Ask HN: Advice for family getting started with Lego building? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Hey, Lego is our family hobby. I had sets as a kid and built with my kids. Now we all get sets for birthdays and holidays and we have a 'LEGO Room' with a lego city and tables for building.

So to get started I would get everyone a set and build together. I like Star Wars sets, my Wife is in to Harry Potter, my son likes both.

There isn't really a right or wrong way to Lego. I would setup a budget/limit though, otherwise you could spend quite a bit.

I collect Boba Fett minifigures so I usually focus on those sets and occasionally buying old ones to complete/keep my collection going.

The larger sets are pretty amazing. Most lego cities you see are mainly comprised of what they call Lego Modulars. [https://brickset.com/sets/theme- Creator-Expert/subtheme-Modu...](https://brickset.com/sets/theme-Creator- Expert/subtheme-Modular-Buildings)

These are some of the best builds, they retire though so I would buy the oldest one you can find new in box at retail price to start if you're interested in these, then buy the current retail ones oldest to newest, keeping watch for when they are retiring, usually Lego will mark them retiring soon.

Lego Architecture sets are really cool. My son collects those.

Collectible minifigures are fun they come out in packs a couple times per year, you'll get good at feeling the packs to figure out what they are.

Then there are MOCs (My Own Creations) these are custom builds that you make or you can get instructions or free build someone elses.

It's a pretty amazing hobby.

Check out Bricklink for parts (recently bought by lego).

Feel free to post questions here or msg me your email.

It's a fun hobby, lots of amazing custom builds out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info and encouragement. I ordered a 1,500 piece set of classic bricks for about $50 to get us started. Coupled with the online resources you and others mentioned, and the additional downtime time at home, we're off to a good start!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for advice (or resources for finding advice) that would help my family (ages 15+) get started building with LEGOs. I have more nostalgia for LEGOs than I do experience, though my teenage-to-young-adult children have much more experience. Do you have any advice that would get me pointed in the right direction? (eg do this, not that)

<comment><USER3> I would recommend just buying some sets that look interesting to you. There is such a huge variety in themes available these days.

I highly recommend the Saturn V rocket. Lots of fun to build and it's pretty impressive once done.</comment></comment>


SpaceX Demo-2 (Crewed) Launch to ISS - <AUTHOR> https://www.spacex.com/launches/ <comment><AUTHOR> The launch is scheduled for 16:33 EDT (20:33 UTC)</comment>


Ask HN: Why are cellphone numbers increasingly used for 2FA? - <AUTHOR> I get that <i>most</i> people have them and carry them around, but it still seems like a naive solution given that they can be lost/dropped/broken/stolen so easily. <comment><USER2> _Can_ be, but .. if you consider the rate of loss of phones amongst people who know and understand 2FA, is it, or is it not better than single factor login?

The absolute loss rate of phones has to be contextually understood.

Also: what do people do when they lose their phones? They notice, and they rapidly cancel them out. So.. if you didn't keep the backup codes you are SoL but if you did.. the 2nd factor can't be abused.</comment>


Unsupervised image segmentation and categorisation - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.01589

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised they refer to their technique as a "growing neural gas", as it appears to be mostly an on-line graph-based manifold learning technique. See ex. Laplacian eigenmaps: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_dimensionality_reduc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_dimensionality_reduction)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wonder if this could be expanded to generic images..</comment>


Understanding the Structure of the Internet Black Market [video] - <AUTHOR> http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/09/new-research-underground-market-fueling.html <comment><USER2> I see a much bigger problem with not-so-underground mainstream internet crime commited by big companies stealing your privacy and delivering your data to rights-abusing organizations on a broad range from targeted-marketing-agencies to robot-killing-clubs.

[https://www.youbetrayedus.org/](https://www.youbetrayedus.org/)

USA and China now working together on crypto-backdooring the whole industry might give you a good hint about where the real right-abusers are today.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...and it's been around for quite a while [https://youtu.be/BsTGQbhuL0E?t=47](https://youtu.be/BsTGQbhuL0E?t=47) and here to stay on its way to pulling the curtains on a few social networks</comment>


Apple, Microsoft, Oracle Lead Unholy Patent Alliance Against Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Apple-Microsoft-Oracle-Lead-Unholy-Patent-Alliance-Against-Android-446031/ <comment><USER2> Awful reporting. I stopped reading that bull shit after this -

The reason the non-Android phone makers are suing the Android phone makers is because they formed a consortium to buy a bunch of patents from Nortel when it went bankrupt.

These companies sued each other before the Nortel patents entered the picture. Anyone who follows Android must know it. Its almost as if this guy came out of his cave, googled a little about android and patents and wrote this article.

<comment><USER3> It actually got worse after that, where he started blathering about antitrust based on the winning bid being 5 times higher than the opening bid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What if... (this is probably a crazy naive "what if") all these legal stuffs highlights the problem with the current patent systems and forces government to start thinking seriously how to improve it?

Perhaps this drama should be blown out of proportion while we're on it so that it stinks so bad that even "dumb" customers would start rallying against it :)

<comment><USER5> I think the "highlights" are going to have to be much bigger.

For example, patenting "A legal document laying the ground rules for running a nation", suing the United States for the Constitution, and _winning_.

Yes, the Constitution was written before the patent system even existed.

Like I said, it'd have to be _big_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> infographic of 37 android related litigation <http://twitpic.com/4c6an1/full>

google/android is not an angel, they have copied generously for building their platform, which is illegal under current patent regime

but I do love innovation, maybe its high time we get rid of software patents once for all

<comment><USER7> aren't quite a lot of the LTE patents hardware?</comment></comment>


Intel hid CPU bugs info from govt 'until public disclosure' - <AUTHOR> https://www.itwire.com/security/81867-intel-hid-cpu-bugs-info-from-govt-until-public-disclosure-report.html <comment><USER2> Who knows if it had been found by a black hat and had been exploited? If a BH had found it, they would certainly try to figure out a way to make one or more viable exploits from it. A national government (CIA, Israel etc) would say nothing and quietly proceed with exploitation - as would most other crooks. White hats would tell Intel and probably set a revelation clock ticking to make sure Intel got to work.

Once Intel knows it, there is no duty to tell the world, but there is a strong duty to fix it and to also monitor DH web sites to see if an exploit is in the wild. They want it secret until fixed. No duty to tell the government at all - they leak like a sieve. In any event, exploits for these problems are hard to setup and execute - they may never be a good live exploit - too hard to arrange. So far I have not heard of any losses from these problems, the greater loss is from the repair patches that slow server throughput down. Intel has been educated. I am sure that Intel will be made to kick some cash to server farms</comment>


Bruce Schneier: Wanted: Cryptography Products for Worldwide Survey - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/09/wanted_cryptogr.html <comment><USER2> We probably collected the biggest and most up-to-date list of crypto gear ever there. Here's the filtered version that team finally presented along with a request for further editing:

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/12/worldwide_cry...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/12/worldwide_crypt.html)</comment>


The Database Programmer: Different Foreign Keys for Different Tables - <AUTHOR> http://database-programmer.blogspot.com/2008/07/different-foreign-keys-for-different.html <comment><USER2> This is quite basic knowledge... (Who ever used a DB in any capacity and didn't know this?)</comment>


Ask HN: Google Books Preview. How to get full preview? - <AUTHOR>

Google says: --- Many of the books you can preview on Google Books are still in copyright, and are displayed with the permission of publishers and authors. You can browse these "limited preview" titles just as you would in a bookstore, but you won't be able to see more pages than the copyright holder has made available. ---- So, what if I want to get the full digital copy of these books, what should I do ? Google of course has them. Should I buy somewhere or what ? Then where to buy ? looking at current situation there is no way one can access this. Some books are like so old but still in copyright, out-of-print and only available in Google BOoks. What to do now ? <comment><USER2> I don't know if this qualifies as a HN question... ;-)

Could you provide some links where a book i ONLY available on Google Books? On the left side of the books you usually have all the sellers of the book "Get this book". Some old books which are out of copyright you can get via different sources (e.g. Project Gutenberg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Like this one, I am learning for typography it is available only in Google Books no other online or physical store. [http://books.google.com/books?num=13&id=zpfgAAAAMAAJ&...](http://books.google.com/books?num=13&id=zpfgAAAAMAAJ&q=Devanagari#search_anchor)

<comment><USER3> Well, somebody on Flickr has it: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/typeoff/3867449610/>

If it is as rare as it appears to be, I suppose I'd put photos of my copy on Flickr, too.

Seriously, though: this looks like an ideal candidate for "Inter-Library Loan". Go to your nearest library, and ask them to get it for you from one of the (few, large) libraries that has it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This book is only available in the central libary of India which don't have any policy of inter-library loan. So, if google has scanned it why not give it to download ?

<comment><USER3> Presumably because the copyright holders are not willing to allow them to do so. Google doesn't decide these things on their own, of course.

Now, why wouldn't the original copyright holder waive the rights? I'm guessing that, since the title seems to have been published by a local government, for purely bureaucratic reasons rather than ones of ideology.

Are there really no other libraries that have it? I'd be shocked if it's not in the Library of Congress, the British Library, or Widener.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gnuplot, a perfect tool for datascience? - <AUTHOR> I'm a graduate student beginning Torch7 and Lua for training a convolutional neural network on a large number of images. During this process, I have to monitor some learning curves. Thereby I searched on google some libs able to plot easily many things (for instance covariance matrix). The only tool I found in torch was https://github.com/torch/gnuplot
Obviously gnuplot is crossplatform able to generate professional diagrams (even to latex). Otherwise, I have a pythonic background and I was using matplotlib instead of some gnuplot wrappers such as http://gnuplot-py.sourceforge.net/
Do you think that using gnuplot as a main lib to plot things is a good idea ? <comment> Engr-Student It is a major pain. Try "R". It is nearly entirely engineered toward proper handling of data. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is so fundamental to the stats folks who make R that NIST dedicated a good chunk of their manual to it. ([http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/eda.htm](http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/eda.htm))

Rstudio is nice. ggplot2 is excellent.

</comment><comment><USER2> [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/911655/gnuplot-vs- matplot...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/911655/gnuplot-vs-matplotlib)

<comment><USER3> That is 6 years old. Some of the comments describe how matplotlib was only just then getting 3D support. Matplotlib has of course had a lot of development since then.

Also, the tools do not stand alone. The integration between pandas, matplotlib, and ipython is much greater than using gnuplot instead of matplotlib for the same situation.

Even if matplotlib doesn't handle a specific task ([http://glowingpython.blogspot.com/2012/10/visualizing- correl...](http://glowingpython.blogspot.com/2012/10/visualizing-correlation- matrices.html) shows an example of plotting a correlation matrix, and one of the commenters points to [http://wiki.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/HintonDiagrams](http://wiki.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/HintonDiagrams) ; "Hinton diagrams are a way of visualizing numerical values in a matrix/vector, popular in the neural networks and machine learning literature"), it's important to evaluate how hard is it to add that task to have the advantage of being on the well-trodden paths of Python tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Use whatever's most convenient and good enough, sometimes that's gnuplot, sometimes that's matplotlib, sometimes that's ggplot, sometimes that's some javascript thing.</comment>


Doctors turn to social media to develop Covid-19 treatments in real time - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-24/covid-19-mysteries-yield-to-doctors-new-weapon-crowd-sourcing <comment><USER2> This is awesome. MDs in American and Europe should turn their social media attention to MDs in S. Korea and China... get frontline tips from them. As for PMG, I love it. My wife is an MD and she is on it all the time. Real valuable information there.

<comment><USER3> As long as you listen to the right people, as in the physical world.

<comment><USER4> This would be easier if the internet were optimized around enlightenment values (for lack of a better phrase) instead of the values of a tabloid newspaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps we should coin the term "epidemiological debt" for the compounding costs of ignoring an emergent pandemic early on. The essential definition of such debt is: paying down the debt requires qualitatively greater expense and creativity (as in this case) to solve this problem later than sooner.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating. First I've seen about the low blood pressure and gastric symptoms in old people...makes me wonder. An older friend of mine in the bay area was hospitalized in the last week of January, first week of February. His symptoms were extreme physical weakness, fever, low blood pressure. Enough so that he went to the ICU twice. A few weeks later he was better. Doctors ran all types of tests then, but didn't know what it was, they told him it was likely a random viral infection. No lung issues that I know of, but that sure sounds like what this article mentions.

<comment> o-__-o SARS-COV-2 binds to ACE2 receptors which are prevalent in your lungs and your gut. Its possible the virus attacked the gut rather than the lung. Staring at data last night there's about 1/4-1/3 of a chance for "mild symptoms" but the data did not capture gastrointestinal issues. This also goes along with the theory that there are two strains, one more vicious than the other.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, the Lcov/Scov two-strain theory turned out to be somewhat of a nonsense paper.

<comment><USER8> Source?

<comment><USER9> Post criticizing the paper and discussion: [http://virological.org/t/response- to-on-the-origin-and-conti...](http://virological.org/t/response-to-on-the- origin-and-continuing-evolution-of-sars-cov-2/418)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I really find worrying is that all this knowledge gets locked up behind the facebook walled garden. Essentially giving them a monopoly on processing this information. I understand why the doctors do it (use something that's available). But as another poster mentioned, we really need something better.

<comment><USER11> Do you really find it all that worrying, more so than the virus itself? I'm not a FB apologist but the fact that they have this network affect and that doctors can use it for free is outstanding. This would not have happened 20 years ago.

<comment><USER12> That's not so much due to Facebook as it is to the internet.

<comment> edouard-harris Facebook has, in fairness, made this sort of collaboration far easier than it would have been in the days of the pre-Facebook Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a publicly available feed/mirror of this?

I have never been there (thefaceship), and would not be just another voyeur of this data set.

</comment><comment><USER14> Looking at the covid-19 hackathon and wondering if there would be an advantage of a dedicated social network for doctors and labs. Perhaps with possibility of making data publicly readable but not submittable. Thoughts?

<comment><USER15> This exists and is called ResearchGate. I'm not fond of it personally, but many seem to make good use of it.

> making data publicly readable but not submittable

I'm unclear what you mean by this.

<comment><USER13> Not the person who wrote that but I think read only feed of the conservation where random folks like myself could hear the conservation but not speak directly == "not submit comments". which would work fine for me. Any hypothesizes I generated should go through a vetting process where the idea generates own momentum so as not to waste their time if it ever showed up. a ... peer review process writ smaller and more distributed.

<comment><USER14> Yup, I couldn't have said it more eloquently.

My biggest issue with pursuing this is I have next to no breadth of knowledge in the medical or medical research fields. It would be hard for me to understand what would help doctors and research labs to share and distribute information, other than being more filterable and searchable than a facebook group.

<comment><USER15> tl;dr Kicking out the non-experts won't solve the current problems and is likely to introduce new ones. It's a tooling issue, not a platform one.

This is a difficult problem. In trying to reduce the noise by choosing who gets to speak, you immediately encounter a number of issues related to gatekeeping. Moreover, filtering by source doesn't directly address what I see as the underlying problem of presenting relevant information to the user.

Competent and aggressive moderation seems to work fairly well for setting a standard of discourse without excluding anyone (HN is a good example here) but it's time consuming. And it doesn't do much of anything to address the problem of filtering for relevant information.

I think conversations themselves (ie actual back-and-forth with meaningful input from all sides) ultimately just don't scale well beyond a small group. Topic specific mailing lists seem to be the least-worst solution to date, and a Facebook group or subreddit is essentially the same thing implemented using a proprietary platform.

It seems like we still lack the models and tooling to address these problems on a fundamental level. Plenty of academic research exists surrounding knowledge graphs, ontologies, and relationships, but in practice all the mainstream tooling that "just works" is restricted to hierarchical folders (and tags if you're lucky). Zotero is very much a least-worst reference management solution in my opinion (I detailed my thoughts in an HN comment sometime within the past year if you're curious). On the literature front we have things like Arxiv Sanity Preserver and Semantic Scholar, but we're still proverbially drowning in new publications. Tools like Memex ([https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex](https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex)) and Contextualise ([https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise](https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise)) look promising, but aren't (yet?) a complete solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> George Hotz is also making a valiant attempt. Starting from scratch, he's made a surprising amount of progress in the last 3 days. Armed with just a web browser and python.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vWaawiUteM&t=43s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vWaawiUteM&t=43s)

<comment><USER17> Love how this went nowhere and the people in the comments are lapping it up. Nice to see a live coding session from him, but man..

<comment><USER18> I don't want to watch it, what is he trying to achieve ? where did it end ?

<comment><USER19> It ended with him playing Plague Inc.. Reminds me a bit of my early childhood, when I wanted to build a galley with a friend. We already had one piece of wood...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That facebook group they talk about is currently getting over 900 posts per day. Difficult to keep up - definitely a firehose of information. Could ML be used to distill this info?

<comment><USER21> It's on Facebook so we know for a fact that ML's already being used to refine the posts now - keeping them relatively free of spam, hateful comments, known malware links, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Watch one, Do one, Teach one. Isn't that the MD way?

Send some to China, get some Chinese surgeons and EMT over in the US.

Oh right: we shouted at them because reasons. Hard to be nice, when they have knowledge we need and the posture is shouty.

<comment><USER23> China has been kicking journalists and other westerns out of the country. I doubt they want to share what they did nor want to disclose what real infection rates are.

<comment><USER24> If only the world were so simplistic. 300 Chinese doctors and equipment arrived in Italy last week. They are anxious to share what they know, to help, and heal, as doctors do. That the CCP gets good press out of it is the sort of "soft power" that the US has forgotten.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-doctors-and-supplies- ar...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-doctors-and-supplies-arrive-in- italy-11584564673)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I lieu of adequate testing, I wonder if we could use mild proinflammatory immune response as a way for carriers to self-detect - i.e. so that they feel more sick, quicker, rather that just carrying it around for days unknowingly. Perhaps garlic?

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4417560/#sec4ti...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4417560/#sec4title)

<comment><USER26> Please don't speculate or spread information like this. When they know what we should do, they'll tell us.

People have already been admitted to hospital for eating too much garlic.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51735367](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51735367)

<comment><USER25> I'm not suggesting trying to _cure_ or _prevent_ the disease, but to _promote_ its symptoms to emerge in asymptomatic carriers so that they can self-isolate.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is gitlab.com down for you right now? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> So I'm here in India, just pushed my repo to gitlab.com and was trying to check the CI/CD job status. However, gitlab.com is taking too long to respond.

@gitlabstatus on twitter says they're investigating, status.gitlab.com says everything is operational and isitdownrightnow.com says gitlab.com is down for everyone right now.

Just wanna know if others here are being able to use it or not.

All things above were observed around 9:00 UTC (it's been 7 mins or so).

</comment><comment><USER2> Gitlab is fine for me now in the UK... but it is not too uncommon for it to go down for a short time

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, took 13-15mins and it's back up.</comment></comment>


Venezuela's Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-23/venezuela-s-behind-on-its-debt-and-facing-two-huge-bond-payments <comment><USER2> On August 25, 2017, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order limiting the government of Venezuela's ability to access certain types of international financing. This would certainly curtail the governments ability to ease the pressure of bond payments.

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/08/25/exec...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/08/25/executive- order-trump-imposes-new-round-venezuela-sanctions/601667001/)

when you cant sell assets, you cant repay a bond. PDVSA, the nationalized oil asset of the state of Venezuela, is now legally prohibited from dealing with US markets.

While this all seems to be a reasonable response to the Maduro leadership issues in the country, one becomes immediately suspicious of the US intent in latin america when Vice President Pence cites the motivation as 'ensuring democracy.' the sentiment has about a 40 year grim history in the region as it applies to US foreign policy.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _one becomes immediately suspicious of the US intent in latin america_

These restrictions are forcing an inevitable outcome sooner. Venezuela's debt load is unsustainable for reasons entirely of Chavez and Maduro's doing (as well as the people who elected them in elections that were, until fairly recently, fair and free [1]).

Suspicion is good. Using baseless suspicion to deflect attention from a well- based problem is not.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Venezuela#Voting_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Venezuela#Voting_system)

<comment><USER3> > one becomes immediately suspicious of the US intent.

I suggest your read or watch this and you'll be immediately less suspicious [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read and enjoyed it. Knowing good people who work and have worked for Bechtel, _et cetera_ , I can assure you that the riveting read it makes contains some truths and many exaggerations.

The laws the U.S. is deploying here are designed to prevent a despot from pilfering a population's wealth to pay cronies. Letting Maduro liquidate PDVSA to pay debts which should be defaulted on is precisely the intent of the law, an intent which aligns the United States with Venezuela.

Again, suspicion is healthy. But using the possibility of an international conspiracy to detract from a well-established national one (in Venezuela) is disingenuous.

<comment><USER4> The answer could be both. The problem is the lack of coverage on the ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The paradox of Venezuela is a populist government that beasts its chest about foreign imperialism starving its citizens to make bond payments to foreigners. We're beyond the point where a sane democracy would have defaulted. The only conclusion I can come to involves cronies of the administration holding substantial amounts of the debt. The payments aren't on interest and principal, but for patronage.

<comment><USER5> They need to keep the capital flowing in order to fund the police/military that prop up the authoritarian regime.

<comment><USER6> It's difficult to figure out what's really going on there. I followed Abby Martin's reporting on the ground recently, and it's quite eye opening: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYWrPiUeWY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYWrPiUeWY)

<comment><USER5> I've only seen a few pieces by Martin, but everyone was a gross distortion of the situation covered. She's a propagandist pushing anti-Western narratives, not a journalist summarizing the facts. I suspect her coverage here may be influenced by her anti-Western feelings.

<comment><USER6> Really? Do you have some examples of those gross distortions? So far it seems like she has an anti-capitalism slant, but that's hardly something unique or a dis-qualifier nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
          On Friday, the government-run oil giant PDVSA owes $985 million.

Maybe an ignorant question... who do they owe... who own's these bonds?

<comment><USER8> The article names a number of the bond holders. In general terms, almost every hedge fund owns some amount of the $140B in outstanding debt.

<comment><USER9> "Almost every hedge fund" is a bit of an exaggeration but outside of the hedge fund universe, PDVSA bonds are definitely held by a lot of mutual funds I guarantee that some people here own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Article autoplays video with audio. Just so you know. Incredible that Bloomberg treats their readers so poorly.

<comment><USER11> Off topic, but if you're using Chrome, change chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy to 'Document user activation required'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Scary times ahead for Venezuela. It's too bad it will be the average person paying the price for the corrupt few.

<comment><USER13> The scary times have already arrived for Venezuela, tragically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you run sovereign debt in a currency you don't control, you become a colony, not a country.

Venezuela private firms should all be run through administration to wipe out the creditors and re-floated with Bolivar investment.

<comment><USER15> Nobody wants BSF. Plus the government does shenanigans with the exchange rate, with the official exchange rate having no relationship to reality.

If you refloat debt in a different valueless currency that you control the exchange rate on, you're de facto defaulting - nobody wants your currency. They want hard currency.

Re: currency you don't control, do you consider Ecuador a colony? They have debt in the sucre, which is pegged to the dollar. Is most of Europe a colony of Brussels? Except for the British and the Swiss, everybody else runs debt in Euros, which they don't control.

<comment><USER16> You should ask some Greeks if they feel they are in a colony like position with respect to Brussels/Germany. Controlling your own money is a key factor to maintaining sovereignty. Goldbugs take this to a level where they desire personal sovereignty and thus a money not controlled by the government (gold or silver).

<comment><USER17> It's seldom for a debtor in need to choose the currency. If Greece kept drachma, they'd still need to borrow in euro or dollar as few would have drachmas to loan.

US can take loan in dollars because everyone has dollars to park, which is because everyone else has dollars too.

<comment><USER16> In any country with a free exchange of currency there is no problem for investors to get any amount of currency they want. They buy it on the open market. Forex is the biggest and most liquid market in the world. Before the Euro every country in Europe had bonds in their own currency. Interest rates were higher in some due to inflation and default risk, but there was no problem borrowing large sums of money.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Browsers Work: Behind the scenes of modern web browsers - <AUTHOR> http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowserswork/

<comment><USER2> Many previous submissions, including one with significant attention in the last year (the criterion for duplicates): [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=how%20browsers%20work&sort=byP...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=how%20browsers%20work&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER3> Honest question, is this much different than say, 10 years ago?

Other than that the page seems like an interesting resource.

<comment><USER4> There's a big difference now in that a hardware-accelerated compositor is used. It's mostly accurate up to compositing.

There are other little things that have happened recently and are worth noting—for example, Blink and WebKit are moving in a more Firefox-like direction for display list construction.

Servo, of course, has a radically different architecture.</comment></comment>


Drupal fixes highly critical flaw, but offers no details - <AUTHOR> https://www.itwire.com/open-source/82261-drupal-fixes-highly-critical-flaw-but-offers-no-details.html <comment><USER2> Ah wow, that is really bad. RCE via multiple vectors (http post, cookies, url params) just by using a leading '#' char.</comment>


Easy, realtime, system-wide Shellshock monitoring - <AUTHOR> http://draios.com/shellshock-sysdig/

<comment><USER2> Has anybody looked for historical Shellshock exploit traffic (in old/backed-up logfiles)?

Though none of the exploits I have seen thus far look very obfuscatible and therefore probably would've been discovered already.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I did. I run a niche site that gets about a thousand hits a day. It has a cgi that uses bash. I've got logs going back to January, and the first (and so far only) attempted exploit is from shellshock-scan yesterday. It came after the first bash patch, which I had applied, and did not succeed.

<comment><USER4> Is this log public available ? I would like to dig into it.

<comment><USER5> This Google Doc has a list of URLs tested by the detectify.com scanner:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vN2QOG2OZIAHGXDmd5wB8FPi...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vN2QOG2OZIAHGXDmd5wB8FPi- Hin2GaIlWRJ0RYkTbA/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll give props to hackers clever enough to poke holes in a massive beast of a system that enjoys boasting itself as "impenetrable", but these, I'm not too happy about - [http://www.pressreader.com/profile/Media_Mentions/shellshock](http://www.pressreader.com/profile/Media_Mentions/shellshock). The potential effects are much too close for comfort.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just so I understand fully, this doesn't block attempts, just logs them?

<comment><USER8> Correct. It will log time, process name/pid, and what's going to be executed.

<comment><USER9> Why not actually also stop them?

<comment><USER10> That can get tricky as a general case, but would probably work OK for most people in this specific case. But, then again, hopefully you've patched bash already anyway, so blocking hosts that are scanning for a vulnerability that you've already fixed probably won't accomplish much.

Generally speaking, if you use something like iptables to block abusive hosts, you dive head-first into a very deep rabbit hole. Usually sysadmins don't want hosts blocked forever or iptables with 30k+ lines in them, so now you have to also add some kind of automated ban-clearing feature. Then you want to make sure you don't ban certain networks, so now you have to have some kind of whitelist feature. Then sysadmins will want to be able to tune which networks are trusted and which aren't, so now you have to add some configuration options for it. And so on.

I've written some software for my servers that does this for several different annoyances, and I spend almost as much time tuning the software as I spent dealing with the annoyances in the first place.

If sysadmins really want to auto-ban abusive hosts, you're probably better off letting them do it with something like Fail2Ban, and then all that muckety- muck becomes their problem, and not yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks cool but I can't get it running on Ubuntu 14.04. I just installed sysdig but I don't have the shellshock_detect chisel :/ Is it available yet through apt?

<comment><USER12> What do you get if you run "sysdig --version"?

If you used the official Ubuntu packages, those are a few versions behind upstream (currently at 0.1.87 while we are at 0.1.89): [http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty- backports/sysdig](http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty-backports/sysdig).

What we recommend is uninstalling those ones (sysdig and sysdig-dkms) and just use the binaries that we, Draios, provide, following this: [https://github.com/draios/sysdig/wiki/How-to-Install- Sysdig-...](https://github.com/draios/sysdig/wiki/How-to-Install-Sysdig-for- Linux)

Should be very easy, and sysdig --version should show 0.1.89

<comment><USER13> Why is the Ubuntu package version behind the upstream version?

<comment><USER12> We just released 0.1.89 (special release to include the shellshock chisel) a few hours ago, so distribution maintainers aren't that fast: [https://github.com/draios/sysdig/releases](https://github.com/draios/sysdig/releases)

Debian is currently at 0.1.88: [https://packages.debian.org/sid/sysdig](https://packages.debian.org/sid/sysdig)

And Ubuntu periodically merges all the unstable packages from Debian, so that's why they're lagging one version behind at this moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess there are already worms around, exploiting this bug.

Thus, has somebody thought of exploiting and patching the attackers in response?

<comment><USER15> I haven't studied a worm in years, but historically it's been common practice to close the door you came in through upon entry, for exactly this reason.

Common, but by no means ubiquitous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> shellshock_detector.lua seems to let this more obscure exploit slip by, undetected:

[http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q3/696](http://seclists.org/oss- sec/2014/q3/696) [http://seclists.org/oss- sec/2014/q3/734](http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q3/734)

<comment><USER17> that has now been fixed: [https://github.com/draios/sysdig/pull/252](https://github.com/draios/sysdig/pull/252)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems like an interesting article, however with the super thin font and the grey-text-on-grey-background it's just too hard to read.

The authors need a visit to [http://contrastrebellion.com/](http://contrastrebellion.com/)

<comment><USER19> [http://rdd.me/ei7jpz02](http://rdd.me/ei7jpz02)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> well, installing a LKM, just that =p

Now sysdig aint bad per se but id like to see it mainlined or using mainline code

<comment><USER12> Fair point, even though:

\- At this point sysdig is estimated to have tens of thousands of users, and we haven't gotten a kernel bug in a while, with people (us included) regularly using it a lot in production. Of course, I see the irony of mentioning this in a "shellshock" thread

\- the dkms packaging should completely hide all the complexities required in maintaining a kernel module

\- Part of the kernel code, if you look at the contributors, has been written/reviewed by gregkh, so we like to think the quality is "high enough"

\- There might be plans at some point to try and propose a merge of the code to mainline

<comment><USER20> its respectable but in the end it doesnt matter. when you have to run this on thousand of systems that have not been tested with that LKM, the LKM can potentially destroy everything.

its not like if grekh code was bug free - theres a lot of bugs being fixed daily in the kernel as well.

additionally, the kernel distribution path has better verifications than sysdig's and sorry, ill trust that more than a few guys. It doesnt make your work any less, its just the way it is.</comment></comment></comment>


ECMAScript Shared Memory and Atomics Proposal - <AUTHOR> http://lars-t-hansen.github.io/ecmascript_sharedmem/shmem.html <comment><USER2> Shouldn't this be a WebAssembly (WASM) only feature? It seems a shame to be introducing the potential for race conditions in JavaScript. Compiling languages that support multiple threads into JS seems to be what is motivating this work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just an innocent question , does it really need to be in the spec ? I mean typed arrays make sense, but isn't that too low level ? Things like that, just like async or even promises concern me. Javascript, the language, shouldn't be concerned with async programming at its core. What I mean is, a js environment that support threads directly, doesn't need promises or async stuffs. Isn't putting memory management or concurrency into the spec limiting JS environments to a certain model of memory management or conccurency model ? there is no notion of event loop up until ES6 in the spec.

<comment><USER4> If you want different implementations to be compatible, they have to be in the spec, especially for something like this! Loops have clearly defined semantics that can be expressed with plain old code, so aren't going to cause compatibility problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This does look interesting, and from skimming it this seems to be about introducing the same sort of atomic primitives as found in clojure, ie. Atoms. And as far as I know they were introduced to address the problem of shared, mutable state in a _concurrent_ environment.

If Javascript doesn't have "real" threads, just unordered, asynchronous execution, what need do we have for atoms? You won't be having concurrent access to the shared, mutable state anyway.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER6> > Though not a part of this specification, we intend for the role of "threads" > to be played by Web Workers in web browser environments.

<comment><USER7> Which reminds me - and sorry for going slightly off-topic - why on Earth does the JS world invent so many new names for things that already have perfectly good ones? For instance, why "Web Workers" instead of "threads"?

<comment><USER6> Because with threads you expect shared memory. Web workers currently communicate only by message passing, more like a basic UNIX process. But they're unlike a UNIX process in other ways.

If they used an existing name someone else would be on here complaining about that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sleep Deprivation May Spur Serious Mental Problems, Study Finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-31/sleep-deprivation-may-trigger-mental-problems-in-young-people-study-finds.html

<comment><USER2> Oooh oooh, can I be "Correlation does not equal causation" guy in this thread?

Seriously though, the actual article is probably much more useful than the headline, since they have presumably actually quantified the extent of the correlation between insomnia and other health problems.

The other thing I learned is that there's a journal called _Sleep_.

<comment><USER3> Well, I came in here to say exactly that: the paper is based on a survey of people self-reporting their past history with sleeping. Not a very good way to control the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The Pennsylvania researchers tracked 1,741 middle aged volunteers who > completed a questionnaire on their sleep history, underwent a physical exam > and were monitored overnight in a sleep laboratory. _The death rate exceeded > 50 percent for men with chronic insomnia_ , compared with 9.1 percent of > those who slept well, after researchers adjusted for differences such as > weight and smoking habits.

Huh? 9% of the normal men died, and _half_ of those with insomnia? How long did they follow them for?

<comment><USER5> You stole my comment! :-)

Anyway, answer is here: <http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=27894>

And to save everyone from clicking on that link: "were followed-up for 14 years (men)", "mortality rate was 21% for men"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Definitely not the article you want to read because it is 4 in the morning and you can't sleep... shit.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah, hell. I should go to bed, then.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anecdote: I have Obstructive Sleep Apnea, which meant that for a good while I was getting virtually no REM sleep every night.

After I got it fixed, I was talking to my doc. He said that he had seen a couple people who were locked up due to psychiatric problems who actually were really suffering from sleep disorders. Once the sleeping problem was fixed, they no longer needed medication or institutionalization.

Powerful stuff, even if it's just second-hand stories.</comment>


Snow depth sensors bounce radio signals off meteors - <AUTHOR> http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/publications/Briefing-Book/bb25.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Found this little tidbit while reading an article about the Cal. drought.

Additional info on the Sensor network SNOTEL:

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

And meteor burst communication:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_scatter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_scatter)</comment>


Brian Wilson, Bonnie McKee and Others React to 'Blurred Lines' Verdict - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-blurred-lines-reaction-brian-wilson-bonnie-mckee-20150314-story.html#page=1

<comment><USER3> > Marvin Gaye's biographer, David Ritz, sided with Gaye's family, though he > said he's uncertain whether from a legal standpoint "Blurred Lines" > technically infringes the copyright on Gaye's song. But looking at the case > in reverse he argued that the jury's verdict was justified because, "There > would be no 'Blurred Lines' if there had not been 'Got to Give It Up.' It > never in a million years would have happened."

By that definition almost every song-writer since since ~1967 owes Bob Dylan some money, and Dylan owes half that money to Woodie Guthrie who owes it to a thousand other musicians that came before him.

Blurred Lines has had a target painted on it from the beginning, I've never seen a song so hated. I've even heard feminists refer to it as a "date-rape anthem." _(edit: see the almost instantly killed comment in this thread that just says "Finally". People hate the song so much that they don't care if it sets bad legal precedent so long as something bad happens to Robin Thicke.)_

Worse than no copyright law, maybe worse than bad copyright law is vague copyright law that's selectively enforced to police message and content.

<comment><USER4> There is a book that tries to chronicle these musical influences: [http://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Like-Teen-Spirit-Ripped- Off/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Like-Teen-Spirit-Ripped- Off/dp/1583480234). Its pretty much impossible to come up with a modern pop song that doesn't borrow heavily from other musicians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could the rights holders of Marvin Gaye's work be sued for copyright infringement of an older, yet still quixotically copyrighted, work? Not only would such a move highlight everything wrong with the verdict, but it would also be quite poetic.

<comment><USER6> Bridgeport Music themselves pointed out that Funkadelic's _Sexy Ways_ (1974) is similar to _Blurred Lines_ \--and so transitively it's similar to _Got to give it up_ (1977), right? But Bridgeport owns the catalog of Gaye and Funkadelic.

George Clinton's take: [https://twitter.com/george_clinton/statuses/3682102168289320...](https://twitter.com/george_clinton/statuses/368210216828932096)

Statute of limitations is 3 years from last date of infringement (which I guess is today since this music is all still being sold).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "We need everything we can get to protect the commodity of intellectual > property."

Protection from what? It sounds to me that this verdict will not protect musicians and songwriters, but put them in danger of litigations.

</comment><comment><USER6> The two songs are hauntingly similar. Is that wrong though? I think fair use has a shortcoming in that what Weird Al does is technically ok (even though he asks permission) since it's parody, yet something like this is still infringement. The originality and creativity in both are similar, yet one's a joke so it's fine.

<comment><USER8> Weir Al's versions are parodies yes, but they are also cover versions - <USER2> are never claimed as original aside from their satirical lyrics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How has Mark Ronson not been sued into oblivion?

</comment><comment><USER10> It was a good verdict. If Marvin Gaye's grandkids (or the grandkids of whoever it is that has the rights to that song) can't collect a tax on anything even remotely similar for all of eternity...

Well, maybe Margin Gaye will stop writing songs.

We can't have that.

<comment><USER11> Not sure if you're making an attempt at a joke but Gaye has been dead for quite some time now.

<comment><USER12> I can assure you that it's a joke.

The argument is not particularly novel, but it's an important one.

I'm honestly confused by the level of downvoting on it.

<comment><USER13> Me too. I thought the sarcasm was spot on. Eternal copyrights FTW! Think of the Children!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fork a distributed Postgres database with Citus - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/08/04/fork-your-distributed-postgres-with-citus-cloud/ <comment><USER2> "staging environment to experiment with, that is an exact copy of your production database?"

This seems to be problematic in several compliance schemes. Most will make sure developers,QA etc. do not get access to production data.

<comment><USER3> Craig from Citus here. In situations where compliance is an issue you would absolutely want to obfuscate the data. You could do this after the fact in a few ways, but have a data set that imitates the distribution and size of your production database even in those cases is still useful. Given only the engineers with production access would be the ones forking before they handed it off they could put the right tooling in place to obfuscate.

All that said it's helpful feedback and something we could definitely look at building more into the product.

<comment><USER2> This would definitely help. Although I think SOX (my compliance days are long gone) is mostly concerned about controls to change data, it might be relevant to access production data. Not sure about PCI and HIPAA.

<comment><USER4> Definitely not good for PCI DSS. Requirement 6.4 reads:

      Examine policies and procedures to verify the following are defined:
      • Development/test environments are separate from production environments with access control in place to enforce separation.
      • A separation of duties between personnel assigned to the development/test environments and those assigned to the production environment.
      • Production data (live PANs) are not used for testing or development.
      • Test data and accounts are removed before a production system becomes active.
      • Change control procedures related to implementing security patches and software modifications are documented.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, now I remember from my PCI DSS days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> it's a very useful feature to have.

if you use Heroku Postgres Database ( production tier ), they have a fork feature as well.

if you are running Postgres on your own and for relatively small loads, it's quite trivial to create a copy of the db using Template

        CREATE DATABASE new_db TEMPLATE = old_db;

[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/manage-ag- templat...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/manage-ag- templatedbs.html)

While not the responsibility of a DB vendor, it would be nice if this includes some Data anonymization/randomization option.

<comment><USER3> Great tip on the Postgres templates, they're a very much underused feature.

Fully agreed on the data anonymization, and it's something we'll think about in the future. Prior to Citus I ran product for Heroku Postgres for a number of years and the engineering team behind our database as a service is the early team that also built Heroku Postgres so it's much of the same product we aimed to create here. Anonymization absolutely makes sense we just have to figure out the right way to deliver it.

<comment><USER6> I think one viable way is if you provide some way to insert hooks or triggers for user to be able to amend data as they want. Maybe for some having ability to mark fields to be filled with auto generated names/addresses will be enough though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We use ZFS (on Linux) clones to instantly fork a read-only replica of our production database, to create r/w copies. We also currently have these upgraded in-place to 9.6 (we're still on 9.5) for testing.

Docker-compose and a makefile make it all very straightforward.</comment>


Mapping How Programming Languages Influenced Each Other According to Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ouseful.info/2012/07/03/mapping-how-programming-languages-influenced-each-other-according-to-wikipedia/

<comment><USER2> Funny to see Eiffel with such a large circle even though it had very limited adoption. I had a soft spot for it once and failed miserably at getting it adopted in my company. Its contracts and invariants were very appealing and probably why it has such a large influence in this graph.

<comment><USER3> Beyond its contracts and invariants, Meyer made Eiffel a very "opinionated" language, with those opinions argued forcefully in his _Object-Oriented Software Construction_. It seems to me that well-argued, almost "ideological" designs tend to have outsized influence. The original relational database papers by Codd come similarly to mind.

It isn't just having a good mathematical model or strong abstract theory. Eiffel got co/contravariance wrong (or at least, incomplete), after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is a very poorly laid out map. This one is much better indexed by time

[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues....](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues.jpg)

<comment><USER5> That's not a very good map either--there's no connection between ML and Haskell, for starters.

<comment><USER6> Or Self and JavaScript. And it calls Ruby a "hardware description language". I need to stop reading it, it's making me angry.

<comment><USER7> It is. It's just the wrong one.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(hardware_description_lang...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_\(hardware_description_language\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice if time were represented graphically. (Imagine this animated Hans Rosling style.)

The graphic shows a kind of downward flow from ALGOL (which is fair enough) but you can almost see modern programming languages as lying in an overlapping confluence of ideas from ALGOL and Lisp (and Simula, itself derived from ALGOL a close third), but Lisp is at the bottom-left.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can you render a large resolution so we can see the small dots with labels?

</comment><comment><USER10> I tried, but I cant find C anywhere inside there.

<comment><USER11> Right between ALGOL 68 and C++.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Arranged by hand, but much better: <http://www.levenez.com/lang/>

</comment><comment><USER7> The diagram is a... png?! This seems a much better application for SVG, I should think.

</comment><comment><USER13> Zoom would be helpful.</comment>


Covid-19 Ventilator Management and Sedation: Improving Survival with Dr. Wes Ely - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug75BW_ppo4 <comment><AUTHOR> Discussion about what it means to be put on a ventilator, common complications, what can be done to avoid needing a ventilator, what can be done to reduce harm caused by ventilator.</comment>


Terry Childs Found Guilty In SF Computer Tampering Trial - <AUTHOR> http://www.ktvu.com/news/23283217/detail.html

<comment><USER2> Actually, a reasonable article. Particularly the followup with a juror who was a Network Engineer (Chilton). I like the following statement:

"Chilton, however, said Childs' supervisors at the Department of Technology were also to blame. He said they "did everything wrong that they possibly could," citing "ineffective management and no formalized policies and procedures" for dealing with employees in such situations."

As one who manages a fairly large team of Network Engineers, I find it hard to believe how painfully absent the city's management must have been to let things go as far as they did. Clearly the city wasn't using two-factor authentication, vaulted enable passwords, or nightly backed up configs (Rancid or role your own) - all of which are pretty bog standard network-manager checklists.

</comment><comment><USER3> Terry Childs sounds mentally ill. Was that raised in the trial?

<comment><USER4> What a mentally ill conclusion to jump to. If this opinion is founded on news and blogs, its _not founded on very much at all_.

<comment><USER5> I can't quite grasp the message that you're trying to send here. Is this supposed to be a jab at 'the media?' Or is this supposed to be some sort of pro-mental-health message?

<comment><USER4> Doesn't it seem mean-spirited for a well known individual to jump to a conclusion in a public forum that a person suffers from mental illness due to their behavior, all descriptions of which likely only comes from blogs and newspapers?

And no, this is not a jab at the media. Not sure if you've ever been the subject of media coverage, but I can tell you from personal experience that it's enlightening to discover how little of reality is represented in the news. It's just a fact of life.

<comment><USER6> _Doesn't it seem mean-spirited for a well known individual to jump to a conclusion in a public forum that a person suffers from mental illness due to their behavior, all descriptions of which likely only comes from blogs and newspapers?_

Without knowing the person in question, what else is there to go off of beyond news and blogs? Seems to me he was stating his opinion based off those sources and I came to the same conclusion.

<comment><USER4> And that's the point.

The limited information mostly points to a person under extreme duress and clearly offended by his management. How is it not a personal attack to conjecture in public about mental illness? Because it's apparently unintended as a personal attack? Hmmm, I'll just swing this club around in a crowded room, hope I don't _accidentally_ hit someone.

In these circumstances questioning mental stability essentially questions a persons entire ability to reason and reasonably rationalize.

Is it that under duress and in a perfect storm of personality conflict, someone must be mentally ill to break down or behave in a way that appears irrational? I guess it could be, and damn, if someone doesn't agree with me, that's a pretty good sign too ;-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I Make $26K+ a Month Selling Onions - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6uyr0c/how_i_make_26k_a_month_selling_onions/ <comment><USER2> Archived version: [http://archive.is/5vpqW](http://archive.is/5vpqW)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well it's a nice story, but as he stated, living in his country is cheap.

And, if I'm not mistaken, gas is really cheap in Saudi Arabia.

So it's not adaptable in another country where you have to pay big money for routing goods. He would have spent his whole benefits in gas.

<comment><USER4> > So it's not adaptable in another country

Not entirely true. Maybe not onions, but I see this business model -- buying very cheap in bulk and selling at a slightly lower price than the lowest supplier price (while still making a profit) -- everyday on amazon on all kind of products.

People buy items in bulk from Ali Express (Alibaba's business unit ) and sell on amazon using the same business model the OP has implemented.

I even tried it a while back and it was fairly successful / profitable.

ex: Stawberry Corer / Huller : [https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search- alias%3...](https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=strawberry+corer&tag=amzndeals03-20)

A bunch of "brands" are selling it for 7$ to 8$. I found the same on Ali Express for 79 cents a piece, bought a 100 and sold them off to for 4$ a piece (with free shipping, it's just a few ounces in weight) a few months back...

<comment><USER5> So basically drop shipping? It is true that it is not adaptable to another country, especially developing ones. In India we have tons and tons of drop shippers who will cut into your margins very fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I mean, good for that guy, but it's not like he found some secret to selling onions, he's just selling them at a lower price than his competition.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes thats all you need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe this guy deleted his post because he didn't want anybody cutting in on his business. The tl;dr summary:

\- Saudi Arabian resident spotted an arbitrage opportunity buying onions cheaply and selling them to small and mid-sized outlets (large outlets already had suppliers) \- reinvested profits to grow the business (more onions, truck to move them, expanded to another province)

</comment><comment><USER9> Don't even want to know how many regulations you'd need to keep in mind doing that here in Germany :P I also doubt you could keep up with Lidl's etc prices. Also, the lack of "small shops" where you can even get hold of someone who is allowed to do any buying.

</comment><comment><USER10> Could sell even more onions on the dark web.

<comment><USER11> Tor loads of onions

<comment><USER12> Onion network

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there any way to find the post?

<comment><USER4> [http://archive.is/5vpqW](http://archive.is/5vpqW)

He deleted it, most likely because -- like @ flashman has stated somewhere here -- that other's might cut in on his business in Saudi Arabia.

Also @flashman's TL;DR is on point. I guess it's a matter of finding the arbitrage, and can be applied to almost any "not so sexy" product in any country, the key is to find it, and keep it to yourself :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The post is deleted, it appears.

<comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/5vpqW](http://archive.is/5vpqW)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> But can he buy eggs for 7 cents, sell them for 5, and still profit?</comment>


Ask HN: HN for Investing? - <AUTHOR>

A couple of friends and I are starting an investment club. We each will bring equal amounts of money in. The problem is we have no idea how to get started. Is there an HN for investing?
Or, even better, can someone with experience in investing share how they got started?
We have $5,000 to play with. We are very much aware of how fast that can disappear. We are just trying to get our feet wet and play a little.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> [http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive- In...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive- Investing/dp/0060555661)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank, I will check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> it has a terrible interface and basically one mantra (you should index invest) but [http://www.bogleheads.org/](http://www.bogleheads.org/) has a very active investor userbase.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I had never heard of bogleheads.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Eg – examples at the command line - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/srsudar/eg

<comment><USER2> Great idea and implementation, but I feel the need to mention for anyone wanting something like this that it's already been made better. Bro pages[0] has a community actively adding and moderating examples right from the command line itself.

[0]: [http://bropages.org](http://bropages.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow that is great! I had no idea. Definitely going to try it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice! I'll never forget how to use tar again.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear it. Let me know if you find any problems.

</comment><comment><USER4> You should add entries for java, javac, etc.

<comment><USER3> +1 totally agree</comment></comment>


Seven Reasons I'm Fascinated By Uber's Latest Financing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.semilshah.com/2013/08/24/seven-reasons-im-fascinated-by-ubers-latest-financing/

<comment><USER2> > Google's head legal honcho David Drummond joins the Uber Board. So, this > means that any municipality thinking of messing with Uber (which seems to > happen monthly) will now have to think twice about getting into fisticuffs > with Google. Well-played, Uber, well-played.

Wow. This is potentially bigger than the investment itself, because it will probably do more to ensure the survivability of the company than the money they received, which they would've gotten from other places later anyway.</comment>


If you have ever had a problem grasping the importance of diversity in tech - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nke_ise/status/897756900753891328 <comment><USER2> Should be shown at the beginning of any tech presentation. It's very funny but very insightful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Racist soap dispenser.</comment>


Hacking the Kinect - How to hack USB device drivers - <AUTHOR> http://ladyada.net/learn/diykinect/

<comment><USER2> This is seriously awesome. While I've spent a lot of time reversing network protocols (and thus had a good foundation on which to pick up USB hacking (which I documented at <http://daeken.com/hacking-the-belkin-network-usb-hub> and, to a lesser extent, at [http://daeken.com/emokit-hacking-the-emotiv-epoc- brain-compu...](http://daeken.com/emokit-hacking-the-emotiv-epoc-brain- computer-0) )), most people have never dropped to this level. We need more articles like this. Good work.

Edit: So, I have an idea, and I think this may be the community to ask about it. I'm considering going to a company (specifically, one that produces some network software or a USB device) and asking them to get a copy/unit of their product, which I will then reverse-engineer in full public view, with the intention of making it fully transparent, and hopefully getting other people into this stuff. It could be something that's already open (either intentionally or by someone reversing it and publishing a driver or other code), or something that's currently closed. But the whole goal is to end up with a set of data that people can work through, along the lines of my Belkin post (but better organized, and published as things go on).

Anyone have any suggestions for who I should approach about this? Or hell, any startups want me to reverse their stuff for the greater good?

<comment><USER3> What about the iPhone/iPad dock connector? There's lots of interesting devices being hooked up to them.

For USB, what about barcode scanners and keyboards? It would be very interesting to see how they communicate with the computer and I figure it would be relatively simple, compared to say an external USB drive.

<comment><USER2> I really want to do this with the support of the manufacturer for a change; that's what actually makes it difficult to choose a target. I've hacked a lot of stuff in the past, but it's never been with the manufacturer's support, and I think that somewhere out there, there's a perfect target. One which is not only a good learning experience for people, but a good marketing opportunity for some company.

<comment><USER3> What about the Arduino USB connection? I don't know if it sounds interesting enough to you but I suspect they would be open to it.

<comment><USER4> I believe the Arduino USB is just a FTDI USB to serial converter.

<http://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/troubleshooting#toc15>

<comment><USER5> It used to be but the new Arduino UNO uses custom software on an Atmel microcontroller that includes USB support:

<http://wiki.ladyada.net/arduino/unofaq#new_usb_chip>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've written USB drivers before (linux, but USB is the same for everything) and this is exactly how you do it even if you know all the command you're writing into the device. Spot on.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the most detailed explanation on howto explore a USB device I've seen. Need more articles like this!

<comment><USER8> lvr.com also has incredibly useful information. support jan axelson and buy one of her books, they're essential for any usb development!

<comment><USER9> The website isn't very well laid out.

<comment><USER9> Well, it isn't. It's just a big mess barfed up onto html. Some links are to elsewhere on the same site. Intermixed with those are links to some other site.

I'm not saying there isn't useful information there, or that her book sucks. I'm just saying her website is a poorly organized mess that makes it less useful unless you know exactly what you're looking for. For a USB newbie it'd just be a maze of links, all alike.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I asked about this a few days ago. This appearing now is just awesome. Would like to say a big thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge.

<comment><USER8> you're welcome! we write a new tutorial every tuesday - some beginner, some advanced. if you subscribe to the blog rss feed you can get the notifications

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A straightforward, in-depth guide which is easy to understand. It's absolutely superb ... but am I alone in being put off by the high cost of a USB analyser?

<comment><USER8> a hardware usb analyzer is just one of those things that's terribly expensive, not really even because of the hardware (its not that complicated) but because of the software which must be _really_ good and this one runs on all OS's. I will admit I used this project as an excuse to get one but good electrical engineering tools cost in the thousands of $

<comment><USER11> Maybe it could be possible to set-up a virtual hackspace-equipment sharing service, where groups can purchase and pool resources .. allowing remote groups to loan items like this on an adhoc-basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> wait - the kinect has a motor?

<comment><USER13> To tilt the camera up and down, making it more adaptable to the range of televisions it may be housed on or under.

<comment><USER14> and to get a wider field of vision for the camera as it records and analyzes your living room and sends it to advertisers and marketers to build an even more detailed profile on you.

[http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/15/microsoft-exec-caught- in-...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/15/microsoft-exec-caught-in-privacy- snafu-says-kinect-might-tailor/)

<comment><USER15> ...is something that isn't actually happening and would violate Microsoft privacy policy if it did.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quant Hedge Fund D.E. Shaw Fires 150; 10% of staff - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/d-e-shaw-said-to-cut-10-percent-of-staff/ <comment><USER2> <http://ycombinator.com/apply.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is sad. Founded by a computer scientist, DE Shaw is perhaps the most tech-focused among hedge funds.

I once had a very challenging technical job interview there. Several interviewers had PhD in Computer Science.

<comment><USER4> i'm not convinced they're smarter than anyone else. i'd rather invest in renaissance or citadel...

my coworkers at morgan were all physics or cs phds. and a consulting expert got a nobel prize while i was there. amusingly, i interviewed at google around the same time, and some of the engineers were condescending about the quality and education of my coworkers.

<comment><USER5> Renaissance over Citadel. If I'm not mistaken, Renaissance is purely automated trading. No traders or trading floor in the conventional sense. Plus they weathered the fallout of 08 much better than Citadel.

What's sad is that these smart people, including ones I've met while working as a SysAdmin for a Prop Trading firm often don't have access to the capital to start their own shops. This is due to the incestuous nature of the Finance world, where it's a lot more about who you know than what you know.

Sadly, they're often in the employ of third-rate CEOs, who always get a cut off the top, and pay the producers a mere fraction of what they made for the firm and their clients.

<comment><USER6> it's not only purely automatic

 _The Medallion Fund has its own internal trading desk, staffed by approximately 20 traders, and trades from Monday opening bell in Australia through Friday closing bell in the US._

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I assume their business model is roughly : to implement algorithms that find near-arbitrage opportunities by sifting through vast amounts of market data, then use those to multiply investment funds. This sounds like the perfect domain for a startup.. where a nimble small team of quant/developers would have huge advantages, by being faster to rollout.

This is almost a pure software business, so why aren't these companies more like startups? Is it because of the expense of getting fine grained and low latency market data [eg. exchange colocation]? Or is it due to the contacts needed in the biz to get the 'investment' funds to trade with? Or is it because only large financial entities have access to these risky speculative trades?

Side note : I see Jane Street Capital use Ocaml, and some other quants use KDB/Q for implementing these kinds of algorithms, so it seems innovative languages give leverage here. I was thinking Node.js + a js BTree api to access streaming data would be a nice dev environment.

<comment><USER3> Two major difference of a trading firm from a software firm: 1) Large amount of trading capital is needed to make a sizable profit. 2) Math, finance and trading skills.

A trading firm needs above 2 items in addition to technical skills to succeed. A team of good people with all 3 above items (capital, trading, tech) have a good chance to succeed.

In fact, Citadel (one of the largest quant hedge funds) was started by one person (Ken Griffin) when he was a undergraduate from a Harvard dormitory. It is pretty much a startup success story.

There is a major culture difference: trading is the key activity; coding is only secondary. This may explain why trading firms usually have a typical wall-street tough culture, and don't feel like a typical silicon-valley startup.

<comment><USER8> Not so different as you might think. After all, a large amount of capital is needed to build out a datacentre. Doesn't mean that Google is the only company that can make a profit on the Internet.

<comment><USER9> Not really on the same scale. If you're a hedge fund, the most you can make in a year is some small percentage of your total assets under management, so you need to persuade people to give you _billions_ (at least hundreds of millions) before you can start raking in the kind of dough that pays salaries.

<comment><USER8> That's what leverage is for (and if it goes wrong you end up like LTCM).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How much staff is really really needed for these quant shops? After an algorithm is developed isn't it just rinse/repeat? Honest question, as I'm not a finance guy.

<comment><USER11> The effective lifetime of a trading algorithm is only weeks. They need to keep iterating to remain competitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing I always found odd about DE Shaw is how casual the work environment is. It's like google, but in Manhattan. The problem is NY isn't california and quant finance isn't all software. There's a certain pace and overt competitiveness to Manhattan that enforces a discipline and a work ethic onto people. This works quite well in the Darwinian world of finance. But, from what I saw of various parts of DE Shaw's operations there was somewhat a lack of urgency to some fairly critical areas. A good firing spree every once in a while seems to work wonders in putting the urgency back into the workforce.

<comment><USER13> Google has an office in Manhattan, 15th street and 8th avenue if I'm notmistaken. I haven't personally been to any other google office, but it doesn't look different than the pictures of any of them; All the perks, sleeping pods and cafeteria stuff seems to be there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is 10% really that bad?

If it's the bottom 10%, it should actually improve company's performance.

<comment><USER15> Unless of course you follow that argument to its logical conclusion...

<comment><USER16> That's exactly what companies like GE and Intel do.

I personally think it's terrible management practice, but it seems to work for them, and there's always fresh young blood coming in at the bottom.

<comment><USER16> The downvote seems to indicate a citation is necessary:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Tenure_as_CEO_of_GE>

[http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/updated-rumors-intel- layo...](http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/updated-rumors-intel-layoffs-fab- delays-and-capital-expenditure-decreases-20020716/)

(The Intel practice was also confirmed in Andy Grove's book "Only the paranoid survive".)

<comment><USER17> Did you read the second article?

> Intel announced it will reduce its workforce by 4,000 workers (5%), mostly > through attrition or voluntary separation programs.

I joined Intel shortly after that article was written (2002). For much of my tenure (3 years), Intel had a US hiring freeze (except through acquisition, how I got hired) and aimed to reduce its headcount primary through attrition, not layoffs. I felt like Intel treated its employees pretty well.

<comment><USER16> I was referring to the comment by "Insider".

In any case, I think Andy Grove's book is a better citation, but some people on the Internet don't read books.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How do you resume your workstation? - <AUTHOR>

You come back to your laptop and it's in screen saver mode.
What do YOU do to wake it up?
I press the right arrow. <comment><USER2> I just type my password. Ubuntu wakes up instantly and accepts whatever you typed in as the password, unlike Windows (and possibly Mac) which has to wake up before you can type. Reason I know this is because each time I use Windows, it always takes me two tries to login ;-)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd normally have closed the lid. So I'd open the lid and hope that OS X hasn't removed all USB attached devices uncleanly.

(I need to search for a fix, but never get round to it.)

</comment><comment><USER4> I normally sleep the machine and wake it up by clicking a mouse button.

</comment><comment><USER5> Left shift!</comment>


Complete Corona lock down of Milano and greater areas in "red zone" - <AUTHOR> Huge Parts of Italy are locked down due to the Corona outbreak in a new "red zone". Nobody is allowed to enter or leave without special reason. Source: https://www.open.online/2020/03/07/coronavirus-ultime-notizie-7-marzo/ <comment><USER2> Finally. Thank you Italy.

But it should have happened 2 weeks ago or even before that, there was no reason to wait.

Now the wait has created more outbreaks elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> Very easy to say. Very difficult to implement. Save human life without destroying (an already bad) economy in between. Especially in Italy a country full of strong opinions.

<comment><USER4> Surely the earlier you do it the least impact there is on the economy. Stoping the movement of people for a month is better than being in limbo for a month and still ending up with a quarantine at the end anyway

<comment><USER2> I find it also logical conclusion. I think it was pretty clear from the beginning in what direction it will develop and what measures are actually working. It looks incredibly irresponsible to wait this long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am an italian from a red zone. It seems like it has been left to the common sense of people. I have collegues who come from other red zones and they could come easily. I don't understand.

Bar, pubs etc will be closed.

Stores will be open like 8-18 and will be closed on weekends.

Honestly I don't understand how this is going to help: say that 100 people go to the store in a week.

\- 10 Mon

\- 10 Tue

\- 10 Wed

\- 10 Thu

\- 10 Fri

\- 25 Sat

\- 25 Sun

Those 50 people that go on Sat/Sun will go during the week, resulting in

\- Mon 20

\- Tue 20

\- Wed 20

\- Thu 20

\- Fri 20

\- Sat 0

\- Sun 0

How is this going to help?

</comment><comment><USER6> "It's just the flu bro!"

<comment><USER7> Overheard some boomers talking about it yesterday at a cafe. "The chances of getting it are miniscule, we should buy cheap airline tickets while we can!".

<comment><USER8> It is interesting that so thought hundreds of Estonians regardless of government strong recommendations to avoid areas in Northern Italy.

9 of them returned with the virus and at least two had public contacts before being detected regardless of mandated self quarantine.

To be honest this raises some questions about the actual spread in Italy. Common sense tells that it should be statistically small change to meet a person with the virus, something between around - 0.05 and 0.1 (calculated "on the napkin") but somehow they managed to get it.</comment></comment></comment>


Half-Broken Car in Heavy Traffic - <AUTHOR> https://esolangs.org/wiki/Half-Broken_Car_in_Heavy_Traffic <comment><USER2> I don't understand this in the slightest (compared to other joke languages like brainfk) - can anyone explain?

<comment><USER3> Languages like this belong to a group called Fungeoids:

[https://esolangs.org/wiki/Fungeoid](https://esolangs.org/wiki/Fungeoid)

While many esolangs simply have a bizarre, embellished, or minimalistic _syntax_ wrapped around very familiar semantics, the most interesting ones create new models with new problems and idioms to discover. For example, Fungeoids bring us the Wire-Crossing Problem, an interesting connection between computational models and topology:

[https://esolangs.org/wiki/Wire- crossing_problem](https://esolangs.org/wiki/Wire-crossing_problem)</comment></comment>


How mantis shrimp make sense of the world - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-11-mantis-shrimp-world.html <comment><USER2> I see mantis shrimp almost every day, and I warn photographers to approach them very slowly because otherwise they will run and hide.

If you can see a mantis shrimp, they can almost certainly see you. The best way to approach them is to hover directly above and slowly descend on top of them.

Amazing animals, I would love to be able to see the reef like they do.

</comment><comment><USER3> So basically crustaceans have private cloud brains. Looks like docker is alive and well at the bottom of the ocean :)

</comment><comment><USER4> How does _anybody_ make sense of the world? Does anybody? 'coz I don't.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is really important foundational research for informing future genetically engineered humans that floresce during mating rituals [1], see 12 primary colours [2] and punch like a 22-caliber bullet [2]

[1] [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/303/5654/51](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/303/5654/51)

[2] [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/07...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/07/03/natures- most-amazing-eyes-just-got-a-bit-weirder/)

<comment><USER6> Old, but [https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp](https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp)</comment></comment>


Why do people use stuffs like iphone, windows and intel cpu that contains spies? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Convenience?

What regular (non-HN reader) user is going to be happy to use an old thinkpad with libreboot+Linux and a rooted android phone with f-droid and no google play services? The user experience is seriously not accessible for a regular human to use these types of things.</comment>


The Easy Ones – Three Bugs Hiding in the Open - <AUTHOR> https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/08/30/the-easy-ones-three-bugs-hiding-in-the-open/ <comment><USER2> > printf("%d, %f", f, i); // Swapping float and int – could print nonsense, or > might actually work (!)

I'm going to guess because the ABI says they are passed in int and floating point registers, so the actual order they appear doesn't matter?

<comment><USER3> Yep. On Windows that code will misbehave when compiled for x86, but will work "correctly" when compiled for x64, and probably ARM64.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > hiding in plain site

Easy bugs hiding in plain sight, you say?

</comment><comment><USER5> > Nobody ever looked at the monitoring dashboard

> The fix was a few lines of code to stop traversing after twenty navigation > nodes, presumably saving a few million dollars in server and power costs

I wonder if this is Stadia?

EDIT: Whoops, I don't think so:

> needed to move on to a different company

<comment><USER6> Valve, probably, based on his job history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _> although, really, if you have compiler warnings you need to rethink your life choices_

Is this a joke, half a joke, or serious?

<comment><USER8> I know what you mean, but I don't share your attitude.

I have worked on codebases where 8000 compiler warnings was just "So no errors then? That means the build is fine."

But 7990 of those warnings had been there for at least five years. Adding the 8001st warning in your build still meant that you probably did something ill- advised or poorly thought out.

It's just very hard to allow/forbid the right warnings per compilation unit (this was in the C#/.NET ecosystem) to tell the compiler what you did or did not care about.

<comment><USER3> Curious. How do you know if you've added the 8001st warning that indicates that you did something ill-advised? It seems that such a huge warning count makes it very hard for the compiler to tell you things.

I've generally found it quite practical to get warning counts to zero with some combination of fixing the issues and disabling warnings that have a poor signal-to-noise ratio. The one exception was /analyze builds. There I added filtering so that I could treat some warning types as fatal, and others would be reported on only when they were new.

<comment><USER8> > Curious. How do you know if you've added the 8001st warning that indicates > that you did something ill-advised? It seems that such a huge warning count > makes it very hard for the compiler to tell you things.

Well, doing a clean checkout of the master branch, noting N=number of warnings, then making your changes and comparing with N. At least that is what I did. It was not very popular, since no one ever tracked N on master at all.

> I've generally found it quite practical to get warning counts to zero with > some combination of fixing the issues and disabling warnings that have a > poor signal-to-noise ratio. The one exception was /analyze builds. There I > added filtering so that I could treat some warning types as fatal, and > others would be reported on only when they were new.

I completely agree that this is how it should be done. I vaguely remember that this is however quite complicated to achieve in the .NET ecosystem. Something about a library A being called in another project B respecting the disabled warnings of A when compiling A and B when compiling B, so you as a client could never disable warnings yourself (?).

This was quite a while ago, and as I didn't work too much on A-type projects (only B-type projects), investigating it was never my responsibility. I just got told "It's not that simple" by the A-type employees.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The meek shall inherit the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11999307 <comment><USER2> Slightly OT, but I just finished the book by Felix Dennis. There's this quote:

"The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mining rights"

<comment><USER3> Attributed to J. Paul Getty.

Just finished the Felix Dennis book too. A little self-indulgent at times but a good read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While they may be 'technically' accessing the web with their phones, it's not the web as we know it via our Laptops/PC's and broadband connections.

My cell phone circa 2001 has net access, but I wouldn't exactly call it the "Interweb" as it was just weather/sports/news on a tiny screen walled in and horribly limiting.

Good article though, and I'm sure the iPhone will influence better browsers for mobile phones which will help this.

<comment><USER5> The point is, however, that most people in developing countries aren't going to be able to afford a $300 iPhone. They're going to be getting a cheap phone with basic functionality.

The innovation that the article is talking about is by using basic mobile technologies like SMS to create mobile banking and payment services. They aren't talking about creating a new bunch of iPhone apps.

<comment><USER6> _most people in developing countries aren't going to be able to afford a $300 iPhone. They're going to be getting a cheap phone with basic functionality._

In 3-5 years, a "cheap phone with basic functionality" will have the same basic feature set as an iPhone (though not the slickness, that costs extra).</comment></comment></comment>