The nuke detectives – New ways to detect covert nuclear weapons - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21662652-clandestine-weapons-new-ways-detect-covert-nuclear-weapons-are-being-developed <comment><USER2> I find it quite shocking how openly this article boasts about violation of everyones' privacy regarding "network analysis" (in the section about intelligence gathering, "The latest kit").

Quotes: "thanks to advances in "network analysis" software", "fed with people's e-mails, schooling, web surfing, phone calls, banking transactions and purchases, the programs try to work out who might be a terrorist." ...

And while US americans might claim that this is of course only allowed to be used on foreigners (ignoring evidence to the contrary that just abut every countries intelligence services seems to spy on everyone including their own citizens), they explicitly mention someone who traveled abroad, comes back, and then gets his phone records screened.

<comment><USER3> It is kind of similar to the Chinese "credit" rating that is also talked about in today's news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The thing that scares me is anything which eliminates the fissile isotope production as a step. Everything else is essentially trivial and could probably be done covertly or brazenly by a state or even a well resourced non- state actor.

Fission-free fusion is probably not realistic at this point (but, if it were developed, would be terrifying), but I think the technology curve for some form of laser isotope separation is disconnected from "special nuclear stuff" and much more "advances in mainstream science.

I'm completely amazed there hasn't been an openly documented theft of either nuclear materials or weapons and subsequent nuclear declaration by a new state or non-state. It seemed self-evident that would happen post-USSR collapse. I suspect some combination of luck and extremely good work by the IC in both Russia and non-Russia had a lot to do with that. Plus, the states most likely to want the weapons already had other pathways, although it's always possible something like the Pakistani or NK or Iranian program "launders" stolen material through some other more overt pipeline, using a "completely working, honest" enrichment process to cover for it. But the isotopic mixes are identifiable, so we'd know once they detonated where material came from.

<comment><USER5> > The thing that scares me is anything which eliminates the fissile isotope > production as a step.

Why do you think we invest in NIF and other fusion projects?

<comment><USER4> To do testing after CBT (validating models), fundamental research, and to a lesser extent, fusion power research.

(Well, the primary reason is to spend money.)

<comment><USER4> (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty CTBT, not CBT)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most of the damage from a future 'rogue' nuke may be done by our reaction to it. Like the modern Pearl Harbor's fallout around us.

Edit: spelling

<comment><USER7> Or like the 9/11 attacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Once a country has a nuclear bomb or two, there is not much other > governments can do to stop it from making more, says Ilan Goldenberg, a > former head of the Iran team at the Pentagon. Plenty of states want such > capabilities.

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

The unstated implication is that weapons and military power are for the US, and its allies. Others can't have any.

The brazen arrogance of that idea is probably among the chief reasons the US is so vehemently and passionately disliked throughout the world.

What precisely is wrong with other states acquiring nuclear weapons, beyond the fact that it threatens US power?

<comment><USER9> You may not agree with it, but I don't think the disbelief is warranted. There may be other less pure motivations but there is a pretty simple moral case - proliferation will all lead to an increased likelihood of nuclear war

\- because more states have them. Increasing risk proportionately (?).

\- because more unstable/nefarious states have them, which are more likely to use them. This is of course somewhat debateable, but nevertheless plenty of people believe this and they're not flatearthists.

Taking an entitlement point of view just seems to be missing the point. It does however explain why these other states want them and resent the US/the West.

<comment><USER8> > proliferation will all lead to an increased likelihood of nuclear war

Again, the unstated implication is that the US has a moral right to shepherd the rest of the world to the correct moral conclusion to this situation. The rest of the world is just too damn ignorant to figure out how to not murder everyone with nukes, so the US has to have the hard job of controlling the nuclear stockpiles of the world. It's tough having that moral high ground, but someone's got to do it.

The US has committed crimes of war with nuclear weapons against _civilians_ : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki)

The fact of the matter is that knowledge cannot be suppressed. The ability to create and operate nuclear weapons is not something that is going to be a controlled secrete for very long - if it is at all. The current policy of the US asserting its power over the rest of the world is only going to ensure that when this knowledge is common, it will most certainly be used to ensure the end of the US power.

<comment><USER10> There are a few issues with your assumption that, and this is coming from an immigrant of former USSR. 1\. It's not the nation-states that posses nuclear weapons that are the most dangerous, it is a possibility of an extremist group getting nuclear weapons. Countries has something to fear, a small criminal/terrorist organization does not.

2\. US and Russia has similar nuclear stockpiles, how come economic distribution is different between the two? Nuclear weapons does not make you a "super-power", economy does. Example: Germany has no nuclear weapons yet are an economic power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > And on top of that, the United States Air Force runs a detection network > that includes satellites that can spot nuclear-weapons tests.

Always curious about this, but how do satellites detect the tests? Especially underground/water ones?

<comment><AUTHOR> This article explains how satellites can detect "underground" nuclear explosions [http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/satellites-can- detect-u...](http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/satellites-can-detect- underground-nuclear-explosions)

<comment><USER11> Thanks, that's very helpful. I've heard that the GPS system has a second function to detect nuke tests, now I see how. It can be considered a lightweight global surveillance system that gives a useful benefit when things aren't blowing up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> paywall :/

<comment><USER13> open in incognito

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that suggestion :)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Journyal – travel journaling made simple - <AUTHOR> http://journyal.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone!

Journyal is a travel journal app I made during my free time as both a conscript and intern. I released it back in March to the iOS App Store.

Journyal keeps track of where you go, where you stop, and what you see, helping you to automatically record your travels, be it backpacking trips, hikes, overseas travel, or even food trails. Simply press start and take photos as you would along the way, and Journyal will help you compile everything into a photo journal that you can save to document your trips. I also made a video ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO9DAVahvIk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO9DAVahvIk)) back when I was still conceptualizing this as a student so people could see how it works (although the UI of the app has changed since then)!

I appreciate any and all feedback, no matter how harsh! Building and releasing my own app to the app store has been an incredible learning experience, but I 'm beginning to truly understand that building something people actually want to use is a beast in and of itself, and this is something I want to learn about.

Download Journyal on the App Store: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/journyal- walk-snap-log/id14543...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/journyal-walk-snap- log/id1454357904)

Visit the website: journyal.com

</comment><comment><USER2> This looks really awesome! I can't tell from the video or website, but where are you sharing your journeys to?

What are the social features of the app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, thanks so much for the kind words! Actually, the video is kind of outdated because I made it a few years ago when I was still conceptualizing this app. The main gist of the app is still conveyed by the video, but since then, I've decided not to include any social features into the app, because I think that travelling is something personal that we should focus on and enjoy, and we shouldn't get caught up in the social aspect of sharing and worrying over taking that 'perfect Instagram shot'.</comment></comment>


Xoom with only WiFi goes on sale for $539 - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/03/wifi-only-motorola-xoom-appears-at-sams-club-bearing-539-pric/

<comment><AUTHOR> Found the original site/article that Engadget carefully didn't link to:

[http://www.droid-life.com/2011/03/03/wifi-only-motorola- xoom...](http://www.droid-life.com/2011/03/03/wifi-only-motorola-xoom-headed- to-sams-club-possibly-priced-at-539/)</comment>


Our modern web theme goes live - <AUTHOR> http://php.net/ <comment><USER2> For better or worse, the one thing that I can say that is very positive about php, is php.net has basically great documentation and it's usually easy enough to find what you need about particular methods. If php didn't have the documentation that they do, it would not be as successful as it is.

<comment><USER3> We switched from PHP to Python a few years back and the one thing I consistently miss is the documentation. I feel that PHP has far superior documentation in terms of clearly showing arguments, returns, examples etc.

<comment><USER4> It is how PHP survived (at least in the 4.x.x and early 5.x.x days when I last used it) the massively inconsistent "standard" library: the documentation reduced the effect of that problem considerably and made discovery of features relatively easy.

A "good enough" system with excellent documentation is going to win out against a better system without the doc documentation to make library feature discovery and use easy.

It'll be interesting to see how node.js develops in this regard. Currently the core documentation is pretty good there, but as the size of the project grows it'll take effort to maintain a certain standard and coverage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In general I like the new design. I do have one thing that I'm not wild about:

[http://www.php.net/manual/en/](http://www.php.net/manual/en/)

The page that you are dropped into for that is not very friendly. I much prefer the layout for a sub-page once you've clicked a link.

[http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.php](http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.php)

<comment><USER6> I agree.

In addition, I hope the next "fix" will be to cull the comments. While there are occasionally some worthwhile edge cases documented in the comments, there is also a great deal of spectacularly bad design advice, which doesn't help PHP's reputation among language elitists as being for script kiddies and beginners.

<comment><USER7> The main reason I like the comments on php docs is it's helpful for me to see a basic usage example. A lot of docs (your typical 'man' page for instance) just have a dictionary-like wall of text without a usage sample.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It reminds me of Drupal circa 2006, not that that's necessarily a bad thing (it's been a tremendously usable site since forever, so if it ain't broke…), but "modern" is a bit of a stretch.

</comment><comment><USER9> Have always liked the user contributed notes on php.net. It really increases the value of the documentation.

<comment><USER10> It isn't often that a doc doesn't solve my api level problem but when it does, user notes always save the day. There is always someone who faced same corner case as mine. One of the many advantages of using the world's most popular server side language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Note that users of extensions like Ghostery will have the search functionality (e.g. [http://us2.php.net/results.php?q=curl&l=en&p=all](http://us2.php.net/results.php?q=curl&l=en&p=all)) "broken." You'll have to allow the Google AJAX Search API permissions for it to work.

</comment><comment><USER12> How do I view the new modern design?

<comment><USER13> I see some text on a very plain page with a top bar logo that feels oddly squashed in relation to the other content. Feels like 2003 to me.

<comment><USER12> So I assume this is the new site? :|

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Search does not work without javascript.

Fixed header takes away screen real estate.

Grey text is hard to read.

Sends every pageview to Google.

I do not like it.

<comment><USER15> * Sends every pageview to Google.

you mean it has analytics, like every other page on the internet.

* Fixed header takes away screen real estate.

it's modern, you know, where people have screens larger than VGA. This isn't 1998 anymore.

* Search does not work without javascript.

Very hard to be a nice guy with this sort of comment. Javascript is part of the web fabric, if you switch it off much of the web breaks. Switch off CSS and you'll notice the page doesn't look very good either. javascript is to behaviour what css is to appearance. I'm really tired of people who switch off js and then complain. Get with the program! Saying something as utterly stupid as this negates any other potentially valid point you _might_ have had.

* I do not like it.

[http://weknowmemes.com/2011/05/and-not-a-single-fuck-was- giv...](http://weknowmemes.com/2011/05/and-not-a-single-fuck-was-given-that- day/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just looking at the home page, the text being sooo close to the left-hand margin really bothers me. I use a portrait monitor and browse full screen and it just feels odd having to read the text butted up against my monitor border.

</comment><comment><USER17> Definitely worlds better than the old design, I think it's awesome, very clean. Makes me want to do some projects in PHP again.

</comment><comment><USER18> I like how you can finally add the search field as search engine in Google Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER19> I had expected some pretty home page indeed remarks in the comments, none yet.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's simple- That's awesome.

To all the snark related to "modern", oh you mean the cluster-f*ck of animated javascript and sensory overload that has become the modern web? please.. you can K.I.S.S it.

<comment><USER21> This new PHP.net site is also dependent on javascript, as the search engine does not work without javascript.

<comment><USER20> wow you really missed that one..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm the alignment nazi and here's your guru meditation:

      .navbar .brand {
        padding: .5em 0 .5em 0;
      }

      .navbar .brand img {
        margin-left: -0.2em;
      }

</comment><comment><USER23> And this is why blogs make lousy home pages.

</comment><comment><USER24> Contrast on links is not quite good enough.

</comment><comment><USER25> That is news-worthy?

</comment><comment><USER26> modern, as PHP

</comment><comment><USER27> Oh man, my childhood memories...gone... _sniff_

</comment><comment><USER28> Well, they moved from 1996 to 2006. So, progress?

Still, big improvement. Snarky comments aside, it seems easier on my eyes. Not a big fan of underlined hyperlinks though.

<comment><USER29> >Not a big fan of underlined hyperlinks though

Don't worry, soon it will become illegal to care about usability and then everything can exist for purely aesthetic purposes.

<comment><USER28> Arbitrary top-down usability guidelines from the early web aren't the unquestionable gospel you think they are.

<comment><USER29> That is an awful lot of fallacious reasoning packed into one sentence.

What evidence do you have that this guideline is arbitrary? It will need to be pretty compelling evidence given the overwhelming evidence showing higher click through rates with underlined links.

Where do you get "top-down" from? Was that simply chosen from a list of sufficiently vague insults that can be tacked onto anything without having to justify them? Who is this top and how are they forcing this down?

What evidence do you have to support the notion that usability guidelines become incorrect due to age? How many years does it take for a guideline to go from right to wrong? Can they be preserved in some way to increase their shelf life?

How do you know I think they are unquestionable gospel? Nothing I said indicated anything of the sort, you have never met me, and know nothing about me, so where could you possibly have gotten that idea? Do not feel compelled to create motives or positions for me in your imagination, if you would like to know how I feel or think about something you can simply ask me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why did this link not generate any discussion? - <AUTHOR> This article presents some important arguments which I felt the HN community is the best place to have a discussion around this. I am kind of thinking why this didn't pick up any discussion. Can anyone enlighten ?<p>https://medium.com/@l2k/why-are-machine-learning-projects-so-hard-to-manage-8e9b9cf49641 <comment><USER2> It's always hard to understand exactly why any given submission does or doesn't "catch". It could be as simple as bad timing - another very popular story had everyone's attention captured when it was posted, or maybe there had been a recent rash of similar articles and people were burned out on the topic, etc., etc. Or maybe the headline wasn't click-baity enough, who's to say?

All of that said, why would you think HN is "the best" place to talk about that topic? ML is certainly a frequent topic of conversation here, but HN isn't - strictly speaking - a "machine learning community". Maybe Reddit's /r/machinelearning or another community would be better?

<comment><AUTHOR> I regard HN community higher for better signal to noise ratio.

I asked this question only because I got curious - I had submitted two links and one of them got highly discussed while the other didn't. Hence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> These days most experts are overloaded with info. Unless someone is constantly pinging them about an issue they aren't going to think about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I genuinely wanted to know the experiences and opinions of HN community.</comment>


First Look at Lenovo's Ultra Green A61e Desktop, with images - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/first-look-thinkcentre-a61e-ultra-small-desktop/ <comment><USER2> It's a compact desktop PC from a major manufacturer. Most of us could build a better one for less money in not much more time than it would take to order this. Is there something exciting about this?

</comment><comment><USER3> Hm... shall I take a picture of my dog and post it here?</comment>


Dear Record Labels: Focus on Buyers, Not Thieves - <AUTHOR> http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/dear-record-labels-focus-on-buyers-not-thieves/ <comment><USER2> From the music industry point of view, it's not about serving the customer, it's about extracting as much revenue as possible _before_ the recorded music market collapses.

See this 2009 article for their thinking: [http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender- bu...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-but-not- until-at-least-2011/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I used a quote from this article during our Demo Day pitch. The problem I have with these particular demands is, what if one of the companies the industry cripples and destroys was actually on track to breathe a little life back into the recording industry? I haven't bought this much new music in a long time and it feels awesome. What if they prohibit features that would cause a 10% increase in purchases because Amazon refuses to be strong armed into paying $30M to overcome legal technicalities? Amazon doesn't make nearly what the labels do off of the music, so $30M might be enough to stop them from doing something that drives $1B in growth for the labels. And all of this to stop people from stealing who are not buying anything no matter what you do. It's just bad business.

<comment><USER2> _It's just bad business_

It's actually quite logical, if you agree with their assumptions:

1) The increased availability of digital music will lead to an increase in piracy, and

2) An increase in piracy will lead to less money being spent on recorded music.

(Both those assumptions can be argued, but the music industry believes them to be true).

Given that, the following argument is logical:

1) At some point in the future the money being spent on recorded music will decrease to a point where it is not a significant source of income.

2) The longer that point can be delayed, the more money can be made from recorded music in aggregate.

3) Anything that makes digital music inconvenient for the consumer will delay the collapse of buying recorded music because it will reduce uptake (!!)

4) Therefor, fight _anything_ that makes digital music better/easier to use.

5) Meanwhile, try and develop new sources of income (360 deals, streaming licencing, game licences etc)

From their point of view it's not bad business at all - it's the safest course of action.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is that there are $9B in recorded music sales. A small percentage of people actually steal music (I believe it's like 9%). You have a bunch of people who probably don't buy much music because it's inconvenient. Then you have other people who would buy more music if it was more convenient. The % of people who steal isn't likely to go up just because storing files online through Amazon's PAID service (keep in mind these people are stealing because they don't like paying for things) makes it easier to access your music. But the potential for the $9B worth of customers you have increasing their purchases is completely mitigated by this nonsense. If I am not an example of a fairly typical consumer in this area, I don't know who is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wish I could comment on the comment below but...

The point is, these people are stealing already, and the difference in the ease of stealing using what's already available and the ease of using Amazon is not that big of a difference, and the current stealing techniques don't cost a monthly fee. I don't see people switching to Amazon for all of their theft. As someone pointed out, Amazon could easily monitor this behavior and turn these people in. At least with the current theft you aren't being watched by a big company with a vested interest in you paying for your music.

<comment><USER2> (you can reply to a comment at any depth by clicking on the "link" next to the time stamp.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't help but draw a parallel to computer games. I find myself buying computer games less and less for this exact reason. If I get the game off a torrent, I will have a better experience. Every time I sit down to play a game I actually purchased, I feel cheated: "insert the disk, connect to the internet, and jump through this hoop please." How about the $60 I just payed? Not proof enough? Piracy is the publishers problem; they insist on making it mine.

In fact, I buy more and more Indie games for this reason, even though I don't play them that much. I just like the fact that some still have the balls to offer their work DRM free to ensure a good experience for the paying customer.

<comment><USER4> I own over 200 games on Steam, from big name titles (Call of Duty) to small indie games and I have never had a problem with DRM.

<comment><USER5> And what happens if Steam is offline? Do not reply "it has an offline mode" because you have to enable the offline mode while being online.

<comment><USER6> And what happens if the power is out in your apartment? Don't reply "my laptop has a battery", because you have to charge the battery when the power is online.

Seriously: what kind of uptime reliability do you demand from a _game_? The fact that it has an offline mode already puts it far ahead of most cloud-based services. If you don't like Steam for political reasons, that's fine, but this is a very weak line of argumentation.

<comment><USER7> Power being out, luckily, is something that can be dealt with by the individual consumer (call power company, go to a neighbor's house, etc). The point here is that if Steam goes offline (through glitch or bankruptcy or whatever reason), there is nothing at all the paying consumer can do, outside of hacking/pirating the game. This is a massive loss of functionality from games past.

And yes, Steam does give new features in return (online backup of your games, unified chat, etc), but there is no technical reason to have to trade the old features for new.

edit: removed possibly inflammatory comment

<comment><USER6> _This is a massive loss of functionality from games past._

Really? Maybe it's my age showing, but most of my "games past" are on 5-14" floppies for DOS, or cassette tapes aimed at the Commodore 6502 architecture.

Portability over time has thus far proven to be largely a myth. If you think that the CD/DVDs you've purchased so far are "buy once, play forever", just you wait...

<comment><USER7> But in that case, again, it's entirely up to the paying customer. You could have kept your Commodore 6502 to play those games (just like I still have my NES and Sega Genesis) - it's up to you. The actions of the company (and the existence of the company) have nothing to do with whether you can play those games in 2011.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Majority of the people who pirate music are not going to use Amazon cloud drive to pirate music because:

1.) Amazon cloud drive does not offer music pirates any significant advantage over what they are currently using.

2.) People are already using alternatives for decades, it's hard to get people to switch.

3.) It would be easier for record labels to track down and take down infringers on Amazon cloud drive as oppose to other services.

4.) We've seen this before, it's called lala.com, and it did not become a hub for music pirates.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think taking Mr. Robertson at face value about the industry demands and the purposes behind them is a mistake. We already have an Amazon service with no current legal action, and we'll soon have similar services from Apple and Google.

The music industry is excellent at providing 100 objections or hoops to jump through for licensing while they're really just delaying your offering until a favored son's (AAPL) service launches. Many of the rest of the objections will come down to dollar figures. Oh, yeah, we can forget about that concern as long as you lose a little on the back end.

Let's not forget that Michael has historically been no real friend of the industry, and entertainment lawyers don't quickly forget things like that. Ten+ years ago the the two industries were more or less at war, and music was loosing. Around the time that napster got huge and got sued like crazy, and industry players like AOL music had staff dropping decentralized p2p code written on company time, my.mp3.com was born. It let anyone that stuck the physical cd into their computer claim ownership of it and have access to it in the cloud, or whatever nonsense we were calling it then. The very easy to read nod and a wink involved there was that you could borrow your friends cd's at work, wherever and in just a few minutes "rip" them all and have access without all the muss of actually ripping and copying them.

The labels shut it down then, and they're unlikely to have forgotten who he is.

<comment><USER10> The ways he's thumbed his nose at the industry go well beyond my.mp3.com. I was employee #5 or 6 at MP3tunes (don't remember exactly), and saw it from the inception as an indie music store to an advanced locker service. One of the main things that led to me leaving the company was the AnywhereCD service, which -- while being a separate company in theory -- was built in early 2007. The concept was great: you buy a CD, and you immediately get the songs in your MP3tunes locker, along with the physical CD mailed to you. Everything was on track to be _awesome_ ; we signed Warner Music on for the initial launch, and all the tech worked brilliantly.

Why did it fail? MR made the decision to allow people to ship the CDs to nowhere. You owned the CD, but it was (in essence) thrown away. Warner explicitly _did not_ want digital-only sales, and that was the only reason they signed on in the first place. He could've launched a service that made everyone happy, but instead he launched with that option, and Warner shut the service down on day one.

MR is far too clever for his own damn good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > My iPod only holds 30GB of music, and I already have that much on there. So, > every time I want to add a new album, I have to get rid of something else. I > already chopped my music collection down to the 30GB limit in the first > place. At this point, any new album I buy actually displaces an album I > already know I love! That puts the price of discovery pretty high.

While I generally agree with the sentiment of the article, he really has trouble picking which of the 16 days of music to take off? My iTunes is set up to automatically load the most played couple thousand songs (4-5 days of music or so), the most recently added songs, the most recently played couple hundred songs, and then more or less randomly pick from the rest. There are songs I haven't listened to in literally years, and I find it hard to imagine that I will, while driving or elsewhere away from my computer, suddenly want to start listening to them _right this instant_. Talk about first-world problems...

<comment><USER12> I _hate_ the term "first-world problems". It seems like _every_ time it's used, it's in the manner of "I don't think this is an issue so I'll dismiss it by comparing it to starving children in Ethiopia".

Corporations snooping on all your internet traffic? Talk about a first world problem. Internet passwords being stolen? That's a first-world problem if I every heard of one. Health insurance backrupting you if you actually need to use it? _Puh-lease_ , just having health insurance means you've got it better than most other people in the world!

Dismissing something as a "first-world problem" to imply that it shouldn't be worried about is intellectually dishonest.

<comment><USER13> > I hate the term "first-world problems".

It is not meant to be dismissive of arguments as much as self deprecating satire. Cheer up mate.

<comment><USER14> Agree. In my circles, it's never dismissive but always a brief "If that's a significant problem for you, you have it pretty good" distraction that the group laughs about before returning to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The recording industry's bigger problem has been that for the past twenty years or more, it seems to have gotten the idea that its consumer base consists almost entirely of twelve year old girls, and at the same time the bigger companies have been absorbing or destroying all the smaller labels that actually produce the innovative music that people want to hear and would willingly pay for. You know there's a problem when kids are saying that all the new music is garbage and listen to music that was made before their parents were born. That's not to say good music is not out there, it's just really hard to find sometimes.

I have heard a few owners of small labels say that they actually welcome the emerging distribution models, and if some of the music is downloaded or whatever (within reason) then that's cool too. That means that they are reaching an audience that is increasingly hard to reach, and so have the potential to find revenue by less traditional means. So while the days of super-bands are probably over, small labels and bands can actually make a decent living now doing what they love to do - producing good music that people like.

Consider this: most bands make their money through live performances and licensing. When you look at the total record sale for a band like the Rolling Stones versus their overall net worth, it becomes pretty apparent that, considering their percentage of the sales, they could not have made all their money by moving boxes full of vinyl, CDs or whatever. The same is true for just about every artist you've ever heard of.

To the irritation of the big labels, though, these new models are quickly cutting out the guys in the middle who don't really care about the quality of the music. They don't seem to get the idea that if they made an effort to produce a product that people want, then (surprise) people will but it. Instead of putting a pile of money into five "artists" that suck, spread it out to smaller projects that collectively do well - like the small labels do it.

I actually heard one of these boring suits discussing the downloading problem on a business program, and he said that if illegal downloading continued on its present course then they would no longer be able to finance all the mega- expensive music videos. All I can say to that is that we should all fire up BitTorrent and make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER16> Everybody knows the record companies will fade away. It's not because of piracy though. Two reasons that come to mind are that there are no more physical "records" needed, and, that the quality of the produced music went down the hill since the seventies. There are very few exceptions.

What's played on radio and music-tv stations nowadays is just bad and bad music is pushed by the music execs to them.

Lady Gaga, Kesha, all the hip hop bullshit, all the alternative crap, most rap, the black eyes peas (!!!) do I need to say more? That's not music, it's a show to make money, and nothing more. No way I, or anyone else interested in music would buy that.

I am a musician, I even studied music, and I cannot find a radio station with proper music, I find some streams, the same way I cannot find a record label to produce my music, they say it would be "too unpopular", I find some live concerts though, which keeps me alive.

There is no room for just good songs anymore, so there is no room for the record industry, who caused that.

<comment><USER17> I think there is actually MORE good music now than there was in the past precisely because there is more music. For every Lady Gaga there is a Radiohead, for every Kesha there is a TV on the Radio, for every Black Eyed Pea(s) there is The Bad Plus. In the 70s, radio stations played Captain & Teneille. The mass market drivel has always been there, you just can't look to the radio for your musical discovery.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I be more entrepreneurial? - <AUTHOR>

3 years ago, I started a one-man company building electronic hardware for artists. I did everything myself: electronics, software, manufacturing, accounting, marketing, music. The only thing lacking was any business sense whatsoever: I quickly burnt out after 2 years, realizing that I just worked 90 hour weeks making 10$ an hour.
Rethinking my priorities, I figured out that I actually had already reached my "4 goals in life" (to use new-agey self-help blog-terms): make art, make technology, having friends and family, enjoying life. I also realized what I don't know how to do: managing people, understanding people, being business-savvy enough to make money. I have done the crazy stuff I wanted to do, and at age 29 feel like I'm actually retiring, doing stuff that is just like watering my plants.
Since me slowly shutting my electronics venture down, I've been quite happily freelancing halftime without trying very hard (doing electronics and software), making about 60k-80k EUR per year (living in a very low-income part of east germany, which makes me pretty much cresus), and pursuing my other projects on the side. I don't miss the excitement of having a company, and am usually happy doing one-man projects.
I know I'm completely underselling myself as a freelancer (I work for 50$/h at the moment, although I had gigs for 100 EUR / hour this year as well), which I understand as me not actually caring. However, I think I miss the possibility of being able to pay a smart developer to develop a compiler backend for me, of having a design agency design some custom cases, of having a company in china produce a few thousand devices. Business-like endeavors that are more driven by a love for art and technology than market, which I learnt is a recipe bound for failure.
I know that I'm quite sharp and pick up things easily. I also have a laser-like intensity, as well as enough self-discipline to reach my goals, even if they take a few years of hard work. That is, as long as I don't get bored, which is as soon as I feel that I'm not learning anything anymore. Would you recommend me to:
* Chill out, relax, and enjoy what I have
* Look for someone to manage me, keeping 80% off my 20% but allowing me to have a bit of a bigger scope
* Manning up, study business, finance and marketing, play the game and make some serious $$$ for a few years
* Slowly ramp up my revenue, getting more consulting gigs rather than codemonkey gigs, getting a suit and upselling myself
* Slowly building up a few "moneyprinting" endeavours (a few iphone apps, a few webapps), either slowly building up a revenue stream or actually turning into something that someone would like to take over or nurture to $$$. <comment><USER2> Are these the only options? Is it just about money and business?

Do you have a family? Maybe you should start one. Or is there a neighborhood kid that could use some mentoring? Teach a seminar, or write a book. These things may not make you rich, but it may make you happy.

All I am saying is make sure you're asking yourself the right question, because of you're not, the answers you get aren't going to help you.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that entrepreneurship shouldn't necessarily be an end, but rather a means to an end. For some it is th end goal but I'd wage that this isn't the norm ( outside hn of course ).

Figure out where you want to be in the long term and find the best way to get there for _you_. Entrepreneurship might just not be th best way to get there. And I think that's alright as long as you get where you wants be.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nobody but yourself can answer this.

There's no point in starting a big new venture if your heart isn't in it.

Having said that:

\- Don't look for someone to manage you, rather look for a business savvy partner

\- You earn 60-80k and don't own a suit?! That's quite impressive ;)

Personally, I like the sound of the last option and am hoping to do something similar. But that's _me_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously, I'll have the last call :) All the 5 options are things I am considering, and I was wondering if someone had been through the same thing.

Cons for each approach:

a) a lot of my ideas won't see the light of day although they could. b) i don't know jack about people, so I'll probably end up with the wrong kind of person c) i'm gonna get bored, or it will clash with my ethics d) getting a suit e) i am gonna get bored, and would need someone to handle the bottomline, back to b)

<comment><USER4> Fair enough, it's difficult. I'm sensing a lot of hatred for suits here though :)

I'm not sure what to say about choosing who to work with. It's difficult, but frankly you have to trust people now and again or you'll have a rubbish life. I suggest you try working with someone on a small project and see how it goes.</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Quote: Ingvar Kamprad, founder, IKEA - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/4086979508

<comment><AUTHOR> Simplicity and common sense should characterize planning and strategic direction.

\- Ingvar Kamprad

<http://startupquote.com/post/4086979508></comment>


The Most Extreme Out-Of-Office Message - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/out-of-office-message-email/562394/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Ha! I remember not ever setting up my voicemail at one company where I was a contractor. Got a little pushback from one guy, but he liked to call when he knew you weren't in the office and leave long rambling messages. I told him it was like hes saying, hey, YOU type this email for me.

Later in my career I've deleted email accounts when they got too full. Just switched. Caused hardly a blip. I'm guessing its for much the same reason - people expect email to be largely ignored now, so its no surprise when I don't respond to some non-urgent ramble.</comment>


BART's Tax Shelters - <AUTHOR> https://darwinbondgraham.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/barts-tax-shelters/

<comment><USER2> Sale and leaseback is a long-established capital allocation tool. The value it provides is short-term liquidity; another way to think about this is the opportunity cost of illiquidity. There's nothing nefarious about it.

<comment><USER3> In this case it most certainly is nefarious because it's not being used as a capital allocation tool, but as a means to get tax reductions where there should be none. This loophole allows local agencies to get paid for letting private corporations get tax deductions that they should not be getting. I may be totally off base here, but near as I can tell the correct market-based solution is probably not to make this illegal (although that probably can't hurt) but to give local agencies like BART the ability to file tax deductions in the same way the private enterprise doing the LILO is. This would remove the incentive to perform a LILO since the local agency would be gaining short term liquidity in the form of "tax returns", assuming their they can deduct taxes beyond the $0 taxes they owe by virtue of being a government institution.

<comment><USER2> I'm not clear why you think they shouldn't be getting them. Depreciation is a normal deductible business expense. The suthor is clearly angry about this but hasn't really made his case for what he thinks is wrong. BART gets about 5% of the deal value up front in cash with no interest payable, which seems about right given historical interest rates. The alternative is floating a bond at interest which costs a lot more over the long term.</comment></comment></comment>


Top Technical Interview Questions for 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://interviewer.io/technical-interview-questions

<comment><USER2> Are these questions targeted to bootcamp graduates or fresh graduates? Then they make sense.

In my experience ([http://InterviewKickstart.com](http://InterviewKickstart.com)), questions in the Valley tend to be deeper and harder, especially with some experience. e.g. HackerRank is much more prevalent and the questions there are proper data- structures and algorithms questions.</comment>


Simple Revision Control - <AUTHOR> http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/ <comment><USER2> I think in a strange way, this tool is actually not a terrible idea. Git is not a configuration management tool, no matter how hard people try to shoe- horn it into that role. A simpler Git designed for configuration management is indeed a good idea.

Unfortunately, I think the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. For one, not including the committer is an important flaw. If you're only managing your own system's configuration, it makes sense, but surely ESR realizes that UNIX- based OSes are multiuser systems, often administrated by teams of people. Being able to track whodunnit is definitely an important part of the equation. (It'd be incredibly clever if it signed the log with the user's public key too, but that might be asking a lot.)

Needing something like SRC to track changes to a simple README or HOWTO? My local bin dir? Ehh not so much. Especially if it's a software project? No, that definitely should live in the VCS with the code, so that those who touch the code will also touch the documentation. It says a lot about src that it doesn't even live in a src repository.

<comment><USER3> It's actually a good idea. People often don't bother version-controlling simple stuff because it's a hassle.

I routinely use my own rdiff/rsync scripts but this is not something you find in every system and also not something most people would use.

A barebones, simple, no-install, easy, not-necessarily-for-experienced- developers VCS is a good thing to have.

BTW it's going at 1 release per day. Heh :-)

<comment><USER4> _It 's actually a good idea. People often don't bother version-controlling simple stuff because it's a hassle._

Here's the thing that's funny to me: git is _easy_. Everyone (especially mercurial users) goes on about how horrible the UI is, but when I think of git, I think of how similar it is to RCS: easy, quick, and simple. With both, I can diff things and check in changes _very_ quickly. I have a bunch of single files in RCS which I'm moving over to git because it's a no brainer: all the speed and ease of use with a ton of advantages (such as dead simple replication) if I ever need them.

<comment><USER5> I love git. I'm a git power user. I've used git as the datastore for a CRM I built.

But I respectfully disagree. Git is not "easy." You've been conditioned. You and I know that it's very very hard to lose work or lose commits with Git. I'd say it's nearly impossible to do on accident. But in my first month with Git I rewrote several things because I messed up somehow and couldn't figure it out. I would hose my checkout and resort to doing a new clone. I've since helped run a big transition from SVN to Git and saw the same struggles there.

Git is power tools for my code. I could never go back to SVN. But it's not easy.

<comment><USER6> I agree. Git is powerful, flexible, and (once you grok it) quite simple to understand ... but it baffles new users, and is a complete turn off for people who happen not to be software engineers, even those who are otherwise highly intelligent.

I work trying to bridge the gap between a team of mathematicians and algorithms engineers, and a team of embedded software engineers. Most of the embedded software engineers "grok" git (after some practice), and are (fairly) happy using it on a day to day basis.

The Mathematicians and Algorithms engineers, on the other hand, aren't really interested in getting to grips with Git (or any version control system for that matter). They'd rather spend their time thinking about mathematics and statistics. (Quite rightly).

The decision to use git, whilst justifiable for many valid technical reasons, has definitely thrown up some additional challenges for me and for our organization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He claims he did not use Mercurial because (a) it stores the history in binary blobs, (b) it does not have sequential revision numbers, and (c) its CLI syntax is ugly, see [1]. Unfortunately he is wrong about (b) and (c). Mercurial assigns automatic sequential revision numbers (perfect for a single non-distributed repo) and its CLI syntax is so neat that this is the reason I do use it a lot to track changes to single files...

Sounds like ESR should have spent a little more time studying Mercurial.

I cannot understand his need for (a). Does he want the possibility to quickly and easily see, or edit the history? If it's only seeing it all, in one command, then a simple "hg log -e" does it.

[1] [http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/FAQ.html#another- vcs](http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/FAQ.html#another-vcs)

Edit: @leoc I based my comment on "Other projects to mold Mercurial and Git [...] will fail criteria #3 and #5, and often #4 as well" with #4 referring to a "modern CLI syntax". But yeah it could be implied that this criticism does not (always) apply to Mercurial.

<comment><USER8> I'm nit particularly fond of git, I much prefer mercurial - but they are of course pretty much equivalent. Either way I have a hard time seeing which usecases aren't covered by the duo of RCS and mercurial (actually I'm very hard pressed to see why one would ever use RCS over mercurial, but no question RCS _is_ simpler). At least something like fossil have some actually unique features....

<comment><USER9> That was ESR's conclusion as well. SRC is just a simple wrapper around RCS.

<comment><USER10> If you want a simple wrapper around RCS (or at least RCS semantics), why not just use CVS.

CVS has sequential numbers. Well, sort of: 1.1, 1.2, ... unless you branch. Close enough.

It works with individual files well enough (and in fact not all that well with clusters of them).

CVS started in 1986 as in fact a shell-scripted wrapper around RCS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am not entirely sure I understand why one wouldn't use git for this role. If you don't need a remote git repository, you don't need to use one, and git will be available everywhere. Certainly many production machines will tend to have it for deployment of applications across multiple machines.

What are some use cases that don't work with git (which is probably already available on the system)? And why wouldn't git be an effective tool for that particular role?

I'm certainly not as experienced as ESR (though, I'm coming up on 20 years of administering Linux and UNIX servers), and perhaps I'm missing some subtle nuance here. I'm not wanting to come off as "screw this, this is stupid". I'm just genuinely not understanding why I should learn a new tool (or re-learn an old tool that's be "reloaded") when git does all of this and more...and I already know it and have it installed broadly across my systems.

<comment><USER10> _I am not entirely sure I understand why one wouldn 't use git for this role._

Because, for one thing, "one" sometimes doesn't have the computer science degree and years of experience to even begin to understand Git.

For many users, using Git means cutting and pasting command line recipes scoured from desperate web searches, and crossing their fingers.

This does not go away when you use Git just for personal use with a repo that has no upstream.

ESR probably wants something that is simple to use for simple use cases.

<comment><USER12> > Because, for one thing, "one" sometimes doesn't have the computer science > degree and years of experience to even begin to understand Git, for one > thing.

With respect, I call shenanigans on this my good friend.

I dropped out of highschool and attended no postsecondary and I don't have any problems with Git. I started with the basics and read more as I got myself into tighter and tighter jams.

I feel like this myth is perpetuated by a small group of people who are very vocal about "git is hard". If git commit and git checkout are too complicated, I don't know what else to say except that every VCS has those concepts, perhaps you're just used to those systems instead.

<comment><USER13> git commit and git checkout are fine. git pull and git push are where the problems start.

 _as I got myself into tighter and tighter jams_

I suppose this is the thing; if you're happy to learn that way, fine. It's just that git is particularly prone to "I've trashed local state and lost work" / "I've just pushed a huge mess and will have to lose time cleaning it up, if that's even possible".

<comment><USER14> I love git, but even git checkout is asinine. It's fine for checking out a tag/branch/rev/treeish, but why on earth does it also revert files to their checked in state if given a path argument?

I don't think git should be prone to trashing local state due to how it usually yells at you when it's about to do that, but then I've been working with a student this quarter who seems to do that every time I push something to github and she needs to pull. I think if the git community got together, did a usability study on how people actually use git, and renamed/split out commands into names that made sense, it would be a huge boon for general usability.

<comment><USER10> > _why on earth does it also revert files to their checked in state if given a > path argument_

Simplification! :) "git checkout file" reverts a file from the index. If it doesn't exist in the index, then from HEAD.

The problem is that you can make a typo, because branches, tags and files are all in the same namespace. Suppose you wanted to type "git checkout foob" which is a tag or branch, but instead you make a mistake and type "git checkout foom" which is the name of a file that happens to have unstaged changes. Oops!

If "file" has unstaged changes, then "git checkout file" should rename it out of the way first to "file.#1#" or whatever. (Hello, look at CVS!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Chosen name "src" is quite unfortunate, as it will be a src of confusion.

<comment><USER16> Agreed, such a horrible name choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't get how git (or any proper multi-file dvcs) falls behind facilitating the purpose ESR is shooting at. You can use "git log <file>" to track changes of <file>.

It's like Gmail drafts. While it's delivered to you as an email stashing feature, I realized that it's the best cloud-based (offline-synced, omnipresent) note application. It can do that even if "note" is not in its name. We can be creative about using the tools at our disposal.

Besides (back to the original problem), it can be handy sometimes that you have a tool that can operate over the whole range of managed files, even if they are logically unrelated.

<comment><USER18> I don't know about this tool, but git does not make it easy to move files from one repository to another, for instance, and maintain that file's history.

Heck, I'd like to be able to e-mail a single file to someone, and have the file keep its revision history. File-based revision histories, as opposed to repository-based, have a whole host of advantages that come from flexibility.

<comment><USER17> git also has good support for explicit cutting down the repo to a subset of its files, or merging back changes of a partial repo to the common one, see filter-branch and subtree commands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Much better link is [http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/](http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/)

<comment><USER20> Ok, we changed to that from [http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/README](http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/README).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can see the need for a VCS that doesn't grab the whole directory but is file based.

But this "SRC is built on top of RCS" doesn't sound like the best idea. RCS has been historically more errorprone than SCCS, probably because it doesn't use a checksum in its history file. So you never know if there has been a corruption or not.

Even though he mentioned SCCS "SCCS died off due to its proprietary nature", he doesn't seem to be aware that the Solaris version of SCCS got open sourced: [http://sccs.sourceforge.net/](http://sccs.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER22> See also [https://github.com/rupa/rvn](https://github.com/rupa/rvn) (not to be taken seriously). (By the author of z, possibly the most time-saving unix tool ever created).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source at gitorious:

[https://gitorious.org/src-vcs/](https://gitorious.org/src-vcs/)

<comment><USER23> Oh the irony of hosting it on something other than SRC. SMH

<comment><USER24> [http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/FAQ.html#self- hosting](http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/FAQ.html#self-hosting)

<comment><USER25> From that link:

> Is SRC used to develop itself? No. That would be silly.

From Git's Wikipedia page:

> The development of Git began on 3 April 2005. The project was announced on 6 > April, and became self-hosting as of 7 April.

<comment><USER26> You're kinda missing the point: this project is designed around a single user maintaining a linear history for a single file. Using it for a project would be a weird impedance mismatch.

That's not to say I find SRC compelling... in the slightest. Just that you'd never use SRC to track a project.

<comment><USER25> You're right, I was mostly just being snarky - but, that said, the source of SRC (sigh - what a terrible name, as others have said) is, in fact, just one Python file, so I suppose you could arguably use SRC for it.

I don't find it at all compelling either.

<comment><USER26> Hah. I just looked at the src (heh) - you're right, one file. I take back my argument.

If esr wants to fetishize a time when Real Programmers took patches over nntp and applied them in rcs, then by god he should go all in and self host the thing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> At the very least I would have liked to see some kind of minimal global index of changes. With single-file vcs, you may have a large tree littered with .src files, and you have to walk to the whole tree just to find all your revision controlled files. By [also] storing them in a global index you could simply list all revision controlled files, then perform operations on them all or on parts of them, without having to 'find' each time. That could default to $HOME/.srcidx so you never have to initialize some root tree or track an environment variable.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is already a very decent little single-user revision control system that is light-weight and well-suited for making changes to individual files.

Namely: the Quilt patch management system.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilt_%28software%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilt_%28software%29)

In quilt, your revision history is a "stack" of patches which is applied to the tree. You can push and pop up and down the stack, and revise the patches (for instance, to migrate them to a different version of the tree, or just to make them more perfect).

<comment><USER28> Quilt is good for managing patches - as in applying or removing them if you know they do apply. But from what I experienced, doing anything else with it is a world of pain. You actually need to say which file are you going to change before changing it! Handling git merges/rebases seems to be a walk in the park compared to fixing quilt patches that don't apply anymore.

I wouldn't say it's useful for individual files either...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> For this niche, I use vcsh:

[https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh](https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh)

I've been using git for years at this point, so I'm glad to leverage my existing skill. It also ties into my existing setup for SSH, so that I can push and pull changes from a central server. I like this because I regularly work on two different desktops, a laptop, and a few other machines.

</comment><comment><USER30> Sounds like someone misses DEC VMS's method of revision

<comment><USER31> I sort of do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How about fossil? [http://tuxdiary.com/2013/09/20/fossil/](http://tuxdiary.com/2013/09/20/fossil/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Aparently you need the rcs and rcsdiff commands available to use it.

</comment><comment><USER34> What's wrong with RCS?

</comment><comment><USER35> ESR, is, if nothing else, the champion of his own relevance. I've never really been fond of his work, though he seems like a nice enough guy.

But he's just another OSS hacker. Bruce Perens has accomplished far more with far less controversy and self-fluffing.

<comment><USER31> "a nice enough guy"

Nope:

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26)

<comment><USER36> Thanks for the link. He actually compares homosexual with pedophiles. I want to have absolutely nothing to do with such a degenerate.

<comment><USER36> For those of you brave souls who downvote me. I'm wondering which part of my statement you disagree with.

\- You think homosexual are pedophiles?

\- It's not important what he thinks about homosexuals. You're going to support him by using his software.

If he had held the same hate speech about women in 2014, everyone would be here talking how imbecile this guy is.

<comment><USER37> People can have different political, religious, etc. views than you, but why should that influence whether you use his software or not?

Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it? What if those views (or your own) change over time and you disagree with them?

<comment><USER38> (ESR aside) Why not? If I believe that someone's exposed views are harmful, doesn't it make sense to avoid increasing his/her overall influence?

I mean, the fact that we're discussing ESR's views on pedophilia shows that his influence in an unrelated area (software) increases the exposure of those views. If he was just a nobody like me, would we be discussing his blog post on Catholic priests? Not likely.

 _Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it?_

I sure don't, but why does that mean one should actively ignore gained knowledge?

<comment><USER37> First of all it would take too much time to find out all the authors of all the software that I routinely use, and then keep up with what their current views are on various topics.

But I think the main reason is that most software has more than one author, and it would be unfair to judge the usefulness of that software based on the (non-technical) views of just one of its authors.

Your reasoning would apply only for single-author software, and TBH I would consider those pet-projects anyway, and I don't think the original author would care much whether you use it or not.

Edit: about gained knowledge: I think you could apply this if you _compare_ multiple competing solutions, one deciding factor could be the author's thoughts on various topics. Just like how a company's attitude towards various topics might be influencing your purchasing decision: for example Nvidia doesn't support open-source drivers, hence I don't buy Nvidia when choosing a graphics card.

But again for me those are all technical reasons, I wouldn't factor an author's/company's political views into that decision, unless it was something really horrible.

<comment><USER38> _Your reasoning would apply only for single-author software_

But doesn't that fit SRC itself?

 _But again for me those are all technical reasons, I wouldn 't factor an author's/company's political views into that decision, unless it was something really horrible._

Ah! But then you're not arguing whether it makes sense to factor the political views in the decision - what you're actually arguing is that ESR's views are not really horrible.

But since pothibo supposedly considers them really horrible, it makes sense that (s)he would factor in those views, no?

<comment><USER37> Maybe, although I don't think I made technical decisions based on unrelated events. The closest that comes to mind is as described here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602582](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602582) I did use ReiserFS in the past, and I _did_ switch to something else but the reason was purely technical: XFS became quite good on a HDD, an ext4 very nice on an SSD, and also there didn't seem to be much development done upstream once the original author was gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yeah, sure. I'm definitely going to use it. Sure. Trust me.</comment>


For some startups, there's no buzz needed – Poll Everywhere (YC S08) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2019/04/21/for-some-startups-there-buzz-needed/RJarWqCgnSgCkjVTaomYEP/story.html <comment><USER2> Poll Everywhere is a cool example of not only a tech startup who beat the traditional startup model but also an example of a company that found success in simply doing something better. Instead of coming up with a unique, complex, and unneeded solution they created something that was better than what was currently available. Very inspiring!

</comment><comment><USER3> Like Basecamp. The question is can a bootstrapped business grow to become a challenger to a VC backed juggernaut like Facebook/Google.

<comment><USER4> I think it's equally valid to ask "Does a business need to become a juggernaut challenger? Are the founders of juggernauts happier? Is society better off for having near-monopolies?" That seems to be DHMs perspective - that the instinctual need to grow should be questioned as intrinsically valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If, like me, you've never heard of Poll Everywhere - It's a way of running live polls in a presentation where people text in their vote and it live updates.

I love the idea and want to use it immediately.

<comment><USER6> Is it like Menti?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good lord the Boston Globe has one of the most annoying paywalls. I can't even use incognito mode to read this article.

<comment><USER8> I'm using Firefox with uBlock Origin. I just blocked the element of the overlay. Works on many sites.</comment></comment>


Ruby front-end MVC framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jgaskins/clearwater

<comment><AUTHOR> The author has a nice write-up on the motivation behind it here: [http://jgaskins.org/blog/2015/1/17/clearwater-a-front-end- we...](http://jgaskins.org/blog/2015/1/17/clearwater-a-front-end-web- framework-in-ruby)</comment>


Binary Search: Beyond Arrays - <AUTHOR> https://www.codementor.io/abhaychaturvedi/undefined-512znyhkr <comment><USER3> _" On a different philosophical note, the real number line is nothing but a sorted array, and every equation solving problem is thus analogous to a search problem. Since binary search happens to be an excellent search algorithm, we can use it for all such problems."_

The example in this article isn't about searching the real number line - it's about searching for the solution to some real-valued function, whose values aren't guaranteed to be "sorted" (think of sin(x), or sin(1000x)).

There are functions for which this algorithm may not work - I'm guessing that the algorithm requires the function to be continuous, and possibly differentiable. For example, what happens if the function goes to infinity in the middle of the search range, like f(x) = 1/x between -1 and 1? And what if it has no real solutions at all, like x^2 + 1 = 0?

The algorithm also assumes that it would be possible to guess the range of x values that bound the solution (e.g., low = 1, high = 1000). What if the solution happens to be x = -10000000? This points to a big difference between the finite arrays that binary search works on, and the infinite domains and ranges of real-valued functions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Uhh, dude. Don't reinvent Newton iteration badly.

        from math import log

        EPSILON = 0.0001

        def f(x):
            return x * log(x) + x - <USER2>

        def iterate(x):
            return x - f(x) / (log(x) + 2)

        def report(label, x):
            print("%s: %s -> %s" % (label, x, f(x)))

        x = 500
        i = 0
        while abs(f(x)) > EPSILON:
            report(i, x)
            x = iterate(x)
            i += 1
        report("final", x)

Output:

        0: 500 -> -2392.695950788904
        1: 791.2732929095519 -> 71.9490905475659
        2: 782.9781524320051 -> 0.043632884977341746
        final: 782.973115798371 -> 1.6199919627979398e-08</comment>


Machine Learning Is Fun Part 3: Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-part-3-deep-learning-and-convolutional-neural-networks-f40359318721 <comment><USER2> I'm loving the latest book by Kevin Kelly about machine learning</comment>


A global fiasco brewing in Japan. (Will the US follow?) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100002951/a-global-fiasco-is-brewing-in-japan/

<comment><USER2> Perhaps governments will stop spending beyond their means and producing fake money with their central banks. Perhaps.

It seems more likely they will blame "the market" and use trouble they created as an excuse to extend their control over their economies.

<comment><USER3> You know, gold is "fake money" too. Money of any kind only works because everyone agrees to want it.

<comment><USER4> One difference is that gold is in limited supply, and cannot be instantly materialized by the State. Its scarcity, beauty and durability make it a natural store of value when the printing presses are running overtime.

Of course the State knows this too. In April 1933, less than one month after taking office, FDR signed an executive order confiscating all the private gold in the country. I wouldn't be surprised to see that happen again some day.

<comment><USER3> A mineral is only in limited supply when there _isn't_ a rush. (See: 19th century American silver rush and bimetallism). Gold isn't _that_ scarce or _that_ beautiful after all, it's mostly a convention.

The limited supply of gold can also be a hindrance, causing systemic deflation as an economy grows.

<comment><USER5> _The limited supply of gold can also be a hindrance, causing systemic deflation as an economy grows._

Nope. The initial supply isn't what matters. With a fixed-supply currency (well-approximated by gold), the demand for money increases as an economy grows, so (for fixed supply) its price increases as well. Hence, no deflation.

Intuitively, the money supply must increase as an economy grows. Intuitively, clocks tick just as fast at sea level as they do on top of Everest. Intuition is often wrong.

Einstein can help you re-tune your clock-ticking intuition (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation>). Rothbard can help you with money (<http://mises.org/money.asp>).

<comment><USER3> Rothbard isn't the end-all and be-all of monetary economists, and there is historical precedent that contractions in the money supply have caused deflation. Also, economies which have gone back _on_ the gold standard have usually deflated as well.

<comment><USER5> Rothbard has gaps, but he's light-years past most.

Never trust "historical evidence" when it comes to economics. There are no controlled experiments, and the winners write the books. In this case, there are four concepts masquerading as two. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058639>.

<comment><USER3> What "evidence" is there to trust, other than Rothbard's amateur philosophizing?

<comment><USER5> Evidence in economics is messy---and political. Trust logic instead. Of course monetary contraction causes deflation; you don't need evidence to tell you that when people have less money, _ceteris paribus_ prices will fall.

As far as the "gold standard" goes, beware: most so-called historical "gold standards" are not gold-as-money, but rather some weird bastardized version, such as "paper currency (partially) backed by gold". As I said: _messy_. This conflation serves the interests of those who benefit from manipulating the money supply. _Messy, and political._

I take it you mean Rothbard is "amateur" in the pejorative sense. Have you _read_ Rothbard? He is many things; "amateur" is not one of them.

<comment><USER3> "Evidence in economics is messy---and political. Trust logic instead."

The problem is, Rothbard's logic is also every bit as political as, say, Marx's logic.

You're talking to someone who was a confirmed libertarian, Austrian sympathizer, and Ayn Rand enthusiast from roughly the age of 16 to maybe 20 or so. I know the arguments and I know inside and outside the kind of thinking they come from, which is simply put, a tendentious effort to justify one particular political ideology over another. That is the exact opposite of what any science should aspire to, even economics. And that is the sin Rothbard is guilty of, a sin he relentlessly accuses others of in order to distract from his own guilt.

This is not to say he in specific, or the Austrians in general, were totally bereft of good ideas--just that their ideas should not be taken as proven unless tested. You're suggesting the scientific equivalent of "the code looks reasonable so there's no need to test it".

<comment><USER5> I certainly don't agree with everything Rothbard or other Austrians say, and indeed I agree that their greatest errors are driven by ideology. (And despite my general sympathy with Ayn Rand, this goes triple for her and her followers.)

That being said, a substantial subset of economics is analogous not, as you say, to a programmer saying

      the code looks reasonable, so there's no need to test it

but rather to a mathematician saying

      the proof is correct, so there's no need to test it

That is, what is the point of testing the Pythagorean Theorem? Perhaps we should measure a bunch of triangles? Why would you do that, when you have a proof? And yet, many people seem to believe that, e.g., raising the minimum wage might not ( _ceteris paribus_ ) raise unemployment. They even sometimes collect "evidence" that it doesn't! (See, e.g., the paper by Card & Krueger showing a _rise_ in employment after a minimum-wage hike, which Bill Clinton used as political cover to get Congress raise the minimum wage.)

Of course, you'd better be double-sure your proof is right, and I agree that the Austrians sometimes fall down on this point (Rand, triply so). But their _approach_ is right: economics, correctly done, is much closer to mathematics than it is to physics.

N.B. I too am a reformed libertarian-Objectivist, and I too know the arguments forward and backward; I could crush a traditional libertarian in a debate, because I know the weaknesses all too well. But it seems that my ultimate parting of ways with them has taken me in the opposite direction from yours. You see, I'm even _more_ radical (or, rather, reactionary) than they are. :-)

<comment><USER3> Mathematics doesn't deal with the real world, nor does it use induction (in the normal sense of the term--mathematicans use the word "induction" to refer to a type of recursive proof method, but inductive logic is the method of reasoning general rules from particular pieces of evidence). Triangles are an abstract concept that abide to rules that we make up, and if we make up a different set of rules, triangles no longer obey them. That's why simply measuring triangles doesn't work.

Economics does deal with the real world, and like any other science it's subject to the demands of empiricism rather than merely the demands of logic. You can use logical and mathematical reasoning to come to a lot of useful conclusions in physics, for instance, but we're constantly substantiating those by experiment as well, and occasionally we are wrong. (Use Newtonian mechanics to calculate the orbit of Mercury and it won't match.) Do you really think that human behavior is so much more simple than physics that we can model it without evidence at all?

<comment><USER5> Ah, so we don't really disagree at all---or, at least not much. It's my fault for using a bad analogy, and you hit on a better one. You're right, the axioms, whether in economics or physics, must come from the empirical world. Given the axioms, you can then prove theorems, but of course the axioms might need tweaking---which can dramatically change the theorems. What I see in economics are cases where people implicitly accept particular axioms, and yet reject many of the consequences (i.e., theorems). It's as if they agree that Newton's law of gravitation is correct, but don't believe that two-body orbits are closed.

Though complex in general, there are aspects of human behavior that are consistent and quite simple, and serve as a solid foundation for a study of human action. (You probably recognize this as the Austrian approach of _praxeology_.) When I read the Austrian argument that any fixed amount of money-stuff (e.g., gold) is sufficient for exchange, I understand the axioms, follows the steps, and accept the conclusion. When I read the Keynesian arguments for the benefits of monetary expansion and "fiscal stimulus", I see ---great clouds of fog. Their arguments are often too vague to untangle, but I can see that their conclusions (a) appear to be based on the same axioms I accept and (b) disagree with a theorem. Something doesn't add up.

In sum, the value of empiricism lies in finding the right axioms. If you discover "empirical evidence" that a theorem is wrong, you must either propose a change in the axioms or find a flaw in the proof. Contemporary economists often appear to do neither.

(The Card & Krueger example is again instructive. If you raise the price of labor, people buy less of it, so minimum wage hikes must increase unemployment. And yet, from a contemporary NY Times article (<http://bit.ly/5afSyk>), we find this:

        They [Card & Krueger] surveyed 400 fast food restaurants and found that
        those in New Jersey actually added 2.5 workers after the minimum wage went
        up. In Pennsylvania restaurants, meanwhile, payrolls shrank.

        Why should bosses hire more workers if it's more expensive to do so? The
        two economists speculate that any fast-food restaurant typically operates
        with a couple of vacancies it can't fill because it doesn't pay enough.

        "If you raise the minimum a little," said Professor Card, "teens who are
        sitting [at] home go out looking for jobs."

Apparently, these restaurant managers are too stupid to realize they're allowed to pay _above_ the current minimum wage, thereby getting those lazy teens off their couches to fill the vacancies without a minimum wage hike. Truly, it boggles the mind.)

<comment><USER3> "In sum, the value of empiricism lies in finding the right axioms. If you discover "empirical evidence" that a theorem is wrong, you must either propose a change in the axioms or find a flaw in the proof. Contemporary economists often appear to do neither."

That's not how the real sciences work, though--physics doesn't operate through axioms and theorems, it establishes a few _theories_ and as long as they hold within experimental error, they don't complain too much. When they stop holding, we either postulate extra "stuff" we don't directly observe (most of the outlying planets as well as the Kuiper belt were discovered by measuring their gravitational effects on planets we could directly observe) or use a more refined theory on the edge cases (Mercury's orbit). But all the while physics gathers more and more empirical data, and spends a lot of time trying to make sense of it.

"When I read the Austrian argument that any fixed amount of money-stuff (e.g., gold) is sufficient for exchange, I understand the axioms, follows the steps, and accept the conclusion. When I read the Keynesian arguments for the benefits of monetary expansion and "fiscal stimulus", I see---great clouds of fog."

The other problem I find is that most armchair Austrians take their entire economic understanding from an 80 year old dispute and have no conception of what's happened in the field ever since. Keynes is a dead old man and the field of economics has moved on from his work.

Incidentally, even if you just take the approach of pure reason, it's still pretty fucking easy to debunk the idea of the gold standard.

"Apparently, these restaurant managers are too stupid to realize they're allowed to pay above the current minimum wage, thereby getting those lazy teens off their couches to fill the vacancies without a minimum wage hike. Truly, it boggles the mind.)"

And here you see one of the biggest problems with the field of economics in general, a problem that's only been tackled in recent decades--modeling how _actual human beings behave in the real world_ rather than supposing that each economic actor is fully informed, perfectly rational, and perfectly self- interested. How many 16 year old kids would know whether or not Burger King paid above minimum wage? Of course Burger King only pays minimum wage. It's a cultural expectation. The same thinking applies to the manager--is a fast food manager really going to be fully informed, perfectly rational, and perfectly self-interested? For the most part, his job consists of executing a manual written at the corporate headquarters in a different state which dictates that crew are paid local minimum wage, and quite frankly, the corporate overhead of rewriting the corporate manual to allow wage adjustments to recruit people to work at a fucking Jack in the Box isn't justified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I notice the author has nothing to say about the over-valuation of the Yen, which for the past year or two has been crippling Japan's balance of trade by making exports _way_ too expensive on world markets.

<comment><USER7> I have been wondering for some time why on earth the JCB has been allowing the yen to stay so high. It would seem a no-brainer to sell it down - they have all sorts of incentives. The car companies in particular must be in a state of permanent howling rage about it.

And yet they haven't done it. There must be an awfully good reason for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So as someone who has assets in Japan, what can I do to protect myself and maybe profit from the looming financial crisis? (reading those kind of articles makes me realize that I really need to read up on economy)

<comment><USER9> I'd take what the author says with a grain of salt; he has a history of making stuff up from whole cloth.

<comment><USER10> Can you provide some references please? I'm unfamiliar with his work.

<comment><USER11> He blows stuff out of proportion, and writes trollish articles that are popular on link hubs due to their provocativeness. I see a headline predicting doom for any non-British country and a telegraph URL and I know it's him again. His main function seems to be to reassure the Brits that it's much, much worse everywhere else.

<comment><USER12> Not to mention Yen has been the strongest currency for recent period and Japan is actually fighting deflation. If there is one currency I'd be worried about - it's GBP and less so USD. UK still has not shown any positive fundamentals out of the recession, while others have.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Future of SQL in a SaaS world: Announcing Zoho CloudSQL  - <AUTHOR> http://writer.zoho.com/corporate/mailzoho.com/vaca/SQL-in-a-SaaSy-world

<comment><USER2> (I am the CEO of Zoho) Let me provide some context on this. What we are doing is to separate the two layers in a database that have traditionally been so welded together that you don't even think of them as two layers: the SQL processing "logical" layer and the storage "physical" layer.

Our real technology here is a multi-dialect SQL processing engine, which can handle a wide variety of SQL dialects with ease (ANSI, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MySQL, Postgres being the major variants). At AdventNet, we have offered a product called SwisSQL to companies, for SQL migration, conversion etc. for a while (4+ years now). We couple that technology with physical storage or other APIs underneath.

Once you decouple the two layers, a lot of possibilities open up. The "slow, risky, inefficient" part is really a function of how efficient the middleware is in processing a variety of SQL dialects and translating it to what the physical layer needs.

SQL is the mainstay of business information processing. We are using the standard everyone loves (or loves to hate in some cases!) and bring it to the cloud computing era. Our goal is to preserve compatibility for existing applications - hence our JDBC driver etc. - while drastically lowering the cost. Today's announcement is only the first step on a long road ahead.

To add a hacker news dimension, I have long been fascinated with relational data modeling. I have always believed that welding together storage with relational models was a disservice to Codd's brilliant work. There are a lot more ways in which relational modeling power can be exploited without tying it so closely to a specific storage context.

</comment><comment><USER2> For convenience, the JDBC client API is available at:

<http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Java-Client-Library.html>

The Google AppEngine version of Python library is at: [http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Google-App-Client- Librar...](http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Google-App-Client-Library.html)

Stand-alone Python library is at: [http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Python- Client-Library.ht...](http://zohoreportsapi.wiki.zoho.com/Python-Client- Library.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interestingly similar to Yahoo!'s YQL. <http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/>

</comment><comment><USER4> It sounds neat, but I can't get their examples to work at all.

<comment><USER2> Can you tell us which ones you tried? I apologize for this opening day glitch.

<comment><USER5> _Username cannot be less than 6 characters_

Why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks like Zoho is not to be underestimated! What a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds expensive, slow, risky, and inefficient to me.

<comment><USER8> Yes. It's a hard problem. The coolest solutions are solutions to hard problems.

If they've pulled it off, that would be totally bad ass. Knowing Zoho, they're probably pretty close.</comment></comment>


Make the Moon Landing a National Holiday - Lets do this - <AUTHOR> http://moonlandingday.com/?=petition

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4277835></comment>


Google proposes new town-like tech hub in Mountain View - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/02/google-mountain-view-tech-hub-proposal-pictures.html <comment><USER2> Imagine your employer owns every form of infrastructure you use.

Please be nice to your colleagues in marketing for providing toilet paper advertising while you can take a shit.

I am sorry for the vulgar language, but not for the cynicism.</comment>


Introduction to high-level multithreading in C++ via Intel TBB library - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ruslans.com/2013/08/introduction-to-high-level.html

<comment><USER2> Since fractals are a passion with me, I intend to give this a try!</comment>