Ask HN: How can I contribute to Open Source as a Designer? - <AUTHOR>

I am a designer. I do web designs and UI design.<p>I've been noticing how Open Source has contributed to my growth. Just wondering what are the options for a designer like me to contribute back to the community? <comment><USER2> SO many open source projects could use the help of a designer! While we all like to describe open source projects as having a meritocracy, the accessibility of information about a project can be critical in picking up a large audience.

Git, for example, had a pretty ugly homepage. Something like this: <http://git.or.cz/index.html> After Scott Chacon got involved (not sure if he designed this or got outside help) launched the new face of git: <http://git- scm.com/>

We're all affected by our first impressions, and sometimes having a well- design site where folks can understand the context of an open source project can make or break its adoption.

I'd suggest just diving in head first. If you know of a project that you've enjoyed and are passionate about, ask if you can help re-design the web presence of that app. I can't imagine anyone turning you down!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! I feel welcomed. I was thinking of contributing to WordPress but they already have good designers at hand. So next stop is Drupal perhaps. I see a lot of potential here. Real challenge to solve real problems!

Just need to figure out how to get started. Do I make my own stuff and release it for free? Join some team? Or it varies software to software?

<comment><USER3> Check out growvc.com, we are looking someone like you. We are not open source yet, but are heading that way...

<comment><AUTHOR> I've herd about you some where. Are you working with L-pad?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most large open source projects have a 'design' or 'artwork' team, who actively seek contributions, for example:

<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design>

<http://art.gnome.org/>

become a design ninja by completing one of the fedora bounties:

<http://mairin.wordpress.com/>

Try googling for <favourite project>+design, or <favourite project>+artwork.

For smaller projects, just do something and then show it to the dev's - explain _why_ it's good and _why_ it's better for the project - just looking nice often isn't enough; Open Source is a functioning meritocracy, mostly, so you'll have to convince people of the merits of what you've done and get them on board. If you're open minded, articulate and willing to help, I'm sure lots of projects will love to have you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! Thanks for the tips man! I really love the idea of "Why" it's a designer's dream I tell you! I am excited!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You could contribute to making decent Gtk themes.

Gnome tends to be the face of Linux, as it's the default desktop for Ubuntu & Fedora, so the way gnome looks is the way Linux looks.

Now, Gnome uses Gtk for widgets, and in my opinion, Gtk is inherently flawed, and it will probably never look as good as Aqua. But I definitely see room for improvement. If more graphics designers get involved, it's more likely that Gtk will get "fixed", where by "fixed" I mean it will evolve to a form where it _can_ compete with Aqua.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point man. To "fix" it all that we need to fix is: type rendering. That's the MAJOR difference between MAC OS and Windows or Windows XP and Windows 7 or MAC OS, Windows and Ubuntu (haven't used Fedora, new around here)

If we can pull this one off - good type will begin to fix the design. It will tell you when things are off.

Writing an open letter / blog post about it!

<comment><USER6> The problem with font rendering is (or, was) patents, not technology. Freetype _can_ render text as nicely as OS X does. But, for a very long time, this was disabled by default.

<http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html> has links to the patents. Which have apparently expired.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now we know why we love Open! Anyways, now that they have expired we can do better, right? I am getting Ubuntu 10.4 let's see how nice it is with fonts!

Cheers mate1

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Joomla! is also a great CMS (Content Management System) with huge user base you could help to improve and is in constant development so you will definitely have a lot to contribute with there.

Have a look at <http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewgroup/119-Joomla+UX.html> and one of the group admins there will definitely help you to get on track.

<comment><USER8> In your opinion, what are Joomla's greatest weaknesses?

<comment><AUTHOR> I used Joomla! for over a year and loved it! Only because I knew nothing better. Not playing fav here but Joomla ain't the way to go.

Security flaws, buggy core, bad performance, paid plugins. WordPress knows better man!

I can choose, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Try <http://art.gnome.org/>, I mean I find the gnome UI in ubuntu pretty depressive (Its better than the previous versions but still not perfect). Try making skins for the ui that make it look better. I mean seriously, what can brown/orange skins do for you do for you?

</comment><comment><USER10> At <http://www.satchmoproject.com> we could really use a designed to help spruce up the default layout. If you're interested, post on the list or email me and we can discuss.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would like to make a request:

Please search for a project not in the web area. Try to work with projects like Gimp, Inkscape, Gnome - they need more help in my opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yeah! These are potential replacements for Photoshop, Illustrator etc. right?

Is it like if I use them they get better? Or do I report some problems or request features? How exactly will the communication go on between the developers and designers?</comment></comment>


What I learnt building 3 large web applications on an embedded key value store - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tonyalaribe/what-i-learnt-from-building-3-high-traffic-web-applications-on-an-embedded-key-value-store-68d47249774f <comment><USER2> A very good read. An interesting point from the article: ">>Also, using an embedded key value store alongside an embedded indexing engine like Blevesearch in a compiled language like Golang, means you can truly deploy single binaries with no external dependencies and no need for post deployment setups".

I think that most small, medium or even large companies which operate in b2b or even in niche b2c markets who would never reach the massive scale of Google/FB/LinkedIns don't need complex architectures involving large scale databases or micro services. Yet they spent large amount of money for building datacenters, hiring large team for maintaining the architecture including system admins, database admins, developers etc.

P.S The author seems to be a developer from Nigeria. It's not very often you get interesting articles from outside Asia or Western countries.</comment>


Twitter Bootstrap Expo - <AUTHOR> http://expo.getbootstrap.com

<comment><USER2> Serious question: what do these sites get from using Bootstrap? I can't see any of Bootstrap's UI elements in use, so is it the grid?

If so, I think something like Susy ([http://susy.oddbird.net](http://susy.oddbird.net)) is far superior. It's more powerful, and also won't pollute your markup with classes like "col- md-6".

<comment><USER3> I don't see why people need to use Bootstrap at all. What's wrong with starting from scratch? Sure, Bootstrap has a lot of best practices you can copy / paste, but so do tons of other boilerplate projects on GitHub.

I also don't see why people need to use grids. Grids are meant for graphic design (ie. [http://subtraction.com/pics/0703/grids_are_good.pdf](http://subtraction.com/pics/0703/grids_are_good.pdf)) and architecture, not CSS. What's wrong with margins, paddings and media queries?

<comment><USER2> Not completely sure if that was serious or sarcastic, but in case that was a real question: The main reason for using a grid is to make sure elements on your page stay aligned vertically and equally distributed horizontally.

If you use separate margins and paddings for each element, there's a bigger risk that you'll mess up and introduce irregularities in the layout.

Of course, maybe you _don 't_ want elements to be aligned on your page. In that case, yes, you might not need a grid.

<comment><USER3> Can't you just put those elements in a <div> and manipulate that instead?

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what you think CSS grids are, but you should probably read up a little more on them…

<comment><USER3> I take it they're preconfigured divs that clutter up your code and that are trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist given the basic nature of CSS.

If you absolutely need a grid, what about [http://hashgrid.com/](http://hashgrid.com/)?

<comment><USER3> Could you explain the downvote?

<comment><USER4> I didn't downvote, but your tone is all wrong. You sound like a know it all, while also not making a strong argument against grids.

<comment><USER3> I'll take that with a grain of salt. For stronger arguments, see my other posts.

<comment><USER4> I read all of your posts, you come off as an asshole in many of them, particularly:

> So basically it's for people not too familiar with HTML and CSS? Ie. like a > WordPress theme?

<comment><USER3> I think you misread. I was not being sarcastic, just trying to understand why Bootstrap is so popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm building a MVP at the moment and whilst I have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, I am looking towards Bootstrap to get things going. We started with a simple LaunchRock landing page [1], but now we want to hook the site up to MailChimp, do a bit of A/B testing and also start building elements of our platform using RoR.

I don't want to deal with the nightmare of using Wordpress as the front-end for this, so Bootstrap seems like a lean way of going about this.

Forgive me if I'm asking a completely n00b front-end question. If you ask me why Bootstrap, it's basically because of its popularity, and how easy I've found it to set something up in a few minutes. I know Foundation is pretty powerful too, but since I've already started with Bootstrap, I figure I don't have a real reason to pivot to something else at the moment. Any reason I shouldn't be considering Bootstrap? Any pitfalls I'm unaware of?

[1] www.launchrock.com

<comment><USER6> The only real pitfall re Bootstrap in my opinion is that Bootstrap sites (especially Bootstrap 2) tend to look, well, bootstrap-y if you don't customize things.

If you want to pay a few bucks instead of customizing things yourself, check out Wrapbootstrap and/or Bootswatch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, I move my mouse pointer over one of the example images, and it goes... blank? That's just terrible UX.

<comment><USER4> It's not meant to do that, it's meant to go slightly transparent. Perhaps you're encountering a bug?

<comment><USER8> Funny, after visiting the site I went straight to the comments to see if anyone else had the same feedback. It goes slightly transparent (not blank) but the standard hand/cursor pointer would be enough to let me know that the image is clickable, and the icon-forward does even more.

I suppose I might leave my mouse pointer hanging out in the middle of the screen a lot, but my intention was just to scroll through the site and look at the large pictures. Unfortunately, whatever is front and center (the one I want to look at) goes jarringly faded because my mouse is usually unintentionally hovering it. I could live with a more subtle opacity: 0.90. :)

That said, nice site. For something similar, if you have not seen it, you might be interested in builtwithbootstrap.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish there was a website which collects decent looking websites which are under the Creative Commons License.

<comment><USER10> you can always copy what you like and change it a little. Art is simulacrum.</comment></comment>


AngelList Gives Smaller Investors A Piece Of The Action - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/19/angellist-now-gives-smaller-investors-a-piece-of-the-action-with-launch-of-angellist-invest/

<comment><USER2> Smaller _accredited_ investors. I not entirely up to date on how the JOBS act changed the definition of "accredited," but otherwise that seems like an oxymoron.

<comment><USER3> The JOBS act did not change the definition of accredited at all (despite what most people in the valley believe). It added a new "crowdfunding offer" that allows individuals to invest 5% of their annual income if less than 100k, or 10% if over 100k up to a maximum of 100k. AFAIK that part is still tied up in the SEC working on implementation details.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you prepare for your annual review? - <AUTHOR> My company has an upcoming review, and this will be my first under any sort of professionally done process. How do you prepare for them? Anything to watch out for? <comment><USER2> Be positive in your reviews and don't complain or be negative, focus on you. Discuss your accomplishments and skills/progress in the context of your groups goals and your overall companies goals. While doing that discuss/remind your boss of what you've done and how you've contributed to these team goals. Ideally, you've done this for the whole year so your review is a summary of what you've already discussed with your manager this year. In practice you've probably not done that so it's hard to provide a comprehensive summary without any notes or previous discussions to reference. So that being said you should focus on your work and your long term career goals in the context of how you can make your bosses job easier/more productive, likewise for the company.</comment>


Implementing a lightning fast Doxygen documentation symbol search - <AUTHOR> http://blog.magnum.graphics/meta/implementing-a-fast-doxygen-search/ <comment><USER2> really nice doxygen theme!</comment>


Ask HN: Your Soundtrack? - <AUTHOR>

Most of us here are all in the same game.  The game of "Contra Wok Force: The Entrepreneur & Startup", released on a golden cartridge and played on the iconic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console.
"up up down down left right left right B A (select) start" is not our cheat code, rather the craziness of how the game is played out.
It's almost a masochistic game--especially as seen by those on the outside who don't understand: a self-inflicted choice to seek gratification achieved through the pain of breaking away from lemming life; deprivation of sleep, personal life; and degradation of sanity--but you weren't really sane to begin with, were you?
Many scholars have proven the influential role music plays in psychology, sociology and entertainment, among other things.  I believe that music has a most important role as the soundtrack to the "Contra Work Force" for those wearing out the controller buttons while feverishly trying to master the gameplay.
After a lengthy induction, I will introduce the question(s): What songs, symphonies, musicians, composers are your soundtrack? What music do you turn to when you need motivation, inspiration, a pick-me-up, or to find your groove?
It was watching a live performance by OK GO! on YouTube--when preparing to write--that served as the inspiration to pry into your minds and see if music plays as big of a role for you as it does me. <comment><USER2> Barbarian Horde from Gladiator by Hans Zimmer</comment>


Ask HN: what type of sources should I use for my novel unsearch engine - <AUTHOR>

Yes you read that right we are building an <i>un-search</i> engine. We are very different from existing search engines. However we are in a dilemma to choose data sources to build out our MVP. Our search is most effective and value clear when multiple heterogeneous data are indexed (obviously we have anything but a Google data farm indexing power). We are trying to pick a domain or source that is manageable scale for a small startup, and yet shows the ability to "weave" interdomain knowledge. The obvious ones are wikipedia, wikibooks etc. but would the community have any suggestions on on other sources? news perhaps? Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Seems like you're building a semantic search engine.

Have a look at some of these: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_databases>

</comment><comment><USER3> Judicial opinions. I'm not really clear on what your product does from this description, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, are these available freely online? and what might the user base be? Presumably legal firms etc. I am trying to make it more general public oriented.</comment></comment>


Get 10 BareMetal SSD servers in the cloud for free - <AUTHOR> https://www.scaleway.com/may-special

<comment><USER2> Any information on what SSD's these servers are using? Are they sata or pcie?

</comment><comment><USER3> I love the idea of ARM servers. I would love it even more if I could by such things to run in-house. I'm an old codger that way, I prefer on site iron, not fluffy leased cloud services.

Too bad you're not selling the hardware.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/imoins/status/560459753152086016](https://twitter.com/imoins/status/560459753152086016) :)

<comment><USER3> Fantastic. I'll keep an eye on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How these ARM cores compare to Digital Ocean cores? My apps are mostly CPU bound.

<comment><AUTHOR> Servers give a constant CPUMark of 12K

<comment><USER4> Do you have a unixbench score?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are 2GB the max amount of RAM per server?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the C1 server is a 4-core CPU with 2GB of RAM and a 1 Gbit/s network card. Other variation of servers are coming, including x86-based CPUs.

<comment><USER6> So it's a Raspberry Pi 2 with 1GB of extra RAM and 1Gb/s Ethernet connection or an average smartphone without a display... times 10?</comment></comment></comment>


Last Week in Pony – November 4, 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.ponylang.io/blog/2018/11/last-week-in-pony---november-4-2018/ <comment><USER2> I'm pretty into Pony, but I don't understand why this is posted or have gathered so many votes. If there's a post about Pony on the front page of HN, it shouldn't be this.</comment>


EFA (Aus EFF): "Clean Feed" Internet censorship plan will not allow Australian adults to opt-out - <AUTHOR> http://www.efa.org.au/2008/10/16/efa-alarmed-at-creeping-clean-feed/

<comment><USER2> It was Oct 16 when this was written. It's now Nov 03 and the number of (technical & political) holes being punched in this idea are increasing. A good summary (as of OCT30) can be heard here _"Silicon Beach #5 Mark Pesce on ISP filtering - the social, political, economical and technical"_ , mp3 22.4Mb ~ [http://wpmu.thepodcastnetwork.com/siliconbeach/2008/10/30/si...](http://wpmu.thepodcastnetwork.com/siliconbeach/2008/10/30/silicon- beach-5-mark-pesce-on-isp-filtering-the-social-political-economical-and- technical/) and another transcript from the same commentator with the Senator ~ [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2405376.ht...](http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2405376.htm)</comment>


Uninterruptible Programming - <AUTHOR> http://faq.sealedabstract.com/uninterruptible_programming_supply/ <comment><USER2> I use pretty much this system when I'm working, except for the paper notes. Instead, I record everything in plain-text files, which I can search with my editor or grep if I'm trying to figure out six months later why I did what I did. For major, long-lived projects, I'll create a separate file for the project.

I find that one big advantage of writing down what I'm doing is that if someone does interrupt me, I can concentrate more on what they're saying rather than frantically trying to keep all the state of my coding in my head while hoping they'll just get the hell out of my office already. It makes me a more pleasant person to work with.</comment>


Ask HN: Any wireless mouse with a tactile/notched scroll wheel? - <AUTHOR> Most of the mice I have used have scrolling that is too smooth. Is there a wireless mouse that has a nice tactile scroll wheel for each step? <comment><USER2> I'm using a Logitech M510 right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I decided to try this one out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I use a Logitech M720. No complaints.</comment>


Ask HN: What does your ML pipeline look like? - <AUTHOR> Experienced machine learning professionals - How do you create scalable, deployable and reproducible data/ML pipelines at your work? <comment><USER3> As a DevOps Engineer working for a ML-based company and have had worked for others in the past, these are my quick suggestions for production readiness.

DOs:

If you are doing any kind of soft-realtime (i.e. not batch processing) inference, by exposing a model on a request-response lifecycle, use Tensorflow Serving for concurrency reasons.

Version your models and track their training. Use something like MLFlow for that. Divise a versioning system that makes sense for your organization.

If you are using Kubernetes in Production, mount NFS in your containers to serve models. Do not download anything (from S3, for instance) on container start up time unless your models are small (<1Gb).

If you have to write some sort of heavy preprocessing or postprocessing steps, eventually port them to a more efficient language than Python. Say Go, Rust, etc.

DO NOTs:

Do NOT make your ML engineers/researchers write anything above the model stack. Don't make them write queue management logic, webservers, etc. That's not their skillset, they will write poorer and less performant code. Bring in a Backend Engineer EARLY.

Do NOT mix and match if you are working on an asynchronous model, i.e. don't have a callback-based API and then have a mix of queues and synchronous HTTP calls. Use queues EVERYWHERE.

DO NOT start new projects in Python 2.7. From past experiences, some ML engineers/researchers are quite attached to the older versions of Python. These are ending support in 2020 and it makes no sense to start a project using them now.

<comment><USER4> +1, tomasdpinho. Yes to everything, and notably the queues everywhere, versioning the models, and the issue to mix sync and async (go for queues).

As a scientist designing risk management systems, I also like to:

. avoid moving the data;

. bring the (ML/stats) code to the data;

. make in-memory computations (when possible) to reduce latency (network+disk);

. work on live data instead of copies that drift out-of-date; and

. write software to keep models up to date because they drift with time too and that's a major, operationally un-noticed, and extremely costly problem.

I'm not yet into Tensor/ML-Flow, but I use R, JS, and Postgres, thereby relying on open-source eco-systems (and packages) that are:

. as standard as possible;

. well-maintained;

. with a long expected support; and

. as few dependencies as possible.

<comment><USER5> +2 for bringing the (ML/stats) code to the data instead of the other way around

<comment><USER6> Could you speak to your experience with this particular list item?

<comment><USER5> We deal with fairly large volumes of data on a frequent basis so it would not make sense for each data scientist to create a copy within their own environment. Everyone works off a centralized data source and we provide them with Jupyter/Spark in an internal cloud environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Depends on what you're trying to do.

Are you putting a trained inference model into production as a product? Is it a RL system (completely different architecture than an inference system)? Are you trying to build a model with your application data from scratch? Are you doing NLP or CV?

As a rule of thumb I look at the event diagram of the application/systems you're trying to implement ML into, which should tell you how to structure your data workflows in line with the existing data flows of the application. If it's strictly a constrained research effort then pipelines are less important, so go with what's fast and easy to document/read.

Generally speaking, you want your ML/DS/DE systems to be loosely coupled to your application data structures - with well defined RPC standards informed by the data team. I generally hate data pooling, but if we're talking about pooling 15 microservices vs pooling 15 monoliths, then the microservices pooling might be necessary.

Realistically this ends up being a business decision based on organizational complexity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. Could you give some more insight into how and what tools you choose for the different sort of tasks (say NLP vs CV vs RL)? Also, how and why are different tools/pipelines better for production and product building?

<comment><USER7> How you parse and manage the inputs is significantly different between those types.

With NLP as one example, you need to determine when are you going to do tokenization? - aka break up the inputs into "tokens." So do you do this at ingest, in transit, at rest?

With CV you don't need to do tokenization at all (probably).

So the tools really come out of the use case and how/when you put them into the production chain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here are some things that have helped me make shipping models easier.

\- Tag and version your datasets, especially your test set, so that you are confident when you compare performance across models or over time.

\- Test your training pipeline. Run it on a single batch or a tiny dataset. The whole test should take less than 1 minute to confirm that your training pipeline didn't break. Once one test works, people will write others.

\- You should be able to measure the accuracy of your model with a single command, or as part of your CI process. This command should spit out a single report (PDF or html) which is all you need to look at to decide whether to ship a new model or not, including run-time performance (if needed).

\- Don't create hermetic training environments that prevent you from doing debugging. Sometimes you just need to ssh in and put in some print statements to track down a problem.

</comment><comment><USER9> The one I'm working with _now_ is very low tech: daily Python processing data from GCP, and writing back to GCP; a handful of scripts that check everything is reasonnable. That's because we serve internal results, mostly read by humans.

The most impressive description that I've seen run live is described here: [https://towardsdatascience.com/rendezvous-architecture- for-d...](https://towardsdatascience.com/rendezvous-architecture-for-data- science-in-production-79c4d48f12b)

I'd love to have feedback from more than Jan because I'm planning on encouraging it internally.

The best structure that I've seen is at scale (at a top 10 company) was:

\- a service that hosted all models, written in Python or R, stored as Java objects (built with a public H2O library);

\- Data scientists could upload models by drag-and-drop on a bare-bones internal page;

\- each model was versioned (data and training not separate) by name, using a basic folders/namespace/default version increment approach;

\- all models were run using Kubernetes containers; each model used a standard API call to serve individual inferences;

\- models could use other models output as input, taking the parent-model inputs as their own in the API;

\- to simplify that, most models were encouraged to use a session id or user id as single entry, and most inputs were gathered from a all-encompasing live storage, connected to that model-serving structure;

\- every model had extensive monitoring for distribution of input (especially missing), output, delay to respond to make sure both matched expectation from the trained model;

e.g.: if you are training a fraud model, and more than 10% of output in the last hour was positive, warn the DS to check and consider calling security;

e.g.a.: if more than 5% of "previous page looked at" are empty, there's probably a pipeline issue;

\- there were some issues with feature engineering: I feel like the solution chosen was suboptimal because it created two data pipelines, one for live and one for storage/training.

For that problem, I'd recommend that architecture instead: [https://www.datasciencefestival.com/video/dsf- day-4-trainlin...](https://www.datasciencefestival.com/video/dsf- day-4-trainline-2019-dan-taylor-and-sam-taylor/)

<comment><USER10> What does "model" mean? What kind of data are contained in a machine learning model? Second, how do you decide a model is robust? I'm asking because I'm looking at using ML to more efficiently use some quality assurance tools for a product line. The idea is to develop a model such that product A, B, C can have existing (or supplementary data) QA data plugged into a model, and then an appropriate sampling plan can be output.

An intern showed proof of concept of such a model based on one product, and it's fantastic work that could save thousands of dollars, but we're struggling with how to "qualify" it. How do we know we won't get a "garbage in/garbage out" situation?

<comment><USER11> So you want to figure out how often you need to sample products for QA?

A model is two things: a description of what's in the black box (could be a linear model, a neural network architecture, etc) and some weights which uniquely define "that specific model". Each model will have some known input (eg image, tabular data) and output (eg number, image, list etc).

You need to store both the structure and weights: for example your model is y = mx + c, but you need to know m and c to uniquely define it.

To answer your second question robustness means a smart test strategy. Train on representative data, validate during training on a second data set and test on hold-out data that the model has never seen.

Unfortunately it's quite hard to prove model robustness (in the case of deep learning anyway), you have to assume that you trained on enough realistic data.

If you really have no idea about robustness, then you should probably do a kind of soft-launch. Run your model in production alongside what you currently use, and see whether the output makes sense.

You could try, for example, sampling with your current strategy as well as the schedule defined by your ML model (so you lose nothing but a bit of time if the ML system is crap). Then compare the two datasets and see whether the ML model is at least performing the same as your current method.

Surely you can make some naive estimates of robustness though? eg if the model says sample 5% of your product, you then have a bound on the chance that you miss something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We're building a deployment system based on the following principles that we've learned:

\- Version control of models and datasets

\- Code, naming conventions and formatting consistency

\- Testing of models before deployment into production (in most cases, this helps gain credibility across engineering)

\- Model review process with a senior data scientist

\- Kubernetes/Docker for deployment serving as an API or running a scheduled job

\- Model performance monitoring when in production to identify degradation

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you also give us some details about the software you specifically use in the pipeline, other than kubernetes/docker? Do you use any available (possibly open source)? tools for versioning and monitoring? Or are you building this all up from scratch for your needs?

<comment><USER5> We use Jenkins for our builds (and soon simple testcases), which then feeds into our system that's built from scratch. However, we are looking to productized the system as we had some discussions with other corporate partners who are interested in as well.

The system we've built in-house is fairly simple to keep development fast - versioning is manual ([https://packaging.python.org/guides/hosting-your-own- index/](https://packaging.python.org/guides/hosting-your-own-index/)) but no reason why you couldn't use a repository manager.

For monitoring, we essentially track any activity related to the model including inputs, outputs, timestamps, duration, etc. to a database and have JavaScript charts render. We might put this into Kafka but seems overkill at the moment and likely force us to hire an actual support team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would be interested if anyone in here has a pipeline operating on regulated data (HIPAA, financial, etc). Having a hard time drawing boundaries around what the data science team has access to for development and experimentation vs. where production pipelines would operate. (e.g. where in the process do people/processes get access to live data)

<comment><USER13> I do machine learning work in healthcare, and work for a HIPAA covered entity. The issue of permissions and data access often gets applied in an unnecessarily strict fashion to data scientists in these environments, often due to a lack of understanding from engineering managers who have been brought in from a non-regulated environment (e.g., hiring a salesforce engineering manager into a healthcare system so they can "disrupt" or "solve" healthcare -- they hear "regulation" and immediately clamp down on everything).

HIPAA allows use of clinical data for treatment, payment, and operations. You can also get around consent issues if the data is properly deidentified. If you have a data scientist who is working to further treatment, payment, or operations (i.e., isn't working on purely marketing uses, selling the data, or doing "real" research), then they are allowed to use the data, assuming it's the minimum necessary for their job. For training machine learning models that support operations, "minimum necessary" is probably a lot of data. And, obviously, the production pipelines and training/experimentation/development would need access to the same amount of data if you want to train and deploy models.

Data scientists are also likely to be the first to notice problems with how your product is working, often before the data engineering team. At my company, I've found numerous bugs in our data engineering pipelines and production code because I've seen anomalies in the data and went digging through the data warehouse, replicas of the production databases, and within our actual product. You probably want to support and encourage that kind of sleuthing - but each organization is different, so maybe you have better QA that's more attuned to data issues.

My opinion, from having done this for over a decade, is that the question shouldn't be about how much access you give your data scientists. They should have access to nearly all of the data that's within their domain, assuming they're legally entitled to it. The question you should be solving for is what restrictions should be placed on how they access and process that data: e.g., have EC2 instances and centralized jupyter notebooks available for them to download and process data, and prohibit storing data on a laptop.

<comment><USER14> I'd just like to point out that "the minimum necessary for their job" is the reason many engineering managers apply unnecessarily strict rules.

It's very difficult to build rules and policies that allow broad access while maintain minimum necessary. Some project may be completely justified in accessing "all" (waves hands) data at its conception but slowly morphing to focus on only a few key identifiers while still processing "all" data.

<comment><USER13> Totally, and to extend that further, one employee may work on multiple projects for which the "minimum necessary" is different. Part of my job involves patient matching and reporting patient-level data to partners we have a BAA with. That means I need access to patient names and addresses. However, if I'm working on training some ML model to predict diabetic progression, it's not necessary for me to pull the names of patients.

I think there's an incorrect assumption in here that there exists a technical solution which entirely solves this problem; that we just need to figure out what the right set of rules are, or get the right column-level and row-level security policies in place and we're all set. It's necessary but not sufficient to have those kinds of safeguards in place. You also need to trust _somebody_ in the organization, and you need to give those somebodies training and support to do the right thing.

In my case, I need access to all of the (clinical) data within the organization. I don't really care how that end is achieved: with one account that has every permission, with multiple accounts that are used for different purposes, or whatever. Ultimately, it's in the interest of the organization to make sure that I have the access I need to successfully do my job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see this as a very timely question. As ML has proliferated, so has the number of ways to construct machine learning pipelines. This means that from one project to another the tools/libraries change, the codebases start looking very different, and each project gets its own unique deployment and evaluation process.

In my experience, this causes several problems that hinder the expansion of ML within organizations

1\. When a ML project inevitably changes hands, there is a strong desire from the new people working on it to tear things down and start over

2\. It's hard to leverage and build upon success on previous projects e.g "my teammate built a model that worked really well for predict X, but I can use any of the that code to predict y"

3\. Data science managers face challenges tracking progress and managing multiple data science projects simultaneously.

4\. People and teams new to machine learning have a hard time charting single a path to success.

While coming up with a single way to build machine learning pipelines may never be possible, consolidation in the approaches would go a long way.

We've already seen that happen in the modeling algorithms part of the pipeline with libraries like scikit-learn. It doesn't matter what machine learning algorithm you use, it the code will be fit/transform/predict.

Personally, I've noticed this problem of multiple approaches and ad-hoc solutions to be most prevalent in the feature engineering step of the process. That is one of the reasons I work on an open source library called Featuretools ([http://github.com/featuretools/featuretools/](http://github.com/featuretools/featuretools/)) that aims to use automation to create more reusable abstrations for feature engineering.

If you look at our demos ([https://www.featuretools.com/demos](https://www.featuretools.com/demos)), we cover over a dozen different use cases, but the code you use to construct features stays the same. This means it is easier to reuse previous work and reproduce results in development and production environments.

Ultimately, building successful machine learning pipelines is not about having an approach for the problem you are working on today, but something that generalizes across the all the problems you and your team will work on in the future.

</comment><comment><USER16> At Logical Clocks, we build a horizontally scalable ML pipeline framework on the open-source Hopsworks platform, based around its feature store and Airflow for orchestration:

* [https://hopsworks.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hopsml/hopsML.htm...](https://hopsworks.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hopsml/hopsML.html)

* [https://www.logicalclocks.com/feature-store/](https://www.logicalclocks.com/feature-store/)

The choice for the DataPrep stage basically comes down to Spark or Apache Beam, and we currently support Spark, but plan to soon add support for Beam, because of some of the goodies in TFX (TensorFlow Extended).

For distributed hyperparam opt and distributed training, we leverage Apache Spark and our own version of YARN that supports GPUs -

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx6HyoUYGL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx6HyoUYGL0)

For model serving, we support Kubernetes:

* [https://hopsworks.readthedocs.io/en/0.9/hopsml/hopsML.html#s...](https://hopsworks.readthedocs.io/en/0.9/hopsml/hopsML.html#serving)

Our platform supports TLS/SSL certificates everywhere and is open-source. Download it and try it, and it runs in several large enterprises in Europe. We have a cluster with >1000 users in Sweden here:

* [https://www.hops.site](https://www.hops.site)

(Edited for formatting)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great, thanks for the link. Could you expand on how this workflow be different/better than sticking to just something like TFX and tensorflow serving? Is it easier to use or more scalable?

<comment><USER16> It is pretty much the same as TFX - but with Spark for both DataPrep and Distributed HyperparamOpt/Training, and a Feature Store. Model serving is slightly more sophisticated than just TensorFlow Serving on Kubernetes. We support serving requests through the Hopsworks REST API to TFServering/Kubernetes. This gives us both access control (clients have a TLS cert to authenticate and authorize themselves) and we log all predictions to a Kafka topic. We are adding support to enrich feature vectors using the Feature Store in the serving API, not quite there yet.

We intend to support TFX as we already support Flink. Flink/Beam for Python 3 is needed for TFX, but it's not quite there yet, almost.

It will be interesting to see which one of Spark or Beam will become the horizontally scalable platform of choice for TensorFlow. (PyTorch people don't seem as interested, as they mostly come from a background of not wanting complexity).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's a framework we've been developing for this purpose, delivered as a python cookiecutter:

[https://github.com/hackalog/cookiecutter- easydata](https://github.com/hackalog/cookiecutter-easydata)

The framework makes use of conda environments, python 3.6+, makefiles, and jupyter notebooks, so if that tooling fits into your data/ML workflow.

We gave a tutorial on the framework at Pydata NYC, and it's still very much in active development - we refine it with every new project we work on. The tutorial is available from:

[https://github.com/hackalog/bus_number](https://github.com/hackalog/bus_number)

While it works well for our projects, the more real-world projects we throw at it, the better the tooling gets, so we'd love to hear from anyone who want to give it a shot.

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 for mentioning this. Took it out for a test run. Really neat stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> We do everything with [https://www.deepdetect.com/](https://www.deepdetect.com/). Small team and targeted applications, this may not apply to all needs. The time from dev to prod is very low though.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not a professional but I built a pipeline for Makers Part List - <USER2> involves ingesting a video URL, converting the video into images, then storing the images in google storage. Once stored I trigger the model to classify the image. The images are then displayed to annotators who verify/relabel the images. Once I get enough new images the system creates a .csv and uploads it to googles autoML where it retrains my model.

My bottlenecks now are splitting the videos into images as its a very CPU intensive process. Implementing a queue here is my best choice I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Could you maybe expand on the tools that you utilize inside the pipeline for ETL, model creation, annotation and testing?

<comment><USER19> I'm running the front and backend of the consumer site on Heroku. The meat of pipeline is hosted on a DigitalOcean High CPU Droplet. I use ffmpeg to extract images from the provided videos. I store everything in Google Cloud Storage and create references to each photo in Firestore. I use Firebase to power for the image verifying/labeling app I built. Its a simple app that presents the viewer with the image and the label that it was given. If its not correct they enter the correct label. I use a cloud function to move the images into an exportable format for autoML once a new image threshold has been hit. Testing is me using it and seeing if it is correctly identifying the objects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been referencing this lately: [https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome- pipeline](https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome-pipeline)

</comment><comment><USER21> Followup question: How often do you all re-tune your hyperparameters? Automatically whenever your training ETL runs? Only on first deployment? Somewhere in between?

</comment><comment><USER22> GitHub repo and a Makefile...

Cut C++ binaries, statically linked, test on local against small data, and ship them to production with scp. Run either standalone, on GPU cluster or MPI cluster.

How the data gets to where it needs to be depends on the environment.

Makefile contains all the steps : from compile to test to deploy.

<comment><USER23> That sounds terrible to me. I hope there is at least proper CI which executes stuff from the makefile, but even that, `scp` to ship something in 2019 is a step back ([https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenSSH-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenSSH-8.0-Released)) .

<comment><USER22> Nah, it's very easy to know what's going on as a result. The endpoint is only ever a single binary that uses environment variables. Nothing mutates the environment. And the environment is only ever a place with an interface to hardware and to data.

There is a single threaded CI for each environment that checks prerequisites, builds, tests, copies, executes and saves logs.

So CI is also a simple queue and binaries remove the need for containers.

Experience has made me a believer in making things only as complicated as they need to be and favouring solutions that can fit into one brain. Do it whenever it fits your requirements and is possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/2054/](https://xkcd.com/2054/)</comment>


Germany's Merkel: 60 to 70% in Germany will become infected with coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.fxstreet.com/news/germanys-merkel-60-to-70-in-germany-will-become-infected-with-coronavirus-202003110647 <comment><USER2> Better link: [https://www.businessinsider.com/angela-merkel-estimates- coro...](https://www.businessinsider.com/angela-merkel-estimates-coronavirus- will-hit-large-majority-german-population-2020-3)

</comment><comment><USER3> How is that in line with China and South Korea apparently being able to bend the curve? Is she saying we are not willing to follow China's lead on disrupting the entire country and therefore accept a 70% infection rate over the next 18 months or so?

<comment><USER4> (Disclaimer: I'm German, but not a lawyer).

One part of it is that we don't have the legal infrastructure in place. For example, the federal government has no power to outlaw gatherings and assemblies because of health concerns. Only the municipal health authorities can do that if they so choose.

<comment><USER5> The federal system is indeed much stronger than in other countries (local health, law enforcement, courts, parliaments, school policies, etc) due to lessons learned with fascism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> previously [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22543055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22543055)

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems pretty much inevitable, for every country that allows reasonable freedoms in travel.

</comment><comment><USER8> Call me paranoid but I have prepared for low to moderate disruption for the next 6 months.

That disruption being financial, career, social and welfare (food). After that time I am hoping we will return to some form of normalcy. Then if we get a vaccine within a year it will be a lot better.

<comment><USER9> I don't see food supplies being affected outside some specialty food. But I don't see staples being affected such that supplies get constrained.

<comment><USER10> Production might not be disrupted, but in a quarantine situation distribution could be affected.

Having the National Guard called up in a neighboring county to NYC has a some people panicking a bit and buying up nonperishable food.

I use Amazon Fresh for my groceries and found the times I normally booked it at all booked up.

Plus certain foods that have never been out of stock were out of stock, e.g. beans.

Will it last? Who knows?

<comment><USER11> Now that's interesting. How the heck could people all buy out dry beans, which are rather mass produced?

Or are we talking convenient cans?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HTC's Vive will cost $799, ship in early April - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/21/htc-vive-price-release/ <comment><USER2> Context for people not following VR religiously: the Vive is $200 more than the Oculus Rift however it includes hand controllers and an extra tracking device. Both come bundled with 2 games if you pre-order. The Rift also has integrated headphones that are attached to the strap whereas Vive has a headphone jack on the headset. They both have integrated microphones.

Edit: Rift also includes an Xbox controller in the $599 bundle and Oculus will be selling their own hand controllers (called Touch) in H2 2016.

<comment><USER3> But you didn't even mention the biggest difference - the way they do positional tracking.

The Rift uses a camera pointing at the headset to track it, which means you have to be in the field of view of the camera. It's designed primarily for seated experiences.

The Vive uses two laser "lighthouses" and phototransistors on the headset to triangulate its position. It's actually really clever and allows room-scale VR.

I somewhat suspect that the Rift will be more successful - not many people have an entire room to dedicate to VR, it's cheaper, easier to set up, the dangling cable problem isn't so severe when seated.

I'm going to predict that Vive-style VR will be most popular in dedicated VR venues - i.e. instead of going to laserquest or paintballing, you go to a VR place. There are actually already some in the UK in shopping centres. I think they're called VR Zone or something like that. They're seated though, and I haven't tried them.

<comment><USER4> >the dangling cable problem isn't so severe when seated.

That is exactly why I don't get how people say the room scale thing makes the Vive the winner in this VR race.

As long as there are cords involved, being able to move around is not a game changer. Especially the way the Vive does things. Didn't HTC say they adressed the issue of being caught in the cords by making them visible in VR? Talk about immersion break. There you are, in the VR world and you look around and see the cords that actually bind you to a very narrow sector in real life.

This whole room scale VR can only become a thing once the tech is wireless and by there own statements, that is still a looong way from being a reality. Especially seeing as these are the 1st generation devices, I say you save yourself some money and get the rift seeing as you will not get much out of that feature that only the vive offers currently.

<comment><USER5> Really what makes the Vive the superior option (in my eyes) is that you can have both a seated experience and a roomscale experience. A roomscale experience also removes any "VR sickness" because all your movements translate 1:1 with the virtual world, so anyone who struggle with movement while being seated won't have the same issues with the Vive headset (in roomscale VR).

If you have tried VR, you will realize that one of the first thing people do, is try to look at their hands, only to be disappointed as they can't be seen. The Vive makes this possible on day 1. (Obviously not a 1:1 mapping of your hands, you'd need something like the Leap Motion Orion[0] for that.)

Most everyone who has tried the Vive have not found the wires to be a problem. Also what you say about seeing the cord in VR is not true, there is however something Valve calls the Chaperone[1] system which activates the camera when you are too close to the edges of your play area. The picture has a bluish tint, because the resolution of the camera is sub-par, so this is a cool workaround. It also prevents you from going around "worrying" that you will break something outside of VR, because as long as the system doesn't warn you about anything: You are good to do whatever you want in VR.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnlCGw-0R8g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnlCGw-0R8g)

[1]: [http://i.imgur.com/N5UQrk9.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/N5UQrk9.jpg)

<comment><USER6> You are not going to have room size experience with any of those headsets at home at least it's not feasible you are tethered with so much crap that you need a man servant walking after you ensuring that you don't hang yourself on that tether.

If you want a room size experience just hook up 2 OR cameras it will work the same way (but better) as the lighthouse approach that HTC took, and you can hook upto 50 of those cameras currently to track I believe up-to a 100 players.

As far as commercial room sized experience goes Vive is sub optimal, it's heavy, wobbly, doesn't have good audio support and you can't currently track more than 5 people at the time and since Vive only supports 2 trackers per space it's also going to have issues with commercial applications that aren't a single open room.

<comment><USER5> > _You are not going to have room size experience with any of those headsets > at home at least it 's not feasible you are tethered with so much crap that > you need a man servant walking after you ensuring that you don't hang > yourself on that tether._

Depends on the size of your play area obviously, but looks pretty good from this[0], and this _" crap"_ you're talking about doesn't seem very bothersome.

> _If you want a room size experience just hook up 2 OR cameras it will work > the same way (but better) as the lighthouse approach that HTC took, and you > can hook upto 50 of those cameras currently to track I believe up-to a 100 > players._

Better how? I haven't seen a good comparison of them yet. I'm curious tho, how do you intend to scale up to 100 players using USB3 connections? That would be a MASSIVE amount of data flowing through the computer powering all of this(, the reason it requires USB3 is because it needs 60Hz high resolution image to have good tracking). The Vive takes a completly different approach by having the headset (and controllers) catch and interpret the (infrared) light emitted by the (dumb) lighthouses.[1]

> _you can 't currently track more than 5 people at the time_

Do you have a source for this? I can't seem to find anything about this. Is it a limitation of the hardware or the software?

> _Vive only supports 2 trackers per space it 's also going to have issues > with commercial applications that aren't a single open room._

I'd be very surprised if this was true. Everything I've read seems to indicate lighthouse is built to be scalable from the ground up. The whole idea of it being wireless, only requiring a power outlet, makes it infinitely more scalable than any USB3 solution.

Again, would appreciate sources for any of your claims because I can't seem to find any of them...

EDIT: Here is a more indepth look at how the lighthouse technology actually works, because you seem slightly misinformed: [http://www.hizook.com/blog/2015/05/17/valves-lighthouse- trac...](http://www.hizook.com/blog/2015/05/17/valves-lighthouse-tracking- system-may-be-big-news-robotics)

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIEuB7H9TOE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIEuB7H9TOE)

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/40877n/vive_lighthous...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/40877n/vive_lighthouse_explained/)

<comment><USER6> >Depends on the size of your play area obviously, but looks pretty good from this[0], and this "crap" you're talking about doesn't seem very bothersome.

That's not a room experience they aren't moving, rotation slight side to side movement isn't an issue. If you haven't been to the demo's look at the demo's from CES/PAX/Gamescon for VR headsets that actually do whole room experience.

>Vive only supports 2 trackers per space it's also going to have issues with commercial applications that aren't a single open room.

You can't install more than 2 lighthouses it's the current system limit I'm not sure what is surprising now, HTC said that future versions might have support for multiple trackers and that they are working with their commercial partners on another set of trackers that could both sense other trackers and have a wider spectrum range to support large scale commercial installations.

In the Vive demo's I've been too they went as far as putting up partitions in order to prevent interference if they were running multiple demos at the same time.

>Do you have a source for this? I can't seem to find anything about this. Is it a limitation of the hardware or the software?

That was the figure that was talked about during the demos, upcoming promotional events like [http://virtuallydead.co.uk/](http://virtuallydead.co.uk/) also limit it, I would say the limit is probably both in hardware and software but mainly "hardware" atm since the Vive room tracking only works when the room is upto 15 sq. feet anyhow (and technically only works when the room is at least around 15 sq. feet to begin with).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone have information about compatibility? Do all these VR things use the same API or must a game support each product seperately?

<comment><USER8> There are indeed competing standards but Valve has introduced OpenVR which is what Steam games will use, which is sure to be an important factor for VR studios. I suspect OpenVR will be the common choice going forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope this isn't the VirtualBoy all over again. I really love the idea of VR gaming but I'm not yet convinced that these platforms will succeed. I'm certainly not willing to shell out $800 on it knowing what I know now.

<comment><USER10> > knowing what I know now.

What are you referring to?

<comment><USER9> Let me elaborate: It doesn't seem that compelling to me yet. I haven't seen any must-have launch games for the system, and I'm concerned that I might end up with an expensive system that I don't use much at all. It's firmly in the "wait and see" territory for me, which I suspect it is for lots of other people. That's unfortunate, because if most people don't find it compelling, and decide to wait on the sidelines like me, then it won't sell much at launch, it won't justify investment by lots of gaming companies, and it's much more likely to fail.

<comment><USER2> For interest's sake, what's the latest VR HMD you've tried?

<comment><USER9> I've tried both Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard. I'm wondering what your thoughts are here too.

<comment><USER2> Consumer Rift? It's worlds better than the DKs.

My opinion is that the consumer headsets launching this year already offer too good of an experience for VR to 'fail' this time around. Virtual boy was a miserable experience from what I've heard (I never got to try one). The CV1 changes people's perception of whats possible with computers.

Obviously we are in the early adopter phase of VR where the utility is not obvious to many people but that's always how great technologies start. Gaming will provide enough momentum to keep the industry alive even if a killer non- gaming application isn't found in the short term. We are in the Apple II phase of VR for sure.

In 5 years once there are portable all-in-one headsets that give better-than- current-desktop quality experiences for <$500 and with applications built from the ground up for VR... I can absolutely see every other house in america owning a kit.

<comment><USER9> It was over a year ago, so I'm pretty sure that means it was a dev kit Oculus.

> My opinion is that the consumer headsets launching this year already offer > too good of an experience for VR to 'fail' this time around.

I really, truly hope that you are right about this. VR is a technology with such awesome potential. It'll be like living in a William novel. I'm just not yet convinced that this generation of devices will be what actually pushes it into the mainstream. That's the reason I brought up the VirtualBoy; not because the devices have similar technology, but because I'm worried that market performance may end up being the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Will there be "Vive ready" PCs for sale too?

<comment><USER12> Yep.

[http://www.htcvive.com/us/product- optimized/](http://www.htcvive.com/us/product-optimized/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand how people claim that Vive is currently "superior" to Oculus.

The approach that Oculus took on virtually every aspect is better than what HTC/Valve went with.

It will launch at 600$ which is 200$ and while it comes with a traditional controller (more on what it's a good thing below) it doesn't matter as much as the pricing does getting more stuff only works when the prices are equal when they aren't the cheaper device wins.

It launches with a traditional controller which is the most important aspect of this as it comes with a control scheme that both gamers and developers are familiar with which will help to bridge the gap while developers work on good motion / acceleration control scheme for their games.

If we take the Wii for example then allot of the early games came out with traditional controls and through out it's life span even 1st party games from Nintendo continued ship with traditional controls only for titles that motion controls didn't made much sense for e.g. Smash Bro's.

The OR Xbox 360 style game pad is something that everyone is used to and knows how it works, it means that developers can focus on utilizing the VR aspects of OR instead of trying to work extra hard on making a more complicated control scheme work. Traditional gamepads are also considerably more easy to implement for seated gameplay which is how most consumers will end up using it any how. Sure a whole AR/VR room size experience might be cool for 15-30min ala Lazer Tag but no one will have that at home.

On a side note playing with both Vive's and OR's touch controllers OR wins here too, the Vive one isn't as comfortable especially for mixed control schemes which is what even the best motion controlled games eventually opt for.

Now tracking, people say that the Vive tracking is superior it's not really, you can stack multiple (upto 50 in the SDK iirc) OR cameras to track multiple players across a large room, from talking to people that were interested in large scale installations (5+ players in a single room) OR is pretty much the only way to currently go because the camera setup can correctly directly track multiple players without any interference.

And it's not like room scale VR is going to be viable both are still tethered headsets in all of the demo's I've been through there was a guy behind each player which was pretty much holding the tether ensuring that it won't tangle or snap off and that the player wont end up on the ground or with the tether around their neck. The installation of a single frontal camera is easier than installing the lighthouses as far as a home setting go, people are used to the Kinect and the Sony Eye cam, the OR camera could also be used for additional full body tracking and object recognition.

Overall as far as build quality and comfort goes the OR is more comfortable (subjective) the rift is considerably lighter and the weight is much better distributed meaning it sticks in it's place better I had issues with the Vive wobbling which can cause major issues for people who suffer from borderline VR/Motion sickness, the OR also comes with great built-in headphones which are definitely of high quality the sound quality from the demos I've experienced as well as the overall noise isolation is about the same level as my Shure premium earphones, the Vive took the bring your own headphones approach which doesn't work well as it puts limit on the size, shape and strap of the headphones and even in the demos it didn't seem like they've managed to find a perfect fit.

On the software side Oculus also has a big advantage they were first and they've scored most developer deals atm, since Oculus is also what drives Samsung VR (which I actually own and even it is superior to Vive as far as comfort and many other things go) and they also plan to licence their software and hardware IP to other companies it looks like Oculus will have the better support out there.

Sorry Valve but Vive atm seems more like a me-too product than a true innovator and industry leader, their bet to go with HTC is also problematic for the long term aspects of the Vive since HTC is in quite a bit of financial trouble.

<comment><USER13> This is a strange post.

How can you reasonably claim that OR is "pretty much the only way to go currently" when the Vive has done perfectly well with lighthouse tracking? You mention tracking multiple players at the same time, but not a single developer is even trying to do this. Maybe Oculus will tackle this at some point in the future, but they certainly aren't right now.

And while it's true that the Vive headset is still tethered, many folks have tried it out and almost none have reported any real issues with the cable.

Some of your points are correct and legitimate, but I think in these two areas you're showing some real bias.

Regardless, I don't think there's any reason to really be worried here. These are two very expensive devices geared towards affluent early adopters. The VR space is going to evolve a lot in the next few years. If room-scale takes off, Oculus will possibly have to redesign their tracking system, but they have the money and the manpower to do so. So if you're a big fan of Oculus, I don't think you need to worry about the company going bankrupt over this.</comment></comment>


Self serving Indian telecos want chat interception - <AUTHOR> https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/telcos-paytm-for-lawful-interception-of-messages-on-ott-services/67459812 <comment><AUTHOR> India's telecom authority released a consultation paper asking whether OTT (Over the top - a stupid term telecos came up with when VoIP & IM took away their profits) players should be regulated[0]

Jio telecom, owned by India's richest person with close affiliations to current ruling party & prime minister has a chat app of their own with questionable security [1]

Paytm, India's leading wallet is facing immense competition from WhatsApp's integrated payment features & uses the opportunity to showcase encrypted platforms as being against national security. Paytm ran full front page news ads with Narendra Modi in it supporting the I'll conceived demonetisation when poor people of India were literally dying because of it.

Other chat apps mentioned in the article are just trying to advertise their lack of encryption as a policy for national security.

[0]: [http://main.trai.gov.in/consultation-paper-regulatory- framew...](http://main.trai.gov.in/consultation-paper-regulatory-framework- over-top-ott-communication-services)

[1]: [https://m.economictimes.com/tech/software/reliance-jio- chat-...](https://m.economictimes.com/tech/software/reliance-jio-chat-app- sending-data-to-chinese-servers-hacker-group/articleshow/47728353.cms)</comment>


The Clean Farming Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/the-clean-farming-revolution/ <comment><USER2> There are a number of problems with this story:

1\. Farmers are using chemicals in bulk, they pick them up in 110-240 gallon containers that include a meter and a pump which are then returned to the dealership. The number of 2.5 gallon containers of old has been greatly reduced

2\. He talks about finer and finer sprays. But there is a huge problem with that and it's drift. Drift over on a neighbors crops too often and your insurance carrier will cancel you.

3\. I am not certain of the percentage but a fairly large percentage of pesticides are applied by commercial pesticide applicators, often part of a fertilizer company or grain elevator. These commercial applicators must be certified and are held to much higher standards than farmers.

4\. He also talks about a positive and a negative charge or what is called electrostatic spraying. This has been around a fairly long while. It's had some success applying fungicides but not that much for other uses.

5\. Lastly he speaks about what he calls vertical farming. People have been building these vertical farms for a number of years. I've yet to see the numbers work out so they can make a profit. It's often a high value crop like fruit or vegetables. For example tomatoes out of season where people in an East coast city are willing to pay 2-3x as much at say a Whole Foods. Funny but you never see a follow up story on these farms.

<comment><USER3> As for vertical farming, there is an interesting video debunking it by some professor of agriculture. In essence it boils down to the fact that the 1000w of light applied per square meter by the sun dwarfs all of the other inputs.

Unless we suddenly gain some form of near unlimited clean energy it doesn't make sense (except for some very limited circumstances like expensive micro- greens for classy restaurants)

<comment><USER4> I think these experiments are meaningful and fascinating for research purposes, but they will never be more efficient than nature. The solution to food security is not to re-engineer the farm, but to return food production to people, because the most dangerous thing we can do is to consolidate our food production into the hands of a few ag-tech corporations.

Granted, I'm talking about a cultural shift and you can't force people to enjoy gardening, but there are some people who are doing incredible experiments in urban farming which is still mostly low-tech. Even though he is an extreme example, Rob Greenfield shows what is possible with a typical 1/8 acre city/suburban lot. He is currently experimenting with growing/foraging 100% of his diet in a city.

[http://robgreenfield.tv/foodfreedom/](http://robgreenfield.tv/foodfreedom/)

The biggest shift will be to convince people that turfgrass lawns are the one of the biggest waste of resources in the modern world, and a silly cultural relic.

<comment><USER3> I really like the idea of growing our own food and have intended to create some raised beds in our garden. I've started taking baby steps this year by growing some herbs. Turns out that's about 10x the effort I imagined it was going to be. I think I might have killed a good portion of them yesterday with the 38 degree heat.

<comment><USER5> It is a lot of work, but there is litterally an order of magnitude in time and energy you spend to get the same result, depending of your technic. And when you start, you usually do it the hardest way.

<comment><USER6> Took me a moment to figure it out, but the word you are looking for is "technique". Unless you're talking about using Lego blocks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I haven't yet read the whole article, but this seems related:

[https://www.quora.com/How-is-China-able-to-provide-enough- fo...](https://www.quora.com/How-is-China-able-to-provide-enough-food-to-feed- its-population-of-over-1-billion-people-Do-they-import-food-or-are-they-self- sustainable)

It's a description of how China does farming at scale. Some interesting points: seafood farms (floating in the sea) instead of fishing, sensible sustainable (or "sustainable") cycles (e.g. fish -> fertilizer -> mulberry trees -> silkworm -> fish) (they also need aerators so the fish don't suffocate, and solar panels to power the aerators), massive amounts of greenhouses (including in places where it was previously impossible to grow vegetables due to climate), drip irrigation (Israeli technology for growing vegetables in the desert, saves a lot of water), returning farmland to the forest (to prevent mudslides).

<comment><USER8> > You know that most Tibetans historically only eat yak meat, milk, cheese, > and bread? They couldn't grow anything in such a harsh climate. Only monks > could have the luxury to eat vegetables. Now it is the solid proof that the > Chinese government didn't just destroy temples in Tibetan culture but helped > them eat vegetables and fruits.

That CCP is just so nice and helpful!

<comment><USER9> wait if they couldn't grow anything how'd they get bread

<comment><USER10> Rye, barley, and certain amaranth species are better suited for brutal climates and inferior soils. Tibet mainly grows a strain of barley adapted to the poor agricultural conditions, AFAIK.

You can process almost any powdered food item flour into something resembling bread, if you expend enough effort on it. You can make bread with cricket flour. Even meatloaf could be considered a type of "bread", if you massage the definitions long enough.

But I'd guess that Tibetans mainly eat barley bread. Rye and barley aren't as good as wheat is for making leavened breads, but they can make a loaf that isn't entirely brick-like, if the baker keeps a good sourdough starter and it gets a lot more rise time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't understand how people can still think that technology is somehow going to save us from bad agri practices.

The rise of permaculture/regenerative agriculture practices are some of the revolutions in 'farming' that I believe are what are going to be the basis for people producing food that are reasonable going forward. Cooperating with nature instead of fighting it is continually being proven to be the best practice for growing food from a environmental and deliciousness perspective.

Every time I see an article about farmers having some kind of trouble, their crops are one massive monoculture. It's not natural, it's not sustainable, it's destructive for the environment, and that party is going to be over in the future. Go look at the permaculture forests that people have established and you'll be shocked at the production, lack of work required (after some years, of course), and complete lack of chemical/nutrient input.

<comment><USER12> People believe technology will solve the day because it has every time single time so far. As we get better and better it looks like divorcing from nature is going to be the best approach.

We are going to make to growing all our food in giant box farms.

The simplest and most glaring issue is the Sun itself. Only a few hours a day for plants. Water is a massive issue! Huge swaths of the earth have very limited rainfall or access to fresh water. Factory farms can make efficient use of its water supply rather than watching the ground soak it up. Pesticides can be used sparingly when the whole environment is controlled.

I'm willing to bet that within 30 years a very large chunk of food grown to eat directly (strawberries, avocados, oranges, etc) will be box farm grown and the transition of wheat and corn will have started.

<comment><USER11> Are you being serious?

I have no idea what you're talking about.

"Only a few hours a day for plants." About half the day is decidated to sunshine, give or take. It's been this way for ... since plants.

"Huge swaths of the earth..." Don't grow there. Don't live there. People don't live in volcanoes for a reason. It's too inhospitable. OTO, you could import your goods via plane/copter/whatever if you're brave. Good on you.

We're already able to grow tropical fruit 1,500 feet up in the freezing Alps with no (artificial) chemicals/fertilizers/pesticides and effective (natural) water management. Can't imagine it will be much more difficult in growth friendly places.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQdCkPR6ZCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQdCkPR6ZCw)

<comment><USER13> Yes, Sepp Holzer! It's refreshing to see other people, especially among the HN demographic, to know of work like his and permaculture in general given the general obsession with specific myopic forms of technology (like to whom you're replying here); i.e. I still see permaculture as a kind of technology, just a different kind than what most modern conventional farms use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you have uBlock Origin installed you may not see this, but in the top-right hand corner there's the text: "In Association with Corteva Agriscience".

<comment><USER15> Wait what? On a BBC site? That seems very unlikely. I'm viewing it in vanilla Chrome and there is nothing saying that in the corner.

<comment><USER16> I can confirm it says that in the corner once I turn off ublock origin in Firefox.

<comment><USER15> Thats weird, perhaps its a Geo thing. I'm in the UK and the BBC isn't allowed to carry advertising/advertorials in the UK. Presumably some of the content is also different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you like that you'll love the sundrop solar & desalinating tomato growing plant in South Australia. [https://vimeo.com/183859356](https://vimeo.com/183859356) [https://www.sundropfarms.com/](https://www.sundropfarms.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a really interesting area and problem. When you factor in the extra food we need to produce to feed a population expected to hit 9bn people AND the increased demand for a more western diet from a growing middle class in places like China and India, we need some serious innovation in agriculture.

Another interesting area not covered in the article is genetic engineering bacteria in soil to fix nitrogen, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers: [https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/11/20/can-genetic- en...](https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/11/20/can-genetic-engineering- deliver-a-natural-microbial-fertilizer-for-crops/)

</comment><comment><USER18> This scrolling takeover is just awful.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think a much better approach would be to look away from using pesticides and start looking in other directions for doing agriculture

</comment><comment><USER20> I _really_ want to get into this. maybe even turn it into a business.

So much potential...

<comment><USER21> Have you considered indoor gardening? I've seen a few pics of fairly-dense setups over the years, might be enough to scratch your itch and work towards an eventual business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very interesting subject, but unfortunately the weird scrolling kills the site for me on firefox

<comment><USER23> Firefox user checking in. No problems scrolling here.

<comment><USER16> Firefox on Mac here. Absolutely unusable. I disabled ublocko and umatrix.</comment></comment></comment>


TSA Threatens Blogger Who Posted New Screening Directive - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/dhs-threatens-blogger/ <comment><USER2> I'm sort of a staunch law & order kind of guy, but this is why you never talk to the police. If they want to talk to you, they can have ample opportunity to do so in your lawyer's offices, in a comfortable plush chair, right into the tape recorder, after giving you blanket immunity for anything resulting from what you are about to tell them.

I will also happily let the authorities image my hard drive if they can convince a judge to issue a search warrant for the entire thing. It isn't that I don't trust you, officer, it is just that I desire to renew our traditional understanding that my papers and effects are _mine_ and not to be trifled with lightly.

<comment><USER3> But if the TSA turn up at your door, claiming they'll put you on the no-fly list if you don't co-operate? Once on the no-fly list, it's close to impossible to get off the list.

It's a government agency with far too much power and no transparency.

<comment><USER4> _Once on the no-fly list, it's close to impossible to get off the list._

Sure, if you don't want to change your name. Go to your local courthouse, change the spelling of your name, get a new ID, you're off the list. That's why the no-fly list is such a joke.

Also, you can bet that they would not make this threat in the company of your lawyer. This is just a scare tactic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> WikiLeaks which provides anonymous leaking services for things just like this has recently stopped due to lack of funding (and this document would likely have been leaked there if it hadn't been stopped).

Please consider donating to them (they need both money and technical services/expertise) at <http://wikileaks.org/> to help them carry on if you'd like to support the freedom to whistleblow.

<comment><USER6> I hadn't realized they were struggling, they've been responsible for some amazing scoops. I thought it was worth calling out this appeal for volunteers as a new item:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023663>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why all of my disks are encrypted. Power turns off, data is gone. If someone shows up at your door threatening you to provide them with a disk image, you can happily comply. When they realize the data is useless without the Constitutionally-protected secret key that only exists in your mind, they will have to file charges, and get a judge to order you to testify against yourself. And right about then, the investigation stops, because you committed no crime, and the order to testify against yourself is illegal. (If anything, it means you have plenty of time to talk to your attorney. They are not getting the data any other way, so you have the power to say, "wait, let me get my lawyer first", even if they physically seize your hardware.)

I also have a few drives in my house that look like LUKS encrypted disks, but are actually a LUKS header with random data following it. There is no way I could ever decrypt these disks, as there is no data on them; just random bits.

Anyway, you can tell that this was never a real criminal investigation, because a real investigator would get Gmail records from Google, not from some random guy with a laptop. This was purely to scare the blogger into not publishing information about the TSA anymore. "Chilling effect."

<comment><USER7> Your fake encrypted disks are so that you can't be forced to decrypt every disk, even under thermorectal cryptanalysis? Did you do that after reading about pre-commitment in game theory, and do you have a plan to avoid the flaw in pre-commitment strategies under asymmetric information exposed in Dr. Strangelove?

<comment><USER4> My main enemy is some random person in the airport stealing my laptop bag. My theoretical enemy is the government.

Neither of these adversaries can afford a technical attack. The guy at the airport will say "oh well", format the disk, and eBay it. The government will try to convince me that I do know the key, will fail, and will have to support its (theoretical, of course) case against me with actual evidence instead.

There is one thing I just thought of, though; the SMART log shows how much activity the disk has experienced. It should be easy to check this log to see which disk I use the most. I will come up with some way to plug this leak :)

But anyway, I am not sure this would "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" that I know the key. If any case against me ever depended on me decrypting my disk, I would first refuse. Then, theoretically, a charge of obstruction of justice would be filed against me, and the government would have to prove that before they could even consider their original case. (And that's no cakewalk, as there is case law saying I don't have to give up the password, and I don't think SMART data has ever been used in court.)

So anyway, I think my system is good enough. I don't have any friends in the government feeding me classified information, anyway :( So, it's likely that I will never get to test my system. But I hope the "Real Criminals" read this and perhaps use this information to help themselves stay safe from their oppressive regime.

<comment><USER8> Be sure that you are aware of the laws on where you travel to. In the United Kingdom, the police can seek a warrant that requires you to either decrypt a specific piece of data or to surrender any encryption private key or password under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. Refusing to do so under this act is a criminal offence with a sentence of two years in prison (longer if they allege that the encrypted data is either related to terrorist activity or child pornography).

The crazy thing about the TSA: I flew back from SFO to London last month. I had three laptops in my carry-on bag. I also had a can of Red Bull. Apparently, the can of Red Bull is highly suspicious, but the three laptops are not. I had a perfect excuse though: one was running OS X, another was running Linux and the last was running XP.

<comment><USER4> The TSA is not supposed to care if you are doing something illegal, they are only supposed to prevent you from bringing certain things into the secure area of the airport. Liquids (or cans that contained them) are what they are supposed to watch for. Laptops are fine.

Customs is another story; they would probably ask about your laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's time for the TSA to go.

<comment><USER10> And be replaced with what? I'm as irritated with all the stupid TSA crap as anyone else and now go out of my way to avoid flying because of it---but the post-9/11 pre-TSA period was _even worse_ as far as fickleness and inconsistency of security.

TSA needs a lot of fixing. But on the whole I think nationalised airline security is probably the right way to go.

<comment><USER11> Two things:

1) Reinforced cockpit doors and armed pilots so terrorists can't get control over the plane.

2) Better intelligence and policing on the ground; remember, in the last attempted attack the guys father had raised concerns about him beforehand.

Airport screening is basically security theater.

<comment><USER12> Arming someone isn't necessarily a benefit. If you can hold a deadly weapon, you can also lose that weapon in a fight, at which point the weapon may be used against you. Especially if you're sitting down in a tiny cockpit when someone bursts in.

If you'd arm anyone at all, you'd want to be sure they are very well trained (e.g. a police officer, infantryman or equivalent) and in a better position to help.

<comment><USER13> >>you'd want to be sure they are very well trained

I doubt they would just issue a firearm along with the uniforms. Many airline pilots are ex-military and quite capable of using a sidearm. Training/restrictions would certainly be available for those that aren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The story according to the two bloggers:

[http://www.elliott.org/blog/full-text-of-my-subpoena-from- th...](http://www.elliott.org/blog/full-text-of-my-subpoena-from-the- department-of-homeland-security/#more-10228)

[http://boardingarea.com/blogs/flyingwithfish/2009/12/30/the-...](http://boardingarea.com/blogs/flyingwithfish/2009/12/30/the- fallout-from-sd-1544-09-06-the-feds-at-my-door/)

</comment><comment><USER15> My favorite quote: "Frischling said [the TSA agents] had to go to WalMart to buy a hard drive, but when they returned were unable to get it to work."

<comment><USER4> An unexpected fringe benefit of owning 2TB drives: the cops can't buy them at WalMart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's the difference between Joe-blogger and someone who's an actual journalist. Granted, I don't know that "writes a column for the Washington Post" is exactly hard-hitting journalism, but I find it interesting that he did not turn over any information on his source whereas the guy who was just a blogger complied.

<comment><USER4> Presumably, the Washington Post has lawyers that deal with this sort of thing, and they have a newspaper that can publish all the details to a wide readership. The Post journalist presumably took some journalism courses, where they probably teach you to not talk to the police in these circumstances.

The blogger probably had none of those, and just wanted to take care of his kids that night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wait, the TSA has their own subpoena-serving law enforcement agents?

I wonder if they instead used the FBI, if _those_ agents might have been able to get an external hard drive to work?

</comment><comment><USER18> Flagged. This one seems straight from the submission guidelines:

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic._

<comment><USER9> I find it very relative hacker news and this isn't a story that will be covered on TV news. This is behind the scenes and is about how the internet is completely disrupting the control of information by governments.

<comment><USER18> Hmmm, maybe. However, I could definitely see TSA harassment as something be covered on TV news. I mostly saw this from the political/legal angle which is rather trite and has been covered many times before.

 _This is behind the scenes and is about how the internet is completely disrupting the control of information by governments._

I didn't think of this at first but you may be right. Although, I would have preferred an analysis from that perspective in this case, rather than a reporting of the legal circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm wondering if there are any of us who would suggest that right after a terrorist attack, it might be a good idea _not_ to share with the bad guys how we're going to stop them? I mean, maybe hold off for a week or so while we figure out if:

A) There are more attacks coming.

B) How we are going to stop them.

<comment><USER20> You are assuming that what TSA was doing, is doing and is planning to do stopped/is stopping/will stop terrorist attacks.

Their track record is so horrible that they should be fired on the spot, be asked to apologize to everyone they harassed over the years and be forced to return tax payer's money they wasted for expensive x-ray vision and air puffing machines.

To bring back an analogy I made in a previous post, they are like the witch doctor that is trying to cure cancer with a rattle or a voodoo doll. The patients keep dying so as far as they can see, the rattle is not advanced enough. Now they've enhanced the rattle with more bells and added more rules that patients have to follow to get cured.

Of course, those who see through the farce and write about it, get some personal attention and home visits...

<comment><USER19> Okay, I'm interested in some more detail regarding your concerns. In particular, why do you consider their track record to be horrible, and what actions should they have been taking to prevent liquid detonated PETN bombs?

Off the top of my head, I can fault the TSA for only two things:

1\. They don't have Full Body Scanners in place. The technology has been around for 3+ years, and would have caught the PETN sewn into the underwear.

2\. They still allow liquids onto planes, which can be used to detonate and/or do significant damage to the inside of an airplane.

You clearly have your own list of steps the TSA could have taken - I'm wondering what they are?

<comment><USER21> 1\. There have been numerous "breaches" conducted by journalists, etc. over the years.

2\. I think the greater point isn't that the TSA is ineffective but rather that they are inefficient. Making millions of travelers each year jump through more and more hoops isn't making any of us safer. A smart, determined, terrorist will easily smuggle something aboard. I've personally walked through security a half dozen times with a lighter in my bag (forgot it was even there) when flying both domestic and international, including going from AMS to IAD. Plus how many TSA screeners have you seen just aimlessly do their job? You think these guys have real incentive to catch smart/determined terrorists?

The fact is the TSA has burned through billions of dollars (your money) that may have been better spent on intelligence and more robust "threat list" monitoring systems. Not to mention on a bevy of other issues they could have tackled with that money.

The TSA going after a few bloggers is inane. Do you feel safer knowing that a bunch of knucklehead TSA agents wasted tax payer money to intimidate a bunch of bloggers? Will the confidentiality of a stupid list of hoops travelers must jump through make you safer?

Is the end-result even a net positive for society? Is it even CLOSE?

<comment><USER22> I forgot that I had a multitool attached to my keys when I went through security about a year ago. I actually took my keys out, put them in the basket, and walked through. No agent said anything until the return trip, where I was asked to either check my bag or throw it away.

<comment><USER23> I used to have a mini-Leatherman attached to my key ring, which had a small knife on it. I'd often forget to take it off when traveling, and it made it through airport security on at least 4 trips (so at least 8 times through the x-ray machine), probably more. Ironically, it wasn't the TSA who eventually took it from me, but security outside a club in San Francisco.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My observations about teaching and learning programming - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3559-my-observations-about-teaching-and-learning-programming

<comment><USER2> Speaking from my background as a humble college student, I think the most important principle to embrace to successful pedagogy (in the professor side) and learning (in the student side) is that of independence. I've seen way too often classmates that copy and paste code without thinking twice about what the hell the code means, or memorize slides and regurgitate answers for a midterm or final. Partly this is the fault of their laziness, but professors have to be somewhat culpable for letting this laziness fester in the first place. It's distressing to me how many people in my class see programming as a (money-making) skill, yet see class material as just a parade of _facts_ to learn, not a mindset to adopt.

<comment><USER3> That's a really great point, good for you for challenging yourself to truly learn the art of programming. To me, the students who only study enough to pass the next exam are cheating themselves, the time I've been given to learn something new and difficult is priceless to me, really a gift! I can tell you won't let them discourage you, follow your own path!</comment></comment>


Sign That You're A Good Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nilkanth.com/2009/08/08/sign-that-youre-a-good-programmer/ <comment><USER2> The number one sign that you're a "not bad" programmer (since the essay says there are no "good" programmers) is that you are actively trying to get better. You're learning new languages and tools, exploring different styles and techniques.</comment>


How to disable blinking cursors - <AUTHOR> http://www.jurta.org/en/prog/noblink

<comment><USER2> While I appreciate the ability to be able to disable the blinking cursor, does anyone else _not_ mind the cursor? Personally I'd rather know where my input focus is(how many times have you dealt with a poorly-written UI that doesn't have a logical tab ordering?), or at least know that I'm able to start typing, rather than wonder if the application in question is blocking input because of execution... comparing it to "torture" seems a little far-fetched.

<comment><USER3> I actually prefer a blinking cursor so long as the window has focus. This is the default of gvim and emacs. Though the one good thing about this article is that it finally got me to read the urxvt man page to figure out how to get urxvt to do that (it defaults to no blink).

<comment><USER4> _I actually prefer a blinking cursor so long as the window has focus._

Both you and a commenter below (wzdd: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2629575>) mention this. I've never encountered cursor-blinking-without-window-focus in any app I've ever used - what programs actually exhibit such obnoxious behaviour?

<comment><USER5> This occurs in the search form (in a white label version of IE, if I'm not mistaken) at the local public library (they have numerous terminals scattered throughout the library). It's rather annoying to see the blinking cursor, start typing, have nothing happen, and have to find the mouse, locate the bleeping mouse cursor, and click in the test box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I actually had to check if the system I'm on had a blinking cursor. I care so little one way or the other that I don't notice.</comment>