baby will eventually grow and become mostly able to survive on their own.

Gedit is now 18 years old, you can't expect its developpers to go on forever. Particularly if they now have actual babies and have less free time to spend on Free Software.</comment></comment>


Container Journal – Sister Site to DevOps.com for Everything Container Related - <AUTHOR> http://www.containerjournal.com

<comment><AUTHOR> things containers. CJ is the largest collection of original content related to Containers on the web and one of the top result for Containers-related search terms. Our content includes in-depth features, bylined articles, blog posts and breaking news about the topics that resonate with IT readers interested in Containers: teamwork through improved IT culture, continuous integration, automated deployment, agile development and infrastructure-as-code among them.

ContainerJournal.com is comprised of thought leaders who understand both Containers and how to create compelling, informative content. The team behind ContainerJournal.com has real-world experience in technology, cloud, online media, Containers, IT and startups. The ContainerJournal.com management team and board of advisors is made up of world-class talent.</comment>


Running a SaaS business while employed? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to get a basic idea of what the legal situation would be here.
If I started a SaaS business (i.e, monthly subscription for a web application), and later got a job, would the employer have rights to code updates to the web application? (and thus partial rights to the application)
How can I continue to run a web application business that I developed previously, if I become employed? Thanks for any advice. <comment><USER2> IANAL.

You are lucky in one area because you created the SaaS product prior to coming on board.

You are (may be) unlucky in another area because it sounds like you took the job without coming clean about the SaaS product.

The situation is complicated further if your employer is hiring you as a developer, and even further complicated if the SaaS product targets (or could conceivably target) the same industry/set of customers as your employer.

Your biggest challenge is conflict of interest. If you can show that there is no COI between you working on your SaaS product and your day job, there should be little grounds (or interest) on the part of your employer to come after you. You should probably be worried not just about code _updates_ to the web application, but to the revenue stream that your SaaS product is generating.

At this point (assuming you are employed), you have three options:

1) Talk to somebody in the company (Legal/CEO, depending on size of company). Have the awkward conversation and come to an agreement.

2) Stop working on your SaaS product, but don't tell your employer.

3) Continue working on the SaaS product without informing your employer (i.e. gamble that you can fly under the radar).

If you're not employed yet and just entertaining a job offer, do #1.

If you're employed, I suggest doing #1 if you feel that you want to keep working on your pride and joy. If they become real pricks about it, perhaps you could negotiate ownership stake in your SaaS company and outsource or have your co-founder continue coding.

It seems unlikely you'll seriously consider #2 if the SaaS product is making some money. If you go down this route, keep records 'just-in-case' showing that you ceased all development at X date (which would hopefully coincide with your date of employment).

If you go #3, be prepared to lawyer up if your employer catches on (e.g. SaaS product starts garnishing serious attention).

I'm not a lawyer, but if somebody on my team came to me with this problem, those would be the options I'd lay out for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the detailed reply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Depends entirely on your employment agreement with your employer. Some employers claim everything you create, others only claim the work you did for them as part of your employment. (Also, some jurisdictions prohibit such broad claims in employment agreements, but most don't.)

Best-case scenario: find a prospective employer that actively wants to support your work on your service because it helps them, and work with them to create an employment arrangement that works for you.

Failing that, you should talk with your prospective employer, explain the situation, make it clear that you'll never work on it during business hours or on business resources (unless they explicitly want you to), and get it explicitly excluded from your employment contract.</comment>


Hack your watch - Texas Instruments releases watch with wireless dev kit - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222400168

<comment><USER2> This is the same company that uses the DMCA to shut down calculator hackers and hobbyists? Screw them

[http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/145/145316.h...](http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/145/145316.html)

<comment><USER3> Upvoted, but what the hackers and hobbyists was threatening was the entire viability of the calculators. Here's why.

TI's generally pretty friendly towards people tinkering with the calculators. But what they were doing was breaking the signing keys of the operating system, so a teacher has no idea what the hell's running on a student's calculator at test time. No one wants that, so that calculator becomes forbidden. (The TI92 had a keyboard, and when people realized how easy it was to copy questions off, it became forbidden the next year. Result: any high schooler had a $200 calculator useless for tests.) Enough calculators become forbidden, people lose trust in the brand, and then they stop buying the calculators, which brings the whole system down.

For $100, why tinker with a Z80 processor when you can get a SheevaPlug?

<comment><USER4> A start-up idea...

A calculator app which can be configured to only perform certain, allowed operations. Teachers could announce that the next test would only allow a particular calculator configuration, and students could run the calc app on their phones/laptops with those restrictions (or none if they didn't want to prepare well for the test). Then, at test time, the teacher passes out purpose built "calculators" running the calc app as configured by the teacher for that test. The calculator would be free, but the teacher kit would be sold to schools. What would be the hardware cost in bulk for a cheap device that could run one TI calculator-like app? If students today can be required to buy a $100 TI calculator, could they be required to buy a flash-able "calculator" device?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe one of the really pissed off people who pre-ordered the WakeMate could take one of these and create their own WakeMate like application.

<comment><USER6> Bought one today after seeing this thread to make a sleep analysis device and webapp. I am a sleep scientist and I would love to have data of sleep patterns of thousands of people. For accurate yet longer analysis we normally use a commercial product called actiwatch but, as everything in research, is very expensive ( <http://tinyurl.com/yhowa64> ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> To keep track of my running workouts, I bought a Timex Ironman Datalink watch which has a USB interface, and I wrote a plug-in for it for SportTracks[1]. It does the job, but it's missing some things.

For one, I'd like to capture ambient temperature too, which this TI watch has, so I took a closer look. The manual states, "The temperature is measured inside the watch right inside the CC430 device. When the watch is worn, the temperature of the watch may be different due to the body heat. For accurate temperature measurements, do not wear the watch and allow a sufficient amount of time for the watch to adapt to the surrounding temperature."

Great feature, poorly implemented. No thanks.

Eventually I'll get a GPS watch, but not until Garmin releases one that has decent battery life. A temperature sensor would be nice, too.

[1] <http://www.zonefivesoftware.com/SportTracks/>

</comment><comment><USER8> History repeats itself:

<http://reocities.com/researchtriangle/7650/datalink.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> I already got mine. But I have no time to play with it right now :(

</comment><comment><USER10> found the idea intriguing and just ordered one, but not sure what I am exactly going to do with it.

<comment><USER11> As the post above pointed out, don't hack too much. TI is known for throwing down the DMCA law on those who get too "hack" happy with their hardware.

Is this their offer of good will? Perhaps, but it is a little late.</comment></comment>


Kathy Sierra On The Primer On Sexism Discussion - <AUTHOR> http://farukat.es/journal/2012/10/669-kathy-sierra-primer-sexism-discussion <comment><USER2> I get angry everytime that I think about how a few vile people attacked Kathy and shut down one of the best blogs to grace the internet, Creating Passionate Users (<http://headrush.typepad.com/>).

After she stopped blogging, I wrote a program to scrap her TypePad site and then hand edited down all of her posts into a single, massive book. I printed a single copy on Lulu for myself which I've marked up with highligher and pen calling out all of her incredible points.

I don't want to earn any money from her work, so here's a link to download a free PDF copy of the best of her blog:

[http://www.kevinmconroy.com/pdf/creating_passionate_users.pd...](http://www.kevinmconroy.com/pdf/creating_passionate_users.pdf)

It's print-ready for you to upload to your favorite self publishing book website (e.g. lulu.com) and print your own copy.

Thank you for continuing to inspiring me Kathy.

<comment><USER3> I assume you mean _s/scrap/scrape/_.

<comment><USER2> Yes, sorry about that unfortunate typo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not directly related to this article, but on the click through (primer link) there's an idea that really resonated with me:

If you're western/male/white/straight you're playing life on 'very easy' mode.

This probably betrays my 'gamified' lifestyle, and maybe it trivializes the issue somewhat, but its a much more compelling argument to me than using the term 'privilege' which is _loaded_ with baggage (hey! I worked hard to get where I am. I'm not some privileged kid who's parent spent big to send me to a good college...)

It's really an idea that connects to my demographic, rather than _disconnecting_ them, which is what a lot of this discourse does.

So you're a great hacker? sweet. You did that on EASY mode.

That guy over there, he's transgender, he's playing on hard and he's where you are despite that.

Those hackers girls in the corner? They're playing on nightmare difficulty.

Just a little bit of gentle respect for that goes a long way.

It's a really great metaphor to explain these ideas to people I know. Just my $0.02

<comment><USER5> > If you're western/male/white/straight you're playing life on 'very easy' > mode.

When I read this, my interpretation is "Your achievements don't count because you are a white man."

Is that what you were trying to express?

<comment><USER6> Perhaps Louis CK can explain it in a way that makes it make more sense to you: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4f9zR5yzY>

It's not about denigrating anyone's achievements. It's about understanding that some things make your life easier. Being born straight, white, and male, in the United States (or other first world countries) provides a tremendous amount of benefit to you. To deny that benefit is to deny reality.

It doesn't mean when you do something good it doesn't count...it just means that you probably would have had a harder time had you been born non-white, non-male, non-straight. No one is saying you're bad for being white, male, or straight, or that what you accomplish does not count.

Denying you receive privileges for being a straight white male can be offensive or upsetting to those who don't experience life with those privileges. It's a complicated issue, of course, and there are plenty of straight white males who have to overcome significant hurdles; but given the same circumstances, the straight white male has an easier time getting ahead in business (especially tech and science), being treated with respect, not being treated like a child (women are _frequently_ treated like children by well-meaning men), and not being treated like an outsider.

You're not being blamed for being born lucky. You're just being asked to acknowledge it.

<comment><USER5> I think the historical narrative that Louis CK has presented in the clip is wrong. Sure at any point in the past 500 years you could probably point out a group of white men that are far better off than the majority of society but those people would always be outliers.

Imagine all the men born in German and Great Britain eighteen years before WWI. Just as they were graduating secondary school they would have been drafted and forced to kill each other in some of the most horrible battle conditions in recorded history. Does lying in a waterlogged trench, dying slowly over three days of a gut wound sound like a privilege?

Men currently account for 92% of occupational deaths in the US. Imagine what it was like a century ago, before occupational safety standards. A coal miner in 1910 had the privilege of being able to vote and to wear pants but his wife had the privilege of not being crushed to death in a poorly supported tunnel or dying of black lung.

Men have far higher rates of mental illness and drug addiction. Men are more likely to attempt suicide and more likely to succeed. Men who are victims of rape or domestic abuse are often ridiculed. At least one study showed 40% of domestic abuse victims are men. The majority of US rape victims are men. Unemployment rates are currently higher among men.

Imagine you're a woman and you really like small children and want to work in a career with them. That's perfectly acceptable.

A man doing the same thing is constantly viewed with suspicion and often faces false accusations.

You say men have the advantage of being treated with respect but I think that is highly dependent on the circumstances.

I will readily admit that the greatest factors that have affected my life are random. We all play the birth lottery but I don't see your ranking of various characteristics as justified or useful.

To me it just seems like a way to dismiss people and their achievements because of things beyond their control.

<comment><USER5> As soon as I hit reply I felt ill. You're right of course. I recall reading about the origins of the plate tectonics and the experiences of women trying to make careers in academic geology in the 1970s. Those women experienced explicit sexism, being told that women don't have a place in geology departments. Those women were certainly playing on "hard mode".

But I still can't believe that it's useful to apply this concept to everyone on a society wide basis. It just seems like too wide a net. The world is more complicated than that.

<comment><USER6> The points you made in your prior comment are all valid, but don't really alter the reality of the difference or of the idea of privilege (which everyone has in some circumstances; as you note, women working in child care have a massive amount of privilege over men). Interestingly, I know some radical feminists who view nearly all of it as symptoms of patriarchy.

For example, a side effect of men being grownups, and women being child-like, is that men suffer consequences in court at a much higher rate than women. Women are viewed as both weak and incapable of making rational choices, and so when they commit crimes, including violence against men, they receive child- like treatment. Where an abusive man might spend time in jail, an abusive woman gets a slap on the wrist and the man gets snickered at for being too weak to stand up to the woman. Woman==Weak and Victim, Man==Strong and In Control.

Similarly, women are seen as safe to be around children because they effectively _are_ children according to this worldview. Men should be ambitious and driven, and shouldn't be wasting time playing with kids, and should be viewed with suspicion if that's how they want to spend their time...there must be something wrong with them, some ulterior motive. This is insulting to _both_ men and women; and it just falls out naturally from the way men and women are currently viewed by our institutions and our society. We could go on for days talking about ways women and men get treated differently, and it's not really about who gets treated worse (though, again, most of the time, us white guys get a hell of a lot of advantages over just about everyone else as long as our goals align with what we're expected to want out of life).

So, I think it's unfortunate that so much time gets spent trying to pick apart the idea of privilege without realizing that it's dangerous for everyone for these kinds of inequalities to exist, but it's generally more oppressive for non-white, non-male, non-straight folks.

I absolutely concede that it's complicated. I doubt anyone, even the most militant old school feminist, would argue that it's simple. It's just a matter of checking your privilege now and then; it's all most folks are asking for when they talk about privilege, and I think that's entirely fair.

I'll give an example: I'm involved in activism in my local community, and have found myself talking to media a lot lately. One of my friends noted that all the people in our activist community who were talking to media with regularity are white, middle class, able-bodied, straight-looking men, even though plenty of women, black and brown folks, disabled folks, obviously LGBTQ, etc. people exist within this community. Media were simply walking into the room, looking around, and picking the person who looked most like they were in charge...wouldn't you know, they'd pick the middle class straight white guy to talk to? It's the way the world is. Changing it means checking that privilege on a conscious level. The next time I was asked for an interview I redirected him to a woman in a wheelchair who is probably a much better speaker for our cause than I am; in a world without this pre-existing bias, she's the person he would have talked to, because she was heading up the meeting. But, due to that bias, he came to me. When you start looking for this bias (and you can call it whatever you like, but this is what people mean when they say "privilege"), you'll start to see it everywhere.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that we can recognize that it's complicated and that everyone is dealing with shit, while also recognizing trends and societal bias and favoritism.

<comment><USER5> > For example, a side effect of men being grownups, and women being child-like

Who the hell says this? Where are you getting it from?

You make tons of assertions but what are they based on?

As far as I can tell you made an absolute statement "White men have privileges that nullify their achievements. Women are not privileged so their achievements count.". I pointed out several cases where men were disadvantaged as compared to women and you start throwing up a bunch of bullshit.

<comment><USER6> "White men have privileges that nullify their achievements. Women are not privileged so their achievements count."

That is not a quote from anything I have written, and is not what I've said or implied. You're taking this in a far more argumentative direction than I had any desire to go in. Perhaps I've struck a nerve?

<comment><USER5> > You're taking this in a far more argumentative direction than I had any > desire to go in. Perhaps I've struck a nerve?

Arguments are fun. No harm done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "You are wrong because of things you cannot know" - impossible to argue with, not very useful. (Disclaimer: I don't know Kathy Sierra, or rather, the first time I heard about her was when she quit blogging, I think, because of that vile stream of hate spam. I have nothing against her, in fact I believe what people said at the time, that she made great contributions before leaving).

<comment><USER8> What I actually said was that _I_ was wrong, and that "just because you don't perceive it doesn't mean it isn't there." That's not quite the same as saying "you were wrong."

And I also didn't say "because of things you cannot know." Yes, there WERE things that I -- and perhaps others -- cannot know, but I also had plenty of evidence I was ignoring because it didn't fit my personal experience. There were studies, stats, research, and yes -- an overwhelming number of personal anecdotes from too many credible women for me to have ignored the possibility for that long.

I still do not know how pervasive or deep the problems of sexism are -- this is not a domain I have studied. But I was wrong to have used my sole personal experience as evidence that there wasn't really a problem.

<comment><USER7> It seems to me you drew analogies between her and you, from the initial state of "seeing no problem at all", and then you realizing that you simply didn't see it. That to me sounds as if you were implying that just like you, she simply doesn't see it and there she is wrong, analogous to the way you were wrong.

Also her article doesn't sound to me as if she claims that there is no problem, just that it is obviously not a problem for every woman.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I suppose I was. Her post reminded me of the posts I used to make, and so yes, I guess I was implying that she, too, was wrong. I agree with you; it was not useful. I have nothing more to add.

<comment><USER9> [insert expletive here], Kathy, don't quietly slink away. It matters not a whit that not _everybody_ is listening; many are. Whether we are enough or not, I can't say.

The worst of all possible outcomes is that one day Laura (and others like her) should awaken into the same harsh reality that blindsided you. And _that will happen_ unless we, as a community, seriously address the tolerance we have for behaviour that simply should not be tolerated. We _need_ to be reminded that it exists, and that while the behaviour might not be universally pervasive, a sort of tolerance of it, whether with a grudge or a giggle, is nearly so.

I truly hope that Laura never has her eyes opened in the way yours were, but that hope hinges largely on the scenery changing in the meantime. "Make your users awesome" was a message we needed to hear, and that cry was silenced not merely by direct action, but by tolerance as well. This message, if anything, is more important. Let those who have ears, at least, hear it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am going to say this knowing that I am venturing into "downvote" territory...but...for every woman that _really_ experiences sexism, there are two that exaggerate their circumstances (and to be fair, this is not at all exclusive to women, it applies to other "isms" as well). I remember one woman at a place I worked at filed a complaint about sexism because a coworker (kindly) asked her out. Maybe its not appropriate to ask a coworker out, but it certainly is not sexist (read the definition of sexism if you disagree with me). A good deal of it actually winds down to the fact that people do not understand the definition of sexism. Being hit on is not sexism. Even being sexually harassed does not qualify as sexism -- although it is clearly another type of bad thing. Sexism is the act of favoring one sex over another. There are women who do experience sexism, but I would say tech has more "reverse discrimination" than anything else. Objectively, I have seen some very average women programmers get hired into high positions just to fill diversity quotas (and yes, I do know of a few very smart female programmers as well).

<comment><USER11> Oh jesus. Before anyone considers responding to Gavan, take a look at his comment history. He has a habit of posting completely unsubstantiated opinions, presented in the most odious manner he can manage. He relates to his confabulations as if they were fact and expects you to do the same.

Edit: I am only talking about your history on social issue threads. You appear to be quite talented otherwise, apparently you wrote Genesis 3D which was pretty awesome. Still, you present yourself on social questions in a way that is pretty much indistinguishable from trolling.

<comment><USER10> Troll Level: Master ;) Yes, I am definitely political-correctness-challenged (to put it in politically correct terms). I intend no harm, but I do like to challenge social norms. I used to think identically to those who think the opposite of me, so I understand where everyone else is coming from.

<comment><USER12> Challenging social norms just for the sake of challenging them is not something to be lauded.

You would be taken more seriously if you provided a well-reasoned response based on facts rather than throwing out opinions like "for every woman that really experiences sexism, there are two that exaggerate their circumstances".

You are setting up a simplistic straw man and arguing that because you believe you have "seen some very average women programmers get hired into high positions just to fill diversity quotas" (how do you KNOW this, btw?) that reverse-sexism is rampant. You do not acknowledge that your understanding of their promotions could be limited, that they might have other skills besides simply programming, or what the position actually required.

Because of these things it's very hard to take you seriously, and if you have a habit of doing these things, I understand why someone would dismiss you as a troll.

It would be more interesting if you argued in a reasoned matter acknowledging the variety of experiences in the real world, instead of drawing generalizations from a few things you have seen.

<comment><USER10> I can only argue from what I have seen, heard of, etc; The glass I look through might not represent the world. Needless to say, I have acknowledged that sexism does exist, it is only my perception that many people tend to complain about trivial cases, whereas serious cases are usually handled with silence (could be wrong here as well). I personally know recruiters at Microsoft, AOL, and Google, so they have provided me with some of my insight (note that each of these companies has very different hiring policies though), other things I get from news stories, comments (like or unlike my own!), so like any propaganda take it with a grain of salt. From the instances I have seen, women are not only treated fairly (doing otherwise would be grounds for a lawsuit), but they are given special attention (I have seen more women greeted into tech with open arms than otherwise...males tend to _want_ females in their male-dominated workplaces). Again, just pointing out what I observe, not claiming to be the Oracle of Truth. And actually, challenging social norms is a good thing. We tend to think like sheep, which is a good reason we only have two significant political parties in the US. It took somebody challenging my views for them to change (I hope for the better).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not entirely clear to me what prompted the "Mack truck's worth of vile, misogynistic, sexist comments and pictures" that caused Sierra to change her point of view (after twenty years of positive experience!) and how exactly it relates to the Tech industry?

I can appreciate the argument that just because you haven't personally experienced sexism that doesn't mean it doesn't occur, but the logical equivalent of that is that you can't point to a few people's (subjective interpretation of their) experiences to conclude that sexism is prevalent in the tech industry.

<comment><USER14> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6499095.stm> is one article on what happened to her. It was pretty awful.

<comment><USER7> That sounds as if it was several people attacking her? I would have thought it was just a disturbed individual? Also how come "prominent bloggers" were hosting the attacks - presumably she means comments on blogs that were not removed in a timely manner?

<comment><USER15> As I recall a couple of the bloggers themselves were attacking her, not just commenters.

<comment><USER7> Wow, that's pretty extreme. I'll look into that. But I don't think the bloggers were doing stuff like the picture with the noose? I can imagine some gave stupid comments to the situation, though. Anyway, this actually makes me curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> All I know is Kathy Sierra's book on Java was pretty much my first intro into programming (SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide). I've gone on to become a software engineer for 7-8 years now. But I still swear by that seemingly simple book because it was so well-written.

And as Jeff Atwood and many others have written, I know whatever she writes about on this or any other subject is a lot more correct than people realize. Just thought I'd register that.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is recursion such a popular topic in interviews? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a full stack developer and I rarely run into the need to use recursion to solve a problem.  So why do so many interviewers like to ask questions that involve a solution that uses recursion? <comment><USER2> I believe the idea is something like [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html)

The idea that if you want to filter out people who aren't going to be good software devs there are two concepts to test. The first is pointers and the second is recursion.

<comment><AUTHOR> >>I think it's just a necessary culling of the people who aren't going to be happy or successful in programming careers.

Thanks for the article, but he is wrong on this point. I have been programming for 17 years and I a) probably wouldn't do well if given an test on algorithms b) have many happy customers that would vouch for me. In 2013 I don't need to know how to traverse through a linked list to write web software that pleases clients. The thing about needing to know pointers and algorithms to have a successful career in programming is wrong. The closest thing to algorithms I need to know is that I need indexes in my database if the queries get slow. I would argue most developers need to learn marketing more than how to program a fibonacci sequence using recursion.

<comment><USER3> "That's just like...aa.. your opinion man." - The Big Lebowski

Spoiler: every set of instructions you code is an algorithm. An algorithm is not something magical, it's just a series of steps that lead you to a result.

Knowing different algorithms and knowing which one is better for you allows you to create the best solution for a problem. For example, having to display a sorted list of contacts or a list of geographic locations can be achieved in many ways. Depending on what algorithm you use for sorting that list you can have a result in 1 second or 2 hours. Says that you can be a programmer without the use of algorithms or pointers is like saying you can be a chef without knowing how to cut onions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My two cents:

I think it's because understanding recursion involves a good understanding of a bunch of stuff. You have to know about the different scopes of variables (global, local), how the variables are stored, how does a stack work, etc.

It also challenges you to understand why it's not a good idea to use recursion and to find an iterative solution to your problem.

Most interviewers like to cover more areas with one question.

</comment><comment><USER4> I rather dislike recursion, I find it to be the remedial hammer of software development. Sure there are some use cases, but most problems are solvable in a more efficient manner, such as the use of formulas. Even if a formula is not viable, there are other methods that produce better maintainable code. I label recursion as 'use as a last resort'.

<comment><USER5> I think that everyone felt really smart the first time they "got" recursion. Then that feeling has followed them around but switched position assuming that someone isn't smart UNLESS they get recursion. I think recursion is a really clever way to solve a select few problems but I hate cleverness most of the time when I see it in code. Recursion is a neat concept but IMO with the multitude of relevant questions that could be asked of a developer it should be further down on most interviewers lists.</comment></comment>


Amazon S3 now allows multi-object delete - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/12/amazon-s3-multi-object-deletion.html <comment><USER2> Ok, I can't help but wonder... ;P

So, I use S3. A lot. Only, I don't store many bytes: I just store lots of objects... enough that I have in the past estimated that I owned >1% of all objects on S3.

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2154792> <\- here I describe how I had been making a billion PUTs per month when Amazon comes out and claims they only have <300 billion objects stored in S3.)

However, in the last few days? I've binged, and this week I'm purging. I've been doing as many as 10 million (and never less than 4 million) deletes per hour for /days/.

Why? One of the things I use S3 for (storing SHSH data, a giant man-in-the- middle attack against Apple's dysfunctional iPhone software protection systems) was simply wasting space. :(

(Specifically, I realized that I had, due to some debugging code I never really realized was for debugging only and thereby never got around to deleting, had been storing every single request in and out to the service throughout its history in XML form, in addition to the tightly encoded binary.)

The thing to realize here: DELETE requests are free. PUT/LIST requests are $0.01/1k, GET/HEAD are $0.01/10k, but DELETE requests are not billed by Amazon at all; even the bandwidth for them "won't count" if they are made from EC2 (which I'm doing).

However, one can only imagine that deleting a billion objects in a few days with a billion separate tiny requests to Amazon is causing someone, somewhere, a bad week (and possibly even a ton of meetings). :(

(Which, honestly, I feel sorry about, but my business isn't even that profitable, so I've been having to figure out ways to cut costs, and this useless data is apparently costing me nearly $1k a month.)

Well, with all of this in mind, and now after almost a week of "the onslaught" (and even myself wondering multiple times what this many requests must be doing to their stats), Amazon conveniently announces a new API feature that lets me decrease the number of separate requests I'm making to their servers by a thousand times over...

...really, I cannot help but wonder ;P.

<comment><USER3> Nah, this has been in the works for a few months. I deleted 160 million objects in the spring, which was enough for me to get a phone call from an Amazon product manager. He asked if there was anything they could do to help the deletes go smoothly, and outlined this feature way back then.

<comment><USER2> Did you, in fact, run into any serious problems with those deletes? (I now have a range of key space that I seem to have "damaged": if I do a LIST with prefix "requests_/" I now deterministically get an InternalError.)

Seriously, though, this new multi-delete is EPIC ;P. I am now deleting objects at an rate of over 4 million per minute! (Although, as these are POSTs, I wonder if these now cost me money; that said, it likely isn't going to much.)

(This is fast enough that I'm now "cleaning house" much more thoroughly than before: going through some of those "database buckets" I have and deleting obsolete indexes.)

<comment><USER4> Can you file a bug or email me (jbarr at amazon.com) so that we can investigate this issue for you?

<comment><USER2> (Done.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's about damm time. This would've been nice a week ago when I deleted 140K items from a bucket that were moved elsewhere. The deletes took _14 hours_.

<comment><USER2> The secret was to do the delete operations in parallel; I've been running anywhere between 64 and 128 LIST->*DELETE processes at any given moment; was often able to sustain 10m DELETE operations per hour. This new feature is still much faster, of course ;P.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> CloudBerry Explorer has already been updated to support this. A good way to lower my $0.60 worth of usage.</comment>


Ask HN: What would happen if an AWS data center was suddenly wiped out? - <AUTHOR> For example, North Korea nukes North Virginia. I'm wondering how AWS currently backs ups data in regions... and with a scenario like that, how would it play out for the huge amount of East coast customers? <comment><USER2> Well, you should probably ask AWS, as they are the only ones that can tell you for sure.

Aside from that, us-east-1 is the most critical region to loose for AWS as some services run solely there. So if AWS looses us-east-1 I expect some services not to function anymore globally, at least for a while. In contrast if they loose one of their more recent regions, let's say eu-central-1, I expect all other regions to continue to run as usual.

Another problem with loosing us-east-1 is that it's also the most frequented AWS region. So lot's of customers would shift their workloads to other AWS regions. While that could cause some stability problem due to unexpected spikes in usage they'd be probably just temporary. What's more relevent is when you look at available resources. Let's take EC2 as an example. I'm pretty certain that AWS doesn't have enough spare capacity in other regions than us- east-1 to satisfy all customers in case us-east-1 is suddenly not available anymore. And there starts the interesting part. For EC2 it's simple: customers with reserved instances first. For all other service it's probably: Most important customers first. So if you happen to be a not so important customer for AWS you might end up not able to run your infrastructure, simply because AWS has no capacity left to satisfy all customers. If in general all AWS regions would be equally utilized that probably wouldn't be a problem at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be quite the trick to take out multiple AZs, much less all of them in a single region. They're spread out within the region in virtually all cases.

Contrary to popular myth, nukes don't have a 30 mile blast radius.</comment>


Errors with npmjs.com affecting multiple parts of the service - <AUTHOR> https://status.npmjs.org/incidents/12mtljkc0vdv <comment><AUTHOR> Stumbled upon this whilst trying to publish an update to a theme I maintain:

      npm ERR! code E404</comment>


Early Developer Access: Twilio International Outbound Calling - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twilio.com/2009/08/get-early-developer-access-to-twilio-international-outbound.html

<comment><USER2> this is cool...national calls are easy enough, I only use internet calling for international.</comment>


Chrome Gains, Firefox Holds, IE keeps dropping - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/chrome-gaining-market-share-firefox-holding-steady/64047/

<comment><USER2> I don't know if I agree with his assertion that Firefox users are jumping to Chrome and IE users are jumping to to Firefox. Google does some pretty aggressive advertising for Chrome. I think the average IE user is more likely to discover Chrome by using Google than to be convinced to use Firefox.</comment>


DEAF – Defense Enabling and Assisting Framework - <AUTHOR> http://freedomoutpost.com/this-is-a-game-changer-for-digital-privacy-and-security/ <comment><AUTHOR> I met one of the people behind DEAF moments ago in a coffeeshop. It seems like an impressive yet hushed technology. Anyone know anything about it?</comment>


The Problem: Bloggers are left without comments - <AUTHOR>

You are a content publisher (a blogger) and not enough people take the time to comment. It is a problem that every website faces. What percentage of readers actually comment? Closer to 5% than anything else I'd imagine.
Isn't it time to give readers a tool that allows them to interact with bloggers in less time but just as efficient? I don't want to comment with my social media account, and I am not alone.
Why not use Feedweb. Check out the awesome plugin that is currently being developed and receiving new features on a weekly basis. check out http://blog.feedweb.net <comment><USER2> Have you done any usability testing? If I had not been told I could vote if I mouseovered, I doubt I would have guessed.</comment>