How We Recruit - On Formal Credentials vs Experience-based Education - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-credentials-vs-experience-based-education/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for all the feedback. As a regular Hacker News reader, I am thrilled to see my post here!

Hexstream made a great comment about the wasted potential of teen years. It echoes what PG has said - boredom being the biggest problem in high school (or even college for that matter). Kids are getting smarter every generation (really true - IQ is going up world-wide), yet they don't feel challenged. Tapping that wasted potential is a huge opportunity, leave aside the "doing good" aspect of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Maybe it's teen angst (age on profile), but the reason I'm trying to do well in high school is to... get into a better college... and then what? _shrug_

Something to think about is what the role of high school is - is it to try to get a numerical GPA on how your work ethic is? (Absolutely not. If you love your job, you'll enjoy working at it. Likewise for school. I love hacking, not so much school.)

Or is it to let people find out what they're really interested in? (Only a few people that I know have gone through this by senior year, wanting to apply themselves to _x_ career.)

College, at least after the first or second year, is definitely targeted to one's own career interest, and although it is much more in-depth than high school, for certain careers it can't replicate the amount of learning you have to actually do. In other words: take hacking or entrepreneurship. You'll need experience in the field, and you can't really be taught it like you can be taught biology or chemistry.

<comment><USER3> _I'm trying to do well in high school is to... get into a better college... and then what? shrug_

A "better" college will have more interesting people - ones that let you sleep on Friday and Saturday nights because they aren't drunk and throwing up outside of your window. It'll provide you with good professors, who aren't insecure about teaching, and are happy to engage you in their research.

Having gone to a big state school/research university (Rutgers), I had the experience of "both sides" of the coin - and there is an enormous difference between how different student's attitude affected their education - it's shocking that there is no "formal" difference between graduates, there certainly is a difference between the people who were engaged in their education, and those who were there to pass while trying their hardest to impress people.

 _I love hacking, not so much school._

I think it was Chomsky or RMS who said something interesting about their high school - that they did all the bullshit hoop jumping you have to go through to get to a good university, and it was worth it.

Yes, in high school, you're jumping through nearly-bullshit hoops in an imperfect system, but there is a practical argument to be made that it might be worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm just seeing it like this:

      High school ==> College ==> Networking with interesting people

Thanks for the insightful opinion and sharing your personal experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It surprises me that so many firms still resort to arbitrary credential-based requirements rather than looking at something such as, say, solutions to a series of problems.

I guess it just means that the most creative HR departments are going to net the most appropriate candidates.

<comment><USER5> we've been brainwashed to reject the obvious and simple solution. merit-based hiring. have them give examples of the kind of work you'd have them doing at your company.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy>

colleges are a form of prestige monopoly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is strikingly similar to what the military does with alot of jobs. (Or atleast used to do.) Instead of hiring certain people out of college (Medical Technologists, as an example) they would build an intense training program that would train them for job they needed to do in 16 months or so. Kind-of reminds of of the old ways of training electricians and various craftsman through specialized schools and mentoring.

I love what Zoho is doing with this -- challenging conventional thought and bringing great jobs to people who would ordinarily be over-looked or counted out.

<comment><USER7> There's an interesting point here - the distinction between vocational training on one hand and learning theoretical foundations + domain specialization on the other. At least where I grow up consensus is that the latter will make a person better suited for changing job requirements..but I have never heard a good line of reasoning backing up this claim.

Perhaps what is needed to succeed in either case is the ability to adapt to changing conditions, with people in the latter category by nature having an easier time doing this. If this is the case, a lot of people could save a lot of pain by simply jumping straight to the domain specialization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The point of a college or university isn't to train you for a profession, that's what trade schools are for, and there's a reason most people don't go to them. You can get a degree from a major university without learning a thing - it's trivial to cram for tests, if not outright cheat (as many do), and pass with flying colors. The point of university is to give you free time to grow up however you want to.

For those genuinely interested in a subject the freedom of 4 years of doing whatever you want is something more valuable than any on-job training. You can read all day, go through GEB or SCIP in a week or two. Not cram it into nights after work, but genuinely indulge in learning the ins and outs of a subject - be it LISP/compilers or Edna Millay. Learning to edit Apache config files or web API's and frameworks takes neither time nor brains. Learning everything about the world around you uninhibited take both.

Ah, college, how I'll miss you...

</comment><comment><USER8> I've thought that because of the iterative nature of learning/doing, school should alternate schedule weighting. For instance, once you've worked some, theories make more sense, and when you understand theories, work becomes easier.

I think school should alternate between 30 hours of practical work and 6 hours (2 classes) one semester to 10-15 hours of practical work and 15 hours (5 classes) the next. If you control the work so that it covers the previous, current, and next semesters, all the better.

</comment><comment><USER9> Learning by doing is often the best way to learn and get up to speed.

I am very happy to hear the opportunities afforded to those of poorer backgrounds in India by this scheme too.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is really bad to recruit teens into IT industry. Let them enjoy their life till 21 or 22.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hell, my idea of enjoying life is hacking around and coding products. Not many things are better than learning _useful_ stuff. check profile for age

<comment><USER3> > Hell, my idea of enjoying life is hacking around and coding products. Not > many things are better than learning useful stuff. check profile for age

At 16, I probably would have said the same thing, but only 5 years later, I'd advise you that there's no rush. There is really a lot of time in life to be great at _useful_ stuff and learn a great many things on the side. My idea of enjoying life in college was falling in love, traveling, and taking poetry classes. If I could do it again, I'd replace my CS classes with drama and a foreign language (studying abroad), and spend free time learning CS on my own. (I'd keep the Math major for the mental rigor)

There is nothing in a CS class you can't get out of a book/working on OSS projects, but a lot more you can learn about life with a good acting, literature, or history class than you'll have time to for most of your life afterward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That is a kick-ass recruitment method.

If I ever get a company I want to try that.

I'm sure (bright) highschool kids pick stuff up a lot faster/easier than beer- drinking, weed-smoking college kids.

</comment><comment><USER12> Amen

</comment><comment><USER13> most of the graduates from indian colleges and universities are not employable - they need extra training anyway - so why not pick them up from high-school and train them and give them employment so that they can come out of poverty ... also they will have experience by the time other peers come out of the university with no experience and employability what so ever ... this innovative model of recruitment should be replicated in all 3rd world countries ... it solves multiple problems at one stroke.

<comment><USER9> Even in the UK many employers complain about lack of graduate quality.

In fact today Imperial College in London announced it will be doing 4-year degrees instead of 3-year ones to address issues in falling educational standards.

<comment><USER14> I also read that they were thinking about having entrance exams as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~shais/UnderstandingMachineLearning/copy.html <comment><USER2> re-re-re-post -zzt- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17029004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17029004)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10589398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10589398)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853997)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976898](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976898)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290070](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290070)

</comment><comment><USER3> That book is so hard.</comment>


Project Argo Goes Open Source: On-Prem Automation and Path to Hybrid Environment - <AUTHOR> https://tech.wayfair.com/2018/12/project-argo-open-source-on-prem-automation/ <comment><USER2> Another cool Argo: [https://github.com/argoproj/argo](https://github.com/argoproj/argo) "The Workflow Engine for Kubernetes"

<comment><USER3> Also [https://www.cloudflare.com/products/argo-smart- routing/](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/argo-smart-routing/)</comment></comment>


SearchYC Presents: Best of Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://searchyc.com/top/list <comment><USER2> The list of most commented threads is dominated by an artifact, because at the bottom of some essays I link to the News.YC thread as if it were for blog comments. E.g. "Microsoft is Dead" is not the most interesting story to News.YC readers. In fact, last time I looked, most of the recent comments were just people saying "fuck you" at various levels of articulateness.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that the "most commented threads" isn't exactly a "best of" list--in fact, they're some of the more controversial/ugly threads to appear on YC, but that's why I found it interesting.

<comment><USER3> I agree with Paul about that because a lot of "Ask YC" threads have tons of comments but aren't really what I'm looking for...but what is useful is the SEARCH. THANK YOU SO MUCH for that.

I've always been afraid to contribute for fear that others have posted an article I encountered. Fear no more! Hello, new homepage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be nice to see two additional lists ranked by average karma/submission and average karma/comment. Being able to specify a time range qualification on the searches would be nice too.

<comment><AUTHOR> We gave that some consideration, but the queries weren't all that interesting. The vast majority of those lists (something like 80%) consist of people with only one post. To illustrate this, here are the top tens for those queries:

      Top Points per Submission
      +</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+----+</comment><comment>---+
      | username    | pts  | ct | avg     |
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+----+</comment><comment>---+
      | dwaters     |   95 |  1 | 95.0000 |
      | keesj       |   78 |  1 | 78.0000 |
      | brl         |  122 |  2 | 61.0000 |
      | a-kill-ease |   60 |  1 | 60.0000 |
      | zombo       |   58 |  1 | 58.0000 |
      | markovich   |   58 |  1 | 58.0000 |
      | fresno      |   55 |  1 | 55.0000 |
      | jdale27     |   53 |  1 | 53.0000 |
      | qwertyy     |   48 |  1 | 48.0000 |
      | jsomers     |   48 |  1 | 48.0000 |
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+----+</comment><comment>---+

      Top Points per Comment
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment>+</comment><comment>+----+</comment><comment>---+
      | username   | pts  | ct | avg     |
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment>+</comment><comment>+----+</comment><comment>---+
      | hazchem    |   37 |  1 | 37.0000 |
      | capablanca |   36 |  1 | 36.0000 |
      | jdrake3    |   24 |  1 | 24.0000 |
      | juanjose   |   24 |  1 | 24.0000 |
      | cetaganda  |   41 |  2 | 20.5000 |
      | cysh       |   19 |  1 | 19.0000 |
      | chime      |   17 |  1 | 17.0000 |
      | zamfi      |   17 |  1 | 17.0000 |
      | kilik      |   17 |  1 | 17.0000 |
      | loumf      |   15 |  1 | 15.0000 |
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment>+</comment><comment>+----+</comment><comment>---+

<comment><USER5> Add a cutoff of, say, 10 comments or 10 posts...

<comment><AUTHOR> Done. I set a minimum of 10 comments or 10 submissions to get on the list:

<http://searchyc.com/top/points_per_submission>

<http://searchyc.com/top/points_per_comment>

<comment><USER6> Would be neat to be able to see the pps and ppc values for an individual... I don't make either of those lists, but I'd be interested what my averages are.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now when you search for your username on searchyc.com, you can see your stats: <http://searchyc.com/Xichekolas>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://blog.searchyc.com/2008/02/searchyc-presents-best- of-h...](http://blog.searchyc.com/2008/02/searchyc-presents-best-of-hacker- news/)

Today we're launching another feature of SearchYC: Top Lists. Using our index of Hacker News threads and comments, we've compiled lists of the most interesting items to date.

So what did we find? Sticking true to the Web 2.0 mentality, TechCrunch articles were the most submitted, by far. Other Silicon Valley favorites such as Valleywag, Mashable, and Wired also made it to the top.

As for top users, nickb gets the honor with more than 1900 submissions while pg has more than 2000 comments. Go ahead and take a look for yourself, and see if you can find other trends in Hacker News activity.

<comment><USER8> A proposal for an experiment:

Having read a bit about the research in networks and graph theory that has been done over the last few years I think that submissions, activity of users and karma points follow a powerlaw. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law>)

Seems like you have the numbers to confirm whether this is true or not.

It would be really interesting to see...

<comment><AUTHOR> If I understand the problem correctly, doesn't this list (<http://searchyc.com/top/submitter>) confirm that? Our data on users' karma is somewhat limited. Turns out that the sum of your points across submissions and comments does not equal karma (downmods have more weight).

<comment><USER9> What's the basis for the claim "the sum of your points across submissions and comments does not equal karma"? Pretty sure karma = 1 + every point beyond 1 point for any comment or submission.

<comment><USER10> It is for lower point stories and comments, but for 75 point stories you don't get exactly 74 karma. I'm not sure what the threshold and algorithm is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good stuff - thanks a lot.

So is the search algorithm implemented in arc ? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> Well done. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER12> You just decimated my productivity. :p

</comment><comment><USER13> Can we have a highest-modded comments scoreboard?

</comment><comment><USER14> now how many users does news.yc have?

<comment><USER2> Around 8000 unique ips per day lately.</comment></comment>


Gyro-X is a two-wheeled, gyroscopically-stabilized vehicle built in 1967 - <AUTHOR> https://www.lanemotormuseum.org/collection/cars/item/gyro-x-1967 <comment><AUTHOR> Video showing how the Gyro-X works:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqGB1zOICfg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqGB1zOICfg)</comment>


Why does Germany have such a low coronavirus death rate? - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20200319020441/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/18/does-germany-have-low-coronavirus-death-rate/ <comment><USER2> It's probably too early to come to any conclusions, while the infection rate is similar to Spain for example, there are only 1/10 of recovered cases, so the dead rate will most likely jump higher within the next few days.</comment>


Java generics never cease to impress - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/q/36402646/521799 <comment><USER2> The basic answer is that generic _methods_ rule in in Java because the compiler can do all sorts of inference over them even if generic _classes_ drool because their types are erased.</comment>


Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) Released - <AUTHOR> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2019-October/000250.html <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is Canonical just doing ridiculously good engineering these days? Like.... 2 days ago I read about the sudo bug, then I ran `sudo apt update ; apt list --upgradable` and BAM the patch was there. Their contributions to the Gnome desktop are fantastic, they're really pushing for Wayland support across the board and their even implementing ZFS on root.... Like... Dude, the openZFS project just made ZFS on linux their "mainline" and Canonical has already got a decent implementation available. Not only are the enterprise products good though, they've incorporated the community Yaru theme as their main theme for their Gnome implementation. So they're doing right by businesses and doing right by their community. Major major kudos to the team!

<comment><USER3> We try harder! Thanks for noticing and sharing, from a long time contributor

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey cool, I like this operating system.</comment>


Canvas Cycle - <AUTHOR> http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ <comment><USER2> I love indexed mode. I painted a lot with deluxe paint and played with palette rotations and tweaks in Pascal+asm in the old times, it brings me a tear remembering all this. But I love it not only for the nostalgia factor, but also because indexed mode allows very cool stuff almost for free.

By modifying the rgb of a color index (like the demos in op's link), you change the color of all pixels in screen that index color. So you can make some pixels blink, flash, oscillate.. You name it. It's cool also for fading the whole screen to black/whatever, turn everything into night or hell..

Also, it was a very cheap and easy way of providing collision and mouse picking, by just comparing the index of specific pixels, without the need of any additional buffer.

Today you can make color adjustments very easily, with shaders or some library, but I don't know of a way of tweaking rgb values of certain pixels in the same way, and as easy and cheap as it was in indexed mode (if you do, please tell!)

In this years of pixel art revival, I find it very sad that indexed mode is dead.

Edit: forgot to mention that I recently did tried to make a library for handling indexed mode in html5, with 2d canvas and webgl support. It kinda works, but it needs more love and work. Also, it's difficult to maintain high framerates with today's high resolution screens and fps standards (60fps are the norm today, back in the old days 30fps were wonderful)

[https://github.com/feiss/indexed](https://github.com/feiss/indexed)

<comment><USER3> I still use palette indexing! However, I use floating point indexing (which in essence is similar to the smooth cycling you see in these demos). It allows many of the same tricks, such as cycling, blinking, perceived animation, etc.

You can do a "true" simulation of palette indexing in modern shaders simply as a deferred shading process or even as a step within the main render pass. You simply write a palette entry and an index to the screen (rather than a color), and then you can modify that index over time or by some other variable. In the final pass (or the immediate pass) you can compute a final color from the resulting palette entry, palette index, and shift amount.

<comment><USER2> Very cool! Do you have any example? It's not very available by hardware nowadays but you can work in indexed by software, or doing the trick you say (that sounds similar to what I do in my library --sorry if I'm wrong, I'm an opengl shaders newbie--, but the workarounds are slower or more complex than traditional indexed mode by hardware, making it less accessible to the newcomers. Maybe my laments are just nostalgia..

<comment><USER3> Not the best example, but at about 5 minutes in you can see how I construct palette entries and how those entries automatically get applied to the screen without recomputing the underlying voxels. I construct two dimensional palettes actually, with just a few entries and it blends between those entries. This allows cycling along two axes of the palette - i.e. one axis can be used to represent shading by amount of light, and the other can represent cycling over time or variations in the underlying pattern. [https://youtu.be/X7MYf01X1Y4?t=5m](https://youtu.be/X7MYf01X1Y4?t=5m)

If you are using a shader, it takes only one texture lookup (into your palette) to do this, so it is extremely cheap.

<comment><USER2> Cool!! Awesome, thanks for sharing. The bidimensional palette is clever! Congrats for the hard work in your voxel engine.

<comment><USER3> Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's an accompanying blog post that explains this effect: [http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5)

<comment><USER5> The artist gave a talk at the last GDC explaining his technique.

[http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023586/8-Bit-8-Bitish- Graphics](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023586/8-Bit-8-Bitish-Graphics)

He really is a master of a lost art. Even back in the PlayStation 2 days, the artists I worked with had never learned how to directly manipulate palletized images.

<comment><USER6> > Even back in the PlayStation 2 days, the artists I worked with had never > learned how to directly manipulate palletized images.

Did they need to?

<comment><USER5> Nearly all of the textures used on the PS1 and PS2 were palletized. But, the artists were raised on Photoshop so they had no concept of how to take advantage of the techniques afforded by the format. If they had spent at least some time being introduced to Deluxe Paint, the games' textures could have been much more animated and varied with nearly zero time or memory cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These feel like the fond memories of a past I didn't actually live. Like, I've never seen these images before, but I have a particular kind of nostalgia for them, like I remember seeing them in a kind of awe at a time when they would have been technical marvels to me.

</comment><comment><USER8> I can imagine this being efficient on an architecture that actually uses a palette for color lookup. But on a HTML canvas, how can this be an attractive technique?

<comment><USER5> It's not a good match for Canvas. This is just a demo that uses Canvas to remind the masses of something we are on the edge of forgetting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> needs a (2011); now this should be much easier to achieve at high frame rates using webgl.

<comment><USER10> Why? How does webgl make indexed pelletes more efficient?

<comment><USER5> The lookup can be done in a trivial shader that runs on the GPU 10-100x faster than a C implementation on the CPU instead as a JS function that runs 10x slower than a C implementation.

Additionally, instead of uploading the complete, 24bit-per-pixel, post-indexed image across the PCI bus every frame; you only need to send the updated pallete. The CPU work approaches zero at that point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was a link to a presentation by Mark Ferrari (the artist) which surfaced on HN within the past couple months which showed these pictures. These aren't just animated, but for some of these pictures, you can also animate the transition from day to night and back with the palette.

They were apparently made for a screensaver which would display daylight or nighttime according to the computer's clock.

</comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of my Amiga days and Deluxe Paint. Someone should recreate Deluxe Paint as a Javascript application. Great stuff.</comment>


Critical Flaw IDed in ZigBee Smart Home Devices - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/07/critical-flaw-ided-in-zigbee-smart-home-devices/

<comment><USER2> The flaw isn't in zigbee persay, but more in how manufacturers are implementing it. In their desire to have easy interoperability, they are allowing attackers the same ease of access. Not unlike early ICQ where spoofing was easy and rampant.</comment>


Ask HN: check out my new web app lystener.com - <AUTHOR> http://lystener.com <comment><USER2> I like the idea! Couple of things:

* Supply the user with an URL that he/she can use like lystener.com/user/username so it can be a bookmark

* Poll the user feed so it updates the lyrics when you start listening to another song

[edit] o, actually it does this, but it didn't work at first.

* Find an API that supplies more results because:

      Now playing: Paparazzi by   Lady Gaga
      We don't have lyrics for this song :(

Seriously? :)

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. <http://lystener.com/?username=yourname> :) but I'm implementing a <http://lystener.com/#!username> soon that will get set by the form.

2\. it does that, but every 10 seconds as to not completely destroy everyone's api's :)

3\. Ouch. Working on it. The API seems overloaded.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Lystener.com takes your last.fm username and display the lyrics for the song you're currently listening to. By simply selecting the lyrics you like you can post them to Twitter or Facebook. Clean interface, easy to use website.

In the future I want to expand it to saving your favorite quotes, making top ten lists of songs and artists, but for now, this is an app I made in about a weekend (with a week of tweaking) and I'm pretty happy with it :) I wrote a blog post with a longer explanation, for those interested: [http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/web/a-web-app-in-a-weekend- lys...](http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/web/a-web-app-in-a-weekend-lystener- com/)

Let me know what you think!

<comment><USER3> I should be able to tell, just from going to lystener.com, that it will automatically grab lyrics for whatever I'm listening to on last.fm and let me share them. The site doesn't communicate that very clearly; I had to read your post here to figure out exactly what the site did.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I displayed the information after the first lyrics are found, because it becomes useful then, but I've made it immediatelly visible now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love rap music, and have been looking for meaningful and deep rap lyrics on the web more than once in the last couple of years (haven't found a webapp for that yet). I'd love to have a place on the web, where others (or your webapp) could recommend such rap lyrics to me as a user, based on my listening history for example. Also, you could also let people discuss lyrics.

I might be biased, because I'm a rap listener myself, but you could add any other genre to your repertoire, that has a lyrics-aware fan base.

<comment><USER5> If you haven't found it already, check out the online hip-hop lyrics archive (<http://ohhla.com>) for your hip-hop lyrics needs. I've been going there for lyrics for as long as I can remember and never quite understood why it doesn't rank higher in google searches for lyrics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this app has potential, but:

Your lyrics database is too small or I am unlucky, I just listened to Muse, The Smiths, Jacques Brel and Muse again and it didn't find any lyrics. (For some reason it seemed to miss the Brel song entirely).

Furthermore Amarok does not update last.fm quickly but this should be an easy fix.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the api that's the bottleneck here. Implementing caching and queueing now to see if that helps some :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As the others have noted, no lyrics have been coming up for me.

But on the flip side, it does pick up my 'currently listening' song from last.fm very fast. I use Spotify, it must publish currently listening pretty quickly. I think its only about 10-15 seconds.

Just a couple of 'ideas':

\- Fix the lyrics api issue

\- Show the last X songs played so you can go back and search the lyrics for them.

\- Enunciate what the site does better than the text box on the side. From the text on the site it looks like it is just a lyrics search engine... display what sets you apart.

Great idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought the description in the text box on the side was okay. What would you say sets lystener apart?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You'd be my hero if you included tabs/chords. Your interface would be a great addition to what's otherwise a cesspool.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually a great idea! Now to find a tabs API (or build it into the site myself)

By the way, I find Ultimate-guitar.com to be pretty good most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I created a similar app a couple of months ago :D <http://nowlyrics.appspot.com> It was also featured on last.fm, <http://build.last.fm/item/481>

<comment><AUTHOR> If I may ask, how do you get full lyrics out of lyricswiki?

<comment><USER9> I used lyricswiki's api to get the url for the lyric's page, then parse it's html to get the lyrics. hope that helps ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks great, and can see it being used. Just tried it. Love Last.Fm, glad it has that integration. but it couldn't find the lyrics for last song i listened to: Rhinoceros by The Smashing Pumpkins

Good luck! Bookmarked!

</comment><comment><USER11> I think you need to relax the timing of the event listener action on the input box a bit, wait for me to at least finish what I'm typing. (Unless the disco light effect is intentional.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't made the timing of the event listener pretty yet, it just checks after every keypress now. Will change!

Edit: fixed :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> With chrome, it doesn't seem to work for me. Whatever I enter in the box, sometime it goes green/red, but nothing more.. no about button, no "What is lystener"..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So, I think you all are bringing the lyrics API on it's knees :( I just implemented caching that should alleviate it some, and next up is a queueing system.

</comment><comment><USER13> this was fun, I couldnt think it would be something I use but it was fun to sit and watch what I was playing come up (or in most cases not found)

finding lyrics isnt something I particularly need a lot, but the interapplication communication was very smooth, I have spotify scrobling to last.fm to update your web app which is pretty impressive, seems like you could make a pretty good karaoke app out of this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Got the "We don't have lyrics for this song :(" message in every track I listened...

The idea is very interesting, but you need a better lyrics database.

</comment><comment><USER15> I love the idea, but you should look into the legal implications. Copyright of lyrics can be a little touchy.

</comment><comment><USER16> nice app, what's the revenue model?, or is it a 'just for fun' app? .. unfortunate that it doesn't have more lyrics, but it's in beta and rome wasn't built in a day ... best of luck with it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Just for fun for now, but the obvious revenue model would be buying songs or cd's. I want to expand it, first :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> three letter nicks doesn't work :|

</comment><comment><USER18> Sorry, but this seems incredibly useless to me. It's dependent on two other services (Last.fm and Twitter), and it provides no value other than the ego- boost that comes from posting to Twitter. Additionally, the problem it solves is not really a problem; if you're on Last.fm I assume you can type in the title and artist on Google and get the lyrics that way. You have to deliver value to your users, and I'm just not seeing how this would accomplish that.

Perhaps there's something I'm missing here, though, because everyone else seems to love it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here my take on it, from the blogpost I wrote about it:

 _Finding lyrics has been a longstanding pet-peeve of mine. A lot of music players don't allow to you easily copy the title and artist so you have to manually type them into Google. Once you're there, most sites are cluttered and spammy. Way too annoying._

As for posting lyrics To facebook or Twitter: This is something a lot of people (mostly teens) do. Having to do the above, copy and paste it (if the website doesn't use some stupid iframe-trick!), formatting it and then going to facebook or twitter to post is annoying, Lystener is a nice shortcut. :)</comment></comment>


Why pricing by logins for a support tool is nuts - <AUTHOR> http://blog.supportbee.com/2011/07/28/why-pricing-by-logins-for-a-support-tool-is-nuts/

<comment><USER2> "is actually lying to you"

I really don't like accusations of lying even if it is accurate (not the case here). I think we need to clean up our discourse and treat people with the benefit of the doubt as much as we can. Public conversations have become so coarse and argumentative.

<comment><USER3> @pbreit Most companies (not going to name names) know involving people or an entire team is what is needed to deliver great support but put in efforts to cap usage in that direction to make more money(which is okay). The lie here is how they claim they are by what they are doing helping their customers offer awesome support. Our contention is there are more sensible ways to monetize and we have no qualms calling a lie a lie.

<comment><USER2> Fine. But a company can charge per seat and still legitimately claim to "help you deliver great support". Saying that's a "lie" really bugs me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pricing via accounts might be suboptimal, but pricing by tickets? This way the useless tickets of people having problems with third party software and still asking me for help will hurt me even more.

Not only do they waste my time then, they also waste my money.

And if I wanted to annoy somebody I knew was using a pay-per-ticket account, I could quickly write up a small script to submit thousands of bogus tickets.

Charging for a resource entirely under control of others and not at all under your control seems to be a bad thing for me.

<comment><USER3> Spam needn't be taken into account. Also, the tiers can be based on a range - let's say upto 500 tickets, between 500 and 1000 and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Similar thoughts from last year.. [http://rrajkumar.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/why-freemium- prici...](http://rrajkumar.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/why-freemium-pricing- model-for-crm-online-databases-needs-to-change/)

Software is turning into a commodity and will eventually be priced like one.</comment>


Falsehoods Programmers Believe - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jameslk/awesome-falsehoods <comment><USER2> A couple years ago, a user of one of my software told me "I can't find some customers in the software, when I type their name nothing happen. It seems it only happens with the new Chinese students!".

Those Chinese customers all had 2 letters last name (mostly 'Xi' I think) but when I developed the software I thought any last name would be at least 3 letters long and to avoid taxing the database, I didn't start autocompletion before 3 letters where entered in the textbox.

Now the search starts at 2 letters, but I fully expect to find a one letter last name customer before retirement ;)

<comment><USER3> Depending on how you encode names and what you define as a "letter", many Korean last names are single characters (Lee: 이, Park: 박, Kim: 김), though they're usually transliterated into multiple letters (Oh, not O). Every Korean "character" has multiple "letters", but they treated as one entity most of the time (like Chinese characters).

Personally, I wouldn't risk it and would just make single character lookups reasonably fast. I doubt the number of relevant records exceed 100k, so the savings shouldn't be significantly enough to bother with. However, I've seen worse things done with poorer justifications.

<comment><USER2> All the names are transliterated in Latin alphabet, when the passports are delivered I guess.

The system is already quite slow as is (the DB is distant and on an underpowered server) so I don't want to tax it even more. What I may do next change is to cache locally all names at the start of the client and hit the DB only when it didn't find the name in the cache.</comment></comment></comment>


How Apple Has Rethought a Gospel of the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/technology/internet/11every.html <comment><USER2> If open platforms are the most innovative environments, then why is the closed iPhone platform so innovative?

 _by just about any measure, the iPhone software platform has been, out of the gate, the most innovative in the history of computing. More than 150,000 applications have been created for it in less than two years_

I'm not arguing that it wouldn't be better if the iPhone platform were more open, I think it would most certainly be better. But isn't it curious that iPhone developers have been so prolific?

<comment><USER3> I know from personal experience as a sometime working artist that limitations create a known space where creative attentions can focus less diffusely on the work at hand, which often has the effect of strengthening the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the final result. A lack of limitations, where 'anything goes', in common creativity (to distinguish it from those rare instances of exceptional creativity, where all bets can seem to be off) can be overwhelming. In art at least, and I suspect in good app creation as well, giving the creative impulse every opportunity to focus closely on the important details of the work will increase the chances that the work will end up with the qualities we most admire in well-crafted pieces of whatever medium: clarity, cohesion, efficiency, simplicity, elegance, among other qualities; that those of us who dwell in the modern era so admire.</comment></comment>


Azure Functions vs. AWS Lambda – Scaling Face Off - <AUTHOR> https://www.azurefromthetrenches.com/azure-functions-vs-aws-lambda-scaling-face-off/ <comment><USER2> Wow, that is pretty substantial difference between AWS and Azure. I'm pretty confident Microsoft is hard at work getting these numbers better, but it shows just how lonely AWS is at the top. I'm pretty deep into AWS-land but I'm rooting for the boys & girls in Redmond; more competition == better service.

<comment><USER3> Concur; despite being so deep in AWS I've drowned here, competition makes all of the offerings in this space better. It'd be nice to have a migration strategy in my back pocket if I needed it; today that's a bit of a pipe dream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "On Azure I'm using .NET 4.6 on the v1 runtime while on AWS I'm using the same code running under .NET Core 1.0."

.NET Core has way less baggage than .NET 4.6 [1] so you'd be expecting AWS to come out ahead.

It looks like Azure functions supports .NET Core now [2]. (Edit: just noticed the author is aware of this [3].)

Of course it might also be Blob storage having higher latency than S3.

Having used Azure Functions before I agree with the article's criticisms about scaling.

[1] [https://www.ageofascent.com/2016/02/18/asp-net-core- exeeds-1...](https://www.ageofascent.com/2016/02/18/asp-net-core- exeeds-1-15-million-requests-12-6-gbps/) Mind this article is talking about comparing ASP.NET with ASP.NET Core, and .NET with .NET Core, not just .NET Core's performance.

[2] [https://github.com/Azure/Azure- Functions/issues/98](https://github.com/Azure/Azure-Functions/issues/98)

[3] [https://www.azurefromthetrenches.com/azure- functions-v2-prev...](https://www.azurefromthetrenches.com/azure- functions-v2-preview-performance-issues-net-core-standard/)

<comment><USER5> He also compares AWS Lambda with Azure blob storage backend and it still lot faster - just 25ms added latency to cross internet from AWS to Azure DC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My experience so far on Google Cloud has been just as bad. I want a simple app that ingests DMARC reports.

\- Google Cloud Functions can't ingest e-mail. Also, JS lockin if you care about which platforms are supported.

\- Google App Engine can only ingest e-mail in the Standard environment. OK, fine. But the standard environment regularly takes almost a full minute to load and boot my app, after which the request is killed for taking too long. Additionally, the sample code (!) for opening new Stackdriver contexts breaks with a totally inscrutable error message.

You can say "well, maybe your app sucks", but it's been running on AWS (SES + Lambda) for months and every aspect about it has been painless.

<comment><USER7> Use Mailgun to trigger a POST to your Cloud Function on receiving an email. Bonus: all the parsing is done for you.

<comment><USER8> I don't know how magic is in Cloud Functions, but I personally set up Mailgun postbacks in AWS and it was a huge pain in the ass to configure correctly. I'd love I know if google does something differently that would have been easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do you know how Google Cloud Functions compares with AWS and Azure?

<comment><USER10> If you're going to be handling http requests it's almost a given you'll be using AppEngine rather than Cloud Functions. Still "serverless" but more tools and languages to choose from.

<comment><USER11> AppEngine is more like a PaaS and not like 'serverless'

<comment><USER12> This. AppEngine assumes an "always on" mentality and is far from "pay for use" unless your "use" is 24/7.

<comment><USER13> AppEngine standard can actually scale down to 0 instances when not in use to save money. Still very different from a serverless architecture though.

<comment><USER14> Not the flexible environment iirc. Which is basically the reasonable env to expect, now. Standard env has some aging issues that keep getting worse. most notably jvm 7, if that's your poison, but just all round crippled env lacking standard libs and with lock in substitutions.

As far as I remember, that is..

<comment><USER15> Java 8 is now supported with the full standard library: [https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java/runtim...](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java/runtime- java8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This face-off will be a lot more meaningful in a couple months when we can have both serverless platforms running on .Net Core 2.0. I do look forward to reading the results of that updated face off.

<comment><USER16> I'm personally leaning towards using AWS Lambda for .Net because unlike Azure it will also support ASP.NET.

<comment><USER17> In general, from the perspective of a dev in a MS-shop, AWS gives you a bit more 'responsibility' for infrastructure than Azure, but that level of control lets you get further in practice sooner.

Azure has a lot of great things going for it, but I've had a lot of issues getting newer tech out on it without considerable delay. I hope both Azure and GCE give AWS a run for their money in coming years :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The biggest issue with Azure functions is the pricing model where you have to provision and pay for servers to execute your functions... How is that serverless?

<comment><USER16> You don't have to provision servers with Azure Functions - but you optionally can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone know if any of these services provide the ability to cycle between IPs? One of the use cases for Lambda (and now Azure Functions) is in web scraping where companies get mad if you access them too many times from a single address. Lambda made it clear while they do use a lot of IPs you're not guaranteed to get distribution among them.

Seems like a long shot but I figured this is a good place to bring it up.

<comment><USER16> I have the same question. Not for scraping but for APIs that are rate-limited by IP address. Like some Google APIs. I certainly wouldn't count on IP distribution from getting around limits for long. Anyway, I'm more interested in understanding how, if at all, we will have to tweak our client code to be well-behaved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting article, but you don't mention what tier of AppService plan you tested against in Azure (or what memory limit your Lambdas had)? I would also be curious to see the same comparisons, but with Azure Functions in consumption mode which, despite the perceived drawbacks you mention, would really be the closer apples-to-apples test, wouldn't it?

</comment><comment><USER21> Does AWS have first class fully production Python yet? In Azure a single import (pydocumentdb) took a function up to 20-30s on Python, I guess they're serious about it being experimental still sadly. Rewriting in Node it takes 50ms for the entire run, crazy difference.

</comment><comment><USER22> I do like the "durable functions" concept in Azure preview. AWS has step functions, but coding in flowcharts isn't scalable.

</comment><comment><USER23> My money is going to the innovators and first movers, regardless.

<comment><USER24> That mindset doesn't change these numbers then seeing that AWS released Lambda in 2014...years ahead.

<comment><USER23> Have to agree with that part, and am in no way taking away from the commendable engineering on the Azure side. But as a developer, it makes more sense for me to invest time and effort getting good at the platform that innovates faster - and the pace at which AWS has been getting out new functionality in the platform has been breathtaking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The fact that Azure provides no SLA for functions apps running under consumption plans is clear evidence that it's not ready for production use.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, there's no formal Lambda SLA either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Did anyone try Bluemix Functions?

</comment><comment><USER27> so does this mean that the cold run startup time thing has really been improved enough to build web applications? To me that is the biggest killer in moving forward, not knowing what the end users experience is going to be like because of cold startups that forces a user to wait a long time.

From the article's data, it's really tempting to use AWS Lambda now given this benchmark.

</comment><comment><USER28> Never ever use averages in your stats. Use medians and percentiles.

Averages are a meaningless stat especially if you benchmark.

<comment><USER29> I would say leave the average in but also show standard deviation and 95th percentile average. Of course it is still very unlikely that Azure Functions would come out on top in this case.

<comment><USER30> What leads you to believe performance follows a normal distribution?

For a given especially slow request would you expect a corresponding especially fast request?

<comment><USER31> Standard deviation applies to all distributions, not just the normal distribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> this is absolutely not a function of Azure vs AWS, the perf diff is completely between .Net Framework (which was used on Azure) and .Net Core (which was used on AWS). This compares Apples and Watermelons.

[https://www.ageofascent.com/2016/02/18/asp-net-core- exeeds-1...](https://www.ageofascent.com/2016/02/18/asp-net-core- exeeds-1-15-million-requests-12-6-gbps/)

[http://codinggorilla.domemtech.com/?p=1499](http://codinggorilla.domemtech.com/?p=1499)

<comment><USER33> Is .Net Core available on Azure functions? If not, then the comparison is an accurate snapshot of the current status.

<comment><USER34> In preview. [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/roadmap/azure-functions- su...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/roadmap/azure-functions-support-for- net-core/)

<comment><USER35> And the performance is dreadful: [https://www.azurefromthetrenches.com/azure- functions-v2-prev...](https://www.azurefromthetrenches.com/azure- functions-v2-preview-performance-issues-net-core-standard/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chef behind 'dark kitchen' says UberEats made him 'invisible', leaving him broke - <AUTHOR> https://www.news.com.au/finance/small-business/chef-behind-dark-kitchen-says-ubereats-made-him-invisible-leaving-him-broke-and-730000-in-debt/news-story/93888b78308d67e303a7144b1c253b53 <comment><USER2> Guy sounds like an idiot because he was relying on one food delivery service to survive, especially without a contract. Uber's customer service is among the worst. If someone likes a particular location they'll order it regardless of the platform. Sounds like he just wanted someone to blame for his own incompetence.</comment>


Electromagnetic Field, a Hacker/Maker Camp for the UK - Hack a Day - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2012/08/03/electromagnetic-field-camp/ Friday 31st August – Sunday 2nd September 2012 in the UK. "There will be people talking about everything from genetic modification to electronics, blacksmithing to high-energy physics, reverse engineering to lock picking, crocheting to carpentry, and quadcopters to beer brewing. Events and activities will run throughout the day and into the evening, everything else (chats, debates, impromptu circus performances, orbital laser launches) will run as long as your collective energy lasts." <comment><USER2> I'm one of the organisers of EMF, if you've got any questions fire away!

We're still accepting speakers and workshops, drop us an email on email@example.com if you'd like to present something.</comment>


Russia Bans the Internet Archive's 'Wayback Machine' - <AUTHOR> https://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/06/25/russia-bans-the-internet-archives-wayback-machine/

<comment><USER2> When I saw the headline my first thought was: "The Russian government has now become aware of the horrible new infinite scroll design, and want to avoid additional elevated blood pressure in the population, by shielding it from this design disaster", but after reading the article I found out it wasn't the case.

</comment><comment><USER3>
        *Correction: This article previously stated that the entire domain and IP address for the Internet Archive were added to the banned websites registry. In fact, only the webpage with alleged extremist content was added.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Catso. I did not see this correction. It's in grey and at the bottom of the article, which is a bit silly.</comment></comment>


RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP Addresses - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-someone-else-is-pirating-through-out-ip-addresses-111221/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak)

<comment><USER2> So they won't mind when the people they accuse en mass say the same thing, then? It would be nice if some of the things they pirated were some independent works, and the author would come out and sue them. If he loses, he would at least set a precedent so they can't mass-sue people again based on their IP addresses. EFF could help with the lawsuit costs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Uhh, uhh, excuse me? Don't they shoot people down for using the "neighbours are using my wifi" line in court all the time? I DO actually let my neighbours use my wifi and they're cool about it and don't abuse it.

Yeah, spoofing an IP is possible, but it's MUCH more likely that someone connecting via RIAA offices is running torrents, probably on a laptop they take home or something (though I've seen some pretty stupid corporate users running torrents at work.)

Hypocrisy much?

</comment><comment><USER4> Can't wait until SOPA lets us eliminate the RIAA from the internet without any due process at all.

<comment><USER3> 1.) Copyright "copyright" 2.) Send SOPA demand to RIAA web server hosting company 3.) ??? 4.) Flawless Victory.

<comment><USER5> FFS I want to see this happen. We can do it. Then do bigger things, serve these notices to online music stores. Bascially make buying something legally impossible due to SOPA. It would be wonderful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That sounds like something a pirate would say.</comment>


At a Steel Plant, Layoffs and a Request: Train Your Replacement - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000005007829/layoffs-steel-plant-rexnord-mexico.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> I have had to interview, recommend, and train a replacement before when I involuntarily separated from the employer. One key factor is that the employer did not cause this separation.

The big difference is that I am in software. My industry is highly portable and the jobs are in incredible demand. Essentially, I wasn't hurt by this separation.

Always have a backup plan. I have a backup career in an unrelated industry. When you rely upon a single source of truth for all your (and your family's) welfare you are at greater risk of losing everything.

</comment><comment><USER3> (video, 14 minutes)</comment>


You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-deleted-your-cookies-think-again/

<comment><USER2> Unmentioned in the fluff article: Since flash cookies are set in a user-global location, they are the same live across all browsers. As an added bonus, they completely defeat "private browsing" everywhere I've tried it.

<comment><USER3> Including the Chrome 'Incognito' mode?

<comment><USER4> Not an expert, but I'd imagine so. Unless they do some wicked hackery, Chrome can't restrict what a Flash plugin executable does with an SWF file.

<comment><USER3> Is there an easy way to test this?

<comment><USER5> Play this (addicting) game in Firefox - <http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bells.htm>. It will record your high score. Open Chrome in incognito mode, die quickly, and see that it has kept your high score from Firefox.

<comment><USER6> CCleaner works well at deleting all those cookies that sneak by private browsing.

<comment><USER7> Not flash visited sites. It may have deleted Flash cookies but the flash check cookies link listed here still shows sites after a CCleaner run.

See <http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=22980>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To see your Flash Cookies, go to [http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...](http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html)

<comment><USER9> Wow, horrible application. First, Chrome gave me warning that ActionScript is too slow. And when you click on 'tabs', a new page is loaded even though it's a flash application! And why do they need a separate page for this? Why is it not accessible when I right click a Flash movie?

<comment><USER10> <em>"Why is it not accessible when I right-click a Flash movie?"</em>

It is... the context menu always holds at minimum a "Settings" link.

For "Why is it on a webpage instead of in the SWF?", it's because Flash is part of a webpage, and is often not sized large enough to display a dialog. Unlike a browser, Flash has no chrome of its own -- it's a component.

For "Why isn't this integrated with the new browser privacy controls?", this is a work item now that browsers offer privacy controls... a Mozilla example: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508167> <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290456>

<comment><USER9> jd, you do not get these privacy settings control when you select 'Settings' by right clicking on Flash. Those 'Settings' let you control microphone/web cam usage. You have to again click on 'Advanced' link on one of the tab, which will lead you to this page. My question is, why do I have to go to a Macromedia hosted page to change privacy settings of Flash player installed on my computer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess this is still irrelevant if you use FlashBlock. I know I've seen many sites that don't obviously use Flash, except for the existence of a flashblock item in the top-left corner - my guess at the time was that it was tracking.

<comment><USER12> Not _totally_ irrelevant, I assume you sometimes enable a flash embed or two. Just because it plays a movie (or whatever) doesn't mean it isn't tracking you, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unix's everything is a file versus Adobe:

      ln -s /dev/null ~/.macromedia
      ln -s /dev/null ~/.adobe

Winner: Unix

</comment><comment><USER14> If you want, you can delete your flash cookies using the BetterPrivacy Firefox Add-On: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623>

Should delete globally so you can use it even if you don't use Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER15> One comment suggests running the browser in a virtual machine and restoring from a snapshot at the beginning of each session, which is also what I do and has worked out well. Using Virtualbox, the bookmarks file can be separately mounted on a so-called writethrough image to allow persistent updates. There are some difficulties with the shared clipboard but ssh between the host and vm is a workaround.

</comment><comment><USER16> yet another reason not to install Flash.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm wondering if there's some similar permanent iPhone ID available to apps.

I did a 'full wipe' on my iPhone3g and gave it to my sister -- but then when she installed Pandora, it started pre-logged-in to my account. The only mechanisms I can imagine for that are (1) (less likely) an app-addressable storage area, like cookies, that's spared the 'full wipe'; (2) a permanent device ID that apps can use as if it were an unerasable, global cookie.

<comment><USER18> [[UIDevice currentDevice] uniqueIdentifier]

<comment><USER17> Thanks. I accept that installed apps have privileged access to such per-device IDs, and can see why Pandora finds it useful... but it seems there should be some guidance against such use, or a mechanism for breaking such associations after a 'full wipe'. (Perhaps, the last part of the ID is an counter that increments each wipe.)

My sister seeing my Pandora stations is no big deal but if it had instead been a stranger I'd sold the unit to, that'd be more of a concern... and if other apps do the same thing, more important personal information could be at risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wonder what happens if you use Flashblock?

</comment><comment><USER20> Finally... this has been blogged about for at least a year.

[http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/online-gambling- priva...](http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/online-gambling-privacy- iesnare)</comment>


What Powers Step-By-step Code Tutorial Websites? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know if there are any tools/frameworks for building the functionality for step-by-step code tutorial websites (bonus if it has an interactive code editor where the user can see what they're doing reflected as they code). Or are these things custom made in-house?<p>A good example is O'Reilly Oriole: https://www.oreilly.com/learning/regex-golf-with-peter-norvig or CodeAcademy. <comment><USER2> I built justalgorithms.com with node.js</comment>


Master statistician weaves Google images into visual quilts - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/14/5103104/make-your-own-collages-straight-from-google-search <comment><USER2> This is an interesting proof of concept of Tufte's ideas around dense imagery and visualization. Beyond that I'm kinda underwhelmed.</comment>


Developers Are Still Building For Apple's iOS Over Android By A Factor Of 2-to-1 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/07/yep-developers-are-still-building-for-apples-ios-over-android-by-a-factor-of-2-to-1/ <comment><USER3> I am increasingly surprised that anyone bothers to make Android apps.

I have a successful kids app on iOS that I recently ported to Android. The Android version made 5% of what the iOS version made last month.

If rankings are anything to go by then virtually nobody can be making money from paid Android apps. During its first week, my app peaked at 50 sales in one day on the Amazon app store. That put it at #120 of _ALL PAID APPS_ and #3 in kids apps just under some Dora app. The app is now idling around #400 of all paid apps with around 10 sales a day. By way of comparison, I need to sell around 100 copies a day to break into the top 400 of all paid apps in the US on just the iPad rankings.

So, from a purely financial perspective, why are people writing Android apps?

<comment><USER4> So based on 1 data (from your own app), your conclusion is that it is not worth building apps on Android in spite of more than a 100 million devices out there.

Is it possible there are already established apps on Android in your category?

Do you think it would be different if you actually ported your app at least a year ago?

<comment><USER5> I think the problem is that this application was released solely on the Amazon App Store whereas most Android users are purchasing from Google Play.

edit: apparently this is not the case, though the OP didn't make that clear initially

<comment><USER3> The app is on Google Play also. It sells more on the Amazon store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't see anywhere in the original flurry report, what is the number of ios and Android apps using their service. Shouldn't this relevant information be clear somewhere? What if there are just more.people who chose to use flurry for ios? I'm an Android dev and haven't even heard of them before.

<comment><USER7> Flurry is very popular also on Android. About 6.5% of all apps, and 28% of the top 500 Android apps use it. See here for more details: <http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev>

<comment><USER6> But how exactly does that compare to their ios popularity? Without knowing that, we are comparing apples to oranges.

<comment><USER7> Yes. The AppBrain report is for Android only, however it shows that Flurry is widely used in Android apps.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure I'd consider 6.5% "widely used". How many use Google Analytics?

<comment><USER7> Google Analytics is in 6.9% of Android apps. For an Android library this means it is quite widely used, since there are only two more popular libraries. (Admob SDK (34%) and the Facebook SDK (7.5%))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In other news, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace hit 100,000 app submissions faster than Android's Play, and a bit slower than Apple's App Store. [http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/news/item/14960_100000_apps_...](http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/news/item/14960_100000_apps_published_to_Windo.php)

<comment><USER10> I think Microsoft took a really interesting strategy for enticing developers to come develop for the platform. Rather than hold a $1M prize competition (a la Android), they went in a similar direction to the offerings that RIM used for the playbook.

Instead of just giving away a device though, Microsoft really gamified the experience by offering several different prizes (including pre-paid credit cards) and tiers based on the number of apps developed. I think this really helped draw the college crowd in.

They also approached individual companies who have successful applications on other platforms and offered to pay them large good amounts of money to develop for the platform.

It seems like throwing all that money around really did work out for them in the end :).

<comment><USER8> Google could've really used a similar approach for tablet apps. I find Google's lack of attention towards Android tablet apps very frustrating. It's one of the main reasons, if not _the_ main reason why Android tablets are generally still not considered very good competitors to the iPad. And if the situation really is better than we think its, then they are doing a very poor job at promoting it. This, plus the botched launch of Honeycomb and the expensive tablets running it, really hurt the momentum for Android tablets, and they are still suffering for it.

Google needs to learn how to do launches properly, and they should keep in mind that developer support from day one is extremely important. Apple had like 2000 apps for the iPad in the first days or weeks after launch, because they announced the tablet 2 months ahead, and made the SDK available right away, too. And made the iPhone developers very excited about porting their apps to the iPad. In contrast, Google released the SDK like literally a day before the Motorola Xoom launched (which cost $800 at launch - <USER2> extremely dumb move. Asus Transformer was $400 a few months later, and a better device, too), and then everyone started talking about the lack of tablet apps on Honeycomb. Would it have killed them to get the developer support _before_ launch, like Apple? I get really frustrated when I see Google making obvious mistake after obvious mistake like this.

<comment><USER11> I sold my Galaxy Tab 10.1 to buy an iPad 3 when they came out, mainly because of the lack of tablet-optimized apps. 9 months into owning it the app situation wasn't any better than on day one, and I gave up.

At least as of mid-March, Google didn't even have a tablet-optimized version of the Google+ app. It was still just a stretched version of the phone view, just like most every other Android app on a tablet would look.

If G+ is supposedly the hub of Google's product strategy going forward, and G+ doesn't have a good experience on tablets, it makes me wonder if they really even care at all about the tablet platform at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> looking at the actual announcement from flurry.com, it seems that the company does not have any data indicating what platforms developers build Apps for.

They just know how popular their own SDK is on both platforms.

There are many reasons of course why flurry could be more popular on iOS than on Android: What SDK was available first? how is it advertised? how well does the competition do?

On Android, flurry competes with Google Analytics, which Google advertises in the Android documentation, developer blog and support pages.

Similar misleading is when they write about "Fragmentation". They list a long list of different devices that their customer's apps are running on. But they have no idea if developers run into any issues when supporting these many devices. How is it fragmentation if you can target many devices and operating systems with a single code base? Isn't this more like the opposite of fragmentation?

</comment><comment><USER13> There's so much FUD in this article it's blinding.

</comment><comment><USER14> HTML5 <3

</comment><comment><USER15> There is no doubt that iOS is more lucrative than Android for many classes of apps, but come on: who takes these Flurry reports seriously?

Flurry pimps an analytics tool that is very popular on iOS, less popular on Android. Their intrinsic bias towards iOS, reflecting this, is amply evident by the narrative they add every time they release these trolling "studies" of laughable methodology (100% of the women married to me think I'm the best, therefore 100% of women think I'm the best) -- their disdain for Android, and pandering to iOS, could not be more evident.

Let's just look at the gross numbers -- if 4x more developers are building for iOS, based upon Flurry being implemented in apps, then the iOS App Store will be growing by 4x the pace. Is that true? I'll let the reader discern, but add the subtle hint that...ha ha...no, not even close.

<comment><USER12> "who takes these Flurry reports seriously?"

The sad answer is (according to techmeme):

MacRumors, Marketing Land, The Next Web, 9to5Google, 9to5Mac, Business Insider, TechCrunch, PadGadget, IntoMobile, Appolicious Advisor, Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News, memeburn, Gruber, Siegler.</comment></comment>


CSS3 Transitions Without Using :hover - <AUTHOR> http://www.impressivewebs.com/css3-transitions-without-hover/

<comment><USER2> I hope I'm not unfounded in saying that there seems to be a trend developing where we're trying to ply out of CSS novel and interesting ways to define the behavior of a page. But doesn't that parallel the issues surrounding visually oriented markup in HTML (i.e. defining the font, background color, etc.)? HTML is for structure, CSS for presentation, and Javascript for behavior, no?

Apart from my concern, the results are impressive as well as appealing.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't really call transitions behavior considering that they don't change the state of the page, and degrade gracefully.

Now, CSS3 animations might be a different kettle of fish entirely, I haven't looked too closely at them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was pleasantly surprised to see that :focus and :active sort of work in IE8. IE7 none.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a really top notch article.</comment>


Top 15 commands for data Manipulation in R - <AUTHOR> http://emumba.com/blog/2017-03-13-top-15-commands-for-data-manipulation-in-r/ <comment><AUTHOR> R is one of the most widely used programming languages for data and statistical analysis. At eMumba we use R heavily to make sense out of data, to find patterns and for general exploratory data analysis. [http://emumba.com/blog/2017-03-13-top-15-commands-for- data-m...](http://emumba.com/blog/2017-03-13-top-15-commands-for-data- manipulation-in-r/)</comment>


Search Any PDF Books and Tutorials - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5209739/search-pdf-finds-and-opens-pdf-books-and-tutorials

<comment><USER2> It would perhaps have been nice to post the link to the PDF search site directly, rather than link to the post that links to the search engine.

For those too lazy to read the article, here it is: <http://search-pdf- books.com/></comment>


Show HN: A color scheme generator for uncommon colors - <AUTHOR> https://poolors.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> just my small quarantine project. It occurred to me that there are a set of colors that designers like to overuse, and recently there has been a design trend of picking "ugly" or uncommon colors to stand out (eg. the dropbox re- brand). This app basically generates color combinations that avoid the common clusters in palette space.

the raw data for this was sourced from dribbble, here's a tensorboard visualization: [https://poolors.com/projector/](https://poolors.com/projector/)

the visualized data is composed of dribbble designs which predominantly uses 2 colors, forming a 6 dimensional vector space in CIE Lab colorspace. After running t-sne for a bit, some interesting patterns emerge: [https://imgur.com/AusbusY](https://imgur.com/AusbusY) \- there's a pretty distinct cluster of dribbble intro shots, and to me it looks like most designs use analogous or monochrome color schemes with little hue variation.</comment>


Show HN: faasd – Lightweight OSS Serverless - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/openfaas/faasd <comment><USER2> Thanks for this link! This is something I definitely want to take a closer look at. ([https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2020/05/serverless- fassd/](https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2020/05/serverless-fassd/))</comment>


Show HN: Lo – Ask and answer "Where you at?" with one tap - <AUTHOR> https://lo-yo.co

<comment><USER2> Love the idea and project, but I have to admit, you missed an amazing opportunity to call it "Yo-Lo" and parody off that awful (popular) phrase used in pop culture... Haha :) Keep it up. Downloaded the app, and am getting some other friends on there too!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! Glad to hear someone enjoys the app as much as we do :). Apple actually wouldn't approve the app with "Yo" in the name, so we decided to run with just "Lo" instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> also really love the idea (have not tried this).

to me, this seems like if you can get past patent issues and get it fully to market this would be a no brainer acquisition for FB messenger.

I couldn't see myself using this as a standalone app but would definitely use it as a feature within another app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We're excited to keep moving forward with the project whether that means integration with other apps or building out Lo itself. It's great though to see people enjoying the app we originally built just to keep track of our team :).</comment></comment>


Open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals   - <AUTHOR> http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/02/06/openaccess_is_t.html

<comment><USER2> He misses the simplest, easiest, and most effective action anyone can take:

 _Don't do reviews for locked-down journals._

<comment><USER3> Danah Boyd is a she.

<comment><USER2> As I am sure you are aware, "he" is the correct English way to refer to someone of unknown sex. (Though to be honest, I have been trying to switch to using "they")

<comment><USER3> You're thinking of indefinite pronouns ("If anyone wants to borrow this book, he can come to my office"). This is a different case - you're talking about a specific person whose sex you don't happen to know. 'The author' would have worked fine.

<comment><USER2> "I saw someone in the distance. He was riding a horse."

Wrong?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If authors only sell first digital/online rights, then they retain the opportunity to publish the material online later on.

There are any number of writer's handbooks that advise authors which rights they can sell / not sell.

Very good resource: SPARC: <http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml>

e.g., ONLINE Magazine's author guidelines point out: "Authors will be asked to sign a publication agreement prior to the editing process, granting to Information Today, Inc. the right to publish the article in ONLINE magazine in print and electronic formats. (Information Today, Inc. will copyright the issue to protect the entire issue as an entity.) The agreement also stipulates that the author not publish any version or excerpt of the article prior to, or for 90 days following, its publication in ONLINE." <http://www.infotoday.com/online/authors.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER5> I already do.</comment>