Seattle Has Reached the Second and Terminal Stage of Gentrification - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/01/15/42571615/the-rash-of-restaurant-closures-shows-seattle-has-reached-the-second-and-terminal-stage-of-gentrification <comment><USER2> Article seems to end just as it's getting interesting.

When there's a tension between city as investment vehicle and city as a place for living what's the tipping point? And what's the next stable equilibrium?

<comment><USER3> A city will not stay a pure "investment vehicle" forever - the RE-values bubble has to deflate at some point. But it can take some time because the market is so illiquid, and a downwards correction is especially likely to be erratic. Then the gentrification/speculation process starts all over again and we're back to square one. Want to improve things? Tax away urban rents by raising property taxes (the opposite approach to California Prop 13) and the relevant market will become far more liquid, and less prone to excessive real estate costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now that the BA and Seattle are gone, where's everyone going?

<comment><USER5> Denver and Portland

<comment><USER6> I don't think that Portland is very far behind Seattle in this problem, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Cpan-outdated - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/tokuhirom/cpan-outdated

<comment><AUTHOR> I can see the jokes coming, but no, it's not a repo full of "CPAN is outdated" cracks. It's a simple program to check what Perl modules are outdated. This functionality is present in both cpan and cpan+, but it's very slow in both (in my experience).

At the moment, cpan-outdated itself doesn't appear to be on CPAN. However you can easily install it via git{,hub} and cpanm:

        git clone http://github.com/tokuhirom/cpan-outdated.git
        cd cpan-outdated
        cpanm .

_Edit_ : Nope, I'm an idiot. I always forget the App::X namespacing for apps. cpan-outdated is on CPAN as App::cpanoutdated.</comment>


Paypal.com appears to be available - <AUTHOR> http://www.paypal.com/

<comment><USER2> It appears to have never went down. The script kiddies targeted paypal.com, which is different from www.paypal.com.

</comment><comment><USER3> They are targeting api.paypal.com</comment>


Asking as a Substitute for Thinking - <AUTHOR> http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010115.html

<comment><USER2> during my co-op with a big tech company this was one of the biggest problems i noticed. in that environment it's a lot easier to ask someone that knows the answer then to figure it out yourself.

i think it's important to push yourself as much as possible to figure things out on your own and get as much learning out of your work as possible.</comment>


Show HN: I have just write a tab-like mode for Emacs, what do you think? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/linktohack/buffer-line <comment><USER2> M-x tabbar-mode Though having them to the echo area means more vertical space. Nevertheless, both are good for new users but not needed after a while. On the interface you're supposed to have only what you need at the moment.</comment>


Inventor Develops Way To Rid The Sea of Plastic - <AUTHOR> http://www.exposingthetruth.co/rid-sea-of-plastic/

<comment><USER2> This is the inventor's website: [http://www.boyanslat.com/plastic5/](http://www.boyanslat.com/plastic5/)

There's a note on the bottom that they understand their idea isn't quite feasible yet. They also need people who can help them out with things like fluid dynamics modelling.

 _The array is designed to be made of manta-ray shaped platforms, with ocean currents pushing the plastic debris into the collector (floating on the surface, since bits of plastic float to the top)._

Documentaries have shown that due to waves and currents most of the plastic doesn't float on the surface. Also, plastic can break up into very small pieces over time. This video from Vice shows the resulting gunk: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D41rO7mL6zM&t=1091](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D41rO7mL6zM&t=1091)</comment>


Experts: Pentagon must look for more powerful rifles and ammo to replace the M4 - <AUTHOR> https://www.stripes.com/news/experts-pentagon-must-look-for-more-powerful-rifles-and-ammo-to-replace-the-m4-1.468940 <comment><USER2> > The M4 carbine is the standard-issue rifle fielded since the mid-1990s and > used across the military as a replacement for the M16.

I never knew it was a replacement. I thought it was just mainly for close quarters/urban combat.

<comment><USER3> The Army switched in the 90's, the Marines held out until a couple of years ago.</comment></comment>


Firefox OS and Browser Choice - <AUTHOR> http://samuelsidler.com/2013/03/firefox-os-and-browser-choice/

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting question, to say the least. Firefox OS makes much of the fact that its apps will run in the browser, but is there any provision for installing native code? Without it, there can be no alternate engines, and thus no real browser choice.

Or is some other avenue for browser choice planned?</comment>


Myo's gesture-control bracelet makes using Kinect look like drunk charades - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/myo-boasts-seamless-gesture-control-weve-ever-seen <comment><USER2> It's a good idea. Myoelectric sensing is currently much more reliable and accurate than camera-based sensing. The algorithms involved are much simpler and more robust. I can actually see myself using something like this, whereas current-gen CV-based equipment really isn't good for anything but novelty.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone actually received theirs? I ordered and then upgraded to their DevKit Program, when the emails when out about that. The article showed a picture of a pretty production looking device.</comment>


Astronomers Find New Object, Possible Super-Earth in Our Solar System - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2015/12/10/astronomers-find-new-object-possible-super-earth-in-our-solar-system/ <comment> stargazer-3 Take it with a grain of salt. The reaction of the astronomer community is much more skeptical than this article leads you to believe. The paper in question, for instance, has been "withdrawn until further data is available" from arxiv.

There are many who think it can be an issue of data reduction - i.e. the process that leads from the raw instrument data to a publication-grade result.

</comment><comment><USER2> [http://www.astronomy.com/news/2015/12/a-new-planet-in-the- ou...](http://www.astronomy.com/news/2015/12/a-new-planet-in-the-outer-solar- system-not-so-fast)

> As Caltech astronomer Mike Brown pointed out via Twitter, "Fun fact: if it > is true that ALMA accidentally discovered a massive outer solar system > object in its tiny tiny tiny field of view, ... that would suggest that > there are something like 200,000 earth sized planets in the outer solar > system. Which, um, no."

> The far more likely possibility is that the astronomers captured one of the > many icy objects floating beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt and the far-flung > Oort Cloud. There are millions of such objects, ranging in size from less > than a mile in diameter to almost 1,500 miles.

<comment><USER3> Mike Brown: Obvious attempt at snark is obvious.

No it wouldn't suggest there are 200,000 earth sized planets in the outer solar system. Don't be absurd. The situation does seem reminiscent of how Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto (accidentally discovered a massive (compared to other nearby objects) outer solar system object in the Lowell Observatory telescope's tiny tiny field of view, no computer help either), but while it is possible that thousands of Kuiper Belt objects on the scale of Pluto exist (we've only discovered three or four so far because they would be so difficult to detect), hundreds of thousands of earth sized planets would have already collapsed gravitationally. Don't be absurd.

<comment><USER4> Another possibility (unless they've already ruled it out) is that it's a rogue planet passing through the Oort cloud. I don't know if thousands of them are any more plausible than thousands of gravitationally bound planets, but supposedly rogues outnumber star-bound planets. They would be spread pretty thin depth-wise and hard to detect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not an expert here, but Forbes doesn't seem like the go-to site for astronomy news.

</comment><comment><USER6> Makes you feel a little uneasy, finding something so large right in our neighborhood. Like finding a cold campfire by your back fence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, if it ends up being large. The other explanations seem more likely. Either way, it does make me feel really small in the overall scheme of the universe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's some great discussion about whether or not this is a real discovery on the Unmanned Spaceflight forum: [http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8127&...](http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8127&st=0)

Consensus seems to be similar to the superliminal neutrino claim a few years back - probably not a real signal, but worth tracking down further on the extreme off chance that it is.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow. A Nemesis star or Nibiru planet possibly?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(hypothetical_star)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_\(hypothetical_star\))

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

It would be exciting to have large bodies out further and further from our planet. Like stepping stones to the stars.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how they found something so small and far out. It's almost like something wanted us to discover it ;)

"Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost lightless planet at the very edge of our solar system—beyond Neptune, and the ninth in distance from the sun. It is, as we have inferred, the object mystically hinted at as "Yuggoth" in certain ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon be the scene of a strange focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate mental rapport. "

</comment><comment><USER10> Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't objects in 'our solar system' orbit around our sun? Sounds like these objects are in the Alpha Centauri solar system, which is one of our closest neighbours in the Milky Way galaxy. It'll be an interesting find if it turns out to exist, but the distinction between solar system and galaxy is important, as it changes it from somewhere we could feasibly visit to an object we can only see through telescopes (bar some sort of revolution in space propulsion).

<comment><USER11> This might help

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLKtG6sy13o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLKtG6sy13o)

The solar system is bigger than pluto's orbit (a few light hours)... A lot bigger.

Theoretically, the diameter could be as big as one light year in diameter.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Living with a Jail Breaked iPhone - <AUTHOR> I look easy enough to jail break an iPhone, which I consider, so I can install the cydia appstore.
I have not been able to find any articles regarding the daily life with a jail broken IPhone.
Except for obvious security implications, what is your experience doing this. Have your phone become unstable? Does it stop working each time apple push an update. Anything you would like to share in this regard? <comment><USER2> I extended the life of my iPad 2 by jail breaking. I can't say for the updates since Apple stopped updating it. It only very recently truly gave up the ghost, so that is one positive.

The negatives: You _must_ re-ailbreak at each upgrade because the vulnerabilities they exploit change by definition between versions.

A lot of the time, the jailbreak fails and you simply restart and do it again. Perfectly fine if you are patient enough to put up with a 15 minute boot cycle.

Eventually it makes you hyper-averse to anything that might cause a reboot - updates and battery drains are dreadful.

And after an update, there is no guarantee that a newer jailbreak will work. o all your cydia-installed apps won't work until you get it jailbroken again.

Sooo, jailbreak for the novelty. Bu be aware the caveats can very easily mak it totally not worthwhile. It did keep my iPad alive and usable for years, but there was nothing smooth about the process.

Of course, ymmv. There are people out there that probably find cydia to be awesome in every regard.</comment>


Ask HN: What cryptocurrency-loaded debit card do you use? - <AUTHOR> I'd like to use one. Providers I'm aware of: AdvCash, Shakepay, Cryptopay.me. <comment><USER2> Bad idea, I've got plenty of crypto, but I wouldn't pay a percentage of it for a company to get me liquidity to use it as a card.

Just sell some and get a normal card. It's a bad money-wise decision for now.

When they start to settle transactions for the same pricing they do for normal CCs, with the same monthly fee, it's worth it, otherwise, bad idea.

This is like travelling to a country and using your CC everywhere, when you could get a better currency exchange rate by not using it and just getting some fiat. If you gonna take those kind of decisions, why invest in crypto at all?

I know that some people gonna hate this, perhaps because they do got cards or they are the companies which make money doing that.

<comment><USER3> In some countries, your solution is more expensive than the BTC CC fee.

<comment><USER2> then good, but most of the countries, not rly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use the Bitpay VISA card and it's worked flawlessly for me for the past year. Sometimes it takes a _bit_ for enough confirmations to pile on for Bitpay to release funds...but 98% of the time it happens within seconds.

$10 in BTC to order the card. $2 ATM fee in the US (I never use an ATM for this thing...mostly online purchases and the occasional "forgot-my-other-card" purchase). Conversion rate is reasonable.

I tried using Shakepay but did not have a good on-boarding experience.

The one thing I don't like about Bitpay is that their mobile app is total garbage - I only use the web interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> They seem to be the veteran in this space, but their docs seem largely US oriented. For European clientele, it's mentioned that an EU issuer is partnered, but not if EUR cards are supported, or what the exchange rates are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems to me like an expensive way to pay. Correct me if I am wrong but these debit cards have higher fees compared to using a fiat based Mastercard or Visa right?

Because for every transaction you have extra crypto <-> fiat conversion which must have some fee attached to it by vendor who does the conversion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Normal fees are 1% loading fee and 1$ monthly maintenance fee.

In some situations, for example as a substitute to paypal, this is less expensive. Paypal charges 4% for withdrawing funds. Correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER5> Paypal is probably more expensive. But why would you use Paypal instead of normal debit/credit card? Not sure what is advantage of Paypal these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that Paypal isn't that interesting. As for crypto cards, they have the advantage of an anonymous way (in the case of foregoing Know-Your-Customer processes) of spending potentially-anonymous currency (crypto currency).

<comment><USER6> which implementation of cryptocurrency is anonymous? My understanding of bitcoin is that it is basically a hash of all previous transactions.

The people who ripped off Mt. Gox went through great lengths to obfuscate their transactions but were unsuccessful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm waiting on [http://MetalPay.com](http://MetalPay.com)

Their alpha should be coming out any day now with the beta scheduled by end of year (I think)

<comment><USER7> Update:

Alpha scheduled for end of October:

[https://blog.metalpay.com/metal-dev- update-2/](https://blog.metalpay.com/metal-dev-update-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bitpay?</comment>


Ask HN: a twisted unconference on tech, got ideas/tips/tricks? - <AUTHOR>

I'm kicking off a technology unconference with a very particular format: a weekend, a few hours, 50 people, only Lightning Talks and Dojos, all self-organized with the intent to share experiences and ideas --- and when I say "all", it means, that all participants must go to talk as well as to listen. So, no content consumers, only content creators allowed.
The idea is to keep high energy levels while distinct talks about diverse subjects (from Design to Development, and from Entrepreneurship to Career), come and go in no more than 5 minutes - so people can't get into much details and the conversation has to occur, preferably in a bar with a beer at hand.
We've put up a website at http://desconf.org (access the translated version by google with http://bit.ly/desctrans) about 5 days ago and we already have tons of retwits, some followers, and a some companies wanting to join as partners.
So, any input about the event format and theme, and any tips or tricks about putting up an event?? <comment><AUTHOR> btw, Dojos are going to be Coding Dojo, _and_ Design Dojos (for both graphical and UI/UX) -- following same Coding Dojo principles.</comment>


Chinese Activists under DDoS - <AUTHOR> http://anti-ddos-protection.com/chinese-activists-under-ddos-attack/

<comment><USER2> I actually sent an email offering to help (I have a lot of experience mitigating DDoS attacks) but never received a reply. I imagine they must already have something in the works to resolve this.

<comment><USER3> Just curious, how are DDoS attacks mitigated?

<comment><USER2> Depends on the attack and how sophisticated it is. For most layer 7 attacks like this one, you can filter e.g. specific user agents or protocols. One thing that often works (but has some false positives with simpler search engines) is dropping all HTTP/1.0 traffic, because any remotely modern browser uses HTTP/1.1. Essentially you block anything that's unusual, like specific user agents (reflected attacks from user agents containing 'Wordpress' and 'PHP' come to mind a lot especially), HTTP headers, and so forth. Ideally as far upstream as possible, but it can be done on the server level as long as you have enough horsepower to throw at iptables or the web server, and your connection doesn't get saturated. The right IP blacklists can help a lot as well.

<comment><USER4> It does not work in this case, rogue states like China are using national backbone internet as DDoS tool.

You can find research papers back in 2001 about GFW. The DNS spoofing "service" can be easily used as a x3 amplification tool by anyone.

<comment><USER2> The implication in the article seems to be it's a GET/POST flood though, not DNS-based. Granted, for DNS amplification, having big enough pipes starts to matter a lot more, which is where providers like OVH shine because of how much network capacity they have, but it's not like DNS traffic can't be filtered. I haven't read the research papers you're referring to though, so I may be overlooking something obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shouldn't it be just anti-ddos or ddos-protection? I read anti-ddos-protetion to mean that they're against the things that protect against ddos. Which they're not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably they're going to bash DDoS protection providers there in the future, who knows. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9233491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9233491)

</comment><comment><USER7> Could you give a report of the statistics of the IP address in the DDOS attack? Maybe you can block all the ip address from China. As I known in China people have to use VPN to access some sensitive websites (such as 8964, falungong, dajiyuan).

<comment><USER4> That's their dilemma.

One one hand they are abusing CDN or cloud platforms for their broken "collateral freedom" project

One the other hand, every effective DDOS protection outside China has been blocked by China already, like Google Project Shield, Cloudflare, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I assume we can then count the days until they simply block AWS as well? But that explains why they don't use one of these to keep the bad traffic away from their hosting infrastructure and instead of AWS eat all of it.

<comment><USER4> AWS does not work in China. Tons of EC2 blocked. Rest are just too slow to connect (like >400ms pings)

Very few S3 CDN IP address left with 443 port open, so greatfire.org carefully picked those and hosting content mirrors there.

Although what they operate is totally free speech, legal and reasonable, but it's like your bad neighbor in a VPS who eats all your co-hosting CPU, bandwidth and disk IO. You have no choice but move to somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> BTW: you can put the contents of Greatfire.org to github, it is free.

</comment><comment><USER8> China operating under an unprecedented level of transparency!</comment>


How to Get Rich – Without Getting Lucky (An Analysis of the Naval Tweetstorm) - <AUTHOR> https://lifemathmoney.com/how-to-get-rich-without-getting-lucky-an-analysis-of-the-naval-tweetstorm/ <comment><USER2> "if you don't have the aptitude for coding, media would be the next best thing."

This seems like a self-justification more than anything supported by his own stated methodology. This line of thinking is why we're stuck in the swamp of oversharing and status economics.</comment>


Hugo: A Fast And Flexible Static Site Generator Built In GoLang - <AUTHOR> http://spf13.com/project/hugo <comment><USER2> I took a quick look at your main.go file and have a suggestion.

I strongly recommend against using external dependencies (e.g. bitbucket.org/howeyc/fsnotify) for something important. It's fine for development, but if "howeyc" decides he's sick of bitbucket and deletes his account, you're now screwed.

If you want to use "go get" to install Hugo, make forks of the external dependencies. bitbucket.org/spf13/fsnotify and what not. You can then keep those updated at your own pace, rather than waking up to see that someone has changed their API and your code no longer compiles.

Remember the game "Haunts"? IIRC this was one of their problems--they failed to manage dependencies appropriately and got into major hell. Many C and C++ programs ship source to external libraries along with their own source for this exact reason. We've taken to doing the same.

Here's what Brian Fitzpatrick has to say about "go get":

 _" Go get is nice, for you know, playing around, but if you're doing something serious and you're going to deploy binaries to production, your deploy to production script should not involve fetching some random dude's stuff on Github"_

We have taken to making a go "workspace" in our repos, with a bash script at the top level and a src/ directory containing all the libraries and such we've written. The bash script sets GOPATH and compiles everything in src/. It's quick and you avoid dependency hell.

<comment><USER3> > I strongly recommend against using external dependencies (e.g. > bitbucket.org/howeyc/fsnotify) for something important. It's fine for > development, but if "howeyc" decides he's sick of bitbucket and deletes his > account, you're now screwed.

How? When you `go get` a package, it physically becomes part of your repository. If "howeyc" deletes his account, it doesn't affect the copy checked out under my repository. Unless you go out of your way to exclude the `go get` packages from getting checked in, you are safe.

<comment><USER2> When you 'go get github.com/spf13/hugo', it checks out a copy into $GOPATH/src/github.com/spf13/hugo. It then fetches all the external dependencies listed in hugo's source and fetches them, so you'll get $GOPATH/src/bitbucket.org/howeyc/fsnotify etc. Those exist in your own local tree, but if howeyc deletes his repository and somebody new tries to check out hugo, he'll get an error when "go get" fails to find bitbucket.org/howeyc/fsnotify.

Now, what you as the developer can do, as I mentioned in my original post, is get all the packages you need and put them in a $GOPATH directory, so you have $GOPATH/src/hugo and $GOPATH/src/fsnotify etc., then check in the entire $GOPATH directory. Your code then imports "fsnotify" rather than "bitbucket.org/howeyc/fsnotify" and so on. This repository is no longer trivially fetchable+compileable with "go get", but in my opinion that's a small price to pay--and compilation is still very simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea of a static binary with no dependencies. It would be nice if my static blog generator fit in with my usual unix toolset. So good job.

Just one nitpick on the marketing copy: _why does it matter what it 's written in?_ As a user it could be written in assembler for all I care. As long as it works as advertised on the tin and it's what I'm looking for, who cares if it's written in Go?

Anyway, I'm looking forward to checking it out and seeing if it'll fit my use case.

<comment><USER5> _" why does it matter what it's written in?"_

As jpalomaki pointed out, it matters since it's open source. If the user chooses Hugo and wants to modify or extend it down the line, he or she will be writing Go.

And it might also matter to the author for a few more reasons:

First, Go is a language rising in popularity ([http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=golang#q=golang&cmpt=...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=golang#q=golang&cmpt=q)), and seems especially popular on HN lately. Mere mention of Go will drive more traffic to his site. (This could be supported by the fact that he constantly refers to the language as GoLang, which is much more search-engine friendly than the proper name Go).

Second, if he enjoys working with Go, then raising the language's visibility will be good for the language, and good for developers who have invested in the language.

<comment><USER6> Looking at the GoLang graph : I have to admit that I'm a little surprised to see so much of that interest originating from China (Shenzhen specifically).

<comment><USER7> They seem to be making a concerted effort to make Go Chinese friendly [https://code.google.com/p/go-zh/](https://code.google.com/p/go-zh/)

<comment><USER8> That would imply the initiative came from the Go team, and I can't recall ever seeing anything on go-dev or go-nuts suggesting such. That said, there are quite a lot of Asians on the go-nuts board.

What might play part of this is that one of the main contributors to Go is a guy calling himself "minux"; the guy is pretty fucking brilliant. IIRC, minux is French with Chinese roots, and he's one of the owners of the Chinese port. Note that he doesn't actually work for Google, so so far it's all community driven. Similarly, one of the earliest Go-specific IDE's is LitteIDE, written by VisualFC. I suspect it's partially thanks to them that the Chinese community was off to a good start. Well, that and UTF8.

Anyway, it's all speculation at this point; it would be nice if someone involved with the Chinese Go community could clear this up though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, here is mine: [https://github.com/piranha/gostatic](https://github.com/piranha/gostatic)

Unfortunately it has no pretty documentation, only README on Github. On the other hand, Hugo seems to have a bit more hardcoded configuration, while gostatic was written with 'whatever you want' idea in mind and is (maybe, I just skimmed though Hugo docs) a bit more tech-savvy people oriented.

Anyway, it would be interesting to compare performance. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't seen yours before. It looks good as well. I'd agree that Hugo is more opinionated (but not as opinionated as jekyll) and aimed at a broader audience.

It would be great to compare approaches to things and see if we can't share and improve both in the process.

The shortcodes feature impacts performance quite a bit as it's all runtime inspection, but I felt it was an essential feature. Even with it it's still fast enough that it still builds the entire site in what feels like realtime.

<comment><USER9> > It would be great to compare approaches to things and see if we can't share > and improve both in the process.

Indeed. Do you track dependencies to not re-render things which were not changed?

> The shortcodes feature impacts performance quite a bit as it's all runtime > inspection

Ha-ha, in gostatic you have this `inner-template` processor, which parses your page as go template and then renders it. Naturally, it slows down rendering a bit, but still it renders my site from scratch in 0.5s (~250 pages with some inner-templates, heh).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice work! Here's my Node.js-based static site generator, for interested users or devs who want to borrow ideas:

[https://github.com/jaredhanson/kerouac](https://github.com/jaredhanson/kerouac)

</comment><comment><USER8> Dammit, already taken:

[http://hugo.neocities.org/](http://hugo.neocities.org/)

Would have been such a nice fit.

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks great, nice work! A few things I'd recommend for the future:

\- Theme plugins; text based as input to Hugo, not golang packages that would have to be compiled.

\- Editor integration so others can make a WordPress-style site editor. Just conventions about layout, I think?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great ideas.

For the theme plugins, could you expand a bit on what you mean or how this would work?

<comment><USER11> Themes should be a collection of template/css/whatever files that can be unzipped to the right location and used by Hugo. That would need standards for the file types and directory structure, config settings for which themes to use, or which parts of the theme to use.

I was thinking about a WordPress replacement in Golang. WordPress themes can be zipped and shared as a bundle, which has made a large variety of themes freely available.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is already the case. The source directory has this structure. /layouts is all the templates, /static is all the css & javascript. Just don't include a content directory and it would work just like a wordpress theme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just a plug for a similar tool I wrote in python. I feel it's a bit more lightweight than Hugo.

[https://github.com/jimktrains/gus](https://github.com/jimktrains/gus)

<comment><USER13> More lightweight in what way?

I wrote something similar myself, also in python, and put it all in one file, organized logically, with extra tools for making management easier. I'm not sure I really see how this is "more lightweight" compared to something else...

For reference, it's located at [https://github.com/dkuntz2/essays/blob/master/pavement.py](https://github.com/dkuntz2/essays/blob/master/pavement.py).

<comment><USER12> More light-weight as it doesn't have dependencies on Git, Hg, and Bzr.

<comment><USER14> These deps are only for installing from source (due to third-party packages using different SCMs).

<comment><USER12> Makes sense. I was trying to figure out what he was doing with so many in his own code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This'd work pretty well with git hooks. Pretty sure you could configure a server so that if you pushed to a repository on it it'd recompile the website. That'd be pretty handy.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why in the world is there a static screenshot of the hugo website, with a button labeled "Get Started", on the hugo website?

<comment><USER17> 'cause, y'know, the more static the better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've seen this a few days ago, and I've started building a Yeoman generator for it.

It's at [https://github.com/celsomiranda/generator- hugo](https://github.com/celsomiranda/generator-hugo)

There's not much done yet, but all contributions/ideas are welcome.

</comment><comment><USER19> So this depends on git, bzr and hg? Why?

<comment><USER20> Only if you're building from the source which is stored in a git repo and uses dependencies from projects stored in bzr and hg repos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks like the contribution guide link on [http://hugo.spf13.com/doc/installing](http://hugo.spf13.com/doc/installing) is pointing to the wrong place ([http://doc/contributing](http://doc/contributing))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is awesome. I've been looking more and more into these types of generators for creating an OSS portal directory for Web, Mobile, Desktop, and Servers; Essentially a Kippt.

Also thanks to everyone posting their projects.

<comment><USER23> I've got a mini-review, stalled, of some of the options:

[https://github.com/skx/static-site-generators](https://github.com/skx/static- site-generators)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's the advantage of something like Jekyll over Hugo? I'm thinking of using the latter, it looks nice.

</comment><comment><USER25> git, mercurial, and bazaar?

Those dependencies give me pause.

<comment><USER26> Those dependencies exist in order for "go get" to be able to download source dependencies that are stored in those kinds of repositories. You don't have to install them. "go get" would complain about if it encountered a dependency that required one of them, but you could install the dependency manually if you wanted to. It's, of course, less convenient.</comment></comment>


Illinois inmates increasingly sued by state to recoup incarceration costs - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/02/illinois-inmates-sued-incarceration-costs <comment><USER2> In a former life, I was a member of this system.

And this system is so fucking broken.

Let's make people broke using tax-payer funds, and put them in a position where they are likely to fail, instead of succeed.

Reminds me of being jailed for being broke. [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/jailed-for- being-b...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/jailed-for-being- broke-20150623)

</comment><comment><USER3> "There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do." ― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

That quote summarizes perfectly my attitude towards the article. We create a system that incentives people to be inhuman.</comment>


Google outed me - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/google-outed-me-7000025416/ <comment><USER2> This is why the whole "real name" trend is insane to me. Who gets to decide what my "real name" even is except for me? I have this problem on a MUCH more limited scale in that I go by my middle name--a shortened version at that--and have for almost all of my decades on this planet. However, for many services, I'm not allowed to use anything except my "legal name." This is a name that, I hasten to add, ought to include my middle name since it's ON MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE, unlike the souls from the article who are using a different yet still identifiable name for a very important reason. For some reason, "legal" or "real" name only seems to mean "the first and last words from the 'name' line on your identity document."

Names are not intended to be unique or, frankly, immutable. A nickname, full name, shortened name, set of initials, or even a creative symbol can all stand for the same person and it's nobody's business, especially for a free "social" site, what relationship that string of letters has to that person.

(I would like to reiterate that I am not putting "oops, can't use my middle name" on the same level as "holy cowbells, an intimate detail of my life was just revealed to coworkers and potentially-hostile reporters without my knowledge or consent." It's just a small point of overlap that gives me a tiny bit of insight.)

<comment><USER3> I'm in the same boat. I actually didn't find out what my first name was until I was in 2nd grade and I saw my birth certificate for the first time. My parents named me "Mohandas" after Gandhi, but were concerned about that being the name I went by, so not only did I always go by "Schuyler", my 2nd name, but my 2nd, 3rd & last names were on every legal document I ever filed.

About 3 years ago an agent at the RMV in MA, while looking at my birth certificate, which has all 4 names on it, decided that my license had to be issued to Mohandas. I showed her everything I had, passport, taxes, etc. yet she wouldn't relent and I couldn't figure out any way to protest it. At first it didn't really matter, until I got a letter from my bank that my car insurance was issued through, that I was Mohandas now, so far as they were concerned.

Then, when I went to get a license in my new state, they also insisted, though they were much more polite about it and raised the issue up to supervisors, etc. In the end they sent me to get a current copy of my social security card, which didn't have Mohandas written on it. When I arrived at the SSA...they balked at the difference and issued me a new card with Mohandas in first, and my 3rd name dropped completely. That sealed the deal at the DMV, so now my social security number, my license, my bank statements, utilities, etc. are all issued to "Mohandas" which isn't an identity I have any connection to.

Sorry for the rant, it's just been a frustrating, strange couple years as I've watched my lifelong identity transform out of my control.

EDIT: Would also like to add that in the scope of the article and the very real suffering this issue is causing an already embattled minority, my issue is absolutely not comparable.

<comment><USER4> You do not have to go through this. You may change your name legally for any reason as long as you are not trying to defraud anyone if you live in the US or a common law country. Your name is someone that you choose to be known by.

Generally you just need to go to a judge and get a court order of your new desired legal name, and prove that you aren't trying to evade taxes or defraud anyone. Then you can bring that paperwork to the proper people.

Look up the process in your new state and get your documents reissued.

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

EDIT: if you still want to keep Mohandas, maybe try keeping it as a second name, or part of your first name. Like you can be "Schuyler Mohandas" as your first name. Having two first names is common in some areas, such as the American South.

<comment><USER3> Your edit is actually a great idea, and I know it seems simple, yet, in my annoyance it genuinely hadn't occurred to me. Thanks so much for the reply!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to think that Google Plus/Hangouts/etc will go down as one of the biggest bungles social networking, but thankfully we have things like Digg and MySpace to point to for worse.

If any start-up or other smaller business had screwed up this badly, they would be bankrupt. Google survives this only because it's not their main revenue source.

I used to be a big Google fanboy, and I still buy Android stuff because it's the biggest OSS platform in its space.

But Google has fallen. Not because they're spying on us, not because they're "evil" or something, but because they _suck_ at the big moves. They're scatterbrained and clumsy and they screw up incessantly. And then defend the obviously-bad decisions as "user error" when their platform is obviously inscrutable for users.

I just set up my wife with a fresh android phone and the process was _miserable_. There were days of it asking her to register for Plus ("I thought I already had a Plus account") or install some Maps support gadget ("I thought I already had Maps") and tedious errors. It all worked out in the end, but it was not a good user experience.

Google never planned to "out" this woman. That's the thing to remember. Google never sat down and said "we want to expose every transperson". They just screwed up. Because they suck. They ask repeatedly permission for dumb things that don't need permission, and then they wander over and make clumsy, grotesque changes without considering the consequences.

The whole "Social Layer" thing was a great idea, really. Google needed a Disqus-like platform to integrate across all their services.

But they completely dropped the ball on implementation. It's too opinionated about things it shouldn't be. If you're running a single site, you can be opinionated and say "Real Names Please". If you're running a _framework_ you need to let the users and page-owners set the agenda.

</comment><comment><USER6> The worst part for me is Bill Simmons apology in Grantland[*]. With phrases like "we definitely screwed up", "moving forward", "we appreciated the dialogue", it reads more like a server-outage postmortem, rather than a somber response to the death of a person.

Also, the article 2769 words too long, which is about 2700 too many.

[http://grantland.com/features/the-dr-v-story-a-letter- from-t...](http://grantland.com/features/the-dr-v-story-a-letter-from-the- editor/)

<comment><USER7> One important fact that this apology made clear for me was that they were never actually planning on outing her before her suicide:

"2\. You need to make it more clear within the piece that Caleb never, at any point, threatened to out her as he was doing his reporting.

3\. You need to make it more clear that, before her death, you never internally discussed the possibility of outing her (and we didn't)."

If you read the original piece without this knowledge it sounds like they wrote an article outing her, told her they would publish it and she then killed herself. What actually seems to have happened is that they only wrote the version of the article outing her after her death.

<comment><USER8> Still, I don't get why this piece insists on their lack of intention to out her in the published article, while admitting they outed her to an investor.

Feels like 'we dont want to tell the world about it, we just told it to some public figure in your field'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google have indexed the Internet. They have indexed public roads (Street View). Both things are pretty useful. Pretty cool.

The issue now is they want to index people.. pretty creepy. This can be seen with Google+ and the various inflexible policies it has towards Google accounts. Is Google "person search" really that far off? Already you can email anyone with a Google account right(?) How long before you put in a name and a town and you get Google+, Facebook, Twitter profiles along with posts related to that user from their public names and confirmed alias.

The only way to opt out is to destroy your Google account which is a shame as gmail + docs are pretty awesome. I don't know how that would affect Android for the day to day user.

<comment><USER10> Primarily only by not being able to use the play store, and having to disable the 'Google Contacts Sync' to store numbers locally without having google sniff them.

Make a gmail account, add no personal data, and use it only for the playstore, and problem solved.

<comment><USER11> It's really pissing me off that in CM11 (Android 4.4?), when I go to add a contact, the message is "your new contact will be synchronized with <google account>". As far as I can tell, the option to store numbers locally has been intentionally hidden (the only way I can think of to do it is create the information on a different phone, export it to a contacts file, and transfer the file...).

<comment><USER12> Have you tried turning off Contacts synchronization in Settings > Accounts ?

<comment><USER11> Yep, but I still get the message.

<comment><USER12> That sounds like it could be a bug, you should consider filing it on [https://code.google.com/p/android](https://code.google.com/p/android)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is NOT true that I can avoid opening a Google Plus/Facebook account, and thus protect my privacy.

Google/Facebook has been striving to integrate the public account with many important services. Google/Facebook are a monopoly/very dominant in email, social networks, navigation, smartphones, etc. Some online services already require a Google/Facebook account. Your social media account determines your credit score[1], or can get/deny you a job position. This is going to get more widespread.

A social media account has become mandatory, and the law should step in to protect our privacy and safety.

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230477310...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304773104579266423512930050)

<comment><USER14> I would not betrust anybody with my money who forced me to have a Google/Facebook/whatev account.

<comment><USER15> You can have your employer use Google services and consequently require you to create a Google account.

<comment><USER16> What's to stop you from creating a Google account specifically for that purpose? Worked for me.

<comment><USER17> Yeah just make a Google+ account for work. And when Google asks for your real name, and nobody at works knows you're transgender, what do you do? Put in your legal name that's still set to your old gender? Put in your new name that Google rejects because it doesn't match the name on your phone bill / credit card / whatever. Put in a fake name and wait until your account gets deleted?

<comment><USER16> > Put in your new name that Google rejects because it doesn't match the name > on your phone bill / credit card / whatever.

This is the part that confuses me -- granted, my Google account for work has my legal name on it, and I don't have to deal with a mismatch between that and the name I go by. But I have several throwaway Google accounts, and have never had my real name turn up on any of them. Is this purely because I don't associate them with my phone number, and don't use them for e.g. purchases in the Play Store or whatever? Are you saying that, if I did that with a throwaway account, I'd suddenly find that it had ceased to be a throwaway, and had my legal name and suchlike associated with it? Pardon my confusion -- it's just that I'm astonished at the idea of Google, or indeed anyone, pulling a trick like that. Is that actually what goes on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That article doesn't make any sense. I have to read each paragraphs two or three times and take mental notes to deduce who's who and who's doing what to who.

<comment><USER7> The author's name definitely rings a bell. I can't recall the details, but I am pretty sure she has been associated with quite a few articles like this on HN in the past, most of which were horribly written and turned out to be largely false or exaggerated. Does anybody still have a link for one of them?

<comment><USER19> I wish we'd have a way to store such instances somewhere and connect it to a browser plugin or something, so that when one opens an article a message is shown: "The author of an article has a history of exaggerating, writing falsehood and outright lying. See [link] for details."

<comment><USER20> I suppose you could use this: [https://plus.google.com/authorship](https://plus.google.com/authorship)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some LGBT rights organisations rank companies by how LGB and/or T friendly the organisation is to companies. Large tech companies often come out quite good. These rankings should start including factors that affect the customers of the company, which means Google would start losing rankings due to actions like this.

<comment><USER22> The rights organizations should award negative prizes to the worst-behaving companies and organizations, bundled at a well-publicizable awards event. This generates bad press on those companies, which in turn might do some good.

I see some candidates for such awards right there in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Vic Gundotra.

Please, get this guy fired. G+ is the biggest failure of Google. It has destroyed gmail chat with hangouts. Youtube with stupid G+ comment integration. It's slow, privacy unfriendly (to say the least, this present article is sadly crazy!), technically weak and socially awkward. They even fuck up the search, even the search!, with a strong bias on G+ "likes" and G+ authorship.

The Internet needs blood... now.

<comment><USER24> > It has destroyed gmail chat with hangouts. Youtube with stupid G+ comment > integration.

These are pretty much huge improvements over the previous implementations though?

>They even fuck up the search, even the search!

I've personally found this useful on many occasions. True, I wish they could integrate with Twitter like they did before, but that's going to take coordination with Twitter. What would you improve regarding search/G+?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm starting to get seriously scared about Android 4.4 whenever it becomes more widespread.

I use CyanogenMod, who should strip out some of the worst intrusions, but I guess with 4.4, I'll need a replacement dialer and SMS as I don't let Hangouts get anywhere near my phone, and the dialer will be sending numbers I call / get called by to google. I've looked at Handcent for SMS, but are there any privacy-focused dialer replacements?

<comment><USER25> Please don't buy into the FUD, there is plenty on control and notice about identity in hangouts: [https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/3441321?hl=en](https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/3441321?hl=en)

[http://www.groovypost.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/12/Hangout...](http://www.groovypost.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/12/Hangouts-SMS-turn-on.png)

<comment><USER10> It's still not going onto my phone. Merging google+ into SMS is a bad idea, and dangerous to privacy no matter what options there are today that will likely disappear later. Google have consistently proven themselves hostile to privacy and user choice.

I think if there's anything I'm not buying into, it's a new account which seems to only exist to promote Hangouts / google+.

<comment><USER26> I'm curious (not necessarily in relation to you specifically) what people's thoughts have been in a similar vein about iMessage vs SMS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd love to know what benefits the real name system has been providing users. It seems like it's causing more outrage and problems (i.e. recent Youtube comment redesign) than actual good.

<comment><USER10> It lets google scrape more data to profit from.

Oh, you meant benefit to users? None. They're the product as far as google is concerned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > And, seems to me, we still have this (white) male dominated journalism > elite, with their myopic, pseudo-macho ideas of what truth and the pursuit > of it means.

What a nice way to plug in some generalizing, offensive, misandric comments.

<comment><USER29> Yeah things like that are a good way to immediately discredit any other content you had, regardless of its legitimacy.

I also read the word "triggering". A term I can never seem to figure out in it's context. It seems some people believe they (at least ought to) exist in some Utopian society where everyone should know what may upset everyone else (even in the slightest way) and endeavour to avoid at all costs. I mean it's maybe a nice concept on the whole, but the over intricate levels these people take it to are ridiculous.

The whole article smacks of entitlement. Simplifying a name, or even a gender is not a personal attack or an attempt at discrimination, it's just in truth a simple system. If you use ten names and five genders, then why the hell should things like this cater to you? Not specifically to ignore you, but if everyone has these over indulgent massively personal requirements then all cannot be fulfilled.

I'm sure there are people in the same situation that haven't had this problem, so how it isn't user error is beyond me. It's a free service...

<comment><USER17> We can't walk on eggshells all day because anything we say could trigger someone's traumatic memory. But use some common sense. If you're gonna talk about rape, murder, suicide, and your audience may not expect it, ... maybe give people a warning.

Also - entitlement schmitlement. Expecting a company to handle your personal information discretely is a reasonable expectation. When Google acted recklessly with peoples private information, they violated their users trust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I was surprised by the tweet saying she was glad she lived in a state where it was illegal to fire her...does this imply there are states where it would be legal to fire someone who was transgender?

<comment><USER10> In a significant part of the US, you can fire people with no notice, with no recourse, for any/no reason.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At- will_employment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment)

<comment><USER31> Which is why unemployment is lower than in Europe.

<comment><USER10> Europe isn't a country. It's a region with both strong and weak economies. A regional average of unemployment rates is invalid and useless for any meaningful statistics.

US: 7.3%

Strong economies in europe:

UK: 7.5%

Germany: 5.2%

Denmark: 6.7%

Norway: 3.1%

Weak economies in europe:

Greece 27.3%

Spain 26.7%

Italy: 12.5%

You can't average countries with completely different governments and economies to produce a regional figure, just like an average of the US' and Mexico's (4.25%) would be equally meaningless.

<comment><USER32> I'm not even sure these numbers are comparable. Who is gathering and reporting the statistics? Are they all using the exact same criteria and methodology? Unemployment is one of the most politically-charged statistics you can find. I'd be shocked if all these countries reported it accurately.

<comment><USER33> They are not comparable, nor is the current rate in the US with historic data since the definitions have changed multiple times. It is very much the same with comparing infant mortality since several EU countries count it very differently than the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's always easy to blame someone else, especially if that "someone" is already being hated on by a lot of people.

Google only knows as much information as you give them [edit: is publicly available or can be bought from someone else]. Using a mobile OS that integrates many services from Google, without doing proper research on what these services are allowed to actually do and then blaming Google for using the data, you agreed to let them use, is just wrong.

People just started to forget: Everything comes with a price. Whether it's money, viewing ads or providing personal information, in the end a product is never truly free.

<comment><USER15> _Google only knows as much information as you give them_

Google also knows all the information _anyone else_ gave them.

<comment><USER35> Yes, but that cat is well and truly out of that bag, so (for me, personally) it's time to take as many precautions as I can. One of those is being very careful around Google services. I've since replaced my use of all of them (thank you ownCloud, and DAV!). I've got far fewer consequences to worry about than other people, but for me the trade off is worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> While it's obviously very unfortunate that all this happened, this is not the full story. The words, "Hannan told her he was going to break the agreement not to write about her personal life and reveal her transgender status without her consent," are a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened.

Also, it's a lot of misdirected anger. The reporter's job is to get the story — and in this case Hannan's editors admit they pushed him to do so.

[http://grantland.com/features/the-dr-v-story-a-letter- from-t...](http://grantland.com/features/the-dr-v-story-a-letter-from-the- editor/)

<comment><USER37> It's hard to defend grantland after they wrote a 2900 word apology, but Dr. V

\+ wasn't a doctor \+ claimed her putter worked on "magical" physics but it didn't \+ claimed she was an MIT professor who invented bluetooth and worked on the B2 and had top secret classifications \+ claimed she was a Vanderbilt \+ claimed because she was a Vanderbilt she has special relationships with Hilton \+ claimed her special relationships with Hilton could be used to get access to Hilton golf courses and Hilton customers

And had at least one investor who said he lost $60,000 of his money

I think this amounts to fraud. I think that changes the story from "marvelous putter" to con artists defrauding investors and consumers. I think that when you commit crimes and especially the crime of fraud it becomes very germane what your history is because you may have defrauded other people in the past.

I think no matter who you are if you have a secret you don't want out the best advice is not to commit crimes.

I don't know where in the priority for the local DA or the SEC defrauding an investor of $60,000 is, but it seems to have been ignored by everyone eager to take offense at how this article was written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Sorry, why didn't they change their name on google, just like the bank, council tax documents and such.

this information could have been easily gleaned when logged in to google, it's not necessarily googles fault if you provide them false or stale information and fail to change it.

<comment><USER39> FTFA:

      I don't remember actually giving this detail to Google, nor can I find anywhere within the settings where anything other than "Nora" is listed

<comment><USER40> There seems to be an implication that Google somehow obtained this information and added it to her account automatically, while this might be technically feasible I'm not aware of any actual claim that this is the case.

Much more likely is that the user entered her real name when she signed up initially and just forgot about it (how many people here can recall what details they gave to MySpace or Yahoo a decade ago?)

<comment><USER41> That's still missing the point. Even IF the user gave that information voluntarily in the past (she claims she didn't and we should believe her by default in my world, out of courtesy and respect) - the quote continues and says that there wasn't a setting to be found that referred to the wrong/unwanted name.

IF that name was given previously the user still needs to have final say about her appearance online, her very own account data. Saying "You probably gave it out earlier and yeah, maybe there's no way to remove it from the history of your account" wouldn't make Google look better in any way.

<comment><USER40> No she doesn't. The exact quote is "I don't remember" which is completely different from "I didn't". That's the danger of implication, it makes you think one thing is meant while another is actually said.

<comment><USER42> Uh, no, "I don't remember doing X" and "I didn't do X" mean exactly the same thing. The first one is just more explicit.

<comment><USER43> No, they don't mean the same thing, even approximately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> a deep lack of understanding and empathy from some here. whether or not someone fucks up because they fail to understand how a service works shouldn't result in them getting outed in a way that can be deeply damaging to them. The lack of care and foresight that google are showing is reprehensible.

<comment><USER45> How does Google know what information would be deeply damaging to them? Perhaps it's obvious in this case, but everyone has different secrets. Short of not sharing any information at all about anyone, there will always be the potential for damaging information to be shared.

I'm no fan of Google's creeping profile integration, but to say:

> Whether or not someone fucks up because they fail to understand how a > service works shouldn't result in them getting outed in a way that can be > deeply damaging to them.

is ludicrous. If I don't understand how my Facebook status update works and type damaging secrets into that, is that Facebook's fault? Eventually there has to be some level of user responsibility to not share information that will be damaging to them.

<comment><USER46> "Short of not sharing any information at all about anyone..." Agreed! And online services, like Google and Facebook, should NOT be sharing ANY information with ANYONE without EXPLICIT permission from the person who's information it is.

I may want to share a photo of a me at a party with a sub-set of my friends, that doesn't mean that I want that photo to be available to my mother or to a potential employee 50 years from now. When G+ started they introduced 'circles' which encapsulates this concept, and I was happy.

Since google combined all google services under single user name -without giving users a choice in the matter- they lost my support. With the exception of gmail, I've stopped using google services; and as soon as I find an alternative to gmail that meets my needs I'm dropping that. And I haven't used facebook in many years, for the same privacy control reasons.

<comment><USER45> Anyone even vaguely knowledgeable about technology knows what these company's business models are. They involve targeting adverts at you based on the information (directly supplied or assumed) that they have on you. In Google's case it's been this way for over a decade. This isn't news.

If you have information which is likely to damage you significantly, don't share it on the platforms they provide. Encrypt it. I can't be the only one who's accidentally shared things as public on Facebook. Assume that something you share via these sites (rather than send via a single receipiant message or similar) is semi-public, because history has shown that it often is.

<comment><USER46> There's a big difference between (a) doing text or image analysis to find out what I drink and then providing _advertisements_ to _me_ for that drink and (b) telling _anyone I have ever, in any way, digitally interacted with_ what I drink!

I have no problem with the first (and in fact prefer it to untargeted ads) and a huge, massive, deal-breaking problem with the second.

I don't disagree that people are responsible _to a degree_ for their own data security. But this case highlights that there is a limit to an individuals _ability_ to maintain their own data security. This woman intentionally shared one name with people associated with one account. If the allegation is true, google then shared a different name with people on that account.

Saying this woman is responsible is like saying I'm personally responsible for my credit card information being leaked by Target. Yes, I used a credit card at Target. Once Target has my information, they should be held accountable for their security and handling of that information. In the same way Google should be held accountable for their security and handling of this woman's information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The Google bashing is getting old. This is yet more evidence that you should be aware of how one service will use the information you give it, and that you should be careful with what information you enter on the internet, no matter what...

<comment><USER48> Yeah, you really should have considered what Google would put on their social network when you signed up for an email account a decade ago before "social network" was even a thing.

<comment><USER26> What a baseless statement.

Gmail started April 2004.

Facebook started February 2004.

At which time Myspace was a year old.

Let's not be disingenuous and throw around nonsensical claims like "when you signed up for an email account a decade before "social network" was even a thing"...

<comment><USER48> -You're parsing that sentence wrong; note the word "ago".

-"social network" is in quotes because while the social networks themselves have been around for awhile, they only became a buzzword and the kind of thing Google would try to clumsily emulate in recent years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Can't we disable G+

Can't we force Google to disable G+? For example, Google has been know to be trigger happy and thinking art works were porn. Or just put an obviously fake name on G+ and let it fall on the "Real Name policy"

Or just quit Google altogether, there. Maybe create then a new account on Google with a fake name.

<comment><USER41> Yes, you can disable G+ (on Android, at least). GTalk/Hangouts can be used with a standard XMPP client - at least somewhat usable and For Now™.

Plus, if you're into CM (as the outed woman was, ironically) you'll get the recommendation to use TextSecure for SMS messages, not Hangout.

I have all these apps/services (Hangout, G+, Google Music, Google Books and probably a bit more) disabled on my phone, so it is definitely doable. I am not sure if it is reasonable and I don't think it should be required to avoid this .. crap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think many posters here are missing the real problem here, Google is taking liberties with (y)our personal data.

Hiding behind the excuse that you could opt out, or that informational leakage is a user problem is disingenuous and can be illustrated by the simple analogy to a telephone directory:

If your telephone directory suddenly arbitrarily decided to indicate beside a listing (a listing you may not have requested) your sexual orientation, gender, criminal history or political affiliation. Would that be ok?

I think the answer is a clear and resounding "no!", and the underlying issue one that Google must address immediately and definitively. I've been migrating away from Google for the past six months or so, but this has now pushed that to the top of my priorities.

So much for "do no evil"

</comment><comment><USER51> I think everyone on the internet should be forced to use their real identity, except for _me_ , because _I_ have a completely legitimate reason for wanting privacy and anonymity!

</comment><comment><USER52> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7012832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7012832)

The original link was filtered/blocked on Hacker News. 19 days ago. :-(

</comment><comment><USER53> In contrast with tag line : "Don't be evil"

<comment><USER54> It doesn't seem like this was intentional in any way. I don't think that counts as being "evil".

<comment><USER55> "Don't be careless?"

<comment><USER56> "Don't underestimate the ability of some segment of the population to be offended by something you do. Whatever you do, you'll offend someone."

Being offended is an epidemic...

<comment><USER57> They seriously hurt a lot of people in a very predictable and avoidable way, and are not interested in fixing the harm they've done. And you're whitewashing it without giving any substantive answer to the points in the linked article.

<comment><USER56> If you don't want to be "outed" by google, why give google the information needed to do that?

Is creating 2 separate google accounts impossible these days?

<comment><USER58> I _had_ two separate accounts. Google merged them despite my telling them not to.

Seems to me HN covered this:

[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/VZSLjkdq...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/VZSLjkdqksG)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745525)

[http://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI.jpg)

Google's proven it _cannot_ be trusted to respect user choice, nor to not arbitrarily change the rules at a later date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I though the Grantland writer outed her to an investor. Sure, Google aided in that, but that was the whole issue.

</comment><comment><USER60> Does anyone know of any guidelines for creating software that is trans- inclusive?

</comment><comment><USER25> To pause the Google-hate, and the same G+ identity talk for just one second I'd like to point out that the details in that post are _not accurate_.

First and most important - the linchpin to that whole post is wrong:

 _Google 's response was that her outing was "user error" \- Google blamed her, the user for not understanding the new, confusing integration._

That statement is untrue, the author is citing a previous reporting that never received any statement from Google: [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google- han...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google-hangouts- faces-criticism-after-outing-trans-woman)

Nonetheless the incident itself was self-inflicted:

The trans woman in question flashed a ROM which skipped the usual disclaimer and notice about which identity will be used: [https://twitter.com/eiridescent/status/419604310213672960](https://twitter.com/eiridescent/status/419604310213672960)

Also it's very unfair to cavalierly invoke that Grantland tragedy and to choose that very provocative title to drive page views.

<comment><USER61> This article is riding the anti-Google+ bandwagon, as you mentioned exploiting a very complex, highly nuanced tragedy to try to bolster page views. It's just as unfortunate to blame complex societal issues (like the acceptance of transgenders, criminal backgrounds, educational history, etc.) on a technology or software product, as if Google Hangouts carefully considered the ramifications of a male versus female name and decided to "out" the user maliciously.

Cue the sardonic "don't be evil" scare-quotes that inevitably appear.

Though I don't know if I'd go as far as blaming the user -- it _is_ possible the system had two or more identifiers and confused them. Indeed, the core purpose of Google+ is as a simple aggregation of disparate identity systems across Google's properties and apps, so such conflicts are a virtual inevitability. Hangouts was upgraded, to much cheering, specifically to aggregate SMS and IM functionality, so if you were living a different life on both things might get complicated.

It's extremely hard to hide or change the past. It was hard before the internet, and has become effectively impossible now. It is almost irrational to expect to transition to a new life and an entire legacy of breadcrumbs will disappear, especially while trying to hold onto some parts of that prior life.

<comment><USER62> > Cue the sardonic "don't be evil" scare-quotes that inevitably appear.

Those aren't scare quotes. That is quoting an actual full heading from one of their founding documents [1]:

 _" Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company."_

as well as their internal code of conduct [2].

[1] [http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders- lette...](http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-letter.html)

[2] [http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of- conduct.html](http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html)

<comment><USER61> A scare quote isn't a manufactured quote, but instead is taking something someone (or some thing like a corporation) said and making one's skepticism/doubt readily apparent.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I was very much into this article until the end, when they started blaming white males for all their problems.</comment>


Show HN: Convert your annual salary into an hourly rate - <AUTHOR> http://dpmehta.com/calculator.html <comment><USER2> I have an hourly rate, in fact in about 20 years of working I've never had a salary.</comment>


Show HN: BladeSearch (re-brand of Google Blade which launched yesterday) - <AUTHOR> https://bladesearch.com <comment><AUTHOR> Just wanted to update you guys that I took everyone's good advice, and changed the name of this project from GoogleBlade.com to BladeSearch.com.

I'm sorry for any confusion I may have caused in making you think it was a service of Google's. I viewed it as a tribute to one of my favorite services of theirs (custom search engines) and let that cloud my legal perspective.

Anyway, I didn't hear from Google, but also didn't want them to have to engage their legal team, so I went ahead and rebranded today.

Lesson learned, and thanks again everyone for the great feedback yesterday.

<comment><USER2> Love the logo :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How do you actually use a blade / search on a blade?

<comment><AUTHOR> To search on a blade, visit the blade page, like this Hacker News Search blade:

[https://hn.bladesearch.com](https://hn.bladesearch.com)

then type your query into the field that says "Search this blade..." and click the blue search button.

Did that answer your question?</comment></comment>


Machine learning basics podcast - <AUTHOR> I'm creating a podcast on the basics of ML: http://ocdevel.com/podcasts/machine-learning. Audio is an inferior medium to task - but with so much chores/commute/exercise time, there's _hours_ every day one could spend learning - so count this supplementary. I aim to be super high-level and 101, so this is for newbies and unconfidents.
One goal of the podcast is to be a curriculum, where in each episode I recommend "required readings" resources - books/textbooks/courses/etc that I've boiled down from the most common recommendations from around the web. So anyone asking "which maths should I learn? which books & courses would you recommend? which language is best?" - this is for you.
Hope y'all find it useful, tell me if it's crap! <comment><USER2> The podcast is pretty good.Podcast form is not the best form for learning the introduction to machine learning but I like that you include the resources for learning more in depth concepts

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Right, I aim to be more a syllabus & high-level than deep-dive. I haven't found much of its kind, and with so much commute/chores/exercise seemed like a hole worth fillin'.</comment></comment>


Active Learning - <AUTHOR> http://blog.giladnaor.com/2008/10/active-learning.html

<comment><USER2> One thing about most? university education, is that the good places have you doing. Homework is more than just busywork. It's to get you actively working in the system you're learning. Same with labs and projects.

Some of the troubles with applying some things (like calculus or physics) is that to apply them in a meaningful way, you need a whole other course's worth of background. So you do little things like calculate how many calories a person burns/hr, or what the unit normal acceleration is.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative > pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls > into lazy habits of thinking." A.Einstein

I disagree. When I don't get enough scifi my thoughts are mundane. When I read scifi I have tons of thoughts every day on different scenarios given the scifi setups I've read, or totally different stories I want to write myself.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Now to start codi, em, I mean, designing. Yes, that's what I mean. Designing._

Rings so true.</comment>


Power output during exercise - <AUTHOR> http://bodytransform.co/Blog/Power+output+during+exercise.html <comment><USER2> Its interesting. The article talks about the energy expended to do work (moving from place to place) and compares different types of human powered movement (running, biking, swimming). Then it dives into efficiency comparing one person racing a commuter train.

Side note: It would be cool to see efficiency of source of energy as well. Bananas eaten through a human digestive system vs diesel locomotives.

This could turn into a new metric for athletes - power output during certain types of physical activity. Ex, did you improve from 4.1W/kg to 4.3W/kg for a certain activity? What did you do to get there?

The answer might not just be about lost fat weight and increased muscle weight but more along the lines of improved form efficiency. Ex, for cycling, I improved by form so my knees don't move out so wide (kept in by 1cm) during the stroke do my drag coefficient from 0.88 to 0.84 and I become more efficient. [https://www.cyclingpowerlab.com/CyclingAerodynamics.aspx](https://www.cyclingpowerlab.com/CyclingAerodynamics.aspx) You could really dive into this as a pro athlete. Just like IQ can be broken into sub-measures (overall IQ broken into spacial reasoning, puzzling ability, etc). Start with EQ (Energy Quotient) for a given activity then break it down into specifics.

Example 1) Michael Phelps has a swimming style that is more efficient than other swimmers. So his swimming EQ would be very high. And you could break it down into specific moves that make it high (ex his flipturn is fast, he breathes fewer times and that is fast, his butterfly kicks are better than usual) [https://www.yourswimlog.com/michael-phelps- numbers/](https://www.yourswimlog.com/michael-phelps-numbers/). Then train the specifics to get your EQ higher.

Example 2) Bode Miller skier with his upper body and arms all over the place but his lower body locked into the fastest way down the hill. His VMG, velocity made good, towards his goal is super high. So if we measured his energy expenditure and change in kinetic and potential energy coming down a hill, we could come up with a EQ number based on a Lagrangian. If other skiers wanted to match his lower body style, we could study their own Lagrangians and optimize for better EQ. Then those skiers could train with exercises to keep their EQs high by focusing on specific moves to perfect, better reading of the hill terrain, strengthening specific muscles, etc. That's the breakdown.</comment>


The problematic culture of "Worse is Better" - <AUTHOR> https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-13/worseisworse.html <comment><USER2> Already discussed [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449680)</comment>


Spaced repetition and practice - <AUTHOR> http://experiments.oskarth.com/srspractice/ <comment><USER2> Gwern has a nice article on Spaced repetition: [https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition](https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition)

<comment><USER3> Here's a HN discussion about that site: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7539390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7539390)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kind of a tangent but...

Anyone know of a nerdy source for stretching exercises? I'd love to know exactly how often, and how far to stretch to maximise progress rather than just guess but I've not really found anything that seems to have rigorous justification for their numbers.

<comment><USER5> I gotchu you.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/jjprs/starting_str...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/jjprs/starting_stretching_a_flexibility_program_for/)

The Reddit user phrakture is awesome and absolutely knows what he's talking about. He contributed quality content very often to the /r/fitness subreddit. Check out those programs he crafted to get more flexible!

Starting Stretching: [http://phraktured.net/starting- stretching.html](http://phraktured.net/starting-stretching.html)

Molding Mobility: [http://phraktured.net/molding- mobility.html](http://phraktured.net/molding-mobility.html)

<comment><USER6> Antranik (/u/antranik) is good, too.

[http://antranik.org/bodyweight-training/](http://antranik.org/bodyweight- training/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spaced repetition is more for remembering things. I've had good experience with it. However, I don't think the methods used in this article are valid to test spaced repetition. The test the author used are solving problems. Solving a problem require much more than recalling facts. Just because you remember something doesn't mean you understand it. In my opinion this is a very flawed experiment.

<comment><USER8> There must be an in-between case where a small problem is solved by remembering the method. The kind of thing where you end up looking up the double-angle formulae or checking the definition for integration by parts. I guess the programming equivalent is remembering how to insert into a tree or do a bubble sort.

Problem-solving in the general case encompasses all of human creativity: I wouldn't claim that one becomes capable of tackling difficult problems through memorising techniques. But once you're part-way to solving a problem there is often a sequence of simpler steps (analysis, not synthesis) - surely most of us would like to be faster/more efficient/make fewer errors in these steps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While this particular article was about SRS for learning programming ( _note: very interesting_ \- may experiment applying this to teaching kids/young adults coding - possibly with a "limited, variable sugar reward system"), SRS can be applied to language learning, In fact, in language learning, it can be a fancy way of avoiding saying 'rote memorization'. The hard part for most people of language learning is 'rote memorization' (e.g. knowing conjugations cold, without thinking).

For those of you who are interested in language learning, I'd like to redirect you to tokenadult's very long and comprehensive post from 2.6 years ago.

"Learning foreign languages to high levels of communication proficiency was the first adult learning challenge I took on. I majored in Chinese at university and worked for quite a few years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator..."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816)

Brief aside on non-Anki SRS. Memrise is a SRS for language learning that I gave up on because it took 3-4x longer to demonstrate that I 'knew' a word because of the variations on testing (cloze, completion, multiple choice (guess). Also, no fault of Memrise - but the problem of SRS is that a) the decks cannot be reversed - e.g. French to English cannot easily be made English to French and b) eventually you just start spitting out entire phrases rather than individual words. Context is everything. Language can be subtle. We may forget the subtleties in our native language(s).

<comment><USER10> As for deck reversal... I have an Anki deck, where the default template actually generates multiple cards (I put in Kanji/Reading/English Definition, and it spits out 3 cards, with front being Kanji, Reading, English respectively).

You can do this in Anki by clicking on "Cards..." on the add dialog in Anki and then creating multiple cards.

This lets me concentrate on the parts of the word retention that I cannot hold onto. Sometimes it's recalling from reading, sometimes recalling from English. Mainly depends on how I initially encountered the word/ how familiar I am with the radicals. But it avoids reworking the things I _do_ get.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I've been hiding from Anki! That is a clever idea that I will play with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's a good piece of advice, although it always bothered me to create flashcards. I create cloze flashcards from notebooks of my knowledge: [https://github.com/masteranza/MathematicaAnki](https://github.com/masteranza/MathematicaAnki)

</comment><comment><USER12> Is anyone aware of a spaced repetition app for iOS that allows you to enter content via a web interface? Most of the flash card apps I've seen require you to build out cards from within the app, which is tedious and clumsy.

<comment><USER13> Anki allows you to add cards through the Ankiweb interface, in addition to having a more flexible card/note data model than most of the alternatives.

The iOS Anki interface _is_ pretty expensive at $25, but you can do everything through the web if you want, albeit clumsily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great article! Just a note: spaced repetition is not only for rote learning, or "remembering things".

When talking about spaced repetition, we need to make a distinction between repeated studying (seeing both the problem and answer) and testing. Once you've overlearned the material, the biggest value of an SRS comes from testing yourself, even if you don't see the solution after [1]. Another potential benefit is interleaving concepts from different problems [2].

Another distinction is what is being tested. For example, testing using same math problem you learned from is repeating both the concept learned and exact content of the problem. Repeating the exact content you originally studied may dilute the benefit of testing you on the concept. However, it is clear that repeated testing on the concept is very beneficial when the content is new (e.g. spaced testing related math problems, [3]). That isn't to say repeating the concept and content can't be beneficial, I think it can be useful, but I'm less sure about how it stacks up.

In the posted article, I think the type of SR will be useful because (1) recalling the pieces being tested are helpful when solving the problem (or a related one), and (2) hopefully they cue you to think of the problems domain they're related to. In a sense, interleaving the pieces can be a test of matching the piece with it's problem domain.

It seems like a better solution would be to create related problems related to the ones you learned initially, to test yourself in a spaced way. For example, you and a friend could solve the same Eloquent Javascript problems, and then create a handful of new problems that are in the same problem domain. Then, you could trade problems for spaced testing. This type of spaced testing could be thought of as repeating problem domain, but not exact problem content. To the degree that the SRS interleaves testing problem domains, it will likely be especially effective for solving new problems [2].

[1]: [http://pss.sagepub.com/content/27/2/223.full.pdf+html](http://pss.sagepub.com/content/27/2/223.full.pdf+html)

(based on this classic!: [http://learninglab.psych.purdue.edu/downloads/2008_Karpicke_...](http://learninglab.psych.purdue.edu/downloads/2008_Karpicke_Roediger_Science.pdf))

[2]: [http://www.indiana.edu/~pcl/papers/carvalho_goldstone_delaye...](http://www.indiana.edu/~pcl/papers/carvalho_goldstone_delayedgeneralization2014.pdf)

[3]: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.1266/abstract](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.1266/abstract)

</comment><comment><USER15> _" A spaced repetition system (SRS) is a way of efficiently repeating things you don't want to forget, usually by using electronic flashcards. A SRS exploits the fact that if you remember something well you don't have to repeat it as often."_

It's interesting that the technique simply shoves the same information in your face until you no longer forget it, instead of actually trying to exploit known ways of learning quickly, such as via the Method of Loci.

<comment><USER16> They aren't mutually exclusive.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the most underrated piece of advice you've been told? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Employ discipline, hard discipline in everything you do. Don't cut corners, if it feels difficult - no shit, that's a good thing so it prevents others from doing it. Go through it and you'll see real success. If you give up because its hard or get bored of it or get distracted, you're gonna be a bottom feeder for the rest of your life.

Also, face competition. Don't shy away from it like a lot of silicon valley advice. Do it better than anyone else and do it so much better than others, that they won't be able to catch up after a while. Competition is the engine that drives you. Without it, it is a pretty insipid endeavor.

</comment><comment><USER3> My parents told me over and over when I was a kid, but I didn't understated until I was in my 30's.

"It's not what you know, but who you know that matters."

I don't like it, but I think it's true.

<comment><USER4> That's close to my career advice. In a job you get paid with money, experience, and contacts. If you're been shorted in any of those, especially the latter get another job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was an intern psychologist at an old State Hospital. The best advice was from a Security guard. He said "You have to meet people where they are". 40 years later, that's been very helpful.

<comment><USER6> What does that mean, and what did it change about your approach to life?

<comment><USER7> I think it's along the lines of, don't make people come to you (your way of thinking) rather be empathetic and see things from their point of view. Start with understanding where they are today if you want to truly help them, but maybe we are the one who needs help instead? Too?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have a backup plan ~ dad

You're a loser because you hang out with losers, try hanging out with new people ~ a kind soul who helped my through a hard part of my life

~ 20% time, I've been doing more and it's been paying off

</comment><comment><USER8> Written and verbal communication are huge.

It's one of those things you eye roll as your teachers say it. But it turns out to be absolutely true. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room, just the one that makes ideas most easily understood and accessible.

</comment><comment><USER9> "You are not your code" When somebody is criticizing code you wrote they are doing just that, criticizing code. It isn't a personal attack and they aren't trying to hurt you.</comment>