Why has the actor model not succeeded? (1997) - b-man http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vol2/pjm2/

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps this is simplistic, but I believe it has succeeded in the form of web APIs/REST/etc.

</comment><comment><USER2> NB: This was from 1997.

</comment><comment><USER3> """The actor model has no direct notion of inheritance or hierarchy, which means it is time consuming and confusing to program actors with trends of common behaviour."""

Mozart/oz allows you to easily implement actors which also have OO inheritance.

Generally, many superior programming paradigms (logic, constraint, functional, concurrent) have been ignored by the computing industry which has probably cost it billions of dollars in lost productivity.

<comment><USER4> Billions? I think you're underestimating by several orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER5> Seems reasonable. Null pointers are rumored to have cost billions in waste and failures. And they're trivial to fix with a little bit of static typing.

<comment><USER6> Not sure I would call it "trivial." You just trade your segfault (or NullPointerException) for a pattern match error.

Although that little bit of static typing would probably have dealt with the vast majority of expensive null-pointer bugs.

<comment><USER7> Not if you enable compiler errors for inexhaustive matches. Are there any compilers for mainstream languages that can flag all possible segfault/NPE locations as errors?

<comment><USER8> That's probably an intractable problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am one of the people who has not bothered to learn about the "actor model" and thus perhaps lost billions... Why? Because it smells of needless complexity, just like XML, Java, Haskell, and everything Microsoft touches.

I think for a technology (or at least a language) to go viral it needs either (1) lots and lots of money (Java for PR, VBA because of the $$$ MS ecology) or (2) a fairly genius level combination of power and simplicity (C, and why Tcl/Tk won't quite die...).

The actor model, functional programming, blah blah blah, have neither enough money behind them to make them happen, nor the magic balance of simplicity and expressiveness such that that a smart 17 year old can spend a weekend learning them and then begin writing apps that had been impossible before said language (lua, for example).

So ... keep trying ;)

<comment><USER10> As someone who has learned a bit about the actor model, I think it actually simplifies one's life a great deal, in terms of writing concurrent programs.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin Hero – Bitcoin Trading Game - <AUTHOR> https://bitcoinhero.me/ <comment><USER2> tldr: there is a lot of real-world variables missing from this

This is very inaccurate because the trades execute immediately. Very rarely are you able to actually execute a trade immediately.

That's true even in the stock market. Stock market simulators need to build in a slight delay to be accurate.

More often in bitcoin you are putting in speculative buy and sell orders at a fixed price and they execute as soon as someone is willing to sell/buy at that price. It could trigger in minutes or weeks (or never) depending on how the market moves.

Also, I'm not sure if the prices here are agregate accross multiple exchanges but in reality the book of orders needs to be deep enough in your exchange to actually execute the order.

If the deal is in another exchange you would have to transfer your coin to take advantage of it and at current network speeds by the time the coin gets there your deal will be gone.

<comment><USER3> >there is a lot of real-world variables missing from this

The most _real world variable_ missing is taxes. In short coins held less than a year can be taxed at a 39% rate on the high end and a trade on a coin held more than a year is 20% (again on the high end). Even those numbers vary on the traders tax bracket (income).

It is significant, especially when you don't know and the IRS audits you adding late fees, penalties and maybe legal fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a fairly brilliant referral advertising scheme.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a bug: when I "invested" $1k and sold it at a +0.21% profit, I made $210 instead of $2.10 (basically, they forgot to divide 0.21% by 100 to get a multiplier; if only real-life was this easy haha) :D

<comment><USER6> The trades are on 10x leverage by default.

<comment><USER5> Even at 1x, the bug is present. Even still, 10x should give me $21.00, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you have a delay in your prices? Where are you getting them from? People will watch the trends from gdax to cheat. I had that problem with my game. I wonder how to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if they are somehow following the trades of the best players on the real market.

<comment><USER9> with some kind of back-end access?

<comment><USER10> I think he means using the trade strategy of the best performing players in the game and replicating it on "real" exchanges.

<comment><USER9> Ah! Makes sense doesn't it!

However the trick is in accounting for trading costs and dealing with order execution, particularly if you are reliant on maker fees only to remain profitable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Variant Travelling Salesman Problem solved by Sharks - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2011/03/19/variant-travelling-salesman-problem-solved-by-sharks/ <comment><USER2> Whenever someone writes an article like this I've always wished they were more careful with their terminology. There's a world of difference between _solving_ TSP and _approximating_ TSP. Something that truly _solved_ TSP would be impressive. Something that _fails_ to approximate TSP when appropriate would actually be surprising; evolution doesn't leave much room for organisms that hunt suboptimally.</comment>


Why XHamster Is So Much Better at Content Moderation Than Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/why-xhamster-is-so-much-better-at-content-moderation-than-facebook-ec318919b0e4?source=grid_home<comment>---0</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>18-----&gi=c87723bc88ae </comment><comment><USER2> Discussed a few days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480585)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Users of xHamster upload about 7,000 videos a day". "300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!" [1]

I think that's the real reason.

[1] [http://videonitch.com/2017/12/13/36-mind-blowing-youtube- fac...](http://videonitch.com/2017/12/13/36-mind-blowing-youtube-facts- figures-statistics-2017-re-post/)

<comment><USER4> For the sake of putting things in consistent terms. 7,000 videos a day works out to just under 5 videos every minute. Assuming each video averages about 12 minutes in length, 1 hour of video is uploaded to xHamster every minute.

Put another way, Youtube has to moderate 300x the amount of content. I suspect (but do not know) that Youtube also has 300x the userbase and can possibly afford 300x the moderation.

<comment><USER5> I feel like porn moderation is a more trivially binary choice: Legal vs. illegal, in a way that is crisp, clear, and clearly legislated.

Whereas what about weird videos that try to sell products to kids under the age of 5? What about anti-semites? What about subtle racism (Is that even something we want to moderate?) What about bullying?

The moderation space, and connectivity between peers, is orders of magnitude larger on youtube. Hours of content controlled for.

<comment><USER6> >What about anti-semites? What about subtle racism (Is that even something we want to moderate?)

It's not clear to me that xHamster actually tries to remove that from their site. I wonder if this is just a case where the media reports about racist content on YouTube or Facebook, but not on porn websites, so comparatively it looks like porn sites are doing a great job moderating.

<comment><USER7> I think that was their point.

Xhampster only has a relatively few and relatively easily identified and relatively clearly defined things to look for, compared to youtube and faceebook and others, which have a universe of nebulous things to try to identify.

xhampster (probably) doesn't even try to figure out if something is subtly antisemetic or anything like that. If it doesn't have kids or an actual not- faked death in it, then it's ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Was annoyed to see SESTA-FOSTA grouped in with the other laws and presented as though it is not a core demand of sex worker organizers to overturn as it shatters their means of protecting each other and screening clients online.

</comment><comment><USER9> The main difference seem to be that Facebook's moderation is done after the fact, while these sites place content in a moderation queue before making them visible. I do like the idea, but it might not fly well with the typical Facebook user, who is accustomed to the instant gratification of seeing his/her post on the feed, followed by likes and comments.

<comment><USER10> It wouldn't be impossible to do faster moderation in these cases. People usually take a bit of time between completion of a post and submission, where you could run basic moderation checks.

<comment><USER9> This gave me an idea: how about you give the author in-editor feedback? As you type your message it runs the content through some sort of sentiment + content analysis and tells you on a scale of 1-10 how civil or factual your post is. This way harmful content not only gets self-moderated, but with repeated, immediate feedback, users actually learn how to write better.

I'm not saying that posts with a low score be removed, but perhaps they will receive less priority on the feed.

Building that analysis layer is the difficult part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Facebook moderation does not even work after the fact. I recently got a friend request from an unknown woman (probably fake, less likely prostitute) who in obscene language offered some sexual services. I clicked the report link, expecting that Facebook would immediately close such obvious profile. Their verdict was that the profile (still unchanged) does not violate any rules.

</comment><comment><USER12> Did not read the subtitle before going to "xhamster.com"...

<comment><USER13> Hopefully you weren't at work.

"Dogmeat12, can I see you over in the HR Director's office immediately?

-Your Manager"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, they did a search and replace across all their videos "Sister -> Not Sister", "Brother -> Not Brother", "Mother" -> "Not Mother", etc...

So now they have no incest. see how easy it is to moderate content?</comment>


Show HN: I made Spotlight for Chrome (Cmd+M) - <AUTHOR> https://usespotlight.co/ <comment><USER2> On iPhone safari this site's nav bar is hard to use. It seems to hide with any downward movement, which is bad for iPhones because of the spring effect at the top of a page. Maybe check that the user is beyond a certain threshold (100px down the page?) before hiding the nav.

Otherwise I really like the idea.</comment>


Stylesignal uses social media to enhance accuracy in fashion trend forecasting. - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/twitter-is-being-analysed-to-see-if-katie-price-is-in-or-out/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my startup - TechCrunch took the UK pop-culture spin on the article, but I was very pleased for the coverage!

Our product is quite niche and B2B, though very much has a technology and internet focus. Ask away with any questions.

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Is the content automated or professionally added?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bit of both - the sources are "curated" and then we automatically discover other sources. A big part of what the software does is to establish source quality and authority.

The taxonomy automatically evolves - so for example during Halloween, words related to Halloween rise into the statistics even though we never manually seeded those words into our system.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What should I include and exclude on my resume - <AUTHOR> I graduate next month with my B.A. degree in Computer Information Systems but I cannot determine what I should include and or exclude from my resume because I have zero experience besides my school work and I don't have an online portfolio of anykind.
I don't want to include past job history because it's in no relation to my degree but, I still should have a resume to email out.
Any advice? <comment><USER2> It depends a lot on where are you going to send your resume. In soma places they prefer a short 1 or 2 page resume. In other places you must include everything, even the public dance at the end of the year in kindergarten.</comment>


Why Paul Krugman thinks inflation fears are baloney - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/paul-krugman-thinks-inflation-fears-baloney/ <comment><USER2> Economists. Lol</comment>


New Vulnerability: Mercurial Command Injection (CVE-2014-9462) - <AUTHOR> http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2015/3/17/this-new-vulnerability-mercurial-command-injection-cve-2014-9462.html <comment><USER2> Are we now at a point with headline writing where the word "This" is going to be inserted into a headline, regardless of whether it sounds silly or not, just because that's what everyone else is doing?

<comment><USER3> An analogy to "This Old House"? Not sure it makes sense, but that's what I thought of.

<comment><USER4> "This Old House" is exactly the intent of the reference. The old Matasano Blog had two ongoing series of posts "This Old Vulnerability" and "This New Vulnerability". The former was used for discussions of older vulnerabilities, while the latter was used for discussing new vulns.

One such example (from 2007) was ported over to our relaunched blog. [http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2007/7/27/this-new- vulne...](http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2007/7/27/this-new- vulnerability-dowds-inhuman-flash-exploit.html)</comment></comment></comment>


How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://collegeinfogeek.com/spaced-repetition-memory-technique/ <comment><USER4> Shameless plug: I made Code Cards ([https://codecards.me/](https://codecards.me/)), which helps you remember programming concepts by active spaced repetition. Think of it as Anki but made with code specifically in mind.

In the interest of full transparency, I think there are some things missing to make it the best tool it can possibly be. I'm still mulling over how to tweak it so it works better w.r.t. motivation/relevancy and availability/convenience.

Write-up: [https://www.oskarth.com/srspractice/](https://www.oskarth.com/srspractice/)

HN thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13521066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13521066)

</comment><comment><USER5> I love Anki. I use it for 10 minutes a day for retaining math, vocabulary, and programming languages.

I've also hacked together a system, inspired by spaced repetition, for remembering better books I've read. It's turned into so much more. If you have an interest in remembering books better or using technology to get more out of reading, I'd love to chat.

<comment><USER6> I would like to chat for sure. I ran across Anki a few months ago, and thought about all the potentially incredible interactions between spaced repetition and Natural Language Processing techniques.

For a super basic idea, imagine a Chrome plugin that creates an Anki deck out of a Wikipedia article at the click of a button? (Maybe not the most useful application, but pretty neat and a great place for a simple proof of concept.)

And what if you took that a step farther and made an app that does the same thing with text extracted from an image set. So you could take pictures of a textbook page or pages and have it do the same thing with those.

Of course, there are many practical challenges to developing the NLP process in a way that it can identify the most salient parts of a text and capture flash-card-friendly phrases or factual statements, but I think the challenges could be overcome. And it would be an amazing feat to capture the benefits of spaced repetition without the upfront cost of manual deck creation.

<comment><USER7> You could call it version 1.0 of the system Neo uses to learn everything about everything in the Matrix :)

I don't think NLP is necessary though.

If you take a look at the stackoverflow data dump sooner or later every possible variation of a question for a particular answer is going to get asked. Ofcourse there are always new topics that haven't been covered but this is a minuscule portion of the entire data set. I think it's a safe bet looking at Q&A happening on sites like Quora\Reddit etc in a couple years the chances that someone is going come up with a question that no one has asked before is going to be very low.

Wikipedia is missing 2 important pieces.

1\. Linkage between all these questions and the content on the site. Currently Google provides this link.

2\. A system to communicate to the reader what skill level /pre-reqs they need to fully appreciate/understand the content they are looking at. The UI for such a system already exists in most games.

Once these pieces are in place you are ready to create a very useful Anki deck on anything.

What most people don't realize is the entire mass of human knowledge given the size of most wiki/q&a site dump is about 100-150 GB. Throw in all the edu video content being produced on Khan Academy, NPTEL etc and you get to a 1-2TB. This isn't a big amount of data. All it needs is a learning system built on top of it for it all to be put to good use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a fan of spaced repetition. Here is the definitive bag of tips about it:

Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge - <USER2> [https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules](https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules)

<comment><USER9> +1.

Supermemo is on the market for over 20 years, I remember using it on Amiga.

Quite amazing that they are still on the market, with not much competition.

<comment><USER10> [Shameless Plug]

We recently launched a free flashcards app on the Mac App Store called PAL: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pal- flashcards/id1187236321?...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pal- flashcards/id1187236321?mt=12)

It's also available on [https://www.pal9000.com](https://www.pal9000.com)

We've tried keeping it as simple as possible which a fair number of people seem to like. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've practiced this for as long as I can recall - not because I was told to, but because I found recalling something and working with it in an appropriate mental context worked to cement seemingly limitless amounts of information in my mind.

I'm not convinced that an app or any external crutch is required - one simply needs to get in the habit of reflecting on new information, and sporadically testing retention. The first step for me to start the loop is to subvocalise (or vocalise if I'm in private) the pertinent info several times after receipt, which beds the memory of learning something in, and the context, if not the fullness of the information itself. It's enough - it's a hook to trigger recall of the full information - sits in episodic memory as "a thing I said or did", rather than passive "this happened/I heard this" information, and therefore surfaces the entry point easily. If an entertaining association rises at that point, I store that too, as it acts as a mnemonic.

I do find myself sometimes doing this with useless information, however, and end up memorising pretty much every bit of information I only intended to retain for 30 seconds (e.g. a chunk of foreign text, ticket numbers, seating plans) - and find myself doing habitual recall on them until they cement like everything else.

One thing that the article doesn't touch on but I think is important is sleep - I find if I recall immediately before nodding off the information sticks far more firmly, and I resultantly wake up in the middle of the night with fresh insights. Conversely, when I don't get enough sleep for a prolonged period, my recall definitely gets substantially worse - I find I both can't remember things and if I do, they're distorted, or I don't trust the information.

<comment><USER12> From my own org-mode link dumps:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14013310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14013310)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A great resource on this is gwern's page on spaced repetition[1], discussed previously[2]

[1] [https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition](https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151790)

<comment><USER14> thanks for sharing this gem!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Spaced reptition isn't exactly a time-saving study method. It takes lots of time to build and maintain a large deck. For very small things to memorize (like the kana), it's probably easier to just make flashcards. But it's fantastic when you need to remember large parts of a very large flashcardable set of information, like "the kanji" or "new target language words". And it's best when you have already made a good start on the topic.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm currently using Anki to memorise vocabulary for Indonesian. One thing I find enormously useful is to link the Indonesian word I'm trying to learn to an English (or even another Indonesian word) word I already know.

For example, here's how I remember the word for 'choose': In The Matrix, Neo has to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. Therefore the Indonesian word for 'choose' is 'pilih'.

To remember the word for 'page' I think of newspaper pages blowing in the local park. I already know the Indonesian word for 'park' is 'taman' so it then becomes very easy to remember that the word for 'page' is 'laman'.

Thus each word has a little mnemonic story associated with it. Eventually through repeated exposure to the word I don't need the story any more, but it's enormously useful in getting to that stage.

</comment><comment><USER17> If this interests you and you want to dive deeper into how you learn, I am enjoying this coursera course and highly recommend it:

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

</comment><comment><USER18> Chalk me up as an Anki user. I couldn't have done as well as I have in my college español class without it. I felt like I had superpowers when I knew vocabulary that some of the native speakers struggled with.

<comment><USER19> The thing I like most about Anki is that it can show you nice little graphs of your progress. No matter whether that line is curving upwards or downwards, it helps a great deal to motivate myself for regular study.

<comment><USER20> Where is this feature? I haven't noticed it.

<comment><USER21> upper right corner, the vertical bar graphs

<comment><USER22> huh, nice! I hadn't noticed that before either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's this scaling problem with Anki, in that if you're doing 20 new cards a day, it gets overwhelming really fast. I haven't done the math yet to figure out how many (or few) new cards per day you should limit yourself to in order to have a manageable review workload over the duration of a course - <USER3> have any ideas?

Sometimes it seems like the pace of college courses is by definition inefficient, like the only way you can pass is by cramming and forgetting. Not even naturally optimized for retention.

</comment><comment><USER16> There's a great book called 'Making It Stick' which details effective, proven methods to improve memorisation and learning. Spaced repition (or more generally active recall) is one of those major methods.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful- Learnin...](https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful- Learning/dp/0674729013)

</comment><comment><USER24> I had a similar realization this semester. It felt like after I learned a new concept, I had to give it time to solidify.

The best students were always caught up with the class and following along whereas the average or below students were fully focused on one class at a time depending on which one had an assignment/exam coming up.

I wondered why some students are able to keep up while others fall behind. I think it boils down to efficient study strategies like this and never falling behind in one class because there's something due for another class.

</comment><comment><USER25> The article mentions optimum spacing if you have an exam coming up. Has anyone found useful references in regards to optimum spacing if you want to permanently memorize information?

<comment><USER26> The schedule mentioned for exams is not used in most SRS; they already target permanent memorization (which is one reason why they sometimes need a 'cramming mode' for students who are willing to pay extra reviews in order to have cards memorized by a particular date).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I learned about SRS when I started studying Japanese. It's the main principle behind WaniKani, which teaches you kanji and vocab. It's been working astonishingly well, and it's extremely gratifying to slowly accumulate more knowledge from a seemingly intractable subject.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm actually a huge fan of spaced repetition. Kinda mad I didn't know this about the brain back in college. I now use this interval method paired with Deliberate Practice for everything -- even working on an app that mirrors my current workflow.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does this concept apply to learning skills (as opposed to memorization)? The general wisdom for mastering skills seems to be "just practice a lot." I wonder if spaced repetition could speed up this process.

<comment><USER30> For skill learning, look into Anders Ericsson's book "Peak". There's much more to say than just "practice a lot" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Shameless plug: I made a spaced repetition website too. [https://qquiz.com](https://qquiz.com)

I use it for Spanish vocabulary but have German, English and several others on it.

</comment><comment><USER32> In addition to spaced repetition you can encode information in a way (method of Loci) that makes it very hard to forget. Did they mention this?</comment>


Model Sues Match.com For $1.5 Billion: Photo Used In Hundreds Of Fake Profiles - <AUTHOR> http://gothamist.com/2013/11/23/model_sues_matchcom_says_photo_is_u.php

<comment><USER2> Putting aside the merits of the case, it raises a question of should social networks be doing facial recognition to validate photos that are uploaded?

They surely could get a probability match as to the likeliness that you would be in a photo with someone else.

Putting a less serious spin on it, if the network did check the probability that your image matches that of another, you also have a good chance of finding your evil twin...</comment>


There Is a Racial Divide in Speech-Recognition Systems, Researchers Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/technology/speech-recognition-bias-apple-amazon-google.html <comment><USER2> Ugh--this is not a racial problem.

Lots of people of all different races--including white--use pronunciation and vernacular that differs significantly from the typical Midwestern speaker. I interact regularly with Caucasians that I can barely understand myself, let alone asking a typical commercial speech recognition system. On the flip side, quite a few black people speak in a manner that is indistinguishable from other races.

Universal recognition is the real problem to be solved. We want _everyone_ to be understood.

<comment><USER3> True, and that is important, but there certainly is a correlation. Good luck writing speech recognition software to deal with this:

[https://ifunny.co/video/damn-wtf-we-really-talk-like- that-63...](https://ifunny.co/video/damn-wtf-we-really-talk-like-that-63-lets- try-IRBGOaYF7)

We may want everyone to be understood, but this goes far beyond speech recognition software. Humans often can't understand humans. There are lots of people who really don't talk well at all.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: For a dependable desktop Linux, is there anything other than Ubuntu? - <AUTHOR> I'm a long-time Windows dev looking to finally migrate to Linux for the long term, and hopefully get some advice along the way.
I'm looking for a solid, dependable desktop experience. If I was younger I'd just install Arch and tinker away, but now I want something that works first time, every time. (Basically, I don't want to spend three hours re-configuring ALSA just so I can watch Youtube.)
Ubuntu looks to be the best bet for this, but people always have their complaints and alternatives. So HN, can you recommend me a distro? <comment><USER2> Fedora. It works well with up to date software and packages.

I've been using it for years without any major problem.

<comment><USER3> Another vote for Fedora here. I've been running it for years on multiple different desktops and laptops, it has been really rock solid. The only thing I would say in favour of Ubuntu (and by extension, Mint) is that because they are targeted more at a 'beginner' Linux user, there tends to be more documentation/tutorials online (e.g. "how to do X in Ubuntu"). Of course with some experience and googling, most of those are easily adapted to other distros too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recommend openSUSE Leap. Very good distribution. It's mostly based on their enterprise server one so the stability should be very good. Also, the OS partition (not data) is using btrfs and there's a snapshot after each package upgrade so if there's a problem, you can boot (and restore) a previous snapshot :)

<comment><USER5> Can't say I agree. Getting nonfree software is a PAIN with opensuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you are interested in Arch but not the overhead it entails, you may wish to consider Antergos [https://antergos.com/](https://antergos.com/)

It's basically a fully set up Arch with sane defaults. Lets you have the rolling updates and other benefits, without requiring as much energy to set up.

<comment><USER7> I have to recommend Manjaro over Antergos. [https://manjaro.org/](https://manjaro.org/)

The Arch and Antergos communities can get somewhat toxic regarding Arch offshoots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ubuntu or Mint (which is based on Ubuntu) would probably be the easiest "just works" distros. I'm told Mint is preferred for people coming from a classic Windows background but your mileage may vary.

Fedora would be the other major contender. It's developer friendly and pretty easy to use. One thing I would mention is that they take a stronger stance on most open source software so you have to add the RPMFusion repository if you want to use closed source software that's excluded from the main repository. Fortunately this is not difficult.

The great thing about all these distros is that you can get LiveUSBs so you can try them before installing. I'd highly recommend doing this.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've tried numerous times to get away from Ubuntu but nothing else seems to support HiDPI displays well enough. I hoping this changes soonish.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't support a HiDPI and a non-HiDPI display side-by- side. You can choose which one looks fine, but one will be close to unusable (either much too large UI elements or much too small ones).

After several days of Ubuntu (and Fedora), I just gave up and installed Windows which works perfectly.

<comment><USER11> How did you get this working in Windows? I'm struggling with just this problem in Win10 at the moment.

<comment><USER10> Really? It worked out of the box for me. Also Windows 10.

Both displays' native resolutions were automatically recognized. I don't remember if I had to manually select separate scaling factors or if Windows did it by itself, but I was relieved to have a working desktop so quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Raspbian PIXEL desktop environment will run on your PC or Mac. It's a distribution of Debian Stretch that is pretty nice and they have a great support community on their forums.

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pixel-pc- mac/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pixel-pc-mac/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Using Debian since Wheezy on my laptops and desktop. I had to learn which packages to install, that Ubuntu might typically have... Volume control for pulseaudio, firmware (plus enable non free repos). I also had to ensure my network card is open source friendly (you can include firmware at install on a usb drive or just have an Linux friendly usb WiFi/ethernet adapter).

I've found Debian less buggy on my machines than Ubuntu.

I use xfce.

If you feel the need to experiment with something that isn't default in the distro, I just use a VM to validate it'll work first or snapshot/backup so I can recover easily.

</comment><comment><USER14> Front page answers:

Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015) | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15245954](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15245954)

</comment><comment><USER15> I am running Ubuntu 14.04 because I don't like thinkering anymore wit OSs, my dev environment is an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in a VM,why a VM for work ? Because I don't want to install Apache,node and other dev stuff on my main OS and also I can move the VM disk if needed to a different machine or OS.

</comment><comment><USER16> Linux Mint ([https://www.linuxmint.com](https://www.linuxmint.com)) it is based on Ubuntu (I think there is a second version based on Debian now) but it nails the desktop part of the OS better.

I have been using it reliably for the past 6 or 7 years.

</comment><comment><USER17> Arch. The catch with Arch is that you need to build it, and preferably should back up all your configuration. The best part about Arch is that you need to build it.

</comment><comment><USER18> You could consider Devuan. Devuan GNU+Linux is a fork of Debian without systemd.

</comment><comment><USER19> > I want something that works first time, every time.

My experience with Mint is exactly like that.

Coming from Windows, I was quite surprised to see that everything works from the start - I thought the transition would be much more painful.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ubuntu is usually the go-to. However, Fedora is also a good bet.

I don't like to recommend Mint since they rip out a lot of the GNOME stuff for their own apps (Mint Store, Mint Updater, etc).

</comment><comment><USER20> this one looks nice, [https://elementary.io/](https://elementary.io/)

but I haven't tried.

</comment><comment><USER21> Fedora, Solus and technically still ubuntu - Ubuntu MATE or KDE Neon</comment>


The 30 Highest Velocity Open Source Projects - <AUTHOR> https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open-source-projects/ <comment><AUTHOR> (Author here.) This started as an idea for a clever visualization but turned into a mammoth amount of work. OpenStack, GitLab, the kernel, Chromium and Apache do not use GitHub (or are only mirrored there).

I'm happy to hear ideas for improvements.

<comment><USER2> Yes, this was a big job -- one of the reasons I stopped working on something similar 1.5 years ago was that I wasn't capturing the non-GitHub activity. Of course that back then I also wasn't controlling for bots.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm hoping the incremental work to maintain this won't be too much trouble and we can release a new version every quarter or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've also checked FreeBSD, and it would be in Top 30 too.

<comment><USER2> Hey, you worked on the project as a freelancer, right? Would you be interested in chatting with me about how to do this again in the future?</comment></comment>


1995 Vannevar Bush symposium: Closing Panel - <AUTHOR> http://worrydream.com/refs/Vannevar%20Bush%20Symposium%20-%20Closing%20Panel.html <comment><USER2> I had no idea what NLS was so I did a quick wikipedia search: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_\(computer_system\))

"One of NLS's most revolutionary features, the Journal, was developed in 1970 by Australian computer engineer David A. Evans as part of his doctoral thesis.[6] The Journal was a primitive hypertext-based groupware program which can be seen as a predecessor (if not the direct ancestor) of all contemporary server software that supports collaborative document creation (like wikis). It was used by ARC members to discuss, debate, and refine concepts in the same way that wikis are being used today."

A wiki in 1970. I feel like we've forgotten so much.

<comment><USER3> Gibson's "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed" comes to mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the video of that panel discussion: [https://archive.org/details/XD1941_10_95VannevarBushSymTape1...](https://archive.org/details/XD1941_10_95VannevarBushSymTape11_2ndDayPanelDis)

and the entire Symposium: [https://archive.org/search.php?query=%221995%20Vannevar%20Bu...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=%221995%20Vannevar%20Bush%20Symposium%22)

Edit: The Doug Engelbart Institute has some more info on the event [http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush- symposium....](http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush- symposium.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting post, but could use a [1995] in the title.

For those that are interested in some radical proposals to try and move things forward, I recommend having a look at the work that's being done at the Viewpoints Research Institute (with among others, Alan Kay):

[http://www.viewpointsresearch.org/](http://www.viewpointsresearch.org/)

There's a lot of different papers, but the last annual report of STEPS is a good place to start:

[http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf)

[edit: Sadly, as far as I've been able to figure out, the kscript and ksworld software mentioned in the last few reports, isn't available anywhere. But I did discover a port of squeak to the lively (js) kernel system:

[https://github.com/bertfreudenberg/SqueakJS](https://github.com/bertfreudenberg/SqueakJS) ]

</comment><comment><USER6> Can someone recommend a book that would talk about all this stuff in more detail? By all this stuff, I guess I mean all the dreams about personal computing that never came to fruition. Ideally with little fluff and a lot of technical detail.

<comment><USER7> Ted's book is fantastic, Computer Lib and Dream Machines.

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

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Lib-Dream-Machines- Tempus/d...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Lib-Dream-Machines- Tempus/dp/0914845497/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395651707&sr=1-1&keywords=Computer+Lib%2FDream+Machines)

<comment><USER8> Technical description of Xanadu is buried in places like

[http://transliterature.org/](http://transliterature.org/)

[http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html](http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html)

[http://xanadu.com/xanasimp](http://xanadu.com/xanasimp)

(See also [http://hyperland.com/TedCompOneLiners](http://hyperland.com/TedCompOneLiners) and [http://hyperland.com/mlawLeast.html](http://hyperland.com/mlawLeast.html) for overview/philosophy and [http://hyperland.com/mlawLeast.html](http://hyperland.com/mlawLeast.html) for some links.)

EDIT: And there's another book, Literary Machines [http://www.worldcat.org/title/literary- machines/oclc/4017610...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/literary- machines/oclc/40176100) but good luck finding a cheap copy.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for filling out the technical side :) Here's Ted showing ZigZag, just because;

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEj9vqVvHPc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEj9vqVvHPc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also a very interesting read: A Conversation with Alan Kay, ACM Queue, 2004, [https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523)

</comment><comment><USER10> I got to meet Ted Nelson a couple of years ago when he gave a talk at a designer/developer conference in Brookyln [0]. He was talking about hypermedia document transclusion, and directed graph mapping of hyperlinked documents. I was one of the ~5 people in the room who got really excited. The other 200 or so... well, let's say they didn't get it.

A lot of the things these guys talk about are really, really abstract concepts, and it takes a special kind of creativity to realize what a big deal they could be. Since most people don't have that (and since it's even rarer among people who market products)... we get repackaged word processors.

[0] [https://brooklynbeta.org/](https://brooklynbeta.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> "Education is a process of ruining subjects for you and the last subject to be ruined determines your profession"

that makes a lot of sense to me, and partly explains why I'm in IT / computers now

<comment><USER12> > _" Education is a process of ruining subjects for you and the last subject > to be ruined determines your profession" that makes a lot of sense to me, > and partly explains why I'm in IT / computers now_

Being unemployed for most of my life, that quote sounds way out of touch.

One of the best ways to ruin a subject is to tell someone who has been studying very hard at said subject and also has made spectacular progress, that they should stick to what they are capable of - and then tell them they are just wasting their time and should stick to sweeping streets and cleaning shit stained toilets. It's even more of an insult to receive criticisms in writing, with poor spelling and grammar.

If, unlike myself, you have a full time job and don't get treated like a retard, rejoice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's striking how all those GUI discussions and moaning about Microsft seems totally irrelevant now. I remember those days well and I can't recall anybody envisioning the way we interact with information via mobile devices now. Interestingly, I hear a lot less complaining about the state of computing now although there's plenty of complaining about what mobility has done to human interaction in general.

<comment><USER14> mobile UI isn't very powerful, compared to Kay & Engelbart's applications either, though. They were focused on quick and powerful editing of content - mobile apps hardly allow you to edit anything at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very interesting discussion.

One gem: _" So the way I hope that it will work for the Web protocols and the WWW standards which I hope will be able to evolve from their kludgy current state towards that beautiful golden dream is that in any case where you lay down a standard, you also allow there to a second and you show a path whereby is a third one comes up that is better you can move in that direction on the heels of the first, keeping it honest and you have a hook in it to be able to hook it all together later on." (Tim Berners-Lee)_

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there a working emulator for Engelbart's NLS system anywhere?

<comment><USER17> After Doug Engelbart died I poked around and found a clone of his Augment software. It's a Windows 3.0 application, this company still uses it and sells copies for $150:

[http://www.ndma.com/resources/ndm8543.htm](http://www.ndma.com/resources/ndm8543.htm)

Comes with a decent manual. I've played around with it a bit but not too much so far.

It's limited to 8-character filenames, and seems more mouse-dependent than I prefer, though maybe I just don't know all the tricks. These days, emacs with org-mode and evil-mode might be a more productive implementation of similar ideas. But it's still pretty interesting. Curiously, one thing that people have criticized as unintuitive is its modal verb-noun command structure, which as a Vim user I find completely natural.

How well this software really captures NLS, I can't say.

<comment><USER18> I tried to email that group and didn't get a response -- have you had any luck?

<comment><USER17> I ended up phoning them. They were pleasantly surprised that someone wanted to buy their old Windows 3.0 software. Mostly they just use it internally.

Once I got connected they were really nice and helpful.

<comment><USER18> Have you used the software?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Alternative (semi-)passive investments - <AUTHOR> hi,<p>what are some alternative investments beside stocks, index, real estate.. should be mainly passive (like peer2peer lending) or semi-passive, like building a mining rig. <comment><USER2> I presume you're mostly talking about passive investment from financing, as opposed to "write an ebook" or "make a course".

I know you said "real estate" but REITs are interesting and quite complex because they specialise in the sort of real estate being allocated to. For example, there are REITs for warehouses, storage, residential property, retail property, logistics, etc. The majority are not listed as ETFs and trade as regular limited liability companies so you have to actually look. They pay quite high dividend (5-6%) but are illiquid and require long holding periods.

Landbay, Funding Circle, Zopa, Market Invoice, etc are all p2p shops for different sorts of lending or factoring, but I hardly see the point since the returns can be replicated by holding corporate bonds, with less risk and more liquidity. Maybe with the exception of invoice factoring.

Crypto is interesting since it's non correlated to the main market but it's also not an "investment". I.e. there's little systematic reason to believe in positive returns over a long run.

Paying down your debts is also obvious if you have a house loan or student debt since it's at least not a loss you need to keep incurring for interest payments.

Investments uncorrelated to the market quickly become market investments so alternatives are pretty hard to find. For example, you're kind of wasting your time with building your own miner since there are multiple miners listed as public stocks readily used as proxies for profitable mining ... The same holds true for a multitude of other activities. So generally whatever you come up with, I'd suggest first thinking "is there already a public stock that represents this activity and does it behave as I'd expect a good proxy for this activity to behave".

</comment><comment><USER3> There are some niches where you can invest in some $100k equipment and then basically just lease it out to people, or operate a very simple business where all you do is operate the equipment.

Some examples: \- cutting prescription lenses \- power washing/landscaping equipment \- food carts \- printing T-Shirts \- plotters/CNC machines/3D printers

I know a few people who run side businesses where all they did was buy the equipment and hire one employee to operate it.

<comment><AUTHOR> this sounds like a fun thing. do you have some more context, how they picked a niche and stuff ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> \- domain names

\- buying websites from flippa that have income

\- collectible coins

\- emergency water and food (expect 1000x return if nuclear apocalypse)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you mean things you can build to trickle in money, indiehackers.com covers a lot of them.</comment>


Ask HN: Tell me about your hacker space. (I'm building one in Beijing.) - <AUTHOR>

Howdy Hackers,
I'm a co-founder at a high-tech incubator out of Beijing.  I've been given the opportunity to put together a weekend hacker space in the 798 Art district.
The goal is to host a Hacker Lab on the weekends to BUILD STUFF, hack software + hardware, and just plain have fun exploring the boundaries of tech.
I know most of us have had great experiences with different hacker spaces, I have one at university that I often pull all-nighters in.  What are some things that you love about your hacker space?  What are some things that you wish were better about it? <comment><USER2> There's a whole wiki, with lots of advice for building hacker spaces: <http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Design_Patterns>

The wiki is based on slides from a nice long talk at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin back in 2007. <http://chaosradio.ccc.de/24c3_m4v_2133.html>

I found another talk titled "Building Hacker Spaces Everywhere: Your Excuses are Invalid" from The Last HOPE conference. I haven't watched it yet, but it's probably really good :-) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxTYUw4gtv4>

<comment><AUTHOR> Great find. One of the guys at the Beijing LUG suggested that we hold a CCC listen-in from the new space. Thanks for the great info, time to do some reading.

Where are you located?

<comment><USER2> Northeast USA, near Boston. CCC has the most amazing talks of any hacker conference I know of. Every year I watch about 24-48 hours of CCC videos. I would watch more, but I don't speak German. Actually, I'm still seeding all the English videos from last year over bittorrent. [http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=7688f1c3fdb544de90...](http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=7688f1c3fdb544de90fe10ad93f2be00&_render=rss)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I frequent two spaces here in san francisco bay: noisebridge and hackerdojo.

What I love about noisebridge:

\- Always people there working on all sorts of projects: and not just software or hardware. Some food hackers as well.

\- Lots of tools you can freely use (bandsaws, scopes, cables, etc)

\- Friendly community where all you need to do is just ask someone what they are working on. Easy to make friends.

\- Open all hours of the day. Governance is best described as anarchy. Number one rule is to "be excellent to each other".

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out Boot! HK which launched a few weeks ago in HK. They are only new but the guys behind it have organised some very successful events in Hong Kong.

<http://boot.hk> is the site for the Hacker Space.

They also run <http://startupshk.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> Comfortable chairs. Large tables. Whiteboards everywhere. No music. Some geeky decorations[1] to stop it from looking like a boardroom. A few lego NXT sets / marble runs / meccano sets / knex / other geek toys dotted around for people to make interesting projects with. Sofas / armchairs grouped around coffee tables. Make sure the sofas are big enough to sleep on.

[1] like these: <http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/cubegoodies/6425/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.yuanfenflow.com/hackerspace>

Just got it up! Right now it's a simple (bi-lingual,双语言) information page for v0.0; after our first meeting, we'll get something that's stand-alone.

If you want to be a part of this, please send me an email and we an set up a meeting prior to the launch on Dec. 11th. stephen [@t] yuanfenflow [d0t] com

Thanks for all the feedback + info! 万分感谢!

</comment><comment><USER6> My priority list would be: beanbags, large flat tables that allows for pair programming, non distracting but ever present ambient music, easy to reach power outlets, good wifi signal, cool art and space decorations(hey you are at 798 after all =)

p.s I just moved to Beijing this year, is running my own start up out of an incubator on the west side, and loves 798. So pretty excited to read about this!

<comment><AUTHOR> welcome to the community, I'm a new Beijing resident myself and was pretty surprised to find that there isn't a well established hacker community here there's diverse groups (BLUG, GTUG, Beijing Coworking, etc.) but there isn't a unifying space for them all. Thus, this was born.

no bean-bags yet, however, we do have two large chairs which are replicas of Michelangelo's David's nose :), but we will certainly have nice space, tables, wifi, etc.

What incubator are you with? We're always interested in who else is in the startup space, to see if there's any opportunity for 双赢 win-win, or at least a meeting.

<comment><USER7> Great idea! 798 is certainly a good place thematically, although transportation wise it's not as accessible as some other sites...? Still, one could do a lot worse :)

Had the pleasure of living in Beijing for a few months last year, hope to be back again soon. Although back on the east coast now, would love to stay in the loop...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great to hear there'll be a hackerspace in Beijing soon!

Ours in Singapore is at <http://hackerspace.sg> =)

Hope to be able to visit some time!

</comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome. Do you have a site or email list? I go to Beijing often and would love to be kept in the loop.

ps: 798 is one of my favorite places..great choice.

</comment><comment><USER10> I may be able to provide some old computers for the space.

Great to see this addition to Beijing!

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like an awesome idea, and something Beijing could use. I'll definitely check it out.

</comment><comment><USER12> i am also live in beijing , is there any require skils to join to your hacker space?

<comment><AUTHOR> jyf1987, the only skill that is required is the open-mindedness to explore, experiment and BUILD stuff. I think the term 'hacking' can be applied to much more than just computers and technology; art hacking, food hacking, life hacking... the list goes on.

If you're willing to listen, learn, and explore together, you can stop by any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, a hacker space in Beijing, I for sure will come to hack.

<comment><AUTHOR> great news... tell your buddies! We're probably going to do a soft opening the saturday after next (Next saturday is the Beijing LUG's Coding4Fun night--you should come!). What day do you think is the most convenient? [Friday, Saturday, Sunday]?

<comment><USER13> Saturday and Sunday are good. I think it's good to have a web page to introduce this hack space in beijing, it will be interesting to many people.

<comment><AUTHOR> we're going to be getting a email list and website up soon--I'll post here when we do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> update:

<http://yuanfenflow.com/hackerLab> is a mini-site complete with mailing list signup.

</comment><comment><USER14> Any more info on your Hacker Lab?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's going to be based @ the Yuanfen~Flow new media art gallery in the 798 Art District.

Here's some pictures of what it looks like now: [http://www.yuanfenart.com/index.php?option=com_content&v...](http://www.yuanfenart.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=162%3Ayuanfenflow- proof-of-concept-prospectus-beta&catid=46%3Acurrent&Itemid=127&lang=en)

Here's the website for our incubator - Yuanfen~Flow (I'm Stephen): <http://www.yuanfenflow.com/>

I'm going to be creating a shoutbox hosted on yuanfenflow.com to focus the discussion and information about it as it becomes available. You can also find me in the #chinalug or #beijinglug channel on freenode

<comment><USER15> hello, i want to know more about the space's opening date. 你好,我想知道这个地方什么时候开放?

<comment><AUTHOR> 我们固定的时候我会告诉你(应该在两个星期之内),好吧?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> great, fellow hackers in china!</comment>


Ask HN: What websites do you check everyday? - <AUTHOR> e.g. news sites, personal finance sites, portfolio trackers.. <comment><USER2> 4chan Daily Programming Thread: [http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/66039286](http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/66039286)

Lobste.rs: [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/)

<comment><USER3> Is /dpt/ of any value? From what I remember it used to be full of fizzbuzz, people arguing about which languages are best and which suck and tons of anime and offtopic. What added value do you see there?

<comment><USER2> Free speech mostly and sometimes interesting screenshots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> el Reg has not been mentioned yet? Travesty! I know their hacks breeze through here because quite a few articles are seeded from here.

el Reg is quite well thought of and their hacks do a pretty decent job - journalism -wise.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk](https://www.theregister.co.uk)

I am just a commentard there but look forward to taking the piss out of you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hacker News, The Register

Reddit

        Documentaries from https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/new/

        Lectures from https://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/new/

YouTube

        Subscriptions from https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions/

I download the videos, convert them to MP3s then add them to the podcasts I've downloaded.

</comment><comment><USER6> HN, Reddit, The Guardian, SI, Longreads.

Although would love to find a better source for sports. SI keep screwing with their website and has a lot of opinion noise...

<comment><USER7> Try The Ringer for sports

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I usually visit Hacker News, Ars Technica, TED Talks, and Pocket to fill up my reading list for long flights with no Wi-Fi.

Then I'll usually check Reddit for any interesting conversations I can contribute to in either /r/flightattendants or other topics.

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of my favourites are already mentioned but I don't see [https://electrek.co](https://electrek.co) . It's very pro Tesla so if that bugs you don't bother with it.

<comment><USER10> "Pro Tesla"

The fact you say it, it made me realize the feeling that I go through when I hear people talk about, "Elon saving the world" and "Tesla to be revolutionary and doing out of the ordinary"

It's all just PR and marketing. They are really good at that.

Sigh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> HN /r/cscareerquestions /r/learnprogramming /r/linux slashdot.org Theguardian Wsj (technically, I live off it's push notification)

</comment><comment><USER11> HN, Twitter, Facebook, E-Mail, ProductHunt and also our own Tool Zenkit. I also read Techcrunch or the next web.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hacker News, I use theSkimm to learn about news everyday (morning email), I check the BBC for other news

</comment><comment><USER13> Blockfolio, Unread w/ Feedly specific Google News keyword alerts, Redflagdeals

</comment><comment><USER14> IndieHackers, Slashdot

</comment><comment><USER15> HN, slashdot, r/programming, and techcrunch.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hacker News, Reddit, TechCrunch, BBC News

</comment><comment><USER17> Hacker news, Soylent news, Slashdot

</comment><comment><USER18> Hacker News, Echo JS, Product Hunt

</comment><comment><USER19> fb,gmail,reddit, instagram, ifttt, pinterest, amazon merch, skimlinks, youtube

</comment><comment><USER20> HN, lifehacker, reddit

</comment><comment><USER21> HN, Reddit, Sherdog

</comment><comment><USER22> trump-news.today

</comment><comment><USER23> HN, IH, lobste.rs, /r/sideProject, /r/digitalnomad</comment>


The Setup: Andy Hertzfeld - <AUTHOR> http://andy.hertzfeld.usesthis.com/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how many other people are waiting on the next Mac Pro. It has really been a long time...hopefully the new Xeons ship this month and Apple builds something awesome.

The really crazy thing I'd love is a Mac pro with a super high bandwidth external port, letting you connect a couple or 4. Some of the 4 CPU IBM servers do this.

I don't care if Apple only sells 50k Mac pro machines, as long as they exist for the right professional tasks and users. And I think they would sell a lot more than 50k if it costs less than 10k.

</comment><comment><USER3> It feels a little strange now knowing that when I'm browsing fokelore.org that I'm accessing a server in his basement.</comment>


Khoi Vinh on revenue from Basic Maths (custom blog template) - <AUTHOR> http://www.subtraction.com/2010/03/31/adding-up-basic-maths <comment><USER2> holy cow, never knew you could make so much from a wordpress theme.

<comment><USER3> You should see Thesis. Dude's minting it.

<comment><USER4> WooThemes is apparently pulling in $2+ mil per year according to the Mixergy interview. (<http://mixergy.com/woothemes-adriaan-pienaar/>)

The market is quickly getting very crowded but I'm currently in the process of selling premium WordPress themes myself, mainly at the request of clients who prefer a cheaper solution that is easier for them to customize. If there's interest I could blog about it or provide some insight into my research (and development) so far.

<comment><USER2> Please please do. I would love to hear about it.

<comment><USER4> I'll try to write one in the next day or two and post the link to HN (it will be posted on my blog at <http://devgrow.com/>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, these are very good numbers for a passive income, are these numbers normal or it's more a success story and not always frequent to have this?

<comment><USER6> Khoi Vinh is a very well respected, high-profile, designer; make of that what you will.</comment></comment>


Show HN: An online collaborative UML editor using PlantUML - <AUTHOR> http://collabuml.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I built CollabUML after the need to work on designing systems with my peers, instead of screensharing, it's simpler to go into a website and start collaborating, it saves bandwidth which can be a problem sometimes, and it allows your peers to do edits instead of just telling you want to modify.

After thinking a bit and talking with people, looks like it can be useful for system design interviews.

I'm still thinking how to evolve it, if you have any ideas, let me know.

Be aware that anyone can go to any board, hence, avoid placing private information.

Thanks.

<comment><USER2> This is cool. Random idea: set up a Blockly[1] mode for using blocks to generate the PlantUML. Even more amazing if you have it bidirectional with a text mode!

[1] [https://developers.google.com/blockly](https://developers.google.com/blockly)

<comment><USER3> Looks cool, is that open-source? I can't find the link to a repository anywhere...

Looks exactly like the [1] Scratch programming language IDE from MIT.

[1] [https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)

<comment><USER2> Blockly is definitely open source[1]. Scratch looks like Blockly because Scratch is now written with Blockly :)

[1] [https://github.com/google/blockly](https://github.com/google/blockly)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The HackMD version of CodiMD[1] also supports this, letting you collaboratively edit a PlantUML diagram embedded in a Markdown document.

[1]: [https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd](https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd)

Some improvement suggestions:

      * Implement shareable URLs (the session name should be in the URL).
      * Don't immediately prompt a session name but explain the purpose of the website.
      * Link the PlantUML documentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good to know, thanks for sharing, while useful, sometimes I just wanted to go into a website and start collaborating, which is one of the reasons I ended up building CollabUML.

<comment><USER5> I think you can accomplish this by using the URL, and it would be significantly cleaner than the input pop-up.

Instead of prompting for input, use URLs like [http://collabuml.com/s/sessionName](http://collabuml.com/s/sessionName) (the /s is just to give you some flexibility in the future, should you want to add other URLs to the site), or alternatively, for pure client-side, you could do [http://collabuml.com/#sessionName](http://collabuml.com/#sessionName).

For an example of how to do this using a landing page, check [https://meet.jit.si/](https://meet.jit.si/).

If you don't want a landing page, then when someone visits [http://collabuml.com/](http://collabuml.com/) (with no session name) just immediately do a 302 redirect to a new randomly-generated "session name" URL. If a user wants to join an existing session, they need to use the URL directly (most likely clicking on a link the other person shares with them).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the hints, I'm aware of such issues and actually want to take the session from the URL, I pushed this last night and was tired enough to not do more changes and just went straight to the plain-old prompt popup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Couldn't resist myself from modifying the default diagram.

      CollabUML -> You ++: Welcome to CollabUML, The collaborative UML editor
      return Sounds good, but How do I use it?
      CollabUML --> You : Just share the url with anyone
      CollabUML --> You : and start collaborating
      CollabUML -> You ++: It's very handy for designing systems with your peers
      return How does it works?
      CollabUML -> You ++: It's powered by https://plantuml.com \nBe sure to check their docs to see the wonderful things you can do\n Just like this sequence diagram
      return Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER7> I get an error about the browser not supporting cookies. In the browser console I get this:

      A cookie associated with a cross-site resource at http://188.8.131.52/ was set without the `SameSite`
      attribute. It has been blocked, as Chrome now only delivers cookies with cross-site requests if they are
      set with `SameSite=None` and `Secure`. You can review cookies in developer tools under
      Application>Storage>Cookies and see more details at https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5088147346030592
      and https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5633521622188032.

Chrome Version 80.0.3987.163 (Official Build) (64-bit) on a Apple MacOS

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the report, I'll look into it soon.

I'm surprised as I and other users can run the app smoothly on Chrome.

<comment><USER7> I looked at one of the URLs [https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5088147346030592](https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5088147346030592). It says:

      ******NOTE: There is currently a bug affecting Mac OSX and iOS
      which causes SameSite=None cookies to be inadvertently treated
      as SameSite=Strict and therefore not sent with cross-site
      requests. (See https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198181)
      Until this is fixed, SameSite=None may not work properly on
      Safari.******

Are all your Chrome users not MacOS and not iOS?

<comment><USER7> Yep and the latest update seems to have fixed it. Sorry. didnt mean to cause extra work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, thanks for coming back, the simpler bugs are the ones you don't need to fix, aren't they? hehe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> All I am getting is :

        TypeError: pad.collabClient is null in http://184.108.40.206:9001/javascripts/lib/ep_etherpad-lite/static/js/pad.js?callback=require.define at line 3'

<comment><AUTHOR> It is very likely that you have rules blocking the JavaScript on the site.

<comment><USER8> The only thing I have is an ad blocker. I tried to disable it, but the error persists...

<comment><AUTHOR> Which browser are you using? I have tried on Firefox and Chrome.

Another cause could be a middle-man (like your ISP), as the site runs on http now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Friendly tip: you should sanitize your inputs / ouput.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, also I need a TLS certificate and fix some other details, this was a PoC that got more attention than expected.

<comment><USER9> Well, I think you did a great job. (:

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool idea! Really like UML and am sad that it doesn't get used as often as it should.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it actually supports lots of diagrams, like wireframes and graphs in dot notation, check [https://plantuml.com/](https://plantuml.com/) for more details and thank them, as their project is the great piece and I just gathered a couple of projects together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious as to how it gets usernames as I never input that anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, there are no names but auto generated ids.

The goal is to eventually let you choose a name and display who edited which pieces on the text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Opened from a mobile and it doesn't seem to work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you please add more details, like what are you experiencing?

It very likely depends on which browser you are using and it's resources (like the network speed), on wifi, it works on my phone on the Opera Mini. Firefox, and Chrome, while using Android.

<comment><USER12> I am pretty much experience nothing, that's the problem. ^^

Android mobile with Firefox. There is a small one centimeter tall picture at the bottom that's the diagram failing to render I suppose?

<comment><AUTHOR> I got some users on the US experiencing similar issues, I plan to push an update in the following days to improve some details and hopefully will fix most issues.

If you like, send me an email (find it on my github) so that I can make sure the issue gets fixed.

Thanks for the patience.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Looking for recommendations on Project Management system - <AUTHOR>

My company has makes a product (a software platform) to which we add custom and or off-the-shelf "connectors" that allow it to integrate with existing systems on the customer premises. Setting up the software also includes some mildly to moderately complex configuration tasks.
When we win a deal, we schedule development of these connectors, and our field team makes plans to go on site to install the software and connectors, perform the necessary customization, and perform acceptance testing.
We're stumbling badly here. We're finding bugs in new connectors, which isn't surprising. But worse,  we're fairly consistently finding disconnects between the connectors we build and what the customers really want. There's also a great deal of confusion about who's installing the software and when, and which connectors are needed by which date. Issues aren't always tracked to completion.
A big part of the problem is that we're doing everything by email. Someone will send an email with the latest schedule, but they won't include everyone who needs to know. Someone will send out issues lists, but each time they use different terms to describe the same problems and there's no place to track resolution. New requirements are send piecemeal by email. e.g. We'll get an email that says the customer wants us to add X. Shortly afterwards we'll get an email that says they want Y. Later they'll ask use the status of feature Z, which we never heard of.
We have a bug tracking system, but it's dreadful. We don't have a project management system where we can see deployment project schedules, action items, and issues.
I'm looking at replacing our bug tracking system and coming up with a better way to track our customer deployment projects. For the former, I want something that ties with out Source Code management system (currently svn ... I'm going to look at changing that later) and allows all checkins (bugs, connectors, and features) to be tied to tickets. I'd like it to be easy for our field guys to enter trouble tickets and connector requests and tie them to specific customer projects. I'm looking at Jira and FogBugz right now.
I also want a system that makes it easy for non-technical people on the project, who are not interested in spending much time to learn a new tool,  to post and update project schedules for customer deployments, and to share requirement documents, the status of action items, and the date(s) of forthcoming customer visits. Basecamp looks pretty awesome for this. I'd also like to make it possible for them to see the status of blocking bugs from our bug tracking system. This is where I'm having some trouble. What system have people used for handling these two problems and two types of users?
We're a fairly small company (~50-60 people), and I don't have resources for building a complex system. I just want something to get us out of the email h*ll and that can be extended as we (hopefully) grow.
TL;DR: How can I set up a system for a ~50 person company where non-technical account people are able to create and manage customer deployment project schedules, requirements, and actions; and technical people can manage their bug and feature tickets; and where both groups can share the high level information each other needs to be effective. <comment><USER2> Have you checked <https://trello.com/> if it can handle what you need?</comment>


Why do airplane windows have tiny holes? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2015/05/29/what_s_that_thing_why_are_there_holes_in_airplane_windows.html <comment><USER2> Am I blind or is the question not really answered?

So the hole is there so that air gets through and the pressure difference is at the outermost pane, OK. What's wrong with it being on the middle pane? What would happen if there was no hole?

<comment><USER3> The purpose of the smudge pane should be obvious. There are two panes and a hole left to explain.

First for the panes:

The article says the two panes are for safety reasons and I buy that. Equally important in my opinion is another reason. It's the same reason you probably have double panes in your home: thermal and noise insulation. Air has terrible thermal and noise conduction. So you need two panes and air between them.

Why the hole:

Remove moisture, I buy that. Allow pressure to equilibrate between the passenger cabin and the air gap between the panes. I buy that too but the article does not really explain why this is necessary.

If the two panes would be sealed absolutely tightly the pressure between them would stay at normal level in any case. As an aircraft climbs, the air pressure drops in both the cabin and the outside air — but it drops much more outside, as the aircraft's pressurization system keeps the cabin pressure at a comfortable and safe level.

Without the hole and with perfect seal if the pressurization fails for some reason you'd have maximum pressure gradient on _both_ panes. The redundancy of the second pane would be lost.

<comment><USER4> Just to put a number on it, the cabin pressure at high altitudes is given by Wikipedia as around 0.75 atm. (It varies by aircraft model.)

If the inner cavity between the two windows did not have a hole, the full sea level pressure would be pressing outward against the outer window. But with the hole, only about 75% of that pressure is present.

Additionally, if there were no hole, the inner cavity between the windows would be positively pressurized with respect to the cabin. This means the force on the inner window would be backwards from what it would have to bear if the outer window failed.

<comment><USER5> > But with the hole, only about 75% of that pressure is present.

wait, what? this isn't how pressure works... am i missing something here?

<comment><USER6> I think it's saying if the two panes were sealed without a hole at ambient pressure when the plane is manufactured then the outer pane at elevation would have ~1atm of pressure pushing out on it and the middle pane would have ~1atm pushing in on it. With the hole the outer pane only has cabin pressure pushing out on it, which is ~75% of 1atm.

<comment><USER4> Yes. This whole exchange could have benefited from a simple diagram (numbers approximately correct for 35K feet):

              |       |
      [cabin] | [gap] | [outside]
      0.75atm | X atm | 0.23 atm
              |       |

If "what to make X" is your design choice, you would not want to have it always pegged at 1 atm, as it would be if it was/could be completely sealed at sea level. It's simplest to have it equalize with the cabin pressure.

<comment><USER3> The ASCII diagram is very helpful. I wish I had thought of including something like this in my original comment. Thanks a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its also interesting that the corners of the windows are rounded - it's to avoid points of concentration for metal fatigue. We learned that lesson the hard way. When the De Haviland Comet was designed with square ones this was still poorly understood and there were several severe failures. The quest to find the cause of these failures at the time could be seen as the birth of modern air crash investigations.

Design evolution at work.

<comment><USER8> The windows weren't quite square panes, they were slightly rounded, but not enough.

Another issue the Comet had were the engines buried in the wings, which makes them less accessible for servicing and more dangerous to the aircraft in the event of failure/explosion.

<comment><USER9> Engines buried in the wings was first and foremost aerodynamic problem. Today we know that intakes must be kept from messing with the airflow above the wing where most of the lift is generated.

<comment><USER10> most lift is not generated above the wing but due to angle of attack which is the angle of the wing relative to the flight path.

<comment><USER11> It's way more complicated than that:

[http://flighttraining.aopa.org/magazine/1998/November/199811...](http://flighttraining.aopa.org/magazine/1998/November/199811_Features_Bernoulli_or_Newton.html)

<comment><USER12> That's a weird text. At the beginning the author lists reasons why it's clearly Newton's third law, and then just basically says: "But then an 'authority' on aerodynamics waved hands around telling me it's not. The end." Maybe I misread something, but nowhere in the examples that are apparently inconsistent with Bernoulli's law, and for which the professor claims they actually support it, does he _actually_ provide an explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's another cool random plane tidbit.

Commercial jetliner fuselage wall thicknesses are typically around 1-2mm. They don't call 'em flying tincans for nothin! Think about that next time you fly!

<comment><USER14> To put it another way: Fuselages are 20x thicker than the walls of soda cans.

<comment><USER15> If you shrank a 777 to the size of a soda can, its skin would be about four times thinner than the average can's.

<comment><USER16> > _If you shrank a 777 to the size of a soda can, its skin would be about four > times thinner than the average can 's._

My take.. The difference between inside and outside of soda can is approx 175 (kPa). The difference between inside and outside of aircraft cabin at the cruising altitude is 56.6 (kPa). So Soda can bears differential of approx 3 times than the pressure differential that aircraft cabin structure supports, with material 4 times thinner.

Aircraft is 12 times more safer than a soda can (!)

Interesting.. aircraft safety engineers at work.

Reference:

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

[http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-altitude-pressure- d_46...](http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-altitude-pressure-d_462.html)

<comment><USER17> Well, except that aircraft pressure is applied outside-in while soda can pressure is inside-out. Put some outside-in pressure on a can, and see how well it handles it.

Both are engineered in a way to make pressure not a problem. The can is subject to stress if you refill it, the airplane is a bit overengineered so it's not subject to stress. Increasing the width of any wouldn't lead to an increase on their safety.

<comment><USER18> Sorry I'm confused by your statement. The air pressure inside an aircraft during flight is much higher than the air pressure outside. So the pressure is also inside -> out, same as a soda can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Bears a strong resemblance to this io9 article from the 11th: [http://io9.com/why-is-there-a-hole-in-airplane- windows-17036...](http://io9.com/why-is-there-a-hole-in-airplane- windows-1703660371) .

</comment><comment> vhost- Holy crap. I actually put this in my notebook to look into. I was flying home from Atlanta a few weeks back and I was staring at the hole, wondering why it was there.

I didn't get around to researching it, but here it is. It fell into my lap.

</comment><comment><USER20> More info: [http://www.airliners.net/aviation- forums/tech_ops/read.main/...](http://www.airliners.net/aviation- forums/tech_ops/read.main/170548/#6)

</comment><comment><USER21> So, why not set the intermediate pressure (fixed) at the average of the external and internal (typical) pressures?

The load on each pane is lower so I would think they'd be less likely to fail.

A few hypothesis:

\- If the main failure mode is a defect that doesn't depend too much on pressure, then we have increased likelihood of failure;

\- The manufacuring cost of pressurizing the midpane is high;

\- Having a varying load direction on the external pane (inward on ground and outward in sky) is not good.

Any opinions?

<comment> alok-g In fact, one could package the three panes in a normal (or humidity-free) air without the hole. Assuming the cabin pressure is close to ground air pressure, the pressure difference will still be on the outermost pane as in the OP, and if the outermost pane fails, it will come automatically on the middle pane as in the OP. In other words, this reason cited by the OP does not explain at all why a hole is there. Am I missing something here? :-)

The other reason cited by OP, fog and frost, would still be valid if it is not desirable to package the panes in a humidity-free environment.

<comment><USER22> Without the hole, the space between the two panes will be pressurized. I'm not sure what the exact figures are (I'm not a phycisist) but I would guess that without the hole the outer pane will be subjected to some force F due to the presure, and the inner pane will be subjected to some force F/2, or even equal.

Without the hole the system would probably be better modeled as a single pane with an airgap between its inner and outer edges. It's likely that both panes would fail at the same time.

<comment><USER21> You don't need to be a physicist: if the panel is sealed there will be a constant pressure inside. The pressure on each face is then P_ext-P_int. It's just as likely that both panels will fail at the same time in that case as in the case with a hole; but the bonus in this case is that you can set up the internal pressure so both panels have lower nominal pressure (but the internal at least should be able to still handle the full pressure difference).

I know it's routine to manufacture even household glass panels with different gases sealed in their interior (I think they put Argon inside? some low conductivity gas), but afaik it's at atmospheric pressure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Many people assume that panes must be fixed solidly within a solid frame. ISTM the frame itself could be somewhat flexible, to accommodate Boyle's Law and the regular sea-level-to-8k-ft pressure cycle. There may well be other factors involved, especially the beautiful simplicity of drilling a hole. However, if for any particular use case the hole proves problematic, we might expect to see the backup pane in such a flexible arrangement.</comment>


Placebo Effects Revisited - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=4304

<comment><USER2> As far as I'm aware, a physiological response to a placebo (and corresponding nocebo) was a well-documented effect. Some examples:

* Heart-rate (not sure what else?) being equally affected by decaf and regular coffee

* Impaired cognitive effects from drinking far too soon after initial drinking (and as measured by BAC)

* Reduced stress hormones when arm is placed in an ice bucket after taking a placebo and being told it's morphine

* Physical nausea including vomiting after being told potential side effects of a trial "drug"

In terms of the body "healing" itself, I can see how the placebo effect could be attributed to other things.

<comment><AUTHOR> _a well-documented effect_

I just did some of the obvious Google Scholar searches on some of the issues you mention, but I'm not seeing clear statements of these findings being well documented in a publication that is not behind a paywall for me. Do you have citations at hand?

<comment><USER2> Try pubmed directly rather than Google Scholar. Most examples I'm quoting are articles I've read in New Scientist so if you have a subscription you can check their article history. I promise I'm not making them up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr: Some people named Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche did a meta analysis on clinical trials suggesting that the placebo effect is solely a reflection of bias or rigor in the given experiment, not of some physiological, "mind over matter" phenomenon.

<comment><AUTHOR> More particularly, from the submitted article, "There is no measurable physiological benefit from placebo interventions for any objective outcome. There is a measured benefit for some subjective outcomes (mostly pain, nausea, asthma, and phobias), but the wide variation in effect size suggests this is due to trial design (and therefore bias) rather than a real effect." In my words, it might be expected that one would see a placebo effect if the clinical records are based on patient self-reports of, e.g., pain or nasal congestion, but a placebo effect would be quite astounding if they were statistically significant over multiple double-blind trials in detection of a chemical in a blood test.

<comment><USER4> Do patterns of brain activation not count as an "objective" difference to them? The effects of many placebos are clearly visible on MRI.

<comment><AUTHOR> What are some examples in peer-reviewed literature for which you have citations at hand?

<comment><USER4> This is a recent one from _Science_ that got a good amount of press when it came out: <http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/326/5951/404>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for that reference. That led me by hyperlink to this

<http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/awq019v1>

and the link here draws a distinction that I think is important, the distinction between injury and pain. The paradox of pain, as this article says, is that patients with severe injury have little pain, while other patients with possibly no injury at all have severe pain. Granting that sham treatments (placebos) can reduce patient perception of pain, how do we establish that they produce more healing of injury, more consistently, than the passage of time as the body's evolutionarily selected healing mechanisms work?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should we go with mobile or web app first? - <AUTHOR> We are planning to launch e-commerce business starting from tier-2 tier-3 cities. Should we go with mobile or web app first? <comment><USER2> Web.

You need a backend even if you only need an app, and adding a web UI to an API-only backend isn't that difficult.

It will also allow you to reach every device (desktop, tablet, mobile, etc) regardless of operating system or platform, where as mobile needs a single codebase per platform (no, React Native is not a silver bullet and you'll still have platform-specific quirks).

Developing a website is also easier than a mobile app, so you'll spend less time, effort and money on it than on mobile apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Mate!!</comment></comment>


Proposed online sales tax draws criticism - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2010/02/24/MN5P1C6156.DTL <comment><USER2> I completely protest. This is very disturbing, and a stretch of the law too far. It's obvious that the USA Federal Government, and state and county governments, abuse taxpayer funds and have some ridiculous programs. However, instead of trimming back and fighting something that is tough to fight, once again the government finds it's all too easy to find yet another tax. The trouble is, in the bad economy, this was one escape valve that self-employed have been using successful to stay afloat. First we were already taxed on our income for being self-employed, and then taxed again on income, but now we're potentially going to have our employment cut back as etailer after etailer drops CPA affiliate marketing.

Time and again, when the government gets involved with the web, they prove their incompetence.

It's kind of like the time when the government tried to consider online sales tax. But the politicians didn't realize that this isn't like local business sales tax. I mean, the Internet has no geography. With local retail businesses you drive a car to, you can raise sales tax and people will pay it because it's a hassle to drive to a place where it might be a lower tax (in some cases). But with the Internet, the dopes in Washington don't realize that if we create an online sales tax, then people will just purchase goods overseas where there is not sales tax. And then businesses that may have had a nexus in the USA will simply move overseas as well. Brilliant move, Federal Government. So I'm glad at least we achieved a moratorium, but it's imperfect because the states disagreed and force me to collect local sales tax for serving customers in my state, and it's imperfect because the moratorium was only temporary and requires renewal.

<comment><USER3> Obviously the dopes thinking they'll just buy from 'overseas' haven't heard of 'import duty'.

Brilliant move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And will they require brick & mortar stores to check everyone's driver's license, so that they can collect sales taxes from out-of-staters?</comment>


Mixpanel (YC S09) Raises Seed Funding From Max Levchin And Michael Birch - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/mixpanel-funding-birch-levchin/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> Congratulations, Suhail.

<comment><USER3> Thanks :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations Tim and Suhail

</comment><comment><USER5> That's a market that hasn't seen any consolidation but quite a lot of competition. It will be interesting to see what they can do and how they are going to approach it..

</comment><comment><USER6> Another reason why you should use MixPanel, besides that they're gonna want to make you money.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's great news!</comment>