Why I turned my back on FOSS - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/ellzey/12e3f69d02790458875840ffa0209a72 <comment><USER2> I don't know anything about the actual story here and the writing does not help either. Impossible to read, sorry author...

He got turned down for a lot of jobs (in shitty ways) despite having published some reasonably successful open-source libraries? How is open source to blame for him not getting a job exactly?

<comment><USER3> I wondered if this person had mental health problems. It reads like the ravings of a schizophrenic. It's possible they need help rather than a rational analysis of their claims.

Edit: Of course, I have no real insight into this person's mental state, it just pattern matched for me with long circuitous paranoid emails a schizophrenic friend of mine used to send me.

<comment><USER4> This unfortunately reminded me of Ian Murdock's (Debian founder) final tweets before he died under mysterious circumstances: [http://archive.is/vBS6N](http://archive.is/vBS6N)

I just hope the author does not take his life, his thoughts are barely coherent and this entire gist is disturbing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I mean that was an interesting read, but if that person is even half as weird as his writing I don't blame the companies.

Or the guy was drunk/high while writing this, dunno...

<comment><USER6> Then again, if all that happened to me I'd be four times as weird as his writing. At least.

<comment><USER7> I appreciate this empathetic response. If you've never encountered a "brain won't go" moment in your life, it's nearly impossible to understand how a bright person can quickly go from presenting as such, to presenting as as a train wreck.

In the past several years, I encountered a mild form of "holy shit, a lot of stuff that was intuitive and natural just got hard for me because stress and other factors." Circumstances changed, and I pulled out of it, but I could have just as easily augered in.

It's probably going too far to wish that everyone here can experience a short- lived, non-catastrophic, empathy inducing mental health scare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Author of libevhtp [1], used in Chromium [2]. He holds 5 patents [3].

[1] [https://github.com/ellzey/libevhtp](https://github.com/ellzey/libevhtp) [2] [https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/ellzey...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/ellzey/libevhtp/) [3] [http://patents.justia.com/inventor/mark-ellzey- thomas](http://patents.justia.com/inventor/mark-ellzey-thomas)

<comment><USER9> All patents in the 3rd URL seem to be the same patent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like she should dual license AGPL/custom licence her code, require copyright assignments from contributes and charge companies for the custom licence. Then they would be forced to pay her if the work were truely vital to their bottom line.

Sounds harsh but what I'm trying to say is you have to take care of yourself or no-one else will.

<comment><USER11> Kindly provide the details on how would one go about licensing the code. I am a developer with no knowledge about the law. How can I license my code so that non-profit & hobbyist can use it for free, while the ones earning money off the code has to pay me.

<comment><USER4> [https://choosealicense.com/](https://choosealicense.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't get what any of this has to do with FLOSS. Seems just American Capitalism as usual?

<comment><USER13> Reading between the lines here, so keep that in mind. Author wrote something popular (libevent) in a permissive license. A company took libevent and ran with it, refusing to hire the original author. Author is now in a bad place.

Sadly, that's one of the risks of releasing code under permissive licenses: it effectively no longer belongs to you. You may think that you're OK with that (like the author originally did), but human nature is likely to curb stomp you when you do lose that control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recognize this github from some fun c puzzles! The developer is intelligent. What gives? I don't understand why it is difficult for someone like that to find employment. Could someone from the bay area give some insight into this kind of thing? The scene is different than that in Boston.

<comment><USER15> [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellzey](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellzey)

Summary seems to be that his open source libraries are very widely used but he couldn't find a job in the Valley and became homeless.

<comment><USER16> Had a good laugh reading his "skills" on his linkedin page.

I understand "Unicorn" and "Wizard", but what the hell is "Wheel Throwing"?

<comment><USER17> It's a pottery technique

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The angst and passive aggression in that post is off the charts - near-manic levels. Based on this alone I'd say the author is "not a good fit" for my reading preferences, can't imagine what working with them would be like.</comment>


Show HN: Nosy – Imgur for Tinder and texting - <AUTHOR> https://nosy.chat <comment><USER2> It's definitely interesting. It needs some design work, although I've seen similar things to this implemented in instagram using a hashtag #tindernightmares for example.

Technically this is slick and the UX isn't bad for an MVP, assuming you did this all yourself? Did you use meteor framework? You should put an email/about up there so I know who made this.

email me would love to kick around some ideas: email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess a little explanation might help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Forget about minding your own business... Nosy lets you stick your nose into other people's conversations.

On Nosy, users post screenshots of ongoing conversations: texts, emails, Tinder, Bumble, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc... it works for any type of conversation.

You can watch and comment in realtime, or use Nosy to share your own conversations and get crowdsourced advice for any social interaction:

* Write a witty first message to that cute girl on Tinder

* Interpret that text from your boyfriend

* Reach out to a potential business partner on LinkedIn

* Email your boss to ask for extra vacation time

Let me know if you have more questions!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Loans as a Limit to Innovation - <AUTHOR>

The ~$40,000 in Student Loans that I currently owe is a limit to the amount I can innovate. Professionally in the form of language learning as well as in general. I was wondering if  anyone has any experience or ideas about investing in mutual funds or other trading items to shorten loan payback time. (Currently I am looking at 10 Years!) [Tuition.io](http://tuition.io) has been invaluable in this effort to answer the questions of how much I actually owe, how much is reasonable as a montly payment, etc. <comment><USER2> The beauty of student loans (from a bank's perspective) is that they are hard for the loanee to discharge and (these days) carry rates well above market with very little risk.

Maybe you can get lucky and out invest financial institutions. But it will be almost certainly be both lucky and unlikely.

The typical way debtors win is via inflation which allows old expensive dollars to be paid down with inflated dollars. Since US monetary policy has kept inflation low (actually just wage inflation) for decades, don't bet on this happening either.

During adulthood ten years turns out not to be that long after all.

</comment><comment><USER3> The best way to get rid of that loan is to cut down your expenses while holding down a well paying IT job. You should be able to get rid of it in a year or less, investing in mutual funds is not going to make a huge difference until you've amassed more than enough capital in order to pay back the loan, so until then you're much better off simply paying off the loan (less risk too!).

<comment><AUTHOR> I have the job, its the resources. Right now at ~450/mo, I am still at 10 years payback time, according to [http://tuition.io/](http://tuition.io/).

<comment><USER4> Surely you can afford more than $450/mo ??

<comment><AUTHOR> If I paid everything I made every month it would be $1584 /mo. 40 months. 3 years 4mo.

<comment><USER4> Why? Is that actually what you get paid each month or are there are issues (family, medical etc)? If not, you can definitely get a better job than that, especially in IT!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pwn2Own owned all major browsers - <AUTHOR> http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-Security-Research-Blog/Pwn2Own-2013/ba-p/5981157

<comment><USER2> "All"? Not Safari yet (knock on wood). Which is a big change from back in the day when it was usually pwned first in this contest. Or are you saying it's not a major browser?

<comment><USER3> At 25% of mobile, I agree it is a worthwhile endeavor to find exploits for safari.

I was about to make fun of you for suggesting safari has significant usage until I considered mobile.

<comment><USER2> Safari's desktop share is somewhere between 5.5% and 15.5% depending on whose stats you trust:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sta...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#StatCounter_.28July_2008_to_present.29)

Is it crazy to consider that significant?

<comment><USER4> I personally consider it not major but significant, not just due to market share but also because it's the default browser (and shares its inner components with applications leveraging WebView) on a certain platform. Therefore it's a prime target for establishing a foothold on that platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks like George Hotz [1] is attending! Judging by his work with the PlayStation 3, I expect him to do pretty well at cracking Adobe Reader.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz>

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting how Java was pwned thee times in spite of the lowest reward.

<comment><USER7> We've seen Java bugs in the news lately for use in co-ordinated attacks against large companies.

A nameless firm (not the one I'm working with now) that happens to be one of Europes largest banks has insainly locked down versions windows, everything disabled, some custom thing that has hooked NT kernel functiosn to check which image is being loaded to be executed.

And then it has Java. A very old, un-patched version running a vendor risk system (yes it is that french one your thinking of).

This means that despite the frankly anoying parinoid security there, you can pwn any of the machines easily. As we see more _targeted_ attacking, remember that Java is heavily used by a lot of rich, often inept due to size, firms.

<comment><USER8> Do these "insanely locked down" Windows have a browser and does that browser enable Java applets?

The 0-days affecting Java lately have all been using Java applets and drive-by exploits. I'm not saying it's not pathetic and lame for Java's security track records but it's not either as if your company was vulnerable to remote exploits in the case Java applets are not allowed in browsers.

I'm running Java webapp servers and I've been _really_ pissed off that I needed to patch to remote Denial of Service exploits (the hashmap / URL query parameters degenerating to O(n) instead of O(1) SNAFU and the "endless loop" while parsing a certain floating-point number) in late 2011 / early 2012 IIRC but basically that's it.

The JVM is still incredibly secure on the server side (and can be installed on Un _x systems in a user account, without needing to be root -- meaning that you can then lock down like mad that user account and have an even more secure setup).

Now to be honest if your company was truly paranoid they wouldn't be using old version of Windows with in-house brittle hacks supposedly bringing "more security".

I know that all too well (at Dexxia for example): some people somewhere decide on a shitty technology (Dexxia was at one point using shitty Java applets to allow clients to do online banking) and then says _"We're going to have the most secure system ever" _.

So these guys _think* they're paranoid but they're using: a) Windows and b) Java applets.

And at this point you have to wonder if you should laugh or cry at their definition of "paranoid".

People really paranoid about security ain't letting Windows in (unless they like NSA backdoors and consider patch-tuesday to be a reliable way to execute) and ain't letting Java applets in.

<comment><USER7> Guess how they distrabute the Java application.

However I really don't want to go too far into a former clients site details, just to say it was a laughably big gaping hole, that is really quite common in a lot of large enterprises. It was also completely seperate from my domain there)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are any vendors offering no questions asked X$/0day rewards all year long instead of dedicated events? Seems like it would be a decent move. If the going rate is really in the 50k ballpark why can't say Google offer 10-20k per Chrome exploit?

Their engineers don't make peanuts and the attacks on the software happen regardless. After a year or two you'd probably have a pretty secure system for a reasonable cost.

I don't think there's much negative press involved either if you spin it a la "we have the best security experts in the world attack our software and fix it asap".

+You might pull off a decent talent grab or two as long as you understand how the people would like to work (probably not from a google office)

<comment><USER10> Google's bug bounty is $3,133.70 (elite). The black market can pay $80k-200k+[1]. Why doesn't Google pay more? Well, like you said, "attacks on the software happen regardless". Their objective is to maximize shareholder value. People adopt browsers for other reasons besides maximum security. You hear about critical vulnerabilities all the time, to the point where you get desensitized to it. I don't think there's been a bug out there that caused people to dump a browser en masse.

[1] - [http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/23/shoppin...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/23/shopping- for-zero-days-an-price-list-for-hackers-secret-software-exploits/)

<comment><USER11> The bug bounty is for a security bug with no exploit. That makes it a lot less work for the security researcher. See the release notes on the Google Chrome blog for details of bounties paid.

Google also sponsors Pwn2Own and Pwnium with bigger prizes for bugs with working exploits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Few silly questions: 1) I got the feeling from this discussion and some other sources that there are a couple of known Windows kernel vulnerabilities that are making these exploitation easier. What about Microsoft? They don't care or are they fixing those bugs?

2) How secure is let's say Firefox + Ubuntu/Fedora, latest updates, default settings. I haven't seen that many exploits for Linux in general. Is it because no one cares about linux or because it is harder and thus more valuable than windows exploits so no one share linux ones?

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't really understand the competiton. Do people come to these with just the intention of finding exploits, or do they come with the exploit ready, waiting to collect a reward?

<comment><USER14> They have the exploits ready to go, the challenge is whether they can exploit the target system (which is fully patched) within their time slot.

It's a useful excercise, I think, in that it demonstrates that even the most hardened of codebases still has security bugs and it also serves as a cautionary tale for people who think they don't need multiple layers of defence..

<comment><USER8> _"...it demonstrates that even the most hardened of codebases still has security bugs"_

Browsers the most hardened codebase? I nearly spilled my coffee ; )

Every single browsers out there (including Chrome) was designed with security as an after-thought.

As for me I browse the Web from Linux, using a throwaway user account which doesn't have Java installed. And that user account is itself "hardened" (e.g. no login shell, specific per user-id firewalling rules, etc.). At this point seen the state of insecurity the Web is in I'll probably go back to the VM route (a browser in a locked down separate user account, but itself running inside a KVM VM).

My definition of an hardened codebase would be something like OpenBSD or OpenSSH or esL4 (in esL4 the code has been verified (using formal provers) to be free of buffer overrun/overflow and whatnots).

What I don't like about your comment is that you consider the current situation to be "acceptable". You apparently do really believe current browsers are "hardened" and that there are people thinking like you is precisely part of the problem.

We can do _much_ better than that.

For a start I'd love to read a rant from Theo de Raadt about what should be done to conceive more secure web browsers.

<comment><AUTHOR> if you trust linux or theo for security, you're going to have a bad time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> woah! whats with the hp site permalink/URI/url formatting?

<http://h30499.www3.hp.com/>

<comment><USER16> [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/hp-license- plate...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/hp-license-plate- domains)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the link. This is crazy. SquareWheel was right. This is an absolutely brain-dead way of doing this, by a very incompetent IT admin.

<comment><USER17> And yet that it persists brings to mind all the problems faced by large organizations. An inability to change processes, execute quickly on decisions, disconnect between customers and company operations. Which is why startups can disrupt them. Pretty much everything HP produces seems mediocre and of substandard quality including their printers, ink, devices, services such as their open stack cloud offerring.

<comment><USER18> Which is only now improving with Meg Whitman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Where's Safari?

<comment><USER20> Directly below "Mozilla Firefox on Windows 7 ($60,000)"

<comment><USER4> Safari is a target in the event, but has not been pwned yet:

        Wednesday:
        1:30 - Java (James Forshaw) PWNED
        2:30 - Java (Joshua Drake) PWNED
        3:30 - IE 10 (VUPEN Security) PWNED
        4:30 - Chrome (Nils & Jon) PWNED
        5:30 - Firefox (VUPEN Security) PWNED
        5:31 - Java (VUPEN Security) PWNED

        Thursday:
        12pm - Flash (VUPEN Security)
        1pm - Adobe Reader (George Hotz)
        2pm - IE 10 (Pham Toan)

Interestingly enough, last year it was the only target not 0-day pwned (but was in the CVE contest, via CVE-2011-0115 and CVE-2010-0050).

<comment><USER21> Poor Vupen. Their Safari exploit must have broke.

<comment><USER22> Or they aren't about to kill the same bug in MobileSafari, since it is worth exponentially more.

<https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/309585202810867712>

<comment><USER2> WebKit code execution against Chrome is also likely to work (in modified form, but same basic exploit) against desktop or mobile Safari. Desktop Safari sandbox escape is likely to be completely different from MobileSafari sandbox escape. And in all three cases, the sandbox escape is the harder part.

So that logic does not explain to me why people are going after Chrome but not Safari.

I honestly don't know why it is. In particular, I don't have specific reason to believe Mac Safari's sandbox is more bulletproof than Windows Chrome's, but I guess Safari has the advantage of not being exposed to Windows kernel bugs.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, the WebKit exploit will work effectively unmodified on Safari. And the sandbox escape used against Chrome on Windows was a kernel bug in surface that can't be turned of from user-space (or really at all on Win7). Also, they softened the target quite a bit by using 32-bit Win7 for the contest, rather than 64-bit Win8 (or even 64-bit Win7).

As for why no one's targeting Safari, I think it's simple market forces at play. The iOS exploit market is established and pays very well, while the core vulnerabilities, expertise, and techniques are all shared with Safari on Mac OSX. And since Safari isn't a soft target (in no small part due to Abhishek's mass slaughter of WebKit security bugs and our bounty program), $65k just doesn't compete with the real-world exploit market.

<comment><USER2> Getting sandbox escapes from Mac Safari and iOS Safari requires completely different exploits. The code execution stage of a complete exploit could be shared, but it could also be shared with Chrome. So you'd think the same argument of iOS Safari exploit market value would apply either way.

My theory is that not much research has been done yet on breaking the WebProcess sandbox. Which makes me sad.

<comment><USER23> >Getting sandbox escapes from Mac Safari and iOS Safari requires completely different exploits.

You're focusing too narrowly on the sandbox itself. You have to consider the whole stack, and all of the surface exposed from within the sandbox. Consider the Chrome sandbox escape from yesterday, which didn't use anything specific to Chrome. It targeted part of the Windows stack that's guaranteed to be exposed to every process on the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Considering Chrome had a last minuite patch applied [http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/03/06/last-minute- pre-p...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/03/06/last-minute-pre-pwnium- chrome-update-closes-numerous-holes/)

It's good to know it still got taken down, because I had a horrible fear they where going to try and advertise they were 100% safe because they weren't exploited.

<comment><USER23> There's no last minute patch. We push security and stability updates every 2-3 weeks. Just go look at our release history to verify. As for your other claim, it's so absurdly off base that it doesn't warrant an explicit response.

<comment><USER7> Which is fair enough, I'm in no way going to suggest having a reactive security update schedule is a bad thing.

However the time of the conference could easily give a vendor that had a compatable release cycle a slight edge.

When I read that story (before hearing the results) I was filled with a kind of dread, I am less than impressed about the claims for Chrome OS, in the UK where its advertised it strikes me as Apple during the _bad days_ who simply advocated bad pratice with regards to security (you've bought us, don't worry) type thing.

If you feel that is at all unfair to you, I am sorry, but Google Chrome has been an agressively marketed product in London and I have general contempt for most of the adds (but then I'm not the target market).

I also think its really important to remind people just how unsafe browsers are (all of them) and how people need to be increasingly aware of the impact such security.

Side Note: If your one of the team, thanks, yours has been my favourite browser for years now :)</comment></comment></comment>


Zappos is offering severance to employees who aren't all in with Holacracy - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/370616/internal-memo-zappos-is-offering-severance-to-employees-who-arent-all-in-with-holacracy/ <comment><AUTHOR> I love this idea, but wondering if this will backfire with mostly the best people (that can easily find other options) leaving</comment>


Lock-free Data Structures Part 1 – Introduction - <AUTHOR> http://kukuruku.co/hub/cpp/lock-free-data-structures-introduction

<comment><USER2> Can someone explain to me how the first queue example's (using singly link lists) dequeue method gives the expected result? Isn't head->m_pNext always NULL, so the new head will always be NULL and tail will be set to NULL losing the rest of the queue?

Seems like you should need to traverse the list to dequeue.

Where did I go wrong?

<comment><USER3> You're right. Enqueue is wrong, it should be:

        if ( !m_pHead )
            m_pHead = p ;
        else
            m_pTail->next = p;
        m_pTail = p;

For some reason, the author is inserting the node in front of the tail leading to the error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have to say that even though it is nice to write about lock free algorithms, it would be probably worth noting that this implementation is dismissing the problem of CPU caches which eventually and most likely lead to race conditions.

<comment><USER5> What kind of race conditions are you talking about? Something along the lines of memory access that causes the CPU caches to be purged a lot more than they normally would? Genuine question, I know little about CPU cache internals :)

<comment><USER6> Out of order execution and possible cache consistency issues can cause your careful order to be upset.

The solution is memory barriers:

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

<comment><USER7> ?

That's the point of this post (well, the second I guess) - the lock free version has those via atomics.

<comment><USER6> So CDS_ATOMIC:: and friends expands into barrier instructions that take care of both re-ordering and cache consistency issues?

edit: reading the [http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/atomic/memory_order](http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/atomic/memory_order) there is tons of data on re-ordering but nothing on cache consistency so I am assuming that's a job farmed out to the hardware somehow.

In that case ignore above comment :)

<comment><USER8> I don't know if this implementation got it right (I don't have a spare month to prove/disprove its correctness)but my advice would be: be very, very careful with lockfree code in C++. This the area where dragons live.

Let me cite Herb Sutter: "Second, it's hard even for experts. It's easy to write lock-free code that appears to work, but it's very difficult to write lock-free code that is correct and performs well. Even good magazines and refereed journals have published a substantial amount of lock-free code that was actually broken in subtle ways and needed correction.

To illustrate, let's dissect some peer-reviewed lock-free code that was published here in DDJ just two months ago [2]. The author, Petru Marginean, has graciously allowed me to dissect it here so that we can see what's wrong and why, what lessons we should learn, and how to write the code correctly. That someone as knowledgable as Petru, who has published many good and solid articles, can get this stuff wrong should be warning enough that lock-free coding requires great care."

<comment><USER9> So if not C++, then C? Exist a good library of lock-free?

<comment><USER6> [http://www.liblfds.org/](http://www.liblfds.org/)

<comment><USER9> Ok. Thanks.

P.D: Weird github use:

[https://github.com/liblfds?tab=repositories](https://github.com/liblfds?tab=repositories)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems like HN took the site down, here's the Google cache

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kgO8-Tc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kgO8-TcOGGgJ:kukuruku.co/hub/cpp/lock- free-data-structures-introduction+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER10> Rule n° x: turn display_errors off and log_errors on.</comment></comment>


The budget could take a 'huge hit' from climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.federaltimes.com/federal-oversight/watchdogs/2019/06/14/the-budget-could-take-a-huge-hit-from-climate-change/ <comment><USER2> Half of the country being uninhabitable could be a huge hit to the budget. /s</comment>


Lego Announces Mindstorms EV3 - <AUTHOR> http://aboutus.lego.com/en-us/news-room/2013/january/new-smarter-stronger-lego-mindstorms-ev3/

<comment><USER2> I have fond memories of spending entire weeks programming the old Mindstorms NXT kits for an infamous undergrad ECE course at McGill... It's strange that Lego markets this so heavily towards children when there's more than enough complexity to keep a team of (adult) engineers having fun for months on end.

Since then, I've always wanted to buy myself one, but the steep price tag has been holding me back. Still, Lego's design and product quality is superb, so now that there's a brand new set of hardware coming out at the same price point I just might bite the bullet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, nicely done Lego. Watching the evolution of this from Dr. Martin's "smart brick" to today has been quite interesting. I've got one of the original Mindstorms kits, this always struck me as an awesome way to get started in embedded systems work, I hope Lego continues a tradition of being 'hacker friendly' in the sense of allowing direct coding to the device.

</comment><comment><USER4> This looks superb, I can't wait to upgrade my NXT kit.</comment>


Bitcoin security model: trust by computation - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/02/bitcoin-security-model-trust-by-computation.html <comment><USER2> This is a neat trick, in that it defines Bitcoin's security model such that all of the successful attacks are out of scope. Meanwhile, the central actors Bitcoin doesn't have who received the trust that Bitcoin doesn't require ran into a smidgen of trouble running the bank that Bitcoin makes obsolete and now their depositors that Bitcoin doesn't acknowledge are praying that the government that Bitcoin undermines will hit them with the legal process that Bitcoin structurally avoids.

<comment><USER3> Patio11, I have much respect for your work and _love_ reading your email digests, but your comments of late about Bitcoin have such a decidedly negative slant that they become hard to digest at face value.

Yes of course businesses built around the Bitcoin protocol will melt down occasionally, as many businesses do within the course of operation -- but don't you see how your attempt to conflate Bitcoin businesses (Exchanges, specifically) with a discussion about the new model of trust employed by the p2p network is probably a bit deceptive?

Yes, Bitcoin is scarce and therefore commands a market price. Commanding a market price has some qualities that suck. One of them is that you have to deposit assets in a market to keep an order book to discover a price. This is fallible. But it has nothing to do with how we (the human race) have discovered a way to create a scarce and transferrable peer to peer asset over the internet. Perhaps you should stop and consider how you can personally deconstruct some of the negative bias you have against Bitcoin in your public discussions of such.

Much love.

[Edited for grammer]

<comment><USER4> I think what patio11 is saying (and I agree) is that too much is being made of the _ideals_ behind the Bitcoin protocol and paradigm, but it doesn't really translate when met with the hard test of practical reality.

I noted your argument, along with many others on the GP's sub-thread which make this very distinction between Bitcoin as a concept and Bitcoin as an actual thing. In so doing, you suggest that failure to make the distinction is misleading and you align yourselves with the idealistic praise heaped on by the original article.

But, I would agree with patio11's insinuation: i.e. that the real fallacy is in this praise. It's misleading, because at some point, the protocol must be implemented in the real world, consisting of exchanges, wallet services, payment services, etc. These are all points where bad actors can attach. To say, "well, that's not the Bitcoin protocol" is to point out a meaningless distinction. When you find a way around these implementation limitations, then it matters.

TL;DR: as implemented, Bitcoin _in practice_ solves exactly none of the problems espoused by the article. We need look no further than real-world events to see this.

<comment><USER4> I challenge whomever downvoted me to refute at least the tl;dr in my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting comparison between Bitcoin and the internet. The Umlaut published an article outlining a similar theory: ([http://theumlaut.com/2014/01/08/bitcoin-internet-of- money/](http://theumlaut.com/2014/01/08/bitcoin-internet-of-money/)) using the same terminology (transport layer) and describing Bitcoins as the "internet of money".

I noticed an interesting comment on the O'Reilly article: "The second problem is that we have yet to expand bitcoin beyond the control of virtual assets. Virtual assets do not physically exist and therefore it is the ability to represent these assets within multiple computers across the network which give bitcoin its decentralized nature. These virtual assets also have to have real world value to everyone, without value, there exists no economic incentive (block rewards and transaction fees) for securing the network through computation."

This analysis of Bitcoin as the "internet of money/finance" is kind of reminiscent of the "internet of things" movement, that, according to inept marketing departments, is guaranteed to revolutionize our lives in short order.

Do we have the need/infrastructure in place for an "internet of money" or an "internet of things" to emerge? Do these terms even hold any weight? Would love to hear any opinions.

<comment><USER6> While there's an element of marketing-speak to this, I think it's instructive to try to apply the idea of "Internet of [whatever]" retroactively. The internet originally was essentially the "Internet of Communication" (email) and "Internet of Information" (FTP, then HTTP). Advancements in technology enable new use-cases over time.

* Internet of Commerce: mainstream adoption of the internet

* Internet of Entertainment: broadband internet

* Internet of Things: ubiquitous network-enabled electronics, with size and cost reductions driven by the smartphone revolution

* Internet of Money: Bitcoin

A corollary to "Software is Eating the World" could be "The Internet is Eating the World". Any technology that enables one of these new "Internets" should be watched closely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Here's the most important effect of this new trust model of trust-by- > computation: no one actor is trusted, and no one needs to be trusted. There > is no central authority or trusted third party in a distributed consensus > network. That

That should be the future of the Internet, where we don't have to trust whether someone is a "good actor" or a "bad actor". This is also what is needed so we don't have "balkanized Internet" because we can't trust countries like US or UK to not spy on the rest of us anymore and get our data. If the network is built in a way that _no one_ can be trusted, then the network can remain truly global again.

That's why I'm glad to see projects such as the Turing complete Ethereum picking up steam, and I'm hoping they succeed. I'm starting to believe more and more that the future of the Internet is going to be "Bitcoin-inspired" in a major way, and it will bring us a lot more distributed trustless applications than exist today on the current Internet, making it a lot harder for "bad actors" to exist in the network, be that for-profit hackers, "cyber terrorists" or even malicious governments.

It's also what will save us from the evil of certificate authorities, the OpenSSL monster, and other such patched up security tools that are meant to protect us right now, yet mostly fail to do so.

</comment><comment><USER8> Andreas is an impressive character. Only by listening to him speak will you understand the passion [1] and potential this guy has. He is well versed and articulate and has a background in distributed systems. Like some of us here he once worked for thieves & sociopaths (banking/defense), and dropped it all to dedicate himself to bitcoin. He has a strong presence in the bitcoin communities and visits many meetups.

I strongly recommend listening to some of the early episodes of him, Stephanie, and Adam on 'Lets Talk Bitcoin'. There's some deep topic discussions and interesting projections - most which turned out to be true.

[1] [https://soundcloud.com/mindtomatter/e72-powerful- perspective...](https://soundcloud.com/mindtomatter/e72-powerful-perspectives)

</comment><comment><USER9> I think Andreas Antonopoulos said in a video that it takes about half a billion dollars to fool the blockchain for 10 minutes. Even though that's a lot, if certain actors (state or otherwise) got interested enough, wouldn't they manipulate the chain at critical moments for their advantage?

<comment><USER10> >I think Andreas Antonopoulos said in a video that it takes about half a billion dollars to fool the blockchain for 10 minutes. Even though that's a lot, if certain actors (state or otherwise) got interested enough, wouldn't they manipulate the chain at critical moments for their advantage?

That's out-of-date now; the total computation power of the Bitcoin network is 25,824,939.77 GH/s. It would probably take a lot more than $500 million now.</comment></comment>


An Extended Conversation with Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak - <AUTHOR> http://www.ideastream.org/news/feature/an-extended-conversation-with-apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak

<comment><AUTHOR> "now we've [sic] allowed to get past that dogma and I think it really came partly from Steve Jobs not wanting things done differently than he could design and come up with himself."</comment>


Game Translator – Google Vision API Live-Translate Japanese Console Games - <AUTHOR> https://www.codedojo.com/?p=2426 <comment><AUTHOR> Had to shorten the title to fit but original is "Universal Game Translator – Using Google's Cloud Vision API to live-translate Japanese games played on original consoles (try it yourself!)"

Very interesting project</comment>


Mariah Carey's record-breaking day shows how little musicians make from Spotify - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1507361/mariah-careys-record-breaking-day-shows-how-little-musicians-make-from-spotify/ <comment><USER2> >Spotify pays whoever holds the rights to a song anywhere from $0.006 to $0.0084 per play.

It makes me happy that the cost of digital goods is falling. The distribution costs are so low for a digital item that this price seems much more in line with what people should pay for a download / stream.

Interestingly, at $10 a month Spotify is charging users $0.00023 per minute (60 * 24 * 30). If each song is about 3 minutes, they're making money on anyone who spends less than 10% of their time listening to music.

<comment><USER3> Digital goods are not worthless because they can be downloaded easily. Distribution costs shouldn't matter much when determining price. Competition should though, and there is plenty of competition for people's time between digital goods.

Also, I'm sure Spotify pays for engineers, offices, lawyers, designers, servers, marketing, avocado toasts and other essentials in addition to royalties.

<comment><USER4> I agree with your underlying point, but distribution cost absolutely matters when determining price.

Competition for time is a great way of framing why I pay for many services. I pay $10 to Spotify to avoid hundreds of commercials each month, it is absolutely worth it to me. Same with Netflix. Would do the same with Gmail if it was an option.

<comment><USER5> > Would do the same with Gmail if it was an option.

It is, pay for G-Suite.

<comment><USER4> I've looked at that before, and I can't claim this with 100% certainty, but seems I cannot use my current email address. I don't want to change that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No - how many times have these people paid for this song?

If they had bought the CD (and many of them have) or the cassette (and many of them have) or the mp3 (and many of them have) or the iTunes AAC (and many of them have) they could play it infinite times and never pay Mariah another red cent.

The music industry keeps trying (and sometimes succeeding) to convince people that they deserve new payment for the same work on every form of new media forever.

<comment><USER7> Don't they, though? (Within copyright limits) If you buy a cassette, the quality and experience is much different than something more contemporary. Doesn't the work of data-conversion and remastering warrant additional funding?

> How many times have these people paid for this song?

You're really only paying for the medium, and renting the music.

<comment><USER8> Cassette to CD, I agree or record too. But once I buy the CD, I can rip it losslessly and it is the exact same ordering of bits no matter where or how I play it.

<comment><USER7> What about if the artist changes the music, like Yeezy did on TLOP. Would you pay again for a new version of the music?

What about in the future, when we add new dimensions to our music, that requires additional remastering? Our current music formats are really great, but I wouldn't be surprised to see another transformation before too long. Maybe downloadable VR concerts, or some integrated rumble data to assist with bass boost. Or possibly holographic versions of the artist performing.

You'll be buying the same music for as long as the industry can keep turning the knob, just enough to bring new interest.

<comment><USER6> A concert recording is a separate work. A music video is a separate work.

An online stream of an existing audio recording is not a separate work.

<comment><USER7> But three different masters of the same song is three different pieces of work, right? A remix is different work, right?

<comment><USER6> A remix is a different work. A different encoding of the same piece is not a different work.

If by "different master" you mean a separate recording of a different performance of the song, then yes, it is a different "work" \- a separate copyrightable sound recording, but it is the same work of the song writer.

Re-mastering may or may not create a separately copyrightable work, depending on the creative expression that goes into the re-mastering.

Encoding to cassette, CD, mp3, audio stream in various formats is a mechanical process, not a separate "creative expression" that receives or deserves separate copyright protection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> $92,400 in a day. How little. For a single song (released in 1994 at that). How detached from reality can people be?

<comment><USER10> You're missing the point. This is the absolute ceiling of success that can be reached in Spotify. If the payout of _that_ is 90k, what do you thing the payout of the typical artist is on Spotify?

<comment><USER11> I love music, strongly support musicians, and buy tons of music, but you're not going to make me feel bad that artists can "only" make $92k a day on Spotify.

<comment><USER12> I think the point is an elite artist tops out at 92k, meaning unknown artists will be making peanuts for their contributions. You're not supposed to pity that top tier artist, only realize that the ceiling is relatively low for everyone.

<comment><USER7> The artist isn't making that money, the rights holder is. Who knows how many hands see that money before the artist does.

<comment><USER8> Well, at least due to the effect of technology on music, many unknown artists are able to produce their own music and go directly to Spotify and other services. And they do that quite often now though I don't know that many making a living on streaming royalties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Put this in context. Profitable musicians make most of their money from ticket sales to live shows. Recordings serve that business model mainly as promotional material. Profitable recording acts like the later Beatles have been extremely rare exceptions.

This Spotify news is a far greater tragedy for record companies, whose entire business model relies on royalty collection, than it is for the artists themselves. But rentier business models don't deserve a whole lot of sympathy.

<comment><USER14> This, successful musicians actually work for a living [https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart- beat/848138...](https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart- beat/8481384/beyonce-jay-z-on-the-run-ii-tour-sales-by-the-numbers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I want to see an analysis that turns the $60 million into price per play. how many times a person with a Casette/CD would listen to it over the life of the medium. radio deals and how many people heard it on the radio each deal. What other avenues are there? Commercials? $60,000,000/(2018-1994+1)/(25 days before Christmas) = $96,000 for each day in leading up to Christmas And what are the current numbers for listening share? What percentage is spotify compared to radio, tv, youtube, itunes, owned media? Also curious about how to compare the value for owning the cd,digital copy, etc. v. listening on spotify? A cd is $10? which would give me only a month of Spotify? But then expand that to my entire media collection and then I wonder where it breaks even--10% of my time?

Current Spotify premium user because I like the curated playlists

</comment><comment><USER11> Sorry, but I can't feel bad for somebody whining about only making $92k in a single day from work they did 24 years ago.

Maybe Spotify is ripping off artists, but this story doesn't demonstrate it.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article is unclear about which distribution channels her and her partners invested in to earn $60M in royalties since '94 before being "shafted" by Spotify for an effort-free return of $92k in a single day. Plus, Spotify did her a solid by making her the top song on the top Christmas playlist thus solidifying her position on the Christmas charts for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER10> I love Spotify, for the service and just for the fact that it exists (just look at the fragmentation shitshow that is movie & tv streaming, with enormous amounts of back catalog still unavailable anywhere, to see how much worse we could have it)

But it should plainly obvious that the price charged is not sustainable.

</comment><comment><USER17> The Music Industry did this to itself - because it disliked the amount of power the iTunes music store had, it decided to allow Spotify's frankly obscene business idea to float.

Well, one of those partners earned them lots of money and the other massively devalued their goods.

What's even more laughable is that the iTunes Music Store represented a massive 'save' for the industry - prior to that they'd earned ~$0 on digital music thanks to rampant piracy.

I wish this could be seen as the high-water mark of stupidity for the industry but I know it well enough to be sure that's not the case.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pennies per play is a hard metric to grok. Let's compare this to CDs.

Assume a CD costs $10, and half of that goes towards the distribution of the physical media. It has maybe ten tracks. If you listen to it every day for a few months that's roughly the same "price per play" if I'm doing my math right.

Maybe that's a little high for an estimate, but streaming is still within an order of magnitude, and probably reaches way more customers than a given CD track ever did.

</comment><comment><USER19> While it is interesting to see how much a superstar makes off a ubiquitous Christmas classic, it might have been nice to see how irrelevant and immaterial streaming royalties are to normal musician,

For sheer resourcefulness (and humor) I enjoyed seeing the band Freezepop include a $3 royalty check in their Kickstarter music video, and offer the check itself as part of $400 backer reward.

</comment><comment><USER20> I never understand why Spotify is so cheap. I'm a bit of a music head, but I would absolutely pay twice as much for the subscription service. Or is Spotify primarily making money off ads or data?

<comment><USER21> The price is roughly at equilibrium with piracy.

<comment><USER22> At this point, piracy only makes any sense if you can't meet the requirement of accessing their servers monthly to maintain access to locally stored songs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's a lot more in one day than many people make in a year for doing actual work (the work of creating this song was done years ago).

If that's all the market's going to pay someone that has already reached a level of wealth that they can't spend in ten lifetimes, I won't lose any sleep. If you can live with the market when someone's making millions, you can live with the market when they're unable to make $100,000 in a day from one source and for one song.

</comment><comment><USER24> How much did it earn from radio play during that time? I didn't hear it once on Spotify, but I must have heard it dozens of times this month on the radio in the car.

</comment><comment><USER25> Let's say that in one month a year, this song earns on avg. like $40,000/day. It's around $36,000,000 over the period of 23 years. It's not that bad, compared to $60,000,000 earned in royalties since its release.

I assume that they count multiple sources of revenue here, like radio licenses, royalties from movies and ads where this song was used, etc. So $92,400 per day only from one medium, is not that bad.

</comment><comment><USER26> Quick calculation: $92,400 a day x 365 days a year = $33,726,000

That is, assuming you made that much every day of the year (on Spotify), you would make $33.7 million a year.

Granted, you're not going to be able to replicate Christmas plays throughout the year, but still, that number doesn't seem small, even for a well- established artist.

</comment><comment><USER27> Spotify doesn't pay artists. They pay the labels. And labels pay the artists. What artists get paid has nothing to do with Spotify.

</comment><comment><USER28> This article could be titled "Look how much music poor people can access for $10 a month (or free, with ads)"

</comment><comment><USER29> There is so much more choice in music now than even 10 years ago. Spotify or not, the monopolisation of your hearing time by a few chosen musicians has been significantly reduced. Less pie for each to share around. Also, spotify is not the only way musicians make money. Its only one of the ways they reach there audience and monetise it. Madonna for example would expect to earn 50 thousand a day from youtube, not to mention all the other less talked about revenue channels.

</comment><comment><USER30> So Mariah earned $92k in ONE DAY (Dec 24th) this year. My gut is that she probably earned at least 20x that this year- the song is popular throughout December. So she earned a couple million bucks on Spotify this year. The song has made $60m in history... So a couple million on Spotify this year seems pretty damn good.

</comment><comment><USER31> Supply, meet demand

</comment><comment><USER32> Poor musicians.

</comment><comment><USER33> How does the record high profit ($90k per _day_ ) show how little musicians typically make?

<comment><USER34> If one of the most enduring popular songs of the last 20 years makes $90K in one day and its a very seasonal song. How much would the average artist make?

<comment><USER33> Anywhere from 0 to $90k/day.

Ok I guess we can assume that music earnings have a somewhat long tail, but hopefully you get my point - the maximum doesn't tell us much about the distribution.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Get a list of the multiplayer games you and your friends have in common - <AUTHOR> http://mysteamfriends.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I built this app to help in those situations where you want to play a game with your friends, but don't know what games you all own and actually play. This will tell you.

What it does:

Pulls a list of games for you and each of your (publically viewable) friends on Steam and returns the Steam games you have in common that have multiplayer features. From this list, you can see what your friends' favorite multiplayer games are, if they're logged in, and even send them an IM through the Steam client (must be installed).

Example:

<http://www.mysteamgauge.com/friends?username=monkeyagent>

Issues:

-The app sometimes gives up mid-process. I think there's some rate-limiting mucking things up on Steam's end. I'm still working on it, but it doesn't happen too often, so try again if you get an error page and you're sure your username is correct.

-It takes a while to load. If you have more than 30 or so Steam friends, it may take several minutes.</comment>


Ask HN: Would one be able to succeed in compsci if they are illiterate in math? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> By compsci do you mean "computer science research" or commercial development? Math is serious business in CS research. But, in the field, serious math is how programmers do things that seem like magic to other programmers because most programmers aren't actually that good at math.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I mean in a computer science undergraduate course. Good perspective though, I completely agree with it.</comment></comment>


Computing pioneer Bob Frankston says algorithms are the new bureaucracy [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://factordaily.com/outliers-bob-frankston/ <comment><USER2> Is there a special term for opaque algorithms with no human customer service contact info or practical alternative? An algorithmic incarnation of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and "Office Space".

<comment><USER3> All we have now are examples like Google and Facebook.

<comment><USER4> Microsoft has recently switched to an unhelpful, enraging chat bot for their help service and hidden their actual contact information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The whole point of electronic computers being able to perform algorithms was to replace the work of computers (the human kind) in huts filling out sheets according to strict rules.

They're literally an attempt to replace humans as the mechanism by which rote paperwork can be done -- that they're used this way by business isn't terribly surprising.

So algorithms aren't the "new bureaucracy", they're the new way of doing the old bureaucracy -- as they were since inception. This is a feature, not a bug.

</comment><comment><USER5> I used to hate paperwork for interacting with bureaucracy until I looked at it as a sort of high latency RESTful API.

<comment><USER6> Reframing a difficult situation is a successful coping skill!

<comment><USER5> Yep, but not just coping. I think reframing is a way of conceptual refactoring to improve any thought process. It's not always successful though..

I've also wondered if some elements of brainstorming could be automated, such as reframing a situation in random ways and see what the result is like..

<comment><USER2> For engineering problems, TRIZ has classes of solutions based on principles of previously solved problems, a semi-structured "random" walk, [https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~jps7/Lecture%20notes/TRIZ%204...](https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~jps7/Lecture%20notes/TRIZ%2040%20Principles.pdf)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is also the term "faceless bureaucracy" which I think describes the situation best.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool interview, but I'm struggling to understand it. Consider tweaking the acoustics of your recording space to reduce reverb.

<comment><USER9> ston3r, I'd be glad to help improve the audio and give you pointers on doing it yourself. Just send a link to uncompressed source audio to me at cwiltgen at Gmail.</comment></comment>


Direct3D 10/11 for Gallium - rw- http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=92617aeac109481258f0c3863d09c1b8903d438b

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I had no idea what it was:

        Gallium3D is a software library for 3D graphics device drivers being
        developed by VMware, after they acquired Tungsten Graphics[1]—the original
        authors.

        The Gallium3D library operates as a layer between the graphics API and the
        operating system with the primary goal of making driver development easier,
        bundling otherwise duplicated code of several different drivers at a single
        point (this is done by providing a better division of labor, for example,
        leaving memory management to the kernel DRI driver) and to support modern
        hardware architectures.

        Gallium3D is currently used by the free and open source nouveau graphics
        driver.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D>

</comment><comment><USER2> Death to dual booting. I can't wait for this and spice[1] to mature, having to be tethered to a powerful machine for any use case is frustrating when so much else is accessible remotely with ease.

Also it's always nice to see corporate contributions of big features to open source graphics:

> Thanks to all the Gallium contributors and especially the VMware team, whose > work made it possible to implement Direct3D 10/11 much more easily than it > would have been otherwise.

[1] <http://spice-space.org/features.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Some context:

[http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa- dev/2010-Septembe...](http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa- dev/2010-September/003129.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this a cleanroom implementation?

Also, I'm certain MS holds some form of IP on the DirectX line of products. Have they made any threatening noises?

</comment><comment><USER5> It would be pretty ironic if this enables D3D 10 on Windows XP.

<comment><USER6> That would only be possible if the framework of Gallium3D can be ported to use the Windows DDK. Gallium is pretty well tied to X11 and a few kernel features present on BSD and Linux kernels.</comment></comment>


Learn to code. Get a job. - <AUTHOR> http://catalystclass.com/

<comment><USER2> Get a job you bum!

It's actually a pretty good idea. I wonder if it's more thorough than what a university's career services office can offer.

I'd be interested in finding out the success rates. Connections are good, but will they accept you and will you be good enough? That's the challenge and there doesn't seem to be any guarantee.</comment>


I'm a Code Monkey Now - <AUTHOR> Long story short, a few months ago I had to change jobs due to my previous company being in financial trouble.
The new company seemed very attractive at first,
* seemed to have great culture on the surface,
* best practices followed (some projects at my previous job weren't always 100% great regarding this aspect)
* tech stack that allows me to stay relevant (in my previous job, some of the tools/frameworks used were a bit less mainstream, and I learned the hard way that those are not very marketable when you are looking for a job).
* great salary (higher than I ever had before)
Then a few things happened:
* Our salary was temporarily reduced in response to Covid-19. This was not great, but I was OK with that, I saw that several companies around here (I'm not in the US) had massive redundancies so I was glad they went for a salary reduction instead.
* I realised we were expected to work at a higher pace compared to my previous job. This is OK, I recognise that in my last place we weren't the fastest team around, it's OK for me to work a bit harder as I still enjoy SW development.
* This is the part were I broke and led me to write this post: I realised that I'm basically expected to be a code monkey. Every attempt to start discussions about the architecture, or even about minor things like how we should structure a module, is met with resistance and I'm implicitly reminded I'm here to write code and meet daily goals and I shouldn't waste time. This is not something that I'm going to live well with, I was never in such a position, I was given great autonomy in the past.
* I thought I should move on. But I just started, how would it look on my resume that I've been here for just a few months? In addition, I'm reluctant to leave right now because as mentioned, due to COVID-19, the job market is not great.
What should I do? I'm not in a good mood (quarantine doesn't help) and I would really appreciate some advice right now. <comment><USER2> _Every attempt to start discussions about the architecture, or even about minor things like how we should structure a module_

[random internet advice]

The organization/team made a decision in the past and moved forward. You weren't there. You don't know how buy-in was achieved. You don't have the big organizational picture. Yet to a first approximation, you're telling everyone they are doing it wrong. Changing the structure of modules might make you more productive but it requires everyone to change the way they are doing things and to do so without misunderstanding at best and passive aggressive resistance in the average case and destructive behavior in the worst.

Don't misunderstand me, I've put myself in similar situations in the past...enough that I could run out of fingers to count them and be forced to take off my socks. What I've realized is that on average, I was more wrong in the ways I was wrong than I was right in the ways I was right. Or to put it another way, it's theoretically correct that soft tires will provide better traction than all season tires in a rain storm, but pulling off the road to swap out tires in the middle of a downpour isn't ordinarily a good idea and so loading an extra set of tires into the back seat is typically a waste of time when the goal is driving from Seattle to Boston and then to Miami in February.

Your in a new culture. Be anthropological and observe and learn with minimal intervention. Just because it is different from the cultures you know does not mean it's broken or wrong. Again there is a big picture and the big picture is about people making money and alternative engineering approaches are usually rounding error. To be explicit, the way things were done at your previous employer were the practices of a failing business. That might be a reason to treat those practices as suspect.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, you are right, I'm new here and I will need to observe first. I just realised that in all my previous jobs, I was being hired as part of a newly formed team, so I never had to go through this adjustment phase as I'm doing now.

Edit: also thank you for helping me realize this:

> To be explicit, the way things were done at your previous employer were the > practices of a failing business. That might be a reason to treat those > practices as suspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have seen the situation you describe many times in the past, the bit about being expected to be a code monkey, not the COVID19 caused challenges.

In many reasonable sized projects, there are several tiers. Domain experts provide the requirements and high level design. Technical architects design the overall architecture, then the team leaders and the programmers who actually produce the code. It is actually unproductive for programmers attempt to dictate the architecture.

I have seen projects collapse into chaos because everybody was an expert at architecture and nobody truly cared about the domain. You really need to have solid structure to successfully complete large projects. It doesn't mean you can't make suggestions. But the decisions lie with those who are responsible for them. If they make the wrong call it is on them not you.

I sense that you are unhappy with your circumstances. Can you rise to the level of team leader or higher based on your experience? If not, then might be a good time to be a valuable contributor at the level you have been hired.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. As said in the other comment, in all my previous jobs I was being hired as part of a newly formed team, so I never had to adjust to an established team and/or project.

> I sense that you are unhappy with your circumstances. Can you rise to the > level of team leader or higher based on your experience?

I can't because the company is too small - no room for growth at the moment - I will follow your advice then:

> be a valuable contributor at the level you have been hired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My two thoughts.

First. Lump it for now. Getting paid right now is good. People that manage to get paid through bad times do A LOT BETTER than people that don't. Sometime they come out ahead.

Second. Things could change for the better as you work there longer and get to know the ropes and the politics. If it doesn't get better start doing the side eye for a new gig.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is good advice and exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you!</comment></comment>


News Corp Sees Big Drop in MySpace Ad Revenue - <AUTHOR> http://www.clickz.com/3633666

<comment><USER2> Can MySpace really not become the next GeoCities?

<comment><USER3> blink tags... check.

embedded audio... check.

obligatory webrings... check.

homemade pokedex... missing!

It fails my unit tests for Geocities-ness, but I think you were referring to the recent collapse. I'll second that motion.</comment></comment>


Obama is RESTful - <AUTHOR> http://www.idolhands.com/personal/obama-is-restful/ <comment><USER2> All I know is when I try to go to Obama's homepage at work and click the link for my home state, IE7 tries to download it rather than view the page.

Clearly Obama doesn't give a crap about us average middle-class working Americans stuck in rough jobs (forced on IE instead of Firefox/Chrome) or anyone from Pennsylvania for that matter.

<http://www.imagesocket.com/view/obama_pa_fail0ac.PNG>

Edit: Oh wait, the satire is only legitimate when it supports Obama?

<comment><USER3> <http://www.imagesocket.com/view/obama_pa_fail0ac.PNG>

_"Content you have requested is for mature audience only and requires age verification."_

Can anyone try to explain why this picture was "mature"?

<comment><USER4> Misconfigured mime-types is not something kids will understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please don't start pimping politics here. Save it for Digg.

<comment><USER6> it is not about politics,dude,don't comment before you read

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly what I thought. This item was meant to be a geeky satire that pokes fun at both candidates.

Call it a bit comic relief for something that is taken so seriously!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One bit of code may demonstrate that Obama is wasteful, using this expensive DOM method:

      jQuery(document).pngfix()

instead of

      $("img[@src$=png]).pngfix();

Intrigue!

<comment><USER8> What it proves is that Obama is trying to fix EVERYTHING, and is not _selecting_ a specific class for fixing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although the article is satire, it does show the decision making process each candidate/staff took (although it might not have carried much weight, and may not actually affect the way they govern) when they were faced with the task of "I need a campaign website."

<comment><USER10> No, it doesn't. It shows that Obama's staff / volunteers are more tech savvy than McCain's. Anyone surprised?

The candidate's aren't sitting around picking web servers and figuring out 404 pages. Nobody that was that obsessive of a micromanager could have gotten as far as they have.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. Any fool can see that all Obama did was set up some Gentoo instances, compile Apache and PHP with the appropriate CFLAGS, and _let his people do their work_.

<comment><USER8> The impressive part is that he did that while holding a speech. With his _toes_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I might be getting prematurely old and cranky at 25, but I am so tired of real smugness from Obama supporters that I can't laugh at faux-smugness.

<comment><USER13> I'm old and cranky at 43.

It doesn't get any better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of the co-founders of facebook is the head of the obama campaign website. That article was both funny and enlightening at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER15> I always thought Open Source was fairly conservative, at least in the Burkean sense. It's a decentralized set of customs, handed down from person to person without being imposed from above or overthrown from below.

<comment><USER16> Open source is like capitalism in process and communism in result.

<comment><USER17> It's neither. Both capitalism and communism deals specifically with the ownership of scarce goods. Software specifically isn't a scarce good.

But it's free market at its best. Both process and result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do either support microformats? Maybe there's a microformat for politics, like hLiar or hBullshit.

<comment><USER19> I think it would be great if more Voter clients supported microformats other than hApathy.

<comment><USER20> Maybe a 3rd Party candidate, oops, micro-format would be suitable for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My favorite line:

 _Obama is inclusive in his support for PNGs, accommodating even disadvantaged (Internet Explorer) users._

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, exceedingly intelligent comments on this thread. (Yes, that's sarcasm.) I'm not going to complain that this is on the front page, but seriously... #1? 77 upvotes?

</comment><comment><USER23> I hope this is satire. Please tell me you're not trying estimate how good a president they'd be based on how their websites are designed.

<comment><USER24> joke ---- _whoosh_ \---->

              O <--- Yuo
            --|--
              |
            / \

<comment><USER25> Holy crap, he's a centaur!

<comment><USER26> And Korean, apparently.

<comment><USER24> Just messing with the OCD crew a bit :)

<comment><USER27> It's not OCD, it's CDO. And the letters are in proper alphabetical order, just like they should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Honestly, I'm not going to vote on a candidate based on the version of HTML their website uses. Nor do I care what web server they use, or what their 404 page looks like.

I don't think anyone else cares either.

<comment><USER29> No, we don't. But this article was humorous and awesome. Geez, lighten up.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, it's hard to tell these days whether someone is being funny or if they are just being stupid. Usually it's the second one, especially when politics is involved :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> hilarious. thanks for the great read!

</comment><comment><USER31> obama is the clear choice for the future</comment>


Expert on Mental Illness Reveals Her Own Fight - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/health/23lives.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing I don't get about all these therapies is that they're basically just attempts to combine the roles of the guru and the shaman, and systematize them in a way that makes them more palatable to the western mindset. Maybe this is just me being elitist, but if I'm ever having a complete psychospiritual meltdown then I want the real thing.

That said, D.B.T. seems kind of cool from what little I've read about it.</comment>


Meet the NASA scientist devising a starship warp drive - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929300.300-meet-the-nasa-scientist-devising-a-starship-warp-drive.html#.UhJQjry9wu5 <comment><USER2> White claims to have calculated a way to substantially reduce the energy requirements to form a warp bubble, and without reading his papers I suppose I should provisionally believe him. But the required energy has to be _negative_ (as he confirms here), and I have never, ever seen him or anyone else suggest how he plans to accomplish that. Negative vacuum energies like what he's relying on have never been observed in the universe (directly or indirectly), and would violate a number of "energy conditions" commonly believed to hold for realistic matter. It would be _very_ exciting if those energy conditions really were violated, but it's an extraordinary claim that backed by _zero_ evidence.

With that in mind, I continue to be puzzled by the amount of press that this story seems to receive.

<comment><USER3> As far as I know, negative energy is theoretically still sound; I may be quite mistaken though. What "energy conditions" would negative energy (or mass for that matter) be violating?

<comment><USER4> Negative refraction is just as strange a concept, and we seem to be slowly getting there technologically. So I'm actually hopeful this will happen someday.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately negative refraction a secondary effect where you have negative permittivity and permeability at the same time. Negative permittivity is no big deal, metals act like an electron plasma gas around certain frequencies and get all weird, something like the color transmitted thru thin films of gold and how weird gold, silver, copper act in the THz range and all that. The "magic" is creatively negating both .. At The Same Time. Then the negative refraction / metamaterial effects take hold.

Kind of like you can compress ammonia (a bit) and nothing terribly interesting happens, and you can cool ammonia gas (a bit) and nothing terribly interesting happens, but do both at the same time and you've invented liquid ammonia and refrigeration and all kinds of nifty stuff.

On the other hand energy/mass seems rather fundamental. There are no multiple "easily" negatable components you can play with mixing together. There's no "add a to b to get the mass" going on. So you can't get sneaky with combinations and initial conditions to magically make negative mass/energy. It's really a different kind of problem.

The whole topic is pretty interesting to me because the first metamaterial stuff was constructed out of printed circuit boards with weird etchings right around the ham radio microwave 6cm and 9cm bands, which is right up my alley (doing weird ham radio things involving PCBs and such around those frequencies) Unfortunately I have been unable to figure out any practical engineering demo (like, an antenna or a waveguide or some such) that would be ham radio applicable in a real world demonstration. I guess I could make a really weird lens and place it in front of a 6cm horn waveguide antenna, but I can make a much simpler microwave lens antenna using about 1940s tech. Lens antennas using plates of styrofoam and aluminum foil work pretty well at 10 GHz ham radio band for example, but I digress.

Metamaterials are kind of a solution in search of a problem right now, like lasers in 1960s or home computers in the 80s or whatever. Most likely, much like the examples, it would be pretty hard to predict today just how important they might be in the future. Or maybe we're seeing the next "magnetic bubble memory" or magnetic amplifier technology or fluidic analog computing or whatever. Hard to predict.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He mentions the 100YSS Symposium, which was conveniently held in my neck of the woods in 2011. It was exciting to be among a couple hundred smarter-than- average people who wouldn't so much as crack a smile when the word "starship" came up in conversation. Outside-the-box ideas, lessons taken from ISS, Orion, nuclear propulsion, radiation shielding, social engineering, violation of the 2nd Law, other cool stuff. It was a _brainstorming_ excuse, and an opportunity to dream big. If you live near Houston, and you'd care to rub shoulders with some not-stupids who think seriously about this stuff, you might check this out. [http://100yss.org/symposium/2013](http://100yss.org/symposium/2013)

<comment><USER7> Space exploration is not handicapped by technology, but by societal willpower in the absence of an existential crisis like the Cold War. The Alcubierre Drive is fine as a theoretically impossible physics plaything, but the expansion of the species beyond the Earth only requires funding to achieve using much more modest means. For every _one_ space science mission that goes forward, our academic system produces 500 concepts that are judged too impractical or too expensive, and 50 that arrive at group consensus that it would be productive to move forward and submit proposals. 5 of them get funded into fully developed systems, and 4 are cancelled just shy of completion through because the JWST has cost overruns or the new Majority Leader / President wants to make his mark with an arbitrary decision like cancelling the 6 year old 20-year-plan for a Mars base in exchange for a 20-year-plan for a Moon base (that will be cancelled in six years).

The path is there, the end discoveries (relative to many other fields) relatively certain, we just don't like to make the effort in any concerted way, and our government is broken; Congress would _prefer_ it if they could just run NASA on a soundstage.

<comment><USER8> I do agree with your overall premise, but societal willpower in this case is really just a proxy for cost. Space exploration is fantastically expensive. Of course it doesn't help that the Space Shuttle and therefore the ISS were hopelessly cost inefficient, but even without the shuttle tax space exploration is still very costly.

This is why SpaceX's plans for substantially reusable launch vehicles is so exciting. They have a credible roadmap towards cutting launch costs by a factor of ten or more. We're in one of those situations where yes, we could spend more billions on space exploration right now, but there's a very real chance that if we maintain current space spending for just a few years those extra billions could buy us a huge amount more. I bet projects like the planned asteroid mining venture are watching SpaceX's technology development program with bated breath.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At first I thought he would be a quack, but his technical credential look legit. [http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/team/harold- white/](http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/team/harold-white/)

I just wish he would explain a little better why this was an allowable violation of relativity.

<comment><USER10> I think the problem with the warp drive is topological. His drive relies on expanding space behind you and contracting it in front. OK. But what happens when you turn the drive off? Assuming all this squashing and stretching doesn't involve discontinuities, at best you're back where you're started from. At worst, you're in some kind of weird messed up crappy nook in spacetime where you're a long way from your starting point and your destination.

<comment><USER11> My understanding is that using a substance called "spice gas" you're able to enable this drive through a process called "folding."

<comment><USER12> HN-as-a-hivemind really should approve of this sort of snark. It's nerd-snark!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wouldn't an Alcubierre drive just always take you into the past? If you leave Earth using this drive and get to some distant star at FTL using this mechanism, maybe you escape relativistic effects, but you'll still get there before light from our star arrives there. And then when you go back wouldn't you arrive before the light left? It doesn't seem to make sense to me. Maybe someone can explain away my misconception about how that works?

<comment><USER14> Say we are having a swimming race and both leave the same starting side at the same moment. I get to the other side of the pool and return to the starting position before you reach the opposite side of the pool. Just because I lap you doesn't mean I travel back in time.

<comment><USER13> Ok, that makes sense, but what happens to the light being emitted from your internal ship lighting. Are you traveling faster than that? How do you look around?

<comment><USER15> the wikipedia article linked above talks about this, saying that the "...This method of transport does not involve objects in motion at speeds faster than light with respect to the contents of the warp bubble; that is, a light beam within the warp bubble would still always move faster than the ship. As objects within the bubble are not moving (locally) faster than light..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would love it if there were a straightforward way to donate money directly to NASA. I'd happily fund an indiegogo project for warp systems.

<comment><USER17> This is just indirectly related to space travel, but there will probably be an indiegogo project for aneutronic fusion in the near future: [http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_l...](http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_lyftenbloggie&view=entry&year=2013&month=08&day=07&id=100%3Aplanning- for-crowdfunding-campaign-underway&Itemid=90)

<comment><USER18> Is this anything like cold fusion?

<comment><USER17> Quite the opposite, it's extremely hot. They got a paper published in _Physics of Plasmas_ saying they'd reached temperatures of 1.8 billion degrees C.

That's hot enough to fuse boron-11 with hydrogen. You end up with three helium nuclei and some x-rays.

There are several attempts underway, though the one I linked above is the cheapest and apparently the furthest along. I wrote up some descriptions with references here: [http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestI...](http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/10/planId/1304006)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am often distressed by the time, energy, and resources people consume in an attempt to escape reality (i.e. video games, films, alcohol, and drugs). Reading about endeavors like this renews my optimism for the future.

<comment><USER20> I take issue with video games and film being a waste.

The entire idea of a warp-drive comes from science fiction and people daydreaming/trying to escape their current reality. The Hyperloop is directly out of Heinlein. Subterranean cannons on the moon as a public transport device... Without escapism we lose the essence of human creativity, imagining a future that is different from the present. Do you think we would have bothered to build rockets and go to space/the moon if science fiction hadn't whetted the public's curiosity?

If anything, the problem is that current escapism kind of sucks and we need to do it better.

edit:lose/loose

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How do we get this "negative vacuum energy" stuff?

</comment><comment><USER22> But the question remains. How did he drop the energy requirements by orders of magnitude, and from my fuzzy memory of such things, would that even be enough to make a warp drive practical?

If he's right, it would be at least, a step in the right direction....

<comment><USER23> He is only testing the ability to warp space. The setup is extremely simple actually. All he is doing is splitting a laser, one part goes through an extremely charged toroidal capacitor and the other goes through nothing. If the path lengths of these two lasers are the same, but the interferometer reads that the lasers are out of phase, then you have possible warping of space. Most of the cost is probably in the high-precision interferometer.

<comment><USER21> If you notice a discrepancy, isn't it more likely that one laser was "slowed down", rather than sped up? You'd get the same effect by shining the laser through a thick pane of glass: it arrives out of phase on the other end as if it were slowed down.

<comment><USER23> Assuming this experiment is done in a vacuum, I've never heard of a static electric field changing the index of refraction of a vacuum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone know how they will test it in the lab? I thought we haven't discovered negative matter yet?

<comment><USER25> The White–Juday warp-field interferometer

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White%E2%80%93Juday_warp- field_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White%E2%80%93Juday_warp- field_interferometer)

<comment><USER24> But how can a charged capacitor warp space? I thought only matter could warp space?

<comment><USER26> I don't understand physics to any degree, but I was under the assumption that EM fields also warped space (albeit orders of magnitude less). I found some explanations that are way above my head on Quora:

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Physics/Can-a-large-energy-field- other-...](http://www.quora.com/Physics/Can-a-large-energy-field-other-than- gravity-warp-spacetime/answer/Tu-Anh-Tran)

[2] [http://www.quora.com/Physics/Can-a-large-energy-field- other-...](http://www.quora.com/Physics/Can-a-large-energy-field-other-than- gravity-warp-spacetime/answer/Frank-Heile)

The second seems to suggest that energy fields, in general, do warp space.

<comment><USER27> considering e=mc2, it's not surprising that matter and energy can both accomplish the same thing - they are the same thing</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla in talks with Apple's head of mergers and aquisitions - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/technology/sns-rt-autos-tesla-apple-urgent-20140220,0,1556791.story

<comment><AUTHOR> Would this mean Apple is going in the car business?</comment>


RAM instead HDD/SSD.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk I don't pursue any promotional purposes, but never heard about such drive before. <comment><USER2> Aside from the seek times, this guy gets destroyed by the latest crucial SSD drive.

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148349)

If you want high speed ram-based drives, FusionIO is the way to go

<http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodrive/>

</comment><comment><USER3> This may work if your server's RAM is already capped out. You can already use RAM as virtual disk space, so this looks more like a way to add more RAM to a system through the SATA bus (perhaps with some extra interface sugar). Although, the main memory throughput can easily overwhelm a SATA bus.

It's an intriguing piece of hardware, I am waiting for some reviews.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was following until I got here:

 _It also offers 100% secure file deletion (disconnect both the external and the internal power!). Flash drives can't offer this. Hard disks suffer from magnetic remnance and so retain their data even after they have been overwritten several times! But the HyperDrive5 is forensically wiped every time the power is fully disconnected_

Wait a minute, if the drive gets accessed quickly or if it's really cold, RAM actually retains its contents. You can't expect the charges to suddenly revert to randomness!

Plus, this presents a major issue if someone wanted to sabotage you... If it's really that easy to clear the contents, someone may just come and clear it for you while you aren't looking.

</comment><comment><USER5> SATA2 interface and DDR2 RAM... A major OUCH! That's like putting Bugatti Veyron Super Sport on a narrow and curvaceous country road: A pinhole that's just stopping it from literally flying (well, speed-wise, not altitude-wise).

On the top of my list as a consumer grade drive (thou, we're considering to put it into the Win2008/SQLServer server on our LAN ) is OCZ Revodrive X2 PCI- Express SSD ([http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-revodrive-x2-pci-express- ss...](http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-revodrive-x2-pci-express-ssd.html)).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for new config for my home pc. Before this article I thought to build RAID-0 with 4 sata drives, but now i would better buy this device.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is an interesting product, and there have been others like it before, but what a shady looking company to be selling it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very nice. But what happens when the power fails? RAM can't preserve state without power...

<comment><USER8> Most of these units have an internal battery and CF card or other flash storage - when the power goes out, the battery lets them write the contents of their RAM to the permanent storage.

There are also other options than the one linked:

<http://www.ddrdrive.com/> \- pcie card, favored by many people running ZFS

[http://us.test.giga- byte.com/Products/Storage/Products_Overv...](http://us.test.giga- byte.com/Products/Storage/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2678) \- Gigabyte's i-RAM, very similar to what's linked.</comment></comment>


Using sed to make indexes for books (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pement.org/sed/bookindx.txt <comment><USER2> Is there any non-artistic reason why one would like to do it this way instead of using any programming language that's actually any readable?

<comment><USER3> I guess because it's 1997 and your free readable programming languages for convenient text processing were limited to... uh... does Perl count as readable?

<comment><USER4> Yes. CPAN is full of readable Perl. Spare us the unfair generalization.

<comment><USER5> To be fair with the previous comment, do you claim CPAN was full of readable Perl, _back in 1997_?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> sed and it's bigger brother awk, are excellent tools to have in your daily use toolkit.

O'Reilly have an excellent book: "sed & awk Book by Arnold Robbins and Dale Dougherty"

For awk, there is the classic book:"The AWK Programming Language by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, Peter J. Weinberger"

<comment><USER7> There are a collection of use cases where sed and awk (and bash) are perfect tools. IMHO, the best advice is to switch to a real scripting language (like perl or python) as soon as the complexity increases. This way you never need to learn in detail all the intricacies of these tools. You just need to know the small use cases and to master your favorite scripting language. The life is too short and too many interesting domains exists to lose time mastering the quirks or sed, awk and bash. Real scripting languages do not have so many quirks and limitations. This helps to produce less buggy software. Time is precious, choose what you want to learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe _The Unix Programming Environment_ used this technique to create their index.

<comment><USER9> A few of the early O'Reilly books.

 _UNIX Power Tools_ may or may not be one of them, but _remains_ a phenomenal book. It's what got me "over the hump" in grokking Unix and how it and its tools worked, many, many moons ago.

Larry Peek is a God.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unix also came with dedicated to the purpose tools for making indexes. ptx is one.</comment>


Show HN: SentCode – Unlimited Web Development for $290 per Month - camping-monitor Hello all!
We launched https://www.sentcode.com a few weeks ago and since then we didn't stop for a second. We basically offer unlimited web development for a fixed monthly fee. I truly believe that we are offering a great service that people gladly pay the small price as it helps them a lot in their own businesses.
I'm right here in case you got any questions, and I hope I can contribute as much as I can to this community! <comment><AUTHOR> Says $390 on your website? Also how do you deliver the project? Do you host or provide the final code?</comment>