Chief U.S. spy catcher says China using LinkedIn to recruit Americans - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-linkedin-china-espionage-exclusive/exclusive-chief-u-s-spy-catcher-says-china-using-linkedin-to-recruit-americans-idUSKCN1LG15Y <comment><USER2> I found it interesting that the espionage is largely aimed at the private sector and not the government:

> About 70 percent of China's overall espionage is aimed at the U.S. private > sector, rather than the government, said Joshua Skule, the head of the FBI's > intelligence division, which is charged with countering foreign espionage in > the United States.

> "They are conducting economic espionage at a rate that is unparalleled in > our history," he said.

<comment><USER3> Think of a scenario where certain government employees have accounts on some Private sector service: Maybe a Grindr or Tinder -- if they can work to obtain any sort of compromising information from those services - they can then use it to manipulate government employees ("Do what I say, or i'll out you")... In fact, pretty sure a Chinese co. recently obtained controlling interest of Grindr.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/technology/grindr- sells-s...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/technology/grindr-sells-stake- to-chinese-company.html)

<comment><USER4> We can inoculate ourselves to this threat by not caring about what politicians, government workers, and other people in general do in their private romantic lives.

<comment><USER5> Well, a think a spouse might justifiably care in the case of cheating.

<comment><USER6> At which point that's just the cycle of karma closing the loop, no?

<comment><USER7> > At which point that's just the cycle of karma closing the loop, no?

You misunderstand. No one cares about Alice's personal life, karma, or happiness. All they care about is manipulating Alice and what a manipulated Alice might do. Alice's desire to hide her cheating from her spouse could lead Bob's trade secrets to getting stolen. Bob did nothing wrong here to have his "cycle of karma closing the loop."

<comment><USER6> Never give Alice your passwords and always have a lock code on your cell phone. Anything else is a moral hazard in my opinion. Bob is complicit in this case IMO.

If my spouse were to attempt to extract data from my work laptop she would run smack-dab into my password. If on the other hand Bob has extracted highly confidential data onto a freely available machine, then Bob is not only complicit, Bob is culpable. Don't be Bob.

If we take this further and Bob's employer made it that easy to extract highly confidential data then they are their own worst enemy.

For example, if a foolish Google employee attempts to stalk an ex-partners confidential data from within Google, they will be terminated and escorted out of the building within 60 minutes. Be like Google here.

<comment><USER7> You misunderstand again. Bob isn't Alice's spouse, he's Alice's employer. Bob legitimately gave Alice access to confidential information in order to do her job. But, unknown to him (unless he intrusively investigated her personal life), Alice could be blackmailed into abusing that access because she cheated on her spouse.

Bob isn't "complicit" or "culpable" he's a victim.

I think you're overconfident in simple security measures and have a poor understanding of human security threats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A company I worked for in a $hot_field had some dev servers breached from some IPs in China; they got some of our app's buggy class files and not much more. It's the kind of app you need a bunch of corporate culture to use effectively, so the jars aren't much use.

Anyway, a few days later, a bunch of us in our R+D group got LI invites from Chinese recruiters out of the blue. Because of the timing and supposed motivation, we assumed we'd been approached for industrial espionage purposes, but there's not much you can do aside from decline the invite.

<comment><USER9> You could troll them.

<comment><USER10> Which would put you in the position of being a rank amateur playing against a top pro.

<comment><USER9> Well you don't get to become a 'top pro' by doing nothing. Seriously though, I doubt the recruiters are 'pro' by any stretch of the imagination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds of a story I read a while back about India's spy agency (RAW) allegedly kidnapping a retired Lt. Colonel from Pakistan's spy agency (ISI) in Nepal using his LinkedIn information as a 'job bait'. From [1]:

> _The complainant alleges that some months ago a person called Mark Thomas > called his father on his phone number 0334344_ _43 from a number in the UK > 0044-7451_ __722 and offered him a job at the Strategic Solutions > Consultancy firm.

> _It now transpires that Lt Col Zahir had put up his bio-data on LinkedIn and > some other websites seeking a job opportunity three years after he retired > from the Pakistan army._

In short, LinkedIn's data is very, very valuable.

[1] - [https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/pakistan-media- ra...](https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/pakistan-media-raw- abudtucked-isi-man-avenge-kulbhushan-jadhav-970887-2017-04-12)

</comment><comment><USER12> > _" I recently saw that Twitter is cancelling, I don't know, millions of fake > accounts, and our request would be maybe LinkedIn could go ahead and be part > of that"_

Wow. Strong language from the head of the U.S. National Counter-Intelligence and Security Center

<comment><USER13> Wow, the US security apparatus is truly pathetic and outdated. No wonder China has pilfered trillions of dollars of IP from us and Russia is successfully destabilizing our society. It reminds me of how big complacent corporations from another era get overtaken by hungry young startups who are fluent in the tools of today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are so many unintended consequences of the internet as we know it today. This, fake news, forums that close because their moderators don't want to cope with the terrible stuff, and on and on.

When it was just computer science departments and a few tech companies, it was mostly OK. With a good portion of humanity online... wow.

<comment><USER15> I remember the internet in 90s being full of spam, popups that would crash your computer and viruses everywhere. Even before mass adoption it was still a cesspool. I am envious of anyone who got to experience the internet in its infancy

<comment><USER16> Eh, until the very late 90s it wasn't that bad. After the dot com bust things got especially bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> New jobs program: you pretend to have all kinds of heavy duty intel, let the Chinese government hire you and then milk the new position for all it is worth.

Could be a thriller, but I would pitch this one as a comedy.

<comment><USER18> All you need to make it happen is Seth Rogen and Roger Stone to collaborate.

<comment><USER17> "WE got a good news bad news situation. The good news is, I convinced them that we are working on a nano-AI-solar-blockchain-social-drone"

"And the bad news?"

"They gave me some funding. I have to hire people. What's your cousin doing these days?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone contacted by China and considering an offer of money under the table for a small "harmless" disclosure should remember that they killed at least 12 CIA sources between 2010 and 2012 [0]

State craft is not for amateurs and sources on both sides routinely get hung out to dry. Think of your family. Do not play this game.

0: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia- spie...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies- espionage.html)

<comment><USER20> _they killed at least 12 CIA sources between 2010 and 2012_

Here and elsewhere in the comments, it's interesting that those stats are always presented one-sided.

<comment><USER21> That's an odd thing to say in reply to someone who said, _State craft is not for amateurs and sources on both sides routinely get hung out to dry._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm sure the OPM hack through which they got all sorts of private blackmail- worthy info on federal employees helped.

</comment><comment><USER23> this might sound really awkward but a few weeks ago two chinese linkedin accounts approached me and asked me to attend a career fair based in nyc and boston but i declined and said I don't understand/ can read Chinese. sorry. And now this news comes out.

</comment><comment><USER24> The issue is that China has blurred lines between government and industry, and industry often uses government resources to accomplish "private" goals. Private defense companies use Chinese intelligence assets to gain access to IP as part of a strategic technological transfer.

The US has no such system. Private companies are left to their own devices and in some ways hostile to government help. On the government side, they are not well equipped to understand or handle the needs of individual businesses.

If we want to combat this, we need to seriously change the way we approach the problem. The reality is that private companies have immense long term strategic value for the US and we need to protect that.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been saying this for years: Linked In is a spies dream. A data gold mine.

<comment><USER26> Have you been saying similar things about any other companies for years?

<comment><USER25> Yes. Google scanning your gmail for targeted advertising. Seems Yahoo has at least fessed up to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the bigger thing going on is Chinese companies setting up "AI labs" in Silicon Valley to juice their valuation. I'm looking right at you JD.com...

</comment><comment><USER27> If you really want to lose sleep at night .... consider the fact that foreign intelligence agencies likely have EMPLOYEES at top tech companies....

<comment><USER28> American intelligence agencies likely have EMPLOYEES at top Chinese tech companies.

Spies are going to spy. I'm far more concerned about my government spying on me, then China spying on me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are they also requiring 5 years of experience for an entry level corporate espionage gig?

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder what is US using? I know CIA places ads for recruitment online.

<comment><USER20> Probably LinkedIn, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> New InMail

"Hi I saw your profile and it looked really interesting, have you considered a new oppprtinity in espionage and treason? Can we setup a phone call to discuss?"

<comment><USER32> Your colleagues have endorsed your skills in "Java", "Spring framework", "proposal writing", and "violent overthrow of the United States government".</comment></comment>


Principles of biological computation: from circadian clock to evolution - <AUTHOR> https://egtheory.wordpress.com/2019/09/28/biological-computation-3/ <comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 ".. that we should look for inspiration in the circuit boards of washing machines and the advice of old Bell Labs telephone repair manuals if we want to find the design principles of gene-regulatory networks." Makes sense. Being able to mentally formulate an analog solution from a digital problem is a dying art that is mainly the domain of those alive at the time of analog and digital interaction.</comment>


Abstract Algebra: The Definition of a Group [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QudbrUcVPxk&list=PLi01XoE8jYoi3SgnnGorR_XOW3IcK-TP6 <comment><USER2> These sorts of videos take a lot of time to prepare and someone has gone to some trouble here. Abstract Algebra is a massive subject though, with thorough treatments running into the many hundreds of pages. So it's too much to expect to get to grips with the subject from a few short videos such as these.

Recently I've been watching Benedict Gross' Abstract Algebra lectures, to see if I can learn anything about how he presents material (he's a famous number theorist and known for his expository style).

[http://wayback.archive- it.org/3671/20150528171650/https://ww...](http://wayback.archive- it.org/3671/20150528171650/https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning- initiative/abstract-algebra)

One neat trick there is that groups are introduced via symmetric groups and via orthogonal groups, which allows a lot of geometric (visual) intuition, in a subject which is otherwise just symbolic (by definition).

What amazes me quite a lot is the total dearth of video lectures on commutative algebra online. This is taught in many undergrad courses, and there are plenty of written lecture notes online, but almost nothing when it comes to video presentation.

I think a lot of people who set out with the best intentions just give up when they find out how enormous the subject is, and how hard it is to keep errors out of presentations.

<comment><USER3> I started thisismath.org as a naive college kid in 2011 because there weren't any good video lectures on advanced maths. I knew it was going to be difficult but I couldn't appreciate how much work would go into actually editing the videos at the quality that I wanted until I felt the true weight of the commitment. I was in over my head and after a few videos I confronted the reality that I didn't have the extra time to commit and I just trailed off.

I still think there's an important need for advanced math video resources, and we should commend anyone who puts in the effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anything that can help make this subject more approachable is alright in my book. In my experience, the hardest part of Abstract Algebra isn't the abstract part of it. It's the lack of examples and clarity around how different named concepts behave. The proofs aren't terrible even except for the fact that they require a familiarity with number theory that many (at least I myself) don't have. I love the subject though. Really interesting.

<comment><USER5> For me, it has always been the terminology. The basic theorems are relatively easy to understand... once you can remember the vast number of algebra- specific definitions. The field also has a proclivity for umm "colorful" choices of names.

It's not unlike say Haskell, which IMO is pretty straightforward _once you have a feel for all the terminology_.

<comment><USER6> Like this from wikipedia on Monoid?

Suppose that S is a set and • is some binary operation S × S → S, then S with • is a monoid if it satisfies the following two axioms:

Associativity For all a, b and c in S, the equation (a • b) • c = a • (b • c) holds. Identity element There exists an element e in S such that for every element a in S, the equations e • a = a • e = a hold.

In other words, a monoid is a semigroup with an identity element. It can also be thought of as a magma with associativity and identity. The identity element of a monoid is unique.[1] A monoid in which each element has an inverse is a group.

<comment><USER7> It seems to me that the definition presented there is relatively free of jargon, except the "in other words" section which links it to other (linked) structures.

<comment><USER5> > except the "in other words" section which links it to other (linked) > structures.

That's what I was getting at. I took a few classes in AA and its sibling topology, including at graduate level. Most of the time was spent defining things, because there's so many terms with very specific definitions. Only after maybe 2/3rds of a course do you really start getting into deeper material. In my brain, reading definitions was always a process like: read through, substitute definitions for jargon terms, read through, substitute... iterate until you hit a fixed point.

That's standard for math, but AA is particularly well known for its colorful choice of names. Some people enjoy it, but I was always more attracted to the analysis-family areas of math.

I've always found the other name for category theory amusing though: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_nonsense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_nonsense)

<comment><USER7> Fair enough! My biggest struggle taking AA was also remembering the definitions of everything. There are so many things all tied together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Socratica was started by two Caltech grads: Michael Harrison (ex-Googler) and Kimberly Hatch Harrison ([http://www.socratica.com/about.html](http://www.socratica.com/about.html)).

The actress in the video is Liliana Castro ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liliana_Castro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liliana_Castro)).

</comment><comment><USER8> The videos are good but something is just off ( uncanny valley ?) about the way the person presents. It seems really fake :(

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't place it in the uncanny valley. It just sounds highly scripted and acted.

<comment><USER10> Another comment mentioned that she's an actress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've probably taken too many courses on this and related topics during my undergrad, going from basic group theory to category theory, representation theory, and algebraic geometry.

For the uninitiated, a great first book is Fraleigh's text - very down-to- earth and conversational. When you're done with that you can read Dummit/Foote and for those with serious gumption, Lang's classic text. Have to say, it was my favorite subject - clean, elegant, and abstract.

</comment><comment><USER12> For some reason this reminds me of Twin Peaks. I was expecting a surreal, supernatural twist midway through.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't is a bit sexist that they use a good looking actress instead of one of the creators doing it herself? I wonder why that is

<comment><USER14> I don't know. Why would it be or not be?

Or might it only "sort of but not exactly" be?

I've heard of things being said that any individual instance wouldn't necessarily be sexist, but the fact that it is particularly common is. Is that a relevant idea? I am not sure.

However, perhaps the question might not be best considered only in terms of sexism, but in terms of general views on attractiveness, and then relating that to sexism?

But then again, that could also not apply. I don't know. I'm not really making any claims here.

I figure that this probably isn't a particularly harmful thing in this instance, if it is at all, though it might be a useful thing as a starting point for thinking about a topic. But also, it could be useless for that also.

I don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> To me it feels forced. Idk, maybe we can just feel it when the presenter is reading a script. This feels a little... unnatural. Some youtube commentor said she's an "expression queen". I tend to agree, though I don't think they meant it in a negative way whereas I do. I guess that would be the appeal for some people but I am not used to learning stuff in such an expressive way.

</comment><comment><USER16> This was good fun to watch. I didn't know much about group theory before this.</comment>


Meter Maid Monitor fixes the most San Francisco problem ever - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/11/not-today-satan/ <comment><AUTHOR> Source at [https://github.com/jnaulty/metermaid- monitor](https://github.com/jnaulty/metermaid-monitor)

Coming soon, no doubt, a similar tool for residents to track vehicles parked long past their time limit and alert parking enforcement to a ticketing opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is great, original and desirable. I would like to see a meter maid App/Software As A Service for me to avoid parking tickets in my city too!</comment>


Show HN: MVP Ruby Open Source Football Survivor League - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/melissajstudent/koth <comment><AUTHOR> I built this app to automate the management of our football survivor league. More information on the project can be found in this blog post: [http://www.mjproductions.biz/2017/11/24/ruby-football- fans-a...](http://www.mjproductions.biz/2017/11/24/ruby-football-fans-an-open- source-survivor-league/). Would love feedback and issue submissions!</comment>


You Drink, Uber Drives – For Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.startuppanel.co/you-drink-uber-drives-for-free/ <comment><USER2> This publicity stunt by Uber actually creates a perverse incentive for drinkers to _increase_ their blood alcohol level.

If cab fare home is more expensive than the cost of the drinks needed to get you over the limit, then it makes (financial) sense to drink up.

Which sounds harmless, since Uber's agreeing to drive you home.

But if your blood alcohol level is high enough to impair your ability to drive safely, who's to say what other abilities it might impair?

And does Uber really want to assume moral liability, if not legal liability, if something goes wrong?

<comment><USER3> Most college campuses already do something similar with safe ride programs. Such programs are usually seen as a good thing, in my experience.

The amount of alcohol needed to be over the legal limit is actually remarkably small and Toronto and other major cities they might possibly do this promotion in aren't exactly known for cheap drinks. Based on that and the high probability that a person who goes out drinking in a major city will not venture too far from their residence, I expect that two drinks would usually be more expensive than a ride home.

Uber fucks up plenty of things that are worth taking issue with, it is my opinion that this is not one of those things. I think most people should see this as a morally positive promotion.

<comment><USER4> Every campus safe-ride I've heard of is free for all students no matter what. The issue here is the breathalyzer, not that they provide free rides for the drunk ones. At the college I went to, for example, you could use saferide as long as you had a campus id (now you can even use it without as long as you are with a group of <5 with an id among you, or if you pay $2). There's no incentive to get drunk there, because the ride will be there regardless. Since Uber is breathalyzing the clients, it's actually in your favor to be over the limit, hence the extra liability.

<comment><USER3> The saferide at schools I went to(large state schools) was limited to students who they deemed 'needed' it so if you stated you didn't feel safe, or that you were drunk they would provide a ride. If you were sober, felt safe, and were honest though they would not provide you with a ride. I know I tried at both schools I attended. Some of us would take more moral issue with lying to abuse a resource in way other than its intended purpose, than with getting drunk so we could use it honestly.

You can easily 'lie' to the breathalyzer to make yourself read as over the limit without drinking more also, so for me it is the same issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Site is down - Content pasted below::

Video: [https://youtu.be/VECIOprmHMg](https://youtu.be/VECIOprmHMg)

We've all been there.

You go out with friends and by then end of the night find yourself drunk in the back of a taxi, searching for $10 to pay the driver. For those who stumble home, singing Sweet Caroline, we applaud you.

This is where Uber took initiative.

The popular ride sharing app is often at the center of global debate as it attempts to disrupt traditional taxis while battling employee wage suits and suppressing customer safety concerns.

However, recently the service has introduced free rides for anyone who passes a breathalyzer test. The concept is called Uber Safe, their attempt to suppress drunk driving. it consists of a massive breathalyzer machine on on a sidewalk. All you have to do is take a straw, from the machine, and see if you blow over the legal limit.

If you do pass, you're too drunk to drive. Uber will hail you a car for a free ride home.

A site has appeared in Toronto as a marketing stunt, so don't get excited. However, with the massive turnout Uber has told users to "stay tuned" for more kiosks in more areas.

Our only concern will be the lines at any NYC kiosk when at that point, drunks will have to decide between waiting for a possible free ride or taking their chances.

</comment><comment><USER6> What? I ONLY use Uber when I'm drinking, otherwise I'd drive myself.

I would go from spending $100/mo to $0

</comment><comment><USER7> Commenters on this thread have their heads so far up their asses that they are choking on their noses. Only on HN is a harm-reduction promo to decrease drunk driving a PR disaster because it _might_ cause some people to drink _one_ more drink to get a free ride.

Did you ever think that overthinking things might give people a perverse incentive to drink so they can forget your post?

<comment><USER8> Seriously, a huge uproar over a marketing 101 textbook promotion. Attempt to alter consumer behavior in a manner that favors your brand by giving away a free sample. Does anyone seriously think Uber will continue this promo indefinitely? Of course not. I'm guessing the culture in Toronto is most people drive drunk because cabs cost too much, so this kind of promo is intended to help gain traction in the most lucrative market segment for Uber, the bar/club closers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I might be sounding as taking Uber for overly cynical, but it really sounds like yet another way to kill all competitors. And if it is, I am wondering what will happen when all competition is indeed killed. Will they keep burning money on it (as they do today on uberpool), or stop the whole program, andmake people chose between paying an uber or driving home wasted ? I'd bet on the second case, in which case the reduction of DYI will only be temporary, followed to a potential increase compared to current rates (due to people drinking more becaus of this stunt). Am I paranoid ?

<comment><USER3> I thought something similar. In that I read this and immediately thought 'wow Uber came up with a way to cut into one of the Taxi systems cash cows even more' Now if they come up with something like cheaper rates when one end point of your trip is an airport they can take a cut of the other big one. It seems remarkably clever as an idea to hurt their competition, just enough evil to seem charming to me in this light.

<comment><USER10> They already do that by providing flat rates to/from many major airports to their corresponding downtown zones.

<comment><USER3> Ahhh well I never claimed to be clever or original. Unfortunately for me in Boston they have an 8.75 airport surcharge, and no sign of flat rates from my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wasn't getting the page itself to load - here is a cached version of the page [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jj45GHq...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jj45GHqI1IwJ:www.startuppanel.co/you- drink-uber-drives-for-free/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't know if its the same in all cities, but in Austin I have actually had taxi services refuse to pick me up if I give an address that is a bar, regardless of my level of inebriation.

Uber may not be a model corporate citizen, but I have trouble as seeing this as anything but a good move. Particularly, given that my current city has a pretty big issue with drunk drivers.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you want get a free ride and you're sober, just swish some hard liquor around your mouth before you blow. A little single serving bottle could probably get you 3-4 trips!

</comment><comment><USER14> This sounds like the exact opposite PR image that Uber wants to create. "We make it easier for you to get drunk." This would be like OpenDoor advertising "Sell your house more quickly during a divorce." Technically, yes, but that's not a sustainable image for your company.

</comment><comment><USER15> This could get ugly if the kiosk tells someone they're below the limit, they drive off in their car and then the cop who pulls them over thinks otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER16> Cab companies have been running this promotion on New Year's Eve since as long as I can remember, it's not a new idea.

<comment><USER17> Those haven't been automated with a breathalyzer kiosk though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why should Uber drivers be forced to deal with shitfaced passengers? Unless the drivers have the choice of taking this category of passengers, this seems like a real shoddy deal for drivers, and a bad incentive for alcoholics.

<comment><USER19> So right now the #1 reason I use Uber/Lyft is because I am drunk or plan on drinking and don't want to:

A. Leave my car downtown and have to get it in the morning

B. Give drunk Josh the option to drive. I'd rather take a Lyft, not drink and take a Lyft back then take the chance that I will made a very stupid decision while drunk and drive home.

I'm rarely "shitfaced" but most of my friends use Uber/Lyft that same way I do so I'm always drunk or planning or being drunk when I take a Lyft. For everything else I just drive myself.

What I'm trying to say is Uber/Lyft drivers already deal with this so if this initiative helps to keep drunks off the road (both driving and walking, which I've heard can be even more dangerous than driving) then I'm all for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yeah, this is a terrible idea, for all the reasons people have already listed. Perverse incentives, easily gamed.

You have to wonder how these kind of things even get past the initial brainstorming sessions. It only takes a couple reasonably intelligent people a bit of discussion to come up with why this is not a good idea.

But maybe Uber knows what they are doing, or how to handle the downsides. I'm skeptical.

<comment><USER21> You could probably increase your Breathalyzer reading sharply by gargling with a few mL of hard liquor seconds before taking the test. (I understood this as an unmanned device.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathalyzer#Mouth_alcohol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathalyzer#Mouth_alcohol)

"[C]ertified breath-test operators are trained to observe a test subject carefully for at least 15–20 minutes before administering the test [... A] very tiny amount of alcohol from the mouth, throat or stomach can have a significant impact on the breath-alcohol reading." If so, people who haven't been drinking at all but are willing to carry around a flask of liquor might be able to get free rides home at any time.

<comment><USER7> So what? It's a promotion, if Uber wants to give away money that's their call.

<comment><USER21> I didn't mean to join all of the other criticisms of the program; I was just interested in the reliability of the Breathalyzer as a way of achieving the apparent goal, which I think is low. I'm not particularly bothered or concerned that Uber is doing this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The real issue is why are bars legal in the first place? Not being a user of alcohol but living next to a bar I constantly ask that question. If they really wanted to catch drunk drivers just sit in front of my house and you would pick up a couple an hour.

Also how can you call yourself a adult and then go out get completely shitfaced then go "Oh no, I don't have a way to get home." like it was a unavoidable consequence of existence.

*People who downvote (but have no correction, objection, or answer to) this may have to reevaluate the role bacteria feces plays in their lives.

<comment><USER23> Why wouldn't bars be legal?

<comment><USER22> If drinking and driving isn't legal and said bar is not within walking distance of any public transport then how can they legally serve more than a beer or two when you arrive alone or when the entire party is drinking? Either change the limit or bust them. The drunks near me even park their cars toward the street because they know when they leave they will be to drunk to back out.

<comment><USER24> * [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab)

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

<comment><USER22> Please see above comment where I say neither are being used.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ChesSMS: Using Unicode to play Chess over SMS - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2012/11/08/adventures-in-unicode-sms

<comment><AUTHOR> (Author here)

Sorry guys, it appears the traffic accidentally caused my balance to go too negative and my account got suspended! D'oit! Fixed now!

<comment><USER2> so great! can you open source the erlang part?

EDIT - sorry just found the link at the bottom - www.github.com/twilio/chessms

</comment></comment><comment><USER3>
        &\&^&]&[&Z&]&^&\
        &_&_&_&_&_&_&_&_
          %?  %?  %?  %?
        %?  %?  %?  %?
          %?  %?  %?  %?
        %?  %?  %?  %?
        &Y&Y&Y&Y&Y&Y&Y&Y
        &V&X&W&U&T&W&X&V

This is what I get.

<comment><AUTHOR> ah! I'm guessing you're on Sprint/Virgin/Boost.

Sorry... there's literally nothing I can do to fix that. Sprint simply just doesn't support non-GSM characters. You can send from AT&T to Sprint and see for yourself :(

If you're not on Sprint, send me a message at chad át Twilio.com and give me some more details.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it is Sprint :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who want the TLDR:

> You can play ChesSMS by texting "PLAY" to +1 (415) 494-8454.

Working with SMS is a very interesting space because of the limitations of the protocol.

<comment><USER5> good summary, though I would claim another takeaway from this is that SMS is also more capable than most people realize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The SMS interface appears to already be overloaded. (FYI, standard phone numbers can send a maximum of 1 SMS a second, this limit is enforced by the carriers and applies to everyone even Twillio)

<comment><AUTHOR> What you say about rate limiting is true, but actually you weren't getting responses because my account was suspended for about 15 minutes.

I don't think even the frontpage of HN would be capable of getting enough chess players for 1 msg/sec to be too slow.

<comment><USER7> The top of the frontpage would certainly be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the work of a true hacker! Every programmer should have the attitude to look beyond the obstacles and strive to find solutions to the problems that they face.

</comment><comment><USER8> I sent an SMS to play but haven't received a response yet. Can it be played by people from outside the USA?

<comment><AUTHOR> It should! Is your carrier listed on <http://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing> ? If it is, send me an email, chad ät twilio.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Such a great use of SMS. Brilliant article too. Really enjoyed reading through your thought process.

<comment><USER10> +1 i've been a messaging sms/mms core network architect for many years (for a uk operator), was a good read! nice work chad!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That is some fancy stuff.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is so awesome

</comment><comment><USER10> chad: gsm 03.42 might aid your final problem :)

<comment><AUTHOR> very interesting. My understanding was that most handsets didn't implement compression but I think it's worth a try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> +1</comment>


Ask HN: Would you work with an "Agent" to help you find your ideal job? - <AUTHOR> I always wondered if good engineers would want to work with an 'agent' to find their next job. By agent, I mean someone who's very technically savvy and would speak with companies and really understand the positions.<p>e.g. What technology is being used and why?
How is the development process done? Really dive into the problem space and challenges. <comment><USER2> I consider the recruiters I work with (there aren't many) to be my agents. They know me, they know what I like, and they're familiar with the jobs they submit me for.

They're a different breed than what I consider run-of-the-mill headhunters who shotgun jobs more or less at random.

They don't use a lot of technology--agents require personal contact and an understanding of both the developer and company culture. It's nothing different than agents for actors--they know people, they know roles, they know actors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Definitely. The whole process is tedious and time wasting. If an agent can help skip one interview out of five and increase odds 10%, that's good.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes. [https://www.10xmanagement.com/](https://www.10xmanagement.com/) went down this road a while ago. I don't know how they're doing, but their site is still online, so maybe that says something? Maybe not. Who knows?

I don't think I'd be interested in an agent for finding full time work. If I had an agent for freelance work, I'd be a very happy person. For me, enjoyment of this field comes from meeting new people and solving new problems in creative ways. I start to get itchy if I feel like all of the major problems have been solved - that's when I start looking for new work.

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem I see with the "agent" model is that it either short-changes the recruiter, or results in an agency that manages too much talent to offer a personalised service (i.e. reverting back to being a bog-standard recruiter).

A lot of people slate the "fire and forget" cold call approach that many recruiters take, but it works, especially for the more sales oriented recruiters. It's not uncommon for many recruiters in Bristol to make tens of thousands a week in sales for their company through essentially building up a database of developers, a database of available jobs, and essentially recruiting for roles that they don't represent. I worked for several agencies that have interviewed and hired developers via recruiters they had never shared a job spec with. All these recruiters had done was find a public job opening, cold call until someone answers, and send that person in for an interview. If that developer is earning £40k and they're getting 10-15% of that salary as a fee, that's £4k for a bunch of emails. Repeat that for several roles a month and you've made a fair amount of cash.

The biggest issue from a candidate perspective is that using a recruiter tends to limit yourself to a subset of companies that are willing to deal with recruiters. A lot of great companies either hire internally, or receive enough spam from recruiters that they threaten day-rates on those that waste their time on cold-calls.

The agent model sounds good for high-end developers, but convincing these people that there is someone out there that can sell their skills better than they can sell themselves would be quite tricky. The vast level of domain knowledge someone at that level has built over the years is enough to get them the job.

</comment><comment><USER6> Companies mostly don't hire because there is that perfect talent/match out there. They hire when they need to. The current model works for the employer and recruiter because whenever there is a need, the company will create a job opening and the recruiter fills it in. Candidate doesn't pay anything out of their pocket.

The only way for an agent to work is for companies to be open to good talent and keep them on their radar even if there is no current job opening. This is usually difficult and not worth to companies. If you become an agent, you will also be at the mercy of asking the companies "hey do you have an opening yet, I have this great guy/gal". So that model fails.

Also, don't forget that there is that tiny population of good recruiters out there who are directly connected to employers and have a rolodex of candidates they have worked with in the past. They can match the candidate to jobs that fit them. Rare but out there. I know a few.

So yea, I don't like the status quo but I struggle to come up with an alternative yet.

</comment><comment><USER7> yes... I've looked for such a service in the past. I thought they were called jobhunters (search for the right job for me) VS headhunters (search for the right person for the job).

But I couldn't find anything, apart from recruiters (ie headhunters).

<comment><USER8> I'm working on this currently. Would you mind answering a few questions for me? Happy to buy a beer in return. My contact details are in my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They do exist however, there are difficulties in this business model in that the candidate rarely wants to pay.

<comment><AUTHOR> This wouldn't be a service that the candidate would pay for, instead, it would be companies.

<comment><USER10> For what it's worth, I'd probably be more interested if it was something _I_ paid for. Otherwise, ends up looking a lot like the existing contingency recruiter model.

<comment><USER8> I'm working on this currently. Would you mind answering a few questions for me? Happy to buy a beer in return. My contact details are in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, definitely.

My problem with crooters is not what they are ostensibly supposed to do, so much as that most of them are hopelessly inept at it. Good ones are hard to find. Ones that know their technical shit almost impossible.

<comment><USER8> I'm working on this currently. Would you mind answering a few questions for me? Happy to buy a beer in return. My contact details are in my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes! I'm working on exactly this problem now, although with a slightly different angle. We should get in touch and compare notes/ideas. My contact info is in my profile.</comment>


Coffee Is Hard - <AUTHOR> https://www.stilldrinking.org/coffee-is-hard <comment><USER2> As a geek and a fan of 80s-90s PC games (not just Sierra but also LucasArts adventure games and so on), this was a super entertaining read on its own; but I also enjoyed some of these insights about life in general from it:

> Living is mostly a series of repetitive and unrelated tasks. It makes sense > that the most tedious things to code are the tedious things that just have > to be done. There are no life lessons or gymnastic skills involved in doing > dishes, there's no underlying theory of housework that will reveal itself > after a thousand vacuum cleanings. Making coffee is a boring sequence of > steps people feel stupid for getting wrong, even though they're > statistically doomed to screw it up now and then. The hard parts of of life > are driving to work, eating properly, flossing, ....

Perhaps I found it particular insightful because I just became a parent a year ago. Prior to this, I thought I had optimized my life so well that most tedious work were gone from my life; with the peak being having switched to remote work and not having to even commute anymore.

Then I became a parent, and had to come to terms again with having to do a long series of repetitive and routine work every day -- washing bottles, dishes, changing diapers, etc. It was a bit of a cultural shock to my system since over the past 10 years I had slowly gotten used to / gradually removed or optimized aspects that are frictions / repetitiveness / tedious routines from my life; and suddenly it's 10x of it all coming back. Over the past year, I've come to realize this is what life is, which is exactly as the author said.

<comment><USER3> At the risk of sounding hippie, "tedious" and "boring" are emotional reactions _to_ the chores, and not attributable to the chores themselves. We don't _have_ to do that.

"Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness." ― James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest

Not that I've remotely mastered it, but I think there's a lot of wisdom in there.

<comment><USER4> Not to sound too much like a hippie, either, but I learned (actually after having a kid as well) that when people talked about enjoying the ride, that's what they were talking about - the tedious stuff.

I always assumed it meant travel more and look for adventure, but I have come to understand that 'enjoying the ride' in your life, not always just pursuing some _next thing_ is about enjoying the tedium.

Some of my favorite memories of my young children is the time we spent washing dishes together or watching them vacuum up the rugs and chase the cat with the broom.

It's all about enjoying the ride, man.

<comment><USER5> Sisyphus may disagree. :)

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

<comment><USER6> The horrifying aspect of Sisyphus is that he is doomed to do it for all eternity. Whereas we have only a limited time to cherish or despise every carpet vacuumed until we die. I believe that we transcend the mundane every time we embrace it and truly live it instead of wishing desperately to be doing something else.

<comment><USER7> I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Albert Camus

<comment><USER8> Hah. I only ever encountered the last sentence of that quote and I thought it was an imperative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of Scribblenauts. There was an interview with one of the devs at the E3 before it was released and he discussed how much time went into the game simply to pad the internal "dictionary" and conjure up not just things, but also make sure that those things could interact with other things (e.g. "bread" should be able to interact with "toaster" to make "toast").

I don't remember if it was the dev talking about _his own team_ , or if he was talking about players interacting with the demo, but he mentioned that some people were attempting to summon a list of ingredients (flour, eggs, sugar, milk, etc.) and throw them into a bowl and then into a heat source to see if they could make cookies within the game.

<comment><USER10> I always thought that game must have an incredible ontology underneath it that would be amazingly useful to other ventures...

I also recall playing it and, at a certain point, realizing that I was stubbornly uncreative in using the variety of options available to me.

In retrospect maybe that wasn't true, and the game managed the massive potential for variance by condensing things into smaller buckets. Either way those were some brave developers agreeing to that project scope.

<comment><USER9> Take a look for yourself:

[https://gamasutra.com/view/news/300313/Scribblenauts_dev_sha...](https://gamasutra.com/view/news/300313/Scribblenauts_dev_shares_lessons_learned_in_making_its_huge_object_library.php)

<comment><USER11> The twitter thread has been deleted :( This is the only reference to it I can find:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/comments/6ibtrf/sc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/comments/6ibtrf/scribblenauts_hand_authored_vs_systems_text/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amped to see Still Drinking on HN again.

If you enjoy devouring this guys writing, buy his book, "And Then I Thought I Was A Fish" (I think it's the "novel" he references the game being based on?). I really really liked it. Link at the bottom of the original post.

The other book is just a collection of blog posts. It's /okay/. But I really really liked ATITIWAF. The kind of book that makes you want to try your hand at writing.

—a random internet fan.

<comment><USER13> I would also recommend his story about acid to anyone

[https://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode- part-1](https://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1)

<comment><USER14> Wow, that was a ride. I could think of worse things to do in a Friday night than read that for the past three hours. Thanks for linking. I'm now much more interested in reading the book and the rest of his blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Having enjoyed the article, it also reminded me why I never once finished making a game.

Instead of seeing the example code and thinking 'Ah, yes, that code gets something done in a straight-forward way.', I instead think, 'I'm pretty sure I could build a scripting engine and turn most of that code into ajax calls to json files. Of course, I'd then have to build an in-game editor which allowed you to modify the contents of the json files while playing the game with hot- swapping content. Huh, art? Plot? Fun? Oh, yeah, I guess I'll probably need those... eventually...'

Fortunately, trying (and failing) to make games led me to realize that I really love programming and building maintainable systems.

<comment><USER16> This speaks to me. I used to spend my childhood tweaking and retweaking my game engines. Never really got my games past the cool demo phase. I guess I also now stay with maintainable systems too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Coffee part of this article resonates with me.

I have a stovetop espresso machine, and I'm constantly amazed at the new and ingenuous ways I come up with to mess it up. Making coffee before you've had your morning coffee is the great connundrum of our generation. Here's a short list of failure modes I've run up against:

      - Machine on stove, no water
      - Machine on stove, no coffee grounds
      - Machine on stove, completely empty
      - Coffee and water in machine, machine in refrigerator
      - Coffee grounds in water reservoir
      - Coffee grounds in brewed coffee reservoir
      - Brewing correctly, brewed coffee reservoir still filled with water from washing
      - Brewing correctly, head off to work
      - Brewing correctly, coffee grounds returned to microwave

That's just a subset, and amazingly I still come up with a new one every few weeks.

<comment><USER18> The coffee part also resonated stongly with me, for a completely different reason :)

I spent last year thinking on how to implement a text-only simulation that could cope with just about any situation. Most of my models were mentally evaluated on this "simple" task of making coffee. The design I came up with (still to be implemented) is not code driven, but data driven. Instead of executing bunch of nested if-elses, I'd have a big list of tuples that contain <action, preconditions, reaction>. When action is performed upon object, this list is traversed. For each element, it's preconditions are compared to current world state. Based on this criteria the most suitable element is selected, and it's reaction is applied to modify world's state.

Your list could be used as preconditions for action of brewing coffee; each would produce different results ranging from nice coffee to yucky mud or broken machine. I'd like to include a nice built-in editor that could be utilized to quickly modify or add reactions, objects, or world state variables. I have most of it figured out but it's a lot of work to put together all the pieces.

<comment><USER19> Sounds like it could make for a fun variation on the text adventure, where having stuff go wrong is at least as amusing as actually solving puzzles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is a famous Zen saying (which) describes nothing-yet-everything about this:

"Before Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

After Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water."

<comment><USER21> One day the Master [Joshu] announced that a young monk had reached an advanced state of enlightment. The news caused some stir. Some of the monks went to see the young monk [Kyogen]. "We heard you are enlightened. Is that true?" they asked.

"It is," he replied.

"And how do you feel?"

"As miserable as ever," said the monk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really like this guy's writing and am grateful that he shared some of the coding challenges. I'd really like to be able to program games like this, and while I'm not a programmer, I'd like to learn how. In TFA he shares some of the code to check the coffee "state":

>'LOOK AT COFFEE MAKER': () => { if( State.scene.state.coffeedrunk ) { return "The coffee maker has done its job and mercifully drained the last life out of the old and savaged grounds." } else if( State.scene.state.brewed ) { return "The coffee maker has a fresh pot of what is likely coffee in it." } else if( State.scene.state.brewing ) { return "The coffee maker is brewing." } else if( State.scene.state.waterinmaker ) { return "The coffee maker has fresh water in it, and is ready to brew a terrible cup of coffee." } else { return "Makes coffee. Whodathunk? There's no water in it, and you don't have any fresh coffee, but the grounds already in there have only been used twice and can't be THAT moldy." } }

This is JavaScript right? Is that how these sorts of games are coded? Would learning this be the best way to go about creating games? Thanks.

<comment><USER23> If you want to create a game you could go with GameMaker or Construct 2 or Adventure Game Studio (if you want an adventure game like SQ1 that he's describing). These are applications that provide you with an interface you can interact with, along with an associated programming language in order to make things happen. So you can draw levels and place objects with your mouse, and then make them move with a script.

GameMaker has a non-programming method but I don't know how capable it really is. I wouldn't worry too much about what language you learn, at your stage it's more about the general knowledge of how to get things moving. Transitioning to another language at a later point won't be difficult.

<comment><USER24> Nuclear Throne is the best example of a solid game made in Game Maker that comes to my mind.

Looks like Spelunky, Undertale, and Hyper Light Drifter were as well.

<comment><USER25> Also Baba Is You.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As an example of one of the more notorious puzzles in the Sierra games of yesteryear, in Space Quest, you have a sand skimmer (think Luke's sand speeder).

When you get to where you are going, you need to sell it for money. If you get out without removing your keys, it is stolen. Then someone offers you enough money to continue on in the game. If you say yes, then much later in the game you die because you don't have a jetpack. If you say no, they offer to throw in their old jetpack. There are literally no hints that a jetpack would be related to selling your skimmer. You just have to reload old saves and try random things until you get one. And hope you have enough saves that you didn't overwrite one from before you sold the skimmer, or you need to start the whole game over.

<comment><USER27> Having played most of the Sierra and LucasArts games when I was much younger, I feel, though cannot confirm, that there was a shift in these kinds of games such that you couldn't actually progress too far beyond a fail state.

That is, by about Space Quest II or III, you could still take an action that would lead to your death within a minute or so, but you could no longer take actions that would lead you to dying/being unable to finish many, many scenes later.

Can anyone confirm this?

And I feel like the later LucasArts games (Day of the Tentacle, etc) you could never actually be in a fail state.

<comment><USER26> LucasArts had a very strong bent towards not putting you in a fail state.

My understanding is that Sierra was intending to be more fair as time went on, but they had a bias against playtesting so there were still some big goofs that got through.

I think all of the first 5 KQ games had ways to lose items that would later be needed to win.

KQ VI had a branching path and if you picked the "easy" branch you were unlikely to end up in a very unwinnable state, but there was no indication at the time of the branch that you were doing so (IIRC you were about to be burned alive and you could either use some maid's clothes to put out the fire, destroying the clothes, or cast a spell that required boiling some water, using up some component). With a hint-book it took me several attempts to make it through the "hard" path.

<comment><USER28> I never got full points on that game. I think I wasted months on it before giving up.

Maybe my favorite KQ memory was KQ 3. Just getting out of the house took my family weeks. Every single misstep turned you into dust. And once you figured it all out, just walking down that stupid path you were 1 pixel away from death in some places.

Those were some fun games.

<comment><USER26> The @#$#@@$ key on top of the closet man...

<comment><USER29> Heh- same with the handle/lever in the hole in the tree...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It was so well written that he made me want to play his purposefully frustrating game and I'm still disappointed he didn't provide a link to download it.

<comment><USER31> The first puzzle is the search for the game itself.

<comment><USER32> If you download it from the wrong mirror..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "You are the master of your universe, and yet you are dripping with rat blood and feces. Your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I'm bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is, some people are okay going to work, and some people … well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."

—the psychologist from 'Pickle Rick'

</comment><comment><USER27> Always pining for more adventure games that remind me of the Sierra/LucasArts games of my youth. Can we start a thread here of great modern examples?

I recently played Machinarium, and enjoyed it a lot. My wife and I played it for many evenings on the couch, and computer games are not her thing at all.

I'm finishing up Infamous Machine on my Android phone. It's a fairly silly, small game, but a direct homage to LucasArts games like Day of the Tentacle.

<comment><USER34> Neverhood and Samorost are also fun. The latter is by the Machinarium creators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Most treasured memories are agonies that won't get out of the mind and have > to get turned into a character-building story to maintain sanity,

My world is changed by how obvious yet insightful this is.

</comment><comment><USER36> Waiting for a Haskell programmer to explain why this is an artifact of procedural languages and that making coffee should be abstracted as the death of coffee caused by hot water.

<comment><USER37> Coffee is just a fixpoint of the coffee-maker state transition monad; what's the problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I really recommend the author's book "And then I thought I was a fish". Not only is it incredibly funny, in my opinion this is one of the best descriptions of a drug-induced psychosis out there. It is really pretty rare that someone can remember that much from such an episode and also has the ability to put it to paper.

</comment><comment><USER39> I still regret that I was never able to finish any of those games. Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, Space Quest and others. I poured hours into them and never got to the end. The worst was Kings Quest V. I really wanted to get that one, but I'm still left with not much more than regret, guilt and anger.

<comment><USER40> We played through Kings Quest (V? I can't remember) as a class when I was in grade school. My math/ science teacher had a copy and would let us play for a few minutes at the end of the day after assignments were done.

We did eventually beat it after much trial and error, but only with the help of a cheat sheet she had printed off :) I do remember it being brutally hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Adventure game frustration was solved, and used to make some classics.

[https://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts](https://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts)

some adventure game puzzles became way too obtuse to be fun.

[https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html](https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html)

<comment><USER42> Oh, the dependency graph article is very interesting. Reminds me of this logic programming tutorial, writing a (tiny) adventure game (with Prolog specifically): [http://www.amzi.com/AdventureInProlog/a1start.php](http://www.amzi.com/AdventureInProlog/a1start.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This seems like a high quality article and has many upvotes, but I found it hard to read, and unfortunately ads made it even harder, so I couldn't get through it. I wonder if I'm in the minority because I don't use an ad blocker?

<comment><USER44> Oh my god, it's so bad with the adblocker disabled. Does the author know?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "There are no life lessons or gymnastic skills involved in doing dishes, there's no underlying theory of housework that will reveal itself after a thousand vacuum cleanings."

This is false.

Doing dishes can involve gymnastic skills _at any moment_ and the deepest truths of life, the universe - and everything - can be found in the simplest of chores.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'd be happy to articulate the hard way to make a really good cup of coffee, starting with ordering green coffee beans and proceeding thru barista tools few are familiar with. (Might take a while to write.) Plenty of ways for the process to go wrong, including lethally.

</comment><comment><USER47> Take a look at rules engines and Expert Systems technology. Its a more declarative way to handle complex logic that allows you to state facts and let a inference engine handle the nested nature of dependent logical conditions. It will decrease the amount of work needed to code this part of your game. With your current approach you end up in the logic programming version of Node's call back hell before we had tools like async await. As an aside, I run into developers taking the same approach with business logic in enterprise apps all the time -- with the same consequences.

<comment><USER48> Callback hell is easily avoided by naming callbacks.

Async/await has its own footguns, except they're so difficult to debug that you need static analysis tools (Typescript or ESLint) to use them safely.

It's one of that most special class of APIs that let you add a bug in one part of the system (e.g. forgetting an await) that causes a totally different part of the system to fail inscrutably. (Although really it's Promises that unlock this ability, but potato/potahto.)

Callbacks are easily debugged with just a normal JavaScript interpreter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Probably worth noting that he also wrote the very well done "Programming Sucks" article, [https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming- sucks](https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks) and the original HN discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667825](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667825). If you hadn't read that post, definitely worth it.

<comment><USER50> I like the core description of programming, but the framing - that programming is tougher than manual labor - is childish. Life is not a competition for whose job is hardest, and if it were, no one on Hacker News would win it.

<comment><USER19> > Life is not a competition for whose job is hardest

I think the author agrees, and wrote the article mostly as a response to people who think it _is_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm having flashbacks to late 90s–early 2000s, when oldschool adventures were on their last legs and I still thought that I could make one just by putting together a hundred random puzzles.

</comment><comment><USER52> For those who love Space Quest, check out Snail Trek. It's like a modern made love letter to Space Quest.

[http://snailtrek.com](http://snailtrek.com)

</comment><comment><USER53> Is there a download somewhere? Or is this still in development?

</comment><comment><USER54> If coding coffee is hard, coding espresso is really hard. More steps, more precision required... just like making espresso in reality. I like the theme of the article.

</comment><comment><USER55> Thinking about stuff like this is fascinating in the context of just how much massively more of a big deal its going to become very very soon.

Specifically, if you draw the trend line on the size and price of kuka/fanuc/abb robot arms, and you put UR's models in there for today, we are really only 3 - 5 years away from you having a robot arm sitting on your kitchen counter that you can script to make your coffee for you.

So all of these bugs will become real :)

<comment><USER56> While UR robots are techincally collaborative robots (rated safe for operation without a cage around them), I am sure that putting them into people's homes is asking for trouble.

<comment><USER55> trouble's coming!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> It's a really fun read, but it's far more satire and humorous interpretation of game design and development than it is a real treatise on those topics.

</comment><comment><USER58> If you like doing your own adventure game, this may be interesting:

[http://www.skotos.net](http://www.skotos.net)

</comment><comment><USER59> I frequently find the essays on stilldrinking.org entertaining. My favorite is still the one on why eCigarettes suck. [https://www.stilldrinking.org/seriously-make-a-better- ecigar...](https://www.stilldrinking.org/seriously-make-a-better-ecigarette)

</comment><comment><USER60> Love this!

> Avoiding premature death is a process of not occupying the same space as > fast-moving metal or motivated microbes. Living is mostly a series of > repetitive and unrelated tasks.

</comment><comment><USER61> > I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they're one of the most > powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime.

1000000% agree!

<comment><USER62> I think that you may have replied to the wrong thread[0]

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289827)

<comment><USER57> I'm curious why people would have voted this person's comment down, simply for a mistake. Seems sort of harsh to do that to someone's reputation simply for a mistake.

<comment><USER63> Because almost everyone who comes to this thread has a better experience if that comment is buried down at the bottom in "don't bother reading territory".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> His thesis at the end explains all of the memes about Link being a monster with a grudge against anyone who own pottery.

</comment><comment><USER65> > There are no life lessons (...) involved in doing dishes

Couldn't be more wrong.

</comment><comment><USER66> Everyone is unhappy these days. It is not cool to be happy and satisfied.

</comment><comment><USER67> tldr; They even offered some decent life strategies: look at everything, pick up anything you can, avoid wizards, and always haggle for jetpacks.

Loved reading this...</comment>


We're Going to Need More Lithium - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-lithium-battery-future/ <comment><USER2> Wonder when it will be profitable to extract lithium from the sea</comment>


What IF Apple Buys Amazon? - <AUTHOR> In its most recent (Q3 2011) financial report, Apple Inc (AAPL) put its reserves at $76.4bn. As of today (8/19/2011), Amazon.com Inc (AMZN) has market capitalization of $81.22bn. It is not at all impossible for Apple to buy Amazon. I can think of the following benefits.
First, iCloud can leverage AWS. Apple does not need to reinvent or relearn the data center management again. AWS itself is a fast-growning profitable business. With AAPL services running on it, the AWS brand will also get reinforced.
Second, Jeff Bezos can replace Steve Jobs as the CEO of AAPL. According to Gruber, Jeff Bezos is the best potential outside successors. I agree with him on this.
Third, combining AMZN's online digital content retailer business, AAPL can dominate the market. The company will have more power in negotiating with content publishers.
What is your thoughts on the potential acquisition? <comment><USER2> Very interesting idea. However, Apple and Amazon have very distinct ways of doing business that would stop any potential purchase talks dead in their tracks.

1) Apple makes and sells everything itself at very high profit margins. They also work with some retailers to extend reach. Meanwhile, Amazon makes nothing (except the Kindle) and sells millions (billions?) of small items at a miniscule profit margin. Completely different models here.

2) Apple is notorious for not trusting other parties to do their business. Amazon depends entirely on it.

3) The parts of Amazon that overlap into Apple's interests -- digital content and AWS -- are irrelevant. Apple already has a huge content distribution channel, and does not need the help of Amazon's agreements with creators. AWS could be intriguing, but if Apple thought AWS was worth using, they'd already use it for iCloud, iTunes, etc.

While Apple and Amazon are two of my favorite companies in the world, I see very little that would give way to a potential acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is horrible.

1\. Apple has a history of not spending a ton of money on acquisitions. That isn't to say they might not (I'm holding my breathe on buying Google or Facebook although that is also unlikely).

2\. iCloud is not the same as AWS. Apple has not expressed any intentions of going into the hosting business and it certainly doesn't support what they do or what iCloud is designed for. The backend might be good structure but the business models are sooooo different, I'm surprise this was even mentioned (albeit I'll admit that AWS is a solid business).

3\. The argument of Apple gaining digital content as a plus is wrong. Apple had numerous opportunities in the past to buy out Music companies and record labels and probably entertainment and production studios as well (even Pixar and Disney which Jobs is part of) but didn't. Apple doesn't need to "own" the content for them to reign as king. Didn't happened then, less likely to happen now.

4\. Bezos is great, but he's no Jobs. He understand even less about hardware (only experience being Kindle) or desktop applications. Apple's core business is primarily desktop applications and heavy on hardware. Bezos would be a bad fit when you consider this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your third benefit is why it would get blocked on anti-trust grounds.

<comment><AUTHOR> They may domninate the download-and-own market. However they still need to compete with other distribution mode, e.g. Netflix and Hulu in video, Spotify and Pandora in music.

<comment><USER4> But you can be sure the big music labels will furiously lobby the Americans and Europeans not to see things that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Will not happen.</comment>


Mozilla has laid off their dev tools people and the entire MDN team - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333952 <comment><USER2> Yesterday's thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336)

</comment><comment><USER3> Pardon my french but fuuuuuck. I switched to chrome back in the early 2010s after years of Firefox use because it was faster, and I stuck with it because the the devtools were better than firebug and later built-in FF tools. But always I told myself "next year, I'll switch back to Firefox" which I was much more comfortable with ideologically.

Eventually after years of waiting FF got fast enough and the devtools were good enough (and chrome got creepy enough: the automatic browser sign-in made clear chrome was tightening the noose of browser/web/google lock-in). So I switched back a year or two ago and have been quite happy with it! This news indicates it won't be long before I have to switch again.

Mozilla's strategy seems so incoherent, at least from the outside. _Who is their target demographic?_ Perhaps "power users" & developers like me are too small a demographic to be worth competing for (see also: the toyification of the macbook pro). But I seriously wonder if Mozilla as a nonprofit has a path forward without keeping some of the "power users", (casual) privacy nerds, and FOSS folks in the fold. Are they planning to compete with Google for casual users as "just another browser"? I really don't see how they plan to beat google in this arena.

EDIT: In Mozilla's defense, no I have not donated anything to the organization to keep FF or MDN development running (though I have contributed to MDN & FF in small ways) so perhaps I share some of the blame here. TBH I'd donate if I knew it was going to FF & MDN and not one of the two thousand other little projects Mozilla keeps starting and killing.

<comment><USER4> Actually, if you donate, literally none of it will go to Firefox.

You'd be donating to the Mozilla foundation, not the Mozilla corporation, which develops Firefox.

P.s the Mozilla foundations CEO makes 2.5 million dollars a year, and said "it would be too much a financial burden to cut C suite salaries to 500k"

[https://mobile.twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1293233620711...](https://mobile.twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1293233620711243776)

<comment><USER5> After link chasing from that Tweet, this appears to be the underlying quote:

> _Here 's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount > from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an > 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo > had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an > 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying > about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their > families to commit to._

[https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker- aGY62z](https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z)

<comment><USER6> > That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.

I'm aghast. How could _anyone_ survive on $500k?! Everybody at the yacht club would laugh at you. It would be simply beastly.

I know they play this game against the likes of Google and Microsoft but they have favour with people _because they 're not Google or Microsoft_, because their product is driven by engineering, not repeatedly tainted by management.

These job losses shouldn't be at product level, they should clean out management, restructure to bring engineering up to board level, kick out the suits that are only there for the cheque.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mozilla MDN docs are my go-to resource for js related stuff, does this mean they won't be maintained and updated anymore?

To be honest, I would be more than willing to pay a reasonable monthly subscription fee to access their docs.

<comment><USER8> It's not only them anymore: "Mozilla brings Microsoft, Google, the W3C, Samsung together to create cross-browser documentation on MDN"

\-- [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings- micr...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-microsoft- google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's at least a tiny bit of good news then. Thanks for clarifying that!

<comment><USER9> The blog is from 2017!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Firefox Dev Tools were how I sold other devs on trying Firefox. I think the number of devs who liked the tools and stuck by them is the only reason why as much of the web renders well on Gecko as it does. Certainly, I've worked at small startups where no one used Firefox that turned out to have significant visual bugs on Firefox for months, because no one ever bothered to check it out.

I understand why Mozilla wants to make more money new ways. I think everyone does. I was going to get their VPN as soon as it became available on Mac. I also completely understand that they can't monetize Firefox, at least not in its current state. Users would obviously rebel against any kind of proprietary features that live behind a commercial license, and I don't think they can make any compelling hosted services that integrate with Firefox either. But I don't understand why Mozilla seems to be trying to speed along its death.

<comment><USER11> Firefox Dev Tools are the best around.

<comment><USER12> Uhhhhhh, maybe back when firebug was the only way to debug.

But this is all subjective anyway, huge fan of Chrome dev tools here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's been pretty obvious over the last 5 years or so that the Mozilla we once knew is dead and gone forever. The MBA types have completed their takeover of a once venerable engineering organization. I'm glad that Firefox still exists as an alternative to Chrome, but the differences between them from a privacy and freedom standpoint are increasingly negligible. And with this move it seems very obvious what management's sole focus is at this point: "trimming the fat" of what little community focused efforts they had left, and boosting revenue.

<comment><USER14> > The MBA types have completed their takeover of a once venerable engineering > organization.

And yet, in the last 5 years we've seen some of the greatest leaps in Firefox in the form of adopting technologies in Servo. And that's ignoring the growth of Rust adoption and so forth.

But you're right. Obviously the problem is the technologists aren't in control.

It's definitely not monopoly abuse on dominant platforms, the fact that browsers don't make money (even Microsoft couldn't do it), the lack of diversification in their revenue models...

If they just got the tech right it'd solve everything!

<comment><USER15> Agreed.

The deeper reason why bundled IE was such an existential threat to Netscape, then to Mozilla, and, more generally, a Web that wasn't under the thumb of any one corporation, was that the surest way to squash your competitors is to take away their ability to make money.

With IE, the strategy was to make money on the OS and developer tools. You needed to buy a Microsoft IDE, which would run on a Microsoft operating system, in order to make those cool ActiveX controls that everyone was leaning on back when JavaScript couldn't quite hack it. Also Frontpage.

With Chrome, it's ads and Google One.

Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox has no way to make money on the browser. There's passing a hat, but that was never going to make for a sustainable business. Not if the only people who really care enough to toss some money in, developers, are going to continue to stick with Chrome. Which they clearly are. So they _need_ to pivot to survive. Even if they lose some goodwill with techies. Most employees won't accept simple gratitude as a form of payment.

<comment><USER16> > There's passing a hat

Frustratingly, Mozilla has made it all but impossible to contribute financially to the development of Firefox itself. You can donate to the Mozilla Organization but there's no guarantee any of that money will be spent on Firefox development.

I would absolutely pay for Firefox if they'd let me.

<comment><USER17> Seconding this for anyone reading!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> With the caveat that the source is a Twitter thread, if this turns out to be true it is increasingly looking like the end of Firefox and Mozilla. Earlier today, a separate Twitter thread was posted that claimed the whole Servo team had been let go.

This is a massive blow to Internet as we know it. It will mean that WebKit / Blink will now be the _de facto_ Internet standard. In about 5 years Blink- based browsers will be the only relevant target for web development and all remaining users will be urged to switch to Chrome/Edge/Safari or have to suffer broken sites.

With Google pushing Chromium to make life for ad blockers difficult, I would really hope an open source project for a new Blink-based privacy-respecting browser to emerge. (As far as I know the Brave Browser is financed by ads that are hard-coded in the browser.)

<comment><USER14> > With the caveat that the source is a Twitter thread, if this turns out to be > true it is increasingly looking like the end of Firefox and Mozilla. Earlier > today, a separate Twitter thread was posted that claimed the whole Servo > team had been let go.

It's pretty clear Mozilla was never planning to have Servo completely supplant Gecko. Their approach has been to treat Servo as a research project and then fold technologies (like Rust and Quantum) into Gecko as appropriate.

Through that lens, you should ask yourself if it makes sense for Mozilla to fund an R&D effort like that given they're operating on a shoestring (especially with at least 75% of their revenues about to evaporate thanks to the Google deal not getting renewed).

I think you could argue either way, and I don't think I have a strong opinion. But I think your framing is overly hyperbolic and doesn't reflect what Servo actually was and how it fit with Mozilla's overall strategy.

<comment><USER18> Even still, firing the DevTools team is equally as worrying as shuttering Servo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know the Mozilla layoffs aren't news, but 25% is a lot and I haven't seen any sources saying exactly what happened in terms of the reorg. The fact that both of these teams have vanished is a major gut punch to developers.

<comment><USER19> Particularly MDN.

I remember the bad old days when you had to have a few huge O'Reilly books to write advanced HTML or program Javascript because Firefox and IE and other browsers were all so different -- you were lucky to have any official documentation at all, never mind something that looked at Javascript from a portable point of view.

MDN paved the way for having online developer info available for the web platform. I use it every day. In fact, I go out of way to look things up on MDN because if I just search "Google" I get spammy and sometimes wrong results that are crammed with ads, often poorly written, etc.

It is sad that good documentation can't pay for itself. It's like "the truth is paywalled but the lies are free".

<comment><USER20> > In fact, I go out of way to look things up on MDN because if I just search > "Google" I get spammy and sometimes wrong results that are crammed with ads, > often poorly written, etc.

Tip: use DuckDuckGo's searchbangs[0]. I reach for !mdn everyday.

[0] [https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=mdn](https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=mdn)

<comment><USER21> with ddg I don't even have to use the bang. Just mdn <whatever I need> gets me to it as the first result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unfortunately 25% at mozilla, 25% at booking, 25% at uber, 20% at linkedin, more at airbnb (obviously) shows how internal management teams are seeing revenues HUGELY shrinking.

This tells a lot about fact that stock prices are bad measurement of situation we're in. It's funny to observe that S&P and Nasdaq are at the February all time high, pre-covid levels. Let that thought sink in.

<comment><USER23> >Unfortunately 25% at mozilla, 25% at booking, 25% at uber, 20% at linkedin, more at airbnb (obviously) shows how internal management teams are seeing revenues HUGELY shrinking.

Of course some companies will struggle during covid. There are others though that have grown and are beating their forecasts. The covid proof tech companies will absorb this talent and grow larger.

<comment><USER22> For me, trying to say, that total net economic impact of covid is _zero_, is like gross negligence in analytical thinking. Sorry for being strong here.

funny fact: I'm using (as we're hiring) 'What do you think of covid' as nice and quick question to judge reasoning ability.

Conspiracy? bam.

Flu like? bam.

ends in a month? bam.

<comment><USER23> The fact you're using that question in what I'm presuming is a technical interview is odd and also potentially insensitive to the candidate.

I can't imagine how I would respond if a family member or someone I'd known had just passed because of the virus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is sad. I remember back when Firebug came on the scene and all of a sudden it wasn't just possible it was _easy_ to debug your website. That, more than anything, I think is why Firefox took off the way it did. Then Chrome came out with its developer tools which eventually, I thought, surpassed Firefox. But Firefox's native dev tools are quite good, too.

I switched back to Firefox as my personal browser a year or two ago when they had the big rendering overhaul (I think "Quantum" or something? when they included the rust code to do layout in parallel, or something like that). It seemed like Firefox was finally moving in the right direction!

But now with the news that they let go of the dev tools team and Servo, I worry about the future of Firefox. I, personally, don't care about Mozilla other than Firefox, so this seems bleak. I'll continue to use the browser because I like it so much, but I imagine eventually it will fall behind newfangled CSS/JS features that developers will use and I'll have to switch eventually.

</comment><comment><USER25> MDN has such a large impact and influence on the web development community so it's baffling to me as to why this decision was made. I just hope there are plans in the work to at least preserve if not continue its operation eventually under a different organization perhaps.

Honestly, I just really don't want to think of the alternatives without MDN. I don't think ANYONE wants to go back to w3schools.

</comment><comment><USER26> Related reading from QuirksMode about MDN: "the cult of the free must die" [https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/the_cult_of...](https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/the_cult_of_the.html)

I think a version of MDN that solicits donations from the companies and individual developers that make use of it could be great. Mozilla being propped up by money Google gave them from the search bar always felt fragile.

<comment><USER27> I will gladly donate money to them the whole year trough.

And I think a lot of people/businesses would as long as they market it well enough and make it easy enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The excellent devtools were a good., non-ideological reason for developers > to use Firefox as part of their daily work, & thus test in it & care about > it. Moz had long given up on any other developer relations activities.

Pale Moon, Waterfox, SeaMonkey and IceWeasel to Firefox: "Your First Time?"

Economically, Mozilla never had stood a chance against the major browser competition given that it was also being 'kept alive' by its main competitor for decades. The open-source alternatives also had no chance of competing and are eternally relying on donations.

The moment Google entered with their own browser and Microsoft, Opera, Qt and Electron crowd all jumped into the Chromium boat, Mozilla only had 'Firefox' as the only reason why they are still relevant and that's it. Not even Mozilla cares about the greatness Rust brings. It's just another open source tool which everyone is saying: "tank u, gimme dat 4 free". Here's another way to make money: Mozilla could also easily have been the Rust equivalent of "Erlang Solutions Ltd.".

We all know that no-one would go for their non-competitive VPNs or premium bookmark service. The reality is, Mozilla has to stand on its own and pivot to something else other than Firefox to generate revenue if it wants to stay true to its mission statement which is essentially privacy. Not sure how they have the balls to support "privacy" (on their frontpage) [0][1] and then tell us that they have a contract with Google to fund them [2] as the default search engine choice at the same time.

[0] [https://www.mozilla.org](https://www.mozilla.org)

[1] [https://www.mozilla.org/firefox](https://www.mozilla.org/firefox)

[2] [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/foundation/annualreport/2018/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/foundation/annualreport/2018/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Not to derail this conversation, but I wonder how much this can be attributed to the ousting of Brendan Eich. Political views aside, Eich was a technologist first and foremost. His replacement, Chris Beard, is a business/marketing guy at heart. It's hardly surprising that Mozilla has since trended more towards business/marketing priorities, as opposed to engineering excellence.

</comment><comment><USER30> This sucks, but it's not all that surprising given that their Google deal--90% of their revenue--is about to expire and won't be renewed.

<comment><USER8> > and won't be renewed.

Source?

<comment><USER31> Mentioned by ZDNet: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays- off-250-employees...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays- off-250-employees-while-it-refocuses-on-commercial-products/)

(fwiw I found out by way of John Gruber: [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/11/mozilla- layoffs](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/11/mozilla-layoffs))

<comment><USER8> That doesn't say it won't be renewed, just that it's currently not renewed.

<comment><USER31> Doesn't it seem a little late for them to be renewing a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

At minimum, I think it spells trouble. Would love to be wrong.

Edit: Since anything can happen, I personally wouldn't have written the sentence with as much certainty as the GP, but I don't think they were far off.

<comment><USER8> Funny thing ;)

> Mozilla and Google are expected to extend their current search deal for > another three years, multiple sources have told ZDNet.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-expected-to- ex...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-expected-to-extend-its- google-search-deal/)

<comment><USER31> Thanks—wonderful news, honestly. I was super concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This seems short-sighted. As does firing the Servo team. Does anyone know which teams they _have_ kept?

<comment><USER33> What? So is the project over? What about webrender and wasm-related stuff?

<comment><USER32> > So is the project over?

As an independent research project, more or less I think. I suppose it might continue as an open source project. We'll see.

> What about webrender and wasm-related stuff?

Webrender and related projects will continue as part of Firefox I think. But I guess Mozilla won't be doing any further experimental work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is absolutely bonkers - if the Firefox dev tools stagnate, then devs won't test their sites on Firefox, leading to even more users ditching the product for Chrome!

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm a bit confused. It seems like not having great dev tool keeps developers using Chrome which hurts the adoption of Firefox. Do they not get that?

</comment><comment><USER36> The MDN is such a great resource. It's my primary source for looking up web standards documentation.

Does this imply that won't be maintained anymore?

<comment><USER37> No. Mozilla is only one of multiple companies that work on MDN [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings- micr...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-microsoft- google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/)

<comment><USER36> Thanks. Still feels like a pretty big loss from that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This makes perfect MBA sense, why bother developing anything when you can transition to shipping Chrome skin with paid Google search bar?

</comment><comment> m-p-3 Without MDN being actively maintained, the web just became a worse place.

<comment><USER28> How exactly?

<comment> m-p-3 It's a way better resource than w3school, would be a shame if it drifted out because of a lack of maintainers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Recently migrated fully to Firefox at work and was really enjoying DevTools. While they still lack features in some places, but Inspector tool with flexbox and grid visualisation is very useful. Also little hints why some properties were not applied really helps. MDN is also one of my frequently visited websites with a lot of useful info.

Is there way open source community could save these projects? I would gladly sponsor further development of Firefox DevTools.

</comment><comment><USER37> I dislike these tweet links with no context. I am supposed to know who the person tweeting this is and how reliable they are?

<comment><USER40> Their profile description says they are W3C staff, and this can easily be confirmed by googling their name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> From an outside perspective it seems like Mozilla has been spending the last few years trying to get traction with social justice and political issues while neglecting their core product.

Safari and Chrome are much faster, Mozilla should have shipped servo in a product by now instead of investing in legacy tech for a declining product.

<comment><USER42> As an on-again-off again user (currently on-again but today here I am googling WebKit-based Linux browsers) who hasn't _loved_ FF since 2.0, it looks like they're spending a shitload on UI fiddling and marketing/messaging of dubious or negative value. Sometimes the UI fiddling and marketing are combined, for when they _really_ want to make me like the product less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Mozilla should have diversified into CDN static web app delivery/JAMStack or similar on top of existing clouds or something. Plus additional instrumentation tooling with backend services to monitor frontend performance etc could be an area which could bring decent amount of revenue.

</comment><comment><USER44> [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world- chan...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-changing- mozilla/)

</comment><comment><USER45> MDN is extremely useful, something I cannot ascribe to Mozillas management. There seems to be some kind of ridiculous transformation in process. Maybe they know that Google will stop sending money?

</comment><comment><USER46> Wait, so who did they keep on staff?

<comment><USER47> The opposite roles of what HN wanted in yesterday's thread ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> That's a massive blow. Rust next?

<comment><USER49> The team these days is pretty small. Two folks have posted publicly about it, one was, one wasn't. We'll see, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> What boggles my mind is why Microsoft just did not acquire Mozilla. They could be funding the project while owning the brand. Hell they could have made FF into the default browser and people would actually not associate it with Explorer or whatever.

<comment><USER51> As I understand, Mozilla is not for sale and can't be acquired.

<comment><USER50> Cant the for profit entity be acquired?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is the eventuality that WebPlatform.org was supposed to prepare us for. But I think WebPlatform failed because most of the docs were upstream at MDN, and people never stopped looking there.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is pretty bleak and sad news for future browser competition I guess

</comment><comment><USER54> Really sad about this lay off, Mozilla does so much good stuff, not just Firefox.

[https://donate.mozilla.org/](https://donate.mozilla.org/)

<comment><USER55> That money goes to the Foundation. The Corporation can't receive money from the Foundation. The Corporation makes Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Time to go back to Firebug? Well, except Firebug no longer exists.

<comment><USER57> This new world of safe, approved, and powerless browser extensions sure is great, isn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Wow. Will others be looking at moving away from Firefox soon? I moved to Firefox because of the devtools! It sounds like they have leadership that's out of touch with community.

</comment><comment><USER59> Want to help? [https://donate.mozilla.org/en- US/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/)

<comment><USER60> Why throw money into this fire?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Huge fan of Firefox, this is unfortunate.

Noticed that this girl is helping them in some way. [https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl/status/1293237589202178048](https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl/status/1293237589202178048)</comment>


Ask HN: Help to start Raspberry Pi development - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
With the delays due to manufacturing defects and the high demand it will probably be a while before I get my hands on a board, though I would like to get a head start in raspberry-pi development.
1. I am a but confused on what development on the board means, with a linux distro installed, will it simply be a matter of programming in C or any language of your choice ? Or should I know ARM specific coding in assembly ??
2. And is there any good guides/tutorial you would recommend for ARM/R-Pi development ? <comment><USER2> What do you want to develop?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment I don't know the details but I know I want to learn how to hook it up to motors/sensors/servos so that I can make a mechanical.

One idea is to make a little car that can run an obstacle course. Or attach a robot arm so that it can pick up small things.

<comment><USER2> If you're just starting out I think the Arduino would be a better choice (it's also slightly cheaper!). The Arduino community is very active and there's a wide range of libraries for all kinds of stuff.</comment></comment></comment>


Philosophical Tech - <AUTHOR> Our Range of Creative Projects was formed in 2014.
Framework based on four colors (Black | Blue | White | Grey) and three forms (Circle | Square | Triangle).
Project No.1 was introduced in 2015.
www.o-r-c-p.com <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.o-r-c-p.com/](http://www.o-r-c-p.com/)

<comment><USER2> I apologize, but I don't understand the project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Visit the website.

Project No.1 is a set of sneakers constructed in Italy.

Then please click on our floating illusions - our vision.</comment></comment></comment>