Ask HN: What is the best personal journaling solution? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Do yourself a favour and write in plain text. I'm keeping a journal (on a computer) since 2003 and have lost many entries due to app crashes, moving between OSes and so on.

There is no need for a proprietary data format in 2018 anymore. Using plain text as the basis, organise your files in folders if you like, encrypt and sync using some cheap (or free) cloud storage provider, and _on top of that_ choose your favourite editor (I use iaWriter because of nice UI + the ability to simply drag images into a file).

You may get hooked on keeping a journal (as I have - one of the best decisions I made) and you will not only amass a lot of text (I have written the equivalent of 4000 book pages) but also want to do this for a long time (speaking decades), far longer than the life-span of most if not all journaling apps.

If you use a proprietary format, at least make sure that the app has a decent export function that creates a result that doesn't require manual changes by you.

</comment><comment><USER3> +1 to plain text + encrypt and cloud sync as @amorphous said. I want these files to stay with me during my lifetime.

I do the same thing, except that I recently made a simple editor UI that shows me the entries of the same day of previous years when I'm writing today's entry.

I've only been journaling this way for a couple of years, but for me this is a good way to review how were my life and thoughts in the past. Reading previous entries gives me more chances to reflect. Many times I feel I've grown, many other times I detect I still suffer from the same issues and this prompts me to take action to correct them.

You don't need a UI that does it, but I suggest reading back some of your previous entries from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a fan of a notebook and a pen.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've written maybe 100,000 words to Day One over the last several years.

It has a ton of functionality that I don't use, but it's reliable, has effective syncing across devices, and a clean export process. There may or may not be better, but I'm very happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://jrnl.sh](http://jrnl.sh) is great for minimalism, if you're comfortable with the command line.

</comment><comment><USER7> another vote for Day One</comment>


How (Much) Do You Test? - <AUTHOR> http://www.codetrails.com/blog/test-analytics-testroots-watchdog

<comment><USER2> I don't honestly understand what is the point of this. How does time spent writing something have to do with the quality of it?

Tests are supposed to be simple and straigthforward, I would hope to spend less than 5% of my time actually writing tests. If I spend more then it means that my tests are too complex to understand, read and write and that my whole architecture is hard to test.

Are we trying to evaluate quality of code (yes, tests are code too) by the amount of time spent writing it? Should we go back to assembly because it takes us longer to write it properly hence it's more correct?

I honestly don't understand the point, enlighten me, please.

<comment><AUTHOR> The first step is just to observe how much time is spent on testing. We have basically no clue about this. And our first study with students has also shown that they had no clue about it.

In a second step, we can think about which implication testing time might have on quality. As you said correctly, more time does not necessarily correlate with better quality or higher productiveness. Maybe there is a certain range of testing efforts that can be associated with good quality tests? E.g. if you spend less than x on testing, your tests are likely to be bad. If you spend more than y on testing, it might be worth investigating whether you have unusually high testing targets. Or your tests might be extremely hard to maintain.

I think the answer is Janus-faced and there is no single, simple answer (see also "Testivus on Test Coverage", [http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=204677](http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=204677)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks like a great example of "Be careful what you measure, because that is exactly what you will improve."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is certainly true to a (I think) minimal extend. Why? Because improving the time you spend on testing is something that is essentially hard to do -- and only a meta-information, anyway.

An example: A quality assessment of your code tells you that your methods are too long. This gives you a concrete task to do: You simply split all too-long methods. However, with testing time, this is not so: Increasing the effort spent on testing is something you cannot "just do" without a sensible plan. If you want to increase this metric, you have to start to think what is wrong with your current test strategy (maybe nothing's wrong at all), and come up with an action plan of how to do.

If you're that far in the game already, I think this metric has done what it can do. Plus, you'll likely see an increase in the metric. Which is justified.

Coming up with (critical) test efforts in the wild is our task now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find myself bouncing between at least three modes.

There are some things that I really know how to code correctly out of my head and in cases like that sometimes I put very little effort into testing.

If I am writing something greenfield that I don't completely understand (say some algorithm inspired by binary search or any other place where off-by-ones could eat you alive) then I would say there is little difference between coding and testing; mostly I use tests and the Java debugger the same way that Ruby or Python people use the REPL, except my tests get checked in at the end.

Another case is dealing with legacy code where I often end up writing tests to document existing behaviors and prove that the system behaves correctly after refactoring. I've seen many code bases that were awful (written by the kind of people who struggle to have unique primary keys) but were salvageable because they had a test suite.

Then on top of that there are a number of special cases too; for instance, if you are doing something with threads that is complicated at all you probably want to write a load balancer or if you're doing classic Map/Reduce you'd better test your mappers and reducers thoroughly before you ever touch a cluster.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, the results are quite eye opening. I'm admittedly not the most "diligent" when it comes to testing (I write enough to pass code review), but I would definitely fall in the camp of overestimating the amount of time spent testing by 3x

But I'm not quite sure if there is a direct correlation between time spent writing tests and overall software quality?

<comment><AUTHOR> > But I'm not quite sure if there is a direct correlation between time spent > writing tests and overall software quality?

Good point. We do not know, either. That is part of the reason why we do this research. :)

As has been said before, the easier to understand and maintain your tests are, the less amount of time you actually need to spend on them.

However, you could argue, that there _must_ be some minimal amount of time that you absolutely need to spend on QA work like testing to ensure a certain quality.

We are investigating this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I generally don't write unit tests, and very rarely write system tests. Partly this is because of the type of stuff I deal with (Django applications), partly it's because I generally have access to good QA people, but mostly it's because the kinds of errors I see would not be caught by the kind of testing I can write in any reasonable amount of time. Here are some real world recent errors I've had to deal with, where testing wouldn't have saved me:

\- Poorly documented external API returns a redirect instead of a 404 in some cases.

\- Missing <title> tag in a random HTML template.

\- Poorly assembled SSL certificate chain for an HTTPS service fails for some browsers, but not all.

\- Celery tasks taking longer to process because there are now more things to do as more users sign up.

\- Starting a DB transaction in the wrong place causes more failures than necessary when only some of the modified rows cause constraint violations.

\- External API returns 0 sized file with no errors instead of the correct response, depending on time of day and phase of the moon.

\- CSS issue rooted in poorly set up position and z-index properties causes elements to be mis-aligned.

\- Missing clear: both;

\- Database server's disk filled up with log files from a rogue service.

\- Hosting provider gets DDoS'ed and their mitigation software starts returning random site redirects.

\- Namecheap's DNS gets DDoS'ed and the site is inaccessible.

These are not the types of things that are easy to test, but very easy to verify by hand or catch at runtime. Personally, I am much more in favor of design-by-contract and logging and alerting of bad conditions at runtime. That's not to say I wouldn't test a financial trading algorithm, or a binary search library function. One of my projects (LogHog, a much easier to use syslog-type-thing for Python), has lots of tests because it's got a very simple and well-defined interface. It's almost library code and verifying its correctness is both easy and useful at the same time. But not all projects are like that, and sometimes easy testing is not actually useful and useful testing is cost-prohibitive.

tl;dr: I can test the obvious stuff, but I can also just spend more time writing it more carefully. It's the non-obvious stuff that breaks: disks fill up, external API's misbehave, bad CSS, etc. You will never have "100% code coverage" because you are not testing all the stuff that actually affects your system, and your users don't care why the application is not working, they just care that it's not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I generally agree with you.

"sometimes easy testing is not actually useful and useful testing is cost- prohibitive."

While I agree here, too, I think that the situation where testing is not useful happens very rarely in practice. Everything can break, and when you think it cannot be possibly be wrong now, a future regression might occur.

I think badly written tests are a different problem. I.e. tests that for example assert on the serialized string and hence take a lot of maintainability effort to adapt to changing production code. But then there is nothing wrong with the test per se, its just badly implemented.

<comment><USER6> I can think of lots of cases where testing is not useful in practice. Simulating random filesystem corruption when writing a Node.js app is pretty much useless: you don't know which files will be corrupted, and testing would take a huge (billions of lifetimes) amount of time to simulate all possible combinations even for a small program. Yet, this can (and in my experience did) take down a production system.

My other examples I already listed, I think, are examples of this too: you can test all you want against a spec provided by your external API maintainer, but if they don't follow the spec, you have a problem. We don't have a good framework (and I don't think we can create one), for testing layout problems in HTML that are caused by bad JS or CSS.

Basically, you do hit diminishing returns quickly, and you do get a false sense of security by having lots of small unit tests that don't actually prevent realistic failures.</comment></comment></comment>


Show your open-source commitment to the world - <AUTHOR> http://open-impact.r12.railsrumble.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://railsrumble.com/entries/24-open-source-impact></comment>


How to turn every child into a "math person" - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/245054/how-to-turn-every-child-into-a-math-person/

<comment><USER2> That list of Math Olympiad top-scorers is interesting. I notice Peter Shor at #3, and Jim Propp ("coupling from the past") at #5. Wow.

</comment><comment><USER3> Title beneath picture of Einstein: "The original math person."

Well, perhaps from the outlook of the public, but math was never Einstein's primary talent. Remember that Einstein wrote t' = t/√(1-v^2/c^2) to describe time dilation, without realizing this strongly implied that space and time occupied different dimensions. That interpretation was crafted by Einstein's math teacher Minkowski, after which Einstein said, "Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore".

As to Einstein being seen as highly mathematical, I guess it's all relative.

<comment><USER4> OTOH his key contribution to special relativity, so I gather, was the axiomatic approach. Others like Lorentz had worked out most of the formulas already by finding some tractable-enough assumptions about electrons and atoms; Einstein went back to the style of Euclid and Archimedes: what if we _postulate_ a few simple laws and draw out consequences?

Back to the article's topic, Einstein wrote that Euclid was a revelation to him when he was 11 or so. (I forget exactly; it was in the intro to his book _Relativity_.)</comment></comment>


Proposed: $2k Monthly Stimulus Checks and No Rent Mortgage Payments for 1 Year - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanguina/2020/04/18/proposed-2000-monthly-stimulus-checks-and-canceled-rent-and-mortgage-payments-for-1-year <comment><USER2> This sounds good, but the PPP wasn't even fully funded, running out of money before it fully satisfied demand. (and even being underfunded by individual banks, with some banks running out before others)

This will be a disaster if it passes and isn't fully funded (ie, renters getting free rent but their landlord not reimbursed through the relief fund).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be on board with both of these, provided that becoming involuntarily unemployed since the beginning of the year automatically qualified for the $2k/month. There should preferably be no phase out, but as long as people who are losing income through no fault of their own qualify, I'd be satisfied. As it is, it looks like this is just another half measure.

<comment><USER2> What you're describing is just unemployment payments, which has already been funded. This plan will cover everyone, employed or otherwise, as long as they don't exceed the income guidelines ($130k/single or $260k/couple)

<comment><USER3> No, I'm describing $2k/month for everyone, but I'd be satisfied if the unemployed automatically qualified. I don't care if a few who don't really need it get it as long as everyone who does does.

<comment><USER2> As written, someone who exceeded the income guidelines won't, regardless of how they lost their job. Then again, that gets into a question of need, with the assumption being that high-income earners have savings as a product of that income.

<comment><USER3> That's correct. I would rather have the means tests eliminated. $130k is roughly a 90th percentile individual income. Just give it to everyone without means testing, and you pay out to ~10% more people, but guarantee that literally everyone who needs it gets it. I don't care if people who don't need it also get it.

<comment><USER2> I suspect there's a number of families out there where one person makes over $130k, but makes less than $260k as a couple (so they'll still qualify).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a site or disscusion area that lets you know the likelihood of any proposed bill or law having a chance and what chance at passing? The $2K/mo seems like it would never get far, for example.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's the chance of passing this bill? If it were to bail out stock market, both parties would be so happy to join forces to bail out the investor class.

</comment><comment><USER2> Quick napkin math shows this will cost somewhere between 6 to 10 trillion dollars a year (assuming it's fully funded)

<comment><USER6> Which might work if we roll back taxes to Regan-era levels. Otherwise this just seems like an attempt to break the back of the government by overloading it with debt. Don't get me wrong: basic universal income is fine by me if we can pay for it, and I don't meant by wishful thinking "cut taxes on the rich and money will surely rain from the sky" policies.

<comment><USER7> Raising taxes on the rich isn't going to do it either, the only way you get that money is taxing the middle class into the ground.

Or you just print the money, make it up out of thin air like we're doing now.</comment></comment></comment>


Chernobyl disaster: Giant shield begins move towards reactor - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37978482 <comment><USER2> 4chan's hr board sometimes has high-resolution photos of this project.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fake news warning: article repeats a bullshit claim from Greenpeace that 90k people died as a result of this accident. The real number is less than 50. But, naturally, there will be no outrage since Greenpeace is left-wing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Clickbait warning: anybody interested in the new disaster caused by "shield movement towards the reactor" will be disappointed.</comment>


Naive Bayes classifier in 50 lines - <AUTHOR> http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2010/12/07/naive-bayes-classifier-in-50-lines/

<comment><USER2> Good post, but it's a sad reflection of code's failure as a medium of expression that we need 50 lines of Python to express one line of math.

<comment><USER3> The actual translation of the formula to Python is about 4 lines. Starting on L30 - L34 of [1]. The rest is just IO plumbing.

[1] [https://gist.github.com/731413/7ad1b4c04bc2d6b5033c5811efcb4...](https://gist.github.com/731413/7ad1b4c04bc2d6b5033c5811efcb4e92d017d3cf#L30) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Upcoming:

\- Raycaster in 1000 lines of Lisp

\- Database management system in 20000 lines of C

\- Python web framework in 2000 lines of Python

...</comment>


Creating art for engineers - <AUTHOR> https://www.compile.com/blog/design/creating-art-engineers/

<comment><USER2> I liked the concept but I was a little bit disappointed by the last photo. When I think of a wall mural, I think of something BIG! Had I been doing it I would probably tried to cover more of the wall space.

<comment><USER3> Yup, seems like 1/3 the size of what would be maximally pleasing. And that way the clock could be integrated into the image instead of just hanging there, the way clocks do, so smug like they're always right, like they're smarter than us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ironically 'getting a list of things people like and then drawing those things' seems like the exact approach an engineer would take

<comment><USER5> Komar and Melamid is an art group that took surveys of art preferences in different countries and then made the logical favorite and least favorite paintings.

America's most wanted painting: [http://awp.diaart.org/km/usa/most.html](http://awp.diaart.org/km/usa/most.html)

Survey results: [http://awp.diaart.org/km/surveyresults.html](http://awp.diaart.org/km/surveyresults.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I'm just grumpy engineer, but I feel like the design got progressively worse. The initial "ENIAC" sketch would have been pretty nice as is, but I can't say that I like the final result. Sometimes just less is more.

</comment><comment><USER7> Some pics really awesome. I feel like I should paint something similar on my wall. But problem is I am not an artist and my drawings are worst.</comment>


Show HN: I made time app for contract programmers w/ new iOS location feature - <AUTHOR> http://www.onsitetimetracker.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice Office Space reference.</comment>


I was in the first car of the Hoboken Train Accident - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/karlward/posts/10210920753877450 <comment><AUTHOR> a lucky friend of a friend.</comment>


Imaging Bell-type nonlocal behavior - <AUTHOR> https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaaw2563 <comment><USER3> Large versions of the images from the paper:

Figure 2: [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw256...](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw2563/F2.large.jpg)

Figure 3: [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw256...](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw2563/F3.large.jpg)

Figure 4: [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw256...](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw2563/F4.large.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER4> I know this must be nuts, could someone ELI20?

<comment><USER5> In this image: [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw256...](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw2563/F1.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1) they describe their apparatus.

The light comes from bottom left, then gets into Beam Splitter (BS) and splits in two. The top-left detector has a pre-selected filter and a measurement device after a delay line. As far as I understand, this device gives binary output: either light received or not. The top-right detector captures whole image of the light ray, but does so only if the left detector has seen light.

The result is that the image from the top-right detector is highly correlated with the pre-selected filter of the top-left detector, even though they're placed in different arms of Beam Splitter! [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw256...](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw2563/F2.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1)

<comment><USER6> Thank you for the setup explanation. I understood what is happening and it is totally fascinating, even if I do not - and probably never can - <USER2> why or how this is happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A blog post is [https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-unveiled-the- fi...](https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-unveiled-the-first-ever- photo-of-quantum-entanglement).

BBC article is [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow- west-48971538](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-48971538), discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20423884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20423884).

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe a bit off topic, but i've always wondered why most physicists dismiss the possibility of superdeterminism to escape Bell's theorem. Are there any physicists here who would like to elaborate?

<comment><USER9> Not a physicist, but I've been studying QM as a hobby for thirty years. The problem with superdeterminism (SD) is that if QM is true then SD is not falsifiable. SD says that all experimental outcomes are deterministic but derive from hidden state, i.e. some sort of "Cosmic Turing Machine" (CTM) calculating the digits of pi or something like that. So now what? The CTM has to be perpetually hidden from us, otherwise we could examine its state and predict the outcomes of quantum experiments, and that would violate QM. So if QM is true, then the CTM necessarily has the same ontological status as an Invisible Pink Unicorn (IPU). In fact, the deterministic calculations underlying SD may well be carried out by a literal IPU. If QM is correct then there's no way to determine this, even in principle.

<comment><USER10> How do you tell if your code is running on a virtual machine or on bare metal?

<comment><USER9> In our case we know we're running on "quantum bare metal" because we can do quantum mechanics experiments.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blackbird: Cloud-Based Video Editing and Publishing - <AUTHOR> https://www.blackbird.video/ <comment><USER2> Who writes sales copy like that home page anymore? The first sentence describing your product is "it's unique"? That's the most important thing you want me to know as a visitor?

Ditch all the self-serving superlatives and tell me what it does and what it does for me, not how impressed you are with what you built.

I'm probably even in the target market for this product, but the home page is so terrible I won't be back to try to figure it out.

<comment><USER3> Also, from the "why the cloud" page:

"Faster than live"

Really? I think that's a little bit too far.

Don't know much about the product. If it works, it's impressive enough: let it sell itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First thing I see is an HTTPS warning.

Also, as a former professional video editor, you're listing your hotkeys as a selling point? I can't find a decent screenshot of your editing interface, and all I get is "The cloud is the future"

Don't try to impress me, try to sell me your product, using tactics like _showing it to me_

<comment><USER5> I really can see this working, but I don't see how this would be a better workflow for me. Problem one is the learning curve of a Video Editor and Problem two it takes hundreds of hours to get fast with an editor. I switched to Davinci Resolve as my perfected but I have to work on who I am working with. I think I found what works fo rthe last three years.

Currently I use Resilio (Bit Torrent Syn) to grab raw video and audio from some client, all they do is copy the raw files into the folder. I then have that folder shared with whoever I am working with on a second folder which has been logged into my system. I then have a third separate Resilio folder for the client where they receive the proofs and after agreement final product.

Working on a cloud I don't have control on my logging or my end product in one system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a really crappy computer ATM, and I was wondering if something like this existed.

Even with a fast connection though, uploading the source files would take forever.

<comment><USER7> It would be really interesting to try and have a client-side app that handled the basic things, and then offloaded expensive stuff back to the mother-ship, like compression or final mixdown, or effects (if the application happens to have effects).

Most computers shouldn't choke too hard on basic, non-destructive editing. I think. I could be very wrong. I'm thinking back to Apple's iMovie offering from quite a while ago, though. It didn't seem to computationally heavy.

<comment><USER4> Proxy editing is the standard solution to low-power hardware. The source files are converted to small lightweight files, the editing is performed, and the rendering is shipped out to a bigger machine, using the original files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Where is the price?

<comment><USER9> I Second that. I was sifting through the site but am unable to find out how much this costs. It looks good but seems to be tailored to professional news organization sized companies so it's probably quite expensive.</comment></comment>


Cyclist Lost Her Job After Raising Middle Finger at Trump's Motorcade - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/us/middle-finger-trump.html <comment><USER2> If Brendan Eich lost his job for supporting Prop 8, and James Damore lost his job for writing his famous memo, of course a company can fire someone who flips off the President. For better or worse (my opinion is worse), Internet activists have created strong precedents for private companies to terminate employees who aggrieve the Internet with their off-duty activities.

<comment><USER3> I won't speak to Damore's essay except to say that I thought it revealed Damore to be somewhat intellectually immature.

But Eich supported something that actively aimed to rob people of the right to pursue their own happiness through marriage. That's a big step beyond giving the bird to one of the richest and most powerful men in the world because he's doing a shitty job as a public servant.

<comment><USER4> Somehow I don't think Eich and supporters of Prop 8 would characterize it that way. You believe that Eich is evil but it is possible that he is on the correct side of the issue and you are on the incorrect side. In any case he was participating in politics just like everybody does and should. He was fired for disagreeing.

The bicyclist was fired because she worked for a government contractor that felt it necessary to do its own kind of virtue signalling, to ward off the potential for lost business.

<comment><USER2> I think that the idea that there is a "correct" and "incorrect" side is a cognitive trap. If we try to break free of this trap, even for the things where there seems so clearly to be a correct side, we can better understand and talk to each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I understand that people are frustrated by this outcome, she worked as a federal government contractor. This is akin to being fired for flipping of the chairman of the board of directors in a company. I understand that there are issues of free speech that can certainly be discussed, but the outcome was anything but surprising given her position.

</comment><comment><USER6> HR is not your friend. One of her mistakes was going to them first. HR exists to protect the company. Employees are liabilities in many respects from their point of view.

<comment><USER7> Yes^2. Protesting has inconsistent, disproportionate costs to the "tall blade of grass." Regardless of customer image issues making her radioactive to government contractors, from a management perspective, her behaviors signaled impulsivity, pettiness and naïveté. They fired her for all these reasons and more perhaps. I hope she uses this wake-up call to self-select a more ethical line of work that isn't contingent on the government-industrial complex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would also fire my employee if she flipped the bird at the CEO of my top customer - in view of the press no less.

<comment><USER9> The president is not a CEO.

<comment><USER10> He is the chief of the executive branch, and the commander in chief of the US military, so arguably he is a CEO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of the rodeo clown who lost his job after he mocked Obama:

[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/rodeo-clown-who-mocked- ob...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/rodeo-clown-who-mocked-obama- missouri-state-fair-banned-performing-f6C10901988)

</comment><comment><USER12> She worked for Akima - another company that does much business around the Washington DC area. Companies in that area never want to seem too anti- establishment.

</comment><comment><USER13> Would it be okay if a cyclist had raised her middle finger at Pres. Obama? If we want to restore civility to our politics, we need to hold everyone to high standards.

No matter what you think of Trump, he holds the Office of the President and that Office should be respected. If you are angry with him for whatever reason, then the most effective way to channelize your anger is every subsequent election where he or his supporters are on ballot.

</comment><comment><USER14> You have the right to free speech. You don't have the right to freedom from the consequences of exercising your right to free speech.

<comment><USER15> Well you can't be persecuted, prosecuted or retaliated against necessarily by a state or Federal government (subject to reason.. e.g. don't yell fire in a theater).. even if they employ you.. but with private employers all bets are off... except not sure what happens if you are a government contractor.. my guess is yes* which is why they asked her to resign.

My guess is flipping off the President is free speech.

*[http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/29/us/the-supreme-court-free-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/29/us/the-supreme-court-free-speech-government-contractors-get-first-amendment-shield.html)

<comment><USER16> Nah, I bet asking her to resign was for not having to give severance pay or UI benefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> She was employed in a state where the employer does not need a reason to dismiss. They could have fired her because "Hey, you're an employee and that starts with 'e'".

Not a sensible reason, but that's not a legal requirement there.

<comment><USER18> At will employment means you can be fired for no reason but not any reason.

That is still my favorite HR joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems like a series of unfortunate or possibly rash choices on her part: the first flipping off, the second when she caught up with the motorcade again, deciding to use the picture as her profile pic, and then going to HR to forewarn them. I'd like to think that even if tempted to do the first of these actions I would have stopped there and kept quiet until it had all blown over, not kept upping the ante.

</comment><comment><USER20> Who goes to HR to brag about flipping off the head of state when your company relies on business from the government?

</comment><comment><USER21> I didn't see that she was identified anywhere in the media. It wasn't until she made it her profile photo on Facebook that her employer found out. Does anyone know if this is accurate?

</comment><comment><USER22> So glad she's fired.

Civility and decency must again become the norm. People should not live like animals.

<comment><USER23> must've missed the chapter on schadenfreude in civics and ethics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Title is incorrect. She lost her job because she outed her self on a controversial image that went viral. She then shared that image on her own social media.

tl;dr - she played herself

<comment><USER25> Agreed. From the article:

> _Ms. Briskman said she became aware of the photograph the next day, when > Indivisible Loudoun ACTION, an anti-Trump Facebook group, posted Mr. > Herman's tweet and asked, "Who is this?" Ms. Briskman replied in the > comments section that she was the cyclist._

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I expect there will be no outpouring of sympathy from the "free speech" folks for this person.

<comment><USER19> Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence. As this case proves. I feel bad for this woman but it was entirely of her own making.</comment></comment>


Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html <comment><USER3> TP is about the same size as Leor Zolman's C compiler for the 8080.

Fast-forward about seven years, and my company was looking at an interpreted BASIC implementation that took about 120K. Since this was supposed to live in ROM, you could think about it as Real Money. We dug into it and found all kinds of fat -- the usual 13 fear-based reimplementations of strlen and strcpy, about a zillion porting layers, endless amounts of cut-and-paste nonsense.

Somewhere between 1978 and 1985, the software industry's drive to be lean and mean on PCs died. I found myself writing 'sed' scripts to do peephole optimization on the intermediate assembly language of one of the C compilers we were using. It was pathetic.

Now, of course, I light my cigars with gigabytes. But in terms of actual cost, I'm still a cheap bastard and I probably don't spend any more money per year on CPUs, memory or storage than I did 30 years ago.

Had a chance last year to write a mission-critical hunk of code that /had/ to fit into 1920 bytes. I can't tell you how much fun that was.

<comment><USER4> >Had a chance last year to write a mission-critical hunk of code that /had/ to fit into 1920 bytes.

Awesome. What was that for? Please don't leave us hanging :)

<comment><USER5> I'm guessing DoD if he used the word mission.

<comment><USER6> Mission-critical is actually a pretty common term and not really connected to the military.

<comment><USER5> I don't disagree that it's used outside of defense. It's just used very very commonly in defense. Just harmless speculation ;).

<comment><USER7> Big bucketloads of business terms and concepts were stolen from the military.

Tactical advantages, strategic initiatives, anyone? And what about the ranking system in your average BigCo? They guys aren't called Sergeant or General but in effect it's the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool post, but I _really_ like this paragraph from his "recovering programmer" page (linked in the sidebar):

"Somewhere along the lines, I realized I was looking at everything backward, from an implementation point of view, not from the perspective of a finished application, not considering the user first. And I realized that the inherent bitterness and negativity of programming arguments and technical defensiveness on the web were making me bitter and negative. I've consciously tried to rewind, to go back to when programming was a tool for implementing my visions, not its own end."

<comment><USER9> 80% of what is on his blog is worth a read. The entries are terse, insightful, and nostalgic without being sappy.

<comment><USER10> Dang, I wish it had a RSS feed! I now have a bunch of really good plain HTML sites which I have to check manually for post updates.

<comment><USER11> No feed? No problem.

My go-to tool for sites without rss is <http://feed43.com> which I find easy to set up. Also important to point out that it plays nice with the sites it scrapes.

Example... Problem: I love lurking in ask.metafilter but only want to see threads that have a "best answer" marked. No official feed for that.

Solution: <http://feed43.com/2602451534003772.xml>

Problem: I really like the PS238 comic but there's no direct feed

Solution: <http://feed43.com/ps238-link-only.xml>

Another tool that looks promising but I haven't really dug into yet is <http://scraperwiki.com> (pardon the pun)

<comment><USER12> I'm also a huge fan of feed43 but I've managed to hit my head more than a few times on its limitations. Coincidentally just this weekend I wrote a teeny program as a replacement for feed43. I've got all my scrapers working with XPath (which I prefer for this situation) but it's very straightforward to add a new site. <https://github.com/dgilman/atom_maker>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> ...and the original VisiCalc executable [1], at 27520 bytes, is smaller than the _app icons_ in a modern iOS app bundle!

VisiCalc was, essentially, _the_ killer app of the early PC era.

The march of progress. ;-)

[1] <http://www.danbricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm>

<comment><USER14> The 60 Minutes interview passed over the Apple II very briefly, but it was tremendously significant, for being one of the first computers popularized with a killer app.

Obviously, this wasn't the be-all and end-all, but VisiCalc did for sure sell many Apple II computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My first encounter with TP was as a high school senior in 89/90 in an AP programming course. What a blast.

Anyway, for those who miss it, the binaries for Borland TP/TC were released some time ago. Probably linked off the Wikipedia page.

The entire Borland Turbo series was cool. I had Turbo C, Pascal, and BASIC. Though Quick BASIC was the gold standard (and almost as fun), my heart will always have a soft spot for the original Borland DOS text-based IDEs.

In terms of utility value per byte of executable, that was such an interesting time. There were so many cool boot sector viruses and utils during that era. Anyone else remember that full-featured DOS-based .COM text editor that fit in a single floppy disk sector (512B)? The original text-based DESQView? So many, many neat programs given the limited hardware.

<comment><USER16> I really liked Turbo C... It was so nicely integrated: the editor, compiler, linker, visual debugger and excellent help system. It also had a nice paned IDE which actually looked good and made it very usable on those old DOS systems. [I had been using Alcyon C on the Atari ST and Lattice C on PC before I discovered Turbo C].

I always have been (and still am) a fan of the Borland series of developer tools - still using C++Builder today and still liking it.

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

 _"Philippe Kahn is a technology innovator and entrepreneur, who is credited with creating the first camera phone solution sharing pictures instantly on public networks. [...]

Kahn has founded four successful technology companies: His current company, Fullpower Technologies, of which he is CEO, Starfish Software, LightSurf Technologies, Borland. Fullpower provides solutions converging life sciences, wireless technology, sensing such as accelerometrics, nanotechnology and MotionX solutions. MotionX is the core technology that powers the Jawbone UP Band and the Nike+ GPS solutions."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> We used to joke that a JPEG screenshot of an old Atari 2600 game was always larger than the object code that ran the actual game.

<comment><USER18> Leads to an interesting compression algo.

<comment><USER19> Somewhat like <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Turbo Pascal wasn't my introduction to programming, but it was where I started to find my way. The edit, compile, test was factors of magnitude faster than any other compilers.

Like the post says, it was very small, even for the time. The editor + compiler was smaller than most text editors and many non-programmers would use it as a word processor. At a time when a lot of systems only had 160KB floppy drives (and no hard-drive), the size made a difference.

One great feature I remember was you could add inline assembler for things that needed to be faster (my IBM clone processor was only 4.77MHz). I spent hours shaving cycles off my Conway's Life program that was half Pascal and half assembler.

<comment><USER21> I have much the same history as you. Started out in basic, but turbo pascal was what really got me going. I must admit that sometimes I really miss those days. But then I remember the horrible feeling when the diskette and the backup diskette with my hard work died, and suddenly I don't miss it that much after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> While Turbo Pascal 3 was good, any true connoisseur would tell you that the pinnacle of Turbo Pascal evolution was the version 5.5 (with an exception of one annoying item in the editor †).

† The Find box was overlapping the highlighted search item when latter happened to be in the top visible line.

<comment><USER23> 5.5 was the best - yellow font on blue background will always bring fond memories, may be I should set Eclipse to that :)

And then came 6.0 and Turbo Vision - out of a sudden it was so easy to write programs with windows. I still remember how I was reading printed out Turbo Vision manual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ahh the warm feelings of memories. My first job involved Modula2 and the Brief editor. As I recalled Modula2 was supposed to be the successor of Pascal but I guess it never really took off. At least I've never met anyone who did any programming in Modula2.

This reminds me of .kkrieger[1], a game made by German demo group. It's a 3D game where the executable at 96k is smaller than most readme.txt files for other games. If we cut down all the abstractions layers we're using every day we could create amazingly small program than ran at blistering pace. Of cause development time would explode :-)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger>

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't see why he compared Turbo Pascal to the Wikipedia page on C++ - <USER2> Pascal is also much smaller than the Wikipedia page on Turbo Pascal :)

</comment><comment><USER26> That wasn't the only thing that was small about TP. The entire documentation for version 2 was a single book about 8 inches high, 5 1/2 inches wide and about an inch think. You could learn the entire language, IDE, library, and debugger in a weekend.

Only six months before I met TP I had been using punch cards on the University's mainframe. TP2 was pure shock and awe.

<comment><USER27> A whole inch thick? The first edition of _The C Programming Language_ couldn't have been half that!

<comment><USER28> According to the OP, "You could learn the entire language, IDE, library, and debugger in a weekend." This implies that the manual covers a lot more ground than _The C Programming Language_ , which (AFAIK) doesn't say anything about Emacs, GDB, GCC, sockets...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29>
        $ file /usr/bin/touch
        /usr/bin/touch: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
        /usr/bin/touch (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
        /usr/bin/touch (for architecture i386):	Mach-O executable i386

So actually _touch_ on Lion is ~half of 44016. But that's being nitpicky ;)

<comment><USER30> You are assuming i386 and amd64 have the same code density, which is not true, also you are neglecting the Mach-O headers and how sections are zero-padded for alignment.

<comment><USER29>
        cp /usr/bin/touch ./; for arch in i386 x86_64; do lipo -thin $arch touch -o touch.$arch; done; ls -l touch*
        -r-xr-xr-x  1 lloeki  staff  44016 31 Oct 11:37 touch
        -r-xr-xr-x  1 lloeki  staff  19440 31 Oct 11:37 touch.i386
        -r-xr-xr-x  1 lloeki  staff  19440 31 Oct 11:37 touch.x86_64

<comment><USER30> The object code is significantly less then the size of the binaries, Mach-O files (and ELF files and PE-COFF files) zero pad sections, allign them and generally have extraneous sections.

The boxes are the same, the content is different.

<comment><USER29>
        > cat touch.x86_64 | perl -p -e 's/\0//' | wc -c
        19407
        > cat touch.i386 | perl -p -e 's/\0//' | wc -c
        19408

        > otool -tV touch.x86_64 | wc -l
        742
        > otool -tV touch.i386 | wc -l
        808

Hmmm.

So, now what? The article mentioned Lion's touch(1) size, and I wanted to point out that it actually covers two arches. We know there is padding, alignment, headers and density whatnot. The end result is that makes a negligible difference between the two arches, hence _"~half"_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It might be fun to compare think/lightspeed pascal/c since they included a full GUI IDE (and inline assembler) as well as full support for the Mac toolbox. (These products were to the Mac what borland's products were for DOS and Windows.)

I know you could fit early versions of lightspeed pascal or c on a single floppy disk with a copy of System 3.2.

</comment><comment><USER32> Turbo Pascal totally rocked. I remember thinking "I can totally dump MASM and Visual C now!"

<comment><USER33> Really?! Pity that Visual C did not exist at the time.

<comment><USER32> What I meant was Microsoft's bloated and unwieldy C compiler, I don't recall if it had achieved the moniker 'visual' by DOS 4 or if that waited until Win95 release. It came in a green box on at least 4 floppies and was a PITA to use. Turbo Pascal, compared to that, made me wonder why Microsoft didn't adopt it as their 'main' implementation tool.

<comment><USER34> Wikipedia has some rumour:

> _Bill Gates saw the success of Turbo Pascal "in very personal terms, and > 'couldn't understand why [Microsoft's] stuff was so slow. He would bring in > poor Greg Whitten [programming director of Microsoft languages] and yell at > him for half an hour.' He couldn't understand why Kahn had been able to beat > an established competitor like Microsoft."_

It's certainly possible that someone was using TurboPascal (discontinued mid 90s) at same time as VisualC or the early version of MS C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Could someone explain why _touch_ program is 47 Kbytes size? Just checked my Ubuntu machine to confirm this.

<comment><USER36> Probably because it's statically linked with some standard libraries. If you write a hello world app in C++ and compile/link with all the defaults, you'll see similar results.

<comment><USER37> It is not. It even dynamically links to libpthread ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I learned programming with Turbo Pascal. I remember appreciating how it used a "Smart Linker" could produce really small executables because it stripped out any unreferenced code. I can't remember now how small the Hello World .exe files were, but they were small.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm surprised that nobody mentioned Wirth and Oberon yet. His '95 paper "A Plea for Lean Software" mentions Wirth's law: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

</comment><comment><USER40> The old computer joke...

\- Cheap \- Fast \- Good

Choose any two

With TP, you got all three!

<comment><USER41> fast is about development speed, not performance.

<comment><USER40> actually the original joke was about buying a new computer, I mutated it to apply it to TP

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Turbo Pascal was my first programming language. I thought it was the coolest thing ever that I could write a game, put it on a floppy disk and share it with all my friends.

I wish there was something like Github back then; I lost all my early source code years ago. It would be fun to see how terrible it looked :)

</comment><comment><USER43> Already posted, but relevant (and fairly technical) details about Turbo Pascal 3: <http://pcengines.ch/tp3.htm>

</comment><comment><USER44> Anybody here loved <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision> back in the day ? ;-)

<comment><USER45> Yes, I was. I still open it up to compile and play around with some old things I made.

<comment><USER44> Nostalgia :-)

<comment><USER45> Yeah! Slight small headache when I see my code from then. It's not great now, but luckily I progressed somewhat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I still think it is appalling that recent commercial operating systems take gigabytes of disk space to install.

<comment><USER31> What truly appalls me is 900mb patches.

<comment><USER47> What truly appalls me is _not using_ patches. Why do I have to download the entire firmware each time, Apple? Why? Why?!

<comment><USER46> Are you talking about iOS updates? If so, I believe this has changed with iOS 5, at least with over the air self-updating.

<comment><USER47> That's good to hear. I still had to download an 80MB iTunes update recently, but hopefully the update tech they're using will spread across the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Comparing executable byte counts with source code or English character counts is ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER49> I think the MS-DOS version is not smaller than the CP/M 80 version I learned Pascal with ;-)

<comment><USER20> I would be surprised if the CP/M version was any smaller. Turbo Pascal was smaller and faster than anything else at the time. However, the CP/M version would not have been a native compiler. Pascal generally compiled to p-code which was then interpreted (and was therefore slower).

<comment><USER50> The CP/M version was a native compiler. The real limitation with the Z80 version was that recursion required either a compile time switch or annotation on the functions (It's so long ago I can't remember)

Somewhere I have a copy of just the editor portion of turbo pascal (from memory it's around 13K) that I snaffled when I worked for Borland in the mid 80s. Sadly no good anymore as 16 bit COM programs won't run on my 64 bit system.

<comment><USER51> > 16 bit COM programs won't run on my 64 bit system

Have you tried DOSBox?

<comment><USER50> Yep that would work, just a bit pointless except for nostalgia purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Do older versions of turbo pascal have any edge over freepascal?

</comment><comment><USER53> Looking around my old DOS files, qbasic.exe is 254,799 bytes, plus a 133,810 help file. 400kb is larger than anything on that list, but we can think of lots of things larger than 400k. I don't seem to have Turbo C++ on my system any more, but it came on floppies and was probably no more than 15MB unpacked.

The entire MS-DOS 5.0 distribution is around 2.2MB. Norton Utilities is 2,316,176 bytes. For a complex application that uses graphics and fonts, Print Shop is 2,716,489 bytes. The average Flash game is larger these days, although that is largely due to music and bitmaps. Individual files in my /usr/bin that are larger than all of MS-DOS or Norton include python2.7 (2,375,356) mono (2,637,288), gdb (3,888,248), doxygen (5,413,488), and smbclient (6,512,344), and these files are stripped.

Linux kernel modules are still relatively small. Most are under 50k, although mac80211 is 257,001 and i915 is 451,033. The psmouse module is 73,312, almost twice the size of Turbo Pascal to drive my mouse.

Most files in /bin are still small. Turbo Pascal is just barely larger than ed (38,464) and cat (38,484), and is smaller than touch (42,552) on my system as well.

Turbo Pascal is also smaller than the gzipped man file for rsync (49,400), /etc/bash_completion (58,739), the Neko compiler (176,073) and DLL (94,203) for Windows, and GNU cmp for Windows (57,344).

<comment><USER54> Yes, most files in /bin are small, but that's because they're dynamically linked to libc, amongst others. I bet you virtually all of them would be larger than Turbo Pascal if statically linked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Not a surprise to anyone familiar with pascal's grammer.

<comment><USER56> A language's grammar wouldn't necessarily be a good indicator of implementation size, would it?

<comment><USER57> Not necessarily. Some grammars can be parsed with simpler code than others, but optimizations can make a compiler larger. Also of note is that Turbo Pascal was written by hand in assembly language, and the executable wasn't likely to have been linked with any libraries.

<comment><USER58> Indeed TP did not have any linking step. I still recall trying to fruitlessly find "Link" on the menu for quite some time until it hit me -- oh, no linking needed. But TP did include a run-time with each of the generated executable. This run-time was part of the compiler and it was approximately 10K (from memory, so I could be wrong). That makes the compiler about 22Kbytes worth of code, which is even more impressive.

<comment><USER57> I wasn't aware that the runtime was included in the executable. Oh, the things we did in the DOS days!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Turbo Pascal 6.0 was the pinnacle of IDEs. Or the pinnacle of my joy in programming, which, of course, is difficult to distinguish. :-)

I spent hours upon hours poring over VGA graphics code in Pascal, then assembly (called by Pascal, since I wasn't sophisticated enough to understand how to build a stand-alone EXE from ASM) in high school. I would tweak things, then run against the slick built-in profiler, then refine some more. Some time later, I came across this vast information pipe called Usenet and found out that everything I worked on was years out of date, since ModeX provided dramatically faster access to video memory. Ignorance is bliss...</comment>


Microsoft and Bytedance Put TikTok Talks on Hold After Trump Signals Opposition - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-bytedance-put-tiktok-talks-on-hold-after-trump-signals-opposition-11596312611 <comment><USER2> The idea that corporations are kowtowing to a polticians individual personal wishes - rather than operating under a framework of laws and regulations based on principles and administered fairly to all - should be offensive to every single American, regardless of who the players are or their country of origin.

<comment><USER3> Well, This is what HN posters want. As evidence by the numerous downvotes I get about not wanting the government involvement in tech. Even after the dog and pony show with the CEO's last week where one representative grilled Zuckerberg about _Twitter's_ treatment of Don Jr.

<comment><USER4> The worst political development over the last decade is the very wide embracing of corporate censorship. It is now widely accepted that media platforms have an explicit duty to control public opinion.

In this context any large foreign media outlet becomes a threat.

<comment><USER5> Social media platforms are tools of information warfare and propaganda. This is what advertising is to begin with, and outside of that obvious function most of these platforms are further optimized to drive engagement by presenting misinformation.

The idea of politicians discriminating against the ones they don't like is repugnant, but these platforms already are already used to control public opinion in ways that are against the public interest, and it's certainly reasonable to suspect that a platform such as TikTok (which is controlled by a competing empire) might be used to that empire's advantage.

<comment><USER6> All of which is either press or speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Non-walled link to TechCrunch coverage: [https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/01/bytedance-and-microsoft- of...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/01/bytedance-and-microsoft-offer-a-deal- to-allow-tiktok-to-remain-in-the-u-s-per-report/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm applying to work at ByteDance, and this whole thing is quite interesting.

I'd most likely, if I get an offer, ask if they would wait to see how this plays out. Last thing I would want to do is join a company that's having these kind of issues.

<comment><USER9> It's not likely they would give you an offer to be perfectly frank. In a very real way, they can't even know if they will have their own jobs in a month.

<comment><USER10> Not sure about that. Companies tend to offer jobs right up until a hiring freeze comes down from above. Happened to me with nVidia, and seemed to happen to a bunch of people at Magic Leap.

It might be best to accept the job offer pronto. What's the worst that happens? You have to look for another job, which is the situation you're already in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How is it ok for the US president to ban a media company? How is it ok for the US president to put pressure on the owners of a company to sell to another company? This must violate > 1 article of the constitution.

<comment><USER12> Why would a media company be special. This type of thing happens all the time, for example the US government banned a Chinese company from purchasing Lattice Semiconductor, the third biggest FPGA company (and really a much smaller player than the big two).

<comment><USER13> If the president is taking this actions in retaliation for the expression of free speech on the platform (TikTok audience skews young, which is a very anti-trump demographic) that may violate the First Amendment if proven.

Viewpoint discrimination is against the first amendment. We know Trump wasn't offended by the idea that foreign countries might be trying to help him get elected, and has repeatedly called it a "Russia hoax", but now that a social media app has anti-Trump users it's suddenly a national security threat without any evidence provided?

<comment><USER14> Tiktok is the only platform where Trump supporters aren't banned. Not to mention, (white) zoomers lean very much to the right.

<comment><USER15> > Not to mention, (white) zoomers lean very much to the right.

Huh? Where on Earth did you get that idea? From what I've read and observed, it seems like while they may not be self-identifying as "liberal" or Democratic on quite the same level as Millennials, they still seem to hold views which are far from what you'd traditionally call "very much to the right".

[https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/on-the-cusp-of- adultho...](https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/on-the-cusp-of-adulthood- and-facing-an-uncertain-future-what-we-know-about-gen-z-so-far/)

[https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-changes-political- divi...](https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-changes-political- divides-2019-7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if the "deal" was going to be just "we'll run your US infrastructure (and keep data) in the US, on Azure, and we split the money" rather than a buyout ? That would make more sense to me.

So more like "Microsoft will invest X billion for a Y% of TikTok and run its US operations".

You could satisfy the US government that Microsoft was guaranteeing the data would not be shipped to China.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought Trump already said no to that plan.

<comment><USER16> Yeah and the article also says that it was an actual buyout of Bytedance's share. oh well. interesting times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't believe business deals with such explicit political motivations are being considered.

<comment><USER17> Every single piece of law granting the US government authority on national security grounds has enjoyed bipartisan support for a very long time. I'm only surprised it hasn't been used like this earlier.

<comment><USER4> Treating foreign media as a "national security issue" is extremely scary. This is not something that free societies do.

<comment><USER18> > Treating foreign media as a "national security issue" is extremely scary.

Not really. RT and Al Jazeera has (rightfully) suffered much of the same scrutiny. There's a fundamental difference between something extremely partisan (think Breitbart or HuffPo) and something _state-sponsored_. Let's not bury our heads in the sand here.

<comment><AUTHOR> RT and Al Jazeera may suffer scrutiny, but the US government cannot ban Americans from reading them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If Tiktok was European/Japanese/Korean/Canadian this would not happen, as those countries are free democracies and work with a similar/common rule of law

1\. China doesn't play with the same rules, and it has been proven to be a malicious player

2\. They don't allow western companies to operate freely in their country, why should we let them to?

3\. The US and to a lesser degree Europe, are in a de-facto new Cold War, and informational warefare is big part of it

You can view either on the reciprocity Point of view, or data-safety point Of view, the US would be foolish/dumb to allow TikTok to flourish in the US., while American companies just can't in China.

Now, if the US was banning an app from another western country, that would be a true scandal.

In this case they are doing the right thinks

<comment><USER20> If the government wants to restrict the ability of Chinese business to grow in the US, that's fine, but it should be under the existing framework of law that we follow. This should be passed through Congress and the SC as a _law_ , not an executive order.

We have Checks & Balances for a reason.

<comment><USER21> Executive orders aren't magic, there's some law they will reference as giving the president the power to issue such an order.

<comment><USER22> Except for there being this joker called "national security" which magically allows practically anything to be ordered by the executive, because you can obviously reframe anything into a matter of national security, even short video clips of dancing teenagers.

<comment><USER23> Let's be clear apps like TikTok are a threat to national security.

Widely deployed apps that capture location data can and have been used to determine the location of military bases and assets.

<comment><USER24> If an app is a national security threat, maybe people shouldn't be carrying them around military bases :shrug:

<comment><USER25> Many of those bases will have baby + home security cameras which are far more obviously a security risk, because they (potentially) send WiFi passwords home.

Trump's move is pure theatre. He has no clue about real security and he's throwing his weight around like an attention-seeking child, because that's what he does.

This is an entirely orthogonal issue to something that's been missing in the West for decades - a coherent program of IT security and IoT and app standards which define exactly what products and apps can and can't do, and which enforces a testing and certification process to make sure products and services stay within the lines.

And also... mandated protections for user data - something the EU is moving towards, but which the US still seems to be having issues with.

Between IoT, IT infrastructure, poor corporate security, and unregulated data capture, there are _much_ more serious security threats than the TikTok app.

<comment><USER26> I fail to see how domestic US regulations will help in this case, if users are willingly installing this spyware app on their phone in the first place and giving it the requisite permissions to access everything on the devices. Do you think China will comply with US protections?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why doesn't TikTok just move out of the US completely? As far as I know, Trump does not have the authority to block foreign websites that he doesn't agree with (for example, the webpages of foreign terrorist groups or criminal organizations are easily accessible). The whole authority for Trump to block this is that ByteDance (a Chinese firm) is investing in TikTok (a US company). If TikTok was run abroad, and had no presence in the US there is nothing Trump can do, and US customers could still use the site.

<comment><USER28> That was my initial line of thinking as well, until someone reminded me of some government list that TikTok could be added to which would require that they're pulled from the app stores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well TikTok is still working in India while it has been "banned" ... kids being kids will just sideload the app unless they are running Apple devices.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is just wild. What will happen when or if a president of a different party is elected?

<comment><USER9> I understand your question, but I'm sorry, that just sounds bush league to me. So you have to change your business to suit every political party that comes to power? That's a lot of unpredictability. How can you run a business like that?

Plus, what if elections are "postponed until a more appropriate time"? I mean, the environment would just be riddled with so much uncertainty that I'm not sure how an honest business would be able to engage in cogent decision making?

<comment><USER3> I'm so confused. Didn't I just read several submissions where almost every person was cheering the government threatening to become involved in Big Tech?

<comment><USER30> It's a very different matter when a government acts within the bounds of its authority. In the case of the congressional hearings, that is well within their bounds, and antitrust law is established law. This is a president asserting executive authority in a way without precedent as far as I know.

<comment><USER3> Yes it is. Anti trust law has never been

A) used against a company that has at most 50% market share (Apple)

B) In the US always been focused on consumer harm and based on does a "monopoly" cause consumer prices to go up. Facebook/Google costs consumers nothing and no one can honestly claim that Amazon/Apple prices have increased because of anything they have done. (Disclaimer: I work for AWS)

C) The republicans were more worried about Facebook/Google's "bias against conservatism" and in the case of Facebook, one Republican representative grilled Zuckerberg about _Twitter's_ policy that affected Don Jr. and the administration has repeatedly gone against Amazon because Bezos owns the Washington Post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> He may not want the chinese benefiting from American money through such moves. This deal could set an example on new apps to come from China.

</comment><comment><USER32> Because it was never about protecting American national security, it was about protecting Trumps ego from TikTok ridicule.

</comment><comment><USER33> \- TikTok would seem to be an existential threat to Facebook.

\- Acquisition by Facebook is problematic given current scrutiny of their market position.

\- Facebook has been Trump's media ally since 2016.

\- Trump is intervening clumsily to kill a rare Facebook competitor.

Circumstantial to be sure. But the pattern match is bonkers.</comment>


News Site to Investigate Big Tech, Helped by Craigslist Founder - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/23/business/media/the-markup-craig-newmark.html <comment><USER2> This looks awesome.

>"The site will explore three broad investigative categories: how profiling software discriminates against the poor and other vulnerable groups; internet health and infections like bots, scams and misinformation; and the awesome power of the tech companies. The Markup will release all its stories under a creative commons license so other organizations can republish them, as ProPublica does."

Also, anyone interested in the high-level question of how technology impacts society is likely to enjoy the only non-fiction book written by one of my favorite authors: The Blind Giant, by Nick Harkaway.[1]

[https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/970091634](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/970091634)

<comment><USER3> This is awesome and looking forward to it!

The one thing that is bugging me is - yet another project that depends on the generosity of a rich person, a project that is so important and vital.

<comment><USER4> Five or so years ago I started a project to make it possible to crowdfund investigative journalism called Uncoverage. We launched with a review in the Times and things looked rosy. The premise: why should rich people - or editors - be the ones deciding what gets investigated? A couple of other projects have made a run at this too. The problem seems to be that the value proposition of "getting investigation" is too abstract for most people, and we've all been trained that information, and journalism, is free. The project flopped, as did its competitors like Beacon. The more recently launched Wikitribune is still going. The day we wake up as a society to the power of paying collectively for investigation into what may be hurting us instead of waiting for it to be done for us by the rich, nonprofits or thinly stretched newspapers will be a very important one. I wish I knew how to bring that about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Julia Angwin was one of the key people who shed a light on GNU Privacy Guard's precarious funding, helping OSS dev Werner Koch get donations from Stripe, FB, and others:

The World's Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who is Going Broke (2015)

[https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email- encrypti...](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption- software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke)

</comment><comment><USER6> > [news articles will] start going up on the website in early 2019.

I really can't wait for this to take off sooner!

> Ms. Angwin compares tech to canned food, an innovation that took some time > to be seen with more scrutiny.

Technology has become a boon in many ways and improved people's lives significantly, but we also seem to be heading toward a future that's _completely_ controlled by a few powerful companies who won't (and after a certain point can't) stop being evil and making huge groups of people further disadvantaged because of said technology.

This site's emphasis on combining technologists with journalists is much needed.

I only hope it can survive the long term and that readers will support it. I for one will be looking forward to the content and supporting it monetarily or otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER7> > The site will explore three broad investigative categories: how profiling > software discriminates against the poor and other vulnerable groups; > internet health and infections like bots, scams and misinformation; and the > awesome power of the tech companies.

Shouldn't they prove "if" software discriminates before figuring out "how"? It seems like they already have a conclusion in mind which rarely produces quality results.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure why you've been downvoted for this. Although I'm inclined to agree with their starting position it's hard to deny that quality investigative journalism shouldn't be about proving a preexisting hypothesis.

<comment><USER9> If you read the article, they already proved that Facebook was selling illegal housing ads that were biased racially and they proved that a common parole software was also biased racially. I think it stands to reason there are plenty of other inadvertent, or otherwise, issues out there.

<comment><USER10> The book "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neill has plenty of other examples of how profiling algorithms often end up disadvantaging the disadvantaged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The comparison to canned food is interesting. It probably resonates with people better than comparing the tech industry to cigarettes. Few people now remember how beloved cigarettes were in their heyday.

<comment><USER12> I wonder if anybody could give me a link to read on canned food issues. I come from Russia and there were non in USSR and Russia after USSR dissolved, what were the issues in the US?

<comment><USER13> You could look at it from at least two angles: canned food became associated with lower economic classes, and people became concerned that much of the nutritional value of canned foods was lost when they were preserved.

[https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/really-the- claim-f...](https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/really-the-claim-fresh- produce-has-more-nutrients-than-canned/)

Today people who see themselves as well-off and/or health-conscious may pride themselves on eating fresh (as well as local and in-season) foods, although it can be an expensive habit in places that don't have as much local agriculture. Restaurants will brag about how they don't use packaged food and how they made dishes from fresh ingredients.

If you go to supermarkets that cater to poorer people, you'll probably see comparatively more preserved foods, although this is far from the only factor and all supermarkets will certainly offer a significant selection of preserved foods.

This phenomenon is probably even more pronounced with "TV dinners", which when they were introduced were seen as impressive and futuristic and somewhat luxurious, and nowadays the original styles are seen as somewhat unhealthy and unappetizing and are often associated with poverty or a lack of leisure time (although there are also frozen prepared dishes that are marketed differently).

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

Edit: an example of some marketing about fresh ingredients in a restaurant

[https://www.chipotle.com/cooking](https://www.chipotle.com/cooking)

Chipotle isn't a very expensive restaurant but they know that being able to say or imply that they prepare most of their items on-site from fresh ingredients makes it look a lot fancier to visitors, compared to other restaurants that might use more canned or frozen ingredients.

<comment><USER14> No. Fresh produce is basically always cheaper than processed foods, and there are no places on the continent that lack access to 'agriculture'. Hawaii, way up in Northern Canada - maybe.

I buy a big bad of produce from the local market and it comes to like $12. A bag of arbitrary goods from the processed isles would be 5 times that.

The only dietary staple that's expensive is meat.

My grandparents grew up on farms, they were poor, they never saw or ate a 'TV dinner' why on earth would they?

TV dinners and canned foods are not about economic poverty.

<comment><USER15> People who run their own farms are usually not living in poverty. Poor: yes, poverty: no.

Eating well for really cheap takes some upfront resources that really impoverished people wouldn't have, like kitchen space, cooking equipment, a lot of freezer or shelf space, equipment for freezing or canning your own food, etc.

Those things are all fairly cheap, so poor people living on a farm can afford them since it will save them a lot of money in the long run, but truly impoverished people can't afford that even if it will save them money.

<comment><USER14> No.

Produce is cheaper than processed food universally.

100% of domiciles in the United States have refrigerators, cooking spaces, and 'shelf space'. (Did you really just use 'shelf space' as an argument?)

The facts are clear - the argument of 'cost of eating well' doesn't make a whole lot of sense because with a marginal bit of thought, it's entirely possible to eat well _and save money_.

If you're talking 'homeless' \- well that's another thing entirely.

I think there may be some issues with 'time' \- with two working parents not normative, and possibly kids, people have less time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> craig newmark is a generous, effective, and humorous philanthropist. he is behind an absurdist easter egg that you can find in the bathrooms of various nonprofits he's supported: a toilet dedicated to his memory.

</comment><comment><USER17> Craig Newmark also gave $20M to the CUNY graduate journalism school (where Jeff Jarvis teaches), which now bears his name.

For a reflection from Jeff on Craig's role, see: [https://buzzmachine.com/2018/06/11/thank-you- craig/](https://buzzmachine.com/2018/06/11/thank-you-craig/). It's worth a look.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would love for someone to take an investigative look at how the stock market is not working for society in many ways. I can't help but feel that as the pressure of being a listed stock weighs on listed companies, their value sets change and not in ways beneficial to "greater" society.

<comment><USER19> I thought that was common sense but you're right. Some non-listed companies are like that by choice, to avoid all that encompasses being a public listed company.

The law requires that the executive board to provide value to shareholders (valuation or dividends). This usually translate in quarter reports with good numbers for greater valuations. It's known that this requirement and tradition skews boards to short term goals which can damage companies' future.

This is the good scenario, just a skew for short term goals.

The bad scenario is when the quarter reports look good my quasi-illegal number juggling and also legal practices which should be illegal like a company buying it's own stocks to please shareholders.

Currently this even worse because central banks interventions from low interest rates (it has been cheaper for a company to use debt buy it's own stocks than to invest) to central banks buying stocks and causing inflated valuations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I eagerly await the announcement of Newmark funding an ambitious local news initiative. That would be a way to put critical information in front of millions of people.

This initiative may also be important, but it doesn't do anything to fill the void of local investigative reporting and press accountability created when Craigslist denuded local newsrooms.

<comment><USER21> One problem is that local news doesn't scale. Nothing really replaces local reporters developing sources and attending a lot of boring selectman, zoning, etc. meetings. I live in a small town that had a "labor of love" local paper for a while but it went out of business and now there's effectively no local coverage.

<comment><USER20> The proximate reason it went out of business is b/c Craigslist took all it's classified income. That's why (in addition to Craig Newmark's professed interest in journalism) I think Craigslist is the perfect organization to be funding reportage.

It's not my money, so clearly knowing how best to use it comes easily to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't wait to see their first publishing. With every article seemingly a sponsored piece nowadays, it's almost impossible to identify those with hidden agendas from reporters whose only interest is to fill up their quotas. I'm happy to see any news source that I can trust.

Mr. Newmark has put it correctly when he said "we're at an information war now". I have seen it first hand how information was reported incorrectly and intentionally on popular news websites just to attack and harm individuals. Our privacy is long gone as people spying on you just so they can sell your private life information to those who have interest. Information is literally being used as weapon nowadays so it's really time we need to wake up.

I hope they have enough power that will back them up as no doubt they will face relentless pressures from the big tech companies.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd like to see a serious investigation and discussion around the recommendation engines used to rank content added here.

Something is seriously wrong with youtube's algorithm, whether in the technical implementation or how it deals with spam/unintended consequences.

Kids watching cartoons get recommended messed up stuff (e.g. [https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/65rkxv/what_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/65rkxv/what_is_up_with_the_weird_kids_videos_that_have/) ), watch a single Jordan Peterson video and youtube will recommend you every fringe alt-right anti-feminism video it can find for months... It is toxic, causes real harm, normalizes extremist viewpoints and is shifting the Overton window in politics.

I'm not advocating censorship in any way, my concern is if algorithms/implementation bias what people see towards what will get the strongest reaction it is at least in a similar class of harm as censorship...

I have a hunch this is a natural consequence of using something like UCB (upper confidence bound) for contextual bandits to rank results when the feature vectors are using broad user / video clusters. Are explore vs exploit reinforcement learning algorithms used in production very susceptible to adversarial spam? Any evidence of fringe videos paying for viewbots etc...

<comment><USER24> > I'd like to see a serious investigation and discussion around the > recommendation engines [...] Something is seriously wrong with youtube's > algorithm

I had a pretty surreal experience last year. My youtube use is almost exclusively for learning; coding, maths, astronomy, science, and so on. Recommendations were never great for me, usually recommending videos I've already watched. At some point I inadvertently clicked a link to a teenage girl's vlog, and watched maybe 5 seconds of it before closing. Instantly half of my recommendations were teenage girl's vlogs. I then misclicked a video in recommendations a few days later, and it turned into exclusively teenage girl vlogs. A year later, it's slightly recovered, but I still get them.

I am pretty confident their recommendation would not be overrun with science if they inadvertantly click a video.

<comment><USER25> I like to watch penn and teller fool us videos and if I click on one, my entire feed is full of magicians for weeks. They need to adjust how quickly they read signals.

That said, I also watch numberphile and do get a bunch of like math suggestions like mathologer and v sauce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Junk food/fast food might be a better villain than canned food: one could probably live perfectly healthily on canned food alone for decades if need be, but the same cannot really be said of junk food/fast food.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think content will be so much a problem, it will be readership. That said, nice effort.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can ProPuboica/MarkUp investigate how Apple never comes under the scanner of anti trust regulators either in the US or EU, while Google, Microsoft get fingered for far less. For instance, Android, which is open source, has been fined by the EU, while EU app developers have consistently complained against Apple's app store authorization and related policies onto deaf ears.

</comment><comment><USER28> Sounds great, can't wait. Just hope it doesn't follow the path of the Intercept: starting out as a legitimate source of in-depth governments exposees, only to turn into a run-of-the-mill liberal rag that hires lazy college graduates and unrepentant race-baiters.

</comment><comment><USER29> Excellent. Now we need Musk to come through with his "pravda" site that investigates news/journalists.

I feel the two biggest threats to american life and freedom are "big tech" and "big news". It's about time these companies get closer scrutiny.</comment>


Ask HN: Selling products/startups? - <AUTHOR> If you've tried to build a product or startup and failed to take it where you wanted or don't want to work on it anymore, someone else with the skills and knowledge to make it take off might be interested in buying all the work you've already put in.<p>Please fill the info below when appropriate and add anything you might deem relevant<p>* product name<p>* product description<p>* market research/validation<p>* number of users<p>* business model<p>* product implementation stage<p>* tech stack<p>* costs of running<p>* domain name(s) owned<p>* available platforms<p>* patent(s)<p>* next steps<p>* minimum offer <comment><AUTHOR> * product name: beat.yoga

* product description: yoga music recommendations (no playlist)

* market research/validation: people think the app look good but and it seems like yoga teachers could use it because making good playlists takes a lot of time, but the idea hasn't taken off

* number of users: a few downloads but no regular users

* business model: none

* product implementation stage: working app launched

* tech stack: React-Native/Django

* cost of running: 7$ for Django worker, requires an Apple Developer account

* domain name(s) owned: beat.yoga

* available platforms: iOS ([https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/beat-yoga/id1505203964](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/beat-yoga/id1505203964))

* patent(s): none

* next steps: reach out to yoga teachers and yogi who self practice to try to the app. business model could be subscription based

* minimum offer: $5000

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> * product name: boomroom

* product description: music with friends - everyone can tune in to boomroom and add songs to the shared queue

* market research/validation: tried it with coworkers and they found it fun - someone's kids ended up taking over the queue and adding tons of fun. No regular use besides that

* number of users: a few users came by but no returning or regular users

* business model: none

* product implementation stage: launched v1

* tech stack: React, WebSocket, Django

* cost of running: $7 for heroku worker + pay as you go for now.sh front-end hosting

* domain name(s) owned: boomroom.co

* available platforms: web (boomroom.co)

* patent(s): none

* next steps: add multiple rooms, try to get events to use it. business model could be ads

* minimum offer: $2500

</comment><comment><USER2> Do they have to be failed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, they don't! I've updated the post</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage and anticipate your personnal finance? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a tool to manage my personal finances which is oriented on the previsional.
Indeed, for me, the purpose of following my operations is to know if I will be ok to finish the month and if the rest of the year will go well. It also allows me to create budget "envelopes" (for trips, gifts, etc.) or to make simulations to refine my savings.
Every day, I use Bankin to track and classify all my expenses and incomes.
Then I add them to a personal Google spreadsheet (which contains one tab per month of the year) in which I add future operations. So, I can see if I will be positive or negative at the end of the month and the rest of the year.
I do it every day and it's very time consuming. The other problem is that to do my simulations, I have to duplicate the sheet for each case. As I work on the previsionel, I do not have visualization of the real instant and, sometimes, some deltas appear (I will improve my sheet on that for 2018).
Do you track your personnal finance this way ? Do you have a tool for that ? <comment><USER2> I also use spreadsheet. Once I got my salary, I make a plan for my expenses for the month. I always leave a buffer of 300 and transfer the remaining amount directly to my deposit account. Once a week or biweekly, I review the plan to check if my remaining balance will cover all upcoming expenses. If not, I use my buffer.</comment>


Ask PG: Ever Considered HN Store? - <AUTHOR>

A 'Store' tab lodged with the other links in the top panel.
...Working exclusively with one print company (for manufacturing) and selling high-quality t-shirts (for starters). YC logos, hacker slogans, and tech images on each.
Storefront could be a clean and spacey UI - following pre-established HN design standards. Or the store's UI could be built off API to third-party 'online store builder' application - a past YC startup comes to mind.
I'm sure you've considered it already, so I guess the better question is: Will you ever sell HN-inspired gear through HN? <comment><USER2> Why not a store that aggregates and organizes all the HN-built apps out there? I'm sure there's an app built by an HN member that covers all the major tools startups rely on. Say you decide you need an A/B testing tool. Check out the HN Store and you'll be sure to see Visual Website Optimizer is a popular choice. Support your fellow Entrepreneur and get great software; its a win, win.

Probably something that wouldn't be incorporated into HN itself, but I could see the potential for success if someone else built it...

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would setting up a HN store be worth the time and effort?

<comment><USER4> it certainly wouldn't be a profit center, but from a brand / loyalty perspective I see the value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Main questions: Does PG actually need more money? Would a store do anything more for the YC brand than if the time required to create it were spent doing other things, like helping startups/doing interviews/thinking?

I suspect that the answer to both questions is not really. Thus, probably not gonna happen dude. Bummer.</comment>


New: Code in comments (plus a bit of Arc) - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32766 <comment><USER2> Very Interesting ! can you tell us anything about how well (or if) Arc is converging to a releasable state?

<comment><USER3> <http://download.archub.com/arc-0.99r1.tar.gz>

<comment><USER2> Is that url correct? I get a "Server Not found" result for download.archub.com though archub.com works fine.

Could be a server in the middle I guess.

Can someone reading this attempt a download and post the result here?

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I was joking. I've seen the "arc we there yet?" question asked so many times I feel the need to tease. I made sure to reply here quickly though :-)

<comment><USER2> no harm done :-)

Just to clarify, I didn't ask for a downloadable. I just wanted a sense of whether arc was converging or not and how the language evolved and what was learned. e.g: the decision to have constants in function call position return themselves. I would really love to know how that came about (though it maybe burdening Paul too much to ask him to write down how he came to that design decision :-) )

I find language design fascinating. One of my favorite books is Stroustroups' "The design of the C++ language". It is not often one can ask question _while_ the language design/evolution is going on.

The question wasn't intended to be "Is Arc ready?" but rather "what is your sense of where the language is going?" .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. I reckon Markdown-style [links](<http://link.com/>) would be at least as useful, though. (I notice the paren is still included in the href -- I often would like to parenthesize links but then remind myself it doesn't work in News.YC.)

Just curious as to why this comments thread (32768) isn't the same as the main link (32766).

<comment><USER5> The main link was to a comment on an old thread. If he'd made the top level of this thread the actual comment it linked to (assuming that makes sense in news.yc), it would take up a whole lot of space on the front page...</comment></comment>


Should people be able to change their usernames? - <AUTHOR> http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/12293/should-people-be-able-to-change-their-usernames

<comment><USER2> Interesting debate.

I'm currently building a web app that not only works using pseudonymous accounts but also supports and encourages the use of aliases (multiple profiles) to allow people to say things that they might not under their main profile.

I've run several very large communities in my time, and none of them suffer a lack of identity by allowing username changes. However policies that restrict changing username can have some bad consequences to it as it's not always obvious at the time of signup that so much data might be associated to you.

I'm personally of the opinion that you either allow changes, or you shift towards the consequences of real identity without the benefits of that (anti- spam and reputation).

Not allowing change means that people will work out your identity anyway, undermining any reason to have pseudonyms which can be very good protective barriers against the potential consequences (which on stack exchange is your employability).</comment>


AWS – RDS – Canada Is Down - <AUTHOR> Amazon Relational Database Service is currently down in Canada. There is no official ETA on this and nothing on their status page yet however, our stack is completely down and the support told us it is a large scale issue in AWS canada. <comment><USER2> Aurora down for the past 4 hours in ca-central-1, still no status update. [https://status.aws.amazon.com/](https://status.aws.amazon.com/)</comment>


Controller Mistakenly Clears a KLM 737 to Line-Up Ahead of a Departing Embraer - <AUTHOR> https://airlinegeeks.com/2020/06/20/controller-mistakenly-clears-a-klm-737-to-line-up-ahead-of-a-departing-embraer/ <comment><USER2> Close call, reminds me of the Tenerife accident. Good this ended well for all involved, I'm missing any kind of steps to improve so that this situation could not occur again in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> KLM pilots should be awarded. I think high workload of pilots and controllers will continue to plague the aviation industry.</comment></comment>


Wolfram Alpha's API is Free, But is it Open? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/wolfram-alphas-api-is-free-but-is-it-open.php

<comment><USER2> Terrible, terrible headline (and question). Submitter: What are we supposed to learn here? That they have a free tier for their API?</comment>


link rel="prefetch" - nasty, nasty? - <AUTHOR> http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Link_prefetching_FAQ <comment><USER2> Yeah, I'd noticed this a while ago. It's actually pretty nice if you've told Firefox to ask you about cookies first. I find that if the top site in the search results tries to set a cookie, it's often also one of those times that it's worth skipping to the second.

What's interesting about this is that it won't so much help spy on you (it won't), as tell people how effective their search engine optimization is (prefetch requests where referrer=Google mean you hit the top on something). I would expect it would make it slightly _harder_ (one more hoop) to spy on you, because getting the cookie does not necessarily imply that you clicked the link.

</comment><comment><USER3> Within a single administrative domain, this wouldn't be a problem. The target already knows you visited the origin page, and exact contents of the origin page. The only information leaked is that the user has 'prefetch' on.

In Google search results, this is problematic. It reveals your search terms and IP address to a third party you've never decided to visit. It's essentially equivalent to a 1-pixel 'web bug' sharing your Google search visit info with the first result site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just discovered this by accident when I cleared my cookie cache, went to Google and found a non-Google cookie on my computer. How did it get there? Google had inserted a link="prefetch" for the top search result (or presumably that cost some money).

I am a bit shocked - yet another way to spy and be spied upon :-(

<comment><USER4> Or another way for sensationalists to moan about being spied upon?

Seriously... They already know you searched for "X". What difference does it make if they load some stuff in your browser cache. What extra information does that give them? How is this spying?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know in the big scheme of things it is not a biggie, it just frustrates me that it is yet another thing to watch out for (and coming from the "good guys" a ka open source Mozilla). There are too many already - Flash cookies, Javascript includes etc.

I just happened to test the cookei thing - my Sage news reader also installs several cookies immediately, even though I have told it to not automatically update the feeds. I am guessing it comes from the favicons?

Anyway, I am planning to create a collection of all of this.

<comment><USER4> 'installs several cookies'

eugh please

<comment><AUTHOR> what does "eugh" mean?

Sorry if my language was not precise enough. What I meant is that several cookies get set via the Sage reader. Better now?

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Cookies get set. They're data the server asks the client to remember for it. The word 'install' suggests something much more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well they feel a little bit like hooks the server sinks into the client, but yeah ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing major here, you can already do this with a hidden iframe if you like.

<comment><USER5> Except that this makes it voluntary for the user. Many people still pay for bandwidth, and they would be able to turn off prefetching in order to minimize usage. By using iframes or AJAX to prefetch, you may be costing the user money that he doesn't want to spend.</comment></comment>