Peter's Evil Overlord List (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html <comment><USER2> > 99\. Any data file of crucial importance will be padded to 1.45Mb in size

I absolutely love this one, if for no other reason than it has no practical parallels today. (In case anyone is unfamiliar, 1.44Mb was the size of a standard floppy disk, so 1.45Mb would have been more difficult to copy to disk and run away with.)

<comment><USER3> For extra fun, the "standard" 3½" floppy disk (the last major floppy disk) does not contain 1,440,000 bytes or 1,509,949 (i.e., 1.44MiB). It contains 1,474,560 bytes, or 2,880 512-byte sectors. So a 1.45MB file would actually fit on a floppy, since disk utility programs invariably use the decimal-based number for K,M,G,T sizing.

<comment><USER4> If I remember correctly, an MS-DOS formatted 1.44mb 3.5" floppy usually has 1,457,664 free bytes for user files?

<comment><USER5> You remember well. Probably like me, you spent countless hours splitting files across disks. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > 35\. I will not grow a goatee. In the old days they made you look diabolic. > Now they just make you look like a disaffected member of Generation X.

Wow, remember the good old days when Gen X were the generation you sneered at? Whatever happened to them?

<comment><USER7> Babies.

<comment><USER8> ...that are now in college. Seeing my friend's kids posting pics in front of the same buildings I took photos in front of in the 90s always causes me to sigh, say something to my wife about how tomorrow I will be 65, and then run my fingers through hair comfortably graying.

<comment><USER9> Wait--you still have hair? Not me, other than a little.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In a similar vein there is "2500 things Mr. Welch can no longer do in an RPG".

[https://theglen.livejournal.com/16735.html](https://theglen.livejournal.com/16735.html)

<comment><USER11> Not to mention the 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. Army: [http://skippyslist.com/list/](http://skippyslist.com/list/)

<comment><USER12> > NEVER nail a stuffed bunny to a cross and put it up in front of the > Battalion Headquarters sign as an "Easter Desecration."

This is made all the more disturbing by the fact that, when I was in college, I witnessed a friend's roommate actually crucify a dead rabbit and stake it out outside... somewhere around Easter.

And, no, it wasn't a dead rabbit they randomly found lying around either. He and some buddies of his went Wabbit Hunting with Airsoft guns one day, and then they settled on crucifixion when they were debating what to do with their newly-acquired dead rabbit. Not so fun fact: around a decade after this, one of the guys involved in the hunting party got killed in a mass shooting. I still wonder if anyone told this story at his wake.

This all happened when my friend and I were studying on his couch, by the way. It was very hard to concentrate on the physics textbook when we kept hearing the _whack whack whack_ of his roommate nailing a rabbit to the cross on the kitchen floor.

Edit: Because it's telling me I'm posting too fast, I can't reply directly to the person replying to me suggesting I'm victim-blaming Tony, so I'll post a clarification here:

I'm not saying that he deserved to get killed or anything. The shooter was a despicable excuse for a person who was upset his ex-wife was moving on with her life and enjoying herself, so he killed her and almost everyone attending her party. None of the people who got shot that day deserved it in the slightest.

I only mentioned he got killed in a mass shooting because it's a really fucked-up coda to an already fucked-up story. Like this story is fucked-up to begin with, and it's even more fucked-up that he got murdered. Honestly, if I was at his wake, I would've told the story not to make him out to be a bad guy or something, but to add some levity and remind everyone what a... shall we say, dynamic guy he was.

<comment><USER13> Lol, sounds like a waste of good stew, but clearly it had the desired effect if you are still telling stories about it years later. Kind of insensitive to victim blame no matter your feelings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > 109\. I will see to it that plucky young lads/lasses in strange clothes and > with the accent of an outlander shall REGULARLY climb some monument in the > main square of my capital and denounce me, claim to know the secret of my > power, rally the masses to rebellion, etc. That way, the citizens will be > jaded in case the real thing ever comes along.

[From 'Cell Block A']

Makes me think, as an evil overlord, I'd do something like:

"I will allow the people to have a democracy, and elect a new government every few years. I will rule from behind the scenes, with my henchmen acting as civil servants. If the people are upset about my rule, they can always be reminded to elect a new government (which will, of course, be powerless to do anything about me)."

<comment><USER15> > If the people are upset about my rule, they can always be reminded to elect > a new government (which will, of course, be powerless to do anything about > me)

This is paralleled/satirized in the British comedy "Yes, Minister", wherein an idealistic politician attempts to enact his campaign agenda alongside a cynical (and unelected) bureaucrat, who holds all the political capital, and tediously educates the new Minister on how power actually works in practice.

It's also mirrored in the original concept of the "Deep State" (before the term was heavily co-opted by conspiracy theorists): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ouch: "Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in a mindless trance, I will provide each of them with free unlimited Internet access."

<comment><USER17> Yeah, that one seemed particularly prophetic. Seeing as this was written in 1996, was that a real concern then? I'm too young to have known the early internet.

<comment><USER18> Most people's internet access was limited to either their university, or a shitty, time-limited, low-bandwidth dial-up connection that blocked your household phoneline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > 65\. If I must have computer systems with publically available terminals, > the maps they display of my complex will have a room clearly marked as the > Main Control Room. That room will be the Execution Chamber. The actual main > control room will be marked as Sewage Overflow Containment.

Another rule: I will not brag about my overlord list (which contains critical information) on the Internet

</comment><comment><USER20> I remember reading this over a 33k modem and a dial up link.

I sometimes miss those early days of the internet where everyone had their own geocities page.

</comment><comment><USER21> Cached [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7R8yueg...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7R8yuegLBjsJ:www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER22> Non-Evil Overlord cache:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190405111542/http://www.evilov...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190405111542/http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html)

<comment><USER23> This made me chuckle. But, also, thank you for caring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just a week or so ago I found a printout I had made of one of these lists in 1997 (had a date printed at the bottom of the page). Good times.

I think today's equivalent of this list is TVTropes?

<comment><USER25> _> I think today's equivalent of this list is TVTropes?_

Pretty much. Indeed, most of the entries on the list probably have an associated named trope.

<comment><USER26> They do, and have been helpfully annotated: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList)

<comment><USER25> Ha, thought so! For some reason I didn't find it when I googled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Thx for this gem. Haven't had a look at this website for 20 years, which was a newsgroup phenomenon back then.

</comment><comment><USER28> Haha, I'd love to see a movie which implements these :)

<comment><USER29> Some of these were lampshaded/lampooned by _Austin Powers_.

<comment><USER30> _The Incredibles_ also took a few stabs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you enjoy the Evil Overlord List, and are in the mood for a diversion into fiction, A Practical Guide To Evil plays to a very similar theme.

[https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/](https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/)

</comment><comment><USER32> "This page has been blocked by your network operator."

Oh, come on, really!? The internet that is to come is going to be a _very_ unfunny place.

<comment><USER33> Clearly, you're working for an evil overlord.</comment></comment>


Tiled: fee, easy to use and flexible tile map editor - <AUTHOR> http://www.mapeditor.org/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps "fee" should be "free" in the title ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, too late to edit it though.</comment></comment>


Retina MacBook Pro Review: The Age of the High-Resolution PC - <AUTHOR> http://stevestreza.com/2012/06/17/retina-macbook-pro/ <comment><USER2> As someone who has used a retina display in daylight, it is unusable (bring up a black terminal, it is a goddamn mirror). It only compares favorably with the notoriously horrible apple glossy displays... well know for having some of the worst imaginable glare problems (unusable in many office overhead lighting situations). How the author found this better than the matte screen is beyond me.

That all said, I am happy about Apple pushing forward on a decoupling of resolution from perceived size... it is long overdue. That combined with apples supply chain clout, I can't wait to see more ultra-high resolution screens everywhere.

<comment><USER3> Can this kind of decoupling be accomplished on Windows and or Linux?

I just ask because I have a 1920x1080 (native) resolution LCD which looks wonderful in Movies and Games, but makes text and other OS artefacts unusable small.

Windows will let you set the text size (Medium, Large) but all this seems to accomplish is to break all non-native applications (e.g. force text off of the right hand side of the drawable area).

It would be wonderful if I purchased for example a 2048x1536 display which Windows could run in 1024x768 "mode" but with four times the pixels per every dot of content on the screen.

<comment><USER2> It can't even really be accomplished well on OS-X yet. But I am delighted Apple is going for it, because the application will catch up.

Right now it works really well with Apple's font render engine, and not much else. But application developers will catch up -- as will Microsoft and Linux (some Linux mailing lists are already blowing up with how to handle it). X can handle it no problems, it is the libraries that can't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone else think it weird that the first mainstream hi-res displays weren't pushed by Microsoft? Let me explain...

Back when WPF was still called Avalon, Microsoft were pushing the technology as a solution for the soon-to-be-arriving high-dpi displays (which, we were assured, were right around the corner). As an example, see a contemporary blog post: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/marcelolr/archive/2004/12/03/274213....](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/marcelolr/archive/2004/12/03/274213.aspx)

Given that Microsoft were (are?) deseperately trying to hold back the tide of web-based applications, wouldn't displays like this, combined with tchnology such as WPF, have been a killer feature of a desktop OS? And hence, shouldn't they have been a high-priority for Microsoft?

So why did Apple get there first? Why didn't Microsoft research/fund/introduce these high-dpi displays?

Edit: More links from a Coding Horror post from the same year: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/11/trapped-in-a- bitmap...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/11/trapped-in-a-bitmapped- world.html)

<comment><USER5> The "first" main stream hi-res display? I have some Sony Trinitron CRTs in my basement that would like to talk to you.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, didn't really clarify what I meant by mainstream: easily available to purchase, by non-techie consumers, from a high-street shop.

<comment><USER5> Sony multiscan trinitrons weren't exotic - you could purchase them in any reasonable electronics store. I have several that go up to 2048x1536 @ 75hz. Viewsonic had monitors that did the same. While I look forward to higher resolution LCDs becoming a standard option, LCD's set us back resolution wise for quite a long time. LCD does have other advantages over CRT of course.

<comment><USER6> I had and loved a similar NEC CRT. But 2048x1536 on a 22" display is ~116ppi. Apple's non-retina laptops have been higher than that for years (with the MacBook Air being highest, at ~135ppi), and Sony, at least, has offered configurable 1080p displays in 13" laptops (~165ppi) for some time.

It was pretty nice a decade ago, when everyone was moving to LCD monitors that were vastly inferior in every measure beyond size or weight, but, at least in terms of ppi (and on consumer grade equipment), display technology eclipsed the CRT quite a while ago.

edit: I'd forgotten that CRTs were measured with the bezel included, so at 20" viewable, the display is 128ppi. So closer, but still pretty far behind.

<comment><USER5> Viewsonic had a 19" display (with 18" viewable) that did 2048x1536. I think that was the smallest size that the 2048x1536 CRT's came in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who has been waiting for a higher resolution laptop screen for years, what apple has done is a godsend. At least now other laptop manufacturers will take high res demands seriously.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm always surprised when I see internet reviews where people talk about no longer being able to see individual pixels. I can't see individual pixels even if I look closely at my screen... and everyone I've talked to in person has said the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who has pretty good eyesight (for the time being at least), I am pretty excited about the prospects of coding in the terminal with a super HD screen (I hate having to buy into Apple's marketing speak). Right now I struggle to have three 80 coloumn wide text files open in VIM on my Lenovo X201, and most other people have a real hard time reading the small font on my screen, while I have just gotten used to it. A super HD screen would mean vertical and horizontal lines of code for me without sacrificing the readability issues of going down in font size, assuming I can adapt to the smaller text.

</comment><comment><USER10> In my old 16 inch notebook I cannot notice pixels at all. And font rendering is just fine. Ok I have an eye problem but still I fail to see the point of having very high resolution on a small screen. What is the catch?

<comment><USER11> I clearly notice the pixels on anything lower than 200dpi and can only completely ignore them past 250dpi.

It's the point where antialising becomes unnecessary, basically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The intro/overview are a complete load of codswallop... Touting increases in DPI as game changing couldn't be farther from the truth.

Nevermind the painting of apple as innovators.

<comment><USER13> One of my first thoughts after hearing the original iPhone announcement was "what a low resolution screen".

After all, the Nokia 770, released a couple of years before the iPhone, had an 800x480 screen.

Most full websites back then were usable on an 800 pixel screen. Because it had a low-res screen, the iPhone required mobile versions, which I thought would doom it due to the chicken and egg problem.

Remember, back then the iPhone didn't allow third party apps, the "blessed" way of adding capability to your iPhone was through web sites. Who would buy an iPhone if it didn't have any apps or mobile web sites? Who would mobile web sites if nobody bought an iPhone?

Apparently, I was wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Actually, it's the end of the high-resolution PC, since there's no point in adding more detail if your eyes are physically unable to detect the difference. Also, we're already able to buy 3D displays, so that's another 'old' technology too. Smart 3D TV's - old.

I imagine someone's going to be selling 3D contact lenses soon, so all surfaces will be 3D video devices. The next step is to make _them_ intelligent...

</comment><comment><USER15> I kind of want Retina display, but I made a promise to myself that my next laptop would be a Linux laptop. Perhaps I could run Linux on a Macbook Pro, but it would look like this: [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/06/what-does- ubuntu-look-lik...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/06/what-does-ubuntu-look- like-on-a-retina-display-bad)

How long until other desktop environments catch up?

</comment><comment><USER16> It's not an mp3 player. It's an ipod.

It's not a PDA. It's an iphone.

It's not a tablet laptop. It's an ipad.

It's not a high resolution display unit. It's a retina macbook.

<comment><USER17> This is very smart marketing for Apple. They have the assets (reputation, substantially different UX) that let them position their releases as new products rather than improved versions of existing products.

That said, most companies would fail completely if they tried this. The average startup wants their customers to quickly and easily recognize their product. YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Saw a Retina display yesterday, I can't see what the fuss is about.

</comment><comment><USER19> is it just me or is the font in this article ironically horrible?

<comment><USER20> It's not just you. Could barely read it.

<comment><USER21> In Chrome I cannot read it, but the text appears fine in Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Retina displays are suddenly the buzzword. Is it a new concept? No. Do we really need it? Debatable. Do we want it? Undeniable. Credit where its due once again to the Apple marketing machine...

<comment><USER23> It's not so much marketing as that _they are actually making these things_. There has been a small but rather fanatical demand for high-DPI screens for a good while, particularly since the demise of CRTs. Note how excited people got about the resolution independence features introduced (and subsequently scrapped; 10.7 does it very differently) in MacOS 10.4.</comment></comment>


GitHub had connectivity problems - <AUTHOR> https://status.github.com <comment><USER2> Does anyone else find the Github status "messages" page [0] a bit jarring in how it's organised? The way that, when read from top to bottom, time goes forwards within a day but backwards across days?

I guess I normally wouldn't notice, but there are currently some messages on there from today and yesterday and I found it hard to read as a story (either forwards or backwards) - I had to jump around a bit to figure it out.

[0] [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages)

<comment><USER3> Design looks very, very confusing regarding timestamps. [https://i.imgur.com/wminZWg.png](https://i.imgur.com/wminZWg.png)

<comment><USER4> It probably uses the local time zone name (for me it shows CEST) and was written by someone who assumed all time zone names are always abbreviated.

<comment><USER3> I also live in CEST.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems a certainty to me that github will be breached one of these days, and all internal data (i.e., private repos) made public. On that day, so many companies will inadvertently become open source!

Do we have any info on what steps github takes to prevent this? I ask as a paying customer (with both personal and corporate accounts).

<comment> vezzy-fnord _On that day, so many companies will inadvertently become open source!_

Well, no. They would be inadvertently source-available. If the license doesn't comply with the Open Source Definition, it's not open source.

EDIT: Downvoted as usual for correcting false impressions about how free software and open source works.

<comment><USER6> " _EDIT: Downvoted as usual for correcting false impressions about how free software and open source works._ "

Are you seriously suggesting that the OP you responded to was comparing "stolen" or "leaked" software to open source? That is probably why you're being downvoted, not because people around here have a false impression as to what constitutes open-source.

<comment> vezzy-fnord "Open source" has an established meaning. Even if the poster in question was using the term facetiously, I feel it must be corrected since there is legitimately a large body of misconception surrounding the mechanics of free software and open source, and such humor may fuel it further.

Moreover, it reflects a critical flaw in the open source dogma as compared to free software. Open source puts source code at the forefront, which is fallacious. The key elements are the ability to run unfettered, study, modify and redistribute identical or modified versions. The source code is a necessary precondition for properly exercising those freedoms, but not a central focus in any real sense. It is easy to misinterpret "open source" as being about publicly viewable source code, and many companies have exploited this to their advantage presently or in the past (GitHub with Atom, Epic Games with UE4, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if this is related to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101469)

<comment><USER8> I'm nobody to assure this but I can see one thing common in both the cases, 'Dragon'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> All these ideas like "let's fetch our deps directly from github" sound good until github is not down.

<comment><USER10> Yeh it's definitely preferable to have one of the two developers your small startup can probably afford spending a good portion of their time rolling out, securing and maintaining your own infrastructure

<comment><USER11> GitHub is not meant for distributing dependencies. Maven Central on the other hand is, the difference being that it is mirrored and if repo1.maven.org goes down, it's not a big deal and your project can still be built and deployed.

<comment><USER12> .. until they become a target of a DDoS.

Also, if GitHub is down you can still fetch your dependencies from somewhere else.

<comment><USER13> You have not understood the concept of 'mirrored'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I do wonder why GitHub gets hit, and people say it's a high profile target, yes almost definitely.

Another thought occurs to me though, I guess one of the problems when writing a DDoS is measuring how well it performs. The GitHub status screen provides a lot of useful metrics for tuning such an attack.

<comment><USER15> If I may posit...

1\. Github is very well known and cater specifically for the tech crowd. So, an attack on Github is more likely to be talked in the tech crowd, which I would assume the people who would try out DDoS attacks be more likely to be part of. Validation is a weird thing.

2\. In a convoluted sense, taking down Github doesn't harm _as many_ bystanders. If that makes any sense...

3\. As you've mentioned, very clear useful metrics for the attacks.

4\. Crowding effect? Maybe attacking Github has become some 'cool' things to try in that community. I'm just imagining at this point.

<comment><USER16> > Validation is a weird thing.

And bragging rights. Imagine the street cred you get amongst that community if you take down something like github...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Possibly just Round 2 of the massive DDOS from March:

[https://github.com/blog/1981-large-scale-ddos-attack-on- gith...](https://github.com/blog/1981-large-scale-ddos-attack-on-github-com)

[http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/ddos-attacks-that- cr...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/ddos-attacks-that-crippled- github-linked-to-great-firewall-of-china/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm getting 500 timeouts on Bitbucket. Didn't Google Code go read-only today? Don't you guys think Bitbucket and Github might be having issues due to people migrating off of Google Code at the last minute?

<comment><USER19> Possibly, but they are having degraded API performance and high load on their front-end systems.

[http://status.bitbucket.org](http://status.bitbucket.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Totally speculation, but maybe related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10115641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10115641)

<comment><USER21> Yeah my first reaction was it is government based and probably China.

I know, we should keep building up their economy by manufacturing nearly everything there, that should stop them.

<comment><USER22> Over the long term, it will. An educated wealthy populace doesn't accept tyranny for long.

<comment><USER23> To some extent, most likely, yes. But my perspective on the PRC is that the powers that be know that they will only remain in power for as long as they can provide, or rather, the illusion of them providing, a continuous increase in wealth. This in part would be why information is key in China. Assange had a very positive view of it when he said "I often say that censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity, because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care about what people think." [1].

[1]: [https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange- Schmidt#996](https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt#996)

<comment><USER24> You know, the implication of that for the U.S. is pretty disturbing.

<comment><USER25> The US isn't big on censorship, they're big on data collection. The MPAA and RIAA are HUGE on censorship, but they aren't government entities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm wondering if there is a corresponding traffic spike on the hn servers ;-)

</comment><comment><USER27> And a famous break-through-GFW software called goagent is deleted from github. *sigh

[https://github.com/goagent/goagent](https://github.com/goagent/goagent)

<comment><USER28> You may want to explain how this is related?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well that's me not able to work.

<comment><USER30> If only git were a distributed version control

<comment><USER31> It would be nice not to have to rely on centralized servers at all. A P2P/torrent client built specifically for sharing code from git repositories, perhaps?

<comment><USER32> But there is much less commercial incentive behind a p2p alternative. Centralized services are easier to monetize.

I look forward to the day governments start to fund free software, for example through the GNU project. Then we'll all have better tools.

Actually, there were already some fundings. Germany funded GnuPG to port it to Windows.

What do I care what is the new world record in sprinting? But I very much do care about a new release of libreboot, libreCMC/openWRT or Debian!

I hope one day we will see peaceful international competitions between nations of who can provide the best/most used free software.

<comment><USER33> Hear, hear. I've talked about this with people and it's surprisingly hard to convince them that government-sponsored software is a good idea. While a tiny fraction of the amount we already spend on commercial software would utterly transform the free software landscape, it's not politically viable as long as commercial software vendors have lobby power.

<comment><USER34> Let's not forget that it is not in many governments' interest to have distributed tools (with strong encryption). It is much easier to take down stuff on centralized services.

BTW, it is _hear, hear_ ;).

<comment><USER35> But of your government is at odds with an oppressive government, it would make sense for it to fund that kind of software so the people could take it down, or at least make trouble, themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Ugh, how horrible! DDoS'ing github is like kicking a puppy in the face.

<comment><USER37> Isn't it more like barricading bus drivers inside their homes because someone you don't like takes the bus to work?

<comment><USER38> I always say that making an argument using analogies is like trying to tie your shoes with laces made of butter. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> [https://pulse.turbobytes.com/results/55dc40efecbe400bf800146...](https://pulse.turbobytes.com/results/55dc40efecbe400bf8001468/) problems during TCP connect

[https://pulse.turbobytes.com/results/55dc40faecbe400bf800146...](https://pulse.turbobytes.com/results/55dc40faecbe400bf8001469/) traceroute looks ok..

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder why are they providing time in FLE[S]T (same as EE[S]T)? Are their engineering team based in Eastern Europe or what?

<comment><USER41> They're trying to detect your timezone and show the local time. Nice of them, however additional UTC for vpn users and lines with broken geoip would be also good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If GitHub folks are technical in nature, couldn't they simply have a secondary mirror of their own that they host on their own servers / clouds and then reference both primary and secondary? Perhaps redirect the secondary to the primary if it is reachable to avoid bandwidth issues?

</comment><comment><USER43> About 3 hours in github twitter profile: [https://twitter.com/githubstatus/status/636159212876361728](https://twitter.com/githubstatus/status/636159212876361728)

</comment><comment><USER44> Bitbucket is currently experiencing some issues too [0]. Is it related?

[0] [https://bitbucket.statuspage.io/](https://bitbucket.statuspage.io/)

<comment><USER45> I'm going to assume yes. And I'm going to assume what ever is the issue has a mirror on bitbucket.

But I don't think anyone can say for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Guys, what's the purpose to attack a service like Github?!

<comment><USER47> China does not like some of the projects it hosts, namely the ones used to circumvent its Great Firewall.

<comment><USER48> That's a clear signal those projects have value and that we should work to make more like them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> What do they possibly get by DDoS'ng GitHub ? Is this out of pure malice or are there any probable commercial gains to this?

<comment><USER50> There's two common flavors of comment on this post, namely "why would anyone do this?" and "well, I guess that means I can't do any work this morning." These _could_ go together somehow. :)

<comment><USER51> Indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Mandrill reported they were investigating system slowness a short time ago, also.

</comment><comment><USER53> GitHub DDoS, pointing out ironic single points of failure since the beginning!

</comment><comment><USER54> Is this because of shadowsocks and China is pissed again?

</comment><comment><USER55> China!

</comment><comment><USER56> I haven't experience any connectivity issues on Github today. Just pushed some code and it worked fine and promptly.

</comment><comment><USER57> I've always wondered why github hasn't considered switching to a distributed sub domain layout to help ameliorate this problem. Surely if they spread their infra out that would make ddos that much harder. A subdomain per user or repo should work wonderfully

<comment><USER58> I don't think that will solve the problem.

<comment><USER57> Well if x% of repos remain up that goes a long way. Right now it's all or nothing.

Also if you're going to respond include a reason why you disagree

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Title should be "Github _is_ under DDoS and having connectivity problems"

edit: TIL my English wasn't as good as I thought.

<comment><USER60> That's subjective. In America companies tend to be referred to as singular entities, but in the UK they would be referred to as plural. Neither is wrong, just different idioms.

<comment><USER61> No, 'are' is, I believe, also incorrect in BrE. It's commonplace here, but not correct. (Or so I was taught!)

<comment><USER62> [http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/09/agreement-over- co...](http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/09/agreement-over-collective- nouns/)

> In British English it's absolutely fine to treat most collective nouns as > either singular or plural – you can say my husband's family is very > religious or my husband's family are very religious.

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.html)

etc.

With something like collective nouns it's probably wrong to make blanket statements about correct and incorrect, even if you're a prescriptivist not descriptivist.

EDIT: And while I love (but am hopeless with) English usage this is the least interesting bit of the submitted article.

<comment><USER61> Ah but that's different. "Company nouns" are not used as collective, they refer to a singular entity - the registered company, not it as a body of people.

<comment><USER63> But they are.

[https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british- grammar/nou...](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british- grammar/nouns-singular-and-plural)

<comment><USER61> [http://www.economist.com/style-guide/singular-or- plural](http://www.economist.com/style-guide/singular-or-plural)

Note while 'just' a style guide, The Economist - like me - seems (note not 'seem' ;)) not to consider "Tesco" _et al_ to be collective nouns _per se_.

      > A government, a party, a company (whether Tesco or Marks
      > and Spencer) and a partnership (Skidmore, Owings &
      > Merrill) are all **it** and take a singular verb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> i'm sorry but... GitHub _IS_ not GitHub _are_

Examples: GitHub IS a web site. GitHub is a SAAS app.

The only plural aspect to GitHub is its employees and _they_ are not being DDoSed. The web site (singular) is.

I'm not going to bother explaining the problems with "under DDoS" or the other issues with this sentence.

<comment><USER65> It's a British thing. Don't try to understand it- just let it be. :)

<comment><USER66> It makes sense, but "is" is too ingrained in my brain to ever go British.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which startup has the best support documentation? - <AUTHOR> I am looking to revamp the support site for my startup and looking for some inspiration. We are in user-engagement and analytics domain. We have our Android , iOS , Windows and javascript SDK. All have been up there on our support site. But right now it is more 'developer friendly'. But as 'user-engagement and analytics' is also used my many marketers/sales folks, I would like to make my support site both developer-marketer friendly.<p>Looking for great support site from which I can find good points and implement it in my own support site.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I've never implemented anything with either platform, but I've been impressed with Dwolla and Twilio. Both provide a nice interface finding the information you need while also giving an example for each language their API supports. I'm not a super experienced programmer, but I am looking at getting into it more, and will probably use twilio as one of my early attempts to work with other services.

[https://developers.dwolla.com/](https://developers.dwolla.com/)

[https://www.twilio.com/docs/](https://www.twilio.com/docs/)

<comment><USER3> I've used Twilio for casual one-day projects and I don't think their documentation is a good example. They have a lot of resources and examples but it's very disjoint and hard to use. A better example would be Stripe.

For example, let's saying I'm trying to redirect an inbound call, a fairly trivial use case. Their nodejs doc doesn't have a section on inbound calls [0] at all. It's different from using your average RESTful API and you'd expect a trivial use case to be given as an example, as opposed to a section on callbacks vs promises.

Trying to find out the 'from' number from your /voice POST request? Good luck parsing out the req manually to figure out what you need because the doc doesn't tell you anything.

And there are things Twilio's neglected to do for no reason whatsoever. For instance, the methods for a TwimlResponse object is not documented on the node doc because the verbs are from TwiML. I get that <say> = TwiMLObject.say() but documenting this is trivial and makes it easier on the developer using the platform.

Anyway, that's my rant. Check out Stripe instead, OP.

[0] [https://twilio.github.io/twilio-node/](https://twilio.github.io/twilio- node/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with the disjoint part of Twilio docs. I had used to integrate SMS in my product. They have awesome Customer-Support which covers their 'not so good but not so bad' documentation. And for rest all points I have exactly been through the same route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are alot of great documentations on the web. My favorite is Surfly co- browsing API documentation. [https://docs.surfly.com?utm_source=hackernews](https://docs.surfly.com?utm_source=hackernews)

</comment><comment><USER5> Stripe documentation is very good: [https://stripe.com/docs](https://stripe.com/docs)

Detailed, full of examples and easy to understand.</comment>


HIGH CPU usage on Mac - <AUTHOR> https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux-Windows-Web-Player/HIGH-CPU-usage-Mac/td-p/359320 <comment><USER2> I think too few people know about this sort of problem or care about it. Dropbox is another example of a well-known CPU hog: on a Mac, it still insists of watching and processing _all_ filesystem changes, not just those inside the Dropbox subtree, so any file operation you perform anywhere on the computer has a Dropbox tax. You pay with your battery life. And yet, after so many years, this is not enough of an annoyance for them to work on it.

<comment><USER3> I don't let dropbox run in the background. I don't need it all the time, so i don't let it run all the time. I really wish they'd fix their junk.

As a developer, I hate that we're becoming a bunch of "whatever"s. I mean this is junk behavior.

<comment><USER4> Completely agree, for example chrome has been observed flushing full state data to disk at regular intervals even with no changes since 2010[1] which is eating battery and SSD lifetime. Firefox does this too as far as I know.

Not to mention the battery impact of poorly written javascript SPA's or advertisements.

[1]: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=52663](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=52663)

<comment><USER5> It's hard to know what the right call is here. In most cases the battery life hit seems to be fairly minimal (I've never noticed it in any browser, even back when I used chrome), and preventing data loss is, well, fairly important -- at least it can be depending on the site.

OTOH there are almost certainly sites that trigger very bad behavior here. While I've never dug into it too much, it wouldn't surprise me that session store was part of why e.g. IRCCloud or Slack have such high power usage (although I don't know for certain -- it could just as easily be something else).

My understanding is that SSD lifetimes concerns are largely misplaced (or at the very least, only relevant for a fairly small subset of users) and that even reasonably old SSDs can handle well into petabytes of writes -- which is far above what this behavior can reasonably approach. But power usage concerns are totally legitimate IMO.

Full disclosure: I'm not unbiased here, I work on Firefox (but have never touched session store).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This isn't fixed, it just isn't as bad as it used to be.

When they had apps spotify would spin at ~90% of one core for me. When they had just musixmatch, spotify would switch between 30% and 60%. Now it decides to randomly run at 90% for about ten seconds every few songs.

A workaround:

        cat ~/bin/music
        #!/bin/bash

        error() {
          echo "[Error] $@" 1>&2
        }

        if [ -z "$(which cpulimit 2>/dev/null)" ]; then
          error "Missing package cpulimit"
          exit 1
        fi

        if [ -z "$(which spotify 2>/dev/null)" ]; then
          error "Missing package spotify"
          exit 2
        fi

        if test -t 1; then
          exec 1>/dev/null
        fi

        if test -t 2; then
          exec 2>/dev/null
        fi

        launch() {
          cpulimit -l 30 spotify
        }

        launch &

And I see no degradation in performance. This is severely low quality software engineering.

</comment><comment><USER7> Welcome to the wonderful world of super-portable web-tech-based apps.

<comment><USER8> Surely this could be an issue with any app though.

<comment><USER9> It must be. They're not pulling a Slack and running a full WebKit in their app. The internal library on MacOS is written in C (or was, they were moving to Objective-C last year).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For all people saying this has been fixed: my Spotify on macOS regularly will spike to 90% usage when idling and stay there until I kill it. Reinstalls change nothing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems like a good reason to go @jessfraz and containerize your Spotify client until there's a fix.

[https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles/tree/master/spotify](https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles/tree/master/spotify)

</comment><comment><USER12> They probably don't prioritize the desktop player but it's the thing that made me cancel my $10/month subscription.

(Not this CPU issue, but general lack of parity with other players and no movement in that direction.)

<comment><USER13> Well, there's the web player as well, but the desktop app seems better

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have had quite a few issues with Spotify on OSX, but not any issues like this lately. The forum post is old, and the most recent answer is from June last year. Is this really still relevant?

<comment><USER15> I've had it happen in late 2016. Threads about this issue come and go:

[https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/messa...](https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?filter=dateRangeType&q=cpu&rangeTime=1M)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> AKA "'sleep(2)' is not a synchronization primitive".

Not that this issue is necessarily due to sleep itself, but likely due to active polling instead of event handling.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm hoping that the web version doesn't commit the sins of the desktop version.

For those of us using Chrome, uninstall Spotify desktop app. Make sure you have uBlock and Privacy Badger installed, go to [https://play.spotify.com](https://play.spotify.com), sign in, and enjoy ad- free Spotify.

</comment><comment><USER18> Did they ever fix the issue where the desktop app would kill SSDs by performing a large number of writes? I stopped using the desktop version back in October because of that issue.

<comment><USER19> There were news articles announcing a bug fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm running spotify 1.0.47 on linux and there's no idle cpu usage from spotify. If I play a song it's using ~ 10% cpu.

</comment><comment><USER21> The last comment on that thread is from June 2016. I think this has since been fixed?

<comment><USER22> I'm also still getting hit by it; every 2-3 days that app will suddenly max out a single core and not stop until I kill it :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yay for electron apps!

<comment><USER24> I don't believe Spotify is an electron app on any platform.

<comment><USER25> Although it isn't an electron app it's just a bunch of CEF (Chrome-ium- Embedded Framework) 'panels' mixed in a single window so it's pretty close to an electron app</comment></comment></comment>


Is artificial intelligence going off the rails? - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/2373/is-artificial-intelligence-going-off-the-rails <comment><USER3> _> Everybody knows that my brain does not operate by having trillions of examples._

This is where I disagree fundamentally with others in the field - <USER2> Trillions is also an exaggeration.

In my opinion this needs a lot more study, but if you look at just the amount of visual data that we process per hour it's staggering.

There is no coherent comparison between our human visual systems and digital system in terms of image processing, but we can use some rough equivalents as a starting point.

MIT researchers have shown that humans can process images that have an exposure time of about 13ms [1]. Now, that is "recognition" of something that has already been seen, but it does show that it is the minimum time to discriminate visual features for the optical/visual system to "close the loop."

If you assume that the 13ms per process "sampling rate" at 60Hz (where most people start to see screen flicker) then you could very roughly translate that into image processing at around 276,000 "images" per hour. Roughly extrapolated you are looking at 1.4B "samples" per year.

I would imagine that a system with millions of years of evolution can do a lot to make that visual pipeline REALLY efficient, even if you keep the same basic learning structure. That's especially in comparison to our crude tools. I mean some of our best DL training sets only have 60-80,000 images.

Again, these comparisons are not rigorous, but illustrate my point that it's much more data than I think Hinton et al give credit to. A lot more needs to be taken into consideration for this to be really studied. Like attention in the visual field, how much cognitive power is put into peripheral vs focal point etc...

[1][http://news.mit.edu/2014/in-the-blink-of-an- eye-0116](http://news.mit.edu/2014/in-the-blink-of-an-eye-0116)</comment>


David Beazley Keynote at PyCon (Live Notes) - <AUTHOR> https://hackpad.com/FYJWFfUnHvn#9:30am---David-Beazley-Keynote

<comment><USER2> There's great notes for a lot of other PyCon talks here: <https://hackpad.com/LQgZLPeokTB#PyCon-2012-Notes>

</comment><comment><USER3> Hearing Beazley speak was definitely one of the highlights of PyCon for me. I've already looked into PyPy in the past, so most of it wasn't news to me. I felt validated though after hearing him declare the same things I thought of as "rough edges" the same.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great shoutout to a Montreal hacker called Jeff Preshing <http://preshing.com/>

<comment><USER5> Nice! Looking forward to the video for this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> brianr, do you live at Langton?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, I'm in San Francisco.</comment></comment>


Headroom.js – hide your header on scroll - <AUTHOR> http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js <comment><USER3> FYI, this UI pattern is called _" Quick Return"_: [http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2012/08/an-emerging-ui- patt...](http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2012/08/an-emerging-ui-pattern- quick-return.html)

I had been looking for this pattern's name after having seen Chrome on Android implementing it for their navbar. I find it useful on mobile where scrolling a long distance can be laborious.

<comment><USER4> I guess "quick return" is a remedy for "infinite scroll" making you lose top and bottom navigational elements, too.

<comment><USER5> I liked the ExtJS4 implementation most.

They kept the data in a div with hidden overflow so you could alway see header and footer (not that useful for mobile).

But they also deleted old nodes when they were far enough away from the visible space in the div.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just get rid of the damn headers. Users don't want them. They are just misguided ways of trying to raise retention, but really what they do is make your site less pleasant to use, which then makes me not want to come back later.

<comment><USER7> I absolutely loathe fixed headers, but I think this script is pretty cool. The headers stay out of your way when you are reading, and when you actually want to use the navigation you don't have to scroll all the way to the top. I really see no downside, except "more JavaScript." (People who are complaining about JavaScript: you really aren't going to like the Web in 5 years)

<comment><USER8> There are two kind of significant problems with headers that hide as you scroll, in my experience. 1) You can't easily get to the navigation when you _do_ need it—have to scroll up some uncertain amount that varies by site (this unknown makes simply using scrollbars more reliable)—and 2) you get it when you _don 't_ need it, as in you're simply scrolling back to reread a portion of the text above.

In short, this element feels always somewhat out of user's control.

Much more usable on mobile would be putting such navigation in a kind of sidebar that many apps already employ (often accessible by swiping from the left edge of the screen), while on desktop a great solution is simple "top" links, strategically placed.

Plain fixed headers, possibly somewhat collapsing in height as you scroll, also seem better than vanishing headers from the point of control.

Unless there comes out some positive research on usability of this particular UI element, I personally am not convinced.

<comment><AUTHOR>
        > Plain fixed headers, possibly somewhat collapsing in height as you scroll, also seem better than vanishing headers from the point of control.

That's doable with this library btw. What happens in response to scrolling is entirely dependent on your CSS. So when scrolling down, have it apply a class which reduces the height, and when scrolling up, restore the height.

Also, it's worth noting, that whilst the obvious use-case for the lib is headers; it can be used on any element, to have it react to scroll direction and distance. For instance, I've used it to make a sidebar fixed after scrolling past a certain point on the page (classic sticky sidebar pattern). Also, I've used it to only show a "back to top" link when a user is > 50% down the page and scrolling up quickly - so unless you're deep in a page and scrolling towards the top, the link will never be visible/distracting.

It works well for these scenarios too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the tagline, I thought this was a joke.. since "hide your header on scroll" implies default browser behaviour (i.e. position:static)

</comment><comment><USER10> Great job! How about adding an option of showing the header when the users moves the cursor to the top of the window? Just like [http://lyst.com](http://lyst.com) are doing it.

<comment><USER11> Ah, thanks for pointing us there. That's pretty slick

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've previously submitted this link, but given the interest in the pattern with yesterday's article [0] I thought it appropriate to post again. Hopefully someone finds it useful. Happy to answer any and all questions

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7799687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7799687)

<comment><USER12> It's pretty nice. In my ipad the header only shows/hides if I scroll up/down AND stop touching the screen. Maybe that needs to be changed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, this is a limitation of the scroll event on iOS. It does not given intermediate results - like it's debounced - only firing the scroll event when scrolling has stopped. This is a well-documented shortcoming of iOS. As Apple puts it [0], "One-finger panning doesn't generate any events until the user stops panning—an onscroll event is generated when the page stops moving". There is no workaround at the moment.

[0] [https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/documentation/app...](https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/documentation/appleapplications/reference/SafariWebContent/HandlingEvents/HandlingEvents.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> wiresurfer, don't understand why you were down voted into oblivion, but now I can't reply to you. Anyway, massive thanks for that, really helpful starting point

<comment><USER13> Till the time its seen by the right pair of eyes :) Will try and see if I can fork a version and add the "inferred " touchend hack to it. Have a good day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I haven't tried it out, but this is how you make it work with bootstrap 3

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20648451/how-do-you- use-h...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20648451/how-do-you-use-headroom- js-with-bootstrap-3-navbar)

<comment><USER15> Thankyou so much for that.

I had got as far as including animate.css in trying to get things working and I was just about to write here about how it didn't bl00%y work!!! All is working now, thanks for your well-spotted tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I scroll away from the top of the page it makes the header disappear, then reappear when I scroll back up to the top of the page.

Isn't that what scrolling does? :)

<comment><USER17> This is what scrolling does. But this option is fancier and IMHO pointlessly visually distracting.

<comment><USER18> I really enjoy this feature because it gives users who read long posts (especially on mobile) quick access to the navigation bar when they need it, but without the screen-hogging characteristic of older position:absolute nav- bars. With regards to the visual distraction, I find that I almost never scroll up unless I'm done reading. Continuously scrolling down feels natural, and in this case, the header will stay hidden regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Kind of odd that if you scroll slowly the header never disappears.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's intentional actually :) The library allows you to supply a tolerance value, to reduce sensitivity of the effect. On the project site, I have it set to 5px (i.e. you must scroll > 5px for the effect to trigger). You can try out the various options in the interactive playground [0]

[0] [http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/playroom/](http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/playroom/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> See [http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/57990/how-usable- are-b...](http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/57990/how-usable-are-bars- that-disappear-reappear-on-scroll) for more.

> I admit, it's quite genius. And I bet that if Apple could, they would have > patented it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I really, really like this behavior on mobile, especially on sites that dynamically load new content as I scroll down. I honestly don't understand the harsh criticism I'm seeing in the comments here, because this really is a super functional way of giving the user easy access to navigation controls without having to scroll all the way to the top of a page. That said, I suppose I can understand criticism if this were being used in cases where there generally wasn't a lot of content to scroll through. I guess my point is, like all design decisions, it completely depends on the use case as to whether or not this is useful or functional.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great, so having previously suffered a rash of sites that permanently took up valuable vertical screen space with fixed headers, they now will all have headers that disappear whenever you scroll down and appear when you scroll up, with slightly buggy behavior on iOS. Has anyone considered what non-technical users will think of this UX idiom?

The effect is exacerbated on mobile devices whose browser chrome follows this very same idiom (for arguably better reasons - at least it's not buggy). So you now have two "competing" user interface effects.

</comment><comment><USER23> Whether or not you are a fan of disappearing/reappearing headers, this is clearly a well-thought-out bit of code that will be useful to someone. The docs also appear clear and concise.

I like that it is not a jQuery plugin by default, but does provide the option. Even better (for me) is an Angular directive ready for immediate integration.

Well done and keep up the good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my preferred way of developing JS stuff. Build an object that you can use in pure JS, then integrations with other frameworks are nothing more than simple wrappers around that object. Check the code for the jQuery plugin [0], it's tiny!

By the way, I'm not an angular user, the directive was added through a PR. If you hit any problems or have any suggestions to improve it, please get in touch on github!

[0] [https://github.com/WickyNilliams/headroom.js/blob/master/src...](https://github.com/WickyNilliams/headroom.js/blob/master/src/jQuery.headroom.js)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's the point of this?

<comment><USER25> To only engage the header when you're scrolling up? Identical to the way Safari on iOS handles it.

<comment><USER26> And this is good because?

I don't get the point of this, you get pretty much the same thing by doing nothing. Fix the menu to the top of the page, when you scroll down it goes away, scroll back up and there it is. Almost no one is going to care that they'll need to scroll back to the top, I'm sure of it.

<comment><USER27> From HN front page yesterday: [http://usabilitypost.com/2014/05/24/the-scroll- up-bar/](http://usabilitypost.com/2014/05/24/the-scroll-up-bar/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Once upon a time, there was a town that had a severe rat problem. They imported a large number of cats, and soon the rats were gone.

Now the town had a cat problem. They imported a large number of dogs, and soon the rats were gone. But now they had a dog problem.

The town imported a large number of lions...

</comment><comment><USER29> It would be nice to have it where after scrolling up it can disappear after a certain amount of time. Very useful for scrolling back up to re-read something, versus scrolling up for navigational elements.

</comment><comment><USER30> Facebook should implement something like this for their mobile site. When I have scrolled too deep into the newsfeed, I find that refreshing the page is a better option than trying to scroll back up.

</comment><comment><USER31> I really like this but I wish the documentation included recommended DOM structure / css styles... it's not as plug and play as the docs suggest

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't like fixed headers at all and I dislike even more fixed headers that hide on scroll... it's too distracting and useless.

A couple of years ago, when fixed headers became "cool", I'd write scripts for Greasemonkey just to get rid of them. Today I'm too lazy for that :D.

But nice project.

</comment><comment><USER33> Didn't work in iOS Chrome or Safari (the header remains fixed at the top regardless of scroll behavior).

Cool effect for desktop but if you can get it working as a responsive solution I think it would be a lot more useful to people!

<comment><AUTHOR> See my other response ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7805748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7805748)). This is a shortcoming of iOS, it works perfectly on other platforms.

IIRC, you reduce the tolerance value (an options you can pass to headroom) it will work on iOS also, it just isn't quite as sensitive as it should be. I'm waiting for my development iPhone to charge so I can confirm this. I'll report back :)

<comment><USER33> Ah. I'm not super familiar with that "bug" \- is it that "touchmove" events don't get fired for single-finger scrolling (panning)?

Perhaps you could make it work (albeit less gracefully) in iOS by reconciling the header visibility state once "touchend" finally gets fired though? Assuming "touchstart" gets fired as you'd expect, you can do a bit of manual calculation to determine if the y-position changed enough to warrant header hide/show.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, when i first developed the library I didn't have an iOS device I could test with, so just went with the simplest solution (that is, not do anything :D). Also, I'd always kind of viewed it as a progressive enhancement - if it doesn't work, it's still a fully functional header.

However, now that I have an iOS device (which is still charging!), I should spend some time seeing if I can get it to work better there. I'll look at various touch events as you suggest. Currently it only listens to the scroll event

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Completely hiding the main navigation bar - is this a UX problem?. Now I have to scroll back again to top just for seeing the navigation bar.

Minor tweak will be to allow swiping from top to show it or when user moves mouse to top.

<comment><USER35> Did you even try it? The header reappears when you start scrolling up - <USER2> need to scroll back to the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Disa-pp-pp-pp-ointed by the lack of Max Headroom references on the linked site.

</comment><comment><USER37> Didn't test it as much in other browsers, but seemed to be buggy w/ Safari 7.0.1 on OS X - wasn't seeing the header appear again while scrolling up.

</comment><comment><USER38> Here is an example with bootstrap 3 [http://firestartr.co/](http://firestartr.co/)

</comment><comment><USER39> I hate the design of disappearing headers.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is why I love open source. Amazing job, congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER41> Why an entire js dependency for what can be accomplished with 10 lines of jquery?

<comment><USER40> Isn't jQuery a huge dependency?

<comment><USER41> Sure, but it provides more features than headroom.js.</comment></comment></comment>


Fairchild-Maxson Line-Of-Position Computer – National Air and Space Museum - <AUTHOR> http://airandspace.si.edu/explore-and-learn/multimedia/detail.cfm?id=4531 <comment><AUTHOR> I can't find any detailed explanation of how it worked. I did discover a picture of a "cassette" for it:

[http://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/cassette- fo...](http://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/cassette-for- fairchild-maxson-line-of-position-computer)</comment>


Ask HN: What tasks you have automated? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I would recommend to check out some previous discussions. HN users share their automated daily tasks based on their problem and context.

1\. Ask HN: What tasks do you automate? (337 comments) [0]

2\. Ask HN: Do you automate most of your routine tasks? (27 comments) [1]

3\. Ask HN: What day to day tasks do you automate? (7 comments) [2]

4\. Ask HN: How do you automate your life? (8 comments) [3]

5\. Ask HN: What are the small things that you'd automate in a software dev team? (9 comments) [4]

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14782332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14782332)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390845)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783598)

[3]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1521673](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1521673)

[4]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437560)

</comment><comment><USER3> Mate, nothing against you but this question comes over and over, times and times again. I won't even bother searching for the links to post here because if you didn't do it, why should I?

Specially from a post coming from an apparent throwaway account that does nothing more that ask questions. Sorry but this one was for you.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=tasks+automated](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=tasks+automated)</comment>


URL Scheme - How to Gather URL Scheme - <AUTHOR>

Dear Hacker News citizen,
I am currently creating a launcher app for iPhone, similar to Launch Center by App Cubby http://appcubby.com/launch-center/.
I am having trouble launching few apps on my iPhone with the launcher app that I am developing.
Is there any way to make sure my launcher app with launch every possible apps?
I asked my friend and he said that I must gather all of the URL schemes of all existing iPhone apps, is that true?
I do understand that I will need to gather URL schemes so my launcher app will detect what apps the user have on his iPhone.
It would be very helpful if I can get an idea how to gather URL schemes of iPhone apps!
Is there an existing API of URL schemes?
Again, thank you very much for your time and kindness :)! <comment><USER2> This would be a better question for Stack Overflow or something like it. Hacker News is a tech news links-and-comments site with "Ask" as a minor feature. Stack Overflow is an actual programming Q&A site.</comment>


ComScore: Facebook Now Serves One Third Of Online Ads In U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/facebook-one-third-online-ads/ <comment><USER2> Just goes to show you what a good CPM will do for you. Google crushes Facebook in revenue even while Facebook crushes Google in impressions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I tell all my friends on Facebook how to install ad-blocking, which considerably improves the user experience there.

Update, after I posted the submitted link on my Facebook profile: A friend just replied to my profile post of the link by commenting, "I recently went without ad block plus and I was really irritated by the ads I saw over and over again. Ad nauseum."

<comment><USER4> I disagree. I don't think it changes the user experience.</comment></comment>


Easily Add Payments to your Django Site - <AUTHOR> http://eldarion.com/blog/2012/10/23/easily-add-stripe-payments-your-django-site/

<comment><USER2> Stripe does, indeed, rock. I've spent a few hours over the last couple days integrating it's payment and customers API into our product and I have to say using their provided Python module makes things _so much easier_ than using Authorize.NET as we were before.

Sure, there are shortcomings compared to Authorize.NET, but from a programming (and logging/debugging perspective) it kicks ass.

</comment><comment><USER3> ... and Stripe still doesn't work in Europe (or am I missing something)</comment>


Cargo cult programming - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming <comment><USER2> I don't think cargo cult/magical thinking is a useful concept.

I don't know enough about the original cargo cults to say whether they were a reasonable attempt to understand very strange and novel events, or whether the tribes entire world view incorporated magical thinking.

It didn't really matter though. There is really no comparison to modern day programming. The analogy is to extreme to be meaningful. When you call someone a cargo cultist what you're really saying is that the causal mechanisms that person believes in don't exist. Which is a very normal reason for disagreeing and doesn't need a separate concept with a lot of baggage (no pun intended). It's like someone says "A causes B" and you don't say "no it doesn't" you say "no it doesn't and you only think it does because you don't know how to think. But it's OK, primitive tribes make the same mistake too."

The weakness of the concept explains the poor quality is the article. It is packed with weasel words and original research/uncited claims.

</comment><comment><USER3> This cargo cult stuff, from which this term derives, get's pretty surreal pretty quickly.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> I worked in a cargo cult SCRUM organization for a while. All the rituals, none of the understanding.

It sucked.

Fortunately, management got replaced by competent management, eventually. Which is a really unusual outcome. It became a very good organization.</comment>


Assange indictment fails to mention video that exposed US 'war crimes' in Iraq - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/15/julian-assange-indictment-fails-to-mention-wikileaks-video-that-exposed-us-war-crimes-in-iraq <comment><USER3> It is going to be _very_ interesting to watch how this trial proceeds - <USER2> indeed, Julian doesn't succumb to the Belmarsh torture and perishes, before the trial can run its course.

For those of us who have been paying attention to Julian for decades, the turning of public opinion against him has been a _very_ fascinating lesson in Western hubris.

I think the most important conclusion of all of this is that a) the US government thinks it has what it takes to continue to commit war crimes and other crimes against humanity with impunity, and b) those who pick up the mantel from Julian's passing will have learned a lot from his case.

Most important of all, I believe that c) the leaks will continue. It is going to be a very rough time, given todays climate, for those who continue to slavishly support the US military industrial pharmaceutical complex' crimes against humanity. Julians' heinous treatment just means, when the leaks continue, it'll be with the gloves off. There won't be a loud, obvious flamboyant cult figurehead to depose - more than likely, the leaker strategy going forward from this point onwards, will be a lot more effective.

One can hope, anyway. Until the American people prosecute their war criminals and faces justice for the crimes against humanity committed in their name, and for which they are thus responsible, the American people will continue to suffer as well. A nation ruled by war criminals is a victim of its own cowardice.

<comment><USER4> I don't see where your optimism about c) comes from. Julian Assange's flamboyance and charisma are the reason he wasn't disappeared a long time ago.

Quiet leakers will surely FB dispensed with quietly and much less pleasantly than Assange.

<comment><USER3> The real reason he wasn't disappeared long ago, is that he had access to such gargantuan quantities of very real evidence of very real crimes that he was able to surf the shock wave, and he successfully leaked it in a way that would guarantee _some_ light on the case - clearly not enough, but he did not disappear into darkness after the first war crimes were revealed. His followup was his defence, and the only reason he got caught in a web of intrigue is that he stopped focusing on the mission and got caught in a honeypot.

Julians flamboyance and charisma are the reason the general public are complacent about his torturous treatment. His character was weaponised against him by those with immense resources to do so.

However, you can't dispense with leakers you don't see. And here is the weakness in the US Governments' strategy of disappearing Julian - Its not the leaker: its the leaks.

And since the West has committed war crimes at such stupendous scale, these leaks are not going away.

<comment><USER4> Ok - but leaks must become public if they are going to be effective, and then they can be traced back to the source and the 'invisible' source can be subjected to judicial processes with none of the scrutiny and publicity that Assange is receiving.

<comment><USER3> Sure, the leaks must become public. But the leakers don't.

And the outrage over the crimes committed is _so large_ that I am fairly confident, within a year, we will see the American public tearing those responsible into shreds. If, that is, America survives another year with its war criminals running free without tearing _itself_ into shreds ...

<comment><USER5> Any damning enough leak can be declared to be a conspiracy theory with an accompanying half-assed debunking and the well-trained public will ignore it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An indictment sets forth the government's allegations regarding the charged crimes. The government's case is that Assange crossed the line from receiving illegally leaked materials to facilitating the illegal leak. The content of the email isn't relevant to the charged crime except that the information needs to be classified.

The fact that the leaked information contained evidence of arguable war crimes is at most a moral (but not legal) justification. There is a good argument that the government should have exercised its prosecutorial discretion not to pursue this case in that basis. But an indictment does not need to include evidence that might be morally exculpatory. (It doesn't even have to include legally relevant exculpatory evidence; the prosecutor is just required to disclose that to the defense attorney.) Assange will definitely raise this video and other evidence in his defense.

The Guardian article twists the narrative—alleging the government "failed to include" to evidence, as if it had a duty to do so—to artificially bolster its premise. You can say that the government should hold back in a prosecution because conduct, though technically illegal, was justified. But reasonable people may or may not agree with that. So instead, the author takes it a step further to try and make it look like the government "failed" to disclose information it was obligated to include (conduct that's much harder to agree with.)

</comment><comment><USER7> _The prosecution case alleges Assange risked American lives by releasing hundreds of thousands of US intelligence documents._

I'm not passing judgement here on Assange or the US's case against him. Just noting that the prosecution case seems to focus on the fact that US intelligence docs being released puts _American lives_ at risk.

The prosecution's case doesn't seem to imply that this video is not evidence of _war crimes_ but that its release doesn't absolve him of the crime of releasing other documents.

The linked article seems pretty light on details so it's difficult to make much out of it directly.

<comment><USER3> >American lives at risk

Failing to prosecute legitimate war crimes puts American lives at risk.

This is duplicity at its finest.

Assange is not really on trial here. The Wests' public opinion of American war criminals is, however.

<comment><USER8> I would argue that the West's willingness to go after Assange, Snowden, Manning, and (sorry to him if he doesn't want to be in this list) Alex Vindman even after their revelations showed serious problems in American foreign policy and behavior. Both Obama and Trump showed a profound disinterest in evidence of a lack of self-restraint and self-governance. That was the test, and I think we have failed spectacularly. Of course, these days, there seem to be much bigger fish to fry, but I worry that "flooding the zone with bs" achieves precisely this constant feeling that _this_ problem cannot be solved because there are more pressing matters.

Apart from climate change, a government incapable of addressing it's own crimes is our biggest threat. Note that I don't expect government to never commit crime, I just expect it to admit to it and take corrective action when it happens.

<comment><USER3> >a government incapable of addressing it's own crimes is our biggest threat

I agree with you, with one caveat: it is the _people_ who must prosecute the governments crimes. Lets see if America today is brave enough to do so...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > US prosecutors have failed to include one of WikiLeaks' most shocking video > revelations in the indictment against Julian Assange, a move that has > brought accusations the US doesn't want its "war crimes" exposed in public.

There's a reason "war crimes" has to be in scare quotes there.

<comment><USER10> Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER9> The article doesn't elaborate on what "war crimes" are alleged because the video actually just shows a highly unfortunate mistake.

<comment><USER11> Let's consider the factors which decided the death sentence of these journalists and their companions (and so many others in the middle east):

1) They were military-age males

Say you have the ability to rain death miles above at whim. Do you think "military-age male" is a robust separator of who lives and who dies? Would you fit in this category? There but for the grace of god go you.

The video doesn't show a mistake at all. It shows a very deliberate action, carried out with great success. That these people were "innocent" in that some westerners cared whether they lived or died is the only reason you're here now defending their murder.

<comment><USER9> You forgot

2) they were in an group of armed men on a battlefield and were pointing the long barrel of a telephoto lens at American Humvees from behind cover.

<comment><USER11> There was nothing to indicate these men were insurgents beyond them being armed. The order to fire was already given before Namir pointed his camera at the humvees. One charitably supposes you wouldn't be quite so cavalier with ending the lives of those around you for similar reasons, so why are you defending it here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll probably regret asking, but why would it?

<comment><USER3> >I'll probably regret asking, but why would it?

Because it is evidence of a crime being committed - i.e. that Assange obtained secret military materials and then illegally published them.

Assange is being held for extradition to face charges in the USA of publishing military secrets. This is a military secret that he published.

The fact of its exclusion demonstrates that the US Government doesn't want its crimes further exposed to the world, and that it doesn't believe that Assange illegally published this material - or else, it would have to be admitted as evidence. This omission demonstrates that he is not being targeted for the reason of publishing military secrets, or else it would have been included in the case as evidence.

Julian Assange is being illegally detained and criminally prosecuted for publishing the fact of America's war crimes and embarrassing the War Coalition.

The USA has, with this omission, essentially admitted guilt for its own war crimes.

<comment><USER13> Isn't the US system of justice adversarial in nature? Why would the prosecutor make the defense's argument for free?

<comment><USER14> It's one thing to avoid making arguments and another to intentionally omit certain "crimes" because drawing attention to them discredits the moral basis of your argument, while emphasizing "crimes" that are identical except for lacking that baggage. It speaks to a fundamental disinterest in the law and its uniform enforcement.

<comment><USER3> You know what else speaks to a fundamental disinterest in the law and its uniform enforcement?

The Gunship Video itself.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do one have to be an exceptional programmer to contribute to opensource projects - <AUTHOR> I'm fascinated by how developers are able to contribute to opensource projects. Do programmers have to really exceptional to start contributing to projects like Kubernetes, TensorFlow? <comment><USER2> More generally with OSS I have found that it mostly depends on the level of contribution.

There are usually some trivial tasks around docs or simple items that can be done with minimal knowledge of the language or project codebase, additionally there are more low-mid tier tasks that require looking at past commits / structure of the project but follow the same pattern.

source: I have contributed to probably close to 100 OSS projects in the last decade varying in size and complexity.

Specifically With respect to kubernetes I have spent some time with trivial tasks for related projects like acs-engine because I am using azure for deployments.

I have not contributed to TensorFlow but in limited areas I imagine I could help with bindings, cross platform support and maybe optimisations of functions given that this is important because the compute cost involved. I would not however be able to dig into some of the complex models the codebase because I have not studied data-science or in any great detail.

We are in an era where OSS project organisers can now see the value and build on these small changes. If you can get enough people interested and contributing towards a goal you can reach a critical mass.

The one tip I would have if you were looking to get started out in OSS development is to make some kind of assessment around how easy it would be to work on a project.

For example: Rust is very popular right now and has been gaining traction for awhile. This is no accident and building a programming language out in the open is very very difficult. A number of very skilled Engineers have allocated time to mentoring. So if you wanted to just jump in having never contributed before you could just filter an issue by mentor. [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ais...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3AE-mentor) Filtering this further by E-easy to get yourself started.

This is probably not the best example as writing a programming language is not an easy feat. The example was chosen however to more highlight what to look for in projects if you want to get your feet wet and start contributing to OSS.</comment>


Ask HN: Best place to sell domains - <AUTHOR> Over the last couple of years I've accumulated a couple hundred domains, mostly for potential side projects which I never launched. Now after selling one of my side projects I'm going to take a couple of years off from tech and want to get rid of my other domains.<p>Any suggestions on the best site to do this? All the domains don't come with anything attached, so not selling actual revenue generating projects. <comment><USER2> Try: [https://flippa.com/](https://flippa.com/)

Also, you can look up something called GoDaddy Marketplace/After Market or something.

Also, you could try (bulk) updating the whois info of all domains with text like: ____This Domain is for Sale __ _

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the whois tip, that sounds like a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Couple hundred domains isn't little. Perhaps you can sell them all together as a bulk to some database like [https://alldomainsdb.com/](https://alldomainsdb.com/). They may be interested in acquiring them all, especially if they are old and have plenty of links, I can imagine they'll be quite interested. And you can ask for more money than from a natural person.

</comment><comment><USER4> Selling the entire lot to a domain vendor is the quickest way out but you would get peanuts, also because with so many new extensions approved recently, nude domains are pretty worthless apart of premium .com. You may target industry-related players, though, for the most attractive ones in your portfolio: placing one or two for a few thousand dollars to the end user would extract some value from the otherwise inanimate dross.

</comment><comment><USER5> This might be offtopic, but im selling domain called privacyzone.org. If you're intrested contact me through contact form: [https://privacyzone.org/domain-for-sale/](https://privacyzone.org/domain-for- sale/)

</comment><comment><USER6> My knowledge might be outdated but sedo.com used to be recommended for selling valuable domains before.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey, this doesn't answer your question but I had to ask.

I'm building a side-project, where users will be able to list their domains for sale. What do you think I should charge as the listing price?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd also suggest flippa.com, and put a holding page on each domain linking to the auction/advert page, or a contact form.

</comment><comment><USER9> You should post a list here. I'm sure many of us could use a nice domain for a side project

</comment><comment><USER10> You can use something like Flippa, but like all the big sites, they'll rob you with fees.

</comment><comment><USER11> can you provide a txt file of the domains in the event us here want to make an offer on one?</comment>


How to Hack Venture Capital - <AUTHOR> http://www.venturehacks.com/ <comment><USER2> Hello, I am Aur Saraf.

I was in a lecture about legal matters in starting up when I figured out that the easy and fool proof way to make money in this business is not creating a great product, but instead marketing yourself to VCs, getting some big money and spending it away pretending to do something.

Most of the start ups that fail, I think, aren't people that couldn't succeed in creating a great product and selling it - they're just people taking advantage of a very broken system.

Myself, I still think that creating a great product is more fun, more challenging and more rewarding. It also fits my moral code.

The site has some great info, but try not using it to hack a broken system - instead, use it just to have the smoothest ride through one of the best experiences our world has to offer. Aur Saraf

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great site, and I think the more people are aware of the situation with Venture Capital, the more they realize that the real cost of it is not in loss of ownership of the company, but in increased liklihood that your company will fail.

Plus, these days, unless you're buidling a manufacturing plant for a medical device or integrated circuit, there is no reason to raise $1M.

Build it for $100k-$400k with angel funds and if its worth a damn, you'll be able to monetize it and grow.

You don't need superbowl commercials ot get your app out there anymore... you need a blog. You don't need to go into expensive deals with portal players-- you just need to show up at carefully targetted conferences. (Twitters performance at SXSW is a great example of this.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great site, a definite must read...I've been aware of some of these VC games by seeing them first hand, but this takes it to the next level of detail.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I especially like their "since persian calendar 1386" tagline.</comment>


Ask HN: Does a genius.com-like app to annotate ArXiv papers exist? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://web.hypothes.is](https://web.hypothes.is)

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe the "Librarian" Chrome extension - [https://fermatslibrary.com/librarian](https://fermatslibrary.com/librarian) \- from Fermat's Library should do that, but I'm not certain if the comments are shared across users.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you download the PDF, you can annotate PDFs locally. Why not do it that way?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's about the crowd-sourcing aspect of genius.com.

Experts in the various fields could annotate papers in order to make it easier for non-science-savvy people to get what is going on.

<comment><USER4> This is an interesting idea. I think the problem with such an app is that reviewers and publishers have sort of a monopoly on papers, which makes it hard from a business perspective</comment></comment></comment>


The Nitrogen Problem: Global Warming Is Making It Worse - <AUTHOR> http://e360.yale.edu/features/the-nitrogen-problem-why-global-warming-is-making-it-worse <comment><USER2> While the article states that nitrogen availability will increase due to climate change, I am missing a discussion about it also being the limiting factor.

While nitrogen is frequently the limiting factor in oceans, this it might not be the case in lakes and rivers, where phosphorus is more often the limiting factor.

</comment><comment><USER3> How about adding genes to plants to make them able to extract nitrogen directly from air? Apparently some vegetables are already doing this (peas, beans, soybeans, alfafa)

But I can already see the huge marketing problem of this (non-organic, unnatural, GMO, ...)

<comment><USER4> Those plants are doing it via symbiosis with soil bacteria. That seems a bit difficult to engineer into other plants, because it involves a lot more than producing a couple of extra molecules, like e.g. BT corn. But then again, I'm not a geneticist.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely, and it's the reason why even something as lucrative as like white truffles or huckleberries can't be cultivated very easily, if at all.

<comment><USER6> I don't quite understand what your comment is getting at but I'm interested. Do truffles and huckleberries only grow in nitrogen rich soils?

<comment><USER5> Oh sorry, no. Truffles grow as part of a symbiotic system around certain tree roots, and it's devilishly hard to recreate those conditions well enough in "captivity" if you get my drift.

Huckleberries are an interesting case and that nobody is quite sure why they fail as a crop, but at the end of the day the only way to grow more huckleberries is to clear woodland and let huckleberries grow there.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/08/11/542690164/for...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/08/11/542690164/for- the-love-of-huckleberries-august-brings-out-hunters-of-elusive-fruit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Algae growth == Carbon Sequestering

We should be finding ways of leveraging this to our advantage instead of complaining

<comment><USER8> They suck out oxygen too. That's how you get ocean deadzones.

<comment><USER9> That depends on whether you've got photosynthetic or abiotic algae. Blue-green algae _produce_ oxygen.

One theory on ice-ages involves what's basically pond-lilly taking over the Arctic, which at the time was a shallow sea with a freshwater lens over salt water.

<comment><USER2> >abiotic algae

What specific species are you referring to?

>Blue-green algae produce oxygen.

That is only true during daylight. At night algae consume oxygen.

Independently, photosynthetic activity can increase pH values drastically.

<comment><USER9> Specific mechanism is described here. It's the bacterial decomposition of the algae rather than the algael bloom itself which _directly_ prompts the issue.

A bit of hair splitting, but useful for understanding what's going on.

[https://articles.extension.org/pages/45651/if-algae- produce-...](https://articles.extension.org/pages/45651/if-algae-produce- oxygen-in-a-pond-how-can-having-too-much-algae-cause-an-oxygen-depletion)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does Software Understand Complexity? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/does-software-understand-complexity <comment><USER2> I do not believe software understands complexity—that's to say programmers can't adequately code complexity into software even if the programmers themselves actually understood all aspects of that complexity—which I'd venture that they don't.

Modern programming as we know it is always a case of a range of given 'knowns' such as input data, program algorithms and programs' application of iterative mathematics and basic logical operators (if-then-else type techniques etc.) to produce an output/the end result. Of itself, no programming language has an _a priori_ concept of 'complexity' built in.

If we move on from traditional software to AI we may be able to tackle the complexity issue to some degree but that's not to say that we understand how AI arrives at a solution. I see this as a deeply unsatisfactory outcome and thus it is only part of the solution. It's why many others and I believe that the term _Software Engineering_ is a misnomer in that the software/programming profession has yet to come of age. Those arrogant enough to say that it already has I believe are just fooling themselves.

I put this case to you as a simple example: take the software that ran the 737 Max and crashed those planes. Let's assume Boeing's engineers knew what they were doing (and that's open to question) and they had essentially programmed the MCAS system correctly but with some bugs. Then I would contend that any system that was capable of adequately handling complexity—here processing parameters outside the range of program's normal design parameters—would have automatically defaulted to a _Do what is necessary to save the plane_ fallback algorithm.

As such tragic cases demonstrate, no such software exists—as software has just not reached the stage of development where users can be certain that their software does not let them down when unforeseen problems arise.

It seems to me software innovation of this type is still years—likely decades—away.

</comment><comment><USER3> A thread from 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17635624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17635624)

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think software understands anything

<comment><USER3> Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here, such as shallow reactions to titles that don't engage the interesting content of an article.</comment></comment>