React-flow: a library to create interactive node-based graphs - <AUTHOR> https://webkid.io/blog/react-flow-node-based-graph-library/ <comment><USER2> There are few similar libraries. I think most feature reach is [https://github.com/projectstorm/react- diagrams](https://github.com/projectstorm/react-diagrams) , but there is also [https://github.com/DrummerHead/react-flow- diagram](https://github.com/DrummerHead/react-flow-diagram) [https://github.com/alibaba/GGEditor](https://github.com/alibaba/GGEditor) , actually I've found about 15 different js open source react and non-react editors for node-based UI. But unfortunately most of them is not very extensible. One of the reason is that the authors prefer to store state inside component, so it's impossible to create non-trivial behaviour.

<comment><USER3> That's why we tried to make this library as simple as possible. It doesn't do any state updates besides the positions. You can easily store state inside nodes and change it as seen in the custom node example [https://react- flow.netlify.app/custom-node](https://react-flow.netlify.app/custom-node)

<comment><USER4> One thing that seems to be missing though is slot names.

For example if the nodes are objects in C++ and the edges are relations, you want to know the names of the members that point to the other nodes.

Labels on the edges would also be nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like the idea that the library doesn't try to do automatic layout, and you need to specify a nodes X/Y coords.

There are a few similar libraries where their layout algorithm is super frustarting and its implementation's so hard coupled it's really hard to change or use your own.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is great, and I was just now preparing to sit down to slog through implementing something like along these lines. You just saved me a lot of time.

<comment><USER7> I'm in a similar position -- This is great, nice work! Looking forward to experimenting with the library.

There are a lot of similarly great React libraries that focus on just one high-level component. A few of my favorites that have saved me tons of time:

\- react-grid-layout ([https://github.com/STRML/react-grid- layout](https://github.com/STRML/react-grid-layout)) for draggable / resizable grids with an easily-serializable layout.

\- react-mosaic ([https://github.com/nomcopter/react- mosaic](https://github.com/nomcopter/react-mosaic)) for tiling / movable window layouts.

\- react-table ([https://react-table.js.org/](https://react-table.js.org/)) for a very powerful, expandable table implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can somebody explain to me how/what this tool is used for? I have an idea but im not quite sure

<comment><USER9> In tools like Node-Red ([https://nodered.org/](https://nodered.org/)), although they have their own implementation.

Any visual coding scenario really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I made a react-based visual tree demo a couple of weeks ago.

[https://ldd.github.io/react-tech-tree/](https://ldd.github.io/react-tech- tree/)

It imitates a long X-Men family tree and slay the spire's room selection.

But this seems pretty cool, and a natural next-step to what I wanted to make.

</comment><comment><USER11> Would be nice to have GraphViz interfaces, such as import/export to DOT file format, and auto-layout using a WebGraphViz plugin:

[http://www.webgraphviz.com/](http://www.webgraphviz.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This looks useful, but also quite big - larger than react-dom: [https://bundlephobia.com/result?p=react-flow- firstname.lastname@example.com](https://email@example.com)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately you are right. There are some heavy dependencies because of the zoom and panning and the dragging behaviour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks great but unfortunate naming means SEO will always compete against the flow type checking library even if you google "react-flow".

</comment><comment><USER14> Would this be appropriate to layer on top of a tornado app toN provide realtime insight into the event loop?</comment>


An Incomprehensible Retirement - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/money-banking/875282f4fd57

<comment><USER3> I think the Money Moustache guy has a much better take on this than someone trying to figure out the complexities of finance.

Yes there is a limit to how much you can put into a retirement account that _isn't taxed_ by the government, but there is no limit on how much of your income you can save, caveat you need some of it to live on.

And while saving and investing can get as complicated as you want it can also be greatly simplified with funds investing.

<comment><USER4> I'm a big fan of the "lazy portfolio." Three funds, nothing more: Vanguard total domestic stock, total international stock and total bond market. Buy and hold forever (rebalancing towards more conservative assets as you near retirement).

<comment><USER5> Vanguard even has target funds that do exactly this, rebalancing included.

<comment><USER6> What are the names of those funds?

<comment><USER7> VTSMX, VGTSX, VBMFX - with corresponding Admiral versions if you have enough money, which are the same funds with even lower expense ratios.

Edit: You wanted the rebalancing funds (those are the component funds.) The rebalancing funds are called "LifeStrategy" - see VASGX for an example.

<comment><USER4> There's also the "Target Retirement" family of funds. I'm currently in the 2050 fund, VFIFX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I don't agree with everything this article says, this is the money quote: "If professionals who benefit from the economies of scale cannot reasonably be expected to provide me with a stable retirement without outside intervention, how can I be expected to do that for myself?"

And is spot on IMO. Whatever else is going on, we as a society are doing poorly at this particular type of specialization. We have done insufficient incentive engineering to make sure people don't regularly get scammed. It is not a solved problem, it is not an easy problem. But it looks like we aren't even working towards a solution right now.

</comment><comment><USER5> The reason retirement doesn't work the same way as a bicycle shop is because the incentives can get badly misaligned. With a bicycle shop, the better you are at fixing bicycles, the more money you make, at least to a good-enough order of approximation. Taking your customer's money just isn't possible unless you give them back a working bicycle. But retirement--especially "defined contribution" retirement--has a much weaker requirement. You give money to a mutual fund, and then who knows what'll happen? The mutual fund takes their fee off the top regardless. You let the company that's servicing your 401k or IRA pick funds for you and they'll just pick some plausible combination of their own funds. At least with pensions they have to maximize their return to have any hope of profiting.

Probably the closest analogy to retirement is auto repair and maintenance. You go in for an oil change and you get back a hundred-something-point inspection where they want to do a thousand dollars worth of work on your car. If you don't know anything about cars, there's no way to tell whether they're ripping you off. With retirement it's even worse, because you started off by giving them the money without any guarantee of how much money makes its way back to you. And the only solution is to actually know something about investing, which was pretty much what you were paying these companies for in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it just me, or is this article incredibly full of crap? First he goes on about how the Fed is lying about inflation, then he kicks OWS. If he threw in a claim that Fannie Mae caused the housing bubble, we'd have the insider trifecta.

<comment><USER10> Not just you, there's so much wrong about this article that I don't know where to begin. My father is a retired Statistician, and I know that the computation of inflation is a seriously considered matter by a lot of smart people. The statement that "What's important to note is that the government is incentivized to report as low of an inflation number as possible and to keep real inflation as high as tolerable." is completely false.

<comment><USER11> You appeal to vague authority. Inflation is looked at by smart people, but many of the smart people whose job it is to define inflation computation are appointed, paid and appreciated according to the perception of inflation.

Bernanke is destroying the USD. It might even be the right thing to do, but he is definitely not frank about what and why he is doing it. Similarly, there might be good reasons to overinflate and underreport - but the official explanation and methodology around things like owner-equivalent-rent and hedonistic correction are ad-hoc, not verifiable or repeatable, aquifer random and somehow mostly reduce reported inflation.

<comment><USER9> CPI closely matches every other inflation index, like the Billion Price Index. In my experience people who claim The Man is lying about inflation usually are just saying "zomg oil" or another small handfuls of commodities, and don't really have any evidence beyond "everyone knows the government is a bunch of lying liars".

Oil may be rising faster than inflation, or not, and energy costs could even be rising faster than inflation. That would probably have profound implications for the economy, but it don't make it inflation.

<comment><USER11> The BPI was apparently constructed to track CPI - there is no chance it would track as closely as it does otherwise. But I can't find any documentation about how its weighting is set or updated - can you point me to such documentation?

Lets ignore subtle semantics, shall we? Definitions of inflation differ - <USER2> restrict it to discussions of money supply (in which case, CPI is not inflation), and some to cost of living (in which case, CPI is a measure of inflation, but not necessarily a good or unbiased one)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We can't really even match the long-term stock market averages. We tend to make more money when times are good (when the market is high), and less money when times are bad (when the market is low), so if we invest money as we save/earn then we're generally buying high.

At some point you wonder if you should just give up on saving and instead invest it into a business or a duplex or something.

<comment><USER13> Buying a duplex _is_ saving. You're placing your wealth in a physical structure (and tenants, perhaps) instead of a bank.

Different, but not so different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _As our society discovers and creates, we must cope with our combined knowledge growing faster than our individual capacity to know things. Our solution - thus far - has been to specialize. When what is known expands, each individual becomes responsible for less breadth and more depth.

Back in the olden days there was only one kind of computer scientist. Before that there was only one kind of car mechanic. And even before that there was only one kind of doctor, who was also a barber. We used to know a lot less about cutting hair._

Except that there has also been a trend _away_ from specialisation. e.g. food: instead of a baker, butcher, grocer and fishmonger, you now have a supermarket. e.g. household goods: instead of a chandler, tailor, cooper or haberdashery, we have clothing & household shops.

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't there substantial evidence that Goldman Sachs were telling clients to make investments into areas they were themselves betting against? I am not sure if they are the best people to use as support for any economic argument, but especially given the wealth of other critics of pension sustainability who don't have such a track record.

<comment><USER16> They are also one of the players in rise in the price of oil.

It's good to be the king. (Or at least deep capture the media, the administration and the Congress.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What does FED stand for?

<comment><USER18> The Federal Reserve which is the Central Bank of the United States.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sometimes I wonder if the way out of the recession is to declare 401K and IRA failed policies and just let people have the money and spend it now to get the economy moving.

<comment><USER4> And then what will those people fund their retirements with?

<comment><USER20> The money that is moved from a 401k to the market, so they can spend and save it as they wish. You don't have to spend all the money you make that doesn't end up in a 401k; in fact, if you do, you're doing it wrong.

The only people whose retirement would be adversely affected are mutual fund managers.

<comment><USER5> How about everyone who has to suddenly start paying taxes on the money they're saving for retirement? 401k is just a tax shield. You want to _raise_ taxes to _stimulate_ the economy??

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "The occupy movement rallied against what they perceived to be a rigged game: a financial system that required their participation but did not offer them a seat at the table. Then they went home - maybe because the weather got bad"

Occupy Wall Street was cleared out by police starting at 1 AM on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011. It was done at 1 AM as they only had to deal with people staying at the park at that time. They arrested 200 people in a well-planned operation. One of the reasons given for clearing the park was unsanitary conditions, which I can personally attest was BS - OWS was always sanitary, and when the mayor began using sanitation as a reason to clear things out OWS became fanatical about cleanliness. I watched people sweep the same spot of ground multiple times an hour. Compare that to the parks and recreation cuts where some NYC parks can go more than a week without any cleanup.

The police pushed back attempts to re-occupy the park in the day of November 15th and November 16th. A more organized effort to get back in the park was tried on New Year's Eve, and was met by pepper spray, dozens of arrests etc.

While this is the reality, which can be easily verified, I realize there is this hegemonic false way of thinking. I realize this requires reporting that OWS were a bunch of trustafarians not affected by Wall Street shenanigans, and who went home when it got cold. Because to talk about what really happened, as opposed to the invented ideas of what would happen from someone embracing a propagandistic model of explanation, would require revealing things which are not allowed to be revealed.

While I embrace ideas that came out of OWS, I didn't go for the first week or two even though I knew about it before it happened, because I didn't see how occupying an area would do anything, and I didn't think people were interested. On that latter point I certainly misjudged - people from NYC and surrounding areas who had pent-up frustration about unemployment and the economy came flooding into OWS. Any how, it's funny how Russian governments or Chinese governments and their press organs lied, and much of the population knew its BS, yet the corporate press organs in the U.S. lie and say it got too cold so OWSers went home, and it is accepted as fact by so many. That the press lies is not surprising, that Americans are so credulous is what's surprising. I guess with so much fundamentalist religion among the working class and a different sort of warped thinking among professionals in the US, I shouldn't be continuously surprised by this, but I am.

<comment><USER20> Of all the things that piss me off about OWS, what's probably the worst is this: our corporate media have somehow foisted some kind of collective amnesia on us. People ask, "Ugh, I hate our financial sector, and OWS had some good rhetoric but they just gave up because they were cold, lazy, and bored." As if one of the biggest domestic displays of government violence in recent times didn't even happen!

There are plenty of other critiques of OWS that I embrace wholeheartedly-- sites became gathering points for the homeless and hurt more widespread appeal, new people who went in were not on-boarded effectively--which we can debate on end. But the idea that one day people just got bored and gave up... that drives me nuts.

<comment><USER22> Am I understanding properly that all it took to destroy OWS in the popular consciousness was to deny them access to a single park?

<comment><USER23> They were arrested, infiltrated, and attacked at multiple locations, over many months. They keep coming back, too, but that doesn't make the news. Right now, they're doing this thing called the Rolling Jubilee.

Also, hundreds of local OWS support protests and encampments happened, and they got raided, pepper sprayed, etc. just like NYC. Many of them are also persisting and fighting. One such group is Occupy Fights Foreclosures, which fights illegal foreclosures.

What is destroying the OWS image is the media, which actively ignores OWS. For some reason, they'll give a dozen TEA party people news coverage, but a larger (but still small) OWS protest doesn't get reporters.

<comment><USER22> Have large numbers of OWS participants been incarcerated?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> betterment.com their you're done.

<comment><USER18> there</comment></comment>


GitHub: Automated pull requests for security fixes - <AUTHOR> https://help.github.com/en/articles/configuring-automated-security-fixes <comment><USER2> This seems like a great feature, surprised this didn't seem to get more notice here.

Are there any potential downsides? (assuming it doesn't make terrible suggestions of course!) If the PR wasn't any good, presumably you can just ignore it (or am I missing something?)</comment>


Announcing Google Cloud VMware Engine - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/announcing-google-cloud-vmware-engine <comment><USER2> Funny how things evolve over time. When I was (2014-2016) VP/CTO at vCloud Air, the cloud division of VMware, I spearheaded the partnership between VMware and GCP/Google (which of course took a much larger team to be brought to life), certain that it was the only viable and meaningful partnership for VMware at the time.

When I left in early 2016, soon thereafter VMware ditched that partnership in favor of... IBM. No comment.

And now it's 2020, IBM is far behind everyone else in the cloud, and VMware and Google are cranking along just fine. This partnership makes a ton of sense for both of them. AWS is eventually going to lose its "monopoly" over cloud (disclaimer: I was at AWS 2008-2014).

It gives me a good feeling. Especially for the very talented engineers that I met on both sides. Sometimes they have to put up with a ton of red tape and politics. At least this will make some of them smile.

<comment><USER3> Ugh. IBM bought SoftLayer and have been slowly destroying it with bureaucracy since then. I had a support agent tell me the other day "all servers become unstable after 90 days." I miss the old support team :(. These days it's a lot of "what the hell did the hypervisor do to my VM this time".

<comment><USER4> True story. I just realized I've had an AWS EC2 tiny instance up since 2016. It has been unstable, never.

<comment><USER5> On at least two occasions I was forced to recreate an instance on AWS. They send out an email similar to this:

> We have important news about your account (AWS Account ID: 288053528466). > EC2 has detected degradation of the underlying hardware hosting your Amazon > EC2 instance (instance-ID: i-0480b1eb4617c84f3) in the us-east-1 region. Due > to this degradation, your instance could already be unreachable. After > 2016-08-16 01:00 UTC your instance, which has an EBS volume as the root > device, will be stopped.

<comment><USER6> Could live-migration prevent that happening today? Depends on the nature of the degradation I imagine.

<comment><USER7> That's where VMware on aws comes in ;) you get vmotion, so no downtime due to planned maintenance

<comment><USER6> I was thinking of live migration performed by AWS. Are there situations where running your own VMware could help, beyond what AWS can do themselves? If there's a sudden outage, neither helps, as the instance disappears. If there's a minor issue, either should be possible.

<comment><USER8> Well, if your instance is important enough, there's vSphere Fault Tolerance [0]:

> _You can use vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) for most mission critical virtual > machines. FT provides continuous availability for such a virtual machine by > creating and maintaining another VM that is identical and continuously > available to replace it in the event of a failover situation._

> _The protected virtual machine is called the Primary VM. The duplicate > virtual machine, the Secondary VM, is created and runs on another host. The > primary VM is continuously replicated to the secondary VM so that the > secondary VM can take over at any point, thereby providing Fault Tolerant > protection._

> _..._

\---

[0]: [https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware- vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsp...](https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware- vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsphere.avail.doc/GUID-623812E6-D253-4FBC-B3E1-6FBFDF82ED21.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't find this in my cloud console. The info pages are all pushing the "Contact a sales rep" button. It's not clear whether all the pricing info is included yet.

They lists one possible node at $10/hour ($7200/mo) before contract length discounts:

> CPU: 2.6 GHz (3.9 GHz Turbo) x2, 36 cores/72 hyperthreads

> Memory: 768 GB

> Data: 19.2 TB NVMe

> Cache: 3.2 TB NVMe

I could already import VMDK's to run in GCE. Obviously this is not intended for that, but rather to provide vSphere/vCenter/ESXi in the cloud. Where I've used these in the past (for relatively low-tech IIoT work), I'd often "pull" the VM's off the on-prem server and run 4-12 VM's on my laptop to simulate and configure machines for chemical plants. If I was in the office, I could RDP into the machines running on the on-prem server and would be able to enjoy a high performing desktop environment. Obviously as I was in the same building as the vSphere/ESXi host, latency was very low.

I've had significant issues with latency in the past trying to use RDP/VNC/etc from Houston to any of GCP's datacenters and wonder if that would affect quality of service for this offering. Will a lot of users be remoting into these VM's to use boxes running Windows/GUI/etc? Or is this a very different use case?

<comment><USER10> With the latest ThreadRipper would probably be the same price after 3 months of service to buy the equipment. If you're running more than 3 servers, most likely you are, then you can add 5 2TB (10TB) per node of M.2 SSDs which are super fast for cache, and cheaper SATA SSDs for regular storage and cluster the storage using Rook (Ceph). Most expensive thing is RAM.

There are a lot of great colo facilities for this type of hardware. Using secure boot, TPM, LUKS and tamper detection, it sure would be hard to break into your server even if not caged. Most of these facilities have video cams and modern security protocols.

However, if you can migrate your workloads to Kubernetes with KubeVirt and others then I'd advise you avoid VMware like the plague.

<comment><USER11> The public clouds are ridiculously more expensive than on-prem; especially for egress. That's an open secret; people choose clouds for the convenience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My NodeJs app running inside a Docker container which is running inside a Linux Debian OS running as one of the VMs inside a Windows OS installed on a rack-mount server module housed with other modules in a server cabinet. The "atomic" structure of cloud infra.

<comment><USER13> It's Turtles all the way down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> All the expense of the cloud, with all of the flexibility and feature set of traditional virtualization.

<comment><USER15> Traditional virtualization still requires you to pay for your own power, cooling, redundancy, SAN, backup, network, etc.

Not every company has the need to staff all of these specialists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wish in VMware vSphere I could easily spin up and down / offline migrate to cloud providers. I have some temporary heavy workloads that could benefit from this but there is no easy way.

<comment><USER17> VMware Cloud on AWS[1] allows for a hybrid on-prem/cloud environment and even supports vMotion between the two[2].

[1] [https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws](https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws)

[2] [https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2019/02/hybrid-cloud- vm...](https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2019/02/hybrid-cloud-vmotion.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Shameless plug that might be of interest to someone interested in trying this out for fun:

I recently posted about installing and trying the VMware ESXi hypervisor to create a homelab here:

[https://henvic.dev/posts/homelab/](https://henvic.dev/posts/homelab/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22929375](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22929375)</comment>


Of Love and Hate: TypeScript, Redux and Immutable.js - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mayflower.de/6630-typescript-redux-immutablejs.html <comment><USER2> I'm wondering why to bother with immutable.js, when redux already requires that state changes has to be immutable.

<comment><AUTHOR> immutability of redux state is convention, but not enforced within redux. This example is react state, but the same problems arise with redux: [https://twitter.com/brayoh_k/status/978539881243774976](https://twitter.com/brayoh_k/status/978539881243774976)

<comment><USER2> Maybe it's not enforced by redux itself, but you cannot use react-redux component then. React-redux will only rerender component , if state or part of it is new instance and not just mutated shallow copy, effectively requiring the state to be immutable.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point of using immutable in this case is to prevent mutating the state by accident as a side-effect of another action.

I know that react-redux will only rerender if things changed through a dispatch (in fact, everything consuming redux.subsrcibe will not notice a side-effect change), but those things happen if you do not use some kind of immutability and especially if they have no immediate effect, it's a nightmare to debug.

Read the article, this is discussed in the first few paragraphs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Complete Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Poetry - <AUTHOR> http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/ <comment><USER2> There's an amazing list of texts to ferret out and read on that site. I stumbled across "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects"

> This is Edward J. Ruppelt's memoir of his role in the seminal US Air Force > UFO study projects: Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book. According to this > account, he coined the acronym 'UFO' and put many of the official procedures > for reporting and studying UFOs in place.

[http://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/rufo/index.htm](http://www.sacred- texts.com/ufo/rufo/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> Bless google translate's heart I can read about half of the words on any poem presented here.

<comment><USER4> Google Translate's rendering of "Dream of the Rood" ([http://www.sacred- texts.com/neu/ascp/a02_05.htm](http://www.sacred- texts.com/neu/ascp/a02_05.htm)), lines 10-12:

        feathers need to be looked after. Neither is it true that the offcodes are algae,
        but they are kept half-
        gassed, but they are too muddy, and they are scarce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually find this harder to read with W/w substituting for Ƿ/ƿ (wynn). Odd that context will do that. At least thorn and eth didn't become _th_.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's like someone took Icelandic and English and threw them into a blender. I dig it.

<comment><USER7> Other way around. This is a major ingredient what went into the blender that produced modern english and icelandic both.

<comment><USER6> Makes sense. I can stumble through a Scandinavian text way easier than I can anything German.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice to see a site _not_ built on Bootstrap, but it is quite ... minimal</comment>


Ask HN: Startup Incubator or Work for the Man? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
Me and my friend are both sophomore computer science majors currently looking at internships for summer 2011.  We've both received offers from large corporations for software development, but we're considering another offer from a new local startup incubator.  The pay there is much less than at the big companies, but it offers a unique experience - teams of students will essentially decide on a startup idea at the beginning of summer and then be paid to develop those ideas into a functioning product.
We think there could be unique lessons to learn at the startup incubator and we're both interested in entrepreneurship in the long-term, but we don't think it will look as good on a resume. Additionally, $520 per week salary at the incubator is much less compared to the ~$3300 per month offer from Big Company. We are conscious of the fact that in grand scheme of our lives, this difference in pay won't amount to much. There will be valuable experience at Big Company too, although the work is probably going to be less fun.
Our question:  Does anyone have any experience interning as a college student at either/both big companies and startup ventures?  What were the pros/cons and what did you gain from each experience?
Thanks for any advice you can offer. <comment><USER2> My internship at a large company was most useful in cementing one idea in me: working at a large company is not for me. Things move so slowly you want to hang yourself, and you see the daily ritual of political jockeying in full force.

At the end of the internship the company offered me a nice position, but I was entirely uninterested. Instead I founded a company with a friend from school and have never looked back.

Money should not be a deciding factor at this point in your life. You will learn an order of magnitude more at a startup. If your goal is to spend your career creeping your way up the corporate ladder, or if you're unsure of your ability, work for the man. If you see entrepreneurship in your future, it's a no-brainer: go for the startup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, considering you net $1300 difference a month, and that (at least in most cities) $2000/month is plenty to live. I'd go with the startup. (Unless you really need the money.)

There is nothing quite like a startup at its raw. You will learn much more at a startup.

That being said, if you want to work for "the Man" all your life, go with them. They like internships with themselves. :) Otherwise, it's head-over- heels into startup land.

</comment><comment> space-monkey Go wherever you're going to learn the most. And if you think you're going to be working at startups when you get out of school, go work for a big company for a summer. There are things to learn everywhere, even if they are "what not to do" kinds of things.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're confident in your abilities, take your future into your own hands, dive in to the startup world and never look back. :)</comment>


Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/robotscientist.html <comment><USER2> Does anyone have more details on this? The article has no actual substance.

If I were to guess, it seems like it's doing something like a genetic algorithm -- try some things, see which ones do something interesting, try variations on those. But the article doesn't say.

<comment><USER3> First, some terminology, w/ an attempt to keep it simple:

1) gene - sequence of DNA that can be used to make proteins 2) enzyme - protein that acts as a catalyst (hence, the relation to metabolism)

Without having yet read TFA (in /Science/), the meat of the article to me is this bit:

1) "They armed Adam with a model of yeast metabolism and a database of genes and proteins involved in metabolism in other species..."

Adam knows what DNA makes up the proteins that are enzymes for yeast metabolism (start here: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/gquery?term=yeast> and you can probably find such information if you know what to look for)

Then, they selected some proteins involved in metabolism in other species (also probably able to find that on NCBI). I don't know how far away in the evolutionary family tree they might have gone with these "other species."

2) "Adam sought out gaps in the metabolism model, specifically orphan enzymes, which scientists think exist, but which haven't been linked to any parent genes. After selecting a desirable orphan, Adam scoured the database for similar enzymes in other organisms, along with the corresponding genes. Using this information, it hypothesized that similar genes in the yeast genome may code for the orphan enzyme."

Here it explained that it's not really a hypothesis. Well, it is in the sense that the hypothesis is 'X gene codes for the orphan enzyme.' Then it could test it having been programmed to do laboratory work (presumably) to do so.

I say "it's not really a hypothesis" because I would have considered the hypothesis of the broader experiment to be something along the lines of 'Proteins/Enzymes for whom we don't know which genes code may be coding for metabolism." Then the experiment is "find all such proteins and test them."

3) "Still chugging along on its own, it designed experiments to test its hypotheses, and performed them using a fully automated array of centrifuges, incubators, pipettes, and growth analyzers."

I don't know anything about the lab work, but before this part happens I gather: a) Adam knows what genes it's looking at (it found them, after all) b) It looks at those genes being turned into proteins (following the Central Dogma - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biology)) c) Using thermodynamics or some aspect of chemistry, it can determine if those proteins play a role in metabolism.

Hope that helps. I'm still very much a novice at this myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was very surprised first time I realized scientific research is a lot like... work. Not so much thinking as I imagined, and a lot of other stuff. So I'm not surprised to find out somebody took a domain where the work can be automated and did it.</comment>


Promising Startups - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-fifty-best-startups/ <comment><USER2> This article's main table suffers from the inaccurate assumption that funding round size and frequency correlates with promise. What's worse, Quid is including a "hotness" factor for the sector the startups work in, so the piece can be sure to include the most faddish, hyped technologies currently in SV. Not impressed, but great PR for Quid.

<comment><USER3> I agree. The numbers they provided are absolutely useless.

Better numbers would be "Size of last round", "Days since last round", "Valuation of last round", and "Founder ownership after last round".

<comment><USER4> Companies routinely lie about when funding round happen to maximize news impact. They'll generally sit on the news until they can announce it with some other big feature or release or something (because they know without fail all the tech news will report fundraising rounds).

So "days since last fundraising" or "days between fundraising rounds" are going to be very inaccurate metrics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Breakout List seems to be a better list of "hot startups." It's still VC heavy, but there are a few other companies listed that aren't your traditional VC-backed startup. The companies listed are going after large markets (for the most part), growing fast in terms of revenue and generally have good financial backing (although that's not a prerequisite from what I can gather).

[https://breakoutlist.com/](https://breakoutlist.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> "Almost eight years later, it turns out that the list had its share of flops—companies that shut down or lost value—but some notable home runs as well. Cloudera, Palantir, Evernote, Twitch and Spotify all increased at least 30 times in value since 2009. If YouNoodle's list had been a venture portfolio, it would have been one of the best-performing funds of the last two decades."

Am I crazy, or has only one of those companies (Twitch) actually made it to a liquidity event for its investors? There are some serious doubts around some of those "home run" companies keeping anything near their crazy private caluations.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. It's hard to say that they've had massive successes when none of the companies have returned money to their investors. That's proof that you've succeeded. The rigor imposed by the SEC makes it a lot harder to fake/inflate the valuations.

That said, I think all of those companies have done great things. Spotify, for instance, has revolutionized the music industry, and Palantir is a major player when it comes to government software (my employer competes with them in Canada).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a list of companies that have raised money but it doesn't appear that there's a list of companies that are profitable. Disappointing that only VC- funded startups are highlighted.

 _Quid began with a list of around 50,000 private companies that had received venture capital or venture debt in the past three years_

Ohhhhh. There's the problem.

<comment> at-fates-hands Some of the best startups I worked for were self funded and avoided VC money. The growth was slower, but the products we put out tended to be better vetted, better coded and far more stable.

Both places were a joy to work at since you were mainly concerned with the quality of the product you were producing instead of how fast you could get it to market.

<comment><USER8> It's because you can only fool your customers/clients for so long before they realize your product is garbage. If you have poor quality you need to have a lot of support staff to deal with the calls/emails or you need to have deep pockets to offer discounts and refunds repeatedly.

It's so fucked to read about VC-funded startups and read Paul Graham's earlier essays because he pretty much summed up a startup as "move as fast as possible to build a product that your customers want" and emphasized quality. Somewhere along the line, getting VC funds somehow has dwarfed that goal.

<comment><USER9> He was of course not a huge fan of VCs

>Back in 1997, one of our competitors raised $20 million in a single round of VC funding. This was at the time more than the valuation of our entire company. Was I worried? Not at all: I was delighted. It was like watching a car you're chasing turn down a street that you know has no outlet...

etc ([http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html))

<comment><USER10> and yet YC is the center of the universe for SV VC-funded tech startups.

<comment> at-fates-hands What do you think changed? Did PG change his view on things, or did the industry change?

A LOT can happen over 15+ years, and considering how fast SV and the tech industry moves, that's almost an eternity.

<comment><USER10> I couldn't say for sure. The cynic in me wants to point to the amount of money in software VC, but I think PG is more principled than that. Perhaps it's related to the fact that YC provides a lot more in terms of advice and guidance than cash, and then passes startups on to seed/series-A investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is Artificial Intelligence a market sector?. Seems as much useful as having a "PHP", "Java" or "<put technology name here>" market sector.

<comment><USER12> I disagree, if Tensor Flow was a market sector, that would be weird... but "Artificial Intelligence" as a term is the equivalent to "Web Development" as a term.

<comment><USER13> See eg. the AI effect and Tessler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

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

There's this weird effect that's been observed wherever once an AI technique starts working, it becomes a field in its own right and ceases to be considered "AI". So for example, beam search and A* were once considered AI; now they're just algorithms that everyone should know. SVMs, decision trees, linear regression, and other statistical machine-learning techniques were once considered AI; now they form the basic knowledge for the field of data science. Computer vision, handwriting recognition, and OCR were once considered AI (indeed, they were some of the first applications of artificial neural networks); now they are fields in their own right. Ditto machine translation and voice recognition. Even information retrieval with its subfields of synonym recognition, language models, bigram recognition, NLP, named entity recognition, etc. were all considered AI.

That "AI" is considered the hot sector means that VCs don't have a clue what is coming next.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's cool to be included on this list with companies I hold in very high regard.

My company (Astro aka Twist Home), isn't one of those sexy AI / ML companies trying to make crazy futureworthy tech, we instead make super simple connected home experiences, and yet people find what we are doing interesting.

I can cite 100 other "lists" we've made this year, but this one seems at least researched versus the typical autogenerated list based on SEC Form D filings.

</comment><comment><USER15> Any ideas as to why they would've excluded biotech? Would they have dominated the list? What about companies that combine some of these fields (biotech + AI)?

<comment><USER16> and does biotech imply wet lab stuff only or is this including software? Does it include healthcare?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The fact that they referenced SoilIQ which was renamed Edyn nearly 3 years ago makes me question the robustness of this study.

<comment><USER18> We've asked the author to update the story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love the HN policy of de-editorializing headlines.

<comment><USER20> This one's editorialized to the point of meaninglessness, though.

I'd have preferred to see something like:

"Quid's list of 50 promising startups."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not particularly confident in their methodology. I think particularly their first stage will suffer from a large number of false-negatives:

\- "top venture capital firms" is an odd filter, especially given that industry specific investment funds are likely to have pretty good signal on good businesses in their industry.

\- "companies that already show traction in their industry" isn't great considering that "AI" is considered an industry here, and startups being particularly "disruptive" might be difficult to classify.

\- "companies in a sector that was an expanding market opportunity" is incredibly vague.

</comment><comment><USER22> Instamotor (marketplace + fintech, San Francisco) is on there and we're hiring engineers :) email@example.com

<comment><USER23> I'm not personally looking, but would be curious in a brief rundown of tech, business, and your example day-to-day.

Good luck!

<comment><USER22> happy to! email me at email@example.com

<comment><USER24> It'd be better if you did it here...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> We're on the list. Not sure I'm happy or sad.

Original title "These Are the 50 Most Promising Startups You've Never Heard Of"

Our company is in this list.

Have very mixed feelings: \- Happy for the PR, \- Unhappy because it means that our marketing team hasn't done a fabulous job on driving awareness.

it means we could probably do a better job

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm impressed by the geographical distribution. Yes there's a concentration in the SF Bay Area, but it's much less on a percentage basis than the distribution of startup finding as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER27> I worked at OmadaHealth series A to C setting up the InfoSec program. It was fun! Looking forward to their continued success!

</comment><comment><USER28> Just a single autonomous car startup.

Peak autonomy already over?

<comment><USER29> Maybe smart autos are being dominated by non-startup large players. Google, Apple, Uber, GM, etc.</comment></comment>


Beware those Black Swans - <AUTHOR> http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/07/debt-system-mother-black <comment><USER2> This is a postscript to the new paperback edition of his book.

Don't miss the set of principals he lays out at the end of the article. These are pure gold.

* What is fragile should break early while it's still small

* No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains

* People who drove a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus

* Don't let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant - or your financial risks

* Compensate complexity with simplicity

* Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning label

* Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence

* Citizens should not depend on financial assets as a repository of value and rely on fallible "expert" advice for their retirement

* Make an omelette with the broken eggs

The ponzi scheme one rings particularly true to me.

The question now is, how do you replace a system that is already set up to fight these principals? I could maybe imagine setting up a new system that embodies principals such as these... but how do you change (refactor?) a government/legislation/economy to get there?</comment>


The brain communicates on several channels - <AUTHOR> http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-brain-channels.html <comment><USER2> And in reality, the brain uses many more signals then the electrical impulses we concentrate mostly one and their frequency. Partially our broken physical model prevents Biologists from looking into the issue from different perspective, which are usually more open minded.

Even stuff we found already: For example, gasotransmitters are usually ignored ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaseous_signaling_molecules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaseous_signaling_molecules)). Pure electrical contacts [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_synapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_synapse) are often also.

From a different physical models I'm missing two important ones: radiant (scalar, LW,...) EM waves and ring photons (photons entangled into a ring). Scalar waves are interesting because DNA is wrapped up in chromosomes in such a way, that a passing LW wave will get a modulation. Ring photons because 3 of our amino acids have carbon rings that could generate those.</comment>


Americans are wasting billions a year on name-brand pills - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/06/generic_vs_brand_name_pills_research_shows_billions_of_dollars_are_wasted.html

<comment><USER2> This webpage by the FDA [1] is also a simple and easy resource about generic drugs.

The basic fact about generic drugs is that they have to contain the same active compound(s) and they have to match the bioavailability (active compound presence in the blood or other targeted region). If the generic drug fits this and is FDA-approved, then it can be sold.

The composition of a pill is complex. There is the active compound, but there are also many other compounds that are needed to make the pill into a discrete structural unit, instead of a fine white-ish powder, the native form of many organic molecules. See [2] for a common example. The composition of these ingredients can vary dramatically between the brand name drug and generics. I know somebody who is allergic to a number of generic drugs, but is fine with the brand name drug. This is presumably due to different fillers used to make the pill.

In some cases, the fillers used in the generic are very similar to those used in the brand-name drug. However, in many cases, they are different and it is incorrect to say that they are identical. However, in the majority of cases, it really does not matter, and Americans are probably wasting billions a year. But in some cases, buying the brand-name is necessary.

[1]: [http://www.fda.gov/drugs/resourcesforyou/consumers/buyingusi...](http://www.fda.gov/drugs/resourcesforyou/consumers/buyingusingmedicinesafely/understandinggenericdrugs/ucm167991.htm)

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

It is worth nothing that some cancer patients can become sensitized to Mannitol and become allergic to it. This may be a result of chemotherapy.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know that Glucochrome eg is more powerful than its generic knockoffs. Also, this article [http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/05/red-pill-indian- generic-d...](http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/05/red-pill-indian-generic-drug- maker.html) talks about how the FDA operates on trust, to the point that foreign generics makers (at least the example given) can and do drive trucks through it.</comment>


Cognitive training helps regain a younger-working brain - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180123112606.htm?utm_medium=email&utm_source=other&utm_campaign=opencourse.GdeNrll1EeSROyIACtiVvg.announcements~opencourse.GdeNrll1EeSROyIACtiVvg.vZLR7wKNEei_JBLBh0UxWA <comment><USER2> It is critical to note that this study does not address the transfer of learning or performance on _one_ task and show that it improves performance (or in this case, energy efficienty) on _any other_ task.

Put another way: lumosity makes you good and efficient at lumosity, but not anything else.

Transfer learning is a bugbear for neuroscientists as well as ML people, sadly.

<comment><USER3> Is there any kind of learning that improves performance on other tasks? (What about language? What about if the 'other tasks' include learning?)

<comment><USER4> There is some evidence that meditation can improve cognitive performance.

<comment><USER5> I was actually just looking for scholarly research on this subject, link?

<comment><USER6> If you dig around, you'll find a lot of studies that are focused on a particular outcome (e.g. effects of mindfulness on the Stroop test, effects of mindfulness on athletic performance.) The quality of these studies is, of course, all over the place. Most of the research seems to come from journals dedicated to mindfulness in some capacity. For example, would you trust a study done by PhDs at reputable universities if they published in "The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine"[0]?

The best research I ever found was a metastudy in Clinical Psychology Review: "Does mindfulness training improve cognitive abilities? A systematic review of neuropsychological findings"[1] concludes that there's enough evidence that further investigation is warranted.

There's also a lot of downstream research (citing articles) from both publications that are worth investigating.

Transferability though, is still an open question. Even in this meta study, the author's admit that certain types of mindfulness training may be beneficial to certain outcomes.

So perhaps you'll be more mindful and less distracted, but you won't be any "smarter."

[0]: [http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.2007.7022](http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.2007.7022) [1]: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027273581...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027273581000173X)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In a randomized clinical study involving adults age 56 to 71, researchers > found that after cognitive training, participants' brains were more energy > efficient, meaning their brain did not have to work as hard to perform a > task.

So if you play a game over and over, you don't have to actively think as hard to play it? A bit far from a "younger working brain"

<comment><USER8> If I understand correctly from the abstract, the task they measured was done inside an MRI scanner, and was a different task from the training games. I know that it's been a question for a while now whether any of this training transfers to anything else, so it makes sense that that's what they would be studying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would have been nice if they went more into the actual training, all I see is "The cognitive training utilized the Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Training (SMART) program developed at the Center for BrainHealth" but they don't go on to say exactly what that program entails.

<comment><USER10> I think they are referring to this app: [https://brainhealth.utdallas.edu/brainhealth- app/](https://brainhealth.utdallas.edu/brainhealth-app/)

<comment><USER11> I downloaded the app in the hope of getting back my fizz from my 20s .... but it just seems to be a timer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Color me skeptical until someone evaluates these claims who was _not_ involved with coming up with the training program in question.

</comment><comment><USER13> brain training as such has been widely debunked by working neuroscientists, those without a personal stake in brain training products

tldr: you improve on the tasks you train on, but generalization to other tasks is extremely limited at best

</comment><comment><USER14> I was contemplating getting an MRI scan of my brain before I went to college. At age 48 I can only assume it is good for my brain to stress it learning something useful.

This isn't my first time going to school old. At age 34 I started University but for various reasons dropped out early.

I have to say going to school now even compared to age 34 just 14 years ago is quite different socially and technologically.

Maybe my brain will benefit from all this learning.

</comment><comment><USER15> DOI: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2017.10.003

<comment><USER16> And another paper showing playing 3d video games causes brain matter to increase (or at least not deteriorate) in older people: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187779)

<comment><USER15> Cool.

I'd be interested in a study where an additional group replaced games/music with walking outside in the natural environment for 1 hr a day. Or since we know "exercise" increases brain mass, what specifically about exercise causes the response. Are the effects additive? Can we exercise, play music and video games for more than 1x the matter growth?

[http://www.pnas.org/content/108/7/3017](http://www.pnas.org/content/108/7/3017)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039208/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039208/)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/srep03457](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep03457)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those who come directly to the comments for the paper link: [http://www.neurobiologyofaging.org/article/S0197-4580(17)303...](http://www.neurobiologyofaging.org/article/S0197-4580\(17\)30342-1/fulltext)

Its worth noting that, from a brief look, the "cognitive training" program looks like a fairly intensive and detailed course, _not_ some brain-app-like game. I don't know if I've seen something similar offered commercially.

</comment><comment><USER18> What sort of cognitive tasks would aid this? Something like Lumosity?

<comment><USER19> They were referring to this "SMART" app by the Center for BrainHealth, but I'd be a bit dubious about the actual result here (see above postings, which has been a debate for a long time):

[https://brainhealth.utdallas.edu/brainhealth- app/](https://brainhealth.utdallas.edu/brainhealth-app/)

...on the other hand It can't (really) hurt much, and the mind is a weird thing :)

<comment><USER18> Thanks. Seems like it's only an iOS app.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: 2048, made with react-motion - <AUTHOR> https://floriferous.github.io/motion2048/ <comment><USER2> Honestly the vertical stretch feels kind of strange</comment>


Morality Check: When Fad Science Is Bad Science - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703846604575447843736639542.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

<comment><USER2> Evolutionary psychology has never really grabbed me due to the lack of evidence in its favor. It seems one could justify almost any result with the right argument. To say that evolutionary psychology is ever anything more than an explanation (not an excuse) seems patently ridiculous -- humans have evolved higher brain function to override decisions previously based on instinct.

Then again, I don't have a lot of confidence in the field of psychology in the broad sense anyway. The experimentalists and those leaning towards neurobiology are probably on the right track, but the Freudian mentality still seems to shine through in some sub-disciplines.</comment>


L.A. is coating its streets with material that hides planes from spy satellites - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/08/18/why-l-a-is-coating-its-streets-with-material-that-hides-planes-from-spy-satellites <comment><USER2> This title has zero to do with the article.

TLDR: LA suffers from "heat island" effect, so to lower the temperature at the street level they're coating streets with a sealant. The company that manufactures the sealant previously developed sealants for the military.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Bad click-baity title.

Before I clicked on the article I was trying to figure out how coating a city's streets would somehow prevent spy planes from being seen. I didn't even want to try and crack why this might be necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "We found that on average the area covered in CoolSeal is 10 degrees cooler than black asphalt on the same parking lot," Spotts said. "We thought it was really interesting. It's almost like treated asphalt warms at a lower rate."

Um, yes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Anything that increases the albedo of a surface will make it cooler than it was before.

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

It's a pity that glass mirrors make for a crappy road surface otherwise they might try that :)

</comment><comment><USER6> That title was pretty confusing. Thought that LA was trying to hide planes...

<comment><USER7> Same. Using 'with the same material' would have made that way more clear IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone have a non-WAPO link?

They're becoming the new forbes.

<comment><USER9> [https://outline.com/ABn5nn](https://outline.com/ABn5nn)

<comment><USER10> WOW, you have made my day. Thank you!!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Per some of the comments, why not just add white pigment or more concrete based streets.

</comment><comment><USER12> That is some next level click bait titling right there.</comment>


Visit http://tronsoundtrack.com/ do 'View Source' - <AUTHOR> http://tronsoundtrack.com/ Kevin Flynn ASCII art hidden in source <comment><USER2> Nice! I wasn't expecting that, fun surprise :-D

</comment><comment><USER3> This site is actually pretty sweet. That ripple effect is actually done with canvas. Pretty slick.

Type "derezzed" to hear another sound clip :)

</comment><comment><USER4> now that was great, thank you sir! ;D</comment>


Fixed Point Madness! - <AUTHOR> http://www.postmodernprogramming.org/stories/fixed_point_madness <comment><USER2> Excellent companion piece to the recent post on the Narcissism of small changes.

I think it's surprisingly easy for developers to forget that at the heart of the matter, their job is to provide business value to customers, and that computers and programming languages and algorithms and data structures and methodologies and design patterns are merely means to that end.

Personally, I'm a fan of a good fixed-point function, and am heavily drawn to the academic side of things; but I recognize that there's a time and place for this fascination to play itself out, and it's usually not in production code.</comment>


Microsoft acquires Bonsai to help with its artificial intelligence push - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/microsoft-buys-ai-start-up-bonsai.html <comment><USER2> I went and bought a Microsoft Surface Book 2 because I got sick of my 3 ~ year old laptop. I wanted specs close to my desktops so having a PCIE SSD is a must along with 16GB ram.

I got the laptop and during setup Cortana started talking to me and normally I'd turn all that off but I thought screw it let me try this out. I setup my whole system with voice minus a few sections like selecting the WiFi network and obviously typing in my password.

A few minutes after install Windows told me it signed me into my Skype in the background. So now if and when I do need to use Skype for a business call I don't even have to bother trying to log in. It doesn't try to force it to start so I'm happy.

On top of all of this I have WSL available to me and can use my favorite unix tools when I need to. I gotta say I probably wont be bothering installing Linux at all. That aside I gotta say Cortana worked pretty darn good, can't say I've has those kinda awesome experiences with Siri or Google.

Oh and for fun Cortana snuck some jokes into the setup process which were appreciated. Never do you normally get jokes from an OS during a fresh setup.

<comment><USER3> Signing in automatically into Skype should not require AI. All it needs is an if statement really.

<comment><USER2> I know it doesn't but the fact I had to a lot less work for my OS setup is fantastic, oh and they pulled up my settings from Windows 8 from ages back and synced everything up to the Wallpaper. It's the little things that make it better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Microsoft has been on quite a shopping spree.</comment>


Ask HN: Variable Declaration Location - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently working on a project with a contract tech lead.
The tech lead is the same tech lead who developed the companies previous application and is well regarded.
The following code snippet is a bogus function the illustrates his variable declarations (all at the top of the function).

  public virtual Token LogOn(Credentials credentials) {
    Token token;
    User user;
    token = null;
    if (ModelState.IsValid) {
      if (validateCredentials(out user)) {
        token = user.CreateToken();
      }
    }
    return token;
  }
 I've always declared my variables within the smallest scope possible. If later it needs to be accessed higher up, then it gets moved during the code change/refactor.

  public virtual Token LogOn(Credentials credentials) {
    Token token = null;
    if (ModelState.IsValid) {
      User user;
      if (validateCredentials(out user)) {
        token = user.CreateToken();
      }
    }
    return token;
  }
 The tech leads var dec  bugs me no end :P
Hell why bother declaring it in the function at all, GLOBAL VARS FOR EVERYONE!
Am I just being anal retentive? Am I wrong? Is it something I should address, conform with (at least in this project) or do I need to build a bridge and get over it? <comment><USER2> It is a bit anal retentive, but there is sound reasoning behind declaring your variables in the narrowest scope possible. Google's C++ style guide ( [http://google- styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...](http://google- styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml#Local_Variables) ) captures some of them. Another is cache locality of your stack, if you are in a language or project where that matters; by creating space on the stack as late in the game as possible, your stack access pattern tends more to the end of the stack than if you declare everything up top in no particular order. This is a really small micro-optimization though; the main point is that you want to know what type something is and what might have been passed to its constructor, on the screen at the same time as the code that uses it.

Another thought; if there is a mammoth difference between top-of-function and narrowest-scope-possible, that suggests that you may have very large functions, and might consider refactoring so that the difference between your method and his is small?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. Although I think there's good reason for declaring variables in the narrowest possible scope, I'm not sure it's enough of a reason to bring it up - especially if it's more about coding style, rather than best practice.

The size of the functions isn't really an issue, but I see your point.

If they're as small as the examples above, it doesn't make much difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe its just an old C (C90 I think?) habit where declarations and code could not be mixed.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I tend to do that too. And I did get it from when I was coding some form of C about 8 years ago. I think at the time I was using gcc 2.95 or something and it only allowed var declarations to be at the top. I sort of got used to it. Now I actually prefer it because when I am reading a new function, you get to see all the used variables and their comments right at the top.

Also, declaring variables at the top helps with languages that don't have block scopes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Narrowest scope seems to be pretty standard practice, as long as that jibes with the language (ex. javascript's function scope).

But...there are probably more important battles to choose to fight during your project.

</comment><comment><USER6> pet peeve alert!

I also prefer declaring all variables at the start of a function. My rationale is that, if _all_ functions are written that way, it's less cognitive load when reading them. All variables used are known at the beginning, and once I've digested that, I can think about the code that will be working with them. These days, if I'm reading a function and a new variable is declared partway in, I feel like I've been ambushed with a new thing that makes it harder to understand.

That said, I tend to write such short functions that it's never an issue. If a particular variable isn't needed until halfway into the function, that's a good sign to me that it needs to be broken into two or more smaller functions.</comment>


Ask HN: How to getting started in AI/ML? - <AUTHOR> Thank you! <comment><USER2> Hey!

I'd suggest starting with this excellent course:

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

And then dive into competitions on kaggle.com.

Then following up with the deeplearning.ai specialization here: [https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep- learning](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning)

and the [http://www.fast.ai/](http://www.fast.ai/) courses.

You'll be up to speed in no time :)</comment>


Tree Style Tabs Extension Ported to Firefox 57 - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ <comment><USER2> This is awesome; Tree Tabs is one of my two essential extensions, the other being Vimperator.

I'm sticking with the Firefox ESR that supports Vimperator until Vimperator is ported (or re-written) for WebExtensions. Unfortunately, Vimperator is struggling to find contributors to help with the migration.

The other vim-themed extensions out there like Vimuim on Chrome or Saka Key just don't come close :(

[edit: added Saka Key]

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a Vimperator user (though vim is my primary editor) so I can't say for certain how well any of these stack up, but in the other thread people were suggesting Saka Key as an alternative: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15340154](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15340154)

<comment><USER2> I looked over the docs -- seems very similar to Vimium, and doesn't come close to Vimperator.

My one feature that I prefer in Vimperator is how it handles link-clicking.

To click a link in Vimperator, you type `f`, then start typing the text of the link you want to follow. Once your search only matches a single link, the Vimperator clicks that link or button for you. You can also type a number, which selects that match.

In Vimium, Saka Key, etc, you type `f`, and then type a short, unique code, which is assigned to each clickable element in order.

So, for a page like Hacker News, to follow the third "comments" link in Vimperator, I type `fcommen3`. In Vimium, I type `f`, then squint my eyes and parse the labels it applies, and them maybe type `sw` or something random.

<comment><USER3> > To click a link in Vimperator, you type `f`, then start typing the text of > the link you want to follow. Once your search only matches a single link, > the Vimperator clicks that link or button for you. You can also type a > number, which selects that match.

You can do that with Vimium too. The setting is called "Use the link's name and numbers for link-hint filtering".

IIRC "Require Enter when filtering hints" is selected by default when you enable the previous setting, so the link is only highlighted and you have to press enter to open it.

<comment><USER2> > Use the link's name and numbers for link-hint filtering

Well, that's what I get for trying something once and never looking again...

Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice for Tree Style Tabs, which I find essential.

However, I'm worried about some other big extensions that have really been useful not being able to be ported to WebExtensions, like DownThem'All, the developer is pretty pissed at Mozilla[1] and offers some insights about the design decisions made by Mozilla that could have a big impact on the ability of some AddOns to tap into the APIs they need to do anything useful.

[1]:[http://www.downthemall.net/re-downthemall-and- webextensions-...](http://www.downthemall.net/re-downthemall-and- webextensions-or-why-why-i-am-done-with-mozilla/)

<comment><USER5> You might find the actual discussion quite interesting it's linked here [1]

[1]: [https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev- addons/2016-December/...](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev- addons/2016-December/002367.html)

<comment><USER6> And as for a DownThemAll fallback whose feature subset may be enough for you, consider Download Star: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/download-star...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/download-star/)

<comment><USER7> It's not just about being able to select what to download, that's a minimal part of what makes DTA so useful.

Does it allow you to manage your downloads though - like supporting multi- source downloads, pausing and re-starting, exporting/ importing lists, prioritise, re-order, limit speed, integrating with the save dialog and menus ...

DownThemAll is the one extension that might force me to abandon firefox or to stick with an ESR release and not upgrade.

<comment><USER6> Thus, my phrasing "feature _subset_ _may_ be enough" :) . I used to use DTA for this subset and am happy about Download Star, but it's totally understandable you relied on more.

As for "not upgrade": do stay on ESR for as long as possible and hope more fully-formed alternatives for your favorite addons eventually arrive. But really, don't disable upgrades altogether and risk being pwned due to running an unpatched, insecure browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found in a comment in today's Quantum thread: _" It still can't hide the tab bar (API will come in later releases) but it works!"_; _"[https://bugzil.la/1332447](https://bugzil.la/1332447) is the bug for adding a WebExtensions API for hiding the tab bar."_

<comment> Ar-Curunir This can be done via userChrome.css. Just add this:

#tabbrowser-tabs { visibility: collapse !important; }

<comment><USER8> Novice question... where do I find userChrome.css on Windows?

<comment><USER9> A bit late to the party, but posting for reference in case someone finds this post in the future. For Ubuntu, I did as the following:

1\. Created the chrome folder at `~/.mozilla/<your-profile-id>.default/`

2\. Created `~/.mozilla/<your-profile-id>.default/chrome/userChrome.css` and added

        @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");

at the top of the file.

3\. Added customizations after this line. The resulting file will be like:

        @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
        /*
         * TreeStyleTabs solutions to remove tabs
         *
         * Solution by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15343940 */
        #TabsToolbar, #sidebar-header {
          visibility: collapse !important;
        }

        #TabsToolbar {
          margin-bottom: -21px !important;
        }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems a lot of very significant extensions, important to large user bases, are going to have trouble making it to 57.

What if Firefox developers were to take a break -- meaning, temporarily slow down -- from the browser development itself, once 57 is stable -- and put some time into helping to port some of those extensions? (At least, where code and license allow.)

I think a lot of Firefox users would appreciate this, and it would help preserve a principal feature set (via those extensions) that has caused many people to choose Firefox and to stick with it, up to this point.

In other words, Mozilla, please don't kill our extensions. How about helping them make the transition? (Also a good opportunity to learn where the new API may need more work/expansion)

Thanks!

P.S. Yes, I've been pissed about this change, for precisely this reason. Reading in this conversation how Mozilla is working to expand the new API, I'm given a bit of hope. And thus, this idea I'm suggesting.

P.P.S. Yeah, this may be an unreasonable and ugly ask. Wading into a bunch of other people's code of varying quality. (Sorry.) Nonetheless... the extensions have been a crucial part of Firefox's advantage, for many.

<comment><USER11> Part of the problem is that APIs that are good for extensions are by definition bad for performance (because they allow the extension to hook into important places and do a lot of things). So there is an inherent tradeoff between extension functionality and browser performance. It's easy to ask for powerful extension APIs because the ask is free. Would you still ask for it if you had to sacrifice performance? (The answer writ large, as evidenced by hordes of Chrome users, is no).

<comment><USER12> Sure. Why would I want two browsers that make identical compromises? It makes choice meaningless.

<comment><USER11> There are more tradeoffs involved in building a browser than just "powerful extensions vs browser performance". So you have a false assumption built into your question, that the two browsers in question are making identical compromises across all facets of things when that is in fact not the case.

And there are more than two browsers - if you do want a browser that still supports powerful extensions at the cost of browser performance, I hear Pale Moon is a good option (I haven't used it myself, so can't comment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great news. I'm still worried about what will happen to my large Scrapbook[1] archive, though. Most of the useful things about that plugin (saving, browsing, and loading files on the local disk) are not available in the new APIs I think.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/)

<comment><USER14> I actually abandoned Scrapbook years ago for fear of the format not being portable. In truth, now I've got data all scattered around but at least I'm not in this position. You might want to look at Zim which is more of a "personal wiki" but at least fits _my_ workflow for Scrapbook with a bit more copy-paste. I hope that it fits yours as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it the vertical display that people like about Tree Style Tabs, or the inheritance/nesting?

I've always wondered why spawned child tabs don't retain the `Back` history to go back to the web page that created them. Would be so useful; do any extensions exist?

<comment><USER16> For me, it's both. Nesting is helpful as a visual history indicator and a quick way to prune unused tabs that were opened closely in time. Great when you're doing a quick research. The vertical display helps locating tabs by its title and in general, narrower text on a page is easier to read. (Most screens nowadays are widescreen. Some blogs even overcompensate for this by having huge margins and even huge ads on the sidebar, but that's another story.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This FF57 looks good - like a revolution about to come. I've made a switch in few minutes and... oh boy, you feel the difference.

</comment><comment><USER18> Holy hell, finally FF57 isn't looking quite as frightening. New TST even supports tab containers. I really hope Mozilla fixes the inability to hide the horizontal tab bar (without userChrome hacking) though…

<comment><USER19> It's in the works, just not there yet. At a rough glance I'd expect it in 58, but I can't be sure of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sea Containers is not exactly the same thing, but some may find it more useful: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sea- container...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sea-containers)

It takes advantage of the (relatively) new Containers feature in Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know if Tab Groups (or something like it) will be ported to 57?

<comment><USER22> The developer had put out a note saying that Tab Groups won't be suppressed by WebExtensions, and the work in order to do a partial port isn't worth their time.

<comment><USER23> The developer of this alternative - [https://github.com/denschub/firefox- tabgroups](https://github.com/denschub/firefox-tabgroups) \- has said that they will port the add-on to a WebExtension, but they are waiting on this bug: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1384515](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1384515)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's good. This one was the one that most people were complaining about not being possible in webext. Glad to show people that the Firefox team has good intentions.

<comment><USER19> A lot of the confusion around webextensions is that while 57 may not support a lot of important use cases, the door is always open for new webext APIs, which is what's been happening so far, and will continue to happen, making more and more such extensions possible again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know what Firefox had to do to support this in WebExtensions? Is it at all generic, or is it super specific to the Tree Style Tabs extension?

<comment><USER26> I haven't looked closely at the extension but I think the two big building blocks are sidebars [1] and the tabs API [2], both of which have many applications outside of tree style tabs. The "hide the tabstrip" bug mentioned in other comments here is more narrowly focused than those two but it hasn't landed yet...

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/us...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/user_interface/Sidebars) [2] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/AP...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/API/tabs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Essential part of My daily browsing. Still surprised it is still an addon and not default in browsers.

</comment><comment><USER28> Best news all day! This is one of the most essential extensions that wasn't going to work before.

</comment><comment><USER29> Feels like I'm missing some background here - what happened between 56 and 57 that made it necessary to port extensions? Some revolutionary architectural change?

<comment><USER30> Yes, they've migrated to a new multiprocess architecture and the extra isolation requires new approach to integrating extensions. Previous extension API assumed UI, pages and everything else lived in the same process.

<comment><USER31> multiprocess was a different event and it happened well before Firefox 56 breakage.

<comment><USER30> It wasn't enabled for users who had any old extensions installed.

<comment><USER32> "Legacy" addons could be made compatible with the newer multiprocess design. See: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/Working_with_mul...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/Working_with_multiprocess_Firefox$revision/993443)

Many developers went through the effort only to see support for their addons scrapped altogether a couple months later. Fortunately, that was quick enough for Mozilla to sweep under the "legacy extensions are unfixable and unmaintainable" rug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That this could be done at all is a good sign for Firefox's future. I do wish they'd retained the ability to customize the UI on the navigation bar, but am now hopeful that more of the extensions that would have made me reluctant to upgrade will be ported.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow, I wish I knew about this extension before. Too bad Chrome doesn't have this.

<comment><USER27> That's why I could never use chrome. Tabs on the side is just more logical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does it sync?

</comment><comment><USER36> Good. I hope Tab Mix Plus will be upgraded too.

<comment><USER37> Sadly, not much seems to be happening on that front:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226546](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226546)

At the very least I'd want something to override ctrl+tab tab switching order (by most recently used instead of tab order in tab bar), and a popup showing the tabs in that order.

Edit: Apparently the about:config setting browser.ctrlTab.previews gives you MRU and a popup. Unfortunately it shows large thumbnails of the tabs instead of just a list of the titles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> When will they drop backspace = go back? Chrome was right

<comment><USER24> [http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action](http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action)</comment></comment>


Inside Myspace.com - (great info on how they scaled) - <AUTHOR> http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1397,2082921,00.asp <comment><USER2> MySpace's success came in spite of their technology, not because of it. There's nothing technical at MySpace worthy of emulation. A real technology startup could have done much better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Who would you suggest emulating?

<comment><USER2> Google, Amazon, LiveJournal, SixApart, Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist. Most any company who has had highly technical top brass. MySpace was created by suits, that's why it runs on Windows and cost many millions more than it should.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> From an engineering perspective, I enjoyed the inside look at how Myspace scaled their infrastructure. Scaling is certainly a critical issue for these big sites; one of the reasons that Friendster waned in popularity was that they used algorithms and a back-end infrastructure that were painfully slow for their once-massive user base.

On the other hand, a site should be able to handle several hundred thousand users with a single beefy database server, remote static file hosting, and a few load-balance webservers. When you start 'scaling out' to a bigger array of cheap hardware, you introduce complications that make your site harder to maintain and improve. That change will need to happen at some point along the growth curve, but it seems to me that seed stage entrepreneurs need to be most concerned about making a product that people want to use.

</comment><comment><USER4> A lot of you would-be entrepreneurs should give this a read. There are many things to consider in the crucial first steps.

</comment><comment><USER5> This was a great read and the patterns of growth and strategies they used hold true even for much less extreme scaling.

</comment><comment><USER6> great detailed read, Kinda of funny to think that mySpace pushed SQL server further than MS have done themselves.

I would have done it a lot different myself :p

</comment><comment><USER7> myspace arn't given enough credit, supporting a site with that many users is no easy task.

</comment><comment><USER8> Test Comment</comment>


Apple and Google are launching a joint Covid-19 tracing tool for iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/10/apple-and-google-are-launching-a-joint-covid-19-tracing-tool/ <comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't this require a lot of data transfer? 14 * 24 * 4 * keysize * millions of people?</comment>


How I won $5000 at a Facebook hackathon without writing a single line of code - <AUTHOR> http://www.opencompute.org/blog/ocp-hackathon-winner-the-codeless-hack

<comment><USER2> That is pretty awesome, I never knew Facebook did hardware or would even imagine that they would totally open source it. Really cool to see the hacker mentality even in the hardware community. I am looking forward to see what they are going to come out with next...

<comment><USER3> It states that a group of Facebook engineers started the project but it may not be an official Facebook project that is actively maintained or even associated with that company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you wrote a few lines of code. :)

Cool project and neat execution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha thanks. The point of the blog was that we made the design too complicated wanting a microcontroller and innate intelligence in the tool when really all we need were flashing LED's

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing and a really good overview of what you did during the hackathon.</comment>


Lenovo Computers, Soon To Be Made In America - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/02/lenovo-computers-soon-to-be-made-in-america/ <comment><USER2> Lenovo is probably doing this for a few reasons:

* The corporate market often prioritizes speed and ease of doing business over the absolute rock-bottom cost. Local manufacturing offers advantages due to a much shortened supply chain.

* The gap between an hourly worker's wages in the US versus China is shrinking, due to Chinese labor inflation and US collar wage stagnation.

* The hours of labor per assembled unit is declining due to advances in automation, rendering regional labor variances less important.

Labor is becoming less of an issue while local manufacturing continues to have major supply chain cost benefits, so Lenovo considers that the scales have tipped enough to justify a US presence for the market segment that values that responsiveness the most.

<comment><USER3> Yes, higher oil prices are starting to affect profit margins, the cost of shipping a 40 foot container has tripled since the 2000s. Shipping finished products is getting more expensive.

Lead times are also very important, it takes about a month to get something from china to the US. This means that you need higher inventory levels in order to be able satisfy the demand without considerable shortages.

When you take into account the variety of configurations available its very hard not to get low rotation items on your inventory. Specially if you are expected to always have stock and when your inventory levels have to consider that it takes a month to get an item to the US.

Shifting assembly to the US reduces the number of SKUs imported and allows an easier control over inventory levels and supply chain costs.

<comment><USER4> Lenovo just has too many choices (technical term for this condition is SKUs up the butt). A T430 can be configured with one of 7(!) CPUs, some Sandy Bridge and some Ivy Bridge. There are _two_ pairs of CPUs that cost the same. There are four wifi choices, even though the most expensive is only $40 (and is actually available 3rd party for ~$17 on ebay). Lenovo should just always stick the good one in there, and either eat the cost or bump the base price. Whenever Apple offers an option with two choices, Lenovo offers it with six choices, and then there's twice as many options on top of that.

<comment><USER5> > Lenovo should just always stick the good one in there

I'm sympathetic to this argument - there's always the oddball page in the configuration process that doesn't make sense, like the not-actually- selectable "Selectable SIM" on the current page for the T430. But the number of choices that _actually_ don't make sense isn't that high, and the wifi adapter is not a good example. Which is "the good one"? The one with a working driver for someone's oddball OS, or the one with 802.11a support for someone's legacy network?

Do you think Lenovo should do away with one of the two palmrest combinations on the T430, and if so, which one, the one with the fingerprint reader or the one without?

<comment><USER4> Considering all the wifi adapters use the same driver and all of them support 802.11a, I'd say the best one is the one with 3 antennas, instead of 2 antennas or 1.

<comment><USER5> Can you point me to the information that specifies whether the 'ThinkPad 1x1 b/g/n' adapter supports 802.11a or the 5 GHz band, and uses the same chipset as the Intel Centrino adapters? I honestly tried looking and couldn't find any confirmation.

<comment><USER4> Ah. Sorry I was hasty, some don't support a. All the more reason to include the good one. :) I believe all the intel chips are essentially identical driver wise, but dunno about the unlabeled one. Then again, I would not be picking the unlabeled mystery chip if I were concerned about drivers.

<comment><USER5> > Then again, I would not be picking the unlabeled mystery chip if I were > concerned about drivers.

You would if you knew what the chip was from sources other than the ordering page. Owning a model already is an obvious example but if I wasn't so lazy I could probably dig up the model spec book, grab the FRU of the card and google up the specs based on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More configurability? Great. When can I order one with a screen that isn't some low-res 16:9 TN monstrosity?

<comment><USER7> When people stop buying cheap bric-a-brac with just-enough-for-youtube-480p integrated graphics from HP and Dell for 499.

<comment><USER8> Last time I bought the cheapest dell laptop with a discrete card it was maybe $600, now it appears to be $719. That's only on the 'small business' more brick-like ones, though. The 'consumer' ones don't even offer discrete, but hey you can get Skull Candy[TM] speakers for an up charge!

Even the cheapest comes with a dual core processor, though, so you can share your memory among 2 cores and an integrated graphics engine. Progress it ain't.

<comment><USER9> Joe Q Public had been subsidizing performance for quite some time. I think that era is ending because most of Joe's use cases can now be met with a ~1.5 Ghz arm tablet. I think the high end of the market is going to become more expensive unless a use case emerges where everyone wants that performance. Intels been hard at work trying to invent such a use case, but so far theres been little to show for it. Making games more realistic is one reasonable use case but those efforts have recently been stymied by content creation costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> BTW, although IBM is based in the US the ThinkPad line was originally designed and manufactured in Japan before the sale to Lenovo.

<comment><USER11> The original design of the ThinkPad was said to resemble the shape of a Japanese lunchbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From a business standpoint, what is the strategy here?

What does North Carolina have over Mexico? How does this cater to the corporate "custom" PC market?

I'm curious to see why the company is moving operations there.

<comment><USER13> Currently, if you want a custom configured Lenovo PC, you have to wait for it to be shipped from China. This increases the average time it takes to get the computer and introduces the risk of a customs problem holding up your shipment indefinitely.

<comment><USER12> I didn't think that larger exporting companies had problems with customs in China. Even so, wouldn't it be better to take advantage of your infrastructure and distribution already existing in Mexico?

<comment><USER13> I know nothing about logistics, but I've ordered a fair amount of hardware from Lenovo and one of my biggest complaints is the erratic shipping times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Assembly_ for _custom orders_.

Hardly a domestic industry, although I speculate it may also help in some political/contract situations.

</comment><comment><USER15> In all fairness, the US corporations probably owe more than a little to Mexico. On purely ethical grounds, I'd rather buy an IBM machine built in Mexico than in the US. It's that little personal satisfaction.... But it DOES make a difference if you're going to use it for the next year or two...

</comment><comment><USER16> I hardly think this is a big deal. The cost for assembly is low anyway. Even though the laptop might be assembled in the US, the major parts of a laptop (chip, case, screen) are still made in Asia.

</comment><comment><USER17> Only 8 years after the sale of Thinkpad to Lenovo. Interesting how fast the economic dynamics can change.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would love to see the resulting shitstorm from that sticker actually being on the laptop.

<comment><USER19> Are you saying people would have problems with any "Made in USA" sticker, or that one in particular (which is obviously a fanciful clipart made in MS Paint)

<comment><USER18> Just that one in particular. I think putting stickers on laptops is an atrocious practice, and one that huge would be hilariously awful.

<comment><USER20> I hate it when they put stickers on laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's the jobless recovery

</comment><comment><USER22> This is going to be huge.

No more waiting 4 weeks to get a computer/laptop I actually want.

<comment><USER5> If you're a big purchaser ordering a thousand of them, anyway...</comment></comment>


Hulu Launchs "Hulu Plus" Premium Service - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/29/hulu-plus-premium/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll gladly pay $9.99 a month to have the privilege and honor of still having to sit through their ads.</comment>


Show HN: VS Code news ticker plugin to keep you up to date while you code - <AUTHOR> https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sepehr500.news-cycle <comment><USER2> I'm not good at multi-tasking and this would increase the likelihood of breaking my limited windows where I reach a high-productivity state.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally get that! Setting the speed to a very slow one might help with this.</comment></comment>


Hikipedia.jp aims to tackle isolation by making connections with each other - <AUTHOR> https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180430/p2a/00m/0na/011000c <comment><USER2> This seems like an interesting approach. The article makes no mentions of whether this site aims to implement wiki-like editing? If not this is really a -pedia, not a play on word on Wikipedia.</comment>