How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary - <AUTHOR> http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html

<comment><USER2> Wtf: "Since I have children, I try to spend evenings with them sometimes. The rhythm that works best for me is to work a very long day, sleep in the office or near the office (I have a long commute from home to work) then go home early enough the next day to spend time with my children before they go to bed. I am not comfortable with this, but it is the best compromise I have been able to work out. Go home if you have a contagious disease. You should go home if you are thinking suicidal thoughts. You should take a break or go home if you think homicidal thoughts for more than a few seconds. You should send someone home if they show serious mental malfunctioning or signs of mental illness beyond mild depression. If you are tempted to be dishonest or deceptive in a way that you normally are not due to fatigue, you should take a break. Don't use cocaine or amphetamines to combat fatigue. Don't abuse caffeine."

<comment><USER3> Some programmers I knew in college could have used this paragraph. It seems crazy and out there, but it reaches a very small sect of the programmer community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I and some coworkers plan to wikify this and update it with more of a web development spin on it. It's a truly astounding document, with lots of good information relevant for programmers.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're gonna share this wiki with the rest of us when it's up and running, right? ;)

<comment><USER3> but of course, what kind of hacker would I be if I didn't?

<comment><USER3> <http://www.trickjarrett.com/programmer/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not going to read it right now, but that is a truly impressive Table of Contents. The relatively few number of entries that involve sitting with hands on keyboard and code editor open accurately reflects the distribution of skills required to be a good programmer.

<comment><USER5> "Not going to read it right now"

I said the same thing when I first found this a couple of years ago. Any day now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Haha. He gives a practical use for divination:

"The multitude of available divination techniques are very useful for determining your own semi-conscious desires, as they each present a complete ambiguous and random pattern that your own subconscious will assign meaning to."

It reminds me of Douglas Adams' speech, "Is there an artificial God?"

"Apparently, we need to think about the building being inhabited by dragons and look at it in terms of how a dragon would move around it... This sounds like complete and utter nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be nonsense... Nevertheless... it may be there is something interesting going on... You figure out how the dragon's going to be happy here and lo and behold! you've suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in."

<http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/>

</comment><comment><USER7> "It is an odd fact that is not reflected in salaries that a good programmer is more productive than 10 bad programmers. This creates a strange situation. It will often be true that you could move faster if your weak programmers would just get out of the way. If you did this you would in fact make more progress in the short term. However, your tribe would lose some important benefits, namely the training of the weaker members, the spreading of tribal knowledge, and the ability to recover from the loss of the strong members. The strong must be gentle in this regard and consider the issue from all angles."

This makes a lot of sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER8> I read it a few years ago when I was a rookie programmer. It gave me a more accurate picture of the job than I had held previously.

<comment><USER9> " It gave me a more accurate picture of the job than I had held previously."

Wouldn't it be hilarious if that was one of the reviews on the backcover of a book?

<comment><USER10> The last time I saw that sentiment in a book review it was on a Dilbert book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Comprehensive? Maybe.

Short? No way.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone shed some light on who the author is?

<comment><USER12> I thought the same thing. Who is this guy and why haven't I heard of him before.

My initial research...

Started with his email email@example.com. From there I went to hire.com which forwards on to Authoria. Apparently Authoria bought Hire.com in 2005.

After a little bit of googling I found an article that was published on him shortly after his orignal "how to be a programmer" article was published.

[http://www.theage.com.au/cgi- bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl...](http://www.theage.com.au/cgi- bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/02/07/1044579937623.html)

Robert Read, 37, of Austin, Texas, is a principal engineer at Hire.com. Before that he founded 4R Technology, which made a scanner-based image analysis quality control tool for the paper industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Short?

<comment><USER14> Well it's only a hundred pages. Short for a book.</comment></comment>


Hackers attack Sony PlayStation Network - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/24/technology/security/sony-playstation-hack/index.html

<comment><USER2> It's more impressive they got the executive's flight diverted. Wonder if it just took a tweet.</comment>


Falcon lands on droneship, tips over post landing. - <AUTHOR> https://www.instagram.com/p/BAqirNbwEc0/?taken-by=elonmusk <comment><USER2> Submitted a few minutes before: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10922386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10922386) (13 points, 1 hour ago, 2 comments)</comment>


The midrange computer dies - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7128 <comment><USER2> This statement is wrong for a large class of users

 _This is more power than a typical desktop user would know what to do with, by a pretty large margin -absurd overkill for just running an office suite or video editing or gaming or whatever._

His "Great Beast of Malvern" custom computer ([http://www.catb.org/esr/hardware.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/hardware.html)) is under powered for high end gaming and doesn't meet Virtual Reality minimum specs ([http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/vr/system- require...](http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/vr/system- requirements)). It is fair to argue that gaming, and especially VR or 4K gaming is a niche market that isn't a relevant consideration in his arguments, but he does explicitly mention desktop computers as overkill for gaming.

<comment><USER3> An AMD 7950 was the high end card when his computer was built, and is only ~20% slower than the minimum recommendation. It should run most VR games just fine.

<comment><USER4> I _strongly_ disagree with this, from experience. The minimum specs are not joking when it comes to VR (and he's off in terms of both CPU and GPU--VR is CPU-intensive too). Even at the minimum there are games that have stuttering, and stuttering is the literal worst thing that you can have in VR. Oculus forces games to fade out/black out before any load because having the head tracking stop even for a split second can make you literally fall over; dropped frames, especially during a big or sweeping motion can make you want to puke.

Honestly, my second-biggest worry (after the specter of a much more intrusive kind of harassment, which has already started to happen, hooray!) with VR is people trying it on machines that were built to save a few bucks and being turned off by the nausea of not having the necessary perf characteristics to deliver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Confusing title. For a second I thought IBM was discontinuing the AS/400 / iSeries / IBM i midrange[1] systems.

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

<comment><USER6> I didn't find it particularly confusing. I feel as though most people would take "midrange computer" to be what the author intended. Might just be projecting my own ignorance of the IBM systems however.

<comment><USER7> The term "midrange computer" to me is more synonymous with "minicomputer" (ala AS/400, etc.) than it is with "desktop tower PC" or whatever. My guess would be that most people would interpret it the same way, given that "midrange systems" is a pretty established and well known term:

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

<comment><USER8> That's what I thought he meant as mid-range in terms of price/performance is always relative and changing. Maybe I should've known better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If so, we should start seeing effects on pricing: as the volume of midrange computers drops, price goes up until it gets close enough to that of a high end computer. At which point people who would normally buy midrange computers (like us devs) end up buying $3000 Xeon workstations instead.

Luckily, gamers are keeping the mid range market alive, and it seems quite likely that VR enthusiasts will ensure that it stays alive for a few more years.

<comment><USER9> If you dont need gfx, you can still turn a 6th Gen NUC into a pretty "mid range" pc. (also the author of this post is wrong about the Intel NUC being fanless)

i7 NUC - [http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit- nuc6i7kyk...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc6i7kyk- features-configurations.html)

NVME SSD - [http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisit...](http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/ssd950pro/overview.html)

32GB DDR4 - [http://www.corsair.com/en-us/corsair-memory-32gb-2x16gb- ddr4...](http://www.corsair.com/en-us/corsair-memory-32gb-2x16gb- ddr4-sodimm-2133mhz-c15-memory-kit-cmso32gx4m2a2133c15)

<comment><USER10> When I was buying some NUCs for a project at work I am pretty sure I saw a few diffrent models some with passive cooling and some with fans.

<comment><USER9> all the ones i have taken apart have a fan in the lid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not exactly a counterpoint, but maybe a more interesting vantage:

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-scooter- computer/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-scooter-computer/)

</comment><comment><USER12> > [T]he quality and design of recent Thinkpads has gone utterly to shit. The > new keyboards are particularly atrocious.

I've never owned a Thinkpad until recently. I purchased a Thinkpad T450s and I love it. I also think the keyboard is quite nice as well. Now I'm curious how the older Thinkpads were. Were they considerably better? Did I buy a bad product and not even know?

<comment><USER13> Yes, in my opinion the Thinkpad peaked somewhere around the T43 or the IBM- made T60 (which was also made by Lenovo). Good keyboard layout, travel distance, spring distance. Even silly stuff like the shape of the key and the precise type of plastic were somehow better.

And everything apart from the keyboard was solid too. How many non-Macbooks can be picked up by any edge or corner? How many laptops have a metal hinge for the screen? A magnesium rollcage inside? Clever drains that divert water out of your keyboard and out holes on the bottom, all without damaging the electronics? Easily user-accessible battery, RAM, HDD…even more advanced components like the screen and the wifi card?

<comment><USER14> Pretty sure the T60 was designed and manufactured entirely by Lenovo but they had permission to use the IBM logo on it.

Nobody makes laptops like IBM used to :-( I know they seem to strongly prefer low-volume high-margin industries but I really would like to see what they could do today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > What it adds up to for me is that midrange PCs are dead.

Yeah, I might even go as far to say: it's mostly just smartphones, laptops, and servers now. ESR admits as much: ", except that [my high-end PC] is really more like a baby supercomputer"

<comment><USER16> At this point, basically the only reason for a normal person to get a desktop rather than a laptop or a big-screened all-in-one is if they want a big graphics card.

Even that's starting to go away with systems like the Razer Core. The only thing holding back more external enclosures is that most laptop hardware makers haven't embraced the idea yet.

<comment><USER17> I think all-in-ones are generally still considered desktops.

And they have the disadvantage that when the hardware fails you have to discard the entire device instead of only the part that failed, which is becoming more important as hardware doesn't have to be replaced for being too slow as often anymore. The traditional format also allows you to use the big monitor for multiple devices, e.g. if you have a PC and a laptop dock or a fast PC and a Mac mini for OS X testing etc.

<comment><USER8> "And they have the disadvantage that when the hardware fails you have to discard the entire device instead of only the part that failed, which is becoming more important as hardware doesn't have to be replaced for being too slow as often anymore. "

BOOM! That and greater hardware customization are where desktops and servers have a benefit at all price ranges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> not everyone keeps a tower PC as a workstation, and there are other uses for a tower PC besides "mailserver."

many people purchase desktop PC's because they are best bang for your buck when it comes to building a PC specifically for gaming.

this article screams "out of touch" in the worst way possible. just because your tower can be replaced by a raspberry pi doesn't spell the death of midrange desktop PCs. in fact, that's an ignorant thing to say. full stop.

as long as PC gaming exists, there will always be a market for midrange power in a tower.

</comment><comment><USER19> It died few years ago for me. I scrapped my big honking tower (I would not even call it desktop as the only logical place was the floor) and purchased: MBPr that works as an actual desktop computer if I am not on a trip, attached to Thunderbolt display, Synology NAS to store data, and small Linux computer for Linux-y server-y stuff precisely the paperbook size ESR describes.

</comment><comment><USER20> When I hear "Midrange Computer" I think IBM iSeries. Was briefly confused by this article.

<comment><USER21> Yup...I immediately thought "Really? Someone is predicting the final demise of the AS/400? Like someone has every year for the last 20 or so?".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Eric Raymond writes: "fast memory access to extremely large data sets (as in, surgery on large version-control repositories)" and I'm wondering just how "extremely large" these things are.

<comment><USER23> The last couple years he's been blogging about converting old open source CSV repositories (FreeBSD, etc...) to git. Here's a post where he talks briefly about FreeBSD being 18GB, and GCC being > 32GB: [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6830](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6830)

<comment><USER24> Pretty small compared to a lot of proprietary repos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 2012 called. If you had disposable income that is.

<comment><USER26> > 2012 called. If you had disposable income that is.

One of the points in the article, near the end. We've hit a crossover point where these small form factor computers are both cheap and capable, rather than one or the other.</comment></comment>


Would you like to eventually become profitable? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> For those who don't get it, this is a karma whore joke.

<comment><USER2> change it to "Vote this up if you want to become profitable."</comment></comment>


Masks May Do More Than We Think (With Dr. Monica Gandhi) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8N5oduX1KQ <comment><USER2> My question: are we not going to lose herd immunity on literally all other viruses (including ones where it may have been man decades since we did not have herd immunity) as a result of masks? We can only really choose masks once, before we either have them forever or have to take them off. When we take them off, why would a giant wave of _all_ infectious illness not take off?

<comment><USER3> Why would wearing masks for a few years destroy decades worth of herd immunity?

<comment><USER2> Because there's a very careful balance of slow spread and natural immunity. If we turn off spread for long enough, we turn off natural immunity too because our body isn't receiving constant low dose exposure.

<comment><USER3> Are you likely to lose an immunity? I thought once you have an immunity it's basically for life.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Dos, Don'ts, and Legalities of Employee Monitoring: The 101 FAQ - <AUTHOR> https://beebole.com/blog/employee-monitoring/ <comment><USER2> Working as a freelancer I've seen many types of requests from the customers or employers, but I have to say I don't like working with customers that request screen captures. It's stupid. I can be with my cellphone if I want to check Facebook...To me time-tracking is fine, I do it for my invoicing, but the other methods mentioned here sound like Big Brother.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good read, thank you for sharing. About all types of tracking, GPS tracking is a constitutional right violation. I mean, how come FBI needs a warrant to track your car, and a boss doesn't...</comment>


AWS S3 Server-Side Encryption  - <AUTHOR> http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ServerSideEncryptionCustomerKeys.html

<comment><USER2> Seriously, this doesn't seem to be common knowledge yet:

 _DO NOT GIVE YOUR ENCRYPTION KEYS TO ANYONE_

This is just a scam.</comment>


Microsoft becomes most valuable US company as slow iPhone sales hit Apple - <AUTHOR> https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/microsoft-becomes-most-valuable-us-company-as-slow-iphone-sales-hit-apple-market-cap/story/294099.html <comment><USER2> It appears this might have been a reporting mistake: [https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/24/apple-market-cap- microsoft/](https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/24/apple-market-cap-microsoft/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Microsoft seems to struggle the least at the moment amongst the tech giants.</comment>


Deep Neural Decision Forests [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/255952/ICCV15_DeepNDF_main.pdf <comment><USER2> Could someone explain in layman words what is the qualitative contribution of the paper and why it is important?

<comment><USER3> Super high level of deep nets, skip if you already know:

Deep nets are good at taking a vector of size N and transforming it to a vector of size M, where M is perhaps a more general, abstract, or "useful" representation.

e.g.

Your N-vector might be a length 786 vector of floating point values representing black-intensity in a 28x28 grayscale image. This is the case in the MNIST dataset (lots of 28x28 images of the digits 0-9), a classic dataset in machine learning.

After a layer or two of a deep net, this N-vector might be transformed into an M-vector where each component represents some particular edge, curve, or blip within the source image.

So you've gone from the representation of "pixel 0 is gray, pixel 1 is dark gray, pixel 2 is white..." to a representation of "There is a vertical edge on the central lefthand side of the image, there is an upwards facing curve in the central top part of the image....".

It's clear that the latter representation is more compact and useful for the purpose of digit recognition.

It's also worth noting this representation is specific to the problem at hand. The edges and curves you have learned would probably be unable to accurately reproduce say, letters of the alphabet, as they are specialized to reproducing digits. The net has learned a more compact representation by using statistics to figure out that most of the information is redundant. There are only 10 possible outputs, but the input space is 256 grayscale values ^ 768 pixels.

In a traditional deep net, your output layer for this particular problem (digit recognition) might be a vector of length 10, where element of the vector is the probability of that digit being the one shown. So a result of <0.1, 0.1, 0.998, 0.0 ... 0.0> would indicate that the net thought the digit was a 2.

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

Super high level of decision trees and forests, skip if you already know:

A decision tree is somewhat self-explanatory -- it's kind of like a flow chart for making judgments. Here is an example, classifying cool vs. uncool based on 3 attributes.

My dataset:

              | bow_tie | socks | sandals | cool
        </comment><comment>|</comment><comment>---|</comment><comment>-|</comment><comment>---|</comment><comment>
        Alice | true    | true  | true    | true
        Bob   | false   | true  | true    | false
        Carol | false   | true  | false   | true
        Doug  | true    | false | true    | true
        Ella  | false   | false | false   | false

A possible decision tree:

        if bow_tie == true
            return true
        else
            if socks == true
                if sandals == true
                    return false
                else
                    return true
            else
                if sandals == true
                    return true
                else
                    return false

It's also worth noting that decisions trees can be equal with different representation. The following will always return the same value as the above for the elements of the dataset:

        if socks == true
            if sandals == true
                if bow_tie == true
                    return true
                else
                    return false
            else
                return true
        else
            if sandals == true
                return true
            else
                if bow_tie == true
                    return true
                else
                    return false

The difference is how you pick the divisions. The first one uses a more entropy-reducing strategy -- we notice that the bow_tie division is a simple, hard rule. Bowties are cool. The second is more of a random decision decision tree, so it's less "efficient" in that it must make potentially more judgments.

Why would we ever want to be less efficient? It turns out if you train several (hundreds, thousands, etc) decision trees on subsets of the data, and then average their results together, they are alarmingly good classifiers. Extremely simple to code, train, and use. This is called a decision forest. A decision tree on its own is often weak, but decision forests are a powerful tool.

</comment><comment></comment><comment>====

High level of why this work is interesting:

The traditional means of training a deep neural net is with gradient descent. The most common form of this is some method of "backpropagation". You run a training example through your network, calculate the error between the result and expected result, and then propagate this error gradient back through the network to tune the transformations to produce closer to what you want. This method often requires the functions you use within the deep network to be differentiable.

As mentioned above, there are several training strategies for decision trees, but the most common is some form of "mostly random".

To extend my example from the first section, one could use the deep neural net to transform the 768 grayscale pixel values into perhaps 30 higher level edge/curve features. Then one could use this length 30 vector as the input to train a decision forest.

This might end up getting better results than either strategy by itself. You use the neural net to do the abstracting and the decision forest to make the final decision. This uses both of their advantages in tandem -- deep neural nets are great at generating more abstract and general features, and decision forests are quite good at producing accurate classifications given high- quality, lower-dimensional input data.

This idea of multi-tiered systems isn't particularly new. What this paper does, though, is introduce a _differentiable_ decision tree. This means that they can train their decision trees with gradient descent, the same way they train the neural network. This means that, rather than training the two tiers of their system individually, they can train them together, producing even better results.

<comment><USER4> Fantastic explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why do they only compare their method against GoogLeNet? VGG was the winner in 2014, most papers seem to use VGG and my team has observed it to always gets higher accuracy than GoogLeNet.

<comment><USER6> GoogLeNet "won" ImageNet 2014[1], but VGG is often found to be more flexible.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think that the multiple softmax layers in GoogLeNet might make it easier to modify for this purpose than the VGG architecture.

[1] [http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/results](http://image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/results) (look for "Classification+localization with provided training data: Ordered by classification error")

<comment><USER5> Oh that's right, GoogLeNet did edge out VGG in the pure classification task. Localization is essential to us, so VGG was the clear winner for us :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> fwiw, Criminisi also was an author on this: [http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/158806/CriminisiForests_F...](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/158806/CriminisiForests_FoundTrends_2011.pdf)</comment>


You should really stop worrying about how much energy Bitcoin uses - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2018/08/22/you-should-really-stop-worrying-about-how-much-energy-bitcoin-uses/ <comment><USER2> > If bitcoin technology were to mature by more than 100 times its current > market size, it would still equal only 2 percent of all energy consumption.

As if using 2% of all energy consumption is reasonable for a payment system.

And at 100x current market size, it'd _still_ be hardly used.

And it can't really start using less energy as it matures, because its insane energy use is its defence against hostile network takeover.

<comment><USER3> It is most certainly a reasonable consumption for a payment system. Every society with inflationary money eventually grinds to a halt and crumbles. The world must absolutely have the best implementation of money that it can get its hands on.

Energy use is not its defense against attacks. Distributed hashing is. The hashrate can be much lower and Bitcoin would still work. The difficulty would adjust downward.

Obviously, the hashrate will top out at some point in the future. From that point on, it can dwindle and that won't be a problem. Just so long as a certain minimum amount stays around to keep the network running. That won't be a problem in a future where Bitcoin has become the new global currency.

<comment> dj-wonk Re: "Every society with inflationary money eventually grinds to a halt and crumbles."

Would you like to support this claim and/or clarify what you mean?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk Re: "So perhaps people should quit criticizing bitcoin for its energy intensity and start criticizing states and nations for still providing new industries with dirty power supplies instead."

Three responses:

(1) The author has introduced another unrelated claim, presumably to distract from the main point. See the informal usage of "non-sequitur" at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy)

(2) This is a false choice. The two arguments are separate.

(3) There are better alternatives when it comes to energy efficiency: (A) in the current cryptocurrency space; (B) in the financial transaction space; (C) in the (open-ended, what might the future hold) software design space.

...

The article misses the point. If we're talking energy, the main criticism of Bitcoin is its efficiency. I mean "efficiency" as defined in the engineering sense: useful output / input. [1]

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

If we define useful output as one Bitcoin transaction, how much input energy does that require?

According to [2], "Because of all that calculation, the energy cost of Bitcoin is high in comparison with that of conventional financial transactions. For example, according to one estimate, processing a bitcoin transaction consumes more than 5,000 times as much energy as using a Visa credit card."

According to [3], "Bitcoin's power consumption is extremely high compared to conventional digital payment, and one transaction now uses as much energy as your house in a week"

[2] [https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous- amoun...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of- energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin)

[3] [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin- mi...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining- electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change)

...

Finally, here's my personal perspective. I have relatively little confidence in a simple, generalized idea of cryptocurrencies. As far as the basic computer science, I like blockchain technologies roughly as much as I like Merkle trees. I'm also open to see where alternative forms of transactions can go.

That said, these forms have design constraints that the technologies must address. I would like to see particular innovation in the design of particular cryptocurrencies that make them suitable for particular uses. For a system that hopes to scale up transactions for a broad user base, I think per- transaction energy efficiency is an important metric.</comment>


Unclimbable - <AUTHOR> http://www.sbnation.com/longform/2015/5/20/8625135/cirque-of-the-unclimbables

<comment><USER2> I really don't have a beef with long form writing. I've read and am reading many books, and i've read many articles longer than this one and taken things away from them.

However i do have a beef with authors who have little empathy and do not respect the reader's time. And that is the case if after 1500 words, the author decides to pull a And Now for Something Completely Different, without even having hinted at what the bulk of the article is going to be about.

It's not hard to start out with "I'm going to tell a story about how ..."

Edit: The part referred to by the title starts with "I need to tell you about the Cirque of the Unclimbables.", about 40% in.

<comment><USER3> I thought it was written quite well. Not everything needs to cater to the impatient.

<comment><USER2> > the impatient

You must be talking about yourself. You didn't even bother to grok what my complaint is about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The photography that accompanies the article is just beautiful. It's not hard to emphasise with the writer wanting to make the trip, even though she could potentially cripple herself by doing so.

<comment><USER5> They are. It feels like a painting where the composition is made to express the grandiosity more than reflect reality.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I use my software skills to help a charity? - <AUTHOR> I would like to volunteer some of my time as a software engineer to help out a charity, specifically one that helps refugees or the environment. Is this something I can do? How do I go about it? <comment><USER2> At least in my area, there are often volunteer Hackathons you can attend. I've had success with those.</comment>


Raising Money: Schedule Meetings in Batches - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rafaelcorrales.com/2010/06/raising-money-schedule-meetings-in.html

<comment><USER2> Actually, this goes for any series of meetings. At work, I actively 'defrag' my calendar and make sure meetings happen together so that I can pull through a long stretch of meetings and be done with it all. Having fragmented meeting time (30 minute breaks between every meeting, a couple of days between travel trips) messes up your productivity as you really don't feel like starting a project.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's great advice and I've anecdotally noticed that when I have breaks in between meetings, I'm basically waiting for the next meeting to start. So you definitely have a good point here, thanks</comment></comment>


MIT CS faculty candidates got 73 job offers this year - <AUTHOR> http://people.csail.mit.edu/saman/AcademicJobSearchResults_2014/

<comment><USER2> This is very interesting. 7 system hires! The market is predicted to be good for the next year as well.</comment>


Truth in Advertising (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://sagehill.net/tia/ <comment><USER2> A great piece of advertising and art history, I wonder what would be the equivalent against today's online ads[1]. Ad blockers are great but don't quite cut it the same way in terms of creativity and wit. On the other hand, digital ads became incredibly more nefarious than billboards.

[1]: One example, close perhaps in intent, would be [https://add- art.org](https://add-art.org).</comment>


Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse - <AUTHOR> https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-introduces-social-features-joins-the-fediverse/ <comment><USER4> As an admin of a 500 user instance I'm having mixed feelings about Nextcloud. Sure it's GPL and free and it got a lot better than the old owncloud mess that broke always but it's still somewhat a gamble. My install is just a no- warranty, non-commercial use case and I wouldn't use it for any large commercial installation without having at least one dedicated and skilled PHP- dev on-site.

I came to resent their marketing blog posts. If you look it's just an alpha version that just got hacked together, often with problems, often not fixed long after the release. There still lot's of serious bugs in end to end encryption for instance.

There does not seem to be a lot of work to improve the base features. Syncing, ACLs, User Mangement leave a lot to be desired. It's not easy but they are in a position where they really could be a perfect solution for a lot of people and probably also charge good money for it - but at the moment it feels like they just build alpha-grade fancy addons.

Me and probably most users would love a no-feature, we just fix the most serious bugs on our github issues release-cycle. I'm fine when it's called Nextcloud 16 and takes a year, hell take your time, but basic functionality should be rock solid.

I also don't get why they ignore the existing open-source ecosystem. Make it possible to integrate SOGo for Calenders and Mail - it's all webdav in the browser anyway. SOGo at least has somewhat working ActiveSync. Same with SAML/Shibboleth/Kerberos - some things got fixed, very late. No deployment story for Active Directory or even Linux.

User management is a mess - the Circles app is a good idea that is crippled by usability and functionality bugs... that possibility to have self-selecting groups and decentralized management is a huge win for them, but they don't seem to realize that this is an important use-case.

Nextcloud is very close to what would be ideal for a lot of smaller organisations, but they somehow are unable to polish what they have but decided to pile alpha-quality on alpha-quality code (and ignore the bug reports)...

That beeing said, it mostly works but your users won't be happy.

<comment><USER5> Let's be honest, if we did a release with only stabilization, it might get us more users. Not more customers. And it is customers who pay for the development.

Everyone asks us to focus "on the basics" and then claim their pet feature requests are, of course, basics. ACL's and user mgmt in your case, perfectly fine features, but features nonetheless.

In the end, our development is guided by the community and customers. If you're not either, we might not do what you want... That's the reality of any open source project.

And you're right, for a large installation, you should obviously get an onsite engineer, or, much better, a contract with us which is both cheaper and better. That's what most larger installations do, and that is how we earn the money to make Nextcloud better.

WRT the E2E, that sadly took a whole lot longer to get working than we had expected. Of course, if you think it is important or need it, time and money can speed it up, we have only so much of those.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your work on Nextcloud! I really appreciate what it does. Also thanks for taking the time to answer my rant ;)

On a positive note: Just upgraded to Nextcloud 15 without any issues in a few minutes. I feel it's getting better with every release. You put in a lot of work and I recently logged into an Owncloud 8 install and it's a night and day difference.

I'm also aware that you owe me nothing. I'm fine with that. It's a discussion forum here and I just wanted to write down my experience. I'm sure you'd rather see solid pull requests instead of unwanted advice. Mea culpa.

<comment><USER6> It would be more fair to compare the LATEST Nextcloud with the LATEST ownCloud. Both projects are going strong! Nextcloud is more community-focused, ownCloud is more enterprisey.

<comment><USER5> Hi Markus,

I'd argue the opposite, actually, ownCloud is betting on providing hosting for small and medium businesses, while Nextcloud targets large businesses.

And that is what reality shows. Nextcloud has far larger customers than ownCloud, which breaks down at instances over 50K users. The only large-ish oC setup is actually a bunch of separate universities.

Nextcloud is far more scalable. Thanks to Global Scale, our largest installation has tens of millions of users on a single instance, and customers like the German government (300K users) wouldn't be able to work with oC unless they split up their users and create silos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How about a working, documented plugin API? Or sync clients that _work_? Instead of taping more random crap onto a base product that only barely works?

<comment><USER8> This. Their sync on android sucks big time. I go to my gallery, select 20 pictures and send them to Nextcloud, only to find only 5 of them have been actually uploaded. It happens every.single.time. Gonna switch to Seafile really soon.

<comment><USER9> Can't confirm this experience. I have auto-upload enabled, and I've never had any issues with my pictures not syncing. Did you check the upload status on your phone during this time? Pictures can get very heavy, and it might just need more WiFi time to upload 20 of them.

<comment><USER10> I also have auto-upload enabled, and syncing works perfectly whether I am on the same network or an outside network.

Perhaps the grandparent commentor is using an older version of the android client or server?

<comment><USER11> I do see some issues with really large files. Files over 50Mb. My server has limits imposed and the resulting error is not communicated back to me on the app. The app merely states "Failed to upload". For me, this is the only issue I ever get, but without knowing the cause it does feel very "random".

In my case, I managed to track it down and, by knowing what causes the sync issue, I can avoid it, or ignore it. Could be that grandparent has this issue too bu her/his server is set to much lower limits even?

<comment><USER10> That could be it. IIRC, the upper limit of file upload size was tied to RAM (had something to do with PHP and how it handed uploads)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> End user of NC here, have it setup on a little Digital Ocean droplet. I switched from OwnCloud shortly after the fork, and sync contacts/calendar/notes between my desktop and android. Pleasantly surprised with how well things work.

My favorite thing to do is upload a short video from my phone, and send my family the share link. Much better than uploading to YouTube / Facebook. I also do photography, and love how easy it is to share a gallery in a few seconds. When I'm done in Lightroom, I just export JPGs to the directory, and copy over the share link to the gallery app. Great user experience!

I'm glad NC is continuing development, and it's interesting that they're adding federation to the client, but I'm not sure it's a feature I'd use. Though I'd like to setup a mastodon instance for myself, there's too much docker/nodejs bloat and hastle, and I've yet to successfully get an instance online. (Even if I did, I'm not sure I'd use it very much.)

<comment><USER13> I started using NC for docs and calendar. Really happy with it. things work great and sharing things via links works great. Especially like how you can add expiry to shared links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> NextCloud, ForgeFed, ValueFlows, MoodleNet, Pleroma, Mastodon, PixelFed ("soon"), PeerTube, WriteFreely, Anancus... (so many more)

The ActivityPub grassroots is slowly growing.

<comment><USER15> How will these systems defend against spam, click farms, troll armies, and AI assisted or powered sock puppeting when they get big and/or influential?

This is usually what kills federated and decentralized communication platforms. They can work fine as long as they are too niche for bad actors to target, but as soon as there is money to be made or political influence to be had from targeting them they are destroyed by abuse.

It's a major threat for the centralized platforms, and those are easier to defend.

Today's Internet is a battlefield in a global information war and new systems must be designed accordingly. Unfortunately most efforts that I see in these areas still make optimistic assumptions and underestimate the sophistication and determination of bad actors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Instances that don't police this get silenced or defederated. Much of the fediverse is made up of small invite-only instances that share information on bad actors like this. The bigger ones have mod teams and are generally run by people who don't equivocate on keeping bad actors to protect ad revenue.

edit: This is, at a minimum, a good experiment to see if these kinds of propaganda are inherent to social media or only possible because ad-funded silos are loathe to ban obvious bad actors and not enable them with their tools.

I'm on the side of blaming Facebook and Twitter. They didn't create propaganda, but they sure did make it cheap and easy.

<comment><USER15> That's a start, but my concern is that the volunteer militia will get swamped and burnt out when the real attacks come.

Right now Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms are too small for a Cambridge Analytica / Russian FSB or other similar caliber actors to bother with. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. are where most of the users are so that's where most of the effort will go.

If these platforms ever "tip" into mainstream adoption, prepare to be targeted by organized crime gangs running financial scams, nation states, corporate PR firms, and other organizations with hundred million to billion dollar budgets.

What I really wanted to do was to stress the fact that this is a battlefield. One of the trends I see in the early 21st century is the dematerialization of warfare. Wars can now be fought entirely online. Governments can be toppled. Economies can be destroyed. Corporations can be imploded. All this can be done with a mixture of cyber attacks and propaganda. As a result we are seeing the redirection of military budgets toward these things. The sort of spam and amateur brigading that most volunteers are used to dealing with on social forums and platforms is nothing compared to what the big social media platforms are facing now and _that_ is nothing compared to what's coming. Billions of dollars are currently being spent by PR firms, advertisers, and governments to develop increasingly advanced AI and big data powered propaganda platforms to weaponize the Internet. In the future we'll probably see fully automated AI driven propaganda, what I've started calling "con artistry at scale."

Federated and decentralized platforms are very vulnerable in ways that silos are not, and this has to be thought about. It's easy to create quiet apparently friendly and normal Sybil nodes that passively suck down data and then use that data to mount active attacks from other directions. Volunteers may fight active attacks, but they may have no way of knowing which apparently normal nodes are actually passive participants in those attacks. Also keep in mind that "attacks only get better." With each attack the attackers learn, and it's generally easier to attack than to defend (in cyber-security in general, not just here).

<comment><USER16> I'm on masto regularly and the community is much more pleasant there (than say Twitter). A lot of users attribute that pleasantness to decentralization. I call BS. It's because it's a tiny self-selected group that wants the opposite of what Twitter provides.

You're absolutely right: once this tips, and people join because that's what you have to join to talk to people and not because they're looking for a real change, then it'll be unbearable.

The best thing that can happen to fediverse is that it will continue to grow incrementally, so that at each step they can see the missing moderation tools and build them before it all blows up.

Personally I think we'll look back on these massively open networks where everybody can reply to everybody as an anomaly.

<comment><USER17> > Personally I think we'll look back on these massively open networks where > everybody can reply to everybody as an anomaly.

It's cyclical.

\- The internet and online communities (BBSes) started out decentralized.

\- Then came AOL / Compuserve / etc. Centralized platforms.

\- The web broke up those platforms and shuffled everything around.

\- Then the current Google / Facebook / Twitter megaplatforms arose and that's the state we're in.

So it's logical that we're ready for a decentralized cycle but over time, users will forget why decentralization is good and another big platform will rise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> These extra features and thus the complexity are the opposite of what I'd like in a self-hosted file share system.

Why does everything have to be bloated into oblivion like this. We need more purpose built software...

What i like? OpenBSD for firewalls, and public facing terminal servers. Just lovely.

/rant.

<comment><USER19> Most of those features are optional. So if you don't care about some functionality just uninstall the specific 'App'. Sure that is not as secure as not having those Apps in the first place, but I think, in general, Nextcloud is moving into the right direction, as many of their use-cases require a tightly integrated but wide set of features.

<comment><USER20> > Most of those features are optional. So if you don't care about some > functionality just uninstall the specific 'App'.

That's true, but unless there are new developers joining to create/support these apps the addition of these new features may spread the developers too thin. Personally I'd rather have a robust set of smaller features than a buggy implementation of a lot of features. The latter is okay if it's just a "for fun" type of project. But I use nextcloud to keep my calendar/contacts/file- sync, so it's really not okay if the core functionality is unstable. So while I can uninstall these apps, I personally worry that it means less attention will be paid to the core features.

<comment><USER5> That is like saying ice cream makers should focus on the 'core' tastes, claiming that that is banana and vanilla because you like those.

For you calendar and contacts are core for a file sync and share software? Above somebody also asked us to focus on 'core', meaning adding ACL's and probably dropping the calendar/contacts.

So it's like the fable where god decides to ask people what weather they want and everyone wants something different so he decides to go back to doing whatever the fuck he wanted. We just keep letting ourselves guided by contributors and customers...

<comment><USER20> > That is like saying ice cream makers should focus on the 'core' tastes, > claiming that that is banana and vanilla because you like those.

From my point of view, I'm suggesting the ice cream makers should stop trying to make paninis to go with the ice cream and instead focus on making sure the ice cream cones don't have holes in the bottom.

I nearly lost all my files because server-side encryption went wonky. That's core functionality that should, imho, be fixed before going off into ActivityPub.

More generally, I have trouble being enthusiastic about "We added activitypub" focus because of what it seemed to do to MediaGoblin. That project seemed to be chugging along and making steady progress until it seemed they focused a lot of their energy into ActivityPub. Since then, MediaGoblin hasn't really had any of its functionality updated, as far as I can tell. They certainly don't seem to have released a new version in over 2 years.

<comment><USER5> All for avoiding Panini's, but we're a Content Collaboration Platform - <USER2> Nextcloud Social fits certainly well in that.

WRT server-side encryption, it gets work all the time, though it is mostly an enterprise feature that gets love when enterprises pay for that. Very few volunteers work on it, if any. Help is of course welcome, in the end - <USER3> somebody pays for it, or somebody puts in free time.

This is true for every open source project, of course.

WRT MediaGoblin, no worries, it isn't like Nextcloud Social has all our attention. I guestimate it is at most 5% of our engineering time, if that. That is enough to make it work and improve it release over release, and we'll put in more if there is customer interest or lots of community contributions, but we always start such new things small. Talk started as a night-long- hacking-to-prove-it-could-be-done and now has 3-4 engineers on it full-time, because customers want to pay for it. Which also means it doesn't take away from other things - if we didn't do it, we simply couldn't afford these engineers in the first place. It isn't like they would work on server-side encryption ;-)

<comment><USER20> Okay, that makes sense and makes me feel better about it. Thanks for responding and clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ugh I just wanted a working file manager

<comment><USER22> Agreed. All this added complexity only serves to increase the attack surface of something I _really_ want to keep safe and secure.

<comment><USER23> +1 on this. My whole reason for using NC has been to remove anything like social features, and let me control sharing.

Maybe all this will be optional, but the direction seems opposite to my needs. And the risks from 'extending' the network too.

<comment><USER5> It is all apps. You can even disable sharing. Heck, you can disable the Files UI...

Note that most people use Nextcloud to work with others and features like these are crucial to their productivity. In the end, we're guided by community contributions and customer demand... Luckily you can disable things you don't like :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> « and soon Diaspora are part of this same network [ie. ActivityPub] » — I was surprised to read that, and after a quick check, it's not looking like it'll happen anytime soon, sadly.

diaspora* is one of the most famous and successful open, federated social networks out there, yet it does not implement the protocol which is gaining unprecedented traction across a large number of implementations. Hopefully, Nextcloud implementing ActivityPub is yet another reason for diaspora* to follow the move.

<comment><USER25> Is it really? Not being snarky here, but I joined diaspora early on and a year or so after the untimely death of the co-founder the project felt like it was going no where. 6 years later it feels like I never hear anything about it, and ActivityPub is almost a must for any serious "open" social network now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds great, but honestly I hoped that federated calls would finally make it...

I mean, Federation is a core feature of Nextcloud and instead of finishing the work on Talk, we have a second (probably similarly incomplete) feature now, which needs to be polished for the next major releases.

I don't want to be negative here.

 _I love Nextcloud_ and the work that is being done around it! It is just that sometimes I wonder about the priorities and in this case, I wish improving existing things would have come before introducing new things.

Besides that, I am quite excited to try out the new social features :-)

</comment><comment><USER26> I really like the upspin approach for federated self-hosting of userdata (for lack of a better term) in that it builds a platform for it that apps like nextcloud and others would build on top of.

I'm not saying its the right solution, but I think trying to get the layers right to make self-hosting a wider and more reliable reality is only going to happen by building the right opensource platforms/components first.

</comment><comment><USER27> Are these guys courting VC funding? This looks less like a feature their users actually asked for than a bullet point for a sales pitch.

<comment><AUTHOR> They've been on Mastodon for over a year. I think they just wanted to be able to see their Nextcloud stuff from there.

[https://mastodon.xyz/@nextcloud](https://mastodon.xyz/@nextcloud)

<comment><USER5> Yup. Also, VC funding? Heck no, we started Nextcloud because VC funding had bankrupted and blown up ownCloud... I mean, seriously. It is now owned by a German real estate agent...

<comment><USER28> By the way. Thanks a lot for your work with Nedtcloud. It's really great.

<comment><USER5> Pleasure, thanks for the kind words!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have been using NC for a few years now and I am mostly happy with it. Contacts, calendars, sharing, photo auto uploads all work with my Android phone.

My problem is the software is pretty slow and from a security perspective I'd be hesitant to expose it to the greater internet. That's just my gut feeling.

<comment><USER30> I feel the same. Basically, I wouldn't like to publish the address of my personal Nextcloud server to anyone (unless I am sharing a file privately with a friend). Fortunately, the social features are not built into the Nextcloud core, rather they are in a separate app. So we can just forget about it if we don't like it.

<comment><USER5> If you're not sure about the security you can firewall it of course, but keep in mind we pay 5K to anyone who can find a remote execute vulnerability in Nextcloud (and smaller amounts for smaller bugs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> my org just moved to FileCloud from NextCloud and it's working out so far. FileCloud is not opensource. but the base functionalities are solid especially sync and user management.

</comment><comment><USER32> Am I the only one that hates that the "fediverse" is not on the web?

We didn't need a separate protocol/app and closed servers to do what are actually just blog posts and replies.

<comment><USER30> What do you mean by "not on the web"? It is accessible on the web. Everybody with a web browser can see public posts and replies. For writing new posts, you need an account though. Here is the public account of Mastodon's founder: [https://mastodon.social/@Gargron](https://mastodon.social/@Gargron)

<comment><USER32> It's on the web like Facebook is on the web.

I can't post or reply by creating a web page, and identity is not email or dns, but specific to whatever mastadon instance I register with.

I already have a domain, blog, and email. Posts, replies, likes, etc. But mastadon doesn't work with the web, or my existing web identity - instead it's entirely based on federated ActivityPub servers plus various extensions.

<comment><USER33> So get a blog that complies with ActivityPub or host a Pleroma instance with an account that mirrors your blogposts / posts them on the fediverse. Shouldn't be hard.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I Hate Template Markets - <AUTHOR> http://akveo.com/blog/why-i-hate-template-markets/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! We are the developers of blur-admin that got trending on github and we wanted to share our story with the community.</comment>


Using a VPN may make you less secure - <AUTHOR> https://stu2b50.dev/posts/using-a-vpn-may09f83 <comment><USER2> It bothers me that VPN providers advertise how using public wifi is "insecure" and that you need a VPN to be safe. It's a bald faced lie and they know it.

Also regarding the article, you can prevent your ISP from seeing your DNS lookups by using DNS over HTTPS such as with a pi-hole: [https://docs.pi- hole.net/guides/dns-over-https/](https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns-over- https/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have always felt this way about VPN's and they become the gate-keepers of your data. Then they are "hacked" and it becomes public information for sale.</comment>


Steve Wozniak Still Doesn't Quite Get Why Steve Jobs Was a Genius - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-just-proved-he-has-no-idea-what-steve-jobs-was-al.html? <comment><USER2> Better headline: Writer Still Doesn't Quite Get What Wozniak Values.

Also, some unfair cherry picking here, like:

 _" Woz got his facts slightly wrong--it's not only the watchbands that differ from a less expensive to more expensive Apple Watch, it's also the case itself. In the more expensive editions, it's made of 18-karat gold"_

Woz's comment was speaking specifically to the products priced from $500 to $1100. The gold case watches are $10k+.

Just an odd article for me. It's not news that Woz is technically focused, and not terribly impressed with things like aesthetic design. There's also many other documented reasons he might not think Jobs was a genius.

</comment><comment><USER3> There seems to be an inordinate amount of Jobs worship in the business press.

I wonder what qualifies someone as a genius? A lot of the ideas Jobs is given credit for were swirling around the Silicon Valley/Homebrew Computing Club milieu at the time. Maybe it just took someone with the energy and ego to put himself in charge of commercializing all those ideas. If that's the case, I'm a lot less impressed by Jobs and a lot more impressed by the real technical geniuses who actualized his visions.

Don't meant to be overly critical here, I'm just naturally skeptical of "larger than life" personalities. Upon investigating their biographies they frequently turn out to be credit-hogging egomaniacs. Not all the time, but frequently enough that I'm skeptical.

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing I don't quite get about Wozniak is this. By all accounts, he was a technical genius/prodigy. Early Apple would never have flourished without his Herculean efforts, regardless of Steve Jobs' business savvy. But while people may debate whether Steve Jobs was really a genius in any sense of the word, there is no doubt that 70s/80s Apple was only the first act in an astonishing career. The later successes were no less impressive. Whatever Jobs had going for him in the beginning, he still had it at the end.

After early Apple, what did Wozniak do with his talents?

I don't want to sound uncharitable. I know Wozniak suffered head injuries in a plane crash, which maybe made it impossible for him to function at his previous levels of technical wizardry. I know not all accomplishments garner headlines. And regardless of what happened after, starting Apple is still an incredible achievement. But I'm curious if anyone has answers to this question. I feel like it could tell us something interesting about the world.

<comment><USER2> He founded the EFF, and spends a fair amount of time on charitable efforts. He does have a day job ([http://primarydata.com/](http://primarydata.com/)), but it doesn't appear to define him.

Basically, he just seems like someone who doesn't define success in the same way that Jobs would.

<comment><USER5> Well his talent was completely different in nature from Jobs' talent, but it still yielded some world changing technology. Maybe the answer is that his sort of talent is not as rare as you'd think, or easier to replace with teams of less talented individuals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> he doens't get it because he personally had to save Job's ass on a number of occasions, and in fact, Jobs kept getting himself fired over stupid shit.

The Macintosh was floating on the sales of the Apple II. Without the Apple II, the company would have failed. The IIgs is arguably a better computer. Woz did more important genius type work for Apple, Jobs did a lot of great work, but not genius level.

Jobs has a lot of charisma and you can't really put that in a bottle and measure it. Jobs doubtfully had an IQ on par with Wozniak. However Jobs made a lot of amazing things happen that wouldn't have. Doesn't make his brain genius level. Like most bosses, he took a lot of great ideas other people had, and solutions other people solved and helped a lot of management put it all together.

</comment><comment><USER7> Woz nailed it.

Also, nevermind the bands for a moment. I had a digital Timex watch in the 1980s that was more responsive than the iWatch. Form eclipses function now. That wasn't a thing that happened in his day.

Back then, when you got an Apple ][+, you got schematics, port assignments, ROM and DOS listings. It was truly _your_ computer, and no piece of it would ever need be a mystery. It was a computer that made love to developers.

Look at how OSX is developed now. It's getting iOSified. It's not open source. You can find random processes firing up on it like Wifi_Agent or kernel_task that take meaningful chunks of CPU time, but they don't really give you the tools to easily analyze what's going on anymore. The firmware, OS, and hardware have become opaque.

That was all Steve Jobs' influence. That and the iPhone.

I got rid of my phone years ago. It's annoying. I use my computer for communication. I am a developer, but Apple doesn't give much of a hoot about us. The Mac App Store is dead. XCode is really unpleasant. Whatever they're doing in VR now, they're not playing well with others.

I would like to think if Wozniak were running the show, that he just wouldn't have allowed things to head this developer- and computer-hostile direction.</comment>


Ask HN: For those of you self-employed, what is your health insurance? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I have a high-deductible health plan (HDHP) from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Colorado, associated with a health savings account (HSA). It has worked well for me and I recommend that general route to other self-employed people, but man have the premiums shot up in the past few years. It was ~$80/month when I signed up (2005 or so, maybe). The same plan is now around $400/month.

For dental, I pay out of pocket but use a discount card (Vital Savings by Aetna). The discount card basically lets you pay the discounted rate that the insurance companies have negotiated with the dentist, which can be significantly lower.

</comment><comment><USER3> I live in a country that will provide healthcare no matter what my income is. Pretty nifty, huh?

<comment><USER4> Not if the country is Cuba.

<comment><USER5> Have you heard of Canada?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm of two minds on this thread. On one hand, I'm surprised at the poor quality of comments ("vitamins", "The government", etc). On the other hand, I sort of place it on the OP's shoulders due to the fact that he didn't list any domain/restriction on this incredibly generic question.

We are a diverse group here of 100+ countries. If you ask a generic question, you're going to get 100+ countries' worth of experiences. In a case like this, it's just not helpful to anyone to throw this question out to 100+ countries - what value is it to a Canadian what someone from Thailand pays for health insurance? Zero. What value is it to someone from England who has four kids and a spouse what a 20yr old American on his parents' insurance "pays"?

I wish this thread had been better. I'd love to know this information about my fellow USA HN'ers. Hopefully the next thread someone creates on this topic will be a bit more specific and we can have intelligent discussions.

</comment><comment><USER7> You have to give more specific details (country/state,marital status etc.) before a reasonable answer can be provided. But to give you a general idea, being self employed in the US can cost anywhere from $100-$1000 per month depending on how kind of insurance you need/want with deductibles, co- insurance limits, out of pocket expenses, in-network vs. out-network etc.

If you want to do some comparisons for US, try <http://www.ehealthinsurance.com/>

In my case, I use my wife's health insurance from her job and don't bother buying it myself.If I had to, it would probably cost me at least $500 per month.

</comment><comment><USER8> My partner has a job in academia which can't pay the rent but includes full health and dental. Before we got together it was basically a $20/month high deductible catastrophic plan mixed with some prayer to FSM.

</comment><comment><USER9> Those that do answer, please mention what country and/or State youre in as things different depending on your locale. Freelancers union for instance does not offer health insurance in california.

</comment><comment><USER10> We did a HDHP at one point. Nowadays, the premiums are just too fucking high (~300-400 a month).

Have a spouse that can get good benefits.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not self-employed, but I purchased my own insurance to cover a 6 month gap recently. I found that I could get reasonably priced health insurance as a member of ACM.

</comment><comment><USER12> None! However, I will soon have an office job with good insurance and am very much looking forward to going to the dentist.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm Australian. I insure with BUPA, who have gobbled up the insurer who gobbled up my original insurer (Community Mutual). Because we have a public health system as a backstop, private health cover is a no-brainer in this country. I'm paying about $550 per quarter.

That said: one thing that annoys me about the Australian private health market is how dumb shit I get bundled in my payment.

I don't want a bloody reiki rebate. I'd rather you refunded my MRIs, thanks ("not an outpatient service").

</comment><comment><USER14> Freelancers Union

</comment><comment><USER15> The government.

</comment><comment><USER16> To answer your stated question: My ex was career military. He spent more than 20 years in the army before retiring and we were married more than twenty years. Thus, as long as I don't remarry, I am technically entitled to free medical care for life through the military medical system. However, I never bothered to renew my military ID when it expired and I haven't seen a doctor in like six and half years, so it might be difficult or impossible for me to take advantage of those benefits. I don't really care.

To provide info that might be useful on the assumption that you are American and that what you really want to know is how to best take care of your needs: New laws mean some Americans can get covered under their parent's healthcare plan up until age 26, even if married. This isn't necessarily free, but for some people it opens up additional opitions they wouldn't otherwise have.

</comment><comment><USER17> vitamins</comment>


Real-time lightning map, worldwide - <AUTHOR> http://www.blitzortung.org/Webpages/index.php?lang=en&page_0=30 <comment><USER2> Just before seeing this on HN, I randomly came across this article on "dark lightning" \-- a burst of gamma rays that accompanies the RF burst that precedes visible lightning.

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130424210319.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130424210319.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> They also have an overlay for Google maps:

[http://www.lightningmaps.org/realtime](http://www.lightningmaps.org/realtime)

<comment><USER4> I believe this one also shows you an approximation of the thunder, so if you are close enough to a strike you can actually tell when you will hear the thunder. We were playing with it over the weekend and it was surprisingly accurate!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I see they have engineered their own detectors [1], but could cellphones be used as EMP detectors? They have GPS and antennas after all.

[1] [http://www.blitzortung.org/Webpages/index.php?lang=en&page=3](http://www.blitzortung.org/Webpages/index.php?lang=en&page=3)

<comment><USER6> You just need to find a Maxwell HSN-1000 Nuclear Event Detector. Very handy part.

[http://www.maxwell.com/products/microelectronics/docs/hsn100...](http://www.maxwell.com/products/microelectronics/docs/hsn1000_rev3.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Hah! Cute part. I'm curious - do you just happen to know of this part or have you been involved with projects that use if?

<comment><USER8> Softbank in Japan did release a phone with a Geiger counter, so it's probably not that far off...

[1] [http://www.softbank.jp/mobile/product/smartphone/107sh/featu...](http://www.softbank.jp/mobile/product/smartphone/107sh/feature/feature_3/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe it's the sounds generated by the app, but I like to think that my furious clicking causes some of the lightning bolts.

</comment><comment><USER10> Was anyone else who has played the game Defcon a bit disturbed by this?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON_%28video_game%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON_%28video_game%29)

</comment><comment><USER11> the range on those detectors is amazing.

<comment><USER12> It's huge. Normally, the curvature of the earth would make it impossible to detect anything at such distances. But the ionosphere's lower levels act like a waveguide [1], (and this tells you which frequencies you should listen on to take advantage of this).

The craziest phenomenon of this kind is whistlers [2]. Lightning strikes can be heard on radio at a point on the earth exactly symmetrical to the source, using the equator as plane of symmetry. In fact, the signal bounces around back and forth between the two points, following a line on the magnetosphere. The ones closer to the poles have longer paths, and their frequencies can get spread out over 3-4 seconds as they bounce around.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93ionosphere_wavegu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93ionosphere_waveguide)

[2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler_%28radio%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler_%28radio%29)

<comment><USER13> Cool stuff. I'm partial to the theory that prior mass extinctions have involved a meteor strike causing a whistler like effect on the opposite side of the plane causing volcanic action. eg [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_igneous_province#Meteori...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_igneous_province#Meteorite- induced_formation)

[http://charles_w.tripod.com/dweber/antipode_theory_d.pdf](http://charles_w.tripod.com/dweber/antipode_theory_d.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey! This site makes strange sounds, which drove me crazy - I've thought my hard drive is going to die..

</comment><comment><USER15> It seems to me that these strikes are happening in clusters at the same time 1000s of miles away. Is this related to radiation from the sun providing the tipping point?

</comment><comment><USER16> Worldwide, if you don't count Africa...

<comment><USER17> They only have so many volunteers, to be fair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Used this to find webcams of places with thunderstorms rolling in, and found this here in Switzerland [0], quite fun to watch when you skip through the history. Day started out lovely but now they are getting hammered.

[0] [http://palacegstaad.roundshot.ch/](http://palacegstaad.roundshot.ch/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, the Alps appear to be going through the apocalypse.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't know how complete it claims to be (in terms of what fraction of lightning strikes in notionally covered areas it catches), but right now there's a storm very close to me (Cambridge, UK) and it's displaying a good fraction, but not all, of the strikes I see and hear.

</comment><comment><USER21> How are they getting the data?

<comment><USER22> (This is getting a bit pedantic but this is HN so we like to be accurate. And I learned the word on HN so might as well pass it on.)

Several of the other answers have mentioned "triangulation" but that's not quite right--that would imply that each listening station measures an angle towards the lightning source. But they don't--instead, they collect non- directional data consisting of arrival time stamps.

I believe the word for what they're doing is "trilateration".

Edit: I originally said "multilateration" but it turns out that's not quite right, either.

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

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

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

The More You Know.

<comment><USER23> From your own source: "Multilateration is a navigation technique based on the measurement of the difference in distance to two stations at known locations that broadcast signals at known times....Multilateration should not be confused with trilateration, which uses distances or absolute measurements of time-of-flight from three or more sites"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So do the lines between stations and a strike mean that detector heard the strike? That's incredible if so... there's a station in California picking up strikes over Missouri.

<comment><USER25> From their FAQ, they pick up RF pulses, tag it with a GPS timestamp, and correlate on a central server.

"A lightning is a pulse not comparable to a broadcast signal on a single frequency. Such a pulse can be described best as a interference of several frequencies. Therefore a ferrite rod for lightning detection has to be a wide- band antenna."

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Europe: 1489 strikes

Oceania: 28 strikes

Asia: 0 strikes

South America: 913 strikes

North America: 15,826 strikes!!

<comment><USER5> It's not the reality, it's just reflecting the coverage.

<comment><USER27> True, of course, but it's also worth remarking that there are huge spatial differences in lightning frequency due to the specific mechanisms causing thunderstorms.

I live in the U.S., and you rarely see t-storms on the Pacific coast here because the nearby Pacific Ocean is cool (due, in turn, to cool water brought down by the clockwise-turning North Pacific Gyre). But t-storms are very common in the Midwest and South due to the presence of warm, moist air there.

<comment><USER26> We get plenty of thunder here in the North East as well, even the occasional instance of thunder snow. Lightning is much more common in a majority of the US, excepting much of the lower west coast and southwest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Doesn't work for Japan. I'm in a Thunderstorm right now in Tokyo. Nothing shows up on the map.

<comment><USER29> Add imaginary "for/in USA only" to every title on HN.

<comment> tech-no-logical not in this case, as blitzortnung is german ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think this mashed up with other "radars" like flight and ship radar would be impressive.

<comment><USER31> Flights (ADS-B): [http://www.flightradar24.com/60,15/6](http://www.flightradar24.com/60,15/6)

Ship Traffic (AIS): [https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/](https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> cool, I'm looking forward for this evening's thunderstorm to confirm if it's actually/acurately working :) Average delay appears to be between 3s and 10s here in Europe, but closer to 3s.

</comment><comment><USER33> What do the lines mean?

<comment><USER34> They show the detectors that picked up the strikes. I don't know if a single detector can determine distance, or if the strike location is triangulated using angles from multiple detectors.

[edit] Oh, the detectors are quite simple. They use GPS for position and time and report time-of-arrival of the elctromagnetic pulses. The server then uses that information to figure out where the strikes occurred.

[http://www.blitzortung.org/Webpages/index.php?lang=en&page=3](http://www.blitzortung.org/Webpages/index.php?lang=en&page=3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Northern Texas is just being pounded right now.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is so cool!!

<comment><USER37> This is absolutely amazing indeed! I wonder if the maps of blitzortnung (please change the name! To blitztracker or something.) match with data from commercial/public weather stations like metox:

[http://meteox.com/h.aspx?r=&jaar=-3&soort=loop1uur&lightning...](http://meteox.com/h.aspx?r=&jaar=-3&soort=loop1uur&lightning=1)

Hard to compare as blitzortnung is realtime. Hmm.

<comment><USER38> re: the name - unsure if you realise or not, but 'blitzortung' is German for "lightning location (or locating)" :-)

<comment><USER37> Yes, I realise that. I live in the Netherlands; which means I have had german language lessons at secondary school.

I came up with blitztracker because everybody knows the word blitz and the word tracker. Easier to write and still keeps the german touch :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Nice map

</comment><comment><USER40> Worldwide, but you link to the US page?</comment>