Show HN: Custom Remote Job Alerts - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/custom-remote-job-alerts <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all

I currently run a remote job board called Remote Circle.

Until now, we've had a single email go out every week which we call the "bulletin". Everybody got the same email, no customisation whatsoever. Pretty rubbish.

Custom job alerts has been on our roadmap for a while but we've taken our time on getting it built because it seemed like such a big task and we wanted to focus on other areas, like getting more jobs. Other remote job boards offered more personalised job alerts, but in our eyes they still weren't personal enough. Being able to get job alerts by job category still isn't enough when looking at remote jobs. We wanted our alerts to be as flexible as our site. It's this level of customisation that our users have come to love us for and we wanted that to be replicated in our job alerts. So our job alerts are actually just as customisable as search on Remote Circle is. As always, we will only send you jobs from companies that are hiring in your Timezone. On top of that, you can also specify:

      Which job category you would like to see jobs from

     What type of jobs you want (permanent, contract or part-time)

  Which keywords you want the jobs to include e.g. "javascript" or "translation"

And even what company you would like to receive jobs from. For example, you might only want jobs from Buffer and nobody else

And of course you can decide to receive these alerts in your inbox every week or every weekday(we don't bother you on weekends).

It's super easy to add your job alert too. Just search for jobs on Remote Circle as you normally would and then hit the Create alert button, the alert will be created for your current search parameters. Choose your email frequency(week/weekday) and your done.

And that's it!

We hope this will make it even easier to find remote jobs so that you don't need to keep coming back to Remote Circle to check for updates. Instead, you get the alert and can be first to apply.

If you have any feedback, please just let me know.

Thanks!</comment>


What to know to get promoted quickly in Big Tech - <AUTHOR> https://philippcannons.com/what-you-should-know-about-how-corporations-work/ <comment><USER2> > Error establishing a database connection

Know database connections to get promoted quickly in Big Tech!

<comment><USER3> Yes, clearly being able to keep your blog running when it's on the HN homepage is NOT one of necessaries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Touché

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The original title was "What you should know about how corporations work" and that made a lot more sense. There is very little about promotions in the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Personally I cannot assign importance to something until I understand the structure it operates within. Hence the preamble to the simple point about promotions in the article.

I wish someone had told me when I was a starry eyed college kid entering the workforce that by focusing on this one strategic decision, I could have gotten so much more out of the many 100 hour work weeks of execution. e.g.: Someone working long shifts at a restaurant is just as hard working as Elon Musk, the scale of Elon's impact is just much bigger.

More practically, the original title got one upvote because it didn't focus on the value of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > If you work in the part of the company chasing one of the top 6 initiatives > of the CEO, you'll usually get promoted fast if you do well. You'll also get > paid a lot.

Sure, but those initiatives can suddenly change when the CEO changes or when the CEO changes strategy. Whole divisions can get shut down overnight.

<comment><USER6> I recently was laid off while working on one of the initiatives the director had going. They hired a CEO who brought all his initiatives and mine happened to fall outside of the new initiatives. They let myself, another developer, and the director go all at the same time.

<comment><USER7> That's very typical, the new ceo will usually try to put their stamp on a company by firing a bunch of the close allies of the previous ceo, cancelling a bunch of their favorite projects, and generally just marking their territory. Same as kings used to do on ascending the throne, it's all about personal brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the bit about the CEO. He's the one you should be dealing with _directly_ should the shit hit the fan. Not the HR department, not your line manager. They're just peons. Also keep in mind the CEO might be concealing all sorts of stuff from the board. Wish I had known this years ago. Excellent article.

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:21xq0j...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:21xq0jgfKEsJ:https://philippcannons.com/what- you-should-know-about-how-corporations-work/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

</comment><comment><USER10> _The better you are at quality and support the more money you'll be paid to stick around and protect._

If only that were true?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have probably phrased that better. At one end your skills might get commoditized and outsourced to somewhere for 1/10th of the cost.

But at the other end, think the person in charge of when Google search goes down in Europe. Or when Azure crashes for Disney. Or when AWS goes down for Netflix. How much do you think the people who are experts there get paid? I know two people who make 7 figures doing jobs like that. They are linchpins.</comment></comment>


The Honest $10,000 Spam - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4xHc2Ow9CY

<comment><USER2> This probably does more harm than good. I just can't believe that the guy who actually replied with his real name and bank details is the "face" of people who actually do this?</comment>


Mashups Are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/business/10slipstream.html?_r=1&ex=1360386000&en=60296335da445fc7&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

<comment><USER2> I tried to play with Popfly. It wouldn't work in Safari so I downloaded Firefox. Then I had to register an account. Then it loaded fine, but it failed to pull the News.yc feed. So I tried digg... nope, wouldn't load that either. I tried 4 boxes and I couldn't get any of them to work. I guess the app is still working out its kinks...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm always glad to seem Microsoft doing something neat -- they have a lot of bright people.

That said....Popfly won't load on my browser -- fully updated firefox running under ubuntu (strangely, the error message implies firefox is supported).</comment>


Show HN: Collaborative drawing with protocol buffers - <AUTHOR> https://johan-nordberg.com/wspainter/ <comment><USER2> Lol, justplayed 3 games of noughts and crosses, always fun to see something like this :)</comment>


Study guide and introduction to the modern front end stack - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/grab/front-end-guide <comment><USER2> Great guide, although I think styled-components deserves more of a mention than an "alternative". It's easy to support both CSS Modules and styled- components in a webpack build and I'm of the opinion that styled-components is always the route to go unless you really need the full power of CSS/Less/SCSS.</comment>


Kotlin 1.4 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2020/08/kotlin-1-4-released-with-a-focus-on-quality-and-performance/ <comment><USER2> If you haven't tried it yet, here's my seal of approval for Kotlin.

Normally I'm quite reluctant to start a new project in a new language, but Kotlin edited on IntelliJ just seems so very smooth. I'm doing a side project which is a game, where most of the website parts are Kotlin.

Most of what I'll say will be a bit vague, I mainly write Python and C++. I'm also not too clear on what benefits come from the language and which from the IDE, my understanding is that JetBrains had a lot to do with it so they are probably connected.

\- Compile times seem pretty fast.

\- Errors seem clear, haven't been as stumped as I'd expected with a new language.

\- Greytext types that are inferred are super useful. I do wonder how I'd do if the IDE didn't tell me what the types were. But it basically means you get all the benefits of type annotation without having to write out the types.

\- The style of using a lot of filter/map/reduce makes my code more terse, but the greytext hints keep it easy to understand.

\- Great sugars. No need to add getters and setters for every member. Likewise it seems to change the calls to old Java lib getters and setters. Data classes can be short and sweet. One-liner functions in-line for simple stuff to keep simple stuff short.

\- Can still do whatever you want with Java libs. Unit testing for instance works much the same.

\- Ecosystem has moved nicely with Kotlin. Ktor and Ebean seem to be on board and pretty mature.

\- Null safety built in makes it clear where you need to do something about it.

<comment><USER3> > \- Greytext types that are inferred are super useful. I do wonder how I'd do > if the IDE didn't tell me what the types were. But it basically means you > get all the benefits of type annotation without having to write out the > types.

Actually the strong-type-inference plus greytext thing is one part of Kotlin where I'm not sure what to think about it.

When I first saw Kotlin examples on the internet with all the "it.something" I was "What is going on there?!? What is that supposed to do".

Then the first time I tried writing Kotlin myself everything became super clear due to that Greytext shown in IntelliJ. However 80% of the time I'm looking at code is not in an IDE. It's either on code reviews or in the browser (github, internal code browsers, etc). All the information is not available there, and one has to be aware again what the implicit types will be.

The challenge certainly also exists in other langues with type inference (auto in C++, var in Java/C#, inference in Rust, etc), but for some reason I found it worse in Kotlin. Maybe due to the commonly used methods which take a closure/interface as last parameter, and and the fancy builders.

<comment><USER4> btw it's "type inference", not "type interference"

<comment><USER3> thanks - I'll try to remember it. Fixed the text

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a guy who has written a lot of modern JS but was working in a JVM-only shop (all tooling etc assumed services were running on the JVM), Kotlin was like a breath of fresh air. Doesn't go as FP as Scala (which is a plus for me) but still has all the nice collection APIs etc that I use frequently in JS.

Really looking forward to seeing what happens with Kotlin native. Compile times were pretty bad last I tried it but I'd give it another go if they improved those.

<comment><USER6> >Doesn't go as FP as Scala (which is a plus for me)

If anyone reading this thinks about using Kotlin and has more positive views towards FP, there's this project to bridge the gap somewhat

[https://arrow-kt.io/](https://arrow-kt.io/)

<comment><USER7> Doesn't this require a plugin, though? So it's basically an extension of Kotlin-the-language.

To those who are using Arrow- why not Scala? Is it just because Scala has too much cruft? The only thing Kotlin has over Scala (AFAIK) is coroutines, which, honestly- I don't even love. They're very awkward to use and require unchecked exceptions for control-flow (and therefore have convention-based rules around using them).

<comment><USER8> I think the answer is quite simple. You might start out with Kotlin and get familiar with it. But when you get thirsty for more, arrow is the logical next step. Going for Scala would require learning a lot of new stuff and once or even rewrite your things.

It's the same for Scala and Haskell, which is why Scala is sometimes called Haskellator - I still would start a project in Scala because I'm more familiar with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 2 years back we had huge debate to choose between Kotlin or Java. While Java folks thought it was immature to even discuss anything other than Java, we ended up adopting Kotlin company wide. Looking back at it we don't regret the decision even single bit! We are using Kotlin and Coroutines to run extremely heavy services (almost 1K req/sec per pod, with complex logic, few hundred threads, 6GB RAM and 2 CPU cores). People concerned with Project Loom, should remember it's backwards compatible & upgrade path can be done multiple ways. I would highly recommend Kotlin for backend services, you won't have to code review IDE vomit, depend on annotations, or live with callback hell (project reactor, rx-java).

<comment><USER10> What framework do you use? I guess not Spring.

<comment><USER9> Surprisingly spring with webflux works fine too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a grad student who has been using Kotlin in research for the last few years, it can also be a great language for data science. Kotlin is one of the few statically typed languages with scripting and Jupyter notebook support, and offers some great features for parallel and asynchronous data processing. Once you set up a project and import the right dependencies, the workflow really clicks. It works smoothly with the JVM and JS ecosystems, which have a bunch of fantastic libraries for data processing and visualization. Happy to answer any questions about using Kotlin for DS/ML if anyone's curious.

<comment><USER12> How about tooling/the ecosystem? Python has all the scipys, pandas, scikits, tensorflows, pytorches.

<comment><USER13> The tooling is ahead in some ways and behind in others. As a statically typed language, Kotlin's autocompletion and static analysis is already miles ahead. More broadly, the JVM has a rich ecosystem of libraries for data processing, from natural language processing (CoreNLP) to big data analytics (Spark). If you're looking for something similar to Pandas/Numpy/Matplotlib, maybe check out Krangl [1], EJML-Kotlin [3] or lets-plot [4]. There are also efforts to port TensorFlow [5] and PyTorch [6] to the JVM. While not all libraries as mature as their Python cousins, there are a growing number of native libraries and JVM wrappers for scientific computing, which provide most of the functionality and are very ergonomic to use in Kotlin.

[1]: [https://github.com/holgerbrandl/krangl](https://github.com/holgerbrandl/krangl)

[2]: [https://github.com/mipt-npm/kmath](https://github.com/mipt-npm/kmath)

[3]: [https://github.com/lessthanoptimal/ejml/tree/SNAPSHOT/main/e...](https://github.com/lessthanoptimal/ejml/tree/SNAPSHOT/main/ejml- kotlin)

[4]: [https://github.com/JetBrains/lets-plot- kotlin/](https://github.com/JetBrains/lets-plot-kotlin/)

[5]: [https://github.com/tensorflow/java](https://github.com/tensorflow/java)

[6]: [https://github.com/pytorch/java-demo](https://github.com/pytorch/java- demo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really good to see these changes. Kotlin is a great language to work with, it has the stability and performance of the JVM and it writes like Ruby / TypeScript. I wish more companies were adopting it as their core language and it is not just limited to Android development.

<comment><USER15> Kotlin really is good and definitely an improvement over Java, but in my experience (like ~1 year) the language itself makes writing unreadable code too easy; it also doesn't help that IDEs like IntelliJ Idea often suggest shorter yet less readable alternatives because it's "idiomatic" Kotlin code. For perspectice, I am writing "enterprise software" and I am big fan of TypeScript.

<comment><USER16> >suggest shorter yet less readable alternatives

What do you mean exactly? I feel like Kotlin's brevity is what actually makes it a lot more readable than Java. With Java there's just often so much noise and fluff that doesn't actually mean much, obscuring what the program actually does. Could just be my personal preference, but I feel like in general I have an easier time understanding terse, dense code rather than spacious, verbose code.

<comment><USER15> I can't give specific examples, but something along the lines of suggesting to replace an early return in the form of `if (…)` by something like `… ?:return`. The former alternative makes it way easier to spot on first glance where the functions bails out. The latter hides it in an assignment making it harder to see.

I should say, though, that I am by no means an expert Kotlin developer; maybe I just have to get used to idiomatic Kotlin.

<comment><USER17> Don't take idiomatic Kotlin too seriously. It's not Go where there's exactly one allowed way to do things. IntelliJ's suggestions go both ways - you can convert to short form and also back to long form automatically. It's that way for a reason: you're trusted to pick the right form on your own.

<comment><USER15> I'd agree in general, but that hardly works for larger teams or even multiple teams. This can probably be solved by a good linting tool, but I am not too familiar with the state of linting in Kotlin.

<comment><USER17> The best linter for Kotlin is the IntelliJ inspector, which is very powerful. You can run inspections from CI builds using TeamCity, at least, probably other CI builds. You may also configure project defaults to trigger various patterns as warnings or errors.

Even better, in the latest IntelliJ you can create new inspections from structural search, which is an AST based matching system. So you have a lot of flexibility to make your own lints and warnings without needing to write plugins.

However, I think there's a more general issue here, which is that if you don't trust your team to write tasteful code, linters will be of limited use. It may be better to invest in more rigorous code reviews, trainings, style guidance, mentoring etc. I've spent five years managing technical teams using Kotlin (yep, early adopter!) and found most of them could handle it just fine. A little training goes a long way. The worst problems came from developers creating overly complex abstractions, not playing code golf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As far as the Java platform (AKA "the JVM") goes, Kotlin is painting itself into a corner. Kotlin was designed in 2009-10, in the Java 7 days, around the time of the Oracle acquisition, and at a time of stagnation for Java due to Sun's decline. At the time, Android was also quite similar to Java. Kotlin was a great design in those conditions. Things are very different today.

Kotlin's design goals are now contradictory. It seeks to be a low-overhead language, i.e. provide abstractions that don't add overhead over the target platform, give access to all platform capabilities, and at the same time target multiple platforms -- Java, Android, LLVM and JS -- over _none of which_ does Kotlin exert much influence (maybe a bit on Android). Since 2010, Java has moved away from Android, to the point that there are very big gaps between the two, and they're only growing.

By both trying to target multiple platforms (with no say in their design) and trying to add little or no overhead, Kotlin will soon find itself in a bind. It's coroutines are in conflict with Java's upcoming virtual thread's design, and its inline classes will cause problems with Java's Valhalla vs. Android. Kotlin will have to choose to either give up on low-overhead abstractions, give up on some of its platforms, give up on giving access to full platform capabilities, or split into multiple languages, each targeting a different platform. For example, if Kotlin's inline types will make use of Valhalla, then they won't work on Android, at least not without much overhead.

TL;DR: A full-capability, low-overhead, multi-platform language is hard to pull off in the long run when you have low market share on all of those platforms (except Android) and little or no influence on any of them. This was viable under some accidental circumstances, but those are no longer holding.

<comment><USER19> ^this is an oracle employee speaking

Everyone else puts a disclaimer on HN. You Oracle people are not special.

Edit: I know I am getting severely downvoted for this. But there are some Oracle shills around here.

<comment><USER20> I mean an Oracle employee talking bad about their own company in the subtext is kinda the opposite of shilling.

<comment><USER7> I didn't downvote either comment, but I do appreciate the person who called out the individual's affiliation. In the current era of so much astroturfing, I feel like it's good manners to indicate when you make a comment that you are an interested party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> dang, can you update the URL to the actual official announcement instead of Google's shorter copy?

[https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2020/08/kotlin-1-4-release...](https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2020/08/kotlin-1-4-released- with-a-focus-on-quality-and-performance/)

It's got more detail and is more canonical.

<comment><USER21> Just mail firstname.lastname@example.com (see footer).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Given the litigious nature of Oracle, how hard would it be for Kotlin to be useful without reference to the JVM at all? Is Kotlin/Native ready for prime time and can it be used for mobile/embedded/IoT applications currently or is it still a work in progress?

<comment><USER23> It's used a lot already for cross platform development for android and ios even though that has been experimental so far. This is where they've been focusing most of the effort and as far as I know it's usable for that and some people have already built apps using this.

I've been looking at multiplatform development recently and maintain a few oss projects on github that are now multiplatform. The build tools are getting there. The multiplatform gradle plugin has improved a lot over the last year. Generally you can get stuff working pretty easily. If you need to target IOS and Android, it's worth a look. Also if you want to share some code with browsers, it can do that too.

The main issues is with gaps in functionality. E.g. kotlinx datetime just reached 0.1. There were a few third party alternatives but if you needed dates, not having a usable datetime library is a bit annoying. That's just one example. When stuff is missing, you can actually fix it yourself. But of course that ends up being quite a bit of work.

I think for e.g. command line development on Linux or WASM development for browsers, the native compiler is not that great yet. They just started working on WASM only a few weeks ago and posix and Kotlin have not had a lot of attention. This is also an issue when using kotlin-js with node.js; they've just not done the work to expose all of the built in node.js stuff to Kotlin yet. On browsers you get a smoother experience with kotlin-js. Of course people doing stuff on servers can use the jvm and that's why there's just less attention going towards native on that front.

So, wouldn't recommend it for IOT just yet unless you are willing to deal with what is likely to be a rough experience and some gaps in functionality.

The big next pieces are finalizing the transition to the new compiler backend and improving the multiplatform library ecosystem. They have alpha versions of the new compilers currently but they are not ready yet. I also expect there will be lots of activity with both Jetbrains and others releasing multiplatform libraries. I've actually worked on a few of those and would love to see this get traction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Kotlin seems finally like a language designed by people who actually develop in it.

OTOH Oracle people seem to always focus on the platform issues - green threads is the next big thing, but it doesn't actually affect 99% of developers since Java's threading model is just fine for most business applications.

Yet things like missing ability to reasonably express non-nullability (and the resulting NPEs) hit me every single day, but for Oracle it's apparently not an interesting enough to work on.

<comment><USER25> Great now let them bring the Kotlin Virtual Machine.

Ah, that is what Google is doing for them.

<comment><USER24> No need for this, there's bunch of existing virtual machines. JVM is pretty nice actually.

<comment><USER25> Sure there is, Kotlin users typically bash Java and how much better it is, so I am waiting for JetBrains to release KVM, Kotlin/Native so far loses in all frontends against AOT Java based toolchains.

<comment><USER26> I dont understand the selling point for a Kotlin VM or Native compilation

Isnt the whole selling point for Kotlin, is that it is a JVM hosted languages, that give you access to all Java Libraries, framework and tools .. but purportedly .. is an easier, nicer , more language language compared to Java, Scala or the other JVM languages

Why go elsewhere, why go native, or develop their own VM ? Any improvement in the JVM benefits Kotlin, correct or am I missing something ?

<comment><USER25> Apparently no, that is why they started Kotlin/Native instead of ping back into AOT compilers for Java, and in Kotlin forums tends to exist an high disregard for anything Java.

<comment><USER17> Actually the story I heard is that Kotlin/Native exists simply because Intel was laying off a compiler team in St Petersburg around that time, so they came on the market as a group and could be picked up easily and quickly. And they wanted to push into iOS.

Could they have done a SubstrateVM/GraalVM competitor instead? Yeah probably, but that's a very different project to adding another backend to Kotlin. Given they already decided to make Kotlin "multi-platform" (i.e. js backend) instead of making Java more portable, it then made sense to go the whole way.

JetBrains also developed TeaVM and arguably it'd have been better to just invest in JVM related tooling, and keep Kotlin as a JVM language. But I think they like the idea of it being its own ecosystem. Who wouldn't, in their position?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Kotlin is exploding in the Android sphere. I am seeing more and more announcements/job postings for Kotlin mobile devs.

<comment><USER25> Naturally, Google is pushing it down our throats, providing minimal compatibility with Java language features post Java 8 and zero JVM capabilities regarding modules or newer bytecodes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I like Kotlin, but I also feel it's a huge missed opportunity.

I have used Kotlin quite a bit. In particular, I've been working on a multiplatform project recently which definitely have helped me learn about some of the less developed parts of the language.

Long ago, I used to do a lot of Java and I liked it a lot (having worked at Sun back around 2000 was certainly part of the reason). Kotlin, in my opinion, is a better Java. It does a pretty good job of providing a nice syntax for it, and these benefits are the first things that are explained in beginners tutorials to Kotlin.

But, it doesn't really do anything new. There are so many things it could do to fix long-standing problems with Java, which Jetbrains refuse to implement due to the fact that the implementation will not be natural to the JVM.

An obvious example is generic functions, or multimethods. This was discussed on the forums, but quickly dismissed with one of the main reasons being that it would have to introduce a new dispatch mechanism and so wouldn't be natural on the JVM. This argument has been made to dismiss many suggested features.

Another reason Jetbrains uses dismiss suggestions is that the new feature would make the language more complicated and difficult to learn. The refusal to implement some kind of macro facility falls into this category.

At the same time, this position leads to truly bizarre language behaviour such as the strange behaviour where declaring a function inline changes the semantics of the code.

This insistence that the JVM dictate the features makes even less sense since they also have native as well as JS code generators.

The only unique Kotlin feature that I can think of which is not a result of the JVM is their support for suspending functions, which is used to implement their async framework. The problem here is that it semantics can be really confusing, and can in fact lead to deadlocks if you have a library the needs to be exposed to Java which internally is implemented using suspending functions. If these functions are then called by Kotlin code which itself use suspending functions, you can end up with really strange behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER29> I love it. Coroutines make async code concise and much cleaner than Java completable futures, Kotlin is a supported gRPC language, and the gRPC service signatures are much cleaner than the java gRPC service signatures, and there is decent Bazel support. I think the biggest threat to this language is the $399 iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER30> SAM conversions finally. I'm in tears!

<comment><USER31> I was looking forward to this as well. But then noticed you have to write the fun keyword in front of the interface. Which makes it more like a workaround than a language feature to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Official announcement: [https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2020/08/kotlin-1-4-release...](https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2020/08/kotlin-1-4-released- with-a-focus-on-quality-and-performance/)

What's New in Kotlin 1.4: [https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/whatsnew14.html](https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/whatsnew14.html)

<comment><USER33> Knowing this wasn't a Google thing, I was a bit thrown by the update being announced by Google. Definitely recommend headlining the original developers' announcement instead.

<comment><USER34> Ok, we've changed to that from [https://android- developers.googleblog.com/2020/08/new-langua...](https://android- developers.googleblog.com/2020/08/new-language-features-and-more-in.html).</comment></comment></comment>


Quicklisp: On Beyond Beta, Talk at European Lisp Symposium 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/quicklisp/els-london-2015

<comment><USER2> So I spent the beginning of my week screwing around at work with the Pharo Smalltalk environment again, for the third or fourth time in the last few years of "flirt with different programming environments."

Problem is, it is just so GUI for development. I mean it is cutting edge so wonderful, but at the same time so much bling. I do wish to continue with GNU Smalltalk and maybe not so much Pharo, because Seaside is very appealing.

So why do I bring this up? The infinite introspection and modability of Smalltalk and Common Lisp make them so beautiful and sexy to a budding wannabe deep-dive hacker. I keep wanting to dive deep into a platform (said elsewhere, I am back to school for Java), but I keep coming back to SBCL.

So I just want to say thanks to Zach Beane (xach). His CL work has been awesome, and Quicklisp is the only way I have used SBCL/CCL/ECL with slime in Emacs so far. And it is just wonderful for me.

I know people were making fun of his smug (in his slides he is like raise your hand if you use CL _without_ Quicklisp, no hands?, ah that's right), but it has been surprisingly little headache for me _except_ for compiled code (Qt5 versus Qt4 in the CommonQt packages for GUI).

So, thanks to yoy, Zach, and the rest of the kickass CL community.

<comment><USER3> I've been working on and off with Smalltalk since about 1996.

I'd encourage you to be open to having a GUI-first development tool. Yeah, it's blingy. But it's also incredibly productive, and I think that eschewing Pharo for GNU because you find the GUI too neat is a bit odd.

(There have been complaints that Pharo's GUI actually makes it too easy to code overly abstracted crazy stuff, which I'm actually quite sympathetic to, but I don't think that's what you're saying.)

<comment><USER2> I find the aversion to outside tooling hard. I know everything is an object, but I have to live completely in the land of $implementation Smalltalk's view. I understand that has power though, so I cannot knock it. GNU became interesting to me through quick research because it kind of rides the line between the two, and feels very Lispy to me.

But you are very experienced. Tell me: if I reinstall Pharo right now, should I just dig into Seaside? Is there anything I can play with and read that will push farther into the traditional Smalltalk camps?

<comment><USER3> So, let me cover three different things here: my attitude on Smalltalk the language; my thoughts on Seaside; and what would push you further into the Smalltalk camp. Last one first.

Smalltalk shines when you go native and really buy the idea that the Smalltalk IDE is going to be your one-stop shop for everything. I personally find that this happens naturally when I'm doing really rapid prototyping. Nowadays, I'm a fairly passionate strong typing proponent in general, and I generally find myself happier languages like Rust, TypeScript, F#, and Kotlin than in languages like Python, Ruby, Io, or JavaScript. But when I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing yet, when I'm exploring a space or trying to figure out how something ought to work, then I find that the power of Smalltalk's introspection, and the flexibility afforded by the browser, debugger, rewriting tool, and metaobejct protocol (similar to but different from Common Lisp's) more than make up for the loss of safety. So if you were going to play with it in order to get hooked, I'd suggest doing it in an area where you're not quite sure what you're doing yet. Maybe Cryptopals or something where you're out of your element.

That all said, the strength of the tooling results in some odd patterns in Smalltalk that I am increasingly thinking are bad decisions. For example, there are no case or match statements. Instead, you're expected to make all the objects that you would be switching on all implement some method (maybe e.g. #handle:), and then you unconditionally call that method and rely on the object's differing behavior to cover the match statement. But that means that you're suddenly unclear who all can actually be affected by a given line of code. The tooling helps, but it's annoying.

The language also shows its age in some other ways. There's not a real concept of immutability, for example, and the only real literals are numbers, strings, and arrays. (Pharo kind of skirts this issue by having an #asDictionary method on their runtime arrays that converts an association list to a hash table, but it's quite ugly for nested structures.) The threading story is green threads only. With all variables being private and no macros, there's a fair amount of boilerplate that shows up (although, like a modern Java IDE, Pharo's IDE can write the setters and getters for you) (I'll also confess to not being sure how the new slots system impacts this, so this may no longer be an issue.) In the real world, for production code, I don't think these have to all be _issues_ , but they keep Smalltalk from being my general go-to language.

That leaves your question about Seaside. I love prototyping in Seaside (see above) because it lets me basically ignore JavaScript and still code a fully stateful website, but I don't personally actually like designing server-local stateful web services these days. I'd personally probably use Teapot (a Sinatra/Flask/Dropwizard-like REST server) and a straight single-page JavaScript app (or maybe Amber, if I wanted to use Smalltalk all the way down) instead. I think Seaside was an absolutely amazing idea when it came out, and I have a very high opinion of its quality, but I don't honestly think it's a great way to design services these days.

<comment><USER2> Sorry for the late reply. I will take more time to play with Pharo. I read some of your stuff on Reddit and it seems compelling to use for proto-typing. I started reading about Seaside-REST, Teapot, and Amber after following your name to Reddit comments about the Smalltalk Renaissance.

Guys like you make me love HN. You took the time to advocate. So I will take the time to take another look.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Faster way to find the perfect image for every purpose - <AUTHOR> All companies have marketing people or other employees wasting a lot of time searching for the perfect image for their newsletter, website, blog, SoMe-post etc – without them knowing the effect the image might have.
We want to change that.
JumpStory is a new kind of image platform combined with both AI and editing tools (for all of us without a degree in graphic design).
Today we have just launched our new HighJumper feature in 30 countries. Based on millions of data, statistics from social media and the latest knowledge within neuromarketing we have built an algorithm, which analyses all the +10 mio. images in our database. The HighJumper icon is our new "performance indicator" icon, which will select the images that have been predicted to perform above average when used in communication and marketing campaigns. With HighJumper your selection of visuals becomes more than just a leap of faith.
You can also use JumpStory to find images in 2 seconds. Just copy-paste your text into our TextMatch tool and within 2 seconds the platform will find suggestions for you.
Finally, we have a built-in editing tool, so you don't need a graphic designer or an image editing program.
Simple just crop, flip, change colors or even remove the background with a few clicks.
Hopefully this should help anyone searching for images a lot of time
Hope you will check it out on www.jumpstory.com.
Mail me at: email@example.com for a free trial period for the rest of 2019.
Have a nice day. <comment><USER2> What is the source of the images? Do you have the right to sell them? Sorry to be mean, but this is a common problem in stock image sites.

How do yo remove the background of an image? It looks like a difficult task to automate.</comment>


Wolfram On Hunting For Our Universe - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/my_hobby_hunting_for_our_unive.html <comment><USER2> Wow, he's turning into a crackpot: long, rambling articles with no introduction or conclusions that have no math or results to speak of, furtive mentions of how the rest of the physics community can't grasp how brilliant and far-out his remarkable work is (which could be because he doesn't publish, doesn't collaborate, doesn't go to conferences, and basically doesn't actually participate in the research community).

<comment><USER3> John Baez has developed an index for quantitatively judging revolutionary discoveries in physics: <http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html>

Doesn't look like Wolfram scores very high on Baez's index, although Wolfram does get the 50 point item.

<comment><USER4> He gets the 30 point question #30 too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You might find this review of Wolfram's book interesting:

<http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf>

<comment><USER6> When the book first came out, I remember there was an air of skepticism surrounding some of its concepts. Has the view towards the book by the science community changed much in the years since? I'm not a physicist, but have always been interested in Wolfram's work out of curiosity from a comp sci perspective.

<comment><USER7> Some ideas have already become commonplace, others less so. Simple programs as 'language primitive' for modeling was criticised by many, but is now becoming popular, particularly in biology (see for example [http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/signa...](http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/signaling.causality.pdf)) General ideas like computational irreduciblity and instrinsic randomness are finding increasingly direct evidence in the physical world ([http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/fruit-flies-have-free- will-13...](http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/fruit-flies-have-free- will-13230.html)) In terms of exploring the raw computational universe, lots of people in architecture and generative design are doing related things now. Unforunately most people are unaware of the fundamental ideas that underly all of these threads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why should it be this network thing? He doesn't back up his assertion that the universe is described by one of these networks.

Juergen Schmidhuber lays out an interesting idea that our Universe is just one Turing machine, generated by an enumeration of all Turing machines (generating all possible Universes). <http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/everything/html.html>

<comment><USER7> The difference is that Wolfram wants an actual, single correct model in his hands, whereas Juergen is just talking about hypothetical computations that theoretically produce our universe as well as all the rest (with no hope of being discovered by us humans)

Effectively Wolfram is pruning the search space by looking for the simplest rules that he thinks have a shot of reproducing known physical features of the universe (eg special and general relativity, with a plan for how QM may come about), and then looking within that space for the specific flavor that is our universe. If you actually want to find the model via searching programs, this is the only realistic way to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read NKS. Good book! Especially for math, physics, and programming geeks.

There has been a lot of speculation that the universe is a simulation. If Wolfram manages to ascertain the rules and network that "runs" the universe, then the question becomes whether a universe is a simulation, or just acts like one. Is there a difference between something that has only computational rules and structure and a computer program?

</comment><comment><USER10> So if our universe is essentially computational, what are the implications of Godel's incompleteness theorem? Doesn't this mean there must be an infinite number of axioms our universe is generated from?

<comment><USER11> If Wolfram is right, our universe would be a mathematical "function" not a mathematical "system". Godel showed that every system of sufficient complexity has facts about it that can't be proven. There is no reason to think though that every function within a complex goes back on itself. x = y, for example, doesn't loop around no matter how far out you go.

For my part however I don't believe it's possible for the universe to be "pure math" (that is, its reality comes from an equation and nothing else besides it) in the sense that we understand "math". Nevertheless, it might be that there is an equation that can predict everything we experience. We may as well search for it.

<comment><USER9> Wolfram's a lot smarter than I am, but I believe he also believes the function is discrete and not continuous. In fact, he makes the point in NKS that we may have went off the rails with Newton and the calculus. It may turn out that the universe is discrete and that our understanding of it as continuous is just an artifact of not having the computational power to see how discrete functions can effectively look continuous at a much larger scale (sort of a reverse proof of the integral)

It blows my mind. But if you're a genius, might as well have a hobby, right? I'm just glad he took this up instead of bowling.

Just thought I would add that clarification in there, because I know the word "function" has a lot of meanings to people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/> provides an interesting read on Wolfram and his "New" "Science".

</comment><comment><USER13> How can this guy STILL be that full of himself even after all the shit he took for writing A New Kind of Science?

<comment><USER5> The book has quite a few citations:

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=31...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=3139230665686742056)

<comment><USER13> It also had a quite a large marketing campaign behind it.

Last I checked most objective scientific writing didn't come with a hype machine attached.

<comment><USER14> Citations seem a far more reliable positive indicator of quality than hype is a negative one.

<comment><USER15> People citing work would indicate that work's quality, but the complaint about "A New Kind Of Science" was weak citations, an indication of poor quality. I don't know much about the details. Nor do I know how much people have sited Wolfram's work since.

I think what upsets a lot of people is the attitude. But a bad attitude can still accompany good work, so I excuse Wolfram for his quirks. That acceptance is essential when dealing with people who know they are much smarter than the average person.

While at NYU, I saw Wolfram speak while on his big book tour. There were a few big brains at the Courant Institute that leveled major criticisms at the book. Unfortunately, there was another talk about nonlinear PDEs that most of the critics elected to attend in place of watching Wolfram. Wolfram started the talk by saying, "well, the important people aren't here to see this, but I suppose I'll continue anyway".

As one of the hoi polloi, I found the remark amazingly conceited, probably correct, and a bit charming at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen My brain just got stretch marks.</comment>


Writing Software That Can Kill - <AUTHOR> https://blog.setec.io/articles/2016/01/07/software-kill.html <comment><USER2> I've worked in highly regulated environments - and you can't reach out the EFF or ACLU without being sued into oblivion after signing the typical contracts. Get a lawyer is your only option - and only on their advice should you contact anyone else.

As for specific examples - what about SCADA, SWIFT (finance), Biologics (genomic pharma), or anything that actually could impact someone's life or an entire community? RS-485 double drops vs PoE for a factory is one example. External auditing of back office / risk management / fixed income software is another. Simulated modeling of genomic drugs and FDA phase II trials is another. And then there's Barnaby Jack vs Medtronic... lots of great examples out there better than tor/encryption.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true! I excluded SCADA and most biologics because they are not necessarily intrinsically harmful in the way I wanted to discuss. There are people far more qualified than I am -- yourself probably included -- who can discuss how to safely build those kinds of systems.

I wanted to touch on a slightly different problem; deciding to build something which is fundamentally impossible to do safely, rather than something which is very difficult to do safely.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I am the author of this post.

<comment><USER3> I'm glad somebody else enjoyed Sneakers.

<comment><AUTHOR> So much. Treats tech pretty accurately, too, for the most part. Teaches some good security lessons as well, about social engineering and infiltration.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A delightful, performance-focused Redis client for Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/luin/ioredis

<comment><USER2> Looks good. Add yourself to [http://redis.io/clients](http://redis.io/clients).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a recommended client now: [http://redis.io/clients#nodejs](http://redis.io/clients#nodejs)</comment></comment>


Hackers make money from your stolen medical data - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-is-how-hackers-make-money-from-your-stolen-medical-data/ <comment><USER2> The title would not misfit a public newspaper shouting for attention at the kiosk.

Most of the article goes on about stolen MD identities used to pose as a doctor, making false claims. Your stolen data is only worth pocket money it seems. Not to say the danger is real and your data should be protected and in your control at all times.

The interesting part is I suspect older systems pose a greater threat than new systems centrally storing information in cloud-on-premise or cloud environments. The lengths we go these days to separate actual observations or data from the PII bits in fear of a hack make it so the hacker has to hack at least two, but more likely three or more separate systems these days. Two of which typically should not be exposed outside the VPC/DMZ. I sure hope this article, or similar ones, will not be used by parlements and countries to slow down innovations even further. There is already enough trouble slowing down innovation in Healthcare as it is today.

Let's not fear this but see it as motivation to do our utmost best to protect your data forcing innovation to get rid of all the legacy systems that still live in the world. And while we are at it, use your anonimized data (with consent) to improve the quality of care, lower cost of care and improve patient experience and outcomes.</comment>


There's a Bus with Wi-Fi That'll Take You from LA to SF While You Sleep for $48 - <AUTHOR> http://nextshark.com/sleepbus-startup-travel-sf-la/ <comment><USER2> How about a bus that just circles SF at night for those who can't afford rent there?

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool concept, seems much better than flight, if you are in no rush to get there.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's great if your time is worth nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or if you'd rather get work done on the way, instead of being behind the wheel yourself.</comment></comment>


When Nature Is Freakier Than Sci-Fi - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/09/when-nature-is-freakier-than-sci-fi/ The large tongue eating parasitic isopod is spooky. great picture. <comment><USER2> That isopod parasite is hardcore, I'll try to forget I read that bit.

<comment><USER3> Why does that fish seem to have teeth?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The newt reminds me of wolverine and how his claws come out through his skin. Pretty interesting stuff all around.

</comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't explain why nature is freakier, it's just a collection of freaky pictures.

<comment><USER6> Is that really so hard to answer? Everything that's possible (to form through evolution) can form. Evolution doesn't care about human aesthetic judgments. (This is obviously not strictly true, but close enough.)

It is very much conceivable that we won't think of the same things evolution can form.

And it is just a collection of freaky photos, but the title doesn't imply differently.

<comment><USER5> Except that deleterious mutations will be selected against. So only adaptations which make some sense will be passed on. That includes things like anemia which provides protection from malaria.

And the title does very much imply some kind of answer or elaboration or something that's not simply _look at these freaky pics_ An honest title would have been upvoted a lot less here, but probably more over at reddit.

<comment><USER6> "Except that deleterious mutations will be selected against. So only adaptations which make some sense will be passed on."

Yeah, you are right, my second sentence is a little misleading. Evolution is certainly constrained. Not everything that is in some abstract sense possible (And what does that even mean?) will or even can form. But evolution is most certainly (most of the time) not constrained by human aesthetic judgments. There are strange things out there in nature.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hungry: We just raised $2.6MM To Build EveryMove - <AUTHOR> http://blog.calbucci.com/2012/05/hungry-we-just-raised-26m-to-build.html

<comment><USER2> Great idea in theory but I can only see it being abused by companies.

"Oh, I see you are not on any of the new range of health tracking services that have sprung up, what are you trying to hide? Permiums UP!"

I don't see companies lowering premiums based on healthy lifestyle but making those the new baselines (at today's pricing) and then hiking them for everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER3> With that many job openings, looks like $2.6MM wont take you very far. Better get back to raising more.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hope they do not succeed in their mission. We are already tracked enough in this world…</comment>


The best way to tour a city is through its grocery store - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/urbanist/article/the-best-tourist-secret-attraction-is-the-grocery-store.html <comment><USER2> Yes! Walking into a grocery store is one of the best things about traveling. It is one of the few genuine everyday activities that are easily available to a tourist, but is going to be quite different to what you're used to from home, sometimes in surprising ways.

Hopefully this will not disappear entirely as brands and chains become more and more homogenized across the world. One of the saddest examples of this is how nearly every brand of ice cream in Europe became part of Unilever's ugly "Heartbrand" in the late '90s. Now anywhere you go, you will just be offered the same Magnum, Solero, Cornetto. Who wants to take a vacation photo eating an ice cream you could find in your local store at home?

<comment><USER3> Latin America too. Interestingly, each country has it's own name, often the name of an old-time ice cream company that has since went out of business. In the US it is "Good Humor."

Took me a few years during my backpacking days to figure it out. While odd, I never thought of it as "ugly."

<comment><USER4> Only parts of the U.S. I've lived in Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, California, and Virginia, and I don't think I've ever had Good Humor. Mostly Blue Bell.

<comment><USER5> I never even knew there was a dominant ice cream brand, and if you asked me to name it, I would have picked Hersheys. I have lots of different ice cream options at my grocery store, and some are going the "all natural, 4 ingredient" route as well. Plus it seems like every small town has a dairy/local ice cream shop it feels like.

<comment><USER3> Not sure I've had the original, but recognized the name, maybe from TV or old movies:

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

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unilever_brands#Ice_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unilever_brands#Ice_cream)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been telling friends and family this for years. It's by far my favorite thing to see in a new city in a region I've never been before. It's sort of like a modern anthropological exhibit in more ways than any other single city structure.

There was a photography coffee table book I loved, where the artist took pictures of an entire family around their table, which had all of the food they ate for a week on it.

I've since forgotten the name of the book (if anyone knows it please tell me -- search isn't turning up much), but grocery stores feel like as close as a regular tourist can get to those personal scenes.

<comment><USER7> The book you're thinking of is probably Hungry Planet[1]

[1][https://menzelphoto.photoshelter.com/gallery/Hungry- Planet-F...](https://menzelphoto.photoshelter.com/gallery/Hungry-Planet- Family-Food-Portraits/G0000zmgWvU6SiKM/C0000k7JgEHhEq0w)

<comment><USER8> What's amazing about that is the unnecessary or excessive packaging becomes evident.

Underdeveloped nations haven't yet gotten in the bad habit of wrapping everything in plastic. Grains are in reused sacks, meat is straight from the butcher. I mean, sure I get egg cases and wrapped meats. But some places put vegetables and fruits in styropacks.... why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just moved back home to New Orleans after twenty-something years in various other corners of the US, and seeing the aisle of local products is both disorienting and familiar. There's a few brands with pro-looking graphic design, a few of which have made it out of the state (you can buy Zararain's stuff elsewhere, for instance), and a lot of brands you've never heard of outside Louisiana with labels that look designed by the owner's cousin who has the Adobe suite.

The stuff with the amateurish labels is inevitably the best. It's not packed with preservatives and stretchers and all the other crap you have to adulterate your food with to be able to ship it across the country and have it be shelf-stable.

There's other surprises around the grocery store, but the feeling's most intense in the Local Seasonings Aisle at the local Rouse's.

</comment><comment><USER10> Spanish grocery stores are incredible, you really get a feel for the tapas culture. Everyone stops by after work just to get their late afternoon meal/snack and breakfast for tomorrow. You can't go wrong with any of the <7€ wines, and the salami and cheese selection is superb too.

I was in Kyoto a few months ago, and wandering through the Kyoto Co-op grocery was super fun. So many kinds of green tea I had never heard of, and again, there's a sense of the Japanese minimalist cooking culture. Almost no one in Japan owns an oven, and most places I've seen just have 1-2 standalone electric burners, so baking either isn't done or it'll be something small in a toaster oven.

I love grocery shopping in general, but if you're abroad I'd highly recommend checking out local grocery stores.

<comment><USER11> If you're in Tokyo (Taito City), go see Kappabashi Dogu-gai or Chef's Street. It has an amazing collection of cookware, dining sets, chairs, signs, place mats, cooking knives, and plastic food.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not in a position to do much traveling right now, but I get my kicks visiting small foreign markets here in the United States. Some things you can't get anywhere else, and it's always fun to see what things are considered Staples for different cultures. For example, I have found that the Russian markets have the best pickles and bread, and the Vietnamese markets have an awesome deli and really good produce, and there's a Caribbean market near my house that carries Ting, which is my favorite grapefruit soda.

<comment><USER13> I buy all my spices from regional markets. There's a Halal market west of my girlfriend's place which is where I buy my fenugreek and olive oil because his prices per gallon are very reasonable, and he actually stocks fenugreek unlike every single other store I've been to in the area. And if I need MSG I go to the asian market because I can buy it for $2.00/lb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Libraries are also a good way to tour a city. Get a transit card from a grocery store or a convenient store (also a lotto ticket because you never know).

Start with the main branch, then on to the various neighborhood branches. It's important to pick a section you are interested in beforehand. Fiction might be too overwhelming, so I'd go for the math or computer technology sections.

Once you've done this in multiple cities you can compare the sizes of those sections between different cities and how current the books are, i.e, for tech books, do they have books on the latest trend in programming languages.

Go to coffee shops and bakeries in between. I can usually squeeze in the main branch and one or two neighborhood branches in a day. Research the city to figure out which neighborhood libraries to go.

<comment><USER15> Cemeteries to

<comment><USER16> Record and book stores as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When people go to China for the first time I always recommend that they go walk through a Walmart there precisely for the reason that it is a friendly and familiar place, but also highlights just how different the food culture is in that country vs. at home. I'm pretty sure it was the only piece of tourism advise my Chinese colleague gave me when I went for the first time, and I've passed it on ever since.

<comment><USER18> Yup, bags of live frogs are not what you'd typically expect in a Walmart !

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I land in a new city, I spend the first day with no plan, just wandering about. It's surprising how much of a feel you can get for the texture of daily life in a city by doing this.

From my perspective, food and all the rituals and customs around it are some of the richest parts of culture, so I also like to go to grocery stores like this article covers. Another half-day is dedicated to a food tour, which is a fantastic way to learn about a new culture. In my experience, often the tour guides have lived in that culture for many years but they're not originally from there, so they can do cross-cultural translation for you, pointing out things you might not expect. And the best tours also include walking around the city and seeing cultural highlights.

</comment><comment><USER20> Shopping for food in grocery stores was one of the highlights of touring Switzerland in a rented motorhome (for the record Migros > Coop > Aldi IMO).

<comment><USER21> Swiss here. Globus > Manor > Coop > Migros. Aldi and Lidl are in Switzerland too but they are German and Migros > Aldi > Lidl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I recall a work trip to a conference in Anaheim (California, US, right outside of LA but still in the metro area). It was my first real work trip and I was disappointed because I wasn't seeing very much of Anaheim outside of the more tourist-y stuff, as the area around the conference center/hotel was one giant tourist trap. So, I ended up at the local Target at around 9am, and I'm really glad I did, because I felt like I was seeing a more real part of the city than the rest of the time combined.

<comment><USER23> Or take public transit around town.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When I visit a foreign country I always make sure I go to a junkyard (preferably a self service one) and buy something. You tend to have very "authentic" interactions with the locals in that kind of setting. It makes for great stories that simultaneously allow you to brag to your coworkers about how "authentic" (or whatever) your tourism experience was while also making them uncomfortable. 10/10, highly recommend.

<comment><USER25> Interesting idea!

I wandered around a thrift store in Bern once and found some weird secondhand stuff -- mannequins apparently for sale, fur stoles, mattresses, chandeliers, clocks galore, oil paintings, dress shoes, model trains, china, flasks, buttons, yarn -- all piled high, priced about 50% of what you might pay in a retail store (which is still very expensive), and sold in what looked like a very large single-family house in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood that had been somehow emptied out and turned into three rambling stories of loosely scattered miscellany.

Reviewing the map now, apparently just down the street at 24 Pappelweg there was an even bigger, more commercialized thrift-store operation, a Barner Brocki Plus, which might have had what I was actually looking for (a men's coat). Oops.

At least I got to read the local news and find out that, yes, their version of the American thrift store is a bit different and a bit pricier (e.g. [https://www.derbund.ch/bern/stadt/brockenhaeuser-sind- zwar-s...](https://www.derbund.ch/bern/stadt/brockenhaeuser-sind-zwar- stubenrein-dafuer-aber-teurer/story/22526852) ), which was an interesting way to learn a new culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would say farmers market even more so than a grocery store, though I usually do both.

Ironically I also love going to foreign McDonalds. Always fun to see what local items they have.

<comment><USER27> > foreign McDonalds. Always fun to see what local items they have.

That's a good point. It's funny for Americans to see beer there, in, say, Europe.

<comment><USER28> It's also weird to see lots of "vices" (beer, cigarettes, condoms, etc) in vending machines on the street. Like, when I was in Italy I saw kids buying beer and cigarettes and no one seemed to care!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Look around the supermarket too.

In France, a bakery can thrive next to a supermarket because enough people mistrust the supermarket's quality.

In N. America, a supermarket opening is a death sentence for nearby food vendors.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you are interested in more genuine experiences in the countries you visit I recommend learning at least 100 words in the local language. It's a pretty low bar, but it will take you a long way! Some of my most memorable holiday moments have been over some fumbled german or trying to build a sentence out of my very limited Japanese vocab.

</comment><comment><USER31> To answer the mystery from the first paragraph the author leaves hanging, the avocado in question was probably a B-cultivar, either Florida avocado, Fuerte avocado, or Monroe avocado.

</comment><comment><USER32> As a kid the differences between Canadian and American grocery stores was amazing. Especially chocolate bars.

Not so different anymore, aside from the prevalence of corn based sweeteners.

<comment><USER14> You still can't get Mr. Big in American grocery stores.

<comment><USER33> Or Kinder Surprise eggs [0]. No problems going to Walmart to pick up a firearm though...

[0] [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and- drink/feat...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and- drink/features/why-are-kinder-surprise-eggs-illegal-in-the-usa-10055273.html)

<comment><USER34> My local grocery store (New York City) has lots of kinder eggs always. So do some local corner stores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm glad I'm not alone in this! you can tell so much from a grocery store, and it's something I always do. People commented that It's odd, but nothing is better than local selection and too many people really value "experience" over price.

I don't care if you can get the same item from the company in it's fancy downtown store, or a few blocks away at the grocery store. It don't really matter and becomes a tourist trap.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sadly, this doesn't apply to America. Our grocery stores are very much homogenized, and in many parts of the country the only grocery store will be Walmart. Urban areas will have higher end chains that stock a wider variety and some foreign and independent stores with unique selections, but once you get past the cities and into rural America, your options for groceries are about the same from town to town.

<comment><USER37> I've been making it a point to visit grocery stores in every country I visit for the last 10 years. I tend to agree with you that grocery stores tend become homogenized within a country (and not just in the US), but there's always a lot of variation between countries.

You'll probably find this strange, but as a foreigner, I was really excited to see Walmart for the first time, and I found it just as interesting as visiting grocery stores in other countries.

There are things there that just seem comically American - like there's a McDonald's inside a supermarket! And there's a section where you can pick up guns and ammo while you're buying milk and eggs!

The chocolates section contains the same products as every other store across North America, but I'd never seen any of these while growing up in Australia, so we picked up a lot of these. Even basic things like bread taste different from back home.

Other stores are interesting in different ways. The size and scale of Costco is insane. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's carry different brands of everything, so it feels very different shopping there.

I'm really looking forward to my next visit to the States, and picking up the bacon flavored popcorn from Trader Joe's. I've never seen this anywhere else in the world, and it's as awesome as it sounds :)

<comment><USER29> > And there's a section where you can pick up guns and ammo while you're > buying milk and eggs!

Please please, this is impossible in America. The guns aren't in the fridge!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It seemed like when I was in Italy I was the only American who knew not to look for eggs in the refrigerator.

But that didn't help me when a cashier got impatient with me for not having weighed my produce in advance. Who knew?

<comment><USER39> In Colombia I found it (very!) strange that meat was not displayed in a refrigerator.

I've never seen eggs being sold from refrigerators though.

<comment><USER38> In the U.S. eggs are washed and refrigerated. You find them at the back of the grocery near the dairy. (Unless you get them at s farmers market or roadside stand.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When I do this, I inevitably have to explain each decision to my hosts:

> "Why did you buy this cheese?"

It was obviously a pricing error, there's no way a hunk of real cheese only costs 2 EUR

</comment><comment><USER40> Foreign grocery stores are definitely a under appreciated tourist spot. Just see Japan for example, it blows me away with lots of wtf moments

</comment><comment><USER41> I can imagine this is great for people who don't have deadly food allergies. For me, navigating foreign grocery stores has become so filled with anxiety, doubly so in a country where you don't know the language.

</comment><comment><USER42> Whenever I'm in a new country or region, I always make a point to go to the grocery store and the McDonalds. Both tend to have unique items that you can't find anywhere else.

<comment><USER43> Vegetarian McDonald's in India was certainly different but it was also kinda gross.

<comment><USER44> I recently tried a KFC in Bangalore. Deep-fried chickpea fritters in spicy biryani rice is a pretty long way from what the Colonel started out with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Was surprised in France to find out Kronenbourge comes in a plain formula. I thought 1664 was all it ever came in.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've been saying that for years!

Every single new country I visit, the first thing I check is the local supermarket.</comment>


Show HN: Bashcuts – command reveals Bash keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/busterc/bashcuts <comment> vhost- I did _not_ know about this one: Ctrl + xx

And here I am thinking I knew everything about navigating the shell.</comment>


Train ML Models on Free Cloud GPUs - <AUTHOR> https://blog.paperspace.com/free-cloud-gpu <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone!

This is my first time posting on Hacker News, and I'm happy to be here. I recently joined as the head of developer advocacy at Paperspace, where we're building tools to support the machine learning community.

Who am I? I'm coming from the bio/health IT space— I gloriously quit my PhD program a few years back and have since been working with companies applying ML to develop decision support platforms for the clinic and pharma R&D.

Now that I'm part of the Paperspace team, I'm looking forward to learning more about deep learning model development and deployment, especially as it relates to production-ready models.

All that said, our primary focus has been on building tools for and supporting ML engineers, with our first stab at that being Paperspace Gradient.

Earlier today we opened up a waitlist for our Free GPU Plan, which lets you develop deep learning models with Jupyter Notebooks on dedicated cloud GPU instances— at absolutely no cost!

We'll be making the free plan available for everyone later this summer— in the meantime, we'd like to invite you to sign up for the waitlist:

[https://gradient.paperspace.com/free- gpu?utm_source=fastai&u...](https://gradient.paperspace.com/free- gpu?utm_source=fastai&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=free-gpu-notebook- waitlist-launch)

Thanks for your time, and have a great day!</comment>


With RAISE Act, Congress Paves Way for Private Secondary Markets - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/20/with-raise-act-congress-paves-way-for-private-secondary-markets/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> Has anyone read up enough on this to understand how this compares to the IPO process before Sarbanes-Oxley [1] etc.? The article says that the purchaser must be an accredited investor. Additionally, it says that the "RAISE Act also specifies disclosure requirements for these transactions."

I wonder how close these disclosure requirements are to the disclosure requirements of 15 years ago. Are we basically seeing Sarbanes-Oxley being reverted here?

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sooooo... Another insider trading channel for banks? Or the banks have total control over the market?

Nothing like this gets passed without the plutobanks being in total control of the profits.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm probably not educated enough to say something like this, but "Included within the FAST Act is a section, the Reforming Access for Investments in Startup Enterprises ("RAISE") Act" is something I hate about how laws get passed.

It feels so strange that Acts can involve completely unrelated regulations.</comment>


Your App Needs To Sync - <AUTHOR> http://informalprotocol.com/2012/11/your-app-needs-to-sync/

<comment><USER2> I think there is a startup in this. A simple API on top of S3 accepting and pushing updates. Useful feature, easy integration, pain to implement well on hour own.

<comment><USER3> There are startups for that, i.e. Parse which he mentions in the post. And of course iCloud.

<comment><USER4> I think benjaminwootton was talking about solving the sync/merge problem..? There are still plenty of opportunities in that space, no?

It's easy to say 'your app needs sync', and I agree it _should_ be part of every app, but depending on what data you're dealing with, this isn't _easy_ to do.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: An experimental code search engine - <AUTHOR> https://codegrep.com <comment><USER2> The thing about search is that it is only useful if it lets you find obscure results. Anyone can find common results; they clog every search engine and suffocate functionality.

For example, if I enter "UDP broadcast" into your search, I find all the usual java and cpp results that I can find anywhere. Ho hum. If I wanted those, I could go use Google or probably just trip over them in my living room.

But I want results in Swift because it is relatively new and obscure. There are only 4 Swift projects on Github that match the term "UDP broadcast" out of 319 total results. I have to do an advanced search on the native Github engine to find them.

I think you might want to start by making your search useful for finding the weird obscure things that people really have to hunt for. Then expand it to everything else while finding a way of not drowning the oddball stuff with the common clay (of the New West).

This is where Google, for example, has gone wrong lately. I almost can't use it for anything meaningful because any meaningful search (example 'MacOS gps") brings back "5 Amazing GPS apps for Mac that you can't live without!!" and many other links with no actual content.

If you want to make a useful search, you have to return the stuff that is hard to find instead of the easy and useless stuff.

<comment><USER3> This would be great, especially if it made it easy to find specific examples of how to do certain things. When I am trying to figure out how to do something I usually find several examples that are decently close of the core idea, then look at the documentation. It helps understand the documentation better, so if I could search for a list of examples, it would be invaluable.

Somewhat related, I put in "std::string" under cpp and it didn't return anything, but "string" returned plenty of instances that included "std::string". Being able to use namespaces would help in finding obscure functions with a name that is common, but has a specific module name to make it unique.

Any and all improvements in context awareness would be nice too, but probably more difficult than they would be worth for any short term implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be great to have a few pre-selected example queries immediately clickable, to see some examples. That would help showcase why this is cool and what you can do with it. And maybe why it's better than other search tools (i.e. built-in github one).

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, will add.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is fun. Why have you restricted the search to just Identifiers, Variables and Functions? Does this mean that text found in a comment block would not be a match?

I'm already devising how you could incorporate a bag of words algorithm plus an embedding to segment/find similar items.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> Why have you restricted the search to just Identifiers, Variables and Functions? Does this mean that text found in a comment block would not be a match?

Yes, by default, it matches any but if you specify a filter, you can restrict on available language features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If this looks cool you might also be into Google Code Search [https://github.com/google/codesearch](https://github.com/google/codesearch)

</comment><comment><USER7> Feature request/idea: Would be nice to be able to 'pipe' the results of one search into another.

Imagine a series of search boxes, with the results of the first fed into the second, and so on. Like:

> codegrep --class "Logger" | codegrep --field "error"

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks good. I wanted to do something similar for Golang when I started learning it.

Like for a package say `sync` I want to see the most common methods first and their documentation.

I find the current godocs lacks in giving welcoming vibes and treat every aspect of a package equally where some method types are more important/useful than others.

</comment><comment><USER9> First search revealed some funny test code :) [https://github.com/ornicar/lila/blob/master/modules/shutup/s...](https://github.com/ornicar/lila/blob/master/modules/shutup/src/test/AnalyserTest.scala)

<comment><USER10> Kind of curious what the story behind the chess-bot stuff is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very nice. I run searchcode.com which I have been neglecting recently. That said I do like to see other code search engines and play around with them. Seems you have disabled the default regex search offered by elastic? I didn't look into the code much but a search of /.*/ yielded no results?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, currently it is simple term search, regex searches aren't very stable with respect to performance. Something to think about it for next iteration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would be useful if it grouped repositories or had a method of collapsing results. My search returned the same repo for each result. Not sure if it was a function of there only being one repository using my term (doubt it, I used "GCD") or what.

</comment><comment><USER13> This has a lot of potential. I would love to be able to type quicksort and automatically see a good implementation of it. What is shown right now is not good enough, but the idea is there. Great job! I also tried ray tracing, and timsort, but got no results.

</comment><comment><USER14> Amazing. Search is super fast.

How do you think about Elm? I want to do more work with it too, play with it on some toy projects and love it so far.

</comment><comment><USER15> It seems to highlight matches both within strings and as normal identifiers (e.g. to_csv finds matches within strings)

</comment><comment><USER16> What's the backend like ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Play framework + Elasticsearch

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do you have a plan to add Pascal/Delphi language support?

<comment><AUTHOR> Adding new languages is fairly easy as long I can write a little helper program to tokenize. I will take a look.

<comment><USER18> Take a look at tree-sitter, it's a parser written for the Atom editor, it supports 20+ languages, and is _super fast_ , as it was written to parse in under 1/60th of a second (parse on keypress, should be done before the screen refreshes)

[https://github.com/tree-sitter](https://github.com/tree-sitter)

It has bindings for node, ruby, rust and haskell

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What is experimental?

<comment><AUTHOR> Coverage, only top few thousand open-source repos from github are being indexed as of now. Similarly, only few languages + features are extracted. Probably I should have said alpha :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How this is different than Github's search?

<comment><AUTHOR> A bit more structured, at least when I last hacked on it. The key idea is to be able to search via language features, for example by function implementation (vs usage). Lets say you saw a function name in kernel crash, like [https://www.codegrep.com/search?query=ext4_extent_block_csum...](https://www.codegrep.com/search?query=ext4_extent_block_csum_verify&language=c&identifier=function)

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the insight. You are correct - github is not supporting this type of search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sweet. Now I can find committed AWS super fast.

</comment><comment><USER22> Useful. Please keep going!

<comment><USER23> Not sure why somone downvoted, here is it back! :)

The search is fast and ui is simple, and works on mobile -- great work, sp1982!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> No C#, useless for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, will try to add in near future.</comment></comment>


Monopoly's Inventor: The Progressive Who Didn't Pass 'Go' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/business/behind-monopoly-an-inventor-who-didnt-pass-go.html <comment><USER2> _> "The seeds of the Monopoly game were planted when James Magie shared with his daughter a copy of Henry George's best-selling book, "Progress and Poverty," written in 1879. As an anti-monopolist, James Magie drew from the theories of George, a charismatic politician and economist who believed that individuals should own 100 percent of what they made or created, but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone. _

A PDF of this book is available at [http://progressandpoverty.org/](http://progressandpoverty.org/)

<comment><USER3> > but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to > everyone.

In effect, this means state ownership, which we've later learned to be very dangerous when taken to that level.

Interesting little snippet:

> Although both advocated worker's rights, Henry George and Karl Marx were > antagonists. Marx saw the Single Tax platform as a step backwards from the > transition to communism.[52] On his part, Henry George predicted that if > Marx's ideas were tried, the likely result would be a dictatorship.[53]

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

<comment><USER4> >In effect, this means state ownership, which we've later learned to be very dangerous when taken to that level.

I dunno. Sounds like a good idea to me. The government owns all the land and rents out 10 year leases to the highest bidder in the case of contention. Currently all that rent-seeking money goes to private individuals who do diddly-squat for the public good. Should society reward sitting on land rights? No, society should award work.

<comment><USER5>
      The government owns all the land and rents out 10 year
      leases to the highest bidder in the case of contention.

So car company A leases some land for $x builds a factory at a cost of $5x. Good news, jobs for the local economy and whatnot. The factory can't be moved, and they want to operate it for 30 years.

After 10 years the lease comes up for renewal. Car company A wants to renew the lease for another $x. But car company B wants to fuck with their competitors, so they put in a bid for $3x. They know they won't win so they won't have to pay (car company A don't want to lose their $5x factory so they'll have to outbid) - they just want to raise their competitors' expenses.

That happens a few times and all of a sudden nobody wants to build factories any more.

Then you realise the same thing applies to your asshole neighbour's house...

<comment><USER2> How about a Dutch auction?

<comment><USER5> It still doesn't solve the root problem that it's possible to increase land's value and we want to encourage people to do it.

Land with a house on it is worth more than land without a house on it. Land that's been cleaned up is worth more than land that was contaminated in the past.

If, a few years after you increase the land's value, all that extra value goes to the state, why should anyone increase land's value?

<comment><USER4> How about the difference in rent from one term to the next is paid to the previous tenant? The goal, after all, is not to funnel money to the government, but to not award property rights squatting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One sad thing throughout history is that creators, inventors and really anyone not in the upperclass, got stepped on repeatedly for their creations and robbed of their success and contribution. Many times the copycat is the one that gets all the praise.

This bit was interesting:

 _She created two sets of rules for her game: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior.

And yet it was the monopolist version of the game that caught on_

Another general sad thing, sometimes the bad version you send to the client/customer is the one they like, apparently also baked into history.

<comment><USER7> Apperently the anti-monopolist version was just not as much fun. This is a board GAME not a morality teaching box, at least for most people who play it.

So I dont see how can compare it to products released to costumers.

I mean, how many games do you, or anybody play where everybody wins or loses the same. I can't think of many video or boardgames where this is the premis. So people just dont seam to care about it.

<comment><USER8> Co-op modes are exceedingly common in multi-player video games?

Battlestar Galactica, Pandemic, and Shadows over Camelot are popular co-op board games. Pandemic particularly has obtained a good amount of main stream appeal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A popular feeling is that inventors deserve most of the rewards from their inventions. This is actually quite strange. Inventing is easy - you just find an idea, sit down in your spare time and work out the details for fun, and that's it. But to do business is different - you usually have to spend money before getting any reward and might lose everything you spent. People don't like that. It can also be boring, so they don't do it much. It makes more sense for the lion's share to go to the person doing the work that most people don't want to do. They're the scarce resource, not inventors.

I'm sure most people here have put a lot of work into designing/inventing something or other, but wouldn't feel cheated if they found someone else had seen their idea floating around the internet, rebuilt it independently to fit a paying market, done the hard work marketing it, and finally made money off it. Those are the hard bits!

<comment><USER10> An inventor might not get the lion's share of the profit made from their invention, however they should at least receive recognition for their contribution.

The linked article strongly implies Elizabeth Magie Philips invented the source material for what later became Monopoly. That we've been playing a cut down version of her game is hardly important, recognition is the least we can offer inventors. It's clear that Parker Brothers did what they could to cut her out of the history of the game, I hope that we don't condone that behaviour.

I'm interested to try The Landlord's Game, I wonder what the situation with the patents are now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you found this article interesting check out the Born Yesterday episode [1] about the history of Monopoly, it's far more interesting that it has rights to be.

[1][http://bornyesterdaypodcast.com/#episode17](http://bornyesterdaypodcast.com/#episode17)

<comment><USER12> The part about George's book reminds me of Sim City too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In classical economics (which I believe in [0]), land is a commodity like any other. There is literally no fundamental difference between land and anything else. Georgists might say that there is no substitute for land, but that is not an important issue unless one person has a monopoly on _all_ land, which is not the case and never will be. So land tax is just a very strange kind of wealth tax. The only effect of land tax would be that the price of properties would go down to account for the future taxes paid on those properties. After that, the taxes would be "priced in" and the tax wouldn't even operate as a wealth tax.

I think land tax is only appealing to people who don't understand income tax (and proper wealth taxes). They have been tricked (by obfuscation from both the left and right) into believing that income and wealth taxes are unable to achieve the goal of meaningful redistribution of wealth.

[0] Yes there are frictions, but not relevant to this discussion.

</comment><comment><USER14> For those interested in the modern-day inheritor to the Georgist/Distributist movement Magie belonged to, there's no better introductory text than John Medaille's "Towards A Truly Free Market":

[http://www.amazon.com/Toward-Truly-Free-Market- Distributist/...](http://www.amazon.com/Toward-Truly-Free-Market- Distributist/dp/161017027X)

There's a particularly salient chapter on Land.

(Medaille positions Distributism as orthogonal to both Capitalism and Socialism.)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd love to have a version of Magie's game .. anyone know where there are better pictures of it that can be used to design one? I'm not sure where the trademark/copyright lays these days, but if its in the public domain - why not recreate the original as an app or something? Its very intriguing ..

</comment><comment><USER16> In the future, will the income received when passing Go be considered a curious parallel with the Basic Income concept?

</comment><comment><USER17> See also: [http://landlordsgame.info](http://landlordsgame.info)</comment>


Show HN: Simulate long-exposure photography with video - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/hipshot/

<comment><USER2> You can also do the same with multiple stills and retain full resolution, which may be easier to work into a regular photo workflow. Take a dozen shots at ISO 9000000 and pipe into enblend -> crystal clear result.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. I'll add support for still images.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I originally wrote this for a computer vision application (averaging frames attenuates low-light noise) but I'm curious what other use cases people come up with. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very clever idea. Can't wait to try this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Let me know if you have any feature requests.

<comment><USER4> How about making it output video, with a rolling average over the previous N frames. Then you can experiment with having the brightness of a pixel impact how many frames are affected. For example, make brighter pixels have a longer impact to get light streaks, or have darker pixels last longer for a kind of hdr effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool, now do image stabilization so it works with handheld video.

</comment><comment><USER6> And what's the point of that? Videos are generally low resolution, compared to photos. We're talking order of magnitude difference - 2 megapixels vs 36 megapixels.</comment>