Ask HN: Node.js with PHP application? - <AUTHOR>

So the application that I am currently working on has a backend written on PHP (CodeIgniter) and MySQL. I am using AngularJS with Yeoman Angular Generator for frontend. It's basically a SPA. The backend is written to serve as REST api with multiple endpoints. I want you guys to give feedback on my tech stack choice. Thanks in advance. (the application is yet to be deployed)<p>I want to develop a dashboard for this application in which I want it to update realtime. I was wondering if Node.js with socket.io is a good choice. I would also want to know how to integrate it with my PHP and MySQL backend? <comment><USER2> As much as I'd love to say "rewrite all the PHP in Node too" :-) yes, your description will work. After a few years in production it seems to me that Node's best position is right between the browser and the backend. Translating legacy APIs into modern, easy-to-use services.

In your case you might want to add some web hooks for the PHP application to let your Node layer know that things have happened which you can then send over Socket.IO. There may be a more efficient way to do this by tapping into the database directly though I don't tend to like going that route usually but that may just be preference.

<comment><USER3> Yah even I was thinking to re-write the application but again I will definitely affect my release time.</comment></comment>


Introduction to Compilers and Language Design - <AUTHOR> http://compilerbook.org <comment><AUTHOR> compilerbook.org redirects to:

[https://www3.nd.edu/~dthain/compilerbook/](https://www3.nd.edu/~dthain/compilerbook/)

Just read a bit so far. Good.</comment>


Remembering 'Portal,' Activision's Interactive Novel - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aekvv8/activisions-Twine-Like-interactive-novel <comment><USER2> > _Remembering 'Portal,' Activision's..._

Aside: After programming, I can not bring myself to place separating punctuation inside quotation marks. It seems entirely wrong to place characters within the quotation when they clearly come from without.

<comment><USER3> I have never understood that, and consequently never placed punctuation within quotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Using a rather Windows-like, icon-based interface (impressive in the > mid-80s), you moved a cursor around the screen to select from database > categories like Geographical, History, Medical, Military, PsiLink, and > SciTech.

From the screen shots, it looks like the game uses the normal Amiga graphical interface. I wonder if the author even knows what an Amiga was, or maybe he knows about games on the Amiga, but he doesn't realize that applications on the Amiga used a GUI.

<comment><USER5> It looked exactly the same on the Apple ][. And I'm not talking about the Mac- like IIgs -- I'm talking about the actual 8-bit Apples. It was impressive to see GUIs on machines like that.

As for the game, I liked the story, but there really wasn't any gameplay as such -- you merely uncovered more of the story by clicking around. In a way, it reminded me of Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars" in that it was a non- linear narrative told in pieces that the reader had to put together into a coherent narrative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would love to experience it myself. What's the best way to play it now - dosbox?

<comment><USER7> The game is playable at the Internet Archive: [https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986)</comment></comment>


IE8 represents a problem for our servers - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/ie-8-connetion-parallelism-issues

<comment><USER2> Technically, this is standards compliant:

From RFC2616 HTTP/1.1 ( <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html> ), Section 8.1.4, Practical Considerations: Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy. A proxy SHOULD use up to 2*N connections to another server or proxy, where N is the number of simultaneously active users. These guidelines are intended to improve HTTP response times and avoid congestion.

Regardless, breaking this advice is grossly anti-social and likely to cause problems.</comment>


Hulu announces monthly subscription, support for iPhone/iPad, still ad supported - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hulu_plus.php

<comment><USER2> This just plain isn't good enough. Nobody is going to look at Netflix ($9/month) and Hulu Plus and pick the latter. They're being way too stingy with content. Give it all up, or go home.

<comment><USER3> People pay close to a hundred dollars a month for similar and non a-la-carte amounts of content that has about twice as many adds. Its called cable. Does $10 a month really seem like that much money to you for something like this? I don't watch TV so i am interested, however I just get frustrated with the trend of people refusing pay for anything tech related such as apps or even services like Pandora. Seriously, my non tech friends refuse to drop a couple of dollars on iPhone apps that they will use all of the time yet they don't hesitate to buy soft drinks when they eat out or add bacon to their burgers for the same price...

Sorry, I don't mean to single you out. This is definitely more generally directed.

<comment><USER2> When consumers make the decision to purchase Hulu Plus, they won't be thinking about it in comparison to cable. They'll be comparing it to free Hulu, at it will lose.

Sidenote: Cable comes on a TV; Hulu comes on a computer. Does this matter to you personally? Likely not, you're a tech person and would have no issue working around that to get your preferred service on your preferred platform. But most people aren't you, and for them, that difference is called a barrier to consumption. This is the same reason IE remains the majority internet browser. It's the easiest thing in the world to just download another, better browser. But some 60% of the US refuses to. Well, they don't _refuse_ to. They just don't think about it.

<comment><USER3> The market for people tech savvy enough to use hulu.com is probably a bit larger than you give it credit for. I really don't see this as an addition to cable either but rather a replacement and for $10 a month that is a hell of a discount. Besides there is simply no way Hulu could make this service advertisement free.. Hulu owns <i>none</i> of the content. They aren't just scraping these shows off of network sites but they are instead making deals with these companies who in turn impose the ads. Hulu is simply providing them a platform to reach a tech savvy audience and they aren't going to change their ad supported model.

But really, if people wanted ad free content it would cost ten times as much as it does because they are making deals with other business to acquire their content. At $10 a month though its cheaper to me than pirating because of convenience. I guarantee I would save myself much more than the monthly price by cutting the time it takes to find a good torrent to download the entire backlog of a show I want to watch.

<comment><USER4> Hulu is owned by the networks.

<comment><USER5> To be specific, NBC, ABC, and Fox own Hulu: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu> (see right sidebar for ownership breakdown)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As much as you spoilt yanks disapprove, we Europeans would crawl on broken glass and do terribly embarrassing things to get something like this. To add insult to injury, basically no channels transmit HD shows in my country.

On another note, all the people who interject "I don't watch/have a TV" in _every bloody conversation_ would probably love this, regardless of how large a demographic they comprise. Are we assuming that Hulu will have to satisfy _all_ types of consumers for it to be a good idea, or are you just chiming in with your own, perfectly reasonable, arguments? I just don't know how useful the "I won't get it, therefore it is a bad idea" is and how it reflects Hulu's strategy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hmm. So for $10/mo. you get... ad interrupted shows, buuut you can see entire seasons of ad interrupted shows on all your iDevices.

How does this function?

<comment><USER8> I tried few free shows on iPhone 4 over 3G. Video quality is spectacular. I am not going to buy it because I am already paying for $120/month for cable and dvr.

<comment><USER9> And this is why I am considering it, in addition to netflix, since I cancelled cable and dvr at that rate.

<comment><USER8> I would agree with you on that but I need cable for occasional news and live broadcasts/award shows/talk shows type things. Otherwise I can totally live off of Netflix and Hulu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Too little, far too late.

I really don't know if the media companies know just how much they have already lost - at this point most of the under 30 crowd downloads without even the tiniest feeling that perhaps, just maybe, they shouldn't or the companies deserve payment for what they have created.

At this point their only hope is to make it more convenient than piracy, which is possible to do now but won't in a couple of years and then slowly ween people away from free content.

</comment><comment><USER11> For some reason, this reminds me of Philip K Dick's book "The Simulacra".

If I recall well, the guy is trying to escape advertising bots of some kind.

There's a trend toward "paid + ads". It may soon become the norm to pay premium plans only to get rid of ads, in the OS, on your phone (<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/27/windows_phone_7_ads/>).

</comment><comment><USER12> Meh. There's no reason the using the iPhone/iPad app should cost money. The subscription should get you back seasons, not just back episodes from the current season. The media companies are afraid of losing their DVD revenues, but if they don't loosen up they may just end up driving more people to illegal sites.

</comment><comment><USER13> Direct link to Hulu's Blog Post: <http://www.hulu.com/plus>

</comment><comment><USER14> I think this is Hulu's attempt to make even more money on the iDevices.

I wonder if the iDevice had Flash, would they be able to do this?

<comment><USER15> The answer is _yes_. Hulu has regularly blocked Flash-enabled devices through various (often circumventable, but still) means. It's just that you never hear about them.

<comment><USER14> I wasn't aware Hulu was that defensive of it's content as to block it based on what device is running the browser. That's crazy.

<comment><USER16> Hulu reps have been quoted before saying it's because of licensing restrictions related to the content on other devices than PCs.

Having played around with it (I hacked together a gnash+ffmpeg port that's just sufficient to run Hulu on my own iPhone), they just have some logic in their flash scripts to prevent playing on unlicensed platforms. And in order to prevent direct linking to the FLVs, they use some obfuscating logic -- namely, they give you a string + a key and have you perform an AES-style operation using the two locally to get a time-expiring key to the file you want to play. They change the obfuscating pattern just often enough to make it annoying if you were, say, trying to keep up a Boxee script or update an AppStore application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Subscription? Ads? heh...</comment>


The Critics Must Be Crazy: 'Altered Carbon' Is a Terrific New Netflix Original - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2018/02/03/the-critics-must-be-crazy-altered-carbon-is-a-fantastic-new-netflix-original/#5e3e0a5f6963 <comment><USER2> I highly agree. I have been watching the "trend" on "critics" reviews vs. regular viewer and they are completely out of touch. I know many individuals who placed "Altered Carbon" on their list so not to miss the release and absolutely LOVED it.</comment>


The Economics of Hacking an Election - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2018-08/2018-08-07.html <comment><USER2> This is seriously uninformed article with bad assumptions and assertions.

The first assertion author makes is that attacker is resource limited which is a pointless assertion for stack sponsored entities unless cost of attack is astronomical.

The second point author makes is that US elections are highly decentralize for attacks such as hacking electronic systems, making effective attacks very expensive. Again this is completely wrong assumption for two reasons:

(1) attacker doesn't need to hack all of US precincts. Thanks to thin win margins in elections, you just need to flip only few precincts that have been predicted as "middle". Typically these are just 1-5% of total so cost of attack is actually very low and could be targeted with precision for a desired result.

(2) There are only few brands and systems of voting machines and other electronic systems are actually in use. Again, you don't have to hack all of them. Just hack one or two and they might be good enough to slip 1-5% margin you desire. The connection to Internet is irrelevant. There are well known methods to hide malware in firmware drivers that could have been planted by a state sponsored hacker who obtained job at one of these companies making these machines. These kind of malware would be impossible to detect without very extensive reverse engineering. Think about this for a minute: For a cost of less than a million dollar (i.e. compensation for single hacker) you can flip election of entire country. It makes a huge economic sense to any adversarial government.

Overall, hacking political system has shown to have ROI of 10,000% or more and it should make a perfect economic sense to businesses and external governments. You can literally donate just $100K to political candidate and he would pass a law for you that makes your company 10s of millions for many many years. It never ends to surprise me that political donations by commercial entities and ultra-rich is not considered a crime in US. In most other countries they are known as "bribe". Even better, just flipping few of the precincts you can flip entire election in to your favor and you can do it all even legally by precision targeted social media. It's just amazing power to behold on one of the largest and most powerful country.

<comment><USER3> This is incorrect:

You can literally donate just $100K to political candidate and he would pass a law for you that makes your company 10s of millions for many many years. It never ends to surprise me that political donations by commercial entities and ultra-rich is not considered a crime in US. In most other countries they are known as "bribe".

Companies cannot give money directly to politicians and individuals are limited. [https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/limits.php](https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/limits.php)

Political Action Committees can accept money, but must be independent from a candidate.

<comment><USER4>
      Companies cannot give money directly to politicians

According to [1] Paul Ryan accepted $121,700 from Blackrock Inc, and [2] says Charles Schumer accepted $102,950 from Lockheed Martin.

Sounds like companies giving money to politicians to me?

[1] [https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of- congress/summary/paul...](https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of- congress/summary/paul-ryan?cid=N00004357) [2] [https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of- congress/summary/char...](https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of- congress/summary/charles-schumer?cid=N00001093)

<comment><USER5> They are aggregating the contributions of people associated with the company. Look at [https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of- congress/contributors...](https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of- congress/contributors?cid=N00004357&cycle=2018)

 _These tables list the top donors to candidates in the 2017 - 2018 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations ' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real election hacking come from the fact that people are easy to sway. We succumb to subtle nudges in ways that we aren't always consciously aware of. We now live in an era where a given nudge can be directed and concentrated to the right group of people and doing this at scale is practical.

The adage in politics has been, "All politics is local." This appears to be changing in the U.S. Money and influence comes from all over and the issues that rile up people enough to vote are less and less tied to local problems. At least this is how I see things. I don't know a good solution to the problem. Perhaps Asimov had it right in his story "Franchise".

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_\(short_story\))

</comment><comment><USER7> Are voting machines really connected to the Internet?

</comment><comment><USER8> All democratic elections are hacked, not in a technical way but in a social way. Take my country India, for example. The winning party in almost all elections till 2014 got just under 40% of the total vote. Minorities form 15-20% of the vote bank and the minority vote is always consolidated, i.e. they vote enmass for a single party (usually for The Indian National Congress (INC)). In other words, anywhere between 15-20% of the 40% mentioned earlier is the minority vote. The majority vote is always divided between the many many warring parties and the minority vote becomes the king/queen maker. No wonder the INC has always danced to the minorities tune.

I guess the majority had had enough and came together for the first time in 2014, resulting in a win for Narendra Modi.

I also guess the same situation happened in USA in 2016. The usually apathic/uninterested majority were frustrated/angered with years of 'minoritism' and bonded together into a single consolidate vote bank that resulted in Trumps victory.

<comment><USER9> I won't speak to the specific examples in either India or the US, but I will say that when you have extreme support for one candidate by members of minority ethnicities, that typically suggests that the other party is either apathetic or hostile to their interests. If there are enough members of the ethnic majority to reach a plurality, then that party will, and should, win. The fact that they vote en mass for one party isn't "hacking"; it's exactly how elections are supposed to work.

<comment><USER10> In an ideal world where people are intelligent enough to vote for their long term benefit, then what you said is true.

But let's say a country have little care to minority ethnicities. I have the many resources to arrange short benefit to them, such as occasional free dinner for those ethnicities, arranging cheap or free traveling trip for them. Essentially bribe those minorities.

Now I am elected to become a president. How do I get more resource to bribe minorities? I just receive donation from the rich and just set law to benefit them. Those law will get me donation and let the rich suck more money from the minorities. Now I have those dirty money in hand. Since minorities are living in a more challenging environment by my policy, those minorities will even more welcome my bribe and continue to vote for me.

Now you may ask, why are those minorities can't read news? Why they can't listen to the other side that may benefit to them? Firstly, minorities have very tough environment and they don't have education and even time to think about their future. Therefore, they just vote for whoever is familiar or whoever give free gifts. Secondly, a government could control the propaganda and paint those opposition as destabilizing country and blaming them as enemy and reason of their miserable situation.

It's not a hack, but a flaw. Democracy assume all people care enough about politics to understand the implication of each policy. If people don't have time resource for this, then it is pretty easy to spread propaganda to paint some enemy. People in poor condition just want to find someone to blame. And people trust the one who could bribe them a little benefit.

Of course, there are no better alternative than democracy, but people just too focus on their living and care to their own short term benefit. Long term benefit is difficult to promote since no one knows when will this be effective.

<comment><USER9> That argument is certainly true, but it applies to nearly everyone. Almost no one is politically well-informed enough to be sure of what's in their long- term interest, with most people not understanding for example economics or environmental issues enough to take an informed position. So politicians frequently resort to short-term fixes, such as tax cuts, to keep people happy and voting for them. If more of those short-term fixes benefit minorities, that still isn't worse than if they benefit majorities.

<comment><USER11> > If more of those short-term fixes benefit minorities, that still isn't worse > than if they benefit majorities.

If minorities vote for receiving short term benefits then everyone including the minorities are knocked out of the long term benefits.

If you can just win by offering a vehicle like horse cart and keep upgrading it through research and development, adding 1km/hr speed increment every 5 year. Then you'll probably never be able to develop a car because its development requires long term research and development program, even if nothing, atleast a working infrastructure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Twitter Knockoff Has China Talking - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_09/b4217039139980.htm

<comment><USER2> Does it have a "report to government" button? I kid I kid</comment>


Using Law Against Technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/12/using_law_again.html <comment><USER2> > It's one aspect of a tech policy problem that has been plaguing us for at > least 25 years: technologists and policymakers don't understand each other

Policy makers do understand very well. This has not been going on for the last 25 years, this has been going on for hundreds of years. That is policy makers blocking new technologies to grant artificial monopolies to incumbents. The UK mercantilism from the 16th century comes to mind with the government trying to block cheaper wool and then new cotton tech to defend traditional wool merchants and justifying this with "a lack of license and legality" issues cheaper rural wood merchants and cotton merchants supposedly had.

As the saying goes: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

As long as you will have governments with the power to shut down new technologies you will have incumbents willing to bribe those governments into doing so. Apart removing the government from the equation or at least its power, I don't think we will ever solve this issue.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United_Kingdom#The_Age_of_Mercantilism)

[https://mises.org/library/mercantilism- england](https://mises.org/library/mercantilism-england)

<comment><USER3> That's why ideas which Lawrence Lessig is explaining are perhaps most valuable in the current US political cycle.

However, even without proposed decoupling of money and power we ought to consider alternatives. That could be at least faster - if not more achievable.

<comment><USER2> What Lawrence Lessig is proposing is not enough. As long as the government has the power to block new technologies and other legitimate new business ideas, there will be incumbents there to bribe them into doing so. Even if you make laws that totally forbid campaign financing. Look at what happened in Germany, the chancellor didn't get any money but when he retired, he got a great mysterious job at a Russian oil company:

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/13/russia.germany](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/13/russia.germany)

Give the government unlimited/huge power to regulate the market and money will find its way to the politicians in order to influence them, one way or the other. The only way to stop this is not to forbid campaign financing, super PAC or else. No, the only way to stop this is to do something most of us are not willing to do: complete separation of the economy and the State, just like total separation of Church and State was the only way to stop religious persecution, nothing short of total separation of the State and the economy will stop unfair and corrupt driven anti-tech and anti-new businesses laws.

<comment><USER4> How do you then regulate players in the economy to ensure that the harm to society caused by unfettered business is minimised?

<comment><USER2> If a business initiates force against you or damages your property, you should have the legal right to attack them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's some cognitive dissonance between how people nod sagely at this vs. how they react when FAA rules force Flytenow to shut down. Note the commenters' largely gleeful reaction to that here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779607)

You can't cry foul when a coin comes up tails if you were happy the whole time it was coming up heads. Agencies that have the power to make good decisions by force also have the power to make bad decisions by force.

<comment><USER6> That's fallacious reasoning. It's like saying people are nodding sagely when doctors do successful surgeries then crying foul when they commit malpractice and operate on the wrong leg.

<comment><USER2> I don't think this is a good comparison. What karzeem is saying is more of a matter of principle: does any one or any group of people has the moral right to initiate force against two consenting adults agreeing to a mutual contract because we think we know better than they do about what's best for them?

If the answer to this question is yes, then you have no right to complain when it happens to something you enjoy consenting to because a group of people think it might not be best for you.

<comment><USER7> > _does any one or any group of people has the moral right to initiate force > against two consenting adults agreeing to a mutual contract because we think > we know better than they do about what 's best for them?_

Yes. Society broadly has this 'right' if you want to call it that (I would refer to it as a 'duty'), though we are wise to exercise power there in a reasonably limited fashion e.g. making up a 'Bill of Rights' etc. What you're referring to forms the basis of the FDA, of OSHA, of the EPA, etc etc., all of which have had an overall positive effect on our economic health, our environmental health, and our literal bodily health. Monopolizing force and using it to promote egalitarian principles is a fundamental part of what makes Western civilization.

You seem to be suggesting that if we as a people decide to enact and enforce laws via our elected government _at all_ , then we give up the right to complain about laws we perceive to be unjust, and agitate for change. In fact, _that is precisely how the system is meant to work._ Just because you're miffed you aren't getting your way all the time, is no reason to tear the whole system down, and I think you'll find yourself part of a vanishingly small minority in believing so (very fortunately, even for you, even if you don't realize it).

<comment><USER2> > Monopolizing force and using it to promote egalitarian principles is a > fundamental part of what makes Western civilization.

Yes, I think giving up force to a monopoly is a terrible idea. Also, I don't see how forbidding two consenting adults from committing victim-less crimes (ie non-legal mutual contracts) is promoting equality. If anything, it's promoting tyranny.

> and I think you'll find yourself part of a vanishingly small minority in > believing so (very fortunately, even for you, even if you don't realize it).

Yeah, I was told the same thing living in a very religious country when telling people about my atheism so I'm used to this kind of patronizing. Funny how Statism sounds exactly like religion. Bastiat was right when he said the State replaced the Church with little differences.

<comment><USER7> > _Bastiat was right when he said the State replaced the Church with little > differences._

Yes, yes. Good for you that your threw off the yoke of your oppression or whatever the shit you're blabbering about. If the preference to live under the rule of law makes me a fucking "statist" then call me a statist.

<comment><USER2> The problem is that the State doesn't respect the rule of law and basic human rights. The war on drugs, spying on citizens, habeas corpus, the Patriot Act, illegal wars, torture and so on are just a few examples that come to mind.

<comment><USER7> In most democracies "The State" is more responsive to the will of the people than you give it credit for, though I will agree with you that it is not as responsive as either of us would like. Moreover they are orders of magnitude more responsive to the will of the people, than whatever strongman or military junta would inevitably fill in the enormous power vacuum left in the wake of dismantling every government in the first world, assuming human civilization could indeed survive such an event in the first place. (And who would quickly reestablish a monopoly on force anyway.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a bit off topic, but I don't understand the government's need to stunt technology for the good of the country. Is there really a net benefit for spending trillions on cyber spying? I've yet to see a cost benefit analysis on that, and would appreciate any input on that.

<comment><USER9> There probably is not, but there is a benefit to those who make a living from spying and undermining freedom. Also, as a matter of psychology, most people prefer it when "something is being done" even when that something is ineffective or self-destructive, so there is some political motivation to "do something", so you can claim to "have done something" in case something bad happens, to avoid being responsible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dammit Scheier, if you're going to point out a pile of shit you should also point out a shovel. Just saying "tehnologists and policymakers don't understand each other, and golly gosh we better _do something_ about it" doesn't cut the mustard.

<comment><USER3> Maybe sometimes it's better to at least point to a problem - and even articulate it, as Schneier did - than do nothing, if you don't have a proposal.

How about bringing law technology - i.e. the technology of establishing laws - closer to the speed of modern times? Things are being done already in the realm of practicing existing laws, as in legal consulting, case search etc. Can we make tech which would help write better laws sooner?

<comment><USER10> The only reason not to offer even a list of possible solutions is because the problem is not be actionable in that framing. It is trivially easy to point out problems in a way that makes it difficult to find solutions. For example, "People don't understand computers well enough," or, "Politics today are just too divisive." Those statements are noise, not signal. The only way to make headway would be to get specific, divide them up, and at that point you're not solving the same problem.

BTW I appreciate your attempt to sketch out a shovel (and it's an interesting one!) but I don't think that really addresses Schneier's particular pile.</comment></comment></comment>


Frog.NET - open source ORM for .NET - <AUTHOR> http://www.bestbrains.dk/Blog/2009/10/02/TakingTheOpenSourceRoadAnnouncingFrogNET.aspx

<comment><USER2> The post is a bit light on details - no indication of why I might be interested which is a shame as I just might be.

I am currently handling some rather complex data that has to be represented at the client end (JavaScript objects), the server in classes and also within a relational database. So far I am happy with my custom solution - but there might be something better out there.

<comment><USER3> If you're using .NET then I would recommend Sub-sonic. It worked well for me, for a side-project.

<comment><USER4> Depends on what you're doing. Subsonic is great, but it's not terribly flexible. On the other hand you have NHibernate which is really flexible, but is a total pain to get up and running with.

<comment><USER3> I'm just simply curious, not debating, so can you please elaborate more on "it's not terribly flexible"? Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everyone and their ORM.

Yeah, I've wrote one in Java, internally, too. But why announce it without code examples, feature lists and praises about issues with ORMs it would fix?

<comment><USER6> There are code examples at <http://www.bestbrains.dk/frogdotnet/>.

I wasn't able to find a list of features or comparisons to other ORMs.

<comment><USER7> I read through what they had, and their main reason for making Frog.Net was that they didn't like some other popular ORM, but after a quick glance at both, I couldn't even tell them apart.</comment></comment></comment>


7 Reasons Why You Need To Work For A Big Company - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/33111/7-Reasons-Why-You-Need-To-Work-For-A-Big-Company.aspx?source=Blog_Email_[7+Reasons+Why+You+Ne]

<comment><USER2> Duplicate:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010277>

Many comments there.</comment>


Show HN: Website design reviews for side-projects and startups - <AUTHOR> https://www.dustinkirk.com/index.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Office Hours is a service I created after reading this article about "Freelance as a Service" about a month ago here on HN.

[http://letsworkshop.com/freelance-as-a- service/](http://letsworkshop.com/freelance-as-a-service/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice. Clean, staightforward, and will probably drive some money your way.

It will be a great lead into other services and requests from customers.</comment>


Memcachedb (db) is a distributed key-value storage system designed for persistence - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/memcachedb/

<comment><USER2> Excellent! hmmm... version 1.0.0-beta. Am I the only one a bit nervous basing a start-up on something this fresh? I'd certainly like to contribute to open source, but in a post launch, here's a toolkit/library sort of way, not by debugging a low level database library weeks before launch or worse post- launch. I've used memcached (not db) and love it.

This new cousin would be ideal for me. Is anyone else considering it? I need a flexible object database. I've looked at CouchDB or something based off of qdbm (<http://qdbm.sourceforge.net>). Currently working on other parts of the system (and delaying the persistence part).

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'd have to run it internally for a while before unleashing it in the wild. Definitely not something I'd want to do while building a new business.

As for alternatives, have a look at thrudb. It's new too but is being used in production by a few decent sized sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Is the "-beta" really necessary if the version is 1.0.0?

</comment><comment><USER4> This is f*cking awesome. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER5> so, in other words, a really badly designed database system?

<comment><USER6> No, it's a specialized persistence system. Not everyone wants or needs the truckload of other stuff that bogs down a traditional relational database.

<comment><USER7> I totally agree. Simple key/value stores are extremely valuable. Their simplicity also requires you to simplify your problems. In many cases you find out that you really don't need that 5 line sql query to join 8 tables.</comment></comment></comment>


Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 now available - <AUTHOR> http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhelv6-announce/2010-November/msg00000.html

<comment><USER2> This is fantastic news for virtualization:

1\. Memory deduplication on kvm machines: matching memory pages are COWed. Hopefully there is a re-spin of the virtio drivers too (which rock, btw).

2\. Way newer kvm/libvirt (the old ones sucked)

3\. Python 2.6. They skipped 2.5 entirely, which is nice.

Just keep in mind, they'll be supporting it for a VERY long time, so RHEL6 will be looking pretty tired in another 3.5 years (the current age of RHEL5).

<comment><USER3> I wonder, will I be able to use Xen on RHEL6 servers? Should I?

I'm learning to use virtualization and I picked Xen because seemed to me like solid technology - it's good for Amazon, Google and prgmr.com, so surely it will be good enough for me? On the other hand, it is not included in the kernel, its usage tends to lead to using anscient kernels, Red Hat and Ubuntu are moving away from it. I'm in doubt what virtualization technology should I be using.

<comment><USER4> Xen is dead. KVM is now equally "solid", easier to use, better supported, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That means I'm looking forward to CentOS 6 soon. I hope.

QEMU/KVM virtualization is very nice and hopefully I won't need to rely on bleeding edge (though surprisingly stable) Fedora 13+ for a good stock deployment from now on.

<comment><USER4> CentOS people are saying 4-6 weeks.

<comment><USER6> Nice, something to do over Christmas as I am teetotal this year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _This truly is a milestone release for Red Hat that is putting a stake in the industry as the foundation for the next decade._

Am I the only one that took a double-take at that sentence?

<comment><USER8> I was fond of: _This is a milestone event for Red Hat as we once again push forward and upward our leadership position in the market._

The message seems to have manifested from the collective will of all redhat employees. There's no human signer or sender.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if they removed all the X11 dependency garbage for a server install? An RHEL5 was approaching the bloat of a Solaris install. There was no "click here to install a slim server" option.

<comment><USER10> From some investigation, I think the simple answer is "yes", as long as you leave out devel, java, and a few specific tools. And totally yes for all the Xserver stuff.

I've got a kickstarted system with "@additional-server-devel @base, @compat- libraries, @core, @development, @network-tools, @performance, @server- platform-devel, @system-admin-tools" package groups and a few specific package tweaks. Fits in under 2GB. Looks like there's no X server stuff, but there's libX11, a few other libX* packages, and gtk2 installed... It's being pulled in by some of the java stuff, seekwatcher, latencytop, python-matplotlib and a couple other devel things I probably don't care about. There's only 29 packages it wants to remove if I tell yum to remove libX11-common.

Looks to me like with a few more tweaks to my kickstart I'll be able to get all the X11 deps out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> PostgreSQL 9.0 would have been nice, but I guess that's understandable.

Otherwise, a great release. RHEL is awesome. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> I hope the standard version of Python is upgraded beyond 2.4.X.

<comment><USER13> Python 2.6. Also PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5.1.

<comment><USER14> But only Perl 5.10.1, they didn't upgrade to 5.12.* for some reason.

<comment><USER15> Only having Perl 5.10 is a problem, and it comes down to timing. 5.12 was released upstream in April, didn't get into Fedora until mid-June, by which point it had missed the deadline for entering RHEL 6 (because of the extensive QA that we would require).

If you're a customer and you need 5.12, be sure to open a support ticket and/or talk to your TAM.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open letter to Glenn Greenwald asking for names to be named - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-6MsK9f75ZbZ6QjgtfE5kfXEQ_sQKciTqtJsx-bLchw/view?hl=en&forcehl=1

<comment><USER2> > [Disclaimer: The views expressed in this letter are my own, and do not > represent those of my employer.]

It's really sad that you have to have that as a header these days; it should be obvious and go without saying.

</comment><comment><USER2> Since this is an open letter, do you accept open proofreading? =P

"Hiding this information about these vulnerabilities from terrorist _S_ [...]"</comment>


Miss Universe contestants represent their countries as dresses - <AUTHOR> http://www.genevievevalentine.com/2015/01/miss-universe-2014/

<comment><AUTHOR> Never heard of it before, no clue who is responsible for the designs. Still kinda interesting what the different countries choose.</comment>


An Italian freelancer in Syria - <AUTHOR> http://www.cjr.org/feature/womans_work.php

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. I even like the bio at the very bottom: _Francesca Borri published two books, one on Kosovo and another on Israel /Palestine, while working as a human-rights officer. She turned to journalism when she realized that power players were more upset by what she wrote than what she did as a jurist._</comment>


What if Steve Jobs Built a Product for your Conference Room? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.prijector.com/

<comment><USER2> Hey we can answer any question regarding sourcing components, hardware manufacturing and making the product..</comment>


The Role of Energy in Production (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUdzH47Mpow <comment><AUTHOR> Kingston University (UK) professor Steve Keen deriving an economic production function explaining much of the Solow Residual in the Cobb-Douglas production function by incorporating energy as a factor of production. "Energy, a corpse, and a sculpture walk into a bar..." shows both capital and labour as _systems for channelling energy_.

Interesting is the suggestion that his formula explains resource (energy), financial, and social aspects of production functions.</comment>


Collapse of Wirecard has temporarily taken down payment card service Curve - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/06/26/wirecard-collapse-drags-down-online-banking-services/#29d8bdae2e28 <comment><USER2> Took down ANNA as well. The message and responses on Twitter is quite something... [https://twitter.com/ANNAMoneyUK/status/1276472004632289280?s...](https://twitter.com/ANNAMoneyUK/status/1276472004632289280?s=09)

At least Curve sent an email.</comment>


Two classic columns on JFK's assassination by the late Jimmy Breslin - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/22/jimmy-breslin-on-jfk-s-assassination-two-classic-columns.html <comment><USER2> _" his iconic column from those tumultuous days. "A Death in Emergency Room One" chronicles Nov. 22, 1963, from the attending emergency-room surgeon in Dallas."_

These are important documents. Written within 24 hours of the JFK assassination, the information collected by a trained journalist reporting from first hand witnesses in print. This: Large hole in back of head, you don't see this in the Zapruda film. First time I've heard of a .25cal round being reported; 7.65, 0.223, .45, 6.55 but not a .25

 _" The occipitoparietal, which is a part of the back of the head, had a huge flap. The damage a .25-caliber bullet does as it comes out of a person's body is unbelievable."_

then this: Already the press is reporting that a lone shooter is known and confirmed.

 _" The ugly kind of factory window. Particularly at the corner window on the sixth floor, the one where this Oswald and his scrambled egg of a mind stood with the rifle so he could kill the president."_

Think about this. Hole in the back of the head, but we have a lone shooter from ^behind^.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Jimmy Breslin had just become a columnist when JFK was shot. The second column here, 'it's an honor', is literally the first column that he wrote. His boss gave him the advice to cover what the others ignore.

I studied 'it's an honor' in Journalism school in the seventies and to my knowledge it's still part of the curriculum today.</comment>


China confirms human-to-human transmission of coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/20/coronavirus-spreads-to-beijing-as-china-confirms-new-cases <comment><USER2> > The strain has caused alarm because of its connection to severe acute > respiratory syndrome (Sars), which killed nearly 650 people across mainland > China and Hong Kong in 2002-03. Three people have so far died in the current > outbreak, which has spread to Thailand, Japan and South Korea.

Coronavirus was also responsible for Middle East respiratory syndrome:

[https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/middle- east...](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/middle-east- respiratory-syndrome-coronavirus-\(mers-cov\))

Coronavirus is also a member of the same group giving rise to the common cold:

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


The Pmarca Guide to Big Companies, Part 2: Retaining great people - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/07/the-pmarca-gu-1.html <comment><USER2> If you are a startup, the real value of this article is in the "How to talk a great person out of going to a startup" section.

You'll need to have better answers for all these tactics to get great talent from big companies.

</comment><comment><USER3> File that under "Problems you'd like to have," because by the time you have it, you're probably already wealthy.

I'm surprised he missed some of the more traditional strategies used to retain people, such as "Hire married men with young children." I would also add: "Hire people who are physically or socially unattractive." This exploits the market's inefficient allocation of pretty boys/girls to jobs they are unqualified for, and provides you with good workers who are less likely to charm recruiters. (Note: Don't do that for sales positions.)

<comment><USER4> You do realize that both of your "traditional strategies" are illegal in most western countries?

Or perhaps you're being sarcastic/witty. :-) (please say yes)</comment></comment>


Mobile OS Alternatives to Android in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://itsfoss.com/open-source-alternatives-android/ <comment><USER2> "Open source" missing from the title.</comment>


Dropbox Acqhires KBVT's Computer Vision Geniuses to Mine Its Photos - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/09/dropbox-computer-vision/

<comment><USER2> I've had the pleasure of working with Dr. Kriegman and some of Dr. Belhumeur's students. Honestly, this is a great match for Dropbox! Super pumped for what's in store.</comment>


When Should You Jump? JSR 308. That's When. - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/2008/05/when_should_you_jump_jsr_308_t.html <comment><USER2> Luckily annotations, like generics, are optional. Because damn is that syntax ugly.</comment>


Ask HN: Is a Masters in Computer Science Still Worth It? - <AUTHOR> With the rise of the coding bootcamps, I've started to wonder if I should get a higher degree (I currently have a bachelor's in CS) to differentiate myself in the job market long-term.
On the other hand, by the same token, there seems to be a surging interest in lower-skilled programmers and a corresponding lower emphasis on highly-skilled ones.
Is a Master's a better or worse investment than it used to be, in the realm of Computer Science? Do employers care? Are there any anecdotes from people who have seen a notable return on that investment? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure a masters was ever worth it. I have not seen people having any notable difficulty getting jobs without one for the last 30 years. (It may help to get the first job; so far at least, it probably doesn't help much after that.)

The future, though... I would expect that in the future, a proven track record of being able to deliver working code will mean more than a masters. But as the car ads say, your mileage may vary...

<comment><AUTHOR> My two main concerns are:

1) Combating ageism in the programming job market. The best solution seems to be continuing to grow and making sure the seniority of your skills matches the seniority of your age. I'm only 27, but in my segment of the programming world I feel like I'm mid-career already.

2) An influx of people who can just "write code" for cheap, devaluing the basic ability to make computers do things. Again, I want to "raise myself above the tide" by boosting my resume.

It is entirely possible that the best way for me to make this progression is just to double-down on self education and industry experience, I'm just trying to cast out a survey to answer the question of which signifiers employers look for.

<comment><USER2> At 27, what can you do that the 22-year-olds can't? At 32, what will you have added to that?

I don't think the masters will add as much as just growing through experience. (I could be wrong, but that's how I see it.)</comment></comment></comment>


Building an Inclusive Code Review Culture - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plaid.com/building-an-inclusive-code-review-culture/ <comment><USER2> "If someone has committed many crimes against the style guide in a PR, the reviewer should point them to the style guide..."

Everything a computer can do trivially should not be done by humans. There are plenty of tools available to validate code to all the standards you can dream up. And most languages allow you to even automatically fix style errors or even enforce it for compilation (thank you Go).

So instead of codifying it in a style guide document, codify it in config files for linting and autoformat tools instead. The defaults of those tools are often fine for what you need and exceptions can as easily be documented in them as well.

<comment><USER3>
      if a = foo()

versus:

      if (a = foo())

Sometimes idiomatic patterns vary based on things which are not amiable to mechanical correction.

<comment><USER4> The trick is to ban even the correct but (to a human) ambiguous patterns. In this case, I wouldn't let you do assignment on the same line as the conditional.

<comment><USER5> With an `if` it's probably superfluous and therefore bannable without cost, but sometimes it can make a `while` loop so much more concise - since the alternative would be to write the same code before the loop and at the bottom of the loop. It is the cost of inexpressive languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Based on my experience with Mozilla's mature code review culture, this article is excellent. If I were going to make one suggestion, it would be to emphasize the points that author jelambs makes below: this approach to code review is inseparable from a commitment to deep shared understanding of the code base. It both depends on and supports that understanding. It's an investment in quality as embodied in a particular technical approach and body of work. It's not cheap, but what it buys you can be very valuable.

</comment><comment><USER7> Most code reviews I've participated in have devolved into the senior/loudest person making sure that people know who they are and what everyone's place in the hierarchy is.

Even in reviews where the reviewee had some amazing code that was kind of groundbreaking in one area, still have to find something to gripe about because I have 20 years on this kid. This seems to be quite common in science/engineering, not just in code reviews.

I wish I could find that company where nobody gives a shit about their place in the hierarchy and everyone isn't constantly trying to gun for other people's jobs to make their linkedin profiles look more impressive. It's been a looooong time now, still searching.

<comment><USER8> > still have to find something to gripe about because I have 20 years on this > kid

I wish I had someone with decades more experience than me taking the time to find areas where my code could improve. Regardless of their motivation, this sounds like an amazing resource that you're lucky to have.

<comment><USER9> I think their motivation still matters quite a bit. Just because someone has 20+ years of experience doesn't mean they're actually leveraging any of that for their review. If they're nitpicking something unimportant and they're only doing it for political reasons, then in that act they are contributing negative value to the team, regardless of experience.

<comment><USER8> If someone is that much more experienced than you are, it can be hard for you to tell the difference between nitpicking and something that experience has taught them is more important than you realize. Even if it is just nitpicking, that still means your code has nits to pick.

<comment><USER9> Code reviews are generally public and visible to the entire team and often even to other teams. While it's true that the reviewee may not be able to distinguish the two cases being considered, there may be other developers on the team or in the company who witness the review and can make the distinction. In fact, this can cause the "toxic reviewing" practice to spread to other experienced senior developers, who may see others with similar positions doing the same thing and then feel they must do it too in order to signal that they are, in fact, senior.

<comment><USER10> Interesting - I thought you would end the argument differently. In my experience additional visibility helps curb the unwanted behaviour because other senior devs step in and help fight it - but I guess that depends on the general culture in the company. If that doesn't happen you have bigger problems anyway.

<comment><USER9> I do believe that code review culture ends up being a reflection of general company culture. In a healthy culture, visibility tends to spread the positive part of what's observable, whereas in a toxic culture visibility tends to spread the negative and political parts of what's observable.

And there's definitely a circularity here. In a healthy culture, code reviews tend not to be overly political in the first place, so it would stand out like a sore thumb if someone was causing a lot of unnecessary drama with their reviews. Likewise, in a toxic culture, code reviews may go from healthy to toxic and dramatic because developers have been incentivized to compete with one another in counterproductive ways.

<comment><USER11> As an engineer, how do you address this sort of mutually-reinforcing jerkery? I expect that complaining to the manager will not be effective because the culprits are not explicitly hostile.

<comment><USER10> Easiest way? Complain, look for another job, quit. There is no way you can change the culture from bottom up. Best you can achieve is make a bubble with your close coworkers where you cover each other - but even that is temporary and can be broken by management anytime. Sorry. But there are many companies with better culture out there...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do you all make sure the code review requests get load balanced across the team, as opposed to 2-3 people getting all the PR requests?

<comment><USER13> Not everyone is the right person for a specific code review. Even on small teams someone may be more of a subject matter expert in one facet of your system or code. Therefore load balancing isn't really the right way to look at it. The idea should be to seek feedback inclusively and welcomed from all teammates. As a submitter your job is to make sure you get the right feedback if there is someone more knowledgeable of a topic. This is why standup is a good place to discuss a code review where you can identify need for time and also identify right people.

<comment><USER12> Agreed it shouldn't be an even distribution of review requests across the board. That said, if a few people are getting all the reviews, it's difficult for them to make progress on their project work, and for other engineers to learn code review best practices and get familiar with the codebase.

<comment><USER13> It's a balance but you need to balance team priorities. If you aren't shipping code because of your time on code reviews you need to better manage your time. Call it out during stand up (assuming your team has them) and make it clear you don't have time or code reviews today because you need to focus on your deliverable. If the review is more important your team can identify this collectively. However, individuals should never feel you describe, if so it's a lack of coordination across team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How common is it to get unsolicited reviews on your PRs? In my team, I have some colleagues who will routinely pipe up when they see a PR being uploaded by an "outsider" and will write a litany of complaints in order to block progress and establish their dominance. (I should mention that these colleagues work in a branch office, so this is their only way to assert themselves.)

<comment><USER14> > in order to block progress

This is your subjective interpretation of the facts. Learn how they complain (in the end, they only can complain about technical facts: learn them, and be correct next time), and you will not receive complaints anymore.

I'm guessing you're new to code reviews right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The real problem here are people with bad attitude and poor communication skills. Bullying other people is a punishable offense in real life, and I don't see why code reviews should be any different. Have some basic rules regarding communication. Issue a public warning for first-time offenders. Give them the boot if they do it again. There, problem solved.

<comment><USER16> You sound like you didn't read the article. There's nothing about political correctness or try-hard inclusivity in that article but many (or indeed all) the things that common sense would dictate as a base of working code reviews.

<comment><USER15> No, I didn't read the article. But I did read the entire comment section, if that counts :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Neat to see that they started by interviewing a diverse subset of their engineers; that type of user-centric research is invaluable. Moreover, I wonder what of their methodology could be mapped to a live analysis of the code review conversation threads they're having via GitHub.

More than anything else, though, I'm curious where teams like this still go to buy those amazing Apple Cinema displays?!

</comment><comment> brian-armstrong Not focusing on style violations is foolish. Imagine someone submitted an English paper littered with grammatical errors and typos. It would be difficult to find the intended meaning and bigger picture. Style violations are the same, they have to be fixed before a deeper review can even take place.

</comment><comment><USER18> Good article, but I don't understand why the word 'inclusive' is in the title.</comment>


Building Your Own LibraryBox v2.1 - <AUTHOR> http://librarybox.us/buildingv2.1.php <comment><USER2> Where are the screenshots? Where is the demo video?</comment>


Ask HN: Tips for selling a website/startup - <AUTHOR>

Hey eveyrone.
About 1½ years ago, I created 1000designers.com as a little side project, a marketplace for the best designers in the world - And while it went rather ok actually, I am now in pursuit of another venture. However, I think that it's kind of stupid just to abandon 1000designers as we generated quite a lot of revenue and press coverage - Such as in TechCrunch.
The technology behind the app isn't very sophisticated, however - I have a V2. built with rails purely that has incorporated a new revenue model that I know is more effective than the one I used and I generated around $150k in revenue during one year.
So - Any channels where you could potentially sell it? <comment><USER2> Flippa is still worth checking out. When you list such a high-revenue site on Flippa you'll get taken through a different track than normal. They'll act more as brokers for you than just listing your auction (they'll contact the buyers on their list, etc).

</comment><comment><USER3> Most small website sales happen on Flippa -- [https://flippa.com/](https://flippa.com/)

If you're hoping for more than $100K or so, you might look into brokers or reach out directly to companies you think might be potential buyers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, no - I'm not looking to get over $100k.

<comment><USER4> How much are you looking for?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The site seems to be down right now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's been down for a few weeks.

<comment><USER6> I've attempted to sell a product on Flippa before... Buyers are pretty skeptical especially about revenue and traffic.

You generally need to have some proof of revenue and that it's continuing to generate income, leads and traffic prior to the sale.

Trying to sell a product that's been offline for weeks is going to be an uphill battle unfortunately. On auction sites like Flippa for instance most of the buyers are SEO-focused so 2 weeks of downtime is going to be a liability.

If you want to sell it getting it back up should be a priority

<comment><AUTHOR> What was the outcome of your attempt then? Did you manage to sell?

<comment><USER6> Nope.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Curry: A Tutorial Introduction [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www-ps.informatik.uni-kiel.de/currywiki/_media/documentation/tutorial.pdf <comment><USER2> The language is intriguing, combining logical and functional paradigms is potentially very powerful. That being said, a quick read of the document doesn't quite illustrate how to harness the [potential] power. Most of the language description is a rehash of Haskell, and the examples focus on simple problems solved purely functionally in a Haskell-like style. Then, mysteriously, we jump into Web programming. I'm a bit at a loss on why logical programming is relevant to generating HTML-formatted pages from a database, though, to be fair, I lightly skimmed that chapter.

I wish there were another tutorial, assuming familiarity with Haskell and focusing on problems that are difficult to solve in Haskell and/or simpler to solve using functional logical programming. Perhaps would also help if the search algorithm were a exemplified in more depth.

<comment><USER3> The Mozart/Oz papers do a great job showing interesting use-cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > This book is about programming in Curry, a general-purpose declarative > programming language that integrates functional with logic programming

Its interesting that Haskell Brooks Curry, a logician after whom this language has (presumably?) been named, has had a programming language named after all three parts of his name.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Curry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Curry)

<comment><USER5> Haskell was famously designed by committee. They also decided the name of the language by committee, and settled on Curry.

Later (I suspect over beer), two or three people from the committee thought that was too ridiculous and just unilaterally decided to go with Haskell instead.

Edit: Look for "Choosing a Name" in [http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp- content/uploads/2011/02/histor...](http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp- content/uploads/2011/02/history.pdf) if you want the actual story, and not my faulty memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sitting here about to watch game 7 of the NBA finals and am getting some kind of deja vu seeing this haha I had to do a double take.

<comment><USER7> I'm also watching the finals, when I opened the link I was expecting instructions on how to make (the food) curry...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You may learn more about Curry here: [http://www-ps.informatik.uni- kiel.de/currywiki/documentation...](http://www-ps.informatik.uni- kiel.de/currywiki/documentation/learn_more)</comment>


Ask HN: What product could be built around NFC and smart tags? - <AUTHOR>

Since the Nexus S is equipped with NFC. I'm curious if anyone has fun/interesting ideas using this technology, other than payment/ticketing. I'm thinking about how to use those smart tags. The functionality is quite similar to QR Codes, except that the user experience is completely different and way more instinctive, and the content on NFC smart tags can be modified.<p>I know there must be obvious use cases that I'm missing. In any case I'm interested to know if you have thought of interesting ones. <comment><USER2> What is NFC?</comment>


Steve Jobs: There won't be a Mac app store - <AUTHOR> http://www.macstories.net/news/steve-jobs-no-mac-app-store/

<comment><USER2> The headline is misleading. As the article points out, it's not clear what Jobs is "noping": that there will be a Mac app store, that Macs will only run Apple-authorized software, or that there is such a rumor going around.

I suspect Jobs is saying "nope" to the "no software without authorization from Apple will run on Mac OS X" and nothing more.

Pretty cool to get an email from firstname.lastname@example.com, but why doesn't he use the ridiculous stationary included with his Mail.app program?

</comment><comment><USER3> I want to find out who started that rumor and take their internet connection away from them.

<comment><USER4> Here's the original rumor <http://rixstep.com/1/20100424,00.shtml></comment></comment>


Chatroulette - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/10/02/chatroulette

<comment><USER2> All I seem to get is the gif of the hanged kid. Thanks.</comment>


Illumina Accelerator Program - <AUTHOR> http://www.illumina.com/landing/illumina-accelerator-program/

<comment><USER2> Oh, that is really cool. From the FAQ:

>Candidate teams are limited to five members. They must be genomic researchers, entrepreneurs, startups, or early-stage companies from academia or industry that aim to take their promising NGS applications to market.

If I were starting a company in the genomics space (maybe someday), I would definitely apply with Illumina. They recently hit a milestone whereby a complete human genome can be sequenced for $1000 [1], which has been a goal for over a decade since it "neatly highlights the chasm between the actual cost of the Human Genome Project, estimated at $2.7 billion over a decade, and the benchmark for routine, affordable personal genome sequencing" [2].

This will be one of the more exciting, and yet at the same time terrifying, areas of research and innovation. Personalized medicine is the future of healthcare, but we'll need brilliant, well-intentioned people to lead us there in a way that benefits us while avoiding the numerous ethical challenges along the way.

[1] [http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq-x-sequencing- system.il...](http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq-x-sequencing-system.ilmn)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately the $1000 genome isn't really accessible unless you are inside of a research or clinical setting. Genomes at high-coverage still cost ~$6k, and likely will for the near future.

This makes it very hard to begin utilizing that technology as an independent biotech startup.

<comment><USER4> It's true that the price has not practically hit $1k, but it's close.

We recently looked to do 1,600 high coverage genomes through one of the X10-capable centers. We were quoted around $1,800 per genome for 101-bp 30X coverage. This price included library prep and some basic bioinformatics.

In comparison, the lowest price for exome sequencing (1.1% of the genome, targeted at the protein-coding regions only. an exome is about 1/10th the size of a whole genome in terms of data size) on the HiSeq 2500 (the earlier generation of Illumina NGS machines) that we ever got was about ~$750 per exome (and that was also at the 1000's scale).

The last thing to consider is that the new X10 centers will be more than happy to take your business-- in order to keep costs under control and to make their investment worth it, they pretty much have to run the sequencers constantly-- something like 18,000 genomes a year!

<comment><USER5> $1800 per genome at that scale (1600 genomes) seems a little high. We've seen lower quotes through our Sequencing Marketplace at AllSeq ([http://allseq.com/x-ten](http://allseq.com/x-ten))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Financial support, including $100,000 instrument access (MiSeq® System and NextSeq 500™ System), sequencing reagents, 20% research assistant time, $100,000 convertible notes, and an equity line of $20,000 or more

I have no knowledge in this area, any thoughts on this deal by someone who does?

<comment><USER7> Its enough for a few hundred genomes to be sequenced at low coverage. Development of a proof of concept is probably possible with this.

<comment><USER3> On an XTen you could potentially do a few thousand genomes for that price... If they allowed it.

<comment><USER8> The X10 costs a wee bit more than $100K though. Considering they've carefully controlled access to it to just a small handful of key genome centers, I doubt they'd be handing the things out to random startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The moonshot is human blood/tissue mRNA sequencing with a 30 minute turnaround for under $100.

That requires some insane processing locally to create a gene expression histogram, a secure cloud database to match against other patient data to recommend health markers, and a few terabytes locally of other gene combinations that are known dissease markers to sift through.

AIDS, diabetes, cancer, ... any disease detectable by your gene expression levels being out of whack can be diagnosed.

<comment><USER9> What Illumina really needs to do if they want a software ecosystem is make a simple Illumina network API for their sequencers, and post an Illumina mock sequence producing server on their Github. [https://github.com/sequencing](https://github.com/sequencing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> No mention of Yuri Milner on the application page, but just in case anyone overlooks the connection: [http://www.xconomy.com/san- francisco/2014/02/12/illumina-yur...](http://www.xconomy.com/san- francisco/2014/02/12/illumina-yuri-milner-start-genomics-startup-accelerator- in-sf/)

$100,000 for 10% of an idea seems generous vs. most software accelerators. Wonder what they're expecting by loaning out all their equipment in a dedicated research facility? Are they expecting actual NGS improvements or are they hoping to facilitate non-NGS innovations that merely use NGS as a tool?</comment>


Warning: Chrome extension 'User-Agent Switcher for Google Chrome' is suspicious - <AUTHOR> Earlier today I noticed every page I visited had this local storage key set: 'IPirat_installed = true'. I figured out this only happens when the extension 'User-Agent Switcher for Google Chrome'[0] is installed and enabled. (Not to be confused with 'User-Agent Switcher for Chrome'[1].)
Digging in the extension's source, I can see this key is set in common.js. I am a bit concerned this advertises that I have the extension installed, and that websites may be able to tell the extension to do something nefarious, like exfiltrate my browsing history. (But I don't have the skills to prove this one way or the other.)
Also, the extension is making various calls to an API, e.g. apparently fetching a list of redirects to implement.[2]
I don't know what else it's doing (I suspect rewriting shopping links to insert the creator's affiliate tags) but needless to say I've uninstalled it for now.
[0]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-g/ffhkkpnppgnfaobgihpdblnhmmbodake
[1]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg
[2]http://api.useragentswitcher.org/api/redirect2list?data-wid=1 <comment><USER2> Does chrome really not include a UA switcher out of the box?

<comment><USER3> It does, if you use Developer Tools you tell Chrome to fake all kinds of browser features. But Chrome's mantra seems to be to make the browsing experience as simple as possible and I agree that its not a vendor's responsibility to support sites misusing user-agents.

<comment><USER2> > Chrome's mantra seems to be to make the browsing experience as simple as > possible

That is not at all how I would describe Chrome's mantra.

Even if you accept that is true - doesn't it seem a little bit ironic that the feature in question is hard enough to use the built-in solution, that multiple people have thought it necessary to not just make an extension to perform the task, but they thought enough people would do this that it's worthwhile making a shitty reffersl link scamming/privacy abusing solution.</comment></comment></comment>


JSCPP, a simple C++ interpreter written in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/felixhao28/JSCPP <comment><USER2> also relevant is cling, made by the folks at CERN

[https://github.com/root-project/cling](https://github.com/root-project/cling)

[https://root.cern.ch/cling](https://root.cern.ch/cling)

<comment><USER3> this is neat. I noticed that with this we get Read–eval–print loop for C++. Which would make it really useful in an ide like light table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A similar project, also good for educating but within a jupyter notebook for c++

[https://github.com/QuantStack/xeus-cling](https://github.com/QuantStack/xeus- cling)

</comment><comment><USER5> * A subset of C++.

<comment><USER6> I was going to say, "Jesus Christ did one guy actually manage to write a fully standards-conformant C++ parser?"

<comment><USER7> I know of one guy who did, as well as inventing the D language, and he also visits HN and posts semi-regularly --- [http://walterbright.com/](http://walterbright.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A _simple_ C++ interpreter is an oxymoron.

<comment><USER9> It's c++ without the "object-oriented features," so that could be fairly simple.

<comment><USER7> That's called C.

<comment><USER10> C is C++ minus object-oriented features, increased type-safety, template meta- programming, lambdas, and many more features.

<comment><USER11> Right, the useless cruft that makes your program impossible to read, let alone reason about

<comment><USER12> Is this the cruft that gets reinvented in C whenever the project grows complex enough?

Something like: any sufficiently complicated C program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of C++'s features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Couldn't find in readme if templates are supported.

<comment><USER14> It doesn't even support structs/classes.

edit: Templated functions don't work either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> But why? Most js engines (or at least V8) are written in c++.</comment>


Introducing App Engine Firewall - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/08/introducing-App-Engine-firewall-an-easy-way-to-control-access-to-your-app.html <comment><USER2> This seems almost perfectly in response to the HN submission on the NYT Games migration to Google Cloud[0], who listed App Engine's lack of a firewall as one of their complaints with the service

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15084728](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15084728)

<comment><USER3> It's quite the coincidence but we're very excited about it :)

\- NYT Games Team

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love it! I was thinking of migrating off GAE for this reason, but now will re- evaluate.

One feature request - can we add a URL parameter to the firewall rule? The idea is I want to restrict access to certain URLs to a well-known set of IPs - e.g. I don't want login into admin pages unless coming from a known IP. Is this possible on GAE right now?

I know I can split the service into two (restricted and public) and then firewall the restricted service, but wondering if there's a simple way to parametrize firewall services by URL.

<comment><USER5> We agree that this is an important use case, and is something we considered during the design. It is now supported by placing a Web Application Firewall in front of the App Engine application. We chose to limit the initial set of firewall features to IP address range blocking only — in part because that's sufficient to enable a WAF to front an App Engine Application.

-Tad Hunt (Manager on the App Engine team that brought you this firewall)

<comment><USER4> Got it - thanks. Any plans to add this as an integrated feature so we don't have to set up a separate WAF?

<comment><USER5> Feel free to reach out, my email is in my profile. We can discuss what you're looking for.

<comment><USER4> Would love to - couldn't find your email in your profile tho.

To keep the UI simple, I'd like to specify a URL and specify the IP range(s) that are allowed to access each. Bonus points if I can in addition to web UI submit and change the map programmatically. The first allows for greater security for admin pages and similar internal uses. The second allows us to provision for our enterprise users dynamically, who are at well known IPs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My heart skipped a beat when I read the title as App Engine Farewell. Have been actively using App Engine since 2009 and the love it gets has been on a long downslide. Happy to see this feature come out though, the previous lightweight dos.yaml method was quite lacking.

</comment><comment><USER7> You were always able to black list IP addresses using dos.yaml ([https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/conf...](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/config/dosref)). This seems to be taking that one step further.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this is a good product offering, and it's nice to see them compete with AWS on another front, as well as Digital Oceans' offering.

However, I wonder if these abstractions are detrimental to developers understanding the underlying technology? I'm not a supremely experienced developer but it takes very little effort to understand, for example, ufw and iptables on Linux distros.

Personally, though I'm (mostly) front end, I spend the majority of my time on the command line. My main editor is vim, I write bash scripts to do what I need instead of manually performing tasks, I often just use `cat` to write files instead of opening my editor, etc.

I found that managing things from the command line such as firewalls, daemons, and other tasks like managing databases, gave me deeper comprehension of what's going on. Are abstractions like this becoming crutches for tomorrows' developers?

<comment><USER9> While they look the same, the technologies serve different purposes.

iptables/ufw block requests at the VM level. So traffic flows all the way to your VM and then your VM spends CPU cycles rejecting those packets.

In contrast, these firewall technologies can block traffic at the network edge of the cloud provider. This is done by propagating rules to the edge routers.

<comment><USER8> Ahh, that changes my perspective on this. That suddenly seems vastly more useful than it did, to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool, now give me PHP 7.1

<comment><USER11> And Python3 with the NDB library.

<comment><USER10> Oh yeah that too

<comment><USER12> \+ websockets

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why do they return HTTP 403 instead of dropping the traffic or returning an ICMP message?

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a good feature. Wish app engine provides capability for blue-green deployments.

<comment><USER15> What do you mean? App Engine supports many versions of your application running simultaneously. You just deploy to a new version and migrate traffic (slowly or quickly, your choice).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this work with the flexible environment too?

<comment><USER17> Yep [https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/python/appl...](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/python/application- security#app_engine_firewall)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does AWS offer something similar?

<comment><USER19> They have offered a more featureful product for a while: [https://aws.amazon.com/waf/](https://aws.amazon.com/waf/)

That being said, the simplicity of this product is elegant and solves a lot of use cases without a lot of headache.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a great first step. Reminds me of when Microsoft started shipping Windows with a firewall with XP.

</comment><comment><USER21> haha ! It come at a better timing than this. Yesterday we had a huge discussion around that in HN !!</comment>


Ask HN: How to disable the microphone on your Mac - <AUTHOR>

You can simply mute your microphone with Audio-MIDI-Setup.app on Mac OS.
Nevertheless when you start Skype it automatically reactives the microphone.
Who has the best solution to disable a MacBooks Mic? Best solution would be a hardware switch ;) <comment> Dirty-flow [http://apple.stackexchange.com/q/73190/24026](http://apple.stackexchange.com/q/73190/24026) but I don't know if this will be the best solution

</comment><comment><USER2> Also pade 120 of this Pdf is reported to work

[http://images.apple.com/support/security/guides/docs/Leopard...](http://images.apple.com/support/security/guides/docs/Leopard_Security_Config_2nd_Ed.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't know if it's worth 2.99 but this will absolve your ailments I believe.

[http://mac.softpedia.com/get/System- Utilities/iMute.shtml](http://mac.softpedia.com/get/System- Utilities/iMute.shtml)</comment>


Gestural interfaces: A step backwards in usability - <AUTHOR> http://jnd.org/dn.mss/gestural_interfaces_a_step_backwards_in_usability_1.html

<comment><USER2> "But the place for such experimentation is in the lab."

That's a silly, elitist statement. No matter how much testing you do in the lab, the ultimate test is in the hands of end users. Lots of dumb WIMP UI ideas, like modal dialogs, MDI windows, and nested menu hierarchies, survived the labs at Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft, but fell out of favor over years of real user experience. On the other side of the coin, lots of now-popular desktop and web UI elements were conceived by run-of-the-mill developers far from any research campus. As the new-car smell wears off touch devices, plenty of touch UI conventions will get drop-tested in the wild, the stupid ones will get discarded, and the good ones will get copied by everyone and become taken for granted. This will happen far faster in the cutthroat app marketplace, under the eyes of millions of customers, than in any HCI lab.

<comment><USER3> Judging from the evidence of my browser, and every other common browser out there --including new IE's!-- I'm not so sure the S- vs. MDI debate is completely settled. I think that a lot of the text editors for the Mac --TextMate, maybe?-- have tabbed interfaces, too; vim and emacs certainly do.

(I don't know anything about mobile browsers, so the statement may well be false for them.)

<comment><USER4> Tabs are still SDI. MDI was a full windowing environment inside of the program itself, including icons and sub windows and a separate, distinct notion of maximization, minimization, window position, and... well, it was as if it were designed to be as confusing as possible by adding a second unnecessary dimension of potential confusion to virtually _every_ core concept in the UI. Tabs are just tabs, nowhere near as complex on any level while still accompling pretty much everything you could want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A good first step may be to have a standard way to show the gestures that are currently enabled (e.g. pinch, swipe). That way, you at least know what is _significant_ to the current app in the current mode, and don't have to try a bunch of things.

Though in some respects, it is unfair to criticize touch technology based on its initial use in phones, because those screens are _small_. Some of the article's goals aren't practical on a small screen, e.g. GUIs have "discoverable" interfaces because of always-visible menus, but a phone can't do this without seriously reducing usable screen space.

On the other hand, the touch screen of an _iPad_ probably _should_ fix more of these problems. For instance, an iPad app can probably have a discoverable "menu bar" like a Mac app does, and not really hurt usable screen space.

<comment><USER6> A friend worked with a high end image manipulation program that had "pie" menus. You held the menu button down on your tablet, and after a pause a circular menu popped up at the mouse position. You dragged in the direction of your choice. If there were submenus for that choice, another circle popped up and so on.

Because of fitts' law, this was far more efficient than standard popup menus: the 'target' for any choice was larger and therefore much easier to hit.

The gestural part was this: If you held the menu button down and immediately started to move the mouse, it would select the choice without bothering to display the pie. Advanced users quickly learned the sequence of zigs and zags required for their most common menu operations and preferred using the pie menus to keyboard shortcuts or standard menus in the window panes.

As the OP points out, this system provided discoverability as well as consistency. The same gesture always produced the same result.

<comment><USER7> For searching ease, this variant of Pie Menus is called Marking Menus. PDF of paper [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93.7499&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had to laugh: when pushing the 'menu' button in Android:

> (The keyboard does not always appear. Despite much experimentation, we are > unable to come up with the rules that govern when this will or will not > occur.)

So apparently these 'user interface experts' have been unable to figure out what I and everybody else I know managed to understand implicitly without any particular effort: that a long press is a different action to a short press. No wonder they think it is a poor UI - they must be utterly confused all over the place. But honestly, this is a fairly common UI concept in space / button limited devices. I somehow doubt they are really as 'expert' as they suggest if they haven't come across this before.

<comment><USER9> I've had a N1 for several months now and I didn't know that pressing the menu button for a longer time is different from pressing it briefly. Nor did I notice the same concept for other GUI elements. Sorry, but you are wrong.

<comment><USER8> Do you also claim to be a user interface expert and write articles about it?

This technique is pervasive throughout Android. You should try long pressing on every UI element - especially the home button and the home screen - to see all the different actions you can do.

<comment><USER9> The point is not "can a user interface understand this menu", the point is "can an average user understand this interface".

I agree that once the different behavior emerges, it might not be that hard to find the source. But I am not sure - the keyboard never appeared for me because I never pressed the menu button for a longer time. Now I tried it and it worked, but I already knew why because of the article.

In the other hand, I use my iPod Touch only very rarely. I think there is supposed to be some kind of tap bar (I know this from reading about PhoneGap), and I managed to bring up a menu once in a game I have installed by tapping around on the screen wildly. I was unable to bring it up a second time, so no, it is not always easy to identify the source of some activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Key criticisms:

 _"gestures cannot readily be incorporated in menus: So far, nobody has figured out how to inform the person using the app what the alternatives are."_

 _"Accidental activation is common in gestural interfaces, as users happen to touch something they didn't mean to touch. It may not even be obvious what action got you there. If a finger accidentally scrapes an active region, there is almost no way to know why the resulting action took place. The trigger was unintentional and subconscious."_

 _"When a mouse is clicked one pixel outside the icon a user intended to activate, the mouse pointer is visible on the screen so that the user can see that it's a bit off. [On a touch screen] Users frequently touch a control or issue a gestural command but nothing happens because their touch or gesture was a little bit off. Since gestures are invisible, users often don't know that they made these mistakes."_

 _"When users think they did one thing but "really" did something else, they lose their sense of controlling the system because they don't understand the connection between actions and results. The user experience feels random and definitely not empowering."_

</comment><comment><USER11> "Bold explorations should remain inside the company and university research laboratories and not be inflicted on any customers until those recruited to participate in user research have validated the approach."

So much for innovation.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's hard to tell what they're actually saying here other than that a newly popular, relatively open platform has some bad UIs. Why's it gotta sound so grouchy?

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://johnnyholland.org/2010/05/26/usability- ain%E2%80%99t-...](http://johnnyholland.org/2010/05/26/usability- ain%E2%80%99t-everything-a-response-to-jakob-nielsen%E2%80%99s-ipad-usability- study/)

</comment><comment><USER14> nice background color. and they presume to talk about usability?</comment>


Do they have work/life balance? Investigating potential employers with GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/31/does-company-have-worklife-balance/ <comment><USER2> If you wanted to really speed things up, you could do this in an automated fashion or with google sheets (to suck in the graphic below).

For manual review: [https://github.com/users/mooreds/contributions?to=2018-12-31](https://github.com/users/mooreds/contributions?to=2018-12-31)

For more automation: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/@simonwep/github- contributions](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@simonwep/github-contributions) or [https://github.com/sallar/github-contributions- api](https://github.com/sallar/github-contributions-api) look useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Two things to consider:

1) it's possible to hide private contributions from public profile

2) weekend coding is a vague info; one shall check what commits have been added, maybe the person is doing side projects, contributing to OSS, not related to work? Maybe the person actually enjoys coding and the amount of time spent during the weekend is "their healthy balance"?

<comment><USER4> Both of these are covered in the article.

1) That's why you should check multiple people's profiles.

2) That's why you should differentiate private from public repos, and again why you should check multiple people's profiles.

Any individual person doesn't tell you much. If you find 10 people all coding on the weekend on private repos on the same dates, it's probably not for fun, it's probably crunch time.

<comment><USER3> > Any individual person doesn't tell you much. If you find 10 people all > coding on the weekend on private repos on the same dates, it's probably not > for fun, it's probably crunch time.

Great info. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the employer has stuff on GitHub, then:

1\. obviously they don't take security seriously

2\. you could be asked to work on their stuff when you are at home

<comment><USER6> Point one is not obvious to me. Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER5> If you take security seriously, you make sure that only your own employees can access the data. This requires that you use your own hardware in your own facility.

For anything really important, you keep it on a LAN separate from the internet. You don't trust firewalls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's an interesting idea, and could probably be turned into some kind of product. I'm envisioning a product that pulls factors from multiple sources: GitHub posts, articles from media, etc and rates companies by work/life balance, along with some kind of measure for standard deviation.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that already GlassDoor? Even better, they pull straight from the source: employees.

<comment><USER9> It would capture some data from the majority who never end up leaving a rating one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When people code, most of the time, is unrelated to work-life balance. Many people code weekends if they slacked off during the week.

How many hours they code is probably a better indicator. Commit times and frequency aren't really indicative of hours invested in coding.

This post needs a disclaimer as "speculation"

<comment><USER11> > Commit times and frequency aren't really indicative of hours invested in > coding.

I don't agree. Environments exist where people code 12+ hours a day, six days a week. Commit times and frequency _are likely influenced by time invested in coding_. Could you spend 12 hours on a problem with only one commit? Definitely! But if your commit window is spread across 12+ hours a day and the frequency of commits within that window is non-insignificant, it's unlikely that is artificially expanded from less work. It is a signal worth extracting.

You'd want to cast a net over as much of the engineering talent in an org that you can to find useful trends.

I would pay for this as part of some sort of Glassdoor/Stackoverflow Jobs hybrid. Only show me jobs where work/life balance doesn't suck.

<comment><AUTHOR> But most companies use in house/private cloud hosted repository...</comment></comment></comment>


Laravel 4.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/laravel/laravel

<comment><USER2> There's also a Laravel 4 book released today. It's Laravel: Code Bright (<https://leanpub.com/codebright>) by Dayle Rees, a member of the Laravel core team.

It's the featured book on the Leanpub homepage (<https://leanpub.com/>) right now, and it's doing really well.

(Disclosure: Leanpub cofounder here.)

<comment><USER3> the Minimum is too expensive... i got the Jeff book instead... thkx however :)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I forgot to mention <https://leanpub.com/laravel-testing-decoded> which is an oversight on my part! Laravel 4 is #1 and #2 on Leanpub for the past week, just because of today!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As of now the official 4.0 docs are still on <http://four.laravel.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://new.laravel.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Another book released today: Laravel Testing Decoded, by Jeffrey Way - <https://leanpub.com/laravel-testing-decoded>

</comment><comment><USER6> I really liked the static method shortcuts Laravel has for almost everything. Too bad it's almost as slow as Symfony, because it uses so many of it's (great) components.

<comment><USER7> Does anyone have any benchmarks?

I've only made a couple of sites using Laravel but I actually really like it and haven't hit any performance bottlenecks yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally I like to follow coding standards when writing app in given framework, so I always start with looking at what they look like and I find that very often there is something that I personally find off e.g. in lavarels case they use tabs for indentation or classes have braces in the same line as class name, but not methods. Other than that project looks great!

<comment><USER3> I dont understand... L4 follows the standard... your standard however must be off. Also PHP-Fig has recommended tabs over spaces.

<comment><USER9> > Also PHP-Fig has recommended tabs over spaces.

Great! I have always ignored that part of the spec. Tabs rule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you haven't tried Laravel 4, now is the TIME!

</comment><comment><USER11> How does this compare to other PHP frameworks?

<comment><USER12> It's very easy to get going with and to learn.

It has good documentation (available here[0] for version four) and the code is filled with comments if the documentation isn't enough.

It uses "Eloquent ORM" which makes it so easy to handle data with Active Record.

RESTful controllers makes it easy to handle the request.

And much more, which is why you need to read the documentation to understand why it's different.

[0] <http://four.laravel.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Troll

<comment><USER14> Who let you into the PHP party?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The fonts are very hard to read on the webpage, how to fix this? maybe text- rendering will help?

</comment><comment><USER3> No HTML::script :(

<comment><USER14> I never liked html-generating methods anyway (it makes escaping more difficult) so personally i'm quite happy if there are fewer of them.</comment></comment>