Thomas Edison's Ambitious "To-Do" List from 1888 - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/thomas-edisons-hugely-ambitious-to-do-list-from-1888.html <comment><USER2> Looking at the list:

* Cotton Picker - _didn 't get done in Edison's time, done in mid 20th century_

* New Standard Phonograph, Hand turning phonograph - _product improvements_

* New Slow speed cheap Dynamo - ?

* New Expansion Pyromagnetic Dynamo - ?

* Deaf Apparatus - _hearing aid. Edison never developed a good amplifier_

* Electrical Piano - _also needed an amp, (but see Teleharmonium)_

* Long distance standard Telephone Transmitter which employs devices of recording phonogh - _something else that needed an amp_

* Telephone Coil of Fe [iron] by tt in Parafine or other insulator - _loading coil?_

* Platina Point Trans using new phono Recorder devices - _point-contact microphone, a dead end._

* Grid Battery for Telephones, etc. - _a battery improvement_

* Improved Magnetic Bridge for practical work - _something to replace the Wheatstone bridge and mirror galvanometer, a sensitive but un-amplified lab instrument. Again, if only he 'd had an amp..._

* Motograph Mirror, relay, Relay, Telephone practical - _the motograph was a really clunky way to amplify, using an unusual physical effect where the friction between a rotating chalk cylinder and a contact changes with the current through the contact. Dead end, although the phenomenon was used once in an IBM line printer paper drive clutch._

* Artificial Cable - ?

* Phono motor to work on 100 volt ckts - _routine job_

* Duplicating Phono Cylinders - _the Edison Amberoll process; many playable cylinders still exist._

* Deposit in vacuo on lace, gold + silver also on cotton molten chemical compound of lustrous surfaces to imitate silk— also reg plating system - ?

* Vacuous Ore milling Large Machine, Magnetic Separator Large, Locking material for Iron sand - _part of Edison 's cement and rock crushing period_

* Artificial Silk, Artificial filaments - _trying to find something better for incandescent lamps, pre-tungsten_

* Uninflammable Insulating Material - _General Electric Deltabeston felted asbestos insulation - "Will not age or crack". Worked great, except for the asbestos hazard_

* Good wax for phonograph - _he did that_

* Phonographic Clock - _" speaking clock - was done eventually, but not by Edison_

* Large Phonograph for Novels, etc. - _long-playing records, not in Edison 's time_

* Pig Iron Expmts with Electricity + Magnetism, Malleablizing Cast now in Vacuo - ?

* Drawing fine wire - _figuring out how to draw tungsten wire for lamps was really tough, but GE eventually did it. Edison not involved_

* Joy phonograph for Dolls - _somebody did that in Edison 's time. Mass produced as Mattel's Chatty Cathy in the 1950s._

* Cable Motograph, Very Loud Motograph telephone with 1/3 siz phonogh motor. - _more attempts to amplify_

* Magneto telephone with actual contact end magnet compression of an adjustable rubber press as in new phones - ?

* Snow Compressor - ??

* Glass plate water ore repeator - ??

* Tinned faced [illeg.] for Stove Castings - _somebody did that, old stoves often have tin facings_

* Refining Copper Electrically - _somebody did that too, but not Edison_

* Quad neutral relay - _another multiplex telgraphy component_

* Cheap low induct Cop Insulating material for Lead Cable people - _insulating materials were a big problem in Edison 's day. No plastic, no synthetic rubber. Lots of wood, fabric, paper, tar, etc., all bad._

* 200 volt 20 cp lamp - _another size of light bulb_

* Recording Volt Indicator - _done, but not by Edison_

* Box balancing System - ?

* Alternating Machine + Transformer - _Tesla 's department_

* Platinum wire [illeg.] cutting Machine, silver wire wood cutting system - _hot wire cutting? Dead end for wood, although today we have laser cutters._

* Boron fil. - _Boron filaments didn 't happen_

* Hg [mercury] out of Lamp - _beginnings of environmentalism?_

* Phonaplex Repeater - _another problem that needed an amp._

* Squirting glass sheet tube etc. Nickel [illeg.] - _glass extrusion worked fine, but Edison didn 't invent it_

* Artificial Mother Pearl - _too early for plastics_

* Red Lead pencils equal to graphite, India Ink, Tracing Cloth - _shopping list?_

* Ink for blind - _not by Edison_

* Fluffy Incandescent Burner for gas - _lantern mantle. Done, but by Edison?_

* Regenerative Kerosene Burner - ?

* Centralized arc in arc Lamp, Cai–[illeg.] Tesla arc lamp test - ?

* Strengthening alternating cli by sternt Dynamo - ?

* Electroplating Machines for Schenectady - _OK, must do day job_

* Condenser Transformer - _a charge pump? Common today in IC size_

* Sqr ft diffraction gratings in silver by 5000 [illeg.] tool special [illeg.] lathe for ornamental purposes - _popular with hippies in the 1960s_

* Cheap plan produce Mimeograph surfaces - _Edison mimeograph upgrade?_

* Miners battery + lamp - _good product idea, done by many_

* Sorting Coal from Slate Machine - _mechanize a job done by kids. Coal floats, slate doesn 't, and coal breakers exploit this._

* Butter direct from Milk - ?

* Burning asphalt Candles by high chimney - _bad idea_

* Magnets RR signals - ?

* Soften [illeg.] of books transfer to Cop plate + plate to [illeg.] matrix - ?

* Telephone Repeater - _another need for an amp_

* Substitute for Hard rubber - _not really solved until neoprene in WWII_

* Artificial Ivory - _ABS plastic was a long way off_

* Revolving Thermo - ?

* Caller Indicator for Jump Telegh - ?

* Marine Telegraphy - _undersea cable, or ship to shore?_

* Long distance speaking tube filled H20 2 dia pressure - _dead end_

* Lend plate battery for modifying attending Current - ?

* Two revolving bands in battery Lead faced press in liquid close together + out into separate chambers to [illeg.]reduce by gas the other - ?

* Siren phonogh - _another need for an amp_

* Perm mag like an electromag of [illeg.] hand steel high polish separately magnetized + forced together powerfully[illeg.] - _magnetic materials in Edison 's day were weak by modern standards. If he'd tried adding some cobalt..._

* Telephone working more [illeg.] - _yes, focus on day job_

* Eartubes formed crescent [illeg.] wire - ?

* Cheap Voltmeter - _outsource to New Jersey?_

* Chalk Battery - _dead end_

* Dynamo or motor long tube in long magnetic field top + bottom contacts forcing water through generator current by – passage. [Illeg.] - _the beginnings of magnetohydrodynamics?_

* Thermo battery slick Copper oxidized then plated over surface oxide nailed to make good contact [illeg.] - ?

* Disk Phonograph - _that worked out very well_

<comment><USER2> Looking through this, you can see the two big problems that had Edison stumped - plastics and amplifiers. Insulation and phonograph records needed better materials. Plastics and synthetic rubber solved those problem, but not until the 1940s-1960s did synthetic materials surpass natural ones.

His telephony and phonograph inventions all suffered from the lack of an amplifier. He was close. He discovered the "Edison effect", the beginnings of electronic vacuum tubes, in 1875, but didn't follow up. Instead, he developed workarounds - a loudspeaker driver connected to carbon button microphone, the clunky motograph, and a microphone diaphragm driving a needle valve on a steam line, the "steam shout" PA system. None worked well. Not until 1906, when de Forest invented the triode vacuum tube, was there a useful electrical amplifier.

Having all the gain you can use in a small, cheap package was a century in the future for Edison.

<comment><USER3> You can probably add "magnets RR signals" (a reference to remotely operated railroad switches) to the list of things that he could have done with amplification.

<comment><USER2> Probably train detection or train stop there, not switch operation. Edison never did much with railroad switches and signals, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Todo: 1) Electrocute a dog 2) Electrocute an elephant 3) Electrocute a man

All to prove the dangers of AC power.

[http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/10/19/edison-publicly- tortured...](http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/10/19/edison-publicly-tortured- animals-to-discredit-ac-power/)

<comment><USER5> Yeah I saw that episode of Bob's Burgers too.

Edit: In all seriousness, the man and the elephant were already scheduled to be killed. So it sucks, but he did so many amazing things that this is easily overshadowed.

<comment><USER6> > he did so many amazing things that this is easily overshadowed

Torture is never "easily overshadowed" in my book. Some things just cannot be erased, no matter how many great things you accomplish.

I don't see the difference between this statement and saying that it's alright to conduct experiments on inmates as long as we discover something amazing.

<comment><USER5> What you're calling torture later became a legal way to execute someone. I don't think it's fair to expect people from the past to have modern morals.

<comment><USER6> Legal executions are actually pretty notorious for being poorly done, so I think I can call it torture just fine when the procedure takes too long.

There's nothing "modern" about not hurting things. That is something a person understands on a fundamental level, because it can happen to them. People just rationalize and don't care and think they're above it. There were people who were against such things in all times, perhaps just not a lot of them.

Wonder what it says about genius and hard work if something so trivial was impossible for them despite all their accomplishments?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those that missed it I assume this is on the heels of yesterday's post:

Leonardo Da Vinci's To Do List (circa 1490) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187316)

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry, you'll have to wait til I die to see my awesome todo list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Edison invented the modern industrial research and development laboratory. He created multiple entire industries. Who else has done anything remotely like that?

<comment><USER10> Nikola Tesla always gets wrongfully overshadowed by Edison for some reason. Although Edison actively shunned down innovations by Tesla time and time again just so he can make more money. He also stole credit for some of the stuff that Tesla did [1].

[1] Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century

<comment><USER11> > Nikola Tesla always gets [...] overshadowed by Edison for some reason.

I get the exact opposite impression.

<comment><USER12> Tesla has recently been getting his due, but most people of a certain age remember having Edison drilled into their heads all through elementary, middle, and high school, with barely a mention of Tesla unless the teacher was really into history and science

<comment><USER11> Oh, I see. I guess it must be a US thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Large Phonograph for Novels, etc.

Audio books as thing in 1888!

I wonder what Elon Musk's "To-Do" list looks like... or Bezos or anyone with the resources like these two gagillion-aires.

<comment><USER14> Discover immortality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> These items sparked my interest, because they are quite similar to things I'm working on or thinking about doing...

-New Expansion Pyromagnetic Dynamo

-Deposit in vacuo on lace, gold + silver also on cotton molten chemical compound of lustrous surfaces to imitate silk also reg plating system

-Malleablizing Cast now in Vacuo

-Snow Compressor

I'm working on a fusion reactor, have wanted to evaporate and experiment with metals in a vacuum chamber, and I want to build a snow brick maker for fun in the winter...

<comment><USER16> Farnsworth Hirsch fusor? Those things are crazy fun.

<comment><USER17> Wow, thanks for sending me down that hourlong Wikipedia rabbithole ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Proving once again the Ideas are Cheap but Execution is Everything.

<comment><USER19> You still have to have the ideas as well, plus the means to make them real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Uninflammable" is my new favorite word.

<comment><USER21> Oddly, according to Merriam-Webster it's a word:

[https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/uninflammable](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/uninflammable)

Even more oddly, the double-negative (un & in) has no impact on its meaning "not flammable."

<comment><USER22> > _Even more oddly, the double-negative (un & in) has no impact on its meaning > "not flammable."_

But in- is not necessarily negative, it's also a prefix that can mean "in" (like indoors, ingrown): inflammable means it "can be _in_ flames".

Actually, French makes it more obvious, as the verb for setting aflame is "enflammer" where "en-" is clearly the prefix that means "in", not the prefix that means "not".

At least English uses two different prefixes for "uninflammable", even if there's some confusion possible. French has it as "ininflammable", with two "in-" prefixes that mean different things.

<comment><USER23> The verb might be more obvious but the translation is actually the same: _inflammable_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminded me that most TO-DO lists will be lost when we die, unless we meticulously set up a backup scheme and an 'inactivity management'[1] like google has. Probably not that interesting to anyone but close relatives, though. However, I find that they reflect our personalities a lot and are pretty valuable. [1] [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER25> \- Cotton Picker

\- New Standard Phonograph

\- Invent the lightbulb

\- Trick Telsa to do work for free

</comment><comment><USER26> I find myself more than a little disappointed in this "todo" list. It looks more to me like an "ambitions" list. These are future long-term projects. It doesn't look much different to me than someone with a todo list that includes multiple long term software development projects.

A much more insightful todo list for me would be to see one of the day-to-day todo lists I find myself writing for every weekend. These include things like "Finish writing chapter 15" or "Refactor [component] into [design pattern]." I want to see the granular tasks Edison and other "great men" worked on in the day-slivers of their lives.

Seeing a big list like this reinforces my impression of Edison as a less of the hands-on inventor our society tries to make him out to be and more of a high-level manager who put mostly signed the patents for everything his workshop of inventors produced.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have only one item in my todo list to end all todo lists: Invent general artificial intelligence

</comment><comment><USER28> It's all fun and games until trying to make a point by electrocuting a pachyderm.

</comment><comment><USER23> How many of these were actually invented?

</comment><comment><USER29> I love looking at these old To-Do lists. I personally think Edison was a thief and jerkoff BUT I gotta give credit where credit is due for his marketing/business genius. I really really want to see a to-do list from Nikola Tesla. Really almost ANYTHING from him would be awesome.

<comment><USER30> > I personally think Edison was a thief and jerkoff

If you haven't, read some more biographies about the man. You'll discover that things were a bit more complicated than what you may currently believe; above all else, Edison was a businessman who invented, and an inventor who knew business, and saw opportunities where others didn't.

That doesn't mean he was a saint - he had and did plenty of things that on retrospect weren't very moral, and questionably illegal. The way he treated his wife and children was terrible - but wasn't out of the norm for the era (unfortunately). And he was a master of taking and expanding on other's ideas and marketing them as his own; you can call that theft - perhaps plagiarism is a better term? - but it isn't anything different than what still happens today.

Excusable? No - but again, it's more complex - and Tesla had his own faults. I've found in my reading about both men, that they were both complex characters of their time. The real tragedy, IMHO, is that their individual prides got in the way of the possibility of their mutual cooperation; had they done so, history would likely be much different today.

<comment><USER29> I completely agree. My wording was a bit strong and I can see from the downvotes that it was unacceptable. I wasn't trying to be ignorant about Edison. I apologize for that. I'm definitely seeing this from a biased view because of my admiration for Tesla. I'm going to read these books about Edison that everyone is posting. I should probably admire Edison alot more than I do. I carry small notebooks around and do the same thing he did, my flaw is that I 'think' more than I 'do'. Regardless of his method or personality, it really is incredible that Edison created so much. If Tesla had been more like Edison and played the social game more than he did, the world might be a different place but it was it is. I'd love to learn more about Edison and would love some recommendations. Thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Whistle Blower Threatened with 35 Years in Prison, Warns of Developing Tyranny - <AUTHOR> http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=7755

<comment><USER3> They go after Manning, they go after Wikileaks, they go after Drake - <USER2> whistle-blowing protected _at all_ anymore?

<comment><USER4> Sure, on appeal.</comment></comment>


Recession 2008: How bad it can get? - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/23/news/economy/how_bad/?postversion=2008012315

<comment><USER2> it seems like people are very excited about a downturn.

i hate to burst people's bubble (haha) but i dont think it's going to be nearly as pronounced as people would like to think.

sorry kids, no bread lines.</comment>


Princess Mako to lose Japan royal status by marrying commoner - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39957217 <comment><AUTHOR> What is the definition of "commoner" here? Is it an interlinked group of families that the royals must choose their spouses from? If even a princess can become a commoner by marrying outside the group then it seems like it must be fairly inbred. Unless, maybe males can marry commoner women without problem?

Kind of typical for the BBC to carry this story without making note of the obvious insanity of such things, since the UK has it's own equally ridiculous system.

<comment><USER2> Im not sure why there is confusion here. A commoner is any common person who is not royalty. As such she is choosing to marry a non-royal and as such loses her status as a royal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would be interesting if this meant she was allowed to express political views and she then campaigned to reform (or maybe end) the Imperial system. I know the Emperor is forbidden from politics, but I don't know if that applies to the entire family. It seems like a lot of ridiculously Byzantine nonsense surrounding what is an entirely ceremonial position at this point.

They almost considered changing the succession laws to allow women to ascend the throne but shelved the effort when a male heir (Hisahito) was born (crisis averted I guess.) So what, really, is there to "royal status?"

<comment><USER4> Probably her descendants won't be in the line of succession.

<comment><USER3> True, but that may not mean much in the modern era, where celebrity status often confers greater power and influence than mere royal lineage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What were even her options to marry? Marrying somebody in a royal family from another country? European monarchs did that for a while, but it doesn't seem in the spirit of Japanese nationalism. Or does she have to marry _within_ her own family?

<comment><USER6> Yes I also don't understand this. Who can she actually marry then without losing royal status. If marrying own family isn't that wrong?</comment></comment>


52,000 Knots – One Man's Journey into the Craft of Tatted Lace - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/re-form/fifty-three-thousand-knots-one-mans-journey-into-the-craft-of-tatted-lace-deefb55795f3

<comment><USER2> I've also made more thousands of knots than I can count while tatting. If you want a handmade knotted lace with even less equipment needed, then Armenian needlelace is a step further. The picture at [1] is one of mine

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_needlelace](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_needlelace)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for mentioning Armenian needlelace, it looks very interesting (and incredibly fine, congratulations on your piece, too, it is stunning. May I ask how long it took?) I'll look into learning its technique. I find it odd that (AFAIR) it is not mentioned on the Encyclopaedia of Needlework, by the way

<comment><USER2> It takes time to learn an even tension, but once that comes, pieces work up quite quickly. The piece on wikipedia is a direct copy of a piece of lace that a friend bought for me from a street vendor in Yerevan. I made it over 10 years ago, so my memory is a little vague at this point, but it was probably less than 10 hours work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've also done some tatting I'm particularly fond of Japanese tatting books. Maybe I miss the text, but diagrams and designs are beautiful. And if course, it's a god change from staring a screen for hours!</comment>


Show HN: Import your Facebook photos to + (python scripts) - <AUTHOR> http://thingist.com/t/item/19166/

<comment><AUTHOR> I know there are some googlers that read HN:

Please give us a way to import photos to picasa via CSV. That would make things tremendously easier for people to move from facebook to plus (most of my friends' biggest worry is losing their facebook photos)</comment>


We started and where we are today - <AUTHOR> https://about.google/our-story/ <comment><USER2> Any message you want to give by sharing this? I mean it is a great story, but any reason to share it now? Just curious :)

<comment><AUTHOR> For some reason it started popping up in my feeds, and it's very great to see. Plus, this is the time, most of them can achieve something in the quarantine period. :)</comment></comment>


OMNI Magazine Back in Print This Fall - <AUTHOR> http://www.tor.com/2017/07/11/omni-magazine-back-in-print-this-fall/ <comment><AUTHOR> The science fiction magazine OMNI is coming back to print. Browse all past issues from 1978 to 1995 here: [https://omni.media/collections/omni- archive](https://omni.media/collections/omni-archive)</comment>


Tor 0.3.3.6 released - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/tor-0336-released-new-stable-series <comment><USER2> > There is now a documented stable API for programs that need to embed Tor.

This is a nice feature. It's just a wrapper around main and CLI args, but lets us statically link it. I just built a Go project[0] that supports this API in statically compiled Tor[1].

> The control port now supports commands and events for v3 onion services.

This is also awesome as v3 services publish much faster. I can create an ephemeral v3 service and have it published in a few seconds as opposed to many seconds with v2. Granted the name is way longer because it embeds an entire ed25519 pub key in there, but it's worth it. There are many other internal benefits of v3 too.

0 - [https://github.com/cretz/bine](https://github.com/cretz/bine) 1 - [https://github.com/cretz/tor-static](https://github.com/cretz/tor-static)</comment>


Journal of a Retired Startup Guy - <AUTHOR> http://bucketlistjournal.com/post/42582741298/intro

<comment><USER2> >"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the >morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he > wants to do." — Bob Dylan

Love that quote

</comment><comment><USER3> Great stuff, agree with every word.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love it.</comment>


Show HN: How to discuss with opinionated people using the Socratic method[video] - <AUTHOR> We all have an opinionated colleague, manager or even a relative. Discussing issues may get tricky and frustrating. In some cases this can end up in aggressive debates where nobody changes opinion.
I came across a YouTube channel where a guy uses the Socratic method to discuss god believes with random people, in a few questions he gets people to lower their level confidence. On top of that his discussions are friendly, last only for 5 minutes and he is often greeted at the end of the conversation.
This video shows off the Socratic method in action:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5EpfExorQQ
Here is the trailer of the channel:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moApG7z2pkY <comment><USER2> The Socratic Method is one of persuasion, not discussion. The effort is to guide the person to your idea, on their own, so to speak. This is a poor method of actual discussion. In essence, you become the opinionated one.

<comment><USER3> > This is a poor method of actual discussion. In essence, you become the > opinionated one.

Exactly. And this becomes very clear in the video. The interviewer harps on about the "reliability of faith" without really listening to what Antony is saying. Different people who are having different faiths but still believe in the same thing is only illogical if you wish to see it like that. All programs in your computer, for instance, can safely assume that memory does exist. There is no point for a program to find out whether something like memory is real. I am not talking about finding out whether space is left etc. I am merely saying that a piece of software does not need a science library to investigate the existence of memory. Sure, sometimes you don't receive something from memory when you need it, sometimes bad things happen when you work with the bits it gives you and so on. But questioning the existence of memory is besides the point.

Now lets imagine another program which also "believes" in the existance of memory The user uses this program to remove the other program. In other words, two programs who have the same "faith" kill each other. This is not a contradiction.

Someone should do the Socrates on him to elicit why "reliability" is something one has to discuss when it comes to faith. I am pretty sure his answers would also be contradictory within a short amount of time.

<comment><USER4> I think you're concentrating on the wrong word - reliability. That doesn't seem the central assumption of Anthony here, it's just an attribute to arrive at the central assumption: That there is a universal truth, i.e we all live in the same world, only our models of that world are different (i.e. subjective).

<comment><USER3> > That doesn't seem the central assumption of Anthony here,

Yes, that's my point. It's the interviewer who has this idea that faith should be reliable and that's what I was questioning. Or did you mean the interviewer (Anthony with an h) ? I am a bit confused right now..

<comment><USER4> Yes I mean the interviewer. Your critique of is argument is based on his use of reliability - I find that tangential. His main assumption is that of a universal truth - faith being unreliable is just what follows. So are you saying that there is no universal truth or that faith is somehow exempt from the search for truth?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (Slightly off-topic) In a graduate theological program I was introduced to the idea of "second naiveté." Simply, if the faith we inherit is a naive one and a process like a graduate education deconstructs such a faith, second naiveté looks like a choice then to return to an assembled faith held in tension with the modern criticism used in the deconstruction.

It's an intensive and disruptive process that I'm not sure many want or are able to go through, but I wish would. The key here is to walk through the entire process (one which is actually cyclical in my opinion) with the individual. Anything less seems malicious or inconsiderate at best. Said another way, to destroy someones worldview or belief system (even flawed or dangerous ones) and not help them rebuild something is not going make the world a nicer place to live in.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point of this was to learn how to question decisions at work, and doing so in a way that you will be appreciated. The god believe was just an example of a believe that usually is hard to challenge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Many things are at play here: 1) the interviewer has a calm and very open demeanor. 2) He is able to build rapport with that person (first URL video) quite quickly. 3) The interviewer obviously has an 'advantage' because they have thought about the subject and are focused on it, which is not the case for the interviewee being 'ambushed'.

I think given some time and thought that interviewee would be better able to gather his thoughts and better articulate them.

Quite simply, taking the time and listening to what other people are saying and really giving their opinion some importance goes a long way into both parties learning something new, without having to 'persuade' them of anything.

<comment><USER7> I've had this thought recently, that staged debate is not necessarily a great way to settle disputes. It mostly relies on the skill of the participants to think critically on the fly or their anticipation of the opponents questions and their practiced retort.

Effective discussion or debate should take place over time such that each participant has time to logically organize their thoughts or gather more evidence/ evaluate the evidence presented by the opponent.

"Ambushing" average people on the street in their sweats headed to a math test isn't exactly fair. To be honest, it isn't much different than what your typical atheist purports to oppose. I have found that people are typically against faith based religion because it's pushed on youth by families and takes advantage of their malleable mind.

You should probably allow for people to be in the correct state of mind for these discussions, not take advantage of their unpreparedness. This video makes it seem like he can only engage these people when he clearly has the upper hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For the curious, the "Street Epistemology" movement, which employs the Socratic method, was coined/outlined by Peter Boghossian in his book "A Manual for Creating Atheists" ([https://www.amazon.com/Manual-Creating-Atheists- Peter-Boghos...](https://www.amazon.com/Manual-Creating-Atheists-Peter- Boghossian/dp/1939578094)). You can find more about it's goals and methods by searching around for street epistemology, or by reading the book. It's a relatively quick read.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think discussions at work would be shorter and more meaningful if we all used this method.

Before I knew this method existed I noticed a colleague had this approach with my claims and it did wonders :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Funny thing that he is using this Socratic method only to religious believes. What about using it on science believes like evolution for instance. The guy in this video did it and it's interesting hear how people blindly believe in whatever science says without thinking too much about it. Watch this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0u3-2CGOMQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0u3-2CGOMQ)

<comment><USER10> A Ray Comfort movie, seriously? He is king of editing footage to make people look the way he wants. Watch around 6:15 as PZ Myers is abruptly cut off before he can explain why we don't see fish change into bears, or whatever impossible goal post Comfort has setup.

Comforts insistence on "kinds" is not based on any science. He just claims that because we only see a bunch of small steps, A->B, B-C, E-F, etc. changes in genetics, we will never see A-Z changes. That is, we can only witness incremental changes in DNA, therefore large changes cannot happen because reasons. He's given and shown multiple examples of the process of natural genetic drift, change, etc. and then proclaims that it can only go so far, up to "kinds" without providing any evidence for this limit. Also without defining what a "kind" is.

Sorry but this man irks me. He is not honest.

He also is known as "banana man" for this pretty weak argument from design: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KqJuITAVWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KqJuITAVWc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Details the socratic method and its purpose for discovering the true essence of knowledge through refined definition:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB4MYGInRl4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB4MYGInRl4)

</comment><comment><USER12> Everyone's faith is different. This guy can't define everyone's faith in one Youtube video. As a scientist I am trained to question anything and everything. As a spiritual person, my God is knowing what the right answer is before knowing the reason why or the purpose of the question. If an answer is already written down, God is the life that came before me. If I guess what the right answer is before, that is the God inside of all of us. How does an Atheist explain intuition?

<comment><USER7> I would argue that intuition is an evolutionary construct that is not actually intuited but is an aggregation of many small pieces of data which biases your expectation of an outcome.

I'm having trouble coming up with an example of a kind of pure intuitive experience that I've had along the lines of what I think you're talking about. If you can give a good example of what you're talking about, I think that would be helpful.

I say all of this as a former atheist who has recently converted to some form of theism that I haven't quite figured out yet.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any idea why this has been flagged? Having meaningful discussions is crucial in a work environment.

I have seen posts about Alzheimer, resilience, psychology... Using it do discuss god believes was a kind of stress test to prove that any topic can be addressed succesfully.

Mods, any help please? Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER13> Show HN is not for videos or blog posts. Please update title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the remark kelukelugames, I cannot remove the "Show HN", the edit link is not showing up. So sorry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd more impressed if this could be done via a chat channel. Face-to-face people are subject to the charm of the interviewer.

<comment><AUTHOR> true, but when you are discussing things in a meeting or with an architect you have to deal with being face-to-face

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> No, YOU shut up!</comment>


Have there been any viable alternatives to GR?  - <AUTHOR>

Have there been any viable alternatives to GR? <comment><USER2> Assuming GR == Google Reader:

I really like <http://theoldreader.com/>

Only thing that makes me wary is that it's free. But at least they're taking donations. But I sincerely hope that they find a viable business model soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google Reader?

</comment><comment><USER4> What's GR?

<comment><USER5> General Relativity?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Wallaby – A very Rails admin interface - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/reinteractive/wallaby <comment><USER2> I've used Active Admin a few times [1]. I can't really comment on Wallaby, but AA does the job, although documentation is a bit a problem. I had to dig into the code more than a handful times to figure out the correct way to customize a certain form input. Also AA_addons[2] contains some useful custom input fields.

[1] [https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin](https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin) [2] [https://github.com/platanus/activeadmin_addons](https://github.com/platanus/activeadmin_addons)

<comment><AUTHOR> The aim of wallaby is to make extremely complicated customization possible in Rails way, it's not just about custom input fields. It's a very different thinking from AA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cute project.

I reported a simple XSS attack as an issue, might be worth a decent audit to make sure there are no other potential holes.

<comment><USER4> Cute comment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cute patch is coming :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any demos of using it with active storage?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's on [https://wallaby-demo.herokuapp.com/admin/pictures](https://wallaby- demo.herokuapp.com/admin/pictures) now, you can check out the demo repo at [https://github.com/tian-im/wallaby_demo/](https://github.com/tian- im/wallaby_demo/)</comment></comment>


The World's Biggest Laser Powers Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22347/ <comment><USER2> Meanwhile the excitement builds among the staff at this location:

<http://www.pbase.com/polakis/image/65862806></comment>


We Need an Invasive NSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115002/invasive-nsa-will-protect-us-cyber-attacks

<comment><USER2> A couple of key flaws here:

* There isn't a market failure. There's plenty of market incentive to stop DDOS attacks, network intrusions, etc., and there are many well-paid cyber-security firms as a result of it. It's unclear how NSA or military involvement would be a net improvement to security, given their own inability to secure their networks.

* The NSA's offensive operations can undermine it's defense roles. I suppose there's a chance that introducing a backdoor into an encryption standard ultimately helps cybersecurity -- e.g. you intercept a message from the Prime Minister of Country X detailing its plans to hack a particular target -- but it seems MUCH MORE likely those backdoors will simply be used against us.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Syrian Electronic Army" Seriously? Oh, obviously it must the Syrians. I mean, it wouldn't be the "Lithuanian Electronic Army" now would it? They're not in Evil Doer Fashions 2013. So clearly it must be the Syrians trying to... well to do what exactly? Change the weather reports in the Times weekend edition? Frailing hogwash.

Far more likely is the old middle school tort: He who smelt it, dealt it.

</comment><comment><USER4> "and to control the stealth introduction of vulnerabilities during the manufacture of computer components—vulnerabilities that can later be used as windows for cyber-attacks."

Right... the NSA needs to stop the kind of bad actors that stealthily introduce vulnerabilities into commercial computer systems, which is extraordinarily dangerous for everyone's computer security.

Oh wait...

</comment><comment><USER5> Lets sleep in the lion's den because could be tigers outside. Basically that is what they are proposing us.</comment>


SPDY on Rails - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bugsnag.com/2012/08/05/spdy-on-rails/

<comment><USER2> This isn't really about Rails at all. But it's still useful as another anecdote about how SPDY is used in production.

Basically if you are set up with the now-fashionable architecture of a caching reverse proxy serving static content (nginx or Apache) sitting in front of a set of application servers then this applies to you too.

Just compile nginx with the SPDY patch or use mod_spdy with Apache and your back-end application servers won't even need to know what the transport protocol between client and reverse proxy is. It will be handled transparently.

</comment><comment><USER3> They forget to explain what problem they are trying to solve. SPDY will benefit google in the race for 100ms response time. For the rest of us, HTTP does the job. But without the hype effect, I suppose...

<comment><USER2> This is a strange comment. SPDY benefits everyone who uses it, not just Google. And actually, for any site with authentication plain HTTP does not do the job, since all requests that pass authentication information should be encrypted. So HTTPS is a requirement and if SPDY can help make HTTPS faster then everyone wins.

<comment><USER4> _SPDY benefits everyone who uses it, not just Google._

You seem to not notice the elephant in the room, being the mandatory TLS encryption.

<comment><USER5> What's wrong with mandatory encryption? Do you still use rsh to log in to your servers?

<comment><USER4> _What's wrong with mandatory encryption?_

Some people say that it uses too much computational resources, for instance. Others complain that mandatory TLS increases latency by one additional RTT. Mandatory TLS is a biggest point of conflict at the IETF discussion about SPDY being _the_ HTTP successor (at least from what I heard), though many sides disagree for evil reasons.

 _Do you still use rsh to log in to your servers?_

Does this question add anything of value to the discussion?

<comment><USER5> _Does this question add anything of value to the discussion?_

Yes. If you are the "I hate encryption because it messes with my tinfoil hat" type, you'll get all angry and not reply. For anyone else, the question is just a minor annoyance to wade through ;)

<comment><USER4> If you wonder whether your disputant may be tinfoil hat type, the exploratory questions to verify this conjecture may make your disputant not want to discuss with you any longer, because it's kind of distasteful.

<comment><USER5> That's why I added a smiley face at the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My problem with SPDY is that it is compressing only headers.

I still haven't figured out how to combine SPDY and gzip compression for POST requests without manually decompressing it in the browser javascript.

Other than that SPDY is extremely useful for web apps as the latency with HTTP round-trip is noticeable and most of the cases web app already runs behind TLS.

For a regular website (not a web app) SPDY adds much less value: 1) TLS encoding and negotiation adds load time 2) 3rd party javascript loading from HTTPS sources do the same 3) Main server data that was previously sent gzipped is now sent deflated [1].

[1] Maybe it's just my incompetence and it's easy to compress the SPDY content. Would be happy to hear about it.</comment>


MongoDB is the New MySQL - <AUTHOR> http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2011/07/06/mongodb-is-the-new-mysql/ <comment><USER2> I would tend to say that MongoDB is the new MySQL in a different way - it's the default not-really-suitable hammer that the current generation of amateur software carpenters are using to turn every problem into a nail. It's not super elegant, but most of the time it works, sort of.

On the bright side, one could say that at least half of the PHP/MySQL tag team has been improved significantly by being replaced with Python/MongoDB, as theological issues aside, Python is a lot less broken than PHP :)

<comment><USER3> For what projects (besides enterprise -> Oracle, embedded -> SQLite and Windows -> SQL server) would you consider MySQL inappropriate? What would you use instead?

I see people angry about not using the "right tool for the job" _all the time_ with regard to web applications. What other tools do you feel aren't used when they should be?

<comment><USER4> If you don't have need for relational integrity, then MySQL is a liability. MongoDB does not have relational integrity which is one of the reasons why it's faster.

eg Real-time analytics

If you need a pre-planned schema from database over making one on the fly (even accidentally), then MySQL is better as MongoDB is schema-less.

eg Rapidly changing input

If you are worried about Oracle's acquisition of Sun and MySQL (Switching to Postgre is the closest alternative though).

MySQL sharding is hard, MongoDB can automate it to a certain extent (MySQL requires third party tools I believe).

eg Distributing large datasets

Note: Other databases, eg Cassandra can also automate 'sharding' for example.

<comment><USER5> Isn't MariaDB an even closer alternative than Postgre?

<comment><USER4> I had to look up MariaDB, that's true in the codebase sense from the gist of it. Postgre is more popular than MariaDB I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that one of the reasons that MongoDB is getting traction is that many people don't use relational databases in a relational way for many projects. Lots of data just isn't as relational as we hope it would be and also people are terrible at modeling data in a relational way.

Relational databases were designed around the idea of minimizing storage footprint, and we have nearly infinite storage capacity relative to many databases, so many devs don't care about only having one copy of a piece of data in the DB.

Also, SQL is great as a data retrieval language, but it is awful for inputting data. Yes, it works, but writing data to MongoDB in general has felt more natural than generating SQL to shotgun in data.

You could argue that ORM's solve a lot of the uglyness of inputting data into a DB and I agree with you, but you still have to deal with table migrations and being able to just add a field in your code and not have to go hold the database's hand or write a migration to make it work is incredibly convenient.

In the end, MongoDB solves a lot of convenience issues for programs that don't need relational data or programmers who don't want to use an ORM, create SQL strings, or write migrations to get their database to store their data.

It's not for everybody, but if it fits your needs, it solves some problems much more conveniently than MySQL.

<comment><USER7> I agree with your first comment: a lot of people suck at creating models that are relational. It's also difficult to use relational data outside of a relational system: when you retrieve it from your RDBMS and get it as, say, a Python dictionary. This is the big problem with using SQL for the web.

However, I disagree with your other statements:

(1) we do not have infinite storage. Most data stores keep everything in RAM, and that is pretty limited.

(2) It's really easy to input data into SQL. There are in fact a bunch of methods to do so (almost all still rely on SQL).

(3) (more of a comment, than disagreement) ORM's don't solve much. They just remove the need for engineering a data access API and trade it for performance and cleanliness of code.

<comment><USER8> Lots of datastores don't keep everything in RAM though. CouchDB uses up a whole ton of disk, because disk is cheap and the way the database is structured the disk reads aren't even a problem for performance.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. I'm more familiar with Mongo and Redis.

<comment><USER9> MongoDB doesn't require everything in ram either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:redmonk...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:redmonk.com/sogrady/2011/07/06/mongodb- is-the-new-mysql/&hl=en&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER11> Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment.

MongoDB is not the new MySQL, because software with as much inertia and adoption as MySQL will not see easy or even complete replacement. Case-in- point: IE6. IE6 is still with us today, as much as we hate it. You can make all the arguments for a modern browser that you want, but businesses and a few people say, "But I like it better."

Are there easy code migrations to MongoDB? No! Are there easy query migrations? Not really. It isn't a linear transition from one to the other. So no only do you have to rewrite your software, but you've got to pitch your SQL references out the window along with your queries.

I believe that Postgres will replace MySQL. It's mature, SQL-based and similar enough that only _tweaks_ are needed to get a code base running. Oh, and it's free.

New projects may support MongoDB, but I'd be surprised if Wordpress _ever_ came out with a version to support it.

Just my 2¢.

</comment><comment><USER12> "MongoDb Sentiment Distribution" is a riot:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/sog/5909237447/in/photostream/>

If sociologists ran _The Onion_ this would be on the front page.

<comment><USER13> There are companies that provide text analysis services to determine the 'temperature' of the text or mood of the writer.

The x axis of the graph is unexplained, but the idea (of being able to measure sentiment) isn't crazy.

<comment><AUTHOR> it's actually just the code from here:

[http://jeffreybreen.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/twitter-text- mi...](http://jeffreybreen.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/twitter-text-mining-r- slides)

applied against a mongodb query. obviously not statistically representative; but rather an indication of what an acceptable profile looks like.

<comment><USER12> Of course you can measure customer sentiment. You can even measure the correlation between your brand name and a selection of happy words as they appear on Twitter.

What you should probably not do, however, is elide the essential difference between these two measurements. Twitter is not a representative sample of anything but Twitter. Much of Twitter is spammers and shills, not customers. A lot of Tweets aren't even from humans. And people can mention MongoDB without knowing the slightest thing about it, and I am sure many do. I'm doing it now.

<comment><AUTHOR> where we agree then, i think, is the fact that Twitter's just another datapoint. and from a statistical perspective, it cannot be considered representative of the wider population for any number of reasons, not least the fact that it's observational rather than a random sample.

that said, it's an interesting proxy for examining questions of sentiment, and its predictive ability has been examined several times academically within specific contexts (elections and markets - e.g. this one by Cornell <http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003>) and found to be relatively accurate.

so agreed, it's not representative. but that doesn't mean it's not interesting and potentially useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most of these Point seem to ring a bit hollow. MongoDB gets criticism: therefore it's the new MySQL? Or because they both use open source licenses?

I'm not saying that MongoDB isn't growing. I just think that it's way early to pronounce it as a replacement for MySQL.

These kinds of provocative but false titles belong in the cheap tabloids, not on the front page of Hacker News.

<comment><AUTHOR> [disclosure: i'm the author]

i tried to explicitly make the point that MongoDB is not a replacement for MySQL, it is rather following a similar path from a licensing, usage and market reaction standpoint. and that mongo's course within the nosql world may follow the pattern we saw mysql track w/in the relational database market.

from this comment, it doesn't seem like i was successful on that score.

<comment><USER14> Apparently I managed to overlook your statement about it not being a replacement. It's just that the title of the post seems to be in contradiction with that.

MongoDB is indeed an interesting software and it's on a promising start. I'll be interested to see where it's going. Maybe one day the title of your post will be true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> HN Trends mentions of the other NoSQL contenders are pretty close to MongoDB.

[http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=MongoDB%2C+MySQL%2C+Redis%...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=MongoDB%2C+MySQL%2C+Redis%2C+Cassandra%2C+CouchDB)

I think it's early to call a NoSQL winner/hammer now but I personally expected one eventually, [http://www.quora.com/Will-there-be-a-new-de-facto- standard-o...](http://www.quora.com/Will-there-be-a-new-de-facto-standard-of- databases) although others aren't so sure. Just seems more convenient to use one database even if it's not an ideal fit for every task.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google's got a bit more spread than HN:

[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=0-5&q=mongodb...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=0-5&q=mongodb%20%2B%20mongo%2Ccassandra%2Ccouchbase%20%2B%20couchdb%20%2B%20membase%2Chbase%2C&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not sure if I totally agree with the article, but MongoDB really is developer friendly: easy to set up and admin, slaves make create sources of analytics data (put a slave on each server that has analytics applications), useful for both large and small projects, etc.

Personally, PostgreSQL and MongoDB meet just about all of my non-graph data store needs. For graph data, I keep switching between Neo4j, Sesame, and AllegroGraph - can't make up my mind since they have different capabilities (Sesame and AG for fast indexed SPARQL queries, Neo4j for graph traversal).

<comment><USER4> Not to mention, a very friendly community if you seek help on their mailing list!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The thing that I've found that makes MongoDB super easy for folks migrating from SQL is that it is easy to add indexes to arbitrary fields, and they work the same way as they do in MySQL. It's just a b-tree and if you can setup MySQL indexes, then you can build smart, well indexed structures and systems with Mongo.

Being able to do this without jumping all the way into writing map-reduce bits, but saving the time of setting up a rigid schema, makes it easy to see why MongoDB is so popular. To me, that is why MongoDB is the new MySQL.

<comment> St-Clock I am confused. How hard is it to create an index in MySQL? I don't have much experience with MySQL, but with PostgreSQL, it is very easy.

In addition, there are some "advanced" features that may not be provided by MongoDB: you can choose your index type, rebuild the index, update the stats that will help the query optimizer decide if the index should be used at all, etc.

<comment><USER18> It's not that the actual command you enter to create an index is hard. It's just that when you have a table with millions or billions of rows, you have to figure out how to create the index without stopping the world for hours.

<comment> St-Clock With postgresql, create index does not block read, only write. You can also use the CONCURRENTLY parameter and writes/updates won't be blocked, but the index creation takes longer (the db has to wait until no transaction potentially involving the index has stopped).

Not sure what other strategies exist to reliably build an index.

[http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql- createinde...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql- createindex.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great!

Now what's the next PostgreSQL?

<comment><USER20> PostgreSQL is the next PostgreSQL.

<comment><USER21> The irony of this is that it's actually quite easy to build a document store on top of PostgreSQL that performs very well indeed. I tried it. I used a similar approach to the one described at [1]. You get the advantage of years of experience (never underestimate this!), MVCC, transactions, consistency and replication as well.

(yes I know it doesn't "perform" as well as the other NoSQL stores but performance is not without tradeoffs [2])

[1] <http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql>

[2] [http://www.caradvice.com.au/wp- content/uploads/2006/12/Ferra...](http://www.caradvice.com.au/wp- content/uploads/2006/12/FerrariCrash4.jpg)

<comment><USER22> To me, the biggest advantage of MongoDB is autosharding. If you read the friendfeed article, you'll see that they also have to deal with 'eventual consistency' on the indexes.

<comment><USER21> I'd say that's not necessarily an advantage. Sharding is incredibly complicated to get right considering all factors such as balancing and recovery.

I'd rather partition the data based on function onto distinct clusters, you know like eBay do.

You can update the indexes in a transaction too, so that's not necessarily an issue. MySQL has problems with this due to locking but the MVCC implementation in PostgreSQL allows much better concurrency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not sure if this is just me, but the site loads partway and then sits forever* and never loads any further. Anyone else have this problem?

* = For a certain value of "forever"

<comment><USER24> Yeah the site blows, I still can't connect.

<comment><AUTHOR> it's not either one of you, it's our setup. that and the fact that i neglected to directly cache the page before it hit, so our server is about to burst into flames.

soon as i can get back into to shut things down and cache everything it'll go back to normal. ish.

apologies in the meantime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article says:

A decade later, MySQL – a feature-poor database relative to the commercial alternatives at the time – was the most popular relational database on the planet.

I would have thought the most popular relational database on the planet would be SQLite....since it ships with every android and iOS device, and with Firefox and Chrome.

<comment><USER25> Oh, and I forgot Microsoft Access....does it count as 'relational'?

<comment><USER26> MS Access is ACID compliant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like and use both mongo and mysql. Where I think mysql shines is when you've been working on an applicaiton for 5 years, and end up connecting every piece to every other piece in ways you never imagined doing at the start. I think that's a lot trickier to do well in mongo, which favors denormalization since it's a document store. Given that most db's do not actually grow beyond what you can put on a single box, I suspect a lot of people may be avoiding problems they don't have while picking up problems they don't need by blindly switching to mongo.

That said, when you have a problem that mongo solves well, boy howdy is it nice.

</comment><comment><USER28> The article doesn't describe but one of the biggest difference is scalability. MongoDB supports horizontal scaling as a built-in feature. It's known that MySQL can be scaled out by sharding but you lose ACID with it. Of course scalability is required only when the service goes well. But it's important to considerate it if you intend to be successful.

It can be said scaled MySQL is a no-SQL. MongoDB is the New MySQL with this point of view.

</comment><comment><USER29> According to the chart in the linked article (<http://www.flickr.com/photos/sog/5909237515/>), MySQL has had 73 (I assume distinct) committers in the past 12 months, but the most recent commit was over one year ago.

I'll admit that I'm not familiar with Ohloh, but I don't see how both of those statements can be true.

</comment><comment><USER30> MySQL and MongoDB have strengths and weaknesses based on use case. MongoDB isn't a drop in replacement for MySQL and you probably wouldn't choose it for something like a message queue.

</comment><comment><USER31> What advantages does MongoDB have over something like Redis?

<comment><USER32> They're really different tools with different use-cases; I'm not sure it makes sense to directly compare them.

Redis is a fast key-value store with the nice property that values can be things like lists and sets instead of just plain strings.

MongoDB is a full-on document store for JSON-ish documents with support for complex ad hoc javascript queries over those documents, indexing, map-reduce style aggregation, and other fun arbitrarily complex search and collection scenarios that don't map into a simple key-value look up system.

<comment><USER31> Ah, fair enough. That's pretty cool. I find that if I want to store something complex like a dict/hash in redis, I simply encode it in JSON and store it as a string.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wow, I don't think you want that comparison.

<comment><AUTHOR> depends on your metric, does it not?

<comment><USER33> MySQL has always (despite its usage) the red-headed step child of databases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> MongoDB and MySQL aren't comparable, one is a document store the other is a relational store.</comment>


Web Cache Deception Named Top Web Hacking Technique of 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/web-cache-deception-named-top-web-hacking-technique-of-2019 <comment><USER2> Please stop spamming the /new page with all these submissions. You've posted over a dozen in only a few minutes

<comment><AUTHOR> New to this so I just wanted to post all the current/previous research. Sorry for the inconvenience :)</comment></comment>


Node OS - <AUTHOR> https://node-os.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm astonished that this has been up for an hour and no one's mentioned Atwood's Law:

"Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least- power/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/)

<comment><USER3> THE BIRTH & DEATH OF JAVASCRIPT

[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)

<comment><USER4> Great Talk to watch

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But the kernel needs to be in javascript. Since anything written in javascript becomes 2X better. </sarcasm>

<comment><USER6> Not to forget your bootloader. grub.js

<comment><USER5> What about the firmware?

<comment><USER7> nsa_backdoor.bin.js

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cooperative multitasking, as found in the Windows 3.1 era!

<comment><USER9> I have a two-finger salute I typically give to cooperative multitasking especially thanks to the Windows 3.1 era. ;) I still investigate it with better type systems, languages, hardware monitors, whatever. I just think "NOOOOO!!!" is a good default when I see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What would be really interesting is Elixir-OS/Erlang-OS where the entire OS can take advantage of a 50 core CPU.

<comment><USER11> Are you saying current OSs dont?!

<comment><USER12> Current OSes don't include the buzzword "Elixir" so they aren't relevant to Hackers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing I can't seem to find is, is this a true nodejs-based operating system in that it's all single threaded? single-threaded event loop stuff works well for network servers but an OS? To me it seems like a terrible idea.

<comment><USER14> What about something like ChromeOS? Does it need multi-threading?

If each app is running it's own thread, and can spawn new threads, maybe that would work.

Also, though Node.js is currently single-threaded, there is the Nexus project [https://github.com/voodooattack/nexusjs](https://github.com/voodooattack/nexusjs) which is doing multi-threaded javascript. Maybe this or Node.js will support multiple threads in the future.

<comment><USER15> Nashorn on the JVM supports threads. So the problem is definitely not a JS issue but a JS engine issue. NodeJS is single threaded because NodeJS V8 is. There was a talk about implementing workers that communicate view text messages though, I don't know the state of workers in NodeJS .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > node-os is the first operating system powered by npm Read More

That's not a very nice tagline to have after the recent left-pad fiasco.

<comment><USER17> fiasco?

<comment><USER18> Let me Google that for you: [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=npm+fiasco](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=npm+fiasco)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow this looks lovely to support

</comment><comment><USER20> When all you have is a hammer...

</comment><comment><USER21> I love node, but a node REPL in lieu of a shell sounds like the worst thing ever.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Read More" link 404'd for me.

</comment><comment><USER23> << Die heart Node.js fan >>

As much as I love Node.js, I have grown to dislike npm. Git + Github is a much nicer way to publish.

Also the whole left-pad fiasco.

<comment><USER24> Not going to defend npm here, but how is using Github as registry going to avoid left-pad-gate?

<comment><USER23> you are right - its not possible to avoid left-pad-gate due to github being a similar company as npm ( in terms of law ).

But using git means its theoretically possible to have multiple registries - etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Now you can left-pad your entire environment instead of just your production build!

Wow!

</comment><comment><USER26> I assume the whole thing goes down when left-pad or some other trivial dependency can't be resolved.

<comment><USER27> npm no longer allows packages to be unpublished after 24 hours.

</comment></comment><comment> alishan-l It's a brave new world

</comment><comment><USER28> It's happening: [https://xkcd.com/1508/](https://xkcd.com/1508/)

<comment><USER29> Also: [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)</comment></comment>


Bay Area man must pay $136,000 in tech-support scam against elderly - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/14/bay-area-businessman-must-pay-136000-in-tech-support-scam-against-elderly/ <comment><USER2> This judgement has no teeth:

>Under the settlement, Brar — who operated Genius Technologies and Avangatee Services and does not admit or deny the allegations, according to court documents — "is permanently restrained and enjoined from advertising, marketing, promoting, or offering for sale, or assisting in the advertising, marketing, promoting, or offering for sale of Technical Support Services."

This guy is being made to pay 136,000 despite:

"The cost to consumers ranged between several hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars," the FTC said of the scam, which appeared to begin in 2015.

This is not justice, and this judgement does not serve as a deterrent. This is grand larceny and needs to be accompanied with jail time for perpetrators.

<comment><USER3> Paid to the FCC, and not the victims? It appears that the government is not interested in the victims, rather just wants a cut of the scam for themselves.

<comment><USER4> How exactly would you propose a settlement of a criminal proceeding be paid out to a large number of victims? This is what class-action is designed for: it qualifies claimants, unifies proceedings and operates in civil court where the barrier is much lower. I'm probably like most in that I think most class- action suits are ambulance chasing lawyers cashing in vs. justice for the true victims, but this seems to be a textbook scenario for class action.

<comment><USER5> This was not a criminal proceeding.

> I'm probably like most in that I think most class-action suits are ambulance > chasing lawyers cashing in

That's not "most people", that's the big business lobby's propaganda. Yes, it's often the case that the costs to prosecute a case are a large fraction of the damages. The defendant doesn't escape punishment just because their payments go to legal fees instead of customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kitboga on twitch [1] calls these scammers and pretends to be various characters and waste their time. He puts funny moments on youtube [2].

At the "end" of his calls he confronts them and tries to talk to them about scamming old people. Most don't take it too well...

[1]: [https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga](https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm22FAXZMw1BaWeFszZxUKw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm22FAXZMw1BaWeFszZxUKw)

<comment><USER7> There's a very interesting two part episode of the podcast Reply All[1] where they delve into one of these tech support scams. Worth taking the time to listen to.

[1] [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long- distance](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long-distance)

<comment><USER8> This one's great because they actually fly to India and meet the scammers! Definitely worth listening to both parts!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Even with all these high profile settlements, it's still not stopping the problem.

Just today, we (Nomorobo) see 25 different numbers pushing Windows tech support scams. It's like that every. single. day.

 _This is an emergency call from Windows Microsoft. Your Windows license key have been expired all services are suspended on your computer. To renew call our toll free 1-877-231-6134._

[https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/844-805-7111](https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/844-805-7111)

[https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/855-328-4888](https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/855-328-4888)

[https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/844-517-8655](https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/844-517-8655)

[https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/844-904-1444](https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/844-904-1444)

[https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/972-441-0548](https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/972-441-0548)

...

[https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/855-895-6786](https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/855-895-6786)

(edit: formatting)

<comment><USER10> I hadn't heard of your service and just looked at it. If you're willing, a few questions I didn't see answered on the website:

From what I can tell, every incoming call rings simultaneously on the user's phone and Nomorobo's systems. If Nomorobo detects a blacklisted number, you pickup the call, play a 'you've been blocked' message, and hangup. Is that basically correct?

So Nomorobo ends up with a log of all my incoming calls. What happens with that data? Nomorobo is free for landlines (which I think means VOIP lines); is data collection the tradeoff?

Also, can I submit a whitelist, to prevent important numbers from being blocked? And is that list confidential?

Finally, do you work with old-fashioned POTS landlines? I'm interested in Nomorobo for an elderly couple who still have POTS.

<comment><USER9> Happy to talk about the landline product. Just for clarification, the mobile product works completely differently.

1\. Yes, pretty much. Here's a more in-depth answer to what happens when the call is answered - [http://www.6083716666.com/](http://www.6083716666.com/)

2\. Yes, we do get a log of the incoming calls. We use that to analyze the high frequency calling patterns across millions of phone lines and build the blacklist. The more people that contribute, the better the algorithm gets.

3\. We globally manage the whitelist and good robocalls (school closings, pharmacies, doctors offices, etc)

4\. We don't work with POTS lines yet. The older technologies are tougher to protect than the modern ones.

<comment><USER10> 2\. Is the data used for anything else? Who has access to it? How long is it retained? Is it anonymized?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pretty sure this guy got my mother. I remember her describing exactly this trying to get her computer fixed. I had to explain to her it was a scam, help her replace all her credit cards and wipe her machine to factory since computer was compromised with remote access. It was a huge headache, this guy deserves jail.

</comment><comment><USER12> I realize this is constrained somewhat by what the prosecutors can actually prove... but it seems like the person in question should go to jail for outright fraud and identity theft.

<comment><USER13> I don't think the FTC can prosecute someone for criminal charges, regardless of proof. They would need the DoJ or an US Attorney to follow up on those. AFAIK, IANAL.

<comment><USER14> I think the DOJ could potentially build off of this case, though.

<comment><USER15> Amateur question : would that fall under double jeopardy ?

<comment><USER16> IANAL but no, double jeopardy only applies to criminal cases

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> $136,000? He probably won'e even stop running his "business." Sounds like he was making bank - just pay the fine and keep going. The problem with a lot of illegal telemarketers/advertisers is its super easy for them to just pretend to be someone else after they get caught and continue on their way.

<comment><USER17> $136,000 plus an injunction against ever practicing tech support again, whether legally or otherwise.

If he tries it again, and gets caught, then the next judgement will involve serious jail time.

<comment><USER18> But how would he get caught again? Let's say he starts a legitimate tech support business. I don't think there would be any connection between his new business license and the FTC. Nor his tax returns. I think the ONLY way he could get caught is to break ANOTHER law and end up before the FTC again.

Otherwise, I can't see how the FTC would have any idea what he's up to. It's not like businesspeople register with the FTC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> anyone find this a bit funny?

       "...and can never offer tech support again."

I've never heard of a non licensed profession being barred from "practicing"

      Brar Mom: Hey Brar, can you help me setup my new iPhone.
      Brar: Not under my parole conditions..

Does that mean that an illegal street food vendor can be barred from cooking, ever? hehe

<comment><USER20> Doctors can be barred from practicing medicine. CEOs can be be barred from running a company.

<comment><USER21> You need a license to practice medicine so that's not a good answer to the original post

<comment><USER20> True. I overlooked the word "non" in " I've never heard of a non licensed profession being barred from "practicing"".

But there have been cases of people not allowed to use computers and whatever. I think the judges have pretty broad discretion in some cases.

<comment><USER22> CEO and Directors can be and you don't have to be licenced to be one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The judgment was for $7.6 million, but it was partially suspended because of > Brar's inability to pay the full amount, according to the FTC.

Seems unlikely anyone else will be deterred from running these scams and I'll still have to be helping my grandparents every few months do chargebacks on scammers.

<comment><USER24> Agreed but to be fair if there is a judgment awarded that you cannot reasonably pay, the entire thing will get kicked out. It's better to hit them with a crippling amount that they _can_ pay than to try to get what is actually owed but they end up paying nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why are they calling a scammer a "businessman"?

<comment><USER26> What else could that title mean?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Slightly off topic, but the "Reply All" podcast did a great episode on the foreign IT phone support scams about a year ago.

[https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long- distance#episode-...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long- distance#episode-player)

</comment><comment><USER28> This guy should be in jail though

<comment><USER29> This misunderstanding of the US Legal system seems to come up frequently on HN. Most recently about Theraos I believe.

The FTC cannot press criminal charges which means they cannot put people in jail. Those types of charges fall to the Department of Justice who can continue pursuing these cases if they believe a criminal offense has taken place.

<comment><USER30> Fraud is still a crime punishable by jail time. So, even after the FTC get's involved he can and should still be sent to prison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I'm wondering if they did any work to find out who was on the India side of this so our law enforcement could work with theirs and maybe, I don't know, capture them, extradite them, and you know, punish them for their international crime? I can dream.

<comment><USER31> Extradiction would be unlikely for such crime(even cases of terrorism can take years for extradiction, or may not even take place). But it would be possible to get them arrested in India.

That said, there are literally millions of people in India who have graduated with whatever degree/certificate, can speak English, and are willing to work in any kind of scam, as long as they get money to buy food. You can setup a office in Noida/Mumbai/Pune/Bangalore etc, and hire these people for dime a dozen. Things getting risky? Close everything and start anew in another city.

Problem lies in poor law enforcement in India, and lack of awareness among old americans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> last year a family friend got her whole identity stolen and gave the guys a few hundred dollars.

Last week (!) my father ended up on the phone with someone before realizing he was being scammed. He is going to just throw his computer in the trash and buy a new one.

<comment><USER33> Get your father a chromebook -- the tech support scammers don't know how to work them yet, and it's easy to "powerwash" them back to stock if they do get taken over.

<comment><USER32> I buy him refurbished windows desktops. They are the same price. :)

<comment><USER34> This is stupid :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Our measurement study on understanding the threat landscape of Tech Support Scam across multiple Online Social Networks ([http://precog.iiitd.edu.in/pubs/shadow-sunshine- characterizi...](http://precog.iiitd.edu.in/pubs/shadow-sunshine- characterizing-websci18.pdf))

</comment><comment><USER36> This guy should get the max punishment, but come on—it's 2018! Who on earth is still falling for this crap? If you haven't yet had "the talk" with your parents and/or grandparents, consider taking a half hour today and doing it. End user education is the only way to stop these obvious (to us) scams.

<comment><USER37> You're on hacker news so it is easier for you to say that who falls for this crap. Ground reality is completely different. Lot of young and mature people can fall for this crap. It's like saying who falls for fake news these days. It is gonna be a learning curve for normal people to understand nuances of these scams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> American prisons are scary places and I believe we lock people too easily. In this case however, this guy should serve the time and not get that easily off the hook.

</comment><comment><USER39> Unable to read article due to "ad-blocker." Can anyone please summarize?

<comment><USER40> Switch to uBlock Origin. The site loads fine with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Years ago when wifi first became a thing my friends and I would drive around with early Wireshark and a Pringles can antenna and change all the open SSID's we could find to "Call [some number] to secure your network". All the routers back then were open by default so we could easily do a few dozen per day.

When they would call (and they always called), we would then show up and charge the person between $50-$250 (or however much we thought we could get) to change the SSID and setup WEP.

When times got desperate and we needed a new flat screen TV we returned back to our previous victims, and, having their WEP passwords we setup, changed it back to the original message:

"It's a good thing you called us -- the hackers got in again, but we have some new defenses against them. Stick with us. We'll protect you."

As a bunch of tech-savvy poor kids, it was very satisfying taking money from rich, old (mostly white) people. We were able to quit our jobs working fast food with our new found venture. That somehow made up for the unethical nature of it all in the youthful minds of late teen and early 20's punks.

<comment><USER42> Why would you share this story? It really is horrible. Anyway, glad you changed.

<comment><USER43> From GP's "about me" on HN:

> most of my comments are designed to provoke a response

Nothing to see here. It's likely a bs story.

<comment><USER42> That's... If I ran a forum that was supposed to be moderated like HN I'd ban someone like that. This is Reddit-tier copy-pasta or YouTube "Social Experiment" garbage.

<comment><USER41> All my content is my own and original, not "CopyPasta". Thanks for your value judgement on my creative works in calling my content "garbage".

Why don't you go start your own forum that will be as dull and devoid of any dissenting opinion as yourself?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Analytics X Prize - <AUTHOR> http://www.analyticsx.com/

<comment><USER2> 100 bucks as a grand prize?

No mention of who is backing it etc.</comment>


This App Turns You Into a Government Informer - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5891682/the-app-that-turns-you-into-a-government-informant

<comment><USER2> I can only imagine how much useless spam will be submitted to authorities through this App. It is a terrible concept in oh so many ways.</comment>


Meaningful short names - <AUTHOR> http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/shrt-nms-fr-clrty <comment><USER2> I take the opposite view.

"ln" isn't "link". It's ln. My brain has particular concepts bound onto the command 'ln', which are not the same as the concepts for 'link' in general use.

"grep" comes for Global search, for a Regular Expression, and Print it. Grep doesn't 'find'. It PRINTS occurrences of a regular expression (not just a string), and continues globally rather than stopping at the first occurrence.

Another advantage is precision. "I did ln -s" is more precise than "I linked the file". "I grepped the file" is more precise about what I did than "I found the file" or "I searched the file".

Re-using English words directly - which already have rather broad and fuzzy semantics - in a domain that is a) more precisely defined than English b) not always consistent with the English meaning and c) international is not a good idea imho.

Heck, even ln/cp/grep etc are already ambiguous enough as it is! Depending on platform, UNIX commands may involve subtly different semantics (e.g. due to things like HFS+ filesystem data fork vs ext3 vs ZFS copy-on-write). Or different grammar. Quick example: cp dirname -rf works in linux, but not in BSD since you need to place options first in BSD.

Having picked up bits of some foreign languages, I've also found that my brain learns the correct meanings of words most easily when they are similar but not the same as English.

When the words are the same in two languages, my brain keeps its binding to the English meaning, and I tend to not to remember the subtleties of using it in the foreign sense.

When the words are completely different, I sometimes struggle to remember the new word. [I sometimes cheat and pretend I'm learning a new word of English. Somehow, that helps]

When the word is very similar but subtly different (for example, Geomatikk in Norwegian vs Geomatics in English, it's a) easy to remember the word and b) easy to remember any subtle differences in meaning.

So I believe the unix way is the right way.</comment>


The cardinal programming jokes - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-cardinal-programming-jokes.html <comment><USER2> The analogies with programming are brilliant. The jokes probably aren't the best jokes in the world (although I can certainly see their charm by translating them back to Russian on the fly), but author's point is to show the dark, depressing side of our business.

</comment><comment><USER3> This post is best subvocalized with a heavy Russian accent.

<comment><USER4> I would say a slight Russian accent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _By the way, I was recently told by a very strong programmer that of all things, he wanted to become a plumber as a kid_

Interesting analogy. Similarly, I wanted to become an inventor and invent (mechanical) gadgets. Surely enough I ended up programming.

</comment><comment><USER4> Which ones are Hebrew, which Russian?

I'm venturing this guess: 1\. Russian 2\. Russian 3\. Hebrew

<comment><USER6> I'm Russian, and think so too. :-)

If you don't know Russian or Hebrew, how did you tell? Just curious.

<comment><USER3> It's the type of humor (culturally Russian/culturally Jewish), not the actual wording.

<comment><USER6> Hey, that's why I asked - to learn how others see Russian culture from the outside. What's the defining quality.

?

<comment><USER4> fatalism

<comment><USER7> Do you mean "fatalism" (a general acceptance of fate) or "defeatism" (a certain pessimistic variant of that acceptance) ?

<comment><USER4> More of the first. Some of the second. But the latter with a sort of sly smile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Poor guy. Someone should tell him about Garbage Collection.

<comment><USER2> Garbage Collection would only inspire him to find another plumber joke, I guess. Because GC is the same pain in the arse as malloc, except the former gives a good excuse for writing awful applications, while the latter doesn't.

<comment><USER8> I've never seen an application impacted by generational GC. I have seen Mark/Sweep slow down an application though.

I have seen Yacc/Lex based C code perform slower than Smalltalk. I also know of instances where _block cipher_ code in C ran 3% _slower_ than equivalent Smalltalk code.

The culprit? Malloc and free.

<comment><USER2> When a C program is worse than its high-level counterpart, it usually means poor choice of some dynamic data structure or algorithm on the C side. As a rule high-level languages provide well-polished, high-quality implementations of most common structures, e.g. all kinds of associative arrays, while a C programmer is left with his own basic knowledge of this kind of stuff.

The garbage collector alone can't make Smalltalk better than C, it's just impossible unless some very advanced optimizations are used, say, compile-time decisions to allocate an object on the stack (if you look at the latest JVM, for example). But even then in C, these decisions can be made by the programmer.

<comment><USER8> In the cases I am talking about, a good C programmer would've created buffer caches which would've pre-allocated memory and reused it. Instead the programmers in question naively malloced when they needed it and freed when they were done. A generational collector does something almost as good as this for you -- they make transient objects very cheap.

Also, the Smalltalk in the block cipher case was written by a very good Smalltalker who knows how to write code that results in fast JITed machine code, who also had the luxury of requesting custom primitive operations like rotations on 32 bit registers. So if the C programs in question had the same level of programmer working on them, they would no doubt have blown away the Smalltalk implementations.

I agree that High Level implementations just get you pretty good for a little effort, and that C will get you darn good for a premium effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I liked the first and third ones.

The second, not so much.

<comment><USER10> I think the second one is a "lost in translation." I can imagine that there's way of presenting the punchline so that it'd be funny, but I couldn't give you the words to say it in English.

<comment><USER11> The little girl likes to "take" a shit, but not be "given" a shit. It's funny.

Has anyone else noticed that coprophiles tend to be highly specialialized and intelligent people? Howard Stern types.</comment></comment></comment>


Livecoding for Android with ClojureScript and Bocko - <AUTHOR> https://nvbn.github.io/2015/06/04/livecoding-android/

<comment><USER2> Nice work! I like the looks of that and never heard of it.</comment>


China mobilises thousands of troops, armoured vehicles near border with India - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3088093/china-mobilises-thousands-troops-armoured-vehicles-near-border <comment><USER2> Why India didn't plant land mines across LAC since 1962?</comment>


Problematic business relationships - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dimist/problematic-business-relationships-44dc00aeb05c <comment><USER2> _" We don't need to have developers in our software company, we can outsource the function and keep only a product owner who would know the history of the project. Only the relationship with the paying clients is necessary the rest are expenses. Imagine yourself as a developer or graphic designer or system administrator in a company like this."_

I don't have to imagine, it accurately describes about 90% of the technical companies I have ever worked for in the UK. That and silos, where they never hire more than one person per business function and working collaboratively with others is seen as a sign that you are not good enough to do the task on your own.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yes the silos. PMs whose only function is to shield the client from "dev- speak" so that (1) nobody will complain when client asks for BS, (2) can help to subsidise dev with a cheaper one... Silos also help that if devs talk to each other, they might start talking about Emperor's clothes.

<comment><USER2> I remember showing one manager an article on 'extreme programming'. His view was that it was just a way for programmers to cheat him out of money and only do half the amount of work, given only one person types at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > most British IT businesses end up becoming consultancies

> [programmers/designers/ops] marginalized as second class citizens

I think these trends were probably true in the past, and were driven by the investment environment in the UK.

10 years ago, early-stage investment was pretty hard to come by in the UK and investors were hyper-focussed on companies that could show early revenue. As a result, many entrepreneurs were forced to bootstrap, and consulting revenue was the only way to make ends meet.

However, things are clearly changing. We've had some breakout successes this year (Transferwise, Funding Circle) and some new entrants in the early-stage funding landscape (Entrepreneur First, Mosaic, Hoxton et al). Investors seem more willing back young, technical founders pursuing riskier projects.

<comment><USER4> We're in the U.S. (East Coast) and are bootstrapped, and the hardest thing to do is keep your eye on the ball and off of consulting. There's easy money there - we get _asked_ to build software by other businesses, and most in our circle look at consulting as the thing you do to save a failing business while you figure out what's next.

That said, it's probably the thing that can be counted as the final nail in the coffin. While consulting can halt a failing business from total wipeout, in reality it's a softens the landing, but I've yet to see a business recover and hop back in to the product game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Looking inwards I have observed that what is considered important is not as much as it should be functions that are related with the end product or service such as programming or design, or generally what's happening at the assembly line." What?

<comment><AUTHOR> Rewrote it. Apologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Small correction: it is Tim Berners-Lee not Burners Lee

<comment><AUTHOR> Corrected. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Student suspended after posting principal's mugshot on Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/student-suspended-after-posting-principals-mugshot/nXmBN <comment><USER2> This is the Georgia school district that lost it's accreditation a couple years ago. The leadership in the county is completely ridiculous. You would normally be able to dismiss this incident by accepting the official's claim that the student was just being disruptive but in the context of this failing school system you can't shake the thought that the suspension was the overreaction of an angry and embarrassed principle.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you "visualize" timezone offsets in your head? - <AUTHOR>

I have always wondered how other people "visualize" this in their own heads =) when they need to do a quick mental timezone conversion.
For me it works like this: I visualize a world map sort of focused on the regions I'm converting between.
I'm based in Western Europe so lets say I'm converting between US Pacific Time and GMT and I know that for most of the year the time difference is 8 hours.
The image that would pop into my head is of a world map centered on the Atlantic ocean where I imagine the Sun going over from right to left as the day progresses, this gives me the queue that as the sun sets/"leaves" Europe it will be "arriving" over the US thus imparting the info that it is 8 hours later in GMT than PST.
Whenever i need to do a new conversion between different regions I usually always visualize it this way...I've always found it odd because a lot of friends tell me they just memorize if its Region A is X hours ahead/behind of Region B and that's it! whereas for me that doesn't seem to work.
Would love to hear your thoughts =) <comment><USER2> Yes, I usually find it easier to memorize things starting from base concepts. (I don't see the Sun moving right to left, but the Earth turning counter clockwise when seen from the North pole).

There's no way to memorize the X hours ahead/behind meaningfully, since the sign of numerical timezone offset may be flipped, depending on the operation AND on the system used. Eg. systems designed in the USA often use an opposite offset, (so they have negative offsets to Europe).

The Greenwich Observatory defines positive offsets East and negative West: [http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/timezone.htm](http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/timezone.htm) So GMT+8 is in China.

But for POSIX, GMT+8 is the USA, like in Common Lisp, where: "Time zone values increase with motion to the west, so Massachusetts, U.S.A. is in time zone 5, California, U.S.A. is time zone 8, and Moscow, Russia is time zone -3." To be noted that both those systems were designed in the USA.

<comment><AUTHOR> >"(I don't see the Sun moving right to left, but the Earth turning counter clockwise when seen from the North pole)"

ha! that's brilliant! thanks for sharing

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Working with teams around the world, I don't visualise the globe, but what they're eating.

I'm eating dinner, so US East Coast is eating breakfast, and we can have a call soon. For Mid West / West Coast, add 2-3 hours.

I'm having lunch, India is having breakfast.

I'm going to have dinner soon, Europe is going to have lunch soon.

Not that scientific, but a way to visualise what people are doing, and therefore if they're reading their email or able to answer the telephone at the time. And it's a good image for some smalltalk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really interesting =) thanks for the reply

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to visualize the sun more easily (naively) when figuring time differences. After moving from 45N to rough 60N it's gotten weirder with the even longer summer days.

The sun doesn't just "go west' as if the earth's axis had no tilt. I think that most people don't really pay attention to the path the sun makes across the sky as the year progresses. It's harder to visualize "in what position would the sun be 8 timezones away" when you account for the tilt.

It's nearing 8pm local time here in Helsinki and the sun is still quite high in the sky. Back in US central where I have family, it's nearing 12 noon. The sunlight overlaps a good deal in the summer time. In the middle of winter, we will never see the sun at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm used to just thinking about GMT. I know that the UK is around GMT 0, the US is negative, and Japan is positive, so those are my starting points for other locations.

I believe it has helped me that I have lived in different time zones, so it has become second-nature.</comment>