Ask HN: What motivates you in life? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I just read the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankel. I think it does a fantastic job of answering the questions about the meaning of life.

Viktor came up with the theory of Logotherapy which in a nutshell has 3 parts:

\- Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.

\- Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.

\- We have freedom to find meaning in what we do, and what we experience, or at least in the stand we take when faced with a situation of unchangeable suffering

[https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor- Frankl/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor- Frankl/dp/080701429X)

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm motivated by the pursuit of things that interest me because I perceive them to be worth knowing.

Unfortunately, crippling depression and a looming feeling of nihilism are sucking most of my motivation away.

<comment><USER5> Even if life is meaningless, you still only get to do it once. Sometimes its more fun when playing on cheat codes if you know what I mean. If life is meaningless then its impossible to fail because the failure had no meaning to begin with. It is however possible to succeed by setting out a goal and accomplishing it. There lies the fundamental difference. The meaning of life is determined solely by the individual and not an exterior presence. You give your own life meaning based on how important of emphasis you place on your goals. If your goals are meaningless, then so is life. If your goals are meaningful, then your life is too.

<comment><USER6> It's always fun to play with cheats on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Motivation is a really tough one. Honestly, I am mostly motivated to go out of my way for delicious food and seeing friends. But if you're talking about motivation for productivity, it's more complicated. I've written about this before on HN:

In my younger and more foolish days, and inspired by Steve Jobs, I tried to literally live life as if every day were my last in an effort to be productive. I discovered that if it were my last day on earth, I would much rather spend the time joking around with friends or family rather than working, and I fell into a depressive funk.

Abstract thoughts about death, while depressive, don't motivate me. What does end up "motivating" me are developing habits. In order to develop habits, I use pathetically achievable goals:

I find goals to be counterproductive unless they're simply achieved and a matter of habit. For instance, "go to the gym and do nothing" became "go to the gym and walk on the treadmill" when I became habituated to showing up at the gym. Now I'm lifting regularly and I feel off if I don't get a chance to go work out.

Audacious goals, on the other hand, are demotivating because there's too much chance of failure. If I hold myself to lifting certain weights, I may even end up getting injured. But now I'm happy simply showing up, doing what I have the capacity for, whether it's walking, stretching, or lifting. I can (and will) come back if I have an off day.

Scott Adams talks about something similar in Goals vs Systems[1]. A goal of writing a book is much harder to achieve than a goal of typing a little bit in the morning. Ironically, the latter may be the best route to the former...as long as you don't think about it too much :)

[1]: [http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102964992706/goals-vs- systems](http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102964992706/goals-vs-systems)

<comment><USER8> > _Abstract thoughts about death, while depressive, don 't motivate me. What > does end up "motivating" me are developing habits. In order to develop > habits, I use pathetically achievable goals_

This. I was chatting with a friend and he asked me about how I get motivated. My answer is that I abstract away the motivation with a process.

For instance, I used to work out a lot when I was younger and then stopped.. But when I wanted to work out recently, what I did to start the habit wasn't to go to the gym because that's a "new thing", an _action_ and I'm a "procrastinator"..

I incorporated working out with the act of taking a shower and they became one, so each time I was _about to take a shower_ , I'd do a few hundred push ups, then get in the shower and do a 100 successive squats and that was it. It's not much but it beats nothing. If I imagined I had to _wear_ clothes, go out _somewhere_ , _work out_ , then _come back_ and _take a shower_ , I wouldn't do it..

As a side note, when I was in college, my commute was 6 hours and arriving late to class. Then they added a university bus. I had to take a bus to get to the Uni bus and I had to wake up early, so I said "why not work out while I'm at it". Woke up at 4h30 and a good work out, shower and food, and about 30 minutes of review study. The energy I had through the _whole day_ was amazing.

<comment><USER7> That's a good point. Combining actions that you already execute with habits you would like to develop can be a powerful thing.

To take the gym example further, I realized that I needed to be doing more cardio (any cardio at all), but the treadmill was the most boring activity on earth. I could only spend a few minutes on it before getting bored. To combat this, I started listening to an audio language lesson in a foreign language that I'd been meaning to learn while walking on the treadmill.

Pretty soon, I ended up spending 20+ minute chunks of time on the treadmill while learning my target language, which amplified both of the habits that I wanted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am motivated by the desire to never say the phrase, "I wish I would have ... when I was younger"

<comment><USER9> That sounds super stressfull

<comment><USER5> Its stressful if you're someone who keeps a list of your failures to remind yourself of your own humanity. Me, I'm a half glass full kind of guy. I look back and think of all the times I sucked up the courage to enter a difficult social situation and it turned out unbelievably better than anything I had envisioned. That motivates me to continue to challenge myself to do things that make me uncomfortable so that I can adapt and improve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hi Everyone - I work as the executive assistant to the Chief Information Officer at my company. I am so envious of my developer colleagues and would love to learn how to code. Any suggestions on where I should start? My colleague recommended the W3Schools online. Any other suggestions you may have? Thanks soooo much!

<comment><USER11> I'd suggest finding a hands-on online course that gives you a tiny portfolio in the end. A lot of the fun with programming is seeing your work come alive and seeing all the projects you've completed. Assuming you haven't programmed before, I wouldn't go with buying a programming language-specific book to start since those can be pretty boring to go through. Books will start to be useful as you develop a lot more curiosity and want to fill in your knowledge gaps.

My friend's learning from the ground-up and he's using Code Academy ([https://www.codecademy.com](https://www.codecademy.com)). If you're a little more serious about this, you could also look into Udacity's Nanodegree program.

<comment><USER12> I'd also recommend giving Code Academy a try in the first instance. It's free, there's no set up on your computer needed (it's all done through their website) and it guides you through.

It's how I started learning when I was trying to do it around my job, I eventually left to work on learning to code full time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What motivates me is far from what I do for 8 hours a day (sitting behind a desk and writing code).

Honestly, it's the belief that communities, at the level of grassroots, can be empowered to be further engaged in the social discourses of their society. I have a strong belief that while our government powers are playing politics, families who are living in impoverished neighborhoods can be encouraged to be active agents of change and can move populations. I'm working with a couple non-profit organizations (that are around the world) that do exactly this and the results we see are incredibly encouraging and endearing. Not only are youth getting excited and working in their communities, their siblings and parents are also getting involved. If it wasn't for this work (of which I spend hours _after work_ partaking in), I don't know what would motivate me.

EDIT: Just to clarify, this empowerment comes through education at the level of the neighborhood. Looking at this practically, it means training our younger future generations and providing them the tools they need to succeed (getting a good education in school, living a moral life, being a good citizen, etc). All this through a process of learning at the level of the organizations I'm working with.

</comment><comment><USER14> Knowledge. I received my Masters in CS last year and am thinking of either getting another one or a PhD. I didn't need my Masters as I probably could have gotten a dev job without it (my BS was in Economics) but there were things I wanted to learn (PL theory and Compilers) so I did it. I would love to be able to do one or more PhDs full time so I could just absorb as much information as I could in specialized areas.

The other thing that motivates me is financial freedom. It doesn't necessarily mean making tons of money but making enough to cover expenses and not have to worry about a budget. I'm currently working on a side project/business that I hope will at least cover my mortgage and student loans each month. I have low expectations but that is what I hope and if I get more than that it would be great.

</comment><comment><USER15> Curiosity. I need to know the underlying structure of things, and the metastructures that arise from their structural interrelations.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am motivated by the desire to crush my enemies, to see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

<comment><USER17> We need an update for this saying that is gender neutral or that reverses the sexes. It's a great saying, but it is deeply rooted in traditional gender roles to the max.

<comment><USER18> I am motivated by the desire to crush my enemies, to see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentations of their children?

<comment><USER17> Um, no. I don't think _children_ works. Tossing out possibilities (that probably all suck):

Chattel property? Loved ones? Lovers? Spouses?

(But thanks! I never am sure how to hit the right conversational note on hn.)

<comment><USER6> "Lovers" can work. It's unassailable.

<comment><USER18> I don't like that it rhymes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm motivated by all aspects of my life:

1\. I want to explore the world: hear people's stories, learn new ideas, experience all the diversity and craziness there is in the world, have moments of childlike wonder.

2\. I want to help people: victims of war, families in poverty, people who did not get a childhood or a fulfilling education, people who are not able to achieve their full potential.

3\. I want to see myself grow. I'm curious as to how my abilities, my personality, and my outlook on life will change in the next decades.

4\. I look forward to meeting the love of my life, raising a family, and participating in a close-knit, medium-sized community.

I may not achieve all of these things, and I will likely be have regrets and dissatisfactions, but on the whole, life has been a worthwhile journey, and I expect the future will be worthwhile as well.

</comment><comment><USER20> In the context of work: the act of "creation" i.e. abstracting some reality into tiny encoded parts that elegantly fit together to perform something useful.

In the context of life: it does derive itself from work i.e. I need work - other than that I don't believe in perfect balance, there's no such thing in life.

I'm usually trying to be an active nihilist i.e. less a passive one as much as I can. So I guess something in the realm of a "quest" of knowledge - the known unknowns and the yummy unknown unknowns.

</comment><comment><USER21> Curiosity and the desire to do things which I enjoy. I also like learning and 1 year ago moved to Germany. I now speak exclusively in German as an IT consultant here after only 2 years of learning.

That said. I don't put too much pressure on myself. I have goals but I'm also human and don't want to take life too seriously. I don't think it necessarily matters if I reach all of them or just a few. I see them as simply markers of directions I could move in that might make for some sort of exciting experience that lets me experience the joys and sometimes struggles of being alive.

</comment><comment><USER22> I like building things, not just code. I think it's a sense of personal satisfaction from creating something where there was nothing and sharing it with others. Most of the time nobody cares, so it's always nice when somebody else likes it.

Lately I've been mixing relaxation music that's really just royalty free recordings of nature and royalty free piano music.

</comment><comment><USER23> Love, mainly. The best of dopes.

</comment><comment><USER24> Facilitating better living and working for the people around me; that's what motivates me, and it's why I became an engineer. Seeing something I've built help someone makes me ridiculously happy!

</comment><comment><USER25> 2\. Changing the world outside myself to have more of what I value.

1\. Changing the inside of myself to have more of what I value.

If you're looking for more motivation, start with self-examination of what it is you deeply value.

</comment><comment><USER26> Taking care of my dependents, which makes me feel capable and fulfilled.

</comment><comment><USER27> Love, happiness, curiosity, and a seething rage at seeing the world around me deprived of those vital things on so regular a basis.

I make no claim to being a healthy or normal individual.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ferrari 458 italia

</comment><comment><USER29> I've no idea ... obsessive personality I guess. I don't have a choice but to be motivated ... a bit like dogs and balls.

</comment><comment><USER30> The belief that tomorrow will be better than today. That progress is being made.

</comment><comment><USER31> it's interesting

</comment><comment><USER32> Probably more appropriate for /r/askreddit

</comment><comment><USER33> death

<comment><USER34> This reminds me of the Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> My family.

</comment><comment><USER6> Lust.

</comment><comment><USER36> Efficiency

</comment><comment><USER37> solving problems

</comment><comment><USER38> The beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER39> Why should I declare my motivations publicly?

<comment><USER5> Because we wouldn't know if you were lying anyways</comment></comment>


Show HN: My friend and I built an LDS dating site that we think is pretty great - <AUTHOR> https://ldsmatch.com

<comment><USER2> I like that it's free.</comment>


H Y P E R NO R M ALIZATION - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFtsrjlsclQ <comment><USER2> Adam Curtis did a short piece for Charlie Brooker's 2015 review about "post- modernist" "non-linear" politics. It's worth a look, especially because it's ~5min instead of almost 3 hours for HyperNormalisation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great link. But would love if the title was a bit less - ehhh - spamish...

<comment><USER4> WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE TITLE?

<comment><USER3> The missing space between `N` and `O`

<comment><AUTHOR> that's called "artistic license" ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Amazing how anything can sound irrefutably correct when spoken with a scholarly male British accent.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> wow ..never heard of the "Alladin" supercomputer [https://youtu.be/zFtsrjlsclQ?t=1h12m4s](https://youtu.be/zFtsrjlsclQ?t=1h12m4s)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> i recommend listening to the whole thing while playing ambient trance in parallel, while muting the visuals. makes for great coding ;-)</comment>


The Man Blocking Peace in Colombia - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/opinion/the-man-blocking-peace-in-colombia.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> it isn't just one man... this went on for a vote and the majority of the people voted against it... sure he probably helped but a lot of us, including myself saw this deal as an insult to the millions of victims of the FARC... Colombia said no to a narconsitution for the second time in my lifetime and for that I am kinda proud.

The FARC IMHO are already defeated and they know it... the government just want to give them a way to save face, however they have no popular support and the country is moving forward without them...

<comment><USER3> Hate breads only more hate my friend. FARC doesn't have the majority, no, but they're not small either. They are a very large and established group, impossible to defeat, because they are part of Colombia, just as you are. You have to agree on the way to live together, and say "yes" to something eventually. That is, without resorting to brutal dick waving that is war once again.

<comment><USER2> the farc only have around 10000 people in their ranks... that's .02% of the population... that is pretty small...

they only look larger due to their narco-wealth (in fact they are one of the wealthiest terrorist groups in the world) add the colombian government history of just ignoring the pleas of the poor and their remote location... and that's how they get away with this crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this article accuse Uribe of being hyperbolic for suggesting the deal contains amnesty, then describe the deal as amnesty for most, and lenient punishment for the worst (keep in mind, FARC spent decades terrorizing Colombians).

I don't know enough to speak on who is right, but this article is engaging in exactly what it accuses Uribe of doing.

<comment><USER2> the treaty was giving amnesty to about 80% of farc members... and although I agree that this is probably necessary for peace... man... these guys are rapists murderers and drug traffickers... so...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like the fact that the article tries to be objective by recognizing that Uribe's government was of great value to the country, but that because of his overwhelming popularity as president he became entitled, arrogant and egocentric, and he has now become a spoke in the wheel for progress and peace in the country.

In addition to being corrupted by power, he has also surrounded himself with yes men who have led a Trump-like lie campaigns around the country (recognized by them) that led people to vote for No in the peace process, and is now demanding impossible concessions from the government and the guerrilla to try and stall the peace process until he or his party members are reelected into power (next presidential elections are less than a year and a half away), while leaving the country at huge risk of going back to guerrilla warfare, terrorism and political violence.

</comment><comment><USER5> Although it is an editorial, the bias is astonishing. The whole nation has cast a vote - but instead of respectine people's opinion, NYT portrays them as manipulated, misguided children.

<comment><USER6> They have been manipulated. There's a investigation close to begin to the PR person of the NO leaders. I would agree with describing the Colombian people as "misguided children".

<comment><USER7> It's a dangerous position to take if you can't fathom that someone may legitimately disagree with you.

<comment><AUTHOR> A large amount of people disagree, but what has come out after the vote has shown than an even larger segment voted because they were intentionally lied to and confused about the actual contents of the agreements.

It was actually pretty funny, because the leader of the NO campaign gave an interview boasting about how they had successfully conned the country into thinking that gender ideology gay marriage and other subjects were being voted for with the agreements (they estimated that over 2mm evangelical christians voted No because of this), and how by lying on social media they managed to execute an incredibly cheap political campaign. He was removed as campaign leader the next day and the opposition quickly distanced themselves from him by pretending his role was minor, since he is also pending penal investigation and will probably go to jail, since under Colombian law intentionally lying to the electorate to change the outcome of an election is punishable by law.

This was the actual interview: [http://www.larepublica.co/el-no-ha-sido-la- campa%C3%B1a-m%C3...](http://www.larepublica.co/el-no-ha-sido-la- campa%C3%B1a-m%C3%A1s-barata-y-m%C3%A1s-efectiva-de-la-historia_427891)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Archive.is linky for those who can't read the article (even via the "web" link above):

[http://archive.is/YLsxH](http://archive.is/YLsxH)

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.yahoo.com/news/majority-colombians-back-peace- de...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/majority-colombians-back-peace-deal-farc- poll-203140748.html)

Kind of weird how virtually overnight support apparently went from 59.5 in favor/33.2 against to 49.8 in favor/50.2 against.

</comment><comment><USER10> Pure opinion without any indication of facts. Perhaps Uribe has legitimate reasons for wanting to punish the rebels?

After our Civil War the U.S. government imprisoned Jefferson Davis and others, and confiscated great quantities of land from former rebels.

<comment><USER11> Seriously, the American Civil War? The mid-19th century does not provide great models for politics of any modern nation.

Anyway, the Confederation was soundly defeated within a couple of years. The Columbian government has been trying to destroy FARC with military force for half a century. At some point, you have to try something else and be prepared to make concessions for peace, even if it does not seem like perfect justice to those who still believe in a military solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Was there not an annoucement of new negotations that were announced in Havana again after this vote went through? What happened to that?

<comment><USER2> there will be a new negotiation, both sides are still commited it'd take a while because the government should demand jailtime...

I believe the cease fire will continue tho

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >>He also asserted, without evidence, that the deal would hurt the private sector.

Bourgeoisie propaganda.

>>even admitted in an interview that they had steered clear of explaining the content of the agreement and instead "focused on a message of indignation."

So it is literally propaganda, paid for by..

>>The Uribe administration has continued dealing with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, securing loans, agreeing to cut expenses, agreeing to continue debt payments, privatize public companies and foment investor confidence, in order to comply with financial orthodoxy.

Capitalists.

Communism is good in theory, but in practice it usually just ends up being destroyed in a military coup financed by the CIA.

<comment><USER14> LOL, good in _what_ theory? Communism is an unworkable mess that demands the use of violence to subjugate the individual to the whims of the majority.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pretinder, Another Tinder Automator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jidicula/pretinder <comment><USER2> Man. It's a conundrum. I mean the concept and execution is brilliant. Damn does it make it hard trying to actually meet someone on tinder. SMH lol

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this before and received a request from another developer to change the name. He's actually made a great tool for sending webpages to your Kindle device, and I recommend you check it out! [https://github.com/darkhelmet/tinderizer](https://github.com/darkhelmet/tinderizer)</comment>


Boy, girl or intersex? Law and gender - <AUTHOR> https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/boy-girl-or-intersex-law-and-gender <comment><USER2> It's generally interesting to think about how old ways of identification may be unnecessary. Why is gender so relevant, on the one hand, and then on the other, what dangers lurk in more precise identifiers?</comment>


Apple, FBI, and the Burden of Forensic Methodology - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5645 <comment><USER2> Fascinating, correct and well worth the read!</comment>


Privacy and control need to be put back into the hands of the individual - <AUTHOR> https://decentralize.today/privacy-and-control-need-to-be-put-back-into-the-hands-of-the-individual-301c4c318ef8#.u3sba968w <comment><USER2> Article is actually a lengthy pitch for YAC$ (yet another cryptocurrency)

It's another anonymized coin that appears to have fancy chat/marketplace support in the main wallet application as a flagship feature.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand how blockchain applications can ever be considered "anonymous", when there's a public ledger and everyone knowing your wallet address can track all your transactions.

<comment><USER4> I guess you could own several wallets for different purposes?

<comment><USER3> Enigma fallacy. Tracing that back to a single owner is hard for humans, but trivial to do for computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Earlier this year the Brazilian government used the courts to block WhatsApp > for 72 hours as it seems they did not like being unable to peer into the > private communications of their citizens. This happened again just a couple > of weeks ago and it seems what the government cannot control should be > blocked or even banned.

It's very hypocritical when an American criticises foreign "corrupt, oppressive" governments for "peering into private communications" by using _public_ legal means against US corporations, whereas the US government has done exactly the same thing (using legal and illegal means) but you just didn't know about it (because most Internet companies are based in the US).

[I'm not sure that the author is an American, but there are undoubtedly many Americans that share this attitude.]

<comment><USER6> Remember: if you're a non-US citizen outside the US, then the US Constitution protection against search (4th Amendment) doesn't apply to you! We have no 4th Amendment protections!

<comment><USER7> I'm as opposed to mass surveillance as anyone on HN, but I've been surprised by this kind of reaction. Why are non-citizens surprised at this lack of constitutional protection? Are there actually _any_ countries whose constitutional protections apply to non-citizens and/or non-residents? I think that would be pretty cool and progressive if it were the case, but I'm not aware of any.

<comment><USER8> I've said it before, but why WOULDN'T a country provide protections and rights to non-citizens (residents or not) that it outlines in it's constitution? After all, the US founding fathers believed it to be "self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". If it is always wrong for a government to do certain things, then clearly it is wrong for a government to do those things no matter to whom they are done.

Morally it's clear that you should treat others by the standards that you believe to be universal.

A government's ability to guarantee and protect these rights is, of course, limited by its geography. Other people may have different value systems which mean they protect a different set of rights than those defined in the US constitution (although the DoI does declare them to be 'unalienable'). But that's not what people are talking about when they talk about US government spying internationally. The US government violates rights it considers to be universal, and many of the people who's rights are violated are in countries with similarly enshrined values, and also who's countries are not at war with the US.

<comment><USER9> And I call BS when I see it. A nation state is morally responsible to it's citizens to uphold the law and order and protect it's citizens [from threats internal and external]. This is funded by the tax money collected by the state from it's subjects. Nation state may, willingly provide protections and other services reserved for it's citizens to others. But concept that it must or should is flawed at heart. World today remains a hostile place and the game for supremacy remains as strong as ever.

<comment><USER10> This is obviously true. It's equally obvious that the neoliberal consensus is opposed to this and seeks to substitute a globalist fantasy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Domain: decentralize.today. Published on: Medium.

Seriously, it isn't THAT hard to at least host your blog outside the centralized disservices. You could argue that reach is negatively affected. It probably is. But if everybody (and that includes the outlets promoting decentralization) just swallows the bait, how can things ever change? (Wo)man up!

<comment><USER12> Having been raised in a country enjoying the first winds of freedom after a dictatorship of 44 years, I wonder how serious this kind of blog posts are.

Sometimes they look just doing activism from the couch.

<comment><USER13> Anything that raises a flag and makes people think and consider alternatives to FB, Google, printed money, etc, is good activism. Whether it's from the couch or the armchair, is irrelevant.

<comment><USER14> _FB, Google, printed money_

One of these things is not like the others.

<comment><USER15> I don't think their point was to make precise and completely congruent analogues of these three topics.

<comment><USER14> It's more that I don't want sensible concerns about privacy in online services diluted by monetary theory that's at best "fringe".

<comment><USER16> The article identifies the risk that printed money will disappear, replaced with a few large credit card companies and banks so the government can monitor everyone's use of money. Since we're clearly already heading in that direction bit by bit, I wouldn't call it a fringe theory.

<comment><USER17> It is only fringe / extremist / conspiracy theorist when its a problem I don't _personally_ have (or have not exerted the mental energy to fully understand). If it is affecting my life, it is serious mainstream business we need to take seriously.

That is a fundamental problem with online discourse. People put on blinders on singular crusades when reality is the combined effects of many, many forces influencing one another. Topically, the anti-encryption movement by governments is tied to broader totalitarian leanings by many traditionally republican states in the west, which has hundreds of influential aspects in all kinds of fields of business and society. And those leanings have correlations in everything from fearmongering to economic uncertainty to long running campaigns by certain interests that have lasted decades.

And then we get trapped in this rat hole of arguing over what is "serious" or meaningful, when in hindsight we can historically recognize almost all of history is the combined effect of _many_ influencing factors not apparent at that moment in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The first half lists lots of state actions against encryption, the second part advertises the shadow project, a blockchain based anonymous currency, communication and commerce platform: [https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow](https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow)

</comment><comment><USER19> Has anyone of these activists ever considered the appalling inability of average person to manage private keys properly? Whether it is Bitcoin, pgp, whatever else, using private keys on own hardware where noone else has access to is absolute prerequisite of successful decentralized crypto. Yet the privkeys keep getting leaked,stolen,lost(including Zimmermann's pgp key),cracked(due to generation by buggy software) without any good solution in sight.

<comment><USER20> You will have a hard time stealing a private key remotely from a good hardware token.

(Of course a compromised machine can be used to sign using a hardware token, but that's a different level of compromise than getting the private key.)

<comment><USER19> Obviously the token can be stolen,too. Also,people all the time _voluntarily_ allow others to use their tokens if convenience demands it.

Your comment is also a good example of how the concern 'people can't manage privkeys well' keeps getting handwaved away, with sad results.

<comment> david-given Sounds like the obvious solution here is to provide a blessed and convenient way for one person to allow another to use their tokens in a limited fashion.

What's the actual use case here? What are people wanting to do when they do this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The right title should be: how to loose all or most your money by using crypto currencies

</comment><comment><USER22> I worry about specific implementations of software for decentralisation. You can ban or block an app, arrest it's creators, but it's a lot harder to ban a protocol that has a number of different implementations. Maybe there isn't enough resources for that, maybe encryption and privacy tech is hard enough that more than one implementation isn't possible at this moment, but I think it should be a goal.

</comment><comment><USER23> The article mentions shadow cash. I've never heard of it, but why would someone use it over bitcoin or perhaps monero?

</comment><comment><USER24> Printed money is decentralized and anonymous in the cash form.

<comment><USER25> Anonymous yes, decentralized no. The bill in your hand is printed by a central authority, is given value (or taken away, at their whim) by that same central authority, is protected by law, and is technically not even your property. It's the opposite of decentralized.

<comment><USER24> It's decentralized because you don't have to communicate with a centralized authority in order to make a transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not only on contents on global sites, China did lots of censorship on the local sites content.</comment>


Shaun the Sheep - <AUTHOR>

No download sales today? Algorithms not working? Installs going bad? Yeah, me too. That's why I end every day watching "Shaun the Sheep," a stop-motion  animation series from Aardman Animations. (Episodes available various places online.)
Shaun is a hacker in the best sense of the word: curious, bright, experimental, fascinated by devices, and willing to take risks.
I recommend this addition to the toolbox of things to make one's day better. <comment><USER2> [https://twitter.com/paulg/status/571104059861524480](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/571104059861524480)</comment>


Announcing the High Replication Datastore for App Engine - <AUTHOR> http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/01/announcing-high-replication-datastore.html

<comment><USER2> Glad to see this live! We've been testing this for the last couple of months at <http://gri.pe> without any issues. It basically means you don't have to worry about datastore maintenance, ever. There hasn't been a significant speed hit for us at all.

I _highly_ recommend choosing this option when creating a new AppEngine project. It's more expensive than a standard datastore, but we pay virtually nothing for storage anyways.

Thanks to Ikai/Kevin and the rest of the HR datastore folks who made this happen.

<comment><USER3> This is slightly off-topic, but here in Turkey, ghs.google.com is blocked for some reason; and Google App Engine projects with custom domains like <http://gri.pe> are blocked as well. (Blogspot blogs with custom domains are blocked too.)

So, you should be aware of that if you wonder why you get no hits from Turkey.

<comment><USER4> It's because they block things overzealously. When one video on YouTube offended them, they blocked all of YouTube. Some site running on GAE offended them, so the whole of ghs.google.com got blocked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Comparison between Master/Slave (current) and High Replication (just announced) Datastores:

<http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/hr/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Does this perform Paxos on every single transaction (wouldn't that be expensive?) or is Paxos used to elect a write coordinator replica and ensure a consistent view of the cluster to guarantee serializable consistency?

If it's former, can we get more details? This would be quite similar to the work Daniel Abadi had been doing at Yale at parallelizing distributed commit (e.g., Paxos) to maintain high throughput despite increased latency.

<comment><USER7> I'm going to assume the later. Why would they need to perform Paxos on every single transaction when just using it to elect a master gets 99.9% of the benefits? That would be consistent with the implementation of BigTable in general.

EDIT: The higher write latency and 3x CPU cost is probably because it uses synchronous replication to write to all of the slaves before acknowledging the transaction.

<comment><USER8> A reasonable thought, but wrong. The existing datastore has basically the 99.9% of the benefits you describe. Unfortunately, 99.9% availability (especially when a single datastore request may touch 10 things and thus be at 99% availability) isn't good enough.

One of the major problems with having a single bigtable is partial outages. These can either be the major events like there were today, with 10% or more of the cell having issues, or it can be just one server in the bigtable having performance issues. The key to having higher availability with the High Replication datastore is that if certain entities are slow or unavailable in one datacenter, we can rely on the performance of other datacenters to limit the latency.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the clarification, but I'm not sure I follow what I was wrong about. I wasn't saying that it should have 99.9% availability, I was just stating that in most situations, using Paxos to elect a master provides very nearly all the benefits (99.9% was just a vague figure to indicate this) of doing a Paxos commit each time.

<comment><USER8> Specifically, for every write, it will undergo the Paxos mechanism; the writes aren't serialized through a single master.

<comment><USER6> Very interesting. Will more information on this be included in the CIDR paper on Megastore?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They say you can only activate this for new apps. But there's no way AFAIK to do this while keeping the same app id.

There should definitely be a way to do a one-time upgrade from master/slave to this new datastore without having to mess around with moving our data from one app to another.

<comment><USER8> Well, if you use Google Apps and your own domain, you can point the domain at the new app after copying data over. <http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/domain.html>

Being able to do a migration online and for the same appspot.com domain is something we'd like to do, but I don't have any timeline as for when that will be available.

<comment><USER10> Unless you use HTTPS, which currently depends on the appspot domain.

In any case, thanks! Very welcome upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can get scalable Paxos replication for yourself when ScalienDB comes out:

<http://github.com/scalien/scaliendb>

(My product.)

</comment><comment><USER7> How are they providing consistent get/put/delete in the event of network partition? Is it CP?

<comment> brown9-2 I would assume that if one of their datacenters became partitioned from the others in the group, then they would stop serving requests out of that DC entirely. This would alleviate the concern for network partition-tolerance, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER7> The problem is that C systems have masters. What happens when the master becomes network isolated? The election and recovery process is tricky. If 100% consistency is assumed, there MUST an outage period until this is recognized and corrected.

<comment><USER8> If you require a read/write to talk to a majority of the replicas, you don't need to have a specific replica as the master to maintain consistency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That explains the 30 minute outage earlier today!

<comment><USER8> While the HR datastore is designed so events like that won't happen (and it was not affected by said outage), there's no correlation between this launch and the datastore unavailability earlier today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can this be selected only for some entity groups?

<comment><USER2> No, it's all or none, configured at the appid level.</comment></comment>


How to prevent sexual assault (no chilli powder required) (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/21/how-to-prevent-sexual-assault <comment><USER2> This is just dumb. It's not like a rapist will read that and say, "oooohhh, I'm not supposed to do this? I did not know that!"

<comment><USER3> It's satire.</comment></comment>


Tindie: like Etsy for electronics - <AUTHOR> https://tindie.com/

<comment><USER2> There are little things that would eventually be improved I'm sure, but right now the biggest, albeit slightly vague, feedback I got is - "Make it more _passionate_." Like Etsy does for handmade goods or sparkfun does for its electronic parts; (You're lucky because your target audience is easy to excite). Not like ebay does where they have to deal with a generic store because they dont know what to specialise for. As it is the bootstrap theme looks nifty, but doesnt get me excited as much as it possibly could.

Brilliant idea though. So much potential, great job man :)

<comment><USER3> Can't agree with this more. There needs to be more indie in tindie. The only problem is time and getting stuff built as fast as possible. But great comment and there definitely be more soul coming to the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I made tindie, so if anyone has any feedback I'm all ears!

<comment><USER4> Where did you find the people who are working on these posted projects, and how did you get them to post?

I think generally, etsy works because they can sell small runs of handmade things at a premium to cover costs (not the only reason). I'm not sure what the costs are to get small runs of circuit boards made, but it may push up prices of small runs of electronics to be much higher than what we're use to paying--and people generally don't think of electronics as being 'handmade' to justify paying the high premium. It's not a show stopper, but it's something I'd watch out for.

That said, it might work for addons for already made platforms like raspberry pi, arduino, etc. I think it's worth a shot to try it out. Keep us posted of your progress.

<comment><USER3> Initially, I just threw a post on /r/arduino asking people if they thought it was a good idea, then had a signup form for people to start seeding projects before the site was built.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/rxyjb/would_you_sup...](http://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/rxyjb/would_you_support_an_arduino_marketplace_or_am_i/)

<comment><USER5> What kind of payment/shopping cart system do you use to allow people to sell products on your site?

<comment><USER3> Stripe for payments. Shopping cart built into Cartridge, a django framework

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have to sign-up to buy anything? I can understand for sellers, but buyers?

<comment><USER3> Hmm interesting point... let me crunch on this one

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I look forward to the Tindie equivalent of Regretsy.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry gang for the site going down. Working on it now.

<comment><USER8> Will this work outside of the U.S.? I know a number of talented hardware designers in South America, for example.

<comment><USER3> They can definitely add items and sell on the site. There are sellers all over the US & Europe, but I'm all in favor of South American makers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Really great idea. I was actually pondering this concept to myself the other day. I had noticed there wasn't really a "go-to" place for people to buy and sell custom tech gear. I mean, I guess ebay would be the default, but ebay is a pile of shit aesthetically.

Good luck on this!

</comment><comment><USER10> I must say the site is very slow.

<comment><USER3> Starting to see this myself. I'll look into making some changes once the traffic dies down. Thanks for the feedback- emile

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Twitter Bootstrap header cheapens the whole thing for me. It's fine if you're designing the documentation for an open source project. It's not fine for a commercial product.

<comment><USER12> >user: Kudos

>about: Engineer at Engine Yard Founder of localhostr.com

wget <http://localhostr.com>

.. ..

 ...

That sure looks like bootstrap to me.

While I understand that you said the bootstrap _header_ cheapens the whole thing, I think that criticism is very "inside baseball", and in the wider market no one cares.

(Personally, I like the bootstrap header and I think anything that speeds up time-to-market should be applauded.)

<comment><USER11> My comment was not against using Bootstrap to bootstrap your design, it's against using Bootstrap as your design.</comment></comment></comment>


Testing a Distributed System - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=2800697 <comment><USER2> From an experience of working on a distributed enterprise messaging server (one of the top sellers with some super advanced stuff like automatic failover, a client opaque to errors, TX and HA), the conclusion is that what could go wrong will go wrong in a distributed system. My favorite were distributed deadlocks; losing messages with certain cluster configurations under specific conditions was close second. If you support multiple OSes, they are all very different at the very bottom level and sometimes socket states and their transitions are just plainly weird (and undocumented). Fun is also caused by the "observer effect" \- if you try to maximize throughput and something goes wrong, once you enable logging, the problem disappears (and of course throughput goes way down). Transaction processing is also yummy, 2PC obviously can't be recovered in all possible failure cases, 3PC is sensitive to network partitioning, checkpointing might run into local storage problem etc. We had our own distributed testing suite as well as standard conformance tests, yet these were badly insufficient and were more like firing off a shotgun and hoping it would help.

</comment><comment><USER3> >> A "hybrid" solution may work well for you—group your tests into small sets, then run the sets sequentially, doing as much of each set in parallel as possible.

Very true. In fact, the Ortask scheduling engine takes this approach for automatically planning test cases, but it goes a bit further: it re-orders the test cases in each set so that they all run in a more optimal way.

Relevant details start at minute 1:35 here [http://youtu.be/n_yOU11J7as](http://youtu.be/n_yOU11J7as)

</comment><comment><USER4> The iptables trick Aphyr uses is great for testing unclean networking failures. Closing network connections uncleanly is not something that is usually supported at the language level.

</comment><comment><USER5> Let's say you have triggered an error-condition. How would you deterministically replay the events that lead to that situation?</comment>


Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming - <AUTHOR> https://palant.de/2019/04/03/dear-mozilla-please-stop-spamming/ <comment><USER2> In a similar vein, I'd appreciate it if Mozilla would stop using updates to Firefox as a mechanism to re-enable misfeatures I've explicitly disabled like Pocket integration and the "recommend X feature|extension while you are browsing but don't forget we totally respect your privacy!" settings. :-/

<comment><USER3> How much money does pocket actually generate? It blows my mind that mozilla would pull a java and have us install a figurative toolbar.

<comment><USER4> pocket is such a useful tool that I have a hard time understanding this comment.

<comment><USER5> I eventually disabled Recommended by Pocket on my new tab screen because the recommendations were typically clickbaity and being on the new tab screen, it would many times divert me from whatever more important original action I meant to take.

The creators probably had good intentions, but Recommended by Pocket seems almost like a dark pattern.

<comment><USER6> Since not all of the links are interesting, I'd like Recommended by Pocket to be able to learn from my input. I want to punish the uninteresting links and reward the interesting ones, so that I see more of something that I like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fact that there's both optin=bool and optout=bool suggests how it could be a dumb mistake, like there are competing opt-in mechanisms and the Firefox Send marketing email reads from optin (new) instead of optout (legacy) or something like that.

Some of the comments here remind me of when my users think everything is deliberately implemented and if something doesn't work perfectly, it's because I'm incompetent/malicious and designed it that way when it's just a bug or oversight.

<comment><USER8> Sounds plausible. I hope this is fixed as soon as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The screenshot in the post shows also a "optin" property, set to "true". Perhaps that should be set to "false" instead?

But anyway, "optout" ought to take priority IMHO.

<comment><USER10> I would expect this is a GDPR compliance thing, moving to only opt-in for non- transactional contact (as is required).

But that doesn't explain how or when it was set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a power move on Mozilla's part... "No, YOU'RE spamming US." And then they add insult to injury, directing you to read about how their server should be configured... classic

</comment><comment><USER12> > A year ago I reported a security issue in Mozilla Basket (not publicly > accessible). The essence is that subscribing anybody to Mozilla's > newsletters is trivial

I don't see how signing someone up to a newsletter is a security vulnerability.

<comment><USER13> In some countries, it's not allowed without verification. This could get Mozilla in hot waters so I would fix it. How hard can it be?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So they emailed you about a new service; _shrug_. Of all the "spam" you could possibly receive this is by far the most useful.

What is it with all Firefox/Mozilla hating as of late? They don't seem to be able to do anything right in the eyes of some people, and seem to be held to a ridiculously high standard (far higher than anyone else).

<comment><USER15> When I opt out (or never opted in) and am still sent promotional material, it is an explicit message that the company disrespects me. Responding to that with _shrug_ is layering more disrespect on top of it. Disrespect for users is a cardinal sin, and quickly reaches unforgivable levels if left unchecked. It is simply incorrect that this is an issue of bias against Mozilla. Other companies behaving worse doesn't make it acceptable - in fact, Mozilla's image of being "better" makes these kinds of infractions _worse_.

<comment><USER14> You could argue that it's not promotional material, but an announcement, which is not exactly the same.

<comment><USER16> I'd argue they're merging into the same thing for certain products with frequent releases. Things like VS code get free marketing every month with their release announcements hitting the front page of HN, reddit and the like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Much as I am a happy user of Mozilla products especially Firefox, incidents such as this makes me lose respect for the organization.

<comment><USER18> There's an opt-in flag set in the data on the screenshot.

Something went wrong and the author (that's the ABP-creator, right?) is just making a mountain out of a molehill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> While your at it Mozilla, stop spamming the new tab page with your podcasts.

</comment><comment><USER20> I also noticed the same, having recently signed up for a firefox account (I'm a long time user, just signed up for the sync).

<comment><USER21> Interesting. I've avoided signing up for a Firefox account, as I don't trust them.

Reports like this spamming thing confirms my lack of trust was on point. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If we started posting about each separate case of misused newsletter subscriptions, that'd would be all we would see :P

</comment><comment><USER23> Mozilla is ethically compromised at the highest levels. They've made a shift over the last few years from a scrappy, low-rent, nonprofit dedicated to helping the web to just another data mining tech company. Just try setting your Firefox browser to a blank page with no requests on startup and watching the Wireshark log if you think otherwise.

<comment><USER24> What browser would you suggest instead? I feel a bit cornered, especially now that literally every alternative is based on chromium.

<comment><USER25> This site suggests IceCat, Ungoogled Chromium, Iridium or Pale Moon: [https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html](https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html)

The also have a guide for enhancing privacy in Firefox

<comment><USER26> There's also Brave browser.

<comment><USER27> No. Brave is collecting money on people's behalf without their consent.

<comment><USER26> Most of the BAT being donated is coming directly from the User Growth Pool.

Do you block ads without the publisher's consent? If so, you are in a much more morally precarious situation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Technologies you should know for Web-development - <AUTHOR> http://nainomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/technologies-you-should-know-for-web.html

<comment><USER2> Great post! I would also add jQuery to the list <http://jquery.com/>

SharpKit can also be a useful resource for learning HTML and JavaScript, if you're a C# developer and like learning the APIs from Visual Studio using intellisense. [http://sharpkit.net/help/SharpKit.Html4/SharpKit.Html4/HtmlE...](http://sharpkit.net/help/SharpKit.Html4/SharpKit.Html4/HtmlElement/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> You should not use W3Schools for reference, take a look: <http://w3fools.com/></comment>


Show HN: TrueJob – OkCupid for Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.truejob.com/ <comment><USER2> A head's up for Hacker News folks - this is entirely for jobs in Detroit.

Some other feedback:

\- Bait and switch sucks. Showing salaries before signing up, and then saying "whoops, we don't have salaries" after signing up is poor form

\- Building powerful filters won't help most job seekers. Most job seekers keep the net wide because it's hard to predict what the perfect job is going to have as a keyword in it. (I helped build trovix.com, acquired by Monster, and ran dozens of user research sessions)

\- Your tour is way, way too long. At the end, there's a next button that doesn't do anything

\- Why can't I upload my resume? I have to cut and paste everything in to your fields?

\- I have a 13" Macbook Pro, and the site doesn't even come close to fitting in the horizontal width of my browser

\- green/red/blue buttons are ugly

\- There are numerous z-index problems around the site

\- the video, particularly of the mouse moving back and forth over the star ratings, is super distracting

\+ a lot more issues - you guys should spend some time dogfooding this.

<comment><USER3> This is a little tone deaf and lacking deeper thought. Surface level stuff like x color buttons are ugly is not really helpful. Telling a guy who has been focused on this for months he should spend more time dogfooding - again, not helpful.

What really got me though was complaining that you could not upload a resume. Seriously, give it some thought. Parsing non-structured data in an accurate way is a very hard problem and I would venture getting highly accurate results on 80% of resumes would take hundreds or even thousands of man hours to build a system, getting it on 90% or more could be exponentially more difficult. It simply is not worth the investment of time unless you have a breakthrough technique, and if you have that - well that is your startup, not a job site.

Feedback is awesome, but not everything that crosses your mind is worth sharing.

<comment><USER2> I've given it three years of thought, particularly on the resume parser. It's not tone deaf either. Do we want to give everyone who has built something a pat on the back, or do we want to help them build something awesome?

Also, you complain about that my feedback is too hard to address, but then simple stuff like non-ugly buttons is unhelpful?

re: dogfooding - often folks will build something and then not holistically test it. You don't need a user study to try something from end to end and pretend to be a user. Just a helpful reminder to do the simple stuff to make something great.

<comment><USER3> I don't think patting people on the back is useful but if you really want to help him build something awesome, be specific.

Your buttons are ugly because they are too small, the text is hard to read and the back button is actually slightly wider than the next button, even though they are joined together. Back is also red which tends to denote a destructive action that cannot be undone, a yellow might be better.

^ that is feedback. Saying your buttons are ugly is not helpful feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a lot to like here and a lot of potential, but I'm not sure I buy the "OkCupid for Jobs" description. OkCupid matches people up based on answers to (multiple choice) questions (along with how important you think a prospective match's answer is to the given question). I'm not seeing anything like that here...

But I like the filtering features, and I'm definitely interested in seeing where this goes. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER3> I went to Startup School in SV this year and must have met 3 dozen startups but the only one I kept thinking about was this one. Scott is brilliant and is thinking about this space in a refreshing way. I am actually a bit blown away TrueJob is not in the W15 batch - SamA and team often say they mess up and miss big things, if any partners read this - please take another look, he is the real deal.

<comment><USER5> I met him the same weekend, and remember him vividly because of his "throwing star" business cards. Unfortunately, we didn't discuss our startups, but I'm very glad to learn of his here and now. I'm very passionate about this domain too. Hiring needs so much improvement, and there's a lot of people trying to find the best solution. I wish Scott the best of luck.

I'll be providing some more thorough feedback to Scott, but at a glance, one thing I really think is great is the JobStats feature. Being rejected with feedback like, "We found someone better for the position," doesn't help struggling job seekers identify areas they should focus on improving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a memory leak or some ridiculous sized photos on the site, it ate 1.5G of my system memory in 30s of use.

<comment><USER7> Same here, memory drastically increased as page was left open and eventually went to swap. Linux 3.17.3-1-ARCH with Chromium 38.0.2125.122 (290379) (64-bit).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about this, my guess is it's the slideshow on the homepage -- there's about 30MB of gifs in that slideshow (terrible, I know), and it should be "lazily loading" them in, but it looks like there might be a bug with either the slider code or the way I'm doing it because it keeps taking up more memory the longer you have the homepage open. It's on my bug list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 30mb for the first page? That's kind of big.

You should convert all your gifs to videos. Otherwise a lot of people will drop cause their browsers crash. And don't think about people from mobile devices. Sometimes they're about 50% of the traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree. This was a struggle for me -- I wanted to show off features on the homepage, but adding a Gif slideshow added a crap ton of load to the page.

I wanted to create a video, but my video editing skills are pretty poor and I wanted the experience to be great (even my gifs have a few bugs in them if you look closely). I'll work on this for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Greetings Hacker News!

Back in 2009 I graduated with a degree in Psychology into one of the worst job markets in years. I was unemployed for about 6 months, during which I tried every job website out there, and thought each one was terrible.

I had some programming experience, so I hacked up a demo that I tried to put out there in 2010 called Scoople, but it was a single page php file that ran horribly and was really bad code. Initially I looked for a technical cofounder, but couldn't find anyone. So I decided to learn myself.

I've spent the last 4 years jumping from job to job, from IT Administrator to Computer Consultant to Web Developer to finally Rails web developer, and now I help build startups for a living. During the past 5 months I finally felt I had enough experience to build the job website I always wanted, and so I built TrueJob, which I'm calling OkCupid for Jobs.

I've made an imgur gif album of all the features here if you'd like to check out that first (more features to come!):

[https://imgur.com/a/rDkaw#0](https://imgur.com/a/rDkaw#0)

The idea is that you sign up with just an email and password, and then fill out your profile -- manually (one field at a time), by authenticating with LinkedIn, pulling from JSONResume, etc.

It then gives you a base set of recommended jobs, which you can then start to tweak by rating 1-5 stars a job posting, or favoriting/blocking certain attributes about that job posting-- company name, job title, job description keywords, etc.

My site then crunches the numbers, and reranks and reprioritizes the job postings so the most relevant matches are always at the top.

Once you apply for a job, employers look at your resume, and favorite or block things about it as well in order for them to get the best candidates -- but not to fear! Once you apply for a few jobs, you'll get back analytics on why someone didn't like your resume -- what keywords they hated, and which ones they loved, so you know what to change before you apply to the next job.

Hate my site? You can at least take the information you put in your profile, and convert it over to a hard copy PDF, with one of a few design styles. Take it to another place, or just use it to get a job! I just want to help people get into a job, whether they use my site or not -- job seekers too often get kicked in the teeth as it is, I want to help them succeed :)

 __A few caveats! (PLEASE READ) __

* Right now, I haven 't seeded the database with that many jobs, only about 1000, and all from Michigan, so if you wonder why you keep getting suggested Detroit jobs, now you know why. This is my number one priority right now -- my biggest struggle is finding a source for jobs that doesn't anonymize a lot of the important data like employer name, salary, etc, so if anyone knows of a great source to pull structured job postings from where I can link back to the original employer company page, let me know.

* The profile to PDF feature isn't working _quite_ yet, so that will be my release next week along with creating scrapers that can get me a ton more job postings (or if you have any other ideas of how to get clean job postings, let me know). I'm also hoping it entices people to check back on the site every so often, in order to see the new stuff I'm planning!

This has been a labor of love for me guys -- I've been developing this app for the past 5 months after spending 4 years trying to get the experience to build it. I'm really hoping you guys like it, and give me any and all feedback and critiques.

Thanks,

eggbrain (email@example.com)

<comment><USER9> AngelList's API or getting a feed from TheLadders.com is probably your best bet for getting structured job data which includes salary data. There are plenty of other options (indeed, simplyhired, monster, burning glass) if salary data isn't a requirement.

I also have a job search tool I recently launched (aimed specifically at software engineers) that I'm looking to get feedback on: [http://www.codejobs.io/](http://www.codejobs.io/)

Any feedback/suggestions the HN community has would be really appreciated!

~Matt firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER10> Should probably have a separate thread for your site, but it's broken in latest Firefox on Windows: [http://i.imgur.com/WNSca8S.png](http://i.imgur.com/WNSca8S.png)

<comment><USER9> Ah, thank you for the heads up - should have caught that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love everything about your site, except the choice of background colors.

Why black / dark grey? It's really really hard on the eyes and I have seen that dark theme used only for nightclub websites and boxing websites (and it doesn't make sense even there.)

<comment><USER12> Wow, this is very interesting. I find this an amazing comment. I'm curious what the bias for white backgrounds is (or at least not 'dark' backgrounds). It's very common in web design, yet relatively neutral for application and other graphic design. Document based applications are usually white of course, but games, content creation, utilities, and many other app types are not.

I have often wondered why white is so amazingly prevalent in web design. I'd never have expected such a strong reaction, but more than one person has commented on the background of this site.

<comment><USER13> It's mostly aesthetic, but lighter visuals (dark text on light background) are better on the eyes during the day and darker (vise versa) visuals are better at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great to see another Reactjs app in the wild (I poked under the hood a bit). I really like the use of animated gifs in a gallery. Very fast understanding for me of how the site worked. Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a great idea. I was joking with my coworkers that job hunting is just like dating. I had briefly considered setting up something like this before I remembered that my project list was already too long.

I'm getting a: "We're sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the application owner check the logs for more information." when I try to signup.

EDIT: Although it seems that it worked one of the times because I'm logged in when I go back to the homepage.

EDIT2: Seems to be completely down now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that! Should be better now -- sign ups were going through the roof, so I had to scale up. Hope it should be smoother now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Probably somebody is panicking over this, but I still thought I should share.

Love the concept.

"We're sorry, but something went wrong.

If you are the application owner check the logs for more information."

<comment><AUTHOR> Doh! This is what I get for falling asleep. I think I need to scale up again, but I'll be watching the logs more carefully now that I'm up and about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The homepage hogs my memory; but I think it's not your fault, opening the imgur link also killed the Chrome tab. Maybe the images are too big?

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice build using Ruby on Rails [https://www.truejob.com/500.html](https://www.truejob.com/500.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> Something is seriously wrong with the gif slider on the front page. It eats unbelievable amounts of memory and makes my machine much less responsive. Are you actually hiding the gifs properly when they're not the slide on display? Are you doing opacity transforms on them? Whatever it is, it's extremely noticeable.

Chrome 38.0.2125.111, Windows 8.1

</comment><comment><USER20> Hi Scott,

Site looks good, but didn't bring in anything from LinkedIn. Also, the "blocked" filtering doesn't seem to do anything, and I keep getting random Server Errors when clicking on certain positions.

Do you support any kind of Markdown, or plan to, or to provide links to resume, github, etc?

I look forward to seeing this take off.

Alex

</comment><comment><USER21> Another site gone down after getting to the top of the HN.

Lesson to the wise: Use cloudflare if you are not prepared to scale up and expecting a lot of traffic. It's saved me more than once.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was hoping for support for ethically non-monogamous careers.

</comment><comment><USER23> Awesome. Great to see more good work out of Michigan!

Great idea as well

</comment><comment><USER24> I like the idea but it seems like a great way to make yourself liable to discrimination laws.

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries! I anonymize data before submitting to employers, meaning that name and gender are removed. If I still do find employers who are blocking or favoriting based on discriminatory criteria, I can find these employers more easily so I can take action.

<comment><USER25> A. Great idea, and thank you for the long explanatory comment...for you to be a jobless psych grad in 2009 to be conceptualizing (and researching, and building!) something like this is quite remarkable, and you should be very proud of yourself.

B. This particular comment thread is so fascinating, it deserves its own blog post someday. But I'll be flippant: if the idea of an OKCupid for Job Seekers is viable...then maybe there could be a Tinder for Job Seekers? But instead of the actual Tinder, the JobTinder omits the physical attributes (i.e. many of the protected attributes under job discrimination law) of the user, and instead, just shows important, "sexy" bullet points...like "Rails Dev, 4 years"...the Employer then does a swipe left/swipe right during their lunch break, and at the end of the hour, has a small stack of candidates that may be worth following up. Even having a better filter would be a win...and hell, if you make it fun, in the same way that Tinder feels more fun than OKCupid, HR people may just love it.

<comment><USER26> Tinder for jobs: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261680)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Holy Cow this is a very good idea.

</comment><comment><USER28> I strongly recommend connecting profile pages to github and/or technical blogs.

</comment><comment><USER29> Any effort on branching out to non-tech jobs?

</comment><comment><USER30> Did they just pull a _reverse_ xkcd 624?

</comment><comment><USER31> Doesn't seem to be a workable way to override the geo-ip location settings. I attempted to set the zipcode which just spins as in-progress indefinitely for me. Finally managed to save the zipcode by hitting save but the listing still shows the previous ip location.

I have to say as a tangent, I hate what the JS-dependent UI people are doing to the internet. The experience sucks with only ghostery enabled and shows as blocking analytics and relic. What happened to the top-shelf web designers using javascript and a UX enrichment as opposed to a dependency?</comment>


Show HN: Proficonf – Web-based video conferencing, and collaboration platform. - <AUTHOR> https://proficonf.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We're still in beta, but here are the features that will be in the "launch" version.

\- Up to 500 (100 default) participants

\- File sharing (basically built-in file viewer), you can share files without putting them to chat, they'll automatically appear in participant's storage

\- Works on every browser (mobile version works only on Android)

\- FB Live/YouTube streaming

\- You can play YouTube videos and MP3 files right in the conf

\- Whiteboard

\- Conference roles (moderator, host etc.)

\- Ability to mute/block participants

\- 1080p recording

\- Up to 100 GB of cloud storage

\- Permanent rooms (that don't delete all shared files/chat once you end the meeting and you can re-enter the same room again)

</comment><comment><USER2> Do you have any information on pricing?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have pricing yet since we're still in beta. But in general, it'll be around 20-200$/month based on features (number of participants, storage space etc.).</comment></comment>


UK clinical trials can't compare drugs against patented alternatives - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/pharmaceuticalsandchemicals/9892893/Government-to-scrap-patent-laws-on-drug-trials.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A comment explaining US law on this:

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/02/26/standard_of_...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/02/26/standard_of_care_not_so_fast_not_in_the_united_kingdom.php#1177059)

</comment><comment><USER2> Why would the fact that a drug is patented prevent it from being used in clinical trials ? Can't a patented product generally be used as the buyer wishes once it is purchased (subject to other laws of course) ?

<comment><USER3> The Wikipedia article on the First Sale Doctrine, which applies to copyrights and trademarks led me to the Exhaustion doctrine for patents, which isn't so clear cut it would appear: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _Before bringing a new drug to market, companies have to conduct clinical and field trials which usually requires testing it against others already in the market. Under the current system, carrying out assessments using patented drugs is an infringement which can incur big costs._

 _...He added: "The main thing is to boost competition. Under the patent laws, clinical trials have been shifting off-shore - so this is part of our agenda of attracting more clinical trials here."_</comment>


Small UK town is 'online crime hotspot' - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8240261.stm

<comment><USER2> Not really - just an old lady defrauded by Nigerian scammers.</comment>


Give us your feedback on our all-in-one marketing platform - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,
I'm hoping to get your feedback on one of my new startups.
Iustus - http://iust.us
Iustus offers small to medium sized businesses an affordable, scalable, all-in-one solution for their marketing.
If you're anything like me, you got tired of paying 10K for things that cost 100, or paying a designer 200/hour to change a banner on your site. Iustus was built for you.
It was built to remove the conflict of interest from marketers that stand to gain from your lack of knowledge. It was designed to protect you from yourself. We charge a fixed price and align our business with yours to help you extract maximum value from the market while driving results. We do this without compromising early stage growth or over investing in bell and whistles when you're looking for nuts and bolts.
Take a look at let me know what you think. I'll offer a free trial to anyone who books an appointment through the site (you can do so via the support page or the footer) and lists their company as 'hacker news'.
Thanks for listening!
Aurie <comment><USER2> Nice site! Love the pricing packages' presentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! By the way, there's also a feedback submission form in the footer if you guys want to submit anything anonymously for us to consider.</comment></comment>


Hacker Chris Roberts Allegedly Said He Hacked Airplane's Entertainment System - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/hacker-chris-roberts-allegedly-said-he-hacked-airplanes-entertainment-system-2015-5

<comment><USER2> "He stated that he then overwrote code on the airplane's Thrust Management Computer while aboard a flight ... [and] successfully commanded the system he had access to the issue the 'CLB' or climb command," the warrant application states."

I read this exact line from an earlier article stating that this was in a simulation only and that he had accessed the in-flight entertainment network as a proof of concept, but did not actually do anything while on the flight.

This is just garbage reporting.

<comment><AUTHOR> All these news outlets reporting on it are claiming he made the plane fly sideways which is bullshit because the only person making this claim is him. You'd think the pilots, airline, passengers, etc. would all have at some point made a statement or posted something to social media but none of that has happened.

I really think it strains credulity for him to claim he overwrote code when at minimum I'd assume code changes are locked out while the plane is in flight.</comment></comment>


China's Xinjiang Residents Are Being Forced to Install Surveillance App - <AUTHOR> https://globalvoices.org/2017/07/19/chinas-xinjiang-residents-are-being-forced-to-install-surveillance-apps-on-mobile-phones/ <comment><USER2> Seen yesterday at: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14826977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14826977)

</comment><comment><USER3> This comes on the heels of banning beards: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world- asia-china-39460538](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-39460538)

and banning "extreme" Muslim names: [https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/04/25/china-bans-extreme- mus...](https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/04/25/china-bans-extreme-muslim-baby- names-xinjiang-reports/)

China's approach to its Muslim population couldn't be more different than western Europe's.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting that neither China nor Europe is likely to integrate most of them into society.

Islam is not only a religion. It comes integrated with governance structure and laws its adherents need to abide by. The whole belief system is strengthened by 5 times of praying every day and very strong community.

The problem with Islam is not its religion part but the whole structure that resists any integration or adaptation to fit well with other cultures.

<comment><USER2> A particular group of Muslim population integrated pretty well in China: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people)

They enjoy a wide spectrum of what Americans call affirmative action. How do I know? I grew up with a few friends who are Hui people.</comment></comment>


Cyberspace and the Sacralization of Information - <AUTHOR> http://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/religions/article/view/17361

<comment><USER2> If I'm a member of this religion, would I stand a chance in court claiming that copyright laws discriminate me on the freedom of religion basis?

<comment><USER3> Probably no (but IANAL): To quote [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism)

"The religion's association with illegal file sharing has been said not to be a sign that illegal file-sharing will be excused from Sweden's zero-tolerance approach to the controversial matter."

The German wikipedia is even more direct ([http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_Missionerande_Kopimistsamfu...](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_Missionerande_Kopimistsamfundet#Urheberrecht)):

"Der formale Status der Kirche ändert jedoch nichts an der strafrechtlichen Belangung von Mitgliedern bei Urheberrechtsverletzungen, wobei Gerson jedoch hofft, dass der Glaube der Kopimisten in der zukünftigen Gesetzgebung berücksichtigt wird."

Trying to translate:

"The formal status of the church makes no difference of the criminal arraignment of members for violation of copyright [note: "Urheberrecht" means something different than "copyright", since "Urheberrecht" is centrally based on the concept of "Urheberschaft" (authorship), but this is probably nevertheless the best word to use for the translation], where Gerson nevertheless hopes, that the faith of the Kopimist will be considered in the future legislation."</comment></comment>


Siberian scientists test anti-ageing pills on themselves - <AUTHOR> http://indrus.in/economics/2013/04/04/siberian_scientists_test_anti-ageing_pills_on_themselves_23507.html

<comment><USER2> _> The experiment ran on until the experimental group of mice lived for more than 21 months. The scientists decided to run the experiment again, documenting it this time not as a laboratory experiment, but as a formal scientific study. Yet whatever the results may yield, Andrei Bekarev insists that he doesn't intend to put out an 'anti-ageing pill' on the market, because the drug-testing for such use on humans could drag on for a hundred years._

I don't even dare to ask: Do they have any peer review publication of any of their "results"? This looks more like an infomercial.</comment>


How I Became a Phone Phreak, part 1 - <AUTHOR> https://soundcloud.com/evan-doorbell/howbphreak1?in=evan-doorbell/sets/group-1

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the first part of Evan's story on SoundCloud.

These and many more recordings also available as .mp3 and .flac from [http://www.evan-doorbell.com/](http://www.evan-doorbell.com/)</comment>


KDE Frameworks 5.40.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.40.0.php <comment><USER2> Has anyone tried working with kirigami ? It seems really interesting, a clean looking way to make convergent (desktop+mobile) apps, but there is so little information around.

</comment><comment><USER3> I see that one of the David Faures is still doing the release. ;) How long has he been with the project? Should be close to 20 years now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, 19 years now. More about David Faure here → [https://behindkde.org/david-faure-2](https://behindkde.org/david-faure-2)</comment></comment>


Implementing Queues for Event-Driven Programs - <AUTHOR> http://ithare.com/implementing-queues-for-event-driven-programs/ <comment><USER3> > In the extreme cases (and ultra-small sizes like 2 or 3), we can even run > into deadlocks (!).

If this happens to you, you're doing it wrong. You _have_ deadlocks; they just aren't happening "usually" unless you're "unlucky"... but happen they will!

Build your program to run correctly when all queues are buffer size of 1. If it doesn't work, you're doing it wrong.

 _Now_ raise the buffer sizes to something reasonable to reduce the performance frictions of too-strict scheduling. You will never have deadlocks.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. If having deadlocks, then there's likely a cyclic dependency the programmer/author didn't consider. This happens a lot in streaming/data-flow code. Worse, something in the queue that's wonky. Seems to happen on multi- arch lockless FIFO's when the authors didn't consider corner cases of architectures with more relaxed coherence, or architected features (e.g., 128 vs. 64-byte cache lines).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Regarding "Removing locks completely", the author laments not knowing of any readily available library providing the blocking-on-necessary support.

I suggest looking into Event Counts, which can be used to non-intrusively add blocking behavior to most lock free queues; they are the non-blocking world equivalent of condition variables. Facebook's Folly library provides a readily available open source implementation of Event Counts.

<comment> no-bugs THANKS! I've added it (not 100% sure how it would work in practice, but certainly looks interesting).

<comment><USER5> You are welcome. Note that the event count is a general synchronization primitive, the one in folly is just an implementation.

BTW, you can build an efficient event count on top of eventfd, so you can even poll/select it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On Linux, another way to signal arbitrary events instead of an anonymous pipe is via eventfd(2).

<comment> no-bugs Added it, THANKS!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > is an ability to push asynchronous messages/events there (usually from > different threads), and to get them back (usually from one single thread) – > in FIFO order, of course.

It is worth noting that FIFO only holds for messages coming from a single thread. If you have one thread posting keyboard events and another mouse events it is very possible that the reader will get them in the "wrong" order, even with tens of milliseconds separating them from the user's POV.

Now it seems obvious when I say it, but it is easy to forget that when you develop the reader side, especially since most of the times the ordering will hold. This leads to intermittent and non-obvious bugs down the line.

On the other hands, if you fully acknowledge the lack of ordering guarantee, you can use that to make a more efficient queue by using one-buffer-and-lock- per-thread. Each producer fills its own lock-protected queue, and the reader just needs to find a non-empty queue, lock it and pop an item, without any penalty for the other threads.

Of course, the inter-thread ordering will be even worse but you keep the ordering of events from one producer, which was the only actual guarantee you had to begin with in the naive version.

<comment> no-bugs > make a more efficient queue by using one-buffer-and-lock-per-thread.

How the reader would block on such a distributed queue when it's empty (without creating one single mutex, which would re-establish the single contention point)? If there is no way to block while waiting for input, it means polling, and polling is a Really Bad Thing...

<comment><USER7> The reader scans all queues, without locking. If one is non-empty, then you lock it and pop an item. Only if are all queues are empty then you hit the slow path and wait on a synchronization primitive (condition variable).

Of course if you can assume that the queue will always be very busy, you can ditch that too and poll instead. Polling is often bad, but not always. When things go very fast, it can be more efficient.

A good example of that occurs with the new storage NVM Express storage technologies and Linux, where the traditional I/O completion interrupt used until now is starting to bottleneck: [https://lwn.net/Articles/663879/](https://lwn.net/Articles/663879/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the first code example:

> Yep, notifying outside of lock is usually BETTER. Otherwise the other thread > would be released but will immediately run into our own lock above our own > lock above, causing unnecessary (and Very Expensive) context switch

Is this true and if so, on which platform(s)? Aren't most mutex/condition variable implementations optimized to avoid this case by deferring the condition signal to the mutex unlock?

Additionally, in the implementation of kill() in the latter examples, there should be notify_all() instead of notify_one().

<comment> no-bugs > Aren't most mutex/condition variable implementations optimized to avoid this > case by deferring the condition signal to the mutex unlock?

Yes, _some_ but not _all_ implementations are doing it; however, as it is not really guaranteed (and actually is a workaround for poorly written programs) - standing recommendation is still to notify after the lock (which can be better, can be the same, but won't be worse than doing it within), see for example [http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/condition_variable/n...](http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/condition_variable/notify_one):

"The notifying thread does not need to hold the lock on the same mutex as the one held by the waiting thread(s); in fact doing so is a pessimization, since the notified thread would immediately block again, waiting for the notifying thread to release the lock. However, some implementations (in particular many implementations of pthreads) recognize this situation and avoid this "hurry up and wait" scenario by transferring the waiting thread from the condition variable's queue directly to the queue of the mutex within the notify call, without waking it up."

> Additionally, in the implementation of kill() in the latter examples, there > should be notify_all() instead of notify_one().

In MOST cases, it didn't matter (as there was only one blocking thread - <USER2> one reading), but yes, there was one case when it was indeed important. Fixed now, THANKS!

<comment><USER8> Since most platforms defer condition signalling to mutex unlocks, the way the code is now written will cause _more_ spurious wakeups and context switching than necessary.

The pathological case in scheduling goes like this:

        1. Reader A enters pop_front on an empty queue, goes to wait on the condition variable
        2. Writer W enters push_back, adds an element to list and releases mutex and get pre-empted (on line 25 first example)
        3. Reader B enters pop_front, sees queue not empty, pops element and leaves
        4. Writer W signals condition, wakes up Reader A
        5. Reader A wakes up but the queue is empty, goes back to sleep causing unnecessary context switch and trashing the TLB

The code is "correct" either way, but it's now optimized for the rare platforms that have a badly implemented condition variable.

I would say it's usually better to signal your condition variables with mutexes locked unless you _know_ you're running on a platform with flaky condition variables. Easier to guarantee correctness and avoid spurious wakeups that way.

related note: cppreference.com is a terrible resource. It was worse 10 years ago, but it's not improved much. I would not trust the weasel wording ("some implementations" etc) in the link you posted, what it says about pthreads contradicts the pthread man pages (that encourage signal while holding lock)

<comment> no-bugs From what I've seen (YMMV), chances of it happening are MUCH smaller than chances of getting context switch under the lock (with lots of threads running into this lock and having their own context switches), because of spending more time under the lock than it is really necessary (and ANY call, especially kernel call at 300+ clocks, is a LOT of time). Strictly speaking, it needs to be measured, but until that point - I'm keeping my mutex locks as small as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do educated adults find the cartoons of hares to usefully or enjoyably complement the text?

<comment><USER10> Some, yes. [0]

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/Y5X3h96.png](http://i.imgur.com/Y5X3h96.png)

<comment><USER9> Haha OK, thanks! I don't mind the cartoon of the queue at the top but for some reason I don't like having a little cartoon lagomorph appear in a speech bubble by the paragraphs while I'm reading.</comment></comment></comment>


Elwha: Roaring back to life (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://projects.seattletimes.com/2016/elwha/ <comment><USER2> Nice, I am a hydropower guy and its rare to see river / hydro related things on front page!

<comment><USER3> This is about knocking dams down, not putting them up :).

<comment><USER4> It feels like a rare success. We managed to get an unneeded dam removed and we did it without endless fights in court and it seems to be working.

<comment><USER3> I remember seeing that dam when I went camping at Elwa one summer. That is such a beautiful area, it doesn't need dams like the Columbia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11095592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11095592)</comment>


Tidbit: Monetize without ads. - <AUTHOR> http://tidbit.co.in/ <comment><USER2> Interesting idea. anyone tried this out? the website doesn't say much and looks a bit suspicious

<comment><USER3> Tried it with an empty wallet, just for funsies, looks like it doesn't even work yet, based on this on top of my dashboard, "We're working on a new version- this is not ready for production use!"

Also, looking at the embed code, and from that the embed itself, it looks like its not doing anything. So, I'm guess this is just a very "wouldn't this be nice" demo.

<comment><USER4> Yup, I think they're rewriting some parts of the code since it was put together at a hackathon. It's a really interesting idea but I feel like they would really need to crank up the power of the mining client to match the current network rates in order to get near ad revenue (or implement some kind of altcoin mining pool algorithm).</comment></comment></comment>


Who Needs College? The Triumph of Young Web Founders - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/06/13/the-triumph-of-young-web-founders/ <comment><USER2> Building a Web 2.0 website for a computer scientist is like building a doghouse for an architect. Neither needed to go to college to learn how, and therein is certainly not the value of their education.</comment>


Colgate Patents Traditional Indian Tooth-cleaning Powder(thousands of years old) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101021/10501311526/colgate-patents-traditional-indian-tooth-cleaning-powder-despite-it-being-used-for-thousands-of-years.shtml <comment><USER2> Surely if its in common use and is well known, then there's plenty of evidence of prior work? That would make it unenforceable surely? In which case Colgate have just spent a smallish chunk of money on publishing how to make a powder that makes teeth cleaner. Funny, but not especially "...another example of companies trying to use patent laws to lock up widely known knowledge.."</comment>


Ask HN: What should I do with this website? - <AUTHOR>

I have been working on a website with a developer I hired to build http://chatplode.com.
My initial vision was to try and mesh imgur and snapchat into a website - but believe I failed pretty miserably with it and don't really have the time to do anything more to it.
Should I sell it? Give it to somebody that can devote more time to it? Pull the plug all together?
I am honestly considering just handing it over to somebody else for no cost. Yeah I will lose money in it but it would be cool if somebody has a great enough vision for it and wants to see it do well I might just hand it over to you.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> It won't show anything when i try to send message. Cool concept tho.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've uploaded a sample image here, so folks can see how the site works:

<http://chatplode.com/c/ozffxd>

<comment><AUTHOR> Just so you know, the real-time chat usually works. Not sure what is wrong with it now. I will try to get it fixed soon. The idea is that multiple people can easily collaborate about an image in real time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would be interested in taking this over from you. I'm looking for a project right now and this looks really interesting. My email is: email@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER5> Contact me, my e-mail is in my profile. I have a lot of ideas for this. It goes, sort of, in had with an idea I was already working on.

</comment><comment><USER6> i'm not sure having a lot of emphasise on deleting the image form the server is appealing to users</comment>


IBM 3390: The world's largest and most expensive hard drive teardown - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/142911-ibm-3390-the-worlds-largest-and-most-expensive-hard-drive-teardown?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ibm-3390-the-worlds-largest-and-most-expensive-hard-drive-teardown <comment><USER2> My tech career came out of the mainframe world, so I'm tickled but really not too shocked at seeing a 3390 teardown. I've replaced enough parts in IBM DASD frames to be a bit jaded I guess. But there's nothing better to make you feel old than some of the eevblog comments about "I work with a guy that's old enough to remember these things..." :-(

1989 wasn't THAT long ago... was it?</comment>