A brief guide to the IRC protocol - <AUTHOR> http://blog.webicity.info/2010/10/14/a-quick-basic-primer-on-the-irc-protocol/

<comment><USER2> Is there any developer that didn't developed and IRC bot or client in their youth ?

I know I did it. It's a great learning experience in network programming. And one you can brag to your friends in #whatever.

<comment><USER3> I think there are plenty of them. IRC would barely qualify as "popular" among CS/SE students graduating in the past 5 years.

/jarek, developer, IRC user, not a bot programmer

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've often wondered how well an ircd would scale as a twitter clone. Following someone would just joining a channel that only they could write to.

I wonder how many clients are connected and receiving realtime messages during peak usage on say efnet.

edit: sorry I clearly phrased this poorly, I said "an ircd" but in my brain I was thinking of an ircd network like efnet, freenode, etc.

<comment><USER5> I might be naive, but to me "connected" to an IRC server implies having an open TCP/IP connection. That means that the server will run out of ports at roughly 65,000 clients.

Of course, you could probably solve that by load-balancing, having multiple parallel ircd instances that share the backend, but then you're not having "an ircd" any longer.

<comment><USER6> No. TCP connections are identified by a four-tuple of (sender's IP, sender's TCP port, receiver's IP, receiver's port). Thus you are only limited by 65536 connections between a particular server and a particular client.

<comment><USER7> In fact you are limited to 2^32 (=65536^2) connections between two hosts, as you can vary both ports. But that is only theory. In practice you will run out of some other system resource (kernel memory, file descriptors, slots in connection table...) before reaching this limit.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I meant connections to one particular service. In that case both IP fields and the server port are fixed, so the only varying parameter is the client port number.

<comment><USER5> And that was, I feel kind of redundant in pointing out, exactly what I meant too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, any speculation as to why jabber never replaced (or even really contended with) irc for developer chats?

<comment><USER9> Critical mass (or the lack of it) would be my guess. Social tools are not very useful if you are using it alone. And switching IM requires quite a lot of momentum imho.

And there are some technical stuff too. Jabber is much heavier and noisier protocol. And afaik there isn't a Jabber client comparable to irssi yet.

<comment><USER8> Good point, I think abstractbill nailed it with the XML, which would explain why there was never a good (or great) client. I remember having the client conversation when Jabber was growing, there were clients you could use but nothing that you really wanted to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice never thought i'd get to mIRC.net, a site i am an admin on, through hackernews. There are several great RAW tutorials on mirc.net and mircscripts.org and in fact theraw section this blog post links too is an excellent reference point for all network deviations of the RFC's.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have IRC to thank for learning a lot about basic client/server communications and networking back in my early teens.

Certainly not the best protocol ever invented, but I have fond memories of figuring out how it worked.

</comment><comment><USER12> I recall I loved IRC so much when I was young I learned all the protocol even if I didn't want to actually use it.

<comment><USER13> I was one of a million other teenagers who learnt it trying to write an IRC client in VB5/6.

<comment><USER14> I think my first introduction to "Turing tar-pit" style programming was trying to write an IRC client in mIRC script, which even sorta worked.

<comment><USER13> I did that too, before mIRC supported multiple servers, I loved mIRC script, now, not so much

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> good work. if only I'd had something like this when working on the IRC module for ayttm.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. I spent way too much time reading old mailing lists and server and client specific docs when trying to understand the protocol (not any specific software that used it) while writing nodebot (<http://github.com/thwarted/nodebot>). RFC1459 is seriously lacking in real- world use, explanation of terms, and general robustness, despite that it was written to document a defacto protocol.

On the other hand, you do see a lot of the organic evolution of a protocol in what is IRC, which is valuable from both an historical and educational perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree about the problems with the specs. For the most part, the best way to find out how a lot of the stuff worked was just to telnet a few IRC servers. For example, the thing about some servers needing a ping after user? Not mentioned in any spec, discovered while using a specific IRC network via telnet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A truly wonky and stupid protocol that could've been done so much better. Good grief. And I say this not just being a permanent IRC resident since over 10 years, but having written both an IRC client and a bot-of-sorts.

<comment><USER18> It was easy for us to say this 15 years ago when a super-compact binary protocol just seemed to make oh so much sense, but now I'm not so sure.

The IRC protocol does exactly what it sets out to do, and there isn't really much over-the-wire overhead for client connections. The only information that's repeated unnecessarily is user hostmask data; everything else is mostly 100% useful.

It could really have only been a bit better if each event was described in a JSON- or YAML-like notation, but this was 1988, not 2008.

Compared to tons of other legacy protocols in use today (FTP!?), IRC isn't all that bad.

<comment><USER19> Well ... FTP was _very_ early, RFC 114 in 1971 going by the titles (<http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/>) and only coming after (at that level) a logger protocol (had to do with setting up terminal service), terminal services and RJE.

But, yes, anyone who complains about a new boziod protocol should be forced to look at the wonders and horrors of FTP, especially in the context of NATs.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Anvil, Visual Basic reimagined for the web - <AUTHOR> https://anvil.works <comment><USER2> I love the fact that the initial site load was rather slow, exactly as expected from something with Visual Basic in the title ;)

Anyway, looks interesting. Good luck!</comment>


Ask HN: On how many topics should a good developer focus? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently finishing my MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering and there are many topics that excite me. However, I feel like some of them are too unrelated for me to specialize in both, like ML and OSdev, for instance. On how many of these "unrelated subjects" should one concentrate and focus on being good at? Any strategies or advice to filter the topics you should hang on to and the ones you should leave behind? <comment><USER2> Take a macro view and guess what's going to be "big" at about the same time as you are applying for your second or third job. Your first job will get you in the door -- but your second or third job will be as you are transitioning from junior to mid-level roles, and you want to be in a good strategic position to move to a growth area at that stage, which will open the door to a management position and a career beyond the "shop floor" \-- _if_ that's the direction you want to take.

</comment><comment><USER3> 2

<comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts on the second question?

<comment><USER3> Honestly you are the first i see to worry about this. Usually these things come (and change) naturally as you use them. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What active/maintained dev (free or $$$) websites/blogs do you visit? - <AUTHOR> I've a small list I really like:
InfoQ, Lambda the Ultimate, DZone, LWN, Phoronix
and blog wise I like Martin Fowler's agile/architecture blog.
Would you mind posting as response your favorite, go-to/bookmarked developer websites? FP, OO, embedded, I don't care, as long as they have good discussion, not a lot of noise, and I don't care if they are free or require subscription either. <comment><USER2> don't know much about it, but i often visit DZone</comment>


Ask HN: Looking to learn some more marketing - <AUTHOR> I come from a technical background and would like to move towards a technical marketing role.
The courses at General Assembly look pretty good. Does anyone have experience of these or are there alternatives out there?
https://generalassemb.ly/education/digital-marketing <comment><USER2> Marketer of 10+ years here, you'll learn 100x more by doing marketing than any course. If you have a side project or could volunteer yourself to help out a business you'd have the best chance of really learning. When interviewing for hires you see people who have done work vs read about it. The later is the more interesting. Practical experience will really aid your transition more than courses.

I made the transition from a technical analyst background this way. Back in the day I was fairly handy with Excel/Access/VBA type work. I was working in a large company and hit up some marketers and asked if I could build tools/reports to monitor and improve ad spend in my spare time. This helped them optimise a bunch and they got a new headcount and gave me a permanent role. If you have a similar option it would be easier than trying to convince a new company to take a chance on you.

Also what do you mean by technical marketing role? This could mean a bunch of things. If doing courses or practical experience you should decide what marketing field you want to go into to focus on. People from ouside the profession don't typically realise the level of diversity in skills/role. If your not sure let me know what your trying to get out of this move and I'll try and offer some advice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Better than any course is real life experience, learning as you go.

Here's an idea. Pick a product on Clickbank, set up an affiliate and train your marketing chops with it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just read inbound.org for ideas

<comment><AUTHOR> I read alot but edging more towards a classroom/structured environment.</comment></comment>


Y Combinator Unbound - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@michaeldelamaza/y-combinator-unbound-c69d27217525 <comment><USER2> > _YC is the dominant force in American business today_

While everyone may agree that YC has had a strong influence on startups, calling it the "dominant force in American business" is narrow hyperbole I'm sure even they wouldn't agree with.</comment>


Cern scientist: 'Physics built by men – not by invitation' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45703700 <comment><USER3> Fake news written to shock, not to inform.

> In 2015, Nobel laureate Prof Tim Hunt resigned from his position at > University College London after telling an audience of young female > scientists at a conference in South Korea that the "trouble with girls" in > labs was that "when you criticise them they cry".

Why was this mentioned, right at the end of the article? Also, the author conventiently ommitted that Tim was _joking_ , the audience _laughed_ (i.e. got the joke) and the joke was about his wife, whom he met in his lab.

In addition, the article doesn't even try to substantiate or explain why CERN considers the presentation as "highly offensive" \- facts can clearly be _wrong_ , but can they be _offensive_?

<comment><USER4> A fact is not offensive, but can be used offensively in an offensive argument. By some school of logic - so I learned recently but forgot what school that was - an argument consists at least of premises and conclusion. If the premises is underspecified, the conclusion can be wrong even if the premises is factual. That is, the correlation suggested by the data might not lead to the conclusion when more data is considered. The fallacy here might be _post hoc ergo propter hoc_ (a term I also learned only recently).

He was basically arguing outside of his field of expertise. I'm not inclined toward gender studies either, but if addressing their conclusions, that women are confronted with unintentional bias, then that argument needs to be taken up. The career argument is the premises, not the conclusion.

Edit: If there is a bias, that would necessarily show up in statistics. Even if the initial data point doesn't show that bias. If there are two data points, one showing bias, one not, that's simply not enough to draw a conclusion either way. A physicist should know that. Anecdotal evidence of course does not count as additional data point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> \- The guy presenting this might be wrong. \- He may be an asshole and/or have resentful intentions with making this presentations.

However, none of the people who disagree with him in this article engage with any of these things. They're just angry that he's saying this at all! Their upset emotions seems to be the only case against what he's saying.

<comment><USER6> It's not the right forum to express this evidence/conclusions. It's insensitive, and entirely without empathy. People have good reason to be upset.

<comment><USER7> People have expressed these arguments in:

\- Conference talks

\- Essays posted to libertarian blogs

\- Private corporate memos written after feedback was explicitly requested

Probably others.

The same thing was said in every case: "it's not the right forum, it's insensitive and without empathy".

How incredibly surprising that there doesn't seem to be any right forum or right time for expressing opinions about anti-male bias. Somehow it's always offensive and it's always terrible that women were upset.

It looks almost as if some people want to shut that conversation down wherever it happens.

<comment><USER4> It seems as if that conversation was part of the bias in the first place, so there's two sides of the same medal.

One right place would have been the room where the anti-male/pro-female responsibility was decided. Now that the decision is through, it's just bickering and not constructive to oppose it, ignoring it denigrating it in public as if that was outside the assumed responsibility for the forum (the institution).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> None of these "facts" refute the hypothesis that "physics is built by men" because that's who has been allowed into the field to date. For example, the points about citations can be explained by the fact that male authors are much more likely to cite themselves, and the fact that social networks play a role in how often works are cited: [https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/05/female-authors- ge...](https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/05/female-authors-get-fewer- citations-astronomy). It also ignores that the citation gap has narrowed dramatically over the past decades, which is the opposite of what you'd expect if measures to admit more women into the field led to underqualified women entering the field.

This ia just lazy reasoning from people who should know better.

<comment><USER4> > that male authors are much more likely to cite themselves

did you mean: _each other_?

self-cites need to be discounted all the more.

<comment><USER8> No, themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You either have to believe that there is a meritocracy and that it's under attack by an unnamed mob of truth-haters or you have to believe there is a pattern of shitty behavior (against women in this case) that people are-- sometimes clumsily--trying to rectify so that anyone with a contribution to make to physics (or computer science, etc.) gets a decent chance at it.

I believe the latter.

<comment><USER10> I'd love to agree with you, but the science provides us[1] with a clear trend: the freer the women and the more equal they are culturally and legally, the lower their participation in STEM. That doesn't agree too well with the "shitty behavior" scenario, putting me in a "we need a better explanation with more predictive power" camp for now.

[1] off of the top of Google: [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the- more...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender- equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/)

<comment><USER11> There are female influencer making lot of money on Instagram by posting photos of their bodies, makeup kits, outfits etc.... who are making way more than median pay in STEM career.

I don't understand why would any woman choose STEM when batter paying gigs are available to them.

<comment><USER12> Um, is this sarcastic?

Maybe because Instagram millionaires are about as common as sports millionaires?

Maybe because beauty fades, and doesn't make for much of a career past age 35?

Maybe because not every woman is conventionally beautiful?

Maybe because some of us couldn't care less about fashion or makeup?

Maybe because we enjoy technical work?

Maybe because some of us are damn good at it?

Maybe because we enjoy producing value with - and being valued for - <USER2> brains instead of our bodies?

"Look at the salaries pro football players make. I don't understand why any man would choose STEM when better paying gigs are available to them."

<comment><USER11> > Maybe because Instagram millionaires are about as common as sports > millionaires?

If you enjoy it, that's good. But not everyone enjoys it and that's why STEM has lower praticipation from females and that's what we are discussing here.

I didn't say millionaire anywhere. Many modeling gigs pay more than entry level median salaries in STEM.

It's about efforts vs reward. People in STEM require years of education compared to posting a product review on Instgram which doesn't even require a high school certificate.

Don't compare it to Pro football players either which is very risky and requires years of training and money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We live in a post truth world. Instead of accepting men and women as complementary we're forced into "competition", yet another way of dividing society.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you missed the link, here's the actual presentation: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA91Kefj/view)

</comment><comment><USER15> _He also said that he himself was overlooked for a job that he was more qualified for, which was given to a woman._

So, basically, he got burned -- or feels he did -- and he wants justice of some sort. Which is not unreasonable per se, but this is not really the way to go about trying to get that.

</comment><comment><USER16> Good on this guy for speaking some truth, even if he faced flak for it all around. He had the statistics to prove it, and he was discredited. He had the anecdotal experience to back his story, and he was discredited. By daring to say that people should be admitted based on merit and not given free passes into the field based on gender, he was lambasted. There was no rebuttal, the only responses were basically 'I don't like what he said'.

<comment><USER6> Let's just ignore whether this guy's arguments are valid or not for a second, why, why would you present them in a room full of young, presumably aspirational, predominately female scientists at a conference focussed on getting more women to science? You can question whether such a conference should exist, but this isn't the way to make your point. Particularly when bringing up studies suggesting women like working with people and men like working with things - all those women in the room seemingly don't fit into that reductionist rule, so it's irrelevant in the context at best, and flat out wrong at worst. He's not a crusader, he just seems like a bit of jerk.

> given free passes into the field based on gender

Free passes aren't given based on gender, though preferential treatment might be given as part of an affirmative action program. Personally I think that is absolutely necessary, in all of STEM, because I believe there is a structural imbalance in our society against women. I'm open to the idea there isn't, and there are immutable biological differences at play, but unless we do something meaningful to correct the societal factor we'll never know. But it's super easy to say there's no chance of that and we should treat everybody totally equal, when you're not the one with the disadvantage.

As to his arguments, so much of the evidence he points to can be shaped by the same societal forces he is trying to dismiss. "I made some simple checks and discovered that it wasn't, that it was becoming sexist against men and said so." Anybody who thinks they can unravel this in a evening on google is arrogant, and totally wrong.

> speaking some truth

Real scientists don't talk in terms of absolute truth, they deal in scientific consensus given the available evidence. Please consider being less dismissive, when almost 50% (and in some ways, 100%) of the world's population is affected by how we view and respond to gender.

<comment><USER3> > Free passes aren't given based on gender, though preferential treatment > might be given as part of an affirmative action program

Isn't that one and the same?

<comment><USER17> > Isn't that one and the same?

What if they are the same. Is that really an issue? Poor children get a "Free Pass" or (preferential treatment) by going to school for free. Seems like the right thing to do to me because their experience should not be decided by factors they can't control (in this case the financial situation they were born in). Same with gender "Free Passes" if one accepts the premise that it is a disadvantage to be born a woman and want to make it in STEM. If one does not believe that (meaning they were not convinced by the evidence), then that's another discussion and the debate is open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This constant "Men vs. Women" narrative really doesn't make any sense to me. I've always seen people as just that, as individuals, with strengths and preferences that will most likely decide what they will work as. Making everything about gender just annoys me, no matter who does it.

Was physics built by men? Sure, probably because women weren't allowed to, or maybe they really didn't want to, who knows. But this outrage isn't about those women in the past who _could_ have made it big, is it? It's about the present day situation where gender is not a deciding factor (or a factor at all) in who is allowed by society to do what.

<comment><USER19> _I 've always seen people as just that, as individuals_

The problem is that there is lots of research indicating that while many people will swear up and down that this is what they do, in many cases it subconsciously isn't the case.

Had you asked me two years ago or so I would have absolutely sworn that I was no way biased with regards to gender, but about a year and a half ago I started to seriously introspect on these issues, specifically trying to focus on my subconscious actions and running through past interactions, and now I honestly don't feel confident claiming that anymore. I obviously never actively discriminate and try to be aware of my action, but the subconscious is a hard thing to control.

<comment><USER18> Sure, everybody is biased in many ways. I am not claiming I don't have any bias, but those become irrelevant if you make an effort to decide things rationally. And in my opinion, when judging other people, we should _always_ make sure we're basing our decision on rationality, not what feels better to us.

This obviously requires some work to train yourself to notice when you're lying to yourself or making up reasons to go with the decision that feels better when you should really know it's not the correct one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why was this flagged?

I don't think it deserves to be flagged - even if the opinion the person holds is unconventional.

OT: He does say his conclusions might not be fully right. But that the assumption of identical brains is ideology. Now, I agree with this but it does not mean one is better than the other.

The fact that women might produce _less_ output (as shown in the stats?) does not mean they produce less valuable work. They might just get their priorities different later in life, as opposed to men.

But again, those are generalisations and you probably should not try to generalize these kinds of things to apply to _all women_.

It was also not the right place to make those comments I think.

<comment><USER3> Controversial non-PC opinions are often flagged on HN, because no productive discussion usually results (not just gender, but also politics).

<comment><USER20> Seems to me that the comments of such a discussion ought to be flagged rather than the entire article.

But that can grow out of hand more quickly, unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> Yeah the second thing is the problem... You also often see like 100 upvotes and 300 comments and many comments downvoted... HN algorithms recognize such articles/threads as "flame wars" so they demote (but not flag) them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And he is absolutely correct

</comment><comment><USER22> A fragment of email that was sent to CERN emploees: We have therefore decided to remove the slides from Indico, in line with our Code of Conduct that does not tolerate personal attacks and insults. Diversity is a strong reality at CERN, and is also one of the core values underpinning our Code of Conduct. The Organization is fully committed to promoting diversity and equality at all levels.

</comment><comment><USER23> I sure this thread is going wonderful places.

</comment><comment><USER24> I do wonder whether humanity will suffer through us aiming for equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. Won't we inevitably end up with less talented/innovative/productive/etc people at the top since some will have come through purely to meet a quota?

</comment><comment><USER25> Why was this flagged?

</comment><comment><USER26> So facts are offensive? I don't see any rebuttal to the facts presented in the article unfortunately.

Anyone knows facts that disprove his?

<comment><USER27> I'm just speculating, but network effects are extremely important in science and I see it as very possible that women might have a harder time networking (presenting their papers, talking to peers, given benefit of the doubt by peers, etc.) in a field that is dominated by men. My SO did her bachelors on AA in big corps and found a lot of studies that supported the hypothesis that males bosses statistically tend to promote and acknowledge the work of other males more than of their peers. (Though I have to concede that it was just a bachelors degree and could also have been badly/unbalanced researched and that I am too lazy to find citations, as I have no clue of where she got them.)

<comment><USER26> Do you also have facts?

<comment><USER28> how are the numerous studies not facts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can sympathize with the lack of EQ, but this is ridiculous and also poor data science.

<comment><USER29> Can you clarify on that a bit? Obviously no one would expect his detractors to spend a _bunch_ of time discrediting him, but at least a cursory explanation of the flaws in his methodology/data is kind of necessary.

Why is this "poor data science"?

<comment><USER14> Validaton of hypotheses by data should consider the explanatory power of variables and possible presence of confounders. Does the distribution of inSPIRE citations reflect the lack of women in HEP, or does the lack of women in HEP result in the distribution of inSPIRE citations due to other confounders? What is the R^2 of the gender-equality-paradox line? Given that citations accumulate over 20-30 years, and the prevalence of men in HEP in the past, is it statistically significant to use gender citation ratios? Experimental research is often authored by the entire lab team, and a gender imbalance in the lab could account for greater gender disparity w.r.t. individuals with significant citation counts. Just saying, proper (data) science should validate a hypothesis and include a discussion of potential confounders and limitations in the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I come from Poland where girls either choose a) medicine b) pyscology c) fashion related gig like hair dressers, tailor d) modeling (often most pretty girls choose this)

Here in Poland, entry level gigs in technology companies pay way less than modeling gigs these days.

I asked many of those girls who went into modeling and fashion related jobs, they always said, they found it easier and more rewarding than jobs where someome else might steal their credit.</comment>


SendGrid's MTA History - <AUTHOR> https://sendgrid.com/blog/sendgrids-mta-history/

<comment><AUTHOR> Learn about SendGrid's decision to build their own MTA instead of using postfix or a commercial solution.</comment>


Top quality historical market data and technical indicators - <AUTHOR> http://www.gourgane.io <comment><USER2> I've recently used this website to buy historical stock data. I just started developing a backtester to test my trading strategies and I've been pretty impressed by this data so far.</comment>


28C3 agenda published - <AUTHOR> http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/

<comment><AUTHOR> Lots of very interesting talks lined up for this year's conference. Personally, I'm very much looking forward towards the keynote by Evgeny Morozov.

Pro tip: yours truly will be giving a talk on what can be done with the publicly available Israeli civil registry [1].

[1] - [http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4652.en.h...](http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4652.en.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> So sad that it is so hard to get a ticket to get there. (see comments here: <http://events.ccc.de/2011/10/31/28c3-tickets/>) (or: <http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%2328c3%20ticket>)

<comment> cf0ed2aa-bdf5 Yeah, I'd love to go but honestly I don't bother anymore.

I'll just go and watch the livestreams in a hackerspace and have some fun there.

<comment> timmy-turner I never take vacation between christmas and new years eve. Its usually a quiet week anyway and I get to watch all the c3 livestreams and enjoy some unwound coding. Especially the lightning talks had been very entertaining last year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is a (web)app for this <http://test1337.scorpius.uberspace.de/28c3-Planer/> (Optimized for mobile devices)

<comment><USER4> 0o Nice ;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What was the most prominent linux-attacking worm or virus, if any? - <AUTHOR> I am curious, given the recent spate of events. <comment><USER2> For most prominent, I'm going to nominate the "slapper" worm: [http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Conte...](http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Content/2002.09.13.html)

For the most interesting, look for "cheese" worm: [https://www.cnet.com/news/cheese-worm-a-linux-fixer- upper/](https://www.cnet.com/news/cheese-worm-a-linux-fixer-upper/)

There are a largish number of worms that have affected Linux machines, it's not clear how much traction any of them got. The "slapper" worm had a slightly different offset for the writeable memory for each distro's version of Apache (1.3.x at the time). Even when distros had the same version of Apache source, they all compiled it differently, so the exploit had to be customized. This illustrates one way for a population of vulnerable computers to resist infection: have a fractured software version base.</comment>


Ask HN: What software stack is most similar to the Lisp Machines? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> GNU Emacs -- throw in Common Lisp and SLIME if you need something akin LML or stick with Emacs Lisp --

Pharo / Squeak smalltalk.

<comment><USER3> GNU Emacs' software stack doesn't look similar to the Lisp Machine in any way. Similarity: Emacs Lisp is a small language based on Maclisp. The MIT Lisp Machine was developed in Zetalisp and later in Common Lisp. as such both are written in a dialect of Lisp (GNU Emacs has also some C code). But both dialects are very different.

As such basically ALL software of the MIT Lisp Machine is heavily object- oriented - unlike GNU Emacs. It uses an extensive graphical/textual GUI layer and abstractions like applications, command loops, servers, clients, ... On the Lisp Machine an editor is an application, but not the main abstraction (unlike GNU Emacs) - even the Listener on Lisp Machine is not in any way related to Emacs (minus some keyboard commands).

Thus the closest software stack to the Lisp Machine are by far Common Lisp + McCLIM + McCLIM-applications (like the McCLIM listener and others) and Common Lisp + CLIM + CLIM-environment.

<comment><USER4> Writing applications or tools in GNU Emacs is kind of nice, but the programming paradigm is something like "textual buffers manipulated by imperative routines backed by some global dynamically scoped variables" which has its beauty and charm but is also quite tedious...</comment></comment></comment>


App Developers, looking for content on new blog - <AUTHOR> http://www.appheadlines.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Articles welcome: appheadlines at gmail dot com

Thanks.</comment>


High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias/

<comment><USER2> My immediate thought when I saw this a few days ago was "sampling bias" \-- not that the author had a biased sample of professional women, but rather that professional women are a biased sample of women. Given the social environment -- pushing both females and males away from what they might have preferred as a life trajectory -- I think it's very likely that the average professional woman is significantly more aggressive than the average professional man, simply because the non-aggressive women tend to not enter professional careers.

This mirrors an observation I've heard from several faculty members in computer science and engineering programs: As complete populations, girls aren't any smarter than boys on average, but in those programs the girls are always among the top students -- because it's only the most exceptional girls who overcome the social factors which keep most of their peers out of those subjects.

There may be a real effect here, but the evidence presented is inconclusive.

<comment><USER3> Your argument is not logical. These were professionals in the same sphere: tech. And one could make the argument that the sample of men was also biased-- towards men who liked tech.

No one claimed this was an iron clad peer reviewed scientific study--and I'd love to see some done on this in addition to those that already exist. Deborah Tannen is one of the more well known researchers in this area to uncover distinct gender patterns in speech that affect performance, for example.

There are now hundreds and hundreds of data points, and anecdotes. At what point is there enough evidence to convince some people that there IS a problem, and believe those of us who have experienced this exact phenomenon?

TBH this response is exactly what I thought I'd see on hacker news: attack the methodology, thus missing the forest for the trees.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _At what point is there enough evidence to convince some people that there IS a problem, and believe those of us who have experienced this exact phenomenon?_

The existence of a problem is virtually undisputed, it's the nature of it that is debated. In addition, the existence of a problem does not justify misrepresenting it, even if the intention is to raise awareness.

<comment><USER4> > The existence of a problem is virtually undisputed

This thread includes people's opinions that this is not a real effect, and is instead the result of poor methodology, sampling bias, and whatnot.

It is really not fair to say that the problem's existence is undisputed. There are plenty of people who dispute it, and that's also a problem.

<comment><USER5> The question is _the_ problem vs _a_ problem. This research uncovers _a_ problem, it does not explicitly state what _the_ problem is. What problem this research found is what people are questioning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this is an outgrowth of our general social tendency to judge men by what they do ("he works at a hedge fund!") and women by what they're like ("she's really sweet!").

I found this paragraph in particular interesting:

> Words like bossy, abrasive, strident, and aggressive are used to describe > women's behaviors when they lead . . . . Among these words, only aggressive > shows up in men's reviews at all. It shows up three times, twice with an > exhortation to be more of it.

My current boss told me after I got hired that he liked me at my interview because I came across as aggressive. It's a personality trait that works great for men, because we're given a wide latitude between "aggressive behavior" and "abrasive" behavior. To a certain extent, we correlate a certain level of aggressiveness, credit-taking, and talking over others with leadership potential. But it seems for women, such behavior can result in being told: "Sometimes you need to step back to let others shine."

<comment><USER6> I have a pet theory that the reason that women (as well as non-traditionally- masculine men) are considered bossy, while other men are considered "go- getters" is due to a lack of the threat of violence. Not that a type-A guy is going to assault you if you don't capitulate to their authority. More that there is a perceived or possible threat.

In contrast to women who would be considered bossy or abrasive because they don't "back up" their claims to authority. I suppose that there is often a feeling of resentment that society/culture/custom is taking the place of that threat.

Again, all supposition and musing on my part. Probably much better articulated by someone writing on the subject 50 years ago!

<comment><USER7> I've never heard this but the idea seems compelling!

Another way to describe it might be as a mismatch between the pecking order according to our simian brains and what's on the org chart. I.e. we don't resent bossy behavior by someone we perceive as a dominant alpha, but bristle when it's someone we see as below us in the "pack".

<comment><USER8> It also seems to tangentially make sense with the bias against "smaller" men in leadership positions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it possible that professional women are more abrasive than men in aggregate? I am not saying that is the case, only that it is another hypothesis from the data. If that was the case and I had to guess a reason, it would be that groups with more power insecurity tend to overcompensate in other areas.

Another explanation could be industry. More women work in Fashion and marketing, which have generally more dramatic environments.

<comment><USER10> It's possible, but the likelihood is so low some might wonder why you're bringing that possibility up rather than discuss the much more likely alternative and how we can fix it.

Also; "I asked men and women in tech if they would be willing to share their reviews for a study and didn't stipulate anything else."

<comment><USER11> Why do you think the likelihood is very small?

Has there been research?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This surprises anyone? I was engaged to a high achieving woman for a period of time. I loved her, but damn, if I had to work with her, I wouldn't put up with her personality. Very aggressive, pushy, and intolerant, to my mind. Very quick to take offense at the slightest provocation, whether offense was intended, or merely the result of ignorance or incompetence. Then again, I'm a libertarian-minded introvert, so I basically just want to let other people do their thing and have them leave me alone...

On the whole, I see the adversarial nature of gender politics that is often pushed as profoundly dysfunctional. Men and women are not the same. Each gender is better at some things and worse at others, on average. Men tend to have more variance, so you see more male geniuses and male idiots (the tails on the bell-curve are bigger), where women tend to cluster towards the mean more strongly. If we could just accept this, and spend our time trying to be happy, rather than demonizing each other, the world would be a better place.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not surprised by this, but I am surprised that the author didn't mention her past research on this topic. Her shock at the "discovery" seems a little disingenuous.

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13513](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13513)

<comment><USER13> The down vote is interesting since I actually agree with her primary research. Women should interrupt more. I've said as much when doing reviews myself.

<comment><USER14> Had I downvoted (I didn't) it would have been because I didn't see any shock in her article, real or feigned. It was clear that the effect she found was the one she was looking for.

<comment><USER13> I think it was really this statement which made me crinkle my nose.

"As a woman in tech who has been called all of these things before, there is some validation in confirming with data that the pattern is real. But as a leader in tech, I'm aghast at how closely under our noses we let this live."

Her past research would seem to suggest that this finding was all but assured. But to be fair, that could just be my reading if it. I have a lot of respect for Kieran's work, so that also has something to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's very hard for us to overlook sexual dimorphism in everything we do, and it's not even clear we should. It's however very trendy nowadays to pretend that it doesn't exist, probably for political correctness reasons.

</comment><comment><USER16> it's not that women are more aggressive, it's that they're perceived as more aggressive relative to expectations (by both male & female managers).

also, it's much more acceptable to challenge a woman's authority than it is a man's. when all you want to do is get things done, this social norm slows you down. you have to explain, persuade, and butter up your peers more as a woman. this is just one way that these subtle biases can lead to divergent outcomes (seeming to be less effective and successful in this case).

<comment><USER17> That may be so, but it unfortunately can't be determined from this study.

<comment><USER3> Let me understand: you think nothing of value can be determined from this study even though my entire newsfeed on facebook is full of my friends in all industries sharing it as exactly in line with their experiences?

<comment><USER11> Yes.

You have a sampling bias in the types of people you associate. Facebook applies a filter to posts which selects for things that are popular with a wide swath of your friends and which support your political/social views (as guessed by their profiling tools).

That something blows up with your friends on Facebook is usually a better indicator that it's polarizing drivel than that it's a well thought out, impactful study, since that's what the machines (essentially) optimize for.

<comment><USER3> Polarizing Drivel. Wow. That's pretty harsh.

The author posts the data, then calls for further study. Isn't that the very basis of science? She admits fully its potential for inaccuracies and wonders aloud about its flaws. Isn't that what peer review is for? The women in tech say it feels true, and it matches their experience. So why isn't the Hacker News Community demanding a peer reviewed study and supporting it, and financing it? Why does it instead choose to ignore its substance, and tear down its conclusions based on its already admitted flaws?

Truly, the persistent and relentless attempts on the part of some Hacker News denizens to discredit any science about bias in technology is disappointing. Any and all attempts to quantify the problem are met with such resistance that it belies the community's own assertions about its objectivity.

<comment><USER11> Looking at the data, I don't think the author did anything with it than see initial numbers matched her feelings, and then called on people to undertake a massive, actual study because she just know this is it.

I certainly think that there are problems with gender in society in virtually every place we could examine, and that we have a long way to go before things are what anyone could call ideal.

I just have trouble with a lot of the statistics used in these discussions, and find that they're very often 20+ years out of date (ie, from or before 1994-1995), don't control for confounding influences, make misleading comparisons, etc.

I would take posts like this much more seriously if she posted the dataset, but I'm not sure how she could do this without revealing personal details or editing the text (which likely would bias the choice of recipients further, or could introduce a new bias). I would even settle for the details of how she did the bucketing, correlations between words and numbers of entries per person, etc.

The short answer to why I think that this article isn't a real source of data is that the study in it has about the statistical power of just asking everyone who's a friend of a friend on Facebook for people with a moderate number of friends.

Everyone already knows that there's a problem with gender in tech. This article does nothing about saying where it is and doesn't really contribute anything to the topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _The manager's gender isn't a factor._

So what's the best way to rearrange corporate structures so that doing well in business doesn't require traits that don't match our cultural ideal for what women should be like? Or would changing cultural ideals be easier (maybe find a way to get hollywood on board)?

I guess I'm assuming here that _" I figured only strong performers would be willing to share"_ is correct, and selected for mostly people who do behave in a mostly-ideal fashion for business success.

</comment><comment><USER19> At my previous job, I had both male and female co workers who were bossy and abrasive.

I don't know if that means I transcended gender or just needed to find a better place to work.

</comment><comment><USER20> Men and women get different from of criticism. Our current culture is to judge men by what they do, women by their person. This article simply include an other example of a rather well established concept.

It would be kind of fun to see what happen if the reviewer intentionally reversed this and judged women solely from what they accomplish, and men on their personality with a token "The work ultimately went well". The resulting culture shock and mixed signals would be an interesting pattern to observe.

An other kind of interesting test would be a dating site that write the profiles for its clients. If they wrote female profile that only focused on job, earning, and skills, and a male profiles that only describe the person personality and looks, would the clients be happy when they got to read their own profiles?

</comment><comment><USER21> I am a bit surprised, the review process I participate in would probably automatically reject the review; there is a legal check and one other whose name escapes me done with software that is really restrictive on words you can use. So I doubt these would arise in any company which has a robust legal department, you just don't do that anymore especially in writing. Mandatory HR meetings, too many electronically signed HR type docs, and it all goes the same way - offend certain groups and your not going to receive any support.

<comment><USER3> Did you happen to notice the author's full name and workplace? And at startups where much of the more recent notorious and egregious behavior is happening, there is no such thing as a legal department, let alone a robust one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Url changed from [http://m.fastcompany.com/3034895/strong-female-lead/the- one-...](http://m.fastcompany.com/3034895/strong-female-lead/the-one-word-men- never-see-in-their-performance-reviews), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER23> i don't find this shocking</comment>


Node.js in Hungary – a community in the making - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/a612cc8f17fd

<comment><USER2> As a Hungarian developer with two Node based small side projects so far, it is nice to see something like this :) Too bad I don't live in Budapest. Keep this up! :)</comment>


Show HN: I Built a GitHub Activity Display with an Arduino and LED Matrix - <AUTHOR> http://jack.minardi.org/projects/displaying-realtime-github-activity-on-a-full-color-led-matrix/

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know if anyone has any questions, this was a fun project to tackle. The electric imp was interesting to work with, however the cost of the Imp + breakout board was more than a raspberry pi + wifi dongle. The Pi also does much more than just wifi, and I don't have to program it in squirrel.

<comment><USER2> I was gonna ask about that. Also could you just drive the TiM with the rPi?

I have a TiM board lying around and this looks like a great project to throw up for decoration and motivation. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> The TiM board needs very precise timing to control, I do not think this would be possible with a Raspberry Pi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Though there's no Neopixel library at the level of the current one for Arduino, you could drive the whole system off of the Imp.

Mozilla built two RGB LED tickers, driven by an Imp, and installed them on their blimp: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz3fEYFDl2o](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz3fEYFDl2o)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey, great work! This is awesome! If you're looking to display weather and stock information too, you might want to check out my project here: [https://github.com/zachfeldman/digi-lcd- server](https://github.com/zachfeldman/digi-lcd-server).

Isn't hardware fun!?1

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah, I love working with hardware. I will definitely check out your project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've got a similar art project I'm working on for my company. I plan on setting up a light array where each light represents a user currently on our website and the color/activity represents an action or location.

It's all part of my desire to make our server room 'feel' more interactive than it is right now. Thanks to co-location I've got three big glass windows and only one physical rack on location :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice work. I don't know much about hardware programming but if I manage to recreate it I am going to use it on Christmas :) How much did it cost you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I actually got everything for free, so $0 ;)

But if you need to purchase everything here are the prices:

* Arduino: $25

* TiM Board: $45

* Electric Imp + Breakout: $42

Total: $112

Yikes, that more than I expected... This is why you need to make friends with people who give away hardware!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Alternative: 10 inch Android tablet for 70$.</comment>


NoSQL without web-scale - <AUTHOR> http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2010/10/05/nosql-without-web-scale.aspx <comment><USER2> Depending on the application, using a document store with the ability to add indexes and/or perform ad-hoc queries can simplify things (something like MongoDB/CoucnDB rather than Cassandra). And sometimes just the convenience of being able to not need to define a schema using SQL or whatever ORM you are using makes using a NoSQL backend worth the pain of learning a new technology.

But there are a lot of existing tools for working with SQL technologies (PGAdmin on the Postgres side, MySQL Administrator in MySQL, etc.) that make the long-term use and administration of a SQL system much more manageable in the long term than some NoSQL options.</comment>


Why can I Debug some Numerical Programs that You Can't? Why should we care? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Stnfrd50.pdf Abstract: The future promises teraflops and terabytes in your laptop, petaflops and petabytes in your supercomputer, and the inability to debug numerical programs on either. Why can't they be debugged? What should we do instead? <comment><USER2> It may be worth offering a brief summary, so here is one. (Note: statements of opinion and exhortations in what follows are Prof. Kahan's, not mine.)

\-- 1 --

A very effective way to diagnose some kinds of problem in numerical software is to run it with different settings for floating-point rounding. That way, if you're using an algorithm whose outputs are pathologically sensitive to small variations in their inputs (or in intermediate results), you're likely to be able to tell because the final results will differ by more than a few bits in the lowest places.

Unfortunately, support for doing this is lacking in most programming languages and environments. This is a Bad Thing.

\-- 2 --

When doing FP computation that mixes single and double precision, it is tempting to treat mixed-precision operations as single-precision rather than double precision. The latest version of MATLAB (at the time when Kahan gave this talk) does this.

This can be very bad, because doing more of the computation than necessary in single precision can produce needlessly inaccurate results and therefore slow down convergence of algorithms (or just plain screw them up).

This is also a Bad Thing.

\-- 3 --

Computer architectures, languages and programming environments should be designed so that following the path of least resistance leads to good, not bad, numerical behaviour. Lots of more detailed proposals along these lines can be found on Kahan's web pages.

Making this happen is a big job. Kahan is likely to be dead before it's finished. So go and make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> For what it's worth, that presentation was by William Kahan. "The Father of Floating Point" and the guy behind the IEEE 754 standard. He also has a Turing award.

</comment><comment><USER4> As someone who doesn't typically have reason to use either -- is using floats rather than doubles actually common? I was under the impression this was pretty rare.

<comment><USER5> It's not rare at all. A double takes up twice as much memory as a float and memory bandwidth is a precious commodity these days. If you have a lot of numbers (e.g. in 3D models or similar) and don't need the extra precision, using floats is an obvious choice.

<comment><USER6> Or when you're reading/writing a great deal of numerical data in a file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there any reason this is marked as scribd, when the link goes to a normal PDF? Usually I avoid scribd documents, but I noticed that the link didn't go to scribd.

[Apologies that this is Offtopic, but I was unsure where to post this question].

<comment><USER8> That's not a tag, the [scribd] is a separate link to a scribd version of the pdf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it infeasible to use something other than floats for such computations? There are many schemes for dealing with bigintegers, bigdecimals and such with reasonable performance.

<comment><USER10> There are some simulations that squeeze everything they can out of a GPU or a cluster or a TOP500 machine. And I don't think arbitrary precision can be done easily on a GPU; if someone knows more, I'd love to be corrected on this one.

<comment><USER9> TOP500 machines probably have CPU features that could help with that.

But yeah, afaik arbitrary precision on GPUs isn't possible with reasonable performance.

<comment><USER11> I don't think he means arbitrary precision, I think he means fixed point.

And to answer him: Some programs can use it, some can't. IMO every program that can should, not not all do.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't be a Codemonkey - <AUTHOR> http://blackhole12.blogspot.com/2012/02/dont-be-codemonkey.html

<comment><USER2> If you are just writing for yourself, and you don't need tests, etc. then who cares what you do. Follow your bliss and more power to you. But if there is some chance I will have to fix or figure out your code - please DO try to make it maintainable. Useful code is useful even if it's dirty, but it's just polite to consider your audience. Surely this is not controversial?

Maybe the issue here is some disagreement about what "maintainable" means and in particular, in how and where it conflicts with "clever."

If "clever" means intentionally obfuscated, or doing something in a complex or unorthodox way just to show off, I don't think there is much controversy that this is unhelpful and not good unless you are just pleasing yourself. If "clever" means extreme conciseness beyond the point where it makes it very hard to read and understand, I would tend to look at that as more of the same.

Cleverness is often instituted to make code more maintainable, as in many cases of "Don't Repeat Yourself" using introspection. I tend to think that gratuitously huge amounts of mandatory boilerplate are very not-clever and actually decrease maintainability.

For example, I have seen dependency injection being heavily touted for 'maintainability', but making a religion out of this can lead to all kinds of tortured and unclear code (just like what you see from many people who have recently become infatuated with "patterns"). Code which is overly complex for the task, and hard to read, isn't that maintainable in my book.

Cleverness can also be done behind the scenes of an API, hidden behind a screen, to make life easier for the API's end users. Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad. Often it is worthwhile to get a clean implementation, just hard to do.

I don't think there is any clear definition of "code monkey" but I think such derogatory terms should be reserved for people who are really incompetent all around, not just people who do clean workmanlike jobs and worry about how their code reads and extends and so on. Those are good things to worry about; there are other things to worry about, but those are good things to worry about.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to disagree with this.

There's plenty of ways to be creative and still be disciplined.

I find myself spending a lot of cycles reducing solutions to their most simple form -- removing everything unnecessary until just what's required remains.

Or, designing large systems. Giving my input on UI layout / design / experience. Imaging use cases and how users will use the software -- what assumptions will they make?

Data structure selection, sync vs async, and a whole myriad of trade offs and judgment calls are all creative processes.

We're professionals after all. We're employed for the finished product -- let's make it as good as we can.

You can always code outside of work to flex your creative muscles if you find your work environment too restricting.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a blatantly false dichotomy--how fun and clever code is is not inversely proportional to how much fun it is.

If anything, I've found the opposite to be true: the code I have the most fun writing is also the code I find easiest to maintain. My latest side project-- writing an interpreted language in Haskell--has been extremely fun and disconcertingly maintainable. Being able to add complicated features that I thought would take a while in a couple of lines of code is just eerie.

Coincidentally, this brings up my second point: writing maintainable code makes the latter 90% of programming (debugging and adding features after the fact) more fun. I think it's a win.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't see why you can't do both? Wrap "clever" things in well tested black boxes that can be used in maintainable systems.

I guess I don't get the article. "Clever" ideas for startups don't translate to "clever" solutions in code. Someone can have an idea of something "new" for a startup, but the patterns in code are often the same. In that sense having well designed code can be a plus and doesn't mean sacrifice of the uniqueness of the idea. Even if my startup requires a "clever" algorithm for speed or scale, that can be wrapped in a coherent black box that enables the code using it to be easily readable and maintainable.

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding, I'm not sure?</comment>


Is the continued forced closure of so many businesses unconstitutional? - <AUTHOR> I'm not a lawyer, and the individuals I've spoken to about this topic are as ignorant of this subject as I am.<p>I live in San Francisco, where businesses I used to use everyday have been forced to close against their will for nearly 7 months. Is this not a breach of constitutional rights? If it isn't, why not? <comment><USER2> A lot of it is regulated at the state level or county level. Just like you need a business license to open a business. And pass a health inspection or fire inspection. The feds defer to the states on commerce inside the state.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there any precedence that might give the state the authority to close a business, indefinitely, if the business has not broken any laws?

<comment><USER2> businesses get shut down all the time for violating health code regulations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Where does the constitution protect a business?</comment>


Show HN: Video conference and synchronized YouTube video to do fitness in groups - <AUTHOR> https://www.co-train.space/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

We've built www.co-train.space to stay fit while staying home. You pick fitness video on Youtube, it plays synchronously for everybody in the group and you see your peers thanks to Jitsi Meet (Zoom-like software).

I am now exercising with my parents every morning and feel much more connected to them. Looking forward to hearing what you think!

<comment><USER2> First of all, it looks great, good job! My question is that why do you limit yourself with only fitness? For example, study sessions are a great example that can benefit from your product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically it was the use case for me personally. I had to spend 2 weeks on quarantine totally alone separated even from wife so we wanted to exercise together. But yeah, I think you are right, there are many potential use cases!

<comment><USER3> My wife and kids do a drawing session with the grandparents, so this is "instructor led from youtube":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tjyfU0pHYc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tjyfU0pHYc)

As you say I'm sure there are many ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Feature idea: use the webcam to project the watcher's image/body onto the instructor's. Then with some computer vision magic, gamify how close your workout matched the instructor's workout.

<comment><USER5> That's not how workouts work, though. Each body is different, and people have different skill levels too. It's not like Just Dance

<comment><USER6> Using this type of method to check form makes a lot of sense. There were manny Kinect apps that did this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does this handle ad breaks? I think with a monetized video different people may get different length ads at different places. Just curious how this would handle that situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I think I did not test this. Completely forgot I have YouTube subscription. I guess it should be possible to detect when and starts and handle it. But sudden pauses due to ads can ruin UX especially for fitness...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What kind of issues did you have syncing with youtube videos and what kind of latency do you experience?

BTW Great initiative and certainly could use that tech for many avenues like remote classroom, any presentation with Q&A. Few others I suspect, but great start.

<comment><AUTHOR> Technically syncing is easy, websocket + Youtube API. The biggest issue for UX though is that a user should click on the video at least once. Otherwise, Firefox will block sync commands.

The latency can be 3-5 seconds for the first sync, when the video is initialized and unbuffered. For the next syncs its < 1 second.

<comment><USER8> Interesting as I would of thought fitness video's would need tighter latency due to the beat, but then, that can actually work in your favour as the beat will be way less than a second, so could always sync upon that for what would appear to be perfect sync, yet 1-3 beats offset beat out of sync and yet the illusion of perfect sync.

With workout videos usually 120-140 BPM, sub second, let's say 1 second for ease on 120 BPM would be 2 beats per second and so a sync of 2 beat offset would be spot on. Now a 140 BPM would be 3 beats, but you get the idea. By syncing the beats with an offset to cater for the latency and the BPM, you can give the illusion of perfect video sync. More so when doing repetitive motion to that beat, just seems like it would work really well. Certainly makes management of latency a much more easier task and allow for buffering as well depending upon how many beats you want to offset, so could handle latency spikes and brief drops. Which again, makes the things easier when you can control and fix latency , though as you can't do that, planning it out of the equation is always a treat. Food for thought perhaps.

But it is your baby, you pick the formula you want to feed it. But hope you do well whatever direction as certainly has potential in many avenues. Remote rave anybody :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I bought a projector just to make my fitness videos life size on the wall. It sounds lame but it has helped my mental health.

Adding the video conference element is a really great idea. Now I just have to find the best place to mount a webcam.

<comment><USER4> Not crazy at all. This is where the industry is going anyway.

For example "Tonal" is a work out machine that attaches to the wall, with a large video screen (probably larger in the next generation version).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdV2U6NxVUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdV2U6NxVUY)

Regarding your wall projector, it would be cool to have a camera project your image onto the instructors. Then some computer vision magic to grade how close you matched their exercise.

<comment><USER10> "This is where the industry is going anyway."

Just because a company offers a product that does something new and different does not equate to where the industry is truly going (as much as founders/CEOs may wish otherwise).

It's more about where the customer/consumers are going...yes you can lead them to an extent, but on that note are products like Tonal actually selling and if so, what clip and density?

I would ask for evidence of adoption of something (beyond just the mere fact it exists) to support the "where the market is going" type of thinking...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice. Most of the instructors on our system* have pivoted to run their classes online like that now too. YouTube or Vimeo synchronized with a live Zoom.

It's actually working really well for them as they can now open to a wider audience! It's great to see how people have adapted so quickly in the lockdown.

* [https://bookwhen.com/virtual-class-booking-system](https://bookwhen.com/virtual-class-booking-system)

</comment><comment><USER12> It's always so exciting when you have an idea, and then get out of having to make it cause it was posted here first, love that about hn. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER10> Really neat idea - I'm a fan anything that helps people improve their health habits whether individually or collectively!

</comment><comment><USER13> Great work, this is exactly what my wife has been doing via Zoom and Youtube with her gym class.

They had been watching the live feed each morning alone and found a lack of motivation since they were used to working out together.

So there is a market for sure

</comment><comment><USER14> This is pretty fantastic, not just for working out. Kudos!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is great! I would love to see a version where you can Sync Spotify playlists & have the fitness instructor teach live

<comment><USER16> Interesting idea! We'll certainly think about it

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I want this but just for watching general youtube videos sync'd with people

<comment><USER18> There have been these posted here, I forget their names though.

I've been thinking of doing some with all my Aunts watching their 60's-80's home videos. They all Zoom in, watch it synchronized and commentate. Would be interesting to have the family history documented, otherwise it's just an old video of a familiar face in some place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is great. The UX is awesome. Do you have limits on number of users here?

<comment><USER15> Yes I'm curious on the number of users too!

<comment><AUTHOR> Youtube sync should work for lots of people.

We tested video calls in a group of 8, it was working well. I heard that having around 35 people in one room can make it unstable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great idea! Tried it with mum, worked quite well!

<comment><USER20> It's a little suspect that you and multiple other names made accounts just to post simplistic glowing comments about how excited you are to work out with your mom, just like the person who posted this.

<comment><USER16> Hey! I personally followed HN but never commented before so had to login only now when news about our platform was posted. Didn't see multiple simplistic comments except for dpie123's who is my friend and an active user of co- train.space:)

<comment><USER21> _> I personally followed HN but never commented before so had to login only now when news about our platform was posted._

Register. Not login. Your account was created about two hours after this post.

 _> Didn't see multiple simplistic comments except for dpie123's who is my friend and an active user of co-train.space:)_

Their account was also created around the same time - after the post.

<comment><USER16> I don't argue with that, I mixed up the terms "registered" and "logged in"

Can't understand negative reaction about 2 new registered users

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> does this allow anybody in the group to pause/move anywhere in synchrony

<comment><AUTHOR> No, there is only one Host who governs the video, everyone else has no ability to change the timestamp or stop the video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Cool app! East to use and fun! Best for corona time!</comment>


My Y Combinator Interview Experience and my Startup Postmortem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.maxlynch.com/my-y-combinator-interview-experience-and-a-go

<comment><USER2> Seems like a shame to shut it down. I've never heard of your product until now but the site is beautiful and it sounds like a super-useful service.

If your NLP is that good and you could figure out how to sell it for more money, you could potentially take on companies like Meltwater News.

<comment><USER3> I agree, there is a clear need for a service like this.

Neither of the problems mentioned are fatal for an early company, you can get better at customer acquisition and raise prices (or better introduce some new tiers and grandfather your existing clients in).

"Despite the fact that the team thought our product was "clearly" better than Google Alerts, they thought our product had too high of customer acquisition costs and too low of a price point to leave us with big enough margins."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I don't know what the answer is. Some of the technology we are using lives on in some new ways like with Fready (<http://getfready.com/>) but we decided to not continue selling GoBuzz.

I'm always thinking of new ways to apply what we built over the years. I certainly believe the technology has other applications but Fready is the first one we've landed on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wait, did they choose to shut down because they weren't accepted to YC? I haven't applied and can't exactly put myself in their place, but I feel like the most successful people would continue to try to grow their company anyway. Or is there a bigger story here I am missing?

Edit: grammar

<comment><AUTHOR> Though it might seem that way, it was more that YC was a last straw. We think we had an interesting product and there were a lot of possibilities, but there were also a lot of other problems as well, some I wrote about and some I didn't. I definitely wouldn't let a YC decision have an impact on your business, but consider their feedback one part of many that you will receive while building your company, and react accordingly.

<comment><USER5> You should build something else instead of entirely stopping.

<comment><USER6> FTA: _It was a huge confidence booster that I will take with me into my future projects. I hope to interview with YC again with whatever project I happen on next (maybe Fready?)_

<comment><USER5> I hope he started the day after rejection, is what I meant

<comment><AUTHOR> Why would I ever stop? :) This product is no longer, but there are many other related ones that build on what I've learned and I'm currently exploring them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice to see a fellow UW-Madison alum on HN.

Do you think being based in Wisconsin hurt your chances of success? I recently moved from Madison to San Francisco, and the difference in the startup scene is tremendous.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting product. Care to share any details on the backend? Presumably a lot of crawling was required to get content? And what were you using NLP for - to understand the context of a keyword/filter match?

</comment><comment><USER9> You're right there's a market for integrating it with CRM, at one of my previous employers we had an automated CRM system (built in-house) which scanned you email and on your homepage automatically told you any news stories related to your contacts.

(I think they did this by converting email -> domain -> domain to ticker symbol -> ticker symbol to news feed rather than any sophisticated NLP thought)

Personally I'd be more worried about legal issues than profit margin for a service like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious, what legal issues come to mind? We've thought through many and what we always land on is "it's a gray area". Very little precedent and lots of existing services with similar functionality.

<comment><USER9> Copyright primarily. Fair dealing/usage doesn't protect commercial use except in fairly limit circumstances. Generally search engines get away with it because of "implicit licensing" and the fact that content owners want to have their content indexed.

When you're using the content of someone who doesn't want to be indexed, there's no real legal defence for creating a derivative work.

(IANAL but I took a couple of courses in IP law at uni)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It does sound like an interesting service. I'm sure you'll apply your learnings from GoBuzz into your next venture.

</comment><comment><USER11> nice to see you pivot as fready. i do think that your idea and implementation has legs ([http://sundarsubramanian.com/learning-from-a-y-combinator- in...](http://sundarsubramanian.com/learning-from-a-y-combinator-interview- experi))</comment>


In China, Facebook Tests the Waters with a Stealth App - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/technology/facebook-china-moments-colorful-balloons.html <comment><USER2> It's more of a message/signal to the government. Their core products are not going to be allowed in that market in the way most of us think of. And I believe FB is aware of this fully. There are various ways for FB to do business in Chinese market. So sending a message here to make a point to help on the whole agenda. Nothing more.

<comment><USER3> >> _There are various ways for FB to do business in Chinese market. So sending a message here to make a point to help on the whole agenda._

The Chinese Govt is the only one sending the messages that matter. This "stealth" app is there at the pleasure of the Chinese government. End of story.

They seem to be doing just fine without Google and Facebook

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Facebook approved the May debut of a photo-sharing app, called Colorful > Balloons, in China, according to a person with knowledge of the company's > plans, who declined to be named because the information is politically > sensitive. The app, which has not previously been reported, shares the look, > function and feel of Facebook's Moments app. It was released through a > separate local company and without any hint that the social network is > affiliated with it.

Well, there goes that secret... Wonder if it will be allowed to continue to exist now that it's known Facebook is behind it? And will this hurt or help FB in China? I could see the Chinese government getting upset about an end-run around their iron control if they were previously unaware of this....

</comment><comment><USER5> Is the app Moments? [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pJcZ58...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pJcZ58dp- QQJ:https://zh- cn.facebook.com/help/moments/146530935875521/%3Fhelpref%3Dhc_fnav+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

From that google cache, Moments is called "彩色气球", which means Colorful Balloons. That Chinese version help page is gone. So we can rely only on google cache :)

<comment><USER6> Yes, as stated in the article, it is basically Moments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> around only for...a moment</comment>


DJI Will Cripple Your Drone If You Don't Register It on the Company's Website - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/dji-will-cripple-your-drone-if-you-dont-register-it-on-1795427600 <comment><USER2> "This is actually a really responsible move on DJI's part. [...] Meanwhile, the consequences for not activating the drone through DJI's website are tough but fair."

A machine that you supposedly own doesn't obey you, but instead follows the orders of the manufacturer and government. This is "responsible" and "tough but fair".

How long until drones refuse to fly over industrial farming/mining operations to document pollution and abuse? Until cars refuse to drive down roads you're not 'supposed' to be on, and won't let the engine start past a curfew, should one be imposed? Until phones refuse to photograph specially tagged items (don't want people stealing movies/unmasking witnesses or jurors/endangering police). Until computers send a plaintext version of all your communications, if asked politely by the authorities? It would be _irresponsible_ by the companies that make those products to enable and even profit off such flagrant lawbreaking by their customers!

When everything you own can betray you, you are a slave.</comment>


Tars: Tencent's microservice RPC framework, open-sourced to Linux Foundation - <AUTHOR> http://tarscloud.org/feeds/3463219192613486 <comment><USER2> I will never be interested in any projects whose primary language is Chinese, or any languages other than English.

I wouldn't care if the project is targeted to China. But it is donated to The Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation should have not accepted such projects at the beginning.

I'm Korean and there is nothing to do with China itself. But the more we accept projects like this, the more they like to write in their language. What's worst is that their Github issue page will be full of Chinese that other people will not understand. I don't want to see the programming culture get fragmented just because of the language.

<comment><USER3> Have you considered how Chinese developers feel when they must not only browse English documentation, but learn English keywords present in every major programming language? How accessible do you think StackOverflow is to Mandarin speakers?

The solution is incredibly simple. Hire professionals or invite volunteers to provide an English version of the documentation. There is no need to force developers to learn an entire new language to be useful to the community as a whole. At the end of the day, it is the code that matters.

"I'm not a nice person, and I don't care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel — that's what's important to me." \- Linus Torvalds

<comment><USER4> As a non-native English speaker: I strongly disagree with this. English is the lingua franca of computer technology, and as long as this remains the case, new entrants must adapt to the standard that is established. This is not a matter of cultural imperialism, it's a pragmatic decision around how to easiest communicate with the existing community.

"It's the code that matters" is a nice soundbite, but in software engineering it's absolutely critical to be able to communicate and understand others' code, as well as reason and communicate about what the code should do. Having a working binary that's decoupled from any human language is only the end result you get after this process.

Maybe Mandarin will be the lingua franca of computer technology in 30 years, if China becomes the dominant player in technology development. But that's not the world we have today, and this is really a decision between trying to include Chinese developers in the international community of technologists, or being stuck with two separate communities for the forseeable future.

[Edit: Of course, since Tencent has 75 open-source projects and there's presumably a thriving community of Chinese technologists, we will most likely end up with the latter result anyway. So you may actually end up in the position where you'll have to learn Chinese to contribute instead, because the Chinese developers will be similarly disinclined to use English as long as they are able to get things done in their native language].

<comment><USER5> This is an anomaly borne out of the discipline's short history.

I had fellow students in my Russian classes that were there, in part, because they wished to pursue math PhDs, and it was crucial to have competency in one of the other major languages for math publications.

A software engineering community with multiple large active language communities is inevitable, and doubly so for software's ubiquity. Math is at least an ivory tower discipline with a small community that can tolerate limited language diversity. The broader software community using English only would be akin to HVAC professionals exclusively using Italian to discuss their work.

<comment><USER6> Unlike most HVAC professionals, academic researchers, pilots, and programmers all need to frequently cooperate across cultural boundaries.

Computers could be in Latin, Esperanto, or Mandarin (which ironically in this case names itself 普通话 "pu tong hua", the common tongue) for all I care, as long as it's consistent. Right now it's English.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> China has its own RPC ecosystem. In addition to Tars there is Baidu's brpc [0] now hosted with Apache, Weibo's Motan [1], Ant Financials SOFARPC [2], Alibaba's Dubbo [3] also with Apache, Alibaba's HSF [4]

0\. [https://github.com/apache/incubator- brpc](https://github.com/apache/incubator-brpc)

1\. [https://github.com/weibocom/motan](https://github.com/weibocom/motan)

2\. [https://github.com/sofastack/sofa-rpc](https://github.com/sofastack/sofa- rpc)

3\. [http://dubbo.apache.org/en-us/](http://dubbo.apache.org/en-us/)

4\. [https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc- detail/100087.htm](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-detail/100087.htm)

</comment><comment><USER8> According to this link it seems to be more than a wire protocol and seems more like a service mesh. [https://github.com/TarsCloud/Tars/blob/master/Introduction.m...](https://github.com/TarsCloud/Tars/blob/master/Introduction.md)

I see:

        -seems to be implemented as a library and not a sidecar?
        -a protobuf type protocol
        -client side load balancing with a name server
        -a consistent request queuing strategy
        -a web console for your services
        -unlike a service mesh, the scope seems to dip
         into things like service config
        -end to end request flow tracking?

Hopefully someone familiar with it will flesh out the details.

<comment><AUTHOR> Almost correct! If you are interested in it, please use translator, even review source code firstly. We are working on translate > < Thanks!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can I just say I really enjoy the Chinese-inflected English in use here. Phrases like "Ten years of sharpening the sword" and "application treasures" sound like some venerable Chinese saying, and I like to imagine the CEO sipping tea ceremonially as he dictates into the Apple watch on his silk- sleeved wrist.

<comment><USER10> "Application treasures" 应用宝 _yìng yòng bǎo_ is a pun on "application package" (i.e. APK) 应用包 _yìng yòng bāo_ and the name of Tencent's app store.

"Ten years sharpening the sword" is a line from a Tang dynasty poem by Jia Dao. The Wikipedia article on him has a translation of the complete stanza: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jia_Dao](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jia_Dao)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The docs seem to suggest that this is a fairly heavy whole system framework, not just an RPC framework. Although I'm not sure because the translation in English is rather poor and I unfortunately do not read mandarin. I want to understand but it's a very hard to read document.

I'm curious if someone can tell more about:

(1) what the value proposition is in a succinct manner,

(2) the specific advantages of this technology versus other RPC frameworks like gRPC or Thrift,

(3) some details about the serialization protocol, in particular is it attempting to be low memory overhead like Cap'n Proto or to have interesting features like Flatbuffers?

<comment><USER12> OT and Nit: Mandarin refers to one of the ways to read Chinese characters (there are other ways e.g. Cantonese, Taiwanese). So you can say "I don't speak Mandarin", but not "I don't read Mandarin".

<comment><USER13> You can definitely say "read Mandarin", because particularly in informal contexts there is definitely a difference between "Standard Chinese" based on Mandarin and, say, spoken Cantonese written down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My quick first take is that Tencent Tars combines a Google-like binary message/RPC protocol (alternative to Protocol Buffers and gRPC) with NetflixOSS-like Microservice Registry, Lookup, Load Balancing, and Fault Tolerance tools. A back-end platform for web scale services provided by businesses like Tencent, Facebook, Netflix, and Google which is why it closely resembles some of their OSS offerings.

</comment><comment><USER15> I can't read mandarin

Is there a document somewhere in english or source code? What is the serialization protocol behind it? Advantages vs. JSON RPC, gRPC, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Plz check docs and source code in (github.com/tarscloud)

<comment><USER15> When evaluating an RPC mechanism I'm mostly interested in performance benchmarks between existing protocols and discussion of schema migration/mutation than architecture (if I'm using your software as a dependency, don't tell me how it works, show me the API and benchmarks!).

There appears to be a benchmark table in docs/performance.md but I hope some native speaker can translate for the English speaking folks among us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> See smf-rpc (fastest rpc in the west) [https://github.com/smfrpc/smf](https://github.com/smfrpc/smf)

Created in seastar-framework (scylladb's core) created at Akamai , used in Redpanda ([https://vectorized.io/](https://vectorized.io/)) that is doing scylladb for apache kafka.

</comment><comment><USER17> How does this compare to gRPC? What makes this "a new way to scale?" I found the website confusing.

<comment><AUTHOR> You could see [https://github.com/TarsCloud](https://github.com/TarsCloud) The performance comparison result: [https://github.com/TarsCloud/Tars/blob/master/docs/tars_perf...](https://github.com/TarsCloud/Tars/blob/master/docs/tars_performce.md)

<comment><USER18> That's not in English though...

<comment><AUTHOR> You also can check this one: [https://github.com/TarsCloud/TarsGo/blob/master/docs/tars_go...](https://github.com/TarsCloud/TarsGo/blob/master/docs/tars_go_performance.md)

<comment><USER19> Do you have any benchmarks comparing TARS to Cap'nProto?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love reading about how companies create technology that meets their own special needs, whether that be scaling, special business problems, etc. I would like to see more languages supported by Tencent's RPC framework (Common Lisp :-) ) but they are covering their own needs.

One quote in the article "Industrial fragmentation and decoupling of technology will harm the long-term interests of mankind." affected me because for a long time I believed in individual effort, the efficacy of small teams, etc. Now I think as much about society as technology, where we are headed, and what does the most good for the most people. I see massive loss of privacy freedoms but I also see the need for getting every bit of productivity from all resources: human and environmental. I have a rosy and optimistic view for the future, but it will involve what I expect to be radical changes in societies, increasing power of elites in general and tech companies in particular. Huge companies sharing technology and affecting standards is one way to squeeze maximum efficiency out of the systems that support the world's population.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am finding more and more sites linked from here to be blocked by my corporate proxy. The offending "host" is malware.opendns.com. They ought to inform site owners when they are listed.

</comment><comment><USER22> i am kinda conflicted about all the "english first" comments. Isnt this just a blubble / echo chamber ? Arent there eco systems of software not based on english we just dont know about? Millions of coders in the east?

on the other hand, human langues (like programming languages) are just a tool in the box right? Dont hold on to your old tool just because.

<comment><USER23> The backlash is due to the Linux Foundation aspect of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Accepting anything from companies like Tencent will put you on a similar list like this one:

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

Prisoners of conscience are herded in concentration camps and ready to be salvaged as soon as someone is willing to pay for their bodies worth. The Nazi Party thought of the Jews as lesser humans. The Chinese Communist Party thinks of the Uyghurs as cattle to be slaughtered.

EDIT: I created this account because of my ethnic background. In China (thanks to the CCP) I am guilty by birth.

</comment><comment><USER25> 2018?

</comment><comment><USER26> Yeah, but the problem is those api responses are only 95% accurate...

—

TARS : [as Cooper repairs him] Settings. General settings. Security settings.

TARS : Honesty, new setting: ninety-five percent.

TARS : Confirmed. Additional settings.

Cooper : Humor, seventy-five percent.

TARS : Confirmed. Self destruct sequence in T minus 10, 9...

Cooper : Let's make that sixty percent.

TARS : Sixty percent, confirmed. Knock knock.

Cooper : You want fifty-five?</comment>


Crunch – Go-based toolkit for ETL and feature extraction on Hadoop - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jondot/crunch <comment><USER2> That's an unfortunate name for a Hadoop-related project.

[https://crunch.apache.org/](https://crunch.apache.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks cool, how's the performance in Go compared to other tools like Python or Ruby streaming?

<comment><USER4> What about compared with Java, a language with a proper native compiler?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately the standard Java map/reduce interface will win out because the IPC is more efficient. But then doing ETL that way becomes clumsy and painfully slow. The idea is the use rapid tools to do the same job. Streaming is then one step higher across the happiness factor because you just use

Unix pipes to test your solution (and you can keep piping other tools as well as pipe Crunch processors over and over again)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this useful for load targets other than Hadoop? RDBMS for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually yes! Because I'm using Pig to "abstract" I/O you can use Pig to load data from anywhere (any format), it streams it into Crunch, and then again, Pig to save data to anywhere (any format).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tested it right now, so easy to use and works great! Great stuff

<comment><AUTHOR> Enjoy! :)

<comment><USER6> Do you have an example for doing ip2location of some kind? We do it today not optimized and it will be helpful

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, will prepare something and push it soon</comment></comment></comment></comment>