Medium's Technology Stack - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/medium-eng/the-stack-that-helped-medium-drive-2-6-millennia-of-reading-time-e56801f7c492#.h8zu8v8qh <comment><USER2> 2.6 Millennia of "reading time".

I just love these made-up PR metrics that can make any audience look big or any business seem successful.

Really, if you write a post about infrastructure you shouldn't have a metric that say absolutely nothing about your site's load. 25 millions unique readers per month is more fitting, but still quite lacking (too big a timeframe and no way to infer how many pageviews there are).

<comment><USER3> The point is that we don't really care about the number of uniques or page views. What we actually look at internally on a day to day basis is the amount of time people spend reading and other engagement metrics.

<comment><USER2> Whether someone spent a second or a year with the page open is irrelevent to how many servers you need to have running. How many pageviews or requests per second is. Aince this is an article about infrastructure no body cares about Engagement time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _In past lives I've raced snowboards, jumped out of planes, and lived in the jungle_

I'm so glad the author added that line, signalling his credibility. I'm even more impressed by Medium's stack when I know the guy responsible for it skydives. The coolness of this dude is overwhelming me now.

<comment><USER5> While I don't particularly like your tone, I found the inclusion of that entire paragraph surprising. The paragraph immediately before it states:

> Where the quality of the idea matters, not the author's qualifications.

It is then followed by the paragraph you talk about, specifically meant to showcase the authors's qualifications.

<comment><USER3> I don't want to be completely defined by my work, but at the same time didn't want to be overly verbose talking about myself.

Also, the original interview had this section as multiple questions; it was collapsed into a single paragraph during editing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope this doesn't come off as negative, I'm honestly curious: Why are there so many Medium stories on HN? There seems to be at least one story a day on the front page if not more. They usually have very few comments and the content often seems a little bit of a mismatch from what normally gets on the front page.

I'm happy to ignore the stories and skip over them but to me that's not the point. Is someone gaming the system? Is Medium a HN subsidiary of some sort? Has anyone done an analysis of how these types of stories get onto HN in the first place? Are Medium stories really that interesting that there's at least one Medium story worth posting on the front page of HN a day?

<comment><USER7> medium.com stories are penalized by default on HN, as are most sites that produce solid articles amid a lot of fluff. (If it were only fluff, we'd ban the site.) The penalty can get lifted by moderators or by software.

You may be underestimating the sheer quantity of articles people post from there (dozens a day), as well as the diversity of topics in them. I took a quick look and the 6 most successful medium.com posts from yesterday were all technical. (You can check this for yourself by clicking on the domain name next to the story title, which shows you all the posts from that domain.)

<comment><USER8> Have you considered expanding the penalization software for content aggregators (such as Medium), so that it would treat a combination of the user and the domain as the key, rather than the domain name alone?

<comment><USER7> Yes. We haven't had a chance to think through the implications yet, but it would be good for the more substantive publications that put out articles on medium.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There're a lot of sour grapes in this thread about performance and made up metrics, but let's take them at their word:

 _For a site as seemingly simple as Medium, it may be surprising how much complexity is behind the scenes. It's just a blog, right? You could probably knock something out using Rails in a couple of days. :)_

This hints that there is a _lot_ more functionality being put up behind the scenes in terms of datamining and analysis and whatnot than is apparent from the simple "display an article", which indeed is a trivial Sinatra or Express (not even Rails!) app.

If you're not the customer, etc. etc.

<comment><USER3> Sorry it came across as "sour grapes", the spec for the post is describe the components of your stack, why you use them, and challenges you've faced.

In terms of "display an article" I'd encourage you to think about what that entails for a platform like ours, it's actually a pretty interesting problem space: near-WYSIWYG editing across 3 platforms, post model vs. HTML (hint we don't store HTML), operational transforms, version history, typographic treatments, copy/paste normalization, ingestion API, etc. It's not rocket science, but it's deeper than you might think at first blush.

<comment><USER9> "Sour grapes" was in response to sibling comments here, not the original article!

The additional stuff you mentioned here--all of the annoying fiddly details for editing and whatnot--is _exactly_ what should've been used to justify the stack.

The problem is that all of the extra stack baggage frankly looks really baroque, even _with_ the trickiness of the UX you just hinted at.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for clarifying and yes, lots of interesting stories to be told around the edges of this post. Some are already written and linked. For example, I'd recommend Why ContentEditable is Terrible by Nick. [https://medium.com/medium- eng/why-contenteditable-is-terribl...](https://medium.com/medium-eng/why- contenteditable-is-terrible-122d8a40e480)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> On this topic, I would like to get a book's recommendation on how to build a full stack product like this. Something more technical with war stories.

My background: I'm a very strong iOS engineer with decent Python and JS skill. However my backend skill is limited at: building a Flask app with custom end points. It will talk to a single sql instance. I'm completely oblivious to memcache, load balancer, different AWS services. My plan is (surprise surprise) to quit my day job next year to pursue my own project and I would like to gather enough best practice and understanding of a full stack app.

Thank you!

<comment><USER11> "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system." \-- John Gall, 1975

If you are building a new service, and doubly so if you are new to web application, you want to build your system with a minimal set of moving pieces. Nginx as a webserver, Flask or Django for you application, and MySQL or Postgres for your database will get you very, very far, and likely remain the be the core of your stack.

Again, you can go very vary with a simple stack. Heck, I've served a very dynamic website to front page of Wired traffic off of single small physical server, PHP/MySQL with no caching. (Caching is great though!)

Avoid as the plague, Docker, unless you know why you needed it. Docker adds complexity, and unless your setup is large enough to benefit more than then costs, then your life has gotten worse and not better. And you've wasted a lot of time. Repeatable server build setups are great though - Ansible or even a good shell script.

Application/Server monitoring is a good thing. Datadog and NewRelic are good choices here.

Although you will one day hit a wall, scaling to bigger hardware is tremendously easier, (and probably cheaper) than building a big distributed system. Don't underestimate just how much more powerful a full, real, physical server can be than a $20/month cloud server.

When you do need to scale out, listen to your application and scale out just what you need too.

<comment><USER12> >Avoid as the plague, Docker, unless you know why you needed it.

Just wanted to add something here. Docker is great when you dont want to do setup work for a service or install unwanted software on your machine when you know it will only be used by that app. For eg - if your app used redis, you can just start a redis instance with 2 docker commands. Rather than downloading and installing it on your system.

You do not always need to dockerise your apps, you can use docker containers for dependencies too. I find it pretty nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > We like the type-safety without the verbosity and JVM tuning of Java.

I've never worked on large-scale services, but I'm a fan of articles and talks on scaling. Is there any reason why I often read about JVM tuning, but never come across V8 tuning, or Go runtime tuning or CPython tuning?

<comment><USER3> This was mostly a hat tip to a scarred past. This is a post about Go's GC tuning philosophy: [https://blog.golang.org/go15gc](https://blog.golang.org/go15gc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The Stack That Helped Medium Drive 2.6 Millennia of Reading Time

> For a site as seemingly simple as Medium, it may be surprising how much > complexity is behind the scenes. It's just a blog, right? You could probably > knock something out using Rails in a couple of days. :)

> In past lives I've raced snowboards, jumped out of planes, and lived in the > jungle.

Looking past the annoying, "look how cool we are" tone, I do appreciate their sharing what they use.

<comment><USER15> Don't think it counts as looking past when you still feel the need to announce specific sentences you don't like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> And 3 millennia of load time.

EDIT: "On the web we want to stay close to the metal."

</comment><comment><USER17> I realize they called this out in the article as "snark", but it really is just a blog engine, and its monthly web traffic is a small fraction of what wordpress.com gets (which is being served on one of the most craptacular platforms that exists).

They in fact could have solved this problem with Rails or even a more full- fledged CMS like BrowserCMS.

<comment><USER16> Or Apache serving flat files.

<comment><USER18> Not even Apache! Just their editor with a DB backend rendering content to S3 with a CDN in front of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> TLDR;

nodejs and Go on the backend , with DynamoDB

clojure on the front end with their own SPA framework.

<comment><USER20> Closure[1], not Clojure.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/closure/library/?hl=en](https://developers.google.com/closure/library/?hl=en)

<comment><USER21> The one that has an O'reilly book with a bird on it?

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920001416.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920001416.do)

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920013754.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920013754.do)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A commenter on another recent submission pointed out the sudden surfacing of tech-stack-blog-posts that mention DataDog in their stack. This appears to be another such of those posts. Someone at Datadog is being clever.</comment>


Hacking Hypertext – How the Hyperlink Created the Modern Economy (2020) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.remaketheweb.com/hacking-hypertext/ <comment><USER2> "Low code" sounds super compelling. Give people with a little HTML and CSS experience a platform to build real things. I'm talking about the people that hacked at My Space back in the day because they wanted to. They didn't really care about learning to code, it was all about the results.

<comment><AUTHOR> MySpace is a great example! I think a lot of web developers out there who now work for major corporations or started their own companies probably started out just wanting to add a gif to their profile or change the background color.

Sure, the results turned out ugly 90% of the time, but it gave people a way in. A way to just experiment and have fun.

Compare that with the front-end build steps new devs are expected to find their way through these day... it doesn't make sense. I think one solution work considering is making the browser and HTML itself take on more responsibility. Front-end libraries are just giant hacks built on top of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have to admit the web is built on top of hypertext. It creates links and connect everything together!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I think links are really under-appreciated, even though they're everywhere you look.

I'm curious about what the next set of hyperlink hacks will be. For example, I'd like to be able to click on an AirBnb experience, but load it up into VR instead of having to go to it.</comment></comment>


Bent iPhone claims put Apple under pressure to respond - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29331349 <comment><USER5> > "Even the most recent smartphones are not designed to be put in pockets > where they are going to be under the most chassis strain. And this just > illustrates the fact that the public's desire for manufacturers to strive > for ever thinner and lighter devices means that we are getting ever more > fragile devices.

> "Just casually sticking a £700 smartphone in your pocket is an increasingly > reckless thing to do."

Wait, this guy really thinks that users should be expected to know that it's reckless to keep their _phone_ in their pocket, and that they weren't designed for this?

That seems not right. I am confident that most people, unless educated otherwise, will assume that phones are designed to go in pockets. If manufacturers really aren't designing phones to go in pockets, they are going to have to educate users on this. The pocket has been the place non-purse- carrying people have kept their phone since the first mobile phone that was small enough to fit in a pocket.

<comment><USER6> They mean back pockets, which while still ridiculous, is much more understandable than just saying pockets. If your phone is bending in your front pockets then there is a much more serious problem.

<comment><USER7> The phones have been bending while in peoples front pockets. Imagine the posture you have while driving a car and the phone in your pocket.

Now, I can't recall the last time I drove with any phone in my pocket (that is what the cup holder is for - phones) so I'm not too worried about it, but it's still interesting.

Has there been any news about the Samsung Note 1/2/3 bending?!

<comment><USER8> I have a lot of bones to pick with Samsung, but one thing they excel at is rugged devices. They use hardy materials and thick glass.

I have a 3-year-old device that's incredibly slippery and have dropped it hundreds of times without a scratch on the glass. For comparison, I shattered a Moto G inside of a month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love Apple (I've got an iPhone 5, an iPad 3, a Macbook and an iMac) but it always dismays me how Apple fans often respond to any issue with an Apple product with "it's your fault".

A guy on MacRumors posted up about his experience with a bent phone and received some supportive comments, but also gems like, "It's aluminum, it's a noticeably longer device and as such it is likely to be bent more easily than previous iPhones. You should expect that it would be easier to bend and act accordingly."

How is this reasonable? We should know better than to put the phone in our pockets?

I sincerely hope Apple does the right thing here and takes responsibility if in fact this turns out to be a legitimate and widespread problem.

<comment><USER10> People like to defend their purchases, especially their $700 ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've owned every generation of iPhone since the 3GS, and definitely think this is being blown out of proportion. I have a 6 (4.7"), and don't have (and doint think I ever will have) any issues with this.

However, I will say that the Galaxy Note bend video [1] in (response to the iPhone 6 Plus bend test [2]) was impressive, and shows that while metal material is more stylish, plastic seems to be much more durable. Of course, I know these are far from scientific tests, but it still seems to show some sense of durability between the two.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwM4ypi3at0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwM4ypi3at0)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znK652H6yQM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znK652H6yQM)

<comment><USER12> It's not really plastic vs. metal, it's plastic vs. aluminum. Steel would be a much better choice for strength, it's just heavy.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely right. I guess it's more like this:

      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - <USER4>

Pick two.

<comment><USER13> Well - Titanium. But then we get into issues with mass availability.

<comment><USER14> There are a number of magnesium alloys which while not as tanky as titanium would be I think would be viable contenders to construct the chassis out of. You could still use an aluminium skin as it's much more attractive usually.

<comment><USER13> I've never seen an aluminium skin on a magnesium alloy. Does that work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So at least for me, if I can't stick a phone in my pocket it is useless. If I can't carry my phone with me everywhere, I might as well not have it. I can understand not sitting on it, but not putting it in my front pocket seems incredibly limiting, because that is pretty much the only place I would have to put it when out and about.

I expect most people will have a case for the phone. I personally have a 5 right now and have it in a BookBook wallet/case, which is not really very rigid. I'll want something similar when it comes time to upgrade to a 6, but if I can't actually stick it in my pocket I'll need to find an alternative. Or maybe pay for a battery replacement on the 5.

<comment><USER16> 5s? That's what I'm leaning towards upgrading from the 5.

<comment><USER15> I think the bigger screen of a 6 and the promise of Apple Pay provides enough additional value over the 5. I don't find the 5s as compelling an upgrade, and would rather spend $90 on a battery instead of hundreds on a 5S (the battery is really only complaint I have about my 5).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They said the same thing about the iPhone 5 ([http://www.cultofmac.com/248603/iphone-5ses-are-bending- in-p...](http://www.cultofmac.com/248603/iphone-5ses-are-bending-in-peoples- pockets\);) Xperia Z1 ([http://www.phonearena.com/news/Xperia-Z1-frame- bending-for-n...](http://www.phonearena.com/news/Xperia-Z1-frame-bending-for- no-reason-claim-users_id51383\);) Nexus 5 ([http://forums.androidcentral.com/google- nexus-5/387390-nexus...](http://forums.androidcentral.com/google- nexus-5/387390-nexus-5-wobbly-bent.html)), and I'm sure many others.

<comment><USER12> The iPhone 6+ is thinner and longer than the iPhone 5, so it makes a lot of sense it would be more prone to bending due to physics.

<comment><USER17> The point is that these articles come out every time there is a new thin phone, but then you never hear about it again because it doesn't happen to any substantial portion of buyers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We need to know the proportion of people this is happening to to understand whether this is a thing or not.

Apple supposedly sold 10 million phones on the weekend of release, more since. Apparently more of those are 6s than 6 Pluses but we don't know the exact numbers or breakdown right now. Similarly we know a few people have had problems but it doesn't seem clear whether it's a few, a few tens, a few hundred or many thousands.

Ultimately this may be bad design ignoring real world valid use cases, it may be dumbness on the part of a small number of vocal users, but without knowing what sort of numbers are seeing the problem and what that is as a proportion of sales it's almost impossible to say.

Right now all we can really say is some iPhone 6s and 6 Pluses have bent and based on that it's no wonder Apple haven't said anything.

Not a great story but probably all that we really know right now.

<comment><USER19> Even if it happens to "only 2 percent" of iPhone 6 Plus owners, that seems like a pretty big number to me for such an issue to even exist.

<comment><USER20> I would consider 2 percent a huge number, yes. I'd also expect Apple to do refunds for those 2 percent, both in the sense that I'd demand it if it were my phone, and that historically they've done things like that.

But we still need to know the number. Has anything so far suggested it might be as high as 2 percent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder to what extent this (and the antenna issue before it) are a result of Apple being so secretive. Because they don't take prototypes out for real world testing, or encase them in bulky facades if they do, they don't understand how real people are going to use it.

Still think it's stupid - just because this behavior didn't result in a bent iPhone before doesn't mean it was good.

</comment><comment><USER22> A few ideas about this problem:

1\. Consumer behavior factors

\- Get a case. These devices will break if dropped, and when you are carrying it in your hand many times a day, it is highly likely to be dropped. It's a matter of "when", not "if".

\- Don't carry the device in pants pockets. Carry it in a shirt pocket, or in a bag or satchel or hang it on your belt. Solved.

2\. Manufacturing and marketing factors

\- Distribute 5,000 beta devices and really field test them. Manufacturers, especially Apple, hate to do this because it reveals the secret design in advance of the dramatic release event. But field testing the devices makes more sense given their complexity and unknown uses and conditions to which they will be subjected.

\- Make the devices thicker and sturdier. Many of us would not complain about an extra millimeter or two of thickness, especially if it means a bigger battery and some nice-to-haves such as a memory card slot. Thinness is costly, too. Make it an indestructible brick, charge less, and millions will continue to buy the devices.

\- An alternative view: yield to bendiness! Make the displays bendy, make the cases flexible, and accept that customers want to abuse their phones by sitting on them in tight jeans.

<comment><USER23> >>Get a case. If getting case is a Must, why even worry about slim and beautiful devices? So much for good Industrial Design.

<comment><USER22> True... but every phone out there has a plethora of cases available for it. Customers have accepted that a case is a necessary accessory and indeed it's a way to personalize their devices. That's why someone can make a living selling cases in a kiosk at the mall.

<comment><USER24> I have not accepted that a case is a necessary accessory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I _really_ want Apple to issue a statement along the lines of "You asked for a thinner lighter phone, you got it. Now stop being an idiot and sitting on it and we'll all be fine."

This is all just incredibly stupid. The fact it bends and _continues to function_ should be newsworthy, not the other way around.

<comment><USER26> Who asked for a thinner, lighter phone? This is a serious question, because I keep seeing this being held as a response to customer demand, when actually few asked for a thinner, lighter phone.

They wanted a larger phone, for sure, but I think one would reasonably assume structural stability for a $1000 consumer device (often bought under a pay-as- you-go loan courtesy of carrier subsidization) under fairly normal conditions.

Further this isn't "sitting on it" \-- the issues seem to be coming via seemingly innocuous, but longer term, flexing in front pockets. Aluminum is not all or nothing, and will quite happily give slowly and gradually over hours.

Maybe it's all overblown -- these things tend to be on new Apple releases -- but I don't see how some can so quickly resort to blame the customer antics.

<comment><USER20> How many high-selling phones do you see that have the thickness of an iPhone 4? The trend is towards thinner and lighter. Maybe the phone manufacturers are wrong, but in general we expect our technology to get thinner and lighter.

That said, it has reached the point where I'd be ok to have slightly more weight and thickness for sturdiness and battery life. I just think thin and light are things people want.

<comment><USER26> _The trend is towards thinner and lighter._

The trend is towards a comfortable size, beyond which thinness stopped being a big selling point. The Galaxy S5, for example, is thicker than the Galaxy S4. The Note 4 is thicker than the Note 3.

Contrary to common notions, Apple occasionally chases specs, and the thin and light thing seems to be one of them (just as unobtanium type materials often make a big presence in Apple devices -- material specs -- regardless of suitability for purpose).

Apple makes fantastic devices, but just as some other manufacturers chase irrelevant things like octal core processors and truly absurd pixel densities, Apple does the same "not for your benefit, but for our bragging" pursuits.

<comment><USER20> Huh--I think I've been sniped by the larger screens and curves of my coworkers' Android phones. They look thinner than my 5S, but they're about the same thickness--sometimes even more. My assumption was that Apple had been playing a game of leapfrogging vs Android phones on thinness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have one of the slimmest android devices huawei p6 (6.2 mm vs 7.1 mm for iphone 6 plus) for a year and a half and im not having any issues with it bending or giving the feeling that its fragile.

[http://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_ascend_p6-5467.php](http://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_ascend_p6-5467.php)

<comment><USER12> Is the back plate on that metal or plastic? It's the metal back that is bending and then staying bent, while plastic will bend and then return back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I suspect this could also be related to iPhone users having had a fairly small phone to date. Slipping the iPhone into a pocket till now has been an easy practice, so I assume the same is being done out of habit with the new larger models. The new form factor (larger AND thinner) can't stand up to the stresses.

<comment><USER29> Somehow, my Galaxy Note 2 has survived the rigors of my front pocket for close to two years without bending or cracking. Phablets really aren't that big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is a lot of fanboys out there still defending Apple with ridiculous arguments. Being a consumer, for me, this is unacceptable. Paying 800 to 900€ for a phone that has the quality of a sub 100€ phone is simply taunting the actual Apple costumers.

Mark my words. This will be the major flop remembered in the future for the start of the downfall of this brand.

This will make history.

The excessively low production costs with these devices made in China with low quality standards and low QA at an excessively price range for the end consumer. The profit margin in this phone has to be huge and will serve as an example in the future in how a major international manufacturing fiasco is made of. This is truly amazing.

</comment><comment><USER31> So I thought that [http://imgur.com/gallery/FSXJp](http://imgur.com/gallery/FSXJp) was a joke. Turns out, nope, it's a real problem. I wonder if Apple did have to fix it, how they'd go about it. I assume reenforcing the body of the phone externally is not really feasible, but manufacturing better bodies and swapping them out en masse would be very expensive and take a long time, no?

</comment><comment><USER32> We have seen this before. [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/260526?tstart=0](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/260526?tstart=0) Put a think computer in your pocket, bend, and it will bend. Get a case or protect it. I have had an iPhone since the 3, never used a case, only broken one iPhone by being extra careful.

</comment><comment><USER33> apple has specifically advertised the iphone as fitting in a pocket.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxtyxCAxGNE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxtyxCAxGNE)

</comment><comment><USER34> I played with the 6+ for the first time last night, and it surprises me people even sit down with it. It seems like like it would be immediately awkward from its size.

</comment><comment><USER35> Has this been a problem with other, non-Apple phones of a similar form factor? If so, this is a design issue. If not, this is an Apple design issue.

<comment><USER36> It's a problem with the phone's aluminum construction. A phone like the Note 3, made with less premium-feeling plastic, responds better to stress like this. It can be bent, but it just bends right back with no permanent bend left.

<comment><USER37> The aluminum phone yields, undergoing plastic deformation, while the plastic phone deforms elastically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> perfect opportunity for Apple to introduce iPants.

Joke aside, this is something that Apple needs to quickly address without putting customers at fault. You cannot just tell the customers not to put their phones in their pocket.

<comment><USER39> > Joke aside, this is something that Apple needs to quickly address without > putting customers at fault. You cannot just tell the customers not to put > their phones in their pocket.

They cannot address the issues for existing devices and all devices that are in the pipeline. Users on backorder could cancel their orders, but most won't do that, so why should they bother? In a year people will be joking about not buying first generation Apple devices and that's it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Oh brother.

<comment><USER22> ...wherefore art thou?</comment></comment>


Four Ways to Clean Up Software Bloat - <AUTHOR> http://aseidman.com/2010/07/four-ways-to-clean-software-feature-bloat/

<comment><USER2> Free-as-in-beer software advocates controlling your own fate, and this is one of the times when that is really quite useful. You might think a feature is "good"; but if the maintainer does not, your feature could just go away.

With free software, you can go back and download some old version that _does_ work the way you want. You might sacrifice other updates in the process; but even then, it is theoretically possible to fork the older version and merge in new features. Many people obviously won't go that far, but it is certainly more control than commercial software will ever provide.</comment>


Silicon Valley exploits time and space to extend frontiers of capitalism - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/29/silicon-valley-exploits-space-evgeny-morozov <comment><USER2> Good lord this author has an agenda.

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Morozov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Morozov)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The space mining act had to do with internet balloons how exactly?

Also oh no, these American companies are being companies and expanding service. How dare they build infrastructure and be successful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Silicon Valley didn't invent capitalism.

Silicon Valley didn't push America to abandon space exploration.

Silicon Valley didn't lobby for austerity, for Reaganomics, for the Iraq war, or any of that other bad stuff.

So why are they going after SV? Because SV doesn't retaliate. SV is a soft target and professional complainers prefer soft targets.

</comment><comment><USER6> So we've invented either a time machine or a bag of holding.</comment>


Open Text Content Server(Livelink) - <AUTHOR> Hi,<p>Is Open Text Content Server  worth a tool to work in if i am looking for a good career in Software Development or shall I move in to some other technology ? If so, can you please advise which technology will be good to pursue ? Thanks ! <comment><USER2> Yes It is. Just Google your Query with how to.</comment>


The Future of Parse - <AUTHOR> http://blog.parse.com/2013/04/25/the-future-of-parse/

<comment><USER2> Parse was an interesting, exciting service; now it's not.

And, I have a hunch that all that stuff on their blog about how _nothing's gonna change_ is even more bullshit than it usually is when a cool startup gets acquired by a walmart. Because since it's Facebook buying them, Parse isn't going to get most of the future customers they might have gotten.

Most developers probably understand at a visceral level that using Facebook as the opaque backend provider for your customers' private information would be like using Oracle as your open-source community relations manager, or using McDonald's as your nutritional consultant.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I'm now really glad I didn't choose to use Parse for an upcoming project -- I seriously considered it.

I do think there is now a particularly acute need for an open source project that implements Parse's REST API. Maybe a Python project using Flask? If I had the time...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll say congratulations to the individuals who helped build Parse and show everyone good developer docs.

As a user of Parse, I'm done. I have zero confidence that the service will continue as is for very long, despite the best intentions of the original team. Biggest concerns are requiring FB auth, FB's flippant attitude towards privacy, and the engineering culture mismatch.

<comment><USER5> Ilya Sukhar specifically cited the culture compatibility as one of the reasons they chose Facebook. I'm curious about why you think that there is a culture mismatch.

<comment><USER4> Facebook is perfectly willing to release "features" of unknown quality to the user population. The developer documentation&communication is still awful (instead of outright misleading as it was a couple years ago).

This seems completely counter to the way Parse has operated so far. Perhaps on a personal level it's a great fit, but in operation? Doesn't seem like it.

<comment><USER6> (FB tool here) How can we make our documentation & communication not awful?

<comment><USER4> I will admit this may have changed in the past 8? months, but the last couple experiences I had on different platforms was headache-inducing. Search (on FB docs) would turn up examples for X that just did not work. It didn't seem like the reference examples were tested when the API was updated. Blackhole/flag any examples that fail. The only thing worse than no docs is misleading docs. Another annoying event was app settings would vanish when submitting.

Edit: Okay, I went over to the developer site and it looks like things have improved more from the docs side. Progress! Can you say with certainty all the new examples work?

<comment><USER6> I'd hate to make a guarantee I couldn't stand by. Let me say this: they're all supposed to work - if you find some that are b0rk3d, please let me know and we'll fix/remove them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking at all these comments has me wondering: _Why is it that as soon as a startup is acquired we immediately abandon it as if it's going offline tomorrow_? I first remember noticing this when FriendFeed was acquired. As soon as I read the news, I quit using it. I checked back about a week later and sure enough, the only ones using it were blogs like TechCrunch.

Any ideas why we (that includes me) behave this way?

<comment><USER8> Parse becomes one of the many strings to Facebook's bow. Parse by itself was a single very good offering. Facebook can now "sunset" Parse whenever they feel like it. My feeling is that Facebook bought Parse for the talent and the mobile knowledge, and not the product itself. I see the Parse engineers being moved out to help Facebook's real mobile strategy move forward. I may be proved wrong, but I'd be scared to invest my entire business on a backend I don't control. I'd be shit-scared to invest my entire business on a backend controlled by Facebook.

Facebook have shown time and time again that they do not care about the privacy of their users. They are not going to get that trust back any time soon. In my opinion the assumption that they could "get away with it" was a long term bad mistake on Zuckerberg's part.

As an aside, I don't post on Facebook anymore once I realised that my deleted data was not really deleted. Even today, almost a year and a half after deleting all my posts, check-ins and photos, my profile still shows 3 "hidden" check-ins. Until a few months ago, a "deleted" (a.k.a hidden) album was still showing in the album count. Facebook has a few bugs when they do their entity counts, which show up their logical rather than physical deletes. Sorry, but when I delete something, I expect it to be deleted, not just marked as deleted.

I don't trust them as far as I can throw them, and I really can't throw a 8000 lb gorilla very far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are alternatives to Parse?

This acquisition just created a better opportunity for a new player. I for one cannot trust Facebook's handling of their data- let alone my apps data.

<comment><USER10> If you want to control your own data, we are building a synchronizing database for mobile <https://github.com/couchbase/mobile>

This isn't a full backend as a service, but for data storage we are hoping to hit a good 80% point where folks can use Couchbase Lite and pretty much just rely on their mobile app chops / not have to worry about the backend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just means that now I have to look elsewhere or roll my own cloud data store and push proxy. It is a small inconvenience, but not something insurmountable.

</comment><comment><USER12> Congrats to the great team at Parse!

<comment><USER13> Why?

<comment><USER14> Because they made an awesome product and deserve this maybe.

<comment><USER13> Im curious as to why an acquire is celebrated. My feeble mind sees this as a success if the original product was the business nd not the offering.

<comment><USER15> I've never seen it put more bluntly and truthfully than "the original product was the business." I always find it creepy to see all these founders and investors and Y-Combinator folks patting themselves on their backs for a hefty exit. It's like saying "well done gentlemen, we fooled them all the way through." Since I have been aware of this, I have decided I don't want investors meddling around in my decisions, or if I even want a business at all. Open source projects seem like a more honest and longterm way to champion a product that I truly care about (which is not the case with most of these "startup guys".) Having a successful business seems to always devolve into just making more and more profit, and those interests permeate back into every decision. Which is why people are so worried about Parse's future with Facebook, and what's also happening to Google in ever increasing levels now with G+. I look up to Mozilla these days, hope they don't fall off the deep end with Mozilla Corp's Firefox OS.

<comment><USER13> You may also develop a commercial product and still care about it. Profit does not mean a product is doomed to be milked. Its the attitude of the business towards that product. In case of Parse, I always thought they would strongly grow into an independent companny. Maybe bought by someone else, though not Facebook.

Another point is that developing businesses as products is aslo neccesary. This allows bigger companies with cash flow but without the talent to simply shop around for their next offering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Parse is a great service. I can only assume the team is as awesome as their product. Fingers crossed some of the Parse approach to product and developer service rubs off on facebook. Well I guess buying the company they want some of the developer love Parse has.

<comment><USER17> >Fingers crossed some of the Parse approach to product and developer service rubs off on facebook

That'd be like boiling the ocean.

<comment><USER16> Hah hah, good one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess Facebook wants Open Graph (and their other APIs) to eventually be the primary backend for apps. Makes sense.

<comment><USER19> I don't believe it's gonna roll that way with developers. They want full control and access to their data and Facebook is not the kind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Facebook are stepping into new (for them) territory here. Unless this is an acqui-hire, it may be an "X isn't shutting down" statement I can believe.

<comment><USER21> Not really, I don't think Instagram is being shut down any time soon. Unless you are talking about then running a subscription service as new ground?</comment></comment>


Devaluation Triggers Exodus of Wealthy Chinese, US West Coast Primary Target - <AUTHOR> http://wolfstreet.com/2016/10/31/fearing-yuan-depreciation-60-of-wealthy-chinese-plan-to-buy-real-estate-overseas-us-west-coast-primary-target/ <comment><USER2> Link is down at the moment. Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uthqc70...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uthqc70FrjUJ:wolfstreet.com/2016/10/31/fearing- yuan-depreciation-60-of-wealthy-chinese-plan-to-buy-real-estate-overseas-us- west-coast-primary-target/)</comment>


Firefox CSP Issue may cause extension conflicts - <AUTHOR> https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/23/firefox-csp-issue-may-cause-extension-conflicts/ <comment><AUTHOR> The tracking issue is also informative:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1462989](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1462989)</comment>


3 Reasons Why Innovative Cognitive Services Are the New Oil - <AUTHOR> https://e27.co/innovative-cognitive-services-new-oil-begun-realising-impact-lives-20170410/ <comment><USER2> The combination of AI and data, with amazing user interfaces, will expedite innovation and be the future driver of tech.</comment>


The Art of Code Review: A Dropbox Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.objc.io/issue-22/dropbox.html

<comment><USER2> Also nice is the style guide, which also covers a number of best practices for modern Objective-C: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/5utnlwhr18ax05c/style- gu...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/5utnlwhr18ax05c/style- guide.html?dl=0)

<comment><USER3> Curious, has anyone adopted another company's published style guide?

<comment><USER4> At Tilt we use the NY Times Objective-C styleguide. [https://github.com/NYTimes/objective-c-style- guide](https://github.com/NYTimes/objective-c-style-guide)

<comment><USER5> That makes sense, those journalists just need to have a good writing style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this may very well be the most joyless article about software engineering I've ever read. The sort of weird tone of moderately enthused Newspeak is also quite frightening in a way.

<comment><USER7> Initially I thought it seemed unreal, with the way it was written, then I thought perhaps it was satire, but couldn't work out what was funny about it.

"Bask in our engineer's prideful feeling that every single line now being added to the Dropbox for iOS app began as a task in Maniphest."

I follow a system just like this; it keeps things working smoothly, but I'm not sure I'm basking in any kind of pride over it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Much more interesting in my opinion is the Square article also in this issue of objc.io [http://www.objc.io/issue-22/square.html](http://www.objc.io/issue-22/square.html)

I am surprised to not see that article on HN instead of this one.

</comment><comment><USER9> Even though this might be best for the company and the product, does anyone else feel that big bureaucratic processes like this take away the joy and creativity of coding? I suppose it is because I'm more fond of coding as an art than as a science.

<comment><USER10> Totally. While it seems appropriate that a product like Dropbox would require some very careful risk management and quality control, this feels like a joyless environment, despite the occasional use of memes in quality control threads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thank god there's a few dank memes to offset the bitter taste of the mountain of red-tape. Employee morale must be off-the-charts!</comment>


Scientists Accidentally Discover Efficient Process to Turn CO2 into Ethanol - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a23417/convert-co2-into-ethanol/?linkId=31295308 <comment><USER2> I did a little sleuthing when I saw this somewhere else. I think The accidentally I think is a bit of a misnomer since this sort of technology is being actively explored. I remember someone earlier found a catalyst that generates acetic acid[1]. Far as I can tell the key difference here is using electricity to push the reaction uphill against the usual thermodynamic preference. And because the process is likely to be extremely selective. You get a pure form of the chemical you want and nothing else. Compared to normal chemical processes which generate a crude mix of chemicals because of the alternative reaction pathways. Sometimes you get just what you want, but often further (expensive) purification steps are needed.

[1] Didn't get the same press of course.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a pretty interesting result. Does anyone know how expensive it is to make their catalyzing structure? (Oak Ridge is not known for making economically useful gadgets :-)</comment>


National security bill could take toll on U.S. startup investments - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/co-1524239719-6fc9b4c9-48fa-43c1-bc21-fd3a157477b8.html <comment><USER2> I'm sure that the bill's sponsors, if aware of this problem, would reply that either:

\- Existing VC's should find a way to buy out or otherwise get rid of their Chinese (or other foreign) LP's.

\- New firms whose partners are exclusively American (or possibly from more "friendly" countries instead of rivals like China) should be founded to take advantage of the opportunities that the bill deliberately closes off from more international firms.</comment>


Ask HN: Returning to an office environment after a 2 year hiatus? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software developer who's been through a couple jobs. The most recent one was 100% remote work. Aside from semi-yearly informal meetings with my boss, there was no on-site interaction.
Due to circumstances out of my control I wasn't able to keep the job after 2 years with them, and that was followed by an unplanned 2 year hiatus from any regular jobs. I want to get back to a normal office job, which is where I'm trying to figure things out.
Most places reject me after a phone interview, so it may be that my interviewing skills have decayed. I usually know how I screwed up on the technical parts, but I'm not really good at figuring out what I did wrong on the soft skills. How do I get back into the groove and make it shown that I can work with others in an office setting again? <comment><USER2> It's hard to make any recommendations without a bit more information.

1) Where do you find your view of the phone interview going from optimistic to feeling it's gone awry?

2) Are the positions you are applying for well within your skillset, related to last positions? Are they a level above or below your past experience? Lateral?

3) How much research do you put into your interviews?

4) Do you have a set of questions prepared for the interviewer? I have found (both interviewing, and being interviewed) that a single unique and well thought question can be a game changer in the interview process and can lead to better conversation with the interviewer.

5) Do you practice interviews / questions with yourself or a friend?

I also would suggest really putting yourself in the interviewers shoes, for each position. What do you think they are looking for? If you were interviewing, how would you want certain questions answered?

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of the time I work a solo dev at the companies I've been in. Which to be more specific means, maybe I'm not always the only dev in the company but more often than not, the only dev in a project. The big exception was my remote job of over a year, where all the devs worked on the same project.

A lot of my correspondence involves talking to non-technical people such as project managers, so I have gotten to figure out how to communicate many things to non-tech people.

1) I usually don't. Unless I really bombed on a problem and am stuck on solving a problem for so long, I really can't tell true negatives from false negatives by the tone of someone's voice, or what they say to me.

2) I apply to mid-level jobs. I used to apply to senior positions (have held 5 jobs) but as I'm getting so many rejections, I've lowered the bar since.

Going by the phrase, "walk before you run" I consider myself still in the walking phase for many skillsets, yet even if I apply to jobs that are less challenging to get into, many people assume I have enough experience to run and say I cover lots of ground but not a lot of depth to have an exceptional strong point. And this is coming from someone with a lot of experience in small companies, where "running" is the norm. I thought years of experience is just a number? Many people learn at different rates, and have a diverse set of work histories.

3) I do some research in questions I should ask, and what I should know about the company beforehand. Typically would be able to find some work they're doing and bring it up.

4) My go-to questions to ask interviewers is "how long have you been working at this company and how have things changed since then?", "What is a typical team size for engineering/development?" and "What is the onboarding process like for new hires?"

5) Interview practices are almost impossible with a friend because I don't know any close friends in the industry, or with any experience interviewing people in general. More of a homebody so I don't talk to many of them. Because of that, I don't believe a mock interview with a random friend is a good substitute for a real interview, because they will not have actual experience in hiring developers.</comment></comment>


Linux Kernel 4.2 released - <AUTHOR> http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1508.3/04416.html

<comment><USER2> Some of the new features, detailed (AMD/GPU, x86 assembly code improved, Jitter (crypto) RNG, Queue spinlocks...): [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-42-...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-42-features&num=1)</comment>


Tor Messenger Beta: Chat Over Tor, Easily - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-messenger-beta-chat-over-tor-easily <comment><USER2> If the setup screen stays the way it is, this is probably never going to take off. The fact that it's officially coming from Tor devs is important and I'm sure people who already use Tor can use this app relatively easily, but if the point is to get more people to use secure and private messaging apps, asking people to enter their xmpp credentials isn't the way to go. Additionally, adding GTalk, Facebook Chat etc. into the mix is only going to confuse people because they'll assume they're secure just by using this app. But in order to have a secure and private conversation you need people on both ends of the conversation to use a client that supports OTR.

They mentioned Pond and Ricochet in that post and I'm a big fan of both but especially Ricochet. It has no setup, no configuration. Just share your address and talk. That's the way it should be. But it's only available on desktops. These days most people connect to the internet only by using their smartphones and if you only support desktop computers (even if you're x-platform) you're missing out on a lot of people already. The perfect solution would be Signal's encryption combined with Telegram's availability, but unfortunately we're not there yet.

I'll keep my eye on this project and I really do hope it takes off but as of right now, it's not that different from any other secure messaging app you can find on the internet that only tech savvy people can use.

<comment><USER3> As soon as Signal has native clients for OS X, Windows, and Linux, it's game over. I will use Signal exclusively for chatting everywhere.

<comment><USER4> I am a huge fan of signal but it will never be the end game. Society needs communications that hide both content AND metadata. Signal only really hides content.

The only programs I am aware of that do both all have significant limitations in other areas and none have gone through rigorous peer review.

i2p-bote has mobile and desktop applications, can use possible post quantum secure encryption, it's asynchronous and real time, capable of multi party communication, and has optional delays between hops making it global passive adversary secure. Unfortunately it doesn't work well because many messages don't actually make it through. You can't send files greater than 500kb. Also it is not peer reviewed.

Bitmessage has multiparty communication and is asynchronous but has a terrible user interface, is hard to setup, no mobile application, no attachments, no peer review.

Ricochet works well and is easy to use but no attachments, it can't be asynchronous, no multiparty communication, and no peer review.

Haven't played with pond. It looks promising.

My wish list for the ultimate messenger: easy to use, secure by default, hides content and metadata, is multi party, can share arbitrarily large files, is both instantaneous and asynchronous, can be global passive adversary secure, is quantum computer secure, truly multi platform, and supports being signed in on multiple devices at once.

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry to derail the conversation with my lack of technical understanding but how do we protect metadata?

If we have two devices (say Alice's phone and Bob's phone) that are sending messages to each other, how do we make sure nobody knows who is talking to whom? The answer seems non-trivial to me.

Could we use Alice's and Bob's public keys to encrypt the message and then send them to the entire network, relying on the security of the encryption (and acknowledging that a third part can read all messages any way)? Is there a way to look at a public key and an encrypted message and say that yes, this message was encrypted with this key? It seems that we'd be paying through the nose in terms of throughput capacity (and processing capacity as everyone would have to take in everyone else's packets) if we wanted to maintain metadata privacy this way. I'm sure this is not what you had in mind. Can you please elaborate on how we can secure metadata?

<comment><USER6> May I suggest taking a look at [https://ricochet.im/](https://ricochet.im/) for exactly this.

<comment><USER4> Ricochet is great :) Very easy to use. Unfortunately, it will be very difficult if not impossible to make it support group chat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the curious, this is InstantBird (which uses Pidgin's libpurple* library for chat and Mozilla for UI/rendering) plus the Off The Record/OTR plugin (for encryption of content) plus a Tor client.

Note that InstandBird last had a release in December 2013 and their blog was abandoned in July 2014, so their future is a bit up in the air even though commits still happen on the Mercurial repository at Mozilla. Pidgin has released multiple security updates since the December 2013 release of InstantBird 1.5. I'm unsure if the Tor folks have incorporated these changes offhand. They use the clunky gitweb client for web browsing of their repository and I don't have time to clone a git repo at the moment.

It's also worth noting that Pidgin's libpurple uses XMPP for Facebook and Google chats, neither of which will work well any longer due to both of them deprecating XMPP.

If you'd like to use secure chat and are unconcerned with the meta-data, there are quite a few better options at present. If you'd like to use secure chat over Tor, you can use any of those options over the Tor network manually. This does have a lot of promise for making it easier for a regular end user, though, so testing and feedback are encouraged.

*Update - According to a comment reference below, they now build without libpurple using their own custom Javascript libraries.

<comment><USER8> Instantbird still seems to be under very active development. See the comm- central repository, which is Instantbird.

Tor Messenger does not seem to be using libpurple, at least judging by the comments here: [https://lwn.net/Articles/662471/#Comments](https://lwn.net/Articles/662471/#Comments). And I tried it with Google Talk and it works. Wikipedia says that Google Talk as a client was deprecated but you can still use it with third-party clients like Pidgin, Tor Messenger, etc.

<comment><USER7> That's surprising. Thanks for the link. So, they rewrote all of libpurple's chat handling in Javascript?

You can still mostly connect into Google via XMPP, it's just a bit clunky. And it doesn't work as a true XMPP service as you can't connect to anyone but Google with it. I'm using it in Pidgin right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, I had no idea the Tor Project was working on something like this. There really hasn't been a good solution for secure, multi-platform instant messaging. My contacts are fragmented across different services, most of which do not have (let alone enforce) clients with end-to-end encryption. I'm really hoping for some sort of platform that can gain widespread adoption and that isn't restricted to any particular device or OS.

<comment><USER9> What is described in the post won't force end-to-end encryption. It is more or less the same as using your current IM client over Tor: you still depend on a server which you may not control and communication between this server and your contact (directly or via your contact's server) may not be encrypted all the way. To be secure you would still need to use OTR, even if your contact also uses a Tor enabled IM client.

Otherwise if you want end-to-end over Tor communication, Ricochet works quite well :).

<comment><USER3> Yes, I understand that, but AFAIK the only halfway decent client on OS X that supports OTR is Adium, and the UX is really bad. A simpler, more reliable client with OTR is welcomed. The direct integration with the Tor network is the icing on the cake.

<comment><USER10> The UX is not the biggest issue, but rather the buggy library it is based on. There is an alternative: [https://jitsi.org/](https://jitsi.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So far I've tried connecting to Google Talk, Twitter, and Facebook. Google Talk and Facebook both blocked the connection and sent me notices that they thought my account had been compromised. After confirming with Facebook that it really was me, the next login succeeded. Google Talk continued to block additional connection attempts even after I logged in on the web and marked the blocked attempt as really being me. I've previously had trouble with this issue with Gmail when I was attempting to use a Gmail address for notifications sent from Monit on a cloud server. While you can tell Google that a connection attempt in the past was really you, this doesn't seem to have any effect on the next login attempt, so effectively Tor Messenger doesn't work with Google for me.

In general, the fact that each time you launch the client (or generate a new path through the Tor network) you get a new IP, these sorts of security measures put in place by the chat networks could be a difficult issue to work around.

<comment><USER11> The biggest problem with connecting to Google Talk and Facebook is that they have deprecated XMPP access[1]. Well Google hasn't really, but they might as well have[2].

As someone who trains people on using XMPP and OTR, Google Talk used to be a great XMPP service and now makes it very difficult for most users to understand why they are having problems with the service.

1) [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat) 2) [https://xmpp.org/2015/03/no-its-not-the-end-of-xmpp-for- goog...](https://xmpp.org/2015/03/no-its-not-the-end-of-xmpp-for-google-talk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So this is compatible with XMPP? I've been toying the idea of setting up an xmpp server and this may push me over the edge...

<comment><USER11> Yes it is. I have Tor Messenger running without problems with two different XMPP servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great to see this - there was a similar project I tried awhile ago ([https://github.com/prof7bit/TorChat](https://github.com/prof7bit/TorChat)) and it was quite disappointing to see it no longer maintained.

</comment><comment><USER14> Good to have another E2EE chat option. End to end encryption needs to be the new normal. It's not enough to just encrypt the connection to your service anymore. That might have been a feather in the caps of eCommerce sites in the 90s, but today we can and should do better.

<comment><USER15> I agree, it's nice to have a choice in end-to-end messaging services. But now that iMessage/Signal/TextSecure exist, seems like end-to-end messaging is solved. People need to move on to harder end-to-end use cases that go beyond OTR messaging.

I guess Tor will provide more anonymity, which is a nice plus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It crashes for me right on start (Unhandled exception at 0x0EDC9BD5 (d2d1.dll) in instantbird.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation writing location 0x00000000.). But once fixed, it can be great.

<comment><USER17> You can try the following workaround: [https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17453#commen...](https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17453#comment:7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting, I never heard of instantbird before. This is great news!

</comment><comment><USER19> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474591](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474591).

</comment><comment><USER20> Avira alerts me that it found some kind of malware in instantbird.exe.

<comment><USER21> What name does your AV return for the malware warning when running instantbird.exe?</comment></comment>


InDinero (YC S10) Brings Budgeting to Small Businesses - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/26/smallbusiness/indinero_budget/index.htm

<comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, how'd you get the coverage from CNN? Was it their interest, or via a marketing outreach?

Congrats on the coverage!

</comment><comment><USER3> I know you must be sick of hearing this, but - do you guys support Silicon Valley Bank yet? We'd love to give Indinero a try.

Presumably if you don't support SVB we could still manually enter transactions? (We might actually do that - SVB's online banking might be the worst I've ever seen, and that's saying something.)

<comment><USER3> Just want to note that shortly after I posted this, someone from SVB emailed me personally to let me know that they agree their online banking needs improvement, and have a relaunch in the works.

In our offline experience with them, we've found their customer service to be very good - personal, efficient and understanding (the latter was important given our circumstances as immigrant founders).

<comment><USER4> SVB's personal level of account service is fantastic, but the online site predates web 1.0 which is an ironic tragedy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just went to check out InDinero and linked up my personal accounts to see how it worked. I have to say it was so nice, easy clean, etc. that I think I might start using it to monitor my personal accounts, it's 10x better than my banks online banking pages.

</comment><comment><USER6> My wife and I run a Salon and I WANT to use InDinero... but it really seems like it's focused on super-small businesses. Is there value for a $500k+ revenue 12+ employee business that I'm missing? I'm not super happy with LessAccounting, but I still want to keep track of per-employee revenue and payouts and what not :\

<comment><USER7> Have you tried Quickbooks? If so, what did you like or did not like about it?

<comment><USER6> I've definitely tried quickbooks and it is a bloated, feature-ridden, trainwreck that requires weeks of training. Doing simple things like setting up categories and viewing transactions become ridiculously difficult and time consuming.

I like lessaccounting because it has some of the features we need, but it's really setup for invoice-based businesses which we are not. As such, there's no way to track things like... credit card payments that a merchant fulfills in May but were actually run against expenses in the end of April.

<comment><USER8> Have you tried using the tags in LessAccounting? They should allow you to do exactly what you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Direct link so you don't have to go to CNN (I got a couple of popups in spite of having AdBlock)

<https://indinero.com/>

Just out of curiosity - how do you manage to get data from credit cards and banks? Are you using some third party service, or did you write something from scratch?

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting pricing concept: If InDinero helps its customers succeed, so do its revenues! Great idea!

<comment><USER11> Scaling with customer success is the way to go in B2B. I was just talking with one of my customers today, who was worried about going from the $30 to $80 plan. "Bob, my back of the envelope math is that your monthly revenue needs to increase by ten thousand bucks before that happens." "Oh that's fine then."

I'm sincerely hoping I make Bob rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _So far they'd paid themselves nothing, but starting in 2011 they'll all receive $20,000 a year._

Really glad the interview included this. It's one of those details you don't hear about much in company profiles.

</comment><comment><USER13> Congrats on getting on to CNN

</comment><comment><USER14> Honestly, InDinero is just one of those genuinely good ideas that I would invest in myself.

</comment><comment><USER15> Really wish it worked with TD Business Direct.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like the honesty about employee salary, keep it up! CNN knows you guys are onto something!

</comment><comment><USER17> I might be biased, I do prefer Outright a little more...

</comment><comment><USER18> Canada support?

</comment><comment><USER19> They just added this? What else did they have??

<comment><USER20> Pretty charts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It might be cool for InDinero to support data imports from our FaceCash POS system. As mobile payments take off more businesses will be using it, and though we have our own accounting features they might want to build it into InDinero too if they're using it already.</comment>


Kadira Launched – Performance Monitoring for Meteor - <AUTHOR> https://kadira.io/

<comment><USER2> What a great addition to the Meteor ecosystem! Just one piece of feedback if I may: I looked at your pricing, realizing beforehand that a great majority of your target market will most likely have to come from individuals, small development shops or startups.

I was looking at your "Startup" plan features and pricing, and was wondering if you may want to reconsider this package. I read that one of the most important key performance metrics of an SaaS product (like Kadira) is "churn". I believe you can attract MORE customers and keep them if your "Startup" plan is packaged and priced attractively.

I want you guys to succeed, so here's my two-cents' worth or unsolicited advice for the Startup Package:

1\. Offer Data Retention for 1 month (4 weeks)

2\. Set the Price at $9.95 per month per host (remember, a customer will most likely have more than one host over the long-term if you can keep this customer)

This packaging/pricing also helps enhance the entire Meteor ecosystem. You also help small developers like us be better Meteor developers.

(As for the "Pro" package, have you thought about renaming it (perhaps "Enterprise")? To me, "Pro" means an individual developer.

Thanks, Arunoda, for another great contribution to the burgeoning Meteor ecosystem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

We've alter our pricing model. See: [https://kadira.io/blog/we-heard- you/](https://kadira.io/blog/we-heard-you/)

Thank You for your input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for creating this Arunoda! It's made tracking down bottlenecks in Meteor very easy. We were a bit concerned about how Meteor was going perform under load, but haven't run into any major issues so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. Currently Meteor performs very well with oplog integration.

We'll show you any potential issues and stay in touch with the app.

<comment><USER3> Using Modulus.io, so haven't been able to enable oplog yet, but performance is still pretty decent. Several thousand active subscriptions on modest server without any issues whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks great! I'm curious how they'll be able to fulfill the "free forever" promise though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Amazing! Thanks Arunoda. This looks out of this world (pun intended)

</comment><comment><USER6> Great job, Arunoda! Amazing. An important step for Meteor.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats Arunoda, this looks stellar

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great! Just signed up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.</comment></comment>


Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can't - <AUTHOR> https://nytimes.com/2018/05/10/technology/alexa-siri-hidden-command-audio-attacks.html <comment><USER2> I don't own either. Do either broadcast a (bluetooth?) signal that they are activated and available? As opposed to being turned off.

My concern being, an unknown / unseen device could record your conversation - even if Alexa / Siri were off - and then covertly upload that later. Yes? No?

This is going to get ugly.

<comment><USER3> Being able to detect whether the 'real' device is listening won't help much there, won't it? The villains wouldn't be so stupid to copy that feature to their recording device.

Also, you're safe as long as you don't buy and configure such a device (that may change if speaker recognition ever gets so good that devices other than your own will recognize your voice and bill whatever you ask them to do to your account)</comment></comment>


My landlord offered me $35K to move out - <AUTHOR> https://la.curbed.com/2018/7/26/17608272/cash-for-keys-tenant-buyout-offer <comment><USER2> Down the street from their apartment (presumably the building next to the Emerson, or else the Bunker Hill Tower Apartments down the hill) are 2 bedroom units in a nice apartment complex in the heart of Little Tokyo (built within the last 3 years) that a month ago were available for $2400...

Blows their argument about rent costs out of the water. They're just humble- bragging about the size of their buyout offer.

</comment><comment><USER3> $35k, that's cute. A friend of mine was the tenant of a rent-controlled victorian house in SF's mission and the landlord's heirs paid him a quarter million to get lost. He took the money and bought a house in Oregon. The landlords sold the building for over $4 million. They had been paying property taxes on an assessment of about $100k.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, maybe I'm just tired, but I think I'm missing something.

I live in New Zealand and here it is a normal practice for landlords to offer a fixed-term tenancy agreement for 6-12 month. When it expires, then landlord/tenant can decide whether they want to sign another one (fixed-term), otherwise it becomes periodic.

Isn't it the case in US? I mean what's the point of wasting $250k if you can just wait for 6-12 months?

Or why can't they sell the building with a tenant? Why move out, what's the problem? It is a common practice here in NZ too.

<comment><USER5> You may be surprised to learn that New Zealand has some of the poorest rights for tenants in the developed world.

In most of the US, Europe and other Western countries lease holders have rights to continued lease and reasonable modification of properties (repainting, etc.).

In Germany for example, many apartments are rented without kitchens, and with plain white walls. It's expected lease holders will decorate and install their own fixed furnishings and return the property to its original condition when they leave.

<comment><USER6> Same in France for the kitchens

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rent control basically doesn't exist outside of NYC, DC, LA, and Bay Area:

[http://landlord.com/rent_control_laws_by_state.htm](http://landlord.com/rent_control_laws_by_state.htm)

<comment><USER8> Liberals still don't understand free markets

<comment><USER9> Please don't post ideological battle comments to HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Gross calls what's happening an "economic ethnic cleansing."_

Jesus. He's comparing people being paid to move out to genocide.

That might be a tad overboard.

<comment><USER11> "Ethnic cleansing" doesn't mean the same thing as "genocide".

If, say, Poland decided next week to deport everyone with a German surname from the country, that would qualify as ethnic cleansing, even though it is clearly not genocide because no one was killed.</comment></comment>


Great histories written by losers - <AUTHOR> http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-written-by-losers.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13011872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13011872)

duplicate of exact same article from original source from today....

</comment><comment><USER3> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13011872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13011872).</comment>


Show HN: Altruisto 3.0 – donate to charities when shopping online (for free) - <AUTHOR> https://altruisto.com/?ref=hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, hey

I have made a browser extension so that when you shop online you can donate portion of the money you pay to charities. There are no extra costs for you, the donation is fully covered by the shop.

There are over 1000 partner shops including etsy, aliexpress, ebay, microsoft.

The charities we support are research-backed and vetted by GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators: Against Malaria Foundation, SCI Foundation, Give Directly, Anima International.

It is written in Typescript/React and PHP/Symfony4. The source code is on github: [https://github.com/altruisto/altruisto](https://github.com/altruisto/altruisto)</comment>


Khan Academy: Good, Bad, or Ugly? - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-keith-devlin/khan-academy-good-bad-or-_b_1345925.html <comment><USER2> > _The truth is, the vast majority of technology companies in the Valley > emerged from either Cold War DARPA funded research, from decidedly corporate > AT &T Bell Laboratories and Xerox PARC, or from federally funded research at > Stanford University and SRI. Hewlett-Packard, Shockley, Fairchild, Intel, > Cisco, Sun, etc. all came from one or more of those sources._

Hewlett-Packard was started by two people. Their first product was built in a garage.

([http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-information/about- hp/history/his...](http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-information/about- hp/history/history.html))

I haven't been to the garage, but it's still there.</comment>


How To Be Fucking Awesome - <AUTHOR> http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-to-be-fucking-awesome.html <comment><USER4> I found this really interesting, because we covered this exact topic in a psychology course that I took while in university, and I think that it is often mis-quoted / mis-used. The conclusion that was drawn from scientific research was that the vast majority of experts all shared a common trait - they all had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (not that anyone who practiced for 10,000 hours would definitely be an expert). Deliberate practice was defined as practice which: has a goal / task that relates to improved performance, there are explicit instructions as the the best methods of improvement, there is immediate feedback on the performance, and the person repeatedly performs these actions. Obviously his isn't leisurely practice like playing catch in your backyard if you're a baseball player. The experts also didn't practice for 1 hour per day for 30 years like someone in the comments mentioned; the average was about 4 hours per day if I remember correctly. The research had also noted (much like the Matt Maroon article) that this does not mean, for example, that ANYBODY can play in the NBA. What they are really pointing out is that those who are in the NBA probably had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. They also noted that some fields of expertise (such as the NBA) have built-in physical constraints (ex: height) which must be considered. Their study actual dealt with the field of music (violin playing, specifically) which has fewer constraints than something like basketball, and the results were significant.

<comment><USER5> In short, practice is necessary but not sufficient for awesomeness.

In particular, this implies: "If you have not practiced, then you are not awesome."

So to be awesome at X, you need:

1) some natural talent for X, varies based on the field

2) a love for X that will allow you to practice for 10,000 hours

<comment><USER6> 3) the discipline to make 10,000 hours of your practice deliberate

<comment><USER7> I was struck a few years ago by an interview with an olympic athlete. She was asked how she found the discipline to keep a grueling practice schedule. She answered that what many see as discipline is actually passion.

If you're having trouble finding discipline, the answer may lie in finding a way to love what you're doing more.

<comment><USER8> This is very important. Having the iron discipline to work very hard for a long time at something you don't really like, in order to achieve some unrelated goal (for example getting rich) is also known as obsessive- compulsive disorder. The worst thing is that this approach sometimes works - <USER2> have met guitar virtuouses who definitely have this disorder. But if it's at the expense of your well-being, it is probably not worth it.

There is a lot of this in the startup community. I'm pretty sure the early life of Cisco is a pretty good example, but unsuccessful instances are all around you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another equally important thing is choosing your battles: you have to not only work hard, but work hard _at the right things_.

I could practice basketball for 10,000 hours, but there's no way I could do it professionally. You have to figure out what your natural abilities are, and work hard in those areas.

<comment><USER9> If you practiced basketball for 10,000 hours then you would be fucking awesome, regardless of having a contract.

The right things don't exist... or have we already forgotten the whole "do what you love" concept?

<comment><USER5> Loving what you do is necessary, but not sufficient.

What you do should be at the intersection of what you love and what you're good at.

<comment><USER10> How do you know you're good at something a priori without spending the 10,000 hours to find out empirically?

<comment><USER5> You do what statisticians do ... take a small sample and estimate.

Spend 20 hours each doing 10 different things, and then pick 2-3 of them to spend 200 hours doing. Then pick the one. While it may take 10,000 hours to be truly awesome, you can probably get a sense of being "good" at something in a much smaller amount of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Time and awesomeness is a correlation, not cause and effect. Sure, talent and time help, but the key ingredient is passion. Without it, you've got a long, painful road ahead of you. With it, you can climb mountains. .

The article gives Bill Gates as an example. According to the article, Gates is a great programmer because he sat in front of the computer for seven years. But Gladwell has it backwards... Gates sat in front of a computer for seven years because he had a passion for programming and that's what lead him to be great.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you get 3 solid hours of work (work you could, if you were being paid hourly, bill for) on something you're doing in a day, you'd accumulate your 10,000 hours in about 9 years, assuming you get 3 hours in every single day of the year. That's unrealistic, so bump it up to 10 years.

This has been brought up before: <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> Wait, wait, wait. Bill Gates didn't program ANYTHING (at least not anything of note). He bought DOS, which made his fortune, and it was his connections through his mother which helped him in the deal with IBM.

You /can/ be awesome with practice. But Bill Gates isn't an example. (And, yes, I know he wrote an early Basic interpreter, but he was also considered a mediocre programmer by many who knew him.)

<comment><USER14> you can call billg an awesome businessman, after all it takes a lot to be the richest man on earth. I haven't heard much about his programming skills, so I don't think he was a great programmer.

<comment><USER13> exactly. And he didn't spend 10,000 hours practicing business.

I'm not trying to be snarky by pointing this out; I'm trying clarify that, while we should remember that in order to be great, we require dedication, effort and patience, the example chosen of Bill Gates shows that, sadly, this is often irrelevant.

<comment><USER15> Microsoft was founded in 1975. 10k hours is 5 years of 40 hour weeks. I think it's fair to say that he was working more than 40 hour weeks, so by the time MS rose to dominance, he'd almost certainly spent over 10k hours at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Gates was brilliant because of his business decisions in which m$ partner up with IBM and dominated the PC operating system market. He was also brilliant in taking the risk in dropping out of Harvard and starting a business with Paul Allen. Gates is not famous for his coding skills. His coding ability is just one part of the foundation that led to his success.

</comment><comment><USER17> Need to season this with a little <http://mattmaroon.com/?p=583>

</comment><comment><USER18> 4 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, you will be fucking awesome.

<comment><USER19> No. At 4 hours a day, you'll need 2500 days. [6.8 years]

If you did it full time (40 hours a week), you'll supposedly be fucking awesome in 4.8 years.

If this were true, I should be an awesome programmer. But I know I am not yet one. Far from it. So I call bullshit. (Some popular 'fucking awesome' programmers for reference: Steve Yegge, RMS, John Resig)

<comment><USER20> "Finally, deliberate practice is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day during extended periods without leading to exhaustion (effort constraint). To maximize gains from long-term practice, individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis." (K. Anders Ericsson)

"A number of training studies in real life have compared the efficiency of practice durations rangingfrom 1-8 hr per day.These studiesshowessentiallyno benefit from durations exceeding 4 hr per day and reduced benefits from practice exceeding 2 hr (Welford, 1968; Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954). Many studiesof the acquisition oftyping skill (Baddeley & Longman, 1978; Dvorak et al.. 1936) and other perceptual-motor skills (Henshaw& Holman, 1930) indicate that the effective duration of deliberate practice may be closer to 1hr perday." (K. Anders Ericsson)

projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf

<comment><USER21> I consider myself to have about 1.5-2 hours of "genius" per day. I don't know if it really is genius, but during it, I'm operating at an intellectual level where I feel that I'm really making progress, and am able to grasp things, formulate clear questions and goals, and notice new connections.

After that time, my own thoughts start to elude capture, as if someone else's dream...

I can work longer, but I need to have a structured task - i.e. that doesn't require original thought, but is just a slog.

It's great to have a study to support my experience, and encourage me to value and nurture this "genius" time, with recovery time and activities.

 _EDIT_ at 1 hour per day, 10,000/365 = 27.4 years; say 30 years. _If you are blessed with a naturally stronger constitution,_ enabling you to do 3 hours per day, you could do it in 10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Short and sweet read says... if you want to be awesome. Put it time. I believe it.

<comment><USER23> I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you believe it takes 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome, it will take 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome. Of course it must take many hours of practice at a given activity, but 10,000 is just a number (and Fucking Awesome is vaguely defined).

</comment><comment><USER25> There is one important thing: some of those hours should come before certain age. For many disciplines/fields it is under 18 and for almost all it is certainly 25. In other words, if you start practicing basketball at age 37, you are not going to make it to NBA even if you put in 20000 hours of deliberate practice. While this principle seems obvious for largely physical pursuits, it holds true for purely mental fields, as well, be it chess, programming or piano playing.

</comment><comment><USER26> Flagged: it's a fun little post, but it's repeating the key claim that Gladwell made in his new book, which appears here in 3 other top-page stories right now, and it's not adding anything new other than the title.

<comment><USER27> those are reasons not to upmod it, but I thought the flag was for spam. do I misunderstand? am I to flag everything I consider a waste of time??

<comment><USER28> I flag anything that makes me think, "I could have spent those X minutes/seconds of my life reading something worthwhile." This screams of a plug for Gladwell's book, which may well be worth reading, but doesn't really offer anything interesting beyond "Bill Gates spent lots of hours programming and made a successful software company so practice a lot."

Well, yeah, duh.

<comment><USER29> Your summary didn't match with what I read in the NYTimes article. The point seemed to be that people have advantages in certain endeavors that are not attributable to their skill or talent. Bill Gates is a offered as a case of someone who had the advantage of privileged access to and time on computing systems (which is not a knock on his genius). Another case cited has to do with age cutoffs for Canadian youth hockey leagues. Basically, anyone born right before the cutoff tends to be the older, bigger, stronger kid in that bracket and this advantage increases over time. They practice, yes, but they also have a significant advantage stemming from a factor totally outside of their influence. The other point being that you can analyze these factors and reduce that influence, supposing you wanted to do that.

I think your assessment of what the book offers is actually more of an assessment of what Giles zeroed in on. I'm not defending the book--I have no interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post--but thought I'd point out that I think there's a different thesis at work.

<comment><USER26> _I have no interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post_

You can summarize anything in a Twitter post: any concept, no matter how complex. Gladwell's advantage is that he tells really fascinating stories that explore his ideas in a real-world context.

I think that TDavis was trying to say was what I wanted to say, but he said it more concisely: this post wasn't really saying anything interesting. It was essentially saying "If you want to be fucking awesome, practice a lot." There wasn't very much more quantitative than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> if u buy that 10% improvement by 10x effort and mapping the 10000 hours:

10000 -> 99.9% 1000 -> 99% 100 -> 90%

100 hrs is about 13 weeks (a quarter) of 3 uni 1hr credits + 1.5hr practice = 13 * 3 * (1 + 1.5)

if u take deliberate practice as vector, that's only the magnitude part

the direction part is what to study and that ends up being more important

given a constraint of 100 hrs, a nonprogrammer will end up becoming more productive studying lisp compared to java

but of course, to say such programmer is 90% better than average is too much :D ... and controversial

</comment><comment><USER23> You do realize that spending one hour daily to get good at something would still require almost 30 years, right? I love the post though. Thanks.

<comment><USER31> I think the point is that you spend much more than one hour a day at it.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. I felt like doing some math. :) Anyway, one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals different from work, family, etc.

<comment><USER32> > one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals > different from work, family, etc.

Perhaps this lifestyle precludes being "fucking awesome"?

<comment><USER23> I'm certainly betting my wife finds me " _fucking awesome_ " for bringing food back home, and no worries. :)

What would be your definition of being " _fucking awesome_ "?

<comment><USER33> 'I'm certainly betting my wife finds me "fucking awesome"'

In this case, the literal meaning of the phrase could be quite applicable, and well worth devoting 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to the cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> That reminds me of Peter Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

Let me add: Don't waste your time reading books about trivial topics.

</comment><comment><USER35> how would someone do "deliberate practice" with programming anyway? Music, basketball etc involve "body memory" where repetitions of identical movements help. This _seems_ to be fundamentally different from programming.

I am guessing programming "practice" would involve writing more ambitious programs? where would the feedback come from?

<comment><USER36> I explained this in my blog a few posts ago. You write programs to focus on some particular aspect of your programming that you want to make better. I think it should be obvious. You use functional programming idioms - <USER3> programs that have using functional programming idioms well as their only purpose. You use regular expressions - write programs that only exist to make you better at regular expressions. In other words write a bunch of regular expressions and make them as good as you can.

In the Ruby community we have the Ruby Quiz. I'm pretty sure that's copied from some other community, I think Perl. Every programming language community has practices of this nature.

It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory _intrinsically_. How many times will you write a regular expression in your life? There's no element of repetition there? The literature on deliberate practice cites Mozart, Bobby Fischer, and Bill Gates. Body memory has nothing to do with it.

The feedback comes from sharing with others, as in the Ruby Quiz, or benchmarking your code, or posting it on a blog. Another form of feedback would be seeing if your programs run at all. ;-)

<comment><USER35> "It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. "

Since no one actually made that claim - the intrinsically part that is - ..... :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Anyone read the new Malcolm Gladwell book that this is based on? Is it any good? A lot of his books seem half-finished. He points out something (Blink: your intuition is more powerful than you realize, and not well-understood) but never gets around to explaining _why_ the phenomenon exists.

Is this one worth reading?</comment>


Physics be damned, we can't stop obsessing over NASA's 'impossible engine' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/11/8586857/nasa-impossible-engine-em-drive

<comment><USER2> The author of this article is guilty of his own criticisms. He lambasts the fact that people have mixed up the facts of what has and has not been shown by the various parties testing the device, but he himself casually lumps the EM Drive and the Cannae drive into the same concept, when in reality they are two separate implementations of an engine that takes advantage of this unknown force researchers keep measuring.

This is an important distinction, because he mentions that the concept has been debunked because the test designed not to produce thrust in fact did. The null thrust test did in fact take place, but only for the Cannae drive. The theory behind the Cannae drive is that it contains slots along the side of the cavity that produce the thrust. The EM Drive does not include these slots and is based on a totally different interpretation of how the force is generated. The null test was performed without these slots, and in no way is related to the EM Drive other than it proves that slots are not needed.

Here is a decent write up (it's missing sources, but frankly there isn't much out there yet) on Reddit that was posted a few weeks back:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/34cq1b/the_fact...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/34cq1b/the_facts_as_we_currently_know_them_about_the/)</comment>


Google Gadget Ventures? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonball.com/techbytes/2007/07/google-gadget-v.html It appears that Google is going head to head with seed investors (like Y combinator) with its Google Gadget Ventures: <comment><USER2> I cannot read the name of this program without imagining it spoken by Inspector Gadget.</comment>


The hilarious product market fit of U2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Why-is-U2-so-popular/answer/Daniel-Rosenthal

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is some kind of prototype or exemplar for snark.</comment>


Inequality and Skin in the Game - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46 <comment><USER2> To the submitter: Not sure you'll see this, but I wanted to get in touch and you don't have contact details in your profile. The website there - [https://www.brunozzi.com/](https://www.brunozzi.com/) \- isn't loading.</comment>


Letters to Philip Zimmermann on how human rights groups used PGP to protect against death squads - <AUTHOR> http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/letters/index.html

<comment><USER2> This product has great synergy with my geospatial social death-squad meetup app!</comment>


Pinoccio - A Complete Ecosystem for Building the Internet of Things - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/pinoccio

<comment><AUTHOR> This is super exciting for anyone who has wanted to hack on hardware but always got hung up on stuff like getting wifi shields, hooking batteries, etc. before even getting to coding. I'm getting one of the beta units (I've known one of the founders for a while) and am psyched to start hacking on it.

As a hardware noob, the promise of the arduino has been that you can build anything(!) with it - which is also the downside. I've always felt like the setup to get pieces of hardware battery powered and communicating with each other was much higher of a hurdle than it should have been and mostly lost interest before getting to build what I actually wanted. Plus, an arduino board + wifi shield + whatever else makes it super bulky.

This feels like an arduino with smart defaults - like a Rails for hardware.

</comment><comment><USER2> Super excited about this. I have a couple ideas I've been rattling around that would be much easier to pull with boards that already have wifi/mesh over trying to get a bunch of xbees/arduino parts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pumped about this as well, it's the perfect packaging to quickly experiment with distributed sensor grids and be affordable to a hobbyist... pretty sure we'll see some cool "green" gardening (optimized watering), thermal/heating/cooling, power usage, farm monitoring, all sorts of great things built on this!

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been following Pinoccio's progress for awhile now, great to see them launch. The all in one package is great for sensor setups that in the past required Arduino, wifi shields, batteries, and a slew of backend tech to keep track of the data. Looking forward to hacking on my 2 pack.</comment>


Magi: A machine-learning-based information extraction and retrieval system - <AUTHOR> https://magi.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> [Here]([https://www.peak-labs.com/docs/en/magi/intro](https://www.peak- labs.com/docs/en/magi/intro)) is the English version of the intro.</comment>