Shipping the Google in Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/shipping-google-in-google.html <comment><USER2> I thought the advantage of having the +1 button in the browser is that you can then block all of those damn sharing widgets on websites so that these social networks don't know every website you visit because of the beacons.

But the +1 button extension will send _every page you visit_ back to Google, with your unique user id as part of the information sent back.

This is just insane. There is absolutely no reason for this information to be sent back, and it is completely identifiable and all in plain text. The installer says that it _can_ access all your website data, not that it _does_ access it and _sends it_ back to Google.

I removed the extension immediately.

<comment><USER3> > I thought the advantage of having the +1 button in the browser is that you > can then block all of those damn sharing widgets on websites so that these > social networks don't know every website you visit because of the beacons.

The advantage of of having the +1 button in the browser is so you can +1/share sites that don't include the +1 button themselves.

> But the +1 button extension will send every page you visit back to Google, > with your unique user id as part of the information sent back

There is now way to know if you have +1'd a page without sending your unique id with. A button that doesn't tell you if you have +1'd something isn't very useful and you will continually be +1'ing pages over and over again.

> This is just insane. There is absolutely no reason for this information to > be sent back, and it is completely identifiable and all in plain text. The > installer says that it can access all your website data, not that it does > access it and sends it back to Google.

If an extension has permissions to access "your data on all websites" there is no way to prevent it from also sending your data to all websites. HTTP is request and response and not very useful with only one or the other.

The Chrome Web Store says

" __ _THIS ISN'T THE USUAL YADA YADA!_ __

In addition to the practices described in the Google +1 Button Privacy Policy, by installing this extension, all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google in order to retrieve +1 information."

The install page linked to from the blog post should be more clear about what the +1 button sends to Google.

None of your data is sent in plain text however. It is all over SSL to <https://clients6.google.com/rpc>.

> I removed the extension immediately.

Good for you. No one is forcing you to use it.

<comment><USER2> > There is now way to know if you have +1'd a page without sending your unique > id with.

localStorage or asking which URLs have been plus 1'd, not the other way around. There are plenty of ways of doing it without sending a request back to google on ever. single. page. load.

I found the disclosure about all website visiting being sent to Google only after looking for it and clicking through some pages. 95% of users will never find that since being alerted to it isn't part of the standard install flow.

<comment><USER3> > localStorage or asking which URLs have been plus 1'd, not the other way > around. There are plenty of ways of doing it without sending a request back > to google on ever. single. page. load.

This introduces all kinds of issues with complexity of having to support multiple storage locations, and inconsistency/sync lag caused +1'ing pages on multiple computers or buttons from the page rather then the extension. If I have two computers and +1 a few pages with one then switch to the other it would either have to download a list of _all_ pages I +1'd. Which could get up into the thousands or tens of thousands or some sort of complex pagination, diff, merge feature. It just isn't worth it.

<comment><USER4> Chrome already does all that for bookmark syncing.

The list of +1'ed websites will never grow _very_ large, because it is created one manual click at a time by a single user. 10,000 urls is only about a megabyte, and if you send diffs you'd rarely have to download more than a small fraction of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google in order to > retrieve +1 information

This is a deal breaker. There's no reason that Google couldn't have used a hash of the URL.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, that quote lives in the following (verbatim) context:

      ***THIS ISN'T THE USUAL YADA YADA!***

      In addition to the practices described in the Google +1 Button Privacy
      Policy, by installing this extension, all of the pages and URLs you
      visit will be sent to Google in order to retrieve +1
      information. Examples of this information include whether you've
      previously +1'd the page and how many people have already +1'd the
      page. Google's use of this information is described further in the
      following help center article
      (http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1319578).

At least they're not trying to hide anything, recognize that some people will have privacy concerns, and are drawing attention to this fact. The linked FAQ claims that they don't store the information persistently. Though I suppose it could be argued that this policy is subject to change in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> the chrome integration plugins look pretty good, but i really don't understand the utility of the youtube integration. if they had built some g+ sharing into the youtube interface, i could see that. but instead it looks like they've essentially built a youtube radio into the g+ page. why?

<comment><USER6> FWIW, I think this is entirely the wrong direction to integrate. I've been loving the "auto-sync photos and videos" feature of the Android G+ app, as it elminates a tedious manual step and as a result I get to show off more videos of my cute toddler.

... or I could, if my family is on G+. And of course they're not: they're on facebook. So what I want is the ability to simply move the G+ videos over to my youtube account. But I can't.

<comment><USER8> And YouTube's lack of a mobile site for publishing makes it excruciatingly painful to share a video uploaded from a phonecam. (As does YouTube's lack of privately-shared "albums" like Picasa has.)

<comment><USER6> Not so bad, really. On Android phones at least you select "share" while viewing the video and pick "youtube" from the list. But you still have to wait for the upload, it's not "just there" the way it is with g+.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was super excited when Google+ came out. I am a total Google fanboy. At least, I was a week ago. Then I found they didn't support their paying customers (apps users). So I waited and waited.

Finally supported a week ago! I'm PUMPED about trying google+. Except there's not a lot going on there and there is no api to integrate it with other social networks. It doesn't really have a purpose.

Then Google completely destroys Google Reader. My absolute favorite website can no longer create an RSS feed for other RSS users making it impossible for users to contribute content to Google reader.

Now I'm just pissed. Gmail is still the best mail service and I like my android phone, but Google has made so many terrible decisions lately - especially around Google plus - I don't care anymore. I'm done. If google decides to right its wrongs I will care about its services again.

If I were google I would drop everything and do the following as quickly as possible: 1.) Release an API for Google+ 2.) integrate google reader with google+. No, I'm not talking about adding a share button. I'm talking about full integration so that Google+ can feed data back into reader.

I doubt that they will be able to accomplish this fast enough to keep Google reader from dying. I'm sure some other service (like Hivemined) will fill the void, but they really need to get moving on that API if they want to save google+.

<comment><USER10> 1\. There is already a Google+ API. <http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google%20plus%20api>

2\. It's always funny to hear these 'was-fanboy-turned-hater' stories because they suggest passion and then some kind of spurned ex-gf syndrome. If you don't like Google products anymore, don't use them. Move on brother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully the G+ chrome plugin will stay as a plugin. I'm not too keen on it being integrated into it as a product as a whole.

<comment><USER12> Well, it is open source, so we can always yank it out if they try to push it on to us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is a popup really the best way to get YouTube into Google+?

</comment><comment><USER14> That's not a smart integration in my view. Out of nowhere you place a youtube icon on a random location on the screen. And the pop up that follows that. You're basically switching the user's context when in fact your goal is to let her stick. There is something wrong going on with the UI design folks at google it seems.

</comment><comment><USER14> Try letting people hangout with popular folks (from tech, media, science and other fields). Announce those hangouts. Let there be participants and viewers. Sell hangout guys!</comment>


Ask HN: How to start making money as a freelance web/ui/ux designer? - <AUTHOR>

I lost my design job because the startup went belly up. I'm not discouraged at all, I am still a talented designer able to sculpt ideas into simple and elegant pixels that can work for any organization, app, or artist. I just need some help to get the ball rolling, some good advice or tips if it isn't too much to ask for. Maybe some good sites to be listed on or ways to make Craigslist work for me. I am 23 and want to be able to work and travel at the same time as soon as possible. I'm not getting any younger and the world is just too big for me to stay in one place forever.
Work: - http://myriann.com/ - http://www.roomsailor.com/ - http://phmhotelgroup.com/
I have a lot more but this is the best of my recent stuff.
Thanks for any help :) <comment><USER2> I'm going to repost my comment here from a previous thread.

I am an iOS Freelance Developer, and this path is what got me my first client.

It seems like you are very aware of what you are capable of. It's great to be realistic, but also realize that you are now in the professional market like everyone else. Like the other posts say here, NETWORK.

Go to local meetups and present yourself as a real professional. Create business cards (BONUS: Make yours stand out from the rest). You will receive many business cards by going to these meetups. You can probably gauge what would make yours flashier.

Update your LinkedIn, Twitter, HackerNews, Blog, etc immediately with solid and presentable information. If you're unsure of how to do this professionally, check out other professionals' pages and emulate success.

Now, BUILD THAT PORTFOLIO. Even one side project is generally enough to show someone that you can do the work. Do you want to show off your skills, but you're not sure what to build? Take a popular site and build a small client for it. This is one of the most exciting experiences you will ever go through. We hear about people building businesses all of the time, and it seems amazing. There is so much more passion - in my experience - when you are building yourself. Congratulations on taking this huge step!

Please feel free to contact me if you have any basic questions about the whole freelancing process. I'm happy to help in any way! (Email in profile)

<comment><USER3> Upvoted, liked, and QFT. The only thing I can add to that is to reinforce that there is _tremendous_ value in being the guy that everybody recommends. Not just in business, but everybody should know what you do, and how good you are at doing it.

You should basically be 'on' all the time, and making it a point to illustrate the value you bring everywhere you can. It's a scalable business model, but if you impress enough people every day, then at some point, you'll start getting recommended by people you haven't even met, and who haven't even really gotten any idea of how good you are.

The only objective beyond that is the one where you're constantly raising rates because people are beating down your door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The single best way to make money as a freelancer or consultant is to grow your own personal network. The brand you are selling is essentially you, so you have to build a strong network to support that brand.

I own a small software company and literally 100% of our clients come from within our network. One friend referred me to one client, and that client referred me to their clients, and so on.

Spend time building your network and you'll be successful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys. This helps a lot. I will update soon when I have my online presence updated and expanded.

</comment><comment><USER5> \- Have you tried Elance.com, Freelance.com, Freelancer.com, GetACoder.com, Guru.com & oDesk.com?</comment>


Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays. - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2265639/Most-depressing-day-year-Feeling-Blame-Blue-Monday-2013.html

<comment><AUTHOR> For your reference and enjoyment: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChfIyHZqEd8></comment>


Why MacPaint's Original Canvas was 416 Pixels Wide - <AUTHOR> http://www.looksgoodworkswell.com/elegance-of-macpaint-code/ <comment><USER2> I know 68k from the Atari ST, and the MOVEM.L trick was well known. The ST had a similar M68K to the Mac 128K, but the screen buffer was 32k (640x400) instead of the Mac's 21.9k (512x342). The ST's CPU was more than capable of copying 32k from location to location within a single screen redraw, so I imagine the same was true for the Mac, especially since it had to shift less data.

In addition, there's no reason why one MOVEM can't contain data from multiple rows. For a 640x400 buffer like you find in the ST, each row requires approximately 1.5 MOVEM commands. No problem, since your buffer will have access to contiguous memory. Your second MOVEM call will copy the last half of the 1st row and the first half of the 2nd. Your buffer has to have a horizontal size that is a multiple of 32 pixels, but not 416.

I suspect the real reason for this weird resolution is boring memory constraints. If I'm reading the 68K code correctly, a MacPaint buffer was 416x200 - 10.4k. According to Wikipedia[1] MacPaint used 2 off-screen buffers = 20.8k. The ROM is 68k, then there's probably at least 1 system-reserved screen buffer of 10.4k. The OS has to fit in somewhere. That's quite a lot for a 128K machine.

Find the most comfortable painting layout where the horizontal canvas size is a multiple of 32 pixels and 2 buffers fit within 21k.

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

<comment><USER3> > In addition, there's no reason why one MOVEM can't contain data from > multiple rows.

The screen buffer is 512x384 (24.5 KB, not 10.4 KB), so you have to copy one row at a time. The source and destination pointers have to increment by different amounts after each row (13 and 16 words, respectively). See the following lines in the article's assembly:

        ADD #52, A0
        ADD screenRow, A1

screenRow must be defined to 64.

<comment><USER2> A fair point, although I think the M68K was fast enough to copy the remaining pixels with a few MOVE.L calls if need be.

[Edit] by which I mean, yes, you're right that the MOVEM can't cross line boundaries in this case, but the CPU should be fast enough to deal with longer lines by using a MOVEM and adding a few extra MOVEs to copy individual longwords. Shorter lines would simply require using fewer registers in the MOVEM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yup, MOVEM was pretty neat on the 68K. For the Atari ST I wrote a very fast memory-fill using a tower of MOVEM instructions; you could get to within a percent or so of the system memory bandwidth, and you might as well stop trying at that point.

(Also had to deal with some _other_ company's programmers who thought their way to fill memory -- with an overlapping memory copy -- was more clever. But theirs was five orders of magnitude slower).

It's interesting that Atkinson's code doesn't unroll the MOVEM loop at all. He could have gotten another couple percent of loop overhead out of it :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> Brings back memories of writing 68K assembly, back in the day when writing raw was the difference between screaming fast and dog slow. 6502 was even more fun.

<comment><USER6> The 6502 was fun and it was the first assembly I programmed[1]. The 6809 also deserves a look if anyone is reviewing old instruction sets / assembly code. I am still not sure which of the three I preferred.

1) on an Apple II, sadly not on my Atari 400

<comment><USER7> I spent many years working with the 6809.

One of the biggest advantages over the 6502 was the ability to work with 16-bit registers. X and Y were 16 bit, and a user/local stack pointer was added, U. Even the A and B accumulators could be combined into one 16-bit register, D.

It's one of my favorite architectures. You could do a hell of a lot with very little room.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if MOVEM was inspiration for ARM's (V)LDM/STM instructions?

x86 has provided an optimised memory copy instruction ever since the 8086: REP MOVS. The history and evolution of this instruction has quite an interesting story from a CPU architecture perspective.

<comment><USER9> > The history and evolution of this instruction has quite an interesting story > from a CPU architecture perspective.

I'd love to read about that if you have any references. I've used the MOVS instructions a million times without really thinking about them much.

<comment><USER8> Originally the instruction was the fastest way to do a block copy, and generally this was the case until MMX appeared, and then it fell into the set of "microcoded CISC instructions no one really uses" \- so Intel didn't bother to optimise it much (the RISC fad was also really starting to take off in the PC world at the time) and it started falling behind. But then, in the post-P4 era, when CPU designers realised that high clock speeds weren't everything, and it was better to make instructions do more per clock instead, it got a lot more attention and a lot of detailed information about that can be found in this thread:

[http://software.intel.com/en- us/forums/topic/275765](http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/topic/275765)

Even more recently (Nehalem and beyond), they _really_ started paying attention to optimising this instruction, so that even the byte/word variants will copy entire cache lines at once if possible.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8858778/why-are- complicat...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8858778/why-are-complicated- memcpy-memset-superior)

(IMHO the 2nd answer to that question should really have been chosen, since the 1st answer would be closer to reality a decade or two ago.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If only the Mac 128k had an Agnus like the Amiga. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> It was a little surreal to be reading an article that prominently featured assembly, and realizing that it was the only variety that I actually know (my college's assembly class was taught in 68k because of reasons).

</comment><comment><USER12> This sort of "bending" of opcodes designed to make saving registers on the stack easier (MOVEM was a common part of most 68k functions' preamble) seems like it was a favorite trick:

[http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-12-14-great-old-timey- gam...](http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-12-14-great-old-timey-game- programming-hack.html)

(above ran on HN a couple weeks back)

</comment><comment><USER13> Except it didn't because there are 14. Unsurprisingly it was aesthetics.

<comment><USER14> One was reserved for the stack pointer, so 13*32=416.

<comment><USER15> Thanks. This is close but off then: The drawing area is evenly divisible by 13 long words (13x32=416). This is exactly the number of registers that were available in the loop above for the MOVEM.L operation (It appears it could have used 14 registers, but I am guessing the extra 32 pixels would have made the drawing area more cramped by reducing the gray whitespace.

<comment><USER7> MOVEM.L can address all _16_ registers on the 68K but keeping the source and destination pointers in the register bank made the routine run much quicker. You also need SP to get back home, so 13 was all Hertzfeld could use.

<comment><USER16> > Hertzfeld

Atkinson

<comment><USER7> Ooops, you're right. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Or maybe the Motorola 68k was designed specifically so MacPaint could have a 416 pixel wide canvas.</comment>


With the iPhone 7, Apple Changed the Camera Industry Forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/with-the-iphone-7-apple-changed-the-camera-industry-forever <comment><USER2> Seems a bit premature to make this sort of announcement before we've seen any actual photos taken by the device.

<comment><USER3> Dual-lens is not even new on phones too.

And of course others valued having a computer on their pocket, Nokia was one of the first smartphone manufacturers after all. Not to say they didn't both screwed up and underestimated the iPhone.

The whole article reads very fanboy-ish.</comment></comment>


Web Browsers Reject About Two-Thirds of Cookies - <AUTHOR> https://www.emarketer.com/content/web-browsers-reject-about-two-thirds-of-cookies <comment><USER2> "Cookies were originally designed to track users across the web on browsers"

No, they weren't. They were designed to store small bits of data (such as a login or session token, or form data) between page requests within one site. It was only later that they were repurposed to track users around the web.

<comment><USER3> Came here to say exactly that. Cookies are only capable of tracking users across the web because giant companies have managed to dupe site owners into adding code to their site.

<comment><USER4> I don't think anyone was duped into adding google analytics.

<comment><USER5> Well, it was bought from Urchin and then they discontinued the original software. I mentioned this in the essay too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like a Firefox extension called "Self-Destructing Cookies".[1]

It will accept cookies, but then delete them when you close the tab.

Unfortunately, it (like many other useful extensions) was permanently broken by recent changes to Firefox. I wonder if there are any good alternatives.

[1] - [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self- destruct...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing- cookies/)

<comment><USER7> You can get close with a built in browser setting. Firefox can erase all cookies as soon as you close the browser:

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable- cook...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cookies- website-preferences)

You can also open up a Private Browsing tab if you want to visit a site you don't trust, or simply maintain a separate environment from your main stuff. Private windows have their own cookie store separate from the main store, and also clear their history upon close.

<comment><USER8> > You can get close with a built in browser setting.

And you can still keep cookies from specific sites by defining an exception. They should better document this feature. For me it would be a good default behavior. There aren't that many sites where I want to stay logged in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> #TBT to when Google bypassed Safari blocking third party cookies and paid an immaterial amount to settle the case [1].

[1] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-pays-17m-to-settle- safa...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-pays-17m-to-settle-safari- cookie-privacy-bypass-charge/)

</comment><comment><USER10> So if i have a product that uses 3rd party cookies to try and enhance the user experience (saving user progress in a 3rd party service for user convenience), whats the alternative to 3rd party cookies?

Bad actors are making it harder for people who want to use cookies for enhancing the experience rather than analytics and marketing.

<comment><USER8> > enhance the user experience

Sorry, but this made me laugh.

> whats the alternative to 3rd party cookies?

Don't use a 3rd party service.

<comment><USER10> yes, saving user progress is enhancing their experience. you hear 3rd party and immediately think its bad.

> Don't use a 3rd party service.

I knew someone would say this, as if I had unlimited dev time.

<comment><USER11> The third party service can provide you with some JavaScript you inject into your website. It stores cookies on your domain instead of a third party one.

<comment><USER12> Which of course begs the question should third party scripts be allowed to run?

<comment><USER11> You don't need cross-origin scripts for this: you can host it yourself.

If you were to disallowed loading scripts cross-origin, everyone would just end up creating subdomains for everything you wanted to load, which would be worse security-wise I bet, as you'd lose some of the cross origin security features we have today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Man I wish we can go back to browsing the web without cookies.</comment>


Singapore: A Model of Judgment for the United States?  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/davenport/2009/08/singapore_a_model_of_judgment.html <comment><USER2> I wish these people saying "country X is so great" were forced to put their butts where there mouths are. At least this goof isn't as bad as Needham's going on and on about China's greatness back in the 1970s and earlier.</comment>


How to Level Up in Your Career as a Startup Software Engineer - <AUTHOR> http://g33ktalk.com/how-to-level-up-in-your-career-as-a-startup-software-engineer/

<comment><USER2> One approach to 'career management' not mentioned here but that I think is non-obvious but helpful to you and to others is to help recruiters with referrals.

Now: I know recruiters are often the subject of a lot of mockery on HN, but referrals are a way to stay engaged and to look good for times (later) when you may need their help.

And any sincere efforts to help others find work is both rewarding and creates a good halo effect.

All good reminders, all hard to keep in mind :)</comment>


Interview with Max Levchin - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/business/max-levchin-of-affirm-seeking-the-endurance-athletes-of-business.html?smid=tw-share <comment><USER2> The glorification of stress in start-ups is an interesting thing. I've always wonder if it's because it's a mental thing. If an industry glorified their employees physically harming themselves, it'd be horrific.

It took me a while to learn, but working hard doesn't equate to being stressed, and being stressed is more than likely to result in mediocre results.

<comment><USER3> I don't read the article as glorifying stress, merely acknowledging it.

Edit: on closer inspection, this is an example of the uncanny power of titles to focus attention, magician-style, on only one thing. Certainly Levchin didn't pick the title and the interviewer probably didn't either. We shouldn't be reacting exclusively to a single (invariably provocative) detail a headline writer picks out for us.

I can almost guarantee that if the headline had singled out his fierce astronomer grandmother instead, the comments here would be about fierce astronomer grandmothers. Which come to think of it would be a lot better.

<comment><USER2> I agree with you - coming back and rereading the article, I didn't have nearly the same reaction. Originally I focused exclusively on that single segment, which my fault.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think his go-to "how did you handle layoffs" interview question is interesting and probably a good heuristic, but I would think that a discussion of individual firings rather than mass layoffs would provide a better data point for evaluating managers.

Layoffs are bad if they involve a lot of people, no question about it, especially if there's been a sense of dread around them for the days/weeks leading into the announcement. But at the end of the day, "we're laying you off" means one or more of: "our business is not healthy enough to support the team we think we need" and/or "we made a poor managerial decision and mistakenly hired a whole bunch of the wrong people" and/or "the nature of our business is changing and we don't need you to do what you currently do".

Telling people they don't have a job sucks, but it's a lot harder to fire individuals for underperformance, especially if they've been trying hard and don't want to go....they like their jobs and they don't want to deal with the finality of "we don't want you to work here anymore, $name."

</comment><comment><USER5> Can I get a tl;dr on who is Max Levchin? I'm surprised to see this article on the FP of HN with such an empty content. He was also giving a crypto prize at last year Real World Crypto.

<comment><USER6> You noticed his crypto involvement - as the original CTO of PayPal he was known for his anti-fraud measures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think that no-one is capable of handling stress for long periods of time without huge side-effects, for example obvious health problems. But in the end guys like Levchin are capitalists not health-gurus, as long as those start-up people are willing to sacrifice their health so that their investors can get their money back multiplied by 50 or 100 then everyone is happy. The start/up founders knew what they were getting into (or at least I hope so), investors like Levchin do not care one iota about what said start-up founders will do with their lifes after all is said and done (i.e. after everyone has cashed out)

<comment><USER3> > _investors like Levchin do not care one iota about_

You can't possibly know all the iotas someone else cares about. Please don't give into cheap attackiness here, especially not when mentioning a specific person.

(Edit: I originally wrote "what iotas", but "all the iotas" perhaps makes the point clearer.)

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13154540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13154540) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER7> > But the right thing to do is to go be there with the people you just laid > off and help them cope, help them pack and tell them that you're going to do > your best to hire them back once the company's on good footing. It's about > having compassion even when you feel you may not have the strength for it in > the moment.

I read this paragraph from the article twice, I think it backs my point, meaning that people like Levchin put their company's and investors' interests first and foremost before the interests of people which are their employees (I generally tend to ignore the "compassion" in speeches like this, I cannot pay rent or my bills with "compassion" once I'm out of a job).

I'm not saying that what Levchin (or any-other person in his situation) does is bad, because that's what capitalism is all about, I just wanted to say that we shouldn't foul ourselves in thinking that the employer-employee relationship is a "Hare Krishna"-type of thing.

<comment><USER3> That's a very different point than the one I reacted to. And it's so uncharitable a reading of that paragraph that I wonder if one could invert its meaning any further.

I have no idea if Levchin meant what he said, but I'm pretty sure he said what he said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't believe this guy is into credit lending now. A bit sleezy tbh.

<comment><USER3> Shallow dismissals are a scourge on HN, and you made it worse with the snark of "I can't believe" and "this guy". In fact, with a single drive-by swipe you dismissed not only the article and someone's current project, but the entire person and an entire business sector to boot. That's a lot of dismissing—it reminds me of the fairy tale, "Seven in one blow." And it's harmful here, so please don't post like this.

If you have a case to make, you're welcome to make it substantively. If you can't do that or don't have time, please don't post at all. That way you at least won't degrade the thread.

<comment><USER8> Having known Max, I stand by my comment.

<comment><USER3> This comment isn't substantive—it merely alludes to substance.

<comment><USER8> Do you think retail credit lending isn't sleezy, dang?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always consider it a bad sign for a startup whenever their founder is interviewed on topics completely irrelevant to the company. This article had nothing to do with Affirm, and is only generic hiring advice that purports to be about startups, but in fact applies equally to a large established company (e.g., perseverance)

<comment><USER10> Successful startup founders are not one-dimensional business machines, they're usually smart people who have some kind of different view on the world (which enables them to succeed in the first place). As such, you can assume that they have interesting things to say.

I don't see why you'd deny them the right to speak about topics outside the narrow band of their startup.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, I know my comment is negative in nature. And I'm not saying someone can't or shouldn't talk publicly outside their narrow band. Just pointing out that when the few public interviews a founder gets are outside their actual venture, you begin to worry about the venture.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure whether the relationship between startup success and public speaking engagements is established. Why do you think the relationship/correlation should be negative?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Immutant - a true, enterprise-grade application server for Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://immutant.org/news/2011/11/01/announcing/

<comment><USER2> I'm not really familiar with what an application server is (even less what makes it enterprise-grade).

What is the typical use-case for this or TorqueBox?

<comment><USER3> I had a similar issue. It'd be worth expanding the description to be more concrete. What I see there now seems more marketing/management focused than focused at the people who are likely to actually be using it. :)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I looked up the wikipedia page for JBoss and it was just acronym soup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Right off the bat you guys need to spend a teeny weency bit of time and rebrand yourselves. The logo reminds me of a counter-strike clan from 2001.

</comment><comment><USER6> So, where is the code?

<comment><USER7> Under the "Development" tab?... <https://github.com/immutant/immutant/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really can't see this flying. Not even most Java guys want the added complexity of an "enterprise application server" anymore.

<comment><USER9> No, we don't, but we often don't have a choice; that choice is made for us by PHB's and astronaut architects. And in my case, banks, who are my company's main customers.

The whole world isn't Silicon Valley; there are a lot of us out here who don't get to do the new-ooo!-shiny all the time.

<comment><USER8> Very, very true. But it seems to me that the people who want this sort of thing (people who make decision on golf courses) don't really like the sound of Clojure.

Although I'm fully aware some firms are dysfunctional, it seems to require a strange alignment of the planets for someone to decide on using immutant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is "enterprise grade"?

<comment><USER11> Something marketed towards MBA's - not coders.

<comment><USER12> maybe for coders that have to deal with MBA's</comment></comment></comment>


How to cite a tweet (MLA) - <AUTHOR> http://edudemic.com/2012/03/how-to-cite-a-tweet-in-academic-papers/

<comment><USER2> Interesting how MLA chose _Tweet_ over _Twitter_ at the end, as well as the fact that the entire tweet is in the bibliography. I wonder at what limit that including the entire content of something is reasonable (from the bibliographic perspective, not the legal one).

I wish they'd have included a way to cite entire conversations conveniently while they were at it, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not use the tweet's ID? That would preserve the conversation/context as well.

Also, I've seen the word "tweet" used to describe posts on Seiba Weibo. It's possible that the term will be become ubiquitous to describe micro-blog posts.

EDIT: Reason for not using ID: no one knows if they're permanent.

</comment><comment><USER4> I saw this some weeks ago and this proposed formats makes no sense to me. Why the full text, but NO LINK? And 'tweet' instead of 'twitter' will just go away once we have more of services we want to quote.</comment>


Encryption enthusiast deciphers 'Unsolvable' WWI Encryption Code - <AUTHOR> http://nocamels.com/2013/12/israeli-deciphers-unsolvable-wwi-encryption-code/

<comment><USER2> This article describes this as a "double transportation cipher" \- which is incorrect. It's more correctly described in the article submitted nearly a week ago here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6960168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6960168)

That also has a link to a more complete description:

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

<comment><USER3> _" During World War I, the German military used a double columnar transposition cipher, changing the keys infrequently. The system was regularly solved by the French, naming it Übchi, who were typically able to quickly find the keys once they'd intercepted a number of messages of the same length, which generally took only a few days. However, the French success became widely known and, after a publication in_ Le Matin, _the Germans changed to a new system on 18 November 1914. [1] "_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_transposition_cipher#Do...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_transposition_cipher#Double_transposition)

Courtesy of M. Édouard Snoden.

<comment><USER4> I think you meant: Mr. Édouard Neigedon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OT but 4MB sure is a lot for a static site.

<comment><USER6> Came here to post this. Scrolling is a nightmare on this page. Why would you do this to your visitors? How would anybody still visit anyway?

<comment><USER7> Times like this, am very thankful for Readability[1]

[1][http://readability.com](http://readability.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know much about encryption - can someone explain why if this was considered so "unbreakable" it was abandoned as a method so long ago?

<comment><USER9> Many codes are unbreakable (or are effectively so) if you only use them once, statistical attacks become possible with multiple messages. In this case if you send two messages of the same length with the same code both can be broken.

Also it's a rearrangement of the letters in the message. So a short message with distinct letters like 'Invade Pyatigorsk' could be easily cracked without knowing the code.</comment></comment>


Honeywell is finally challenging the Nest thermostat - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/10/5793536/the-heat-is-on-honeywell-is-finally-ready-to-challenge-nest

<comment><USER2> I think I'd rather have a reliable old school thermostat that won't need maintenance for 50 years.

I'm okay with not having access via a smart phone.</comment>


Shuttleworth: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/719037/ <comment><AUTHOR> [http://linuxfr.org/news/ubuntu-abandonne-unity-mir-et-le- mob...](http://linuxfr.org/news/ubuntu-abandonne-unity-mir-et-le-mobile)</comment>


Disney's head of streaming leaves to become CEO of TikTok - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-05-18/disneys-streaming-chair-kevin-mayer-leaves-to-run-tiktok <comment><AUTHOR> This is a power move by TikTok.

They're looking for new ways to capitalize of the attention they have on the platform.

Does anyone give a fuck that they're run by the Chinese government though?</comment>


Startup Quote: Tom Preston-Werner, Co-founder, GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/9892955627

<comment><AUTHOR> Bootstrapping is a way to do something about the problems you have without letting someone else give you permission to do them.

\- Tom Preston-Werner (@mojombo)

<http://startupquote.com/post/9892955627></comment>


Thiel's Failed Education Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2013/09/11/peter-thiel-promised-flying-cars-instead-we-got-caffeine-spray/

<comment><USER2> More of the same Vivek Wadhwa essay that has been submitted twice already, because it is spammed around multiple domains online.</comment>


Hyman Rickover on Nuclear Reactor Designs (1953) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf <comment><USER2> Another ex-Navy nuke here. More than 45 years later, I can still practically recite both sides of my interview with the KOG,* which was necessary to get into The Program.

Here's an excerpt. Important to the story is that I was escorted into Rickover's office by a senior officer who was in training to be a submarine skipper. Also relevant is that I was younger than the usual candidate.

KOG: Why do you want in my program?

Me: From what I've seen of the submarine fleet, there's a lot of professionalism there; I'd like to be part of that. _[Later, in nuclear power school, I switched to surface, and spent my sea time aboard the carrier USS Enterprise.]_

KOG: So you don't think there's any professionalism in the surface fleet?

Me: I didn't say that, Admiral.

KOG _[to the escort officer]_ : Read back what the kid said.

Escort officer: Mr. Toedt thinks there's a lot of professionalism in the submarine fleet and not in the surface fleet.

KOG: _[Angrily points out my personal failings, ending with:]_ You're shooting your g--damn mouth off about something you don't know a g--damn thing about. What do you think of that?

Me: That's not what I said, Admiral. _[At this point I started getting pissed off.]_

KOG: _[More vigorous imparting of wisdom, ending with:]_ Have you learned anything?

Me _[angrier than I 've ever been, before or since]_: Yes, SIR.

KOG: What's that?

Me: Not to shoot my _[pause]_ MOUTH off about something I don't know a _[pause]_ thing ABOUT — SIR.

The interview went downhill from there, including inquiries about my sex life. I figured I'd bilged the interview and would be heading for destroyer school, which had been my preference anyway (the officers at my NROTC unit had strongly "encouraged" me to apply for The Program instead). I was shocked afterwards when the nice older lady congratulated me on having been accepted to The Program and asked which of the two nuclear power schools did I want to attend.

After the interview I realized that Rickover and the escort officer had intentionally been f--king with me as one of his little stress tests, the stories about which are legion [0].

* KOG = Kindly Old Gentleman. The nuke joke was that he checked the box for at most two out of those four things.

[0] [https://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2009/02/rickover-stories- ne...](https://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2009/02/rickover-stories-needed.html)

<comment><USER3> I wonder what his reaction would be if you went with something similar to the Grand Budapest Hotel job interview scene.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You are likely familiar with the quip that "While in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is." Here's a delightful letter by "The Father of the Nuclear Navy" Admiral Hyman Rickover ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover)) on how that saying applies to nuclear reactor design. Excerpts:

 _An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose ( "omnibus reactor"). (7) Very little develop- ment is required. It will use mostly "off-the-shelf" components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now._

 _On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated._

It's a short two-page letter, so I won't excerpt more. It merits reading in full.

<comment><USER4> That really does sum up all the gaps between the promises of "too cheap to meter" and the practical expensive reality. Doubly so for things that haven't made it out of the lab at all, such as thorium reactors. There's always people willing to give the "academic reactor" sales pitch for nuclear on here, especially as a reason not to proceed with some scheme using a renewable, proven but intermittent technology like wind or solar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's Rickover's concluding paragraph I find most compelling:

 _Yet it is incumbent on those in high places to make wise decisions and it is reasonable and important that the public be correctly informed. It is consequently incumbent on all of us to state the facts as forthrightly as possible._

That resounds today, especially with a novel current rapidly-spreading challenge, and responses around the planet which fail all three of Rickover's admonishments.

The essay itself has long resonated with me:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28q61o/hyman_g...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28q61o/hyman_g_rickover_paper_reactors/)

<comment><USER6> Off topic:

What are your thoughts about hoaxes, cults, groupthink?

I'm hoping to find explainers in the same way Sara Robinson and David Neiwert have tried to study and understand authoritarianism. [https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall- part-i-...](https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall-part-i- defining.html)

FWIW, I am scanning your prior posts (HN, reddit, mastodon).

I try to pay attention to "explainers" like you, Slate Star Codex, Gwern, Ezra Klein, David Roberts (also Vox), Bill Gates, others. People who voraciously consume info, synthesize it, and try to explain it to the rest of us.

<comment><USER5> That''s a very complex topic.

Of possible relevance, and reflecting one current of my thinking:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothing_music_diets_art_management_theory_fad_as/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Prior navy Nuke- it's hard to explain how much Rickover continues to permeate the Navy Nuclear program. When you start your naval nuclear career, you still literally have to go through Rickover. That is, the building where all naval nuclear training begins is "The Rickover" in Goose Greek, SC.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rickover has a case to answer for the Thresher:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20170514181829/http://www.au.af.m...](http://web.archive.org/web/20170514181829/http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/airchronicles/aureview/1983/jul- aug/schratz.html)

>Beneath the surface, however, was always the cold, unrelenting, ruthless workaholic, undermining the bureaucracy while creating his own. His was a management textbook for the inside operator, organized to the smallest detail, intolerant of error, devoting everything including his personal life to a cause, an obsession. Rickover established a constituency in Congress by superior salesmanship of his own product and skillful sowing of dissension and division in competing programs. Carefully slanting facts and covering up what he did not want disclosed, he skillfully manipulated his two bosses to become what the authors call "The Unaccountable Man." He destroyed any competing nuclear program within his own organization and any person likely to emerge as a competitor or successor. In time, he became increasingly conservative if not reactionary, putting space between himself and any responsibility for failure or accident. When the USS Thresher was lost in April 1963, he immediately phoned the Bureau of Ships to dissociate himself from any likelihood of failure of the nuclear plant in the incident. The bureau chief thought this action "thoroughly dishonest."

<comment><USER8> On the subject of this thread:

>The cult of personality produced other adverse side effects. Having achieved brilliant success with the pressurized water coolant system in the Nautilus installation, innovation in other types of plants was stifled. The USS Seawolf plant, developed in tandem with Nautilus, utilized liquid sodium as coolant, promising much smaller and more compact reactors. Because of limitations in metallurgy, the system was unsuccessful. The program was scrapped, and its obvious superiorities were never again reexamined, even after twenty years of further progress in nuclear technology. Rickover put the kiss of death on programs generated within the Office of Naval Research and elsewhere for smaller, lightweight reactors that could reduce the enormous size and cost of nuclear-powered ships. None saw the light of day; all were thwarted as interference in his work. When nuclear power was adapted to surface use for large combatants such as aircraft carriers and missile cruisers, new systems apparently were not examined. For instance, a smaller and more efficient combination of nuclear power for normal cruising plus an overdrive of conventional gas turbine plants for high speed use had been proposed but was not investigated further.

<comment><USER9> We built one. It didn't work then. He said it wouldn't, and indeed it didn't. He's been dead for decades, and we haven't built a working one now—but somehow it's his fault!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow! I wish the thorium enthusiasts would all read this.

<comment><USER11> Small molten salt reactors were actually built. They weren't just paper reactors, even in Rickover's day. Now there are companies working on MSRs for commercial use. There's more computer simulation than running reactors so far, partly because governments are much more cautious now. But I'll also point out that Rickover in 1957 had no idea what computers in 2020 would be capable of.

I think it's reasonable to suspect that we didn't find the best possible reactor design six decades ago.

<comment><USER12> The part that the computers help with - nuclear and thermodynamic physics ODEs - isn't the hard part. A couple of sharp grad students can do that with OpenFOAM and a modest workstation.

The hard parts are the operations, maintenance, building for robustness, and enormous amounts of empirical field experience with the materials.

Rickover and his contemporaries judged - rightly - that those issues would make MSR and metal-cooled reactors too finicky to be of practical military value.

<comment><USER13> ...but there actually was a liquid sodium reactor sub built in the 50s, from what I've heard.

<comment><USER12> Only one. She was a contemporary of the Nautilus. It was their experience with that vessel that killed liquid metal coolant for the navy.

It might help to understand something special about the nuclear navy in those days - prototypes in the lab don't count. Prototypes on land don't count either. The only prototypes that counted were ones that actually went to sea. All the way through the Skipjack generation, they were regularly doing crazy- eyed one-off experiments.

Nautilus and Seawolf were both prototypes.

<comment><USER14> Agree.

One Soviet 'November' class (K27) and all 7 'Alfa' class used liquid metal. It wasn't developed further or used after.

<comment><USER11> But Russia does have two sodium cooled reactors on their power grid right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> TIL there was a Seawolf sub long before the Seawolf- _class_. That explains a lot.

</comment><comment><USER15> PBS had a good documentary on this.

[https://youtu.be/G0p8bWYY7qM](https://youtu.be/G0p8bWYY7qM)

</comment><comment><USER16> My father-in-law was just getting used to his new posting when Admiral Rickover came for an inspection. Talk about pressure.

<comment><USER12> That culture of pressure never changed, and they are better for it.

The best analogy I can give you is this: Imagine your CTO just decides to walk up to your datacenter to throw open a breaker or few to verify that your failover and redundancy tech works correctly.

The CTO doesn't do this often - just once every few months. Each time the failure mode is different. Remove a live hard drive, disconnect some network switches, etc. The only reason she does it to is to emphasize the importance of these drills upon her VPs and directors.

They run drills of this nature on their teams every few days.

<comment><USER17> Simulating a power failure to test and prove the resiliency of the system is precisely what caused the Chernobyl disaster.

<comment><USER18> Ah, no. The cause of Chernobyl is lost to the dead but probably caused by a young engineer who didn't quite do the right thing.

You absolutely must drill for rare, high stakes events. Auto-rotations in helicopters. Mass casualties in hospitals. Reactor scrams. Man overboard on a ship. All these things are drilled _because_ you don't have time to read the book when it actually happens, _and_ it rarely happens.

<comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster)

The accident started during a safety test on an RBMK-type nuclear reactor, which was commonly used throughout the Soviet Union. The test was a simulation of an electrical power outage to aid the development of a safety procedure for maintaining reactor cooling water circulation until the back-up electrical generators could provide power. This gap was about one minute and had been identified as a potential safety problem that could cause the nuclear reactor core to overheat. It was hoped to prove that the residual rotational energy in a turbine generator could provide enough power to cover the gap. Three such tests had been conducted since 1982, but they had failed to provide a solution. On this fourth attempt, an unexpected 10-hour delay meant that an unprepared operating shift was on duty. During the planned decrease of reactor power in preparation for the electrical test, the power unexpectedly dropped to a near-zero level. The operators were able to only partially restore the specified test power, which put the reactor in a potentially unstable condition. This risk was not made evident in the operating instructions, so the operators proceeded with the electrical test. Upon test completion, the operators triggered a reactor shutdown, but a combination of unstable conditions and reactor design flaws caused an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> WW2 Germany had Donitz, and Cold War US had Rickover - both were giants.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz)

Nuclear power is a game-changer, allowing aircraft carriers to sail completely around the globe at speeds fast enough to barefoot water-ski behind.

<comment><USER20> The words "nuclear" don't appear in this wikipedia article. It does state, however, that Dönitz was closely wedded to Nazi ideology.

<comment><USER19> You're missing the point.

Both were the successful leaders that their era and countries needed.

Donitz almost defeated Britain using his submarine fleet alone (he just didn't get the number requested.)

Rickover's accomplishment wasn't demonstrating that nuclear power was useful, it was getting the support and funding to actually roll out the new technology. To this day, no other country has a nuclear aircraft carrier besides the US and France.

<comment><USER21> 75% of U-boat crew died in combat, primarily because Donitz never changed their cryptography and gave them tons of radio traffic to decipher.

"Radio traffic compromised his ciphers by giving the Allies more messages to work with. Furthermore, replies from the boats enabled the Allies to use direction finding (HF/DF, called "Huff-Duff") to locate a U-boat using its radio, track it and attack it.[64][65] The over-centralised command structure of BdU and its insistence on micro-managing every aspect of U-boat operations with endless signals provided the Allied navies with enormous intelligence"

<comment><USER22> They did change their cryptography. They changed the settings on the enigma machine daily, and they also went through various versions through the war.

<comment><USER21> Changing the settings wasn't enough after the enigma machine was cracked. And more to the point, Donitz management style made their radio traffic easier to decipher, and he was extremely slow to react when it was clear crews were dying because their radio traffic wasn't secure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple Go utility to ease deployments via SSH and SCP - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/skx/deployr/ <comment><USER2> Heh, I made a similar thing (mostly unreleased/undocumented at [0], original idea at [1]) that would take your Go code, build a binary wrapper for it using the target OS arch, SSH to the target, SCP the file over, run the binary, connect stdout/stderr/stdin with the remote, allow the remotely running binary to request files from the home binary, and delete itself once complete. One thing I found is SCP/SFTP is a really slow transfer protocol and an alternative should be made available as an option (but leave SSH as the default).

I believe that we are getting to a point where config management might as well be in a programming language instead of a bunch of ad-hoc scripts in templates that defer to dynamic language scripts and become a mess.

0 - [https://github.com/cretz/systrument](https://github.com/cretz/systrument) 1 - [https://github.com/cretz/software- ideas/issues/1](https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/1)

<comment><USER3> > I believe that we are getting to a point where config management might as > well be in a programming language instead of a bunch of ad-hoc scripts in > templates that defer to dynamic language scripts and become a mess.

That's the idea behind my brainchild, judo[1].

[1]: [https://github.com/rollcat/judo](https://github.com/rollcat/judo)

<comment><USER4> Judo seems like a great automation option for some simpler tasks where Ansible could be considered overkill. For me, that covers almost 100% of my remote automation needs. :) Nice!

<comment><USER5> Another infrastructure as code (not code as in YAML, etc.), but programming language 'code' tool is Pulumi[0].

[0] [https://www.pulumi.com/](https://www.pulumi.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A comparison to Ansible might be helpful to help clarify why you would choose this instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. Ansible is robust, well-known, well-supported, and has support for doing anything and everything from creating users, to setting cron-jobs, MySQL users, and more.

This application only allows two things:

* Uploading a file, or series of files. * Running a command, or series of commands.

In short I'm very simple. But because of that it avoids some of the horrors of trying to be overly-complex in the way that Ansible is. It avoids cryptic failures, and the horrible "language" for looping constructs, etc.

I could imagine adding support for cron, mysql, etc, but I think as soon as you allow real conditional actions to such utilities it becomes a mess to use.

<comment><USER7> So perhaps this is most comparable to Python's fabric library.

<comment><USER8> Yes I think that is a fair comparison. Fabric allows a similar set of primitives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks a lot like sup[1].

[1]: [https://github.com/pressly/sup](https://github.com/pressly/sup)

</comment><comment><USER10> Coincidentally I just wrote a similar set of tools using bash scripts for doing deployments of a simple app. I opted for rsync mostly because I'm more familiar with it than scp. It basically runs some build commands, copies the files up, and runs some commands to restart Docker containers.

I always think it's interesting to see things pop up on HN that are randomly relevant to things I'm thinking about or working on.

</comment><comment><USER11> Small question:

In the readme (first section) you use, as an example, the command:

"Run adduser bob 2>/dev/null"

why do you add the "2>/dev/null" part? I see a lot of tutorial/guide/example/etc... do that! I understand what it does (send the stderr to devnull) but i don't understand why would i want to do that?

<comment><USER8> Adduser will fail a second time, and show "user already exists" or similar. We hide that via the redirect

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This definitely looks interesting, have you considered an option to use rsync instead of scp?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I had not. Interesting idea. Presumably over the existing SSH, rather than using the rsynd-deamon?

Not a bad idea, but I guess I'd need to think about it. Mostly the "large" files I pull from github, or distribution sites. I tend to only upload some simple config-files, and systemd-service units. So the extra overhead of SCP isn't so significant.

<comment><USER13> Yes, rsync communicates with the rsync at the other end automatically over SSH. You could use rsync by default and then fallback to scp if rsync isn't usable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A similar tool, but npm/js, I successfully use in a few apps: [https://github.com/shipitjs/shipit](https://github.com/shipitjs/shipit)

</comment><comment><USER15> So, capistrano? [https://capistranorb.com/](https://capistranorb.com/)

But you don't need Ruby installed?</comment>


How newspapers can survive - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/20/opinion/barth-newspapers-decline/index.html

<comment><USER2> This argument fell flat for me as soon as I read that newspapers are the only ones left to hold the gov't and wall street accountable. Newspapers are corporate for-profit entities, and like all media companies they are owned by the people they 'report' on.

In the traditional sense, newspapers will not survive. I believe that independent journalism will survive, as people like me move to curated content services, and pay for valuable new stories. The way to do this is to combine the kickstarter model and the steam model. Small teams of topical reporters post stories that they want to write and/or pursue, and potential readers bid on them to do so. Then when the content is finished they can distribute it through a global distribution channel, like a Steam for news media content. You can bundle subscriptions from your favorite news teams, get the 'all inclusive package' get the just 'sports and gossip' package, or whatever else works.

Sure a lot of content will seep out there for free, but the kickstarter-like company can add value by explaining to people the importance of funding these teams. As teams get established they can get to a level of continuous funding, or at least for X # of months at a time, that way they can do indepth whistle- blowing type stories, without having to give away what they want to do in the original kickstarter.

I have only just started thinking of this, so I'm sure there are many holes to be worked out. Nevertheless, I do want this industry to 'pivot' into success because I do think they provide an important social good.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Case in point: the housing bubble. I frequently read from a blog called thehousingbubbleblog from 2004 to 2008 and learned about the looming crisis from all kinds of insiders - mortgage folks, appraisers, etc. On the other hand, my local newspaper, with an enormous Sunday Real Estate section, rarely reported on it and when they did it always ended with a spokesman from the Realtors association who would put their spin on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> TL;DR. Stop pleading. Start actually finding news!

The final three paragraphs seemed like a plea for government or government- related funding. That is, for the public to pick up the tab because they do read news (just not from them).

While this can work quite well as part of a general public media body, you rarely expect cutting edge investigative journalism from such public organisations who face their own funding and political justification pressures constantly.

At the end of the day, newspapers are struggling because they have created a model that does not differentiate themselves from anyone else.

This is especially the case when it took something like Wikileaks, which has always considered itself to be as much a journalism organisation as a whistleblowing haven, to show how little newspapers contribute to new knowledge, and if anything are merely tools of others.

The second function of newspapers, as a sort of social bulletin board system is being slowly undermined by new media, however on this front, the more locally-connected papers seem to be faring quite well for now. Though in the end, even these will be unable to catch up to the speed and breadth of updates available via new media, unless they embrace it themselves.

No matter what failings it may have otherwise had, Wikileaks and now others have demonstrated that at core crowdsourced news can be a compelling model, IF you operate a highly _trustworthy and ethical_ platform, for example. That said, nothing can really replace true investigative journalism.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hi:

Since I wrote this I just want to clarify that I did not say that newspapers were the only ones in the accountability business; I intentionally said news media, which is a wide swath that also is meant to include certain bloggers and others. Newspapers do NOT have a monopoly on that.

Also, I intentionally did not include 'government related funding' in my mention of what's worth learning from public media's business model. I stressed the role of listeners and the value that public media has been able to gain from developing a reliable and meaningful RELATIONSHIP with listeners. That has taken 40 years to build.

I agree that investigative reporting is a high point and necessary one for journalism, but let's not discount the importance of day in, day out reporting that informs and accurately reflects the life, doings, role, malfeasance of institutions and people of a community. There are some impressive local blogs and sites that do an ambitious job of capturing a pretty full picture of what is going on. My hat's off to them. They need support. Reporting on scandals and forcing out the scoundrels is only one measure of the value of a good news outfit.

Newspaper ownership is a mixed bag; some owners would not know the First Amendment if it bit them. But then there is the McClatchy chain whose DC bureau did some of the most outstanding and aggressive reporting on the lead up to the Iraq War. No one paper or news organization performs well or poorly all the time. But I take the point of one poster here, I think, that a newspaper is only as good as its owners' and leaderships' commitment to independence and the role of an aggressive press.

What is killing a lot of papers -- and my op ed only touches on the mix of factors -- is high production costs, debt and relevance of these brands and forms to audiences with many other choices. The NYTimes HAS an audience, so does the WSJournal. But so does Google and Slashdot and Mashable and Gawker. The news space is crowded with a lot of value for new audiences hungry for the right mix. If you find your news sites valuable to you, then support their business model. What we need are credible, accurate and competitive news businesses.

Thank you all for the thoughtful feedback. This is the sort of debate and discussion I was hoping the oped would generate.

Finally, this crazy notion that journalism is not that hard. It is. Good journalism is very hard, demanding, damning and public. Go to a crime scene at 2AM, or into a courtroom, or try an election night and let's see how good you are at getting the story of what is going on. Only an uninformed cynic would think that ANY profession done well is 'easy.'Take a look at the LV Sun link I included - that investigation into patient deaths and suffering at local hospitals was groundbreaking work. Not at all 'easy.'

-John

</comment><comment><USER6> They can't. Not because they can't make money online but because they are not worth the paper they are printed on -- this includes newspapers such as the NYT.

Ask yourself: when was the last time the NYT published a story that cause a scandal and forced a politician to retire? A couple of years ago? For it to be worth more than the paper it is printed on, it has to be at least once a week -- there are enough scandales to choose from.

But of course printing filler is cheaper.

<comment><AUTHOR> How is the record of online nonnewspaper reporting in forcing politicians to resign or exposing other scandals? And how do we establish causation (that any one story brought someone down) in a world where many readers, for example nearly all readers of HN, get their news from multiple sources?

AFTER EDIT:

Taking into account the other thoughtful replies here, I remember reading in the mainstream print press (Business Week) about the housing bubble no later than 2005, and I'm sure that wasn't the only mainstream source pointing out that housing prices made no sense in the mid-2000s. The print publication The Economist was also referring to inflated housing costs in several countries, notably Spain, before the bubble burst. One problem any news source has in establishing credibility in predicting problems is hindsight bias: once a problem blows up, it's "easy to see" that the problem was inevitable, but until it blows up, plenty of people are making money off of betting that they can stay solvent the whole time the market stays irrational, and no amount of responsible journalism seems sufficient to overcome that kind of mass delusion.

<comment><USER6> The comperative record does not matter -- simply reading the newspaper is a waste of time.

As for correlation -- who broke the scandal? The newspaper that did that gets the point. Did multiple newspapers break it at the same time? Then nobody gets a point, since it is only worth paying for unique stories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Newspapers were providing a valuable service, but were funding the bills and the payroll by selling ads. Sounds familiar.

</comment><comment><USER8> They are in a bed of their own making.

They made the news a commodity because it lowered their costs and raised their profit margins. They trained readers to be shallow and emotional, to skim for the high level details and ignore deeper analysis, to be easily swayed by cheap "human interest" reporting. They sold themselves out to national chains and ignored the interests of their community.

And now we are supposed to feel sorry for them?

Newspapers have always been sort of a sham. Propped up by the fact that for centuries it was an enormous challenge just to get any sort of information from beyond the horizon, let alone accurate or timely information. The bar has always been low, and it has always been easiest to skate by on doing little more than repeating what someone else has said but putting it in a nice little easily consumed package (length, writing style, format, etc.) But the barriers to information dissemination have fallen, fast and decisively. And now all of the access, publishing infrastructure, and tricks of the trade that kept the newspapers rich in the past are useless.

In the end it's not a bad thing. There has always been a very profound and wide reaching problem in that journalists have as a rule, and especially toward the last half of the 20th century, been trained in that abstract subject of "journalism". A reporter is a journalist first and then has some specialty as a minor side note to their core competency of generic journalism. The big problem with that is that journalism is not actually that hard. But elevating it to such a high level diminished the importance of "secondary" knowledge in a reporter, such as expertise in the subject they are covering. We've all been witness to the problems this creates. The "science" reporter can barely understand the subject their covering and they routinely make errors which significantly damage the quality of their reporting. That problem has been endemic to journalism for decades.

Journalists who know a lot about the business, how to format a story, how to write a hook to get people interested, but who are as ignorant of the subject matter as a high school sophomore tasked to do a surprise report on a country they've never heard of. Yes there have been exceptions, in rare cases there have been reporters who were experts or who had a strong knowledge of the material they covered, but outside of sports reporting this has always been the exception. Because the difficulty of getting the story out to people in a format that was accessible was primary.

The value of the specialty skill of "journalism" is far, far less important today due to modern communications technology, making the very significant and real short-comings of traditional journalism all the more glaring.

Sorry reporters but I think your days are ultimately numbered. The ideal future I see is one where experts learn how to communicate, not where communicators learn how to fake looking like experts. If you want to be a part of that future I suggest going back to school or otherwise spending a lot of time becoming an expert on something important other than how to arrange letters into a 2 inch wide column.

P.S. Another enormous problem is that the media has become part of the establishment, and has blatantly fallen down on its job to challenge the establishment and report on the key issues of the day instead of merely serving up infotainment and pablum.</comment>


Dart vs. Node.js vs. Go for Building a Web App - <AUTHOR>

Which platform/language and/or framework(for the selected choice) should I use to build simple,fast, versatile, and feature rich web apps?(by feature rich I mean many useful packages to enhance user experience). I know JavaScript and some Java(taking AP course).<p>P.S: For Node.js, ES6, TypeScript, and other JS alternatives may be included. Just so no one starts hating on JavaScript's original syntax design flaws. <comment><USER2> You can build the same quality of web app in any of the above. The question is how much you'll have to fight against the platform's pain points.

Will you be CPU bound? Will you be memory bound? IO bound? Will you need to scale? it what way? What libraries, frameworks, modules etc . . . will you need? Will your app be isomorphic? Where will you host?

And if you don't have many answers just go with what you're most familiar with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which would YOU prefer?

<comment><USER2> Me, I'm a Node.js guy, but that's in part because of my long history with JavaScript. I don't think I've ever been tempted to write anything in Dart, though there are some things I've written that would have been better to be written in GO (for deployment and memory use reasons). It really depends on your constraints, just like any other design decision.

What are your constraints? I suspect they're mostly around the availability of code and availability of learning resources.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd just like a fast, easily hackable, versatile(meaning you can do so many things with ease(frameworks)) language to be honest.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/technology/12comments.html?ref=technology

<comment><USER2> I don't know how they plan on making comments not anonymous. In this article the only defense is having users register. Which I'm assuming means that they would register with a valid email address and click a confirmation link. In that case services such as ShadyEmail.com and the like can get around this type of registration.

The only real way to stop anonymous comments and commenting is to make being a non-anonymous member of the community more rewarding and productive than being an anonymous member. It's not really a technology or policy issue, its an issue of personal incentive and community.

<comment><USER3> Re: "The only real way to stop," I don't entirely agree. News sites could approach their comments like they approach their letters to the editor, and ask for the phone number of new members.

Verifying every phone number would be a lot of work, so you don't do that. Just verify the folk who post more than, say, 5 comments.

<comment><USER2> Requiring phone numbers could be effective. Though no matter what technology you use there will be a way to get around it.

I think a good case study of a community promoting non-anonymous comments is facebook. They use very little in the way of technology to prevent flamewars and spam, mostly it is user culture.</comment></comment></comment>


Memory Safety in D - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/420yhi/memory_safety_in_d/ <comment><AUTHOR> Apologies. Wrong link. Resumbitted here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10947519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10947519)</comment>


Ask HN: How much bandwidth is actually used for sending a single character? - <AUTHOR> A single character is 1 byte , but how many bytes are actually used for sending a single character? Assuming TCP is used <comment><USER2> Size of Ethernet frame - 24 Bytes Size of IPv4 Header (without any options) - 20 bytes Size of TCP Header (without any options) - 20 Bytes So total size of empty TCP datagram - 24 + 20 + 20 = 64 bytes

total size of TCP datagram with 1 char - 24 + 20 + 20 + 1 = 65 bytes

<comment><AUTHOR> But there would be more data right? ACK packets and all</comment></comment>


Systemd has a problem with SATA disks behind port multipliers - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdSATAPortMultiplierProblem <comment><USER2> From reading the systemd developers' reactions to similar problems, earlier this year, it seems unlikely that M. Siebenmann will have much joy even if xe _does_ manage to get a bug report through.

* [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/2665/#issuecomment-1...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/2665/#issuecomment-186190469)

* [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/2500/#issuecomment-1...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/2500/#issuecomment-178071901)

* [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/2363#issuecomment-17...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/2363#issuecomment-173274244)

* [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/2500/#issuecomment-1...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/2500/#issuecomment-179177979)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3943](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3943)</comment>


NPR's Car Talk to end in September - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jOCGFHXdRDFYjEtqQss6Z1jiCmtg?docId=a86195c0202f48b7962a89b1807dbd4f

<comment><USER2> I remember the first time I heard Car Talk. They made some stupid joke and were laughing uproariously at it. I thought, "Who let these idiots on NPR?" Then they said, "And even though you're thinking, 'Who let these idiots on NPR?', this is National Public Radio." Instant fan.

<comment><USER3> It got tired after a few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Vehicles are a ubiquitous part of American culture and Car Talk shed light on an otherwise opaque world of mechanical wizardry. Click and Clack will be greatly missed.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think if we all at HN were born in the '30s or '40s, we would be tinkering with cars instead of computers. Likewise, if the Magliozzi brothers were born in our generation, they would be here with us on HN.

</comment><comment><USER6> I imagine a lot of young children bonded with their fathers over this show. My father and I have been listening for 20+ years. Car Talk will be greatly missed.

<comment><USER7> That was my experience. My Dad and I listened to to show together when we happened to be out in in the car on the weekend, and some of the stuff that was brought up lead to further discussion between us. These days: cannot stand the show; have not been able to for years. The laughing. Oh oh man, the laughing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every time my 5 year old daughter and I get in the car she'll ask me, "Is Car Talk on?" We'll sure miss listening to this show together.

<comment><USER9> Same here. And thanks to my phone, it always is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Their own statement on the Car Talk site: <http://www.cartalk.com/content/time-get-even-lazier>

I'll miss these guys, I listen to NPR saturday mornings on the internet wherever I am in the world.

</comment><comment><USER11> I couldn't care less about cars. But I love this show, their banter, and their ability to deduce the problem.

</comment><comment><USER12> They apparently plan to "repackage" the show... Cut calls together from various shows and represent it as new material. Grosses me out, but that's the plan.

<comment><USER13> Yes their devious plan to air reruns of a successful show, repackaged so only the most entertaining parts are included. Going to be hard to represent it as new material when they announced their retirement. You ought to crank down the sensitivity on your "things I get grossed out by" meter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would love to get a published collection of their brain teasers. Those were always a good way to pass time during car rides.

<comment><USER15> There's <http://www.cartalk.com/content/puzzlers> at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That show is one of my absolute favorites. Nothing else like it on NPR.

</comment><comment><USER17> Nooooooooo! I'm gonna miss Clik and Clak. My wife is not a talk radio listener, but she'll listen to Car Talk, and laugh. Sad to see them hang it up.</comment>


Facebook: We're Not Giving Out Your Number - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/08/11/facebook-phone-numbers/

<comment><USER2> There was a post about this months ago and I was surprised at the lack of uproar then.

The problem I have isn't with the numbers being there, after all I'm the moron who thought facebook would just get my friend's pictures and update my iphone contacts with them, NOT steal my phone numbers and upload them to their database and use them to recommend friends to me (heavy sarcasm intended) ... no, my problem is with the fact that the link to delete these phone numbers (this page [http://www.facebook.com/contact_importer/remove_uploads.php?...](http://www.facebook.com/contact_importer/remove_uploads.php?r=%2Fphonebook)) DOESN'T work ... it didn't work months ago and it still doesn't work and they don't give a damn about it, despite numerous complaints.

I had to go in this morning to delete the numbers I didn't want on there by hand (because I was reminded by that chain status message going around)... 150 of them ... one. by. one. It wasn't annoying at all.

I'm kidding. I'm PISSED OFF, but that doesn't matter, I'm just one more insignificant customer who will jump ship as soon as something better comes along, but that will never happen right?

Go facebook!

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the things that Reto Meier talked about at Google I/O this year is building apps that are "Psychic," e.g., using things like Contacts on the phone to make the user experience less painful. However, he cautioned against being too psychic because it might make users uneasy about what else is being accessed.

One of the things I like about the Facebook Android app (and by extension any Android app) is that you can go to the settings and see what permissions you granted the app when you installed it. In contrast, you can't tell whether an iOS app can access your contacts list.

Given the recent history of Facebook with respect to privacy, I'm not surprised that this bit of software magic was considered by the user base as something nefarious.

<comment><USER4> > However, he cautioned against being too psychic because it might make users > uneasy about what else is being accessed.

This is a theme I've come up against before. I worked for a company that did e-billing. When you signed up, it would go through the list of bills it was pretty sure were yours (because the billers would submit them, and it would match them against your profile information), display those, and then a list of bills that you PROBABLY had (companies that had a monopoly in your area, bills from companies that people LIKE you had, bills most people get, etc.) and display those under a different heading.

People _FREAKED OUT_. They'd call and wonder HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW WHAT BILLS I HAVE!?, in no uncertain terms.

Eventually, we had to "mix them up" and put ALL the bills into one big display, including bills that we were pretty certain you DIDN'T have (like Florida utilities for a Nebraska customer), just to give the customer the feeling that we weren't THAT psychic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The whole attitude behind this feature is gross. Regardless of whether the numbers are shown publicly, just because I install an app on my phone doesn't mean _help yourself to all my contacts_ and feel free to publish them to the web. It doesn't matter if it is not public.

Now my contact list is susceptible if Facebook gets hacked, and further, now governments can ask for the contacts on my phone and get them from Facebook!</comment>


A proper server naming scheme (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/ <comment><USER2> The mnemoic world list link in the article points to wayback machine, which is honoring robots.txt so it can't be displayed. But found an alternative here: [https://gist.github.com/ehedaya/2743dce1f0d1e8375367](https://gist.github.com/ehedaya/2743dce1f0d1e8375367)</comment>


Systemd for Developers I (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/socket-activation.html <comment> vezzy-fnord I think it's unfortunate that Lennart didn't continue this series. The last installment was III in October 2012.

These articles actually provided some valuable insight into the internals of systemd, rather than the highly abstract and inconsistent descriptions that have generally been given for systemd throughout the years.

I actually remember seeing an infographic comparison that was taken from Ohloh, showing systemd, Upstart and OpenRC. systemd trumped the other two in SLOC, contributor counts, repository activity, but it was absolutely devastated in one area... source code comments.

The systemd codebase is quite opaque to follow. I guess you could say most codebases are, as we have yet to develop any sufficiently advanced tools to assist in reading and instrumenting source code beyond scoping and IDE-style symbol relation trees. But it's still excessively inaccessible, I find.

That said, systemd has changed radically since 2012, now using its own homegrown kdbus layer called sd-bus which currently communicates through a shim that translates kdbus calls into dbus1. There's been new generators, networkd, resolved, prerequisites for kmscon, additions to journald like compression, and so much more. It really is a beast.

Instead, they seem to have thrown their hands in the air and said it "Fuck it, we're doing a second kernel." (as this year's GNOME Asia talk elucidated).

For those who say systemd is well documented because "look at all the damn manpages", those manpages are often inconsistent, incomplete, vague or otherwise unhelpful to understanding systemd on a level beyond that of a cursory end user.

Which is probably why both systemd proponents and opponents are all totally confused in the entire mess, both thinking they've grokked it and all of them looking like fools. I guess when you have PR like Red Hat alternately calling systemd a "service manager", "system manager", "init daemon", "basic userspace building block to make a Linux-based OS from", "a general system framework to unify Linux work" and whatnot, you get a whole bunch of chaos.

<comment><USER2> > it was absolutely devastated in one area... source code comments.

It is arguable whether this is a downside. I think that comments mean that source code itself is not readable enough. Comments should be used sparingly - only in exceptional conditions.

<comment><USER3> >It is arguable whether this is a downside or not.

No it isn't. Software developers have been saying for 30-40 years "the code is readable as is", yet we keep coming up with easier to read languages, and comments are still in the spec of all these languages.

Comments are important, it's not worth arguing if the code is readable or not. It's a waste of time that could be spent better documenting what ever you consider readable. Because your co-workers, or co-contributors may have a different definition of what readable is.

<comment><USER2> > Because your co-workers, or co-contributors may have a different definition > of what readable is.

The same could be said about comments. You can always say they are not enough. As I said - comments have their use - in my opinion for the cases where language is not flexible enough to express intent in a readable way.

<comment><USER4> Or you're implementing an odd algorithm where a pointer to the paper, etc, describing it is located so that co-workers, etc, know what's going on. Or you're working around architectural limitations, such as doing work on microcontrollers, where you don't always have your preferred integer size to work with. Or working around bugs and/or poor naming conventions in other peoples' software. Yes, your code may be beautiful and cause angels to sing, but it's going to be working with code belched from the deep bowels of hell, and giving others clues as to why you're doing things in non-intuitive manners is not just useful, but needed.

<comment><USER2> I agree, though in my experience all the cases you enumerated are not norm but exceptions to it.

<comment><USER5> I think the point is that in writing something like systemd it's more likely to be the norm than if you were, say, writing a Ruby server.

<comment><USER2> Point taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Quick question re using systemctl to check status on machine running SSH on a non-standard port. Is it possible?

So, for example, I have no problems with "systemctl --host email@example.com status httpd.service". But I would _like_ to be able to do "systemctl --host firstname.lastname@example.com --port 2255". The manpages seems to only show "\--host" as an option with no ability to specify "\--port". Grepping through the code left me no wiser, so was hoping someone in the know could confirm/deny.

(The specific case is that I have a bunch of VMs controlled by VirtualBox and am redirecting localhost ports e.g. 2255 to guest port 22. I can of course run "ssh -l me -p 2255 localhost "systemctl status httpd.service".)</comment>


Chrome is right to remove its bad webRequest extension API - <AUTHOR> https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/removing-webrequest-api <comment><USER2> > …but the proposed declarativeNetRequest API isn't a good replacement. So > where does that leave us?

Exactly. The issue is Google is using the removal of this "bad API" as an excuse to end ad-blocking in Chrome. If it _only_ wanted to remove the bad API and secure users, it would have announced a better alternative for ad-blockers at the same time.</comment>


Ask HN: Other than Sourceforge, are there any sites to publish your software? - <AUTHOR> Publish or share.<p>In my case, it's for regular users. <comment><USER2> Github. Gitlab.</comment>