U.S. personal income posts first drop in over three years - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-spenidng/u-s-personal-income-posts-first-drop-in-over-three-years-idUSKCN1QI4P7 <comment><USER2> The drop coincides with the market tanking at the end of last year, due to the Fed badly miscalculating their rate hike policy.

TFA omits this context, and glaringly doubles down on the omission when they state;

"The report from the Commerce Department on Friday also showed inflation pressures remaining tame, which together with slowing domestic and global economic growth _gave more credence to the Federal Reserve's "patient" stance towards raising interest rates further this year._ "

The Fed caused tremendous damage at the end of Q4 with their breakneck rate hikes in the face of record-low inflation. They sucked over a trillion dollars out of the economy which is why the numbers are down.

To write that this gives credence to the Fed's "patient" stance is wallpapering over the real story, and it smells politically motivated.

<comment><USER3> How was it miscalculated? We can't sit there and leave interests rates low forever. It's a mitigating tactic, not a tenable one. We've been doing this for _years_. It's long, long, long over due for fed interest rates to come back up. Because right now all it's really doing is building a credit bubble.

Real wages and real purchasing power must keep going up. And for that to happen the upper 1% are going to have to take a nice hit for the economy to truly correct. Both effectively need to happen at the same time. The FED is essentially signalling to policy makers that the time to up minimum wage is... was, yesterday.

I want to challenge you to really dive into your perspective and defend why you think the fed miscalculated here, and why you think leaving interest rates low isn't going to have extremely negative effects if we don't start changing course now. If not now, when?

<comment><USER4> "We can't sit there and leave interests rates low forever" ...says who? What force dictates that the equilibrium for rates must be higher? Yes that's historically been the case but that doesn't mean that's the right path for us now and in the future. I would argue that low interest rates will be and need to be the new normal.

Interest is the ultimate rent seeking activity. The fed funds rate is a form of price fixing for banks whereby they collectively decide how much interest they can extract from the economy without killing it. Why must this be the case, the economy should be allowed to run much hotter for much longer.

Inflation is less of a risk now because of technology + globalization, right now we are experiencing significant deflationary pressure as products and labor converge towards global pricing/wages.

Our economy and government will be in very serious trouble if we have to pay higher interest on our significant national debt, so the government has a big interest (pun intended) in keeping rates low to protect its own financial solvency.

Finally, high interest rates imply money is scarce and that's far from the case now. Having large sums of money is not what it used to be, you're competing against a lot of other people and organizations seeking to deploy that money productively for a return. This generates downward pressure on market interest rates as evidenced by European Central banks going below zero to negative rates.

<comment><USER5> > "We can't sit there and leave interests rates low forever" ...says who?

Certainly it can be done, but if 2008 proved anything it was the theory that lowering interest rates would provide Keynesian stimulus and mitigate the impact of a recession. One of the perks of controlling the interest rate is that you can use it to apply counterpressure to the business cycle, pushing down bubbles and pulling out of recessions. If the interest rate is stuck near 0, you can't really do that, so it's in the interest of economic stability to bring it back up again.

<comment><USER6> 2008 was more a consequence of lowering lending qualification standards (or just ignoring them altogether) than it was low rates. Doesn't matter so much what the interest rate is, if you are lending money to people who can't pay it back.

<comment><USER7> I believe OP was talking about the stimulus/recovery, not the cause of the crash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wages up, investment income down?

This sounds like cause for average people to celebrate. Wonder why the headline is focused on the negative aspect...

<comment><USER9> US wage is growing though. Money is flowing into US at an unprecedented rate due to:

a.) Fed raising interest rates to a normal level. Government bonds are now earning close to some of the faster developing countries, without the risks.

b.) Brexit impacting the growth of EU. Germany narrowly avoids recession....for now. But grew only 1.5% in 2018. There's still the matter of a possible US tariff on EU automobiles. And Italy/Greece/Spain debts are still a thing.

c.) Chinese economy is crumbling. GM dropped crashed 15% in China in 2018. Ford dropped 36%. iPhone sales dropped 13%. Louis Vuitton dropped 20%. Overall car sales dropped 13%. Stock market dropped 22%. Real estate sales in January 2019 dropped 44%.

d.) Asian countries impacted by China's fall. South Korea's export to China dropped 14% in 2018. Japan dropped 8%. Taiwan dropped 10%. Singapore dropped 8%.

e.) Uncertainties and high debt ratio in developing countries, prompting money to seek safe harbor. Tariff and protectionism impacts.

f.) lastly, US is growing at a healthy 3% in 2018

<comment><USER10> How does the Fed interest raise helps with more money flowing into the US?

I mean okay, money flows into US "saving accounts", but due to higher interest rate a lot of investments will be put on hold, no?

The Fed raised the target federal funds rate, which is the rate of the interbank overnight repo market, which is basically the "back office" clearing house between the accounts of creditors and debtors. And all of this means that the NY Fed's trading desk does a lot of open market transactions to reach that goal. (It converts cash in banks' reserve accounts into US Treasury bonds, thus forcing banks to increase their reserves - to meet requirements, hence forcing banks to loan reserves from other banks, which pushes up the overnight repo rate.)

How does this effect the US Treasury bond auction rate? (In theory banks [and other primary dealers that participate in the auction] just use loans (excess reserve) to buy bonds, so if excess reserve is less, then fewer banks are able/willing to buy bonds, so yes, that pushes up rates, but the target-FFR increase only affected US banks, and US T-bills are bought by a lot of foreign entities.)

<comment><USER11> all I know is they raise interest rates, it absorbs up the money supply in circulation due to the attractive yields on the Ts

also the whole trope about 'China owning most of US T-bills' is actually false, there is apparently T-bills that are specifically sold to foreign nations, and then there are the real T-bills that not many countries own. The other one is an IOU and may not be honored, say during wartime.

<comment><USER10> They raise the rates indirectly, by selling T-bills on the secondary market, which simply sucks money out of the circulation. (Which makes simply makes debt more expensive, and that leads to T-rate increase.)

> also the whole trope about 'China owning most of US T-bills' is actually > false,

They are just the largest foreign holder, and it was noteworthy because of the rapid rise in the distribution of foreign debt holders.

Anyway, my thought process was that even if the US money supply drops, it should not influence T-bill auctions, because the whole world likes it (due to being the least risky investment). But it's very likely that the T-rate was low because banks and other investors exploited the low FFR. Now that's gone, the system settled in a higher equilibrium (as foreign and other investors had no real reason to change their behavior).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> New year + tax return tends to lead people to spend a bit more. Anecdotally I'd expect the downward spending trend to continue. Majority of the customers I interact with (barista programmer checking in) I know are asking themselves "do I need this?" before they buy. Most have cancelled their Amazon Prime subscription and stopped buying there altogether, which for many was the equivalent of an online shopping spree.

<comment><USER13> sorry for a weird question but how does one decide to be a barista programmer? is it because you like being barista or is it because programming doesn't pay enough?

<comment><USER12> Burn out and tired of writing CRUD all day in an office.

<comment><USER14> Honest question. Is being a barrista _better_ , or just _different_?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _" Income was weighed down by decreases in dividend, farm proprietors' and interest income. Wages increased 0.3 percent in January after rising 0.5 percent in December."_

I have no education in economics, but does this imply that it is becoming less lucrative to invest money? (Also, later in the article, it says that purchasing dropped sharply in December. How is it that wages are growing, job market is hungry for more labor, but consuming is dropping?)

<comment><USER15> The Personal Consumption Expenditures number from the Federal Reserve is seasonally adjusted. A decline in a seasonally adjusted number can actually a lower than expected increase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Waiting on the trickles of the "trickle down" economics. I bet CEO salaries are doing just fine.

<comment><USER17> "U.S. personal income fell for the first time in more than three years in January as dividends and interest payments dropped"

It hit the people with stocks and money in the bank the most.

<comment><USER18> Or you know people with pension funds

<comment><USER19> And people who buy from the rest of us

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I thought real wages had already posted drops. The numerical drop might be expected w/ real wages as a leader.

</comment><comment><USER21> Do these measurements consider inflation?

</comment><comment><USER22> Tax rates in high income states went up (limits on deductions for housing and state income taxes); no surprise.

<comment><USER23> Tax rates and deductions have nothing to do these income and wage numbers.

<comment><USER22> If you read the article, you'd know that the commerce department was talking about disposable personal income, which is post tax. Pre-tax, personal income went up.

[https://www.bea.gov/data/income-saving/personal- income](https://www.bea.gov/data/income-saving/personal-income)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How am I supposed to verify the origin of a sign-in page in a web view? - <AUTHOR> I just had to sign in into my google account in an iPhone app (ingress). The familiar google sign in page appeared in what is known as a "web view", that is a browser that is embedded into the application. The problem I am seeing here is that I don't see the URL that is being loaded into the web view. It could be a page on a completely different domain that just looks like the google sign in page. Even if it did show a URL, I couldn't be sure that it actually is what it claims to be, because you could just make it look like it loads google.com even if it didn't.
Should the sign in page not be loaded in the actual system browser, which I do trust and where I can see the URL and the certificate, and then somehow redirect back to the app?
The only way I can think of is by installing MITMProxy on my computer and watch the traffic as I sign in to confirm that my password is really only transmitted to google.
Is there a better practice than the sign-in via web view for (iPhone) apps? <comment><USER2> I'm also interested in this. Seems like a very easy way to phish for credentials.</comment>


CERN Live Video Webcast on Neutrino Findings - <AUTHOR> http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/

<comment><USER2> You can download the archived video from <http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1384466> in mp4, Windows Media, or Flash.

</comment><comment><USER3> They are answering tons of questions I've heard people here and other locations speculate about including one I considered. Someone asked if they accounted for the rotation of the Earth and he immediately responded that they had.

</comment><comment><USER4> Any non-flash stream available?</comment>


ELI5: Do animals from different countries understand each other? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/912fa6/eli5_do_animals_from_different_countries <comment><USER2> Studies have shown a universal language between dogs and humans. Dog barks sound the same worldwide. Even humans with no dog experiance understand various barks, suggesting a genetic language basis. I think any wolf would have a similar basic understanding of any other wolf.

<comment><USER3> Can you link some of those studies? genuinely curious

<comment><USER2> One that got some media attention a few year back:

[https://drsophiayin.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/04/Yin2004Ba...](https://drsophiayin.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/04/Yin2004Barking.pdf)

Some less-dense coverage:

[https://www.star2.com/living/2018/02/27/ev-when-your-dog- bar...](https://www.star2.com/living/2018/02/27/ev-when-your-dog-barks-do-you- understand-its-message/)

"All the people were pretty good at figuring out what was going on. There were no significant differences between dog owners and non-dog owners. They were particularly good at identifying dog emotion in Stranger Danger, Guard Dog, Alone, and Play."

These are interesting studies, but many nevertheless wonder why scientists bother. Most of us understand a common language for terrestrial animals. Lower-pitched sounds come from bigger animals with bigger throats. I've never been growled at by a lion, but I would understand that a deep low growl means it is trying to scare me with its size. This holds true for bears, dogs, cats, deer, even humans. Conversely, high-pitched screams are generally calls for help, mimicking the pitch of the young. Showing your teeth is a near-universal sign of aggression. Put this all together and it is enough to satisfy most definitions of language.

<comment><USER4> > Showing your teeth is a near-universal sign of aggression.

Smiling humans are a significant exception to this rule.

<comment><USER5> And evil-smile is an exception to that exception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sort of on topic: supposedly parrots that learn to talk can teach wild parrots to talk, but the wild parrot can't continue the trend.

On topic, I have a parrot that can call the dogs name, the dog comes running and the bird throws food at him...then laughs. Sometimes in a British accent. I am not sure where he picked that up.

</comment><comment><USER7> What about dolphins from other planets? :)

([http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Dolphins](http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Dolphins))

</comment><comment><USER8> For birds, TL;DR answer is that they can have regional dialects' [0].

The question isn't really whether they 'understand' each other, but whether the differences cause changes in behaviour. Some birds preferentially mate with others that sound most like themselves. Others, because nature is complicated, do the opposite.

[0] [https://web.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Voc...](https://web.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Vocal_Dialects.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> nice thread but no real definitive answer

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/30/258393176...](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/30/258393176/make- it-so-sir-patrick-stewart-moos-in-udder-accents)

</comment><comment><USER11> There is definitely evidence that some animals have regional/group dialects. The 52 hertz whale comes to mind. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/52-hertz_whale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/52-hertz_whale))

<comment><USER12> That whale was just an unfortunate whale that tried to communicate with others on a different wavelength (literally) due to something physically wrong with its pitch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are probably nuances that they learn from others in their geographical location. Perhaps similar to various dialects of the same language.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think animals are divided not by "country" but by significant change in geographical features of a place where they live. Probably a dense forest monkey understands the calls from another monkey from a dense forest but not from a deserted place. It's only my assumption, as they [have to] learn to make different sounds based on where they live.. probably.

</comment><comment><USER15> The question reminded me of this scene in Bertolucci _The Conformist_ :

[https://youtu.be/L7rX4WOKZ7g?t=1h9m13s](https://youtu.be/L7rX4WOKZ7g?t=1h9m13s)

</comment><comment><USER16> zebra finches have distinct in-group call patterns.

</comment><comment><USER17> Countries are a human concept.

<comment><USER18> The question isn't perfectly formed, but I believe we all understand what is being asked.</comment></comment>


Volcano Music - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/whatonearth/posts/post_1288979835771.html <comment><USER2> "Much like human voicings are defined by the combination of air flow through the vocal chords, tract, and mouth shapes, this harmonic tremor sound is shaped by the interaction of volcanic gases as they are released and flow through open conduits."

Delicately put, what can they have been trying not to say?</comment>


Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/ <comment><USER2> RoHS applies to solar panels since 2006, so they should not contain any lead, at least in the EU.

<comment><USER3> I really don't understand the title, the only toxic thing in there could be the lead based solder. How many solder joints are in there? 4 ?

Referring to solar panels as toxic trash is grasping at straws and it makes me wonder what motivation was behind writing up this article.

<comment><USER2> I have bought some little solar panels as a toy and they come without leads, manufactured only with conductive bars spaced few milimeters apart. To connect them to leads, you have to connect all these bars by soldering a strip, and that's nontrivial amount of solder. AFAIK most panels are connected this way.</comment></comment></comment>


33 Weird Statues and Sculptures Around The World - <AUTHOR> http://www.toroller.com/2008/01/03/amazing-weired-statues-manuments-sculptures-of-the-world/

<comment><USER2> Not to be trolling or sound like a stupid old fart - but if I want to see weird statues, LOLcats, or the best picture in the world I will go to Reddit.

The great thing about this place is that the signal to noise ratio is good, the articles that are linked to are insightful, and the people are intellligent.

Kind of like Reddit in the early days.

Go figure...

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the same. But I found these statues (particularly the first one) to be pretty interesting, showing a particular ingenuity. Probably material for NYC.

And I was curious about whether the NYC audience would like those too, or not. It was just about sharing an interesting link (note: not a cool link, something that I found to be interesting).

<comment><USER2> All is forgiven, I just wanted to point it out :-)

The first one reminds me of an art project we did quite a while ago: An electronic valve inside a tap would open to let out a droplet of water twice every second. A strobe would be synced up with the valve, and light up the droplets of water falling to the ground. By carefully timing the strobe you could make it appear that the droplets were falling upwards into the tap. It looked really cool.

Great fun - got me laid too :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> rather than giving ppl with 250+ an option to change the bar at the top of the page, why dont they give those users the ability to downmod submissions?</comment>


Microsoft mocks Internet Explorer haters in new ad [video] - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/29/microsoft-mocks-internet-explorer-haters/

<comment><USER2> This ad isn't about the merits of IE as a browser, this ad is about building a preformed thought in the common users mind whenever they hear someone bash IE. IE hasn't been the victim of bad PR, it has earned it's reputation through years of blood/sweat/tears by the hands of developers. Microsoft recognizes that they won't be able to change this attitude in the developer community, but that they can lessen the weight a developer's opinion has amongst non- technically minded people, which is a much larger share of users.

Like it or not, a lot of people will think of this ad first (and what it tells them), the next time one of us tries to warn them about IE

<comment><USER3> With all 300 views...I doubt it will change anything at all.

(EDIT: MY opinion will say the same until that view counter says a million and I highly doubt it will even get close. The only people who really care anyway are the "trolls" that Microsoft is talking about!)

<comment><USER4> Usually a video with 301 views means it's suddenly exploded virally. YouTube 'stops counting' temporarily at 300 views whilst it verifies that a video is being legitimately viewed by many people in a short space of time, rather than people artificially inflating their viewcount by whatever methods they can.

In a matter of minutes or hours that number will suddenly increase significantly.

So it's an anti-spam measure. There's a short explainer here: <http://www.seroundtable.com/youtube-301-views-15347.html>

<comment><USER5> Further confirming this, the video has 301 views and over 1800 likes, 400 dislikes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As I said in the other IE submission, most of the criticisms that have been levelled against IE are technical in nature and very real (dragging their feet on web standards, breaking their own compatibility guidelines from version to version, etc). So portraying IE haters as having the IQ of the average YouTube commenter just loses any credibility in the message (plus the way they fell back on badly judged kitten memes was just cringe-worthy)

Nobody is disputing that IE has come along way. The issue isn't whether the latest version of the browser is capable, but rather whether we'd want to get back into bed with Microsoft given their past history. And thankfully there is so much choice in the market now, that people can choose not to use browsers for even the seemingly trivial reasons; such as historical prejudice.

Thus as long as there is competition in the market, I'm going to support the platforms that have a history of promoting a free and open web.

</comment><comment><USER7> IE hate is well deserved. How many hundreds of thousands or millions of productive hours have been lost due to incompabilities, bugs, etc?

That being said, Microsoft is full of talented people and they do create some fantastic products. IE is slowly getting to a more respectable point and hating on it so harshly seems juvenile.

<comment><USER8> Microsoft is attacking a straw man. The people Microsoft needs to worry about are not trolls with too much time on their hands. The people they need to convince are web developers frustrated by 10 years of IE that refused to cooperate with standards and held everyone back. Even IE 9 has problems with JS features that Firefox, Chrome, and Opera implement. Microsoft did this to themselves, and I believe it is one of the reasons why developers are reticent to develop for Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I actually kinda like the ad, because the guy could be me in a heartbeat, i even own the same keyboard xD.

However the hate in me burns with the power of a thousand sons, when it comes to IE. The almost constant changes of MS standards with each new version of IE, inevitably breaks something, and will often require separate CSS styling..

And dont get me started on maintaining an app, that was built on IE6..

If I was in a room with Hitler, Osama bin Laden and the devlead for IE6, and had a gun with only 2 bullets.. I would shoot the IE6 lead twice..

That said and done, i really hope they start to embrace the "real" standards, as the the new development team proclaims.

<comment><USER10> "I would shoot the IE6 lead twice.."

That's a little bit harsh, isn't it? While I would never defend it's usage today, it wasn't that horrible at the time it was released.

However, as Microsoft decided to kill off development it soon grew too old for it's own good.

<comment><USER11> > While I would never defend it's usage today, it wasn't that horrible at the > time it was released.

I think it was bad even considering that it was released in 2001. Not supporting PNG alpha channel is just an example.

But I do agree that Microsoft taking so long to release IE7 made things even worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For me, IE is like landmines. Built as weapon to break the web rather than to do anything constructive, and then abandoned after the war to create more havoc for years.

Maybe MS should have given the new generations of IE a new name. Rebranding would probably have been cheaper and more effective than marketing campaigns trying to make IE respectable.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, you are wrong and trying to rewrite history. But this is Hackernews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The thing about IE is that once they gain some market share, they start trying to push their "own" standards, even if the community is moving in the opposite direction. That is just the way it has been since IE6.

The ad targets haters that convince "regular users" that IE sucks...haters needed to do that because regular users couldn't totally grasp how much their web experience is affected for using that crappy browser and how many features they were missing.

The fact that a lot of them do not realize how awful their experience is, is due to countless hours of near-suicide frustration from programmers and coders around the world trying to make IE compatible applications.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ha ha, yeah, I know, the way some people carry on, you'd think Internet Explorer had crippled the web and added hundreds of hours to web development projects everywhere for over a decade, or something. Jeez!

</comment><comment><USER16> Yeah, the detractors of IE are just mindlessly posting "IE SUCKS" over and over for no reason. It's not that the browser is seriously lacking, or that it's been behind for so long and actively blocking open standards. It's that the internet is dumb and people just love to hate.

<comment><USER17> To be fair for every web developer with legit gripes about IE there probably are about 100 people posting "IE SUXX" on youtube.

Most discussion of technology on the internet is just noise written by people who don't have the slightest clue what they are talking about.

<comment><USER18> You forget the other side, though. There are tons of people like my in-laws who used to get all sorts of malware thanks to IE, and once they switched to Firefox or Chrome no longer do. There's a pretty large group of non-technical people out there who have found not using IE makes their life more pleasant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This ad might have a point if it was actually IE10 that people hated. People hate IE 6, 7, 8, and 9, because they stalled web progress and MS did nothing proactive to try to filter them out of the marketplace. Talk about missing the point entirely.

<comment><USER20> I liked IE4 because it was pretty damn good.

I liked IE6 because it got me out of the hell that was IE4.

I liked IE8 because it got me out of the hell that was IE6.

I suspect I'm going to like IE10 because of IE8.

I'm going to hate IE10 because it's not Webkit/Gecko.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So internet explorer is good because it is the best browser on a platform (xbox360) that didn't have a browser before and where it doesn't have any competition because there are no other browsers?

</comment><comment><USER21> I have to admit that I had something personal against IE:

When I stated as an entrepreneur, the banks forced me to use IE as using any other browser will be full of incompatibility bugs. They made them on purpose.

So they forced me to use a Windows machine when I worked with Unix. I had to spend a thousand dollars so I could use my ebank and read-write my customer's Office documents(because MS also made very hard for Office documents for being standardized).

When I created my site I had to spend a lot more money so it worked on the main browser: Explorer. It was kind of hard to understand why it was so difficult to make something that worked in all browsers, it was always Microsoft fault there.

I calculated that I doubled my expenses because of non expected stupid incompatibility bugs on my web site. The people that made it really cursed the Redmon company.

The moment I could jump ship and work without Windows or Explorer I experienced an Enlightenment, a liberation: Now I just don't hate them, I simply don't care because I know the only reason they are doing the right things is because they lost the monopoly in some areas and had been forced to react.

Good for them, I prefer "don't be evil" than "embrace, extent, and extinguish" for now.

</comment><comment><USER22> Did you guys notice the OS X hand cursor when he tweets? Here is a screenshot: <http://imgur.com/ll0fq>

</comment><comment><USER23> Did you notice this in the ad?

<http://www.karaokewebstandard.org/>

<comment><USER24> I did notice, but didn't care enough about karaoke to look it up ;)

It's all great that Microsoft is trying to push the web forward again, they used to before IE6, but I'm not sure I like this new direction. WebGL, WebRTC and other APIs being pushed by every other major browser vendor looks much more promising and useful. Karaoke isn't making the web more practical, although it's a nice feature for entertainment.

<comment><USER25> I believe it is a continuation of the joke. Mimicking the look of w3c standards. It's also interesting to point out they are using google analytics

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Sucks less"? Well, that's totally going to make me feel tempted to give it a try...

Seriously, I started my web dev career at a time when IE had a market share of 80% and... I'm OK now.

I'm glad that Microsoft decided to embrace web standards and is committed to make IE easier to develop for but they'll have to do much more than this if they want to be taken seriously again.

</comment><comment><USER26> I used to love IE simply for OnMouseEnter and OnMouseOut... made JS dragging techniques super easy, compared to other browsers, but still couldn't use it cause they were the only ones so, pfft. I stood by them till Chrome came out. I preferred Microsofts decisions of how the web should be rendered over w3c.

<comment><USER27> I'm a fairly young developer so managed to avoid the IE6 problems.

Can you elaborate on which MS decisions you preferred over w3c?

<comment><USER28> The infamous IE box model is one thing where you could debate that one or the other was preferable.

<comment><USER29> Thanks to box-sizing we can finally have both, but thing haven't always been like this.

<comment><USER28> didn't know that one - thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think a good response to this would be a four hour live-coding session of trying to get shit to be backwards compatible with 6, 7, and 8.

Oh wait, I can't test your browser without a VM because I didn't buy your OS? Fuck you.

</comment><comment><USER31> Where is this ad going to be shown? Because, honestly, IE isn't that vilified outside of tech circles. My parents and friends happily use it without a second thought.

</comment><comment><USER32> It is an example of a symptom that has presented itself because of an underlying disease rotting away the core of Microsoft.

<comment><USER33> Do you mean the constant chorus of individuals who enjoy putting down MS for fun?

Or do you mean an internal cause?

<comment><USER24> I think both sides are equally bad here.

Bashing MS just for fun isn't very smart (for all their sins, there's a few good things coming out of Redmond - and Microsoft Research is just fantastic for the most part), but Microsoft is just lowering itself to the level of their critics here.

While a large part of the public has a biased opinion of Microsoft, Microsoft also has a biased opinion of their users - otherwise their marketing wouldn't feel so out-of-touch. I don't see any winners here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Found it interesting how they chose to portray the person doing the hating as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Follow up video is here, just for kicks: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=d...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dAecpAcyFCw)

</comment><comment><USER35> wishful thinking, MS... nobody gives a damn about your browser anymore

<comment><USER10> As I understand it the problem they're trying to tackle here is the opposite. That is, that some people still give too much of "a damn" about their browser and convince normal users to move away from it.

<comment><USER36> When I see an IE ad my first reaction is: "Wait, MS is still making a browser? How odd. Did not know that."

The reaction after that is: "Hmph. I wonder if it runs on any OS I run. (brief google) Nope, I guess not!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Lmao:

 _> IE implements HTML6.

> and 7, 8, and 9._

Oh, if only.

Good ad though, but they're still not there yet.

</comment><comment><USER38> So the message of this ad is that the new IE sucks _less_ than it's predecessors? That's what I took away from it.

</comment><comment><USER39> If you can't beat 'em, mock 'em!

</comment><comment><USER40> "Comments are disabled for this video."

What else is there to say, really?

</comment><comment><USER41> This was just submitted a few hours ago:

[http://cbateman.com/blog/whats-missing-in-internet- explorer-...](http://cbateman.com/blog/whats-missing-in-internet-explorer-10)

That's probably not even the full list of what's missing in IE10, as html5test puts IE10 way below the others in HTML5 features:

<http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html>

I wouldn't hold my breath for WebGL appearing even in IE11. Whatever Microsoft is saying, the "security" of WebGL is not the main reason why Microsoft is not the adopting it - not even close. Just like security is also not the main reason why Apple is not allowing other JS engines on iOS.

The security reason is used mainly as a "reasonable" excuse to cover for the _real_ reason why they aren't implementing it (they obviously don't want OpenGL to gain anymore traction that it has already gained in mobile and Linux). If security would be an excuse to not implement something, we'd probably still be in the dark ages of the web. Consider Flash, it's one of the least secure pieces of software out there, and yet it's also what enabled video on the web for everyone. It's the reason Youtube exists today.

The lack of support for XP, which is still like 40% of the market, means Chrome is still by far the most secure browser on XP, which is something companies who aren't going to get new PC's and Windows licenses anytime soon should start considering.

No full screen API, no Web Audio API, and no WebRTC (and no Opus either) are also very regrettable omissions from IE10, and it will be another year or two before it will get them. Who knows how far ahead Chrome and Firefox will be by then.

<comment><USER42> I'd bet that they will never support webgl in IE -- it competes too directly with the windows/xbox360 directx gaming ecosystem.</comment></comment>


Microsoft extends updates for Windows XP security products until July 14, 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/01/15/microsoft-extends-updates-windows-xp-security-products-july-14-2015/#!sj2X7 <comment><USER2> Skip the blog and go right to the source: [http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft- antimalware-support-for-windows-xp.aspx)

"To help organizations complete their migrations, Microsoft will continue to provide updates to our antimalware signatures and engine for Windows XP users through July 14, 2015.

"This does not affect the end-of-support date of Windows XP, or the supportability of Windows XP for other Microsoft products, which deliver and apply those signatures."

<comment><USER3> From reading the blog post it doesn't look like security updates will be released. This means you can be infected by any new vulnerabilities, but can clean it up.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the key words in the title are "security products": "antimalware engine and signatures".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ...mostly because newer versions of Windows are so absurdly bloated, and just as slow as a decades old machine on ever more powerful hardware, that there is almost zero benefit to upgrading beyond XP.

Seriously.

A single core 1.5GHz Pentium 4, with 512MB of RAM, running XP delivers all of the same features that Windows 7 delivers with a quad-core 3GHz iCore7 and 8GB or RAM.

Notepad still chokes on 500KB of plain text wrapped to the window, Paint still struggles with images above 5000 pixels square, MS Office still takes eons to load, and one large document created by any particularly incompetant user will destroy 15 minutes of your day. One bad tab in a browser (any browser), and your entire system might grind to a halt for minutes on end. Starting and stopping windows services takes ages. Hard drives are still just as noisy as fuck, and god knows what the fuck is even being paged to disk anymore. Network traffic is relatively opaque, despite prettied up WYSIWYG spikes on logarithmic line graphs of monitors that provide meaningless information.

And then Windows 8 comes along and tries to disenfrachise the common layman end user even further by covering everything up with a touch-based interface even for machines that have no touchscreen, and follows Ubuntu's lead of serving up ads in a local file search.

If you want a version of Windows that doesn't embody this nightmare, call Microsoft directly and provision an Enterprise account with one of their helpful sales reps. What's the price tag? Why, the sales rep will inform you of that once you answer some simple questions.

Gee, I wonder why "enterprises" refuse to budge off of XP.

<comment><USER6> Have you ever tried running a modern browser on a machine with less than 2GB of RAM? It's not pretty.

<comment><USER5> But that sort of plays into my point.

With a 64 bit version of XP, and 8GB of RAM, you could fit the entirety of the operating system in memory, paging file and all. A clean install of XP, with nothing else included, occupies about 3GB of disk space. You'd still have 4GB of RAM free to run the system.

But as of Vista, the mandatory minimum RAM was escalated (from 64MB) to 1GB, and all to support a hideous UI, and not much else. The operating system sprawls across 64GB of disk space.

With every new version, it feels just as shitty as before. Despite umpteen quadruplings of hardware resources, shit still feels like it's Windows 95, fucking again. Nothing gets faster. Drop $3,000 a year, just to swim against the tide, with incremental changes in the appearance of progress bars, so that ugly animations can actually flash periodically as they steal your youth from you, rather than inflicting anxiety whilst freezing intermittently.

Every subsequent version of Windows fails to improve, continues to suck, and in some areas it actually gets worse than it already is. But christ almighty. After 20 god damned years. Why?

<comment><USER7> Your parent's point is that at least some of the bloat is not actually Windows. There was a time when Firefox occupied tens of megabytes in RAM. Today it occupies at _least_ 500MB at all times, for me. So good luck with your 512MB Windows XP machine of yore- and that one isn't the fault of Windows.

<comment><USER5> An application installed at the option of the end user is not subject to the same rigorous requirements that an, oftentimes, compulsory operating system is subject to.

Especially when the operating system costs money, and lots of it.

<comment><USER7> I still don't see how Firefox bloating proves your point about Windows.

<comment><USER5> Maybe it has something to do with the background service Firefox has to bundle with their Windows installer now. You know, because Windows registries and Windows user policies are borderline retarded. But I agree, I'm really not sure why you decided bring Firefox into this discussion either.

<comment><USER7> dubfan was the one who brought up browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They will only update antimalware signatures, nothing else.

Direct link: [http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft- antimalware-support-for-windows-xp.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER9> Ugh. This operating system is almost old enough to vote. Can't they just let it die?

<comment><USER10> > Can't they just let it die?

Why?

If it aint broke don't fix it. What new features do the newer versions of windows provide that makes it worth spending money, and worse time to upgrade?

I don't use it myself but I know a TON of people on XP and the computer works fine, they use openoffice, a browser, and a few games.

Computers used to get faster all the time, that's not true anymore. They are now appliances - you use them till the break, instead of upgrading all the time.

<comment><USER11> The OS itself might not be broken (though I find 7 way better) but for some native app developpers like me the continued XP support is not welcome at all, since it means some of our customers will probably still not upgrade which means we still have to support them. And that means we cannot use all C++/C# features we want or have to resort to ugly workarounds. Just compiling C++ for XP means having to set a flag in Visual Studio, and if you want to do that for multiple projects automatically you've gotta do it system wide. Thats' not nice. Worse is .Net 4.5 is simply not supported at all, so no new goodies which are quite welcome.

<comment><USER12> That's your fault for choosing Microsoft as your development platform. You've put them in the driver's seat of your business, which is never a good thing.

<comment><USER13> Yeah! Who needs to target 75% of the desktop market!

[http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market- share.aspx?qprid=9](http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market- share.aspx?qprid=9)

<comment><USER12> Just because Microsoft dominates the desktop market doesn't mean you have to use their tool chain when developing for it - this is especially true when creating commercial applications, not so much for creating business applications for internal use.

Microsoft often places restrictions on their tool chain for marketing rather than technical purposes and if you're a commercial software outfit you should be very wary of using their tool chain for that reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I suspect Microsoft is planning to have Windows 9 available by then. I have a computer that is too old to run Windows 7, and was going to retire it. I'd rather not deal with Windows 8, and was considering replacing the old computer with a Mac or with a Linux machine. If Windows 9 is out by the time XP finally dies, I can stick with Microsoft Windows.

Update: It's just anti-malware signatures, nothing else :-( I really hope the new Microsoft CEO decides to extend XP support until Windows 9 is out so I won't have a tough choice come April.

<comment><USER15> I didn't know anyone _liked_ using Windows. Especially when you can get almost any UX under the sun in linux, assuming any proprietary software you need runs under wine.

<comment><USER16> I once spent a rather long time trying to get Linux to work like Windows, but in the end gave up because it still didn't "feel right" to me.

I think *nix has an awesome CLI, but dismal GUI options, while Windows is just the opposite.

<comment><USER17> Have you used KDE? It doesn't look like windows, but it is quite easy to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If I were MS I'd provide no updates to laggards. They either can't upgrade or they won't upgrade, so what's the point? What does another year of virus definitions really get them when the Fisher Price OS can already be exploited in so many other ways?

</comment><comment><USER19> I guess we also just learned the release date for Windows 9...

</comment><comment><USER20> Millions of machines about to loose MS support. Millions of machines unable to run windows 7/8/9\. Millions of people suddenly very interested in linux.

MS isn't worried that people won't upgrade. They are worried that they will.

Also, this may have to do with the Target malware as the afflicted POS machines appear to be running XP.

<comment><USER21> Not being a troll, but where do you think most of these people are going to buy these linux boxes? A quick search on bestbuy.com's top deals are all Windows 8 machines. I think these people are more likely do one of four things before migrating to linux:

\- Do nothing and use an un-patched machine \- Buy a Windows 8 machine \- Buy a tablet \- Buy a Mac

<comment><USER20> lol, I meant to say that they will be installing linux on the old XP machines, without buying new hardware. There are plenty of tiny distros that could keep those XP machines running safely for many years.

<comment><USER22> Fairly sure it's not shitty machines keeping XP alive... it's shitty custom software that only runs on XP and shitty IT departments.

<comment><USER23> >Shitty IT departments

There you go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Got a client said ,their oracle form only work on win xp internet explorer 7. Thanks god for them . But to me it was disaster because to suggest web application compliance to internet explorer 7 :( Anybody knew about their activation for windows xp after april 2014. i still got laptop using windows xp.. 2008 laptop.

</comment><comment><USER25> It is probably no coincidence this match the date of the end of support of Server 2003.

</comment><comment><USER26> Microsoft should spin off Windows XP (perhaps in combination with IE6) and sell it to some private equity firm for exploitation. It would live on for centuries ;-)

</comment><comment><USER27> Wasn't able to get Windows XP updates for months now. Not quite sure where the issue lies, but forums are roaring.</comment>


Editorial Team of Top Linguistics Journal Resigns Over Elsevier's Pricing Policy - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/02/editors-and-editorial-board-quit-top-linguistics-journal-protest-subscription-fees <comment><USER2> "Elsevier did not respond to an email sent Sunday morning seeking comment."

Seeing as it is only Monday lunchtime in Europe, and currently earlier than office hours in the USA, I don't think it reasonable to expect any company to have responded to such a query sent on a Sunday morning. Consequently I assume that the reporter/writer of the article was not really interested in seeking an honest balance in their reportage.</comment>


Can you name the 25 most popular programming languages? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sporcle.com/games/moogles/programlanguages <comment><USER2> Cool.

Also check out the related Hello, World! test <http://www.sporcle.com/games/psychofish25/hello_world_syntax> (where you really want to see if what language you type in matches the slot you think it should be in). Brought back some old memories.

</comment><comment><USER3> 21/25 with SQL, Assembly, Actionscript, and Delphi missing. What happened to Smalltalk?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm always kind of suspect of these 'programming language popularity' measurements because they usually rely on search engine result volume. I think a more meaningful metric would be, say, job openings by programming language.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is nice as well <http://www.sporcle.com/games/psychofish25/hello_world_syntax>

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't JavaScript be print('Hello, World!') instead of document.write('Hello, World!')? The DOM isn't part of JavaScript; it's just a common environment. I would assume that the official JavaScript shell's environment would be assumed instead.

<comment><USER7> Or rather: alert('Hello, World!')

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since when is SQL a programming language?

<comment><USER9> I put that on the list just to piss pedants off.

If you're not careful, I'll put HTML on there to see you really squirm:-)

Kidding aside, it's there because I think it's interesting to see where it stacks up against other things.

(By the way, the list I am referring to, is of course the original site at <http://LangPop.com> \- I had nothing else to do with this quiz)

<comment><USER10> Turing completeness should be the minimal standard to be considered a programming language. SQL is a pseudo-relational query & update language. HTML is a markup language. Both are useful. Neither are programming languages.

There are SQL extensions to make it Turing complete, because Turing completeness is pretty darn useful.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely correct, but I don't really give a shit :-) I'm curious to see how it fares against other languages. I'd rather have more data than less. You can always use a magic marker to cover it up on your computer screen if it offends you.

There's a reason behind things like that too. It's a good check on the results to see how well SQL does in, say, job listings, where one listing might be a hit for both Java and SQL, as opposed to Ohloh, where, yes, SQL is going to be present in many projects, but not a majority of the code. And that makes sense, because pretty much anyone out there is going to know and use some SQL, so as a job skill, it's extremely popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How is D is on the list? And how is Objective C less popular than Lisp?

I'd be curious to see where this list comes from...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I doubt it's in any way accurate. You can get a very rough guide (albeit skewed towards .net) from <http://stackoverflow.com/tags>.

<comment><USER9> It apparently uses my stats at <http://LangPop.com> . While the numbers are rough, and there are some (stated) biases, I think they do a pretty good job of reflecting reality, and in any case, you get everything broken down with a normalized chart, so you can play around with the weights of different things.

As to why anything is on that list: because I put it there. In some cases, after being asked to.

(BTW, I know the IRC numbers for the most recent version are a bit off - I'm currently working on that).

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, fair enough. I didn't spot the source. If you were omnipotent and could get at all the information directly, what would you consider to be a true measure of popularity? (Eg, number of people who know each language, total time spent writing in each language over the last week)

<comment><USER9> That's a good question! I think that even in that case, the best answer would be to break things out so that people could see the different categories. The amount of code in production (this is something where langpop.com likely falls short: I can't think of any way of getting data on all the COBOL out there without paying through the nose for it) certainly counts for something in terms of popularity, but so does the language most people know some of. So does what's hot these days and being used for new systems being written.

I think, though, that ultimately it doesn't really matter once you get past a certain threshold and see that people are writing libraries for the language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I guessed 21/25 in the time limit. Missed ones are Shell, ActionScript, Tcl, and Cobol.

<comment><USER13> 24/25. Missed ColdFusion.

Why the heck do they put SQL as a language but not HTML, CSS, or Makefiles? I kept trying variants of those, because once I got SQL anything goes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> lol I missed... delphi, coldfusion, scheme,tcl, cobol</comment>


Things I've learned deploying PHP app on Amazon EC2 WAMP/WIMP stacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.dave78.com/2009/09/29/scaling-php-apps-on-wampwimp/

<comment><USER2> Is there a reason for using Windows over Linux for *AMP type server any more?

<comment><USER3> Was there ever? I mean, they were running Apache, PHP, and MySQL. This makes no sense to use Windows, especially when you factor in the extra costs for the instance.

Sure, if you have some sort of Windows specific code you need to run, it _might_ make sense, but even in that case, it could be easier to run N Linux web facing instances and 1 dedicated Windows instance. For example, if you needed to run SQL Server, you could still access it from the Linux boxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lesson 1: Don't use PHP.

Lesson 2: Don't use windows.

<comment> w-ll I wish I could down arrow you right now!!!</comment></comment>


Tails 1.0 is out - <AUTHOR> https://tails.boum.org/news/version_1.0/index.en.html <comment><USER2> more info:

 _" Tails or The Amnesic Incognito Live System is a security-focused Debian- based Linux distribution aimed at preserving privacy and anonymity. It is the next iteration of development on the previous Gentoo-based Incognito Linux distribution. All its outgoing connections are forced to go through Tor, and direct (non-anonymous) connections are blocked. The system is designed to be booted as a live DVD or live USB, and will leave no trace (digital footprint) on the machine unless explicitly told to do so. The Tor Project has provided most of the financial support for development. Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Barton Gellman have each said that Tails was an important tool they used in their work with Edward Snowden"_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tails_(operating_system)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tails_\(operating_system\))

<comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this! I know I can just google it, but since the link from this item does absolutely nothing to just say what the hell Tails actually is, I probably wouldn't have bothered. Glad you posted this because it's actually good stuff to know about!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone seriously considering Tails, do invest either in a laptop with a dvd drive and run rails off non writable storage, or use something like a hardware switchable write usb: [http://www.amazon.com/Kanguru-Solutions-Flash- Write-Protect-...](http://www.amazon.com/Kanguru-Solutions-Flash-Write- Protect-KF3WP-32G/dp/B008OGNMEI/)

<comment><USER5> It would be nice if their bootloader "just" loaded the entire image into RAM and let the user continue booting and running without the USB drive attached. Optical drives are on their way out, USB drives with a trustworthy write switch are obscure (if they exist at all) and this seems quite secure. I'm using scare quotes because I don't know how difficult this is.

<comment><USER6> Tip: Most laptops have an SD card reader and most full size SDs still have write switches.

Also as SystemRescueCD does a load to RAM so it's certainly doable :)

<comment><USER7> This is not safe! The SD card write switches rely on the host to respect the state of the switch[0]

[0] [http://www.electronics-lab.com/blog/?p=2620](http://www.electronics- lab.com/blog/?p=2620)

<comment><USER6> Wow; I had no idea. -Thank you for the warning :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The planned update to Wheezy is important because it brings an update to OpenSSL. Updating OpenSSL on Squeeze is time-consuming and buggy, and a later version is required to run several software packages including Bitmessage.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does it make sense to run a Tails Virtualbox VM under a Linux host? (eg: Fedora)

<comment><USER10> That's the use case of Whonix.

[http://whonix.org](http://whonix.org)

<comment><USER11> Didn't know about this Physical Isolation feature[0] before. Does anyone have any idea how reliable this is?

[0]: [https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Dev/Build_Documentation/Physical...](https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Dev/Build_Documentation/Physical_Isolation/8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't wait for the pending UEFI support[1] so that I can use the official installer for Tails and boot with my Mac. Currently I have to use a custom installer[2] to get it to work.

[1] [https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/UEFI/](https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/UEFI/)

[2] [https://github.com/hellais/TAILS-OSX](https://github.com/hellais/TAILS- OSX)

</comment><comment><USER13> Please don't start using it as your permanent OS. As soon as you start regular browsing in tails you are overdoing it.

Tails is excellent for posting anonymous information to the internet, as long as it is a one time thing. If you first browsed reddit, read your (g)mail or looked at facebook, you are still quite easily identifiable!

</comment><comment><USER14> Did Edward Snowden really use it ?

<comment><USER15> Yes, according to this Wired article: [http://www.wired.com/2014/04/tails/](http://www.wired.com/2014/04/tails/)</comment></comment>


Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/why-luck-matters-more-than-you-might-think/476394/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> > In an unexpected twist, we may even find that recognizing our luck increases > our good fortune. Social scientists have been studying gratitude intensively > for almost two decades, and have found that it produces a remarkable array > of physical, psychological, and social changes.

At 62 years old I have started to reflect on my life and where I am in relationship to where I wished I was or envisioned in my youth. I have also reflected on luck and gratitude and faith. I will state right now that when I was in my late 40's I had to have emergency 4 way bypass. I was lucky that over the 3 days to get me to the right hospital I did not have a heart attack but just pain. My surgeon says I was lucky I just did not die suddenly.

While waiting on the doctors to get the paperwork signed by my wife I closed my eyes and said a little prayer. Now understand I am not a church goer but I am spiritual and since having an out of body experience at 5 years old always believed that we are all connected. So I asked God if I would be okay and to take care of my family should I die. God talked to me, or I imagined God talked to me. The difference to me does not matter. The content of what God said matters. "You will be alright and it is not about you, it is about the kids." I thought this was about my kids but I have come to believe that it is about many kids. So I work at a University now, I support FIRST Robotics in many ways, I take interns from High School on at work when I can, I mentor an occasional High School student and I help organize a local annual maker faire like event called RVA MakerFest.

I don't tell you these things to brag. In fact I just feel lucky that I have a purpose and can help in some small way to increase the success of a few youth.

So how does luck and hard work play into this? Well if I had heard God's message and not acted on it then my life would be different. I would not be making a difference with youth. If you are a "slacker" most luck is not going to change that. If you work hard then luck can play an additional role in what you achieve. I don't consider myself to be successful but I do consider myself to be happy. And maybe that is all that matters.

I'm lucky that I had an out of body experience (OBE) during a face injury when I was 5. I realized what the OBE was in college when I was reading some text about OBE. I am lucky that I had 4 way bypass and yet not a heart attack. I am lucky that out of 800+ resumes in my job search I found a local university to work for that is my dream job. I left banking which surely would have killed me.

I am lucky that I found my lovely wife and had two great kids. I am lucky for so much more.

I work hard and expect my staff to do the same. Without that hard work I would not have the time and the money to give back for mentoring youth. I would not have the ability to act on luck.

I try to reflect on my gratitude everyday. Sometimes during meditation, sometimes when going to bed, sometimes really at the top of my lungs in the car with screams of excitement about life. When I do, I see more opportunity to give more. Some might call this the miracles of coincidence some might call it abundance. I don't care what it is called. I just know it works for me.</comment>


Per Twitter's Request, We're Removing Auto Unfollow - <AUTHOR> http://blog.socialtoo.com/2010/01/14/per-twitters-request-were-removing-auto-unfollow/

<comment><USER2> For once I agree with Twitter.

Why would you want to automatically unfollow someone just because they unfollowed you? Either you're genuinely interested in their tweets, or you're not.

<comment><USER3> Because Twitter is about communication and conversations. And if someone unfollows you, it shows that they're not that interested in you.

I totally agree with reciprocating unfollows; I'll happily follow most (non- bot, non-spam) twitter people, because that's what makes Twitter interesting. But if they then unfollow me, clearly they're not interested in forming a communicative relationship.

Personally, I find it a little worrying that Twitter are dictating the use of their API: not in terms of number of requests (which they should be dictating), but what 'good practice' behaviour should be (which, perhaps, they shouldn't).

EDIT: I don't mean to sound so prescriptive; what I mean is that many people use it for conversations and communication; I understand some use it as 'RSS', and therefore - to these people - it doesn't matter if follows are reciprocated. But for those that want to use it to build relationships, auto- unfollowing makes sense.

<comment><USER4> To be fair to Twitter, they _do_ dictate usage rates, and I think the rates are pretty conservative:

<http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Rate-limiting></comment></comment></comment>


Code Golf and the Bitshift Variations [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqZgoNRERY8 <comment><USER2> If you run Linux (or Mac, if they have aplay utility), I highly recommend typing the C into a terminal and giving it a listen! The song's way more complex than you'd think could fit in that amount of data!</comment>


Show HN: Jumpy – An Atom Package for Jumping around Code - <AUTHOR> https://atom.io/packages/jumpy

<comment><USER2> This plugin literally made me go back to SublimeText. I used Atom for months but it was bothering me that it was slow. I saw this plugin and was super excited. This plugin absolutely rocks. However...It only further showed off how slow Atom is. Thanks to ohadron for linking the Sublime equivalent (makes me feel better about going back to Sublime).

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see any performance issues of notable concern with Atom. I've done my fair share of dev work both using Sublime and working on Sublime packages.

Are you constantly working in super large files or on an old machine?

Have you tried on the newest versions? They have made some serious performance upgrades: [http://blog.atom.io/2014/07/22/default-to-react- editor.html](http://blog.atom.io/2014/07/22/default-to-react-editor.html) And what react on atom is all about: [http://blog.atom.io/2014/07/02/moving-atom- to-react.html](http://blog.atom.io/2014/07/02/moving-atom-to-react.html)

Also, if my package was solely responsible for making you feel Atom was slow, :-( (really hope not) I have, with the help of another contributor changed the labels and animations, so that they all behave a lot faster now, and the whole feel is a bit cleaner.

Maybe give Atom another shot with react turned on?

Also, while the whole character level precision ace-jump like easymotion is great it's a little too complicated for my tastes. Several other people agree. How have you been liking it? Does it jump between panes/views? Can you use it to highlight text?

I almost had a sublime version of jumpy working (it jumped views) but I found the architecture of sublime packages at least 4x more difficult to develop than Atom packages (web tech / chromium etc.)

I think with the ease of development of Atom packages it's only a matter of time before Atom takes over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sublime Text equivalent:

[https://github.com/tednaleid/sublime- EasyMotion](https://github.com/tednaleid/sublime-EasyMotion)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very different. I had seen this a long time ago, wasn't able to get it to work at the time, and was recently reminded by someone about it. He actually said he prefers EasyMotion because of character level precision. I was thinking of trying to create that as well, but I noticed someone has already started with an atom plugin called quick-jump (Today).

Personally, I think jumpy is a bit easier on the brain, but only brings you to the words. Also the quick-jump doesn't yet seem to work for vim-mode or multiple pane jumping. I might try to contribute to quick-jump, or start my own depending on collaboration etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The vim equivalent:

[https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion](https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim- easymotion)

</comment><comment><USER5> like laser guidance for your vim commands. very handy!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

<comment><USER5> is there an example picture w/ alt styles?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nah, I didn't want to bloat the page, but I have a link to a gist that has it. It's super easy to do in Atom.

So.. Styles can be overridden in "Atom" -> "Open Your Stylesheets" [https://gist.github.com/DavidLGoldberg/58b96b80902724ba3c5a](https://gist.github.com/DavidLGoldberg/58b96b80902724ba3c5a)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


25 Years Ago Today: First Dot Com Address - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8567414.stm

<comment><USER2> How does this article get written without actually naming the domain name? I mean one can infer from the context, but seriously?

</comment><comment><USER3> And it was sold to some domain name troll.. this makes me sad.</comment>


Ask HN: Can a start up succeed with a CEO that no one wants to work for? - <AUTHOR> Our start up has ten "A player" employees and visionary CEO that very smart and capable himself, but all recent progress has existed without him and every project he joins dies, or at the very least stalls until he leaves. <comment><USER2> It sounds like you don't like this guy even if you respect his abilities.

If everyone here validates your implied assumption that "a startup can't succeed with a CEO no one wants to work for," what will you do?

On the other hand, if everyone here tells you, "sure it can succeed because people do all sorts of things they don't want to," what will you do?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was hoping for more than yes/no answers, so thank you. I suppose I will continue to grind it out..

<comment><USER2> You asked a yes or no question, so there should be little surprise that's most of what you received. Interestingly, my response was the only one that wasn't a simple yes or no.

I wasn't dismissing your question and I wasn't baiting you.

My point was to get the information needed to offer a substantive response, which you confirmed is what you are seeking.

If you are hoping for more I think you need to at least take steps to make that possible, i.e. provide more information, respond to the questions asked, rephrase the question to not make it a yes or no response, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not without exceptionally good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> No

</comment><comment><USER5> Nope.</comment>


How Airbnb Affects Home Prices and Rents - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-airbnb-affects-home-prices-and-rents-1508724361 <comment><USER2> "Policies should try to stop the conversion of properties from long-term rental units to short-term rental units."

Why?</comment>


Bloglines to close - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bloglines_closes_shop.php

<comment><USER2> I used to work on Bloglines. It's sad to see it finally die, but the writing was on the wall for years.

There are two questions I'd like Ask.com to answer: What will happen to the source code? and What will happen to the archive of RSS items?

Ideally, Ask.com would open source Bloglines and get the item data over to archive.org. We never deleted anything, so the item archive is around 11TB and has blog posts going back to 2003. I bet quite a bit of that data doesn't exist anywhere else. Although Sturgeon's Law applies, there are some gems in that data. I took a look once and found some interesting blog posts from the 2004 election cycle and Hurricane Katrina.

I seriously doubt that will happen though. Building an archival tool for the podserver/itemdbs would require more dev work, and there are the hardware costs of reliably storing 11TB.

<comment><USER3> I hope not - I had private RSS feed from things I don't want to share with the world, and I can't be the only one.

<comment><USER2> Bloglines already has that logic. It would be built into any archival tool as well. If the feed url scheme is https or if it's using http auth, it's private.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A bunch of folks in this thread have asked about an alternative that is better than Google Reader.

I created NewsBlur, <http://www.newsblur.com>, which is an intelligent feed reader. It shows you the original site (which is why I never liked using RSS in the first place, but once you read enough sites, you have little choice but to switch to a reader). It also has an intelligence trainer that allows you to explicitly hide and highlight stories that you like or dislike.

It imports directly from Google Reader. It's just a project, but if people like it well enough, I could be persuaded to add some more advanced features (metrics on your subscriptions, advanced AI, etc) for a monthly/yearly cost. I'm afraid to put a Paypal/Amazon Checkout button on there, because that means NewsBlur is held to a much more difficult/higher standard.

But anyways, please, offer feedback and let me know if you think this is a good alternative. I worked very hard on NewsBlur, and so I make it all open- source (everything from the feed fetcher, the reader interface, and the coming iPhone app) on GitHub, so that other developers could benefit from all the tricks and knowledge I acquired while creating this multi-faceted project: <http://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/>.

</comment><comment><USER5> So would now (now that everyone has left the market except the winner) then be a good time to create a new, better, nextgen kind of RSS reader product (or something similar)? Something to disrupt Google Reader, the new market leader? Will the pendulum swing back from centralized (twitter, fb) to distributed (rss)?

Similar question: is podcasting ever going to go anywhere? Would now not be a good time to create a product for that market, now that it's been abandoned by everyone for a few years?

Or are both these technologies/markets evolutionary dead-ends, ie. never going to go anywhere anymore?

Edit: I did a quick mockup :) [http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/09/10/4765/time-f...](http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/09/10/4765/time- for-a-new-type-of-feed-people-reader)

<comment><USER6> I've been working on a new style of RSS reader in my spare time for a month or so now. Current RSS readers treat RSS like email, which pressures the user to at least glance at every item. I have 177 subscriptions in Google Reader, so you can imagine how much of a time-suck it's become.

Some ideas to solve this: (1) eliminate unread-item counts from the UI, and (2) introduce Usenet-style scoring and some sort of smart (Bayesian?) filtering.

The goal is to allow the user to decide how much time to spend reading blogs: if she only has time to read 5 things before getting back to work, she simply sorts today's unread items by score and opens the first 5.

Unfortunately, I'm not actually a good programmer, so I haven't gotten far. If someone skilled would like to implement this, I'd be grateful.

<comment><USER7> You could try out Planetaki (<http://www.planetaki.com>) it doesn't do anything fancy, just just puts all your favorite websites on a single page (full disclosure: I used to work for the same company that made it). It's a relief from the task oriented feed readers.

Pro tip: once you sign up you can import your websites from google reader at planetaki.com/username/import (not linked yet because it's in beta).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I got back to using Bloglines, after I found out that Google Reader purges updates older than a month. Bloglines was obviously not doing very well and has had awful performance the last couple of weeks which has let me to try out Fever. That is, if my server didn't crap out. Heck, I think Bloglines' beta has been around longer than Gmail was back in the days.

For long, I've regarded the RSS reader market something missing some great minds and ideas.

This also brings up the discussion of keeping your data online - not only my subscriptions, but also my pinned updates - and what can be done about it. This obviously can't be exported, sadly. Sometimes, I just want Apple and Google to try to do everything so I at least know that I'll at least have all of my data somewhere.

Speaking of back-ups and portability, Bloglines seem to have removed its option to export the subscriptions as OPML in favour of XML. Can anyone verify this? It's pretty annoying to say the least.

<comment><USER2> Hmm? OPML is XML. To export your subscriptions, log in and then visit <http://www.bloglines.com/export>. That URL is linked to at the bottom of your feed tree, under the name Export Subscriptions.

<comment><USER8> Thanks. That's always something.

Seems the Beta version is already shut down, and all RSS updates and those Pinned are already gone. Appreciate the heads-up from Bloglines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I reluctantly switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a year or so ago when it became clear they weren't improving their product any further. Unfortunately, I've been just as frustrated with Google's lack of innovation. And it seems like the new services I've seen (Pinyadda, feedingo) are focused on dumbing down RSS for casual users rather than serving the needs of information professionals.

I keep track of a lot through RSS. I'm subscribed to almost 500 feeds, most of which are blogs and websites, with several that are search results or other monitoring feeds. Managing my feeds and seeing which feeds are providing me with value are my biggest pain points.

If there were a service that provided easy import from Google Reader (or an OPML file), that provided analytics on the feeds I'm subscribed to (update frequency, how often I read, how often I click through / save), good organization of my feeds (labels, not folders, ability to mark as high priority), and delicious-like saving / organizing of feed items, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER10> What would you pay for that though and how many people out there are in your position?

<comment><USER9> I'd pay $20 / month for it. More (up to $50) if I felt it improved my efficiency enough that I'm continually saving hours of time by using it compared to another service.

How many people subscribe to hundreds of feeds I don't know, but any modern journalist, industry analyst, political analyst, social media manager, or executive advisor tries to stay on top of many sources of information, and would find a tool that makes it easier to manage, optimize, & organize to be invaluable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All > non-Free software is a dead end."

\-- Mark Pilgrim, "Freedom 0", <http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0>

</comment><comment><USER12> I used Bloglines for a long time, and finally switched away a year or two ago after the lack of innovation and some frustrating problems got to me.

It's sad that Google is the only real game in town when it comes to web-based RSS readers - anyone know of any others?

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's what I want:

I just started using Instapaper recently - if there was an RSS reader integrated, I can easily add stuff into my to-read list. (OR, bloglines can integrate Instapaper into their reader - and that would also be hot.)

<comment><USER14> <http://blog.instapaper.com/post/163849131>

This allows you to send items to posts in google reader.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, a year or so back I switched from bloglines to the NewsFox plug-in in Firefox. It does everything I need.

</comment><comment><USER15> So I'm going through my bloglines feeds and re-entering them into feedingo.com. Apparently bloglines has been ignoring updates to over half my feeds for many months. The other reader finds very recent updates just fine. I had just assumed the feeds dead.

Thanks a lot bloglines. ಠ_ಠ

</comment><comment><USER16> who decided adding a captcha to the login process was a good idea?

<comment><USER17> That was seriously puzzling. Bad enough the site seemed to forget who I was (but only sometimes; seemed it depend on what URL I was using), but having to do that stupid captcha thing each time was tiresome.

Still, I really liked Bloglines. I've several hundred feeds there, mainly because it was so simple to add them and organize them. I tried Google Reader but something about it was just annoying and clunky and wrong.</comment></comment>


5th RISC-V Workshop Proceedings - <AUTHOR> https://riscv.org/2016/12/5th-risc-v-workshop-proceedings/ <comment><USER2> You might also be interested in my notes from the event:

[http://www.lowrisc.org/blog/2016/11/fifth-risc-v-workshop- da...](http://www.lowrisc.org/blog/2016/11/fifth-risc-v-workshop-day-one/)

[http://www.lowrisc.org/blog/2016/11/fifth-risc-v-workshop- da...](http://www.lowrisc.org/blog/2016/11/fifth-risc-v-workshop-day-two/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm particularly interested in Derek Atkins' talk on low-power crypto algorithms. He claims to have developed a DSA algorithm and a key exchange protocol that are both quantum-resistant and operate on very small numbers. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any published work on these algorithms outside of marketing material from his company's website (SecureRF).

I was however able to find some slides on Walnut DSA[1], but I haven't worked through the math yet as I'm lacking some required background.

[1]: [https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2016/10/1...](https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2016/10/19/atkins- presentation-lwc2016.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone know if / when videos will be available?

</comment><comment><USER5> I thought the talk on "Enabling hardware/software co-design with RISC-V and LLVM" was particularly interesting. Designing a chip around your your specific code with that sort of fast feedback looks really compelling if your volume is big enough to make it worth while.

</comment><comment><USER6> Trying to make sense of what the future will be made of, and how to be an early user of the value unearthed.

So basically the silicon is hitting some walls; and the only way to provide more performance is through hardware specialization. Which we are already seeing with Google's TPU [1] and AWS having a new FPGA instance type [2].

On top of this, hardware is getting cheap and fast iterations with RISC-V and its associated ecosystem and philosophy.

\----

From OP's link, in "OpenSoC System Architect: An Open Toolkit for Building High Performance SoCs" [3], slide 3:

> Continued increases in parallelism and heterogeneity will require advanced > runtimes, programming environments and compiler optimizations in order to > take full advantage of these new architectures

\----

Questions abound:

* Runtimes are supposed to provide reduced complexity, regardless of hardware; but the hardware is changing under their feet. Taking the topology of a manycore processor into account is paramount to performance. Can it really be abstracted away in the current runtime models we have? How do you influence programmers to be aware of it? Same thing for memory models. There will be vast amounts of diversity here. Will we see runtime support reasonably early?

* Speaking of abstractions, will there be a clear winner on this new hardware? Threading? Message-passing? A runtime accommodating lots of different ones?

* Will we see large amounts of library code go into hardware (these come to mind: http header parsing, JSON serialization, matrix multiplication, GC[4])?

* Could JITs offload things to specialized hardware, or is it a pipe dream? Intel is supposedly doing stuff for letting a JVM talk to an FPGA at runtime (probably following their Altera acquisition). No further news about this has transpired since the announcement at JavaOne.

* Will all these SoCs necessitate each a specialized abstractions/languages/DSLs? And with one runtime to bring them all and in the silicon bind them?

* The Graal/Truffle compiler[5] structure is doing well at optimizing across languages. Would it make sense in optimizing the way SoCs talk? Would it make sense in providing abstractions over vastly different hardware? Will there be one VM/Compiler to bind them all, x2 (languages + hardware)? I'd love chrisseaton's opinion on this.

* What will be the threshold for cloud providers to provide silicon as a service? E.g you have FPGA code for several customers; what would be the level of income at which getting it into silicon automagically in the datacenter make sense?

* More generally, will there be something new under the sun? Will there be entire new industries, application categories made reachable by hardware getting specialized? Or is it just some improved speed here and there?

* How can a user position himself so as make a profit from it? List current workload patterns, and offer ports to cheaper/faster hardware? (Waiting to do it through a runtime?) Or listen to newly enabled applications, and try to be part of the tide?

* How can a chip designer position himself so as make a profit from it? Make a Node.js_v7.2.1™ chip? Double down on a specific metric (be it latency, throughput, floating point operations, reconfigurability)?

[1] [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google- supercha...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercharges- machine-learning-tasks-with-custom-chip.html)

[2] [https://aws.amazon.com/fr/ec2/instance- types/f1/](https://aws.amazon.com/fr/ec2/instance-types/f1/)

[3] [https://riscv.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/12/Wed0900-OpenSoC...](https://riscv.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/12/Wed0900-OpenSoCSA-Fatollahi-Fard-LBNL.pdf)

[4] some elements in slide 25 of: [https://riscv.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/12/Wed1415-web-RIS...](https://riscv.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/12/Wed1415-web-RISC-V-jikesrvm-Maas-UC-Berkeley.pdf)

[5] [https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Publications+and...](https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Publications+and+Presentations)</comment>


Firefox Send: Send files with end-to-end encryption - <AUTHOR> https://send.firefox.com/ <comment><USER2> I wish Mozilla tools had opportunity to gain more traction, but it would seem the general population of the internet is blind to the fact that Mozilla is not only Firefox and Thunderbird. In fact many people I serviced (personal) computers for called the browser itself Mozilla. On the other hand Firefox is great in that it doesn't push unnecessary widgets on its users. Not even on default Firefox new tab. I guess it's up to users who love Mozilla to promote it.

</comment><comment> polski-g Anyone know how the encryption is performed?</comment>


How Many Passes? (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ericlippert/2010/02/04/how-many-passes/ <comment><USER2> I always wondered why the C# team chose to compile directly into assemblies. One main (accidental?) advantage of Java's way is that each .java file is compiled into its own .class file, which takes mere milliseconds.

The C# compiler is fast, but not millisecond-fast. You can code Java as if it's interpreted code but with better editor support and great error messages. Change the code, run the test or the program, bam, immediate feedback. With C# it's always been change the code, wait a little, ok well just a little longer, yay feedback. Those 5 seconds there really make a difference.

I assume there's a performance (or VM simplicity?) reason behind preferring assemblies - after all, you can statically link method calls without needing the JIT to do it for you. But it really hurts developer productivity. I wish they had done both - .class files in debug mode and entire optimized assemblies in release mode. Or something like that.

<comment><USER3> Java puts strict naming standards on your files to pull that off, although to be fair they are standards you should normally be following anyway.

IMO the fast performing code is best in the IDE's compiler, since that is even faster than a build in most cases.

Overall I think the .NET whole assembly building is at very least an interesting industry level example of something different that the common per- file build model used.</comment></comment>


Kent Beck predicted continuous delivery in 2000 - <AUTHOR> http://alistair.cockburn.us/Kent+Beck+draws+WIP+and+predicts+continuous+delivery+in+2000 <comment><USER2> Regarding the snarks about the unlabeled x-axis, _obviously_ it's time transformed so that days-of-work-not-yet-in-production decreases exponentially.</comment>


Why FinTech is failing the poor: A Behavioral Economics perspective [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://innovationforallcast.com/2019/02/20/fintech-poverty-behavioral-economics/ <comment><AUTHOR> Episode covers how can FinTech leverage behavioral economics to help people become more financially secure.

I was surpised at how many common practices of "money saving" apps are not supported by scientific research (or in some cases, just don't make any sense for those in more extreme poverty)</comment>


Catching crumbs from the table (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a0.html <comment><USER2> One thing I think is particularly interesting about this idea is the ways in which it already applies today.

Working with overseas-produced chips with no or poor English documentation is a kind of hermeneutics. The ESP8266 is a popular chip but mostly because of the (now) enormous body of third-party English-language instructions. The RTL2832 is perhaps an even better example - nobody knew it could even do SDR for a long time. In the west we rely a lot on third parties to bridge the gap with the real hardware hubs in Asia.

Popular science is another example. We can see lots of videos of people trotting around the LHC handwaving about how it works. Is that really useful if there's basically zero chance of the audience getting involved in particle physics? And yet widespread opposition to evolution and climate science shows that teaching science to non-scientists can be a wise investment.

And, of course, the infamous "programming by poking" metaphor from Sussman: "You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, 'Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?'" In other words, programming by hermeneutics. And yet, this approach solves certain problems far more quickly than building from the ground up.

I see these as an essential artefact of specialisation; we're not smart enough to be particle physicists, and computer scientists, and chip engineers. We can't understand everything, and as these fields deepen, they only get more incomprehensible. I'm sure most observations by one serious physicist to another would go totally over my head, despite my relatively decent amateur physics knowledge. It's maybe not a stretch to say that at some point to push the frontiers of physics you will need to be a physicist from birth.

So it seems we don't necessarily need a jump from human to metahuman; hermeneutics is important already, and going to become more so as our specialists become more specialised. Greg Egan once wrote about passing important information through a kind of enormous transhuman game of telephone, where each kind of intelligence translated the concepts into a form its nearest intellectual neighbours could understand, and so on until it spread to everyone. Perhaps that's where all of this ends.

<comment><USER3> Well put.

Except:

> _And, of course, the infamous "programming by poking" metaphor from Sussman: > "You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that > poke it and see what it does. And you say, 'Can I tweak it to do the thing I > want?'" In other words, programming by hermeneutics._

I'm afraid that this is sometimes the excuse for not documenting software -- sort of a, "Hey, here it is, just poke at it, you'll figure it out!" kind of attitude. Eat your veggies, rotate your tires, document your code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know how many people realise this, but Nature puts out great little SF short stories. If the interaction between humans and "metahumans" tickle your fancy, I can recommend Peter Watts' Blindsight/Echopraxia as well.</comment>


Ask HN: what is your wishlist for cloud computing features? - <AUTHOR>

I will be speaking on a panel to discuss features that developers want for cloud hosting (e.g. related to security, payment, storage, performance)...
What's on your wishlist?
What do you wish EC2/AppEngine/Heroku/... could do? <comment><USER2> _What do you wish EC2 [...] could do?_

FreeBSD!

Or maybe I should say that I wish FreeBSD could do EC2, since this is currently blocked by deficiencies in FreeBSD's Xen code. Either way, I wish I could stop using Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER3> Single image, multiple machines.

That would be a pretty big step.

Then we can finally forget about things like cluster topology and inter-node transfers because they would all be completely transparent.

A node breaking would simply cause the unified virtual machine to become a little slower.</comment>


Show HN: NotifyGrid, HTTP POST to Send Notify to SMS, EMail, Slack Channel, IMs - <AUTHOR> https://notifygrid.com.au <comment><AUTHOR> I am wondering if there is some value to create a WebHook Center, which enable users to use simple HTTP POST to send notifications to various receivers like Email, Mobile phone(SMS), Slack Channel, IMs. It is not difficult to set up all of these by individual. But extracting this feature into one product seems a good way to reduce cost overall.</comment>


Foxconn Pledges Big Changes in Working Conditions - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/business/apple-supplier-in-china-pledges-changes-in-working-conditions.html

<comment><USER2> In other news Foxconn pledges to buy a ton of robots...</comment>


Millennials Can't Afford Homes After Exiting the Basement - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-24/millennials-will-be-poorer-than-parents-if-they-can-t-buy-homes <comment><USER2> The truth is they cannot afford homes in the cities they'd prefer to live in. This is supply & demand, and local city councils are artificially restricting the supply while demand is high, which only increases supply, and interest rates are at their lowest, which also increases demand. It's a simple econ math model.

Millennials need to move to suburbs and other towns which have more affordable living. Just because they want to live in city X doesn't mean they deserve it.</comment>


Thue – Morse sequence and how I discovered I wasn't alone after all - <AUTHOR> http://linkdot.link/abbabaabbaababba/ <comment><AUTHOR> A compilation of properties of Thue Morse sequence and the story of my obsession with it as a kid. Nothing original as such. Would love to hear if anyone from the Hacker News community experienced this. I'm new to programming so please don't judge me if the code snippets aren't up to the mark. Would appreciate constructive feedback.

<comment><USER2> For a while, when I was young, I obsessively shaded in squares on graph paper whenever it was in front of me. I believe I often converged on this pattern as my favorite.

<comment><AUTHOR> You would love this Youtube channel in that case :)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart](https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Coworker is moving on, how to celebrate virtually? - <AUTHOR> The team I work on is mostly geographically centralized. Traditionally, I would set up a team event such as an outside lunch or mini golf as a farewell / well wishing event To celebrate and thank the person moving on.
With quarantine this obviously can't happen. Does anyone have some ideas of what do virtually to achieve the same effect?
I'm open to spending money but can't do anything over ~$100 US. <comment><USER2> Copy what Jim Krazinski did for Some Good News</comment>