Bill Gross of PIMCO calls an end to the 30 year bull market in bonds - <AUTHOR> http://www.pimco.com/Pages/RunTurkeyRun.aspx

<comment><USER2> As much as I want to defer to the expertise of the author, to say that there's been a 30-year bull market in bonds is to say that there was at least a 20-year bear market before 1983. This may be the long term trend, but within that is up and down like you'd expect in the business cycle. The confusing thing is that those who are buying bonds are bearish about the economy as a whole. You have to be buying these things thinking they won't be wasteful when interest rates rise. If interest rates skyrocket like many voices claim they will, those who are holding 0.25% paper are going to be unhappy when they are unloading it at 80 cents on the dollar.

His discussion of the matter seems very confused. The problem with the bond market right now is that there is no inflation, but real returns elsewhere are often negative. So bonds are a safe place to put money. It's certainly not being invested. Now, one can argue whether the Fed has any ability to affect that. The clock may have run out on quantitative easing, as I have heard argued. That means the Fed would be somewhat irrelevant and the US economy would falter in the absence of fiscal stimulus.

There aren't many voices articulating sense in this discussion. Many have simply said "deficits bad" and called on increasing unemployment as the solution to our concerns. Good luck with that. I think the solution probably requires preventing the unemployed from becoming the desperately long-term unemployed, at a minimum, and also using the favorable bond situation to repair infrastructure, which is apparently in huge backlogs across the country.

To some extent, I wonder if Bill Gross is really just sort of pandering to his clientele, who are not sophisticated economists and who are happy to agree that politics is full of apes. After all, at the end, his call to action is for a vote of confidence in PIMCO. This article doesn't give me much faith, but I suppose if he hit the right buttons, his investors might just pull that lever, and keep sending the money his way.

<comment><USER3> Over the last 30 years bond yields have fairly steadily declined. Admittedly with variation, but the trend has been clear. However there is no way for them to decline further at this point - they can't go much below 0%. (They can go below 0%, Treasuries did briefly during the crisis, but not by much.) Furthermore in the last 30 years we've seen the broad expansion of bond categories like junk bonds and securitized bonds. This has resulted in great growth in the bond market, and it simply doesn't have room to grow by that much again. (Indeed fallout from the subprime debacle is likely to make it shrink going forward.)

Prior to that the advent of increasing inflation rates winding up with stagflation did constitute, from the point of the bond market, a long and nasty bear market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "This isn't a choice between chocolate and vanilla folks, it's all rocky road: a few marshmallows to get you excited before the election, but with a lot of nuts to ruin the aftermath."

That pretty much sums up modern politics for me, and I was a crazed politico just a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER5> Tough call with real interest rates at zero or negative.

The Fed has created a bond market bubble to replace the last couple that popped. They mean well, not wanting Mom to default on her upside-down, floating rate mortgage. But they are not doing us any favors in the long run by threatening the value of money.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's certainly troubling; I'm skeptical of inflation panic but Bill Gross isn't known for being a doomsayer.

<comment><USER5> To your point about PIMCO, I agree. They make a living offering people a way to own bonds. The call must be past obvious to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article points out a couple of important points: \- it's a giant ponzi scheme of the likes never seen before, so the outcome is far from certain, but no ponzi scheme ever ends well for all involved. \- because everyone expects QEII to happen, it should be already priced in. So the effects can only really change things if it is either more or less than expected. \- For people like me who price in USD but spend in another currency, this is becoming more and more difficult to bear. I have to increase revenue by 20% per year in order to just stay still. With further inflation of the USD. -Those who think that inflation can be carefully controlled are not conversant with history. When inflation outbreaks occur, they are by nature uncontrolled.

Basically the post Bretton-Woods era is coming to a close, and history is being made. Nobody knows what will happen.

<comment><USER7> That it is "priced in" only means that the probabilistic effect of it is priced in : what is priced in is its probability of working (p) times its effect (e). As things play out, p will get closer to 0 or 1. That things don't change immediately after the announcement does not mean that e is zero or that p*e is zero.

That you have to grow revenues by 20% a year to stay still does not necessarily mean that you are getting screwed. It may mean that the value of your services (at least from the economies that can buy them) are becoming less useful due either to cheaper competition or simply lack of need in a less sophisticated economy.

Side question : why 20%? I don't think the dollar index is weakening and currently there is very low inflation or slight deflation.

Is there an alternative to trying to control inflation? Are you saying that energy spent trying to do it is wasted or that inflation would be stable with no intervention?

<comment><USER6> >why 20%

I earn in USD, I don't spend in USD. Therefore I am exposed to currency fluctuations. In this case it is USD depreciation because of inflation expectations and virtually negative interest rate.

The USD has lost 20% in the last 12-18 months against many currencies. I'm getting screwed because the actions of a country I have no say in are systematically devaluing their currency, which happens to be the 'standard' pricing unit of the internet. There's not much I can do about either. So two forces beyond my control are conspiring to make me earn less for the same amount of work. That's getting screwed in my book.

The value of the products/services is exactly the same. It's the pricing units that are changing, and changing fast. People inside the USA don't notice this because they earn and consume in USD, until they start looking at a trip somewhere else. Importing companies haven't really started to adjust prices yet, but the day is coming soon when imported items really start to jump in price.

Is there an alternative to trying to control inflation? Well, QE doesn't control inflation, it creates it. If you're going to accept that a central bank should have pricing power over money, then you have to accept the tools they use to create inflation and disinflation.

My stance is that stable monetary periods are periods of growth and prosperity. All paper currencies eventually reach their net worth - which is zero. The USD is one of the longest lasting currencies in the history of the world, but nearly 100 years ago it was given over to a central bank, and nearly 40 years ago it was turned into a purely paper currency. In that time period it has lost nearly 95% of it's value. While that stimulates certain types of economic activity, my personal belief is that the bad has probably outweighed the good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It will be interesting to see how (and how quickly) Treasury yields rise when they ultimately do. I suspect that the longer the Fed keeps up T-bill purchases, the more violent will be either the collapse of bond prices when they finally pull out or the greater the rate of inflation when they don't pull out early enough.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's been a lot of speculation on the condition of the US bond market in the recent years. For PIMCO and Bill Gross to come straight out and call a spade a spade confirms the speculation.

The US is caught in currents that lead in two general directions: one, a slow recovery with a soft landing; two, a slow recovery with a very hard landing. There's nothing positive to look forward to.</comment>


Ask HN: Are coupon sites worth having as affiliates? - <AUTHOR> As a software developer we have a lot of affiliates who own coupon websites. I'm unsure of their value, meaning would we get those sales they're sending us anyway? So we're just paying money for sales that people would have found via search. Eg, they search our product + discount. Does anyone know how we can track this? <comment><USER2> If you're selling a commodity product available on multiple websites, having a presence on coupon and cashback websites can help you capture some of the aggressively frugal customers. However, you need to be prepared to have the best deals if you want these customers.

On the other hand, if your product is only available on your website, you don't need to compete as much on price. In this case, coupons are more useful for generating a sense of urgency. If you offer coupons sparingly and with specific time limits, the frugal customers can feel compelled to order now before the price goes back up. However, you have to balance this against a perception than they can get a better price by waiting for the next coupon to appear. Use this opportunity to capture them into your e-mail marketing campaign (Sign up to get news and special coupons).

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know how we can track this?

Do you actually have any active coupons?</comment>


How Elon Musk Thinks: Reasoning from First Principles. - <AUTHOR> http://www.oninnovation.com/videos/detail.aspx?video=1251 <comment><USER2> I think Musk is right to point out that many people don't reason from first principles-- basically, that they consciously decide not to think about something, but to allow other's thinking to guide their thoughts. ("It has always been done this way")

I recently began teaching in a school where students are required to write extensively in every class, including "extras" like PE, Music, or Art. I've found that, generally, students who have been subjected to that system for a number of years are far better at reasoning (and expressing that reasoning, naturally) than those who are new to the school. (It is astonishing how quickly new students, who inevitably struggle with complex reasoning at the beginning of the school year have made leaps and bounds in this area, and are far more skilled at verbal reasoning by the end of the school year).

All of which is to say: I think that this style of thinking is greatly buttressed by enhanced linguistic ability, as language is critical to higher- level thinking.

Very interesting video, and the interactive transcript was extremely cool.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a little suspicious of people who claim to think "everything" through from "first principles" (whatever those are).

Where do you get your first principles from?

If you get them from observing the world around you, how do you decide what parts to pay more or less attention to?

While you're deciding things from first principles (and coming up with those first principles), how do you make decisions in the mean time?

Note that in physics, computing things "from first principles" is often done to attempt to recreate a result that's already been reached by other approaches, to attempt to verify that you've got the right set of first principles.

<comment><USER4> Your first principles are the constituents of your worldview. Put in reverse: You worldview is the sum of your first principles.

Unfortunately, understanding your world view is a daunting task. This is why most people don't start with first principles. They have yet to know them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The transcript on the right is the same as the video, and easier to read.

I think this is great overall. However, I think he's wrong at the very end. People aren't just hardware and software; they're hardware, software, and the thinking they have done (call it "free will" if you want). That accounts for a lot of the differences in people.

<comment><USER6> Or it's software that keeps writing more software, thereby modifying itself and sometimes its hardware.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I think that's probably more accurate. Anyway, the point is that the end of the interview is a fallacious denial of that which is commonly called free will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's ironic that Elon Musk starts off by railing against reasoning by analogy and then ends up with analogizing human behavior using the technological metaphor of his age.

<comment><USER7> More specifically, it's our tendency to rely on the current technological metaphor to analogize the brain that contributes to misunderstanding and false equivalency: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/metaphors.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this ability is really valuable, but there's so many barriers to people getting experience with it.

To do it, you have to venture into the unknown without a map. You have to make the map yourself, and you have to figure out how to do that. You don't know how long that will take, but it is likely to take quite a while. While you're working at it you will not have a very clear understanding of exactly what your position is, and you won't be able to articulate it clearly to others. And of course you will have to go against what "everybody knows" (but really just think they know).

There's so many barriers to this that come from our social and institutional norms, where it's generally expected that you can explain what you're doing, that you can say why it is better, that you can estimate how long it will take, etc, and where it's frowned upon if you can't do these things. And where it's generally frowned upon to "have the arrogance" to "go against" what people of high-standing came up with or take to be true.

</comment><comment><USER9> In the end he says that after having had 5 kids he believes that nature has a much stronger impact on people's personalities than nurture. That surprised me, I wish he could have elaborated on it.

<comment><USER10> Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is a spirited and informed articulation of this view.

<comment><USER11> That book is excellent. In the same vein, you can read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, or if you want to dig deeper, check out the studies cited in those books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I didn't think much of the video, but I liked the "Interactive Transcript" widget on the right side of the video.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm all down for first-principles reasoning, but I don't like that term for some reason. For some reason it makes me think it's unduly favoring deduction and making assumptions whenever possible, even though it's not. If you start from good first principles, like the axioms of probability theory, all of a sudden you get inductive inference and deductive as a special case. Yay! Nevertheless I'd still more enjoy shouting "Baaaaaaaayes!" from the rooftops than "First Principles!"

</comment><comment><USER14> Say basically ayn rands "existence exist"

That's not first principles just to be clear.

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh the arrogance....the pride... my head hurts.

"First principles"... Must be that our interpretation of physics is THE first principles.

<comment><USER16> From the context in which he's saying it, I don't think he means it in the sense you're thinking. I thought his reference to physics was an analogy, not an exact statement. I took it to mean more "don't assume that what you hear is true, if what you conclude based on the things you know is different, you should go with that."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If it's really a first principle then there should be only one of them. This is very important if you want to understand the world completely.</comment>


I criticized 'South Park' for spawning a generation of trolls - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/21/i-criticized-south-park-spawning-generation-trolls-so-trolls-came-me/ <comment><USER2> I never thought of South Park as nihilistic. The show regularly examines meaningful social issues despite its comedic delivery. They just do not seem to be aligned with US party politics very well.

But that does not seem to be the core message of the article, which is that someone tweeted something about a show and got an unexpected, disproportionate and apparently also very rude reaction.

I think that's largely a problem of Twitter. It's structures (public by default, designed to cut context, encouraging brevity, enabeling users to bring their followers as some kind of drive-by audience etc.) appear to me to make piling and bullying a very rewarding experience.

<comment><USER3> Here's one of her comments ( she did a thread) before it hit....

"Matt and Trey are rich white guys and they convinced a generation of scared, vulnerable young men that irony will never hurt them."

It's hard to know what to say to that. It's something that just shouldn't be published. But that's what Twitter, it is a publishing house that allows these quips out.</comment></comment>


Daisy: A private blockchain where blocks are SQLite databases, in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ivoras/daisy <comment><USER2> Everything abut this feels like the most terrible idea ever, but in such a _fascinating_ way. It's beautiful.

<comment><USER3> My thought EXACTLY. Can't wait to play around with this...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the point of using a blockchain in this way?

Bitcoin's blockchain is necessary because newer blocks need to inherit the proof-of-work done on previous blocks, since the correct chain will be the one with the most cumulative work in it (presuming it's also valid). So it needs to be a sequential list of blocks, where each new block references the previous one.

But I can't see why this is useful when a) proof-of-work isn't used and b) blocks are separate databases. Why not just have one, big database and accept commits into this if they're signed with the expected private keys?

<comment><USER5> You could probably probably get away with putting a single sqlite database on IPFS and using IPNS to point to the latest version and achieve the same thing. IFPS' block level deduplication means you'd only have to download the changes if the database receives a new update.

I'd like to see a decentralised database that doesn't require downloading the entire dataset. It should be possible to implement index-only queries that don't need to do a full table scan and therefore could run entirely in a browser. The only problem is that having an index for every possible query means the indices require more data than the dataset itself.

<comment><USER6> Something like [https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent- net](https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net) ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From what I read, any holder of a private key that is accepted as authoritative can add data to the chain at will and without restriction. The consensus algorithm would then allow that user to rewrite the entirety of the blockchain at will from the point their key was trusted forward by simply creating a longer chain at no cost. What am I missing?

<comment><USER4> > What am I missing?

You're not missing anything, in my opinion.

Private blockchains make little sense, and the standard rebuttal of this simply lists a large number of "potential applications", without going into detail on any of them and explaining how a private blockchain solves that specific problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Government employ working on publishing government documents here. This looks very interesting. What if a private key is leaked (by accident or on purpose)? It would be good to have multiple branches of government sign the published documents.

Is there a small tutorial on how to quickly set this up for demo and evaluation?

</comment><comment><USER9> There is something I don't get about the databases distributed : they are read/write, and their data is not part of what is distributed in p2p, is that right? It seems to be what means "Block payloads are SQLite database files. Except for special metadata tables, their content is not enforced".

If that's so, what is the purpose of distributing blank sqlite databases (with exception of blockchain keys metadata)? Also, how is it p2p distributed if several users may have the sqlite databases in different state (and thus, different sqlite files)?

<comment><USER10> My understanding is the data is distributed, the metadata tables are enforced by the blockchain protocol, but the contents are free to be whatever the writer wants to put in the database. Once it's written, the metadata/protocol enforces the integrity of the data on the blockchain.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, it would make sense. "Content is not enforced" would mean "content data structure is up to block creator". Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel like people are actively trying to mash up technologies just because. No real benefit, just toy projects.

<comment><USER12> So? Just for fun is not allowed anymore?

<comment><USER11> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ idk I'd rather it be on Show HN than front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was on posted as Show HN six days ago but didn't generate any discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14512531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14512531)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks interesting, but I feel like it's conflating two equally interesting ideas, "what if only certain nodes could make new blocks" and "what if the blocks had some kind of structured data".

I think moving those into two separate but compatible projects might help both of them take off.

<comment><USER14> Private versions of Ethereum do both things; JP Morgan is leading the charge on this with their Quorum software. But it's object-structured data instead of SQL.

[https://www.jpmorgan.com/country/US/EN/Quorum](https://www.jpmorgan.com/country/US/EN/Quorum)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thinking twice about it, there is something exciting here about the concept.

Of all databases, sqlite has this special interest : it's the perfect tool to be embedded as local database in clients.

Now, if we consider that blockchain is a new p2p effort to build decentralized softwares, putting sqlite on a blockchain makes a lot of sense : this is a mean to distribute data for decentralized apps.

It also makes sense in an era where data mining becomes a thing on its own, and not just as part of a software stack.

Now, this is clearly not a drop in for our usual database on our server (where latency and concurrent writing is the topmost concern, two points which are blockchains weak points - and sqlite weakpoints), but there is certainly something to explore there.

<comment><USER15> See [https://github.com/pixelspark/catena](https://github.com/pixelspark/catena) \- does exactly this.

<comment><USER9> Love this. Catana and Daisy have different approaches, Daisy is distributing databases that can bootstrap an offline app, while Catana is truly a decentralized online database. Both are really interesting ideas, thanks for pointing it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why store a database file in each block when you could also store transactions? This is what Catena does: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548174). Also allows for some interesting things you can do with privileges, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand. The added value of a blockchain compared to a simple distributed store is that peers who don't want to trust each other need to get to an agreement. All the examples look like they can be solved with a standard distributed store like a set of couchDB instances where no deletion can happen.

</comment><comment><USER17> If a blockchain is a public ledger, what is a private blockchain?

<comment><USER10> A blockchain is a distributed ledger, not necessarily public, although bitcoin, being the most famous, is public.

In this implementation it seems anyone can read the blockchain, but writing to it is permissioned/controlled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's the difference/benefits from, for example, having a feed to stream pgp signed data where signature is for the current and previous message for example?

<comment><USER19> You just described a blockchain/DLT...</comment></comment>


Thinking about the Librem 5, why is it so expensive? - <AUTHOR> There have been a few news stories and articles recently of people walking around some Shenzhen market putting together phones from components very cheaply. How hard would it be to put together a "Linux phone" that was only $200 instead of the $700 for the Librem 5. <comment><USER2> We can still pre-order at a little discount, until 31 Jan. I'd love to see the business actuals for this device. Apple charges this level or more for theirs, with have the world's largest economy of scale. Purism is tiny by any measure, compared to Apple, so I would speculate they are not taking a big margin on it. Am I off base?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, not suggesting that they were taking a big margin, I was thinking that I don't want a very powerful phone, I recently chose a Nokia 3.1 and have been very happy with it ($250 AUD), but would also like it to run Linux instead of Android. All I want is a phone calls, sms, camera, maps, and browser. (And a few other minor things like clocks and alarms and things.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would you please post a few links to the news stories and articles you mention? I would very much like to read them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been looking for the one I read earlier in the week but can't find it. It must have been from some big site because there was a video of the presenter walking around with a local, then they put the phone together in a MacDonalds right near the marker where they picked the components from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shouldn't their slogan be

"At last, a modern smartphone you can truly own." ?

</comment><comment><USER5> What software stack do you intend to run on the phone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Dunno, same as Librem?</comment></comment>


AMD's Vision: The chip race is finally over - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/05/12/amds-vision-the-chip-race-is-finally-over/ <comment><USER2> The race isnt over, only the metrics changed a) Battery life. b) Number of cores c) Can it run 1080p videos in Adobe Flash.</comment>


Build and Analyze podcast ending December 17 - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2012/11/18/build-analyze-ending

<comment><USER2> I'd like to know what others think about other podcasts he's listed (especially, <http://www.coreint.org> and <http://developingperspective.com>). I was never a B&A fan, but enjoyed _technical_ episodes of Hypercritical (those about programming languages, time machine, file systems, etc.) immensely (even though they were inaccurate at times, but John would address those in the next episodes and all of us would be wiser). Do you recommend these podcasts, or any other podcasts like those I mentioned from Hypercritical? Thanks.

<comment><USER3> +1 for Core Intuition and Developing Perspectives. Identical Cousins is a bit of a "meh", to my ears. Haven't listened to any of the others (giving debug and CMD+SPACE a try now).

If you want _technical_ stuff, check out Edge Cases (<https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/edge-cases/id538007855>).

<comment><USER2> I'm _so_ ashamed of myself now... It never occurred to me that I can fire up iTunes and search for, for example, cocoa or test or bdd in Podcasts...

Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny to see this, since I just recently thought about unsubscribing from B&A in Downcast. The thought would have never crossed my mind a few months ago, but Marco's right.

Episodes started veering into niche discussions specific to iOS developers (see the episode on in-app vs. iOS-level settings). Occasionally Marco and Dan would discuss the mobile market but their opinions are established after >100 episodes, so we never saw any surprises there. The overall effect, though, was a show that felt "ready."

I'm one of the people that emailed or tweeted at Marco whenever I disagreed with him, but I'll miss this show. B&A started two years ago when I was just wrapping my head around Python, and I really enjoyed hearing people geek out about development (and coffee and cars and...) during a time when I was just realizing that an engineer's life doesn't mean writing some terrible language alone in a cubicle.

Thanks to these guys for the good run. Siracusa will have to fly the geek banner a bit higher now.

<comment><USER5> Ironically, I actually _just_ started listening to Build and Analyze a few episodes ago, because I was like "wow, this is lots of great details about iOS app development and design!"

One person's trash...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Arrested Development ended right before Michael met Rita.

For shame!

<http://stockholm-syndrome.com/AD/tobias-underwater.mp3>

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems that with the success of The Magazine there's more than ever to talk about on B&A, but I'm guessing he's wanting to do something closer to what Gruber is doing: rotate authors through as co-hosts every week and have them discuss their articles and the latest Apple news. And I suppose this format is incompatible with the current way the show is structured with Dan.

</comment><comment><USER8> I definitely understand the feeling that the podcast has become stale. I still enjoy it very much, but topics have had to become more and more specific lately and as such I feel the show runs the risk of losing its "timeless" quality. However, I do hope that Marco considers staying with 5by5 when he does decide what he wants to do next. Mule Radio is great too but I really love the dynamic that Dan brings to all of his podcasts.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hypercritical will also be coming to an end according to the 5by5 State of the Union.

<http://5by5.tv/specials/10>

<comment><USER10> Marco's post lists some iOS, Mac (dev & news) podcasts, but I'm not aware of any good "replacement" of John Siracusa's one. While he's not always right--is any of us?--I really enjoy the depth he likes to go into the subjects he picks. So, question is: does anyone know any similar podcasts to Hypercritical?

<comment><USER9> Sadly, no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pretty much my sole use for Yahoo Pipes these days is filtering out any mentions of "episode" or "podcast" from tech RSS feeds. Why does anyone spend 30+ minutes listening to a) recaps of a previous episode, b) padding and filler, just to get c) the bad delivery of a central idea that takes 4x as long as reading it?

If these things had the production values or compelling continuous narratives of something like This American Life, I could see the point. But every time I listen to one, it's a blog post plus inane comments section, being read out by people with voices for typing. Such a waste of time when there is a sea of quality radio out there.

<comment><USER2> Some people commute, and find listening to podcasts is a better use of their time than listening to music. Some, like me, gain value from _some_ episodes of _some_ podcasts - for me, B&A wasn't one of them, but the early (1-20) and mid (40-50) episodes of Hypercritical[1] (by John Siracusa) were _really_ educating. I learned _a lot_ from those episodes.

However I don't like it when they talk about next Apple event or iPhone, or endless discussions about app.net/twitter/... and wish Hypercritical was a more _technical_ show (after weeks, the last episode in Intel chips was a bit satisfactory, so I hope they put twitter/iPhone discussions to rest).

[1]: <http://5by5.tv/hypercritical>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mule Radio Syndicate show in 3...2...

<comment><USER13> When it comes to podcasting, Marco and Gruber are on two different levels; I don't think Arment is jumping ship for the sake of money.

<comment><USER12> While my comment was a bit flip and I'm not saying it was a money based, I do think there may be a bit of truth to it. Arment makes it clear he is still going to podcast, so clearly he thinks that it is the format of Build & Analyze that was growing stale, not his voice/ideas or the medium. If the problem didn't lay in the format, he could easy just make the necessary adjustments within the current podcast and avoid having to rebuild an audience. Considering the format of B&A is essentially the 5by5 standard, I imagine he is going to be jumping ship (in a much less controversial way) and wouldn't be surprised if he emulates Gruber. Or make something called The Podcast and have it be an offshoot of The Magazine.

Of course, this is all blind speculation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 'Build and Analyze' has not become 'stale and repetitive' in my opinion and I will miss the show. From my own blogging experience, however, I understand that Marco wants to end his successful show on a high note. Being the host of a weekly podcast show is quite a burden and his other projects (in a wider sense, i.e. Instapaper, The Magazine, wife and child etc.) are probably challenging enough. In addition, the show has probably become less important from a marketing perspective. Anyway, thanks a lot to Dan and Marco for many great episodes! :)

</comment><comment><USER14> I understand his decision though, show was becoming a bit redundant, he did point out a lot of good stuff throughout the way. Less shows for me to watch on 5by5 now, this one and Grubber where the most interesting ones IMO.

</comment><comment> why-el I am sure this is very irrelevant, but anybody else thinks season 5 of The Wire was that bad? I think it was outstanding.

<comment><USER15> Bitey, the fake serial killer? Super-Omar jumping out of the window? "The Dickensian aspect"?

The middle seasons of The Wire were about the city of Baltimore. The first season was an excellent long-form procedural.

By the last season, Simon seems intent on retrofitting a structure of "each season is about one failed institution" --- the police, the working class, then politics, then schools. For the last season, Simon chose the news media, a subject dear to his heart. But whether newspapers just make for boring TV (see _The Newsroom_ for more evidence) or the story arcs from the last seasons just brought too much baggage, the season was unbalanced and disconnected. Each season involved some degree of suspension of disbelief, but by the last season The Wire was trying to do so much that it was impossible to ignore how silly the whole serial killer plot really was.

<comment><USER16> Actually, Omar jumping out of the window to escape an ambush was something that one of the real-life guys he was based on (Donnie Andrews) actually did. The only thing that was made up about that was in the show they had him jump out of the fourth floor because they felt that people wouldn't believe it if they showed him doing what Donnie actually did - jumping out of a sixth floor window and limping away.

<http://www.vice.com/read/david-simon-280-v16n12> (about half way down the page).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> BUT WHAT ABOUT HYPERCRITICAL

</comment><comment><USER18> Back to Work is next.</comment>


Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (2003) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.pdf <comment><USER2> There are some great videos by the author on the same subject at: [http://videolectures.net/course_information_theory_pattern_r...](http://videolectures.net/course_information_theory_pattern_recognition/) They cover a lot of the same ground but in a gentler way so they're good for building intuition before working through the book fully.

<comment><USER3> These look great, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> David MacKay's landing page: [http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/)

Other formats are available along with some other information.

David's course and drafts of this book were my introduction to machine learning. It starts out very accessible (for those with maths at undergraduate science-subject level or a very good high-school), and also contains more dense advanced material later on. This is a book with hidden gems throughout that you can return to many times.

</comment><comment><USER5> I read a chapter of the book, it criticizes non Bayesian statistics too much. For example at discussing p-values. The p-value method is for getting sound results but not for interpreting the particular value obtained in one experiment, for example 5% is for being right 19 of 20 times, the numbers obtained in the experiments doesn't change this.

<comment><USER6> The author is trying to present a probabalistic framework for reasoning about the world. The issue with p-values is that they have a narrow band of utility, and can't really contribute much to the process of inference as a whole; you can say no to a nearly infinite number of absurd propositions and still not be able to say anything insightful about a system. On top of that, p-values are clearly not intuitive, as demonstrated by their widespread misuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> honestly, i tried reading through the initial chapters, and found them too be waay too much for me. any pointers to gentler introduction to the subject matter ? thank you !

<comment><USER8> Only 24 hours in a day, and so much to learn about.

<comment><USER7> > Only 24 hours in a day, and so much to learn about.

why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous ?</comment></comment></comment>


Samsung warns customers not to discuss personal info in front of their TV - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/xor/status/564356757007261696/photo/1

<comment><USER2> Really can't believe the diff here, nice catch.

<comment><USER3>
      $ diff -s samsungpolicy.txt orwell1984.txt
      Files samsungpolicy.txt and orwell1984.txt are identical</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the baseline for cloud tech knowledge in modern web dev jobs? - <AUTHOR> In most of my career, I've taught myself many programming concepts and different languages based on what I started out with. I'm comfortable with design patterns, many algorithms, certain monolithic applications, and know enough about databases to get a local app up and running fast. I've used a variety of languages and frameworks including JavaScript, Vue, React, PHP, and Ruby on Rails.
I am not so familiar the modern deploy and automate side of things. I cannot tell you, for instance, how to leverage AWS to optimize a website I made, once it goes online. However, more and more jobs are requiring it, so I must learn to stay on point. But I don't know what is "enough" for a good starting point with talking about it at web dev job interviews.
From 2008-2013 the deployment workflow at my jobs was similar: Setup DNS and databases with your hosting service, upload website files directly via FTP, and migrate database. Following that time, I rarely did any of that and almost all of my work has been in local machine space. If I needed to upload code to a source code repository, I use Git. If I wanted to demo a side project online, I use Heroku.
It's a big ocean to start Googling for tutorials for things like AWS, Azure, data stores and the like. What are some good starting points? Or books to read (I prefer free ones)? In a post-cloud, post-Kubernetes world, what is the minimum standard for entry in web dev jobs? <comment><USER2> I recently made a career transition from SWE to DevOps/SRE role. The big difference is tooling - IaC tools like terraform/ansible/chef is a must because automation is key. Those are also like scripting languages (declarative/procedural) instead of OO.

Generally requires a different thinking too - when you develop code on localhost you can ignore all the networking constraints, monitoring, logging etc.

In a production system those components are critical, so the focus becomes more on understanding how the full system functions, rather than just the business logic of the code.

A lot depends on experience but I think in general it's better to move from Dev -> DevOps than from Ops -> DevOps. Especially now that IaC is the primary tool that you would use.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can only speak based on my personal experience, which is anecdotal, but I think a good starting point would be learning to duplicate the deployments you're familiar with, in AWS. Some simple projects would be:

\- Spin up an EC2 instance, set up SSL, configure webserver, deploy application.

\- Create an AMI from your instance, destroy instance and restore from AMI.

\- Host a static site on S3.

\- Use an IAC (Infrastructure as Code) tool to provision resources - CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.

\- Use CodeBuild and github to setup a continuous deployment pipeline.

Each of these little projects can be done in a day or two, if you can do them all, you'll know your way around AWS and be able to do some useful things.

Some (paid) resources I've found helpful are [https://acloud.guru/](https://acloud.guru/) and [https://linuxacademy.com/](https://linuxacademy.com/)

Good luck!</comment>


Teens playing with laser injure helicopter pilots - <AUTHOR> http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/01/03/1998113/teens-playing-with-laser-injure.html

<comment><USER2> At that distance the beam has dispersed quite a bit and has hit more than enough particles of water and other stuff in the air as well as Rayleigh (sp?) scattering that I find the story somewhat unbelievable.

Your typical laser pointer is not collimated to the degree required to do damage at that distance, a few hundred feet and you're looking at a spot size way too large to do physical harm. It would still blind you for a bit and it's definitely irresponsible and illegal but that alone should be enough.

The chances of hitting both pilots in their left eye while their right eyes remain undamaged is interesting in itself, possibly they should do a control on this by testing other helicopter pilots directly after flight for similar symptoms when they've not been hit by a laser pointer.</comment>


Half Life 2 runs on ReactOS for the very first time - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1Ft6b8BoKg <comment><AUTHOR> Half Life 2 almost runs on ReactOS inside of VirtualBox! Software GPU emulation via SwiftShader and -dxlevel 80 startup option were used.</comment>


A Conversation with Christos Papadimitriou - <AUTHOR> http://www.ddj.com/architect/208807268

<comment><USER2> I've seen this guy speak and read Turing. Looking forward to Logicomics.</comment>


Hylas-Lisp - A JIT-compiled Lisp targeting LLVM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/eudoxia0/Hylas-Lisp

<comment><USER3> I like this trend toward wide-spectrum languages. For other recent examples, see Terra and Nimrod (I realize Nimrod has been around for a while, but seems like it's recently gaining significant popularity).

It's nice how closely languages like Python and Lua and integrated C through their various FFIs (particularly Luajit's FFI), but it's still a huge pain in the ass to continuously context switch between languages whenever you have to drop down and do something low-level, or to improve performance. I hope at least one of these languages catches on in the wider programming community so I'll have a chance to use it in "real world" programming.

</comment><comment><USER4> How does this compare with extempore? More specifically xtlang which seems to have similar goals. [http://extempore.moso.com.au](http://extempore.moso.com.au)

<comment><USER5> Wow, this blows my mind up, thanks for posting. Immediately had a look if it was already discussed on HN and to my surprise it went completely unnoticed! So here the links:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397123)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125339)

<comment><USER5> After having slept over it I re-posted it on HN, because I am convinced it needs more attention. So in case you stumble over this comment, the new post is: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6640244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6640244)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> as people said on reddit, the CL timing on the chart is "bogus" [http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1pgdyo/hylaslisp/](http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1pgdyo/hylaslisp/)

<comment><USER6> Indeed (author here). Aside from Fibonacci being a worthless benchmark, the Common Lisp code was unoptimized and running on CLISP(!) on Windows(!!). Moreover, it was from an old version of the compiler. The benchmark just sat there for a while as I rewrote it from C++ in Common Lisp, and it was stupid of me to let it hang around for so long.

<comment><AUTHOR> side note: as long as your jitted-llvm time is correct, then it speaks for itself, people shouldn't really care how much faster hylas is compared to any lisp implementation (even though it's in the chart).

ps: I really like the WSL side of things, as a lispos/lispmachine daydreamer, I'm impatient to see bare metal lisp systems running (fast).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How hard is it to extend 'foreign' to other languages besides C/C++? If this is possible, a guide for doing so would be invaluable. It would be awesome if there was a lisp that could compile directly to LLVM using native objectiveC libraries on iOS. VERY cool work, thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER8> for Lisp on iOS & Android see [https://wukix.com/mocl](https://wukix.com/mocl)

intro talk (at Bay Area Lisp Revival): [https://wukix.com/mocl- balisp8](https://wukix.com/mocl-balisp8)

<comment><USER9> I still remember when you guys initially posted this on HN a couple of months ago. I found it interesting though one dominant criticism was that your site does not deliver enough information about the product to form an informed decision. Especially not given the steep price. I've played with NU, I've played with Clozure, I've played (a bit) with ClojureC, but they all felt half-finished or I couldn't get into them. Mocl still sounds kinda good, but your site looks just like it looked a couple of months ago, no information on why exactly I should spend that much money, or how it performs in comparison to other solutions etc.

I think it would be great if you could put way more code and docs there.

<comment><USER8> You may want to check out the sample code on our Github, [https://github.com/Wukix](https://github.com/Wukix), which wasn't available at launch. Working on adding more. Appreciate the feedback!

<comment><USER9> Thanks! Will look into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I missing something with the "Hylas" name vs. the lambda & gamma initials within the project logo?

<comment><USER6> The inverted lambda was supposed to look like the letter 'y'.

I like to pretend it looks more like 'hylas' than 'aylas'.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the letter 'y' is called '(G/Y)amma' im greek. Why 'Hylas' for me it reads like 'Lylas', considering that λ is the greek 'L'?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> wes-exp eudox, do you have a use case for this Lisp or is it more of an intellectual exercise?

<comment><USER6> I feel there is a spot between the performance and control of low-level languages and all the tremendously useful features of high-level languages. What I basically wanted was "C with Lisp macros". I think Rust is the closest language, ideologically, to Hylas.

There is no specification or anything very formal laid out except for a couple .md files in the docs folder. The language has evolved and changed a lot over the past year (Everything from the comments to the type system has changed), and is nowhere near prod-ready, but I want to eventually put it to practical use.

<comment><USER12> This reminds me a lot of GOAL, the in-house videogame development language that we used to use at Naughty Dog. It had a LISP syntax and feel - <USER2> with awesome metaprogramming and on-the-fly relinking - but the runtime was much closer to a low-level C/C++. In fact, you could even drop into MIPS asm in the middle of a function.

Coming from a mostly C/C++ background, it was an eye-opening experience, and I'm definitely a fan of languages other than C for performant code.

<comment><USER13> C and later on C++ just got widespread due to UNIX's adoption at the enterprise, before that, there were quite a few systems programming languages around.

Of course, youngsters nowadays tend to think only C and C++ play on that league.

<comment><USER14> Interesting. Which ones in particular were popular? And what do you consider a "systems programming language"? As I understand it, a systems programming language is a language that can be used to implement an operating system. C was the first high-level language to be used in this way.

<comment><USER13> Algol 68, PL/I, PL/M, Ada, Modula-2, Modula-3, Oberon, Extensions to Pascal like Apple Pascal and Turbo Pascal, Lisp</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Presenting The Worst Thing On The Internet: The Nokia Lumia Rap - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/10/presenting-the-worst-thing-on-the-internet-the-nokia-lumia-rap/

<comment><USER2> The linked video has become private, but other copies are available:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6H7NkM21MY>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFZB91a1qUw> (short)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This gave me goosebumps and crushed my Nokia loyalty to pieces.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome.</comment>


Want Innovation? Try Raising Minimum Wages - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-23/want-to-boost-productivity-raise-minimum-wages <comment><USER2> I agree. Sometimes a nudge is all it takes to start things going it a positive direction. Employers have been stuck in a rut when it comes to the minimum wage. If the supply of labour becomes more expensive, maybe this will change their mindset.</comment>


Fundamental theories of nature aren't allowed to hide information - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/is-your-theory-of-everything-pure-enough-rd <comment><USER2> This was a poorly written article, in my opinion. It failed to communicate the intent of the paper. I _think_ it's trying to say something like...

In quantum information theory there's pure states, like "[Off]", "[On]", "([Off] + [On])/sqrt(2)", "([Off] - [On])/sqrt(2)", and "3/5 [Off] + 4i/5 [On]". There's also mixed states, which are probability distributions of pure states, like "35% [On] + 65% [Off]" or "10% [On] + 90% ([Off] + [On])/sqrt(2)". Pure states behave differently from mixed states (sometimes), which is why the distinction is worth having. Pure states collapse into mixed states when measured.

There's a process to convert any mixed state into a pure state, called purification [1], that works by grafting on a secondary system with the appropriate entanglements. For example, "10% [On] + 90% ([Off] + [On])/sqrt(2)" can be purified into "sqrt(1/10) [On and Extra=0] + sqrt(9/20) [Off and Extra=1] + sqrt(9/20) [On and Extra=1]". This isn't just a theoretical trick to ignore mixed-ness, it's something you can do in practice. You can even verify that it works, statistically, because pure states interfere and correlate in ways that some mixed states can't.

The article appears to be saying that any theory that allows for purification (however they define it) must secretly be isomorphic to quantum mechanics (i.e. the state space is tensor products of complex vectors, the operations are unitary matrices, and measurement outcomes are related to the eigenvalues/vectors of Hermitian matrices).

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

</comment><comment><USER3> For every claim in the article, you must remember to prefix it with "If this asserted principle is true, then..." But as far as I can see, no proof of the principle is given (that's why it's called a principle, not a theorem).

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a link to the referenced paper on arXiv: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6451](http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6451)

</comment><comment><USER5> > For if every event was predetermined, the outcomes of all experiments should > be independent of the information possessed by any agent.

I don't see how this follows from what was said before.

I also don't see how he can say that Quantum Mechanics is the _only_ theory that can be pure.

You don't know that everything is not predetermined, they might be. We don't know. Quantum randomness might not actually be random.

<comment><USER6> If quantum randomness isn't random then QM is wrong. For quantum randomness to not be random, that would mean that the outcome of quantum experiments must be correlated with some other observable somewhere in the universe. QM specifically denies this, so a demonstration that quantum randomness isn't random would be a falsification of QM. That would be the biggest breakthrough in physics in 100 years.

<comment><USER7> But what if an underlying "random number generator" was actually built into the rules of physics? In other words, that quantum randomness appears to be random, but is a byproduct of a (probably much more complicated) underlying scheme that is totally deterministic.

(This random number generator would not be external to the universe, but implicitly built into the rules of this universe.)

<comment><USER8> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory)

"Assuming the validity of Bell's theorem, any deterministic hidden-variable theory which is consistent with quantum mechanics would have to be non-local, maintaining the existence of instantaneous or faster-than-light relations (correlations) between physically separated entities."

Basically, you have three choices:

      1) The universe is genuinely random
      2) The universe is "nonlocal" (i.e. "spooky action at a distance")
      3) Bell's theorem is invalid for some reason.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What kind of funny is Kafka? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n23/rivka-galchen/what-kind-of-funny-is-he

<comment><USER3> David Foster Wallace also has a good essay on this in _Consider the Lobster_. I think this is the same one:

[http://harpers.org/wp- content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-0...](http://harpers.org/wp- content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf)

<comment><USER4> That Foster Wallace essay is great: when he was good, he was really very good, and that's one of his better pieces.

Milan Kundera's Testaments Betrayed is pretty excellent as well; the last chapter (and title) cover Brod not burning Kafka's papers, and then manufacturing tortured genius Kafka instead of sticking with the fairly ridiculous reality (the one that actually matches how his characters behave, as this posted essay describes)

<comment><USER5> There are layers to being a tortured genius. A person who is observer, participant, and transcriber of a ridiculous reality is one who glimpses through the lens of his own device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone else make it all the way to the word 'Franz' thinking this was going to talk about the distributed commit log service?

<comment><AUTHOR> "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a high-throughput distributed messaging system."

<comment><USER7> I'd really like to read this story, although I'd envision the ending closer to Animal Farm than The Metamorphosis. After all, I don't think a distributed, persistent messaging service is quite as shameful/unclean and useless as a cockroach/vermin thing.

<comment><USER8> Any kind of complicated system can contain quite nasty bugs and being distributed one doesn't really help in this regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The kind of funny where you deplore your best friend to burn all your writings after you die but then he publishes them anyway. "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka#Max_Brod](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka#Max_Brod)

<comment><USER10> You mean Kafka implored Brod, and /then/ he deplored him, posthumously...

<comment><USER11> That seems impossible?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to > friends.

Does anybody know the source of this statement? I have read it for years and I always wondered where it comes from. Some interview with a friend of him? A friend's diary? Chronicles of the time?

</comment><comment><USER13> I find Rivka Galchen's essays enthralling. One intriguing thing she wrote a while back is that the game Minecraft has a Joycean quality. I don't know what she means by this, but I'm pretty sure she's correct.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/books/review/who-are- james...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/books/review/who-are-james-joyces- modern-heirs.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Funny? Sure, when it is "the ONION"-style satire!

[http://www.theonion.com/video/pragues-franz-kafka- internatio...](http://www.theonion.com/video/pragues-franz-kafka- international-named-worlds-mos,14321/)

</comment><comment><USER15> He mastered his style of "special effects" made out of words - <USER2> metamorphoses of familiar day-to-day situations.

Like it is with modern 3D special effects, out minds "get aroused" watching them, and we, persons, like them due to some hormonal feedback loops.

Why not keep it that simple?)</comment>


The art of the OKR - <AUTHOR> http://www.eleganthack.com/the-art-of-the-okr/

<comment><USER3> OKRs sound great. Partly cos they're TM Google. For a small startup with super limited resources, I'd like to hear from VSMEs who have used them - <USER2> mistakes did you make with them, what are pitfalls in implementation, how did your poor overworked team members take to it? I want to implement it at ours but there is some pushback.</comment>


The culture behind a 1.5m page view, very profitable, website: Photojojo - <AUTHOR> http://rahfeedback.posterous.com/keep-project-and-personal-metrics-closely-tie

<comment><USER2> I've known Amit for a decent length of time, I think there are very few people that are as driven while naturally successful as him in the world. I listen to him. 310,000 people on one mailing list? Insanity!

</comment><comment><USER3> Went looking very a quantification of "very profitable", but got none.</comment>


Fujifilm X-T4 announced with in-body image stabilization and flip-out screen - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21151718/fujifilm-xt4-announced-specs-pricing-ibis-stabilization-vlogging <comment> 4x5-Guy Looks like a nice camera. I might have to consider getting one when they get out in full production. Probably mid-summer.</comment>


Olivetti Programma 101 "Perottina" - <AUTHOR> http://www.curtamania.com/curta/database/brand/olivetti/Olivetti%20Programma%20101/index.html <comment><USER2> I used one of those as an undergrad. It was really a programmable calculator. It was incredibly slow for an all-electronic device; square roots took seconds. You could write simple programs for it and get homework done, though.

It was beautiful. Olivetti had great industrial design in the 1960s and 1970s. Their typewriters and calculators were works of art, and you can often find them today in the collections of major modern art museums. Olivetti tried to get into computers, and even had a good-looking IBM PC clone. The nice design didn't help.

The Mathatron came out a year earlier, in 1963. ([http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/math8-48mII.html](http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/math8-48mII.html)) Unlike the Programma 101, the Mathatron had trig functions built-in. The Mathatron had enough compute power that they offered a remote-access shared programmable calculator with a phone modem. ([http://www.amazon.com/Wright- Mathatron-Computer-Calculator-M...](http://www.amazon.com/Wright-Mathatron- Computer-Calculator-Memorabilia/dp/B0086U6EFG))

The shared-calculator approach reached its peak with the Control Data Remote Calculator. ([http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/a-cdc-11-65.html](http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/a-cdc-11-65.html)) This was a scheme to have 2000 calculators share a CDC 6600 mainframe computer, an excellent supercomputer of the 1960s. It was not successful, and surplus units appeared in the movies Soylent Green, Westworld, and Marooned.

None of these were very powerful, but the alternative at the time was slide rules and trig tables.

<comment><USER3> _" It was incredibly slow for an all-electronic device"_

It wasn't all-electronic; that memory used _sound_waves_ to store bits. That six meters of wire probably meant that reading a word, worst-case, took about a ms (assuming a fairly generous sound speed of 6km/s), and about every instruction read from and wrote to that storage. This being the first of its kind, the implementation probably would be worst-case for both reading and writing (wait for the 'start of memory' marker, count bits until the ones needed come along)

And of course, it had to read its instructions from the same wire. I guess 500 instructions per second would be an exaggeration of its performance.

<comment><USER3> I started wondering how one would reliably store a bit in about a microsecond of audio in the 1960s in a device that doesn't require continuous tuning.

Google led me to [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory#Magnetostri...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory#Magnetostrictive_delay_lines). It isn't audio, but a torsional wave, and Wikipedia claims a delay in the order of half a millisecond.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The story of Olivetti is another sad story of great business created by visionary people like Adriano Olivetti, and destroyed by the same old ignorant people that run the country.

When Olivetti was in financial troubles, a task force of government people and people from other industries (FIAT, cited in the video at "[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYB2oBc1BpA"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYB2oBc1BpA"), linked in another post) gathered together not to help Olivetti, but just to sell it.

They just did not understand what they were dealing with.

<comment><USER5> Are you aware of a documentary in the English language on Olivetti?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a great documentary on this. Unfortunately Youtube only has the Italian version (not that there is anything wrong with Italian). I have seen it in English (narration and subtitles, so it's out there, somewhere).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYB2oBc1BpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYB2oBc1BpA)

</comment><comment><USER7> I learned programming on one of those. It had a magnetic card to store your programs. You could connect it to an electric Olivetti typewriter. Imagine that, a real affordable printer back then!

</comment><comment><USER8> The Olivetti-Underwood Programma 101 was the first computer I ever programmed before graduating to the "big iron" of Fortran on punchcards fed into a mainframe.

There is a Programma 101 on display at the Computer History Museum a couple of blocks from the Googleplex. I was walking along a glass display cabinet with my kids, saying, "I used that one, and I owned that one, and that one...," when there it was in all its ancient glory.

</comment><comment><USER9> We had one of these at school, I don't remember much apart from the fact the teacher didn't have a clue what to do with it. It was about the same time I got a TI programmable calculator which was my real introduction to programming.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> stumbled on this reading <[https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/67-announcing- eight-new-re...](https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/67-announcing-eight-new- residents-for-2015>) and discovered this machine was 'first programming project' for 'Robert Lefkowitz' (r0ml)</comment>


Godaddy shows a lower price while not logged in to your account - <AUTHOR>

In the checkout stage when buying a .com domain for a year, without being logged into my account, I'm presented with this price:
http://i.imgur.com/CBUTCpg.png
As soon as I log in to be able to make the purchase I'm presented with this new price:
http://i.imgur.com/7lguXls.png
Everything being the same between the two. The lower than usual price is due to a promo code, which is applied to both of them. <comment><USER3> Solution: Stop using Godaddy and sponsoring their awful business practices.

<comment><USER4> What is the alternative? (simple & cheap may be?)

<comment><USER5> I have been using NameCheap for about a year now. No issues so far.

<comment><USER6> NameCheap has been excellent. Moved over following the wake of the SOPA fiasco. No regrets. In fact, the move should have been sooner. Their service is far the superior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I signed up for GoDaddy $9.99/month hosting and after the first month this went up to $14.99 without notice.

What is worse, is I called GoDaddy b/c my website is so slow to load (see: www.ommageo.com) and I wanted to know if they could recommend one of their VPS that would run my website faster - instead they said they would look into my current hosting and openly admitted there was a known issue with the shared server I was currently using. I asked if they would take my domain off the "known server with problems" and they said no, so I asked for a discount since I am paying for a service they knew was defective and never notified me - <USER2> rep. said I would get a 15% discount but that is when my price jumped from 9.99/month the first month to 14.99/month for the past 3 months.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've seen this. I used a 99 cent .com code last night. It didn't work and I logged out. Then they flashed a banner telling me to grab a 99 cent domain. So I logged back in and grabbed it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm a big fan of gandi.net - I'll never use godaddy again.

<http://www.gandi.net/no-bullshit>

</comment><comment><USER10> I confirm this. Also, outside the checkout page or domain search page what they show is an entirely different price from when you move forward to purchase it(even before logging in). On their just one website, any sub-domain - I tried with GoDaddy India pages - there are more than 2 prices at least, for a TLD registration, on different pages.

I've raised at least 3-4 tickets in the past and all the answers came ending in something like "this policy" "that policy" "certain offer is valid from this or that or sth else". You ask simple questions using bullet list(I've tried this), they answer(instead of a YES/NO) an entirely different matter and always linking to those irritating policy/pricing page links which I had referred to them in the first place and had asked them questions based upon that.

Feels like I asked population of Alaska and the support rep replied Tom Cruise's educational background with Wikipedia links. This is exactly how frustratingly their customer support replies.

But this was before they _came out_.

Now, I've blocked "godaddy.*" from my computer and I do this for websites which I find worthy of the honour.</comment>


Introducing Sugarless - A Functional & Context Oriented way to write JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://laktek.com/2011/12/21/introducing-sugarless/

<comment><USER2> tl;dr: If you think that

      var output = Sugarless(input)(
         sanitize
       , trim
       , truncate, "", 200
      );

is more readable than

      var output = truncate(trim(sanitize(input)), 200)

than you may be interested in Sugarless. Call me old school, but I prefer the latter.

<comment><USER3> What about something like this:

      fn = compose(truncate.flip().curry(20), trim, sanitize);
      output = fn(input);

Better or worse?

<comment><USER4> Better, since it is clear how to pass a function as an argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I mentioned this when stream.js was announced on hacker news a couple months back. I think that it's a good idea for JavaScript project pages to include the actual library in the page. That way, when I visit the project page, I can just pop open a console and start playing around with it, which is always my first instinct.

</comment><comment><USER5> In addition to not being easier to read at all (in my opinion), its complete dependence on the `arguments` object means your code will be less likely to be traced/compiled by the JIT.

</comment><comment><USER6> The project that I'm working on has functional abstractions, contexts, and node-fibers flying all over the place. It gets hairy at times but (I claim) it's nonetheless workable precisely _because_ I don't use libraries like Sugarless -- every abstraction is designed for its specific purpose.

If input processing is complicated enough to have annoying syntax, it gets its own special-purpose class (if not a separate module) written in the language of the domain. Frankly there's probably several things that look like Sugarless in the codebase already. But I consider this a Good Thing:

If I want to change the way operations distribute over an Input object, I can do it in an arbitrary, appropriate way. If I'm using someone else's convenience library, I'm limited to what the library author decided I should be able to do. This happens surprisingly often in my use case and more often than not it means going back to throw away the library in question, and reimplementing what I needed in the first place.

This isn't actually a comment on Sugarless itself -- I haven't gone out and used it. But I'm quite jaded by all of the times I've had to deep dive into other people's 'convenient' JS library when it was subtly broken (or wasn't working as I'd like) to the point that I try to avoid them as best as I can.

</comment><comment><USER7> A better approach to it: <http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/#chain>

        var stooges = [{name : 'curly', age : 25},
                       {name : 'moe', age : 21},
                       {name : 'larry', age : 23}];
        var youngest = _(stooges).chain()
          .sortBy(function(stooge){ return stooge.age; })
          .map(function(stooge){
            return stooge.name + ' is ' + stooge.age; })
          .first()
          .value();

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't like to play contrarian when the room is full of them ;), but I was just reading some slides from a conference about understanding various costs in javascript and how to optimize, and it was put forth that contextualizing with call() and apply() are quite costly, more costly than one or two "upward" context traversals in search of e.g. the "self" variable you created to point to the top context (var self = this). And arguments look-ups can be costly as well. I can't find the damn slides or website now tho, sry.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks like you can't pass a function as an argument to any of the functions in a Sugarless chain.

Seems like a pretty glaring oversight to me.

<comment><USER10> Sugarless is something difference from other libraries, I think we can pass any functions into the Sugarless chain as array.

Seems this example explain how deal with functions as arguments in the Sugarless chain. [https://github.com/laktek/SugarlessJS/blob/master/examples/c...](https://github.com/laktek/SugarlessJS/blob/master/examples/client/todo_list.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The idea using next() with asynchronous sounds interesting. With sugarless, you could create a state machine with functions as the nodes and next() calls as the transitions. I don't know if I would ever use this, but it is still an interesting idea.

<comment><USER12> you can only descend further into your command stack, not transition upwards. you could make a state machine by modelling out transitions forwards, sure, but it'd be of limited length.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sugarless is apparently a toolkit for creating execution contexts bearing a strong resemblance to a run through a Chain of Command pattern.

</comment><comment><USER13> syntactic saccharin?

<comment><USER12> nay, execution context DSL.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there enough video content out there today to learn cs and programming? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There's a lot of video content on a lot of topics, but their content is shallow. If you want to get a deep understanding of something, reading textbooks and official documentation is likely the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER3> I learned CS from nothing but online media. Videos weren't my primary source, but blog posts and documentation was. Also working with smart people, and working on hard problems.

</comment><comment><USER4> I mean new technologies keep coming out basically every day, there will never be enough videos to cover all of them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you found a CS/programming topic without enough video content to learn from?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't so far. Am I ever going to run into a topic that I can't learn on video? Can I get a bachelor's or master's degree level computer science/programming education from all the content online?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Definitely . . .

Team Treehouse

Railscasts

Laracasts

Pluralsight

YouTube

CS Lecture Videos

More than enough.

And more being added everyday.</comment>


Minimum Viable SEO - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/15403657245/minimum-viable-seo <comment><USER2> I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I read something about SEO. I keep expecting there to be more to it or that I'm missing something. Other than that, SEO is just making sure you have reasonably semantic markup and clean URLS. Isn't that just plain old best practice anyway? What am I missing? I swear there must be something!

<comment><USER3> You're definitely missing the incoming links part.

<comment><USER2> Ok, but what the hell does that have to do with building the site. Inbound links are obvious. Wow, really, is that all? And there are entire communities devoted to this? Seriously, I really want to know what I'm missing because I feel like I must be whiffing pretty hard here not to see it.

<comment><USER4> It's a lot more complicated than you are letting on.

What you are saying is like saying architecture is just drawing diagrams or good journalism is just writing about stuff.

Like many industries, there's an art to SEO and plenty of nuances far beyond clean coding and user friendly design.

<comment><USER5> I think many SEO type people have done a terrible job of marketing their field, because the place they occupy in most people's minds is not a particularly nice one.

I think emphasizing statistics and analysis would make a bit better impression on some of us. It turns on a light that says "aha, there is something real there!".

<comment><USER6> the problem is there are so many hacky, cold-calling SEOs that the majority of people you're likely to run into in SEO suck. when you really get into it (obviously biased) i think the combination of statistics, data mining, creative content and competitive analysis of your position in a perpetually changing market is a fascinating blend and you can learn as much as you want and take your skills and strategies in a ton of different directions.

it'd be nice if we could be completely transparent with analytics while iterating a search strategy for a large site, because the learning experience would be great whether you're a big-name, experienced SEO, looking to get further into SEO, or an anti-SEO hacker looking to just call us all out for being full of shit :) it'd be cool. too bad the economic reality of releasing complete analytics data to the entire internet makes this an impossible dream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't do SEO.

Do accessibility.

Seriously, don't worry a single bit about SEO. Yet, if you make it so that your site's content, navigation and URLs are screen-reader friendly, then you've probably made a site that has solid SEO and is accessible to people with vision problems.

Yet, just doing SEO doesn't make for a very accessible site all the time.

Once this is done, make good content, be real and responsive humans to your customers and you're on your way to a good business model and website.

<comment><USER8> I read this, and all I can see is:

"Don't do marketing." "Just make a good product and people will find it."

I think this is the downfall of many great products. The current startup world has an idealistic belief that better products always win and if you build something people want, they'll find it, when in fact, this has never been true. The "best" politicians consistently lose to those better at marketing and branding. The "best" ideas in organizations often fall to those trumpeted with more style or by those with more clout. Many great startups shut down because they couldn't find a repeatable, low-cost way to acquire customers (and SEO is exactly this).

More here: [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-disagree-with-fred-marketing- is...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-disagree-with-fred-marketing-is-for- companies-that-have-great-products)

And here: [http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound- marke...](http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marketing- for-startups/)

<comment><USER9> I believe parent was trying to express the sentiment that search engines inherently favor sites that are well-structured and present the relevant keywords in a format that is easily parsed by web crawlers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We've spent a lot of time doing whitehat SEO on our website, and it's paying off (2x search traffic in 6 months). I really would recommend most startups spend a few days reading up on it from good quality sources. Nearly 40% of all our traffic comes from search so it makes sense to pay it some attention.

It's not hard. What is hard is navigating your way through the crooks/spammers/quacks who will try every trick in the book to try and sell you something you don't need. Startups do not need to hire experts to do it for them. What they need to do is solve problems like they solve other problems, with no money.

People who sell SEO usually:

\- Have the gift of the gab

\- Prey on peoples ignorance

\- Prey on peoples greed

There are good SEO people out there, but they are rare. Also I struggle to imagine a situation where smart people just can't read up on it themselves and execute it themselves.

As a startup you should be focusing on good quality content and sustainable growth. So play to your strengths and don't pay a lot of money for magic potions that offer short term benefits. Play the long term game.

SEOMoz is a good place to start (their free blogs etc). Executing good technical SEO on your own website is pretty easy.

Tibbon made a good point, 'dont do SEO do accessibility`. I'm not sure I'd go to that extreme, but it's a good way of looking at it. Google is your most disabled user, it can't see very well, it can't really understand things very well either. If you make your site highly accessible you're well on your way to good SEO.

<comment><USER11> 2x search traffic over 6 months? That is not something to be proud of. A real SEO would have got 6x easy on a site with no existing SEO.

<comment><USER10> All depends where you are measuring from doesn't it! Where do you think I was measuring from when I said 2x? A site with 0 traffic? That would be quite easy to x6 sure.

Also your post smells exactly like the sort of sales pitch people seeking SEO should try to avoid. Big grandiose speculative statements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article mentions the beginner's SEO guide, but coming in at 2 pages, the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet from SEOmoz is my go-to resource:

[http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat- shee...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet)

<comment><USER13> I'm seeing only bad links to the PDF on that page.

<comment><USER14> Yep, same here. Google isn't helping either. Anyone want to upload the pdf for all?

<comment><USER15> seo pages can't be found by google.

meta!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I did a quick SEO analysis on priceonomics.com. Most of these tips fall into the 20% category. Maybe they can use some of these tips to perfect their SEO strategies.

1\. Blog on a subdomain.

Though sometimes easier for administration, subdomains might dilute your SEO efforts. Links to a subdomain don't count 100% as links to your main domain. A /blog/ could help with the generation of incoming links and addition of fresh content to the domain you want indexed a lot.

2\. Employ Canonical

www. redirects to non-www. Trailing slashes get added automatically. So far so good. But it is still easy to create duplicate URL's by adding random dynamic variables.

Without Canonical an URL like /boats/?dupe=content will point to the same resource as /boats/. Here you might introduce a canonical problem. ([http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify- your-canonical.html))

3\. Optimize your site for speed

Though not that many search queries are affected by the site-speed algo, site speed remains very important for your visitors, and so indirectly for your SEO/marketing efforts. Google Site Speed plugin, Yslow or these guidelines (<http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html>) might help you fix some of these issues and gain a few seconds.

Mostly loading javascript just before </body>, turning on caching, and compressing and combining resources.

4\. Robots.txt vs meta robots

/search is disallowed in robots.txt. If you disallow it on a page basis, with meta robots, you can specify: "noindex, follow". That way if people link to your search results, link juice will keep flowing through your site.

5\. Breadcrumbs

Add rich snippets mark-up. For product information and reviews, but an obvious contender is the breadcrumb. Link to your twitter (and future Google+ profile) with 'rel=me' to signify ownership of your graph.

6\. Images

Add an alt-attribute to the site logo. Specify the dimensions for faster rendering.

7\. Don't critique ehow.com if you fill Google's index with 245.000+ automated results.

Or put less bluntly: Write more unique content to introduce bigger categories. Add more relevant content to your listings (reviews, search/trend data, price watch).

8\. Make clear if an item is "already sold".

If I click on 10 entries and I get 10 times "item already sold" I start to doubt the usefulness of the application. I compare this to a job site, where the jobs are mostly filled: You happen upon such a site through Google, because Google still thinks these listings are relevant.

9\. Quality

The site is mostly void of trust factors. Due to some listings being in ALL- CAPS, some result pages can look a bit spammy. Add more trust factors, and try to repair spammy listings.

<comment><USER17> On point 1 - if you do have your blog already stuck on a subdomain (blog.site.com) this a neat solution to serve it through site.com/blog that might work for you: [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and- how-c...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it- help-my-seo)

<comment><USER18> Reverse proxying an external application isn't always as trivial as just proxy_pass in vhost.conf and go - we recently moved our company blog from blog.picklive.com to picklive.com/blog and it caused issues with WordPress relating to cookies for the admin control panel and invalid cookies set by WordPress caused us huge problems with our actual app.

These issues were fixed by doing slightly more complicated proxying rules and by filtering the cookies as part of the proxying.

Reverse proxying is a really powerful technique (you could sit things like mod_security in front of your relatively vulnerable WordPress install, for example), but unless you have an experienced sysadmin on hand to help if it all goes wrong it's probably not something you want to try based solely on an infographic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Onsite SEO is essentially good web design and content strategy, any developer worth his salt will produce a site that already ticks all the boxes.

All the work is in producing great, relevant content and then link building.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's not what you say, it's what people say about you. Kinda like a popularity contest in high school. If you are quarterback screwing the hot cheerleader, most people are looking/following you (whether they "like" you or not). So, get links. Lots of 'em. source: <http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking- factors>

Yes, setting up your site based on broad or long tail terms is good foundation...but you can rank your site for words that aren't even on your site. Why do you think disney ranks for 'exit' and 'leave'? [http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/14/the-evolution- of...](http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/14/the-evolution-of-google- rankings-rand-fishkin-at-the-searchmetrics-partner-meeting/)

</comment><comment><USER21> A bit off topic, but relevant to the suggestions in this post: a few of my friends are finding it more effective with Google to use a flat file structure rather than the highly nested folder trees that are usually recommended. Anyone have any thoughts/experience with this?

<comment><USER6> who recommends highly nested folder trees? i've not heard this and have certainly seen it hurt sites. all things equal, flatter is better. my rule of thumb is go as flat as you can while still having an organized, navigable URL structure.

<comment><USER16> I sometimes recommend nested folder trees, but never deeper than 3 folders. 3 folders deep is enough for millions of pages.

I like nested folders for a couple of reasons, some of which are:

\- Clarity. A good structure will instantly signal what the page will be about, before a user or searchbot follows that link.

\- Bolded keywords in URL in the SERPS.

\- Using pages to flow juice to categories.

\- Benefit of targetted anchor text, when using the URL for anchor text.

Compare: big-ecommerce-site.com/yoga-pilatus/accessories/yoga-mat/

vs.

big-ecommerce-site.com/yoga-mat/

And search queries like: "pilatus mat" or "yoga accessories". Which will work better for these queries?

\- Structure. Your URL's will reflect in your breadcrumbs, allowing users to navigate your site through URLs (By removing a folder and going to a higher level in the site).

\- Silo's. After the Panda update, and this is speculation on my part, Google might lower the imporance of "parts" of your website. Let's say only your blog is of very low quality. Google could discount /blog/ when you have nested folders. With a flat structure your removed "parts" or higher level categories from your site, and don't allow for this.

Ofcourse there are benefits to going flat too. But nested folder trees are not neccessarily a bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have to agree that most people ignore SEO because of the lack of understanding. May be they are intimidated by the very word. The three steps mentioned in the article: URL, Navigation, Page title go a long way. This is were content management systems like WordPress really help as these three things are taken care by design. In addition to this, internal linking structure is important to. Again, a proper CMS makes it way easy to get a decent SEO going to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER23> In addition to the 3 minimal actions I would also add, to use relevant keywords in each page's content. Often I notice clients creating content without actually using the keywords, by which they want the specific pages to be found. Also check the grammar, especially when creating multi-language content.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great discussion, thanks. Now im off to the urology forum to ask about my sore elbow. Theyre all doctors, right? They all went to med school. A body part is a body part...skin and bones and theyre all connected anyway.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a small nit to pick in an otherwise great post: Codecademy is not the same as Code Academy.

It's also noteworthy that codecademy.com ranks higher than codeacademy.org in the google search for "Code Academy".

Well played indeed.

<comment><USER26> I think Codecademy needs to get CodeAcademy.com as soon as they can.. otherwise they're gonna rely on mostly search traffic to get visitors since most ppl won't remember their url

<comment><USER27> It seems that they do already - see <http://www.codeacademy.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I first read this as Minimum Viable CEO and double face-palmed

<comment><USER29> LOL

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If you working on an Internet startup and you're not thinking about SEO from day one: you suck.

Any decent marketing strategy is at least going to give a nod to SEO. Is your team is so consumed by your awesome product that you think it's more important than marketing and distribution?

I really hope that isn't true of anyone here. If championing product over marketing and distribution does sound like your team, I have GOOD NEWS! — you'll be too busy jerking each other off to notice that you're not making any money.

<comment><USER31> There's no need to employ this tone; we're all adults here.</comment></comment>


How children lost the right to roam in four generations - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html <comment><USER2> How children gained the ability to explore the world without leaving home.</comment>


You Might Be A Computing Old Timer If... - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpcdan.org/reeds_ruminations/2010/10/you-might-be-a-computing-old-timer-if.html

<comment><USER2> Some of these do apply to me.

3- I did have the chance to write programs on punch cards. This was nearly at the end of the punch card era and I only did a couple assignments that way. But it was still another two years before we stopped having the "wait for your printout at central computing to see your results" hassle.

4- One of my first jobs involved loading a boot loader via toggles every morning while powering up the PDP-8. It had a washing machine sized hard drive with removable disks, but had to be set up with the boot loader. The lights blinked when programs ran... good times.

7- Remember the VAX well, and VAX/VMS was the first OS I hacked.

10- A surprising number of machines at the computer history museum were contemporary or objects of lust during my career.

I still want a Cray, though its gold value probably keeps it out of reach now.

The interesting thing about this article is, I think it was written by an old timer to my generation, and the current 20 somethings are 2 generations further on.</comment>


UK shopper accused of being a paedophile for photographing own son - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/24/mall-security-guard.html

<comment><USER2> From <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> :

        Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or
        sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting
        new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or
        cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news,
        it's probably off-topic.

        On-Topic: ... anything that gratifies one's
                      intellectual curiosity.

I can't see how this is on-topic. If someone would care to make a case defending it I'd be interested to learn.

<comment><USER3> It might have something to do with the fact that it was written by Cory Doctorow, an author that is frequently found in the orbits of various HN types. Other than that? It was on BoingBoing, right where it belongs. It should remain there.

As a general rule, if you can slip "yes but does he weigh more than... _a duck_?!" into the comments and have it fit, it probably doesn't belong on HN.

Edit: I just noticed several "burn him/them!" in the comments. There may actually be merit to this hypothesis.</comment></comment>


The Risk Not Taken  - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/40cf0a8919cb <comment><USER2> "Let her pay? Nope. Way too much pride for that.

It's also the most unromantic thing you can do on a first date as a man outside of spitting on her, and I wasn't about to spoil the evening."

I stopped reading there. WTF is with this brainwashing of men that they need to pay? IMHO this is a symptom of low self worth. This is a disease. Stop watching TV. Stop watching hollywood movies -- they are making you dumber.

You have intrinsic value as a human being regardless of your ability to pay. Show her a good time and she'll be glad to pay -- in fact, she'll want to go out with you again.

Later edit: Finished reading. Some good wisdom in there. Inspiring piece.</comment>


Show HN: Beautiful Personal Site and Domain and Email in Seconds - <AUTHOR> http://gripid.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the co-author. This has been a little side-project for us because I couldn't find anything to generate a personal site for myself in a few seconds. Full-featured website builders seemed much too cumbersome. Any feedback always appreciated!

PS Here's my site for example: [http://krymski.com](http://krymski.com) . A bunch of friends copied it, and that's what gave us the idea.</comment>


The Ultimate Guide to Using Visual Studio on a Mac - <AUTHOR> https://stormpath.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-using-visual-studio-on-a-mac/ <comment><USER2> That's a pretty good guide.

Visual Studio gets a lot of guff for being laggy and resource intensive. But in my experience if you run Visual Studio out of the box it is pretty responsive, it is only after you add extensions (particularly Resharper) that it starts to feel worse.

Although disabling Code Lens (which seems to have a few bugs anyway) can definitely help if you want rock bottom resource usage. It is a wonderful feature if you work in teams (or just want to look at a specific piece of code's history).</comment>


Clean up promise handling with resolvePromiseProperties - <AUTHOR> https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/04/18/clean-up-promise-handling-with-resolvepromiseproperties/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, if you have any questions.</comment>


Show HN: Reinventing a Raspberry PI Zero Stock Alert with Redis and Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://stockalert.alexellis.io <comment><AUTHOR> about [http://stockalert.alexellis.io/](http://stockalert.alexellis.io/)

– it's fully open source

– is careful and polite when scraping – it won't scrape an endpoint more than once per minute

– pulls stock levels, too

– easily extensible to send emails etc

– takes < 1 second to update stock not 3-8 seconds like whereismypizero.com

If you want to try it – it just needs two commands – git pull and docker- compose up. Or check out the technical deep dive for all the details on how it works in the link above.</comment>


Open Source Version of Google App Engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/appScale/appscale

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like they support most of the APIs/features in GAE: [http://www.appscale.com/](http://www.appscale.com/)</comment>


How do developers promote open source projects? - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04219 <comment><USER2> Interesting topic, but the paper presentation looks weird to me. Most figures don't show curves but a single value with error bars. Never have seen such a way of presenting single data points. I don't see any advantage of presenting these numbers (solely) in text.

I wonder at which journal this paper is going to be submitted (I am not a CS guy so this is a honest question, no sarcasm here)</comment>


Debugging the Mars Pathfinder - <AUTHOR> http://vst.ensm-douai.fr/noury/8 <comment><USER2> This has been around for a while, and is much more widely known than the reply from the software team leader on the Pathfinder mission -- which puts a somewhat different light on things.

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/mbj/Mars_Pathf...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/mbj/Mars_Pathfinder/Authoritative_Account.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I prefer Ron Garret's experiences of debugging Lisp in a REPL on a deep space probe.</comment>


Is cleanliness to blame for increasing allergies? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100413160901.htm <comment><USER2> You only develop strong muscles and bones if you put some stress on them in the form of exercise. Without that stress demonstrating the inadequacy of the existing systems our efficient bodies don't waste energy building muscle and bone.

It stands to reason that the other systems of the body similarly only develop when they are required. They need some level of stress put on them to develop to their capacity.

</comment><comment><USER3> On a related note: using hookworms to "cure" oneself of asthma or hayfever:

<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/30/91945/8971>

</comment><comment><USER4> There are some researches going on, which say that intestine parasites decrease sensitivity to allergy. I am quite allergic, but I dont think nonetheless, that I like the idea of having "tenants". BTW, allergy has increased recently, but so did life expectancy [and it especially high in clean countries]....Blame cleanliness?</comment>


Reddit gets an (unofficial) iPhone app - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/01/reddit-gets-an-unofficial-iphone-app/ <comment><USER2> Not free? Really??

<comment><USER3> It's a buck! Why does everything have to be free?</comment></comment>