The lost generation of tech pioneers: 90s kids - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/tech-disruption-outsiders-cdd3106eeb02 <comment><USER2> I almost relate to this, having grown up and learned in the same environment. But I reflexively feel weirded / disgusted / something when people write or say things like: _This is probably the most 90s kid techy-anime-nerd image I've ever seen._

I can't relate to it. It's a link to some video, and all I think is, watching videos is consumptive activity, whereas working is 'productive'. While you might have a valid reason to have a chip on your shoulder about the way- things-are, the fact that you like(d) a video isn't relevant (or even acts as an opposing force to your actual point). It doesn't tell me anything other than you grew up in some time period. It certainly doesn't say you're more valuable as an employee. If anything, the navel-gazing article about how you liked this-and-that -- attention to mundane details for most employers (except the _cool_ ones, right?) that give no signal about your performance, maybe just your personality -- will send people running in the opposite direction.</comment>


Ask HN: Is karma real? - <AUTHOR> What are your thoughts on the concept of karma, do you think it is real or do you think it's supposed occurences are but bye products of universal randomity. I will like to know what your thoughts are or better still what your mental justification is for doing "good" every day.?<p>I asked this cause I am starting to feel that perhaps there are no real rules anyway, and that justfull actions, and upright deeds weigh and slow you down. I mean the bad guys seem to be on a roll. <comment><USER2> I spent my teens in Hollywood and surrounding areas in the `70s. I sat in on many discussions about "Karma" there. Here's a summation of what I heard...

If your goal is to gather more wealth, or celebrity, or political power, then it is true that "justfull actions, and upright deeds [might] weigh and slow you down".

But you miss the entire point of Karma if you think those are worthy goals. Those are selfish goals and silly distractions in the work towards obtaining enlightenment, which is the intended goal (why we are here).

Aside from that, Karma is the law of cause and effect. But it's not a reward system that tallies up your good deeds and pays them at the end of every month.

Good Karma is what allows one to break down in their car in South Chicago and a stranger appears with the help you need to get back up and running and safely on your way.

You obtain good Karma via selflessness and a true sense of caring for others and doing what is right.

To trust in Karma means you must not seek revenge because it's a waste of time when you're seeking enlightenment. You leave the work to teach those who screw you up to Karma.

Now, if you screw up, screw others, cause pain and suffering, you will also cause a visit from Karma intended to provide you with the lessons you need. This will continue until you learn those lessons. The real lesson is you must seek enlightenment.

Ultimately, to believe in Karma you must also believe in everlasting life. If you don't, well then, Karma will make no sense at all to you.

Now, what you asked is "Is Karma real?"

All I can tell you is that I am poor but I live much better than most of those I met while living in LA, and everyone that's ever screwed me has had bad things happen to them that I had nothing to do with. And that I've been smacked down a few times too, and needed it. And that my work over the years has touched and made life better for a lot of people, and I feel good about that. My grandkids are visiting with my wife and I now. When they grow up the stories they hear about us will be of good times that were had with us. And even if I don't live on those will for quite some time.

So it's worked for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the concept of karma is an attempt to find a way to talk about impossible to prove patterns suggesting cause and effect of social phenomenon.

You can't really prove that honesty or kindness or whatever is directly responsible for various positive outcomes, but the concept of karma encapsulates such ideas in a somewhat actionable fashion.

My son read a book that contained a story about a primitive village with a concept of _a lucky jaguar._ The village believed that if there was a jaguar in the area and it wasn't bothering the villagers, you should not kill it because it's presence was a blessing on the village.

Somehow modern scientists were able to determine that the big cat was eating wild pigs and the wild pigs were feeding on the crops at night. In years with a _lucky jaguar_ in the area, the crop yield was 50 percent higher than average.

So villagers could observe that when there was a jaguar around, life just mysteriously worked better. They were unable to pinpoint cause and effect, but they could recognize correlation.

Similarly, I think the concept of karma is an attempt by humans to say that pro-social behaviors like honesty and treating others well observably correlates to a better life, though we often fail to identify the exact mechanism by which such traits come back to us in a positive way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you meant to write "shouldn't kill it" up there, and by the way, your thoughts up there makes a lot of sense but it still has that air of non- exactness that I've always felt around the subject of karma.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I meant _shouldn 't._ Corrected. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a creator of [http://karmabot.chat](http://karmabot.chat) – I can confirm, it is real ;)

Philosophically, there is no justification for the existence of balance of good and evil. Humans tend to believe in such thing, that makes it somewhat real, but not in the material sense.

AFAIK, there is generally a chaos: in life, in the universe. It can be carefully observed, rationalised and handled with great deal of care and toughness. It is hard but not impossible to bring more order in one's way of living. Karma rule is a by-product of such process.

Possibly good read: [https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for- life/](https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice work on karmabot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Consider the following Thought Experiment:

Let's assume for a moment that the "six degrees of separation" theory is true. (six can in-fact be any number so long as it is some valid number)

Let's also assume that for every person to whom you bestow a good deed, pays that kindness forward at a rate P, where P > 0;

Then it can be mathematically proven that given sufficient acts of kindness, eventually, a loop will occur where the good deed has propagated back to the source, thus proving Karma to be True.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply, I have sadly never heard of the six degrees of separation theory, but I will give it a look up, but then what happens if certain people (or a lot of people, consider ing the fact we are talking about humans here) in your kindness path "graph" do not pay it forward I.e their P rate is 0?

<comment><USER5> I would argue that there are very few people whose P rate is actually zero. AKA someone who has never done a good dead in their lives. I don't believe there are enough Karma Sinks to outnumber the Karma Sources and propagators.

Even at very small P values, while yes the propagation time is longer, loops will still appear. Now the question is what is the average P value, and how many good deeds must one do to realistically see a Loop within their lifetime. The answer is that the likelihood of small loops is fairly high even with low P-Rates assuming someone performs say 1 good deed per day.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Pivotal Tracker Hygiene Grader, Are your tasks up to date? - <AUTHOR> https://www.tenxer.com/grader/hygiene/pivotal/

<comment><AUTHOR> We built this free little app because we saw a lot of our Pivotal Tracker customers were doing a bad job of keeping their stories/ tasks up to date. To know if you are on schedule to deliver or get any metrics, your PT projects need to be up to date. We looked at over 250 PT projects to come up with some algorithms to determine if your team is keeping Tracker up to date. Feedback appreciated!</comment>


Q&A with Greylock's David Sze: The $250MM Difference in Facebook's Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://iamvictorio.us/post/53985025665/q-a-with-david-sze-the-250mm-difference-in-facebooks

<comment><USER2> There is a lot more to an investment than just the valuation. If VCs are shooting for outsized returns on home run investments that make up for their failed investments, then Greylock shouldn't have made the investment at all. "At least $1 or 2 billion big but no one had certainty it would end up being $50-100 billion+ big" \- that sentence is laughable in its tautology. If people had certainty about that, the valuation would be way more than $500MM and another $250MM would have made no difference. For VC fund to invest at a $500MM valuation in hopes of an exit at $1-2B, they have already indicated that they are riding the coattails of earlier investors. This article makes it sound like Greylock evaluated Facebook in an intellectual bubble and took a big leap of faith, but that's just what they want you to believe.

</comment><comment><USER3> Outside of the value of actually being helpful, I can see why this would appeal to Mark. I bet he saw Greylock as a better partner for helping him maintain control over the subsequent rounds.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe it was Sean Parker who is credited with helping Mark Zuckerburg maintain control.

He supposedly was the one who got mark 3 of the 5 board seats from the initial round of financing: [http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/10/sean- park...](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/10/sean- parker-201010)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Existing investors like Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman must have influenced fb's decision. Honestly, what kind of VC firm can add value worth up to $250MM.

>(a) kids move on to the next thing The risk is small given fb users's engagement time. "Kids" were spending hours on fb. This is an entirely different beast than myspace and friendster.</comment>


DynDNS Finally Absorbed by Oracle? - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-platform/dyn-upgrade-and-integration-with-oracle-cloud-infrastructure <comment><USER2> We moved our DNS from Dyn as soon as there was discussion of Oracle buying it. It's too bad really, Dyn was a decent provider. Maybe Oracle will let them continue to run on their own for a while. I can imagine them rebranding the DynDNS service at some point and offering different subscription fees.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm submitting this for completely selfish reasons!

I've been a DynDNS user since 2012 and maybe earlier.

No offense to Oracle, but I'd rather not continue my dynamic DNS services with them. What's everyone else using?

Is it worth hosting my own? I have a VPS for web hosting, etc, and could put something there.

<comment><USER3> I moved from Dyn to cloudflare and have been really happy with the change. Cloudflares interface is much better, every time I wanted to add a record in Dyn I had to hunt around to figure out what service i was using and which admin interface to use.

The only issue Ive had with Cloudflare was that some of my records had the CDN setting enabled accidentally (orange cloud icon) which broke my reverse proxies. Once I figured out what the issue was it was a quick fix to disable on all domains.</comment></comment>


Notes on Postmodern Programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/archive/CS-TR-02/CS-TR-02-9.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> "Let us therefore create a new guild of programmers without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between programmers and computer scientists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new program of the future together. It will combine design, user-interfaces, and programming in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith."</comment>


Honda Needs a Tune Up (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://davidsd.org/2008/12/honda-needs-a-tune-up/ <comment><AUTHOR> This title doesn't give you any clue what the article is about, which is a shame because it's a good blog post about a musical road, and the errors made when building it, and about how to avoid those errors if you build your own musical road.</comment>


Ask YC: Where is YC News hosted?  - <AUTHOR>

Any hosting suggestions, feedbacks would be very much appreciated. <comment><USER2> According to DNS and WHOIS, news.ycombinator.com is hosted at ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc.

Since "where are YC funded companies hosted" is a common question, I'll answer that too, based on the list of YC-funded companies at <http://www.ycombinator.com/faq.html>:

$ echo reddit.com loopt.com clickfacts.com textpayme.com snipshot.com inklingmarkets.com flagr.com wufoo.com youos.com likebetter.com thinkature.com jamglue.com shoutfit.com scribd.com weebly.com virtualmin.com buxfer.com octopart.com heysan.com justin.tv iminlikewithyou.com socialmoth.com xobni.com versionate.com adpinion.com anywhere.fm fuzzwich.com bountii.com auctomatic.com disqus.com draftmix.com webmynd.com rescuetime.com reble.fm heroku.com tipjoy.com addher.com 8aweek.com | xargs -n 1 | lam -s 'www.' - | xargs -n 1 host -t a | grep 'has address' | cut -f 4 -d ' ' | xargs -n 1 whois | grep OrgName | sort | uniq -c | sort -srn | sed -e 's/OrgName://'

       8     Amazon.com, Inc.
       6     SoftLayer Technologies Inc.
       4     ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc.
       2     NoZone, Inc.
       1     BitPusher, LLC
       1     Columbus Network Access Point, Inc.
       1     Global Netoptex, Inc
       1     Layered Technologies, Inc.
       1     Performance Systems International Inc.
       1     RackForce Hosting Inc.
       1     ServePath, LLC
       1     Slicehost LLC
       1     Time Warner Telecom, Inc.

<comment><USER3> This is a poor list of YC Companies.

<comment><USER4> There's the wikipedia list also, which used to have all of them, them several wikipedians insisted on "notability" so it's much less complete than it once was.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator>

<comment><USER5> Is that what happened to the Wikipedia article? I thought the list used to be more comprehensive.

The "News" link on YC points here, so I assume this is intended to be the place for YC company headlines, but I wish there was a more traditional "Press" or similar page on the YC site to track news about and announcements from the participants. An alternative would be some type of parameterized link filtering the results for relevance, but in its current form it just dumps one into the news pool here (which presently looks like _another_ company's Press section!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're looking to scale (as in, you need at least one dedicated machine and will likely be adding more), I highly recommend Softlayer. Their pricing is reasonable and support is pretty good, but more importantly (for my startup) their setup time is incredible. Adding a low-end machine usually takes about 2 hours and higher-end machines take 4-6 hours. That kind of agility has really been invaluable.

<comment><USER7> I use SoftLayer as well, and it's fantastic. Prices are very reasonable. Only took 2 hours to set up our first server, like you said, they provide excellent support. Also, unlike certain cloud computing services, there's no ridiculous overages. Extra bandwidth costs the same whether you accidentally go over or prepay.

It's run by the same management team as ThePlanet, which is another great service, from what I hear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're just starting up, Slicehost is generally considered the best of the VPS providers, though Linode is also well regarded and is cheaper than Slicehost.

If you want to scale bandwidth eventually, Amazon is the only game in town unless you want to beta test Google. Maybe Microsoft would also let you beta test if you asked nicely.

Is there anyone using enough bandwidth on Google App Engine to hit the bandwidth cap and start paying?

<comment><USER8> But with Microsoft you'd be stuck using Windows Server, ew.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use and would recommend ThePlanet.com and Slicehost.

I use and would not recommend Mosso or MediaTemple.

I use and would conditionally recommend PHPWebhosting.com, Google App Engine, and RackSpace.

I use and do not have enough data to comment on AWS.

</comment><comment><USER10> Slicehost +1, easy to use, easy to scale, cost effective.

</comment><comment><USER11> softlayer ftw (most of the time)

</comment><comment><USER12> I would suggest Linode for hosting and Virtualmin (YC backed) for the panel.</comment>


Nearly Free Speech significant pricing updates - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2017/09/25/significant-pricing-updates-are-coming-soon/ <comment><USER2> It is interesting to hear about what it takes behind the scenes to run a hosting company.</comment>


Lojban - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban <comment><USER2> I had a lot of fun in the lojban community back around 2003 - 2010. I attended a few jbonunsla, and that community is where I made the professional connections that lead to me moving to the Bay Area.

During a recent conversation, I realized that a lot of the community dysfunction there is the typical contrarian trap: If you're doing something sufficiently unusual, the vast majority of the people who show up to work on it with you are going to be extremely opinionated contrarians more-interested in personal experimentation than in working to make something solid and accessible to a general audience, and not particularly interested in cooperating or otherwise working together. Most of the people who are interested in pragmatic applications are going to just use something already widely used. The lojban community, when I was active in it, had a huge variety of interesting ideas that nobody was ever following up on or implementing, and the big projects people agreed were important (completing a document standardizing a new version of the language) languished. There were pretty regularly complaints about the community infrastructure (website, wiki, mailing list) that were answered with "If you're passionate about this, please feel free to fix it, or take over running it yourself. I want to hand these off and stop being the only responsible person. I'll give you commit access, root access on the servers, etc." that were almost never actually accepted.

So, basically like almost every open-source project out there. ;)

<comment><USER3> When I was playing with Toki Pona, a surprising amount of people were incredibly resistant to it, sometimes to the point of being upset about it, for... some reason I could never figure out. Never got a straight answer. I found the whole thing really, _really_ bizarre.

Before anyone asks, it wasn't because I was speaking Toki Pona to them. I only speak it to friends that also know it, it's just that sometimes there are other people around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love utopian language communities. I finished out the Duolingo Esperanto course. And of course, a Lojbanist would tell you that Esperanto is too Euro- centric to be truly international, and not nearly as linguistically precise as Lojban.

In other words, Esperanto is the worse-is-better universal language. Unfortunately for both Esperanto and Lojban, English is worse-is-better than both.

<comment><USER5> Esperanto is really better-is-better: most of the world today either knows some English or speaks a romance language. Also, the language has a very natural structure to it, an a lexicon that seemingly (I'm not a speaker, but I have some familiarity) could've formed under a rather natural process of elite dominance---the hyphothesised means to Latinification of northern Mediterranean, and Turkification of the region that constitutes modern Turkey and thereabouts, for example; see "Before Babel", Renfrew, 1991---in central or eastern Europe. Thus, knowledge of many prominent world languages is transferible to Esperanto, and the knowledge of Esperanto can be transferred to other prominent languages. That is very valuable.

WRT English, there's nothing inherent to it that makes it the lingua franca of the world, it's just that it's the language of the dominating socio-economic powers since the British Empire. How quickly Mandarin is becoming popular around the world is a modern evidence to how economics play a role in determining the cultural appreciation of a particular country.

<comment><USER6> I _am_ an Esperanto speaker, so I can say that this is not really accurate. Esperanto isn't a Romance language: it's got a lexicon that was drawn haphazardly from many different languages—not just Romance ones, but also Germanic and Slavic ones—in ways that render the source words difficult to pronounce and very often result in words that are confusingly non-similar to the original. For your past vocabulary to really contribute to knowing Esperanto, you'd probably have to know English, French, a dash of German, and maybe some Polish, and even then, the language is filled with false friends and idiosyncratic choices. (From English, for example, it drew the word _boato_ for 'boat': pronounced "boh-AH-toh", making it sound nothing like the English word!)

And "the knowledge of Esperanto can be transferred to other prominent languages"? Only in the most cursory ways! Esperanto's vocabulary is also _deeply_ minimal: for example, it makes antonyms from the prefix _mal-_ , so that 'big' is _granda_ and 'small' is _malgranda_ , and it makes heavy use of affixes and word-combining to generate new chunks of vocabulary: a school is a learn-place ( _lernejo_ ), lunch is day-eating ( _tagmanĝo_ ), a dictionary is a word-group ( _vortaro_ ), and so forth. This is great for making a minimal vocabulary that can be easily learned, but it means that you get only a tiny fragment of knowledge that's transferrable to other languages.

I could go on about how the structure is actually deeply unnatural and reflects several odd choices, or how the pronunciation involves tricky to near-impossible consonant clusters (e.g. because _s_ is pronounced as 'ts', the word _eksciis_ 'realize' has the cluster _kssts_!), but it's really not a well put-together language in the way that this seems to imply it is.

<comment><USER2> The most comprehensive document I've happened to personally encounter discussing complaints with Esperanto is [http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html](http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html) . I am not an Esperanto speaker, so I can't speak to the veracity of the complaints there, but when I've seen it linked before, I don't recall seeing people contradict it or claim it's from an inaccurate perspective.

<comment><USER6> Again as an Esperanto-speaker, I can say that my only problem with this document is that it can come across as a bit snarky and mean-spirited, but this is pretty well addressed by the disclaimer [http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#00e](http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#00e)

I have heard other Esperantists describe the document as maybe harsher than it needs to be, grouping in the mountains with the mole-hills, but I think most of the things it describes are pretty uncontroversially considered to be flaws with respect to the language's original intent. Most of the speakers I interact with would say, "Yes, but what's your point?" But on the other hand, neither I nor the Esperantists I interact with regularly tend to be the types that think Esperanto still has a viable chance of becoming a true international language: we simply think it's a fun language to learn and speak. So it's possible that more radical Esperantists would disagree with our position there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, was just explaining this to a colleague this morning. I tried to learn some Lojban.. was a good experience. I like that sentences start with a dot and capitals are thrown out. I even registered a lojban word domain name. Some noteworthy bits: * Vitalik Buterin reads/writes Lojban long before he started Ethereum [https://bitcointalk.to/index.php?topic=21007.msg%msg_id%](https://bitcointalk.to/index.php?topic=21007.msg%msg_id%) * Ben Goertzel of AGI fame dabbled in Lojban but decided on an English hybrid to skip learning the vocabulary but keeping the grammar [http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/Loglish.htm](http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/Loglish.htm)

I've some good Esperanto books I chew on and lately I've been looking into Elefen and Ikthuil.

[https://gist.github.com/melopee/2f8cd71fa628a11c3dbfd39e2db4...](https://gist.github.com/melopee/2f8cd71fa628a11c3dbfd39e2db4034b)

</comment><comment><USER8> I took classes from lojbab when I was 16 or so waaay back in the 90s in Vienna. It seemed like a cool techie thing to do for a college freshman.

Now and then I look into it, where it is, etc. One thing I could not get past was that the language is ugly. It's very hard on the ears - I say this speaking English, Japanese, and some Spanish and have taken a few years of Mandarin, so perhaps it's a taste thing, but I've heard lots of people say this over the years and I agree with it.

</comment><comment><USER9> It only takes a day to learn the basics: [https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda](https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda)

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone with an interest in the story of Lojban and a dozen other fascinating conlangs (constructed languages) should read "In the Land of Invented Languages". It's a terrific collection of tales of bizarre ego, hubris, and profound misunderstandings of how human ("natural") languages actually function in reality.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love Lojban from the point of view of "eliminate ambiguity as a language feature", but the choice of turning classic punctuation characters into full fledged "letters" is.... odd. It also makes reading somewhat more difficult from anyone who uses a Latin character set and english-alike sentence structures (IMO, a single 100 level linguistics course does not make me an expert)

<comment><USER12> > but the choice of turning classic punctuation characters into full fledged > "letters" is.... odd

The ʻokina is sort of a precedent for this

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language#Glottal_stop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language#Glottal_stop)

although then people can have humongous arguments over whether it's correct to write it with ʻ, `, ', or other alternatives.

<comment><USER13> A glottal stop is not really a normal letter (for example in German it is not written at all), while the H is more of one, and it is written with a "'" in Lojban.

Edit: The Lojban "'" can also be considered not to be a real phoneme but to be more like a gilde sound between two vowels.

But maybe the glottal stop is only in German not considered to be a phoneme. (Actually it is more of a short pause, the snap is only an easy but not necessary way to do it.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> coi le munje .i coi se terdi

<comment><USER2> coi gleki .i do mo .i mi pu zi co'a se jibri lo cnino

<comment><USER14> .i ue do za'o xu se bangu lo jbobau .i xu do nelci lo cnino jibri be do</comment></comment></comment>


Multicore Programming in Haskell Now - <AUTHOR> http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/defun-2009-multicore-programming-in-haskell-now/

<comment><USER2> I'll ask: with Erlang I understand the mechanism it uses for concurrency fairly well. From a quick glance at these slides, I get the impression that Haskell would be very good at doing parallel calculations (it's fast), but am not quite so certain about doing parallel system tasks, like sockets, something I know Erlang is good at. Care to elaborate?

Do you guys have a fast/small web server, for instance? Something like mochiweb?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's quite a few on Hackage. [http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg- list.html#ca...](http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg- list.html#cat:network)

E.g. salvia: <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/salvia>

The trick is to use lots of Haskell lightweight threads to hide latency (much as you would with Erlang).

<comment><USER2> Cool, thank you!

If I may ask you another question, how would one install that and start fooling around with it? I really don't have time, but... my curiosity has been piqued! (So much for 'discipline', but hey, it's a Sunday).

(BTW, Google is very fast at indexing conversations here - this thread is the first thing that turns up for "mochiweb vs salvia")

<comment><AUTHOR> Super easy:

* one click: install the Haskell Platform: <http://hackage.haskell.org/platform>

* type: cabal install salvia

Another good one is hyena, <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hyena>

You can get a concurrent web server going in a dozen lines of code or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Lots of great stuff happening in the Haskell community at the moment. What is it they're doing that the OCaml crowd aren't? This is a genuine question, I want to know so we can do it too...

<comment><USER4> The OCaml community doesn't have anybody who promotes the language with quite as much gusto as dons, to my knowledge, and its library situation is a bit messy - there are _nonstandard community replacements for the standard library_ [1] because Inria is just not going to fix some major warts. It _has_ libraries[2] (and a pretty good library manager[3]), but OCaml has been around for quite a while and hasn't ever seemed to aquire critical mass. That degree of blatant fragmentation probably makes people wary.

Haskell seems to be stealing its thunder now. There are numerous "intro to Haskell" / monad tutorial / etc. articles out there, and the OCaml community seems very quiet, by comparison. I don't particularly care for Haskell* , but its designers and users have done a good job of ensuring people hear about it, and get at least a roughly accurate first impression of what makes it noteworthy.

* I don't like laziness as a default, I've been burned a couple times by portability issues (and the way that "whatever GHC does right now" has become a de-facto standard means that portability issues are probably not a priority), and it's academia-centric "avoid success at all costs" attitude doesn't sit right with me.

      [1]: http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/
      [2]: http://godi.camlcity.org/godi/toc/toc-3.10.html
      [3]: http://projects.camlcity.org/projects/findlib.html/

<comment><USER5> "I've been burned a couple times by portability issues (and the way that "whatever GHC does right now" has become a de-facto standard means that portability issues are probably not a priority)"

I am interested in this issue and would love to hear more details. Portability between different Haskell implementations or portability of GHC to different operating systems?

<comment><USER4> I should preface this by noting that I haven't looked into the situation recently, and the problem may have been fixed, but it really soured me on Haskell. (At a glance, it looks the same, and discussions with a presenter at a local barcamp implied no real change.) I stopped worrying about it because I'm quite content with Lua for small personal projects, and OCaml and Erlang seem to be more my style than Haskell for larger ones.

So, that said: I primarily use OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and bootstrapping recent versions of GHC from source has been broken for a long time. OpenBSD's current GHC is 6.6.1, and FreeBSD's is 6.8.x, but (last time I checked) was marked as broken. While porting language runtimes to OpenBSD can be tricky due to e.g. its randomized malloc, an open-source language that _doesn't even build from source on FreeBSD_ probably doesn't place much of a priority on portability. GHC 6.6.1's ghci segfaults on my openbsd/amd64 system, too.

Just after I got settled with XMonad, GHC updated without a clear plan for source bootstrapping. I get the impression that a lot of people just use Debian/Arch/etc., like dons did[1]. (I'm a (somewhat minor) OpenBSD porter, so I probably care about this more than many people.)

[1]: <http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/haskell_openbsd.html> \- He switched to using Arch in ~2005.

Here's a Hackage bug ticket, closed after a year and a half with the note that they're probably just not going to support building that way anymore:(<http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1346>). It's not hard to find griping about the situation on the openbsd-ports list.

While GHC is just one compiler (and I've put some time into helping with updating Common Lisp and Scheme ports in the past, due to similar issues), Haskell programmers seem to assume a recent version of GHC and its extensions, making "whatever GHC does" a de-facto standard. That rules it out for me entirely, and I wonder if anybody else feels the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> I switched to Arch in 2007 because I needed multicore SMP runtime support. OpenBSD was only running userland apps on 1 core at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks like the speed gains are rather small and optimizations complex to debug even for small programs. And the "implicit parallelism" is really an explicit one since you have to annotate/hint what could be run in parallel.

<comment><AUTHOR> > speed gains are rather small

How did you get that impression? Depending on the problem, there are programs in that talk that scale linearly with the available cores.

Secondly, there are two forms of implicit parallelism presented:

* "semi implicit parallelism", via annotations. no locks, synchronization or communication required * "data parallelism", a subset of the language that can be auto-parallelized.

Or did I misunderstand you?

<comment><USER6> Slide 34 where you find out that the improvement was only a little better. 03.hs is a fairly simple program and I would guess that one would run into a lot of these problems developing "real programs".

I would prefer if the compiler / runtime system were smart enough to figure out where parallelism could be applied - - and I would had guessed that this would be a lot easier in Haskell since there are no side effects. Are there anyone playing with the idea of JIT parallelism (i.e. apply parallelism while the program is running)?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to reduce the complexity of software interfaces? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, do any of you know of particularly good, pragmatic, resources for building better (web) software interfaces, particularly along the lines of:
1) Decreasing complexity.
2) Increasing real ease of use.
3) Increasing optionality (Features will be added in the future, perhaps many of them. How does one design an interface that can adapt to future requirements?).
4) Long-lasting, not chasing design trends.
Any input as to what makes an interface wonderful for you to use? Any favorites?
Thanks in advance! :-) <comment><USER2> Techniques of interaction design might help you, as many of them covered exactly this problem, namely:

-User interviews will help you understand the problems and contexts your target users have. -Personas for focus on the target user. "Jobs to be Done" is a popular alternative. -Scenarios and user flows will help you better understand the temporal context and flow between states -Prototyping in tools like inVision, etc will help you test ideas before committing too much time and effort -User testing goes hand in hand with prototyping, you will better understand how your users perceive your software, which usually differs quote a lot from makers perspective

I don't know what type of software are you building, but design systems like Salesforce Lightning Design System and Google Material Design provide ready- made patterns with extensibility in mind. They usually have similar patterns, but enterprise ones are more focused on "optionality".

</comment><comment><USER3> > Long-lasting, not chasing design trends.

Your "design trend" might be my "prevailing idiom". I have different preferences depending on what language, platform, and industry my work involves.

Even if they aren't speaking to each other, I like it when the collection of services, modules, libraries, etc used by my project share a common mentality and (when appropriate) terminology.

If it helps, you might want to think about who is most likely to use your interface and what they individually prefer. Consumers from Rails and React and .NET are each going to think of things a little differently and want different things. Lean towards one and help the rest adapt.</comment>


Cross-domain AJAX using XMLHTTPRequest - <AUTHOR> http://www.oriontransfer.co.nz/blog/2011-05/cross-domain-ajax/index

<comment><USER2> This is called Cross Origin Resource Sharing, and only works if the API is serving the appropriate headers. Unfortunately, very few public APIs have adopted CORS, so until then we're stuck with JSONP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the clarification. Because I control both sites it wasn't a problem, as described in the article. Yeah, it was a bit of an experiment because I wanted to see how it would work out.</comment></comment>


EFF's fair use win over Righthaven: it's hard out here for a troll - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/righthaven-v-cio-it-s-hard-out-here-troll

<comment><USER2> Well, it's a pretty small victory when you consider the copyright troll didn't even really own the copyright in question. If the EFF can't win these cases, we're _really_ in trouble.

I wonder how the case would have gone if Stephens Media had just hired Righthaven as a law firm, rather than try to get cutesy and (I assume) use them as an asset shield.</comment>


Lay off W3Schools - <AUTHOR> http://www.sagegerard.com/index.php?cID=152

<comment><USER3> Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners. It's jargon loaded and filled with a bunch of information that means _nothing_ to beginners.

Let's look the page for explaining 'div': <http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_div.asp>

"The <div> tag defines a division or a section in an HTML document.

The <div> tag is used to group block-elements to format them with styles."

Oh, I get it. Its for grouping block-elements(??) to format them with styles(??).

The above is followed by this fantastic tip: "Tip: The <div> element is very often used together with CSS, to layout a web page."

Looking at their "examples" its an in-browser html editor with un-annotated code that makes a table suitable for the web circa 1995.

Then it trails off in to sparse definitions of the attributes for the div tag with an excessive amount of discussion about web standards compatibility.

Normally I wouldn't gripe about an awful tutorial site but w3schools consistently ranks high in google queries for questions about html tags. Personally I've never left w3schools with an answer to the question that led me there. That signals to me that it is indeed a failure.

<comment><USER4> > Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners.

I too had the exact opposite experience. I found the HTML, CSS, and Javascript tutorials extremely intuitive and well-presented when I was in 7th grade. I ate them up.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. I don't depend on it any more, but w3schools helped me make the transition from WYSIWG web site building to hand coding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "...Some folks have started voicing hostile opinions..."

A little late to the game, there.

This post ignores two important points:

1\. There _are_ a lot of much better sites out there (linked to from W3Fools, even). Selectively highlighting a single post is misleading.

2\. W3Fools is not so much for the benefit of W3Schools, but for people who _link_ to W3Schools as reference in blog posts, SO answers, etc. There are lots of great reference sites (MDN!) that provide much better material, but circumstances have given W3Schools a lot of GoogleFu. That needs to change.

<comment><AUTHOR> #1: Where is one post highlighted? The article (lazily) acknowledges other competition, and you even quoted said acknowledgement.

#2: Yes, this point is ignored because it was not really the focus. The benefit you speak of can be realized without statements like "W3SCHOOLS IS TROUBLE" in big scary letters on W3Fool's homepage. The attitudes of the people involved and the clarity of their content are the focus of the article.

<comment><USER6> #1: Paragraph 3 - "...sometimes even dead silence..."

#2: OP misses the point of _why_ there is so much hostility. If W3Schools was on page 3 for (chosen utterly at random)"getElementById" on Google, no one would care. Predictably, however, it's number 1. That's pretty dire - I would hope that the top results for common questions would be quality resources. Which W3Schools is not. There is a greater good here, which is not served by continuing to promote W3Schools _the_ top developer resource.

<comment><USER7> #2: How is that w3schools fault that they are listed top of Google's search results? What do you expect them to do, somehow reduce their ranking? Surely it is the job of other sites to increase their ranking?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _W3Schools has already announced that it's content should be used at the > user's risk, which means they waive all responsibility for inexperienced > users. It is not their job to babysit developers, since it is the > developer's job to research other sources and improve his understanding > through rigorous practice and peer feedback._

That's awful advice for beginners, who have no idea why some things are good and others are dumb.

Some people will validate their pages. Some of those people will know what the errors mean, but decide that it's okay to have those errors. Other people will get a bunch of errors, and not really understand what's going on, and will just publish anyway because "it works in the browsers I tested on".

<comment><AUTHOR> > "That's awful advice for beginners"

It's not bad advice to suggest that developers be stupid if they are the type to learn from their mistakes. If they are not the type to learn from their mistakes, why are we worried about them?

<comment><USER8> Being given correct information but making mistakes, and then learning from those mistakes in your efforts to recreate the good advice, is a useful learning technique.

Being given incorrect information, and making mistakes, and not knowing you've made mistakes, is not a useful learning technique.

And while these people are making mistakes and learning from them their customers are suffering buggy code and everything that goes with that - <USER2> loss and insecurity at the extreme end and unexpected behaviour at the mild end.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "Being given incorrect information, and making mistakes, and not knowing > you've made mistakes, is not a useful learning technique."

W3Schools has pointed out that users take a risk with its content, and it made no claim over the quality of its code. The only element they have authority over is its clarity, and that is what's important. The information may be lacking, but I stick by my guns when I say that crap code can still make some concept that a tutorial revolves around clearer. If other elements are not relevant to the tutorial, I do not believe it is fair to blame the author for excluding them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> w3schools is not the best resource, but 90% of the time, when it shows up as the top result on Google, it tells me exactly what I want to know.

Some common examples:

\- What values does CSS attribute white-space take? #1 result on Google for "css white-space" is <http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_white-space.asp> which has exactly what I need to know.

\- What members does the Array object in JavaScript have? For the query "javascript array", the first result is an overview of what an Array is, but the second result is the object reference which is exactly what I need.

When learning, looking things up is one of the most common actions. Whenever w3schools comes up, it doesn't necessarily make me smile but it's reliable^Wconsistent so I know what to expect. It maintains a lot of utility, unlike good ol' experts-exchange.

<comment><USER10> I highly recommend <http://dochub.io/> over w3schools. Not only does it source MDN, which is much more accurate, but it allows you to instantly search for whatever CSS property or JS function/object you're looking for. (The only thing that I find disadvantageous is that you have to know the name of what you're looking for)

<comment><USER11> Is there a similar site that is less Firefox-specific?

<comment><USER12> MDN is not Firefox specific, it intends to document JavaScript, CSS and HTML in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The first time i wanted to learn HTML and CSS,i happened to come across the W3fools page.So i followed their advice and their recommended resources.What do i get?Tons and tons of STORIES about secure code,best practices,patchy examples,and some sections clearly marked "This notes are out of date".Man,i have barely learned to switch on a computer.What are you talking about??

</comment><comment><USER14> Not sure if you're serious or just trolling (you seem to be posting snippy responses to everyone's comments here), but there's a big difference between something like O'Reilly's Missing Manual or Head First series and w3schools. As demonstrated on the w3fools site, some of the information on w3schools is inaccurate or just plain wrong. The O'Reilly books have a much higher degree of accuracy yet remain approachable, beginner-level texts.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "you seem to be posting snippy responses to everyone's comments here"

Sorry about that. It is not my intention to be rude or troll, but I've got a lot of discussions to manage. I went ahead and edited out some needlessly harsh bits here and there, but I'm not touching ones where I am just reciprocating the same attitude as the parent post.

I'll watch myself more carefully, so thanks for the reminder.

> "The O'Reilly books have a much higher degree of accuracy yet remain > approachable, beginner-level texts."

Yes, but they still promote outdated and insecure approaches. As a beginner, I actually got yelled at for using an image map for obvious reasons. The edition of the book I used did not discourage them, but I still swear it was a nicely written text.

As for inaccuracies... W3Schools has been addressing them if the cited sources were reliable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yeah, how dare we as developers criticise a website disseminating wrong information like W3Schools. It's not their fault they get tonnes of Google traffic and have made no effort whatsoever to bring their site inline with other equally great resources.

The first Google result for the query, "div tag" is a W3Schools page. The page then cringefully displays a sample piece of code with an inline style colour attribute that probably would have been acceptable in 2002. Don't get me wrong, as a developer I think W3Schools can serve a purpose, but I've often found myself on a W3Schools reference page and not leaving a single useful piece of information.

It feels like W3Schools hasn't changed since it launched. I'm guessing the software company that runs it has better things to do and doesn't really care whether or not they're miseducating people.

And by the way, I think the author is about 7 years too late on the W3Schools hate train, the article reads like hating W3Schools is a new thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "I think the author is about 7 years too late..."

If Hacker News participants ran the world no one would care about history. We can discuss things that happened in the past. It sure as hell sparked discussion here.

> "Don't get me wrong, as a developer I think W3Schools can serve a > purpose..."

And it does. It's easy to understand, which is not something you find often in sites trying to teach something. As I said elsewhere, good code makes crappy tutorials since it introduces more concepts that can confuse and overwhelm a inexperienced reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _I suspect that sources like W3Schools, the O'Reilly Missing Manual series and DirectXTutorial.com leave out good practices to avoid overwhelming the reader._

This idea is sometimes called Wittgenstein's ladder: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children> \- "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb beyond them. He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it."

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with everything but the last bit. If you throw away the ladder, doesn't that represent forgetting the information that actually helped you?

<comment><USER17> No, you're still on top of the mountain, you just no longer need the rungs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe not, but I can still appreciate them and remember what they offered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> W3Schools is not perfect but it is the best HTML/CSS reference that I've seen. The W3Fools effort is sort of well-intentioned but overly disrespectful. The supposed alternatives linked from W3Fools are hideous.

W3Fools energy would be _MUCH_ better spent on developing an alternative.

<comment><USER19> We have MDN, dochub, sitepoint, etc, they all have up-to-date, correct content. We don't need another one. What's hideous about them?

<comment><USER20> MDN: Too Mozilla centric. I certainly hate devs who make Firefox-only pages more than ones who look up on w3schools. And I've met a few of them ;)

dochub: Where are the tutorials?

Sitepoint: The structure is messy. It looks like a blog, but a historical structure is awful for learning. I want topic categories. Also lots of things I don't care about - books, courses - I just want references and tutorials! MDN is better from this side.

I'm not convinced. You're not going to kill w3schools if you don't understand why so many folks go to that site.

Personally I didn't know dochub, and might probably get back soon on this site. It's clean, and the information is useful, but only when you already understand well what you're doing. It's not for learning the Web concepts. Also, it misses direct mention of browser support for every feature.

<comment><USER21> Have you used the MDN? It's hosted by Mozilla but it's an open wiki. Almost any bug or oddity in a browser will likely be listed. There are pages for essentially every extension for most browsers as well. Webkit's extensions live at [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/CSS/CSS_Reference/W...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/CSS/CSS_Reference/Webkit_Extensions) for example.

The MDN also has fantastic tutorials (<https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/CSS/Getting_Started> is the CSS one) and lots of examples of good or complicated HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3.

I see the MDN catch a lot of unwarranted flack and i don't understand why. Shoot I use chrome as my main webrowser and I still spend most of my time on dochub.io (which is sources entirely from the MDN) and the MDN itself.

<comment><USER20> I use MDN, not extensively though. I like this site, it is useful and very well organized, but feature availability (browser & level) is not as well documented as in w3schools I find. Chrome is probably not the issue here, rather - let's name it - IE.

MDN is a great site, don't misunderstand me - but in this case I am not sure this is the right hoster. I used MDN for some JavaScript issues like one year ago, and it was then running well on FF but not at all on IE. Maybe they have all corrected that since, but I'm not seeing that clearly now.

dochub looks nice, but again it is not something for beginners.

Also, MDN is client only (which is one point making me say it is very Mozilla oriented). w3schools has this part about PHP which is very useful for beginners. Again, my point hasn't changed. MDN and others are more useful resources to experienced web devs than w3schools, but w3schools is the better point to begin with when you don't know about web development and want a clear overview.

<comment><USER21> _shrug_ different strokes. I learned to website via the MDN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > It is unrealistic to expect beginners to learn what good code is before what > code is in the first place. Aspiring programmers do not yet understand the > nuances of their trade, and often overlook security concerns and the > importance of formal documentation.

That's no excuse for ignoring even the basics. Some of the w3schools tutorials are like starting a teenager's first driving lesson with "run down as many pedestrians as you want, we'll teach you how to not drive on sidewalks later".

<comment><AUTHOR> No, they're not. Quit exaggerating and let beginners be beginners.

<comment><USER22> C'mon. Their "PHP MySQL Insert Into" tutorial (<http://w3schools.com/php/php_mysql_insert.asp>) uses direct $_POST data with no escaping. No mention of security is made in the _entire_ "PHP Database" section.

These tutorials need a massive red flashing warning saying "we've left critical stuff out, you will get your site defaced if you code like this".

Newbies don't need to be expected to know good code. That's no excuse for presenting actively _dangerous_ examples to them with no warning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good code makes crappy tutorials. If I was a moron, I don't care if the examples inadvertently summons swarms of locusts if I understand them quickly.

Now, I would be all for W3Schools making their disclaimer more noticeable. It is there, though.

<comment><USER22> > Good code makes crappy tutorials.

Not necessarily, and bad code can make _dangerous_ tutorials.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "Not necessarily, and bad code can make dangerous tutorials."

W3Schools is not responsible for what devs do, and safe code means introducing more concepts that can leave the scope of a tutorial.

I agree the code sucks, but we're talking about minimizing time to understand something, not security. Save that for the security tutorials.

<comment><USER23> How are people supposed to know that they need to go and find a separate security tutorial (and not a W3Schools one, they don't have one)?

Following that tutorial introduces massive security holes into a site. Those security problems need to be discussed. At the very least they need a warning saying "Don't do this until you understand the security issues discussed in THIS OTHER GUIDE".

<comment><AUTHOR> > "How are people supposed to know that they need to go and find a separate > security tutorial (and not a W3Schools one, they don't have one)?"

Whenever they realize they don't understand something. This could happen by reflecting on the material or after making a mistake.

> "Following that tutorial introduces massive security holes into a site."

I've touched on this on other parts of this page.

<comment><USER23> > Whenever they realize they don't understand something.

Which is quite likely to be when their customers' data gets leaked or altered. That's a really bad time to discover a hole in your understanding.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "Which is quite likely to be when their customers' data..."

Who would hire someone who only has W3Schools knowledge? Are we really worried about them?

<comment><USER24> > Who would hire someone who only has W3Schools knowledge?

And this pretty much negates your whole argument. If you ever plan on getting hired or being taken seriously enough to get clients, this isn't the resource. How pissed would you be to find out at an interview or after a breach that the site you used to learn all this stuff was the laughing stock of developers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> To be fair, W3Schools is simpler, cleaner and more organized than the alternatives suggested by W3Fool. It is still the fastest way to start learning about a web technology. But perhaps it would be best if they wikify it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe, but I would be concerned about a future where W3School's increase in accuracy hurts it's clarity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I agree. I've been developing web stuff since '98 or so, and w3schools is quick, easy, and I've never run into an accuracy problem that affected a real, production site. Most are academic.

Sure, there's better sites out there, but sometimes you just have to trust the Google.

If the site shows up #1 for 90% of web stuff you're looking for, then others obviously found it useful too.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think the important point is, that there _ARE_ better alternatives out there. There's just no point in defending a mediocre and potentially harmful[0] learning platform. There's no need for hostility, just move on.

[0]<http://en.w3schools.com/php/php_ajax_database.asp>

</comment><comment><USER27> Step 1: Log into Google.com

Step 2: Block w3schools at <http://www.google.com/reviews/t>

> Sites will be blocked only for you, but Google may use everyone's blocking > information to improve the ranking of search results overall.

<comment><USER28> That blocking no longer works for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have learnt/used as reference way more from w3schools than I ever will from the people who created w3fools.

So kudos to them for criticizing the crap out of the site? (I do also see what they are doing as valuable, but I'd agree it's needlessly hostile).

I of course didn't learn exclusively from w3chools (I doubt anyone does), it's just a resource. Not perfect, but it's useful.

</comment><comment><USER30> The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

<comment><USER5> Except w3school is a road to heaven paved with bad instructions. None the less it _is_ a road, and it's approachable.

<comment><USER30> Oh no, if you follow the instructions on that site you're going straight to code hell. Yes it is very approachable and enticing, but it's wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> I came out of it just fine. Satan had some good contacts.

<comment><USER30> That's the problem though, people who have been misled by w3schools often don't even realise it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did. I am fully aware of the inaccurate content I ran with from w3schools, which is why I corrected myself. That does not change the fact w3schools was there when I needed a source that was easy to understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> domain: w3fools.com created: 08-Jan-2011

<http://whois.domaintools.com/w3fools.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> The age of what is being talked about does not determine the relevance of the conversation and what it entails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> From the w3fools I learned the valuable trick that if you add "mdn" to your Google search you are likely to get a link pointing to Mozilla Developer Network.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Some folks have started voicing"... How old is the article!?

</comment><comment><USER34> W3 is killing it in the SEO department though. It'd be nice to buy those guys and use that google-juice for the forces of good.

</comment><comment><USER35> What is it 2008?

<comment><AUTHOR> The age of what is being talked about does not determine the relevance of the conversation and what it entails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> nice url structure you got there

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.sagegerard.com/blog/lay-off-w3schools/> works. Edit mode in Concrete5 does not use pretty links.

<comment><USER36> considering you use this mess I'm not suprised you support w3schools: [https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/blob/master/web/concr...](https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/blob/master/web/concrete/dispatcher.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. I'm glad you care. You can clean it up. We done here?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dear Idiots, Stop Leaking Comic-Con Trailers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/07/comic-con-stop-leaking-footage/

<comment><USER2> It's our privilege to be advertised to? Fuck Wired.

</comment><comment><USER3> And the irony is that many of the same people that would agree with this article would also defend copyright infringement via torrents or other illegal downloading of movies, music or books. It's interesting how copyrights are to be respected when because of a perceived personal benefit (getting access to early, exclusive stuff,) but when copyright is inconvienient, many in the community happily ignore copyright.</comment>


Ask HN: Will privacy and cryptography go the way of communism? - <AUTHOR> In other words, a nice idea in theory but eventually we'll all realize we can't afford it?
Or will it somehow stick around? And maybe somehow find the balance needed to survive?
For me this question was prompted by reading https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/cypherpunk.manifesto and thinking, yeah, it's a nice piece, but written before terrorism, globally, became a weekly occurrence and before secret message services were widespread, and is blissfully ignorant of the future we inhabit.
And also by remembering, I used to like writing cryptography, but now I also have the feeling that I don't want to make something that helps people do bad things. I never felt that responsibility before. It was just being creative and making something cool. But I feel that responsibility now. I don't want to put a tool in people's hands that could help them get away with hurting people illegally. So even tho I want to, I don't know if I'll write crypto anymore. And even if I do I don't know if I'll share it. It's kind of sad to realise stuff you like doing is going to be abused by some people. And that if you share it with the world, you're going to be part of that. And so instead you pick other projects that have less abuse potential. <comment><USER2> The other day a HN reader said it's already to late and we go extinct within 3 decades (global warming). I don't think we need to worry much about privacy.

Worldly things are fleeting. Death always wins.</comment>


A Bitcoin conference has stopped taking Bitcoin payments because they don't work - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/10/bitcoin-conference-stops-accepting-cryptocurrency-payments.html <comment><USER2> I think Bitcoin is pretty broken at this point, but this article vs. the headline is absolutely atrocious.

 _The North American Bitcoin Conference, held in Miami next week, said it has stopped accepting last-minute ticket payments in bitcoin_

...Well yeah, of course.

 _" We have, and always will, accept cryptocurrencies for our conferences, up to fourteen days before the event," the organizers wrote. "However, due to the manual inputting of data in our ticketing platforms when paid in cryptocurrencies, we decided to shut down bitcoin payments for last minute sales due to print deadlines."_

What the shit, this is a non-story in a space with plenty of genuinely positive and negative stories to tell. What is the deal with CNBC?</comment>


Functors, Applicatives, and Monads in Pictures - <AUTHOR> http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_monads_in_pictures.html <comment><USER2> Thanks, I found this really helpful!</comment>


Less Everything - Taking Risks - <AUTHOR> http://b.lesseverything.com/2009/10/29/the-right-decision-should-make-everyone-squirm

<comment><USER2> Lots of selective memory and faulty reasoning here. Take his first example: "Took art classes in high school instead of working out with the football team. I design for a living now." It's easy to retroactively give a positive interpretation to any life choice you might make, but consider the alternative. Had he chosen football instead of art he might be looking back thankfully that the decision lead him down the path to becoming an NFL star, or sports announcer, or whatever.

Similarly, the folks who took risks, ignored the common wisdom, and failed miserably may not be writing blog posts extolling risk taking and ignoring the common wisdom. IMHO there's no sound generalization to make about risk. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not, and plenty depends on our attitude towards it.

<comment><USER3> _Had he chosen football instead of art he might be looking back thankfully that the decision lead him down the path to becoming an NFL star, or sports announcer, or whatever._

The likelihood of football leading directly to a career path (rather than through connections obtained while playing) is far lower than the similar probability for art, though - there are hundreds of thousands of jobs that directly use art skills, whereas the number of football jobs is far lower (even if we include high school coaching in the equation).

In that sense, doing art is really the "safe" option, at least compared to playing football. It only feels less safe because in high school playing football is a lot more respected than doing art.

<comment><USER4> I chose to work out and play h.s. football. I'm a developer at Intel, so maybe I learned a lot of discipline playing football? Or maybe I'm more inclined to do corporate work...

"It's easy to retroactively give a positive interpretation to any life choice"

<comment><USER5> Johnny I'd say you followed the head sheep. Now you're in a cubical wearing khaki pants to work spending your day on ycombinator news, dreaming about what could have been.

<comment><USER4> Maybe, if I stop learning and creating new things. And I wear jeans and flip flops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More of an interesting anecdote than evidence of a trend. Between name- dropping Seth Godin and mentioning how he eschewed football, this comes off as a linkbait appeal to the internet design crowd.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is he asking for our approval of him buying that Lincoln Continental? And why is that risky? Might not be dead-center-mainstream.. but a lot of people still buy old cars like that. Maybe people around him feel strangely about it since it might be out of character? I don't know, has the author owned any other old vehicles? Sorry if I'm being too critical here

<comment><USER8> I think he was just using it as a nice lede. And he had a picture.

<comment><USER5> It's about breaking the trends. The classic car is just an example of what most people DON'T do. Most people think the safe choice is to purchase a vehicle with a warranty because they know what they're getting into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How much of a risk is it to not follow a career that you don't like (he's says he wasn't passionate about football in his comments)? I'd say that was the appropriate decision, not risky.

"5. Put in every dime I owned into Less Everything so Steve and I could change our piece of the internet."

OK, maybe, but answer the following questions and then we can ascertain the amount of risk taken:

1\. approximately how much money?

2\. how old were you?

3\. did you have a mortgage

4\. were you married at the time

5\. did you have children?

I applaud his success, but we're not really talking "Sell your parent's farm for a 1 in a million chance" level of risk here, are we?

</comment><comment><USER4> His examples seem to be more about making choices than risks. I choose not to buy a new Prius because it's an insane waste of money compared to the used car I bought at 20k miles. I also felt my choice was better for the environment (30mpg highway on a used car, compared to 50mpg new car).

His choice to buy that old car is a wise one, it will probably maintain value, while his expenses/maintenance will be lower on a car that's simpler to work on or buy parts for.

</comment><comment><USER10> You can take risks with anything that you want to explore your limits with, be it with a business decision or a sport. I've absorbed a fairly substantial amount of risk financially with ventures, and that's actually a thrilling thing. I think the seed of that though came from the times I stepped out on the field knowing I was about to risk some serious injury because of some particular circumstances, then managing to scrape by on the thinnest margin.</comment>


No funding for uncomfortable results - <AUTHOR> https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/12/07/no-funding-for-unwanted-news/ <comment><USER2> In the 80:s, when I was a child, I was part of study about something called DAMP - Deficits in Attention Motor control and Perception). The DAMP diagnosis was roughly similar to ADHD, and kind of a precursor to it, invented by psychologists in the university in the city I grew up on. Back then, this Swedish university was very influential in the area of child psychology. Several renowned text books are written by researches on this university and so on. Luckily for me, I was part of the control group and not among the kids they thought suffered from DAMP.

Anyway, Gillberg the professor who led the study had promised all participating families total anonymity. But in the mid nineties, other researchers started to doubt the veracity of Gillberg's results. They thought they had found flaws in his methodology and wanted access to the raw material to double-check his results. Gillberg refused, realizing that anonymizing the data sufficiently so as to not leak any identifying details would be impossible.

Eventually, the other researchers went to court and got a court order demanding that Gillberg give up his data. At which point he destroyed all the raw data thereby completely removing any scientific underpinnings the DAMP diagnosis had. There is a lot more to be said about this controversy, but one thing is clear and that is that you shouldn't promise anonymity if you can't keep it.

<comment><USER3> _> …one thing is clear and that is that you shouldn't promise anonymity if you can't keep it._

Although it sounds like he did keep it, at significant cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The statement in the original article linked is more interesting:

"In the few experiments a decade ago where publication would have been possible, academic journals refused to do so for reasons having nothing to do with the scientific quality of the work. Computer-science publications refused to publish re-identification experiments unless the paper also included a technological solution, notwithstanding assertions that publishing these experiments would inspire technological innovation to address the real-world problem. Health-policy publications refused to publish re-identification experiments related to health data from fear that reaction might make data sharing more difficult, despite assertions that because technology was fostering unprecedented levels of data-sharing, it was timely to scientifically re-examine data-sharing practices. Even my Weld example and related demographic analyses, despite making significant contributions to privacy regulations worldwide, were refused publication by more than 20 academic publications at the time."

Personally if feels like the work was an important journalistic effort, but its scientific merit is less clear.

<comment><USER5> That's not how I would read it. Instead, the article fell between the gaps between two different disciplines. The computer science guys wanted a tech fix - reasonably enough, that's kind of what computer science is about. The health policy guys' reaction is harder to understand: they didn't want to publish it because they feared the consequences of publicity, rather than because of flaws in the methods. That's almost never a legitimate reason to reject a paper.

<comment><USER4> That's what the author said, but it seems suspect to me. I'd like to read the rejections and understand if this is just the authors interpretation.

But looking at what was done, it doesn't seem novel. It's just combining two datasets, and while journalistically important, doesn't seem to be sufficiently novel for publication in most journals.

<comment><USER6> > doesn't seem to be sufficiently novel for publication in most journals.

The question is why you think novelty is relevant. Replication studies aren't novel but are critically important to real science. Novelty is not and should not be mandatory.

<comment><USER4> Maybe, but it generally is. In most scientific disciplines I think you'd find it hard to publish simple replication of someone else's work. You'd need to add some novel aspect, or extend the work slightly.

For a healthcare replication study, I would guess you be hard pressed to get a replication study published for the same demographic, and same sample size as a previous study.

<comment><USER6> > I think you'd find it hard to publish simple replication of someone else's > work.

Yes, but this shouldn't be the case. The replication crisis clearly points out the problems with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought this was famous work that stopped a lot of anonymized data being released and was part of the reason that the programme around differential privacy kicked off?

<comment><USER8> It became famous because she was clever enough to get the _governor 's_ data, which meant her work became interesting to the general press. The specialist press remained uninterested for reasons discussed in the article and elsewhere in this discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing I don't quite understand is why aren't the wealthiest citizens lobbying for privacy legislation? I'm sure there are plenty of wealthy people who have a lot to lose having their medical or financial information leaked. This seems like the kind of bipartisan cross-class issue nearly everyone can get behind.

<comment><USER10> Because they can pay to either insulate themselves (private clinic, fake names, etc), or pay to have such things silenced/changed/denied would be my guess? Especially if their businesses somehow benefit from not having privacy legislations...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see no evidence that the problem is that people were unwilling to fund uncomfortable results, but that they didn't see the point of funding a calculation that as the article notes, could be done on the back of the envelope, and without any proposed solution. Basically, what would the funding add to this statistic?

<comment><USER12> What's significant is this:

> Over 20 journals turned down her paper on the Weld study ...

And this:

> A decade ago, funding sources refused to fund re-identification experiments > unless there was a promise that results would likely show that no risk > existed or that all problems could be solved by some promising new > theoretical technology under development.

And she didn't just do a "back-of-the-envelope calculation". She re-identified an actual public dataset, including the then governor of Massachusetts :)

<comment><USER4> In order to publish in a scientific journal the work needs to be novel. Based on this article, the work doesn't seem novel...

I'd like to see the rejections, my guess is they mostly said "this is not novel or unexpected".

To make the work novel you might suggest a new approach to anonymizing data for example...

<comment><USER13> I think it was only trivial in hindsight. Scientific publishing is rife with articles the reveal a problem without offering a solution; to expect one seems outright weird.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Becoming a 10x Developer - <AUTHOR> https://kateheddleston.com/blog/becoming-a-10x-developer <comment><USER2> Thats not what a 10X programmer is about.

<comment><USER3> It is more like "The smallest dogs always bark the loudest" a.k.a. make sure/at least try to remind why are you important for everybody who meet.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Restyaboard – Open source trello alternative - <AUTHOR>

Demo: http://restya.com/board/demo.html
Features: http://restya.com/board/features.html
Trello Vs Restyaboard: http://restya.com/board/comparison.html (Offline support and more)
AWS AMI coming soon for 1-click install (Submitted for approval). This is one of revenue options.
Source code will be pushed once AMI is ready.
http://restya.com/board/ <comment><AUTHOR> (With clickable links)

Demo: [http://restya.com/board/demo.html](http://restya.com/board/demo.html)

Features: [http://restya.com/board/features.html](http://restya.com/board/features.html)

Trello Vs Restyaboard: [http://restya.com/board/comparison.html](http://restya.com/board/comparison.html) (Offline support and more)

AWS AMI coming soon for 1-click install (Submitted for approval). This is one of revenue options.

Source code will be pushed once AMI is ready.

[http://restya.com/board/](http://restya.com/board/)

<comment><USER2> I couldn't find it anywhere. What are your thoughts on collapsing empty columns to take up less horizontal space?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comments. We welcome you to provide more such suggestions in our github repo. Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice! I like the bottom nav bar. Would definitely use over Trello. A few notes on UI:

When adding a card, why not make labeling/assigning more accessible? You could give those functions little icons near the "Add" button instead of making users dig through settings.

Orange loading bar at the top is distracting.

Window that pops up when you click on a task seems cramped. Maybe increase the container width or rearrange the info in the first column?

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks for your kind feedback. We'll definitely improve the UI. Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is amazing.

You have music? Insane. Are there people out there who will like that?

Please remove the top bar that fills itself on every action I take.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your kind feedback. We'll definitely improve. Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> seems like the trello developers only want to improve their business deal. we needed a trello calendar for all cards across all boards so urgently that we created it ourselves... (i hope its ok to spam the link since its open source)

[http://calendar-for-trello.com/#/month](http://calendar-for- trello.com/#/month)

[https://github.com/w11k/calendar-for- trello](https://github.com/w11k/calendar-for-trello)

if restyboard implements a native feature for that we'll try it out!

<comment><AUTHOR> We're committed to improve Restya platform and board. If this is a common request, we'll see what we can do here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You really should submit this as a direct link to [http://restya.com/board/demo.html](http://restya.com/board/demo.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> The demo UI feels like a mashup between Trello and Myspace... not sure if people logging in as admin are to blame, or the demo theme itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. We tried our best to differentiate from trello. We haven't checked MySpace UI. Will check. If you have any suggestion, please feel free to share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How many trello alternatives do we need, really?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. If you're not finding our product and platform attractive than others, can you share some details?

<comment><USER8> [http://libreboard.com/](http://libreboard.com/)

It's pretty cool. But please keep going, competition is always good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. We hope, when you check our demo, you'll like it. Also, our focus is Restya platform for its tech agnostic approach.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tumors have a bloody new way to grow and spread: vascular mimicry - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/tumors-have-found-bloody-new-way-grow-and-spread <comment><USER2> And that is why angiogenesis inhibitors don't work as well as we'd hoped. Damn.

<comment><USER3> Fortunately, according to the article, there _are_ drugs that can prevent vasculogenic mimicry:

> Yi-Wen Chu, TaiRx's senior vice president, sent the drug to Hendrix, her > former Ph.D. superviser, to determine whether it would halt vasculogenic > mimicry. It did, curbing the activity of Nodal, a gene that drives > vasculogenic mimicry by making cancer cells more like stem cells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wait are the tumors learning? This headline is a tad confusing.

<comment><USER5> Somewhat yes tumors have something dubbed "tumor escape mechanisms" these mechanisms allow it survive our immune system as well as treatments like radio therapy, chemotherapy and surgery.

Tumor traits are likely to undergo similar natural selection processes like every other bilogical constructs.

<comment><USER3> But it isn't "new" in the sense that tumors are starting to do it recently. It's "new" in the sense that we are only now discovering it. That's why it is a bad title, a bit click-baity.</comment></comment></comment>


BYU Students Value Their Strict Honor Code. But Not the Harsh Punishments - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/us/byu-honor-code.html <comment><USER2> Bring on the parade of Mormons that think they're unfairly persecuted. Maybe they'll start another Change.org request to make NYT change their tone. "They shouldn't sign the honor code if they don't want to live it." "Go to another university!" I heard the same comments when the SL Trib won a Pulitzer showing that RAPE VICTIMS were further abused by the BYU Honor Code Office. I heard the same comments about the push to de-list the BYU police department because they won't provide information as required by state law. It is my opinion these same people would rebel the strongest against allowing Sharia law. How ironic they are allaying the foundation, brick by brick. It's easy to say "not my clowns, not my circus", but folks, these people are destroying fundamental rights guaranteed to all Americans.

</comment><comment><USER3> Context: I'm an undergraduate student studying at BYU.

This article puts a nasty and unfair spin on the whole situation. While I do accept that there are probably some things that could be changed with the way the HCO handles cases, this article is reporting false or misleading information.

For starters, the bit about "mandatory religious worship" as punishment is nonsense. I don't know where they got that. Probably a misunderstanding of how the HC Office encourages students to attend their worship services---whatever their religion might be. Secondly, "stories of being suspended or expelled for violations such as kissing a date good night," etc. is ludicrous. BYU hasn't expelled anyone in 2019---and only two people in the current academic year. Those were for _crimes_ : Title IX violations and the like. If they expelled people for all the things mentioned in the article, (and on Instagram) BYU would have a _much_ higher expulsion rate.

Many of the stories on the mentioned Instagram page are pure fabrication. Many more are highly embellished. After talking with some people involved with the protest, I went and talked to the HCO myself with some hard questions: the Honor Code Office is not there to expel or punish students---they're there primarily to help students develop character and morally-upright lives. (This being one of the aims of BYU's education.)

Granted, I would like to see some sort of student component in the HCO. I think that's a good idea. There are unfortunately a lot of people who are just angry at an institution trying to do good.

If you're curious, I recommend reading the source instead of trusting the NYT: [https://honorcode.byu.edu](https://honorcode.byu.edu)

<comment><USER4> You're being disingenuous and attempting to deflect from real issues. It's not only the text of the honor code that matters, but also the social context and how it is applied.

If you attend BYU as an LDS member, you need to maintain an ecclesiastical endorsement. Part of this includes paying tithing and attending at least some services. If you do not maintain your ecclesiastical endorsement, you can have a hold put on your account to where you can't register for additional classes, graduate, and possibly can't even apply for a transcript. In short, they can keep you from transferring schools unless you are willing to start from scratch, in order to get you to comply. Yes, that is mandatory religious worship, just with extra steps between point a and c. I should know. I attended BYU within the last decade and stopped believing at that time. You are not free to cease being a practicing LDS member. As it is a private school, I would have been fine had they simply asked me to pay the non-member tuition, or requested that I transfer schools. Instead they held my transcript as punishment. I had to grovel and go through a family friend to get an ecclesiastical endorsement to get a transcript. What rubbish. Surely you would be upset if Notre Dame treated a student who converted from Catholicism to Mormonism similarly?

The Honor Code Office has a whole history rife with abuse. In 2015, student Madi Barney was raped. She reported this to Provo police. She was placed under investigation by the Honor Code Office and was barred for a time from enrolling in classes. Unlike previous victims of this institutional abuse, she fought back and went public, ultimately forcing the Title IX office to formally separate from the Honor Code office. Previously information had been shared freely between the two.

[https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4732048&itype=CMSI...](https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4732048&itype=CMSID)

And it's not just the Honor Code Office and the Title IX office. BYU's campus police department was and is complicit in the institutional abuse of authority wielded to keep students in line. Earlier this year the BYU police department was sanctioned in a move to decertify the entire police department. This happened because they failed to investigate misconduct where campus officers were accessing and sharing information using external police databases.

[https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2019/02/26/utah- moves-d...](https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2019/02/26/utah-moves- decertify-byu/)

In my own personal experience, I and friends disclosed information to religious leaders, which was subsequently disclosed to the honor code office and used to justify academic probation and punishment. Yes, this was absolutely a blatant violation of priest-penitent confidentiality.

Think about that for a minute. Think about the sharing of information between religious authorities, school's honor code office, title IX office, campus police, and external law enforcement. All in a direct line. Institutional abuse of power and crossing lines that should not be crossed.

The social implications of student body awareness that the Honor Code can be used against you as a student, has been taken advantage of by predators. During my time on campus, talking with victims of sexual assault, the following was explained to me. Would-be predators would attempt to target individuals, like women or closeted gay men, and manipulate them into breaking the honor code in some manner. And have a recording of this. And then assault them or attempt to coerce them. If the victim then went to the police, the campus would become aware that they had previously broken the Honor Code and would have action taken against them. This was used to try to silence victims and prevent them from turning to the authorities for help. And you know what? It worked in a number of cases I personally knew of, allowing predators to victimize multiple individuals before being stopped.

I'm no longer a believer, but reading this comment, I assume you are. Is this how you believe Jesus would want his church, and a school supposedly run in his name, behaving?

<comment><USER5> FWIW, What you described as your personal experience doesn't strike me as all that abusive.

If my (non Mormon) pastor was told someone was violating title IX (sex assault), I'd expect them to report to various other authorities. Mandatory reporting laws mean most information communicated to religious leaders abouse sexual harm isn't all that confidential.

Maybe Mormons have a relationship to clergy more like Catholics do to priests?

<comment><USER4> You've got it backwards. This has nothing to do with mandatory reporting laws. You are assuming something is said about person B during person A's confessional. That isn't what is being described.

A student confesses to their religious leaders that they have done some sin. Fine, go through the religious repentance process. That's how things normally work in other religions too. A religious leader doesn't have authority to academically punish someone. What doesn't normally happen, is that this info gets shared with a school authority that does. And then the school authority shares info with campus police, from where it can also go into state or federal databases.

Or it goes the other way, where info given to city police ends up in the hands of academic or religious folks who use it abusively.

A student like Madi Barney is assaulted, she goes to city police. City police share detailed info with campus police, who share it with title ix and honor code office, who share it with religious authorities. She was not the assaulter, she was the victim. Yet, because a part of the police report includes a history of some breaking of the honor code, even though as in my original response predators manipulate folks into doing this, she ends up being investigated and punished academically and religiously. City PD ends up functionally an investigation and enforcement arm of academic and religious authorities. That is ABSOLUTELY institutional abuse of power.

I didn't share much of my personal experiences, just enough to rebut the claim that religious attendance is not mandatory, that was the purpose of paragraphs 1-2 so I don't know what you are going on about. The rest of the response was what detailed the abusive system.

I didn't even touch on how this is used against LGBT students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I live very close to this university and have had 2 friends relate the same basic story: They each gained a reputation for being discreet (not sure exactly how that worked) and slept with many, many girls who attended BYU.</comment>


Ask HN: Any devs/engineers looking for a designer/marketing partner? - <AUTHOR> I'm a product designer for a startup in SF during the day, but I've been itching to create a side project.
I've built a couple of successful side projects, but they were smaller, and mostly content type sites, since the extent of my programming is HTML/CSS/jQuery and WordPress. I would also say that I have a lot of marketing experience and am pretty connected in the startup/design community.
Anyone interested in partnering up to build something? I'm interested in possibly an app or SASS product. Let me know what you think. <comment><USER2> I have a site I'm building called bid2mow.com. It's a bidding site for lawn care. But, I also have a domain called bid2design.com which could reuse the code from bid2mow.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> What did you have in mind for this site? And how is it doing now?

<comment><USER2> It would be a site focused on companies posting design projects and freelancers bidding on the projects. The site itself isn't even started. I have bid2mow.com code (bidding, messaging, tracking tasks, etc.) that could be reused. If you wanted we could setup a basic landing page with a wufoo form wizard to collect some lead info of google. that's what I did with bid2mow.com to validate whether it was worth pursuing further. I haven't done much with the domain yet because I don't have the design connections for vendors and/or design chops to make the site look good enough. One thing for people looking for lawn care but quite another for people looking for designers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I honestly think this market is too saturated, especially with sites like 99 Designs and Upwork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How can I contact you?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can email me. email@example.com</comment></comment>


Selecting a lower-res display? - <AUTHOR>

My setup consists of a Windows 7 PC with two monitors:
- 26" 720p (1366X768) primary display - Toshiba 26AV502U LCD Television - 20" 1024X768 secondary display (Generic Dell monitor)
I prefer lower resolution, as this allows me to sit further from my screens, and is easier on the eyes. I have tried, for example, to run Thunderbird on a 1900X1200 display, and everything is just too damn small.
I'd like to add a third display that is energy-efficient (Energy Star) and gives me 720p, or close, at 26" display size - native resolution, but the trend is in the other direction - higher and higher resolution.
I know I can try running something at half the native resolution, but that requires I get a display which runs something ridiculous like 2600X1600.
I suppose I can get another of the Toshibas, but I'd prefer something more energy-efficient.
Ideas? <comment><USER2> Have you never heard of OS-level scaling? I run 1080p on a 13" screen (116 ppi) and if I set the "Make text and other items bigger" setting in Control Panel to the largest option (150%), then I can get it looking like this: <http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/3294/bigscreen.png> (Chrome doesn't automatically zoom with the OS, but you can zoom it easily or use another browser).

You don't need to double the resolution to do this (besides, 2600x1600 isn't as ridiculous as you might think). 200% isn't your only option - the two that Control Panel gives you are 125% and 150%, but there are other ways you can make it bigger that allow for different percentages (try your graphics card settings if you need those).

It's well worth it to get a higher-res monitor and scale it - everything will look far better, particularly text, than if you get a low-res monitor. It also gives you a lot more options.</comment>


Are Sensors the Answer to Beat Growing TSA Lines? This Airport Says "YES" - <AUTHOR> http://www.aviationpros.com/article/12217457/cvg-fights-wait-times-with-technology <comment><USER2> No. The answer is to kick the TSA out.

[http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2016/0514/Is- Phoenix...](http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2016/0514/Is-Phoenix- airport-opting-out-of-the-TSA-video)</comment>