Keywhiz: Square's system for distributing and managing secrets - <AUTHOR> https://square.github.io/keywhiz/

<comment><USER2> Coincidentally Coda Hale's sneaker ([https://github.com/codahale/sneaker](https://github.com/codahale/sneaker)) just popped up in my Twitter feed earlier. Sneaker stores the secrets on S3. Keywhiz stores the secrets in a central database and then ephemerally on the client servers. I guess if you started with something like sneaker on AWS using Amazon's KMS you could then move to Keywhiz if you eventually moved out of AWS.

<comment><USER3> You'd probably still want to use Sneaker until you were massive, even if you moved out of AWS. S3 provided tremendous value compared to its costs (3 cents/month/GB for storage, requests are cheap as well) compared to EC2.

<comment><USER4> Though the sneaker page makes it very clear that its not ready for production use.

<comment><USER5> I don't think "Keywhiz should be considered alpha at this point" really screams production ready, either. For me, the Sneaker README's detailed enumeration of which threat models had been thought over really helped inspire confidence, as did the acknowledgement that no professional cryptographers had evaluated its soundness (most people just ignore this idea and rampage onwards unencumbered by reality). I believe that both are probably better than storing plaintext keys and passwords at rest in Git or on developer machines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow this looks great! If the whole online payment system thing doesn't work out for square the engineers there should fire the entire management chain and pivot into a developer services company, because the projects and libraries they publish are just stellar (particularly the Android stuff).

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe I'm missing something, but how do you get the client certificate private key on the e.g. new webserver which allows it to connect and retrieve its server certificate private key? Isn't that the same key distribution problem, just one step removed?

<comment><USER8> [https://github.com/square/certstrap](https://github.com/square/certstrap)

<comment><USER7> I saw a reference to that PKI package in the linked article, but it doesn't really answer the question.

A newly brought up server can generate its own private key and issue a key signing request to a certificate authority, but how does the CA server authenticate the request? You still need a shared secret (perhaps implicitly through the username / password of an administrator doing things manually).

Any way you cut it, I don't see how you avoid this problem outlined in the article: "Common practices include putting secrets in config files next to code or copying files to servers out-of-band. The former is likely to be leaked and the latter difficult to track."

I do take the point made by some of the sibling comments that this allows for better mitigation of the damage in the case of the loss of the bootstrap shared secret, and I can certainly see the value in that.

<comment><USER9> You can solve this by having a bootstrapping process that issues the appropriate credentials when bringing up a new server.

<comment><USER10> And how do you trust the identity of the new server/instance during boot strapping?

<comment><USER11> You could leverage the TPM and some version of remote attestation and only permit key-requests from attested machines. Alternatively (or concurrently), you could PXE boot all devices with a parameterized shared-secret individualized for each node.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _KeywhizFs is a FUSE-based file system, providing secrets as if they are > files in a directory. Transparently, secrets are retrieved from a Keywhiz > Server using mTLS with a client certificate._

I hope this doesn't bring their entire infrastructure tumbling down when a network problem causes processes to block while reading from the mount point.

<comment><USER13> There's an in-memory cache that keeps the secrets locally even when the server disappears either due to downtime or network issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also coincidentally, this was just released today -- Credstash: a utility for managing secrets using AWS KMS and DynamoDB. Written in Python. [https://github.com/LuminalOSS/credstash](https://github.com/LuminalOSS/credstash)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh thank goodness! I was about to have to implement something like this using S3 signed requests, ramdisks, etc. I owe somebody a beer! (or coffee)

</comment><comment><USER15> Previous short discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9375620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9375620)

</comment><comment><USER16> I want this in a smartwatch.

</comment><comment><USER17> mm it says "java" :(

<comment><USER18> People downvote this, but there's a couple good reasons it shouldn't be in Java.

This doesn't need to be a complicated service. You could write an alternative to Keywhiz in bash in a weekend. This is a tremendous win over Java because 1) it's interpreted, so modification is trivial and fast, 2) it's a commonly known language by nearly everyone on *NIX platforms, 3) it's simple to troubleshoot, 4) highly extensible and 5) fast to develop with.

In terms of how to do this securely, you could of course still write it in bash and use FUSE to distribute your secrets, but why? Personally i'm more of a fan of push services when it comes to opening up what is literally all the keys to your kingdom. Design a host-and-user-and-service-specific trigger that can request the key server push the proper credentials to the machine and you avoid opening up your server to attacks on open services.

If you want to keep your secrets from getting on disk (and honestly, this isn't a concern for most servers as 99% of them are on all the time and will more readily leak secrets from memory than from disk), just push the secret to a tmpfs mount. The only annoyance is when your machine reboots each service's init script needs to request the secret be pushed, but I can't imagine that takes any more time than doing the same thing through Keywhiz.

I know the draw of writing everything imaginable in your favorite language. I used to write all my tools in Perl, but it turns out that's annoying for people who have to admin my services later that don't write Perl. For really simple admin tools like this, Bash is really the best thing for you. (Though i'll admit, some web app language more secure than Bash to handle the client->server requests would be handy)

<comment><USER19> The downvotes are likely the result of not adding anything to the conversation.

More specifically to your point, I strongly disagree. People should build systems in their favorite language if the language fits the use case. And usually, the language chosen isn't as important as being familiar enough with the language that your solution is clear and well written.

However, contradicting myself for a second, bash is probably not a great choice to build complex systems. The problem with bash is that it's easy to write something that works, but it's much harder to change it and keep it working. Bash is very powerful for one liners, but the second your program grows, you start to miss all the nice things that most general purpose languages have. And another problem I've ran into with bash is that not all *nix systems actually have bash, and even those that do have many different versions which make it hard to write a large code base that works without issue across different services. Even more so when people tend to use non-bash binaries, and then you have to write up a script to install the dependent binaries, and have to make it work for different package managers and the complications go on and on.</comment></comment></comment>


An open letter to Techcrunch editors - <AUTHOR> http://startupcrunch.org/an_open_letter_to_the_techcrunch_editors_0 This is an open letter to Techcrunch in a last-ditch attempt to bring some sanity back to the main blog in the startup sector!
<comment><USER2> Really great advice.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use proxies? - <AUTHOR>

Yes or no, how, and why? <comment><USER2> 1.) Yes. Almost always.

2.) I use ssh to the tunnelr.com proxy/vpn service. It's usually just a socks5 proxy link bound to the internal interface or localhost. Using a VPN service is very useful since I get a choice of exit nodes all over the planet which really helps a lot when traveling. I do a simple hop count (tracert) to a few physically close nodes and pick the closest available node.

[https://tunnelr.com](https://tunnelr.com)

If you don't like using ssh, they also support IPSec, L2TP, PPTP, OpenVPN, and plain old unencrypted SOCKS (4a/5).

3.) My only real choice for ISP is Verizon Wireless, a cellular phone network, through an G3 (EVDO) or G4 (LTE) dongle. Verizon Wireless does all sorts of strange mangling, shaping, and recompression on network traffic (such as degrading images with higher compression ratios). The reason why they do this is simple; they expect the end device to be a smart phone, and it is in the vast majority cases, except for their dongle based customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, I proxy some of my work ssh connections so I can access them despite working from home.

Yes, when I'm working from the library, I proxy all my work ssh connections over a ssh connection to my personal vps, because the library seemingly blocks everything except dns/http/https; sshd on my personal vps listens on port 443 for this very reason.

Yes, at work we use CloudFlare to proxy our website.</comment>


Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb - <AUTHOR> http://fooledbyrandomness.com/SITG.html <comment><USER2> For somebody who wrote 'Fooled by ..' one of my favorite books of all time, he certainly doesn't seem to suffer from self-doubt when it comes to stating his personal hypotheses. I can look past his condescending tone (especially towards the wealthy and 'pseudo' intellectuals), but his certitude in his own ideas -- especially after pressing home the point that we are surrounded by randomness -- tarnishes his punditry in my view.

<comment><USER3> I read Fooled and Black Swan and I'm just going to admit it: I don't get it. I mean, I think I understood both books. But can someone explain why they're supposed to be so revelatory? I found them to be... something else.

Many, many smart people seem to swear by Fooled. Why? What am I missing?

<comment><USER4> Fooled by randomness is his best book, but it's probably getting replaced by Robert Frank's book "Success and Luck" on my recommendation list for that topic.

It's just a good reminder that you might be luckier than you think and that skill doesn't fully explain the successful achievements.

Black Swan is seriously hard to read through; his arrogance is insufferable. The point he's making is fairly self evident; the book just got published at a very appropriate time.

You can get by without reading, or thinking about, his writings. He doesn't deserve the level of fame he has achieved by all standards.

<comment><USER5> I also found his arrogance in Black Swan insufferable - enough that I lost all taste for his writing. I saw him talk in person in my building when he was promoting Anti-Fragile, and I was also not impressed. Do you still recommend I read Fooled By Randomness?

<comment><USER6> I would.

Do you think highly of Mandebrot? Clearly a deep thinker. Most of his writings are filled with his self references.

<comment><USER5> My own academic papers have a decent number of self references, too. But there is an enormous difference between referencing your own work, and telling the reader that the author is brilliant and those other people over there are stupid.

<comment><USER6> Ok, so what your call be about Benoit pointing out how smart he is making me feel non-brilliant?

<comment><USER5> I am honestly not sure what you are saying. I never brought up Mandelbrot, only Taleb. (Although this is a curious example, since Taleb brings up Mandelbrot a lot.)

<comment><USER6> My clumsy attempt was to draw a parallel between to authors who do a comparable amount of self congratulation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The chapter about minorities ruling majorities was really insightful. He mentioned how if even a small percent of people become anti GMO, then GMOs will die out. A scary thing to keep in mind with the whole "label it" debate that was on here a few days ago.

<comment><USER8> That only works if GMOs don't have a significant advantage over non GMOs. And if they don't (in terms of price, properties, etc) then there's really not much point to them, no reason to get excited.

<comment><USER7> They don't have a significant advantage. The price of non GMO food is only slightly higher. Most of the cost of food is from processing and transportation, not at the agricultural level.

But to the farmer, GMO yields are significantly higher, and can be the difference between making a profit or a loss. It also means less use of pesticides, and safer pesticides, among other possible advantages like disease resistance. On a world scale, we produce more food with less land, which is definitely good. And especially important for the third world.

The future of GMOs also has a lot of potential. We could engineer plants with many times greater photosynthesis, or the ability to grow in salted land, to not be damaged by frost, etc.

<comment><USER8> If all the factors you mentioned don't lead to a big price difference, then that's the market telling us that they don't really matter. If production is cheap, then there's a lot of supply, and there's little to be gained by optimizing supply.

I stand by what I said. You cannot simultaneously have GMOs that are a significant improvement overall without them negating the "minority" argument, and ones small enough to be undermined by a vocal minority shouldn't matter.

"many times greater photosynthesis, or the ability to grow in salted land, to not be damaged by frost"

If any of those were a real problem, then production would be a greater percent of the final cost. If changing those doesn't really change the final product price, then they're not important.

<comment><USER7> Just because something is only a small portion of the final product, doesn't mean it's negligible overall. If say it raises the price of food by 10%, that's 200 billion dollars lost in just the US. Probably the price increase is smaller than that, but it would still be a non trivial amount of lost value.

And again, the real issue is with third world countries, where the price of food can mean life or death. These countries depend on the first world to innovate in things like GMOs. If we stop doing that, because people won't buy them, we hurt the world's poor disproportionately.

<comment><USER8> 10% of the price is enough to prevent a vocal minority from blocking it, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here are two Facebook posts from Taleb related to the topic and a ~3 minute video that has the main point.

"The _establishment_ composed of journos, BS-Vending talking heads with well- formulated verbs, bureaucrato-cronies, lobbyists-in training, New Yorker- reading semi-intellectuals, image-conscious empty suits, Washington rent- seekers and other "well thinking" members of the vocal elites are not getting the point about what is happening and the sterility of their arguments. People are not voting for Trump (or Sanders). People are just voting, finally, to destroy the establishment." \- 7th March - [https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153654273663375](https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153654273663375)

"What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi- intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label- driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons. Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren't even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call "rational" or "irrational" comes from misunderstanding of probability theory." \- 9th March - [https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153658794008375](https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153658794008375)

"Nassim Taleb: Skin in the Game" \- 2m48s - 22nd April - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uc4DI- BF28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uc4DI-BF28)

<comment><USER4> Seems like he's gone full ZeroHedge

<comment><USER10> Except this guy is a _known_ and reputable expert in economics. He's worth listening to unless you fear he may be shorting his readership (joking).

<comment><USER4> Nitpicking: he's an asset allocation/market expert, not an economics expert. His PhD is in finance, not economics. There's a significant difference.

<comment><USER10> Significant perhaps in the statistical sense. The domain is the same. I believe he is also a professor of mathematics. He has some eminence in this area in any case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I look forward to reading his book. His writing style is good but not great.

I'm surprised about a lot of accusation of arrogance,etc...

From what I have read his arrogance, might be misconceived as he is willingness to call out anybody on what he perceived as their BS. We need more people to call others out on their BS. (US elections, MSM, cnbc, Mosanto, wall street...)

Anybody that open comes out and says Saudi Arabia is a barbaric / terrorist state, (which the US Gov, seems to over look for years) questions the Federal Reserve, teaches at community college. Constantly, open sources his books and math. Probably isn't part of the establishment and hence might be driving peoples dislike.

Of course most people on Wall St. don't like him because they don't understand his theories or his thoughts.

He has great twitter feed. (He retweeted me once!)

<comment><USER12> The accusation of arrogance is especially ironic coming from the HN crowd, who assume themselves being especially qualified to comment on fields they are not experts on (statistics and economics in particular, but many others as well)

<comment><USER11> Thank you for putting in words, what I have always thought, but never put in actual words or was validated by anybody else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I the only one who doesn't enjoy Taleb's writing style? I find that he tends to use overly complex vocabulary to explain very simple ideas.

<comment><USER14> When I tried to read Antifragile his style seemed rambling and incoherent, darting back and forth between concepts and obtuse metaphors, like a tirade from the coked-up conspiracy nut at every party.

I may need to give it another shot.

<comment><USER15> I don't know how to describe it, but his style is...vintage. More like when I read old books. I'm particularly suited for this writing style and I interpret it fine. People frequently make the same complaints about the way I speak in person when discussing things. This is in no way a claim that I am as smart as Taleb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf](http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf)

this chapter interesting contrasts with this blog post

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/01/setting-the- default/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/01/setting-the-default/)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-

a better writer than me could shortly synthesis what's interesting about the two

the blog post is sort of a defense of cultural warriorism

the chapter seems to expand on it

</comment><comment><USER17> I look forward to reading this book. It would be interesting to have an investigation of the two different kinds of "skin in the game" in this book.

There is a positive spin of the expression, e.g. the entrepreneur, who has skin in the game of his company via his shares and resources. This scenario (ideally) results in eustress.

However, there is also a negative spin of the expression, e.g. an employee, who has skin in the game by being afraid of losing his job. Usually, this leads to distress over the long term.

Hence, if I want to employ someone I face a dilemma: the employee should have skin in the game, but it shouldn't create distress. There's a huge set of options you can go with as the employer, but I wonder if there is an optimal solution.

<comment><USER18> Misalignment of incentives with desired outcomes is often overlooked as a cause of social ills. In general people do what gets them pay and promotion.

Bonuses and shares align owners and employees interests.

In Shaw's introduction to _Pygmalion_ he points out we pay our doctors when we are ill; contrasting this to paying only when well, which Shaw suggests more clearly aligns preventative medicine with doctor's pay.

Or the classic budget underspend resulting in less funding next year, incentivising innefficiency.

'Juking the Stats' is the epitomy. A useful metric, like pupils passing tests when used to allocate budgets becomes the sole object of teaching. Rather than education, the school teaches the test and worse those who are educators are ground down - as Simon's _Pryzbylewski_ finds in _The Wire_.

<comment><USER17> I agree, although bonuses and shares can also backfire (esp. bonuses). There seems to be a mix of extrinsic and intrinsic factors that work well. Do you think there is an optimal solution to make an employee have skin in the game, but in a positive way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thoroughly enjoyed his other book, "Anti-Fragile" and even more enjoy his twitter feed. He may be low on humility factor, but him calling out BS is refreshing, esp. the self-proclaimed vanguards of science whose work in science is filled with holes and/or is sparse.

Read some of the preview chapters, posted here and twitter feed. Fits very well with his writing style and over all theme. I look forward to read this book.

<comment><USER4> For someone calling out vanguards of science, he's light on science himself. He pulled all his "theories" out of his ass, with no empirical support or mathematical deduction.

Fooled by randomness was nice and all, and Black Swan was OK (if you can read past his arrogance), but now he considers himself a "public intellectual", and treats himself as the class of a Nobel winner when he has no more credentials than any other random day trader

<comment><USER20> Probability theory is the queen of science

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The solution to the employee slavery problem is simple: try a part time stint in an industry you can afford to mess up in.

For example, if you can get a job as a non-proprietary trader you get a huge positive expected value. You make $$ - you get a huge windfall. Mess up? You get fired and collect only a small salary. You should make a pact with a couple friends to share he windfalls, and then each of you makes a guaranteed win.

<comment><USER22> That's interesting. Four different trading philosophies, four traders. They're aware of their fallibility. They contract and pour their earnings into an escrow account every pay period. They each receive a basic stipend. At the terminus of the agreement (e.g., 2 years), all earnings are distributed evenly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From [http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf](http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf): "Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on airplanes"

I was _just_ on a flight where peanuts was one of the snack options. (I chose pretzels.)

</comment><comment><USER23> Couldn't finish Black Swan, the same idea, regardless its merits, is discussed on 300 pages over and over again. Highly repetitive, the tone is generally condescending. I didn't like his stories about giving taxi drivers 100 dollar bills and observing their behavior.

</comment><comment><USER24> Taleb has made a career out of distorting and misconstruing the opinions of experts and professionals, whether it's about statistics, option trading, or risk management. He has few is only unique insights. His trading strategies that he allegedly used to make a fortune no longer work.

</comment><comment><USER25> You can see that he enjoys his writing, and I will enjoy reading this book.</comment>


Percival Everett, the Art of Fiction No. 235 (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6948/the-art-of-fiction-no-235-percival-everett <comment><USER2> I really like this Paris Review interview. It illuminates a lot about Percival Everett's character and way of working. He is one of my favorite authors. Sadly not nearly as well known as he deserves.

Long ago, I read God's Country (2003), which was strange and captivating. Erasure (2011) was flat out very funny [1].

His latest book, Telephone[2], which came out four months ago, is top of my "buy next" list (actually, I just ordered it...). Most people don't know it is printed in three different versions, with nearly identical covers. If you order it online, you won't know which version you'll receive [3]!

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/1555975992](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1555975992). Though I'm disappointed the current cover is family-friendly. My original hardback copy from 2011 has this cover: [https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/I/31ieK15vpnL...](https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/I/31ieK15vpnL._SX314_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/1644450224](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1644450224)

[3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/books/percival-everett- te...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/books/percival-everett- telephone.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Brilliant answers, much like the Terry Southern interview with The Paris Review. The fact that Everett kept a crow named Jim is radiant.</comment>


A father knows best: Vint Cerf re-thinks the Internet in Stanford talk - <AUTHOR> http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/february/cerf-rethinks-internet-021111.html

<comment><USER2> I've heard many of the "fathers of the Internet" say that security is the biggest flaw with the architecture of the modern IPv4 Internet, but not a lot of detail on why they think that is, or how it is they think that the _network_ is going to mitigate the effect of billions of lines of code written without regard for security, much of it inherently exposed to attackers.

Ten years ago, one could reasonably argue that traceability was a key Internet security problem. A modern Internet would prevent people from launching anonymous attacks. When I was at Arbor networks, our most interesting competitor was a company called Asta, led in part by Stefan Savage, which had in their intellectual heritage a thesis on stochastic traceback of DoS attacks. Great stuff. But, as it turned out, not 3 years later the majority of non-trivial DDoS attacks were being carried out by organized armies of compromised machines. What's a secure Internet going to do about that problem?

I don't care about this as a practical matter. In reality, Vint Cerf's reimagining of the Internet has little force. The market (rightfully) determines what will be deployed. But it's a little sad to me if part of Cerf's logic is that the End to End Argument In Systems Design has outlived its usefulness --- that is, if he really believes we should concentrate more security intelligence into the network, instead of keeping the Internet dumb and insecure so people can innovate security from the edges.

<comment><USER3> What do you think about the the idea of letting hosts ask the network to drop certain traffic upstream?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wasn't able to pull anything out of this article. Perhaps I read it too quickly. Did anyone get a sense of what sort of re-thinking he has in mind?

Something content-centric, perhaps?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8> (an excellent google tech talk)

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

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. A link to the talk somewhere?

<comment><USER6> The official site has it via <http://soe.stanford.edu/alumni/cerf_lecture.html> (sadly, requires Silverlight)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Chatty – a Slack app that help you stay on top of your networking - <AUTHOR> https://bechatty.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> After discussing WFH issues with friends and colleagues one issue kept popping up -- we kept forgetting certain people existed now that they no longer walked past our desks.

I built Chatty as a tool to remind me to reach out to people in my office, and it's helped me reconnect with a lot of coworkers. I'm checking in with about 10 more ppl a week now :)

</comment><comment><USER2> Future feature request! Map the name of co-workers to the teams they're in so we can keep in track of how much we interact with different parts of our company. Mostly just curious but I have a feeling it'd actually show us that we don't spend our time/comms how we think we do...

<comment><USER3> +1 - maybe leverage channel membership to make this happen automatically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Love the landing page - simple and to the point!

</comment><comment><USER4> Easy to use and greatly useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice!</comment>


Apache Tika – a content analysis toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://tika.apache.org/ <comment><USER2> Tika has been around for ages, and I remember many of the early versions (probably up to 1.2 or 1.3) would completely explode if you threw in a PDF with some UTF-8 characters, or Word documents with many foreign/non-ASCII languages.

Thankfully nowadays the problem I run into the most is memory exhaustion when some client uploads a 500+ MB PDF and expects my cheap Solr SaaS ([https://hostedapachesolr.com](https://hostedapachesolr.com)) to handle extraction for these giant files!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, we are seeing the same problem in Solr User Group discussions. That Tika integration will need to change to something else (with Standalone Tika). Of course, Drupal's Solr module already allows to provide separate Tika, but I guess there is no equivalent Tika SAAS service, so they just point it all at your service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We had a problem where we need to index and make searchable a hundred of thousands of government pdf files, some are as old as 15 years ago.

Tried a bunch libraries and settled with Tika. Although we were a PHP/Node shop, nothing could be compared to the ease of using Tika for this exact purpose.

</comment><comment><USER5> A timely link given there is a current discussion on the trouble with extracting meaningful text from pdfs in another thread on the front page! I look forward to reading the feedback on actual use of this

<comment><USER6> Tika's PDF text extraction is fine if you're just trying to get searchable text. Which is what it's made for: Slurping doucments into Lucene. Fulltext search typically isn't terribly sensitive to getting the order of words right, and is even less sensitive to getting the formatting right.

If you're trying to get something fit for consumption by human (including via a screen reader) or an NLP pipeline, though, all the problems discussed in that FilingDB article still apply.

<comment><USER7> aspose can convert pdf to html

<comment><USER8> Firefox's PDF reader does the same. A few years back, I wrote wrote a pdf to csv converter with selenium -- it worked surprisingly well! Though, after I finished I found tabula and the code became immediately useless, hah.

<comment><USER9> When that happens to me, it's due to a keyword I hadn't thought of looking for. Then, while building the project, it came to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apache UIMA played a key roles in the data intelligence and analytic proficiency of the IBM Watson supercomputer, playing against human champions on the TV show "Jeopardy!" and uses Tika for UIMA annotation.

[https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/apache_innovation_...](https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/apache_innovation_bolsters_ibm_s)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there any website, table or whatever that compiles all/most apache projects and described them in one or two sentences?

Nifi, Flink, Mesos, Kafka, Cascoon, Cordova, Hadoop.

<comment><USER3> It is a VERY long list: [https://projects.apache.org/projects.html](https://projects.apache.org/projects.html)

<comment><USER11> I'm also aware of this one, doesn't have descriptions.

<comment><USER3> The descriptions are behind the link, driven by the DOAP files each project maintain.

But I agree, it would have been nice to have a version of this page with first para of the description inlined in the listing itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just tried this out on a handful of PDFs, comparing it to Calibre's `ebook- convert`

They seem roughly equivalent, neither better than the other. Particularly, both fail the same dehyphenations, a category of error that's extremely frustrating for text-to-speech users. By default tika seems more aggressive when joining split lines, but without good dehyphenation that's not worth much, and some of the lines it joins shouldn't be joined.

Calibre's is also several times faster, but the difference between 1 second and 7 seconds isn't really a big deal for my purposes.

</comment><comment><USER13> If curious, see (small) discussion on HN from 8 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878054)

</comment><comment><USER14> Is Tika any good for MS Word structure?

Apache POI is amazingly complex and undocumented. It is one of the few Java libraries I have ever seen, where classes have setters but no getters, and the hacks you find on Stackoverflow involve reflective traversals and coercion of access modifiers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Last month I had to do a PDF parser and searched a lot for a solution like Tika, but strangely this didn't come up. Cool, I'll test.

</comment><comment><USER16> I only learned of Tika through Dovecot which can use it to include email attachments in it's Full Text Search index using it. Pretty neat stuff.</comment>


So you're learning OCaml - <AUTHOR> http://hyegar.com/blog/2015/10/19/so-you%27re-learning-ocaml/ <comment><USER2> If you are interested mainly in the functional language aspect of OCaml and use Windows, F# is very close to OCaml in syntax/semantics, but has really good support within Visual Studio (a really good debugger for example).

Once you want to use some of the more advanced features (Modules and Functors come to mind), you can switch back to OCaml relatively easily since they are so similar.

<comment><USER3> Any good books or resources for learning F#?

<comment><USER4> [http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/](http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/)

<comment><USER5> I second that along, with fsharp.org and tryfsharp.org.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Additional resources:

[https://github.com/rizo/awesome-ocaml](https://github.com/rizo/awesome-ocaml)

(via: [https://twitter.com/ocamlmooc](https://twitter.com/ocamlmooc) ).

</comment><comment><USER7> I love OCaml the language, but the tooling, especially wrt building (ocamlbuild, Oasis etc) , is horrendous. That said, the situation is much better now, than say 5 years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed.

FWIW I basically use the same _oasis file over and over again, it literally takes only 5 minutes to set up a project's needed boilerplate, _oasis, .merlin and opam directory.

<comment><USER8> Is there any good guides on how to do this? Or are your oasis template files shared online?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just amended the blog post with a cradle to grave example of creating _oasis, .merlin and opam directory for any OCaml project.

<comment><USER7> Very useful. Thank You! I basically gave up on OCaml for anything but toy projects, but I may re consider that decision if this works for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An OCaml MOOC just started yesterday, I think there's still time for people to get in:

[https://www.france-universite-numerique- mooc.fr/courses/pari...](https://www.france-universite-numerique- mooc.fr/courses/parisdiderot/56002/session01/about)

Session 0 is just a lot of introductory stuff (history of OCaml, etc.), so it shouldn't be difficult to catch up.

<comment><USER10> Is there a way to watch the classes and other course material without registering?

<comment><USER11> The registration is free, unless you are weary of sharing your email with a _university

_ (which are pretty good at guarding their students' privacy.. though you should definitely check their policies before signing up)...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm in this course I've been interested in the ML family of languages ever since learning SML which is without a doubt my favorite language ever.

<comment><USER13> I really wish there were an implementation of SML that got some traction. It's a lovely language, but has very few libraries for actually getting anything done.

<comment><USER14> I do not think it is too late for SML necessarily. MLton (the full-program- optimizing compiler) is very competitive with the (one) OCaml implementation.

As someone who did a lot to market certain OCaml libraries, I have seen similar interest in some of the "modern" SML libraries I have played around with. Not a ton of work has gone into both of these, but you may be interested to look at two projects MonoML[0] and SSMLS[1].

These are some /very/ minimal projects I've worked on in SML in the past few months to gauge how well SML might work as a modern, web-friendly, higher- level language. The results are certainly not completely disappointing.

Edit: Oh also! HamletML[2] (yes, written by the 1ML guy) is a very interesting ML implementation that would probably be a great way for work on modern language features. Not that I know what I'm talking about, but it could also provide the framework for an even more powerful backend/optimizing compiler.

[0] [https://github.com/eatonphil/monoml](https://github.com/eatonphil/monoml)

[1] [https://github.com/eatonphil/ssmls](https://github.com/eatonphil/ssmls)

[2] [https://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/hamlet/](https://www.mpi- sws.org/~rossberg/hamlet/)

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, SML has no industrial users. At least, that I've heard of. It's a language that's used mostly in teaching and academic research. First ML I used was SML/NJ in my intro CS class, and haven't seen it since. Whereas OCaml has a many industrial users and is widely deployed. My favorite example is of course management layer for the Xen hypervisor[0][1], but there are more as well[2].

Adam Chlipala has a writeup[3] on comparing SML and OCaml that may be of interest to the discussion.

[0]: [https://github.com/xapi-project](https://github.com/xapi-project)

[1]: [http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2010-icfp- xen.pdf](http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2010-icfp-xen.pdf)

[2]: [http://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html](http://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html)

[3]: [http://adam.chlipala.net/mlcomp/](http://adam.chlipala.net/mlcomp/)

<comment><USER12> What do you think about Manticore? I'm curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like OCaml very much, though I haven't written code in it in the last 10 years, when I taught myself the language a long time ago I very much enjoyed it. I preferred SML/NJ, but that never got any velocity.

It'd be nice to have a job working in OCaml.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone know any good GUI OCaml IDE for Mac (something like RStudio)? Because the plugins for Eclipse and Intellij aren't very good and ocaml-top doesn't seem to work.

<comment><USER18> None exist. So far the best solution is to use Emacs with [2]

* merlin-mode, for autocompletion

* ocp-indent, for external code formating... think running gofmt on every enter press (surprisingly, it's fast enough unless your file is 2k lines long)

* tuareg-mode (everything else, REPL etc.)

* flycheck-ocaml for syntax checking

The "real" IDE plugins aren't even close and that's saying a lot since the hodge-podge of addons I just listed isn't

The default Emacs user experience is awful so if you're a Vim user, just install the "evil" package and enable it inside Emacs by doing M-x evil-mode, then you have Vim inside Emacs. Or use Vim, but the experience isn't as complete w.r.t. tooling[3]. There's always Spacemacs as well[1].

[1] [https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs](https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs)

[2] [https://github.com/the-lambda-church/merlin/wiki/emacs- from-...](https://github.com/the-lambda-church/merlin/wiki/emacs-from-scratch)

[3] [https://github.com/the-lambda-church/merlin/wiki/vim-from- sc...](https://github.com/the-lambda-church/merlin/wiki/vim-from-scratch)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the links! I am currently using Sublime Text with the merlin plugin, which is pretty good. But I guess I should learn emacs to use OCaml.

<comment><USER19> Stick with Sublime Text. As long as you have merlin, the rest doesn't matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Second Drup here, merlin is the key feature. (I didn't know sublime had a merlin plugin)

<comment><USER17> Yeah it's this one: [https://github.com/cynddl/sublime-text- merlin](https://github.com/cynddl/sublime-text-merlin) (The one on Sublime Package Control is the same, but seems to be out of date and doesn't work).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Swift has lots of ML heritage, tho' not as much as F# obv

</comment><comment><USER21> While digging for history I read these slides from David Turner (miranda and other, pre-haskell)

[http://www-fp.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/tifp/TFP2012/TFP_2012/Turn...](http://www- fp.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/tifp/TFP2012/TFP_2012/Turner.pdf)

It's not directly related to OCaml, but it retrace the roots of the ML family too, so I thought it could be of interest.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yes, I'm learning an OCaml dialect. It's called Rust, it's really interesting, you should take a look at it.

<comment><USER23> Is there a good reason to say that Rust is an OCaml dialect?

<comment><USER24> I'd describe it more as uglyfied Haskell, but anyway: [http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional- program...](http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional- programmers.html)

<comment><USER25> It really doesn't have that much in common with Haskell either. It's designed by people who are not oblivious about PL stuff, but it's still pretty thoroughly in the C/C++ world in terms of both syntax and semantics.

It's not a _bad_ thing, but Rust has very little in common with Haskell/Ocaml; aside from stealing a couple of good ideas.

<comment><USER26> I would say Rust's type system has a lot more in common with Haskell/Ocaml than with C++, at least, although it's not quite as flexible as what Haskell offers (a lack of HKT is painful sometimes).

<comment><USER25> I think the similarities are mostly superficial. I mean it has (local) type inference, ADTs, and traits (which are sooooorta like type classes). But, as a Haskell programmer, the Rust type system feels very foreign.

No typeclasses (and associated goodness), GADTs, HKTs, Monadic IO, first class functions, generic deriving, higher rank types, existential type, etc. These are bread-and-butter features in day-to-day Haskell work. Rust's type system isn't powerful enough to build the vast majority of the tools that Haskell programmers use every day.

I don't mean this as a criticism; The Rust design seems solid. But different priorities lead to different trade-offs, and the end result is a very different type system.

<comment><USER27> Traits do a lot of what one can do with typeclasses (they're mostly just different names for the same thing), what differences are you thinking of?

Also, traits objects are existential types, and closures & functions are as first class as they are in Haskell (main difference is a bit more verbosity).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google to own the App infrastructure behind Bing Travel? - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/07/01/google-ita <comment><USER2> The linked article makes a very fundamental mistake. While ITA Software is the search engine "for many major airlines around the world, as well as travel sites such as Kayak, Orbitz, Hotwire and many others", it is not the "reservation systems" for those same companies. It's the difference between being able to search Hacker News and maintaining the database of users, comments, and stories. In fact, "sites such as Kayak, Orbitz, Hotwire and many others" do not have reservation systems of their own.</comment>


Collection of Data for Scientific Article - <AUTHOR> I am a visiting PhD student working on quantum probabilistic graphical models for decision and cognition from the School of Business, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.
I would like to kindly ask you to participate in a decision-making questionnaire (no more than 15 min). The results of which will be used in an article on decision-making in presence of uncertainty. This test is part of a scientific investigation we are carrying out, with the aim of understanding more of the nature and structure of human decisions and behavior. Just fill out your answers to the questions that are asked by choosing among the possible alternatives in the tables in this attached file. Please, consider that there is no correct or wrong answer, so just choose the alternative you prefer.
Thank you for your contribution!
http://decision.limequery.com/survey/index/sid/627595/newtest/Y/lang/en <comment><USER2> Can I get a copy of the results of the study if I participate?

<comment><USER2> btw, the first question made me laugh at myself, lol</comment></comment>


Show HN: Serving Django and Twisted using HAproxy - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/sspross/5433881

<comment><USER2> I was hoping to find a 'why' as well as a 'how'.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, we'll add a "why wood you need this" section soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> there is a working installation under this link <http://test.frog32.ch/></comment>


STEVE JOBS HAS 6 WEEKS TO LIVE - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalenquirer.com/steve_jobs_6_weeks_live_cancer/celebrity/70197

<comment><USER2> wow. i had no idea that doctors have access to technology that lets them predict how long people will live by looking at a few photos. last time i checked, they had a hard time predicting how long people would live even if they've done extensive tests. a friend's mom was supposed to live only six months during a battle with cancer, but she lived three years. god bless that doctor for making totally irresponsible judgment calls.

memo to self: spread the news that the doctor is a quack -- any decent doctor would have refused to speculate.</comment>


Samsung phones are spontaneously texting users' photos to random contacts - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/7/2/17528076/samsung-phones-text-rcs-update-messages <comment><USER2> For any Samsung users who want to try and avoid this until a fix is pushed: 1\. Open settings widget. 2\. Click on Apps. 3\. Click on the Messages app. 4\. Select Permissions. 5\. Toggle 'Storage' off.

<comment><USER3> This causes the app to not open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sound eerily similar to a recent instance when Amazon's Alexa recorded and transmitted a private conversation of a Portland family to a random contact, just a couple months ago. [0]

This is some bad publicity for the tech industry at large. Hope the team at Samsung figures this out soon.

[0] [https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/woman-says-her-amazon- devic...](https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/woman-says-her-amazon-device- recorded-private-conversation-sent-it-out-to-random-contact/755507974)

</comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17445529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17445529) (80 comments)

</comment><comment><USER6> I really hope this bug has a post mortem.

</comment><comment><USER7> Shouldn't the news here be that ppl use Samsung's msging apps?</comment>


Ask HN: How should early-stage companies recruit great software engineers? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, this is my first post on Hacker News, but I read Hacker News pretty much every day.  My name is Josh, and I'm the CEO of Omedix.  Our company's mission is essentially to deliver Web 2.0 to mainstream healthcare.
I am a geek, as are many of my coworkers.  We're based in Scottsdale, AZ which has a decent concentration of technical talent, but nothing close to Silicon Valley or Seattle.  We're looking for engineers who are exceptionally talented and shine particularly well at architecture.  That is, the engineer should be able to take a problem presented by a non-technical person, and translate it into a well-defined and simplified problem that can be solved with a deceptively simple elegant architecture.
"Architecture" is just one skill we're looking for, but it seems to be a proxy for most of the other skills we care about.  We've posted on Craigslist and tried networking around the city.  We're about to try posting on LinkedIn.  Posting on Monster.com was pointless.  A friend of mine who's also recruiting tried posting on Dice.com, but again to no avail.
So here's my question to the Hacker community.  The readers and contributors of this community are pretty much the kind of people we're looking for -- passionate about technology, smart, entrepreneurial, excited about the possibility of making a difference, motivated by the belief that you can do it better than most of the others out there.  So the community is actually a perfect audience for this question, and I believe all of us would benefit from hearing the responses:
What is the best way for early-stage companies to recruit great software engineers?
For further feedback, you can see the current job posting in question at: http://www.omedix.com/careers/software-engineer/
I appreciate your responses, and nice to meet everyone!
Josh <comment><USER2> The offer seems decent, not thousands of skills or specific java frameworks with version numbers :-).

There are many things that makes it difficult for startup to hire great software engineers : \- A startup usually means low to very medium salary.

\- Long working hours most of the time, with zero flexibility in terms of hours. Finish at 9pm come back very early, etc. People have a life and sometimes families. Working 8 hours a day, is almost a crime, even if you only take 10 mins for the lunch. As the company is a family everybody gets to eat together frequently which means one hour lost, leave the job one hour later.

\- A one man show: Usually you have to do everything depending on what's expected or how great you are.

\- Poor recognition as in no real way to advance(cash, tasks, help by hiring new guys) even if the company becomes more profitable.

\- Very short holidays sometimes 2 weeks max per year in some companies. For a very young guy it might not be a problem, but for someone with family in town and abroad it is an issue;

\- Usually in a startup, you don't get to influence strategic discussions. For example, someone might think that some architecture needs some change to follow X or Y specification, but it doesn't matter to his boss "Fake communication. Listen and execute".

\- Young startups often try to play psychologists as they tend to try to understand/predict/control everything around them, which is impossible.

\- Often you need to cope with developers that were around, have influence and make poor decisions. As the new guy comes in, he's not involved in architecture decisions and need to fix trivial, annoying but silly errors for a while.

\- Sometimes there are no meetings. The master plan is known only by the founders and there's nothing explained to the engineers.

\- A startup doesn't usually encourage initiatives, new ideas, modern development practices.

</comment><comment><USER2> I would also add in the offer : \- How many weeks your offer for holidays ? People might want to know for how long they can rest if they'll have to work harder than elsewhere(as in government, some banks, etc.).

\- Approximate range followed by "depending on experience" ? That way a person won't apply and waste his time and yours. If everything seems ok from your perspective and you meet good engineers, then you know the problem is likely the salary offered.

Personally for a startup, that would make a difference, as the position seems interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here are some ideas that might work:

\- Coworkers from previous jobs

\- old classmates

\- friends

\- friends of friends

\- smart people you meet at user groups/conferences

\- mailing the jobs lists at top universities

\- attending career fairs at top universities

Asking any of the above if they know any smart people who are looking for jobs.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was a software developer in Arizona for a while, and it was very very difficult to find decent candidates. I suspect that great developers in Arizona find the dearth of exciting companies a turn-off and leave, as I did. (You've got a GoDaddy, a handful of no-name startups, and ?)

The strategy my company (employee, not owner) ended up using was to hang out in the IRC channel used by our web framework. We were a very developer-centric company, and I think that was attractive to good developers. We hired a couple of people from there on a contract basis, and then moved them out to AZ after they proved themselves. One thing I noticed in your requirements:

> 4-year degree in computer science (or related field) from an accredited > university

I've worked with great developers who have CS degree and great developers who don't. At the very least, I would add "or equivalent experience."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, thanks for the comments.

@brianwillis - I have read the Joel writings before but didn't realize StackOverflow had a careers section. Great pointer!

@manganita - I think you describe a certain kind of startup environment, but certainly not all early-stage companies. I know from the standpoint of having to attract great people, we need to offer a good "product" which means great company potential, nice work environment, reasonable hours, expectation that it will be fun, etc. Certainly, there are times when you just have to go all out to get the work done, but in my experience that quickly exhausts a team and lowers overall productivity anyway.

<comment><USER5> To reply to someone on Hacker News click the "reply" link under their message. This keeps conversations threaded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The obvious first choice for advice is Joel Spolsky's excellent writing on recruitment.

Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?: <http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html>

Finding Great Developers: [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.ht...](http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html)

There's a lot of crossover between the Stack Overflow and Hacker News communities, so Stack Overflow Careers might be a good place to look for actual candidates.

</comment><comment><USER6> Your job posting looks great - the problem might be Scottsdale and the size of the tech community there. It could be that all the entrepreneurial developers there are working on their own projects. Have you thought about reaching out to the Bay Area?

</comment><comment><USER7> You can't. Great software engineers prefer to work in _great_ companies.</comment>


Obituary: Baba Amte - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10757984 This article reminds me that if I really, truly want to "help people" in this world, I have to put my hands in the gutter and not on a nice, clean computer keyboard.<p>Anything else is just trying to put a shiny halo on a moneymaking scheme. <comment><AUTHOR> This article reminds me that if I really, truly want to "help people" in this world, I have to put my hands in the gutter and not on a nice, clean computer keyboard.

Anything else is just trying to put a shiny halo on a moneymaking scheme.</comment>


Apple Music Connect to Shut Down - <AUTHOR> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206651 <comment><USER2> I think Apple Music and the Music app on the phones have become far too intertwined. It feels like I'm using a shareware version of Real Player at times.

<comment><USER3> That's not surprising given how Apple's ever increasing revenue is now from their services business. Apple doesn't care about HN users, it makes sense to integrate the music app with their paid service as it does the same basic thing - plays music. Upselling and enticing users to get access to Apple music in their music app _just makes so much sense_ from business standpoint.

<comment><USER4> Apple is serving their customers here. With iTunes Match you can upload unlicensed songs and have all your music in one place. There's plenty more music than available through Apple Music, Google Music, Spotify, etc.

<comment><USER5> You can do the same in Google Play Music for free. [https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/1143668?hl...](https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/1143668?hl=en)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google APIs Repository on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/googleapis <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool. Right now, there is very little there, but hopefully more will get put up. I've been working with maps a lot recently, and this would be extremely useful if maps were there.

<comment><AUTHOR> As more Google APIs support gRPC, their API definitions will be published.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm still bitter over the shutdown of the "hidden" weather api. I know it wasn't official but come on...

<comment><USER4> Google had its own weather API? Well, I missed out.

I wonder where the data was coming from.

<comment><USER3> I believe it was something that was used in the weather widget in iGoogle.

There was a small blip of outrage at the time but nothing major.

[http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/08/28/did-google-just- quie...](http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/08/28/did-google-just-quietly-kill- private-weather-api/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well I for one hope they put all of their API code up on github so the community can contribute to it. Just have to say, google's youtube api v3 is absolutely awful compared to the delightfully restful API of Github or Twitter.

<comment><USER6> What specifically are the issues with the YouTube API?

<comment><USER5> In particular, they aren't restful or intuitive. If you've never used youtube's api v3, and someone demanded you give a basic explanation of what youtube data should look like, you'd guess:

1\. a user has many (or has one) channels 2\. a channel has many playlists 3\. a playlist has many videos

So naturally, you'd expect the following:

1\. api/v3/channels/teamcoco -> gets you the channel with id "teamcoco" 2\. api/v3/channels/teamcoco/playlists -> gets you all the playlists on teamcoco's channel. Say they have ids [coco-001, coco-002, coco-uploads, ...] 3\. api/v3/playlists/coco-uploads -> should get you the playlist with id "coco- uploads" 4\. api/v3/playlists/coco-uploads/videos -> should get you the videos belonging to playlist id "coco-uploads"

Of course, the real api/v3 has none of that. The full details you'll have to read at the developer console at google, but in rough summary, if you wanted the teamcoco channel, you'd do:

1\. api/v3/channels?forUsername=teamcoco&parts=id,snippet,topicDetails,contentDetails&fields=([forgot- what-went-here])

And you'd get a json that looks like: { ... items: [...], ... }

and all 1 channel with id "teamcoco" will be in items, with playlist info strewn somewhere in topicDetails or contentDetails. Then, when you want playlist information, you have to look at either the /playlist?id=whatever or /playlistItem?forChannel=whatever, depending on whether you wanted playlist metadata or playlist video data.

In all, it's an extremely horrible user experience, and yes, I get it, Google has to split up the data model so youtube can scale. Sure, but then they go about and expose all the details of their implementation in their external developer facing API. And if you've ever worked with other such api that has their innards exposed for the outside world to see, you know to be antsy. Such trashy api is bound to be refactored as soon another "Rockstar" engineer gets hired, so say goodbye to whatever customized adapter/serializer you wind up writing for api/v3 4 months down the road.

<comment><USER6> So far looking at your complaint you just don't like their URL structures.

api/v3/channels/teamcoco vs api/v3/channels?forUsername=teamcoco

api/v3/playlists/coco-uploads vs api/v3/playlist?id=whatever

api/v3/playlists/coco-uploads/videos vs api/v3/playlistItem?forChannel=whatever

The only thing that takes a second to understand is parts=id,snippet,topicDetails,contentDetails but seems really convenient optimize your rate limit usage based on the info you actually need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are there any more details on how Google is designing these new API endpoints? The information here is pretty sparse. It seems like a big strategic initiative to unify API design though.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if they use the protocol buffers definition to validate json over http, or they dupe schemas into json schemas or other format.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle the information mass HN provides you with? - <AUTHOR>

On HN I get very useful hints how to be productive every day. Moreover, I read a lot of highly interesting artlices, with information I want to keep in my mind.
How do you handle this overwhelming amount of information (next to just bookmarking it)? How do you get yourself to actually appyly the hints you get? How do you classify which information is actually useful and which is not?
Too often I read very interesting articles once, but later I will notice that I could have applied the information I got in certain situations, but did not as the article did not come in my mind in this situation. Do you build up a knowledge base or something like that?
Thanks <comment><USER2> I bookmark and post the links I like to my website; which allows me to browse through my reading history every now and then to refresh my memory of what I had read.

Adding search really helps.

</comment><comment><USER3> This comes with experience. As we acquire more life experience, our ability to separate the wheat from the chaff becomes more refined. For example, when I was young, I ranked articles about physics and psychology the same. Now I know the difference.

The above is an obvious example, but it's just meant to show how experience tunes our filters and makes us more efficient at separating the jewels from the trash.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've repurposed a Trello Board into a knowledge base where I put all the interesting info Ive found

I also have another Trello board of to-dos This way, whenever I'm doing something where information on anything in the knowledgebase could apply, I link the card from the knowledgebase to the card for my to do.

Centralization & Context in one nice little package :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have something like a daily routine of reviewing what you bookmarked that day and how much time would you spend on that?

I tried it but spent far too much time on it...

<comment><USER4> By definition, I read stuff and only links that I think will be useful make it into Trello Also, because the links are categorized well, it removes the need to keep going back and reviewing further etc - I only access the info as and when I need it.

The key is in organization & labeling It's not just a random pasting of links into the board I use different lists to categorize broad categories of content & cards as "sub categories" which makes it easier to go back to as and when i need it.

It helps that I always have Trello open in a browser so its quick and easy to paste stuff into the board wherever it belongs and move on with my life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I rarely bookmark anything. Useful information goes straight to Evernote or Instapaper (for longer articles I want to read later that evening). And I tag every item in Evernote to speed up searching.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not all information is relevant to you. Learn to make the difference and you should fine.

</comment><comment><USER7> I categorize everything using Evernote :)</comment>


Maddy – Composable all-in-one mail server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy <comment><USER2> Developer here to answer any questions. Also see [https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy/wiki/FAQ](https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy/wiki/FAQ).

<comment><USER3> FAQ says "Implement a meaningful subset of IMAP for access to local storage."

What subset do you implement? Thanks.

<comment><USER2> Currently it is base IMAP4rev1 specification (RFC 3501) minus /Recent flag plus SASL-IR, APPENDLIMIT, MOVE, CHILDREN, SPECIAL-USE, COMPRESS, UNSELECT and IDLE extensions. Support for CONDSTORE and UIDPLUS extensions is planned.</comment></comment></comment>


GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline - <AUTHOR> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg <comment><USER2> The timeline shows Crunchbang derived from Ubuntu, but the crunchbang site and wikipedia imply if not outright state that it derives directly from debian. My background brain seems to have soaked up the idea that crunchbang derives directly from debian. ?</comment>


Come be a co-founder, No Thank You... - <AUTHOR> http://minicompact.blogspot.com/2011/02/come-be-co-founder-no-thank-you.html

<comment><USER2> \--"I met Mark Zuckerberg in School and he asked me to join TheFacebook and I refused" _Assuming you are telling the truth, you can't see a brilliant business even if its in your face_ \--

Only people who do not actually have to make the choice find such decisions obvious. When Microsft invested in fb most people thought that it was dumb move. But they look smart now when GS is getting people to invest in them at 50B. Which now people think is a dumb move and so on.

Bottom-line, you may have turned down some version of theFacebook already but you would not know till 10 years from now...

</comment><comment><USER3> It's "met", not "mat".

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed thx</comment></comment>


Minimalist RESTful CRUD API with flexible storage in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sauerbraten/crudapi

<comment><AUTHOR> Note: I'm not trying to convince anyone to use it, but rather am looking for feedback. It works as documented, but the source code feels a bit clumsy, especially the handler's declarations.</comment>


Disney and the Future of TV - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2019/disney-and-the-future-of-tv/ <comment><AUTHOR> Companion podcast discussion here: [https://overcast.fm/+BihlQ2Pdw](https://overcast.fm/+BihlQ2Pdw)</comment>


What it took to save the Twinkie - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/07/05/what-it-took-to-save-the-twinkie/ <comment><USER2> I've seen a lot of stories that blame robots and unions for the job losses, and praise the new managment's tough choices, but it is all a distraction.

They reformulated twinkies to have a longer shelf life. This let them fire the distribution channel, and close all but 3 of 40 factories. I haven't tried the new twinkies, but the consensus on slashdot (this is running there too) and elsewhere is that they taste like cardboard.

So, they didn't really save the twinkie at all; they just slapped the brand on a different (and vastly cheaper) product, and now they're prepping for an IPO by running consumer (investor) facing stories like this one.

Prediction: A year or so after this fall's IPO, they burn through their brand equity, sales tank, and the stock collapses.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not just Hostess automating, I think baking in general is becoming increasing automated. I was talking to a COO of a large mill, and he remarked how customers asking for significantly tighter tolerances on the makeup of their various flours because they've automated the whole line and need highly predictable results.

</comment><comment><USER4> You mean the same amount of quality twinkie product was created at a fraction of the cost? And this is why the old company went bankrupt? Sounds like a success story to me!

</comment><comment><USER5> AI/learning startup idea: build an AI to do the role of middle-to-upper management or maybe just the c-suite?

Just think of the profits. sacking a thousand blue collar factory workers won't save much but fire the decision makers (or outsource them) and you'll save an absolute fortune.

I'm not even joking. It's unlikely to happen soon but if this were possible the savings would be amazing!

<comment><USER6> I've always wondered how effective this would be in different industries. In some businesses, leadership exists to make very easily quantifiable (and perhaps therefore more automatable decisions) - answering questions like "Should we build a new factory?; What product lines should we develop?".

Where I work, in consulting, the senior leadership exists almost solely for the purpose of building relationships with customers and bringing in business - really hard for AI without a radical change in the sales model (but I can imagine a sort of Consulting-As-A-Service, given that we already bill by the hour).

I really suspect (and worry from an own-career perspective) that the first thing to be automated will be the number-crunchers surrounding senior management. I spend my time doing things like calculating the marginal effects of extra pay on employee productivity, which is hard largely because most companies have terrible data. Once companies start implementing systems that can effectively and automatically track complex metrics like this, around 80% of my role won't be needed any more, and instead of paying $250/hr for a guy to whack out some R code, companies can get the same service wrapped up in whatever future version of SAP they're using.

<comment><USER7> I heard a story once about how the introduction of power tools was protested by the set builders of Hollywood (and probably Broadway) - they said, "now it takes fewer people to build the same set! we'll lose jobs!"

The reality turned out that people built bigger sets on the same budget, and people with smaller budgets could now build sets.

A large part of the job of programming is automating away the job you're currently doing, so you don't have to do it again. This frees you up to do more, newer things.

I suspect both with hold true for you. What you currently do will be wrapped in an automated layer, and you'll do something similar on a higher layer previously inaccessible.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that's pretty much what's going to happen. My employer just acquired a rival that does exactly that, so now my entire division is gradually shifting to build on their work and automate more and more.

The biggest change internally is what kind of grad degrees people get. 10-15 years ago everyone went for an MBA when they wanted to move up, now more people are getting their Stats PhDs, then coming back and applying their knowledge to problems that would have been the domain of B-Schoolers just a few years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another example of why a brand matters so so much. Brand managers all over have to use this as an example

</comment><comment><USER9> What a crock. The whole bankruptcy was just a union busting maneuver to escape the contracts they had signed. The company was deliberately run into the ground to restructure and now it's making the executives rich while all the workers have been tossed aside.

To hell with Hostess and all the people profiting off this upcoming "IPO".

<comment><USER10> I mean if you engage in agreements with unions that are fundamentally impossible for the company to meet, I wouldn't exactly call that union busting. In fact from what I remember about this bankruptcy specifically, in order to continue operations they absolutely had to negotiate a new contract with all the unions. Every union but the bakers agreed. Because the bakers walked, they had to file bankruptcy.

I feel like this is an example of the failure of unions. It also seems selfish that given that if you know bankruptcy is coming, one union would bankrupt the company when all the others were for it. If you hated the job that much, you can leave. In the end, it didn't save jobs, it didn't protect their livelihood, and I think it's quite possible that it delayed what is obvious now: automation was inevitable and layoffs were necessary. Their workforce of 8000+ is now ~1200 and only now are the becoming profitable again.

<comment><USER9> You can choose to believe that narrative, but I think that's what the Hostess executives fed to the media. I believe they deliberately negotiated in bad faith with the goal of declaring bankruptcy and restructuring.

 _Some_ layoffs may have been necessary, but given how much profit they are making now I'm not sure I believe that all 6800 were. Plus, we aren't given details about how were these layoffs distributed? Were they all at the labor level or was anyone from corporate laid off? Did any executives take pay cuts? Are they all getting bonuses now? How much do they stand to profit from the upcoming public offering?

My point being; the media was fed a narrative about the union being unreasonable and the bankruptcy and layoffs being "unavoidable" and they eat it up uncritically, and then the public does too. I don't think it's that simple.

Unions are human institutions and like any human institution they can have issues, but they have served an important purpose in this country in creating the middle class. It is no coincidence that over the last 40 years unions have been systematically undermined, busted and halted everywhere and at the same time middle class wages have stagnated, with benefits that could have been expected at a middle class job in the 60s now being basically unheard of at a middle class job today.

<comment><USER4> What is your calculation for the proper amount of workers at the Twinkie factory? Modern technology allowed 1200 to do the work of 8000. How many workers would you mandate work at the Twinkie factory in your ideal vision of the world?

<comment><USER9> Wow the libertarians are really pushing the straw men tonight.

This is going to be my last response on this thread because I'm tired of explaining reality to you.

Obviously my number would be the number that makes the most sense. You obviously take the view they did that already, but my point (which I've made all along) is that companies rarely cut into executive staffing, pay or benefits the way they cut into labor. Labor tends to pay the price of keeping the executive staff, pay and benefits as is even when times get tough.

Ok enough of this tedious discussion. Have a good night folks.

<comment><USER4> Your comment is both ironic and hilarious but I'm not sure you have the perspective to understand why. Thank you for "explaining reality" to me with your "what makes the most sense" argument about why the successful turnaround of Hostess is a "crock" that is ethically dubious and screwing the common man. The bottom line is that in a capitalist society reducing costs is required to stay competitive. The only way to artificially inflate employment is to mandate it with regulations. I was curious what mandates you would have, perhaps banning robots so that all baking had to be done by hand? Or if it's not the raw employment numbers you object to, but rather the pay differential between management and labor, how would you force a multiplier that is fairer to without being gamed? I talk to people who argue views like your's regularly and they collapse when logically analyzed. I am hoping you can explain it to me better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We updated the link from [https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/07/10/1659250/hostess...](https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/07/10/1659250/hostess- saves-twinkies-by-automating-fires-94-of-their-workforce?sdsrc=rel), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is the future.

One way to avoid it would be to tax companies as a percentage of their net income divided by the number of employees that exceed some salary. However, it's not a great idea to stifle innovation and efficiency.

<comment><USER13> Tax is usually close to 30% of net income to start with and even those with the best accountants usually pay a few percent.

So dividing their tax bill by the 10, 100, 1000 or whatever workers that exceed some magic income level won't generate much income...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Capitalism's race to the bottom continues unabated.

<comment><USER15> Communism's race to the bottom has already been won. Only, Capitalism is racing to the bottom of 'time spent by humans doing unfun things', and Communism's was 'human rights'

<comment><USER16> It's not like those are the only alternatives.

We should try communism with modern IT infrastructure and AI. The big problem with many command economies was the inability to collect and act on the data. Call it a "just-in-time command economy" if you prefer.

<comment><USER17> Ultimately those systems will have to be run by people, and all the same perverse incentives will apply.

Corporations become corrupt too, but there is more than one and you can start new ones. In a command economy like you allude to there is only one corporation and if it becomes corrupt there is no recourse.

<comment><USER18> That's the exact point that applies to federal government programs vs state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Fight for 15 will fix it</comment>


Robotic Arm Controlled in Free Space by Leap Motion - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnWJ3Q_PA5Y

<comment><USER2> This is such a modest video, yet the demonstration seems so significant.</comment>


Ask HN: Can you get a job at Google without a degree? - <AUTHOR> I believe I'm a great designer/developer who just happens to be without a college degree.<p>I would love to be able to work at a wonderful company like google, but I feel like I will never be seen as a potential candidate. Is this true? <comment><USER2> Why do you want to work at Google? This is a serious question.

</comment><comment><USER3> You might focus on trying to get _any_ job at such a company, and then be really proactive about showing off your designer/developer skills. I knew an Apple retail employee without any college education who landed an engineering job in Cupertino through an internal talent program.

You might also consider looking at startups or incubators. They tend to be less interested in credentials and more interested in ability to execute than some of the larger companies.

So, it's possible, but I would agree with the other poster that trying to stand out among a normal application pool would be really difficult.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd recommend setting your sights on a small company. Once you get good experience, education is less important. The problem I see coming though is that you work at X company for say 3 years. You're going to have a hard time coming up with references since they're all employees at your current company. So do whatever you can to develop meaningful references.

I'd also go to a market with a ton of jobs, such as the Bay Area. It's a numbers game. Eventually, if you're smart, someone will hire you.

</comment><comment><USER5> You probably can, but consider that you will be competing against probably 20 other people if Google hires 1 out of 20 interviewed. This is just based on rough estimates,but: Ten will have a BS, five will have a MS, and one or two will have a phd. keep in mind this is if you get an interview. Everyone will be afraid of looking bad if they hire a dummy. What would you do?

</comment><comment><USER6> It might not be easy but some serious skills can trump a required college degree in my opinion. You don't have an email in your profile but feel free to shoot me some links to some of your work and a little bit about yourself and we can chat. (I'm a frontend dev without a degree at Google)

</comment><comment><USER7> You can for sure.But because you don't have a degree you will have to take a differet path. Prove you are what you say(great designer/developer etc..) Build your portfolio, make online repo and then get in touch with google,amazon,facebook,apple recruiters.All the best.

</comment><comment><USER8> For the normal hiring process you are probably right. Try an acqui-hire.

<comment><USER9> They will often make you re-interview for your own job as a pretense to remove people without degrees.

<comment><USER8> To be more specific, I meant as a founder so it's _you_ that they're acqui- hiring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have you tried reading sample interview questions?</comment>


PepperTab – Notes, Todos, Calendar, Weather on browser new tab - <AUTHOR> https://peppertab.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> PepperTab is a browser extension that will replace the page you see when you open a new tab. - Take notes - Create todos - Google calendar - Favorite websites - Weather - Beautiful wallpapers - 100% free. No tracking, No data sent to server.</comment>


Singapore and its lack of Democracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_266146.html?vgnmr=1

<comment><USER2> Hogwash.

Free market regimes that happen to be authoritarian have succeeded because of extrinsic reasons (international conditions), not intrinsic ones (the authoritarian model is fundamentally a better one than the democratic model).

During the Cold War, democratic regimes that were not free market (or did not sufficiently recognize private property, specifically private property owned by former colonial powers (i.e., US and Europe)) were consistently harassed or even toppled by the dominant superpower (see Allende's Chile, Mossadegh's Iran). For the most part, those regimes that were toppled were replaced by authoritarian (but free market) regimes.

In the last half of the 21st century, being a free market regime was both a necessary and a sufficient condition for survival, whereas being a democratic regime was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for survival. These two facts strongly encourage the success of authoritarian free market regimes.

Why weren't there more democratic free market regimes during the Cold War? Well, they certainly existed in Western Europe, but the development story there is complicated by Europe's historically high levels of development (and the Marshall Plan).

Why weren't there more democratic free market regimes in developing countries? Democracy is susceptible to populist acts. Much of the private property in developing countries was owned by former colonial powers. A democratic government would be very tempted to dabble in nationalism (and nationalization), risking external regime overthrow.

If the West is puzzled by the success of Singapore and China, they should examine the history of their own foreign relations. The West gradually opened up to China as China gradually became more free market, despite the fact that China didn't (at all) open up politically. Had the conditions for Western engagement been political rather than economic, we might have seen a democratic (but perhaps not free market) China.

<comment><USER3> _Why weren't there more democratic free market regimes in developing countries? Democracy is susceptible to populist acts._

Isn't that like saying democracy is susceptible to democracy?

Let's use the word "market supportive" to describe governments that support and enable property rights and contract law ( the essence of a free market).

How many countries became more "market supportive" as a democracy? Britain, the U.S., Germany, Austria, France, Canada, Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong - these countries all either developed their market oriented legal systems as authoritarian states or they inherited their system from a colonial ruler.

I can think of numerous examples of democracies ( or failed attempts at democracy) moving in a less market supportive direction. Compare Britain 1884 ( the year of the Reform Act granting universal male suffrage ) to Britain 1950. Germany 1871 to Germany 1935. Russia under monarchy to Russia under the populist Bolshevik revolutionary government. Or Argentina in the first half of the 20th century to Argentina in the second half the century. France under any of the monarchies to France under any of the succeeding republics. India under the Raj to India post-Raj. Zimbabwe pre-universal suffrage, to Zimbabwe after universal suffrage.

The only counter examples I can think of are the former Soviet republics. However, that is not really fair, since 1) it would be impossible to be more anti-property than the Soviet system and 2) the Soviet system arose as a result of a populist revolution. Ireland might be another example, though I haven't studied its history enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems that democracy inevitably creeps towards totalitarianism, while totalitarianism creeps toward democracy. One wonders if theres not some optimized blend in the middle somewhere that we have yet to achieve, that could yield better results than either of the pure forms of the two alone.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good: social order and a virtually non-existent crime rate

Bad: virtually non-existent creativity / independent thought

from the South China Morning Post: "married couples [in Singapore] turn up each year at a clinic for sexual problems with an unusual dilemma - they don't know how to have sex.

'There are probably many more who are keeping quiet because they are too embarrassed to come forward,' V. Atputharajah, the doctor who runs the centre, told the Straits Times...

While there are no official figures on unconsummated marriages in the city- state, Dr Atputharajah estimated that one couple in 200 had the problem. Chong Yap Sent, an associate consultant at the National University Hospital, said the figure was probably twice to four times as high as that."

<comment><USER6> Gosh, so many start-up opportunities. So little time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of course personal freedoms aren't required for a successful economy.

 _The model for this is Singapore, where repression is highly selective. It is confined to those who take a conscious decision openly to challenge the authorities_

This sounds precisely where the US is headed, with watchlists and selective enforcement of laws.

And of course those who are financially successful can spend their wealth to mitigate the lack of personal freedoms if they so desire. I'm sure Singaporeans can buy chewing gum at a premium just like Americans can buy marijuana.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't think this article is particularly good, but I've always wondered how people come to accept living without certain freedoms, so I found it interesting in this regard.

<comment><USER8> The benefit of liberal democracy is that it prevents the corrupt and powerful few from acquiring the leverage to do great damage, allowing for technological and civil progress over the long haul.

Well-run dictatorships can be prosperous in the short run, but the inexorable decay into rule by a corrupt elite will bankrupt a society. Once a madman or idiot gets into power, decades or centuries of progress will be erased. One benefit of liberal democracy is that it's much more robust, relying on laws and traditions rather than the people running it. Look at how much damage the Bush Administration has done to the US. Were it not for our liberal, democratic political traditions, they'd have caused 100 times more ruin by this point, and we wouldn't have a very good chance of being rid of them in Jan. 2009.

<comment><USER9> I think the jury is still out on whether a corrupt elite cannot hijack a democratic system. You got rid of "Bush" in '93 yet here he is again. More to the point, the powers behind the Bushes and probably any other candidate you get to choose from are still there - big money sponsors.

And that doesn't even touch upon the other issue, that of the corrupt elite being put in place by the democratic system itself, as happened with basically all the fascist dictators in the 30s. Who's to say that won't happen again?

<comment><USER8> _I think the jury is still out on whether a corrupt elite cannot hijack a democratic system._

I don't think the jury's out, so to speak. It can definitely happen, and I think US plutocracy is definitely corroding the democracy. Democracy is a complex system and needs a lot of safeguards; a constitution and an electoral process are only two of many necessary ingredients.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


This is the first ubuntu phone, from Bq. Flash Sale 8:00~17:00 UTC for Europe - cm-t http://www.bq.com/gb/ubuntu.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Sold out? I don't see how to buy it ..

<comment><USER2> Indeed it says: "You will receive your new device and the cover in March." and "Availability: Out of stock" if you try to purchase it.

I find the educative/interactive animation/game funny. The one that you are forced to play before getting to the checkout screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Darn, I guess I missed it then - how did you get to the order screen? Were you on time? Want to sell me yours!? :P

<comment><USER2> No I was not on time. It was out of stock when I tried. Sorry, cannot resell to you ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's Global Warming, Stupid - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/its-global-warming-stupid <comment><USER2> Flagged as inappropriate for HN, but if we're going to have this discussion:

It would greatly help the "we must do something" crowd if they spent some time working out exactly what that "something" would be, posting it for public comment and refining as needed.

I am sympathetic to the idea that leveling off and eventually reducing global CO2 emissions would be a sensible thing to do, but the key word there is "global". China is already the world's leading emitter by a good margin and will likely continue to increase their emissions, regardless of what happens in the West. Indeed, if we make energy and its uses more expensive here, the likelihood is that at least some of those emissions will simply migrate to China, where they will be cheaper but likely greater for the same degree of production.

I have yet to hear a proposal that is likely to both have an effect that justifies its cost (carbon taxes are wildly regressive, and removing that feature is tricky!), and is not absurdly unlikely to ever come to pass.

The cap and trade bill mentioned in this article fails the first test, I believe.

<comment><USER3> And yes, we do need to agree at a global level and be willing to pay more for certain goods/services as a result. The entire economic system will just re- balance itself around that, if we as a global society agree that the costs of inaction are greater.

Another note: while China is the world's leading emitter, they also have contributed the most to abatement of emissions according to some (example: [http://www.dbcca.com/dbcca/EN/_media/Global_Policy_Tracker_2...](http://www.dbcca.com/dbcca/EN/_media/Global_Policy_Tracker_20120424.pdf)) Let's not forget that the US did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, while China did ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Kyoto_Pr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Kyoto_Protocol)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a political scientist with a strong climate science background discussing how Sandy is at this moment, is #17 in terms of all time damage, but could move into the top 10.

[http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/10/sandy-and- top-20-n...](http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/10/sandy-and- top-20-normalized-us.html)

For me the question is what kept damages from Sandy down, is it because a) it really wasn't that bad, or b) it really was that bad but East Coast resources, modern construction, and recent experiences with Katrina, etc., minimized damages?

Regardless, I find articles written a day or two after an event, by a layman, attributing causality to that event fairly vacuous.

<comment><USER5> What do you mean by "what kept damages from Sandy down"? The damages for Sandy huge for a weak category 1 hurricane.

By contrast, study the infographic linked below. Florida was hit by Charley, Frances, Jeane, Rita, and Wilma in the span of two years (2004-2005). These were all category 1 or 2 storms at landfall. They weren't nearly as large as Sandy, but we're talking five separate storms of greater intensity. Some of them made landfall or passed over densely populated South Florida regions. In total, these storms added up to around $75b in damages; a mark I wouldn't be surprised if Sandy passes. Individually, none of them passed the $20b mark.

Sandy did tremendous damage in the northeast for a weak category 1 hurricane. No single factor is to blame. There are many:

* Sandy was large... LARGE

* Sandy hit an extremely densely populated area

* Coastal topology in the region made it susceptible to storm surge

That last point can't be made strongly enough. Once again, we see that it is the water (ocean) that poses the greatest threat. The wind and rain are bad, but even a small amount of water can pass wind and rain damage by a long shot. It also takes far more lives.

[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/rising- tide#...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/rising-tide#r=lr- fst)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, what happened in 1938, when a storm of similar power swept through the region? Was that also global warming?

<comment><USER7> People have a powerful bias towards recent history. Perhaps 1938 was a 100 year storm, and perhaps this was another. But nobody lives to be 300 years old to where a 100 year storm isn't ZOMG WORST STORM EVAR!!!1!one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ok there Jim Norton.</comment>


The Shellshock bug, explained in four minutes - <AUTHOR> http://viracious.com/2014/09/the-shellshock-bug-explained-in-four-minutes/

<comment><USER2> It has been unnoticed for 23 years, because IT IS NOT A BUG! It is an admittedly misconceived, FEATURE!

It is a feature that has existed since the beginning of bash it seems (the oldest tarball on ftp.gnu.org already has it), and its user interface is documented under the -f option of the export built-in.</comment>