Is Microsoft About to Announce an Info Pad? - <AUTHOR> http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-microsoft-about-to-announce-info-pad.html

<comment><USER2> The way I manage this part of my work is the following setup:

* iPad mini retina

* Adonit Jot Pro (stylus)

* Adonit Jot Tote (A protective case, fitting with the smart cover, and holds the stylus)

* UPad for iPad (note taking app)

It's a setup small and light enough that I'm not worried about 'bulking' the small profile of the mini, but also solid enough I can throw it into my bag and haul it around without worrying about protecting it.

The note taking app allows for handwriting into a box that is then represented on the page (so I can write big and have it appear small and readable on- page).

I've been using this since each of the products was released and it would be extremely difficult to replace any part for me.

This product might be cheaper, but I would say the number one advantage of my setup is that at any time I can just use it 'as an ipad' and not a notetaking business device.

<comment><USER3> Have you tried a real wacom-style stylus before? With pressure sensitivity, etc.? Adonit doesn't come close imo.

<comment><USER4> There are actually several brands of pressure-sensitive styli available for the iPad, including Adonit Jot Touch, Hex3 JaJa, and Wacom's own Intuos Creative Stylus, and even more on the way such as the Hex3 YuFu and Adobe/Adonit's Project Mighty, though it does appear that none these offers come close to devices with actual Wacom active layers built-in, as most of these pens are bluetooth hacks that attempt to make up for iPad's shortcomings. It's really a shame, though, since I find iPad's library of note-taking and drawing apps to be significant better in terms of quality and quantity than those found in Android's Play Store and Microsoft's Windows 8 Store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would be very excited if it had a very low lag screen for note taking. Something along the lines of this: [http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/9/2856795/microsoft-high- perf...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/9/2856795/microsoft-high-performance- touch-research)

</comment><comment><USER6> There's already other 8" (Windows based) tablets out there. Majority of which are powered by Intel Atom processors.

One of them (an ASUS VivoTab Note 8 [http://www.asus.com/Tablets_Mobile/ASUS_VivoTab_Note_8_M80TA...](http://www.asus.com/Tablets_Mobile/ASUS_VivoTab_Note_8_M80TA/)) even has a Wacom stylus.

That said, there's been rumours of touch optimised versions of Office being released (soon).

OneNote is pretty good for note taking. I still remember first using it with an XP based tablet/laptop (Toshiba Portege m200) many years back.

<comment><USER7> Agreed, I owned the Asus VivoTab TF810c for about a year. It was close, but it was asked to do too much with too little. The processor power was pathetic, the emmc drive was too slow, and it frequently froze. These issues made it too unreliable to use day to day. In the end, I bought a MacBook Air and began typing my notes instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have yet to have a really great writing or note taking experience on a tablet. It always feels laggy and just a bit off. Sure, it might work, but it does't have the right "feel".

Sadly, the best devices to do handwriting and notes seem to be the PDAs of old. Maybe they were worse so we didn't notice as much, I don't know. It just feels like we are in some kind of stylus uncanny valley.

</comment><comment><USER9> A tablet with a stylus and note-taking software, what a revolutionary device!

<comment><USER10> yeah welcome to 2014</comment></comment>


Reform Tax Credits with a Negative Income Tax (UK) - <AUTHOR> http://www.adamsmith.org/news/press-release-reform-tax-credits-with-a-negative-income-tax-says-new-report/ <comment><USER2> I've been arguing this idea since I was a teenager. Even 30 years ago it made sense. Stigma of being low waged, people not moaning because everyone gets their share, reduced administration, removal of poverty traps. I've never heard a convincing argument against it. I'm convinced it is only ideology prevents such an idea blossoming, it's not like I'm some crazy idea guy and no-one else ever thought of it.</comment>


Audi's improbable project to put a rover on the moon - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/11/10746926/audi-lunar-rover-xprize-detroit-auto-show-2016?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter <comment><USER2> I work for the team Part Time Scientists. AMA.

There's an older post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916217)

<comment><USER3> How large/heavy is the rover?

What is the plan for getting it up and land it on the moon?

<comment><USER2> Around 100x80x50 cm. Between 30-40 kg (depending on payload).

The plan: Rover into the landing module (LM), LM into the rocket, rocket brings us to the right orbit where it releases the LM, from there to the Moon, soft landing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Automated remote synthesis and production of mechanical parts from regolith has the potential to be absolutely huge. Most the problems with establishing human colonies beyond earth are that they require the astronauts to either bring their shelter with them or construct it while living out of a rudimentary temporary shelter. With this, a team of rovers could be sent in advance to build machines, living spaces, and other equipment that's already in place for when the astronauts arrive. It also solves concerns about radiation exposure since the rovers could potentially construct a buried/underground living structure.

<comment><USER5> Go PTS! :)

And I feel for you chfjfuchdjd, I started writing a response and noticed that I'm writing basically same thing you did, but anyway:

The most important thing is _industrialization_ , using resources already in space (moon and NEOs), independent as possible from things lifted from earth. It sounds a far off goal to - for example - plaster moon with solar panels, but there's no physical reason why it couldn't be done, mostly automatically, with very small input of materials from earth.

"Want to go live to moon? There's nothing there but vacuum, wasteland and radiation, and you need to take everything with you, at costs of 1.2M$/kg. Nice view of stars.", doesn't make much sense, does it. Try this: "Want to go live to the moon? You'll have 40B$/day of free electricity [1] and absolutely massive, if still somewhat one-sided manufacturing capability to use. Build anything you like (including a garden, just bring the soil and seeds with you). Yeah, it costs 1.2M$/kg to get there, but you'll have a big underground shelter and free oxygen for kickers. Nice view of night sky, btw.". There, now it's suddenly making a lot more sense!

The problem is not that there would be some single insurmountable technical challenge stopping us, there just there isn't an agency or program whose purpose would be to attack the huge number of those technical challenges needed to overcome. Like, how do you build magnets for electrical motors without plastic or carbon for wire insulation?

Maybe you could find formulation of glass to coat wire with. Maybe you could deposit alternating layers of conductor and glass directly to core to make magnets. Maybe you could 3D-print the wires directly inside the insulator. Or something completely different. It could take better part of decade to find out and scale, and perfect the process down to a T. And the end result would be something onerous and expensive to manufacture in earth (where's my vacuum for that vacuum deposition step?), and probably somewhat less efficient than we can muster with earthy materials. It doesn't matter, it could still work brilliantly on moon. But it's quite unlikely that such a technology would be an offshoot of some other R&D project here on earth, or an offshoot of some space science project. None care about the poor plastic-free magnet wire.

There are some really interesting projects in NASA, for developing ISRU, and say nuclear power (could be handy for bootstrapping moon base), but these never seem to be the ones that literally fly. At least for an outside punter (correct me if I'm wrong) they seem to be just a side dish, not part of concerted effort/vision to develop technological base for manufacturing. What flies seem to be science probes (good!) that can also take nice pictures (a bonus), and ISS.

Which brings me to humans in space. It seems a huge waste to haul people to LEO, and then support them there for decades for great expense, and hope that will somehow help the march of civilization to space. You need a _reason_ first for those people to be there. You need to extract energy and material from the _environment_ , and _create useful and interesting things_ with them, because that's what life does, both pooping humans, and clanking machines (together what I'll call civilization). What proportion of space civilization should be humans, and what proportion machines, should be strictly rational affair, you lift as many people as is optimal for economic growth at that moment. I would not worry, as long as machines need humans at all, it's probably useful at some point to have some people nearby to troubleshoot processes gone awry, do R&D, or just hang around at spa, even if life support is expensive. If humans actually become redundant, we will probably become redundant some point on earth too, anyway.

tl;dr: Self replicating solar power industry on moon - build it, and they will come.

[1] Roughly the amount of electricity that 200km wide strip of solar panels around moon equator would produce at 0.04$/kWh and paltry 4.3% efficiency, possible with even crudest of processes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice to see Audi try something different for publicity than just ever more aggressive headlight designs.

The players have changed, but space seems to be just as much publicity driven today as it was in the original space race.

<comment><USER7> > but space seems to be just as much publicity driven today as it was in the > original space race.

Marketing and advertising makes things seem ways they aren't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is marketing for design, not engineering. Audi will not put a rover on the moon in 50 years. None of their statements are novel. Sending printers to somewhere to make robots is probably an idea that most engineers already know. The mock up itself is just a basic model with X-Prize on the side and an Audi hood ornament. Remember Lexus's hoverboard? It was not a hoverboard, its was great advertisement for their style. This is also just an ad.

<comment><USER9> I believe it's called "sponsorship".

Audi is funding Part Time Scientists ([http://ptscientists.com/](http://ptscientists.com/)), a team headed in part by NASA engineer Jack Crenshaw ([http://jackcrenshaw.com/work/me-and- nasa/](http://jackcrenshaw.com/work/me-and-nasa/)), who worked on lunar trajectory calculations for the Apollo missions.

The PT team has already received milestone awards from the X Prize foundation for rover development and optical systems: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize#Terrestri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize#Terrestrial_Milestone_Prizes)

The hard part of this mission, of course, is getting to the moon. This team is just working on the rover and its mission once it lands.

You're probably right that they wont make it to the moon, but the purpose of the X Prize Foundation is to stimulate commercial interest in emerging fields and industries. Sounds to me like it's working.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Developing a recurring payments system, what do I need to consider? - <AUTHOR>

I'm starting work on the payments portion of our saas load testing app. My partner and I have been dogfooding our app for a while on our own load test consulting gigs and we're at the point where we want to roll it out. The app is written in rails. I was planning to use a "credits" system, and thinking about using Braintree.
I'm wondering what things I need to consider, and trying to reinvent as little as possible. I'm wondering if there any full example apps I could work from. Maybe something with templates for Success emails? Failure emails? Card expiry? One time payment/monthly payments. Also wondering what libraries I should look at, etc.
I'm interested in pointers to libraries, samples, what to look at and think about, etc? Thanks! <comment><USER2> Things to think about:

1\. Keeping the credentials (account number, name, telephone number, credit card number, routing number and account number, etc etc). You may have legal duties to perform certain things, or to delete them every so often.

2\. Retries of failed payment authorizations. The ACH and credit card systems ARE NOT THAT RELIABLE. Your code will need to take account of network failure (failed to contact Paymentech or AmEx) vs a declined payment. Not the same things at all. You need to have the ability to retry an authorization.

3\. Your own software failures can leave a "batch" of payments in an inconsistent state. The dangers here are double-billing a human, and on the other hand, not billing a human. In one case, your clients cry out, in the other, you miss some money.

4\. Give your clients the ability to cancel a scheduled payment right up to the deadline, but don't let them schedule a payment too close to the deadline. Horrible race conditions that are hard to imagine ensue.

<comment><USER3> May have legal duties?

If you wish to handle credit card details in your systems, you must pass PCI compliance, and this is something you really, really do not want to do if you're a small company.

<comment><USER4> This is correct, I offer PCI complaince tools and advice, for recurring billing, you will need to have pci scanning on your servers, if your hosted and not doing sys admin yourselves or if you dont have sys admin skills it's going to cost you dearly. Basic advice, use a linode, get a sys admin who knows about pci compliance, set up pci compliant approved server, check with scanning software, we offer it for 200 GBP which includes the SAQ wizard which will save you days. pcicompliance.org.uk, nightmare process. Best advice, just starting, use Paypal...

<comment><USER5> I thought VMs didn't qualify for PCI compliance unless you had the physical hardware the VM runs on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The intellectual property for minimizing charge backs, preventing fraud, and handling exceptions and edge cases--knowledge built up over handling millions of transactions--is generally not worth relearning. Then there's the outrageous business crushing liability if something with CC data goes wrong.

You're usually better off keeping your brainpower focused on your app's differentiators, and leaving the recurring billing part to someone whose brain has already been sucked down the black hole of gateways, processors, and PCI compliance.

Chargify, Spreedly, and CheddarGetter come to mind as SaaS billers discussed frequently here.

(If your pain tolerance is higher, PayFlow Pro has tremendous institutional knowledge under the hood from handling over $100 million USD daily, despite changing corporate owners several times. Also compare Authorize.NET.)

<comment><USER7> "gateways, processors, and PCI compliance"

These are not that complex and should be well-understood by any would-be entrepreneur. We are writing our own recurring billing system right now for our startup www.wellhubstudios.com, using Auth.net CIM. Auth.net even offers recurring billing themselves. Another obvious issue with the services you mention such as Chargify et al is that they charge a higher rate for each transaction than most other Merchant Account providers, sometimes 1-2% more per transaction which, if your trying to run a viable business based on margins it is something to greatly consider. The Transaction fee we got was ridiculously low compared to what these "recurring billing" apps (which surely will reduce your headache) are offering. Off to make some money.....

<comment><USER6> To say the ins and outs of card processing should be "well-understood" by any would-be entrepreneur seems like saying biochemistry should be well understood by anyone who wants to wear a Got Milk? t-shirt.

How many stores write the software in their cash register? Who would argue that was useful instead of working on their product line?

The would-be entrepreneur really should be doing other things with his time, and if the card processing percentage difference matters to the business model, hopefully the model is micropayments or billing itself, because for anything larger, there should be room and the entrepreneur better watch out for the much larger expense of supporting billing.

Billing is rarely a differentiator, except when it goes wrong.

On the other hand, if you're selling billing itself as a service, as I see your site says you are, then sure. You're competing with Chargify, Spreedly, etc., for a more targeted vertical. So sure, billing is your product. In that case, agreed, it needs to be well-understood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> i implemented the recurring billing for <http://corduroysite.com> with braintree and ruby activemerchant.

i did the recurring billing manually rather than using braintree's automated billing. i'm storing credit card numbers and addresses in their secure "vault" and just store the associated token with each customer record for pci compliance and added peace of mind.

some things to consider:

\- store the last billed timestamp with each customer record, don't just sweep through each customer and try to bill for anyone with a billing date of today. if something goes wrong in your billing script halfway through, you don't want to double-bill those first customers and don't want to forget to bill the second half. when billing auth failures happen, you want to retry those failed customers the next day.

\- don't be quick to blame the customer for their card not going through. even if it is on their end, it might not be their specific fault, and may be their credit card company, someone else using their company card, etc.

for corduroy, it emails the customer with a notice saying the charge failed but it'll retry for a week or so before anything bad happens. it sends the error message from the credit card processor, though many times they're hard to decipher exactly what's wrong (usually a billing address change though). if the card continues to fail for a week, the customer's site is put into a disabled state where the customer's staff users can't login without fixing the problem, but none of their data is affected.

<comment><AUTHOR> What made you not use Braintree's automated billing? How long do you think it took you to implement from soup to nuts?

<comment><USER9> We have several projects (non-Braintree, we use Authorize.net) where the amount billed per month varies. Authorize.net's automatic recurring billing system doesn't allow you to change the amount in between pay periods, so we had to do something similar to what the original commenter said. Basically cron running a script that bills whoever needs to be billed for the proper amount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> __1\. It's about PCI compliancy ____2\. It's about running a cronjob/sending invoice mails ____3\. It's about fancy features (up/downgrade/trials/coupons/variable fees) __

1\. You will not be able to collect raw credit card data without having a PCI certification. This is easy to get by filling out a questionaire if you have only a few thousand transactions per year (below 200k iirc) and it's about a ~1500$ fee (iirc).

PCI compliancy limits your choices of payment gateways and inhouse software solutions:

a) you can use a payment gateway that supports recurring payments: they save your customer's raw data and provide you a token where you can bill future charges. This is the simplest way, does not require a PCI certification of you but has a huge vendor lock-in. If ActiveMerchant (e.g.) supports your gateway of choice AND recurring functionality WITHOUT dealing with raw credit card data: Go for it, it's the easiest way.

b) you can chose between more payment gateways by using the various 3rd party services that are PCI compliant (recurly.com, spreedly.com, chargify.com). Of course this is another vendor lock in and costs money.

2+3) This is about dealing with subscriptions and is primarily not credit card dependent. Of course you want to deal with chargebacks (you don't want to but this will happen) but usually the hardest parts are: up/downgrading within a paid period. Everything else is easily done, imho no special "kits" are needed UNLESS you're busy or lazy which is sometimes ok.

TL;DR

If you think that your MVP and core functionality needs more love than a fancy payment system, go with one of the services (recurly, chargify … or even paypal). If you business works, you've the time and money to upgrade to a better/your own solution/pci compliancy. It usually does not pay off to write your own billing system unless you already have paying customers :)

</comment><comment><USER11> You need to worry about everything mentioned as a feature at <https://cheddargetter.com/features>. No, I am not associated with them, but I have been researching subscription billing and found CheddarGetter's list of features a good template to compare other providers.

Why are you considering Braintree? They seem a little more expensive for starting out (though probably they are more robust and have better support than the rest -- Spreedly/Chargify/Recurly/CheddarGetter/Vindica/Zuora/Aria are some I researched).

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't looked exhaustively.

After the chargify free account fiasco, I'm staying away from them. I would have started with the free account there and moved up, but now I'd be too nervous to look at them. Not familiar with the others, but I'd be nervous to go with anyone who doesn't have serious momentum, or size in their favor, as I don't want to rewrite my code if a startup fails or deal with stranded account information.

<comment><USER12> That happened to my co-founders and I on our previous product (the one visible at the website in my profile). The only thing our payment provider ended up being serious about was getting acquired.

We had to change providers about a year after we launched, and it ended up costing us nearly half of our early customers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting that the data didn't transfer over to the acquiree. Is that a rule in terms of PCI I wonder?

<comment><USER12> My understanding was that it was a low-dollar tech acquisition. The acquiree had no interest in existing customers beyond the fact that they validated functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You might want to check out <http://railskits.com/saas/>. Yes it actually costs money, but consider what your time is worth.

<comment><USER14> Just bear in mind that the SaaS Rails Kit has been around for quite a while. I don't know if the features page lags behind the actual code, but: "Compatible with Rails 2.3.8"

<comment><USER15> I enquired the other day about Rails 3 support - he's working on it and expects to release it in the next few weeks.

<comment><USER16> In fact the rails3 release is mostly ready. There's a rails3 branch in the customer git repo that will be merged into master in the next week or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just use Braintree's API with their vault. It's as easy as it gets without going with Chargify/Spreedly/etc, especially if you're just doing plain vanilla recurring billing.</comment>


How to track social shares for specific URL free? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for an API or a way to track the number of social shares for specific URL's
E.g. Twitter Likes/ Retweets Facebook shares/ likes Google Plus Shares
I can only find paid tools and they are super expensive for a small time app. <comment><USER2> Track it yourself by writing code that uses the twitter and facebook api.

Facebook's api has an endpoint for getting the share count. with twitter you need to call their search api and count total retweets yourself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its likely expensive because it is a complex problem to solve. Can you post a link to some of the services that you have found that do this?

<comment><USER4> With Facebook and g+ is free. G+ is easy because it's 0 99,99999% of the time.

For Twitter you have to pay to a third party service like gnip. It makes senses since twitter is still losing money.</comment></comment>


Why use Go programming language? - <AUTHOR> http://www.usmanajmal.com/go-programming-by-todd-mcleod/ <comment><USER2> This is a pretty miserable example of PL advocacy. There may be good reasons to use Go. The attempt to make the case here is lazy, and largely uninformed.</comment>


Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion by Kokichi Sugihara - <AUTHOR> http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/ambiguous-cylinder-illusion-by-kokichi-sugihara <comment><USER2> I have some of these and they are wonderful, simply wonderful. When you get the lighting and angle exactly right they mess with your brain beautifully.

Beautifully baffling and wonderfully weird.

Love them.</comment>


Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as treatment of Covid-19; results of a trial [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Hydroxychloroquine_final_DOI_IJAA.pdf <comment><USER2> I've seen azithromycin counter-indicated as a treatment to be used at the same time as Hydroxychloroquine, on the medscape site, among a couple others, so this is surprising to read..

</comment><comment><USER3> The removed cases look a bit dodgy and controls are not unbiased... I wonder if it will pass peer review

<comment><USER4> They removed 6 patients of the test group (one because he died) and none from the control group. This is very strange because both had a similar size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm sure this is good work, but what's actually being tested? Weren't these the medicines the Chinese used in Hubei, what's the question left to ask after that?

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32031570](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32031570) was the top result when I googled. As a naïve bystander I don't understand the difference.

<comment><USER6> One of the least talked about things in science is the number of studies with results that aren't reproduced in subsequent attempts. More evidence is great.

<comment><USER5> A physician friend of mine explained it: If you're desperate by overwhelming numbers of patients, and there's a drug that may work, you do a "study", which means you give it to some of the patients and afterwards publish a paper with numbers based on the data you collect.

Ie. some studies are motivated by battlefield desperation, not by scientific curiosity or someone's need for a publication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why wasn't this started in America two months ago?

<comment><USER8> As recently as Jan 14, 2020, the World Health Organization stated that there was no evidence of human to human transmission for nCoV. [1]

The USA, and the world as a whole, has done an amazing job mobilizing itself to change borders, adjust social mores, limit large groups of people, and relax regulation around testing in order to get a treatment out.

And it's been working! We've already begun testing new vaccines, and cheap and already-approved treatments of Hydroxylchloroquine and chloroquine are showing extreme promise in both prevention and treatment of the disease. [2] [3]

It's easy to complain and blame America for problems, but look at how fast things have changed. Humanity as a whole is amazing -- in times of peril, we have the ability to adapt so rapidly that we can fundamentally change the world.

[1] [https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en](https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en) [2] [https://cleantechnica.com/2020/03/18/progress-on- covid-19-tr...](https://cleantechnica.com/2020/03/18/progress-on- covid-19-treatment/) [3] [https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/French- researche...](https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/French-researcher- in-Marseille-posts-successful-Covid-19-coronavirus-drug-trial-results)

<comment><USER9> I'll preface this with the statement that I am as far away as you can be from an antivaxxer. I do believe vaccines work, and that everyone should get their vaccines. Vaccines save lives and are safe.

However, I am a bit worried about a vaccine that is rushed to approval and use.

If the regular process to approve a vaccine takes years, I'm pretty confident that the vaccine is safe for 99.99% of the population. This is further verified by the sheer number of people getting the vaccine for years without adverse reactions (very rare cases excluded, like 1 in 100,000 or 1,000,000 rare.)

But what about a rushed nCoV vaccine? Wouldn't it be potentially more dangerous if it underwent weeks/a couple of months of testing for approval instead of the usual years? And if it wouldn't, then why do we require any other vaccine to undertake years of clinical trials before approving it then?

An other hypothesis I have (but can't verify, I don't know enough about how vaccines are made) is that the nCoV vaccine is basically another flu vaccine. We know how to make safe flu vaccines since most of the potential harm comes from the additives/preservatives in the vaccine (I might be wrong on that, please correct if that's not right.)

So, making a nCoV vaccine is basically the same additives/preservatives as the flu vaccine but with nCoV strains in it rather than the ordinary flu. And this way, the absence of danger is pretty well established already because the flu vaccine has been proved safe, the only question is whether the nCoV serum works or not. And thus, the only risk from a rushed vaccine is not that it is harmful but that it might not be reliably giving immunity.

Again, this is a guess from my rough understanding of how it all works. I'm posting this here hoping that someone much more knowledgeable than I am can chime in and clarify.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is the omission of politics a political stance? - <AUTHOR> When posting to HN it states posts must be on-topic and exclude things such as<p>"Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon"<p>I truly do enjoy the content and community here on HN, but my question is that given the current political climate isn't the decision to omit political content a political stance rather than an apolitical one? <comment><USER2> My preference is to see political stories here _only_ if they're related to technology or tech companies. That seems to be the line mods are straddling now, as far as I can tell.

For pure political stories, there are a million other places to discuss those, and honestly some really disturbing opinions (e.g. eugenics) come out of the woodwork here on those types of stories.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just because sports stories are omitted doesn't mean HN is taking a stance for/against sports, its just stating that isn't a topic for discussion here. Same for political discussions or crime.

Technology has become more pervasive in a lot of industries. I'd like to see less "news" articles posted here that really have nothing to do the creation of or new insights on technology and just tangentially are related to "tech".

</comment><comment><USER4> To the main question, I think the answer is yes, although that's only something I've recently come around to.

To strike a metaphor, is ignoring or not participating in religion a 'religious stance'? It depends on your frame of reference. To someone who is religious, yes. To someone unaware or ignorant of religion, no.

So, why is ignoring or not participating in politics a political stance? Because unlike with religion, we _have no choice_ to live outside of the systems which politics govern. You are affected by the politics of your country and your community _even if_ you are unaware or ignorant of them, therefore the frame of reference is within a political system and a lack of politics is a political stance. Purely IMHO, of course.

</comment><comment><USER5> Look what happens when this rule doesn't exist, you end up like the biggest subreddits. Wall-to-wall politics, bots, manipulation, censorship and just a general awful place to be.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't mind it so long as the political discussion is localized to political stories, and so long as those stories are the minority of content on HN. Generally speaking, the political discussion here is better than on reddit, but I only want to engage with it when I seek it out. What's frustrating is when political discussion creeps into totally unrelated threads.

</comment><comment><USER7> Given the current political climate, I'd like to make sure we're extra vigilant about keeping that content off HN. I've already deleted three accounts on other community sites. HN is my last refuge. I'm flagging it all.

</comment><comment><USER8> It is never not the case that you can make everything about politics and that politics is a mind killer.

If we accept that not taking a stance is a political act then you can extend that to everything.

If anything, HN should be far more vigilate in banning politics given the current political environment.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'll put it this way: I'd like to see thoughtful discussions of the flaws of MCAS and what incentives led the Federal Aviation Authority to approve the 737 MAX. I am not interested in discussions of good pilots vs bad pilots.

If we think problems are systemic or structural, then lets talk systems and structures.

</comment><comment><USER10> If I ask my dentist a gynecology question, does it make him sexist not to answer it?

No, it's simply off-topic for the forum.

</comment><comment><USER11> Emphatic "no".

</comment><comment><USER12> No

</comment><comment><USER13> That brings it probably closer to a libertarian position</comment>


Civil Liberties Groups and Internet Companies Demand an End to NSA Spying - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/86-civil-liberties-groups-and-internet-companies-demand-end-nsa-spying

<comment><USER2> I dig the letter, but someone needs to have edited this for content.

> _" reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer"_

That's clearly factually incorrect. Snowden wasn't a career man, and also wasn't an officer. He was an IT infrastructure analyst. He's a support guy.

Reading posts like this make the distinction (even w/in the intel world) very clear: [http://qz.com/92509/edward-snowdens-lesson-to-both- businesse...](http://qz.com/92509/edward-snowdens-lesson-to-both-businesses- and-the-nsa-your-it-people-are-your-biggest-risk/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I see that Google, Facebook, Microsoft et al are conspicuous by their absence from that list. Kind of shouts out how little they feel for your (and my) data privacy.

<comment><USER4> It would be pretty shocking if Microsoft continued the "Scroogle" charade after all of this.

But you're right, I would've thought Google and the others would be the _first_ to start a major lobbying campaign against NSA's surveillance powers. So maybe they don't really care about user privacy that much, or don't think this story will damage them too much in US or abroad, and that they don't really need to do anything to fix the broken trust relationship they have with their users now.

<comment><USER5> Or if Google continued their "Don't be evil" façade.

<comment><USER6> Or if Facebook... well. Guess they didn't really ever pretend, did they?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The spying will never, ever stop.

This plays out as: The NSA etc. claim "Okay, we've stopped spying!" right up until they get caught again.

Then the cycle starts over.

\--

There is no technically feasible way of ensuring that you're not being snooped on. Thus: you will always be snooped on.

<comment><USER8> I doubt that the NSA, or the executive branch, or the legislature, will ever be put in a position to have to claim that they've stopped spying.

There will be brief outcry, some half-hearted claims by a few in charge that they will look into it, and after the next shooting or terrorist attack it will be on the second page, soon to drop off the radar completely.

At least that's what I'd put my money on. They won't even be bothered to lie about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would like to see Googles name on this action.

Now is the time for Silicon Valley to step up.

<comment><USER9> I dont really mean this as a criticism..

but it seems like a good opportunity to really send a message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It won't have any effect. Most people don't care, so long as they feel safe and aren't inconvienced.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe you're right, maybe most people think that they have "nothing to hide" and want the government to "protect" them against the current boogieman (the USSR, now Islamists, tomorrow China?).

But most people _do_ care about Freedom and civil liberties, on a less "abstract" level. They just don't quite see the connection yet.

And then it's _our_ responsibility to inform those who don't care of the reality of what's happening and what is at stake --freedom of speech, democracy. Before it's to late to do it.

<comment><USER11> I think the public out cry of loss of civil liberties in this instance verse the relative lack thereof regarding the Executive creating the authority to name US citizens for extra judicial targeted drone strikes is very telling.

It is not that people fear, or care more about the governmental power to intercept our electronic communications than the reality that citizenry might be killed without right to trial - they feel the loss of civil liberty in one instance is more likely to affect them personally, that is why it is important to remember "injustice anywhere is threat to justice everywhere." \- MLK Jr.

<comment><USER12> That's not the only reason. With drones strikes we all can essentially see when they've been carried out. With wiretapping there is no such evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Complete waste of time. This is not where your problems are nor is it going to lead anywhere. May I offer [http://chxrambling.tumblr.com/post/52584359139/why-are- you-s...](http://chxrambling.tumblr.com/post/52584359139/why-are-you-so- outraged-now)

"you need to attack corporations bottom line for political reasons and make it very clear that's what you are doing"

</comment><comment><USER14> It is interesting to conjecture and theorize about the personality of the US intelligence community and just what price they are willing to pay to protect different types of information.

For example: I wonder how much of their secrecy is really about protecting American citizens. After the Boston bombings (and 9/11 for that matter) there seemed to be no secrecy about the bombers. All types of information came out: that Russian intelligence had warned them about these guys, that one of them had already been investigated by the FBI for something else. All the information coming out had this open, non-secret feel. Same for 9/11: we suddenly knew about the movements and actions of the terrorists for months prior to the World Trade acts. How they trained, how they hijacked the planes, how Bin Laden had engineering insight and knew that hitting the towers at a certain height would make them collapse.

PRISM seems murky as shit compared to that. It's almost like it's dealing in a completely different type of information altogether. This is what makes me wonder about what percentage of PRISM-type surveillance is really about locating some band of terrorists training in some desert camp. The secrecy around it seems much more likely to protect the spies than the American people.

I do refuse to believe that the NSA employees are merciless warmongers looking to secretly destabilize nations and install puppet regimes while somehow profiting off of the anarchy that ensues (although a lot of US history is precisely that). I think most of them genuinely believe that they are doing good work that makes the world a safer place. But the personality of the organization they work for doesn't fit the rest of the picture and I just wonder what it is they are told in order to feel that the secrecy is justified.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's funny how they put 4chan with the 'F's in the list of supporting companies instead of at the beginning where you'd normally find names starting with digits.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, 4chan shouldn't be your lead-in supporting web community when you're trying to look legitimate. It's bad enough that silly sounding names like "Boing Boing" are in there so early.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps the bigger issue we need to discuss is are entities like the NSA providing value, honestly how many intelligence agencies do we need?

</comment><comment><USER18> How is the NSA going to stop doing something they've never admitted to doing?

<comment><USER19> If desirable, stopping, or better regulating the NSA is the government's job. Of course they wont suddenly decide to stop.

<comment><USER20> Stopping the NSA is about as likely as a snowball surviving Jenna Jameson's cleavage.

More probable is renaming PRISM and (if the political heat [sorry] warrants it) splitting it into smaller entities, and then re-mount [ok, I'll stop now] the business-as-usual bike, as though nothing had ever happened.

<comment><USER19> I volunteer for snow ball duty....

I know what you mean though. My point is that you need the political will, and politicians are way too scared of a bomb going off, and the people forgetting that they demanded privacy, asking why the NSA didn't magically know of it in advance.

I do think the people need to once and for all decide on what they want, and once decided, be reminded of it every year or so.

My opinion is that Im happy to take more risk of being killed in a terror attack and keeping freedoms. Since one is about 1000 times more likely to be killed in a car crash, I reckon we can have some freedom back.

<comment><USER20> We agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what would happen to these companies if they simply refused to comply with the order to give access to their data?

<comment><USER22> They'd allegedly get lucrative govenment contacts cancelled:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_for_NSA_spying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_for_NSA_spying)

It has also been suggested that the insider trading charge were trumped up as retribution, in that the CEO was accused of purchasing shares with 'insider' knowledge of government contacts, but that he was prohibited by law from publicly disclosing those contracts.</comment></comment>


Evernote's new CEO and the elephant in the room - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/evernote-new-ceo-chris-oneill-one-year <comment><USER2> Honestly I never understood the success of Evernote : you don't get much more value than if you were using a bunch of rich text files in a Dropbox folder (OK I'm exaggerating a bit).</comment>


Preview FirefoxOS with R2D2B2G - <AUTHOR> http://davidwalsh.name/r2d2b2g <comment><USER2> Why are they allowing the Twitter app to have a square background? At least force it into a circle background even with its own square background. I actually like the consistency of having every icon a circle no matter matter. It makes it look much cleaner than how Android icons look (all different shapes and sizes). I suggest they fully enforce the circle backgrounds.

<comment><USER3> It's not as if it's difficult, it's just border-radius: 24px; or an SVG mask.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Or, if you have a Galaxy Nexus, try out an alpha port here: <http://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=1805282>

<comment><USER5> Thanks! Been meaning to check this out for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really nice! I just tried it for a few minutes and that's impressive. Works really well on Mac and FF Nightly.

A few things thought:

\- I didn't find how to switch between apps.

\- Setting a custom resolution will be a good feature.

\- Copy/Paste from desktop to B2G

edit: Ok so to go back to home screen, on a mac use fn+left arrow key of fn+right arrow ke

<comment><USER7> To switch between apps, you can hold the Home button down (Don't know what that is mapped to in r2d2b2g, and it will 'zoom out' to a WebOS-like list of cards that you can swipe left or right.

Swipe up to Quit the app. Press home, or one of the cards, to return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately it seemed like I couldn't get it to work on Windows.

How long is it supposed to take before you see anything in the simulator?

<comment><USER9> I had the same issue here (Firefox 16, linux). I downloaded the latest nightly build and it works for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> OT, but Firefox's extension downloading (at least on Windows 8 Desktop) seems to stop when the pop-up loses focus, meaning you either have to sit there for 8 minutes, or right-click and do "Save Link as...", and then open the downloaded files.

<comment><USER10> There is a tiny plugin logo to the left of the address bar. Clicking on that will bring the popup back. Easily missed though.

<comment><USER3> For me it restarted the download...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great to hear that it works with all your tools!

Follow the development at <https://github.com/mozilla/r2d2b2g/> . We are working on the first release, so feedback is more than welcome!

</comment><comment><USER12> Lovely, I just tried with Selenium and it works. Also, with Eclipse Orion on the other tab and all you need is Firefox to do all development.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not working for me in Firefox 16.0.2 on Windows 7. There's just a black phone sized Firefox window on my screen.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't know why they won't just start making nightly builds. If they setup Jenkins and produced GSM and CDMA Galaxy Nexus build, they would increase testing and feedback significantly.

<comment><USER15> I believe there are licensing issues with the actual device drivers, they can't be distributed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great, so now _all_ my mobile apps can have the same performance, consistent look & feel, and full access to the phone's capabilities as Phonegap / Cordova / Titanium! Clearly this is a step forward for mobile development.</comment>


TempleOS Creator Terry Davis Has Passed - <AUTHOR> https://templeos.org/ <comment><USER2> My deepest condolences. TempleOS was a thing of beauty, which I would totally see used x86-64 VMs instead of 'thicker' operating systems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link is down.

Terry Davis was a troubled individual but an impressive hacker.</comment>


Microsoft's Phil Spencer Says Amazon and Google Are Xbox's Real Competition - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/5/21124148/phil-spencer-microsoft-xbox-xcloud-amazon-google-competition <comment><USER2> I hope not. What we've seen so far with Google Stadia is not exciting to say the least. Sony has the right idea with focusing on home consoles, the market is just not mature yet. There is after all a world outside of the US, where not everyone has fast internet connections and unlimited bandwidth. It is disappointing to see Phil more or less announcing the Xbox's defeat over the console "wars".</comment>


Ask HN: Financial independence in high cost of living city? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I'm a recent grad with about 2 years of professional experience, currently working as a software developer. Even though I think my salary is higher than average for where I work, I am still struggling to come to terms with the high cost of living in my city.
The average cost of a detached home in Toronto has just passed $1M Canadian dollars (~$820k US). Even if I were to commit to a commuter lifestyle and live outside the city, a 20% down payment could require upwards of $100,000. Some say that a recession in the housing market is inevitable, but with so much foreign investment and insatiable demand for detached homes, I just find it hard to believe. Worst of all, with real estate prices having climbed ~10% each year for the past few years (faster than the average salary, and at a higher rate than a typical mortgage), real estate ownership is getting further and further out of reach.
When I look southward, I see such vibrant cities in the US where developers are getting paid more, and the cost of living (and real estate ownership) are much lower.
I fear that I am coming off sounding as entitled, as many of my non-techie friends are struggling to find jobs relevant to their studies, while I am in a situation where I am quickly paying off my student loans and trying to increase my savings. I'm still young, and perhaps I am just asking for too much. I would very much like to spend more time working on my own projects, and would like to one day do that full-time. However, I can't imagine that happening without a large safety net (not having to worry about a mortgage, or rent).
I guess I haven't really asked a question yet ... I was just hoping to discuss this topic and hear your stories. <comment><USER2> I'm older (54), live in San Diego, CA. San Diego is also high cost with a 440K median house price.

I was employed as an electrical hardware engineer for a computer peripherals company until November 2014. The job market for electrical engineers in San Diego is currently in an awful state.

While I was employed, I managed to buy a vacation home which I converted to a rental property after I became unemployed. I also was able to build a large nest egg of investments and cash. I am using these to live off of at the moment.

I am Financially Independent to the point where I can pay for basic living costs, but not for fancy stuff like eating out or vacations.

When I became unemployed, I updated my home engineering lab with a new test equipment by selling items on Ebay which I no longer needed. I currently spend a lot of my time developing open source hardware,firmware, and software and upload my projects to Github.

If the job market in San Diego improves, I would consider going back to work, but it would have to be on my terms. I have enjoyed not having to commute to work every weekday. Any new job would have allow 80 to 100% telecommuting.

Financial independence can be achieved, but it requires sacrifice and dedication. For details on how to do this I recommend visiting the Mr. Money Mustache blog: [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com) for ideas and support.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. I'm saddened to hear about the tough job market you're facing, but I'm happy to hear about your garage hacking :) I personally wish you the best of luck. Your GitHub repo's are neat!

San Diego seems like a great city, with much nicer weather than Toronto - I've heard a lot of nice things about it. While the housing prices are equally high, it seems like tech salaries are much higher there, compared to Toronto.

I would like to one day be in your situation, but I feel like starting an independent adult life is harder than it used to be (mainly from accumulating student debt) for graduates in previous generations.

Do you think you could elaborate a little more about your early career?

Thanks so much!

<comment><USER2> I have been passionate about electronics since I was 6 years old.

In my senior year in high school, I landed a part time job as an electronics technician. When I graduated, I worked full time for that company for 10 years as a self-taught electrical engineer. I started working on my college degree (Computer Science). I was able to take advantage of tuition reimbursement offered by the company to pay for college. Student loans were not really needed back then as college costs were reasonable. I bought my first house.

I switched companies in 1989 and worked for almost 26 years as an Electrical Engineer. I finished my Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science at the second company using tuition reimbursement, and my own funds. I really wanted to do a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering, but there were not any evening classes available for EE at the time. Sold my first house, bought my second house and my vacation home. Paid off my vacation home, refinanced my first home several times.

I think the main things which got me to where I am today are the following:

1\. Think of debt as slavery. It should be paid off as quickly as possible. 2\. Have as few children as possible. (I have none). 3\. Don't spend frivolously. Live way before your means. 4\. Try to do as many home and car repairs as you can yourself. 5\. Make sure you are adequately insured. In the US, you need medical insurance to cover medical costs and liability insurance to protect from lawsuits. As your assets grow, you need to adjust your liability insurance accordingly. 6\. Invest regularly and often.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again for the reply. It sounds like you've always maintained some level of financial independence, even at a young age, which is awesome.

Have you ever wanted to work on your own startups? It seems like you have some personal projects - why work a traditional career?

If you could do it all over again, would you do anything differently?

<comment><USER2> Things I would have done differently:

1\. I should have started earlier. I didn't start working towards financial independence till my second job. 2\. I should have bought more rental properties.

Regarding startups:

For hardware products, startups involve a lot of effort. You usually have regulatory things to deal with and that is a big burden. Also the capital requirements are more than a pure software startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It doesn't sound like you're looking for financial independence. It sounds more like you're looking to buy all the same things that everybody else buys and otherwise act like all the other adults you see, but be able to do so _now_ with your entry level salary.

But that's what _everybody_ wants. And it's why people end up living beyond their means.

If you want actual financial independence, that's pretty easy to pull off. Even in a place with million dollar houses. Just convince yourself that you don't need a million dollar house. Or a nice car. Or your own place without roomates. All you really need is to pay that debt down to zero over the next year or so then find an equilibrium where you can live on about a quarter of your take home pay.

Then you're done.

At a developer salary (even a canadian developer salary), that will start you down a path of saving a _lot_ of money in a hurry. Enough that were you to lose your job entirely five years down the road you could happily coast along another five years before really needing to worry about money.

That's what you're shooting for. Notice that at no time do you do any of that coasting in a million dollar house. But if you keep at it, you'll eventually get to a place where you can buy that place in cash.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nothing wrong with wanting a detached home. Wanting one where it's too expensive, or getting one far away because it's affordable while continuing to work where it's expensive, probably requires a rethink.

Right now you're building experience, knowledge and savings/investments, so you should probably focus on that. So live as cheap as practical where you are.

At some point the curves will cross. If you still want a detached house, and you haven't become rich relative to where you work, then move to somewhere that you can work and live cheaply. Then buy your house.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is definitely the pragmatic choice, and it's what I keep telling myself. Thanks for reverberating the message :)

If I may ask, how do you feel about your personal situation right now? Are you living in an expensive city?

<comment><USER4> Denver's not so bad. It would be a great choice after you've done whatever you're doing where you are now, there's a reasonable amount of tech work. Lot's of telecom (but that's not all), something to do with being at 105 west I've been told. Boulder is nearby, and lots of tech jobs there. Also the skiing is great, and only when you want to. :)

Ah, here we go, "Denver's west-central geographic location in the Mountain Time Zone (UTC−7) also benefits the telecommunications industry by allowing communication with both North American coasts, South America, Europe, and Asia in the same business day. Denver's location on the 105th meridian at over one mile (1.6 km) in elevation also enables it to be the largest city in the U.S. to offer a "one-bounce" real-time satellite uplink to six continents in the same business day. Qwest Communications, Dish Network Corporation, Starz- Encore, DIRECTV, and Comcast are a few of the many telecommunications companies with operations in the Denver area." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver)

EDIT: s/east/west/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a startup founder living in Toronto, and thought I'd post in counterpoint. I live in a small apartment, and pay myself using any money I can cobble together from grants, contracting, investment, etc. I have no interest in buying a house, and I'm actually pretty sure that committing to that would be counterproductive if you're founding your own startup. If you think it's necessary to have a paid-off house before you start something, then you likely don't fit the risk profile of someone who would successfully be able to do so. No first time startup founder I know owns their own house, and most pay their own rent, and most have jumped off to do their own thing because they simply cannot wait any longer and hate working on anyone else's stuff.

On the other hand, you're right about developer salaries being low here, comparatively. It's partly a function of the startups that exist here, and of Canadian cultural tendencies to just sit and simmer. If engineers are unlikely to jump ship, it's likely going to mean that salaries are lower than they could be.

So if you just want to get paid more, interview at a bunch of places and get higher offers, then tell your boss. If you want to be a startup founder, then quit your job when you've got six months' runway saved up, incorporate your company in London, ON, and do your best to get NRC IRAP and OCE SmartStart, and expect the rest to work out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for your reply! How do you like being a T.O. startup founder?

I'm not 100% committed to buying a house, but I don't have any runway to start out with my personal projects full time. What I meant to say was that I would never want to be in a situation where I can't meet my financial obligations (rent as a part of a longer-term lease, or mortgage payments). I am doing my best to get out from under my student debt and build my runway/rainy day fund as quickly as possible.

Do you think that low salaries might also be a function of brain drain? There are a lot of tech workers in Canada on visas, and it might be because a lot of Canadians leave the country to work in SFBA, NYC, Seattle, etc.

Could you point me to any resources for information about starting companies in Ontario, and receiving grants? You seem like you've got quite a bit of know-how :)

<comment><USER5> No problem! So far it's decent, but for the stuff I like (consumer-facing businesses) it's definitely nothing like the Bay. There's a lot less money for early-stage startups, there's a lot more government money (which is good and bad), and there's a more risk-aversion on behalf of founders and investors alike. Here's an instructive read: [https://medium.com/toronto- tech/toronto-d0ea5da434e](https://medium.com/toronto-tech/toronto-d0ea5da434e)

I was fortunate enough to not have student debt when I graduated, so that's one thing that made my leap easier. Agreed, though - I don't wanna go broke either :)

I think braindrain probably plays a role... But ultimately, the issue is that there aren't even enough (successful) startups in the province to employ all those grads if they stayed.

Actually helpful resources are scarce but we could grab coffee or skype if you wanna talk about your options! My email link is in my profile. It's always best to find someone who has done exactly what you intend to do, so just keep talking with folks.

-Andrew</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I post mediocre and/or small projects on GitHub? - <AUTHOR> Having 1.5 years left on my CS degree (of 5 years in total in Sweden) I wonder how potential employers rate the amount of content vs quality - when using GitHub as an extension to my regular resume?
I have developed quite a few programs varying in quality and size over the years. I however feel that for every program I develop I find that my previous programs lack in quality, and sometimes I even get a sense of shame in having written that code. This prevents me from submitting anything to GitHub at all, thinking that I will regret it later as I learn more. There is also the problem of documentation - large portions of code that I write lack comments, as at the time of writing the code seems "obvious".
So what do you think? Is it worth re-working the code, adding comments & code refactoring in order to present some sort of portfolio or should I wait until I feel I have reached a level of maturity and standard of quality? <comment><USER2> I wouldn't get too hung up about it. Just having a Github account puts you ahead of the curve, and most Github accounts are just random personal projects and junk, including mine. My current employer even pointed out that I have the same problem (very few comments and not much documentation) with my projects, and I just told him "it's all personal projects" and it wasn't an issue (but YMMV obviously.)

Most employers don't care. Of the ones that will, most will only give your code a cursory glance just to make sure you're not a drooling imbecile. For _those_ employers who actually look and actually care, maybe, have one really shiny project and refer to it your resume. Really work on some final projects and consider posting those. Although, if you do add documentation and comments, etc, then your projects will be more attractive to the open source community as a whole (which will, of course, make you look better to employers.) But do it if you want to, not because you feel you need to.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, you should.

The positives (e.g. learning something new, getting feedback, improving, etc) far outweigh negatives (the worst that can happen is that no one will care).

> _I however feel that for every program I develop I find that my previous > programs lack in quality_

You're not alone, it's normal. No one likes being judged, but it's one of the main ways of improving and should be embraced.

</comment><comment><USER4> From an interviewer's perspective, they just want to see that you can use GitHub and write some code that looks well-formatted and well-reasoned. Nothing is more disheartening than opening up someone's GitHub profile and seeing 70 repositories, most of which have less than 10 commits, or are just forks.

I'd recommend using GitHub however you want, and when you want to apply for jobs, create a small website on GitHub Pages highlighting your best projects. If you can intelligently talk about your different projects and how you improved between them, that will be a hugely positive signal when applying for a junior position.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't worry about cleaning up old code, so much as I'd worry about making sure that new projects showed progress and improvement on those fronts to old ones.

I actually quite literally use Github as my resume, but while I'm not 100% proud of some of my earlier projects, I simply keep working to make sure the next one is better so that my Github demonstrates my ability to grow and improve in a tangible way.

</comment><comment><USER6> Post anything you want - nobody will really care, even if you use your GitHub profile as part of your resume. Heck, many won't even check out the code (I do).

I would mention it only if there is any code there you would like to show off though. I got tons of crap on my profile, but the valuable thing that anyone sees with mine are the projects I have contributed to and the quality of my contributions.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think that it is fine to have small mediocre things on your github. It is your github after all, use it to host your things so that you can use them when needed.

Maybe point out some of the more solid applications that people could check out on your resume, but really having anything on your github is a plus on its own.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think any project is a good one - service a purpose. I have been writing small programs to fill my needs for like 3 years, improvee them and share with my coworkers, you can use github for a lot of stuffs i.e. I have my webpage code in github there are no real constraints here.</comment>


Why Drug Packaging Matters - <AUTHOR> http://medcrun.ch/2011/01/package-design-for-drugs-does-matter/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting thought on a medical topic that's being neglected.</comment>


Montana city asks for social network logins on job application - <AUTHOR> http://www.montanasnewsstation.com/Global/story.asp?S=10551414

<comment><USER2> The /. comments on this were rather good too. Points made:

1\. Most sites have a terms of service that says you will not give you login information out to anyone else, or allow anyone else to login to your account. So by requesting this information the City is asking potential applications to violate a contract. Especially since they specifically mentioned Facebook and this _is_ in the Facebook ToS.

2\. There are a lot of things that are illegal for employers to ask for (sexual preference, groups that you belong to, ethnicity, etc) and most of these things are present in someone's Facebook profile. So by requiring access to Facebook, you are requiring them to hand over access to information that it is illegal to require...

3\. Lots of people use the same password for multiple accounts. Their Facebook password could be their online banking password. That puts an employer at a HUGE liability if one of the employees breaks into this information to do some identity theft. Even if some 3rd party gains access through another method, you could be investigated as the possible leak and/or theif.

4\. By requiring users to provide this information (i.e. passwords to personal accounts) you're only going to end up with employees that will easily give out secure information. The vulnerability of your workplace to social engineering attacks will go WAY up because anyone that would be smart enough to question whether there really is a 'Bob from IT' that 'needs their password' are people that wouldn't fill in their information into the application.

5\. Employers that do this open themselves up to possible lawsuits from people for requiring information that no one will ever truthfully fill out and then using it as some sort of 'we can fire you at any time because we know that you lied on your application' carrot over someone's head.

Edit:

Also, I could give my Facebook login to this employer. Deface my Facebook account, then claim that the company/ did it b/c the company had access to that information.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hundreds of cities, dozens of departments in every one of them. Fifty state government, hundreds of departments in each. Thousands of semi-independent departments in the federal government.

You have to figure that just statistically, one of them is going to do something stupid in hiring every once in awhile.

Is there are broader point to be made here?

<comment><USER4> To answer your quest: no, not really- but it is still important to name and shame.

<comment><USER5> How about if the naming and shaming takes place at Reddit, Digg or any number of other online communities where that sort of thing is not only acceptable but encouraged? I, for one, would prefer not to see posts here whose sole purpose is to point out the fact that someone working for a local government in Montana made a mistake.

Besides, while this kind of practice may be particularly loathsome to us it doesn't seem to be bothering the people filling out the applications. The article says no candidate has withdrawn from consideration over the policy. Further, when presented with an alternative method to check out profiles without usernames and passwords they said they'd look into it. It seems like a simple mistake made by someone who doesn't necessarily have the most acute awareness of how social networking sites work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure who's dumber -- the person working for the City that decides this is actually a good idea, or the person applying for the job who actually gives them their user name and password on the job application.

<comment><USER3> If you're the kind of person applying for a municipal job in Bozeman, MT, it's probably very smart to comply with this request. Which is why cities shouldn't be making it.

<comment><USER7> I miss Bozeman, MT, but this is one of the reasons I'll never be returning. I guarantee that most of the population there doesn't see why this would be a big deal. Drunk driving is a forgivable offense, actin' up on the internet is not.

<comment><USER8> Really? I spend a summer working in Glacier Park, and I have a friend who lives out there, but I just can't understand what aspect of "actin' up on the internet" would be intolerable. Are they just trying to figure out if you're some type of sexual freak or pervert, or what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if anyone is pointing out to them that the privacy violation goes beyond the privacy of just the job applicant.

Friends and business associates of the job applicant also have privacy expectations around content they intend to be viewable only by trusted individuals.

<comment><USER10> FTA:

"You know, I can understand that concern. One thing that's important for folks to understand about what we look for is none of the things that the federal constitution lists as protected things, we don't use those. We're not putting out this broad brush stroke of trying to find out all kinds of information about the person that we're not able to use or shouldn't use in the hiring process," Sullivan said.

<comment><USER9> That's what I mean - by that quote you can see they still don't get it. He's talking about "the person" (his words). There is more than one person getting their private information reviewed. And the article says "The requirement raises questions concerning applicants' privacy rights." So the reporter doesn't get it either. It's not just affecting the applicant.

<comment><USER10> That quote is in reply to: "Another concern the applicant raised was that by providing the City with a Facebook user name and password the City not only has access to the applicant's page but also to the pages belonging to all of the applicant's Facebook "friends.""

I think they get it just fine, they just don't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tagentially related: I have actually been planning on putting some clarifying information on any future resumes that I send out indicating where my website is, where you can find some "jerf" postings, and which are _not_ me. I don't even use Facebook and the last thing I need is to lose some job because some guy with my same name is out there making ethnic slurs or something on a Facebook page.

I'm actually surprised that we haven't seen a news story about that, perhaps because if it happens you'll never know that's _why_ you didn't get the job. As more people come on the Internet, the odds of your name or handle being truly unique go down. The google results for "jerf" have gone from all me, all the time in 1999, to a random hodgepodge of results, mostly courtesy of user accounts on high-page-rank services I don't use that aren't me, oh, and _oi_ for that Urban Dictionary result. (That one was news to me. I could have gone without knowing that one, even though I'm sure it's another of UB's crappy "some guy somewhere used this word once and I'm going to put it on UB" results.) And my real name's results have long since been cluttered by "not me", some of which are even close enough to me to be confusing to a potential employer due to technology interests.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why is the password necessary? That's what I don't get. I totally understand why a government agency would want to be able to see public information, but this implies that they want to see what isn't public as well.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like an intelligence test. Anyone who would submit their password is too dumb to work there.

<comment><USER14> Or dumb enough..</comment></comment>


Israel's huge binary options fraud - <AUTHOR> http://www.timesofisrael.com/13-sickening-truths-about-israels-huge-binary-options-fraud/ <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_option#How_binary_optio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_option#How_binary_options_work) Wikipedia explains a binary option as:

 _Binary options "are based on a simple 'yes' or 'no' proposition: Will an underlying asset be above a certain price at a certain time?" Trades place wagers as to whether that will or will not happen. If a customer believes the price of a commodity or currency will be above a certain price at a set time, he buys the binary option. If he believes it will be below that price, he sells the option. The price of a binary is always under $100.

Every option settles at $100 or $0, $100 if the bet is correct, 0 if it is not_</comment>


Rovio's $42M Investment In 2011 Actually Went To Its Owners - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/05/21/rovio-missing-42m-investment

<comment><USER3> Why are people bothered when founders of hot companies take money off the table during a financing? They own a load of personal stock and then they sell it. Why does this so often cause pushback and discomfort?

I could understand if it were a down round or if the available capital was limited but these stories almost always centre around companies (AirBnB, Rovio) doing very well and raising an unconstrained financing round.

The only remaining reason I can think of is the concern that once cashed out, founders will cease to work as hard but there's little evidence of that and plenty of founders who were rich to begin with.

Is there something I'm missing or is this just frugal guilt?

<comment> Tuna-Fish It signals distrust in the company. People equate it with pump-and-dump schemes, grabbing the money before value creation and running.

In strictly rational terms, it almost always makes sense. Even late funding round startups are risky -- when you have that kind of risk, the sanest thing you can do is to diversify early and often. Losing half of your potential future payout is nothing if you can exchange it for guaranteed middle-class lifestyle (or the funding for your next startup...).

<comment><USER3> And that cash-out-early logic is assuming that each subsequent dollar has the same utility which doesn't. I can't remember the exact figure but I think that economists drop capital utility by a factor of 10 for each zero. The first million has ten times more utility than the tenth which means that it makes terrific sense to cash out.

Compound that with the fact that the utility of cash is, like the value of health an integral over time and you have more reason still to cash out early. Every if the utility were the same, five extra years of your life with the end-cash is five extra years of utility.

I get your point about pump and dump and if it was a no-name hustler ringing up a round for a just-arrived company I'd understand that but none of these companies ever are. I feel there's something deeper driving the reaction - <USER2> seems more resentful than rational.</comment></comment></comment>


Serverless Golang API with AWS Lambda - <AUTHOR> https://read.acloud.guru/serverless-golang-api-with-aws-lambda-34e442385a6a <comment><USER3> I'm terribly skeptical of AWS Lambda as the engine of a _main-line_ REST API. There seems to be no way to avoid the cold-start time: not only when your function is first called from a dormant state, but also when request load rises, bringing additional workers online. (A timer that constantly pings your service only protects against the first, and I hope we all agree is a dirty hack.)

I'm hoping someone will correct me if I'm missing something. Otherwise it seems like Lambda isn't really suited to use-cases where random latency spikes would degrade user experience.

<comment><USER4> Fun fact, on the lowest memory available, cold start times are really bad in Python when you have a lot of libraries that need to be imported.

The Lambda runtime is exceedingly slow at that on the 128MB tier. This is in fact the case for Django apps, even in their default state.

Now here's where the fun fact starts: If a function times out during cold start, it hasn't successfully been warmed. That means upon its next trigger, it will coldstart again.

Now lets say you deploy a tiny little function over wsgi. You see in your metrics that it takes an avg of 200ms... now, you're a smart dev, you set its global timeout to 3 seconds down from the default of 30 seconds because you don't want to get billed more than necessary. But as it turns out, the cold start takes on average 10 seconds. Your function now never successfully completes.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but why would you do that? If you're running Django, set up your ec2 instance, and run Django. If you're running lambda, don't spin up an entire framework in it to run for individual requests. That basically defeats the purpose. You're not running a tiny little function, as you said. Your running an entire web framework that's running one tiny function. Instead of doing that, write an actual simple function that does the one thing it needs to do. It will take 200-300 ms to spin up and run the first time, as well as on requests when it scales up, but otherwise will run in 2ms. Keep it really simple and stateless. If some part of that doesn't work for your use case, then don't use lambda.

It was not meant to run an entire framework in. If you're reaching for an entire framework to run a simple function in a lambda, I'd bail on one or the other. Don't use a framework, or don't use lambda.

<comment><USER4> I mostly agree, but sometimes it's simply convenient to use the regular Django wsgi routines to serve parts of a Django app. The alternative there if you want to serve stuff behind URLs is using the Api Gateway and that is atrocious to work with. Also, whenever there's a discussion about lambda, people talk about "lock in" and the api gateway is a much bigger lock-in than lambda.

Example: I have an API in Django which uses DRF, served on a classic web server instance behind load balancers etc. Parts of that API, which have the same authentication/business logic/etc, are much more suited to lambda, I'm sure it's not hard to imagine :)

<comment><USER5> That's fair. Api Gateway is definitely the lock-in as well.

<comment><USER6> Everything is a lock-in. :) Lambda has a straightforward interface so wrapping your functions in something else should be easy enough.

<comment><USER7> Also, Lambda is just the glue code. You have to use many other AWS stuff that really locks you in deep, even if you functionallity could "theoretically" be ported to different providers.

<comment><USER6> If there is a real need to port your infrastructure you can do it in small steps. Using single cloud provider is also not smart. If I need to do huge data processing I will never do it with AWS although this is where the rest of the infrastructure is as Google has better solutions. Just pick whatever is best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMHO serverless is a dangerous trend. It locks the developer to one of the large cloud vendors with a propietary API, a problem I thought would have been solved with orchestration software (like k8s) that abstracts away service providers. It may be useful for minor quick-and-dirty trigger functions - <USER2> no way for business-level logic!

<comment><USER6> We decided to base our new platform on serverless - previously docker. Couldn't be any happier. Everything runs as expected and I don't need to worry about a tone of things.

People talk about vendor lock-in and all that. If you don't write things from scratch there is a vendor lock-in everywhere. Open source is also vendor lock- in. For example, we used to use xulrunner from Mozilla for some time and look where it is right now - nowhere.

I was also concerned initially with being locked in into a particular platform but then again, what I realised is that if your project is extremely successful you can always spend big to migrate when you have the funds to do it. As a startup, that is not the case. You start with nothing. So platforms like AWS are absolutely amazing because not too long ago you still had to buy your own datacenters.

<comment><USER9> > So platforms like AWS are absolutely amazing because not too long ago you > still had to buy your own datacenters.

But just in terms of dollars, how much does it cost to own hardware? I have never worked in an "infrastructure" team so I'm am outsider looking at it with no experience but I hope someone will correct me.

Imagine a startup needs a 42U cabinet in four co locations. Each one costs a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars a month? Let's say that puts the colocation bill at $5k a month. Next, we need the actual computers and it seems this is the expensive part? I simply searched for servers. Just for kicks, I selected a 2U supermicro 2023US-TR4. With 2x epyc 7301 16 core processors, 16 x 4GB RAM, 2TB Intel P4600 SSD, 4TB Hitachi 7K6000 HDD, and a five year next business day on site service quotes about $10k.

I imagine you can fit up to 20 such computers in a full 42U cabinet. This means just buying the computers will set us back 4 * 20 * $10k? Spending almost $1M on admittedly low end server hardware sounds expensive.

Colocation cost over let's say five years will be about 5 * 12 * $5k or about $300k.

I guess just because you have space for 20 computers doesn't mean you have to fill them all up. Also, I guess you don't _need_ to be in four locations.

If we scale down our ambitions to 10 computers each in two locations, initial cost is 2 * 10 * $10k or about $200k and colocation costs are 5 * 12 * < $2k? or about $100k? because we no longer need a full cabinet...

I know I'm making a lot of assumptions and I'm hand washing a lot of important details but this seems like the smallest possible cost of self hosting, no? About $300k over five years is about $5k per month. It won't make sense for everyone but I guess if we have a thousand people paying us ten dollars a month, that pays for the hardware?

I welcome all corrections and insights. Like I said, I have no experience in these things.

<comment><USER10> You probably need a dedicated sysadmin as soon as you've got physical infrastructure that needs to stay online for your business to keep running - you honestly probably need this even if you're leasing dedicated hardware.

I used to work for a company that leased dedicated servers, and I talked to A LOT of customers that lost their business or lost a significant amount of their runway/savings/whatever due to mistakes caused by not having a real sysadmin around to handle their infrastructure. Long running issues they didn't have the experience to troubleshot, bad (or nonexistent!) backups or restoration procedures, extended outages due to server related issues, bad update/firewall/other security practices, etc.

There's pitfalls with every option, but running your own infrastructure is a completely different skillset from developing an application, and is a professional trade in and of itself - you can try to force this on a developer and hope they have the time and expertise to handle all of these different things and run the risk that they don't, or you can tack on another ~100k/yr for a professional. And as you grow, so does the complexity, and maybe now your infrastructure spans a lot of racks, and you need network engineers, you need multiple sysadmins, etc, etc, etc.

You can't DevOps your way out of managing physical infrastructure

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> After reading through all of this I'm like ...

"Yep, that's cgi"

For the not-yet-old farts: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface)

(Note CGI capable accounts are still available for WAY cheaper than on Amazon at a great many hosters)

(And no, the program is not restarted every request: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCGI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCGI) )

(You can even get ones that "autoscale" because the load is sharded on the hosters side, meaning the CGI will start up on a number of different servers - can be pretty high - when required, and only when required)

Implementations for pretty much every language are available.

Serverless does, of course, mean WAY less efficient (but you're charged for that by Amazon, so that's a plus, not a minus for cloud providers), far less language implementations than cgi, less support, closed source, much bigger memory usage, ...

<comment><USER11> Why the downvotes ? What is the difference between serverless and something like fastcgi ?

<comment><USER4> There is no fastcgi implementation which autoscales based on the amount of concurrency expected.

<comment><USER12> Arguably, there is: [https://php-fpm.org/](https://php-fpm.org/)

<comment><USER11> Or even just having your provider distribute the load of a number of servers. The same FastCGI handlers will startup on many actual machines, providing a measure of scaling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really want to see Lua support.

<comment><USER14> Yes please, Lua support would be amazing. Such an under-appreciated and under- utilized language in backend development.

<comment><USER15> You can embed lua into one of the supported frameworks, e.g. [https://github.com/Shopify/go-lua](https://github.com/Shopify/go-lua)

<comment><USER14> Sure, but then the burden is on you to build the Lua-specific tooling and framework around that. Pretty quickly it becomes a bespoke platform which, although fun to build, is rarely an economically sound investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> How to create a movie website using an AWS Lambda function written in Go — the latest language for serverless applications</comment>


India's Phantom Flats Leave Homebuyers' Dreams in Tatters - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/phantom-flats-have-homebuyers-fleeing-a-once-hot-property-market <comment><USER2> This I believe is the direct result of the demonetization that they went through.</comment>


A Defense of the Reality of Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-defense-of-the-reality-of-time-20170516/ <comment><USER2> >> This notion that time is just a fourth dimension is highly misleading. In special relativity, the time directions are structurally different from the space directions.

In "A World without Time" Palle Yourgrau makes it clear that Kurt Gödel didn't think so, and that Einstein himself, who was good friends with Gödel, mostly agreed with him on this. I'll take Einstein's word above Maudlin's here... I don't mean to make this an "argument by appeal to authority", but Maudlin starts out by making this dubious assertion about special relativity, which I think is the wrong move if he wants to convince anyone.

As for the rest of the interview, I don't understand his geometry, but he also goes on about "the problem of why things started out in a low-entropy state", and I think that there are many ways of envisioning cosmology and/or metaphysics under which this isn't a problem at all. I just started reading Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time", which comes down firmly on the other side of this argument, for example.</comment>


Ask HN: Isn't machine learning just a special case of curve fitting? - <AUTHOR> I'll be honest, I am busy doing other physics things (involving actual curve fitting) but from the little I've read in my little free time, it sounds like ML is just multilinear curve fitting. Is this true? <comment><USER2> Yes. But curve fitting is qualitatively different with millions of dimensions than with just a few, and it's only recently that we've gotten good results in the 1M-dimensional case. For example, modern image captioning can successfully assign 1 out of 1000 semantic labels to images from ~1M pixels. There's no interpolation in that 1M-dimensional space that corresponds to the sort of curve fitting operations that work in a few dimensions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see, so it's the high dimensionality of parameters to fit rather than, say, a small number of parameters for millions of points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My understanding is that only one part of ML - regression has similarities with curve fitting while classification/clustering does not. What is the equivalent in curve fitting where the goal is to find which points belong to one specific group (of points) rather than the other (clustering)?

Curve fitting makes sense for cardinal values (countable quantities), but usually does not for ordinal (numerical, but not countable, usually indicating order - e.g. rank, review scores) or nominal values (male vs female, zip codes) because you cannot even plot these as x-values on a graph in a meaningful way.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's like saying curve fitting is just a special case of calculus.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is the specialization here that deep? Can you give a concrete illustrative example?</comment></comment>


Why does Martin Fowler not understand feature branches - <AUTHOR> http://jamesmckay.net/2011/07/why-does-martin-fowler-not-understand-feature-branches/ <comment><USER2> _If you check in code that breaks the build, then go home, and then someone else checks it out, they can't get anything done till you return and fix it._

A problem that Jenkins Build-per-Branch¹ nicely obviates.

¹<http://entagen.github.com/jenkins-build-per-branch/>

</comment><comment><USER3> While I agree with the author that feature branches are useful, I think he went too strongly the other way, against feature toggles.

Feature toggles allow you to do things like: 1) deploy only to certain users. 2) incrementally deploy to N percentage of your users. i.e. deploy to 1%, then 10%, then 100%. These are things that absolutely cannot be done by your VCS system.

If you're going to use FTs, then yes, they need to be baked in and well supported by your app. A consistent API & tooling are a good idea.

FWIW, at CircleCI (<https://circleci.com>), we use feature branches all of the time. We automatically CI all branches, and we use feature toggles. In fact, I'm toying with the idea of a feature-toggles-API-as-a-Service.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't imagine how people do continuous integration _without_ feature branches.

<comment><USER5> Feature branches are almost the opposite of continuous integration. If you're committing to a branch then by definition you're not integrating your changes with people working on other branches.

It's quite possible to integrate and deploy changes to production several times a day. If it hurts, do it more often. Smaller changesets are far easier to merge.

<comment><USER4> OK, let me throw this out there: what if you're developing a feature that takes longer than a fraction of a day to write, and you want that feature to be developed independently of any other half-baked features that are out there?

Or developing more than one feature at a time?

Or you are halfway through developing a major feature when you suddenly realize there's a high-priority bug that has to be fixed first?

Or you decide halfway through developing a major feature that you went about it all wrong and made a hash of everything and want to start from scratch?

> If you're committing to a branch then by definition you're not integrating > your changes with people working on other branches.

When other people's changes are merged to integration, I'll rebase off of integration and resolve any conflicts then and there. No problem.

> Smaller changesets are far easier to merge.

...and since I'm continuously rebasing off of the integration branch, all my merges are fastforward, which is even easier.

The criticism against feature branches makes sense if it's coming from people who don't use Git fluently. Otherwise it's absolute nonsense.</comment></comment></comment>


As Trump Tightens Legal Immigration, Canada Woos Tech Firms - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/nyregion/trump-legal-immigration-canada-tech-jobs.html <comment><USER2> Isn't his ultimate goal to create an immigration system in the US that is more like the Canadian one?

<comment><USER3> Uh, Canada seems somewhat open to immigration. Donald seems like he is willing to kill immigration to 'woo' voters.

But I'm interested in why you think his ultimate goal is similar.

<comment><USER2> They're open for now but have the ability to close things down and switch the type of people (based on occupation, ability to integrate into Canadian society) as needed.

A few months ago there were stories floating around about how much Donald Trump likes Canada's immigration system.

If you search for "donald trump's opinions on canadian immigration system", the top results are some of those stories.

<comment><USER3> > A few months ago there were stories floating around about how much Donald > Trump likes Canada's immigration system.

Donald's opinion changes arbitrarily, just as folks suffering from the early stages of dementia are prone to do. So that's not really a great example.</comment></comment></comment></comment>