Feedback for Yotpo first product- Thanks - <AUTHOR> http://yotpo.com

<comment><USER2> I'd like to try it without connecting with Facebook. Put a demo site up.</comment>


Google Voice May Open to All Today - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5302430/google-voice-may-open-to-all-today

<comment><USER2> Been using it since GrandCentral, here's the features they need to get moving on...

* International Forwarding. They should let me pay them (!!) to forward to my international phone. Even worse-than-standard-VoIP rates would be acceptable to me for this purpose, and as an expat I can't fully make the switch until they move on this. Also adding int'l numbers alongside your main US Google voice number would be incredibly handy, and possibly worth paying for.

* Number Portability. Let me take my number to you, and assure me that I can take it back in the future. There really should be a law about this...

* Transcribe Recorded Messages. Google voice already transcribes (or attempts to) recorded voicemail messages, which is occasionally handy and will probably get better over time. You can also record conversations with a number combination, and it would be nice to bring those two features together. Disclaimer: I'm currently working on a thesis which is highly dependent on phone interviews ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-voice- invites-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-voice-invites-on- their-way.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Living near 612 myself, I would love to get 612-AWESOME as shown in the example.</comment>


Australia has taken the record for the longest run of uninterrupted growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/gdp-australia-grabs-record-for-longest-time-without-a-recession-20170606-gwm0o2.html <comment><USER2> It's easy, just grow the population and the economy grows with it. Then politicians can congratulate themselves on economic management and be oblivious to the recessions that people are actually feeling.</comment>


BURPPLE app for your epicurean adventures - <AUTHOR> http://www.greyreview.com/2012/05/08/introducing-burpple-the-smart-and-stylish-food-journal-app-for-your-epicurean-adventures/ <comment><USER2> "Foodspotting is good for social discovery of dishes around you and acts like a food guide. Fondu focuses more on eateries' reviews. Chewsy allows you to rate restaurant and its dishes. Ness recommend you restaurants through its personal search engine, based on your profile. Forkly adds gamification to social food sharing, by allowing users to earn influence points and become tastemaker at a particular venue. DishPal tries to pack features like photo styling and virtual potluck (a'la Pinwheel) to set itself apart.

For new social food sharing app Burpple, the abandonment of complexity seems to be a primary goal."

This is a great way to introduce Burpple - it's smart, effortless and beautiful.</comment>


IRS warns: Tax data thefts are spiking, so use 2FA - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/irs-warns-tax-data-thefts-are-spiking-so-use-2fa/ <comment><USER2> 2FA would not have helped the Equifax hack that could have been prevented. Equifax still gets to operate as business as usual. Until there is accountability this will keep happening 2FA auth or not.</comment>


Ask HN: What technologies to learn full stack development - <AUTHOR> I want to learn Full stack development.I have a background in back end development in Java and Python.<p>Can someone suggest a good headstart to learn front end technologies to be able to do full stack development? <comment><USER2> Rails with Ruby 2.0, PostgreSQL, Webpack, Bootstrap, and (optionally) only one of the following: JQuery, React, Backbone or Angular (depending on your tastes).

Make all your designs responsive and mobile-first.</comment>


Just 318 Crypto Addresses Control 80% of Tether - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-07/tether-mafia-318-crypto-addresses-control-most-of-stablecoin <comment><USER2> thats probably expected though right? If tether is used by exchanges to facilitate transfers of value. Its not going to be widely held by individuals other than on exchanges.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing to see here... please disperse. Everything is fine.</comment>


Money can't buy friends, but it can buy Twitter followers - <AUTHOR> https://stephenwattam.com/blog/?/20160716/money-friends <comment><USER2> > It seems these services are used as 'seed followers' to convince people of > their legitimacy.

Crowd begets crowd?

This has been going on for years and presumably, will continue for the foreseeable future. Out of sheer curiosity, I too have tested this personally in the past, and did not find ANY benefits in terms of attracting genuine followers. Anyone with other/different experiences?</comment>


Administration Releases Strategy to Protect Online Consumer - <AUTHOR> http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/04/15/administration-releases-strategy-protect-online-consumers-and-support-in

<comment><AUTHOR> It is just me or some of the things seem quite difficult to enforce in reality, like identification of age of a child visiting a chat room.

<comment><USER2> It's purely for assignment of liability. It won't prevent bad things from happening, but it will tell you who to blame. (Hint: It's not the actual perpetrator. If it were that simple, we wouldn't need a new government policy to tell us that.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This sounds a lot like OpenID to me, even down to the idea of an "identity ecosystem." Does anyone know if this is going to be OpenID under the covers, with the US government being a provider?</comment>


Stack Exchange grew from 16M to 32M uniques in 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://stackexchange.com/state-of-the-stack

<comment><USER2> The main thing they got right is that pages on the Stack Exchange network include (as primary content) exactly one question, followed by the answers to that question. That's it. All other side discussion, requests for more info, expressions of gratitude, etc, are secondarily attached as comments. They are visually and conceptually separate.

In retrospect, this is totally, obviously what you want, but there was a lot of momentum behind making Q&A sites look like a forum.

In other words, their success is well-deserved.

<comment><USER3> Well, that's not strictly correct. In my experience every interesting question ever asked at any of the Stack Overflow sites consists of:

(1) A single question (as you say)

(2) (Attached to the question) Some whiny git putting on his internet cop hat and suggesting that the question is inappropriate

(3) An almost immediate locking of the question by said whiny git

(4) An interesting discussion

Almost every time I see some moderator putting on his 'big boy pants' I want to reach down the internet and slap them.

I just wish they could find a way to send the gnomes back to wikipedia.

<comment><USER4> This really varies per site. For example, since StackOverflow is primarily for concrete technical questions, overly subjective discussion questions are liable to get moved or closed; however, if you're interested in something _concrete_ but still broad (e.g. how to use existential types), you're likely to be fine.

On programmers, on the other hand, most of the questions involve a good bit of discussion; the majority have several answers. This is because the focus of the site is different.

Finally, I think there's a lot of selection bias--you're more likely to remember closed questions, and the sort of questions that get shared on HN are the sort that don't really fit in StackOverflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is well deserved.

A little off topic but still about SE.

If you ever want to understand "social" not as in the buzzword but as in "what's it really about" I can highly recommend the Stack Exchange podcasts.

I know this is not their aim but it's actually one of the most insightful podcasts about social networks out there. So many great insights simply stemming from the conversations they have. For instance the one with Chris Poole from 4chan.

[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/11/se-podcast-29-chris- po...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/11/se-podcast-29-chris- poole/#comments)

Good stuff and I am glad to see them move up the ranks.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm 90% sure that 15M of those new users are just Jon Skeet clones that upvote him!

But in all seriousness, stackexchange have completely stolen the parade from all other community driven Q&A sites.

Joel was correct when he withdraw support for customer hosted Stack sites, and went through the incubation process.

Stackoverflow has totally wiped out all of the other failing programming websites, and the community is a great one to be apart of. (I hated those sites that would obfuscate all the answers and try and get you to pay to sign up, while cloaking everything on Google).

Congrats.

<comment><USER7> I certainly don't miss wading through all those crap Experts Exchange links in the Google results (actually the advice on that site was often pretty good, but the business model was repellant).

<comment><USER8> Weird part was that though the answers were obfuscated, all you had to do was to scroll down the page and get the answers - what a joke! But the answers were good.

<comment><USER9> That's to ensure Google could read them. If they hid the answers the Googlebot wouldn't include them in the search index.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the things I love about StackOverflow is that I learn even when I'm the one _answering_ the questions. People are always happy to point out how I can make my code more clear, idiomatic or elegant all without trying to belittle me. Not to say other communities are worse--it's just that the _absolute_ level of quality at SO is very good.

And, of course, since it's basically an MMORPG, it's addictive. Not that I mind--one of the best ways to learn a technology at an intermediate level is answering questions there. It's much more productive than a real MMORPG and more convenient time-wise than just learning from a book or by having a project (of course, I use those too: all the different methods augment each other).

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's me trying to convince the Groovy mailing list to use StackOverFlow back in 2008.

[http://osdir.com/ml/lang.groovy.grails.user/2008-09/msg00714...](http://osdir.com/ml/lang.groovy.grails.user/2008-09/msg00714.html)

Those guys wouldn't buy into it. It seemed liked such an obvious solution to the existing solution. Walking down an email thread then getting to the end with no answer. I think it's especially useful for a new or esoteric technology because it allows new users to come up to speed quicker. Scala, Go, Haskell can be learned in short order.

The one thing that could be improved is to partition answers that become dated. Also, some questions could be asked every 3-5 years. For example, best frameworks, etc. Tech changes fast.

</comment><comment><USER11> I decided to learn ruby on rails (via <http://ruby.railstutorial.org/> I highly recommend it) and stackexchange.com has been an invaluable resource. Both as I learn the ruby language, and troubleshoot issues as I'm coding.

<comment><USER8> When I want to learn a new technology, I start following a tag and silently lurk for a while and then start answering to the questions. I have been able to learn so much by answering question on SO.

<comment><USER12> Same. I love using the most-voted question list to see what types of issues I'm likely to face using the technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did anyone else notice that the page uses custom-made buttons for all platforms other than G+? I wonder if those buttons were made with not allowing Twitter and Facebook to track users in mind.

<comment><USER14> I think it was because the default buttons were slightly different sizes and looked terrible next to each other.

<comment><USER15> Joel, Curious about your opinion on HN culture vs. SE culture in the context of growth. Both sites saw significant growth in 2011, but from my perspective, HN culture has been far more affected than SE. If you agree, do you attribute this to something specific that you are doing at Stack Exchange and is there something you would do differently to improve things here?

Some people discussed the situation on HN earlier today[1], but I think you bring a unique and valuable perspective to the issue. I have my own theory (i.e. _SE has a superior technical solution for reputation_ )[2], but you have some of the most directly relevant experience.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469453>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354171>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think that's the prettiest page I've ever seen on their network. Hopefully we'll see some creative/design refreshes this year -- it makes a big difference.

<comment><USER17> If you look at some of the newer sites, they're generally prettier than the original trilogy sites. Still have the same basic design and still all about the text of questions and answers.

A few examples: \- <http://ux.stackexchange.com/> \- <http://bicycles.stackexchange.com/> \- <http://scifi.stackexchange.com/> \- <http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/> \- <http://tex.stackexchange.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Love StackExchange network, they deserve their success!

</comment><comment><USER19> "Let that be a lesson kids: video games CAN make you succesful."

I agree.

</comment><comment> james-fend I was probably responsible for 100k of those views as I was learning Rails. Cool note: I put a question on stack, went to do a Google search seconds later, and my question (I just made) came up. Cray

</comment><comment><USER20> Have they published any revenue numbers? I'm happy to hear that they're growing like crazy, but knowing that they'll still be around in a couple of years would be even more awesome.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how their growth is within established sites, vs. adding new sites.

</comment><comment><USER22> Lets get some revenues figures in here.</comment>


Baidu's Andrew Ng on Deep Learning and Innovation in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/11/21/baidus-andrew-ng-on-deep-learning-and-innovation-in-silicon-valley/

<comment><USER2> Having lived in China and experienced the Great Firewall of China firsthand, I've always wondered what role Baidu and other firms like it play in controlling the conversation and identifying dissidents. It would not surprise me if Baidu plays a large role in not only in providing search like Google but specifically tailoring those results to be inline with the content the Party would like the people to see and uses it's crawling and machine learning ability to identify dissidents.

This is of course speculative based on my own experience with the Firewall and seeing the degree to which companies located within the PRC need to cooperate, but it wouldn't surprise me if machine learning techniques are already used in such a capacity. Does anyone here that know a lot more about Baidu have any information supporting or refuting such speculation?

I know Google has already ventured into this territory with it's autocomplete word blacklist[0] and modified results for terms like torrents.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8577513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8577513)

</comment><comment><USER3> > There are a lot of deep-learning startups. Unfortunately, deep learning is > so hot today that there are startups that call themselves deep learning > using a somewhat generous interpretation. It's creating tons of value for > users and for companies, but there's also a lot of hype. We tend to say deep > learning is loosely a simulation of the brain. That sound bite is so easy > for all of us to use that it sometimes causes people to over-extrapolate to > what deep learning is. The reality is it's really very different than the > brain. We barely (even) know what the human brain does.

100% agree. Needs to be said 100x more. What is one of the first things Ng taught in his ML class? These methods are tools, but that doesn't mean every problem requires a hammer. Because Deep Learning is getting press start-ups think they need to use it. And i really doubt that most of the start-ups that claim they are using it, are really using it properly.

It's at the point now that when i see a start-up claim they use deep learning i flat out don't believe them.

<comment><USER4> As someone building a deep learning platform as a startup[0], I do training among many other things and some of the trends I have seen in this space are that many aren't even familiar with what deep learning is good for, let alone why they should use it or where the hype is coming from. If you want a good explanation or 2 about deep learning, I would suggest a recent panel discussion by some people brought together by gigaom (disclaimer I was one of them)[2] as well as Andrew. What most people who try to sell you deep learning won't tell you is how impractical the algorithms can be to use and train. If you need that extra bit of accuracy, make sure you understand what you're getting yourself in to.

[0]: [http://skymind.io/](http://skymind.io/)

[1]: [http://gigaom.com/2014/09/22/heres-what-you-missed-at- gigaom...](http://gigaom.com/2014/09/22/heres-what-you-missed-at-gigaoms- future-of-ai-meetup/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Large parts of China are still a developing economy. If you're illiterate, you can't type, so enabling users to speak to us is critical for helping them find information.

Baidu needs voice search because so many Chinese are illiterate? WTF! This is an incredibly bizarre statement.

He's suggesting there are a significant number of Mainland Chinese users who speak Mandarin good enough for machine transcription- but are illiterate? Anyone who has lived in China for a significant amount of time can tell you that's just not plausible.

The people who have poor reading skills (in ten years I have never met any completely illiterate Chinese) generally only speak their provincial dialect. Last check only 53% of Chinese can communicate in Mandarin, while only 5% are illiterate. The overlap is nearly non-existent.

I think Ng picked up a bit of Singaporean bias during his time there- it certianly seems he has spent no time on the Mainland.

<comment><USER6> Hi Wogef,

Sorry to bother you (and everyone else) on this thread. I'm interested in visiting Shenzhen and would like to meet up. I tried to reach you on the email on your profile but it didn't work. Are you able to reach out on the email in my profile?

Regards,

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Watch Ng at 57 minutes discuss the "cocktail party" problem and present an amazing solution: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E&t=57m0s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E&t=57m0s)

</comment><comment> phatak-dev His course on ML made me interested in ML field and drew to coursera.</comment>


There is a fine line between stupid and clever - <AUTHOR> http://timharford.com/2018/11/there-is-a-fine-line-between-stupid-and-clever/ <comment><USER2> > _As a wise man once said, it's such a fine line between stupid and clever._

That man was not terribly wise, actually: he was the David St. Hubbins character in the 1984 rock and roll satire film _This Is Spinal Tap_.

The quip is intended by the screenwriters to be comically idiotic, and not to portray St. Hubbins as a wise man, because in fact there is a big difference between stupid and clever that is not subtle at all.

It also satirizes such a belief, which permeates popular culture: the belief that something that is, on the whole, banal or stupid can be propelled to excellence on account of some rescuing subtlety. Basically the bulk of the content doesn't matter: whether you're clever or stupid rests in some tiny, subjective detail. Layers of pretense are heaped upon garbage based on this principle.

<comment><USER3> > > As a wise man once said, it's such a fine line between stupid and clever.

> That man was not terribly wise, actually: he was the David St. Hubbins > character in the 1984 rock and roll satire film This Is Spinal Tap.

I think that the idiom "as a wise man once said" is not meant to be read so literally. I've always taken it more to mean essentially "here's a quote with which I agree."</comment></comment>


~200M TWTR-2M Experts-40K Topics-Information Search and Discovery Platform - <AUTHOR>

Mining ~200M twitter graph to filter 2 million Influencers, graph partitioning into 35000 deep interest areas, ranking & scoring them based on custom page rank, & bringing all their expert curated content & conversations in these 35000 topics in near real time for information search & discovery, sharing, curation, connect. Feedback Appreciated <comment><AUTHOR> www.rightrelevance.com is the web-app</comment>


Pipeline Vandals Are Reinventing Climate Activism - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/monkeywrenching-vandals-are-reinventing-climate-activism/ <comment><USER2> It seems counterproductive to attack the transportation infrastructure for oil, rather than the users or producers of oil. Would the "pipeline vandals" rather oil be transported by truck or train? I'm pretty sure the numbers show that those transportation methods are more dangerous and damaging than pipelines.

I think it is more relevant to try and get the users of oil to stop using it than to get the producers to stop making it. Their will always be some country that is willing to produce oil so long as there is still oil available. Reducing demand is the only way to actually make a significant difference IMO.

<comment><USER3> They want the oil to not be transported at all.

Switching to truck or train would reduce the profitability of using tar sands. [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=7270](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=7270) says (for Bakken oil) "Shipping oil by rail costs an average $10 per barrel to $15 per barrel nationwide, up to three times more expensive than the $5 per barrel it costs to move oil by pipeline". It looks like oil is about $70/barrel, so that adds about 10% to the cost.

[https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/012015/what- average...](https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/012015/what-average- profit-margin-company-oil-gas-drilling-sector.asp) says "the average net profit margin for the oil and gas drilling industry is 6.1%." Tar sands oil is already pretty expensive to produce, so I'll guess there already isn't as much profitability.

There are enough people in the environmental movement that many approaches can be done at the same time.

Plus, as the Wired piece quotes:

> This is really the dirtiest oil on earth, in carbon terms," McKibben says by > phone from Vermont. It's a mixture of bitumen and sand about as gooey as > peanut butter. "In many cases you have to burn natural gas to heat the > ground to get the stuff to actually flow, even before you burn it in > somebody's car and produce more carbon. If you set out to build a machine to > wreck the climate, it would look like the Alberta tar sands."

I think it's easy to compare it to attempts in California to reduce smog. One method is to require strict emissions control. Another is to start a vehicle buy-back program to get "clunkers" off the streets. These can work together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this really matters to you, there are things you can do:

Walk and bike more.

Eat less meat.

Drive and fly less.

Wherever you live, promote a more walkable city.

Get involved and make an effort to track successes, track progress and publicize what's working. Humans are terrible at counting the successes. We tend to focus on everything that's going wrong.

<comment><USER3> Yes. This Wired piece is tracking the progress and success of a technique for climate activism, based on the necessity defense. And it seems that it has had some success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When Mike Wallace interviewed Martin Luther King, race riots were going on as a minority of African Americans, angry that decades of "reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro" (quoting MLK), advocated violence instead.

King strongly advocated for non-violence, and commented that "riot is the language of the unheard".

I think I can draw a parallel here, with people who "[f]or years ... [have] done all the things law-abiding climate change activists do: filed petitions, lobbied legislators, hosted speakers, wrote letters, blockaded refineries, and tried to block Shell from moving their drilling rigs into the Arctic." Without effect.

The data is clear. We are past the point where there can be any doubt that human generated CO2 emissions are causing ecosystem problems, and it only will get worse unless we drastically reduce our pollutant levels.

I expect this 'vandalism of the unheard' will only increase, while the police, and government in general, act as the socialized protection force for large oil companies.</comment>


Ask HN: Free program for making polished PDFs? - <AUTHOR> I was looking for a free or nearly free program that can make polished PDFs and will run on a macbook.
I have used Scribus in the past, but I was not entirely satisfied with it.
What do you use to make PDFs that is intuitive  and does not have a steep learning curve? <comment><USER2> My typical process is to start in Mac's Pages app, using the Page Layout mode (Edit > Convert to Page Layout before doing anything). Very intuitive and a lot of control over placing elements on the page. Much better than using Word and without the major expense of more sophisticated/advance layout software.

Then, as others have suggested, Print > Save as PDF.

If I require the PDF to have editable fields, I then use Adobe Acrobat Pro. Fairly easy for simple use cases. Not sure of the cost on that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have not used Page Layout, but I think this is exactly the solution I was looking for. Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think you can replace "PDF" in your question with "document" and use anything (latex/word/libre) then just print it as pdf.

</comment><comment><USER4> I went through many iterations of this very same issue, and note that I have pretty deep experience with latex and other publishing tools.

At the end of the day, now I'm optimizing for simplicity. Personally I use Google docs, but open office would be exactly the same. You just print as PDF when you need the PDF -- and with Google docs typically you can just share the link in view only mode, you don't even need the PDF.

The reason for me is small edits. With Gdocs I can do any small change even on my phone, and most importantly I can share the file with anyone and they can make edits for me, if needed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Latex is not that hard to learn. The very basics you can learn in under 20 minutes. Then grab a template from openlatex or sharelatex and don't mess with it. And if something doesn't work out, ask on tex.stackexchange.

<comment><USER6> Use Lyx. It's a wrapper around Latex (or frontend for it) that makes it much easier to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure exactly what you mean by "make PDF". In my flow I sometimes use Inkscape to save something as PDF, or PDF Latex to generate documents. I hope it helps you.

</comment><comment><USER8> On mac, docs can print to PDF. What kind of work do you need to turn into a PDF?

<comment><AUTHOR> But I am looking for something to handle the layout

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can create document in LibreWriter and export it as pdf.</comment>


Legislator Says Housing Is a Right, Sues Affordable Housing in Her District - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/2019/10/11/legislator-who-argues-housing-is-a-human-right-also-suing-to-stop-affordable-housing-in-her-district/ <comment><USER2> Also, legislator has no idea what rights are.

No one has a right to another's output.

We have a right to a free press... Not to free newspapers.

We have a right to bear arms... Not to free guns.</comment>


If Linux Never Was – imagining an alternate reality without Linux - <AUTHOR> https://lunduke.com/posts/2020-02-14/ <comment><USER2> Nah. If Linux was never invented, this would just be the 20th time in a row someone declared it to be "the year of BSD on the desktop".

<comment><USER3> And there would have been a Beastie Racer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If not some version of BSD, we might be using Minix or perhaps Hurd.

<comment><USER5> This, I feel like Linux was just sexier for kernel devs, robbing Hurd of potential support

<comment><USER6> I don't know anything about Hurd besides GNU working on it when Linux came out. What was sexier about Linux? Was Hurd any good?

<comment><USER3> I don't know how "sexier" has anything to do with the topic.

Linux was available _now_. Hurd ... was not. Still isn't.

Hurd is based on a microkernel architecture, which was/is enticing because (quoting [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd) ), "In theory the microkernel design would allow for all device drivers to be built as servers working in user space" and "According to Hurd developers, the main advantage of microkernel-based design is the ability to extend the system: developing a new module would not require in depth knowledge of the rest of the kernel, and a bug in one module would not crash the entire system."

There is a long debate about microkernel vs monolithic kernel. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel) for one such summary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Like everyone else is saying. This is silly. Another open source kernel and OS would've taken Linux's place.

An easier example is Git. If Git wasn't made. Or perhaps it was made by an unknown and thus didn't gain traction, the world would be pretty close to how it is now. Another DVCS like Hg would've been widely used or a split of a few. However it would've ended up, the world would be, relatively speaking, the same.

</comment><comment><USER7> NooooOooOOoOoooOOOOooooOoooooooo :'(

We'd be all on win :((((

Joke aside : BSD would probably at it's place - one thing that we could advocate as being unique to unix is it's viral open license system

<comment><USER8> > unique to unix is it's viral open license system

GNU is not Unix</comment></comment>


Where the complex points are (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.adelaide.edu.au/maths-learning/2016/08/05/where-the-complex-points-are/ <comment><USER2> I find this less intuitive than simply looking at the real component, imaginary component, magnitude, and phase plots of simple, and then progressively more complicated functions of interest.

For example, starting with y = x^2+1:

[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+z%5E2+%2B+1](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+z%5E2+%2B+1)

You can see that the real component has a hyperbolic parabaloid shape. The imaginary component does too, just rotated by 45 degrees. This shape clearly has zeroes, since it's continuous and has infinite range. You can try to look for spots where both components are zero, or you can plot the magnitude:

[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+Magnitude%28z%5E2...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+Magnitude%28z%5E2+%2B+1%29+from+-2i+to+2i)

You can then clearly see that the zeros are "out" and below the global minimum of the real plot.

You can only really look at a slice at a time, but I find this easier than the crumpled-paper-at-every-point approach, because it's a lot harder to see patterns emerge in nearby bits of crumpled paper.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's always appreciable to try to comprehend stuff through new ways and tools, but I fail to see the aim of the post. Isn't it a matter of properly defining the domain of application and associating a way to visualize it?

Representing the result of a function from R to R requires two orthogonal axes because the element pre-transformation is 1-dimensional and the result is also 1-dimensional.

For C to R, this would require 2+1=3 orthogonal axes, so it can be visualized with a 3D representation. Likewise for R to C.

From C to C that would be 4-dimensional and becomes already trickier without some effort to conceptualize it, and certainly becomes less intuitive without resorting to alternate ways to conceptualize dimensions.

It quite probable that beyond that, one would really encounter decreasing returns on trying to visualize the situation because the cost of abstraction would increase in order to rely on multisensorial approaches to compensate for our inability to visually perceive much beyond 3D.

It's entirely possible that the whole post flew way over my head and I absolutely did not get it though, in which case I am truly just a confused commenter.

<comment><USER4> One of the things that is painful because it's out of reach for me intellectually and yet tantalizingly straightforward sounding is extending the concept of an n-dimensional space to infinite dimensions.

The idea of a mathematical function of a function doesn't sound like a big deal; it sounds vaguely similar to mundane abstractions in programming. This sort of thing is beyond my ability to cope with and yet it sounds like counting 1, 2, 3, not like abracadabra...

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

<comment><USER5> One of the very important things to know is that, while an infinite- dimensional, separable Hilbert space is basically "n-dimensional space, but more so", there are more general kinds of infinite-dimensional spaces (I'm thinking of Banach spaces, but you can certainly get still more general than that) that are much more general than that. The prototypical examples of these are the L^p spaces, where p stands for ∞, or a real number p ≥ 1—but p _isn 't_ the dimension, as in ℝ^n (they're all infinite dimensional, at least for a reasonable underlying metric space). Rather, it's a parameter that controls, in some sense, how close the geometry is to being governed by the Pythagorean theorem, so that only p = 2 gives (a Hilbert space, and hence) the 'usual' geometry.

I think your point with functional programming is spot on. Just as one learns, to pick that bête noire, monads not by reading yet another clever re-packaging that somehow only manages to make them sounds _more_ difficult, but rather by finding a problem for which they're relevant and getting a feel for them by using them, so too does one learn about infinite-dimensional space not by treating it as some sort of philosophical profundity, but by finding a problem for which it's the right setting, and realising that it's just a mathematical tool like any other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think about it quite differently.

A function in the complex plane is a 4-dimensional thing. A graph of that function on the real plane is a 2-D slice of that 4-D thing.

That said, the one visualization of complex numbers that I wish more understood was a complex number in polar coordinates. In polar coordinates, addition is complicated. But multiplication is simple. Every complex number is a magnitude and an angle. You multiply the magnitudes and add the angles.

What this means is that -1 is (1, 180 degrees). Literally a turn halfway around the circle. And now what are its square roots? Well i is (1, 90 degrees) and -i is (1, -90 degrees). Now stand up and actually do those turns.

The result is that i is a turning motion that takes you off the real line. But that visualization helps build intuition about why in the complex plane there should be a close connection between exponential functions and sin/cos. (Specifically e^(ix) = cos(x) + i sin(x) - in other words it is a turn by x radians.)

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure that is in fact _the same_ way of thinking about it. A 2D space with extra 2D spaces attached at every point _is_ a 4D space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not a mathematician so correct away:

I think the initial confusion stemmed from not pinning down the domain of x and y.

When he says "I don't see the complex points" in the xy graph that is because they aren't there: the xy graph is in R^2 and x^2 + 1 = y has no solution in the reals for y = 0.

But if you imagine, as he did, an extra dimension attached at each point then that is now a complex space, is it not?

<comment><USER9> The domains of x and y both appear defined as the real numbers. But, the reals do not have a root for every non-constant polynomial defined in terms of x or y as the real numbers are an not algebraically closed field. The proposed concept attaches two extra (complex) dimensions to each two dimensional real point. This is close to visualizing R^4 by attaching an R^2 to each point of R^2, so in some sense the tangent bundle of R^2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does it matter what is the orientation of the "iPlane"?</comment>


The car sharing aspect of robocars isn't as exciting as people hope - <AUTHOR> http://ideas.4brad.com/no-car-sharing-aspect-robocars-isnt-exciting-people-hope

<comment><USER2> Don't forget -- if let's say we want robocars for commuting, its not that people are commuting ALL day, its that during rush hours, people are commuting, so you will still need a giant fleet to service those people.</comment>


An entrepreneur earning $100k keep over $99k in Singapore but under $57k in SF - <AUTHOR> http://gyrovague.com/2013/10/30/half-the-donut-why-an-entrepreneur-earning-100k-gets-to-keep-over-99k-in-singapore-but-under-57k-in-san-francisco/ <comment><USER2> I hate these types of comparisons. Their myopic view of society and progress is just a race to the bottom - there will always be someplace willing to sacrifice wider community values in order to benefit just a few.

I would prefer some system with no taxes on individuals. With modern data collection techniques, it should be possible to monitor all transactions well before anybody gets any salary, and make adjustments there. And I'd like to see sales and marketing restricted for companies which don't employ in a country. I think every country should have an obligation to look after the employment and well-being of all its citizens. So some loss of "efficiency" is appropriate in order to get other benefits. (And please don't quote the old non-zero-sum arguments to me. Read about positive-sum and negative-sum and look at recent experiences with inequality and stop misunderstanding Ricardo from the 1800's.)</comment>


The Oral History of the Launch of Epicurious - <AUTHOR> http://www.epicurious.com/about/epicurious-oral-history-article?src=longreads

<comment><USER2> From the article, emphasis mine:

> There was much debate about what platform to build on. _Would we be on the > open web or a walled garden?_ There was no guarantee that the web was going > to win over these big companies. In fact, a lot of them, like The New York > Times, started on AOL. But Steve Newhouse [chairman of Advance Publications, > parent of Condé Nast] went with the open world. We started on the web.

Some things never change.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm the Dan Kohn in the article. AMA, though my memory from 20 years ago is a little shaky.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Dan, no questions in particular, but this was a fascinating and hilarious look into the infancy of the internet. Kudos, my parents, and 13 year old me didn't get the internet til 1999, but this site certainly seemed to be ahead of its time. To this day it's my go to cooking site, although Kenji and the team at serious eats bring a perspective I enjoy.

<comment><USER3> I'm so glad it's still around and making people happy.</comment></comment></comment>


Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site - <AUTHOR> http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

<comment><USER2> While the principles still hold true, I think the Google Best Practices are a little more up to date:

[http://code.google.com/speed/page- speed/docs/rules_intro.htm...](http://code.google.com/speed/page- speed/docs/rules_intro.html)

There are also companies that can automate these best practices for you. Check out my company, <http://torbit.com> for example.

<comment><USER3> Are you guys mostly focused on larger sites right now? Is pricing in the same ballpark as a Cloudflare type service?

<comment><USER2> we're mostly focused on large enterprise customers where speed is actually quantifiable in dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A website tool I saw linked in the comments of another article on hacker news is:

<http://gtmetrix.com>

It does PageSpeed + YSlow + other stuff. Saves me having to run both tools in my browser and it combines all the output into a nice interface with the ability to send my client a PDF to talk about small tweaks we could make.

<comment><USER5> Good tool.

I note that it puts a lot of weight on Css minification, which I don't like (I value the readability of HTML/CSS seen through curl) and doubt the value of with reasonably clean, lean source HTML. About half of the grade Fs on my sites come from this. The others need fixing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or install YSlow [1] to get suggestions right in your browser.

[1] <http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Now remember kids, this should be applied to already existing website. When developing, use whatever works so you can ship. That's why we have updates and maintenance developers.

I'm not saying be as sloppy as possible, but if you sweat the small stuff, not much will happen.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not to be a troll but how much of that is patented by Yahoo? If its recent threat to sue Facebook is any indication, "Methods to reduce HTTP requests" could be one of its patents that it's willing to wield.

<comment><USER9> Not to sound offensive, but looks like you really don't understand how the web works.

Btw, like someone just pointed out - YSlow (A tool that has all these rules) was just open sourced under the BSD license by Yahoo! - [http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2012/02/welcome-y...](http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2012/02/welcome- yslow-open-source/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Extra tip. Use JavaScript to load things on demand. For example, make Buttons to load embedded Youtube videos.

(Btw, whatever happened to 2-Click Facebook buttons? They didnt catch on)

</comment><comment><USER11> _Use GET instead of POST._

How rediculous. Use whichever is appropriate, as well as PUT and DELETE.</comment>


Perf for low level Haskell profiling - <AUTHOR> https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/bitonic/perf-for-low-level-profiling

<comment><USER2> > mov instructions from register to register make up for more than 60% of the > time spent in the critical section of the code, while we would expect most > of the time to be spent xoring and anding. I have not investigated why this > is the case, ideas welcome

If you're not using precise events, then the instruction addresses reported by perf will have some skid. This is a small cpu delay from when a performance counter overflows to when the interrupt actually freezes state.

You can choose precise sampling for some events, depending on the CPU. Try "-e cycles:pp" for instance.

        0,09 │      mov    (%rax,%r8,4),%eax
       29,32 │      mov    %r14,%r8

I think this first mov from memory is likely to be your true cycle eater, much more so than the second mov reg-reg or any single xor/and operations. But don't optimize based on my hunch - measure it precisely first! If memory access proves to be your slowdown, then you can try optimizing your access patterns.

<comment><USER3> Also, because of how complicated modern pipelining is, some instructions that you wouldn't expect to take a long time do take a long time (usually because they're waiting on a mov from memory to finish). In this case, the mov from memory could be throwing up a hazard that's blocking the mov from register.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how many veteran C programmers (myself not included) would react with "d'oh, of course you should byte-align memory access" here...

<comment><USER5> I was the author of the _digest-pure_ package ('author' is a big word, since it is an extremely small amount of code). I would like to mention that my goal was to make simple, pure, reference implementations of crc32 and adler32 in Haskell. The _digest_ package already provided performant implementations of the same functions using zlib. In fact, it is pointed out in the description of the _digest-pure_ package that you should use digest if you want performance.

It turned out to be a useful exercise, since adler32 in digest gave incorrect checksums, due to initialization to 0 rather than 1:

[https://github.com/jkff/digest/pull/1](https://github.com/jkff/digest/pull/1)

Anyway, thanks to Francesco Mazzoli for the really nice article!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your favourite HN Hacks? - <AUTHOR>

I was thinking that there are a lot of HN-related greasemonkey scripts, websites, apps, etc. but there is no place to find them all (that I know of). This is a thread to gather the best ones. Which ones do you use? <comment><USER2> I click on 'threads' every once in a while to see who replied to me and what my karma is for my recent comments. Not exactly a hack, but I use it often.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find this search page is useful <http://searchyc.com/> but the same is achieved by Google domain search as well.</comment>


Ask HN: this is core business for YCombinator startups, why isn't it solved? - <AUTHOR> Is there a SAAS handling user registration, oauth signin and Stripe subscriptions?
I don't want to write all that stuff yet again.
I'm not enthused about http://www.signupasaservice.com/ since their login link leads to a dead page, not inspiring confidence.
EDIT: why isn't this a solved problem by all the ycombinator genius folks? Remember - build something people WANT. <comment><USER2> My 2 cents on this.

You need to think ahead a bit on how you might use the user management layer down the line. Even if you decide to move away from XYZ service that you started with, you need to at some point replicate all the functionality that made you want to go with them in the first case. Ideally, your best bet is to use this kind of service for as long as you can to minimize service disruption to your users. As you pointed out, "A dedicated third party company is going to do this better than me."

A better approach, IMO, is to go for an authentication service that is flexible for a longer term and satisfies your core requirements today (ie user management functions). The payment stuff is anyway custom (as the nature of your plans are unique to your business) and can be easily achieved a 3rd party platform where the user layer is integrated via OAuth.

One simple approach here is to use Wordpress with WooCommerce (ready packages exist) as your "sales" layer + an integration module to Stormpath/Auth0/etc to sync the user auth layer. This is a solved problem for Wordpress sites, and you just need to link it to an OAuth layer that does what you need. I get that you don't want to write any code, but no two businesses are alike especially in the subscriptions game, and you're better off spending a little time to get this setup the way you want, instead of having to live with what someone else gives you.

We just went through a similar exercise, and this is the understanding we arrived at. We're using Auth0 (www.auth0.com) instead of Stormpath as we plan to deploy quite a few micro-apps linked to a single login, and we don't want to be charged by the number of apps we have, but by our user volume. Otherwise, the service feature-sets are quite similar.

Hope this helps.

P.S We're using ChargeBee (www.chargebee.com) to handle our subscription billing management and we're writing some minors scripts to automate our user layer based on the payment status.

</comment><comment><USER3> My personal view, is that the cons significantly outweigh the pros in a situation like this. I know your pain, as I recently went through the subscription hell (confirm emails, error checking, change credit card, valid_until, webooks, accounting stats, etc), but this is the core of your company and it needs to be right. Stripe was actually the easy part, it is all the scaffolding around it to make subscriptions work, which is extremely painful. If this out-sourced saas goes out of business tomorrow, you are royally screwed, has a security issue, screwed, hardware failure with data loss, screwed, bad service, customers are screwed, you are screwed, etc, etc. There needs to be a better way I know, I'm just not sure this is the answer, and it is just way to risky.

Having said all that, I think [https://www.ccbill.com/](https://www.ccbill.com/) does something close to what you are looking for.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just want to get a subscription product out there fast, not spend three months building yet another user registration database with oauth and payments.

What I really need is something like shopify - but allowing subscription payments via Stripe. I also need Shopify to provide an API so I can query my user database and do stuff with it.

I want someone else to be taking care of user interface stuff. I should be able to pay and get a gorgeous looking site that works well on mobile and desktop, facilitates user signin via oauth, allows me to set up products and prices, lets people purchase my services on a recurring basis, doesn't try to own my user base and lets me write code to access all the relevant user and account and product data.

I do agree that there is a level of risk of the provider going bust but I'm willing to take that risk at least in the initial stages of a project. To offset risk I need to be able to get backups or replication of my user database out of the Shopify system.

Surely it's an opportunity for someone.

Here's what needs to be melted together:

\-- Shopify

\-- Stripe

\-- StormPath

\-- oauth.io

\-- and maybe something like Strikingly or Squarespace.

Put it all together and you basically get a digital subscription goods business in a box. I could immediately get going writing code to provide my digital service, not wasting my time building shops and user databases and login systems AGAIN.

<comment><USER3> Preaching to the choir ;) If someone reputable built it, I would also highly be interested, as it is such a pain re: subscriptions. It would be nice if Stripe just had a spinoff that handled all this as there is major overlap in skills required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi, co-founder of OAuth.io here. We have a full OAuth.io + Stormpath integration already

[https://oauth.io/home/user_management](https://oauth.io/home/user_management)

and the set up is quite straightforward if you go in our User management API documentation.

[http://docs.oauth.io/#user-management-api](http://docs.oauth.io/#user- management-api)

We are built on stripe so we could do something there to fulfill your need.

Thanks for your feedback and hope this helps,

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice to see you in person commenting on this!

To help you understand the background. I have built a web service that I want to sell.

Unfortunately I'm now faced with writing a whole bunch of code that is not my core business. I can do it and have done it before many times but it's really just a time consuming barrier to getting my product to market.

I really need a "business in a box" and I really don't want to write code. Here's the requirements:

\--> Website

users need to be able to come to a gorgeous looking site (or at least clean and professional anyway) - must work well on mobile. The website is a very substantial part of the requirements. It should look like my website and not show any signs that it is actually constructed using something else. No "powered by Shopify" or anything on it.

\--> Authentication

users to be able to sign in and create an account using whatever the common signin services are (i.e. oauth)

\--> Authorization and user management

the back end must save the user data into a database and should handle all the crap involved with sending out confirmations, password resets etc. the back end must provide me with an API. the back end must provide me tools for backing up my user and account data cause I don't trust that they won't go out of business one day the back end company must exude the sense that it's my customer base, not theirs. if I get the sense that I don't trust them then I'm outa there.

\--> Commerce

the website must allow me to set up a very simple schedule of service levels and present it in that well known pricing table format that almost all websites seem to use

\--> Payments

MUST allow me to do subscription payments through Stripe - nothing else will do here

\--> integrated

all the above must be nicely integrated.

\--> API

stripe have shown everyone how to do API's well. Must be incredibly thoroughly documented with lots of practical examples and wide language support. Python 3 please as well, not just Python 2.

\--> Setup and configuration

hard to see why it should take me more than half an hour in an admin interface to set up all the above.

Seems to me that various companies are "best in class" for each of the above areas, but nowhere is it all integrated into the smooth end to end complete experience that I want. That leaves me needing to write code and damn I really don't want to - it's completely pointless to be writing all this stuff yet again.

<comment><USER4> And how much would you pay for that? What would be your prefered model? per number of users? per number of API calls? a % transaction fee on top of existing stripe fees? Something else?

<comment><USER5> As someone else looking for the same thing, I'd pay a monthly subscription on a per number of tiers. I'd likely pay around $10-15 for every 1,000 users, probably a little more. I wouldn't ever do a "% of revenue" or a fee on top of existing transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.dailycred.com/](https://www.dailycred.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this is exactly what you need: [https://www.userapp.io/](https://www.userapp.io/)

</comment><comment><USER8> WHMCS? Hostbill? Clientexec?</comment>


Something About This Russia Hack Story Stinks - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/something-about-this-russia-story-stinks-w458439 <comment><USER2> I follow Matt Taibbi's work, he had nothing to do with the false rape story reporting.

</comment><comment><USER3> the sad thing about this article is that rolling stone has completely lost all credibility to me after their complete and total journalistic failure over the University of Virginia story ([http://www.cbsnews.com/news/verdict-reached-in- rolling-stone...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/verdict-reached-in-rolling- stone-defamation-lawsuit/))

does anyone else have a more reliable source?

<comment><USER4> The source seems to be a lack of a source. No one has offered up a smoking gun directly linking Russia to the DNC leaks. The most conclusive evidence anyone's been able to provide so far has been that the build times for the malware matched work hours for UTC +4, and Russian language settings were used by the build host.

None of this proves anything about who's behind it. For example, some other country could have simply hired a Russian firm to do the work.

There's also the possibility that this is a false flag operation. If a non- Russian entity had hired me to point the finger at Russia when deploying the RATs, I probably would have modified the executables in exactly the way that's being observed. Sanitizing malware to hide its origins boils down to two options: 1) sanitize everything so it looks like anyone could have done it, or 2) modify it to make it look like someone else did it. If you're politically motivated, 2) would probably be the way to go since your target is going to waste resources going on a wild goose chase.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What applications do you use to create game assets? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,<p>I was wondering what applications do you use to create your game assets, visual or audio, such as sprites, backgrounds, sound effects, music, etc.
I'm particularly interested in the graphics side of the question however I would also appreciate any answer on the audio creation/manipulation. <comment><USER2> Inkscape, mainly!

For sound, I first check [http://www.freesound.org/](http://www.freesound.org/), then if I'm unlucky I end up using Audacity</comment>


Apple announces iOS 10 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/13/apple-announces-ios-10/ <comment><USER2> Looks like Apple is doubling down on at least two features that really seem like duds -- 3D Touch (which as far as I can tell nobody even knows exists), and Siri (which everyone raves about but nobody uses for anything).

I'd love to see UX improvements around minor inconveniences of the iOS experience:

\- what the hell the volume button does in different contexts (sometimes it changes the ringer, other times the in-app volume, other times it just seems to go into a black hole)

\- easier access to app settings for the app you're using (things like privacy settings and notification settings and revoking/re-allowing privileges (like camera access, etc.); maybe context-sensitive pull-up or pull-down things? I like that OS controls this, not the app, just need a better way to navigate to it.

\- turn off buzzing and booping when I plug in a charger, and maybe some sort of wireless charging thing if the technology is where it needs to be yet

\- stop showing album art on the lock screen (or make it optional)

\- more uniformity on how lock screen notifications are acknowledged and dismissed -- sometimes there's an 'x' in the swipe-over, sometimes actions, sometimes just pressing the notification does something

The only feature that seems interesting to me is the voicemail transcription; previous services I've used for this have been pretty terrible, but hopefully this is better.

With Marshmallow's security model (of run-time grantable and revokable permissions) Android has become a lot more attractive to me -- my biggest pain point in using Android devices has always been the nightmare of looking at what an app wants in order to install.

<comment><USER3> > what the hell the volume button does in different contexts

If the app you're using right now has a handle for audio playback, it changes the speaker volume. If not, it changes the ringer volume. As far as I can tell, that's all, and in a half decade of using iPhones and iPods, I've never actually seen it misbehave.

<comment> martin-adams This bugs me like mad on Android. When I know the app is going to blast out, I have to let it before I can turn it down. I'm forever having to hop through menu after menu to turn the volume down.

My phone is permanently on vibrate (have young kids in the house and don't want to wake them), so changing the ringer is frustrating at most.

<comment><USER4> On Android 6:

1) Press volume button to bring up volume controls

2) Tap the arrow on the right to expand

3) Adjust ring/music/alarm volumes as needed: [http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/05/android_...](http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/05/android_m_volumes-100587783-orig.png)

<comment><USER5> Just like he said, that involves touching the screen and opening a menu. There's no predictable way to immediately silence your phone.

<comment><USER6> You can predictably silence it before it happens with the above method. Just drag the "music" volume to zero.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what solution they're looking for. A single universal volume control where if you turn up a video it means your ringer is now on full blast? 6 volume buttons on the side of your phone to adjust them each individually?

Android's system of adjusting media volume when media is playing and ringer volume when it isn't seems like a reasonably clean solution. It takes a single tap to expand to the three sliders.

Maybe a shortcut where where pressing volume up/down simultaneously mutes everything?

<comment><USER7> It's not that exotic, you've got a child or a sleeping partner or a boss in the same room and you want to watch a mostly visual video without any unnecessary jingles or other audio cues from disturbing them.

So you reduce the volume, but it only reduced the ringer for calls, which isn't what you want.

As the sibling answer says, newer Androids can do this. One click to display the volume, a touch to see the individual controls and then slide.

<comment><USER8> Or swipe down the top drawer and tap the Sound setting to Mute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Holy moly, Apple is very aware of the competing chat apps. iMessage looks amazing and they packed a lot of features in there, but I wonder how they're going to make it all easily discoverable.

<comment><USER10> Really? I felt the presentation of iMessage was embarrassingly trying to seem hip. The only thing I didn't find to be annoying bloat was the ability to tap and "like" a message. Really cuts down on messages like "great" and "ok." Otherwise it honestly felt like Yahoo Messenger from 2005 in level of bloat, where you could "buzz" people and shake their windows. People use things that aren't iMessage, not because of features, but because they are cross platform and secure. Apple doesn't have that, so everything to me just felt like texting with bloatware.

I don't find those features confusing, just annoying.

<comment> yoz-y No. People use other apps because they have a large adoption and stickers (we chat and line) or because they were free while sms were not (whats app). Only us tech nerds care about security.

<comment><USER11> But not only nerds think about cross-device compatibility.

<comment> yoz-y Of course, that is how you get to the large user base. but I think it is wrong to assume that users care about security. If they did nobody would use SMS, email or Mc Donald's wifi but here we are. It is a very important feature, but it does not sell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's really troubling to me that 3D Touch features are a big part of this release and yet their most recent phone release (the iPhone SE) has no support for it at all, and neither does ANY iPad, including the flagship iPad Pro 9.7 released in March.

I know many people are sceptical about 3D Touch. I myself found it to be quite useful if you build habits around it - until I got an iPad Pro 9.7 and found all those habits were useless. Since I had to break the habits on the iPad I rarely use it on the iPhone now.

If Apple wants people to adopt 3D Touch and make it useful it has to actually be available on anything other than the 6S.

</comment><comment><USER13> Finally they managed to remove the weird intelligent selection behavior in safari!!! (The one that unpredictable marks blocks or the whole website). Thank you apple :)

They also ignore any viewport meta data so you can always zoom. My Cordova app doesn't like this :( I hope it can be disabled for WKWebView programmatically

<comment><USER14> > I hope it can be disabled for WKWebView programmatically

I'm hoping it can't - being unable to zoom a web page means it goes on the shit list because then I can't read it how I want to.

<comment><USER13> For websites this seems ok for me, but for apps that run inside wkwebview, I think there should be more control about this behavior. You can't zoom normal apps so this would make the Usebility properly worse or unexpected.

<comment><USER14> Oh, hmm, good point, I missed that subtlety. Yes, apps definitely should be able to prevent zooming.

(Purely from a personal perspective, I'd prefer that people who made web apps didn't because they're a much less good user experience.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How is object recognition possible on a (i)phone without a huge/massive dataset like Google uses on Google Photos' AI backend? It has to be worse AI than from Google Photos. Can someone clarify?

<comment><USER16> You only need a huge dataset to train the network. The trained network itself is (relatively) tiny, so it can be loaded and run on iPhones.

<comment><USER17> It's a whole subfield of machine learning called model distillation or model compression that concerns with shrinking large neural nets, or ensembles of them, to fit on small devices like phones and tablets. By reducing the space needed by 10x, they only lose 1-2% in accuracy.

But what I like about it is that neural networks can be transferred between different architectures, and the whole process of training a neural net can be sped up by starting from a previous result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this the death of hybrid apps? Seems all the announcements were focus on the deep integration that apps can now have with the OS. For a long time, the big knock against hybrid development was that performance was never as good as native, but it seems that this new wave of integration presents a far more compelling case for native development, no?

<comment><USER19> As long as one can leverage plugins for hybrid apps, I don't see why most of the demoed features today aren't possible in a hybrid app. At least nothing sent up huge red flags for me as a hybrid app developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A lot of iOS 10 features are Google inspired.

<comment><USER21> Does that matter for some reason?

<comment><USER20> It does, because when Google did it in past, and they did, Apple zealots ripped on them.

<comment><USER21> Saying something is valid because someone else did it, doesn't mean anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since they're tweaking copy/paste to work between devices, hopefully they are also working on the phone UI for text selection. Before I care about cloud- sharing any text, I need to be able to SELECT IT properly, and frankly iOS fails completely at this right now. They need to remove the second-guessing, over-selecting, contextually-smartly-selecting code, or whatever it is doing now.

</comment><comment><USER23> I guess as every innovative company reaches it's climax the motivation to actually innovate dies out.

As long as the money is coming in they don't have to change a thing.

But it begs a different question. What's all the money for if you're not going to have any fun?

At least do some live drop / break / blend tests or something to spice things up.

</comment><comment><USER24> Am i the only one thinking that Steve Jobs would have refused most of the things that were introduced this morning? Apple sure has changed over the years.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I don't think that all that junk added to Messages would have been added under Steve Jobs. Not that I think that's a bad thing, but it's definitely a notable departure away from clean and simple and minimal to something that is much, much more complicated and glitzy.

<comment> k-mcgrady Considering the number of people that use other messaging apps these features are what people want. Apple can't just ignore that.

<comment><USER25> Why not leave these things to third party messaging apps, keyboards, and integrations? Why does it all have to be first party?

<comment> k-mcgrady Why build a first party messaging app if most people aren't going to use it? For people who just want to send plain text messages the UI is pretty much identical. Text box, type, send.

<comment><USER25> What if I want to receive plain text messages?

<comment><USER26> Turn off iMessage or tell your friends. Or get over it because it's just a silly message?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Third party VOIP sounds great! Trying to answer hangouts from the lock screen is impossible currently.

</comment><comment><USER28> Always wondered if they'd stall at iOS 10 and just start moving up minor versions like macOS. 10.1 etc. Another change that doesn't make a ton of sense but I guess looks nice.

</comment><comment><USER29> Was it just me, or ability to interact and access personal data on the lock screen on a locked phone seems little insecure?

<comment><USER30> It's not just you. That was my first thought too, as it pretty much seems like a huge extension of the amount of data you can see without unlocking.

<comment> k-mcgrady They're already showing personal data on the lock screen (messages, emails) and there is a setting to disable and has been for a few years.

<comment><USER30> This seems like more than just a summary of a message/e-mail to me. A live view of the app in question?

<comment> k-mcgrady Yes but I'm sure the same 'don't show private crap on my lock screen' setting would apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> iOS 10. 10 Features that I think they had a hard time to convince the audience that were so important.

I've been using iOS since v3 and it's going ^2 complicated every year. Come on guys, nobody expects that you can deliver a revolution with every WWDC. Just don't make the interface more complicated.

Siri, 3d touch, home kit? I barely know anyone using those and everyone these days has an iPhone. The focus is shifted from usability to features. So sad.

<comment><USER32> I find Siri useful for certain things.

'Set a timer for 20 minutes' is faster for me than using the clock app.

'Navigate to the nearest gas station' is faster.

Setting reminders is usually faster with Siri. Especially geofences ones.

Finding pictures in a location is much easier with Siri.. "Find pictures at Lake Tahoe"

The main problem is that you have to remember what you can do.

<comment> matt-attack "Set a timer for 20 minutes" is heavenly. No, extra bloat like, "Shall I start it now?", it just starts ticking as soon as you as for it.

Every time you feed a parking meter, I recommend this feature.

<comment><USER33> I also use voice to start timers, probably more than once a day on average.

Which is why, by now, the idiotic and unfunny jokes Siri makes almost every time I do that are _really_ fucking annoying (even though it doesn't say them out loud, and I just have to see them printed on the screen).

<comment><USER34> You can tell their engineers never continuously tested Siri's responses for multiple weeks. I'd rather have the "Ok" than Siri's 5 other longer responses, and the one sassy response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Third party integration and inter-operability with third party apps has been one of the areas Android fared better than iOS. Now with Siri, Maps and Messages third-party APIs and keyboard updates, apple can completely shed its walled-garden image.

</comment><comment><USER36> My only question is: will the nagging for apple services increase or decrease?

<comment><USER37> Depending on how Desktop sync works, I'm thinking we'll all be very familiar with the "Upgrade Storage" alert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Anyone know if Siri will still only respond when plugged in? I wish it were an option to turn on at all time. I realize battery would be drained considerably.

<comment><USER39> It works every time, so long you are not on "Low Power Mode".

<comment><USER40> As of iOS9, the "hey Siri" touchless functionality is only available when the phone is plugged in.

<comment><USER41> Assuming you aren't on the iPhone 6S I believe

<comment><USER42> Also the SE

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I love the news maps ui it's beautiful and so much more intuitive. It was really confusing before even to me: a techie!

</comment><comment><USER44> Ah the last operating system I feel comfortable installing on my iphone 6 without risking (designed?) obsolescence crushing the performance.

The features look really good. I use siri daily, but with 3rd party integrations that could be hourly.

</comment><comment><USER45> "It looks like the Photos app is getting a huge upgrade and now looks more like Google Photos. The big difference, obviously, is that Apple handles everything on your device and doesn't collect data about you. "

Yyyes, rrright...

</comment><comment><USER46> is it just me or has apple really lost its advantage with the departure of steve jobs, i mean johnny ives is still there, but they seem to be doing a mediocre job, dont get me wrong, i really liked the new macbook when it came out, and i own an apple watch (more of a fashion accessory more than anything else), but maps, siri, music, photos, etc seem like minor increments. blow me away apple like hou did with the first intel based macs, or how about when mac os x first came out, the very first ipod, we need more makers, not an operations guy

<comment><USER47> Jobs was there when iOS was in infancy. Now it is a mature platform. I don't get this constant "entertain me" whine.

<comment><USER46> i've been a loyal apple user since the motorola 68030 mac ii, this was in the 90's so it's natural to expect apple to change the game every few years, with cook at the helm, he's done nothing exciting, just a lot of conservative incremental changes, you see where the stock's trending lately. i am not some fanboy that jumped on the apple bandwagon in the past 10 years, so from my perspective, apple is starting to falter, but jobs has laid a solid foundation of innovative products, couldn't see myself buy a dell/lenovo or android phone anytime soon, but things have certainly changed in the past few years, regardless if apple has so much cash in the bank. wwdc's in the past unveiled mac os x, the intel based macs (from powerpc), ipod, iphone, ipad, this wwdc has really been underwhelming granted it is a developer conference, but apple has always been using this to market their new gadgets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> iOS X, if you will.

</comment><comment><USER49> Can I have Siri answer with the speaker yet?

</comment><comment><USER50> Accessing everything on lock screen? So, my GF can see my app activity and pretty do all the things without my authentication?

Craig touts specifically that we don't need to press the home button for all this to work...

<comment><USER51> I'm sure you'll be able to decide the amount of stuff you want accessible from the lock screen, as you already get to do now, but you may have more pressing concerns regarding your partner's trust.

<comment><USER50> Oh, I used the example of my GF responding to messages/viewing notifications to essentially bring out my privacy concerns. Not that I don't trust my partner :) I must have disabled this feature when I installed iOS 9 and being unnecessarily surprised at this now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I love 3D Touch. Best feature on iphone.

</comment><comment><USER53> If you want to watch the keynote, the last line in this macrumors blog post: [http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/13/wwdc-2016-spoiler- free/](http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/13/wwdc-2016-spoiler-free/)

provides a link labelled "Video Posted: A direct link to the video file is now available, with no spoilers." The direct link is: [http://p.events- delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/16faohbadfv...](http://p.events- delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/16faohbadfvoihjbadfvljhbphjb06/m3u8/hls_vod_mvp.m3u8) \- Hopefully you can just click it and it'll work.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

If you want to _download_ the above video. (In my case, on Windows, VLC has trouble with that so I used the instructions here to actually download it: [http://stream-recorder.com/forum/livestreamer-m3u8-error- no-...](http://stream-recorder.com/forum/livestreamer-m3u8-error-no- plugin-t20173.html) )

The exact thing I did was:

1\. Get dl-youtube.exe from here: [http://youtube-dl.org/](http://youtube- dl.org/) (save the fourth link for windows, labelled youtube-dl.exe, to your desktop)

2\. Option One: Download Highest-Quality Version

From the command-line execute, in my case. The following line downloads the best quality version:

      C:\Users\User\Desktop>youtube-dl.exe http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/16faohbadfvoihjbadfvljhbphjb06/m3u8/hls_vod_mvp.m3u8 --hls-prefer-native -o output.ts

Notice that the above defaults to the best stream which is 7.13 GB (and 1920x800). It's too much for me, so I killed it and instead did:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

2A. Option Two: Choose Quality

Instead you can run -F to list formats. The following line outputs possible settings:

      youtube-dl.exe http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/16faohbadfvoihjbadfvljhbphjb06/m3u8/hls_vod_mvp.m3u8 --hls-prefer-native -F

Which outputs:

      [info] Available formats for hls_vod_mvp:
      format code  extension  resolution note
      meta         mp4        multiple   Quality selection URL
      786          mp4        480x200     786k , avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2
      1406         mp4        640x266    1406k , avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2
      2029         mp4        640x266    2029k , avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2
      2806         mp4        960x400    2806k , avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2
      3849         mp4        960x400    3849k , avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2
      4967         mp4        1280x532   4967k , avc1.640028, mp4a.40.2
      6581         mp4        1280x532   6581k , avc1.640028, mp4a.40.2
      8728         mp4        1920x800   8728k , avc1.640028, mp4a.40.2 (best)

I chose the one labelled 2806 for me, so I just ran:

      C:\Users\User\Desktop>youtube-dl.exe http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/16faohbadfvoihjbadfvljhbphjb06/m3u8/hls_vod_mvp.m3u8 --hls-prefer-native -f 2806 -o output.ts

Notice that capital -F lists the available formats, lowercase f chooses one.

This one is only 2.3 GB, which is good enough for me. At 2-3 MB/sec it took me twenty minutes to download.

VLC plays this one just fine.

<comment><USER53> I'm extremely surprised this was downvoted by two people. Anyone care to explain? (I just show how to watch the keynote.) Did I post this on the wrong article or is this not what this is about, or what's wrong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Heck, I just bought a course to study iOS9 development... Who can withstand such a pace?

<comment> k-mcgrady If you're developing production apps you're likely supporting at least the last two versions of iOS. I'm a full-time iOS developer and don't remember half the new stuff in iOS 9 simply because I don't need it yet or it's iOS 9 only and I have to support iOS 7+. Also all of that knowledge transfers. iOS 10 will bring extra deeper stuff that you're not going to get anywhere near learning on an intro course.

<comment><USER38> 3D Touch... you aren't adding it to every app now? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Looks pretty interesting.... Apple is putting support for 3D touch, more features we expect to come & a better siri support for future...Siri is fine now I think, developers should work more hard for siri!!!

</comment><comment><USER56> I just want to know one thing:

DID APPLE FINALLY MAKE WEB PUSH AVAILABLE IN iOS THE WAY THEY HAVE IN MacOS?

Anyone know?

<comment><USER31> Not announced. If it's reality it will come out this week when more information on Safari iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Apple used to be about quality products. They would ignore the demands of shareholders, who are always wrong and never actually understand what customers want.

Now they're a generic computer company like Compaq and Gateway. Shareholders are running their business into the ground, and they're making terrible products, from head to toe.

<comment><USER47> So what's so horrible about iPhone? Crappy build quality? Subpar camera? Nonexistant battery life? Performance is shit compared to cometition?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Does Apple really think that people use Siri? Yes, limited voice control is useful in the car when you need to call someone. Other than that, I've never seen someone using Siri for anything other than screwing around. I think Amazon has forced Apple's hand with Alexa. The problem is, Alexa is more useful, more open, and overall far ahead of Apple's technology. I don't think that Apple understands that the main reason Alexa is great is that Amazon put it in a tube and made it able to control the lights in my house, the music, and lots of other stuff. It's not just for changing your name to something stupid and asking it to Google things for you like Siri is.</comment>


Ask HN: Who are your 'must follows' on Twitter?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to start following more users who constantly unearth great content and things to read, I'm finding that the Twitter suggestions are good in terms of similar industry/skills but many don't tweet often or share links <comment><USER2> News in general:

@reuters

@bbcworld

@theatlantic

@australian

@japantimes

Science (and popscience):

@carlzimmer

@edyong

@sciam

@plos

@plosbiology

@sciencecomedian

@gizmodo

@boraz

internets:

@ccc

@wikileaks

@wired

@timoreilly

@wiredopinion

@boingboing

@slashdot

couple rails-people:

@tenderlove

@dhh

@headius

and of course:

@newsycombinator

@shit_hn_says

I've got many more but these are the ones I just pulled together scrolling through my feed.

<comment><AUTHOR> great list thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Slightly off-topic, but Twitter has all but replaced RSS for me. I'm getting more value out of following people I have similar interest to than I did subscribing to their feeds.

</comment><comment><USER4> What are your main interests?

<comment><AUTHOR> Innovation, tech, mobile, design :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> for 'those' kind of days when u need a quick laugh @NotANark</comment>


FastSpark: A Simple Spark Rewrite in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rajasekar3eg/fastspark-a-new-fast-native-implementation-of-spark-from-scratch-368373a29a5c <comment><AUTHOR> PS: I am not involved in the project or have much knowledge of it, just wanted to share something intriguing I came across.</comment>


Bitcoin mining to earn money from free web content or mobile apps - <AUTHOR>

Recently there have been discussions about how to pay content generators money for reading their content.  E.g. How do I pay a good journalist who writes a great news blog for his or her work?  Has anyone thought embedding Bitcoin mining JavaScript code that runs in the Browser while the reader is reading the content? Similar idea (native code instead of JavaScript) could be used to support free apps on mobile phones and tablets.  This idea has several nice properties: 1. The content creator gets paid directly by mining Bitcoin.
2. The payoff is proportional to the amount of time the content or application is used by the user. 3. No need for ads to support content or free apps.
Unfortunately, the idea also has a couple of disadvantages that I can think of: 1.  I have read that it gets progressively harder to mine Bitcoin.  Depending on the exchange rate of Bitcoin to physical goods, this could be a problem.  My guess is this is a flaw due to the design decisions of Bitcoin.  Another virtual currency designed so that mining it does not get progressively less fruitful, would solve this problem. 2.  The User could hook the javascript/Browser and possibly steal the mined Bitcoins.  This could be mitigated by making it hard enough that the payoff would be too small.  Also, for the mobile apps, the hooking and stealing should be a lot harder.
The whole idea seems obvious, so I wonder if anyone has already tried or done this? <comment><USER2> <http://www.bitcoinplus.com/miner/embeddable>

It exists. It's not fair to do it to your visitors, though; the cost to them in increased power consumption is going to be significantly more than the value of the bitcoins you mine (virtually none)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! Thanks!</comment></comment>