Ask HN: Should I kill my open source project for a 5 figure sum? - <AUTHOR> The short version: late last year I open sourced the code I use for creating real estate websites and now a company is offering me $10,000 to effectively kill it.  How do I calculate if its a good offer or not? The longer version: These guys got in touch with me a month ago saying that they wanted to work with me on the project but strongly suggested that I make it closed source. I make it quite clear that I wanted to keep it open.
We've exchanged a few friendly emails since then and last week they sent me an email offering to pay me $10,000 to close down the project on github and pass ownership of the code to them. I think they made this offer primarily because they realised I was working on MLS / RETS integration and I was going to make that part open source as well. One of the conditions they have made is that I do not compete against them in the MLS / RETS integration space. Its all a bit baffling to me and I don't think I'm going to accept it but just thought I might as well share here to hear what people think. I haven't really got a good way of calculating the value of my project but my gut instinct tells me that in the longer term (3 years +) I will be able to figure out a way to make some money out of it. <comment><USER2> That number is much too low. Ask them for $50k and see what they say.

Also, can you send me the name of your project? I'm really curious about it, as I recently got an offer to do some work integrating MLS with another system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course I tried asking for more - I'm not completely dumb ;)

The project is called PropertyWebBuilder

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm afraid I can't provide a realistic answer to your question, only my encouragement to keep things open.

Nevertheless, I am tangentially curious: once a project already is open source, can it be realistically (legally) closed up again?

Envision the following scenario: I'm just going to clone your project now, as it is - open source - on my machine. You might close it later, transfer ownership, etc. Am I not holding a legally valid open source pile of code, regardless of what Company X decided to do later?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, they can't stop anyone else from carrying on with the project. It hasn't had much take-up so far though. A few people have starred it and forked it but hardly anyone has contributed to it. I think what they are most concerned about is the MLS integration piece I'm working on at the moment which is not yet complete.

<comment><USER3> I understand now. Thanks for clarifying :)

As a little side note - possibly helpful if you are willing to invest more time in this project in the long term: I've had some discussions long time ago with people from wikihouse [1], and am still struggling with similar issues with my own adventures (academic research sponsored by an industry network). The model wikihouse adopted was that everyone has a seat at the table, but nobody owns the table itself (or the chairs).

It can be simplistically simmered down to: If this is a core feature that will allow your project to expand and make it relevant to a wider audience, considering labelling this as a "core feature" and insist on it being part of the open source project. They could sponsor it and/or have direct support of the developer and/or "first adopter" privileges but the code will fold back in the public branch after a given time. It would help if you had another company expressing interest (maybe just ask).

Good luck with your endeavours!

[1] [https://wikihouse.cc/](https://wikihouse.cc/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, wikihouse is pretty awesome!

Yeah, the idea of core features being open source makes sense. What I'm aiming for is that PropertyWebBuilder becomes something like WordPress for the real estate sector - a base on which value-added functionality can be built. That extra functionality can be commercial but I want to core product to remain free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Okay, I will assume:

1\. You are unlikely to make more than $10k

2\. If you do make some money off it, it will be much more than $10k

That is to say, there is a 90% chance of making $0 and a 10% chance of making 100s of thousands.

In this case, it is worth more than $10k from an expected value perspective.

The value of the product might be much greater for the community, and you might get speaking gigs and so on out of it. Not sure how much you value those.

If you don't need the money, I would not take it.

If you do need the money, who am I to tell you what to do?

<comment><AUTHOR> "a 10% chance of making 100s of thousands" \- I wish / hope ;)

I don't desperately need the money right now. I'm more attracted by the idea of a good base from which I can draw a steady income over the years. I've been quite surprised at how much effort is involved in maintaining an open source project though.

Its fun but its also quite tempting when an offer comes along. Would be interesting to know if there have been other projects that have shut down after an offer was made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These guys have given you excellent market information. The piece of your project with value is the mls integration you are about to write. I think you should continue working on the open source part and keep the mls plugin closed source and sell the plugin for the mls integration to the realtors. imo this plugin will be worth more than $10k and the guys contacting you know that.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you are thinking in terms of money you probably won't make more than the offer so I would take it. Previous versions were released already under an open license. Take the money and take down the code and give us all time to fork it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Of course, I should have posted the link to the project:

[https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder](https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder)

<comment><USER7> Thanks - I've forked it.

The 10k is now pretty much a moot point: if your original repo vanishes, there will still be forks of the project on Github.

Makes me wonder if they actually know how open source works?

<comment><USER7> What you could do now you have an obviously successful open source project, is to offer your services as an open source developer for hire, and see if they'll pay you to add new features to your software.

Though it kinda sounds like they're not going to be into that suggestion without quite some re-education.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> $10,000 is barely worth one man.month. If you spend more than that, then you should get more than that.

But then, independently on the time invested, your project may be worth millions of revenue a year. At the current rate of interest, (close to 0), you shouldn't sell it at less than a few billions!

Oh, and all of this is totally unrelated to the opensource aspect!

</comment><comment><USER9> 10K is not much.

</comment><comment><USER10> 10k is really nothing if its a threat.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is the possibility that I won't make 10k with the project ;)</comment></comment>


Cringely: Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13cringely.html

<comment><USER3> This analysis is sorely lacking perspective. I could pick on a bunch of things but I'll just choose one to make my point.

Cringely's assertion that Google should fear making Google search not work on Windows PCs is ludicrous. Period. Anyone who seriously thinks any broadly successful (public) company would pull a stunt like that and piss off the vast bulk of their users has lost touch with reality.

<comment><USER4> Not even the PR implications, but just the security/technical. How does an OS vendor block access to a website? Deny it in the hosts file? Add a default firewall rule? Code a special case in IE?

Any such incident would cause irrevocable damage with any government/enterprise and push them to abandon the platform entirely. As you say, it's just absurd.

<comment><USER5> Like a computer where you can only buy apps from a single site owned by the maker and only connect to the net through a single service provider - <USER2> consumer would ever go for that.

<comment><USER6> That's a bit of an overly obscured reference to Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Google's real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success._

I call bullshit. This suggests that if Windows and Internet Explorer were replaced by some other browser or OS, then people would search less on Google, which is ridiculous. As long as the number of people using the replacement products remain the same, the number of searches performed on Google should remain the same, all else remaining equal. It's not like Google searches run especially fast on Windows and IE.

</comment><comment><USER8> _And don't forget Apple, which with the iPod and iPhone has shown an ability to revolutionize markets other companies saw as mature._

Did people really think MP3 players and phones were anywhere near "mature" before Apple's products? I remember getting my girlfriend a pre-iPod MP3 player back around 2002... she never figured out how to put her music on there, and ended up getting an iPod as soon as she started buying music via iTunes.

<comment><USER9> The smart phone market is pretty far from "mature" right now.

I'd say it probably just crossed the chasm with the iPhone, and the bulk of the mainstream has yet to be converted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Uh, Bob, what happened?

Executives at Google and Microsoft are delivering solutions to "remind" each other that they exist?

I'm going to go back to some of your older blog posts to remind myself that you can add something to the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hm, a lot of opinions here, ranging in insight. This one was the most perceptive, in my opinion:

 _It's not as if these companies are gearing up to produce automobiles. The engineering teams for any of these products are, at most, 20 to 30 people — immaterial for Microsoft, which has 90,000 or so employees, and Google, which has 20,000. Nor are all of Google's products even guaranteed to ship, being as they are in that semi-solid technical state called beta test and subject to cancellation on a whim._

<comment><USER11> The problem with this statement is that Cringely has no way of knowing this and the facts publicly available contradict his account.

Just to give one example look at Steve Ballmer and Bing. Unless he's flat out lying he's going to spend 5% to 10% of Microsoft's operating income on Bing (<http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/171648.asp>). That's not exactly immaterial as Cringely claims.

<comment><USER12> According to Ohloh, there are 199 committers to Chromium:

<http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome/contributors?page=1>

A few of them probably don't work for Google, some are duplicates, but still nowhere near 20-30 people.

<comment><USER8> Wow, that's an order of magnitude more than I expected... now I'm really curious how many full-time engineers Google pays to develop Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have found Cringely to be usually essentially correct even if he is wrong on details. You just have to know which details are important and which are not. The strategic importance of Windows to Google and for Microsoft of not again getting the attention of the Justice Department by anti-competitively squeezing Google functionality on Windows (now that Bush is out of office) is absolutely correct.

Microsoft is clearly going to provide Google enough competition that they cannot roam too far into Microsoft's profit center. And Google is absolutely focused on Search using OSes to press the market (including Microsoft) in directions that Google needs to maintain its position and grow it.

Cringely is absolutely correct on the points that matter here. Contrary arguments centered on staffing sizes and such are I think probably correct but missing the point.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yesterday's Office Depot flyer had 12 laptops and 1 desktop, exactly the reverse of 3 years ago. Who knows, in 3 years it may have 12 handhelds and 1 laptop.

One thing's for sure. If your software has problems running on smaller and smaller hardware, you're doomed. Just ask DEC, Wang, Qantel, Basic4, Data General, etc.

With Chrome, Google is attacking Microsoft's Achilles heel. If Microsoft's response is another Vista, it should be interesting.</comment>


JQuery says Goodbye to IE - <AUTHOR> http://write.visualcake.org/jquery-says-goodbye-to-ie/

<comment><USER2> Silly headline that almost completely misses the point.

There will be parallel versions of jQuery - one of which will drop legacy support for outdated versions of IE in order to slim the library where such support is not required.

IE9 (and later) will be fully supported even on the slim version.

<comment><AUTHOR> It will be supported on Version 1.9 but not further! If I understand it correctly.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Android GPU - <AUTHOR>

So, I've been doing a lot of researching on the internet... actually its been two hours so far because I'm a perfectionist, anyways I'm getting a new phone and I was reading a lot about Android phones having GPUs but Android doesn't use it at all. Then I read that you can use the GPU in applications but it's just not used for the UI. Can anyone clarify this? When is the GPU used in Android, if at all. I'm mostly wondering about Android 2.3 and 3.1, since those are the latest versions. <comment><USER2> that depends on how the hardware vendor has implemented the support for it. Opengl es is almost always offloaded to a gpu and java bindings for the same are also available so u can use them in your ui. As far as general android ui is concerned it is rendered using skia,a graphics library,it can be configured to use gpu via opengl but most hardware vendors don't do it. so in general android ui is not rendered using gpu but it depends on hw implementation.....pardon me for english,its not my native language.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honeycomb's UI is GPU accelerated. You can benefit from the GPU in applications, yes.

ICS should bring a high level of hardware acceleration for both UI and applications to both tablets and phones.</comment>


Why Wikipedia's Policy to Blacklist Blogs is Outdated and Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_blacklist_blogs.php <comment><AUTHOR> I found this interesting as the line between a reputable news source and a blog has become significantly blurred. Especially in Europe where the most read printed news sources are tabloids, it's difficult seeing something that tends to be high quality like ReadWriteWeb being shortchanged. Honestly, I've never even really thought of it as a blog; it's a tech news site run on a blogging platform.

<comment><USER2> "Especially in Europe where the most read printed news sources are tabloids"

That must be a europe where I don't live. In England and Germany maybe, but most other countries actually have a surprisingly large 'regular' newspaper distribution network (in Amsterdam in any newspaper stand you can find newspapers in 3 or 4 languages). And even in England and Germany the tabloids aren't seen as real newspapers by the majority of the people.

They fall somewhere in the gray area between news and entertainment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I'm most familiar with England in Germany where the most widely read newspapers are in fact tabloids (Bild Zeitung, Sun, et al). But that wasn't really my point: it was that the line between "published source" and "blog" doesn't say much about quality, illustrated by the fact that popular printed newspapers in some European countries are, well, horrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's already unblacklisted. It didn't take much, this was just a case of one stupid Wikipedia administrator.</comment>


Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/45.0/releasenotes/ <comment><AUTHOR> When will Mozilla stop developing Thunderbird totally? Trying to find an alternative after they announced EOL for Thunderbird a while ago.</comment>


Reactive Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://www.reactivemanifesto.org/ <comment><USER3> I've been reading to learn about tech for over a decade. It used to be the case that anything that didn't make sense was a sign that I'm a dumb baby and need to learn more. As I progressed and started exploring beyond dense technical tomes for knowledge, I've learned the hard way that other people's standards for what they would publish online in a professional capacity are lower than I assumed. They could actually just be talking out of their asses. That if a webpage is full of buzzwords written loftily, the purpose is to dupe me, regardless of whatever the distilled 1-paragraph version of that would say.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's nothing like the fiery, strident rhetoric of a _manifesto_ to get one's heart pounding.

"Application requirements have changed dramatically in recent years."

I mean, if _that_ doesn't make you want to lose your chains, I don't know what will.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the broad idea (applications should be very responsive). Yes, this is very important, but I can't shake the feeling that the author of the manifesto has very little experience with responsive software (or even with software generally).

For example, the manifesto confuses ends with means. It states a desired end, but then claims that certain means are required to get there (for example, "event-driven"). Maybe event-drivenness can come into play in a given system, maybe it shouldn't; across a broad set of domains this is orthogonal to the concept of responsiveness.

In video games, for example, we do things that are extremely responsive compared to web stuff (last week I worked on something that had to run at 200 frames per second in order to meet requirements). Interactive 3D rendering systems are most certainly _not_ event-driven; they derive their responsiveness from cranking through everything as quickly as possible all the time.

There are lots of different domains of software out there and they all have found different local attractors with regard to what techniques work and produce the best result. Web software is just one of these domains, and frankly, it isn't doing so well in terms of quality compared to some of the other ones. So I think if one wants to write a manifesto like this, step one should be to get out of the Web bubble for a while and work hard in some other domains in order to get some breadth and find some real solutions to return with.

</comment><comment><USER6> I made a new diagram they can add to this "manifesto" if they like - [http://i.imgur.com/ll51WJ3.png](http://i.imgur.com/ll51WJ3.png)

<comment><USER7> Reference for those that don't get it (I had to look it up): [http://www.timecube.com/](http://www.timecube.com/) Original image appears about 1/3 of the way down.

<comment><USER8> I think...well, I know...I just...

What?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My first reaction to reading this? If you follow this design in the way that they say, you're going to wind up with a confusing mess with no visibility into why your buzzword compliant application is dog slow.

Very carefully thought out and pervasive monitoring is an under-acknowledged but utterly essential part of Google's recipe for success.

<comment><USER10> First reactions can be misleading. I'm currently taking the Reactive Programming course by Martin Odersky and Erik Meijer, over at Coursera, and one of their stated goals is to _reduce_ complexity, specifically the complexity of what they call "callback hell".

Not sure if Reactive Programming achieves this lofty goal, and buzzwords are always annoying, but I'd be wary of dismissing RP out of hand.

(I'm still undecided on its merits, by the way)

<comment><USER9> Yes, they aim to reduce the complexity of the code.

The issue is what tools you have to dig in when you're asked, "Why is this page taking 5 seconds to load?" With a traditional single threaded application there is the inherent simplicity that you can profile it, look at timings, and see where the performance went. With an asynchronous distributed application, you have to do a lot more work to start digging in.

The reason why this matters is that there are always some boneheaded performance mistakes. They would be trivial to fix if you only knew what to change. Without visibility, you won't be able to find where they are - you're just stuck suffering the consequences.

I'm definitely not saying that this is impossible. Far from that - <USER2> succeeds brilliantly. But the kind of behind the scenes pervasive visibility that you need is an essential component, and it is not something that happens by accident or is trivially retrofitted on.

<comment><USER11> They don't just talk the talk, they walk the walk. Typesafe (the company founded by Martin Odersky) offers Typesafe Console as a part of their Reactive Platform.

There you can see lots of data related to an application using Akka, including its performance and possible bottlenecks.

You can use it easily from the web browser, the only downside is the large amount of RAM used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "It works best if the compartments are structured in a hierarchical fashion, much like a large corporation where a problem is escalated upwards until a level is reached which has the power to deal with it."

Because when I think "effective, responsive, and scalable decision-making", I _definitely_ think "big ol' ORG CHART", amirite? /snark

</comment><comment><USER13> This talk by Jonas Bonér (one of the Akka devs) covers the motivations behind this well: [http://parleys.com/play/51c0c876e4b0d38b54f461f6/chapter0/ab...](http://parleys.com/play/51c0c876e4b0d38b54f461f6/chapter0/about)

</comment><comment><USER14> So basically... Tcl. Which got all of that years and years ago. Except of course 'scaling', which doesn't make a lot of sense for the desktop environment it was created in. Actually, come to think of it though, it did get that too, via AOLServer.

<comment><USER15> I'm really curious about this, do you mind expanding on it?

<comment><USER16> I've always been fascinated by TCL, so I second girvo's request. I'd like to know more, with possibly some links to in depth resources, or some insight (as TCL is not that "in" nowadays).

<comment><USER14> Well, it was a pretty vague "manifesto", but Tcl (not TCL) did the event driven thing before it was cool, back in the 90ies. That made it quite responsive for Tk GUI's.

Erlang does a lot of the stuff in their manifesto too.

<comment><USER17> Uhhh... were you aware that basically all the GUI OSes were event driven such as Windows 1.0 and MacOS and AmigaOS etc? Writing desktop applications for any of those OSes involved writing lots of event handlers. And even before that, in the 80s when Lotus 123 reigned in the PC world, that was also built around an event loop. Same with Microsoft's Word 1.0 for MSDOS.

TCL did not have anything to do with event loops. Its claim to fame was that it was a simple language with a small footprint that was easy to integrate in any kind of application. Tk was a GUI like all the others, but you were able to write your event handlers in TCL. That doesn't make TCL into an event driven system. It just shows that when you have an event driven system you can factor it into two parts, the event driven core, and the event handlers. Then the event handlers can easily be written in a higher level language to reduce the lines of code and improve productivity.

<comment><USER14> I didn't say that Tcl was unique in this approach, just that it did it before it was 'cool'.

Tcl is very much an event driven system if you want it to be - they're fairly deeply ingrained into how it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Horses for courses. Async. architectures are great for distributed back-end systems (God I love making streaming data-science applications) ... but not so great for on-the-metal embedded devices; where static & limited computational capacity & whole-system predictability requirements drive you in the opposite direction. I do a lot of machine vision stuff for embedded systems, and having everything driven by the drum-beat of a frame interval really does simplify things a lot; particularly when it comes to finding the absolute cheapest hardware that will be able to perform a given function.

<comment><USER19> I read this awesome book and multi threading embedded systems. "Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++: Event-Driven Programming for Embedded Systems"

The author has an amazing stack for psuedo real time scheduling on _seriously_ limited hardware, [http://www.state-machine.com/](http://www.state- machine.com/) . QP-nano brings async real time to PIC processors! So there really is little overhead for async architectures. I think async squeezes more out of limited hardware by avoiding busy loops waiting for IO or other synchronizations to align.

I agree its more difficult to develop with async, but I strongly disagree going non-async saves you money on hardware

<comment><USER18> It's not really about the overhead. The intrinsic overhead of async. is trivial, anyway. It is more about predictability & how the system is understood. Async architectures let you have simple, easy-to-understand components, but the expense of a more complex macro-control-flow. Hardware and embedded guys spend a lot of time looking at storage 'scopes, and like things to be nice and periodic... it just fits in with the world-view a bit better. It is not so much that one is objectively better than the other, it is just about how different people's mentality works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Apparently written for the sole purpose of feeling superior to the 95% of all developers who's applications in no way, economical, practical or otherwise, justify such architecture astronautics.

Yes, there are applications that needs this, and I love to read about them, and learn from them. From real world solutions for real world problems that is. Not via some arrogant abstract this-is-the-one-true-path manifesto.

</comment><comment><USER21> I found out that a build I was doing was utilising [http://imgur.com/U70Rcrz](http://imgur.com/U70Rcrz). I don't see that very often. Personally I find that kind of parallel processing CS magic impressive. Similarly I like the possibility of processing data as it arrives in a non blocking fashion in pipes-and-filters chains of computation. Another thing I like are having arbitrary numbers of stateless possibly short lived servers. Like you see at PaaS's like Heroku. Easy load balancing, easy recovery. These are all things that become possible by employing other programming paradigms than the classical thread based, blocking, stateful ones.

And it's not confined to one tech stack either; .net, javascript, java, scala, ...

To me it's just good computer science for when you want to be near real time, scale horizontally and utilise your hardware resources and be able to handle failure.

</comment><comment><USER22> The people behind the reactive manifesto are typesafe.com

Unsurprisingly, they have products to sell that are manifesto-compliant.

</comment><comment><USER23> Some thoughts about manifestos in general:

"A manifesto is about moral authoritarianism: an absolutist statement of eternal values from which follows (typically) an absolutist ideal of the good life. If there is one thing that most defines a manifesto, it is what it lacks: a central place for uncertainty."

"The problems Haque identifies cannot be solved with manifestos because they are problems, not karmic punishments for espousing false values that will go away through the embrace of the "right" values."

[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/11/13/the-gooseberry- fallacy/](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/11/13/the-gooseberry-fallacy/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice moment for the pioneers, such as Joe Armstrong. Seems like they finally got understood. There would be no Scala without Erlang and no such paradigm without Martin Odersky. I am happy and grateful that I could read their books and use products of their efforts.

<comment><USER25> [http://www.reactivemanifestomanifesto.org/](http://www.reactivemanifestomanifesto.org/)

<comment><USER26> Hm, the reactive manifesto doesn't say that it's new. It tries to convert people from bloated ol' Java/CSharp to better practices that fits new common needs. Of course Reactive is not new... Nor realtime... But an ecommerce website for instance never had to wonder about this kind of things before: new needs.

<comment><USER24> It is not just about Java bloatware, it is already obvious that it is crap and several "fixes", notably Scala and Clojure, are already matured. It is mostly about understanding and avoiding other broken by design things, such as thread-mutex based "concurrency", mutable, non-parallel collections, and imperative programming (all these Java loops which do mutations) in general. It is about ideas summarized by Joe Armstrong in his thesis, that the world is parallel and that actor model and share nothing architecture together with fault tolerance and message passing via unreliable channels as the only way of communication coul is a more appropriate paradigm than current imperative- pthread-mutex mess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 'Show your support with a ribbon' that breaks when the site goes responsive.

</comment><comment><USER27> here is my manifesto: react to everything and you're slave. create reactions and you're ruler. balance action and reaction and you're a master.

</comment><comment><USER28> Whoever created this page obviously never tried to resize the viewport to something like 320 by 240.

<comment><USER16> Yes, please! [http://i.imgur.com/yMzh9jQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/yMzh9jQ.png)

EDIT: It's nothing more of a joke... What if we had Deluxe Browse II?

But more seriously, who browses in 320x200? Does anybody follow 256-color web- safe palettes anymore?

<comment><USER29> The Reactive Manifesto page can't react to resizes. Oh the irony.

<comment><USER30> It does, it's fully responsive. I believe the complaint is because the header sticks on the top so when you have a tiny screen then you can't read much.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get Ready for the Apple Treadmill? - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/02/03/apple-treadmill-patent/ <comment><USER2> Some of those patent ideas are really cool. Having your phone being able to unlock your door is a bit scary though.</comment>


Ask HN: Quick question about your professional relationships - <AUTHOR> Just want to get hackers, makers and operators opinion on this.<p>- Are you maintaining your professional relationships? Why?<p>- How hard is it to maintain your professional relationships? <comment><USER2> I maintain them for 1) job opportunities in the future 2) Professional learning by discussing best practices or challenges they overcame

I don't have that large of a network so it's pretty easy to manage my relationships. Mainly text and misc messaging apps

</comment><comment><USER3> Since I had kids it seems practically impossible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear you clear from your short response :) Other than time, What's the next hardest thing?</comment></comment>


US Study Projects How 'Unequivocal Warming' Will Change Americans ... - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/06/17/17climatewire-us-study-projects-how-unequivocal-warming-wi-29186.html

<comment><USER2> Just in time for one of the coldest summers on record.

It's hard for people to fathom the thought of global warming while their local weather is in fact colder.

Jared Diamond's Collapse is a good reference. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_(book)>

What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree and doom the island think as he used his stone axe?

While I remain skeptical about global climate change, I can also appreciate the fact that polluting less and taking care of the environment is a good thing.

The problem is that even as America becomes cleaner, China, India and the rest of the third world are burning trees and coal like crazy.

<comment><USER3> I do not believe that human contribution to global warming is significant.

Water vapor is responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect, yet somehow it is never brought up in global warming discussions. Why is this?

We've raised CO2 concentrations 100 ppm to 370 ppm... a concentration that's tiny in comparison to the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere... after all, we're on a giant ball of water.

I subscribe to the theory of giant ball of nuclear fire leads to warmer temperatures -> increase in ocean temperatures -> release of dissolved CO2 & increase in water vapor -> greater greenhouse effect

I don't hate the environment and obviously we should be reducing our impact, but cleaner air and water should be cause enough.

If anyone can explain to me why my reasoning is flawed I'll be happy to champion the idea that global warming is primarily driven by man... it would actually make my life easier to embrace it as fact. However, as it stands now, it seems to me a rather arrogant proposition.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't matter if 99.9% of greenhouse effect is not caused by humans, if the extra 0.1% is. The gross heat fluxes in and out are enormous, but because they precisely balance they're not noticeable. An extra 0.1%, while very small compared to the total heat flux, is a purely net flux because it's not canceled out (until the Earth has warmed). It's simple conservation of energy.

Think of it this way: If you have a gallon of water and you pour it back and forth between two containers, you will eventually run out of water even if you lose only a few drops each time.

Another example: If you trade your assets back and forth between different stocks (and they don't change value), it doesn't matter how much money you start with, if you do it for long enough you will eventually run out of money due to the transaction cost.

A small effect can have a big impact if it's allowed to accumulate over time, and that's precisely what's happening with the greenhouse effect.

<comment><USER3> This is a good argument assuming that the Earth's heat fluxes are in balance, but I don't believe this to be the case, what with ice ages, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> anon-e-moose On the other hand, a lot more people die from cold, so if you decrease that, it could be a net win...

[http://discovermagazine.com/2007/sep/global-warming-the- grea...](http://discovermagazine.com/2007/sep/global-warming-the-great- lifesaver)

Let me be even more sarcastic and snide... maybe people who are afraid of global warming are close minded and afraid of change...

<comment><USER5> Wanting to avoid death, disease, and destruction is not the same as a general fear of change.

<comment><USER6> I read the post you are replying to as a jab at those who believe change leads to death and destruction. We could move the cities inland. We could optimize buildings to keep people cooler. We could find more efficient forms of energy to enable more indoor climate control.

The current stress right now is to _stop_ climate control. We humans believe we can stop climate control, but what if we can't? What if it actually _is_ due to sun spots and beyond our control? It seems like it would make sense to _adapt_ to the change rather than try to stop the change.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, had to reply again.

"I read the post you are replying to as a jab at those who believe change leads to death and destruction."

What I was saying is that global warming will lead to death and destruction.

"We could move the cities inland. "

I love how people say this like it's no biggie. Let's hire some contractors and bam, city moved. LOL. I'm guessing it's a lot easier to reduce are use of fossil fuels than it is to move a few major cities. what do you think?

<comment><USER6> China moved hundreds of millions of people away from the lake formed behind the three gorges dam. That's ultimately what _will_ happen. Either we'll build levies around the whole continent to protect coastal areas or the people will move. It'll probably be a combination of both.

<comment><USER5> China doesn't have the same level of infrastructure as we do. Imagine trying to move large chunks of Los Angeles. That's a completely different animal isn't it? Doesn't it seem easier and cheaper to reduce our energy use than to move multiple cities like Los Angeles?

I personally think it's a better idea to avoid serious problems than to accept the enormous pain that will come with ideas like "hey, change is normal".

<comment><USER6> I don't believe reducing our energy consumption is going to have much effect on global warming. I think the sun is way more powerful an influence on our climate than humans.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand your point of view. The sun certainly can affect climate in large ways, but that does not mean that all climate change is due to the sun or that human activity can't cause climate change.

"But even if solar forcing in the past was more important than this estimate suggests, as some scientists think, there is no correlation between solar activity and the strong warming during the past 40 years. Claims that this is the case have not stood up to scrutiny (pdf document).

Direct measurements of solar output since 1978 show a steady rise and fall over the 11-year sunspot cycle, but no upwards or downward trend .

Similarly, there is no trend in direct measurements of the Sun's ultraviolet output and in cosmic rays. So for the period for which we have direct, reliable records, the Earth has warmed dramatically even though there has been no corresponding rise in any kind of solar activity."

source: [http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11650-climate-myths- gl...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11650-climate-myths-global- warming-is-down-to-the-sun-not-humans.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I measure how serious someone is about CO2 and global warming by their enthusiasm for nuclear power.

A govt that claims to be concerned about CO2 that isn't pouring concrete for dozens of reactors isn't worried about CO2, it's worried about something else.

It's porkulus II, bigger and badder.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ask YC: How will 'Unequivocal Warming' provide new opportunities? Technology is our hammer, so what can we start making now?

A weather aggregator and tracker (and projector)?

Information services that decrease carbon emissions? Ex: <http://neighborhoodfruit.com>

Let's brainstorm right here.

</comment><comment><USER9> Let Carl Zimmer sort it out for you: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/02/27/unchecked-...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/02/27/unchecked- ice-a-saga-in-five-chapters/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Please fix the URL to the NYTimes URL, since this is a NYTimes article...

</comment><comment><USER11> I still haven't heard convincing arguments for global warming as fact. Climate change, yes, but warming as a result of human activity on a global scale no. Chief among my concerns is the fact that Mars seems to be warming as well. [http://www.dakotavoice.com/2009/06/nasa-study-shows-sun- resp...](http://www.dakotavoice.com/2009/06/nasa-study-shows-sun-responsible- for-planet-warming/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Not sure why it would lower crop production.

Also not sure why maple syrup is worth mentioning.

<comment><USER13> "Not sure why it would lower crop production."

The conditions that crops need aren't based on average temperature, but rather they're based on the minimum temperature, the maximum temperature, and how long it takes to go from very cold to very warm and vice versa. With global warming the climate zones don't just shift north, but rather you get these situations where certain crops just won't grow at all. For example, grape vines have certain mechanisms to protect the buds during winter, but these mechanisms get disabled as soon as you get the first warm snap. The problem is that if it then gets cold again you lose all the buds, so no grapes.

With global warming what happens is you still have very low minimum temperatures in winter, but the average temperature is warmer and so you have these temporary warm snaps disable all the natural protection mechanisms that have evolved over thousands of years. So if you just move the vines north then they all die because their cold protection mechanisms get disabled and the buds freeze, and you can't keep them where they are because it's too hot in the summer so they die also. So what happens is that you just can't successfully grow good wine grapes anymore. Now obviously this is a pretty trivial example, but there are similar things going on for a lot of our major food crops. You can't just move them north, so we're just going to have major food shortages.

Another good example is wheat rusts. Every winter our top scientists go down to Mexico and create new types of wheat based on whatever rust is currently spreading. The only reason they have time to do this is because the wheat sprouts later in the US than it does in Mexico. But with global warming all the wheat will come up much closer together, so what may happen is that we just don't have wheat anymore.

(And believe me, wheat rust is pretty much the scariest shit you can imagine. There's a reason it was one of the biblical plagues.)

<comment><USER14> _For example, grape vines have certain mechanisms to protect the buds during winter, but these mechanisms get disabled as soon as you get the first warm snap. The problem is that if it then gets cold again you lose all the buds, so no grapes._

But in fact, we know that grapes were grown at more northerly areas in the British Isles in warmer historical times. If it has been done, it's too late to suggest it's impossible.

<comment><USER13> "But in fact, we know that grapes were grown at more northerly areas in the British Isles in warmer historical times. If it has been done, it's too late to suggest it's impossible."

That's vitis labrusca, I was talking about vitis vinifera. I have no doubt it can be done to some extent, but there's a large difference between being able to do something in theory and having large quantities of good wine for relatively cheap.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Promise of Blockchain Is a World Without Middlemen - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-promise-of-blockchain-is-a-world-without-middlemen <comment><USER2> I don't see it that way.

Bitcoin "miners" are absolutely middlemen. Right now they take a cut mostly in the form of the block reward; later it is assumed they will take a cut in the form of rising transaction fees.

Anytime you have a blockchain that (A) anyone can join, (B) transports or represents value, and (C) is vulnerable to "51% attacks" the system only works when there is an equilibrium among the stored or transacted value, the compensation for miners, and the electricity that they burn doing the mining. Otherwise, the value that can be extracted with a 51% attack exceeds the cost of mounting the attack (PLUS the cost of not participating in the blockchain with that amount of hashrate, which pushes the needle somewhat but doesn't change the fact that there must exist some equilibrium point)

(last I knew there was not a breakthrough in block chain technology that protects the blockchain from being rolled back by an attacker who holds over 50% of the hashrate for an extended period of time, and that allows double spending and other unintended transactions to occur)

It's true that in principle these miners can be anyone---maybe even you---but the reality is that they are vastly, overwhelmingly ASIC miners running in places without metered electricity. _They_ are your faceless middlemen, absolutely 100% by design leaving you without even the meager recourse your government probably requires you when you feel you're wronged by your banks or credit card companies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh glorious day. It can't come soon enough. Imagine buying a new car from the manufacturer and having all the "paperwork" handled on the block chain.

</comment><comment><USER4> Blockchain will change the world!!! Then his examples are more items at Walmart and furniture rental. Hahaha

I don't doubt that blockchain has the ability to upend business as usual in myriad ways, and there are a lot of really exciting projects out there that have that potential... but the examples this article used definitely don't live up to the hype of his opening paragraph.</comment>


Ask HN:Google adsense - <AUTHOR>

Approxmately,  How much uniques / page views required to make $1000 per month on google adwords? <comment><USER2> It varies too much by topic, site type, and where your visitors are coming from. I was once regularly making $1000 per ~10,000 pageviews on a certain type of site. At the same time, I was making $800 per month on another site doing ~200k pageviews.

Sadly I only make about $150 a month in all now, but I filled my boots and sold some of the sites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing the numbers.I have currently around 9,630 page views/ month. Not running any ads yet.</comment></comment>


Genius discovered Google was scraping their lyrics - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/lyrics-site-genius-com-accuses-google-of-lifting-its-content-11560677400 <comment><USER2> > Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some > of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics' apostrophes between > straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every > song.

> When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used > in Morse code, they spelled out the words "Red Handed."

Clever. Reminds me of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street).

Can Google really be so stupid/careless to just scrape Genius directly? Their explanation that they source these lyrics from someone, which in turn apparently scrapes Genius seems more plausible to me.

<comment><USER3> It's indeed a lot more likely that LyricFind, from whom Google buys the content, scrapes the lyrics.

Why risk showing stolen content when you are already paying for them?

I understand that Genius focuses on Google though. That makes the story a lot more interesting for publications like WSJ that have a bit of a anti-Google campaign going on.

<comment><USER4> WSJ had a focus on Google and NYTimes has Facebook in the crosshair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ironic that genius scraped other lyrics sites to bootstrap their business. Cute analysis can't hide the basic hypocrisy here.

<comment><USER6> I feel it's pretty typical for some of these companies who like to complain about other's unethical practices. Strongly reminds me of Crunchyroll.

<comment><USER7> What's wrong with crunchyroll? I thought they were legitimate?

<comment><USER8> NOTE: The following may not be correct...

I might be wrong, but IIRC, CR used to be a fan-sub type of site; I don't recall if they hosted stuff, or just linked to it. When I first found them, though, that's how they seemed to be. But since then, I think they license all of their content now or something like that. I may be totally wrong here, keep that in mind...

<comment><USER9> Reminds me of Spotify during the invite only service (2008ish?), when a lot of albums still had scene release tags in their titles from the mp3 scraping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 1) Extremely recent Repost [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952) 2) I find it extremely aggravating how needlessly accusatory the title is. It presumes guilt when its still technically an accusation

<comment><USER11> Hacker news isn't a criminal trial.

<comment><USER12> The presumption of innocence is supposed to be a shared value of western culture, of which the WSJ is part of. Unfortunately we all know the narrative they're trying to frame here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Relevant history how they had to be forced into agreeing to pay royalties for lyrics [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap- genius...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius- website-agrees-to-license-with-music-publishers.html) (via @CaseyNewton [https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1140266508318334977](https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1140266508318334977))

</comment><comment><USER14> They don't really own the lyrics in any case. In traditional publishing you would have to pay the original artist to reproduce the lyrics, as you have to do for poems and other lyrical works.

<comment><USER15> They were forced to pay royalties, so should others incl Google.

<comment><USER16> Sure, but to whom? If your web site has data or works you uploaded but have no particular rights to, you can't prevent someone else from reusing it if you've given them access to download. Royalties are fine -- it depends on where you draw the line on fair use -- but they should go to the artist or publisher, not a random web site with no particular rights to the work who just happened to aggregate it. That's not how IP works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone here remember lyrics.ch and their inevitable takedown?

The copyright situation is not complicated; lyric copyright resides with the songwriter, and is usually sublicensed exclusively to the publisher. Like Napsterisation, these were forced open by hugely widespread infringement, and eventually a stalemate has been reached between publishers and the internet.

Like youtube, this will result in lots of weird anomalies where ownership is disputed and the publishers claim all sorts of things they're not technically entitled to.

Like a lot of other things, the publisher may never have made a clean official copy of the lyrics available, so the actual compilation is done by third parties - but that doesn't grant them a formal copyright in that work. (Unless the weird sui generis right of databases comes into play)

</comment><comment><USER18> Do Genius actually own lyrics?

<comment><USER19> Pretty sure that's the main reason Genius will have difficulty pursuing this case. Google isn't infringing their copyright, because they can't copyright someone else's work, and I doubt the unique pattern of apostrophes is enough of an infringement to claim Google stole, it merely proves the source of the content was them.

It does, at the least, suggest Google is paying someone who less than ethically sources their data though.

<comment><USER16> Why do you say "less than ethically"?

Copyrights, patents, and trademarks have clear limits. An overly expansive theory of copyright would be stifling to innovation and free expression.

It was sourced from someone who was liberal about taking legal risks, but I have a hard time seeing what ethical rights were broken. Indeed, the opposite theory is that if we don't exercise out rights, they go away and Google's source is risking litigation to preserve our rights.

The rightsholder here are the artists and their proxies (publishers and agents), not Genius. I wouldn't feel bad of they asked for a takedown or royalties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hope Google delists them so they go fuck themselves.

azlyrics is SO MUCH better. I'd rather see them at the top instead of Genius.

<comment><USER21> For pure lyrics viewing azlyrics might be better (I don't think so), but Genius is so much more than just raw lyrics. I love the comments / interpretations by other users.</comment></comment>


I-score: Free and open-source intermedia sequencer - <AUTHOR> http://i-score.org/ <comment><USER2> This seems to be an extremely powerful tool, but the onramp is pretty long - many strange abstractions have to be configured and running properly before you can get anything out of it.

I would highly recommend that the package maintainers for i-Score consider adding pre-made samples to the package.. this way at the least, we could load the tutorial files and see how it works without having to dance through the fire of configuring Pd, adding a new patch, etc. This can be very daunting for newcomers - so it'll mean your users will be the more pro/critical types. You've got to work on the newbies in this field (music-making), or else you don't get the users you think you deserve ..

</comment><comment><USER3> The Ubuntu packages seem quite out of date.

</comment><comment><USER4> Typo: Ressources.

I'd also recommend setting up LetsEncrypt.

<comment><USER3> That's nice, but a bit off topic for the original site.</comment></comment>


A collection of tweet-sized D3 creations – to add yours, just tweet the code - <AUTHOR> https://t.d3fc.io/ <comment><USER2> I like how all it takes to get some cool art is to impose an arbitrary constraint on technically skilled people.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Isn't technical mastery what art is supposed to be about? I'm pretty sure we won't see a "selfie artist" anytime soon.

<comment><USER4> Technical Mastery is not Art, it's Technical Mastery. There's nothing inherently creative in having mastered a craft. Technical Mastery is a comparative metric when a given output has been determined to be artistic.

Producing a "selfie" is, by definition, working within an artistic constraint, and when I read your post I had to assume that we had _already seen_ many "selfie artists", which seems to be the case:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/10-artists-who-use- selfi...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/10-artists-who-use-selfies-as- their-radical-weapons_us_55e7393ae4b0c818f61a303b)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are awesome! I've been learning d3 and have been struggling a bit with animations. Does anyone mind breaking down one of these tweets and explaining how it works? I understand it's minifed but learning how to loop animations would be great.

<comment><USER6> What you see in the tweet is the code which runs in the animation loop. The animation loop is provided, along with all of the abbreviated function aliases, by this base file [1].

I've reproduced the guts of it below -

      d3.timer(function(t) {
        g.d([t]);
        if (window.tweet) {
          tweet(t);
        }
      });

The important bit is the t argument which is provided to the code you see in the tweet. Most of the animations are driven by this value, normally passed through a trigonometric function to provide some easing.

In the case of my Hello World example, the tweet code is as follows -

      // Perform a data-join [2] with the parent set to the root node provided
      // by the base file, the data defaulting to [t] as above and with a
      // built-in behavior of appending an SVG text element in the enter selection.
      T()
      // Set the following attributes on the text element -
      .a({
        // Affine transform the element using a sc-ale transform.
        // The scaling value is a function of the data item bound to the element (t).
        // s is an alias for Math.sin and 1e3 is just shorthand for 1000 (saves 1 character!)
        transform:d=>sc(4+s(d/1e3)),
        // Make use of another alias to offset the text based on the normalised mouse position.
        x:d=>mo[0]*10,
        y:d=>mo[1]*10
      })
      // Set the text content of the text element
      .t('Hello World')

This is by no means an exciting example but it should provide some clues as to how the more complex animations work.

[1] [https://github.com/chrisprice/t-d3fc/blob/master/public/base...](https://github.com/chrisprice/t-d3fc/blob/master/public/base.js) [2] [http://bost.ocks.org/mike/join/](http://bost.ocks.org/mike/join/)

<comment><USER5> Very nice explanation, the selectAll bit is clever. So the key is that timer. I tried googling around for animations before but I guess I missed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ah there's the inevitable alert("test") messages. Thank god for the 'prevent this window from generating additional popups' option in browsers these days.

Makes me want to learn d3 finally.

<comment><USER8> I got a "You've been XSSd" popup. Not sure if humorous alert("test") or if demo JS exploit...

Edit: Some Ctrl+F resulted in "console.log("halp"); alert("you've been XSSd");" from "Harrison Shoebridge". Naff.

<comment><USER9> Without looking into the source, I'd bet someone tweeted the "exploit", just to make the point that going to that page basically runs arbitrary javascript in your browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> if you constrain languages enough, they all eventually become verbose k.

</comment><comment><USER11> So awesome! I added a flanging dancing circle thing.

I ran a 'write a game in a tweet' challenge last year, was super fun and had heaps of creative entries (mostly javascript). [https://twitter.com/eigenbom/status/614783132391247872](https://twitter.com/eigenbom/status/614783132391247872)

</comment><comment><USER12> Super. My firefox 43.0.4 gobbled up all the CPU it could but it was a rare case where I would gladly trade CPU cycles for the pleasure of scrolling through examples.

</comment><comment><USER13> Demo scene 2.0?

</comment><comment><USER14> wow, this made my fans go crazy!

<comment><USER15> Whenever I need my office a little warmer I go to Mike's gallery page. (please dont bother with relevant xkcd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yet another site that breaks your back button. Cool idea, but that bug left a nasty taste in my mouth.

<comment><USER17> It's fine to report such a problem, but "left a nasty taste in my mouth"? Come on. You make it sound like they shouldn't have even bothered, when this is one of the coolest things to have appeared on HN in a while.

All: Before responding to new work with swipes, dismissals, or nitpicks, try mentally multiplying their effect by 1000x. That seems to be about the magnitude by which we underestimate how such stuff comes across. Adjust accordingly, and then you can offer criticisms and corrections without adding air pollution.

<comment><USER16> Sorry, man. This is a pet peeve of mine, as you can see from my comment history. And I'm not the only one, those comments often get quite a few upvotes. I can see how it must be frustrating to launch something only to have a comment like this, but it is my honest not-trying-to-be-mean reaction to a site that breaks the back button, I feel very frustrated and it's off-putting. The website _is_ a cool idea as I said, so to be clear, I do _not_ think that they shouldn't have bothered.

<comment><USER17> I believe you, and didn't think that you meant to communicate that. The trouble is that individual signals that aren't objectionable compound into global problems at scale. It's a community problem more than an individual one, which is why it's so hard to correct.

One thing we've learned is that you can't judge this phenomenon accurately by upvotes. Indignation of any kind reliably gets more upvotes than anything else, by a large margin.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Phone Number Area Code? - <AUTHOR>

I'm building stuff with Heroku, but am wondering which area codes work best for every body/is best generally (reputation, 'prestige' (or something)).
Right now I have a (202), which is form Washington, D.C.
I was debating between numbers from California, New York, Chicago...
Whast do you think? <comment><USER2> Depends on who your audience is. 404 is pretty amusing :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, but none where available :(</comment></comment>


What does America look like from outside America? - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/ <comment><AUTHOR> Wade Davis, a professor of anthropology and an expert in cultures and ecosystems, describes the last 100 years of America, culminating in the now of COVID19.

This portrait stings.

If you can keep your eyes open long enough to read and absorb Davis's shocking chronicle, the silver lining is that 99% of Americans are not to blame... so long as they can keep their eyes open for long enough to make a difference.</comment>


Thoughts on R7RS - <AUTHOR> http://benjisimon.blogspot.com/2012/02/some-initial-thoughts-on-r7rs.html

<comment><USER2> Odd how he dislikes both not having a way to create disjoint types and the way provided to create disjoint types (define-record-type).

<comment><USER3> Indeed, and what could be a truer reflection of the Scheme community than this ;-)

<comment><USER4> LISP and Buddha-nature... ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Still going to stick with R5RS. do we really need to revise Latin?

<comment><USER6> My understanding from superficial observation is that they are trying to fix the (perceived) mess that was R6RS, and thus unify the community.

<comment><USER7> That would be the case. Some people were unhappy with R6RS not keeping Scheme a minimal language anymore.

Now they're making one "small" Scheme and one "big" Scheme. That's a good thing because they can actively decide what to put in the big version (full numeric tower, e.g.) and what to put in the small language (e.g. a standardized module system).</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing the etcd 2.0 Release Candidate - <AUTHOR> https://coreos.com/blog/etcd-2-0-release-candidate/

<comment><USER2> This is great news !

The Raft implementation inside the Etcd codebase is probably one of the core (no pun intended) implementations available.

The fact that it is written in Go gives developers the ability to have a rock solid consensus algorithm in place across multiple processors.

Not since Paxos, has such a clean algorithm been written that solves this mission critical (difficult) problem in the cloud world we live in today.

For those not familiar with Paxos, here is a reference:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_%28computer_science%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_%28computer_science%29)

Raft is a much simpler, easier to use and maintain algorithm.

And with the Etcd implementation it bootstraps one to have a clean well maintained version.

For those interested in Raft they can check out the website with more details...

[https://raftconsensus.github.io/](https://raftconsensus.github.io/)

Here is a PDF version of the paper on Raft:

[http://ramcloud.stanford.edu/raft.pdf](http://ramcloud.stanford.edu/raft.pdf)

And here is a PDF version of Diego Ongaro's PhD Thesis:

[https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/~ongaro/thesis.pdf](https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/~ongaro/thesis.pdf)

Thanks,

Michael Angerman

Corvallis, Oregon</comment>


Bill Gates has stepped down from Microsoft's board - <AUTHOR> https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/microsoft-announces-change-to-its-board-of-directors-301023293.html <comment><USER2> Also stepped down from the Berkshire board as well.

Given that he stepped away from a day to day role in 2008 and then stepped down as the chairman in 2014, I'm guessing he's focusing on his foundation.

He's still the 8th largest shareholder according to Bloomberg's records(103,000,000 share), which is pretty impressive given that the 7 entities above him are all funds.

Incase you wanted to know who the remaining 12 board members are:

With Gates' departure, the Board will consist of 12 members, including John W. Thompson, Microsoft independent chair; Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock Partners; Hugh Johnston, vice chairman and chief financial officer of PepsiCo; Teri L. List-Stoll, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Gap, Inc.; Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft; Sandra E. Peterson, operating partner, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice; Penny Pritzker, founder and chairman, PSP Partners; Charles W. Scharf, chief executive officer and president of Wells Fargo & Co.; Arne Sorenson, president and CEO, Marriott International Inc.; John W. Stanton, chairman of Trilogy Equity Partners; Emma Walmsley, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK); and Padmasree Warrior, founder, CEO and president, Fable Group Inc.

<comment><USER3> Kind of odd, being an employee there, I've never heard of eleven of the twelve board members before.

<comment><USER4> Most of the board members seem to be partners at various investment firms. Many of them don't seem to even remotely tech people. It's kind of sad that the Microsoft board lacks any external visionaries.

<comment><USER5> At a huge company like Microsoft the board isn't really a great place for visionaries. It's much better at things like helping the CEO understand the thoughts of large institutional investors that provide Microsoft with capital. A visionary is better suited as a "special advisor" to someone... like the role that Bill Gates is keeping.

<comment><USER6> With cash on hand of around $140 billion, I'm not sure Microsoft really needs to worry about outside capital. I would think the board could help with how to keep those big companies paying for everyone to have the full Microsoft Office suite and how to custom price it.

<comment><USER7> They still care about share price, which depends on outside investors willing to buy the shares, which depends on MS having good IR, which some of the board members help with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would guess that Bill Gates has been looking to do this for a while now, and this is just a good time PR-wise. It won't tank the stock anymore than it already has because the market's crashing, and people have other stuff to worry about.

<comment><USER9> Eh, I honestly don't think he has to care how much any news would marginally affect the stock or not. Unless he actually cares if he or Bezos is the #1 wealthiest person -- both being anyways astronomically rich at the end of the day.

I didn't in fact even know he still had a role in Microsoft. My understanding was first Ballmer and then Nadella took over running the show years ago. So I don't think it's not even going to to affect investor sentiment that much.

<comment><USER10> > Unless he actually cares if he or Bezos is the #1 wealthiest person

He could also care about whether his actions have a negative impact on others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whichever poster it was the other day saying that this was the optimal time to send out bad news as a company seems to have been astute.

<comment><USER12> Friday afternoons are generally a time when they'll dump out bad news.

<comment><USER13> Much better when you have a pandemic going on. A friend of mine who is a CFO told me this sort of thing is used by CFOs in all companies to "clean the balance sheets" of bad news. Basically writing off things and taking losses with the excuse "the <name> disaster has really hit us hard but we expect to emerge stronger than ever."

The reason for this strategy is that it is difficult for an aggravated shareholder to prove that the thing they are writing off was their fault. It is a giant get out of jail free card for contradicting any previous guidance or other statements simply "because disaster."

As a result, the statements from companies on their Q1 results will be a lot of "we've been hit hard by this disaster" and they will dump a lot of things off their balance sheets that they should have dumped off prior to this, take a hit in their stock price but no one will be "guilty" of causing the stock price hit, "because disaster."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Satya Nadella is doing a terrific job leading Microsoft. Prior to his taking over, Microsoft was seen as a has-been. Today Microsoft is the most valuable company in the world once again (edit: AAPL is slightly ahead).

Nevertheless, this is a sad day. If anyone has the ability--and credibility-- to provide guidance to Nadella it is Bill Gates. With Gates gone (and Ballmer too) it is Nadella's Microsoft. That's not bad necessarily, but having Gates around as a backup was a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is the end of an era. I can only imagine what those board meetings are like. If anything like his product reviews, he asked incisive, aggressive questions.

I hope he left because he is satisfied with the job the rest of the board is doing. Yes, Microsoft caused a lot of damage during the monopoly days. The tech industry needs a healthy, competitive Microsoft - at the very least to keep a check on other companies.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems like he's laser-focused on global health at the B&MGF with some occasional videos about books, tech and trends. Corporate governance may seem to him less interesting at this stage.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does this let Bill sell stock without needing to file SEC disclosures?

<comment> wombat-man I think if you own a certain percentage of total equity you still need to file disclosures.

<comment><USER18> But after a year or two, it does mean he's no longer an insider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Surprised he was even on it still...

</comment><comment><USER20> The patent king is stepping down from his empire

</comment><comment><USER21> The optimist in me wants to believe that this means he's about to be appointed as the head of the national coronavirus response.

There's probably no better qualified person in the world to manage the coordinated effort.

<comment><USER22> Why on earth would he be the most qualified person for that?

<comment> tuna-piano 1\. Bill Gates is extremely competitive, he's a bulldog, he fights and wants to win against whatever. He built Microsoft into a Monopoly and is fighting hard (and doing a great job) against diseases.

2\. Bill Gates looks at problems logically, finds missing links, and solves those links. Whether that is refrigeration for vaccines, getting useful data for diseases, etc.

3\. Bill Gates knows a ton about diseases, epidemics, etc. He's super curious and doesn't stop learning.

Who could be more qualified for the job?

<comment><USER23> Maybe someone with a medical degree?

Gates can certainly bring some unique skills to the table if he was invited, but it seems like we should have an actual doctor leading the charge.

<comment> kube-system MDs are good at treating patients, but they're not necessarily good at leading people.

Good leaders know how to draw on the expertise of others to organize a coordinated response... which the Gates Foundation has proved themselves very capable of doing, particularly with public health issues. The Gates Foundation employs lots of healthcare professionals.

I'd highly suggest looking up some of the talks Gates has done about his work with his foundation. He definitely has his shit together.

<comment><USER24> Spot on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Bill Gates got his start at Micro-Soft coding BASIC dev stacks for the microcomputers of his day-- and Microsoft has now announced that further development on Visual Basic is to be frozen indefinitely ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22570684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22570684) \- "Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language"). There's no way that this is mere coincidence.

<comment><USER26> Or, it could be that

> Bill Gates stepped down from the company's Board of Directors to dedicate > more time to his philanthropic priorities including global health, > development, education, and his increasing engagement in tackling climate > change.

If you follow Bill Gates at all, you'll understand this is where all of his energy, and passion, have been going for a long while now.</comment></comment>


Show HN: tesserocr – A Python wrapper for the tesseract-ocr API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sirfz/tesserocr <comment><AUTHOR> This differs from other python wrappers like pytesseract [1] and pyocr [2] in that tesserocr binds the tesseract c-api. The others call out to the tesseract executable via `subprocess`.

[1] [https://github.com/madmaze/pytesseract](https://github.com/madmaze/pytesseract) [2] [https://github.com/jflesch/pyocr](https://github.com/jflesch/pyocr)

<comment><AUTHOR> slight correction, pyocr has three apis: Libtesseract, Tesseract, and Cuneiform. The first calls the c-api while the other two call an executable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Strangely enough started using pytesseract yesterday and realised it was subprocess only.

Thanks, will give this a try instead :)

<comment><USER3> Hey ddmf, you might want to use the latest beta version directly from the master branch of the repo as it has an important issue fixed (the way the PIL image is converted to pix). Otherwise it's safer to use the SetImageFile method instead of SetImage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't the GIL the way not to go if you really want to be multithreaded and with good performance?

<comment><USER3> tesserocr releases the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) while performing some tasks which allows threads to run them in parallel without waiting for the GIL to be available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great. Did you tune the recognition models at all or is it straight tesseract plus the wrapper.

<comment><USER3> The aim of the project was to bring most tesseract's API functionality to a pythonic interface without the need for any subprocess calls. No model tuning involved, just a wrapper :)

<comment><USER6> Great work, btw!

Feature request: It would be great if you could also hook-in to the model training API, if any, of Tesseract. That way, you could drive the training via python rather than using Tesseract's accompanying executables.

<comment><USER3> It's possible the required methods are already there but I'll look into it. Would be cool if you open an issue on GitHub. Thanks for the feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could someone guide me to a step by step guide for installing it in windows ?

<comment><USER3> It was never tested on Windows, perhaps you can try the Linux steps on Cygwin? I'm interested in seeing how this can work on Windows as I developed this with Linux in mind which was suitable for my use-case

<comment><USER7> I have cygwin installed on my machine., I ll give it a shot.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Android launcher or that supports a dumb phone profile? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a way to set up my phone with just phone, texting, maps, and spotify, while still being a reboot or reload away from having distracting apps like amazon and a browser, so there's a decent bit of friction between myself and mindless distraction. Is anyone aware of a solution for this? <comment><USER2> Evie launcher works beautifully for me. Might not be restricting enough for your taste though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I checked it out, but I didn't see any way that it helps. It actually seemed worse than Nova in that there is a feed screen (read: endless scrolling distraction) if you swipe right.</comment></comment>