In Japan, Cellphones have become Too Complex to Use - <AUTHOR> http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article4791.asp <comment><USER2> Someone should collect all the completely idiotic quotes by pundits saying that the iPhone is old-hat in Japan. Quite the opposite. The market is salivating and sick to death of the endless progression of features at the expense of usability.

There are infinite features, and they are all implemented terribly. After v1.0, they just move on to working on this season's new useless feature, rather than actually making the phones work properly.

As a concrete example, Japan has high-speed data on most phones now. But they almost all use built-in browsers that choke to death on a modest web page, sometimes nearly locking up the phone.

A month ago I went in a store to look for a phone that was actually viable for browsing, and the staff told me forget it, just wait for the iPhone. This was the staff whose job it is to stand in the phone area and drive phone sales!</comment>


ORM's hidden cost - <AUTHOR> http://n0tw0rthy.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/orms-hidden-cost/

<comment><USER2> That's one of the reasons we use a graph database which, by definition, has costs that can easily be predicted by the graph, i.e. the data structure being stored.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thoroughly agree, after watching ~10 developers with precisely zero understanding of what they are doing "attempt" to use NHibernate over the last 3 years...</comment>


A vote against SB50 is a vote for California's housing and homelessness crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-A-vote-against-SB50-is-a-vote-for-15011922.php <comment><USER2> This bill needs 21 votes to pass. It got 18 this afternoon, and its last chance is tomorrow.

Here is a list of senators that did not vote and the districts they represent: [https://twitter.com/aceckhouse/status/1222676578708021251](https://twitter.com/aceckhouse/status/1222676578708021251)

Definitely definitely worth calling if you live in one of those districts, and encouraging friends and family to do so if they live there too!

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand the counter argument to a bill like this. Protecting property value, I guess?</comment>


China is not banning Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=358368.0

<comment><USER2> Of course not. No one said they were banning bitcoin. They have relegated it to a digital barter similar to other digital points like those used in World of Warcraft or SecondLife's LindeX.

What they have done is to shut it out completely from the formal Chinese banking and financial system. So much for the debate about bitcoin being a currency!

<comment><USER3> _Sorry in advance for this wall of text and the redundant use of the word "currency." It makes for a shitty read, but I couldn't find a better way to construct my comment._

All joking aside [0], you seem a little over eager to discount Bitcoin in this regard.

Here's my take on BTC's relevance as a currency:

\- Its 'success' as a currency in the developed world (in the way we use greenbacks & fiat / Chinese use Yuan in daily life) ...

... on this point, I've never been too hopeful. [1]

This definition of "success" is biased by most of our developed-world perspective. . _tldr; - It will likely become 'relevant' without becoming a 'success' in the Western/1st-world sense._

.

Observations on why Bitcoin will struggle to become a ubiquitous currency:

1.) This statement from the PBOC - more or less negates its chances in China as being a "first-class citizen" (status) currency.

This comes as no major surprise to me. But, what _is_ surprising is the portion which reaffirmed the legality of the participation in Bitcoin in China ("... Bitcoin transaction as a commodity trading behavior on the Internet, ordinary people have the freedom to participate in the premise of own risk."), as you alluded to in your comment. This more than "leaves the door open." That said, the factors which contributed to this approach are unbelievably complex and probably nefarious (w/regards to BTC's future).

2.) In the USA, I don't see a pressing need for it to be used in the way we know dollars to be used. The reason here is that we have a historically stable system in place.

3.) The volatility of Bitcoin is not, and likely will never be, as stable as most of the fiat units in circulation. This would discourage me from paying my employees in Bitcoin.

4.) Since day one, we have all been apprehensive about the deflationary nature of the currency -- expressing the Keynesian-concern that spending in an economy is vital to the prosperity of said economy.

.

With that being said, here is where-and-why I'm long ...

I.) ... because of the international nature of the protocol, one must think about those living in Iran, Zimbabwe, Argentina, Russia, etc.. In those places, I think it has legs as a currency, regardless of state-endorsement. Some of these states in crisis may even endorse Bitcoin.

I believe that perfection isn't sought after in the 3rd world, as confidence has been lost in the fiat systems in place. (This is the reason why greenbacks are so ubiquitous abroad.)

There's also a palpable anti-American sentiment in the third world that _could_ discourage greenbacks' usage by the layman if there were a viable and universally accepted alternative.

But paper greenbacks don't play well with the internet. Bitcoins do. One can argue that you could still use greenbacks digitally abroad, but this is not without large transaction fees, and -- in the case of unstable countries -- there may uncertainty in the bank which is facilitating the financial services.

II.) ... it's nature has melded the idea of a cash dollar and a digital dollar into a decentralized, ephemeral-yet-"trustworthy" protocol. I can honestly say: I'd be a fool if I claimed to have the slightest idea how Bitcoin will innovate and make itself useful as a currency.

So, I actually believe that Bitcoin has relevance as a currency, just not in a way that would make sense to the developed world.

The above is part-and-parcel from Bitcoins as a store of value and other financial novelties, which I don't really have the time to enumerate.

[0] - "So much for the debate about bitcoin being a currency!"

[1] - [and it saddens me greatly, because I'm a Bitcoin fanboy, and I've believed since the early days that Bitcoin is special in many other ways. And no, I'm not a Bitcoin millionaire.]

If you enjoyed this comment - I am releasing a Bitcoin-related service in ten days, and, in the idealistic spirit of Hacker News, I kindly encourage you to add me to Google+ or Twitter, so that you can offer early feedback. @spencenow or [https://plus.google.com/+SpencerDailey](https://plus.google.com/+SpencerDailey) Thanks! :)

<comment><USER2> I understand you have a vested interest in bitcoin and for that same reason I would suggest you take a few basic economic courses so you can understand what a currency is and why it is impossible for bitcoin to be a currency.

> But paper greenbacks don't play well with the internet. Bitcoins do.

This is simply false. The evidence is all around you.

Bitcoin is composed of two parts: the token and the protocol. The protocol is interesting and useful. It will be most probably integrated into existing currency systems. We are already seeing this type of experimentation with the Canadian MintChip.

The token system on the other hand will be remembered as an interesting digital phenomena the same way we now look back at beanie babies and tulipmania.

<comment><USER3> "... it is impossible for bitcoin to be a currency."

It is already functioning as one -- just not a very effective or useful one. So, please be more articulate if you actually want to have a debate.

But thanks for diverting the the discussion by maligning my character.

Looking through your comment history, it's pretty clear that you have a strong aversion to Bitcoin. As someone so blindly opposed to it -- you probably have an ulterior motive too. At least I was forthcoming about mine -> I'm a Bitcoin fanboy and am building a business around it -- which is more than most speculators can claim.

So, what's yours? Because otherwise, you're kind of in need of digging yourself out of troll status. :)

<comment><USER2> It is functioning as digital barter - that you fail to recognize this and mistake it for a currency is why I suggested you take some basic economic courses.

How did I malign your character? I simply stated that since you are building a business based on bitcoin you may not be as objective as someone who has no vested interest one way or the other.

I don't own bitcoins or have any vested interest. It is simply an intellectual curiosity for me. I have no interest in making this personal and I was and am polite to you.

<comment><USER3> It seems like we had a misunderstanding around semantics then. My defintion was: "the fact or quality of being generally accepted or in use." The act of it being used as a currency.

My distinction between this and a more general "form of barter"/medium-of- exchange was written as '"first-class citizen" status' currency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel a little like its banning in China is inevitable. This is a currency that allows people to circumvent the PRC's ability to monitor and control money, in a country where Facebook and Twitter are blocked because the government can't control them. It seems to me like they're not taking it seriously as a viable currency, and that's why they're responding in this way.

<comment><USER5> I agree that it's inevitable that the Chinese government will ban Bitcoin. However, I think their gradual response is more due to the complex preparation needed to enforce a ban, than scepticism about its viability as a currency.

The great firewall - the infrastructure as well as the body of regulation on ISPs and online services - took time to reach its current level of effectiveness, and it is likely that a ban on bitcoin would also be phased in similarly. This announcement is certainly just the first step.

The most likely next steps would probably be:

\- Ordering financial institutions not to provide services to Bitcoin-related companies such as exchanges; this could happen fairly quietly without explicit announcements. This might already have started.

\- Withholding trade licenses and other regulatory approvals to prevent Bitcoin-related companies from operating; This can be done without specifying the actual reasons for denial, which would make it hard to be sure that it's happening.

This would drive Bitcoin to a small-scale, grey-market activity, with transactions forced to happen directly between individuals. They might leave it at that, or explicitly ban bitcoin, using the firewall to block the bitcoin and getwork protocols as well as and servers used by known web-based clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Always a good idea not to panic at Bitcoin news, unless you have a lot of your personal equity tied up in it - the revolution has already happened, the message calling for a feeless (although BTC has lots of fees associated with it), decentralized, secure, fast way to exchange economic value has been heard.

Whether it's Bitcoin or something else or a LOT of something else's, it's here to stay. I'm working on my own take on it, so I have opinions as to what it should look like, but the great news is so are lots of other people AND Bitcoin is still growing. Payments are about to explode - it's gonna be fun you guys.

<comment><USER7> I work in a different country than all of my friends and business partners, and we've all started using bitcoin for everything in the last few months. The first time you set up a multi-signature escrow with no fees, no middleman, and no 3-5 business day wait, it's mind blowing! I believe that everyone will eventually have this "ah hah" moment, even if the currency units themselves are horribly unpredictable.

<comment><USER6> The good news is, crypto isn't the only thing that can do that - banks already do it all the time! That's what I'm saying - this has shown a demand for what you just talked about, not Bitcoin in general (which, of course, has it's own demand). We're going to get more and more options that fit those qualifications, and a couple will become dominant. I would personally be a little surprised if Crypto is one of them, but not floored - it's totally in the running if not in the lead.

<comment><USER7> I think we're in the same camp, but I disagree that existing organizational structures will be able to compete with a decentralized, consensus-based network. I know the analogy is wearing thin, but I think of working within the current banking system as a bit like trying to lease time on a university mainframe circa 1980–difficult to access, and totally out of reach for anyone that isn't already on the periphery. You could send email and post to usenet, but you couldn't build an Amazon, or an Airbnb.

Of course banks can zip arbitrary amounts of cash all over the world, but I'm not a bank! The public internet created an economy where a clever and dedicated person can teach themselves all the skills necessary to pull down an income that was previously reserved for highly educated professionals. I believe cryptocurrency will have the same democratizing effect on finance, and open up opportunities for autodidacts that were previously only available to ivy-league MBAs. Most people will consider me an idealist (or a lunatic, if other commenters are to be believed), but I believe that we are on the verge of an unprecedented explosion of commercial innovation. Consider how long it took for the internet to filter from early adopters to the mainstream, and compare that to the growth of the bitcoin network. Last time it was decades, this time it was years, with exponential growth in just the last few months. I do have some bitcoins, and I wouldn't complain if they made me rich, but the exchange value of one particular unit of measure isn't what I'm excited about. There is just no way that top-down, private organizations can out-innovate the general public given access to a platform with the same capabilities and trivial barriers to entry. I'm especially hopeful that the ease of access and equal treatment of micropayments and massive wealth transfers will bootstrap parts of the world that are currently completely dark to the global economy. I hope that the speculative greed that is currently dominating the discussion around cryptocurrency won't overshadow its long term potential. Exciting times ahead!

<comment><USER6> I'm with you - but here's something that you may be overlooking:

1\. New banks and new kinds of banks are forming every day with full rights and accreditations 2\. You may not be a bank, but banks have APIs and methods of partnering with them so that you can act like a bank. Sure, you're still to some extent at their behest, but that can be mitigated all sorts of ways.

So maybe if you think banks as a whole won't be where we house our money in 50 years, then yeah, let's look at ways that cut those ties. I'm not of that opinion, at all actually, but it is one I can understand. My focus is how to empower individuals and businesses to have the same money transfer power that banks have - and I think I'm getting there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am surprised at the selloff given that bit coin is completely impervious to government control. That is the whole point of bit coin. We buy bit coins because we all read about what happened in Cyprus and we don't want to worry about capital controls ourselves. We bit coin buyers are innovating beyond government sponsored/manipulated money (and hopefully getting filthy rich in the process).

<comment><USER9> The lesson of Cyprus is that allowing your government to create a financial sector which is worth more then your entire country, and _can 't_ default on that debt for fear of Russians murdering a lot of people is a _bad_ idea.

It sure wasn't that Bitcoin somehow escapes you from the problem, since very few people are likely to have wanted to buy any Cyprian currency with Bitcoin - the bump is more a product of Bitcoin being an incredibly small economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I understand how news like this will have short term price effects but isn't one of the fundamental reasons for betting on bitcoins that governments can't (not won't) regulate them?

P.S. When are spellcheckers going to start recognizing bitcoins?

</comment><comment><USER11> This is going to hurt it nonetheless...</comment>


NC Police Issued Warrants to Search Data on All Google Devices Near Murder Scene - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/north-carolina-police-issued-sweeping-warrants-to-searc-1823845667 <comment><USER2> Since when are _police_ empowered to issue their own warrants? (As opposed to a _judge_ )

<comment><USER3> I believe that the headline is intended to be read as:

"NC Police _Were_ Issued Warrants to Search Data on All Google Devices Near Murder Scene"

Headlines are frequently written in terse language to save space. In this case, I'd guess that the editors assumed that since everyone knows that judges issue warrants, the intent would be clear.

<comment><USER2> Within the article text:

      WRAL reporter Tyler Dukes found four investigations in 2017 where **police issued these uniquely extensive warrants**...

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I missed that sentence. It seems like sloppy or ignorant reporting. The original WRAL investigation referenced by this article makes it clear that a judge issued the warrant:

> _" On a satellite image, they drew shapes around the crime scenes, marking > the coordinates on the map. Then they convinced a Wake County judge they had > enough probable cause to order Google to hand over account identifiers on > every single cell phone that crossed the digital cordon during certain > times."_[1]

The WRAL article, in turn, links to the actual warrant, which is indeed signed by a judge.[2]

So in this case, the HN guideline that asks us to "submit the original source" would have resulted in a higher quality article that would have avoided all this confusion.

[1] [http://www.wral.com/to-find-suspects-police-quietly-turn- to-...](http://www.wral.com/to-find-suspects-police-quietly-turn-to- google/17377435) (which someone submitted earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16604181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16604181))

[2] [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4388571-20170308-hom...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4388571-20170308-homicide- warrant.html#document/p5/a410668)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is best alternative for Google Groups? - <AUTHOR>

Looking for google groups alternative for open source discussion with lot of code syntax highlighting feature. thanks. <comment><USER2> Please check out: [https://groups.io](https://groups.io). We support markdown/code syntax highlighting, Github integration, member sync with Slack, and lots more.

</comment><comment><USER3> NodeBB[0] and Discourse[1] are good alternatives... They have a lot of integrations including github and syntax highlighting

[0] [https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB](https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB)

[1] [http://discourse.org](http://discourse.org)

</comment><comment><USER4> I recently moved a google group to Google Plus Communities[0]. It's a free option and all your community members already have a google login.

[0] [https://plus.google.com/communities](https://plus.google.com/communities)

</comment><comment><USER5> This wouldn't work for larger projects, but if it's a smaller project, maybe Slack[0]? It has a pretty good free-tier as well.

[0]: [https://slack.com/](https://slack.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Discourse maybe a good choice: [http://www.discourse.org/](http://www.discourse.org/)

You will need to pay to host it though.</comment>


Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGqwXt90ZqA <comment><AUTHOR> Note to future self: This video contains some super-important concepts, re- watch...

<comment><USER2> Thanks for resurfacing. I watched this a couple years ago but it's always a great reminder.</comment></comment>


Node.js From the Enterprise Java Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shinetech.com/?p=394

<comment><USER2> Google Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0xyMcR_...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0xyMcR_ofM0J:blog.shinetech.com/%3Fp%3D394+%22Node.js+From+the+Enterprise+Java+Perspective%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this article expresses my doubts pretty well. Other than everyone being excited about a cool new technology, I don't understand why anyone would create their startup using node unless they have massive amounts of server calls per user or they already have a very large user base. With a more mature framework like django/apache you can build sites so much faster and pain free. Am I missing anything?

<comment><USER4> there is no much sense indeed to use node right now as a complete backend solution. There are much better ways to push out html and do db queries ;)

This being said, there are lots of use cases where node shines. In short - anything related to push or massive number of connections.

So if you are building a chat server it doesn't make much sense to write it in rails or django as your server will die as soon as it gets even slightly popular; and fixing it at that stage will not be tuning this or that. you will have to rewrite it. probably in node.js ;)

<comment><USER5> Coming from a RingoJS background, I'm trying to address the first use case you mention with <http://olegp.github.com/common-node/> \- would really appreciated any feedback or comments you may have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those coming to JavaScript from Java <http://ringojs.org> & <https://github.com/lhofhansl/RhiNodeII> should be of interest.

The performance improvements brought on by InvokeDynamic in Java7 are also pretty exciting.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you do graphic design? - <AUTHOR> How do you design icons, logos, marketing stuff, etc. for an app you're writing? Do you do hire a graphic design artist or do it yourself?  What are some good learning resources to get started with DIY graphic design? <comment><USER2> As a graphic designer/artist: this question strikes me as funny because the frequent "how do I start programming" threads are always so matter-of-fact. 3-4 biblical texts get recommended, a handful of vetted resources bandied about, and then a minimal amount of hemming and hawing over which language to use.

As daunting and foreign as those threads seem to me, programming has a lot of known knowns - I can see where "how do I design" would be more daunting because it's such an unqualified expanse consisting almost completely of grey area. Stand before it, naked, putting yourself in the shoes of the designer, and imagine the horror of the client's most unspeakable words: "I can't explain it to you, but I'll know it when I see it."

All that aside, I think the advice that I've received from this community re: learning to program/hack is still sound as it applies to graphic design:

1) Have a project and work toward it. If you don't have one, make one. Be specific in your end goal.

This focus enables you to do the most important thing:

2) Steal like an artist. (via [http://www.austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to- steal-like-an-a...](http://www.austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like- an-artist-and-9-other-things-nobody-told-me/))

All the other advice in this thread is pretty legit. You probably don't even know what looks good, so don't start on your own. Do your research. Look at competitors in the space (or the closest you can find to it). Use open source/CC art. Follow the crumbs back to the artist's portfolios and see the other work they've done. Web and app design follows patterns and there are many pattern resources that you should use. Form follows function and usability should inform design: copy good patterns and make them great later. Copy copy copy.

And at the end of the day: hire a designer! It's a big ecosystem and we all need to eat.

</comment><comment><USER3> For some reason I'm reminded of The Tick Omnibus, wherein was featured "How to draw The Tick" (The Tick is an unlikely superhero).

The complete instructions were something like this:

1\. Draw an oval.

2\. Bisect the oval with a straight line.

3\. Draw The Tick holding an oval bisected by a straight line.

Gets me every time. As a programmer, though, I actually do something similar for my artwork--except step 3 is "hire an artist".

I'm not sure I can bend my brain to work like that of an artist, but what I do is look at graphics design pieces and do A/B comparisons between them. What's better about one or the other? How are things aligned? What are the nuanced technical details of shading, shadows, colors, highlights? Why that font?

It's really the same procedure I use if I want to learn the best, say, coding style or technique for a language. I look at code, and compare it to other code, and choose which looks best, and analyze why that is.

That's very procedural. A lot of art people I've talked to just mess with stuff until it "feels right", whatever the hell that means. It works for them, though!

<comment><USER4> I'm reminded of "How to draw an owl" :)

[http://nerdnirvana.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/draw- owl.j...](http://nerdnirvana.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/draw-owl.jpg)

<comment><USER5> imgur tells me they can't find that file ... <http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2010/08/27/how-to-draw-an-owl/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thinking you have a decent sense of what looks good just doesn't cut it, unfortunately every human being is endowed with this belief, hence the general ugliness of the interwebs. I(/we) need to know more about your experience and abilities to give you better advice.

Logo's and "marketing stuff" are very different disciplines, although a good designer will be able to do both. A good logo makes the rest a lot easier.

The most sound _general_ advice I can give you as a graphic designer is to focus on typography and whitespace.

<comment><USER5> >" _Thinking you have a decent sense of what looks good just doesn't cut it, unfortunately every human being is endowed with this belief, hence the general ugliness of the interwebs._ "

I strongly disagree with this statement. Perhaps every web designer thinks that they know what looks good and not all do but this is not a feature of the general public. The public tend, in my country at least, to consider that "I can't do art" - it's like a massive version of imposter syndrome.

I work with a company that spends a lot of time tapping the art and creativity of those who think they have none.

/antihyperbole

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Icons, logos and marketing stuff are all very different tasks. Many designers will specialise in just those particular disciplines. To take them all on and expect to execute them in a manner which is professional and not distracting, is a big ask.

There are plenty of on-line resources(1) to get started, but be aware that a lot of learning will be required. And that means a lot of failures. If you don't want your failures to be a part of your product/brand etc. then you should hire a professional(2).

(1)

<http://webtypography.net/>

<http://www.thegridsystem.org/>

<http://www.alistapart.com/>

<http://www.typophile.com/>

(2)

<http://www.behance.net/>

<http://cargocollective.com/#/featured>

<http://carbonmade.com/examples/graphic-designers>

</comment><comment><USER8> I try not to. I'm significantly more efficient at developing. I try to outsource/delegate design as much as possible to exploit marginal utility.

However, there are instances where this isn't always possible - sometimes I have to do some basic design. I've assembled a small collection of graphic/web design books that I try to make use of when I can. I'd recommend "The Non- Designers Design Book" and "Universal Principles of Design" to help you get started. In addition, I take screen clippings of interface elements that stand out to me and try to draw inspiration from them whenever I need to implement something similar.

<comment><USER9> Would also recommend 'The Non-Designers Design Book' for base knowledge about layout and typography.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Search for and use open source, public domain, creative commons, etc art. Make note of the artists.

When you get money, go back and email the artist(s) you liked best and ask them if they'd be willing to do some commissioned work.

</comment><comment><USER11> _My advice is programmers who need graphics for their apps not for those planning to become designers._

Hire a designer - but for their design skills, not their photoshop skills.

You should (slowly) develop basic photoshop skills. This will let you go further before you hire a designer and also let you communicate with the designer much better.

Steps:

1) Ask a designer friend to show you the very basics: layers, file format, resizing, colors, simple tools like text, bucket fill, etc.

2) Use a cheap Photoshop substitute - Paint.NET, Gimp or Pixelmator depending on your OS.

3) Learn by (i) watching a designer, (ii) reading online tutorials, (iii) trying simple stuff you need

Over the years, I've gone from simple to more complex:

\- Crop & resize images and convert file formats.

\- Convert transparent PNG icons to transparent GIF.

\- Made very simple 16x16 transparent icons for web apps - by zooming in and toggling individual pixels!

\- Changing the colors in a designer's graphic to try out different color themes in a web app.

\- Simple text logos - watch a designer & you'll see a lot of this is about having a huge selection of fonts & picking a good font/color combination.

\- Business card design - some cards are just good text, colors and alignment

\- Basic fake miniature effect on some of my photos (following online tutorials)

\- Simple app icons (again, online tutorials)

 _Edit_ : add opening paragraph

<comment><USER12> Good post. In addition to 2) For designing icons and illustrations, a vector drawing tool such as Inkscape (or Adobe Illustrator) can be a great help.

It's more flexible than bitmap oriented tools and you get perfect zooming to multiple sizes for free.

<comment><USER11> Excellent point. Guess this will depend on the work you need done.

I did a lot of web apps and not much print or illustrations so I never bothered with vector tools.

I did the business card in pixels - good enough for email proofs. Then a guy at the shop remade it in CorelDraw for actual print.

For icons, I just use 512x512. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I understand your question is about icons and logos, but this _might_ set you along the right path, as the post links to many other resources: <http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-web-design-ux-crash-course>

I'm still figuring it out myself.

</comment><comment><USER14> I did most of the design work for our travel app (Room 77), it certainly can be learned especially since there are some well established app design patterns. If you are developing for iOS, most of the built-in libraries look pretty good and you won't need to do a lot of tweaking. I'm not as familiar with Android. Keep in mind that although you can learn graphic design, would your time be better used on other parts of the app?

I recommend the following resources:

1) Glyphish Pro icon pack - $25, pretty much everyone uses this high quality icon pack in their apps.

2) Tapworthy - Designing great apps - Great book with a lot of case studies and practical advice on grid based design, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> The "don't DIY" option hasn't been explored here: why not pay a graphic designer?

<comment><USER2> For the same reason the "every co-founder should learn to code" mantra always gets tossed around here: because it's not impossible to do yourself and will make you a better and more self-sufficient developer.

You might still choose to bring in a design specialist for pixel-perfect work or usability perfection, but it's no different than having the hacking chops to get your prototype into a functionally complete form. Done is better than perfect.

<comment><USER16> That reminds me of a quote:

"I've been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration—likely because so much bad design simply is decoration. Good design isn't. Good design is problem solving." – Jeffrey Veen

It certainly wouldn't be worth hiring a designer just to get "pretty" pixel perfection. I would hope they could provide thinking as well. By doing the work in parallel with you, they should make it possible to go faster than doing it yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you are not going to hire a designer here are some beginner tips:

      - choose at most 1 or 2 sizes (like 5pixels and 15pixels)
      - use only x*size for all your sizes (image sizes, margins, paddings)
      - choose only 2 or 3 colors (kuler.adobe.com).
      - check, double check and check again if what you created is easy to read/see.
      - check how your design looks in grayscale (will help the colorblind but is also a good contrast check)

The limitations above will help a lot. But in the end it all comes down to experience and feedback from others.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think it depends, if you are doing a personal,or not very impprtant, app and you do not need awsome design i do it myself, but my skills are limited(like most programmers?) so, if i need really good graphics i think it' better to pay someone who can do some great stuff insted of having it for free but not too mich good. Anyeay depends also on your design skills.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't.

For web apps, I throw uncut, raw and basic app online and see if it rolls. When and only when I start getting signups and questions whether it will do X or Y, then and only then I start thinking about design.

I usually end up with either ripping ideas from some themeforrest theme and going my own route or just buy the theme and be done with it. Same for icons.

Bottom line is not to waste time.

<comment><USER20> To the average user, your product IS the design. So I think seeing if it rolls without the design is kind of like seeing if your sandwich tastes good with just the bread.

<comment><USER5> Some breads are great just by themselves.

YMMV a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> i, as a web developer, have the same exact issue, im not an artist, yet i need it done. so i believe if your not good at something, dont pretend that you are. you just got to bite the bullet and say that if I try doing this: A) its not gonna be good anyway B) im going to waste time on bad designs. so personally, obviously taking my lack of design skills into account, i would hire someone OR partner with a designer. thats also a good option

<comment><AUTHOR> See the thing is, I think I have a decent sense of what looks good and what doesn't, but I just have no idea about common design patterns and how to create the designs I envision. I also am reluctant to believe that this can't be learned.

<comment><USER22> I'm a web designer by trade. While I think I have a good innate layout and design sense that I've been working since the days of print, I certainly do not believe it can't be learned. If your goal is to produce product, though, you have to consider if there's a long term time/money benefit to learning. I license layouts from Theme Forest and icons Graphic River _for clients_ all the time when budgets are tight and money is an issue. There's no shame in it. It's very efficient and in the right hands, effective.

For me the biggest advantage is that they do backend stuff as well, which since that is God's most tedious job, is a real bonus. It is so much easier when you have somewhere to start.</comment></comment></comment>


Why "Move Fast and Break Things" Doesn't Work Anymore - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2019/12/why-move-fast-and-break-things-doesnt-work-anymore <comment><USER2> Please, someone tell the geniuses at Harvard business that no one ever used "Move Fast, break things" for chips. Having been in the industry long enough, I've seen plenty a launch date moved, and chip-respins executed in favor of risking a recall of hardware from the field.

It's only non-critical, consumer/casual software/applications that can afford to move fast, and break things. Your bank, or medical records, or even traffic light controls simply cannot move fast and break

<comment><USER3> >Your bank, or medical records, or even traffic light controls simply cannot move fast and break

Don't tell the banks and financial industry that (looking at you, Equifax).

<comment><USER4> At least in finance it's more "move slowly and hope no one notices it's broken."

<comment><USER5> Don't edit that, that's a load bearing spreadsheet!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sadly the author doesn't understand what iterating quickly means. It's not a means of achieving greater performance in a known area, but a means of finding something that works in an unknown space.

So the completely opposite argumentation would've worked. For the last 10+ years we spent iterating over several startups to find how to use this new technology of mobile and internet, and now that we have found most reasonable usecases we can slow down and optimize them.

On the other hand there are always areas we don't know much about, like in the areas of shared knowledge, in the niches. There of course quick iteration continues to be the way to go.

<comment><USER7> Nowhere in the article has the author claimed that. :/

<comment><USER8> From the article: "Shift 2: From Rapid Iteration to Exploration"

But rapid iteration is the most efficient means of exploration for many areas. Exploration is the _reason_ many people use the "move fast and break things" rapid iteration strategy.

<comment><USER7> Yes, exactly my point. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Move fast/break things works great when the risks associated with the "breaking" are minuscule, experiments can be measured and isolated, and the upside for experimentation high (UI tweaks, recsys or search algo improvements, social media, etc).

Move slow, keep things working works well when breaking things has a huge downside and safe experimentation on live customers near impossible. Such as medicine, legal compliance, building airplanes, utilities.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the big issue with companies like Facebook is not that their development model moves too quickly for them to be able to react to their issues but that they simply don't care. Facebook has known about the issues with privacy, hyper targeted advertising etc for years. You don't need to move very fast to react to a fundamental issue in that timeframe.

<comment><USER11> You call it an issue. We call it a revenue stream.

<comment><USER12> And here's another point where we may disagree: money is not a thing to be worshiped at the cost of everything else.

<comment><USER11> You may disagree, but where are you getting the resources to push your position?

<comment><USER12> I think my position is already a majority one. Go out in the street and ask people if money is the most important thing in life.

<comment><USER11> Now, go find one of those people that isn't a willing revenue stream for surveillance capitalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Move fast, break things" never worked in any meaningful way, especially in AWS. It's a garbage philosophy repeated by idiots who don't support business applications driven by software on a global (enterprise, mission critical, always-on) scale. Literally no one at Amazon practices this idea, except the idiots who think that launching pre-alpha garbage into production because of poorly conceived re:invent promises is an acceptable business model that builds customer trust (spoilers, it doesn't). Source: worked there, did that.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think it ever worked that well, but I have also always followed a different muse than the current zeitgeist.

I think that SpaceX is living proof that you can move very fast indeed, without breaking things.

As we well know, they do, very rarely, break things (with great video), but when that happens; it only happens _once_.

<comment><USER15> That's about as nice an example of survivorship bias as you could find. SpaceX came within a whisker of ceasing to exist. If that _one_ launch had failed it would have been game over for them. But they got lucky that time and they have done a fantastic job at keeping their eye on the ball ever since. Every business has one or more of those critical moments in time when things just have to go your way. If you are in a business where breaking things is your only option to succeed at all then you should. SpaceX gambled and won, and breaking things is still the way of the world in rocketry and likely will be for some time.

<comment><USER14> Point taken, but they also don't keep breaking the same things, over and over; simply because it is not cost-effective to avoid the breakage.

Makes business sense, but I've always been one of these knuckleheads that wants to write great code; simply because I like to do it.

I got into the habit of practicing zero-tolerance on quality. I've never found _any_ level of breakage acceptable in my own work. I literally get physically uncomfortable when I know there's a bug in my code, and I have been known to get out of bed at 2AM, and go downstairs to fix it.

I know that I'm fortunate to be in a place where I am free to do that. I don't need to run in the rat race.

<comment><USER15> When SpaceX breaks stuff it is simply because not all the variables are known, not because they cut corners and harm their customers in favor of their bottom line or speed of execution.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. It may be "survivorship bias," but sometimes, we survive because we did it right, and it's not a bad idea to see what the survivors did. They didn't screw up the launch, because they screwed up the tests; where it was expected.

Remember when the ability to land a spent booster was being poo-poohed by the "old guard"? Remember those really awesome booms?

Nowadays, landing the boosters has become so routine that it isn't even mentioned anymore.

That's cool.

I am kind of in awe of the way they work. I'm not sure that I'd be up for working in that environment, myself, but I have mad respect for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _With every new generation of chips came new possibilities and new > applications. The firms that developed those applications the fastest won._

Initially, I was really disappointed in this article. Facebook, on the client- side, was _' possible'_ on a Pentium 4. Perhaps a III.

Internet speeds where sufficient in the early 2000's, and MySpace was created a year before Facebook. We all know who won.

I really had a hard time seeing what "chip generations" or "being first" had to do with any of it.

Sure, powerful enough hardware is a pre-requisite. But... I couldn't see any correlation between generations of products / services and CPU power.

In my mind, if there was a correlation to be had, it'd rather have been between said generations of products / services and, first internet speed, and then internet adoption.

And Moore's law didn't have much to do with it.

Then, it hit me. I was on the wrong time scale. He's talking decades. We're not looking at the 20 or even 30 years, but at the last 60 or 70 years.

So, yes, he still misses the entire "internet tipping point", with the associated paradigm shift, that is probably just as important as his precious Moore's law.

But he's also right on how it enabled the Mainframe -> PC -> Smartphone transitions.

Although I still don't believe in the theory that being first matters that much.

Who here remembers Microsoft's UMPCs? Or Intel's MIDs? Or the first third- party iPhone app?

... he does make _a_ point. But I don't know what to make of the whole thing, really.

</comment><comment><USER17> Whenever I see articles like this or about frameworks like the Cynefin framework I cannot help but to see it like any mathematical optimization problem. If the solution is simple to see you just jump to the solution. If it is more complicated but you have good practices / know the gradient ("know in what direction you are going") and the problem is well behaved, you can iterate quickly and reach and expect to find an optimum. But if it is more complex and you don't know I what direction to go / don't have a gradient you need to do try lots of different experiments in parallel also.

And the more costly an iteration is the more important it is with multiple perspectives to get as much data into the different experiments from the beginning as opposed to randomly selecting things to try out and seeing what happens.

</comment><comment><USER18> TFA has lots of 'ideal world' assumptions that are a real hostage to fortune, e.g.

> This new era, on the other hand, will be one of mass collaboration in which > government partners with academia and industry to explore new technologies > in the pre-competitive phase

. ...

> That's why we can expect the basis of competition to shift away from design > sprints, iterating, and pivoting to building meaningful relationships in > order to solve grand challenges. Power in this new era will not sit at the > top of industrial hierarchies, but will emanate from the center of networks > and ecosystems

Not sure if the FAANG-likes will see it like that.

</comment><comment><USER19> 4\. Regulators and the public have both grown increasingly alert for 'fake it til you make it' gambits. Regulators are more likely to intervene when companies create a public hazard (eg. Theranos, Uber's self driving program) or skirt legality with their business models (Uber, again, hmm.) The public is more likely to cynically exploit loss-leader behaviour and then jump ship once the company tries to turn a profit.

</comment><comment><USER20> My answer would be: as the things are so broken, that I sometimes wonder how anything still works. Flawed cpus, memory, motherboards, operating systems, hardware, not to even go into userspace/web software full of lasigna frameworks that are buggy as hell even on then own and once you put all that into gulash called modern software... Its a small miracle on its own.

<comment><USER21> the saving grace is probably the fact that our hardware is pretty well designed and so are the core components of our operating systems

<comment><USER22> Not just well designed, but many core components have been iterated on for decades at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hopefully this ends open Office spaces trend. I hope that there be a resurgence of private offices again. Cross discipline cross company cooperation sounds interesting.

I also tends to think that the move fast and break things builds technical debt. As such as there is a need for a cross between agile and a more planned approach.

</comment><comment><USER24> In my opinion, there are many companies that "move fast and break things". It happens on the early days.

Once they grow big, they can't afford to move quick. And breaking things seems dangerous.

So it does works. But depending on the stage the company at

</comment><comment><USER25> It only has ever worked if you have a monopoly or plenty of cash to burn. If you can test in production and your user base can absorb errors/inconsistent behavior, it's the path to finding new verticals.

</comment><comment><USER26> I always took this to mean break your unit tests and fix them before anyone else notices, but that just may be the software developer in me.

</comment><comment><USER27> I always used "move fast and break things" as an excuse to dump legacy soft

</comment><comment><USER28> I move that the article definitely touches upon a critical topic but fails to nail it due to a too-narrow yet too-peripheral account.

Consider this:

> Over the coming decades, however, agility will take on a new meaning: the > ability to explore multiple domains at once and combine them into something > that produces value. We'll need computer scientists working with cancer > scientists, for example, to identify specific genetic markers that could > lead to a cure. To do this, we'll need to learn how to go slower to have a > greater impact.

This "working with, across domains" mantra underlies the entire article. It's called transdisciplinarity — if not of individuals, of teams.

Guess what. That's how we've done _any sector_ for the longest of times. You start with self-made specialists, they grow the field, which then touches other fields, and before you know it, a "normal" business has several functions: accounting, sales, legal, marketing, production, etc.

Tech is new, and tech is geeky — the greatest among us estimate that no more than 1~5% of the population has enough interest to enter and remain in the field.

Transdisciplinarity is usually a major key to unlock hard problems, indeed. As more and more engineers enter the tech field coming from previous careers, armed with domain knowledge, the quality and "relevance" of tech features improves, no doubt about it — I think music and the arts in general, observed over the last 50 years or so, is a strong illustration of that.

> These new technologies are far too complex for anyone to develop on their > own. That's why we can expect the basis of competition to shift away from > design sprints, iterating, and pivoting to building meaningful relationships > in order to solve grand challenges.

This literally confuses goals with methods. Agile never told you what to do or why you do it, it's just a "small method for small teams to work better/faster, to manage complexity". Grand challenges don't get automagically solved because they're big and involve many people from many fields.

The "far too complex for anyone to develop on their own" part is more telling of a philosophical bias: we tend to either see the world as "too complicated to be explained" (as the HR author) or "too simple to be worth wasting time to intellectualize it" (this is the general entrepreunarial mindset, to go at things from action even if it's not entirely clear mentally; the opposite mindset, which is mine, is more of a research ethos, an observer / thinker.)

Transdisciplinarity is also not a new thing. It's just the latest trend to kick in on the road to progress, it's a pendulum from hyper-specialization (high verticals) to holistic solutions (big horizontals).

Consider philosophy, human beings sprouting ideas, software engineering for the mind. An idea appears somewhere, in a group, in some space-time. It starts localized, vertical. The taller is gets (i.e. the highest its worth and the strongest its implementation, its relevant rooting at many levels of the stack), the wider it may eventually resonate, spread, horizontally towards other fields, other domains, other spacetimes and cultures. "Don't kill thy neighbor" is kind of such a piece of software that most of us have installed. But look how philosophy generates ideas: usually not in isolation, rather from looking at the world. The best philosophers, imho, are those who speak from experience (typically not career-philosophers, rather doers, goers, people who act and only then speak).

Case in point: after a few thousand years of thinking and transmission, philosophy is part of everything we do, are.

Technology (in the current modern sense, computing, electronics, etc) is like that, it's a big vertical with tremendous horizontal reach. It will become, like philosophy, like any valuable improvement to human condition, a massively transdisciplinary activity.

</comment><comment><USER29> Did it ever? And if so for what value of 'work'?

</comment><comment><USER30> Anymore? Did it ever?

</comment><comment><USER31> It never did

</comment><comment><USER32> Did it ever work?

<comment><USER33> It worked for the 5% survivors.

<comment><USER34> If you have a 5% chance of becoming a billionaire and a 95% chance of walking away from a failed startup with minor debts and lost time, the math says that your expected value for moving fast and breaking things is still quite high.

Of course, if you step outside yourself and _also_ consider the downsides of failure for your employees, your investors, your customers, and the harm that a fast-and-loose approach could do for the public at large, or the environment, (or other externalities, depending on your business) it starts to get less attractive.

Being a sociopath who is "only looking out for #1" is a big advantage in business!

<comment><USER33> There's no 5% chance of becoming billionaire, but of building a business that _survives_ beyond 2 years, probably with lots of hard work, investment and learnings from past failures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Original, and full article at [https://hbr.org/2019/12/why-move-fast-and- break-things-doesn...](https://hbr.org/2019/12/why-move-fast-and-break-things- doesnt-work-anymore)</comment>


Yahoo demoting IE6 to C-grade status in Q1 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/11/03/gbs-update-2010q4/

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are wondering what "C-grade" support means...

<http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/#define-support>

"Summary: C-grade browsers are identified, incapable, antiquated and rare. QA tests a sampling of C-grade browsers, and bugs are addressed with high priority."

The end is near!</comment>


Undersea Cable System Cuts in Singapore - <AUTHOR> http://status.linode.com/incidents/wwzn1mcmc2fp <comment><USER2> I know this is probably a slight tangent to the article, but I is anyone else fascinated by underwater cabling?

My first job out of university is working on the USNS Zeus for Military Sealift Command. I've been out on the ship and we're working directly with the cable handling equipment. I've walked in the big empty vats they fill with the cable. It's over 25 feet deep and 20 feet wide. They actually "walk" the cable up to prevent it from getting tangled. Seriously!! SO COOL!! I would love to post pictures, but I like my job a little bit too much to risk it.

<comment><USER3> Neal Stephenson has a great little non-fiction piece on these cables, both overland and undersea, talking about the process of laying them down and negotiating what countries they go through, etc. It was unexpectedly tucked into the end of my version of Cryptonomicon, but it might be available separately. I agree, I'm fascinated as well.

<comment><USER4> It was originally published in wired. It is indeed a great write up on the topic!

[http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/](http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/)

<comment><USER5> That literally just took me a week's worth of free time to read. Absolutely worth it.

Several years ago I read a short book with a similar theme: The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage.

Another inspiration to me was a 25 minute video about the HVDC lien linking North and South Island in New Zealand. [https://hackaday.com/2015/08/19/retrotechtacular-one-does- no...](https://hackaday.com/2015/08/19/retrotechtacular-one-does-not-simply- string-up-a-half-million-vdc-transmission-line/)

I wonder if anybody will make a popular game out of estimating cable slack?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice map of all cables --> [http://www.cablemap.info/](http://www.cablemap.info/)

<comment><USER7> _Sigh_. BP can afford to run fiber to their oil rigs, but Comcast can't be bothered to lay it through my neighborhood?

<comment><USER8> Oil rigs make a little more money than residential neighborhoods.

<comment><USER9> I thought they were currently operating at a loss?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm in Kuala Lumpur and use Telekom Malaysia Unifi for my ISP (20 Mb/s bidirectional for $US62 per month, for anyone who is curious). This fault has existed for the past few days and is only now being reported.

It not a simple slowdown and is frustrating due to the architecture of the modern internet content hosting and I suspect however TM is rate limiting its customers. e.g.

1) some youtube videos play fine, others stall and simply never load.

2) I cannot play anything on soundcloud.com, plays first 2 seconds then never recovers (however if I switch off wifi and use Maxis 4G mobile connection it works fine).

3) Animated gifs take ages to load and stutter

4) torrents stream perfectly: I can fully utilise my upstream and downstream bandwidth

5) Netflix has no problems (I use a dynamic DNS to get USA content)

6) iOS App updates depend on time of day, during the day they are fine, at early evening peak hours they crawl.

7) Downloading any large file from a website is very slow at all times

It is a pity TM won't purchase/route capacity through an alternative link, having throttled internet for a month is terrible service...

<comment><USER11> Have you considered a VPN to a Singapore provider. e.g. PureVPN or alternatively PPTP on a DigitalOcean, Linode (maybe not in this case), Softlayer etc.. Generally VPS provider will have better international transit than your local ISP, however your local ISP will peer in Singapore so that part is usually congestion free.

<comment><USER10> Hmm, interesting suggestion for a temporary fix. I'll have a play around later.

But I'm loathe to add another point of failure in my transmission route, let alone one I need to maintain myself and troubleshoot myself (VPS).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> According to Telekom Malaysia, it will be fixed earliest end of this month: [https://www.tm.com.my/OnlineHelp/Announcement/Pages/RESTORAT...](https://www.tm.com.my/OnlineHelp/Announcement/Pages/RESTORATION- WORKS-TO-REPAIR-SUBMARINE-CABLE-FAULT_2-MAR.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of a funny story. I was a tech manager for the Winter Olympics in 2010, allocated to the mountain venues. We had this crazy test rehearsal day where we'd test our systems and processes. Proctors would actually walk around the various venues at the Olympics and just randomly create both big and small problems to see how we'd respond. Suddenly, our network connection to the primary datacenter went down, and we couldn't figure out why. We later learned that a boat had somehow (I don't know how) cut a main underwater cable that connected the mountain areas to the city. It was a stupid day. :)

<comment><USER14> Are you sure it was a boat? The fibre providing most of the connectivity from Whistler to Vancouver runs along the highway and has been cut by traffic accidents, but I don't think there's anywhere that a boat would kill it...

<comment><USER13> All I remember is what I was told. It could have been specific special-purpose fibre that was laid by Bell for the Olympics, don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe it's the NSA splicing a fiber with the USS Jimmy Carter.

<comment><USER16> How does that work in practice, anyways? I mean, cables these days don't just carry a bunch of fibre wires, but also high-voltage cabling to provide power to the repeaters. Isn't it risky / detectable to cut open such a cable?

Also, how is the spliced data actually exfiltrated back to land? The obvious candidate is either a leased dark fiber (which requires intimate knowledge of how the individual fibres are arranged) and laying a second cable (with the obvious disadvantage that cable-laying ships are rare and can easily be spotted).

<comment><USER17> >how is the spliced data actually exfiltrated back to land?

During the Cold War, they periodically returned to the site of the tap and changed the tapes and batteries. One of the taps was installed on a Soviet telephone cable across the Sea of Okhotsk in several hundred feet of water. It was a 20-foot long contraption able to eavesdrop without penetrating the cable. It was designed to fall off the cable if the Soviets raised it for repairs. It survived nearly a decade, until 1981, when Ronald Pelton sold its location (among other secrets) to the KGB for $35k.

[http://www.military.com/Content/MoreContent1/?file=cw_f_ivyb...](http://www.military.com/Content/MoreContent1/?file=cw_f_ivybells) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells)

<comment><USER18> An inflation calculator says it is $100k today. That sounds awfully cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "TM: Work to restore Internet speed starts March 25" [http://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2016/03/02/tm- inter...](http://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2016/03/02/tm-internet- traffic-slow/)

<comment><USER20> I'm in Singapore and this is not reported at all. Likely affects only Telkom Malaysia users only - one Malaysian telco lost their link to Singapore rather than Singapore losing link to the world as implied by the headline.

<comment><USER21> It definitely affects Thailand too, Sinet sent notifications about the problem, and speed is quite bad to some sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If I were a terrorist org with ___deep_ __pockets, I 'd just hire a black market deep see trawler with a sharp cable hook and have it drive north south a thousand miles out of Japan. Global everything shall halt.

<comment><USER23> Infrastructure damage that causes severe issues is such a low hanging fruit it's a mystery to me why it isn't attacked more by terrorist / anarchist / primitivist / et al. groups unless I adopt the Hansonian "X is not about seemingly related Y" viewpoint...

<comment><USER24> Thesis: The bogeymen don't really exist.

<comment><USER25> And/or they aren't very smart or very well resourced.

<comment><USER24> If a terrorist plots in his lounge-room and nobody ever sees repercussions, do they really exist?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am amazed that the undersea cable is not so thick at all. I was expecting a huge tub of cable. Just thinking about that and the amount of data we can equip across continents in less than 200ms is just incredible.

Is there a documentary on deep sea/undersea cable system? I am really interested in how they deploy the cables across the ocean. Have a ship sail across the ocean and start laying the cable down?

<comment><USER27> This animated GIF shows how it's done:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Undersea...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Undersea_cable_laying.gif)

<comment><USER26> I see thanks. Now wonder how they pick up where it left off :-))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Weird, but in February 29, some of our customers experienced difficulties to connect to our Linode servers in Dallas (not Singapore) from some Internet providers in US (e.g: mobile carriers, cable ISPs). That day I checked the Linode status and it was normal so I forgot the issue until now.

Do you think these events can be correlated? May be they were trying to mitigate the issue and affected other regions as well.

<comment><USER29> Is it _possible_? Sure. Is it likely? No.

Without _a lot_ more information -- preferably from both sides -- it's impossible to know.

<comment><USER28> Sorry, but I was expecting an answer from someone at Linode. Since their update page was not accurate I couldn't rely in their last report. I think the answer is: it is possible and it is likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's so startling to see failures so...unabstract. We depend so much on the layers of the internet fulfilling their protocols perfectly, that seeing a vulnerability like this is just bizarre.

Of course xkcd is relevant as always: [https://xkcd.com/697/](https://xkcd.com/697/)

</comment><comment><USER31> On a tangent, I'm curious whether events as the 8.2 earthquake that happened today, could affect these fibers?

<comment><USER29> I just recently read an article about this...

 _" Around 150 to 200 fiber-optic cable breaks are recorded each year. Between 65% and 75% occur in water depths of < 200 m and result mainly from fishing and shipping activities. In contrast, breaks attributed to geohazards comprise < 10% of the world average. However, seaward of the busy continental shelf and upper continental slope, geohazards account for at least one-third of breaks."_

\-- _" Insights into Submarine Geohazards from Breaks in Subsea Telecommunication Cables"_

PDF: [https://www.iscpc.org/documents/?id=1794](https://www.iscpc.org/documents/?id=1794)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Singapore has a fair bit of redundancy of cables. Perhaps linode are only using a single provider (seems likely given they're cost concious).

The only Perth-Singapore cable has broken a few times on the past few years, latency really sucks then going from 50ms to 270ms (routing via the US instead).

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there a global status of cut/degraded undersea cable systems? That would be very beneficial. It seems that the connectivity providers Level3, Hibernia/Atrato, HE, NTT etc.. only relay limited information, perhaps their notification from cable providers is very limited too, by the time it gets to downstream customers we're all guessing, e.g. on WebHostingTalk there are customers trying to determine latency issue to a Hong Kong provider, only to have a competitor announce a fiber cut 2 days ago in Jakarta may be affecting it.

<comment><USER33> You are wrong on one part: connectivity providers usually provide detailed information about failures to their customers [1]. The only thing is: you are not their customer — your ISP is.

Some ISPs will communicate to their own customers, i.e. you, for instance see the link NiekvdMaas posted in the thread [2]. Sadly, most ISPs do not relay any detailed info.

[1] I once saw a fully detailed report from a connectivity provider about a cable failure and repair, with pictures of scuba-divers included — the cut happened on fibers running at the bottom of a water canal.

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213555](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213555)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I hope this isn't China what with their recent land grab in the pacific [1].

[1]: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/us-issues- stron...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/us-issues-strong- warning-to-china-over-land-grab-island-in-south-china-sea-10286206.html)

<comment><USER35> I wonder if any countries have "just in case" sabotage-devices near the the undersea cables of possible enemies..

<comment><USER36> or a fleet of submarines that run around tapping them...?

<comment><USER35> If you've installed a tap, it can just as easily be a tap with a limited self- destruct (for deniability) and/or a bomb (for sabotage.)

<comment><USER36> The point is that the comm lines are more valuable as an intelligence asset than they are as a strategic target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is reported maintenance though.

[http://www.thanhniennews.com/tech/some-bad-days-ahead-as- vie...](http://www.thanhniennews.com/tech/some-bad-days-ahead-as-vietnams- internet-cable-will-undergo-maintenance-59782.html)

<comment><USER38> is it though?

From the link:

The Asia America Gateway, which connects Vietnam and the US, will be serviced from March 4 to 6, the source told Thanh Nien.

That says, March 4 -> 6\. Also only specifies Vietnam.

Edit: Spelling correction

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Few people realize that to splice an undersea cable, you need two (big) ships. This is because if the cut was where the cable is a mile deep, by the time you bring the ends to the surface they will be approximately two miles apart.

<comment><USER40> Aren't the cables run with a bit of slack for just this reason?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What caused this? Sabotage? Animals? Submarines?

<comment><USER29> Let me check.

      $ bofh
      user to computer ratio too high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> how thick are these cables?

<comment><USER43> Depends on the cable, but it's not unheard of to be a foot or more in diameter. Here's a deep-sea fiber splitter:

[http://i.imgur.com/qh4Gf.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/qh4Gf.jpg)

<comment><USER44> This is incorrect. A subsea fiber optic cable is about an inch in diameter. The splice cases and amplifiers are bigger.

<comment><USER43> It's not incorrect, the original comment is vague. I think it is more reasonable to assume they are talking about the entirety of the cable rather than just the carrier embedded within it.

<comment><USER42> Indeed I was. Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Fucking sharks

<comment><USER46> Downvoted for being funny(?) but seriously, any speculation on what could have cut them? Ocean currents? Debris?

<comment><USER26> I think it had happened before [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/08/15/shark_att...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/08/15/shark_attacks_threaten_google_s_undersea_internet_cables_video.html).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Discuss: Kickstarter to fund unmanned submersibles to follow a cable end-to- end, looking for taps

<comment><USER48> I'm afraid that you'll only be able to follow them for a short while before they slip below the ocean floor.

<comment><USER47> What about duplicating how they repair broken cables... hook onto it close to shore, pull the cable up to a boat, then follow the length of the cable across the ocean.

I'm assuming that's how they're repairing this one?</comment></comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Interview - <AUTHOR> http://www.internetbilgisi.com/2011/08/mark-zuckerberg-ile-roportaj.html

<comment><USER2> Video is below the fold. Sums up Facebook quite well within the first 90 seconds "The Facebook is a directory where I can go to look up all the information I care to know about you..."</comment>


Apple in advanced acquisition talks with Lala - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10409472-261.html

<comment><USER2> Anyone here use Lala?

<comment><USER3> just signed up. they have a pretty interesting model. they let you upload your purchased music and play it. songs are just 79c, as opposed to 1.29 at itunes.</comment></comment>


Facebook could be breaking EU law by using shadow data for ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90243244/facebook-could-be-breaking-eu-law-by-using-shadow-data-for-ads <comment><USER2> That they don't share shadow data on request is already breaking the GDPR.

Even if they would get some lawyerish twist on it, sometimes grey scales isn't needed. Just give me my effing data - if you have it you have it.

It's a bit of FB meta-theme on HN right now, and I wrote something similar before in another comment, but I really wish we could have some whistleblowing considering the shadow data.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope the EU comes after them for this. Using data collected for a completely separate purpose (ie 2fa) for advertising is blatantly evil. Not to mention this "shadow data" isn't request-able, and probably not deletable.

</comment><comment><USER4> If they're doing something this blatantly in violation, then I hope the EU comes down hard on them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. I'll hit up some contacts and send them this, this is a blatant disregard of GDPR.

</comment><comment><USER6> GDPR is not enough because violations are so hard to prove. There should be a law forcing companies to publish a full list of ads they show together with all targeting settings and data.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does GDPR stop Facebook from re-purposing the phone numbers that they already collect? It seems to me that everything is GDPR compliant, even if it's a scummy thing to do.

<comment><USER8> > Does GDPR stop Facebook from re-purposing the phone numbers that they > already collect? It seems to me that everything is GDPR compliant, even if > it's a scummy thing to do.

I'm pretty sure it does. My GDPR training was very clear that we couldn't pre- populate a marketing email list with emails previously collected for another purpose, and this seems like the same scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Assuming we're at step $n on the path to corporatist dystopia, does Facebook care? Do they bait the EU into playing chicken with some sort of Facebook ban? There's a non-negligible chance Facebook might win that one.

<comment><USER10> > Assuming we're at step $n on the path to corporatist dystopia, does Facebook > care? Do they bait the EU into playing chicken with some sort of Facebook > ban? There's a non-negligible chance Facebook might win that one.

Why go through the trouble and scandal of banning it? Just bleed it dry with fines until it complies and/or ban its European _revenue streams_. The latter might be quite effective and immune from political blow-back: Facebook users don't care for ads and would not shed a tear if Facebook was banned from selling them in Europe due to its noncompliance, however literally the only thing Facebook itself cares about are ads and the associated revenue.</comment></comment>


AI Saves Woman's Life by Identifying Her Disease - <AUTHOR> http://futurism.com/ai-saves-womans-life-by-identifying-her-disease-when-other-methods-humans-failed/ <comment><USER2> Excellent news and a wonderful breakthrough; I am definitely glad IBM's Watson exist but was it really an AI that made this discovery?

"...The system looked at the woman's genetic information and compared it to 20 million clinical oncology studies. After doing so, it determined that the patient had an exceedingly rare form of leukemia...."

That sounds like an extraordinary search and data compare but did Watson create those search parameters on it's own to solve the problem or was Watson fed the parameters?

<comment><USER3> IBM is selling lots of solutions under the "Watson" umbrella nowadays.</comment></comment>


Text in Senate Bill Would Allow Warrantless Access to Email - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/05/26/secret-text-in-senate-bill-would-give-fbi-warrantless-access-to-email-records/ <comment><USER2> I wish these politicians would just consider what if my political opponents ran the intelligence agency I'm writing this bill for.</comment>


Launching Jetpack Social. What does hacker news think? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jetpacksocial.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

We just launched Jetpack Social. Its a social media platform that allows businesses to create sweepstakes, daily deals, coupon offers, etc to their customers on Facebook via custom app pages.

I'm looking for some feedback on my landing page as well as the entire website and app. Looking forward to hearing from you all.

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks like <http://i.imgur.com/N6HR2.jpg> when I go to the page using iOS 6 on iPhone 5

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks so much for this. I've fixed this now. A late change caused this issue on mobile browsers. i would appreciate any feedback people can give me on the site.</comment></comment>


Marine Archaeologists Excavate Greek Antikythera Shipwreck - <AUTHOR> http://www.heritagedaily.com/2015/09/marine-archaeologists-excavate-greek-antikythera-shipwreck/108391 <comment><AUTHOR> Amusing quote: "Every single dive on it delivers fabulous finds, and reveals how the '1 percent' lived in the time of Caesar."</comment>


Heads Up - open source MacGap/Spine/Rails app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maccman/headsup

<comment><USER2> Very nice work with MacGap. I've been following Spine for a while, finally integrating it into my projects as of late and loving it. Always nice to see something new from ya.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is cool. One thing I noticed is if you don't allow the app access to your google account, it encounters an error.

</comment><comment><USER4> I couldn't get the email part to work, but this app is seriously responsive. Nice work on this demo app and MacGap!</comment>


"Let Us Calculate": Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination - <AUTHOR> http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/11/10/let-us-calculate-leibniz-llull-and-computational-imagination/ <comment><USER2> Amazing work on this. It really strikes me to see a snapshot of the genealogy of the "technological utopian" viewpoint often seen today. People have believed that computational reasoning could delivery universal truth for quite some time now! Also I find it particularly interesting to note the mythical / religious conviction of these thinkers.

Not sure if Leibniz could have forseen the ethical / moral divergence of internet culture today, but I'm sure he would have been fascinated & repulsed by the diatribes of comment sections...

</comment><comment><USER3> "Leibniz's interest in this area can be traced back to his 1666 Dissertatio De Arte Combinatoria — an extended version of his doctoral dissertation in which he explores what was known as the 'art of combinations'."

Does this refer to the branch of mathematics which is called Combinatorics today?

<comment><USER4> Sort of, it has to do with a generalizable philosophy on combining underlying pieces of thought in order to argue any concept. This was popularized by Ramon Lull, and discussed in the article. He focused primarily on religion and conversion to the Christian faith (a primer to answer any question about god/religion ) for example. It turns out he also had interests in computation on recently discovered work ~2001

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

In the Arte Combinatoria Leibniz basing on these ideas makes forays into mathematical combinatorics, and did a bunch of unpublished work (Nachlass) in the area yielding some results that were not published for many years later. For example partition of n into k published by Euler later.

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03150860749...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0315086074900329)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny that this pops here today. I was rereading _Logicomix_ two days ago, and Leibniz " _Calculemus!_ " is mentioned at least two times in the comics.

Anyone who hasn't read _Logicomix_ already should really do it asap.

</comment><comment><USER6> Martin Gardner published a small book early in his career that describes Llull's project. It includes reproductions of many of his diagrams, which are very geometrically ornate.</comment>


One big cluster: How CloudFlare launched 10 data centers in 30 days - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/one-big-cluster-how-cloudflare-launched-10-data-centers-in-30-days/? <comment><USER2> This was an interesting article. Mostly because of how it took words that mean one thing to people and then tries to define them as something else.

When we set up our "data center" in Santa Clara (nearly 1600 machines in 100 cabinets) racking and stacking and booting didn't take long at all, what took forever was getting various network providers plumbed.

Co-location facilities range from extremely 'swank' like the Switch [1] facility in Las Vegas, to the extremely 'bare' like some mid-peninsula facilities I looked at. They can be run by a 'team' of folks with on site security, network staff, mechanical teams, and HVAC teams, or one contract security guy in a bullet proof glass booth noting who goes in and out.

A 'swank' co-location facility can sell you floor space at $800/kw per month. A 'bargain' co-location facility might be as little as $150/kw per month. A 'cabinet' is generally between 4 - 10kW so $3,200 - $8,000 per month per cabinet high end, and as little as $600 - $1500 per month per cabinet at the bargain side. If you negotiate your IP transit (networking) costs you pay between $3 and $6 per mbit or $3000 to $6000 for a gigabit line. For swank co- lo centers like the ones mentioned you're also going to pay $150/hr for "smart hands" services where someone on staff in the colo will go out and swap a drive for you or replace a bad Ethernet cable.

The ownership of these places ranges from real estate investment trusts (REITs) to businesses dedicated to internet services.

It is an amazingly diverse set of things for something as simple as chilled room with power and security and network connectivity. The first time I had to go up and do some work in Google's Oregon data center it became really clear to me _why_ someone like Google would build their own data centers. The amount of costs you could shave off your computing budget were _enormous_. With that much profit just laying there on the table it becomes clear how folks can compete in that space.

With regards to the article, if I want to drop 3 or 4 cabinets of 'stuff' into 50 data centers around the world using the local datacenter IP connection its pretty straight forward to do. If you need a megawatt of space (I know megawatts aren't normally a measure of volume but in Data centers they are) and guaranteed redundant gigabit IP that can burst to 10Gbits, that is a bit harder to co-ordinate in 30 day bursts unless you do most of the work yourself.

[1] <http://www.switchnap.com/>

<comment><USER3> I think it would be more accurate to say "the install took less than 30 days." If you get all your circuits dropped in and then start counting days, it becomes much more realistic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A bunch of machines in someone elses DC isn't launching a data center...

This article basically amounted to "we set up machines with some provisioning tools".

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like their trying to launch some new staff as well: <https://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team>

</comment><comment><USER6> Having done lots of this type of work I see it more as a triumph of paperwork and scheduling skills than techincal acumen.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's nice to see in the age of the cloud that co-lo can be "cool" again.

Ironically used by a so-called "cloud" company.

</comment><comment><USER8> well I wouldn't call a few racks in some one elses co-lo a data center.

<comment><USER9> From the article, it appears that they are the sole resident in the data center; "[Cloudflare] owned every router and every server in their racks".

<comment><USER10> The word "their" refers to Cloudflare's racks, not the datacenter's racks. Cloudflare might have two racks out of a thousand, but all the equipment in those two racks were supplied by Cloudflare, not rented/leased from the datacenter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They mention that they use anycast rather than geoip-located DNS. (which itself would probably use anycast) I was under the impression that with anycast it was possible for routes to change mid-connection and you could end up with packets being routed to different datacenters as a result. Is there something they do to prevent this, or is it not a problem in practice?

<comment><USER12> That doesn't really happen in reality. Convergence is fast and as long as your datacenters are topologically disparate enough, you won't have random route selection changes outside of failures, in which case, the connection would have failed anyways. :-)

And if you're really tricky, you can sync state between POPs and keep a connection moving if your application is aware of the state change. :-)

<comment><USER13> Yup. David knows what he's talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 10 datacenters in 30 days really isn't anything terribly amazing. We're doing about double that in half the time with about half the staff ;)</comment>


Introducing Nuclio: A scalable, open source, real-time processing platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.iguazio.com/nuclio-new-serverless-superhero/ <comment><USER2> > nuclio runs faster than bare-metal code

So I'm staring at the high-level architecture [1], and I don't see how this claim can be true. Is this claim explained somewhere?

[1] [https://github.com/nuclio/nuclio#nuclio-high-level- architect...](https://github.com/nuclio/nuclio#nuclio-high-level-architecture)

<comment><USER3> to some extent in the detailed arch: [https://github.com/nuclio/nuclio/blob/master/docs/architectu...](https://github.com/nuclio/nuclio/blob/master/docs/architecture.md) The point is that there is a lot of parallelism, reduced locks and context switches, zero-copy and buffer reuse (less GC), async IO, Etc. things that most developers wont implement (unless they are perf optimization savvy), so you get that for free and can run 400K events/sec on a process using standard server (with Go functions)</comment></comment>


Programming tricks for Vim, Bash, et. al - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/XonqNopp/conf <comment><USER2> Unexpectedly underwhelming. Then again, maybe I've just been using vim for too long and know more of its weird features than I should want to.</comment>


Thief copies out 11 pages of contacts after stealing man's iPhone in China taxi - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.news.com.au/technology/thief-copies-out-11-pages-of-contacts-after-stealing-mans-iphone-in-china-taxi/story-e6frfrnr-1226768240870

<comment><USER2> I love how the theif even are being threatened still didn't return the phone, he just sent back the sim card and a handwritten backup of 1000 names and numbers, that's a lot of effort.</comment>


Lenovo refreshes its ThinkPad lineup with AMD Ryzen Pro 4000 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/02/lenovo-refreshes-its-thinkpad-lineup-with-amd-ryzen-pro-4000/ <comment><USER2> What's the difference, if any, between Ryzen 4000 and Ryzen _Pro_ 4000?</comment>