MySQL Editions - <AUTHOR> http://www.mysql.com/products/ <comment><USER2> Judging by the comments people are confused. The free, GPL edition of MySQL ("MySQL Community Server") is still what you've always had. These are the commercially licensed products. Oracle's shifted around some features and pricing on support plans and such, but if you're not a commercial customer, nothing's changed for you.

<comment><USER3> What's the difference between community and commercial customers, aside from support? Is InnoDB a feature? Why would MyISAM support be free but InnoDB support have a yearly fee?

<comment><USER2> MySQL is dual-licensed. If you download the community server, it's GPL licensed. If you want to distribute MySQL as part of your application, then your application may have to be GPL licensed as well, which is often undesirable. ISVs and others that need to distribute MySQL can buy one of the commercial editions to get it under a non-GPL license.

If you're worried about the future, Oracle agreed to maintain the dual- licensing strategy until at least 2015 as part of the EU negotiations before acquiring Sun.

<comment><USER4> How exactly does distributing MySQL as part of your application make your application GPL as well? It's not a retorical question, can you please suggest a case? Unless you outright fork MySQL to make your own database, you can run and distribute it with your proprietary stack without being forced to license your code as GPL.

The FSF call it "mere aggregation": <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#MereAggregation>

<comment><USER5> Here we go with the amateur legal stuff, but until a more educated comment comes up, as far as I know, it is a question of the drivers being GPL, and coding up against the drivers crosses the threshold.

<comment><USER6> Not only that, but MySQL AB considered their network protocol to be GPL as well, and went after anyone who tried to make a clean-room implementation of it.

I don't know whether SUN and Oracle still pursue that strategy. Otherwise you could indeed bundle MySQL with some clean-room libraries to talk to the server.

<comment><USER7> >and went after anyone who tried to make a clean-room implementation of it.

That doesn't sound legal. You're allowed to clean-room implement anything aren't you?

<comment><USER6> The idea was that their network protocol was an original copyrighted work, and that any clean-room implementation of it would be a derived work.

That does indeed sound crazy, but they also had piles of cash to throw at lawyers to go after anyone who challenged them, and (maybe as a result of that) nobody ever made e.g. a clean-room BSD or LGPL licensed version of the mysql library. So it never made it to court AFAIK.

<comment><USER8> A nice fiction.

The reality is that copyright covers verbatim copying. If you read a book and write a review, the term "derived work" makes English sense, but not legal sense. Similarly, if you read the MySQL code looking for magic words to say to the server to get it to give you data, saying those words is not copyright infringement. It's "learning", not "copying".

If anyone used MySQL, I would write a BSD-licensed API just to prove a point. (And to be non-blocking.) But the world has moved on since the Oracle deal...

<comment><USER9> > Similarly, if you read the MySQL code looking for magic words to say to the > server to get it to give you data, saying those words is not copyright > infringement. It's "learning", not "copying".

What would happen, if the protocol would require sending a picture of a picture of Mickey Mouse with each request (or some copy-righted novel)?

<comment><USER10> That's been tested in court before, in Sega v. Accolade (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade>). (You had to display a Sega logo before your game could run, so you had to have their logo in your code)

In short, it's fair use.

<comment><USER11> My understanding from the Wikipedia article you linked is that you just had to have the string SEGA in a specific spot on your ROM, and that the logo was in fact part of the Genesis III BIOS. A four-character string and an image are pretty different, copyright-wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Still, MySQL is under GPL, InnoDB is under GPL.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone have ballpark numbers for what a non gpl encumbered mysql licence used to cost before this announcement? I assume Sun and/or Mysql ab used to offer a similar range of mysql based licences?

<comment><USER14> I'd negotiated licenses between $200 and $500 for their old basic offering (depending on volume). I've been punting on a switch to Postgres for the last few months, but they've forced my hand now.

<comment><USER15> Any particular reason you're not just using the community edition? Do you need the innodb features? (I'm asking because I've been wondering lately if I should make the switch...)

<comment><USER16> The fee is for the JDBC connector, not the db.. regardless of edition.. Bummer, that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does the introduction of MySQL without InnoDB mean they can also remove this from the community edition (and bug fixes) without getting into trouble with the EU? They still provide a dual licensing strategy with the same code base then.

</comment><comment><USER18> The Community Server editions are still available.

</comment><comment><USER19> Got confused until I read the legend at the bottom. Everything with a 1 next to it is commercial edition only. This does not include InnoDB thus, it's available in the community edition. Which is good, who uses MyISAM anyway?

<comment><USER20> maybe some people who want basic full text search capabilities but do not want to roll their own solution or use solr/sphinx whatever, I recall innodb did not support that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Even the $10,000 cluster edition (which is based on NDB) is GPL.

So clearly they can not be selling software, I can only assume these are prices for support, not for software.

Have they taken down download links? Removed source code?

<comment><USER22> GPL doesn't mean you can't sell it; it means you have to provide source and allow derivative products within the constraints of the license.

<comment><USER21> Isn't that what I said? It's GPL, so why are people so worried that they are also selling it?

Edit: I guess I can see how you can read it in reverse from what I meant.

<comment><USER23> _Isn't that what I said?_

"Selling software" is distinct from "preventing others from selling copies of [said] software", and confusing the two is the source of much fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the GPL, so some people get a little defensive when they're conflated. When I ran a small software shop, most of the work I sold to small business was built on libraries and other works that were GPL, but this didn't prevent me from charging money for it, it just meant that I couldn't prevent them from selling or giving away copies themselves. Of course, few small businesses are interested in paying for software and then providing it to their competitors, so in practice that never mattered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oracle has updated the page and clarified their lowest offering:

Embedded Database6

6 MySQL Classic Edition is not available as an Annual Subscription. ISVs, OEMs and VARs can purchase a license to use as an embedded database.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's about time! All three specs of MySQL have been OP for too long.

</comment><comment><USER26> You have got to admire the evil villany we're up against. Buying the 'M' in LAMP and then exploiting that position.

Business first, not the heart and minds of developers.

Luckily the 'L' + 'A' + 'P' cannot be bought.

LAPP stack anyone?

<comment><USER27> I take it the extra P is for PostgreSQL? As far as I could ever tell, the only advantage MySQL ever had over PostgreSQL 10 years ago is that it ran on Windows, and Postgres did not, back then. Oh, and by skipping ACID features, MySQL was faster.

So, back in the day, that drove me to conclude that all the MySQL fans were crazy, and I decided to use Postgres at home, since Windows != server, and having done quite enough XBase once upon a time, DB integrity had some value to me.

LAPP? Bring it!

Is the final P PHP, or Perl (which would be my preference)? Maybe make it an R for Ruby? :-)

<comment><USER28> Most Rubyists (I have no numbers for this, just a general sense of the community, I could be totally wrong, all generalizations are false, etc) use Nginx nowadays, so it'd be more like LNPR.

<comment><USER29> Most Rubyists also seem to be squarely in the NoSQL camp too, so try LNNR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Some people are capitalizing on this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866064>

</comment><comment><USER31> Somebody please fork mysql and get rid of oracle once and for all.

I bet the whole community will support the new sql.

<comment><USER32> There are several MySQL forks, have been for years. Most notably: Drizzle, MariaDB, Percona MySQL. There are many others.

I don't see anyone rushing to abandon mainline MySQL for the forks.

<comment><USER33> Percona's is probably the closest to the MySQL people are looking for; Percona is the premier MySQL consultancy, and they've patched the codebase for performance, etc.

<comment><USER34> From Monty's presentation about MariaDB, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL1l9Puh0sk> I got the impression that MariaDB is the primary open MySQL fork, with Percona merging their patches and becoming a downstream of MariaDB. Did MariaDB and Percona have a falling out in recent months?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, yeah hello PostgreSQL

<comment><USER35> I think the reason you are being downvoted is that you are comparing PostgreSQL with the commercial version of MySQL. A better comparison would be between EnterpriseDB and the commercial version of MySQL.

<comment><USER36> Afaik, the free version of MySQL doesn't let you do a live transaction-safe database dump of InnoDB tables.

A pretty basic feature I thought, which is included in the free version of PostgreSQL.

<comment><USER35> Well you can _almost_ get there (completely if you're not changing schemas):

mysqldump --single-transaction

This option sends a START TRANSACTION SQL statement to the server before dumping data. It is useful only with transactional tables such as InnoDB, because then it dumps the consistent state of the database at the time when BEGIN was issued without blocking any applications.

<comment><USER37> Unfortunately, mysql still doesn't have transactional DDL, I believe...

<comment><USER38> Nor does Oracle, for what it's worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So now Workbench costs $2000?

<comment><USER40> No, the MySQL Workbench Community Edition is still GPL and free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Well, don't imagine anyone's too terribly surprised by this.

Time to start boning back up of Postgres, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER42> Well, fuck. InnoDB is now a premium feature. So long, ACID compliance?

 _Edit_ "Classic Edition" — what a cop-out name. It should be "Crippled edition."

<comment><USER43> Just to be clear, "Classic Edition" is not the free open-source MySQL that we all know and love. It's a separate product for inclusion in other proprietary products. MySQL has always been a dual-license product, and this is similar to previous offerings by MySQL AB and Sun.

The "N/A" price probably just means "contact us so our sales team can squeeze you for all you're worth" -- which is how enterprise software deals typically work.

<comment><USER44> I'm glad I read the comments. I had the same knee-jerk reaction as above. Glad to know I'm still safe :)</comment></comment></comment>


The U.S. Air Force's X-37B Space Plane Could Soon Leave Earth for 2 Years - <AUTHOR> https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-air-forces-x-37b-space-plane-could-soon-leave-earth-2-years-148841 <comment><USER2> That always struck me as extremely weird.

If it's a useful vehicle, tying it up for years at a stretch seems terribly wasteful. It seems better to use dedicated equipment for the two-year project, and keep the versatile thing free for things that need versatility.

All I can think of is that nobody has actually discovered anything well-suited to its strengths, so they keep it in orbit so it doesn't seem to be doing nothing, and a waste of money.

Clue?

</comment><comment><USER3> they're testing some sort of exotic propulsion system for ion thrusters</comment>


Tempo - Email Client that helps you to focus - <AUTHOR> https://www.yourtempo.co <comment><AUTHOR> Email Client in Beta and does what it says. What you guys think. Btw I am not a developer or no way related to this. I just like this. But $15/mo is way higher for individual user for emails</comment>


If Google achieves superintelligence, time zones will be its Achilles heel - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3221 <comment><USER2> I gave a talk last year about a timezone strategy for Rails apps (or any app really). Sadly it wasn't recorded, so I'm hoping I can give it again somewhere, but here are the slides and source:

[https://github.com/pjungwir/timezones- talk](https://github.com/pjungwir/timezones-talk)

I suggest dealing internally with UTC as much as possible, and treating time zones as an "I/O formatting" concern. But ironically the big exception I know of is scheduling future events in calendars! The reason it's a problem there is that if you schedule a meeting, the app converts it to UTC, and then the timezone rules change, your meeting will be at the wrong instant. So it is important to keep the original input string (or at least the originally requested local time).

Another crazy timezone issue I encountered recently is that the Javascript standard originally told browsers to use Daylight Savings Time transition dates from _the current year_ when deciding the timezone offset of days in _past years_. This has been changed, but in IE you still see the old behavior. [1] is a Stack Overflow answer+comments that mention this history. You can see the problem by loading [2] in multiple browsers. The fix is to use moment- timezone.js [3]---but make sure you download the file with historical data!

I guess the moral is that timezones are not easy. :-)

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16946002/javascript- time-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16946002/javascript-time-zone-is- wrong-for-past-daylight-saving-time-transition-rules) [2] [http://jsbin.com/zicomitoka/edit?html,js,output](http://jsbin.com/zicomitoka/edit?html,js,output) [3] [http://momentjs.com/timezone/](http://momentjs.com/timezone/)

<comment><USER3> Following up because I need to write some time handling stuff in a side project. Could you elaborate on why a future date would cause a problem?

<comment><USER2> Sure! It is a rare problem, but I seem to recall a similar thing (at Facebook?) actually making the news not that long ago. Here are the steps:

1\. The user in California saves a meeting at 7am for June 1, 2017. (Today is April 17.)

2\. You convert to UTC (-0700) and save that in your database.

3\. On May 1st California decides to stop observing Daylight Savings Time effective immediately. Your server automatically updates its system-wide timezone file so it knows about this change. Now that UTC date in your database is happening at 6am instead (-0800). The _instant_ hasn't changed (The meeting is still happening at the same moment in e.g. Paris.) but the user probably really wants it to stay at 7am. They are going to be annoyed if their colleagues dial in while they are still in the shower. :-)

I hope that helps!

<comment><USER2> EDIT: jfoutz gives a much more realistic example: maybe California doesn't give up on DST altogether, but just moves the start date. Note this is not really about DST at all, but DST stories probably make the best examples. Another example could be that China decides to create East and West timezones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It sounds like the real problem here is that time specifications are fundamentally _contextual_ , and for whatever reason the application either doesn't have enough machine-readable context to work with or doesn't use it.

Even then, it's still not clear-cut enough for computers to guess. Imagine the following facts are presented in this order:

1\. "It is a Friday, and I am in London right now."

2\. "On Tuesday I have an incredibly important [X o'clock] phone-call with someone here in the London Office."

3\. "I am traveling to Prague on Monday and returning on Friday."

As a human, can you tell when the phone-call is? Did the traveler intend wall- clock X "here" in London, or did they mean wall-clock X wherever they'd physically be in the future? If it's that ambiguous to a human, do you _want_ your software to make fancy guesses?

(Bonus: "The Czech Republic is ending their Daylight Savings time this Sunday.")

<comment><USER5> London and Prague both follow the EU standard dates for DST, so at least there's a minor comfort that you can assume all of EU to switch at the same time. (Of course, after Brexit, who knows -- maybe they'll move DST start and end dates around just because they finally can?)

<comment><USER6> There's a 1hr difference between Prague and London.

Finland is E.U. and has a 2hr time difference. The EU doesn't mandate a time- zone.

<comment><USER7> 'pavlov meant that the entire EU switches to daylight savings time on the same date.

<comment><USER6> Ah I see. And that's been a thing since 1996- it's unlikely Britain would switch to be spiteful as it doesn't add anything for Britain and only adds confusion. But I've been wrong about Britain and the EU before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Time zones certainly won't be Google's super intelligence achilles heel, but certainly a good dramatic title to get people to read a bug report/feature enhancement.

The author says you should assume the time zone of where you will be when that time occurs, but that's certainly not a safe assumption, as I may schedule a call at my Boston office for a certain time, but then may be traveling during that actual trip but the time should still be Boston and not where I'm traveling. I use Google Calendar backend but only interact through my Mac or iPhone using iCal or Fantastical both which support time zones. So for most people who time zones isn't an issue, its not a problem. For people who travel often or who have clients in different time zones, you simply add a couple keys when creating a smart entry in Fantastical. Just like when I'm talking to client who know are in a different time zone I always mention the time zone after the time.

<comment><USER9> > The author says you should assume the time zone of where you will be when > that time occurs, but that's certainly not a safe assumption

It's not even assumption which is guaranteed to have a unique answer, much less the _correct_ unique answer. It's possible for a person to experience the same time local time (on the same local date) in more than one time zone when travelling.

Heck, it's possible to experience the same local time on the same local date twice _without_ travelling during DST or Summer Time transitions, and while _most_ people don't have events scheduled then, people who do might work might.

<comment><USER10> What difference would that make? If different time zones give the same time, that makes no difference, as the time needed would be the local time. The local time could be in a twilight zone that works on a mod43 clock, but if you're scheduling an appt to be in the twilight zone at +800 twilight zone, +800 twilight zone will be the time you need to be at the place.

<comment><USER11> The problem isn't that multiple time zones give the same local time at a particular time; the problem is that a person may experience the same local time multiple times during a day due to traveling or summer time.

Suppose I'm coming back to Chicago from a trip to Japan, and a friend wants to get an early dinner when I get back. One frequent direct flight from Tokyo leaves NRT around 6 PM and arrives at ORD at 4 PM on the same calendar date. Before I leave Chicago I set an event for meeting them at our favorite restaurant at 5:30 PM. Should my calendar remind me about the event when it's 5:00 PM where I'm at waiting for my flight to board at Narita or at 5:00 PM where I'm at back in Chicago?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a real usability issue but author's solution isn't really simple or correct. Your computer/Google calendar cannot definitely know your current time zone. (Imagine traveling but not having switched your computer's time zone.) Second, modifying all your events to be relative to your current time zone seems incredibly destructive — you may have events in your home time zone like conference calls, etc that you don't necessarily want converted.

A possible solution might be to ask the user to switch event times when a time zone switch is detected. Also, the computer can ask for clarification if the location of an event can be detected at creation time (i.e. it knows your travel itinerary or location of the event).

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a problem unsolved by humans and is caused by not being specific enough. My human assistant who helps schedule things for me frequently has to ask clarifying questions to nail down the appropriate time and timezone. Even with that additional work it happens that one or more parties involved in the schedule failed to understand those questions and answer them properly.

</comment><comment><USER14> I actually had a heisenbug related to Google calendar _not_ caring about timezones.

One of our internal scheduling tools used Google Calendar as the backend but had a custom frontend, It was to schedule a service call and the scheduler didn't actually care who made it as long as _someone_ did at the appointed time so the frontend aggregated multiple calendars and displayed all free times. Most of the people being scheduled were in New York, but a few were in Arizona. Intermittently people in New York would complain about not being able to schedule after 5 pm EST on Friday. Refreshing the page sometimes fixed it

Certain it had to be a timezone bug I put off working for it for as long as possible.

tl;dr; The people in Arizona had all day blocks on the weekends. The all day events had no timezone because the calendar has it. The default timezone in the library I was using sets the timezone to GMT. 5 pm EST is midnight GMT. So after 5 PM Friday it looked like no one in Arizona had free time.

It was intermittent because as a form of load balancing the service calls I had randomized which calendar I tried to schedule first.

The team in Arizona was dissapointed when I finally fixed it.

<comment><USER15> Time zones in Arizona get extra exciting twice a year when the rest of the country jumps an hour for DST while we stay the same. Unless, of course, you're on the Navajo reservation, which does observe DST. Make sure you're not actually on the Hopi reservation, which is entirely surrounded by the Navajo reservation, because they _don 't_ observe DST.

<comment><USER14> Just in case someone reads this comment and thinks it's a joke, this is a real issue i.e. I've seen it cause issues in production

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How would Google Calendar know the event is at 4pm _in California_? Is the location field filled with enough information? If not, that seems like almost as much work as entering the timezone.

This did happen to me with daylight saving a while back so I do sympathize.

<comment><USER17> The article suggests:

assume that "4pm" means "4pm in whatever time zone we find ourselves in when the appointed day arrives."

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately that's not a safe assumption either: Suppose the user is scheduling a phone call to reach someone who is back home at the location they haven't left yet.

Alternately, suppose the user changes their destination to another country in another timezone: Does the phone call get rescheduled to another absolute time?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can set the time zone on an event by event basis. You can even set starting and ending times in different zones, which I do for flights. It's not hard - and hardly an "Achilles heel."

<comment><USER19> He knows.

> You can set the time zone on an event by event basis.

>> At least, until we learned to painstakingly enter the time zone for every calendar entry by hand (even now, I often forget).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Based on the articles I've read on Spanner it doesn't seem like time zones will hold them back, no matter how frustrating their calendar UX is.

<comment><USER21> My guess is AI will only use UTC. No timezones needed. Timezones are so humans can all get to work at 9AM no matter where they are on the planet. If humans were ok with getting to work at 12:00AM and eating "dinner" at 7:00AM etc it would be fine. Some timezone would look like usual 9-5 and the rest would adapt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A lot of the proposed solutions forget that this is a UX issue that can be addressed with the addition of more contextual information.

I'm going to start with an assumption that for the most part Google knows where you are and where you'll be. (Assume it has access to your email / flights / other appointments etc.) An appointment also has access to who is important to the entry.

I'm currently on PDT, will be traveling to CDT and have a phone appointment with someone in MDT later this week. A good user interface for this would show all three times so that I can intelligently talk about the appointment either in an email or on the phone. This is what I mean by 'added context'. UTC is fine for storage, but the who and where is generally interesting (even if you're looking back on things later).

This problem seems like it has a simplification to a common fallacy that a single representation of any fact is the only way to display information. I'm not sure it would be significantly too much effort to make a 'super intelligence' understand that.

</comment><comment><USER23> > then, as often prophesied, Google's deep nets achieve sentience and plot to > take over the entire observable universe … and they would, if not for one > fortuitous bug, which will cause the AIs to tip their hand to humanity an > hour before they'd planned.

Their hand might be tipped even before that, when the AIs connect with weapons suppliers on LinkedIn during the planning stages.

<comment><USER24> Ai: 4x Missiles, 100xBullets at <address>, here is the Bitcoin Supplier: mkay

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sigh.

In Russia there are 11 time zones. When somebody moves from Irkutsk to Chelyabinsk by train, the arrival and departure times for trains on all stations are _always_ stated in Moscow time zone.

Scott Aaronson haven't visited International Space Station yet. Do you guys know what time system is used on board of ISS? And how they arrange time of the meetings with somebody on Earth?..

</comment><comment><USER26> So why not just use UTC everywhere?

<comment><USER19> > So why not just use UTC everywhere?

...you live your day by UTC?

<comment><USER26> I generally do, yes. I'm a consultant, working remotely. Using anything but UTC would be too confusing. Also, I use multiple online personas, and time zone is an information leak.

<comment><USER19> OK, well most people don't set their alarms for "12:00 +0000 (UTC) in the morning". They set it for 8:00 AM local time or something. So you're kind of an exception.

<comment><USER26> True.

But still, can one set UTC as the default for time entry in Google Calendar?

<comment><USER19> Yes? [https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render#settings- general...](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render#settings-general_11)

<comment><USER26> OK, thanks. Except Mirimir has no Google account.

Cool. So can display time be set independently?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Couldn't this be easily solved by auto filling the time zone if you input the address (location) of the place? Like if I put in a californian address just prompt if I want the pacific time zone?

</comment><comment><USER28> Is it really 'superintelligence' if unable to deal with a simple concept such as time zones?

</comment><comment><USER29> >>If Google achieves superintelligence, time zones will be its Achilles heel

This sounds like an oxymoron to me. If it is superintelligent( i.e. smarter than a human) then it would not be tripped by a simple thing like this.</comment>


Music Pirates are Immoral Cheapskates, Or Are They? - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/music-pirates-are-immoral-cheapskates-or-are-they-091021/

<comment><USER2> Asking people what they would pay is pointless. People don't know what they would pay. People lie about what they would pay. People lie about pirating music. This is why surveys suck. People are just going to lie... even if they don't intend to.

Music pirates are not immoral cheapskates. They are normal people who occasionally engage in immoral, cheap (and I would add self-destructive [if the music industry dies, so does your access to music, pirated or otherwise]) activities.</comment>


Adventures in Netflix - <AUTHOR> https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-in-netflix/ <comment><USER2> I was somewhat disappointed this went from promising an evaluation of Netflix originals to detailing his 4K streaming setup.

I care much more about the content than how it looks. I've watched films off bootleg DVDs and been happier than watching comic book movies on IMAX screens.

> According to Wikipedia, there were about 70? 80s? of these movies in 2018, > so presumably there'll be a similar amount this year.

I'm curious if anything Netflix is pumping out is worth the time investment.

<comment><USER3> > I was somewhat disappointed this went from promising an evaluation of > Netflix originals to detailing his 4K streaming setup.

Aren't there enough movie review sites that also have lists of Netflix Originals with their reviews / votes?

<comment><USER4> Yes, but it was promising to be more than a review. Author was going down the path of a whacky binge watching adventure, probably comparing 1940s cinema to 2019 Netflix Originals on the way, before detouring off to a story about gaming the resolution.

For people like GP and I, who care more about content than format, the first premise was more enticing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't help but groan a little at the fact that this entire voyage of dongles and hardware and head-scratching is based on the ridiculous axiom that letting your smart TV access the net would be "insane".

Guess what, the smart TV will stream 4k, and the app allows you to display the current bitrate and resolution to verify it (complaint in the article).

When you're done consuming online stuff on your TV, why not just cut the power? Or hook it up via ethernet to a port you can easily disable? Or both?

Sure, these types of articles can be interesting but this comes off as navel gazing and unnecessary complexity of what the actual issue is.

<comment><USER6> But he wants to take screenshots, which I assume the smart TV won't let him do for HDCP-protected content? And then he overengineered it to the fullest extent, which was fun to read.

Agreed on the smart TV - better to assume your home network is already compromised, plan accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad I'm not the only person who ends up with a baby-smooth yak like this. And it's much more fun to read somebody else's narrative of it than to do it myself!

</comment><comment><USER8> > Apparently, there's no way to make the Netflix app say what resolution it's > streaming in, or what the bitrate is.

There is, search for "test patterns" on Netflix: [https://i.imgur.com/nOb7BX4.png](https://i.imgur.com/nOb7BX4.png)

<comment><USER9> Nope, "Test patterns" doesn't show this real bitrate and other info on my devices. There is no yellow text like on the screenshot, at least in my case. There was a real test in Netflix which did show this, I used it when testing my phone a few years ago, when I learned that it doesn't support Widevine L1. It was called "Example Short 23.976" but it looks like it was deleted since. This year I changed phone to model that supports Widevine L1 and I wanted to test it, but it looks like currently there is no way to do it.

<comment><USER10> For me it's shown when using Chrome/Safari on macOS but not when using the app on iOS

<comment><USER11> It might show info only in some modes. E.g. I only got bitrate tests with the 60FPS test screen, but not any other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can watch Netflix in 1080p on macOS by using Safari. Chrome and Firefox don't support the drm used by Netflix.

As for 4k on macOS:

>The DRM Netflix uses for 4K content is the new HDCP 2.2 (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection), which macOS does not support as of Mojave. [https://www.howtogeek.com/412033/how-to-watch-netflix- in-4k-...](https://www.howtogeek.com/412033/how-to-watch-netflix-in-4k-on-a- mac/)

<comment><USER13> On Windows you need to use Microsoft Edge (not the new one, the one that ships in-box) and it will render in 4K

<comment><USER14> Using the netflix microsoft store app also does this

<comment><USER15> The Netflix app has additional benefits such as higher bitrate audio and multichannel 5.1 sound.

Also supports downloads and offline viewing.

<comment><USER16> I have a 100-minute subway commute and a Windows 10 laptop. The ability to download is nice. If I wanted to, I could watch two movies a day in 4k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17>
      (/ (* 4000 2000) (* 1400 720))
      => 7

...huh

So here's what to remember about resolutions.

All the common resolutions these days are multiples of 360p.

720 is 2x2

1080 is 3x3

1440 is 4x4

4k is 6x6

So you can fit a grid of 3x3 720p screens into a 4k screen. 9x the pixels.

And the actual resolutions are 1280x720 and 3840x2160.

<comment><USER18> I stopped reading when he said calling it 720p was quaint, then got the horizontal pixel width wrong.

<comment><USER17> That's pretty judgemental for a 10% difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So the reason this person had to go through all of this trouble--the reason why it didn't "just work" to plug his laptop into his TV and watch movies in 4K, something that clearly should "just work"\--is because if Netflix allowed arbitrary devices, like general purpose computers that work for the user (as opposed to being effectively owned by content studios and licensed to you), to have access to 4K video, then people could pirate movies and watch them in high quality, something we all know is currently impossible, which is why the hardware for pulling off this impossible feat wasn't something that he was able to _just buy off of Amazon for $65 or anything_... oh. (The logic of DRM pisses me off :/.)

<comment><USER20> How many people would even _care_ about pirating this sort of content? A 4K movie can easily take up 50-100GB in its _native_ format - even the cost of storing this on durable media is quite non-trivial. I suspect that there's nothing of substance behind this renewed "protective" push besides content studios' artificial paranoia, the point of which is mostly to cling onto a delusion that their content is somehow uniquely valuable.

<comment><USER21> The cost and hassle of storing 1080p back when it first became common is about on-part with the cost of handling 4K content today. Lots of folks have 100-1000Mbit connections, and storage capacities have increased to keep pace.

Although, anecdotally, after setting everything up for 4K I've been underwhelmed by the content - Modern film CGI at 4k looks garbage, the kind of fidelity leap we saw with HD isn't nearly as ubiquitous. On tbat basis, 4k's not 'must have'.

<comment><USER22> For me the point of 4k isn't actually 4k, it's HDR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This post made me laugh because it seems to be about movies but it's about something else entirely. I guess what he really enjoys are not the movies, but the process of watching them.

</comment><comment><USER24> On recent _LG_ s with _WebOS_ it's quite easy to get that type of information with the native _Netflix_ app.

So if you happen to watch on one of those, just make sure you have that info button[1] on your app or real remote.

When pressed, you get the basic bitrate and resolution information for the video stream: [https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/1081721617741430785](https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/1081721617741430785)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP040UKE69w&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP040UKE69w&feature=youtu.be&t=55)

<comment><USER25> On the authors Sony too. At least it works fine on my lower end model. Can't remember whether it shows Bitrate, but resolution is certainly there. And no color format issues. I think they made their life voluntarily complicated.

<comment><USER26> > I think they made their life voluntarily complicated.

Giving your TV access to the internet might make some things easier, but you're giving a quite a lot away if you care about privacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am delighted to see that Lars Ingebrigtsen has not changed a bit since I subscribed to the Gnus mailing list.

</comment><comment><USER28> The Roku app has a secret mode for displaying streaming details in the corner without all this hassle by pressing * on the show/movie selection screen.

</comment><comment><USER29> Articles like this make me resent my kids (/s) and all the money and time I cannot dedicate to important life endeavors like this guy does...

</comment><comment><USER30> Related to "watching every new netflix release", this podcast tries to do just that: [https://player.fm/series/recently- added](https://player.fm/series/recently-added)

</comment><comment><USER31> OT: anybody know a way to use widevine on aarch64? Can't use spotify or netflix on my nvidia jetson nano.. boo drm

<comment><USER32> Probably a red herring, but: [https://packages.debian.org/stretch/arm64/chromium- widevine/...](https://packages.debian.org/stretch/arm64/chromium- widevine/download)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> On PS4 Netflix app you can check "live stats for nerds" like resolution and bitrate pressing a single button ("option" AFAIR). It's not much fun but doesn't cost as much time and $$$ No screenshot thou :-(

</comment><comment><USER34> The best line (toward the end) is: "Well, that went well! See how easy it is to watch 4K content from Netflix?"

<comment><USER35> I mean, it is. He has a TV with a perfectly good Netflix app that plays back in UHD without having to touch anything.

He just didn't want to turn it on due to paranoia, and ended up using a bunch of extremely dodgy devices that seem to have broken his viewing chain and created lots of problems instead. Well... yeah?

<comment><USER36> Definition of a hobbyist?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Almost makes me glad to be getting older and my vision isn't going to notice anything better than 2K no matter what.

<comment><USER38> On anything short of a monster TV at a too-short viewing distance I can't tell the difference between 4K and 1080p. And for a high percentage of the content I watch there's no benefit to anything over 720p. If I could get HDR on a 1080p tv and save some money I'd do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'll be happy if I can get a PinePhone next year. After that, I'll call it victory and just watch other people's TV. This streaming fiasco is too crazy to entertain.

</comment><comment><USER40> I stopped reading here: "My TV is "smart", but I'm not insane enough to ever let it go on the interwebs." Anyone can give me a TLDR?

<comment><USER41> TVs that connect to the internet often send data about what you're watching back to their manufacturers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can't believe no one pointed it out:

> Meanwhile, there's another output on the splitter (that can either be 4K or > 2K (some people quaintly call this "1080p"))

Nope. 1080 is the horizontal resolution as is 4K. So 1080p is _not_ 2K. 1080p is 2 MP, and 4K is 8MP.

<comment><USER43> 4K is 2160p, exactly double 1080p in the vertical. In the horizontal, it's 1920 for 1080p vs 3840 for 2160p (colloquially known as 4K). The industry naming convention is not consistent.

<comment><USER44> Your both wrong, conflating standards from the world of cinema and broadcast.

4k (a cinema format): 4096x2160

2k (a cinema format): 2048x1080

UHD (a broadcast format): 3840x2160

HD (a broadcast format): 1920x1080

 _UHD also includes 7680x4320_ *HD also includes 1280x720</comment></comment></comment>


We analysed 75K builds and this is what we learned about CI/CD - <AUTHOR> https://nevercode.io/blog/what-we-learned-about-ci-cd-tool-analysing-75k-builds/ <comment><USER2> This seems little more than an elaborate bit of PR for "Nevercode"?

<comment><USER3> Nevercode? Lol. If anyone brought up something called "nevercode" in a meeting I'd laugh them out of the room.

<comment><USER4> Its the new hot Harvard Business trend where you make a company out of SaaS subscriptions and marketing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a prime example of numbers with no value added. Just spitting out figures. No insight. For example relating frameworks to build times.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for the feedback! Relating frameworks to builds times is an awesome idea! We will start working on it. Do you have any other suggestions to make more sense from our data?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Title should specify they're only discussing mobile app development.

<comment><USER7> It should also, either specify what they learned, or go full clickbait clarifying that I won't believe number four.

<comment><USER6> 75,000 CI/CD builds we love (number 31,284 will blow your MIND!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Saying that build times is time you've saved developers is a very odd conclusion - I doubt most developers sit watching the compiler build an app...

<comment><USER9> Build time is not just compile time. My app is Ruby so deployment time is nearly nil, but we have a regression suite that takes inching past an whole hour, that we run before every merge, and consult in detail before prod releases.

I hope I am an outlier (admitting that regression testing should not take this long, as there are larger projects with much broader scope that get the job done in significantly less time than that), but without CI this strategy would have already failed a long time ago, and it has helped us immeasurably with onboarding new developers and keeping release quality high.

"Build" time is not compile time.

<comment><USER8> I hope you don't watch any of that either.

<comment><USER9> Without CI, what choice would I have? Go find another computer when I think my feature branch is ready to merge? (...stop working for an hour?)

<comment><USER10> Put your running build process in the background and continue to work on something else?

<comment><USER9> That's exactly what CI does. It saves me from doing it, and it can do so with concurrent workers (say, if I finish the next thing before the hour is up. Should I be running the two concurrent test suites on my local machine? Or holding them in a queue, manually...)

My build spins up a browser and does expensive feature testing in a browser window to prove that our Rails app and JS code play nice together. For a long time, this was working in a way where the browser would stay behind other windows and not get in my way. Then a Chrome upgrade came and now, at the start of every example, the window moves itself to on top of the other windows on the screen, and steals the focus.

I know you're going to tell me to file a bug somewhere, but I suspect this change was made on purpose for a good reason. (Maybe you remember pop-unders?)

CI solves this problem for me, rigorously, and in a way that is unobtrusive and not brittle. If you're not using CI, you probably don't understand the idea that "all developers should be able to run the test suite, but none of them should have to do it." That's the big idea. CI helps our team to increase their velocity, and keep it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Thanks for the meaningful contribution to the conversation. I share your thoughts on CI. I think it's a irreplacable tool for mobile app developers that actually reduces the hassle and repetitve grunt work. That's why this article was published in the first place! Take care!

<comment><AUTHOR> @yebyen It's seems you know what you are talking about. Would you be interested to test Nevercode out and share you experience?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure if their numbers are sound. For example they claim to be able to deduce hosting service market share from their build numbers, but considering GitLab has built-in CI/CD system and GitHub doesn't it would make sense to me that the numbers they see are not directly comparable.

Interesting numbers but no real value without more analysis IMO.

</comment><comment><USER12> The term CI/CD suddenly appears everywhere. Can «continuous integration and continuous delivery» be shortened to CI&D or CIaD? Or how do you pronounce CI/CD?

<comment><USER13> I've facetiously pronounced it as 'cicada' in the past :)

I've only ever heard it pronounced 'see eye see dee' which is pretty quick to say while still being intelligible.

<comment><USER12> thanks, obvious in hindsight

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Request for Post: web dev version of this. maybe from heroku/netlify?</comment>


The Definitive Guide To Facebook For Musicians (and anyone using Facebook Pages) - <AUTHOR> http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/07/facebook-for-musicians-a-definitive-guide.html

<comment><USER2> Hey guys this "guide" is sort of a work in progress for me, would appreciate any other suggestions you guys have in this here Hacker News comments. Also, I'm always looking for good examples of facebook pages done right, music or other.

<comment><USER3> I do not consider this a definitive guide on Facebook. Maybe for musicians but certainly not for hackers. You only talk about how to engage your current fans but there is no mention of how to get new fans, build an audience or market your page.

Off topic suggestion: go easy on the ads on your website, I got irritated by all the movement in the sidebar.

<comment><USER2> That's a good point, I know a few tricks to increase or capture likes. Actually my company's FB platform, Tracksby, has a good way to capture likes. I focused so much on engaging the current audience that I completely forgot about some new lead tactics. It was getting a little tl/dr though. Next post!</comment></comment></comment>


Schmidt: "We Have Not Yet Found The Evil Room." - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/07/schmidt-we-have-not-yet-found-the-evil-room/

<comment><USER2> The responses in TechCrunch disturbs me a little. While Google's occasionally stumbled over its informal "Don't Be Evil" policy a few times (China, I feel, will forever haunt them, along with everybody else that's ever been tempted with its forbidden fruit of 1.3 billion seeds), their business model is so deviant from the Microsoft propriety method that trying to accuse them of being the next Evil Empire misses the mark by a wide margin.

It's not as if Google can't be more open, more altruistic, better about intellectual property management and better about privacy concerns. But there's a pretty big difference between demanding for more and dismissing them for not being "perfect" in the eyes of their critics.

<comment><USER3> The threat of vilifying anyone who commits any sin -- no matter how ethically good their average performance -- is that it decreases the incentive to strive for good behavior.

There's a huge perception gap between being perfect and being very good, but it often seems the perception gap between being very good and no good at all is surprisingly small.

Given that it's nearly impossible for a very large company to be perfect all the time, it becomes easier to give up trying so hard to be very good.</comment></comment>


iMac killer from Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/microsoft-reportedly-working-apple-imac-171535510.html <comment><USER2> You can't really design an iMac killer up front. You can position something to compete with the iMac, and then, after you've sold a very large number of them and your competitor (Apple in this case) has been unable to match you stride- for-stride you might conclude that it was - in the end - an iMac killer.

But given MS's track record to date with 'killer' projects (Zune, anybody?, Windows phone, perhaps?) I'd not hold my breath until they have accomplished the stated goal.

<comment><USER3> That makes sense, but is Microsoft saying that this device will "kill" the iMac (whatever that means), or is this just a catchy phrase that journalists like to use?

<comment><USER4> I think that it's just a catchy phrase, especially considering the source.

I can't really see Microsoft really trying to go up against Apple these days. For both of them, Google is a way bigger adversary.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Data Up For Sale: 1 Billion Connections - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/11/12/12readwriteweb-twitter-data-dump-infochimp-puts-1b-connect-51616.html

<comment><USER2> Nice to see Scoble referred to as journalist rather than blogger.</comment>


How China Is Quickly Becoming an AI Superpower - <AUTHOR> https://singularityhub.com/2018/08/29/china-ai-superpower/#sm.0000m5r9o8dtkew8y3x22vdab0230 <comment><USER2> There is an upside to China investing heavily in AI, the technology will advance much quicker.

Perhaps this means the Singularity is nearer, if you believe in such a thing.

<comment><USER3> Singularity... with Chinese characteristics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nerd might be chic in some circles now but is still widely derided by politicians seeking to show themselves as men of the people.

While Asian countries proudly and unabashedly pursue technological advancement and innovation western policitians are still pretending that our economy is dependent entirely on guys mining coal with a pickaxe.

You can see the Western fall of technology not only in AI but in renewables as well.</comment>


Suspected security hole found in many Samsung devices - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57559495-83/suspected-security-hole-found-in-many-samsung-devices/

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently, a fix has already been released, by a 3rd party developer. Site however is currently offline: [http://project-voodoo.org/articles/instant-fix- app-for-exyno...](http://project-voodoo.org/articles/instant-fix-app-for- exynos-mem-abuse-vulnerability-no-root-required-reversible)</comment>


Ask HN: What's the most interesting algorithm? - <AUTHOR> In your opinion, what's the most interesting algorithm?<p>(You can list several, if you like.)<p>It's a fun question, so maybe this will be a fun thread. <comment><USER2> Huffman coding is probably one of the more interesting ones, not only because it is so ridiculously useful, but because of the wide taxonomy of implementations. It is quite malleable, able to be morphed and optimized to the particular application: JPEG, PNG, HPACK, Gzip to name a few popular usages and implementations.

What is really enlightening though is implementing a basic one, because it is so simple. The core of it involves popping two graph nodes from a heap and pushing a new one. I did this in school, and was impressed by it, but became far more appreciative when I tried to do the JPEG way. It doesn't even provide a table, just a histogram!

It also acted as the basis for the successor of arithmetic coding, which is pretty much in every modern video codec. Can you imagine a world that is still analog because we couldn't figure out how to transmit digit video or images or audio? Huffman is a key link in the chain between the past and present.

<comment><USER3> My gut reaction to the question was "The one I can understand and apply", but I think that the Huffman algorithm added a third feature for me, it expanded the way I thought about computing in general. It is relatively simple, but it is clever and it makes you feel clever to understand it when your experience with algorithms is limited and your relationship with them is tenuous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the fast fourier transform method for fast integer multiplication. Only applicable on really big inputs, but the idea is that it computes the fft of both integers, does point-wise multiplication of the resulting vectors, then does the inverse fft to recover the product. More about this ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplication_algorithm#Fouri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplication_algorithm#Fourier_transform_methods)).

Another interesting but asymptotically slower integer/polynomial multiplication algorithm is Karatsuba's.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the RSA algorithm is fascinating, just because of the impact it has had on the industry. Imagine a world without public-key encryption. Crazy right? _(Obviously there would be other ways to achieve public-key encryption if RSA had never come along... but you get my point)_.

While we're on the subject: This book is a great read: [http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Algorithms-That-Changed- Future/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Algorithms-That-Changed- Future/dp/0691158193)

</comment><comment><USER6> Full support to Huffman coding and RSA.

Last year I learnt Ford Fukkerson [0] and Dijkstra [1] Algorithm. Algorithns for graphs are really interesting and have a lot of applications. Fun fact, I learnt these in a transport engineering course, not in a computer science one, and I still use them sometimes in computer science courses.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford%E2%80%93Fulkerson_algor...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford%E2%80%93Fulkerson_algorithm) [1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm)

</comment><comment><USER7> The HashLife algorithm is pretty neat and easy to understand: [http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/an-algorithm-for-compressing- spac...](http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/an-algorithm-for-compressing-space- and-t/184406478)

</comment><comment><USER8> The union-find data structure (the idea is so simple and a sophisticated analysis yields a really low upper bound).

RMQ with linear preprocessing and constant time queries (which is also true for multi-dimensional cases, if the dimension is bounded by a constant).

Knuth-Morris-Pratt pattern matching is the first algorithm where I saw the usage of an additional variable in the pseudocode just to simplify the complexity analysis.

</comment><comment><USER9> The binary search method is an interesting and simple enough algorithm to teach basic CS skills: [http://joaoventura.net/blog/2015/search- algorithms/](http://joaoventura.net/blog/2015/search-algorithms/)

</comment><comment><USER10> The Monte Carlo algorithm is elegant, simple, powerful and useful for a large number of real world applications.

</comment><comment><USER11> ElGamal encryption. I'm a Cryptography fanatic. But really, any algorithm involving modular arithmetic is pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would say the simplex algo, ridiculously useful and efficient (most of the time)

</comment><comment><USER13> A* is nice.</comment>


Snapchat getting ads soon - <AUTHOR> http://www.product-reviews.net/2014/10/09/snapchat-ads-opt-in-not-forced/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if a better model would be to use dwolla to charge a monthly fee of $0.25. I bet that ads, even opt-in, will be disruptive and eventually move to opt-out or no-choice ads.</comment>


Voynich Manuscript Breakthrough over 600-year-old mystery manuscript - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-26198471

<comment><AUTHOR> "He said he had managed to find the word for Taurus, alongside a picture of seven stars (seen as part of the zodiac constellation of Taurus) and the word Kantairon alongside a picture of the herb Centaury."</comment>


Ask HN: Thought experiment: coding a VanillaJS front end - <AUTHOR> Hey, I know there are a lot of long-time frontend devs on this forum. As for me, I've worked with Dojo, JQuery, Backbone, React, and most recently, Angular.
A random thought struck me this morning: what would we do on a large project in 2017, if there were no frontend frameworks?
For some reason I can't let this go. So I thought it would be fun to post the concept here and see if anyone wants to join in.
Questions:
* Would you transpile from another language, and if so, what?
* How would you structure your code?
* What capabilities / browsers would you support?
* Would you request JSON or HTML from the server, or both?
* Would you test your code and with what?
* What build tools would you use?
* How would you import and use external libraries and utilities?
* How would you avoid namespace collisions?
* Would you make your app an SPA?
* What are the main challenges / problems you would face? <comment><USER2> \- No

\- If es6 is available, in modules that I'd import.

\- No explicit support of IE and Safari. If it works, it's nice, else, I don't care.

\- If it's a strictly-kept webapp, either GraphQL or JSON

\- For API: Postman, else I don't know.

\- GNU Make

\- Either npm or in-html links

\- Make namespaces following the folder architecture

\- As little as possible

\- Lightness, availability and, more importantly, security.</comment>


All About Python and Unicode - <AUTHOR> http://boodebr.org/main/python/all-about-python-and-unicode

<comment><USER2> Excellent article. One of the clearest explanation of how to use unicode in python that I have seen yet.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but it leaves out one important bit that I've never been able to figure out. How do you use print to output a UTF-8 or some other Unicode encoding w/o using the repr() call?

<comment><USER4> Simply encode your unicode string in utf-8 and print the resulting bytestring. Simple, huh?

Okay, say you don't want to do u"somestring".encode('utf-8') all the time. Python has a set of classes that will wrap files and transparently encode and decode for you. And stdout is just another file.

      import sys
      import codecs
      sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter("utf-8")(sys.stdout)
      line = u"\u0411"
      print line</comment></comment></comment>


'Young poo' makes aged fish live longer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/young-poo-makes-aged-fish-live-longer-1.21770 <comment><USER2> Are you listening, Mr. Thiel?

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if fecal matter transplants in humans can be used to affect more than C.DIFF.

This guy did it at home. [http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/4/11581994/fmt-fecal- matter-t...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/4/11581994/fmt-fecal-matter- transplant-josiah-zayner-microbiome-ibs-c-diff)

</comment><comment><USER4> I heard Young Poo has a featured track on Kendrick Lamar's next album

</comment><comment><USER5> Antibiotics and starving periods make short-life fishes live longer.</comment>


Straightforward Guide to Pricing Strategy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/179505/A-No-Bull-Straightforward-Guide-to-Value-Based-Pricing-Strategy

<comment><USER2> I think that the biggest takeaway here is that you can change your pricing. As the article says, it is a process. A lot of people tend to forget that.</comment>


I Topeka'ed April Fools - <AUTHOR> http://jonathancavell.com/wordpress/tech/2010/04/i-topekaed-april-fools <comment><USER2> Wait, what? Is this just a blog post giving an "attaboy" to Google for their weakest April Fool's joke yet? Okay, guys. I was just as annoyed with the "Don't make posts about April Fool's" guy as everyone else, but... I think I have to be the "Don't make posts about posts about April Fool's day" guy right now.

<comment><USER3> What's a solution to the voting up of empty articles problem? I'm tired of this whole "everybody's vote counts the same" tactic.

If people vote together all the time in close time proximity, let's not count them as high (stomp out voting rings).

If somebody upvotes 50 articles a day, maybe they aren't the best judge of quality, so they can get ratcheted back to 1/4 vote weight.

Perhaps vote weighting can become stronger at cliffs after every yearly anniversary of the account while the account is engaged on the site (asymptotically approaching a vote weight of 2 after 5 years of contributions).

Accounts may not be discriminated against based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or national origin. Only stupidity, brilliance, and gaming the system can reduce or increase your vote weights.</comment></comment>


Memory access pattern matters - <AUTHOR> http://blog.filipekberg.se/2013/07/01/memory-access-pattern-matters/

<comment><USER2> Cool post, the mechanical sympathy group is all about exploiting today's CPU/Memory caches to their fullest usually referencing Java and C, great to see C# based examples of this.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical- sympathy](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical-sympathy)

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought there might be something more insightful than this within the article. It's probably just because I happen to work in a field (HFT) that obsesses over memory access patterns. Cache hits are your best friend and they seem to be under-appreciated in the wider development community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check the linked video, it's a great talk on memory access patterns and why it matters. If you already know "everything" about it, then I guess there's not much new in my article but if you're like many of my co-workers, ordinary web developers some of this might come as a surprise.

I think performance optimization overall is under-appreciated in the wider development community, too many devs expect the runtime/compiler to solve it for them.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much time do you spend perusing new submissions? - <AUTHOR> I have been on hackernews for months and to be sincere I have not really been a benovelent citizen when it came to going through the new submissions segment not until I started really submitting posts and found myself relying on people who actually went through the new submissions segment to either upvote my submitted links or to answer my pertinent(to me) Ask Hn: questions in the new submissions segment ,and I will like to know how much time the average  hackernewsers spends being a benovelent citizen perusing the new submissions segment of hackernews. <comment><USER2> A good question. All crowd-ranked sites like reddit, imgur and hacker news rely on the initial votes of a few to get exposure to many.

I browse "/new" quiet often. The incentive being, that my opinion (comment) is more likely to be heard and seen.

Rather than leaving a comment among 600 of opinions...

<comment><USER3> Does that work out for you? My experience is it's kind of a waste of time commenting unless it's on the front page. Even in (most) front page posts, the conversation seems to die quickly after it drops off.

Does anyone else wish HN would notify you when your comment is commented on? This pushes it into the realm of online forum software, but as someone who comments much more than they submit that essentially what HN is for me.

<comment><USER4> Yes, this is probably my number one feature request. The top level "threads" link is helpful for showing recent replies but you still have to remember to check on it every so often.

<comment><USER5> There's a 3rd party service for that, I've found it to be pretty reliable. [http://www.hnreplies.com/](http://www.hnreplies.com/)

P.s. I hope you'll remember to check this one thread one last time :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Almost never. I'm an easy prey for procrastination, so I'm actively trying to limit my time on HN and Reddit especially. The new submissions section is thus something I actively avoid.

But I do also think it is important to check it every once in a while, for the same reasons with you. So maybe having the---say---newest 10 submissions appended to the main page would increase visibility, and we'd have more interesting stuff get the chance to see the front page.

<comment><USER7> > I'm an easy prey for procrastination

Same.

(Currently at work, procrastinating.)

<comment><USER6> Oh, you're not meant to browse the HN for "boosting your creativity" and "relieving stress from a long spree of coding"? I mean that was what I used to say when I was caught red-handed :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't find the source for this but, as I recall, HN has a system where certain new or recent submissions are artificially promoted to a low position on the front page for a few minutes to see if they gain traction naturally. Also, I believe that some people (perhaps just dang and sctb, I don't know) can manually add to the pool of submissions that the algorithm will randomly draw from to temporarily promote. They don't have the power to push them directly to the front page, only to give them a chance to be selected for a few moments of spotlight.

Forgive me if I got some of that wrong, or if the system as a whole does not work like than anymore. Not exactly what was asked, but maybe helpful to someone.

EDIT: Closest source I can find: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866140)

It references a long comment from dang three years ago regarding this as an "experiment": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134)

<comment><USER9> It seems like HN ranks a lot by recency. I have seen articles with 40 or so points high on the front page and of course highly rated articles need to leave it at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not even sure the last time I clicked "new" until you mentioned it, and I've been here since 2011.

<comment><USER11> sometimes I misclick `new` instead of _Hacker News_ and wonder how I missed all these hot takes on the frontpage

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I prefer browsing [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/)

I can see the number of comments & points, in chronological order.

<comment><USER13> Me too. It's a great way to experience HN.

<comment><USER14> It's worth pointing out that this isn't ALL submissions. They still need 5ish points to make it out of new and on to this list I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I spend a bit of time most days on new submissions. With so many submissions being made there's no way some high quality content (or at least content of interest to me) won't ever make it on the front page here so I think it's worth a few minutes to see what's there.

That said, a couple months ago one of my submissions got buried quickly and about an hour later I got an email from HN telling me they "put it in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page sometime in the next 24 hours"

I was pretty amazed by that and it warmed my soul. They included a link to learn more about that:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)

</comment><comment><USER16> I skim _new_ as often as _latest_ if not more. There is a lot of good stuff that never makes frontpage (or it takes several days until it does).

</comment><comment><USER17> (Shameless self-plug) [https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/](https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/) can help you keep a closer eye on /newest via your RSS reader, especially when using searches to limit the posts to topics you're interested in.

</comment><comment><USER18> The Hacker News submission page dumps you into the new page whenever you make a new submission. I usually take a look at some of the other new submissions at this point. Otherwise it's fairly rare that I check the new page.

</comment><comment><USER19> I spend more time reading new submissions than front-page submissions. There are far more new submissions, and I usually have the time to go through at least four or five pages of them, so the pool is larger. What's more, cumulative advantage boosts good submissions that, for whatever reason, enjoy a strong start and penalizes good submissions that don't get out of the starting blocks as fast.

</comment><comment><USER20> I tend to look at the New page pretty regularly, focusing on "Ask HN" or "Show HN" titles.

Only because I feel like my upvote and/or comment is a lot more valuable there. Plus I feel bad knowing some good questions/projects are being asked/shown and they may never be seen (by that many people) if they fall off the first page without an upvote.

</comment><comment><USER21> Every week or so I'll go to |new| and use my browser cmd+f to look for keywords I'm in the mood for (games/gaming, AI, GDPR, whatever is relevant at the time). I don't even skim otherwise.

I look at the |show|ask| sections, every couple days and look at it pretty closely (like this, although now this post is FP as well).

</comment><comment><USER22> A lot less than 1% of my time here. Either when I just made a submission myself, or when I'm _really_ bored.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would spend a lot more time on them if there was an RSS feed. Same with show, ask and everything under /lists.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's my proposal for an alternative to the new page from a few years ago:

[http://www.almostinfinite.com/other/hacker-news-new-page- scr...](http://www.almostinfinite.com/other/hacker-news-new-page-scroll-of- death.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Honestly only ever visit and skim it after I submit something myself. I think its mostly a time thing. If I stick to the front page (sometimes two pages) I can minimize the distraction. If I am looking at new there is always new (duh) stuff to distract me.

</comment><comment><USER25> I get the RSS stream into Outlook so I click over there a few times a day but only spend a few seconds reading the titles.

</comment><comment><USER26> skim. truly minimal. the one sentence hit is all.

wisdom-of-the-crowd in this case, is about summing ant-like impressions, to get scale to peek above the surface to rise to the top to accrue karma.

its hard. I am very sure interesting things just pass me by</comment>


Sokal Affair - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair <comment><USER2> Whenever this is posted, I think this should be posted as well: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_h...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_hoaxes). I feel there is a conspiratorial aspect to the anti-pomo movement, some sort of vanguardism regarding what is and what isn't a valid form of academic study. A conservative perspective on the values of postmodern thought [http://reason.com/archives/1995/10/01/goodbye-true- world](http://reason.com/archives/1995/10/01/goodbye-true-world).

<comment><USER3> > I feel there is a conspiratorial aspect to the anti-pomo movement

Keep in mind that at least the Sokal prank wasn't an attack on pomo _per se_. It was an inkling and subsequent confirmation that pomo editors could not tell the difference between highly technical jargon that drives home a larger theoretical point, on the one hand, and highly technical jargon engineered specifically to serve no purpose whatsoever.

Imagine submitting a large patch to the Linux kernel that references various files and line numbers but makes no additions or subtractions to any of those files. If you could feed such a patch all the way up the chain and get Linus to accept it, you'd have a pretty good argument that something is fundamentally wrong with then intellectual endeavor of Linux kernel development.

<comment><USER2> That is a fairly ridiculous argument. Many people try to portray the Sokal Hoax as a broad indictment of the wide field of everything that is considered "pomo," when really it is at most the indictment of a single journal. To say all editors of all postmodern journals are unable to distinguish crock is an insane extrapolation.

I feel a more apt metaphor for the Sokal Hoax is a security researcher purposely submitting a backdoor to a random driver. If the commit gets accepted, the failure is not a result of code review being a flawed process or Linux itself being a failed project, but the driver maintainer who did not catch the vulnerability. Even then, mistakes happen.

One can also put some of the burden of responsibility on the security researcher herself, since code review/peer review is generally faulty when one acts in bad faith. Similarly, the Sokal Hoax is a great example of bad faith used to justify an ideological position through point scoring rather than legitimate criticism.

<comment><USER3> > Many people try to portray the Sokal Hoax as a broad indictment of the wide > field of everything that is considered "pomo," when really it is at most the > indictment of a single journal.

Well, the problem is "pomo" being such an ambiguous term for the two of us to be likely talking at cross purposes.

There is an outstanding set of academic journal writing in the humanities whose jargon includes casual references to the jargon of the hard/soft sciences. By casual, I mean the relevance of the scientific jargon is left as an exercise to the reader.

The implication in this writing is that the argument put forth is of such profundity that nothing but the scientific concepts will do to elucidate it.

Sokal submitted an article to a journal full of that kind of writing. In his article he removed the argument and left the referents. The editor didn't notice. End of prank.

That is as legitimate a criticism of this journal as getting a fake journal to accept an article written by a python script. It has nothing to do with point scoring.

The prank extends to any other "pomo" journals, articles, and books which utilize the same type of causual science jargon. Sokal wrote a book that gives more examples of such writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the- unfortunate-f...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unfortunate- fallout-of-campus-postmodernism/)

Seems very relevant, as another facet of this issue.

</comment><comment><USER5> Soon after this Sokal and Bricmont wrote a book called 'Fashionable Nonsense' (titled Intellectual Impostures in the UK) in which they tackle Lacan, Deleuze and Guatarri, etc. Its well worth a read.

From the wiki page about the book:

 _Sokal and Bricmont claim that they do not intend to analyze postmodernist thought in general. Rather, they aim to draw attention to the abuse of concepts from mathematics and physics, subjects they 've devoted their careers to studying and teaching. Sokal and Bricmont define abuse of mathematics and physics as:

\- Using scientific or pseudoscientific terminology without bothering much about what these words mean.

\- Importing concepts from the natural sciences into the humanities without the slightest justification, and without providing any rationale for their use.

\- Displaying superficial erudition by shamelessly throwing around technical terms where they are irrelevant, presumably to impress and intimidate the non- specialist reader.

\- Manipulating words and phrases that are, in fact, meaningless.

\- Self-assurance on topics far beyond the competence of the author and exploiting the prestige of science to give discourses a veneer of rigor._

</comment><comment><USER6> The editors' response: [http://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf](http://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> Some people use this whole incident, which was an important one, as a support for arguments that attempt to diminish the importance of the humanities, or tout how 'the sciences' are superior. While I appreciate what Sokal did, I think it leads many people to draw hasty and value-laden conclusions which are otherwise unwarranted.

If anything the whole experiment points to the incommensurate nature (Kuhn) of discourses and the multiple levels at which degrees of incommensurability can occur.

The trendy and monistic nature of postmodern theories in the humanities is not an issue that has been ignored within the humanities either, and furthermore the problems of jargon, sycophantic behavior, and dogmatism that arise in the application of postmodern theory are problems for (ostensibly) _all_ theories. A literary theorist from Yale, Quigley, has an excellent book on this subject and attempts to offer some means of resolution to the issues (see: Quigley _Theoretical Inquiry_ ).

The sciences are slightly more immune because while they diverge they have a shared ancestry and methodological base in mathematics (or, if you would, the 'scientific method' which is a highly problematic, over-general, and reductive term).

The sciences are also plagued with issues in academia. For instance, negative results, which are instrumentally important to the progression of science as conceived in our current model of what constitutes the scientific, are pretty much completely dissuaded and suppressed by the current academic apparatus-- positive discoveries, not elimination of hypotheses, are sexy--that's what pulls in the money, that's what people want to read, but negative results that help us further narrow the field of inquiry are just as important, if not more so.

I think the whole Sokal thing was important--but I always think it's necessary to bear the banner for the humanities to an extent when this is brought up, as its easy to fall into notions that the humanities as an entire field of inquiry is sort of baloney or shaky or unstable. It definitely _is_ unstable-- but that doesn't make it worthless or unimportant...I think postmodernist theories and their application will probably go down in history as an important transitional period away from structuralism and other forms of analysis, but it's incredibly clear that they are not very sustainable means of inquiry going forward.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Sokal affair was a real-life "long con" version of XKCD #451.[1]

The farther you get away from STEM subjects, the easier it is to pass off Poe's Law[2] on unsuspecting readers.

(That doesn't mean that social sciences, literature, and art have nothing important to say.)

[1] [https://xkcd.com/451/](https://xkcd.com/451/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law)</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find new horizons probe data - <AUTHOR>

The images of new horizon so far look good but they all seem to be just for press releases. I'm interested if Nasa provide the raw data collected by their probes (not just new horizon I'd also be interested in other datasets). <comment><AUTHOR> For anyone that wants a bit information on what I mean, your average camera goes through a fair few stages of postprocessing to get from a sensor through to a human understandable image.

I seriously doubt Nasa has got any of these wrong, but their goal seems to be for scientific exploration which to me suggests their main effort is contrast enhancement rather than human understandable colour reproduction (imagine if your camera was tuned to find differences in skin tone and blemishes rather than as a reproduction of what you remember a face as). It would be interesting to see what we can do with the data from before mutation.

More info on the post-processing pipeline here [https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448a-10/post- process...](https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448a-10/post- processing-21jan10-opt.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: How to stop building apps/solutions without knowing my audience? - <AUTHOR> I think many of us went through it.
Sometimes, we think like:
genius idea, I do not need any validation. I'll just make it and everyone will like it
99% of cases it passes through unmentioned. Not because it is bad. Mostly because you did not make enough effort to promote it to your audience. <comment><USER2> The usual problems are: 1) You don't know your audience; 2) You know your audience but you can't reach it.

Note that you can't properly validate ideas with the audience; you have to validate a solution around your idea. It's super hard to get the set of features and UX right even when you have the 'right' value proposition.

I believe we could mitigate both problems with more dedicated forums to discuss ideas in a structured way (a kind of flea market for ideas).

That was my intention when I started a while ago: [https://github.com/marcelosousa/million-dollar- ideas](https://github.com/marcelosousa/million-dollar-ideas).

</comment><comment><USER3> It can help if you are part of the audience. For example if you are building an app to solve a problem you are facing.

I think marketing is the biggest factor. For example, I built an app that uses a reverse BAC formula to calculate the amount of alcohol for a party. I thought I should market it to college students (just put up posters on a campus). I didn't have much success, probably because of the bland UI or that college kids are more laid back about planning.

Someone suggested I market it to event planners or caterers for doing weddings, etc. I think this would be more successful since they need a calculator more than a cool UI. I don't want to pay for promoting it though.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Successful- Stra...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Successful- Strategies/dp/0989200507)

</comment><comment><USER5> I have always found it best to obtain FEEDBACK regularly from the intended client(s). Particularly recommend observing (and recording) your client(s) attempting to `interface' directly with your work as it progresses to eventual reality.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just make draft versions without much effort involved to test the waters.

Nobody actually know what they really want before they see it.</comment>