500k Amazon Coins Offer per Qualifying Fire App - <AUTHOR> https://developer.amazon.com/post/Tx2I49QTWPW228V/Appstore-Developer-Select-Benefits-Expands-to-Fire-Phone-500k-Amazon-Coins-Offer.html <comment><USER2> Amazon coins? Why can't companies just use normal money instead of inventing their own monetary units?

<comment><USER3> I believe it helps avoid legalities involving gambling and the such as well as helps to keep the money circulating in their marketplace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It'll be interesting to see if developers can woo users into their apps by offering up to $5000 in prizes (Amazon Coins). I personally believe that Amazon should be offering the $5000 directly to developers to simply build apps through a large competition (i.e. top 50 apps in every category will receive a prize). This current approach is assuming there's a population of users to bribe which isn't necessarily true.

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazon should learn one or two things with the FED (Federal Reserve Bank). Printing so many Amazon Coins and giving them for free means diluting the value of the apps on their own store from day one. Good one Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem is, Amazon is notoriously bad to their vendors. Even getting paid $5000 in cash (which this apparently isn't) I don't know that I would want to be in business with them as a vendor.

</comment><comment><USER6> The $6 per 1k impressions guarantee seems more exciting than the coins.. Seems that would be high for mobile apps? Interstitials it says..

<comment><USER7> That is high. I get $2.50-$4 on iOS across millions of users.</comment></comment>


NASA starts year-long isolation to prepare astronauts for Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34092770 <comment><USER2> Misleading headline. It's an isolation experiment, and the six person team are not astronauts. Only in the loosest sense is it preparing anyone to go to Mars, or simulating life on Mars. It's also not even the longest to date.[1]

[1] "Other simulation experiments have taken place under the ocean off the Florida coast, in Antarctica and in Russia, where a 520-day Mars experiment was carried out in 2011."

<comment><USER3> >where a 520-day Mars experiment was carried out in 2011

They sure crammed a lot of days into that year.

<comment><USER4> That's like 3/4 of a Martian year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just watched a Twighlight Zone episode about this subject. It was actually the first of the series.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Is_Everybody%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Is_Everybody%3F)

<comment><USER6> The throwback of the U.S. looking to get to the moon was pretty interesting.

</comment></comment><comment> vladimir-y You better just read the "The Martian" Andy Weir's book than sitting in a dome for a 6 month. And for what reason, Russians have already completed such kind of experiment in 2010-2011 and the length of experiment was more then 500 days [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500)

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminded me of the Biosphere 2 experiment, which I saw a fascinating talk on. I think it was basically the same as this TED talk: [https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2](https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2)

Eight scientists lived in a closed biosphere to simulate what a potential colonization scenario might be like (among other things). The first experiment lasted 2 years, and encountered environmental issues, but also some psychological upsets - the crew split into two factions who became bitter enemies, among other things.

<comment><USER8> Looking at the pictures, this doesn't look like a sealed environment (which biosphere 2 was). The dome is made of fabric and there doesn't seem to be an airlock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> More at the web site for "Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation":

[http://hi-seas.org/](http://hi-seas.org/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Brings to mind: [https://youtu.be/u80ZMJSyEzo?t=14s](https://youtu.be/u80ZMJSyEzo?t=14s)

</comment><comment><USER11> NASA, if you need a volunteer, I'm your guy! Please?

<comment><USER12> If it makes you feel better, if you're interested in helping get people to Mars and elsewhere in the solar system, there are almost certainly more productive uses of your time than camping in Hawaii for a year. :)</comment></comment>


GitHub will switch to English-only on Friday, May 20, 2011. - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/a4b4fac18beb08335919

<comment><USER2> Good decision. No translation is often better than a poor translation (open source projects, take note...) (But of course, if I didn't speak any English and wanted to use GitHub I'd probably feel differently.)

<comment><USER3> In particular, a translation has to be better than the automatic translation you get when using Chrome, which has the advantage of being up to date.</comment></comment>


Tips and Myths About Extending Smartphone Battery Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/technology/personaltech/tips-and-myths-about-extending-smartphone-battery-life.html?ref=business <comment><USER2> The myths section doesn't sound very accurate. They also contradict themselves about cellular vs wifi.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to start with User Experience Design? - <AUTHOR>

When building a good web site or service that people are intended to use, where is the best place to start with the user interface and interaction design? Even if your site has a good idea or sophisticated technology behind it, if this part is done badly then the site fails to be useful for anyone. Alternately, superior usability trumps even the poorest of aesthetics as attested to by both stack overflow and News YC. However, since good design doesn't come out of thin air, what resources would you direct me towards or what advice would you provide? <comment><USER2> Knowing your use-case actors is a primary requirement before anything else is done. You should have atleast 2 or 3 just having come up with the idea to build software (by that I mean you will have an implicit actor just by deciding someone needs a bit of software), but UI wise you need much more granular detail. The implicit actor for your software is usually as simple as "a freelance developer needs to be able keep track of the time they devote to projects so they can effectively bill their clients while minimising time wasted on their own admin".

When you want to create use-case actors for the UI side you want to really think about people and not functions. The Joomla admin system is, in my opinion, an example of something that was written as a set of functional requirements without anyone attempting any user empathy.

A starting point here might be: "Tom is going into his second year as a freelance developer, having had a more successful first year than he had anticipated. Tom doesn't keep detailed time records and ends up partially guessing at the end based on emails but as he works with clients he likes he's been happily underestimating because his income is really good compared to his old job, and what is an hour or 2 anyway?

He has just taken on some work with a really well known agency who want work break-downs to 15 minute accuracy included with invoices, and while he doesn't really see what the point is, this is a big opportunity for him and wants it to go smoothly. He is also a little intimidated by his contacts at the agency and doesn't want to cause any conflict.

Tom is willing to run the time software for working with this agency, but at the moment doesn't really imagine the benefits to using it for his existing clients because it seems like more effort every day than it is just to do what he usually does at the end of the month."

From here you can extract lots of valuable information that will inform your UI cases. You know instantly for example that if you need to read a PDF to understand how to even start tracking project time this user will no doubt ditch the product because right now he is not really buying into the concept.

Case 1: The user must be able to record time information on a per-project basis to specified precisions, broken down by task.

Now look at Case 1 and ask yourself how you would go about building the task tracking UI for your actor. Would you build something like a tray app that he can quickly select the project, add a row into with a name, and then run a start/stop timer on that task? Would you add a way to show visual reminders that a task is still running every x minutes? Why? Or would you make it a system that you had to log into where you click into a project, then create a new task, then on the next page you can put in the time you spend on that task, save that and go back to the project panel, then swap projects and put in some new time against another task?

Both effectively do the same thing, but which one is Tom more likely to use for his current requirement, and more importantly for your business, which one might affect his opinion that it's more hassle than it's worth and would look to expand his use of your product to all his business (and this possibly be up-sold to)?

Writing clear and precise actors that have some empathy to them makes a huge difference to IA and UX as a complement to a good set of functional requirements.

(Note: I've cheated a little by basing my example to expand on as developers, as this makes it very easy to remove actors who don't understand technology that well).

And that is really a starting point, I've not touched on using real users to inform your decisions (though things like card sorting) and I would really suggest that if you use people to test wireframes or early designs you don't sit over their shoulder but screen-share with them instead, as people definitely tend to act differently when they are in a "test" environment with someone watching them.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are many books and all but if you want to just dive into it, here is the basic process you can build upon (this is how I design):

1) For every page of your site, list BIG 1,2,3. (Like what you want users to do, and two alternates).

2) Now design around that. Make it easier and obvious to follow your 1,2,3 (If there are more than 3 steps - you might wanna break them into more pages).

3) Remove noise and barriers that come in way of BIG 123

4) Test, test, test & Optimize

It's a very short description of how to go about it. But you gotta do it to know what I am talking about.

The aim is to design an experience around user.

Once you've practiced this at least with one project,you can dive into awesome articles at:

<http://www.uxbooth.com/> <http://www.uxmagazine.com/> <http://www.uxmatters.com/>

Just read what interests you, but before - practice the above, so you can relate to what they are talking about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your advice and the links.

<comment><USER3> Sure man! Always happy to help in design, UI & UX :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with weego that the place to start with user experience designs is with THE USER. Describe these (assumed) primary and secondary players that support whatever business and marketing efforts you've got.

Simple persona style might be:

\-- Jim is 32, an accountant, online 4-5 hours a day, has an iPhone, 2 toddlers, and no time for anything except his fantasy football league and the occasional game of Angry Birds while on the metro each morning. --

By getting my team or clients onboard with Jim right out of the gates, I've found that I can say "Seriously, 'Jim' doesn't care about button colors or sharing this on Facebook," when projects typically might otherwise get distracted, and the development cycle then stays more uniformly focused on the user (our ultimate goal, usability wise).

Then, I complement this user development with MEANING creation. What does "Jim" really _care_ about? What core aspect of our app makes his life easier, means more to him, or is /the/ most entertaining way to engage his attention?

From there, I'd build (ugly) only that feature/interaction with great content that provides necessary cues, then go find a few Jims. Test, re-test, evolve, and FINALLY layer in the pretty (and additional features _essential_ to bolstering usability... not just for the purpose of adding stuff).

Rinse and repeat for all target audiences. Well, repeat anyway. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me, or there a new one of these threads once or twice a day now?

From a couple of emails I recently sent out:

"I'd suggest starting out with 'The Non-Designer's Design Book,' which explains the basics of putting elements on a page or screen together in a tasteful way; 'The Humane Interface,' which explains testing and measuring for efficiency and why dialog boxes are often bad and so on and so forth; and 'Designing for Interaction,' which is often cited as a good overview of the practice of interaction design, and I just flipped through it and it seems to be, although I haven't read it."

"If no-one [on your team] is a designer and you don't want to hire one, help everyone become a designer. Buy these books, a copy each for everyone, and make everyone read them and discuss them with each other, cover to cover, no exceptions, everyone doing all the exercises in them."

"After everyone has dog-eared copies of those three books, have everyone pick a different book from this list and buy it and read it and present it to everyone else, and then repeat that until all the books have been gone through: [http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=114778998560307&to...](http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=114778998560307&topic=130)

<comment><USER6> Instead of reading books, why not organize weekly Friday user afternoons: invite three users to use your product. Or a competing product if yours is not ready. Every freaking Friday. Invite the team, too, with pizza and beers.

Better than any book.

<comment><USER7> There are actually a couple of books that can probably help with this kind of informal user experience testing. Both are by Steve Krug. The first is "Don't Make Me Think" which focuses on design for usability, and includes a chapter titled "Usability Testing on 10 Cents a Day". The second is "Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems" (already mentioned by petervandijck). This is a newer book (2009) that goes much more deeply into usability testing for people whose primary responsibility is design and development rather than user experience. It's a great book in spite of the cutesy name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suggest keeping a clip file. Anytime you see something you like, take a screenshot and save it (locally, create a gallery on Picasa, etc.).

Then figure out exactly what it is you like about the sample. Break it down, see the individual elements and think about how you'd implement them in your own design.

That way you can learn the techniques (how to fish) and avoid wholesale copying.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Be clear about the problem you're solving.

2\. Watch (in person) real people using your website trying to solve this problem. Many times. Fix the most glaring problems.

This is the best book to learn usability testing, and the only one I would recommend: [http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-- Yourself/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-- Yourself/dp/0321657292/)</comment>


Stemming the Plastic Tide: 10 Rivers Contribute Most of the Plastic in Oceans - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/ <comment><USER2> We have been talking a lot about the problem but not about the solution. It is time to come up with ideas. _People of hacker news, how would you solve this problem if you were in charge of solving it?_

<comment><USER3> Plastic can be recycled into fuel rather easily. Sponsoring plants in africa and china which convert waste plastic into fuel would appear to be a worthwhile endeavor. Then people might be incentivized to hold on to their plastic and exchange it for something of value, rather than discard it into the ocean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274675).

</comment><comment><USER5> So China and India to blame for most of the plastic pollution in the world as well as most of the coal pollutions. What a surprise....

<comment><USER6> From whom do you think they imported all that plastic?</comment></comment>


It's Okay to Store Data in Apache Kafka (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.confluent.io/blog/okay-store-data-apache-kafka/ <comment><USER2> I think what the article greatly skimps over is data migrations: what do you do if you need to change the format of your data? If you retain logs in Kafka indefinitely as the source of truth for your data, then if you need to migrate materialized data to a new format, you'll also need to either 1) support all the previous forms of materialized data so operations from the log are guaranteed to be safely replayable on it, or 2) don't do that and keep one form of materialized data and hope you have enough test coverage to make sure some unexpectedly old data doesn't silently corrupt your materialized data.

Event sourcing is useful, but using it as a source of truth data store in itself instead of e.g. an occasional journalling mechanism seems pretty fraught.

<comment><USER3> You use AVRO and the confluent schema store so that you can do compatible schema upgrades (automatically upgrading messages when reading). If you need to do a breaking change, you can detect the avro schema from the message and have code in the reader to convert one to the other. It's not that much of a problem in practice.

<comment><USER2> This is a problem we've actually encountered in practice: you need to preserve the conversion code for as long as the history exists, which is permanent technical debt. If you get your domain model wrong at the start, it will haunt you forever.

<comment><USER4> This is no different from evolving an RDBMS with ActiveRecord or Flyway. It's not technical debt (there is nothing to repay or maintain).

<comment><USER5> If you write "read it to the latest version" code for every version, you need to write that for every past version - potentially a high burden. Writing "convert it to the next version" instead is much less work for humans, and probably usually the best call, but less efficient when you actually need to read that old data. There are hybrid approaches to consider, too.

Wherever you are on that spectrum, there is code. Exercising it may slow down your test suite. It might need to be touched when you update lint rules (at least to add annotations to shut off the new rules).

Code nearly always represents _some_ amount of debt. Code to deal with history, more so.

<comment><USER4> We have a slight disagreement on what it means to accrue technical debt.

When a schema changes for an all, _someone_ has to migrate it and the data, unless the design is that all incompatible data is dropped. Either that's the codebase itself or the dev team is punting to the user. Punting to the user just shifts the burden around.

If the R&D team shipped a shitty / incomplete schema to get the software out the door that they need to change later, then yes, that is technical debt - something they'll eventually need to repay.

If requirements evolve over time and thus the schema needs to, that is not necessarily technical debt in the usual sense, which usually implies a temporary technical compromise for the purposes of expediency / getting something out the door.

I suppose I agree there is a trade off here and a penalty - after many years the migrations get slow to apply etc, and you could say that checkpointing the schema every few versions and preventing upgrades from any prior point is a way of cleaning up the "migration debt".

But people like to suggest that there's some other way , ie. the OP saying " If you get your domain model wrong at the start, it will haunt you forever.".... I have never seen any system get the domain model perfectly right at the start!

<comment><USER5> That may be. I was mostly trying to address the claim that "[i]t's not technical debt [because] there is nothing to [...] maintain."

Financially speaking, it's more like an annuity than a credit card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kreps has a gift for writing, this is so clear, well organized, and far more fun to read than the topic has any right to be. Hopefully he'll retire after confluent and finally start writing novels.

<comment><USER7> I came to say something similar, but targeted at the quoted paragraph below.

> If Kafka isn't going to be a universal format for queries, what is it? I > think it makes more sense to think of your datacenter as a giant database, > in that database Kafka is the commit log, and these various storage systems > are kinds of derived indexes or views. It's true that a log like Kafka can > be fantastic primitive for building a database, but the queries are still > served out of indexes that were built for the appropriate access pattern.

A wonderful insight!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMO using Kafka for long term storage is not the greatest idea. It is expensive to keep CPU and RAM constantly on top of data that it going to be cold most of the time. There is no DML which means mistakes are expensive (from an engineering pov). And while the whole event sourcing paradigm can work quite well in narrow domains with teams fully aware of the implications of what they are doing, in practice, on large orgs, it is hard to scale (from a people perspective).

<comment><USER9> > hard to scale (from a people perspective).

This is always going to be true. Either your system is built in a way that even the most ignorant of users cannot do permanent damage, or you design it to be understood and run by a small group of people who fully comprehend what they're doing. Of course neither option is easy, but the alternative is a prolific generator of daily trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well maybe for non critical data. Multi regional Kafka clustering is not easy. There are much better and cheaper data storage options that can provide eventual consistency.

<comment><USER11> What tech would you use to store a critical append-only data if not with Kafka ?

<comment><USER12> Kafka topics compacted to some sort of disk storage? It really depends on what you need to do with it. All of our kafka topics have a TTL on messages that's less than or equal to 7 days. If the data is critical, then that topic has a archiver job that writes the messages to files in HDFS.

Postgres, Spanner, etc. come to mind as options if you need to store critical append-only data and also have it be queryable in real-time.

<comment><USER13> postgres is a bit different use case, isn't? kafka is mainly about scalability, it has nice partitioning out of the box. and i would not say that it's not reliable, because you always replicate data with it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> you _can_ do it, but you shouldn't

treating your message bus as a infinite storage system is going give you a bad time.

<comment><USER15> This is quite an unsubstantiated claim in response to a detailed article. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER16> Not the original comment, but I have run into a specific set of regulatory scenarios where the immutability of any event log is a big problem.

The data retention policies for users who leave the platform is set to 30 days by GDPR, which requires the data to be deleted and expunged by the storage system in ways in which normal users cannot recover - or in another way, the data needs to "offline".

This is not actually that "all data older than 30 days is thrown away", but that "all data for users who have deleted their accounts need to be deleted from the start of their account creation, 30 days after they say forget-me".

Kafka (or Pulsar or Pravega) or any of the other immutable commit log implementations make forgetting a small slice of data from a large set a complicated and nearly impossible task to accomplish.

You can accomplish some part of this with log compaction assuming you have a definite primary key for all updates (i.e the log needs to be partitioned on a key to do compaction along that key). If there's a way I could declare a primary key as a device+event_timestamp+metric, but delete by a user_id column, let me know and I'll be happy to find out how to do it.

However in its original form, Kafka is still very useful.

Being able to hold data in Kafka in those periods of time is extremely valuable and naturally lets the system lose part of its state with the ability to replay itself back into the same state from a saved checkpoint.

If you store 7+ days of Kafka data and flush the newly arrived data-set into a persistent, but mutable columnar store every day & maintain the partition/offsets on commit, then you can recover from a complete loss of the mutable store's in-memory data by replaying the log from where you left off.

The row-major nature of its storage still hurts though if you plan to do all your analysis off it directly, because you'll burn through the disk bandwidth for no good reason.

<comment><USER17> > forgetting a small slice of data from a large set a complicated and nearly > impossible task to accomplish.

We use Kafka as our storage for almost everything, and we managed to solve this by encrypting all user data that is relevant to GDPR and trowing away the key when asked for a removal.

if a user asks to be forgotten, we commit a empty privacy key for this user and compress the privacykeys topic and all is done, no service will be able to decrypt it anymore.

So far it has been a good solution and it was easy to implement on all our services.

<comment><USER18> This is a great idea. If you couple this practice with storing user data encryption keys with additional layers of security, you'll decrease your susceptibility of someone being able to extract all data if they get access to your kafka. Spotify talks about this here: [http://labs.spotify.com/2018/09/18/scalable-user- privacy/](http://labs.spotify.com/2018/09/18/scalable-user-privacy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article seems to propose log compaction as the answer to the question of size (i.e. how much historical data is going to have to be kept around and how much is that going to cost). However, log compaction is not well suited to many use cases: storing partial updates or diffs in the log, storing many trillions of tiny entries (as keys), multiple messages on the log corresponding to related (contingent) updates, and so on.

Those are tractable but hard to solve; log compaction is not a silver bullet and unless you think really hard about how your data changes over time, you may end up storing more of it than you expect if you use the log as an eternal source of truth--compaction or not.</comment>


Textpattern CMS 4.8.0 - <AUTHOR> https://textpattern.com/weblog/423/textpattern-cms-480-released <comment><AUTHOR> Textpattern is a bit like "everything that's modern and hip right now, like SSG, let's do the opposite".

It got a lot of attention and love back in the day, because everything is in the database. No template files or anything. You just backup your database.

(It would be great if SQLite was officially supported, or anything but MySQL)

It has a large (for the time) ecosystem of plugins. Which are base64-encoded strings that you upload in a web form in the admin interface. The horror, I know! But back then it was seriously cool.

All templates, forms etc in the database also means you don't have a file lying around. Which means you cannot point your favorite text editor you it. You either use the builtin "editor" (just a form field) or copy and paste it into your editor and back, if you need syntax highlighting, validation or whatever.

Textpattern was pretty much dead a few years ago, but then development picked up again, and now you get a new release every now and then. The development team finally made XHTML optional and HTML5 possible (already quite some time ago), they expanded the builtin template language with new tags. It's tasteful development, not hectic.

Textpattern is great! I'm thinking about using it for a new project as a quasi-SSG, building my site and then wgetting it into static files.

<comment><USER2> >I'm thinking about using it for a new project as a quasi-SSG, building my site and then wgetting it into static files.

This is an interesting idea - presumably a sitemap-esque file could be generated for an SSG to parse and then bulk download. I've never thought of that. Thanks for the tip!

<comment><AUTHOR> There are sitemap plugins, using those will be my first step. We'll see how far it takes me.

Edit: Turns out, you can do sitemaps natively, like that: [https://github.com/colak/neme/blob/master/pages/sitemap.tpl](https://github.com/colak/neme/blob/master/pages/sitemap.tpl)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Textpattern is sort of a forgotten CMS, and that's a shame; it's got a powerful template language, a good extension system, and a tiny but very enthusiastic community. It's often easier to set up a custom site in TXP than it is in a lot of other systems, in my admittedly now out-of-date experience.

Textpattern was created by the late Dean Allen, a great early web designer and typographer -- and creator of the also somewhat forgotten Textile, an early markup system that's somewhat like a more complete Markdown.

<comment><USER4> Wasn't it somehow linked to Joyent? If not involved with development, they certainly helped popularise it, at least back in their freebsd/virtualmin/RoR days.

My memories about it are plenty vague now though...

<comment><AUTHOR> Joyent merged with TextDrive, a hosting company by Textpattern's creator.

They got bad press years later when they didn't honor TextDrive's "lifetime account" anymore, which TextDrive had used to get early funding.

<comment><USER5> And bad press again when Dean Allen popped out of nowhere to save the day with continuing the lifetime hosting (but shared.) I don't quite remember what happened as I don't use shared hosting. I believe people actually got their shared hosting but it didn't last long. Dean Allen disappeared again and the service went away.

<comment><USER3> You're right, yes. I was an original TextDrive customer and had the "lifetime hosting" plan, although I'd moved off of it well before Joyent shut it down -- it was clear that Joyent didn't have any real interest in keeping that promise. I think I got into an argument with a Joyent person or two by phrasing it similarly bluntly, but Joyent went through several pivots in their lifetime -- their original pitch was SaaS, providing "simple, powerful, web- based software that provides small teams with email, calendars, contacts, and shared applications" (quoting from their web site circa 2005 courtesy of archive.org) -- and when they pivoted into Serious Big Iron Enterprise Hosting (tm) it was clear fairly quickly that not only was shared hosting on borrowed time, but that they had no real interest in "low end" hosting of any sort.

I suspect we'll never know the true story of what happened with Dean Allen; looking back, there were definite signs even from as far removed as I am of him battling with depression, but of course, I'm writing this now with hindsight. At the time I'm pretty sure I just felt mildly annoyed that he seemed to have vanished from both TextDrive and Textpattern.

<comment><USER5> > I suspect we'll never know the true story of what happened with Dean Allen; > looking back, there were definite signs even from as far removed as I am of > him battling with depression, but of course, I'm writing this now with > hindsight.

Or he just liked to drink. Have you seen this piece from Om Malik?

[https://om.co/2018/01/18/dean-allen-rest-in- peace/](https://om.co/2018/01/18/dean-allen-rest-in-peace/)

There's a story in there about Dean Allen getting drunk and locking Om Malik out of the apartment. ;)

<comment><USER3> Heh. I did see it, but that's also the piece with the line "I think I heard Jason say that Dean gave up on the struggle," which sure seems suggestive.

<comment><USER5> Ouch, I forgot about that part. That's sobering.

I remember the drinking part of the story, but as with any story, there's more to it than we'll know.

I suppose this is a good moment to say, RIP Dean Allen. This is another moment where we remember you at HN.

Regardless of the history of Textpattern and all that followed (including the hosting) - I spent many hours happily hacking on tools provided from that shared journey. It was a great ecosystem, or we wouldn't still be talking about it.

Thanks to everyone who participated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know anything about Textpattern but I love that the homepage of the project has a picture of a Commodore PET on it. That's going back a long ways.

</comment><comment><USER2> Textpattern web ops guy here.

Thanks for giving our server a good workout today!

</comment><comment><USER7> Textpattern was the first CMS I ever used, and purchasing its custom fields plugin was perhaps my first online transaction. It was very pleasant to use.

<comment><USER2> >purchasing its custom fields plugin was perhaps my first online transaction.

Wow. That was a long time ago! Custom fields are standard these days, albeit limited to articles and 10 maximum, though there are plans to extend to unlimited custom fields in core.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are there plans to give them some type? As of now they are simply strings, as far as I understand. Having a date picker for date customs fields etc. would be great.

Of course, if you give us that, we will always ask for more, until you have implemented half of Kirby ([https://getkirby.com/docs/guide/blueprints/introduction](https://getkirby.com/docs/guide/blueprints/introduction)). :-)

<comment><USER8> > Are there plans to give them some type?

Yes! The next custom fields implementation is, as far as I'm aware, one of a kind in that it a) uses the 'best' field type to store the data under the hood in the database (int for numerical data, datetime for dates, and so forth), and b) will permit you to output any html component to support that data type at input time. So, yes, a date picker for dates if you like.

All the built-in data wrangling is customisable by plugins so they can override/extend data storage and offer different input methods as needed. Though we do have to finish that bit of code yet! The branch is still lurking in our repo, awaiting final tweaks for prime time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Github stuff if you're curious:

[https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern](https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern) (CMS)

[https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern.github.io](https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern.github.io) (docs)

[https://github.com/textpattern/](https://github.com/textpattern/) (project)</comment>


GM crops already feed much of the world today – why not tomorrow's generations? - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/gm-crops-already-feed-much-of-the-world-today-why-not-tomorrows-generations-too-59715 <comment><USER2> My understanding is that people opposed to the use of GM crops don't oppose the research itself. They oppose the lack of strong government regulation of these products, as well as the questionable ethics of the corporations who sell them.

<comment><USER3> They've succeeded in imposing fairly strong government regulation, at least in the US and EU.

I think that mostly now the opponents of GM are trying to get them stopped entirely. At least some (most?) of GM opponents also oppose research on GM crops, such as the "golden" crops where they add vitamin A to the commonly used variety of a crop in a region.</comment></comment>


Digg is dead: lessons of a failed startup - <AUTHOR> http://qdork.com/2010/11/digg-is-dead-lessons-of-a-failed-startup/

<comment><USER2> This article is full of nonsensical garbage (or, I've just had too much red wine tonight).

It mentions their VC funding, and specifically says "That's $28.7 million that they will have to pay back." Venture Capital doesn't work that way. It's an _investment_ not a _loan_. They don't have to pay anything back if the company does not succeed.

There is also the mention of businesses "only" needing a $5/month website. WTF is this guy talking about? You're not going to build a social news aggregation app like Digg on a $5/mo hosting plan.

The 'Wandering Aimlessly' paragraph also has some things that don't make sense. Many of the features Digg was adding were targeted towards commercial clients that wanted to get info on the stories they posted, or the stories other users submitted that linked to those corporate properties. IMO, this made sense as a strategy, as if successful Digg could have charged for access to this information because the users weren't going to pay for the service.

This guy has some interesting thoughts, but I'm not sure any of it is rooted in anything other than wild-ass speculation.

<comment><USER3> I agree. The entire time I skimmed over this article (a process of about 10 seconds), I was able to clearly determine that the author had no idea what they were talking about. Needless to say, his website isn't even ranked by Alexa, Compete, or Google because it's THAT low. That's a feat I haven't accomplished in several years. Aside from that, I'm unimpressed.

<comment><USER4> Plus he's using the default theme of wordpress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Haven't really heard of the author. I think the author is just trying to predict the death of Digg and hopefully get some karma from it should it eventually happen.

Some of the valid points include the large amount of VC funding and staff. However Digg is trying. The fact they are even laying off staff means they know the money won't last forever. Features targeted toward commercial clients means they are trying to pivot. Is it too late? Who the hell knows.

Author points to their business plan when they started. Just because they didn't know how to monetize out the gate doesn't mean it is bad. You rarely know everything when you start. And exactly how is "getting bought up" a bad plan. It might be foolish to rely on it solely but it certainly can factor in marketing position and overall strategy.

-Jeff</comment>


Diet Drugs Work: Why Won't Doctors Prescribe Them? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/diet-drugs-work-why-wont-doctors-prescribe-them.html <comment><USER3> More relevant questions:

\- Why don't we stop subsidizing corn so much?

\- Why don't we teach effective nutrition and cooking in school?

\- Why don't we teach effective exercise, sports, and fitness in schools?

\- If we can ban alcohol and tobacco sales to children, why not things like added sugar, hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc?

\- If we can ban alcohol and tobacco advertising to children, why not products with added sugar, hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc?

\- Why don't we limit advertising on fast and junk "food"?

\- Why don't we provide healthy lunches to school children instead of using them to subsidize agricultural conglomerates for low quality food?

\- Why don't we stop subsidizing fossil fuels so much so people would walk and ride bikes more?

\- Why don't we align our medical system with prevention instead of expensive and risky cures?

You can come up with plenty more questions that would mostly obviate the need to wonder about obesity and wonder drugs to cure it. The overwhelming majority of people would benefit from changes in diet and exercise requiring no chemicals needing FDA approval. Fresh fruits and vegetables seasoned with fresh herbs and spices taste better than anything, at least to me, and it's hard to eat too much of them. Few feelings feel better than the exhaustion of even moderate exercise.

EDIT: reduced cynicism based on eli's welcome comment.

<comment><USER4> I've been looking for a way to make vegetables like brocoli or green beans palatable. What's your secret?

<comment><USER5> Two suggestions, slightly contradictory, but either will work:

1.) Spices. there are loads of really interesting, amazing spices out there, but even a simple sautée of olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and black pepper can make almost any vegetable taste amazing.

2.) Stop eating over-flavoured foods. Doritos etc. have a ridiculous amount of flavouring; if you eat foods like this consistently then you'll desensitise your palette to the subtler but still absolutely lovely tastes of vegetables, in the same way that staring into a spotlight makes it difficult to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of twilight. You can't re-sensitise your palette by simply cutting down on hyperflavoured food; you need to eliminate it almost completely. After a while, you'll discover that brocoli and green beans are wonderful, and Doritos are absolutely brutal on the tongue.

<comment><USER6> This is great advice, and worked for me beautifully since I stopped smoking and started eating at home with my wife. +1

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's worth pointing out that "losing weight" isn't a panacea for health. Yes, it would almost certainly be a very good thing for significantly overweight and obese individuals to shed pounds, period, but the article doesn't address the fact that in and of itself this is unlikely to make them "healthy."

There are _lots_ of people who are _not_ overweight who have many of the same cardiovascular issues commonly associated with obesity (high cholesterol and blood pressure, insulin resistance, etc.).

If the goal is overall health and well-being, the title of this article is arguably misleading. Diet drugs might "work" when it comes to weight reduction, but it would be unrealistic to ignore the fact that without real lifestyle changes (diet, exercise), many of those who use them will likely be plagued by the same serious health issues.

<comment><USER8> Finally a well thought out comment. One of the big issues I see with obesity is that the problem is oversimplified, as are the solutions. I know of several people on whom counter-obesity problems have had a significantly detrimental effect.

I've seen ineffective gastric bypass surgery which led to a friend gaining even more weight and watched helplessly as he slipped into a very depressed and negative state. As the article points out, if someone said there's a drug that just cures cancer it would be laughable. It is indeed so with weight loss. Phentermine will have minor side effects with impulse control, addiction, paranoia etc.

Interestingly enough, obesity is typically not associated with the "poor" in the rest of the world. I have often heard it mentioned as an anecdote to how "wealthy" Americans really are. But therein lies a very interesting problem to which I simply haven't seen a very good answer. Unfortunately the sigtma associated with obesity and the well entrenched and highly profitable "weight- loss" industry gets in the way of significant advances being made in this arena. Again, as is mentioned in the article, there is even a stigma associated with "diet doctors", which surely has dissuaded more than a few brilliant minds to explore the field more.

Ofcourse, as a programmer who is very familiar with a sedentary lifestyle and the pizza culture, obesity is a serious issues that does affect more than just the poor. And for crying out loud, I hope someone figures out more about it than pseudo science of obesity we have now. It's not as simple as it looks at first glance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an interesting issue. If you're morbidly obese, a 5-10% reduction in weight could add up to significant LBs/KGs lost. So it would seem to me like this would be a great way to jumpstart and re-enforce the other aspects of weight loss. Many people give up because they don't see results fast enough.

So much of weight loss is mis-understood, but a lot of it boils down to convenience, will power (choosing to resist going through McDonalds drive thru), food choices (i.e. I don't know how to cook, and no healthy options are affordable and quick).

I am a firm believer that weight loss is 75+% diet, and the rest exercise (disclaimer: I lost 30lbs [17% bodyweight] doing the 4 hour body diet).

<comment><USER10> I have the opposite problem - can't gain weight. Doesn't matter if I eat more or less, what kind of food, how many times a day and if I am training or not - it just stays the same no matter what. Recently it's been even worse - <USER2> simple 2 hour exercise would leave me with -1 kg and I had to wait like 4 days to gain back that 1 kg lost in one exercise. I think the hormones almost singlehandedly decides what you look like. I knew people that were obese and gained weight simply by drinking water and not eating anything. I thought maybe "survival instinct" would help me gain at least fat, where it supposedly activates when you are eating very little, and that is supposed to be the reason why not eating does not help fat people lose weight, but my weight even then just stays the same. I occasionally go for a whole day without eating (not intentionally) and never start to gain fat. It's really frustrating. Sometimes I just wish I could be fat and just go to gym.

<comment><USER11> Honestly most people I know who say they have this problem aren't eating as much as they believe. We call these people "hard gainers". If you have that much trouble gaining weight then try eating 6000 calories a day and tell me you don't put on any weight.

<comment><USER10> Honestly the problem is I don't have time to eat that much. I'd have to devote all the time to this single one activity - eating, making food and thinking what to eat next. Others just live eating same as me and gain weight no problem. Besides, if there's not enough growth hormones in the blood, you can eat as much as you want, nothing will stay in your body.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Because they "cause side effects and yield undramatic results."

Doctors are protected from the consequences of prescribing statins and SSRIs because everybody else does it too. If you could get a critical mass of them to start prescribing diet pills by directly generating consumer demand, the floodgates would open. We're one good advertising campaign from everybody 5% overweight having a bottle in the bathroom - of a 'new' formulation of course, because I'm sure a lot of these are going out of patent.

Then we'll find out that they really don't work any better than placebo and cause nerve damage, but the lawsuits will drag until all patents expire.

</comment><comment><USER13> >The drugs work by suppressing appetite, by increasing metabolism, and by other mechanisms that are not yet fully understood.

Why would FDA approve something which it we don't fully understand?

<comment><USER14> There are many drugs where this is true. Antidepressants, especially.

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

<comment><USER11> I was going to say this. Most antidepressants are not really understood. Also I have central sleep apnea (brain forgets to breath when sleeping). They give me a machine but they don't know exactly why the machine helps but it does. It's approved for use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another reason that's not touched upon in the article is that many of these drugs are Schedule IV drugs. While prescribing a Schedule IV isn't theoretically more onerous than prescribing antibiotics, often pharmacy chains, insurances, and the government can combine to make busy primary care doctors less likely to prescribe them.

I know many a PCP that rage at the fact that Phentermine is schedule IV, which adds extra complexity to prescribing it.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you want to see a biotech start-up working on a very interesting obesity drug, check out [http://zafgen.com/](http://zafgen.com/)

They just release the results from their Phase 2a trial and results are amazing. After 12 weeks on the highest dose, patients lost an average of 24 lbs, which is competitive with bariatric surgery.

If the drug makes it to approval, it could be a real game changer for the healthcare system.

</comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't another part of the problem simply be lack of marketing for these drugs?

Everyone is aware there are goto drugs to toenail fungus and restless leg syndrome from all of the commercials. Shouldn't drugs like these that apply to even more people be all over the airwaves?

<comment><USER17> I suppose it is potentially, but I have to assume that the people in the pharmaceutical industry understand which drugs they should market (and how, and when) to make the most money. To me it seems that "diet drugs" would basically print money from them, but my point is I believe there is a reason for them doing what they are doing, and that if they calculated they would make _that_ much money, you better believe that they would pour truckloads of money into advertising.

Still, it just seems so odd, given the rather... large potential market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The answer is simple. A doctor won't be sued for not giving an obese person diet pills. These drugs aren't very effective, and they have side effects such as raising blood pressure. A typical doctor will just tell you to be more active and eat less.

</comment><comment><USER19> Because there's nothing wrong. The ability to store energy as fat is a natural survival mechanism. Your body doesn't care about looking good on the beach, it knows that Winter Is Coming and it's tooling up to deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Because the markets have been flooded with either snake oil products or unproven chemicals like ephedra. Nothing is a replacement for diet and exercise. Diet drugs should be used in _tandem_ with proper diet and exercise.

<comment><USER21> >Nothing is a replacement for diet and exercise.

I don't know why people say this. The benefits of exercise are simply initiating biochemical processes that cause your body to grow and become more efficient (drugs that target the SIRT1 gene are an example). There's absolutely no reason why we can't develop drugs that initiate that same process. Same goes for preventing fat accumulation. Claiming that there's no substitute is a cop-out and its an unfounded assumption.

<comment><USER20> For some people its simply an over indulgence problem. You could easily counter by saying why don't people just throw up after eating problem solved. Yet in my experience quick fixes often have other consequences that may not be immediately known. I don't believe you can simulate complex bio mechanical processes like muscle tearing but you may be able to allow you body to be more efficient when you do these things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would anyone be able to give or link to a summary of the four drugs it mentions? How would a person evaluate which would be the best one to try?

<comment><USER22> Here is what Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D. has to say about weight loss: [http://www.drfuhrman.com/weightloss/](http://www.drfuhrman.com/weightloss/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Articles like these are so sad to see. They're on the same level of reporting how large the shit was of some celebrity's dog when a national crisis occurred the day before. If journalism isn't dead it's certainly being slowly strangled.</comment>


GM scraps historic Holden car brand in Australia - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51499775 <comment><USER2> I'm sad about this but not surprised. Holden was one of the two iconic Australian car manufacturers (Ford is the other, but we also had Toyota and others) but had really lost touch in the last 10 or so years.

Go back 20+ years, and there's no way you could have convinced any petrol head that Holden would exit Australia, ever. Ever second car you saw on the road was either a Commodore or a Falcon. There's a car championship (Supercars Championship) that was literally built, for decades, on the "rivalry" that was Holden vs. Ford.

We have a "luxury car tax" that was implemented as a cushion for the local automotive industry. It's meant so if you buy a car from overseas, there's a tariff to make it less enticing, and buy local. Now that Holden will exit, and Ford/Toyota will no longer make cars in Australia, I hope we abolish it. Doubtful though.</comment>


The CEO's Start-up Story of Blackboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.wynnewilliams.com/?p=58 <comment><USER2> As a college student I found Blackboard to be the crappiest piece of application ever made. Awkward UI and dysfunctional.

These guys need some competition. Each time I find Cramer recommending their stock I can only shrug.</comment>


A Bootstrapper's Experience Seeking Traction - <AUTHOR> http://wedistill.com/a-bootstrappers-experience-seeking-traction/

<comment><USER2> Great post</comment>


It is unquestionably the future - <AUTHOR> http://www.threepanelsoul.com/view.php?date=2008-11-05

<comment><USER2> This is why I know we live in the future:

<http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/05/dean-kamens-rob/>

This dude is a cyborg. Not a technical "oh you've got eyeglasses" cyborg. Not a wannabe Kevin "I've implanted a subcutaneous neurochip" Warwick cyborg. A full-on, bad-ass "I have robot arms that I control with my fucking mind" cyborg.

<comment><USER3> Um, wow. That is drop-dead _unbelievable._ I had no idea that thought-based control had progressed to this point. Why am I just now seeing this?!

<comment><USER4> It's not literally "thought-based." They're reading the signals from his peripheral nervous system, not his brain.

<comment><USER5> And the difference is...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> During a discussion with a friend on future technology, someone remarked that for a few days' wages ($200 for an iPod touch) you can now hold a condensed summary of all human knowledge (Wikipedia) in the palm of your hand, with near-instant access to astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, geography, engineering, mathematics, history, sociology, economics, psychology, medicine, technology, literature, art, drama, religion, and boundless other subjects.

Yet far more often we use it for trivia and the mundane. The future is wasted on the future.

<comment><USER7> "with near-instant access to astrology"

Not that your comment is incorrect, but I'm guessing you meant to say astronomy.

<comment><USER6> You're right; it's been corrected.

<comment><USER2> Of course, you can get your astrology too: <http://shine.yahoo.com/astrology>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Further evidence that we're in the future:

<http://www.nvidia.com/object/3D_Vision_Main.html>

With the right monitor, glasses, and video card, you can play Batman: Arkham Asylum in 3D.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's here alright. Until we can communicate telepathically - via our phones I bet - being able to send instant SMS messages around the globe will have to do.

When 3G (or 4G, or the next one) is more accessible to everyone we'll have a whole array of ways to communicate instantly with literally almost everybody on earth (for reasonable values of "almost"). Twitter, traditional IM, IRC, Skype, ...

<comment><USER9> I want a netflix recommendation system, but for friends. I can communicate with anybody on earth, but I only know a handful of people in the immediate vicinity.</comment></comment>