The Dorito Effect - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/books/review/the-dorito-effect-by-mark-schatzker.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-middle-span-region&region=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region

<comment><USER2> A significant portion of the blandness of some supermarket foods is the result of processing, with "pro-juiciness" treatments being some of the worst offenders. Chicken (even whole chickens for roasting) are injected with water, oil, and water-binding compounds to plump them up. The water mostly evaporates during cooking so the result is usually blander rather than juicier. Most hams sold today are cured by injecting them with brine, as opposed to traditional surface-based dry curing methods that are slower and result in less mass. The result is bigger hams with inferior flavor and a somewhat gelatinous texture. It is still possible to find traditionally cured hams, but you often have to go to a specialized butcher.

So, it's not just breeding that has prioritized factors other than flavor, but also how foods are processed. We pay by the kilogram, so producers have found ways to make the same animals weigh more.

<comment><USER3> That's at the root of corn-fed beef too! Feeding cows corn the last days of their lives before they get on the truck to be weighed and cut up, raises their weight by far more than the cost of the corn. Its just economics. And the farmers set the beef grades, so beef raised this way is Grade A regardless of how it tastes.

<comment><USER4> Honestly I greatly prefer corn fed beef to grass fed regardless of economics. Grass fed is nice once in a while, but I think the best is grass fed, corn finished. It gives the meat a much fattier taste, and I've found also gives you a much nicer maillard crust.

<comment><USER5> Where and how are you eating that you are able to sample and differentiate:

\- corn fed \- grass fed \- grass fed, corn finished \- other permutations ?

Genuinely interested ... I mean, I know where I can go to get either corn or grass fed, but I wouldn't assume that other variables are controlled for. And then the grass fed, corn finished ... no idea who I would submit that request to ...

<comment><USER6> They sell these varieties all at Whole Foods. Usually Grass Fes and Corn Fed at the butcher section and Grass Fed Corn Finished pre-packed on the side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am from Brazil, here our economy depends greatly on commodity exports (meat, soybeans, iron, coal, and whatnot).

Producers of commodities, tend to export the best stuff, and sell the crap internally... It has an interesting result: the flavour (or quality, for non- edible products) of some stuff, is drastically different, for example two famous cases is chicken, and oranges, it happened once to each industry to be unable to export for some reason, and they dumped the export product in the internal market, people that bought the "export" chicken and oranges were very impressed, it tasted MUCH, MUCH better, also the export oranges are obviously different (they are bigger, heavier and have a more striking colour).

Unfortunately, I am not one of those people :( (I had girlfriends that tasted those, but when it happened I lived in a city that was too small to get those products).

Still, for many people that think that produce can not be THAT different, I can say, yes, it can, even when made by the same company, sometimes in the same farm.

<comment><USER8> Since it costs the same to ship a mediocre product as the best products, it makes sense to ship the nicest stuff since a premium can be charged for it.

<comment><USER9> Happens in the US too, for the same reasons. Our export avocados tend to be larger an nicer looking than the domestically circulated equivalents. However, they both taste the same.

<comment><USER3> That explains it! I lived in California, where all the grocery-store avocadoes were marked 'Florida'. And California is a major avocado-growing region! I suppose all their best ones ended up in Florida.

<comment><USER10> The same happens here in Florida with orange juice. Every grocery store carries many varieties of "California orange juice". Which seems silly, given that we have great oranges right here.

<comment><USER11> Same in California: I only see Florida orange juice in the supermarket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In Bangladesh, we had scrawny little chickens that you'd buy live at the market. When we moved to the U.S. I couldn't eat chicken for 6-9 months because it just tasted so bland and flavorless.

<comment><USER13> Back home in South Carolina, we had apple trees in our front yard. Never used any pesticides or anything, just let them grow. Anyway, they were about half the size of grocery apples, almost completely covered in insect bites, and tasted like ass. Incredibly sour, strangely dry, and very little sweetness. So thank god for pesticides and Fuji apples.

<comment><USER14> probably a "real" apple tree. Most apple varieties are created by grafting a branch of an existing variety onto a new tree. Thats why despite genetic variation, they taste pretty much the same.

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

<comment><USER15> It's not my experience that apple varieties in the grocery taste "pretty much the same." Maybe you meant something else?

Apple trees are grafted because the best-tasting varietals don't form the most hardy root system. You put the good-tasting apple tree on top and the hardy strain on the bottom (to become the roots)

<comment><USER14> Each variety tastes the same (a golden delicious apple tastes like other golden delicious apples). The grafting does that among other things "Maintain consistency". A hardy root system that you mention is one.

I started looking into it because my dad has a giant apple tree thats much bigger than the ones I've seen in an orchard, but the apples taste surprisingly bitter.

I guess another reason they like grafting is the trees stay smaller and its easier to pick the fruit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We have "badges" for all kinds of things, ie free range eggs, organic produce, electricity usage etc. why does something equivalent not exist for flavour? might be a tad subjective, but certainly doable. Might be because a lot of people actually confuse organic produce for a flavour badge?! never been convinced by it though..

<comment><USER17> It's not straight forward that people will like traditionally produced food products better. In the case of beef for example most people prefer the taste of corn fed beef to grass fed even though corn is horrible for cows and grass is their natural food.

<comment><USER18> Hmmm, really?

When I moved to the US, I was put off by the taste of beef; I found that corn fed just didn't taste as good. I'm curious if you just prefer what you were brought up on?

<comment><USER3> The 2nd. My dad liked cold corn grits fried in lard for breakfast. Its totally disgusting. Unless its how you got your calories on the farm during the depression - then it was heaven-sent.

<comment><USER19> I make that anytime we have left over grits, although I usually use bacon grease. My kids love it too. It's all about what you're used to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A great talk touching on this topic is "Law of the locust: a tale of swarms, cannibals, ageing and human obesity" <URL: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rV7zAGdbyA>](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rV7zAGdbyA>) (though I saw Dr. Simpson speak at Harvard, rather). He mentioned how the body craves protein and will over-consume carbohydrates to get enough; less so the reverse. It really messes things up when you have a starchy food laced with MSG so your body thinks from the savory umami flavor it's getting protein, but never does, so desperately eats more.... according to him Doritos are pretty much evil incarnate.

Speaking of Doritos I just noticed they finally came out with the Roulette ones near me. May have to risk the evil.

<comment><USER21> Very nice video.

It explains a lot about the low-carb (high protein) diet.

Thank you for sharing it.

<comment><USER7> I always ate food in not much large amounts, but one thing that impressed me is that when I switched my diet (when I could afford it...) to salad + cheese and meat, the amount of food I ate dropped a lot, even in unrelated meals.

It was great to go to a restaurant, eat a third of what other people were eating (it was a weight-based restaurant, so I could see that I ate a third of what other people ate, in weight of the food terms), and feel completely satisfied.

Even better, I could get back to work right away, or even go do something that require physical exertion (for example once I was late for something, and could eat, and then immediately run toward the place where I was supposed to go).

<comment><USER20> Soylent has proven to be exceptionally filling for me, more so than any other food. It actually gets rid of that ever-present background hunger for up to half a day.

I've lost a ton of weight on it, enough that I've gone down 3+ inches in pant size in a few months. Of course, being in a stressful situation such that I lost interest in eating, then getting out of said stressful situation so I didn't have as much of an urge to binge and stretch my normal appetite again, probably helped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can confirm this, lived on a ranch where we raised our own free range chickens. They had a noticeably more savory flavor. Not being brined, also helped not overpower their taste. Even the old roosters who's meat was so tough that you'd have to stew them for hours tasted better.

(it was also neat to see how neotenic and undeveloped the bones of store bought chickens are in comparison)

</comment><comment><USER22> > According to a gruesome statistic from a 2013 article in Poultry Science, if > humans grew as quickly as the Chicken of Today, "a three-kilogram > (6.6-pound) newborn baby would weigh 300 kilograms (660 pounds) after two > months."

How is this an appropriate comparison? A quick google search attests that birds grow faster than mammals, and that humans grow especially slowly; I'm sure you could conjure up a similarly "gruesome" statistic with any wild bird.

</comment><comment><USER23> I had to spend a good amount of mental effort trying to explain to my German teacher, in German, why American pork tastes so bad (or, rather, has no flavor). When I said, 'Schwein, das andere weisse Fleisch, wie poulet' (I'm in Switzerland), she figured it out immediately and was as disturbed as anyone should be.

<comment><USER24> Wait, is pork really considered white meat in the US? I've never seen white pork, but then again I think I never consciously ate pork in the US - all I know is that ham is absolutely terrible for my taste - but I think I've never had good ham outside German/Italian/Spanish- speaking countries. I'm Swiss btw.

<comment><USER25> Yes. The typical pork chop in the United States contains so little fat that it is closer to a chicken breast than a fatty cut of beef.

<comment><USER24> Ok, so the fat determines the way people think about it, but the meat's color is still red, right? If it were white I'd make a big circle around it since I'd assume it's spoiled.

<comment><USER25> More of a very light pink than red. I've definitely mistaken a pork chop for a chicken breast when glancing through my fridge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can confirm. Doritos are amazing.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's funny that she takes the opportunity to plug her former employer chef's work and an entirely different book at the end.

It makes it seem like that was her motivation for reviewing this book in the first place.

<comment><USER28> > her former employer

She was a research assistant _11 years ago_ for someone who is very famous already.</comment></comment>


Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read at Least Twice (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every-programmer-should-read-at-least-twice/ <comment><USER2> There is very little all programmers should be required to have in common. The field is just that big now.

9 times out of 10 a list like this includes a treatise on floating point number representation, which while useful, probably isn't of utmost importance in the 21st century, but hey, at one time folks thought that _was_ required for 'all programmers' to read. At least this list does seem more up to date and relevant.

I just wish we'd stop with 'all X should' titles. Its demeaning and inaccurate.

<comment> momo-reina Actually I'd argue that there are quite a few things that programmers should have in common, if by programmers we're talking about serious engineers/computer scientis[1] and not "amateur-hour web designers"[2].

Knowledge of the fundamental concepts talked about on that list of papers, and the history therewith, is what allows us to go past the current level of engineering and actually reach greater heights. Most of the emphasis nowadays is spent on knowledge of specific toolchains, frameworks, etc, instead of actually learning WHY and HOW these things work.

From that basic foundation you can then go into any field and learn the semantics, details, and problem-specific techniques to deal with the problems presented. Without that foundation, we're all just floundering around, becoming proficient in using these tools without actually KNOWING how they work and therefore unable to take them to the next level.

[1] - A conversation with Alan Kay [https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523) [2] - JavaScript isn't Scheme [http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/07/18/javascript- isnt...](http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/07/18/javascript-isnt-scheme/)

<comment><USER3> "not "amateur-hour web designers"

Perhaps you're confused. Most people who refer to themselves as "web designers" aren't meant to be or and aren't trying to be computer scientists or engineers. Many of them have a graphics design education, or taken inspiration from that tradition. Some of the more technically-minded of them can do basic coding, but most of them stop at HTML and CSS. But they're better than I am at UI/UX, and visual design, because _that 's what they do_. They're not meant to be computer scientists.

If you mean web-application developers, however, I'd urge you to take a look at some of the stuff that is being done on the front-end these days. (not to mention the fact that this blog post was written by a Javascript expert)

Yes, there are some people who have drifted into their jobs and are little more than cargo cultists, although some of the more talented and curious of them do make the upgrade to serious professionals. But by far, most of the people I've worked with recently on front-end jobs have had a rigorous computer science education, with an excellent knowledge of data structures, algorithms, software engineering, and computer architecture. The fact that they're working on the front-end, in Javascript, is incidental. In their spare time, and if they're lucky, on some in-house stuff, they might prefer working in Haskell, or maybe Clojure. But much like C in past decades, the web is ubiquitous, and any serious developer of this era must know how to work in it. We don't all have the privilege of getting paid to write Scheme.

But I do share your opinion that there are certain foundational concepts and knowledge that all professional programmers should have in common, including some of the papers referenced.

<comment> momo-reina Perhaps the comment came out wrong, let me try to be a little clearer.

I'm not trying to create separate categories between front-end, back-end, desktop, CLI, and systems engineers. The distinction I am trying to make though is that yes, while Computing has become a vast field, there simply are some basic fundamental skills that are absolutely required if we want to go beyond our current level of achievement.

These are things that you have mentioned: deep knowledge of algorithms, data structures, software engineering, computer architecture, etc. This is absolutely the MINIMUM requirement Without understanding these things, we will stay at this present level of software engineering forever. Sure we will have mastered the tools, and the current programming-paradigms that these tools teach us, but we will not be able to advance.

Whether one programs in JavaScript, Forth, Common Lisp, or even BASIC isn't the issue. The point that Fogus's post is trying to get across, or at least what I have taken away from it, is that most "serious" programmers are incredibly lacking in what is considered basic foundational knowledge. What field one specializes in is irrelevant, there is just some stuff that everyone has to understand, not necessarily in the way that a specialist in the field does, but at least have more than passing, cursory knowledge of it.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. We're are on the same page, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think Communicating Sequential Processes [0] by Hoare is another landmark paper that should be on this list for its perspective on organizing concurrent processes. This was actually required reading for the concurrency section of my undergrad operating systems course.

[0]: [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Hoare78.pdf](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Hoare78.pdf)

<comment><USER5> "The practice of supplying proofs for nontrivial programs will not become widespread until considerably more powerful proof techniques become available, and even then will not be easy. But the practical advantages of program proving will eventually outweigh the difficulties, in view of the increasing costs of programming error."

The Hoare paper actually linked is hopelessly outdated, despite being an interesting historical artifact.

<comment><USER6> I might call it "sadly" outdated... not that I'm a fan of provably-correct programming (I've never done it, I just fix systems and networking software), but the seemingly modern comfort with buggyness and sloppy implementation... funny or sad, who knows

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to read the HN comments on this post now and what others have said previously.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3382962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3382962) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2979458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2979458)

<comment><USER8> Wow. That really is a quite revealing comparison.

<comment><USER9> Part of it might be that this was dropped on a Friday night, US time.

<comment><USER10> There is also the fact that the first condensation seeds of discussions on HN are largely determined by chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Eight out of ten are about programming languages, and strong on the functional side to boot. It's not that these topics aren't important, or that they're not great papers, but isn't that a bit too heavily skewed toward one area? Shouldn't at least one of those top ten be more directly about security, or performance, or some other kind of idea rather than the notation we use to express ideas?

Yeah, I know, make your own list. Maybe I will. Nonetheless, the author specifically mentions "cover a wide-range of topics" as a goal and this list fails to meet that goal.

<comment> dj-wonk Yes, there is an emphasis (and bias!) towards functional languages and distributed systems. Yes, Fogus' intent is to raise awareness of these concepts. Yes, other people would have different lists. Yes, the list could have more breadth.

Personally, I'd like to see a concept map of essential computer science topics combined with some of the top papers and books that cover each. It could be implemented as a curated collapsable directed graph.

<comment><USER12> > Personally, I'd like to see a concept map of essential computer science > topics combined with some of the top papers and books that cover each. It > could be implemented as a curated collapsable directed graph.

I've tried building one of these before, both for CS and for Maths. Funnily enough formatting, displaying and making it accessible (whilst retaining enough data) was the time-consuming issue, despite all the tech around for handling graphs. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's weird that "What every programmer should know about memory" Isn't on here. Even for languages that manage memory for you understanding the hard limitations and basic operations used to access and manipulate memory is certainly useful.

<comment><USER14> This is an excellent read, but I disagree with the title. It's a must-read for people interested in CPU architecture and for programmers who, after profiling, still consider doing micro-optimizations. E.g. if you seriously think about reordering your struct members for faster access. If you're building a web service, skip it.

<comment><USER15> I think it is a useful read for people doing any kind of programming at all, in that it might discourage them from attempting optimizations that seem obviously good, and might have _been_ good, if they were running on 20 year- old architectures, but these days just make the code more convoluted to no gain.

I know that this is the kind of effect the paper had on me (I spent a lot of time carefully reading it shortly after it was published), and now I almost never use what knowledge I gained from it to make performance optimizations, but it does frequently discourage me from attempting optimizations that I now know would probably not have the desired effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would recommend this one for historical purposes: [http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html](http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html)

<comment><USER17> This is an excellent paper but it does require a prior understanding of the stack, addressing, buffers, pointers, etc. It would be really nice if there was an article or blog post designed for people who want to read this paper but don't have the prior knowledge that's required to understand it. Unfortuntely I don't know of any. HN?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why _this_ Hoare paper and _this_ Lamport paper? A list of ten is a bit long considering how much background material is required reading for every single entry.

</comment><comment><USER18> Any list without Shannon's 1948 "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is just not a good list. Sorry.

[http://cm.bell- labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...](http://cm.bell- labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf)

The foundation of information theory. It is, by far, the most astonishing paper I have ever read. Far more astonishing than Lamport's famous conclusion about clocks. It is the kind of paper that causes a soul rift when read thoroughly.

<comment><USER19> I'm partial to his Master's thesis, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits." It literally invented digital computing. As an electrical engineering student it blows me away that one guy's thesis (he was 21!) can be fundamental to so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Most seem to be available here - [https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we- love](https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love)

</comment><comment><USER21> I love that even HN has listicles, and I would rate this one as at least on par with [http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/21-things-you- are...](http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/21-things-you-are-doing- wrong-every-day.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can some please do a similar list for machine learning and also for maths relevant to ML?

<comment><USER23> Probably the most famous papers is Breimen's "The Two Cultures". The rejoinder's from Cox and Hoadley add two additional perspectives from long careers.

<comment><USER24> Breiman, btw. Link to paper: [http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726](http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I had a dream about one of these papers tonight (seriously), so I come to HN and find this post. Pretty amazing coincidence. :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Has anyone else explored the rest of his site? Good posts, workable, no fuss design. All good work here. Keep it up!

<comment><USER27> fogus is a well known HN contributor.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fogus](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fogus)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Agree with platz

</comment><comment><USER29> #oly $#it! I have read these papers, all of'm! WHAT! Haha that is so accurate LOL!

Great stuff! But there are way more important whitepapers to be honest. I can't really think of the others right now, but if you go to the Digital library from ACM / IEEE, you can find really good stuff.</comment>


Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For - <AUTHOR> http://www.boxuk.com/blog/web-app-business-model-user-needs

<comment><USER2> A questionnaire at the end would be more useful if grouped by purpose and influence on price, i.e. answering yes here and yes there gives an option to charge for comfort 3x amount :)

Possibly an idea for a weekend project...

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, good idea. I might do a follow-up/edit with that. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Goodyear Bosses Held Captive by Workers at French Site - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/staff-seize-bosses-restive-french-goodyear-site-21431248

<comment><USER2> Why is this on HN?</comment>


Show HN: Free and Easy HTML Website - <AUTHOR> https://htmlight.com <comment><USER2> Nice work. Are the URLs recycled after some time? Do you plan to support some editing after the page has been created?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, not recycling urls at the moment, planning to do so soon after a few months of inactivity.

Great question, editing is on the feature list, thinking of adding once it attains traction and I add a verify ownership feature.</comment></comment>


Confirmation That Earth's Core Is Solid - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/seismic-j-phase-shear-wave-detection-reveals-elastic-solid-inner-core <comment><USER2> I'm a geologist. This press release is pure BS. We've known beyond reasonable doubt that the inner core is solid for more than a decade - for instance: [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2005/04/14/scien...](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2005/04/14/science.1109134)

We even know the elastic modulus of the solid inner core: [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/6/eaar2538](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/6/eaar2538)

<comment><USER3> So why is the earth so old and still incredibly geologically active? Is it simply because of the moon and tidal effects? If the crust is thin relative to other planets why hasn't the earth cooled more by now?

<comment><USER2> Two reasons: (1) the earth has really huge thermal inertia (2) radiogenic heat production. (2) often gets a lot of the credit (who doesn't like radioactivity), but (1) is probably doing more of the heavy lifting

At present day, Earth is losing heat at a rate of about 40 terawatts. This 40 terawatts drives mantle convection, plate tectonics, and every volcano out there.

As best we know, about 35% of that 40TW is radiogenic (decay of Th-232 with a half-life of 14 bilion years, U-238 with a half life of 4.5 billion years and K-40 with a half life of 1.25 billion years, among others). A fair amount of the decay energy is actually lost to neutrinos, but the rest is converted to heat and eventually lost by convection or conduction.

The other 65% or so is primordial -- essentially, gravitational potential energy from the accretion of the Earth, converted to heat and slowly lost over the past ~4.51 billion years since the moon-forming impact.

Earth's bulk thermal inertia (heat capacity times mass) is about 5.6E27 J/K. In other words, cooling the earth by one degree C releases 5.6E27 joules. That's a lot of joules!

Even so, there's a bit of a problem because geochemical evidence suggests that the mantle (which makes up most of the earth by volume) has probably not cooled by more than about 150C over the past 3.5 billion years, which means either one of our estimates is wrong, or the core is cooling pretty fast -- this would actually mean that the inner core might be pretty young, like < 1 billion years.

<comment><USER4> > this would actually mean that the inner core might be pretty young, like < 1 > billion years

What are the error bars on that? It seems to be getting quite close to the emergence of complex life, enough that the radiation shielding may be a more important pre-requisite than previously believed.

<comment><USER2> Big enough that that's a totally reasonable question! I don't think I can even put a number on it very confidently, but maybe something like 1.0 -0.7/+2.0 Ga?

One counterpoint that comes to mind is that the Ediacaran fauna is usually though to be marine, and water is a pretty good shield of radiation. There is one geologist who argues the ediacarans were terrestrial (Greg Retallack), but he interprets any sedimentary rock that's red as a paleosol, which is actually not completely silly, but is a bit more liberal than most others would be comfortable with.

In any case, I don't know, but it's not impossible!

edit: I should also say that the generation of Earth's magnetic field in the liquid outer core is a bunch of incredibly messy magnetohydrodynamics that is hard to simulate accurately, but we can probably have a pretty reasonable magnetic field with a purely liquid core (no solid inner core at all) -- it's the convection of the liquid outer core that provides the energy to sustain the magnetic field, so it's actually once the core becomes fully solid that we'll be in trouble

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 'our latest understanding is', not 'confirmation'

<comment><USER6> When your latest understanding is based on new evidence consistent with and supportive of your previous understanding, then it is a confirmation. It really isn't necessary to blindly hedge on what we know unless you're willing to call into question the concept of knowledge itself.

<comment><USER7> This 'confirmation' sure doesn't sound like a five-sigma detection of a new particle at CERN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> there is actually no observable proof that anything about the inner inner earth we 'know' is correct. for lack of a better theory and any kind of observations, like with any science, we accept the most likely theory untill it's proven wrong >.> which it might or might not be in the future. to say you know exactly how the core of the earth looks like is just plain silly. it's like saying the universe is infinite or finite. there is no proof or fact. just theory upon theory upon theory. not saying it's bad to theorize, but confirmation? that would be a sample from earths core...... not some wild speculation base on observations of processes very far from what is being theorized about</comment>


The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill Gates - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes/ <comment><USER2> Obviously an unpaid robot cannot pay taxes, businesses that use robots would have to pay said taxes</comment>


Skittles.com: Interweb the rainbow - <AUTHOR> http://skittles.com/ <comment><USER2> If there were ever a book written entitled "How To Spend Money While Not Selling Candy", chapter one would probably be "Turn your website into the brief object of fascination of people using another service, who have the collective attention span of an ADHD squirrel hopped up on crystal meth".

P.S. Did anyone even notice they linked their product pages to Wikipedia? I'm thinking that sounded very hip and progressive at the planning meeting.

<comment><USER3> It _is_ hip and progressive: they're sacrificing an opportunity to present their products in the best light possible, and are instead trusting the general public to describe them. To me that's a huge display of confidence in their product.†

You say Skittles is wasting money and misdirecting effort, but it seems opposite. How much does this gimmick actually cost? All the content is hosted and delivered (and in some cases created) by other people. Skittles' site wasn't popular before and the next couple days will get a lot of hip people thinking about Skittles, so it's seems like a great move.

† It's also not that big a deal since it's, you know, candy, which usually puts people in a good mood. I doubt most makers of consumer electronics would display unfiltered commentary from their customers.

<comment><USER4> I couldn't agree more.

This is a huge, huge branding win the Skittles guy. Thousands upon thousands of people who would never visit their site (I mean, who the hell visits a website for a candy?) are not only visiting but immediately talking about it to all their friends. Skittles on Facebook has nearly 600,000 fans, more than John McCain, who I assure you spent a LOT more money trying to get people to like him.

Sure, people will say stupid stuff and try to mess with it. But the majority of people are saying funny or at least neutral stuff, and are drowning them out -- just like in the real world. The confidence in the resilience of their brand and in the technology behind this is impressive. These people Get It, get it even more than some readers of Hacker News.

<comment><USER5> _Skittles on Facebook has nearly 600,000 fans, more than John McCain, who I assure you spent a LOT more money trying to get people to like him._

Well, that's not entirely fair. Most of the people using Facebook are what, 14-22? Definitely in the Skittles demographic. In the McCain demographic? Not so much.

<comment><USER6> There are a lot more stay-at-home moms on Facebook than you'd think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Internet now has three phases: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Skittles.

<comment><USER8> I don't know how citation works in these cases, but I think you should get credit for bringing this story to everybody's attention on IRC before it got submitted.

<comment><USER7> HN user Mazy actually pinged me about it first and based on the Twitter search results it seems quite a few figured it out a couple minutes prior. Overall, awesome news is awesome news.

<comment><USER9> I'm really not seeing why it's awesome. Would it have been awesome if they just redirected to a google search for 'skittles'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> <http://www.modernista.com/> (an ad agency) has been doing something similar for a while. Seems a bit copycat.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how hard a sell this was at the pitch meeting. On one hand, it's pretty unorthodox, especially for a snack food or junk food, which generally have product sites which are the web equivalent of the back of a cereal box, at best.

On the other hand, how many times has a marketing VP said "get us on Facebook, get us on Wikipedia, get us on Twitter, get us on flickr, get us on YouTube!" and had the advertising team reply with a site containing nothing but a set of six buttons which do nothing but that? Pretty hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's pretty damn incredible. They're taking a risk, but at the same time their home page is fascinating now.

</comment><comment><USER12> They 2.0'd their site:

Home/Chatter: _Twitter_ , Friends: _Facebook_ , Videos: _Youtube_ , Pics: _Flickr_ , Products: _Wikipedia_

The only normal (traditional) thing about their site is the contact page. If they _really_ wanted to go all out they would have only used myspace messages for contacting them.

<comment><USER4> It's amazing. Not only do they have a ground breaking site and a ton of viral traffic, _they're not even paying for the hosting_. They're getting Facebook, and Google, and Yahoo, and (cough) millions of altruistic donors to Wikipedia to foot the bill.

I'm sold. This isn't gimmicky, this is _brilliant_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a second there, I thought that was a twitter search page, and that skittles had put ads on it since the search term was _skittles_ , and that twitter finally started making money of their service!!

<comment><USER14> twitter == public feedback page

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What strikes me as odd is that it's all centralized at skittles.com . This sort of marketing obsoletes the need for a TLD that you try and entice your customers to visit, instead it allows you to engage with your customer where they are. Yeah, this made for a good publicity stunt, but it's nothing that plenty of other companies aren't doing far more subtley. Do you really want the player to know they're being played? ;)

</comment><comment><USER16> I thought it was hacked, but this is legit.

<comment><USER17> and apparently racists love skittles

<comment><USER18> Would it help if Skittles offered watermelon flavor?

Edit: OK, so I'm going to explain the humor and the criticism here, since I'm being voted down and I actually wanted to get a point across with this comment. thomasswift's comment of "and apparently racists love skittles" rubbed me the wrong way, in that it seems to implicate Skittles in the racism by association (or even just accepts the premise that by allowing people to say anything about Skittles on their home page they were tacitly endorsing everything people say about Skittles). I thought my comment was over the top enough to be obvious. But, I'm pretty sure every satirical comment I've made in the past couple of months here has been voted down. Hackers love satire. I dunno who you humorless ninnies are, but you aint who I wanna hang out with. I'm guessing you're new around here.

<comment><USER17> I originally wrote my comment in regards to the fact that about 8 tweets you can see on the page that were not obscured but the red boxes were extremely racist, hence what I said.

I did not mean to imply if you a non-racist person that likes skittles then you are a racist, or skittle endorses racism or anything like that.

Also other people seem to notice people taking advantage of this.

>> Naturally, people are already spamming the hell out of this. One tweet being repeated over and over again unfortunately uses a racial slur. As such, I suspect this little experiment will end rather soon for Skittles. This is from a venturebeat article - [http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/01/skittles- tweet-the-rainbow...](http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/01/skittles-tweet-the- rainbow-or-racial-slurs/)

I don't usually like to comment when people downmod me, they probably had a reason, but I feel like I should try to explain this one.

<comment><USER18> I don't think your comment deserved downmods, either. It just seemed, to me, to be a simplistic view of the situation, and maybe the one that the old media would take (along the lines of Fox News approach to the Internet: a place for child predators and cyberterrorists). And, so, I made a joke that I thought pointed out the ridiculousness of that simple view; when you give your customers the ability to say _anything_ they will say bad and good things. And that's OK. It doesn't mean anyone approves...just that people get to have their say.

My little moment of bitchery was about the humorless folks who've been voting down comic gold around these parts because it's biting. I've seen it enough lately, in my posts and others, that it feels like a pattern. And it's a pattern I don't like.

<comment><USER19> I don't think his comment endorsed that view at all. I saw it as a surprised reaction to see blatant racism on the front page of the website for a popular candy.

Also: you have to consider that people aren't voting you down because your humor is biting, but because it's not funny and doesn't add to the conversation.

<comment><USER18> _you have to consider that people aren't voting you down because your humor is biting, but because it's not funny and doesn't add to the conversation_

Maybe you're rig....nah! That's not it!

Ninny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Pretty disgusting spam popping up there (along with the rest of the stuff - pretty awesome).

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a process story co-opted by our Madison Avenue overlords.

Oh, how I hate process stories.

</comment><comment><USER22> I for one welcome our new skwittle overlords. Skittles: the official candy of the twitterati?</comment>


Employee Equity - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity <comment><USER2> Targeting an expected value equivalent to what Google might provide is under- compensating relative to the risk. Why not just join Google?

Compounding this is that "expected value" is often grossly optimistic.

Furthermore, depending on when hires 1-5 occur, 1%-2% equity in the form of options can significantly under-value the risk they take.</comment>


Don't do Startups, Buy a Business..? - <AUTHOR> http://www.college-startup.com/entrepreneur/dont-do-startups-buy-a-business/ <comment><USER2> Being a startup focused web geek I'm constantly bouncing ideas off of my hacker friends. One of which always responds with statements like "It would be cheaper and a better investment to just buy a Quiznos franchise" or something along those lines.

Now he contends mostly that he's looking for free lunch more than anything (oh he's a funny one), but often buying a traditional boring old business makes much more sense than tying to hit the VC tech lottery.

Screw logic though, onward towards beta 2!

<comment><USER3> The big advantage of web startups is that they can be done with no capital, which makes them attractive for people who have no capital. If you finance a business purchase, you have to a.) qualify for the loan and b.) earn over and above the cost of capital to turn a profit. That can be a risky bet, particularly if you have no operating experience.

Private businesses can be very attractive if you do have the capital, though. They often give much better returns than publicly-traded companies, because the seller gets something in return (liquidity) that public shareholders already have. If I had a spare $10M or so to throw around, this is definitely one place I'd look to park it.

<comment><USER2> No capital assumes you are doing everything 100% by yourself which is unlikely. Even if you assume you have 3 partners each 'donating' their time for a piece of the action, the 4 of you could probably secure a commercial loan and start a traditional business with a greater chance of success.

Also, because I sell my time, I never consider it free.

<comment><USER3> What's so unlikely about doing everything 100% by yourself (at least for an initial prototype...you can bring in other people after you have some indication that it'll work)? Many - perhaps most - of the successful tech products you've heard of were developed that way.

Your point about time not being free is well-taken, but the original context of this post is people in college or just out of college. Their time is very likely undervalued by many of the jobs they would otherwise be working at, so they can get a better return on it by working for themselves.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


C500k in Action at Urban Airship - <AUTHOR> http://blog.urbanairship.com/blog/2010/08/24/c500k-in-action-at-urban-airship/

<comment><USER2> I'm curious what kind of OS tuning was required for 500k concurrent connections. It's obvious that some ulimit tuning is necessary, but I'm wondering if any other hard limits beyond that were hit? Also, in case the original author is reading, you might find this interesting as well. It's an article on trying to reach 1MM concurrent connections with Erlang.

[http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet- applica...](http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application- with-mochiweb-part-1)

<comment><USER3> We modified /etc/sysctl.conf to have really small buffers per socke, modified ulimit to allow for 999999 fds, and modified /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range to max out ephemeral ports per connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for doing this, definitely very interested in the follow up posts. Having just finished working for a company that 'claim' to be experts in this area it is very interesting to see you guys wipe the floor with your connections/node ratio.

</comment><comment><USER5>
      Jumping from 35,000 connections per node on an EC2
      Small instance to over half a million on a single
      EC2 Large...

You moved the goalpost. I think the conclusion would make a lot more sense if you compared apples to apples when it comes to your server... either test everything on a small or on a large.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for not publishing the EC2 Small number in the original post. It was 120,000 for the pure Java NIO implementation, but I'd like to explain a bit more on that one.

We hit 120k clients at the time the process was killed by the kernel, but had about 500mb free memory left when the OOM kill occurred. Here's why (and please correct me if I'm mistaken - I'm not a kernel expert, but have done a lot of reading in this area over the past couple months):

Small EC2 instances are restricted to running a 32-bit kernel. The 32-bit Linux kernel (2.6 series) allocates memory into three zones, with the first and smallest slot reserved for DMA (~16mb), the next portion reserved for kernel functions ("low memory", ~896mb), and the rest allocated as "high memory" for userspace. There are very limited options to configure this allocation, aside from recompiling and maintaining a custom kernel for our purposes, which we do not want to do. The Hugemem kernel allocates low memory differently, but is no longer being actively recommended (that I can see), and only makes sense for servers with > 4GB anyway.

Because TCP sockets are allocated in low memory, and its size is relatively fixed, 120k sockets will exhaust low memory despite about 500mb of high memory being free and unallocated. At this point, the kernel has no memory left allocated to itself to do work, so the OOM killer steps in and shoots the process.

The 64-bit kernel makes no distinction between "low" and "high" memory, and does not suffer this problem. We switched to an EC2 Large instance in order to avoid this limitation and properly test the service. In the end, if Amazon were to offer a 64-bit Small instance, it would be ideal for our application and would push our cost per client even lower, though it's currently at a very acceptable spot.

While the metrics in this post focus on connections per node, our ultimate goal involves both maximizing the number of connections per instance, in addition to minimizing the number of instances required (essentially, we want to [safely] maximize density across the board). The sentence you quote refers to this cumulative goal rather than the particular comparison of implementations and instance types. I should've been more clear.

Anyhow, pardon this omission from the original post. At some point, I might write a bit more about the TCP/kernel-level issues we ran into if anyone's interested.

<comment><USER6> It would be interesting to know what the "slow" software looked like on the big instances, then. Still, a "large" instance is not fifty times the size a "small" instance, so it looks like you're easily coming out ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone clarify what a spike is? It doesn't appear to refer to just resource load...

 _"...we spent several hours fanning out that spike to include three versions"_

<comment><USER8> It's a spike as in a spike solution -- an end-to-end prototype to see if a chosen method of solving the problem is feasible, but without writing tests or handling all error cases or the like.

<http://c2.com/xp/SpikeSolution.html>

<comment><USER7> thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why the difference when working with code written in Scala?

What does Scala do to make the number of connections 50% less?

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd be particularly interested to know what the JVM spikes were doing with their respective connections. I'd love to profile some roughly-equivalent implementations using Erlang/Twisted/libevent/et al.

FOR SCIENCE

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting, but I wonder why they didn't take a look at Erlang - I mean this is pretty much what it was meant to do.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps they did not have a cool enough accent? 'EARRRRRLang'

 _Kidding_ \- I would be very interested in more on why Scala failed as well. Both Scala and Erlang are implementations of the Actor model and should theoretically be very well suited to this.

<comment><USER13> When trying to support the maximum number of connections per box the model with the best conceptual fit doesn't necessarily have the best functional characteristics. Actor models can have much higher per-connection resource usage. Message passing isn't free, and wrapping each connection in an Actor/Greenthread structure isn't free either.

At the end of the day storing sockets in a hashmap is a pretty compact data structure. _If_ you can minimize synchronization/locking, threads shared state is extremely efficient from a CPU and memory standpoint. Maybe not so efficient from a developers time/sanity standpoint though. :-)

Do note that this article is purely about an edge server though. Its job is essentially to hold sockets and communicate with internal queues. The message passing model is alive and well, albeit at a higher level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Someone mentioned this in the comments, but I'm curious about the outcome of the Node.js spike as well.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does keeping a socket open affect the handset battery life much?

<comment><USER16> Not in our tests, and nobody in our beta test period had any comments. The logic around controlling the connection is pretty intelligent in what it does.

A connection that's open isn't problematic at all, assuming it's being used - lots of setups/teardowns can be an issue (which is why polling apps will consistently take up a large portion of your battery life). The main issue is if the app is using a radio when it shouldn't be. Luckily, we can control this pretty well with our handling code and have been able to balance out needs pretty well between delivering a message as quickly as possible and not destroying battery life.

If you're an Android dev, we'd love your feedback on it in general :)</comment></comment>


Following with no information - <AUTHOR> http://bckmn.com/following-with-no-information/

<comment><AUTHOR> This has been bothering me for some time now, and this last case just pushed me over the edge.</comment>


Doom on Hundreds of CPU Cores - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1284523595348299777 <comment><USER2> This video is faked. Or rather it is showing an app which pretends to be Task Manager. Further done in the comments of the tweet it is demonstrated that this is fake.

</comment><comment><USER3> More like: rendering Doom output as pixels in the task manager for hundreds of CPU cores. They didn't massively parallelize Doom itself, but just the pixel drawing.

<comment><USER4> Oh thank God for people like you. Correcting everyone all the time always no matter what. So brave.

<comment><USER5> I am always glad when someone calls out nonsense that wastes people's time. Even if this wasn't fake, the headline says something completely different than what it actually is. It isn't nitpicking to point out a lie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is reportedly fake.</comment>


Australia's bad broadband punchline - <AUTHOR> http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/13/comment-australias-bad-broadband-punchline

<comment><USER2> My take: Living in Australia, the best thing that we can do to increase the perceived quality of web services in Australia is to subsidise the local hosting of international web companies. It's latency that is killing our experience right now.

The latency between Australia and the internet (hear AWS data centre in Virginia where most startups live, or rely on an API that exists this region) is crazy! It's especially so as companies are starting to push "regular traffic" over to https (even HN is https now). The 4+ requests required to establish an encrypted connection adds up.

 _Whenever I 'm in the Bay Area it feels like the internet is on localhost!_

The cost of hosting in Australia is 5-10x that of the states[1].

Whilst it's fun to bash the Coalition's NBN policy, the Labour party's plan topped out at only 100Mbps (which I'm already getting on Telstra Cable). What really annoys me is that

Australia's cable network is Fibre to the node already[2], and it is already capable of 1Gbps speeds. I hear that Telstra is not offering 1Gbps per second as part of an agreement with NBN Co.

[1] My friends over at orionvm.com gave me a lesson in hosting economics when I wanted to white label their service.

[2] My next door neighbour designed and sold the underlying hardware used on Telstra's coaxial network.

<comment><USER3> Markus (assuming that's you given the username and proximity to OrionVM) - Labour's plan didn't "top out" at 100Mbps. They merely offered that as the practical maximum when first talking about what hardware they would place in the points of interconnect. About two years ago NBNCo made another announcement that 1Gbps hardware was now cost-effective and they switched to that almost immediately.

I also have not heard the same rumours as you, and would be interested to know more about Telstra's artificial limiting of fibre speeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The results of the strategic review announced that not only will the > Coalition's plan cost almost as much as the originally announced NBN plan

That isn't because it is more expensive, it is because the estimate on the original plan was wrong.

The old peak funding requirement on the original plan was $43.6 Billion with 3.5 million households passed by June 2016. There was supposed to be an update of those figures published this July but they sat on the report until after the election. We now know that those figures are now $73 billion peak funding and 1.7 million residences passed [0].

> The Coalition's NBN is a joke. It will not arrive faster, cheaper, or > better.

It will be faster (as in, rolled out faster) and cheaper. Despite the political vitriol surrounding this topic in Australia, you can't bend the technical and economic reality that rolling out a fiber to the node solution (FTTN) is both cheaper and faster than rolling out fiber to the premises (FTTP) with existing households:

[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=638167...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6381672&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6381672)

You rollout fiber to the home where it is more economical (dense areas, new developments) you roll fiber to the curb where it is more economical and faster (apartment buildings) and you roll the fiber to a cabinet where it is more economical and faster (existing suburban areas).

Attaching each plan to a rollout strategy was a mistake in the first place, as a national network requires a mix of technology (this isn't FTTN v FTTH, its about where to apply each).

[0] Here is a nice table the lays out the old/new estimates: [http://www.zdnet.com/au/nbn-strategic-review-by-the- numbers-...](http://www.zdnet.com/au/nbn-strategic-review-by-the- numbers-7000024217/)

<comment><USER5> My concern is how they are calculating maintenance costs of the copper tail. Telstra's linesmen are some of the few equipped/trained to maintain these lines, and in areas > 30 years old much of the copper is in poor condition or direct buried (read: $$$ to replace). Flooded pits causing comms connectivity issues, radio interference, etc all impact copper performance too.

Speed is often the argument for FTTN vs FTTH, when reliability should be.

<comment><USER6> The flooded lines is a funny one. When I lived in Bondi my DSL would drop out or start seeing massive slow downs every time it rained. It took me half a year before I realized the correlation too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyone already knows the NBN is now going to 1) take forever to build (~10 years), and 2) deliver terribly retarded service that will be obsolete once it exists.

I can't wait for them to pull a Telstra as well, and try to sell it off to the public in shares to 'mum and dad investors'.

Its embarrassing to watch the farce unfold.

(and will, I predict, continue to be, for years to come...)

(the irony is, there is NBN fiber _in the ground_ outside my apartment _right now_ , up and down all over. ...but we're still on the '2-3 years' waiting list, and so is everyone else here, because maybe 40% of the homes in this area are apartments. Stupid doesn't even begin to cover it.)

<comment><USER8> Yep, it's disgraceful. The fibre was laid outside my house about 6 months ago and I'm still told that "construction is yet to commence" in my area.

They might want to tell that to the friendly workers who were digging the road up and running fibre reels into it for almost a week.

I'm sure they'd be happy to know that the job they just finished hasn't actually started yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just got the NBN installed the other day(insane speeds, at a very high monthly price). The technician was at my house several times and his opinion as a contractor on the ground level is that no one at the top is aware of the impracticality of scaling the home installation in the time frame they are proposing. Furthermore, many people do not yet require such high speeds but are having it installed just because they are not required to pay for the installation, especially older folk who don't understand what they are being ask to sign up for. There is a massive disconnect between who need such services (and what type of services at what cost) and what sounds good on a policy paper and in a press briefing.

</comment><comment><USER10> It sounds almost as bad as what's going on in the UK. The current "superfast broadband" contracts have been offered to BT (former state run telecoms monopoly) across England and Wales and local projects for innovation have been turned away. [0]

[0] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24919148](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24919148)

<comment><USER11> No, not really. Its certain areas where there are broad band black spots. Your post implies is a UK thing.

On top of that, the idea is to get it done, as opposed to mucking around waiting for "innovation", which _was_ happening to fill the gap. That gap is being closed. People in BB black spots want a decent connection at a reasonable price, not innovation. And frankly they want and need it ASAP.

As for the innovators, they can still innovate if they like. Just not off the premium backs of people in black spots.</comment></comment>


Bacterial molecule trains the immune system to tolerate infection - <AUTHOR> http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-10-bacterial-molecule-immune-tolerate-infection.html <comment><USER2> blogspam of:

[http://www.massgeneral.org/about/pressrelease.aspx?id=2001](http://www.massgeneral.org/about/pressrelease.aspx?id=2001)</comment>


A video shot on the iPhone 4S - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/30578363 <comment><USER2> Gorgeous! Nice work - really shows off how much detail on textures the new camera captures.</comment>


Georgia Tech's "Crystal Cathedral" of Robotics: A Lab Open to Outsiders - <AUTHOR> http://magazine.coe.gatech.edu/feature/welcome-robot-zoo <comment><USER2> aw... i thought there was something I could play with... like this [http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au/Telerobot/instructions.html](http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au/Telerobot/instructions.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, a peek into the "Robatorium": [http://magazine.coe.gatech.edu/story/inside- robotarium](http://magazine.coe.gatech.edu/story/inside-robotarium)</comment>


Spyder IDE for Python has hit 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/

<comment><USER2> Would also recommend Pydev: <http://pydev.org/> -

an Eclipse plugin bringing Python and Jython support. The debugging leaves a bit to be desired, but has interesting stuff like code completion.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am a fan of Eclipse with Pydev for mid to large size development, but it is not really built for interactive work with the interpreter or for quick, off the cuff scripts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I didn't know Sypder IDE before.. however, when I click on documentation and I've got a corrupted link I usually assume it sucks. But of course, I might be wrong :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Spyder is an excellent lightweight IDE for short Python scripts and interactive use of Python. There are certainly better IDEs for large projects, but for quick scripts Spyder is excellent and has just hit its official 1.0 release.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just installed on XP. Nothing shows up after I click link from start-menu.

<comment><USER5> start -> run -> spyder

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> At the surface level (from the screenshot) it looks like this includes everything you could possibly need, which is a huge flaw in my book, because it presents itself as that. I want something that shows simplistically, but is powerful underneath. Emacs (vi(m) for some) is that for me.

</comment><comment><USER7> What would this get me over emacs + python-mode?</comment>


Three new FOSS umbrella organizations in Europe (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/713073/ <comment><USER2> On my opinion, the most prolific organization of such type in Europe is OW2: [https://www.ow2.org/](https://www.ow2.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ive typically been recommending non-profits and public-benefit companies. Tax write-offs for donations are useful, though. Mozilla has a foundation that owns the for-profit company. Maybe improve on the idea with:

1\. A for-profit and charity side-by-side working on same thing with charity just collecting donations.

2\. Improve on prior models with a charity that owns a public-benefit company or non-profit whose charters or goals are same. Keep them aligned.</comment>


Ask HN: why do companies use 3rd party recruiters? - <AUTHOR>

I've talked to 30-40 recruiters over the past few months about various jobs in IT.
I wondered why so many companies use 3rd party recruiters as opposed to in-house recruiters? Is it just the money or what is it?
Other developers on here - what are you thoughts on communication with 3rd party recruiters?
Recently I've found in-house to be far more effective in communicating the company, position, etc. than 3rd party recruiters (who are after just the "finder's fee") <comment><USER2> I've had positive experiences with third party recruiters. They're experts on the state of the job market. They know who is hiring and what their processes are like. They can tell you what to expect at each stage of the process. When you're doing your job search you want to time things so that all of the offers come within a few weeks of each other. Recruiters know how to make that happen. They also know what salary ranges companies will pay and can negotiate a better deal than you might get yourself.

A good recruiter cares about getting a good placement. I don't plan to look for another job anytime soon. However, because of my positive experience I'd definitely recommend the last recruiter I worked with to former coworkers and friends in my field.

One catch with recruiters is that they seem to prefer placing senior people. I'm guessing this is a combination of better payout (their pay is often a percentage of he placed salary) and the fact that senior positions are harder to fill so there are less other candidates to compete with. Finally, this is based on good experiences. I've never had a good experience with a third party recruiter that cold called me. The good experiences came from recommendations from friends so YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER3> Companies do it primarily because they don't understand the large variance in productivity between tech people, which seems to range between 18x-25x. They think they can outsource the task like outsourcing office cleaners.

The problem with that is companies can't tell how badly they are doing at recruiting. They think they are doing great, because they fill positions with people with credentials, but they can't gauge the bottom-line productivity. They can't see how badly they are doing compared to other companies. (Ironically, some companies see that when they go out of business.)

The skills needed to know how good you are at something are the same as the skills needed to be good at it. Which means if you aren't a good tech person, which HR people aren't, not only do you not find good tech people, but you also can't tell you are doing a bad job it.

Most companies are also not willing to pay to get this higher productivity. Partly because they can get away with it, and partly because they have been conditioned to believe tech salaries shouldn't vary more than salaries in other professions.

<comment><USER4> How did you arrive at 18x-25x?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Obviously, from the Apple/Google/et al no-hire conspiracy we know that in- house recruiters get fired for trying to hire the best people from the wrong company. 3rd party recruiters don't have any such restrictions or fears.

Of course in house recruiters are more effective. They are sitting in front of a database with the job, job description, hiring guidelines, potential candidates, and have probably talked face to face with the person who posted the job. A 3rd party recruiter has none of that.

</comment><comment><USER6> The value of using third party recruiters is that most companies don't need a full time recruiter until they are fairly large. Most companies usually only have a few positions to fill, or go through short hiring sprints, both of which are more conducive to third party recruiters.

That being said, a lot companies will avoid recruiters if they can. That is why you will often find that companies have referral bonus programs.

<comment><USER7> In my neck of the woods, Detroit metro, most of the companies using recruiters are clueless megacorps. For the dev unit or subsidiary looking to hire there is very little difference between going through a recruiter and their own HR.

Edit: Actually the tech specific recruiters are likely better than the industry focused HR.

I find most recruiters are a waste of time, but that's because I work remote for California wages in an area that wants to pay senior devs 60k. My policy is I quote my hourly and tell them to contact me if they have something. Weeds out a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, not every company has sufficient staff turnover to warrant an in-house recruitment team (or person) so they find that it's cheaper to use recruiters every so often. Other companies don't have staff willing or capable of doing in-house recruiting (lack of experience, too much other work to do, etc). Hell, I'm met some business owners who thought that doing it in-house wasn't 'professional'.

</comment><comment><USER9> Every profession has its assorted Pros & Bozos, regardless if they're In-House Staff or 3rd Party Hired Guns. As for communicating with them, be welcoming and curious. Learn more about them and the problems they have to solve. You'll be able to discern who's real and who's not.</comment>


A City of Workers Turns to Wilders - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/fallow-ground-a-dutch-city-turns-to-wilders-a-1138641-2.html <comment><USER2> 'Votes for Wilders Are Cries for Help'

As were votes for Trump.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps Hillary was just a terrible candidate.

<comment><USER4> Can't it be both?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't help but think the apathy expressed in this article leads to political disruptions. If people say something along the lines of "what does my vote matter" and then the article ends with "the centrist party will probably win," then people like Wilders will win.

<comment><USER3> I'm not surprised by apathy. Politicians have been doing their best to ignore the views of voters for a long time.</comment></comment>


If you want to be rich, first stop being so frightened - <AUTHOR> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article1084093.ece <comment><USER2> I disagree. Fear is one of the two major forces at work in a startup (the other is faith).

There are legitimate fears--these are the risks. Fear that you'll run out of money. Fear that you've picked the wrong people to work with. Fear that you'll be beat to market. If you don't have some measure of fear, you're ignoring risks, which makes your failure that much more likely.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but you wouldn't start anything in the first place if you were *afraid* - you would get a nice steady job at a big stable company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He speaks humorously with a good point (Go do it!). I don't think someone just starting up should be in the same state of confidence as he is, but his attitude towards working hard is noteworthy. He can speak whatever he wants, how he wants. That's a nice freedom. Picking up his book on Amazon with Founders at Work. Even if I don't learn something from him, I'll at least be amused, http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/0091912652/ref=dp_olp_2/103-9496918-3879027

<comment><USER4> An update on the book. I'm almost done reading it, and I would like to say that it's a really amusing book (not the Anthony Robbins type). Some take aways (I'm not saying I agree with them all. I could agree, but I'm just saying I'm not saying that.):

1) You gotta really really want to make money, more than you want to be happy if needs be. Be compulsively determined.

2) Don't try to cheat the IRS.

3) Delegate. Hire smarter people than you, and pay them very well, but keep ownership.

4) Get rich. Give it away.

5) Timing is very important, more than talent?

6) Execution is more important than the idea. Just go do it.

7) Self-belief is priceless. Confront doubts for facts.

8) Time is the most important thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Those fears can be legitimate, but I don't think they're favorable, because there are alternative and positive forms of motivation to deal with those situations. Fear also overrides logical thinking, which can't be good for business.</comment>


Mobile Fashion Discovery – Great Style + the Daily Weather - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/threadweather-great-style/id838715981?mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to get some feedback on our recently launched mobile app. We have addressed a number of issues that are now waiting for review with Apple. In the mean time would love to hear any and all thoughts you might have. Many thanks in advance.</comment>


Serverless Data Analytics Using AWS Glue and Athena - <AUTHOR> https://agilevision.io/blog/aws/2018/11/19/serverless-data-analytics-using-glue-and-athena.html <comment><USER2> What are the limitations of this serverless architecture? What is time, RAM, CPU constraints?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. There are limits on the max query execution time (30 minutes) and the number of parallel queries that can be executed at the same time.

There is a separate page about service limits here: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/service- limits....](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/service-limits.html)</comment></comment>


ITunes 11-style color matching code for Android - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MichaelEvans/ColorArt

<comment><USER2> Author here: contributions/suggestions welcome!</comment>


Reverse Kickstarter – shows real sales stats - <AUTHOR> http://twolivesleft.com/Crabstarter/ <comment><USER3> We set this site up for our new game Crabitron and decided to call it Crabstarter. It is intended to be a light-hearted parody of Kickstarter, while showing real sales.

One of the main reasons we set it up is because we wanted to have some hope of recouping our investment in this game. In order to do that, we felt that we couldn't go for rock-bottom pricing and hope for a mega-hit. That seemed crazy and unrealistic.

Instead we gave our game the price we thought it deserved — $5. In order to help App Store players get over the "sticker shock," we set up Crabstarter. When you see that five dollar price in this context, it suddenly doesn't seem so high.

We also wanted players to see that we were real human beings, and not a faceless company. So we tried to make an honest video in the format of a standard Kickstarter video.

<comment><USER4> It's good to educate the buying public about how much it really costs to make something like this and how hard it is to recoup that. I hear people grousing about $3 apps and it drives me nuts.

The new era of apps is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we've got these obscenely low prices... but on the other hand, people are actually _buying software_. That's a bigger deal than most folks realize. Before the iOS era, people basically just didn't buy software. I mean, geeks did if there was some specific tool they needed, and gamers bought games of course... but the run- of-the-mill normal person? At most they bought MS office and maybe got hoodwinked into picking up Norton when the trial expired on their computer.

Now? Jane Q. Soccermom buys programs and games. That's a _huge_ shift.

<comment><USER5> _I hear people grousing about $3 apps and it drives me nuts._

The Oatmeal did a great parody of these people a while back: <http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps>

<comment><USER6> While funny, it completely fail in identifying the underlying causes of this consumer behavior.

I do not consider it strange that people feel threaten by a $3 app purchase, but not a $400 phone. To me, its consistent with consumers when they buy a product they trust vs a product they don't. In psychology, economics, and finance, its call Risk aversion and is the reluctance of a person to accept a bargain with an uncertain payoff rather than another bargain with a more certain, but possibly lower, expected payoff.

People expect software to fail. To a degree, Microsoft is to blame with blue screen of death, but thats only part of the culture regarding software. If I buy that $3 app, it might not solve the problem I got, it might be buggy, and it might not even start. If it end up in either of those cases, the social blame is normally put on the consumer for not knowing better on which software to buy, adding additional feeling of uncertainty.

On products like phones or computer hardware, the risk feels less. If the phone don't start, we expect to get it replaced and fixed. The blame will be on the seller/producer, and not on the consumer. Add on top the positive reinforcing through marketing in TV and movies, and a physical sale person, and the $300 or even $1000 can feel much safer for the consumer than clicking yes on a $3 app purchase.

<comment><USER4> Point. I've been dithering on purchases of a DNLA client for my iPod because quite frankly everything I've demo'd and tried has _sucked_. Crashy, buggy, poor format support, etc. Now, maybe these problems are also coming from my servers, but the programs are terrible at explaining what I'm doing wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brilliant concept IMHO. A lot of people don't realise the amount of work that goes into creating this kind of stuff, and sadly the race to the bottom that's happened with games on the app store has meant in a lot of cases it's hard to for developers these days to justify the large development costs.

I also love that you've given it a price and not gone with a freemium model. I'd much rather pay $5 for a (good) game up front than be constantly annoyed with offers to "buy more coins" etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> The game looks really fun. I'm going to get it now.

One thing I looked for and didn't see was additional tiers of contribution a la Kickstarter. The post-game credits tier, the t-shirt tier, the poster tier, etc. The art and game looks so fun I would've tossed in an extra $20 to support you guys and get a shirt.

</comment><comment><USER8> How much do they have to unlock before it becomes a real kickstarter for an android version of the game?

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't get it. How is this a reverse kickstarter?

<comment><USER5> Normally with kickstarter they ask people to contribute to the development of something before the development is done.

In this case, they've finished & released the game, and are encouraging people to contribute to recovery of their development costs _after_ the development has been done. Hence it's in "reverse".

<comment><USER9> But what do the people get for the donation? If it's the game, then are they selling it outside the app store? And if so, how?

<comment><USER5> It's sort of an ironic parody of kickstarter.

People "donate" by simply purchasing it on the app store, just like you would with any other app, and thus they get the game (immediately). And they are saying that they will add other features to the game if the revenue exceeds the target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the idea of the top-up, in-app purchases. Makes me wonder how successful a much-loved, popular app would do if it adopted a 'get free, pay what you want via in-app' model, along the lines of Radiohead's In Rainbows sale. Think something like ... Monkey Island 3. Unfortunately, if my maths is correct, Crabitron has sold barely any (literally 1-3) top-ups :-(

<comment><USER11> Keep in mind that some figures only will update once per day. It could be much more by the time tomorrow hits.

<comment><USER10> (Bear in mind that I don't know whether you're anything to do with the project, so I might be speaking out of turn!)

I'm assuming that the two figures in the top-right, being so closely related, are 'cached' in tandem: 732 backers, $2,569.56. 732 * 5 = 3660. 3660 - <USER2> tax @ 30% = 2562. That gives $7.56 worth of 'top-ups' (no, I can't explain why that's such an odd number, unless the apple tax for in-app purchases isn't exactly 30%)

<comment><USER11> I have nothing to do with the project, and I agree with you on the caching in tandem. I think my point is that those numbers might shoot way up tomorrow after a decent showing on HN (and presumably other places).

I really like the idea, the look of the game, and the execution of the site. I'm in for the full $10.

<comment><USER3> Thank you!

I hope it does well, too. Our current chart position is #117 in paid iPad apps (ranked by number of downloads). Our current _grossing_ chart position is #368 for iPad (i.e., Crabitron is the 368 highest earning app on iPad).

There is a massive discrepancy between these two charts because freemium games (i.e., games that allow consumers to spend as much as they want) can sit relatively low in the paid charts, but earn a lot more money from a stable user base.

Our current popularity is mostly due to being featured by Apple in their New and Noteworthy section. This will end in 5 or 6 days and sales will likely drop down to $100/day (instead of $1000+ per day). Games are extremely hit- driven, and have very unreliable sales curves.

With this trajectory in mind it is unlikely we will hit our development costs of $100,000. More realistically, we will see $20,000 before the game drops off completely in a few months.

It's still a pleasant amount to earn back for a side project, but it's definitely why we still work full-time for someone else, building things for clients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm going to guess that KS will be sending a C&D. It's a cute site, and I like the idea, but the style is way too close to KS. They have to be concerned about people stumbling onto this and not getting the joke.

On the other hand, if it gets popular to the point that KS sends a C&D, then the site probably served its purpose. Overall, a neat marketing idea.

<comment><USER3> I tried to make it an obvious parody, but if it's too close for comfort I will change it even more.

It's more about showing players our sales data and giving faces to the developers of their games. The Kickstarter parody aspect of it is intended to be humorous more than anything.

<comment><USER13> I'm on my phone so couldn't see the URL. I thought it was a Kickstarter, for what it is worth.

Great to see you're from Adelaide too! Keep up the great work, and best of luck. Really imaginative campaign.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for letting me know. The last thing I want is for people to confuse our page with a real Kickstarter page, so I've made a significant change to the theming.

I hope it helps make it stand out as a parody.

<comment><USER14> still too close :(

I love the concept, but I spent most of the time reading the page wondering when kickstarter had started offering projects hosted on your own domain, a la wordpress.

it's the layout of the right column that's sailing a little too close to the wind, IMO

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel as though a much more exciting thing you guys are doing is Codea - <http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/>. It looks so cool and something a lot of people could relate to, given the major shift to tablets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Codea rules and is pretty popular. As far as I know, Crabitron is just their side project.

<comment><USER3> Actually both Codea and Crabitron are our side projects — we work full time on iOS development... for clients :(

<comment><USER15> It's incredible to hear that since your work is really insightful (Codea reminds me of <http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming>) and is pointing in an interesting direction. At the same time I do get that you need to put bread on the table, so to speak. Still with startup culture booming one has to wonder, why not commit? Have you guys tried that or is it something in the works?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen Incredible marketing!</comment>