Taking Rust everywhere with rustup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/05/13/rustup.html <comment><USER2> Rust's support for cross compilation, both in the compiler and the tooling (cargo, multirust/rustup) is amazing. Last week I was working on a hardened system project. It involved building a system consisting of just a kernel and a single process. At first I was going to target a unikernel, so I pulled the "x86_64-rumprun-netbsd" target, read some docs on rumprun, and in about 30 minutes I had a Rust project running as a unikernel, all well supported by Rust and its tooling.

For various reasons I had to drop the unikernel and switch to Linux combined with the program (I set the program as init, so Linux boots, runs the program, and that's that). That was super easy as well. I grabbed "x86_64-unknown- linux-musl", and the Rust program runs like a champ as the init process on this Linux "system" with no libraries to speak of.

I'm also immensely happy that I added the .cargo/config "target" option to Cargo's code. "cargo build" is much nicer than "cargo build --target=name_of_the_target_which_I_will_never_remember_x86". Cargo's code was fairly simple to dive into, and Rust's team has made the contribution process smooth and bulletproof (thanks to all their Github bots and unit/integration tests). I think that pull request was resolved in about a week (mostly due to waiting for the team to meet and confirm that they wanted to add that flag to the config file).

<comment><USER3> What is the new target config option you mention? Link?

<comment><USER4> It's both mentioned in the blog posting being discussed and from there a link to the standard Cargo documentation: [http://doc.crates.io/config.html](http://doc.crates.io/config.html)

<comment><USER3> If I set

        [build]
        target = "x86_64-unknown-linux-musl"

in Cargo.toml and run cargo build --release

        unused manifest key: build.target

What am I doing wrong?

<comment><USER5> .cargo/config is different from Cargo.toml

<comment><USER3> Oops, you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Rust has already been ported to Emscripten (at least twice), but the code > has not yet fully landed. This summer it's happening though: Rust + > Emscripten. Rust on the Web. Rust everywhere.

I've been following the various RFCs and PRs for emscripten support for awhile now, and it's been cool to see some slow but steady progress. It's very nice to hear the Rust team acknowledge that they are actively moving towards making the web a first class target in the near future.

> Rust is uniquely-positioned to be the most powerful and usable wasm- > targetting language for the immediate future. The same properties that make > Rust so portable to real hardware makes it nearly trivial to port Rust to > wasm.

As a web developer I couldn't be more excited to be using Rust right now. There's been a good amount of movement among JavaScript developers toward type systems and more explicit typing in JavaScript code. I find it's a much nicer development experience to have sane guarantees about the types in your JS code. I see Rust as the big next step for the web—a language that is still a pleasure to develop in, but with excellent static typing and tight, targeted builds without the bloat and buildup I'm accustomed to seeing with current transpile-to-JS strategies.

<comment><USER7> > I see Rust as the big next step for the web—a language that is still a > pleasure to develop in, but with excellent static typing and tight, targeted > builds without the bloat and buildup I'm accustomed to seeing with current > transpile-to-JS strategies.

I think this will depend on the output size of the compiled file. I've always gotten very large js files out of emscripten, which are fine for games or media decoders, but would be undesirable for (e.g.) a vdom implementation that's part of a larger framework.

<comment><USER8> Both Rust and emscripten do produce notably large output. On the Rust side it's true that the emscripten port won't use jemalloc, but instead the emscripten malloc (which presumably is better tuned for its environment). Also the wasm format's main design goal is to reduce binary size.

<comment><USER9> WebAssembly will have a binary format with a 20-30% reduction size than its gzipped asm.js counterpart[1], for context :)

[1] [https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/Rationale....](https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/Rationale.md#why- a-binary-encoding)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great to see all this progress :) . I have three questions about Rust static binaries on Linux through musl, and how they compare to Golang static binaries:

1\. At low level (binary format, system calls), is a Rust static (through musl) binary "as static as" an equivalent Golang binary?

2\. The article says _" for technical reasons, glibc cannot be fully statically linked"_ . Did this apply to Golang too? Is Golang using musl too on Linux? If no, why not / what is their strategy/tooling to produce static binaries?

2\. From my own biased observation/reading of Golang writings and usage of Golang binaries, I feel static-by-default is hugely appreciated, for the portability. Did Rust consider it?

<comment><USER11> 1\. I'm not certain on the precise binary layouts etc, but I believe the answer is "yes, except Go binaries can't be stripped". In terms of practical usage, they'll run on the same machines.

2\. This is a long one.

The statement you've quoted is false. However, it's both a) a common misunderstanding and b) a sort-of-ok simplification (the full story is much more involved). I'd personally alter it to say "it is technically challenging to statically link glibc". You can read more about the whole musl Rust origin story at [0]. The 'problem' with glibc is that it uses NSS, a feature that allows you to dynamically load libraries installed on the system to let you change how some libc functions work (if neither you nor your libraries use these functions, static linking with glibc works). For example, musl will look up users from /etc/password, whereas with glibc an admin can install an LDAP library, change a config file and all programs using glibc will magically use LDAP. But, you can disable NSS in glibc at compile time [1], which _then_ allows you to truly statically compile with glibc.

Go is interesting because doesn't use libc at all (when using the standard compiler)... _except_ when doing some network things that NSS is useful for, when it does link against it. People who want totally static binaries pass a few additional flags to say "don't use NSS, use the Go implementation of these features"...and you then end up with bugs like [2].

3\. Yes [3], but you lose (by default) a) the ability to use shared libraries from the system, b) NSS. Given that one angle Rust is pushed from is "C/C++ replacement", not being able to link to system libraries without using arguably cryptic command line arguments would be a bit sad. But I'm ambivalent about this.

[0] [https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/static-binary-support- in-r...](https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/static-binary-support-in-rust/2011)

[1] [https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/FAQ#Even_statically_linked...](https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/FAQ#Even_statically_linked_programs_need_some_shared_libraries_which_is_not_acceptable_for_me.__What_can_I_do.3F)

[2] [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/1715](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/1715)

[3] (specific post from [0]) [https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/static-binary- support-in-r...](https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/static-binary-support-in- rust/2011/17)

<comment><USER12> > Go is interesting because doesn't use libc at all (when using the standard > compiler)...except when doing some network things that NSS is useful for, > when it does link against it. People who want totally static binaries pass a > few additional flags to say "don't use NSS, use the Go implementation of > these features"...and you then end up with bugs like [2].

Oh god, I completely forgot about that bug. For what it's worth, the technical reasons why Docker had to be linked statically are no longer valid and so it should be able to fix that issue. Unfortunately, "os/user" is lacking some things we need within runC and Docker.

<comment><USER13> Docker is available statically linked now yes, and it works fine. Although that issue is still open, you have to use dynamically linked version if you want to use these features. Docker is not required as a trampoline any more.

<comment><USER12> Heh, I know, I'm a long-time contributor. And I'm the one that actually removed .dockerinit. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In case you're binary-size-obsessed like me, here are some stats on that statically-linked musl "Hello, World" binary:

        $ size target/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/debug/hello
           text	   data	    bss	    dec	    hex	filename
         351471	  10256	  10064	 371791	  5ac4f	target/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/debug/hello

Here is a "Hello, World" C program statically linked against musl:

        $ size test
           text	   data	    bss	    dec	    hex	filename
           3380	    248	   1232	   4860	   12fc	test

Looking at a size profile, about 25% of the static Rust binary comes from jemalloc, which is strange since musl doesn't seem to use jemalloc?

<comment><USER15> Rust chooses to call jemalloc for allocations by default[0], as it is generally faster than the system allocators, especially as we can go beyond the plain malloc/free interface. This choice is independent of the libc used, which Rust mainly uses for syscalls.

[0]: [http://doc.rust-lang.org/book/custom-allocators.html](http://doc.rust- lang.org/book/custom-allocators.html)

<comment><USER14> Would switching to alloc_system then use the musl one, leading to a smaller binary?

<comment><USER15> That's the intention, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > rustup is a toolchain manager for Rust

I'm hoping this follows the "functional" paradigm, where a compile command is invoked, and the compilation result depends solely on the arguments of the command, and not on configuration files and such. This makes it much easier to script things, to use alternative build systems, and, in general, to keep things predictable.

I'm saying this because I'm detecting a trend in a different direction, where tools are making things more confusing instead of more clear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rustup manages installing rustc, cargo, and toolchains: it's not what you use to compile. Cargo does have a single Cargo.toml that manages per-project config stuff. But keeping it in a file is part of repeatable builds...

<comment><USER17> My opinion is opposite of the GP: why isn't this just in Cargo? I'm locking all of my other dependencies, why not the language?

<comment><USER8> This question comes up a lot, and we've debated it a fair bit.

There are a few key arguments for keeping them separate from my perspective:

First, they have distinct audiences. Cargo is a tool for building Rust programs no matter how you obtained the compiler. rustup is a tool fundamentally for installing the official Rust binaries. So if Cargo contained rustup, that would be a large chunk of features that have an very unclear role when Cargo is distributed by Linux distributions, and would probably need to simply be compiled out.

That last point about compiling out rustup also points to the fact that Cargo's and rustup's features are completely orthogonal. There's no _technical_ reason to combine them.

Of course, the practical reason to combine them is that one tool is conceptually simpler than two. Even I have found myself accidentally typing `cargo update nightly`, `rustup build`, etc.

Finally, releases of Cargo today are paired with releases of rustc. Distributing the Rust installer with Cargo would necessarily change that relationship. That is, there would be one global Cargo that is used with every revision of rustc. This isn't necessarily a bad way to arrange the tools, but it is a big change from today that would require significant effort to move to.

<comment><USER18> Having had this same conversation in the past:

I want to say thanks for all the hard work!

Regardless of anyone's rationalizations about 1 or 2 or X tools, having great tools exist is most important!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Should I be using rustup instead of multirust, then?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is its successor.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but last I heard rustup wasn't recommended yet (i.e. it was still beta, missing some features, etc). Is it recommended over multirust now?

<comment><USER8> I do recommend using rustup to all Rust developers now, despite still having reservations about its done-ness, and not being ready to commit to putting it on the main website (I guess that's something of a contradiction).

This blog post marks the beginning of the phase where we will seriously try not to break things on upgrade - I consider it 'in production' now.

Even now I think it provides the best installation experience and I have much higher confidence in its reliability than the older multirust shell script.

That said, if you are on Windows you might want to be more cautious. Just this week I broke rustup's networking on Windows, and there are periodic reports of intermittent self update failures (though these don't cause data corruption).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This sounds like a huge boon to game development! With the piston.rs ecosystem doing a stellar job of centralising Rust gamedev libraries, Rust seems primed for use in game tech.

One thing I'm not hearing much about yet is iOS though. C# relies on Xamarin. Java's best bet is probably Intel's Multi-OS (since RoboVM is no more). What does Rust/Rustup have planned?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can cross compile to iOS today, but you lose access to native GUI stuff IIRC. But games don't usually use that anwyay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article says this about a musl-using statically-linked rust binary:

> take that hello binary and copy it to any x86_64 machine running Linux and > it'll run just fine.

Is that true? I would have assumed that musl has some kernel ABI version requirements, and won't run on older kernels (older than whatever that specific musl library was built to support).

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html](https://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html) Says 2.6 officially, due to some threading stuff on earlier versions. Should work on anything later though.

<comment><USER21> This says that musl will build and run on Linux 2.6.x, but it says nothing of the binary compatibility between systems.

If I build musl and statically link my program to it on one version of the Linux kernel, and then I copy that to an older version of the Linux kernel (both 2.6 or greater), I'm extremely skeptical that it would just work (especially for any two arbitrary versions above 2.6).

<comment><AUTHOR> My understanding is that the kernel goes to pretty great lengths to not break ABI compatibility, so this should be fine.

I just tried it out with a server I have lying around: [https://gist.github.com/steveklabnik/0b2736642ddd4669260bd7f...](https://gist.github.com/steveklabnik/0b2736642ddd4669260bd7fbb9a70787) Compiled on 3.16.0-4-amd64, ran on 3.2.0-4-amd64, no issues

<comment><USER21> I expected it to work for most cases - especially trivial ones like that.

Where I was skeptical was around new features added to the kernel. I do not know how careful musl is when it is built on a kernel which includes a new feature (say something like F_DUPFD_CLOEXEC, added in 2.6.24), but is then copied and run on an older kernel (2.6.10) which would return -EINVAL from that system call.

A quick glance at the musl sources shows that in this particular case musl is careful to notice the -EINVAL and emulate it (via F_DUPFD and F_SETFD FD_CLOEXEC).

But without seeing documentation from musl that this is guaranteed for everything that could be added in later kernels (I'm not even sure everything added could be emulated easily, but perhaps it could be), then I'd still be skeptical making the claim that musl and Rust could be statically linked on any version of Linux after 2.6 and run on any other version of Linux after 2.6.

It's not really about the kernel ABI being compatible (programs built on older kernels run on newer ones quite nicely). It's about newer features from newer kernels still being supported (or their absence detected and their features emulated) on older kernels. That's a property of musl, not of the kernel.

<comment><USER13> For libc functions (man 3) it will emulate if the syscall doesn't work. If you are making a system call directly (man 2) it is up to your code to do a fallback, more or less.

<comment><USER21> First, my example was fcntl(2), which musl is emulating. So that doesn't fit your "rule".

Second, is your "rule" documented anywhere for musl? That's what I'm looking for - an indication by the musl project that such a thing is supported (binary compatibility from newer to older Linux kernels, and if so, what version range).

Without such a project-sanctioned statement, I'm afraid I stand by my position that the blog's assertion that the statically-linked rust-musl binary can be copied to any Linux 2.6.x machine (or newer) and just run without any issues.

I would agree that any statically-linked rust-musl binary could be built on a Linux kernel and then run on a later Linux kernel, but earlier, well that's up to the musl project to say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is definitely a big step forward. I had become spoiled by Go's cross compile capabilities, which Rust had paled in comparison to. Prior to this, it was a pain having to get the right toolchain for each platform. With this, I can download the toolchain as needed for the target platform, and build against it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Do these changes require/imply upstreaming rust's llvm changes? Is there any resistance for llvm to take the changes necessary?

<comment><USER8> Today Rust only has a [few patches to LLVM]([https://github.com/rust- lang/llvm/tree/rust](https://github.com/rust-lang/llvm/tree/rust)). One is for Android stack overflow detection using a mechanism that upstream isn't fond of (split stacks), the other an optimization not required for correctness.

The Android patch can be eliminated someday with stack probes (though it's not clear upstream wants those either).

Emscripten support though - at least in the short term - is going to bring in the [emscripten LLVM 'fastcomp' backend]([https://github.com/kripken/emscripten- fastcomp](https://github.com/kripken/emscripten-fastcomp)) that translates LLVM IR to JS. This patch has no hope of being upstreamed and will impose significant maintenance burden on both Rust and Emscripten as long as its in tree. This solution should be short-lived though as we will transition to either the upstream LLVM->wasm backend or a new Rust MIR->wasm backend.

So I think the answer to your question is 'no'.

<comment><USER8> I've been told that the LLVM branch I linked to is 'the most wrong branch you possibly could have linked to'.

This is the right one: [https://github.com/rust-lang/llvm/tree/rust- llvm-2016-03-13](https://github.com/rust-lang/llvm/tree/rust-llvm-2016-03-13)

Patches are mostly backported from upstream or optimizations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Easy management of cross compilation is a major plus. Thumbs up!

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder when rust will be natively available on arm64.

<comment><USER26> Excitingly, today! If you run the rustup install script on an arm64 device it should "Just Work", but if it doesn't end up detecting arm64 you can download rustup and/or the compiler manually.

* rustup - [https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup/dist/aarch64-unknown-lin...](https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup/dist/aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/rustup-init)

* rustc+cargo - [https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-nightly-aarch64-unkno...](https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-nightly-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz)

Currently arm64 isn't a Tier 1 platform for us, however, so you may hit some bumps along the way. Please feel free to file issues so we know what to fix if you do!

<comment><USER25> That is great news indeed! Been waiting forever to try it out on my arm64. Thanks!

<comment><USER27> Wait for this to land: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/33500](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/33500)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The lack of C toolchain management yields some errors when trying to cross compile between OSX and linux (both directions).

See [https://github.com/rust-lang- nursery/rustup.rs/issues/462](https://github.com/rust-lang- nursery/rustup.rs/issues/462) and [https://github.com/rust-lang- nursery/rustup.rs/issues/463](https://github.com/rust-lang- nursery/rustup.rs/issues/463)

Been able to cross compile between these systems using rustup, anyone ?

</comment><comment><USER29> > rustup install stable-aarch64-apple-ios

> info: syncing channel updates for 'stable-aarch64-apple-ios'

> error: target not found: 'aarch64-apple-ios'

What is the process for toolchain stabilization? I know that iOS support is unofficial right now, but I would love to be able to run the above command at some point.

I can see that official support for more platforms might hurt development speed (more tests to pass!), but eventually all platforms will be officially supported, right?

<comment><USER8> Try `rustup target add aarch64-apple-ios` and see how far you get. It's a tier 2 platform so it usually has builds available. But the iOS targets are some of the least tested for Rust. I have no idea if they work!

The process for adding tier 2 platforms isn't well defined but is closely related to ease of automation. If it can be done in a Docker container then it is simple to build std and ship it. Right now we're enthusiastic about this level of support - we can provide builds of std for lots of things. As long as somebody cares just enough to keep std building, which is pretty easy to do.

Whether those builds work at all is a different matter! We don't run tests on most tier 2 platforms. It's a big commitment to do so, even more to keep the tree green.

Personally, I really want to say that in time Rust will have perfect test and build automation on all platforms that matter even a little bit. All platforms are on a slow treadmill to perfection. They all come with maintenance burden, but the more successful the project is the more maintenance (and perfection) we can afford. Hm, I hope that's how it works...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am confused. A few months back everyone was talking about WebAssembly. Now Rust on the Web. Do they conflict each other?

<comment><USER31> Rust would compile to WebAssembly. As would other languages. LLVM will support a target that will enable this in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. Rust does have some advantages here, in my understanding, since it has no GC. I haven't been following the latest wasm stuff, but GC integration is coming later, right?

<comment><USER32> The MVP for wasm will not include any built-in support for garbage collection, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are musl builds of the rust+cargo toolchain available via rustup? For running rust+cargo on Alpine.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's still some issues with a host musl rustc, so not yet, but we would like there to be.

<comment><USER3> Is there a tracking bug to follow?

<comment><AUTHOR> My knowledge was apparently outdated! So, the bug I was thinking of was [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/28667](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/28667) , which has apparently since been closed. The Alpine tracker also links to this bug: [https://bugs.alpinelinux.org/issues/3949](https://bugs.alpinelinux.org/issues/3949)

And in fact, [https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/advanced- linking.html#linux](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/advanced- linking.html#linux) has some instructions for building your own rustc in this way.

I am not sure why we don't currently distribute them today, though... I will ask around.

EDIT: Alex says:

      we don't have an issue for it
      specifically, no, but I think all alpine users were
      trying to use the llvm on the system

      b/c we don't work well with building an llvm against
      musl right now

So, yeah, some small things to work out with regards to Alpine.

<comment><USER3> I've done that once but since building rustc requires a specific nightly I'd need a glibc environment each time I want to build rustc. Replacing the glibc builds with a musl static build (not targeting but built with musl statically and no glibc requirement) would give us a single binary that works on Alpine and Ubuntu. If that's not an option I'd welcome a musl variant that's automatically installed by rustup when on Alpine or VoidLinux musl edition or any other musl linux environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> And please add fix for OpenSSL OS X issue ot of the box.</comment>


Mapping OKCupid answer data: rape fantasies and hygiene by state - <AUTHOR> http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/06/25/rape-fantasies-and-hygiene-by-state/ <comment><USER2> The article makes some strong claims about the statistical validity of their results. However, 1,000,000 observations is not always better than 3,000 observations. If the data are not representative, then a Gallup poll (which is) of a order of magnitude smaller sample is much more powerful.

<comment><USER3> Counterintuitively, if the sample is truly randomly distributed, you gain very little additional information as you go beyond 300 samples. This is why every political poll has an error margin of + or - 3%.

<comment><USER4> Right, but that doesn't mean that 300 (or 3000) samples total is enough. You can't make the detailed map about burning the national flag with 3000 samples. More data is helpful until you have 300 samples per pixel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Selection Bias much?

Volunteer polling is about as un-scientific as you can get. Did it not occur to them that people who are willing to answer poll questions about sex are probably going to have different opinions about sex than someone who isn't willing to seek out the poll?

<comment><USER6> Selection bias doesn't explain the inter-state difference, which is what the visualizations are attempting to display.

For that to be an issue here, you'd have to argue that there's something about living in Nevada as opposed to New York, independent of your attitude towards sex, that would affect whether or not after seeing this question, you chose to answer or pass.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps not, but ratios of males and females might explain most of the differences between east and west.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Re: Showering.

I have this tragedy-of-the-commons thing going on with the other tenants in the building. The water is "included" in the rent and so I sometimes shower 3, 4 times a day for the hell of it. I've seriously considered heating the place by running the shower nonstop in winter, but someone would probably catch on.

Right out of college, dirt poor, I had a place alone, and would turn the water heater on 45 minutes before I'd shower, then turn it off again.

<comment><USER9> I had a similar situation. During a heat wave I filled up the bathtub and sinks with cold water to absorb some of the heat. A few days later they sent someone to check for water leaks in my apartment =).

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure that is actually such an inefficient method of cooling your place- water is after all, famous for its high heat capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, it scares me that _anyone_ thinks flag burning should be illegal.

<comment><USER12> The interesting thing is that almost _everyone_ believes that flag burning ought to be totally legal; the argument is just over the circumstances.

As is routinely pointed out, burning a flag is the approved way of "retiring" one when it's no longer fit to be flown. If you fly a flag every day, this will be about once a year or so. In my area, the American Legion or Boy Scouts do "flag retirements" as a fund raiser once in a while; you turn in your old flags and they respectfully burn them. (Maybe they play Taps at the same time or something.)

So the argument isn't over flag burning per se, and it never was. It's over flag _defacement_ or "desecration," i.e. burning the flag in the context of a political demonstration, or as an overtly political act.

<comment><USER13> Technically you don't burn a flag during a retirement. It is cut into quarters first. Or at least it was when I was doing these ceremonies with the Boy Scouts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have to move back to California

<comment><USER15> The Bay Area is hands down the worst place I have ever lived for dating.

<comment><USER16> It's not nearly as bad if you're willing to be open and try non-conventional ways of meeting people, e.g. online. Sites like OKCupid have many women who are either intellectually inclined themselves (i.e. "nerdy") or are looking to meet a guy who is; this way, you are much more likely to find someone who appreciates and likes you for who are you than at a sports bar or a night club (whether in Bay Area, or elsewhere).

<comment><USER17> Given the tech-savviness of the Bay Area, I actually think how well OKCupid works out here almost makes up for the fact that it seems to be harder to meet girls in the real world here than anywhere else. Given, you won't always "spark" with someone you meet online, but if you do, at least it means you probably get along with them on a deeper level than just "you're at the bar and look cute."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I fail to understand why anyone would fantasize about anything remotely like rape.

<comment><USER19> On the off chance that you are genuinely curious about the phenomenon, here is a good start:

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200805/why- do...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200805/why-do-women- have-erotic-rape-fantasies)

<comment><USER18> Thank you. I was/I am.</comment></comment></comment>


Was There a Civilization on Earth Before Humans? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of "The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe" [https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613](https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613) where it is pointed out that for some time during cosmological evolution, the universe would have been quite comfortable and rocky planets (if any existed) could have had liquid water, with no need to be in a Goldilocks zone---the whole universe was Goldilocks!

<comment><USER3> Back then everything would have also been so much closer together. The universe could have been like one great bustling city. Perhaps, from that perspective, we are already in some long-tail end-of-days time. Planets and stars and galaxies are so far apart as to make travel difficult or impossible.

<comment><USER4> A science fiction story set in this time would be truly epic and beautiful.

<comment><USER5> Space 1999 was a little like that. The premise was that the moon was blasted out of the Solar system into interstellar space. Somehow, the doughty denizens of Moonbase Alpha managed to encounter a new planet with intelligent life in nearly every episode. That would have required the stars to be pretty close.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the reminder. I was completely OBSESSED with that show as a kid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would geostationary satellites from a previous civilization still be orbiting in an approximately geostationary orbit? Or would they have been perturbed enough that they would either exit earth orbit or impact earth? Or pounded into dust by collisions?

If a previous civilization had metal-based moon landers, would we likely have found them/found areas with an unlikely amount of metal on the moon? Or would they have probably been obliterated by meteorites by now?

<comment><USER8> It depends? If the satellites used chemical rockets to produce stationkeeping thrust then they'd be long gone, but if they used some exotic power source who knows? If they had a good AI and power, there is no real limit on how long they could stay in orbit. If they were using technology like ours they'd be gone, but a hypothetical civilization might use exotic materials and power sources that would stand the test of time.

For the moon thing, the above applies, but assuming that they were obliterated we'd have to get pretty lucky to detect their remains. They could also be totally intact because there would be essentially no weathering, they would never be buried by shifting regolith, and so on.

<comment><USER9> Anything sitting on the surface of the Moon would must likely completely buried by regolith after roughly 2 million years. Every lunar day dust particles are launched up from the surface only to fall back down at night.

<comment><USER7> Where do you get 2 million from? I.e. why not 20k or 200m?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Online version of the original paper:

"The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?"

[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international- journa...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of- astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an- industrial-civilization-in-the-geological- record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6/core-reader)

</comment><comment><USER11> What interests me is the possibility of human civilizations between the Eemian and last glacial maximum.

Any evidence of civilization from that period would either be hella deep under the sea or obliterated by glacial expansion and retreat.

Homo sapiens have been here 300k years. I find it ridiculous to assume we only started living in cities about 5-7000 years ago. Conveniently the period immediately after the last rapid glacial retreat...

<comment><USER12> Homo sapiens started emigrating out of Africa 50k years ago. There is a small incertitude on their emigration pattern (one wave or several), but it doesn't matter here. If they had cities in Africa, it is very surprising we found no trace of it, given the numerous archaeological expeditions everywhere in Africa. There was no glaciation or sea change to destroy the evidences.

So according to your hypothesis, civilizations would have emerged from hominids other than the homo sapiens, contrary to what we know about them. And their cities would all be in the North of Europe, where the later glaciation could hide some archaeological proofs. And we could not detect anything, though an Ice age doesn't destroy anything.

I believe there is no fact to sustain that hypothesis, and many facts against it.

<comment><USER5> Don't forget that sea levels have risen some 120 meters since the end of the last ice age. Given that civilizations tend to form close to the ocean, most archeological evidence from tens of millennia ago, if such existed, would be under water.

[http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories- preser...](http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve- history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know they are focused on markers of industrial civilizations, but the prevalence of purpose built stone tools millions of years ago still blows my mind a little.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan)

<comment><USER14> I always chuckle (and wonder at the veracity) when I find stuff like this: [http://www.s8int.com/page8.html](http://www.s8int.com/page8.html)

It makes me wonder if the Ancient Aliens guy might be partially right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps dolphins are descendants of an ancient civilization, they evolved from land animals [https://www.whalefacts.org/dolphin- adaptations/](https://www.whalefacts.org/dolphin-adaptations/) about 50 million years ago. Just imagining here, but what if they had an industrialized civilization that caused global warming that led to the PETM temperature rise, their civilization declined and they had to adapt to a water world. Chuckle, just a kooky thought I had after reading that article.

</comment><comment><USER10> Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" is an interesting book/thought experiment that highlights just how fast the features and evidence of a civilization might be erased through natural processes.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248787.The_World_Without...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248787.The_World_Without_Us)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm actually more interested in if there was ever some sort of extraterrestrial outpost on this planet in the past 1 billion years or so.

At that time scale, exploring the entire galaxy seems reasonably practical. And stopping here to refuel and recuperate, not so unlikely, at least to me.

<comment><USER17> It's possible that the kind of extraterrestrial beings that could do any form of FTL travel wouldn't even think in terms of "outposts" or "refuel." The task is so immense that any technology capable of doing it would belong to a society that would be gods to us. You're treating it like it would be them cruising route 66, but for them, it could be something like us browsing a web page or even just dreaming. I dream I want to be on earth, and here I am.

A lot of SF is really bad in they assume people will be the same and just drive to different galaxies instead of drive to different states. But the technology between the two is so huge that to get there would probably entail a whole host of things that would transform them into something above us as mayflies are to us. Not sure we'd even be able to tell if they left anything or even stopped by.

<comment><USER18> Possible - sure. But the default state should be to assume FTL aliens would need to refuel.

Consider human civilisation circa 3000 years ago. People moved around on horses, with carts. Roads were usually poor or non-existent. We are incomparably advanced compared to back then. But:

• They had outposts for travellers and we have airports.

• They had to feed their horses, we have to refuel planes.

• They needed infrastructure to establish new towns and colonies. We do too although the Earth being inconveniently full of cities often hides this fact.

Whilst the technology has changed enormously the fundamentals of travel and colonisation haven't. If there's no refuelling process _at all ever_ then that implies a violation of the conservation of energy laws anyway - even if you only refuel once when a ship is newly built with some incredibly long lasting energy source, that's still fueling.

<comment><USER19> That's somewhat of an anthropomorphic bias that may or may not hold true and is impossible for us to determine until we meet said aliens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > "Wait a second," he said. "How do you know we're the only time there's been > a civilization on our own planet?"

Imagine for a moment that we're Martians who managed to terraform Earth because of some runaway climate catastrophe on Mars. That now, we're in the early stages of repeating the same mistakes because of some extinction event in the past that wiped out all of our prior history and knowledge.

<comment><USER21> We're too similar to other life on earth for that to be credible.

<comment><USER10> We says we, the martians, didn't bring the other stuff with us?

<comment><USER22> Life has been on Earth for at least 3.8 billion years. All of the life on Earth today is descended from that original life. So if life on Earth originally came from Mars, it would have had to do so at least 3.8 billion years ago. But that's too close to the origin of the solar system as a whole for it to be credible that an industrial civilization could have evolved on Mars, caused a climate catastrophe, and then migrated to Earth.

<comment><USER23> I don't think it's at all likely that life on Earth originated on Mars, but if it did then there could have been cross pollination of microorganisms over billions of years due to meteor impacts on both worlds throwing bits of crust into space. In fact if we do find life on Mars at some point it wouldn't be shocking if they are quite similar to bacteria found on Earth, since they might just be descendants of earth bacteria carried over from the impact that killed the dinosaurs.

<comment><USER22> _> if it did then there could have been cross pollination of microorganisms over billions of years_

I don't think this is consistent with DNA evidence, since such cross pollination would be expected to show up as two sets of genetic lines of descent with very different characteristics, since the environment of Mars is very different from that of Earth; and we don't observer anything like that. In fact, if life was evolving separately on Earth and Mars, it might not take very long before the two lines of descent were not even compatible genetically, meaning that genetic exchange would be impossible even if the organisms were brought back together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of the great short story "The Next Ten Billion Years" by John Michael Greer: [http://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-next-ten- bil...](http://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-next-ten-billion- years.html?m=1)

<comment><USER25> I liked this part from the "10000 years from now" section

 _believers in most traditional religions declare piously that the climate changes of the last ten millennia are the results of human misbehavior, while rationalists insist that this is all superstition and the climate changes have perfectly natural causes._

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My best reasoning for why we may conclude we're the first civilization here is the brain sizes seen before us in the fossil record other biological features. You need big brains (in absolute volume), tool use, and culture forming. Of course, just a guess.

<comment><USER27> Well, humans are not the ones with the biggest brain volume right now, but the question stands: why other animals have not evolved bigger intelligence before.

<comment><USER28> in "the science of discworld"[0] this is touched upon through the nice example of: T-Rex have been on the planet for a few million years, they were huge, and we found a handful of their fossils. It is plausible (but not probable) that a civilization of smart lizards evolved and disappeared in 100k years without leaving any trace that we could find.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Discworld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Discworld)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This reminds me of a couple of old sci-fi series I read a long time ago. Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of time series about the last of humanity that's become apathetic, decadent and godlike as all the stars die around them and they come up with a plan to travel back in time and start civilization earlier so humanity get get on its feet quicker, but discover time is cyclical.

And another series, I wish I could read again but cannot remember the author or titles, but it was about a world where civilization ended because we'd genetically engineered ourselves and animals and everything into fairy tale creatures who overran everything. The whole time it seems like it's set in the future but it ends up the main characters become Adam and Eve and it implies all our current mythology came from the society that genetically engineered themselves out of existence.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think Neanderthals buried their dead and looked after their elderly @ shanidar cave site. Does this imply civilization?

<comment><USER31> I think it implies a sophisticated culture, but people say that civilisations are those cultures that create cities. It's a narrow conceptualisation, but it goes hand in hand with the capabilities to create technologies that significantly modify the environment in favour of the members of the culture doing the city building. I don't think that anyone has found any indication of Neanderthals using any sort of pottery, agriculture, domestication or metalwork. This is not to say that they didn't have poetry and mathematics and understandings of the world we would find interesting and unexpected, or that they didn't have any of these technology - it's just that there is no evidence at all that I am aware of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > And then there's all that plastic ... creating a layer that could persist > for geological timescales.

Won't the plastic eventually turn back into oil, on geologic timescales? Or are the conditions for that too specific to be relied on? Or am I completely mistaken, and oil->plastic is basically one-way?

<comment><USER33> Ive heard there is too much oxygen in the air now for the original oil forming processes

<comment><USER34> > _there is too much oxygen in the air now for the original oil forming > processes_

This is addressed in the article:

"...our work also opened up the speculative possibility that some planets might have fossil-fuel-driven cycles of civilization building and collapse. If a civilization uses fossil fuels, the climate change they trigger can lead to a large decrease in ocean oxygen levels. These low oxygen levels (called ocean anoxia) help trigger the conditions needed for making fossil fuels like oil and coal in the first place."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If there was a civilization 50 million years ago, I would think some parallel species or genus would continue that DNA lineage to this day.

<comment><USER36> Maybe Humans?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Somewhat incidentally, I was watching a Wisecrack episode on the philosophy of Tolkien which seemed to imply that his middle-earth universe was meant to be read as preceding our own history [0]. Following in that vein, I wonder what a high fantasy story that used prehistoric motifs would be like. Not a sci-fi story, actual fantasy. Instead of a high fantasy with elves and hobbits, maybe one with neanderthals and cro-magnons, but show them as having advanced, competing civilizations to homo sapiens. Maybe instead of increasing technical progress, we see primitive technologies evolve into living things like plants and animals. "Every sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature" as someone once wrote. Idk, I guess this doesn't add to the discussion, but it's stimulating to say the least.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-sTbaH- aA0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-sTbaH-aA0)

</comment><comment><USER6> I always liked this aspect of H.P.Lovecraft's Chthulu mythos i.e. the allusion to the existence of pre-human civilisations (specifically in 'Hyperborea').

</comment><comment><USER38> SCP-1115 [1] is proof!

[1] [http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1115](http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1115)

</comment><comment><USER39> Well don't all the megalithic sites which are all over the planet suggest exactly that?

</comment><comment><USER21> "Inherit the Stars" by James Hogan is a good scifi story about this.

Also "The Hab Theory" by Allan Eckert.

<comment><USER40> I really enjoyed the whole Giant series by Hogan.

Star Trek Voyager had an episode with the idea of an ancient saurian species that left earth many millions of years ago. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin)

<comment><USER41> I think TNG's The Chase is yet more interesting; it's also a shame its plot was never pick up again by series creators. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_\(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation\))</comment></comment></comment>


Sexism and the ISC West Party Girls - <AUTHOR> http://ipvm.com/report/sexism_domewizard_girls

<comment><USER2> Could someone please explain to me how this is sexist?

<comment><USER3> It's using women as passive objects instead of as participants in the show. Women and men have different roles in the show. The men are taken seriously and the women are not. That's why it's sexist.

<comment><USER2> So it would be fine if the scarcely dressed participants in the show were of the same gender as the main characters?

Furthermore, I don't think that the 'passive objects' were chosen based on gender, but rather on appeal to the assumed audience, possibly complementing the main presenters as to offer likeable elements to every member of the audience.

Or are you saying that the visitors of this show are sexist because they only like women (assuming that this is true)?

<comment><USER3> I think the main problem is that women are already a minority. So when they look around, the women they are most likely to see are the ones who are not being taken seriously. This will discourage women from participating, and continue to ensure that the audience in future events is mostly male.

A larger issue is that attendees will stop taking _all_ women at the event seriously. It's like a spam filter for the brain: if you want to talk seriously about a product, find a man. Please note that even women attendees do this to each other.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2963733> especially the comments

<comment><USER2> So clearly if the general population was less heterosexual[0] and/or more women in tech[1], this wouldn't be a problem. However, it is rather difficult for me to understand that an action (employing scarcely dressed women) can be sexist depending on external factors such as the percentage of people interested in women/men.

[0] Such that more men would be interested in men and hence scarcely dressed men were around as well.

[1] So that the link female ⇔ booth babe breaks down.

<comment><USER3> Mostly, yes. Of course inviting only scantily-clad _women_ makes women attendees feel a little less welcomed/catered to/pandered to than the men.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yesware's Free plan is ending - <AUTHOR> http://www.yesware.com/blog/transparent-pricing-announcement <comment><USER2> My two main problems with not paying $15/month: 1\. I'm only using opens and clicks. No templating, no scheduling etc. I'd love to use landing page tracking, but there's no such thing. 2\. It's buggy. To remove notifications, despite reviewed them, I have to refresh Gmail's page.

A side note, to not be able to completely remove/delete your account is remarkable.</comment>


Court adopts a 4th Amd right to deletion of non-responsive files - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/06/18/court-adopts-a-fourth-amendment-right-to-the-deletion-of-non-responsive-computer-files/

<comment><USER2> I'm not the only one who doesn't know what a non-responsive file is, am I? My Google-fu has failed me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this conflict with the NSA's collection and retention of mostly non- responsive files?</comment>


Why did Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post? - <AUTHOR>

Now that we've had a day to digest the news, does Bezos have a master plan that's much larger than the obvious things that come to mind at first glance?<p>What do you, the HN readers think he bought it for? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure it's much more than him wanting to get on the forefront of the coming changes in the way print media works.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of news integration with Kindles in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Why did John Henry buy the Boston Globe?

</comment><comment><USER4> To get to the other side?</comment>


DIY Remote-controlled air conditioning using a Mac, INSTEON devices & PHP - <AUTHOR> http://www.pommepause.com/blog/2009/07/remote-controlled-air-conditioning-using-mac-os-x-and-shion/

<comment><USER2> Got some really good leads for my personal projects from this one. Thanks.</comment>


We are Microsoft. We are here to learn. How can we help you build mobile apps? - <AUTHOR> https://hockeyapp.net/blog/2016/08/16/survey-announcement.html <comment><AUTHOR> Hey All, I am a PM at Microsoft and we looking to learn how we can best help mobile app developers make awesome apps faster / better.

Please let me know any questions / thoughts!</comment>


Shipping an iPad Children's Book: Soup to Nuts - <AUTHOR> http://jessbogart.4ormat.com/overview

<comment><USER2> Is there a corresponding writeup somewhere? I love hearing about the difficult decisions, and this has some teasers that sound like they'd be interesting stories - especially "fired illustrator over contract dispute", "developers 'need' to start over", and "made appearance in costume".

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.findhg.com/> Looks like it hasn't launched yet, although the video said early 2011.

Somehow I feel sad, like all the work suddenly stopped and there was no product launch and all that hard work I've observed was lost in the wind.

Or maybe I'm just projecting my own pre-launch jitters for my own app.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh, typo.

<http://jessbogart.4ormat.com/selected-pages>

"Gretel jumped on her big brothers bed,"

s/brothers/brother's/

<comment><USER5> this was fixed but great catch! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi there! My name is Jessica, and I'm one of the creators of the Hansel and Gretel app. We are thrilled you guys have taken an interest in our app and my personal portfolio site- it means the world to us. We are experiencing issues with our developers but we're working as hard as we can to get back on track. I would love to keep a conversation going with you though. Feel free to shoot me an email at email@example.com, and I'll let you know when we finally hit the app store!

</comment><comment><USER4> Great timeline design, especially after you recognize how the color captions match the line colors. I would have preferred that the captions were consistently stacked in the same order as their lines though, give you both a color and a positional cue.

</comment><comment><USER6> it looks nice - went to buy it but i don't see it in the app store... has it launched? I found quite a few hansel and gretel books so you have some competition.

<comment><USER7> Want to buy it but can't find it either, why did the programmers need to change to a 3D Gaming platform? sounds like a good story

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> looks great, must be a lot of work.

Definitely want to get your money back on your SEO [http://www.google.com/search?q=pb+and+j+publishing&ie=ut...](http://www.google.com/search?q=pb+and+j+publishing&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en- US:official&client=firefox-a) top hit: <http://www.pbjpress.com/>

:)

</comment><comment><USER9> Ah! Finally a truly justified use of a horizontally-scrolled website! I thought I would never see one...</comment>


TechStars Wildcard NYC - <AUTHOR> http://frederickcook.com/techstars-wildcard-nyc

<comment><USER2> Solid post, thanks for sharing.

Never even knew that such an event existed - cool idea.

Possibly moving to Chicago huh? Keep me updated!</comment>


APT 1.2 preview uploaded to experimental - <AUTHOR> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/01/msg00341.html <comment><AUTHOR> Posting this here because some previous stories on apt garnered a great deal of attention, particularly on performance, and this release includes numerous performance enhancements.</comment>


Chromium: Improve support for Nintendo Switch gamepads - <AUTHOR> https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/1510080 <comment><USER2> This is a pretty smart move, considering that rumors point to Google's "game streaming service" being available on every device that runs Chrome, without additional installation. That would mean a launch across:

* Windows

* Mac

* ChromeOS

* Linux

* Mobile

...overnight. Pretty compelling way to draw in new users given millions of people already own a Switch controller and could start without needing to buy Google's one.

<comment><USER3> > Google's "game streaming service"

A number of companies, both startups and established game companies, have tried this. It's not taken off because you can't beat latency.

<comment><USER4> Not every gamer cares about latency.

<comment><USER5> Personal opinion: I suspect it's something most gamers care about even if they don't realise they do. If your controls feel disconnected from your gaming experience then you will get frustrated pretty quick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not being a C/C++ programmer, I wonder why they postfix their variables with "underscore"?

[https://chromium- review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/15...](https://chromium- review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/1510080/13/device/gamepad/gamepad_device_linux.cc)

e.g: switch_pro_4, dualshock_ps4_, ...

It does not happen for all variables, what is this convention? :o

<comment><USER7> Google C++ style guide. It's for instance variables on classes, to distinguish from local variables.

[https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Variable_N...](https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Variable_Names)

<comment><USER8> Is there a reason for not using 'this'? I assume the risk is that you might have a scope where both this->foo and foo are valid and it's unclear which is which. You have no ambiguitiy with this->foo_, and foo (and if you forget 'this', foo_ is still clear).

<comment><USER3> It's unidiomatic?

> scope where both this->foo and foo are valid and it's unclear which is which

Ideally you'd turn on the compiler option to warn about scope hiding.

<comment><USER8> Maybe, though it's a common thing I've seen in setter functions or constructors:

Eg void set_foo(int foo) {this->foo = foo;}

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> OT: I'm quite disappointed by the switch hardware. We're using it lightly in our family, not tugging it around or travel with it. Mostly game with it docked. Ca 1 year old at this time.

The controllers have both been plagued by the issue of dust entering the analog sticks, making it drift. You can't calibrate this away (tried it). Nor did it for us help with a spray can of air to blow it away, but perhaps I was holding it wrong (snark). Had to send it away for repair and they changed both analog sticks.

A new set of controllers (ie two sticks) also cost almost twice what an official PS4 dualshock controller costs. A single costs about as much as a PS4DS. Also, the PS4 one feels so much more robust.

For a controller that is meant to be used on the go, I find the poor dust- resistance and high cost of replacement very off-putting. I get the feeling that they, or something else on the switch, is gonna break again soon.

Puh, sorry for the rant.

<comment><USER10> A rant this is. Send them in. You'll get new ones without flaws.

Dragging my Switch everywhere haven't had a single problem ever with my joy cons not with the pro Controller. Friends had problems, got their joy cons replaced - all good now.

<comment><USER9> Do you mean there is a new controller version that is more robust, or simply replaced with ones that aren't (yet) dusty?

If the latter, it's just a question of time before one has to do the same ordeal again. I'd prefer the problem not to arise in the first place. But good thing Nintendo are generous with replacements.

<comment><USER11> No, he is saying the vast majority of people don't have those issues so short of exagerating* you probably have deficient ones, and simply need to get them exchanged for new ones .

* you know, like saying "oh this issue is really bothing me but no I won't change them because it would just happen again anyway I'm sure of it even though most of others aren't affected". This is a definite case of "the user is not looking for a solution, but for a chance to rant", we've all seen it one time or another

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I made a gist from the base64 patch for easier reading: [https://gist.github.com/localhostdotdev/f07d7ba7ae6cac4ea1c8...](https://gist.github.com/localhostdotdev/f07d7ba7ae6cac4ea1c8976a41400d43)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there a plan to support Chrome in the Nintendo Switch? The rumours (which are mainly speculation or clickbait pages) talk about just supporting the gamepads.

<comment><USER14> Maybe to add controller support for the upcoming Google game streaming console?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Huh that's weird. I was a beta tester of Project Stream during the holiday season. I travelled with a Pixelbook and before my travel I tested all my controllers: PS4/Xbox/Nintendo and even an NVIDIA shield controller. Only Nintendo Pro Switch controller can be paired with the Chromebook.

The only problem is that A/B and X/Y is different between Xbox and Nintendo controller and you need to press B when the game tells you to press A. But it's a minor issue.

<comment><USER16> > The only problem is that A/B and X/Y is different between Xbox and Nintendo > controller and you need to press B when the game tells you to press A. But > it's a minor issue.

It's also different with Xbox and PS4 controllers. It's something I got used to a while ago after using DS3 controllers in Windows games.

Lots of PC games nowadays detect PS4 controllers and properly adjust UI (or even work with the lightbar), but I doubt Project Stream / browser controller APIs get that level of info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well except two points:

\- Switch doesn't even have a browser (it does technically, but it's internally used and you need to hack the switch to be able to use the browser)

\- Nintendo could easily change this if they wanted, of course, but considering their history of tight control over the platform, I don't think they'd be willing.

<comment><USER18> This is for support for Nintendo Switch _gamepads_ when connected to a normal computer over USB or Bluetooth, not for running Chromium itself on the Switch _console_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wonder why not write it in Go or Rust, c++ limits contribution to old developers only

None of my friends know c++

But all of them know Go or Rust.

<comment><USER20> Well the first thing to realise is that you live in a bubble.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I am in SV. It's a bubble but that shouldn't be a problem, everyone around me is Rust and Go hacker

<comment><USER20> I'm not in SV but have worked in a few different areas/industries and all are big C++ houses. I'm not old :)

I'm in a bubble too. I couldn't name a single friend or colleague who uses Rust or Go.

Just for example, scanning the jobs in my city the most in demand are c#, java and c++ in that order.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android vs iOS Game Sales Comparison - <AUTHOR> http://games.greggman.com/game/android-vs-ios-game-myths/

<comment><USER2> Uh, Myth #3 looks like it was proven correct. Apple users had 2x the conversion rate (.18 vs .4)!

To be sure, conversion rate isn't the best way to measure Myth #3. The correct measurement would be revenue per user (in app purchases, etc.).

<comment><USER3> Well the usual "iOS makes more money per app than Android" is misleading because from what I've seen it keeps referring to _paid apps_.

So for example if a dev has both a free app and a paid "pro" version on Android, most will get the free one and make him money on ads (which isn't counted in these charts), while on iOS he will only release one paid version, so then it turns out on iOS he makes "more" from the paid version, than on Android - for the paid version. But I don't think I've seen a report yet that combines the total revenue per user or per app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm surpised South Korea did so poorly, I thought I saw numbers suggesting it was equal to Japan for Android game profits.</comment>


Why it's a bad idea to warranty your code - <AUTHOR> http://pluggio.com/blog/?p=302

<comment><USER2> I completely disagree.

You just have to classify 1> What bugs are and 2> What bugs aren't. We have warranties on close to a hundred iPhone apps out there. If its within the spec, and it fails under the version of the OS it was developed for on one of the devices it was developed for, it's under our 6 month rework warranty.

We have a long list of disclaimers (say Apple changes API functionality, private functionality, policy, etc, none of those are covered, but many real bugs are).</comment>


2016's Best US Cities to Live and Work Remotely - <AUTHOR> https://www.highspeedinternet.com/best-cities-to-live-work-remotely <comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was a neat tool, and also an excellent demonstration of ReactJS working quickly.

In full disclosure I know the developer who built this, so I may be biased.</comment>


GitHub was down - <AUTHOR> https://www.githubstatus.com? <comment><USER2> If you're wondering if GitHub has been down more since the Microsoft acquisition, I actually just recently did some analysis on that using their status page data (the answer is yes):

[https://nimbleindustries.io/2020/06/04/has-github-been- down-...](https://nimbleindustries.io/2020/06/04/has-github-been-down-more- since-its-acquisition-by-microsoft/)

<comment><USER3> It's not surprising. I don't have any data to prove it but it feels like they're shipping improvements and new features at a much faster rate.

<comment><USER4> Or it could be some of the older employees decided to cash out after the acquisition, and they've lost some institutional knowledge about how to keep things running smoothly?

<comment><USER5> The addition of interns and new members typically cause more outages, as they make a lot of changes and discover how things work or not.

Retaining older employees has little effect to prevent that, because they typically don't/can't review much of what's happening from a new team, sometimes a whole department, who joined in on the project and has its own agenda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Again? This is like the fourth time GitHub went down. Last time this happened was almost a week ago. [0]

Seriously, just consider self-hosting [1] rather than 'centralizing everything' [2]

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23604944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23604944)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23572532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23572532)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803)

<comment><USER7> I set up a self hosted Gitlab where on-prem was a requirement and it's surprisingly easy. Obviously another service that needs to be maintained and updated but as code repositories and connected services are a crucial part of infrastructure it makes sense to have control over that.

Not the biggest fan of Gitlabs UI but I got used to it quickly.

<comment><USER8> > Not the biggest fan of Gitlabs UI but I got used to it quickly.

It gets more attractive now that GitHub starts changing theirs. Might as well adapt to GitLab now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So many services rely on github that it has become a single point of failure for online infrastructure as we've come to know it. I remember seeing this shared many years ago [1] and not much seems to have changed in the interim. If anything the MS acquisition has only exacerbated matters.

[1] [https://www.brandonsavage.net/github-your-single-point-of- fa...](https://www.brandonsavage.net/github-your-single-point-of-failure/)

<comment><USER10> > Gitlab is written on Ruby on Rails; you should understand the security > implications of Ruby on Rails before using Gitlab

Can someone ELI5 the security implications of Ruby on Rails?

<comment><USER11> I'm sure its 'less bad' now -- but here's an example of an absolutely horrendous security-bug-as-a consequence-of-design-deeply-baked-into-rails ... [https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/13420](https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/13420)

Interestingly -- the rails developers decided to put in a really horrendous hack to mitigate the common paths through which this design-flaw might lead to unexpected security outcomes ...

In a way, one could argue that the willingness to put in a horrendous hack to 'mitigate' a security flaw provides an example which demonstrates some amount of 'security reasonableness' in rails ...

In reality tho -- I think that this example serves as evidence more for the fact that rails is deeply flawed and very unlikely to be secure in practice -- for reasons of design complexity alone.

<comment><USER10> Thank you. I agree with you, even though most of the tech world is run on bodges, that does not mean it is the right thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has anyone here tried self hosting Phabricator?

Some of our private repos are Mercurial so it would be nice to have both git and hg repos on a single platform.

<comment><USER13> Years ago, it was too complex for me. I recently switched to Gogs and I'm satisfied with that. But that's Git only.

<comment><USER12> Thanks. I need something that can handle our hg repos.

<comment><USER14> Sourcehut (hg.sr.ht) is supports Mercurial and can also be self-hosted. Not sure how complicated it is to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well, at least Microsoft hasn't had a Sidekick like event happen to GitHub. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sidekick_data_loss](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sidekick_data_loss)

</comment><comment><USER16> 99.95% SLA means less than 66 minutes of downtime is acceptable per quarter. I guess they will be offering credits to enterprise customers this time for the first time.

Edit: Correct a mistake but the time calculated is correct.

<comment><USER17> Nice. I hope GitHub is down 67 minutes every quarter, just so that Microsoft loses some money.

<comment><USER18> You must have a fulfilling life with lots of friends

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> C'mon microsoft GH is down it's becoming a weekly trend here on HN..

<comment><USER7> After Facebook bought Whatsapp it also started having outages at a scale never seen before. Whatsapp used to be a service that was practically never down, after the acquisitions it sometimes had outages of up to a day. Rumours were that it was related to features that FB wanted to add (e.g. video chat). Maybe there's something similar at play here, that Github integrates MSFT services without proper testing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sounds like a good time to run something like this [https://github.com/clockfort/GitHub- Backup](https://github.com/clockfort/GitHub-Backup)

<comment><USER21> Git itself is not the issue - the problem is Review Comments, Pull requests and issues.

<comment><USER22> Are you saying that Git should implement those features?

<comment><USER23> Fossil [1] has those integrated, along with a built-in web interface (which git kinda has)

[1] [https://www.fossil-scm.org/](https://www.fossil-scm.org/)

<comment><USER12> I wish fossil had become more mainstream. It seemed such a cool tool when I tried it 8 to 9 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Browsing through the status page makes me wonder how they manage to have issues like this so frequently. Are there publicly available post-mortems for previous incidents? From a first glance I can't find any on the status page.

Having an electronics engineering background, my personal pet theory is that the convoluted layers upon layers of automagic container management, load balancing and scaling mechanisms act like nested control loops in respect to each other and sudden load increases (e.g. Monday morning load spike) cause the system to essentially produce a step response and it starts overshooting/oscillating. Just a thought tough.

<comment><USER25> Earlier this year, they were blaming several of the outages on "the database". Not sure if that's still their scapegoat or if they've come up with a new one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> GitHub Pages seems to be up though. My website is still online.

<comment><USER27> I'm guessing the core functionality of Pages is quite isolated from the rest of the site since it's just serving static sites over a CDN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It feels like this is happening a lot more(since quarantine) . It's really weird for how big this company is, how important, and have microsoft's backing. It is a little concerning given how much my work depends on its stability.

</comment><comment><USER29> Its back up for me

</comment><comment><USER30> Monday blues...

</comment><comment><USER31> Unicorn!

<comment><USER28> I get the falling off a cliff.

<comment><USER32> No, you fall of a cliff in that very specific manner only when ACME fails you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's back up for me now

</comment><comment><USER34> Ag nee ouens !

</comment><comment><USER35> +1 down in India

</comment><comment><USER36> Looks like something went wrong!

</comment><comment><USER37> Can we make this thread a sticky?

</comment><comment><USER38> I hate Microsoft. I've seen a lot of unicorn lately.

<comment><USER38> I love downvotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The prophecy, it's starting...

</comment><comment> tony-allan We had issues producing the response to your request.

Sorry about that. Please try refreshing and contact us if the problem persists.

Contact Support — GitHub Status — @githubstatus

</comment><comment><USER40> It drives me insane that they don't localize the times on their status page, is there a real reason they are displayed as UTC? If you are looking at a status page chances are anxiety is already high, to throw time zone conversion into the mix too is just obnoxious.

<comment><USER25> I'm the exact opposite.

I hate it when sites use their local time, instead of just using UTC everywhere. I got accustomed to using UTC ~25 years ago.

At worst, it'll take you two seconds to open up a terminal and run

      $ date -u

if you can't handle the conversion "internally".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> works for me... loaded this file no problem: [https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police- shootings/blob...](https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police- shootings/blob/master/fatal-police-shootings-data.csv)

</comment><comment><USER41> First time I've ever seen it down, I guess there's a first for everything. Now I understand why many people are very paranoid when it comes to taking backups.

Is it worth backing up my GitHub repos somewhere else? What do other people use as an alternative source of truth for their code?

<comment><USER42> Not sure if you were being sarcastic but Github goes down quite often :)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=github+down](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=github+down)

<comment><USER43> I think this implied that it never was down for him before when it was reported to be down. Which is exactly my experience, too. I've seen a lot of GH down posts here - it never was for me. Now it's the same.

<comment><USER44> Possibly region/cluster specific? Not loading for me from Denmark.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get a 40% discount on the Rails 3 Tutorial book (one day only) - <AUTHOR> http://news.railstutorial.org/get-a-40-discount-on-the-rails-3-tutorial-boo

<comment><AUTHOR> The _Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial_ book has been updated for Rails 3.0.0 final. The arduous update process was completed by changing

      $ gem install rails --pre

to

      $ gem install rails --version 3.0.0

(That's a little lie—there was a _bit_ more to it than that—but this was the only substantive change.) Thanks to the Rails core team for all their hard work!</comment>


LinkedIn is Integrating with OS X Mavericks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.linkedin.com/2013/06/11/your-professional-network-is-integrating-with-os-x-mavericks/ <comment> o0-0o Aren't we all just a little sick and tired of all of this 'integration'?

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting. Do many people really use LinkedIn as a central online identity, like many use FB or Twitter? It's always seemed to me to be more of something to show employers than something used as an identity or social presence.</comment>


CNET Hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/cnet-attacked-by-russian-hacker-group/

<comment><USER2> > A representative from the group calling itself W0rm told CNET News in a > Twitter conversation that it stole a database of usernames, emails, and > encrypted passwords from CNET's servers.

I wonder how many MD5 encryptors they used </s>

In all seriousness, it sucks to see this being reported by someone who doesn't know (or care) about the hashing/encryption distinction.

...but probably not as much as if it turned out they are _actually encrypting_ passwords.</comment>


Corona – 1.5 Social Distancing App – works? - <AUTHOR> https://onepointfive.app/ <comment><USER2> Very effective tool in this crisis. I use it in the supermarkt mostly. The design is simple, just like the user interface, and that is fitting in regards to the function of the app.</comment>


WebOS Open Source Roadmap Update - <AUTHOR> http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/The-Next-Bench-Blog/OFFICIAL-webOS-Open-Source-Roadmap-Update/ba-p/76443?sssdmh=dm13.299872

<comment><USER2> Very useful also through Haxe JS extern. Wish for more media control but that will probably come in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is from January

</comment><comment><USER4> ____* Please correct the link __ __ _

</comment><comment><USER5> They already released the source: [http://developer.palm.com/blog/2012/03/sams-blog-a- community...](http://developer.palm.com/blog/2012/03/sams-blog-a-community- release/)

<comment><USER6> No, the just posted libraries that WebOS uses. Much in the same way that Apple posts libraries that OSX uses.

<http://www.apple.com/opensource/></comment></comment>


Confession of an Ivy League teaching assistant: Here's why I inflated grades - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/157579/confession-of-an-ivy-league-teaching-assistant-heres-why-i-inflated-grades/

<comment><USER2> Speaks a lot to the character of the average Harvard student, more disappointing to hear the lack of backbone with regards to the TA.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know what's worse, the sense of entitlement to good grades or whatever thinking is behind the feeling your life is ruined if you can't work at Goldman Sachs.</comment>


Yes, we might be sold say the Pirate Bay - <AUTHOR> http://thepiratebay.org/blog/164 <comment><USER2> They are trying to decentralize their operation so it will be more difficult to take down the piratebay.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do not see this as good news. tpb works. If it ain't broke, don't go mucking about trying to fix it. If they think they can maintain control without ownership they are seriously delusional. A company with a stock symbol is beholden to its stock price, not idealism.

</comment><comment><USER4> TPB is down. Related to sell-out or just massive traffic due to the news?

<comment><USER5> Neither, actually; according to [http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay- closes-its-tracker-re...](http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-closes-its- tracker-removes-torrents-090630/), Pirate Bay is closing its tracker and will some kind of third party tracker in place.</comment></comment>


Show HN: How to launch a tech startup without a tech co-founder - <AUTHOR> http://www.bubble.kz <comment><USER2> please stop sharing affiliate links</comment>


Chute (YC W12) Launches A Twilio For Photos - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/05/chute-launch/

<comment><USER2> IPIX was a photo-hosting service for E-Bay and various other sites in the late '90's -- that was a very big chunk of their revenue, I believe, and sounds a lot like Chute's product area as well.

It looks like E-Bay discontinued the IPIX integration and brought all that in- house, effectively killing IPIX's main cash cow (which was already anaemic after the dot-com crash). See this article from 2003: <http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y03/m09/i22/s01> . I wish the YC company best of luck in addressing this similar market.

I think IPIX' original product idea was a special camera to take 360-radial or 360-spherical photos and let people host those images on their website. Web clients needed a special plugin to view the results. Using these became popular on various real-estate websites for a while. It looks from IPIX website (<http://www.ipix.com/>) that that's their main focus again.

A former IPIX employee, Adam Sah, took some rudimentary log-aggregation tech he built for monitoring the IPIX servers, got permission to start a new company, and founded Addamark, now SenSage (<http://www.sensage.com>). They implemented one of the first columnar databases to minimize large-scale log aggregation storage space (logs take 2.5% the space required in a traditional DB) and to speed up queries. Many other companies are adopting this strategy (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS>). Here's the columnar-database patent: [http://www.google.com/patents?id=q4d4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=q4d4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=nathan+watson+column&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XypVT7ifJKSZiAKx5uS0Bg&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA)

I worked at Addamark/SenSage for almost 4 years, it was a very good experience.

<comment><USER3> Thanks that was some good background info. Only informative message among useless back patting posts.

<comment><USER4> seriously, they probably got some friends to comment.. i rarely see such useless responses to posts here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a little confused as to the Twilio reference. Does this mean Chute will allow users to MMS images to a phone number with a server backend?

<comment><USER6> Me too, and I work at Twilio.

<comment><USER5> Isn't twilio working on allowing web apps to receive MMS messages? I assumed this is what Chute is intending to do.

<comment><USER7> MMS would be very cool - we support web services, email, mobile and would love to add MMS.

I'm sure we'd use Twilio to accomplish it as well :)

<comment><USER8> Let's talk, happy to buy you a beer and take a list of feature requests. You know where to find me. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the article, here's a good excerpt of what Chute does.

 _[Chute] handles the entire backend environment for uploading, processing, authenticating, resizing, and serving images.

...for example, you're running a popular website and you want all of your users to be able to have profile images, you can sign up for Chute and paste a few lines of code into your application, and that's it. Users will then be able to upload images to Chute's servers, where they will be cropped, resized, etc. according to your specifications, before being served onto your site._

That's pretty useful!

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, I don't like the Twilio reference explanation.. it's just confusing.

</comment><comment><USER11> It seems like there is a growing market for offering the most basic of web development tasks as a service to all the non-technical people trying to start a site these days. It seems people are moving away from all-in-one website builders (no geek cred.) to do-it-all frameworks coupled with a large variety of 3rd party services to implement the few things the framework doesn't.

It'll be interested to see the common man's web stack in a few years.

</comment><comment><USER12> UploadCare <http://uploadcare.com> is another startup in this area.

</comment><comment><USER13> So, similar to Transloadit, then? (<http://transloadit.com/>)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, except they seem to also provide photo hosting and tooling beyond that. We are purely focused on upload and processing so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Idea has been mentioned many times here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3594401> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049903> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2877026>

Though I'm not sure how mission critical this is.. it's something you can easily find a gem for, and adjust for your own use in a couple of hours. And if you're a photo sharing startup/business, I would assume you wouldn't want to outsource something that I'd consider part of your core.

<comment><USER7> Hi - one of the founders of Chute.

You are absolutely right that there are many ways to accomplish basic uploading and hosting. In fact, we've used those same gems time and time again and it was the process of re-building it that seemed problematic. When we started working on mobile, however, most of those things were not as readily available or accessible.

That said, we're much more focused on the workflow that is required to make those photos useful. For example, if you're a publisher, you may need to have rights cleared, captions, user information collected, and even moderation before any user-generated content is "usable" to you.

We're happy to help anyone get their prototype running and hopefully offer enough value on top that they won't ever want to leave.

<comment><USER15> Yeah. I have a lightly used production stack that is the very beginnings of a service like this. I think there is a lot of potential value here, if you can strike the right pricing/feature balance. Also a ton of opportunity to add value (look at some of the Ideé APIs for ideas: <http://ideeinc.com/> ). I'll be keeping on eye on this product & space in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Twilio has now achieved Kleenex status in the tech community, nicely done!

</comment><comment><USER17> We currently use SWFUpload + ImageMagick + (sometimes) Aviary in our PHP apps. We're using Mailgun for receiving images via email/SMS.

I'd love to replace that with Chute. Checking it out now.

<comment><USER7> Let me know if we can help get you started, we can add you in !

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Congrats on the launch!

I'm curious about the previous project - lifegrams.com - I was talking to my OH about a similar idea just a few hours ago.

Would be interested to see a lessons-learned for the previous project. Was it successful, if not as successful as hoped, why not, how much traction, what could have been done differently, etc.

<comment><USER7> Would be happy to chat some time about that experience! Feel free to shoot us an email. gregarious at getchute dot com

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Slightly Off Topic:

I'd love to see a service like this for Video. We currently have to content manage a ton of video for our Video Based eLearning application and it sucks to have to manage encodings file upload/download and streaming. I'd like to outsource all of that and focus on just building a great learning platform.

<comment><USER20> <http://transloadit.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This sort of reminds me of a DAM (Digital Asset Management system). I work in the media CMS industry, and most big news organisations carry one + usually some front end integration code. Seems like an obvious direction to take this (though it carries the pain of doing enterprise sales, of course).

<comment><USER7> We're definitely working in that direction as part of our launch. As you mentioned, there's some specialization required for publishers, even more so for large ones.

User-generated content has definitely posed new challenges for them and we're working to package the platform in a way that makes it a lot easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking great and positioning is really nice (just photos).

We used Zencoder for a similar purpose last year and it helped to encode video files as well. The pricing on these services to make your image-related pain go away is totally worth it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would love to start using this now on a new project. Is there any idea yet of pricing / paid features? I'm hesitant to spend time on a new API only to find out in a couple of months it's outside of our budget.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sweet. Something similar has been on my ideas list for a little while now. Glad someone is doing it, because it needs to be done, and the idea never excited me to action.

</comment><comment><USER25> Detail but the word _chute_ means "failing/fail" in French.

pic related (french translation of a famous movie): [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UzYc8Z-JK08/TsAvnQEJgjI/AAAAAAAAAV...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UzYc8Z-JK08/TsAvnQEJgjI/AAAAAAAAAV4/BQpcgk3SUaQ/s1600/la- chute.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER26> very nice!

</comment><comment><USER27> Cool!

</comment><comment><USER28> Now this is smart.

</comment><comment><USER29> Grats on the launch!

Was awesome meeting you guys at AngelHack over the weekend.

Your stuff is legit and I'll be spreading the good word to my photo-centric entrepreneurs.

Less stuff for them to worry about.

-Mat</comment>


Baby taken from mother by UK social services in 'forced caesarean' - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/news/woman-baby-removed-caesarean-542/

<comment><USER2> The facts as reported are almost certainly incomplete - to the point where they completely fail to represent the truth.

This is necessarily so - in the UK we have strong privacy laws to protect both the mother and the child but make no mistake despite the barrier to public review (shall we call it kindly) everyone will have been represented properly by the best available legal, medical and social agencies.

I speak from a little knowledge (not of this case because if I did know something of that then I would be silent) but because my wife and I are foster parents and are regularly involved in the processes that secure the best available outcomes for each child temporarily in our care.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's not often, these days, that a news article makes my blood boil - that is, provokes a genuine physiological anger response. This is one of those.

<comment><USER3> As upsetting as the story is, I'm trying to reserve judgement until more is known.

Having known people with acute mental health problems, I know that people are not routinely sanctioned in the UK -- even when police become involved. The fact that they committed her and carried out a forced caesarean makes me think she must have been self-harming, attempting suicide, or a self-induced abortion; in which case, I can fully understand why this was done.

Of course, because of patient confidentiality, the authorities aren't going to disclose the details unless it goes to court.

<comment><USER4> I read this story yesterday, when "The Independent" published a piece, a little bit lengthier:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10486452/Child- taken-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10486452/Child-taken-from- womb-by-social-services.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suspect there is a lot more to this story. Councils tend to avoid going down this route unless there are no other options left to them. Mainly because doing something like this costs them a fortune and councils hate spending money on children services if they can avoid it.

There would have been a lot of people involved in the process and they are very risk averse people for the most part.</comment>


Ask HN:  Should CS university grads be unemployable due to lack of initiative? - <AUTHOR>

Given the amount of self-teaching that can be done nowadays, doesn't it make more sense for software companies to prefer self-taught applicants over university grads? <comment><USER2> >doesn't it make more sense for software companies to prefer self-taught applicants over university grads?

I don't like the question. It's too open, what role are the "software companies" selecting a candidate for? What skills did the self taught applicant teach themselves? Which university course and how successful, what industry experience if any comes with it?

Generally I'd say a good degree shows rigorous study, flexibility a certain amount of persistence.

University graduates are often self-taught in many aspects - a degree however comes with a transcript given a brief overview of what the applicant should know and the level of their ability. To get this from a completely self-taught applicant without formal qualifications you'd need to test them thoroughly; why do this when you can choose from pre-tested stock.

As a complete outsider, the relationship between computer science and most software to me looks like that between physics and mechanical engineering.

 _I'm nowhere near being an IT employer, or computer scientist I just like sticking my oar in_.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a dumb question -- what makes the two mutually exclusive? I've been programming since I was 9. Here's the paper from the research I worked on my freshman year, which wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't gone to college.

<http://v3vee.org/papers/ipdps10.pdf>

<comment><USER4> While I agree with you, "what a dumb question" doesn't really contribute to the discussion.

In my opinion, getting your degree and teaching yourself or launching a product show two different types of initiative. If you've done both, you should get double points.

<comment><USER3> My comment about it being a dumb question certainly contributes to the discussion: it says that I think the question is intellectually bankrupt _prima facie_ and that I don't think questions like it should be submitted in the future. I have a standard for intellectual discussion on Hacker News and this question doesn't meet it.

There may be a legitimate question hidden behind the _non sequitur_ but if so one should ask that question, not require people to do some linguistic gymnastics to find the real question.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, but the pretentious tone of your comment distracts from your point.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I'm just attempting to beat Reddit away from HN with as big a stick as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Went to College. Was very frustrated with how little I learned in the areas I was interested.

However I learned a lot in many areas that I wasn't (at the time) interested in.

</comment><comment><USER7> I went to uni, and got a decent Computer Studies BSc degree. It never stood me one damned bit of good, because before, during and after my studies, companies are still holding to the mantra "We need two years' experience in [name the technology]." I have seen employers asking blithely for "two years' experience" in technologies invented six months ago, so "experience" is not the issue.

I have come to the conclusion that, like desperate people in their forties still holding out for their One True Love and still staying single, employers are looking for someone who will come on like Neo from The Matrix, yet look, speak, think and get paid like Wally from the Dilbert strip.

I think the degree puts the "hard working, white collar, self-made man, bucked my own goat, got myself to where I am from nothing, Essex barrow boy, yadda yadda" interviewers off their stride. Some misplaced sense of snobbery, perhaps. I have seen them snap at me, yet treat a candidate with only a minor diploma with kid gloves.

And as for what I've done with myself since I got my degree ... applied for, literally, more than a thousand jobs, attended countless business breakfasts, attended VIP private viewings of art exhibits, appeared in front of and behind a TV camera, done a stint on a radio show as a presenter, given classes, studied languages, mathematics, poetry and art, seen my writings published in a number of different places, and taught my nephew stick fighting for his drama class.

Plus, I had the time somewhere to fit in some coding.

Unemployable? Lacking in initiative? Hardly.

<comment><USER8> Then go to a uni with a required co-op or intern program

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're interested in running a successful company you'll prefer whoever is most competent (technically, socially, etc.), regardless of where they're coming from.

If someone you think is a 'know nothing' gets hired instead of someone you view as technically skilled, you've learned something about that company. Maybe you don't actually want to work there.

College isn't a magical pill, what you get out of it is proportionate to what you put into it. If you're motivated enough to teach yourself to program, you're probably motivated enough to learn a lot in college as well.

Being self taught and being college educated are not mutually exclusive.

</comment><comment><USER10> As someone who doesn't have a single credit hour of college and currently works at a university as lead developer on a NASA space mission, I will say without hesitation that I would recommend getting a degree. I would hire anyone who was right for the job, but a good education gives some breadth that is very hard to acquire through self study.

Some universities offer a different degree program where you learn some EE & chip design along with software. When these programs are done well they are great.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm currently attending college and it is frustrating to watch grad students who know nothing get hired over some one who is technically skilled. It's baffling to say the least.

I learned a ton in school and have applied concepts and took ideas and expanded upon them. Now I'm not just hacking away at a piece of ice, now I understand everything I'm doing and why one way is faster than another

</comment><comment><USER12> No, self-taught is fine for trivial tasks but for good solutions it take a well balnced education. Example: I've yet to interview a self taught programmer/analyst that had a grasp of space/time complexity.

<comment><USER13> (first year electrical engineering student here) Could you explain what you mean by space/time complexity? Is this just Big-O notation and the associated ideas regarding complexity, or is it more than this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> No.

</comment><comment><USER15> Initiative is orthogonal to academia?

</comment><comment><USER16> why would software companies cut themselves off from the supply? that's just bad business.</comment>