Next-Generation Cloud: The Rise of the Unikernel - <AUTHOR> http://www.xenproject.org/component/allvideoshare/video/latest/next-generation-cloud-the-rise-of-the-unikernel-updated-april-2015.html <comment><USER2> What's old is new... Unikernels are quite reminiscent of the VAXELN product from ~30 years ago; write the application code, link in the various services you need, and disk or network or ROM boot the results:

[http://odl.sysworks.biz/disk$vaxdocdec953/decw$book/d33vaa48...](http://odl.sysworks.biz/disk$vaxdocdec953/decw$book/d33vaa48.p13.decw$book#23)

<comment><USER3> Sounds like LibOS: [https://lwn.net/Articles/637658/](https://lwn.net/Articles/637658/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9259292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9259292)

Or Service Virtual Machines: [http://alt.folklore.computers.narkive.com/LXzjsdU7/was-vm- ev...](http://alt.folklore.computers.narkive.com/LXzjsdU7/was-vm-ever-used-as- an-exokernel)

Or Exokernels: [http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/exo.html](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/exo.html)

<comment><USER3> Because why not:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/8jQ- sJ1n7l8/ijWzPZL2tewJ)

ACM Fellow for Reinventing Virtual Machines: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.folklore.compute...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.folklore.computers/7ADCQ3z0s38)

<comment><USER4> > ACM Fellow for Reinventing Virtual Machines

It was less "reinvention" and more "making them actually useful." From the ACM announcement[1]:

 _Although the concept of virtualization was first explored in the 1960s in the context of mainframe computers, it languished until Mendel Rosenblum and his students at Stanford University rediscovered the idea as a simulation tool for new multiprocessor architectures._

It goes on to point out how they created _a vibrant industry and research area around the technology_ and _spurred a shift to virtual-machine-based architectures._

[1] [http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/rosenblum_4094918.cfm](http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/rosenblum_4094918.cfm)

<comment><USER3> Eh, most of the fun of alt.folklore.computers is listening to a bunch of geeks who were there from the time CTSS seemed like a novel idea moan about how everything was done before, either by DEC in the 1970s or IBM in the 1960s (or 1950s!). Oh, and DEC, not Digital: The VAX was an abomination and command line technology peaked with TOPS-20, if not TOPS-10.

(Seriously. One of the people I quoted claimed elsewhere, without any hint of irony, that IBM invented personal computing by putting CP-40 on System/360 mainframes, to give everyone their own personal guest system on the shared hardware. Yes, and the Ancient Romans invented radio by reflecting sunlight with mirrors; after all, it's all EM radiation!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is encouraging. A path to the post-C, post-Linux world is starting to become clear.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. In my mind that's the best thing about these projects: the technical benefits are so amazing they might actually encourage people to look beyond the Linux-and-company systems stack.

(Although, to be fair, most people run a Linux dom0.)

<comment><USER7> What's weird and funny is the collapse in complexity this represents.

Linux, NT, BSD, and other modern kernels implement all kinds of complexity around user/group management, ACLs, security policies, file types and permissions, and so on.

If we're moving to unikernels and containers and similar, all that has been replaced with stupid simple access control systems like API access tokens or login/password pairs for cloud service control panels. Your AWS access token is now a single security credential for your entire infrastructure.

Of course I'm sure the cycle of reincarnation will continue. Things like Docker or the AWS API will grow in complexity until they at least subsume the entire feature set of Unix UID/groups, Unix/NT ACLs, SELinux, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those who are interested in this, you may also be interested in ZeroVM[1].

To be clear, ZeroVM _isn 't_ a Unikernel. Instead, it is a virtualization technology based on NaCL[2] that is designed to quickly create throw-away VMs. The idea is that the VMs is created to service a single request, and disposed of afterwards.

Obviously this model has challenges, but it is similar to the model proposed on slide 24 of the OP slidedeck. The security benefits of this are real, even if the programming model is challenging.

[1] [http://www.zerovm.org/](http://www.zerovm.org/)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client)

</comment><comment><USER9> Are there any benchmark comparing speed of execution of a xen+unikernel app vs no virtualization at all ?

I wonder if this tech would let you have bare metal speed in a cloud environment.

</comment><comment><USER10> I love the idea, always have. Does a unikernel application need statically allocated amount of RAM or is there a way to have unikernel-programs allocate memory dynamically?

Maybe this is where garbage-collected language would be useful.

<comment><USER11> Seems to me a unikernel app would have access to all the RAM in the system. It is, after all, the kernel itself.

<comment><USER6> Yea but the hypervisor has to know how much physical memory to give the unikernel.

<comment><USER12> The way it usually works is that the guest OS gets a certain allocation of RAM and if it doesn't want to use it all it can inform the hypervisor of which ranges don't need physical backing at the moment. From the guest's perspective this is often implemented using a "balloon" process/driver that reserves a large chunk of guest memory in order to return it to the hypervisor. It can also be handled by the guest having a more general memory hotplug capability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was happy to see Clive, and I imagine a RUMP implementation or other unikernel that supports Rust won't be far away. Being able to compile Go or Rust to metal byte code is absurdly sexy.

I don't know how AWS will meter it yet (yup, I love AWS) but I sure hope they're following this trend. AWS support would put so much energy behind this path forward.

<comment><USER14> Isn't AWS built on XEN? I think the MirageOS folks have said you could deploy one of their unikernel apps on AWS as-is.

<comment><USER15> Yes it is, and AWS already supports unikernels.

<comment><USER16> Yes, we can confirm that. We let you generate and run unikernels for JVM apps on AWS at [https://boxfuse.com](https://boxfuse.com)

Disclaimer: I am the founder

<comment><USER17> Interesting. Is it open source?

<comment><USER16> No. It is SaaS with an installable client. But we do have a free tier that is perfectly aligned to the AWS free tier. Also there is no lock-in per se as you give Boxfuse an app in a standard format (.jar/.war) and Boxfuse turns it into an image in a cloud native format like an AMI for AWS. All this with just a single command.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Notes on 'The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World' - <AUTHOR> http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2017/04/26/notes-on-the-distracted-mind-ancient-brains-in-a-high-tech-world/ <comment><USER2> Ever increasing distraction and "real-time" communication and collaboration are reaching a point of diminishing returns and actually decreasing our productivity.

The book Deep Work, by Cal Newport is a start on identifying the problem and a possible solution (i.e. isolate yourself for stretches of time to accomplish Deep Work).

Unfortunately, we live in a world where collaboration is necessary. So, what's the solution?

One possibility is to come up with a collaboration solution that is built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. (Deep Collaboration as the enabler of Deep Work)

Such a solution would complement our real-time collaboration solutions.

<comment><USER3> E-mail, wikis, discussion forums, and issue trackers are all collaboration tools built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. Are you looking for something else?

<comment><USER2> Agreed that all of these can be used asynchronously. However, I would refer to these as "incidentally-asynchronous", in the sense that their design goals were not primarily to be asynchronous (and hence support "Deep Work").

The major determinant of asynchronous deep collaboration efficiency is number of "cycles-to-outcome". (where a cycle is roughly a request/response loop).

Email because of its lack of shared state collaboration generates lots of extra cycles because of confusion on shared state (i.e. attachment nightmare).

Conversely, something like online document collaboration supports shared state collaboration, but is really poor at "what happened". For all but the smallest of documents this leads to compounding "implicit document rot" on every iteration. Alternatively, it leads to ever increasing time to "catchup" once again vastly expanding cycles-to-outcome.

Neither is good with accountability (something that issue trackers are good with). Lack of accountability is another driver of increasing cycles-to- outcome.

A deep collaboration solution that enables Deep Work could be designed from first principles based on minimizing cycles-to-outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found the noted acceleration in time to 50 million users to be very interesting:

       radio       38y
       telephone   20y
       tv          13y
       cellphone   12y
       internet     4y
       ipod         3y
       myspace      2.5y
       facebook     2y
       youtube      1y
       angry birds 35d

<comment><USER5> I wonder what they'd look like if you changed the target to a percentage of global population. Moving target, so it'd be harder to figure out, but say time to 5% or similar. It'd surely make the numbers less dramatic.

<comment><USER6> From 38 years to Angry Birds is 2.6 orders of magnitude. Population has increased by a lot less than that since radio. It's close to 400, so a radio population of one billion would have to be 400+ billion today to scale linearly. You are correct that it would be somewhat less dramatic, but it would still be impressively dramatic.

I'm just doing some Fermi estimates here to give a sense of what sort of change we'd get in reaction to your idea in the spirit of fun, not anger, because I enjoy this sort of thing. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem)

<comment><USER5> As pointed out in the notes the Angry Birds entry is a bit of a _non sequitur_ since that's more like measuring how fast a given new TV show's viewership increased after TVs were already extremely common, and it's not exactly a _world-changing technology_ like most of the other things on the list. It's not comparable to the other things, and was probably included for effect rather than its belonging on the list by shared criteria with the other items.

I expect the others would look far less dramatic as a percentage—I'd guess the 12-year cell phone number and the 38-year radio number especially would move far closer together if percentages rather than an absolute count were used. TV/cell phone might well reverse, since they're already so close. The table sets off some serious "lying with numbers" warning bells.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Many of these subjects are discussed in the popular Learning How To Learn online course [[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)]. I finally signed up for it and I'm grateful. Sure, we all know how to learn, otherwise we wouldn't be here. This course provides practical techniques for learning more information, better, and with greater durability. Plus science!

</comment><comment><USER5> A cursory search for the briefly-mentioned Tools of the Mind program does not make it seem "promising". However, social science and education research is terrible and lots of organizations conducting research and pushing meta-study- backed recommendations have an agenda ($$$). Anyone in the field willing to offer some insight?

</comment><comment><USER8> That's the kind of stuff that UX should focus on, not some hog wash handwavy fuzzy pop science.</comment>


Caveats of Evaluating Databases - <AUTHOR> http://jan.prima.de/~jan/plok/archives/176-guid.html <comment><USER2> And of course, the caveat about reading other people's evaluations is hinted at up near the top: "or my favourite CouchDB".

<comment><USER3> Well, he's helping write it, and gives talks about it at conferences. I think he's permitted a little evangelism on his personal blog.

<comment><USER4> I read one of your previous comments about being able to scale Tokyo Cabinet up to 1TB. I'm having trouble even uploading wikipedia dataset. I seem to run into a wall anytime my database exceeds the size of my ram. This is after I set bnum, xmsiz, and other properties. I would love to get in touch you with you about how you tuned TC..</comment></comment></comment>


Our Feces Are Full of Microplastics, According to a New Study - <AUTHOR> https://www.iflscience.com/environment/microplastics-have-been-found-in-human-feces-for-the-first-time-/ <comment><USER2> Are there studies about the effects of microplastics to humans?</comment>


One Human Heartbeat - <AUTHOR> http://onehumanheartbeat.com/

<comment><USER2> It's a beautiful piece of art.

More info: [http://datatelling.com/projects/onehumanheartbeat/](http://datatelling.com/projects/onehumanheartbeat/)

<comment><USER3> To know myself,know my heart

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Until I read the project description, I wondered if somehow that radial representation included a whole range of contributed heartbeats. And that the word "one" was a comment on it being something that unites all living people.

I wonder if a huge range of people around the world did it, if there might be some interesting data to mine regarding differences from one region to another, or by occupation, age and so on.

<comment><USER5> I wondered that too. When I was learning about timing and synchronization in distributed systems, I thought about building an app with a fake "heartbeat" that attempts to sync between everyone viewing the page.

Had a brief moment when seeing this (before I read the description) of "Cool! someone finally made it!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks beautiful, the description says its not live data but from the day before because she has to use USB to get the data from the device twice a day. Its also just based on a normalized per minute heartrate. So i guess there are no practical consumer devices that transmit the heartbeat in realtime...that could be really interesting :)

<comment><USER7> > So i guess there are no practical consumer devices that transmit the > heartbeat in realtime

A $50 BLE Polar HR strap and an iPhone app that one could whip up in a weekend. Using Apple's BLE sample app as a start, probably wouldn't even take an afternoon for an MVP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat. I remember it used to be cool when someone hooked up a fridge or fish tank up to the internet.

<comment><USER9> Ahh the exciting days of mouldy cheese and the coffee machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Old news, but somehow this art reminded me of this Apple patent:

[http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US6658577](http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US6658577)

</comment><comment><USER11> A daily schedule would be nice, of course not exactly for every day. right now it's 85bpm at 7.45am.

I'm at work at this time and my heart rate is usually between 55 and 60 while working.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting project. It would be cool to see the heartbeat contextualized with what you were doing at the moment.

<comment><USER13> xkcd has done something similar.

[https://xkcd.com/1331/](https://xkcd.com/1331/)

(I probably stared at that for a good 15 minutes the first time I saw it.)

<comment><USER11> pretty cool. the average person buys 7.5 shoes each year in phoenix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like how in this presentation of time progress the (angular) speed will increase with progression of time ...

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how did he calculate the days he still has to live.

<comment><USER16> I think she is just using average life span.

There was an old apple app (I think called death clock), that when you opened it you entered your birthday and it would tell you how long you have to live. Every time you opened it would just recalc. Always counting even when not running. It was a little freaky.

"Your older than you've ever been, and NOW your even older, and NOW your even older still..." _TMBG

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is beautiful. Totally love it.

</comment><comment><USER18> 75bpm, I'm not sure that's a healthy heart rate. I've always thought 60 was the norm.

<comment><USER19> Actually, 60 is the edge of bradycardia, unless you're really, really fit. Anywhere from 60 to 100 is considered normal in adults.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is it just me or is this totally useless and uninteresting? Are people so bored nowadays that they end up doing this kind of stuff?

<comment><USER21> Probably the difference is that when you are bored, you read HN but when this guy was bored, he created a piece of art.

<comment><AUTHOR> She, hehe

<comment><USER21> Oops :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using AI to hire the right programmer - <AUTHOR> http://research.aspiringminds.com/ai-and-the-right-programmer/ <comment><USER2> >Thus, AI tells us that there are 20% programmers here whom we should really talk to and hire!

No, it doesn't. It tells you that 20% of the number of people who undertook your experiment are potentially strong programmers. Does that make them a worthwhile hire? Absolutely not. Sure it warrants a conversation but nothing more.</comment>


When there's a problem with the track, compete with caution - <AUTHOR> http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20140730/c30track/en-us/

<comment><AUTHOR> Lessons for the business/tech race between US and China.</comment>


Generate Hacker News Comments from Titles - phoe-krk https://hncynic.leod.org/index.html <comment><USER3> From Yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578)

</comment><comment><USER4> "Generate Hacker News Comments from Titles" yields

\- A nice little hack and I think it would be better to have a bit more info on the title. It would show a much more comprehensive description and a little more info on the actual title.

\- I don't know enough about this topic, but it makes me wonder why it's so popular in some other forum. It appears there is a lot of noise in the community, so why not just show up at the bottom of the page, or go to the top of HN, rather than showing up, to get to the bottom of the page?

\- I find the title on the front page to be a bit clumsy. Maybe a change to "HN News." might help somewhat, I suppose. EDIT: The title is a bit misleading. Is this some kind of a "submitter" with pg saying "Show HN" because of some sort of 'Show HN'?

These are actually believable

<comment><USER5> Lot of noise though, we are far from passing the Turing test in most case but still fun:

>Nice idea from a hacker perspective. I'd like to point out the following two issues

\- Your results for your comments seem a hell of a lot to me, for example, but not the comments that you linked to.

\- Your results for comments in particular appear in the top left of the comments. But the comments appear on the right of the comments.

\- You need to be looking at what your titles are up to and what you are actually looking at and how other titles are. I have to click through the comment page to get to the first page.

I just tried it and it works.

<comment><USER6> These sound like actual comments from people with an incoherent train of thought, which might be plenty of people on the internet. These are scary accurate. I wonder how easy it would be to write a bot to, for example, post on Reddit and gain karma for the purposes of trusted-account generation. It seems like most of those account farms rely on self-upvoting which can be caught easily by the site. Posting potentially good comments that get upvoted by real people would be pretty hard to counter.

<comment><USER7> Who has ever looked at a reddit profile and decided that an account should be trusted based on karma? Recent few comments are way more likely to determine trustworthiness.

Hoarding karma on reddit is as useless as hoarding karma on HN. I've deleted the only reddit profile I've ever had a few days ago with about 45k karma. If they had any value, I would maybe keep it and just stop posting.

<comment><USER6> > Who has ever looked at a reddit profile and decided that an account should > be trusted based on karma?

For starters, automated subreddit spam protection algorithms. You may have misinterpreted me, think of it like StackOverflow karma. Your account needs a certain amount before it can do certain things.

<comment><USER7> Yes, _maybe_ like +200 (which is what I've set it at as a mod in severe cases of brigading), not thousands. Most of the subreddits don't require anything but positive karma, and you can achieve that with less than a dozen manually created bots upvoting the comments that new bots make.

There are no subreddits with a spam algorithm counted in the thousands of karma, that would prevent them from growing.

<comment><USER6> > with less than a dozen manually created bots upvoting the comments that new > bots make.

As I said in my other comment, these self-upvoting schemes are very easy to detect and are not a scalable way to create tens of thousands of bots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When given "Elon Musk Dies", the model outputs:

"It's easy for everyone to believe that Musk was the real reason behind the death of the planet. He was the first guy to believe the same as we did. But this seems so obvious that many people have started believing it. I'm convinced it was because the world was so big that it's so easy for people to believe that."

Maybe the model knows something we don't.

<comment><USER9> > It's easy for everyone to believe that Musk was the real reason behind the > death of the planet. He was the first guy to believe the same as we did.

Robot, no

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > pace.js : pacemaker controller software implemented in javascript

out

> Looks interesting, although I'm still waiting for a way to make my own > pacemaker using Javascript

> For anyone else who wonder what the fuss is with the pacemaker API, I wrote > a library that was ported to iOS, Android and the iOS platform back in 2012. > It was a very fun way to play with pacemakers in iOS. The codebase is just > small so any time you try to use it on your Android or iOS device, you want > to check it out and watch your progress. The idea is to add a couple of API > calls to the iOS code to access pacemakers, then use another library to > access the pacemaker software on your iOS device. This is the kind of thing > that makes the browser a bit better. This way you can use the API to do > everything you want via a browser widget, and then use the API to generate > pacemaker apps.

</comment><comment><USER11> NN-generated text has this really weird uncanny valley feeling to it, where the words are well organized but there's no cogent thesis or point to be made. I feel like I might be reading schizophrenic ramblings.

No point here necessarily, this stuff is fascinating but creeps me out. Words from generated comments (using this website) are organized in a way that cause me to second guess my own reading comprehension abilities. It's kinda neat and fascinating.

The real challenge here: did I write this myself or modify a recommended NN- generated comment? I'll award points to the winner.

<comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad)

> A word salad is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random > words and phrases",[1] most often used to describe a symptom of a > neurological or mental disorder. The words may or may not be grammatically > correct, but are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot > extract any meaning from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I tried: "Facebook announces sending man to Mars" and got this:

I'm impressed that they have finally addressed the issues with the mission to Mars. I hope this isn't just a marketing push from FB, but a huge PR push.

then this:

I was wondering how they do it: the man is going to be in a position to land on Mars. Maybe not in Mars, but in the atmosphere of the Moon, this would be the most useful thing I have ever seen. And I guess the question is, can it be done with Mars?

then this:

The headline is a bit misleading. Facebook has no plan to send a man to Mars. The article points out that Facebook are planning to send a woman to Mars.

I couldn't help but laugh aloud. Good work!

<comment><USER14> SpaceX announces sending man to Mars (wired.com)

hncynic 1 minute ago

The most important detail was the last paragraph. The actual announcement for the launch of the Falcon 9 is here: [http://www.spacex.com/releases/index.html](http://www.spacex.com/releases/index.html)

This is a huge leap forward for SpaceX to make it into space again. SpaceX will still have a large stake in the rocket, but that's a huge leap forward for the whole industry. I wish SpaceX would just stop [... redacted ...] be more aggressive and look at their competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Getting some interesting syntax ideas from the headline "rust version 3.2 released":

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

"For example, let's say a function is like this in C++.

\- a function that has a string of type (value: value: value: value, value, value: value) - a function that returns an address in C++'s form: value: value: value: value: value[value:user]:{value[user]:}], value = value[user]}}: value[user]:{value[user]:}}

I'm still not quite clear on what does this mean to me. In Rust, you have a function that returns a value: value, value, value = value[user-]: value[user-]: value[@@"

<comment><USER16> "How to be happy"

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

How to be happy?

1\. Do something meaningful, 2. Do something meaningful...3. Do something meaningful...4. Do something meaningful...5. Do something meaningful--(even if that is not your primary goal)--5. Do something meaningful...6. Do something meaningful...(eg if you are a software engineer). 7. do something meaningful in life, not just some sort of job or hobby, to keep your sanity up. 9. Do something meaningful-- not what you think you're doing.

I think this is a good starting point; but the author is right.

I think the real key difference between happiness and pleasure is your own self-actualization and that it is something you can accomplish in the long run.

\</comment><comment>

^ I know natural language generators can kind of get "stuck" sometimes, but this is pretty funny. (Also, some wisdom at the end).

<comment><USER17> This is by far my favourite one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I typed in "hacker news comment generator" and was disappointed to not find "I could build this in a weekend" as one of the outputs

<comment><USER19> Reddit has you covered: [https://i.imgur.com/xa1MDnt.png](https://i.imgur.com/xa1MDnt.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Title:

        Linus Torvalds elected as the new president
        of the United States

hncynic:

        Now all he has to implement is version
        control. So I can have my own branch.

</comment><comment><USER21> hncynic 1 minute ago

"Emacs can do the job!", "Emacs is faster than Emacs" "Emacs is faster than Emacs because it runs inside an emacs environment"

This is absurdly accurate I have to say

</comment><comment><USER22> This is really useful.

Some suggestions:

1\. Add a "Download this site's CSS" field so it can't just be a "Show HN". The "Show HN" button should be a red flag.

2\. "If the site is a startup, we can always add some comments to the title." That's one reason I'm not using [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER23> Did you just...respond with a comment generated by the site about its own title? Or is this a real comment that I just don't understand.

<comment><USER19> the fact that you couldn't tell just shows how eerily brilliant this is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Currently near the top:

> Smoke seen for miles as SpaceX Crew Dragon suffers anomaly at Cape Canaveral

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

hncynic 1 minute ago

The problem is that it was a sign of an unstable airplane, as in the case of the original comets. The only way to protect it is with the helium and oxygen and liquid nitrogen.

I don't really care, but I can see no reason to be afraid to do that.

hncynic 1 minute ago

For the first 10 minutes there was a huge difference between the reported issue being a bug in the test software and the SpaceX failure.

The second time that happened was a second time to the SpaceX crew with their tests and another second time to the Space Shuttle team with their test suite. It was a different time to the launch of the test software, but that's it.

The two times the SpaceX crew did that, the first time they did this, they would have to run their tests with a new test/test suite.

I am wondering if it's the first time the SpaceX crew received a test suite with the mission at all.

hncynic 1 minute ago

I was always in the Space Shuttle business and they had a shuttle that would burn and land the crew on a very low orbit and then use it to do the launch. They were pretty upset that if they ever came back to space, they would probably still be at SpaceX, at least for the rest of my life.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

I find it strangely realistic. When I skim it kinda sounds like HN. You have to actually read to suspect anything. If I was a bit mischievous I might actually post one of these in the other article.

So how is this done?

<comment><USER25> I've got:

> > _hncynic 1 minute ago_

> _The article didn 't say anything. But it just says that the launch failed, > and that it did not have a recovery time._

> _So to me, this sounds more like an anomaly of some kind to explain it > better than a normal anomaly of the event._

> _What it means to say that the failure caused is exactly the same thing that > happened when the spacecraft started at the right time, except it didn 't > have a recovery time and was unable to recover._

> _How long is an anomaly like this from space-X supposed to take?_

This is a comedy generator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The previous thread had some interesting example outputs:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578)

<comment><USER27> >Very cool project but how is this different than HN comments?

Is this a real output from the generator? Too good to be true

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Hacker News to Merge with Reddit" resulted in:

>> hncynic 1 minute ago

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your contributions to the community. I hope you like this more in the future. I was able to post a link to the blog post I just posted in the last few weeks and it has helped a lot.

I believe it will help to create a community so more people can use Hacker News to connect with interesting people. I think it also helps people get better at finding cool stories on their own instead of doing it themselves.

>> hncynic 1 minute ago

If I recall correctly HN has been a "mersy" forum for many years already.

>> hncynic 1 minute ago

Wow! Now we have the option to merge the whole HN community, even better.

</comment><comment><USER29> Title: PayPal Sucks

\- It sucks because the author is not even a PayPal user or is not an account owner and only doesn't seem to have been involved in an online business since then.

-As someone who has lived in the US for 2 years, I've noticed that the biggest problem I have with PayPal is how difficult it is to manage your account in general. The PayPal account is set up as a backup to a central server, so you can use whatever tools you need for the job. So you set up a small number of accounts which you may have to mangled yourself. You do get to be really careful what you do with the money you pay with your account. At any rate, at some point, I just switched from using PayPal for some things - I want an account that I can use to pay for my business and have a good experience with them.

-Yes, PayPal sucks on a daily basis. I am an account user (and a regular member of our site) and have also dealt with several PayPal/Dwolla accounts using it. I had to do some googling and it seems very helpful. I don't know how they work with PayPal's customer support - I understand that they are trying to be like PayPal - but I had to look at the documentation to see what actually happened. I can understand having a few customers who will not have any problems with them, but as a customer, this was extremely frustrating, just frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER30> For the title "AI personal tutor for Auto-Didacts" this gives:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>----

> This seems to fit the trend of people using AI as a tool as much as possible > to save time.

> If you want to save time, just don't try to do something about it. A good > AI's ability to reap more benefit is not measured in dollars/days of > training per se, but rather, a more accurate one.

> Wow -- this is really interesting, I was expecting it to look like a robot > taking a long walk around the world and going to work.

Anyway, I like the idea.

The big challenge I see with the auto-didacts is that the people who are doing it will have more data to look at and can do it quickly. I think if there are any intelligent bots, I'm looking at making this much harder for the people who are doing it quickly. But it would be great if they found a way to make their algorithms so easy to follow and make them more productive.

As other posters have pointed out, this type of thing is not for everyone. It just might be to make your computer do the work on your own time, and to keep things consistent and understandable.

I love the idea of an interface that has to match the time someone else is doing it in a similar manner. I don't know about others and if it would work or not, but I think I want to think of a way to see them learn from each other.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

Wow. :o

<comment><USER31> Once you stopped using the quote symbol, I thought it was your comment and spent too long trying to understand it as such.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, that's why put the result in between two lines. HN can have at least a bit better text-editing support though.

<comment><USER31> It made sense once I looked at it again, it wasn't a complaint more a praise of the generated comments!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Input: "Elon Musk to Star in Next Iron Man Movie'

>> As an aside, here are some other movies in this directory.

* The Iron Man and Aliens ( [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt010248/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt010248/) )

* The Mars One ( [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638888/?ref_=tt_1](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638888/?ref_=tt_1) )

* The Mars Orbiter ( [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt009608/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt009608/) )

>> So Musk got a job at Apple and then worked on it at Apple for a week before he was told the movie went live.

>> This movie is really about this as an advertisement for the movie. Just so you guys know, this guy is making a better movie by talking about the movie not about the movie but just the movie, and how he has a lot of different experiences.

</comment><comment><USER32> Top Indian female biker dies in road accident during country-wide tour hncynic 1 minute ago

It says "India's top female bike deaths in road trip during the world's most dangerous years".

Did he mention the death rate in China?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki2/List_of_countries_by_fataliti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki2/List_of_countries_by_fatalities/List_of_by_deaths_in_U.S._by_fatalities/List_of_countries_by_fatalists_by_fatalities.html)?

I would be interested to know more before writing this.

hncynic 1 minute ago

"She was a motorcycle helper. She was a motorcycle driver, and while she wasn't riding on a bicycle, she was on a bicycle. She was on a bike. When she drove on it, she was wearing an underwear on her head."

This is an incredibly unfair statistic. As far as I can tell people who use bikes don't even know how many times the "bicycle helper" is used.

As a bike enthusiast, I never have any problem riding as a bike helker, but in the city as a cyclist I regularly spend almost double the time riding bicycle helper in my town and have to be absolutely sure that she is riding on a bike that does not have a collision.

So while that is a big thing, I think the majority of bikers should take advantage of that knowledge to do so.

I can see how many motorcycles are in the US and other cities with very high density bike lanes, the article seems to imply that the city is doing something right as a biker. I don't really know about that, but I'm guessing it's just a matter of how many years a bike helper will take you to the point where you're not doing it wrong, or how

hncynic 1 minute ago

There is nothing to be proud of with a single biker at any moment.

<comment><USER25> > _I would be interested to know more before writing this._

Good thinking there. We all could learn from the generator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Ask HN: How to start a consulting practice?

> "I need clients to work with me and help me grow" -> "They don't need me to > help me grow". -> "I'm not sure what I do because they are working with me > but my experience suggests that I shouldn't do that with me" -> "But in > practice I can work with me as my client as long as I stay in touch"

> Just start a side project on github and make sure you are the kind of person > who is interested in this kind of thing and don't just make a "Show HN".

> I think a lot of the comments here are focusing on this one question - <AUTHOR> > about just working on one thing that you don't have any experience on? Do > you feel like you are going to go out of your way to do it at all - <USER2> > have you done at any length to get the experience in the way that you need?

Not bad at all. Some improvements and this can become my goto HN website. (only partly kidding).

</comment><comment><USER6> It apparently doesn't do well with titles that ask questions (e.g. Ask HN) with no backing article. This was trained on titles that are assumed to contain linked article, so I wouldn't expect it to do well on these:

Title: "What is your favorite color?"

Comment:

> Kill me with my iPhone.

Title: "What is the worst language?"

Comment:

> This is probably one of the more insidious comments about the article that > pops up.

> It was a really good article.

> But this one is absolutely stupid.

> I could understand a few simple examples:

> * Explicit arithmetic

> * Explicit arithmetic

> * Selectable numbers

> * Concrete math

> * Consistent arithmetic

> * Concurrency... or something.

> "Yes," by the way is an interesting comment.

> "Yes... but I think we all have this problem, and I can't help feeling that > we could all do just that: We need to do something about it. And so what..."

> I do like how he presents that question. I would be much more interested in > an answer like that.

</comment><comment><USER34> Title: What is the worst language?

hncynic 1 minute ago

> The most difficult languages to learn are C, Java, C++, and C, which in > their implementation would have helped prevent them from becoming "worse" > languages

Nope, but still more challenging than "easier".

> Lisp

No, because that's not so hard...

> Ruby, Python, and even Haskell

Nope, but Lisp is the least painful language to learn.

> PHP

Lets say I want to program on a Mac. I want to program on a Mac. The only reason I need to do that is that the code base sucks and you can't use PHP.

hncynic 1 minute ago

I don't think this guy is wrong. I think that's the best language to write web applications. I personally have spent a fair amount of time building web applications. I think people have a hard time focusing on web apps. If you can use Java or PHP or Python, you can do web applications too.

</comment><comment><USER35> I copied a random title from the front page to test with:

>Show HN: Tetris Implemented in ClojureScript

The results were eerily good:

———————

hncynic 1 minute ago

I just finished a version of Tetris ([http://clj.net/clj.htm](http://clj.net/clj.htm)) in ClojureScript. It took me about 2 hours before building the full game in Clojure.

———

Very cool! Is there a link out there to see how this compares to other Tetris implementations ? I'm a little confused as to why this would be different from the "Teach Yourself JavaScript" or whatever.

———

The demo is a bit too slow because the game is in a weird state but it's in a state where it needs to be replayed.

</comment><comment><USER36> It would be useful to see the comments and get an idea of the quality of each title. This site does a good job of conveying what is good enough while still providing a summary of the contents and submitting an opinion.

How do you get your comment title into the list?

You can just use a few of the existing ones: [http://hn.algolia.com/hacker](http://hn.algolia.com/hacker)

It's not perfect, but it works fine

(all three comment above generated by OP's site)

</comment><comment><USER37> Randomly entering "China" into the title makes the model oddly obsessed with the U.S. :

\- The U.S. has a similar problem

\- The same can be said of US citizens in countries with strict immigration policies and very few foreign nationals.

\- I am really not sure how this is different to what is happening in other countries/countries and how it has changed.

\- The US is one of a few countries the US was supposed to be a democracy. Not only that but there is a reason that it's no longer the case.

</comment><comment><USER38> "Musk says SpaceX will start selling tickets to Mars"

\- I thought the title was going for Elon's marketing and the fact that one of the people behind this site is probably one of the least technically competent people I've ever met.

\- It seems like this is a common tactic in the aerospace world. The first thing I always thought was that spacex was going to go in space like space and the cost wouldn't be a problem.

\- He probably won't make it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Good work, the github repository is also clean and easy to follow.

May I ask : What is the size of the live model of the website, in MByte ? (or maybe it would be nice to add that info in the README, just to have an idea)

Also, would be interesting to see how it compares to the recent GPT-2 ([https://github.com/openai/gpt-2](https://github.com/openai/gpt-2))

<comment><USER40> Thank you!

The model weighs in at 1.2GB with 100M parameters, which is similar to the smallest GPT-2 model.

I wouldn't be suprised if GPT-2 small (+ finetuning on HN data) performed better than what I have trained. Other than hyperparameters, I think there are two main differences: First, I pretrained the model solely on Wikipedia data, while GPT-2 used more general web data. Second, I used an encoder-decoder model, while GPT-2 is a language model. I'm suspecting that the encoder is not very useful for this task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Funnily enough it can generate links to genuine HN comments. eg.

> hncynic 1 minute ago

> > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471054)

> > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13778525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13778525)

</comment><comment><USER42> I got "[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Hacker+News"](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Hacker+News") as one of the comments for a couple of searches. You may want to remove the Algolia search link from your training data - which is at the bottom of every thread page.

</comment><comment><USER28> Input: "Python Escapes From Local Zoo'

>> I have to wonder what Python was doing as a kid and what was the point of making this happen?

>> This kind of stuff is why python3 can't be adopted by all programmers (no matter how hard it's to get things done).

>> I can't believe that there were no escape codes or excuses?

</comment><comment><USER43> Nice, and I like it too -- but it lacks the comments that are so useful for me. I've found a ton of good ideas to use on sites that I've just bought.

I've had a lot of fun making a script similar to this that would convert your site to a commenting system. Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER44> This is really fantastic! How do you generate these kind of comments?

I have the same question but without the title. Maybe I can generate the "Ask HN: Hacker News Comments" link from titles by tagging it by topic.

</comment><comment><USER45> Took a few tries before something fun came up, but this one blew me away (OP title as input).

> Wow, the quality of the comments is impressive. But it also shows the top > comments that have appeared from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER46> "This should become part of the UI of Hacker News"

</comment><comment><USER47> Is the generator still being trained based on current comments?

If so, how long will it be before it starts generating comments that include feeding the title init itself?

</comment><comment><USER48> Would be handy if it could generate the article too.

<comment><USER25> Just sprinkle some "experts say" and "the community responds" in between.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Hilarious, I got comments complaining about how "the article is from 2011" and "the linked article is more thorough."

</comment><comment><USER25> This might just be the morning dumbs, but in this trip to metaspace I find it mighty hard to tell forged comments from authentic ones.

<comment><USER50> For real. It's kinda disconcerting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> just entered "seo test" and the garbage out was 100% spot on! congrats!

</comment><comment><USER52> obligatory test:

Generate hacker news comments from titles

hncynic 1 minute ago

I thought it was going to be more like /. but I'm confused. Can you add some sort of comment link to /, which is something I could have easily navigated, like /. and /. would be great.

hncynic 1 minute ago

Nice, but I wonder why you would want to do the same with comments on the same page. If you're not really getting it, why make a single sentence and the title different?

hncynic 1 minute ago

How about adding a "Downvote" to the title? For example, "Hackernews: The best comment in the world: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635686](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635686)

"What I like about the HN thread, which is that I don't have to post links here to get upvotes on comments from hacker-news posts"

I just wanted a way to filter out the "Ask" from your comments so you could add new comments, and then maybe change the URL to "Show HN" to the "About the Hacker News thread" link.

</comment><comment><USER53> thiscommentdoesnotexist.com

</comment><comment><USER54> > What you need to add to this is an official Hacker News API.

</comment><comment><USER55> Capable of philosophical investigations also:

\---

The world is everything that is the case.

hncynic 1 minute ago

The author claims the same thing is true of software, but not with software itself.

hncynic 1 minute ago

This is great article. When I read "Taught in 30 Minutes" I was amazed at how the author seems to think that it was a "fantastic story" that was written in an unrealistic way - that the author has been able to write his book on his own (yet untrue). The author doesn't seem to be aware of the actual circumstances behind the creation of a book.

hncynic 1 minute ago

Great post. This is really the kind of article I don't think the author talks about in his blog post.

TL;DR - the world is everywhere.

I was very disappointed with the title, but here we are.

\---

</comment><comment><USER56> \- why didn't you write it in Rust?

</comment><comment><USER10> "n-gate.com is hiring"

> Seems a bit off topic, but I have an idea for a service that gives people > the benefit of the doubt. How would it work? How would it work?

> This sounds like a bad idea. There might be some sort of "hire a few > engineers" thing.

> This would appear to me a lot more valuable than a list of job postings like > [http://www.n-gate.com](http://www.n-gate.com) (it only has the name 'n, but > you might get the email from them)

</comment><comment> rajesh-s The comment above mine was written by AI and you will never find out.

</comment><comment><USER57> Fascinating!

</comment><comment><USER57> Fascinating

</comment><comment><USER58> Cute idea, but I can't seem to get anything decent out of it.

I tried the following:

> Massive strike at oil rig as radical turtle lovers declare independence from > federal regulations against shelled creatures

> 1 + 1 = 2

> 1 + 1 = 3

> Cats rule teh interwebz

> US elects Jon Skeet for President; challenger Chuck Norris too busy counting > to infinity infinite times to notice.

> xkcd is funnier than late-night comedy

On the upside, the titles about math did include commentary on math, while the title that references xkcd included a link to one of the comics.

</comment><comment><USER59> I could do better with the Ad-lib library I wrote as a freshman in High School. At least those generated comments where coherent. The garbage that is being generated here is an incoherent mess. Deep learning is going to be another blow against the AI community like in the 80's when expert systems didn't pan out. Once ML is well understood a few well defined algorithms will replace all the buzz, just like expert systems.

ML as we know it today is not going to usher in Sky Net.</comment>


Ask HN: Learning PHP, reluctantly, for a lisp hacker - <AUTHOR>

I hear awful things about PHP as a language and have barely touched it, but it looks like I might need to get my hands dirty and learn it in enough detail to make architectural choices that will haunt my team for a while.
My closest point of reference is Django/Python, and professionally I've spent the most time in C# and personally in Common Lisp (of course recently exploring Clojure).
I enjoyed Cal Henderson's book Building Scalable Web Sites, which is PHP-based but not too PHP-specific.
With that background, let me ask for the community's judgment and experience:
Is there a recommended experienced programmer's guide to PHP with limitations, gotchas, and quirks?
Hacker preferences on IDE's, free or not?
Tools like remote debuggers?  Lint equivalent?
Maps of the community, libraries, and available resources?
Tradeoffs of Modern frameworks, especially on the ORM side - what's the closest thing to Hibernate?
Security, testing, performance best practices guides?
Possibilities and limits for integration with C, JVM, .Net, and dynamic languages' existing libraries?
Also, using HaXe and compiling to PHP - is it a mature technology and the cure-all it appears?  Are there gotchas? <comment><USER2> _using HaXe and compiling to PHP - is it a mature technology and the cure-all it appears?_

There are three reasons to use PHP. One is that it's very simple to deploy because there aren't a lot of layers between you and Apache's C code, and those layers have been exhaustively tested.

The second is that it is very easy to learn and there are lots of people who can tinker with it. It's generally easy for another PHP programmer to get your code running. It's generally easy for them to read and understand your code. It's a standard, and it's a _simple_ standard. (A bit _too_ simple, for problems far outside its sweet spot -- but that's what other platforms are for.)

The third is that you want to integrate closely with one of the toolkits or frameworks that have already been written in PHP.

HaXe breaks all of these features. I see no reason to use it on a production project. If your problem is truly unsuitable for PHP you should use something else. (You have a choice; this is server-side code.) If you can't bring yourself to write code without fancy language features that are missing from PHP you should find another project or another job. You are doing yourself no favors by trying to paper over the issue, whatever it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the candor. The reason for PHP over my first choice of Django is that this project has a lot of junior people with PHP-only skills.

I'm wondering about HaXe because I still want the people on the team who can appreciate it to get a high productivity language with snob appeal, but without fracturing the project into two code bases that need to cross type system barriers to call into each other, as would be the case if the "language snob components" were in, say, a JVM language.

The price is that the PHP-only people won't be able to read the cross-language group's code effectively; but frankly I don't think they'd do much of that anyway.

One hypothetical setup would be:

1\. Doctrine ORM

2\. HaXe-to-PHP business logic and harder UI logic, calling the ORM and referring to the PHP-only pieces by links only

3\. PHP pieced together by tinkerers from lots of CRM-like components for simpler front end stuff, occasionally calling the ORM and the HaXe-to-PHP classes

Separately, being able to cross-compile to JavaScript/Flash for the client - and doing I/O without breaking the type system - looks exciting.

So, I'm considering HaXe to keep a fraction of the second and third PHP benefit you list.

<comment><USER2> _The price is that the PHP-only people won't be able to read the cross- language group's code effectively; but frankly I don't think they'd do much of that anyway._

...so why not just go ahead and make it impossibly difficult for the junior people to read your code? That should really encourage them to enjoy working with you.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Let me outline the problems I foresee:

You are going to create a huge political and management problem -- deliberately driving a palpable wedge down the middle of your team -- by implementing the "harder" parts of the app in a language that the PHP developers not only can't understand but _aren't expected to understand_ , a language that they will have very little incentive to learn. (I know plenty of PHP devs who are curious about Rails or Django; I've met plenty who use PHP frameworks; I've never heard the word HaXe pronounced. It is not worth having on one's resume.)

Why not just force the PHP devs to wear little dunce caps when they're in the office? Perhaps you can have a ritual where you throw eggs at them at every morning meeting. Surely that will help your team to gel.

Meanwhile, be very careful about referring to your non-standard _compiled_ extension to PHP as a "high-productivity language". Eternal optimism is the occupational hazard of software engineers. I bet you'll find that any gain in expressive power will be more than offset by: Waiting for the compiler; remembering to run the compiler; writing makefiles that remember to run the compiler for you; fixing bugs in the compiler; adding missing features to the compiler; justifying the need for the compiler to the PHP devs; justifying the need for the compiler to your boss; explaining your architecture to every new engineer that comes on board; trying to guess which bug is in which portion of the code (is it the HaXe, the PHP, the compiler, the PHP runtime... or perhaps even the language that the _compiler_ is implemented in?) so that you can assign an engineer from the appropriate language background to fix that bug; spending your own valuable time finding and fixing simple bugs that an intern could fix, except that the interns can't read your code...

Meanwhile the rest of your colleagues will conclude that you're just some sort of language crank. All this grief, because you're unable to bring yourself to write code in a language without closures.

Just build it all in PHP and try to enjoy your (perhaps temporary) journey into another culture. Or make the case to build it in Rails or Django and tell the PHP developers that they're going to enjoy their journey into another culture. ;) Or make the case that the architecture divides cleanly into two components, one that is best built in Django and the other built in PHP. (If you find that the inability to call PHP routines from Django, or vice versa, is a liability, it's a sign that the architecture doesn't actually divide cleanly and you've got to pick one platform or the other.) Or find a different job.

(And forget this crazy notion of cross-compiling your code into JavaScript. YAGNI. It's like claiming that it's going to be easy to cross-compile your pickup truck into a Honda Accord -- after all, they're both made of steel and auto parts, and steel is malleable, and auto parts are interchangeable. And that isn't exactly _false_ \-- I have a fun book called _Build Your Own Sports Car_ which literally tells you how to turn an old pickup truck into a Lotus Seven replica -- but it's only for hobbyists, and it's very inefficient because you have to optimize the process by hand, particularly when it comes time to fix bugs.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Point well taken. Thank you. I'm being both over-optimistic and arrogant.

And hey, apparently there's closures in PHP 5.3 anyway...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if one considers that PHP started as a templating language and has evolved in what it is to-day the 'awfulness' goes away.

For a person with C# background it offers the advantage of extending the language if you need to. For IDE I use Netbeans. For frameworks I use CodeIgniter and CakePHP. For ORM I use Doctrine. For CMS I use Drupal. For one two night projects I use Wordpress.

There is so much in PHP in the web that it would be hard to keep yourself from re-discovering the wheel!

</comment><comment><USER4> docs.php.net is exhaustive, especially for a lisp hacker.</comment>


How we built a Vine clone using IPFS - <AUTHOR> http://bits.citrusbyte.com/thicket-a-vine-clone-built-using-ipfs/?r=hn <comment><USER2> This article immediately lost me for calling Vine a "gif sharing app".

<comment><USER3> Please don't post unsubstantive nitpicks to Hacker News. The purpose of the threads is thoughtful conversation, not rushing to report the first wrongness you find.</comment></comment>


The 17" MacBook Pro against consumer Windows laptops (verdict: great, but $1K more) - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2009/04/07/macbook-pro-expensive-round-two/

<comment><USER2> First page: Are you going to tell us anything about the machines? Nope, I'm trying to be objective. Does the OS affect anything? Nope, but I'm a realist, so yup.

Second page: These machines are basically the same hardware-wise, but lets say their names a few times. Since they're the same hardware-wise, lets discuss things that don't affect the computer, hardware or software wise! Also, be sure to bold their names no more then 3/4 the time though!

Third page: Lets reprint the same information from the previous page, again! This time, using ugly colors that don't go well together. Then we discuss what most consumers care about; the price. And recommend other notebooks that we didn't even discuss!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not going to accuse this piece of consisting _entirely_ of rabid Mac fanboyism, as he clearly has the ability to recognize that other laptop manufacturers are able to provide much of the same and in quite a few cases, even better.

Doesn't really help though. It still comes off as "I'm going to use 3 pages to justify why I just spent $1000 on branding and I'm _OK_ with that" and not much more.

So apart from (once again) confirming that Apple sells equal hardware at a higher price, this wasn't really all that interesting.</comment>


WhatsApp Sells for 19 Billion and All I Got Was Jealous - <AUTHOR> https://startupsanonymous.com/story/whatsapp-sells-for-19-billion-and-all-i-got-was-jealous/ <comment><USER2> Why be jealous? They solved a hard problem - and executed on that really well. They got the traction and the audience - they did everything right - and it was a lot of hard work.

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounds like it was more of a competitive jealousy.</comment></comment>


Coronavirus mutation found in India could threaten the race to develop vaccine - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3079678/coronavirus-mutation-threatens-race-develop-vaccine <comment><USER2> Experts are working on Universal Vaccine [https://archive.vn/0skBn](https://archive.vn/0skBn)</comment>


Google Changes Font Size Unilaterally... Why? - <AUTHOR> http://adamman71.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-changes-font-size-poor-ugly.html

<comment><USER2> This is what all you "designers" get for insisting on setting fonts and colors and whatnot. Now you have a Web where you have gotten everyone to force their tiny sans serif fonts and bright white backgrounds down my throat, but one Web site you like makes a change you don't like and suddenly you are up in arms. If people would leave the fonts and colors alone then everyone could set their browser how they liked and be happy.

I notice this guy has all kinds of fonts and colors explicitly defined in his blog's style sheet. He gets no sympathy from me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree that it is irritating, but it is their site, it's not like they need to ask for permission.

<comment><USER4> Well, no, they don't 'owe' anyone anything but it seems like an uncharacteristic move for Google, which seemed to be the author's point.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> When I wrote this post, I was also thinking about a former colleague. He has a birth condition requiring him to use huge font size to read anything on his screen. There is no way to resize fonts, did Google think about disabled people?

</comment><comment><USER5> The author says that the page disregards user font size choices, but when I zoom in using Firefox it makes the text larger. So, no usability issue, perhaps I am using too new of a browser?

</comment><comment><USER6> Weblog uses bright purple text for unvisited links... Why?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This does answer the issues I raise. Why the question?</comment>


Ask HN: Web app to monitor all receipts for tax purposes? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a web app that allows me to, somehow, store all my paper receipts as a digital copy (either scanning them, or taking a picture) which will then be added to some sort of cash flow management tool, that allows me to easily see my cashflows and keep good records of all expenses & income (also being able to generate a nice print-out of my expenses over different time periods would be nice).
Also note that my income isn't necessarily from invoices sent out that are paid, but could be a variety of different activities - both online and offline.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> <http://www.neatco.com/> comes close as anything I've seen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thnx...this is really cool.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education - <AUTHOR>

Hello!
I'm thinking of an idea of a social networking education website. Many online educational projects such as Youtube EDU, iTunes U or Academic Earth have great content but lack social networking features. I believe the "social" part is very important in the process of learning things when you can interact with classmates and instructors, ask questions and get answers. So that not only you can browse and watch education materials, but also the community will play an important role in the learning process.
Do you know any websites that already offer these features?
There are good examples of the execution of this idea for particular areas like italki.com for english learning or www.jamplay.com for guitar playing. But I'm thinking bigger, so it'd be for fundamental university disciplines like computer science or mathematics.
I don't want to build another useless social network, I'm more on the way to research what is already available, how existent solutions can be enhanced. <comment><USER2> Do you think of learning management systems ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_learning_management_sys...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_learning_management_systems)), or do you think about it being open to all?

I know some of those systems has the option for fora, and my experiences with those has just been good. If you're looking for good ways to work with an open-for-all system, I suggest looking at the most used fora in e.g. mathematics and physics, and then take some ideas from there.

A problem I suppose you might encounter is that most schoolkids use this networking site just to solve their homework: At least that's what they do now. If you could somehow change that problem into a way of making them interested in learning how one solve those problems (instead of making other solve them), then you've got a great idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think of it as a open-for-all online university, in the beginning at least for Russian speaking students as I have access to many Russian universities and professors who might like to participate.

Regarding the problem of schoolkids misusing the community to solve their homework, if the project is targeted for people who really want to learn something, doing so is cheating themselves. Also, for university students I believe the effect of this problem is not so evident as in middle schools.

<comment><USER2> Well, if you're backed up by professors, then this sounds promising.

What I would start with if I was working with this issue, is how to present the information for the students in the best way. At least for me, linear algebra and physics becomes way simpler with good visualisations/videos. If you could somehow make it easier for professors to present the content well, then you have a good start for a good website. So, all in all: Find out what makes people learn the easiest - I'm pretty sure there are some studies out there elaborating _the_ way to teach students. If you make this way of teaching students easy to do on your website, I'm pretty sure that this idea might work out well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, will think on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been thinking about this in terms of my own (7-year-old) educational website: <http://eMusicTheory.com> \-- interactive online drills for music theory students/teachers.

The entire experience would be much more interesting for students if they could compete with friends (like with apps on facebook, for example), but I'm not sure making yet another FB app is a good idea here, plus you'd be stuck competing with other music theory students.

My half-baked idea is a central educational social networking site in which you could earn education points by achieving scores on lots of different member sites, not just mine... so a music theory whizkid might use their stats/achievements/reputation/karma/whatever to compete with their math nerd friend, even though they're focusing on entirely different specialties. There'd have to be rough equivalency in the effort involved to achieve points on different sites, but that's not a big hurdle (and weighting could be adjusted automatically based on students' relative speed of advancement.. if students tend to go tearing through achievements on a given site, the value of its points would be reduced in the global stats).

I'll dig through some of the sites linked above when I have time, but at the moment nothing seems to match up with this concept.

Is this a good idea? (Is there anything out there heading in this direction? I don't have the time to develop it myself currently, though I'd happily offer tons of advice).

</comment><comment><USER4> It's worth looking at what OpenCourseWare are doing, as well as university- centric networks like the British Open University's OpenLearn.

I co-founded an educational social network called Elgg.net in 2004 (which later became Eduspaces.net when Elgg's scope grew from education into an open source social networking platform for all), and I've been watching this space carefully. There have been quite a few services which have been and gone that have followed the model you've outlined, but that doesn't mean you won't be able to build something that works.

The biggest deal, in my opinion, is always this: find a way to make it work for the first user. Build it around existing educational resources, or tools for an individual to learn, and then let the community enhance that initial offering. Otherwise you've got one hell of an uphill battle ahead of you. (Pertinent examples include Flickr and Delicious which both allow you to store and share resources, but are so much more when millions of people are also participating.)

<comment><USER4> NB: I should have mentioned that I've moved on from Elgg and EduSpaces, and am not able to speak for either project.

<comment><USER5> We are building this very thing at www.nixty.com. Benwerd, I'm familiar with Elgg and have actually consulted with Harold Jarche a few times (several years ago). If either of you are interested, then I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Please send me an email at glen at nixty dot com.

<comment><USER4> I can't speak for Harold - although we've spoken, he's never directly been involved with Elgg or me - but I'd love to. I'll drop you an email now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've built a website to do that! It's called Curious Reef <http://curiousreef.com/> and I launched it a few months ago. People have been steadily learning a variety of subjects together since then.

The most active class so far is MIT's OCW 6.00, Intro to Computer Science: [http://curiousreef.com/class/mit- opencourseware-600-introduc...](http://curiousreef.com/class/mit- opencourseware-600-introduction/)

There are others learning Vim, SICP, bash, etc. I'm also experimenting with a guitar class.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the site. My goals when designing the site were exactly as you have described above.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems very promising. I like the slogan – "explanatory social learning".

How many users do you have at this moment?

Have you contacted content owners to ask them for permission to place the videos directly on your website? It'd be awesome if you can do so.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, there's over 1200 registered users, but I wouldn't quote that as active users. The site got redditted when it launched and there's some people who signed up initially and haven't been back. I don't have a number for active users off the top of my head, but there's always someone submitting homework, writing a comment, or starting a discussion every day.

I haven't looked into hosting content yet. I feel that others do that pretty well already, but it would be more convenient to have it all in one place. What type of content do you think would be most beneficial to be hosted on Curious Reef? Embedded videos, PDFs, etc? Or are you thinking of something like replicating the content of all of OCW's classes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe not hosting content yourself, but embed it somehow into your website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm leading a project doing exactly this, building an open source social learning platform on Drupal. You can check it out at <http://eduglu.com>. I made my second release yesterday - [http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2010/06/01/second- release-e...](http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2010/06/01/second-release- eduglu)

Things are early on still so if you wanted to pitch in, you could be a lot of help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for suggestion, will definitely look at it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank everyone for participation. Did some more research and found out two interesting projects:

<http://smart.fm> – a next generation learning platform from Japan featuring personalized learning techniques.

<http://grockit.com> – a social learning tool to help students prepare for SAT, GMAT, etc. With elements of a social game.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought about this too, wrote about this a little bit here. Social Network was just one aspect of my idea.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351871>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353756>

Don't have money to work on it, right now. :(

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes, Classroom.tv. Based in Palo Alto, we are an early-stage Stanford startup. Contact me if you want to meet (firstname.lastname@example.com).

</comment><comment><USER10> There's <http://curiousreef.com/> (formerly Crunch Course).

</comment><comment><USER11> We just released Student Revolt which adds a social network to existing courses. You can see a screencast of how it works on the home page.

<http://www.studentrevolt.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> In France we have beebac, it's a great website, very useful. (url : <http://www.beebac.com>). I'm not sure about the US-friendly educational social networks..

<comment><AUTHOR> A very interesting project, will look at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Moodle.com

</comment><comment><USER14> Have a look at <http://www.supercoolschool.com/>

Is it what you were thinking about?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that seems interesting. But it is only a platform for creating online educational communities, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm more thinking of a service that is a combination of great educational content with an active community, that help a student throughout the learning process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not a bad idea; might be tough to monetize</comment>


Pitfalls of Object Oriented Programming (on modern hardware) - <AUTHOR> http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/gcapaustralia09/Pitfalls_of_Object_Oriented_Programming_GCAP_09.pdf

<comment><USER2> Warning: 100+ slides focusing on Data Oriented Design and performance in game development.</comment>


Mt.Gox's tweets are all gone - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mtgox <comment><USER2> So, each bit of news coming out of Gox makes me more likely to assume the worst.

When preparing for lawsuits, often the lawyers will recommend silence, and making sure that there are no public statements that are misleading. Given that they've been making reassuring comments all along, this makes me assume things are very bad indeed. I must assume they've been advised to _stop_ making reassuring comments and saying things that could make them liable for more damages in court...or, worse, make them guilty of fraud.

Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. Anybody else got theories on why they'd do something so extreme? I certainly can't think of any _positive_ reason for them to do so.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, destroying evidence once a lawsuit is filed is a definite no-no. But what's one more no-no in a career of no-no's?

An account compromise is possible.

Perhaps they're about to take some steps they'd previously publicly assured people they wouldn't, and don't want the obsolete assurances to be easy-to- reference.

<comment><USER4> This is criminal activity. They are tanking their market on purpose to buy up at firesale prices and make the most of their insider position with their customers locked without withdrawals.

I wonder what do they have in mind but this is a bonafide bucket shop and I have little doubt that they will be facing criminal charges.

<comment><USER5> Assuming for the moment that they are doing that - is it really criminal activity? I understand that it would be in regulated markets, but Bitcoin isn't regulated.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't matter what they deal with. MtGox is a financial services provider registered with the Japanese FSA that transmits money in multiple "recognised" currencies (AUD CAD CHF CNY DKK EUR GBP HKD JPY NOK NZD PLN RUB SEK SGD THB USD).

They are subject to Japanese law and International law. And also to US and EU law regarding AML/KYC of their citizens.

Bitcoin might not be regulated in most places to different degrees, but that doesn't mean you are above the law because you deal with Bitcoin among other things.

<comment> at-fates-hands >>They are subject to Japanese law and International law. And also to US and EU law regarding AML/KYC of their citizens.

Is there any legal precedent for this? What would you sue Mt.Gox for? Do they have contracts or some form of binding agreement with people who store their BTC with them?

I'm not sure they're really bound by any laws in regards to currency. Maybe contractually, but beyond that, not sure what you could sue them for without some real concrete evidence of criminal activity.

<comment><USER6> You typically sue a company over torts, not crimes. A tort is a civil cause of action. "They deprived me of my property in a fashion we had not agreed upon" is a tort called conversion. There exist many other ones you could describe Mt. Gox as having committed. Japan and the US are friendly first-world nations; their courts routinely enforce each others' judgments. (You'd have to demonstrate tortious behavior in the US to the satisfaction of a Japanese court, which might not be straightforward, but that's the sort of thing you'd want to ask an actual Japanese lawyer rather than somebody with a cursory understanding of the matter.)

That said, most people hoping for recourse in a court of law do not understand the expense, timeline, and likelihood of actual collection involved. (Six figures, years, and "probably nil", respectively.)

<comment><USER4> There are hundreds to thousands of people and many millions of US$ affected. I'm pretty sure they will work out a way to get them to court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are these the actions of a company that intends to stay in business? I would hazard a guess that the answer to that question is "No." Who would be foolish enough to keep their money with mtgox after 3 weeks of silence, and now with them seemingly erasing their footprint off the Internet? Even the worst businessperson would know their actions are jeopardizing their viability as a business.

So, based on that assumption that they know they will no longer be in business, you need to decide, are they going to make their users whole before shutting down, or not? Again, I would hazard a guess that the high-probability answer is that they will not make their users whole. If they had enough money, it would seem that knowing they are going to go out of business, the best thing to do is make their customers whole and close up shop.

The fact they aren't do this, to me, suggests they are attempting to protect themselves. If my guess is correct, then it suggests that they don't have enough money and are trying to figure out how best to save themselves from being sued or worse.

<comment><USER8> I withdrew my money a couple of weeks ago to a European bank account, shortly before the news of their issues broke. It wasn't a fortune but it was a large enough amount to care about. Still hasn't made it onto my account. I doubt it ever will at this point.

<comment><USER9> I have been waiting since October for a transfer of USD to my bank account for an amount that I had sold 1 BTC for USD. I have had an open support ticket with them for 3 months now and they have held my money hostage.

Just last week when the price of BTC was lower than what I had sold mt BTC for, I asked them to cancel the withdrawal and credit my account. I then proceeded to purchase back more BTC than I had sold originally over 4 months ago.

Unfortunately my BTC is still held hostage until they reinstate BTC withdrawals but their support has confirmed that I will be able to withdraw my BTC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> They've clearly suffered a Twitter Malleability attack.

<comment><USER10> I am not sure why people blame Mt. Gox for a problem within the Twitter protocol that always 'deletions'. We discussed the solution with the Twitter core developers and will allow our tweets to be displayed again once it has been approved and standardized.

<comment><USER11> "our tweets" ?

<comment><USER12> He is mocking the way MtGox tried to pass the buck for their inability to deal with the malleability issue to Bitcoin core developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Initially read this as: Mt.Gox tweets "all gone"

<comment><USER14> That would definitely be one of the craziest tweets of the year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> IMHO, this is a ruse. Only Gox knows if they are going under or not. By playing up the trend of bad news, they are forcing down the prices of Gox BTC which they can buy up at extremely generous prices.

The more they make it look like they are screwed, the cheaper people will sell. Thus they can keep this facade up for months. As long as they don't go under, they profit.

<comment><USER16> It's also possible they're not doing this out of greed but as a way to actually rescue their company. They may owe a lot of money and the only way they can make it through this without going under is by buying all the bitcoin back at a low value. The question is, how far do they go, and how much of the retained earnings do they commit to rescuing the company and how much of these retained earnings have already found their way into individual executive bank accounts.

<comment><USER17> That's still dishonest if they hold other people's bitcoins hostage so they have no recourse but to sell them to Mt Gox at low value. Their customers are at their mercy, and they're taking full advantage of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here are a few of the last tweets: [https://archive.is/eDanx](https://archive.is/eDanx)

Edit: And more at [https://archive.is/https://twitter.com/MtGox/status/*](https://archive.is/https://twitter.com/MtGox/status/*)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm kind of in the dark about Mt.Gox, is their recent downfall just the fault of inexperience when dealing with complex code and Bitcoin or did the team at Mt.Gox actually act with malice, attempting to steal money from people?

Is Mt.Gox just a startup made of 2 brothers and a fullstack engineer that happened to hit it big and muck up brilliantly when they scaled?

Part of me feels really sad (granted I don't participate in Bitcoin at all) because these guys may actually go to jail for fraud. I just want to know if my moral compass is pointing in the right direction.

<comment><USER5> There comes a point where incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

MtGox has had so many incidents that they would have faced sanctions in a regulated market. But then the people giving money to MtGox should have seen just how flaky MtGox was.

It is sad and frustrating that this happened. I kind of want bitcoin to take off. And I especially want to avoid saying "told you so" because that's just being a dick.

<comment><USER20> It is easy to say these things in hindsight. A year ago Mt. Gox was the paragon of the 'industry'.

<comment><USER21> Not really. A year ago, it had already been crap for quite a while... it just still had a sizable club of apologists saying "don't be so hard on them, they've done so much good".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not a great day to be a Libertarian.

When their domain goes up for sale, I'm going to buy it and start an online exchange for Magic cards.

<comment><USER23> So in the current EU/US political climate, MtGox would be bailed out, meaning people who didn't invest their money with MtGox would be forced to make the people who did whole. Whereas in the current BitCoin climate, the investors suffer and will be forced to sue MtGox to reclaim their money.

Which is morally better?

No libertarian will tell you that either of these is a preferred outcome, but out of the two, the morally superior one should be relatively obvious.

Edit: The reason I say it would be bailed out is not because they are investment accounts but precisely because it was so huge in the BitCoin economy.

<comment><USER24> MtGox is an exchange, not a bank. I'm mentioning this because there is an important third person with a bank: the customer, not the investor.

With mtgox, every customer is an investor. When bailing out a bank, however, the rationale is often to help out the people who cannot be blamed: the customers.

I'm still not claiming that bailing out I banks is a good thing, but the comparison you make is a small apples/oranges thing.

<comment><USER23> This sounds a lot like the too big to fail argument and so it is not an apples/oranges thing. It's a sliding scale and the only reason it seems like it is apples and oranges to you is precisely because MtGox isn't big enough.

I'm not saying that customers of a bank should suffer for the investment side but let the investors suffer for their bad investments, if the political will is there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Check out the recent update to this YouTube video...

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP1YsMlrfF0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP1YsMlrfF0)

Apparently liquidity problems and solvency problems are different problems, who knew.

<comment><USER26> Oh wow. I see 3 possibilities:

1\. Mt Gox is going under, probably this week.

2\. These people are utterly clueless about public relations and how the public perceives their actions.

3\. This is all a big prank. You've been punked.

<comment><USER27> 4\. Mt Gox is no longer liquid because the Feds have their (encrypted) wallet

(ok, this is probably a bit too far down the conspiracy path)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A somewhat redundant exercise given all the tweet archiving and indexing services that are around nowadays. I can't help but think there's nothing sinister or suspicious here and more likely an account compromise.

<comment><AUTHOR> There was another news a couple of hours ago that they resigned from Bitcoin foundation board, so it indeed is very sinister [https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=462](https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=462)

<comment><USER28> Did you read my first point? Whilst I understand it's perfectly normal for BTC community members to jump to rash conclusions, I feel this time it's misguided given the numerous ways that tweets can be recovered. So what exactly would wiping them achieve?

<comment><USER29> I'm not much of a fan of "X probably didn't do Y because I cannot guess what would be to gain."

There has been no word from Gox that their social account has been compromised so the clearest conclusion to guess is that they wiped their timeline. Why? That doesn't exactly matter before establishing who and right now the who seems to be Gox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> About 6 months ago (when Mt Gox had some other issues with people's money) I said:

> If you trusted a company that started out trading Magic: the Gathering cards > with a significant amount of your money, you probably need the lesson you > are going to learn from this.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6264666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6264666)

And was mocked/dismissed. It's disheartening to me the blind spot that otherwise intelligent people have when it comes to BitCoin and BitCoin related businesses.

<comment><USER31> Probably because what they bought the domain for was utterly irrelevant to their competence or complete lack thereof.

The enemy is stupid the overcredulous decision-making of ideologues and the incompetence of people who want to handle your money. Adding more dumb information just confuses the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> relax, they're just pivoting and will relaunch next week as an RPG card trading exchange.

</comment><comment><USER33> _grabs popcorn_

I am an asian, therefore my comment shouldn't be taken as racial. The moment I realized, Mt.Gox was an asian enterprise, (based in asia) I became wary of them, and put them on my least priority. I want people to transact their wealth/money only with those companies, which are located in countries, which have good repute for accountability and have strong judicial system. I don't mean, Japan is not one of those. But I don't know, I still can't put faith with any Asian company as yet, when it involves 'money'.

<comment><USER34> Even though the founder isn't Asian at all, but a French techie who moved the Japan to become an entrepreneur? And the top management appear to all be non- Asian?

I'm not saying your concerns don't have some basis, but MtGox was not a relevant example. Unless you mean that Westerners moving to Asia to set up businesses automatically can't be trusted either.

<comment><USER33> I wasn't talking about individuals, instead the company and where it is based at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Their account was full of some bot gone-wrong spam, deleting all would have been an easy cleanup. People are jumping to conclusions a tad rapidly.

<comment><USER36> This is a valuable observation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Even thinking about it, makes me feel dirty. But since things can't get any worse than this, let me please ask this. Is it mere coincidence that the creator of Bitcoin is of the same origin as the Mt. Gox. I am feeling guilty for asking this, and I would be pleased, if I remain guilty forever for asking this, than otherwise.

<comment><USER37> Neither the founder nor the current owner of Mt. Gox are Japanese. And Satoshi is unlikely to be Japanese anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think it's evident that frameworks are being drawn to wrestle "the bitcoin question" into some mechanism of control / oversight. Look to US exchanges that partner and work within these frameworks to remain in good graces. I imagine that's the reality of it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Hey, at least there's a chance they might finally delete all the sensitive user data they have on hand - presumably stored in a less-than-secure fashion.

Apparently, this is what it takes.

</comment><comment><USER40> Well, that's certainly interesting. I wonder if it was Mt Gox themselves removing them, or hackers seizing the account.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually been building up, so probably intentional [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230342630...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303426304579401883794330454)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Wow that's eerie. It's as if they're trying to pretend it all never happened.

</comment><comment><USER42> Hmm if Mt. Gox doesn't plan to get back it will be a huge backside for bitcoins :(

</comment><comment><USER43> Did you ever read their twitter feed? It was nothing but auto-responders!

</comment><comment><USER44> Has to be some real shit 'bout to go down

</comment><comment><USER45> Mt. Gox was weak, and they died.

</comment><comment><USER46> Rebrand?

<comment><USER2> Merely rebranding won't resolve the millions in obligations they have to customers. There's real money at stake here; it's very unlikely that it will be something that can be swept under the rug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Google cache: [https://www.google.com/#q=site:twitter.com%2Fmtgox](https://www.google.com/#q=site:twitter.com%2Fmtgox)</comment>


Introducing Trinity: a modern, high performance, elegant IR(search) library - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@markpapadakis/introducing-trinity-a-modern-high-performance-elegant-ir-search-library-a1a3b4e287a7 <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone following IR related news, do you know what happened to BitFunnel (opensourced rewrite of Bing search engine).

[https://bitfunnel.org/categories/blog/](https://bitfunnel.org/categories/blog/)

[https://github.com/bitfunnel/nativejit/](https://github.com/bitfunnel/nativejit/)

[https://github.com/BitFunnel/BitFunnel](https://github.com/BitFunnel/BitFunnel)

<comment><USER2> I wasn't familiar with this project. Thanks for mentioning it.</comment></comment>


Dear John Carmack (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://news.quelsolaar.com/#post88

<comment><USER2> This article puts into pretty good words what draws me toward indie games nowadays. Their development is typically devoid of artists making beautiful in-game art, so the good ones have to resort to mechanical innovation in order to differentiate themselves against the vast ocean of other games vying for players' time and (usually) money. It's this sort of differentiation that made me fall in love with World of Goo (which also, incidentally, is backed by more conventional storytelling of those wanderlusting gooballs, but I always felt the mechanics of the game were the bigger sell) and Kerbal Space Program. It's this sort of differentiation that caused Minecraft to explode with popularity - both among those playing it and those seeking to emulate it.

The video game industry tends to seesaw between indie-dominated and big-name- dominated. I think we're going to be seeing a hard downswing toward indie- dominated pretty soon, if we're not seeing it already.</comment>


WWII Surplus Boneyards - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2015/08/15/wwii-surplus-vehicles/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link

<comment><USER2> Just an FYI, the first picture is _not_ from 1949. It's from the 80's. A result of the SALT talks whereby the US and USSR would start dismantling nuke- capable offensive weaponry.

The planes were towed into position and chopped up in-place to ensure their numbers and disposition.

<comment><USER3> Also considering there weren't that many 52s on the planet, much less the boneyard fleet, until the late 50s, it's a safe bet it wasn't '49.

<comment><USER2> I happened across an article this morning while doing some unrelated research. There were only a couple jet-powered XB-52 prototypes in 1949.</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix lets its staff take as much holiday as they want, whenever they want - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/7945719/Netflix-lets-its-staff-take-as-much-holiday-as-they-want-whenever-they-want-and-it-works.html

<comment><USER2> Amazing, I can imagine how effective this policy would be. For me I would definitely feel guilty taking a vacation day when I know I had important stuff to do, or I had been slacking. However, I can't speak for the sociopaths who work there.

<comment><USER3> I worked at a startup that had the same policy. As long as the team is responsible and driven it is not an issue.</comment></comment>


Randomized Consumerism - A bot that buys randomly from Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized-consumerism

<comment><USER2> This would be even cooler if it sent the purchased items to random people with a postage paid envelope for a reply!</comment>


Ask PG: how about using this model for HN monetization? - <AUTHOR>

www.ligertail.com
hybrid of digg and adwords.
if you have something to share, you can see the analytics for each piece of content and the spot it occupies. based on that data you can choose to place your content anywhere on the site - bidding against others.
once submitted, the community votes on the content's quality.
in theory, the system can be applied to any entity with traffic (hn, digg, facebook, ny times, google). <comment><USER2> I shudder to think how bad the economy would have to be before PG started 'monetizing' HN.

Still, as mentioned when Ligertail was discussed under its former name [1], I like the Ligertail idea of mixed earned/paid placement in general, for other sites -- it has shades of Goto.com and Stumbleupon.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382626>

<comment><USER3> I'm totally in favor of him monetizing HN. A few 125x125 ads could probably generate $5k-$20k/mo given the traffic/audience here. It could go to charity and would give a nice spot for HN users to buy ads for an audience they may want.

<comment><USER2> While I don't think it likely, I actually agree with your analysis -- that relevant, measured ads could be a net benefit to the community.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: InstaBilling Time Tracker - My first ios app - <AUTHOR> http://www.goyaveworkshop.com

<comment><USER2> Grammar issues:

1)You can expect regular update to InstaBilling, based on your feedback" - Please pluralize update - (make it updates).

2)Timesheet made easy - Please pluralize timesheet - (make it timesheets)

3)Simply add your clients and tasks along with your hourly rate, and start tracking your time from everywhere. - Change everywhere to anywhere. You can't do ANYTHING from everywhere because you can only be in one place at a time.

Good luck - from your testimonials, it looks like you've got a good solution to a real pain point!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks _lex, web site updated. English is my second language

<comment><USER2> No problem - nobody's perfect.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft has published its own distribution of FreeBSD 10.3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/09/microsoft_freebsd/ <comment><USER2> Finally! A good, solid, professional operating system from Microsoft. It's the first time since Xenix they have such a product...

;-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this 'E' number one or two in MS's 3E strategy?</comment>