Skydeck: unlocking the valuable information hidden in your cell phone bill - <AUTHOR> http://skydeck.com/blog/announcements/skydeck-is-no-longer-secret/

<comment><USER2> I've got a few invites for the app if anyone wants to try it out. Reply to this comment with an email address if you'd like one

<comment><USER3> Would love one, thanks!

kdw at spathis dot com

<comment><USER2> done

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They are rockin' with OCaml! Very nice.

<http://skydeck.com/jobs/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to put that in the title but it is limited to 100 chars. On their blog over the last year they've mentioned some neat looking OCaml tools they've written (some have been open sourced)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I particularly appreciate their approach to data storage and security: <http://skydeck.com/security/> ... no need to store this server-side where it's out of the users' control.

</comment><comment><USER6> You know you are in trouble if you can no longer remember who you have been calling?

Seriously, not a problem for me, but I'll admit that there might be people out there who really talk on the phone a lot, with a different outlook.

</comment><comment><USER7> reminds me of Xobni for cell phones. Worth a closer look...

</comment><comment><USER8> I cannot even imagine there being valuable information in my cell phone bill. But, no one would spend months building a business around the idea if there was really nothing there, right?

</comment><comment><USER9> seems like more of a business application than ordinary consumers?</comment>


Successful Companies That Did Without an SQL-based RDBMS? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> So which employed RDBMS are not SQL-based? I don't many are even offered commercially, and I can't think of a company utilizing something such off- standard.</comment>


Deep Reinforcement Learning: An Overview - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.07274 <comment><USER2> What important DRL stuff does this not mention?

<comment><USER3> That DRL is incredibly difficult to stabilize in general.

<comment><USER4> More details, please. I'd especially be interested how the "in general" insight has been derived.

<comment><USER3> Basically, when deep reinforcement learning works, it's like magic, but unlike supervised learning where the default expectation is that it works without a hitch right out of the box, the default expectation for most new tasks through deep reinforcement learning is that it will fail, and you will need something to fix it.

For example, the high dimensionality of robotics makes it very difficult to apply deep reinforcement learning to it, although it definitely can and has been applied (and is, IMO, the future of robotics).

Another example is that simple supervised learning often outperforms DRL for many arcade games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is the current state of the art for multi-agent DRL?

</comment><comment><USER6> >arxiv.org refused to connect.</comment>


Is Facebook Forever? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/is-facebook-forever/245484/

<comment><USER2> I'm half expecting them to go the same route as Matthew Sobol in the Daemon series: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(technothriller_series)>

For clarification, maybe not take over the world per se, but definitely go along the same lines as give every member a set of AR contact-lenses/glasses.

</comment><comment><USER3> i think it will stand forever, because they have future plans. they are slowly converting in to a kind of search engine, and also they are incorporating newer and newer options everyday. according to me the reason why facebook is still strong is that they allow applications of various types, because of this fb isnt just a social networking site but some else also</comment>


Category Theory for Scientists (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.6946v1.pdf <comment><USER2> A thread from 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9651828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9651828)

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I missing something or the last X -> X' on Example 188.8.131.52 is inverted? Shouldn't it be X' -> X?

</comment><comment><USER4> New version (2018): [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.6946v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.6946v1.pdf)

The linked version is from 2013.

<comment><USER5> Nope, that's an older version than [http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/CT4S.pdf](http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/CT4S.pdf) . The date you see under the title is the date when the file was last compiled (which is done automatically by arXiv every once in a while), because arXiv is still too stupid to redefine \today when compiling files. The date in grey on the left margin of page 1 is the right one.

The proper new version has been published by MIT press in 2014 and can be downloaded from the usual places where books can be downloaded.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe this was the version I originally posted.</comment></comment></comment>


GetClojure: Tons of Searchable Clojure Examples - <AUTHOR> http://getclojure.org/

<comment><USER2> Very nice idea. I recommend trying to move to direction where you get results for 'ring', 'compojure' and 'friend', ie. examples for prominent frameworks and libraries.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool idea, but lack of results for `deftemplate` suggests that you're not scraping enough :) It's the non-core stuff that's more likely to need scraped examples.

<comment><AUTHOR> Anderkent, all of the examples you see at the moment were run through a sandbox so I could capture their value and output. I would love to open it up to more forms and libraries in the future. The plan is to give users the ability to add, edit, and rate examples so things like `deftemplate` could be included. Either way, thanks for checking it out and giving feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. A link to the file and project of each example would be great for usage context.

What is it scraping? Is it just Github projects with language "Clojure"?

<comment><AUTHOR> IRC logfiles, mostly. You're seeing examples of code snippets typed into IRC from the last 4-5 years run in a sandbox under Clojure 1.5.1. I also ran it over the ClojureDocs s-expressions. There are a lot of examples missing (defn, def, etc. for instance) due to the fact that I didn't want to inadvertently run something evil, but FWIW there are over 30k examples of sequence functions, JVM interop, etc. In a previous comment I mentioned that my plan is to add the ability to submit, edit, bookmark, and rate examples.

RE: GitHub projects tagged "Clojure": I think exploring Codeq ([https://github.com/Datomic/codeq](https://github.com/Datomic/codeq)) would be a cool way to go about doing that kind of thing.

<comment><USER4> Last time I tried codeq, the analyzer was limited to symbols defined outside of functions. The Clojurescript parser might be a better option, because the parse tree would allow indexing usages inside functions.

I also wonder if a generative testing library could be used to generate examples.</comment></comment></comment>


Vue Native - <AUTHOR> https://vue-native.io <comment><USER2> Here's my pitch for a better ecosystem: we develop an intermediate standard for fundamental UI building blocks (divs/blocks/layers, images, video, etc.) + a layout engine, sort of like the DOM. Shells (browsers, native platforms like React Native but without the React requirement, etc.) would give JS renderers access to the lowest level painting calls available (ie. "repaint this node") along with programmatic access to the new standard UI API. Renders could then build on top of that API, implement the draw call optimizations themselves based on whatever makes sense for the rendering engine (for instance, React Fiber would be issuing draw calls differently than Vue's rendering engine.)

This would allow developers to get native performance out of a web-based rendering context. It would also be theoretically easy to build new renderers around the standard UI API. So you could swap out your backend between browser-native and a mobile/desktop library backed by OpenGL/WebGL, or another headless solution, etc.

Importantly, I think you need to limit the scope of this new UI standard (perhaps just to basic shapes, like how SVG is similarly limited), that way you leave UI implementations like dropdown boxes to ecosystem programmers (so you'd have a dropdown box for each React, Vue, etc. -- this sounds bad but people do this already.) Limiting the API scope also means making it easier for new renderers to enter the scene. Compare such a world to the current hellscape that is building your own HTML renderer. The API is so insane it's really only possible for big companies to take it on (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla.)

How this ties back into this post: you could create an _____ Native, which would really just implement everything you want from React Native, but without React. Then you can just plug Vue or React into the renderer and boom you're done.

Edit: Observant people will notice my ideal system resembles X11. Indeed, I think X11 is an interesting proposition in "shell" (browser, native) contexts, as shell applications are inherently window-managed and sandboxed. This allows for applications to reinvent the wheel without disrupting the fundamental UX of window management on the system OS.

<comment><USER3> While I admire your hopefulness that this could solve the problems, I don't think it will for two reasons.

1\. This is what the DOM is, to some extent. All those components on the page are "native" components, we have declarative markup for them (HTML) and we can script them. They are "rendered" by native code in browsers which are some of the most highly optimised codebases around.

2\. The API design for JS and for higher performance systems is quite different. Take UITableViewDataSource for example, it does view prefetching, caching, object reuse, etc. As of iOS 12, this also feeds into the CPU throttling control to ensure enough compute is available on a cell fetch that it will meet the 8-16ms deadline so that no frames are dropped. This is just a totally different way of thinking about APIs and performance that the JS ecosystem is not designed to work with.

It's possible that a total rewrite of that stack could provide significant benefits, but I think that would be more from removing legacy cruft in the DOM, than from it being a paradigm shift.

<comment><USER2> Your UITableViewDataSource is a common problem with big JS applications, and has been solved to some extent with the same optimizations you've mentioned. However because JS and HTML is what it is, it has to be solved on a per- library basis (React Virtualized List, Vue Virtualized List, etc.) The problem remains that the JS renderer does not have access to those low level draw calls to optimize performance further.

As for the DOM, again I think that while it's true that native HTML elements are highly optimized, many applications have much larger performance goals in mind and HTML/DOM has proven to be an ineffective system when trying to do very specific performance optimizations. Check out flipboard.com on your phone for an example of how much smoother a web app can feel when you bypass the DOM and let React take over the draw calls.

<comment><USER4> AFAIK all virtual lists break native searching in the browser, so sadly the problem is far from solved

<comment><USER3> Well browsers are probably doing virtual lists themselves, it's just that the JS/DOM API doesn't provide a way to expose that to the application developer, which means the impact will be limited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I prefer NativeScript[0] & it's vue-specific extension NativesScript Vue[1] due to NativeScript's ability to work with more than one paradigm/framework. NativeScript enables _any_ Javascript application to become a mobile app (along with ones built in Angular and Vue) and I think that's pretty great.

[0]: [https://www.nativescript.org/](https://www.nativescript.org/)

[1]: [https://nativescript-vue.org/](https://nativescript-vue.org/)

<comment><USER6> And there's no need to make bridges. Simply access the native API from javascript/typescript

<comment><USER7> NativeScript simply binds to all native APIs by default?

<comment><USER8> Effectively yes, but not like that. You can access all native APIs with a marshalling layer which maps Javascript to Objective C or JAVA.

For example, when the Javascript parser sees

       var className = NSStringFromClass(NSArray);

The ObjectiveC side executes

        NSString *className = NSStringFromClass([NSArray class]);

Then creates a link between the JS object and the ObjectiveC object. Any methods/properties you access on the JS object, get executed or read from the native component.

It's really quite clever and why we use Nativescript to bring corporate apps to market quickly and cross platform while not worrying about the limitations of the Javascript bit, because you can always access the native APIs anyway.

<comment><USER7> Haha, nice.

First time I heared about this killer-feature :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the only missing piece that has held me back from jumping into Vue. I know its not the most advantageous aspect of the framework, but my personal favorite aspect of it is the single file components. Being able to create a complete logical unit of UI of in one file feels more natural and produtive. All the speed of inline styles without the guilt and shame.

<comment><USER10> Yes! :) I've been using VueJS for awhile and my next step was to create a mobile app - either via RN or even Flutter. But, hello vue-native!

<comment><USER11> You can also give a shot to Quasar (quasar-framework.org) that will provide you with single code base SPA, PWA and mobile through Cordova, and in a few days also SSR.

Disclaimer: I'm also contributing on this project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those who haven't heard of it, there is a project to render native desktop applications with Vue too:

[https://github.com/mimecorg/vuido](https://github.com/mimecorg/vuido)

</comment><comment><USER13> > Vue Native transpiles to React Native.

Why would you not use react native directly then? I don't get it

<comment><USER14> A lot of us prefer Vue over React, I for one favor Vue over React personally and have been using it in all my recent projects. So, just a matter of preference for those who don't want to use React.

<comment><USER15> I'm curious, what do y'all actually like about Vue over React? I spent over two months doing proof-of-concept migration work for an AngularJS to (React- Redux|Vue-Vuex) and, other than the component-data wiring it does internally, I found it to be worse in nearly all respects.

Despite being an "opinionated" framework, Vue provides so many escape hatches and alternatives that it, in practice, hardly seems opinionated. Additionally, the templating language it promotes seems like a step backwards compared to JSX render functions. As it were, the "unopinionated" React, by offering a small handful of primitives, ends up making things simpler and more ergonomic to work with.

I really can't seem to grok why folks like Vue over React.

<comment><USER16> I got into Vue because it was much easier to approach coming from a back-end (Python/Flask/Jinja or PHP/Symfony/Twig) perspective. It made it easy to adopt small pieces and learn as I went. React probably allows this sort of thing, too, but the documentation for Vue pointed it out first thing. Since I've started working with it, I haven't gotten a compelling reason to change to react or angular.

<comment><USER15> > React probably allows this sort of thing, too, but the documentation for Vue > pointed it out first thing.

That's actually a pretty good difference I hadn't really thought about from the other perspective. React does a good job explaining the how and why, but is a bit more clinical leaving the last-mile as an exercise to the reader whereas Vue seems a bit more focused on coaching you.

I, personally, found Vue's documentation to be a bit less in-depth than I like and hadn't considered folks would prefer Vue's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How does this compare to nativescript-vue?

[https://nativescript-vue.org/](https://nativescript-vue.org/)

<comment><USER5> It looks like Vue Native is a wrapper around React Native UIs [https://github.com/GeekyAnts/vue-native- cli](https://github.com/GeekyAnts/vue-native-cli) (in the README)

I personally am following/want-to-use [https://nativescript- vue.org/](https://nativescript-vue.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Their website may have repurposed the look and logo of the Vue project, but (unlike React Native's relationship with React) this doesn't appear to have any official association. In particular, Evan You called it an "interesting approach" but added "not endorsing this"[1].

[https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1006565660091125760](https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1006565660091125760)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm confused. Wouldn't "native" imply it uses platform widgets rather than HTML?

<comment><USER7> This is what React-Native (which Vue-Native is build upon) does.

Instead of

Hello

you have

        <View><Text>Hello</Text></View>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Similar projects: [https://weex.incubator.apache.org/](https://weex.incubator.apache.org/) [https://www.nativescript.org/](https://www.nativescript.org/)

I think Weex has better performance and lighter overhead than this(?)

<comment><USER21> I'd love to get a side by side comparison of Weex and Vue Native.

<comment><USER22> Weex lacks english documentation and most of the Weex devs are from China and support forums also tend to be in Chinese. By far RN has best documentation and plugin / package ecosystem. A full fledged app can be built using RN. Whereas it'll be hard for Weex, Vue-Native. Just search for Google Maps package for any of these frameworks, you'll have tough time finding any (barring React Native)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ironic the site does not seem to be responsive

<comment><USER24> Going to fix it ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ironically I just saw the tweet about Udacity team removing React Native from their apps:

[https://twitter.com/n8ebel/status/1006244834351312897](https://twitter.com/n8ebel/status/1006244834351312897)

<comment><USER7> I can understand this.

I already planned 3 weeks for the Android port of an app.

But probably still better than the 5 months the iOS app took to make.

I have to set up an Android build environment and install all the Android versions of my native modules.

Since iPhones required dynamic sized UIs for iPhone5/iPhone/iPhone+/iPhoneX anyway, I expect to use most of the UI code without any change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > How does it work?

This is fork of react-vue

[https://vue-native.io/docs/how-does-it-works.html](https://vue- native.io/docs/how-does-it-works.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> It's based on react-vue[1] and It is internally using react-native.

1\. [https://github.com/SmallComfort/react- vue](https://github.com/SmallComfort/react-vue)

Why but Why.

<comment><USER28> I honestly do not understand how did a large part of the software engineering community get to this point of idiocy.

Is this due to the principle of getting to the market first and quick prototypes? I don't see a quick way back.

<comment><USER29> Frankly I find your view pretty offputting.

I'm not really that into the idea of JS-as-a-platform, but it obviously emerged because it fulfilled certain requirements that weren't covered elsewhere.

The "way back" from this is for people like yourself to stop dismissing others' work as "idiocy" and start building better solutions to these problems as you see them.

<comment><USER28> Maybe "idiocy" is unnecessarily strong, but I certainly don't have to praise all emerging experiments just to sound polite, do I? The emerging of all these stacks is because of approachability. Everyone has a browser. Anyone who wants to create their first website can do so, by opening up e.g. notepad. By this approach you get low-quality, self-taught JS "experts" who are much cheaper to hire than a proper software engineer with fundamentals of computer science. After a few years these developers feel so confident, they decide to launch their own perfect new framework/library to solve all the problems they experienced!

There is a better solution. It's called native app development, without a hyphen of any sorts in front of "native". Different platforms have different quirks and there is no way to have the exact same UI/UX on all platforms.

The true challenge is to explain the executives, that hiring 2 developers will be much better in the long run, than 1 underpaid JS developer for all platforms.

<comment><USER30> I used to agree with you. But over the last few years, in their own ways, Apple and Microsoft have dropped the ball on their native desktop UI toolkits. So, whereas the argument for native used to be "rewrite your client once per platform, and you get a better language, better performance, better usability, and a better development experience", now it's "rewrite your client once per platform and you may get a better language, depending on your taste, probably better performance, an aging closed-source toolchain, an outdated development paradigm, outdated APIs covered in legacy-barnacles, debugging-resistant performance pitfalls, and decent usability if you're ok with a generic one- size-fits-all look (and you're on your own if you're not.)" In other words, the argument for native, and native development itself, is not aging well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Site is broken on mobile. Styling issues make it undreadable.

<comment><USER32> It's hilarious that you can't view this site on native browsers. How ironic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm genuinely confused as why this is getting so much attention. The NativeScript-Vue integration is out for over a year already. It fulfils exactly the same purpose, without the additional strange cross- compilation/transpilation.

</comment><comment><USER34> Page consists of an example (useful) and slides (not). Might look again once there's some useful content; slides aren't _quite_ as bad as a video, but it's pretty awful.

Edit: ah, the get started links to real content. Missed that.

<comment><USER35> Maybe you also didn't notice you can scroll down on the slides to get more info on the headlining topic (I missed it at first).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm no longer a career webdev, but when I still do need to do something front- end related, Vue is a tool of choice. I really like Ethan's non-doctrinal approach, and that Vue is as isolated from dreaded committee designs of opens source projects invaded by corporate types.

I still regard GTK+ as one of the best C GUI toolkits. Particularly when it comes to thought-through design of layouting mechanism and that the widget lib was build with ergonomic in mind.

When you work with UIs in plain C, you invariably come to getter-setter pattern.

I wonder, can Vue guys somehow glue Vue components to GTK widgets?

</comment><comment><USER37> Considering there is already Weex and NativeScript with Vue, what does this add?

Personally I think Flutter will become the dominant cross platform solution in 2020 or so. ReactNative has always seemed like a hack to me.

<comment><USER38> What about it seems like a hack? Why do you think Flutter will become dominant?

<comment><USER37> Flutter basically works like a game engine. It has a rendering area and it uses Skia to paint stuff. This means it has a lot of control over what's going on and the bridge to the OS is minimal.

ReactNative is basically giving tons of instructions from the JS engine to the OS. Sure the performance of the OS is great, but this has limitations and many moving pieces.

For example animations used to be a problem in RN because someone thought it was a good idea to send instructions on every frame from the JS engine to the OS. Of course many devices can't keep up with this, and I imagine Facebook solved this by creating an animation engine on the native side of things and JS only passing start/end states and such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Aren't native Vue apps already supported with Weex[1]? Why would I use this over Weex?

[1] - [https://weex.incubator.apache.org/guide/](https://weex.incubator.apache.org/guide/)

</comment><comment><USER40> what's the difference between this and react-vue?[1]

I would prefer to be using weex, but that project has seemed stagnant ever since it became part of the apache foundation. or at least, they haven't really updated their site or fleshed out the docs etc. it's very hard to get buy-in from other developers because of that.

1\. [https://github.com/SmallComfort/react- vue](https://github.com/SmallComfort/react-vue)

</comment><comment><USER41> Can someone explain what the differences are between React and Vue? Why is this a good idea and what benefits would it afford me as a React Native developer?

<comment><USER14> This page is a good start, it discusses the differences in detail:

[https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html](https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html)

My personal experience wasn't that positive with React and then, the whole treatment of JSX as a first class citizen isn't really my style (although you're allowed to use React without involving JSX). Vue just feels more mature (personal opinion) and much, much easier to reason your code about, down the line in 6 months.

I've had super-complex apps that required so many nested components and I had no problem picking them up after about 6 months. With react, you have to be careful as it's easier to shoot yourself in the foot (personal opinion).

Also there's flux, redux which do require a bit of a learning curve if you want to architect your applications using them. Vue has something called Vuex which again, in my opinion is slightly friendlier to beginners.

I re-wrote my entire teaching syllabus for my programming course to use Vue instead of React, simply because it's much better to maintain Vue apps rather than React apps after 6 months, which is the most important value add for me in any framework.

Anyone can pick up a trendy new JS framework and hack a TODO app over the weekend these days, but if you're working on client side, or some serious projects that require long term commitment and maintenance, then you will realize it's more important to consider the framework's maintainability and code readability. For me, Vue triumphs React in this aspect easily.

So, there you go.

<comment><USER42> > I re-wrote my entire teaching syllabus for my programming course to use Vue > instead of React, simply because it's much better to maintain Vue apps > rather than React apps after 6 months, which is the most important value add > for me in any framework.

Why do you find it harder to maintain React apps after 6 months?

<comment><USER14> One of the main reasons - JSX. Contrary to popular belief, JSX is all cool until you're in a situation where you need to maintain the app you wrote.

I know React can be written without JSX as well, but frustratingly most documents/resources online are all examples with JSX.

And then, this:

[https://twitter.com/thomasfuchs/status/810885087214637057](https://twitter.com/thomasfuchs/status/810885087214637057)

<comment><USER43> That doesn't really clarify your position. JSX is a syntax, why in the world does that cause maintainability issues? And that tweet is a massive straw man. It's poorly spaced, poorly written and YEARS after React came out it shows that people still don't understand the difference between separation of concerns and separation of languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The funny thing? The website renders for desktop on my S8, making it completely unusable.

</comment><comment><USER45> Anyone else getting "This site is blocked due to a security threat."?

</comment><comment><USER46> So are all those beautiful UI elements in the kitchen sink demo included?

</comment><comment><USER47> I get an HSTS error while accessing the web site.

</comment><comment><USER48> Pardon my ignorance on the matter, and I'm truly sincere when I ask, but why does there need to be a *-native library for "each" different JavaScript framework?

Why this instead of say Electron or something that seems, to me, to be more general purpose and thereby useful[1] (I'm not coupling my mobile apps to a single JavaScript framework).

... I suppose "React" is more of an API now-a-days, and so it may not be so bad to port to another transpiler/compiler/build system? But I still feel like I'm missing something. Are folks writing games in React or something that requires the performance optimization's from a specific build system? If so would anyone mine showing an example? Or just learn me in general?

Many thanks.

1\. Don't take "useful" personally please. I mean it mostly in the context of shipping and supporting an app for a few years. Which... is probably not the best _use_ of "useful."

<comment><USER49> Christ, Electron would be truly terrible for mobile apps.

All the excuses people have for its bloat ("we all have tons of RAM anyway!", "storage space is cheap!", etc) evaporate when you're running on an ARM processor with maybe 2GB of RAM and 32 to 64GB of onboard storage.

<comment><USER50> > 32 to 64GB of onboard storage.

If only. Probably a lot closer to 4-16GB for a lot of Android phones.

<comment><USER49> Thankfully even the shitty low-end phones I see these days have 8GB ROM

<comment><USER51> Of which 7GB is taken up by the OS and system apps.

I was kinda exaggerating, then I checked my phone and there's actually 15GB used by the OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> App stores should be abandoned, web app is the only thing you can 100% control.

If you can't publish critical update for your app in minutes, just because you use phone vendor's store, then that store is a huge priblem.

If store can just uninstall your app in any moment (without user's request) - it is a huge problem.</comment>


Big Sugar's Secret Ally? Nutritionists - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/opinion/sunday/big-sugars-secret-ally-nutritionists.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=1 <comment><USER2> Nutrition is like, the _worst_ field of medical research, and that's saying something. All of the hallmarks of typical medical research (studies sponsored by interested parties, non-repeatable results, tiny sample sizes, contradictory health recommendations, lack of properly controlled experimentation, etc.) are present in nutrition, but turned up to eleven. Future generations will lump the nutrition advice with which we struggle to survive, in with bloodletting and snake oil.

No, I don't see a way around any of this. Lots of money is spent on food, and will be for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER3> Ridiculous. The future will not show that proper nutrition is a waste of time. It is absurd to think our body responds to every input the same.

You are lumping every Doctor, Biochemist, Farmer, and John Doe who call themselves a "Nutritionalist" together. They are really, really different people and some of them are totally right and some are dead wrong.

<comment><USER4> jessaustin isn't saying proper nutrition is a waste of time, but rather that nutritional research is of exceptionally poor quality due to the amount of money on the line for the vested interests that fund the studies.

To your second point, the problem is that we don't know who is right and who is wrong. The studies are conducted so poorly or with such bias that it's near impossible to have concrete recommendations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also, don't forget that the food pyramid is defined by the Department of Agriculture (whose job it is to sell food and maintain food surplus) and not the Department of Health and Human Services (whose job it is to pay for all the trillions in health issues resulting from the billions in subsidies).

The calorie is a calorie argument is old and dumb. It ignores insulin which is a _BIG_ deal. It also ignores that high blood sugar can cause a temporary endorphin rush. Ever hear anyone talk about a "protein high" or "fat high"?

<comment><USER6> Anecdotal evidence _for_ a calorie being a calorie: lost 5 kgs in three months by cutting food intake evenly by just reducing the size of meals. Also consumed slightly over 10% of daily intake in sugar (saccarose) which surpasses the recommended level (10% absolute max). Otherwise stuck to official recommendations. Sedentary lifestyle, moderate alcohol consumption.

The magic trick is being able to measure your weight for the first week or two and then keep the same habits until the goal is reached. No fancy apps or diets or nutritionists or whatever required. So a calorie is a calorie.

<comment><USER7> The problem with anecdotal evidence is there's no particular reason to think that others metabolism is going to react the same as yours does, or that your weight loss will continue indefinitely. For instance, a diabetic on insulin would likely gain weight following the diet you follow while you lose weight, because the insulin would signal to the body to store the calories as fat.

<comment><USER6> Since you're an expert in the field: How does the insulin for a diabetic patient differ in its fat-storing capabilities from the normal insulin secretion of a healthy person? I agree that there are metabolic differences in people but rarely non-pathological and rarely not age or body mass related. Pathological cases where the difference in metabolism is indicable, we already know how to treat / be unable to treat them. Moreover: type I diabetics tend to be lean / normal weight. So the question is: what is the metabolical difference you are referring to?

<comment><USER7> I'm referring to insulin resistance. Chronic high levels of insulin will result in cells not responding to the signal from insulin to store blood sugar (because they've already saturated their glucose storage capacity), which will result in the pancreas releasing more insulin to compensate. The more insulin resistant you become, the more your pancreas ramps up its insulin levels (to diminishing returns, unfortunately), until it reaches the point where your pancreas can't make enough insulin to control blood sugar. (Type 2 diabetes). Your body can't/won't burn fat when insulin levels are high, and the insulin resistance results in insulin never dropping an appropriate amount, which results in fat not being burned despite the meal not being particularly egregious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish they'd quit misusing the word "nutritionist". The word has no value whatsoever. If you want to call yourself a nutritionist, go ahead. Nobody will stop you.

The protected professional designation is "dietitian". When the NYT calls out "nutritionists", I have no idea who they're talking about.

<comment><USER9> I personally don't hold dietician in any higher regard than nutritionists.

My mom had a dietician as a next door neighbor. This lady was never seen without a 1 liter big gulp filled with diet soda. We had her family over for Thanksgiving one year; Mom puts on a big show with white table cloths, fine china, crystal, etc. They all showed up with big gulps and even went home to get some diet soda when they ran low because we only had regular.

The kicker was this lady didn't eat vegetables. Only bread, meat and diet soda.

<comment><USER10> Even though she doesn't eat well, it doesn't mean she doesn't know a lot about nutrition.

<comment><USER11> Who wants to take advice from a hypocrite?

It would be like a dental hygienist that didn't floss, or a personal trainer that never did squats, or an arms control advocate with armed bodyguards, or an envronmentalist that never separates recyclables from the garbage.

<comment><USER10> Is a fat dietitian more of a hypocrite than, say, an out of shape football coach?

<comment><USER11> Neither is necessarily a hypocrite. You can't really tell until they open their mouths and speak. It is likely that the coach was not out of shape at a time when they participated in competitive team sports. But a football coach that had never suffered a severe sports injury commanding players to "hit harder"? That's some hypocrisy right there.

The fat dietitian might be self-experimenting to support they hypothesis that their fat-loss diet plan works (at n=1), or becoming familiar with the effects of various unhealthy eating habits.

But we weren't talking about a _fat_ dietitian. It was a dietitian that apparently _does not eat vegetables_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Completely anecdotal - I've decided to give up refined sugar for 2017, especially coke (I was drinking a can every two days or so in late 2016).

So I lasted until today, Jan 18th, when I had a small bottle of Sprite. (In my defense, I was at a restaurant using the wi-fi and had to order _something_ ).

Within five minutes my heart rate was through the roof, I had the shakes and felt really, really lightheaded. It lasted at least three hours.

Wow. Three weeks without sugar and then ONE drink did that to me. Now I'm ten times more motivated to never have one again.

<comment><USER13> If you were actually in a state of ketosis for 3 weeks your body would have mostly adapted to it. It takes a couple days of carb refeeding for insulin sensitivity to return to normal.

[http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/10/physiological...](http://high- fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/10/physiological-insulin-resistance.html) < blog on the topic (sorry to link this blog again, he really has some good posts on topics like this with research linked in)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Look at the mirror. Big Sugar' best ally is not the nutritionist but the average American consumer.

Between a fruit or a chocolate bar at identical prices, the vast majority of Americans will choose the chocolate bar. Most people will scoff at eating only veggies, whole grains, legumes, fruits (aka Mediterranean style diet). They will cheat and get their sweets, sugar and refined bakery products, even knowing the evidence.

Sugar (or bad food) is an addiction. It's not about nutritionists or scientific evidence, it's about having enough mental strength to stay away from bad foods.

<comment><USER13> > Sugar (or bad food) is an addiction. It's not about nutritionists or > scientific evidence, it's about having enough mental strength to stay away > from bad foods.

You're close. Attempting to do so while not having any understanding of why things happen is a recipe for disaster.

It must be reasoned that obesity is a disorder caused by something more then just 'poor eating habits'. There are physiotypes that will simply resist obesity on the worst of diets. I don't need to link a paper for this, this should be common sense from anyone's experience around enough people.

So, if you reason that obesity is a disorder or sickness... you would then try to treat the cause, not the symptom. In the same sense that a person with a peanut allergy would simply avoid peanuts, a person with obesity may have this state caused by disturbed leptin/insulin signaling. A diet must then be designed to compensate for that disorder. (we know that once surplus white adipose tissue is grown, there's no going back, a modified diet must be adapted for life or those buckets just start filling again)

<comment><USER15> > we know that once surplus white adipose tissue is grown, there's no going > back, a modified diet must be adapted for life or those buckets just start > filling again

Mind providing more references/reliable pointers on this?

<comment><USER13> Apologies, I can't find the precise paper covering what I mean. You will find that there's a suspicious lack of studies on formerly obese people.

Paper to get you thinking on how WAT acts on signaling: [http://www.cambridge.org.secure.sci- hub.bz/core/journals/pro...](http://www.cambridge.org.secure.sci- hub.bz/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-nutrition-society/article/div- classtitlephysiological-role-of-adipose-tissue-white-adipose-tissue-as-an- endocrine-and-secretory-organdiv/6F914782A23DBDEC3E582833F6A16717)

Paper on WAT quantity and its effects on metabolic syndrome. [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.12519/pdf](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.12519/pdf) . Where this one gets me thinking is that for some people, growing WAT may actually be an _adaptation_ to prevent metabolic disorder from a poor diet.

What we know is WAT can hold about 4x its size in fat before it divides into more. What we don't really know for humans is whether long term weight loss allows us to lose some of these, or whether they just deflate.... some rat studies show there can be a reduction, but for humans it would require repeated biopsy......

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the paper links.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Give this game a try :-) [http://howmuchsugar.in](http://howmuchsugar.in)

Also if you want to increase transparency for nutrition, consider contributing to Open Food Facts (we need Perl, Android, iOS volunteers and barcode scanners to help) [https://world.openfoodfacts.org](https://world.openfoodfacts.org) [https://github.com/openfoodfacts](https://github.com/openfoodfacts)

<comment><USER17> ima go ahead and assume that has nothing to do with India.

<comment><USER16> we have an Indian version and we need more contributions :-) [https://in.openfoodfacts.org](https://in.openfoodfacts.org)

And we're translating it to Hindi :)

<comment><USER18> I think he means "even though it uses the .in TLD, it's not directly related to India".

<comment><USER16> I was being obtuse ;-) It is actually a play on words so that you can have nice urls like [http://howmuchsugar.in/broccoli-cauliflower-florets- asda](http://howmuchsugar.in/broccoli-cauliflower-florets-asda)

More seriously, Open Food Facts is a mobile crowdsourcing effort, and we have volunteers from all the planet :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's bizarre to me that he goes out of his way to say it's just okay for the sugar magnates to promote sugar with junk science but it was really nefarious for some researchers to promote a nuanced view, especially when they were often relying on published studies promoted or financed by the sugar industry. This is a weird form of muckraking, exonerating the sartorial and lambasting the professional.

Are we really to think that the American diet is so unhealthy because of the opinions of unknown dietitians and researchers? Was Fred Stare ever a household name? (Maybe Fred Astaire). Or is it more likely that the manipulation of the diet to use more salt, more sugar, more oils and thus more food, is really the problem. Authorities have been saying for plenty of time to avoid sugar, overeating, processed foods and sedentary lifestyles.[1] This isn't a new thing. Taubes and similar authors act like they discovered a conspiracy among scientists and thought leaders to make Americans sick, but it just doesn't add up. The obvious culprit has been food processors' desire for growth the whole time, and that was visible at least 40 years ago.

1\. _Healthy People: The Surgeon General's Report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention_ , 1979. [https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/NNBBGK.pdf](https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/NNBBGK.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> It is totally strange that anybody can think cal. is a cal. We proved otherwise so many times.

People can eat the same amount of cals that are diffrently processed for various reasons:

\- Insulin resistence

\- Specific cancers

\- Thyroid disfunction

\- Level of amylaze expression (how good we absorb complex carbs)

\- Microbiota status

\- Even viruses ([https://www.wired.com/2016/12/mysterious-virus-cause- obesity...](https://www.wired.com/2016/12/mysterious-virus-cause-obesity/))

In all casses people/animals did eat the same amount of food and got different amounts of fat.

Since anybody is in a differerent biochemical spot here the default should actually be that cal. is NOT a cal, depending on your (meta/epi)genetics.

Any proffessional claiming otherwise should find another job IMO. I use this claim as a marker for incompetence.

<comment><USER21> "A calorie is a calorie" is wrong, sure, but so is Newtonian physics. It leads to a lot of better-than-random-guessing predictions about what you should do in order to achieve certain goals. Want to gain weight? A gallon of milk is roughly 2k calories, so if you add that to your daily diet you ought to put on weight. Want to lose weight? You should probably "eat less", and calories are a good approximation of how much "less" eating less is.

<comment><USER20> Except it doesn't work that way. Nobody eats when not hungry. Obesity is a disease or disfunction.

Imagine saying to someone that has bad vision to focus on the object.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can somebody explain to me why Taubes gets so much credit on this forum? He says himself that he's arguing without evidence.

<comment><USER23> Exactly. He puts forth an interesting hypothesis. Now he needs to prove it. You don't just get to say something _should_ be a certain way, you need data to back it up.

<comment><USER24> I don't think he has to prove anything. Personally, I'm long past the point of feeling the need to argue about nutrition on the internet. No one is going to change his/her mind due to "rational debate" because _all_ of the evidence is shit. So...I will not eat sugar, but feel free to eat as much sugar as you like. I genuinely don't care; if you develop obesity or diabetes or heart disease, you can rest easy in your epistemic conviction that sugar consumption didn't _cause_ it. Likewise, if I develop any of those conditions, I can be absolutely sure it wasn't due to excessive sugar consumption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One often overlooked factor of obesity is how fast you eat. The feeling of having eaten enough comes with a delay. So the faster you eat (in calories per second), the more likely you are overeating. And calories per second are typically much higher with sugary food than with say vegetables.

<comment><USER20> Actually, there is evidence to contrary.

\- Faster eating will stretch your stomach muscles more which is trigger for satiety

\- Faster eating will produce lower blood sugar as salivary amilaze doesn't break complex carbs into simple sugars.

There are papers on that, but CBB to find them now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> No surprises here. Sad truth is that science isn't driven by the search for objective truth. Rather, research funding determines which way the scientific literature will sway.

</comment><comment><USER27> Big Sugar's biggest allies in the US were, historically, the United States senators from Hawaii. To buy them off, Congress long ago applied nasty import duties on the substance, tripling the price of sugar in the US and giving rise to the substitute we all know and love to hate, high fructose corn syrup. (Not that sugar is actually healthier for you at all, mind you.)

It looks like they might actually be getting out of the business, though. Good luck on replacing the corn syrup now that the Midwestern corn states are their own lobby...

<comment><USER28> Hawaii's cane production has never been higher than Florida or Louisiana. Why would anything to do with sugar be aimed at Hawaii?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritionist#Regulation_of_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritionist#Regulation_of_the_title_.22nutritionist.22)

A demonstration of the ease in which it is possible to become an accredited nutritionist can be seen in Dr Ben Goldacre's successful application to have his dead cat Hettie accredited as a certified professional member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants.

<comment><USER20> Meh...

This is not specific to nutritionism. See "Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List" is an actual science paper accepted by a journal

[http://www.vox.com/2014/11/21/7259207/scientific-paper- scam](http://www.vox.com/2014/11/21/7259207/scientific-paper-scam)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Yep. Most all of the "low fat" and "reduced fat" foods pushed by nutritionists contain more added sugar than their fat-laden counterparts.

<comment><USER11> Every time I see candy marketed as "a fat-free food", I die a little inside.

Better put that crap on your packaging now, confectioners. I see mandatory warnings like "consumption of this product increases your risk of developing type 2 diabetes" in your future.

<comment><USER30> Compare the labels for the "Sugars" row on any regular vs. low fat food. Deleting fat removes flavor so they add sugar. At the moment, the clearest example that comes to mind is salad dressing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >Another way to say this is that what we eat doesn't matter; it's only how much

The big, glaring, obvious problem with this is "how much you eat is the only thing that determines weight gain/loss" doesn't imply that what you eat doesn't matter. What you eat can easily change how much you eat; it's much easier to consume a giant pile of calories if it's a cake than if it's spinach.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does it really matter that much if one calorie is not exactly equal to one calorie? What seems immediately obvious is that sugar is less filling per calorie than almost anything else, and thus if you eat sugary foods you'll end up eating more calories.

The only way to prevent this is to count precisely with an app or something, which is obviously a big challenge for most people.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's a food industry problem, not just a sugar problem. I'm supposed to believe a company like ConAgra is being manipulated by the sugar lobby?

</comment><comment><USER33> Nutritionfacts.org for evidence-based nutrition advice.

</comment><comment><USER33> nutritionfacts.org for evidence-based nutrition advice.</comment>


Could electrically stimulating criminals' brains prevent crime? - <AUTHOR> https://newatlas.com/brain-stimulation-psychopaths-prevent-crime/55281/ <comment><USER2> This concept forms the setting for the old Michael Chrichton novel _The Terminal Man_.</comment>


Show HN: Scan Sheet music and play it from your phone - <AUTHOR> https://www.playscore.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is not mine, but I saw it recently and thought it was pretty cool. You can adjust the speed it plays back and have it play an accompaniment to you if you are practicing. Pretty awesome, but there are reviews that say the OCR can make mistakes and you can't edit them.

</comment><comment><USER2> "Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread."

If you just "saw it recently and thought it was pretty cool", submit it just like any other link.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok thanks</comment></comment>


A Man Who Invents Languages for a Living - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2015/09/26/443170619/meet-the-man-who-invents-languages-for-a-living <comment><USER2> A fun and fascinating resource for anyone interested in artificial languages is Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit [1]. And if you want to get extremely into it, I highly recommend Paine's _Describing Morphosyntax_ for a detailed tour of diverse grammatical systems from across the world [2].

[1] [http://www.zompist.com/kit.html](http://www.zompist.com/kit.html)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Describing-Morphosyntax-Guide-Field- Li...](http://www.amazon.com/Describing-Morphosyntax-Guide-Field- Linguists/dp/0521588057)

<comment><USER3> Oh yeah, I remember stumbling across the Language Construction Kit years and years ago. What sticks with me is that all the language stuff on his site was fascinating, and then I looked at the rest of his site and it turned out he was more or less batshit insane. I guess maybe that's not unusual for someone super-dedicated to a hobby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> David is a great guy. Before Dothraki and his other languages for hire, I exchanged emails with him and he gave me a bunch of advice on my own constructed languages.

<comment><USER5> Dittoed. I still exchange emails with him from time to time, and he still gives good advice. And is just an overall nice guy. If you ever get a chance to meet him in person, he's quite friendly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been interested in a conlanging IDE for a long time. Good moment to raise the idea to others' attention?

The only general-purpose one I'm aware of is this: [http://sulmere.tumblr.com/PolyGlot](http://sulmere.tumblr.com/PolyGlot)</comment>


The Dangers of Code Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.jmolly.com/2012/11/06/the-dangers-of-code-review.html

<comment><USER2> I would suggest changing the title to "the dangers of not fixing problems found in code review", the very first example shows code review being an effective means of finding problems, and the presumption is that they just let the problem slide instead of refusing to merge the change until it was fixed.

The problem of changes being to big ... is another instance where you're ignoring the results of the code review. "This change is too big for me to review effectively" is a 100% legitimate problem with a change. The change should get rejected on that basis alone.</comment>


Detailed Agenda for a DDD Design-Level Event Storming - <AUTHOR> http://philippe.bourgau.net/detailed-agenda-for-a-ddd-design-level-event-storming-part-1/ <comment><USER2> "Detailed Agenda for a Domain-Driven Design Design-Level Event Storming". That title is worth a lot of consultant scrabble points.

<comment><USER3> Event Storming as a concept is nice. (i.e. Before building a system, talk with stake holders about relevant "business logic" events happens on the system) It helps with building a common language, and understanding about what's important to the product.

But now there are levels? Detailed Agendas are needed? Well, consultants have services to sell, gotta name things.

<comment><USER4> And the best things are things that sound important but that your competitors haven't offered, proving that your service is more comprehensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alberto Brandolini's "Introducing EventStorming" [1] book is worth reading, even in its incomplete state, to understand the approach from its author.

There aren't too many concepts to understand, it almost feels too simple to be of any value. But in all of the sessions I've been involved with participants have come away with a better understanding of the domain and often a useful model to begin working from.

[1] [https://leanpub.com/introducing_eventstorming](https://leanpub.com/introducing_eventstorming)

</comment><comment><USER6> We are currently in the process of reorganizing our teams to use DDD & Gherkin. Any tips? There is a lot of churn currently and I have not yet seen any real benefit to it. Context -- I'm full-stack, our team has recently grown to a point where we needed more organization than just throwing a frontend/backend pair at a story/task. Our team is distributed across the country as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> I read the DDD book by Evans some time ago. There's a bit where he was essentially saying "Even when you're really good at it, Domain modelling is still very hard to get right". So that left me thinking: Well, why bother then? Why subscribe to this methodology is its so hard to properly realise the benefits?

<comment><USER8> I'm really trying to understand what you are saying here. It reads like you are saying that because something is hard it is not worth the effort. I mean would you not expect the benefits to outweigh that effort, or at least assume that this is what the author believes to be true?

<comment><USER9> I think there is a valid point to be made that as the difficulty of something goes up the number of people capable of producing good results with it goes down. That leaves all the other people who try to use and wind up producing poor results. If the difficulty is such that there is a greater chance you will produce a poor result with it than a good one then it might not be worth taking such a gamble but rather sticking to a simpler methodology capable of producing good results a greater portion of the time even though the best result it can possibly produce is less good than that of DDD.

I really think there is an argument to be made for that. It's not that people are stupid, it's just that things are hard. Doing simpler things helps communication scale as it's easier to get everyone on the same page and engineering failures are almost always the result of communication failures across the engineering org.

<comment><USER7> Yes that is exactly what I meant

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The readers should also familiarize themselves with Event Modeling which goes with or without DDD. In fact, it can describe traditional systems while keeping the event-centric mindset.</comment>


Why Mathalicious is wrong about Khan Academy and engineering education - <AUTHOR> http://biesnecker.com/mathalicious-the-khan-academy-and-more-on-whats-wrong-with-math-education.html

<comment><USER2> One thing that you can always depend on the HN crowd to do when considering Khan Academy is to only consider how it works for them personally.

The HN crowd is made up of intelligent people who tend to learn things on their own. We're autodidacts. For people like us, Kahn Academy is wonderful. As a general educational solution, it's going to fail just as badly as every other general educational solution out there.

It's not because it's a bad idea. It's because there is no generalizable educational solution. Until we're comfortable with the idea that education is personal and we allow everyone to gain that personalized education, we're going to continue waffle around with solutions that provide some hope and excitement for a year or two before burning out.</comment>


Climate Change Predictions Have Suddenly Gone Catastrophic. This Is Why - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9393jd/climate-change-predictions-have-suddenly-gone-catastrophic-this-is-why <comment><USER2> The difficulty in simulating any non-linear system like clouds, climate, and weather is that it will either tell you what you want to hear, or exactly what your empirical data points to. The system can literally do ANYTHING. The only option is to create an array of probable states and look for the one that is more likely than the others.

At a large scale we have some metastable states that are kinda synced to some large linear input. But for all our predictions, the math says we could be experiencing 200C by September, and -80C by December.

The only reason to believe that these states are unlikely is they haven't happened in the past. At the same time, there hasn't been a carbon dump into the atmosphere at this scale so consistently for the entirety of our recorded history. So we are kind of entering unknown territory.

</comment><comment><USER3> I predict the predictions will remain very dire until December 2020. Then they will back off, probably with little note of explanation.

The predictions will again become shrill in February of 2024. Then they will back off in December.

The predictions will again become louder in February of 2028...

</comment><comment><USER4> TLDR; Clouds reflect light depending on the amount and how high they are, this contribute to greenhouse effects. Apparently, this wasn't part of the models before.</comment>


Nassim Taleb: How to React to Pandemics (Coronavirus) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1221486205847646208 <comment><USER2> Direct link to Nassim's Taleb paper: [https://www.academia.edu/41743064/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_...](https://www.academia.edu/41743064/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_via_Novel_Pathogens_- _Coronavirus_A_Note)

</comment><comment><USER3> His argument is to reduce mobility in the short term to combat the uncertainty and unknowns associated with the Coronavirus. The R0 (reproductive ratio) of the virus is increasing and it'll probably take longer to know how much havoc it'll reap.

It's unclear to what level the paper is referring (reduce flights on a global level, between cities in China or people leaving areas where the contagion started)

</comment><comment><USER4> 5 references and no quantitative treatment of a very very serious topic like nCoV. Taleb can publish whatever, but why is this grabbing HN front-page ?

<comment><USER5> His writing style is the most vexing thing ever!

<comment><USER6> Try reading _A New Kind of Science_. But only if you like many "sentences" starting with conjunctions. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I never understood this guy's following. Everything I've seen from him is intellectual bro-flexing, physical bro-flexing, or buzzword bingo.

Here's the bottom line, from the conclusion:

> Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary > approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include > constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak, > especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogen.

In other words, isolate the infected. This is not new, nor is the idea of today's highly connected world causing diseases to spread faster than in the last century.

</comment><comment><USER8> Call me cynical, but this seems like little more than an attention grabbing paper aiming to leverage press coverage to increase the authors' fame.

<comment><USER9> Yes, that's why it's from Nassim Taleb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is scary: "We estimated that the mean R0 ranges from 3.30 (95%CI: 2.73-3.96) to 5.47 (95%CI: 4.16-7.10) associated with 0-fold to 2-fold increase in the reporting rate."

<comment><USER11> MERS had a small R0 and yet killed more than SARS, which had a R0 range of 2-5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Taleb's prominence is baffling to me. I've read all his books, and tried hard to figure out why people I respect believe he's an important thinker. I just can't see it. Almost everything he says sets off my bullshit alarm.

Here we have him in typical form. The point of the paper seems to be to argue that we can reduce transmission by reducing contact (obvious), and concludes that we should do this pre-emptively at large scale worldwide (never going to happen, only good for alarmist headlines). This is exactly his formula when treating risk: start with a total platitude (rare events happen), and spin it out through huge over-reach into a headline-grabbing book (black swan! boo!).

The other thing about Taleb is that he's frequently way out over his skis on on the facts. Here, he states that the "selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens" makes "extinction certain" as if he's stating an undisputed fact. But instead of citing a virology paper, he cites an interesting but not very relevant evolutionary dynamics paper that draws on a particular mathematical model. In fact, the real world is complicated, and if anything virology tells us the opposite: zoonotic viruses tend to become less virulent over time, as the tradeoff between transmission and lethality is optimised. Almost nobody working in the area of virology would agree with the alarmist nonsense that this paper takes as axiomatic.

If anyone is interested in hearing how actual virologists talk about this outbreak, the superb This Week In Virology podcast has just released an episode that dives into this in depth:

[http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/](http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/)

<comment><USER9> He is wrong in just about every case, yet he is right in the aggregate. We are terrible at predicting high impact low probability events and waste our time worrying about low impact high probability events.

Put another way, if we were Turkeys our risk analysis would be modelling how much food the farmer is bringing us every day. And we don't know about Thanks Giving.

<comment><USER13> With a basic world model + scenario analysis they should have become aware of the possibility of a Thanksgiving Event

<comment><USER9> I am very interested in seeing the research about teaching Turkeys English, time keeping and American colonial history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is the paper available without signing up for academia.edu?

</comment><comment><USER15> tl;dr This old Pandemic II meme fluffed in scientific jargon: [https://files.catbox.moe/lenadr.jpg](https://files.catbox.moe/lenadr.jpg)

The only actual purpose of this paper is to advertise Taleb (and his books): Wuhan virus worse than current predictions? He's definitely going to remind people about his "genius" prediction that it could be worse. Turns out to be not such a big deal? Nobody is even going to remember he wrote this.

<comment><USER16> That's not what I got from it at all. The precautionary principle and fat- tailed processes that come with extinction-level risks are real. He makes valid and salient points.

<comment><USER17> Valid points that are hand wavey, non specific and non quantitative. Basically, you can't estimate parameters because of fat tails so what people are doing is inadequate. Seems trite to me

<comment><USER18> the search for novelty above all else killed the cat

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Since there literally nothing of substance here, just awesome sounding words, normal Taleb, lets go meta.

The new cool of 2020 seems to be is to make things look like journal articles and blog them. I almost wish for the days of peer review.

I have no idea what a "general" or "non native" "precautionary principle" is. I assume a Markov chain suggested it to them.

But if you believe the precautionary principle then you are pretty much anti- science. Anti-Vaxxers are precautionary principle enthusiasts for instance.

You could go all philosophical and say the precautionary principle is a new science, but that just sounds off alarm bells to me.</comment>


Show HN: Learn any language when committing to git with termit gem - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pawurb/termit <comment><USER2> I'm very confused about the purpose of this. If it's just taking advantage of the Translate API so you don't have to use the browser app, I can see the convenience of being able to, say, write a local script without having to munge through API docs and get a Google account and so on. However, I'm confused about it being branded as a language learning tool...

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the zsh git hook described in the docs. Every time you do a commit you can see and hear its message translated to the language that you would like to learn. I find it useful when learning french now since I do dozens of commits every day.

<comment><USER2> See, my problem with this idea is the inaccuracy of Google Translate's translations. For Romance languages, the results are questionable enough (I'm also learning French at the moment, and anything more than simple sentences can be hit-or-miss); for non-Romance languages, the sentences are just hilariously bad. A sentence as simple as "Hey, cowboy where is your horse?" is translated into Chinese as the slightly mangled 嘿,牛仔是你的马在哪里? according to the project's README. (To non-readers of Chinese, that 是 should be replaced by a comma.)

(As an aside, I got the strangely reordered and even more ungrammatical "哎牛仔哪里是你的马?" when I tested it myself in-browser. Talk about unreliable.)

<comment><USER3> _" Hey, cowboy where is your horse?" is translated into Chinese as the slightly mangled 嘿,牛仔是你的马在哪里?_

That's partly because the input is bad grammar, casual American. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

<comment><USER2> Adding appropriate commas doesn't help, afaict.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i think post commit hooks would be a better idea than aliasing git? interesting hack nonetheless :)

EDIT: also I presume you could use afplay on OSX which is preinstalled rather than suggesting installing mpg123

<comment><AUTHOR> You are welcome to submit a PR then :)</comment></comment>


Where to Go from Here - <AUTHOR> https://owensd.io/2016/10/31/where-to-go-from-here-2/ <comment><USER2> This article is very interesting, but it's unfortunate that its title says little about its content. I had no idea it was about Apple when I opened it, expecting it to be about the Go programming language instead.

> Why the 7th generation Intel chips?

I suspect the author meant "6th generation", or "why _not_ the 7th generation Intel chips", because the new MBPs have 6th-gen (i.e. Skylake) CPUs.

<comment><USER3> The answer is simple; the 7th gen mobile quad-cores are not available yet.

[http://gizmodo.com/why-are-apple-and-microsoft-using-such- ol...](http://gizmodo.com/why-are-apple-and-microsoft-using-such-old- processors-i-1788302547)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Change the title to something like "Picking an Apple laptop for development use".

<comment><USER5> Am I the only one getting title fatigue? Now I automatically skip or flag links whose title (not necessarily editorialised) are completely uninformative or deceitful.

<comment><USER6> It's clickbait, and I seem to recall hearing that it's a deliberate strategy from Hacker News – that they _want_ people to be "intrigued" by the headline. I hate it.

<comment><USER7> The site guidelines say the opposite, basically:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would totally buy a laptop with the weight and a bit thicker than my 2012 13" MacBook Pro, if I could get:

nvidia 1060/1070 GPU able to run VR headsets, without sounding like a hairdryer

Commensurate or better battery life

More than 16GB RAM

Easily upgradeable SSD.

More durability

Apple is not making this laptop! In fact, I have no inkling if they're going to make that if I wait another year, or ever. So why should I remain an Apple customer? I don't think Apple is interested in me as a customer. What kind of customer am I? Basically, a dev.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if Mac-users realise that  isn't actually an Apple logo, but is just a private-use character which Apple display as their logo (while every other system can do whatever it wants).

<comment><USER10> Yeah, we do. However, since our primary audience of people we are talking to are on a Mac/iOS device, it doesn't really matter. And when we are on a non- Mac, we know what the square box symbol is supposed to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > And then the �WATCH came out.

Aaah, standards.

</comment><comment><USER12> > I still have hope that Apple can start to tighten the reigns in

It was just a couple of months ago that I noticed somebody misusing "reign" for "rein", and now it's _everywhere_.

<comment><USER13> Trust me, this mistake has been ubiquitous for decades. You're just now realizing it. (cf "recency effect")

<comment><USER4> I know, and as a horse owner, it irks me.</comment></comment></comment>


Want to keep track of gem updates? BundleWatcher's got your back! - <AUTHOR> http://www.bundlewatcher.com/

<comment><USER2> What is the added value beyond what `bundle outdated` does?

<comment><AUTHOR> For me it's the RSS feed</comment></comment>


Kicking the tires: A trial month at 37signals - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3077-kicking-the-tires-my-trial-month

<comment><USER2> Every time I read about 37signals and how they work I get a wave of jealousy and impatience. Its refreshing to know that there are some companies out there that treat their employees like humans and not cogs in the machine. Its also refreshing to know you can run a business at the scale of 37signals without huge bureaucracies.

I know they aren't the only ones who do this but they are vocal about it, and when your living/working in enterprise land (MKE/Midwest) its good to remember it doesn't need to be this way.

</comment><comment><USER3> A brand new Basecamp developer is allowed to push a change like "disable HTML support" directly into production, without anyone pointing out that it might be a bad idea? Seriously?

<comment><USER4> There exist plenty of organizations where a manager would have reported in April 2012: "Hey Bob, the $PEON_1846 on the QR team in $LOCATION reported that $COMMIT breaks requirement 1,735: todos must allow embedding the following restricted subset of HTML. Refer to requirements documents /shares/documents/basecamp/specs/dashboard/subcomponents/todo/functional_spec.xls sheet Content Embeds page 3. Submitted as issue 124,436 in the tracker, assigned to the June milestone. Get it done by then, otherwise we can't fix it until September prior to the Q4 code freeze, but turn in your TPS reports first."

Basecamp would be a _very_ different product if it was made that way, though.

There are non-zero costs associated with giving people the authority to do productive work. On the plus side, this enables them to do productive work.

P.S. Having worked at an organization which did development that way, I can tell you that having copious documentation does not mean requirement 1,735 will be implemented, but it guarantees requirement 1,735 will be written about somewhere, which _is what that organization type ends up optimizing for_.

<comment><USER5> There's an enormous middle ground between the two extremes you're portraying, though.

<comment><USER4> True. If, for example, you're a consulting company, you could have an intermediate developer sit down and watch every junior developer as he codes. The intermediate developer could then say "Oh, dude, nice try but stripping all HTML will probably bork at least some customers' sites. Here, let me open a console on prod and fire a quick SQL query that would get me fired at TPS Reports Inc. Ahh yes, it appears customers do indeed embed HTML. OK, let's do this the long way."

This would allow you to bill, ballpark, $10,000 for "Enhancement: forgetting to close a tag in a todo no longer borks site."

But, while not being TPS Reports Inc, that is still a pretty different environment than what 37Signals operates in.

<comment><USER6> what's wrong with adding tags at the end of the user editable areas that are unmatched so the rest of the page does not break when they add unbalanced html? I think they should parse it and make sure it's legit html before blindly saving it(xss possibilities if anything is public facing et. al.).

<comment><USER4> I think if you have two developers continue this conversation to its logical conclusion with bouts of coding and testing interspersed, you will bill $10k.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Did Churchill Cause the Bengal Famine? - <AUTHOR> https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/did-churchill-cause-the-bengal-famine/ <comment><USER2> TLDR: No

The truth—documented by Sir Martin Gilbert and Hillsdale College—is that Churchill did everything he could in the midst of world war to save the Bengalis; and that without him the famine would have been worse.4

4 Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill: The Churchill Documents (Hillsdale, Michigan: Hillsdale College Press, 2006 and ongoing).</comment>


Hacking Team and a case of BGP hijacking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bofh.it/id_456 <comment><USER2> As someone who works in technology, but has only a cursory understanding of BGP, I find BGP's trust mechanism flabbergasting. Would anyone like to explain why it remains the preferred protocol and what improvements are in the works to mitigate the effect of these sort of hijacks?

<comment><USER3> >What improvements are in the works to mitigate the effect of these sort of hijacks?

I happen to have published research in this area[0]. There are two systems being developed to secure BGP.

The first is the RPKI which aims to provide a Public Key Infrastructure to attest to the origination of IP addresses. To grossly oversimplify it: everyone would get a certificate that says "AS X is allowed to originate IP prefix Y". Many routers already support the RPKI[1] and the RPKI is currently undergoing deployment[2], but it should take some time before operators begin using it to make routing decisions. Once used the RPKI offers substantial security benefits[3].

The second protocol is BGPSEC which is designed secure routing paths. It will use the RPKI as its foundation.

[0]: [https://www.cs.bu.edu/~goldbe/papers/sigRPKI.pdf](https://www.cs.bu.edu/~goldbe/papers/sigRPKI.pdf)

[1]: [http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios- xml/ios/iproute_bgp...](http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios- xml/ios/iproute_bgp/configuration/xe-3s/irg-xe-3s-book/irg-origin-as.pdf)

[2]: [http://rpki-monitor.antd.nist.gov/](http://rpki-monitor.antd.nist.gov/)

[3]: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.2690v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.2690v1.pdf)

<comment><USER4> And presumably the only organisation issuing the certs will be the organisation issuing IP space, right? RIGHT?... Guys?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who are curious, 126.96.36.199/24 (the hijacked IPs) belong to balticservers.com, which is based out of Lithuania[1].

[http://wikiscan.org/plage- ip/18.104.22.168/24?submenu=whois](http://wikiscan.org/plage- ip/126.96.36.199/24?submenu=whois)

<comment><USER6> Interesting choice, I don't recall many malware C&C servers hosted in Lithuania

<comment><USER7> The Italian "Special Branch" were hosting a "legal" cnc with a security- oriented ISP there -- not really classic malware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everyone should just blackhole any traffic to and from the Aruba ISP. They have failed to maintain the trust relationship needed at high-tier ISPs and should no longer be operational.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can somebody explain how they got the police to help them?

"You remember the RAT we sold you? Yea... That's broken because ... Help us or people might notice." If that's it.. Wow. This whole story gets more fishy by the minute.

<comment><USER10> Exactly, how can the police order an ISP to commit a crime? Why did the ISP committed the crime? Hopefully both will be charged now.

The only one thing I trust here is the independence of the Italian prosecution system.

<comment><USER11> I'm not surprised, in Italy the Mafia blew up or assassinated prosecutors and lawyers threatening them. In countries where the government is not the law, anything can happen with the right sized envelops of cash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can take over other providers IP space by announcing their IPs via BGP from well connected high ranked tier ISPs, but just because you can do one thing does not mean you should exercise it.

Internet was built on the premise that you can trust other organisations such as good willed universites, it was not built for a landscape of internet crime and state sponsored hackers.

BGP and central certificate authorities is flawed in princicple and this sense. Its very easy to create fake certificates for big organisations if you have the power of a state.

Diginotar is such an Epic fail of CA which shows exactly why you cannot trust central trust when there is state hackers at work.

So you either hijack BGP, DNS or Central certificate authority then you steal peoples cookies. Since most does not use two factor authentication that is enough to take ownership of their email accounts. Once the email accounts is compromised all other accounts can be compromised through password resets.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is pretty crazy. I wonder how the route hijack didn't get noticed by anyone at the time, though? Or at least if someone did notice, they didn't make a fuss about it.

<comment><USER9> That frightended me a little to.. It seems like these things can fly by if operators don't fuck up on a major scale like recently with Malaysia(?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I do not undertsand this. We recently had to change our announcement to upstream ISPs from/23 to /22 and our ISPs verified with ARIN that the entire /22 belonged to us, before changing their filters. Also, there's RADb database.

<comment><USER15> I used to work at a spam company and we did this and similar techniques.

One similar technique was we basically created our own fake ISPs, disguised as rural wireless Internet providers. Paid yearly ARIN fees, had or own /20 blocks of IP space allocated, etc. We specifically requested ip filtering completely removed from our peering connection with major upstream/backbone ISPs. They did so without question. This allowed us to source route any IP out to the Internet. Then, we would purchase large blocks of IPs (a couple of /20s a month) from Romania and Argentina. We would create GRE tunnels over to RO and route them back to the US. It's been years since I was involved so my memory of the technical details is hazy now...

<comment><USER16> Did anyone ever notice?

<comment><USER15> Not getting listed on Spamhaus was a constant battle. One time our network engineer made a huge mistake by announcing 15-20 /20 blocks registered with RIPE out of the US ASN. Spamhaus apparently automatically scans for this type of suspicious behavior and falgged like 20,000 ips.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_(Internet)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_\(Internet\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [http://www.bortzmeyer.org/bgp-malaisie.html](http://www.bortzmeyer.org/bgp- malaisie.html)</comment>


Ask HN: 100 Languages will come n go COBOL will still run global economy.debate? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Old and obsolete mean different things.

If something comes along significantly and obviously better-suited than COBOL in its domain, with a migration path, we might see COBOL code gradually replaced. Peter Thiel said " If we are truly talking about an innovation, then the product will not be an incremental improvement. For it to be an innovation it must be 10 times better than what is currently available." Steve Jobs said something similar.

Having worked on big systems in COBOL, I can say it's good at what it does, and the tools are better than you might think. The tendency to view anything old or out of sight as obsolete junk bedevils the tech industry.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not that all the native floating point languages can't switch to fixed point, but Muller's recurrence is essentially what caused the IRS to switch BACK to COBOL. Accounting hasn't changed much since the 60's and no other language is this auditable. It is still the best language for reliably calculating massive accouting transactions and thats why it is still the engine of the entire ACH system, the IRS, the FDIC, the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury Department. Not mention just about all banks, insurance companies and national brokerages.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Think about this: COBOL was "outdated" when Java was born. Will COBOL's replacement require an upgrade every decade or will it behave this well into obsolescence?</comment>


Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course - <AUTHOR> http://www.kyle-brady.com/2009/06/10/how-i-won-a-copyfight/

<comment><USER3> Aside from the question of publishing source code, I wanted to applaud the author for his observation that students want to do meaningful work. I work as a programmer (and have done so for more than a few years) and am only going to school to "get my degree". Nothing is more frustrating to me than when people who have spent their whole careers in academia correct me on dumb things. I once got marked down because my curly braces were on the same line as the function definition in Java. They said it wasn't "the way it was done in the industry". I learn 10 times more from my job than I ever have at school - their students would be far better off if their projects were more realistic, and if their teachers had real experience.

<comment><USER4> _I wanted to applaud the author for his observation that students want to do meaningful work._

      The pitcher cries for water to carry
      and a person for work that is real.

      -- Marge Piercy, "To be of use"

<comment><USER5> The pitcher simply is, while our cries encompass it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lot of folks seem to believe that this fundamentally screws over the professor. If it does, he's an idiot, and I speak as someone intimately involved with all this before.

There are basically three kinds of CS assignments. The first is the moral equivalent of algebra problems, where you change the parameters every year if you care. These were boring to give, boring to solve, but very easy to grade.

The second is "write an implementation of X" for X ranging over things like binary trees, etc. In these cases there is one correct answer that the TA is looking for _and it is already in the book_. No creativity is necessary. Simple copy/paste detection will catch obvious cheaters, and anybody who modifies this guy's code enough to be non-obvious has just performed as much work, if not more, than was needed to do the assignment in the first place.

The third assignment requires creativity, and here if two students solve the problem in the same way you can usually be sure they colluded. Most of these can be trivially changed, but they're a bitch to grade (although my favorite problems on both sides of the aisle, they're very time consuming) and so are not favored by lazy profs.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good for him. It's perverse for the gatekeepers of an institution supposedly dedicated to increasing human knowledge to attempt to restrain its dissemination in this fashion, and it's cheering to see the university backing the student here.

<comment><USER8> I think the gatekeepers of the institution feel that human knowledge is not increased when homework answers are published on the web, rendering the assignments obsolete for future instances of the course.

<comment><USER9> What is the chance they are doing anything new in a 100 level CS course? Interesting, perhaps, but new? Couldn't one find answers to most of the problems in 4+ languages with a single search? I understand the argument, to an extent, that the student is simply lowering the barrier to cheating, but isn't it he really just lowering it from just above the knee to just below the knee?

It was easy to cheat 8 years ago (from what I remember), it's surely easier to cheat now, and it's certainly not because this one kid stood up for something in which he believes.

<comment><USER8> No, he's lowering it from just above the knee to the ankle. One link to his site, and you'd have all the answers to all the homework questions for the whole semester, presumably ready to print and hand in.

<comment><USER10> But the professors aren't stupid (one would assume). They're going to know about this guy, remember his site, and very easily compare the work?

(Edit: I don't have all the answers, or an opinion on this piece, just playing devil's advocate)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but why make it harder for the prof? What's the upside to allowing students to publish the answers?

<comment><USER11> To encourage students to take pride in their work?

Nowadays it is hardly any extra work for the prof either, any coursework of substance gets put through plagiarism detection anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In my program, I had to sign a non-disclosure when doing an assignment for a local tech company. They didn't use anything I made, but I can't share it. It's basically gone for a minimum of 4 years.

I always feel like I've lost a little bit of myself when I lose code or IP I've created, even if I'm paid for my time.

<comment><USER13> "I always feel like I've lost a little bit of myself..."

You shouldn't. Because you haven't. _You_ are greater that then sum of what you have done. You wrote it once, you can write it again (not exactly the same, of course, but you get the idea).

They can claim your work as their IP, but they can't claim who you have become in the process.

<comment><USER14> _You wrote it once, you can write it again (not exactly the same, of course, but you get the idea)._

Can you? That code is now a trade secret for that company, and if you wrote a clone (or compatible version) using your knowledge of the product, that seems like a clear case of infringement.

<comment><USER13> The code may be IP, but the thinking behind it is not, and who you are most certainly is not.

Once you learn how to ride a bike, the owner of that bike has no claim to prevent you from riding another.

<comment><USER14> IANAL, but the thinking behind it, if not generally known, is definitely a trade secret. Using or disclosing that information to another party is trade secret infringement.

If (as an employee of that bike company) you developed a way to make the bike 20% lighter that wasn't readily discernible, you can't leave and start a competing company using that idea. The law around trade secret misappropriation is such a minefield that most companies separate the reverse engineering team from the implementation team (ie. clean room design).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let me tell you something about labs. Challenging labs a) are REALLY hard to make and b) ALWAYS suck on the first iteration, ALWAYS. This guy has set back the whole course to the very beginning, because now everything needs to be rewritten. He's a jerk.

No one's impressed by his sophomore-level introductory data structures and algo classes.

And because he posted his code to the public, I have the following comments: his code is poorly commented and kind of crappy. I'm further bothered by the fact that he's a senior-to-be and hasn't done anything substantial yet. Where's the kernel, 1337 freedom of information defender?

<comment><USER16> _This guy has set back the whole course to the very beginning, because now everything needs to be rewritten._

So? As someone who is not a student there, I could also read the labs and post my take on the code. Information wants to be free.

Anyway, my advice would have been to take down the code when asked. Wait a week (until grades are published), then put the code back up. By that time, everyone will have forgotten. (People are very, very lazy.)

 _I'm further bothered by the fact that he's a senior-to-be and hasn't done anything substantial yet. Where's the kernel, 1337 freedom of information defender?_

I don't think undergrads ever do anything substantial (as part of their official coursework, that is). So I would not fault this guy for that, that is a problem with the system in general.

<comment><USER15> Professors can fail students at any point between starting the class and graduation. Piss one off bad enough and he'll change your grade.

True on the lazy part though.

At the risk of being _that guy_ , at _my_ school, many undergrad CS majors write an honest-to-god ground up Kernel. So, from scratch to able to boot on x86 hardware and run multiple different programs and everything. Arguably substantial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Outstanding result. Compliments to both the student and the Chair of the CS Dept at SJSU.

Not only was the matter resolved properly, the Chair also managed to stop it from "escalating" until lawyers had to get involved.

Instead, the Chair successfully "hit the pause button", reflected on the issues, got some expert advice, and then communicate the result clearly and definitively, so everyone could close this chapter and move on.

Even for the prof who initially complained about the student posting code, this is a good result. It lets him know how he should update his course in the future, and what limitations on students posting code is reasonable, or not reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER18> One of the problems I'm seeing where I go to university is that with budget cut's one of the most effected area's is course preparation. Lecturers aren't getting paid properly to update there courses and as a result are using the same or very similar lecture notes/ assignments and exams for years.

Basically meaning that any innovation in the courses is coming out of the lecturers own time. A pattern emerges in that the young, recently graduated lecturers will put the extra effort in to make there subject good and the older ones by and large will just run what they have been running with for many years.

</comment><comment><USER19> I sure hope he doesn't take that guy's class or any of that guy's friend's classes. He may find his work held up to a higher standard... I think the prof was pissed cause the solutions being posted meant he had to do more work. I am all about free speech, but if I were doing my degree there I wouldn't want to antagonize the faculty so much.

</comment><comment><USER20> I had a good teacher at UVM who took time out of class to discuss this subject one day. He made it crystal clear that as a student, you own everything you code. As a professor, or paid person of the university, that is not necessarily the case. But as a student, what you write is yours. From the other side, I could see how the professor doesn't want people posting code (most likely solutions) online.

<comment><USER21> I'm considering transferring to UVM for computer science and I was wondering if I could talk to you about your experiences there.

<comment><USER20> Sure, you can contact me at my hackernews username @ gmail.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congratulations to Kyle for violating the spirit of the modern university by going up against faculty. ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> I think that to some extent, the professor might be right. What if I was to take that same course, with the same professor, and got the same assignment.

I could easily browse his source code when I get coder's block.

</comment><comment><USER24> Isn't Computer Science a complex enough subject for the teacher to be able to write new problem sets every semester? Isn't he just being lazy by trying to reuse his problems over and over?

</comment><comment><USER25> university is an extension of high-school-as-prison system, except that it's very big that one doesn't feel in one (maybe because one pays for the delusion^W priviledge of 'freedom')

</comment><comment><USER26> I actually encourage my students to POST all of their WORK under a by-nc-sa Creative Commons license so that other people/students can build on their work - it's actually EASIER to check for plagiarism when their work is online - <USER2> just Google it and it will flag if they are copying verbatim.</comment>


Yet Another Flying Car - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/30/hyundai-is-getting-into-the-flying-car-business/ <comment><USER2> Flying vehicles are inherently more expensive than ground vehicles, so I doubt this will take off. And these things had better be completely autonomous or else you'll have to watch for bad drivers coming at you in three dimensions instead of two!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the commercial usage of drones are just evolving up after a lot of R&D and a scrutinising from the regulatory bodies. Even in the case of drones, it's the products that would be damaged if anything goes bad. But in the case of flying cars, it would really be a nightmare and the cost would sky rocket for sure!</comment></comment>


Show HN: The New CloudRail Portal – Find the Right API and Connect 10x Faster - <AUTHOR> https://cloudrail.com <comment><AUTHOR> We released a new version of the CloudRail portal which helps you discover and connect to APIs much faster. Looking to hear any feedback, especially around usability. Thanks!</comment>


Simplest kind of xss at google? or is it just me...? - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=%22%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert%28%27xss%27%29%3B%3C%2Fscript%3E

<comment><USER2> Did this really work when you tried it? Seems to have been fixed if it did.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally did, find it hard to believe myself. Probably some local issue.. screens at <http://webting.no/gscreen/></comment></comment>