After evidence of fraud, Indiegogo responds by deleting anti-fraud guarantee - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/04/03/after-pando-shows-clear-evidence-of-fraud-on-indiegogo-company-responds-by-deleting-anti-fraud-guarantee/

<comment><USER2> It seems silly for any company to say that they can stop "any and all cases of fraud". That's just impossible. If they had a mechanism to prevent all fraud, it would be worth billions of dollars (assuming it could be applied to payment processors).

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. For me the issue here seems to be more around their handling of the issue. The new wording of their policy seems more sane/better to me. But they need to address the issue in an open manner ASAP.</comment></comment>


The Camless Engine of the Future Is Almost Ready for the Real World - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a24005/koenigseggs-camless-engine-getting-close-to-production-in-china/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if that's similar to F1 cars which also use pneumatics for valve lift.

It looks a like a great design. I'm guessing valve lift is what also is being used as a substitute for a throttle body but seems tricky and difficult to understand initially. How does it handle situations under vacuum or high boost? Hopefully they release more information about it.

<comment><USER3> BMW Valvetronic does away with the throttle body - it adjusts valve lift instead.</comment></comment>


Hard Drive Stats for Q2 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q2-2018/ <comment><USER2> I've always had a question about those stats. "Drive days" seems a key figure; but 1000 drive days may mean 100 drive with 10 days each, or 10 drives with 100 days each. This kind of metric implies that the chance of failing is independent of the age of the drive. Is that so? Was that verified? One of the most failing drives around is the Seagate 4TB, which is a quite old model (it exists since 2013, but it's still sold). How is the drive cohort composed? If it's composed by many old drives and many very new drives, it could mean that we're observing a "mean value" with very little significance.

It would be GREAT to have a "long form" CSV with a) drive model b) service start date (or service hours cont) c) failed/not failed during quarter. THAT would help understanding whether drives fail at random or because of old age (and/or what is the correlation between age and failure - there's a threshold effect, or it's linear?)

</comment><comment><USER3> Anecdote: this one drive I have with more than 10 years power on:

      Model Family:     Hitachi Travelstar 5K160
      Device Model:     Hitachi HTS541660J9AT00

        9 Power_On_Hours          -O--C-   001   001   000    -    89479
       10 Spin_Retry_Count        PO--C-   100   100   060    -    0
       12 Power_Cycle_Count       -O--CK   100   100   000    -    112
      191 G-Sense_Error_Rate      -O-R--   100   100   000    -    0
      192 Power-Off_Retract_Count -O--CK   100   100   000    -    47
      193 Load_Cycle_Count        -O--C-   001   001   000    -    18380622

According to spec the "Service life of the drive is approximately 5 years or 20,000 power on hours" and "The product supports a minimum of 600,000 normal load/unloads"

</comment><comment><USER4> Andy or Yev: what do you do with the working drives that are pulled to be replaced due to density reasons? Recycled?

<comment><USER5> Yev from Backblaze here -> Yup, wiped and recycled!

<comment><USER6> any news of EU datacenters? Thx

<comment><USER5> We're working on it! It's a bit tough since we're bootstrapped, but that is definitely a priority. We can't grow too quickly for risk of overreaching, but hopefully we're hoping we can find something soon, though no ETA on when that's coming.

<comment><USER7> I know most of your stories are about Hard Drives, the 4U Stack, its software and DC. But I don't seems to record any stories about being bootstrapped. As compared to lots of other VC backed startup. Are you guys taking investment, if not why not?

Is cash flow or capital a concern for EU DC? If yes, have you consider Crowdsourcing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there a reason these blog posts embed the tables as images? Is it to prevent the results from getting indexed or just convenience? Because it also makes it impossible to copy/paste the model numbers when looking up pricing. :(

<comment><USER9> They link a zip file with all the tables in one spreadsheet. Here's a copy and paste:

MFG Model Drive Size Drive Count Drive Days Drive Failures Annualized Failure Rate

HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 4TB 4,773 441,707 5 0.41%

HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 4TB 15,051 1,384,015 10 0.26%

HGST HDS5C4040ALE630 4TB 78 7,791 1 4.68%

HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB 1,044 95,056 3 1.15%

Seagate ST4000DM000 4TB 27,476 2,645,254 134 1.85%

Seagate ST6000DX000 6TB 1,832 168,450 4 0.87%

Seagate ST8000DM002 8TB 9,886 899,939 25 1.01%

Seagate ST8000NM0055 8TB 14,393 1,309,622 24 0.67%

Seagate ST10000NM0086 10TB 1,220 111,020 0 0.00%

Seagate ST12000NM0007 12TB 21,580 1,816,181 57 1.15%

Toshiba MD04ABA400V 4TB 146 13,286 0 0.00%

Toshiba MD04ABA500V 5TB 45 4,095 0 0.00%

WDC WD30EFRX 3TB 180 16,380 0 0.00%

WDC WD40EFRX 4TB 46 4,173 0 0.00%

WDC WD60EFRX 6TB 434 39,722 3 2.76%

    		Totals: 	98,184	8,956,691	266	1.08%</comment></comment>


Are eCards back, but in mobile format? - <AUTHOR> http://textygram.com

<comment><USER2> This is really cool spin of mobile ecards/greetings. Uses touch + photos which is a no-brainer on mobile. Also like that you don't have to install an app to send or receive them. Hilarious!</comment>


Heroku for Facebook Developers - <AUTHOR> http://heroku.com/facebook

<comment><USER2> I haven't had to manage a site at that traffic level before, but is there really a use case where you're immediately going from no managed hosting to needing $1500/month in managed hosting?

I don't doubt these are the resources necessary for a 1M user site and I don't even doubt that that's a good deal for not having to manage a site of such scale, but how many people are $1500/month ready to test an idea?

<comment><USER3> Ad agencies are a good example. They put together a cheesy game as part of a campaign, and need to hit the ground running. Relative to development, creative, and everything else that goes into a campaign, $1,500/mo is a steal.

<comment><USER4> I work at one, and you'd have to make a really good case to a client to factor in $1,500 / month in hosting costs. Even though it's a small sum compared to total campaign spend, big companies are more into the "wow" factor than anything else. Thus they're more willing to pay for cool designs than that boring hosting stuff.

Also, support is extremely important for these big campaigns. Companies want someone to call if things go awry. If Heroku goes down, you're kinda screwed. All we can tell the client is "sorry, Heroku's down. we can't do anything about that." That's something you want to avoid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heroku is in general too expensive for me.

Personally I would go for an AWS Free Tier account + 1 EC2 large instance. Then use the micro instance as the HTTP server, and the large instance for the DB and a 1 GB memcached.

That would cost no more than $100 / month and will give you more processing power than what this package offers.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting to me that heroku chose to showcase a realtime app (Clobby) as an example of what they do well. Don't get me wrong, I think heroku works very well in some use cases, but I'm really curious how to get access to the "specialized addons" that enable this behavior, as the heroku I'm familiar with doesn't play well with websockets/comet.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure this would appeal to "developers" at $1500 per month. Perhaps the CTO of a funded businesses. I was half expecting something in the price range of a mortal individual developer/entrepreneur.</comment>


AngelGate: Chris Sacca Responds To Ron Conway - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/26/angelgate-chris-sacca-responds-to-ron-conway/ <comment><USER4> Mark my words: all of Silicon Valley will regret it if the federal government gets involved in angel financing, "collusion" or no colllusion. It is not easy to build a Silicon Valley, but choking off deal flow with red tape could well destroy it.

When the government enters an area on the basis of negative press coverage, it does not have an informed opinion or a light touch. Think about it: years later, we are _still_ taking off our shoes and surrendering our liquids at the airport. Policies written in haste after a media event are almost never revisited or changed, no matter how much economic damage they do.

I don't want to paint a mental picture by giving too many details, but you can imagine what any government assault on angels would do to the financing environment. This is exactly the kind of premise that a broke California (or federal) government can use to impose new taxes, just like police officers are ordered to increase ticketing when the city needs revenue.

Bottom line: the cure would be far, far, FAR worse than the disease.

<comment><USER5> For me, minimum capital requirements to be an accredited investor is already far worse than the disease.

I'd prefer to see certification programs that people raising money must apply- for, and have that be the basis of whether an investment is valid for the market, rather than placing a capital requirement on potential investors as the way to determine if an investor is smart enough to reject scams, and thus save the government from complaints and minimize lawsuits than what would happen if joe public and his granny could invest their savings.

Perhaps there could be a certification program too for people wanting to invest.

This I think would free up capital and opportunity, ie real micro finance.

<comment><USER6> I cannot meet those "accredited investor" requirements, which if you think about it, are really meant to cut off dealflow for anyone who isn't already rich.

Meanwhile, I have easily lost an angel investment's sized amount of money in equities and derivatives I've controlled. (and made many times that in positive returns... but it is the losses the government pretends like they are protecting me from.)

I could have been putting $15k-$20k into several startups a year, for the past 15 years, up to one a month in recent years, if the government would let me.

Think about that-- it would have been ILLEGAL for me to invest in these companies (or for them to take my money)... while at the same time I've incurred complete losses of the same size in the public markets, and could blow all of it and more at any casino on the country in a weekend.

<comment><USER7> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investors>

If you could put 15-20k a month into startups, how are you not meeting the accreditation reqs?

I think the requirements are to cut off companies from taking investments from little old ladies. It's the startup that would get in trouble, not you.

You considered talking to a lawyer?

<comment><USER6> I could put that amount in at the end of the period, not the beginning, and accredation requires either a higher salary than i have, or a net worth over a million, which I don't have.

If preventing little old ladies was all that was needed, then it could be accomplished with a wavier.

<comment><USER7> The other issue that for angel investing is that you really ought to be doing 10+ investments a year to actually even out the risks so that you can get a return. That's a fairly high watermark.

I've done approx 45 investments. One has returned (a small amount) of money in five years, so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My summary (I did my best to represent the gist of what Sacca was saying):

Chris Sacca considers Ron Conway a mentor and greatly respects him. However, he was "hurt" by Conways email. Sacca was at the first meeting, not the second. He wishes Conway had been there, since they would have liked his input on the things they talked about: standard docs for financing, pro-rata rights ("early investors continuing to stay involved"), futility of VCs blocking company sales, giving more liquidity to founders.

He said they are all pro entrepreneurs, they coach entrepreneurs along the way, and they 'bleed' just as much as founders do. Sacca's first deal was paid with a credit card check, which was stupid but he wanted to help.

Because of Twitter and search, they can't "fuck" entrepreneurs, since it would be forever attached to their names. Sacca is upset at Conways "rush judgement" of his (Conways) friends (Conway allegedly privately referred to them as 'dirtbags' to Sacca).

He wants Conway to ask entrepreneurs how working with the Angels in question is, and hopes Conway realizes how hard they work.

</comment><comment><USER9> After careful reading of Sacca, Conway, and Arrington, I've come to the conclusion that they might all be correct in their representation.

We know there were at least two meetings of the "Super Angels" - It's possible (likely) that the first meeting that Sacca attend was an aboveboard engagement in which all of the positive conversations that took place were as Sacca described it. Indeed, I read Sacca's email as a shout-out to Conway saying "Hey - the meeting I attended, was above board - don't paint me with the second meeting brush"

It sounds like in the second meeting, the conversation departed from "How do we help entrepreneurs" and started sliding into "How do we increase value for angels". Maybe not full out (actionable) collusion in which any agreements were made (and the concept of agreement is pretty important in collusion) - but skirting dangerously close.

David Lee was at that second meeting (and, for all we know, was one of Arrington's sources - He had Three), likely gave conway the briefing, and conway, being savvy, realized he needed to immediately separate himself, particularly as all this email floating around is discoverable.

Nobody should, for a second, think that Ron Conway is writing email with the belief that it won't be seen in the public light.

Talking as a group about things like holding down valuations, dealing with YC leverage, and the impact of convertible notes on the Angel's cut of deals is all pretty dangerous territory. Sacca wasn't at the second meeting, so his email has to be taken in that context.

All in all I think Arrington has done a great service with some excellent blogging, not only to the startup/entrepreneur scene, but also, ironically, to the Super Angels themselves. By surfacing these conversations early on, I'm of the belief that he may have actually given them a wakeup call before they started doing (illegal?) things like agreeing as a group not to accept convertible notes.

This is hard hitting reporting that harkens back to a day of serious reporting - ironically done not by a "mainstream" news outlet like the WSJ, or NYT - <USER3> by a "mere" blogger.

kudos.

<comment><USER10> both meetings were aboveboard... period. the discussions at the second dinner meeting were similar in nature to the first, altho Chris wasn't at the 2nd dinner.

we also discussed ways to reduce legal costs, increase exit opportunities by using services like Second Market, how other services like Angel List were innovating & bringing access to more investors / entrepreneurs, how convertible notes were becoming more popular (which i use most of the time, and both PG & Mark Suster have written about lately), and a number of related topics -- again, many of which i mentioned on my blog post in response to Arrington's initial post.

altho some folks were bitching about startup valuations being higher lately, THERE WERE NO conversations about "price-fixing" or other BS mike reported... which is why i got so pissed when mike made such accusations, even though he wasn't there for any conversation & only reported based on anonymous sources.

while some people might suggest Mike's reporting as "hard-hitting", i'd characterize it as more inflammatory and not very well sourced. if he'd bothered to talk in more detail with any of us who were there before rushing to print, he might have gotten a lot more information about the discussions, instead of just printing one anonymous source's perspective... and perhaps less criticism from those who think he's just creating controversy to drive attention prior to the Disrupt conference.

mike has a right to report what he thinks is news, but that doesn't mean it's ok to go to print with only anonymous sources perspectives on that matter, particularly when others (like me) are willing to publicly state otherwise.

in any case, i guess we'll hear more about this in the morning on the panel. i'm tired and i'm going to bed.

believe what you will.

<comment><USER11> This should have been your blog post

<comment><USER12> this is much more readable font-wise :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow. I've dealt with Chris a little (and know people whose companies he has invested in, whose companies have gone both ways) and was always impressed but now am even more so. I obviously knew nothing about his financial situation but can admire anyone who'd put that much on the line when they smelled good gambles.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think I would like it if I knew a e-mail intended to be personal ended up on techcrunch. I don't think the leaking of these personal e-mails is very polite.

<comment><USER9> Rule number 1: write every email As though it will appear on the front page of the New York Times. If you aren't comfortable with that, then make a phone call or talk in person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Someone, a person who was at the meeting informed Arrington about the negative purpose of the conversations. So either that person was lying to Arrington and Arrignton to the readers or Sacca is telling half truths. Even as he wasn't at the second meeting anyway.

It's rather obvious that for Sacca his relationship with Conway is more valuable than anything he does for the startups or his freaking charities. The purpose of his long, very long essay is the damage control of the relationship with Conway, nothing else.

<comment><USER16> _Someone, a person who was at the meeting informed Arrington about the negative purpose of the conversations. So either that person was lying to Arrington and Arrignton to the readers or Sacca is telling half truths._

Look at the first reporting on AngelGate. Michael Arrington says he got the content of the meetings from _multiple sources:_

 _> This group of investors, which together account for nearly 100% of early stage startup deals in Silicon Valley, have been meeting regularly to compare notes. Early on it was mostly to complain about a variety of things. But the conversation has evolved to the point where these super angels are actually colluding (and I don't use that word lightly) to solve a number of problems, say multiple sources who are part of the group and were at the dinner. According to these souces, the ongoing agenda includes:

Complaints about Y Combinator's growing power, and how to counteract competitiveness in Y Combinator deals_

etc...

<comment><USER6> Of course, he "claims" that, but it sure reads like a rant from a guy who got snubbed when he wanted to be buddy-buddy with potential sources of information.

I think this is really all about Mike ego not being stroked enough.

And no, I don't think it is outlandish to posit that Mike made the whole set of allegations up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't get it. These mails from Ron Conway and Chris Sacca sounds like founders are babies in their diapers who won't even find the way to the toilet without their angel's "coaching" them. They are taking the "angel" thing too seriously.

And why does these mails have to sound like charity or some great cause? These angles aren't donating to charity - it would be good if it doesn't sound like that. This "how much we do for founders" is overdone. From where I see, the introductions and exposure that comes along with the Angels can help you get, well more introduction and exposure and may be, funding which you already have.

How does a company's success depend on these charitable deeds? It won't result in more paying customers or buyout. I don't like the tone of the mails where it makes it sound like founder are a bunch of ignorant chumps and they owe it to these Angles for the hard work and guidance. First, doesn't matter who the investor is, if founders and team aren't competent, the company would succumb. Second, the work angels are doing aren't for the founders - it's towards ROI.

<comment><USER9> "Second, the work angels are doing aren't for the founders - it's towards ROI."

Some Angels are focused on that. Others have a different take, from Ron Conway's Email:

"I want to clarify once and for all my total disagreement with your values and motives for being investors.

I have stated consistently for year that I invest because I love helping entrepenuers and watching them learn and succeed."

And, as someone who's been through several startups, and seen those run by seasoned 'serial entrepreneurs' (who've learned the hard way, and could be angels in their own right (and later have done so), and some run by first timers (who haven't even heard of the phrase "term sheet", let alone know how to negotiate one) - I'd suggest that there is a certain class of founder, an entrepreneur out to build a great product for the first time, that while not a 'baby in a diaper', is a 'babe in the woods' - and having someone who is working for _them_, rather than 'ROI' can quite often make all the difference between success and failure.

VCs (at least the three or four I've had exposure to at my low level) are focused on returns. Great angels are focused on helping entrepreneurs succeed. A VC will pursue a strategy that results in complete and utter failure for some of their investments, if it means overall greater returns for their aggregate portfolio of companies. That's just not in the DNA of the few angels I know.

I'd be cautious in trying to understand what the motivator is for these angels - for some of them, their mission is even more important than charity - it's a higher calling in which they are trying to help entrepreneurs succeed, rather than simply chase the almighty dollar. The money is important insofar as it is an indicator of their success, and as a tool to continue their mission - <USER3> not necessarily the objective.

<comment><USER17> Then we must agree to disagree.

For analogies sake, let's talk about Google. Google hires the best geeks, provides free food, doesn't hire PHBs, have a large impact on the world in some ways etc etc. Its hiring best geeks works as a magnet pulling other geeks. Not hiring PHBs means programmers are comfortable working here. Work being done at Google having a large impact gives people a sense of accomplishment and validation. Working with like-minded people lowers the stress level compared to working with idiots who accidentally became programmers and who have no respect for the trade.

In comparison, a bodyshop doesn't do any of it and still does fine financially(I know; I worked for one). Both Google and bodyshop have the same motives with different paths. It's all fine but that doesn't mean Google can claim "We don't want money. We do it for the programmers. See how much we do for them. Checkout the bodyshop which doesn't do anything for the employees and makes a ton of money. Since we do a lot more compared to the bodyshop, it proves we aren't after money and we are working towards higher calling."

Ron Conway is doing just that. Substitute Google with Ron Conway and bodyshop with traditional VCs above.

By claiming he isn't there for money but is just helping people, he is being a hypocrite. Compared to traditional VCs, he might be working more towards the welfare of founders but that doesn't change the fact that it's business and he too is working towards ROI. There is no higher calling; it's just simple, plain business.

<comment><USER9> I don't recall anyone ever claiming Google was ever "doing it for the programmers" - it's well understood that the perks and environment are there to attract talent and increase their profitability. Also, free gourmet food is increasingly a (relatively inexpensive) standard perk in the valley, so it no longer really sets Google apart as much as it used to.

And note, I never said Ron Conway wasn't there for the money, I just that it wasn't the objective. The objective is to help great entrepreneurs succeed. The money is a (not unexpected) side-effect of succeeding at that objective.

At this stage in the game, and with his network, I'm sure Ron Conway could take much higher ROI approaches if that were really his primary goal. He just isn't wired that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why are people still discussing this? Start-ups don't grow on trees. If there is something to be investigated it will, if there are any problems with angel financing they'll be known, meanwhile all this speculation is a waste of precious time.

</comment><comment><USER19> BORING. How much longer will this go on? I don't come to HN to read infinite responses to the boring news that investors meet and chat. Who the hell cares?

<comment><USER20> Apparently, you do since you care enough to reply.

<comment><USER19> I care enough about hacking to try and keep HN a useful place. Unfortunately it seems most people here are just interested in gossip and giving Techcrunch pageviews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know Chris Sacca and I've never met Mike Arrington, but reading this email and the original article Mike wrote, Chris has a lot more credibility than Mike to my eyes. OF course, Mike wasn't actually there so his allegations are pretty much by definition unsubstantiated.

I think it is a shame that Mike gets the attention he does, and that his website gets the traffic it does. This is not the first time he has impeached his credibility.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sounds too good to be true.

<comment><USER21> Would the downvoters explain this one? Do you think anyone sincerely cares about your best interest the way this guy claims in his email? Because this sounds incredibly charitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> tl;dr: Ron, Where Is The Love?

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if people will start using public-key encryption or something to encrypt mails so that only certain recipients can read them.

<comment><USER24> Do you really think these emails are being intercepted by third parties? Surely the recipients are leaking them and no encryption scheme can prevent that.

<comment><USER25> True, encryption probably wouldn't help, but you could probably come up with a scheme to watermark the messages. You could make it look like the same thing was sent a large CC list, but be able to determine the source of the leak by a changed word or two. Makes you wonder if some of these smart people are already doing it.

<comment><USER26> This technique has been used for a while, and it's widely known. It's "easy" to defeat, you need to ask someone else for a copy, and match its contents/changes with the copy from the original leaker.

I don't mean to say it's a bad idea, and it's standard practice in enterprise environments, but it's no silver bullet either.

Plus, to align with parent messages, it won't prevent leaking, it just helps to identify the person.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Professional Transitions (or: the shutting down of Mozilla Labs) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2014/09/professional-transitions.html?imm_mid=0c3621&cmp=em-prog-na-na-newsltr_20140920 <comment><USER2> This is the fourth time the essay has been linked to in as many days.</comment>


Ask HN: What Integration testing framework do you use? - <AUTHOR>

So, at my new gig, we have 2 backend engineers and 3 front end. This is causing a problem since it means we can't use something like capybara as it requires ruby knowledge. What types of integration testing frameworks have you used for teams with various skills? <comment><USER2> In my experience, Capybara is the integration testing tool that teams with various skills use. Capybara is mostly just DSLs so you can get away not knowing Ruby all that much and still be effective with it. Will you write the most maintainable integration test suite of all time? Likely not, but your team can still be productive with it.

If most of your team knows JavaScript, there is CasperJS[0] which is like Capybara but for JavaScript.

0 - [http://casperjs.org/](http://casperjs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> As another poster said - of course you can use Cucumber (Capybara), just pick the flavor for the language that your team is most familiar with.

When using Cucumber, make sure you actually write end-to-end tests that will drive your app all the way to a result that demonstrates business value. Otherwise, you're just writing unit tests :)</comment>


Guy Who Tried to Frame Me in Heroin Plot Pleads Guilty to Cybercrime Charges - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/01/guy-who-tried-to-frame-me-in-heroin-plot-pleads-guilty-to-cybercrime-charges/ <comment><USER2> This is why simple position of something as a defacto crime is problematic. Including but not limited to: illegal drugs, terrorism materials, CP, and stolen goods.

I legitimately wonder how common it is to frame someone on a possession charge? In particular if they're socially disadvantaged. Seems almost too easy, buy illegal drugs, plant illegal drugs, call in a "tip" on said illegal drugs. Very hard charge to get out of at that point, since all they have to prove is that you "possessed" them.

<comment><USER3> There needs to be 'evidence' that the person was knowingly possessing the contraband, so this is a tactic mostly limited to use by corrupt police.

[https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2015/09/11/judge-rules- po...](https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2015/09/11/judge-rules-police- planted-heroin-to-frame-driver.html)

[http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/ex-drug-officer-says- he-...](http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/ex-drug-officer-says-he-stole- cash-planted-drugs-many-times/ar-AAb0iDC)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/13/ex-nypd-cop-we- plan...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/13/ex-nypd-cop-we-planted- ev_n_1009754.html)

<comment><USER4> I've seen the other side of that one, too. We called the cops on a guy who was so intoxicated he was driving into the trees in the parking lot. Other drivers sacrificed their cars to box him in so he couldn't kill anyone by getting onto the road while the police got there.

When they arrived, he grabbed a bag of white powder out of his pocket and threw it on the ground, as if to pretend it was a throw bag. There was no possible confusion on that point (nobody was near him when it was thrown) and about a dozen independent witnesses.</comment></comment></comment>


Plain and simple: Net neutrality is hypocrisy - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703395204576023452250748540.html Don't believe politicians? Take it from techies:<p>http://scripting.com/stories/2010/12/19/netNeutralityIsHypocrisy.html <comment><USER3> I know this is ad hominem, but Robert McDowell is one of many corporate lobbyists appointed by Bush to undermine a federal agency.

<comment><USER4> It's not ad hominem; it's good to know sources, especially with an opinion piece like this.

<comment><USER5> It certainly is ad hominem.

 _\- attacking an opponent's character rather than answering his argument._ <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ad+hominem>

It's also hard to see how it is relevant.

<comment><USER6> It's not attacking his character, but rather his bias. And the funding that supports his opinion is entirely relevant; He is paid to craft arguments in opposition to Network Neutrality.

<comment><USER5> Accusing him of being biased is attacking his character.

As for his funding source, which of his arguments does that invalidate? Which of his facts is false, as a result of him being funded by Verizon (or whoever)?

(By the way, I don't even agree with him. Just pointing out that ad hominem is a logical fallacy, except under fairly limited circumstances - <USER2> when facts are presented that the reader cannot verify.)

[Edit: just thought of another circumstance where it isn't a logical fallacy. "You are wrong because of XXX. Also you are stupid." In this case, the argument is unchanged regardless of the attack on character.]

<comment><USER4> In the context of a proper debate, bias is expected since the opposing view will be supported by your opponent.

In the context of an essay, there is no opponent. The author is responsible for drawing conclusions from evidence which they use to support their thesis.

The corollary is an opinion piece. The author is free to derive evidence which supports their pre-determined conclusion. Such articles are able to be complete fabrications and misleading while lime-lighting in our media as legitimate articles to report. If the reader is not aware of the author's bias they may be mislead in their own conclusions.

Therefore it is not ad hominem to draw into question the bias of an author of an article. Doing so may invalidate any argument they have made which relies on the intended omission of evidence which may counter their argument. Sometimes it is the only way by which a reader can distinguish an opinion piece from a proper essay when the distinction isn't made clear by the publisher of the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't get his arguments ... it just seemed like one big REGULATION IS EVIL rant/FUD.

Did I miss anything ?

<comment><USER8> Let's put it a way a programmer would understand. Regulation is like generalization. Not enough of it is bad. Too much of it is also bad.

What is the problem we're having that's in need of fixing? If you can't answer that question with concrete examples of problems we are having right now, that would be fixed by adding expensive lawyers and regulators, then it is an imaginary problem. Regulation is not necessary. Regulation costs money. Do we have an overabundance of money right now to fix imagined problems that nobody can explain? I sure don't.

<comment><USER9> When faced with a prompt: "Input a number from 1 to 5", a tester asks "What if I put in 6?". One possible answer might be: "The program crashes."

In this situation, there is no problem with the program _right now_ , only at some hypothetical point in the future when someone actually enters an invalid value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The thing is, in most locations broadband is a monopoly.

Show me the competition, innovation, and capital investment in the last mile, and I'll consider your argument that regulation will stifle innovation, competition, and capital investment.

Netflix is a good example... show me that even with all your advantages and investment in view on demand, you were able to deliver a customer experience as good as Netflix, and I'll consider your argument that you should help determine what services to offer and how to charge for them.

</comment><comment><USER11> I like what Stephen Kinsella wrote in response to this article in "Against Net Neutrality" <http://networkedblogs.com/c3MxZ>):

``It is true that some corporations probably have extra-market power to control aspects of the Internet, _as the result of_ state interventions such as IP, FCC licensing, antitrust law, big business favoritism, and so on. But the solution is not to grant the state even more power to regulate private companies... [N]et neutrality is an attempt by the state to [seize] more power to control private property rights as an ostensible response to various "market failures" that are really themselves caused by state intervention.''

</comment><comment><USER12> Let me get this straight: nothing is broken right now, and therefore legislation to stop it from being broken in the future is... bad? Is that seriously what he's suggesting?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right. Ronald Reagan liked to describe the sequence of actions that government typically takes toward private business:

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite tech podcasts, and how to you find them? - <AUTHOR> 1. What's your favorite tech podcasts?
2. How do you go about finding the top most relevant ones for you? Is there a way to search/slice/dice among topics etc somewhere?
BACKGROUND
I'm finally starting to get into listening to some tech podcasts, but I find it really hard to know which ones to listen to. I feel I really want the best and most relevant stuff for me particularly, to make it worth the slight distraction that a podcast still is. So, what's your favorite ones, and how do you find your favorites?
I found a thread from early 2017 [1] but I feel this field is developing somewhat fast, so would be interested in updated views on this.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747563
(FTR, I already listen "Practical AI" and "Go time" from time to time). <comment><USER2> While not about software engineering, I find Reply All to be one of the most interesting podcasts out there because it deals with the intersection of technology and society. While it's more geared toward the layperson, listening to it really helps you understand how everyone around perceives various pieces of technology.

<comment><USER3> I also recommend Reply-All, entertaining and gives a great window into the consumer side of the tech world.

Hangouts with James Fee is a podcast primarily about the business side of GIS, I haven't seen a new one in a long while now though. [https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/hangouts-with-james- fee](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/hangouts-with-james-fee)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The MIT AI podcast by Lex Friedman has an impressive track record so far, all guests are deep thinkers and veterans in their fields.

Other podcasts in my very subjective order if value : the cognitect podcast, ycombinator podcast, functional geekery, software engineering daily, a16z podcast, masters of scale, talk python to me, GCP podcast.

As for how I go about finding new podcasts, unfortunately I have not found a good aggregator/rating site, so I just stay alert for mentions from other podcasts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will check out the MIT AI and cognitect ones ... (Indeed perhaps subjective, but happen to fit my interests, though I had missed these :) ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Data Skeptic : Especially all the episodes of Kyle explaining a concept to Linda. I've learned lots of great concepts from those episodes. [https://dataskeptic.com/](https://dataskeptic.com/)

CoRecursive : Long form interviews around a particular topic per episode, with a focus on programming languages and functional programming. This is my podcast. [http://corecursive.com](http://corecursive.com)

For finding podcasts, that is tricky. One tip I have is to use [https://www.listennotes.com/](https://www.listennotes.com/) to search for a subject. I recently a book by Adam Grant, as was able to easily find all the podcast interviews he had done by searching for him on listen notes. I may not subscribe to all of them, but its great if I want to do a deep dive on someone who is doing the interview rounds.

</comment><comment><USER6> The Changelog. The topics are pretty diverse, with an emphasis on open source. I find myself listening to about half of them. Also Technotopia from John Biggs, about "a better future". The latter is more abstract but often worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER7> Corecursive Great in-depth interviews about functional programming, computer science and software development in general.

[https://corecursive.com/](https://corecursive.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Talking Machines. (Especially when Ryan Adams was the host)

It is possibly the best ML podcast available. It is fairly technical and assumes a base level of ML and Statistics competency.

It is great way to keep in touch the ML landscape and doesn't feel like a watered down discussion for newbies.

I've tried a few more for ML, but they are either not hosted well, or talk more about everything around ML than about it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well I have to mention _Security Now_. A fascinating dive into the recent security breaches and vulnerabilities. It's well explained and a pleasure to listen to each week.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd love you to check out Conversations With Dez - [http://soundcloud.com/dez_blanchfield](http://soundcloud.com/dez_blanchfield)

</comment><comment><USER11> My favorites are Make Me Smart, which focuses on the intersection of technology, culture, and the economy, and Embedded.FM, which discusses all the different aspects of embedded software.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://techzinglive.com/](https://techzinglive.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> good tech talk video page [https://semiengineering.com/videos/](https://semiengineering.com/videos/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Software engineering daily

</comment><comment><USER15> Techdirt</comment>


Gotchas, Irritants and Warts in Go Web Development - <AUTHOR> https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintrust/gotchas-irritants-and-warts-in-go-web-development

<comment> grey-area Great post. I've done some experimentation with Go for web dev, and encountered similar problems; it's such a delight to write code in that I'd love to use it in production, but can't justify spending a lot of time debugging the immature libraries and writing new ones, particularly not on the clock for clients. I too ran into a problem with null types in another library interfacing with postgresql. The weak points I found were:

* Lack of an ORM (there are many, almost all incomplete, and lacking in some way)

* Immature or incomplete db interface libraries

* No db migrations (would love to see a simple sql-only solution here)

* Package management is simple and elegant but without explicit versioning, so forking is the end result to ensure stability

* No process pool management for running Go behind something like Apache or nginx.

This goagain tool looks interesting for the last point though:

<https://github.com/rcrowley/goagain>

and the routing I found pretty straightforward with something like github.com/gorilla/mux so there are solutions, they're just not always as fully baked or as mature as you'd find in other ecosystems. One place Go shines though is the great built in web server which really simplifies getting up and running and testing, and which I see they've built on here.

Given how easy and pleasurable it is to work with, and the focus on practicality rather than language features, I'm quite confident that Go will reach it's stated aim of becoming a popular server-side language quite soon. For those new to the philosophy behind the language, I found this informative - <http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article>

<comment><USER3> I went on a framework binge over the past two weeks to see what the state of web development was. I looked at a dozen or so frameworks including Go frameworks. I came to the same conclusion you did.

Revel was the most promising Go web framework that I saw though very immature.

Go ORMs aren't ORMs. They are object persistence frameworks (at best). None of them really provide the "R" in ORM. Most of them basically do "SELECT * FROM table WHERE id=12" and dump that into a struct. There goes the "M" as well.

The Go language itself is very nice to work with though. It's a great language. Give it 2-3 more years and a truly usable ORM and web framework will crop up.

<comment><USER4> Many people coming from dynamic languages rely too heavily on ORMs. It's not very hard to write some SQL that will do what you want it to do, and it'll almost always be faster than an ORM. There is a little more setup, but it's not really that hard unless you have a really huge data model. Also, many people are moving away from relational databases for web platforms anyway, and non-relational databases are a lot easier to write code against. Check out the mgo package for running against mongodb.

<comment> grey-area I don't think people use ORMS because relations are hard, but because they are boring, repetitive, and just complex enough to make them tricky but not interesting. So ORMS are used to take away some of that cognitive load when you just want to say that Story has_many :commenters, via: comments or something similar. It's simpler to express what you want, gets rid of boilerplate joins etc, and usually you can drop down to SQL if you need it to fine tune a query, so why not?

Re relational versus non-relational, they're really suitable for different kinds of data, and it's disingenuous to suggest that one is the future and one is the past.

<comment><USER5> This; the moment I realized I was never going to choose to do CRUD web stuff in Go was when I realized that this was the perspective Golang developers have on ORMs.

<comment><USER6> That's funny... knowing that ORMs aren't everywhere actually makes me _more_ likely to use Go. I still have Hibernate flashbacks.

<comment><USER7> Hibernate is not a good example of an ORM, frankly. (I myself have horrors of both Hibernate and TopLink, which was the top Java ORM way back when.)

Ruby's ActiveRecord is a much better choice. It has an excellent balance between SQL and OO. It doesn't pretend that SQL doesn't exist; on the contrary, it encourgaes SQL use, and merely maps tables to objects, adds a bunch of useful features (data validation, change management, automatic joins, declarative migrations) and gets out of your way most of the time.

For example:

        users = User.where("created_at > ?", Time.now - 1.year).
          order('name').limit(10)

Results are lazily loaded and composable, so you can do:

        users = User.where("created_at > ?", Time.now - 1.year)
        if (page = params[:page])
          users = users.offset((page - 1) * 10).limit(10)
        end

Joining is easy:

        users = Users.joins(:accounts).
          where(accounts: {type: 'facebook')).first

becomes something like:

        select users.*
        from users
        join accounts on accounts.id = users.account_id
        where accounts.type = 'facebook'
        limit 1

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The timeout issue was fixed in Go 1.0.3. The problem wasn't that the connections timed out, but that the database/sql package wasn't able to handle this correctly. <http://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=b397807815a6>

Please keep in mind, that the database/sql package is - like Go itself - <USER2> very young. There is still a lot of work to do compared to mature libraries like JDBC, but it will improve with every release.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, like the fact two queries can't run simultaneously in a single transaction. All queries in an single transaction must be run sequentially. What worries me though is that this is "by design", and seen as completely proper by the Go devs.

That's the reason I stopped using Go: they have guys who don't understand databases writing their database code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems like most issues (except the nil problem, which is explained very well by chimeracoder) are not really with the language itself, but just with its ecosystem, which naturally is nowhere near something like Java or Ruby at this point. I agree, and while I love Go, I would probably develop a new web app in Sinatra. Who knows if that will be the case next year, though.

<comment><USER11> Yeah and this is why I don't think it will ever become semi-main stream. I personally use Express with Node and it seems a good amount of people use Sinatra/Flask as well.

It's much more than just that though. If you scanned Express feature by feature you could implement most of them in Go. I would imagine someone experienced in JS and Go could port the entire thing over in a day.

It's just then what? Now you have:

1\. Similar / worse performance.

2\. Way less useful libs to leverage.

3\. Have to write 2 languages instead of 1 (if you happen to already use Node).

4\. Dealing with way less mature libs for crucial components that you definitely don't want to be writing yourself.

There's basically no gains. Deploying single binaries is great but a "write once, use nearly forever" build script makes deployment a snap with any non- compiled language.

Testing support is amazing in JS too and debugging is leap years ahead of Go. Using gdb is just archaic compared to using node-inspector. I'm sure Ruby and Python have equally as amazing testing/debugging support too.

<comment><USER5> Yes because Javascript and Golang are basically the same language with basically similar approaches to concurrency, similar deployment characteristics, similar toolchains, and comparable performance in most situations. Is what you're saying, right?

<comment><USER11> No, they have much different ways of dealing with concurrency. Deployment is a solved problem in most modern languages.

I think you may have misunderstood my post?

I also spent a pretty decent amount of time performing real world benchmarks for both languages by writing applications in both and then ran various performance metrics. Performance for general web apps with real world data goes back and forth depending on what you're doing.

My point was Go doesn't offer nearly enough pros for it to worth switching to.

<comment><USER5> If by "solved problem" you mean "if you accept the problem of keeping an up- to-date deployment environment on every machine with up-to-date patches", compared with "build this binary copy it over and run it", yes, Node and Golang deployment is comparable.

I think you're mostly just handwaving.

<comment><USER11> It is a solved problem. You can't just copy over a folder (or file) and call it a day but it doesn't take that much to get Node deployed by simply typing 1 command on 1 machine and this is the same thing you would end up doing for Go too.

If you ever dealt with deploying to more than 1 machine you would realize that doing it by hand is a pretty crazy idea. The first thing you would do is create a solution that allows pretty much hands free deployment, and those solutions exist for every modern language. Heck, it's one of the first things I did as a developer even while deploying to 1 machine.

<comment><USER12> > this is the same thing you would end up doing for Go too.

No, you'd just need to copy over one binary. Go programs compile to a system binary.

<comment><USER11> Ok, so you're going to be scp'ing your binary over manually every time? Do you manually do your other build tasks too?

No, you would have a build script that minifies/concats assets, runs tests, maybe generate docs, then finally deploy using whatever method you happen to be using if everything passes.

This might be a git deploy, or scping files over to some server.

In either case you're never copying 1 file over because that is abstracted away from you by your build script. In return you type 1 command and let your build script do the dirty work for you.

Typing this one command is the same if you're using Go or Node or any other modern language. It doesn't really matter that I have to add a few extra commands to my build script because these are things I only have to do once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not an expert in databases, but a boolean that can take 3 values smells wrong to me. Is this regarded as best-practice?

<comment><USER3> NULL is one of the most powerful features of SQL. It simply means a lack of data. This means it is neither equal nor not equal to anything else (including NULL). NULL is not a value; it's a state of non-existence.

So, for example, if you were providing a survey with an optional question with a yes/no answer. NULL would mean "no answer", false would mean "no", and true would mean "yes". Storing the "no answer" as a false would be incorrect since they did not answer the question.

It could also happen if you were adding a new column. Existing rows do not have data and would deserve a NULL unless you had a deterministic way to fill in a true or false value.

<comment><USER14> > NULL is one of the most powerful features of SQL.

I'd argue that NULL is, from a logical perspective, the single most broken feature of SQL.

> It simply means a lack of data.

The semantics of NULLs are less straightforward than that, and have a poor relationship to how SQL actually treats them. Every table with one or more nullable columns really should be a table with all the non nullable columns, plus additional table with each combination of columns that would never be missing together, each of which has a foreign key relationship back to the first table.

That's for the simple case, where the semantics of missing data are always consistent for any set of columns; in real-world databases there are often more than one reason data that can be missing might be missing, and those different reasons (because they are different classes of fact), for any given column or set of columns to which they apply, each call for another table with a foreign key reference to the table containing only the mandatory columns.

> So, for example, if you were providing a survey with an optional question > with a yes/no answer. NULL would mean "no answer", false would mean "no", > and true would mean "yes". Storing the "no answer" as a false would be > incorrect since they did not answer the question.

Sure, storing it as one table with all the questions as columns and storing the "no" answer when the answer was missing would be an error. If all the questions aren't required for the survey to be valid, then -- from a logical perspective -- the problem is presenting the whole thing as a single relation in the first place. Its a set of relations, that share a key (but not necessarily all _values_ of the key.)

<comment><USER15> And how much overhead in logic, code and frustration would that cause in terms of development and support.. right now, I'm dealing with an over-normalized database close to what you are describing and needing over 20 joins in a single query to get a complete record for display (not including actual sub- records) but to get a complete set of properties, where null means not there...

<comment><USER14> > And how much overhead in logic, code and frustration would that cause in > terms of development and support..

Depends on the competencies of the people doing dev and support. Personally -- both as a developer and a technical user -- I've had more problems dealing with situations where NULLS had ambiguous semantics, where the typical naive use of nullable columns instead of normalization into logical units of data that must all be present or absent together resulted in avoidable data inconsistencies, etc., than I've ever had with overnormalized tables.

Joins for queries are a solve-once development problem; data inconsistencies and ambiguities resulting from the problems with NULL are an ongoing problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Go does not allow many basic types, such as strings or booleans, to be nil. > Instead, when a type is initialized without a value, it defaults to the > "zero value" for that type. This is frequently useful, but complicates > database interactions, where null values are common.

This sounds like they weren't defining their types properly.

If your value can potentially be null, it should be a pointer to the type, not the type itself. A string can't be null, but a pointer to a string can.

(In fact, there's no magic going on here - 'nil' is simply the zero value of a pointer. So you always get the zero value - you just need to choose the type that has the zero value you want... which is, in this case, a pointer, not a value).

As explained well in this thread[0], this is the most accurate representation of the data itself. You _could_ create your own type that automatically decodes all null values to whatever the zero value is (empty string, etc)., but then you lose that information.

Yes, this forces you to do a check for the null value before using the data for the first time (or to invent your own monad for abstracting this), but at a high level, that's what you have to do in _every_ language.

[0] [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/golang- nu...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/golang- nuts/JOFWAqrTbUs)

<comment><USER17> Using a pointer adds an extra heap allocation, though. The right thing would be to use a Nullable<T> type and define a custom marshaller once and for all... but Go doesn't have generics, so you can't do that.

<comment><USER16> > Using a pointer adds an extra heap allocation, though.

If you want to dereference it immediately (as they seem to want to in the post), this isn't really going to affect you. You probably want to pass around a pointer, anyway, so that you're not copying values over each time.

> The right thing would be to use a Nullable<T> type and define a custom > marshaller once and for all... but Go doesn't have generics, so you can't do > that.

Sure you can - that's literally what the NullBool, etc. types do

A pointer to a string IS a 'Nullable<String>' - what they need to do is define a way to unwrap this cleanly, which is easy.

<comment><USER17> > If you want to dereference it immediately (as they seem to want to in the > post), this isn't really going to affect you. You probably want to pass > around a pointer, anyway, so that you're not copying values over each time.

Sure, I'm not saying that the extra allocation will always _matter_. In most cases it won't. My point is just that this type system workaround does cost some performance. For example, a heap-allocated struct that contains two nullable ints using the pointer trick has 3 heap allocations, not one.

> Sure you can - that's literally what the NullBool, etc. types do

But that has to be done for each type. If you define a custom type Foo and want a nullable version, you have to write the NullFoo boilerplate yourself. This is what generics are for.

<comment><USER16> > If you define a custom type Foo and want a nullable version, you have to > write the NullFoo boilerplate yourself. This is what generics are for.

I don't want to descend down the rabbit hole of 'Go doesn't have generics', but as I said above, in this case, pointers do exactly what is needed.

<comment><USER18> A pointer to T is not the same as Nullable<T>. There are many important differences.

The expressible values for a Nullable<T> are, in theory, the following:

A valid instance of T, or Null

The expressible values for a pointer-to-T are, in theory, the following:

A null pointer (pointer-to-0)

A pointer to a valid instance of T

A pointer to a previously valid, but now invalid because it was freed, instance of T

A pointer to an arbitrary location in memory

In systems programming (the space Go is presumably designed to be most useful for), the distinction between valid and invalid data is pretty important, so it's a little lazy to say 'just use pointers' when there are examples out there of safer, more efficient alternatives.

<comment><USER19> >The expressible values for a pointer-to-T are, in theory, the following: A null pointer (pointer-to-0) A pointer to a valid instance of T A pointer to a previously valid, but now invalid because it was freed, instance of T A pointer to an arbitrary location in memory

In C. Go has garbage collection, and no pointer arithmetic, so that's not the case in Go.

<comment><USER18> If you think a garbage collector and the lack of pointer arithmetic protect you from heap corruption bugs and developers deciding they're smart enough to manually manage memory for some extra speed, I've got some bad news for you. ;)

<comment><USER19> How do you expect them to do that when the language doesn't allow it? Can you show an example of Go code which creates an invalid pointer?

<comment><USER20> There's a library called "unsafe" explicitely for this. I think it's reasonable to expect people to generally not use it, though.

<http://golang.org/pkg/unsafe/>

<comment><USER19> As far as I know, it can only create a pointer of type A that actually points to a value of type B, not reference unallocated/deallocated memory. Nullable<T> could do that too if the language allowed it.

<comment><USER21> It's definitely possible to access unallocated memory e.g.,

// p points to address 1000

p := (*int)(unsafe.Pointer(uintptr(1000)))

Of course, this is why use of the unsafe package is heavily discouraged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I basically encountered the same annoyances, primarily with the whole NullBool, NullString business.

Go is pretty good at most things, dealing with SQL so far was a bit annoying however.

The Goroutine scheduler also needs some love still. The Garbage Collector and global heap I feel like is always a bad idea but Go did it anyways. Shouldn't they have learned from Java that global heaps and concurrency don't mix well?

<comment><USER8> There will be a new scheduler and an improved GC in Go 1.1, which will be released soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You should try out Play2 on Scala if Go doesn't work for you.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm 100% a ruby fan, but it seems crazy they went from Go to ruby if ultimate performance isn't their goal. Wouldnt a static type language be worlds faster?

<comment><USER10> Go is pretty slow right now. I wrote a prime number finder in Go and Ruby 1.9 and Ruby smoked it. Granted that's probably mostly due to all the math in Ruby being C, but still, you can't just say that Go is faster because it's compiled before hand.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, my guess is that you were doing something wrong in the Go code. Go is definitely faster than Ruby, even on a single core machine. [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=go&lang2=yarv)

<comment><USER10> EDIT: haha, thanks so much, guys! Stupid mistake. Go is _significantly_ faster if written properly.

I'd love to know what I screwed up. The results surprised me:

<https://gist.github.com/pkulak/99d2d5a5968b5fc03754>

<https://gist.github.com/pkulak/909d882614e0781e4525>

      bender:Desktop phil$ time go run primes.go
      Found them! 78702

      real  0m21.349s
      user  0m21.304s
      sys 0m0.033s
      bender:Desktop phil$ ruby -v
      ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-darwin11.4.0]
      bender:Desktop phil$ time ruby primes.rb
      Found them! 78702

      real  0m7.656s
      user  0m7.651s
      sys 0m0.005s
      bender:Desktop phil$ time go build primes.go

      real  0m0.269s
      user  0m0.231s
      sys 0m0.033s

<comment><USER25> You're using integer arithmetic in Ruby and floating-point arithmetic in Go. Try replacing

      math.Mod(float64(i), float64(j))

with

      i%j

My results:

      $ time go run primes.go
      Found them! 78702

      real	0m0.835s
      user	0m0.787s
      sys	0m0.039s

      $ time ruby primes.rb
      Found them! 78702

      real	0m21.013s
      user	0m21.005s
      sys	0m0.016s

<comment><USER26> It's worth noting that the time on the go side includes the time to run the compiler, and linker, since you're using `go run`, instead of `go build`. Not saying that's bad, just something to keep in mind when benchmark numbers are in the second range.

(I understand that you did because the original poster did it)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"What Did You Do?" – Alexis Ohanian Resigns from Reddit's Board - <AUTHOR> https://alexisohanian.com/home/2020/6/5/what-did-you-do <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23430575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23430575)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437549)

</comment><comment><USER3> These days it feels like the whole world is broken and people break it even more by catching the falling knife.

<comment><USER4> I'm having trouble understanding your comment and how it relates to the content of the post.</comment></comment>


Why New Zealand doesn't have deposit insurance - <AUTHOR> http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/finstab/banking/regulation/3256868.html

<comment><USER2> The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has decided that you folks dont need deposit insurance, because it doesnt prevent runs on banks and you would have to wait to get your money anyway, pretty much ignoring that deposit insurance is to protect small depositors. In the US, deposit insurance is rarely used, because the fed usually arranges for a takeover of the failing bank, but it is nice to have in as a last resort.

I admit I didn't do a deep analysis, but I dont think I would want to opt for lower moral risk and less prudent supervision at the expense of not actually getting my money back</comment>


Systemd 219 released - <AUTHOR> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2015-February/028447.html <comment><USER2>
              * When the user presses Ctrl-Alt-Del more than 7x within 2s an
              immediate reboot is triggered. This useful if shutdown is
              hung and is unable to complete, to expedite the
              operation. Note that this kind of reboot will still unmount
              all file systems, and hence should not result in fsck being
              run on next reboot.

Well that's wonderful. Sticky Keys for Linux. I'm waiting for them to implement a custom recovery shell triggered by the Contra code.

<comment><USER3> 7x in 2 seconds is ridiculously fast. I'm not even sure I can pull that kind of speed off.

<comment><USER4> Hold down CTRL and ALT; press DEL 7 times. Much easier that way.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, doing a simple "sleep 2" and trying to press enter 7 times before it returns, showed me how much I was underestimating my button pressing. It's actually not hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord The hardware database now being a systemd API rather than a udev one, I guess, shows that the systemd-udev migration is going steadily. Lots of emphasis on exploiting btrfs features and beefing up nspawn.

</comment><comment><USER5> Soon the Linux from Scratch guide will be:

* Compile kernel

* Compile systemd

* Boot

;)

<comment> vezzy-fnord There actually is a grain of truth to that, and it's already here. The LFS book has a separate edition specifically for systemd, as listed here: [http://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/read.html](http://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/read.html)

<comment><USER6> In looking the table of contents of both editions, it seems that the only high level differences are in the exchange of sysvinit and systemd. Both serve the same purpose, but the implementation is different. If LFS made a BSD init version, then I would expect a forked edition as well. At first it feels more political than technical, but since the underlying configuration files are going to be vastly different, it makes complete sense. I don't even understand how this could be construed as an argument for either side.

<comment><USER7> A couple of differences is that the systemd version lists dbus, and the classic version lists eudev and syslogd.

Their reason for adopting eudev had something to do with the problems of automating the extraction of udev from the larger systemd source, iirc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Golang SaaS for a REST API Testing - <AUTHOR> https://api-testing.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone,

I've created a small service in golang for a testing REST API endpoints. It is a language agnostic since it uses only a json file where you can describe your tests and assertions. You can easily integrate it with any CI/CD tool.

Any feedback or advice is highly appreciated.

Thanks a lot !</comment>


How Google Search Works - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/?fg=1 <comment><USER2> What Google thinks you see: [https://tinyurl.com/yx9syhq8](https://tinyurl.com/yx9syhq8)

But what you actually see: [https://i.imgur.com/SihcV2K.png](https://i.imgur.com/SihcV2K.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's lots about what they attempt to optimize for, and approximately zero about "how it works".</comment>


Major new climate study rules out less severe global warming scenarios - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/07/22/climate-sensitivity-co2/ <comment><AUTHOR> An assessment of Earth's climate sensitivity using multiple lines of evidence [https://doi.org/10.1029/2019RG000678](https://doi.org/10.1029/2019RG000678)

[https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019...](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019RG000678)

</comment><comment><USER2> I would highly recommend "The Uninhabitable Earth". I'm 27 and for at least 10 years I've been aware of the people trying valiantly to sound the alarm about climate change, but only recently has this disaster sunk in.

Maybe it's because it was the right book at the right time, but reading through I could felt my connection with the emergency in my stomach.

I can only guess that this is true, but at times reading it I'd sense an uneasiness in myself like I was learning of an imminent world war. Given what Climate Change is and what destruction looms, it's the most appropriate disposition I've had towards the problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I can figure out exactly how many beers it takes to get stomach cancer, I should be fine to have exactly one fewer.

I just need to know I am measuring this very precisely.

</comment><comment><USER4> "An analysis finds the most likely range of warming from doubling carbon dioxide to be between 4.1 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit."

</comment><comment><USER5> If this was indeed such a problem, the world would be on a strict lockdown for next few years. It isn't happening because the expected global warming is too far in the future: too far for the ruling class to care. Downvote all you want.

<comment><USER6> > too far for the ruling class to care

Why would the "ruling class" care less than everyone else? Don't they live on the same planet?

<comment><USER5> They probably know that visible effects of global warming won't manifest themselves until a century later: enough time for them and their kids. They don't care about their hypothetical grandkids. When the world starts collapsing in a century, they expect to have machines to fully replace 99% of the workforce: so most of the populace will fight for scare sources of clean water, while the rich would live somewhere in new Zealand, protected by unapproachable army of machines. That's what I think is their plan. However, I also think it's a naive plan.

<comment><USER6> > visible effects of global warming won't manifest themselves until a century > later: enough time for them and their kids

This is true for you as well. So why would they care less than you do?

<comment><USER5> My opinion is irrelevant here. I'm not giving orders to suspend or resume the economy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


You Can Be Too Beautiful - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/you-can-be-too-beautiful/309227/

<comment><USER2> > Last year, a modeling contest claimed to have found the most beautiful woman > in Britain: Florence Colgate, an 18-year-old who worked at a chip shop in > Kent.

A picture of Ms. Colgate: [http://a.abcnews.go.com/images/News/abc_florence_colgate_dm_...](http://a.abcnews.go.com/images/News/abc_florence_colgate_dm_120425_wg.jpg)

Hmm -- it seems beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Compare the above to Ellen Page, my favorite actress right now (get ready to have your heart broken):

<http://www.hdwallpapers.in/walls/ellen_page-wide.jpg>

To me, it's no contest. Reasonable people may differ, but ...

<comment><USER3> Well as you pointed out, beauty is relative, and that me be the beauty of it !

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something I noticed in the last 30 years is that the common man/woman is having an increased problem with anything that stands outside mediocrisy at either side of the spectrum. I have a feeling that they feel intimidated by super performers and feel superior towards under performers, no matter what subject, beauty, skill or education. The people that live from catering stuff to the biggest group of consumers like model agencies, advertising buro's and tv makers, increasingly make use of middle of the road models and performers as there is the most money to be made.

</comment><comment><USER5> Must be true--it has footnotes.

A.J. Liebling wrote years ago that there is a suspicion that men who are too good looking are simpletons, and compared it to the racetrack notion that gray horses quite--both, he said, are easier to spot.</comment>


Show HN: Regex for Super Humans in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iogf/crocs <comment><USER2> I thought this might be related to Superhuman but it seems not :)</comment>


Building a business with Haskell: Case Studies: Cryptol, HaLVM and Copilot - <AUTHOR> http://corp.galois.com/blog/2010/12/10/building-a-business-with-haskell-case-studies-cryptol-halvm-1.html

<comment><USER2> Galois makes some pretty cool stuff, and it's full of smart people. Buzzing through the slides I felt like it wasn't so much the case that Haskell was essential for building a business, but rather it was the right tool for the kinds of things Galois was looking to build, or maybe Galois picked doing those things because it was really good at Haskell (it is) and it just carried out a "hammer looking for nails" situation. I write in Haskell, yes, but I typically use it for specific things I'm trying to do (languages research, writing parsers, evaluating funky theoretical stuff). I'm not to keen to the idea of writing web pages in Haskell (<3's Rails) for example, or generally trying to shoehorn it into something that I would use C or Java for. The mental overhead just isn't there with the other language, especially for small projects where thinking of doing something with Monads would take me longer than just writing the thing in C and debugging it.

That being said, I think Haskell is an amazing language for what it's worth, and it's a great way for other language designers to see how many theoretical language features can be worked into a real life industry-grade language. Also, it's good for learning just because it's so different from everything else and can give you perspective on your programming.</comment>


1000memories (YC S10) Is About To Fill Facebook With Gen X's Embarrassing Photos - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/27/1000memories-is-about-to-fill-facebook-with-gen-xs-embarrassing-photos/

<comment><USER2> Disclosure - My company (PhotoScanning.ca) scans photos in bulk in Canada

I have run extensive tests with DSLR cameras, trying to approach the level of quality that you'd get from an entry level scanner. My research project in uni was on this topic. It just isn't there yet, even with these prosumer cameras and high quality lenses. The concept is good, and it works for a $30,000 hasselblad, but this will produce brutal copies from an iPhone 4S.

I'd love it if this was possible in any reasonable form as I'd abandon scanning and go to this method. In a millisecond.

Trying to justify that it is OK based on a 550 DPI is ridiculous as well - sure, the photo is large enough, but the optics inside the camera are not.

Do your own tests and see, but this is gimmicky to the extreme

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://assets.1000memories.com/blog_posts/iphone4s_1.JPG> was taken with our app. Not a gimmick.

Almost all of the photos we (1000memories employees) upload to our site are through the iPhone app, and we're more than pleased with the results.

<comment><USER2> Well, again being a bit biased, I'd say that I couldn't give that to a customer. It looks like there is significant flash reflection (or another light source) on the mid right and left. (Also, to note, my company focuses value over quality, so we're doing "consumer" level scans)

Don't get me wrong - I WANT this to work. I've spent hours trying to get the quality to an acceptable level. I love the concept and am 100% convinced that it will replace scanning in the near future.

I guess I should rephrase to explain that this is likely good enough to send a quick email to my mom, or post on my wall, but using this method as a substitute for a higher quality method is leaving a lot on the table.

<comment><USER3> You sound like the photo version of a wine snob.

<comment><USER2> LOL - Again, I don't even focus on quality - our scans are 7¢ each, done in auto-feed scanners. I'm not talking technical at all, if it looks good, if it is a reasonable duplication of the original, then I'm good with it.

I'm saying that from my tests, doing the same photos with DSLR, point and shoot, auto feed, and high quality (epson 10000xl, creo, etc) then viewing on monitor, reprinted, ipad, etc. that there is a significant jump between the scans and the pictures. It is very noticeable, and 9/10 people that I talked to weren't happy with it (after seeing better options as well)

I'm sorry if I'm offending people here - I'm a gadget nerd first and I think it is cool. I've said that like three times. I just don't like how it is positioned as replacement of scans - if a user is expecting something that is better then what the service is able to deliver, they will be disappointed. Maybe I'm in the minority on that thinking

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend an inexpensive desktop photo-oriented scanner, such as the Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner. With a list price of $200, it can handle prints, negatives, and transparencies (slides) at resolutions high enough to capture a lot of detail. Its driver software does a good job correcting color of faded prints and negatives, and it works with Windows or Mac. I've scanned about 12,000 negatives this year with one. (I'm a baby boomer who took a lot of pictures, as did my parents, in-laws, and grandparents.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Many of us with embarrassing photos from the 90s have already had them all transferred to CD (at the print shop, at the time they were developed.)

In fact I have more photos on CD than I have in print, because being a geek I have been more careful to preserve my digital media than anything printed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Be careful with storing stuff only on CDs. CDs (especially consumer CD-Rs) don't last forever.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What happens to the date you put in? How hard is it to get a JPEG with backdated EXIF?

<comment><USER7> Currently, we prompt users to date their photos and we store this info as meta-data without changing the EXIF.</comment></comment>


Damien Katz: CouchDB in the Browser - <AUTHOR> http://damienkatz.net/2009/04/couchdb_in_the_browser.html <comment><USER2> I would be interested to hear thoughts on how CouchDB would compare to Google gears from those that have worked with either. Would it make sense for Google to expand the gears API into some kind of monster that would make it easier to work with app engine or similar by only writing client side JS?

What about a JS lib that allows you to interact with gears as if it were CouchDB? This gets you a little wider audience since you only have to ask people to install Google gears. And what user does not trust the Google brand :)

<comment><USER3> I wonder how difficult would it be to include support for SQLite right there in the browser, or at least an ECMAScript implementation... Kinda like Adobe did with AIR.

<comment><USER4> Webkit already does this - [http://webkit.org/blog/126/webkit-does- html5-client-side-dat...](http://webkit.org/blog/126/webkit-does-html5-client- side-database-storage/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No reason why the machine running the browser can't be a part of "the cloud." (It may be an intermittently connected bandwidth-poor outskirt of it, but a part just the same.)

</comment><comment><USER6> CouchDB is fantastic, I think it's still too early to see the impact it's going to have down the road... Getting past the RDBMS way of thinking about data really creates opportunity for new applications... I just don't understand the emphasis on offline syncing. Seems like 1999 all over again.

<comment><USER7> Offline is a default, and defaults rule.</comment></comment>


You're wrong about LinkedIn, it's not the users, it's you - <AUTHOR> https://www.ufp.com/identity/blog/linkedin.html

<comment><USER3> I agree with the article's premise, but the user does need to be educated about the risks at the same time. We can enforce some degree of password strength, but we can't keep the user from reusing the same password. If we could guarantee that their password would never be exposed, that would be fine _but_ I'm never going to make that guarantee.

I can be diligent and yet one mistake can still expose the user's (hopefully salted and hashed) password. If there is a financial impetus for someone to find my mistake, they will spend the time looking.

As a side note, I'd love to hear how the hackers came to be in possession of 6.5MM LinkedIn passwords ... what mistake was made that allowed them to collect unsalted hashes in the first place?

<comment><USER4> > _we can't keep the user from reusing the same password_

Neither can the user. Users cannot remember a unique password for every site they visit. That's just not realistic.

The simple fact is that unique-password-per-site does not scale. Password managers don't work well, either, because they can't be integrated into the common mobile browsers, and they frankly just require too much user intervention. (Sure, I'll install this plugin on every machine I use, plus the gimpy custom browser for my phone and tablet, and I'll use the app to cut/paste into other apps that need auth...)

We really need to big players to get together and build a system that works, and for them to all implement it properly and push 3rd parties to use it. BrowserID seems promising, but I haven't heard of any other big players signing on to implement and support it.

<comment><USER3> Jeff Atwood has made the same claim and it's his rationale for using OpenID on the StackExchange sites. I don't disagree, but most users won't figure out how to use OpenID. FB login is widely known but it's not at all side-effect free.

<comment><USER5> FB seems like the lowest-bar when it comes to usability. Most people have a facebook account, and are familiar with the "app needs your permissions" flow.

I'm not familiar with how you write a web-app to use FB authentication - <USER2> much does using FB auth obviate the need for you to worry about user credentials?

<comment><USER6> I just wish everyone didn't take the opportunity to also tap into the 'post to you activity stream, spam your friends' goody bag at the same time.

Use FB by all means, but don't fail the auth if the user declines the extras.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Makes a fairly interesting point that seems obvious once you've read it, but which we actually don't have embedded as an assumption - that the level of user trust placed in us as developers is not matched by the level of care and responsibility which we actually feel when that trust is placed in us. Definitely some food for thought, and I think we need to take the entire issue much more seriously rather than just slapping anything together and forgetting about it.

<comment><USER8> What is the interesting point? That users should place a foolhardy, ridiculous level of trust in developers and processes that they don't know and have no insight into?

<comment><USER9> I don't know what it takes to build a lot of things, but I trust that the engineers will do a good job. I see no difference with software.

I've always found it odd that SWEs can harbor this type of opinion. That is, "it's the user's fault for trusting me/us." when every other engineering discipline would consider such a stance insane. All other disciplines would place responsibility directly on the engineering team. Whether a plane falls out of sky, a car explodes when rear ended, a bridge collapses, a chemical causes cancer, or an oven electrocutes the user, in all cases we'd point the finger at the engineers (or company that performed said engineering) and demand an explanation. I see no difference here.

Full disclosure: This is coming from someone who was originally studying to be a ChemE before switching to comp-sci.

<comment><USER10> It might be interesting to point out that in all the examples you give there exist strong regulatory requirements. Are you (we, collectively) saying that regulations and government oversight should be on the table for web sites that provide services requiring a certain level of security?

<comment><USER9> The regulatory compliance varies from state to state. For example, ChemE doesn't require a PE in most (all?) states. Typically, regulatory compliance is only required when the work involves some sort of interstate commerce.

With all the leaks and concerns over privacy lately, I think we'll see some sort expansion of the laws covering PII sooner than later. So wether or not I agree with it, I think this will happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would like to disagree on that:

"It's not really about MD5, SHA1 or BCrypt, (...) It wouldn't matter if the passwords were all in plaintext if they never got out."

It is also about the hashes, because a good security infrastructure should anticipate the possibility of a leak and still protect the users.

For that, you need to use the right encryption so that users don't have to change their passwords in the next days, but have 5+ years for that.

And yes, I see that you are promoting dedicated authentication services (which would do it right), it just looks strange to me there.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right, what I meant is that its not _just_ about using the right algorithms and making sure they are implemented and used correctly. It's also a whole host of other things including avoiding SQL injection, CSRF, XSS, data leakage in logs, proper access and provisioning, following and reacting to the constant stream of security alerts (case in point: the MySQL Ubuntu issue that cropped up yesterday).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The point about insiders is often overlooked but just as plausible as an outright hack. A rogue sys-admin or coder who is trusted and has access to file-systems and DBs can leak or sell data and might even get away with it without ever being caught.

<comment><USER13> I imagine there's all sorts of motivation for this too. A dishonest security admin or consultant for LinkedIn might have had no traction in convincing managers that they should pay him to upgrade the security system. I can see rogue programmers contriving leaks like this just to give themselves more work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The trick that I've found works is to use a password that I can remember on sites like Facebook. It's the only site I'm likely to log into on my phone. GMail should be a random password though, but it can be stored on your phone so you don't need to remember it. Everything else that doesn't require mobile access use a random password managed through a program like LastPass. If you're thinking about logging in to sites like your email from a public computer or something, well you shouldn't do that anyway.

</comment><comment><USER15> Solution: delegate authentication to experts - use OpenID.</comment>


Living in the real world via a third person perspective - <AUTHOR>

How would you use tech to give someone a real world third person perspective?<p>And how might this influence his/her behavior toward others? <comment><USER2> <http://www.marcowens.co.uk/avat.html></comment>