Signal is down since ~1 hour - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=signal%20down&src=typd <comment><USER2> Came here to post [https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Android/issues/7460](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/7460)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/824cci/signal_down/](https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/824cci/signal_down/)

You were faster than me. This is a real bummer for me since I use Signal daily. First thought was that my signal installation was broken (since I had some problems with it yesterday).

<comment><AUTHOR> The main problem for me is the lack of transparency, and communication. Shit happens, but you shouldn't let your users alone in the dark.

<comment><USER2> Couldn't agree more. This is why I would like a federated service. Right now I'm testing riot as well, but it was such a hassle to get people to use signal that I didn't even want to start to try to persuade people to try it with me. It's really annoying that I still use more than one messenger (xmpp, riot, signal, irc), but at least I can still communicate with some of my peers.

Back to the signal topic my first thought was that they just didn't have time to react yet since it's before 4am in the US, but they changed the DNS entry of the signal gateway so I guess it's maybe a DDOS? First people are asking for a service page [https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Android/issues/7461](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/7461)

Anyway it's up again. Hopefully there will be a writeup

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just got a couple of messages through; not sure if it's back or if it's an intermittent/congestion problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> btw Telegram is down also in many regions

EDIT: there is speculation it's Chinese DDoS since today is day 1 of the first session of China's 13th National People's Congress? The very Congress meeting that is going to remove Xi's 2 term limit (dictator for life).

<comment><USER2> Yup was speculated in the github issue as well. Wouldn't jump to conclusions yet thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> yes, same in EU

back to WhatsApp and gotta try open source Wire which doesn't require phone, though i will still keep Signal as SMS client

<comment><USER2> Wire is already open sourced [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12148596](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12148596) and server [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302592) And article links [https://medium.com/@wireapp/wire-server-code-now-100-open- so...](https://medium.com/@wireapp/wire-server-code-now-100-open-source-the- journey-continues-88e24164309c) Here is the repo [https://github.com/wireapp](https://github.com/wireapp)

<comment><USER4> tried, they are kinda shady hiding email registration only for desktop and not allowing on mobile

in the end i have found there zero contacts although i know at least one of my contacts use it, tried also Telegram, found many of my Signal/WhatsApp contacts are there as well and same with Allo, tried also Skype lite bit horrible experience and again same contacts as my other combo minus 1-2, so all in all seem pointless to leave from WhatsApp and Signal could be replaced by regular SMS app</comment></comment></comment>


The case against Dropbox looks stronger with each passing day - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/22/9372563/dropbox-really-is-a-feature <comment><USER2> We have a product that competes with dropbox in enterprise file sharing and Sync space.We know dropbox has its challenges.But what I don't understand is why every dropbox bashing story talks about slack. Who is paying who and how much.The whole tech media is a big joke with zero ethics.

Another Slack post from the same author: [http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9349425/slack-future-of- co...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9349425/slack-future-of-conferences- xoxo-festival)

<comment><USER3> " whole tech media is a big joke with zero ethics." Maybe it's time for TechGate? Just pray that same media you fight against don't paint you like brocoder that hates stuff...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It certainly looks like Slack develops it's own file service, and pays authors for bashing Dropbox.

<comment><USER5> I agree, what's up with the repeated mentions of slack. It's like comparing Dropbox with Skype - they are 2 totally different utilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> DropBox will continue, but it may never expand to the size its owners originally hoped, due to free competition from Google Drive and OneDrive.

At least Drew Houston has avoided the problems of other online storage companies, like Mega's Kim Dotcom.</comment>


Modern CSS Explained - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/actualize-network/modern-css-explained-for-dinosaurs-5226febe3525 <comment><USER2> I would like to take this opportunity to confess that I was baffled by the use of the term float in CSS since inception. I vaguely thought it must have something to do with layers and you would float an image to the top layer.

It only occurred to me recently that float actually meant float from a 2d point of view. As in a side view of an aquarium, you attach float to an object, and it goes to the top of the tank, displacing water along the way. You can float it left, and right, etc... goes to the left and right of the top of the aquarium. Things line up at the top if you float multiples, etc.

I don't know if that is an appropriate analogy or not, but it seems to fit for me.

<comment><USER3> FWIW CSS simply adopted the term from publishing:

> A floating block in writing and publishing is any graphic, text, table, or > other representation that is unaligned from the main flow of text. Use of > floating blocks to present pictures and tables is a typical feature of > academic writing and technical writing, including scientific articles and > books. Floating blocks are normally labeled with a caption or title that > describes its contents and a number that is used to refer to the figure from > the main text.

> […]

> Floating blocks are said to be floating because they are not fixed in > position on the page at the place, but rather drift to the side of the page. > By placing pictures or other large items on the sides of pages rather than > embedding them in the middle of the main flow of text, typesetting is more > flexible and interruption to the flow of the narrative is avoided.

<comment><USER4> > unaligned [...] rather than embedding them in the middle of the main flow of > text

I don't understand. The first and simplest use of CSS float that I learned is to embed an image into the text flow, with the text wrapping around it, [http://allwebco-templates.com/support/S_textwrap.htm](http://allwebco- templates.com/support/S_textwrap.htm)

I always thought that was its original purpose. And it is its effect in its purest form --- when you set the float property and nothing else. (Using it to lay out a page in columns, as the article mentions, usually takes juggling other properties, like margin, width, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent! This is from the same author as "Modern JavaScript Explained For Dinosaurs"[1], that article got me much more closer to understanding the insane world of modern frontend development, I would recommend it to any other "dinosaurs" like me.

I'm very excited about modern CSS, I grew up in the crazy world of floats and the transition to responsive, new concepts like flexbox and grid are much more sensible approaches to layout design.

[1][https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern- javascript-...](https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript- explained-for-dinosaurs-f695e9747b70)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link, good and useful article indeed. What I miss from it though is an explanation of how to debug bundled or transpiled code. I am aware of the existence of source maps, but I've never used them. Until I am able to debug my code efficiently with source maps I cannot adopt bundling nor transcompilation for my projects. Does anyone have a good quality article or video that explains this?

<comment><USER7> I never used them myself but i thought the point of source maps was that the major browsers understand them; you load them in the browser on command, and can then debug from there, as you would normally with unbundled code

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excellent article for a dinosaur like me.

So much of CSS seems like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.

I've had to occasionally delve into webdev since 1994 and despite progress CSS still seems clunky.

Currently I am going through Udemy's Jonas Advanced CSS course

I love the idea of grid layouts, SCSS rocks, BEM sort of makes sense.

Still I hate the fact that I can't quickly iterate layout/design with CSS unless I am really proficient with CSS.

I do not want to keep all the CSS quirks in my head!

Reading questions like this(oldie but still): [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396145/how-to- vertically...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396145/how-to-vertically- center-a-div-for-all-browsers) makes me recoil in horror.

For one there is no software tool that can let someone visually move elements around and still produce reasonable CSS.

On one end you have mockup(Mockplus for one) and beginner(shades of Frontpage) level tools which produce monstrous write only CSS.

On other end you have regular developer tools(VS Code, browser dev tools etc), which do not really help you with layout.

So it seems for making SPA you need 3 people:

      1. Designer making mockups
      2. CSS expert converting said mockups to usable HTML/CSS
      3. Programmer actually working with DOM manipulation

My complaint is that when I am doing regular desktop development, I can wear all 3 hats only consulting designer ocassionally.

With webdev it seems incredibly hard to go alone.

SVG seeems such a normal standard compared to CSS.

<comment><USER9>
      > I do not want to keep all the CSS quirks in my head!

Some had to care about IE6, _that_ was the time you had to keep quirks in the head.

<comment><USER10> You've still got to deal with the fact that some browsers support some aspects of CSS Grid, some you have to fall back to Flexbox which doesn't work in the same way and you'll still use some grid system based around floats or display:table to capture everyone. More choice of ways to do the same thing, some very useful media queries, but most of the rest of it could have been done equally hackily in the late 90s.

If IE6 was bad, the fact that we're on the third or fourth generation of different implementations of CSS layout aiming to reproduce common layout styles achieved with HTML tables in the 90s and still need javascript polyfills to use them on non-autoupdating browsers still in widespread use is ridiculous

<comment><USER11> I'm intentionally not learning CSS Grid until it has good browser support. That way I only need to keep one thing in my head at a time, and I don't need to write a bunch of fallbacks. I did the same thing with Flexbox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This kind of tech writing — the historical/anthropological - especially wrt web tech is far more helpful to me than the technical & how-to docs etc.

Just knowing _why_ things are creates a much better context for me to place the knowledge, understanding and appropriate use for each property/feature etc.

<comment><USER13> I completely agree. I went down the rabbit hole a few months ago and started reading some of Dennis Ritchie's papers on his home page. I particularly liked the C history linked below. I found it interesting around how the limits of the memory drove creation of things like the ++ an -- operators. Limitation being the mother of invention it's amazing, at least to me, how far we have come in such a relatively short period of time.

[https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html](https://www.bell- labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone coming to web development from iOS development, CSS is the only thing I've really been struggling with. I just have such a hard time working with a model where changes aggregate around so much, so changes intended for one place end up messing something up elsewhere. Maybe I'm just not using it right? To me it just seems much saner that components (and the styling thereoff) are by default completely isolated from each other and their parents and children, and styling is only shared where you explicitly request it. Maybe this is due to the historical roots, where CSS is intended to style documents rather than apps? Maybe it's in the same category as JavaScript in that it's easy to hack something together that sorta works, but it takes a lot more overview and discipline to create something sane and maintainable? And where there are a ton of online resources that are outdated or will teach you bad habits?

<comment><USER15> > I just have such a hard time working with a model where changes aggregate > around so much, so changes intended for one place end up messing something > up elsewhere.

You're better off with functional/atomic css then, because the styles aren't cascading like css is typically used, which, while powerful, doesn't scale. As such, the classes defined in an atomic css framework are consistent and reusable everywhere. See for example, [http://tachyons.io/](http://tachyons.io/)

It maps much better to the programmer mindset, where we're typically generating dynamic content, and so generating the sets of style classes needed entails just using our usual code reuse techniques.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for the tip - this does indeed seem to map much more to the way I tend to think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Excellent article -- this kind of concise history is something beginners need now more than ever. Also, I think it's ridiculous that CSS could be considered the hardest language to learn but I can forgive the hyperbole.

One nitpick: I wish the article had started with a html file that used style properties to influence DOM nodes though -- the <link> tag is basically glossed over, could be a stumbling block.

</comment><comment><USER17> More of this sort of article please. This is the sort of thing I come to HN for.

</comment><comment><USER18> I also highly recommend this article, "CSS Utility Classes and "Separation of Concerns": [https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation- of-...](https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-concerns/)

This helps you wrap your head around semantic-vs-layout CSS and Functional/Atomic CSS

<comment><USER9> And then visit [http://www.csszengarden.com/](http://www.csszengarden.com/) (also metioned in the article) and take that article with a huge grain of salt. Especially with advent of CSS Grid some thing that were difficult do achieve because source ordering still had a play are much easier now.

To me it looks like people still don't take HTML and CSS seriously. By this I mean they do not think that it is worth understanding neither HTML nor CSS and "whatever Boostrap does" is good enough.

Looking at that "Atomic CSS" abdomination: maybe let's just bring back <font> and friends and be done with it.

Or people just forgot what web was for…

<comment><USER18> There's nothing abominable in the Atomic CSS. In order to achieve Zen Garden with Zen Garden approach you need a PHD in brain-bending. It's enough to open any of the CSS files in Zen Garden to see the amount of tedious repetitive manual work, where every single small element has to be manually tweaked and adjusted.

> Or people just forgot what web was for…

The web _was_ for simple text documents. News flash: the world has changed, and the web has changed, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This needs a part 2 on the history of the philosophy of CSS code. It should go through 4 eras:

Table and Frames - how layouting dominated the CSS school of thought

Grids and Frameworks - the mighty grid frameworks that gave you lots of stuff for free at the cost of the language itself (and your freedom)

CSS Themes - how SASS, naming conventions, and framework customization created the era of CSS theming

CSS Components - how we realized everything we did in the past was wrong, fixed up the language itself, and made styles servants to modular components, the way it should have been all along (spoiler alert: Javascript helped).

<comment><USER20> > CSS Components - how we realized everything we did in the past was wrong

Not really. This was born out of necessity - deeply nesting components within other components doesn't work so well when styling with broadly defined CSS selectors. So, we generate class names (or inline styles) directly in our application.

It comes with its own trade offs. I don't know that adding a build step and tightly coupling your styling with your DOM counts as "fixing" css, but I suppose it all depends on your perspective.

It's more like we kind of threw away one of the main principles of CSS and forced a completely new philosophy upon it.

<comment><USER21> This is the fundamental issue with most of the web technologies, though: we've taken a platform intended to essentially display documents with a tiny bit of interactivity and turned it into an operating system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In a similar fashion to the start of the article you have

1\. [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

2\. [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

3\. I wrote a slight further step for minimal forms/bootstrap [http://ianchanning.com/mofoforms/](http://ianchanning.com/mofoforms/)

<comment><USER23> I tried to do the same thing while keeping the same appearance between browsers. Tried to use some graceful degradation on some parts, but this articles really made think differently about the way I write css.

[https://imaginamundo.github.io/boilerform/](https://imaginamundo.github.io/boilerform/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I built my first website in 2003 on freewebs.com, and a couple more from 2004-2006. [0] [1] I remember "slicing" layouts in Macromedia Fireworks and Photoshop. You would draw rulers over the main components, and the program would generate a monstrosity of <table> tags to convert the layout to HTML. It was an improvement over Microsoft frontpage. At that time CSS was largely used for fonts and colors. I even had a feature on one of those websites where you could "switch layouts" by using a different css file with new colors.

Then developers started decrying the use of tables for layout, and sites like AListApart (referenced in this article) really pushed for more reliance on CSS. It seemed like we were then stuck in an uncanny valley from 2006-2015 when, even though some browsers supported modern flexbox/CSS3 features, you couldn't really use them if you wanted feature parity between browsers because so many users were stuck on older browsers due to enterprise upgrade rules.

What really improved css, and the web in general, is automatic browser updates. Chrome was the first to implement it and now its commonplace. Not only that, but the security community spent a decade shaming enterprises for rules against upgrading software. Now, finally, it seems like enterprises are realizing the insecure thing to do is _not_ upgrade.

It's an interesting interplay of pressure between chrome/Firefox browser devs and security community that got us to a place where a huge percent of browsers are the latest version. It really can't be understated how much this trend has helped frontend developer productivity the past few years.

[0] [http://web.archive.org/web/20040610011616/http://www.mainelo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040610011616/http://www.mainelobsters.org) This beauty got me 2nd place in the "maine student web design awards" for middle schoolers! You can see the layout switch if you choose "aqua" or "mid morning breeze". I think I actually implemented it with two different slicing layout. All the images are dead now, but you can see from where they were positioned what slicing used to look like.

[1] Ok, so probably nobody cares about this, but I'm enjoying the blast from the past... here was my second site the next year. This one didn't win the competition, which I think was due to my trash talking on the competition forums lol. [http://web.archive.org/web/20070104015744/http://www.splitat...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070104015744/http://www.splitatoms.com:80/sa/tutorials/view.php?id=30)

<comment><USER25> "I remember "slicing" layouts in Macromedia Fireworks"

I share this history, and while Fireworks _would_ export complete HTML, "responsible" web builders never allowed that. We would use the "slice" feature of Fireworks to manually export elements of our designs, and then using HTML/CSS we would create the layout code. Raw exports from Fireworks were horrendous, our hand-build layouts were lean, and worked great.

<comment><USER26> > I share this history, and while Fireworks would export complete HTML, > "responsible" web builders never allowed that.

I guess I wasn't responsible - I confess that I left DreamWeaver's output intact: those sweet, shiny rollover buttons where easier handled by mm_preloadImages() :-D.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If the end of the article made you curious about CSS-in-JS this is a great follow-up read about the why's and how's of putting your CSS into your JavaScript: [https://medium.com/seek-blog/a-unified-styling- language-d0c2...](https://medium.com/seek-blog/a-unified-styling- language-d0c208de2660)

Highly recommended!

<comment><USER28> This seems to be only useful for large teams building complex web apps. :P For everyone else, inline-css is a horrible idea.

<comment><USER29> It can actually help everyone to write CSS more quickly and in a scalable and structured way. Not saying that everyone should and needs to get on the CSS- in-JS train, but I'd certainly recommend any team of any size to investigate it.

Also, it doesn't have any association with inline-css and -styling. What all new CSS-in-JS libraries do is generate actual stylesheets in a performant and sensible manner.

<comment><USER28> >What all new CSS-in-JS libraries do is generate actual stylesheets in a performant and sensible manner.

Which web components will make obsolete. Therefore they are a temporary hack of sorts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I recommend Rachel Andrews "The New CSS Layout" for understanding everything in CSS layout: [https://abookapart.com/products/the-new-css- layout](https://abookapart.com/products/the-new-css-layout)

</comment><comment><USER31> I laugh every time I see the culmination of CSS has resulted in grid based layout. You mean, like tables?

<comment><USER28> Yes, but grid/css is _designed_ for layout. Tables was a bastardization of markup designed for data display. (ie, a table of data, like in a spreadsheet)

Unless you have truly dug into how awesome grid is, you can't really understand what it's done for the future of web design.

I will look up a short tutorial I ran into that really showed me the power/value of grid. (fyi, I use CSS daily in my work)

Edit: Here's one example. You could use tables, but this is incredibly flexible and with media queries you can completely manipulate the layout and position of the design based on the screen size. And the markup is incredibly light, it's fabulous for those of us who want more control and less work to do, _and_ less debugging of browser quirks.

[https://bitsofco.de/github-contribution-graph-css- grid/](https://bitsofco.de/github-contribution-graph-css-grid/)

<comment><USER32> Of course, the argument can also take it that HTML was designed to markup textual documents. Such that getting HTML to do what an SVG could easily have accomplished is a touch excessive. :)

I suspect there is a middle ground here. But I can't shake the feeling that as soon as you had to add all of the elements of the chart with javascript, the options were already high that you could have used another method just as easily.

As an example, this would not have been difficult with absolute positioning. See a crummy Rubik's cube I built using absolute positioning in [1]. I could have generated more of the styles using a loop construct in a programming language, so there is room for help, but we already had javascript for that.

[1] [http://taeric.github.io/cube- permutations-1.html](http://taeric.github.io/cube-permutations-1.html)

<comment><USER28> That's a neat example there. But with the grid example, it was more a technology demonstration to show the power of a css tool so new most people don't even know what it's capable of. (at least I didn't fully know)

So it inspires me to study more into grid. I avoid hacks like the plague, and it's saved me tons of effort, time and money, and even emotional stress. Grid is not a hack, but a full fledged solution to layout. It's how it should have been done to begin with, if we could have condensed 20 years of global css/html experience into an instant. :P

HTML is just a markup language, not a display language. Even an H1 element has styles set by the browser, without that, it wouldn't look any different than an H2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Useful to get an overview.

I tend to delegate a lot of this to 'whatever bootstrap does'. Does anyone know if bootstrap fits neatly with any of these methodologies?

<comment><USER34> Pretty solidly in the float schema / era. At least up to version 3. I started using CSS grid and haven't looked back except for the occasional polyfill.

<comment><USER35> Bootstrap 4 I believe has switched to Flexbox entirely, but the naming conventions have stayed the same for the most part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Just a minor note, in a couple of places there is "inherit" written where the author clearly intended to write "inherent".

</comment><comment><USER37> And this is just CSS. As a full time frontend dev (started it back in the days of table-based designs) sometimes I look into the mirror and honestly think that I'm a hero :D From mm_mouseover and Netscape Navigator to PWAs, electron apps, responsive layouts, REST apis, webpack, babel and object spread, the web today is getting dangerously close to rocket science.

<comment><USER38> Since 1996 I've been doing frontend work. First it was HTML with table layout, all the way up to modern js frameworks (although I prefer laravel). I've recently taken on doing a lot of backend work for the first time, and it finally clicked for me why people have had a hard time with CSS. It's a totally different mode of thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Finally, someone mentions SMACSS.

I learned about it a few years ago, but whenever I saw blog posts they mostly mentioned OOCSS and BEM. Meanwhile, I was more focused on SMACSS and was wondering if it became obsolete or what happend, but I coulnd't spot why OOCSS or BEM should be any better.

I am quite happy with SMACSS, but as that probably doesn't mean much, as those rule sets become crucial when you are working on a long term code base with a large team. So I would argue that SMACSS is probably a little harder to learn and produces a little higher quality. But while large code bases should always aim for maximum quality, using something which requires a few extra steps to learn ins't the best thing to be introduced to a large team.

</comment><comment><USER40> > To use Sass, you need to install Ruby

Nitpick: You don't need to. There is `sassc`, a Sass/SCSS compiler written in C (which is great for someone like me who hates Ruby with a burning passion). (The article surprisingly hints at this by mentioning libsass later on.)

<comment><USER41> This is a recent development however, the first few years of using SASS was with Ruby and more often than not Compass as well. In the context of what he's talking about he is not wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Its still not clear to me why native CSS doesn't/shouldn't support variables.

<comment><USER43> It does : [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/Using_CSS_v...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/Using_CSS_variables)

<comment><USER44> Pretty cool though < 80% supported as of now. [https://caniuse.com/#feat=css- variables](https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-variables)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Good read! This article is specially interesting for "dinosaurs" who have been coding html and css since the 1990's. It has been complicated to implement layout on web pages. Slowly it is getting better though.

</comment><comment><USER46> Very nice writeup! I like the fact that he explained both Flexbox and Grid, as they can both be misunderstood since in some cases they can be interchangeable, although they work quite differently.

If you like step-by-step guides, you might enjoy this tiny tutorial I made last year: [https://jgthms.com/web-design- in-4-minutes/](https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Remember the sliding doors button technique? Good times.

</comment><comment><USER48> What I've anyways wanted was a mixin-only Sass library so I can start with nice building blocks and still end up with bloat-free semantic CSS.

Today I found Kickstart ([http://getkickstart.com](http://getkickstart.com)), which seems to be an option if only it was more obviously maintained! Any others liked it out there?

<comment><USER49> Surprisingly, Bootstrap v4 may fit your bill. If you into the source, it's all scss and mixins, so you can freely pick and choose. Besides, it covers any possible corner case out there thanks to its massive adoption.

<comment><USER48> It's certainly all scss, but not all mixins. Ideally there'd be a framework that output nothing more than normalize.css until you used the mixins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I really liked this summary, and I recall having gone through some of these stages myself. Discovering BEM and ITCSS made my life a lot better. Even when building React apps now using CSS in JS I still try to maintain BEM style class names. It just feels right.

<comment><USER51> I quite like BEM (and SUIT, and OOCSS), but every single naming scheme is hard to enforce when it's just a 'process you must follow' type of system. There's nothing about BEM that stops me adding a .homepage__contactform-name style to a list item on the news page (apart from my colleagues rejecting the pull request or something). Consequently it's far too easy to use BEM very poorly especially when you're working under pressure.

Stylelint and PostCSS have postcss-bem-linter, but that just checks the name is in a BEM style rather than testing that the style is being applied to the right element. Linting style names is definitely better than nothing, but really I want some way to tie class names to elements that's both easy to use when I'm writing code, and straightforward to ensure my class names actually match what ends up in the browser.

<comment><USER52> You can do this with CSS Modules using BEM Classnames and a function to generate BEM classnames given a Component Name and State/Props.

The function can then pick the generated classes out of the CSS Module's JSON import. If the classname doesn't exist, it can warn to the console.

It's farely straight forward in React. You just need to make sure you always use the function to provide values to the className prop instead of manual strings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wonder if there are other languages that like CSS work by exception. You add "cases" (switches based on the classes, ids, tags) to portions of CSS not by adding lines (like traditional functions) to them but by extending them with a distant block.

<comment><USER54> :not kind of disproves your point unless you are only talking about ancient CSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> To add to the mix: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kVeCqQCxlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kVeCqQCxlk)

</comment><comment><USER55> Is it reductive for me to say that we're finally getting the GridBagLayout that I was using for Java Swing UIs 15 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER56> In a world where things like this[0] have legitimate reason to exist, an article where phrases like "barbarianism", "dumpster fire" or "you have got to be fucking kidding me" aren't central to the thesis hasn't _really_ explained modern CSS.

[0] [http://howtocenterincss.com](http://howtocenterincss.com)

<comment><USER9> If you understand CSS those things do not have reason to exist. You may have similar sites for the various concepts in various languages— e.g. pointers in C, block syntax in Objective-C. Yes, there were omissions in CSS which made centering _vertically_ and only in _some_ cases difficult, but far cry from "dumpster fire".

<comment><USER56> If you're writing an OS or a driver for the machines we have, whether it's C or Rust, pointers are unavoidable.

The entire web platform is insane. Even basic things--like versioning--or error reporting--were completely ignored. Semantic markup has been mostly abandoned. Accessibility has declined rather than improved. Something as basic as column layout shouldn't require an article that long, but it does.

<comment><USER9> The web is not insane. Trying to make application platform out of the document platform—that's insane. But I agree 100% about accessibility. In the race to win the stupid war against the native apps all the good was thrown out of the window. Somehow this point is conveniently forgotten by those touting the superiority of the web tech for the apps.

<comment><USER56> How is the web _platform_ not insane?

edit: PS, not downvoting anyone here. Just curious as to how other people square html5+es5/6+css2/3 as anything more than an engineering failure and a major waste of human effort.

Having to put a considerable amount of reading, googling, continuing ed--or in some cases even a college degree--just to technically layout a page ( _technically_ \--not getting into aesthetics, readability, flow, taste, etc.) is insane if you ask me.

<comment><USER28> Because in theory, you can build an application that will work on nearly every device in the world? Think phones, desktop computers, tablets, watches, tvs. With every conceivable operating system going back many years. And you don't have to install or update any software, worry about data loss, accessing the same data from multiple devices anywhere in the world.

Seems like there's a lot of good non-crazy reasons for the web to have taken this turn. Is it perfect? Nope, but it's pretty damn cool that I can login to a computer anywhere, put a point on a map, and have it show up on my phone, and I am privacy nut. :P

<comment><USER56> If we're getting into application development, we have a sandboxed VM that a) requires megabytes of npm/webpack/jquery/bootstrap mystery meat to paper over all of the cross-platform and form-factor potholes, and b) allows everyone and his brother to track your behavior in real time.

Go to practically any major content website and poke around in the developer console. Check the cookies, the constant ajax requests, the payloads, the file sizes, etc. It would be one thing if this were all for the sake of compensating creators and good user experience, but I don't see that. I see a dystopia where Google/Facebook/Amazon gets the sandwich, SV gets the crust, and everyone else gets the shaft.

There have been many browser forks where some heroic soul tries to strip a few of the more obvious f-yous out of Chromium or Firefox. They all eventually give up. When even the #3 company is blasting through half a billion dollars a year to put mr robot bullshit in their browser, any one-man effort in that direction will be drinking from the fire hose.

<comment><USER28> So you agree the web is a good platform for mass global access... gotcha.

<comment><USER56> The web is a good platform for mass global _surveillance and control_. If that still counts as " _pretty damn cool_ ", then yeah, you got me!

<comment><USER28> "Gotcha" means "I understand you", its not an accusation or a condemnation.

Technology is not a moral issue, how people use it is. You seem to be confusing the two.

<comment><USER57> > "Gotcha" means "I understand you", its not an accusation or a condemnation.

It can also mean, roughly, « _j'accuse_ »—or perhaps, "I have just proven the accusation against you"—so it can be ambiguous when context doesn't make the intent clear.

<comment><USER28> Maybe to a non native english speaker the context could be misconstrued.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm using style-element with elm now, and for the first time in ages I enjoy web dev.

</comment><comment><USER59> I'd love to read an article like this for C-style languages.

<comment><USER13> [https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html](https://www.bell- labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> What about Web Components?

</comment><comment><USER61> Unfortunately, doesn't mention Shadow DOM.

<comment><USER62> How is that relevant to CSS?

<comment><USER63> It is actually relevant: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Web_Components/Using_shadow_DOM)

Support for it only exists on Chrome at the moment ([https://caniuse.com/#search=shadow%20dom](https://caniuse.com/#search=shadow%20dom)), but things like Angular are already geared up to use it for encapsulating styles, but defaulting to an emulated mode that is essentially css-modules: [https://angular.io/guide/component-styles#view- encapsulation](https://angular.io/guide/component-styles#view-encapsulation)

<comment><USER64> Vue scopes components through data attributes. I'm not entirely confident we really need shadow dom support in browsers, as we have good strategies now of creating components without it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> "semantic class names"

What?! Leave the semantics alone!</comment>


Create a blog using Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://renard.github.com/o-blog/

<comment><USER2> By coincidence, I've been investigating various blogging solutions that integrate with org-mode.

O-blog is pretty good, but it suffers from having horrible defaults that break when your org file isn't structured to its expectations. It also does too much by default, and there's no simple way to tell it _not_ to do some of these things. Pretty much all customization depends on you understanding a bunch of template layouts with embedded elisp and how they all fit together. Ideally, you'd want to be able to toggle various features via Customize or your init file, but o-blog ships with defaults that make this a lot of work.

The baked-in Bootstrap integration is also something I could do without. I don't see why an org exporter needs to know anything about layout, truthfully; just export HTML or Markdown of your subtree and let a dedicated static site generator do the work. O-blog really needs to separate its concerns here and set some sane defaults.

The solution I settled on is a slightly-tweaked version of the relatively ancient org-jekyll package. I can blog from any org file by setting a :blog: tag on a subtree, and customizing Jekyll is really simple. Plus I can utilize the existing universe of Jekyll plugins without pulling my hair out.</comment>


Seven on Seven: Guilt Marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://joshua.schachter.org/2010/06/seven.html The results and presentation of an art piece I did in NYC earlier in the year. Used mechanical turk to estimate charitable donations for guilty feelings. <comment><AUTHOR> The results and presentation of an art piece I did in NYC earlier in the year. Used mechanical turk to estimate charitable donations for guilty feelings.

I resubmitted this because I posted the wrong URL earlier.</comment>


How we stopped the resume plague - <AUTHOR> http://blaisemcrowly.in/blog/How-we-stopped-the-resume-plague

<comment><USER2>
      Responds to follow up 99% 1%

With a sample size of 16, that should be 94% and 6%

<comment><AUTHOR> clarification : The difference seen in the expected % is because the method used for calculating was not that one of the candidates did not respond but was based on the number of exchanges we had with them and if did respond. One of the candidates later stopped replying after a few discussions. So when we did (No that we got response)/(No communications) * 100 we ended up with a 98+ value which we rounded to 99. :D</comment></comment>


How to maximize your closet - <AUTHOR> http://contributors.luckymag.com/post/maximize-your-closet

<comment><AUTHOR> I am trying to win an online pinboard on Lucky Magazine's page in an effort to drive more traffic to my startup, JoydeJewels.com

Vote for me and help me get to the top of the page.

I know - why am i posting this here? Because most chicks who blog are usually a lot more fashion-minded than I am, and also a lot less of a geek than I am. Why not help out a geeky girl in her quest to earn more traffic to her site?

Thanks so much!</comment>


Ask HN: Is SteemIt a scam? - <AUTHOR> I'd ask on SteemIt, but there's a lot of Koolaid drinking going on there. It has some cool features, but also some glaring warning signs. If I trust anyone's opinion, it's HN. What do we think: next Reddit, or pyramid scheme for suckers? <comment><USER2> This is also in the new queue right now: [https://medium.com/@BlockByBlock/the-ugly-truth-behind- steem...](https://medium.com/@BlockByBlock/the-ugly-truth-behind- steemit-1a525f5e156)

Seems pretty self explanatory.

<comment><USER3> I suspected that it was only just another news aggregator + altcoin + buzzwords, were the creator underestimate how difficult is to moderate and prevent spam, specially if it is successful, specially if it's easy for cheaters to monetize because the karma is somehow directly related to an altcoin.

But after reading the article, it looks much worse.

PS: The thread of the post is [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331824) (no comments yet)

</comment></comment><comment> m-jones

      if money=="involved":

          print("It's a Trap!")

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if the creators are completely above-board, the incentives could not be more perverse. The Internet doesn't need more low-quality content! What they are incentivizing is for 1000s of monkeys to churn out crowd-pleasing garbage like Buzzfeed. Jason Calacanis already tried that with Mahalo and it provided a lot of mediocre articles.

But beyond that, there is a really unpleasant vibe to the site. Like an Amway kind of feel, where a small number of people who got in early are exhorting new users "Don't give up. Stick with it! The money will come" and half of the articles are about steemit itself.

The idea is good, but the implementation seems sketchy.

<comment> m-jones Steemit provides an example of the failings of an oligarchy. When you give power to a limited few it is exceedingly rare that any equal distribution of power and wealth is to exist.

Democracy tries to solve this, however whilst it is not direct (also known as true) we still have an oligarchy, just an elected one. It shares all flaws with an oligarchy except how permanent those in power stay as usually a new election is held every 4 or 5 years within a representitive (or false) Democracy.</comment></comment></comment>


You're Right Mr. Cruz. Net Neutrality Is Like Obamacare for the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://greaterdebater.com/blog/gabe/post/48 <comment><USER2> It really is. We will sacrificing quality for the ability for everyone to have access. In addition to this, I'm not sure I want the government with the ability to control free speech on the Internet.

I predict that if it is classified as a utility, there will be additional provisions that will erode our freedom of speech on the Internet.

There are already proposals to make it illegal to parody things like presidential candidates.

<comment><USER3> > There are already proposals to make it illegal to parody things like > presidential candidates.

If we dispense with Net Neutrality, parodying presidential candidates (or some other form of speech) will be less possible due to lack of access, without passing any laws.

All traffic is either equal, in which case we need to declare that the Internet has no bias and _make it stick_ thru regulation, or we decide that some forms of traffic are more important than others, then decide which traffic is more important.

You can't have it both ways. I can guarantee, however, that no one will ever agree which traffic more important. Well, until someone starts shouting about "patriotism" and it's "for the children".

It's pretty clear that the market just wants to milk people for all the money it can. Which would be fine if it did so by charging those with more resources more money for more access. But it's also clear that the market is all in favor of charging those with fewer resources more, because they have fewer resources to defend themselves against predation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> +1 for the author.</comment>


Ask PG: How many jobs have YC companies created in total? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> We don't know for sure because we don't track such things, but I'd guess they have around 1000 employees total, not including the founders.

If you include jobs created indirectly, the number might be higher. And of course there are lots of people who make most of their money using Airbnb, although that is not a formal job. There may also have been jobs eliminated, if a startup's new technology makes it possible to do the same work with fewer people.

This stuff is hard to measure.

<comment><USER3> Going by linkedin employee count the ten biggest YC companies have 1500 employees between them (heavily dominated by 845 at Airbnb).

Doing a back of the envelope estimate based upon some sampling, companies 10-50 have about 500 combined, and the long tail is probably another 500 (inclusive of founders).

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I didn't realize that info was in LinkedIn. I was trying to be conservative, but looks like I overdid it.

Does LinkedIn know how many employees every company has? Where do they get that information?

<comment><USER4> Its based on the number of people that say where they work at in their profiles.

This is AirBnB's <http://www.linkedin.com/company/309694?trk=tyah> it says it has 902 employees.

<comment><USER5> _Its based on the number of people that say where they work at in their profiles._

Thanks for making that clear in this thread. My company used to have some faker in another country claim that she worked for my company. Nope. She never has. It took me a while to figure out how to notify LinkedIn of that kind of resume padding. I wonder how many people right now are claiming things on their LinkedIn profiles that are totally bogus, and how much that inflates the employee count of some trendy companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TechStars puts up their data here: <http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/>

Currently the number is 990, which doesn't include employees of TechStars.</comment>


XXX TLD Officially Open - <AUTHOR> http://www.about.xxx/launch/ <comment><USER2> I actually find this structured approach to be quite interesting, despite the cynical, money-minting glee with which it will no doubt be executed. How far the industry has come since the days of faxing in my passport to register a .com.

Allow me to translate, for those that were lulled into a hypnotic trance by the Patrick Stewart sound alike:

 _Sunrise A:_ Additional adult domain cost! Your existing domain strategy just got more expensive to maintain unless you want your SEO to get nuked.

 _Sunrise B:_ Brand Blackmail, early period. Otherwise known as "That's a nice non-adult themed brand you have, it would terrible to see something happen to it."

 _Landrush:_ Laughing all the way to the bank. 18 days? Try 18 hours.

 _General Availability:_ Gone, all the good names are.

<comment><USER3> _Sunrise B: Brand Blackmail, early period_

For what it's worth, it looks like the Sunrise B is for blocking/making it impossible to register .xxx domains with your registered trademark such as MarthaStewart.xxx instead of having to pay to register (and presumably not use) MarthaStewart.xxx

If any other TLDs work this way, I don't know of them.

<comment><USER4> The fee for Sunrise B appears to be almost the same as the annual fee for actually registering. I assume you won't have to renew, though.

<comment><USER5> It is a one-time fee. About 200 dollars. godaddy has the lowest price that I've seen (199.00). I think it's a smart idea (if you own a _registered trademark_ ) as 200 dollars is a lot cheaper than getting attorneys to go after trademark violators... even if it's a guaranteed win. Registered trademarks carry a lot of legal protection and someone would have to be nuts to try and build a porn website using a _registered trademark_ that they did not own. No legit company would do that as their lawyers should catch it and realize the potential financial doom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Regardless of your opinion of adult content, this stuff makes far less practical sense than things like RTA labeling <http://www.rtalabel.org/>. All that RTA requires is a simple meta tag, and it's free.

Content filters abide by it, and it doesn't disrupt existing business.

.xxx is just an effort to make money with another new TLD. It doesn't make the web safer and it doesn't make content-filters simpler or more accurate.

Since no one is proposing _forcing_ sites to use .xxx, those concerned with truly making the web safer should really be looking for the most effective way to get wide penetration of a labeling solution, and a meta tag is about as simple as simple gets.

<comment><USER7> _Since no one is proposing forcing sites to use .xxx,_

No one has to propose it openly since the threat is implicit. Regardless of what is said at the moment of creation of the domain, all that a would-be censor has to do is wait [Internet-memory-erasure-period] and say "hey, we created XXX because all the porn is supposed to only be here" and _viola_.

<comment><USER8> Just quietly: voilà. A viola is an instrument.

<comment><USER9> most people don't know how to quickly type: à

<comment><USER10> Mac OS: Option-`, a = à.

Windows: Alt-0-2-2-4 = à. Go Microsoft!

<comment><USER11> Mac OS X Lion: Hold a.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The consensus seems that the .XXX TLD is just a money grab because it's not forcing adult content onto this TLD, and there is no practical way to even do that.

Therefore, wouldn't a counterpart TLD, such as .SAFE, actually make more sense? Companies that target children, such as Walt Disney, could provide a guaranteed safe sub-internet. With wikipedia's new filtering options, they could put a wiki-subset on .SAFE with maximum filtering on.

It would be hugely costly to police, and so probably the most expensive TLD ever. But some companies would surely still be able to profit.

<comment><USER13> Agree re: cash grab.

The counterpart "safe" TLD is part of a much bigger content curation problem that is evolving in the Internet. Some parents out there are not at all OK with Disney content, even, some will want to leave boobs in but head-crushing out, etc, etc. Properly tailoring to people's many shades of content filtering seems like a job for dedicated browser-recognized crypto certificate chains.

This way, different consumers can directly delegate trust to a custom choice of entities that already are engaged in this space (e.g. all the "family focus" agencies), instead of fighting over a centralized TLD committee.

<comment><USER14> > seems like a job for dedicated browser-recognized crypto certificate chains

You don't read the news much, do you? ;)

<comment><USER15> Apparently neither do i. Can you throw some light on what you are referring to?

<comment><USER16> I assume Mark is refering to the DigiNotar hack (and earlier Comodo ones) and the ensuing shit-storm which showed what an awful security model the current CA/certificate system really is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ah yes, .xxx -- a solution to a problem that absolutely nobody had other than wannabe-censors.

<comment><USER17> how about whitehouse.com? Quite a few kids stumbled into the world of porn through that domain

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehouse.com>

<comment><USER16> What about it indeed? .xxx doesn't solve that problem unless you forbid porn on every other domain.

In other words: .xxx really is a solution only for wannabe-censors.

<comment><USER17> " .xxx doesn't solve that problem unless you forbid porn on every other domain"

That is a perfectly plausible solution now that the .xxx TLD exists.

<comment><USER18> Are you joking?

1\. Define "porn"

2\. Get every other TLD operator, including all the international ones, on board with your definition and rules (e.g. are we only banning websites on port 80, or would FTP sites also be verboten? password-protected sites? is classical art exempt?)

3\. Enforce the censorship via some kind of magical system that is automated, doesn't trigger false positives, and allows for an appeal process

Yeah, that'll be a snap to put together.

<comment><USER19> Don't forget:

0\. Repeal the First Amendment.

<comment><USER16> There _are_ other countries...

<comment><USER10> No no, the United States constitution is a worldwide law. We invented freedom, and we invented English!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I feel desensitized by the countless number of TLDs that have come out recently. I guess I should be excited by .XXX, but I just am not.

<comment><USER21> Not quite countless. There are 307 TLDs today, up from about 250 a decade ago. Most of this growth as been in non-Latin IDN domains (There are 21 gTLDs today, including .XXX)

There will however be a sea change in the future, ICANN is intending the open up applications for new gTLDs in 2012 that could see hundreds more TLDs added. So if adding the dozen or so new gTLDs in the last 10 years has seemed countless, it will get worse.

<comment><USER22> Is it so bad? It'll get easier to find the name you want as a domain.... [http://<mydomain>.<tld>](http://<mydomain>.<tld>);

If anything, so many tlds would devalue the existing .coms, .net, .org... if only slightly.

<comment><USER23> I think more and more people will rely on Google for navigational queries.

"Hey you should really check out this awesomestuff.sfdj website"

"I'll look at it when I get home."

... later in the day:

"Hmmm was it awesomestuff.com or awesomestuff.me ..."

"Let's ask Google for a link to awesomestuff"

<comment><USER24> I agree. I think a lot of people do this already, and not just for sites where they can't remember the exact URL. It's often just as quick to type 'bbc' or 'facebook' into the Google search bar, especially if Google is your homepage. You don't have to worry about typos, either. Some computer users I know, older users, access everything that way. When I asked one why, she replied that she found the browser address bar "fiddly".

Earlier this year Bing stated that "about 30%" of search queries are navigational.[1]

[1] [http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...](http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/02/10/making- search-yours.aspx) (paragraph before penultimate screenshot)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's only a matter of time before someone pays the ICM Registry for on A record on XXX. so they can have <http://xxx/>

<comment><USER26> For $85,000 though. Makes .xxx look cheap.

<comment><USER25> The initial $185k USD fee is for TLDs, not DNS records on already existing TLDs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can I get xxx.xxx and then subdomain it out to my heart's content to anyone that wants to pay?

Martha Stewart can pay under Sunrise B to stop marthastewart.xxx, but can she stop marthastewart.xxx.xxx?

<comment><USER28> She can sue for trademark infringement via normal channels (courts) for both of those, even if she has not registered marthastewart.xxx.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The temptation to put a useful, non-porn site on a subdomain of .xxx is quite large. Just to make the point that .xxx is useless _and_ for the large number of clicks that it will no doubt bring.

Elementary programming course on 'thesecretcode.xxx'. Legions of porn seeking people converted to programmers, if slashdot is any indication that should be a perfect match.

</comment><comment><USER30> I want to register "fffaaaaaaaaaaaaaaxxxxxxx.xxx" and it can be a place people can send faxes online from

</comment><comment><USER31> There's something difficult about saying "hey go to mypornsite dot x-x-x", it's 3 syllables over the conventional "dot com", "dot net" or "dot org."

<comment><USER32> www has _three times_ as many syllables as 'world wide web', yet somehow it caught on.

<comment><USER33> Just curious; how often have you heard dub-dub-dub for www?

<comment><USER34> I use that all the time, but the only other person I've heard say it is the person I picked the habit up from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> ICANN is a corrupt undemocratic non-representative self-important parasite on the internet who's main concern is increasing their budget so they can schedule more of their all expense paid meetings in Puerto Rico or Costa Rica.

That is all.

</comment><comment><USER36> Feel like I'm going to get in trouble checking this out at work ;) All anyone has to do now it filter by .xxx

<comment><USER37> What really needs to happen now is for lots of people to start registering domains for (preferably high profile) non-adult content websites.

Water down the domain so it no longer means much, so filtering by it becomes destructive.

<comment><USER16> Nice try, ICM Registry! (Domains are $200 p.a.)

<comment><USER37> That's not all that bad, all things considered. I probably spend more on breakfast cereal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hard to see what all the excitement is about while xxx.ly is still available.

</comment><comment><USER39> So, who's gonna get lambdax.xxx ;-) ?

<comment><USER40> I can think of a ton of great domains, but at $250 or so a pop (including taxes) that's probably not going to happen.

Nobody I know in the adult industry is rushing to register anything either (except a few who are doing it purely as a defensive measure and don't plan to actually use it).

<comment><USER22> You're the first person I know that knows someone in the adult industry... :)

<comment><USER40> I still (sort of) work in the adult industry :)

I worked at a big porn company a few years ago, and I do consulting for a porn startup now. I have other clients too, but it's a pretty fun industry to work in (fun parties, lots of great scaling challenges, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> how do they make these intro videos? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIDKnDSaWqE> Does this technique have a name? Are there any special tools for that?

<comment><USER42> I believe the name for that is kinetic type: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_typography> I'm not aware of any specialized tools, I've heard of using illustrator and after effects, however.

<comment><USER41> thank you, that was very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Since the MPAA got rid of the X rating, I'm glad we have this. Now the phrase "Triple X" won't become obsolete.</comment>


It's not about how many hours you work - <AUTHOR> http://warpspire.com/posts/work-life-balance/

<comment><USER2> I absolutely like this post.

I am one of those who thinks amount of creativity shown is more important than amount of hours worked. Creativity should not be bound in hours.</comment>


Finnish guy is about to jump from hydrogen filled balloons (live video) - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/antti.pendikainen/videos/1752802204732504/ <comment><AUTHOR> Facts: Happening at Tahko, Finland. Balls are filled with hydrogen gas (about 3100sqft of it). Antti and his date are about to get lifted to air and skydive from there and while jumping burning the balloons.</comment>


Paul Allen wrestles PaulAllen.org away from 'Paul Alien' filmmaker - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/microsoft/Paul_Allen_now_owns_PaulAllenorg_48109232.html

<comment><USER2> "Postman noted that Mayer had taken large portions of the legitimate Paul Allen Web sites in order to make his site look as if it was connected to the billionaire."

Seems like a legitimate seizure to me. If you're actively trying to fool your clients in order to make a profit off someone else's name, that seems like a legitimate cause for domain seizure. It's like someone registering gooogle, making a google copy, then putting their own ads on it.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I was just about to copy that same line from the article. The article title is sensationalized. I had assumed he took it from someone also with the name Paul Allen, but it was just someone who made a satirical film of the real Paul Allen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >David Postman, a spokesman for Allen, said the company attempted to reach Mayer on a number of occasions but the email and physical address provided on the domain registration papers didn't work.

That's just as important -- a reminder to you to always use real information when you register!

</comment><comment><USER5> I killed Paul Allen. And I liked it.</comment>


Upgrade your jail cell for a price - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pay-to-stay-jails/ <comment><USER2> Having seen the horrific rikers beating video. [1] I don't understand why in this day and age, prisons are NOT under 100% CCTV monitoring. Is this just out of sight, out of mind approach? As we debate body-worn cameras to prevent police brutality, ensuring prison and jails are kept under constant surveillance might help reduce recidivism.

It's also tragic that there is direct equivalence to the charter/public school debate. A lot of the arguments for/against charters schools can be simply applied by swapping school for prison. And just like test-scores/teaching- philosophy, you have a superior scandinavian approach.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000002996576/foota...](https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000002996576/footage- of-inmate-beating-at-rikers.html)

<comment><USER3> I agree. I know someone who was arrested for being drunk in public (very, very drunk and belligerent). Once at the jail I guess she continued being belligerent.

At this point she was restrained on a gurney, surrounded by no less than 4 guards. She said something rude and as a result was tazed not once but 3 times.

After I bailed her out we went to the sherrifs office and requested an investigation. After a few days they claimed to not be able to find any video of this happening. They conceded that there are multiple areas where the cameras can't see.

I also found out that the guards at the jail are not sheriff deputies, but employed by a private corporation. But they wear the same uniform as the deputies, sans badge.

The criminal justice system in this country is disgusting. Truly disgusting. If I'm ever fortunate enough to be financially secure (long term) I plan to dedicate my time to induce change in this area of our society.

One interest effect this had on me was respect for local law enforcement. I used to have some level of respect for them and what I had observed as professionalism. That's all out the window now, and I have 0 respect for them. Instead of being polite and reasonable I am now combative and uncooperative in any encounter. They can taser me all they want, Ill just use it as a public campaign against them.

<comment><USER4> What the guards did was wrong, but don't you think your belligerent drunk friend needs to share even a tiny bit of the blame? People act like civilians should be able to do or say literally anything and fully expect law enforcement to be perfectly rational and fair and gentle with them.

<comment><USER5> I 100% believe that "civilians should be able to do or say literally anything and fully expect law enforcement to be perfectly rational and fair and gentle with them."

And I don't see why that's not feasible.

<comment><USER4> > And I don't see why that's not feasible.

Because law enforcement is made up of the same imperfect, mistake making humans as the bone-headed civilians that committed the offense.

<comment><USER6> The thing is that they have less expectations than civilians in many cases. If someone was restrained and I tazed them three times I would be arrested immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I read this in Snow Crash, I thought Neal Stephenson was being deliberately absurd. But here we are. Want to go to The Hoosegow LLC and not The Clink, Incorporated? That'll be an extra $50 a night.

<comment><USER8> I didn't even bat an eye. This was probably because this is completely sensible and logical in a libertarian/anarchist society. The concept is expanded in other works of dystopic fiction.

You pay for the best jail you can afford. If you are found innocent, your accuser/prosecutor has to reimburse your costs. If you are found guilty, you have to pay restitution to your victims (or their still-living representatives), and the justice service provider handling your case will take whatever measures may be appropriate to protect their subscribers from you after your release. If you can't immediately make restitution, there may be a supervised work program around that will help you finance your jail boarding and court judgments. Or maybe the judge will work out a deal to reduce your weregeld bill, perhaps in exchange for something like submitting to a specific torture, or having a warning tattooed across your forehead.

If you're a really hard case, you just get named outlaw, and someone kills you for the bounty.

For most people, instead of paying taxes to a county, you would pay a subscription fee to a company that provides all-in-one security, dispute resolution, arbitration, rehabilitation, and property and casualty insurance. You might pay $99/month to a reseller agent of Brinks Allstate, and your neighbor might pay $119/month directly to Alfa Pinkertons through their website. If your kid's bike gets stolen, the cop-adjuster comes by to take your report, helps you file your claim, and determines whether it would be cost effective to investigate and prosecute. If they do, and it turns out your neighbor's cousin was operating a bike theft ring out of their garage, the Alfa Pinkertons arrest him, put him in their jail, and provide him with defense counsel. Brinks Allstate and Alfa Pinkerton have a pre-existing extradition agreement in place, engage Wopner-Brown-Scheindlin as their arbitration subcontractor, who in turn sub-subcontracts some jurors from YourPeers. (You might also need to have a separate justice provider through your workplace.)

After the neighbor is found guilty, he has to pay back the cost of reimbursing the bike owners. Perhaps a few of them are willing to buy their stolen bikes back with [a portion of] their insurance money. Until his checks clear, he stays in the Alfa Pinkerton jail's sweatshop, working off that debt at $X/hour. After he's out, he goes right back to being that creepy guy living above your neighbor's garage, and his credit score goes back up with that "RESTITUTION PAID IN FULL" line on his report.

As bad as this all sounds, our actual, real-life criminal control system is in some ways worse.

<comment><USER9> That's a _lot_ of people that have to work together when they don't have to and have no incentive to in order for this to be even somewhat effective.

Part of me wants to be a libertarian/anarchist, but the way their ideas resemble freshman physics explanations that ignore friction and wind resistance really turns me off.

<comment><USER8> The incentive for everyone is in not getting murdered, pillaged, or otherwise brutalized by roving bands of outlaw raiders, like in Mad Max or Fallout. Also, the whole thing runs on pure, unadulterated money-grubbing.

A libertarian world really is a nightmare for the people who believe that the government world does not essentially do exactly the same thing, but with better PR, and maybe different price points. The government version of freshman physics assumes a spherical cow. The libertarian version assumes a spherical pig. The Internet argues about the flavor of the milk.

The truth is that no one will admit there may be warts on their favorite goblin baby until they are growing one right on the end of their pointy little green nose. I have already spent an awful lot of time on the Internet arguing both for and against libertarian ideas. The only good thing that can really be said about the adherents of alternate political views is that at least they recognize that change is only possible if you try something different. You can't really ever predict the outcome of a system when you divorce its ideal workings from the real people who will eventually be running it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't see this as especially outrageous. The part that bothers me is that it isn't available to poorer criminals. But I don't agree with the ex-gang fellow who said getting your ass beat is part of the punishment. That seems unfair to weaker criminals in the same way this scheme is unfair to poor ones. I think the state has an obligation to keep inmates physically safe. If physical violence is something we want as an official part of the punishment let's just bring back corporal punishment.

Also can't help but notice the problem with making this more widely available. The violence in regular jail is a consequence of being locked up with violent people. If you move them to these easier jails they would bring the violence with them

<comment><USER3> I think exposing rich people to the same conditions as poor people in jail is extremely important.

Monetary wealth translates to social power more often than not.

If rich people experience the same jail as poor, they will push in society to improve it. If you let the rich opt-out they'll never see it and won't be motivated to induce change.

I have spent a couple nights in jail. I know what it's like, and it's not acceptable for anyone to be exposed to this. Change is needed whether you're rich, poor, black, white or purple.

<comment><USER10> I agree in principle but I doubt enough rich people would ever get sent to jail to make a difference.

<comment><USER3> Sad, but appears to be true. I did some cursory googling and found this[0].

[0] [https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every argument in favor of letting people with money have a nicer prison experience than those without is an argument in favor of fixing prison problems for every inmate, instead.

As a side benefit, you avoid seeing rich people swinging from lampposts instead of serving time.

<comment><USER12> > Every argument in favor of letting people with money have a nicer prison > experience than those without is an argument in favor of fixing prison > problems for every inmate, instead.

Uhm, could it be that you have a typo in your posts, like a missing not? Because i have a hard time finding logic in the argument as written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cop: So would you rather go to The Hoosegow, or The Clink?

YT: Hoosegow, no question.

Cop: You know, we get a kickback from The Clink for every suspect we bring in.

YT: How much do you want?

Cop: How about a hundred? Swipe your card through the reader.

YT: Done. Enjoy your bribe.

Cop: The Clink it is.

YT: My union will hear about this.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is despicable, but the conditions at the average prison are despicable too. Just watch almost any cop show to see how the expectation of prison rape has become normalised in American society.

<comment><USER14> Let it be known: jail is not prison.

Short-term incarceration (less than two years, and that's not an arbitrary figure) leads to much different conditions than long-term incarceration. There's different effects on humans and different changes in valuated needs.

Rape tends to be the province of those expecting little to no change in their long-term experience. A little different from murder in incarceration, in that the victim has opportunity for reprisal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well, it worked for pre-revolutionary France! What could possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment> david-cako Can't wait for prisons to start selling life insurance :^)

<comment><USER16> Morbid thought: I'm surprised there isn't a cottage industry around buying life insurance policies on prison inmates. I bet you could use statistical methods and/or machine learning to profitably predict inmates most likely to die early, given the prison location, staff, the inmate's crime, and other factors.

<comment><USER17> Not only morbid but I'd argue morally wrong as well, as this would be betting on peoples lives. It's just as awful as the coliseum just without you being exposed to the blood.

<comment><USER18> How is this different from life insurance in general?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How do I disable untrusted pages reading my phone's precise 3d orientation without my permission?

</comment><comment><USER20> Some European prisons are way better than the best America's pay fof jail schemes.

America's jails are places where people got to get abused rather than get rehabilitated, so what is the big deal about some people paying for a better environment?

<comment><USER21> > so what is the big deal about some people paying for a better environment?

Because it incentives the private prison to make the situation even worse for those who fail to pay. Effectively the worse they make the "free" the more money they make.

To use an analogy, it is like Amazon Prime, when Amazon Prime first started free shipping was at $25 minimum order. Last year free shipping was at $49. Why? To incentivise Prime memberships. Only competition from Walmart forced them to bring it back down to $35.

So back to prisons... If this became popular, we'd see more prisons who offer zero privacy as the "free" option (e.g. shared bunk beds) all as a means to "incentivise" (blackmail) prisoners into paying for a semi-private or private room.

Plus when you take into account the safety aspect, the whole thing becomes immoral. You're literally forcing prisoners to pay so they can sleep safely at night, otherwise they might get shanked while they sleep (or not get any sleep due to fear). US prisons are already much less safe than most European, Canadian, or AUS/NZ prisons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison#Great_Britain_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison#Great_Britain_.28later_the_United_Kingdom.29)

</comment><comment><USER23> Despite the article's inane attempts to link this to sex crimes, I see nothing wrong with this. Housing and feeding prisoners is a huge drain on society; a prisoner who alleviates that drain absolutely deserves a more humane experience. That's not to say that everyone else doesn't deserve a more humane experience, but we simply can't afford it. No one is suggesting we close down shelters and start housing the homeless in five star hotels, and no one seems to be too bothered by that. On the whole I'd rather money be spent first on that than upgrading prisons.

EDIT: As to the idea that this somehow reduces the effective punishment: while that might be true for the ultra-rich for whom $10k is irrelevant (but since when do they go to prison anyways?), for everyone else, having to fund your own incarceration [directly, in addition to funding everyone else's via taxation,] seems to offset that.

<comment><USER24> Incentives matter. If you allow prisons to charge for improved prisoner experience, you make the default prison experience the BATNA for negotiating how much money you give the folks running the prison.

Like, if you pay ransoms when terrorists take Americans hostage, you're funding kidnap-Americans-and-ransom-them businesses. If you pay prisons for more humane treatment, you're funding imprison-people-and-threaten-them-with- inhumane-conditions businesses.

IMO, it should be illegal for prisons to get money from prisoners. There's a bunch of really shitty things that inevitably happen. See: [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/us/steep-costs-of- inmate-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/us/steep-costs-of-inmate-phone- calls-are-under-scrutiny.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Given that current jail conditions are dismal as best, I see no reason for private companies to not offer for-pay incarceration services that solve these problems. This is no different than private companies offering delivery services because USPS sucks, or private transportation companies existing because bus infra simply isn't good enough. If a judge considers these options prison-like enough, then I see no reason they cannot exist.

Does it suck because not everyone can afford it? Sure

Does that mean we should just screw everyone equally simply to claim we're fair? IMHO no. Not unless you also want to close down UPS, FedEx, and Greyhound. And not unless you are willing to come out and openly say that _YOU_ consider rape, abuse, and neglect to be an official part of our rehabilitation strategy (because that is all that county and federal prisons excel at)

<comment><USER26> You write as if the current jail conditions are set in stone. Why is that?

<comment><USER25> You write as is USPS's suckiness is set in stone.

Alternatives are allowed even if incumbents can change...

<comment><USER26> My point is that allowing alternatives for a price removes the incentive to fix the free somution for everyone who can afford that price.

<comment><USER25> In that case please stop driving (go fix public transit), eating at restaurants (go fix soup kitchens), using Lyft (go fix cabs), etc...

(The point is: the people providing alternatives are under no obligation to fix anything. Isn't HN all about disrupting bad models?)

<comment><USER27> You could say that YC is.. HN is just a tech news/discussion site. If anything it's all about (comparatively) respectful discourse.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why CTOs shouldn't write code at work - <AUTHOR> http://katemats.com/why-ctos-shouldnt-write-code-at-work/

<comment><USER2> Does it even make any sense for a good engineer to remain an engineer even in startups?

It seems that power (and stock and money) gravitates to executives who don't code. Why not be a CTO who 'doesn't code at work' anymore? Why spend your time working late nights and burning out on fulfilling someone else's dream?

(there _are_ good answers to these questions, especially if you think in terms of economics, but it behooves a good engineer to think about them and find her own answer)

From the article, after the author stopped coding,

"I still was technical. I often wrote code on the weekends. Although the type of work I did is what I call tinkering. I would want to know about a new language or technology, and so I would build little sample applications (typically analogous to a slightly more advanced "Hello, World!") – just to learn enough to form an opinion. And I read a lot of articles, source code, and documentation on things that struck my fancy."

sounds like a plan.

I particularly like the "I was still technical" sentence.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comment plinkplonk - I think it is super important to be technical. In reading some of the other comments on the post, I really think the decision was based on priority and the fact that in the free 1-2 hours I had working on adding code to our production systems actually didn't add enough value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article gets a little bizarre at the end, until you realize she forgot to mention that she is no longer CTO.</comment>


Renewable hydrogen could fuel Australia's next export boom - bash-j http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-11/hydrogen-breakthrough-could-fuel-renewable-energy-export-boom/8518916 <comment><AUTHOR> loads of conversion losses at all stages, but if you are willing to accept those - it will work</comment>


Is Scientific Truth Always Beautiful? - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/When-Beauty-Is-Not-Truth/136803/ <comment><USER2> A focus on "beauty" or "elegance" is, for starters, just an updating of Occam's Razor. The simplest theory that fits the facts is assumed best, and people pick different ways of expressing the notion of "simple".

There's nothing wrong with that as a starting point. Problems can arise, however, when you take that further and make simplifying assumptions. Economics has been particularly prone to that problem; I believe the famous can opener joke dates to the 1960s.

(<http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/JokEc.html> gives the simplest :) form of the can- opener joke I know: A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Lets smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Lets build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Lets assume that we have a can- opener...")

By way of contrast, simplifying assumptions in physics have usually gone better. In particular, relaxing them has gone fairly smoothly ("Assume all the mass is concentrated at a point of zero diameter ... oops, I mean in a small sphere of finite diameter ...") On the other hand, one of the core critiques of string theory is based on the suspicion that a key simplifying assumption (only the early terms of certain Taylor series matter) is badly mistaken.

And in climate science, predictions are necessarily based on simplified models; debate can then ensue as to whether or not the models are misleading.

<comment><USER3> > On the other hand, one of the core critiques of string theory is based on > the suspicion that a key simplifying assumption (only the early terms of > certain Taylor series matter) is badly mistaken.

Do you have more info on this please? It sounds interesting.

<comment><USER2> I got it from Lee Smolin's book, The Trouble With Physics. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting article, very bad title. Science is not a search for truth, it's a search for testable, falsifiable theories that (a) resist falsification, but (b) are perpetually open to falsification by new evidence.

Those who want truth should join a religion -- science is content to successfully test theories against reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see how you can dismiss the notion of truth and then invoke falsification. What does "false" mean but "not true"?

<comment><USER4> > I don't see how you can dismiss the notion of truth and then invoke > falsification. What does "false" mean but "not true"?

I will let philosopher David Hume explain it: "No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."

To summarize, we can never say that all swans are white (a truth) but we might be able to prove that claim false.

> What does "false" mean but "not true"?

The statement that an assertion is false follows different rules than the statement that an assertion is true. And a theory that's supported by evidence can always be proven false by new evidence -- the point being that no theory ever becomes true in perpetuity (except in mathematics). More detail here:

<http://arachnoid.com/doubt>

<comment><USER5> Nothing in that explanation is incompatible with the view that science is a "search for truth", at least taken in a suitably weak sense that does not claim to have "found" it. Falsificationism is simply a methodology, not any kind of end goal. The whole point of following such a methodology is to come up with theories that are in some way "better"; the thing we actually want is the positive content of the theories, which can be used as models, make predictions, etc. If we weren't interested in the positive content of theories at all, there would be no point in trying to falsify them.

That said, I think Popperian falsificationism is rather questionable as a philosophy of science, once you prod at it more than a little.

<comment><USER4> > Nothing in that explanation is incompatible with the view that science is a > "search for truth".

Of course it's incompatible. If there is no such thing as truth in science, that eliminates truth as a goal. And there is no such thing as truth in science.

> Falsificationism is simply a methodology for finding where theories are non- > truthy and amending them accordingly.

No, this is not so. Falsification doesn't cut away those parts of theories that aren't representative of absolute truth, it cuts away the theories in their entirety.

Astrology wasn't modified to become astronomy, instead astrology was demonstrated to be false and abandoned.

The ether theory wasn't "amended" to become relativity, it was falsified in its entirety and abandoned.

Falsifiability is not an editor's red pencil, it is a test against reality, and if the test fails, the idea is abandoned.

> ... the whole point of falsifying theories is that we don't want false > theories, but theories that are... less false.

No. This isn't what falsifiability means. Falsifiability means that our ideas must be testable against reality, and only those ideas that survive the test remain standing ... to be tested again, later on, with new evidence. But we never declare a theory proven, beyond doubt (which would support your apparent notion about science).

<comment><USER6> _> If there is no such thing as truth in science, that eliminates truth as a goal. And there is no such thing as truth in science._

This is nonsense. I graduated from MIT and I and all my classmates would be shocked to learn that science is not about truth. And furthermore, stating such nonsense is just fodder for critics of science. After all, why worry about climate change if climate change theories don't represent the truth? If it's not true that climate change will likely cause the deaths of many millions of people, then we need not worry.

Your notion of truth is too highly constrained. Science makes models, which are approximations of reality, but accurate approximations are a form of truth. Using models, we build such things as TVs and airplanes and vaccines that work. Things that work are a form of truth.

<comment><USER7> Climb down from your rocking pony of mock outrage MIT boy.

He's talking Truth with a Kappa T, as in Newtons Laws were true but not True and as in Einstein's modifications were truer but we still don't Know if they are True.

You seem easily shocked.

<comment><USER6> That notion of truth is a straw man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Beauty", in science and mathematics, is not a quality of the object regarded so much as it is a pattern-recognition response in the one regarding it. Patterns which are predictable are naturally pleasing to us because our pattern-recognition abilities evolved to harness the patterns of nature for prediction of outcomes. Predicting and harnessing outcomes based on patterns may be the power that humans posses in strength over the other animals.

It should not be the case that exploration of an outcome is excluded on the basis that it is not perceived as beautiful. However, that there are patterns among the laws of nature was one of the fundamental discoveries of our species and a guiding principle of modern science.

Richard Feynman said[1]: "Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."

[1]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=j3mhkYbznBk#t=3233s)

<comment><USER2> Well, that gets us near aesthetic philosophy -- something is beautiful if most relevant people will or should find it beautiful. The distinction between "will" and "should" can of course cause issues, and in this case "relevant people" can be troublesome as well.

But as a shorthand, "This is a beautiful theory" is a lot like "This is a theory that seems like it SHOULD -- or at least COULD -- be right".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have one (insignificant?) beef with the article, in that it positions critics of a scientific discipline as those who decide the validity of the 'status quo' - this is right, that is wrong - which is a rather bleak picture of what their role is for. Criticism is as intrinsic to the development of a theory/experiment as is the effort of the scientist.

In short, science critic != movie critic.

</comment><comment><USER10> Its definitely more often beautiful than historical truth or personal truth. Either way, you deserve to wear the uniform.</comment>


Judge orders identities of commenters be revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10224/1079435-455.stm?cmpid=MOSTEMAILEDBOX

<comment><USER2> The IP address is a _possible clue_ to the identity of the commenters but surely it would take some kind of corroboration to be conclusive. For example, would you not also need to show that the person using that IP address also logged in to a particular bank account or email address at that time?</comment>


At Starbucks, Baristas (Now) Told No More Than Two Drinks  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704164004575548403514060736.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

<comment><USER2> It's a conundrum. I have noticed the factory-line feel and don't like it. I do like getting my coffee quickly, however.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency with process between Starbucks stores, so I don't think this will last. Stores will just ignore the directive.

Although a huge chain, Starbucks doesn't seem to enforce standards very well. For instance, some stores are very clean and efficient, while others have obnoxious teens behind the counter making rude noises while filth piles up in the customer areas without being cleaned for hours.</comment>


Google is using AI to compress photos - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/763649/google-is-working-on-a-way-for-ai-to-compress-your-photos-just-like-on-hbos-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> The pied piper algorithm was Lossless. I don't think google's is like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Psychoacoustic masking was the premise of Sony's ATRAC compression scheme for audio (used almost exclusively on the Minidisc format).

Today it'd get a press release describing that as AI no doubt...

</comment><comment><USER4> In the example image the compression seems more noticeable on some parts of the image than others, though this is probably due in part to my imagination. It gives me a wacky (far-future) idea, though; what about combining a NN-based compression system with data on eye tracking and attention, to vary the level of detail in an image depending on salience?

<comment><USER5> I believe John Carmack has discussed this idea in regard to VR. I haven't actually tried current VR or tracked the development that closely to say whether this is currently feasible or not, but VR with eye tracking is perfect place for optimization. Why have high res textures and such pushed out to what you are not looking at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is super-interesting as a facet of the "Intelligence is Compression" model. It's tempting to anthropomorphize and say that the system is building an opinion about what an image, fundamentally, _is_. I'm inclined to believe that these kinds of compressive abstractions are integral to higher-level reasoning. Could you build a system with even better behavior, for example, if you included text snippets describing the images, and a multi-modal model?

I'd be interested to see an analysis of the behaviors of this system compared to more generative efforts, like autoencoders or Deep Dream.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's also been discussed that they're using WebP instead of the older JPG / PNG formats in Chrome Store / Hangouts / etc.

[https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/07/google-now-uses-its-own- we...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/07/google-now-uses-its-own-webp-format- instead-of-pngs-in-the-chrome-web-store/)

</comment><comment><USER8> What is their Weissman score?

<comment><USER9> 2.89. The theoretical limit of course.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cloudflare for web applications? - <AUTHOR> Cloudflare et al. only work properly with static web sites (esp. Always Online).<p>Is there a service that connects to my code repo, DBs', etc. and is able to serve as a fallback system? <comment><USER2> I think you can achieve that using AWS OpsWork.. So you can configure local machine as well as cloud using same Opswork agent and when on premise one dies.. It should scale it on cloud.

Though it requires decent knowledge of AWS.</comment>