API providing threat analysis of any given IP address - <AUTHOR> https://fraudguard.io/ <comment><USER2> I operate two non-exit tor relays. They have both return risk_level: 4 with the "threat" being "tor_tracker". What threat is posed by a non-exit tor relay? What does the "tracker" part of "tor_tracker" mean?

<comment><USER3> Exit node: [https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/463DC28452F676B7A6597A...](https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/463DC28452F676B7A6597ACA6DF7C6934F598806) [https://fraudguard.io/?ip=22.214.171.124](https://fraudguard.io/?ip=220.127.116.11)

Non-exit node: [https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/EF4BD6E8E5817690B79C67...](https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/EF4BD6E8E5817690B79C6760898C7EFCCB6C2D30) [https://fraudguard.io/?ip=22.214.171.124](https://fraudguard.io/?ip=22.214.171.124)

It does not seem to make a distinction between exit and relay nodes, they are both deemed "tor_tracker".

<comment><USER4> A number of large vendors like Barracuda and Tipping Point do this. A friend of mine one time found that they were unable to log in to pay their TV bill a few days after setting up a relay node. After he made enough noise about this, their engineers investigated, and sure enough, Tipping Point flags a relay node as suspicious for no good reason, and the IPS was blocking his traffic.

On a side note, companies _really don 't like to deal with people who can't access their site_. Being told over and over "It's your ISP", even when on a conference call with said ISP (and nevermind how difficult it was to get _that_ set up with someone who understands the problem) was infuriating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of this data is available for free download via an organization called FireHOL. See [http://iplists.firehol.org](http://iplists.firehol.org)

It's not clear what this adds on top of FireHOL.

</comment><comment><USER6> If the creators are on HN, curious to know what sets this apart from other threat intel services like IBM X-Force, ThreatConnect, VirusTotal, Carbon Black, etc.

<comment><USER7> I'm Ryan, one of three devs that built FraudGuard.io. The answer is basically price. We do EVERYTHING ourselves and try to keep price extremely fair. We have plans that start at $10 /month and we also have a small free-for-life plan too.

Thats the best answer. The secondary part is we want a simple way for any dev off the street to integrate with api.fraudguard.io in 5 minutes. Imagine you are a small company and you want to limit back office access to you CMS to only IPs outside of Germany. That takes just a couple minutes. Or you want to allow back office access to you CMS from everywhere but you want to decrease the session timeout to only 30 minutes if the originating IP is a tor node or public proxy, etc.

We just got out of beta (literally last night) but so far thats the majority of use cases that we've seen so far.

<comment><USER8> Hey Ryan, I applaud the free tier and think it's important, but I'd caution that it can be awfully hard to make a business-sustaining revenue on $10/mo. I think it's smart to start low and compete on price, but I think there's value here, it's why there are larger competitors in the space, and if you can climb that value chain and raise prices along the way you will be better off for it.

From a merchandising POV, you could consider moving up-market by building new more powerful features and giving them only to the $25 plan. Then, rename the plans to match who you expect to buy them. People identify with who they are more naturally than they do a number of requests per month.

Also, congrats on shipping.

Edit: Also, pre-fill the form with the visitors own IP -- or better yet just display the results?

<comment><USER7> Ya this is really great info. Thanks for the feedback. We are still looking at pricing as this is only day one but we're on it.

This one I'm moving up the list - I like the idea "better yet just display the results of visitors IP"

<comment><USER9> ipinfo.io do this well

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like this, but I have to tell you what I've been looking for in one of these services for forever.

I help develop a fairly popular webgame. One of our biggest headaches is people who are evading bans by using VPNs (public or not), VPSes, etc. Although we've outright blocked some large chunks of IPs (AWS, for instance), I've never seen a good service that identifies those specific blocks. Sometimes I go manually digging in the case of serious ban evaders, looking up the owners of specific IP blocks, but boy it'd be convenient if there was a service out there that did that.

<comment><USER11> > One of our biggest headaches is people who are evading bans by using VPNs > (public or not), VPSes, etc. Although we've outright blocked some large > chunks of IPs (AWS, for instance)

Please don't do this. It's perfectly legitimate to route one's traffic through other nodes one owns.

Please consider other ways of dealing with banned players — perhaps make creating an account slow and/or costly.

<comment><USER10> We've examined all the options. We already use browser fingerprinting, and that takes care of a good percentage of it, but for the truly committed there are really only two options: Blocking all VPNs, or using supercookies. I'm actually a bigger fan of the supercookie solution, but one of the other developers is staunchly against that. It's an ongoing battle.

The problem with the slow/costly account thing is that one of the big draws of our game is that there's no registration necessary. You can jump in a game instantly by pressing 'Play Now', and you just get named 'Some Ball 1/2/3/4/etc' and tossed with the registered players.

<comment><USER12> What do the evil Some Balls do that you want to avoid? I've never noticed an bad behaviour tbh (other than just being not very good).

Tagpro is awesome btw.

<comment><USER10> Mostly really nasty chat and working against own team. You don't see too much of it nowadays as we're very proactive about that, and have blocked all the major slurs from being typable.

Always glad to find a player in the wild! We're working hard on Next and hope to have the beta open soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Where do you get your data for botnet compromised IPs?

</comment><comment><USER14> "Our Team of Engineers track public IPs across a wide scope of popular botnet networks."

How do you track botnets (along with the other collection you do) with a team of three? How many botnets are being tracked and which malware families? This is an especially dubious claim when coupled with another statement you made: "We do not rely on external sources at this time".

<comment><USER15> I bet he is using maltrail and firehol.

<comment><USER7> We do use Maltrail along with a whole lot else. You don't have experience with it perhaps? Are you currently employed or angry at your employer?

<comment><USER15> :-) I built my own API and it is automatically updated every 2 hours. I'm using threatminer to do cross-validation on sampled values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just had fed a bunch of IPs from one of my server's auth.log and got the same:

      "country": "China",
      "threat": "unknown",
      "risk_level": "1"

I'm not surprised but with increasing China's activity on the scene we have to do something with it.

</comment><comment><USER17> I plugged in a few IPs from stopforumspam.com and they all had the same "risk level" as my own IP: 1.

<comment><USER7> I'm Ryan, one of three devs that built FraudGuard.io. Honestly we have a lot more work to do specifically in spam. With that being said, spam is the least requested collector so far by our users. Just to share in beta we asked some of our heavy users and about 90% of our users preferred our focus was on honeypot collection, spam was less than 2%.

So heres how it works now. We do not rely on external sources at this time. The reason why, because our traffic is so high that no external source at least that we've found will serve our users traffic.

For example stopforumspam.com limits API requests to 20,000 per day. I haven't checked our stats today but during our beta (which ended yesterday) we served more than 20,000 API requests per hour. So even with huge cache durations set its very hard to rely on outside sources so instead we run all our own spam collectors, using our own domains, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Correction, API providing:

502 Bad Gateway

nginx/1.8.1

<comment><USER19> Same here. And [https://www.fraudguard.io/](https://www.fraudguard.io/) uses the wrong SSL certificate (that of analytics.crynix.com)

<comment><USER20> Probably the site was taken down by removing the vhost config. So the domain is getting the default vhost and its certificate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have a couple of questions:

\- Why can there be only one risk type per IP? What if an IP is a honeypot and botnet. It would make sense to me to have a list of threats or a different value for each.

\- Why is the threat level a string? Is it meant to be compared for equality only?

Also your docs need a lot of work. I would like to know specifically what threat types there are currently, what their slug is and what specifically they mean.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the feedback, completely agreed. We are redoing the entire docs page to give more info on all responses plus some other generic stuff/updates.

Regarding only one risk type per IP. We set the severity to the max level logged in our system. If it's a 3, 4 and 5 based of attack type, frequency of attack, method of collection, etc it'll be the highest severity logged. We might look at integrating this differently in v2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tried putting in quite a few IP addresses from /var/log/apache/access.log that have been trying to hit up "wp-config.php" and "phpmyadmin" and whatnot. All of them came back as risk_level 1.

<comment><USER7> There are a lot of IPs out there. Unlike Pokemon we can't catch them all. It varies but we run less than 50 honeypot nodes in 15 different countries (because I pay for them out of the kindness of my heart each month as we are not yet profitable) right now that would collect this kind of data. Our goal is if we get more people to signup we will add more nodes. Obviously more nodes = more data.

<comment><USER23> Why not price a little higher, lower it when you get profits?

<comment><USER7> We never considered it I guess. Like someone else already mentioned there are other options out there but their prices are insanely ridiculous. Starting at $10 /month the three of us devs/creators feel like a competitive price will keep big and small customers happy hopefully long-term.

<comment><USER24> Look up articles on pricing plans. $10 is really low and makes your product seem less valuable (if it's so good why are you almost giving it away?). Cheap and free customers are often not worth the headache. You probably want the entry-level plan to be at least $39, $49 or so. Maybe more. Offer a free trial, and let that be enough for the cheap customers.

I don't think there are 100s, let alone 1000s, of low-maint customers that are thinking "hmm, this abuse issue is really a problem on my site, consuming at least an hour a month of my time, but I can't afford $49 to fix it".

Think about it, you're asking for $25 for a million checks. Typically that'll be sign-ups or some sort of interaction. So their volume is probably what, 10-50x times that. Even if they used your API for checking before anon comments, that means they're getting millions of pageviews/visits per month. If such a site can't afford a, I dunno, $199 plan, maybe they aren't worth dealing with.

If you really think you need a charity-level plan, perhaps include a contact link for "open source and educational projects".

Someone will probably point out some wildly successful freemium model. Suppose that's possible too. But even then you'll want to make a large gap between free and premium. No one wants to deal with $10/month business customers.

<comment><USER25> You know, I remember some old Tom & Jerry cartoon where an older mouse was explaining capitalism. How a factory that sells great volumes is able to reduce its margins and make even more total profit. Something like that.

So... what is wrong with a "low" price?

Must pricing nowadays be all game-theory where you want to extract the maximum amount without any regard for underlying value or actual costs?

It's almost a meme on HN: "you are asking too little!" "Raise your prices, double your consulting rate!" "Businesses don't even notice bills under $4999!"

I'm from Romania where my "business" cell phone (with 1GB internet and basically unlimited calls) is costing me $7/month. My build server on AWS used to cost me $25/month. Nowadays I use my own machines so I only pay for some leftover storage and I get a whooping $1.50/month bill on my card. I pay $39/month for accounting.

No matter how great a startup believes their thing is, a business has to cover a lot of expenses and 100 super-duper-products to purchase do add up. At some point it might even make sense to say: yes, I'll have an employee waste 1 hour each month on this problem instead of adding another vendor/product/contract to the list.

<comment><USER24> 1 million checks a month. If the problem rate is even 1%, that's 10,000 "problems" that need to be resolved. At 1/minute, that's a full-time person on the job! If that's not worth $$$$, the business isn't in the target audience.

And for people using this for fraud, it's gonna take more than a minute, and there might be even more damage. For instance, avoiding chargebacks on 0.1% would more than pay for itself. And that's a good selling point: "Our product will save you $x% a month". It makes it a no-brainer, instant ROI.

So getting, say, $995 vs $25 means he has to find 40x less customers! He can afford to spend a bit on sales. It's a meme on HN because it's true and us engineers have a terrible habit of repeatedly undervaluing things.

He could even offer a "pre-launch" plan if he's worried about startups not wanting to rack up bills before actually having customers. That way they can maintain price plan integrity.

Overall I feel HN/engineers (myself included; I have to force myself here) worry too much about edge cases and keep thinking somehow these cases will make a serious business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> more-entropy Money from nothing project. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER26> bad cert?

<comment><USER7> Can you send a screenshot to email@example.com and I'll take a look now?</comment></comment>


US Supreme Court upholds state power to enforce compulsory vaccination (1905) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts <comment><USER2> Interesting line drawn by the ruling. The government can enforce consequences but not forcibly vaccinate.

>Justice John Marshall Harlan delivered the decision for a 7-2 majority. He rejected Jacobson's claim that the Fourteenth Amendment gave him the right to refuse vaccination. Harlan deemed that the Massachusetts state punishment of a fine or imprisonment on those who refused vaccines was acceptable, but those individuals could not be forcibly vaccinated.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you can show you have the antibody response, you might be able to argue that you've had the vaccination.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd wager that depends on how the law is written. The court may be unwilling to make scientific conclusions, unless the law is somehow vague on the matter. IOW, if the law states, "every one shall receive the following vaccination," I doubt a court would allow the presence of antibodies to preclude enforcement of such a law.

<comment><USER3> How would they deal with someone who would have a deathly allergic reaction to the vaccine?

<comment><AUTHOR> The cynic in me says they would find that risking the death from the vaccine outweighs the risk of spreading the virus, even where that risk is 100%.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: When to clock in, when to clock out? - <AUTHOR>

I am in the wonderful position of setting my own hours. My boss likes me to work a certain minimum amount (because, so he says, his job is to make me rich), but the main concern is that the work gets done and when I do it is completely up to me.<p>However, I am often puzzled over just what and how much time I should count as "doing work", particularly when so much of creative professions like programming is just thinking about the problem. At one extreme, I'd only count the time that I'm actually typing or in meetings; at the other, I'd say "I'm on the clock if I'm even thinking about a client." Obviously, neither one is a very good idea, so how do you know where to draw the line? <comment><USER2> IMO you should count the time you would want an employee you were paying to count. If you are giving 100% of your focus to thinking about solving a problem for a client, you should count it. If you know you're not giving it the work the attention it needs, you shouldn't count it.</comment>


Boeing astronaut capsule for NASA stalls in orbit - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50855395 <comment><USER2> Can this be merged with the existing discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21843988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21843988)?

<comment><USER3> Yes, done now.</comment></comment>


Options for moving a C# application off of Windows? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to port a C# application into a Linux environment.  I can't find any success stories of businesses moving large applications to run on .NET Core so I'm wondering if it's not straight forward. <comment><USER2> We need more information on what dependencies your application has. Is it Silverlight? What does it target?

Our company has been moving all new stuff to .NET Core 2.1 and it has been relatively painless. We don't use things like WCF or Silverlight, however, just plain old C/F# classes that play nice with .NET Standard (the cross between full Framework and Core)</comment>


Ask HN: Will the Price of Bitcoins and Alts Skyrocket Again? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,<p>I miss the days of $1k BTC & $15 LTC. I'm here wondering out loud if people think there'll be another rally like Thanksgiving a couple years ago. What do you think might cause another bull run? Or do you expect the bear conditions to continue? <comment><USER2> I don't know about a rally.

But there is a specific maximum number of bitcoins. At the same time, they are becoming more accepted by traditional merchants. Perhaps the day will come when everyone uses bitcoin.

Given that, I have no doubt that the value of one bitcoin will steadily increase.

We are a long way from that maximum number, but my understanding is that it is getting harder and harder to mine each coin as time goes by. That is, if you mine one coin today, it will be somewhat more difficult for me to mine another coin tomorrow.

If that's really the case, then the value of bitcoin should grow quite a lot faster, as well as long before we reach the maximum number of coins.

</comment><comment><USER3> I doubt it.

The reason BTC rallied to $1000 was that people speculated that it was undervalued, so it'd keep going up, which made them believe there was profit in it at anything below the possible future value. That speculation was largely due to it being such an unknown quantity. BTC, and cryptocurrency in general, has too many people looking at it for that to happen again, at least in the spectacular way it happened before.</comment>


2007 In Numbers: The Year AOL Killed Netscape's Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/23/2007-in-numbers-the-year-aol-killed-netscapes-traffic/ <comment><USER2> Sad to see Netscape rapidly decline. Not surprising really, with AOL's direction, and their firings.

Anyone blaming comscore numbers should know that AOL/netscape make sure everything is comscore compliant.

<comment><USER3> This seems a clear case of management and the BOD not understanding the industry. I can't even imagine how much in branding AOL screwed up. I'm amazed they still retain the AOL front without having a serious play in the market. It seems like the competent fled. One expects a company the size of AOL to have competent people running the company. If you still own any AOL or work there, I would caution your future involvement.</comment></comment>


PostgreSQL 10.2 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1829/ <comment><USER2> > Please note that PostgreSQL changed its versioning scheme with the release > of version 10.0, so updating to version 10.2 from 10.0 or 10.1 is considered > a minor update.

While this looks like an important update, note that it's not a new feature release.

<comment><USER3> Hmm I'm a bit confused. Why did they decide to do this ?

<comment><USER4> Largely because the previous version numbering was sometimes confusing for the opposite reason: Postgres "major" releases were sometimes interpreted as point releases. For example, 9.1 to 9.2 was major version jump. While that was understood by those who already understood the versioning scheme, it was often confusing to those outside the community.

Josh Berkus discusses this here:

[http://www.databasesoup.com/2016/05/changing-postgresql- vers...](http://www.databasesoup.com/2016/05/changing-postgresql-version- numbering.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Spinlock fixes and support for Motorola 68K and 88K architectures

I'm astounded that they support those architectures

<comment><USER6> > I'm astounded that they support those architectures

I work on PG, and I'm regularly astounded too...

As long as the compilers are new enough, the burden isn't too high though. Previously it prevented us from using atomics for some concurrency optimized things, but now we've an atomics implementation that, at compile time, falls back to a spinlock backed atomics implementation. Slightly complicated by the fact that we don't even have a hard dep on a spinlock implementation, falling back to semaphores :)

Ah. Fun.

But seriously, the thing that hurts more is that we only require a C89 compiler :/

<comment><USER7> > But seriously, the thing that hurts more is that we only require a C89 > compiler :/

Indeed. For a glimpse for the non-PG-hackers (like me), there's an ongoing attempt discussed in the PG-hackers mailing list to use stdbool.h.

<comment><USER8> That can be tricky because you can't emulate the semantics of the C99 bool type.

In C99

      (bool)256 == 1

but on systems which emulate bool with, e.g., an 8-bit unsigned char then

      (bool)256 == 0

<comment><USER9> Another problem is that the bool provided by stdbool.h is 4 bytes on some platforms, which breaks PostgreSQL all over the place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the release notes: >Fix sample INSTR() functions used to help transition from Oracle(r) PL/SQL to PostgreSQL PL/pgSQL to correctly match Oracle functional behavior

TIL PL/pgSQL exists so I googled it. In the page for porting from Oracle PL/SQL:

>Instead of packages, use schemas to organize your functions into groups.

Does anyone know if there are plans to introduce packages in Postgres? Doesn't putting function in different schemas mean you have to grant select/update permissions to the schemas that talk to other schemas?

*edit:formatting

<comment><USER7> > Doesn't putting function in different schemas mean you have to grant > select/update permissions to the schemas that talk to other schemas?

In Pg, schemas don't talk to schemas. When a function is run, it runs with the privilege level of either the user that called it, or the user that defined it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to see updated versions of PL/v8 ship. The situation with building v8 is so bad ( [https://github.com/plv8/plv8/issues/251#issuecomment-3645410...](https://github.com/plv8/plv8/issues/251#issuecomment-364541059) ), that almost the entire cloud infrastructure (AWS, Heroku, Docker) is stuck with an ancient version of PL/v8.

<comment><USER12> The solution is to fire whoever convinced you that javascript belongs in your database.

<comment><USER11> Pl/v8 is at least safer than PL/Python due to being properly sandboxed ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's a shame that Postgres 10 still ships with the abomination that is pgAdmin 4. You don't have a lot of other choices either (the pgAdmin 3 LTS version still throws error left and right when connection to a postgres 10 DB)

<comment><USER4> This is package specific. pgAdmin is a separate project. There are other tools out there (there is a recent Show HN thread for a macOS client and the comments include other tools), though to be honest I use psql almost exclusively, so I'm not one to ask for recommendations.</comment></comment>


A Scheme bookshelf - b-man http://programming-musings.org/2007/01/31/a-scheme-bookshelf/

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. I have most of those books, save for a few. All I have to do now is read them completely :)

How good is "Lisp in Small Pieces"? I might get that one next.

<comment><USER2> How good is "Lisp in Small Pieces"?

It is very good in that it contains a wealth of information on all aspects of implementing a lisp interpreter/compiler. It is just a little bit baroque in style, but I suspect this is because it has been translated from French to English. Overall, great book.

( My copy is falling apart. I heard some rumours there was going to be a new edition but I can't find any supporting evidence online.)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good to hear. On the author's website, he says the new edition bears the new name "Principes d'implantation de Scheme et Lisp". Looks like it hasn't been translated to English yet, unfortunately. Either way, the older edition looks like it's worth it. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> (Yes, it really is "implantation", not "implementation"; the word apparently means both "setting up" (think "planting") and "implanting". Looking through the sample first chapter, I think "implantation" is probably the standard French equivalent of "implementation"; can someone who knows French better than I do confirm or correct this?)

<comment><USER4> Implementation in french is usually "Mise en Oeuvre", "Mise en place", "Application" or "Exécution" depending on the context.

In this example, implantation is probably more directly translated to "layout".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Idea Sunday - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Buy the domain idea-sunday.com and set up a site where people can post new ideas only on Sundays while all the other days are devoted to posting code, constructive discussions and other stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> A well constructed laptop with good processor and lots of RAM (16gb) that has a great trackpad and is sub 800 euro! (Sorry - just venting)

</comment><comment><USER3> A device that is essentially a smartphone when used on it's own and a PC when it is connected with a monitor and wireless keyboard

</comment><comment><USER4> Idea Sunday was discontinued by the mods IIRC.</comment>


Origins of the myth of dopamine as the 'pleasure chemical' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17169446/dopamine-pleasure-chemical-neuroscience-reward-motivation <comment><USER2> Dopamine is the compulsion chemical, not the pleasure chemical. It turns thoughts into beliefs into actions. This is why people who take too many dopamine recreational drugs who get leaky dopaminE vesicles tend to easily believe any thought that occurs to them and do all kinds of psychotic things. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick had some great portrayals of what this looks like.

Opioid are the pleasure chemicals and that's why exogenous opioids destroy people. There's nothing that an opioid high can't fix, because that's literally how the brain is wired. Once the opioid receptors are activated, the brain is literally done trying to do anything else because the ultimate aim, at least the way the brain is wired, has been acheived.

<comment><USER3> Psychologically, this is a gross oversimplification and seing it this way generally does not help people.

It implies no choice, it implies that your life is controlled by chemicals.

And yet this theory cannot answer some simple questions, like, why there are people who actually get off opioids? How is it possible, if opioid is the "ultimate goal" of the brain and it "literally done trying to do anything", how does anyone ever get off it?

The brain and especially the mind is much more complex and deep than something that is controlled solely by some chemical. Chemical is what the brain uses. Chemicals do not use the brain.

<comment><USER4> > It implies no choice, it implies that your life is controlled by chemicals.

This implication would be correct. Hormones and other chemical messengers heavily influence brain "states" such as moods. The brain learns to make decisions that maintain homeostasis through the development of somatic markers, which represent body states that are composed of nerve and chemical activity. Even nerve impulses themselves are initiated by chemicals. And of course the structure of your brain and body are dictated by, you guessed it, chemicals. (Specifically deoxyribonucleic acid.)

"Choice" is a powerful illusion driven by our hypercompetent rationalizing system, whose purpose is to hide our true intentions in order to help us better operate in a social world. In the end, we are just elaborate stimulus- response systems, that is unless you believe in a "soul" or pseudoscientific quantum magic.

Edit: to more directly address your point about overcoming addiction. The brain's reward and drive systems are indeed very complex, and I do think that the suggestion of an "ultimate" goal is a gross oversimplification. On the other hand, if someone were able to maintain a permanent high (with no need to re-dose, find more drugs, find money to pay for drugs, etc), then perhaps it would indeed be impossible for them to overcome their addiction. From the addict's perspective, part of the problem with getting high is that the inevitable "low" may be worse, especially when tolerance and dependence kick in, followed by withdrawal.

<comment><USER5> > Choice" is a powerful illusion driven by our hypercompetent rationalizing > system, whose purpose is to hide our true intentions in order to help us > better operate in a social world. In the end, we are just elaborate > stimulus-response systems, that is unless you believe in a "soul" or > pseudoscientific quantum magic.

You are wording things in a derogatory way. If you said "unless you believe the world is rooted in subjective experience, or is non-deterministic", your argument would lose its strength (which is rooted in shaming), because there are many great thinkers and arguments along those lines.

<comment><USER6> Not that I agree with the GP, but non-determinism doesn't imply free will in the usual strong sense of the phrase (e.g. that there is some intrinsic notion that humans can directly dictate their own actions). Non-determinism (as in QM non-determinism) still has deterministic _evolution_ , since specifying the wave-function at any one point in time is enough to specify it for all of time via evolution by the Schrödinger equation.

So, this notion would require something stronger than QM non-determinism, or a different definition of free will.

<comment><USER3> > specifying the wave-function at any one point in time is enough to specify > it for all of time via evolution by the Schrödinger equation.

Scientifically this is not very correct when you consider the chaos theory, which has been widely accepted by physicists for many decades now.

The problem is in practical application (and we live in a practical world, right?). The thing is that in theory, yes you can have some equation or elaborate mathematical model about the world and calculate everything. But once you start doing it, you immediately will see that it is impossible to calculate anything to such precision that this would work, the world is so big and complex that to calculate an X amount of world into the future, you would need Y (>X) amount of world to host those calcaultions. This is only the tip of the iceberg of why that is impossible.

So in practice, it is impossible to "specify it for all of time".

This is not just some logical trick, this is an important difference.

It's the same principle that applies in the Turtle-Achilles paradox ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes)).

In the perfect logical world of perfect science and nice beautiful theories and equations - Achilles can never possibly reach the turtle. And yet in the physical reality that we live in it's obvious to anyone (and is truthful) that Achilles will easily reach and overrun the turtle.

On a related note, what is your definition of free will? People with similar SamHarris-esque arguments seem so happy that they have proven that there is no "free will", and yet it seems they have a difficult time defining what it is they have proven? Isn't this a problem if they are trying to be scientific? Would a perfect scientist ever entertain such vague concepts?

"intrinsic notion that humans can directly dictate their own actions" is very vague. Specifically, I can't see any place where even perfect determinism would conflict with this notion: a human is a very complicated deterministic neural network, that analyses the world and does some actions. This whole network processes information, and makes decisions based on that information. Based on that information it does directly dictate it's own actions. Of course those actions are going to be in part based on external information, but in part on the structure and form and function of the network itself. You're not going to find any single neuron that decides everything, but it's very clear that the whole network decides things.

Do you have a disdain for the fact that actions are being based on external stimulus? That this somehow is a problem for free will existing? But of course we would want them being based on external stimulus, that surely must be a part of being sentient? Reacting to something that happens in the world, not just blindly "choosing" random things for the sake of choosing?

And of course "based on external stimuli" \- does not mean that the way it's going to react to them it "pre-determined" by something. The network can choose to react to stimuli from right now, or from yesterday, or from some other part of memory, or even from it's own thoughts or definitions. Those are also stimuli. It's obvious to any sentient human that sometimes we do react and act based on such things, not simply on currently active external stimuli.

<comment><USER6> I'm... not really sure what argument is being presented here. There's some weird accusations of vagueness, yet I see no proposition for a definition of free will here (and in the original comment, there was never attempt to provide one, since it had little to do with the content of the comment as a response to a tiny claim made in a sentence or so), and I just see a lot of random attacks against a position I don't even hold ("People with similar SamHarris-esque arguments seem so happy that they have proven that there is no "free will"", "Do you have a disdain for the fact that actions are being based on external stimulus?" the latter of which I have no idea if I even understand).

So what's the point? If you'd like to reason with me, at least give me a starting point, rather than accusing a comment I wrote in less than a minute of not being "scientific" because it doesn't define all of the terms it makes use of; even if the statement within it is correct with most definitions, discarding chaos theory and 'practicality' issues (which the statement above is totally unconcerned with).

<comment><USER3> Well I'm sorry you feel attacked.

The arguments (even though written in a quite short form in your post) are indicative of a much bigger and broader discussion taking place right now in the intellectual/philosophical world. This gives people the ability to infer a lot of information from even small statements, because the exact forms and phrases that you use are used in exact same manner by other people who have gone much deeper into this discussion and have a lot of thoughts about these things.

Sometimes on the internet one has to infer, because otherwise you would need every participant to first write a 100pages essay of all of their thoughts about the matter, before anything can be reliably responded to them without inferring.

In this case it seems you don't wish to have a well structured and formulated position with deeply going implications into this matter, which I inferred from your post. I guess sometimes inferring just backfires.

Coming back to having some kind of grounded argument, I would say that

> Non-determinism (as in QM non-determinism) still has deterministic > evolution, since specifying the wave-function at any one point in time is > enough to specify it for all of time via evolution by the Schrödinger > equation.

is not really the case. Specifying anything in this matter (including evolution) works in theory and not in practice. There is no physically viable way to do this. Since science deals with physical reality first and foremost (math does not, but we talk about physics and the nature of reality, right?) - then scientifically that statement does not make a lot of sense. It is in fact not enough to specify the wave-function in such a way as to specify it for all time via evolution. This is the essence of Turtle-Achilles paradox and more prominently Chaos Theory, which has been an established paradigm of science for many decades now.

You write that "discarding chaos theory the statement is correct". Well, yes perhaps. It's about the same as to say "discarding Einstein's relativity, one could easily travel faster than the speed of light". Chaos theory describes the real world, better in this regards than other theories we have. It's not enough to just discard it: you will end up with faulty reasoning...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anyone is interested more in the latest science of teasing apart the neural substraits of wanting and liking I highly recommend taking a look at the review papers written over at Berridge lab, [http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/resear...](http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/research/affectiveneuroscience.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> The new popular oversimplifications tend to be really patronizing to the previous ones

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there some kind of war between The Verge and Business Insider? The article mentions 3 times that Business Insider mistakenly called dopamine the pleasure chemical just in the intro.

<comment><USER10> Nah it's just verge being a crappy example of journalism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's the purpose of a distinct pleasure chemical and a "compulsion" chemical, evolutionarily? Wouldn't a pleasurable response already compel you to repeat the action?

<comment><USER12> I can't see any way of defining pleasure, in an objective way, without it being part of motivation. "Reinforce the recently followed decision paths" sort of thing.

<comment><USER11> Then it's semantics, if that's true, and dopamine may as well be "pleasure". For what it's worth the expert's explanation of how cocaine "compels" you to do work didn't sound intuitive. The common understanding is that it alleviates your brain's need for "pleasure" so you can focus on long term goals instead of short term goals (distractions). It's intuitive because it's analogous to satisfying one's pressing immediate needs so that one can do other higher level stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >dopamine cells

The quality of the article is horrifyingly low</comment>


Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C400693880002574CE00371FE1.html?ref=technology

<comment><USER2> Linux vs. Solaris -

Linux: Seg-fault in the gcc toolchain. After casting about for several days, we couldn't even find someone willing to take our money to fix it. Digging into the code (ld), it's so cryptic it may as well be written in undocumented assembler. Responses from mailing lists and forums: "Go back to Windows" "Restructure your project to avoid that problem" "Why are you complaining, fix it yourself, it's open source" etc. We couldn't submit a test case, because it would have required making public a lot of code containing trade secrets.

Solaris: Seg-fault in the Solaris compiler toolchain. We called Sun, and were talking directly to dev tools engineers within minutes. They put the case on 24 hour support and had a patch for us to test a day later. We could submit a reproducible case because Sun accepted the code under NDA.

Not the kind of thing that shows up in feature bullet point comparisons, but when you have 30 developers held up on one side and the clients need the code to calculate their bid for an eleven-figure project (as in this case), it makes a difference.

In other words, Sun is at a disadvantage, since one of their main selling points requires an understanding of IT risks that most people, unfortunately, do not have. IT guys may think linux is 'cheaper' but they don't have their end-users' acute desire to minimise the already-remote chances of some random problem costing them millions in commission. Edit - it is also an unfortunate reality that being able to pin the problem on Sun (or Microsoft, etc) can save your career in a situation like this. There's no-one to blame if you are using open source and it goes wrong. The buck stops with you not just for your code, but for the code of any free tools you are using. I wish that wasn't how it worked, but there it is.

Plus, if you stay 'on piste' doing stuff that has been proven to work (you could hardly argue against Linux + apache for example), you have a relatively small chance of stepping on these engineering landmines.

<comment><USER3> If you pay for support, you get support. I doubt that there would have been much difference in your experience if you were paying for a support contract with one of the larger Linux distributors, like Redhat or Novell. Linux doesn't mean you're stuck without vendor support, although that's a common misconception.

I don't know how Sun's support compares to the various commercial distros, but comparing an unsupported Linux install to a supported Solaris install isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

<comment><USER4> This is true.

What would be interesting however, would be a nice comparison of a supported Linux with a supported Solaris.

Then again, when you've paid for Linux support, do what is price difference between it and Solaris then? Whit is the price difference between a supported Solaris install and a supported Red-Hat install? Is Red-Hat significantly cheaper? Does it's less restrictive licensing bring about an advantage? Does it have features that compare with Solaris?

In addition to Red-Hat, Novell and supported Ubuntu are also worth talking about. Ubuntu may be free, but support licenses sure aren't.

You could also then compare supported Linux distros to unsupported Linux distros, but that's a whole other box of worms.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, you can buy Linux support from Red Hat and other companies. But this rings hollow - they do not provide the level of support that Sun or Microsoft does - try getting them or anyone else to fix an obscure bug in the GNU linker, especially if you're not using their distro (even if you want to pay). If you think you're going to convince the likes of prickly GNU toolchain developers to prioritise the development or release of a patch your company depends on, guess again.

And those support contracts cost money, just like Sun/MS support contracts. And as soon as you start relying on software that isn't in their distro, you rapidly run into uncharted territory. The Linux meme of 'you can get support', is, I think, promoted mostly by people who haven't worked on critical IT systems, or have done so without understanding their responsibility.

That's not to say Sun's engineering is better than OSS (after all, we got their compiler to segfault as well as gcc, and my BSD/Apache shared hosting has had better uptime than my landline and TV for the last few years, and I'm sure many people want to set fire to the source code for NFS). Linux and other OSS provide the bulk of features that most people use. And you're probably better off with an unsupported apache server than some of the hideous commercial webservers that used to be around.

The bottom line is Sun charges a lot of money to mitigate somewhat nebulous risks that are hard to understand and communicate, and their OS has no killer features. They have also mastered the art of alienating potential enthusiasts. All of which put them on shaky ground. It is a shame, because platform diversity is one of the best defences of the internet as a whole.

(If you have access to dtrace, learn it. Understanding what it does and being able to use it will make you a better and probably richer developer).

<comment><USER3> As I said, I have no clue on how Redhat's paid support compares to Sun's, although I know they hire lots of developers working on things throughout the entire stack, so I'm assuming that if you paid enough they'd set one of their developers on your problem. I'm not qualified to judge how helpful they are though.

Interestingly, I seem to have the entire opposite experience with unpaid support. If I asked nicely, I quickly got help about where to dig into the software and what to look for when fixing stuff. The programmers on the projects were quick to respond with requests for more information and suggested fixes, and often the problem was solved within a day or so. All I did was poke them on IRC.

No support contracts at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A better question is - is SPARC on it's deathbed? If yes, then Solaris (as we know it) probably is too.

Answer is probably only "maybe" at this stage. The SPARC/Solaris combination (usually w/ Oracle) is a mainstay in the financial industry, so the current climate might be a significant hit for Sun.

<comment><USER6> SPARC deployments are a fraction of Solaris deployments, which are in turn a small fraction of server deployments. That's for an entire computer architecture. SPARC has also been displaced by MIPS on the high-end and PPC on the low end of "pizza-box" and network infrastructure, and the embedded market seems to belong to ARM.

Financials and WebSphere farms definitely do still run Solaris/SPARC, but plenty of huge financials have also transitioned to RHEL.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I agree - I know they are not totally encumbered. Think it's more of a question of buoyancy. If SPARC deploys were to drop off it might be enough to drop below the waterline.

I guess I should have said that Solaris is actually being eroded on two fronts - On the x86 architecture they are under growing threat from Linux (and Windows). On the SPARC front Solaris is still a mainstay, but the SPARC market is being eroded... That is to say, if SPARC goes into serious decline they are in trouble.

SPARC has a good multicore strategy, but remains to be seen how this progresses. Again, a key market for this is financials (e.g. hedge funds like these architectures).

Solaris/SPARC still deployed in a lot of scenarios where (1) midrange is required, (2) it's a vendor requirement and (3) where there is security paranoia (e.g. Internet Banking, particularly in the DMZ) - Not saying these can't be achieved with other architectures, just the correlated factors I've witnessed.

Unfortunately, most of these are holding positions rather than growth areas. You're right about RHEL in the financial industry - particularly as Oracle is now more at home with Linux. It used to be Oracle and Solaris going hand in hand (anyone remember Oracles "Raw Iron" strategy?).

Interesting times for Sun all round.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill No it is not.

I have run both side by side, and still do run Linux for some customers and Solaris for others. Linux wins on ease of installation and apps available, Solaris wins on just about everything else (better threading, VM pager, etc).

If you have the source code to your application and it runs on both platforms, Solaris will run it better.

<comment><USER6> I don't doubt that for totally standard three-tier apps with no OS-specific customization, on a J2EE stack, Solaris will run your app "better". I strongly doubt it runs it better enough to cost-justify. Many of the largest web apps today scale horizontally, instead of trying to squeeze blood from stones in the VM system and thread scheduler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, but our experiences with Solaris at work seem to not be unusual.

Over the past ten years Sun has NOT had their story straight on the availability of Solaris x86 ISOs and support patches (formerly packaged as _X_ _Recommended bundles). While I could download x86 and install it when I was considering trying it out for an important but non-funded project (replacing authoritative DNS servers for our domain), AFAIK the only way to install updates was to download individual patches from a FTP server and apply them one by one -- and there was no way to tell which applied or why.

I think CentOS is saving RHEL's market penetration... if CentOS (or equivalent) wasn't available to cover all of those little cases that nobody would ever fund in a business, all of the Linux expertise would move on to other distros. I think Sun might have figured that out now (OpenSolaris), but if not they have an even harder road ahead as they continue to lose more market share.

<comment><USER8> RE: x86 support for Solaris: How recent was your experience?

Re: CentOS: I agree, I am considering "upgrading" from CentOS 5.2 to RHEL 5.2 to get support for some servers. If CentOS didn't exist then I wouldn't probably went with Debian or Ubuntu on those servers when I set them up, and then I'd be looking to get support from Canonical.

<comment><USER7> The specific moment I'm referring to was in 2007. I believe it's still the case that you can not download patch clusters without a support account. I'd love to be proven wrong about this, though.

There was a previous time (circa 2002) when I was considering it for another company but they pulled the freely available x86 ISOs altogether. This lack of commitment on Sun's part means I can't trust the free stuff for test / low end, even if they started offering everything again today, because I no longer trust that they won't do the same thing again next week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are the advantages of Solaris and RHEL in these settings over FreeBSD? Is it all about commercial support?

I've found FreeBSD to be a nicer environment from a few aspects - better man pages than the GNU world and less SysV-vs-BSD cruft than Solaris. But my perspective is based on my experience as an operator rather than any big- picture considerations.

<comment><USER10> Zones, ZFS, and DTrace are the main differentiating technical advantages for Solaris.

<comment><USER6> Zones are inferior to almost every other OS's virtualization/isolation strategy, a fact that Sun seems to be recognizing now. If virtualization is a key part of your IT strategy --- and it is for most large enterprises --- Solaris isn't your OS.

<comment> patrickg-zill Only someone who hasn't actually USED zones would say that.

Sun never said that zones were the ultimate in virutalization - which is why they are coming out with XVM (their Xen implementation, basically).

I have made plenty of actual greenbacks with zones.

<comment><USER6> I've done more than "use" zones, but I'm not going to go into details; you can infer what you'd like from my background.

On the other hand, you didn't actually make any arguments here. All you did was assert that I'd never used the zones feature, make a point about something unrelated to zones, and then say that you made money with zones. Nobody is disputing that there is money to be made selling people Solaris instead of Linux.

I would at this point be more comfortable running applications under FreeBSD jails than zones, but, for obvious reasons, I would be much more comfortable running those same applications under virtualized Linux.

<comment> patrickg-zill OK, I will expand on my original comment to give you a better idea of my perspective.

Zones are a useful tool because they provide the needed amount of separation (for me anyways) without a lot of overhead. They are portable to whatever the Solaris kernel is ported to (x86, x64, SPARC, and there is a PPC port being worked on).

A zone with /usr, /opt, etc. mounted read-only in the zone, is more secure (assuming no security holes to bypass the read-only property) than a non-zone Solaris system, yet it works exactly the same way. I can compile something in the global (root) zone and when installed under /usr it is available in every zone, and if there is a security hole that involves writing to e.g. /usr/bin/ping , it will fail.

Note that the kernel only loads one copy of each library, no matter how many programs reference or use it; this saves RAM compared to e.g. VMWare, and may reduce disk accesses if you have short lived processes as the library may already be loaded and resolved by the link editor.

You could duplicate this, of course, under any OS with a combination of NFS read-only mounts (loopback or over ethernet) and jails, although the administration overhead would be higher.

My reference to XVM (Sun's customized Xen) was to point out that if you don't like zones, you can still use "full" virtualization from Sun; it is not an either/or choice.

<comment><USER6> NFS is a great example of something that has subtle, _bad_ security interactions with zones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Linux Foundation is funded by IBM, HP, Intel. So I guess its just an anti-sun attack. Its just a negative-PR. >>["The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows," says foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin] Stop predicting...Start working!! Michael Dell once predicted similar thing about Apple. But look at where Apple is today!! And look at Dell!!

</comment><comment><USER12> Around '95, I was a college student with a brand new Pentium-90. I had read about this Solaris thingy that could run Windows apps and thought, "Hey, I'd love to try that out..I have 64 megs of RAM!" So, I called Sun to ask about getting a student copy. $600! I was a sophomore in college. When I asked the Sun salesperson why I couldn't have a copy for $50, she explained that they'd be losing money that way since they had to recoup their R&D costs! My argument that I wouldn't be purchasing a copy for $600 anyway fell on deaf (dumb?) ears? Right after that, a friend helped me install Linux -- no small feat as a kernel hack was required for network connectivity in the 0.9 kernel!

To this day, I have never owned a computer that ran Solaris. However, I work on a project with over 500 Linux production servers. Serves Sun right for not being nice to me when I was nineteen.

</comment><comment><USER13> Analogous to Lotus versus Excel Spreadsheet Market <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9893>

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting read. Especially considering the school of engineering at my university just replaced its last Solaris station in favor of some flavor of Linux.

<comment><USER8> There's really no reason to use Solaris on the desktop. It is even worse than Linux is.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I manage number of Solaris servers for a major university and we face the decision of switching to RHEL every budget cycle. We are already moving some over piece by piece.

I will note that OpenSolaris is promising, and tools like dtrace and zfs, if positioned correctly, can give Solaris better leverage than they do.

<comment><USER15> Solaris x86 vs RHEL is a no-brainer from a budgetary perspective.

<comment><USER7> Forgive my ignorance, but I haven't done the pricing for both. How do they work out?

<comment><USER15> RHEL is _shockingly_ expensive for what you get. Either you do what they approve (in which case you won't really need their support, so you might as well be using CentOS) or you don't (in which case you won't get any support, so you might as well be using CentOS). But RH has the mindshare among developers; if you need to run something like Oracle on x86 then your options are RHEL or Windows.

Solx86 is free and of very high quality (far better than RHEL in package management alone!). But application vendors (e.g. again, Oracle) treat it as a tier-2 platform. So in many cases, it's just not an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd be more inclined to use Solaris if there were a virtual machine image I could try out from my present platform of choice. Why doesn't Sun make those available? And without annoying promotional crapplications and trialware asking me to buy when I'm just checking stuff out.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the differences between Wit.ai and Api.ai? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Api.ai is focused on conversation and context awareness support and leverages huge amount of data daily processed by its engine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Would love to know more here!</comment>


Shazam: not magic after all - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revolution-computing.com/2009/10/shazam-not-magic-after-all.html <comment><USER2> Don't I feel vindicated:

[http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7310&cid=823710](http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7310&cid=823710)

(from 2000).

I remember this because I got in a big argument with someone about whether this could possibly work. Of course, I never got off my ass and implemented it, which I guess makes me a huge loser.

<comment><USER3> Quite funny anyone would argue it wouldn't work. It's pretty similar to speech recognition algorithms which have been around for a while now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> quote from the article:

"Unfortunately, there's no indication in the paper of what software was used to develop the process (although the scatterplots in the paper do look decidedly R-like)."

I used to work with Avery Wang, the guy who devised the algorithm. He used Matlab.

<comment><USER5> Here's an independent MATLAB implementation of the Shazam algorithm: <http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/matlab/fingerprint/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article and comments seem to suggest that the use of Matlab or R is a prerequisite for performing calculations such as this. However, MIR (Music Information Retrieval) libraries exist for a number of languages, including Java[1] and Ansi C[2], amongst others. A good dynamic language for experimenting with this sort of thing is SuperCollider[3].

By the way, the psycho-acoustically spectral measurements referred to in the article are called MFCCs[4] - basically an FFT reading weighted according to the sensitivity of our ears. They are often used in both music and (especially) speech recognition because they tend to accurately sum up the timbre we perceive in a given sound. Timbre is much easier to extract from a digital audio file than pitch or vocal information, hence why it tends to be successful in applications such as this.

Shazam is still pretty cool too

[1] <http://jmir.sourceforge.net/>

[2] <http://libxtract.sourceforge.net/>

[3] <http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/>

[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel-frequency_cepstrum>

</comment><comment><USER7> This is exactly how you identify chemical compounds using X-Ray Crystallography. You shine x-rays of different frequencies onto a compound, measure the magnitude of the reflections, noting down the 3 highest peaks.

Then, you look up those peaks in a book, which has compounds ordered by the wavelength of the highest peak.

It takes minutes to do it by hand, I'm not surprised computers can do it better.

<comment><USER8> That's very interesting! I have a friend who worked on a project that was using this process but I never knew the name of it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Aww man, when I read the headline I was expecting a SpinVox-like scandal. Like a room full of idiot-savants in Bangalore that knew every pop hit for the last 50 years or something.

<comment><USER10> heh. It is actually fascinating how strong crowd sourcing can be. You would logically opt the manual root & surprisingly lot of times esp for cost and simplicity of solution

5-6 hrs of a good developer == 1 month of 3 ops in India or elsewhere. Except that getting ops to work itself can be painstaking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> An interesting app.

Airtel, a leading telecom provider in India had a SongCatcher service long back (3 yrs ago) [http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Catch_a_Catchy_Song_with_...](http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Catch_a_Catchy_Song_with_Airtel/551-77435-663.html) I never tried it - may this one worked for a predefined set of songs.

<comment><USER11> Here is what they say in the website:

 _"Specifically, a fixed length of audio is converted to audio DNA; this conversion process extracts certain features from the signal based on the psycho acoustic considerations. The system has two components, one that enables the extraction of Audio DNA from a few seconds of recording, and the other is an efficient search engine that finds the exact match for the DNA.

The audio DNA is based on extracting 64 sub DNAs every 3 seconds. The sub DNAs are generated by looking at the energy differences along the frequency and time axes. These 64 sub DNA form the chromosomes of the system, which enables the system to uniquely identify the chosen song."_

Looks to me like pretty much the same technology. This is again not a surprise. Most implementations of this idea will be using similar techniques. What I am amazed at is that somebody thought that all this was feasible.

<comment><USER3> It's just a variation on speech recognition, which has been around for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would be much better if you could hum or whistle a tune, and it would recognize it. I saw a PhD thesis once about this, with an actual implementation that worked pretty well. The only problem was that the database of songs was very small. It's probably hard to scale this type of search.

<comment><USER13> The majority of people doesn't have an ear for music to correctly repeat melodies :(

<comment><USER12> Exactly. But this algorithm was fuzzy, so it gave you a list of the songs which most closely resembled the one you tried to sing.

<comment><USER13> I tried to use different "query by humming" services but the percentage of false positives (when a service produced a list of melodies and no one matched yours) was really huge. And even if the melody was in the list and you tried to find it again with the same service (by humming the same tune) the probability of getting it in the list again was pretty low.

Anyway, I think the idea of query by humming is not a dead end. However, such a hypothetical service should somehow collect and use a database of different "hums".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was working on a little side startup that used crowdsourcing to help ID songs, I was just getting into researching how programs like shazam and midomi worked until I killed the project. His paper and the way it works is quite nice, but it's not perfect for other rare music and songs without elements that really stand out(frequencies or otherwise like house music). Thanks for the link!

</comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me a little bit of

<http://astrometry.net/>

here is an overview:

[http://cosmo.nyu.edu/hogg/research/2006/09/28/astrometry_goo...](http://cosmo.nyu.edu/hogg/research/2006/09/28/astrometry_google.pdf)

It's fun to read about but way over my head mathematically.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have often sat in coffee shops wondering what method of data extrapolation Shazam used to parse audio to be able to search it's music db. I would think about how I would do it. I use Shazam all the time so it's nice to finally know the basic idea.

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908201>

</comment><comment><USER18> Now recognize people! Or cars, or engine problems, or birds...Rats! I missed the yc deadline by 1 day!

</comment><comment><USER19> I disagree, any type of programming is magic.

I'm tired of these software 'engineering' types who insist that computers are run by using 'maths' and 'numbers' (whatever those are).

Clearly, computers are run by aphasic tonally-separated spinning disks. These disks fire puffs of air out the sides of the computer, creating little tiny tornados, which summon air spirits to call the fire spirits, which causes the screen to light up and the keys to make tappy-tap noises.

anyway. to be clear: not statistics. not math. not regulated pulses of electrons. MAGIC!

<comment><USER20> In my experience, the people who are most informed about how a computer actually works are those most convinced that it runs on magic. All my compE friends insist that cpus are maintained and operated by tiny gnomes.

While less technical people don't understand, they have 'faith' that there's a logical, scientific explanation for how computer's work.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Continue developing website or start to sell the product - <AUTHOR> I am developing this website and we are I am currently planning the next steps for this product. So we could use this website and start to attract the first clients, for a example a refugee and someone who want to hire him/her and therefore generate some feedback from them or develop a better website before we start with the clients. What is your opinion?<p>http://binye.pythonanywhere.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I attached the link to the url</comment>


Pinioner - <AUTHOR> http://pinioner.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, if you like reviews on topics such as movies, food, tech, books, fashion, and more, please check out Pinioner. It's a site me and a couple friends have developed over the past few months. The basic premise is that people can write reviews and discover them, and its essentially a platform for sharing opinions. We are struggling to create a user base. It would be highly appreciated if you checked it out and maybe even signed up. Thanks!

[http://www.pinioner.com](http://www.pinioner.com)</comment>


Aristotle's first mover theorem is is a number theory - <AUTHOR> https://firstmovernumbertheory.wordpress.com/aristotles-first-mover-theorem-is-perfectly-sound-in-terms-of-modern-math-2

<comment><USER2> Grade A bullshit. You should get in contact with any farmers you know, they'd pay good money for this quality merchandise.</comment>


Tumblr now using Github for their Privacy Policy - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tumblr/policy/

<comment><USER2> Migrating living documents to a public source-control repository is fantastic. I can now subscribe to changes in policies (and maybe even propose my own).

</comment><comment><USER3> When tumblr pushed their terms-of-use updates on users by displaying it in a modal lightbox over all the content, it had a link to the commit at the bottom.

[https://github.com/tumblr/policy/commit/ebf3666dffc80af7122c...](https://github.com/tumblr/policy/commit/ebf3666dffc80af7122cf26bd4410b85e9c6b6a5#commitcomment-1126340)

There's now some confused kids with github accounts that didn't have one before, I hope they found their way back to tumblr again. :(

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it open source? Like creative commons or something? Don't really see any notes about if someone could base their own sites documents on these. Well if you copy and paste any websites terms in to Google, you'll find lots of sites use the same wording anyways. Writing a terms of service and privacy policy seems scary and complicated without hiring a expensive lawyer.</comment>


Matt Cutts: Clarifying a couple points - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/clarifying-valleywag-comments/ <comment><USER2> > Suffice it to say, I don't believe that Google "must sacrifice user privacy > to grow."

That may be so, the fact is though that google is already in the posession of more privacy sensitive data than it probably should have.

So even if google may not need users to sacrifice more privacy in order to grow, maybe they should focus on how to return some of their users privacy and not shrink.

And the 'Eric Schimidt works for $1 / year' is a red herring, of course he doesn't, it's just that tax on equity is lower than a tax on salary, which is why plenty of big time CEOs and other high functionaries take a symbolic salary.

Steve Jobs does just the same, Larry Ellison does too, and neither Jobs, Ellison nor Schmidt are philanthropists so there is no need to try to portray them as such.

It's just clever marketing and tax breaks.

<comment><USER3> Practically speaking though, I doubt that another 200 or 300k in base salary would make a dent in these guys' tax liabilities.

You also have to concede that it is conceptually appealing that their compensation is directly tied to the performance of the company.

<comment><USER2> Their 'base salary' could be in the millions, and then it definitely does start to make a difference.

I really think that given the amount of publicity around these 'symbolic' salaries that it is really a marketing ploy.

"performance" of the company is in the hands of many people, not just the CEO, that's just symbolism.

And it also is a risk to portray it as such because that would mean that if the CEO should have an accident or become incapacitated that it would be curtains for the company.

edit: in 2006, before the $1 symbolic payment Steve Jobs for instance took home a whopping 647 million $US.

<comment><USER3> The $647m figure was stock grants and he did indeed make $1 in base in 2006.

[http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/03/ceo-executive- compensation-...](http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/03/ceo-executive-compensation- lead-07ceo-cx_sd_0503ceocompensationintro_print.html)

Again, outside the finance world, 7 figure base salaries are quite rare.

<comment><USER2> Ah ok, the source I had was not splitting it out at all, just mentioned that he had that much compensation. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heh, the title is a little link bait-y given the recent Mahalo debacle.

<comment><USER2> There wouldn't be much to 'clarify', only a single bit change somewhere in a google table would do all the clarification needed.

Yes, we do enforce our terms of service across the line, and no there are no exceptions even when there are investor ties between companies.

So much said with a single bit...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had no idea that Eric Schmidt had written lex!

<comment><USER6> I literally just learned this the other day (in that "create a programming language" book posted on here). I always had the impression Schmidt was a "business guy" - Lex is a very solid bit of engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I await his responses to my questions. My posts are stuck in the moderation queue. Not sure how it works, but the timestamps on mine come before two he's already approved/posted.

If he doesn't post my questions and address them, I'll share them here (via screenshots). I am not attacking Google or him, I'm asking legitimate questions about their opt-in by default policies, which I think do sacrifice a privacy in the name of profits.

<comment><USER8> Hi Ignacio, I was watching a movie with my wife, but I just approved your comments. Here's what I replied to your comment over on my blog:

"I hope you guys can invest more on privacy and take the heat." Ignacio Zendejas, I think Google has invested more on privacy than most other companies. I'm not aware of any advertising company that has done as much on the Google Ad Preferences page (e.g. to the point of writing a browser extension to opt-out of ads even when people flush cookies). The Dashboard page is also pretty rare in terms of bringing information into one spot. Earlier this year we also flipped on default HTTPS for Gmail too. I'm not aware of any other major webmail provider offering HTTPS after login authentication, let alone turning HTTPS on for every Gmail user by default. It takes a major investment to offer HTTPS by default, and it only costs money -- it doesn't generate any revenue for Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just did a simple search for Mahalo on the article. I didn't find it, so I'm assuming my questions aren't going to be answered. fail</comment>


Professors' unprofessional programs have created a new profession - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21695377-professors-unprofessional-programs-have-created-new-profession-more <comment><USER2> Most academic code won't get repurposed. If a rewrite is necessary for commercial use, so be it.

I once did a job like that in 1996. I was building a collision detection engine for an animation system. I had Lin's "I-Collide" to look at, and the paper that goes with it. This was one of the first fast many-vs-many collision detection systems. There's a bounding box layer for culling, and then a detailed layer for precision collision detection between pairs of objects.

The code was in C, but written strangely for C. Everything was lists, handled with raw pointer manipulation. When I saw something being appended to a list by reversing the list, adding a new member at the head, and reversing the list again, I realized that this had been written by a LISP programmer. As I found out later, it was originally in LISP, but had been rewritten in C to speed it up.

So I started over in C++, using classes for the geometry (Face, Edge, Vertex, Polyhedron, etc.) and collection classes (Microsoft's, this was pre-STL) for all the links between the geometry objects. This is one of those problems that maps well to an object model. I used a standard library of inlines for all the geometric calculations, added lots of checking for geometric inconsistencies, and commented the code properly. I noticed that the original implementation used a bubble sort when starting up the axis-oriented bounding box level, which made for a slow startup. I replaced the original separating vector algorithm with GJK. (I think mine was the first collision engine to use axis oriented bounding boxes with incremental GJK, which is fairly standard now.) I wrote a different approach to managing pairs of objects, so that pairs were created when objects got close together and released when they were no longer close. (I-Collide generated pairs, but never released them, which was a memory leak.) I added code to detect fast fly-throughs, so that a fast moving object couldn't get through another object between frame times. I hooked the system up to QHull to generate convex polyhedra from input geometry, and OpenGL so I could see what was going on. The end result was faster and much more robust than the original.

That's the difference between academic proof of concept code and production code. Having the I-Collide implementation to look at and run was very helpful for insight into the algorithms, but in the end, the job required all new code. Making academics do this is inappropriate. Really, very little code needs to undergo such a process.

<comment><USER3> Just to be clear, the Lisp code you describe sounds very amateurish. Like the code described in the post, its quality is a function of the programmer, not a function of Lisp. No professional Lisp programmer would write double-reverse consing lists for a serious application. He/she would use a tail-consing structure, an array, or (if it was Common Lisp) objects, as you did. The fact that they tried to speed this up by translating everything literally to C rather than first trying better algorithms and data structures is another red flag suggesting inexperience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Those who do put effort into producing good code risk being seen by their > colleagues as time-wasters._

I wonder how important this cultural factor is. Is there peer pressure among academics to not put effort into learning proper programming?

(As an aside, on a personal level it's kind of funny reading this because I was hired as a programmer by professor Sten Linnarsson (via a in a "who's hiring thread" so through this very website). During the job interview I got the impression he is a very capable programmer but simply has to budget his time.)

<comment><USER5> It's not peer pressure - indeed, if anything, the people making noise are the ones espousing _good_ coding practices. The problem is there's an intense selective pressure not to spend time on great code. There's a number of reasons for this - lots of code is only run once "for reals" or a small number of times. It's not necessarily going to be visible to the outside world. And there are other time pressures.

To use two examples from my own work:

1\. Right now, I'm working on some code that could really use improvement. It's hard coded to a specific project, when it could be generic. The variable names are a mess. It's run on a single thread, when it's practically begging to be parallelized.

Doing all that, for me, will take some time. In the meantime, several things that will actually matter for my tenure portfolio someday are due. Things that will support my lab and it's projects, whereas this code...might come up again in a few months? And as I'm not writing ground-breaking software, "Authored X,Y,Z package..." is not going to be something a tenure committee even considers. Guess which one I'm going to work on?

2\. I worked on some forecasting code for Ebola that I _was_ actually proud of. Cleaned up a messy, ad-hoc, "And then I go in and change some variables based on what you put up in a Google Doc..." style system. Fully documented it. Made the variables arguments instead of being hard coded. Designed it so it could be used with minimal expertise.

It was used for a week before the epidemic crested and forecasting stopped being of particular interest. There are papers I could have written instead.

<comment><USER6> I understand this perspective, and I've succumbed to the same sort of pressure in the past, but doesn't it feel like you actually end up losing net time in the long run by doing this?

I mean, you save a bit of time up-front to hit a deadline but then you have to spent hours of frantic debugging when you should be sleeping to rerun a slightly modified benchmark for some other deadline. Or somebody suggests a good idea that you can't test quickly because the code is a mess. And then you either spend a bunch of extra time on it or pass on something that _should_ have been easy because it wasn't.

I only worked on a CS research project as an undergrad, but there we had the same dynamic. On the one hand, it made sense not to spend too much time writing good code, automating benchmarks... etc. On the other we spent too much time chasing down stupid bugs as the project went on. I wouldn't be surprised that, had we been slightly calmer and more methodical up front, we'd have saved time overall _that month_ if not in the _same week_.

And that's not counting how code like that makes research worse. Like, I see why writing a framework to optimize your benchmarks could be a waste of time, but it could also be the difference between running a bunch of tests to evaluate the project instead of just shoving the first ones we thought of into the paper because running more would take too much effort.

It's not unique to research either: I ran into exactly the same sort of tradeoff working at an early stage startup. We care about putting out features above all until things came tumbling down. Spending a week or two chasing down bugs and making new features more expensive was bad, but then again we did need to test things and establish product/market fit quickly...

My intuition is that this sort of pressure-based decisions end up a net loss of time even in the medium term, maybe even on the scale of weeks. But I don't know how to actually measure this sort of thing: we never measured how much time we spent on different tasks, and time is probably the wrong thing to measure anyhow. Debugging stupid code saps creative energy and lucidity even more than time, and how do I know what potential things didn't get done because the code was too ugly or, on the flip side, what things I could have had done in the time I spent making code better?

How do you deal with this sort of trade-off? I'm not being rhetorical in the least, by the way: I genuinely don't know. But I really feel that incentives are geared towards short-term benefits in a way that is simply worse overall even across relatively short time horizons.

<comment><USER7> >It's not unique to research either: I ran into exactly the same sort of tradeoff working at an early stage startup.

This is what you are missing. It is research. What they are saying is that the vast majority of the code academics write is "throwaway". It will only ever be used for a brief time or in a very limited capacity and then never again. This isn't software development. There is not technical debt incurred, because they almost never actually have to go back and run the code or repurpose it. There's not point in putting in the effort "up-front" for a deadline because there is no "later" that they usually have to deal with.

This article is about the exceptions. And making sure to write cleanly factored, well documented, maintainable and flexible code every single time you need a program isn't worth it for the very rare instances when someone else actually needs to continue developing it.

<comment><USER8> You are right, but...

I, as an academician, have another perspective. Often the very reason why the code is throwaway is because it is so bad. That's also one of the reasons why it is so difficult to replicate research. If code was more reusable, maybe there would not be that much need for throwaway because, well, we could use the code from one research project in another. But, it is difficult to teach old dogs new tricks, I guess...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > In the rarefied atmosphere of academia, [spaghetti code] is generally good > enough. For commercial applications, though, it is intolerable.

Whoever wrote that article doesn't know what really goes on in commercial IT outfits. A lot of business code gets written by "programmers" who lied on their CV's, unit tested by the business users after roll out, and programmers come in on after-hours callouts for years afterwards to "firm up the business requirements".

</comment><comment><USER10> As a researcher (who codes contingently) I've enjoyed for a long time the blog of Mike Croucher ([http://www.walkingrandomly.com/](http://www.walkingrandomly.com/)) who was Head of Scientific Applications Software Support at The University of Manchester and blogs accordingly, with interesting tips and insights on this issue. Very very recommended!

</comment><comment><USER11> This article describes what I'm doing right now.

The academic group I am a part of have developed an adaptive or active machine learning system. This code is being used by the New Yorker to run their caption contest (example contest at [1]). It tries to find the funniest caption and uses previous answers to decide which question to ask next.

The code used to create this contest is a _mess._ Developing a new experiment type (not a new algorithm) meant copying and pasting roughly 1500 lines and changing 20.

We have since rewritten it to make it much better, and the shared code is in only one file. Developing a new experiment type is only 120 lines of code now :)

[1]:[http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/vote](http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/vote)

</comment><comment><USER12> The funny thing is, writing good code takes no longer than writing crappy code. For anything non-trivial, writing good code takes less effort, less time, minimizes aggravation, and saves you so much more time to work on other things that are important.

People have always struck me as masochistic when it comes to this. I think people write crappy software because they've become so habituated into acting "busy" that writing crappy code is just the thing into tricking them into feeling like they're doing what they ought to do (instead of just doing it right the first time, and going at a relaxed pace)

<comment><USER13> Learning how to write good code takes much longer than just writing crappy code.

<comment><USER14> You've got to write a lot of crappy code before you can write good code, so it works out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've you're involved with scientific research and coding in the UK, both the SSI ([http://www.software.ac.uk/](http://www.software.ac.uk/)) and Research Software Engineers community ([http://www.rse.ac.uk/](http://www.rse.ac.uk/)) provide some excellent resources.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sounds interesting. I think it would be cool to fix shitty science software.

<comment><USER5> Someday, I aspire to have a well-funded enough lab to hire someone to actually code my stuff well.

<comment><USER15> Keep an eye out for funding calls like this one: [https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/rsefellowships/](https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/rsefellowships/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Spaghetti code is not exclusive to academia. I actually felt like we produced some decent code in my lab, and we utilized some academically-produced libraries that weren't half bad, either. But that C89 government code we used was another matter altogether....

</comment><comment><USER18> Having done a variety of data analysis and computational modeling while working as a PhD physics student and postdoc, I can attest that many of my colleagues wrote terrible code.

The problem wasn't that their code didn't have a nice user interface, or wasn't designed for reuse. The problem was that it was often impossible to really know whether it worked correctly or not.

In my experience, whether the code you're writing is going to run once or go into production, it needs to testable and understandable - enough that you have confidence that it does what you think it's doing. And that means building it in small enough pieces to analyze. Otherwise you just don't know.

</comment><comment><USER19> Another contributing factor is this certain phenomenon that's happening with the academic job market. There's such an over-supply of new STEM PhD's looking for postdoc positions, it's becoming common for PIs to hire them up as super cheap programmers.

On paper, they're academic postdoc researchers. But in practice, they're full- time programmers.

So you end up with people who have PhDs in theoretical astrophysics or whatever, and who learned somewhere on the side how to hack things together in Matlab, working full-time as programmers and you get the inevitable result.

</comment><comment><USER20> A former Ph.D. student of my supervisor(s) in grad school designed his linear algebra code in such a way that he was able to separate it out and create a business from it. I've seen the rest of the code and it's a bit of a tangled C++ code, but the linear algebra classes were really well designed.

</comment><comment><USER21> Turning (possibly closed source) academic code into (closed source) business code does not make it more reliable, readable, or efficient necessary. The new profession is made possible by the openness of the code, which is not necessarily spaghetti.

I would rather think spaghetti academic code is written by people who never wrote code before (I've witnessed a few such examples), and these people are often students not professors.

</comment><comment><USER22> That headline really is something.

</comment><comment><USER23> Education is based on mandarinat.

Teachers often never left universities. Teachers never faced the problem of working. Teachers often steal the work of their students. Teachers don't care about readable code. Teachers don't care about security.

How can they make student good at something they ignore.

Our education system sux as a whole. Private, public, they all sux big. Education requires critical thinking. Passing exams require obedience.

And, there was never an evidence in the first place that CS is related in anyway to better quality or productivity in coding. Not a single study can prove it. Yet students takes loans and bankrupt themselves for life making theses studies.

Universities needs to be reformed.

PS they are non CS specialty that requires to get the job done with computers that are doing a better job at teaching CS than the specialists...</comment>


TransferWise launches 'Borderless' banking account - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/22/borderless-banking/amp/ <comment><USER2> This company is a privacy nightmare asking people's selfie with a social security number or passport or national id card in it, the most creepy company ever encountered. So for saving $5-10 you hand them data which they use to make $20 and there is no recourse once opened account with them. Small remittance agents are far better. Company is just riding on VC money otherwise nothing unique in its offering. This company being U.K. based think every country is U.K., where personal data privacy doesn't matter as they don't follow European personal data privacy laws.

<comment><USER3> On the contrary I've used multiple international money exchangers and Transferwise gives me my exchanged money the quickest and with the best rates by far.

<comment><USER2> In U.K. or Asia? You might have used others but transferwise is the most creepy for personal data privacy. It's not even low level PCI compliant.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: 90 Seconds for Snippets in Xcode - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBmthkXqBXQ

<comment><AUTHOR> My first video, which took several hours for a 90 second lesson. The video shows how to use the Xcode Snippet Library. I made it with iMovie and QuickTime Player's record function and Keynote for the slides.</comment>


Braggadacio, information control, and fear - <AUTHOR> http://retractionwatch.com/2014/05/30/braggadacio-information-control-and-fear-life-inside-a-brigham-stem-cell-lab-under-investigation/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been in and out of half a dozen labs around the country (and have one of my own now) and this is the craziest story I've ever heard of. It's hard to imagine how one creates a culture like that in the lab; sounds awful.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you analyze your AWS Bill? - <AUTHOR> Out of curiosity does your company analyze your AWS bill on a recurring basis. If so what program(s) do you use? <comment><USER2> This might be a handy article for you: [https://hackernoon.com/analyze-your- amazon-web-services-aws-...](https://hackernoon.com/analyze-your-amazon-web- services-aws-bills-w-google-bigquery-data-studio-a9dc85d4eef0)</comment>


Ask HN: founder dating website - <AUTHOR> Anyone knows of a website that connects people with ideas and necessary experiences (dev, design, marketing) to start companies together? Sort of like a founder dating website. <comment><USER2> I was thinking the exact same thing. I made a post here before I saw this.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1270235>

I personally feel that this would be perfect, since it would allow some very talented people come together to build something great.

BTW, if any of you are about to start a startup and need a good designer to design your website or app interface for equity, let me know, I'd be happy to help you guys out.

<comment><USER3> hey i'm about to do this, would be happy to chat about it sometime

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What you need is HireLite: <http://hirelite.com/> It's speed dating for hiring

</comment><comment><USER5> This exists, name and all! Though it's more of a real-life networking event than a website right now, it's still great and they pull some amazing entrepreneurs. I know, I've been to some of the events. Check out founderdating.com and sign up for an event near you.

<comment><USER6> clickable link: <http://founderdating.com/>

I've heard mixed reviews but skewed on the more positive side, so definitely worth checking out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm actually looking for the same thing :) It's such a great idea for a startup btw - at the moment we have "job search" like co-founder directories/searches.

What we need is "dating site" like services. Co-founder is like a husband/wife isn't he?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great point. The relationship matters, and there is compatibility issues involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lots of those around.

A better question would be "How do potential cofounders date?" ie, how do you do small things to try to figure out if you're going to be good working together?

Solve that one and you're on to something big.

</comment><comment><USER9> Partnership site, not a dating site. ;)</comment>


Ask HN: Creating a new web app – what's your chosen stack, tools and services? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I would look at what your future competition is using as reference point.

[http://stackshare.io/trending/tools#](http://stackshare.io/trending/tools#)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've learned mean just to be fast. Lots of documentation and examples, I also like that you can setup continuous integration quite easily (compared to maven java in my experience)

</comment><comment><USER4> Grails, not because it's better then anything else out there but because Groovy is similar in syntax to JAVA and I was able to get productive quickly.

<comment><USER5> Groovy hasn't kept up with Java's syntax extensions in Java 8. You'd be better off using Java 8 than Groovy, if only because Oracle's committed to maintaining Java whereas Groovy was ditched by its only financial sponsor earlier this year and all the developers working on it were retrenched. The only activity at least one of them has time for is planting blatantly promotional questions and answers on Hacker News.</comment></comment>


5-minute outage costs Google $545,000 in revenue - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/16/3-minute-outage-costs-google-545000-in-revenue/ <comment><USER2> Was this downtime related to PRISM?</comment>


360 Degree HD Image From Top of London's Shard Building - <AUTHOR> http://www.willpearson.co.uk/virtual-tour/shard-360-dusk/

<comment><USER2> Beautiful, but I wish the scrolling wasn't backwards. Also the watermarks are a little over the top.</comment>


Outromaker – Create YouTube outros online - <AUTHOR> http://www.outromaker.com <comment><USER2> Simple and cool. Definitely simplifies the youtube production process, or at least mine (i am an amateur though)

Are there any similar tools around?

</comment><comment><USER3> Clever!</comment>


White House Considering Response to Chinese Cyberattacks - patrick-james http://mashable.com/2013/02/01/obama-china-cyberattacks/ <comment> patrick-james It seems like the pace of cyberattacks is accelerating...will be interesting to see how the US responds, and especially if it's even possible for massive government organizations to adapt quickly enough.</comment>


U.S. astronauts' selection process for flight still a mystery - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/15/with-more-chances-fly-space-than-ever-before-us-astronauts-are-still-unsure-how-they-get-picked/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.vn/dFv2a](https://archive.vn/dFv2a)</comment>