RIM switching to open source WebKit - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/RIM-switching-to-open-source-WebKit-932717.html <comment><USER2> It really looks like WebKit is going to become the standard for mobile browsing. Google, Palm, Apple, and Nokia are all in the WebKit camp and now RIM. Who does that leave now that RIM is going WebKit? Microsoft? Opera clearly has its own engine, but they don't control a platform.

<comment><USER3> I don't know how Opera is on other mobile platforms, but on Android the UI is absolutely rotten.

<comment><USER4> Opera Mini (JME) works great on my Motorola stupid phone.

<comment><USER5> The issue is that (IIRC) they use Mini on Android instead of Mobile. Better for them (Mini's already written in Java), worse for others (Mobile is a much more capable browser).

Hopefully Mini 5 will be more awesome and this will cease to be an issue. The beta looks promising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When?

They are very slow deploying new software. They are talking about a Twitter client since last year and there is not a public beta yet

</comment><comment><USER7> "Full HTML5 support"? Er, no desktop browser has full HTML5 support. HTML5 is not even done yet. How can they offer "full HTML5 support"?

<comment><USER8> As another poster said, RIM is very slow at releasing software, so by the time they release this HTML5 will probably be getting old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Boy I'd like to open HN some day and see the headline "IE switching to open source WebKit"

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it bad that the web (especially the mobile web) is shifting toward a monoculture around WebKit?

<comment><USER11> Given that Webkit is an open-source project with contributors from many different companies and areas of the industry, I don't see how monopoly could divert too far in the direction of non-standardness.

Really, the concept of 'monoculture' doesn't really apply to browser renderers, because a rendering engine isn't a cultural artifact. It's a medium. It's designed to be totally neutral. The only reason that we're discussing the competing browser engines right now, and discussing them in terms of culture and creativity, is an artifact of their history, not their nature.

<comment><USER12> Well, yes and no. It isn't that big a deal with Webkit because it does a good job at being standards compliant. But what if the mobile phone market was converging on the IE6 rendering engine?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It will be the Twilight Zone if the mobile market gets a more capable, better browser market share breakdown than on desktop. Hrm, I wonder what Microsoft will use for their new Windows Phone?

I had heard windows 7 might use OpenGL ES for graphics (<http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=2752>) which would be amazing... But latest news is that it won't. It would be very nice if Microsoft also went with Webkit, but that will never happen. However the mobile gaming and browser standards are starting to be established, will Microsoft become the IE6 of mobile by not supporting OpenGL ES and WebKit or HTML5 capable browser?

It will be much harder to port games to Windows Mobile the way they are setting it up. And web development for mobile would be nice with mobile market supporting an html5 browser before desktop across the board.

</comment><comment><USER14> This has been coming down the pipe since RIM acquired Torch Mobile in August:

[http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/24/rim-buys-torch-mobile- bla...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/24/rim-buys-torch-mobile-blackberrys- might-finally-get-a-decent-br/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember suggesting this idea way back when I was an intern with them a few years ago. While I doubt this is a result of that (I was merely a lowly intern-peon, and I doubt that the right people heard me).

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish... really really wish, they would make an email client that renders html nicely.

</comment><comment><USER17> Would this include the email client?

</comment><comment><USER18> this is a great news, it should be a good news for weapps coder, build once and use on all plattform, good news.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a win for developers everywhere.</comment>


Chrome's Most Important Feature  - <AUTHOR> http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/08/chromes-most-important-feature.html <comment><USER2> This will probably get downvoted quickly, but Chrome's updater is one of few things I quarantine on my machine. I just don't trust Google enough to let it run stuff that "works quietly in the background, never notifying you." The technology is interesting (though not exactly a rocket science and certainly not _magical_ ... which it would've been if it could update a running instance of Chrome without restarting it), but I am wee bit uncomfortable letting a company who is in business of collecting data and tracking people to run anything in my background.

<comment><USER3> I just run the Canary build and get auto-updated nightly. Until Google does something egregious, why not just help them build a great browser as quickly as possible?

Google, and now Mozilla too, is essentially crowd-sourcing, hopefully throwing a few million extra eyes on the problem.

<comment><USER4> I have an idea what all the different channels that the different browsers have but I am uncertain if I have them all. What does everyone here think?

There are the four Chrome channels: <http://www.chromium.org/getting- involved/dev-channel>

Chromium snapshots can be pulled from the buildserver: <https://factor.cc/chromium.php>

Firefox has the Stable, Beta, and Aurora channels: <http://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/channel/>

Then there is the Firefox Nightly channel: <http://nightly.mozilla.org/>

Opera and Opera Next: <http://www.opera.com/browser/next/>

Safari and Webkit: <http://www.webkit.org/>

I guess IE is here: [http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Info/Downloads/Default.htm...](http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Info/Downloads/Default.html)

Is that all of them? I keep finding more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whenever I start Firefox it tells me:

"Stop! Whatever you were going to do, it couldn't possibly be more important than checking if fart-button-xpi has been updated from 1.0.4 to 1.0.5! Now just five more clicks and I'll restart"

<comment><USER6> You must be running Firefox 3.6 then.

<comment><USER7> But that's exactly the point -- just manually update to firefox 4 and your problems will go away! Firefox 4 is only a few months old. Compared to previous firefox releases it's brand-new.

<comment><USER6> Define "manually update".

<comment><USER7> Having to complete something like this: [http://www.newsmild.com/wp- content/uploads/upgrade-offer-boo...](http://www.newsmild.com/wp- content/uploads/upgrade-offer-boosts-firefox-4-share-by-30.jpg)

Unfortunately, I think years of popup dialog fatigue leads lots of people to just close the window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree with this. Chrome has effectively changed the entire nature of client- side computing with this feature. If you want to run stuff client-side any more (hello Windows? Anybody listening?), you're going to need to implement this.

In general, the user should _extremely_ rarely be interrupted for anything, especially not anything program-related. Each program having a tray icon, an update alert, update restarts, and flow interruption because it thinks something is important is what has turned windows from a productive computing platform to some kind of cross between a Kafkaesque X-box and a slot machine.

<comment><USER9> After getting used to Chrome's silent updates, I started to find it breathtakingly ridiculous the way Firefox kept interrupting its startup asking about updates. When I start Firefox, it is because I want to go to a website. Giving attention to updates is _not_ what I want to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google have open-sourced their auto-update mechanism to a project called 'Omaha'. But it's so complicated an google-specific that nobody else seems to use it:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3711435/has-anybody- used-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3711435/has-anybody-used-google- omaha-their-auto-update-engine-for-chrome)

<comment><USER11> We use it. The server isn't open source, but it wasn't difficult to follow the protocol and create a Google App Engine app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "It is magical because it continuously updates an entire development platform invisibly, frequently"

That "frequently" is every 30 minutes, by the way... I accidentally removed the goog updater from my Lil Snitch rules and noticed that it then started asking permission every 30 minutes, on the dot (I started recording the times for a while).

I don't know why it needs to check so often - except that that kind of data would be very useful for noting how often your users were on 'puters, and if they moved around etc.

<comment><USER13> A hyper short time could be massively benefitial to security. Imagine a security bug fix that's installed on every browser within the hour.

<comment><USER14> That is true... but it can go the other way to: Imagine a security bug that is _introduced_ on every browser within the hour.

<comment> T-hawk Even worse: imagine a poisoned update that gets installed on every browser within the hour.

Or just an update with a non-malicious bug that breaks the updating mechanism. (This last has happened to companies the size of McAfee and Skype.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My group is currently having discussions about the new paradigm of browsers updating frequently and silently. We currently have to support a wide array of browsers and versions for our apps (due to the nature of the product), and our QC group is grappling with how to manage this.

Personally, I don't think we need to worry about a Chrome or FF update suddenly breaking our apps--they don't use cutting edge HTML5/CSS3 features, and I don't suspect that either browser will suddenly change an HTML4 implementation.

Anybody else dealing with this same issue?

<comment><USER16> While I've never seen an update cripple our software. I have noticed changes in rendering engines that change how things appear slightly. Minor stuff, only a few pixels here and there.

Also, I was forced to change our browser checking software to only do lower bound checking. Before, I would explicitly specify which versions were allowed. Now it's more like Firefox 4+, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I notice on Ubuntu auto-update doesn't work. I wonder if this is a technological issue (they can't or haven't bothered to get it working) or a cultural one (like if Ubuntu programs shouldn't auto-update ever).

<comment><USER18> On Linux, the chrome team chose to integrate with system package managers instead of using their native updater - arguably the native updater would have worked better (many Linux distros still don't support delta updates!), but they wanted to buy goodwill with the Linux community.

<comment><USER19> This is also the reason why there is no canary version of Chrome available on Linux: since packaging is so involved, it's not worth the effort.

<comment><USER20> Um. Chrome is offered in both .deb and .rpm (each 32bit and 64 bit).

<comment><USER21> I don't see any such thing on their download page, only for stable and beta. I think linux users are better equipped than most to build it from source, however...

<comment><USER20> Oops. I missed the canary part. You're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good thing they are still not evil. Seriously, this is a very powerful way to run software, but what if they, or some other company who emulated this idea, took that great power we have granted them and used it for evil? They could suddenly 0wn millions of computers.

<comment><USER23> Or if a company, maybe even Google, gets hacked and their distribution channels are used to send out poisoned software? That would be bad.

<comment><USER24> I could see Google being taken by force (read guns) and millions of computers sent the launch codes.

Joshua

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I _really_ want a Linux version of the binary with the updater. There's an open feature request for it, but no activity on it.

Flash is unfortunately still a requirement for a lot of websites. The 32bit binary chrome has flash bundled, so updates are received as quickly as possible (I know, I should run some flash-blocking plugin, but I don't right now). On 64bit Linux (which is what I need most of the time), you have to maintain the flash plugin separately, and run it through nspluginwrapper, which makes it much less stable in my experience.

You used to be able to run the 32 bit debs on 64bit Ubuntu, but that broke a couple versions ago, and I never had time to see if it could be fixed. You also lose the package manager updates when you do this, since apt isn't multi- arch aware.

<comment><USER26> Chrome has a built in "click to play" feature for plugins.

<comment><USER25> D'oh, you're right. I completely forgot about that (it's still in the hidden flags setting though)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "you can no longer decide that it's a bad idea to upgrade to the new version because of an annoying change."

Exactly what I dislike about the web app model; I want it even less in my client apps.

<comment><USER4> How much power do you have over updates now? When Skype destroys everything good about their UI aren't you still going to have to update eventually?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice, except Chrome doesn't update _at all_ for a lot of Mac users (myself included)...

[http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=update+server+not+available...](http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=update+server+not+available+error+12)

So, hilariously, I have to totally remove the app and re-install to update.

<comment><USER26> Reading the bug reports makes it seem to be mostly caused by third party applications screwing with the Chrome install.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's nice, but I really don't find it vastly preferable to a friendly update notification and a quick application restart - especially now that most applications open in the state they were closed in, and with an SSD the restart is barely a blink. In fact, I like to know the feature additions or design adjustments happening to an app, so I enjoy the notifications - it's like I'm getting something for free (which I am, actually).

I don't think it's a huge advantage for average users, either - %90-percent of iPhone users are on the latest available major OS version, and that (until 5.0) involved a huge non-delta download, physically docking your phone and an onerous, lengthy (well over 30 minute) process, during which you had limited use of your phone.

</comment><comment><USER30> The only issue with this otherwise wonderful feature is that often when chrome starts doing something weird/broken it turns out it installed an update and is ready to be restarted.

So it appears there is a bug where the update messes up currently running processes.

</comment><comment><USER31> On a related note, for a side project that requires a windows download (<http://www.getbugcam.com>), I've been experimenting with Microsoft's "ClickOnce" installer + autoupdate technology. Obviously (per the name and Microsoft reputation), it's not quite as simple and straightforward as Chrome's autoupdate process, but it is pretty good.

For those interested in some of the available options for Windows apps, see here: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37030/how-to-best- impleme...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37030/how-to-best-implement- software-updates-on-windows)

</comment><comment><USER32> Although it is a nice feature, for me the most important Chrome feature is unifying the address and search box. Even non-technical people know to respond to a software update prompts, but the number of people I see (including normally quite tech savvy people) that still search for a url, or enter a search in the address field surprises me. OK, you could argue it is bowing down the lowest common denominator, but I believe it's a great feature that saves the frustration of people that just want to do go somewhere or find something on the web quickly.

</comment><comment><USER33> Users in countries with slow/expensive internet connections will hate the feature. It might not even work as the machine is not connected to the network 24/7. And when its connected they do not want Google to use bandwidth for updating software. I know many people in India turn off autoupdate on their windows machines because it eats bandwidth (of course I try to talk them out of it).

</comment><comment><USER34> Only those running admin accounts benefit from this feature. If you run Chrome in a limited user account on Windows 7, or a Standard User account on OS X 10.7, Chrome may or may not prompt you for an admin password (depending on the configuration). I've always had to quit all my applications, log out of my everyday account, login as admin, update, logout, then login again.

<comment><USER35> From my experience Chrome installs itself into %appdata% to avoid requiring admin permissions. And not once has Chrome asked for my admin password on OS X.

<comment><USER34> Right, that's one way of installing Chrome on Windows. However if you install Chrome for all users, then you pretty much have to start Chrome with an admin user's UID. I get prompted for my admin password on OS X, as I work in a standard user account.

<comment><USER36> Do you mean your Mac user account does not have admin privileges?

In that case have you tried just installing Chrome into ~/Applications instead?

<comment><USER34> I maintain two accounts on OS X: one for software installation & updates, and the other being my primary account with limited credentials. That way, if I were to accidentally run some malicious code, it wouldn't hose the entire system.

So Google Chrome.app resides in /Applications, but it's installed by the account that gets created when you reinstall OS X (which is by default an account with full privileges). Standard users can read /Applications, so they can launch Google Chrome.app, but the process can't write to /Applications because of its effective UUID. That's why it prompts for an admin password.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I would have thought it's best features are that it's fast and clutter free compared to other browsers. Whether chrome updated every 5 minutes silently in the background or never updated at all would not make a difference to me.

</comment><comment><USER38> _Chrome's Most Important Feature is autoupdate_

In that case, the latest incarnations of Microsoft Windows ought to be doing pretty well for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is the updater part of the Chromium open source package?

It would be pretty neat if someone use only the updater as part of other desktop software packages.

<comment><USER40> They have releases their updated as open source under the name Omaha: <http://code.google.com/p/omaha/> Several of their products use it but afaik no other product is making use of it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> So why hasn't Firefox implemented this yet? They've already said they are moving away from version numbers, but I still get the "You need to update, do you want to?" and "You've updated, now stop what you're doing and restart".

Chrome has eliminated both of these dialogs (that used to be browser standards), and the FF dev team is usually responsive enough to adopt new, good ideas quickly. So what gives?

<comment><USER42> Because Firefox is very plugin driven, and its current design disables plugins that aren't compatible.

It is not in the best interest of users to have their plugins disabled automatically as a "feature".

<comment><USER35> Can't they just stop making changes that cause plugins and extensions to break?

I know that would be easier said than done, but Chrome seems to do a good job of it.

<comment><USER43> Firefox addons are traditionally written using the same API the browser itself uses. That's what makes them much more powerful than Chrome extensions, but clearly more fragile to breakage.

They're starting to offer a separate extension SDK (formerly called Jetpack) that allows extensions to ignore the internal API and build against something more stable. Such add-ons can be installed without requiring a restart, and should be much easier to update, but many important extensions need more power than currently provided. (Ad block is a good example.)

<comment><USER44> As is vimperator and pentadactyl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> They may well be right, but boy does it /feel/ wrong.

What if it sucks down bandwidth when I'm on 3G? What if an update breaks something, and I'm in the middle of something that can't be updated? What if an update silently breaks the update process? Hrm!

<comment><USER46> It's like you've never actually experienced the autoupdater and are only responding to a rough description of the process. It's a HUGE win.

      > What if it sucks down bandwidth when I'm on 3G?

That might happen. What if it does?

      > What if an update breaks something, and I'm in the middle
      > of something that can't be updated?

As per TFA (and experience): The autoupdater never interrupts you. The only UI change is one of the toolbar buttons changes subtly. Most of the time you don't notice that an update is ready to install. More to the point, after the update you usually _don't even notice anything different._

      > What if an update silently breaks the update process?

There's absolutely no precedent for this, but honestly, who cares? This is hardly reason to shun the entire system.

Bottom line: The autoupdater makes sure I never care about the version of Chrome I'm running, just like a web app.

<comment><USER47> _That might happen. What if it does?_

Then it risks costing me money, for doing something I've not chosen to do. For a feature described as "not worrying", that can be potentially very worrying.

<comment><USER48> Do you choose what version of a web site you use? Generally no. You trust that whoever is running it cares enough to not break it for you, just like Chrome users trust Google to not break their web browser.

<comment><USER49> Exactly. I can only buy this line of thinking if you're in charge of mission critical machines (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

For the vast majority of people, heading down this rabbit hole isn't worth the effort.

(On the flip-side, it would be nice if there was a magical "undo those updates to point in time X" feature in case something went wrong and you wanted to see if it was because of an update).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Great Britain's Geology with Minecraft - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgs.ac.uk/minecraft/#/-53473/64/85530/-10/0/0 <comment><USER2> Why "Create chunks using the height data to add blocks repeatedly up to the desired height using the real world geology for that location" instead of simply adding the top two blocks?

It seems unnecessarily wasteful of resources considering there is absolutely no value in the 'below the surface' geology in this demo.

Other than that, neat! Can't wait to look for my neighbourhood when i get home :)

<comment><USER3> I think because: "In reality the geology varies with depth, like cake layers, and BGS is working on representing the arrangement of the rocks and sediments in the form of a 3D geological model. Watch this space!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone decipher this to tell me what the scale is?

Oh, it looks like it's copyright. Just became much less interesting...

<comment><USER5> This looks relevant (???) [http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and- government/lice...](http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and- government/licensing/using-creating-data-with-os-products/os-opendata.html)

It seems to imply a fairly open license that requires only attribution. I don't really know UK law however.

<comment><USER6> Actually, I don't actually see a copyright notice on the actual minecraft product. I haven't downloaded the actual zip (I don't have minecraft at work!), and maybe there are additional claims there, but the copyright string on the page is simply the required acknowledgement for the original Ordinance Survey data under the Open Data license that you linked.

Note that the Open Data license does not require that your products based on the data be open as well, just that you acknowledge the source.

The Minecraft world is built by the British Geographical Survey, not the Ordinance Survey.</comment></comment></comment>


Convert paper-based notes to HTML content with Google Vision API - <AUTHOR> https://itnext.io/convert-paper-based-notes-to-html-content-with-google-vision-api-e398fdb45cb9 <comment><USER2> Hey! Nice article there!</comment>


ISPmail Tutorial for Debian Squeeze - <AUTHOR> http://workaround.org/ispmail/squeeze

<comment><USER2> Looks great, but you forgot to mention that it's about running a mail-server

</comment><comment><USER3> nice. been looking for something like this.</comment>


How to fight inequality with stocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/1/employee-ownership-bernstein-000030 <comment><USER2> "Around 80 percent of the value of the stock market is held by the richest 10 percent of Americans while the bottom 40 percent barely have any wealth in the stock market at all."

So to reduce inequality, we are just going to give away stocks to employees?

It should be about a risk/reward ratio. Stocks go to the richest 10% of Americans, because they are risking their hard-earned cash. If a company goes bust, they lose that cash.

An employee has no such risk. If the company goes bust, they lose nothing. They just need to find another job, which isn't pleasant (it's happened to me plenty of times over the years), but nowhere near the risk of losing cash, assets, and even reputation.

I also don't see a problem with a CEO getting paid many times the lowest employee. Most CEOs earn their keep. They make many important decisions that usually make a company millions of more dollars. If not, they get canned accordingly.</comment>


Why Scaling Bitcoin with Sharding Is Very Hard (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://petertodd.org/2015/why-scaling-bitcoin-with-sharding-is-very-hard <comment><USER2> this is pretty good. Key line for me:

> How do you prove that a coin has validly been spent? First, prove that it > hasn't already been spent! How do you do that if you don't have the > blockchain data? You can't, and no amount of fancy math can change that.

and also, something Bitcoin devs realise that Bitcoin fans often don't seem to:

> On the other hand, decentralization isn't cheap: using PayPal is one or two > orders of magnitude simpler than the Bitcoin protocol.

<comment><USER3> Why couldn't you use a sufficiently large bloom filter to determine if a coin has been spent?

<comment><USER4> How do you verify the authenticity of the bloom filter?

<comment><USER5> That's not really a problem – anyone could verify it by downloading the full blockchain. The important thing is that you don't need the full blockchain to get a negative answer from a bloom filter, which helps.

The problem happens when you get a _positive_ answer from the bloom filter; i.e. a coin _might_ have been previously spent. As far as I know you then _still_ need the full blockchain to verify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some coins do sharding by not using a blockchain at all. e.g. RaiBlocks [1] uses a "block-lattice" approach. It is a Proof-of-stake-secured coin.

[1] [https://raiblocks.net/media/RaiBlocks_Whitepaper.pdf](https://raiblocks.net/media/RaiBlocks_Whitepaper.pdf)

<comment><USER7> There's also the Iota "Tangle": [https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf](https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Sharding isn't any easier with the Tangle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's hard but not necessarily impossible. Here's Ethereum's sharding FAQ:

[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding- FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ)

<comment><USER10> Hi Dennis, a friend recommended you to me for Ethereum smart contract audit, are you open/available for a project?

<comment><USER9> Willing to talk at least, how do I contact you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> SPECTRE: [https://medium.com/@avivzohar/the-spectre- protocol-7dbbebb70...](https://medium.com/@avivzohar/the-spectre- protocol-7dbbebb707b5)

<comment><USER12> That is not a sharded blockchain and shares the same fundamental restriction: all nodes must verify all blocks.

(though it does offer some nice improvements, we're taking factors of 2-5, not 100-1000)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bitcoin is over.

<comment><USER14> ... $15,000</comment></comment>


Can someone recommend a good personal finance book/guide - <AUTHOR>

I want to get control of my debts and finances. Any good reads out there that helped others? <comment><USER2> I haven't read much on these kinds of books, but these things that I've picked up have helped and seem like common sense: 1) Don't anything big on credit unless you have the cash to back it up. 2) Stick your paycheck in the savings (or some prudent recurring investment vehicle to have at least 6*monthly wages at any time in your bank account - aka rainy day fund). 3) Income ≠ disposable spending 4) That "utility" (internet, cable, phone, etc) which can be shared can be money saved. 5) Take financial advice (including this one :-) with extreme prudence!

</comment><comment><USER3> Canadian: "The Wealthy Barber: The Common Sense Guide to Successful Financial Planning"

Easy read, covers all the basics.

</comment><comment><USER4> I recommend _I Will Teach You To Be Rich_ by Ramit Sethi.

<comment><USER5> Is it focused on the US, or is most of the advice good anywhere? Financial software, books, and websites focus so much on the US sometimes that it's hard to find things that are neutral, or focused on Canada.

For example, I'd love to use Mint, but it doesn't have support for Canada.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recommend _The Millionaire Next Door_.</comment>


Ask HN: Can we talk about recent Mozilla layoffs? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
Mozilla was, is, and hopefully will be, a fundamental part of the web.
The recent round of layoffs in Mozilla is an important news for our community that deserve to be discussed. I saw a couple of new hitting the front page, and both were flagged to the obliviom.
This does not allow us to discuss the issue properly and it is a shame.
Can we somehow repost the news and have an healthy discussion about it?
Thanks <comment><USER2> There is a substantial, ongoing discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336)

</comment><comment><USER3> We should, my only gripe about the recent Mozilla layoffs is that after all the funding they had from Google, they didn't focus on creating products which make money.

I know there is Pocket and a VPN but IMO I don't think its enough.

</comment><comment><USER4> There was a couple long lived stories about it. General consensus was they should concentrate on Firefox and stop wasting money on other stuff. Later ones were probably just flagged as dupes.</comment>


Joe Hewitt : I'm an indie developer now.  - <AUTHOR> http://joehewitt.com/post/creative-tools/ <comment><USER2> It's always exciting to bump into, meet or find out about someone who can see interesting possibilities where others see nothing. I don't know Joe, but he seems like one of those people (Firebug, FTW!).

At the same time, I'm always kind of bummed when those people are snapped up by a large company because their ability to produce the mind-binding ideas seems diminished or, at least, less visible among the many large accomplishments/events of a large company. Good to see that one of the lateral thinkers is returning to where we can more easily see his ideas in practice.

Firebug: I remember the first time I left behind the edit-save-refresh-cry- because-my-padding-was-wrong cycle of HTML/CSS development for the Firebug- driven-tweaks flow. Excellent.

<comment><USER3> Re 'Firebug-driven-tweaks flow' [Sorry if this is OT]

With Stylebot when you make these kinds of tweaks it builds up a supplementary ruleset in a single location that you can afterwards copy and transfer to your CSS file. With Firebug it's relatively tricky to make sure you transfer all the tweaks you just did. Feature request. :)

<comment><USER4> Making it easy to save Firebug CSS changes back to the source file was at the top of my todo list in 2007, and I was really bummed that I didn't get the chance to build it. Years later the Backfire extension came out, which does alleviate some of the pain of saving CSS, but I still think there's room for improvement.

<comment><USER5> For the line of JetBrains IDE (PyCharm, IntelliJ, PhPStorm), there is a wonderful plugin, called css-x-fire that allows to save all tweaks you did in Firebug back to your source file. It gave me hours of life back.... I bet there exist something similar for lots of IDE.

<comment><USER6> Woah. Just installed this and I'm getting that giddy feeling a web developer rarely feels when doing CSS editing. This is a godsend! Thanks :D

<comment><USER7> I have switched to "Stylizer" for CSS editing and have never looked back.

Firebug is pretty good for JavaScript and DOM. Chrome for profiling and the network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Haha: <img class="profilePic" src="/themes/pimp/me.jpg" title="Ladies - I'm taken.">

</comment><comment><USER9> "I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until 2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won't wait." -Joe Hewitt [1]

I wonder if Joe Hewitt is not going to wait, and he will channel his energies into helping HTML5 catch the native app rocket ships. Go beyond Firebug.

[1] <http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/joe-hewitt-web-development/>

<comment><USER10> _... helping HTML5 catch the native app rocket ships._

Can it? It feels like the browsers are slaves to their own success; what the web desperately needs to compete with native applications is the antithesis of what the web has become. To compete, the web would need:

\- A runtime environment that can run complex applications -- including games -- with high performance on low-end mobile devices.

\- Support for languages other than JavaScript, without having to compile to JavaScript (for why javascript is not an adequate compilation target, see above).

\- A common, consistent, high-level application UI toolkit, with support for re-usable UI components. The seperation between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is the wrong one. We need 'native' widgets rendered in canvas, using a coherent hierarchical view-based design -- not the DOM. You can build this on top of HTML/JS/CSS (see Obj-J/Cappuccino), but that's like saying that all turing complete languages are equal because they can emulate each other.

Any progress that a particular vendor might make (such as WebSockets, NaCL) will be held back by the other vendors (looking at you, Mozilla).

If you help the web catch up to modern native apps, you'll have just re- created native apps -- sandboxed, native code execution speed, coherent application libraries, etc...

<comment><USER11> There is one huge company, whose name start with g, highly interested in all of the above (they want to make a web apps based os). but seems like they have lacked the inspiration, or... mm.... maybe they are quietly doing it right now, with NaCl

<comment><USER12> That doesnt change the fact that mozilla isnt interested in NaCl, which is sad because it could enable alot of cool stuff, especially in regards to games and realtime apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It sometimes seems it's difficult to make money from making tools, because developers expect them for free, and with source (like Firebug). But of course it is possible, with products like Joel's FogBugz, like Jira and some IDE's.

Even serious money: Microsoft's _Developer Tools (Visual Studio)_ business made over $1B revenue last year: [http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/microsofts_11_billi...](http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/microsofts_11_billion- dollar_businesses_and_what_they_say_about_the_company.html)

<comment><USER14> Some other good "indie" examples: TextMate, Charles, GitHub, Opacity, and Acorn.

<comment><USER15> Balsamiq

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Firebug is a boon to humanity. Seriously.

The second it came out, it personally started saving me hours of work every single week. If you multiply that by the number of people working with the web, damn, that's like millions of hours? Billions?

I think it was Vint Cerf who said something like: if you want to have the most profound effect on the world you can, rather than work on a particular problem, work on tools that help problems get solved and accelerate the process everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER17> Leaving Facebook to reinvent Firebug is actually pretty baller, I gotta say.

<comment><USER18> I think he has enough credit to be able to go back if he wanted to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just want to thank you for firebug again. Day after Day it just saves my life.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for making firebug. Good luck on future projects.

</comment><comment><USER21> As someone about to join Facebook for his first job in a few months, posts like these make me even more enthusiastic about starting work!

It would have been even more cool to work alongside the creator of firebug, though.

<comment><USER22> Look me up, maybe we can watch GOT together in PA each sunday or something.

<comment><USER21> er, "GOT"?

<comment><USER22> Game of Thrones

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Btw, the submission title is from his tweet announcing this blog post.

<comment><USER23> <http://twitter.com/#!/joehewitt/status/66662766093664256>

(Link to the status)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have no idea what Joe's option situation is, but supposing that he's cashing them in and dumping them in the secondary market it goes to show that Facebook is squandering the employee lock-in advantage of having pre-IPO stock. It's probably in Facebook's interest to shut down the secondary market, but I imagine zuck and co like being somewhat liquid for personal reasons.

<comment><USER25> If your goal is to have people doing creative, innovative work, then I would strongly disagree that there is any advantage whatsoever to be derived from making people feel "locked in." In practice, I have only seen this achieve the opposite effect -- disengaged people hanging around longer than they should and poisoning the atmosphere for passion-driven folks around them.

Joe's post made it quite clear that Facebook's management strategy is to provide freedom and autonomy, not handcuffs. This is one of the key reasons people love working there. The only thing Facebook is "squandering" is the opportunity to be experienced as a corporate financial prison.

The idea that any of this would be driven by Zuck's personal desire for liquidity is way off the mark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Continued success, Joe! Thanks for Firebug, and all your other work.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is great news for us developers and designers. Inspiring too

</comment><comment><USER28> Between firebug, three20, iui, joe has a history of making tools that make really hard things easy. I look forward to what he builds next.

</comment><comment><USER29> Thinking since @joehewitt left @facebook he's going to be drinking @milk with @kevinrose soon.

</comment><comment><USER30> Can't wait to see what Joe comes out with next. But do take some time off first

</comment><comment><USER31> @joehewitt, open source? And where can we expect to start contributing to the tool-chain?

</comment><comment><USER32> Dom Inspector FTW!

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd love to work with this guy. Wonder if he's up for a position with a small team of craftsmen... (yeah, we're actually hiring, if anyone is interesting in working out of a small office in Carlsbad, CA!)

</comment><comment><USER28> >Working at Facebook was like having my own startup, but with a paycheck instead of ramen

Joe Hewitt hasn't worked for Facebook in years. This is old. Second, he wouldn't be eating ramen anyhow. Facebook bought his company for the employees (primarily him). He went on to make the iPhone facebook app, which has been wildly popular.

<comment><USER34> A while ago he stopped working on the Facebook iOS app and the Three20 framework, not in Facebook itself.</comment></comment>


Evolution of Application Data Caching: From RAM to SSD - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/evolution-of-application-data-caching-from-ram-to-ssd-a33d6fa7a690 <comment><USER2> Does extstore also use the same slab allocator that memcached does in memory? Cause if so I feel that disk usage might actually be worse than imagined due to the slab packing problems. I think the design decision to keep everything in memcached makes a lot of sense, but RocksDB seems like an odd choice for the first iteration. It's big claim to fame is durability while achieving high performance, and it shines in situations like MyRocks, but for caching, especially where replication is handled on top of the things writing to disk, that doesn't seem as important. I think extstore also does compaction but on a 64M page by page basis instead of using one big log.

</comment><comment><USER3> >EVCache has become a fundamental tier-0 service storing petabytes of data and hundred of billions of items,

So newest Memcache with extstore allows them instead of PB of RAM to PB of SSD. I look at the pricing of EC2 instances, turns out it is may be a $3/hr saving between Memory Optimised and Storage I/O optimised. On a petabytes scale at 500GB / node that translate to roughly $4.3 million saving per month from on demand pricing. Likely much lower from Netflix discount but still quite a bit of money.</comment>


Onix: A Distributed Control Platform for Large-scale Networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.systemswemake.com/papers/onix

<comment><USER2> <http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/onix10.pdf> Link, as the internal page viewer is, well, claustrophobic.</comment>


JSON Patch with Rails 5 and React - <AUTHOR> https://formapi.io/blog/posts/json-patch-with-rails-5-and-react/ <comment><USER2> One thing to be aware of: applying the patch in `before_save` means validations won't see the changes. Might want to either move that to `before_validation` or apply the changes directly in the `update` action.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point, thanks! I also wasn't sure about the before_save. I'll probably change the = method to apply the changes immediately.</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-06/silicon-valley-hedge-fund-takes-on-wall-street-with-ai-trader <comment><USER2> I just checked out glassdoor, and it seems like they don't know what their product should be since top execs don't want to agree on anything.

> We have too many executives for a company this size - most don't add much > value except for fighting with each other and politicizing issues. The CEO > lives in HongKong and remotely manages this crew of distrusting, non- > supportive and close-minded execs. The HR function is practically a joke. > You don't ask questions, challenge their decisions or speak up - they'll > threaten to fire you if you did. They have not been able to productize their > technology, their trading business has not picked up and their sales > pipeline is pretty dry for the other businesses. They have laid off a large > number of people recently and financial trouble seems to be brewing - lot of > marketing smoke in here!

> Focus on one product and give it more time.

> Productize, productize, productize.

<comment><USER3> Which is really odd, since if they had any idea of what they were doing, they wouldn't need to sell. Trading is among one of the few industries out there where you don't need to have anything like a customer.

What you do is make money, and if you're making money, well, you don't need to ask anybody else for money. This tells me that its a bunch of executives who either don't know anything about trading and/or don't have any coherent strategy, and are really just trying to throw enough buzzwords out there to get investor capitol.

<comment><USER4> Peter Muller has the most succinct summary of this that I've seen in his (very worthwhile) opinion piece on proprietary trading [1]:

Sharpe Ratio, Marketing department

≤ 0: Runs the firm

0.25: Very important; involved in all investment decisions; major focus on asset gathering

0.5–1.0: Secondary

1.0–2.0: Almost superfluous

≥ 2.0: What marketing department?

[1] [https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/BA453_2004/...](https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/BA453_2004/Muller_Proprietary_trading.pdf)

<comment><USER5> For others: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_ratio)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The clickbait headline is amusing, but "Wall Street" has been doing this > 10 years. I'm genuinely not sure if they're trying to "beat wall street" or simply be yet another quantitative hedge fund that happens to use machine learning and neural networks to power their strategies.

Most real electronic trading firms are putting those algorithms in hardware.

Source: Have worked in HFT the past 10 years.

<comment><USER7> > Source: Have worked in HFT the past 10 years.

OT question: how would I get into acquiring market data to try my own backtesting strategies ? Is there anyway to "get in" without putting up $5k + for the data ? I'm not green to this, I worked at a prop shop for a year writing market feed handlers. I know the dangers of overfitting data and how hard it is to make money (so I'm not deluded by a fantasy). I want to start out just for fun doing backtesting and see if I can scrape out a (paper) profit, but accessing historical data seems to be the hard part. I dont think online services that offer this would work for me because I want to use intraday data and replay many times with different parameters. I want access to "the whole firehose" if you will.

<comment><USER8> Not a personal recommendation as I haven't used it, but you might find quantopian.com fun if you've got any python.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Huh, hasn't wallstreet being doing this, and even putting these things into FPGA's for nearly a decade now? Hell I wouldn't be surprised if they're printing ASICs with their algos.

<comment><USER10> Surely - but 'AI' is new. Surely 'Deep Learning' is something at least they are not doing widely, because it's difficult to pull off.

That said, anyone actually doing it would be smart enough to shut the hell up about it.

Finally - one might argue that the big money is all made in 'soft insider' information anyhow, and that with so much tech, analysts already there ... there's just no way to win without clear leverage i.e. relationships, servers on premises of the trading facility, or some other non-market advantage.

<comment><USER11> This is just an anecdotal experience but according to a former hedge fund manager, insider trading is an open secret in the industry. You really can't expect to gamble away billions of investor's money without an edge. Information is the only possible edge that is closely guarded in the markets.

I don't know how true that is, he's a washed up piece of shit that wall street chewed out but has the eyes and ears of gordon gekko wanna be finance grads.

but I'm writing this because this is like the 3rd time I've heard this. Just throwing it up there if "soft insider" information is what they were referring to.

<comment><USER10> Big funds will have direct access to CEO's and execs.

They'll sit down for an interview. Technically speaking, everything that the CEO will say has to be public information. It has to be above bar.

But sitting in the room, being right there, one might easily be able to glean more information than is actually public. Ergo - and edge. And it's not quite illegal.

So that is a form of fairly above board 'soft inside' information that nobody will ever go to jail for.

As far as more obvious 'insider' \- maybe so, maybe not - I don't know - but I do know that you don't even need to do that.

But generally I believe there is basically no reasonable way to beat the market: all of the quant stuff is done by very smart people, fast computers, the value investing done by massive players like Buffet, and the regular investing done by people with 'extra info'.

I really do think that small retail investors are the losers in the casino.

Oh - and also 'big dumb money', i.e. low-performing people at big banks, sitting on huge sums that the hedges get little bites out of.

<comment><USER11> How many retail investors get face time with CEO of Kraft? It's a pretty rigged zero sum game for the rest with much of the edge in the hands of the few.

I actually started to treat trading very much like the casino. I just do it to make news reading interesting. Of course the mental pictures I form in my head are influenced by what I read. I use my gut....

Therefore retail trading is a social acceptable gambling.

brb shorting TSLA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Sentient Technologies won't disclose its performance

"We are doing some shit but we have nothing great to show but you should probably read the rest of our PR article."

> The CEO lives in HongKong and remotely manages this crew of distrusting, > non-supportive and close-minded execs.

"We are a highly _disruptive_ people working on _disruptive_ technology in a _disruptive_ way."

</comment><comment><USER12> PR bluff.

I find the Renaissance Technologies story more compelling and worthy than a press release drafted by the VCs funding/cheering Sentient (Kleiner Perkins, Tata, Horizon, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is the most interesting bit for me:

>Sentient's system is inspired by evolution. According to patents, Sentient has thousands of machines running simultaneously around the world, algorithmically creating what are essentially trillions of virtual traders that it calls "genes." These genes are tested by giving them hypothetical sums of money to trade in simulated situations created from historical data. The genes that are unsuccessful die off, while those that make money are spliced together with others to create the next generation. Thanks to increases in computing power, Sentient can squeeze 1,800 simulated trading days into a few minutes

<comment><USER14> So, genetic algorithms? Good luck with that.

<comment><USER15> I recall reading an early article about using genetic algorithms for stock trading in the early 90's. This isn't really that new....

<comment><USER16> One of my school mates did it in mid-90s and he got his first yacht five years later. It worked for a while.

<comment><USER17> The second happiest day in your life is when you buy a yacht...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Taking on Wall Street by participating in Wall Street?

I somehow doubt how 'disruptive' this will be.

</comment><comment><USER19> Haven't wall street firms been doing this for decades now? I remember 10 years ago I created a trading algorithm that ran by itself without my intervention. I fail to see what is different about this company than some generic quant hedge fund.

<comment><USER20> They use "the field of artificial intelligence known as machine learning" duh. "Big Data" and "Data Science" weren't around 10 years ago /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can you imagine an investment AI that did not have human biases. Here are some my favorite investor biases:

SALIENCY bias. People remember memorable things. The guy who made $100 million by investing in a Romanian immigrant will invest in you if you're a Romanian immigrant, but not if you're one country over even if their education and politics are the same. Computers don't care.

AVAILABILITY bias. People analyze data that is available. If you have worldwide sales figures your market seems huge. If you no data investors will be strongly prejudiced against it.

CONFIRMATION bias. Investors who have a bubble mentality will see the positive and reinforce their theory, however non-rooted in facts (for example the theory that silicon valley teams will succeed and, for example, foreign teams will fail)

There are a bunch more, too.

[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

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

An AI would not suffer from any of these. However, due to the skills required to evaluate a pitch, the AI would have to be much, much smarter than any expert system today. Today you can't even tell a robot how to boil a pot of water (no matter how explicit your verbal description is) or anything else, and have it even come close to succeeding.

We're far away from robots (AI) evaluating pitches and business plans. But how cool would that be!

<comment><USER22> > Can you imagine an investment AI that did not have human biases. Here are > some my favorite investor biases:

It's actually a trivial problem. Just need to ask a few questions to determine the investor risk profile and goals, then pick the appropriate Vanguard fund.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader"

Another generic, contentless article using the standard outline: (name) takes on Wall Street with (scheme).

Percentage of traders who beat the market average: 50%.

Traders to the left of the average who assign the outcome of bad luck: 100%.

Traders to the right of the average who assign the outcome to a secret method and/or genius: 100%.

An unscupulous broker can "prove" to you that he is a stock picking genius, by mailing you correct predictions of the market _in advance of the outcomes_ for, say, six months, then ask you to assign your assets over to him -- but it's a scam, a trick. The explanation: [http://arachnoid.com/equities_myths/#Miracle_Man](http://arachnoid.com/equities_myths/#Miracle_Man)

</comment><comment><USER24> Frustrating that so many great minds are swooped into the finance industry.

The lure of money is too strong.

<comment><USER25> Frustrating that so many great minds are swooped into the online advertising industry.

The lure of money is too strong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> _> Thanks to increases in computing power, Sentient can squeeze 1,800 simulated trading days into a few minutes._

How is it possible to generate seven years of convincing sample data from historical trading data without overfitting your models?

<comment><USER27> Probably by testing against other data to make sure you're not overfit. Though it looks like they're not profitable currently, so... maybe they just don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> fwiw [http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any- monkey-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey-can- beat-the-market/#85db6466e8b6)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm having flash backs to xkcd:

[https://xkcd.com/1570/](https://xkcd.com/1570/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Renaissance Technologies, DE Shaw, etc. wall street. Wall street is usually on the forefront on using math, technology, etc. to make trades. Sometimes the models end up causing calamity as well.

</comment><comment><USER31> The problem with algorithmic trading is that markets are complex systems. As an algorithm is adopted, it changes the dynamics of the market, and the result the assumptions it was based on tend to no longer hold. Note that humans trade via implicit algorithms, which is part of the reason why consistently outperforming the market is highly unlikely.

In my opinion, the whole idea of investing to try and maximize profits is myopic. The real reason to invest should be to gain a measure of control over the corporation being invested in. This suggests that the board should play a more active role in the governance of corporations.

People who just want to make a buck off a corporation should be limited to providing debt financing.

<comment><USER32> Let's assume your algorithm moves the market: 1) This is not a big problem: Lots of machine learning and control theory involves dealing with feedback loops. 2) If it moves the market in a predictable way, you can use this to make money.

The Western world is capitalist, not a Platonic ideal. Even if you strongly feel that people should have different reasons to invest, you will not be able to sway them (unless you can show that your alternative makes them even more money).

If you claim that long-term outperforming of the market is highly unlikely, you contribute outperforming to short-time flukes: The stock market is essentially unpredictable or in perfect equilibrium.

Unpredictability implies all these hedge funds would do better consulting random number generators, instead of well-paid quants.

Equilibrium implies the current market is operating at maximum efficiency, yet one currently makes money by exploiting non-equilibrium and erroneous evaluations.

<comment><USER31> Point #2 is what I'm talking about. Any algorithm that is going to make money long term on a large scale has to be inherently unpredictable, which is difficult if it is an algorithm that predicts the future state of the market from past data.

Sure, the world is less than perfect in a lot of ways. In most cases we try and fix it. Why is capitalism the one way where we say "oh well, that's just how things are" ??

Research has demonstrated that barring insider information, random stock picking often outperforms "experts".

I believe the market is fairly efficient, and people who make money are either lucky or are leveraging short term information differentials, which in today's hyper-connected society are going to become increasingly rare (barring insider information, again).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I just started reading 0 to 1 and I think according to Peter Thiel this news sums up everything that is wrong with the world in one sentence :)

<comment><USER34> care to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> There's this thing called data snooping bias, I hope these GA folks recognize that.

As trading goes, past performance does not equate future performance.

</comment><comment><USER36> Hedge funds need other people's money to make money. So I assume everything they make public is PR and marketing.</comment>


Google is welcome to return to the mainland, but it must comply with Chinese law - <AUTHOR> http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0806/c90000-9488156.html <comment><USER2> The flavor of this post is chilling. It reminds me of the fictional, satirical rhetoric of 1984, The Diamond Age, and Brave New World. I think it is the matter-of-fact dismissal of free expression, captured beautifully (horribly?) in this sentence, that scares me the most:

> No country will allow the internet to be filled with pornography, violence, > subversive messages, ethnic separatism, religious extremism, racism and > terrorism.</comment>


The 10 Deadly Sins Against Scalability - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/6/10/the-10-deadly-sins-against-scalability.html <comment><USER2> I find the list of little help. Yes, these points might be 'deadly sins', but just pointing me to RabbitMQ or advise 'feature flags' is of little help. And why is 'optimizing and tweaking' queries necessary for scalability?</comment>


Whack: Compile and run path-independent Linux programs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mwilliamson/whack <comment><USER2> However, on a technical note, 'relocatable program' usually refers to a completely different concept, namely that the programs binary has relocation entries so it can be 'relocated' and executed at any address range (thing Address Space Layout randomization for binaries or libraries that will be linked).

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right, but "relocatable" was the best word I could find that's used for the concept that was relatively accurate. The other usual adjective is "portable", but I felt that was misleading since you can't just stick the binaries on a USB stick, since the target computer needs to have whack-run installed, which requires root access.

Suggestions for alternatives are extremely welcome!

<comment><USER3> We've been calling them "portable" much before usb sticks were around: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable)

I suggest you reconsider. :)

I've been waiting to see a .dmg equivalent for Linux.

<comment><USER4> > I've been waiting to see a .dmg equivalent for Linux.

In a very literal technical sense I have no idea what this means. Linux can mount a file as if it is a disk with -o loop. I suspect you're really talking about something else. App bundles perhaps?

<comment><USER5> A single file on the filesystem, that acts as a complete application (i.e. can be copied to another system, and run on that new system by double-clicking on it, etc.)

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you're really talking about app bundles plus some kind of container (to make the app bundle a single file instead of a directory).

The thing about that is various *nix machines do not have a standardized user interface. Every Mac has Finder for example, so if Finder wants to call into various components (eg. to mount a .dmg on a double click) or create a metaphor layered on top of the directory concept (app bundle), there are a number of places to put that. A Linux system has no similar "one place" to make that consistent where it will be seen by everyone.

Personally I consider that a feature rather than a bug. One person's idea of a better way of working could break another person's perfectly good workflow. If you want a Mac, get a Mac, and leave the rest of us alone. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's possible to do similar things without setuid/root, by modifying the absolute paths in the binaries and config files. To modify binaries, [http://nixos.org/patchelf.html](http://nixos.org/patchelf.html) . I'm not aware of an automated tool to do this at present.

<comment><AUTHOR> Originally, I tried using similar tools (I think I used chrpath, I can't remember whether I tried patchelf) to implement whack, but I found it quite time-consuming to get things working, and had limited success. I chose the current implementation since it was simpler, quicker and more reliable, and the setuid requirement wasn't a problem for my particular use case.

Having said that, it would be great to have an implementation that didn't require setuid/root.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How can you not be calling them "whackages"? You're sitting on a gold mine!

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a cool project but isn't that kind of what containerization is trying solve? (ex: docker or FreeBSD's zfs+ezjails)

<comment><AUTHOR> Containerization solves this problem, but it also solves many more. Whack is intentionally narrow in scope, which means that there's relatively little to learn as a user. Whack certainly isn't a replacement for Docker and the like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't that just statically linking binaries? Couldn't I do that manually too very easily? Serious question.

Otherwise, if it's really relocating binaries, then it's awesomse, BUT I definately want to know MORE about the 'caching' part. That comes short in the docs.

<comment><AUTHOR> In my experience, a lot of Linux programs aren't straightforward to compile statically. Having said that, that might just be my ineptitude!

Which bit of the caching isn't clear? If you're happy that whack creates relocatable versions, then the caching works just by copying the output directory into ~/.cache, and then copying that directory to the target on subsequent installations. The exact details of how programs are made relocatable are under "How does Whack work?" in the README.

<comment><USER10> Some programs rely on dynamic libraries for modules so you can't, but the main issue is glibc is not designed to support static linking. Use eg Musl as your libc and it is fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So does it require root to install applications the first time?

<comment><AUTHOR> You just need to be root to install whack-run, since whack-run requires the setuid flag. Once you've installed whack-run, you can install the applications as an ordinary user.

<comment><USER4> How complex is whack-run? A setuid binary should be sure to minimize its attack surface. It's just a quick look but when I see your shit-ton of .py files and then you say there is setuid involved it does not fill me with lots of confidence.

<comment><AUTHOR> whack-run is a separate C binary for this very reason:

[https://github.com/mwilliamson/whack- run](https://github.com/mwilliamson/whack-run)

Whack itself is run with normal privileges.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


JRuby 9000 released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jruby.org/2015/07/jruby_9000/

<comment><USER3> JRuby is a great idea.

It has one pitfall which consistently stops me from using it though : poor support with newer releases of Rails, usually due to the Active Record stack not working well with the AR JDBC adapter.

I know some work was being done on a JRuby version of the standard pg gem (without the need for JDBC) which would be fantastic if it was completed and working.

<comment><USER4> Define "newer" and define "poor"? The JRuby team has done a fantastic job of keeping things working. Do you have any specific problems other than vague grumblings?

Anyone married to the MRI ecosystem because of dependencies on modules with no JVM equivalent may have problems, but new projects usually have no such issues.

<comment><USER5> I don't want to complain because it is a free product. But there is no doubt a big lag with activerecord. Rails 4.2 is still not supported: [https://github.com/jruby/activerecord-jdbc- adapter/issues/59...](https://github.com/jruby/activerecord-jdbc- adapter/issues/599)

<comment><USER6> Currently, there's $1700 in store for whoever does support it: [https://www.bountysource.com/issues/5831191-tasks-to- finish-...](https://www.bountysource.com/issues/5831191-tasks-to- finish-4-2-support)

<comment><USER7> Yep, I've put up money for it myself, and regularly be on twitter for other folks to do the same. I wish a big company that uses jRuby would step up and support the tools they use :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed.

<comment><USER7> Know anyone? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Concurrent threads using magic regexp vars like $1 stomp all over each other, quite nasty: [https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/3031](https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/3031)

Stumbling over a serious race condition in the first 5 minutes of trying it with real code makes me a bit wary. All the performance in the world isn't much good if it's randomly _wrong_ :/

<comment><USER9> You really shouldn't be relying on globals anyway. Using $1 etc. is a serious code smell. It shouldn't by definition be threadsafe in any event. The only way that would work would be if you rely on the threads not actually running at the same time as an implementation detail of the MRI.

<comment><USER10> $~ and friends are not global:

      def f
        p $~ # => nil
        "123" =~ /\w+/
        p $~ # => #<MatchData "123">
      end

      p $~ # => nil
      "abc" =~ /\w+/
      p $~ # => #<MatchData "abc">

      f

      p $~ # => #<MatchData "abc">

<comment><AUTHOR> Matz himself has said he regrets putting these variables in the language, and some day they may disappear. We'll match behavior as much as possible, but they're a relic no matter how you slice it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _JRuby 9000 now uses native operations for much of IO and almost all of Process. This makes us the first POSIX-friendly JVM language._

Did they achieved this via JNI?

<comment><USER12> This will prevent running JRuby 9000 in (today's) Google App Engine.

The project has been drifting away from App Engine support for some time now. See #2304.

[https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/2304](https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/2304)

<comment><USER13> There's a pure-Java fallback that has most of the same functionality. But if you wanted precise POSIX function calls you probably weren't running on App Engine anyway.

<comment><USER14> Have you tried the pure-Java fallback on App Engine? I tried it for JRuby 1.7 and it didn't work. I haven't tried yet with 9000, have you?

<comment><AUTHOR> We welcome GAE users of JRuby but they never seemed to be a big segment of the community. And we continue to maintain non-native IO and process logic for limited environments. If that is not sufficient for GAE, we'll work with you to make it so.

<comment><USER14> Jruby 1.7 simply doesn't work in GAE, and maybe it's not worth making it work there, which I would understand. I opened an issue a while ago ([https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/2304](https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/2304)) and I spent about a week trying to fix it. Each time I fixed one issue another one popped up and I gave up after hacking up JRuby beyond my comfort level.

Edit: I just want to stress, the JRuby team is amazing, and I've always been impressed with the responsiveness and openness of the team. This comment isn't meant as a critique in anyway, just a statement of fact with my experience trying to run JRuby on app engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We're using JRuby in some core projects and it's great. From my experience (moved 2 high load projects to Jruby) transition to JRuby from Ruby is not just changing Ruby version. But often you spend around 1-2 weeks to move medium size project on it, change some gems and configure Java options to not have out of memory errors. So it works fine, I'd not say that it works much faster than latest Ruby. But I think that main reasons why you should switch are multithreading and Java libs. We switched because of we was need to use latest Java libs for Kafka. But the main disadvantage is that sometimes when you need to deal with Java objects you need to think about object data type casting (from Ruby object to Java and vice versa). And this is extra actions, extra memory usage.

I'm very happy to see JRuby 9000 and hope we'll upgrade soon.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've actually found JRuby to be very handy when it comes to packaging. Using warbler I can generate a jar file and then using the javapackager I can create self contained packages for all the major platforms/package managers: windows (.exe/.msi), linux (.rpm, .deb), osx (.dmg). Way more painless than packaging a ruby runtime. I've tried traveling ruby, but have not had the same seamless experience. Especially when it comes to multiple platforms. However, packaging with java, jruby and my application usually turn out to be quite large. Around 80Mb for a CLI and the startup time for short running programs like CLIs using JRuby can be quite long.

</comment><comment><USER17> Damm, I so wish Jython improved like this too. I've been thinking of helping out.

<comment><USER18> jRuby is one of the biggest reasons I lean to Ruby over Python. Ruby gains a lot more from the JVM than Python (at least that's my understanding) does and that leads to much more momentum behind jRuby.

<comment><USER19> Like what? They both benefit from the lack of GIL (Jython maybe moreso) as well as the portability and other benefits of JVM as a platform.

<comment><USER13> Jython doesn't use advanced functionality like invokedynamic.

<comment><USER20> It's unclear how much benefit invokedynamic actually provides at present, I recall seeing benchmarks not showing much.

I think the big JRuby advantage is actually that by and large code written for MRI Just Works on JRuby. The exceptions are relatively few, and usually easily worked around, or if not quickly bug fixed. Despite this thread, I haven't had significant troubles with ActiveRecord-ODBC, although in Rails 4.2 have occasionally run into relatively minor worked-around-able issues.

My impression is that code written for standard Python tends to have a lot more trouble running on Jython -- not from any fault of Jython, but because 'standard' Python code tends to be more likely to use native C than typical ruby.

<comment><AUTHOR> Invokedynamic's benefits have been a bit of a mixed bag, but id _does_ make the JVM see through dynamic call sites and optimize them like it does statically-typed call sites. That generally improves performance for JRuby, but there are cases where simply inlining the code together doesn't lead to a measurable increase.

<comment><USER21> Given that both you and Chris are posting to this thread, I was kind of surprised to learn that you're planning to focus on a non-Truffle compiler/optimisation engine in future. Isn't Truffle meant to give huge speedups? It sounds like you might eventually get JRuby 9000 to be faster than MRI but that a rewrite of the current code didn't do it yet.

Is there some kind of vision or plan for how Graal/Truffle fits into the JRuby roadmap?

<comment><USER13> Truffle is a research project. It is not a short-term goal to replace the current IR-based runtime in JRuby, and Truffle isn't really part of the 9k release (it's there but I wouldn't recommend trying to use it).

We are working towards being fully compliant and we're getting there fast - <USER2> think with four full-time people and more in support we are now the largest employer of Ruby implementors anywhere. But since we aren't ready yet, stopping work on IR isn't an option even if we wanted to do so and we all need Charlie and Tom to continue their excellent work on the IR.

In my personal view, Truffle will be good enough to replace JRuby runtime at some point in the next couple of years, but we aren't advocating for this now and if it did happen it would be because the JRuby community and leadership make that decision for themselves.

I think we might come up with some kind of roadmap, or at least stated plan, at JRubyConf next week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So why does JRuby never got as much traction as other jvm langs like clojure, scala, groovy? I have heard good things about the ruby syntax, top that you get unparalleled powers of jvm like gc, cross platform, libs and much more!

<comment><USER23> For the same reason that alternative implementations of Python never got the kind of traction they deserve, because 90% of the gems, libraries and everything are specifically tailored to MRI and it's always harder to play catch up.

Also, the strong anti-Java culture in the Ruby community probably didn't help (even though JRuby has nothing to do with Java, or very little).

<comment><USER24> Nothing to do with Java? Really? How did you come to that conclusion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fantastic news! Very excited about seeing the Ruby ecosystem advance.

</comment><comment><USER26> Big thanks to the Jruby team!

</comment><comment><USER27> is it faster than MRI?

<comment><USER28> That depends on what you mean by faster. For CPU-bound work, JRuby is almost always faster. The JVM is very good at optimizing. However, the best performance doesn't kick in until the JVM is sufficiently warmed up, which means JRuby shines mostly for long-running tasks. Warming up can take a few minutes, although some people tell me that I should warm up for half an hour (!).

On the flip side, JRuby starts much more slowly than MRI. This is a general Java problem: startup times are problematic. Also, code reloading performance may be worse than MRI, so things may be slow in development. JRuby is optimized for production-level long-running workloads. So something like 'rake' will likely take longer with JRuby.

<comment><USER4> In practice I've found the start-up times aren't all that different. The drag is more pronounced on older hardware, though. A current i5 or i7 system with an SSD is usually _roughly_ the same.

<comment><USER28> That is very contrary to my experience. A Rake task in a Rails project almost always takes somewhere like 15-20 seconds just to start up (on MRI it's around 2-5). Just today, I tried to run the Middleman static site generator. Where on MRI, Middleman starts building after around 3 seconds, on JRuby it starts building after around 10 seconds. And I'm on a 2012 Macbook Air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's at 9000!

<comment><USER30> One more version to be over 9000!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If I committed to using jRuby instead of regular ruby, I would have that nagging fear that Oracle would go after all the other companies that build their product using Java APIs.

<comment><AUTHOR> We work closely with engineers at Oracle and JRuby is one of the premier projects on the JVM. There's also no legal way they could come after us; their suit against Google is about copying Java APIs, a very narrow domain.</comment></comment>


Animal Deception Illustrates the Human Variety - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/science/animal-deception-illuminates-the-human-variety/

<comment><USER2> Confuses the actor with the behavior.</comment>


Show HN: Pycraft – learn Python with Minecraft - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/teachthenet/pycraft
This project is aimed at 6-12th graders, though all may find it fun. It's goals are two-fold:
1) Teach the basics of programming, of reading code, editing code, writing code from scratch, and learning how to google things.
2) Give kids something they can use as a baseline to heavily modify based on their own ideas - they can start with the spell frameworks in lessons 7 and 8 and give themselves superpowers, or go in the direction of lessons 5, 6 and 9 and focus on automating complex architecture!
Solutions can be see in the branch "solutions", and a person can run their own server from the "server" branch. The Master branch is the client, and you can connect to my server from it (instructions in the readme).
Looking for any feedback, particularly around the lessons themselves and any ideas for additional lessons - but open to anything constructive. <comment><USER2> Is there a homepage explaining more about the project?</comment>


Replacing Lightweight Web Services with Twitter Bots - <AUTHOR> http://www.jelaidit.co.in/2011/06/replacing-lightweight-web-services-with.html

<comment><USER2> Nice idea. How often do you try to go on twitter and get the fail whale, though? Downtime of the twitter servers could be a major concern.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. But many of the lightweight web services that aren't too critical can run on twitter. But downtime applies to self hosting web based solutions too. So it should really be a calculated trade off i guess criticality vs uptime of self hosted servers.</comment></comment>


Elon Musk launching "x.com" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/885776126148083712 <comment><USER2> Can't even imagine how much that domain cost. Lok

<comment><USER3> He could sell it for a good bit of money, I guess. But I think he still has the domain from what later turned into Paypal.</comment></comment>


Under the Knife: Why Chinese Patients are turning against their doctors - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/under-the-knife <comment><USER2> I once accompanied a friend with a bad cold to a hospital in Shanghai. They ran a blood test, and the doctor announced that she had a viral infection. He then handed her a (fairly expensive) prescription for antibiotics. Now, as anyone who's studied biology (or even Googled 'antibiotics') knows, antibiotics have absolutely no effect whatsoever on viruses. I called the doctor out on it, and he scowled at me and said something like "foreigners do things differently".

Apparently antibiotics account for around 24% of total hospital revenue in China[1], which may explain it somewhat.

1.[http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2103733,00...](http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2103733,00.html)

<comment><USER3> "Bacterial superinfection in viral respiratory disease is a clinically well documented phenomenon."

[http://www.hksid.org/pdf/bult200305.pdf](http://www.hksid.org/pdf/bult200305.pdf)

"Respiratory viral infections may facilitate secondary bacterial infections"

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15166819](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15166819)

The doctor might have had some information about his patient, which you don't?

<comment><USER4> If he did, surely he would have told them about it, rather than just say, "foreigners do it differently".

<comment><USER5> My doctor friends get really annoyed when I read something on WebMD and argue with them. 8 years of schooling makes them an expert and I'm just being a jackass for thinking googling grants me an MD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So much grief but still focused: I asked Wang Dongqing whom he blamed for his son's (the doctor) death. "I blame the health-care system," he said. "Li Mengnan (the killer) was just a representative of this conflict. Incidents like this have happened many times. How could we just blame Li?"

<comment><USER7> Wow:

> When People's Daily, a newspaper that acts as a Chinese government > mouthpiece, posted an online questionnaire asking readers to rate their > reaction to the murder, as a smiley face, a sad face, or an angry face, > sixty-five per cent of readers chose the smiley face.

After having read the accounts of what their health care system is like, it's not hard to understand this level of outrage. It sounds like many of these doctors are exploiting the hell out of their information asymmetry in order to defraud and extort patients who have already been driven to desperation by their ailments. Arguably this behavior is due to the fact that the doctors are underpaid in the first place, but I doubt anyone expects that to be much comfort to the patients.

If Wang Dongqing was privy to his son's misgivings about the moral compromises he and/or his peers were making then the possibility of patient retaliation must have haunted him for some time. The fact that his son died as collateral damage rather than as a result of a slight he personally committed really drives home the fact that the only solution is to address the issue at the system level :/

<comment><USER8> What? This kid murdered an innocent person in anger. It starts, and it ends there. Whether it was collateral damage, or how angry the kid was, is irrelevant.

It's like saying: you know, there's all these fat people that are constantly abused and get run-around by pretty girls. They are suffering so bad, it's not hard to understand their level of outrage when one of them raped a woman.

Seriously, violence against innocents can never be justified. No matter the rational behind it. And by defending them and their actions, we're just giving them credence and making them think their anger and actions are "not their fault".

<comment><USER9> Conflating facing a severe and painful disease [1] while being repeatedly dicked around by the medical system through a combination of incompetence and greed with an entitled asshole who rapes a woman because he feels like he's, well, entitled to have sex with people he finds attractive is pretty stupid.

As was explained in the article, the murderer had endured a painful illness, a misdiagnosis, used his grandparents' life savings and borrowed money for treatment, traveled some distance, had treatment interrupted, was blown off again by the medical system, and snapped. Of course it doesn't justify murder, but it is quit different than, for example, a premeditated murder over money.

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

<comment><USER8> He felt entitled to retribution. The fact that he was "dicked" around by medical individuals over a more serious matter does not nullify the comparison, here are the details of the two scenarios:

In both scenarios the victim's were not directly to blame. In both scenarios a larger group of people "dicked" around the aggressor. And in both scenarios (one hypothetical) the violent actions are being downplayed, or justified because of some sort of indirect harm towards the aggressor.

This backlash just shows how easy it is for people to conflate the issues involved. It is in essence justifying violence against _innocent_ individuals, and frankly, it's sickening.

" _Of course it doesn 't justify murder, but it is quit different than, for example, a premeditated murder over money._" Murder is murder, I don't see the distinction here. You can't go ahead and say murder isn't so bad if the aggressor was "having a bad hair day", or any other trivial issue. If you want to say that this individual was justified in his act of killing because he was in danger and was forced to do so, or was defending himself, then fine that's a different issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Joe Passanante, a doctor from Chicago who did a stint at Beijing United Family Hospital, told me that he was once performing CPR on a woman when the parents of a girl with a fever walked into the room. "Here I am pushing on a dead person's chest, trying to revive her, and they're asking me to see their daughter," he recalled."

It seems like a totally different world in so many ways but this quote highlights it for me.

<comment><USER11> United Family Hospital is very different though from the typical public hospital. It's a private hospital where a simple consultation with a doctor costs about 2000 RMB (around 325 USD) and is geared towards expats with good health insurance or rich locals.

It's worlds apart from the public hospitals they were talking earlier in the article and is really not representative of the situation. There, the doctors are more likely to deal with entitled customers who feel that they should be treated with the respect their money affords them.

<comment><USER12> Not my experience with Chinese hospitals, and I've seen several (with consultation fees of 2 CNY - not the entitled rich crowd). Usually there are five or six other people pushing each other to get the doctor's attention inside the office. It's nearly impossible to be seen without some less-than- violent strategic body positioning without eye contact. No such thing as privacy, even in gynaecology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A general rule of thumb for an acute complaint: Go to a hospital affiliated with a medical university. That's where the next generation of doctors are trained by (hopefully) some of the best of the current generation. As workhorses, they also tend to see a lot of cases in a working day (an indeed, some of the most unusual), leading to a lot of practical experience.

<comment><USER14> I think there's also a lot of recruitment of foreign experts for academically- oriented institutions. I've been seeing a lot more biomedical science papers from Chinese universities with non-Chinese names of faculty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "Protest becomes the mechanism for providing social security and for > distinguishing people who need help."

Now that's one way to evaluate the health of the system. I wonder if the baseline is measured in protests/day...

</comment><comment><USER16> > Wei had only recently returned from a reëducation camp

They'll put a diaeresis in re-education but they won't print tone diacritics in Chinese names. I'd kind of like to know how to pronounce the names.

<comment><USER17> I hope that in the next ten or twenty years it will become normal practice to include tones in Chinese names, or at least typeset the original names parenthetically beside the transliterations.

<comment><USER18> Visiting Beijing a few years back, I recall a bunch of signs had a pinyin versions of the street-name showing... but without tonal marks.

Never did figure that one out.

<comment><USER19> AFAIK it's kind of uncommon to print pinyin with tones. Especially since, when Pinyin is used as an input method, you would write hua4 for huà.

<comment><USER16> Children's books get printed with tones. I think the lack of tones in other contexts is down to no better reason than that keyboards don't have any obvious way to enter them.

Using zhuyin would solve the problem neatly, but comes with its own ("made in Taiwan") political drawbacks. It also wouldn't be an improvement in the context of English speakers reading the new yorker.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


James Damore vs. Google Class Action Lawsuit - <AUTHOR> https://www.scribd.com/document/368688363/James-Damore-vs-Google-Class-Action-Lawsuit#from_embed <comment><AUTHOR> Why is this dupe? I posted the source. I noticed someone posted the twitter link after i posted but I (and hopefully others) rather read this than some (imo biased) opinionated article/tweet from blog/twitter/news agency.</comment>


Stanley Kubrick's life as a still photographer - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2018/04/13/stanley-kubricks-little-known-life-as-a-still-photographer <comment><USER2> Now that explains much of his eye for composition.

Mr Kubrick's obsession with light motivated him to shoot all the candle lit scenes of 'Barry Lyndon' without supplemental lighting, using three Zeiss f/0.7 lenses. He wanted audiences to see what the characters saw.

Only ten such lenses were ever made and are still the fastest apertures ever used in filmmaking

[https://m.dpreview.com/articles/9811242514/kubrick- s-f-0-7-l...](https://m.dpreview.com/articles/9811242514/kubrick- s-f-0-7-lenses-now-available-for-rent-but-start-saving-up)

And very difficult to use, too; depth of field of a 50mm f/0.7 lens is about 20cm at 5 metres! So to keep his subjects in focus he had the actors move only sidewards in those scenes!</comment>


A hacker site says it has discovered the apps Mark Cuban loves... - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/A-hacker-site-says-it-has-discovered-the-apps-Mark-Cuban-loves-and-those-he-doesnt/articleshow/47301996.cms

<comment><AUTHOR> HN is a "hacker site." Sigh.

Note this version of the story has a different headline: [http://www.businessinsider.com/the-apps-mark-cubans-loves- an...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-apps-mark-cubans-loves-and-those-he- doesnt-2015-5)

The discussion that sparked this article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9549236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9549236)</comment>


The State of Ello - <AUTHOR> http://dembot.com/post/672

<comment><USER2> >What's interesting to me of course is that even though they don't have a convenient API for all of the data, all of the data (except passwords they said) is public. So if you and I can see it, Facebook, e.g. could easily see it too, and tell what everyone is doing just the same.

If true, this sort of nullifies their claim not to sell your data. No one needs to buy it; it's just sitting there!

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's be realistic here. The extent of that information is the users' profile, which currently consists of a 160 character bio, a human readable name (which can be anything) and any external links they choose to supply; their followership information; and whatever they choose to include in their posts.

Is there really enough salable information in there to make it worth the full time effort that would have to be put in working against the bot detection measures, the inevitable IP blocks and account suspensions? Is that really something you could base a business on?

I imagine the Ello social graph could be useful in an online anthropology study, but I can't see anyone getting much mileage out of it beyond that.

(Although to contradict myself, CircleCount.com does maintain a database of Ello user statistics. They did ask the Ello team nicely about this, and I imagine there is some kind of exception made here.)

<comment><USER2> If the data were worthless it would _also_ make the promise not to sell pointless, paralleling my original point.

But I actually think there's plenty there, even if you just include the posts. What turns out to be valuable can be surprising. I remember when "interests" was a plain text input field on Facebook where people put a comma delimited list. And I loved it; I even put little jokes in there (e.g. coffee, chocolate, and mint, concurrent or consecutive). Then one day, they turned every one of those list items in the text field into, essentially, a fucking ad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> from the article: "Most striking, the company said they are applying for patents to protect what they believe are innovative ideas for providing social network services." -i would love to see ello help establish a community protocol using the open source governance model.

</comment><comment><USER4> > On numbers, they said they are not going to play the numbers game anymore > (i.e. will not tell us)

So, that bad, huh?

<comment><AUTHOR> The number of registered users was sitting at around the 2 million mark at the end of 2014. Since then, they've started issuing invites for people who asked for them at a more rapid pace (one Ello developer said signups are now at a rate of around 250,000 a week). Of course, there's no way to obtain an indication of the number of active developers from this.

I'd speculate that the reason they held off issuing solicited invitations is that they spent most of December 2014 performing infrastructure and backend upgrades and improvements. (The fact that these upgrades happened is fact, the connection with the change in invite policy is speculation).</comment></comment>