Setting Up a Jenkins Home Lab - <AUTHOR> https://www.gdcorner.com/2019/12/27/JenkinsHomeLab-P1-MasterSetup.html <comment><USER2> If one were to have a choice, I would steer clear of jenkins for home use, and use a gitlab runner instead

Jenkins is fine, if you commit to maintaining it, but thats a non trivial task.

THe joy and pain of the gitlab runner is that the job is tied directly to the git repo its attached to. This means that unlike jenkins, the setup is versioned, meaning disaster recovery is much more simple (spin up new runner, attach to project. Done.)

You do then sacrifice multi-project pipelines, but even in very large companies, I've only missed that feature once. It also in no way makes up for having to look after 60+ jenkins masters. (dont ask)

Yes, you gitlab gives you less control over environment, but I would put forward that this is only an advantage when running on windows.

<comment> jl-gitlab In GitLab we have shared group/instance runners now as well as multiproject pipelines.

[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/multi_project_pipelines.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/multi_project_pipelines.html)

[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/runners/#shared-specific- and-g...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/runners/#shared-specific-and-group- runners)

We are focusing on improving the new user experience here, so OP if you decide to try out GitLab I'd love to hear what works well and what doesn't.

<comment><USER2> At $work we properly rinse autoscale shared project runners. (we make lots of CUDA lumps so we need GPUs to test, and they are uber expensive.)

I wasn't aware of multi-pipeline, so if I bump into that problem again, I'll give it a go

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you just want to play with Jenkins, I recommend just getting it up and running in Docker and using only Jenkins Pipelines for jobs and JCasC for system configuration.

This directory ([https://github.com/peterwwillis/devops- tools/blob/master/os/...](https://github.com/peterwwillis/devops- tools/blob/master/os/linux/docker/jenkins/jenkins-manager)) has basically everything you need to get the manager up and running as a container. (though I think I still need to add Docker to the master container, so you can use the host's Docker daemon to run arbitrary build agent containers on the fly)

From there you can play with the JCasC configuration to do things like add agents, configure the security realm, seed jobs at start-up, etc. Documentation is pretty sparse, but you can at least log in to the web UI and start playing around.

Outside of a single build node, I highly, highly recommend _not using Jenkins_. It's just such an unnecessarily complicated beast to manage with modern best practices, you might as well just cobble together your own system, or use a _real_ modern distributed build system. It will take you just as long as going through all the endless bullshit options of trying to force Jenkins to do what you want, but you'll actually have something simple and useful in the end that works (if you choose to).

<comment><USER4> > Outside of a single build node, I highly, highly recommend not using > Jenkins. It's just such an unnecessarily complicated beast to manage with > modern best practices, you might as well just cobble together your own > system, or use a real modern distributed build system. It will take you just > as long as going through all the endless bullshit options of trying to force > Jenkins to do what you want, but you'll actually have something simple and > useful in the end that works (if you choose to).

So much this. I've worked with Jenkins for most of my professional career. Its much better today than what it used to be, but compared to the CI toolings that are now available, using it today makes no sense at all (with a few exceptions, especially when it comes to maven build pipelines).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Regarding suggestions for alternatives to Jenkins I'm curious if anyone has any for game dev use cases.

We use Jenkins now and build for PCs, consoles, and mobile. Almost all of our builds must be on Windows. Some builds require GPUs. Builds require things like specific versions of Unity, Unreal, or a console SDK. Many builds result in build artifacts in the multiple gigabytes which we then want to efficiently copy to e.g. a QA person's console dev kit on our local network.

For all these reasons we've setup our own Jenkins deployment onsite at our office on bare metal. But I'm curious if any of the newer services or technologies might be useful for us.

<comment><USER6> I'd like to know more about your setup.

We're a small startup building infrastructure for developers. We do address problems like what you describe: enforcement of the exact library version requirements for each codebase, reduction of artifact egress costs, integration into the Jenkins workflow as well as into IDE for devs and QA, and more.

We've been looking for game devs who'd be interested in what we're doing. Please reach out if you're interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thank you for this guide! I am going to have to check it out. I have heard a lot about Jenkins but never really got around to trying it out myself. This seems like a great way to get my feet wet!

</comment><comment><USER8> Great!

I recently switched to Gitea from GitLab for my homelab. I think Jenkins + Gitea will combine well. I'm looking forward to trying this out. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why would anyone waste their time on such an outdated CI tool? Drone.io is just one example of where the future is.

<comment><USER3> _Very unfortunately,_ it's the de-facto tool most businesses use. It's free, but you have the option of support, and everyone has used it. There are better free tools, but they're more complicated for the layperson, and usually don't have support, much less the huge ecosystem of plugins.

As a person who earns probably half his living propping up horrible Jenkins installs, I highly recommend that nobody ever use it. But if you're going to work in corporate-world, you probably will have to use it, so you might as well get comfortable with it.

<comment><USER10> What would you recommend for a shop that has some mature projects they'd like to add a bunch of tests to, to improve speed and confidence in future changes?

<comment><USER11> Use a SaaS solution like CircleCI, Travis, BuildKite, etc. They all have various upsides and downsides but you will save lots of money vs maintaining you own Jenkins and dealing with all its flaws.

Also, people who are not used to the whole test driven development culture will have an easier time adapting if infrastructure doesn't constantly break.

<comment><USER3> Yes, 100%, SaaS is the way to go - unless it is impossible. There are some orgs & projects out there that literally cannot use a SaaS, which usually leads to self-hosting. ("Cost" is not a valid reason, btw - if one more junior manager tells me "oh but it's so much cheaper to self-host" i'm going to take away their lunch money because isn't _growing your own lettuce_ cheaper than paying for it on a sandwich?).

I would say the simplest thing would be to buy a self-hosted GitHub Enterprise, although the cheaper option is self-hosted GitLab CI (but, _ugh_ , maintenance). GitHub Enterprise is so much easier I would gladly pay out the nose for it, though it lags in features.

Next you're looking at Bamboo, TeamCity, Harness, JFrog Pipelines, Spinnaker. Spinnaker is probably the best (only?) open source choice among these.

After that you're looking at open-source projects that come "batteries not included", requiring scripting and integrating more stuff. At that point, my personal preference is to just tie together some AWS or GCloud services, and make your own event-driven task-running pipelines (ex: GitHub webhook triggers Lambda which adds some build items to an SQS queue which triggers more Lambdas which run a build task on Fargate which dumps an artifact into S3 and the end of the pipeline triggers a container build which pulls from S3 artifacts and dumps the resulting container into ECR and test-runs it on Fargate, publishing build results to GitHub commit status). This model is slightly more complex to set up, but insanely easy to scale.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Aria2: CLI downloader for HTTP, FTP, torrents, metalinks - <AUTHOR> https://aria2.github.io/ <comment><USER2> So excited it moved to github and away from SourceForge

By far my go to app for downloading anything. aria2c [link] downloads anything and is also the fastest bit torrent app I have ever used.

EDIT: I also use aria2c for the backend of my Arch Linux package manager pacman. Gives me multiple of connections per host and speeds up updates by at least two folds. [https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=192072](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=192072)

2nd EDIT: Windows works but I have had better luck with uGet portable app for Windows.

[http://ugetdm.com/downloads-windows](http://ugetdm.com/downloads-windows)

<comment><USER3> "By far my go to app for downloading anything. aria2c [link] downloads anything"

Just to clarify, when you say "anything" do you mean things like soundcloud and youtube ?

Is this an alternative to a tool like youtube-dl ?

<comment><USER4> Probably not quite what you meant (since it still require youtube-dl), but youtube-dl has built-in support for downloading using aria2c as a backend.

        youtube-dl --external-downloader=aria2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

<comment><USER2> I now have a new alias thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who would prefer a graphical interface for their multithreaded downloading, I highly recommend webui-aria2, which (of course) uses aria2c in it's backend: [https://github.com/ziahamza/webui- aria2](https://github.com/ziahamza/webui-aria2)

It's super easy to install locally since it's basically a JS app in a couple of HTML files. For ease of use, I have a shortcut to the index.html in my browser and launch aria2 on startup from my .zshrc.

<comment><USER6> Agreed webui-aria2 is great. I wrote a little launcher script for it that configures the RPC secret, download directory, and other settings, starts aria2c, then opens up the WebUI in a Chrome kiosk. [https://github.com/brbsix/aria2-webui- launcher/blob/master/a...](https://github.com/brbsix/aria2-webui- launcher/blob/master/aria2-webui)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If they add a "\--download-over-tor" flag[1] this would be awesome.

[1]: _Yes we all know that it 's not a good idea to download torrents and other large content over tor (for various technical and non-technical reasons) but it'd sure be convenient!_

<comment><USER8> Is there a reason torify isn't sufficient?

<comment><USER7> Haven't heard of torify before but it looks cool. Does the app being invoked by it have to be able to use a SOCKS proxy or does it auto wrap all socket connections?

<comment><USER9> It auto-wraps them using tsocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Haven't heard of this tool until now. Say I already use wget (or curl) for command line downloads. Besides the ability to download torrents, why should I switch?

<comment><USER11> I for one prefer aria2c's ability to download a huge file via multiple parallel streams using the -x switch. AFAIK wget doesn't have this feature.

<comment><USER12> Try prozilla

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Aria2 is great.

I also used Axel[1] a lot (its lightweight) during my college days where we were behind an http proxy and increasing the number of connections would result in increased download speeds.

[1] [http://axel.alioth.debian.org/](http://axel.alioth.debian.org/)

<comment><USER14> I've been using axel for a while and it worked great so far. I'd suggest it if you re looking for a linghtweight chunked downloader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wish it could be able to download dropbox/wetransfer/hitail/etc links.

I imagine it'd be quite hard to go through that JavaScript crap; I can barely do it myself with a browser. :)

</comment><comment><USER15> apt-fast is a very nice wrapper for apt-get / aptitude that uses aria2c to download packages MUCH faster. (It also automatically calls itself with sudo if you wish, i.e. automatically requests the sudo password if needed.)

[https://github.com/ilikenwf/apt-fast](https://github.com/ilikenwf/apt-fast)

<comment><USER16> I wish it was written as an apt-method, or even a replacement for /var/lib/methods/http. I suspect the lack of documentation for apt methods has made this unlikely.

<comment><USER15> The Debian base is in many respects beautiful, but it also seems quite fossilized and rigid to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Aria2 is awesome. Probably the most commonly typed in command (besides ls) on my home computer is "aria2c (xclip -o)".

<comment><USER18> Then you probably want to alias it.

<comment><USER17> Thanks to fish shell, it's usually only _a C-f_ away. Or quite often even _arrow up_ away. :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [http://tuxdiary.com/2016/01/28/dsdownload/](http://tuxdiary.com/2016/01/28/dsdownload/) is also good

</comment><comment><USER20> Did anyone had luck seeding aria's DHT for downloading magnet links?

<comment><USER21> Back when I used aria it seemed to work with the default one mentioned in the man page (I think).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> git-annex uses aria2 for torrent downloads

<comment><USER23> In case anyone wanted it from the source, here is Joey Hess's announcement from a little more than a year ago:

[http://git-annex.branchable.com/devblog/day_239-240__bittorr...](http://git- annex.branchable.com/devblog/day_239-240__bittorrent_remote/)

And reference to git-annex's bittorrent special remote:

[http://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/bittorrent/](http://git- annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/bittorrent/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> aria2 will eventually support chunked transfers over sftp, too - then I can get rid of lftp.

</comment><comment><USER24> aria2c is absolutely awesome for dev ops.

A lot of regular download clients got problems if you have 1000+ servers downloading 100MB+ and hit a lot of stragglers. I find aria2c very reliable and performant comparing to other client.

</comment><comment><USER25> Running on Windows too now! :)</comment>


Ask HN: How many HN readers are avid poker players? - <AUTHOR>

This is semi-inspired by several articles that have popped up in popular periodicals over the past few months regarding increasing academic interest in teaching poker theory. (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877087)<p>However, I am mostly just curious. <comment><USER2> I am. I was so in to it I actually worked for an online poker provider for a year up in Canada. In the "salad" days when it was gaining attention, I was actually making money, because, well, it was easy with a lot of inexperienced players coming in. In general, the quality of players has risen significantly since then and I'm not good or persistent enough to win as much, so I can still play ahead, but with a much lower margin than, say six years ago.

<comment><USER3> My online cash winrate dropped to 1/3 of what it was in the "salad" days, and my variance increased substantially.

My understanding is that my winrates are still very good, but the rise of massive-multi-tablers and HUDs really ruined the game for me as even if you're turning a profit, it's just not as fun as it once was.

God bless real-life poker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am one. I play mid/high stakes poker, and pretty much every form of it.

I funded my first startup by playing nights and weekends. These days, it's solely an avocation, but one I rather enjoy.</comment>


Scientists caught off-guard by record temperatures linked to climate change - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-weather-climatechange-science-idUSKCN1061RH?rpc=401 <comment><USER2> I have no doubt that climate change is a problem. I have kids, I dont want to give them a hospital pass.

I've tried to stop living such a carbon dependant lifestyle but I look outside and my efforts feel futile. How do I REALLY do something about this other than a few pretentious yet barely discomforting lifestyle changes and the odd empassioned few sentences at dinner parties?

Start pushing for a carbon tax?

Start an electric car company?

Begin development of technology to get us to Ma.....oh wait

Plant heaps of trees?

Buy drones and start my own version of operation sunscreen?

Seriously. The mild excitement that comes with media alarmism has transitioned into "I really need to start doing something drastic or I'll regret it"

<comment><USER3> IMO the problem is that most sides in the discussion don't propose any viable solutions:

On one side there are the climate change deniers (and the people who don't care about it). They are fine to continue business as usual.

On the other side there are the people who are concerned about climate change. But instead of agreeing to effective solutions (compromises) that allow us to somewhat mitigate global warming (such as nuclear energy) they oppose those solutions and instead propose things that are 1) not realistic to implement in the short-term and that 2) the first group (the climate change deniers) would never agree to.

Basically the outcome is that we're stuck in a grid lock now and nothing happens at all.

Regarding nuclear energy: Most of the people whom I know oppose nuclear energy because of 1) "what happens if there's an accident" and 2) "what should we do with the waste". My response to this: 1) Per TWH nuclear energy is statistically safer than other energy sources: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy- so...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html) and 2) While there are some more long-term approaches for waste (reprocessing, maybe Thorium) even in the short-term I prefer a well definied disposal site over just blowing the waste into their air (which is what happens with fossil- fuel powered plants. I recommend reading [http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/james- lovel...](http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/james-lovelock- nuclear-power-is-the-only-green-solution-564446.html) for a few more arguments.

<comment><USER4> The only viable, realistic solution is for people to stop having as many children as they currently do. The population of the planet is beyond carrying capacity at current levels of consumption.

<comment><USER5> The Malthusian argument is threadbare and false.

Humanity has always been on the brink of demise. We've always been barely able to feed our people. This took us from hunter-gatherers to the development of agriculture, on to irrigation, fertilization, terraced farming, crop rotation, selective breeding, genetic manipulation.

In terms of energy, as we depleted the forests of wood for burning, we've gone through similar transformations, learning to harness other means of light and heat like wax, whale oil, and so on.

It turns out that the greatest resource we have is not vegetable or mineral, it's the human mind. Intentionally shutting off the creation of new minds - the engines that are going to find the means of solving all the other problems - is counterproductive.

<comment><USER6> This "we've gotten this far!" argument applies to global warming as well, doesn't it?

I don't believe the proposition that global warming is not a problem because human ingenuity will fix it.

Our land and oceans are already straining under our population load.

<comment><USER5> Yes, they're straining. But they've always been, through recorded history. The only difference is that when we look back at them through 21st century glasses, the problems don't even look like problems anymore.

I mean, we stopped denuding the forests to get firewood, so a visitor from, say, 3 centuries ago would be astonished at how well wooded the land is near cities. You can canoe down the Delaware River today and feel entirely surrounded by the trees, yet around the time of the Revolution, those hills were bare.

We hunted whales almost to the point of extinction. But we came up with better energy sources, and while this was recent enough that the whales haven't quite recovered yet, they're not threatened in this manner anymore.

So you'll have to explain to me how this time it's different than the countless other times when our ancestors (look back at Malthus!) claimed that we were on the brink of disaster.

<comment><USER7> > Yes, they're straining. But they've always been, through recorded history.

You keep repeating that, but it simply isn't true. The oceans have not been straining in the pre-industrial era in the slightest.

> You can canoe down the Delaware River today and feel entirely surrounded by > the trees, yet around the time of the Revolution, those hills were bare.

This is a typical anecdote that falls flat in the face of data. Look at global forestation rates in the pre-industrial era and today.

> So you'll have to explain to me

No one owes any explanation to a person who denies facts when presented with them. You made claims without evidence, therefore your claims can be dismissed without evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem.

What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM [http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html](http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html) We are being lied to and mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar and wind energy is starting to become incredibly efficient and cheap but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves.

What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.

<comment><USER9> One more key contributor (since CH4 aka natural gas is so much worse as a green house gas compared with CO2 when released than burned or kept in the ground):

Human activity, ranging from fossil fuel extraction, to natural gas usage, has massively led to a large amount of natural gas leakage across the network. All this leaking adds up and is an "unseen" but incremental accelerant on these problems ([https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/2016/02/25/california-gas-leak-was-the-worst-man-made- greenhouse-gas-disaster-in-u-s-history-study-says/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is frustrating about this article is that no climate scientists were caught off-guard by 2016 bring hot so far. There was a strong El Niño. Everyone saw serious heat coming months in advance.

<comment><USER11> The amount of heating is what's surprising, not the heating itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> CO2 is the only culprit?

This one says Ozone layer is recovering: [http://research.noaa.gov/News/NewsArchive/LatestNews/TabId/6...](http://research.noaa.gov/News/NewsArchive/LatestNews/TabId/684/ArtMID/1768/ArticleID/10741/Report- telltale-signs-that-ozone-layer-is-recovering-.aspx)

This one says increased CO2 has helped the speedy recovery of Ozone: [http://classroom.synonym.com/co2-deplete-ozone- layer-4828.ht...](http://classroom.synonym.com/co2-deplete-ozone- layer-4828.html)

I understand the topic is climate change. Probably there are other factors contributing to it. Its been said Methane and NOx are more potent. Is there an increase in those emissions? We are only looking at CO2 it seems.

</comment><comment><USER13> When are we going to stop f __*ing around and start doing something serious? Let 's just buy off the carbon lobby (oil/coal/gas owners) and get on with a crash program of energy decarbonisation.

<comment><USER14> I think that many people agree with you in principle, but when they start considering the cost in terms of lifestyle, than the followers start to vanish.

<comment><USER15> "Cost in terms of lifestyle" compared to what? there're studies (e.g. this report from citybank[0]) that shows that inaction is actually more expensive, taking into account the cost of the climate change disasters...

Seems to me that people believe that doing nothing we will keep living in the same way. Sorry to have to wake you up. Doing nothing will screw up the planet and your (and mine) "lifestyle".

The article referenced in this discussion[1] have other nice data/information about this topic.

I have kids and this is not the future I want for them.

[0] [https://ir.citi.com/hsq32Jl1m4aIzicMqH8sBkPnbsqfnwy4Jgb1J2kI...](https://ir.citi.com/hsq32Jl1m4aIzicMqH8sBkPnbsqfnwy4Jgb1J2kIPYWIw5eM8yD3FY9VbGpK%2Baax)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615)

<comment><USER7> > "Cost in terms of lifestyle" compared to what?

> I have kids and this is not the future I want for them.

Why did you choose to have kids? Was not having kids an acceptable lifestyle cost for you in order to _save the planet_ ?

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately unless everyone stops having kids it is not going to help. I would argue that what the world needs is more thoughtful people and that thoughtful people should be having more children.

<comment><USER15> Well, if everybody stops having kids (everybody), saving the planet will not be a problem for a long time, at least for human kind :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's all about batteries. An order of magnitude more efficient electric battery technology is the key missing piece to get us away from a fossil based economy.

</comment><comment><USER16> How much of it is due to El Niño, and how much due to global warming proper? Is it difficult to figure out? The article doesn't say.

<comment><USER17> From Bad Astronomy, El Niño accounts for around 0.1C globally: [http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/07/20/june_201...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/07/20/june_2016_was_the_hottest_june_on_record.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, what can be done? I posted this question on Reddit ages ago with no replys, would be interesting to hear anyone on heres opinion on it...

> Hi all, Im sure there are many reasons why this would not work but thought > would be good to get some input. I came across this article about creating > carbon fibre from atmospheric carbon > [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540706/researcher- > demonst...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540706/researcher- > demonstrates-how-to-suck-carbon-from-the-air-make-stuff-from-it/) and as > carbon fibre utilising 3d printers now exist like > [https://markforged.com/product/mark-one- > composite-3d-printer...](https://markforged.com/product/mark-one- > composite-3d-printer/) this seems like something with amazing potential. Of > course one of the main challenges is the energy needed to operated such a > machine - but in the right places (which im guessing is windy as the carbon > pulling machine needs high air exposure anyway) renewable forms of energy > could maybe be used? In a daydream I thought it would be amazing to replace > steels and plastics with atmospheric carbon. Reduce oil dependency, lower > carbon footprint (even thought its not putting it back in the ground it > seems like a good second), created a fantastic building element. Anyhow - > would be great to hear why this wont (or would!) work from someone who knows > more than me about this stuff. :)

<comment><USER19> Money? There isn't currently a market for this product, there may never be, and it requires a big upfront investment.

Scaling? "given an area less than 10 percent of the size of the Sahara Desert" _does nobody have any idea how large that is?_ If he'd said "an area the size of Texas and California combined" it might look less feasible.

But really it needs millions in altruistic funding to even get a pilot plant going. It's a lot like Tesla's plan to get everyone driving electric cars: no technical barrier, but the financial one is huge and it takes a while to scale even if it's successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems pretty clear to me what is going to happen over the coming century.

The world has turned a blind eye to the millions dying from starvation and preventable disease. And will do so again when tens to hundreds of millions die from the effects of climate change e.g. starvation, flooding, heat waves etc.

And as the disaffected and left behind turn to terrorist acts to vent their frustration the rest of humanity will close borders, become more xenophobic and intolerant. Governments will be polarised to the extent that they will be largely ineffectual.

Ultimately it is going to be the likes of Tesla and hopefully Apple to make electric cars a lust item, scientists to finally get nuclear fusion, carbon storage and renewable battery technology working and entrepreneurs to glue it all together.

<comment><USER21> At times I hope that climate change deniers in positions of power are held accountable for crimes against the human race; however, in the face of what I would anticipate to be the global living conditions justice would seem pointless.

We can only hope that it becomes just bad enough to scare everyone[1], but no worse (i.e. methane pockets). _If_ it's already "worse" geoengineering is the only thing that can save us because it's a runaway process, cutting carbon emissions would only delay the inevitable. We're not seeing much in the way of investment into that final pocket ace, though, at least Alphabet had a shot at it.

[1]: [http://traveller24.news24.com/News/Alerts/watch-another- torn...](http://traveller24.news24.com/News/Alerts/watch-another-tornado-hits- joburg-in-peak-traffic-20160726)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> climate change is one of those few issues where an alarmist attitude is actually needed. Still need to get more media outlets to change from saying "save the planet" to "save humanity".

<comment><USER23> Why? Humanity will be fine. At worst some people will have to move a bit inland.

<comment><USER24> Under some predictions, parts of the Middle East and North Africa might become, if not uninhabitable, very uncomfortable (50C+ summer averages) by the end of the century, with all the consequences that arise from this. [http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-016-1665-6](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-016-1665-6)

Present experience proves that people, especially the impoverished, can't just easily uproot and leave one country for another, with no political or sociological consequences whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What is this data based on? From my own experience, living on Vancouver Island, temperatures this summer have been much cooler than in recent years. This summer has been almost exactly average in temp, compared to above average for the last few years.

Looking at accuweather's data (www.accuweather.com, search for a city, then click 'month'), virtually everywhere in the US has been pretty much bang on the average temps for June and July.

<comment><USER26> What drought? it rained in my town today.

<comment><USER25> Ok, I see you were being sarcastic, saying that what happens in my hometown has no relevance. I guess you didn't read the rest of my comment...as well as my personal anecdote (which was probably bad to put on HN), I put actual science.

If you look at the data for New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and various other cities across the US, you'll see that temperatures have been exactly average for June and July.

So, I'm just wondering where this data came from, and why it is difference from the actual recorded temperatures. Is it because it is satellite data? If so, why does it differ?

In typical HN fashion this is a press release rather than an actual scientific article.

Just to clarify, I'm not a climate change denier. However scare articles with no science behind them do more harm than good (if that is what this is).

 _EDIT_ here is where the data comes from:

[http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201606](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201606)

I guess a small amount above average temperatures just isn't noticeable in the average temperature graphs.

<comment><USER27> >I guess a small amount above average temperatures just isn't noticeable in the average temperature graphs.

From your link

> The worldwide ocean surface temperature during June 2016 was 0.77°C (1.39°F) > above the 20th century average, the highest global ocean temperature for > June in the 137-year record.

0.77C is not a small amount

<comment><USER25> >0.77C is not a small amount

It is in the context I was using (the accuweather graphs). If you have a look, you'll see that 0.77C is not noticeable.

<comment><USER26> So your argument centers around looking at non scientific data and coming to a different conclusion.

<comment><USER25> No. I asked a question and answered it myself. I come to the same conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I see articles like this that are pure fear mongering and weep. It didn't mention El Nino even once.

Yet a massive El Nino event caused the increase in world temperature and higher rainfall around the world in 2016. This isn't even a debatable fact, yet apparently not worth mentioning in an article about weather and temperature events in 2016.

</comment><comment><USER29> Some points:

(1) Does the climate change? Apparently. E.g., we had _glaciations_ , most recently IIRC, about 12,000 years.

(2) What is a _greenhouse gas_ : Leading examples are water vapor, CO2, and methane. Each of these is transparent to visible light, e.g., if water vapor or CO2 were not transparent to visible light, then we could see our breath as we exhale. So, since greenhouse gasses are transparent to visible light, visible light from the sun passes through greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, strikes the surface of the earth, and gets absorbed by and warms the surface. That warmer surface then radiates as in Planck black body radiation. That radiation is mostly out in the infrared we cannot see with our eyes. But here is what a greenhouse gas does: It absorbs the Planck black body infrared radiation from the surface of the earth, gets warmer, and warms the atmosphere. Without a greenhouse gas, that infrared radiation might just continue and escape into outer space. The glass in the ceiling of a greenhouse works similarly -- it lets visible light from the sun in but blocks infrared light from the warm interior surfaces of the greenhouse from getting out (there is some controversy in how a greenhouse works, but a greenhouse is still the source of the term _greenhouse_ gas).

(3) Since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, CO2 in the atmosphere warms it? Yup.

(4) What are the sources of CO2 in the atmosphere? I don't have good data on all the sources and how much each contributes (it's not clear that anyone does). Supposedly one of the largest sources is volcanoes, and there we have to count the ones under the oceans, too. Supposedly rotting vegetation is a source. All animals exhale CO2. Burning fossil fuels, wood, etc. releases CO2. Baking calcium carbonate to make lime for cement, etc., releases CO2. Supposedly a large source of CO2 is the oceans: Supposedly warmer water can absorb less CO2. So, as ocean water warms, from circulation, volcanoes, the seasons, warmer climate, etc., CO2 can be emitted. A guess is that the oceans are an overwhelmingly large store of CO2 and a major source/sink of CO2 (as a _source_ emits CO2, a _sink_ absorbs it). Yes, rotting vegetation emits CO2, but, then, sure, as that vegetation originally grew, it was a sink of CO2.

(5) Does CO2 absorb all the infrared light? Nope, not even close. CO2 absorbs in just three narrow frequency bands, one for each of bending, twisting, and stretching of the molecule. More generally, say, for other gasses, the subject is _molecular spectroscopy_ , based on, e.g., quantum mechanics, some group theory, etc.

(6) Okay, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and, thus, warms the atmosphere. If someone lights a match, then that, too, will warm the atmosphere. A question is, how much? In particular, how much CO2 warms the atmosphere how much?

So, we believe that what CO2 does follows only from well understood principles of physics and chemistry. For large changes in CO2 concentrations over long terms, say, centuries, maybe we would have carefully to consider biology, that is, how plants, the oceans, etc., respond to the extra CO2.

But, already just for small changes in CO2 over just a few decades, apparently the calculations from principles in physics and chemistry are quite challenging. E.g., for flows in the atmosphere and oceans we would have to use the equations of fluid flow, the Navier-Stokes equations, for the whole planet, including the oceans. Of course, for such a calculation, we would need _boundary conditions_ , e.g., what all the CO2 concentrations, temperatures, and flow rates are now. For the oceans, our best data for the boundary conditions is often crude.

Still there have been efforts to do the calculations. The efforts resulted in predictions of temperature for a few decades.

The results of some dozens of efforts to do these calculations have been summarized in, e.g.,

[http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg](http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg)

By now we have been able to compare the predicted temperatures with the observed ones. The result is that in nearly all cases of the calculations, the predicted temperatures were way above the observed temperatures. In simple terms, as science, the calculations flopped.

So, for the question of how much CO2 warms the planet how much, we don't have solid scientific information.

(7) Apparently a common _Claim_ is that essentially the only cause of changes of the temperature of the planet is greenhouse gasses, essentially just CO2, from human or other sources. So, with more CO2, the temperature will go up; with less CO2, the temperature will go down; the times the temperature went up was due to more CO2; the times the temperature went down was due to less CO2.

Well, we can test this Claim. We have three tests, A-C:

Test A. As at

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

there was the Little Ice Age:

"The NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals: one beginning about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850, each separated by intervals of slight warming."

It was significantly colder, certainly in both Europe and the US. Some of the effects are famous: E.g., in the famous painting of General Washington crossing the Delaware River, there was ice in the river. IIRC, usually there isn't. There was winter ice skating on the Thames River in London; IIRC usually there isn't.

Was this cooling caused by lower CO2 concentrations? Apparently there is no such evidence. So, the cause was something else. So, the Little Ice Age serves as a counterexample to the _Claim_ above. So, there can be causes of significant changes in temperature that have little or nothing to do with CO2.

Test B. Can say the same for the Medieval Warm Period, as at

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

from "lasting from about 950 to 1250".

Test C. For more, at Vostok Station in Antarctica, the Russians took some ice cores and from them measured CO2 concentrations and temperature back ballpark 1 million years. They found several times when temperature went up and CO2 concentrations went up. Al Gore's movie _An Inconvenient Truth_ showed a graph of those two over several hundred thousand years. E.g., as at Web page

[http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/labs...](http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/labs/Lab10_Vostok/Vostok.htm)

can see graph

[http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/labs...](http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/labs/Lab10_Vostok/Vostok_files/untitled2.jpg)

Gore claimed that the higher CO2 caused the higher temperatures. Well, due to the long time interval of the horizontal axis of the graph, not easy to see on the graph was that the CO2 peaks occurred about 800 years after the temperature peaks. So, really, just by common sense, the higher temperatures were not caused by higher CO2. Instead, something caused the higher temperatures; they caused more biological activity, and in 800 years that activity caused higher CO2.

So, here we have three failed tests of the Claim, three counterexamples of the Claim above. For anything scientific, those counterexamples are an overwhelmingly serious problem for the Claim about CO2.

=== The Current Scientific Situation ===

If we get a case when CO2 went up and soon temperature went up, that still is poor evidence that the higher CO2 caused the higher temperature, that is, the several counterexamples to the Claim remain.

That is, from the data, we already know, e.g., the end of The Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Vostok data, that there are causes of significant warming that have nothing to do with CO2.

Indeed, it is not at all clear that at realistic concentrations CO2 has anything at all significant to do with the temperature of the earth; to the Claim from climate data we have several overwhelmingly serious counterexamples, and otherwise we just don't have any solid scientific evidence: We tried with calculations from principles of physics and chemistry, and they flopped.

Net, from the calculations and from the historical record, we have no solid evidence that, at anything like realistic levels, more CO2 in the atmosphere will cause significant increases in the temperature of the earth. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but we just don't have any solid evidence, from either calculations or observations, that CO2 will be causing any significant warming of the earth.

So, can we use science to urge reductions in burning fossil fuels, subsidize wind and solar sources of electric power, impose carbon taxes, etc.?

IMHO, my view is that such steps would be extremely irresponsible, would shoot our economy in the gut for reasons that are little more solid than some ancient religion, e.g., when the Mayans killed people to pour their blood on a rock "to keep the sun moving across the sky" \-- e.g., as at

[http://books.google.com/books?id=DgqLplWtGPgC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA...](http://books.google.com/books?id=DgqLplWtGPgC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=Mayan+blood+sun+moving+sacrifice&source=web&ots=Do6njWN5M9&sig=FxTeclIiqggqIH5Ws_oENCek1uI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA76,M1)

on page 76 of

Susan Milbrath, 'Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies)', ISBN-13 978-0292752269, University of Texas Press, 2000.

with

"Indeed, blood sacrifice is required for the sun to move, according to Aztec cosmology (Durian 1971:179; Sahaguin 1950 \- 1982, 7:8)."

</comment><comment><USER30> IOW climate change is even worse than scientists anticipated.

<comment><USER31> While this is true, I think that what the article is trying to point out is not that climate change is worse, but that the models we have do not work in the current conditions. This is scary, because scientists have been anticipating climate change for decades, but now we know that what they anticipated was not as accurate as we thought.

If predictions from 10 years ago, let's say, had been replaced by worse predictions one or two years ago, we would still know with some certainty what will happen next. But what the article says is that everything we know is that things are getting worse than expected and we have no way to know how worse. Scary.

<comment><USER32> >> scientists have been anticipating climate change for decades, but now we know that what they anticipated was not as accurate as we thought.

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future

<comment><USER33> Aye but predictions are necessary. If there's a 4C global temperature rise that displaces 760M people. To put this into perspective, about 1M migrants in a year almost collapsed Europe's political system. We need to know how quick that happens so we can begin to do something. Dam, evacuate etc.

<comment><USER34> More likely, we will cover the borders with barbed wire, and machineguns.

<comment><USER33> The borders of what? Omaha? New York, DC, Los Angeles, Seattle and 'Frisco are (at least partially) gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Buy some of these from your local government: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence)

</comment><comment><USER36> except that temperatures dropped in June by a large amount after El Nino started to wane. The La Nina that is coming could once again stall the "warming". Let alone, the warmest title is for years since 1979, its not like we have satellite data that is accurate and going back that long. We do however have drought data including some good numbers out of China that shows clear cycles in weather for centuries.

So long story short, we don't know why and we need to quit acting other wise and put more effort into correcting models so that they are least close to predicting what has occurred over the last few decades of known data. If a model cannot reproduce what has happened it cannot be reliable in predicting what will. How can we not fix them?

<comment><USER37> The temperature dropped in June in the sense that the rather than being 0.3 degrees warmer than the warmest equivalent month, now it's only 0.2 warmer than the warmest equivalent month ever recorded. That is an odd sort of progress.

Also, the records don't go back to 1979, most go back to the start of the instrumental record in the 1880's. And satellite data isn't a panacea, the process of getting from the direct measurements to a temperature distribution involves a significant amount of processing based on theoretical models, and corrections for factors like orbital decay, and different satellites and processing methodologies have historically shown a lot of disagreement. It's all useful data, but it's not as if satellites are perfect and everything that comes before is worthless.</comment></comment>


Show HN: PressRise, an alternative to Reddit that lets users vote on development - <AUTHOR> https://www.pressrise.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I was working on a blog aggregator and decided to transition it into a simple link aggregator, since a lot of people seem to be looking for an alternative to Reddit these days. I wasn't sure what features I would add or subtract or do differently, so I thought this could be a good opportunity to practice the concept of user-driven development.

There's a link at the bottom of the page ("Add a Feature") where people can submit and vote on feature requests. The most upvoted feature requests will dictate development.

So the site isn't just user-generated content, but is also in itself a user- generated platform.

If anyone wants to help me work on this (or any of my or your other projects), there's a contact form on the main website, or you can email me directly at my username on Google's email service. Always interested in making new contacts. Thanks.

<comment><USER2> maybe. email@example.com

My macbook pro dropped dead. I am limited in the work I can do until I can buy a new notebook. Probably not a mac.

A very common problem with community-driven for-profit businesses is that the paid employees often do not realize that the community should be consulted about important decisions. To the extent they do realize it, the paid employees do not understand why they should.

For example, one of the reasons that Sun hired its open source diva was the outcry that resulted from sun adding a new committer to a repository. Suns take is that they hired the guy to write code for that specific project, but the other developers - not sun employees - pointed out that he should have attached patches to bug reports until he was invited to become a committer.

I dont have a position on Victoria's dismissal. There are many reasons it could have been justified. But even if it was so justified, it was damn fool ignorant for reddit to drop its most-popular feature on a cement floor.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Meetup for Philippine-based hackers - <AUTHOR>

Anyone interested in meeting up in Manila for a hackathon and/or chat/share?
I'm the co-founder of a local startup (itenna.net) and we can meet at my office.
Email me at terencepua gmail if interested. <comment><USER2> I'm interested too. I'll be in Manila for the holidays.

I'll send you an email.

There was a related thread a few weeks ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76204>

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey Terrence isn't it? when will this be? I'll be in the country for the holidays.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing formal yet...waiting to see if there is any interest.

<comment><USER3> Well if there is then count me in :P cuz I've heard in Singapore there's a lot of activity going on especially in the start up scene. Would love to see how this goes for the Phils.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you email me your digits?

<comment><USER3> Sure I will when I get them :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I propose Dec 6 at 5pm in Makati</comment>


Google offered free slice, wants whole cake - <AUTHOR> Asymmetric Numerical System (ANS) is a new compression algorithm that matches compression ratios of previous state-of-the-art encoders at up to 30X speed up.
Jarek Duda introduced ANS about 10 years ago and freely donated it to the compression community by publishing extensively and helping Google for three years to apply ANS to the open source AV1 video compression codec.
His hope was to avoid what happened to arithmetic coding, which was locked up by patents for 20 years.
Now history is repeating itself: Google has applied for a very general patent for ANS and video compression.
Reddit Discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6h08z5/google_is_currently_trying_to_patent_video/
Encode.ru Discussion:
https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Storeleap/page3
The detailed claims for this patent can be found here: https://register.epo.org/ipfwretrieve?apn=US.201615370840.A&lng=en
There is plenty of prior art that should invalidate such a patent.
If you would like to electronically submit prior art related to this patent application, do the following: (submission is free for up to 3 pieces of prior art)
1) Read Guide https://patents.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105/i-want-to-make-a-difference-how-can-i-submit-prior-art-to-the-patent-office
2) Visit USPTO website https://efs.uspto.gov/EFSWebUIUnregistered/EFSWebUnregistered
3) select "Existing application/patent"
4) select "Third-Party Preissuance Submission under 37 CFR 1.290"
"Application number" : 15/370840 "Confirmation number": 5111 <comment><USER2> So, Google has been becoming quite evil for a while. My personal one is scraping people's pages and offering the scraped advice for free, without leaving the main google search -- thus getting free advertising dollars from this knowledge without supplying anything back to the scraped site. Now, they are taking prior art that was given to the community and trying to patent it.... sigh. Everyone else, do no evil... for us, it's fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just human nature, I guess.</comment></comment>


How many times can Silicon Valley be wrong about cars? - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27119/how-many-times-can-silicon-valley-be-wrong-about-cars <comment><USER2> Is the answer zero? The article doesn't actually list any examples.</comment>


Joseph Weizenbaum died at age 85 - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum One of the founders of computer science, famous for his Eliza application and an outspoken critic of artificial intelligence died in Berlin at the age of 85. <comment><USER2> The wikipedia link for him doesn't mention this but I thought he also had something to do with the weird japaneese parallel-prolog fifth-generation AI project Feigenbaum and McCorduck wrote about.</comment>


Sid Meier's Civilization VI Live on Linux Now - <AUTHOR> https://blog.aspyr.com/2017/02/06/sid-meiers-civilization-vi-linux-releases-february-9/ <comment><USER2> It seems to load faster than Civ V did. I think the UI/GUI is easier to use than Civ V, and they learned from Civ:BE how not to do things.

On sale at Steam until the 13th of Feb.</comment>


Ask HN: Best technical kindle books - <AUTHOR>

I am going to be traveling a lot in the next couple of weeks so I am looking for some new technical books for my kindle. I'm wondering what you have been reading on your kindle and what you would recommend. I just finished reading Building Scalable Websites by Cal Henderson, and Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran.<p>I'm open to any suggestions. I don't want to be stuck on a plane flight with nothing good to read. <comment><USER2> I've got an original Kindle, not the DX. Most of the time when converting a doc, it comes out readable enough. Its not perfect, but, readable.

However, pragprog offers kindle editions of most of their books. These are all perfectly formatted for reading. And usually very useful to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> How well do tech books hold up on the Kindle? If there is code, does it display OK? I realize there is no syntax coloring, which is a major downside for me, but I guess for small amounts of code it might be OK. How about diagrams?

I imagine anything with large amounts of code won't do well in this format. Higher-level (like the OP mentioned) or software-engineering books might do a bit better (I have Mythical Man-Month in queue).

<comment><USER4> Yes, they look wonderful:

[http://www.matthewdavidwilliams.com/2009/06/12/technical- doc...](http://www.matthewdavidwilliams.com/2009/06/12/technical-document- pdfs-on-the-kindle-dx/)

<comment><USER3> Aah, this is on a Kindle Dx - I only have the Kindle 2...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Pragmatic Bookshelf titles are available in mobi format. I'm reading Programming Clojure (<http://www.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming- clojure>) and overall the experience is good, though the coding snippets don't scale with the rest of the test.</comment>


Visual explanation of the last Google Codejam 2017 question - <AUTHOR> https://asrp.github.io/blog/gcj_qual2017 <comment><USER2> Their analysis in terms of chess pieces also helps: [https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/3264486/dashboard#s=...](https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/3264486/dashboard#s=a&a=3)

<comment><USER3> Thank you! After reading blog-post I had zero understanding of what the problem is about and how they solve it. Tried to read again - no luck. Then I opened codejam link and saw that it's basically about placing maximum amount of bishops using maximum matching. (Other parts of problem are trivial)

That's really sad that this pattern of bad explanations is so frequent in the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could this be easily solved with the Z3 theorem prover? Is Z3 an acceptable programming language for this code jam.

<comment><USER5> Looks like you would be allowed to use it: [https://code.google.com/codejam/terms](https://code.google.com/codejam/terms)

'You may use any programming language to solve a Code Jam problem. However, for any round after the qualification round, the compiler, interpreter, libraries, and external services you use must be available such that anyone else can use it for free without a time limitation and without violating any rights of any person or entity'

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was also confused about algorithmic skill and software engineering skills. But I got clarification after working in industry for a while.

1) Most of the software engineering work is product development, just wrapping already existing algorithm and optimized computer program into apis and test and maintain it.

2) There are very few software engineering work involving writing algorithm and optimized computer program.

One example, everyone here might have just used mysql database. But if you look into the code, you might see there are complex data structure, and algorithm are being used.

[https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server](https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server)

Its a good thing to solve these kind of algorithmic problems.

</comment><comment><USER7> The more I scroll, the stupider I feel. Ugh.

<comment><AUTHOR> This wasn't my intention. I hope the feeling subsides!

I did try to keep it short although some parts still (fortunately) shows how to come to those conclusion. That might give it the impression of being smart but the presentation is definitely selected among many idea and rearranged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if there is a real cause and effect relationship between being good at this kind of games and being a good coder. I suspect not.

<comment><USER9> I wonder too. I think it's like asking whether a math olympiad champion would make a great engineer. Certainly they have a lot of potential because they show extraordinary abilities, but there is much more to being a good coder than _just_ being able to solve very short and extremely specific problems.

I've been playing these games for a couple of years (initially, for interviews preparation), and it's been very instructive. The competition format makes it convenient and addictive. There's no doubt that I improved a lot on algorithms, data structures and on "small scale" coding. While this is useful, it is quite different than what you do when working on real projects.

<comment><USER10> When I was preparing for interviews I found that the skill that overlapped between interview puzzles and everyday work was the "head interpreter" as I call it. Typically you end up relying on the IDE and the compiler telling you if what you're writing makes sense or not. Static analysis by the IDE would only tell you if you've made a syntax error, you would need to run a test to tell if what you've written makes logical sense too.

So there's a couple of advantages if you can execute code in your head line by line while storing state as well. You can be slightly faster and more correct while coding yourself and while reviewing the code that others have written. Typically in the latter case you don't have the benefit of the compiler or running tests.

In my anecdotal experience I found an improvement in my "head interpreter" after practising interview questions for a while because typically you're not allowed to execute your code. I can't say if any of the algorithms I learnt and practised helped, but this, in my opinion, made me slightly better at my day job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now I just need to understand flow networks: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_network](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_network)

<comment><USER12> I think college lectures are still the best resource for learning problem solving. You might want to work through [https://youtu.be/xWTc8xuHX00?list=PL- XXv-cvA_iDbtIylJDpPPJfa...](https://youtu.be/xWTc8xuHX00?list=PL-XXv- cvA_iDbtIylJDpPPJfaFweeaR-3&t=1111)

<comment><USER11> Thanks, I'm gonna see what can be applied to my own problems

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this trolling? I don't understand most of it and it ends in the middle of the unfollowable explanation.

<comment><USER14> After you reduce it to maximum bipartite matching you just use whatever stock algorithm for bipartite matching you want.

Another comment links to the official writeup. The official writeup says that you can think about it as the "rook subproblem" and the "bishop subproblem" separately. This is the easiest way to think about it imo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not really a maximum matching problem if a greedy algorithm works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which greedy algorithm do you mean?

I meant that bipartite matching was enough for getting the answer, not that the two are equivalent.

<comment><USER14> There's a greedy algorithm explained at the bottom of this post: [https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/3264486/dashboard#s=...](https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/3264486/dashboard#s=a&a=3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How did you make the animation?

<comment><AUTHOR> I, um, recorded my screen while a loop was running to change values. Its a bit of a hack.

<comment><USER14> What are you using to render the animation then?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Inkscape uses Cairo for rendering. So eventually Cairo.

P.S., thanks for answering some of the questions in here! Guess I should reformulate that last part.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Snappy Dashboards with Redis - <AUTHOR> http://blog.togo.io/how-to/snappy-dashboards-with-redis/ <comment><USER2> This doesn't make any sense to me. Why store the values in Redis and use Ruby to do simple math? If you're using Postgres already, just store the stats in Postgres and use an aggregate or window function to grab the stats. (And collect those stats with triggers, in the first place.) If you're using Mongo already, just grab your stats with a map reduce query.

<comment><USER3> It looks like one of the things they're counting is clicks, so they could potentially have some pretty large datasets.

I don't know how well Mongo's map-reduce works, but in Postgres, COUNT(star) [1] does not perform well for very large tables (e.g. 100 million rows). You wouldn't want to be doing a COUNT(star) once per minute for each customer that had their dashboard open on a plasma screen.

Of course, there are other solutions to that problem: generate the counts on some more feasible schedule and cache them; have a read replica used for analytics queries; shard by customer and have no large customers.

I don't know whether their scale strictly requires the Redis solution, but in any case there are situations where it's not as simple as "throw it in Postgres and use an aggregate function".

[1] "star" instead of an asterisk to avoid HN thinking I'm trying to write in italics.

<comment><USER4> Note that recent versions of Postgres can now COUNT against indices so no need to do a full table scan.

<comment><USER3> This certainly helps, but if your indices are several GB in size, even an index scan is a nontrivial expense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is cool and, I believe, a good strategy for many things.

> If Redis isn't available, for whatever reason, we could rebuild the gaps > from the canonical data in Mongo. We've never had to do this.

I'm not sure this is so straight-forward.

So, this is a guest post by Sqoot hosted by togo.io, who owns the redistogo.com. Can anyone explain redistogo.com's pricing? I understand the value in not running your own service dependencies, but the redistogo.com prices seem really high to me. I was under the impression redis is fairly easy to manage. What kinds of operational tasks does redistogo.com perform for a redis instance that would warrant such high prices?

<comment><AUTHOR> I pinged the guys over at RedisToGo to get you some more clarity on the pricing.

Speaking for ourselves, we've historically preferred to have someone else manage our infrastructure. Setting up Redis is fairly trivial, I agree. However, setting up a secure machine out on the internet and making sure it's always there is less trivial. Rather than juggle an ops/engineer role, we just double down on engineering. I'm sure at some point this may need to change. Hopefully, when that day comes we can afford a sysadmin!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a pretty standard way to handle counts and doesn't seem to have much to do with redis. In an SQL database you'd just do it with a trigger and your application wouldn't need to know a thing about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never used SQL triggers. We host our Postgres database with Heroku. As a result, I think I've ruled out database level solutions.

On a related note, it feels good to know that everything our app needs to run is in the code base. Back in my C# days, I remember relying on stored procedures that were configured manually at the database level. Rails fights that with migrations and the callback chain too, so I guess that thinking has sunk in for me.

Thanks for the comment.

<comment><USER6> > We host our Postgres database with Heroku. As a result, I think I've ruled > out database level solutions.

What does hosting with Heroku have to do with using a trigger?

> On a related note, it feels good to know that everything our app needs to > run is in the code base.

Except the database schema and any additional indexes you need to make it not perform terribly. All basic setup, just like creating triggers.

> Rails fights that with migrations and the callback chain too, so I guess > that thinking has sunk in for me.

The problem with doing stuff like this in a callback is that an additional query is sent to the database which can be a big performance problem if the insert load is high. I generally agree that complex logic should be avoided in triggers and is better left in the application code in most cases but incrementing a counter is about as simplistic as you can get.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well thanks for the insights. I'll keep triggers in mind when I come across a problem like this in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like the typical caching approach to me, "avoid making big queries by caching your data in a ram-based key-value store" .. so this is pretty much common knowledge amongst webdevs since LiveJournal introduced memcached back in 2007?, or am i missing something ?

</comment><comment><USER8> This works great, one thing I've started doing is caching those mget's in memcached. Redis is fast, but it's also single threaded and depending on how you're using it can become cpu bound, causing timeout errors while busy redis instance handle lots of write/reads... so similar to mysql - i've started guarding multiple redis reads with single memcache get... feels crazy, but maybe correct?

<comment><USER9> I'm surprised that Redis cannot handle your traffic. What are you throwing at it? Or are you on EC2, with frequent BGSAVEs or AOF enabled on an EBS volume?

<comment><USER8> rackspacecloud - no AOF only BGSAVEs currently my save frequency is:

      save 1900 1
      save 1300 10
      save 160 10000

Perhaps there's a better way for me to tune this? Most of the data I store in redis is temporal so I don't mind losing it, but I do store stats for usage of features for reporting in my admin dashboard similar to how this article describes and that stuff i would like to keep around but if i lost a few hours or even a day i'm not going to lose sleep.

I should add, I also use redis to handle some pretty large calculations... zrange's for distance calculations intersections and so on... I did some benchmarking and found that at least in ruby (1.9.3), this was more efficient to load up redis for the sets and sorting, fewer GC hits and faster sorting intersecting... I'm thinking it might be good if for these one off frequent compute tasks, I run on a redis instance that has no save, especially considering I expire/delete the keys immediately after running my calculations.

<comment><USER10> Tried running the redis benchmark app to see how your figures compare to other published stats?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been working on a dashboard that uses Redis as well. Just wondering, why not take advantage of sets/lists/zsets for your date-related keys. With lists you can do an easy LRANGE instead of that loop of GETs you're doing now.

Also, if you don't do this already, look into using bitsets to track users. As long as userID's are integers, it's real easy it saves a _lot_ of space.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nothing specific about redis or new here. Of course if you can easily cache a pre-calculated value, that'll save you time and CPU.

<comment><USER13> Well, to be fair, the cached counts are incremented by Redis through the incr command. So, no pre-calculation here. It can be interesting also to aggregate metrics of floats using the incrbyfloat command.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why not store & update count in database. Rather Redis. Also I could never appreciate the redistogo. I can get much powerful redis instance on EC2 for much lesser price.

</comment><comment><USER15> nitpick: "The values are almost inconsequential since THEIR just numbers" should be either THEY ARE or THEY'RE

<comment><AUTHOR> Good god. I can't believe I missed that. Thanks. I'll make sure that gets fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is exactly what I'm building <http://www.instahero.com> to solve. You don't have to build your own infrastructure, just write the relevant bit of code (or select a template) and you have a dashboard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing. I agree with @bunkat here (though I didn't read the whole page). I find the language around analytics apps (including big boys like Mixpanel) to be generally vague. If you're catering to a primarily developer audience, you may consider just showing me how easy it is. StatHat does a good job of this.

<comment><USER16> Very true, thanks. Here's a sample: [http://www.instahero.com/blog/2012/10/11/using-instahero- gai...](http://www.instahero.com/blog/2012/10/11/using-instahero-gain-insight- user-onboarding/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use Fnordmetric - Ruby/Redis dashboard. Works great.

<comment><USER18> Please always include a link: <https://github.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric></comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Please provide feedback for fonefu.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.fonefu.com

<comment><USER3> Firstly, as always, congrats for making this happen so far. Two things pop out for me:

1) The brand, url etc is all about Phones and nothing about Books. Do you plan to expand the service into other areas? Because right now it sounds like it will cut your phone bill in half, not your next Malcolm Gladwell purchase.

2) As phones evolve, will your target market be dwindling. Can I go online with my current phone and look up Amazon while I'm in the bookstore? If I can, why would I call you? If I can't, surely it won't be long before I can - <USER2> then, why would I call you?

But hey, you've got a revenue model, so who am I to question the niche you seem to be servicing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Jacob, thanks for the comments.

1) Yes, that was intentional. I'd like to take this to serve different types of media, and possibly extend to UPC (although the haphazard ways that UPCs are assigned makes this task difficult). If there is any way I could make the purpose clearer short of changing all of my branding, I'm open to suggestions.

2) Yeah, for sure. This isn't necessarily for the early adopter crowd. That said, there are many people without smart phones who have no idea this service exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea. I am probably a member of your exact target market: I often wander into a bookstore or library to kill time, but don't always have a notepad with me to jot down titles that look interesting. If I had an iPhone I'd use Amazon's app, but I don't.

I could barely understand the synthesized voice (there was a lot of hissing and other artifacts when I called; I'm nearly certain they weren't on my end of the connection).

I tried a few ISBN's of books I recently purchased on Amazon and fonefu found all 3 titles, but it only gave a price on the one that was available directly from Amazon. I don't know if this is intentional on your part, or a limitation of whatever Amazon API you are using, or what. At any rate perhaps you could make the limitation more clear?

When I went back to the website, I typed my phone number in the 555-555-5555 format like the example. However my login attempt was rejected a few times before I thought to try 5555555555 instead.

As a non-Friendfeed user I am left wondering why Amazon wishlists aren't also supported as an export target. Maybe another API limitation (not your fault)?

I'm going to add the 877 number to my phonebook - if the voice becomes easier to understand I may become a regular user.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are totally my target audience - I had better make you a regular user :)

The synth voice is less than ideal, I'm looking at other options, but they get expensive quickly. One possibility is to use a better codec on the web server. Added to the 'todo' list.

The number - That is a strange bug, I thought I had fixed it a while back. I'll correct it soon.

I'll have to look into wishlists - exporting them is a neat idea, and probably won't be a lot of work if the API support it.

Thanks for your thoughts. As you continue to use it, please feel free to give me feedback: email@example.com.

<comment><USER5> You could at least have a greeting and some options read by a real person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I enjoyed being able to clearly learn what your product does in 4 easy steps.

However, step 1 (No registration required) is not a step. It told me what not to do, which is confusing. I recommend making it "how it works" in 3 steps, with a bubble or callout saying "no registration required!"

Also, step 4 made me think I should buy the books in the store, which is exactly what you don't want them to do... The icon (books in shopping cart) and words "Purchase your books" don't clearly tell me to drive home empty handed.

I like the concept, would definitely check it out if I was more of a frugal shopper, but I often just buy in store to have the instant gratification.

congrats on getting this out there! That's a great accomplishment in itself

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points on the copy. 3 steps + a 'no reg' badge or something makes sense.

One point of fonefu beyond just the cost savings is the ability to keep a record of books you might be interested in buying later - things you lookup are stored on fonefu.com or your friendfeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just an idea. Could you extend this so that I could send a text with an ISBN number or numbers and you would return a text with the prices.

I hate the idea of trying to hear a robotic voice in a busy store and then having to write the price down on the back of my hand while holding the phone in my third hand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, good idea, and that's one service we definitely plan to offer. Meanwhile, one thing I might add is the ability to enter an email address and have the service email you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Initial thought: I like this idea. I might actually use it.

I tried it out. The robot voice is a bit hard to understand, but I doubt there's much you can do about it.

I signed on at the website and tried to enter the phone number in the format XXX-XXX-XXXX and it failed to log me in. When I removed the dashes it worked fine. Weird?

Also, on Firefox 3/Ubuntu, the 'add to cart' link goes onto the second line (overlapping 'delete') and didn't seem to do anything when I clicked it.

When I deleted an item, it was gone and there's no obvious way to get it back.

You might want to allow people to add items to their cart from the web interface somehow (paste link to Amazon page?)

The website's favicon is very weird.

Cool idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll have to look at FF3 on Linux. Thanks for the pointers. The phone number parsing has a bug - I'll fix it soon.

Thanks for all of the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great concept!!!

This is exactly the type of thing that I would use given that I do not have an iPhone (or something similar). Even if I did have an iPhone, I think the convenience of punching in the ISBN and getting a direct answer trumps having to launch Safari, navigate to Amazon.com, do a search, select the title, pinch (zoom in/out), etc.

I'm definitely going to try this one out (and this is coming from a hard core skeptic!).

I would suggest adding an SMS interface. Also, if I could get an email reminder of the books I was looking for then that would be pretty cool as well. Also, if I could get some information about discounted bundles then it would be a sure thing for me to actually use regularly.

I agree with JAcobAldridge's comment about a dwindling market. My suggestion in response to this would be to build an iPhone/Android/[whatever] app next and keep all channels open.

<comment><USER10> FWIW, Amazon has an iPhone app that makes it pretty easy to look up books and other merchandise, including a team of mechanical turks that'll look up photos of unidentified products to find info on 'em.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats on launching a service that should be very useful to lots of people.

Have you seen Amazon's TextBuyIt? [https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/productsServices?sn=te...](https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/productsServices?sn=textbuyit/o)

What are your plans for the future of this service? Anything that would make me want to use it over Amazon's service?

<comment><USER11> Since it wasn't clear in my previous comment, Amazon's TextBuyIt is the exact same service but via SMS and you can purchase via SMS too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Two thoughts: 1\. You might want to tell the user of other books similar to the one she queried for (this could be a reason to call, simply because the user wants to see more books of th esame kind in the store).

2\. There should be a reverse service too; which lets you browse books at the store depending on what you looked at Amazon from home.

</comment><comment><USER13> There are retail places where I am price-sensitive when shopping. Borders isn't one of them. I'd worry that the positive comments you're getting here are very biased towards the HN audience.

The place where I'm most price-sensitive when shopping is probably Best Buy.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool.

A little recommendation would be for you to create a sample account using the "555-555-5555" number you default to in the login field. That way, curious people who are interested in the interface can click through and see what they're going to get.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

Thanks a lot for the comments! - all of the feedback is insightful.

I will let the community know when I make the updates.

</comment><comment><USER15> This seems like just the type of app Twilio was built to be built upon. Are you guys using their API, or something you rolled on your own?

<comment><AUTHOR> Rolled our own - we started this before we knew of Twilio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looking fwd to trying this out next time I'm in a bookstore. Very interesting!

</comment><comment><USER17> First thought about the name: Phone-f*ck-you

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, if my current idea doesn't work out, I could just fonefu.com as a site to complain about cell phone contracts :)</comment></comment>


RIP Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5838847/steve-jobs-is-dead

<comment><USER2> They were too sad to update the date before publishing <http://cl.ly/3l1x2b1v2y2t0p3f2m09> (They since fixed it; Sept 9 was the date of the accidental CBS tweet: [http://www.tmz.com/2011/09/09/steve-jobs-apple- ex-ceo-health...](http://www.tmz.com/2011/09/09/steve-jobs-apple-ex-ceo- health-whats-trending-cbs-tweet-death-rumor-accident-apology-dying-dead- resignswas-dead/))</comment>


Show HN: Shift for Android – Photo filters made by you - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pixite.shift

<comment><USER2> This looks brilliant! Wish I had an android device to test.

This would be great on iOS 8, which allows developers to bake photo editing tools and custom filters into the stock Photos app.

<comment><USER3> It is available on iOS: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shift-photo-filters- designed...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shift-photo-filters- designed/id939767518?mt=8)

Not sure if it integrates into the photos app, however. That would be good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How do I add a new control point? Are you using opengl for the filters?</comment>


Photoshop is not a verb - <AUTHOR> https://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions/trademarks.html <comment><USER3> It doesn't matter what the actual status of the word in common usage is, they just have to show they are attempting to protect the trademark so that they can litigate to protect it in specific instances.

Adobe thoroughly enjoys the fact that 'photoshop' is synonymous with image editing. They just have to pretend otherwise. See also band-aid, aspirin, Hoover, Kleenex. (iOS capitalized the last two but not the first two)

<comment><USER4> Their legal department might disapprove of it, but their marketing department loves it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Photoshop is a verb.

Adobe's trademark lawyers would very much like it to not be a verb, but it is. They've lost that battle long ago.

<comment><USER6> I think it's an excellent excuse to try to get people to stop making implicit product recommendations and reinforcing a de facto standard (monpoly?) when they are really just trying to say "photo editing".

Adobe's Creative Suite is a little pet peeve of mine. Many people I know have it illegally (I'm a student, so that says something about the financial capabilities of my peers), and even if they can afford it they say they don't use it professionally or not enough to warrant buying it. Many are even software developers themselves. Some subjects in the study I do even require using Adobe Photoshop specifically, but kindly ask people to buy it rather than supplying a license "because it's too expensive to provide for everyone". (So they think the students can afford it then? I'm quite certain they're just covertly asking us to violate copyright laws here.) If it's all so terribly expensive and apparently we can't negotiate with this overlord, why don't we try to get rid of this industry standard?

<comment><USER7> $29 per month for the student subscription which includes access to ALL creative cloud products? That isn't expensive at all especially in the context of higher education where a single textbook can cost over $100.

<comment><USER8> I think daily income of an undergraduate level engineer in countries like India is in the 10-15$/day range. It's substantially lower in some African countries. It's pretty strange that the software industry seems incapable of offering software priced by country. Both have marginal reproduction costs. I'd of course recommend using FLOSS software but it's a self feeding vicious circle of "no Photoshop skills no job for you...lol Gimp". I'm pretty sure software "piracy" is gladly accepted in low income countries as long as the corporate/government licenses are bought. That was very much true for Microsoft licenses when I was in Africa. Administrator basically meant Windows-Administrator which was mind boggling since TCO should be in favor of Linux and the like in low income countries but if there's only a tiny pool of admins the TCO rises compared to Windows (due to accepted "piracy"). I thought it was a very interesting (and sad) phenomenon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sure it is. Thankfully that's not Adobe's decision to make.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here is Google's version of Google is not a verb: [https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/rules.html](https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/rules.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> So your brand got the rare honour of being used in many languages of the world as a verb, burning the brand to peoples heads and then, instead of being damn proud, you publish such a marketing nonsense and slam it in peoples faces? Are you kidding me?? Really, your marketing department thinks this is wrong? Challenge accepted. Let me GIMP your brand out of my mental image.

<comment><USER12> This is not a marketing page. It's a legal page from their lawyers stating how the brand name should be used, such that they don't loose control over their trademark. You better believe they're damn proud of the fact that their name is being used as a verb. They just have to show that they're defending the brand so that they don't loose their trademark. Google and Kleenex are in the same boat.

<comment><USER13> While Kleenex is commonly used to refer to any brand of facial tissue, I've never heard of it being used as a verb.

<comment><USER14> It's been a few years since I looked at a print version of "Writer's Digest," but there would regularly be ads stating Kleenex was a brand name for facial tissue. A number of companies, like Xerox, would do the same thing to protect their trademarks.

As noted elsewhere, while the legal departments hate it, the marketing departments probably love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://imgur.com/a/ot4RV](http://imgur.com/a/ot4RV) Fake news.

<comment><USER16> I Photoshop®ped it :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The lawyers who drafted this must be great fun at parties!

"No smiling, the cake hasn't been cut yet."

</comment><comment><USER18> Using it correctly will only make you look like an Adobe® Photoshop® shill. No thanks.

<comment><USER6> So then don't use it except if it's a necessary detail for the story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's an interesting case from the open-source world.

Apache holds the "Apache Maven" trademark. Apache Maven is a build management/automation tool which uses a lot of "plugins".

The peculiar part is that Apache won't let you name your plugin "maven-<foobar>-plugin" whereas "<foobar>-maven-plugin" is allowed. The wording is:

"Calling it maven-<yourplugin>-plugin (note "Maven" is at the beginning of the plugin name) is strongly discouraged since it's a reserved naming pattern for official Apache Maven plugins maintained by the Apache Maven team with groupId org.apache.maven.plugins. Using this naming pattern is an infringement of the Apache Maven Trademark."

[https://maven.apache.org/guides/plugin/guide-java-plugin- dev...](https://maven.apache.org/guides/plugin/guide-java-plugin- development.html)

To be clear, we're talking about technical naming here, similar to how you'd name a package or an executable file. These names are actually composite, the full plugin name consists of a "groupId" like "com.acme.foo" and "artifactId" like "<foobar>-maven-plugin". For non-"org.apache.maven.plugins" plugins groupdId is mandatory, so "com.acme.foo:maven-foobar-plugin" makes it pretty clear that it's not an Apache development.

I'm a plugin developer who had the bad luck naming my plugin "maven-<foobar>-plugin" before this convention was established. There's an established user base, a lot of documentation, StackOverflow tags etc. There exists also an alternative plugin named "<foobar>-maven-plugin".

But still once in a while I get contacted by someone (from Apache or totally unrelated) who educates me on how the name of my plugin infringes on the Apache Maven Trademark.

I strongly disagree with this and my position was ever since that if Apache wants to enforce this trademark, they are totally welcome to send me a "Cease and Desist" letter. I'll print it out, hang it on the wall and then shut down the project.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm mostly disturbed by the sentence "Since Photoshop is a trademark, you should always use it as an adjective only to describe the Adobe products associated with the Photoshop brand.", as Photoshop is clearly a noun.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have an issue with the whole thing. I think they've already lost the trademark to the language.

      Correct:   The image was enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software.
      Incorrect: The image was photoshopped.

<comment><USER21> I love how they expect people to assert their trademark rights with the ® symbol. Unless this document is aimed at Adobe employees or contractors, that's inappropriate.

<comment><USER22> Ya, this is bordering on REALTOR® level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I remember reading on Kelloggs box: If it doesn't say Kelloggs on the box, it's not Kelloggs in the box.

Where I live many people call Kelloggs any cereal boxes. I though they should have been proud that their every such product is called by their name.

Pampers also comes to my mind - almost no one calls them diapers - <USER2> pampers be it from any manufacturer.

<comment><USER24> I'm googling how to photoshop this image of pampers & kelloggs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Columbia Journalism Review used to have full-page advertisements from Xerox that read, "You can't Xerox a Xerox on a Xerox. But you can make a copy on a Xerox-brand copier."

It was effective, in that I remember the ad many years later. But it didn't do much to change the way people use language.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand how this is a bad thing, I mean to Google is a verb, to Photoshop ® is to edit photos, it means that their product is the absolute best in its category so much so that it became a verb. Most startup folks would kill it to have their product be a synonym with a verb.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yes it is. And so is google, and table.

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY](https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY)

</comment><comment><USER28> Not even the title of the article. A little click-bait-y. Expected a blog post from Adobe or something, not to be redirected to their trademark page.

</comment><comment><USER29> It reminds me of "Legos".

It is a shibboleth, and the "Lego community" is incredibly serious about it, to the point of incivility, but who cares?

<comment><USER30> [https://twitter.com/LEGO_Group/status/842115345280294912](https://twitter.com/LEGO_Group/status/842115345280294912)

But interestingly, everyone I know in Germany says "Lego bricks/stones" (translated to German, of course) but not "Legos" \- but maybe it helps we can/must contract many words to one :P

<comment><USER29> Everyone I know in Germany says "Legos".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone know when this guidance was first released? I see it cited as far back as 2004 but I seem to remember it earlier than that.

</comment><comment><USER8> If only Gimp wasn't so odd to use as a verb. Perfect time to start a "Adobe says don't photoshop it" campaign :)

</comment><comment><USER32> NYT: Photoshopped or Not? A Tool to Tell

Wikipedia: ... the word "photoshop" has become a verb as in "to Photoshop an image," ...

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if Xerox went through the same mental gymnastics on their path down the drain?

<comment><USER34> Xerox went to great lengths to prevent their trademark becoming generic in just this way. In the west, they succeeded, and so fell into obscurity—but at least with their trademark mostly intact. In India, where we in Australia would use the verb "photocopy", they use the verb "xerox". And a fair few of the machines actually _are_ by Xerox (though far from all of them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Well fine, i'll just say, "this image was fireworked!" Oh wait...

</comment><comment><USER36> lol xD</comment>


Everything I Know, I Learned from Warren Buffett - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/19990701/811.html <comment><USER2> If you had put $10,000 in Berkshire Hathaway when he took control in mid 60's, your shares would be worth more than $50 million today! Today, the company's shares are worth more than $100, 000 a piece `:0

<comment><USER3> To put that in perspective, 5% interest would have netted just over $70k, 8% around $220k and 10% $450k. Absolutely insane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The first rule is not to lose [money]. The second rule is not to forget the first rule." -wb

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of my favorite Buffett quotes: "There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult."

<comment><USER5> I'm thinking WB feels that way because he's super smart and a lot of complicated things really are simple for him. He's able to see through to the root of problems where others get distracted by the noise.

Reminds me of this one from PG: _"I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent."_</comment></comment>


Show HN: Using 3D CSS transform to make a "live screenshot" - <AUTHOR> http://scalatutorials.com/?3d <comment> grey-area For the confused (I initially only saw a sign-up form and thought it was required, and came back here disappointed) - if your browser window is below 1300px or so wide, the live demo won't show up. When it does show up it is quite subtle - in the screen of the generic background image is an editable code snippet, transformed with CSS so that it is skewed and appears to be in the picture. You can type and run code in that laptop window screen.

Note to the site author - you should put the live screen flat below the sign- up form even when the screen is smaller. Changing window size should not remove information from your page, just move it around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, good idea, will do!

p.s. due to HN front page traffic probably the service that does the execution of the code seems to have been knocked down... (scalakata.com, an amazing project by the way, not mine, source on github). sorry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> This is really cool!

Two minor bugs, which are probably two manifestations of the same underlying issue:

1: The screen is centered correctly but the lower left and lower right corners are slightly too far down compared to the screen graphic. (This is with a maximized Chrome window on a 1920x1080 screen.)

2: If the window's not minimized, and I slowly make it narrower or wider, the point at which the live screenshot appears (instead of the static white screenshot) has a problem - the simulated live screen is slightly too small and doesn't fill up the entire laptop screen. The live screen's top right corner is positioned correctly. The problem goes away as I make the window wider and the live screenshot expands (and vice versa).

<comment><AUTHOR> Just noticed #1 too, fixing it...

It's hard! :)

Though I found a generic formula, apparently I need to work on it!

Thanks

EDIT:

fixed the perspective attribute to follow screen width

one open issue is that for some 4:3 resolutions, the sizes are wrong (the background stop resizing for some ratios)

still needs some work. but the real thing will be to find the generic formula for any background, and any location on the screen...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For me the actual 'live screenshot' seems to be at a random position in the page, not lined up with the screen of the laptop in the picture.

Nice idea, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I tested only on latest Chrome + Firefox... May I ask which browser did you use?

<comment><USER4> Similar problem, using Version 30.0.1588.0 dev-m.

As I resize my browser the screenshot position moves (such that it never fully lines up). It's always near the laptop screen, but depending on the width of the browser it's always off either in size or position.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pushing a version that should fix it... please let me know if it does the trick... thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This just brings me to some spam about subscribing for a scala tutorial, c'mon HN.

<comment><USER6> There's a demo on the page. The macbook's monitor is interactive

<comment><USER2> The browser window has to be some minimum width, otherwise the page defaults to a static image of the guy editing some code in a generic text editor.

<comment><USER5> Ah I see, thanks it's working now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Embedded GPU: what are they hiding? - <AUTHOR> http://airlied.livejournal.com/73337.html

<comment><USER2> I think its great when people see more to gain by being open and collaborating. Its also fine with me when they choose to act on their own and proprietarily. While I'd rather have things cost less, sometimes you don't get a thing at all if people can't make a profit making it.</comment>