Latest Safari 10 features - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_10_0.html <comment><USER2> _Safari's IndexedDB implementation now fully supports the recommended standard._

It's been a long time coming, but this is pretty awesome! Although after their previous IndexedDB implementation, I'm still feeling a bit of "trust but verify".

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh finally, inline videos are enabled. Took a long time!

        When the webkit-playsinline property is specified,
        Safari on iPhone allows videos to play inline.
        Videos without the property will commence playback in
        fullscreen, but users can pinch close on the video to
        continue playing the video inline.

        On iOS, videos without audio tracks or with disabled
        audio tracks can play automatically when the webpage loads.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, this is a huge release! Does this mean Safari supports ES6 modules now? Also, how did the Nitro team resolve the issues that the V8 team faced when implementing tail call optimization (tooling broke when they implemented it, so I believe they were investigating a Scala-style annotation to opt in).

<comment><USER5> Yes—[https://webkit.org/blog/6240/ecmascript-6-proper-tail- calls-...](https://webkit.org/blog/6240/ecmascript-6-proper-tail-calls-in- webkit/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _The ECMAScript 2015 standard, also known as ES6, is completely supported, > bringing this major JavaScript evolution to Safari on OS X and iOS._

</comment><comment><USER7> when will apple figure it out that releasing a version per year is bad for everybody. chrome and firefox work seamlessly with continuous updates.

<comment><USER5> This is actually the second major release of Safari in calendar 2016; there was 9.3 had a bunch of features back in March: [https://webkit.org/blog/6008/new-web-features-in- safari/](https://webkit.org/blog/6008/new-web-features-in-safari/).

And of course Apple has also been shipping Safari Technology Preview every two weeks since March 30th: [https://webkit.org/blog/6017/introducing-safari- technology-p...](https://webkit.org/blog/6017/introducing-safari-technology- preview/) that updates via the Mac App store, in addition to the WebKit Nightlies.

Many of the JavaScript and web features have already shipped in the Tech Preview versions of Safari; the new ones will likely show up in the next Safari Tech Preview. Features that rely on macOS Sierra frameworks won't work on El Capitan obviously.</comment></comment>


Terrorism and the emergence of Stand alone complex behavior - <AUTHOR> http://www.reflectionsofthevoid.com/2015/01/terrorism-and-emergence-of-stand-alone.html <comment><USER2> Interesting read, although some claims are thrown in without any source or justification whatsoever.

Still, I almost feel like the reference to Ghost in the Shell is simply an excuse to insert the Laughing Man logo at the end. From the Wikipedia page linked to in the article:

 _What separates the Stand Alone Complex from normal copycat behavior is that there is no real originator of the copied action, but merely a rumor or an illusion that supposedly performed the copied action. There may be real people who are labeled as the originator, but in reality, no one started the original behavior._

According to the above, I am not sure the "recent terrorist acts of seemingly disconnected individual" mentioned in the article actually qualify as Stand Alone Complex.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really interesting article.

I always love it when concepts from fiction become real.

I was expecting a Ghost in the Shell refrence, and was not disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER4> >Recently terrorist acts of seemingly disconnected individual started to rise

Granted there were 3 internationally high publicity terrorist acts in Europe recently, I think there is an element of confirmation bias in that statement.</comment>


Exoscale – swiss public cloud provider: vms, object storage and paas - <AUTHOR> https://exoscale.ch

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, exoscale CTO here. As mentioned in another post, we are doing a special pricing for startups and SaaS businesses available here: [https://www.exoscale.ch/pricing-target/](https://www.exoscale.ch/pricing- target/) and we encourage you to try the service out with the WELOVEHN coupon for extra initial credit.</comment>


Researchers Demonstrate Heat and Sound Are Magnetic - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/for-first-time-reseachers-demonstrate-heat-and-sound-are-magnetic <comment><USER2> I hate to follow the pattern of negative Hacker News comments, but this article is atrocious. Please don't upvote it.

First, the title is total clickbait. Heat and sound are magnetic??? More like heat and sound are affected a little bit by magnetic fields. (Giant magnetic fields at low temperature, no less.)

Second, take a look at the first paragraph:

>"Earlier this month, we reported on research demonstrating that heat propagates as a wave through graphene rather than as vibrations of atoms the way it does in 3-D materials. In 3-D materials, the collective state of those vibrating atoms is known as phonons."

What does it mean to say that heat propagates as a wave rather than as vibrations of atoms? The definition of phonon is a WAVE of ATOMIC VIBRATIONS. It makes zero sense to say it travels as wave, but not as vibrations. Also, there is not a fundamental difference between heat transport in graphene and normal materials - the main difference is that is just takes a longer distance before the wavelike motion scatters enough to become diffusive.

Source: Years of work in a materials science lab on 2D materials and a PhD in Applied Physics

<comment><USER3> You are correct on all points. I believe the article is trying to refer to the recent studies:

[http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150218/ncomms7290/abs/ncom...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150218/ncomms7290/abs/ncomms7290.html)

[http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150306/ncomms7400/full/nco...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150306/ncomms7400/full/ncomms7400.html?WT.ec_id=NCOMMS-20150311)

<comment><USER4> Press release from the OSU lab that did the study - [http://news.osu.edu/news/2015/03/23/heatmag](http://news.osu.edu/news/2015/03/23/heatmag)

Having been taught by both Roberto Myers and Dr. Heremans, they wouldn't release something like this unless they had repeatedly reproduced results and were extremely confident in their findings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 5 degrees above absolute zero, in a 7 tesla magnetic field produces a 12% effect by a completely unexplained and unpredicted mechanism.

I will wait for another researcher to confirm before I get too excited.

<comment><USER6> As tbrownaw points out elsewhere they apparently do have an explanation and maybe even the ability to predict the behavior.

Essentially this isn't _that_ far away from more common things like paramagnetism and diamagnetism where electron orbitals align with an applied magnetic field and the properties of the material change, except in those cases it's their magnetic properties that change. In this case they're saying the speed at which waves/quasiparticles are transmitted through the material changes.

I'm not fond of the title but it's an interesting idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm just an amateur, but this doesn't actually seem that surprising.

It's also relevant to the part of the book I'm reading now, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in QED, Electromagnetism, or even just Computer Science.

"The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose (1989) - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind)

</comment><comment><USER8> What I thought the article was about after reading the title here: "Heat and sound are magnetic"

What I thought the article said after reading the article itself: "Heat propagates as a wave rather than as atoms. These waves are called "phonos" (wtf?! #1) and they carry sound too (wtf?! #2)"

What people with knowledge in the field seem to think about the article, judging from the comments: "Total bullshit".

I'd love someone to elaborate with some patience and simple explanation of what this is (and isn't) about because it sure sounds very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER9> In a damned material! If you have the right terms giving a coupling between the electromagnetic field and phonons, yes, yes that's what happens. No, in free space, there is no such coupling.

<comment><USER10> We've been in a low-fun aether pocket for a while now- maybe in a few centuries..

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sigh. It is an interesting result, but I expect that you'll find that magnetic constriction of the structural motion has much more to do with heat propagation (or not). If someone liberates the actual paper I would be interested in reading it.

<comment><USER12> The research group put up a PDF (direct DropBox link is theirs) here:

[https://windlgroup.engineering.osu.edu/publications](https://windlgroup.engineering.osu.edu/publications)

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27852198/WW/Jin_NM_2015....](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27852198/WW/Jin_NM_2015.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Cool.

"""The displacements of atoms locally affect the orbital motion of valence band electrons, which, in the presence of an external magnetic field[...]. The process is modelled by _ab initio_ calculations that, without the use of a single adjustable parameter, reproduce the observed 12% decrease in the lattice thermal conductivity[...]"""

 _Because the bonds between atoms are based on electrons, they can be affected by magnetic fields. Which means that materials can have different properties when exposed to magnetic fields, even if they 're not magnetic themselves. We understand this well enough to model it exactly, at least in simple cases._

<comment><USER14> So ... Val Kilmer in "Real Genius" was right that freezing a liquid laser increases the efficiency, and 30 years ago at that?

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How is this any different than materials that change color or refractive index based on temperature?

Yeah it's kinda cool, but the interpretation (and title) are ridiculous.

"Semiconductor found to have different physical properties when under strong magnetic field."

</comment><comment><USER15> makes perfect sense for materials that allow idealised forms of wave propagation to behave like this. Might even make a neat sonoluminescent thingy if you fiddle with it.</comment>


The Laser Craze (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.filfre.net/2013/06/the-laser-craze/ <comment><USER2> Even though I kind of hated Dragon's Lair, RepliCade is making a mini version with a little (fake) Laserdisc player, that I'd really like to have on display: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/newwavetoys/replicade-m...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/newwavetoys/replicade- mini-dragons-lair-arcade-machine-replica-12-tall)</comment>


I hired twice the people in half the time by changing my decision-making style - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/d3b5d9216145

<comment><USER2> Link shorteners are highly discouraged on HN. This link goes to [http://bit.ly/19IUGXU?cc=79a16693e4e904c00490c6eb9a2d621e](http://bit.ly/19IUGXU?cc=79a16693e4e904c00490c6eb9a2d621e) (and you can see the stats [https://bitly.com/19IUGXU+](https://bitly.com/19IUGXU+) ) which finally redirects to the actual article [https://medium.com/p/d3b5d9216145](https://medium.com/p/d3b5d9216145)

</comment><comment><USER3> The term for this style of short circuit decision making is "satisficing.". There's a wide body of economic psychology that suggests that satisficing selection algorithms (as opposed to optimizing selection algorithms) lead to greater happiness.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing)

<comment><USER4> I remember learning about that in micro econ. Maybe I did learn something in business school after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I typically recommend this in my line of work, especially for occupations that are non-abundant in the relevant labor markets. Hiring can be expensive if only for the time spent looking for that _perfect_ candidate which ultimately appears only marginally more qualified, and vacant positions carry a cost themselves.

Add on to that the fact that most employers use selection techniques with relatively low validities (e.g., interviews, particularly unstructured) and that validity degrades over time anyway (i.e., performance between someone predicted as "good" vs. "mediocre" is much more noticeable early in the employment relationship than it is six months or a year later).

</comment><comment><USER6> You can do a lot better than this, with only an incremental cost. Look for an adequate fit; pass on them. Then accept the next fit that is better than that first fit.

Its a whole standard deviation better result, at probably less than double the cost. Works for lots of things: choosing shoes, a wife or husband, entrée on a menu etc.

<comment><USER2> Are you talking about this problem? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem) The math is a little different: You can increase your chances of finding the single best applicant in a pool just by discarding the first 36.8% that you come across, then picking the next one that is better than those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know Vungle is a pretty young company, but how long have the people you hired this way generally stayed with the company? Really interested in how short hiring cycles translate to culture fit and employee longevity.

<comment><USER8> So is the author of the article; I hope she writes a follow-up whenever it becomes clear how her strategy has worked out!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, guys! We're still early in the process, but I'm more than happy to do an update next year! Let me know if I can give you any more information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sounds like a really bad idea.You'll end up with a bunch of mediocre people and a few that carry all the weight. Soft skills are great in marketing, but in development, give me competent developers over ppt writers any day.

<comment><USER10> That's not the impression I got from reading the article. It says:

" _Instead of interviewing everyone on the planet and trying to optimize, I set a goal to hire the first person who met all of my criteria._ "

If one of her criteria is "must be a competent developer", then she's going to get competent developers.

The kind of criteria she can easily compromise on are:

\- Some kind of mythical perfect "cultural fit" (e.g., must like to have beer with co-workers after work and eat lunch with them every day).

\- An exact match on salary requirements (instead of finding someone who will work for $100K or below, pay them their asking salary of $110K; time is money, and if you hire someone today, you'll get to market faster).

\- Must know every single open source library you're using (if they know 5 out of 8, they can learn the other three faster than it would take you to find the "perfect candidate").

\- Attended a fancy college and got a 4.0 GPA (if someone has a few years of work experience, that stuff doesn't matter much anymore).</comment></comment>


Financial panics still require that practical men violate their own principles. - <AUTHOR> http://weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=15921&R=15FF68930 <comment><USER2> I find two things fascinating about this piece. First, it is a book review, but the book being reviewed is 135 years old. Second, it is effectively a defence of opacity and inequity in financial regulation. And it seems coherent, too, though verbose. But I hesitate to accept it without having read the book and without any experience in the realm of central banking.

</comment><comment><USER3> I caught this article about a week ago but didn't think HN would like it that much.

Since then, I've seen Bagehot mentioned or quoted in about half a dozen other articles.

We think each time there's a financial panic that it's the end of the world -- unless we look long-term. None of these problems are new, and in fact they are most likely a built-in "feature" of central banking.</comment>


Palm Pre: Two Months In - <AUTHOR> http://randomfoo.net/2009/08/25/palm-pre-two-months-in <comment><AUTHOR> (via. Daring Fireball)

I realize this can potentially spawn all sorts of "that's not my experience" and a point-by point counter-list of why this list may or may not be bullshit... but all the same I find things like this interesting, and I think it's good to discuss longer-term experiences with different devices to counter the "I had to review this device so I used it for a week" columns and "I already hate this device but I'm going to give it a once-over and find more things I hate about it and make a list all while giving a strong look of mixed disapproval and disgust" type posts...</comment>


Show HN: Charts for Hacker News Polls - <AUTHOR> http://hacksandthoughts.posterous.com/charts-for-hacker-news-polls <comment><USER2> This is cool, but you really should have used bar charts rather than pie charts. Humans are really good at comparing lengths, and terrible at comparing areas. As an example, your chart of which database systems HNers use is almost meaningless to me - it conveys less information than staring at the raw data does. If you were able to rewrite to use bar charts instead, this would be a kick-ass tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, I will make bar-chart the default view with an option to switch to pie- charts if desired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is cool.

The results of the first poll I looked at surprised me and I wanted to read the comments, so I think it would be useful to have a link to the actual poll (on HN) because I had to google it. Another small thing is that the "HN Charts" in the nav bar doesn't really behave as expected. For example, on that page : <http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=3298905> the link doesn't do anything. On other pages it brings you back to the home page.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hear JGC's Pie Chart Challenge calling... <http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/pie- chart-challenge.html>

<comment><USER5> I must admit I don't fully get his argument. Is there research into the perception of pie charts, or is it just an assumption that people are bad at judging areas and angles?

<comment><USER4> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Use.2C_effectiveness_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Use.2C_effectiveness_and_visual_perception)

Looks like research has been done. Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not a web developer, so maybe I'm misremembering, but wasn't there something in HTTP that let you check the last time a page changed? Scraping the poll pages every 10 minutes seems like it would cause a lot of unnecessary requests to HN.

Also, you probably consider any poll that's not on the first few pages of the 'news' or 'newest' sections to be complete. Sure, they might change, but they're not going to change by enough to affect your graphs.

<comment><USER7> If-Modified-Since? You still have to issue the http request.

<comment><USER8> There are ETags too, but they suffer from the same problem (and usually dynamic pages don't serve them).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome! It would be nice to have prev and next button for the chart detail page. Even better if u could add a swipe for mobile devices

<comment><USER10> That's a good idea for frontpage and best polls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great. I think it would be helpful to add the percentages here too. Perhaps in the key so as not to clutter?

</comment><comment><USER12> great job, Shishir. are the legend/poll options in the same order as shown on the original poll? i ask because the colors are a wee bit difficult to differentiate. feature request: link to the original page.</comment>


Commuting Kills - <AUTHOR> https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2015/08/commuting-kills/ <comment><USER2> The article argues for telecommuting to reduce commutes. I think a far less radical approach would be to open multiple offices and put teams in more affordable secondary cities. Modern technology has made it pretty easy to spread your organization across multiple offices. I work at an organization of less than 35 people that has offices in three cities. Outsourcing IT/HR/building administration makes it pretty low-cost to have additional offices, to the point where it might actually be cheaper when you weigh the fixed overhead of each location against the cheaper office space outside NYC/SF.

I live in Baltimore now, and before that in Wilmington, and I'm astonished that more companies don't have offices in those cities. Both cities have a lot less traffic than D.C. and Philadelphia, respectively, and are well-served by rail. I'd imagine there would be a lot of talented people who would sign up at offices in those cities so long as they weren't backoffice locations and they could still do frontline work.

<comment><USER3> I know this probably sounds crazy to folks from the Bay Area, but I would gladly move offices if my company had remote offices in Boise, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, or Denver. I would even take a small pay-cut as long as I came out ahead when you adjust for cost of living. I don't know why no companies seem to offer this.

<comment><USER4> I feel the same way about NYC. I can see why early-stage companies want to be in the city, but all these Fortune 500 companies, big law firms, and banks wouldn't even have to move very far. Instead, I'm stuck on the subway every day for over an hour (each way) with a few thousand of my nearest and dearest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "...strong, rational and tangible reasons why an employee needs to be based on-site, rather than intangibles like culture, narrative or norms."

What.

This sentiment is exactly what's wrong with trying to push for more remote work. I don't think we have the tools, either technical or managerial, to build fully-remote companies that are as effective as in-person companies. There are niches where this is true, but they're not particularly fun places to work: call centers come to mind. Companies are living, breathing, organic organizations.

The fundamental assumption that I'd challenge is that productivity towards a goal is what's hold back most organizations (or divisions / teams). I think productivity can be a bottleneck, but most of what makes companies successful is doing the _right_ thing, not the _most_ things. (Otherwise, startups could never compete.) As of 2015, I don't believe we have ways to get everybody in a company aligned in ways to make that happen. One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things is to have them hang out with each other. Sitting next to each other, getting coffee with each other, BSing with each other before / after meetings, etc. There's a lot of unstructured communication that's simply lost, even with tools like Slack.

If that direction is there, then you can start to complain about things like lost productivity and commutes. But if there's isn't a strong sense of direction and consensus on where we're going, it doesn't matter how fast everybody is running.

(FWIW, I put my money where my mouth is on this one. I did a 3.5 hour daily commute for 2.5 years, in spite of an office 5 minutes away, because it made things better for me team.)

<comment><USER6> > One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things > is to have them hang out with each other

There are blatant examples to the contrary: Just look at most large organizations. Getting people to work on the right things isn't a matter of spending time together, it's a matter of company culture! In a company that's constrained by processes and pointless bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake hardly anything ever will get done, much less so the right things.

Long commutes are not a sustainable way of living and working. If we don't have the tools for making remote work a realistic option for most companies we simply need better tools.

<comment><USER7> You cant have people drive 2.5 hours to work however that does not make the parent comment incorrect. Working together is the better option and we need better tools for remote workers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> " Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they're needed with zero transmission cost."

Except, it doesn't, because achieving productivity usually requires remote workers to be able to collaborate effectively, and whether they can or not varies wildly.

The author doesn't seem to get this - if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more.

Companies do not want the expense of real estate, amenities, etc

Maybe the author should stop to wonder about "hmmm, i'm clearly not the only one to think of this idea, maybe this hasn't happened because there aren't a lot of huge success stories".

<comment><AUTHOR> You're looking at this from a founder/company perspective. When I wrote that, and most of this post I was thinking of three things: The employee, the greater good (all of us, environment, etc - 'community' for lack of a better word) and the company.

So you could change that first sentence to read:

"Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they're needed with zero transmission cost [to the employee]"

Employee, company and community aren't mutually exclusive. Reducing commuting cost for employee makes for someone who's happier, healthier and has more time available which benefits company and community.

I'd say only considering cost-to-company is less effective and a narrow way to measure how well your work environment and policies are doing.

"if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more..."

An argument that can be used against any innovation with a legacy alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Long commutes are of course a problem.

However, I am not sure the analysis method used in this article is really the way to look at this issue. The fact that lots of people spend 15 minutes sitting on their rear is not a serious problem, despite the fact that you can multiply that 15 minutes by millions of people to get a large number.

The _problem_ is that some people have very long commutes. 30 minutes or more is a problem. An hour or more is a serious problem. 90 minutes or more is, for most jobs, ridiculous.

Actually, I see rather more good news than bad news in the referenced statistics. According to the source ([1], see the table on page 2) only 2.3% of Americans have a one-way commute of 90 or more minutes. Only 7.5% have an hour or more. But 33.5% -- more than a third -- have 30 minutes or more; that is troubling.

By the way, the statistics in the source[1] strike me as a little suspect. In particular, the big bump at "30 to 34 minutes" suggests that a lot of people were thinking, "Oh, about 30 minutes." That kind of estimation is not mentioned among the possible sources of error. Someone was not thinking clearly enough when that Census Bureau report was written.

[1] [https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf](https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf)

<comment><USER10> "30 minutes or more is a problem"

I live 4 miles from midtown Manhattan. That's about a 30 minute bus ride during rush hour. An hour commute is probably the average commute from the suburbs to NYC.

<comment><USER11> Cool fact: The average NYC commute is 79 minutes a day, 40 minutes each way.

<comment><USER10> Are you sure about that? I'm seeing 48 minutes.

[http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers- havelongest-...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-havelongest- commute-times-article-1.1426047)

This includes people commuting from Brooklyn and Queens, which is most likely less than 10 miles to work.

<comment><USER11> That could be right too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I started to walk to work more than a year ago (5km one way, about 45mins). Makes a world of a difference, as it gives me more or less two hours of exercise per day, time to get my mind on/off of work, call family/friends and other stuff. Bottom line for me - it's less the time spent commuting, than whether you can spend it in a useful way.

<comment><USER13> I agree completely. I take the shuttle from SF to Mountain View every day (I work at Google). It's about 70m door to door each way. For the first 6 months of work I was miserable, 70 minutes is way more time than I wanted to check my RSS and Email so I was bored. Boredom kept my mind on the commute, and thinking about the time made me angry.

I decided to use the time to read books as a new years resolution. Having at least 2h a day, 5 days a week to read books has made me fly through books faster than any other time in my life. I've already read 21 books since January and I actually look forward to my reading time now! I think if I had this time at home I would not be using it so peacefully/productively, I'd probably waste it on Netflix.

That said, 70m each way is more than I need. I think 30m each way would be the ideal balance of forced mind-clearing and reasonable work-life balance.

<comment><USER14> Why not do actual work on the shuttle ride?

<comment><USER13> I do enough work at work. Plus I am not very productive on a 13" computer SSHing over flaky highway WiFi while bumping down the highway compared to sitting at a workstation with two 24" monitors, gigabit internet, 12cores, and 64GB RAM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's why I think everyone should bike to work if possible. It has little to no environmental impact and a positive health impact. And because you are killing two birds with one stone by exercising during your commute, you really aren't wasting any time.

<comment><USER16> Biking is fine if you are a prof at a college campus, or the boss of some hip startup, but I cannot arrive at work sweating through a horribly wrinkled suit. We don't have showers.

I have yet to meet anyone who has communized by bike in my city (Vancouver BC) for more than a few years without a major altercation with a motorvehicle. It might be healthy, but it is also physically dangerous.

<comment><USER17> There's a double standard for women in many jobs, even in the most bike friendly city in the US, as a biker I've observed most of my fellow commuters are men. Its easier for me as there's less expectations placed on my appearance. I put on a fresh set of clothes, a hat and I'm good to go. I'm lucky I live where biking is easy, working a non-client facing job, as male and a company with an indoor bike rack and shower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My commute is a solid 2+ hours each way. I thought it would make me crazy, but acceptance has sort of seeped in after a couple of years. On one hand, it would be nice to have free time and/or see my family, but on the other hand, my family simply won't fit into a 900 square foot box in South Bay or a hammock in SF, which is what I could afford in those locales.

<comment><USER19> Mine is a little over 30 minutes in good weather[1] (28 miles of mostly highway), Sirius XM and Audible have been great investments. Its about the right length to get the days work sorted out in my mind, but I would live closer if I could.

The reservation suffers from a serious housing shortage never mind not being a member of the local tribe, and eastern ND has a lot of families of folks working in western ND, so housing is a bit hard to find.

1) 2 hours in crappy, why the heck didn't I go home sooner weather

<comment><USER20> satellite radio is awesome. the best thing about it is it's the same channels and programs everywhere you go in the country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Mark Maunder is being generous with his statistics... With his average 50 min/day commute time, and assuming a 16 hour waking day, you're actually losing a full _2 weeks_ of waking days each year to commuting.

And I think that average belies the large number of people in tech working in dense cities like San Francisco or Seattle where the commute is much worse... We're talking 1-2 hours/day in the Seattle area if you have to cross the bridges.

Commuting is truly costly for time, health, and lifestyle in ways that neither the employers nor the employees usually account for. It's a serious externality that I wish we had a better mechanism for capturing, since people more or less take it for granted that they'll be locked in their cars for a large part of their day.

</comment><comment><USER22> > The way I see it, remote-workers are like work-place superconductivity: > Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they're needed with zero > transmission cost.

I think that's a weak analogy. I think a better one is that you have a core that's off the motherboard but starts up fast. Sure, there's no wake up time, but your communication _with_ the chip is limited by the bus.

We work together to communicate. Being physically remote, even with email, chat, phone, VC, etc. is still lower bandwidth that physical presence. You can certainly make remote work successful, but I think you're lying to yourself if you don't acknowledge that _being together in space matters_.

This article really isn't an argument for remote work any more than it is an argument for living closer to work.

</comment><comment><USER23> Checkout [http://offsite.careers](http://offsite.careers) \-- a professional networking site for remote workers.

</comment><comment><USER24> i love how i moved to be closer to my office, then the office moved some 10miles away to be in a hype place that doesn't even have chairs. only standing desks. and the CEO boasted that sitting kill BS. and here i am, having to drive 20min instead of walking 30min. with an expensive rent next to the old place...

<comment><USER25> At least you are renting and can pick up and leave</comment></comment>


Soylent: Mechanical Turk for Microsoft Word - <AUTHOR> http://futurismic.com/2010/09/29/soylent-is-people-word-processor-plugin-crowdsources-your-editing/ <comment><USER2> Here's the original author's site: <http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/>

Paper: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/papers/soylent- uist2010...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/papers/soylent-uist2010.pdf)

Video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_miZqsPwsc>

Code: <http://code.google.com/p/soylent/>

Slides: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/talks/soylent- uist2010....](http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/talks/soylent- uist2010.pptx)

Please try to link to original content for submissions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've just been reading _A Deepness in the Sky_ with its focussed zipheads, who provide human-level automation in the the Slow Zone. Only difference was that that was realtime.

What I'm trying to say is that this is _creepy_.

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740796>

</comment><comment><USER5> This is wacky beautiful. I look forward to the packaged precompiled plugin so I can try it out myself.

One thing that comes to mind -- it may not be that hard to overwhelm the Mechanical Turk tasks associated with Soylent to reach a situation where I see every single Soylent task from a single document. It's an interesting question to calculate how many people you would need, given the volume of Soylent usage.

The point is that if I control every single worker on your Soylent task, then I can lean a lot about your document. That in turn could lead to exciting conversations with your IT department.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah this is definitely not for sensitive documents. Users have enough trouble already distinguishing between native and web applications, public and private, etc… Now you need to explain the difference between AI and non-AI computation.

<comment><USER6> It could be very nice for blog posts, and website infos. I'm not a native speaker, I'd love to have an army to fix my mistakes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe you can use something like MyGengo and just ask for an english to english translation. ;-)

<http://mygengo.com/>

<comment><USER6> I'd love a service that does english to english translation. It would fix my english and I would learn what I did wrong as well and improve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can not see how this could be efficient. The amount of time you would spend evaluating the different options and the cost of having the edits rejected would not add up.

So alternatively.. Find people you think are good by testing them. Hire them.

I would personally like a few editors that I could trust. This would sort out the privacy issues too. Is there such a service that manages these contracts? It seems like a good business idea.

</comment><comment><USER8> I stopped reading at 'Micro$oft'. I am sorry but that's pretty juvenile.

<comment><USER9> I nearly stopped - but it's the opinion of the blog writer. The video is not from the blog itself, and is definitely worth the watch.

But I agree - stupid things like 'Micro$oft' are a pet peeve of mine. I think people should use what they like and what works better for them. I personally use Windows and Linux, just for different things. And I've have a Mac box to play with if I wasn't broke.

So I suggest to anyone else who didn't watch the video - ignore the irritating blog author and check the video out. It's completely unrelated to the idiotic comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> i hope it doesn't require any downloading like silverlight</comment>


Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/berkeley-programming-languages/

<comment><USER3> The key take away from this:

 _"Part of the problem, he says, is that language designers don't always have practical objectives. "There's a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem," said Rabkin, who recently received his computer science PhD at Berkeley and is now at Princeton working on a post-doc. "_

I was at Google when Go was birthing (not part of the project or team, just co-employed :-)) and asked the team "What problem does this solve?" I asked because I had been part of the original Java team at Sun. One of the things I had learned at Sun from James Gosling, who had previously done a language for window systems, NeWS, was that the only reason to have a new language is that it solved a problem you could not easily solve with the existing languages.

If you look at all of the durable languages, they share this heritage. BASIC solved the problem of what you had to learn before you could actually program problem. FORTRAN, solved the problem of converting Formulae into computation, which was later made into high art in Mathematica. COBOL which could express business process in code, and of course C which was a logical follow on to BLIS which was the minimal wrapping over assembly language so you could implement large systems and still read the code later and know what they were doing.

I didn't get any sort of coherent answer from the Go team at the time. Which for me was an indication they were a solution in search of a problem, and thus not likely to be much more than a niche language. But to be completely fair I've seen good languages like Rexx go nowhere even though they solved a huge problem (automating the integration of different programs).

A co-worker at Google suggested that we should start holding meetings in High Elvish, their reasoning was that it would keep people out of meetings who were at least motivated enough to learn elvish, and it sounded better when you swore. But applying a language change to solve a structural problem was never going to fly.

<comment><USER4> How do you explain Java's massive uptake. It can't be it that it solved some problem uniquely that no other language did (whatever that was in 1995). Without the massive marketing and development by Sun, IBM and Oracle who wanted to use it to undermine the windows platform I doubt Java would have taken off the manner it has.

Same thing with C and C++. Without AT&T's backing of Unix and C it is highly unlikely C would have ended up where it is right now. The initial backing of C++ by AT&T was certainly instrumental in pushing it forward.

Similar examples Python -- interesting niche language until Google picked it up and started pushing it around 2004.

FORTRAN -- IBM's muscle

C# -- doesn't solve anything that Java or C++ couldn't do in 2000 except Microsoft wanted their own proprietary language.

It seems that solving some problem might be optional, but commerical backing and long term support is essential.

<comment><USER3> Java set out to solve two problems, one was portability of 'compiled' code, so OS/ISA independence, and the other was security issues. And Sun was actually in the process of flushing it down the toilet prior to the response it got in Darmdstadt and elsewhere. The big marketing push came when Sun saw it as a way to club Microsoft, that occurred only after people figured that 'life in the browser' didn't care what OS you ran on. And a _lot_ of people wanted to get out from under Microsoft's thumb at the time.

 _"It seems that solving some problem might be optional, but commerical backing and long term support is essential."_

It seems Forth might be a counter example here, what are your thoughts on its relative success?

<comment><USER5> Very few people/projects use Forth…

But, I can think of one or two way more popular and significant counterexamples (although I don't disagree with his general sentiment): Perl and Ruby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "Maybe the solution isn't entirely technical,"

Gee... you think? Programming languages are designed for humans - <USER2> get by just fine with bits and bytes. And a programming language must not only communicate something to the computer, but also to any other humans who have anything to do with said system, if it's doing its job well.

So the problem is entirely social. I wrote something about it a while back:

<http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics>

</comment><comment><USER7> It is interesting they remark towards the end about age having a factor in innovation. I've noticed that as I've aged my ideas are better (at least for me, heh) but that I have less time or desire to implement them.

</comment><comment><USER8> On the correlation between bearded language designers and language popularity: [http://www.alenz.org/mirror/khason/why-microsoft-can-blow- of...](http://www.alenz.org/mirror/khason/why-microsoft-can-blow-off- with-c.html)

<comment><USER9> That author needs to either learn English or blog in his native language. It was downright painful to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of an earlier piece, the one about VB. Merit of a given PL and its success/popularity are correlated, surely, but it's more complex than that. They can be orthogonal by varying degrees, I'd say.

What they really seem to be asking is why hasn't a language which has improved substantially on C received similar adoption. Possibly another qualifier is that the language mustn't be C-like. Or there's an implicit value judgment about Java in there. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> This subject has been covered extensively, but rarely in the popular press. One correction: C wasn't "popularized" in 1977. It was available inside Bell Labs and in a few C.S. departments on early PDP-11 Unix versions, but it did not really become popular until the late 1980s, when it became a viable choice for development on MS-DOS and Windows (with some ugly extensions to handle 16-bit address segments).</comment>


Show HN: Chrome extension that hides Medium.com articles on HN and DN - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-medium/fjfdkhihpiabibpdkddchbkmmbabhpaj <comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, why do some people want to hide Medium articles?

<comment><USER3> Its not the articles, its the platform (and its aesthetics). Medium is not meant for things like code samples and shoehorning them in leads to these fullwidth blocks which are hard to read. The fullwidth images and embeds are also somewhat annoying.

There are better places to reproduce your content

 _edit, fixing a typo_

<comment><USER4> so you would rather hide the "content" because you dont like how it's presented?

<comment><USER5> Why do you care what other people are hiding?

<comment><USER6> Because it's dumb and I don't like dumb things and it's frustrating that people spend their time on dumb things when there are so many non-dumb things that they could do instead. Clutters up HN & the Chrome Store and reinforces dumb thinking.

<comment><USER6> At this point, I guess I'm honored to be downvoted. This community is trending toward pathetic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Or maybe just, you know, don't click them?

</comment><comment><USER8> I just submitted something I wrote on Medium. Did I break some rule?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at all, there's a ton of good content on Medium. This was just a little project, not some commentary on Medium as a platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And what about an extension to hide "Show HN" posts?

<comment><AUTHOR> It'd be pretty easy to mod this to do that. I can't tell if you're being snarky but I could actually do that if you really want me to. I could also change the alert to read "# dreams were crushed."

<comment><USER9> I think it would be better to use GreaseMonkey for this than having an extension.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like being able to turn it on/off just by clicking the icon. Also, Chrome. You're right, though, it'd make a good GreaseMonkey script.

<comment><USER10> Tampermonkey is great for this kind of stuff on Chrome. Provides quick toggle for userscripts too.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgffkkebhmkfjojejmpbldmpobfkfo?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why? What's wrong with an article that just happens to be hosted on medium?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some people like to visit Medium directly, some people try to avoid Medium altogether. This is for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I accidentally have something similar: since I have ghostery on and it blokes some adobe typekit JS, medium.com articles are all blank except for the top image for me.

<comment><USER13> At first I thought this is an oversight on their part for not providing a web safe font fallback, but they do. Maybe it's because when ghostery blocks the url, so the browser thinks the font exists and doesn't fall back to the next one somehow.

<comment><USER12> I have no idea, it's somewhat intermittent. Anyway it's very annoying and it's making me avoid medium somehow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe this is for folks who already see a lot of Medium articles on Twitter, etc. and want less saturation of Medium articles.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely one of the target audiences :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So why do people dislike Medium.com articles?

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe he works for Quartz or Vox!

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't. That'd be a hell of a competitive strategy, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of those IRC bots that would automatically ban AOL subscribers...</comment>


Twitter sues U.S. government over demand for records of anti-Trump account - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ReutersTech/status/850068537922248704 <comment><USER2> This is the account: [https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis](https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-lawsuit- idUSKBN178...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-lawsuit- idUSKBN1782PH)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's more discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14053958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14053958)</comment>


I code like a girl - <AUTHOR> http://volumelabs.net/i-code-like-a-girl/ <comment><USER3> > _What is now considered a male-dominated field, was once defined as "women's > work."_

Once? It's naive to think that these attitudes do not persist, albeit in somewhat disguised forms, perhaps.

At some universities, for instance, engineers regard CS majors as "wimps". Engineering is hard, CS is soft.

Moreover, think about how there is an attitude that some "softer" or "easier" programming is lower on the pecking order. While programming as a broad category may not be "women's work", web design (even with client and server scripting) is "for girls" and, say, writing drivers for a network switch is for "real men".

Oh, the hard/soft stereotyping in digital tech is alive and kicking!

<comment><USER4> I briefly did front end web design work many many years ago. Now I have a masters in software engineering, two books published in web scraping in Python and Java, and years of experience in back end Java, database architecture, data science, and all that jazz.

The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web development or UI/UX work. I removed all mention of "HTML/CSS" type skills from LinkedIn, but that hasn't stopped it. I'm beginning to suspect that removing my photo from public profiles would probably do more to stop the inappropriate job spam than anything I could actually change in LinkedIn, however...

<comment><USER5> > The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web > development or UI/UX work.

I'm transgender, and I can tell you that I got that kind of spam both before and after I transitioned. In fact, most recruiter spam I've ever gotten is wholly irrelevant to my skills.

You're getting that spam because the positions are in high demand, so there are a lot of them, and recruiters will spam all their positions to every single email address in their database.

They just plain have no respect for other human beings. Half the recruiter spam I get uses my old name, even though I legally changed it almost a year ago and changed it on my resume (which I posted to all job sites) a few months before that. I also list on every job site that I cannot relocate and I'm only seeking full-time work. Most of the recruiter spam I get is for positions out of town and for contract jobs. They never get it. I've written scathing emails to recruiters lambasting them for suggesting I uproot my life and move out of state for a shitty 6-month contract. I usually don't get a reply.

One recruiter took the cake. He emailed me about one such position, then called me the next day after I ignored his email, and I told him I wasn't interested in any contract work and that I don't ever want to do business with him. A few days later, he emails me again about the same position. I replied with a Cease & Desist notice making it clear that he is to have no contact with me from now on, and then he calls me again to try and convince me to take the job. I spent the next few minutes shouting at him and berating him for harassment. I planned to contact his firm's HR department about his conduct, but I never got around to it, sadly.

<comment><USER4> That's good to know! It's so hard to tell, having only the direct experience of being a single gender in the industry, what is normal and what isn't. I try to stay away from it, but some days, it seems like I'm filtering all my experiences through Medium blog posts about gender inequality and tech- conference-horror-story-of-the-day BS.

I might have to go back to front end work if that's really the hot thing everyone's clamoring for these days... (kidding! I love what I'm doing right now).

It's always interesting to hear about transgendered experiences in the sciences and programming. We need more points of view with control groups! ;)

<comment><USER6> Maybe you should stop looking for gender inequality without direct evidence.

Crazy thought I know.

<comment><USER4> The point was that I wasn't actually looking. So many of the articles on HN, and on tech blogs/news sites around the Internet are about gender inequality. As a human being, I can only encounter so much of it before it starts to affect how I view and interpret events around me, without realizing it. "Are they asking me to be a speaker at this conference because I'll provide valuable knowledge to the attendees, or is this a 'token speaker' situation?" It gets to you, after a while, even if you're actively trying not too let it.

My whole point was that that situation is bad, and hearing experiences such as ones from MTF or FTM transgendered individuals in tech can be valuable. I don't see any reason for you to be a jerk about it here.

<comment><USER6> I just watched you blame recruiter spam on your gender and you think the blame lies in all the talk online about gender inequality?

The blame lies squarely with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes I get a little happy - maybe even proud - when I read about the achievements of women who pioneered this field (especially the _awesome_ Admiral Hopper.)

Then I stop smiling and remind myself that, even in praise, _it 's not relevant._

<comment><USER8> Sometimes people claim that women are biologically, statistically, just not as good/interested as men at programming/technology, and point to current gender balance in tech as evidence of this ("There's a reason there's lots of male programmers, men must be just better!")

Remembering some of these women, and the early history like this, is very relevant today to show that that's nonsense.

<comment><USER9> It's not nonsense.

Modern women are statisticaly less interested in programming. That's because boys 20 years ago got c-64 or PC because they wanted to play games, and girls 20 years ago got barbies.

Turns out barbie doesn't have the same side effects.

<comment><USER10> I got basketballs and golf clubs. I had to beg my dad to get me my first amiga 500. He agreed only because he thought I'd might get rich from it one day. So my interest, to the best that I can tell, was self originated.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. Geeks used to be picked on, and bullied. Maths and science wasn't cool.

<comment><USER11> there is a difference between it being cool and being acceptable. you had an identity as a nerd. you were accepted as a nerd, and cool people were probably happy that you were because it put you lower on the totem pole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a damn shame that ENIAC's programmers and those that followed them get no greater mention in the annals of history than the footnote that "computers before 1945 were women". I had a really good CSSE education, yet until recently, if you asked me to name a notable female computer scientist, Countess Lovelace or Grace Hopper would be the only person to come to mind, and I would be a little hazy on their accomplishments to boot (then, I would have said something about Hopper creating COBOL when her work was really quite a bit more fundamental and wide ranging than that, and as for Lady Lovelace, even now without peeking at Wikipedia, I think she had something to do with the math surrounding Babbage's engines and couldn't be more specific). It took a recent Imgur posting to become aware of people like Margaret Hamilton, who _led_ some absolutely astounding work for the Apollo Program. I'm sure there are other women of whom I'm ignorant that are every bit as important to modern computer science and software engineering as luminaries such as Turing or von Neumann. If some kind of history of the profession is to be included (and I think it should), there should at least be some mention of them during one's CSSE education.

<comment><USER5> You can also add a couple more in somewhat more modern times:

* Lynn Conway, who co-launched the Mead & Conway revolution that made VLSI feasible for the first time

* Sophie Wilson, who developed the ARM architecture

<comment><USER3> Did you cherry pick these examples to some ironic purpose?

Sophie Wilson was "born Roger Wilson" (Source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson)).

"While struggling with life in a male role, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children." (Source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway))

<comment><USER5> Trans women are women.

<comment><USER3> Of course, I don't disagree with you, but think of it from, say, this angle:

"Hey, class full of young women with university aspirations! Don't be put off from entering science and engineering fields. Look, there are even famous women in tech such as X, Y and Z which are behind some technology that you probably use, like the instruction language understood by the chips in most tablets and cell phones. Oh, they were born men and even had wives and kids, but don't let details like Y chromosomes and functioning penises be a distraction from this forcefully convincing rhetoric which I painstakingly prepared last night in my hotel room, on the backs of these two crumpled restaurant receipts. I'm confident that you can identify with them as human beings with struggles in their lives---just like you!"

My point is that certain kinds of examples can detract from a thesis, by drawing focus to some other thesis or factors that may be perceived as confounding or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why can't we just code like professionals ?

Sidenote: Disclaimer: I was heavily influenced by my Biology professors. I don't think society evolved in vacuum separate from genetic evolution. So while I don't appreciate insulting people by gender. I do however think there are gender differences.

Another person on HN linked me to this documentary, which opened my mind. [https://vimeo.com/19707588](https://vimeo.com/19707588)

<comment><USER8> > Why can't we just code like professionals ?

What does that mean? Suit and tie? Clean shaven, short back and sides?

<comment><USER3> Professional means getting paid, but there is a nuance of doing a proper job to deserve pay (even if there is no pay); a FOSS project that hasn't received even a dime in donations can be professionally developed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the topic of equality in general - As an _old man_ and a father of a 22 year old woman let me tell you what I've observed - women don't need your help and when you act like they need your protection you're no better than someone who treats them as weaklings. It's a fine line and imho the best bet is to just treat them as you would anyone else.

<comment><USER15> Ugh. I am considering your intentions good, but your statement sounds evil.

Most human beings need protection and help. Programming is hard. Learning to program is hard. Leaving happily in these crazy times is hard.

Just be empathetic, dont be condescending and bam, your help will be greatly appreciated by men and women. That's what I think one should treat anyone else in this particular regard.

<comment><USER14> I'm sorry, did you just call me evil because I said you should treat women equally? Get your head checked.

<comment><USER15> >.. did you just call me evil.. No, I did not.

> Get your head checked. Is this the kind of treatment you were talking about? > :D

<comment><USER14> Are you trolling me? I don't understand what you want. Be straight forward and stop wasting my time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A good read. Although I was surprised the grandmother of programming, Ada Lovelace, wasn't mentioned.

 _Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage 's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world's first computer programmer._

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

<comment><USER17> As interesting as Ada Lovelace's and Charles Babbage's story is, their efforts have had little (if any) influence on the computer we know today. In a sense, they are not completely relevant when talking about modern computing. I also feel Lovelace tend to distract the subject on women in computing.

<comment><USER18> Likewise Leibniz was the first computer scientist. As if anyone cares.

<comment><USER13> I care. I like to know the truth not the marketing angle. Do you mind explaining ?

<comment><USER19> Probably a reference to Leibniz having discovered/invented the binary number system back in the 1679 [1]. He also worked on theories of algorithms and designed calculating machines [2].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number#History)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Compu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Computation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20>
        > "Software design and programming were considered clerical work."

I realize that there's a certain art of code, and even a science that goes into the underlying algorithms, languages, and methodologies. Indeed I've spent the majority of my life now in one way or another transfixed by software development.

But it seems to me that the vast amount of code written is still, in fact, "clerical work". Whether it's gluing together enterpriseBeanBuilderExpressionListMochaBusinessLogicAuditingFactories, or hooking up your node.js to your express.js to your bootstrap.js to transfer JSON over REST into your DOM, or even converting your 4000 character, 50 pipe bash one-liners into nicely polished scripts that properly account for exit codes, handle non-standard locations for sysfs, and work on a multitude of platforms, at the end of the day, a lot of this really does come down to clerical-style work. The difference is that the language, terminology, abstractions, and platforms are more obtuse than the previous generation's clerical work. The nouns are different and strange, but the predicates are all the same.

There are indeed wondrous areas in computer science and software engineering, but I think for most of us, we're just doing fairly menial work. We feel smart doing it, because it's still new enough that the objects and content of it are still uncustomary for most folks, and in fact the best of secretaries and clerks have indeed possessed great intelligence. But at the end of the day, we need to recognize that most of what we do is mere clerical work, glorified only by the odd shapes of the more obscure symbol keys on our keyboards.

 _ducks_

"I swear, by clerical, I meant the clergy!"

 _ducks again_

</comment><comment><USER21> > It becomes increasingly important to value each member of a programming team > regardless of gender, age, race, or creed to attract and keep the best minds > to build our future software.

And this is actually what you don't want to do. You don't want to ignore gender, age, race, or creed. You want people to understand it, be open to the value it brings, connect with others outside their comfort zone, and embrace the differences. Doing things 'regardless' is how we've got here in the first place. We are all different. Ignoring those differences is not helping the problem.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have never heard anyone in real life tell a woman that she "codes like a girl.", as if that would be a diss anyway?

Given that anyone with even a basic understanding of history would be awed by some of the women in the industry (ada and grace anyone), you would have to pretty stupid to come to the conclusion that women cant code.

<comment><USER23> When a guy tells another guy "You run like a girl.", "You hit like a girl", "sit like a girl", etc... it's historically an insult.

Recently, there has been an effort to "take the phrase back" and turn "... like a girl" into a good thing - instead of being considered an insult - <USER2> the commercials that tout "Running like a girl".

I've never heard "coding... like a girl" either, so you have to frame it as part of this movement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> _" The only human labor noted in the press was the initial design of the machine, which was performed by men."_

Who gets the credit for e.g. iPhone? Chinese workers? That person who was tweaking the icons to look pixel-perfect (pre-iOS7)? CEO?

<comment><USER25> Apple does - I doubt anyone truly believes that Steve Jobs personally designed the whole iPhone; also, the Chinese workers are at least in the public consciousness - apart from the Foxconn labour controversies, each unit has 'Made in China' written on it somewhere.

If as the article says the ENIAC news reports were along the lines of 'here is a machine that can calculate trajectories, and these are the men who designed it', who's to know that maybe half of the effort was undertaken by others not mentioned?

<comment><USER24> designed != implemented

<comment><USER25> My wording not theirs, and incidental to the point I was making.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It think this has nothing to do with gender: In those early projects those who got the biggest respect (like John Neumann) have done the intellectual heavy- lifting. Seriously, that guy was a genius. Today it is the same way: The CTO or chief scientist of an elite company gets much bigger respect than a subordinate programmer who mostly does what he/she is instructed to do. This is not a gender issue in my opinion. Women like Yahho CEO Marissa Mayer or researcher/Coursera founder Daphne Koller are much more respected than an average programer guy maybe at a mediocre company.

<comment><USER27> You are naming anecdotes (really just one that is relevant to the era of history in question) involving individual people, while the writer is pointing out more general trends. I'm going to sympathize with author.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've heard _You punch like a girl_ , _You drive like a girl_ and similar before, but never _You code like a girl_. Which is good, I guess.

<comment><USER27> Coding doesn't involve as much kinetic and immediate action, and I can't imagine it being infantilized. When it comes to violence, you can be weak, and so "like a girl". "Driving like a woman" I think means to drive naively, like a child, which women have generally been seen as equivalent to for thousands of years. (Edit: not that I agree with any of that, of course; it's how gender is constructed)

<comment><USER29> Now that Ip Man is a popular movie (?) is "punch like a girl" still an insult?

<comment><USER27> I haven't seen it. One can only assume insults like "[violent act] like a girl" is still used among male youth to horrible effect, encouraging more violence and self-hatred.

<comment><USER29> As a male youth with very little experience with people in general, I hate people who make me look bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Tip for anyone having trouble reading this in Chrome: Hit F12, select "elements", go over to "Styles", and scroll down to find the "font-weight" and "color" entries, and uncheck them. This will let the default (readable!) font settings show through. For those of us who spend a lot of time on needlework and other fine tasks, it helps a lot!

I don't know squat about CSS or how to fix this for real, but I've bumbled around enough to be able to override this crap when it makes an article physically uncomfortable to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> By the way, note that a "woman's work is never done"\---aha! I missed this obvious connection to software at first. :)

</comment><comment><USER31> the title is provocative, but the content is better.

it's funny how grown women are referred to as girls, yet it's less common that grown men are referred to as boys - in my experience.

<comment><USER10> Women often refer to each other as girls. Men don't usually to each other as boys.

<comment><USER32> interestingly this might be because girls like to retain some semblance of youth.

anecdotally my girlfriend (Russian if that makes any difference) absolutely hates when I refer to her as a young woman, or use the word "woman" at all. She much prefers to be referred to as a girl.

I have no issues with being called a man.. not saying that this pattern is everywhere but it's very apparent with her and her family.

<comment><USER33> Yet lots of folks say "Mr. Smith? That sounds like my Dad! Call me John!" Which is much the same thing?

<comment><USER32> but "Mister" is not "Man" even my girlfriend doesn't mind being called "Miss" or "Ms", she might take exception to "Misses".. but I don't think anybody assumes at her age anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> TIL programmers evolved from being secretaries to bricklayers.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why is mentioning transphobia such a downvote-trigger?

</comment><comment><USER35> Flagged for being transphobic and gender-essentialist.

</comment><comment><USER35> Flagged for being transphobic.</comment>


My first Android app after a year - <AUTHOR> http://blog.avabodh.com/2012/12/my-first-android-app-after-year.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting. A couple of years ago any new app would see a huge boost on the first few days due to being on the latest/new app list. Now that Google expanded their lists, new apps lose visibility.

</comment><comment><USER3> don't you think that was a small number ?

<comment><USER4> From his/her post:

> _The total number of downloads are not much. But this is not bad at all if I > consider the fact that this is my first app, total time I spent to develop > this app and features provided by this app._</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you emoji-code your contacts? - <AUTHOR> For example I prefix my 'old' contacts with the 'zzZ' emoji instead of deleting them. That makes it easier to dismiss them in a search.<p>I tried to use groups but (at least on the iPhone) I find this method better. <comment><USER2> You just made my day!This is really smart and easy way to managing contacts!!!</comment>


Why Limit the Format of a Password? - <AUTHOR> http://joshtronic.com/2013/09/02/why-limit-the-format-of-a-password/#.UiTBZhavIyA

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure it's so they don't have to quote the input before they run it through through their form regex to see if it's not malicious (XSS) user input.</comment>


Retguard: OpenBSD/Clang - <AUTHOR> https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=150317547021396&w=2 <comment><USER2> I love the line: _I spoke a lot with Todd Mortimer. Apparently I told him that I felt return-address protection was impossible, so a few weeks later he sent a clang diff to address that issue..._

<comment><USER3> I know right

Strong opinions, loosely held

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The volume and quality of tools coming out of the OpenBSD community in recent years has been absolutely awe-inspiring.

I'm presently able to do the entirety of my personal project work on the OS and I'm only a couple of tools from being able to do the same professionally.

Keep it up, y'all.

</comment><comment><USER5> I also must be missing something. XORing the return address on the stack with the stack pointer is similar to other stack protection mechanisms. I forget the precise name of it, but I'm pretty sure one of the existing stack protection tools does exactly this? MSVC's /GS feature is similar but slightly different in that it XORs the return address with a random value initialized on module load.

However, the claim that ROP is impacted seems a bit flimsy to me. After all, ROP only requires that the C3 (RET) or C2 xx yy (RETN YYXX) byte sequence be present at the end of it; these sequences do occur at the end of a function, but they also occur in other places (such as anywhere the byte C3 arises in compiled machine code). ROP tools are programmed to look for the C3/C2 XX YY sequences and do not know or care whether these sequences are at the end of a function. The post is claiming that by transforming the ends of functions, ROP will be affected; but given that it seems to makes no attempt to remove C3 and C2 bytes from elsewhere in the machine code, that ROP tools will in fact continue to work just fine.

Basically the whole thesis of this patch seems to be that "existing stack protection methods will change function epilogues and therefore break ROP". I don't think it will have much of an effect on existing ROP tools. What am I missing?

<comment><USER6> > but given that it seems to makes no attempt to remove C3 and C2 bytes from > elsewhere in the machine code, that ROP tools will in fact continue to work > just fine.

To use ROP you need not only the RET instruction, but the code before it. You want to execute some existing function and return only then, not just return.

Buffer overflow attacks rely on overwriting return address, which is stored on the stack, with address of some code that attacker wants to execute. But if before returning the function XORs the value attacker used with some value he does not know, it is impossible for attacker to start ROP chain.

Though like with ASLR, it is possible to defeat this with a leak. If attacker can defeat ASLR, he likely can defeat this as well.

<comment><USER5> As I said to the other user who replied to a similar comment, these observations apply only to exploitation of stack buffer overflows, and hence don't rebut what I've said about this not mitigating ROP as a general technique (which is also used in the exploitation of non-stack-based vulnerabilities like use-after-free).

<comment><USER6> You have not replied to this:

> To use ROP you need not only the RET instruction, but the code before it. > You want to execute some existing function and return only then, not just > return.

Ok, you found RET in some unexpected place, like an immediate value. But do you want to execute the code before it? Most likely it is just garbage.

Usually you want to return to mprotect() and then chain somewhere else from it. With this mitigation even if you manage to jump to mprotect() function, you will not be able to make it chain to the next function you want.

<comment><USER5> Yes, gadgets arising from non-epilogue instances of C2/C3 are used frequently. In fact they are most often critical and the ROP exploit would not work without them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like I'm missing something here. An infoleak is required to successfully ROP against ASLR (otherwise the attacker doesn't know what to overwrite the return address with). Once an infoleak is available, the address of the stack can be leaked. I'm not really sure this does much beyond requiring attackers to modify their existing exploits.

<comment><USER8> It increases the complexity of the attack. Usually, stack cookies make ROP harder these days but guessing the cookie only has a complexity of 8*256 (on OpenBSD), but xor'ing the return address with another value does increase the complexity even more. And that might be good news for programs that use fork a lot (like nginx) and hence don't get a refresh for ASLR/stack cookies for every request (like e.g. sshd on OpenBSD does [which does does fork/exec to ensure ASLR/cookies are refreshed]).

<comment><USER9> Perhaps OpenBSD should consider randomizing the per-process stack canary value upon fork().

<comment><USER8> How does that work? Should the kernel walk the stack to change all the saved cookie values of the forked copy? I doubt the kernel even knows where the saved cookie values are stored on the stack. Also, that would make fork quite slow, depending on how the deep the stack was when the fork happened.

<comment><USER9> The post-fork canary value could be paired with the stack pointer at which it became valid. If not valid, the process could walk a linked list of pre-fork canary and stack pointer pairs, to find the correct value to use. Would be interesting to see the performance hit on such an approach.

<comment><USER10> Or not. The stack canary is not the only random value reset upon exec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Microsoft has a much more sophisticated control flow integrity mechanism called control flow guard [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/mt6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/mt637065\(v=vs.85\).aspx).

LLVM also has an impressive set of CFI capabilities: [https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ControlFlowIntegrity.html](https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ControlFlowIntegrity.html).

The proposal just sounds like higher entropy stack cookies.

<comment><USER12> I think the LLVM CFI options only apply to C++ programs?

Microsoft's CFG is cool, but works on the other end to this - by protecting CALL instructions instead of RET.

Stack cookies are similar, yes. This mechanism combines two ASLR-randomized values (the caller address and the stack address) to control program flow. Stack canaries use a constant random cookie per object file to detect stack smashing. Retguard raises the bar for successful ROP attacks, just as CFG raises the bar for function pointer corruption attacks.

Full disclosure, I am the author of the clang diff that kicked this off. The appeal of this mechanism is that it is cheap enough to apply in every function, pollutes the ROP gadget space with instructions that permute the next return address, and requires attackers to have more information in order to kick off ROP chains (the address where they are writing their ROP chain). I know about some of the other stuff people are working on (CPI seems promising), and look forward to turning those things on when possible. Meanwhile, this mitigation is cheap, localized inside every function, and doesn't require any program modification in the vast majority of situations (programs that inspect stack frames without consulting the unwind info may have problems), so is fairly easy to turn on everywhere.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, you are correct. I was actually thinking of clang's SafeStack ([https://clang.llvm.org/docs/SafeStack.html](https://clang.llvm.org/docs/SafeStack.html)) and Microsoft's Return Flow Guard ([http://xlab.tencent.com/en/2016/11/02/return-flow- guard/](http://xlab.tencent.com/en/2016/11/02/return-flow-guard/)). Both use shadow or alternate stacks.

Regarding cost, a few years back, I implemented a shadow stack system via static binary rewriting. The overhead was very low, 1-2%. SafeStack claims < 0.1%.

<comment><USER12> Ah, Return Flow Guard is cool - I did not know that MS had done that!

I like SafeStack, but was disappointed to learn about the limitations with shared libraries. Some SafeStack is better than no SafeStack though, and it can probably be turned on without too much effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe we seen this before? :)

[http://i.imgur.com/DW1dqnV.png](http://i.imgur.com/DW1dqnV.png) [http://i.imgur.com/vZnpKwL.png](http://i.imgur.com/vZnpKwL.png)

Seriously.. these projects should talk more about each others stuff..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a better mail archive link: [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=150317547021396&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=150317547021396&w=2)

EDIT: Thanks mods? :-)

<comment><USER14> Thanks, we've updated the link from [https://marc.ttias.be/openbsd- tech/2017-08/msg00349.php](https://marc.ttias.be/openbsd- tech/2017-08/msg00349.php) to the original archive site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This dude should choose a better font for his blog.

<comment><USER4> I hope you're kidding, but for the uninitiated:

MARC, or marc.info, is the Mailinglist ARCive. You're reading email.</comment></comment>


Save Should Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.postal-code.com/binarycode/2008/05/12/save-should-die/ <comment><USER2> I have to admit, the lack of a "Save" function is one of the things I like best about OneNote (which seems to be my favorite app, these days).</comment>


Cisco tells employees to avoid traveling in China and then backtracks - <AUTHOR> https://navva.org/singapore/singapore/cisco-tells-employees-to-avoid-traveling-in-china-and-then-backtracks/ <comment><USER2> Is this Chinese propaganda? Because it's clearly not written by native English speakers.</comment>


Qwant Maps: open-source and privacy-preserving map - <AUTHOR> https://betterweb.qwant.com/qwant-maps-a-open-and-privacy-focused-map/ <comment><USER2> > All components developed by Qwant Maps are open source so that users can > contribute directly to improve their experience with the map: they can > contribute either to the Qwant Maps code or to the enrichment of the data > directly in OpenStreetMap.

This is an important takeaway.

One of the pain points in the OpenStreetMap experience has been lack of performance of the reverse geocoding engine (input lat/lon, get POIs/adress). Or so I hear/see. It looks like they worked around this by only letting the user click on known POIs.

One small nitpick: I find the simplified polygons to be... too polygonal (forests, bodies of water, etc) at lower zoom levels. I don't know much about this field, but that's probably a result of not picking the right points when reducing the shape complexity? A bit like what bilinear/other filtering does for raster.

<comment><USER3> The simplified polygons are a result of using vector tiles, more specifically from OpenMapTiles project, as noted in copyright notice. They need to be simplified in order to achieve reasonable size. Although we can argue how much is too much.

<comment><USER2> This is true, but you can be smarter about which points you prune from the polygon. If you take a random polygon and delete random points, you will likely end up with a pointy shape (more so if you only leave a triangle).

I don't see why vector tiles should lower the end result's quality. In the end this is strictly an aliasing issue.

Take those two zoom levels as an example. In the middle of the screen, a big portion of the forest is discarded:

[https://www.qwant.com/maps/#map=7.92/50.4850901/16.1876218](https://www.qwant.com/maps/#map=7.92/50.4850901/16.1876218)

[https://www.qwant.com/maps/#map=8.10/50.4787168/16.2208950](https://www.qwant.com/maps/#map=8.10/50.4787168/16.2208950)

This isn't a very good example because those polygons were likely distinct, but a better job could be done by joining them. I wonder what kind of data is available to the vector engine. Would the pruning/simplification be done server-side, or client-side (with the client only requesting parts of the dataset)? In the later case, I feel like a smarter ordering of the primitives, and maybe some hinting metadata, could make a visible difference already.

On the other hand, it seems that they went with splines instead of polygons for roads, which produces a smoothed-out result. I think they should probably do the same for water bodies and green areas at lower zoom levels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with OpenstreetMap based map is that there are no good reversed geocoding to search locations. For example, Osmand app is perfectly fine to use except I can't search location by postal code. Pasting the address does not work and searching only the street name leading to multiple city with same street name.

What I am doing now is searching the location in Google, getting the coordinate and searching the coordinate in OSM for offline map. A pretty dumb workaround but nothing can beat Google's resources on refining their map.

If this project aimed to be the consumer version of openstreetmap, then I would claim that reversed geocoding is the first thing that need to be fixed.

<comment><USER5> Is that not what this very article describes?

> Mimirsbrunn (or simply Mimir) is the search engine of Qwant Maps. It allows > to search for the following "punctual" geospatial objects: addresses, > administrative areas and points of interest. It is a web service of > geocoding (or more precisely geoparsing) that matches the user unstructured > text query with a specific point (or area) on the map (i.e. a latitude and a > longitude). The complexity of the problem is to disambiguate user requests. > The roots of this ambiguity are numerous. First of all there are a large > number of possible interpretations in the world for a given mention of a > place: the difficulty is to choose the most "relevant" interpretation. Then > there is the natural ambiguity due to the natural language: the user often > looks for a place whose the exact spelling is not necessarily known.

<comment><USER6> How does Mimirsbrunn differ from Pelias? [https://pelias.io](https://pelias.io)

<comment><USER7> Both are geocoders using OpenStreetMap data and backed with Elasticsearch. The main difference is how they handle geographical context, eg to determine in which city/region each place is located. Which is useful both for indexing the data and producing human-readable labels.

Pelias is using its own gazeteer ([https://whosonfirst.org/](https://whosonfirst.org/)) to index locations and remarkable zones. Whereas Mimirsbrunn relies only on OSM data for this task using Cosmogony ([https://github.com/osm-without- borders/cosmogony](https://github.com/osm-without-borders/cosmogony)), a tool that extracts official administrative boundaries and other shapes from OSM data. But the world is a complicated place, and OSM tagging scheme doesn't always lend itself to geocoding purposes. So it comes with a lot a caveats which are still being working on :)

<comment><USER6> Thanks! I can see how using Cosmogony can make sense if Who's on First is too complex but I'm afraid OSM doesn't have enough coverage of administrative boundaries. The boundaries are mostly not visible in the physical world and thus cannot be mapped in the traditional sense.

I wonder if there's an open catalog of boundary data analogous to [https://openaddresses.io/](https://openaddresses.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Link to the live map: [https://www.qwant.com/maps/](https://www.qwant.com/maps/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! It's absolutely baffling that they would write a blog post introducing their map and not include a link.

<comment><USER10> I've been looking for it too, with no luck! Thanks for the link

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hate to be "that guy", but in their enthusiasm I think the writers forgot to account for the "what is this?" demographic. I know what OSM is. I understand that Google Maps tracks me to no end. I'm curious what exactly this is in a nutshell, and it would be good for one of the early paragraphs. It looks like a UI on top of OSM, but this wouldn't be the first. I assume there's something else special here.

I appreciate any work in this area. I like the idea of a self-hosted map, if indeed this is open source to that extent.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is cool, but how is it privacy-preserving? The server gets to see my exact search terms, and also which tile areas I'm zooming in on.

Is it just that it's not linked to an account? If so, openrouteservice fits the same bill: [https://maps.openrouteservice.org/](https://maps.openrouteservice.org/)

<comment><USER13> Trying out the live map, it does seem like "just" a much, _much_ nicer interface to openstreetmap. And it does seem to do routing, but openrouteservice is something that I use when I plan a multi-day hike in the mountains, while qwant knows/shows the opening hours of shops around me, more like google maps.

The two seem to be quite complementary. Each seems to beat google maps in their own arena, at least where I live.

<comment><USER14> StreetComplete has been collecting business hours for OSM, that is likely where this data is coming from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We're getting to the point where mapping is becoming a simple apt-get install away, and that's a great thing.

Projects like this are important not so much because of the service they provide, but for the software that's being open sourced.

For example I was able to set up a mapping server by compiling (only to get the latest versions) mapnik and osm2pgsql, downloading data from OSM, and voilà... Next step is way finding, and there are a few options available.

Now I have another one to look into ;-)

</comment><comment><USER16> I really tried to use qwant, but their exact match operator (« ») is unusable from a spanish keyboard, and guess the same happens for other languages, while "keyword" seems more reasonable. I've tried to contact them many times through many channels, never had a reply.

Qwant is not bad as a google alternative, but if this simple things are not polished and it's basically impossible to give them feedback, I'm not even gonna try.

<comment><USER17> I used Qwant for a while (lite, the main version is so cluttered), but found the results to be hardly usable.

I do hope they manage to stay afloat though, as I am happy about any Google challenger.

<comment><USER16> Results in spanish are not bad. For the time I used it it was useful. But there's the problem I mentioned. I use operators a lot and I can't live without them. I don't want to use alt+numbers just for the basic one, and also, everything seems or not translated to spanish, or only half-translated. I don't really get it, since you have Spain + most latin america as a market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I could recommend mapy.cz (there is English language interface).

[https://en.mapy.cz/](https://en.mapy.cz/)

They are based on topographic map with very high accuracy - better for biking and walking in the forest. They search the route for road bike and mtb.

There is also an Android app.

</comment><comment><USER19> Glad it has bicycle directions, since that's my main use personally.

I just tried a search, and it got a POI location (a Minneapolis park building) right even though I misspelled it, which is something other non-Google maps are weak on in my experience. But weirdly I couldn't get it find my home address (also Minneapolis), either with street number/name/direction, adding the zip code or in full.

<comment><USER20> OSM-based geocoding often fails if you include the house number (because that number almost certainly isn't mapped in OSM). Try removing that.

obPlug: if you're after OSM-powered bike directions, I run [https://cycle.travel/map](https://cycle.travel/map)

<comment><USER19> That makes sense as an explanation. But it means it's hard to use in a city that has long streets with the same name the whole way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This may work in France, but it's shockingly bad in New York.

I'm unable to find addresses that it doesn't think I mean Brooklyn or Queens instead of Manhattan. If I replace New York, NY with Manhattan, NY in the search, to try to stay out of Brooklyn or Queens, it ends up showing addresses in Europe instead.

For instance:

        144 W 48th St, Manhattan, NY

Goes instead to:

        144 Rue Frédéric Manhès (Champ-sur-Drac)

I haven't deciphered how the search works to take me even to famous addresses in New York City, unless the address is in the place's name.

If I try to find a hotel called "Grande Cloche" in Brussels, it's the top result:

        A la Grand Cloche

If I type Hilton NYC, doesn't work, but Hilton New York does. Seems like it's ok with literal names, not ok with addresses or geo names.

Of maps that work well for location finding, directions, and transit, in both Europe and America, Apple Maps seems relatively privacy preserving.

</comment><comment><USER22> The accuracy is terrible, try searching for "Bitzighoferstr 6 6060 Switzerland" and you get "Embassy of Switzerland in Moscow". [https://www.qwant.com/maps/place/osm:node:698892171@Embassy_...](https://www.qwant.com/maps/place/osm:node:698892171@Embassy_of_Switzerland#map=18.00/55.7652453/37.6405076)

It should return: [https://geocode.xyz/Bitzighoferstr%206+6060+Switzerland](https://geocode.xyz/Bitzighoferstr%206+6060+Switzerland) "6 Bitzighoferstrasse, Sarnen, Switzerland 6060 / 46.90353,8.2472 "

Even adding the latitude,longitude manually for reverse geocoding returns some strange results: [https://www.qwant.com/maps/place/osm:node:1024510041@353_km#...](https://www.qwant.com/maps/place/osm:node:1024510041@353_km#map=18.00/49.3091298/142.8656364)

</comment><comment><USER23> Trying to get from east London to Euston on foot, it suggests I walk on the Thames for about 60% of the journey.

I'd love to be able to walk on water, but alas, I cannot.

Guess it's still very much Beta.

<comment><USER24> Isn't it routing you via a Ferry?

<comment><USER25> It seems to be [1].

Perhaps there's a miscalculation for when to use ferries.

If I wanted to get from Canary Wharf to Euston without a car quickly, I would take the metro. If I want to walk, I don't want to use a ferry.

But of course, sometimes it's essential to use a ferry to get somewhere, like an island. Perhaps that's why walking directions include the possibility to use a ferry.

[1] [https://www.qwant.com/maps/routes/?origin=street:osm:way:193...](https://www.qwant.com/maps/routes/?origin=street:osm:way:193407944@Canada%20Square&destination=osm:node:6472516924@Euston%20Square&mode=walking#map=13.03/51.5150907/-0.0929096)

<comment><USER6> The metro and other public transit is difficult to include in the directions because it's highly time-dependent given operating hours and transfers (for that, there's OpenTripPlanner). In addition, it's difficult to manage such complex data correctly in OpenStreetMap (as opposed to separate GTFS files and tools). OsmAnd for one is trying to get us there with a beta release of public transit directions based on OSM data: [https://osmand.net/blog/osmand-3-3-released](https://osmand.net/blog/osmand-3-3-released)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So this is basically a UI layer on top of OpenStreetMap?

Would be cool to see Android/iOS versions -- I rarely look at a map unless I'm navigating somewhere, usually in the car.

<comment><USER3> I think "basically" may be an understatement. With OSM you get "only" (or "as much as") data. The rest of the stack is up to you - whether you use some ready-made open source solution or roll your own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's quite nice, although I prefer basemap style of maps.sygic.com - a similar venture. It's much more legible.

<comment><USER27> Hosted on Azure. Pushes an Android-browser user hard to install the app.

Based in Czechia: [https://travel.sygic.com/en](https://travel.sygic.com/en)

<comment><USER16> Hey! It's actually good! I'd use it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Quant Maps search seems to be quite lacking. Searched for a large store in my city, where I recently drove using Google Maps, and it can't find it. It just responds to a match to the city name. When I used just the name without the city, it found a pub half way around the world with exact name match.

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks like this crowd would love BSV Maps. It puts crowdsourced map data onto the Blockchain:

[https://twitter.com/justicemate/status/1144481701290078209](https://twitter.com/justicemate/status/1144481701290078209)

<comment><USER30> Why exactly is a Blockchain needed for that?

<comment><USER29> 1) It's an experiment. Perhaps it will be abandoned.

2) Curation/Upvotes via transaction needs to be on chain.

<comment><USER30> 2) Why do you need the overhead of a blockchain to increment a counter?

<comment><USER29> It's not a counter, people pay bitcoin to upvote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think what folks need is download + local search.

\- download everything about a large area: city or county or zipcode or similar

\- do any kind of searching on the local machine within that data

This would be basically localized offline maps and would preserve privacy.

<comment><USER32> Osmand can do a lot there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> These OSM-based maps are pretty! Is there a way to set the distance and scaling in Miles instead of Kilometers for all of us USA folk?</comment>


The Internet would have disrupted Luther? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nobody-listened-to-luther-at-first-thats-why-he-succeeded/2017/10/26/53e2fafc-b9a7-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html <comment><USER2> Luther would have been at home in the Internet. He would be frequently banned and would have to use multiple accounts.

The bulk of his writings were private letters that were intended for public use.

He was personification of what is today seen as negative discussion culture. He personally attacked his enemies using very colorful vulgari language, calling them whores or asses and cursing them. He used fart, shit and ass frequently.

It was his philosophy. He didn't believe that only ideas should fight, he believe that people should fight and attacks should be personal. It was the only way to get truth out. It was his suspicion that if things are expressed with pleasant eloquence, it may be Satan's plot.

"Think what you will, so make in your pants, hang it round your neck, then make a jelly of it and eat it like a vulgar sows and asses you are!"

\-- Martin Luther, Against Hanswurst, pg. 187 of Luther's Works, Vol

[http://ergofabulous.org/luther/](http://ergofabulous.org/luther/)</comment>