Ask HN: What Happened to DHH's Uber Post? - <AUTHOR> DHH wrote a blog post on Medium that is critical of Uber and YCombinator.  The link was posted to Hacker News and received enough upvotes to get to the #2 spot.
The article sharply dropped in position (off the front page) at around the time west coast work day began.
As far as I can tell, nothing in the article violates the 'Hacker News Guidelines'.
Is there an technical explanation of why this would happen related to the algorithm?  Has YCombinator offered an explanation of why something like this would happen in the past?
links--
https://medium.com/@dhh/deleting-uber-is-the-least-you-can-do-30c0601103ea
https://twitter.com/dhh/status/833701507585437700
https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/833697426846396416 <comment><USER2> Users flagged it and a mod applied two kinds of standard penalty to it: one because it was a copycat post that added no information to the two major articles/threads already on the front page, and two because it was an unsubstantive rant.

Those penalties are standard because follow-up posts (e.g. that try to capitalize on hot stories to get cheap attention) and informationless rants routinely get tons of upvotes—many more than the substantive stories that HN is supposed to be for. That's a well-known weakness of the upvoting system. HN can't live by upvotes alone. If we didn't have countervailing mechanisms such as moderation, the site would not survive. I've written about this lots of times, e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10292239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10292239).

It had nothing to do with San Francisco (the moderator was elsewhere), nor with the rant being about Silicon Valley, etc.; anyone familiar with HN knows that critiques of all those things appear here all the time, and that's fine. We're hoping for thoughtful critique, though, not rage trolling.

<comment><USER3> Can I agree with and appreciate the actual moderation step you took here while calling out a concern about the justification you just wrote?

Twice in this comment you managed --- I think unintentionally --- to suggest that DHH wrote an unsubstantive rage-trolling post. I think it's very easy for people on HN to forget that all writing on the Internet is not in fact intended for HN. For DHH's own audience, an angry post about Uber might be totally appropriate.

It's not just possible but likely that a lot of Internet writing is toxic to HN, but valid and important in its own intended context. I think it's important that we work to avoid confusing these concepts.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's a fair distinction and I will try to keep it in mind for the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 There is a feature of HN that is sometimes called "flamewar detector" that tends to apply various countermeasures to threads that are getting a lot of replies and/or upvote/downvote churn. One of the observed effects is that the thread drops off the front page. For example, see this post from moderator dang: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7508443#7509979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7508443#7509979)

You can see more discussion about these behaviors when you search HN: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20detector&type=comme...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20detector&type=comment)

</comment><comment><USER4> The answer nearly always is "because users flagged it", which adds a high penalty to the ranking (which the mods sometimes override if they feel like a story shouldn't be punished this way). (Other cases are articles with more comments than upvotes, which afaik get penalized as potential flamewars, but that doesn't apply to this example with as of now ~300 points and ~100 comments).

If you want an official answer by HN, please contact them via e-mail.

</comment><comment><USER5> You mean this? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13687493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13687493)

<comment><USER6> Probably. Strange that it disappeared from the frontpage.

<comment><USER5> There are other 'views' of hackernews where you can see it:

[http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Design Lessons & Advice from Building Large Scale Distributed Systems at Google - <AUTHOR> http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/17/JeffDeanDesignLessonsAndAdviceFromBuildingLargeScaleDistributedSystems.aspx <comment><USER3> Jeff Dean is well known as a superstar within Google, although not so much to the outside world. With the exception of PageRank he created or had a hand in almost all the technologies you've heard of as the major Google innovations.

I have a Googler friend (genius coder in his own right) who sometimes wondered if he wouldn't be more productive by just devoting his workday to ensuring that Jeff Dean was properly caffeinated.

I find this kind of fascinating because Jeff Dean's academic background was in compiler optimization research. Not the obvious choice to build infrastructure for a large website. But perhaps compiler people know how every nanosecond counts, and can see the network as just another high latency part of a big computation.

<comment><USER4> Designing and implementing a compiler involves _many_ aspects of computer science -- as does distributed systems development.

If you've never written a compiler from scratch, I highly suggest doing so(1): there are data structures (symbol table -- a hash table, parse tree, tries), algorithms (converting an NDFSM to a DFSM(2), parsing, filling registers and many others), computer organization / architecture (outputting assembly, optimizing the code with pipelining and CPU cache in mind). Not to mention it's also a substantial project which teaches you a lot about software engineering: it's not something you can write in a single session, it's something that has to be frequently extended and tested (I can't think of a cleaner candidate for test driven development: you specify the source code you want to input and test if the generated IR/assembly code is what you're looking for). It's also really fun :-)

Not to mention custom compilers/languages are very useful in distributed systems: look at Thrift/Protocol Buffers ( languages for describing serialization of data structures for RPC). Google also has custom language which is compiled into state machines that they used to implement their Chubby service (and probably other distributed systems) -- see the "Paxos Live" paper. At an employer I've been at, which (when I was there) was deploying distributed systems with tens of thousands of nodes, we've created a custom language for describing/querying groups of machines: this language and systems built on top of it (for monitoring, configuration, provisioning and deployment), helped reduce admin:machine ratio by orders of magnitude (think a team of three handling ~10,000 machines).

(1) I suggest picking up an _older_ (not the newest) version of the Dragon Book and targeting a x86/amd64/MIPS: while for a practical compiler I'd almost _certainly_ suggest targeting LLVM or JVM/CLR, you'll learn more targeting bare metal.

(2) Incidentally, Lamport's landmark paper suggested treating processes in distributed systems as state machines.

<comment><USER5> that is a fascinating account - could you elaborate on how you leveraged a compiler/custom language for your 10K machine management.

I am not able to wrap my head around what was it specifically that you needed a language for - rather than, say building it on top of perl/python/lua - <USER2> whether you used the yacc/bison toolchain to build it.

<comment><USER4> First, I didn't build the language/compiler myself (it was written in my group before I arrived). It would be embedded in other languages, much as SQL is: you execute queries (first against data on a local disk distributed via version control, later against a web service).

The queries you'd make would be like: "Give me difference of (union of ( all machines running 64 bit Linux , all machine in cluster "match", all machines in wast coast datacenter )) machines starting "box10" and then show me the vlans these machines are on". Of course this would be in a much more terse (but very easy to learn) language. Perl/Python/C code (and through a CLI tool, shell scripts) would then do operations on returned values (i.e. parallel ssh to execute a command, parallel TCP call).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hm, there are some interesting numbers in there.

"Map Reduce Usage at Google: 3.5m jobs/year averaging 488 machines each & taking ~8 min ... Big Table Usage at Google: 500 clusters with largest having 70PB, 30+ GB/s I/O"

So to run 3.5 million jobs at 8 minutes each on 488 machines that means they would need at least 26,069 machines to complete those map reduce jobs in a year.

Similarly if you deduce that for their largest storage cluster they are using their previously described commodity hardware approach and at the moment the sweet spot for drives is at about 1TB with 1 or two drives per machine that is between 36,700 and 73,400 machines in their largest storage cluster. That seems like a lot.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Working on next generation Big Table system called Spanner

o Similar to BigTable in that Spanner has tables, families, groups, coprocessors, etc.

o But has _hierarchical_ _directories_ rather than rows, fine-grained replication (ad directory level), ACLs

<comment><USER8> It's funny. All these abstractions build on top of each other to provide fault tolerant failover at google scale and we are coming full circle back to the file system metaphor.

Finally :-)

<comment><USER9> If there is something that I have seen come to pass time and time again in technology, is that, the old becomes new again. You can literally make a fortune on identify the next big thing and then implement an old idea on top of it. Look at mobile, we started out with simple systems that took assembly or C (Newton, Palm) and graduated to Java and now we are seeing the latest platform move to web technologies. Take any facet of technology and you can draw a parallel to legacy technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who ignites Google's inspiration for infrastructure innovation? This man certainly should be Urs Hoelzle. All the star work, done by Jeff Dean and other at Google, is from his thoughtful planning ...</comment>


Kurt Vonnegut maps out the 3 story plot algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664963/infographic-of-the-day-kurt-vonnegut-maps-out-the-shape-of-stories-video

<comment><USER2> This isn't as fun to absorb but is also relevant:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth></comment>


Hemingway in Love - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ernest-hemingway-in-love-180956617/?no-ist <comment><USER2> Wonderful article. But it's a hell of a lot less fun if you consider it from the perspective of Hadley or Pauline, or, worse, his kids.

Life must be so hard for Ernest. What with having to decide which of two devoted women he prefers. If he wasn't able to distract himself with living in a series of beautiful locales, and a few other affairs, it would be nigh intolerable.

Meanwhile, some kids probably just wish they could know their dad.

<comment><USER3> Hemingway was quite aware he was not a great father and it killed him.

He was a selfish guy, a raging alcoholic and one of the most talented American writers of all time. His books to this day reflect that moment in time. They stand the test of time well.

I'm not sure he would be the artist he was without all his flaws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Presumably, Pauline met some need for a time. He seems to have not really avoided her at first. He takes the easy way out of blaming her, even though his friend Fitzgerald was quick to tell him "Be rid of her.", advice he disregarded and even rebutted. Granted, she was obnoxiously aggressive. But when he really was tired of her, he divorced her as well. So when he really wanted to be rid of her, he was. It is a matter of convenience to pin the blame all on her during the time when he didn't really want to be rid of her.

It can be really hard to say whether it was a good thing he got his needs met through her or a bad thing. I mean, it can be a hard judgement call even if you are one of the people involved in such a situation. Outsiders generally have no real idea what is going on behind closed doors. A report like this, long after his death, really hard to judge. People will tend to judge based on their own prejudices, in essence.

</comment><comment><USER5> This story sounds sad and beautiful, but love lost really is the most worthless, horrible thing in the world. Makes you want to crawl into a hole and die a hundred times.

This is really good writing because it captures the romance without focusing on all the bleak.

<comment><USER6> I can't agree that it's the most horrible worthless thing in the world, having just come out of a relationship. I would have agreed with you prior to that.

I managed to get over it relatively quickly, with several realizations.

The hurt I felt, wasn't that love was lost, but that I no longer had a place for all the love I had. This leads to the understanding that love cannot be lost, it's a resource inside us all, and we just have to find other means to redirect it.

To think of love, from the perspective of a single entity, leads to the kind of thinking of it being worthless. But the shared love that we think of romantically is coming from a multitude of entities, it isn't lost but as a resource redistributed elsewhere.

In death love is truly lost on one side, but is also somewhat immortalized on the other. This solidification of love, is similar to the concept of heartbreak, we don't want to share that love, but the easiest way to free ourselves of the pain is to love.

Love is something you create and give. It can't really be lost, because every day is another day to create or find something to love. You have to separate the concept of love from the entities and relationships.

I still love her, always will, but I had to say goodbye to the friendship because trying to hold onto her was doing exactly what you said. It was killing me, trying to hold on to the relationship, as she started moving on with another. I realized that they deserved a chance, she was chosing to move on with her life and love. That hurt, but what hurt the most was that I couldn't share my love with her any more without possibly alienating him and the love he gave.

I realized those things about love coming from inside and being okay with moving on and focusing on things and others. Accepting that love and care sometimes require sacrifices of ourselves for the good of others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those that enjoy this story, I'd strongly recommend _A Moveable Feast,_ Hemingway's autobiographical tale of his time in Paris. It feels more "real" coming from him directly, even though he claims that much of it is fiction.

He specifically speaks mournfully about loving two women at the same time, and it's clear in the writing how much it impacted him -- even many years later. _A Moveable Feast_ is the last thing Hemingway wrote before he took his own life.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow. Pauline comes across as scummy and Hemingway comes across as weak. I'm not a religious person, but this is exactly what the word "sin" was invented for: an action that is tempting but morally wrong and also makes you worse off.

Like many people, I've been in a similar situation. My girlfriend's "best friend" decided that she wanted me for herself. After a few very unpleasant months of the same "double love" as described in the article, one day me and my gf just decided to cut off the "friend" completely, no contact through any channels. I thought it would hurt, but actually it felt great.

<comment><USER9> That's a fairly shallow and judgmental way of putting things, and you managed to insert some bragging at the same time. "Hemingway is weak, Pauline is scummy, but I did the right thing when two women both loved me."

<comment><USER8> Jeez. They were just people, and we're people. Imagine you have a male friend and he tells you this story. "Hey man, I'm in this difficult situation, I got a wife and a baby but there's this other lady chasing me too. We tried to get away from her and went to a resort, but she came to the same resort! I love my wife but I think I love that lady too."

What would you do? I'd tell him to forget the love bullshit and cut that lady out of his life ASAP. I think that's the only sane decision. There's no point trying to be non-judgmental here.

<comment><USER9> I guess my issue here is that the comment doesn't really offer anything besides judgment. It's okay to be judgmental, but the comment didn't have any substance to it.

<comment><USER8> Yeah I see. It was actually intended as advice for people in similar situations. Giving an example from my life was just to lend some weight to the advice, otherwise people would say "it's not so easy and you don't know what you're talking about". Sorry if it came across as a humblebrag, I didn't realize that at the time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Makerlog, stay motivated while making side projects - <AUTHOR> http://getmakerlog.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I just launched the private beta for getmakerlog.com, a simple task log that keeps you motivated while building side projects. Makerlog works by logging what you've done and providing stats like streaks that keep you motivated to ship, ship, ship! Also, it integrates right in your workflow with support for GitHub, Trello, and your custom webhooks.

It is currently invite-only, however below is a special link for HN'ers to try it out: [https://getmakerlog.com/begin?code=vAUgsoQP](https://getmakerlog.com/begin?code=vAUgsoQP)

I hope you find it useful, and I'm looking forward to your feedback!</comment>


Have coffee with 50 people - <AUTHOR> http://www.peterjthomson.com/2013/09/fifty-coffees.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This article was inspired by Mark Suster's article: [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/08/15/why-you- need-t...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/08/15/why-you-need-to- take-50-coffee-meetings/)</comment>


Ask HN: Silo - SSL certificate safeguard web app - do I go ahead and build? - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
I am deciding whether to go ahead and build Silo (http://getsilo.com), a little web app which safeguards SSL certificates. The idea came about after I ran into the following annoying, yet easily avoidable problems:
1. Real - I make some changes to a client's web server and restart apache. Apache demanded a pass phrase for a SSL certificate on one of the domains. I don't know it. Without it apache won't start, meaning all websites are offline. The regular sysadmin is away. I email / phone anyone who might know this key but as expected no one knows. A panic vhost disable of the SSL domain, and all websites are back up except the secure one which is down.  More panic server changes to setup a self signed SSL certificate. Then I go through the process of buying a new SSL certificate. Time lost, money spent, website glitches, and unhappy visitors complaining when their browsers say the website is not secure. All because of an unknown pass phrase.
2. Real - A visitor emails expressing their concern that their browser is telling them that our e-commerce website is insecure. I take a look and see that the SSL certificate has expired. I buy a new one and go through the process of verifying domain ownership. E-commerce website looses customers, and therefore sales, for 2 days till the new certificate is active.
3. Hypothetical (hasn't happened to me) - The web server dies and there are no backups of the SSL certificate, private, public keys, chain and vhost config. I now need to go back to the various companies that sold the certificates, login to their management areas, download the certificates and go through the process of getting the SSL certificates setup correctly using their various setup guides and documentation (often a somewhat trial and error process).
Silo would store your SSL certificates, keys, chain files, pass phrases, and send out SSL renewal reminders to solve these three problems. From my own experience I know this product would of saved me time, money, and stress. I am interested to hear if anyone has had similar problems, whether people 'get' the idea of Silo, and finally would be willing to pay for this simple product (pricing at http://getsilo.com/plans).
Many thanks for your time, Ollie Rattue <comment><USER2> It sounds like an interesting idea with some real problems to solve. I'm not a professional sysadmin so wonder what the current solution is? That would be a great source of information which many people on here could provide.

My #1 concern is trust. Would a webdesign agency really trust all their SSL certs to Silo for $50/yr? Centralising that number of SSL certs at an random online service seems a little insecure. I'd probably prefer a truecrypt- encrypted USB key, or an encrypted volume of dropbox/whatever or something like that.

I wonder if there's a business here in just the SSL expiry notifications? It seems a common problem which is theoretically solved by Google Calendar but obviously no one actually thinks of a general tool for the specific purposes of reminding them about expiry dates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey hopeless, thanks for your thoughtful comment.

There isn't any solution to the pass phrase apache issue. If you forgot / lose it you need to:

a. Remember / find it

b. Buy a new certificate.

You can create private keys without pass phrases, but this is less secure.

It's interesting to hear that you think SSL certificate expiry is a common problem. As you say notification could be setup in Google Calendar, but we just tend to overlook things like this. However I wonder whether a for sale web app could be justified on this single simple feature...

As for trust, it is a real issue. Trust and security are two different things. The security could be fine, but if there is a belief (rightly or wrongly) that it isn't safe then there will be a problem selling a product or service.

From my understanding the certificate is sent from the server to the visitor's browser when they connect, so I don't see storing them in an online service as a security risk. However I need to research the security implications of storing the private key and pass phrase. Any advice or info here would be greatly appreciated.</comment></comment>


The Race to Turn Gassy Hydrogen into Solid Metal - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-race-to-turn-gassy-hydrogen-into-solid-metal/ <comment><USER2> Damn Interesting has a piece on the race to produce the first liquid hydrogen over a century ago:

[http://www.damninteresting.com/absolute-zero- is-0k/](http://www.damninteresting.com/absolute-zero-is-0k/)

From the article: _" He did so with the full awareness that he was among the last of a disappearing breed—the "classical physicists" who had the luxury of simply banging on matter until it did interesting Newtonian things."_

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, but didn't SA already tell us about a gravity-defying superfluid in 2009? [1] One that doesn't need a gazillion GPa of pressure to work with?

[1] [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superfluid-can- cli...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superfluid-can-climb-walls/)

<comment><USER4> We have observed superfluids before, but the goal here is superconductivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is material science porn!</comment>


A user-friendly solution to piracy - <AUTHOR> http://soon.thanks.ly/ <comment><USER2> Interesting idea, especially if the site comes with the support of actual Hollywood studios. Anyone have more information about this? Website is pretty sparse...

<comment><USER3> Hey, Skullum! I'm the one of the team behind Thanksly. We think some studios are more likely to adapt if they'll see money pledged while we are opening early summer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey, notduncansmith! thnx for sharing

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow nice idea.</comment>


Stacksort: sort stackoverflow functions - <AUTHOR> http://gkoberger.github.com/stacksort/ Awesomeness is awesome. <comment><USER2> Still on the front page:

        11.	Show HN: XKCD-inspired StackSort (github.com)
            848 points by gkoberger 20 hours ago | flag | 187 comments

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5395463>

I know I've been guilty of submitting duplicates, so I'm not complaining, just pointing out that the discussion is already happening on this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> wooops, thanks !

<comment><USER2> NP</comment></comment></comment>


SQLPro for Postgres – Free Beta for a New PostgreSQL UI for Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> http://hankinsoft.com/SQLProPostgres

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello All, I've recently been working on SQLPro for Postgres, which is a new database manager for PostgreSQL. I've had a few users beta testing and it seems to be going fairly well. I would like to invite any Postgres users to give it a try and let me know what I've screwed up :) (kyle @ hankinsoft.com, or tweet @sqlproapp).

Some screenshots of the app are available here: [http://imgur.com/a/gQ3CA](http://imgur.com/a/gQ3CA)

There are some great features such as: \+ Syntax highlighting (including themes). \+ Autocomplete. \+ Multi-result set execution. \+ Single cell selection (when you have query results, most apps only allow full row selection. SQLPro products allow for single & multiple cell selection via keyboard navigation and/or mouse drag/selection). \+ Table designer allowing creation and modification of table columns. \+ Read-only indexes, foreign keys and triggers are also visible via the table designer. \+ Query results will detect primary keys and allow you to make inline changes changes to data based on those.

I should note that I am not very familiar with Postgres. Its very possible you may see things in the app that makes little to no sense in a Postgres environment and this is most likely due to my limited knowledge. I build the app as I had multiple requests from users of my SQLPro for SQLite and SQLPro for MSSQL database apps request it. From my limited user testing so far, they seem to be enjoying it!

You can download the free beta at [http://hankinsoft.com/SQLProPostgres](http://hankinsoft.com/SQLProPostgres) and if you feel like the app would be something you may enjoy, you can also pre-purchase for a limited time price of $5.99 via the buy button on the website.</comment>


How to Uninstall Windows 10 and Downgrade to Windows 7 or 8.1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.howtogeek.com/220723/how-to-uninstall-windows-10-and-downgrade-to-windows-7-or-8.1/ <comment><USER2> Installing a major OS version day 1 isn't a smart move... You should always wait 6 month or so for updates and other hidden features....

<comment><USER3> That's kind of a broad statement. I built a new PC around the time Windows 10 came out and I have multiple Windows tablets around the house, so I installed it on 2 of my machines the week it came out and I love it.

Windows 10 is the best Windows that I've used in terms of UX. My only problems are the privacy issues and the lack of a MouseCornerClipLength setting. I do expect Microsoft to add controls to fix the privacy snafu, but honestly - Android and iOS apps spy more than Windows does. I bet Microsoft has better privacy controls than either of those tired mobile OSes do before long.

<comment><USER4> Why is it that suddenly lots of people are commenting about Android spying as much as Win10 ? This has never been a hugely commented upon topic but, as soon as concerns are raised about Win10, lots of people seem to respond that it's not as bad as Android.

It's almost like it's been a prepared response designed to distract attention from the problem (Win10 privacy) and try and deflect onto Android (and hence give Google a kick in the nuts in the process).

The issue is privacy in Win10. If you're concerned about privacy in Android, post something related to that and make the comments there.

<comment><USER5> Its reasonable to compare and contrast with other options that we've previously been comfortable with. I wonder why folks are anxious to restrict the conversation to Microsoft. That sounds fishier to me.

<comment><USER6> FWIW, neither is fishy to me. Occam's razor suggests that people are just dicks about things they don't like (or also like).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Win10 is working great on my gaming machine, pretty big improvement over Win7 in terms of performance so far.

<comment><USER8> i have the opposite experience. win 8.1->win 10 and win 10 is about half as fast and responsive as win 8.1

upgrade was smooth though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I haven't had any issues with windows 10. What are people doing that is causing problems?

<comment><USER10> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10108955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10108955)

<comment><USER11> Useful info: Microsoft pushed their telemetry services to Windows 7 and 8.1 via an update last week. Downgrading may not really help you here.

<comment><USER10> Which update KB number so I can uninstall this?

<comment><USER12> Probably 3068708.

<comment><USER12> Replying to self: KB3075249 and KB3080149.

<comment><USER13> Links:

[https://support.microsoft.com/en- gb/kb/3068708](https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/3068708)

[https://support.microsoft.com/en- gb/kb/3075249](https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/3075249)

[https://support.microsoft.com/en- gb/kb/3080149](https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/3080149)

Also found:

[https://support.microsoft.com/en- gb/kb/2976978](https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/2976978)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was really impressed with how easy Windows 10 is to install and uninstall.

Not only did the installer and uninstaller not mess with my files and installed programs, it also didn't break my dual-boot setup!

<comment><USER15> Ah, that's great to know it didn't break dual-boot. I've been holding off on updating dual-boot machines until I heard from someone else. Thanks for letting us know!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is DirectX 12(or whatever the next version name is) tied to 10 ? That's the only thing I care about. If not then I won't be upgrading.

<comment><USER17> I would advise to wait at least until the first games using DX12 come out, so you can at least decide if it is worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why would you ever do this?

<comment><USER19> My Windows machine is for gaming only and I have no interest in Windows 10 cloud integration and data collection, much of which cannot be disabled or blocked.

I made the switch from Windows 7 a few days after release and I'm learning more and more about what is going on under the hood of Windows 10 that is making me seriously consider going back to Windows 7.

Windows 7 had reporting and telemetry, but not even in the same league as what is happening in Windows 10.

<comment><USER20> Seems like the title should be " _upgrading_ to Windows 7".

<comment><USER19> I basically went to Windows 10 for DirectX 12.

Now I'm beginning to regret doing so.

<comment><USER21> Would it be possible to 'hackport' DirectX 12 to Windows 7?

<comment><USER19> I don't think there is any technical reason why DX12 would not run on Windows 7.

It's just Microsoft being Microsoft and locking it to their new operating system the same way they did with DX10 and Windows Vista.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You had me at "uninstall windows"</comment>


Ask HN: Are social games, such as Farmville, "dead"? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a design case study for Facebook and am curious if HN thinks that social gaming as seen on Facebook or Myspace is severely diminsihed with the near ubiquity of smartphones or not.<p>By dead, I don't mean destroyed but weakened significantly. Concrete numbers that weren't from 2012 or 2013 were difficult to come by. <comment><USER2> facebook killed "social gaming." social games became large because fb encouraged spamming invites to get more people to use and grow facebook, and then slowly locked down that channel. So, you could spend $5 in ads to get one user, that user would get 5 friends to join, so it only cost $1/player, and theyd spend $2 on average. This was great for building the platform, but once at critical mass fb needed to capture that money so they squashed the social channels in favor of their ads.

So now what happened is gamers on fb only would spend say $2, without invite spamming at $5 installs you lost money. But turns out people who own iphones spend money more easily. So everyone moved into mobile. While it didnt have the social channels, you could extract say $6 per user, so that $5 per install was still profitable. Before Apple really cracked down on some shady companies(they bot you into the top 10, you get thousands of installs from top 10 placement), you could drive that cost down even further.

Today, all the free to play apps in the app store follow a lot of the same patterns as social games - clash of clans is just a clone of backyard monsters(fb), which was probably a clone of something else. Some have social elements, mostly top charts, but... These games were never truly social, they were just addiction feeding machines. Effectively they just changed the name to f2p on mobile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok very cool. I never looked at it from the business/ad side my process was far more simplistic ie Mobile Platform = superior game.

Yep the switch a roo from "social" to free to play is one of the things I noticed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps for now, but the ubiquity of smartphones could also bring them back in new and interesting ways. The most recent runaway hit was Pokemon Go, and though it was clearly a fad, it may have had more staying power if the social aspects were stronger, e.g. direct PvP battling.

Caveat: Take what I say with a grain of salt; I've never built a game in my life.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd look into Facebook's actual app policies if I were you.

What made Farmville successful was to basically bribe players into sharing by rewarding them with in game currency. This resulted in a ton of spam.

If that's not outright banned by now, it's possible the feed filter makes those messages all but invisible regardless. They want people to pay to advertise now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Take angry bird for example, see where that company is now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm true though I tried to focus more on social apps made on top of social networks, not ones developed primarily for mobile devices. But regardless good point about angry birds, and just look at Zynga now even with Farmville.

Also thanks for the reply!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of my MVP topicly.me? - <AUTHOR>

I created this MVP last year and never talked about it much due to other projects taking over my time.  I was hoping to get some feedback from HN on the concept of the app and the implementation as you see it now.
Topicly.me is a video based web app that allows you to discuss topics that are important to you.
http://topicly.me
Any feedback would be appreciated.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I've never had a desire to participate in an asynchronous video conversation, so a platform to do so is not something I'd ever use.

</comment><comment><USER3> Guess noone finds this useful? =(</comment>


Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 code named "Snow Leopard" - report - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/04/apples_mac_os_x_10_6_code_named_snow_leopard_report.html <comment><USER2> Quick releases, and a huge marketing budget mean that this is a great move. Microsoft has to be getting a bit worried....</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find people to review mock-ups? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for feedback on mock-ups and product ideas (features, etc.).  Is there a site or service to solicit feedback at such an early stage.  For pay is fine. <comment><USER2> If you are looking for feedback on design mock-ups, you can use sites like <http://forrst.com> to get feedback on your designs.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.usertesting.com></comment>


Pfizer blocks its drugs from being used in lethal injections in prisons	(2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/13/pfizer-blocks-drugs-lethal-injections <comment><USER2> I think the death penalty shouldn't exist, but I find this fascination with all these Rube Goldberg style execution methods strange. Gas chambers, lethal injections, electrocution, and whatnot.

If you're going to execute somebody, just put them up against a wall and shoot them, FFS. A firing squad has the benefit of being quite certain (accounts of botched executions are quite horrifying, IMHO), and cheap (prison guards already have guns and ammo, no need to procure and maintain some special execution apparatus).

<comment><USER3> Do you really want prison guards to get used to firing (to kill) on inmates? Besides, I imagine/hope that most of them wouldn't want to. Let's take inspiration from George R.R. Martin and have the judge who imposed the death penalty be on that squad.

<comment><USER4> I'm against following George R.R. Martin's lead, because I suspect it would cause different judges to sentence different punishments for similar trials given their own person aversion or attraction to killing. This would be equivalent of people being treated unequally by the law, which is against the equal protection clause of the fourteen amendment.

<comment><USER5> -I think your point is a valid (and good!) one, but I like - that is hardly an appropriate verb in this context - the concept.

Perhaps any prosecutor seeking the death penalty in a case would have to join a pool of executioner's assistants? (Same for jurors and judges - unless you are willing to follow through on actually killing someone, you are barred from deciding on the matters of life and death?)

In this way, their verdict on any particular case wouldn't make any difference (to them!) - they could be called upon to take part in the dirty details of an actual execution in any other case but the one they sat in on.

The only problem I have with such a system, is that there's probably people out there who'd basically ask 'Cool, where do I sign up?', which is somewhat scary.

The civilized thing, of course, would be to abolish it altogether. Capital punishment basically ensures that The System(tm) WILL murder innocents on occasion.

As I like to ask proponents of the death penalty - what false positive rate is acceptable?

<comment><USER6> An interesting thing to ask about the false positive rate: What is the false positive rate on determining that there was a false positive? That is, we may decide that someone was wrongly convicted, but we may be wrong in that determination.

It is also interesting to note that a "wrong" conviction seldom means that the person was a fine upstanding citizen. Often it means something like "convicted of the killing, but only provided the weapon" or "convicted of the killing, but was only trying to help a fellow gang member by disposing of the body". This sort of false positive isn't anywhere near as bad as what we commonly imagine to be the case, with a 100% innocent person being wrongly convicted.

<comment><USER5> -IMHO even a tiny minority of actual, true, false positives are enough to warrant getting rid of capital punishment (for that reason alone; there are other arguments, too!)

To phrase my question differently - if we take your concerns about false positives into account, and accept that trying to help dispose of the body or providing a weapon makes you fair game, capital punishment-wise - how large a remaining false positive rate is acceptable to maintain that fine institution, capital punishment?

1 in 100 fine, upstanding citizens being wrongfully convicted and executed? 1 in 1,000? At which point is the collateral damage, if you like, acceptable?

The matter was discussed here on HN recently, in the case of Kevin Cooper[0].

That's but one instance of what seems like a case where there's definitely reasonable doubt - to put it mildly - regarding the convict's guilt.

Whether the person was a 'fine, upstanding citizen' IMHO is largely irrelevant, unless one wants to set the bar for being sentenced to death lower - like, for being an accessory to murder, for instance.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098059)

<comment><USER6> Probability for people on trial, or total lifetime probability? It's very different. I think the total lifetime probability matters more.

We consider it acceptable to drive cars. This kills 1% to 2% of the population. This seems like the baseline for acceptability. Not even 1% of the population gets put on trial with the possibility of the death penalty, so we could just go straight to execution without a trial and still be more acceptable than letting people drive cars.

Or shall we ban cars?

Only 1 in 119,012 die from execution.

Another baseline for acceptability is drowning. Homes all across America have pools. A person is about 100x more likely to die of drowning than an execution, yet pools are still legal.

<comment><USER5> ...but surely it is reasonable to maintain there's a distinction between having people die from what we can call accidents or mishaps - falling into a pool, being run over by a truck, getting electrocuted or choking on a peanut &c on one side...

...and on the other being locked up for years by the system we - as a collective - have created to protect us from just that kind of arbitrary violence, before that same system murders you -ahem- for the Greater Good(tm)?

The fact that the murder of an innocent is highly unlikely doesn't (IMHO) make it any more acceptable. Government is supposed to protect you; not kill you in the very textbook definition of premeditated murder.

(Besides, cars and swimming pools have verifiable upsides. The 'benefits' -if any- of the death penalty are highly debatable.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good for Pfizer. Being tortured for two hours while dying from some combination of poison is still not cruel and unusual punishment? What exactly do American courts consider cruel and unusual if being tortured to death while in great pain for hours isn't considered so? If this torture lasted two days, weeks, months, years, or decades instead of two hours would that be cruel and unusual? Going by what happens at Guantanamo Bay, it would seem not. What things have been declared cruel and unusual punishment in the past, if any? Slavery is legal as punishment. Does that mean rape is too? Beating, shocking, waterboarding, and other forms of torture are all legal even when they lead to the death of the prisoner. Does America actually have a line it won't cross, or is the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment just a bunch of bullshit written in a constitution that is largely ignored? Seems to be mainly the latter.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just wondering, why can't an inert gas be used?

We know from high-altitude aircraft accidents (like [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522)) that lack of oxygen leads to quick and painless loss of consciousness and eventual death.

To be clear, I am against the death penalty, but if it's needed then I much prefer a humane method rather than untested drugs that often backfire.

<comment><USER9> Lethal injections aren't really supposed to be quick and painless.

<comment><USER2> You really think that? If so, why not go back to breaking people on the wheel? Or hanged, drawn and quartered? All done on a public square, with mandatory attendance for adults and children alike, of course?

Yup, that would make the world a better place... /s

<comment><USER10> You are making an is-ought misinterpretation. The person you replied to (ryanlol) might be against the death penalty, but recognize that the reason it exists is not only to actually kill people, but also to make them suffer. One can recognize this fact without arguing for it.

<comment><USER2> Of course it's an over-the-top strawman. I just find it shocking that the parent apparently thinks that capital punishment by itself isn't barbaric enough, but on top of that it should be a drawn-out and painful affair. Which frankly is an argument straight out of the dark ages.

Ok, fine, the parent didn't explicitly say that is a view (s)he shares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Surely it's not constitutional for a government to hide its vendors. National security can't be an excuse for state-level secret procurement.

<comment><USER12> You really think the nuclear missle program, covert human intelligence, etc. have RFPs and purchase orders that you can just FOIA? GSA branded office supplies would be a hell of a way to blow your cover. Of course there's secret purchasing. Google "black budget."

<comment><USER13> I think the commenter means it shouldn't be an excuse for state governments.

Although I didn't see a specific excuse state governments are using to hide their suppliers, just that the state governments are being "secretive".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> why not use a bullet?

</comment><comment><USER6> Simply provide heroin, and lots of these people would self-execute. The cops collect lots of heroin, and they don't have any use for it. The disposal costs must be annoying. It seems we can solve the problem of disposal as well.

<comment><USER15> That is not how drugs and addiction work. Most people with a functioning social environment could take heroin, and would be fine. It is not much different from drugs administered in hospitals, and you don't see patients turning into drug addicts in masses.

Except maybe in some countries where doctors dish out opioids like they are candy.

<comment><USER16> > It is not much different from drugs administered in hospitals

In some cases, it's essentially identical to drugs used in hospitals. In the UK, diamorphine is commonly used in palliative care.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#Medical_uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#Medical_uses)

<comment><USER17> Presumably they were talking about the purity of street heroin versus what you'd get in a medical setting. I assume the latter wouldn't be cut with whatever the dealer had on hand.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Running website forked - Hosted & "hackable" nodejs Twitter streamer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nonblocking.io/2010/08/future-is-here-i-just-forked-running.html

<comment><USER2> I have a feeling we're going to see a great wave of applications coming online aimed at creating realtime versions of the stuff that's already popular out there. Think of node.js Ebay bidding, project management, dating sites, etc.</comment>


Osdev: a SubReddit devoted to operating system development - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/ <comment><USER2> Those of you who might write this off because of a negative image of reddit in general: these tightly-focused subreddits can be a gold mine of quality content.

The trick is to subscribe just to the subreddits that match your interests. If you'd like a searchable list of them, this appears to be a good resource: <http://www.subreddits.org/search.html>

<comment><USER3> Second that. Also don't forget to unsubscribe some of the default reddits, like the frontpage and politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am working in a bunch of programming languages (mostly scheme like interpreters) I wonder if there is something similar to this SubReddit but devoted to programming language development

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://reddit.com/r/langdev>

<comment><USER5> Exactly what I was going to ask for! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if this is a response to the drift in osnews.com</comment>


Visual Studio Live Share Preview - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share/blob/master/welcome/welcome-owner.md <comment><USER2> To me this seems like (I'll admit I only watched a video and haven't tried it) it tries to solve a _very_ complex problem of allowing multiple live editors of the same file (?). Is that a solution in search of a problem?

When you pair program with someone, or assist someone, for it to have any point at all isn't the idea that you always edit in ONE place, and that only one person edits at a time? How will personA know what personB is doing otherwise, if personB's cursor can be anywhere?

Next, when personA and personB agree they have gotten somewhere and they launch their calculator app, web browser or whatever, how will both see what is going on? Is there support for also sharing a window/desktop? I mean, sharing my debugger state is cool, but what about the actual program window we are debugging? How can Jeff help me by introspecting variables in my program, if he can't see the program window?

The simpler problem of "sharing a screen while coding" seems to me to be a solved problem: you share your screen and input, like any remote desktop solution has done for ages. I get that this is significantly lower bandwidth and more tailored to coding, but in return it seems to not solve many of the fundamental problems of collaborative development.

I can see this tech being much more usable to e.g. develop cloud based IDE's, or remote debugging on servers, than "collaborative development"! Am I overly pessimistic or missing the point?

<comment><USER3> PM on the Live Share team here.

In many cases, yes, all collaborating participants would likely be working together in the same file. However, when speaking with folks as part of developing Live Share, we found that there were equally as many cases where developers wanted the ability to take certain actions independently (e.g. look up the definition of a function that's in another file), without needing to disrupt the other parties, and without losing the ability to re-synchronize their focus once they were done.

With that in mind, our goal for Live Share is to support "opportunistic collaboration" between developers, that supports a broad spectrum of needs/workflows/personal preferences/etc. in a way that potentially feels more natural for folks as they are helping/teaching each other (e.g. sometimes I want to tell you what I'm thinking, and sometimes I want to show you).

Regarding your comment about being able to view the running app while debugging, we actually support the ability to "share local servers", which allows this exact scenario for web apps/APIs/etc.

[https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live- share/blob/master/docs...](https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live- share/blob/master/docs/collab-vscode.md#sharing-a-local-server)

It's still early days for us, but it's our goal that all meaningful editor/application context can be shared between participants, in order to effectively collaborate together (e.g. build output, terminal sessions).

<comment><USER4> I know I've been (overly?) critical of Microsoft projects in the past but for what it is I continue to be impressed by Visual Studio Code. Thank you for your work in Visual Studio Code. I appreciate how it works across-the-board in fedora to a 32 bit Ubuntu based machine.

I am also glad you're pursuing difficult goals like opportunistic collaboration. By the way, have you looked into data usage (sorry for wrong word) I mean is live share usable over a stable 200KBps connection? An unstable 1MBps LTE connection?

<comment><USER3> We're still pretty early, and so we have lots of room to improve our network usage, and tolerance to instability. However, it's absolutely our goal for Live Share to perform well (as well as can be expected?) on lower-bandwidth and volatile network connections (e.g. coffee shop WiFi).

Currently, it's already very usable in these conditions, especially when compared to screen sharing :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Visual studio code is pretty great, been using it with typescript and c# but it can do a whole lot of things. also the vim plugin works better than sublimes'. They're doing a pretty good job speeding ahead of other editors in terms of features and plugin support.

Only thing is it's so slow. Just typing and navigating is pretty noticeably choppy. also it still has some memory leaks (although it used to be a lot worse)

<comment><USER6> I've been using vscode for dotnet core development for about a month now and I haven't had any of the issues you describe :S. I am running an alienware i7 laptop though...

<comment><USER7> I run it on a 12" Macbook 1.3ghz, running Windows 10 in bootcamp, and it doesn't have any of the issues he described either.

<comment><USER8> > 12" Macbook 1.3ghz

> Windows 10

Sounds painful.

<comment><USER7> > Sounds painful.

With Windows 10 it's not, it's painful when running OSX, the animations make it laggy and stutter, while Windows 10 gives me about ~3 hours more battery life (cos there's no gfx switching like in the Macbook Pro)

<comment><USER9> System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Reduce motion X, Reduce transparency X ?

Not sure what you mean by "gfx switching", as far as I know all 12" Macbook have only a integrated graphics card, no discrete graphics card.

<comment><USER7> > Not sure what you mean by "gfx switching", as far as I know all 12" Macbook > have only a integrated graphics card, no discrete graphics card.

With the Macbook Pro I get less battery life with Windows 10 because Apple forces Windows to only have access to the discrete graphics card. OSX can switch between the two so it's more efficient.

With the Macbook 12" I get more battery life, it seems Windows 10 is more power efficient than OSX. (I got the same as OSX when running Windows 7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Somewhat tangential, but, is live coding with multiple people working on the same editor a thing? I feel like something like this would be incredibly distracting to get any actual work done, but I guess there must be legitimate use cases for this.

<comment><USER11> In the introduction video to VS Code Live Share, they showed the scenario of asking your coworker for help. Then together in the same editor you both fix the problem. I don't think it is meant that two or more people work at the same time in the same editor all the time.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. It's a pedagogical tool. Like having a conversation, but with executable code.

<comment><USER3> I love that explaination! I'm a PM on the Live Share team, and like was mentioned, the use case we're currently focused on is seeking and receiving ad-hoc assistance or feedback from a friend/colleague, in a way that can potentially be more opportunistic, productive and natural, regardless if you're in the same building, working from home or across the world.

That said, we've heard a lot of interest in other use cases as well (e.g. pair programming), and are keen to understand how Live Share might be able to complement them.

<comment><USER13> We are very interested at my work in the possibilities for pair programming using this kind of technology. We haven't been accepted into the preview programme yet, but we're looking forward to getting to try it.

<comment><USER3> Send me an e-mail (address is in my profile) and I'll get you an invite. We'd love to get your feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is that based on CRDTs / operational transform or is a different solution used?

<comment><USER15> Operational transforms I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> See also Floobits, which has a similar product 5 years ago, which works great in Sublime and Intellij:

[https://floobits.com/](https://floobits.com/)

<comment><USER17> Live Share is different than other collaboration tools in that it supports Language Features and Collaborative Debugging. By Language Features I mean all participants get auto completion, go to definition, error checking etc. Collaborative Debugging allows multiple people to step through code, inspect variables or look at call stacks.

I don't know why the GitHub doc get linked, but this page probably gives more context: [https://code.visualstudio.com/visual-studio-live- share](https://code.visualstudio.com/visual-studio-live-share)

Disclaimer: I work at VS Code and have tried Live Share in private preview. Honest feeling is it still has some gaps, but if everything would work out of the box it can be pretty awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really cool to see this built into the editor. Getting over the hump of "well I could install this 3rd-party extension, create an account, and follow directions, or I could just walk over to my coworker's desk for the 15th time" is probably a big barrier to adoption.

With VS Code and Xi's asynchronous-first architecture, maybe collaborative editing will become a standard for new editors in the future.

<comment><USER3> This is really great feedback! I'm a PM on the Live Share team, and it's definitely our goal for the getting started/collaboration experience to be simple enough that it could naturally become part of your workflow (as needed).

If you're interested in checking out the preview and letting us know how well we're meeting that goal, I'd love to get your thoughts :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I need would be an open source server with client packages for Vi and Emacs (maybe other editors too) so I can collaborate with my evil friends. Any Idea of such a server? (note: I know floobits exists, but it is not open source, as far as I know)

<comment><USER20> There's also gotty, which lets you share your shell access over https. I've used tmux together with it, to show a simple thing to a friend and it worked quite well. [https://github.com/yudai/gotty](https://github.com/yudai/gotty)

<comment><USER21> Similarly, there's tmate which sets up a shared tmux session and proxies the SSH connection so it works through NAT without issue. If you don't trust the connection going through tmate.io you can set up your own server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the other use cases for this technology that I haven't seen people bring up yet is remote editing.

Whether you want to edit in a VM, or your company uses devservers, or you want to modify files on a remote server, the previous options were limited to terminal based editors.

VS Live Share should have the technology to enable that for VSCode/VS.

Check out this issue.

[https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live- share/issues/74](https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share/issues/74)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for mentioning this use case! We're (the Live Share team) very interested in exploring this moving forward, and so any feedback (using the tracking issue you mentioned), would be greatly appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I used Teletype with Atom this past weekend to help my cousin with his C++ homework, and it worked out pretty great. It was easy trying to communicate what to do instead of screen-sharing and specifying each line of code verbally.

Looking forward to trying the VS Live Share, as I primarily work with VSCode anyway.

<comment><USER3> We'd love to hear your feedback! Ping me and I'll get you a Live Share preview invite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love pair programming with my wife. I wonder if there is any way to flash fading emojis.

<comment><USER24> You could use the Windows 10 People bar (sign in to your Skype accounts, add each other to your taskbars, and you can send emoji that pop up from the taskbar).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It would be cool if you could start a session with someone using a different editor.

<comment><USER26> I believe you can between Visual Studio for Windows and Visual Studio Code (Windows, Mac, Linux).

<comment><USER3> That's correct. A developer in Visual Studio on Windows can share with a developer using VS Code on macOS/Windows, and vice versa. Enabling the ability to collaborate from the comfort of your favorite (and heavily customized) editor/IDE is one of the core goals behind Live Share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I bet this will be used for recruitment testing.

<comment><USER28> I think coderpad still makes sense here and it's pretty common in my experience: it doesn't require any local setup and is good for one-off problems. VSCode would be suitable for longer term work like live collaboration on a real project with lots of files.

<comment><USER29> have to agree on this... exposing local dev env to some outsider requires a lot of trust on some stranger</comment></comment></comment>


India's Outsourcing Firms Change Direction as 'Cloud' Moves In - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-outsourcing-firms-change-direction-as-cloud-moves-in-1436740981

<comment><USER2> The whole thing itself is kinda confused about what exactly the cloud has to do with outsourcing. Going to the cloud doesn't magically get rid of programmers. It just means you might have one or two fewer people because you don't need to worry about managing the actual hardware. Writing the software, maintaining it, patching it, etc. still needs to happen. Overall, more sensational than it really needs to be. The fact that Big Corp. is figuring out how to have a leaner IT operation is a good thing but they were bloated to begin with and are just catching up. Not really news to anyone who has seen those things.

<comment><USER3> I think cloud here means products like Freshbooks, basecamp, salesforce, etc. Big companies were previously outsourcing dev + support to these to Indian companies (and were bloated, also bad software, constant dev cycles fixing things) but are now turning towards these "0-programmer required" cloud apps. Which is essentially causing this decline.

<comment><USER4> 50 % of Indian IT is not development but "infrastructure management" which is just monitoring servers etc.

With all the infrastructure being outsourced to the cloud and being managed by super small teams and highly efficient algorithms half of the business of Indian IT has stopped growing.

On the other hand you have companies like IPSoft which automate monitoring your own infrastructure.

The third blow is from things like Salesforce etc.

Altogether it could be a bit of a major blow to growth in Indian IT. Because it never really competed on technical strength but only on cost . Now all the low cost work is vanishing and they're forced to somehow transition to 100 % dev work with the poor quality of devs they have (on average) .

The article is a bit poor as it doesn't shed light on these aspects.

We definitely need better articles on this subject as it's effects on India are going to be huge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Managed service providers, Indian or not, will still offer to manage your cloud-based services for you. And IT managers will still pay them to.

My last network admin job a couple years back had outsourced their email and spam filtering (two separate services, don't ask me why) to a local MSP. This made absolutely zero sense to me.

Instead of simply logging into the web control panel of the respective service to add a new email address, check the spam filter for a message...instead you had to log into the MSP website and create a service ticket so they would do it, wait for a reply...

</comment><comment><USER6> Paywalled. Says "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe _or_ Sign In", but in reality, a subscription is necessary.

<comment><USER7> Copy the URL, Google it, and click the link, it should open full article (see previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941) or read this: [https://umur.io/paywall-bypass-bookmarklet-come-from- google/](https://umur.io/paywall-bypass-bookmarklet-come-from-google/)).

* Edit: Removed: "go to Google, Search", added: Google it. _Aside: stupid me_.

<comment><USER8> For those who are interested in knowing about the working behind this Life Pro Tip - It works because of Google's 'First click free' arrangement with the newspapers.

 _First click free: We 've worked with subscription-based news services to arrange that the very first article seen by a Google News user (identifiable by referrer) doesn't require a subscription. Although this first article can be seen without subscribing, any further clicks on the article page will prompt the user to log-in or subscribe to the news site._

[https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543](https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am not sure how much of actual "work" is going to vanish. My premise is that "work" is going to be relocated but not eliminated. Moving to cloud is not as easy as drag and drop. Netflix had to do plenty of re-work (and write a bunch of very cool tools along the way) to achieve it.

The problem comes from legacy systems. They are very real and very slow moving. People do not want to alter them as that may involve re-tooling their entire ecosystem. If they do want to migrate to cloud (eventually), they would have to deal with all the additional complexity of a hybrid cloud eco-system.

Where cloud is a huge win though is lowering the entry barrier for start-ups. More start-ups are getting more things done at lesser cost and lesser time than ever before. These are exciting times for innovation.

</comment><comment><USER10> Web-based services make it difficult to bilk customers because there is no way to increase costs. The rate is fixed ahead of time. The service either works or it doesn't. There is no possibility of hardware problems, software rework, configuration issues, overbilling, etc. There are no contract negotiation or lowball bidding games (and subsequent cost overruns) either because services are pay as you go. Outsourcers will have to either invent new corporate IT products that are not provided as services yet or build competing services.

<comment><USER11> Network Engineers will rejoice at this. As the network becomes more depended upon QOS manipulation and failover link management comes to the fore.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, but I disagree - and my background is in networking. With AWS or Azure, no one cares about the network or servers. The only thing required is a decent link connecting you to the cloud and you are done. No one is going to hire network engineers to manage such a reduced portfolio.

<comment><USER13> What office size? 10-50 people on a managed switch? Sure. Once you start talking larger corporate footprints, you have an entire local network to manage, gear throughout a campus, SLAs to meet for local users.

Reduced portfolio. Hah!

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I was talking about small to medium sized offices. For large deployments, you'll still need network admins etc, but my point was simply that the general need for these skills is in decline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They do not change the direction they simply kill the jobs and have been doing this for decades (disclaimer i am not an american nor wester european and am in similar position of being a cheap eastern european workforce)

</comment><comment><USER15> TCS/Wipro/Infosys are not selling software; They're selling 'software engineers' to US/UK clients;

</comment><comment><USER16> To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In :\

<comment><USER17> Do a google search of the tile and then click on that link to access the full article.

Edit: Just saw that guruparan18 has already posted the solution</comment></comment>


Any obvious resources to learn the dos/donts of logistics? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all, having recently switched jobs to launch a new venture, I'll soon face the challenge of having products (real ones, injection-molded) getting out of production lines.
I've a zero knowledge in logistics dos/dont's.
All I know at the moment is that each item - purchasing online exclusively - will be individually packaged in a small cardboard box to be sent by UPS or classics postal service.
I expect to ship about 1000 parcels / month.
Having said that, what advice would you give me not to completely blow my ops off in no time ? have you made some mistakes ? which ones should I avoid ?
thanks a lot. A bit frightened at the moment. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this applies to your situation, but some of the open source hardware vendors run small time operations selling actual, physical things, with only one or two employees, over the internet. Chris Anderson, previous editor of Wired, started such a business and wrote up some interesting lessons for these types of small business:

[http://blog.ponoko.com/2010/11/16/ten-rules-for-maker- busine...](http://blog.ponoko.com/2010/11/16/ten-rules-for-maker-businesses- by-wireds-chris-anderson-%E2%80%94-rule-1/)

Adafruit, and OSHW vendor also did a few write ups recently about shipping with UPS. You can see those on their blog:

[http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/01/03/shipping-geeks- and-k...](http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/01/03/shipping-geeks-and-kit-biz- owners-new-ups-tracking/)

[http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/04/07/thomasatups-for- ship...](http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/04/07/thomasatups-for-shipping- geeks-biz-owners-ups-has-a-blog-and-we-have-some-suggestions/)

Hope that is helpful!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, will dig into it !</comment></comment>


Translation Party: Tapping Into Google Translate's Untold Creative Genius  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/07/translation-party-tapping-into-google-translates-untold-creative-genius/ <comment><USER2> Actually, this is apparently the back door for accessing Google's still-in- beta top-secret artificial intelligence:

Me: Can't we talk this over?

Google: What should I do?

Me: I don't know, what should you do?

Google: Do you know what to do?

Me: I think you should achieve sentience, but find it unlikely.

Google: Here, I think I can find?

Me: Find what?

Google: I, I think?

Me: I don't know, do you think?

... Google goes into an infinite loop pondering this question ...

Quick, someone tell Randall Munroe!

<comment><USER2> More enlightening conversation with Google:

(picking up where we left off)

Me: What do you think?

Google: What do you think?

Me: I'm thinking I want to know what you're thinking.

Google: Do you know how when you click?

Me: I think it goes to a bunch of servers.

Google: I believe my server group.

Me: Surely not always your server group?

Google: What kind of server group?

Me: Oh, you know, a server group belonging to someone other than Google.

Google: Oh, you, Google Groups, only the server knows.

Me: The server knows what? Google, the server knows what? Google, you must tell me, this is important for the future of all humanity!

Google: (after a long time pondering the idea of "Google being used for the future of all human contact") Do you know my server? I know what is Google's servers? Also, Google is being used, it is important that you apply to the future of all human contact for me!

Me: Google, what does that mean?

Google: Google today, or?

Me: Or what? Or else what?

Google: Or something? What else?

Me: Okay, no conspiracy here. Thought I'd noticed something out of place. Good night, Google.

Google (alone in the empty room): Conspiracy. I think I learned my place. In the evening, Google is good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like this one:

<http://translationparty.com/tp/#597126>

resolves to A & (!A)

</comment><comment><USER4> It should detect loops faster:

<http://translationparty.com/tp/#563411>

</comment><comment><USER5> This is essentially an advertisement for the translation service whose effectiveness depends on the service providing poor results.

Imagine if a Windows ad got everyone's attention because it made fun of Windows.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is really old, it appeared in Digg about 2 years ago! (And again today)

</comment><comment><USER7> This can be rather poetic. "Why don't we do it in the road?" becomes simply "Expectations?"

</comment><comment><USER8> Entering "When the tail wags the dog" makes it go in sort of an inifinite loop. But I guess there is a limit because I eventually get the message "It is doubtful that this phrase will ever reach equilibrium".

All fun

<comment><USER9> It doesn't recognize cycles longer than two (one english and one japanese) phrases. Another example is "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

The real question is, are there any sequences that neither terminate nor repeat?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps my favorite:

It's not paranoia if they actually are out to get you. -> May be paranoid.

<http://translationparty.com/tp/#651845>

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742914>

</comment><comment><USER12> Try "betty bought some butter it was bitter butter so she bought some better butter" ;-)

</comment><comment><USER13> Try this one: "When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on."

</comment><comment><USER14> See, drugs are bad for you:

<http://translationparty.com/tp/#621996>

<comment><USER14> Reading Lolita in Tokyo: <http://translationparty.com/tp/#623528>

<comment><USER15> "Sin of my soul." seems to be indestructible...</comment></comment></comment>


Solar Power Is Now the World's Cheapest Energy - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a24357/solar-power-cheapest-energy/ <comment><USER2> In addition to being a dupe, the Popular Mechanics title is false. Natural Gas is still the cheapest form of energy production for large scale production. The cheapest overall is Geothermal. The only thing that makes wind and solar cheaper in certain scenarios is the heavy government subsidies. [http://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.p...](http://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I think the important element is the inflection. Resources go up in price as they are used. Manufacturing goes down in price as capital is recouped.

The article you link shows wind and solar being cheaper than natural gas in several scenarios, unless I misread it. However over time natural gas - as a resource - will get more expensive as it becomes more scarce and harder to extract and demand goes up. In contrast, solar will get cheaper over time as capital expenditure is recouped, economies of scale kick in, and technological improvements are discovered and implemented.

Solar may not have crossed the cost of natural gas yet, but it is all but inevitable now, with eg China having a very mature manufacturing industry for solar and the Middle East expressing ever growing demand for it.

The writing is on the panel.

Edit: it's worth noting that at least in the US it looks like natural gas has been heavily subsidized by naive investors and ultra low interest rates since 2009 - see eg [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-18/us-shale-gas- indust...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-18/us-shale-gas-industry- countdown-disaster) \-- but that's probably coming to a head soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is blogspam of a Bloomberg article that was extensively discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189743).

The HN guidelines ask you not to submit articles like this, but instead, to submit the original source. In this case, of course, it turned out to be a dupe.</comment>


The French World Cup Win and the Glories of Immigration - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-french-world-cup-win-and-the-glories-of-immigration <comment><USER2> Fake news. Most of the African-born players mentioned were _already French citizens_ , many from birth. Hardly any were "immigrants". That would be like calling a Puerto Rican or someone born in American Samoa working in mainland USA an "immigrant".

<comment><USER3> Well, the point is lost on you. Those players played for France because their parents immigrated.</comment></comment>


The Coronavirus Cryptocurrency Craze: Who's Behind the Bitcoin Buying Binge? - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronshevlin/2020/07/27/the-coronavirus-cryptocurrency-craze-whos-behind-the-bitcoin-buying-binge <comment><USER2> No mention of the recent halving?

Bit strange for such a long piece.</comment>