Omnisharp – Tools and extensions to work with C# in any editor - <AUTHOR> http://www.newventuresoftware.com/blog/bring-net-development-into-your-favourite-editor-with-omnisharp/ <comment><USER2> I use Omnisharp pretty much daily with emacs, on Windows, in my day job (mainly ASP.NET MVC development). I still use VS, mostly for managing MSBuild files, NuGet package configs, and debugging. But it's nice to have a more capable text editor than the one in VS for lots of text wrangling tasks.

<comment><USER3> Why not use VsVim or ViEmu? Then you get a proper text editor, but all the VS niceness, too. Actually if you're using Emacs , you're in the same place, having to install Evil and all.

<comment><USER4> Not OP, but maybe because he's not using any of the vi stuff? He nowhere said he's using evil or anything. Just emacs.

<comment><USER3> Sorry I just inferred due to "text wrangling tasks" :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My first thought - someone should do this with Java as well. One could argue that Java developers are held hostage by IDE's stuck in the past.

As a Java developer, I'm given a platform when all I needed was something a lot simpler. Note that autocompletion is not enough to efficiently code in Java though (especially Java EE), you need a bit more - but the current IDE's are relics of the past.

My personal opinion is that IntelliJ is the best IDE out there, but I'd like to see a vast simplification of your typical Java development environment.

<comment><USER2> It would be nice. There's an older package for doing Java completion, JDEE, which takes a similar approach (running a helper in BeanShell). But it is difficult to configure, and fragile, and doesn't have enough active developers to keep it up to date.

OmniSharp is a lot simpler, in that you just point the server at a solution file, and it just works. There was talk on the JDEE mailing list a while back about doing something similar using Maven POMs, but I don't think it took off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not a .NET guy but I played with OmniSharp for a while with Unity3D in Emacs and it's definitely really cool. Nice to have a powerful autocompletion engine for .NET that plays nice with Linux.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was literally giddy with excitement the other day when my first ever open source contribution was merged in to the OmniSharp generators project.

(which I think is unrelated to this, but maybe run by the same people. I can't tell if OmniSharp is its own standalone company staffed entirely with MS people, or what - or is it just a "club" of really smart MS people?)

Nothing more than a few lines but they were the difference between being able to see a webpage a 500 error on the default templates so maybe a little worthwhile.

It was so _very_ enjoyable and fulfilling to be working on a project that will be used by so many people. And the nature of giving back to the community really was its own reward.

I'm looking forward to this new world of .NET where it is so much more open and average joe developers can throw in fixes for weird things they find in real time, rather than waiting on bottlenecks at the company.

<comment><USER8> Omnisharp is mainly community members getting together to produce it. The idea was originally devised by Jason Imison. A couple of MS guys wanted to get involved and now VSCode uses Omnisharp under the hood. So whilst there are a couple of MS guys involved and VSCode uses it, Ominsharp is a community project

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used Omnisharp + vim for Unity3D development and it was working surprisingly well. I would highly suggest you use it for C# development if you are not happy or cannot use IDEs such as MonoDevelop or VS.

<comment><USER10> I use C# all the time on Linux, mostly on MonoDevelop. But when I'm not using C#, I use vim, so I have tried Omnisharp+vim several times hoping to rid myself of MonoDevelop. Unfortunately, the performance of vim tanks when I have OmniSharp installed, even when I'm not editing C#. Hoping that NeoVim's improvements to asynchronous plugins helps this.

<comment><USER3> What about Evil in Emacs? I've heard/seen great things about this model versus using vim. (But haven't gotten around to it yet.)

<comment><USER11> omnisharp-vim author here. I switched to emacs around 18 months ago for exactly the reasons described here.

For the last few months, I don't write C# any more, but still use emacs for F# development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have tried omnisharp with every editor I can think of (Vim, Emacs, Atom on Ubuntu) and have never gotten it to work correctly, so I've given up. Maybe never is a strong word.. I think I had it working for a week until a new version broke it again.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've only used omnisharp vim once, but the main problem was the configuration files. They're always seemed to be problems.</comment>


TokuDB open sourced - <AUTHOR> http://www.tokutek.com/2013/04/announcing-tokudb-v7-open-source-and-more/ <comment><USER2> I can't help but think that this announcement is 5 years too late. 5 years ago the field for write-optimized database was wide open and obviously there was a lot of demand for such a product or otherwise companies like facebook and Powerset wouldn't have had to write their own versions.

But since there was no open source software available for this usecase back then, they did write their own, which became Cassandra and HBase. And now these SSTable type of solutions have become the de facto standard for write- optimized databases.

If Tokutek had open sourced TokuDB from the very beginning things could have turned out very differently. TofuDB had an huge advantage over Cassandra/HBase in being SQL-oriented and based on MySQL, whereas Cassandra/HBase required a much steeper learning curve. But since TokuDB was proprietary, it never really gained much traction.

<comment><USER3> One big differentiating feature between TokuDB and other write optimized databases is that TokuDB is fully transactional, it is ACID compliant. There is a demand for this.

AFAIK, TokuDB is the only write-optimized transactional data store. We (I work at Tokutek) are working on integrating with MongoDB as we speak, and when we do, we will bring transactional semantics to MongoDB in addition to improved performance.

So, I think there is still a big demand out there that TokuDB will be able to meet

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.tokutek.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fannouncing- tokudb-v7-open-source-and- more%2F&aq=f&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.tokutek.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fannouncing- tokudb-v7-open-source-and- more%2F&aqs=chrome.0.57.2161j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER5> > Tokutek, a leader in high-performance and agile database storage engines....

"Database Error: Error establishing a database connection"

Ouch!

<comment><USER6> Heh

<http://i.imgur.com/2WhDwFI.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> TokuDB is great technology, glad to see them embracing open source. Too bad their wordpress installation needs some tuning!

<comment><USER8> The site is down. What is great in this technology ?

<comment><USER9> The main technical underpinning (though note this isn't my area) seems to be basing indices on a particular improvement to B-trees, Cache-Oblivious Streaming B-Trees, which have some nice performance characteristics. I _think_ what TokuDB calls "fractal trees" are just a catchier synonym.

Here's an academic paper from a few years ago from some of the people involved: <http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/sbtree.pdf>

And a more recent talk focused on TokuDB: [http://www.bnl.gov/csc/seminars/abstracts/Bender_Presentatio...](http://www.bnl.gov/csc/seminars/abstracts/Bender_Presentation.pdf)

<comment><USER10> We have some more descriptions of Fractal Tree Indexes at <http://tokutek.com/what-is-a-fractal-tree>, and I'm always happy to answer questions about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Error establishing a database connection" - Irony.

<comment><USER12> Shit happens - to everyone, even DB guys. Even with DB's. And I'd say more often with DB's to DB guys than with DB's to anyone else ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sadly, we don't use TokuDB to run our web site. It's some relatively inexpensive service.

</comment><comment><USER10> We're trying to contact the website folk but they're mighty busy announcing things right now. I'll let you all know what happened soon. In the meantime, here's a press release you can read: [http://www.marketwire.com/press- release/tokutek-meets-big-da...](http://www.marketwire.com/press- release/tokutek-meets-big-data-demand-with-open-source-tokudb-1781248.htm)

Also, we're on github: <http://github.com/Tokutek> and on IRC at #tokutek on irc.freenode.net, so come hang out!

</comment><comment><USER14> Does this mean that it's now safe for folks to write their own versions of the data structures that tokutek has patents on? They hold patents on some of the more natural choices In cache oblivious b trees (admittedly they also invented those retrospectively natural choices).

<comment><USER15> Oh what a world. A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors.

I'd really like to see TokuDB discuss its patents, why they have them, and what they intend to do with them. I'd like to see a page like that from every corporation on their website actually.

<comment><USER16> "A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors."

Can we please let this disingenuous argument die already? Yes, in theory they can spring up in many minds independently. In practice they rarely do unless they are trivial. If the alleged disparate inventors can prove they came up with it independently, fine; the onus is on them.

<comment><USER15> In practice, independent invention happens all the time, and we end up with absurd patent lawsuits as a result.

<comment><USER16> AFAIK none of these ludicrous patents are about data structures, algorithms or math formulas.

<comment><USER17> I find that somewhat difficult to accept, given that pretty much every single patent that touches software is ludicrous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Link to source code: <https://github.com/tokutek>

</comment><comment><USER18> Was quite looking forward to reading this, but when I clicked the link, I was faced with: <http://imgur.com/wwEogpx> I think there's a certain irony seeing as this is a database related announcement!

<comment><USER19> You took a screenshot of plain text. Did "Error establishing database connection" not suffice?

<comment><USER20> Well ... I think it's actually pretty good bug reporting habit. Was it text/plain or unstyled text/html? Was the body an error message but a styled header and footer present? You might want to copy and paste the text as well, to aid future copy and paste efforts, but it's surprisingly frequently useful to have a screenshot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> LOL "Error establishing a database connection"

</comment><comment><USER22> OK, we are all learning first hand here about the "slashdot" effect <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect> (now Hacker news effect).

We are working to get the site back up (a simple Wordpress site set up by the marketing department that does not use our database). In the meantime, please take a look at <http://mwne.ws/124r2GL>

Thanks for all the comments. We clearly didn't anticipate this level of excitement, but are grateful for the interest.

</comment><comment><USER3> And our google groups: \- tokudb-dev \- tokudb-user

</comment><comment><USER23> Ok, the website is starting to come back online after our huge spike in traffic.

Thanks for all the interest and for your patience...

-Tokutek

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone have a cached page?

<comment><USER25> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=fi&q=ca...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=fi&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tokutek.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fannouncing- tokudb-v7-open-source-and-more%2F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Any plans to have this as an indexing option for PostgreSQL?

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there any testimonial using TokuDB?

<comment><USER3> Hope this helps, from Tokutek's website: <http://www.tokutek.com/solutions/>

<comment><USER28> Edit, oops followed parents link to this: <http://www.tokutek.com/products/tokudb-for-mysql/>:

"Tools such as Hot Backup (coming soon) allow a backup to be completed while database is running."

\- Does that mean that someone using the opensource version would be unable to take a backup of a running database?

<comment><USER10> Someone using the open source version can take backups just as they would with our versions prior to 7.0:

\- snapshots (LVM, EBS, etc...)

\- cold backups

\- mysqldump (with MVCC, this is technically hot)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Induction: A Polyglot Database Client For Mac OS X  - <AUTHOR> http://inductionapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Serious question:

Can't someone just add database drivers to Sequel Pro? It's far and away the best Database GUI I've ever used and its reliance on MySQL is actually keeping me from moving to PostgreSQL full time.

(i.e. <http://www.sequelpro.com/> and <http://www.sequelpro.com/docs/Source_Code> \- a little crazy they're still on SVN but oh well)

<comment><USER3> I've never used Sequel Pro, but I've used plenty of other RDBMS GUIs. What's so special about Sequel Pro? It certainly doesn't look like anything to write home about (compared to say the MS SQL tools).

<comment><USER4> I'll take a shot:

1) Every GUI function results in a SQL log entry so you can learn/improve your SQL if you're not a guru.

2) You can give this to an analyst (whose db user is restricted appropriately) and have them be productive in adding and updating data.

3) Any view can be exported to CSV, so the analyst can use what they know (ie, Excel) to do things you might not care about but are important (ie, pivot tables, etc).

4) It's free.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the list. Those are nice features. The SQL Server tools can do all that (except the free part, but the cost of the client is kind of included in the SQL Server license cost). Still, sounds like a nice app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This idea is friggin awesome and definitely something I'd pay for. My apps are pretty evenly divided at this point between MySQL, Postgres, and MongoDB, and I don't see that trend going away any time soon (we always pick the db that makes the most sense for each particular project). Having them all available in the same app would be amazing.

With that in mind, just to warn everyone, this is _very_ alpha-level software. It only supports postgres and redis right now. If you put the wrong credentials in, there's no feedback, it just seems like nothing happened. Also, trying to resize the window turned everything white for me and the app had to be rebooted.

If you decide to use it (and please do, because I want this to work), be sure to have your Mac's system log opened in console, so you can see what's going on.

UPDATE: Looks like someone has already submitted a pull request for the "no feedback on wrong credentials" bug I mentioned [1], and I created a ticket for the resize issue [2].

[1] <https://github.com/Induction/Induction/pull/8>

[2] <https://github.com/Induction/Induction/issues/10>

</comment><comment><USER6> "for Mac OS X" breaks my heart, because this is exactly the kind of open- source DB client I want on Linux.

At least I can use this when I'm on my Air, but I recently went looking for a multi-DB client app like this for Linux, and this looks like what I was _wishing_ I would find.

<comment><USER7> Written to what API? Gnome, X, Qt? You'll be addressing a slice of a fraction of potential users. It'd be great if it weren't the case, but the diversity that makes linux interesting to hackers also makes it really tough to roll out GUI apps like this and have it 'just work'. I get the sense that's a good part of the appeal of OS X for the developer community lately - mostly Linux-ish when you need it, but a unified GUI experience for the pretty tools (e.g. TextMate, Base, and so on)

<comment><USER8> That's just patently untrue: either GTk or Qt would work perfectly. I don't see why the desktop environment would matter--the program doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't) care whether I'm on Gnome or KDE or Unity.

Moreover, all the popular environments support both GTk and Qt fairly well, and both are cross-platform, so you would actually be supporting _more_ users than with a Mac OS-only program.

Really, fragmentation like this is not nearly the issue people make it out to be. Basically, everybody can use everybody else's programs on Linux, with the exception of very odd or customized systems. And the sort of people who have very odd and customized systems can fix problems themselves.

EDIT: Also, you could use wxWidgets. That would give you a native look on all the platforms you support.

I would also like to clarify that I understand an OS X user wanting to write an OS X-only program. The real issue is dissuading others from supporting Linux because of non-existent fragmentation issues. They simply do not affect people using GTk or Qt, in practice.

<comment><USER9> > Moreover, all the popular environments support both GTk and Qt fairly well, > and both are cross-platform, so you would actually be supporting more users > than with a Mac OS-only program.

By that logic Windows should be first since it has the most users. Also, are you sure that the installed base of Gtk+ or Qt (or both) is greater than the installed base of OS X?

<comment><USER8> Well yes, because unless I'm much mistaken, Qt and GTk are both supported by OS X so they are both supersets. (This is obviously ignoring Windows, which is also supported by Qt and GTk but is probably difficult for other reasons.)

There are also cross-platfrom native options like wxWidgets. These also work both on Linux and other systems.

Finally, the last StackOverflow survey[1], which I think is pretty representative of the sort of people who would use a program like this, had both Linux and OS X at about the same level (~20% each). So Linux is certainly not negligible.

[1]: [https://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=2RYrV_2bFw2aZ2RfedWH...](https://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=2RYrV_2bFw2aZ2RfedWHNW_2f0DgNnatyQnvvrorWEYhuAQ_3d)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't this just reinventing ODBC?

Back in the day you could whip together an app like this using Borland's dev tools in literally a matter of minutes, and it worked with any data source configured on your system.

And I think there's a YouTube video that has Steve Jobs demoing that same sort of data access using only Interface Builder on NeXTSTEP.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER11> ODBC is fairly complex (both to work against and to implement providers for) and is very much tied to relational databases.

It's also unevenly implemented: On Windows there's native Microsoft-provided ODBC (but in terms of focus it has been superceded by ADO, which superceded OLE DB, which was supposed to be the replacement for ODBC — it's not like Microsoft ever settles on a single technology), and on Unix there's UnixODBC. I don't know about the driver quality; I suspect Windows ODBC drivers are quite good, whereas JDBC has been favoured by the server/enterprise world for a while, and I would not be surprised if UnixODBC drivers were a bit behind the times.

As for the Borland dev tools, they also used their own proprietary data source tech: The BDE (Borland Database Engine), which had an ODBC bridge built in. I remember being quite fed up with the BDE at the time, and eventually started using a set of native ODBC components that someone developed.

Cocoa does have a sort of rich data framework that you refer to: Core Data. Unfortunately it's quite complex, and not really designed to be a common interface to databases, but rather a sort of data abstraction layer where you work with objects and never see any SQL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone have an actual build of this? I just uninstalled XCode this morning and replaced it with Apple's new CLI dev tools, otherwise I'd try building it myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Builds are available at <https://github.com/Induction/Induction/downloads>.

<comment><USER13> The built copy only seems to support PostgreSQL and Redis, but the site mentions MySQL, SQLite, and MongoDB too. Is that coming soon?

Edit: I could have answered this question for myself by reading... Skimmed the line that explains that on the site and just caught it now. Oops ;)

<comment><USER14> I didn't notice the note at first either. They should probably revise the whole sentence to make it clearer that it doesn't yet support those "out-of- the-box" instead of a note afterwards.

I'm yearning for the MongoDB support myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd do this myself if I had time, but I'd love a homebrew formula for this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wonder if I'll be able to get this working with Oracle. Unfortunately (believe me, I've complained and hope to change it in the future) I have to use Oracle at work. Would love to use this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oracle support would be very awesome (and hopefully very possible). I designed the protocols to be extremely simple; check the Postgres one for an example (~500 LOC)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if this could be used to hook up something Excel-ish to a DB backend.

I use Excel frequently to model and ask "what-if" questions but I often wish I could store/retrieve information dynamically from a DB. (The ODBC connectors that Excel has leave much to be desired).

For my use case, that would be the holy grail.

<comment><USER18> This commercial solution seems to be languishing in relative obscurity: <http://www.querycell.com/>

<comment><USER19> Somewhat off topic, but I remembered the author of this Excel add in's "Ask HN" when it first came out ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794317> ). 2 or 3 years later, it looks like he's expanded and now has 2 software products and a SAAS ( <http://www.OakFocus.net/> ), so very inspiring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks interesting, but there are no binaries and the XCode project didn't compile right away.

(I guess, being a software developer, I should go and try to figure out what's breaking the building process. On the other hand, I've never used XCode and don't know enough about OS X library management to figure out broken deps)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that!

Binaries are up at <https://github.com/Induction/Induction/downloads>

Let me know what build errors you're getting. I would do well to document the requirements (Postgres, Redis)...

<comment><USER21> I'm getting lots of "Unknown property attribute 'strong'" type errors (which I suspect would go away if I upgraded to XCode 4.2?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that should do it :)

Induction is my first real project with ARC, so I'm figuring this out as I go along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For someone thinking about building a java version - this might help: <http://schemacrawler.sourceforge.net/>

(I don't think that it supports noSQL.)

</comment><comment><USER23> This would have been great when I was taking the Stanford DB class a few months ago.

I like it, looks much nicer than any of the solutions I'm aware of currently.

</comment><comment><USER24> I got it to build using Xcode 4.3 (with warnings), but since my Postgres user and database names don't match, I can't connect to my local database.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can specify the database as the path of the connection URL. I'll add a field for that ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> really interesting. im excited to check this out. what are you using for the data visualizations?

<comment><AUTHOR> d3.js embedded in a web view. That's a sister project I'm calling "Lies, Damned Lies", and will include a variety of canned charts to plug into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This looks like it might be less painful for simpler postgres databases than Navicat. Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER27> RazorSQL is excellent too, and connects to lots of different databases through jdbc.

</comment><comment><USER28> DbVisualizer is a nice RDBMS client that is cross platform, supports many databases, graphs table relations, and comes in a free or $$ flavor:

<http://www.dbvis.com/>

</comment><comment><USER29> Very cool. This is my current suite of DB apps:

\- Navicat \- PGAdmin III \- SeqlPro

Looks like I will add this as a fourth. Big win on the visualization feature!

</comment><comment><USER30> It should be noted somewhere that this project currently appears to only work on OS X Lion due to usage of a few Lion-specific classes, namely NSOrderedSet.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is incredible! Kudos. I can't wait to try this out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's super alpha, but I hope to iterate quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The list of 5 databases are precisely the set of database technologies used across my entire projects folder... Suite!!

</comment><comment><USER33> This looks great! I maintain a number of PostgreSQL DBs so being able to visualize it locally will be a great resource.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like the design on that landing page. The most relevant bits are also the most apparent.

</comment><comment><USER35> Oh, I'd love it if it supported the Google AppEngine datastore!

</comment><comment><USER36> If I could just marry something like this to DataGraph. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is freaking awesome and I can't wait to build it.

<comment><USER38> I'm lazy, where's the binaries? :3

<comment><USER37> Theres a binary hosted on the github page somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is there a visual query designer?

</comment><comment><USER40> What's the appeal of this? Just use SQuirreL or DBArtisan.

<comment><USER41> DBArtisan, while a very good tool, is expensive, and Windows only. It is one of the few remaining reasons I keep a Windows VM.</comment></comment>


WeChat's world - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21703428-chinas-wechat-shows-way-social-medias-future-wechats-world <comment><USER2> Has anyone criticizing it actually tried weChat?

I know that there are better ways to do things, and you don't have to accept the "Chinese way" of doing things, but that's mainly politics, and yes there ARE a lot of privacy concerns, but, and there's a big but.

Technically speaking, the app is amazing. I recently used it to talk to my girlfriend while she's in China and seriously, it's the best (face to face) communication app I have used. I'm not talking about any features in particular, though it does feel very stable. I'm talking about un-interrupted voice communication for hours and hours!

I've lived abroad for the last 4 years, so I use skype and Hangout and facebook call and whatsapp call and appear.in and any new hipster service that comes up a lot. The main thing they have in common is that I spend a quarter of the time saying "hello, hello, do you hear me?"

This is the best VOIP service I've ever tried, period. It just works.

My point does not address the privacy concerns and so on, but seriously, I really think that most people commenting here are implying that the app is necessarily crappy, reality isn't that simple. I'm seriously trying to get my friends to use it, I will not discuss very sensitive matters over it, but seriously, if you're really concerned about privacy, you probably shouldn't be using any of the big ones anyway.

<comment><USER3> I have in fact used WeChat (particularly when I was in China) and my opinion is that it's still incredibly mediocre.

In just a few weeks of using it, I ran into numerous bugs and inconsistencies—not to mention the fact that it's a giant walled garden with zero privacy.

Unfortunately, it is essential in China (primarily because alternatives are throttled/banned). I definitely would never use it anywhere else though if I had a choice.

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate on the bugs you found during the weeks? I have used it years and have yet found any bug.

<comment><USER3> It was 2 years ago, so I don't really recall most of the bugs. I do remember struggling mightily when I somehow lost access to my account. Restoring access required opening a janky web view with a form that wouldn't load properly on my iPhone so I had to borrow a friend's Android phone to try. Then the form was entirely in Chinese with no internationalization/translation available.

<comment><USER2> Oh, coincidentally, I've just had to do that, and it's true it is still a little bit "janky" since it's a webview and the process is a weird, but it was perfectly doable, it was also internationalized,

Not saying the app is perfect though, I'm sure it has lot's of bugs, and to be honest I definitely haven't used it fully, since I just use it for this one contact and mainly just talk, I was specifically talking about having good stable conversation for hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> .. which is terrible. Apps like these (including Facebook) are breaking the Internet.

Now it's up to the social network to decide how resources are located (what standards?), who can access them, and for how long, etc.

Saw a good video in your Facebook timeline ? Good luck finding it again after you refresh the page.

It's a pity how 'the crowd' is now dictating the direction in which technology evolves. By trying to please the users at all times, we the tech people have now created these golden cages for users - in which their identities are commodified and sold to the highest bidder.

This is not the Internet we once dreamed about and 'social media' apps like these are getting it further and further for that vision every day.

<comment><USER6> So don't use it? I'm not sure how your comments reflect on WeChat; it's not like stores are insisting on you paying through the app, or that businesses are forcing you to use WeChat to contact them. It's an added convenience, and it seems people like that.

<comment><USER5> I generally try to avoid these services, but it's impossible to not use some of them, because of their monopolistic position.

I have to use Facebook sometimes because people use it to organise events, concerts and other things which are now inaccessible to me unless I use Facebook. Which is terrible.

These services are bad _because_ they are popular and successful and _because_ they try to offer more and more services on top of the 'social' aspect.

>it seems people like that

That's exactly my point. By catering to what the masses 'like', we're slowly closing the door to the 'free Internet', replacing it with a hegemony of "social" networks, owned by big corps.

And people don't just 'like' that - otherwise companies wouldn't have sales and marketing and advertising departments.

They're unwitting players in complex games of chess between these companies and their value to these companies is the tendency to accept subliminal suggestions and then act on those suggestions when they make purchasing decisions. Also called advertising.

<comment><USER7> I'm in a similar position to you in regards to facebook. My strategy is to use custom CSS to remove the elements of the site that only serve to distract me (newsfeed, etc.). I still get notifications for events, chat, etc. so it works out alright.

<comment><USER8> Are there example open-source stylesheets to accomplish this filtering?

<comment><USER9> Many of the user styles (e.g. for Stylish) are purely cosmetic[1], but you can see what elements they're matching on and roll your own.

1: [https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/facebook](https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/facebook)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bit offtopic;

For me it shows more, to western apps, how you build an app that always works... with wechat I can do sync and async voice calls, chat and photo sending with any connection, even if it is very slow or intermittend. No western app I have tried, including the actual phone app, does that as well as wechat. I can call, on 2g crappy China Mobile to colleagues in the EU where Skype and Whatsapp will not even connect or send anything over.

Payments are nice when they do not take card here in China (as I do not have a CUP card).

But that, for me it is secondary: the always connected and stable is better. And that works on my mountain in Spain too :)

Edit: for people that always have fast internet, apps that are totally unusable with bad connections are: skype, slack, office 365 (google docs is still workable). OK apps are Facebook messenger, google hangouts, google docs and whatsapp. And so far the only that just works is Wechat.

<comment><USER11> One thing you need to be careful about is comparing a service in China with the service outside of China. For example Skype in China because of the monitoring put on it disconnects all the time where it would be fine outside of China. Services like WeChat have an inbuilt advantage in that their connectivity isn't as interfered with in the same way that western apps are.

<comment><USER10> Skype doesn't work in the west (I live 5 months per year in Spain and the rest I work in UK/NL/China/HK/Aus; it is no different in other places hence I like wechat which works well everywhere) either on bad connections; it won't connect or will be very slow/unreliable at sending even small pieces of text, let alone images.

<comment><USER12> It works for me. It's stable and down-regulates the stream quality really well with a bad connection.

<comment><USER13> It's horrible and I often have to reboot my computer whilst using it.

<comment><USER12> Why would you have to reboot your computer if an app is failing? I don't think I've had to do this since running Windows 2000..

<comment><USER13> Exactly...

It actually starts saying it is unable to connect to my speakers and microphone...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article is a little weird to me. It seems to read fairly ok, seems pretty pro wechat, which is fine. Then I realized that the article was saying things like:

"HSBC, a bank" "BMW, a german car maker" "Goldman Sachs, an investment bank"

Which got me thinking... who is the audience for this article? Probably not the average Economist reader, who knows who HSBC, BMW and GS are. In fact they know that "GS" means Goldman Sachs in this kind of context.

It's also wildly pro-wechat, in a very boosterism way. For an editorial this would be fine, but this is pushed as news. It also cites businesses, not people, as various 'proof' points, and inconsistently uses informal and formal language in the same sentence. Most investment banks don't "reckon" about the rise of multibillion dollar firms.

As an introduction to nonfiction writing, I feel like this piece would struggle to get a C-, if not a F.

I have always understood the Economist to be a newspaper held to a different standard (self-imposed even). But this kind of stuff suggests that perhaps they are trying to infringe upon Forbes' territory.

<comment><USER15> Summarizing the mentioned companies, no matter how big, is a quirk of The Economist. A more notable quirk is their lack of by-lines. Presumably, multiple authors work on each article. Perhaps that's why you feel the tone is inconsistent. Or perhaps its because they write in UK English, where words have different tonal attributes.

The paper (they insist on calling themselves a newspaper, another quirk) is prone to these sorts of booster articles. Other times, they write in-depth, balanced, and informative articles from a Liberal view point. The thing that irks me most is how they casually omit criticisms from other viewpoints, but that's expected as they wear their bias on their sleeve.

<comment><USER14> ok fair enough. I guess my expectations were out of step with the reality of their writing.

I feel like their analysis here is lacking, and I learned nothing from it. Other than some people love wechat, which is something I could have guessed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Among all its services, it is perhaps its promise of a cashless economy, a recurring dream of the internet age..."

I will correct that a cashless economy is a recurring dream of central bankers and their more fervent supporters, like "The economist" or Keynesians or whatever.

I prefer the old model in which companies compete against each other instead of having a panopticon company that knows all your private conversations, control all your money transactions, knows when you are, who you are with and by the way, censors you, etc.

When I have been(living) in China I came to the realization that central planning is a retarded idea, responsible for China 5 century standstill. You really appreciate freedom when you have lost it.

But it seems central planning is all the rage now. We have to let "expert" economist academics to tell us what to do with our money, forget the open web to become citizens of facebook (or Google or Microsoft) land, and let those companies control our computers, so we don't watch videos or books that panopticon does not give us rights to access, and copy dictatorship regimes in our policies because people in power envy it.

<comment><USER17> To be fair, central-bank-hating cryptocurrency enthusiasts also dream of a cashless economy. It sounds like you're kind of projecting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The terrible part of the WeChat's world is quite simple, it's a very private network piggybacked on the open internet. Even worse, unlike facebook, it's poorly moderated in the 'Chinese Way'. As for privacy/security concerns, WeChat is doing better than most of its counterparts in China, and let's just limit our scope in China.

The domestic criticizes about WeChat is mainly in these aspects: 1\. Using WeChat for Work, I have ZERO idea why people just did this, but even in my workplace, it's a common practice. It sounds unprofessional and risky to use an external tool for work purposes.

2\. Lack of Openness, the only successful crawler works with WeChat is Sogou's search engine. Indexability is just the beginning of the issue.

3\. Lazy moderation, rumor, pseudoscience, (domestic) copyright infringement articles are just everywhere and non-stoppable. WeChat officials said to put some force to stop these, but their 'official account hasn't been updated for ages. Maybe it's just what 'Chinternet' is like.

4\. WeChat is a network of people you known in the 'outside world', friends/family/co-workers, this part just as bad as facebook.

There's also an awesome part about WeChat, the payment. WeChat got into payment business not long ago in a traditional measurement of time. A few years later, can you imagine that you can buy vegetables with WeChat/AliPay? Back in my college days (2009), it was a Country where only some decent restaurants, chain markets accept debit/credit cards. WeChat is accepted everywhere now, only and offline.

Speak of payments, there's one thing to add, you can check out how Alipay, a payment app, like PayPal are so much into communication business that flooded its app with all the SNS crap, even made friend suggestions based on who you had transactions with. I uninstalled the app immediately after they demonstrated their determination in the social network business, creepy.

Not only WeChat is the only choice of social network on the go, but also it's a quite predictable software, more decent than most of its competitors. So I think this is more than just the "Convenience weighs more than risk mgmt" scenario, more likely something weighs more than 'Der Freiheit'.

</comment><comment><USER19> WeChat's features (text, photo post, video post, live phone and video) mostly work correctly for me, but a number of things frustrate me about it:

\- Photo zooming and scrolling is broken

\- Large photos and videos don't load half the time, and the retry mechanism is unclear (but eventually works given enough patience)

\- Arbitrary limits like 9 photos per post in moments

\- Really bad for writing and reading paragraphs of text

\- I use Facebook as my primary social media, and the difference is stark. On a big desktop monitor, I can scroll through a hundred posts and comment on a few per minute. WeChat is mobile-only, and reading and writing is painful compared to PC.

\- You can't log into WeChat on multiple devices simultaneously. Logging in will kick out the other device. Only the active device will receive and save current messages. And if you switch back and forth, you will fragment your message history across devices. This is unlike services like Facebook Messenger where messages are saved on the server and multiple logins are supported.

\- Properly transferring message history from one device to another is painful. I did it on ~3000 messages plus ~300 MB of attached photos, and it took 10 minutes of transferring over Wi-Fi plus another few minutes just to digest/re-index all the messages on the new device.

\- It forcefully uses your cell phone number as your identity, rather than a separate user name

</comment><comment><USER20> What I am worried about is that Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple are copying the same model [1]. These companies are killing the open web.

[1] How China Is Changing Your Internet (The New York Times) - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAesMQ6VtK8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAesMQ6VtK8)

<comment> yoz-y The open web is still there. There are just many people that chose to not participate in it. There are still many who do and will probably do so for a long time. The one problem might be funding, but people will always think of something.

<comment><USER21> People are thinking of ways to break the open web too. Witness what just happened in India and was narrowly avoided because of hubris.

To add: there's still more attempts to break NN in India.

The civil groups which are being formed don't have the same environment or support that the first world has developed after years of civil liberties battles.

So yes, people are always thinking of something. It's just that the time to defend the commons is here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Quick story time:

My wife and me have been trying to set up a service on top of WeChat using their payments and other APIs. (A very small idea, takes two days to implement on top of, say, Facebook and using Stripe for payments.)

The amount of hoops you have to jump through when you don't have guanxi (there was a huge discussion about this topic on HN some weeks ago) is staggering. First, forget about getting access without having a Chinese ID, next up, be prepared to go through multiple rounds of document sending in order to get access to more "advanced" API features, so you need a Chinese ID and a Chinese company number. Next, be prepared to go through loads of confusing documentation and terrible navigation to actually implement the thing (no English documentation is available, and not many Stackoverflow posts on the topic... yet). In case you try to be smart like me and only use Wechat's API for the "social" API features and not payments, you come across another wall: the API expects call to originate from a domain name having an ICP license: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license) basically a number registering your domain with the Chinese government. Again loads of paperwork and weeks of waiting around to get it done.

Give up on the Wechat API and hope people will share your website? Fine. So which payments API to use? Alipay works a bit better in Europe but most Chinese are allergic to anything that breaks Wechat's app "flow". Forget about using Stripe of Paypal: most users forgot about their debit/credit card number ages ago (the app has it) or don't even have a compatible one.

Still, every day I'm seeing pages from big and small Chinese brands that apparently can do all of these things with relative ease. Don't they have to jump through all these hoops, you wonder? Turns out that Tencent will allow "strong names" to get access quickly in order to help grow the platform, or so the gossip goes.

Why not use the western offerings then? Well, as of now, it's still "coming soon": [https://pay.weixin.qq.com/wechatpay_guide/help_docs.shtml](https://pay.weixin.qq.com/wechatpay_guide/help_docs.shtml) ... also, it's unclear whether you'd be able to access Chinese users through this. It's frustrating how hard it is to get anything done in China without local help. On the other hand, given how well platforms such as Wechat work for end-users and how feature-complete they are, Facebook better hurry up before Tencent decides to take on the western market for real.

Rant over :).

</comment><comment><USER23> Soon, all the internet we hackers like will be called the darkweb

<comment><USER24> So true; I agree 100%!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Disclaimer partly in response to "has anyone criticizing it has actually tried weChat": I use WeChat daily.

WeChat is an amazing App with a lot of features. Using it for payment is convenient. It's video Chat is so much better than Skype in terms of stability etc. (Consider the network condition in China that's certainly a miracle.)

But there is certainly something Orwellian in WeChat. WeChat has built-in browser, which they do some censorship on links people click on. I put in a link from cn.nytimes.com and I got this: [http://i.imgur.com/jMGZZSH.png](http://i.imgur.com/jMGZZSH.png) (I clicked this link in China and got that, my friend clicked that link in WeChat while being in U.S. and get through fine. magic) Please note this is not even the usual GFW business, GFW doesn't return something like that at all. The text in the pic says "it was reported by many people", my feeling is that any link from cn.nytimes.com would got that no matter whether people reported or not.

What is more, they do this to Taobao, the major Chinese online business website, held by their competitor Alibaba (they are competitor in the same sense Google, Apple and Facebook are competitors, not because of they are both in the same niche field), namely if you send a link from taobao.com (e.g. [https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=531244443418](https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=531244443418)), you end up seeing this: [http://imgur.com/e3pHmUe.png](http://imgur.com/e3pHmUe.png) where the text says "Please copy this link and paste it in the browser to visit." (On the other hand, WeChat has a "Shopping" entrance to taobao's competitor jd.com right within the App.) [The actual reason is complicated, Taobao blocked UserAgent:WeChat long time ago when WeChat is small, but now it's the other way around.]

Although I won't put it as 1984, I'd say it's more like "Brave New World". With WeChat one can do whatever he/she wants "as long as being a good citizen" (and not using WeChat's competitor's service too much). It could be turned into a 1984-world very easily -- e.g. You may noticed that I'm paranoid enough to cut the ISP information when showing the screenshot, but what if the background image contains information of my WeChat ID? After all it's only 4-5 bytes at most. (To those who think I'm overthinking, this is already happening to Alibaba's internal network to prevent information leak.)

That's why apps like Signal/Telegram always have a small user base in China, no matter how much better WeChat are compared to them.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sad to see so many comments that seem like knee-jerk or one-sided criticism. I expected better from Hacker News.

Sure, point out flaws in something, like the centralised nature, but only after recognising its benefits.

For example, not having to download umpteen apps and juggle umpteen accounts and enter your credit card everywhere is a big plus. I just want to make an appointment with the doctor without researching which app to install for that purpose, choosing between multiple apps, creating a user name and password, giving my credit card (which I wouldn't give to an unknown app) and so on. It certainly has downsides, but advantages as well.

Often, I care about getting the job done, not about researching and finding the best app to make an appointment. Even if the centralised decision-maker (WeChat) chose a second-best app, using the second-best app to book an appointment beats booking the appointment on phone because I couldn't bother to research between multiple apps in an open ecosystem. Sometimes, a good enough default beats choice.

Again, pros and cons. Let's recognise both. Since many of the other posters have pointed out (valid) criticisms, I've focused on the other side of the coin.

</comment><comment><USER27> 5 years in China now: WeChat is my primary connection online. I check email once every 2-3 days, Facebook once every few months and usually just to turn off notifications that never seem to actually stay off. WeChat allows me to pay my utility bills, Call taxis, buy a soda, send out promotions for events, publish my photos, stalk friends, find movie tickets and reserve seats, buy a box of avocadoes, find a group of expectant mothers, and the list goes on and on. This is the social network that Chinese people use and folks in the West don't get how pervasive it is.

</comment><comment><USER28> qq+weixin > facebook many times over

even without considering that fb casually lies about the number of active users they have

</comment><comment><USER29> I haven't really seen anyone doing a decent security audit for WeChat though. Last time (2014) I tried digging into their third party API, I was put off by uses of MD5 as the preferred hash function. Does anyone know they have improved on the security front in the intervening two years?

</comment><comment><USER30> A couple of hidden features a lot of people ignore are: 1\. iBeacon 2\. AirKiss and AirSync protocal for hardware connection.

To me, the 2nd function is a next big thing beyond social media. It seems not very significant now but will have a big impact in future.

</comment><comment><USER31> Perhaps the most amazing thing about WeChat I've discovered is Chinese in America using it to order from Asian businesses in America.

</comment><comment><USER32> I love how WeChat allows for sending of large video files. I haven't come across a US based chat service that allows for this.

<comment><USER33> I hate to be the Telegram shill, but Telegram supports sending an unlimited amount of any type of file up to 1.5GB in size each.

[https://telegram.org/blog/shared-files](https://telegram.org/blog/shared- files)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This seems more like 1984 future...

</comment><comment><USER35> after all, it's us the users who want free internet services, so naturally these companies are building beautiful walled garden with free admission to lure us in, and suck our privacy or whatever we don't care about to feed themselves.

</comment><comment> happy-go-lucky Google and Facebook, what are you waiting for? Go vie for the app.

</comment><comment><USER36> Social media chat is the new Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER37> it seems every month we get an submitted article about how 'inclusive' and 'integrated' wechat is. nobody ever remembers that wechat is a result of government/state relationship, (unfair) shutting out of all foreign competition, tech monopoly, and lack of credit card use. Nevermind the downsides of having _one app_

1.) lack of choices

2.) pricing gouging

3.) monitoring

4.) lack of product innovation

5.) censorship

naturally the big US tech companies would _love_ if the user only used their one single app. but thank god there are choices in the western world.</comment>


MathFiction: Alex Recommends - <AUTHOR> http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/readinglists.php <comment><AUTHOR> I downloaded the book "Carry On, Mr Bowditch." Opened it and only took three breaks. It's a fun read for both kids and adults. But you won't learn any new math through it.

However, it taught me a few things.

The importance of math and how tiny errors in calculations can cost lives. In this case, the lives of sailors. That before GPS, sailors used the position of moon and stars to calculate the longitude.

A bit of American history - why the US had to become a navy superpower.

I learned a lot about sailing - logbooks, knots, starboard, stern, lunar navigation, sextant... and how dependent on the whims of the Wind shipping used to be.

A bit about patience with people mentally slower than me in a given topic. The analogy used: Walking in the dark and hitting my leg against a chair. I'm angry and want to break the chair but it's not the fault of the chair.

Also learned about book writing. One could teach a class represented by audience of a book in search of explanations they'll understand. And then use those for the book.

The sentence "Math conquers all" might be a good summary for the book.

<comment><USER2> I wonder if Nathaniel Bowditch was an inspiration for Heinlein's 1953 novel _Starman Jones_. It seems quite possible, given his Navy career.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Was confused how Greg Egan wasn't on the list, then I got to the sci-fi section, and he's in there.

I could second his recommendation for 'Turing (A Novel About Computation)' by Christos Papadimitriou

</comment><comment><USER4> Excellent list, I would merge with [https://justinmeiners.github.io/foundations-of-math- reading/](https://justinmeiners.github.io/foundations-of-math-reading/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Barely qualifying as fiction, but very focused on the beauty and entertainment value of mathematics: "Surreal Numbers" by Donald Knuth.

</comment><comment><USER6> Two recommendations:

"The No-sided Professor," by Martin Gardner, and "A Subway Named Moebius," by A.J. Deutsch.

[http://www.carliner- remes.com/jacob/math/project/lit.htm](http://www.carliner- remes.com/jacob/math/project/lit.htm)

</comment><comment><USER7> At high school back in 1984, my year 9 math teacher (Larry Doolan) read us excerpts from "Stories about Sets" by N. Ya. Vilenkin (1968) [0].

The book's first story is about a hotel with an infinite number of rooms. It is fully booked, then one new guest arrives. Fortunately a solution is found. Then an infinite number of new guests arrive. After some head-scratching, a clever solution is found. Finally an infinity of infinite numbers of new guests arrive. And a lot of head-scratching, an even cleverer solution is still found!

[0] [https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Stories_About_Sets.ht...](https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Stories_About_Sets.html?id=5I3iBQAAQBAJ)

</comment><comment><USER8> I can second the recommendation for "Pythagorean Crimes" by Tefcros Michaelides.

While not as good as "The Parrot's Theorem" that Tefcros translated from French, it manages to seamlessly interweave famous figures into its otherwise fictional plot.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're looking for books for older children, e.g. 9-13, _The Boy Who Reversed Himself_ , _The Man Who Counted_ and _The Number Devil_ , which are listed here, are fantastic.

For the younger audience, e.g. 6-9, I suggest the Math Adventures books, e.g. _Sir Cumference and the Isle of Immeter_ , which are illustrated and introduce mathematical concepts in a fun and subtle way.

</comment><comment><USER10> Was there a Nabokov novel about mathematicians/mathematics ? Or perhaps it was about chess.

<comment><USER11> The Luzhin Defense is about chess. But perhaps the same novel could be written about a mathematician, I first learned about the novel while reading this article by V.I. Arnold: [https://www.math.ru.nl/~mueger/arnold.pdf](https://www.math.ru.nl/~mueger/arnold.pdf)</comment></comment>


An update on state-sponsored activity - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/update-state-sponsored-activity/ <comment><USER2> They can't tell you when their own government goes fishing in their pond so they talk about Iran instead.

<comment><USER3> [https://transparencyreport.google.com/user- data/overview?use...](https://transparencyreport.google.com/user- data/overview?user_requests_report_period=series:requests,accounts;authority:US;time:&lu=user_requests_report_period)

<comment><USER4> Those are actions with judicial oversight. I believe OP was referring to NSLs and other IC actions.

<comment><USER5> NSLs are counted here, and ones without non-disclosure obligations have the actual letter published.

[https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/us- national-...](https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/us-national- security)

<comment><USER4> Should have specified NSLs that cannot be disclosed but the IC activity is far more significant.

<comment><USER5> It appears even NSLs that cannot be disclosed are still counted in the published numbers. IC is Intelligence Community? I would assume google would warn users of phishing attacks by the NSA just as they would warn users of phishing attacks by Iran.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Technical data associated with these actors is strongly linked to the > official IRIB IP address space.

I've always been under the impression that IP addresses aren't always reliable indicators of identity, has this changed?

<comment><USER7> Far more reliable for large organizations/governments, less reliable for ISPs that hand out dynamic IPs.

<comment><USER6> I should have been more clear, I'm wondering if it is technically possible to spoof an IP address?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that the Russians chose to use Microsoft instead of Google[1].

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/microsoft- shuts-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/microsoft-shuts-down- phishing-sites-accuses-russia-of-new-election-meddling/)

</comment><comment><USER9> The number of channels and accounts identified strikes me as low.

</comment><comment><USER10> One can delete the 'amp/' suffix on the URL to get a version which works just fine without JavaScript: [https://www.blog.google/technology/safety- security/update-st...](https://www.blog.google/technology/safety- security/update-state-sponsored-activity/)

</comment><comment><USER11> duck and cover

</comment><comment><USER12> How many Googlers are drawing a second paycheck from a foreign or domestic spy agency? The root of that equation is assuredly greater than 1. How much greater?

<comment><USER13> It would be interesting to see how the US government treated any Googlers that had a foreign state paymaster, as foreign influence has been a bit of a controversy for the government too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't be evil -> Do the right thing -> At least we are not dropping bombs on schools in Yemen

</comment><comment><USER15> > _three email accounts_

three. email. accounts. I'm feeling safer already!

Truthfully, it's disconcerting that this is being presented with a straight face. Although thinking positively, maybe the larger campaign is a sign that the four standard horsemen - "terrorists", "pedophiles", "drugs", and "money laundering" \- are getting tired.

It's also interesting how quickly the sabre-rattlers got this to play with the political team that is usually less jingoistic.

<comment><USER13> There were the three YouTube and three Google+ accounts too, although I'd argue that the Google+ ones come pre-disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This tepid references to we can't disclose anything 'because security' is circular logic. Casting aspersions without evidence is a fundamental abuse of due process and basic standards of jurisprudence. It is a witch hunt.

Are we to assume only Russia, China and Iran are running ops and others are innocent sheep? This is like 'villain of the month'. If they truly have the capability bring out all the evidence and identify all patterns of such behavior so people are aware of astroturfing not only by other governments but also their own government and other vested interests.

This is a dangerous game of spreading FUD and poisons the well. Without ironclad evidence it demonizes dissent, diversity, alternative opinions and with it informed discussion. And legitimizes censorship.</comment>


NSA has direct access to tech giants' systems for user data, secret files reveal - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data <comment><USER2> This is not surprising, is it? I don't quite get why this and yesterday's story about NSA mobile eavesdropping are causing so much shock. Over a year ago, WIRED featured a story by James Bamford about the NSA's planned data center in Utah, sourcing an anonymous former intelligence officer who said that the NSA had been installing controlled equipment at ISP facilities for years. (<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/>)

</comment><comment><USER3> It isn't surprising, but it is worth talking about.

I subscribe to "nothing to hide" but it would be nice to, at least, have some notification and callback over who had access to my personal details.

I don't really mid my information bing used to infer if pot-holes are more important to fix than water leaks. I do however object, without prior consent, for my details to be a way of supporting political movements /ideologies.

<comment><USER2> Yup, agreed. Although I bet there's a less intrusive means of aggregating citizen data germane to things like road maintenance than capturing our web browsing history, emails, and phone calls. IBM's Smart Cities initiative is essentially all about that -- distributing sensors throughout infrastructure for the purpose of gathering just that sort of data. That seems like a much more worthy investment in technology than massive data centers that suck up our chatter -- chatter which we have a reasonable expectation of privacy over, by the way.</comment></comment>


The tech boom in Seattle is bringing in droves of successful, insufferable guys - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/05/30/amazon_is_killing_my_sex_life_partner/ <comment><USER2> ___"The sad thing about guys who exhibit these brogrammer qualities is they seem to fall short of greatness in both worlds," said Parish. "They're not purely macho or purely geeky, they're somewhat pretenders in both..."_ __

Part of the problem is that women like this want a man who looks like Tarzan, is rich, respected and powerful but who can also change the oil in the car, fix the plumbing, mow the lawn, fight Brock Lesnar for her honor (and win) and make her laugh on command.

I tell my wife that she should have married a dozen guys. Yeah, I do so much stuff that I don't do anything really well. Thanks for noticing and calling me a pretender. I'm just an average guy like all the rest.

Edit: Happily married for 15 years. My wife and I joke about this. She understands and has settled for me ;)

<comment><USER3> I don't share that takeaway from the article. What I took away was:

1) She's looking for someone who has confidence in a well formed personality all their own.

2) That personality is not defined by what they do for work.

3) Part of that personality includes taking an interest in the lives and personalities of other people, particularly in the context of a one-on-one social situation who's entire purpose is (arguably) to get to know one another.

Sure, I'm certain that if all of the traits you outline came by in one package they'd happily take it, but the complaint seemed to be that she's encountering men who, having _any_ of those qualities, assume that's like having all of them and don't bother to develop the rest of the bits that make us human and tolerable to fill in the gaps.

My reasoning behind this takeaway is that I spend a fair amount of time hanging out in (apparently) the same neighborhood and same bars that she does, and I find a lot of the folks who aren't interested in talking about anything other than what they do for work similarly insufferable. That said, I'm a guy. I work in tech. In Seattle. For Google. After having gotten tired of Amazon. I routinely catch myself being part of the problem (although not the dating problem as I haven't been single in over ten years).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Frankly, given the ratios of male to female residents in Seattle and other tech-heavy West Coast metro areas, nobody looking to date men (gay or straight) has any right to complain. You have your pickings!

Are they all kinda similar? Well yeah, but so are the men in all other areas whose economies are heavily mono-industrial. As a matter of fact, so are the _women_ in areas whose economies are heavily mono-industrial with emphasis on more "feminine" professions, _and_ the women in areas with populations more female than male.

I would say "lower your standards", but that allows you to hold on to the whole dehumanizing concept of dating-as-meat-market you've got going. In fact, you should be getting over yourself and understanding that all these "insufferable" men, _of whom you have your pickings_ , are human beings with life histories and hopes and dreams of their own.

This mentality that everyone the natives don't like should just pack up and leave Seattle is actually (shortage of sunlight aside) a significant reason I have turned down job-offers that would have put me in Seattle.

EDIT: Seriously, normally I don't like contributing to outrage-mongering, but this is a seriously _bratty_ article. Men are not entitled to women, and likewise, neither are women entitled to men.

EDIT EDIT: Also, all the really awesome, wonderful men are already married to the really awesome, wonderful women. This article is giving me an immense urge to call my fiancee, tell her how incredible she is just for not giving a shit about cliques and status, and then spend half an hour talking about anime and board games just to reaffirm how "insufferably" nerdy we both are.

<comment><USER5> > but this is a seriously bratty article.

I kind of get that, but, there's nothing wrong with a bratty article, and that's her experience. Should she not write about it? Or should she wait until she fits in with the local men and then write about that?

Or I could say "raise your standards" beyond vanilla, non-challenging, pleasant writing.

I really appreciate the writer's description of her experience, even if 20 years ago it would have hit close to home for me.

<comment><USER4> >Should she not write about it?

Frankly, why _should_ she write an entire article, other than perhaps on her personal blog, to complain that she can't find a man who's good enough for her standards?

>Or I could say "raise your standards" beyond vanilla, non-challenging, pleasant writing.

Ok, you want challenging? Here's challenging: I would find many of the same people insufferable as she does. That doesn't mean I feel a right to go telling the whole world that most people around me are unworthy of love or friendship, and that the world will have to _fix itself_ by importing a fresh supply of people _I_ happen to like.

There was a time when I might have thought like that... at age 15. Well, and maybe up through 19. And I _still_ have a hard time finding _real_ common ground with people who aren't _at all_ nerdy.

But hey, diversity is the spice of life! I _like_ having things I don't understand about explained to me! Just last night at Shabbat dinner, I sat across from a fresh new cellular biology grad-student and asked him what his lab does. I did _not_ dismiss him as a peer, even when I grew disinterested because the talk turned to the various drugs he and some electrical engineering type had indulged in during undergrad. At that point I went over and listened to my friend the host of the house (and twenty-something Lubavitch shaliach to my neighborhood) giving his religious lecture for the evening.

Whom _did_ I dismiss as a social peer, politely ignoring for the rest of the night? The guy who thought there was something unpleasant about describing growth rates using terms like "logarithmic", "linear", "polynomial" and "exponential", who considered me _less human_ for knowing.

This is something that has happened _repeatedly_ to me throughout life, and it leaves me with rather more empathy for the boring nerds the author doesn't like dating than for the stuck-up philosophy-major-turned-journalist who can't be bothered to take an interest in lifestyles beyond the underground hippie/artist/rocker crowd that brought her to Seattle in the '90s. To me, she sounds like an insufferable hipster, coincidentally.

Maybe she'll never take an interest, but these are still human beings, not spoiled meat. Just because I don't like brogrammers or workaholic money- mongers on a personal level doesn't mean that I want them dehumanized, any more than I like being dehumanized for being a nerd. Let's have this subcultural holy war! Why do the hippies and humanities majors get to talk down to the rest of us?

<comment><USER6> >Frankly, why should she write an entire article Uhm, I don't know... wasn't there an entire tv series, two movies, and another tv series spinnoff that basically revolved around exactly what this article was discussing? Sure it was in NYC and talked about all men, but still...

<comment><USER4> Yes, I agree, _Sex and the City_ was a deeply problematic and sexist program!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting reading this from the female perspective. So much of the gender roles have changed over time. There was a time when this exact same article could have been written with the sexes reversed, "All she did was talk about herself and how she was doing this cause, or that cause, and the wasn't it atrocious about the children starving in foreign countries."

Its a problem when our view of the world is focused on what we personally are bringing to the world as opposed to the world around us and the people in it. Perhaps it is the result of having one's "self esteem" pumped up from birth through college.

It would be like carrying around a small yellow card, one that was the exact shade and saturation of yellow that was in Vincent's Starry Night painting. Without the rest of the painting around it, it loses much of its specialness.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's time for a single man who speaks Latin fluently, knows how to cook, is able to talk at least superficially about philosophy and can even shut up every now and then to _disrupt_ the Seattle dating scene!

Maybe some VC can fund potential "interesting dates", in exchange for a few percent of the newlywed's house?

<comment><USER9> Perhaps something like this :) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7343283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7343283)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> (writing from a throwaway account)

As a young male engineer in SF who is very much _not_ the brogrammer type, I can understand where the author is coming from. I'm neither a bro, nor a nerd. I find myself in a vacuum sometimes, wondering where the other "well rounded" guys from "flyover country" are. Everyone seems to be too caught up in their startups or caught up in the money. Or their so nerdy that it's impossible to have an honest conversation with them. (Engineers can be so self-righteous sometimes.)

There is a lost art that these tech hubs need to find again. Maybe it's "being a gentleman". Or "being a renaissance person". There are so many soft skills that most people (young tech guys) lack.

* How do you have a conversation with someone not from your socioeconomic/political/technological/generational background? * How do you treat a woman with respect and dignity? * How do you "pick up girls" without needing to resort to the absurd tactics of The Game? * How do you host a dinner party? * How do you approach the arts and culture? * How do you pay attention to world news and politics? * How do you dress respectfully? * Can you debate philosophy gracefully and purposefully?

From the outside perspective, I'm one of the rich, dumb tech nerds that this article is rallying against. I'm a white kid from flyover country. I have a lot of money. My company is very successful by all standard measures. I'm an engineer, I like science fiction.

It's funny, though, when people (especially women) meet me. They are often surprised that I am not an idiot brogrammer. I can carry on a conversation about topics outside of tech. I have opinions about the arts and music. I can discuss world politics with knowledge and tact. I know how to carry a conversation: give and take, tell jokes, etc. I have traveled widely.

Because of this differentiation, I've found it very easy to pick up women in SF. Women are surprised to find a genuine person who actually cares about them, what their passions are, what they think.

I know I'm not perfect, and I certainly am striving to do better at all of these things. But I know I'm one of the few who actually pursues these activities and has interest in these kinds of soft skills. I wish more people took this approach. I would have more friends, the women of tech hubs would write fewer articles about idiot brogrammers, and we'd all live a more fulfilling and happy life.

So here's a plea: let's make a finishing school for nerds. We would all benefit.

<comment><USER11> I agree that teaching people how to carry on conversations would be a useful course. But the slight problem with a finishing school is that nerds will probably disagree on the topics of such a school and find some of these suggestions offensive.

E.g.

>How do you pay attention to world news and politics?

Hopefully little as most news isn't news in any usable way. And unless you're actually doing a lot of research, you're unlikely to be discussing anything at a usable level. It's not like _I 'm_ going to be comment intelligently on e.g. Crimea without spending what, hours or more(?), reading background on it. News reporting is unlikely to get much insight other than noting which countries are in NATO and saying things like if the US started a war with Russia it would be a big deal. The rest just makes people suffer more bias as they start overestimating the incidence of uncommon events.

Talking about the news is as small talk as talking about the weather. At least with the weather you're likely to get some things right.

Politics, at least in the US, seems to be dominated by moronic discourse. Even the writers/shows that I "agree" with are intellectually dishonest and obviously just "rooting for the team". I'd be surprised if all modern politics is not about the same thing.

>Can you debate philosophy gracefully and purposefully?

What do you mean by philosophy? Because what "most people" consider philosophy is unlikely to lead to any useful discussions. And worse, if you're trying to have a polite conversation with someone but somehow find out they take p-zombies seriously... well it puts a downer on the mood. Just like when someone says they've been feeling sick, probably because of all the WiFi or chemtrails. Or maybe that's what you mean by graceful? How to say "oh really?" in a nice tone and change the subject?

<comment><USER4> >And worse, if you're trying to have a polite conversation with someone but somehow find out they take p-zombies seriously...

OH GOD! Don't tell me you're some kind of damn dirty naturalist! You people and your scientism! Don't you know Bayes' Theorem can't even solve the Problem of Induction!?

</parody of smug philosophy major>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There really is an epidemic of lameness in SF and Seattle.

I'm a straight single guy. We also want interesting dude friends. I'm fortunate enough to have found many, but almost all of them are outside the tech industry or women. Many of my friends don't know what I do, let alone that I'm quite well off and successful. And if you ask me about my work and don't notice when I change the subject, I will immediately and without sympathy move you to my shitlist.

The truth is, all the pasty white faces eager to salve their insecurity by convincing me of their startup's viability are incredibly shallow and dull. Learn how to let loose and be a genuine man who doesn't need my approval. Then come talk to me.

<comment><USER13> To be fair, a genuine man wouldn't change the subject. He'd say what he did. He just wouldn't consume the entire conversation with it. "I'm a programmer for Google. Yes, I'm evil, ride free buses, and push rent up. What do you do?"

If your "friends" don't know what you do or that you're successful, you're not genuine. You shouldn't be ashamed of it. You just shouldn't be all-consumed by it either.

<comment><USER12> You might have confused "genuine" with "compliant" and "truthful."

I am under no obligation to answer your stupid, predicable, and irrelevant to our social future questions.

In fact, it would disingenuous of me to give you the impression that your social style was anything but annoying and bland, and likely to lead to me never wanting to see you again.

<comment><USER14> Honestly, not much would be missed if this is your attitude to things that don't work exactly the way you want them to.

I'd hazard a guess that your friends are more likely 'acquaintances' or 'hangout buddies' (nothing wrong with that) than friends. I know what all of my friends do in life (and it's a diverse mix, from trauma docs to people who work for the governor to self-made day traders to senior management at IT multi-nationals) and, perhaps surprisingly to you, we are able to balance work as a minor conversation topic from time to time.

But phrases such as 'stupid', 'predictable', 'irrelevant', 'annoying', 'bland' only give off the perception of you as having quite the superiority complex, haughtily sniffing down your nose at anyone deigning to disagree.

Why? For we are not our jobs. But as we move through our lives, particularly beyond that first job or two, the kind of person we might be, our wants and desires are not defined, but least elucidated at by how we choose to spend a quarter of our lives.

<comment><USER12> Contrary to your guess, this approach has brought far higher quality and more intimate relationships into my life. You'd be surprised how immediately rejecting what you anticipate will bother you results in the void being filled by what will add to your life.

If someone is still in a phase of their life where the first question out of their mouth is "what do you do for a living," they can find other friends. There are a lot of people in this world - no need for me to waste my time with ones who follow routine social interaction protocols. Suggesting this is elitist is a little silly. We are all elitists. There are 7 billion people in this world - we choose who we spend our time, and always reject others. Not actively making that choice is a recipe for an unfulfilling and frustrating existence.

I'm not saying you shouldn't know what your friends do, only that I don't want relationships where my first impression or their first impression is based on employment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pretty much just a sensationality ragepiece designed to mine clicks.

Just some quotes from people unhappy with their sex lives used to incite the implication that tech workers are somehow destroying a city.

<comment><USER16> That crossed my mind too. But I see an ounce of truth in this. I can speak from experience, when you're young and consumed by technology, you might have difficulty conversing with women, even if you're attractive physically. My dating life improved after majoring in art ;-)

In general, I think it's hard to find people that can keep an interesting conversation going, and in your 20s you don't have much life experience anyway, especially if you moved straight from a classroom to a cubicle.

As far as talking about yourself on a date, it's not necessarily a problem, it's just a different style of communicating. If she's talking about herself, that's a strong signal she's interested. Then I can respond with information about myself--that's perfectly acceptable and possibly the desired response. In a conversation, you can change the subject, what a concept ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is exactly why I hated living in the SF Bay Area. We've all heard the jokes: Man Jose and Man Francisco. This article just reminded me of the terrible time I had trying to meet a nice gal there for nearly a decade. Although, to be fair, I've read the census and it seems that the entire West Coast is afflicted by this problem of more single men than women, whereas the East Coast has the opposite problem.

Anyways, to offer an opposing point of view, I found girls like the author equally unpalatable and boring. Sorry, it works both ways.

</comment><comment><USER18> This post has been locked in a mortal battle between upvotes and flags from the moment it appeared. The flags prevailed. They do however wish to be gracious in victory so we have unkilled the post. Carry on—just not on the front page.

<comment><USER16> How many of the flags came from Amazon employees/investors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm proudly one of the insufferable "brogrammers" who wears that new employee backpack everywhere. I spend my free time learning new web frameworks. I go to tech meetups. Strike up a conversation with me and recoil in horror at my ignorance about everything outside of tech. I'm racing against imposter syndrome here, and a reduced sex appeal isn't going to stop me.

</comment><comment><USER20> I try my very best not to talk about work unless specifically asked. And when people do ask, they will still get bored very quickly. _Even_ if they are asking for advice on how to learn programming or enter the field—of which it seems only 10% of those asking the question are genuinely interested in doing so.

If a date (or prospective date) asks you about work, it's probably best to just tell them you slay dragons and steer the topic towards something else.

</comment><comment><USER21> Everybody complains. There's too few men. There's too many men. The men are too random. The men are too predictable.

Are there some good examples somewhere, something which someone could build something upon? I realize that maybe there's no incentive to write anything, if everything's okay....

</comment><comment><USER18> We changed the title in a vain attempt to make it less linkbaity.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit > _The odds may be good, but the goods are odd._

Hmmm... never mind that she referred to men as _goods_... what is wrong with a little odd? After I met my wife for the first time, she told her friends back home that I really wasn't like the other guys she had dated. Like not her usual type. One of them had the good sense to remind her that there was a reason she wasn't dating any of those other guys anymore. :)

<comment><USER22> It's a saying, a play on words, I wouldn't read into it too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What seems strange to me is, if she's found a strongly predictive indicator, why does she not simply filter before going on a date? Have Amazon's employees run off all the "weirdos"? She even mocks them in the last paragraph, saying how easy they are to spot. So why continue to date them?

>but high on his newfound power drank four or five "special" drinks from the craft cocktail bar, Canon, ordered the foie gras, and racked up a $200 bill in less than two hours.

This part seemed the most curious to me. Is having a few "special" drinks a bad thing? $200 seems quite reasonable at a higher-end place. 5 cocktails alone could be nearly $100. Foie gras is like $40 or so (I didn't see it on Canon's menu)? Another few drinks and some food and you're there. Or is the subtext that he ordered in an arrogant way?

I wonder because I'd easily do this and certainly not in an arrogant way, but hey, life's short, and if a restaurant seems good and has interesting food and drinks, why not try them out? It's only money.

<comment><USER3> Canon is a pretty easy place to run up a $200 tab. My wife and I rarely make it out of there below that, and I've done it myself on at least one occasion.

That said, five cocktails in less than two hours is going to leave all but the stoutest alcoholics a lot worse for wear, and there are more and less flashy ways of running up such a tab. Of course, neither of us was there to witness this, and as I mentioned in another comment, I'm likely part of the problem.

Tangentially related, if you're ever in Seattle and want tasty small plates and cocktails with a bit of showmanship to them (as well as a somewhat absurd scotch/bourbon menu), I'd highly recommend Canon :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "When you see an asshole, you've seen an asshole. When all you see are assholes, you're the asshole"

Our generation (and by that, I mean broadly "anyone from a western culture currently in the first half or so of their career") has a serious problem with seeing and understanding things outside of our own little world. When we see things, people, events, that displease us, we always have to extract some grand underlying theory and trend about it, about why the world is against us, and why it's just not right. We're always the ones with the intelligence, the burning passion, the openness of mind, the great understanding of the world- it's always others that aren't enough. Of course, the author isn't an entitled self-centered young adult just like the men she describes: it's the whole tech industry that's even more awful than the law or banking industry, and just can't ever be good enough for her! We believe ourselves to be individuals imbued with uniqueness and intricate subtleties, and yet judge others as merely the sum of the loosely defined groups we put them in.

(I have tons of female friends who are in committed relationships/engaged/married to men from the law/banking/tech industry, while themselves having graduate degrees in literature/philosophy/fashion design/biology/etc, and they are all very satisfied. But I'm sure they are all wrong and as vapid as their partners from those god awful industries)

This woman was part of the date with the "insufferable tech worker" as much as he was. If she had a terrible time and found the date bland, chances are he did as well.

As a non American, I do find the US dating culture hilarious to the point of the absurd. It's a practice codified to the extreme, as boring as it gets, practically a checklist of do's and don'ts and desirable attributes and undesirable attributes. In an hour after work around a cup of coffee, the average American expects to gain enough knowledge about the human in front of them to judge whether they should see them again or cut contact forever. How can you expect anything but abysmal success rates in that case?

In the culture where I'm from, you typically meet people through social gatherings where your friends brought some of their friends, who themselves brought some of their friends. You get to know people through shared experiences and group discussions rather than awkward timed sit downs at the local Starbucks. And maybe after a few of those events you realize that the guy who spent the first 30 minutes of your first conversation talking about his job actually is much more than that- because honestly, how reasonable is it to issue a definitive judgement of someone based on 30 mins of conversation with someone you've never met before?

<comment><USER24> What culture is that? I'm curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My girlfriend is the only other person who understands what the software I am writing is supposed to do.

She doesn't program at all.

</comment><comment><USER26> why is it suddenly A-OK to generalize men in tech?

</comment><comment><USER27> By definition, only some people can be "extraordinary", yet most people in this generation were raised to believe they are. Thus, widespread unhappiness.

And to think, our parents tried so hard.

</comment><comment><USER28> It sounds like normal guys acting like normal guys, and women having too high of standards. You can't connect with anyone well on the first date, or at least it's very rare.

<comment><USER12> Funny how a group who can't accept "normal" socioeconomic or personal success is ok with "normal" social lives.</comment></comment>


Go forth, and make your company more secure - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/article/18/10/how-level-security-expertise-your-organization <comment><USER2> Was somehow hoping that this was pitting two languages (golang vs forth) against each other. It wouldn't make any sense, but it would have been at least as interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Was this sponsored by IBM?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I worked with Ann Marie to get this published, we do not pay our writers. I'm actually surprised she didn't need to put the IBM disclaimer on it ;) But this is her sharing some best practices from her team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To the HN mods: the actual title of this article is "How to level up your organization's security expertise", but it has been editorialized in this submission.

</comment><comment><USER5> Corporate crooks. Fail.</comment>


Mining 24 hrs a day with robots - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603170/mining-24-hours-a-day-with-robots/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've been following robotic mining stories for a while, this one summarizes what Rio Tinto has been doing in Australia.

One of the questions that I've wondered about is what will it take to achieve robotic mining of asteroids or other planets. Its an important question because if you want to colonize a remote planet you need to recover your raw material from the planet (its prohibitive to ship it) but you can't also afford to ship an entire population of miners and their support infrastructure. Leaving us with robotic mining as something that has to exist before colonizing remote planets can exist.

This work by Rio Tinto is getting closer than anyone else so far to an answer. Combined with a robotic refinery and one could imagine parking something like this in the eastern mounts of Afghanistan to pull out iron as an export (for example).</comment>


Poking around your Chrome OS notebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device

<comment><USER2> That developer switch (linked from [http://www.chromium.org/chromium- os/developer-information-fo...](http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer- information-for-chrome-os-devices/cr-48-chrome-notebook-developer- information)) is interesting. What I really want to know is whether the switch is one-way -- can I switch back out of developer mode without things breaking?</comment>


How to Retire at 40 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-early-retirement/ <comment><USER2> > Financial planners typically recommend that you save enough to replace 80 > percent of your preretirement income, but Udo says his family lives > comfortably on less.

Exactly. You don't need 80% of your _income_ , you need 100% of your _expenses_. If you're saving 40% of your income, you need to save until your investments can reliably generate 60% of your income. If you're saving 60% of your income, you need to save until your investments can reliably generate 40% of your income.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _> We asked three people who retired in their 30s and 40s to explain how they've made it pay off._

Alright, let's see how they do it...

1\. "a blog where he chronicles his retirement experience"

2\. "writing a book about retirement"

3\. "blogging about financial independence"

It seems the trick to early retirement is blogging about early retirement.</comment>


Show HN: Deploy Jitsi on AWS in 5 Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/amoffat/tf-jitsi <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, since I've had a question about cost/performance, I thought I'd post my experience:

I had 9 participants for 1.5 hours. Using an m5dn.xlarge, which is $0.27/hr, I peaked 13Mbit/s incoming, 23Mbit/s outgoing, 40% cpu. Over 1.5 hours I accrued 20GB outbound network, which AWS bills at $0.09/GB.

<comment><USER2> Thank you! I need this, and a cost estimate is amazing. Legend!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nothing wrong with this if you want to use AWS and like using (or learning) associated technologies like Terraform.

And, the Jitsi Quick Start is also about five minutes and works on vanilla Ubuntu:

[https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/quick- in...](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/quick-install.md)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is very cool!

Does anyone have an instinct what kind of use of Jitsi you would have to have to make a more complicated infrastructure (I'm not saying containers, but maybe containers) cost-efficient?

e: To be clear, I'm fully aware that 98% of personal setups for friends or small organizations would be just fine with this setup; I'm wondering what it would take to need more.

<comment><USER5> Cost efficiency on cloud providers mostly comes down to how well utilized your fleet is. You can always waste money on idle machines. Containers help with the "packing", which in turn can help with costs. Issue being: your time is probably the most costly thing, so it's debatable unless you can get it done comfortably and happily.

<comment><USER6> There are cloud providers who already started to offer pre-configured Jitsi in containers. So there is no need to package it manually and at the same time cost efficiency is higher. Today I've tested Jitsi on Jelastic, they deploy it automatically to containers, offer automatic vertical scaling and don't stick to VMs, so there is no waste for idle machine.

<comment><USER5> If you're paying another company for hosting, and they're using containers natively, then they're just pocketing the margins by packing you onto busy hypervisors with other users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> is there a Jitsi vs Zoom breakdown somewhere? Why are more people not using Jitsi meet which is free?

<comment><USER8> My guess is because many employers had contracts with them and if you're using it at work, it's likely your go-to for leisure at least if you don't know any better about other options.

It bothers me that people are willing to jump to use their company license of zoom for personal gatherings. I have no idea if it's possible but what if a license holding company, whose employees are utilizing their zoom account, can record any sessions in use by the account?

Even if it's not possible, I hate mixing my personal life with work, and when I see the opportunity I always bring up Jitsi as an option over Zoom.

<comment><USER9> I think the key difference is that Jitsi doesn't have breakout rooms nor a desktop app. Otherwise user experience is rather similar and from my pov the Jitsi meet style with room name is much more friendly than random numbers on zoom.

<comment><USER10> There's been interest in adding breakout rooms to Jitsi. A live demo that you can test and deploy for yourself just in GitHub pages includes a breakout rooms starting point.

Trial it here and give the issue a thumbs up if you'd like to see breakout rooms added.

[https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi- meet/issues/5550](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/5550)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So any advantage to the casual user to set up your own server instead of using jitsi meet?

<comment><USER12> First thing I did was increase the max frame rates & resolutions of screen sharing and webcams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pretty cool. Thanks for sharing!</comment>


'Western society is chronically sleep deprived' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/06/western-society-is-chronically-sleep-deprived-the-importance-of-the-bodys-clock <comment><USER2> I can believe that. I certainly am. But it's hard to undo the bad habit of going to bed late. When work and travelling to work occupies ten or more hours a day you end up feeling that sleep is stealing time from you.

<comment><USER3> I have to wonder how often the problem is bedtime, rather than wake-up time. In the past year or two I've come to the realization that part of my own inability to get a good night's rest is because my body really does function best when I go to bed at 3am (and consequently wake up at 11), a behavior that I had always thought of as aberrant due to social perception and the realities of maintaining an office job.

I still have the office job and I'm still chronically sleep deprived, but I'm less anxious about allowing myself an extra half hour in the evenings to blow off steam when I "should" be sleeping, now that I think of an early bedtime as one end of a compromise I'm making with myself rather than as a personal virtue that I'm forever failing to uphold.

<comment><USER2> Not an option for me really. Have to be working during the hours when my colleagues are available but it's an interesting point. I'll be retiring at the end of the year so I'll have an opportunity to experiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The content of the article doesn't seem to match the headline.

In any case, the headline doesn't seem to be right according to a recent meta- analysis seems to suggest we aren't getting any less sleep than 50+ years ago: "Has adult sleep duration declined over the last 50+ years?" [https://www.semel.ucla.edu/sites/all/files/Mirwin%20Has%20ad...](https://www.semel.ucla.edu/sites/all/files/Mirwin%20Has%20adult%20sleep%20duration%20declined....pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you care about web security? - <AUTHOR>

My opinion is that web security is at the bottom of the priority list, especially for startups. I just want to get your opinion how important web security is for you and the companies your build/work for. <comment><USER2> It really depends on the type of startups you are talking about... security is obviously more important for companies involving financial transactions (say, all the bitcoin-related companies) than others.</comment>


Fuse4js - FUSE bindings for NodeJS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vmware/fuse4js

<comment><AUTHOR> For what it's worth, installing from the NPM repository didn't work for me on OSX. Cloning the git repo and running `npm install fuse4js/` worked though.</comment>