Free vector icons - <AUTHOR> http://ikons.piotrkwiatkowski.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> Wow! I was just looking for something like this. Thanks for sharing.

I especially like the permissive license -- commercial or non-commercial use with modifications allowed and no attribution requirements. Basically, you just can't sell the icons as your own work.

That means I can actually have nice icons in this project I'm doing for work. Good stuff.

<comment><USER3> Also see FlatIcon [1] which has 1000s of icons. I've been especially impressed by their download flow. Only negative is the pagination, which is a bit pants.

[1] [http://www.flaticon.com](http://www.flaticon.com)

<comment><USER4> what is the "we are working to get these available for you" link under most of the packs?

<comment><USER3> Hmm I hadn't noticed that, you still seem to be able to download the icons individually/bundled though by clicking on the download link on each icon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's worth noting that these come with a free commercial license, not a FOSS license.

That said, for what I'd use them for free commercial is far preferable to GPL.

<comment><USER6> As someone with open projects on GitHub that may or may not be a future source of income (lol), specific and succinct language on the licensing is probably your best way to ensure adoption of your product.

I just cannot be bothered to risk using an icon font in a GitHub repo only to have to bleach every trace of it, because I misunderstood the license or the author's intent.

To help remember just how the hell the most popular "free" font icons are licensed, I created a gist: [https://gist.github.com/4443939](https://gist.github.com/4443939). There is no way that overview looks simple to anyone.

 _This_ is what I as a developer think about as _the very first thing_ , when I see a collection of free-asterisk icons.

The cognitive load of parsing the legalese, especially from the standpoint of someone with zero jurisprudence is a huge toll and reason for my personal bounce rate on similar products.

Consider what the point of your free icons are (portfolio vs. seeing your icons everywhere), and how you wish to stand out (quality vs. licensing).

They say cache invalidation and naming things are the hardest thing in programming, but licensing is definitely up there; at the very least, it is something most people in the field do not—but should—understand.

+++

tl;dr: If you launch a set of free(*) icons, crystal-clear licensing should be at the top of your checklist.

<comment><USER7> I wonder why most free icon sets are licensed with attribution but most free software is not...

<comment><USER8> > _licensed with attribution but most free software is not_

Let's see:

3BSD: _Redistributions in [source /binary] form must [retain/reproduce] the above copyright notice [...]_

MIT: _The above copyright notice [...] shall be included in all copies [...]_

ASL: _You must retain [...] all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices_

MPL: _You may not remove or alter the substance of any license notices (including copyright notices, patent notices, disclaimers of warranty, or limitations of liability)_

The above sounds like attribution to me.

And here's for the elephant in the room:

GPLv3: Not required by default (merely requires _an appropriate copyright notice_ to make the license actually enforceable), but (7.) Additional Terms may supplement the basic terms (especially for but not limited to additional material such as art). GPL is deemed compatible with BSD so there's no problem in adding such a clause, even if it is free form. Even if not required, I guess it is customary to do so anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every single SVG icon in the .zip contains every icon in the whole set... Show 4 different icons on your site? Load the whole set 4 times...

<comment><USER10> Good catch! I wonder why?

Any idea how to get around this?

<comment><USER9> Take the icons from the zip and export your own SVGs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> inspired by Batch or what? [http://adamwhitcroft.com/batch/](http://adamwhitcroft.com/batch/)

<comment><USER12> The style is different. The glyphs are similar like chars in fonts. This shoudn't be a problem. Or is a circle with a plus sign in it copyright property of Batch ?

<comment><USER13> "inspired" not "copied".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The JPEG artifacts here really hurt. A png would also have been smaller probably.

</comment><comment><USER15> I am not sure about the icons in the last two rows. I would bet they are certainly trademarks of other companies.

<comment><USER16> Of course. Most icons packs include trademarks and servicemarks of companies without worrying about the legal implications. I'm a little paranoid of legal quagmires and that's why I didn't include any of them in my Clear icon pack [http://appzgear.com/products/clear- icons.htm](http://appzgear.com/products/clear-icons.htm) The understanding is that anybody who wants to use the trademarks can do so by downloading them directly from the companies' websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are the company specific icons on the bottom (Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google+, etc.) not copyrighted?

<comment><USER18> Trademark law is applicable here.

In general, you can use a trademark to refer to the trademark owner's good or service. That is, you can use the Android robot to refer to Android.

<comment><USER19> Google explicitly allows use of Android robot, but disallows use of ANDROID logo (one with letters):

[http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/b...](http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/brand.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is great, I hope he makes more. I'd especially like to see the +,-,x overlays as separate icons. Though that's easy enough to do on your own if you needed to. Still, I love this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Windows icon, Apple icon, no GNU or Linux icon.

Also, the license doesn't seem to be a free culture license. Lame.

<comment><USER22> Linux/GNU doesn't really have a foothold in the world of design, so that it not surprising.

<comment><USER23> A cute penguin silhouette?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> a webfont format would be perfect :)

<comment><USER25> [Icomoon]([http://icomoon.io/](http://icomoon.io/)) could easily convert svg into web font icons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> awesome!</comment>


Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/2013/ml.pdf <comment><USER2> By Hal Varian, who has interesting microeconomics books, works with Mathematica to provide visual examples of what he is teaching, etc.

Reading that at the moment, seems very interesting.

<comment><USER3> He's Chief Economist at Google, starting on line 49 he begins by outlining big data challenges unique to Google infrastrucutre

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author mentions Pig as the open-source version of Go, which have nothing to do with each other.

Aside from that, this paper is excellent.

<comment><USER5> The only mention of Pig I see seems to suggest it could be used as an alternative to Go for the purposes of the paper, not that Pig is a version of Go.

 _The list below has both the Google name and the name of related external tools... ...Go [Pig] Go is an open-source general-purpose computer language that makes it easier to do parallel data processing._</comment></comment>


Misunderstanding the Church-Turing Thesis - <AUTHOR> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/#Bloopers <comment> andrew-lucker The author doesn't seem to be very familiar with the Church side of the Church-Turing thesis. That is where the "limits of computation" notion comes from.

"All total functions are recursively enumerable"

<comment><USER2> For a long while I've had the opinion that the major conceit about Turing machines is, yes they can do things that humans suck at. However it's likely they are a pretty hackneyed way to accomplish what neuron based systems are really good at.</comment></comment>


HubSpot Is Good People. A Reflection on My Time at the Company - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@toddo/hubspot-is-good-people-f01b41e0f596#.bn68t1g9s <comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't look like Todd is out for a book deal...</comment>


Use Google Glass and Twilio to Send and Receive SMS Messages - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/blog/2013/05/using-google-glass-twilio-ruby-and-sinatra-to-send-and-receive-sms-messages.html

<comment><USER2> Hey, thanks for this, this is awesome. I have been playing a bit with just some basic ruby scripts to shoot cards down to the device and your Sinatra examples on how to handle subscriptions from Glass look really, really helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to help, Ben! If you want to do some more complex stuff I also published a basic Rails scaffold: <https://github.com/jonmarkgo/GlassRails>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> First of all, I think this technology and application is awesome. Glass really is pushing the boundaries of what can be done in the physical world with contact to software and the internet. I just worry that it's approaching communication platforms a bit too swiftly, especially in light of recent controversy regarding usage while driving ([http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/technology/personaltech/go...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/technology/personaltech/google- glass-picks-up-early-signal-keep-out.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0)).

Really hope that some sort of legal precedent is set so that us geeks and developers don't have to worry about distribution if we want to invest time/energy into building apps for Glass.

<comment><USER4> I'm super excited for glass. it's going to be a game changer in every sense of the way, especially for hands free computing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - it's really the first widely available wearable computing platform!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jon Gottfried does it AGAIN! You are a god among hackers, sir.</comment>


Blue Feed, Red Feed - some-guy http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/ <comment><AUTHOR> They try hard in the FAQ to explain what they built but I'm sure most people will not actually understand what this is. This is not a Facebook feed, it is not what left or right leaning users actually see. These are stories pulled with Facebook's API and then filtered by WSJ to only show sources which were previously ranked in a study as being the _most_ consistently right and left leaning sources that people liked. In other words, they are just showing the most slanted news sources they could find.

Talk about fanning the flames. When I first started reading I assumed what they had created was a bunch of dummy accounts that would like various posts based on political viewpoint and then showing actual feeds Facebook pushed to those accounts. That is not at all what is happening here.

<comment><USER2> That definitely would have been much more interesting.

Generate a few accounts. consistently cause the algorithm to think you are Red vs Blue (via Likes, Profile tweaks, Posts from specific sources like Mother Jones vs Instapundit/Drudge) and then see how they start to diverge.

Reminds me of the Like-Everything experiment Wired tried. a while back. Much more interesting to see how it slowly moved toward what the Facebook thought was the local maxima. ([http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw- on-fac...](http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook- for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me/))

Unfortunately, without knowledge of Facebook's algorithms, it might be a bit difficult. For example, I'm sure a decent chunk depends on your social network and what they are posting and that's much harder to simulate.

EDIT: I still find this illuminating. I am subscribed to two feeds, one Far Left and one Far Right, and it's always fascinating to look at them and how little they overlap. They pull from completely different sources and focus and nitpick and the craziest things about each other. Even when they cover the exact same story, they contextualize it completely differently with insinuated comments and bylines.

So, it's true it's not purely organic of real Facebook feeds. And as a result doesn't get to the heart of the criticism of Facebook generating echo chambers. However, it is a good exercise of showing how this might look and how jarring it can be to compare them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Everyone seems to be misinterpreting what the WSJ did (which is probably what the WSJ intended). There's absolutely nothing here to be worried or concerned about.

This is the key line:

> These aren't intended to resemble actual individual news feeds.

The WSJ specifically filtered each feed to only include conservative or liberal sources. Facebook could observe a full equal time rule in each user's feed, thereby constantly exposing users to a variety of viewpoints and this so-called study would have given the exact same results.

</comment><comment><USER4> So WSJ specifically crafted feeds with left and right leaning sources to illustrate what exactly? That political differences exist? I don't think Facebook has much influence over the company you keep in meat space. Your real-life circle has far greater influence on your political leanings.

<comment><USER5> I definitely agree that your real-life circle has a large influence, but I can't dismiss how much the articles that people see effect how they talk about things.

Especially with the older generation. Anecdotally, I have seen my mother have very extreme opinions on things simply bc "she saw an article on facebook" and didn't fact check anything in the article. It was impossible for me to convince her that the article was wrong.

<comment><USER6> I have engaged in discussions where I post, for instance, actual scientific studies that refute a shared article. (The specific debate was about nitrites in hot dogs)

You didn't have to read more than the synopsis to see that the article was thoroughly refuted.

The study had roughly zero effect on the beliefs of the person who shared the article. In effect, they already believed something (hot dogs are going to kill their baby), they found an article that agrees with them, and there will be no changing minds thereafter.

I may just engage with a subset of people who are prone to be like that, but a large portion of my facebook feed is similar. They just believe there's some puppeteer pulling the strings on everything. We can cure cancer but 'they' don't want to. We can create infinite free solar energy but 'they' don't want us to have it. "They" orchestrated the entrance into wars, "they're" hiding aliens, etc. Some of it is cliche conspiracy theory, but some of it leans towards "we're in the matrix" level of conspiracy.

I come to HN to keep grounded. I love it here because of rational discussion & debate among people who seek factual truths.

<comment><USER7> > The study had roughly zero effect on the beliefs of the person who shared > the article.

There's something called the Backfire Effect, wherein presenting facts and evidence actually reinforces people's positions, and can make them believe even more strongly in the thing you're proving is incorrect.

[1] [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect) [2] [https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire- effect/](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/) [3] [http://bigthink.com/think-tank/the-backfire-effect-why- facts...](http://bigthink.com/think-tank/the-backfire-effect-why-facts-dont- win-arguments)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A little OT, but as part of its public apology/explanation, the FB news team uploaded a PDF of RSS feeds that they say they pick from to find stories to include in the News Feed (to supplement "organic" trending stories)...they don't say how often they do this, but I imagine what RSS feeds they chose to pay attention to (around 800+) has to be a partial reflection of how they do day to day curation of the organically trending stories.

I parsed the PDF and did a scrape of the feeds in this repo: [https://github.com/dannguyen/facebook-trending-rss- fetcher](https://github.com/dannguyen/facebook-trending-rss-fetcher)

(but didn't do the work of extracting items from each individual XML)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, what an awesome experiment!

I know that FB shows me articles that their feed algorithm determines to be aligned with things I've clicked on before (so that I'll click again), however it's pretty shocking to how my clicks can effect what sort of articles I see.

It's almost as if every click digs me further and further into a specific bucket that shapes what I see and that I can't really climb out of.

<comment><USER9> > It's almost as if every click digs me further and further into a specific > bucket that shapes what I see and that I can't really climb out of.

As in life, it's important to _actively_ seek out information you disagree with. That's how you learn and broaden your horizons. It's the only way.

<comment><USER10> That keeps being repeated along with the "filter bubble" trope now and then. I'm not sure I buy it.

Most of the stuff out of my "filter bubble" is just incredibly low quality garbage, whether it agrees or disagrees with what I think.

I can't see how actively going out of my way to read articles about how Kim Kardashian is an interesting intellectual adds much to my horizons.

There's only so much information we can consume. There seems to be this myth that looking now and then at the opposite viewpoint from what you believe frees you from the constraints of bounded rationality. It doesn't, and I haven't seen very conclusive evidence that it helps in any meaningful way.

<comment> vertex-four > Most of the stuff out of my "filter bubble" is just incredibly low quality > garbage, whether it agrees or disagrees with what I think.

The thing is... it's entirely probable that most of the people who agree with you do so because of low quality garbage. So you're very much comparing yourself to a large group of other people and coming out that you read things above their level - not very hard. You need to find people on your level on "the other side" and figure out what they're paying attention to.

<comment><USER10> > The thing is... it's entirely probable that most of the people who agree > with you do so because of low quality garbage.

So?

> So you're very much comparing yourself to a large group of other people and > coming out that you read things above their level - not very hard.

Not sure I understand. I'm not comparing myself to anybody. I'm simply stating that I can't find a reason to go out of my way to read garbage.

Your last point is absolutely correct, and it probably summarizes why I believe the whole "filter bubble" thing is irrelevant or at least vastly overstated: the criteria that I use when deciding whether to read or not read something are entirely orthogonal to what "side" it comes from.

<comment> vertex-four The criteria that you use is that you come across the material in the first place. Most likely, that is subject to a filter bubble. I really doubt your bubble consists of all good information available.

Your fallacy is assuming that there is nothing outside your bubble that isn't garbage.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that's a very fair reading of what I'm saying.

First, whether something enters my filter bubble or not is not the same thing as the criteria I choose to look for new things, or to decide whether something stays within my filter bubble (say, a website I would add/remove from my RSS feeds). There's a passive/active dichotomy here.

Second, I don't think I've claimed there was nothing outside my bubble that wasn't garbage. Now, I do assume that 99% of the stuff out of it is, because that's the nature of the SNR on the internet. Note that all of that is of course entirely subjective, and I'm only talking about the value I derive from it personally.

Certainly, there are things that would be interesting that at a given time live outside of my filter bubble. But actively looking for them is not necessarily the best way to find them, as I might have to expend a lot of effort going through lots of junk before I get there, and other sources within my bubble might percolate that information faster, with less effort from me (say a link post on SlateStarCodex will give me a bunch of links to stuff I would have never found by myself).

Finally, I never said my bubble consists of all good information available, precisely because as I stated, all that information could not fit in anybody's bubble due to the limited nature of our attention or available time. So that's just a straw man.

The fact is that there's a game being played between what's inside my filter bubble and what's outside, and that game is not zero sum: most likely, actively trying to add more information from other sources will decrease the utility I get from it. It could be a temporary/local minimum (going through a bunch of garbage to find some hidden gem), but it could also be a more stable, lower utility state.

<comment> vertex-four Personally, my bubble tells me untruths about communities and belief systems I'm not part of - I suspect that yours likely does, too, because it seems to be human nature to distill one's "opponents'" beliefs into something easy to attack. Even when the beliefs are abhorrent, and I'm likely to continue seeing them as abhorrent, it's useful to know what people are actually saying, instead of what my bubble says they're saying.

And the only way I can find to do that consistently is to actively seek sources of information on specific subjects from the "opposing" point of view. The articles my filter bubble send me are generally going to be emotionally- fueled rubbish, because it takes time and effort and a very good understanding of the subject matter to take apart an argument otherwise, and for most people, their time on the Internet is time they don't want to be spending mental energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is fantastic. It's especially interesting to see how differently the exact same stories are reported on each side of the political spectrum.

Although (this coming from a huge Bernie supporter), it seems like both sides are in agreement that they should be attacking Bernie Sanders.

As an aside, the format of "And now you won't believe THIS happened" as a headline/tagline with almost no additional info to get more clicks is absolutely infuriating. I've always made it a point to not click on headlines/links written in that format.

<comment><USER6> I also clicked on Sanders, and the feel of the articles wasn't all that much different.

It seems the pro-Hillary left is fairly well aligned with the anti-Bernie right.

I have no idea if this updates to display different articles throughout the day, might have just been my small sample.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not really sure viewpoints like "Pope Francis Likens Jesus to ISIS, says Muslims Must Breed with Europeans" are what I need to be exposed to to have a broader view of the world but this is a cool toy.

<comment><USER13> I found both sides of the feed repulsive. They are all biased and misrepresenting facts, just towards different ends. It's sad that these stories appear in anyone's feed, let alone that they get so many clicks and shares.

<comment><USER12> That's true, although this one stuck out to me as particular egregious, if not outright offensive.

Also, there's a lot of internecine quarrelling in the blue feed about Clinton and Sanders which might be an interesting angle to examine further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I worry about the echo chamber effect. I have friends who are both conservative and liberal, but what I increasingly notice is that each group seems to mostly be friends with their own "type"; i.e. my conservative friends are for the most part only friends with other conservatives, and my liberal friends are for the most part friends with other liberals (there is always the possibility that my friends represent an anomalous sample, but I think that's unlikely. I generally avoid expressing my own political views to someone unless I am extremely close to them, so perhaps this is why I haven't alienated half of my friends yet...)

I think that only showing people news that agrees with their way of thinking leads to the dangerous situation where you end up with a positive feedback cycle of groups self-confirming their own beliefs, and the other side — "them" — is viewed as a deranged bunch that is incapable of irrational thought. While increasing groupthink may lead to higher advertising revenues, it also leads to interpersonal polarization and higher levels of animosity.

There was an interesting NY Times article that came out recently ([http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessio...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession- of-liberal-intolerance.html)) about how liberals and libertarians are far overrepresented in academia. While that in itself didn't surprise me, the comments on the article did. Here are a few of the NYT picks:

> "It's not that conservatives aren't bright; it's that, for the most part, > they are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers."

> "Conservatives are entitled to their views, but they also must understand > that young adults pay thousands of dollars to obtain a college education in > order to learn facts, not fiction."

> "Is intolerance necessarily a bad thing?"

> "No scientist holds groundless beliefs to prove some kind of subservience to > a deity."

What is interesting is that I frequently hear conservatives making the same comments — just swap out a few of the words:

> "It's not that _liberals_ aren't bright; it's that, for the most part, they > are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers."

> " _Liberals_ are entitled to their views, but they also must understand that > young adults pay thousands of dollars to obtain a college education in order > to learn facts, not fiction."

> "Is intolerance necessarily a bad thing?"

> "How could any intelligent person possibly believe the universe came from > nothing?"

What I generally find is that the further left or right someone leans, the more similar their personality becomes to their right/left-wing counterpart. In my experience, the "extreme" people are much more similar to each other than they are to the people in the middle of the political spectrum. I would argue that — born into a different family — many of the zealots would hold their opposing view just as strongly.

One oddity that I haven't yet found an explanation for is that conservatives seem to be less prevalent online than liberals. I'm not quite sure why this is the case.

<comment><USER15> "One oddity that I haven't yet found an explanation for is that conservatives seem to be less prevalent online than liberals. I'm not quite sure why this is the case."

Your filter bubble, probably. Telling whether that's true in an absolute sense would be difficult.

(Bear in mind that I believe it is not possible to "not have" a filter bubble, so no offense is intended in my first sentence; everyone has a bubble, the only question is the nature of it, not whether it exists, and it is not sensible to want to not be in one, only to ask how you might change it.)

<comment><USER6> I come from a very conservative circle, and I find that outside of my specific facebook feed (where that group is), the internet at large is a very left- leaning place.

HN is the most neutral place I can think of. I think it might just hide it well, as politics aren't a large topic here. I'm just glad to see that even political conversations here are largely rooted in facts.

<comment><USER16> HN is really cool in that many people have an idea of what public choice theory is.

There is an old maxim - "all organizations that are not designed expressly to be conservative get more and more left leaning over time" or the like.

<comment><USER17> Mr Bug is a philosopher for our times.

I see his ideas spreading everywhere, directly and in derivative form.

I can seriously see him being studied in academia in XXIIth Century. Him and Satoshi and a handful of other radicals in our midst who should not be named. The Net is like a flower unfolding, the people who intellectually influence the beginning are sure to have some of their number be rockstars much later on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This kinda thing has been visible in social media for quite some time now. For example in Adamic and Glance's "The political blogosphere and the 2004 US Election" the authors study a network where blogs are connected based on hyperlinks. I made a visualization of their dataset here:

[http://ryancompton.net/2014/10/22/stochastic-block-model- bas...](http://ryancompton.net/2014/10/22/stochastic-block-model-based-edge- bundles-in-graph-tool/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I often see both, may be because I click on both the "red" and "blue" topics in the "TRENDING" feed.

</comment><comment><USER20> Takeaway: the far right _and_ the far left are both nutso.

<comment><USER21> There is a saying that the political spectrum is actually a circle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Huh, all I'm seeing is yellow journalism.

</comment><comment><USER23> Note that Ghostery blocks the posts. You might need to whitelist the site. YMMV.

<comment><USER24> As does uBlock Origin.</comment></comment>


Martial Arts for Geeks? - weak-geek I've heard a lot of geeks say they do martial arts. I hate going to the gym, and am looking for an alternative to stay in shape. Martial arts sounds interesting, but... doesn't that hurt? I'm a little weak geek, and would like not to get things broken, or having to limp around. Is there anyone with the same "background" here that does martial arts? How much time a week should I expect to put?<p>Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Well, if your instructor is good at running the class you shouldn't be getting hurt any more than incredibly sore from using new muscles and some scrapes and bruises. Nothing broken or torn unless you aren't paying attention. Most of the time you cause your own injuries through stupidity.

That being said, martial arts is a chance to learn about fighting and the pain and suffering it causes in a controlled environment. That's something most men these days never learn, which you can see by how they threaten and insult people on sites like this.

For martial arts to study, you'll obviously be limited by your geographic region and what's available. Honestly, you should just try a whole bunch and see what you like and if you like the instructor or not. Good ones to try are boxing, judo, aikido, shorin-ji kempo, wing tsung, and most forms of karate.

I'd avoid MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) unless you want to hang out with roid juiced douche bags with no sense of honor.

In your case, I'd start with either aikido, judo, or shorin-ji kempo. All three of these teach non-violence, are very structured, effective, designed for small people, and generally run as non-profits or taught at universities. I recommend judo especially for women.

Finally, you need to avoid scams more than pick a good martial art. To be honest, at your level just about anything will help, but if you pick a bad instructor you'll be in more trouble than if you picked a incompatible martial art.

When you meet your instructor, if he's immediately trying to sign you up for long term contracts or sell you shit, then walk away. If he talks in religious terms, or talks too much, then walk away. Meditation is great, preaching is not. If he makes claims that are "magical" then walk away. Floating, levitating, mind control, are all bullshit. Ki, chi, "energy" are fairly common and alright. If it feels like a religion and the students don't think for themselves, it's a cult walk away. If you get "love bombed" when you first walk in, it's a cult, walk away. If there are tons of belts walk away. If you see the instructor get his ass kicked by a student then don't bother.

Picking a good teacher is far more important than picking a "good martial art". If it feels like a scam, then just trust your gut and avoid it.

<comment><USER2> I train in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and many of my training partners (including my instructor) compete in MMA. I help them train in MMA by sparring with them. (I try to avoid saying I "train MMA" because I have no intention of competing; I compete in BJJ.)

In my experience, MMA people are _not_ "roid juiched douche bags with no sense of honor." The opposite is my experience; the comradery, mutual respect and emphasis on hard work is what I enjoy most.

Don't generalize based on your limited experience.

<comment><USER3> Capoeira ? Or something else ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are many different styles of martial arts, with a wide variance in philosophy. Some martial arts discourage hurting the body, in stark contrast to those that seem to promote it. Personally, the philosophy of Chayon-Ryu matches me really well. If you do a bit of research and try out some styles that look promising to you, you may find one that you like. I recommend checking out aikido, which encourages safety and does not require much physical strength.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the best martial art for long term health and well being is Tai-Chi

It's simple to learn, for young people it will not even seem like a workout, but it's likely the most powerful of all the arts and it's integrated with a chinese system of medicine if you want to explore nutrition as well.

You can also study push hands, swords, and even beautiful fans[1], all very gentle and peaceful.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5RzZC0aB6I>

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know whether it helps, but a few friends of mine do kickboxing. They don't seem to think it hurts - and even when it does, it doesn't hurt for long.

Also, once you start working out, your tolerance for pain is much higher.</comment>


How to Monetize Apple Watch Apps? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mmudassir/how-to-monetize-the-apple-watch-apps-6486f7ed0ace There are some ways to monetize the Apple Watch App. I think of two ideas, what your thought on it and if you have any other ideas please feel free to chime in! <comment><AUTHOR> I discuss the two of my ideas to earn money on Apple Watch apps, using some simple technique.</comment>


Functional and Object Oriented Programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.jmolly.com/2012/06/24/functional-and-object-oriented-programming.html

<comment><USER2> Well, everything that jmolly says is true, but decoupling data and functional behavior is only part of it. Indeed, OOP was designed specifically to couple data and behavior together, so some people (at least) think that this is a good thing.

In my mind, the difficulty lies not with OOP per se, but in the thought- patterns and practices that have grown up around modern OOP programming, and the mental confusion that we have between the construction of models, the design of algorithms, and the creation of machines to help solve a particular problem. To a large extent, we lack the intellectual tools required to understand the problem; or, at least, the use and understanding of those tools is not widespread.

Personally, I suspect that there is a significant difference between product- centric thinking (design the product, ignore all else), and product-line- centric (or capability-centric) thinking (design the machinery that will make it trivially easy to design the product). This, for me, is a more important distinction than OOP vs FP, or any other dichotomy that you might care to mention.

I am not suggesting that I am right here, mind you: this is just the way that I feel; my gut instinct ... so perhaps some Socratic questioning might be in order here:

Let me start.

What problem, as software developers, are we actually trying to solve?

<comment><AUTHOR> In most business cases, I would think the problem for us is to minimize the work required to solve the ongoing business needs.

The other cases, I suppose, are art and play -- but there probably isn't much point in trying to optimize these activities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _OO idioms and practices encourage coupling. For example, in Java, if you want behavior you are forced to create a class. In OO instruction classes are often introduced as containers of state. So it's no surprise that in OO systems you typically find data and behavior mashed together._

Replace class with arguments and you have the same "coupling"

 _As soon as I get the creative idea of asking if my Cat is of drinking age, I can't reuse this behavior_

Yes you can, you just delegate the behavior to an object whose job it is to determine things about ages. It isn't much different than having a suite of related functions designed to operate on things with ages.

We'll designed software doesn't look much different if you do it in a functional or OO language. The main difference you do see is that much of the code for dealing with state disappears in an OO language as the language itself implements it. In a functional language you have to build your own OO like system to make the stateful parts easy.

</comment><comment><USER4> The original vision behind OOP wasn't at odds with functional programming. In fact, it looks more like modern FP than modern OOP, with its FactoryFactories and POJOs and cargo cult bullshit that are more an artifact of a failed attempt to commoditize programming talent (one which hijacked OOP) than anything else.

Pure functional programming is great. Alan Kay would agree. However, the world is stateful. The original inspiration for OOP was the cell, which encapsulates complex physical machinery (state and behavior) behind a simpler chemical or electrical interface. The idea wasn't that complexity is a good thing (it's not) but that, when it becomes inevitable, it needs to be sequestered so that it's only visible to the few who need to fuss with the object's internals, not to the many who need to interact with it at an API level only.

An "object" is a complex entity whose interface is designed for simplicity. An example of this would be a SQL database. Query optimization is complex, but the interface is much simpler. You don't micromanage which indexes it uses and when; you just specify the query you want to run and trust the software to figure it out. In spite of its age, SQL is the most successful DSL ever invented, and for a number of reasons, but it's relative simplicity and flexibility are high among them. An added benefit of the simpler interface is that implementations can be swapped out without rewriting the entire interface.

Where OOP broke horribly was when someone got the (wrong) idea that every program needed to be "object-oriented", and OOP went from a set of tools solving specific problems (e.g. GUIs) very well to a general-purpose programming paradigm, which became worse because it was so poorly understood. It evolved from a stance of "use objects when complexity requires it" to "use objects as the fundamental unit of programming", which is bad because complexity and uncertainty aren't inherently good, but undesirable all else being equal.

Scheme is a better first substrate for programming than Java, because the fundamental building block of programming should be the referentially transparent function. Only when this is reasonably well understood should people be exposed to mutable state.

<comment><USER5> _Pure functional programming is great. Alan Kay would agree._

Alan Kay does agree: "the greatest single programming language ever designed" - Alan Kay, on Lisp (<http://paulgraham.com/quotes.html>).

<comment><USER6> Except Lisp isn't a pure functional programming language. It has side-effects, no?

<comment><USER5> Some Lisps are more functional than others. You're right though, a purely functional language has no side effects, but this is sometimes used loosely. To draw on another quote, this time from Rich Hickey, "A purely functional programming language is only good for heating your computer" :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is learning Haskell even practical yet? I have a great interest in becoming a more productive programmer, but not as much in learning a language just for the fun of it. What kind of stuff is Haskell best suited for building?

<comment><USER5> Clojure is functional and practical -- you get access to all of Java's libraries without the performance hits from languages not originally designed for the JVM, like Jython and JRuby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> DrinkingAge.isAbove(person.getAge())

Sounds like the type of code Yoda would write if he codes.

</comment><comment><USER9> i've being dalliancing in haughtiness for years.</comment>


The cult of genius? - <AUTHOR> http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-cult-of-genius.html <comment><USER3> This issue seems loaded because cognition is the way you win big now. Although NFL stars win big with pay, it's the Gates and the Zuckerburgs who loom high in our minds.

I've learned to ignore the issue (aside from its entertainment value) because there's still too much for me to optimize within my phenotypic range and local environment to make me better off – or at least, so I think. Either way there's much more to keep me busy than navel-gazing at cognitive-height so much.

On a related note: James Flynn of the Flynn Effect has noted many paradoxes within his infamous and eponymous result. I.Q. might not be improving so much. He anticipates explanations which synthesize nature and nurture but also look at the mind in terms of more basic cognitive operations and strategies. If I.Q. scores increasing reflect on the acquisition of useful, task-specific strategies, one might still be emulate the downward effect of a couple of I.Q. points which is at least something to be optimistic about. Newton only discovered Freshman Calculus. [http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/12/16/the- flynn-effect-tro...](http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/12/16/the-flynn-effect- troubles-with-intelligence-2/)

EDIT:

Or perhaps it's the reduction of ambiguity/improvement-of-clarity that intelligence can bring that makes it so appealing in modern life? In which case there's still Buddhism to help with that.

<comment><USER4> >Although NFL stars win big with pay, it's the Gates and the Zuckerburgs who loom high in our minds.

That's interesting. I have the opposite view: people in tech tend to earn more, but it's the LeBron James's and Taylor Swifts of the world that loom in our minds.

<comment><USER5> People like LeBron James and Taylor Swift make most of their money from endorsements, and I'd argue that endorsement income doesn't really scale very well. There's a limit to what your brand is worth if you're a celebrity - <USER2> can make hundreds of millions of dollars by diversifying across a huge range of products but that's pretty much it. You'll never earn more than a small percentage of the marketing budget of the biggest company in any one market multiplied by the number of markets your celebrity brand is applicable to. Whereas a tech founder has a practically unlimited upper bounds to their net value; if you start a company that becomes the defacto monopoly in a space (operating systems and office software, or social media for example) your fortune tops out at some percentage of that entire market, multiplied by the number of markets you can leverage your product in to. That's a far bigger number.

<comment><USER6> The reality is that the chance that an individual can convert being significantly smarter than the rest of their generation into becoming the largest shareholder in a de facto monopoly in a particular tech space is negligible. Whereas the chance of converting being significantly better at basketball than the rest of their generation into becoming a multimillionaire basketball star (with or without well-planned endorsements) is extremely high, with only injuries and attitude problems to hold them back.

If you're a young LeBron James (or Usain Bolt or Lionel Messi) your chances of becoming a multimillionaire owe very little to where you start and who you meet. Talent in sport is very efficiently identified, promoted and developed. You can't expect the same probability of outstanding success from a young person with the same personal characteristics as Mark Zuckerberg.

Startup founders are rolling the dice with Taylor Swift and the musicians. Massive talent coupled with attitude helps a fair bit, and above average talent is a basic requirement. But the sharpest minds have no reason to expect they'll make it to the top, and not everyone that makes it to the top owes it to "genius"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think that intellectual pissing contests are disgusting. In upper middle- class institutions such as Berkley people seem to revel in it. Everybody embraces the imaginary hierarchy so completely that watching them do it makes me gag. I think that this phenomenon has been intensified by the relative disappearance of the middle class. People no longer aspire to academic excellence because of their passion or enjoyment for the subject they study. Instead they believe that they need to be among the elite in order to have a happy and satisfying life.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have become more and more discouraged by the blog kindly submitted here. The blog post author started out as a physicist, somehow didn't make a big mark in physics, and since then has been going into academic administration. His blog collects his unpublishable (in the scientific sense of "publishable," after peer review) thoughts about a variety of controversial issues on which he expresses opinions without as much knowledge base or professional training and experience as the older domain experts who actually research those issues. I just haven't found this blog to be a reliable source for Hacker News submissions that lead to informed, fruitful discussion. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

<comment><USER9> This has to be the nicest, most reasonable-sounding ad hominem argument I've ever seen.

But it's still an ad hominem argument. Is there any way you actually disagree with the post? What would you say to Dr. Hsu if he were in the room?

Also, what is your evidence that he's not in touch with experts in psychometrics and human genomics? I don't know him, but I have very much the contrary impression.

<comment><USER8> _Also, what is your evidence that he 's not in touch with experts in psychometrics and human genomics? I don't know him, but I have very much the contrary impression._

I don't know him in person but I have emailed him. He is in touch with a lot of eminent experts (I know some of the same eminent experts and see some of the regularly in person), but he hasn't imbued their worldview about human genetics, forged after years of pursuing other worldviews that don't hold up to experimental test. But your comment is fair, so I'll recommend here for you and for onlookers some writings by people who are experts in psychometrics and human behavior genetics.

The review article

Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20\(2009\).pdf)

includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

The review article

Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182

[http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/...](http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Johnson%20Current%20Directions%20Psych%20Science%202010%20\(G%20and%20E%20in%20IQ\).pdf)

looks at some famous genetic experiments to show how little is explained by gene frequencies even in thoroughly studied populations defined by artificial selection.

"Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA [general cognitive ability] and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic. We will understand them best through investigation of their manifestation in biological and social developmental processes."

(The review by Johnson, by the way, is rather like Tao's understanding of how mathematical talent develops in individuals, which prompted the blog post kindly submitted here.)

A comprehensive review article for social scientists on genetic research on IQ emphasizes what is still unknown.

Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological science, 23(11), 1314-1323. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611435528 [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498585/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498585/)

[http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9938142/Most_Repo...](http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9938142/Most_Reported_Genetic.pdf?sequence=1)

"At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be tempered—as it has been in the medical sciences—by an appreciation that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects. Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Doing otherwise may hamper scientific progress by proliferating potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not appreciate that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public risks creating an incorrect perception about the state of knowledge in the field, especially the existence of genes described as being 'for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."

The newer publications on the topic are not changing the picture significantly. If one desires to develop a child's mathematical ability, for example (a problem I have pondered four times over as a parent), then the thing to do, after gaining whatever favorable shuffle of genes one can through thoughtful choice of a marriage partner, is to ensure that the child receives a sound primary education in mathematics. That is rarely done in the United States,[1] but it's something parents can do if they know mathematics well through some other channel, for example having lived in another country.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary- Mathematic...](http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics- Understanding/dp/0415873843)

[http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/amed1.pdf](http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/amed1.pdf)

[http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev- howe.pdf](http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf)

[http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask- gian.pdf](http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf)

[http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN- NEW.pdf](http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf)

[http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is- mediocre/](http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/)

<comment><USER10> > The review article...includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable > traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has > little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the > order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same > genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches > (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

If you think this is contrary to Hsu's position, you don't understand his position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone done any studies to correlate intelligence with net worth? Since the +3 or +4 SD people usually work to satisfy their own curiosity and thirst for knowledge, I would assume that it doesn't pay really well above a level...

I find it rather discouraging that mediocracy really punishes people for being extremely smart. Evolutionary punishment is decreasing their fitness (money, social stature, e.t.c.) and thus decreasing their procreation chances. Smart women are affected even more. Not to mention the intentional punishment/oppression by different intelligence class supervisors.

PS: one of my favourite relevant reads: [http://prometheussociety.org/cms/index.php/articles/the- outs...](http://prometheussociety.org/cms/index.php/articles/the-outsiders)

<comment><USER12> > He wore a vest summer and winter, and never learned to bathe regularly.

I am curious as to why so many geeky/nerdy type guys express disinclination to daily bathing (myself included).

While regular bathing is beneficial to maintaining hygiene and health, too frequent bathing (especially when using cleansing products) can disrupt the skins natural sebum, pH & moisture control mechanism, dislodge the natural bacterial flora which may predispose the person to harmful infections. Many chemical products commonly used during bathing (soaps, shampoos, gels, disinfectants) are known to mess with the human immune & endocrine systems, a few may even be carcinogenic. Afflictions like eczema, asthma etc. are allegedly attributable to a heightened state of "hygiene" among modern humans - the immune system which keeps constant vigil against infections, is rendered "jobless" because the chemical disinfectants have done it's job, eventually attacks the body itself.

Spurred by the aggressive marketing from the personal cleansing products manufacturers, daily bathing has become a cultural phenomena in our society. Prime motivation for daily bathing seems to be grooming these days.

Anecdote does not equal evidence, but I've encountered many geeks who are inclined to hold off having a bath until it becomes necessary. I wonder why that is?

An interesting read: [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/fashion/31Unwashed.html?_r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/fashion/31Unwashed.html?_r=1)

<comment><USER13> I didn't shower every day. Then I got overweight. Now I do.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: A new way of pricing financial software - <AUTHOR>

Imagine a startup with trying to break into the financial software karket (enterprise). They target companies that are very young and can't afford the likes of Accenture or IBM.
The startup could sell the software to the company on the basis that they don't have to pay for it until the company can afford it. Obviously the term "afford it" will be defined by a lawyer so they can't make it look as if they can't afford it when they can.
Or, they could have it cost free for the first 12 months which will give them time to focus on becoming profitable. Remember, the startup is trageting startup comapanies in the financial sector.
Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> <http://www.clarityaccounting.com>

<http://www.blinksale.com>

<http://www.freshbooks.com>

Now, more importantly:

 _The startup could sell the software to the company on the basis that they don't have to pay for it until the company can afford it._

Dude WTF? Not trying to be harsh, but this is known as guaranteeing the failure of your business. Most businesses fail. That means most businesses will never be able to "afford it". Ergo, you will never realize a vast majority of your potential revenue.

Further, your suppliers won't be as charitable as you are with your clients. You'll be paying bills to support clients that aren't giving you any money. You won't have income. You'll have increasing expenses. You'll have a disincentive to actually trying to growing your business. Disaster all around.

The goal of business is to make more money than you expend. If you want to be nice, found a charity - even then you'll need to brake even one way or another.

An overall better option would be to do as my linked examples have, and provide less of a product for less of a price. Most startups simply have no need for Accenture style services hence, they can purchase something that better fits their needs.

Do yourself a favour though and drop this "pay me when you can" idea forever. You'll have more than enough risk in managing your own profit levels, don't take responsibility for everyone else's too.

I know I'm being very direct here, but this aversion to making money is something a lot of people have, and it kills businesses every day. It's important for not just you but all of us to avoid this position whenever possible.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's seems contradictory to say that you are targeting the "enterprise" and yet they "can't afford it". Either you're going for thrifty startups, who are not enterprises, or enterprises for whom a few thousand dollars a year is chump change.

I have seen at least one online accounting app that is "free for startups" - that is, you don't have to pay until you have a minimum amount of revenue. I think it was ClearBooks.

</comment><comment><USER4> you could price based on usage somehow, assuming the usage of financial software will increase when the size of the company increases. more details on a concept would probably help to produce a more detailed answer.

</comment><comment><USER5> You're entering an up-market, please don't cheapen it with "freemium".

</comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't freemium solve this problem?</comment>


Ask HN: What technology is the most likely to replace the smartphone? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Given enough time; I'd say something that's similar to Google's Glass or a physical sensor stuck into one's brain (Neuralink).

What's holding back these advancements is the way companies monetise these ideas--the fact that people feel creeped out by how they can be abused. This also gives these companies enough time to iterate, though.

But my guess is as good as any.</comment>


Show HN: Redux JSON Router – Declarative, Redux-First Routing for the Browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mksarge/redux-json-router <comment><AUTHOR> I started this project to learn about Redux middleware and client-side routing in React/Redux. It's my first open-source library, so tips/suggestions are greatly appreciated!</comment>


How To Learn About Everything - <AUTHOR> http://metamodern.com/2009/05/27/how-to-learn-about-everything/

<comment><USER2>
        You learned your native language by immersion, not by swallowing and regurgitating spoonfuls of grammar and vocabulary.

I remember a study about language learning that concluded that it's a matter of age and that the older you get the more efficient you learn by using a systematic top-down approach. On the other hand, immersion over a longer period of time doesn't guarantee you make any advancement.

</comment><comment><USER3> "This knowledge isn't superficial in a survey-course sense: It is about both deep structure and practical applications. Knowing about, in this sense, is crucial to understanding a new problem and what must be learned in more depth in order to solve it."

I am usually of the school that finds more value in deeply understanding a single thing than having good knowledge of a lot of things.

When it comes to start-ups and hackers, do you think it's more important to have a deep knowledge of a few topics or a fair understanding of a lot of topics? I think it's more beneficial to have the kind of knowledge that the article described, than a true bare bones understanding of programming.

You don't need to know compiler languages to code the next big thing. It just gives people an indication to how smart the founders are, which means a lot.

<comment><USER4> "do you think it's more important to have a deep knowledge of a few topics or a fair understanding of a lot of topics"

I have been thinking a lot about this. My conclusion is that the optimal thing is somehow both. When I say both, it sounds bullshit, but it is not. I think the key is to be ABLE to study specific topics deeply, know what is deep understanding, know what really tight focus is, learn and practice one or two specific topics very deeply AND with this kind of developed mind, go into lots and lots of quite diverse topics following your interests and needs. And be brave to sometimes dig a bit deep into something which no one expected you to dig into.

So optimally your knowledge should be 'incalculable' by other people. A kind of interesting, a little bit strange knowledge-portfolio which is not very common.

TL;DR: Go very deep into something (extremely deep if possible), learn a little a bit of everything (extremely only the basics about extremely lots of things) to avoid knowledge holes, and go a little bit deep into unexpected things to make your knowledge-base incalculabe and interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For me, it's about constantly barraging my brain with new info by reading, writing, listening and speaking. No matter if it's a new language or any new subject. Read about it, write about it, listen to people talk about it and talk about it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure this works for things that require a lot of precision and focus, like understanding proofs of theorems. That's probably part of the "about" caveat.</comment>


Rendering on the Web - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/rendering-on-the-web <comment><USER2> > It's perfectly okay to mostly ship HTML with minimal JS

Some might even say it is _better_ to mostly ship HTML with minimal JS.

 _ducks_

<comment><USER3> I'd say for most web content, minimal JS gives the best experience. With all the integration and UI improvements browsers have gone through the past ten years, all most content needs is some CSS to add a theme and some minor readability tweaks, except if there's some interactive animation that add value to the content on the web page. You don't even need JS for videos or audio anymore, it's all there in the browser.

It's sad how most websites these days are fully-featured web applications. Take this blog page by Google. A simple web page with some pictures loading over 300kB of Javascript libraries and tooling. And this isn't even an exception. It's sad, really, and a waste of readers' bandwidth.

<comment><USER4> css animations on :hover and :active psuedoclasses can go a long way for an interactive experience without running programs too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is insightful and deep, but it begs the question:

Does my text only newspaper article really need all this crap? Like, it's text, with maybe one image or two. Just give me the damn text and cut out the cruft.

Why are browsers now competing with reader modes? We're sending a bunch of data just to have the browser remove it. Just don't send it to begin with!

<comment><USER6> That's what the article is pushing for:

"Consider whether static rendering or server rendering can get you 90% of the way there. It's perfectly okay to mostly ship HTML with minimal JS to get an experience interactive."

In other words, just serve some HTML so your users can read your content.

On the other hand, your newspaper writers still need to get paid and unless you're a subscriber, that means ads and cruft on your page for ads.

<comment><USER7> And of course the article ignores its own device and is a 1.4MB page containing 10x more JS than HTML.

<comment><USER8> We are hosted in infrastructure that doesn't let us change this (although we are currently migrating a lot of the content off on to another site that we do control). Like many developers, we can only do what we can with the tools we have, but we are changing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This goes into great depth explaining what has become a tired argument. No, you don't need React for everything. Yes, there are lots of benefits to rendering static HTML if your interface doesn't have much dynamic state. And yes, React can still be a useful tool in the right context. Those who say you should use it for everything are naive. Hopefully your team lead who's making these decisions isn't naive. It's possible they are.

I really don't think that anyone who's been in web dev for more than a couple years still disagrees with the above points.

<comment><USER10> You're arguing with an imaginary straw man. Is someone credible in the React community saying everything should be be done in React?

<comment><USER11> There aren't many people in the React community who are explicitly arguing that everything should be React. But there seem to be very few things that the React community believes are a poor fit for React.

Take addons.mozilla.org. It's a simple, tiny website with a list of browser addons and a button to download each one. Perfect fit for server-rendered HTML, right? Nah, front-end developers rewrote it in React. [1]

Or blogs. Blogs are just a collection of text pages with occasional images and links. Surely you should use static HTML for those, right? Well, okay, but only for the initial page load; after that, make sure you let React take over so it can "improve" your page navigation. [2]

[1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/10/25/test-new-look- add...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/10/25/test-new-look-addons- mozilla-org/)

[2] [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2017-07-19-creating-a-blog- wit...](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2017-07-19-creating-a-blog-with-gatsby/)

<comment><USER12> You put "improve" in quotes as if instant page navigation without flickering is somehow worse than the alternative. Browse around this [1] website and tell me it is not a better experience than your bog-standard html + vanilla js concoction. Also every time this is brought up the developer/content editor experience is entirely neglected, when in reality it is a big consideration when creating something other than your own dev-blog that you update once a year.

[1] [https://reactjs.org](https://reactjs.org)

<comment><USER13> > _You put "improve" in quotes as if instant page navigation without > flickering is somehow worse than the alternative._

Yes, instant page navigation without flickering is better than the alternative - instant being what you get from reloading a static HTML page, alternative being React.

Seriously, fetching, parsing and displaying a tiny bit of HTML is _fast_. As fast or faster than the React virtual DOM shenanigans, once you account for the computational load the framework adds on top of your simple page.

<comment><USER12> Real life is not code golf. We do not build things entirely for ourselves. We build things for our employers, for our co-workers, for our family members and for our friends. We build to create value for someone and value is not a one- to-one correlation with the weight of a site in KB.

If I can make it easier for me and anyone working with my site in the future by sacrificing 50-150 KB then I will take that deal any day of the week. That is what abstractions are for. That is why we do not work in byte-code. We pay for convenience in clock-cycles and disk space.

<comment><USER13> Arguably, using React where a static HTML with maybe a little bit of vanilla JS would do, _is code golf_.

HTML and CSS are not bytecode. They're high-level abstractions, hiding a very complex renderer underneath. Sometimes you need to build another tower of abstractions when this doesn't suffice - like when you're trying to build an application with complex GUI in the browser and you need an adapter between DOM and a more suitable GUI pattern. But displaying text and images communicating a message is _not_ one of those cases.

<comment><USER12> We do not rebuild the tower of abstractions for every site that uses them. I do not personally implement React from scratch when I use it for any of my sites. I get all of the benefits for none of the effort. You do not seem to acknowledge factors other than straight up performance, as is evident by what you are picking and choosing from my comments, so obviously it is not attractive to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Web developers amaze me.

ALL (all) of the problems they face are either self-inflicted or due to other web developers, such as those who design web advertisements or bloated JavaScript libraries. The problems with sending multiple simultaneous streams to a browser are due to web developers _deciding_ to design a web page with hundreds of individual files to be downloaded. Rendering times are long because of the complexity that today's sites are built to attain.

I can view simple sites EXTREMELY quickly today -- that is to say, sites that designers have not "improved" to the point that the site is no longer worth visiting. A simple page shows me what I want to see, and doesn't take a designer 400 hours to come up with.

All of today's problems on the web are due to web developers.

I'll fight and die on this hill, and no amount of downvotes will change my mind about this in the slightest.

<comment><USER15> I agree with you. But the problem is web designer clients _demand_ all the darn garbage on their site.

I have the scars to prove it... currently dying on said hill.

<comment><USER14> Hang in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What I don't like on current state of server side rendering with hydration is that server still sends initial state data, even thought, it is already contained within initial html. This means, that site is rendered twice on first load. First time from html and second time after initial state (some json) arrives as state atom is usually null at this time. Why can be initial state just reconstructed from html (data-attributes ...).

<comment><USER17> There are many nuances though. Some data/state may not actually be rendered but used for later. It's also not really accurate to say it's rendered twice, as it's rather hydrated (before hydration this used to be a big problem; sites actually rerendering/flashing when the js loaded/initiated).

<comment><USER16> >It's also not really accurate to say it's rendered twice

Not sure if we're on same boat here :). By rendered twice I mean:

Let's imagine we use React and some store management like redux.

1\. Visit some SSR rendered site. Browser receives html (which represents some initial state of an app - rendered by the server)

2\. Browser fetches some json representing initial state (hydration). It's the same state that server used for rendering html.

3\. State atom was null in step 1. and changed to some initial state in step 2, which basically means full rerender (second) of an app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It talks about Google Search and the Google tools pointed to are good at telling you how Google search will react. But, things like the Internet Archive and other search engines are not going to be as good with the Full CSR apps.

For those here who use other systems like DuckDuckGo that makes a difference. I really started to notice this when I visited some sites (not apps) via the Internet Archive to get old versions and found things broken.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Server rendering has had a number of developments over the last few years.

> Streaming server rendering allows you to send HTML in chunks that the > browser can progressively render as it's received.

Hasn't PHP done this by default since, like, forever?

<comment><USER19> Though no-one (for a rounded-down definition of no-one) uses PHP without front-controllers and templating systems these days, giving up that feature.

<comment><USER20> > and templating systems

...but last time i checked PHP itself was a templating system. What changed?

<comment><USER21> PHP is not a templating system, it's a web-centric programming language. It doesn't support any of the features one would want in a modern templating system, such as auto-escaping or tainting of user supplied data, knowledge of the current rendering context, native support for HTML or XML entities, macros, template caching, etc.

All of these features and more have to be implemented as a third party framework for PHP to be effective as a templating system, which is why such systems exist.

Merely echoing HTML strings and wrapping variables in htmlspecialchars() does not a "templating system" make. If it did, then every programming language would also be a templating system as long as it could output a string of characters to the necessary port.

<comment><USER20> I was thinking about being able to write regular HTML with code <?php ... ?> and variable expansions like <?=$foo?> with uses like having a for loop over stuff (like, e.g., table records) and inside the body including another PHP file that is the HTML to write with <??> tags that reference to the object looped over.

It has been a very very long time since i used PHP for anything serious (or did any web programming at all) but to me that sounds like templates. Perhaps you are referring to something else with the word "template"?

<comment><USER19> Modern PHP isn't written that way, is the point. For better or worse.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but my original question was that it can be written that way and since it can written that way, why do you need to implement a template system when the language you are implementing that template system can also function as a template system itself? Isn't it a waste of time and resources?

<comment><USER21> >why do you need to implement a template system when the language you are implementing that template system can also function as a template system itself?

Because PHP, natively, doesn't provide the features that a modern template system needs to be safe, scalable or productive. PHP doesn't recognize HTML or XML as a type, or a "template" as a thing, automatically escape user supplied data (correctly, based on context) or correctly deduce content-type headers or route requests or any number of things one expects of a modern framework or templates. As a PHP application grows in complexity, you will, inevitably, find yourself reinventing frameworks. So might as well just use one that's already been proven in the wild and optimized.

All PHP has is string concatenation. It's "templating system" is blind string concatenation - that's it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This area desperately does need terminology to be nailed down.. but.. I don't really like the proposed terminology. It's kinda hard to understand and follow. (The meat is in the table at the end of the article.)

</comment><comment><USER23> If you actively use w3m/lynx. It's actually surprising to me how many websites can still be visited by non-js enabled browser. But I guess I have my bar way too low as I expected pretty much every website that I visit behave like an npm blackhole.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Trisomorphic Rendering" \- looks like someone at Google is working on their promotion doc.

<comment><USER8> I believe that term had already been used before (I'd at least seen it on twitter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Did anyone else notice they used the term "uncanny valley" in the article for something totally unrelated to what that means? Or maybe they did mean it but the paragraph didn't elude to that very well. Or maybe they interpreted "uncanny valley" after hearing the phrase into what they thought it meant...

<comment><USER26> It's not unusual to see it in the context of UI as something that looks interactive but is not / looks done but feels wrong. Like the prank of replacing someone's desktop with a screenshot of itself :)

<comment><USER27> > Like the prank of replacing someone's desktop with a screenshot of itself :)

That's a fake, not the uncanny valley

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Do Google developers follow Google's advice?

<comment><USER8> Not always. We do work with a lot of teams internally though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> React and similar JS frameworks were created by a walled-garden companies that do not want most their content indexed by Google. Use it on applications and content you don't want indexed with search engines.

<comment><USER30> Sarcastically, React server side rendering works much better than the others like Angular.

It's that easy - just one liner to use it in ExpressJS and a server side template system.

<comment><USER26> In a similar fashion to React itself, it's not that easy once routing, caching, context data, request or query parameters, data fetching and state management, environment variables, sessions etc all come into play.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Really confused by the terminology. I assume in this context "rendering" does not mean translating an abstract scene description into pixels on screen, but something else.

Can somebody shed some light on this?

<comment><USER32> "Rendering" in this context is turning an abstract representation of the content of your page (or state of your application) into HTML (either as bytes delivered in an HTTP response from a server, or as DOM nodes created by JavaScript on the client).

For Hacker News, "Server Rendering" is taking the top 25 stories, creating a large string containing all the HTML tags, then serializing that to a byte stream.

A hypothetical "Client Rendering" alternative to HN might be downloading a JSON chunk containing the data about the top stories, then using a JavaScript framework to create DOM nodes in the user's browser that create the same document client-side.

<comment><USER31> Ah got it, thanks for the concise explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Read without any JS: [https://beta.trimread.com/articles/116](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/116)

Reduces from 1.2 MB to around 500 KB.

<comment><USER34> This is great, it really proves that you don't need a lot of styling and interactivity to get a message across.

I'm sounding like my grandpa, but... _back in my day, things were fast, simple and they worked_ Now we got this huge mess of technology just so we can track users, sell ads and annoy our site visitors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is it possible to achieve a good point about seo without using ssr?

<comment><USER36> Yes, juste test how it renders as explained in the article. Well, for Google at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is there another name for "Trisomorphic Rendering"? There are not many hits. It seems like Nolan Lawson coined the term in 2016[1] (see quoted tweet, since deleted).

[1]: [https://jeffy.info/2017/01/24/offline-first-for-your- templat...](https://jeffy.info/2017/01/24/offline-first-for-your-templated- site-part-2.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> I tried Google's Mobile-Friendly Test on a web page running Google AdSense and received a "Page partially loaded" warning because the [https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/ads](https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/ads) "page resources couldn't be loaded". Details as why is because "Googlebot blocked by robots.txt" which links to their robots.txt here: [https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/robots.txt](https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/robots.txt)

The page also received a "Redirection error" on [https://stats.g.doubleclick.net/r/collect](https://stats.g.doubleclick.net/r/collect) and [https://www.google-analytics.com/r/collect](https://www.google- analytics.com/r/collect)

301 and 302 redirects are also returning a redirection error.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is very disappointing to read. I encourage anyone to compare the architecture and DX of client side rendered apps based on Create React App to Next.js. Next.js is very immature and clunky in comparison.

<comment><USER39> What part are you disappointed with? They just mention Next.js as an example.

What does "DX" stand for here?

<comment><USER10> DX means Developer Experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Who writes this stuff?

<comment><USER40> I don't know why I am getting downvoted, I literally am curious who writes these google-hosted documents!

(I also do find this one to be not very well copy-edited/written).

<comment><USER41> I didn't downvote you, but I guess it's because:

a) From the way your comment is written, it's pretty clear that you actually just want to say what's between the brackets in your second comment. It comes accros as passive aggressive and doesn't contribute anything.

b) The page mentions who have written this article. The names, positions at Google and pictures are all there.</comment></comment></comment>


Someone is stealing Christopher Columbus letters - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christopher-columbus-letters-stolen-from-vatican-libraries-around-the-world-60-minutes-2019-10-20/ <comment><USER2> > _One of the most valuable art collections in Europe isn 't housed in a > museum visited by millions of tourists, but in this warehouse in the back of > his police station. It's basically an evidence locker for stolen artifacts. > This is a Caravaggio. What does a Caravaggio go for these days? It is > millions of dollars. It is a paint stolen at the end of 1990 and was from a > private house._

What's not explained is why are police keeping all this artwork? If you saw the _60 Minutes_ piece on this you'd see that it's an enormous evidence room full of artworks they are hoarding. They know where the multi-million dollar Caravaggio was stolen from in 1990. Why hasn't at least this particular piece been returned to its owner?

I also wonder why such an obvious question isn't answered in the story. I'm afraid that the answer might be that it doesn't fit the agenda of the story about sophisticated art thieves and super rich collectors. The reason might be that the Italian police declare that your art is a national treasure and they simply keep it. Or they impose an impossible burden of proof that you acquired it legally (similar to U.S. asset forfeiture laws) and require you to show a chain of receipts back to Caravaggio in 1602.

<comment><USER3> Why do you think there's an agenda? The article talks about returning the stolen letters to their owners, so it's not like the police are unwilling to repatriate stolen goods. Perhaps these artworks in their store have unknown owners or there are conflicting claims? And what do you do with antiquities like an ancient amphora? Who knows where it came from originally, so who do you return it to?

<comment><USER2> > _Perhaps these artworks in their store have unknown owners_

For unknown owners, fine. But they know where the Caravaggio came from. The article says, "Giovanni Prisco: Yes, and it is a paint stolen at the end of 1990 and was from a private house. It was discovered in the north of Italy."

I'm reading that as saying that it was stolen from someone's private house and that it was recovered somewhere else in the north of Italy.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps the person from whom it was stolen can't prove they owned it legitimately? I expect stealing stolen goods has higher odds of not being reported so lower risk for the thieves. That said, stealing from people who might own stolen expensive art might not be the smartest thing to do... :)

<comment><USER5> That's why OP asked if the burden of proof is so absurd that you have to show receipts back to 1602 by Carravaggio himself. This should be easily answered in the article but isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If there is one library in the world you'd think would be impervious to > theft, this would be it.

Gotta admit, not really.

> Jay suspected the library's letter had been stolen and put up for sale, > which meant whatever was currently in their collection was a fake.

> Jay Dillon: To my utter astonishment, a Columbus letter in the Vatican > library was a forgery. And then I went to the Biblioteca Riccardiana in > Florence and damned if the same thing doesn't happen again. Their Columbus > letter is a fake too.

I think this is an interesting story. But, imagine if all these "valuable" private libraries just scanned all there stuff. Does the original really matter? The data in the book should be enough. Of course it does to many people, the original DOES matter. Because the book is no longer valued for it's contents, but as an art piece.

The most shocking thing to me about this article isn't about the theft stories, but how there is a Cultural Heritage Squad police division. And that they have in possession of the worlds rarest art pieces. One example is in the millions stolen from a private home. Did the owner not even bother to call the "lost and found" or are they the ones holding it? Why aren't the paintings taken care of better in a climate controlled environment by professionals? And WHY is EVIDENCE hung and frame on the wall in the police stations. Something smells here to be frank.

</comment><comment><USER7> _[The stolen letters] were found in the most surprising places. The letter stolen from the Riccardiana Library in Florence turned up in, get this, the U.S. Library of Congress. . ._

</comment><comment><USER8> Inspired by Lee Israel[0][1], perhaps?

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

[1] [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4595882/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4595882/)

</comment><comment> gjsman-1000 Sounds almost like a plot from National Treasure (2004). Except it's Columbus letters instead of the Constitution.

How rich was Columbus?

<comment><USER9> [https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/christopher- colu...](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/christopher-columbus- dies)

"Although Columbus enjoyed a substantial revenue from Hispaniola gold during the last years of his life, he repeatedly attempted (unsuccessfully) to gain an audience with King Ferdinand, whom he felt owed him further redress."

So I'm thinking - well off, but not wealthy.

<comment><USER10> His heirs also had 30 years of lawsuits or so: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleitos_colombinos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleitos_colombinos)

<comment><USER11> amazing that you could sue the King...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is also this from 2017: [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/24/sleuths-track- ce...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/24/sleuths-track-centuries- old-copy-letter-written-christopher/)

via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15094537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15094537) (but no comments)

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks like this is really all old news. The thief might not even be alive anymore.

Should be "Someone was ... ". Probably moved on to Gutenberg Bibles or something. Which are harder to fake, but people are correspondingly less likely to check.

</comment><comment><USER14> Do digital copies exist?

<comment><USER15> Many!

This seems like a good English translation: [http://www.ems.kcl.ac.uk/content/etext/e022.html](http://www.ems.kcl.ac.uk/content/etext/e022.html)

Wikipedia links to more: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus%27s_letter_on_the_fir...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus%27s_letter_on_the_first_voyage#Online_editions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When combined they yield a treasure map

<comment><USER17> To the mythical land of Alabama.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This happens all the time, and for decades, and is one of the prime reasons why institutions digitize their collection.

</comment><comment><USER19> Non-AMP link: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christopher-columbus-letters- st...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christopher-columbus-letters-stolen-from- vatican-libraries-around-the-world-60-minutes-2019-10-20/)

<comment><USER12> Thanks—changed from [https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/christopher-columbus- letter...](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/christopher-columbus-letters- stolen-from-vatican-libraries-around-the-world-60-minutes-2019-10-20/). The software missed that one for some reason.

<comment><USER20> What the...?

Google can host amp links on foreign domains?

<comment><USER21> They might be using the Signed HTTP Exchanges functionality.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to get a temporary EMail ID - <AUTHOR> http://tekunik.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-to-get-temporary-email-id.html

<comment><USER2> I built 10MinuteMail as an exercise to learn the JBoss Seam framework. I'm very glad people like it and find it useful.

There are a number of great temporarily mail services out there, each with different features, strengths, and weaknesses, so definitely use which ever one fits your needs best.

10MinuteMail is supposed to be easy to use: zero clicks to get your e-mail address and to see incoming e-mail. Everything is on the front page and refreshed via ajax. You don't have to sign up, or provide any information at all.

It's secure: there's no way for other people to read your e-mail by guessing your username/address.

It's available in 36 languages (so far!). Over 50% of the traffic comes from non-US sources.

</comment><comment><USER3> Problem with lot of these disposable emails is the domain names used by them get blacklisted by services very fast.

I'd suggest just get a domain name and set up a catch-all account that forwards all your mail to a gmail account.

<comment><USER4> You will be impressed by the amount of spam with a catch-all account.

<comment><USER5> I find looking at my gmail spam label to be more depressing than impressive, so I try to avoid looking at it -- which is why I use gmail for my catchall accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm particularly impressed by the zero click ,ajax page feature. @dryicerx -It is not possible for everyone to get a domain and set up catch-all account.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I wanted it to be super easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just append something to my Gmail address with a plus character. Like: email@example.com might become firstname.lastname@example.com. I can then set up filters to sort or delete specific sources of mail.

According to Wikipedia, this is called "sub-addressing".

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd still use Mailinator over this, but I do dig how the address expires. Interesting twist.</comment>


500+ person startup event this weekend in Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> http://startupshk.com/sus2010/

<comment><AUTHOR> I mention this event because it started with a couple of founders getting together for coffee last fall. We had just been at a startup event in HK that was very US centric and sorta top down. Dave McClure, who attended, suggested we build on that event with just some informal meetings between founders to help the community grow. So for the next couple of months, we've been meeting at coffee shops every other week. This built into planning a TechCrunch 50 style event and setting up a new co-working space (boot.hk). All of this motivated, organized and driven by local startup founders.

If anyone has any questions about startups in Hong Kong, let me know. Happy to share. If you can attend, the Hong Kong BarCamp will be Sept 18th this year.

Tweets about the event are tagged #sus2010</comment>


Rolls-Royce RB211 - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_RB211

<comment><AUTHOR> I was reading the BBC story about Turing's Bombe beating out Concorde in a UK mechanical engineers poll: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks- herts-295126...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks- herts-29512623)

And therein found a mention to the RB211 with the following mention:

        The Rolls Royce RB211 engine received 11% of the vote.

        It was developed in the late 1960s but cost miscalculations led to the company
        going bust in 1971.

The Wikipedia has the best summary on this period that I could find, but I also thought that this event might be of interest to people on HN as it combines both a story of engineering as well as the story of a business going through massive change: [http://aerosociety.com/Events/Event-List/1754/The- History-of...](http://aerosociety.com/Events/Event-List/1754/The-History-of- the-RollsRoyce-RB21122-Turbofan-Engine)</comment>


Ask HN: Please suggest a name for my Django app - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I am looking for a working name for a demo app that I created in Django. I used the development server and now I want to buy a domain and migrate to hosted server so that I can demo the app. Here are the slides for what the app does. http://www.slideshare.net/zeynel1/swimswith-demo
Basically, I have names of lawyers and schools that they went to. I sort by school and declare that "Lawyer x knows Lawyer y" if they graduated from the same school the same year.
In the finished app I will add more relevant criteria to make it like commercial CRMs (such as InterAction) used by law firms.
I have been using the name "SwimsWith". Do you like the name? What suggestions do you have?
Thank you. <comment><AUTHOR> live link to slides: <http://www.slideshare.net/zeynel1/swimswith-demo></comment>