Simple Exercises To Help Undo the Damage of Sitting (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/08/05/undo-the-damage-of-sitting/ <comment><USER2> One of the most amazing books I've read about simple ways to correct the muscular imbalances that result from too much sitting is Pete Egoscue's _Pain Free at Your PC_ [1]. His other book, _Pain Free_ [2] is also extremely effective and informative.

The first part of _Pain Free_ explains how muscular imbalances form and, most insightful to me, how every human body has the same _design range of motion_ (with a few exceptions due to birth defects or disease), that is every human body is designed to have the same range of motion but muscular imbalances formed as the result of specific repeated activities (or lack of activity) impede that design range of motion. All of the exercises in the Egoscue Method require no special equipment, only simple things like a chair or a wall (which further convinced me that it's not a fad out to sell something). Highly recommend reading these books if you're interested in this topic.

1\. [https://www.amazon.com/Pain-Free-Revolutionary-Stopping- Chro...](https://www.amazon.com/Pain-Free-Revolutionary-Stopping- Chronic/dp/0553379887)

2\. [https://www.amazon.com/Pain-Free-Your-PC- Computer/dp/0553380...](https://www.amazon.com/Pain-Free-Your-PC- Computer/dp/0553380524)

<comment><USER3> Isn't this obviously false? First, humans weren't designed at all. Second, the range of motion is often determined by bone structure, which no amount of muscle imbalance can affect. Check out squatting positions and how they're affected by the variety of hip joint shapes people have. Like this page: [https://squatuniversity.com/2016/03/25/how-hip-anatomy- affec...](https://squatuniversity.com/2016/03/25/how-hip-anatomy-affects- squat-mechanics/)

<comment><USER4> > First, humans weren't designed at all.

Oh come on. You know what he means.

<comment><USER3> It's not wrong to care about phrasing when that phrasing leads to wrong results. Anthropomorphising evolution as a designer is a classic mistake to make precisely because it causes us to make real mistakes. The parent post makes a big claim which is based entirely off a mistaken metaphor.

<comment><USER5> Even biologists and anatomists use the same language as shorthand when they know the audience understands what the shorthand means. It's just more convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great suggestions -- the fire hydrant is a great exercise.

More simple exercises are one leg squats -- if you use a desk to keep your balance, they're not that difficult to do and a great exercise you can do anywhere. Also, you can drop down and do 5, 10, 20 pushups anywhere. While on the phone you could put it on speakerphone and drop down and try to hold the plank position for the length of the call -- I've seen some Scrum meetings have everyone do the plank (shortens the meeting much more than just standing up).

A few more ideas :-D!

<comment><USER7> I call this Office Calisthenics. It really throws people off. Nothing bad, but they're confused. I've tried to convince some that it's fun. Even did it with a tie on. Didn't get any takers.

<comment><USER6> Try having a contest or competition. See who can hold the plank the longest or stand on one foot the longest. That makes it fun.

<comment><USER8> Or it may make people detest your management style even more. I belong to those who cannot stand being coerced into doing some "fun group activity" (whether in office or in a hotel). And when people want to take care of my health in office, why not start with the obvious:

* Don't give me a car - give me a bicycle and tickets for public transport.

* Give me a shower in office or a membership in a gym nearby.

* Invest in good chairs and tables (yes, yes, you all do - until I arrive with my 190cm and suddenly it's .. "we could place some books under the legs of your table!")

<comment><USER9> Completely agree about detesting the management style. It's not even actually health focused, it's just showing off like you're at a frat house.

190cm isn't that tall, really. (I'm short). Do you normally have trouble with the standard 30-inch (76-ish cm) desk?

<comment><USER8> It's tall enough that I can neither bend me legs to 90 degrees nor use a regular office chair.

While 190cm is not this tall, it's just too tall to fit into most industry norms: Beds, bikes, desk & chairs are all made for "slightly smaller" people. The 3cm my armrests are missing in height are exactly those 3cm that my whole upper body will gravitate down so that my arms can rest. 2h later I have a stiff neck, 8h later a sore back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's always yoga [0] [1].

I just do the sun salutation [2] a couple of times a day - takes ~5mins, reduces any back pain I get.

[0]: [http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2017/02/20/51567525...](http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2017/02/20/515675259/got-back-pain-try-yoga-or-massage-before-reaching- for-the-pills)

[1]: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/01/12/yoga-key- relie...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/01/12/yoga-key-relieving- long-term-back-pain-new-study-suggests/)

[2]: [http://yogasite.com/sunsalute.htm](http://yogasite.com/sunsalute.htm)

<comment><USER11> Yoga can be great.

Ditto qigong, tai chi, pilates, isometric exercises, physical therapy. I've even done goofy looking breathing exercises that rebalance your diaphragm.

I also know that yoga, chiro, gyms hurts people. Gonzo attitude, ignorance, and bad instruction.

The trick is to find the therapists and teachers who understand the body, your body, and help you mend. Everyone needs something a little different.

Source: I had a lumbar fusion and some other stuff. I've spent a lot of time just remaining functional, managing pain.

Advice: By 30, everyone should be hitting the gym. By 40, everyone should get regular PT tune ups; you'll be surprised how much function you (unknowingly) lost. Like now I can stand on one foot and put on the other shoe, two years ago I couldn't do that.

<comment><USER12> I was also surprised to learn the thing about putting on one shoe by standing on the opposite foot, as that's how I've always put on shoes, and thus never understood the seeming requirement for a bench / chair in an area where shoes come off and go on.

<comment><USER10> Are we talking tying laces as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've heard* that the discs in your back cannot repair themselves -- they have no blood flow. So strengthen your "core", because if you squeeze those discs (thru bad posture) year after year, eventually they deteriorate. Then your nerves get pinched, and the pain can be insane.

* Not a doctor. Let me know if they self-heal.

<comment><USER14> They self heal, slowly, as long as they can. In order for them to self heal, they have to stop getting squished at all, for long periods of time.

I never knew the importance of core exercise until I squished some discs and experienced pinched nerves. Core exercises build up the muscles around the discs and can help prevent them from getting squished. But you have to also find out which activity is squishing them, and stop that too. Exercise alone won't do it.

Pain is the first part of what happens. Pain nerves run along the outside of the spinal column. Motor control nerves run inside the spinal column, so the second part is the pain goes away and your muscles stop working properly. That's the really scary part. Even though the pain can be bad, as long as you feel pain, you're closer to healing than after the pain goes away and you develop a funny walk or can't do pushups anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nothing fixes my desk-related back issues like being regular at my gym, doing deep squats and deadlifts. When I can't manage my priorities, it's only a question of time before the old back starts complaining.

<comment><USER16> An office job is basically 40+ hours a week of practicing disengagement of the posterior chain (via sitting, likely with poor posture). Deadlifts are such a good treatment.

<comment><USER15> Yes. The deadlift is probably the most universally useful exercise, when executed properly. It really is worth the effort to learn. (Closely followed by the squats.)

<comment><USER17> I would put squat and deadlift at the same rank personally, just because they are very similar in their impact. Closely following behind them would be a vertical pressing exercise (e.g. barbell overhead press) and a vertical pulling exercise (e.g. chin-ups or pull-ups) because it feels great to decompress the spine after putting so much weight on it.

<comment><USER15> I agree, it's hard to split squat and deadlifts in terms of how good they are. Do them both! And yes, overhead press is fantastic - it's a great way of engaging the whole body too. I need to be doing chin ups more, however just a bit too fat to do them in numbers; have just been hanging off the bar to stretch my spine out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> He's right about taking it easy if you're tight or sore. I've hurt myself from cranking into stretches or exercise without a gradual warm-up. Want more stretch + pace ideas? Do like the Japanese: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnZJINpzhs8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnZJINpzhs8)

</comment><comment><USER19> Another front page post compliments this one: Why Walking Helps Us Think ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14235398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14235398))

i.e. Do your thinking while walking, not sitting and hunched over a screen. Your brain and your body will love you for it.

<comment><USER20> it would be awesome if you could walk and program. back pain can come from static hand posture. and swinging your arms is good for the back. i imagine parks full of programmers that time to time bump into each others because they are in deep focus.

<comment><USER10> Isn't that the point of the desks with treadmills?

<comment><USER20> you cant swing your arms while typing though. im thinking wrist censors for input and vr like helmet or glasses for output.

<comment><USER10> Or some half decent voice recognition / brain implants when ever they arrive.

Not sure you'd want to do this walking around outside though, seems to increase the likelihood of hitting trees.

<comment><USER20> I usually walk around or do house-hold work when solving hard problems, it's slow as my mind is _somewhere else_ but I think that with a brain implant or voice recognition like you suggested it would be totally doable to program and do other stuff at the same time.

A screen-reader might also be used for output.

<comment><USER10> Ah - I was thinking as a replacement for your wrist input and VR helmet. I'm guessing you're not planning on doing house work with those on :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How about using Squat Toilet and do the Grok Squat a part of daily routine than a conscious effort...

<comment><USER22> Squatty Potty for the win!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Semi unrelated but I like the art of manliness podcast

</comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone else work at a standing desk?

<comment><USER25> Does anyone use a small treadmill with slow speed at a standing desk?

I saw a video a year ago, looks like a good idea, I am planing to buy a small one

<comment><USER26> Linus Torvalds seems to use a treadmill with his standing desk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuS-3HSnpq4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuS-3HSnpq4)

<comment><USER27> Hello wsc981, This one is off topic and I am sorry about that. A while back I have read here somewhere that you are/were freelancing and doing so via Computer Futures. Can we get in touch? I've got couple of easy to answer question. Thanks fella developer.

<comment><USER26> Hi sevmardi, we could chat over email. You could contact me on firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL This is really nice but all these excercises are really heavy on your knees. Are there alternatives?

</comment><comment><USER28> This is exactly what I needed. The couch stretch is a miracle.</comment>


Source Code For Over A Dozen 7600 Games Released   - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/07/source_code_for_over_a_dozen_7.php

<comment><USER2> The article says the games where nearly lost when the company shuttered it's doors in '96.

It is scary how easily we can lose huge chunks of digital history unless thoughtful people make the effort to preserve it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could any of these be easily/legally ported as iPhone games? (perhaps with titles changed)

<comment><USER4> No to all possible interpretations of that question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kudos to the Atari Historical Society for saving this code and releasing it! I cut my teeth on Atari 800 6502 assembly code, and spent many hours playing these very games wondering how they wrote them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looking at this makes me both nostalgic about asm and thankful that I don't have to write any enterprise applications in it.

<comment><USER7> The guys who wrote that code were probably thankful they didn't have to write any "enterprise" applications.</comment></comment>


AI used for first time in job interviews in UK to find best applicants - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/27/ai-facial-recognition-used-first-time-job-interviews-uk-find/ <comment><USER2> dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21106520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21106520)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's nice and everything, but when I submitted the story it wasn't flagged as a dupe. Sorry.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is a MS in CS from USC useful in the long term? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I am a programmer, currently working in India. Although I had never dreamed about obtaining an MS from a US university and settling there, but last year, I decided to give it a try just for the sake of it and have got an only admit from USC. This has put me in a dilemma as the costs of studying there are huge. Now my question is, would an MS from USC help tremendously boost my credentials (given that my undergrad is a tier-3 institution in India) such that the heavy cost of USC would be justified? How good is an MS in CS from USC perceived over the long term? On a slightly off topic but related note, what are the different career paths one can take after graduating from USC (or after an MS in CS, in general)? <comment><USER2> As much as I hate the high cost of international tuition, I would say this would end up being beneficial to you. In addition to the boost to your credentials, you'll also become eligible for employment on a special visa once you graduate that will allow you to be employed for I believe 18 months with option for 12 month extension thereafter (even longer extensions allowed if you work for an educational institution). This allows you to get your foot in the door somewhere and then work that into a really well paying job here.

Source: Multiple Indian and Thai friends who have followed this path in life.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, and that's why looks very promising. It's just that the cost scares me a bit. Anyways, thanks a lot for sharing your insight :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> USC isn't Stanford but it's vastly superior to a "tier-3" Indian school... either way you should basically look at it as an H1-B job ticket and do the math on whether its worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had thought so too. Thanks for the reply :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would say , take some udacity courses(gtech) while in India and see if u like them. There is an engineer shortage everywhere and if u up your skills you may be able to get well paying jobs (remotely or those that sponsor a visa) the cost and time spent may be lesser.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, while I mostly agree with that, I think an MS also provides a lot of time to freely pursue our interests. However the high fees does kind of put a constraint to that :)</comment></comment>


The Ad Blocking Industry: Global, Large, Threatening - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/12/06/the-ad-blocking-industry-global-large-threatening/ <comment><USER2> The best trend of 2015 is Ad Blocking. Love it.</comment>


Advantages of a name-brand school - <AUTHOR> http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/advantages-of-name-brand-school.htm <comment><USER2> I guess the only disadvantage is the apparently unbearable pressure of keeping it to oneself for more than 5 minutes?

>Take-home message number two is the importance of humility. I get seriously annoyed when I hear stories of people from name-brand schools being arrogant towards or looking down on people who weren't fortunate enough to go to name- brand schools.

Thanks Philip "MIT" Guo, but I don't want your sympathy or your company.

<comment><USER3> The author seems like a tool. That's the thing about name-brand graduates (particularly Harvard), within 5 minutes of meeting someone you will hear about where they went to college, even 10+ years after they graduated. Clearly this is an exaggeration, but definitely has some truth to it.

However I must agree with the OP sentiments, it is way easier for name- brandies to get job interviews/offers. Nevertheless, I am doubtful that the price differential is worth it strictly to help you land a job. I guess I will never know what I missed out on, but faced with ~40k per year in loans I am very glad I chose to go to a state school.

<comment><USER4> A friend's boss went to harvard and stanford - We meet up with him a lot, and he can be relied on to name drop his alma mater s once every 2-5 minutes. At first I thought this was a little pretentious and phony but I've actually come to like the guy - he tells pretty interesting stories, he's very outgoing etc. I guess we all have things that we are proud of. I'm definitely not a name- brand school person but there are somethings that I'm proud of that I probably talk about too much and I think most people are the same way. I try not to judge. I've found that you can actually learn some stuff from "arrogant" people if you just let them say the things that make them feel special.

<comment><USER3> Not me. Ever since I got back from Everest I keep my mouth shut.

<comment><USER4> See this is a great example - If I met you I would love to hear your story, but your modesty would make it unlikely that I would.

<comment><USER3> I was joking about Everest. Some day maybe :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this a Zen thing?

By gratuitously recapping the top 1% of humanity's absurd privilege through a litany of self-congratulating narcissism disguised as advice are we supposed to reach some sort of nirvana?

<comment><USER6> aka <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given that 4 years of tuition at one of those name-brand schools might run $150k (vs, say, $25k at your local state University), the given advantages don't seem to be worth it. Starting off your career 1/6th of a million dollars in debt in order to cut short your job search by a few months and earn perhaps a few percent higher salary (a lot of which will get swallowed up if you're unlucky enough to jump into the higher tax bracket in that range) seems a dubious decision to me.

If I had gone to one of those "name-brand" schools I suppose I might have been better off in some ways, but right now I'm 100% debt free and that gives me a hell of a lot more options than a diploma from a name-brand University would, in my opinion.

<comment><USER8> (this is the tool/author here)

Right on for being debt-free out of college :) The financial argument you make is convincing, but please note that I am not trying to pit private schools against public schools! There are _plenty_ of people who are $150k in debt out of college who went to private universities that are not known as so-called 'name-brand' schools.

<comment><USER8> ADDENDUM: and, depending on the need-based financial aid they receive, there are plenty of people who attended name-brand universities who graduate with much less debt than $150k

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you don't start with the advantage of a name-brand school and work resume then you have less to risk or distract you from your world-beating startup.

An astonishing number of billionaires never finished college (<http://www.pennylicious.com/2006/10/09/billionaire-dropouts/>)

<comment><USER8> (this is the tool/author here)

yes i totally agree --- actually i've observed that people who graduated from name-brand schools are often more risk-averse and less likely to start their own companies, since they've been trained at a young age to take the safe and steady route through school and life.

regarding your billionaires comment --- please note that nowhere in my article did i say that going to a name-brand school would make you more likely to strike it rich :) the advantages are most prominent when you want to stay within "the system" rather than venturing off into new territory

<comment><USER9> Good comment - you would do well to balance your article with this unexpected risk-aversion result of having a name-brand academic and work pedigree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe those points(which glaringly describe benefits) are no substitute for competency & experience. This sounds more like entitled mediocrity from the author 'privileged' enough to have attended one of these schools.

I've known enough ivy league grads(even post-grads) who would argue against the claims in that blog post. Of course they are proud of the schools that they graduated from but their joy rests primarily in what they learned while they were there.

The author writes as if education ends after graduation.

Why not also write about the 6 figure debt that many graduates walk into their first job with ?

<comment><USER8> (this is the author/tool here)

> Maybe those points(which glaringly describe benefits) are no substitute for > competency & experience.

Agreed, but the title of my article was the _ADVANTAGES_ of attending a name- brand school, so of course it glaringly describes benefits :) i should probably write a follow-up article talking about disadvantages

> Why not also write about the 6 figure debt that many graduates walk into > their first job with ?

sure, that's also a good topic to write about, but please note that many graduates of non-name-brand private schools also walk into their first job with the same 6-figure debt. i'm not trying to contrast private/public schools here.

<comment><USER8> > Why not also write about the 6 figure debt that many graduates walk into > their first job with ?

ADDENDUM: there's been no discussion of financial aid packages at private universities (doesn't matter if they're 'name-brand' or whatever, many private schools offer need-based financial aid). depending on your family's financial status, you could end up paying tuition comparable to what you'd pay at a public school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good thing when you start a startup you answer to reality, and reality doesn't make estimations of your abilities based on a degree

Of course I agree, if you want to get a job, a name brand degree is going to help. Heck if I was recruiting for a company I'd certainly pay more attention to someone with a better degree (just more attention though). But doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. A successful ENTREPRENEUR is worth 10 MBAs and 10 PHDs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In other words: Connections and reputation. It lets you market yourself better and meet people you wouldn't meet otherwise.

<comment><USER13> Not just that, but many companies focus the large majority of their recruiting efforts on a select few universities. My company, for example, focuses almost entirely on CMU, Berkeley, and Caltech for technical hires.

If our recruiters' actions are any indication, a name-brand school can save your resume from being trashed right off the bat. But it won't land you a job; it just makes the competition more intense.

<comment><USER12> Articles like this make me glad to be working with the stuff I am. I could never handle a field that looks at anything other than portfolio. Reading this gave me the heebie-jeebies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author speaks like not going to a "name brand" school will doom somebody or make things exponentially harder. This is simply, empirically not true.

If landing a first job out of college is what worries you, factors which matter a great deal more (for dynamic, high growth, technology companies of any size) are competence, curiosity and credibility.

Speaking from _my own_ experience, somebody from an relatively uknown school but who spent his college and high school years working in the industry (even in small companies people have rarely heard of) and writing code _outside_ of work/school in his spare time, _will_ get noticed, interviewed and hired by top tier employers _no worse_ than somebody coming from a brand-name school.

<comment><USER8> (this is the tool/author here again)

> Speaking from my own experience, somebody from an relatively uknown school > but who spent his college and high school years working in the industry > (even in small companies people have rarely heard of) and writing code > outside of work/school in his spare time, will get noticed, interviewed and > hired by top tier employers no worse than somebody coming from a brand-name > school.

I totally agree with you, but one of my points in the article is that (rightly or wrongly, i'm not in a position to judge), somebody from a name-brand school would have a decent chance of getting that same job offer _even without putting in nearly as much self-driven dedicated real-world hacking work experience_ as somebody who didn't have such privileges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Question: which UK schools are known in the US?

<comment><USER12> Oxford and Cambridge are the only two that come to mind, and I know nothing about them but their names.

<comment><USER16> London School of Economics also comes to mind. But Oxford and Cambridge are probably the ones with the best reputation.

<comment><USER17> In fact, there are very few international universities that are well known among the general public in the United States.

The only other international schools that I suspect are well known are McGill and the Sorbonne.

<comment><USER18> Waterloo? U of Toronto?

<comment><USER12> Legitimate American here! Waterloo is that battle Napoleon was in, right? And U of X doesn't ever strike me as reputable unless it's Tokyo University, and I don't think many Americans know Tokyo University either. Outside of England the only schools I know of are Trinity in Ireland and IIT.

<comment><USER19> I don't have anything against "U of X"es. The University of Chicago, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), University of Wisconsin (Madison), and University of California (Berkeley) are all good schools. I think that in the right fields any of those schools will get you anything having gone to MIT or Stanford would (except with alumni of MIT and Stanford).

Incidentally, nobody interviewing me has ever asked where I went to school. Seems like something that matters only if you have no proof of competence.

<comment><USER12> You forgot UPenn, which is the only U of X that is in the Ivies. But that was kind of my point. The names all run together, and while I do recognize some (and not all positively), I don't recognize any outside the United States beyond TU.

<comment><USER19> I guess this means that the best way for Universities to advertise is by having an iconic clock tower that is in every animated television show with high-school or college-age protagonists. I think Keio and Waseda are objectively better schools (in Tokyo), but they clearly do not advertise as well as Todai. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Source: <http://tr.im/CuGq>

        * Open new career opportunities
        * Personal development & education experience
        * Increase salary
        * Potential to network

</comment><comment><USER20> This guy's writing is poor. His tone is pretentious, and his use of words is offensive. In no uncertain terms, don't read this guys narcissistic bs.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is not a study. It's also especially susceptible to confirmation bias.

Also, my friend went to a name-brand school and he did not experience any of the listed so-called advantages for which he was applicable. Clearly the article is only a celebration of the author's ego since he fails to cite the number one professional advantage from attending a name-brand school: receiving a world-class education, and becoming more intelligent than coworkers.

<comment><USER12> That's some confirmation bias too: You assume name-brand schools have better education than non-name-brand schools.

<comment><USER8> (this is the maniacally egotistical author here)

> Clearly the article is only a celebration of the author's ego since he fails > to cite the number one professional advantage from attending a name-brand > school: receiving a world-class education, and becoming more intelligent > than coworkers.

yep i agree with the OP ... please note that nowhere in my article did i claim that you receive a higher-quality education or become more intelligent than your co-workers by attending a name-brand school. on the contrary, many people i know (from all sorts of colleges) would disagree with those claims. the course syllabuses from most US universities are now online, so you can make the comparisons for yourself; you can see what people in different schools learn, and it's pretty similar ;)</comment></comment></comment>


In OS X 10.15, all Excel documents show text upside down and backwards - <AUTHOR> https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304933-excel-for-mac/suggestions/38773642-after-upgrading-to-mac-catalina-10-15-all-excel-d <comment><USER2> If the version you have starts with 15.X you are incredibly far behind in updates. You're so far behind, AutoUpdate won't show you available updates. The 16.X series is current. Download, install and then run the latest version of AutoUpdate to update Office. [https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?linkid=830196](https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?linkid=830196)

This fixed the problem for me this morning!

</comment><comment><USER3> Excel on the MacOS is pretty bad all around. Filtering a 100 line spreadsheet hangs for 20 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER4> What is the logic of upgrading OS but not updating the software?

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe don't do anything important on your Mac if you've upgraded to Catalina...</comment>


Apple Releases OS X 10.11 El Capitan Open Source Darwin Code - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.apple.com <comment><USER2> What does this mean? I would hope that best case would be:

a) something like [http://www.puredarwin.org/](http://www.puredarwin.org/) could be updated

b) something like [https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross](https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross) could drop the step of grabbing files from xcode

<comment><USER3> Apple stopped releasing Darwin binaries quite some time ago.

They only release the source code now.

I'm not sure if the source code released can be made to make a binary ISO file yet. Apple could have a competitor to GNU/Linux if it released Darwin binary files as ISOs and had some program like apt to download free and open source software for it. It would be a step towards making an OS for PC Clones that can compete with Windows and GNU/Linux.

<comment><USER4> > It would be a step towards making an OS for PC Clones that can compete with > Windows and GNU/Linux.

If they wanted to do that, they'd just release OS X for generic X86-64 hardware.

Apple tried the whole "lets officially support 3rd party hardware makers" thing in the 90s. It did not go well for them.

<comment><USER3> They can't release OS X for generic X86 hardware because it would kill their Macintosh sales.

If they made Darwin for X86 systems it wouldn't be the same as OS X but it would be something that competes with GNU/Linux and Windows. Somethings they could sell apps for with an app store.

But yeah in the 1990s they tried MKLinux and Mac Clones and it didn't work out too well because they didn't have the proper tech support for them. The Mac Clones cost less than the real Macs and cut into their sales.

<comment><USER4> > If they made Darwin for X86 systems it wouldn't be the same as OS X but it > would be something that competes with GNU/Linux and Windows.

Why would they ever do that? What is the benefit to Apple? They make less than $0 on OS X - it costs them money to develop, and is given away for free. It's subsidised by the sale of hardware.

> Somethings they could sell apps for with an app store.

The stuff that's included in Darwin wouldn't be nearly enough to support the App Store - all the high level frameworks that make OS X what it is, are _not_ included in Darwin because they're not open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They still ship UUCP? Are they serious?

Maybe it's time to clean out the attic...</comment>


Glenn Greenwald: Mass Extermination of Iowa Pigs Amid Pandemic Revealed - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/pigs-factory-farms-ventilation-shutdown-coronavirus/ <comment><USER2> >Under this method, pigs at the company's rural Grundy County facility are being "depopulated," using the industry's jargon, by sealing off all airways to their barns and inserting steam into them, intensifying the heat and humidity inside and leaving them to die overnight. Most pigs — though not all — die after hours of suffering from a combination of being suffocated and roasted to death. The recordings obtained by The Intercept include audio of the piercing cries of pigs as they succumb. The recordings also show that some pigs manage to survive the ordeal — but, on the morning after, Iowa Select dispatches armed workers to enter the barn to survey the mound of pig corpses for any lingering signs of life, and then use their bolt guns to extinguish any survivors.

Truly disturbing. Increasing cruelty and suffering in order to minimize monetary loss of profits.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think there's a way to tastefully draw a parallel between thousands of pigs being suffocated out of convenience and unarmed civilians being murdered by the police...

But all I can think of right now is "I can't breathe"

</comment><comment><USER4> The people deserves to know the externalities of such practices of the animals agriculture business.

Why is it that main stream news is so afraid of exposing stuff like this ?

<comment><USER5> > afraid of exposing

They are afraid of losing their audience and/or advertisers. Not that hard to figure out.

Same reason why I tune out Facebook posts like this -- I have a visceral reaction to pictures of destroyed animals when I see pictures/videos. I would argue it's the news consumers that have a problem with it, not investigative journalists.

Also, there are laws in many of the states which specialize in factory livestock that criminalize gathering evidence, so it's difficult to report.

<comment><USER6> They don't need to flash the gore to make the report.

Murders are reported without showing the body with holes in it, etc.

<comment><USER5> I don't think people react the same to murders even of different classes of people, let alone all animals. I don't make up the rules; I only observe them.

Humans have heuristics. I suspect the more we can personally identify with a victim, the more we are likely to be interested in hearing about it. Why don't news programs continue to post about all of the Pakistanis, Afghanis, Somalis, Libyans, etc that are killed either by terrorists or US drone strikes? There's only so much people will tolerate before their attention moves elsewhere.

I trust that news outlets will follow the money. If it was low risk of being sued, not terribly expensive to cover (as in didn't piss off advertisers), and got viewers to pay attention (without vomiting during dinner time), news programs would cover it.

<comment><USER4> Good point. Compared to murder, animal cruelty segments will be a lot of cruelty without generating much sympathy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This shows how broken the farming model is in the States. Slaughter is pretty much the same, people have to work too quickly to despatch, often resulting in animals surviving as they go on the line to be cut up.

It would have been far more humane to use carbon dioxide instead, this is standard in Europe. It induces unconsciousness without much trouble.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is why I'm mostly vegan.

</comment><comment><USER9> Truly, despicably evil.</comment>


Lisp Is Not Functional - <AUTHOR> http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap5.html

<comment><USER2> I posted this 12 hours ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2888735>

Thunderous silence met it - I wonder if this will fare better.</comment>


Ask HN: What's stopping PWAs from being more popular? - <AUTHOR> PWAs = progressive web apps<p>Why can't we just get rid of most native apps and app store duopolies? Or at least complement them with good web apps, that work offline, use service workers, small sized and so on? <comment><USER2> Performance, efficiency, native UI, privacy, security.. I mean, really you need to make a reasonable case for why you think a web page can replace compiled code running locally on the device, not the other way around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Freedom? Both on the consumer side and the company side? Also web indexing? Easier sharing? privacy concerns?

<comment><USER2> Freedom from what?

How does web indexing help the end user?

Sharing what?

How do you imagine that a cached webpage is more private than a locally running compiled app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not freedom from but freedom to : set your own terms not the terms of the play store or the iPhone store. Indexing helps the user find the app. Sharing a specific page of the app to a friend's thanks to the URL.

You can't install an app without accepting all permission, contact info, sms, and so on. Facebook is much more privacy agressive on native than on the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can instantly rat out a web app, instead of a native app. They scroll in the wrong places, don't react instantly, have weird or very uncommon widgets, look like a page is loading, etc.

If you don't care about high quality of UI, then sure.

</comment><comment><USER4> From my little part of the industry, clients _want_ to be in the two app stores. Even when what they're putting there would be better as a PWA.

(Also, it seems from my perspective, that clients with money here care most about being on iPhone, and service workers there are not yet ready for primetime. Its only been available for 7-8 weeks, and it's got some warts - only 50MB of storage, your cache and persistent storage may vanish after only a few weeks, and no push notifications - which is the showstopper where I am...)

</comment><comment><USER5> A centralised place for discovery of PWA's. Like an App Store.</comment>


Show HN: FinalBoard – Your own private dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://finalboard.com/

<comment><USER2> This looks pretty cool, nice job! I have no real need for this at the minute, but I'll definitely keep it saved.

I think the real benefit would come from shared/reusable widgets, do you have any plans to try to help your customers find the useful BS3 widgets for this?

On another note, Bootstrap moves fast and makes pretty major syntax changes - do you plan to keep updated so your users can keep using whatever comes up when they search <widget> bootstrap? If not I think trying to maintain a repository will become even more useful.

Quick design side note, on mobile your pricing collapses a lot and is a bit confusing. There's a thick line between tier and price, and no space between that price and the next tier. My immediate reading was basic is free and developer $49 due to that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback. 1) I am thinking of opening github repository where users can access and explore all the widget examples and also share their own by pull requests. 2) I will continue updating bootstrap version and now thankfully the changes are not so major as it was migrating from bs2 to bs3. Since widgets are usually quite simple, just some typography and sizes, i don't think following BS updates should be a problem. 3) Thanks for design note in responsible layout, you're right, it is confusing how it collapses, i will fix the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> no free pricing tier?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the author of the library. Let me comment about the pricing - for me personally, all the alternative hosted solutions (like Geckoboard etc.) where too expensive - by paying monthly subscription fee in a long term you still pay much more, than once buying any licence of FinalBoard.

There is a trial version available where you can download and test it out and see if it fits you.

I set minimal price for Basic license and on my opinion this is fair price for what you get. In basic license you get unlimited dashboards, unlimited widgets with all the benefits FinalBoard offers you - you won't see such price on any on hosted solutions even close.</comment></comment>


Please, PC manufacturers: Don't screw up Windows 7 - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2008/11/06/please-pc-makers-dont-screw-up-windows-7/

<comment><USER2> It's Microsoft that you should ask not to mess up Windows 7. But I doubt that it will make a difference.</comment>


Ideas Boston - A one day conference of ideas - <AUTHOR> http://ideasboston.com/Speakers.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> "The core of IDEAS Boston is an annual conference where leading innovators present their latest – or sometimes their next – big ideas in a fast-paced format that combines succinct and lively presentations, artistic breaks, and time for networking and discussion."

Sounds interesting. I'm going to it this year but I'm not sure what to expect. Tom Ashbrook is hosting it, so how bad could it be?

Has anyone been?</comment>


Legal considerations when gathering threat intellegence from illict sources [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ccips/page/file/1252341/download <comment><USER2> To me, the big question underneath all of this is password dumps. I don't know that there was much uncertainty about buying vulnerabilities. But password dumps are almost always per se stolen data, and it's a bit of an open secret that there are anti-ATO teams using those dumps to create better versions of HIBP. I read this looking for clear guidance on whether it was safe to buy a password dump if you're only using it to force password resets for your users, and didn't come away with much certainty in either direction.

<comment><USER3> >As noted above, many of the federal criminal statutes associated with the type of stolen data that tends to be sold in Dark Markets—e.g., passwords, account numbers, and other personally identifiable information—only apply if there is intent to further another crime: for instance, an intent to use the information to defraud.33 For this reason, a purchaser of the stolen data who lacks a criminal motive is unlikely to face prosecution under those statutes.

Which part is unclear?

<comment><USER4> > knowingly purchasing another party's stolen data without that party's > authorization can pose some legal risk. It is much more likely to raise > questions about the purchaser's motives and result in scrutiny from law > enforcement and the legitimate data owner, particularly if a trade secret is > involved.

So if you're buying password dumps only to protect your own users from account takeover then you're _unlikely_ to face legal consequences? However, that's not ironclad and not explicitly protected by the law. No promises.

I know some large sites will use illicit passwords dumps to revoke re-used passwords for their own users. Though they'll be very obtuse and just tell users something like " _your password has expired_ ". Given the fuzzy legality of this practice, I can understand why.

<comment><USER2> Also, there's a potential gap between "protecting your users" and "selling protection for users to other companies" that you'd really like to see clarified, if you're a vendor who buys password dumps to provide a commercial ATO service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad they released this and made it clear that there is a legal and safe way to collect this sort of information.

From my reading, as long as you're not furthering any crimes the community is engaged in, or impersonating a real person to gain their trust (as opposed to a fictional false identity), or breaching any systems they use, then it's generally okay to gather information. Purchasing stolen data (that you own/are authorized to possess) and vulnerabilities is more complicated, but they explain some legal ways of doing it.

<comment><USER6> One thing to keep in mine. They specifically call out anything involving child pornography isn't covered by this document. The gist I got was, "Don't be a dipshit, run screaming in the other direction if you get even a whiff of it," which is my policy on the subject irregardless of this document.

<comment><USER7> There are several situations where you, by nature of your employment and/or the discovery, may be legally required to disclose finding it to certain parties. Running away as you suggest can create legal liability in a few circumstances. Speak with your corporate lawyer and someone at NCMEC if you are based in the United States and come across this situation, _especially_ if it is UGC that your network touched in any way.

Any U.S. organization that handles UGC MUST be aware of this, because failure to follow the process can clap back rapidly. IANAL, so ask yours, and I'm only familiar with the U.S. If you accept and transmit UGC, it will happen. Be ready and train your people, and be ready to support them when they collapse mentally from dealing with it (not even to mention the impact to the children).

I still have very specific nightmares and refuse to work in UGC/hosting due to this.

<comment><USER8> I used to work as in-house counsel at a machine learning company and we had exactly the system you describe set up: a standard set of procedures for immediate reporting of child pornography found in image batches sent to us by customers, NCMEC notification, quarantining and isolated storage of the data, and offering counseling for affected employees. It didn't happen often, thankfully, but was pretty eye-opening about what's out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 'Intellegence' in the title should be 'intelligence', as in the linked document.</comment>


Async-GraphQL: A GraphQL server framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/async-graphql/async-graphql <comment><AUTHOR> I've been using this for a small project and the feature set is far more comprehensive than anything else I've seen in Rust. In comparison to Juniper, it has much better support for subscriptions in particular. Its creator has been amazingly productive and continues to add features almost daily.

<comment><USER2> Came here to ask how it compares to juniper. Juniper has been the one part of my stack of crates that's made async difficult for a while now. Building a rust app with full futures support from top to bottom has huge benefits, but support on juniper has been slow in coming (a lot of existing code to move along with it), and the main error being GraphQLError<'a> with a lifetime and no impl of std::error::Error has been a huge nuisance to deal with.

That said, constructing the resolvers with the `#[juniper::graphql_object` macro has been incredibly easy. They used to use some clunky DSL, but since the move it's been great. Don't think I'd consider moving if async-graphql isn't as strong on that, but I won't really know until I try both.

<comment><USER3> Juniper master has async and subscription support

<comment><USER2> Yeah I've been using it - took a while but pretty happy with it so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excuse me what's the point of GraphQL as a primary middleware/middleware protocol? I can get the use case of consolidating a number of existing "REST" services to reduce service roundtrips with HTTP/1.1 or layering problems with HTTP/2.0 or QUIC, but it's not like nobody warned against use of the "REST" spaghetti antipattern, including Roy Fielding who coined the term. So JSON and XML (de-)serialization is natively supported by browsers, but what has GraphQL going for it when you need a browser client lib for it anyway? Why not just use a regular endpoint for JSON or XML; their use isn't tied to an opinionated "REST" interpretation at all and you could just send arbitrary payloads. Or is it just because, like React, GraphQL is advertised with all the strength of the media powerhouse that is Facebook in the end?

<comment><USER5> IMO GraphQL is a far better API framework than anything REST or "REST-lite"

1\. Since GraphQL is always strongly typed, it serves as the perfect contract- definition layer between front-ends and back-ends. A common pattern is to define all your endpoints with the type definition language, then expose mock endpoints that the front-end team can code against while the back-ends team implements. In practice this works much better than anything I've ever done with REST tooling.

2\. The strong typing also guarantees that many classes of mistakes and errors (and potential security holes) never even make it to your running resolver code.

3\. GraphQL really excels where you may have clients outside of your control running against older versions of your API. A big original impetus for developing GraphQL was supporting native mobile clients, where all clients can't be updated in tandem with the server like a web-app can. Since the _client_ always sends the full shape of the query they're executing, it's easy to evolve endpoints slowly: just add new fields or endpoints to your schema, @deprecate the old fields, but older clients can use those deprecated fields until they can migrate onto the newer fields. Backwards compatibility is never free, but again, in practice I've found this works _much_ better than maintaining and potentially transforming between different explicit versions of REST APIs.

4\. The tooling is simply fantastic. GraphiQL/GraphQL playground are leaps and bounds beyond something like Swagger.

There are other reasons but those are some of the highlights for me.

<comment><USER4> Appreciate your response. This sounds _exactly_ what SOAP is like, then, and also what OpenAPI/JSON schema are attempting to do (only SOAP/WSDL also adds auth, transactions, discoverability, language mappings, schema evolution, and a couple other things). My post surely wasn't meant to defend "REST" or Swagger of all things :); more like, the industry has delivered one middleware standard after another in the last 20 years since "web services" became a thing, and arguably even earlier (CORBA). So it wasn't quite clear for me where this enthusiasm was coming from all along. Please don't be offended, but your answer confirms my suspicion that GraphQL is introducing an age-old concept to a new audience that was raised in the naive "REST all the things" mood of the last decade.

From the other answers, I get there's additional practical functionality like generic sorting and filtering in a GraphQL endpoint, though as a fullstack but mostly backend guy I'm puzzled how that's supposed to work without pushing the query criteria including sorting/offset/limit down to a DB in a hands-off way without a backend team implementing it.

<comment><USER6> You're right. GraphQL definitely seems like that. There are a few nuances though:

1\. GraphQL is like SOAP for JSON. JSON is important to lot of developers today, especially the frontend/javascript ecosystem

2\. GraphQL also helps developers think of data as related entities in a way that fits JSON. Nested objects and arrays essentially, but not ad-hoc. Hence a "schema" of your "graph" that describes the API.

3\. GraphQL has a construct called fragments that makes it easy to declare data-dependencies at a UI component level that are then automatically composed together into a single query by graphql client tooling (at build time ideally). This can be done with JSON as well, but the ergonomics with GraphQL are nicer.

None of these are truly "new" ideas perhaps. But I think all of it coming together is new.

That said, the complexity of building and maintaining a GraphQL server is definitely non-trivial in the real world. For example, health-check tools often rely on HTTP status codes in responses to check service and API health. This doesn't work well with GraphQL because GraphQL supports partial errors and responses, and the error itself is embedded inside the response. This means analysis the response is necessary. This means that the privilege required for the health-check tooling is greater. Responses should not be logged or analysed by third party services without taking a lot of explicit care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a GraphQL n00b. My app is a pretty vanilla monolith server rendered Ruby on Rails / Postgres (no SPA).

1.) Would I use async-graphql on top of postgres and communicate via a ruby graph ql client?

2.) Is it a bad idea for me to use a rust backend on top of postgres instead of Ruby? Is there something more common then async-graphql?

3.) How is GraphQL for aggregate queries (count, avg, etc)?

<comment><USER5> Aaaaarrrgggghhh! I feel like I post this same comment whenever the discussion is about GraphQL.

I love GraphQL. What I hate about GraphQL is that it has "QL" in the name, so it confuses people into thinking it's somehow comparable to SQL. The question "How is GraphQL for aggregate queries?" doesn't even make sense.

GraphQL is simply another format for APIs. E.g. you could do APIs with SOAP, using REST, or with GraphQL.

<comment><USER8> Totally. As I tell people, it's neither a query language, nor particularly graph-oriented. I describe it instead as a toolkit for writing custom domain- specific languages for your services.

<comment><USER9> Eh, I'd call it a query language in the same way that I'd call XML a language. I've heard the term metalanguage bandied about for XML, but it never really seemed to catch on. GraphQL could perhaps be called a query metalanguage, defining grammar and language semantics.

<comment><USER8> They're both metalanguages to me. You use them to define domain-specific languages. We may as well throw JSON in the mix, too. Sure, it's a language with its own grammar, but it's only really useful when implementing the semantics of an API contract (whether that contract is explicitly specified or not).

The reason I object to the "query" part is that GraphQL has no built-in operators that true query languages invariably have. All you really get is inclusion of fields into your request and parameterization. All other semantics have to be implemented by the user in their own spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know Rust, but i think with this library i could have a chance to learn Rust by writing a production graphql server.

</comment><comment><USER11> Oh cool, they've also authored a Tide integration: [https://docs.rs/async- graphql-tide](https://docs.rs/async-graphql-tide). As someone who works on Tide, this is really exciting!

At a glance the integration between the two looks fairly straightforward -- two lines for the integration, and five lines to define a schema. That's pretty good.

<comment><USER12> For anyone else who doesn't know what Tide is: [https://github.com/http- rs/tide](https://github.com/http-rs/tide)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing I wonder with GraphQL, is usefull to use for mostly server-side without routing by JS?

I think could be use-full to use for the extra possibility of auto-get a lot of the client side utilities, but if I wish to handle all server side (like in a regular actix project), how is done?

<comment><USER14> We (fly.io) use GraphQL pretty extensively with server side clients. We have both a CLI and a Rails app that consume our API. It's pretty good if you need multiple client apps, even when those clients are server side.

<comment><USER13> How make that work? As far I see, i need to compile js ahead of time, but never see it done inside rust or python or else...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You need to come up with a name. Graphiq comes to mind if you are edgy. Disgraphiq if you are super edgy.

<comment><USER16> Maybe a bit too similar to GraphiQL?</comment></comment>


OpenBSD 5.9 released (early) - <AUTHOR> http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160329181346&mode=expanded <comment><USER2> Lots of great improvements for laptop users in this release, in particular for UEFI, N Wireless and Intel GPUs.

Plus: Improved GPT support for all. Very nice. =)</comment>


Grapse: online man pages editor - <AUTHOR> http://www.roperzh.com/grapse/ <comment><USER2> For people who want to learn how to write man pages, I've found the following resources to be invaluable:

"Practical UNIX Manuals: mdoc" \- an introduction to writing man pages in the mdoc language ([http://manpages.bsd.lv/](http://manpages.bsd.lv/))

"mdoc(7)" \- a definitive reference for the mdoc language ([http://mdocml.bsd.lv/man/mdoc.7.html](http://mdocml.bsd.lv/man/mdoc.7.html))

Detailed mdoc documentation ([http://mdocml.bsd.lv/mdoc/](http://mdocml.bsd.lv/mdoc/))

The mandoc utility also has a built-in linter for man pages, run with -Tlint ([http://mdocml.bsd.lv/](http://mdocml.bsd.lv/)). It was originally designed for OpenBSD but it is portable. I've run it on Linux and Cygwin without issues. It really is an amazing tool, and its own documentation is fantastic.

Users writing new man pages should prefer the mdoc language to the legacy man language. mdoc has been around for nearly two decades, works well on all modern platforms, and is a semantic markup language rather than a presentational one. If you really need to support legacy systems, mandoc can convert man pages written in mdoc to man.

Please don't write man pages in Docbook or anything that relies on Docbook for man page output. I've had so many issues with xmlto and xsltproc and Docbook. Really, mdoc is very simple and writing it by hand is not a big deal. Modern man page processors can also produce HTML or PDF output, so don't worry about that. I'm sad that I've had to pull in such a heavyweight and complicated toolchain that doesn't even work half the time just to generate some tiny man pages.</comment>


Stackoverflow peak detection algorithm with academic citations - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/a/22640362 <comment><AUTHOR> It is really neat how sometimes SO makes it into science. I love stuff like that because it showcases how the internet originally a science project enables new generations of scientists.</comment>


Changelogs (for Android) - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thunderclouddev.changelogs&hl=en <comment><AUTHOR> Participate in the Open Beta in here: [https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.thunderclouddev.cha...](https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.thunderclouddev.changelogs)</comment>


Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/want-50mbps-internet-in-your-town-threaten-to-roll-out-your-own.ars <comment><USER2> Speaking as somebody on satellite, and not happy about it, there are two parts to this problem.

Part one is connecting fiber to every house back to some centralized switching station. This part can, and should, be financed and regulated by government in much the same way power lines are.

Part two is what happens at the switching stations -- who controls the service and bandwidth to the homes. This part should be as free and open as possible, and each home should have at _least_ three available services competing for its business.

We seem to lump all of these problems together when we talk about the problem of internet connectivity. I don't know why. Maybe it's just easier that way. But it obfuscates certain parts of the discussion.

For instance, in this story things got very interesting once two suppliers were competing to connect fiber. Why? Because whoever connected the fiber would run the service, ie, have the business. It shows that as things stand, you physically have to be willing and able to take the fiber right into the house to make the current monopolistic providers increase their service.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Where I live we have it much like you describe it. I live in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden.

I paid for the connection to the house from the street (US$2k). The fibre in the street is owned and operated by the municipality/local government. They also own the local multi-gigabit ring and provide redundant connections to the rest of the net.

Then we have four different ISPs offering IP on this fibre at reasonable prices for "home use":

0.5 mbps @ $10/month, 10 mbps @ $23-28/month, 100 mbps @ $33-36/month. Un- metered.

They also offer commercial contracts. I am paying under $100/month for 10 mbps. You can also get VOIP from the same operators and cable TV over the fibre from four different operators.

I currently have 1x 10 mbps for the company, 1x 100 mpbs for everything else + TV and VOIP. A bunch of fixed IP addresses and capacity to add several more connections in the fibre modem.

I know this is not exactly a rural town, but having the local municipality build the IP infrastructure and let companies sell their services on it has been a great success. The local municipality also owns and operates the local roads, water and sewage system, district heating, waste, as well as the local electricity grid. I can choose who to buy IP and electricity from, but water, district heating and sewage has only one supplier.

Works well for us.

<comment><USER3> It works well until something goes wrong and each claim it is the other's problem.

<comment> bjelkeman-again For the four years I have had this setup I haven't had them blame each other. Not that it has worked flawlessly mind you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And as I found out first hand, if the only internet provider in town starts to roll out bandwidth caps, just raise a ruckus until your senator drops legislation on the table banning caps, and then watch your ISP become a sour grape and refuse to roll out DOCSIS3 in retaliation...

Internet really needs to become a public utility operated by the city/state on cost, rather than to line the pockets of greedy corporations...

<comment><USER5> I'm not an American, and I was wondering if you could help me to understand this ...

      > Internet really needs to become a public utility
      > operated by the city/state on cost, rather than
      > to line the pockets of greedy corporations...

How is this not effectively Socialism? Isn't the system you currently have simply Capitalism in action?

Under Capitalism, shouldn't people simply choose another supplier when your ISP does stupid things?

<comment><USER6> _> How is this not effectively Socialism?_

Does that make it bad?

 _> Isn't the system you currently have simply Capitalism in action?_

Does that make it good?

<comment><USER5> The perception, rightly or wrongly, in the rest of the world is that in the USA people go "OMG !!! IT'S SOCIALISM !!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHHHHH !!!!"

Nowhere else have I come across people who dismiss ideas by saying - Oh, that's Socialism - and seem to think that that's enough.

Game Theory says that mixed strategies are almost always (in the technical sense) the best, so the instant dismissal of ideas simply being they have a flavor of socialism seems stupid, and yet it seems that it's the instant reaction of many, many people in the USA.

I could be wrong, it might not be the case, and it's interesting to see that the perception from outside the USA might be wrong.

<comment><USER7> What you'll find if you get into more detailed discussion with public-utility internet _before_ dropping the socialism bomb is that they're usually advocating a hybrid model: municipality builds out the pipes and then isps compete on actually providing internet service.

You're right about the loudmouths here, but it'd be a mistake to let your sense of public sentiment be overly colored just by volume.

Calling something socialism here is a pretty good debate hack, like calling someone racist or anti-semitic or whatnot; it's enough of a social taboo that the so-accused will usually feel compelled to defend themselves against it, thereby derailing the original course of discussion...this is a good strategy for winning unrefereed debates.

<comment><USER8> Really? I just laugh when I hear someone talk about Socialism in the US. We have been Socialist for years. Ever drive a car on the road? Did you buy the road? Did you pay a company for a subscription to the road network?

No, it's all paid for by the government. That, my friend, is Socialism. And it's a good thing.

(Actually, it's a bad thing; if people had to pay the full cost of using the road network, it would be a lot easier to get people to take public transportation. But I am just saying it's clear that Americans have nothing against Free Stuff From The Government, even if that Free Stuff is paid for with tax dollars.)

<comment><USER9> Actually, most of us do pay for access to the roads, in the form of vehicle registrations, driver's licenses, and tolls. On average, I pay about $600-$700 every year just to drive on the public roads.

The fact that the roads are owned by state and local governments does not inherently make them socialist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, before everyone goes off on how it's only big business that's preventing great, high-speed internet, there are municipalities in this country that do run their own cable company.

<http://www.shrewsbury-ma.gov/egov/docs/1231423976788.htm>

That's a perfect example. Town owned and operated and it offers service up to 10Mbps for $50. More expensive and slower than the internet offered in many surrounding places. Oh, and they have a monthly data transfer cap that makes Comcast look good. At $40, you only get 75GB of transfer.

I think it's wonderful if municipalities want to try and roll their own competitors to commercial cable/phone/internet companies. However, it isn't all roses. It's expensive to build and operate and you need to get enough capacity to the internet to serve everyone's speeds.

The threat might have been better than actually building it.

<comment><USER11> The bandwidth cap sucks, but compared to DSL, that's a great deal for 10MBps. In Cambridge, MA we were paying Speakeasy more than that for 1.5MBps.

<rant topic="speakeasy">

It turned out to be terrible, but our contract locked us in for a year... and we moved to a new town in 10 months.

Free markets are great, contracts are fine, but in our situation, we simply didn't have any competitive options to choose from. Also, the assumption of "perfect knowledge of the marketplace" was violated because we didn't know how severely non-premium the service would be.

Speakeasy happens to be the worst ISP I have dealt with -- ever. Their support were competent, but customer service was terrible. They had a system-wide outage during the US Inauguration ceremony. Their prices, as I already mentioned, were very high, but we agreed to the contract under the assumption that we were paying for premium service.

In contrast, I can't say enough good about sonic.net, which is a California Bay Area ISP. I'm currently very satisfied with Teksavvy, who are an Ontario ISP.

Speakeasy, though... Avoid them. It's the free market in action. If you're in MA, and specifically in the Boston area, be aware...

</rant>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Add telecommunications companies to universities, hospitals, mercenaries (Halliburton) and banks as private institutions that receive government money and/or monopoly protection in order to avoid both market competition and public oversight. I continue to think that this is the central problem with the U.S. system at this moment in history.

</comment><comment><USER13> It would ideal if the government bundled fiber and power lines together and restructured both grids at once. Two birds with one stone. However, this is probably unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have to laugh at the idea that 20Mbps is slow. I just got upgraded to 16Mbps (from 2Mbps) and still can't believe I can download a full HD movie in 30 minutes.

<comment><USER4> Well, that's better than my "10Mbps" connection that only delivers about 2Mbps at any given time...

<comment><USER15> Heh. I have, at nominal, 16Mbps. During peak times, though, it drops like a rock below that to even being intermittent - Google Talk and AIM will drop every couple of minutes. Our cable node is seriously overloaded, and Cablevision isn't doing a damn thing about it. Over the summer everything was pretty reliable, but then a bunch of new students moved into the 'hook and it plummeted. I can get 16Mbps - if I'm lucky - at 4am, and sometimes 8Mbps throughout the day. But from 7 to midnight or so, it's impossible to even browse the web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 50Mbps is a bit on the slow side these days, we have 120Mbps over coax here...

</comment><comment><USER17> I now have 50Mbps, it was easier to move to a town that had it already.</comment>


"Just let some joy smoke sift into your system" - <AUTHOR> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30359 <comment><USER2> The fascinating thing about old advertisements to me is how much faith they placed in the power of words to sell products. Old ads are absolutely _swimming_ in copy. Words upon words upon words; literal walls of text. And the farther back in time you go, the more words they piled on.

This is in contrast to modern advertising, where it's understood that _images_ are what sell products and the ad strives to communicate visually, through photography, illustrations or a striking logo. We're a long way from the heyday of cigarette advertising, but I bet a lot more people today can still tell you about the Marlboro Man than could tell you what Marlboro's slogan was back then. (The answer: "Come to where the flavor is.")

My modern mind looks at those old ads and reacts viscerally in the negative, recoiling at the thought of all that _reading._ I wonder how much of that is something fundamental, something basic about the way the brain works that ad men in the old days didn't understand, and how much is something new -- something that makes modern people different from how people were back then. How much contemporary culture has trained us to discount the word and favor the image, and what that says about us and the world we have built.

<comment><USER3> Definitely new. It's something I've watched in my lifetime - ad copy getting shorter and shorter, and the reading age dropping further and further.

I think the copy in this ad is super-effective. It honestly made me feel like rushing out and buying some of the product - even though I've never smoked, and never will.

My normal reaction to ads is somewhere between outraged irritation and utter indifference, so that's quite a result.

I think we lost that literary slant some time in the 1980s. I used to value the language in pre-70s science fiction, precisely because it was written like this. Alfred Bester and RA Lafferty did beautiful things with English, and I think Bester was a former ad man - so that explains that.

After Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Alien, science fiction became a lot more visual - even written science fiction, which suddenly became more about images (often stock images) than the power of words.

<comment><USER4> I wonder how much of it is the primacy of an American audience over a more British one, at least for English media; while American advertisements in the fifties and sixties weren't these wordless demands that you worship their #brand, they were generally shorter and more terse--which coincides with a very big boost in American consumer power and more of a push to appeal to the American audience. I believe it was Stephen King who noted that a British advertising man with a proper education could make copy for ribbed condoms read like the Magna goddamn Carta (his words, not mine).

Personally, I just like _reading_. (Which is probably also why I like writing.) So stuff like this is interesting from the perspective of just how to put things together to come up with neat strings of metaphors and interesting thoughts. So getting to watch people who are really, really good at their craft come out to play is rad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of Dr. Bronner's soap, the way the rambling, hyphenated copy freely invents words and associates the product with feelings of peace and goodwill.

<comment><USER6> Puts me a little in mind of the little ad segments of _Ubik_.

<comment><USER7> I was having the hardest time figuring out why Philip K. Dick sprang instantly to mind reading this. Thanks. Could not for the life of me remember where or why!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So tobacco is what the "Do you have Prince Albert in a can" prank phone call is referencing? I've heard that forever and never knew why it was funny… I knew it was a double meaning, but the only Prince Albert I knew about was, um… something else (that wouldn't go in a can).

<comment><USER2> Yep: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Albert_(tobacco)#/media...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Albert_\(tobacco\)#/media/File:Prince_Albert_Cigarettes.JPG)

<comment><USER9> Also, Prince Albert and Middleton's Carter Hall are pretty decent, among the OTC/drug store/old codger blends. (Sir Walter Raleigh's texture reminds me of grape nuts, though.)

<comment><USER10> I found a gravel bar in Alaska where the river had deposited several battered, barely recognizable old Prince Albert cans. There was some other stuff, too, but nothing I could identify. A local told me that middens from miners in the 20s and 30s were eroding out of the riverbank upstream. Apparently they weren't considered to have any archaeological value, but it was interesting to poke around the old trash, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how this style of advertising would work in a modern SaaS product.

It would be a rebellion against virtually every principle of modern ad copy while still being rooted in something that sold units. Might try it.

<comment><USER6> Ask the question the other way round: will modern ad copy seem as different as this to readers in a hundred years time?

<comment><USER11> It undoubtedly will, if words are even a meaningful concept at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whoever wrote those was a stone cold genius. They are making me want a cigarette from across nearly a century. Ridiculous.

I mean, I am a smoker, I was probably going to go for one soon enough anyway, I'm sure it's just coincidence, buuuuuut... damn.

<comment><USER12> Nah mate I know what you're on about - I genuinely want to try some of this stuff now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a riot. It's almost like a Homestar Runner parody of "old-timey" speech. I'm particularly fond of the recurring verbal brohug, "just between (or among) ourselves". Like you're being let in on a little secret from one of your chums from the bar.

</comment><comment><USER6> For anyone in the habit of skipping/blocking/ignoring comments on articles, this one is worth a look: [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30359#comment-152621...](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30359#comment-1526212)

</comment><comment><USER14> The prose in these ads feels like I'm reading a Trump interview.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish hacker news allowed a short description of why something might be interesting... How about I take an hour and try to interpret this history of a Prince Albert advertising campaign?

<comment><USER16> It could be any number of things- insight into the history of smoking ads, the bygone culture of advertisement copy as poetry, or the bit about the "poetry of industrialism."

But if you can read the words "BUT just among ourselves, you better start a rapid whiz system to keep tabs as to how fast you'll buzz from low smoke spirits to TIP-TOP-HIGH" and not understand why someone thought it worth sharing, I don't know what to say.

<comment><USER15> Fine, but a sentence would suffice, something akin to, 'Interesting older copy.' because this site is generally tech oriented, I often click a link and start reading assuming it will wrap around but after a few minutes it doesn't and I question the purpose of the link on hacker news...

<comment><USER17> > because this site is generally tech oriented

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." has been in the guidelines for years.

<comment><USER15> Look, let it go, I've already exposed you as a Prince Albert shill.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Every programming languages are just sequence, selection, iteration - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mslMLp5bQD0&feature=player_embedded#!

<comment><USER2> The presentation is dynamic and flamboyant, but the content is unoriginal and uninspired.

Summary: Hardware's progressed O(10^25); software, no where near as much. Software's just been sequence, selection, and iteration in various guises. Moore's law is ending; clock-speeds, slowing; multi-core, coming. Functional programming will help.

Check it out if you're interested in a fun talk about programming and history of languages. The intended audience, despite being at a Rails Conference, seemed to be programmers who've not ventured far from the popular languages of the day. Anyone else will likely be disappointed, waiting for a new message that's never delivered.

<comment><USER3> O(10^25) = O(1)

<comment><USER4> Substituting that in...

 _Summary: Hardware's progressed linearly; software, no where near as much._

<comment><USER5> If you consider speed and storage as orthogonal dimensions it would be quadratic.

<comment><USER4> Well, I just rewrote what grandparent said, subbing in that O(10^25) is linear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could you please take the time to go over your title before you post, or read it after you posted it, and make sure it's grammatically correct?

Thanks.

<comment><USER7> With a little homework you could have easily figured out the poster is not a native English speaker and thus spared making yourself look like a bit of an ass.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that even more reason to check it for correctness? I know when I write in German I do at least two proof readings before I send it out into the wild, preferably after checking with a native speaker.

<comment><USER7> Checking with a native speaker is not something everyone has access to on an every-moment basis. Without that, if you're a non-native speaker, how can you tell that something you don't know is incorrect is incorrect?

It's just a link title with an extra s and 'are' instead of 'is'. Not a big f'ing deal.

Interesting to see the see-saw of downvotes from people who agreed with me, to people who apparently agree more with you though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a hard time watching his talks. Too much fluff around the substance.

<comment><USER10> I'd never heard Martin talk.

Honestly, I found him to be an amazing speaker.

I did not find any "fluff", just a wide viewpoint.

<comment><USER9> yeah, a lot of people like his talks. Something about his style is abrasive to me.

I really liked him on the stack overflow podcast though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He seems just a little too full of himself. One of those people who gets too much pleasure from hearing words come out of his own mouth.

</comment><comment><USER12> I happily accept the mad flourishes of Robert Martin. They fortify his arguments and help engage the audience. Good education has an element of entertainment and emotion. It's a part of how we learn, or at least, how we learn best.</comment>


Show HN: DataRole- the Address Intelligence Data Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.datarole.com/ <comment><USER2> Hey everyone! We're stoked to be launching our API today because real estate data sucks. Stop guessing and grab millions of home projects with our API in a second to make data-driven decisions!

Predict the next 10,000 houses from SF to NYC that will need emergency repairs this month. Use our insider data to uncover the top 100 real estate deals on the market in Chicago today. From coast to coast create warning signs for "lemon" properties. DataRole's API learns from the past so you can predict the future.

We know about home improvement projects before they begin. Here are examples of our hourly updates:

1\. The year a property's roof, electrical, and plumbing was replaced. 2\. The contractor who did the job. 3\. The length of time it took to complete the project.

The best things about your apartment aren't the 2 beds, 1 bath, and 1,000 sq ft. Our data is creating an entirely new business around what real estate search should be and we need your help!

Join us as we predict the future of real estate. What are cool products we can build? Thanks everyone!</comment>


A CoffeeScript Intervention - <AUTHOR> http://www.pragprog.com/magazines/2011-05/a-coffeescript-intervention <comment><USER2> I don't quite agree with the conclusion of the article ("you'll come away with a better understanding of JavaScript"). The fact that CoffeeScript hides scoping and other stuff from you means you will never have to learn how JavaScript really works.

You can argue whether this is good or bad, but it's not giving people a better understanding of anything, it's just making them follow best practices unknowingly.

<comment><USER3> (I'm the author.)

JavaScript can be pretty overwhelming to newcomers. You mention scope, which is a good example of where CoffeeScript actually clarifies rather than hides the underlying semantics.

The most important thing to understand about scope in JS is that _only functions create scope_. This is very different from C and Java, and since JavaScript looks like C and Java, that difference is surprising (see e.g. [http://www.adequatelygood.com/2010/2/JavaScript-Scoping- and-...](http://www.adequatelygood.com/2010/2/JavaScript-Scoping-and- Hoisting)). When you learn the same rule in CoffeeScript, it feels a lot simpler. And that understanding can carry over to JS.

Granted, the compiler is generating the `var` keyword for you, but the mapping is trivial. What's important is that scoped variables have the same behavior in both languages.

<comment><USER2> All I'm thinking is that people should start using JSLint instead of making up languages on top of JS. That will catch most of the bugs due to common misunderstandings of the language.

<comment><USER4> JSLint can't solve the "I forgot to include a frickin' explicit return _again_ " problem, can it?

<comment><USER2> That's a first world problem of ruby devs I think. When you're used to it, you never forget to write return statements.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. I hardly think that people who haven't used languages like Ruby or Coffeescript (with implicitly returning the last expression) ever forget return statements in a way where everything would be okay if they just added a "return" keyword. When I use Ruby and Coffeescript, I consciously have to think "no, I _shouldn't_ write _return_ this time"; I find it hard to believe that, without using a language like this, anyone would just write an expression and expect it to be returned. I could see an argument that if you're returning the application of a function, but it has always seemed extremely natural to me that I think about what I'm returning when I write a function; I actually always have a little bit of trouble adjusting to writing Ruby-style return-less code.

<comment><USER6> it depends on how you think of functions... If you think of everything as an expression, of course it has some kind of value.

That being said I prefer not to have to write "return" but work plenty with languages outside of ruby and have no issues writing return when necessary.

<comment><USER4> > it depends on how you think of functions... If you think of everything as an > expression, of course it has some kind of value.

Sure, and functions by definition return a value. I know programming isn't math, but the notion of a "void function" is somewhat of an oxymoron.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, this article actually had the opposite of its intended effect with me. I had always expected that CoffeeScript was a better form of JS that I should probably get around to learning. Now I've just learned that besides having an unpleasant syntax, it actually redefines some important features of javascript to behave in novel ways.

As an example, the whole point of setTimeout is to be able to do the sort of thing shown in Example 4. Defeating it just means you now have to search for another way to do the things that setTimeout was designed for.

Same with variable scope. If you can't declare a global without actually standing in the global scope, that makes things harder, not easier.

Beyond that, I glazed over at seeing various little ascii arrows. I'm sure they're there for a reason, but by then I was already halfway out the door.

<comment><USER8> First, use or don't use what you want. If you don't like the cleaner CS syntax, stick to writing raw JS. Your other points aren't especially valid though:

1) You can trivially use setTimeout just as you did before. CoffeeScript just gives you a couple extra tools for simplifying things when you have use cases like the one presented in the article.

2) As for the global namespace: if you want to attach something to the window object it's much more readable to just write "window.foo = bar" or whatever. In general though, I defy you to come up with an example where you want to define global variables from some other scope where your code wouldn't end up just as clear but more robust with cross-scope variables defined in some high- level scope. Pretty much everyone agrees that JavaScript's "pollute the global namespace by default" feature was a mistake.

The ascii arrows are by far the best part. JavaScript turns out to be a very nice language (semantically) for writing functional-style code. Unfortunately, the regular JavaScript syntax makes defining functions so unpleasant that I go out of my way to avoid extra ones. CoffeeScript makes defining functions so easy that I go looking for ways to use more, instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you can't be bothered to learn the behavior of keywords as fundamental to JavaScript as "var" and "this," then yes, you'd better be using some wrapper. Items (3) and (5) seem to be the only valuable features demonstrated here, and (5) should be present in the ES Harmony (it is already present in JS 1.7).

The article states that

> It's about more agile code

but I find this claim dubious when the best JS tools are for JS, and not CoffeeScript. I believe that the features provided by the Closure compiler are more beneficial for stable JavaScript development (annotations, etc), and carry a significant performance incentive.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the point is "you won't need to learn how these work!"; rather, it's "you don't need to worry about using the normal convoluted ways of dealing with these". It's never claimed that _= >_ implies (ha, logic humor) that you don't need to know how _this_ works, just that _= >_ helps you deal with a common annoyance found with using _this_.

<comment><USER9> My main point is that only those who cannot be bothered to learn the language's finer points (I don't consider these to be amongst them, but as indicated by this blog post, others do) will reap significant benefits from using a tool such as CoffeeScript. Anybody else would be sacrificing too many useful JavaScript-specific tools to justify the benefits of a slightly more expressive language.

<comment><USER10> > the language's finer points

I wouldn't call those "finer" points.

<comment><USER9> You don't read parentheses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This and the recent release of 1.1.0 gave me a push and I spent some time converting a small library I maintain (<http://flickrshow.com>) to CoffeesScript as an exercise and and education into the syntax and potential benefits.

As it was a 1-1 conversion it was fun to see not only how much syntactical cruft the CS syntax removes but also how a few sloppy lines got tidied up, (mainly existence checks). In that sense, it adds value. It'll be interesting to follow this up with how easy it is to churn out new code ...

</comment><comment><USER12> It looks like the future of JS resembles CoffeeScript quite a bit: <http://brendaneich.com/2011/05/my-jsconf-us-presentation/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. I didn't know about the 'do' keyword or the repetition bit with {x,y} returning {x: x, y: y}. Pretty cool!

<comment><USER14> The {x,y} rvalue syntax isn't in the CoffeeScript documentation. This is the first place I've seen it.

<comment><USER15> It was but it got dropped in the doc update for 0.4 or thereabouts. I was hoping he'd take it out for a while because it complicates the disambiguation of braceless object literals but it seems most people like it, so meh.

<comment><USER14> It's a bit weird that it breaks alpha equivalence (i.e. you expect your program's semantics to be invariant under local variable renaming) but I can see why people like it. It's certainly compact and idiomatic, and there's a nice (albeit superficial) symmetry with destructuring assignment.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Left or Right Mindedness (Thoughts on Jill Bolte) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bobz44.com/2009/01/thoughts-on-jill-bolte.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Link back to the conversation that spawned the post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442111></comment>


When You're Going Through Hell, Keep On Going - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/11/22/when-youre-going-through-hell-keep-on-going/ <comment><USER2> "I don't think the downturn in our general field will be as drastic as it was back in the day."

Whatever area they work in, people always seem to say this. I used to work for a "Big 4" accountancy firm, back in '91, and the official message from management was "we do OK in a recession. People go bust and we get more receivership business." Then they laid off 200 people, then 200 more the next week.

Now I hear the same thing from people I work with. One of our tech support guys reckons he'll be OK because "people still need techies to fix their printers." Well, assuming people _do_ still need to have their printers fixed, which they won't if they just got laid off, or if they decide to do it themselves instead.

Even if you have a strong business, a recession could change the whole game. Or maybe you get lucky and your competitors go under and you pick up more business in the medium term. But nothing's certain.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless, of course, changing direction would get you headed out of hell, rather than in deeper.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of a recent HN conversation about Mitt Romney being the best guy to "turn around a sinking ship."

So when you're going through hell in a sinking ship:

1) Keep on going.

2) Turn around.

3) Rearrange the deck chairs.

4) Ask Mitt Romney for help.

<comment><USER5> Worked for the Olympics and Massachusetts.</comment></comment></comment>


Why new antibiotics never come to market - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-new-antibiotics-never-come-to-market# <comment><AUTHOR> They want help in finding samples from divers. I bet there's a way to make a site and app to help with this process. And I'm wondering if they wouldn't do well with a good crowdfunding campaign.

'"Before we dive anywhere, we always talk to the local divers to find out about what's out there," he said. "Some of these guys spend more time underwater than on land. So we had the idea, why don't we get them to collect the sponges and specimens growing in these lakes and send them back to us?"'</comment>


Quora raising Series B at $400 million valuation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/quora-is-raising-at-a-400m-valuation-with-dangelo-putting-in-his-own-money/

<comment><USER2> Wow, Quora is now in IPO territory. How do you think a Q&A site would perform in the public markets?</comment>


Ask HN: I'd pay X for Y - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'd pay $50 to have a UX expert look at a feature in my app and give me feedback.

Often I find myself looking for input on a problem, but actually hiring someone is such a hassle, that it just doesn't pay off for small projects.

<comment><USER3> I'd take $0 to add you on skype and chat about your entrepreneuriality. I'd like to own a tesla someday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd pay $100 for a product marketer to give advice on how I should improve the positioning of [https://www.soundshelter.net](https://www.soundshelter.net)

contact me at my username at gmail

<comment><USER2> Show me what you've got before you ask me to log in.

I think Tastekid did this really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> $500/m - $1000/m

Someone to do all the chores for my house:

Internal cleaning, cut grass, clean the pool, trim hedges, weeding, fold towels plus odd jobs that are once a quarter - spring cleaning type things / discarding broken or old toys, selling stuff on ebay etc.

<comment><USER6> You can almost definitely find someone to do that. Try craigslist.

<comment><USER5> I guess that is what I am paying for - not needing to interview a bunch of people on craigslist. Have that trust/reputation from the beginning. I guess HomeJoy tried this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd pay 50USD/month to argue with thought leaders and well-known VCs.

<comment><USER8> Why would thought leaders and well-known VCs want to do that?

<comment><USER9> For the $50 lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd pay for a protocol or API test suite to help me build compliant clients and servers.

For example let's say I want to make my own HTTP client like curl. Instead of relying solely on the RFC or spec, I can additionally use this test suite to run my code against the spec and as many edge cases possible. I expect the HTTP product to cover the usual header grammar but also timeouts, HTTP/2 upgrades, encoding mismatch, etc.

I can see myself paying $100 and over depending on complexity.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd pay $10,000 for 1 Bitcoin

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd pay %20 for a tool that will let others pay for what they say they want before I go build it for them, to prove that they actually want it instead of just talk.

<comment><USER12> How about 10%?

[https://www.kickstarter.com/](https://www.kickstarter.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd pay reasonable (to me) 15% recruitment fee for a guaranteed job offer within 2-4 weeks.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd pay 15% of payment per contract found for remote backend development jobs.

<comment><USER15> Check out [https://www.moonlightwork.com](https://www.moonlightwork.com). They take 15%, I believe.</comment></comment>


Financier Who Amassed Insurance Firms Diverted $2B into His Private Empire - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/financier-who-amassed-insurance-firms-diverted-2-billion-into-his-private-empire-11551367856 <comment><USER2> Context: he was indicted on multiple counts of campaign fraud yesterday to the tune of several million dollars.

Rep. Mark Walker is likely implicated as "Public Official A" in court documents.

Robin Hayes, the chair of that state's GOP party chairman was also indicted yesterday in the same probe.

[https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/north-carolina-gop- chairman...](https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/north-carolina-gop-chairman- indicted-as-scandal-continues-to-grow) has a copy of the indictement documents embedded on the page; not sure how to link them directly.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://wwwcache.wral.com/asset/news/state/nccapitol/2019/04...](https://wwwcache.wral.com/asset/news/state/nccapitol/2019/04/02/18300306/lindberg_indictment- DMID1-5ibzqsqem.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://outline.com/P2hakC](https://outline.com/P2hakC)

</comment><comment><USER3> This whole scenario just seems to follow the rich businessman influence industry. When people start investigating you too closely, then take over or influence the agencies investigating you. Start by giving tons of money to your party leaders. Then step by step get regulators replaced or co-opted.

</comment><comment> T-A Matt Levine's take on it (tl;dr: "I don't know!") from March 1:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-01/insura...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-01/insurance- is-where-the-money-is)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised Matt didn't mention that this is one way BRK amplifies their results.

<comment><USER4> _"Guy buys insurance company and invests its float in his other business ideas" can describe a scam, but it can also describe Warren Buffett._</comment></comment></comment>