Ask HN: Coder at heart, PhD in pocket. Job advice please - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm feeling a bit lost. Advice appreciated. Posting under a new account but long-time HNer.
I have a CS PhD from a top-10 University. In my mid-30s. Recently married and trying for kids. I love to code - while I am decent at it, I'm not a 10xer. I probably code 30-50% of my time at work. I'm pretty broad in my interests and, since I currently work in research, I move from one area to another. In the last 3 years, I've professionally written code in Java, Python and Go. That said, I have the same skills as someone who did a University course in any of these languages.
I've been at my last employer for the last 4 years. Very serious about changing my job and getting out of research. I've gotten interviews lined up at the heavy hitters but I am extremely nervous. Previously, I failed to get offers from some major league software firms (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, NetApp). I also interviewed at some small, exciting startups and failed to past their dev interviews.
I'm in a place where my confidence is shattered. I have recruiters setting me up interviews as a senior dev. My wife isn't in tech and she is being supportive. Says I should be confident since I have so much experience and am a pretty strong technical person. When I look at myself, I see lots of breadth but no depth (oh and no management experience to speak of).
A related issue. I have a weak memory. As a regular person, my memory is probably average. As a developer, it is weak indeed. I have 5 languages listed on my resume - I've written code in each of them. But I've messed up programming interviews because of minor slips - one time I didn't get passed the phone screen because I couldn't implement a Singleton in Java and Python. The large set of languages I work with compounds the problem. My resume should say half as*ed coder with Go, C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, Elixir.
I'm looking for honest feedback. <comment><USER2> Your credentials are great, but it sounds like you need to work on your interview skills, and not necessarily the technical side of things.

I've worked at three of the major league firms you list, and interviewed several hundred engineering candidates between them.

If I was to give one bit of advice, it would be to focus less on getting the perfect solution to their questions, but instead, talk through your thought process and explain why you're doing certain things and not others.

The most difficult interviews to evaluate are those where the candidate goes all quiet at the whiteboard, and then panics when they assess their own performance as poor.

I've recommended hiring plenty of people who were excellent communicators and logical thinkers, even though they didn't successfully answer the interview question, but they walked me through their thought process, and I could see that they're just getting tripped up on something.

Think about a handful of the coolest problems or bugs you've ever worked on and be able to explain why they're cool. Have a good understanding of common data structures (trees, tries, lists, hash maps, etc), and their big-O complexity. You've got to be pretty excited about something to get a PHd in it, so let that excitement come through in the interview.

Your communication and energy level, especially excitement about your chosen field, are as important as the technical questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interviewing sucks; for everybody, not just you. But it gets better as you get more practiced at it.

My advice would be to line up 10-20 interviews that you absolutely don't want. Jobs that are too junior for you, jobs that are a terrible fit culturally or ethically. Companies you wouldn't be caught dead working for. Then just march in there and get practiced at interviewing. There's no pressure, you don't actually want the job; you're just there to get really good at doing exactly that. Spend a few weeks doing this, have a job interview every evening after work, or every day on your lunch break.

Later on, apply to the jobs you really want and it'll feel like a walk in the park. You'll be a pro at it.

I personally still do this to this day; a decade into my career. I'm on the job hunt right now actually. I had 3 interviews yesterday and only one of them was real. These days I like to mix it up, and have at least one warm-up interview the same day before any big interview for a position I really want. Practice makes perfect.

<comment><USER4> I think this is good advice, but I worry about wasting the interviewing companys' time. Of course in my experience they rarely worry about wasting my time, but I guess I'd be concerned about becoming known as someone whose interest in a position isn't trusted.

I suspect that this is my inner Cinderella -- be humble, scrub the floors, and one day my hiring manager will come. I feel like that princess is really hurting my bank account.

<comment><USER3> I think these are valid concerns. It's definitely a selfish thing to do; but in this particular case, I'm okay with it for some reason. I guess it's a "ends justify the means" kind of thing. I draw the line at lying about my intentions. If they ask me, I'll definitely tell the truth about how seriously I'm taking them. Regarding reputation, who knows. I think many hiring- managers' hubris gets in the way of them thinking they're a warm-up company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I interviewed many candidates with PhDs for one of those major software firms, and I was not long ago one of those candidates myself.

My advice is to spend some time and practice interview questions: go from the problem, to the idea of the solution, AND WRITE DOWN THE IMPLEMENTATION in a piece of paper (or screen).

The last step is the key. Many people I interviewed knew how to solve the problem, but then had no clue on where to start when writing down a concrete solution to it. This is not a matter of being not technical, it's really a matter of practice.

Also, in those large firms, nobody cares that you already know a bunch of languages. It's better being able to demonstrate that you know one of those well. Part of the assumption is that if you know one well, you can learn the others if needed.

<comment><USER6> This. Also pick a single language to do it in: I would recommend Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not so long ago, I was pretty much in your situation, except that I didn't have a PhD. I was moving into a software engineering role from a DevOps role. I was initially flunking a number of interviews at pretty much the same companies you have mentioned. My advice as most, Practice and Patience while solving problems. Practice talking through a problem in particular. The interviewer is waiting with a hint in hand, which you can always use to get a direction in which to solve the problem. Getting this hint 100% of the time from the interviewer is 100% fine.

As for study, I highly recommend the index page of this book, Elements of Programming Interviews, as a reference. It contains a catalogue of questions, whose complexity exceeds that of CTCI or PIE. Here are the links.

For the entire book, [http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Interviews- Inside...](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Interviews-Insiders- Guide/dp/1479274836)

For just the index page, [http://elementsofprogramminginterviews.com/pdf/epi- toc.pdf](http://elementsofprogramminginterviews.com/pdf/epi-toc.pdf).

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER8> What feedback have you gotten from interviewers? I'm surprised you are having so much difficulty at those companies with a PhD, they routinely hire people with far less experience or knowledge. I don't think you should sell yourself so short as to try to compete for the kinds of jobs people get after 6 months of a code bootcamp or something like that. That would be an enormous waste of your talent.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm sorry I can't give any useful advice, only a nitpick.

Please change the "pls" in the title to "please" while you can edit it. If you are asking people for help, at least show that you value their time and write "please" and "thank you" with all the letters. (I think that "CS" and "PhD" are fine.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Done :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> LostPhD,

Consider cultivating your programming side by working on an open source project, by helping to maintain code, implement fixes etc., in a language that you like, and don't quit your day job until you have something you want lined up. In the meanwhile, keep improving in whatever area you do research in even if it's not programming. You're memory I'm sure is not weak, but you're rusty with the specifics of that interview question, that is not a poor reflection on your character. Hang in there and work on incremental improvements in the different areas you care about.

Brian

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some more data:

I study pretty much all my free time (time not spent with my wife). 2 hours a day reading papers, books, etc. I don't think studying more will help.

I can't post on github. Employment agreement says all the code I write belongs to my employer and can't be opensourced without jumping through some hoops. Won't make this mistake the next job I end up at.

I think I can move laterally without too much grief. I.e. get another research job. I have experience in systems and clouds. Lots of research groups would want someone like me.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would say you should not go to interviews, where you have to prove generic coding skills. Stick with one narrow area/library and keep subject on that.

And if you can not implement singleton under pressure, there is possibly some underlying reason. Concentrate on that reason.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's nothing to do w/ memory but practice. Only keep one or two hot languages like python or Node.js on resume; go to websites like www.geeksforgeeks.org and finish every f*king question. try to write fast and bug-free code, u will land a job very soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I haven't seen that site before. I got cracking the coding interview (which seems too easy) and Elements of Programming Interviews (picked that up a few days ago and that book has some hand in shattering my confidence. Is that the bar for devs? If true, I freely admit I'm not at that level).

<comment><USER12> just practice, keep thinking and coding. in a few months u won't give a damn thing abt such coding questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> On the top of my resume I include only languages that I'm current on. Then in the job descriptions I may go into more detail. Usually you'll be asked to code in your favorite language anyhow.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great idea. Now that I think about it, it seems silly boasting how I've coded in so many languages. The reason I had them on my resume was to indicate that I have experience writing code in them. I like your idea of listing something under "Currently used" and listing the others under projects. That way, there is less chance for ambiguity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In all honesty, take a deep breath, relax, it's going to be ok.

Now that you have done that, here is a bit of feedback. You seem a little scattered in your thinking. This isn't the biggest problem in the world. You need to just hide it a bit and look less scattered to your potential employers. Here are a few ideas:

First, you have a PhD. This tells a potential employer very important details about you. As an interviewer I care very little about your thesis, about your advisor, and about which papers you are current researching. I DO care that you spent a significant amount of time solving problems. You found a problem, you stuck with it, and you solved the problem. Again, I have my own problems, I don't care at all about the problem you solved to get your PhD, just that you did! You have a HUGE ability to stick with things, this is an asset. Practice getting this out during your interviews. Make sure they know this is a skill they need within their organization and that regardless of the challenge, you will conquer it.

Second, you have a lot of languages. There is nothing wrong with that, but tune your resume and your interview towards the one this potential employer needs. You mention that you study a lot. Spend that time studying the needs of the person you are interviewing with. Know a lot about their product, about their environment, and about their history. Be ready to talk to them about all of these things. Defend your "mini thesis" about this organization every time you walk into an interview with them.

Third, practice confidence. I know this is easier said than done. I am not always confident in myself nor in my abilities. But I practiced and I show confidence when I walk into an interview. This helps a lot. Control the interview by asking questions, talking about what they need, knowing what to say when you get stuck, and showing your skills even when you feel nervous or scared that things aren't going well. Over the years some of my best jobs came from interviews that I was SURE I bombed miserably. Use your study time to practice these skills for a while. Never call yourself half as*ed again. Ever.

Finally, practice interview questions! Google "interview code questions" and practice one a day. Practice them in different languages. Really understand why you use some of the techniques that you use. You have an AMAZING ability to study, learn, reason, and defend your ideas. Use these skills to your advantage. You will do well!

Final Note: interviewing is a numbers game. You have to interview with a lot of companies to get where you want. You are already playing it well. Keep interviewing because you only have to pass that one best interview to get that one best job that you have been looking for. You can do it!

</comment><comment><USER15> Read Steve Yegge's: how to get that job at Google and try to do a lot of practice before you go for interviews.

Good luck.</comment>


Paradify – Songs to your Spotify - <AUTHOR> http://www.paradify.com/

<comment><USER2> Look like a convenient extension.</comment>


John Lewis has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/17/john-lewis-obit-civil-rights-congress-036212 <comment><USER2> He was my representative before redistricting.

If you don't know his story, it's worth taking the time. He got himself beat up to unconsciousness so that the rest of the United States would not be able to ignore the brutality of its racist South.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this. Read his Wikipedia page[0] and a few blue links. Crazy how wild the 60s were with racism! The police did nothing to stop mobs because of people riding on a bus... Mind blowing

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_(civil_rights_leade...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_\(civil_rights_leader\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Big loss at one of the most pressing time in American history. Here he is advocating non-violence and peaceful protests and wishing well to the people of Hong Kong: [https://twitter.com/RepTomSuozzi/status/1187375246204162053](https://twitter.com/RepTomSuozzi/status/1187375246204162053)

</comment><comment><USER5> Worth mentioning about another civil rights leader whom we had lost few months ago - Elijah Cummings.

Edit -

I was waiting for Obama's statement, and here it's - [https://medium.com/@BarackObama/my-statement-on-the- passing-...](https://medium.com/@BarackObama/my-statement-on-the-passing-of- rep-john-lewis-fa86761cd964)

<comment><USER6> FYI just in case you're not a native English speaker, you generally can't end a sentence with the contraction "it's."

The actual reason is much more complex than the simple rule of thumb, but if you're interested in a thorough explanation: [https://english.stackexchange.com/a/2547](https://english.stackexchange.com/a/2547)

<comment><USER5> Hey! I'll keep that in mind. Thank you so much for taking your time to correct me and sharing the details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He was 80 when he died and not all that young when he took a stand.

We are closer to barbarity in time and in fact than we are comfortable acknowledging. Vale.

<comment><USER8> If Bill Gates has been born black in my Maryland county, he'd have gone to segregated schools until high school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> By coincidence John Lewis's graphic-novel memoir _March_ was released around the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and it made me feel optimistic in what otherwise felt like a dark winter. I can't recommend it highly enough.

</comment><comment><USER10> He lived the fight for justice and equality through almost or all of modernity. His weapons were his will, his strength to face violence with nonviolence, the truth of equality, the evil realities of racism, and justice, and nonviolent protests. And he was a politician. House Representatives are not graced with the immunities US Senators are. To my knowledge, John Lewis never once was investigated let alone found guilty of offense as a Representative. His is an example for generations to follow - and he did lead generations.

I genuinely hope to see an America someday in my life which expects and enforces the highest of its politicians again. There was a time where being a politician was respectable and honorable. It's the position they should hold. I hope we regain that societal cohesion again. I think John Lewis was one such politician.

He is missed.

</comment><comment><USER11> Another reminder of the importance of taking the periodic, thoughtful moment to document the type of imprint each of us would like to have left on this world once we're gone.

</comment><comment><USER12> Rip to a great man

</comment><comment><USER13> Quite a man.

</comment><comment><USER14> I didn't align with the man politically, but I admire how much of his life he spent working to improve this country for others. A life well lived.

<comment><USER15> He's known politically for ending racial segregation.

<comment><USER16> He did many things in Congress unrelated to civil rights. Those votes are not in alignment with many, who still respect him.

<comment><USER17> Which votes?

<comment><USER16> This is not a place to go into points of disagreement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you create personalized weekly update emails? - <AUTHOR> Curious as to what the best way would be to implement emails where every email is different for each user. Is the best way to run a cron job every week and send them out using something like Sendgrid? <comment><USER2> Sendgrid or Mailchimp let's you create templates which get filled with the custom details, though you'll likely be running a cron-job to get the data to send to the email provider.

Email is a bit of a pain, there is a reason these companies exist. They aren't cheap either.</comment>


Legal and Tax Implications of Founders' Equity Splits - <AUTHOR> http://founderresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-note-on-legal-and-tax-implications.html

<comment><USER2> It would be more useful if you didn't have to pay to read the actual note.</comment>


Most people still don't get password security...'123456' is most common - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1557915/top-passwords-revealed

<comment><USER2> 64 people using '123456' out of over 10,000 people (who were caught in a phishing scam), doesn't mean that most people don't get password security.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's really easy to remember though. And if you forgot you can ask your coworkers what their password is and most of the time they'll be right.

</comment><comment><USER4> Similar report here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866653></comment>


The Corporate Tax Dodge Continues - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/opinion/the-corporate-tax-dodge-continues.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region <comment><USER2> The US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. With more restrictions and taxes, things like this will continue to happen.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it appropriate for a Facebook Director to pursue vendettas? - <AUTHOR> Is it appropriate behaviour for a large public company director like Peter Thiel to pursue vendettas over a long period of time? <comment><USER2> It should not be seen as Peter Thiel, director of Public Company X and founder of Y, but as Peter Thiel, private individual.

I really can't understand the way Americans want to punish companies for the actions of the individuals working for them, or the way Americans absolutely have to associate an individual's actions to that individual's participation or employment in a company - this goes against employment laws in any country other than America.

<comment><USER3> I know right! This ranges from this to someone losing their job because of a joke they said to a friend[0].

0.[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, the chatter among VCs on Twitter that I see is that Facebook is going to ask Peter Thiel to step down any day now. FB doesn't want to hurt its relationship with publishers.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does HN have multiple domains? - <AUTHOR>

I can see in my web stats package that I get referrers from multiple ycombinator sites. e.g.
http://news.ycombinator.com
http://news.ycombinator.org
http://news.ycombinator.net
Why doesn't HN have one canonical site? He could redirect two of them to one? (For reference, it looks like YC owns the .com and PG himself owns .org and .net so it's possible). <comment><USER2> Also <http://hackerne.ws/> doesn't redirect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Explanation of that here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2558169></comment></comment>


Show HN: Please give feedback: usability, template and content - <AUTHOR> http://www.carsandcars.ca

<comment><USER2> All of the car images don't seem to be showing for me.

I see the sidebar shows the most recent 5 reviews, articles etc. Is there somewhere to view all reviews or articles by release date and paginated? I got the car reviews and news page but it't just categories.

The dealer finder is great to have but is just a little hard to really see who I should go to. It paginates at 25 per page for the 1100 or so Ontario has but I wouldn't try look past the first few pages. If the information was displayed a little nicer and maybe more per page, I would find that to be more useful.

I would highly recommend you get a logo designed in some way. If this is some sort of side project that you are trying to monetize through ads, I can assume your budget is somewhat low but it really helps identify a brand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the feedback. Some of the issues noted have been already resolved (ie images) and for the others we will think how to address them better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You need to do a "Show HN" submission to let people know that you want feedback on your project or startup. The "Show HN" submissions get listed under the "show" link in the top menu and the rules for doing a "Show HN" submissions are here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

If you can still edit the title, prefix it with "Show HN: " but if that fails, one of the moderators might change it for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Title changed. Thx.

<comment><USER3> I checked out a few pages, but the browser I'm using is more than a bit outdated, so it's not too useful for providing useful feedback. I did notice one thing that you might want to fix. On the following review page, the sidebar for "Latest Car Reviews, ..." shows one item, "2015 Kia Sedona SX-L" four times:

[http://www.carsandcars.ca/Car/Review/0](http://www.carsandcars.ca/Car/Review/0)

I could do a screen capture if need be, but I doubt you'll need one to find it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Appreciate your help.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Rich Have Stayed Rich in England for 1,000 Years - <AUTHOR> http://allday.com/post/1688-the-rich-have-stayed-rich-in-england-for-1000-years#

<comment><USER2> Something tells me that this isn't the full story.

While it may be true that the top 1% of British society has remained constant for 1000 years, Britain's place within the world power system has changed dramatically. They went from a sleepy backwater island during the Dark Ages, to a major European power under Elizabeth I, to the pre-eminent global power during the British Empire, to a sleepy backwater island as the U.S. ascended after WW2. It's telling that the article eventually turns to "But what does this mean for America, the land of opportunity?"

It's also telling that of the three families highlighted - Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Kennedy - Cornelius Vanderbilt's great-great-grandfather emigrated to America as an indentured servant, John D. Rockefeller was the son of a con artist, and JFK's great-grandfather was an orphan who emigrated from Ireland to avoid starvation.

I think a more accurate lesson might be that social mobility _within_ an established social hierarchy is impossible. You have to transcend the existing social structure, basically leaving your existing place in society to join a different society that's growing much faster.</comment>


Dan Weinreb comments on Google's acquisition of ITA - <AUTHOR> http://danweinreb.org/blog/rumors-of-ita-acquisition-are-just-rumors#comments <comment><USER2> "I would not expect any new major software effort to be written in Lisp. On the other hand, it's not clear that ITA would have done that, either..."

So ITA (possibly) wouldn't choose Common Lisp again. I wonder if he includes other lisps in that. And does he agree with ITA on that choice?

</comment><comment><USER3> "I would not expect any new major software effort to be written in Lisp."

How many companies have purchased companies whose flagship is developed in Lisp only to shutdown or redo all Lisp work? WTF is this pattern? Is there a name for it?

(and that doesn't count the companies that did it to themselves like Amazon)

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps fashion more than anything else.

Lisp was fashionable through sometime in the mid '80s or so, when it was "officially" blamed for the failure of the over-hyped expert systems market. (See a bit of that here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Winter#The_fall_of_expert_sy...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Winter#The_fall_of_expert_systems))

The biggest reason, of course, is what some have called the "de-skilling" of IT. The vast majority of organizations view IT as a cost center, and they (want to) view us as interchangeable cogs; this became critical when IT became so big (say, starting in the '80s). Lisp goes very much against that philosophy; as Dan notes, " _Acquirers of companies with Lisp software usually make the big mistake of commanding that it must be rewritten in Java._ "

That's a language _explicitly_ designed by James Gosling for implementing already fixed/solid designs and it fits very well into the humans as interchangeable cogs mindset (not his fault, except in that C++ wasn't really suited to that mindset and Java fixed the intractable problem with C++ for that (manual memory management)).

PG and the failed C++ re-write of Viaweb might be an example of this, Yahoo is said to be a place that doesn't attempt to hire the best engineers and that alone is very telling.

<comment><USER2> > The biggest reason, of course, is what some > have called the "de-skilling" > of IT.

I don't buy that. There are countless software shops that are obsessed with programmer skill and productivity, in fact live or die by it, and almost none of them choose a lisp.

<comment><AUTHOR> De-skilling has nothing to do with that, it has to do with changing jobs so that they require less skill. Assembly line factories are an example, they were an efficiency improvement over individual craftsmen that not coincidentally required much less skilled labor. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling> and <http://www.google.com/search?q=deskilling+programming> and [http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&link_code=qs&f...](http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&link_code=qs&field- keywords=deskilling)

Even then, in knowledge work you're obviously going to care about skill.

(Sure wish I'd believed a book on this subject (the deskilling of programming) that I read in the '80s; knowing what a recipe for technical failure it is I didn't. Unfortunately all too many suits believe it.)

<comment><USER2> The most astonishingly skillful programmers use lisp more often than average or crummy programmers, but it's still an unusual choice among them. Look at the results of the ICFP programming challenges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The 4th and 5th comments so far.

</comment><comment><USER4> Flagged because the content is outdated. There has since been an official press release confirming the intent to purchase.

<http://investor.google.com/releases/2010/0701.html>

<comment><USER5> I think most people here are not interested in the main post but the comments regarding Lisp.</comment></comment>


World War II Is Full of Plot Holes (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html <comment><USER2> Well, knowing this is intended to be just funny I have to point out a few things:

> All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it > sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

Germany was drowned in serious economic depression that was deep enough to trigger a huge social response. Plus we cannot forget about the humiliating Versaille Treaty.

> they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies > with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese

Holocaust was not intended to wipe out all other races, only those that stood in the way. This includes Jews and Romani people for inhabiting "incorrect" lands, East European nations for inhabiting fertile lands. Hitler was happy to jump into one bed with Hungarians or Italians for example, although it is not obvious what would happen later had he won.

> Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the > Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict > on two fronts (...)

And Hitler was not far from taking over Moscow in 1941. Of course the failure of Operation Barbarossa was huge, but there was a point when Stalin must have been really afraid about the future his capital (end of July 1941, before Nazi troops diverted north for Leningrad and south for Kiev, following an order from the Furer himself; his generals strongly opposed this order).

<comment><USER3> Hitler was willing to be opportunistically flexible with his definition of the "Aryan race." For instance, he recognized Iranians, Arabs, and Turks as "Aryans"[1] in so far as they supported his war efforts. He also dubbed the Japanese "Honorary Aryans," whatever that's supposed to have meant. (Hirohito was about as fanatical over "racial purity" as Hitler was, and perhaps Hitler saw in him a kindred spirit, in addition to a military ally. Extant records and writings suggest that Hitler viewed the Japanese as more reliable allies than the Italians, whom he was planning to double-cross at some point down the road. This is probably because Italy shared a border with Hitler's Germany, by way of Austria, and hence, was "in the way," while Japan was not. Hitler's writings and track record suggest that, had he won the war, he'd have turned on pretty much any country at any time, should they have proved inconvenient for any reason).

[1] Leaving aside the obvious, of course, which is that Iranians are arguably more "Aryan" than Middle-European Caucasians. That is to say, if we use the historically accurate definition of the term, and not the Nazi-racist- mythological definition of the "Aryan" people.

<comment><USER4> The whole fixation on Aryan race was less about racial purity than it was about psychological transference. The combination of abusive child rearing practices, the Treaty of Versailles and the economic depression left many, if not most, Germans very angry with no logical outlet for that anger. Hitler was able to channel that anger towards minority groups, particularly Jews. The other, somewhat controversial theory for why he targeted Jews was the possibility that he was actually 1/8 Jewish and he was targeting the part of himself that he considered shameful.

Regardless, the fixation on the Aryan master race was never about the belief that there should only be one race. It was about needing to feel powerful when others had made them feel victimized. It was the cycle of child abuse played out on an international scale. It didn't need to be ideologically consistent so long as it soothed that hurt that both Hitler and much of the German people felt.

For anyone interested in the psychological explanations for the war, Alice Miller's "For Your Own Good" is any excellent exploration of that subject.

<comment><USER3> A lot of that is true, but I don't think it's a wholly sufficient explanation.

Unfortunately, the "master race" rhetoric served a tidy political purpose, as well, even outside of Germany. Throughout much of European history, there hadn't been a great deal of "German" history to speak of. The peoples we currently recognize as German were fragmented across hundreds (at one point, thousands!) of independent polities and micro-states. These peoples were scattered across a large portion of Central and Eastern Europe, even after the unification of Germany as a nation-state. Hitler was able to play the "Aryan race" card as a pretext to invading and occupying any countries or territories that happened to have German-speaking inhabitants of any appreciable number (Czechoslovakia, Poland, and so forth). Interestingly, his phrasing started off as being more about the "German people" or "German folk." When he set his sights on other quasi-Germanic countries, like Norway and England, he talked about the "master race," a broader and more strategically flexible concept.

The "master race" concept also won him a small, but vocal number of adherents in the UK and US, particularly among the upper classes, in which racism and eugenics had become fashionable for a time.

No question Hitler's psychology was deeply troubled (and troubling). But it's tough to cleanly separate his personal beliefs from his political opportunism. He seemed to act upon each in almost equal measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's the same reason why fictional commandos like Rambo and buddies have less kills and not so daring achievements as some historically documented cases.

Fiction writers try to push the limits of what readers will [try to] believe, while reality simply ignores those limits.

<comment><USER6> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill) tldr: He once killed a German with a longbow and would carry a broadsword with him into battle.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Medicine_Crow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Medicine_Crow) tldr: Last war chief of the Crow nation. Still alive at age 101, because Death is afraid of him.

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Carton_de_Wiart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Carton_de_Wiart)

>He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War; was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; survived two plane crashes; tunnelled out of a POW camp; and bit off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them. Describing his experiences in World War I, he wrote, "Frankly I had enjoyed the war."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4) | [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1517044/The-long- view...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1517044/The-long-view.html)

>Using nothing more than an iron-sighted, bolt action standard rifle, Simo killed 505 Russians during a three-month period

<comment><USER8> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Whittemore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Whittemore)

Veteran of the French and Indian wars. At the age of 78 he participated in the Battle of Lexington and Concorde, where he was bayoneted, beaten and shot in the face. He recovered and died of old age at 96.

<comment><USER9> How about winning an Iron Cross _and_ a Victoria Cross (albeit in different wars):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Manley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Manley)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting > an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and > untrustworthy they could be?

Sneakily, except for the reams and reams of writing the National Socialists had written about conquering Russia to use their land as Lebensraum, and how that was the whole point of their war.

<comment><USER11> I always wonder about the History Channel...the programs are a good piece of entertainment but it's never seemed to be well researched/thought out enough to act as a serious academic resource of any kind.

<comment><USER12> [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-idiocy- fabr...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-idiocy-fabrications- and-lies-of-ancient-aliens-86294030/?no-ist)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus_Effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus_Effect)

[http://www.history.com/shows/ufo-hunters](http://www.history.com/shows/ufo- hunters)

It's unambiguously entertainment.

<comment><USER13> " _Bird wasn't the first person to notice the dinosaur tracks, and selling the sauropod and theropod tracks was a cottage industry in the vicinity of Glen Rose. And a few local people carved fake human tracks in the same stone. Bird actually saw a pair of such forgeries at a trading post in Gallup, New Mexico, along with dinosaur tracks removed from the Glen Rose area, shortly before he left to investigate the site himself._ "

That's completely ridiculous! I'm surprised the Smithsonian is putting it's good name behind this sort of trash. Do you know how far Gallup, NM, is from Glen Rose? It's nearly a thousand miles! Certainly, no trading post dealer is going to travel that sort of distance to tote some rocks around! Not even the most dedicated 12-year-old tourist would do it.

I'm sorry, what was the question?

" _Read more:[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-idiocy- fabr...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-idiocy-fabrications- and-lies-of-ancient-aliens-86294030/#Grp0TFZfLeW7kDSy.99) Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! [http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv](http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv) Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter_"

Thank you, Smithsonian!

<comment><USER12> I think your premise about the rocks moving around is flawed. I was in a touristy rock shop near here a few weeks ago:

[https://email@example.com,-88.4525903,12z](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-88.4525903,12z)

It had junk from all around the world. I imagine they utilized package delivery services (further sarcasm omitted) as much as they carried stuff around themselves.

But sure, let's be more cynical about Smithsonian Mag than History.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's funny; I was just sitting here thinking about dropping software dev to become an anthropologist and then I run across this. I have to give the author credit in that anything viewed in the right light is absurd, but I think he misses the point that that "show" invented the tropes he accuses the show of having.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's a similar page around somewhere on the implausibility of the Falklands War, starting with the absurdity of the conflict over tiny resourceless islands, through things like the transatlantic bombing run and putting all the helicopters on one ship which was sunk immediately. Then there's Thatcher ringing up Mitterand in the middle of the night to demand the remote disarm codes for the Exocet missiles France had sold Argentina, involving threats to nuke Buenos Aires.

And the War of Jenkins' Ear, which is just silly.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Plot holes" \- brilliant term I've been looking for to explain conspiracy theorists' obsession with finding ludicrous explanations in mundane/petty inconsistencies normal in the real world.

<comment><USER17> Conspiracy theorists are the people that come up with the inept cash-in "non- canonical" sequel and dreadful fanfic that make the official story seem quite compelling by comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I totally agree with all the other explanations posted, but here's another one: popular history as a retelling of real events gets the same tropes applied to it as fiction does.

</comment><comment><USER19> If Churchill is the hero, he's a monstrously flawed one: [https://www.quora.com/Was-Winston-Churchill-a- racist](https://www.quora.com/Was-Winston-Churchill-a-racist)

That should make the war a bit more believable.

Also, the part where the US wouldn't take Jewish refugees: [http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007094](http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007094)

<comment><USER20> Heavy-handed attempts by the writers to insert some "balance" into the story. Hmm, we show these guys as so good, it's not believable, how can we show them as flawed? Oh, I know, let's have them refuse to take in some refugees for no apparent reason, the very same people they later fought to save. It's just amateur hour in the writers' room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you want to discuss ridiculous stories, he claims he watched this WWII historical stuff on "the history channel" but I checked the schedule for tonight (honest!) and tonight is a three hour "Pawn Stars" marathon, tomorrow has more pawn stars followed by what appears to be a horror-reality crossover called "the curse of oak island" and wednesday night has a marathon of "american pickers" and thursday is, I kid you not, another marathon of "pawn stars". So I suspect he never saw anything other than blue collar workers screaming at each other and at customers on this so called "history channel". Its the same pablum on TLC, discovery, syfy, etc. The only way to tell TV channels apart in 2014 is to check the name, there's really only one channel.

(That said, I'd recommend the 60s era BBC WWII series if you can find it in the usual locations, legal or otherwise)

<comment><USER22> Maybe he originally wrote it during the Hitler Channel era.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I thought this was making the point that WW2 is often reduced to a simple coherent narrative for the purpose of documentaries concerned more with their viewing figures than historical rigour/the truth.

These simplifications are distorting the mainstream collective memory of these events. This is particularly prevalent in the UK with regard to the First World War; a popular satirical comedy series has shaped a widely held view of mindless muddy bloodbath which does not do justice to the complexity of reality ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackadder_Goes_Forth](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackadder_Goes_Forth)).

It'd be nice to see the History Channel et al delve a little deeper.

Edit: I'm not totally sure if he's making this point or not frankly.

</comment><comment><USER24> And a particular division even had little skull and crossbones on their hats for heaven sake.

One wonders if Hugo Boss actually got ideas from comic books bad guys.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hmm, this made me think: do people who believe America was right to drop the atom bombs on Japan also believe they should have been used in subsequent wars? If not, why not?

<comment><USER26> I don't think this is the right place for such a debate, but if you google "did the atomic bomb save lives", you'll find people that make the case that it was the right choice.

I suspect the response to your "why not?" would be that we haven't had any war since then where the threat was significant to warrant the horrific impact of their use (which nobody seems to deny). Plus, ever since shortly after WWII, there was always the possibility of nuclear weapons triggering a nuclear response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well, considering the Japanese actually tried to surrender before the bombs fell to the Russians is totally not important... and that they found out about the 2 N-Bombs only after they surrendered to the Americans. /s

</comment><comment><USER28> The sarcasm falls flat when you realize that a lot of what he is talking about really is wrong. That is not what happened, that is a collection of misconceptions people gathered which are only loosely based on actual history. Germany was not simply racist, they had declared jews to be their enemies. Not "people who aren't white". The German military was the most racially and religiously diverse military force involved in WW2. There were plenty of Wehrmacht soldiers with brown skin, wearing turbans, or carrying copies of the Quran given to them by Hitler as gifts. A shocking number of people are under the impression that the US joined the war because Germany attacked France and was killing jews. It is no wonder that people have a comic book view of WW2 given how little actual history they've been taught.

<comment><USER29> Although Nazi Germany did co-operate with various (for want of a better term) brown people, Hitler and the rest of the Nazis certainly held racist attitudes towards them. It would be misleading to suggest that the Nazis were "only" racists with regard to Jews.

(Of course virtually everyone on the allied side was also racist.)

<comment><USER28> >Hitler and the rest of the Nazis certainly held racist attitudes towards them

Why is that certain? I'm not aware of anything that would support that claim. High ranking nazis and even Hitler himself made positive statements towards plenty of other ethnic and cultural groups. A belief that ethnic groups should have pride in their culture and stay "pure" by only breeding with other members of the same ethnic group may not be popular now, but it is not racist.

<comment><USER29> I hate to cite Wikipedia, but the following helpful article has some quotes from Speer's memoir which are relevant:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relations_between_Nazi_Germany_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relations_between_Nazi_Germany_and_the_Arab_world)

>A belief that ethnic groups should have pride in their culture and stay "pure" by only breeding with other members of the same ethnic group may not be popular now, but it is not racist.

Actually it is racist.

<comment><USER28> That wikipedia article supports what I said. And I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but when speaking with others you do need to use the actual definitions of words. If you pretend words mean things they do not mean, then communication is impossible. Racism requires the belief that one or more races are inferior or superior to others. Not merely an acknowledgement that races exist.

<comment><USER29> The Wikipedia article shows Speer making reference to the fact that Hitler considered Arabs racially inferior.

I am not going to argue the semantics of racism with you. You know as well as I do that there are no examples of non-racists opposed to interracial marriage. Such people could conceivably exist in principle, but do not in practice. I am not sure what your motivations are for trying to defend these hypothetical non-racist anti-miscegenationists, but this has nothing to do with the Nazis in any case.

<comment><USER28> It also shows Hitler saying otherwise. Hearsay vs first hand, what a tough call. Why are your responses so consistently dishonest?

<comment><USER29> Where on the page does it show Hitler saying that Arabs are not racially inferior to "Aryans"? The page has multiple well-sourced instances of Hitler making explicitly racist comments about Arabs. E.g. "Let us think as men and let us see in these peoples [in the Far East and Arabia] at best lacquered half-apes who are anxious to experience the lash". And as far as hearsay is concerned, the article notes that similar statements are made in Mein Kampf (which, to state the obvious, was written by Hitler personally).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cost-Cutting in New York and London = A Boom in India  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/business/worldbusiness/12indiawall.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss <comment><USER2> Wow 40% of jobs could be offshored? That surprises me. What is the 60% of jobs that requires a physical presence in wall street?

<comment><USER3> Meeting customers in person. Sitting in meetings in companies that is going to have IPOs. Sitting in wealthy client's private jet or yachts in Saint Tropez talking about the new products to hedge the client's capital. And because it has to be in person, they would better dress nicely and are attractive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is a good time for Indian research-related startups to take advantage of this. Indian VCs should take note.

"Over all, United States banks will cut 200,000 employees by 2009, the banking consultancy Celent said in April. "

"Theoretically, as much as 40 percent of the research-related jobs on Wall Street, tens of thousands of jobs, could be sent off-shore"</comment>


Microsoft will charge $40/mo for 20K queries for access to the Bing Search API - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2012/04/12/microsoft-to-begin-charging-for-access-to-bing-search-api-starting-at-40mo-for-20k-queries/

<comment><USER2> It's interesting that Microsoft is planning to charge more than Yahoo! Boss for access to the same data. BOSS charges $0.80 per 1000 queries, while Microsoft is priced at $2 per 1000 queries. BOSS is also pay-as-you-go with no monthly minimum. BOSS has less restrictive terms and conditions (re-ordering allowed, for instance). I've been using the Bing API instead of Yahoo! BOSS for my metasearch engine for two reasons: the feed is free, and the response time is faster. The Microsoft/BOSS prices are not unreasonable if you are actively monetizing your page with search ads, but if you are doing an experimental search engine it is very stressful. If I suddenly get a surge in traffic, I could be broke very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really hope DDG have thought out a backup plan, I am an avid user of their amazing service

</comment><comment><USER4> I didn't even know Bing Search API let you just query it. IMO they should have done more evangalism before starting to charge. Has someone used this to re- create the classic Google search experience that Google has shit all over recently?

On a different note, it seems both Google and Microsoft are in a battle to first commoditize the other's core product and then start charging. Google's getting more aggressive with charging for Apps. And now Microsoft with the index.

<comment><USER5> I think DDG uses this as one of its primary sources for search data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is too bad. The Bing API was a great service. I wish they would keep a free plan for hobbyists.

A side project of mine is a search engine for coders (www.gigglebang.com) which I'll now have to take down or put ads on.

<comment><USER7> I am with you there. <http://searchco.de/> uses the Bing API as a fallback when the main index cannot find anything. I was halfway through blending the results but will now have to fall back to my own indexing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Disappointing, but I understand. I use the Bing APIs, probably only 4K to 5K calls per year, but useful. I don't think it is worth $40/month to me.

<comment><USER9> Same here. I wish they had a free quota of around 1-2K calls per month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let's see what happens to DuckDuckGo now, since it's dependent on Bing.

<comment><USER11> DuckDuckGo uses more than just Bing for it's search backend [1], however I wonder if their other sources are enough to compensate for the potential loss of Bing.

[1] [http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources)</comment></comment>


Coming soon: Money from your Tumblr - <AUTHOR> https://staff.tumblr.com/post/148012671115/money <comment><USER2> More information: [https://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/partnerprogram](https://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/partnerprogram)

It's opt-out which is unfortunate. Though custom themes aren't affected (yet).

They already inserted some terrible auto-playing audio ads into the Dashboard and now this? I think they're on a downward spiral.

Considering closing my accounts.</comment>


Entrepreneurs, quit your whining about fundraising - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/27/entrepreneurs-quit-your-whining-about-fundraising/ <comment><USER2> Its strange to me that entrepeneurs have time to do this when self promotion is so ripe for the taking these days. A entrepeneur who wants to succeed has to do it with a grin, failure after failure.</comment>


Is the IPFS Project a Failure? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I never understand why people ask questions like this. Just a raw, but likely inflammatory, question with no additional exposition explaining what it is they really want to know. In reality, without defining the parameters of what would constitute "success" or "failure" there _is_ no real answer to this question, except a bunch of people's opinions.

So 30 or 40 people say "yes", 30 or 40 more say "no" and what new, actionable insight does anybody gain from this?

</comment><comment><USER3> Blockchain tech and ethereum is a failed project, IPFS is an unfortunate casualty of collateral damage.

Juan Benet and the team at Protocol labs is the definition of top talent, it's too bad their work had to be stymied by an industry that basically cannibalized itself at the hands of idiot entrepreneurs (I'm looking at YOU Jeremy Gardner of Augur...)

</comment><comment><USER4> It worked the last time I checked. Why would it be considered a failure?</comment>


Show HN: Early access to ready-made, tested API collections for Postman - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/postman-collections <comment><USER2> When is the launch planned?</comment>


Reliably compromising Ubuntu desktops by attacking the crash reporter - <AUTHOR> https://donncha.is/2016/12/compromising-ubuntu-desktop/ <comment><USER2> > The computer security industry has a serious conflict of interest right now. > There is major financial motivation for researchers to find and disclose > vulnerability to exploit brokers (...)

> To improve security for everyone we need to find sustainable ways to > incentivize researchers to find and disclose issues and to get bugs fixed. > We can't and we shouldn't rely on researchers giving away their work for > free to for-profit vendors.

This. Despite that being said (using other words) in some other blogs and reports, this is the main point of bug haunting. People have to eat and live, in the end of the day, and when the dark side pays much more that the brighter one, it's hard to defend that only responsible disclosures will happen. Because, well, it won't work like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I heard linux is secured!! Should I (we) stop using gui to be secured?

<comment><USER4> The desktop is pretty insecure whatever OS you use.

If you want a secure platform iOS is your best bet

<comment><USER5> I agree.

Also for server security, vendor bloat is as much a problem for Linux as it was for Microsoft (since always). Microsoft went through decades[1] of ridicule which resulted into immense internal pressure to improve security.

When you compare major linux distros now (and look at the lkml or other open source communities) then Linux hasn't changed much since the 90ies. It's still full of people who are almost religious when it comes to accepting that just because a system is open source doesn't automatically make it more secure.

Monolothic kernel with containers? anyone who has the luxury of starting new (Like Linus in the 90ies) would point the finger and laugh. Some people laugh now, but nobody hears them because we already have this cool thing called linux so why would you re-invent the wheel ...? (so seems the logic towards anyone who questions the design) ... If you say Linux is less secure than Microsoft or Apple you must be a troll (is the answer to most who dare to say apple / microsoft are more secure than Linux)

[1] [http://trustworthycomputing.com](http://trustworthycomputing.com)

<comment><USER5> QubesOS FTW!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting conclusion on this post.</comment>


If you think that a Harvard grad is smarter than you, then you're pretty stupid - <AUTHOR> https://code.likeagirl.io/if-you-think-that-a-harvard-grad-is-smarter-than-you-then-youre-actually-pretty-stupid-2cd5c0d64e6d <comment><USER2> Maybe they want the connections that come with Harvard grads? You're the one who's invented "intelligence" as the reason... there are others. I'm not supporting the underlying practice, but it's worth really asking why it exists. Laziness, prestige, connections, familiarity, etc...</comment>


Quit wasting my screenspace : an editable markdown preview - <AUTHOR> http://vallettamd.com/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if this could support the fountain dialect

<comment><USER3> I didn't know that screenwriters read Hacker News.</comment></comment>


US Drought Monitor - <AUTHOR> http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

<comment><USER2> And yet the denialists will continue to refuse the accepted, and perceivable, reality that we are experiencing anomalous weather worldwide, on an accelerating scale that will mean the end of most ecosystems as we know it, including the ones that support life at the planetary scale.

We are sliding so quickly into unknown territory that at this point I can only hope I don't live to see the worst of the consequences. The so-called "alarmists" have been proven right time and time again, and within the next few years we'll have new, even worse factors to deal with.

The badly-placed optimism some people still have seems closer to insanity with each passing day.</comment>


Thank You HN Community: Free Tickets to the Founder Conference - <AUTHOR>

HN is my favorite community. I spend way too much time here. Since I happen to run the Founder Conference coming up on August 17 in Mountain View, I figured the least I can do is give back a little bit by giving away free tickets.
So if you are interested, just reply to this thread. But there's a twist:
- 1 ticket for the person with the highest karma (finally, having a high karma pays off)
- 1 ticket for a new user with a really low (positive) karma (to encourage newbies too, that's the spirit of HN I believe)
- 2 tickets randomly given away to anyone who wants them
And for everyone else, there is a promo code "yc" to get 20% off. <comment><AUTHOR> You can downvote this comment while you upvote this thread and I won't gain any karma from this post.

</comment><comment><USER2> Thanks for doing this, it really helps!</comment>


NASA X-59 Is Building Its X-Plane from Old Warbirds - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a31674235/nasa-x-59-boneyard/ <comment><USER2> With all the military parts, including from F117, I call BS... this is a future spyplane prototype leeching off of NASA funding under the guise of "supersonic passenger aircraft".</comment>


Adobe CTO on Flash for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_content_and_app.html#comment-2137153

<comment><USER2> Apple is certainly blocking Adobe despite being able to run Flash on a machine like the iPad. The reason for this isn't because it _can_ run, it's that it can't run _well enough_ to not break the flow of the device, making it feel slow. Most mud being slung back and forth seems to be ignoring this.

To a large degree, I agree with this choice, and I welcome Flash's demise (if it happens) in favor of something more open / capable / faster. Flash serves unique needs which have now largely been done better by other tools.

Apple is all about _feel_ , and as they absolutely cannot control the quality of the flood of old / crappy flash apps that will grind the machine to a halt if they enable it, they've decided to block it outright. It fits perfectly with their App Store model, where they can ensure programs run quickly enough. Whether you agree with the App Store model or not is another issue entirely, Apple is being merely _consistent_ in all this.

<comment><USER3> On equal terms there is also the issue of Apple's control over the software that iPhone OS devices run. Adobe's Flash includes an interpreter, that _will_ be used to deliver applications to devices circumventing the AppStore.

While Apple officially supports scripting WebKit and extends it ever deeper into iPhone OS APIs, I don't think they'll be willing to take on a similar venture with Adobe's Action Script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "These crashes you are seeing do not exist. The 100% CPU usage is likewise an illusion. Also, Google is evil. Believe me!"

<comment><USER5> Could it be that some crashes are the fault poor programming and not the Flash Player itself?

I can eat up 100% of your CPU with Python.

<comment><USER6> Flash video performanc is awful on OS X and Linux. That is entirely Adobe's fault.

<comment><USER3> An Intel Core2 Duo Mac Mini, with no graphics card to speak of (so this couldn't skew the results even theoretically) plays 720p H.264 YouTube-encoded videos with ~9% CPU usage, and no hiccups, the frame-rate is evenly distributed, every frame lasts for whatever time it should. Compare and contrast with the Flash decoder, that ceilings at about 70%, and plays un- evenly, even on a frame-by-frame level -- there is no way of telling how much time a given frame is showing on the screen.

That's why many will use Rentzsch' Click-to-Flash WebKit plug-in, to block all Flash permanently and play H.264 movies natively. github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash

Here's another one, this time from Firefox for Maemo RC3:

> We've decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are > supported) support for this release. The Adobe Flash plugin used on many > sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn't > meet our standards.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like didn't read the linked info either.

For Maemo, see earlier on Hacker News: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1090855>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Flash has been incredibly successful in its adoption, with over > 85% of the > top web sites containing Flash content and Flash > running on over 98% of > computers on the Web.

Oh really? I've disabled Flash on all my browsers a week ago and don't even notice that I'm missing so much web-content!

<comment><USER9> My guess is that 85% number is actually referring to a majority of that content being flash-based ads. So both of you are right.

<comment><USER10> That poses an interesting question: A certain amount of people here think that using ad-block is wrong, because you are denying that site revenue, etc. I don't want to rehash that argument, but what I'm wondering is do they feel the same about not installing flash? You're still blocking a lot of ads, but the main difference is you're choosing not to install something, rather than installing something extra to block things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If they are having problems reproducing the crashes, they should pay for me to send my MacBook to them - it is 100% reproducible every single time. I actually installed Windows on a partition, and I boot in there to play flash video.

I open a video site. I try to jump to a location in the middle of the video. It crashes.

And of course, if you play 3-4 videos, the MacBook will decide to switch itself off because of overheating.

<comment><USER12> Obviously it's the macbook's fault - It's not designed to play that many videos...

/sarcasm

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have to say Kevin is doing an incredible job remaining collected and professional even amongst the unprofessional comments from both the pro-Flash and anti-Flash.

<comment><USER14> He's saying that all the problems that all of us have with Flash on a daily basis actually do not exist. We're just imagining all of it, all of us. That is not doing an incredible job, it's just not listening.

<comment><USER7> Try actually reading what was said, instead of rephrasing it according to some internal narrative.

<comment><USER14> No matter how hard you try, no matter how long you try; you will never _ever_ be able to convince the people of the internets that Flash _isn't_ a crash prone performance hog.

<comment><USER7> Most people don't think it is. That's why everybody uses it.

Crashing seems to be mostly directly correlated with pseudonymous Apple- polishing on webforums.... ;-)

(btw, if you're sincerely trying to improve your own experience, there's a quick set of diagnostics here: [http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/troubleshooting_player_sta...](http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/troubleshooting_player_stabili.html) )

<comment><USER14> People don't use Flash because they like it, they use it to view the content that requires it. It astonishes me that you don't understand this.

Like I said; no amount of effort on your part is going to make us forget our experiences with your suck ass plugin crashing our browser every day. Thankfully, there are Flash blocker plugins that make this a more rare event.

Your inability to understand this _does_ explain why Flash is getting worse instead of better though. So thanks for that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AFP: Twitter will mine people's tweets to target ads - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iGJWr3Hz9U9K7nTLF0uAvTqAB0LA?docId=CNG.6be733b733d88a0732a758a94c78e2ea.b1 <comment><USER2> This is still far less creepy than google/facebook's massive hoardings of personal information used for advertising.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is firmly in the "they weren't doing that already?" file for me.</comment>


Flight Tracking Statistics - <AUTHOR> https://www.flightradar24.com/data/statistics <comment><AUTHOR> Nearly 50% less tracked flights, even September 11 had not such effect as it was limited to the USA.</comment>


Twitter Displaying Expanded Short URLs Using 301 Lookup - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/twitter-displays-expanded-short-urls

<comment><USER2> FriendFeed had this over 2 years ago: [http://friendfeed.com/steverubel/54df8bf5/short-urls- shared-...](http://friendfeed.com/steverubel/54df8bf5/short-urls-shared-on- friendfeed-now-reveal-re)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hopefully they improve this in the future by not showing the short URL at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> _it prevents me from ever clicking on a short link that will take me to somewhere evil_

There are plenty of ways to trick people with links. For example, you can register a domain called not-hardcore-porn.com, and then put porn there. Or you can just poison some upstream DNS cache, and then facebook.com goes to phishing-site.com.

The Internet is very insecure. Short links are the least of our worries.

</comment><comment><USER5> _"In speaking with a few colleagues, it appears Twitter is using the 301 redirect on the short URL to provide the mouseover with the full URL."_

Is this just a non-technical person attempting to inject a little detail into the article? My first thought was, "How would I do this in JS?" and it took me a second to decipher that sentence.

<comment><USER6> kind of. it's not done on the front end (js) but rather using some service on the backend.

the phrasing of that is a bit weird, but they probably test until they no longer get a 301 or 302 redirect and save the result. they print this result on the front end as a title for the link and as an HTML5 data attribute "expanded-url" on the link.

<comment><USER7> I looked at doing this using Javascript in a browser extension a while ago, and it's actually not possible to do for a couple of reasons:

      1) XHR cross domain policy prohibits requests to domains other than the domain the page loaded from
      2) the XHR GET method always follows a 301 redirect and returns the content at the URL.  The full URL is not made available.

<comment><USER8> You'd have to write something on your server that does this, and expose it to your client JS via a local URL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hootsuite has been doing this for a while with a + icon. Good to see Twitter itself doing it.

<comment><USER6> similarly, search.twitter.com has had this using "(expand)" on the end of links for some time. i'm not sure if this was part of the original acquisition for that service or if they added it in after.

<comment><USER9> Also search.twitter.com matches search terms against both the expanded url and shortened url.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I also didn't notice this until today, but this is a great feature to prevent spam and malware. Usually I feel like my Twitter feed is filled with people and links that are moderately trustworthy, but that leaves everyone vulnerable to someone hijacking a twitter account using firesheep or something else.

</comment><comment><USER11> Any clue whether they are checking the destination URLs for malware? Using perhaps Google's Safe Browsing API ( <http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/> )?</comment>


Ask HN: Should algorithmic news like GPT-2 and clickbait be banned? - <AUTHOR> I've been thinking about this a lot lately but algorithms like GPT-2 scare the hell out of me:
https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/
(if you're out of the loop on that one)
I'm excited about it in some ways. It might mean we can build real models from content and build real understanding but the option for Google spam and fake news is too frightening.
I think I'm generally OK with A/B testing.
I'm actually a bad writer and sometimes titles are rough.  If you A/B test a bunch of them via something like Mailchimp you can come up with a better title but of course I don't have nefarious intentions.
Maybe a middle path could be to implement some sort of public key system / validation for actual humans.
This would also solve the fake news problem we currently have but it would also mean people need to actually use keys responsibly.
The idea being that every blog post, email, etc you send off needs to be signed.
Google could just flat out DROP content by anything created by GPT-2 as it's not validated by a chain of trust that goes back to a human.
The reason I'm leaning towards making it illegal is that humans are just too naive.
I have family members who have sent out images that are clearly photoshopped because they not technically literate enough to understand that they're fake.
When something like GPT-2 can write 5-10 pages of content and it looks completely legitimate I think we might be in a world of hurt. <comment><USER2> The thing about GPT-2 is that it's only a marginal improvement over a markov chain, and much worse than paying somebody on mechanical turk a quarter of a cent per hour to write lies. It doesn't _actually_ hang together -- it only looks like it might if you are skimming rather than paying attention.

The appropriate way to counteract GPT-2 having any effect on politics is to promote social norms around careful reading, and this solution also works against all other forms of grey propaganda. ("If you go home with somebody & they don't read critically, don't sleep with them" is the new "if you go home with somebody & they don't have books, don't sleep with them".)

Technical solutions aren't really viable, and miss the point. Most human- generated content on the web isn't amenable to trust chains, because it's generated anonymously or pseudonymously by people who don't really have the technical chops to understand cryptography. It's trivial to write a text document and put it on a web server, & it should remain trivial to do that. The onus of epistemic hygene falls on individuals and communities.

> I have family members who have sent out images that are clearly photoshopped > because they not technically literate enough to understand that they're > fake.

Mock them mercilessly and they will quickly learn how to distinguish shooped photos from real ones. It's not a deep technical skill, but a shallow recognition of tell-tale signs -- a skill that is easily learned passively, if social pressures exist to encourage learning it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that they should not make so many thing to be illegal. However, people who use that kind of GPT-2 and stuff to make fake news should be given a bad reputation if the news isn't accurate. (They should also be given a bad reputation if you just make up stuff and say it is proper news, even if you do not use a computer to do so.)

</comment><comment><USER4> What's to stop me from copying the output of gpt2, as a human, into the chain of trust?

What about the first amendment?

<comment><AUTHOR> > What's to stop me from copying the output of gpt2, as a human, into the > chain of trust?

You would lose trust. Humans can only hit a certain volume...

> What about the first amendment?

It's not absolute. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater and SCOTUS has ruled many times that it has limits</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ice – WSGI microframework to develop small web applications in Python - <AUTHOR> https://icepy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html <comment><USER2> This looks like a whole lot of work for a 0.0.1 release so I must ask... why might I choose Ice over Flask?

<comment><USER3> Even more: why WSGI ?

We need a django of the async world. We need something in Python to compete with nodejs, or even meteor, with async/await as primary tool. And maybe a aWSGI support.

But WSGI ? We have everything we need. They are proven tools. They work. Have great ecosystems and documentations. They do the job perfectly for non real time oriented web site. We don't need another one.

<comment><USER4> Seen Sanic[1] yet? I've become a fan... works well with asyncpg[2] too.

[1]: [https://github.com/channelcat/sanic](https://github.com/channelcat/sanic)

[2]: [https://github.com/MagicStack/asyncpg](https://github.com/MagicStack/asyncpg)

<comment><USER3> It's very limited. We are far, far away from what django or meteor can provide. The API, while using async, is kinda old school (no plugins, namespaces, conf hooks...) and low level for some stuff (where is my task queue ?), and yet too high level for others (you give up control of the even loop policy completely).

It's a nice attempt, but it's barely a draft IMO.

<comment><USER5> When did you last use sanic? It's far from limited, and advancing quickly. However, it's a microframework, so it's true that you'll not get a full Django-like experience (and Meteor isn't even in the same class of web framework as Django or microframeworks like Sanic, so there's nothing to compare there either).

But with respect to microframeworks, Sanic is getting pretty close to feature parity with Flask, only asynchronously. I'm not sure what kind of plugin architecture you're looking for, but you can do middleware with Sanic. Also custom protocols. Also decorators (e.g., for auth). And for namespacing, there are blueprints. I'm not sure what you mean by "conf hooks".

It does help with Sanic if you're already familiar with Flask. Sanic is very close to an async version of Flask.

For a task queue, you can run async tasks with Sanic alone using `app.add_task(some_async_function)`.

It's also simple to use apscheduler if you want a more full-feature async scheduler. Example:

        from apscheduler.schedulers.asyncio import AsyncIOScheduler
        from sanic import Sanic

        app = Sanic()

        async def tick():
            print('Work!')

        @app.listener('before_server_start')
        async def initialize_scheduler(app, loop):
            scheduler = AsyncIOScheduler({'event_loop': loop})
            scheduler.add_job(tick, 'interval', seconds=1)
            scheduler.start()

        if __name__ == "__main__":
            app.run(host="0.0.0.0", port=8000, debug=True)

Finally, unless things have changed, you should be able to set event loop policy with `asyncio.set_event_loop_policy`, have you tried it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The minimal implementation for the application side in Python is "flipflop". It calls your function, and you return a HTML string as a result. That's enough to hook up a Python program as a web server.

Anything beyond that, such as input data parsing or generating HTML from a template or tree, should be a library, not a "framework". You might want multiple libraries from different sources.

<comment><USER3> It seems the entire Python community disagree, and made the monolithic Django the most popular framework. No the minimalist flask. Not the very composable pyramid.

Django.

And the reasons for that are:

\- choosing tools takes time and resources. \- integrating them takes time and resources.

\- keep up to update the stack so it works well together takes time and resources.

\- multiple tools mean multiple docs.

\- you need to train your newcomers to your whole whole stack.

\- when you change project, you have to learn a new stack.

\- multiple tools won't be nearly as well integrated or full featured than the big framework. Have you tried flask-admin ? It's very far away from django- admin.

\- ecosystems build on common grounds. They assume they have tools, configurations, conventions. If you just use anything and everything, no third party tool car easily fit in your stack. E.G: django has a lot of nice libs around authentication because 3rd parties can rely on having a central User model. It's terribly unperfect, but it's really productive.

\- JS has this philosophy, and it's a terrible horrible no good messy pain.

<comment><USER7> Express has way more devs than all of the Python frameworks combined. JS is past, present, and future. This is what the job market looks like: [https://www.dynatrace.com/blog/node-js-is-hitting-the-big- ti...](https://www.dynatrace.com/blog/node-js-is-hitting-the-big-time-in- enterprise-markets/)

On npm, expesss had _538,945 downloads in the last day_ [https://www.npmjs.com/package/express](https://www.npmjs.com/package/express)

[http://blog.builtinnode.com/post/most-installed-packages- acc...](http://blog.builtinnode.com/post/most-installed-packages-according-to- npm) "Express is a very popular package with 160,809,503 downloads so far. It has a very steady growth, peaking in March with a little over 12 million downloads."

Express was released November 16, 2010; Django was released July 21st 2005.

[https://trends.builtwith.com/framework](https://trends.builtwith.com/framework) shows PHP with 53 million sites, Express with 217K, and Django right under Visual Studio (wat) and ColdFusion with 59k.

It really depends on what you're trying to do. Because so many JS frameworks for the browser integrate so nicely with Node, you can use stuff like Axios on both ends and only learn one API. Meteor is even nicer in this (write models once and use on both ends).

<comment><USER8> I think both integrated monolithic framework as well as microframework + library based web development have their place in software development. Most of my career, I have seen Flask to be popular wherever I worked, but I am well aware that Django is the most popular Python web development framework out there. It shows that there are all kinds of developers with their own preferences. Therefore both kinds of web development would remain popular.

There is no one way framework or paradigm that can be the past, present and future. There are always multiple of them.

<comment><USER3> That's fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why invent a new string matching format, instead of just using regular expressions?

<comment><USER3> They allow regular expression.

But having use Django's regex matching a lot, and the one provided with werkzeug, I can tell you the second one is much more productive: 99% of the case you don't need a complex pattern and you are very happy to be able to just say "hey gime 'stuff' here" instead of crafting things like "(?P<stuff>\d+)" . For the rare use case, you just fall back on regexes.</comment></comment>


Early Transmission Dynamics in Wuhan of Novel Coronavirus–Infected Pneumonia - <AUTHOR> https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2001316?articleTools=true <comment><USER2> > The mean incubation period was 5.2 days (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.1 > to 7.0), with the 95th percentile of the distribution at 12.5 days. In its > early stages, the epidemic doubled in size every 7.4 days. With a mean > serial interval of 7.5 days (95% CI, 5.3 to 19), the basic reproductive > number was estimated to be 2.2 (95% CI, 1.4 to 3.9).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Current trend from China CDC: [http://2019ncov.chinacdc.cn/2019-nCoV/](http://2019ncov.chinacdc.cn/2019-nCoV/)</comment>


Why do I have to put shields down in Brave to view Google Cloud Pricing - <AUTHOR> I can't see the "Google Cloud Platform Pricing Calculator" if shields are up in Brave - is this an intentional move by Google to force visitors into accepting tracking? <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: stupid question

But: what is Brave and why does it have shields?

<comment><USER3> [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

Secure, fast and private browser with adblocker.</comment></comment>


Hackpad shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://hackpad.com/ <comment><USER2> All these "generic" apps like notes, photo, project management etc will all be bought once they become successful and be consumed by one of the existing giants in the space. On one hand I would love to try out all the latest and greatest apps. On the other hand, I already know that they will either a) shutdown OR b) sell my data OR c) show ads or some such nonsense.

Why can't people just build products and ask for money upfront? Is bootstrapping really so out of fashion? The startup agenda is either make a billion dollar company or go home. Nothing in between. Very sad (I even saw Sam in some video last week asking 'how do you become a monopoly'?) Why this obsession to grow massive?

<comment><USER3> I think you're attacking a straw man - this situation is nothing like the typical pattern of "acquire company, shut down the product". Hackpad has been running for years since it was acquired (everyone in our company uses it regularly). Dropbox Paper is basically a newer, better version of Hackpad. Anyone using Hackpad can "upgrade" by moving all of their pads into Paper. We just moved over - it was easy and cost nothing.

<comment><USER4> > Dropbox Paper is basically a newer, better version of Hackpad.

How do you create cross links between pages in Paper?

<comment><USER5> Prefix +

<comment><USER4> Great! I have been waiting for a mobile personal wiki since the Palm Pilot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A year or two ago when I was running the SageMath booth at a conference a woman (with a Eastern European accent, I think) walked up to me and said "My son co-founded Hackpad. Their company recently got bought by Dropbox. I was so happy because he said now he can finally eat!!"

</comment><comment><USER7> Hackpad was cofounded by one the original authors of Tomboy, which was a really excellent desktop note taking app that has withered since. It was based on a fork of Etherpad, which was a startup that made a multiplayer, web based note application- that company was purchased by Google, the code open sourced, and the service wound down. Sort of a long sad trip.

I really liked Tomboy, I enjoyed Hackpad, although I quit using it over time- I collaborate much less now.

I don't take notes anymore, with software or on paper.

<comment><USER8> > I don't take notes anymore, with software or on paper.

This sentence made me laugh out loud, sounds like you gave up on life.

<comment><USER9> I understand where you're coming from, but there is a mindset for some people that note taking isn't all that necessary. It often goes along with the mindset of "enjoy today without worrying about trying to capture it for tomorrow." An example would be those who scoff at trying to capture everything on film and forgetting to enjoy the experience.

The opposing mindset is also valid, of course. Different strokes.

As an aside, there are also so many ways that archiving is automated these days that many things we used to have to manually take note of are automatically and indefinitely searchable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's the original HN post when Dropbox acquired Hackpad: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604809)

1104 days ago -- about 3 years and a week. Something makes me think this had been planned for a while.

<comment><USER11> In my experience, companies do often plan things, yes.

<comment><USER10> I think you're implying that I'm stating the obvious here, but, almost every time one of these sunsetting announcements comes out, it's written as if the company just recently decided this was genuinely the best move for everyone, customers and employees alike. "We've had an incredible journey and _it 's just time now_."

I think the timing of "3 years plus a week" indicates that they either decided this date 3 years ago and were just biding their time, or that someone signed an agreement to keep it going for 3 years and they're no longer being held to that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 3 years of development, open sourcing and auto migration to a new app made by the purchasing company and lead by the original founder.

Not sure if all the functionality was kept but really I think one of the better acquisition and eventual closing of a Saas app I've heard of so far.

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://github.com/dropbox/hackpad](https://github.com/dropbox/hackpad)

There's this open source version of Hackpad, under Dropbox's Github account. Apparently, it's an obsolete version, since the last commit made dates back to two years ago.

Not sure whether they would take down this repo too.

</comment><comment><USER14> Shameless plug here, but if you were using Hackpad for meeting notes, links, code snippets and other short work notes, you should give [https://memo.ai](https://memo.ai) a try!

We're building Memo, a note-taking app for technical teams. We integrate deeply with Slack which makes it super easy to save notes while in Slack, and you can write notes using both Markdown and Slack formatting (including @users, #channels and :emoji:).

We were recently on Hacker News and Product Hunt and got a ton of great feedback: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14092279](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14092279)

Having been through an acquisition before, our plan is to build a sustainable business asap by charging for the product.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sincere question: why do people use apps like Hackpad and Paper? I mean, obviously "to take notes", or "to collaborate", but in what contexts? In what use case do they add lots of value?

<comment><USER16> I dig your style. I'm not about solutions looking for a problem. One of my favorite back-and-forth "arguments" with a legit software developer is how much he embraces tech vs. my "luddite" insistence on paper and pen. The use cases end up being very telling.

As I learned from a Jeopardy answer the other day, the most patented design in the United States is for a mousetrap. Everybody tries to build a better mousetrap, apparently that cliche is true! Big picture stuff is kind of wonky like that from my studies, and I love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What an incredible journey.

<comment><USER18> Probably a reference to

[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/about/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/about/)

<comment><USER19> [http://svdictionary.com/words/awesome- journey](http://svdictionary.com/words/awesome-journey)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really love this part: "Paper takes many of Hackpad's best features—like instant collaboration, comments, and real-time editing—and adds a lot more, including additional security features, faster search, and more visibility for teams. "

I know it talks about Dropbox Paper, but I just find it funny that this "recommendation" works as well with the real , physical paper.

</comment><comment><USER21> Anyone know how to export docs for an account for which you're not the admin? I have some docs in various HP orgs that I'd like to export.

</comment><comment><USER22> I liked Hackpad better when it was named "Bachmanity".

</comment><comment><USER23> So sad! I love Hackpad

</comment><comment><USER24> Woah! I knew you from sigmil ACM@UIUC

best of luck in the future

</comment><comment><USER25> please dont shut down it is a great service better than google docs

<comment><USER26> Move your data to dropbox paper, which I assume is hackpad++

<comment><USER8> I wish these companies published their expected longevity at launch. e.g., "We'll be in business from 2015-2017," so you could plan to migrate your data to the next newness ahead of time.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there an offline RegEx training app for iOS or Android? - <AUTHOR> Just wondering if there is something like Duolingo or similar for RegEx. Basically, it throws challenges at you that increase in difficulty, and you try to come up with the correct Regex.<p>It would be perfect for being on planes or trains, and I've had a quick glance at both of the app stores but couldn't see anything interesting. Would possibly have a great monetisation opportunity (in-app upgrades of higher levels). <comment><USER2> Maybe now you should look at sites, not apps, and check out sites that will work offline. Someone could create a training program based on an offline copy of a regex helper site.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=regex&sort=byPopularity&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=regex&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

It sounds like you're floating a cool idea for an app ;) But market size and monetization potential seem hard to predict. Build it and they will come (maybe)</comment>


This Rural Community Is Building Its Own Gigabit Internet Network - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-building-its-own-gigabit-fibre-network A group of locals watch eagerly, mindful not to trip over an orange cable lying nearby in the grass <comment><USER2> So, I live in a rural area in flyover country and have taken the approach so far of contacting the state government, local ISP as well as the owner of the fiber that runs directly through our community from one large metro area in the north to another in the south. I've received nothing in the way of assistance or advice. The large telco that owns the fiber acted as if it was impossible to tie into their lines.

My community is very, very interested in tying into the existing fiber and building its own network; the existing line quite literally bisects the township. But, the township council is very adamant that it needs to be assisted by someone externally to avoid lawsuits, which, to be honest, we do not have the funds to deal with.

I have hit the end of my expertise in this endeavor. Does anyone here have any advice?

<comment><USER3> Calling the ISP's bluff directly will likely be counterproductive.

Snoop around and see if you can find a fiber cabinet anywhere. It's not uncommon to get many km between fiber repeaters so it's entirely possible that the cabinets will be located well out of town making it more difficult. If you find one close in then you can move on to phase two.

Call them up and pretend to be a businessman who wants to lease a fiber line to connect his small, local, automated manufacturing plant centered close to the fiber cabinet and lease a fiber to a big city somewhere where the "servers" are located in a colo facility. It's all blatant lies but it will tell you if the ISP is willing to play ball for money or if they really can't be bothered.

If they are willing to lease you a line you've solved the back-haul side of the problem. The tough part becomes cobbling together enough people right near where the cabinet is who will all invest in a non-profit to get the thing off the ground. Once you have the infrastructure in place adding an additional user or ten gets much easier. I am not really sure how to build the necessary demand in the group of people who live right near the cabinet. Plan a meeting and go door-to-door? A lot of the success there depends on people feeling enough sense of community to go in on the whole thing. If it's a small enough town you've got a decent shot at it. Try and get some respected elders to join up with you even if they're not on the city council; my mom's dad lives in a small town (where his dad also lived) and he's said he could get elected to city council if he just ran since everyone knows and respects the family name.

I wish you the best. It would be great to see more of these kinds of things crop up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> B4RN are great but they're unique, primarily because they have local access to backhaul fibre. There are some key fibre routes travelling through their area and there are existing fibres (originally used to connect local schools) that run to the nearby Lancaster University (where the CEO of B4RN used to work), and from there onto Telecity in Manchester.

Organising a fibre across some fields and your neighbours gardens is one thing, but connecting into the national fibre network can be quite another, especially for "real" remote villages where the nearest fibre point is many miles away.

Of course you then have to lease the fibre capacity too which is very expensive (£20k-40k+ a year for 10Gb backhaul) and ultimately at the operator's discretion, some operators will just not sell to customers who they see as direct competition. I seem to recall in B4RN's case they had such a clash with BT that they pretty much burnt their bridges with them for any future assistance.

This lack of existing infrastructure is why you couldn't (cost effectively) replicate B4RN in rural Wales for example, even if you had fibre to all of the houses in a village.

<comment><USER5> The HUBS/Tegola projects I linked to in another comment have managed to provide broadband speeds to Arnisdale - which must be one of the most remote villages on the UK mainland:

[http://www.glenelg.co.uk/news/broadband-solution-provided- fo...](http://www.glenelg.co.uk/news/broadband-solution-provided-for- arnisdale-and-corran-by-tegola-project/)

It's wireless though - still a pretty good result getting decent connectivity to small remote communities!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A small town in Alberta, Canada did the same thing.[1]

All 8,500 residents have access to gigabit for $57/mo.

[1] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets- ma...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets- massive-1-000-mbps-broadband-boost-1.1382428)

</comment><comment><USER7> I am working on a similar initiative in a rural Missouri (United States) county. DadeCountyFiber.org

We are looking for help, if anyone is interested.

<comment><USER8> How successful have you been in getting the average citizen on board for such an endeavor?

<comment><USER7> Everyone I have spoken to has been supportive, but I am struggling to get them involved. I don't think I am presenting a clear enough message as to what it is we need to do to get the job done.

Unfortunately my wife has been sick and was in the hospital all last week, so I am behind on my list of things to do, and simply don't have the time to do it all myself, so at this point I really need to get more community members actively engaged and helping me get the message out.

Any suggestions are always most welcome!

<comment><USER8> Sorry to hear about your wife, I hope that situation improves. Regarding community involvement, this is the hurdle that I can't figure out myself. I've done research in this area and talked to people about the prospect. I haven't gone door to door but in the end, I think involvement will be rather limited in a place that already has reasonable broadband access (albeit for unreasonable prices and silly data-caps). I think B4RN is successful in getting community involvement because the rural areas have very limited Internet access. For sub-urban and urban areas, I think you'd need to simply start offering a service. If you can offer comparable service for a lower price, some people will switch. I'd love to hear otherwise.

<comment><USER7> In my rural county, about 50% of households have some form of DSL service from CenturyLink. They are the ones that live in the towns. Some of those towns also have cable service from Mediacom. There are 2 WISPS serving parts of the county, but their speeds aren't really broadband- and they are expensive! Verizon does have wireless data coverage in some areas, but that is prohibitively expensive for streaming video.

The rest of us are stuck with satellite as the only option, which is expensive and laggy, and has very limited data caps.

I have no doubt we would be able to get 30-50% of households to signup for fiber service if we had it. But I can't finance the entire cost of building the network and still make it financially viable. Volunteers and community support is the only way to make it happen.

If I can make it happen here, I plan to work very hard to expand the network and help other communities to do the same thing.

(PS My wife is doing much better now, thanks!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I so want to learn how to do the splicing now. :D

Creating fiber networks is something i always wanted to learn how to do.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not always sure what to expect from a vice.com article, but I was pleasantly surprised by this one. Not much technical detail of course, but I found this to be a great story of, well, hacking.

</comment><comment><USER11> There is a similar effort in Scotland called B4GAL: [http://b4gal.org.uk/](http://b4gal.org.uk/)

<comment><USER5> Also the linked HUBS and Tegola projects - more for wireless access in really rough spots like Knoydart:

[http://www.tegola.org.uk/](http://www.tegola.org.uk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Inspiring. Good show, rural north!

</comment><comment><USER13> Who are they connected to?</comment>