Objective Lua - <AUTHOR> http://www.cowlark.com/objective-lua/ <comment><USER2> Really?

Seriously, Lua is a fine language, and doesn't need this objective-crap thrown in top of it. How to make a simple thing, more complicated. Just b/c you can, doesn't mean you should.

<comment><USER3> My friend Josh is working on a big project in Lua, and part of his wishlist is a Lua-compatible language with "classical" OO (language-level classes and interfaces):

<http://blog.reverberate.org/2009/02/09/disappointment/>

<http://blog.reverberate.org/2009/02/09/static-lua/>

<comment><USER4> I don't see the point of adding classes* to Lua, but implementing points 1 and 7 (the error for undeclared vars and nonexistent fields, not the "as userdata" part) is done as an example in PiL. See strict.lua. Any variables not declared as local default to globals, and you can trap the use of globals quite easily by hooking __index and __newindex in the global table's metatable.

* With a class-based system, you first write an _abstract_ version of what you need, then create instances. With prototypes, you just create the instance, and if generalizing is worth doing (it often isn't!), you can spawn new objects based off of it. I wonder if classes themselves encourage over-abstraction. Of course, you have to use prototypes idiomatically, or they just seem like weird classes. (This is also orthogonal to static analysis.)

To really take advantage of static typing, you would probably need to add support for it to the Lua VM. I don't know of any languages as lightweight as Lua with good static type systems, though - and I agree that an ML-like language as lightweight and clean as Lua could be _really_ nice.

<comment><USER5> _To really take advantage of static typing, you would probably need to add support for it to the Lua VM_

Understandable, but not entirely correct. See StrongTalk. You can have the static typing be in the parser/compiler frontend only. The programmer can get feedback about type metadata, and can use it in refactoring and ensuring program correctness. The VM has to know _bupkus_ about that stuff. In particular Lua's VM is good enough that in most cases it's not needed for performance reasons.

This makes the typing system somewhat circumventable. But the type system is usually circumventable even in a traditional static typed language. At some point, you have to count on programmers not doing stupid things.

On the other side of the coin, such type systems are _optional._ Which means that you can have less typing for prototyping and rapid development, and more for mature code going into production and maintenance.

<comment><USER4> I originally had a few lines about how it would "just" be usable for static analysis, debugging, etc. otherwise, but that would still be worthwhile. I haven't looked into StrongTalk yet though, so thanks. :)

<comment><USER5> Whoops, it's spelled Strongtalk. Arrgh!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The main advantage in bringing OO concepts in the Lua world is actually to improve code modularization. There is no such thing as classes or modules in Lua - although there is a notion of 'environments' defining the scope of global variables. Grouping related functions/variables into classes is just a way to improve the maintability of large Lua chunks, it's not about transforming the language into something less simple.

I wrote my own library to implement OO concepts in pure Lua 5.1 several years ago; the code and details are still available at <http://lua- users.org/wiki/YetAnotherClassImplementation>.

<comment><USER6> Whoops, my bad. You're right, I forgot about the module system of Lua 5.1. Guess I will have to refresh some clusters of memory around here :o)

<comment><USER4> Well, the nice part with Lua is there's only so much you can forget. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An interesting project but I don't really see any practical need for this as Lua provides plenty of ways to construct just about any object system.

</comment><comment><USER8> A bit unrelated, but how do I find a Lua developer? I have a Lua project I need done soon.

<comment><USER7> Post on the lua mailing list: <http://www.lua.org/lua-l.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's one of the best descriptions of a programmer's tool I've ever seen.

<comment><USER10> ... said the project manager</comment></comment>


How and When Did the U.S. Start Veering Economic Nativist? - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/09/how_and_when_di.html

<comment><USER2> The trend has always been there-- for example, these folks: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing></comment>


Writer Jeffrey Lewis: A site by someone who won't have one - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffreylewis-novels.com/

<comment><USER2> And he manages to have a website with more style and personality than much of the internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's excellent. It's got a zen like simplicity that fits exactly the desires of the author/owner.

</comment><comment><USER4> People still use earthlink.net email addresses?

</comment><comment><USER5> ack, he's using p-tags for what obviously is an ordered list. =)</comment>


jsScheme - Scheme in JavaScript - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> There is no link.</comment>


Ars Pro: Now free of tracking scripts for subscribers - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/staff/2018/03/ars-pro-now-free-of-trackers-for-subscribers/ <comment><USER2> Hoo-ray! It's refreshing to see an honest online business model for a change: "you pay us money, we write stuff for you." It's also interesting to see what they think you're worth in ads and tracking: $2-3 a month. I hope they succeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm entirely in favour of supporting this approach. And Ars is one of the few sites which I read enough of to justify the price. (Which is only about $2/month)

</comment><comment><USER4> A few years ago I would have thought Ars was worth it, but it has since slipped below the "worth my time" threshold, aka "not even for free." I'm glad that they finally realized a significant portion of their audience use script and ad blockers, often with a VPN; that's something at least.

<comment><USER2> They unfortunately publish a lot of useless filler nowadays, but it's pretty easy to skip past that, and they still seem to do real journalism on a regular basis. Are they really worth less than $0?

<comment><USER4> They do very little that want previously covered by other, better sources. As a bonus, I don't have to sift through a mess for that information. Sadly, Ars has mostly become a sort of digest for tech/science. So for me, they're not worth the time, never mind the money.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where to find angel investors for funding below 100k? - <AUTHOR> Trying to develop a product but out of money.
Before you ask, yes I tried YC. Didn't get in. Not to knock yc in any way, but despite their name I consider them a (benevolent) VC firm. Their conditions and the recent spike in highly accomplished founders with competitive entries means that they sponsor companies that would get VC funding anyway.
I am aware the traditional sources of this kind of money is the three F's but I think tech community could also be an untapped resource.
Looking for true angels prepared to put up 25k to 100k for negotiable equity in a very early stage company. My needs are mundane, office space, utility bills, internet etc
I'm based in Lagos, Nigeria but I'm sure there are other would-be founders on HN in the same situation  from other countries. <comment><USER2> You're right about YC. Have you tried Angel List (angel.co)? Unfortunately the bar is set pretty high in general. A lot of the time investors will expect a working product and evidence of a growing user base.

Further, you're going to have a hard time raising capital from anywhere outside the US, with the exception of a few cities like London and Berlin. It's a big problem and a big flaw in the funding model which, despite investing in new technologies, is itself antiquated and old-fashioned.

Let people on HN know what you're trying to do and how they can help and you might be surprised. In any case, good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you david. I really appreciate your contribution and kind words</comment></comment>


Show HN: Hacker News Title Edit Tracker - <AUTHOR> https://hackernewstitles.netlify.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I built this several months ago as I was interested to see how the titles of posts evolve/change on HN. It turns out lots of titles are edited every day (in both subjectively and objectively good and bad ways!) and I've found it interesting to see how titles have evolved.

The whole thing is automated and is built around a Ruby script that pulls down the titles on the front page at a frequent interval. Any titles for specific story IDs that change get tracked and rendered out to a static HTML page hosted on Netlify. It runs by itself without incident so far.

This has been on Show HN before but I was kindly invited by dang to repost it.

<comment><USER2> This would be really good to apply to watching spin on various verticals.

Such as entertainment and financial articles...

Recall during the banking crisis of 2008 there was the article stating that the EU was about 16 TRILLION in debt crisis, but then that was too alarmist and they didnt. Want that getting out, so they edited the title, but they forgot to change the UrL which had the original title in it.

<comment><USER3> News outlets do that all the time. NYT in particular. Often they don't change the URLs, and I've always assumed that's for technical reasons—either there's a system that's treats URLs as immutable, or it's copied through multiple systems that the people who change the title can't edit, or some such thing.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps you'll appreciate this:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/nyt_diff](https://mobile.twitter.com/nyt_diff)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That is such a great UI. I feel like the list should be longer. Can you do that without it costing more?

Not all of those edits are by mods, of course. Some are made by submitters (edit: as the site points out!). Also, some are because we switched the URL and thus to the title of the new article (example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616157)). Those look weird if you assume they're moderation edits.

It looks like the list is sorted by reverse ID, which means articles that were submitted earlier are lower down on the page. But sometimes we re-up those ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)), so from a front-page perspective some 'newer' stories are below older ones.

<comment><USER5> > I feel like the list should be longer

Isn't there a small window of time to edit a submission before it gets committed permanently to HN? I imagine the list would be bigger if the grace period lasted much longer.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but moderators sometimes edit titles and do other moderatory things after that limit has expired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks - really interesting.

Take this one, for example:

 _nvidia Drops Support for CUDA on macOS

\--> CUDA 10.2 is the last release to support macOS

\--> CUDA Toolkit Release Notes_

The first two titles are quite interesting to me, as a macOS user and a general follower of the tech space (and I'd note neither are sensationalised, or click-bait, from what I can see). The last...? I'm not going to click on that in a million years, as I don't work with CUDA.

I'm not totally clear what the moderators' motivations always are, but might it be true that in _some_ cases, maybe they're prioritising strict accuracy over interest, or discoverability? And as a result, their actions are actually diminishing the value of HN as a discussion forum?

<comment><USER7> You have the answer here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617317)

"[...] The big no-no is extracting some interesting fact from inside the article and using it as the title"

<comment><USER8> Ironically, that's exactly what dang often does, including today.

<comment><USER3> Often? That doesn't seem true to me. Can you give examples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sequence provided some comedy:

> 21:00 Trends in the San Francisco poop crisis

> 21:15 Trends in the San Francisco (dog) poop crisis

> 22:25 Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog) poop crisis

<comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21610152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21610152)

<comment><USER10> Title was updated because of some primary research on the data set. Thats kinda cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some of these edits seem really questionable when laid out like this.

 _Pew Research: 2.2% of Americans produce 97% of political tweets_

↓

 _Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets on national politics_

Why remove the exact figures?

 _Former Apple chip executives found company to take on Intel, AMD_

↓

 _Three of Apple and Google's former star chip designers launch NUVIA_

Isn't "star designers" more subjective than "executives"?

 _1.2B people exposed in data leak includes personal info, LinkedIn, Facebook_

↓

 _Personal and social information of 1B people discovered in data leak_

Why make the headline _less_ informative? Data leaks happen regularly. Data leaks from Facebook and LinkedIn has different implications than a leak from LexisNexis or a random blog.

 _Cloudflare open-sources Flan Scan, a network vulnerability scanner_

↓

 _Flan Scan: Lightweight Network Vulnerability Scanner_

Again, why _remove_ info? The fact that CloudFlare is behind this is more interesting than yet another random tool.

 _Mozilla: "Dear Facebook: Stop cross site tracking by default"_

↓

 _Dear Facebook: Stop cross site tracking by default_

Same complaint. This distinguishes a random person making a random gripe from freakin' Mozilla who has the control to make Facebook's tracking more difficult.

\----

Every single one of these headlines actually are less informative or less interesting (in general, of lower quality) than their original submissions. They actually served to make HN less informative. WTF?

That gripe aside, _most_ of the edits are useful (typo fixing, adding dates, and such). These just leave me scratching my head.

<comment><USER3> > _Why remove the exact figures?_

That submitter broke the site guidelines by changing the article title when it was neither misleading nor clickbait—so we changed it back. Also, we've found that when a title is gratuitously numerical, it makes for worse discussion. Why? I don't know. It just does. Therefore, if anything, we take numbers out rather than add them in. For the same reason, we wrote software to abbreviate "1,000,000" to "1M", "1,000,000,000" to "1B" and so on. Numbers in titles are baity and long numbers baitier.

> _Isn 't "star designers" more subjective than "executives"?_

That title changed because we switched to a different URL and updated the title to match the new article. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616157).

> _Why make the headline less informative? [...] Data leaks from Facebook and > LinkedIn has different implications than a leak from LexisNexis or a random > blog._

That submitter broke the site guideline against editorializing. It's editorializing to cherry-pick the details that you consider important and put them in the title. That amounts to the power to determine the story for everyone else, and on HN, submitters don't get such power. We prioritize authors; submitters have no special rights over a story. If a submitter wants to say what they think is important about an article, they're welcome to do that in the comment thread, on a level playing field with everyone else.

In fact there was a lot of data leaked in that leak, not just LinkedIn's and Facebook's. That's another important. Putting famous names in a title makes it baitier and evokes lower-quality discussion, because it activates everyone's pre-cached responses about the famous names. If anything, we are inclined to take famous names out of a title, and certainly not to add them in.

> _Again, why remove info? The fact that CloudFlare is behind this is more > interesting_

Because cloudflare.com is right next to the title: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21605719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21605719). From the guidelines: _If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link._

> _Same complaint. This distinguishes a random person making a random gripe > from freakin ' Mozilla_

Same answer: mozilla.org is right next to the title: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599496). Avoiding repetition is part of HN being organized around curiosity.

<comment><USER12> > Also, we've found that when a title is gratuitously numerical, it makes for > worse discussion. Why? I don't know.

This is interesting and an example of this happened recently in a post that ended up on the front page with 50+ comments. It was titled "100k+ page views a month for $5 with a self-hosted static site".

I chose that title because it kind of sets the stage of what to expect (a small / medium tier site being hosted cheaply) but it did bring in a number of comments where some people dropped in with "but that's only 0.04 posts per second, anything could host that!" which kind of detracts from the content of the submission which had nothing to do with saying those numbers are impressive in any way.

It's definitely a tricky balance and is so context specific. I think that post without the numbers wouldn't have gotten much engagement because "How I build, deploy and host my static site" isn't that interesting at a glance and I wonder if you came to the same conclusion because the title wasn't edited other than capitalization.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that one is a borderline case. Actually I included it in my GP comment as an example, and said we decided to leave it up except for downcasing it! But then I removed that bit, because the comment is so long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who frequently submits title change requests to the HN mod address (firstname.lastname@example.com), this is an interesting and insightful tool. No, none of my recent requests (the most recent is a few days ago) are shown. Which suggests I'm not too much of an annoyance, yet.

HN's mods (dang and sctb) are amazingly responsive and tolerant. I try to make their job easier in requests by keeping those short and clear. Others may find this useful or have futher suggestions.

Generally:

\- Action in the subject: title, clickbait, spam, link disintermediation (pointing to a primary rather than secondary source), self-promotion (I've landed on "one-note flute" to describe this), and behavioural issues. Also occasionally vouches (for flagged posts/comments), or best-of nominations (there's a curated list put out by HN monthly).

\- Followed by the title-as-presently standing. Should make identifying the post easier.

\- Link to post (or comment) as first line.

\- Often a link to the submitted article.

\- A suggested change or revert. Often these are clear, sometimes not. My view is that submitting _both_ a "this needs changing" and "here's my suggestion", along with a possible rationale (usually a subhead, lede line, occasionally a good overview line from the article) makes the editors' job easier.

These are often accepted, sometimes with a slight change, sometimes as is. I generally don't follow up with a thanks or further acknowledgement, but usually do note when the request _isn 't_ accepted that I'm OK with it.

There are times I've differed with views (usually tech-politics intersections). I really wish HN could discuss such topics better than it does, though that also seems to be ... _somewhat_ ... improving with time. Discussion on HN is almost always superior to other venues I frequent online.

Response times are generally a few minutes to hours, longer during off-hours. Rarely, less-critical issues may take a few days to generate a response. But there's very nearly always one, which I appreciate.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am very thankful for this policy. The HN titles are essentially always better and more honest representations of the article contents.

Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER15> One thing I dislike about title edits, even when it is for the better, is that it makes it hard to know if you already have read the article.

Popular topics often get multiple submissions and trigger related topics. When the title changes it is hard to know whether it is a new link with new/different information or whether it is the same one that I've already read.

In my opinion once something hits the front page it is too late to edit it (other than minor things such as adding year or [pdf/video]).

<comment><USER16> My browser (FF) displays the link in a slightly lighter grey if I've visited it.

To clean up my feed, I hide topics that I am "done with." That is, I gave it the amount of attention I'm willing to give it. This keeps my feed updating quicker as new items enter the stack at the bottom to replace the ones I've hidden.

I started doing this because it mimics the behavior of one of reddit's settings, which is to hide all topics I've voted on. I found the feature so convenient that I started using the hiding behavior here in the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 20:40 Is the San Francisco Poop Crisis Out of Control?

↓ 21:00 Trends in the San Francisco poop crisis

↓ 21:15 Trends in the San Francisco (dog) poop crisis

↓ 22:25 Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog) poop crisis

<comment><USER3> It's missing one now though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is great! I have a feature request:

One thing that worries me about HN is that I've had a _link_ changed by a moderator in the past. And I don't mean removing query junk or changing between mobile/non-mobile sites -- I mean changing the link to an entirely different site. Even worse, by the time I noticed, I couldn't edit or delete my post (which I wanted to do because I disagreed with the new link). I was essentially forced to post content I didn't want to post! I think this is crosses the line from curation to impersonation.

<comment><USER3> What was the link?

We change URLs every day, for lots of different reasons—for example if one article is mostly just copying from another source, or if users suggest a better URL. When we do that we nearly always post something saying what we did, and including the previous link:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20changed%20url&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20switched%20htttp&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><USER18> It was over a year ago I think. I can do some digging, but not right now.

<comment><USER3> If you find it, please email email@example.com so we can take a look. If we got something wrong, we're definitely interested in learning from that.

<comment><USER19> One such instance:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21378471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21378471)

I remember commenting on a different article but the one that it points to now is a different article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384151)

<comment><USER3> I checked the logs and you're right. The URL was originally [https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/28/google-reportedly-in- talks...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/28/google-reportedly-in-talks-to- acquire-fitbit/). That article is simply pointing to the Reuters source, so a moderator changed it in accordance with the site guidelines: " _Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._ "

Normally when we do that we explain so in the thread, like this: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22points%20to%22&sort=byDate&type=comment). But this one happened overnight when no one who is public as a moderator was awake. That's a flaw in the current moderation system.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Arguably a bug: some of the titles listed have subsequent edits that don't show up on the page. Examples:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21619671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21619671)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21609572](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21609572)

Does the script stop checking them at some point?

<comment><USER20> I understood the script only checks the front page. Could the change have happened when the article was not on the front page? Or are all articles that have ever been on the front page supposed to be checked "forever"?

I have no idea how often / how quickly an article could oscillate between rank 30 and 31 for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is really cool! It'd be great to have a tool that tracks all editing/curation/censorship on hacker news.

<comment><USER21> Or you know . . . we could just throw it onto the blockchain . . . ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'd love to see the domain added to the end of these, like they are on HN itself. For example, one might wonder why NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit is shorted to CUDA Toolkit... unless you see that (nvidia.com) is after it anyways.

It might add some context to some of the edits.

</comment><comment><USER23> you should also track the comments moving from thread to thread (when an admin moves comments from one thread to anoter), comment shadow banning, post popularity based on upvote counts (lots of times, post get to the front page with only a few votes), or maybe even track how fast posts get deranked

<comment><USER24> HN has an API: [https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

I'm using it to track common items here and on Lobste.rs (and Proggit):

[http://gerikson.com/hnlo/](http://gerikson.com/hnlo/)

Here's the endpoint for the latest 500 submissions:

[https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/newstories.json](https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/newstories.json)

here's the one for the current top stories:

[https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json](https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json)

It's actually quite nice to work with. I don't know how to keep track of comments moving from thread to thread, because that's not a metric I'm interested in, but it should be possible to track somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This shows how much work goes into moderation here. Almost all titles seem more accurate and less clickbaity.

</comment><comment><USER26> What is the rule for titles being edited? Is it just no editoralization in the titles?

<comment><USER27> See the guidelines. The titles should be the original article title, unless that title is clickbaity, in which case either a less baity subhed can be used or a carefully written neutral headline. The big no-no is extracting some interesting fact from inside the article and using it as the title; submissions are community property, and the person who submits them isn't entitled to decide what the most important angle in the article is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I remember there being an extension for Firefox which showed editorialized (news) site titles and content. I forgot the name though. Does anyone have any recommendations for this feature?

</comment><comment><USER29> Have you considered adding a "sort by amount of change" option? It would be very interesting to see why larger changes happen compared to smaller ones.

</comment><comment><USER30> This would be interesting for a number of news sites too.

<comment><USER31> This is one for the new york times [0].

[0]: [https://mobile.twitter.com/nyt_diff](https://mobile.twitter.com/nyt_diff)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is great! Transparency, accountability, predictability etc should be more prevalent in the web.

</comment><comment><USER33> Could you also match to the source article/post title?

</comment><comment><USER34> It would be interesting to let submitters provide multiple titles and a/b test them from the outset.

<comment><USER14> The entire point is to make titles less clickbaity. A/B testing them to get more clicks exactly defeats the entire purpose why mods edit titles.

<comment><USER34> Yes but the vast majority of folks on the Internet, including HN, don't get to directly experience the effect that headlines have on engagement.

I never said it was a good idea, just interesting. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What frequency of sending GET requests to the servers of HN is an acceptable rate for a bot? I tried to look for an answer on this but didn't find any.

In the past I got the IP of my server banned from accessing HN for sending too many requests in too short of a time span. I found the unban interface that you provide, lowered the request rate of my crawler and tried again but was still sending too many requests in a limited amount of time and got the IP of my server banned again. If I recall correctly, I got it unbanned a third time and lowered the request rate even more but then got banned again and then I think it would not allow automatic unbanning.

Don't remember if I just gave up at that point or if I sent an email about it, or if I just waited some amount of time if there was a statement about how long I would have to wait before being able to use the unban interface for the IP of my server again.

Anyway, an official answer about the acceptable request rate would be nice. Perhaps put it in the FAQ?

Also, if people doing automated GET requests were to create a unique UA string for their scrapers that include a way for HN staff to get in touch, like for example (but with actual names of bot and site)

        Examplebot/0.95 (+http://www.example.com/bot.html)

where the page on that URL would list an e-mail address for getting in touch, as well as having a statement about how to verify that a given crawler belongs to that service, would that help in not getting server IP banned automatically?

<comment><USER3> Once per 30 seconds. That's in our robots.txt: [https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt](https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt). We've been working for a long time on (edit: what we expect to be) some serious performance improvements that might allow us to relax that limit. For now though, HN's process still runs on a single core and we don't have much performance to spare.

If you need more than that, you should use the Firebase-based API ([https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)). The public dataset is also available as a Google BigQuery table: [https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/bigquery-public- da...](https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/bigquery-public- data:hacker_news).

Edit: since this subthread is not really on topic I detached it from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617478).

<comment><USER36> >single core

Instead of further optimizing the already light design surely it would be easier to do a gofund me and get a server upgrade? I certainly wouldn't mind chipping in a buck or two if it relaxes limits.

<comment><USER37> I think the problem is more the software is single threaded. I'm sure YC can afford more than a single core machine.

<comment><USER3> The software is multi-threaded but it runs on a platform (Racket) which implements that as green threads, meaning it runs them all on a single core.

<comment><USER36> ah. That makes a lot more sense than hn being short $100. Thanks for modding.

<comment><USER38> Note that Racket besides threads also has places, which allows programs to use more than one core.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Three Hundred Mechanics - <AUTHOR> http://www.squidi.net/three/index.php <comment><USER2> I wish there was actually a tvtropes.org-type listing of game mechanics employed in video games. I think the design space isn't that large, and most games tend to reuse the same mechanics which work well. A lot of games use rock-paper-scissor either as primitives, or at a meta level. Does anyone know of any such listing or book which covers important game mechanics? It would be the equivalent of CLRS but for game mechanics.

This particular site is not that, because it's the author's list of novel game mechanics. They aren't particularly fundamental, and have a lot of the biases due to the author's preferences, or trends of the time.

<comment><USER3> Rules of Play (Zimmerman, Salen) and Art of Game Design: a Book of Lenses(Schell) come to mind as resources that cover this sort of "comprehensive" study.

In my opinion, there isn't a great deal of direct design information that can be gleaned from compendiums, though, even though they have surface appeal and can bring you up to speed on surface trends. It's equivalent to trying to do artistic work by only using "how-to" guides and not other forms of reference: the magic happens in adapting from one medium to another and developing the needed technique along the way, not from strenuously studying an existing technique because it's fashionable to do so.

e.g. if you make a game that has "polished Mario style movement" and "rock paper scissors combat," you have made something totally familiar and predictable. It can be reasonably interesting during the game session but still fail to attract attention or hold anyone for the long term. A great of the interest is in not knowing for sure that the game will reduce to a "predictable and fair" design trope like RPS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=207](http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=207)

He's basically described "complete gatcha" which was so addictive/exploitative that it was banned from Japanese F2P games by the government.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ah, squidi. His webcomic is also worth checking for those who missed it - [http://www.squidi.net/comic/amd/](http://www.squidi.net/comic/amd/)

(A critical mass of tropes guaranteed)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, one of my favorite comics of 10-15 years back. Too bad he seemingly gave up on his main series. Was always very well written and drawn.</comment></comment>


Bvckup2 by the original hamachi author - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/comments/iarao/minimalistic_realtime_backup_for_windows_about_to/

<comment><USER2> Reading the comments, this actually looks rather interesting. For example:

[http://www.reddit.com/comments/iarao/minimalistic_realtime_b...](http://www.reddit.com/comments/iarao/minimalistic_realtime_backup_for_windows_about_to/c22oypk)</comment>


How J. K. Rowling Became Voldemort - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/why-millennial-harry-potter-fans-reject-jk-rowling/613870/ <comment><USER2> tl;dr: she didn't (that is what the article concludes.)

I was expecting a enraged rant or a call to cancel. But instead, it was a well-balanced article about creator vs creation and becoming an adult.

(I still dislike the title)

EDIT: Flagged for what exactly?</comment>


Show HN: We are a small startup from Turkey waiting support from HN - <AUTHOR> http://orkestra.co/

<comment><USER2> Here are some of my thoughts:

Try to use proper english. If you want to enter an international market let someone with very good english skills proofread your apps/websites.

Even better would be if you improved your own skills.

Second, especially if you offer website development it's considered professional to create your own theme instead of using one you bought or downloaded for free.

This way you show that you're able to create clean html and css.

All the best, Martin

</comment><comment><USER3> If you use an existing wordpress theme, at least customise it a little bit.

[http://demo.mattiaviviani.com/stand/portfolio/artwork/](http://demo.mattiaviviani.com/stand/portfolio/artwork/)

</comment><comment><USER4> What kind of support are you looking for?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are looking for feedbacks for our projects mostly.</comment></comment>


Leaked Emails Unveil Snapchat's Secretive CEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/leaked-emails-unveil-snapchats-secretive-ceo-1418865047

<comment><USER2> [http://briefly.today/leaked-emails-unveil-snapchats- secretiv...](http://briefly.today/leaked-emails-unveil-snapchats-secretive- ceo/)

Here you go

</comment><comment><USER2> Really? A link to an article that doesn't show the full story unless you login or subscribe?

</comment><comment><USER3> Paywall links are fail.</comment>


Computational fashion on your laptop - <AUTHOR> http://www.rhymeandreasoncreative.com/portfolio/index.php?project=continuum

<comment><AUTHOR> Really interesting stuff, see also: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rhymeandreason/continuum...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rhymeandreason/continuum- computational-couture)</comment>


Ask HN: As an indi-Hacker, How have you manage to stay disciplined and focused? - <AUTHOR> I have been working as a remote developer since one and a half years now. I find myself working very little some days and a lot some days. Since working from home, I often end up watching some random YouTube clip or reading some stupid article which will never do me any good or sometimes running errands take over my work hours. Have you faced this problem? Did you try anything that helped you tackle this problem? <comment><USER2> I have to do multiple things at once, and in fact, I am working for a few companies around the world and run my own business. Yet I still manage to always get my work done. I also use medical cannabis which helps with anxiety, especially during these times. I will open up YouTube videos, find myself watching news, watching Netflix, searching for corona virus stats, or procrastinating on Facebook.

Once you realize it, you can fix it. Once you admit you're doing it, you can fix it. Once you accept that you did it, accept that you needed a small break, you can fix it. Now that you know this, go ahead and do it. Set yourself up with blockers or attention forcers. Things that block Facebook, YouTube, or Netflix. OR if you don't want to be that strict. 10-15 minutes per hour, dedicate to slacking, and 45 minutes should be spent on your work. You can break it up along the hour, but it does help.

Also, I find myself procrasting the most when I don't know how to solve a problem or I don't want to face it. You can fix this too! Write down how you are going to handle the solution before you go tackle it. Always write an outline of your work process... and then you will progress.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Have you faced this problem?

You can be fairly certain that everyone that has ever worked at home or worked remote generally, has faced this problem. The answer is yes, everyone deals with it.

I've spent most of my life working in a remote model, home office and similar. I was working in remote teams as far back as ~1997. Back then IRC was our Slack (combined with email lists and ICQ or equivalent; it all worked very well, productivity was high; it's amusing how far we haven't come).

One thing I've noticed that seems to be close to universal for people, is the first five or six hours of the day after you wake up are the most critical. They're the high-focus, high-productivity hours. The brain is raring to go. Try to knock out as much high-value work in those initial hours of the day as you can, and let yourself relax more thereafter rather than punishing yourself for not being at max productivity for 8 or 10 hours per day. Working at a high level of productivity for five or six hours every day will accomplish amazing things over time. If you start working at 9am, relax your slack-off (laziness) controls after 2pm, take care of the more trivial / mundane / mindless work tasks after that if needed. Something along those lines. It's about prioritizing work importance by order of the day. Make sure you don't invert it by wasting your precious high-productivity hours on bullshit. If you try to enforce hyper discipline on yourself for 8 or 10 hours per day, seeking long durations of max productivity, you will suffer for it immensely over time and you won't end up in a good place in terms of productivity or results (including mental state, happiness). Instead, compromise with yourself. It is possible to do bursts of long hours of high productivity with limited negative consequences (especially when you're young), you just should not do it frequently, you pay a price for it. Don't fight with yourself, don't try to beat yourself into submission, it's not an effective approach; instead, structure everything so that internal wrestling match is unnecessary.

Some people work better late at night, they do their best work then. The concept applies just the same, prioritize your high-value work for that time if it makes sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks a lot for this really valuable advice

Because of my personal needs, I am using this small program that I start when I start working. I asks me some basic questions like did I meditate, did I exercise, etc and show a list of long term goals. It runs for 8 hours (if I don't stop it with ctrl+c). It logs all that info in a json file by date for me to see in future. As long as it is running I am less likely to deviate from work. It would also tell me to drink water every hour. Wonder if there are other people out there who try to be strict with their days this way?

But, I don't really prioritise my work as you have suggested (tricky things in the morning, mundane things for later), I would definitely start doing that.

<comment><USER4> do you mind to share which "this small program" is ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have put it here [https://github.com/kishansagathiya/pomodoro](https://github.com/kishansagathiya/pomodoro)

It is written in Go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would you be interested in an accountability video call with someone in the same boat on a daily basis for 15 mins?

I am not sure if it will cure the problem, but there is no harm in trying it out for a week and see what happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, that seems like a good idea. They definitely help inside the company (those `standup calls`). YC Startup School does accountability calls. And since they are really pushing people to join those calls, I am guessing they must work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> IMO I have found that not working on your project is one of two things, or both:

1\. The project isn't working, and you subconsciously know it but don't want to admit it.

2\. You need to, but don't want to, do the next most important task for your startup. So you do other things to procrastinate.

According to the article Sam Altman calls the latter 'fake work', which sounds like a good description to me.

[https://tech.co/news/sam-altman-y-combinator-5-signs- youre-f...](https://tech.co/news/sam-altman-y-combinator-5-signs-youre-fake- work-2015-08)

>> TLDR "Fake work does not count and will still get you a failed startup no matter how intensely you do it"

So the sooner you can figure out which point it is the sooner you know how to, or how not to, move forward. Probably the most useful thing is just to imagine how much more interesting things will be once you're at the next stage.</comment>


Is NYC's most iconic sandwich dying? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20160218-is-nycs-most-iconic-sandwich-dying <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting article since the deli is facing the same thing today's startup are "society changes, can you adapt to stay in business". Two good examples of how deli's are doing exactly that.</comment>


Is programming in C99 relevant for systems? - <AUTHOR> What at the best resources to learn Modern (C99) portable C for a person with some computing science background and a I have used Pascal, python... but I don't have any knowledge of some other scripting languages like JavaScript, hypertext like HTML, css.
Let me know what you think: I all ready went throughout Programming in C and I am know proceeding with "Notes on Data Structures and Programming Techniques (YaLe CPSC 223, Spring 2018) by Yaleby James Aspnes and Modern C by Jens Gustedt.
Could you advise on good courses in Advanced C or books that might enlighten me. <comment><USER2> Was not aware of NDSPT, here is the link: [http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/223/notes.html](http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/223/notes.html)</comment>


Implementing Language Engine – Paraphrases and Lexical Decomposition - <AUTHOR> http://languagengine.co/blog/paraphrases-and-lexical-decomposition/

<comment><AUTHOR> This one is I guess less about implementing LE than it is about how to implement things _in_ LE, but whatever. Maybe next time I'll say "devblogging" to be more generic. heh</comment>


Source code powering potent IoT DDoSes just went public - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/10/brace-yourselves-source-code-powering-potent-iot-ddoses-just-went-public/ <comment><USER2> The idea of one botnet taking over another, by stealing infected devices, is interesting. What if "policing" botnets were deployed as a counter measure? Devices would be infected by the same methods used by malicious botnets, but these benevolent botnets could hinder or disable other botnet agents. Has this been tried or, if not, would it be effective? Or would it result in endless botnet warfare, with each side continually coming up with new counter measures against the other and no real progress ever made?

<comment><USER3> This already happens between malicious botnets.

There also once was a worm that would infect computers and patch against itself.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Another convenient web app for reading whoishiring - <AUTHOR> http://www.hnjobs.io <comment><AUTHOR> It's reasonably mobile friendly. The data includes: "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?" "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?"

You can search by regex in the search bar.

Data is updated daily.

The initial load speed is a bit slow, I'm still working on that.

I created it while learning developing in MEAN stack. This is my first online toy, any feedback appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER2> Making the shitty jobs collapse-able (or making them disappear entirely) would help when filtering out opportunities.

hnhiring.me almost got it right.

<comment><AUTHOR> you mean like this one: [http://www.hnjobs.io/#/11213227](http://www.hnjobs.io/#/11213227)

<comment><USER2> see how it is done on hnhiring.me, where there is a "-" OR "+" sign for each posting.

Instead of that, you have an x-box to 'delete' job postings from the main view.

In that way, I am only left with the jobs I am interested in, in a main view (no need to click on each job to see it).

<comment><AUTHOR> Added a button to collapse uninteresting jobs, what do you think? At the moment migrating away from the main view won't save collapsed list, will fix that soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now with the ability to collapse uninteresting jobs. Also enabled caching so page loading is faster.

</comment><comment><USER3> HNJobs is 2 letters away from HandJobs. Maybe write out Hacker News?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, certainly didn't think about that :), might be too late to change the domain name, I'll see if I can fit HackerNewsJobs to the logo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Should go for "yjobinator.io" instead :)</comment>


US bans Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones from airliners - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/10/14/us-bans-samsung-galaxy-note-7-phones-from-airliners.html <comment><AUTHOR> > It says the phone may not be carried on board or packed in checked bags on > flights to and from the United States or within the country. The phones also > can't be shipped as air cargo.</comment>


Google shares software network load balancer design powering GCP networking - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/Google-shares-software-network-load-balancer-design-powering-GCP-networking.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> The consistent hashing stuff in the paper is pretty cool. In order to distribute traffic among backends, they came up with a new "Maglev hashing" algorithm that gives a more even distribution than existing techniques, but is less robust to changes in the set of servers. The trick is that you can locally memoize the results of your mostly-consistent hash function, and rely on an extra layer of connection affinity from the upstream ECMP routers to the load-balancers, so that the same memoized value is used every time. So you never actually drop connections unless _both_ a backend instance and a load balancer fail at the same time, which should be very rare. Clever!

As an aside, I couldn't help noticing these lines on adjacent pages:

> Maglev has been serving Google's traffic since 2008. It has sustained the > rapid global growth of Google services, and it also provides network load > balancing for Google Cloud Platform.

> Maglev handles both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic, and all the discussion below > applies equally to both.

In that case, any chance GCE will be getting IPv6 support soon? ;)

<comment><USER3> Google uses ipv6 internally for its services (no ipv4 at all?) but doesn't see fit to let the rest of us use ipv6 apparently, very annoying.

<comment><USER4> Source?

<comment><USER5> as a GCloud user I've never seen any mention of IPv6. That's the main reason i've not bothered trying to get on the ipv6 bandwagon. I don't want to strugle through it if my hosting provider doesn't even support it.

<comment><USER4> CloudSQL instances support ipv6,[1] and appengine apps can receive ipv6 traffic, but only suggestion regarding delay in getting ipv6 to users was hardware limitations.[2] I wanted to know why op thinks this is only for external customers.

[1] [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/11/cloudsql- instan...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/11/cloudsql-instances- now-come-with-free-ipiv6-address.html)

[2] [https://code.google.com/p/google-compute- engine/issues/detai...](https://code.google.com/p/google-compute- engine/issues/detail?id=8)

<comment><USER5> cool, thanks for the extra details. maybe they are using ipv6 for a portion of the internal infrastructure and the OP extrapolated that to mean they use it everywhere internally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't need to tell you how much of an ecosystem exploded after the BigTable whitepapers. It might not be realistic to expect that kind of reaction for load balancing tech, but it's great to see them continue to do this sort of thing. Also looking forward to seeing what this release in particular may inspire.

<comment><USER7> ECMP is pretty old-hat. Example from 2007: [https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog41/presentations/Kapela-...](https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog41/presentations/Kapela- lightning.pdf)

Exactly how the routes get steered to servers can vary (static routes with track objects, OSPF or BGP on the server), but the basic idea of using network gear to ECMP traffic between servers is, if not ancient, pretty common.

I suspect there's something novel in control plane or hashing used to steer ECMP but I didn't see anything about that in the article.

<comment><USER8> ECMP is old, we've being pulling this stunt for a long time, for the right applications (e.g., UDP, short lived TCP). Adding/removing routes in ECMP can cause flows to hash to a new destination. The connection tracking and consistent hashing in Maglev is important to deal with faults and avoid disrupting unrelated flows. Still nothing new.

<comment><USER9> We (Cumulus Networks) support a feature called "resilient hashing" that ensures that if a software LB fails, only the flows going to that LB are redistributed to the remaining LBs.

You still lose some connections when an LB fails, but only the ones going through the failed LB. Unrelated flows to other LBs are not impacted.

We've got multiple customers doing variants of the LB architecture Google talks about here.

<comment><USER10> I didn't know Cumulus had a LB product. Any more details that you can share?

<comment><USER11> You can turn any switches into ghetto load balancers by running BGP on some hosts and advertising a /32 into your switches.

<comment><USER12> You want BGP on your edge router, where your transit connections, these are what do the ECMP towards your LBs which speak iBGP. I'm not sure where you would use a cheap switch in this setup, certainly not at the edge.

<comment><USER11> Many recent data centers run eBGP between all switches. I can't explain the rest without diagrams.

<comment><USER12> Huh? Then you must not understand what you are talking about very well. Are you talking about running BGP to ToR switches? What does that have to do with ECMP or load balancers? Its just an L3 design and its not new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > This is possible because Google clusters, via Maglev, are already handling > traffic at Google scale. [...] Google's Maglevs, and our team of Site > Reliability Engineers who manage them, have that covered for you. You can > focus on building an awesome experience for your users, knowing that when > your traffic ramps up, we've got your back.

This is probably one of he most compelling arguments I've heard: "It will work well because we both rely on it working well. We have skin in the game."

</comment><comment><USER14> Great blog post! Thoughtful explanations and links to research papers[1] is a much classier way to compete and differentiate compared to just saying "we're better, we're better" like they've done before[2].

I love the jab at AWS in the end:

> 'knowing that when your traffic ramps up, we've got your back.'

They've heard that AWS load balancers need "prewarming" to handle huge traffic spikes, so they're throwing one in there...

[1] [http://research.google.com/pubs/pub44824.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub44824.html) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10287318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10287318)

</comment><comment><USER15> The paper talks a lot about pushing Linux out of the way in the receive path (including to avoid copies), only to have a demultiplexing thread steer packets once they arrive in userspace. Linux has PACKET_MMAP for a long time and modern linux has RPS, which would seem to exactly duplicate this functionality without the copies or single point of contention (one thread running on one core, vs. N interrupt queues directly waking threads pinned on N cores). Can anyone comment on why they aren't using it?

> Because the NIC is no longer the bottleneck, this figure shows the upper > bound of Maglev throughput with the current hardware, which is slightly > higher than 15Mpps. In fact, the bottleneck here is the Maglev steering mod- > ule, which will be our focus of optimization when we switch to 40Gbps NICs > in the future

Sounds like they could use RPS

<comment><USER16> (Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google, and I'm oncall for this service.)

On the understanding that I can't tell you any more than what it already says in the paper, the key detail that you're looking for is section 4.1.2:

""" Maglev originally used the Linux kernel network stack for packet processing. It had to interact with the NIC using kernel sockets, which brought significant overhead to packet processing including hardware and software interrupts, context switches and system calls [26]. Each packet also had to be copied from kernel to userspace and back again, which incurred additional overhead. Maglev does not require a TCP/IP stack, but only needs to find a proper backend for each packet and encapsulate it using GRE. Therefore we lost no functionality and greatly improved performance when we introduced the kernel bypass mechanism – the throughput of each Maglev machine is improved by more than a factor of five. """

My understanding is that RPS just steers packets into the Linux TCP stack. Nothing on the maglev machine wants to process the TCP layer; that workload can be distributed over the backends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is awesome! At work, we're a heavy user of google's network load balancer to route persistent TCP websocket connections to our haproxy cluster. It's worked flawlessly. Glad to see the design behind this released!

</comment><comment><USER15> > to build clusters at scale, we want to avoid the need to place Maglev > machines in the same layer-2 domain as the router, so hardware encapsulators > are deployed behind the router, which tunnel packets from routers to Maglev > machines

Is "hardware encapsulator" just a fancy way of saying they're using tunnel interfaces on the routers, or is a "hardware encapsulator" an actual thing?

<comment><USER18> It's a real piece of hardware.

<comment><USER15> Commercially available?

<comment><USER19> Yes, it's just a 10GbE ethernet switch that can encapsulate the traffic in VXLAN headers, so that it can traverse east/west between any of thousands (millions?) of hypervisors without requiring traffic to hairpin to a gateway router and back. The logical networks all exist in an overlay network, so to the customer VMs, you get L2/L3 isolation. But, to the underlying hypervisors, they actually know which vNICs are running on each hypervisor in the cluster, so they can talk directly on a large connected underlay network at 10GbE (x2) line rate.

This is the standard way of distributing traffic in large datacenters. That way you get extremely fast, non-blocking line rate between any two physical hosts in the datacenter, and since the physical hosts know which VMs/containers are running on them, they can pass the traffic directly to the other host if VMs exist in the same L2 network, and even do virtual routing if the VMs exist across L3 boundaries - still a single east/west hop.

<comment><USER15> So it was a mystery-inducing way of referring to some commodity SDN-related tech, thanks, that's far more informative than the paper :)

<comment><USER20> Fair point, we should just have taken the opportunity to say SDN here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "There's enough headroom available to add another million requests per second without bringing up new Maglevs"

How awesome is that?

</comment><comment><USER22> Using ECMP to balance the traffic across the load balancers is definitely the way to go. You can couple this with a dynamic routing protocol (BGP/OSPF/ISIS) to achieve fast failure detection of load-balancers too.

We used this strategy at a previous company I worked at deploying large Openstack based clouds, worked really well. Though if you want to to be easy on the backends you need to use some sort of stick table or consistent hashing mechanism as described in the paper.

</comment><comment><USER23> ECMP has been used for well over a decade. The DPI industry has been doing this entire load balancing thing for at least 15 years.

10gbps with 8 cores is pretty crappy performance. People using DPDK and netmap are getting 10gbps with a single core. Netmap can bridge at line rate for 64 byte packets with a single core.

I am actually surprised this is 'news'. Perhaps google should reach out to some of the DPI companies to figure out how to really scale this. Currently they are 'overpaying' on commodity hardware by at least 8x over the current cutting edge in this type of field.

Just have a look at the NFV world for the cutting edge packet forwarding rates

<comment><USER24> The paper points out that they can do better than 10Gbps, and when looking at 40Gbps, their limitation is their traffic steering piece.

And I'm sure you're aware, bridging is a totally different use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting read. I am most fascinated by their kernel bypass mechanism for packet transmission. They claim that their system requires proper support from the NIC hardware, does not involve the Linux kernel in packet transmission, does not require kernel modification, and allows them to switch between NICs. As well, if I'm reading the claims in the related work section correctly it seems this solution is architecturally different than netmap/pf_ring or dpdk/openonload.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is this at all related to [https://github.com/google/seesaw](https://github.com/google/seesaw) ?

</comment><comment><USER27> The ring buffer approach reminds me of the architecture used by the LMAX Disruptor.</comment>


Can you make gasoline that slows down global warming? Google Ventures thinks so - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/31/5566052/cool-planet-biofuels-raises-100-million

<comment><AUTHOR> "Because the biochar keeps carbon in the ground for years, even centuries, Cool Planet argues that its process takes more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it adds in."

Critical take on biochar from Monbiot: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/mar/24/george- mo...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/mar/24/george-monbiot- climate-change-biochar)</comment>


Microsoft Surface Studio 2 review - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/19/18102490/microsoft-surface-studio-2-review-specs-features-price <comment><AUTHOR> Although it's horribly expensive this is a desktop computer that I would actually love to own, I feel the same way about the Surface Studio as I used to feel about the iMac although it's closer to the pricing of an iMac pro.

Unfortunately I just can't justify the $5k pricetag, is there anything out there that offers a similar touch & pen enabled, all in one format?</comment>


The Dangers of Working From Home - <AUTHOR> http://sunshineny.com/working-from-home/is-working-from-home-worth-it

<comment><USER2> If these are the only dangers from working from home, I would take that over the dangers from working in an office. I haven't even given those dangers much thought, but I'll start with a few.

1) Commute - wasted time and energy sitting in traffic, plus added stress depending on amount of traffic. (not to mention all that gasoline!)

2) The walk-by - trying to get work done when anyone can just saunter over and ask you a question, or just shoot the sh*t.

3) Noise and smells - people playing music randomly, loud conversations, YouTube videos, someone eating a smelly burrito, chinese food

4) The cold starter - someone has a cold but feels fine or wants to show they got guts, spreads the cold to 50% of the office.

5) Constant trivialities - walkby hellos, lunch anyone?, who's driving?, peeing next to someone in the bathroom stall

Anything else to add?

<comment><USER3> _Anything else to add?_

Yea, plenty.

\- I impose discipline upon others. Since you can't just poke your head in with an "idea", you have to think about it first (imagine that). If your email doesn't include enough data for me, I say so and hit "reply". Same for phone calls and voice mails. Signal to noise ratio increases dramatically.

\- My performance metric is WorkCompleted / WorkPlanned because that's all people can witness. Not 101 other meaningless metrics like number of sessions running, time spent on internet, time spent BSing, time spent on cell phone, time spent at lunch, shirt color, or droplets of sweat on forehead.

\- Wake up at xx:34 a.m. Start work at xx:37 a.m. (if I want to).

\- Wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. Log in and work on it immediately.

\- No meaningless team building, HR, or mandatory meetings.

\- I eat what I want, when I want, where I want. No more vending machine or carryout crap.

\- Headphones or speakers? Oh wait, never mind.

\- Casual dress, gym shorts, or warmups. Again, never mind.

\- Cats often make better companions than cubicle mates.

\- I hate shaving.

<comment><USER4> Oh my, you couldn't be more correct.

I've got one more to add: people going in and out and in and out for their smokes. Plus the smell they bring in. Quit already!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This does a better job of illustrating the problems of credibility on a corporate blog. I mean, really, this company is selling you office space and is blogging about the downsides of working at home? I bet I could find lots of blog posts about the downsides of cooking at home on lots of restaurant blogs.

<comment><USER6> The HR dept. at the last company I worked at used a similar pitch based on a "research document" in an attempt to sell the programmers on how much better bench seating in an open floor plan vs cubicles would be for productivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A sensationalist article title, for sure. My answers to the three "dangers" listed in the article:

No separation between home and work: in the late afternoon I shut down my computer and have a glass of wine and snacks with my wife. Work day is officially over.

The prevalence of distractions: earphones.

Lack of human interaction: I broke up my work day today by spending 90 minutes at our local shooting range with my wife and three friends. On Mondays and Thursdays I go on 2 to 3 hour hikes with several people. (Anyway, human contact is probably over rated :-)

The bottom line is that people should do whatever works for them. One caveat about working at home: you either really have to love your work or to have a strong work ethic.

<comment><USER8> I like the lack of human interaction. After working from home for a while, I found myself going regularly to hobbies in the evening to get human interaction. I much prefer this way.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. It's a general question of what you'd rather do: spend all day doing grudging, necessary work with alongside people who happen to do the same kind of grudging, necessary work as you do, then go home and "unwind" by spending time alone—or do all your grudging necessities on your own, and then unwind by spending time having fun alongside people _who like having the same kind of fun_? One social group seems much more likely to promote emotional health (though both can be intellectually stimlating.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The no separation between home and work in my case is more of a mental thing than a physical one. If I'm caught up in a problem, I tend to obsess on it no matter where I am and my ability to get away from a problem seems to be more about having satisfied my brain that I have some kind of solution or approach to it worked out than my physical location.

</comment><comment><USER10> I just don't buy the "you won't be distracted in the office" argument. I work from home ~12 hours a week, and I find being in the office _more_ distracting because people are constantly badgering me with questions. And I see plenty of other people wasting time talking around the proverbial water cooler.

Working from home requires discipline, especially when it comes to unplugging from work. When working from home, I try to provide a schedule of availability to my co-workers, so there's no expectation that I'm going to answer an email at 6:30 PM while I'm eating with my family. There are also days, however, that because of family schedules, that I work from, say, 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM, and folks know they can contact me 'til that point.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure why people asking questions in the office is considered a bad thing. Sure, if they are inane questions not related to stuff you or they are working on, then yes, that could get really annoying. But if people are asking questions that help them get work done or to clarify some aspect of something they are working on, isn't that kind of a good thing?

By working from home and avoiding distractions caused by other people's questions, it seems like you trading other people's productivity (you are making it harder for them to get answers to their questions) in order to boost your own.

<comment><USER10> I'm not saying that people asking work-related questions is a Bad Thing(TM)--I'm saying the assertion that you can easily get into a distraction-free groove in the office is not necessarily true. It might be true in the case of a small start-up, but I've never found it to be the case in my experience (and I've never worked in an office with more than 40 or 50 people).

At home, I can close to the door to our "office" and everyone knows that I am not to be disturbed. At the office, I'm in an open cube plan, so short of doing some sort of jwz-style camo netting, it's harder to convey "leave me alone."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wait, a company selling/leasing office space writes an article about how people shouldn't work from home?

Yawn.

</comment><comment><USER13> What: Journal of Applied Psychology article about teleworking and professional isolation ...

Bottom line: The authors surveyed 261 professional-level teleworkers at a large corporation (80,000 workers) to study the effects of professional isolation, which is defined as a state of mind that one is out of touch with others in the workplace, on job performance and turnover intentions. Professional isolation led to lower job performance and lower turnover intentions. The effect on turnover intentions was contrary to expectations. The authors argue that this unexpected effect may be due to professionally isolated teleworkers losing faith in their skills and knowledge and their ability to find alternative employment. Another possible explanation may be that teleworkers face family or dual-career constraints due to which they telecommute as a way to maintain their job. Or it may be that those who telecommute enjoy its benefits more fully, so that despite professional isolation, they don't seek employment elsewhere. The authors report other findings too. For instance, professional isolation led to even lower job performance for those who spent greater time teleworking and lesser time interacting face-to-face. In other words, the negative effect of professional isolation on job performance reduced for those who teleworked less as well as for those who engaged in extensive face-to-face. To reduce professional isolation, the authors make several suggestions. One of the suggestions is to include structuring activities between coworkers to ensure sufficient levels of task and social exchanges, so as to build and strengthen interpersonal connections while achieving work objectives.

Source: <http://www.leadingvirtually.com/?p=157> , which is a great blog on all aspects of remote work.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are plenty of distractions in an office as well -- chitchat, meetings, poor environment not under your control (e.g. too hot or too cold) and noise. You do need to be disciplined because there's none of the peer pressure that arises from being around other people who are busy working. Additionally, I'd only work from home if living in a big city, in order to combat isolation. In a city you have access to people, whether by interspersing meetings into your day or simply stepping outside, and this combats isolation. I would not enjoy working at home in the suburbs.

</comment><comment><USER15> Just short of a self-serving advertisement. As someone who has worked at home for a substantial portion of my <redacted> years long career, and have managed teams that work exclusively at home, what works is 1) have an office with a door that closes and make sure even the most slow-to-learn family member knows to treat the closed door as you being out at the office 2) I have found more distractions in corporate workspaces than at home. See #1 for reducing distractions 3) Find or build a community that is refreshing--it is likely to be better for you in any case.

There are certainly some office situations that are impossible to duplicate from home, even with lots of electronic communication, however. They are quite rare in my <redacted> experience.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is very, very true. I worked on a start up for a friend of mine years ago, and I lived in his guest room. I woke up, rolled out of bed, walked 2 feet to my desk, and coded for my 4 hours work day, then some at night, and it was exhausting. I know, that sounds crazy, 4 hour work days and being exhausted, but when you work where you sleep you get pretty confused. The 4 hour work day was mostly due to distractions: video games, walking in the woods, arguing with cofounder about randomness. On top of that, where we were was so isolated (about 16 miles from civilization) so I never really saw anyone but my cofounder. Things got tense sometimes, and there was no one to vent to.

</comment><comment><USER17> hey guys-

i do freelance social media for sunshine as one of many, many freelance projects that i have, and one of the fringe benefits of putting in a few hours a week for sunshine is that i get to work out of either of the Manhattan locations. it's a bit of trek, since if i'm at home i'm in astoria and if i'm with my girlfriend i'm in greenpoint, but i've found that the act of getting up and actually going _in_ to a desk space, rather than saying 'yup, gonna start working" at _arbitrarily assigned time_ , even figuring in the hour of transit.

it's true that a lot of the same distractions, or rather variations on such, can exist in a co-working space. annoyingly loud phone calls, bothers from home, cat videos on the internet (sooo many cat videos. SO. MANY.).

but in a co-working space, every distraction is an opportunity, really-someone COULD be bothering you to see if you do graphic design, because they're looking for someone to do their business cards. and i've found those opportunities outweigh the negatives? because when it comes to stuff like not slacking around on the internet, that's still a temptation anywhere-may as well place yourself smack dab in the middle of networking opportunities.

that's just my two cents-i'd probably STILL be working from home if my work at sunshine hadn't introduced me to Coworking with a capital "C", but, honestly, I've tried to work from home and it just doesn't happen.

</comment><comment><USER18> We live in the best networking city in the world as far as I am concerned and the last thing I want to do is stay at home when opportunity is out there. I am currently working out of Sunshine Suites @ Tribeca West and I got to tell you I really benefit from meeting a ton of entrepreneurs, in fact I just heard a lecture in one of the conference rooms about social media law really helpful.

<comment><USER19> Huh? Who is 'we?' What city are you talking about? How does 'working from home' mean that you _literally_ have to be at home working instead of just remotely working from a cafe or something where you can also interact with people?

The fact that you _just_ created your account for this comment smells fishy to me too. It's a little suspicious that on an article where people are commenting that the author has a conflict of interest (i.e. claiming that working from home is bad, while selling office space), someone creates an account _just_ to comment in favor of the product that the company is selling. You're not agreeing with the article (that working from home is bad) so much as you are praising/pimping the product.

This is one of the reasons that I feel 'crowd-sourcing' isn't as important as 'social-networking' because I would trust someone I know more than some random person that shows up just to make a single comment. You _could_ be a real person that just wants to share you experiences, but you could also just be a marketing/social-media person for Sunshine Suites that's trying to 'drum up' some interest in the business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You could easily argue these points the other direction. To me the office environment is really distracting. I focus better at home. If I had my own sound proof office at work with a big, lockable, door I'd probably get an equal level of focus but that's becoming a rarity in the cubicle environment for most people. Ideally a mix of both works best. I like having the option.

<comment><USER21> The fact that you have a "sound proof office at work" seems to agree with the article.

It's not that you're travelling to a corporate office environment that helps you work, but the fact that you're in a separate environment to your usual home that's distraction-free (be it a library, or as in your case, an separate office room).

Had you not had the sound-proof office, you'd easily get distracted by the TV, the book you were reading yesterday evening, the kitchen, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They forgot to mention one of the dangers of working from an office : paying exorbitant rent that you could save by working from home.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hard-line 9-to-5 sucks much worse than working from home, but the best is to have an office available with flexible hours. I think the optimum is somewhere around 20-30 office hours plus 20-30 work-from-home hours.

One of the lingering benefits of old-style work environments is the idea that a corporation is invested in your career development; you're _their_ employee. In practice, a lot of corporations ignore this responsibility, but that's another topic... If you work from home, it becomes more visibly evident (or at least seems to be) that you're just providing services in exchange for money; there isn't even the pretense of that sense of responsibility.</comment>


€2k bounty for deciphering 230 year old rock inscription - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48212442 <comment><USER2> If it only dates back 230 years, it's not ancient Breton or anything "ancient". 230 years would put it in the 17th or 18th century.</comment>


Facebook suspends Cubeyou over harvesting data claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/09/facebook-suspends-cubeyou-over-harvesting-data-claims <comment><USER2> I wonder how many suspensions there are going to be before everyone accepts that data leakage is nothing less than _by design_.</comment>


"Substitute any special characters with an asterisk." - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Fidelity/status/983369027073593345 <comment><USER2> Took me several reads of this to figure out the context, but now I think I understand it.

I think this answers the question about how passwords at what seems to be a large financial firm are stored - after all, there's only one way to know which of the characters in the stored password are special...

<comment><USER3> There's a few different ways, if they need to say they store them hashed, maybe they are hashing a T9 version (at severely reduced entropy).</comment></comment>


Ontology is Overrated – Categories, Links, and Tags (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

<comment><USER2> My favourite counterexample is mp3 vs ogg "tags". Mp3 has a fairly complete "traditional" tag schema, with things like "album artist" and "composer". Ogg allows completely free key-value pairs as tags - with the result that it's completely useless. A few very basic tags like "artist" and "title" get applied by common consensus, but forget about finding "composer" or "genre" in your ogg tags, because none of the players can agree on what the tag should be.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone Else Tired of All The Leak and 'PRISM' Stories? - <AUTHOR>

We get that civil liberties and privacy are important but for three days straight that's all there is on HN. <comment><USER2> No, not really. Right now I don't care about the usual stories about someone launching a photo sharing app or creating a javascript framwwork. The thing I take away from it these days is that if it succeeds it's going to be used to spy on us.

</comment><comment><USER3> My old friend Zigurd, who's Latvian parents, grandparents, etc. know a thing or two about totalitarian regimes (in WWII the country was first invaded by the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, then recaptured by the Soviets; his parents met in a displaced persons camp post-WWII), and who is now heavily into the Android ecosystem, made what I think is a wise comment in the Stallman prediction thread, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5840210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5840210):

" _Until the early 80 's there was no widespread use of mobile telephony and internet. It's not crazy to think that the surveillance state has ruined the internet and that there is more value in avoiding it than in using it. Maybe it's over.

[...]

The car industry is facing a generation of buyer who find cars a burden. It's crazy to think that we can't screw this up._"

He may well be right, it could be that these wonderful toys are so subject to government abuse that we'll realize we would have been better off without the rush to adopt them.

Perhaps we need to develop proper institutions, methods and control over their abuse, but that process is going to be painful. The story of the West's adaptation of the printing press and government controls over them is not a pretty one, after all.

Anyway, if he's even somewhat right, it's hard to imagine there's a more important topic for HN to discuss right now, it impacts _everything_ , from our daily lives to the things we build and expose to the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm certainly tired of the Edward Snowden stories. "Hi, I don't want the conversation to be about me but here I am going public, revealing I have a healthy fantasy life by saying utterly ridiculous things about 'triads' and such, and making the conversation all about me instead of the actually important issues I claim to want to do something about."

On the other hand, I'd happily see the public go back to actually talking about surveillance instead of Mr. I-Read-Too-Many-Spy-Novels-And-Want-To-Be- Famous.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes. I am also tired of weightlifting trying to lose weight. Doesn't mean I should stop. The problem is unless there is steady stream of leaks in the next few days it will all be forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, at least some good theories on how a yottabyte storage system (10^24 bytes, or a trillion of your stinkin' external Time Machine drive) might actually be implemented would be welcome (particularly within the physical confines of the Bluffdale site). That would for sure be a good hack! With civilian uses, even.

As of 2011, the internet's monthly traffic[1] amounted to about 27.5 petabytes per month, or about 2.6e-5 yottabytes. A yottabyte would be about 3300 years of 2011 traffic.

What we are seeing is the recurrence of Admiral Poindexter's vision of Total Information Awareness[2]. It got shot down last time around, but not with sufficient finality. That's what the "three days straight" is about.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes. "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." I don't know what US telly news covers, but this is by no means a niche story.

HN is being swamped here and IMO it's degrading the impact of the story. I'd appreciate fewer, but more detailed/technical/analytical links.

</comment><comment><USER8> HN folk should be out on the streets, protesting. Or the equivalent, on the internet. Seriously, this is _important_.

Civil rights: use 'em or lose 'em.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, let's start organizing public protests. Even regardless of PRISM, the Verizon (and undoubtedly other phone companies) dragnet surveillance of everyone, which is absolutely confirmed, is unacceptable! Now that everyone is aware of it, this story needs to not go away and slowly become accepted as the way things are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel so sick about this, I'm really not in the mood for any other kind of piece of news right now. I just want us to get to the bottom of this, and for the spying to end, and until everything is uncovered. We shouldn't just start our Mondays as if none of this ever happened, and just go back to our daily routines. I sure hope Americans are better than that.

Plus, I bet Greenwald has a lot more to show us next week. He's probably just letting the administration stumble over their own lies, and then uncover more stuff to contradict them, which would be pretty brilliant if he did that.

Don't expect this to end too soon, and I sure hope it won't.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes. But ironically you just created a new first-page piece related to PRISM...

</comment><comment><USER12> yes</comment>


African American Women Worked as Some of NASA's First Computers - <AUTHOR> https://bitchmedia.org/article/african-american-women-worked-some-nasas-first-computers <comment><USER2> One of my undergrad math teachers once held a job as a computer. She liked to tell the story of how she once spent about a week solving a complex integral. The answer turned out to be 1. She said she felt both elated and kind of disappointed.

<comment><USER3> This is basically the plot of an Iain M. Banks novel. (Spoilers.)

<comment><USER4> I've read that novel. I think your comment, while clever, and admittedly a little oblique, is still a major spoiler.

Why would you write 'spoilers' _after your comment_? Its probably better to say nothing. Would you consider editing?

<comment><USER5> I don't understand how people continue to expect that it is nearly their right to not be spoiled about every book, movie, and so on. You're on the internet, on a website with public comments. If it is such a big deal to not be spoiled about an old book you probably weren't even going to read, then maybe you should reconsider your browsing habits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are smart people of both sexes and all races, and I always assumed that an organization as focused on problem solving as NASA would employ the smartest _people_ and ignore the discrimination that was all too commonplace at the time this occurred. While I'm glad to see that my assumption was grounded in facts, articles like this, in 2016, seem divisive to me.

<comment><USER7> > While I'm glad to see that my assumption was grounded in facts

Sadly, you're wrong. For years the route to become a NASA astronaut included being a military test pilot. That position was not available to women, and so NASA prevented women from becoming astronauts.

They continued to do so even when testing showed that women were at least as good as men, and often better, and had other advantages. (Smaller, and thus lighter, and thus considerably less expensive to send into space).

[http://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/flats.html](http://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/flats.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_13](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_13)

<comment><USER6> I was just referring to the article. Apparently the "computer" position was open to the best applicants, regardless of sex or race. You know, the way things are supposed to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty cool. They used to have a position at NASA whose job title was "computer", which was typically filled by women. They would compute whatever was necessary, and invent any tools they needed to make those computations.

<comment><USER9> The term dates back to the 17th century: [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=computer](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=computer)</comment></comment>


Three decades of the Commodore 64 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/08/three-decades-of-the-commodore-64/ <comment><USER2> The commodore christmas...memories...was it 12/84 or 12/85...i forget. How could a mass-market computing product explode like that when it booted up into a BASIC interpreter? Could you imagine a product like that released today that booted up into a python prompt? Like this: build_something >>

<comment><USER3> Nostaliga trip!

My parents had bought me a Commodore 16 for Christmas, maybe 85 or 86. I remember us hooking it up to the old Rank Arena telly that we had in our back room and then not knowing what to do. I remember we put a tape in and pressed PLAY but didn't type anything.

Only ended up having that machine for a few weeks from memory. We couldn't find any software for it and couldn't really figure it out, so my parents packed it up and took it back to the store where they exchanged it for a C64.

I'll never forget the next few days. The computer was set up in the living room and it was amazing to everyone. We played Space Invaders and Frogger and Arcadia and African Safari.... My mum and dad got into it, my uncles and aunts got into it.

I'll never forget falling asleep snug in my bed, listening to the rest of the family out in the living room laughing and having such an awesome time.

Then I found BASIC and "WOW I CAN MAKE THE COMPUTER DO WHAT I WANT!". The rest is history :)

Nothing really quite matched that feeling, until the 'Christmas of the Wii'. Sitting at my aunt's place, again with lots of the family around, watching my normally grumpy grandfather get into Wii Sports.

Oh man, this made my day. I'm so lucky to have the life that I do :)

<comment><USER4> My dad bought me a Commodore 16 after I had been nagging him for months about wanting my own computer. The little time I had been allowed to spend on my dad's CP/M and DOS machines and on our neighbour's Apple II just was not enough for me anymore.

I wanted a Commodore 64, of course, so when I got that grey instead of beige box it was immediately clear to me that it was not "the real thing". In retrospect, though, I am immensely grateful for my dad's choice. There being almost no software for the C16, and in particular the complete lack of games, meant that the only thing I could really do with it was to start programming with the built-in BASIC. So, I learnt that... and it did not take long until my dad stopped being the person I could ask about how to do things on a computer...

First experiencing a computer as something you program instead of something you use to run programs written by other people was one of the coolest things that could have happened to me at that time.

Later, I got a Commodore 128. I did some interesting stuff on it, for example, it is the only machine I ever really programmed in assembler. But to be honest, most its uptime was spent in the C64 mode running games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I learned so much about programming on my C64 -- that one can buy it at a Toy R Us for $300 back then was amazing. I learned assembly on it - in fact what was really cool was that the 1541 disk drive had a full blow 6502 with 2k of RAM. I remember when I used that as a second computer to help calculate the Mandelbrot set! Multi-processer computing in 1985!

That machine was way ahead of its time in so many ways - pure genius.

</comment><comment><USER6> The demoscene is still producing a rather large volume of C64 demos:

[http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+6...](http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+64&page=1)

</comment><comment><USER7> Possibly my favorite part of the entire post comes from the comments at the bottom. Apparently some radio stations used to broadcast software--you'd just record it onto a tape and then load it with your C64 (or other computer with a tape drive)! What a fantastic world I missed out on by being born a decade late!

<comment><USER8> Yeah, now you are stuck with the crappy option of downloading code over the internet.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's that crappy. Is it?

<comment><USER8> Your sarcasm detector needs recalibration.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, boy, it's yours ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My first computer.

I got it in 1992 (Eastern Europe was few years behind at the time). It was the version with shorter, thicker case. I only knew Polish. There was no internetm the manual was in German, and for a different version (video memory addresses or sprite registers were different I think - I tried to type in these few included programs with moving sprites hundreds times, and they did nothing - never got it to work). Still I've learnt a lot about programming, by typing the listed programs in and trying them out.

On saturdays my neighbor cut wood with electric saw, and loading games from tape didn't worked. I've had to wake up and load a game before he started, or the whole day was "wasted" :)

Also the power supplier heated up so much, that after +- 8 hours it stopped working. My uncle was an electrician, and he fixed that power supply a dozen times or so.

There was this blackbox cartridge, that allowed faster loading of games from the tape, had some programming tools (which I didn't understand at the time), and realtime multichannel piano (you could play chords no problem).

It's funny, that no piano on PC (or android) I've ever used was as responsive as that C-64 program.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's actually almost 30 years to the day since the launch of Commodore Amiga.

<comment><USER12> And mirroring aswansons's comment[1] above:

One of my best memories was Christmas 1985, waking up to my dad fiddling with the A1000 in the living room. He learned enough from the ComputerLand salesman to type `dpaint` at the `AmigaDOS>` prompt and launch the coolest thing[2] I'd ever seen.

That computer was my only machine from 1985 through 1997, when I finally got a secondhand 486DX2-66 to replace it. It wasn't until well into the 2000s that I had a computer that could do the things I could do with that Amiga.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894641)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint#/media/File:Amiga...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint#/media/File:Amiga_1000DP.jpg)

<comment><USER13> I still remember my reaction to Windows 95.

"So finally Amiga-like long file names and plug and play like with Amiga Zorro bus. But why it doesn't still let me to rename volumes as something else than single drive letters C, D, E... etc.?"

My 1995 self would have been so disappointed to hear Windows is still stuck to drive letters in 2015.

<comment><USER14> I've been using Linux as my primary desktop nearly continuously since 1999, and I'm typing this in Linux right now, but for what it's worth, you can now mount volumes in Windows as a path on another volume.

<comment><USER13> The difference might seem subtle, but on Amiga you could refer to volumes as "Volume name": like WorkDisk:. Then whenever anything referred to say WorkDisk:dir/file, the system would request you to provide this volume, "WorkDisk".

So mounting a filesystem to a directory is not same. When directories are mounted, you _need to provide volume first_ and then you can refer to it. You could name some USB stick as "Important Files": and whenever you copy or save anything to drive "Important Files": the system would ask you to provide this named volume.

<comment><USER14> Nice. That's way better than DOS's old "Insert disk for drive B:" message or whatever it was to fake having two floppy drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Tao for me was: Timex Sinclair, Vic-20, C-128 and Amiga 500. What a journey it has been, typing in game programs from Compute's Gazette: [https://archive.org/details/compute- gazette](https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette)

<comment><USER16> Oh my that cover brings back childhood memories. It seeded my desire to program computers that is still with me 30 years later. (C64 for years till I saved enough for a used A1000).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Scott Hanselman interviews his father:

[http://www.hanselminutes.com/98/scott-interviews-his- dad](http://www.hanselminutes.com/98/scott-interviews-his-dad)

It's worth a listen just for the story of how Hanselman got his first computer, a C64,

</comment><comment><USER13> Well, this seems fitting here: [http://www.pagetable.com/?p=53](http://www.pagetable.com/?p=53)

"The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3"

</comment><comment><USER18> The biggest newspaper in Norway honours the 64 in their own way. Curl vg.no and look at the server header :)

</comment><comment><USER19> The C64's SID sound chip was ages ahead of anything else on the market when it was released, and it was nearly a decade before the IBM PC produced anything comparable with decent software support. As far as I know, the C64 was the first platform ever to produce dedicated game-music composers.

Here's a sample of what it could do, by the legendary Martin Galway: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf29ShkoAiA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf29ShkoAiA)

And here's a netradio station that exclusively plays remixes of C64 game music (!): [https://www.slayradio.org/](https://www.slayradio.org/) (listening links on the left)

<comment><USER20> I think the Wizball theme is an even better example of Martin Galway's work: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFYzjU-C3mA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFYzjU-C3mA)

Takes a while to get going, but it's sublime.

<comment><USER13> True classic. Also other tunes in Wizball are great.

Here's a great tune from another game. Rob Hubbard - Nemesis the Warlock.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdzfOXkZrY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdzfOXkZrY0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> (2012)</comment>


Two Cold-Emailed TechCrunch Pitches That Worked - <AUTHOR> http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/03/28/two-cold-emailed-techcrunch-pitches-that-worked/

<comment><USER2> You can never be a 100% safe from luck :)</comment>


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With us you can do this in 5 steps. Try it, give feedback, and be candid. Thanks!</comment>