Running an Akka cluster in an EC2 Autoscaling Group - <AUTHOR> http://chrisloy.net/2014/05/11/akka-cluster-ec2-autoscaling.html

<comment><USER2> Excellent post. We made the mistake of trying to use Chef to deal with seed node discovery in our Akka cluster and that was a terrible idea. Really wish we'd gone with the AWS SDK instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The SDK has some "quirks" (and isn't especially Scala-friendly) but I reckon it's ultimately pretty powerful. My main gripe is the lack of real- world examples in the docs - hence my desire to write this up.

<comment><USER3> Hi, I didn't see an obvious way to reach you on the blog bit just FYI, it looks weird on iPhone Safari

Edit [http://imgur.com/oX0CzuZ](http://imgur.com/oX0CzuZ) [http://imgur.com/WsqEVxA](http://imgur.com/WsqEVxA)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for the feedback! Yeah I'm aware the look on Chrome on my Android is pretty terrible, which is on my list to get sorted. Looks like it's even worse on iOS! At the moment its basically using the default site template from Jekyll which is apparently very much _not_ mobile first!

Also re: contact, there's a link to my Twitter account but not much more. Cheers for letting me know anyway!

Edit: Grokked media queries; hopefully a little nicer on mobile now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excellent post! How do you ensure that you don't split the cluster - do you have to configure the ASG to add the 2nd node only when the first one is already up? If so, how exactly do you do that?

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice post. Would love to more about your application of Akka Cluster -- it's far and away the most interesting part of Akka to me, and something we have plans to build some very interesting systems on top of.

<comment><AUTHOR> I work for a large organisation and am not really in a position to go into details about what we'd be using it for at the moment, sorry.

Suffice it to say that we're pretty early on in the project and so far we're using Akka Cluster for sharing transient state between nodes, without the need for any kind of persistence store being used. My post was in response to the pain I had in getting over the initial hurdle of getting a prototype running.

<comment><USER6> Does Akka cluster do load balancing between nodes yet?</comment></comment></comment>


Adobe Creative Cloud Survey - <AUTHOR> https://adobeformscentral.com/?f=RWEOXopZmiTktEl0uH6x9g

<comment><USER2> If any of you startups are looking for an opportunity to make a billion come up with a Creative Suite killer that isn't cloud based. Many of us creatives really hate Adobe at this point and are looking for alternatives. Most designers want to own their tools rather than having to rent them...

PS The arrogance of this "survey" really shows you everything that is wrong with Adobe. They don't give a damn about their customers, they just want your credit card.

<comment><USER3> While I agree with the general sentiment, no one has been able to build viable alternatives. The ones which have come close are GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. Maybe contribute code to these projects to make them better? If I recall correctly, GIMP has a shortage of developers.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What can I reasonably expect to make at a FAANG? - <AUTHOR> Say I am a mid to senior developer. I've heard people making ridiculous amounts of money. Where do I get the cajones to ask for a price that high? <comment><USER2> cojones* "cajones" means "drawers"

Entirely depends on your field and location. You could make 80k in google france or 200k+ in SV for the same position.</comment>


Debounce in Bash - <AUTHOR> http://vaclavkosar.com/2018/09/23/Debounce-In-Bash-To-Fix-Lenovo-Touchpad-Lost-Sync.html <comment><USER2> When measuring elapsed times, instead of executing date(1) to get the current time, use $SECONDS:

           SECONDS
                  Each time this parameter is referenced, the
                  number of seconds since shell invocation
                  is returned.  If  a  value  is  assigned
                  to  SECONDS,  the  value returned  upon
                  subsequent references is the number of
                  seconds since the assignment plus the
                  value assigned.  If SECONDS is unset, it
                  loses its special properties, even if it is
                  subsequently reset.

Like so:

      throttle() {
        local -i limit
        ((limit = SECONDS + $1))
        while read line; do
          if ((limit < SECONDS)); then
            ((limit = SECONDS + $1))
            echo "$line"
          fi
        done
      }

Try it like so:

      $ yes | throttle 2

Of course, that's a bad example in that yes(1) will go as fast as you let it and it always outputs the same thing. In the case of yes(1) the better thing to do would be to sleep between reads, but yes(1) is a special case.

<comment><USER3> It's worth noting that OP's example works in any Bourne-compatible shell. I don't think `date +%s` is costly enough to warrant losing the portability.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be worried about the performance cost of using `date +%s` personally, I'd be concerned about what happens when the user or an automated process changes the system time.

For example, what will happen in the debounce function if the user sets the system time backwards by a week after a limit has been set?

<comment><USER3> Good point, didn't think of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The term debouncing is also used in an analogous manner for electromechanical switches and is probably the origin of the term. These switches literally 'bounce' off the contact during the first few milliseconds after the circuit is closed, rapidly opening and closing the circuit. Debouncing attempts to filter out these rapid, unwanted changes by e.g. adding a capacitor in parallel.

</comment><comment><USER6> >For example it exists both in React and JavaScript

There is a funny hot take in there somewhere...

<comment><USER7> Oh no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems more like a throttle rather than a debounce:

[https://css-tricks.com/debouncing-throttling-explained-examp...](https://css- tricks.com/debouncing-throttling-explained-examples/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Good script.

I have this touchpoint problem too. Since I hate those red eraser nubs anyways, I actually disable them entirely at the xinput level. This breaks the physical right mouse button. (because Linux, ofc) but fortunately the touchpad driver replaces it.

Better overall experience without any chance of pausing as the driver bounces back.</comment>


How do I get more Karma? - <AUTHOR> ... and can I buy coffee with it? (what is it for?) <comment><USER2> High karma lets you downvote/flag:

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, thanks for the link. Think I got this now. Front page here I come ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are three ways to do it

1) post and patiently wait for your points to rise. You may skew or bend your opinions to maximize gains or post honestly from the heart/mind

2) gather a group of freinds and upvote eachothers posts. I find there are many lurkers here that seem to attempt to control narrative by doenvoting without posting responses.

3) create a few bot accounts abd write a script that upvotes withthese accounts on every post. This is probably the most reliable way and I would guess how crap/duplicate articles consistently reach the front page.

<comment><USER4> > _gather a group of freinds and upvote eachothers posts._

It's not very unusual, but the site has many spam, shills, bots and voting ring detectors. If the system or a mod detect this behavior the votes will not be counted and in some cases the accounts will be banned.

It's better to stick to the old method of posting interesting stories and comments, and hope that the other users will find them interesting too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Post good stories and write good comments.</comment>


Predicteria 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://www.joyent.com/blog/predicteria-2015

<comment><USER2> I was at a classmate of yours at Brown, although a few years younger. I like to play the prediction game too! Maybe it comes from all those hours in the Sun Lab.

I like most of your predictions, but I think you're at least half-wrong on the cryptocurrency side; the blockchain is real innovation. Do you guys _know_ at Joyent that your data hasn't been modified, deleted, lost or added to and when? I bet you don't. The amount of data risk any modern company takes on is almost criminal, just like you refer to in your security predictions. The blockchain technologies let you solve that problem, among many others.

I'm not predicting a brilliant year for Bitcoin; I think there's a lot of building to be done on the currency side especially, but I just don't see the case for sniping at it too much, especially while transaction rates stay well in excess of $10mmUSD / day in the middle of falling prices. I'm going to predict some notable traction in smaller non-libertarian markets for Bitcoin by the end of 2015 in return. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't dispute that there is real innovation with the blockchain -- just that the level of innovation cannot alone justify the value of or interest in cryptocurrency. To answer your question: linked timestamping[1][2] does, in fact, solve this problem -- and solved this problem long before the blockchain. Again, not disputing that the blockchain doesn't allow one to prove tamper-proof transaction systems or that this isn't an important problem -- just that it's not the first technology to do it, isn't the only way to do it, and doesn't alone pay the freight for the level of interest in cryptocurrency.

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

[2] [http://dspace.utlib.ee/dspace/bitstream/handle/10062/15188/T...](http://dspace.utlib.ee/dspace/bitstream/handle/10062/15188/Truu_Ahto.pdf?sequence=1)

<comment><USER3> It seems odd that you would claim that a system requiring a centralized "time stamping authority" is equivalent in functionality to a decentralized mechanism like a blockchain.

As for saying that "cryptocurrencies are a laughingstock"... can you quantify that claim in concrete terms using a date and a price range prediction for that date?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is very amusing to see him predict that internet of things will "broaden" while wearables will "fizzle". He even links to an example of how silly an idea this is: [http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/07/intel-smart-baby- onesie/](http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/07/intel-smart-baby-onesie/)

A watch that isn't a great computer, and doesn't work well as a watch, isn't going to be a great product. However there are so many other kinds of wearables that we can do well with modern technology.

One kind of wearable technology that we have now and are going to see a lot more of this year is the body camera.

<comment><AUTHOR> I probably wasn't sufficiently explicit, but that was actually my point: that IoT would divorce itself from wearable computing -- with the latter being a fizzling fad but the former being a profound change in nearly every industrial activity (in my opinion). For example, GE has a bunch of interesting things going on in this space[1] -- stuff that I think is much more real and much more profound than wearable computing (at least in 2015).

[1] [http://www.fastcompany.com/3031272/can-jeff-immelt-really- ma...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3031272/can-jeff-immelt-really-make-the- world-1-better#2)

<comment><USER4> I did not argue that the IoT won't expand dramatically, or even that it is not the more important of the two technologies. However my point is that wearable computing can't possibly divorce itself from from the IoT. Any wearable object with the ability to collect and upload data falls into both categories. By that token, if wearable computing is not going to break away as its own thing, it will just become a small part of the internet of things.

Though I do suppose that the trend of pretending we can magically fit a smartphone into a watch or a pair of glasses is going to fizzle. However that was never really more that fantasy(I mean Google X is about taking technology they expect to have 10 years in the future and trying to build it now). In the meantime the more modest wearable computing devices we can actually build(like smart onesies and smart insulin pumps) have been continuing their steadily accelerating progress along with the rest of the IoT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ripple is going gangbusters. I think it will be bigger in 2015: [https://ripple.com/news/](https://ripple.com/news/)

<comment><USER3> I like how the quote they pulled from the WSJ article at the top of your linked page is out of context to make it look like the federal reserve is specifically investigating ripple technology.

<comment><USER5> The sentence is pretty clear:

> Some Federal Reserve district banks are looking at how the technology might > streamline the Fed's interbank payments system...

Not sure what you are construing.

The Earthport deal is much bigger anyway because it is addressing an area for which there is no existing infrastructure, international payments.

<comment><USER3> There is no indication that "the technology" in the WSJ article is referring to Ripple, but to Bitcoin technology in general- Other readers can check the original source and draw their own conclusion, but it is pretty obvious when the entire paragraph is read (instead of the cherry-picked sentences)

<comment><USER5> There is no confusion if you read it as it is stated. They are referring to banks investigating Ripple, not Bitcoin. So no, the article is not confusing the two. Bitcoin technology (blockchain) is completely different from Ripple (consensus). The only thing they have in common is the "crypto" moniker. You can see an article with a Vice President of the St Loius Fed who is aware of the differences: [https://ripple.com/blog/5-questions-for-st-louis-fed- economi...](https://ripple.com/blog/5-questions-for-st-louis-fed-economist- david-andolfatto/)

<comment><USER3> Wow, I've done a few Google searches on the sourcing of articles on Mr Andolfatto that contain pro ripple statements, and I see curious things, a deep rabbit hole I'm not going to enter.

I should say in general though the Ripple did some very innovative things and deserves the success they've had so far, on technical merit alone.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Victory Passport is not Secure - <AUTHOR> http://victorypassportisnotsecure.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if they will fix it, or go after the folk who found this out.</comment>


Ask HN: How should I report my gender when applying for a job? - <AUTHOR> Sometimes a job application will request certain demographic information - race, gender, etc. In the gender field, I most often find that there are only 3 options: male, female, and decline to self-identify. There are almost never alternatives like "other" or the option to write-in. My question is, how should a transgender individual fill this in? Does it even matter? Is it better to use the gender I identify as or the sex I was born as? Is it better to just always select "decline to self-identify"? What about non-binary/gender-neutral individuals?<p>I am already selective in which companies I apply to, in that I won't apply to companies in states that lack protections against discrimination on the basis of gender identity. However, I'm not sure about whether I should be open to potential employers about my gender identity or whether I should try to hide it; it's hard enough to get an entry-level job. <comment><USER2> Given your reluctance to be open about your gender identity, what is your aversion to marking "Decline to self-identify"?

</comment><comment><USER3> Although I am a white heterosexual man, I have always refused to provide such information as gender (I have recently made a new passport without gender information). Your gender should not be of concern neither for the state and administration, nor for any organisation or company. By law in certain countries (in Europe) it is illegal to ask about things such as gender, marital status or age, and it should be illegal to ask for adding photos to your CV.

Even if they ask you to fill a form, just leave these fields blank.

</comment><comment><USER4> Any company I worked for, that info never got out of the job tracking system, and I dont remember even seeing it as a hiring manager, though maybe it was there. It was basically just a legal cover to have evidence we weren't being racist/sexist/etc. So I'd say do whatever you feel comfortable with, and I doubt it will have an effect.

</comment><comment><USER5> How would you expect or want colleagues to refer to you as? For example if a lead programmer asks another one of your colleagues "who's looking at this bug?" and that colleague points to you do they say "he is" or "she is" or something else?

</comment><comment><USER6> Leave it blank if you can. It shouldn't be required as it's really none of their business.

</comment><comment><USER7> Look at it from their point of view. If you identify as something other than what you were born as, what is to stop you from changing that from time to time? You may, at a later junction, feel more comfortable with your birth gender.

Thus the option "decline to self-identify" gives you everything you need to say.</comment>


The next Olympics should include Fortnite - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/06/27/why-the-next-olympics-should-include-fortnite <comment><USER2> Fortnite has _way_ too many problems to even be anywhere near considered ready for an esport presented in the Olympics.

Fortnite still has a large amount of luck involved. Even the most skilled players have to rely on luck to be able to get the high leveled items they need to succeed in the long game. While current competitions have tried to lessen this by having multiple rounds over and over in attempt at giving all players a fairer chance, the luck aspect is still there.

All other games with a heavily established esports base uses games with much lower levels of luck, and are centered around the balance of skill and strategy. CS:GO, League of Legends, Rocket League, Valorant, Super Smash Bros, etc. are all centered around the player or team's skill and/or strategy. Luck is either minimal or non existent.

The Olympics should be about skill, never about luck.

<comment><USER3> There is still a fair amount of luck in the Olympics. For example, in the winter Olympics, snow conditions are only somewhat in the control of the organisers and can have a huge impact on someone's performance. All you can do, as an athlete, is train in a variety of conditions to try to be ready

<comment><USER4> Sure, but snow differences aren't determined by programmers trying to make the game more interesting by ensuring different skiiers have different amounts of snow to work with. If e-skiing were to become an Olympic sport you'd expect everyone to start with the same amount of snow.

<comment><USER3> > If e-skiing were to become an Olympic sport you'd expect everyone to start > with the same amount of snow.

Since competitive skiing is based on athleticism in the face of uncertain conditions, that sounds dreadfully boring.

<comment><USER4> From a consume-on-TV perspective it's the athleticism which makes it compelling, not random misfortunes with the snow conditions.

Appreciate experienced skiiers might see more nuance to how skiiers approach subtle changes to the piste, but still doubt they'd find button clicking in the face of uncertain conditions equally compelling (or even more compelling than watching real skiiers on a suitably large raked and climate-controlled slope)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Olympic games should be activities that will remain largely the same for decades, or forever.

Fortnite, or any eSport game out today, will not be a thing 40 years from now, let alone 4. You can't have records when the game constantly changes.

<comment><USER6> > Olympic games should be activities that will remain largely the same

But why?

> You can't have records when the game constantly changes.

Many olypmic games have no records. There's no records in fencing, for example, as all matches are against an opponent not an absolute like a time or distance. Nobody considers this a problem. Why do you think it matters if there are records or not?

<comment><USER3> When the rules stay the same, it pushes people to improve their performance within the rules (or, sometimes, unfortunately, outside of the rules). When the rules are constantly changing, the focus shifts from the competitors to the game itself and the corporation promoting it.

<comment><USER7> The rules in sports change pretty frequently. Little changes to the rules have a massive impact on the way the game is played at a high-level. See fencing, or goal-line tech in football (soccer).

<comment><USER4> I'm the first to sneer at the merchandising elements of [association] football, but the rare substantive changes to the game aren't driven by sales cycles. Ensuring the game isn't significantly different at grassroots level has always been a sticking point for tech adoption in football, and this is a sport so contrary to the original amateur ethos of the modern Olympics that the top players earn millions every month, clubs have official tractor sponsors and manufacturer sponsors promise the official World Cup ball will curve differently from the last one.

Also, you don't have to use the IP of Epic Games Inc to play any variant of football, or even a stereotypical rich person sport like dressage, so performance improvements aren't contingent on enhancing a specific corporation's bottom line

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The Olympics doesn't currently include any competition fully controlled by a corporation. Why would you want to introduce this?

<comment><USER6> Most sports are controlled by corporations - for example fencing by the FIE, football by the FIFA, etc.

<comment><USER8> You literally can't play fortnite without a license from epic or epic's servers. You can play soccer with a ball and a field, no FIFA involved.

<comment><USER9> Except you can't in any serious organised form, like the olympics would be, or they'll come after you / the payers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The idea that an activity, rather than a substance, can be addictive is contentious among doctors" As a person who has been struggling with video game addiction, especially in order to combat the loneliness I have been experiencing during the pandemic, I would disagree. While it is unlikely one would get an addiction in terms of physical dependency, psychological addiction is a whole other question. That being said, one can also get addicted to exercise, so I guess its not a reason to keep it out of the Olympics!

<comment><USER11> This highlights something that's made me uncomfortable for a while. In discussions around addiction, suicide, and other mental health outcomes, the focus is almost always placed on stopping the undesirable outcome. They'll put timers that kick people off games, they'll put barriers and nets around bridges people commonly jump from, etc.

What they aren't doing is treating the root cause of the problem: loneliness, listlessness, depression. These are problems of our society and they seem to be getting worse over time. We need to change this. We need to build real communities where people belong. We need to build relationships. We're not doing that though. We're becoming more and more atomized.

<comment><USER12> You can hire a contractor to build a net, but you can't hire a contractor to make people have more friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Why the next economist article should include name of an author or at least pseudonym" So I can know who writes this bs.

<comment><USER14> John Doe, PR/Social Media, Epic Games?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> IMHO, Olympic sports should never have their playerbase entirely beholden to one corporation who makes all the "equipment" (in the case of a e-sport, the game itself.)

An Olympic e-sport should probably have _at least_ a FOSS reference implementation, if not multiple competing implementations all inter operating on the same network.

It is also very important (much moreso than for conventional sports) for e-sports rules to be driven by a rules body external to the league owners—hopefully one with membership open to any interested organization.

</comment><comment><USER16> Please, any game except Fortnite or any of the DoTA variants. The last thing the Olympics needs is to be infiltrated by a half million 12 years older throwing hard Rs.

</comment><comment><USER17> Another Olympic discipline could be programming...

</comment><comment><USER18> Obviously it would be a win for the Olympics to include Fortnite. After all, Fortnite makes more money than the Olympics and is more popular than almost all Olympic sports. It would provide inroads to the more valuable younger audiences that the Olympics are starting to lose. But why would Fortnite want to give up control of its product to the Olympics?

<comment><USER4> If Fortnite was really the entity holding the spectator sport aces here, broadcasters would already be paying them handsomely for broadcast rights to their competitions rather than Fortnite streaming being the preserve of Twitch amateurs collectively reaching as many people per _quarter_ as an off-peak hour of the Olympics[1]. It's not like Epic aren't commercially savvy, after all.

The reality is that there's little about a computer game that's less than an Olympiad old to appeal to the IOC and plenty of major issues with them granting Epic their patronage, and both entities will do fine without each other.

[1]obviously many of the minor Olympic sports also aren't great as standalone TV and wouldn't get the viewers without the big umbrella event, but that's kind of the point

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> League of Legends was introduced in the last Asian games, I think when they tried to get it included in the Olympics it was rejected on the basis of promotion of violence. So we'll see how it goes this time

</comment><comment><USER20> I've always wanted Japanese style dodge ball (with inner and outer courts) to be an Olympic sport.

</comment><comment><USER21> What about Beer Pong and Dodgeball?

<comment><USER4> Both of these are closer to the original Olympic ethos than Fortnite.

As is [for better and for worse perceptions of the original Olympic ethos] naked Twister.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm on board if quake 3 will be in the olympics, and especially defrag.

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe 1000 years after it includes chess.</comment>


Finite Element Method - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_element_method <comment><USER2> At one point I was doing a PhD in programming a custom FEM program written in Java. I ended up not completing that program, but have been using FEM for many years to design things.

One of the ways I play around with programming languages is try to make a small Finite Element solver. I think so far I've made them in Matlab, Python, JavaScript, and Rust. Maybe I made one in C or C++ as well.

Whenever I do, I realize that a lot of the barrier is getting good Matrix solving tools in that language. Rust was a bit difficult because I was forced to choose between 1 or 2 main linear algebra codes. However, these codes are not optimized and will not be as fast as the Fortran based codes that a lot of the Python libraries now reference (LAPACK and BLAS if I rembember correctly).

It comes down to how you store the information in the Matrix. Physical problems solvable by FEM are symmetric and linearly independent, or some tricks are done to make them so. They also end up being quite Sparse. Those Sparse solvers from LAPACK and BLAS, as well as all of the past optimizations that are probably made for dealing with cache size (I'm speculating here, I really don't know), really make a huge difference in the problem.

Last I touched the Rust libraries to make a simple code, I just stuck with non-sparse solvers. There's an enormous difference between storage size and computational effort to go through a non-sparse matrix in comparison, especially when the problem is large. I think past a few million degrees of freedom on typical mechanical engineering problems, it started to become unmanageable on a local cpu.

<comment><USER3> There are tons of solvers, there're a lot of libraries and SciPy, Fenics, most likely even MATLAB, Octave, FreeFEM++ all of them use LAPACK and BLAS (at least in their most performant flavours), all calling eventually the FORTRAN subroutines written decades ago. And yes, the tricky parts of this is also that how Fortran and C store 2D arrays, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row- _and_column-major_order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-_and_column- major_order).

So no one re-writes their own stuff, unless for academic purposes. I was on the verge of trying to extend the SciPy library to support block matrices 4 years ago for my thesis, but was able to work around it because duck-typing had generalised quite enough to encapsulate even that.

Sparse and Full matrices have a totally different data structure. hence the difference in the solvers. Engineers and Mathematicians that want more performant solving, rely more on the modelling of the problem (physically or mathematically) than improving the solvers.The other option is hardware- assisted optimization. For full solvers, I suppose the AI/ML folk have come up with TPUs, also because they have different tolerances for floating point calculations in classifying an image compared with launching a satellite on Mars.

<comment><USER4> > So no one re-writes their own stuff

I have (unwillingly) had to do this. I did look at off-the-shelf solvers but they all seemed to restrict themselves to nice domains in low dimensions.

Edit: Perhaps you are only talking about the linear algebra "stuff". I did use SciPy for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those interested in FEM, I found out about Fenics a few years back [1], here's an extract from their homepage:

"FEniCS is a popular open-source (LGPLv3) computing platform for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). FEniCS enables users to quickly translate scientific models into efficient finite element code. With the high- level Python and C++ interfaces to FEniCS, it is easy to get started, but FEniCS offers also powerful capabilities for more experienced programmers. FEniCS runs on a multitude of platforms ranging from laptops to high- performance clusters."

I never got to use it because I've moved out of mechanical simulations a few years ago, but it definitely looks pretty sweet ;)

[1] [https://fenicsproject.org/](https://fenicsproject.org/)

<comment><USER6> You might also want to look at the Firedrake project [1]

[1] [https://firedrakeproject.org/](https://firedrakeproject.org/)

<comment><USER3> Oh ther're tons of those. Here's another: [https://freefem.org/](https://freefem.org/)

Eventually all of them call LAPACK AND BLAS Fortran stuff written decades ago. Just the problem definition syntax evolves a little in each package.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a fan of Code_Aster at the moment. It has a massive amount of documentation due to its provenance from the nuclear industry. The only downside (for me as an exclusive English speaker) is, it's all either in French or machine-translated (including functions and parameter names) which adds an extra layer of difficulty.

<comment><USER8> yes code aster is great. I work on a cloud based FEA SaaS based on code aster. Besides a GUI it will also have an english API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> FEM is super important/useful in engineering and scientific disciplines. While the basic concepts are quite straight forward, all the details you need for developing useful engineering FEM tools make it really challenging. You can read a textbook and learn a lot, but in production tools you have to figure out how to handle things like: mesh generation, mesh adaptivity, coupled nonlinear equation support, different time-stepping/integration schemes, 3D, convective term stabilization, sparse matrix solvers, preconditioning, parallelization (e.g. MPI for supercomputers), and much much more. I work on an open source FEM framework called MOOSE ([https://mooseframework.org/](https://mooseframework.org/)) and get to enjoy digging in this stuff every day!

</comment><comment><USER10> On a related note, I've enjoyed reading about the Lattice Boltzmann method:

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

<comment><USER11> Thanks, I wrote a lot of that page :)

<comment><USER10> oh nice, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In my Fluid Dynamics class we used Excel together with Finite Element Analysis to solve all kinds of problems. It was actually pretty cool. I remember specifically solving heat gradient problems in various shapes this way.

</comment><comment><USER13> FEM os the workhorse of pretty much any engineering field that needs to use models expressed as partial differential equations, such as heat exchanges, mechanics (solid and fluid statics and Dynamics), electromagnetics, etc. It's hard to go through a day without using anything whose design process involved FEM analysis at some point.

<comment><USER14> While FEM is (rightfully) very popular, a lot of work on electromagnetism is done using finite-difference time-domain methods (FDTD) instead of finite- element.

<comment><USER15> And there is a huge need for better open source tooling in both fields!

<comment><USER16> I don't think that will ever happen. The knowledge to develop the tools is too specialized and the user base too small. The same goes for any RF tools.

<comment><USER17> There's a lot of open source from the academic world (e.g. SALOME, ONELAB, FreeFEM). But maybe you think "tooling" in terms of integration in CAD packages (which are more lacking in the open source world than FEM packages arguably).

<comment><USER16> Yes. The integration and polish is what make all the difference. The commercial EDA tools are light years ahead of the open source, and will probably stay that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> libMesh is quite a tool for anyone looking for FEM software: [http://libmesh.github.io/](http://libmesh.github.io/)

"...a framework for the numerical simulation of partial differential equations using arbitrary unstructured discretizations on serial and parallel platforms... support for adaptive mesh refinement... supports 1D, 2D, and 3D steady and transient simulations on a variety of popular geometric and finite element types."

</comment><comment><USER19> I've never seen a Wikipedia article on the front page of HN. Any idea why this particular one made it?

<comment><USER20> Are you serious? This happens every day.

<comment><USER21> I agree. This is also a particularly annoying example - at least some of the niche ones are interesting. Who hasn't heard of FEA?

What next? Posting a link to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer)?

<comment><USER20> Why not see what happens[0]

0: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22356125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22356125)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I studied mechanical engineering we had one semester about finite elements. It was really fascinating to take some simple physical rules, set up some matrices, calculate them and have the result then be reproducible in the real world. It drove home to me the power of computing.</comment>


Is Boost Better Than YC for Bitcoin Startups? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.blockcypher.com/?p=32

<comment><USER2> Boost understands Bitcoin better and is much more plugged into the Bitcoin ecosystem</comment>


On 5 years of college – What I learned - <AUTHOR> http://devanpatel.me/things-i-have-learned-from-5-years-of-college/

<comment><USER2> > Get up at 7.30 and go to class

> Don't take joke classes

> Don't study too much

I sense some conflicts of interest here...

<comment><USER3> How is this a conflict of interest? He mentions to go to every class (whether 7:30a or 8:00p), don't take joke classes (Man's Food), and don't study too much.</comment></comment>


Side-project Ideas That Could Get Big - <AUTHOR> https://pioneer.app/ideas <comment><USER2> > Reply-to-sheet > You often send emails to lots of people where the replies > ("yes I can make it!") are collected into a spreadsheet. With your service, > you can simply CC firstname.lastname@example.com and have the replies collected into a > Google Sheet. Make it frictionless to get started. No sign-up should be > required to create the sheet.

I'm really surprised that evite hasn't done this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm really curious how many people win each pioneer round. I haven't been able to find that information. That's actually the only thing keeping me from participating again (I did the first one and I enjoyed it).

Also your terms of service don't say users are limited to a single account, so could someone create an account for each of their projects?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. We'll be releasing more info about our first cohort of Pioneers soon!

2\. Sure! Just don't do anything you wouldn't do if you were running Pioneer :)

<comment><USER3> very cool. I'm going to get my application submitted this weekend. I'm looking forward to learning more about the first cohort. My original guess was that you'd select ~10-20 people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Feedback to the pioneer team :

\- remove the country and age columns in the leaderboard page. There's no need for it to be public...privacy.

\- we still don't know what the experience of going through the program will be like, maybe have a few people write about their experience?

Questions : \- how's the security of the backend used to collect all the info? A simple page going over what you do to secure applicant data will be reassuring.

\- how many people applied and how many did you fund?

While these may not seem important to the general public, I'm pretty sure the average HN user cares about it. As some anecdata : this is basically why I have not put in an application.

Thanks

<comment><USER4> Another point : the privacy policy could be improved. Specifically, sharing of applicant data with 3rd parties. I don't want that at all. When I submit an application, I expect only Pioneer will have access to it. If you want to send marketing emails to applicants that's fine, but sharing applicant info with 3rd parties is not cool. Keep it simple like YC's no bs approach. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why are they against Gmail Auth? What's wrong with it? I love Gmail Auth. I trust it far above Facebook and Twitter Auth.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are a lot of personal CRMs already -- I use busycontacts instead of the default Apple contacts and that is one of its functions. Look up a contact and you get the messages and calendar entries about them; you can add notes, etc.

One nice part is it uses standards instead of requiring something proprietary like gmail.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes, I always knew that is just a simple side project to reliably measure software engineering productivity. It is probably as simple as counting the lines of code produced in a given day. /s

<comment><USER8> I think the "side project" framing actually makes this problem more solvable, because you don't have to completely solve every aspect of the problem. It seems likely that developing an easy to measure metric would start to help the issue, which is what Pioneer may be looking for.

E.G., measure the productivity of repo owners (managers/leads) by their lag in accepting pull requests. Measure the quality of submitted code by comparing how often my code is accepted compared to someone else's (w/in the organization/language/community).

From there you could build more of a productivity measurement suite, e.g. maybe connect test coverage and bug reports to specific commits and start to score a coder.

Basically, look at currently-existing data points about coders that a specific team culture believes are important to productivity. Then baseline that against a comparable group, and present reports.

Another trick is to simply measure stuff over time. (This is a bit trickier, due to what you hinted at w/ LOC... but still measures change over time, which is really useful for managers.)

The final thought I have is that it is useful to connect events over time that are related to the same code/feature/branch. If my team's workflow is design/develop/test/commit....gap....deploy to users, then bugs are temporally disconnected from development efforts. Connect things over time in an easy to use report, that has value.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is a Great Marketer Worth at Least 10 Great Developers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You need both; they aren't substitutable. And great anything is hard to get so hire as many as you can of either category.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is a great developer worth 10 marketers?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I read an answer on Quora by Venkatesh Rao and he says it there: [https://www.quora.com/Some-startups-never-get-the- publicity-...](https://www.quora.com/Some-startups-never-get-the-publicity- they-deserve-What-can-be-done-to-obtain-more-exposure-especially-in-the- critical-start-phase)</comment>


Qutebrowser (vim-like web browser) Kickstarter: v1.0 and per-domain settings - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/the-compiler/qutebrowser-v10-with-per-domain-settings <comment><USER2> What's wrong with existing browser extensions like Vimperator or Vimium?

<comment> The-Compiler I've used Vimium for some months myself, and wasn't really happy with it. The reasons why mainly boil down to how VimFx/Vimium are quite limited in what they can do. For example:

\- They can't change the user interface at all - qutebrowser has a much more minimal UI.

\- They can't spawn external processes. In qutebrowser, you can simply hit ctrl-e while editing some text input, to edit it in Vim. Or you can use `:bind ,v spawn mpv {url}` to add a keybinding which spawns mpv with the current page, to watch YouTube videos in a real video player.

\- As soon as you are on some special page (like the Chrome extension store, or the "new tab" page), they stop working, because they can't intercept keypresses there.

\- In general, qutebrowser is much more configurable and extensible. You can easily integrate it with shell scripts via userscripts ([https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/u...](https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/userscripts.asciidoc)), and soon there'll be a Python plugin API as well.

As for Vimperator - as mentioned, that probably won't be around in its current form much longer.</comment></comment>


The surprising truth about what motivates us - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=player_embedded

<comment><USER2> What a trite and naïve rephrasing of Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs> ). I will certainly grant that Economists and Business people need to have these ideas battered into their thick crania, however it's irritating to have the speaker present ideas as if they were novel which are not only _not_ novel, but actually _thousands_ of years old.

If you pay people well enough to decouple their concerns about economic survival from their work, it shouldn't be surprising that there isn't a relationship between increased reward leading to increased performance. That's a pretty fundamental part of the humanist movement which predates the French and American Revolutions (Liberté, égalité, fraternité! or Americans might prefer Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness). Even then, Humanism was merely the popularization and egalitarian movement to provide for everyone the model which the wealthy and elite have been following since at least the time of Aristotle!

Put succinctly, this guy isn't describing the Open Source movement, he's describing at least 2500 years of Academia. You pay people a tenured salary, because they, free of concerns regarding economic security, will produce works for the benefit of all.

And this is telling for two reasons. First, Academia is not free from woe and misery. Second, and i would hope that Economists would realize this, just because you have (partially) removed monetary incentives, does not mean that there is no currency or economics in Academia. The reason why the "Publish or Perish" mentality exists, is because it's what's used to differentiate academics. Academics trade on their reputation, and their reputation is measured based on publication.

<comment><USER3> I think any attempt to further our common understanding should be welcome. clearly previous attempt didn't work very well because this video is news for most people who have seen it.

<comment><USER2> I certainly don't deny any such attempt. But i think that again it's a bit naive to say that things like this are new, and ignore historical precedent. I think that self-actualization and being able to determine the course of one's life is important, especially for work (i certainly wouldn't be able to live any other way). But treating that as a panacea for misery in the work place, or saying that it'd address the ethical lapses of places like Wall Street is naive or perhaps disingenuous.

I'm not knocking the message, i'm knocking the delivery and lack of context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Duplicate.

[<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408731>]</comment>


Dogma is underrated - <AUTHOR> http://sbrady.github.io/tech/programming/professionalism/2017/04/02/Dogma-is-Underrated.html <comment><USER2> Or you could worship none of that and instead do: [http://programming- motherfucker.com](http://programming-motherfucker.com)</comment>


A Formal System for Euclid's Elements - <AUTHOR> http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FRSL%2FRSL2_04%2FS1755020309990098a.pdf&code=0101c65ca3f3f091d563057d88374391

<comment><AUTHOR> The Cambridge link appears to be down. Try arXiv instead: <http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.4315v3></comment>


Thinking The Unthinkable: Is Oracle Considering Buying HP? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/08/22/thinking-the-unthinkable-is-oracle-considering-buying-hp/

<comment><USER2> i honestly think that larry ellison will buy HP — he's dreamed of hardware since the net computer days, and would love to beat both blll gates and steve jobs at their own game: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer></comment>


The People vs. Goldman Sachs - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-people-vs-goldman-sachs-20110511

<comment><USER2> Goldman Sachs is amazing. I follow articles about them since a few years and I must say, the ingenuity with which they act is inspiring, scary, terrifying...

Another evil master piece of them may have been the food market. [http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman...](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis?page=full)

The same dynamics behind the foot price bubble may cause the current surge in gas-prices <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2315894>

Also the Author of the article (Taibbi) wrote a book about the bubble: [http://www.amazon.com/Griftopia-Machines-Vampire-Breaking- Am...](http://www.amazon.com/Griftopia-Machines-Vampire-Breaking- America/dp/0385529953)

All the information I have is obviously very biased towards blaming Goldman Sachs, yet if their involvement in the extreme price hikes in foot, oil, housing markets is only half as bad as it seems, they are the single biggest source for the worlds macroeconomic problems.

This is very disturbing to me, as I see myself as a strong advocate of the free market hypothesis. I guess if Goldman's involvement turned out to be as bad as I fear, it can be explained by them finding holes in the regulation where they were the only dominant player. They were able to act (as in the foot market) with no one challenging their doings. No regulation, no competition meaning they were able to game the system as they pleased.

Somehow I hope all this information about Goldman's involvement is correct, because it would give clear directions on how to fix the macroeconomic problems the world (not just America) faces. It would clearly show how to adjust the legal system, enforcement.

<comment><USER3> "This is very disturbing to me, as I see myself as a strong advocate of the free market hypothesis."

I always thought the free market hypothesis assumed the free and open flow of accurate information.

Goldman simply lied and conned billions out of their customers and the United States tax payers. They are a criminal enterprise whose ring leaders must be put behind bars if the rule of law means anything.

Free enterprise has nothing to do with it.

<comment><USER4> The point is that the "free flow of accurate information" is a fantasy and it seems that liars are rewarded by the market, increasingly so in markets with less regulation.

If "simply" lying is all it takes to steal billions (and not be punished for it), then the free market is stunningly ill equipped to deal with reality and is just a charade to allow a few wealthy people to rob the rest of society.

<comment><USER3> The legal system is supposed to deal with the "simply lying" part.

Ever notice how over the top SEC filings are in detailing every single thing that could possibly go wrong? That is because corporations can be sued for keeping information from their shareholders, and they want to play it safe.

So yes, a free market without a legal system to punish frauds and cons is stunningly ill equipped, indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone else as shocked as I am that Goldman has barely had a slap on the wrist for this stuff?

<comment><USER6> say what you will about Zero Hedge, but I find it to be an invaluable site. The comments are utter crap, and a lot of the stories are selectively chosen/biased in other ways, but the same is true of the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream news sources - I find it to be an extremely valuable counterpoint.

No, I am not surprised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen.

And then there's these guys who convinced two presidents they were too large to fail.

<comment><USER8> Goldman Sachs didn't have to convince anyone of anything. They already ran the treasury and the SEC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.justice.gov/contact-us.html>

</comment><comment><USER10> Somewhat unrelated but the documentary 'Inside Job' provides a brilliant insight into the financial mess that unfolded in the past years.

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/></comment>


Daylighting Detroit's long buried rivers - <AUTHOR> http://www.freep.com/article/20110509/BUSINESS04/105090350/Activists-Detroit-streams-once-turned-into-sewers-could-new-life

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a map showing the locations of the rivers <http://www.freep.com/assets/freep/pdf/C417411359.PDF>

I've walked the Bloody Run stretch in the Elmwood Cemetery while doing geneological research.</comment>


Show HN: Turn GitHub Usernames into Emails - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/levthedev/GitMail <comment><USER2> I would recommend everyone to create separate email for their open-source work. After ten years on SourceForge, Google Code and now Github I get 200 spam messages a day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. When I first started programming I felt weirdly happy about getting spam related to github (because it meant at least one other person thought I was a 'real' programmer), but quickly that turns into annoyance at having such a cluttered inbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you just want a list of contributors' emails, you can just run git log --pretty=format:'%ae' | sort | uniq

<comment><USER3> Even better, take those results through something like Mailgun email validation REST service, and you've got valid emails: [https://documentation.mailgun.com/api-email- validation.html](https://documentation.mailgun.com/api-email-validation.html)

<comment><USER4> Warning

> Mailgun's email validation service is available for free to all Mailgun > customers. It is intended to validate email addresses submitted through > forms like newsletters, online registrations and shopping carts. It is not > intended to be used for bulk email list scrubbing and we reserve the right > to disable your account if we see it being used as such.

<comment><USER5> Install Flanker [1] and you can do it locally. Just make sure your ISP/firewall allows outgoing SMTP connections on port 25, and ideally have Redis running for caching [2].

[1] [https://github.com/mailgun/flanker/](https://github.com/mailgun/flanker/)

[2] [https://github.com/mailgun/flanker/blob/master/docs/User%20M...](https://github.com/mailgun/flanker/blob/master/docs/User%20Manual.md#validating)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hate how people refer to email addresses and email accounts as "emails". Half the time, I don't know if they're referring to addresses, accounts, or messages. I'm not looking forward to when these people start referring to phone numbers as "phones".

<comment><USER7> On that note, I hate how Hamiltonian, Jacobian, and Lagrangian are nouns while Brownian, Newtonian, and Freudian are adjectives. It's about time we standardize our language and namespace conventions so these things are clearer.

<comment><USER8> forgot Orwellian: "1984" has a strong theme of standardizing namespace conventions to make things clearer. They call it "Newspeak". A terrifying idea.

<comment><USER7> I think the terrifying part of Newspeak is more in brainwashing people by removing certain words from vocabulary. Standardized namespace conventions isn't scary, and many human languages are close to standardized. English is just a mess. Spanish is a lot better in this respect (e.g. all verbs end in -er, -ir, -ar, period).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In bash, if anyone is interested in something they can throw in their .profile

        gitspam () {
        	if [ -z "$1" ] || [ "$#" -gt 1 ] || [ "$#" -lt 1 ] || grep -v "http\(s\)\?://\(.*\)\.git" <(echo "$1") &>/dev/null ; then
        		echo "usage: gitspam http://somedomain.tld/path/to/repo.git"
        		return
        	fi

        	tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
        	git clone --bare "$1" "$tmpdir" &>/dev/null
        	cd "$tmpdir"
        	git log --pretty=format:'%ae' | sort -u
        	cd "$OLDPWD"
        	rm -rf "$tmpdir"
        }

<comment><USER9> I hit my noprocrast before I could edit this, but I believe that this:

        git shortlog -se |& sed 's/^.*\(<\(.*\)>\)/\2/g' | sort -u

is a quicker replacement for

        git log --pretty=format:'%ae' | sort -u

By about 50%

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is why I commit with email@example.com

<comment><USER11> GitHub's documentation:

      # Set your email address
      git config --global user.email "firstname.lastname@example.com"

[https://help.github.com/articles/keeping-your-email- address-...](https://help.github.com/articles/keeping-your-email-address- private/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like a great way for recruiters to harvest email addresses.

<comment><USER13> Not surprisingly, they've been doing it for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ooooooh this is gonna be controversial

<comment><USER15> every few months someone discovers that either a) there are e-mail addresses in git commits!!! Public!!! or b) You can put ANY e-mail address there and commit code as SOMEONE ELSE! and it seems the general reaction always is: "Yeah, that's how it works." That stuff is just to easy and obvious to be that interesting...

Now what are appropriate ways to use that data, that's an interesting question.

related: [https://github.com/ghtorrent/ghtorrent.org/issues/32](https://github.com/ghtorrent/ghtorrent.org/issues/32) (Ghtorrent archives the public timeline of GitHub)

<comment><USER16> a) is fine (which is what this "Gitmail" service provides), but shouldn't b) be preventable if you tied email addresses to the public keys uploaded by the user? So if I tried to push commits _to Github_ with an email address that belongs to Linus Torvalds, Github should be able to reject the push based on the fact that I authenticated with a key pair that is not in Torvalds' keys.

(Perhaps I don't understand the way in which git pushes work well enough?)

<comment><USER15> You have to be able to push commits other people have made. E.g. if you work together in a different repo and then publish the result to github, one person pushes all the commits.

Maybe GitHub should indicate more precisely who pushed the commit, but on the other hand that's often unnecessary noise as well.

If you want to be able to trust the data in a commit, it has to be signed (which nearly nobody does, and AFAIK GitHub doesn't display)

<comment><USER17> Someone should build a tool that autosigns your commits for you if you have proper SSH keys and emails.

<comment><USER18> There's an interesting discussion on Stack Exchange about whether it's useful to sign every commit:

[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/212192/what-a...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/212192/what- are-the-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-cryptographically-signing-commits-a)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if this is similar to what spamming companies are using:

"We've seen your contributions to github and think you'd be an excellent fit for our startup ... PS Please move to Paris".

</comment><comment><USER20> > _" temp_email" already exists_

That could be solved by using this, I believe: [http://ruby- doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/tmpdir/rdoc/Dir.html](http://ruby- doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/tmpdir/rdoc/Dir.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup! It's been updated to use tmpdir so that isn't an issue anymore

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yeah, this is why we have spam filters. Although, to be fair, I got my job at SUSE because of my free software contributions. So there is a benefit of including a real email (one that you check) in your commits.</comment>


Top judge: ditching software patents a "bad solution" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/top-judge-ditching-software-patents-a-bad-solution/?comments=1#comments-bar

<comment><USER2> My idea would be a weekend workshop "How to create a modern Video Codec without violating patents" with a walkthrough of the process you would need to innovate there.

Since according to the Microsoft vs. Motorola case [0] there are over 2300 patents for h.264 alone you would have to read a pretty big stack of patents before doing any actual work.

Then, present a little insight how hard it is to work around all of them and ask the question whether it it is the intention of patents that all innovations need to implement hundreds of time consuming workarounds.

Then one could cover whether buying a license for h.264 and creating dependent work is feasible. And of course we have this hilarious example of again a Motorola vs. Microsoft case: Banning Microsoft from selling Windows 7 and the Xbox in germany [1].

There are too many patents relevant to h.264. It kind of worked until now because all of them were kind of at the MPEG-LA and they managed to sell licenses for all of them together but in reality anyone with such a patent who is not directly at the MPEG-LA can sue anybody who uses h.264 in a product.

But don't worry, we can suspend the patent system just fine if it affects a big company:

> Based on the evidence before it, the court finds that Microsoft has shown > that a German injunction enjoining the sale of Microsoft Software and the > Microsoft Xbox in the country of Germany will result [in] irreparable harm. > Microsoft has provided this court with convincing evidence that it will lose > market share, which will be difficult to regain, and suffer harm to its > business reputation.

I'm sorry, I didn't follow fo a little moment? Infringing patents is just fine if you would be adversely affected by enforcing the law?

Wat.

[0] [http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2012/02/22/google- please-don-t-kill-video-on-the-web.aspx)

[1] [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoftpri0/20182089...](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoftpri0/2018208947_judge_issues_preliminary_injunction_barring_motoro.html)

<comment><USER3> Motorola says Microsoft infringes patents, and got a German court to agree, allowing Motorola to stop Microsoft from selling certain products.

Microsoft says that Motorola is breaching a contract to license those patents to Microsoft on reasonable terms. That case is currently being litigated in a US court.

The US court is, quite reasonably, not allowing Motorola to take action on stopping Microsoft until the contract issue is resolved. If Motorola is allowed to stop Microsoft now but then loses the contract case (and so Microsoft gets a license to the patents) this will cause great damage to Microsoft. If Motorola wins the contract case, then they can enforce their injunction in Germany. Any extra harm Motorola suffers by not being able to enforce the injunction immediately can be addresses by a simple increase in monetary damages later.

<comment><USER2> Ok, I didn't read that right. I had to look up what preliminary injunction means and it's clearer now.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preliminary_injunction>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > excluding software from patentability was an "odd way to divide up the > world."

Here in Brazil software cannot be patented. We still write software, make money off software. In fact, in the last couple of years we're seeing a huge number of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors migrating here, because the tech startup scene has been getting really hot.

The point is. Our industry doesn't need patents to exist. We do fine without it. Patents are just an artificial bandage trying to fix flaws in other industries. But these flaws doesn't exist in tech, so the artificial bandages are just getting in the way for no good reason.

</comment><comment><USER5> His arguments triggered a sense of deja vu. I've made those same arguments with clients who want a system to process a specific product differently to all the others, and colleagues who think our framework should have special code to handle a rare use case.

Those arguments are valid - from the perspective of the architects. Maintaining and learning to use such a system is incredibly difficult, and resistance against special cases is healthy and helps promote simplicity.

But the purpose of law is to promote quality of life not quality of law, and _life is messy_.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is like asking a duck what it thinks of all the flooding after a tsunami.</comment>


Ask HN: Solutions for collaborative code review, pair programming? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN, Me and a friend of mine want to do a series of screen casts of walking through and modifying open source code of popular libraries. The idea is to help people dig into OSS and to understand how the software they use work under the hood!
I plan to start with JavaScript based front-end libraries. So other than the editor and terminal, there is the browser as well that needs to be shared.
Any hints on what tools I can use to collaborate with my friend online? Final product is a open video playlist on YouTube. Ideally I'd like my friend to also modify the code when we're playing with it! <comment><USER2> For collaborating on the code look at the Visual studio code feature called live share, which allows you to collaborate in real-time [1].

I've tried it and it worked well.

[1] [https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/11/15/live- share](https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/11/15/live-share)

<comment><USER3> Atom has [https://teletype.atom.io/](https://teletype.atom.io/) as well. I don't have any experience with either though.

<comment><USER4> supposedly tandem leverages teletype work for vim and sublime

[https://github.com/typeintandem/tandem](https://github.com/typeintandem/tandem)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey there!

At Scribma, we're building a new tool for doing exactly this: sharing both code, terminal, and browser, and collaborating using 100 times less bandwidth than you would via traditional screen sharing tools.

Also, it's automatically recorded, so you don't have to worry about doing screen recording via e.g. QuickTime while coding (which at least makes my mac fan go nuts after a few minutes).

You can check out a video of it here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsorl3-TjdY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsorl3-TjdY)

We're on the lookout for more beta testers, so I'd love to set up a chat with you.

Interested?

If so, let me know at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER6> That looks very cool. The demo says it's 2-way collaboration. How does that work with the terminal? Or rather how do you stop your colleague from going rogue at your command line before you can hit stop

<comment><USER7> If this is part of your threat model then you probably shouldn't be collaborating with a shared terminal in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Probably not quite what you had in mind, but because I'm half way around the world from my teammates the most successful tools I've used are a console editor and tmux (potentially running on a VM if you don't trust your friend). For voice, mumble is my first choice because it is both low bandwidth and low latency. Tiger VNC works reasonably well to display a shared web browser. Nothing else I've tried has the fidelity and low latency to do serious pair programming for long periods of time when one person is really far away.

Having said that, almost _anything_ works well if you are close to each other or if you are only going to pair for an hour or so. Even non-collaborative conference call-type tools work fine. One person does some work. Then they check in their code to a git repository. The other person merges the changes, shares the screen and picks up from there. It means about a 1 minute "keyboard handoff", but it's pretty reasonable.

For you, though, I think the main thing is trying to find a solution that allows you to capture video and audio from both parties easily. You don't want to be relying on two parties to record and then editing because it's pretty risky if something goes wrong. I would first look at mutli-gamer streaming setups and then start seeing how a collaborative session might be done.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're both using macOS, the Messages app's screen sharing [1] is seriously good.

[1]: [https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/messages/screen- sharin...](https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/messages/screen-sharing- icht11883/mac)

</comment><comment> frant-hartm This is where Intellij IDEA (and other JetBrains' products) lack severely.

There is a 14 year old (!!) issue in their issue tracker [https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-708](https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-708) asking for such feature. Unfortunately they are so much better in other areas (code navigation/exploration, refactoring) that they don't have to even try :-//.

There is a commercial plugin [https://floobits.com/](https://floobits.com/), but it is \- monthly subscription \- buggy \- transfers code to their servers so it is not really an option.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like a good idea for an OSS IntelliJ plugin actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> While researching remote desktops this weekend I ran across this:

[https://www.use-together.com/](https://www.use-together.com/)

Looks pretty cool actually.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for sharing Slovette :) we're building USE Together on Windows and MacOS (Linux coming later) as a Screenhero replacement tool for remote pair programming and collaborative screen sharing.

When you share a screen or app with people via USE Together, you see each user's mouse cursor on your screen and they can interact with your apps in real time, feeling like you are at the same desk.

You can share any IDE with USE Together :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can recommend two free solutions that both work fine. For both you can share the controls, to basically hand-over the keyboard/mouse.

\- zoom.com: You can share desktop or windows with groups or individuals. We use it at work, the user experience is really great. There is a record-feature (probably not available in the free version).

\- slack.com: The popular chat provides a desktop (not windows) share feature. I am not aware tough if you can share a stream with a group of people.

</comment><comment><USER14> Tuple[0] is a new entrant in this space, still in alpha currently. I've never seen or used the tool, only know of it via Ben Orenstein's Art of Product podcast[1].

[0] [https://tuple.app](https://tuple.app)

[1] [http://artofproductpodcast.com/](http://artofproductpodcast.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Take a look at repl.it - I've been using it a lot after trying glitch and a bunch of others and it's really flexible and powerful. They released some more collaboration features very recently. It's a bit rough around the edges, but it's been working great for me so far.

</comment><comment><USER16> One alternative is [Codesandbox.io][0] for collaborative editing. Your friend and you can then do a Hangouts Live session. Only one of you needs to share your screen (with the codesandbox tab open).

[0]: [https://codesandbox.io](https://codesandbox.io)

</comment><comment> another-cuppa I'm not sure what other commenters are talking about, but the vast majority of open source is developed by programmers in isolation and the only collaborative tools used are some kind of VCS like git and some kind of "forge" like GitHub.

<comment><USER17> OP is looking for a tool to live-share their programming environment with a friend for demonstration (and recording) purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Use the same vim or emacs with ssh and floobits or something. Stream windows with ultimate flexibility using OBS.

Edit: ngrok for exposing ports, OBS can stream and record simultaneously.

</comment><comment><USER19> You can collaborate on code in the browser with Glitch ([https://glitch.com](https://glitch.com))

</comment><comment><USER20> tmate is pretty good as a way of sharing a tmux session over the internet (which precludes you do development in a terminal)[1]. We use it quite a bit in my team as a quick way to explain/debug a problem.

[1]: [https://github.com/tmate-io/tmate](https://github.com/tmate-io/tmate)

<comment><USER21> +1 for tmate. I use it constantly with friends in combination with Vim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Vim, ssh, irc, mumble, and screen all the tools I need for collaborating on code with others.

</comment><comment><USER23> Zoom lets you record and share screens. Not free, but works with most operating systems.

</comment><comment><USER24> VScode livecode share works great.

If it can stay purely on codepen, that's a great alternative too

</comment><comment><USER25> Such a video will be useful for newbies like me

</comment><comment><USER26> vscode live share

</comment><comment><USER27> atom teletype</comment>


Usability dilemma: New electronic meters devastate business on Clark Street - <AUTHOR> http://theurbancoaster.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=489:new-parking-boxes-devastate-business-on-clark&catid=64:business&Itemid=50

<comment><USER2> As for the instructions being given in English, I fully expect, when visiting another country, to see signage in the country's official language.

It's expected from a tourist to learn at least a minimum of the local language. If I move to another country, I better learn the official language. It is a bit too much to ask the locals to extend the courtesy of accommodating my language needs.

What's next? Klingon? Esperanto?

<comment><USER3> The U.S. doesn't have an official language.

Also, as a business, if you have the option to make it easy on a significant portion of your audience, and you don't, it shouldn't be a surprise when that audience chooses not to patronize your business.

<comment><USER2> "The U.S. doesn't have an official language."

Not an official one, sure, but we can all agree it's an important language. Bordering essential.

As for the courtesy part, I always try to become minimally functional in the language and customs of the country I happen to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've read this story elsewhere and as a UK citizen where this alternative to parking meters (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_and_display>) have been standard for a couple of decades it's somewhat amusing to read of the confusion and chaos that having to walk to the ticket dispenser and back to the car can cause.</comment>


Software Is Eating Real Estate - <AUTHOR> http://pawel.posthaven.com/software-is-eating-real-estate <comment><USER2> Maybe it's not eating, overuse is taking over!</comment>


Lexadecimal - colour codes with meaning - <AUTHOR> http://lexadecimal.com/

<comment><USER2> Lovely!

I think it would be improved by having a cleverer colour-based sorting algorithm. At the moment, you choose one parameter (H, S or V) to sort by, and the others have no effect at all, and it looks a bit too random.

Here's one toy example of what I think is a more natural-looking order of colours: <http://i.imgur.com/xjh97.png> (I took red<<1, green<<2 and blue, and interleaved their bits). Better still might be to sort by position along a Hilbert-curve traversal of the RGB cube or HSL space or something, but I couldn't work out how to do that in 5 minutes so didn't bother :-).

<comment><USER3> > Better still might be to sort by position along a Hilbert-curve traversal of > the RGB cube or HSL space or something

Like this? <http://corte.si/posts/code/hilbert/portrait/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kinda interesting looking, but why? What's the point? I hate to be the guy who says "I don't get it," but...I don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's the most beautiful thing I've seen today.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) I was one of the guys working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I could definitely see these adding another level of depth to Alternate Reality Games / Puzzles (not to mention computer art). Beautiful design, as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> I really like the "I want a T-shirt!" button. I wonder if those button-clicks are being tracked or only emailed requests. I think tracking both would be smart.

</comment><comment><USER8> Haha, I'm going to start referring to colors this way in my office. It would be fun to pair colors together as a sort of designer inside joke. Like design a celebrity site with "scolds" and "celebs." Anyway, I hope they get the t-shirt thing going. That's a cool idea.

</comment><comment><USER9> Speaking of hexadecimal numbers that mean something. Does anyone know any good numbers that stand out both in hex and in decimal? Something that would make people suspect it is a number used for debugging.

<comment><USER10> Wikipedia knows plenty: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_%28programming%29#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_%28programming%29#Magic_debug_values).

My favorite is probably the classic 0xDEADF00D, but I also like 0xCAFEBABE as used by Java class files, and 0xFEEDFACE since it's just funny.

True, these mostly stand out in hex, but they would be "very large" in decimal which often stands out pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Palette-sentences, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER12> Genius. Not sure why this hasn't been done before. I can see using this in future projects.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love it. The basic idea is beautifully simple, and it's very nicely done.

</comment><comment><USER14> reminds me of my brief stint in frontend web development, when i would sneak in at least one #c0ffee-coloured element in every project.</comment>


Watch us crawl the news in realtime - <AUTHOR> http://newsbasis.com/news

<comment><AUTHOR> You can read the motivation for this technology here: [http://ceo.newsbasis.com/try-newscatcher-our-built-in- real-t...](http://ceo.newsbasis.com/try-newscatcher-our-built-in-real-time- media)

It's built on rails, node.js, resque, and solr

</comment><comment><USER2> Would be nice to see a list of sources. When I first tuned in, I didn't recognize any of them, then the MSM started to come in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I understand. I think at this point we're considering the list (~10k sources) a business asset.

<comment><USER3> Is it possible to give us a rough overview of your tech infrastructure? (Servers, processes, storage)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. This probably will turn into a blog entry, but here's the gist:

      4 medium sized linodes, divided as follows:
      1 app:    unicorn (rails), nginx
      1 db:     redis, solr, mysql
      2 worker: resque workers (both ruby/rails node.js) & the crawler

The crawler is written in node.js, backed by redis. When it finds a new page, it downloads it to shared local storage and adds a task to a resque queue monitored by the rails workers. They add a row to a mysql table that represents the permanent record of the page, use nokogiri to extract the body content and any metadata, index it into solr, delete the local copy, and upload the page to an s3 archive. When you request the page, rails asks solr.

<comment><USER3> Nice, thanks..any stats on how fast it is? It looks pretty fast from the web page update

<comment><AUTHOR> Haven't built in much monitoring yet, but watching the resque web interface, most of the delay is in actually finding the new page - from there to it showing up on your screen is no more than a second or two. For subscribed users, we do email notifications and we almost always beat google news alerts, often by around 15 minutes.

<comment><USER2> I have it bookmarked and find myself peeking in at least once a day during other news downtime.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Report: Jobs disses Adobe Flash as 'CPU hog' - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-10456175-260.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 <comment><USER2> Funny, iTunes and Quicktime are CPU hogs on Windows machines</comment>


Ask HN: Should we all start using MongoDB for new projects? - <AUTHOR>

I'm seeing more and more articles on HN with projects that are choosing MongoDB and other NoSQL data structures over MySQL. Is this what the future is going to be, so we might as well start adopting now? What are it's disadvantages if any? <comment><USER2> I can't see using MongoDB for any production project. It combines a limited replication/sharding model with a poor single-server durability, lack of tunable CAP constraints, and some surprising performance bottlenecks.

If you want integrity and SQL, use PostGres. If you want volatile speed, use Redis or Membase. If you want a rich data model and excellent durability with limited but highly configurable replication, experiment with Couch. If you want federation, predictable horizontal scaling, and HA, perhaps look at Voldemort, Cassandra, HBase, or Riak. There are a lot of good datastores out there, and chances are one of them fits your needs better.

Edit: I think [http://www.paperplanes.de/2011/1/10/mongodb_and_data_durabil...](http://www.paperplanes.de/2011/1/10/mongodb_and_data_durability.html) basically sums it up. When the Mongo folks started telling me that kill -9 should never happen to any database, I stopped taking them seriously.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have just been reading that MongoDB is much more scalable and faster and I looked into it and saw that its queries were very similar to SQL. There are a lot of DB choices out there, and just trying to find one that I should either stick to or learn based of trends, benefits, and level of user-support out on the web.

<comment><USER2> _its queries were very similar to SQL_

You may want to learn more SQL.

If you're interested in picking up a more complex document database, I would recommend Couch. For a simple k/v store that will get you thinking about concurrency, perhaps Riak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Its very difficult to explain why you would use MongoDB and why its becoming so popular. The best way to learn it though is to do a project with it. Im actually working on a few right now, mostly games, and would be open to having you involved. If youre not into that then just read the mongodb books and understand what it is. Also learn what couchdb, riak, and membase are and why they are different since they are all "nosql" datastores but are very different from each other. Also a good way to learn it which is how i learned it is to learn jquery/ajax and specifically developing the json api that it will call and use. Once you understand json and key value pairs then why mongodb is so great will become apparent.

</comment><comment><USER4> We use MongoDB on ww.interstateapp.com but only really because Interstate started out as a small fun project and not something we expected to take that seriously (so it didn't matter too much if MongoDB was a perfect fit or not - it turns out that it suits the app quite well). If your app is the type of application that would benefit from the advantages of having a NoSQL style setup (not all do) then go for it but I can't see MySQL being phased out (in terms of usage by devs, etc) anytime soon...

Also, if you don't know whether your app could benefit from using MongoDB it's kind of a general rule of thumb (from what I've seen) to just go with a traditional MySQL setup for now.

</comment><comment><USER5> You shouldn't start using something just because others do. NoSQL databases are tools, and it makes sense to employ them when they actually are the right tool for the job. Does MySQL and relational databases in general satisfy your requirements for a given project? If yes, you don't need NoSQL.

Some projects will require NoSQL. Others will require both NoSQL and relational databases (a great combo). It's all about what problem you are trying to solve.</comment>


A C++ Implementation of HBase - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/baidu/tera?from=hacknews <comment><USER2> Maybe much better performance than HBase?

<comment><AUTHOR> The dominant advantages are the ability of rapid split and merge of ranges, the linear scalability and the performance benefits from C++.</comment></comment>


Followware - <AUTHOR> http://dribbble.com/shots/537811-Introducing-a-concept-of-followware

<comment><USER2> Seems counter-productive to copyright the term or want some exclusivity to it. If you want the term to be known and understood, let others denote their service in the same way.

Did anyone copyright the term shareware?

<comment><USER3> I don't think he was actually serious about copyrighting the term. I believe he was just using it as a figure of speech.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It just occurred to me that a free service of notable popularity _can_ be capitalized on, and without resorting to ads.

You use the service - you follow me on Twitter/Facebook/elsewhere. You get the service, and I get an ear to promote my other projects.

Have anyone tried this before?

<comment><USER4> I use the method on <http://www.twitterdoctors.net/> and more than 70% of my followers are now doctors, which is useful for the occasions I do tweet about new features and stuff related to my healthcare start-up.

For those interested, I am in the process of re-writing the site (dev version at <http://www.twitterdoctors.com/>) – to automate the process, try the wizard out, it uses twitter's new event listeners.

<comment><USER5> Your site violates Twitter's trademark. You need a different name...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Likeware - like it to use it.

Tweetware - tweet about it to use.

Referware - refer friends emails to use the app.

Reviewware - write an app store review to upgrade to pro version of the app.

And so on....

</comment><comment><USER7> You 'claim copyright', eh?

<http://ask.yahoo.com/20041213.html>

<comment><USER8> I guess he technically could patent the concept (IANAL though).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I seriously hope that the author was being purposefully ironic/trolling. You can't copyright a word. It would fall well short of the de minimis, even if it was totally made up.

The only case I can think of off of the top of my head would be Exxon, where they tried to copyright Exxon, because if my memory serves me correctly they failed to secure their TM correctly.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Corp._v_Exxon_Insurance_C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Corp._v_Exxon_Insurance_Consultants_International_Ltd)

As others have mentioned, perhaps I'm just taking him too seriously and he was just using it as a figure of speech. However, on the internet, he really should be as verbose as possible... and not make poor jokes like that.

</comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of 'I DECLARE BANKRUPCCYYYY'

<comment><USER11> Came here to say the same thing. Here it is for those who missed it:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuGIgf-ICHM></comment></comment>


Taylor – Swift on bare metal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/klange/taylor <comment><USER2> I'm the author. This wasn't something anyone was supposed to 'find', it's not even really a 'project', just a quick hack to demonstrate a point; I don't even think it's valid to say the project name is "taylor", it's just the name of the repository - I probably should have just called it "swift-on-baremetal" or something equally boring. I have a history of my stupid little 'projects' showing up on HN.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious as to what kind of bare metal is meant. From the " elf_i386" target I infer it's some kind of Linux machine?

<comment><USER2> The code in the repository builds a multiboot-compatible x86 "kernel" that can be booted with GRUB or iPXE or any number of other bootloaders supporting the format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> whatever, that is the best name I've seen for an OS project all year. Bravo.

<comment><USER5> I had thought most of us know this video presentation. Still an interesting video.

[https://realm.io/news/swift-summit-jorge-izquierdo-taylor- ht...](https://realm.io/news/swift-summit-jorge-izquierdo-taylor-http-server- library/)

There are a few talks on Swift in Realm conference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could someone please explain what this project is about? I gather it's a new implementation of the Swift language without using Xcode's compiler and Swift standard library, but I find the full readme very undescriptive of what this is and why it's useful.

EDIT: Clicking through the source I found about a dozen files in total, mostly scripts and make files.

<comment><USER7> It builds Swift without any standard library, runtime or linkage to other components. This isn't normally possible with the Swift compiler.

The solution doesn't involve changing the compiler or building everything into the executable. Instead, this is a makefile coordinated pipeline (front-end swiftc, back-end clang) plus a start.s and a system.c file that omit any need for typical standard library components in the first place.

i.e. a "bare metal" compilation

<comment><USER8> Without the swift standard library, what can be done? Doesn't the standard library include all of the basic types, like Array, Int, etc?

<comment><USER9> Fixed-size integers and UnsafeMutablePointer are supported, so it is basically C with different syntax:

[https://github.com/klange/taylor/blob/master/src/main.swift](https://github.com/klange/taylor/blob/master/src/main.swift)

<comment><USER10> Except it has a stronger type checking and safety.

<comment><USER11> sounds good, what's the draw back like?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
        Horrible Taylor Swift puns in Swift development
        considered harmful.

It's already been done[1], it makes your project completely un-Googleable, and it also pollutes the search corpus making it harder for automatons to weed out Taylor Swift stories even when searching for things like "Swift compiler intermediate representation".

Please stop!

[1]: [https://github.com/izqui/Taylor](https://github.com/izqui/Taylor)

<comment><USER13> As a go player, I had the same problem when google has created the go language.

<comment><USER14> Try with baduk :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "What's in here right now doesn't need any Swift runtime support. That will change very quickly as we try to add support for things like arrays, classes, structs, strings, etc."

</comment><comment><USER10> Didn't get the point of using inline assembly for _outportb_ instead of making it part of start.s.

Just to prove the point of calling something with C calling convention?

<comment><USER2> Yes.

<comment><USER10> Ah ok

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cool! but you have a name collision: [https://github.com/izqui/Taylor](https://github.com/izqui/Taylor)

<comment><USER17> I can think of at least one other "name" collision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the fun ends when most Swift related stuff are named Taylor...

Some examples are

\- the OP's project

\- [https://tailor.sh/](https://tailor.sh/) \- Cross-platform static analyzer and linter for Swift

\- [https://github.com/izqui/Taylor](https://github.com/izqui/Taylor) \- lightweight library for writing HTTP web servers with Swift

\- Many many others at [https://github.com/search?l=Swift&q=taylor&type=Repositories...](https://github.com/search?l=Swift&q=taylor&type=Repositories&utf8=%E2%9C%93)

</comment><comment><USER19> Hahahahaha this name is amazing!

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't normally comment like this but ..

That title bothers me a bit.

<comment><USER21> But software projects are swarmed with bad puns

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I up voted this post just because of the name. Very clever. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER23> where is seed?

</comment><comment><USER24> Taylor Swift metal is oxymoron.

</comment><comment><USER25> upvote for the name alone

</comment><comment><USER26> don't be surprised if people can't find your project with a name like that.

<comment><USER27> It was hard enough when Swift 1.0 was released and Google searches kept bringing up this woman, this will be worse.

<comment><USER28> Nothing hard about appending "lang" to your queries. Go and C programmers have to deal with the same thing.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, long ago I learned the difference between "strings in C" and "C strings" when searching Google.

<comment><USER30> The Google personalisation filter bubble seems to have me covered, even in incognito (this is a work machine with its own public IPv4). Nothing but programming on the first five pages for either query.

"std list" is another good one, with very different meanings to C++ programmers and just about anyone else :)

<comment><USER29> Singular does the trick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone see the awesomeness of the title of this post?

Taylor Swift.

Ha.

<comment><USER32> you catch on quick

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Bad project name for SEO purposes. Do you really want people to trudge through SERPs of some popstar who makes vapid music before they get to your project?

<comment><USER5> The whole story is in this video, nothing related to SEO or whatever. [https://realm.io/news/swift-summit-jorge-izquierdo-taylor- ht...](https://realm.io/news/swift-summit-jorge-izquierdo-taylor-http-server- library/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to build a business that generates 10k/month in 10 months or more? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to know how to build a business(I'd prefer SaaS) online with the skillet of Design+Dev.
I've tried it a few times and haven't succeeded. I know money shouldn't be my goal but I'd like to get your opinion on how to create a business that generates 10k/month in 10-12 months.
Feedback greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> I think you'll get better responses if you focus your question a bit more. Right now, it's a bit too close to "how long is a piece of string?"

There are a lot of ways to generate $10,000 vis SaaS. You can build something that 10,000 people will pay $1/month for, or something that 1000 people will pay $10/month for, or something that 100 people will pay $100/month for, or something that 1 person will pay $10,000/month for.

All of those are valid possibilities, and have their own advantages and disadvantages.

So, first step: identify a market need, and a service that will fill that need, and do the math on the size of the market, the cost of acquiring customers, and the amount of money the customers are willing to pay to solve that particular problem.

That's a place for you to start your thinking, at least.

<comment><USER2> By the way: if you've done this a few times, should should have built up a fair bit of experience about what works and what doesn't work. This should make it easy for you to re-focus the question appropriately.</comment></comment>


Snowden Inc. - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/edward-snowden-national-security-agency-sxsw-104509.html

<comment><USER2> The author clearly doesn't like Snowden much.</comment>


Guidance for Docker Image Authors - <AUTHOR> http://www.projectatomic.io/docs/docker-image-author-guidance/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've been pointed to this via Tomáš Tomeček here at DevConf in Brno:

[http://blog.tomecek.net/post/tips-and-tricks-to-write- docker...](http://blog.tomecek.net/post/tips-and-tricks-to-write-dockerfiles/)

Another set of useful image build guidelines by OpenShift:

[https://docs.openshift.com/enterprise/3.0/creating_images/gu...](https://docs.openshift.com/enterprise/3.0/creating_images/guidelines.html)

Best practices github repo:

[https://github.com/projectatomic/container-best- practices](https://github.com/projectatomic/container-best-practices)</comment>


Ask YC: Link to a video previously posted - <AUTHOR>

I've searched for every keyword I could think of - there was a video previously posted on HN - a talk about the relationship between the opensource community (specifically Perl) and some ancient temple that is torn down and rebuilt every few years.<p>Little help? <comment><USER2> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs> ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


"Something's Not Right Here Folks" – A Look at USA 2009 H1N1 Virus Compared - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/somethings-right-here-folks-look-usa-2009-h1n1-virus-compared-cavolo <comment><USER2> Part of this, I think, is the disgust felt by westerners around the wet meat markets that is added to the horror.

</comment><comment><USER3> China bad commie

Amurca good 🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲

All countries regularly turn fear of X into X is evil.</comment>


Brad Pitt's Foundation Unveils Floating Home That Rises Up (and Away) in Floods - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/sustainability/brad-pitts-make-it-right-foundation-home-can-withstand-flood-wate <comment><USER2> The way the article is titled (emphasizing that it was Brad Pitt's foundation) almost makes me think that they expected the foundation to fail. "Oh, an actor's foundation. What good could they do?". Or they were being sensationalist (anything with 'Brad Pitt' is highly clickable surely).

</comment><comment><USER3> it's a defective house boat.</comment>