Ask HN: Do you use your laptop while you cook? - <AUTHOR> I was making pumpkin pie this weekend, and I was thinking about how a smarter kitchen can make cooking and preparing great meals better and a greater experience.<p>Does anyone have things that frustrate them with cooking? Anything frustrating on having your laptop out while you cook? Would love to hear your thoughts? <comment><USER2> Don't be a savage. Get a tablet and some 3m Command hooks. strategically place the command hooks in various locations in your kitchen. put 2 hooks upright level, and then another hook inverted centered between the bottom hooks, use your tablet to measure the distance, so that you can slide your tablet through the hooks to hold it. So Bottom left a hook, bottom right a hook, invert hook on the top to hold the middle of the tablet.

like this:

[https://productreviewsbychristina.files.wordpress.com/2017/0...](https://productreviewsbychristina.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/tablet- cabinet-door-3.jpg?w=1170)

I have hooks on the window above my sink, on the outside of the exhaust hood above the stove, on the fridge door, and on the inside of a select cabinet door that can be angled. just have to slide the tablet out, and move it where I need it. Don't have to worry about spills and damaging it because it's not on a counter or table and it's out of the way and eye level.

it's great for looking at recipes, using a Timer app, and watching Netflix while cooking and or doing the dishes.

I'm on the hunt for a decent bluetooth in oven thermometer and app. Anyone have any suggestions?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a simple solution! Have you had an issue with getting your tablet dirty though?

Ive been looking at projectors I can point down to the kitchen counter. Then I can swipe through recipes without getting my devices dirty.

Also, I would think watching netflix as you cook would distract you and maybe mess up your meal, has that happened to you?

<comment><USER2> no, because any self respecting cook has a towel on their shoulder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just get the right model, and you can cook your food on the laptop itself. Screen placement ceases to be an issue when your stir-fry is sizzling away on the keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not for cooking but for streaming tv while washing dishes. ;-)

The problem in my opinion with recipes is that there are too much and most of them are not good. A lot of times I started to cook anything by recipe just to throw it away after some minutes and "freestyling" the meal...

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a few times, but I find it just easier to print out the recipe.

The place where it would get difficult is where I am making multiple dishes with multiple steps and I need to have timers for many of the steps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you had issues with preparing meals just from instructions, like the description on completing the step was not enough? For example for me, I never cooked a pumpkin, so I had a wrong assumption on how I would make the pumpkin filling, but seeing a video helped realize what they meant.

Probably better instructions would of dealt with that, but I would think some recipes would assume a level of background knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use it to play music that's about it.

As I've gotten better at cooking I rely less on recipes and sort of glance of them to get the idea of what is supposed to be happening and go off that.

</comment><comment><USER7> I place a piece of Velcro on the back of my phone, and have Mount points around my kitchen

<comment><USER7> I also placed these Mount points in my car in the shower, and my bedroom

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nope, I do use my phone thou. I also have a LCD mounted in the kitchen with an old Mac Mini connected to it, works great for cooking.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, the laptop--it's not even on the radar for cooking; that's why we invented tablets. And cookbooks.

</comment><comment><USER10> TV is near by I just cast youtube vids on my TV.</comment>


How to Architect with a Design-for-Failure Approach - <AUTHOR> https://cloudacademy.com/amazon-web-services/courses/how-to-architect-with-a-design-for-failure-approach/

<comment><USER2> I like how they took a simple use case and were able to show the key concepts of designing stuff with HA as a priority. I'd have like to see some hints about security too, that would have been a nice addition

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Actually we published a course on AWS Security a few days ago: [https://cloudacademy.com/amazon-web- services/courses/introdu...](https://cloudacademy.com/amazon-web- services/courses/introduction-to-aws-security-best-practices/)

<comment><USER3> Good starting point. I think it would be great (perhaps PPallemberg agrees) to have some advanced stuff as well - that's the hardest to understand well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great course: I just finished!

I have a technical question (don't know if this is the rigth place to ask): the architecture is clear to me now. But which is the related best practice to deploy my app (stored in a git/github repo) in such a place? I mean in order to have it in all the different EC2 instances sped-up by the load-balancer.

At the moment on my architecture I use a queue system and a pull script in every machine.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Never heard of Cloud Academy. Is this the codecademy of cloud services? Unlike codecademy you seem to have to pay for this so maybe it's higher quality content. Can any users give me some info on it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Stefano here, CEO of CloudAcademy.com, thank you for your comment!

Yes, similar to the concept of Codecademy, but totally focused on cloud computing technologies. Actually in CloudAcademy.com you can test your skills on cloud computing platforms and technologies (AWS, Google etc.) and learn with courses and learning explanations.

Our system is designed around our CloudRank: if you try our quizzes ([https://cloudacademy.com/cloud-computing-learning- quizzes/](https://cloudacademy.com/cloud-computing-learning-quizzes/)) you will see that we are testing you with a question and right after we show a small learning explanation. Every time you answer you increase or decrease your CloudRank.

We are transitioning to a freemium model, right now all the courses and questions are free and you'll always have a free account to get access to a good number of them.

Stefano

<comment> k-mcgrady Sounds great, thanks for the info!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, Stefano here from CloudAcademy.com. Just wanted to say that right now everything is for FREE. We are switching to a freemium model in a few weeks.

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER5> How important do you guys think AWS certifications are? This is a world changing at such a fast pace that I doubt companies would really care?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very nice comment, thank you. Look my opinion is that cloud computing is really an important skill that you need in your resume, and if you take a look at 90% of technical job positions today you'll find that they cite AWS skills when they speak about cloud architect, system administrator and even developer position.

The reason is quite simple, AWS is still the leader in the public cloud market and we have thousands of members that are looking for training to pass the certifications (actually we have a dedicated product called CloudCareer for AWS for that).

You're right, they are changing very fast but that's part of the tech world and definitely something that we have already saw for other platforms.

Think about all the companies like Trendmicro or Reverbed that are building product for AWS or Google or Azure, on top of these platforms. Having an AWS certification is really the first goal there and the first need for millions of companies. The same is going to happen with Google Cloud, Azure and so on.

For CloudAcademy.com we have a great challenge about this point: we are developing a technology to keep our content automatically updated with the help of the community and of our algorithms.

Stefano

<comment><USER3> degio knows Riverbed well :) (good to see you Loris)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice one, sounds like a great resource. Anybody knows if they will add more content about AWS stuff in the future?

<comment><USER3> Multiple clouds is the killer app - that's a key thing that nobody offers at the moment.

<comment><USER7> I agree. We are seeing more of our customers at Cloud 66 ([http://www.cloud66.com](http://www.cloud66.com)) move to multiple cloud apps for reasons like DR or data center location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems interesting. I don't see mentions to CloudWatch, perhaps it is simply not in the index.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the comment. Yes, we do talk about CloudWatch, let me check why it's not cited in the index.

Stefano

<comment><USER3> It would be interesting if people here on HN have tried the course, to hear what they think about it.

My understanding is that users are required to pay; why don't you offer a limited access for free, say for the next 24 hours?

I'm sure that you would benefit from such feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now everything is for free and we'll always have a free version where you can learn and test with a good amount of learning materials.

Comments and feedback about courses and questions are very welcome! thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Laboratories looks like a great tool!! Are you planning to add more of them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we have a dedicated engineer in our team that is working on them. We are using our own technology to build and serve them. There is a bunch of them ready to be published, always on AWS for now.

Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Weird. Title has changed now - and I preferred the original one.

<comment><USER9> Mods have been doing this lately. There's been a lot of grumbling and discussion about transparency from Mod's and auto-admin actions, like show something that makes it obvious an admin action was taken or show the original title before the change somewhere.

Regarding titles specifically -- a change has the power to destroy a thread and drop it from the front page almost instantly.

<comment><USER3> Agree, and I noticed it as well. It is weird because sometimes these changes are so obviously dumb.</comment></comment></comment>


Where Are the Startups? Loss of Dynamism Is Impeding Growth - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/business/economy/start-ups-growth.html <comment><USER2> People with money and vision spot the good startups in the early round(s) and may decide they do not need a gorilla (SEC) sitting on their shoulders at this time, mainly due to the burden, but it also shits down your back...

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe the Garbage Collector has kicked in</comment>


Notes on my full-time testing of 7 Dropbox alternatives - <AUTHOR> http://vxlabs.com/2015/03/29/notes-testing-7-dropbox-alternatives/

<comment><USER2> Does unison still have the problem that it refuses to work unless the exact same version of the program is installed on every computer? Also, I've found it extremely hard to install on linux boxes where I do not have root access.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, unison does require that you have matching versions on both ends of the synchronisation.

Fortunately, installing unison can be done quite easily without root access. On my synology, I simply downloaded the arch linux arm packages and extracted the 2.48.3 binaries from there. Because the packages in Ubuntu 14.04 are outdated, I extracted the binaries from the arm linux x86_64 packages for my laptops. For MacOS, there are downloadable 2.48 binaries that also work out of the box.

<comment><USER2> That's good to know. Still, I think it would be much saner if Unison was self- compatible at least within the same major-version. It's an excellent program, beyond the tricky details of setting it up on all your systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been using cyphertite after giving up on SpiderOak. It's been nice so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> cyphertite looks more like a backup solution than a syncing solution. Does it also do syncing?</comment></comment>


Firefox Local Files Theft – Not Patched Yet - <AUTHOR> https://quitten.github.io/Firefox/ <comment><USER2> IMO, the approach taken by Chrome and other browsers is over restrictive, basically killing off the file:// protocol. Already now it's impossible to load wasm files in the file:// protocol in Chrome, and I think this also had implications on using wasm in electon.

Ultimately, file:// is a great, cloud free method of having web pages and applications and it should stay that way instead of forcing everything to be networked and reliant on third party computers or domain names.

There are so many reports, documents, etc that live as non-networked html files. E.g. rust documentation (cargo doc --open) is generated as html files on-disk and then just displayed without the need for a webserver. Starting a localhost webserver is in fact _less_ secure than file because now every user on the computer has access instead of just the users with read-access to the files. This has thankfully been fixed in Chrome OS though.

Responsive web apps are not the solution as they still need "seeding" via the network. Maybe some kind of standardized format where you have a glorified zip file with some metadata and when you double click it, it opens in the web browser which starts a web server in the background that runs a specially designated js in that zip file and which can accept usual fetch requests and has read access to the entire zip file. The browser's "UI" would then communicate with the server via well-known protocols.

<comment><USER3> Learning web programming is amazing, since you can just start writing a .html file and open it in a browser. There is no need to learn how go set up a local http server. Chrome truly is killing that experience; you can't even load javascript modules without http involved now outside of Firefox.

I really hope Mozilla doesn't "fix" this "vulnerability" by destroying the experience of people learning web programming like Google did.

<comment><USER4> Is it really that hard to run `python -m http.server` in your repository?

<comment><USER5> When I was about 13 I wanted to learn C++. I bought a book, installed the software from the CD and tried compiling the first example. It failed with a cryptic error about a file not being found. I gave up on programming for a number of years.

The book had failed to mention that I need to include the compiler in my PATH.

<comment><USER6> Honestly, if that's all that took you to give up on programming, it would not have gone on much longer anyway, especially with something like C++.

<comment><USER5> So what was I supposed to do with no expert on hand and no Internet? I went back to the bookshop and asked there. They didn't know either, so I returned the book.

I returned to programming when I learned about Quickbasic. That just worked and had an extensive help system that was suitable for self study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps this should be addressed but the fact it requires the user to download and open a file means it's of limited use to attackers. If you can persuade a user to do that then you needn't bother with browser exploits to get access to a user's files.

Edit: but wait, it can only access the directory the file was downloaded to? So that's almost certainly restricted to the user's download folder. That makes even less useful.

<comment><USER8> The downloads folder is a perfect target actually. Lots of documents end up downloaded as pdfs, I certainly have enough documents to dox me. Anyone who does their e-mailing through a browser will most likely have a bunch of exciting attachments in their downloads folder.

You'll probably also find a bunch of installers in the downloads folder, I could imagine a sophisticated attacker looking for installer .msi's or .exe's for software which is known to have vulnerability.

<comment><USER7> Sure but you can get much more if you use a more exploitable file type in the first place. Why would you willing jump back into a browser's sandbox when you've just persuaded the user to bypass it entirely?

<comment><USER9> It's not so much why someone would choose this over that, as it is what attack vectors are added to which surface. Why wouldn't a bad actor be willing to jump back into a leaky sandbox?

<comment><USER7> Because they already have the run of the user's profile. Why add additional complexity for less access?

<comment><USER9> Because you may of had zero access rather than some, for example a web dev who wouldn't click on an .exe but would open an .html file without a second thought. More access isn't necessarily always the end goal either.

<comment><USER10> If someone is knowledgeable enough to not open a shady exe file, they'll probably not simply open any shady files, including doc, ppt, and html

<comment><USER11> Not true for html files. They are widely regarded as harmless.

<comment><USER10> I have never seen anyone saying HTML files are harmless, and would definitely never say it myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Compatible with spec and previously a feature. I agree that it should be patched but Chrome's policy has historically made local web development and testing a pain in the ass because now you have to configure a web server correctly and work around Chrome's broken cache-control policy (have fun ctrl-f5'ing all the time or opening devtools to disable cache, which deoptimizes your JS)

I struggled with this for years and opened multiple bugs about it. If you're trying to release software to end-users that requires them to configure a whole damn web server you get really tired of it.

Disabling content loading from file:// is one solution, but I feel like the 'this was loaded from the internet' flag already used for downloaded EXEs and DLLs is a perfectly reasonable alternative that would work just as well without breaking things for local development. (To be clear, you don't offer the option to bypass that, since it would only be a security vulnerability)

<comment><USER7> Does`python -m http.server 8000` not work for local development?

<comment><USER12> You need way more configuration than that, python's http server doesn't handle keepalive and threading correctly (or didn't when I last used it, maybe that's fixed in 3).

I historically had to use IIS or Apache, and at work we used a full Apache install. If you used python your performance was much worse if your application worked at all.

For C# apps you can at least just spin up a HTTPD directly in your app using system APIs, but it's also kind of flaky.

<comment><USER7> I'm just surprised that file:// works better (when it's allowed).

<comment><USER12> It was very fast, at least for a while. It might be slow now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Killing javascript access to file:// would be annoying for quick experimenting. Maybe denying network access to locally loaded JS, so that nothing could be transferred out is possible solution?

<comment><USER14> You need to spin up a server if you want to use modules anyways.

Well, it's not a big deal. Just run `python3 -m http.server` or install "http- server" via npm.

<comment><USER15> This is not something a kid learning basic html/js can do easily, since he probably uses windows, and doesn't even know how to navigate in the command prompt.

The "click on the html file on the desktop" just works(TM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can we at least disallow iframes containing file:// URIs? Essentially treat them as if they had X-Frame-Option: DENY.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am not a Web programmer, so what I suggest might be nonsense. Please correct constructively :)

The central statement seems to be:

> "Our implementation of the Same Origin Policy allows every file:// URL to > get access to files in the same folder and subfolders."

What about the following simple mitigations:

* Access by file:// URL to the root and user's home directory proper are forbidden by the browser implementation (Because all subdirectories of the home directory is always a bad idea, root even worse so) Hard-coded, error dialog, period, no way to override short of patching the browser or mounting trickeries.

* Access to any other subdirectories is allowed, but will cause a warning that by proceeding you grant access to the directory and all it's subdirectories. The warning cannot be suppressed by normal settings, but appears only once a day. An average user will not get it frequently, so there is a chance that they read it (and if they click OK without reading it's their problem). And for the Web developer clicking once per day is still easier than configuring an Apache. And ideally they know why they are clicking it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Another good reason to use Firejail. You tell it which folders FF gets to access, and Bob's your uncle.

<comment><USER19> It's easier to create a new user account and run firefox from it. Something like: xhost +si:localuser:firefox && su - firefox -c 'DISPLAY=:0 HOME=/home/firefox firefox 2>/dev/null' && xhost -

<comment><USER18> Yeah, because that's a lot easier than just running "firejail firefox".. And does your snippet work on Wayland?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To avoid this, I use Firejail [1] with a custom rule set to limit the browser's access only to Downloads and its own profile folder. Does anybody know of anything similar for MacOS?

[1] [https://firejail.wordpress.com/](https://firejail.wordpress.com/)

<comment><USER21> From the article, access is already limited to the directory in which the HTML file is located, so this wouldn't help.

Either it would be in the Downloads directory, where it already has access, or it would be in another directory and you wouldn't be able to open the file at all unless you disable your sandbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, what is it different to download random exe and execute it?

Isn't that accessible by design as the dir html allocated is also the root path of that page?

Beside that, aren't both windows and macos warn you when you open random file downloaded from internet?

</comment><comment><USER23> Mozilla's latest tactic appears to be to trash Chrome semi-weekly on HN and then try to bring in users to Firefox. Then, later that week a new vulnerability is discovered in Firefox.

<comment><USER24> This breaks the site guidelines by being flamebait, by insinuating astroturfing, and by using HN threads to fight some sort of pre-existing battle. You've done this before, and we've had to warn you before. If you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you, so please stop.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


40% Of US Workers Now Earn Less Than 1968 Minimum Wage - Suraj-Sun http://soundmoneyinstitute.org/40-of-us-workers-now-earn-less-than-1968-minimum-wage/

<comment><AUTHOR> FTA:

> That isn't a lot of money, but according to the Social Security > Administration, 40.28% of all workers make less than $20,000 a year in > America today. So that means that more than 40 percent of all U.S. workers > actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in > 1968. That is how far we have fallen.

So the article compares _all wage earners_ today with _full-time_ workers in 1968.

<comment><USER2> Hours worked is irrelevant. The lifestyle afforded by $21,480 a year is terrible. That's barely enough to support a single person let alone a spouse/family. This means that 40% of the workforce are most likely dependent on someone else. Either another individual or the government as evident in the 47.7 million Americans who receive food stamps.

The workforce has changed since 1968. Full time jobs are not as easy to come by now as they were back then. There is indeed underemployment with people working fewer hours but that doesn't change the fact that 40% of the population is living off less than a 1968 minimum wage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know much about economy, but I always thought this was an expected outcome of globalization. People in developing countries make more than before (since they get to work at factories instead of farming) and people in developed countries earn less, because of competition from cheap labor in other countries.

Lastly, the people who employ cheap labor can increase their profit margins.

<comment><USER4> I see it this way as well, but most of the people I know who bring up this subject as a problem are either xenophobic or have some sort of cognitive dissonance. These kinds of statistics fail to point out the billions of people who have come out of poverty, and the millions who are now in the middle class, particularly in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). The response to this point is either "We have to take care of our own first" as if the well-being of an American person is somehow more important than that of 10 Chinese people, or that the progress made in the developing world is insignificant.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, in point-of-fact:

[http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/half-a-billion-people- escap...](http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/half-a-billion-people-escaped- poverty-2005-2010/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The title is misleading. A more fitting title would be: 40% of US workers earn less per year then the full time minimum wage inflation corrected for today. Without numbers about how many hours worked are worthless, for all we know 40% of US workers only work 1 hour per month and are doing really well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Fortunately this is more than compensated by the extreme rise in wages for CEOs and other high management positions.

</comment><comment><USER8> And it has NOTHING to do with the current administration. That's pure coincidence. This is the sleeping in the bed part..

<comment><USER9> The median US wage has been stagnant or falling since the 1970s.

<comment><USER10> Is that because median world income has been ~rising since the 1970s?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And 0.0001% earn more than the planet's GDP in 1968, inflation adjusted.

At this point, the picture isn't going to change without a complete collapse/overthrow of the plutarchy.

<comment><USER10> Why? The Western 'elite' create an Eastern 'elite', which create a 'South American' elite, which create an African 'elite', until there's no more cheap labor.

The collective 'elite' replace human labor with automation.

Once all labor is automated, there is massive deflation, since no one can afford the output of robot labor.

Then we're left with what, a post-scarcity utopia?

Can greed take us to this utopia, entirely by accident?

I can't think of any other possible outcome on 1000-year timescales.

<comment><USER12> What I am thinking will happen is lots of ugly wars as inflation and debts cause several crisis, until there is not much trade left, plunging us back into dark age again.

Debt, and inflation in the whole world is rising much faster than people income. Yes, now people are richer than ever, I am sure that right now there are more US people being able to buy crap than in 1968, the same in Brazil with the famous "rise of the middle class".

But this won't last long.

US has crazy debts for example: [http://rt.com/usa/us-debt-study-hamilton- economy-103/](http://rt.com/usa/us-debt-study-hamilton-economy-103/)

Or Brazil, as I fully expected in 2011 (where we had a crazy GDP growth) is now with lots of inflation (6.7%) and anemic growth (0.9%)

And why I expected it? Because it was fueled by debts, and as soon people had to PAY them back, and fail, things would derail. And they don't even fully de- railed yet, the construction market is still misbehaving (house prices where I live rose 200% in the last four years and are still rising, to me is obvious the whole thing will come crashing down US 2008 style when foreclosures start).

<comment><USER11> When you keep borrowing from the future (which our economies have been doing since Bretton Woods, pretty much), you eventually have to pay off the debt.

You can't keep pushing it back and back.

No economist or politician seems to understand this basic tenet. Or they do, but they don't care, as the ones paying off the debt are the disenfranchised underclasses, and the political classes profit from the debt, as they own it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: LinkBoard, my free Pinboard alternative - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkboard.org

<comment><USER2> I am interested, but you are going to have to show me something about it before I give you my email address.</comment>


I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006788354/nike-running-mary-cain.html <comment><USER3> This article was discussed last week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21476304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21476304)

</comment><comment><USER4> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21476304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21476304)

23 comments, 65 points

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember Mary Cain's amazing promise. It's sad to see how this turned out.

One of the things that most turned me off of competitive running in my personal life is when I realized that the lighter you are the faster you can run long distance. It just turns into an unhealthy feedback loop where all your training can be superseded by someone that just weighs less. I don't want to do a sport that rewards anorexia and unhealthy body weights. Better to just run for fun and the health benefits.

<comment><USER6> > the lighter you are the faster you can run long distance

Is there a running-related sport that doesn't care about who gets there first, but instead measures success like a gauntlet, where the last person to drop out of the race for just not being able to run anymore, wins?

Not quite like a multi-day ultramarathon, where the running is segmented. I'm talking more about something that measures who can muster the longest single- segment run, with most people being expected and encouraged by their trainers to drop out once their muscles start to fail them, lest they incur permanent damage.

I imagine light weight would serve no advantage in this kind of "race."

<comment><USER7> There is a gauntlet race somewhere in Appalachian US that only 20 or 30 have ever finished.

It's a 30 hour race through the woods if I recall correctly.

EDIT: I wasn't 100% correct, but this looks like what I was talking about: [https://www.outsideonline.com/1924491/60-hours-hell-story- ba...](https://www.outsideonline.com/1924491/60-hours-hell-story-barkley- marathons)

The actual count is 16 finishers and it is a 60 hour race so I am assuming it is done in legs.

<comment><USER8> The Barkley Marathons. It's a 60 hour race of 5 laps through an unmarked course in a Tennessee state park: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barkley_Marathons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barkley_Marathons)

There is a good documentary about it called "The Barkley Marathons: The Race that Eats its Young" currently available on Amazon Prime streaming. There are also some smaller pieces on YouTube about some other years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I watched the video on YT last night. I find it rather disgusting. If you ask me there should be weight classes in running, a lot of them. For a company like Nike, not having trained professionals on staff is simply absurd and is completely unacceptable. Obviously, they are wrong about the importance of weight in these competitions considering they killed this poor girls potential with all that nonsense. She was running very fast, then they started starving her and then she started running poorly. Personally, I would have fired the entire staff and started over from first principles after hearing her story.

<comment><USER10> I think I understand what you're getting at, but I don't think weight classes will help. E.g., consider boxing and wrestling. The competitive pressures will still exist, and athletes will have to go to extremes to make the lowest weight class possible to maximize success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> can this be redirected to the article instead of the video or at least marked as a video?

Article link: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/opinion/nike-running- mary...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/opinion/nike-running-mary- cain.html)

<comment><USER12> In this case the main story is the video, not the article. The article is mostly third-person but in the video Mary Cain speaks out directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't it well known that you have to be extremely skinny to be competitive in long distance running at the highest level?

<comment><USER12> This is more or less true but you have to draw the causal diagram carefully.

Everyone has an optimal weight for them (oversimplifying).

The best in the world tend to be very effective at very low weights. E.g. say 114 lbs at 5'7 for the sake of argument.

It does not follow that lowering a 5'7 runner's weight to 114 will always cause improvement. MC is a counterexample.

Yes, I'm saying Salazar fell to a basic misconception. He's had success, but he's obsessed with dumb things. When you have insanely talented and durable athletes who actually do run best at e.g. 114 you start thinking your system works for everybody.

<comment><USER14> So then why this whole issue related to women? Mary's opinion is that more women on Alberto's team would have been good without any explanation to why. This is an issue with Coaches. In my opinion, if Alberto was a woman, she'd be equally be deluded by her past success, having trained world class athletes and having the prestige of the top program at Nike.

Instead of focusing on the issue at hand, broad strokes across the women's movement do not help (in fact that masks the truth). The issue here is specific knowledge that the coach needs to train a woman. There are male gynecologists and urologists, so this is not an issue with Alberto's sexual orientation or his team mates. This was a good ol' boys club of high profile coaches and teams, when they're given large number of resources (Nike), they'll do anything and everything to be successful.

<comment><USER8> Because women react differently to very low weights. When they're underweight for a prolonged time, they will stop having their period, which will cause a change in hormones. The hormonal change leads to weaker bones, which makes injury more likely. This happened to Mary Cain, as she explains in her video.

<comment><USER14> I agree with you. So, the root cause is the lack of knowledge on the coach's part. Mary in her video wishes that if there were more women on Alberto's team, that would have helped. I don't see how. This is purely an issue about Alberto's incompetence, which you've just highlighted and I agree with that.

<comment><USER8> Based on the abuse she suffered, I think it's more than "lack of knowledge" and incompetence. But to the point of more women, it's easier to ignore the basic needs of one young girl, but much harder to ignore the basic needs of (say) half of your team. And if a large portion of the coaching staff are women, it's also more likely they will be aware of those basic needs.

<comment><USER14> This is best observed and proven in medicine. There are men and women as gynecologists who fundamentally understand women's health.

So, I don't see why this is a special case in Sports except for just the lack of competence and perhaps they were deluded, malicious or just fogged by their egos. This can happen to a womens team of coaches as well.

I can totally see a group of competent, well educated and professional men teaching a young girl how to be the best at any sport.

<comment><USER8> It's not a question of is it _possible_. It's question of what scenario makes it _most likely_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Competitive sports(or anything else) at a high enough level is more about genetic selection than training. The training reveals and reinforces potential and is obviously necessary, but at some point anything that is competitive enough it really just showing you who found the right sport and the right training for their genetic capabilities.

In high school football there were guys who with the same amount of training could squat/bench/deadlift considerably more than everyone else. They were stronger/faster and when applied to the right sports they were on another level.

Sure, those less gifted in those areas could train hard to make up some of the difference, but not as much as you'd imagine. If you are short, no matter how hard you train you will be at a disadvantage playing basketball. If you are tall and bigger/overweight, you aren't going to win at cross country distance running.

Humans tend to overvalue magical training and undervalue the existing potential that training reveals.

<comment><USER16> You can be naturally strong, but if you don't train, those who do train will beat you anyway. So you need to both train and have good genetics. Sports is not fair, but training usually pays off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you'd like a deep dive on the extraordinary lengths professional athletes and their teams will go this is a great read: [https://www.tylerhamiltonofficial.com/book](https://www.tylerhamiltonofficial.com/book)

It not only goes into the doping, but also the training and diet necessary to get the athletes weight to a level so they can achieve the necessary power to weight ratio to compete to win. It's crazy. But when you consider the investment teams are making in these athletes, you can see their motivation to cheat the system.

</comment><comment><USER18> As an avid runner myself women have it the worst during that time in their lives at that age. Their bodies are changing rapidly but they're still trying to make the same times.

</comment><comment><USER19> Really inspiring for her to come forward knowing how big nike is. Honestly, we need more people like her.

</comment><comment><USER20> People don't understand the point of competition is virtue, not winning.

Take the 'winning' mentality to its logical extreme of killing all the competition, and the absurdity of it all becomes obvious.

<comment><USER21> The point of competition is to compete (which is why you need to leave the competition alive,) and sort best to worst. Why you would do that is subjective.

<comment><USER20> Like I said, if the point is just winning the whole thing is absurd. And yes, people can do something for whatever reason they choose. But, if the reason they choose is at odds with the reason the thing exists, then they undermine the thing's existence. At best they are ignorant. At worst they are actively trying to destroy that in which they are participating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Transcript?

<comment><USER23> Below the video at [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/opinion/nike-running- mary...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/opinion/nike-running-mary- cain.html)

<comment><USER12> I don't see the transcript...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In general, Coaches are tough and demanding. In this case, clearly, Alberto has crossed the line with Mary. But, how does one know if the coach is abusive or "that's just how sports is, it's hard and coaches are tough"? Wouldn't this lead to weaker coaches that don't push the atheletes but now are afraid of abusing and crossing the line? Please don't take this as anything to do with the what happened with Mary - I am not condoning what Alberto did.

<comment><USER24> > But, how does one know if the coach is abusive or "that's just how sports > is, it's hard and no replacement for hard work"?

Two comments -

First, althetes are already tough and demanding to themselves. The kinds of tough coaches that need atent the same kind of tough I'd need to get my unmotivated self moving. Equating these kinds of "tough" is inaccurate. They need coaches that have insight and cover their weaknesses, not assholes.

Second, I completely understand your logical approach - I've done it myself so many times. But I've started realizing that in doing so I'm supporting the status quo without evidence. I'm defending current injustices because of potential, hypothetical problems.

What IF "this lead to weaker coaches that don't push the atheletes but now are afraid of abusing and crossing the line"? While that's not the ideal, that sounds better than inducing eating disorders that destroy quality of life (and potentially, the lives themselves). I dont think that's a risk - my first point covers that - but if that is a risk, it sounds worth the risk. Certainly better than accepting the status quo because change MIGHT not be better in every measure.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for a detailed response, I know this is a sensitive topic.

I was more curious from a new athelete's standpoint. Say, I am 14 years old, and say I want to become a world class athelete. Objectively, how does a _new_ young athelete know if they are being abused or just "working hard"? There is literally no way to know if some authoritative figure as Coach is telling me to do something I don't like.

The central question I have is how does a new comer sense and detect abuse so that they can take action?

There is a lot of bullshit in Sports and Nutrition fields of study - <USER2> because the data just isn't there but also because the lack of scientific method employed by people in this industry. Try searching for help on the internet for a sports related topic and you'll get everything and anything from tabloids full of bogus claims to rarely an linked journal from Johns Hopkins.

Furthermore, we need to also think about this from a Coach's perspective. There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of coaches around the world. What credentials and authority do they have to make their students do something, especially if there is not scientific or objective backing up the claims? On the other side, Coaches that are now in the business would be completely taken aback and question everything that they do to avoid potential unintended abuse.

I have empathy for abused athletes and it has no place in the society. Just that it is important to understand both sides of the coin and not be riled up by emotions.</comment></comment></comment>


Hey Cortana, Open Alexa: Microsoft and Amazon's First-Of-its-kind Collaboration - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2017/08/30/hey-cortana-open-alexa-microsoft-amazons-first-kind-collaboration/ <comment><USER2> "Hey Cortana, open Alexa" is bad UX. The "open" voice command feels like we are stuck in some former computer era. If there are multiple assistants on a device, each one should be triggered by their own keyword. I should be able to say "Alexa, …" and "Cortana, …".

<comment><USER3> Maybe they could try for the old shared phone-line fun of "Alexa, can I speak to Cortana right now?" or "Hey Cortana, is Alexa there?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds really messy. If i issue a voice command, I want my device to work out what provider (alexa, cortana, you name it) to handle that request. I dont care which one. I just want it turn down the volume if that was my request.

</comment><comment><USER5> This seems a bit unnecessary to me, but I'd love to proved wrong. Voice as a medium has a nasty discoverability problem and most of the main voice assistant functions are covered first class by all the major assistants (weather, music controls, timers, etc).

I hardly know all the features of Alexa and all the features of Cortana, and I have less an idea of what areas one excels in over the other.

Can anyone name one?

<comment><USER3> Alexa (which should be no surprise being from Amazon) is quite strong in the world of ordering products by voice, making shopping lists.

Cortana, at least in my case, has a better view/integration of personal assistant things like what my appointments are, what's on my TODO list, people to call/email, things like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> After my son mentioned it yesterday,Ithought this article was going to be about assistant infinite loops (e.g. a Google-Alexa infinite loop. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LEz9AU9c2qQ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LEz9AU9c2qQ) )

</comment><comment><USER7> This is complete tin foil hat thinking, but this seems like a high stakes game.

It's one thing to do competitive landscape research. It's another for your "host bot" to be able to record and analyze all of the guest bots in aggregation. This feels like asking for hiybbprqag all over again.</comment>


New Chatroulette Stats: 13% are Perverts - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/16/chatroulette-stats-male-perverts/

<comment><USER2> On a related note: Chat Roulette Piano Improv is fantastic.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32vpgNiAH60>

<comment><USER3> I feel like the real story isn't twitter/chatroulette/whatever, but these awesome things artists do with them. Shitmydadsays comes to mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pervert seems a bit judgemental. The more interesting fact is that something like 13% of the population (assuming I can extrapolate) would like to show others their genitals. I wonder what the true stat is for the population.

<comment><USER5> But you can't extrapolate. A lot of people heard about chatroulette and heard that it's filled with perverts. The average person is a mixture of intrigued and scared by this, but an exhibitionist will definitely want to give it a try. So there's a huge selection bias.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, 89% male gives us 11% female. If the perverts are equally distributed between male and female, you get about 2% female perverts.

It's easier to go to a bar.

<comment><USER7> The article addresses this:

 _Of the perverts that were identified, only 8% were female. Combined with the overall female rate, that means less than 1% of chats feature a female pervert._

<comment><USER8> The stats that Techcrunch cites don't actually match up with its conclusion. If 13% of ChatRoulette users are perverts, and of the perverts, 8% are female, then 0.13 * 0.08 = 0.0104 (or slightly, barely, more than 1%) are female perverts. If it had been "of the females, 8% are perverts", then it would be under 1%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 13%? That's all!? I figured it would be much higher, especially since 89% of the users are male.

<comment><USER10> 13% is not enough for you?

you, pervert!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hey, you don't know how many normal-looking people are perverts. It could actually be way more than 13%!

:-)

</comment><comment><USER12> We published similar findings on March 1 with the Web Ecology Project <http://www.webecologyproject.org/2010/03/chatroulette/>

When we were doing the research the geo-ip information wasn't factored in, but overall we saw quite similar. Good to see that the results are reproducable (almost like science)!

</comment><comment><USER13> "less than 1% of chats feature a female pervert."

This is really disappointing news for most hackers.

</comment><comment><USER14> Looking at random pictures on the chat roulette map is pretty disturbing lol.

I wonder if these people knew a) they were being tracked and b) they picture was being saved would they have still done what they did?

</comment><comment><USER15> And 13% is just the average! I was on the other night during what must have been a perv peak (20%). It was slightly terrifying.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what the stats would have been if it _hadn't_ been plastered all over the media as the 'new cool thing'.

</comment><comment><USER17> UK. . . what's up with the high percentage of perverts? Too much BBC?

<comment><USER18> The data firstly pointed out that UK usage was extremely low.

I'm skeptical if there was enough UK usage for the other UK statistics to be valid. Can't see any absolute numbers there though, so hard to tell.

<comment><USER19> The 95% CI is going to be roughly 15-31%.</comment></comment></comment>


Indentation-Based Racket Syntax with Macros and Infix Operators - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tonyg/racket-something <comment><AUTHOR> It's experimental, but supports things like the interactive shell I mentioned in this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16879995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16879995)

Example of a use of the shell library with the special syntax: [https://github.com/tonyg/racket- something/blob/master/exampl...](https://github.com/tonyg/racket- something/blob/master/examples/sh.rkt)

Screencast of an interactive session. Very simple, but shows some of the basics: [https://asciinema.org/a/83450](https://asciinema.org/a/83450)</comment>


Ipad security app - <AUTHOR>

So I just got an Ipad and thought to myself, I just spent $600 on this thing! What if someone steals it from me.  Anyone interested in creating a security app for the ipad which sends you an alert if your ipad has been stolen and tracks it down for you? <comment><USER2> <http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/iphone/>?</comment>


Puzzle game Sokoban made in Go! - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tristangoossens/sokoban-go <comment><AUTHOR> also if you like terminal games like this, check out my popular first project snake!

[https://github.com/tristangoossens/snake- go](https://github.com/tristangoossens/snake-go)</comment>


Google Maps' Former Lead Data Scientist Building World's Largest Plant Library - <AUTHOR> http://fastcoexist.com/3034047/google-maps-former-lead-data-scientist-is-now-building-the-worlds-largest-plant-library

<comment><USER2> This is a great idea. I wish that it was free, but I don't have FU money to fund my own version, so I can't complain too loudly. Hopefully if they become successful or fold they make their basic data public and in the former charge for analysis or similar.

This along with a few other projects (unified math language; vertical robotic greenhouses; acquoponics; lightscribe DVD player laser on a 3D printer graphene... ) are really worth investing money in long-term. Wish the government still did blue-sky research. _sigh_

</comment><comment><USER3> Random side question, in case anyone here knows:

Since when has "lead data scientist" at Google been a real (or maybe just important?) thing? I certainly did not interact with any in my time on Maps, but that was before the date mentioned on his cv.

<comment><USER4> I think that's an editorial embellishment. I don't think Google hires "data scientists" per se.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I don't know anyone with the title "data scientist" at Google, even though basically every search quality backend engineer I know does work that is actually data science.

My manager once said he had a good anti-Hearst pattern for Google executives: "Google executive". In other words, if the press reports that someone is a Google executive, it's a pretty likely bet that she's not. Actual executives at Google have the title "software engineer", as do data scientists.

<comment><USER4> > Actual executives at Google have the title "software engineer", as do data > scientists.

Not entirely accurate. There are also VPs and engineering directors who could be considered executives, who are not titled software engineers. And don't forget the business, HR and legal orgs where executives certainly don't have to be software engineers.

<comment><USER5> Well, true. It doesn't apply to all executives, and obviously not to non-eng departments. There have been execs with over 1000 people reporting to them that are still on the engineering ladder, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Whistleblowers are not traitors - <AUTHOR> http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blog/whistleblowers-edward-snowden-bradley-manning/#.UcBtm-smzs8

<comment><USER2> Ed Snowden is a traitor. He betrayed the trust of the government he worked for. That means he _is_ a traitor. He committed a traitorous act against those who trusted him.

What he is _not_ , however, is treasonous. He didn't betray his country. He did his country (and many others, including mine) a huge favour by changing his allegiance from government to country - he did the right thing. It'd be nice if those working in government never had to do that, but it'd be foolish to thing they won't, and downright wrong to think they've done a terrible thing if they do.

If you believe he committed treason then you're conflating the country with its government. They are not the same thing _at all_.

<comment><USER3> ""He betrayed the trust of the government he worked for. That means he is a traitor."

Actually, no. Treason - as a formal charge - can only exists in a time of formally declared war. Even in the depth of the Cold War, we didn't charge turncoats spying for the Soviets with treason since technically, we were never at war with the USSR. Espionage, yes, treason no.

<comment><USER4> I'm confused about what you're getting at. In the next paragraph he defines being a traitor and being treasonous as different things.

<comment><USER3> Correct, but that doesn't change the fact that his definition of "treason" is wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a balance. Complete transparency and access to all information (ie, Julian Assange's stance) is extreme. If we gave away all of our secrets, we wouldn't have an advantage over our country's enemies.

<comment><USER6> This may be extremely naive of me, but I really hope that within my lifetime those notions ("our county", "country's enemies") well have ended. The imperialistic nationalism of Europe culminated in WW1&2, and now they mostly get along. Maybe the rest of the world can, too, in the next 50 years (without another cataclysmic war).

<comment><USER7> Is that to say that nationalism among EU member states is a thing of the past? I'm skeptical that EU citizens are collectively so enlightened.

<comment><USER6> The national pride is still there, sure, but the circumstances that brought about two world wars are not. I just mean that (generalizing) the French don't view the Germans the same way Americans view the Middle East.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is a whistleblower, exactly? It should be defined before we make these sweeping statements. You could imagine whistleblower protections being abused ...

<comment><USER8> "Exactly" is too detailed of a request. Currently in the US the "exact" definition depends very much on the activity, organization, and person involved.

For purposes of this discussion, a reasonable definition might be "a person who releases information about internal activities when 1) the information concerns illegal activity of an organization, and where 2) there is a strong and reasonable belief that internal mechanisms in the organization is insufficient to address the activity.

This is an incomplete definition. For example, someone who reports to a supervisor about possible fraud case and is punished for doing so because that person's supervisor and department head are actively participating in the fraud, should have whistleblowing protection, even if that information stays entirely within the organization.

Of course these can be abused. But as with all cases of power imbalance, the lack of whistleblowing protections means that people who might report fraud or other illegal activities may decide that it's not worthwhile to risk one's job, personal safety, or threat of jail, and therefore allow the crime to continue.

Note that "concerns illegal activity" is of course the issue here.

The reference everyone uses in this discussion is the Pentagon Papers. The NYT wrote that it "demonstrated, among other things, that the Lyndon Baines Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance." Quoting from Wikipedia, "The most damaging revelations in the papers revealed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled the public regarding their intentions."

If you believe it was appropriate to publish this classified information, then under what guidelines do you think it's appropriate to break the laws regarding the release of classified material. If you think that Daniel Ellsberg was wrong for doing so, then do we now have a mechanism in place which is able to detect and correct systemic "misleading" by a presidential administration? If so, what is it? If not, then I'll assume you think it's okay for an administration to mislead Congress and the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The premise of the article is false. It says, right in the first paragraph, that "[Western States] at least accept that they will be held accountable by the press and public alike." (By Western States I don't mean states west of the Mississippi river, I mean states of Western European types, description which presumably the US fits.

Alas, the US government seems to have lost that particular element. They seem to think that they will not be held accountable by the press and the public. They may be right too.

I find it most saddening and ironic that a United Kingdom journal is defending the freedom we fought to acquire from the King of England.

</comment><comment><USER10> ancient Greeks said : τα εν οίκο, μή εν δήμο

those of the house not of the public</comment>


Syntax extensions and regular expressions for Rust (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.burntsushi.net/rust-regex-syntax-extensions/ <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that this is an old post. This crate is still used today, over at [https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/regex](https://github.com/rust- lang-nursery/regex)

</comment><comment><USER3> Date: 2014

<comment><USER4> Over a year before 1.0 was released, which is ancient in Rust terms.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A Video API which serves best quality dependant on connection? - <AUTHOR> Anyone know of a service that supplies this that isn't youtube? I know youtube has this functionality baked in, but in my experience, many people ask for custom video players, which are very possible with videoJS, but getting the right video dependant on connection is key.<p>I know of no service that offers this atm. Specifically where it will serve up a specific url you can stream from independent of player. In the past I have used Vimeo to serve up the files, but hosted them in a custom player. It's possible to write your own script too that will do crude detection of a network speed, but wondering if anyone has any other answers to this. <comment><USER2> The technology is called "Adaptive Bitrate Streaming". Look for terms like HLS, DASH etc. Many software stacks are available. You may check out jwplayer (paid), videojs (HLS) etc. for some implementations.</comment>


Ask HN: Are you supposed to "study" for FAANG interviews? - <AUTHOR> I fall under the umbrella of impostor syndrome where I think I'm not capable of passing a FAANG interview. I was wondering why that is. I think I would be able to learn what's "typical" about a FAANG interview (CTCI problems?), but maybe I'm going about this the wrong way. Are you supposed to study for these interviews in the same way you study a test on new material? How much of the interview is expected to be second nature (or maybe even just solvable) to an entry-level engineer? <comment><USER2> Judging by the number of "How to prepare for a Google interview" blog posts there are out there, and given how few people routinely use a lot of low-level C.S. knowledge in their daily lives, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to "study up" for an interview.

I mean, I've been programming for 25+ years, the past 19 professionally, and if I were going to interview at Google I'd go off and spend some time studying. Because frankly, I don't walk around with the runtime complexity of various sorting and searching algorithms memorized, nor do I remember all the details of how to implement Quicksort from memory, etc.

So are you "supposed to" study? I don't know, but feeling like you need to study certainly isn't anything you should feel bad about.

</comment><comment><USER3> >How much of the interview is expected to be second nature (or maybe even just solvable) to an entry-level engineer?

Essentially none. Its a London Taxi Knowledge test(1). Its a filter designed to see if you can acquire "the Knowledge", not because you'll "need" it to do the job, but because of what it says about you as a technologist. Its not a _good_ filter, mind you, but they think its the best they've come up with so far. (Its cheap for them to use and expensive for you personally; it works for them because they have more than enough applicants.)

If you really want to work FAANG, treat it like being on a game show like Jeopardy.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> I think so. When I had an interview at Google, the recruiter advised me to study, and even sent a long a list of books I should read...

<comment><USER2> That's pretty cool. Are you allowed/willing to share that list?

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, the email says it is confidential / under NDA...

<comment><USER2> That's too bad. While I personally have no interest in interviewing with Google, this piques my curiosity. :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Most Valuable YouTube Video: A Brilliant Gimmick - <AUTHOR> https://mostvaluablevideo.com

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea, but I doubt it can work. There's no incentive to bid after $20, once the novelty has worn off.

<comment><USER3> The OP has been spamming and vote rigging for a few days now: [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=qwickbit](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=qwickbit)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes good ideas need a little help.

<comment><USER3> Good ideas stand on their own merits.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter will backup/delete the account when a user dies - <AUTHOR> http://support.twitter.com/groups/33-report-a-violation/topics/122-reporting-violations/articles/87894-how-to-contact-twitter-about-a-deceased-user

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting commentary on CNN too: [http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/08/11/twitter....](http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/08/11/twitter.deceased.user.policy.cnet/index.html#fbid=mTWta0EWeYr&wom=true)</comment>


New YC Startup: Adioso ("casual travel") - <AUTHOR> http://adioso.com/

<comment><USER2> Absolutely love the concept.

One hangup nitpicking about grammar. See here: <http://adioso.com/airport/cheap-flights-sydney.syd.html>

You have "International Flights to Sydney," but then the list is {Sydney to Aipa, Sydney to Auckland} -> the depart and arrive need to be switched to make sense.

The domestic flights have it displayed correctly so it looks like something just got switched around.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gorgeous UI, slightly odd architecture of said UI: Why are the cities so random?

<comment><USER4> Agreed.

Also, more businesses involving content search should have their search box in a prominent location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> its not finding any of the dozen searches I ran.

also is there a reason why most of the examples have to do with Australia?

<comment><USER6> I think they are from Australia. I see a lot of different asia countries in the list too.

<comment><USER7> Spot on. The flights are pretty much all australia/south-east asia at the moment. We're not officially launched yet (I'm co-founder at Adioso, btw) and site is in beta using a subset of full airline data, hence the lack of results people have noticed for USA/etc.

It wasn't intended that we'd really be used outside of Australia yet, but demo day has had some interesting publicity side effects :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Capturing the first click on the search input destroys my usual form habits. I can see doing that once when I first arrive, but after that it gets annoying fast, as I have to click, _then_ double-click to select before I hit backspace and type, which is the usual way of handling form fields that have bogus data prefilled.

This is on Safari on OSX, by the way.

</comment><comment><USER9> It appears that this is Australian-based at this time? Not of much value to US consumers until it gets populated with relevant data from US airports (I cannot even pick "Seattle" as my home airport at this time).

I'm not sure how this brings me more value than Kayak or Farecast, but I did think the integration with facebook connect was nifty - nicely done! :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Anybody else getting (a lot of) errors?

All destination pages give me some sort of generic error page (Symfony PHP framework).

It seems like they try to do geolocation according to IP and international visitors trigger some untested code path.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool idea but doesnt track my route (pittsburgh to boston).

As a side note, the official interface for trying to do this is quite annoying, and this 'beta' is promising.

</comment><comment><USER12> You are doing the right thing by focusing on non-US markets and making deals with these little carriers. They're under-served at the moment.

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill kind of interesting but needs more flights. For instance, JFK to LAX has 0 hits.

</comment><comment><USER13> So what does this do for me beyond all the other "cheap flight" websites?

<comment><USER14> My next trip is from Bangkok, Thailand to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. Other comparison sites like Kayak found the cheapest price to be $184, this one found the correct choice which is Air Asia at $55. Currently there seems to be no site where I could go and trust that it really gives me the best prices, so getting one more option to search on is great.</comment></comment>


Dynamic Session Timeouts – Rewarding site progress with a longer session - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitekickr.com/blog/dynamic-session-timeouts/

<comment><USER2> People still use in-language session mechanisms that run out of memory?

Let me clue you into something.

Professionals don't.

If you're selling something, you don't EVER want to dump a shopping cart on the floor. It seems natural to you, from your self-centered perspective, that it's OK for a session to time out after a week, but from a user's perspective they can leave Microsoft Word running for a week and it still works.

<comment><AUTHOR> They sure do, that's primarily who this method is geared towards.

If you left every session open for a week, you'd surely see a huge chunk of memory devoted to it.

<comment><USER2> you keep that kind of session on the disk</comment></comment></comment>


Offer HN: YC Interview Advice - <AUTHOR>

The 7-10 days before your YC interview should be some of the most productive in your life. Myself and Aleem (cofounders of Streak.com) are offering advice to interviewees on how to best make use of this time to maximize your chances.<p>Founders who get an interview aren't allowed to be public about it, so send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com and we'll setup a call. <comment><USER2> omar, it's my understanding that you can talk about the yc interview experience all you want afterwards. If you have a blog about your yc interview experience, please post a link so I can add it to the 30+ other blogs at <http://ycuniverse.com/interviewees.php> . thanks!</comment>


19 years old bug closed in Firefox 68 ( GTK dark theme) - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315 <comment><USER2> Hallelujah and such! Now I just have to wait for Debian to update to that ESR... D:</comment>


What Sells Online? Unsexy Newsletters  - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/feb2009/tc20090224_035701.htm <comment><USER2> Newsletters are also the best way to get visitors to return to your site. Far superior to RSS. It's the difference between being one of dozens or hundreds of feeds in a reader and reaching into a person's inbox. Jakob Nielsen wrote an Alert Box about this.

<comment><USER3> And as a site owner, it has the bonus of being much easier to track than RSS. It's difficult to quantify how many people "read" your RSS feed in a week. But it's pretty easy to count how many people loaded the images in your email or clicked a link.

<comment><USER4> Dosn't email clients such as gmail automatically block images though? How do you track it?

<comment><USER3> The short answer is: give people a reason to unblock images on your messages.

<comment><USER4> Ah, clever! Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Of course the real money is B2B, not B2C. The more desirable your audience is to advertisers (e.g. corporate IT managers), the more you can charge for ads.

</comment><comment><USER5> Through consulting I've seen the numbers, and I wonder why more people don't push to get users e-mail adresses and send newsletters. This is partuciularly true if you sell something online.

</comment><comment><USER6> I find Sarah Lacy's views intriguing, and wish to subscribe to her newsletter.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is very true. I am still amazed at how much revenue gets generated from email still. I wish I could share some numbers.</comment>


Redis: the AK-47 of databases - <AUTHOR> http://flazz.me/redis-the-ak-47-of-databases <comment><USER3> The title randomly reminded me of the AK-47 quote from Lord of War (an actually decent Cage film, and definitely a good bit of monologue):

 _Of all the weapons in the vast soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947. More commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple 9 pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam, or overheat. It'll shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it; and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin. Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists. One thing is for sure, no one was lining up to buy their cars._

Only tangentially related :) but I thought worth sharing. Anyone care to write a redis version?

<comment><USER4> I'll only be pedantic about them rarely being forged (mostly stamped) and definitely still having problems of overheating. Try firing one on full auto for more than one clip - better have gloves...

They are great weapons though. I've never cleaned mine or had a jam. I hope this database is that good!

<comment><USER5> You actually own a AK-47? Out of curiosity, why?

<comment><USER4> Well, few people own true AK47's, most own copies of the Russian AKM which is made from stamped parts (as opposed to machined on the true AK47 [1]. I own a semi-auto Romanian WASR 10 - which is very common in the US (PA). They go for ~$300 at a sporting goods store.

It's a lot of fun to shoot, the AK is cheap reliable, historical and can be used for fun, hunting (yes) and in survival situations. I actually do a "StartupGuns" [2] event in Pittsburgh where a bunch of us go shooting like OpenCoffee or similar.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akm> ("Features") [2] <http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=207534415228>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      > In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm a newb to Redis. My
      > knowledge is basically the contents of this post (at the
      > time of writing). I don't use it in production (yet).
      > Likewise I'm no expert in AK-47s (I've never even fired
      > one) or guns in general. I'm aware via notoriety alone.

Fantastic quote. So you're hardly familiar with either component of your simile, but you'll post it anyway? I really don't expect _New Yorker_ -esque editing from bloggers, but that's simply not very substantial writing.

No wonder people make fun of the so-called "NoSQL movement."

<comment><USER7> It still has value according to the two-step HN algorithm of fact-finding.

step 1. Someone posts something (anything will do) on a blog

step 2. HN tears it apart and reconstitutes it with some decent approximation of truth and usually a fair bit of insight.

Basically, the source content is just the jumping off point. The blogs serve as a focal point for directing the HN hive's attention for a while.

You could post a story titled "Sarah Palin is more influential than the Pope but less influential than the iPhone" and fill it with lolcat pictures and still get an interesting discussion here.

Why? Because smart people are awesome.

<comment><USER8> Very true, thats why most of the time I spent time reading the hacker news discussion rather than the original link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "According to AK-47 legend, assault rifles were not popular because of their tendency to consume large amounts of ammo. The Soviets embraced the idea and simply supplied their troops with more ammo. Kinda like Redis and RAM."

That's obviously just a legend. This debate was actually carried out in the 2nd half of the 19th century, starting with the Civil War. (Many repeating rifle designs were offered to the Union. Quartermasters repeatedly shut them down on account of expected difficulties with ammo supply. After much time and effort, a few repeating rifles made it through, particularly to the cavalry, where they proved quite decisive in the last year of the war. See Five Forks, for instance.)

<comment><USER10> The British army only just relented - the new SA80 is the first fully automatic rifle to be standard issue.

<comment><USER11> That's not exactly true. The SA80 isn't exactly new. It was in use during the Falklands for example. And the British Army used a version of FN FALs before the SA80s were adopted, and those were also automatic rifles.

Now, I'm pretty sure 'automatic' fire was burst limited. But that's pretty much nearly universally accepted as a good idea in main infantry rifles.

<comment><USER10> It was standard issue from about 1985/1986 - before that they used self loading rifles ie. one trigger - one round.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Being the AK-47 of databases is not a bad way to be known.

That said I hope the author will revisit the topic when he has more knowledge of the subject matter, such as when using it in production for a while on a fair sized project with a lot of users. That's where the rubber meets the road, first impressions tend to gloss over the areas where the meat is.

<comment><USER13> > That's where the rubber meets the road, first impressions tend to gloss over > the areas where the meat is.

One hopes the meat is not between the rubber and the road. That would be unfortunate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Eek. Locking the entire data set to perform transactions? Isn't that so... MyISAM? Does rolling the transaction back work? The optimistic lock is not a great solution either: instead of deadlocking while waiting for a lock to be released, you are now stuck in a while (!saved) loop. Imagine two web pages trying to update the same resource at the same time.

Also this part of the config:

      save 900 1
      save 300 10
      save 60 10000

is not at all obvious. Maybe it's better documented in the sample config.

<comment><USER15> According to the first comment, the part about locking the whole data set for MULTI is not accurate. Only the connection calling that is stalled, which makes perfect sense.

<comment><USER14> Ah: <http://redis.io/commands/multi>. So the problem with this approach is that there are no consistent reads. If I say:

      MULTI
      get foo # Returns 'abc'
      set foo 'abcd' # (as in application code said foo += 'd')
      EXEC

while another process sets foo to 'xyz' between my get and set, I just overwrote that value. No serializable transactions.

<comment><USER16> MULTI/EXEC is completely atomic and transactional.

You can perform just writes inside the block. If you want atomicity with reads in the middle, you need to use WATCH/MULTI/EXEC that uses an optimistic locking algorithm.

<comment><USER14> Ah, that makes sense. I imagine allowing atomic reads without WATCH would complicate the code quite a bit.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, not very Redis-ish :)

With WATCH is very easy. WATCH this keys. Perform your reads. Prepare to write in a transaction. If at least one key was modified in the meantime the transaction will fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Factual incorrectness aside, and even speaking as a person that doesn't have much to do with anything other than SQL RDBMSes: this style of presentation piqued my interest in Redis. Seeing how fast and easy it was to get up and running, seeing how simple the protocol was, and getting a smattering of its features in this very terse format was effective on me.

</comment><comment><USER18> The author needs to know more about databases before claiming something is the AK-47 of the subject. It kinds of reminds me of those guys who think they are gurus just because they know some rarely used Linux commands, while in fact they don't have good understanding of OS. :)

<comment><USER19> What do you think he's missing? The comparison seems rather apt to me - <USER2> is shockingly simple and surprisingly effective compared to other persistence options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The information about transactions in this article is wrong. Read the redis docs he actually points to for an accurate description.

This article should not get upvoted.

<comment><USER21> and the title?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "The entire dataset is in RAM."

How can they guarantee that, when RAM is little more than a disk cache on modern operating systems? Is there a syscall that prevents specified pages of virtual memory from being paged out to disk? Or is Redis implemented as a kernel module?

<comment><USER16> Redis uses a memory layout that, unless the instance is completely idle, will make it very easy to touch every page even if there are just a few queries per second.

So fare in two years we never saw an instance where there was a latency problem because part of the dataset was swapped on disk by the OS. This is why we currently don't use mlockall().

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In another comment, someone compared the PUB/SUB feature of Redis to ZeroMQ. Can the PUB/SUB feature of Redis function as a queue system for many common uses, or is there another significant difference that sets a full queue implementation apart? I ask because I am not particularly familiar with Redis, my queue usage has been fairly simple so far and I would enjoy simplifying my technology stack by combining the two if it makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER24> Redis is great for small things. Massive scale players in the write-heavy owrld can rarely consider it in its current form.

</comment><comment> X-Istence "Pub/Sub is a unique and useful feature."

Pub/sub exists in a multitude of different pieces of software. ZeroMQ has a pub/sub feature. PostgreSQL has the NOTIFY/LISTEN command which is also a Pub/Sub channel allowing all those listening to be notified of certain events.

This is by no means unique to Redis. It is very useful, so I'll agree with that!

</comment><comment><USER25> I served in the bulgarian army with this weapon, and it was very easy to handle. That's all I can say

But every weapon was a bit off, so you had to get used to it (I guess that might be the same for all weapons).

</comment><comment><USER26> The total number of the AK-type rifles made worldwide during the last 50 years is estimated at 90+ millions. Does the title implies that Redis will handle this amount of values too?

</comment><comment><USER27> This one of very few google hits for the phrase "get the juxt".

</comment><comment><USER21> AK of DBs should be used for some Russian DB! or Chinese...

okay okay. i hereby patent the definition 'an iPhone of databases' :)</comment>